Angry Planet - Causes and Consequences of War In Gaza

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

This week’s episode is a long conversation with Joey Ayoub about Gaza, Palestine, and Israel.We cover a lot of ground and we’ve got a lot of show notes that accompany this episode.Show notes from Joey:Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here“Divide and Rule”: How Israel Helped Start Hamas to Weaken Palestinian Hopes for StatehoodJoey’s excellent podcast, The Fire These Times and its Patreon.Follow Joey on Mastodon.Show Notes on Robert MalleyThe Smear JobInside Iran’s influence operationHouse is investigating Biden’s former Iran envoyAn Iran mouthpiece’s ‘scoop’ draws Republican ireAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. I want to take a moment to address some concerns that listeners sent me after the last episode. We had on Joseph Epstein, and as many of you pointed out, he said some things that aren't true. One of them I'm going to address directly here is the Robert Malley situation.

Malie was the U.S. Special Envoy to Iran. Epstein made some claims about Malie and his team that are not true. It's a complicated situation that involves the State Department, the Tehran Times, and an ongoing investigation. Basically, it's the kind of thing that needs its own episode. I'll include some links in the show notes to kind of give you all a primer. Some of the other stuff Epstein talked about, we address in a show that you're about to hear. And in another episode that I've already recorded about the nature of propaganda during a live conflict. I wanted to thank everyone that reached out. You were, by and large, very polite. Our listeners are wonderful, and I can tell that we've cultivated an audience of people who come to us because you love nuance, just like we do. You noticed later in this episode that Jason queued me up to deliver this speech that I'm giving you right now, and I waffled. I left that moment in because we thought it was funny, and the rest of the episode gets quite grim and scary. So without further ado, here is that episode, a conversation. with Joey Ayub.

I was re-listened the other episode that you were on this morning while I was making breakfast, just to make sure I was absolutely refreshed. And it was a story Jason told towards the end about an old Holocaust survivor living on the border with Gaza and going into the shelter and deciding that they were not coming out anymore. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Joey, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet again. I want to put, because this is the third.

episode we've recorded, this will be the third episode we've recorded since the last time we were on air, but I think it's probably going to be the first one we air. I imagine, Jason, maybe we'll decide something different, but it is the 23rd of October. It is a little afternoon. Big news this morning is Erdogan has decided to let Sweden into NATO. And also, I believe Al Jazeera is reporting that 50 of the hostages with dual citizenship passports are going to be released. To just kind of put things in a specific time before we start talking. Obviously, we're talking Israel Hamas again today. Joey, we've had you on the show before.

I thought of you immediately when the attack on October 7th happened. And you were thinking of us because you also reached out almost immediately and said, hey, I want to come on the show again. And I was wondering why you thought of us and like what your, what was your headspace that you were in in that immediate moment and like what you needed to communicate and get out. Right. Yeah. Well, Matthew.

And Jason, thanks again for having me. Unfortunately, it's under these circumstances. Yeah, I contact you guys immediately as well as. buddies of mine at the Ukraine without hype podcast which I mean obviously from the title they tend to focus on Ukraine but they also have this for more like internationalist lens

and I knew that they were interested in this topic because me and Romeo one of the hosts talk about this a lot and so they had me on and shortly before they had me on I also thought of you guys because I felt like last the last chat we had was

you know pretty productive for lack of a I don't even know if these terms make any sense in the context, you know, given the topic of conversation, but like it was an engaging conversation and I'm hoping listeners thought the same. And in times like these, I have like two hats on. One is the hat of me freaking out because I have obviously family both in Israel, Palestine and in Lebanon as a Lebanese-Palestinian that tends to happen. And the other hat is trying to put this analytical one on, which is kind of like a coping mechanism in some sense as well.

So yeah, that's why I'm here. And hopefully the listeners will find this useful as well. It's funny, actually. What I think is going to be good about this conversation is that I'm in the exact same situation except on the Jewish side. That's all. I mean, family directly affected in Israel and trying to also be a journalist. and analyze things fairly. And we actually, on that line, we have a correction to make from our last conversation.

And I think we should just get it out there immediately because I think it is actually probably the most important thing in our conversation today is to be as factual as humanly possible. So, Matthew, do you want to hit it with the correction? You know, I don't have all the notes in front of me. You're kind of putting me on the spot. I thought we were going to. I am. So if you're hearing me, if you're hearing. me a meander right now, and you will be in the edit afterwards. My plan was I was going to

write a little something and say it right before the episode begins is kind of like an intro. But the short version is that we had a gentleman on in the last episode that said some things that were not correct, specifically about U.S. diplomats and their ties to Iran. So I if you're hearing me if I was much more articulate before the episode started About this in the lovely intro bit that I wrote that you've already heard if you're listening to this podcast And I will put this as a placeholder so you can see how the sausage is made But yeah I have I've got like the document that has everything in it I just wanted to be super specific So that's my plan just

is I will record a little something after we get out of here. But yeah, thank you for that. We did get a, I do also want to say real quick that we got a lot of notes from listeners. After that one, after that episode, everyone was really polite and said, like, hey, I think you should check a couple of things out that were in that episode that didn't sound quite right. But everyone who came and sent me messages directly was like very nice and said that they appreciate what we do. And I think, like, on this topic, people can, like, understandably, there's emotions are running high. And I just really appreciate the listeners being kind when they reach out, especially.

Bless them for doing that. Yeah. Especially when they have corrections or they think that we did something wrong. Like, because I like constructive criticism. I like to be told when I'm wrong, but nobody likes to get yelled at. So everyone, all the listeners who reached out were very nice. And I appreciate that. Thank you.

All right. Let's get into this. Joey, first, actually, can you give us a little bit of your background, your academic background, like who you're working for right now and where you're writing, that kind of thing? Of course, yeah. Okay, so I'm in between jobs, as they say, you know, meaning I'm soon to be unemployed. But I work as a freelancer, most of the time. I recently finished the PhD in cultural analysis, focusing on Lebanon and specifically post-war

Lebanon, themes related to memory, to conflict, to whether the past is really the past, that sort of thing, which was really cathartic, despite honestly like 90% of the topic is pretty traumatic and pretty pretty depressing. Before that, I did my master at Zores on the politics of Yiddish and Hebrew, on the cultural studies. They call it in English and cultural analysis in German. Because I did my PhD in Switzerland, I should say. And so during that year at Soaz in London, so that was 2015, 2016, is when I, let's say, delved to pretty deep extent. I got pretty obsessed with the history of Fyiddish especially. And to a lesser extent, but still noteworthy, I think,

the history of Hebrew because obviously they are linked. And that allowed me, I think, a way of understanding, quote-unquote the other side. I don't like sides. That's not how I'm using terms that folks, I think, listening at least can follow me a bit better because otherwise my thoughts are very chaotic. Or they sound so.

They're not chaotic in my head. And that's what I think allowed me to have this. this, again, for lack of a better term, like nuanced perspective on what has been happening in Israel, Palestine, for basically my entire life and the entire life of my parents and the entire life of my grandparents, more or less. And so I am Lebanese, like, that's my nationality. I am also of Palestinian heritage. My grandfather was exiled in 48 from the city of Haifa, which is obviously now part of the state of Israel. And I've always had this relationship with that entire part of the world, for lack of a better term, as someone who grew up in Lebanon, but surrounded by two states, the state of Israel and the state of Syria, that were not exactly easy or not easy neighbors, to put it very mightly. And Lebanon's kind of sandwiched between the two. And so, I don't know. I feel like this is a perspective that took me some time to even appreciate, like a positionality that is actually.

worth discussing and talking about and all of that stuff. Not that it's all about identity politics or any of that. It's just a way of informing or at least it kind of gives a different layer or an added layer to what could otherwise be very complicated and almost in undecipherable. Is that the word? Topic, which is the topic of Israel, Palestine. Oh, and I have a podcast because I need to plug shit. Five these times. Talk stuff, politics. Check it out.

It's good. It's a good show. Go for it. And more importantly, you actually just had a child. We don't know if it is your first child or? It is my first child. She's a preemie, meaning she's extremely premature and is extremely tiny. So that's kind of also a bit scary. But she's doing well and the hospital. We live like not far from the hospital and they have been brilliant. So at least I'm grateful for that.

Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So you mentioned identity politics in there. And I think that we have this, that is a lens through which I think a lot of Americans are viewing this. And I wanted to bring up something that I think is a complicating factor here. We talked about this a little bit the last time you were on. A lot of the Jews and Israel are not European of European extraction.

They are people that came from the region. to Israel because it is not as if if you were Jewish in Iraq you were having a great time, right? No, you were not. So can you tell us a little bit about the Arab Jewish population and how that kind of complicates

Western narratives about this war? Sure. And of course, I would like to also focus more on the Palestinian side at some point just because of that Western narrative for that matter. But yes, so the Mizrahim population, Mizraq just means east. So it was the term in and of itself didn't really exist before the 40s. Well, it did not exist before the 40s.

Before that, you know, you were a, I don't know, a Baghdadian Jew or a, you know, you were from a certain place and you had a certain ethnicity and also a certain religion. And the relationships between ethnicity and religion and nationality is one of the most difficult ones to even get into. And to be honest with you, although I have read my Benedict Anderson and my Ella Shahat and all of that stuff. It's still very complicated. the way certain categories are formed, like even what is, for example, an Arab Jew today compared to, I don't know, 70 years ago, obviously. There was much more a sense that this was even a possibility. And although today, of course, many people still identify as such as clearly more difficult to do so in large part due to the formation of the nation states that, you know, for various reasons had to quote-unquote homogenize the populations and create us versus them and that sort of thing. So the Mizrahim today are like the majority of the Israeli Jewish population.

At the very least, like close to the majority, I don't have the statistics in front of me. And that's kind of in contrast to the Ashkenazim population, which were the, where a lot of the founders, or most all of the founders of the state of Israel were from, I don't quite know the etymology. I don't remember. I think like Ashkenazim is something to do with like the Germanic origins, basically like Europe, Eastern Europe. obviously where a lot of the Jewish population was from, obviously, before the Holocaust, most of them before the Holocaust. And so the complication here is that, especially if we talk about America, Israel,

is that most American Jews are Ashkenazim, most Israeli Jews are Mizrahim, or Sephardic to the extent as well, Sephardim. And this kind of creates a bit of a, for lack of a better expression here, like a lost in translation, of how certain forms of identity politics within the U.S. then get mistranslated rather than translated or in any case a lot of what's actually happening on the ground or the nuance and the complexities, the relationship between someone who's Ashkenazi versus

and Mizrahi and Sephardic and Ethiopian and Yemeni and all of that stuff, let alone obviously a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a Bedouin and Druze and so on. Those are things that don't quite fit as neatly in U.S. style identity politics. It's not to say that it's not. identity politics it's a version of that it's just an Israeli version of that and it requires like a different type of understanding i'm by no means an expert on that but from what i have read and as i said i was quite obsessed for like a year or two um it's it's it's a different type of of of power relations a different type of dynamic it's not quite just about race in the sense of the color of one's skin

for example or colorism we might say it's a bit more complicated than that basically So how does the Palestinian population of Israel fit in? And I mean the actual citizens, Arab citizens or Palestinian citizens of Israel. Are they accepted in Israel and what do people outside of Israel, particularly Arabs, think about that population? well a complicated one of course but what I can say to not also lose myself in my own train of thought is that there is a bit of a not now clearly and not last year either and not two years ago but before that there was a bit of a tokenization of like the not quite a modern minority kind of thing because it doesn't really apply in the same way as you have for example with

Asian Americans in the US, which is like a specific, sorry, specific sociological formation. But the Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom would call themselves Arab Israelis, many of whom, and I don't have the statistics most or I don't know what the majority is, would say Palestinians of Israel and others would actually say in Arabic, Flosinian bin ad-Dahil. So like Palestinians from the inside, i.e. the inside the borders of 48. And so that's a way of like you're placing yourself within the land, but you don't recognize. the state you're under, basically.

And so that obviously creates complication. It just makes it a bit more complicated. Let's put it that way. Because there are relationships between, let's say, a Palestinian from Haifa, who I may be related to through my grandfather, let's say, but who's the citizen of the state of Israel, and obviously I'm not. And a relationship between that person and someone from Gaza, from Gaza, or someone from, I don't know, Betlaham, Bethlehem or Ramallah.

And that's a different type of relationship. because A, it's in Arabic for the most part, so you have a different vocabulary. There are different things that does separate them, and sometimes it can make things uncomfortable. Not always, of course, but it's just one of those things that because at times there's a bit of a difficulty, I think, in the wider Arab world, of making space for Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose relationship to the state is, to put it mildly complicated, very complicated, with various degrees of, like some, believe that change comes from within. And so they participate in the electoral system.

They can vote for the, you know, the Arab joint list or the leftist coalitions and all of those groups. But you have also others that are like on the Islamist side. And so they vote for an Islamic party within Israel that's actually kind of on the far right side of things. And so that party allies with the far right religious Zionist coalition or party. I don't quite know the titles in English. And they are Palestinians, but they always.

also see themselves as separate. And so you have all of those different, you know, nuances to that specific population, which are roughly, I think, 20% of the Israeli citizenry. As for the relationship with the rest of the Arab world, it's also very complicated. It depends where some countries, the countries that have recognized the state of Israel, like let's say Egypt or Jordan. If you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel, going there, you're going there as like on your Israeli passport, for example.

And so that makes for an interesting conversation, but you can enter. So like it's not necessarily dangerous or anything like that. As for other states, most Arab states as of now have not recognized. And so more recently, same for like UAE, Bahrain, all of those states that have established relations to the state of Israel. But like from Lebanon, obviously in my case, I have met, for example, Palestinian citizens of Israel in Lebanon. But this only happens because they would have connections to the West Bank or to Jordan. And so they're able to get either a special paper or maybe they have access to the Jordanian nationality, in which case they enter Lebanon on the Jordanian nationality. Or, of course, if they are dual citizen like American or whatnot, then they enter Lebanon on the American passport or whatnot.

And so there have been, and this is more on the cultural scene, right? You will have people who are Palestinian citizens of Israel who are like, I don't know, from Nazareth or Haifa or Yafah. or whatnot, who would appear on those pan-Arab musical shows like The Voice or what have you. And they would be there as Palestinians. And they would be talk to as Palestinians. They would be representing Palestine with a Palestinian flag and so on and so forth. And so those folks for the most part have, like,

I'm going to say 10 different layers of identities that they navigate. Also depending on who they're talking to, like probably if you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel and you're talking, to an Israeli Jew, probably you're not going to say you are from the dachal, you're from the inside, because you probably would be speaking in Hebrew, for example, and the translation doesn't really work in the same way. And so they end up having these, as with all identities, you have multiple sides of those identities and multiple identities, you might say, that they have to navigate as best as they

could. And that changes again, if they are then migrants to, I don't know, like you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel and you migrate to the U.S., are you there as in Israel? or either as a Palestinian. And so many, many of them end up having to negotiate those identities, depending on their own views, obviously, and how they feel about where they come from and where they belong and all of that. Can I ask a series of deeply ignorant questions? Sure. So can we, can you explain the relationship of Hamas to the Palestinian people?

a thing I keep hearing over and over again lately is that they were elected in 2006, et cetera, et cetera. They're, you know, they're part of representative government. That's not exactly true, right? What, like, how did Hamas come to power? How have they stayed in power? And what kind of rulers are you? Okay, yeah.

Well, they're not good rules. I would reference Tarek Bacconi, who has a book called, Hamas contained. He was a guest on the Friday's Times. He recently was interviewed, I believe, on the New Yorker. As far as I can tell, he's really the best or one of the best people who has researched this specific question of what is Hamas. How does it even function? How does it see itself? What's this relationship to the Palestinian people? And also, like, what's the relationship between Palestinian people in Gaza versus the West Bank versus citizens of Israel? Because those are not, of course, the same priorities, the same thing. If you're in the West Bank,

maybe you're not necessarily, but if you might be more like sociologically aligned or socially aligned, sorry, with the PA, if not politically necessarily, you may not like them. But it's like, well, I know those guys that's sort of my people, it's like my uncle is in it or, you know, whatever. And whereas, you know, if you're from Gaza, Hamas is a more immediate reality. And you deal with them as you would deal maybe through bureaucracy, like, oh, I need to go to the government today to get my papers done on something or whatnot. And so technically you're going to Hamas, but as far as you're concerned, you're, you're just going to the government. Those are like state institutions or proto-state institution because they're not, and those are boring academic separations, but they're not as well-formed, quote-on-quote. And part of why they're not well-formed is that obviously the state of Gaza itself as a state of, not the state, as a nation state, but as a space is not exactly conducive to like, quote-unquote, a normal state. And so the relation between Hamas and the wider, I'm not going to say,

people because that's like a more complicated one but like let's say to the cause that's like what is what is Hamas vis-a-vis the Palestinian cause of seeking uh justice ending the occupation ending the blockade all of that stuff what what is Hamas and all of this and Hamas like up until 2006 were relatively small players six I don't remember the elections were six or seven and they did win those elections those were like normal elections in that sense and shortly after that is when the the power grab happened because you had a, what is effectively a civil war between Hamas and the PA, or Fatah and Hamas, you might say,

partly backed, or at least this is where I thought it would be a better source than me, but my understanding is that the PA and obviously Fatah were backed by the US and the Israelis, and Hamas at the time were backed, I'm going to say Iran, probably, but I'm not entirely sure, and Hamas won that civil war. And that's how after that, they managed to stay in power, despite being initially democratically elected, but then the conditions that led to the civil war and then what followed after the civil war, basically,

obviously meant that this was no longer really a democratic institution. Now, whether you can always debate, would they have always been a democratic institution? That's a big, you know, what if, if you want. But there were aspects about them that's like, at least at the time told like a neutral observer, let's say, they're willing to play by the rules. They're willing to participate in some form of like civil society

because Hamas always had a separation to very extent depending on the time and, you know, the circumstances between its like civilian or like its government functions and its military functions. And those are separate groups. Like they're not necessarily even in contact with it on a daily basis. And that's a bit like with Hezbollah, although that's a different, there's a different dimension to that, which we can get into. But they had to operate as a state providing services, you know, all of that stuff.

While at the same time being a very repressive movement, pretty conservative, obviously, not exactly the best people to be under if you are anyone who's not part of the, you know, straight male, not even majority, but like the straight male population. And obviously, if you're non-Sunni, you would have certain restrictions as well. it's not quite as I've been seeing in the media at times like oh there just everyone is oppressed and so on there is that element but on a day to day basis a lot more things and this is obviously before the most recent work a lot of things would come into play like do you even have a connection to a Hamas member maybe then your life is a bit easier even if you are personally more liberal let's say stuff like that so that's kind of

um Hamas in a very very small nutshell but that's kind of what they are have been in any case since the early arts, right? What is the structure of this government, such as it is, even look at, look like? They won the, and I want to note just that they won the election in 2006 by a plurality, not a majority. Was not. Yes, yes, yes. So, like, you said that there are, like, government buildings and things like this, but is it, like, is there Hamas councilmen for a neighborhood? like how does this work?

Do we know? We know, but I don't think I know. I don't know the details in any case. But yes, my understanding is that to the extent that, you know, kind of like Fata, it's like they have institutions. There's a ministry of health. There's a ministry of whatnot with various degrees of autonomy, with various degrees of like, you know,

if you are a militiam man, you probably don't have much to do with what the doctors are doing in their lives. You know, it's just, there's a separation there. Hamas has tended, for the most part, to basically pressure a lot of the population to, well, to fall in line, right? Like to not, there's no freedom of expression in that sense. If there is, it's extremely limited.

Obviously, any other types of expressions, like an actual protest for the most part would only really be possible. Not always. There have been exceptions. but would be possible if Hamas, like, you know, allows it, which doesn't mean that they are not valid. That's more complicated. But it does mean that this is the circumstances

in the same way that we know that a protest at the Ravha border between Egypt and Razzar, not easy to do if the C.C. regime doesn't approve it. It doesn't mean that the people who are there are not genuine and doesn't mean that they don't generally mean the thing that they're saying. They just mean that those are part of the circumstances that can complicate the situation a bit.

So yeah, that's kind of a bad answer because I don't want to give a wrong one. But yeah. So what does it mean to fall in line, though? What's the line? Well, the line is don't challenge us. You know, don't, or if you do, I don't know, be very smart about it, quote on quote. Like you don't, you don't go to the street and say, fuck Hamas. Can we swear here?

Sorry, I don't know. Yeah. Like, you don't just go to the street and say that. And there will be repercussions on you. They have been killings. There have been people who have been murdered, you know, all of that. You have people who even if you are suspected of spying for the Israelis, let alone, obviously, if you are caught actually spying for the Israelis.

But even if you're suspected, your life can just be over. It's not quite a fair and representative process, the judicial system, I mean, in that sense. That being said, Hamas has always occupied a pretty complicated position within Gaza, because the situation itself has always been dire, or at least has been for the past couple of decades at the very least, more or less. And so a lot of people, including like pretty close friends of mine who are very not on the Islamist side of things, very liberal, progressive, atheist, queer, all of the good things,

are not, have been at times not necessarily supportive of Hamas, but more like, well, those are the guys in town. Those are the main players. That's what we have. and it's part of my frustration a lot of the time is like, well, where is the Palestinian Mandela or whatever? Like, for one, probably under the rebels or in some Israeli prison or in exile, there aren't many, there isn't exactly a situation that's conducive to sort of like a healthy and vibrant civil society that any place would almost naturally and organically develop because people don't like living in rubble. Like that's not exactly something that people like to do. And so Hamas has kind of been in many ways

The The I don't know What's the what I'm looking for Like the prison owners Or at least the prison managers And you know Israel in this case would be the prison owner

But like the prison managers And at the same time Like the other ones that can Temporarily let you play in the playground Or let temporarily tell you We're going to protect We're going to defend you Against the actual owners

Against the people who are committing Who causing the blockade Blockade or whatnot And so the average person in Reza, who have to, people always, I always have to emphasize this, a good half of their population is underage. Like, the life expansion machine gas is not very high. And obviously, due to the blockade.

And so for many people who are underage right now, their entire existence has been the blockade. Like, they don't know anything else. They're not sitting in cafes debating the difference between the 67 war and the 73 war and whether the Oslo Accord were a good idea or not. They're not. They're just in this very dire circumstances. And there is a group like Hamas that says basically, like, we will protect you. And as far as they are concerned, up until like the most recent massacre, this was sort of true.

Now, whether it was a good thing, no, it wasn't. It was never a good thing. But Hamas and Israel have basically had some kind of power equilibrium for the past decade or so. There would be tits for that. Hamas throw some rockets. Israel bombed some places. Hamas gets something as a return. Israel says we have declared victory, we have destroyed X amount of tunnels, we have to

destroy or killed this commander or killed this jihadi leader or kill this associate or whatever. Hamas can then say also, well, we have stopped the bombings. Then that's a victory of sorts. If there's nothing else to count on as, that can even count as a victory or in a victory as like something good, there's like it's the only game in town in that sense. Yeah, so I think my answer was too long. No, I don't think so. Okay.

So if you were, I mean, does Hamas, like, are they capable if they wanted to, and let's say they had a real partner on the Israeli side? I mean, are they interested in negotiating a piece? Or is it all rockets all the time? And I mean, so what I've been reading is the Hamas charter. charter, rather, is, you know, basically from the river to the sea. I mean, you know, no Israelis, no Israel. Anyway, so I'm just wondering, like, how do you get talk started or can you get talk started with these two sides?

I know the Netanyahu government, I'm not going to say, like, you know, looking for peace with the Palestinians, that's for sure. But anyway, I just, what do you think? So again, with a huge caveat here being before two weeks ago, because the dynamics are such right now that it can go to like a different scale of things that I don't know. Like honestly, if Hezbollah gets involved in a serious way, Hamas is like very weak in comparison to Hezbollah. They don't really compare. And I would, I would be glad to talk about that as well. Hamas has said many times,

and again, like this is not to give them credit or whatever, there's just what they have said, either in, well, you know, the leadership that's in exile in Qatar

or within, um, uh, Gaza itself have said that they are willing to negotiate and have said that, uh, they are willing to recognize even. And there was this story that I think,

uh, yeah, he was this, uh, Israeli academic. He mentioned how I think it was last year, if I'm not mistaken or at least, like before this most recent wave of violence.

Um, One of the Hamas leaders sent a note to Netanyahu in Hebrew saying, I don't remember the exact quote, but something along the lines of like, let's find something, let's find a deal or let's find a compromise. That doesn't mean that there are, it's not to give them credit, right, but in the same way that I wouldn't give the Netanyahu regime credit for anything, not just because of what they do, obviously, but for what they say. So for me it's like both to be taken into account. So Hamas's actions say one thing. And they don't all say rocket, rocket, rocket, kill all the Jews and whatnot.

They also say, we are in this situation. And I hope I'm saying these things like, I hope this is not, I hope you understand. I'm kind of paraphrasing and not even like it's not, this is not good language, basically, but that's just how dire the situation is. But like they would not, they're not just that. There's an element of them that.

is that. But there is an element of them that's like, you know, they wear their ties. They like to go to Qatar and negotiate with the Americans and the Israelis. And they like to play the politics, the game of politics and of geopolitics and all of that stuff. And more importantly, they are a party that doesn't want to die. They want to survive. They want to exist as a serious political party, which, you know, is what most political parties do. So at one point, I think right now, in the past couple of weeks, I don't know what the next Hamas is going to look like.

Because for one, breaching the fence border, whatever, is one thing. And if they had stopped at that, that could have actually been understandable. Justifiable is a different thing for me, and that's like immoral ethics, whatever. But it would be an understandable thing to do

because it's a blockade. And when you're under a blockade, I think it's not an unreasonable thing to want to get out of that blockade. That's just for me a normal human thing. But obviously what they did immediately after doing that, the massacre, the massacre of random civilians and all of that stuff, that's obviously a line crossed. And it's a kind of a, it was a bizarre thing for them to do. And I don't know if quite the term is bizarre.

If the term bizarre is quite accurate, just because it doesn't quite follow their previous modus. It doesn't reflect the actions of a political body that wants to continue, I think, right? You would have had to have known that doing that was going to wake up this military power next to you in a way that it had not been awakened before, right? Or at least not in the past decade. Yeah. So I've heard different analyses of specifically why does this specifically happen. One version of events that I think is plausible, I can never know for sure. Of course, so people please don't hate me.

This is just a plausible scenario. of what happened is that the mission was to enter, get some hostages, and negotiate with those hostages to get Palestinian prisoners in Israel to get them out and to have a hostage really. This has happened in the past. So it's not unusual that it would happen again. And the main difference obviously right now is just how the scale of how many hostages they've I think as of now is around 222 still in Gaza.

And how kind of relatively sophisticated the entire operation was. So that's one version of events that, this is how it started. But then an argument that I've seen is that what seems to have happened is that they were themselves surprised by how relatively easy it was to enter. And then mostly their lower ranking members, many of whom are very young, not that this is an excuse, found themselves suddenly in a position of power where they were, as far as they're concerned, in a position of powerlessness their entire lives. And they quite literally took it out on civilians. Now, this is obviously not an excuse. I hope this is clear. It's just something that we see in terms of when we see power dynamics in different places.

This does sometimes happen. But regardless of what the initial causes or rationale or what's not happened, the fact of the matter is that this many people were murdered. And this is a line crossed. It's a line cross for Palestinians for that matter because that's not part of the Palestinian cause. It's not something that has ever really been as serious. there's always been Palestinians that have murdered civilians. As you know, you have during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon,

you have Lebanese that wanted to kill Israeli civilians. But most people in that situation focus on military target. There's like a rules of engagement, ethics almost, that it doesn't look good for them, even within their base, that they don't make distinctions between, you know, an armed military soldier, like an armed soldier, I mean, and a child. or just a random person dancing. Like it doesn't look too good within their,

obviously within their most extreme base. Yes, maybe. But for the most part, most people are like relatively sober and understand that if you do a certain thing, especially if it's like something this massive that will have a certain resonance and therefore a certain reply that will clearly,

even if you think about it as just purely on military terms, clearly like not be worth it essentially. and yet it's what happened. So another version of event, or like an interpretation of what's happened, and again, I do not know for sure which one it is. It just seems plausible to me, because last year we had the rapprochement

between Hamas and the Iranian side. Hamas and Iran were not on good terms. They were actually on very hostile terms because Hamas in Syria was against the Assad regime. Hamas was, to some extent, still is, broadly speaking, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, so more on the, you know, Sunni Islamist side of things in Syria rather than the Iranian side of things in Syria.

And there's also an organic bond, if you know, link between a good chunk of the Hamas base. And here I'm talking about just like your ordinary civilian that might be a sympathize of Hamas. And let's say the Free Syria Army at the time. So it was not unusual to see like Hamas fighters of the Lkuts Brigade, for example, walk down the streets of Gaza with a free Syria, like a revolutionary Syrian flag. around them, you know. It was not unusual. Just in the same way as you, to this day, in Idlib today, you will see a protest and you would see like people in Idlib and in Syria waving the Palestinian and the free Syria flag

together because there's a good, there's a good percentage of the population that has experienced oppression, how they interpret that oppression is something else, but they have experienced oppression that might see some link between their experience and the experience of someone, if you're from Idlib, maybe, or Aleppo, before 2016 and someone who was in Gaza at the time or someone in Gaza or someone who's in Aleppo and Idlib and so on. And Hamas was not in that access of resistance, quote-unquote, as Hezbollah calls it, at least not after the Arab Spring or shortly after the Arab Spring.

They cut ties with the Assad regime. They cut ties with Hezbollah. There were even active fights within Syria between Hamas and Hezbollah, and they were certainly not on good terms with Iran. Now, last year, there has been a rapprochement. because Islamic jihad being the one that's closer, the party being closer to Iran, they sort of meant the ties. And now they, I don't quite know how they work on the inside.

But my understanding is that they have like a joint command kind of thing, or at least they talk to one another when they decide to do certain things. And also more as importantly, the relationship with Hezbollah, which is a much stronger party, and the relationship with Iran, which is obviously a geo-regional power or regional power, has shifted since last year. So one interpretation of what happened is that they may have felt emboldened by this, and they may have thought, whether rightly or wrongly, that they will be bailed out, that i.e., that something would happen on the second front, as the Israelis called it, on the northern front,

that Hezbollah would do something, forcing the Israelis to basically be very stretched out, which would then force them to come to the negotiating table or to what not to then give Hamas or concede to Hamas some of the demands that they would have wanted or would have asked, including most importantly and maybe more symbolically powerful the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel because doing so is like also their way of saying look we can get something out of them

we can actually make demands out of the occupiers so my hunch and maybe in the weeks and days and weeks and months to come we will know more and more is that it was probably a combination of those two we still don't know what Hezbollah will really do like there have been tits for tasks but as of now it's not completely out of the order although more Hezbollah fighters have been killed recently than in a very long time.

I don't know if since 2006, but certainly in a very long time. So this might yet change the dynamics on the ground. But it's quite also possible that they may have been given this guarantee by Hasbullah or by Iran via Islamic Jihad. And I should say even within Lebanon, Hezbollah has been since lasty, more tolerant of Hamas and Islamic Jihad factions, which are not many, but they exist. operating within southern Lebanon, for example, was before Hezbollah would accept no, like a complete hegemony of operations there. And so it's quite possible that they thought this is,

or they would give in a guarantee or whatnot, and it may yet be that Hezbollah delivers on that guarantee, in which case I honestly fear for us all, and I'm not exaggerating. But if not, it might be that Hezbollah did give them a guarantee, but then decided to back. down, maybe because the Israeli response was so violent and so brutal

that even Hezbollah is sort of rethinking a bit to rethink strategy, I don't know. And obviously, I have no way to know right now. But those two scenarios in my view seem, if accurate, for me, makes the most sense in terms of what was most likely

or what most likely happened in terms of what they decided and so on. First of all, I'd want to say that I really do hope that many people, if not most people, share your point of view about what happened on the seventh in terms of the horror of it. I know from speaking to relatives in Israel and here in the States, one of the great fears that Jews have right now is being abandoned and that people are celebrating what happened. And, you know, even here in the United States, we've had, I don't know if you've been paying attention because you don't need to. But, you know, the academic response.

I feel I feel I have to because whatever happens in the U.S. is going to affect me. Yeah, I try to. Yeah, no, that makes sense. But, you know, in some of the biggest academic institutions, there was this immense equivocation saying, you know, violence cycle of violence, you know, violence on both sides. And I just, you know, I just wanted to say, you know, it's, I don't know, it's good to hear that at least your point of view or if, I mean, do you think your point of view is widely? Yeah, that basically, basically. I mean, I don't know. I would say it's not like my point of view, let's say is not, it's not really extreme.

it's not seem as like because the extremist positions if we want to call them that are more like the Hezbollah types so my point and on the other side on the flip side you will have like the more

right wing slash far right like Lebanese Christian nationalists that are they wouldn't always say so but they're more sympathetic to Israel than they are to Iran for example or even to Hezbollah within Lebanon so those exist

and like those would be considered extremist positions my position is or my view on this is relatively mild. I would say it's not that out of the ordinary even if

and this is like maybe it takes us a different on a different I don't know. You tell me if this is like out of like two out of there but I know a lot of folks

friends especially in Lebanon who would post a lot of things online and maybe need to pause exactly before posting. I think there's a lot of problems related to the internet right now in social media of people sharing very emotional

like they can be very generally emotionally distraught by seeing like a hospital bombed in Gaza or like a UN school destroyed or some not all but some of the Israeli reactions online which have been pretty nauseating to look at and react also

very viscerally and very like fuck everything and destroy it all and even like starts supporting kind of supporting Hasbalah but not quite and those are people who are not as I said secular queer some of many of them atheists like democratic what have you

but it gets to a point where it gets so cynical and so desperate and so hopeless that they are basically saying well again the same as I said before with Hamas and Minazans like what other games in towns are there as soon as the massacre happened the Americans the Europeans you know basically the Western powers were saying

of course condemning this, this is a terrorist attack and that's fine. And honestly, not a lot of people would have a problem with that in of itself, condemning it for what it was, which was a massacre, multiple massacres for that matter. But then saying, like, Israel has the right to defend itself, okay, that's one thing, you know?

It could be understood especially in the context of it immediately responding to an actual massacre, but then kind of giving carte blanche to the Israelis, as the Prime Minister Rishisunak said, as basically Biden said multiple times, Biden, who seems to have, I don't know,

lied about seeing beheadings that he didn't really see and stuff like that. It's gotten to the point where, and now in Germany, the repression against Palestinian supporters and Palestinians themselves and saying stuff like we will not, the conservative leader just today saying stuff like, we will not allow any Palestinians from Gaza coming to Germany because we have enough anti-Semitic young men in Germany.

And it's like, I don't know, I feel like sometimes I'm losing my mind. Like the Germans are talking to me about anti-Semitism. Like the Germans are talking to me about anti-Semitism. Like the Germans of all, like I generally feel like I'm losing my minds at times. But to go back to it, I don't think it's an unusual position. I mean, everyone I talk to and sure my circle of friends are more on the left than not and what have you. But even the things that I read, sure, you'll have certain languages, like for example, they would say, the occupation or, you know, the occupation army, to refer to the entire IDF.

And this may be that might sound a bit off, I don't know, to an English speaker or to an American, or maybe to an Israeli, I don't know. But it's not that unusual if you're in Lebanon and your experience of the IDF is that of an occupation force. So that's just the term that you would use. You would even have terms that are very problematic. Do not get me wrong here, and I'm not comfortable with them. But a lot of people in their world will say, al-Jahood, the Jews, in order to actually mean the Israelis. because for the most part, their relationship to a Jewish person

or what they, you know, the one most popping up in their news happens to be in Israeli. So there is this equivalence between the two that, for example, wouldn't necessarily extend if they are talking to an American Jew. Okay, this person is also a Jewish person, but they're also American and that's it. Like, that's the end of the conversation. It's not necessarily something that is politically relevant, if you see what I mean, even culturally relevant. And so it's a mess, right?

And I don't think my particular, I have views that I'm like, you know, I'm also more on the anarchist side of things. I'm not a fan of nation states, all of that stuff. But that's not, that's not what I necessarily use as my, my starting point to reach that kind of analytical conclusions, if you want. I'm trying to just understand the situation for what it is as much as I can and try to understand the quote unquote different sides, as I said before. don't really like sides, by trying to understand and that's, in order to make sense of it,

because it doesn't make much sense for me to say, those people are just born hating those other people, and that's what it is, and we are all fucked. It's a cop out. Because that seems to be a lot of it. Yeah, for me, it's, I agree. It's a cop out. I think it doesn't explain anything. We have this, we want this rush to get to certainties to have, like, things kind of

squared away and be able to just say, like, all right, well, I understand this. I can put it in my box. and this is a situation that simply does not work. And it doesn't work in most situations, really. But I've never seen anything quite like this that eschews simple answers and simple explanations, right? All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break.

We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back. We are back on with Joey Aube. Another ignorant question. If I can jump in, Jason, I've got one. If I can answer, I'll answer it, of course. No, Matthew, I've grown used to your written questions.

Wow, that was a good burn for a Monday morning. I guess Monday afternoon. Another, we're kind of talking about some of the narrative lines that we're seeing kind of run through media over. over again. Another one that I wanted to ask you about is this idea that Benjamin Netanyahu, and I was trying to find the quote while we were talking. I couldn't find the exact quote. Built up Hamas as a way to delegitimize a Palestinian state. Is there any truth to this? And this is something that's in like, oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there is.

No, no, this is, it's not a conspiracy. Yeah, sorry. It's not, this is, again, the Hamas contained book, goes into it in much more detail than I probably can explain it. But it's not rocket science in some sense. If you are someone like him who is very smart and arguably one of the most cynical human beings I've ever seen in my life, like I think this should be agreed. Dealing with a PLO type of group is more difficult than dealing with a Hamas type. The PLO for all of its flaws, and there were many, you could talk to it. And it had some representative value.

It even had like Jewish members in its ranks. It obviously had many Christian members in its ranks and atheists and communists and so on. And it had a version of an interpretation of reality, if you want, that was more accommodating than a group like Hamas or especially a group like Hezbollah, but that's a different story because it's more related to Iran and Lebanon's civil war at the time. So at the time, as I said, like Hamas and Israel. reached a violent, but an equilibrium. Like,

it's an equilibrium in a political sense, in the sense that they were in so tat's, but that's because that's the only way Hamas can get the Israelis attention.

The Israelis pay attention and they respond because they have to, because they don't want to lose face or whatever, and they need to show maybe to their allies that they can deal with Hamas.

And there's some kind of, like, trade of like, you know, give us money, allow permits, which kind of shows a bit the desperation of the situation on the ground in Gaza, that one of the negotiating, one of the things, one of the demands that sometimes Hamas would make is give permits to X amount of Palestinians to go and work in Israel. Because at the end of the day, you have this power differential, regardless of the ideologies,

even Hamas recognized, obviously, that Israel is an actual state. It's powerful. It's richer. And so you kind of have to deal with that reality. And so, yes, not too long. This is why I do not have the timeline and Torik, in English pronunciation, would be a better source on that. And so I'm happy to send you the links if you want to put stuff in the description and stuff.

Sounds like we should just have them on the show and doing a whole, do a whole Hamas episode, honestly. Go for it. I recommend him. It's very good. But, yeah, I'm going to say about a decade ago, and this is give or take some years. I'm not sure.

actually what am I talking about? Sorry, even going further back, in the early days, and this does go beyond before Netanyahu, I should say. The Israeli state as a whole found it easier to deal with Islamists than to deal with secular nationalists. Again, this is not new.

This was actually the case in Lebanon, not just between the Israelis and the Lebanese and Palestinians, but between the Assad regime and the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Let me just quickly give the Lebanon exam, because for me it's more indicative. like after the civil war erupted in 75 for various reasons that we won't get into, the vast majority of the parties that formed the,

here I don't remember the English translation, but the Lebanese national coalition or something, some kind of neutral term like that, were like Palestinian resistance forces, the vast majority of whom were either on the left or at least pan-Arab or pan, you know, nationalist, Palestinian nationalists, Lebanese communists some Islamists but not many

because in the 70s that was not a massive thing Nasarites and obviously Nasarites at the time were a thing in Lebanon understood a thing but they're very small and so that was that was the main resistance and resistance again to the set

to in that neutral term of there was an occupying force and they were resisting that occupying force therefore they are a resistance whether you like that term or not And so up until 82, the majority of that resistance was secular and left wing and, you know, again, for all of the flaws that they may or may not have, like closer to an IRA if you want than a Hamas or a Hezbollah. But in the 80s, as the occupation after 82 especially started becoming more and more brutal, that allowed for the rise of a group like Hezbollah, which obviously was. in good part created by Iran after the Iranian Revolution in 79, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 79,

in order to form as a counterweight to the secular and communist and pan-Arabist coalition. Because in 76, and this is before 82, before the Iranian Revolution, before all of that, that coalition was actually winning the Lebanese civil war. And so that threatened what at the time was the Maronite Christian. And I should say that's my background, that my people, quote, But that coalition, that side of the equation, if you want, the right-to-wing Lebanese Christian nationalists were losing. They had like a very small percentage of the Lebanese territory. And in theory, the war could have ended in 76 or 77.

The Syrian regime at the time, Hafez al-Assad, actually went to the Americans, quite literally. Kisinger was there at the time. And he's still there with us because he never dies. One hundred-year-old guy. he literally went to the Americans and said like I can take care of this for you guys and here I can recommend the episode with Ziyadh Majid who was one of the most active Lebanese left-wing thinkers especially around 2005-066 in Lebanon which were significant for other reasons here and so anyway Hafez al-Assad the father of

Bashar al-Assad of course went to the Americans may say I am the one who can protect the Christians I'm the one who can defend them and that was almost all that was needed to say even though that wasn't actually accurate or whatever, but that's geopolitics for you and Realpolitik, Al-Khlyssinger, and all of that stuff. So the Syrian army actually invaded Lebanon in 76. They assassinated Kamal Shum Blot in 77, who was the leader of that coalition that I mentioned. And so by the time the Israelis entered, really entered,

they were there beforehand in terms of fighting the Palestinians and all of that stuff. But when the proper invasion of Lebanon in 82 happened, that coalition was so weakened that it facilitated obviously the Israeli invasion. So you can argue that the Syrian invasion facilitated the Israeli invasion, which is quite ironic, but that's accurate.

And so that they were facilitated into entering Lebanon. It became easier for them to do so. They obviously bombarded Beirut. There was a siege, the Someratina massacre, all of that stuff that happened in 82. And the occupation stayed in southern Lebanon at one point. They withdrew to that side of Lebanon. And that facilitated the rise of a group like Hasbullah.

which was nowhere to be found in the 70s. It did not exist. As I said, literally created by Iran after 79. And before that, there was a different group that then became, actually it was called Islamic Jihad, not related, but that became, you know, Hasbullah and so on and so forth. And Hasbullah rose to power partly by assassinating communist leaders in the south. Mahdi Amel is a very famous person,

who was himself of Shia Bakhran. He was a Marxist communist thinker, and he was assassinated by Hezbollah. not really a secret. It's one of those things that like if you read a book and autobiography by his partner or his cousin or whatnot, they just say so, like matter of fact, like everyone knows this. But because Hezbollah is what it is today,

you can't quite talk about it in those same terms. You have to, you know, maybe be more nuanced, oh, the fog of war or, you know, whatever. But that's what it is. And when that happened, Israel, in my opinion, had a better enemy. Because an enemy like Hezbollah is a much easier enemy to sell. and this is before 9-11

after 9-11 with the war on terror and like all Islamists are the same all jihadis are the same it's all the same we need to just destroy everything and bomb everything that became a much easier setting point as well for the Israelis to basically say hey we're like you

you guys were bombed by al-Qaeda we are under threat by Hezbollah you know and Hezbollah were for their part cannot happy playing that role because they were pissing off the Israelis that was good for their base

and so you had again another violent equilibrium. You know, that kind of established itself. With Hamas, it's kind of similar story, although the actors are different and dynamics are different. I would just point out that the PLO is responsible for thousands of deaths, quite literally, including at the Munich Olympics where they murdered Israeli athletes

and they took hostages all over the place, aircraft, as well as ship. This isn't to argue that they were good. I'm just saying they suck. Yeah, sure. I'm happy with that. But you know, the IRA killed civilians as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I'm not a big fan of them, I've got to say. But, you know, what I'm trying to say with all of that is that they come from a certain context which you can understand, quote unquote, not necessarily justify. And that context can be tackled in the same way that you don't have to like the IRA to still think the Good Friday's agreement is a better deal than not having it, although it was flawed. That's what you're saying. sort of what I'm going for is that it's a good Friday's agreement, especially giving freedom of movement to people in Northern Ireland to also opt for Irish citizenship if they

can, which became very handy after Brexit, I should say, and all of that stuff. That allowed for a reduction of temperature. Like for me, my concern is how do we lower the temperature? Because there are these maximalist positions, as they are called, that are not, and here, this isn't a both sides or whatever. It's just a fact of the matter is that in the moment, what matters is, for example, now, what matters is a ceasefire to just stop the destruction because random people are being murdered and that is not good to actually tackle some of the roots of the problem. Maybe not all. Maybe it's not possible to deal with all of them because so much time has passed and whatnot. I don't know. But the blockade of Gaza is a blockade. And a blockade does

not mean that, oh, you can, you just now open the gates and you're now happy with Hamas running all over because I know this is not a good selling point. I understand that. But for the average citizen for the average civilian in Gaza that doesn't have much to do with that situation. Because as I said, most of them were just born in that situation and have stayed in that situation, a lot more can be done to ease tensions, to work towards social justice, to actually allow some freedom of movement. Like, for example, someone in Gaza who has relatives with someone in the West Bank or someone in Jerusalem or even someone within Israel proper, they can't see them.

They can't just go there. They can't attend the wedding. Or if they do, they need to get approval from the Israelis. can you allow me to go to my cousin's wedding? And Israel says no most of the time. And, you know, that situation is very humiliating day-to-day situations creates at least funnels or fuels, if you want, sorry, fuels a movement like Hamas. I want Hamas gone.

I want them destroyed. I am not fan of them. I want Hezbollah gone, although that's going to be a more difficult situation. But in order for that to happen, the things that gave rise to them, and maybe more importantly, because you cannot quite turn back the clear, clock, but the thing that allows them to be sustained today, maybe again, not all of them. Maybe you don't have control over Iran, for example, but in American, in an ideal democratic situation, would have some influence over what the US foreign policy should or shouldn't be

about. And that's how it's perceived. That's how it's understood. Like, if democracy is supposed to be better than non-democracy, and I certainly believe that, it has to show something. It has to show for something. It has, you should be able to see that, okay, with the democratic government, like again, the US, as flawed as it is, or even Israel, even more flawed as it is, something good should be able to come out of it. And that's what kind of concerns me right now, is that the lessons being drawn are for the Israeli side, not all in Israel, of course, but the Netanyahu side specifically, is that it's always an all for nothing.

You always do all for nothing. If you even risk doing nothing, you will be destroyed and you will be politically destroyed. And I still think Netanyahu is probably politically dead, but that's a different conversation. And you have to just go full at it, show that you have zero emotions. Like you're just, you're going to destroy, you're going to bomb, you're going to just annihil it as many people as you can, as many neighborhoods as you can. And that will teach them a lesson. And I think we're at the stage right now where Gaza has been bombed so many times that I quite literally do not know how many times Gaza has been bombed. I literally do not know how many civilians have been killed since the blockade has started.

I just know that in the most recent couple of weeks, about 1,000 children on their own have been killed. And I'm at the stage right now where I don't quite understand what is even the end game. Because annihilating all of Gaza and ethnically cleansing everyone in Gaza to the Sinai Desert as some Israelis that foreign minister, I don't the ex-foreign minister said on Al Jazeera a couple of weeks ago is a pretty insane thing to say. And yet this has kind of been normalized. It has been normalized within Israeli politics. And so there has to be some kind of pushback within Israel, ideally, obviously, and I'm happy to support anti-occupation activists, peace activists, as flawed as I'm sure many of them are,

versus what we have in the Likud government with the extreme right and all of that stuff. If it doesn't come from Israel and if at least is not likely to come from within Israel, at least not now, I think it's the responsibility of Israel's allies, which clearly have a lot of influence here because they provide a lot of them, not all of it, obviously, but a lot of the money in weaponry that they can at least use as a bargaining chip

in order to say, okay, well, we need to force some kind of negotiation here. The Good Friday's agreement were not seen as a likely thing until they happened. The Camp David's accord, again, with all of the flaws, were not seen as a thing that was even possible

until they actually happened. Hamas are not just, I feel like I need, please don't get me wrong, right? Like, I'm not, they could be gone tomorrow and I would be a happy person. But right now, they're just the reality on the ground. And they have said that they are willing to negotiate to talk, to do all of this. And therefore, if the alternative, if the two options here is bomb, bomb, regardless of how many people are murdered,

in order to hope that for some reason you can destroy all of them, even though one of the leaders of Hamas is still in a tunnel to this day. And the idea somehow hasn't found him yet, like if you, if that's the, if that's the plan, we're seeing at a campaign of extermination. We're just witnessing a campaign of extermination that's being normalized. And that terrifies me. It terrifies me for Palestinians in Gaza first and foremost. But it terrifies me for what this says in terms of what is acceptable, what is the new rules of engagement and whatnot.

Like that's what concerns me beyond even the specificities of that conflict right now. Right or wrong, though, both sides do see this right now as an existential war. And I think that makes it that much harder. I mean, as if you can make problems in the Middle East harder, you might not be able to. But, you know, really, I know from talking to friends and everything I've been reading. And yeah, it just feels like it's a matter of whether, you know, if Jewish people, even in the United States kind of feel like the walls are closing in. I mean, you know, now I'm not, it's probably not rational, but it's amazing. I sent Matthew, and I'd have to share it with you too.

There's a woman who wrote this great book called People Love Dead Jews. Oh, I know it. Yeah, yeah. You know the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and anyway, she wrote something for the New York Times. It just not so much justifying anything, but really kind of explaining where some people are. when we had, you know, when you have people screaming for, you know, for you to cease to exist. And, you know, and I'm hearing you, because what you're saying is it's the same thing. It's, I mean, it's being seen and may be an existential struggle where, you know, the Jews are Israelis and they're not as separate as people may think. Or maybe they are.

you know, they see it the exact same way, that it's just a matter of, like, it seems like people are seeing it like one side will survive. And that's, I would just say that's not really possible. First of all, there are a lot more Arabs than there are Jews in the world. There are a lot more everybody else than there are Jews in the world. It's hard to imagine everything, just, you know, things working out. But Jason, you said something, if I may, like, it's, I think it's actually important. You said, okay, it may not be rational, but it feels that way. And I feel like we need to emphasize how much of the world today is just that. Being rational is a bit overrated, or at least it's overly, like we invest so much in the fact that we think we are rational actors

who are, you know, perfect consumers and whatnot. And there are lots of problems with that as well. But it doesn't have to be rational for it to feel true. And there's just the fact whether we like it or not. So I spend a lot of my time. As I said, I come from a specific background in Lebanon. I may also be Palestinian, which I am. But I grew up among Lebanese Christians, many of whom were, like I just called them the Serbian ultra-nationalists of the Middle East.

Like they were kind of that. They are very far-right, very racist, very anti-Semitic, very Islamophobic, very all of the bad stuff. And many of them are there to this day. Most recently, they called themselves the soldiers of God, or soldiers of the Lord, rather, would be the translation. Christian nationalists in Lebanon who apparently have taken it upon themselves to terrorize every queer person that exists in Lebanon because that's their priority right now. And so those are the people that I'm familiar with. I generally grew up with those people. One of my close friends at the time, his mom wrote the autobiography, we're no longer friends,

wrote the autobiography of one of the main warlords in that group, Samir Shah, wrote the autobiography, I should say, because it's not really an autobiography. But those are the people I'm familiar with. And so, you know, cynicism and helplessness, because one thing that they would always say is that there are many more Muslims than there are Christians in the Middle East. And that's numerically accurate. Sure, it is.

Now, in Lebanon, it's actually very different because Lebanon is a very special place and has a very specific political reality, if you want, where Christians are not actually in danger, in any meaningful sense. If anything, they have disproportionate amount of power in Lebanon in terms of their actual percentage in the country. The president has to be a Marianite Christian according to the constitution, et cetera, et cetera, and the general of the army as well and other folks. And so I have seen people who, and I grew up, as I said, with those people who would say things like, if we don't do this, or if we don't let Israel destroy all of Dahi in southern Lebanon and the east of Lebanon, sorry, and so on, we will be next, i.e., they will come for us. Now, the fact that they have never come for us doesn't change that equation. And if they do come for us, they only need to do so once for the past like 30. years of paranoia and fear and anxiety to just be confirmed. You don't need more than once.

And so that's what I mean when I say that Hamas crossed a line, an actual line, that needs to be acknowledged that can't just be wished away as one of the Hamas leaders who was interviewed in Al Jazeera at the same time, at the same he was interviewed before, I believe, the Israeli ex-foreign minister, yeah, yeah, on something, forgot his name, said like, you know, actually, no, we didn't kill any civilians. That's propaganda and whatnot because, you know, they're going to stick to their ranks, right? That's, if that's the response, instead of saying, well, a faction of our, like a group of ours, they could have just said that.

A percentage of our fighters, a minority of firefighters, they could say, disobeyed orders and committed a massacre, and we will deal with them. they could have executed them on the spot even like scapegoated random people and executed them on the spot and this could have been a good enough story for the rest of the world and they didn't do that and that's their choice

I'm not saying executing random people is a good thing but they could have done that they have done that in the past they could have done that and they chose not to and that tells me that either they generally thought as I said before that there would be a northern front maybe coming from Hasvallah

that eases the burden against them because we should say this, it's important. Part of the reason why they managed to even do the thing that they did is that they identified correctly so that the IDF was very stretched out because they were too busy propping up the occupation of the West Bank.

And this is because of Netanyahu's political priorities. They identified that. They recognized a flaw in the machine, if you want, and they took advantage of that flaw. Now, I've gotten to the point where I generally don't expect Western governments to care as to whether I die or not, or people like me die or not. Palestinians, Lebanese, and so on, I grew up in post-9-11, the invasion of Iraq and so on. Like, I feel like I know better by now. Sorry, my dog is choosing to chase

her own tail right now. Come in. This is the seriousness of the conversation, right? God bless pets what I was saying so I so I stop expecting it it still bothers me it still hurts me it still makes me very sad when I see statements coming out from like especially Germany these days but also France the UK like I'm in Switzerland

so it's like they're all around me it saddens me and it worries me and I'm concerned when I see memes and images and videos of people openly saying like Beirut is the next Gaza because that's like most of my family. That scares me.

The Genri does scare me. But as I said, I have those two hats on at the beginning, one where I'm freaking out all the time. And the other one, I try to put my analytical hat on. And my analytical hat on says, if the only thing that the West cares about is whether, you know, Israelis die or not, the politics of Benjamin Netanyahu are a cluster fuck. They're a very bad, it's just not good politics.

It does not, it's not conducive to fewer people dying because you just can just put the numbers right now, it's not good, it's not working. And so there has to be something that gives. There has to be something that's like put some pressure. As I said, maybe from within right now is not very likely, although I have seen many Israelis be very pissed off at the Likud and at Netanyahu understandably so because they understood. And I think they are right in that understanding that Netanyahu has made a decision to basically sacrifice the hostages. Like it just does not matter to him. I think we need to acknowledge this. And I'm worried for those hostages. I don't one random civilian skills, regardless of where they're from.

But in order to turn down the temperature, in order to try and turn it down just a tiny bit, there has to be some acknowledgement of what it is to exist in a place like Gaza. That's all. I mean, that's all. That's like a first step to even acknowledge what it is. But what we're seeing now are like, we're going to turn Gaza into a parking lot. They're human animals, as the idea of General said, like day two or day three. We're going to cut off water.

We're going to basically treat them all as potential terrorists, even if they are like there's 130 primis right now, premature babies. They may already be dead as far as I know now. Very sensitive to me because my child that was born last week is a premature baby because they need a lot of attention. Care, obviously, which means a lot of fuel, a lot of water, a lot of food, a lot of all of that. And the idea I've chose to cut that off. Now, they are opening a pipe in the south and they're doing this, sure, because they want people from the north to go to the south. but the fact of the matter is if you are a preemie baby in northern Gaza, you're not exactly going to have your parents take you out of the incubator and go to the south.

So if we're at that stage right now, and the only thing that we're seeing is the actual military power, because the power differential does matter, say that we're just going to do more and more and more, and then some more after that, I worry about what's next. Because maybe we can get into it depending on timings, you guys can tell me,

but Hezbollah hasn't really entered the game yet. It's not really there yet. It's doing it a bit, but I'm generally scared. And this is as a Lebanese who is partly in exile because of Hezbollah, I'm generally scared that we are at a stage right now where a lot of major players in the West especially, and even in Israel for that matter, don't actually understand that this group is not like the other groups.

It's not just because they call themselves vaguely, Islamist and whatnot, that means that the same group of people. Hezbollah has a different capacity. They are battle-hardened after Syria, and I have always opposed the intervention in Syria. They have people generally willing to die, like more so than with Hamas, for that matter, which have always been, quote-unquote, more pragmatic on many ways because they've had to deal with the reality of the Israeli occupation. Hezbollah doesn't.

Not since 2000. It's 23 years ago. An entire new generation of Hezbollah fighters, because the vast majority of them, obviously, very young. Our battle-hardened, have gone to Syria since the age of 16 and whatnot, are pretty good at what they do, which is horrible things. And they have access, unlike in Gaza, they have access to, in theory, unlimited amount of weapons. Because Gaza, they have to smuggle things in tunnels and whatnot, because neither the Egyptians nor the Israelis want to allow them to have the weapons. And yet they still manage. Hasbalah doesn't have that. They just have,

most of Lebanon's border is with Syria. Syria allows, of course, transport of any anything via Iraq from Iran. And sure, Israel can bomb a lot of them and will bomb a lot of them, I'm sure. But there's only something you can do given that they are already in Lebanon. There's 50,000 of them at the very least that are very well trained. And if nothing is done right now to actually reduce the temperature, to actually find some kind of compromise that could be at least on this understanding of the Palestinian position, which has not really changed in so long time, I'm worried about what's next. I'm generally worried for not just for Lebanese civilians and Palestinian civilians and Syrian civilians, obviously Lebanese, Palestinian especially given the context of what we're talking about. But I would be really worried for Israeli civilians as well.

Like Hezbollah are, I have to keep on emphasizing this. Hamas is nothing in comparison to them. Like there's no comparison. They are, they operate like an army. They are stronger than the Lebanese army. They're stronger than the Syrian army for that matter. the Iraqi army and many other armies in the region, they have different capacities, they have different ideological certainties within them, within their ranks of what it is

that they are doing. And if the only thing that Israel is sort of providing them, and Israel's allies especially, is that, yeah, actually, you want to, you want to play, will play. And then they will play. They will do it. They are happy to do it. It scares me. I spent a lot of my time studying Hezbollah.

And when I was still a journalist at the time interviewing Hezbollah, members of and whatnot. Some of them are sober and pragmatic and sure. Yes, of course. But a good chunk of them are not and enough of them are not that they can really start something. They were protesting a few days ago basically saying to Nasrallah, where are you? What are you doing? Like, why aren't you defending our brothers and sisters in Gaza? If this isn't stopped and if then the supposed ground invasion which hasn't has happened but not really happened yet and whatnot, if it does actually happen and the destruction continues to even grow and grow and grow, I'm worried about just this getting even more out of hand than it currently is.

And so that's my pitch to, I don't know, if your audience, mostly Americans, I'm assuming. That's like my pitch to Americans, if you want. This shit can get worse. It can really get worse. And I don't want it to get worse. So that's my fear. And part of why I wanted to come on this podcast other than your amazing, tolerance and patience at me just gambling for hours and hours, but thank you for that.

Yeah, we're known for that. Yeah, it's true. Everything that you said about the fear of the widening war, throw in just a couple other things just for fun that you just didn't expressly mention. One is that the U.S. seems to really be throwing itself into this in a way that it didn't 2006 or, you know, in other. conflicts in the Middle East for, I mean, there are two aircraft carrier groups and thousands of soldiers that have been, you know, mobilized and ready to go with a 24-hour notice. And Iran has also said some really scary stuff about, you know, their willingness to help out their friends. and if Hasbola does attack, you know, what does the U.S. do? What does, and then if, or what does Iran do?

And who knows who acts first? It just, you know, the fact is that if one acts, the other will, right? Yeah, I don't think it will be Iran because they tend not to do it themselves. They tend to prefer their allies to do it. And so I do think the main front, if we want to use those military term right now, is basically Hasbullah. and that's the if a good chunk of the base of Hezbollah is genuine in what they say

again you may not like it but they're genuinely and they say that what's happening in Gaza is enough of a reason for them to intervene and to open a second front like they're genuinely in saying that and their past animities between like them and Hamas because they were on the

side of Bashal Asa al and Hamas was not that's kind of like it's like water under the bridge right now like these change these things change all the time and so quickly And so they are willing, they are generally willing to martyr themselves, as they would say, like Stashid, to fight for what they would say in Mukawame, the resistance or the liberation of Palestine or to fight the Zionist enemy or whatever interpretation or however they were going to frame it. The carriers in the Mediterranean, yes, I mean, that's also very terrifying and they would intervene and all of that. but as I said, like the IDF right now, I should say I was listening to this popular front episode just yesterday

interviewing a, I don't know if he's Israeli, but he's based in Israel journalist, who was himself citing and I looked up the, the quote he mentioned, which was accurate, he wasn't mistaken, that like two months or so before prior to the breach, basically Hamas' attack on that date, there was an internal audit of the IDF. by this veteran of the IDF and people can check out that episode because he mentions the name of that veteran,

who said that like the internal audit concluded that actually Israel's army is very weak and that there are many, you know, tanks are rusty and some they don't have night goggles in certain places and whatnot. And he himself said that, and this is a quote, that there is going to be a massacre. This was two months ago. And if like a veteran of the IDF can say that, apparently he's quite old, he was described as being the idea. for like five decades. I'm assuming he's on the older side of things. If he can conclude that, I have to assume that the Americans with their supposedly superior intelligence who were able to predict that the Russians were going to invade Ukraine, and they were right about that, who supposedly them and the Egyptians were telling the Israelis that something might happen, we don't know what, but something might happen, clearly they were right about that. I have to conclude, and maybe I'm being

optimistic here that they understand that yes they can put plane carriers and whatnot in the Mediterranean but if Hamas was able to cause this much damage to the IDF in Gaza Hezbollah can do so much more from Lebanon even even if like the end goal is that Hezbollah gets destroyed after six months or two years or three years or four years of war the cost will be on like a different scale than anything we've seen so far and this will have wider implications on pretty much everything. And war, like the example of the Lebanese Civil War, has a tendency

of then creating a language of its own. The initial spark that started the Lebanese Civil War, a fight between Maronite militias and Palestinian militias, that by the 80s and late 80s, those two groups were not nowhere to be found, but they were just two among

50 different actors. And in the state of the world that were currently in, with things being already so precarious and so fragile and so, such huge swaths of the Middle East, especially in North Africa, I'm worried that either they're really not taking this into consideration or if they are, they're willing to say fuck it and they're willing to get into it. But the consequences, I'm, I just need shudder to even think about them, to be honest with you.

So I hope we don't get there. As I said, I'm not a fan of Hezbollah. I want them weakened. I want them gone. But they're there. And they need to be contended with and they need to be reckoned with in the sense of like they need to be dealt with as serious political. actors that can do X, Y, and Z if they tell you that they're going to do X, Y, and Z.

And I would want people who supposedly care about civilians and lives and peace and whatever to take that seriously because they say that they're going to do something, they tend to do it. And they have the capacity to do it. Anyway, so I repeated myself a bit. Sorry about that. No, no, no. No, Matthew, unless you have something else. I just want to say that that is the perfectly scary note that we like to go out on.

we're either depressed or scared. Sorry about that. No, it's us, not you. And it is a frightening situation. And I don't know, beyond the immediate politics of Israel, Palestine, I don't know if enough people are watching everything else that's going on and how frightening it really is. I really was able to turn my brain off a little bit this weekend and step outside of it, because I don't. gotten pretty frightened, thinking about how big this could really get if, as you say, Joey, somebody doesn't turn down the temperature and real soon. And I'm afraid that it doesn't look

like that temperature is going to get turned down. Yeah. Yeah, that's my fear as well. And I see, I have obviously more friends in Beirut than I do in Israel, Palestine, just because I grew up there. but I see a lot of my friends right now in Beirut have like a mix of feelings let's say of helplessness obviously and some of them of like deep nihilism like it's like if it's going to happen happen like stop like there's this expression

badly translated here was like if you're going to do it just do it stop making us wait that you're going to do it if we're going to die tomorrow like do it now and it's that kind of like again it's this type of trauma-induced nihilism, you might call it, whatever. But that's the civilian population.

That's not the Hezbollah population. That have been fed basically a very distinctive story and timeline and narrative, if you want, for roughly the past couple of decades. They believe that they won in 2006. They believe that this was their victory in the same way that the Israelis believed that they won in 2006. They kind of both lost, to be honest. But they believe that. And after the Arab Spring happened, and they had to just,

to their base, that actually we, the group that loves to talk about the oppressed and fighting oppressors and whatnot, we need to go to Syria to fight the oppressed on behalf of the oppressors, on behalf of Bashar Assad and Iran. And they had to do a lot of, I'm going to call it, brainwashing for lack of a better term,

in order to justify that. And I think the result of that, because of the horrors that Hezbollah soldiers committed in Syria, you now have a different generation, one that's actually harder in the sense of, like, battle hardened than the one in 2006. Does that mean that they will go on rampages and kill civilians?

I don't know. I don't, I don't, I'm not confident in saying no, they won't. So like, it's like I'm not confident enough to say that that's completely out of, out of the, the kind of possibility. They tend to be more careful. But I thought the same about Hamas two weeks ago, that they tend to be more careful. And even if, let's say, the theory is that, uh, actually it was like rogue elements within the Hamas upper echelon or whatever that basically gave orders to like terrify them, terrorize them, kill everyone, all of that.

Or if those people who actually did the massacres decided to make that decision themselves, just scaled that up to a Hezbollah. Like maybe the upper echelons are like actually we need to be sober. We need to be careful. We need to do this and that and this and that. But I mean, you know, many of them will accept orders and listen to orders, but not all. you know, some of them will go their own ways and feel like they're justified in doing so. And there will be enough people that believe so. So yeah, turn down the temperature.

This is not good. It's not, and it's not going in a good place. It would be my pitch to, I'm sure, the American and EU presidents and rulers that are listening to my words right now. Joey, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and scaring the shit out of this once again. No, I mean, it's the situation. It is, it is. It is. It is. It is. Unfortunately. I wish it was not. Joey Ayub. I don't think we even said your last name. Joey Ayub, yes. That's my last name.

He introduced himself. It was quite lovely. He said Joey. Anyway, just want to be sure. Just want to be sure. Okay. Thank you very much, really. Thank you both. Thank you both. Yeah. Speak soon. Hopefully in better circumstances. Yeah. And really, all the best for your new child. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners.

As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's been a pretty wild two weeks. As I said, kind of at the top of this show. This is the third episode that I've recorded in as many days. This is the first one that's going out. The other two are some pretty different perspectives on everything that's going on. And we'll be obviously covering this whole story quite a bit.

bit going forward. If you like us, if you really like us, argueplanet.substack.com. $9 a month. Really helps us out. I think things will be coming out at a pretty brisk clip here for the next few weeks. It's because of everything that's going on. It's top of everyone's mind. We'll talk to you again very soon. We'll be back in a few days with another conversation about

conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until that.