425. Israel, Gaza, and the Definition of Genocide

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen.

Only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to the Rest of Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And Rory, I feel we're going to get quite heavy today.

We're going to do Israel first half, Ukraine second half.

Right.

And do them in some depth.

I think we decided on Israel first, even before last night, where we had the remarkable spectacle, I would say, of a dinner in the White House where B.B.

Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, presents across the table, a bit like Keir Stan with his letter for the King, presents to Donald Trump the letter that he, Netanyahu, an indicted alleged war criminal, says this is the letter I've written to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee nominating you, Mr.

President, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

And as listeners will remember, this is part of a pattern.

The Pakistan Chief of the Army staff went for lunch at the White House and the Pakistan military has nominated Donald Trump for a peace prize.

The government of the Congo has nominated Donald Trump for a peace prize.

And he would think he really wants a Nobel Peace Prize.

You would think so.

And of course, it also sits with Mark Rutter, the head of NATO, sending these amazing, oleaginous, creepy notes to him saying, you're the best president ever and nobody could do this except you.

So essentially, before we get on to Israel, I mean, Donald Trump has bent the world to turn international leaders into a cringing court of obsequious people kneeling at his feet, flattering him in the most monstrous way.

But the thing that both Trump and Netanyahu are very, very good at is deflection and distraction.

A few days ago, Donald Trump was saying there will be a ceasefire within days.

And of course, what he was trying to do was engineer it, so that when Netanyahu got to the White House, this is his third visit since Trump's second term began, that there would be a great ceasefire.

Well, there is no ceasefire, little sign of a ceasefire.

In fact, the overnight news actually is this unbelievable,

frankly, insane plan to put 600,000 Palestinians into the ruins of Rafah and during a 60-day ceasefire, which doesn't yet exist, build what they're calling a humanitarian city.

Only catch future residents of the humanitarian city.

Once you're in, you're not allowed out.

Yeah.

I don't know how you describe that.

Yes, well, how do you describe something that you can't leave?

Normally you describe it as a prison camp.

Yeah, and this is the defense minister of Israel's now analysis.

We'll get into the depths of this, but somewhere right at the very heart of this is a very strong commitment from bits the Israeli government and possibly most of the Israeli government now towards the idea of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, putting unbearable pressure on, in a dream scenario for them, opening the Egyptian border and just relying on the relentless suffering and horror to drive people across the border to Egypt, or if not that, what the Defense Minister has now announced, which is moving them into a small perimeter imprisoned holding camp,

potentially as a prelude to then pushing them across the border.

But the whole thing amounts to this idea, which we keep coming back to and which it seems as though that,

although they've been denying it, but there's been some good investigation from Finance Times.

The Tony Blair Institute had a couple of people consulting on a plan that seems to be financed by some wealthy business people fleshing out Donald Trump's dream of an empty Riviera, which is then reinforced by the Finance Minister, Bazel Smotrich of Israel, saying that he absolutely wants settlements back there.

And of course, Ben Gavir, the security minister and his party, who keep making it absolutely clear that every last person should leave.

Just for the record, I'm no longer Tony Blair's spokesman, but I have seen the line to take that was put out by them and they said they denied the Financial Times story insofar as they are not part of this Boston consulting group plan that was all over the FT.

I have no idea.

That's all I've got to say.

It was quite interesting.

I mean, people should read the FT because it's a good bit of reporting because actually what the FT does is go from a denial that was made a few days earlier, then look into it in more detail, identify who the TBI people were.

And essentially the FT story is saying TBI are not being as honest as they should be about that.

And the big point from that story, which you and I said right from the word go, when you try to replace United Nations and reputable charitable organisations that have been delivering humanitarian aid in really difficult circumstances for decades, and you try to replace them with something ludicrously called the Humanitarian Fund, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund.

And I'll tell you something, I know we're going to talk about the...

the BBC later in relation to the documentary that we both watched about the Gaza doctors under fire, about the sort of what seems like systematic destruction of the health service.

There is something about the way they use language.

So they're calling this the humanitarian city.

Trump seems to have moved away from the idea that it's going to be a great beach resort, the humanitarian city, the humanitarian fund.

And what that does, I think, alongside a media that is sort of just gets bored and moves on, plus they can't get in, to be fair to people like Jeremy Bowen and all the sort of decent journalists who are in the world.

They're trying to get in because the Israeli government won't allow them to get journalists to report.

Exactly.

And a lot of the journalists who are in there are Palestinians, many of whom live there, many of whom are now dead.

So the point I was going to make is that where we are on the language is that unless you challenge this language all the time, it just becomes a given.

So it becomes the humanitarian fund, the humanitarian city.

Who knows which of these insane, cruel fantasies actually come to pass?

The Riviera, the humanitarian city.

But there is a glimpse of what this humanitarian city idea, which is being sold, would look like, because I've seen it in Lebanon.

The Palestinians in Lebanon, who were driven out of their homes in Palestine and Israel, into Lebanon, live in what are described as refugee camps, but are in fact enormous,

shabby skyscraper cities surrounded by fences, which are then controlled.

And it feels like, I don't know whether you ever saw the cities in Hong Kong and the new territories which had sprung up in the 60s or 70s.

I mean, these are things which are terrifying.

I mean, you walk around, the buildings look like they're on the vertical apse, there is absolutely no green space, and there are generations of Palestinians, in the case of southern Lebanon, growing up radicalized, dreaming of return, trapped in something that is like something out of a sort of dystopian.

Well,

we drove past some of them, didn't we?

When we were when we were in the city, well, those are more tented camps.

But this humanitarian city sounds more like that Lebanon thing yeah but the idea that you let's just look at how the difficulty of building any major infrastructure project first of all where are they going to get the money from secondly where are they going to get the contractors from and okay let's say those problems are surmountable are they seriously saying in 60 days they're going to build a place to house in conditions better than the ones that they're currently in 600,000 people and it's very very hard to escape the conclusion when you listen to people like Netanyahu so last night he was saying if people want to stay they can stay if they want to leave they can can leave.

Yeah, the phrase is voluntary repatriation.

Voluntary repatriation.

Whereas Ben Gavir and Smotric, as you say, essentially their argument is that no, until every last one has gone,

this is what I did see from Tony Blaze Institute saying that they always assumed that the future of Gaza has to be for the Gazans to stay in Gaza.

But what Ben Gavir and Smotric are very clear about is that is not the future that they want.

They want other countries to take them.

Why should other countries take them?

The other countries will be saying.

So this is gaslighting on a monumental scale and yet doesn't seem to be getting challenged in the way that it should be.

We often talk about Bengavir and Smotric

and we just use them, these names, the security minister and the finance minister, as a sort of shorthand

for the extremities of the Israeli government.

I'd like to just take a minute to try to explain how radical and extreme this is.

These are

people whose parties were very, very close to terrorist extremists who quite literally were murdering Palestinians.

Netanyahu's bodyguard from his first term points out, they were basically trying to protect Netanyahu in the early 90s from people like Bengalir.

And they are now in the government, security minister, finance minister.

Okay, so these are not...

They're not French.

These are not French, okay?

Imagine you have in your government...

as your government backbenchers, people saying this.

So this, for example, is Zvivka Fogel.

There shouldn't be a single Palestinian left in Gaza at the end of the war.

It's one of them.

Here's another government backbatcher.

Crozier.

Calls for the deaths of all residents, the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip should be flattened.

There should be one sentence for everyone there.

Death.

We have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map.

There are no innocents there.

A third of his MPs, and we'll get to this in a second, demonstrated, led the demonstration, essentially going into the black site to try to stop the Israelis investigating abuse.

These are black sites are the places where they take Palestinians and no real oversight of them.

And this finally is the heritage minister.

This is actually a minister in the government talking about Gaza's population.

They can go to Ireland or deserts.

The monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.

We wouldn't hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.

There are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza.

Anyone waving the Palestinian flag shouldn't continue living in the face of the earth.

Now, this is a minister in the government.

And just on this, so they're people that maybe most of our listeners and viewers won't have heard of.

They do know Itamar Ben-Gavir, almost certainly, and he said this weekend, just gone, that the only way to secure the return of the hostages was the, quote, full conquest of the Gaza Strip, a complete halt to so-called humanitarian aid, and the encouragement of emigration of the Palestinian population.

That's the same thing.

It's slightly more polite, but not much.

So I think we're at a point now where...

And, you know, it was very interesting.

We talked about this last week in the context of Glastonbury and the BBC documentary and the loss of perspective and the fact that kids were being killed and nobody was talking about it and we've we've been holding back right from the word go since october the 7th i think we've been trying trying to be fair trying to say there's arguments on both sides but i think it's impossible now to argue that this is anything other than genocide and i think that that will provoke the usual we had it last week actually to be fair most of the comments we had last week were supportive but the exceptions were israeli government people and people who passionately support Israel and including this government and some of the arguments it's really interesting you mentioned in one of those quotes Ireland the extent to which they now identify Ireland as this sort of great opponent okay so but let me stop you then because you've you've just said something very very significant okay you you've you've called this genocide what do you mean by that well I've read the genocide convention okay and I think the reason why we've been maybe holding back is because

we've wanted to hope and believe that quotes the famed international community would be able to use the horror of October 7th to get to a place where actually we get back on track to a two-state solution but what you read out is a succession of people who and I think these include Netanyahu now who the last thing in the world that they want is a a two-state solution.

And because we're living in this world of frankly of impunity where Trump, there's Netanyahu, as I say, who's wanted on war crimes.

One of the ironies, of course, of him saying you should get a Nobel Peace Prize.

If he did, Netanyahu wouldn't be able to go to Oslo for the ceremony because the Norwegians would have to arrest him because they're secretary to the ICC.

Similarly, Putin can't be in Brazil for the BRICS because the same would happen to him.

But if you go through, the key articles of the Genocide Convention are Articles 2 and 3.

Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as follows.

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, or racial or religious group.

Do you think there's a tick applied to that one?

So let's just pause on that for a second, just so that I can understand this.

So we normally think about genocide in terms of what the Nazis did during the Holocaust to the Jews, which is to try to kill every last person.

To eradicate the race.

In this case, you're saying it could be in part.

Because clearly what they're not doing is dropping a nuclear bomb on the site.

They're not killing every last person.

What they seem to be doing from the outside seems to me to be making it completely uninhabitable, killing tens of thousands of people and trying to drive millions out.

Right, well that's why it's important to go then on to the ABCDE.

So that's the Article 2.

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethical, racial or religious group.

As such, A, killing members of the group.

Well, that is being done.

I don't think anybody can argue about that.

They can claim that they always take care to avoid civilian death and civilian casualty.

I think it's very, very hard to make that claim.

And even though I think we tried at the start to say that maybe they were.

B, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

C, and this is where I think the BBC documentary comes in, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

D, less relevant maybe, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

E, this one does apply to Russia, by the way, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the Convention as A, genocide, B, conspiracy to commit genocide, C, direct and public incitement to commit genocide.

I would argue the quotes that you've just read out do that.

D, attempt to commit genocide, E, complicity in genocide.

That can apply to other countries, by the way.

Look, what's happening is so disturbing that getting into these legal arguments is a bit distasteful.

But I suppose there is genocide, there's crimes against humanity, there's ethnic cleansing, there's a whole international legal conversation here.

International Criminal Court, International Court of of Justice.

There are UK lawyers who have been advising this court.

Helena Kennedy, for example, has been advising.

In subsequent, she's been a bit reluctant to go as far.

She actually does say, she's on the record of saying that definitely crimes against humanity have been committed, but genocide ultimately is a matter for the international court.

Let's take a step back for the moment.

Presumably, we can agree

that in the end, this has to be a decision made by the international courts.

That what brought peace to Bosnia was international courts going without favor against Serbs, Croats, Bosnians.

I think over 160 war criminals put on trial, recognizing Srebrenica as genocide.

And actually, that's one of the keys to getting a multi-ethnic Bosnia rebuilt.

So international justice helps.

And that was only, I think I'm right saying there are three.

that have been identified in that way since the creation of the convention.

One was Cambodia, the second was Rwanda, and the third was Bosnia.

It was defined as genocide.

Now there, so they didn't kill every single

Bosnian Business that they were targeting.

They killed, I think, about eight or nine thousand men and boys.

And by the way, just your point of it, you're absolutely right about the importance of the Holocaust and all this.

But the other genocide that was quoted in all the in the development of the convention was the Armenian genocide in the First World War.

And I think one of the arguments that I think has been, I find most repellent about the way that we get the pushback on this, and this is why they keep going for the Irish, and I saw President Higgins coming back again at it this week.

I'd love you just to look at one thing, which I think is key to the whole sensitivity, which is that for many people in the Israeli government, and indeed many, many people sympathetic towards Israel, the problem with using the word genocide is that the Jews suffered this

genocide, suffered a holocaust that killed well over six million people.

And therefore, to accuse the Israeli government of committing genocide feels as though it's turning everything on its head and it's it's sort of trivializing uh the holocaust by equating the two is is that part of the issue here i think i would turn that on on its head so the the holocaust uniquely evil is the phrase often used uniquely evil and yet what i think the israeli government and their supporters around the world have tried to do since october the 7th is essentially to make that equation.

You know, from day one, this is the worst attack upon the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

And since then, I saw an interview with Naomi Klein the other day, Canadian, Jewish,

and she was making the point that

they now seem absolutely determined, essentially, to give people the idea that the war started on October the 7th.

And by equating it in the way that I think often they do with the Holocaust,

identify the enemy in this, the Palestinians, as on a par with the Nazis, to be wiped out, to be dehumanized in the way that I think they have been dehumanized.

And so, I, you know, some of the feed pushback we got last week, I got a message from a former MP.

I won't say who it was, but I will if he keeps coming at me.

And essentially, part of the argument is: how can you possibly imagine that the Israeli government would want to

commit genocide, an act of genocide against Palestinians, against the Gazan people, when the entire state of Israel was born out of the worst act of genocide in all of human history.

But I think that that equivalence is now being weaponized.

And the reason why I think I'll always speak up for old President Higgins, and I mean the Irish, as you know, has got a history on this issue, and they're very, very.

But he made the point last week that every time now, this is what's happening, we're getting blowback in this as well.

Every time you today criticise the actions or the words of the Israeli government, you're accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I think some of the most passionate people against what the Israeli government are doing are Israelis and are Jews, but they're being,

I'm not pretending, by the way, Netanyahu, who's got more support now than he had at the start of this war, not least because of Iran.

But everybody who criticises Israel being labelled anti-Semitic, I think has become part of the problem that stops proper debate about this.

I know a lot of Jewish people, I work with a lot of Jewish people, I've spoken out against anti-Semitism all of my life.

Fiona, my partner, she resigned from the Labour Party.

And she actually sat down with Geir Starmer before he became leader and said, unless Corbyn sorts this out, I am leaving the Labour Party.

And she did.

And yet, we, just for saying what I said last week, you have a very small minority of our listeners and viewers coming on and say, I cannot believe that you're, quote, anti-Semitic in the way that you talk about Israel.

I'm talking about the Israeli government and its current policy, which I think is indefensible.

Maybe we should get on to the documentary as a way into this.

So this was the documentary that was commissioned by the BBC, and it's a documentary that describes the attacks on the healthcare system, on hospitals and doctors in Gaza over the last 18 months.

BBC in the end didn't show it, and it was shown on Channel 4, and you can watch it.

Anyone listening can watch it by any YouTube channel 4.

Mehdi Hassan's site, Zetio, they're showing it.

Just quick summary of the documentary.

The documentary...

You watch it over the weekend.

Yep.

Documentary shows that every single one of the 32 hospitals in Gaza has been targeted again and again and again.

An incredible disproportionate number of doctors have been killed and a disproportionate number of doctors have been arrested and taken to prisons and even to black sites, to informal prisons.

The argument from the Israeli government is that the reason why this has happened is that these hospitals had Hamas locations underneath and that these doctors knew about the whereabouts of hostages or were themselves Hamas sympathizers.

The description, though, of the extremity of what's happened, though, makes it very difficult to believe that the actions are proportional or that

what the Israeli army is doing here is purely about trying to find Hamas.

Repeatedly, the pattern is that the hospital is surrounded.

essentially cut off.

The Israeli army then moves in, often with tanks.

Often imagery is released.

Al Shifa, for example, imagery is released of incredibly 3D imagery of what appeared to be almost like a video game of layers of Hamas bunkers and command centers underneath the ground.

When the Israeli government arrives, that isn't what they found at all.

Turned out that intelligence presumably wasn't validated.

They did find some weapons, which they showed in an image.

And then what seems to happen is the entire hospital is then destroyed, because when you see the imagery of the hospital later, the whole thing is essentially a wreck, and patients are killed in bombardments, etc.

We then had a very, very detailed description of two things, which I think are, again, are impossible to explain.

One of them is this incident that we covered in March where an ambulance with its lights on was attacked, the occupants killed outside the ambulances and buried in shallow graves, and then a doctor whose apartment was attacked.

His brothers and uncles, who were also doctors, were killed.

And when he took his wife and his small child, who I think was six, outside, they were then struck with a drone, killing his wife and his six-year-old out in the open.

These things are very, very

closely related to what other governments do.

Syria would be an example where regimes deliberately target that infrastructure in order to drive populations out.

The easiest way to get rid of a population is to completely destroy their healthcare infrastructure, because you can't live.

Then if you're bombed, you can't get any medicine, you can't get any operations, you can't get any surgery.

This is what the court is looking at now, and I wonder what you thought about that documentary.

Well, I thought it was really powerful.

And I imagined when I watched it that they had adapted it and changed it from what was going to be on the BBC to what they put out.

And I've spoken to some of the people involved in the making it that say that's not the case.

That actually they got the go-ahead from the BBC.

The commissioner, senior commissioner, senior executives.

they got the go-ahead.

This was going to go on the BBC.

And they then got this succession of what they they call changing stories about why it wasn't going to happen.

First of all, it had nothing to do with the other documentary where there was this documentary where it turned out that one of the people profile was related to a Hamas member and it wasn't made public on the documentary.

There was an inquiry into that, a review.

They were told it was nothing to do with that.

But then part of the later delay, they were told, actually, yes, it is to do.

They're going to wait for the review, etc.

etc.

The guy in charge of the film, making the film, was then asked to sign a gagging clause, basically saying he wouldn't criticise the BBC, he wouldn't say that the BBC had agreed to broadcast it, and he wouldn't say that all this sort of obfuscation had gone on.

Why would the BBC do that?

Is that normal?

I don't know, but it's backfired because he refused to do it.

Right.

And why wouldn't, sorry, but just get to the basis.

Why didn't the BBC show this documentary?

His argument is that senior people within the BBC, right up to and including the top, decided it was not to be shown.

And why not?

Well, their argument is that what the BBC says is that they were worried that it would lead to claims of partiality.

And have they pointed to things in the film that they have they given detailed examples from the film?

They haven't.

And of course, what they presumably know is that

there are people within the BBC who had agreed that this was a perfectly good film to show.

Now, it comes from a certain perspective because virtually everybody who's interviewed in the film is a Palestinian doctor or nurse or patient or family of somebody who's been killed.

They keep putting the points that are being made that regularly, you know, the Israeli Defence Force refused to comment or the Israeli Defence Force said, blah, blah, blah.

So I think it's hard to escape the conclusion that there are,

you know, I've always said my problem with the BBC is that they do allow themselves to be pushed around by governments, by lobbies, by different people pushing different arguments.

And I think they've been pushed around.

on this and pushed around not least because as we saw with the Glastonbury thing the line of attack at the BBC all the time is that they're anti-Israel.

Okay.

Well, let me come to the final thing.

Given that what's happening on the ground is so horrifying, and

I guess, don't know whether we should be calling it crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, general.

You've called it ethnic cleansing before.

Right.

Which is a crime against humanity.

And from my point of view, you only need to see what Gaza looks like.

You only need to see

95% of the buildings destroyed, all the hospitals destroyed, to know that tens of thousands of people have been killed.

I mean, one of the problems is that this endless fight on social media about fake news and this video and that video is just taking away from the big picture, which is that this is the most horrendous infliction of suffering on a population imaginable.

So, why is the British government not doing more?

And let me put it in an absolutely kind of brutal way.

David Lamy, our foreign secretary, made a blistering speech in May in which he absolutely explicitly explicitly stood up and talked about the horror.

And yet, we continue to train IDF soldiers.

RAF planes continue to fly over Gaza.

No comment has been made by the British government about the fact that the Americans are sanctioning British citizens who helped the International Criminal Court.

British citizens who provided advice are now having to move their money to protect themselves and the British government isn't speaking up for them.

What on earth is wrong?

How is it possible for David Lamy on the one hand to describe this horror and on the other hand the government to continue to providing military assistance, training, flights and not standing up for our own lawyers?

The other thing that's worth pointing out on that was there was a sort of rather horrible irony last week in David Lamy met the guy that we met a while back, President Al-Sharra.

So he's now the President of Syria, ex-head of al-Qaeda.

And David Lamy met him at a time when the Labour government is prescribing Palestine action as a terrorist organization.

Now, I don't think Palestine Action

remotely in the same league as Al-Qaeda were.

I think what David Lamy would say is that he has put sanctions on, for example, Ben-Gibrian Smart Root sanction.

They have cut back on some of the arms sales, et cetera.

But I don't know the answer, to be absolutely frank.

I think it's, if you go through all the countries in the world, and it's quite hard to get an exact position, but roughly 95 UN UN member states have now effectively said that they think this is genocide.

Roughly 6% of countries have given the sense that they don't think it is.

And that's US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Austria.

That's very strange again, because we're run by our Prime Minister who's an international lawyer.

Why is he not waiting for the International Criminal Court to come to a ruling rather than coming out and saying it's not genocide before the court has ruled?

Or just

all they, I think, need to do is constantly to be saying,

as they should have done from the start, they keep saying Israel has a right to defend itself, which is true, it does,

but that does not mean they have a right to do whatever they want without regard to international law, civilian life and the future of Gaza.

And

I think if only they said that

every time that these issues these things happen.

But I think the other thing sorry to go back to the BBC, but I think the fact that partly because I suspect of this row, there's been very, very little coverage of this stuff, of these kids being killed in the queue for food on the Today programme, on the main 10 o'clock news.

It's a pretty low-level story.

And I think that of itself kind of puts less pressure on the politicians to come out and say what I and by the way, I said, I can't remember if it was here or on the BBC last week, but I made the point.

I think one of the reasons for Labour's current standing is actually the point you just made.

Why are they not speaking up more for human rights, for Palestinian people, and calling out the absolute horror of what's going on?

And I feel a bit, to be honest, I think we've taken too long.

I've taken too long to come to this point because I think we've tried to be fair.

But I find it impossible.

I find it impossible to watch what's going on.

It's impossible to defend this.

Yeah, and I agree.

Netanyahu, who's been at the White House, this documentary has now shown in real, careful forensic detail the shattering of the health system.

The Israeli Defense Minister has now announced that he's trying to create a essentially a prison camp, 600,000 people, on the Rafah camp in Gaza.

The security minister and the finance minister continue to call for the expulsion of the people.

And

international processes against Israel are frozen because the UNS won't cooperate.

It's sanctioning people working at the International Criminal Criminal Court.

And our own media is finding it very, very difficult to deal with this.

I think we should return to this in a section also in question time because I'd like to talk also about what's happening in the Conservative Party and what they are doing or failing to do around this issue in Britain.

But let's take a quick break.

Okay, we'll take a quick break and then come back and talk about another seemingly intractable, difficult international problem.

That's Russia, Ukraine.

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This episode is brought to you by Penguin Audiobooks.

And this is a treat for audiobook obsessives among you, and that does include me when I'm traveling and Rory pretty much all the time.

So we've teamed up with Penguin, and we've got now the Restless Politics Audiobook Club, where we're going to recommend titles we've spent real time with, those that gripped us, stirred us, or echoed long after they ended.

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So I am going to start with a book that I mentioned on the podcast when I first read it.

It is called The Nazi Mind by Lawrence Rees,

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More recommendations to come.

Welcome back to The Rest of Politics.

It's me, Alice Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

Now, we haven't covered Russia-Ukraine for a long time.

And it's one of these stories, because it's been going now for two and a half years, where people lose focus.

So, quick summary.

There was a big uptick in Russian attacks in the autumn.

That was a really, really intense period.

It then dropped down somewhat after Trump came in, and it's massively upticked again.

There's been a huge increase in Russian attacks.

And there are two things really going on on the ground.

One of them is the Russians have got much more aggressive about targeting Ukrainian UAV pilots, drone pilots, and hunting and isolating their logistics.

And the second thing is that the American government is not providing Patriot missile interceptors.

So these are the surface-to-ear missiles that you need to take out Russian ballistic missiles, in particular the Iskanda systems.

And without the Patriot defense, Ukraine is terribly, terribly vulnerable.

And that means that Russia is steadily pushing forward.

Okay, over to you.

We talked a lot about Israel in the first half.

And I think another reason why it is utterly absurd for Donald Trump even to be considered as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is the guy who said as a campaign shtick, I can end this war in 24 hours.

And it's getting worse and worse and worse.

And just he hasn't used his power and leverage that he had with NYU, and he certainly hasn't used his power and leverage with Putin.

I mean, actually, there's a different way of looking at Russia-Ukraine at the moment.

And that is, given the unbelievably difficult circumstances in which they've been fighting this war from the beginning, but particularly, I would argue now, they are doing an amazing job.

And I read an extraordinary thing the other day, I can't remember where I saw it, but it was essentially about how when this war is over, Ukraine is going to have the most advanced, best-developed armed forces, particularly the use of modern warfare.

So, we hear a lot about the Russian drones, and we see the Russian drones as they're sort of, you know, flying into buildings, apartment blocks in in Ukraine but the Ukrainians are developing this drone technology at an extraordinary rate so I think again we have to look you were sort of quite critical in the first half of the UK and other governments have they done enough to call out what's going in Israel I think there is the case to be made that for all the the words of support that have been given from the US under Biden the US under Trump and the big European governments I think the Ukrainians are entitled to make the case that both on military support and on sanctions

they kind of haven't had all that they could have had.

Absolutely.

And the Ukrainians are showing again and again that the most pessimistic scenarios,

which is that they would collapse immediately when America began to wobble, which is what people were hoping around Putin, hasn't been true.

They are absolutely determined to keep fighting.

Again, I was very lucky to talk to Jack Watling from Russi, who very kindly called me from a plane when he just was leaving Ukraine.

He points out that on your optimistic scenario, that that if Ukraine can hold through to next year, Russia is of course not in a very strong position because the oil price is well down.

And the oil price is really what keeps that economy going.

But this is really where the question is, if you really wanted to have an impact on Russia, what you would do is you would go after these shadow fleets.

And in particular, what you'd do is you would put full EU sanctions on any country.

that's moving Russian oil and you would close the Straits of Denmark.

You'd stop the ships going through.

60% of of Russian oil is going through the Straits of Denmark.

To do that, you would need the European Union, you'd need the Danish Navy, you'd need the British Navy and everybody else to come together.

You could do it without the US, but you'd have to get the Europeans together and you'd close the Straits of Denmark and you would have to plan for Russian response.

You'd have to manage that escalation.

You can do that.

I don't think that this is the edge of a third world war, which is what people will imply.

But Russia will definitely bark and respond as you begin to shut down those shadow fleets.

But if you do it in a reasonable way, measured, have everything thought out, Europe could really inflict serious damage on the Russian economy and put pressure on them to stop this war.

So will they do it?

I remember right at the start of this war, was List Truss's foreign secretary when the whole thing was starting?

I think she was.

And I can remember her saying, I don't know why this just popped into my head.

I can remember her saying that they won't be stupid enough to invade.

And if they do, we are ready with the toughest sanctions that have ever been imposed on another country.

Okay?

Good talk, made for headlines, which as you've constantly told us is what she cares about.

I check this out.

There are several hundred banks in Russia.

How many of those banks were targeted when we were going after the so-called SWIFT systems?

Seven.

Seven.

Out of several hundred.

Out of several hundred banks.

So you go after them, you get the headlines, and then the money just gets moved around.

We've talked before about how the oil getting cleaned in different parts of the world, and India's a big importer, China, massive.

Europe itself contains to buy oil.

And this is also so difficult with Trump.

Sorry to keep going on about Trump, but I think he is such a consequential figure in all of these disputes.

And there's this really strange pattern going on.

So, like I said in relation to Netanyahu, a few days before they met, we're days away from a ceasefire.

We're going to get a ceasefire.

It's going to be beautiful.

It's going to be marvelous.

And he's got a cycle with Putin that goes like this.

I've got a great relationship with him and I think he wants peace.

He then has a phone call with him and literally immediately after the phone call they had last week, they had the biggest drone attack in the history of this conflict so far.

And then he goes straight into, I'm not happy with him.

And then he goes around the cycle to this is all Joe Biden's fault.

Yeah, so as you've pointed out, there's an amazing cycle because it's the same cycle that he follows with Israel.

So remember, he said, I'm in the middle of peace negotiations with Iran.

Don't attack them.

Netanyahu then orders an attack.

Trump says, terrific, wonderful attack.

And now it's peace.

I've spoken to him on the phone.

We're calling it off.

And then Israel continues to strike.

And he then says, I'm very, very angry with Israel.

Turn your bombers back.

You mustn't do this.

And then Netanyahu turns up in the White House with a letter saying you've got a Nobel Peace Prize.

And Trump is happy again.

And even says, wow, that means a lot coming from you.

Wow, that means a lot coming from you.

So, and one of the things that I think Russia senses and Netanyahu's government senses is that in the end, they can do almost whatever they want because Trump is never actually going to sanction them.

And he's never really going to withhold the support that he provides for Israel.

Impunity.

Impunity.

We talked before the Trump second term how we felt that Putin and Netanyahu were basically waiting for Trump because we thought, and it's been shown, that he'd be more sympathetic to them than Biden or Kamala Harris.

But I don't think any of us imagined it would be quite this level of impunity.

And the other thing, just for European leaders, how long have we been talking about this?

I think it's 300 billion dollars of Euros now of frozen Russian assets that are held in the jurisdictions of the West.

And we're still talking about whether this can be used to help Ukraine.

And there's an argument, well, let's save it for reconstruction.

But, you know,

I just think I was talking to, you know, I was talking to Ukrainian, and that's probably why I've sort of speaking these terms.

But I think they do feel that

their hands have been pretty tied behind their backs.

And if you think that when J.D.

Vance was saying you don't have any of the cards, you've got no cards left to play, and Trump and Vance were picking up bullying Zelensky in the White House, in a sense that's because the West has been...

taking the cards off them.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's the extraordinary horror of what Trump and France are doing.

I mean, what they're doing systematically is weakening and impoverishing their allies.

You can look at it in the way that Trump and France present it, which is we're just asking European countries to pay their own way.

But what is the consequence of forcing European countries to spend 5% on GDP?

And we can get into this.

I'd like to do a proper episode on this maybe next week.

It basically means...

that countries whose economies are underwater and aren't growing are going to have to cut their health spending and all their other welfare spending.

So, you're shifting your view on defense?

I'm beginning to shift my view on defense.

What's happening when

we're spending too much?

I think that we are now in danger of spending too much, yes.

And I'll try to develop that next week.

Okay.

Second thing: what happens when Trump announces 25% tariffs on Japan, 25% tariffs on South Korea, which he's just done in the last few hours?

He's impoverishing and bankrupting America's allies around the world.

And this idea that it's just about America first, he is is making the world a worse place by targeting the most stable liberal democracies around the world, undermining their finances, making them poorer, and somehow not caring.

And final point.

We talk about strategic autonomy, Europe being independent from the US.

The fact is we do not have any systems that actually allow us to fire surface to air missiles to really deal with ballistic missile threats.

We're completely dependent on the US.

It's true for many of our weapon systems, where most of the components come from the US.

But these things in particular, it's extraordinary.

They were developed first in the 1980s.

They are very, very complicated bits of kit

because what they have to do is increasingly deal with hypersonic missiles which are traveling at 2,000 meters a second.

They have to intersect with their warheads.

They have to decouple from your radar system and trigger in.

They have to be tested on these incredible ranges where the US are firing them in the desert in California or they're firing them into the sea.

And despite 30 or 40 years of this technology, Europe has simply not stepped up to deal with it.

So that our major enemy in Europe, which is Russia, have Iskanda missiles, which we have no way of dealing with.

We are completely over a barrel.

We talk about the strategic autonomy stuff, but it's not just Ukraine that can't get its hands on the weapons it needs to defend itself.

Europe isn't going to be able to get them.

And for two reasons.

I mean, one of them is, you know, Trump not wanting to provide them.

The second thing is the Department of Defense, in particular, a guy called Elbridge Colby, who's advising Hesfeth on this, which is we want to keep our Patriot missiles for China, so we're not going to give them to Europe.

Yeah, he is clearly a very, very powerful person within this debate and, you know, is regularly portrayed as being one of the forces pulling Trump away from Ukraine towards Russia.

Just one other thing.

You mentioned about the missiles getting sent returned, as it were, getting sent back.

For the third time, Hexeth, the Secretary of State for Defence, has ordered the return of weapons that are already in the process of being delivered.

And then there was one line that really struck, jumped out at me, and I think this was from Peskov, my old sparring partner, Dmitry Peskov, who's still Putin's press secretary.

And he said of the phone call, they did not broach the subject of the paused weapons deliveries.

Why not?

Why is that not a

speaker?

I guess what Mark Rutter, who you were giving a very hard time to last week because of his obsequiousness, I guess what he and other European leaders might say is that they can see where this is going, but because they have allowed Europe to fall behind, they're going to need time to fill this massive gap.

And the most important thing is to keep Trump as on board as they possibly can during that period.

But it's a pretty hopeless situation to be in.

My final point, Roy, before we close on what has been a pretty heavy session.

Who do you think are the five most important people in the world to Donald Trump right now?

Five most important people to Donald Trump in the world.

So I think what he cares about, this is a trick question, obviously, but

I believe on the basis of talking to Michael Wolf and the mooch and others.

So what does he really care about?

He cares about fame and money.

So the five most important things in the world, people in the world who are people who are going to make him famous and rich.

Okay.

The five most important, I think, are as follows: Jürgen Wattner Friedness,

As Latoya, Anne Enger, Christian Clemet, and Grie Larsson.

Are they footballers?

They are the current members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

They will decide.

And I've got great faith in Norwegian people

to do the right thing.

That's the fame bit, isn't it?

That's the fame bit.

Those are the five people who are going to give him the fame that he wants.

Absolutely.

I always think, remember

when I worked in number 10,

people who would sidle sidle up to me, remember Simon Hart, the former chief whip, he said he thought about calling his book about my knighthood.

I always had a rule, anybody who came in trying to use me directly to lobby for them to get a knighthood, I would do everything I could to make sure they didn't.

And I think we should apply that to the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you want one, you don't get it.

It's good, isn't it?

Even if you get letters from the head of the Pakistan Army staff, from Netanyahu and the President of Congo, no.

No.

Not going to work.

We have to find a better contender next week.

It's amazing, isn't it, actually, how much President Trump's ego is now bound up with this international statesman thing.

It's one of the things that I was most interested in when we were working together on this mini-series that we've just done on J.D.

Vance, which is the way in which J.D.

Vance really establishes himself through that staged, mad confrontation with Zelensky in the White House.

So maybe something just to finish on for a second, which is thinking back on that, what do you think we learned about J.D.

Vance?

What was surprising about J.D.

Vance?

I've got to be honest, I think the thing that most surprised me looking at his early life, in a sense, was just how impressive the story is.

You cannot take away the fact that he's clearly come from an unbelievably difficult, chaotic background.

There's an argument as to whether he overstates it, but on any reading, he is a pretty impressive person to have turned himself into the figure that he became.

But then I think because of this constant changing of his circumstances, I think he is capable of changing personality.

I also think with most people, they're not really capable of changing personality, but I think he is.

And whether that makes him a good actor.

So when you talk about

the meeting with Zelensky, looking back at that, I think he provoked that way more than Trump.

And I think he did it because he was in that mode.

One, he doesn't believe in forever wars and he wants to get Ukraine out of their hair.

But two, I think at that moment, that's what he thought he had to do most to impress Trump, which right now is one of the big things he wants to do.

I thought that was fascinating.

And I think this sense of him as a chameleon endlessly changing, adapting, is right at the heart of that mini-series.

So encourage people to listen.

Yeah.

So we've got episode four.

We're on episode four this Friday of this mini-series.

And then after that, we're going to be doing a QA to see what those who've listened to have thought about it.

And you can hear the first three episodes in full right now.

Get up to speed before episode four.

Just head to therestispolities.com, join The Restis Polities Plus, and that will give you access to, go on, Rule, what does it give you access to?

It gives you access to ad-free listening if you get annoyed by ads.

Gives you early access to tickets for our live shows, which we're about to do at the end of the year.

It gives us access to mini-series and interviews that we do only on the Restis Politics Plus and other offers too.

Great.

Well, it takes two minutes to sign up.

New episodes of the series will drop every Friday.

If you haven't heard episode three, here's a taster.

The price of getting Trump's support is you have to say the election was stolen, or you have to say that Trump won the election and Biden is not the president.

Which he doesn't believe.

The shift has been so profound.

We're seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats, and what I worry about is the threat from within.

Have you said thank you once?

To accommodate Trump, to be alongside Trump, to be the vice president, and hopefully set himself up to be president.

I mean, he showed so much character getting from point A to where I knew him that you thought that

it never occurred to me that character would be the defect, actually.

That that was the deficit quality.

There is some talk that the vance's favoured idea for the next election ticket is vance trump a vance with donald j is his running mate correct how better to keep trump senior on board than to have trump as a name still on the ballot as a vp

okay hope you enjoyed the taster and if you want to hear more of that one and episode one and episode two all you got to do is sign up to trip plus so it's super easy to sign up all you need to do is go to therestlerspolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com.

We'll see you soon for Question Time, where I think we're going to be talking about new parties, Elon Musky Party, Corbyn's potentially new party, special education needs in British schools, Texas floods, what's happening in the Balkans with Dodic.

We're going to touch a little bit on Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, and we're going to finish with a few lighter questions.

Cool.

See you then.