Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 39: Fear and loathing in the diaspora, live in Oslo with Bjørn Gabrielsen.

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

During an August speaking tour in Norway, Haviv was interviewed at an event hosted by the remarkable Jewish organization Kos & Kaos - The Nordic Jewish Network. It's a unique group founded in 2016 that brings together Jewish voices and friends and allies of the Jewish community across Scandinavia for dialogue, cultural events and critical conversations.Norwegian writer and journalist Bjørn Gabrielsen interviewed Haviv in front of a packed house in Oslo on August 21 about the war in Gaza, the condition of diaspora Jews in the wake of October 7, the state of modern journalism, how the Middle East is seen in the West, and more.This episode was sponsored by the children of Naomi Pinchuk of Chicago in honor of her 78th birthday on August 30th. Happy birthday, Naomi! Till 120.Please join us on Patreon to support this project: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Haviv Anything. This episode was recorded live in Oslo, Norway on August 21st, at an event hosted by Kuzon Khaos, the Nordic Jewish Network. I sure hope I pronounce that correctly. Founded in Oslo in 2016, Koso and Chaos has become a unique platform where Jewish voices and friends and allies of the Jewish community across Scandinavia come together for dialogue, for culture, for critical conversations. By the way, across a surprising spectrum, just a real wide spectrum of Norwegian politics, Jewish politics of the Jewish world generally. It was a pleasure to be their guest last weekend in Oslo. The conversation you will hear is a discussion between myself and Bjorn Gabrielson, a Norwegian writer, journalist, literary critic. He brought a unique voice and tempo to the conversation.

Bjorn, I really appreciated how you ran everything, including the humor. I discovered a non-Jewish man who has a tremendous knowledge of his country's Jews and also concern for his country's Jews. And I am grateful he was my interviewer and appreciate that we met. There was a loud protest outside. I don't think it'll come through the microphones. It added some excitement to the proceedings. We couldn't help but reference it a little bit in the conversation. So just be aware of that. Thank you so much to Louisa and all the team at Kossin Chaos. Thank you to Bjorn. It was a pleasure. It was an honor to be part of your conversations up there in the cold north, which in August was not a terrible place to be. Before we start, also, I am very happy to tell you that this episode of Ask Koviv Anything was sponsored by the children of Naomi Pinchik from Chicago in honor of her 78th birthday.

on August 30th. Happy birthday, Naomi, till 120. And now, our conversation in Oslo. Wow, this is very exciting. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Javid. Came all the way from Oregon. Including the Arnold, which was pretty exotic, I believe.

Yeah. Yes. And thank you so much to you, Bjorn. That came all the way from Greeneloko or something like that. We're really excited to have you here. At Coos and Caos, as you know, we try to foster some sort of healthy debate climate and be curious and listen to each other. And tonight we are really excited to hear some insights.

So knock yourself. Thank you for you for me. I should also point out that this is being recorded would be quite marvelous podcast as if anything. Did I see a show of hands? How many of you listen to it? How many enjoy the Patreon?

That's episodes beforehand. Which I recommend you all do. So if who's in college are a slightly more democratically inclined, than I am. They aren't to people from the audience asking questions. So if this happens, know that you will be recorded. And another thing to know is, you know, there's a special genre

of person who stands up and says, This isn't really a question, it's more of a comment. And you should know I am a school teacher now and there's police on the outside. When it comes to this topic, I think quite a few people. I think quite a few of us in this room experience. We never really did start in talking with people who disagree, you know, seriously, because they have a question which they need to be answered before they can go anywhere,

before they can talk at all about this. And when I try, I get so triggered by this demand, and I turn into a Douglas Murray. a one-man tribute band and nobody's happy. And so as quite often, when I have problems of this kind, I ask myself, what would have you do? So I'll try to steal man the arguments I meet from the people who might be outside.

And I'll try to be as eloquent and as honest as I can, because this is what I feel they're asking me. They're saying, Byr and Haviv, how can you discuss the finer points of development of anti-Semitism or Rheh, and Sad Kut, the development of Muslim Brotherhood? These are all details. This is all commentary.

There's a crisis. The dam is being breached. The house is on fire. All hands on deck. And this is what they will always say. Children are being slaughtered. So how can we talk about anything else? but stopping this.

And when I don't give them an answer, the conversation starts. First of all, thousands of children have died in this war. If you strip away everything, the explanation for what Hamas is, what Israelis think is happening to them, how Israelis understand the nature of the enemy, how Palestinians understand their history, and therefore so many Palestinians follow Hamas, you strip all of it away.

is that basic human reality, and there are many human realities, but there is this massive and vital human reality that the thousands of children have died. So the question is utterly legitimate and real and true. And if it comes from a raging anti-Semite, then everything else about that person is terrible. That question is legitimate and true. And so first of all, take it very seriously. The second point I would say is,

In as much as this is concerned for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, for the people dying, the people suffering in war. It is a legitimate movement. It is a legitimate and not just legitimate. I am absolutely sure Israelis are more careful at war because the world is watching. Now I know commanders in the army, including people who are more careful at war because the world is watching. including people who have been in Gaza. I have a friend,

is a battalion commander in Gaza. I think that means he commanded something like 400 infantry in the Gaza war. The understanding among the lieutenant colonels and above that the world is watching has, he tells me, shapes the battlefield. So that's great. That's fantastic. What I find disgusting about these people

is that the only war that they will do this with is the Gaza War. They don't care about other wars, including wars fought by Western allies with Western weapons, like Yemen. But that's not, that doesn't mean they should stop with Gaza. If their bigotry brings them to an obsessive focus on Gaza, and therefore the Gaza War is slightly more morally prosecuted, then their bigotry has done one good thing. Now we should expand their bigotry so that it then focuses on many conflicts and makes many more conflicts slightly less deadly, slightly less harmful.

I don't mind saying that. The IDF is a bunch of human beings. And inasmuch as you can create, and by the way, this is the point of international law. What international law tries to say is the world is watching. We have set standards and we will know if you break them. meet these standards, the world is watching. Great, fantastic. Every Brigadier General in the IDF that I've ever met,

and I haven't met any American ones, but I've met a couple generals, as a journalist, just sort of sitting in the room, they want international law. They want to know that there are guardrails that they know if they're inside or outside of them. So I don't mind that. Not just I don't mind it.

The specific question of the civilian harm in God, is a good question. The person out here in Norway, in Canada, in South Africa, screaming at the local Jewish community about it is a flaming, raging bigot. And there was once a, I once read a book about the organized crime in the United States. And a lot of organized crime in the United States

in the 20s and 30s was from Catholic immigrants. By the way, a lot of it from Jewish immigrants as well, but that's not part of this story. So, and the Archbishop of Chicago was once accepted an enormous cash gift to the church in Chicago from basically a crime boss. And he was asked, how could you accept, you know, a donation to the church from this evil person? And he said, every single thing this person does is evil, except that gift that's going to feed hungry children.

That's the one good thing. That's the money that's laundered. You want to truly longer bad money, feed children with it. That was his answer. So yes, absolutely, absolutely. It might nevertheless be useful to know something about the conflict, to understand Hamas where it comes from, because that will tell you where Hamas wants to go.

And that will tell you what the options are that the Palestinians have and that the Israelis have. And so if, for example, you're concerned not just about the children in Gaza, in danger now, But the children in Gaza endanger three months from now, or the children in Gaza endanger 10 years from now, then we have to talk about Hamas. So, yes, the emergency, scream and shout, make sure the Israelis are as focused as possible. You want a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in place. Just know that if Hamas is in place, this war never ends. Hamas won't let it end.

Hamas has already made that decision and already announces that all the time. So your ceasefire is just a temporary respite before the war is renewed anywhere. So you want to actually bring those children out into a new day from this very dark tunnel? To do that, the only way to do that is to have that conversation about what Hamas is. And how your activism isn't just raging at the Jews, raging at the Israelis, raging at all the evils of the West that you see incarnated in this one Jewish state, but actually dig seriously, deeply into what Hamas is, respects Hamas. They're not brown people oppressed by white people. They have agency. They have thought.

They have two centuries of theological debate that they are expressing and discussing and living out. And if we don't understand that, we're not going to end the war. So yes, focus on the kids. It's an emergency. And by the way, thank you for that part of what you do. Maybe we should talk about how we actually end this thing, which is going to require a slightly larger frame. It is Havivism, which I've heard you say several times, which is, there's nothing you can do that Hamas can't undo. Yeah, there is nothing anybody can do for Gaza. If there's a protester in this room waiting for the moment to jump up and scream, this is the moment. It'll help my dramatic buildup.

I would stay and hear what we have to say because then you'll know more. And by the way, opposition research is part of a campaign. You should actually learn what we think so that you can oppose us better. But if you don't want to do that because you're not a very good protester, go for it. But there is absolutely nothing that you can do. You cannot, if you, I'll put it real simple. Hamas, Al-Hia himself, I mean, he's one of the heads of Hamas now. There's not that many left.

He's one of the living ones. said, I believe it's two weeks ago. I saw the video, so I don't know exactly when it was. It was, I think, two weeks ago. He said, you know, we're still proud of October 7. October 7 was important. Thank God we did it, and obviously we're going to do it again. And not just that, but Samasa's actually put out a pamphlet,

a fascinating pamphlet in Gaza that I have. I have in PDF, in Arabic. Chat, GPT, will translate it for you. Don't work hard. where it tries to explain to Palestinians. By the way, well-crafted on the page and, you know, with some beautiful artwork, it tries to explain to Palestinians why October 7 was not, in fact, a catastrophic disaster for Gaza. And it has a whole theory of Israelis, of the enemy, of how the enemy thinks,

and a whole theory of the strategy, and they really lay it out in a clear and serious and an interesting way. And the bottom line is that Hamas thinks that this war can never end. Because for Hamas, this war is a war for the redemption of Islam itself, for their surge back into history of a powerful, assertive, conquering, redeeming, world-redeeming Islam. And the Palestinian cause is just a small battlefield. Maybe the most important at the moment, but nevertheless a small battlefield in the awakening of Muslim consciousness And Hamas has this game that it plays. It's a little Palestinian nationalist sometimes. It's more pan-Islamist other times There's the charter from 88. There's the charter from 2017 without canceling Charter from 88 that tries to play this this game depending on who the audience is

But they believe that that the war on Zionism the war on the Jews If you read their original founding charter there is an eternal war between Muslims and Jews. They don't talk there about Israelis or Zionists. It's about Jews. And they quote the Koran and the Hadith to explain it. This war can never end. Folks, one of the great waves of criminality that Hamas has ever engaged in was during the Second Intifada, which was 140 suicide bombings, a mass war on Israeli civilians, on Israeli children at what was supposed to be the height of the peace process. It was to destroy the peace process. And, and And so Hamas is not a war with occupation.

It doesn't want an end to Israeli military rule in the West Bank while Israel still stands. That's not worth it. And in fact, wants to maintain Israeli military rule in the West Bank, as long as it's useful for the war to destroy all of Israel entirely. All of that basically means that if you don't understand the difference between Palestinian interests and Hamas's interests, Hamas wants a war and is willing to sacrifice. all Palestinians, literally all of Palestine, all of Palestinian society on the altar of the destruction of Israel. They say it, they explain it, they talk about it, they're proud of it.

Ismail Hania, the head of Hamas, he was killed in Tehran and an Israeli strike. I believe Israel took credit. I don't know if it didn't, then according to foreign sources, I think I'm supposed to say. Ismail Hania lost two sons in this war, or I think maybe even three sons and was proud of it. In other words, when they talk about sacrifice, they include themselves. They're not just willing to sacrifice every other Palestinian. What does that mean? If Hamas remains in charge in Gaza, it doesn't matter how much money you've sent to rebuild Gaza, it'll rebuild tunnels. If Hamas remains in charge in Gaza, it doesn't matter how much concrete you send to rebuild Gaza. It'll only go down into the tunnels.

There have been millions upon millions of cubic meters of concrete, vast oceans of concrete, vast oceans of concrete sent into Gaza over the course of Hamas's 17 years of ruling Gaza, and they didn't build anything in Gaza except almost entirely those tunnels. You will only supply another round of war as long as Hamas remains. So this is my message to the anti-Israel protester. Hating Israel is not enough. You want to hate Israel? Hate Israel.

You want to hate Jews. Hate Jews. If it makes you happy, that's fine. I'm a Zionist. I'm not waiting around. to find out your opinion of me before I can go about my day. I truly don't care what the anti-Semi believes, and I frankly don't care what the anti-Zionist believes,

excepting that it's an interesting conversation. But if you think that's enough, and you leave Hamas in power, and you support Hamas remaining in power, there's literally no way to rebuild Gaza. There's literally no way to end the war. For the sake of Palestinians, pressure Hamas. Let's get the hell rid of Hamas. And by the way, when Hamas is gone, when the people now telling Israelis this is an eternal war for all time, stop telling Israelis that,

your campaign to pressure Israelis to change policy toward Palestinians might actually work. You won't be competing with Hamas in that effort to pressure Israelis. This ex-proarationalist mindset, it's sort of similar to Osama bin Laden. Sometimes Westerners will say, well, he was against this and that policy, but one way of seeing some of the London work was just to create enough of a pain for the West, so the West would react and create a conflict. But to me it seems that the normal Western response is to believe that not doing anything is better than doing something, which we saw in the United States.

The Iran, when the United States and Israel bombed Iran, where there were so many opinions and views that it would be better to do nothing. There were three years away. There weren't three weeks away. So maybe they should, do you recognize this? An impulse to always say status quo is better than doing anything. Building checkpoints after 140 suicide attacks is worse than doing nothing. something is worse than doing. Yeah, frankly, I hear that constantly from Europeans.

And I, okay, so let me finish before you get angry, okay? I want to say something about Europe. Europe lives in an illusion, and it's a tragic illusion because Europe could be an enormous force for good in the world. But it's a This illusion creates a fog that prevents it from seeing the world and acting. And I once called the Europeans hobbits. What I mean by that specifically, I got a lot of Europeans wrote me and said, yes, you're right. And that's how I know they vote right, I think, in European political.

But what I mean by Hobbits is that at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, when you meet the hobbits, Tolkien writes that the hobbits had been protected. for so long, for literally generations by the Rangers, don't worry about it. I mean, read it. If you haven't read it, read it. Don't watch the movies. Watch the movies. They're masterpieces, but the books are truly masterpieces. And this part is not in the movie. So you'll get so much more. But he says, the hobbits were protected for so long

that they forgot they were protected. They were just convinced the world was the Shire. Everybody going about their day, shaking everybody's hands and frowning at each other because you've got to judge your neighbors. And everything and the food always comes in, the harvest time, and everything's perfect and idyllic. And they didn't know that there was an evil bad world out there, and someone was patrolling the boundary between them and that bad world. And then you meet those people, and they are hardened people suffering difficult lives,

in order that the rest, the hobbits and many others live safely. Europe doesn't have armies. Okay? I'm sorry. I saw a naval ship in Bergen. It was very impressive. You do not currently have the ability to go to war, and you do not have the ability to defend Finland, if Putin gets a, learns the wrong lesson from Ukraine. And you simply don't.

And nevertheless, the Soviet Union and then Russia have not decided to invade Europe en masse. Now, it could be that that's because they are just much more kind and hearted and warm and happy people than we all learn. in our history books, or it could be that there was some other massive powerful force in this world spending and bleeding and willing to carry that burden for Europe, specifically the United States. I mean, I'm not saying Israel. I'm not taking any credit here. And Europe never really changed to terms with that fact. How dare, okay, the French intellectual class, almost to a person, be anti-American after the Cold War

how dare they and you know I don't want to bring it too close to home so I'm not going to say anything about Norway but also Norway and so this sense that look you don't need to actually do much in this world things are okay

and by the way Westerners are bad at it you'll try to intervene in the Yemen war because 85,000 children starved to death And you'll only make it worse. Why? Westerners. Westerners are colonialists and imperialist and Nazis and every bad thing. Excuse me, especially white Westerners. And that sense of self, okay, is limiting.

And the democracies, the best nations in the world, the ones least likely to go to war with each other, I don't think there's ever been a war between two democracies. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing like that one Taiwanese self-corrhiz. Korean skirmish that somebody can point out. But I don't think there's ever been one. Those countries, countries that don't want to go to war.

By the way, even the Americans, when they go to bad wars, stupid wars, poorly conceived wars that don't go well, they do it because of the lesson of having saved the world in other wars. Now, you shouldn't necessarily go to a war because the last war, you were the redemptive force in the world. That doesn't mean you'll be that this time. Okay, so you can also make the mistake the other way. But this, yes, this motionlessness of Europeans, this sense that you don't step out into the world and shape it and build it and influence it, you don't build real power as well as soft power, alongside soft power.

It's a real problem. Imagine if Europe was scary, but still democratic and liberal and demanded things of the world. It would be a force for good for the next hundred years of world history. We live today in the most, I know it doesn't look that way because of how information flows today, but it's true, one of the, maybe the most peaceful, healthiest, happiest periods in the history of humanity. And that's a function of the power of America and not anything else. That's the power that held back evil, tyrannical, vile forces that would have destroyed the world and sent the world into anarchy and despair. And Europe should not start wars, okay? Don't go to Vietnam and start a war,

but Europe should be willing and able to understand that actually it has been protected by somebody else's actions and should be capable of doing actions. I'll just say one other point. You know, all of this energy, all of this cultural energy around the Palestinians, what has Europe actually done for Palestinians? Actually, you send money into Gaza.

Well, who handled that money? money. Who took over that money? What did that money actually buy in Gaza? That wasn't useful. Pressure Hamas. Come down on Hamas. And if Qatar is a patron of Hamas, exact costs from Qatar. You can't exact costs from Qatar because they own half the economies of Europe. I'm exaggerate. A little. But Europe, it could be, it could stand up and it could be assertive. The Israelis are watching all of this whirlwind of hatred of them that is unique. There's no other conflict that no other, nothing, Europe never goes out for anybody else. It never goes to bad.

And they're, first of all, concluding that Europe is anti-Semitic, which is maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, can get into that, but they're also concluding that Europe is useless. It's how much do you need to care about something for you to actually accomplish anything in that department? And it turns out even now, even for Palestinians, you're not all that useful. So, yes, I would actually like to see a Europe. that wakes up from the sleepiness, from the shire, and understands that the world is full of evil

and is willing to face down the Iranians aggressively, and the Chinese aggressively, and build out economic power and a cohesion and a united defense policy. Why not? I don't know if you can, but why not? I know Norway is not in the euro and all of that. I know I'm civil, but I'm just saying, as a culture, you've just accepted that the world is pretty and beautiful,

and you all live in the shire, And therefore, anybody who thinks you have to bomb anything ever is a, you know, as a fascist, but that's because somebody else was doing it for you. And I think it is time to wake up from that. And Europe could be a tremendous force for good. You're still the good guys, even if you're asleep. It's very, very difficult to be grateful for something you receive. It generates resentment, which is why you get the French anti-Americans.

and the belief that, well, this is the way nature says it is interpreted as evil. The French director, Frantelato-4, he said, all Frenchmen have two jobs, the one they're paid for and they're film critics. And you see where I'm going with this probably, because in Norway, 5,000 kilometers from the epicenter, everybody's a Middle East expert well I'm a Norway expert so that's okay

I'm wonderful but you know you go to Israel and most people are hospital clowns and and yoga instructors and children drivers why did why did you choose this

why don't you write about something nice what made you choose this can you remember when you decided this is going to be my life I remember very clearly it's funny I don't think anyone's I were asking about okay so I'll cut this from the podcast but I did not know anything about journalism didn't want to go into journalism I was interesting going into politics because I have strong opinions and I think everybody else is wrong and I finished the army and went into got a security job while I was a student in

college because that's basically what you can do after the army that's your one sellable skill and I was actually the bodyguard of a housing minister Natanzharyansky if anybody knows that name there's a Jewish community here so you'll know that name and then later I would become his spokesman he didn't remember that one of the bodyguards around him was also me but but he was a sweet guy to his bodyguards. That is a, to people who have to stand there quietly while he does whatever he needs to do.

So that was it. And then I got sick of guarding because it's very boring. And I answered a job ad at the Jerusalem post, this English language paper in Israel and Jerusalem. And I had very good spelling. I went to about 40% something like that of my childhood was in the States. And I was always a very, very good speller.

I mean, three. years into America, I still had an Israeli accent. I was second place in my school spelling bee, which I don't know if that translates into Norwegian, but that's impressive. I just wanted you to go. And so I was basically, I became an editor in the junior version of spell checking in my newspaper in English, and that was it. And then I discovered that you could write stuff, and it's Israel, so you could just write, you know, they didn't require a degree in journalism or anything. So you could just, if you're good, you're good, and if you're not good, nobody cares.

They'll throw you out no matter how many PhDs you have. So it's very much, I think it's more meritocratic just because there's a lot less respect for symbols and elites and all that stuff in Israeli culture. And I started writing about all kinds of things. I was education reporter. I knew nothing about education. And I learned something really profound about journalism that made me fall madly in love with it very early. on. One of my very first articles as education reporter 19 years ago was I had to go to the Knesset where the Minister of Education with a couple of PhDs from Harvard was arguing with the Minister of Finance, also who came with his couple of PhDs from Harvard, about whether you normalize the, you normalize the spending on the education system by GDP per capita or by purchasing power parity. Raise your hand if you're following me.

Okay, there's a couple, so now I have to get it right. And depending on how you understand what it is you're actually spending on in an education system, you can figure out whether you're spending enough or not enough in international comparison. Right? And because education systems are over 90% salaries, you build a building once, and then you have to staff it for generations, because of that, the correct normalization is purchasing power parity. But if you do it with GDP per capita, it turns out that there's far too much more.

money in the system and the system's producing the outcomes in standardized testing of Romania. And if you do it by the other way, then it turns out there's not enough money, and the problem is you're not spending enough. And we're talking about billions difference for the education of our kids. It's a really fundamental debate. And you know when I learned the topic? Six months after sitting there and realizing I know nothing, and I'm the guy who has to tell the story to the world. Everybody in the room at that Knesset Committee knew what they were talking about, except the journalist who's the, I was the only journalist who showed up, by the way, who is supposed to explain to the world what's happening.

And that's when I learned what journalism really is. And if you're a journalist in the room where you want to be a journalist in the room, I have to tell you, journalism is not a profession. I consider a profession something that has a body of knowledge like medicine. Medicine is a profession. Journalism is something much cooler than a profession. It's a trade. It's a set of skills.

And you take that set of skills and you learn how to learn, and quickly and seriously, and self-critically, and then you take that over to the topic, over to the public debate, over to the storytelling part of journalism, which is the other major set of skills, and you piece that together, and you're a journalist. It's a trade that when it's done well is an art form. And so I have just been madly in love with journalism. I can't believe there's such a profession, and I mean trade, and it's way better than politics. No politician has as much fun or is fascinated by the things they do as me.

and the only reason I deal with this stuff, all the hard things, only the hard things. I only ever have to, am asked to comment on the really hard things, is just because I think I've tried to walk that thin line where you can hear everybody and you can try to understand the different sides on judicial reform in Israel. It tore the country apart. There's a civil war over it, basically. And the ability to understand that there is a case against the strength of the Israeli Supreme Court.

It's unbelievably strong. But also there's a case that actually there's very few other checks and balances in our system for various historical and reasons and cultural reasons. And the ability to then bring that conversation into a single article, I think that's journalism. And everybody who doesn't do that is not doing journalism. And so also the person screaming at the anti-Israel things,

the ability to parse out from what they're screaming the actual moral concern about the images of dead children they saw on their phone from the sort of architecture of anti-Jewishness and projecting onto Jews, Western evils, and all that other stuff, but the ability to sift that out because there's a human being there.

And that human being is not innately hateful, but that human being is struggling themselves in this world of ideas. That is journalism. And I'll just say one last thing. I think that that ability, for me, and everybody can pick it up where they pick it up, comes from religion.

It comes from Judaism. My dad's a rabbi, and my father-in-law, my wife's dad's also a rabbi. I got rabbis all around. And one of the things I learned was that a human stands before you, always. And there's nothing more important than that about the person standing before you. And this is something that the Talmud says

probably 10,000 times in different ways. And they're going through mental imagine journeys and you have to see that journey to be a good rabbi. And so the Talmud, for example, says to rabbis, you can't give an answer, the person can't hear. It's talking about whether the chicken is kosher, but it's true of every single question in life. You cannot give an answer, the person will be unable to hear. And so that pedagogic sense of the world is, I think, fundamental to journalism. And it's not all the stuff that I've said. I've never gone to journalism school. I learned history and Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University.

but I have had interns from journalism schools, and they did not know any of this. And so I don't know what they teach at journalism schools, but they don't teach journalism. That's all I have to say about that. I was a journalist for 25 years. And an excellent one, I should say, I do. But one sort of occupational hazard. I guess when I read other journalists, I can. tell quite precisely how both they were to the deadline when they started.

Right? It's very transparent. Yes, it is. You didn't have time to read. You wanted to read. You just didn't. I need to get this out because you mentioned gangsters. This is just a small aside.

I can tell you all if you have a question, I'm going to tell a small anecdote now, which will give you time to think if you're brave enough. But since you mentioned gangsters, and there was, for 20 or 30 years, there was one generation of Jewish gangsters in the United States, none before, none after. There's a book which about them. Do you know the name of the book? He was good to his mother? I love that book. Robert Rockaway, Professor Teller, Professor Teller, University, wrote a book about Jewish gangsters, and I think the book's title is, But He Was Good to His Mother.

Yeah, but one of my takeaways from that book was, why did the Jewish Mafia die? It was extraordinarily powerful and quite evil, quite evil. And it died because of essentially social shame. The other immigrant groups, almost every immigrant group created, the Irish and the Italians are famous mostly because of Hollywood. They were big and significant, but there was a Greek and an Albanian and many other immigrant groups created these organized crime networks. Among the Jewish community, the social shaming was such that the gangsters didn't want the kids. Their kids all went to medical school.

In other words, they did not want the kids rising up in the business, so the thing just died and the business got out of the kids. Social shaming works, okay? It keeps the community strong and moral. I think it's the lesson. Very good value. One thing I find interesting when listening to you is the way you present Israel, which is quite different from the Rar-Raw start-up nation or the Holy Land version. Here's how I perceive how it describes Israel, and you can tell me from wrong,

which is very provincial. It's the Middle Eastern Nebraska. Not central. Most people who came there wanted to go somewhere else. So in the sense, there's a sadness about it. And there's just this disbelief

that people are so much against that. Zionism, anywhere else, because they would go somewhere else if they could. Is this? Yes and no. Yes, absolutely. Most, look, if you've heard my podcast episodes about this or lectures about this, or read the books of the historians I use,

right? I'm just a teacher. I'm not a historian. I'm not a scholar. I would say very much that, yes, when the doors to America were opened, when the doors to Canada, when the doors to Norway were open, from 1890 to 1921, most of the Jews of Norway, your great grandparents, came in that period fleeing the same pogroms that the American Jews were fleeing, and Norway then closed its doors. I think in 1925, I don't know exactly. But there was a period where Norway, by the way, like America, like Canada, like everybody else, shut their doors. And that's when the Jews all started turning Zionist and going to the land of Israel.

They very much was. Now, I don't think that they didn't want to go to the land of Israel or didn't think the land of Israel was what it was. But there wasn't the economy there. There wasn't the stability there. They were basically looking to feed their kids. They were in a world where they were displaced by mass violence and oppressive legislation by these empires and by these new nationalisms. and they just needed safety, stability.

I understand them. I love them. They're my grandparents and great-grandparents, and they were making the best decisions, and there's probably a decision I would make if I lived in their world. And then when they got to Israel, when they got to Palestine,

either in Ottoman times or British times, or when they got to Israel, once Israel was founded, they interpreted it as redemption. It felt like redemption. A, because every synagogue in 2,000 years prays to Jerusalem. I mean, you can't get away from that. B, suddenly all the Jews around them, they're surrounded by Jews who would die for them.

And everywhere else, they were not. Because other Jews couldn't, if they wanted to, or because they were surrounded by people telling them to leave or killing them until they understood the point. And so it felt very much profoundly like redemption. And not in the sense of an abstract sort of religious ideology, but as a lived experience of just breathing, the air of this earth, and it finally being yours.

And so, yes, absolutely, they would have been somewhere else for good reason. And going there was redemption, also for good reason. And those two things are in the same person's head. So absolutely, it is something very sad. the fact that Zionism succeeded so wildly was a direct function of the collapse of the capacity of modernity. Europe, but not just Europe, the entirety of Western civilization,

to contain minorities. And let me just say that because, you know, it isn't just a Jewish story. Europe has been... I'm sorry to really harp on Europe. I come to Norway to tell Europeans they're bad people. You're not bad. I wish you'd realize how

good you are, is what is the story. But Europe has not had genocides and brutalities. There was Bosnia, which is really a very different cultural world. Western Europe, certainly, Central Europe, certainly have not had these evil kinds of things since the war. And Europeans tell themselves that that's because they learned the lesson in the war. But I'm a Jew raised in Zionism. I can't help but notice that you also have no minorities for the vast majority of the time when you got really nice to the non-existent minorities among you. Now that Europe has imported into itself, significant minorities, everything's changing again. Your politics have gone in terms of 20 years ago, haywire. LePan will win 40% of the French vote, which is something nobody could imagine 30 years ago.

So I don't think Europe gets to credit for being liberal and modern and magnanimous and humanitarian when it literally homogenized itself through genocide and mass expulsions, including of Germans. So now Europe is kind of testing itself. Now that it has these questions to ask again, now that there are differences in Europe, now that there are strangers. I don't mean that I'm calling them strangers. I mean that Europe experiences these migrations as strangers. And there's the question of what is European, what is it to be French, what is it to be British? The story is always more complicated when you try and actually get into the lived experience of the actual people.

Nothing is, you said. Well, I knew it was true beforehand because I knew the numbers, but you pointed it out in a different way where you said, Israelis are not that concerned about diasporas, because most Israelis come from diaspora that, no longer exists. No Jews in Libya, none in Alger, none in Afghanistan, almost done in Iran, certainly none in Iraq. And the place where there are diaspora is they haven't fed a lot of immigrants into Israel, the United States,

which makes, I think maybe Europeans exaggerate the Europeanness of Israel. I think there's a connection which isn't really If you travel to Europe and you read about Jewish communities in different countries, I don't know if you notice this, but there's a law that says they always have to be described as vibrant. Have you seen this? Every Jewish community is always vibrant. Yeah, I actually once met a non-vibrant Jewish community. It was not great.

It was not great. It didn't even meet the bare minimum standard of vibrant. No, you're right. It's one of those words that are thrown out, as if, I don't know what, everyone's getting together. and dancing all the time. I don't know what, I don't know what, I don't want to be, yeah. But I once went to synagogue in a place called Nozsche, I think, where it's not used for services anymore.

There's a Nertamit, which is on, but, and there are two old guys running the synagogue. And they're, they're just like those two guys in the bullets, those old man. You mean they're fighting? Yes, but they love each other. So there's Alexander who's very stylish, an artist. And there's Pavel, who's a working class pole, and all his big work. And their job, or the job that put on themselves is they make sure the synagogue is tidied up after levels. So that's the other synagogue that there's nothing except it's breaking.

painted by each other. I think it's a public service that they're doing to the anti-Semites to give them something to do to spray tent to do you're describing look I mean you're describing to quote Professor Dara Horn who you also cited the Nazis won the war if you're a Jew European Jew is a dead world, trying to find ways to rekindle pockets. But the culture creating heart of the Jewish people, the Jews of the Muslim world were small. It was maybe a million out of 13 million.

And the Jews of Zionism, of the project in the land of Israel were tens of thousands. They had reached hundreds of thousands, but I think 300,000 or something like that in 39 or 400,000 maybe, I have to check. and the Jews of America were two and a half million. There was an enormous thing, but they had almost no serious learning and institutions and education, and they weren't writing serious Jewish books.

I know everyone was going to get angry for saying that. Those literature professors are going to say this book published in New York by this guy, but they're almost all European Jews who came over to America to publish in America. And people like Shalom Alem hated America because he said it's a wasteland of Jewish culture.

The peasants moved to America, fleeing pogroms, all the elites stayed in New York. Europe. And Europe was producing the great learning and the great literature and the great religions, the Jewish religions, meaning the Jarreism and the reformism and all these different options and all this flourishing and insane just cultural creation. One of the things the Nazis did was kill Jewish bodies. But the other thing they did was kill the culture creating heart of the Jewish world. And it's most serious and profound. And so we are living in a dead world that has to be brought

back to life. And the Nazis, you know, the Nazis won. And now the question is, what is European Jewry? And the funniest thing is sitting in on German officials having these conversations about the vibrancy of German jury today. And you're like, what is, what are we even talking about? The vast majority of German Jews, by the way, are Russians besides immigrants were assimilating.

Yeah. But I still say there's, you know, despite the, there's often a transit nature in European Jewish communities, because there'll be expats who come and then leave, and then there's somebody's daughter, Mary, and Israel. So you won't have the same people there who were there 50 years ago. I still think there's almost, you know, as far as European countries are concerned, there's almost a Biden. thing where yes, yes, the communities are destroyed, but if you have a functioning synagogue in the country, there's a big difference between that and just having a guy from Khabad rent a room at a hotel twice a year. I think the Europeans, this matters.

If you can take your kids past the synagogue and say there's a synagogue, we're for you you or if there's nothing. I think it matters. I'm a Zionist. I'm an Israeli. That's the worst kind of Zionist. I have a hard time connecting to any of this. Being, having a synagogue that the world around the Jews can look at and say, look, there's a synagogue. Isn't the, Judaism, okay, the Jewish people, or whatever the hell Jews are, whatever the hell Jews are doing. and it's a little bit the way I think about my kids. Okay? I try to teach my kids certain things to be certain kinds of people.

Ultimately, my kids are going to teach me who they are. And I'm going to love them, even if they're the wrong kind of thing, or vote the wrong way, God forbid. And I will learn from them who it is that they are. As per cent, I don't mean specific, you know, that sounded almost like gender talk or political talk. I don't mean that. I mean, just literally, what kind of person are you?

You're going to teach me? I'm not going to teach you what kind of person you are. Israel is vibrant in the sense that it's a whole bunch of Jews, doing a whole bunch of contradictory things, screaming at each other, fighting each other, creating constantly new Jewish experiences, new kinds of Jewishness. That's what it is. So it's the very freezing in place of that synagogue that you describe of those two people.

That's a frozen thing, and therefore not a living thing. And so if you find a Jewish community that managed to freeze in place, that's a problem. It's possible that what I just said is incredibly patronizing and ignorant. It really is very possible, because I come from Israel where, you know, it's easy. And it's not easy to be in the diaspora. I tell the Israelis, the world hates us. We have terrible information war management in this war. Also, it's an actual terrible war.

But also, we're not saying anything when the latest libel goes out that's not. true and the Israelis say screw them they hate us so what and then the best answer I give Israelis to make them pay attention is yeah you don't have to live with them the Jews of the world have to live with these people they're suffering when Israel looks bad you in Norway suffer and that sense that I don't live your experience and so I can come here and tell you you know here's the real Jewish and here's less Jewish here's a live Jewish and here's frozen Jews I realize how that sounds but that's kind of just my lived experience my lived experience

is when Jews are so smushed up together that they're just constantly arguing and creating, that's a Jewish community. And if you don't have that, build it. By the way, 25 people can do it. They just have to be arguing all the time. But that's my feeling. Europe is far too much of Europe is in that sense of dengue. When you have large, strong Jewish communities, big enough, London, Paris, they have, you know, six-figure-digit numbers of Jews that happens anyway. Even if 10% of are in a room arguing it's happening. So that's the future, by the way. If European jury has a future,

that future is in getting into a room and friction with each other. And you can often tell this size is satisfactory based on how people describe their dating crimes. Do I have a choice? What do you think the choice is? I'm sorry, you're not Jewish. No.

I think you have hacked the Jews. I think you've understood. Exactly how it works. But in our approach, it's a really wonderful. I still don't have to get involved in community politics. That's amazing. That's idea. All the fun without all the...

So, where you go. I think I keep getting back to his theory of mind of how people think, how... ...Postinians. Postinians are not winning. One reason, as I interpret you, is that they have not had the Israeli mind. They did not know. They've misunderstood something, partly because the Jews have described their arrival to the country in a way which is not entirely correct. Since half of the people who don't listen to you, could you just go through that quick?

Yeah, this is my great theory. So be kind. No, I'm just kidding. Don't be kind. I try to, when I was once a soldier in the IDF, in the infantry, at the checkpoint in the Northern West Bank. And a suicide bomber, driving a sedan, a car with, I think, 50 kilos of T&T in it. probably enough for 10 suicide, excuse me, something like five suicide belts of one kind or another,

blew up at the checkpoint. And on soldiers from my platoon. And I remember being, you know, a medic who rushes to the place, and we have one guy who's wounded, and everybody did everything right, and so nobody is dead, except the suicide bomber, obviously. And his body was, you know, he was wearing a bed, and also the car blew up. So he flew through the windshield and the belt went off probably while he was airborne and his body split in two and his legs are in one place and his upper torsos in another. And all of us 19-year-old soldiers arrive at this scene of his essentially body parts, innards strewn across the road. And this is, I voted left. I was really eagerly left. I really loved being left. My dad was left

all his life and I was following his footsteps and he's the smartest guy I know. And I remember thinking, I remember being angry at the guy at this suicide bomber for being such a, can we curse? Sure. For being such a fucking idiot. Because the Israelis were engaged in a immensely powerful, painful, difficult, generational civil war amongst themselves

on the question of is it safe to pull out? Is it legitimate to pull out? Will we end up being massacred? Or will we end up stronger and more more? And this guy decided that he was going to strap

on himself bombs and build bombs or carry bomb-making supplies to build more bombs to blow up on buses that carried children to school at 7.30 in the morning, city buses in Jerusalem, and this guy decided that he was going to settle the civil war among the Jews for the future of the Palestinians. He was going to settle it for the Jews on the side of the people who said, we can never afford to pull out. How dumb do you get?

Why would you condemn Palestinians to the destruction of the Israeli left? And I felt it, and it was me, it was my story, and I didn't understand. That experience of that suicide bombing, you can look it up, I think it was in 2001 in Ka'Ot was the specific location. That suicide bombing sent me on a journey, and I started asking Palestinians, are you stupid? The good thing in Israel is that you can have real frank conversations. But what I mean is seriously, what do you think? Why does this make sense to you? Why do you think a suicide bombing would work?

And I began to hear about anti-colonial violence, about Algeria, about how you terrorize the colonialists, they leave, about how we are artificial, we're going to lead. Now, this was new to me, and Palestinians explained this to me. And I now teach this story, and I bring as many sources as I can from the other side, because, You don't want to hear an Israeli Jew talking about it. And what's been amazing over the last year, some of these lectures on this specific topic, how Palestinians think of the Israelis, of the Jews, of the Zionists,

from 1881 till today, from the beginning of the Zionist political movement immigration, till today, I would give these lectures, and they went insanely viral. And I would get letters from Palestinians who said, that's exactly what they taught us. But I didn't understand what it meant that they were teaching us that, Because I didn't understand that they were trying to frame you in a certain way, but you're actually a little bit there.

My basic argument is very simple. For 140 years, Palestinian political elites, ideologues, ideological factions, have been telling Palestinians that we are one kind of thing. We Israelis, we Zionist. We are a European colonialist project, a European imperialist project. The language changes at different times. 1914 is very different from 1934 in the newspapers of an Arabic language news. papers of Palestinians. But nevertheless, that we are something artificial, something European, something that can be crowbarred out of the land, kicked out of the land,

see the same means and methods used to kick the British out of Kenya and the French out of Algeria. And that is terrorism, and that is violence and brutality. And this is long before the example of Kenya and Algeria. This is a conversation that happens in the Jerusalem City Council in 1908, when the father of Hajamina Hussein, Abdallah, actually suggests that we brutalize the Jews, we massacre the Jews. He says, look, why are they coming here? Because the Romanians are massacring them. He's referring to the southern Russian Empire. It wasn't today's Romania, exactly. And so if we treat them the way the Romanians treat them, they'll all get on a boat and leave again. By the way, that might have actually happened had they done that. The Ottomans

won't allow it because they'll look bad. They're Russian subjects. They're Western European Empire's keeping tread. The Ottoman Empire is very weak. The Ottomans don't want the problem. But there's this discourse that if you brutalize them, they'll leave, as though they have options, as though they're the French colonialists in Algeria. They can all just go back to France.

And they've thought about us one way or another, reinterpreting this one way or another, since then. And everything they've ever called us, whether it's imperialist or colonialist or apartheid, or Nazi. One of the points that I keep trying to make to people is that it's not an analytical statement. You don't hear Nazi so much. You'll hear it from the more radical activists, but in Arabic it is constant. It is more common than colonialist or imperialist or any of the rest. And what they're talking about is not specifically look, the Jews are Nazi, the Jews are

apartheid specifically explicitly. Apartite folks in South Africa was interracial sex was a felony. That's not what's happening. Now you could say, oh, no, we've reinterpreted it to be something much narrower and it's inequality, but we already have a word for inequality. Systemic and equality, we already have a word for that too. What they're trying to do with the words, first of all is borrow the moral cachet of the word. But the second thing they're trying to do is that all these things share one characteristic, whether it's imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, Nazism, and all the rest.

There are a few others I keep forgetting. And that is that you can peel off apartheid from South Africa. You can peel Nazism off of Germany, and you can peel imperialism off of India, and you can peel colonialism off of Algeria. And Israel can be peeled off. That's the argument. And it's an argument they've been making for 140 years. I have a talk online called the Great Misinterpretation. That's what I call it.

It's not so sexy, but I'm open to branding advice. But I make there two points. One, the point I just made to you, they misunderstand us. Now, if you think we are removable, you will launch suicide bombings at the height of the high of the United States. of the peace process because we're removable. Why do we go to a peace process? Because we're scared of you. So you make us more scared.

We're not going to go to a peace process. We're not going to pull out of a West Bank. We're going to pull out of Tel Aviv. That, by the way, was true of a lot of the colonialist projects that were kicked out by terrorism. It wasn't true. It was never true of us. With us, it had the opposite effect. Because we have no France to go to.

Because we're the grandchildren or refugees. Because this is the first time we breathe the air of this earth safe and free. because all those other options that the other Jews had to go to the West to go to America, we didn't have. But the second point I make, and this is really, really important, and this is why I think, I have hundreds of emails

from Palestinians, from Muslims around the Muslim world, and I think it's because of the second point. And the second point is, they were never stupid. If I say to you, eight years of FLN murder of French, civilians in Algeria, kick the French out of Algeria. And it never kicked the Jews out of Israel.

And the reason is we have no France, right? We have nowhere to go. That seems to you very obvious and very simple. And so you'll come to the conclusion maybe that Palestinian strategists are dumb. They don't realize we have nowhere to go, so we're not going to leave. And one of the things I need to explain is that, no, they're not dumb. They had good reason to think that we were imperialist. The British supported Zionism for decades,

and the British actually promised the land to the Zionists at San Remo, one of the conferences after World War I that sort of divvied up the world between the winning powers. And the Arabs weren't even invited into the room. If you're Palestinian, you think, wait a second, Zionism is just the spearhead of British imperialism, because that's how the British thought of it. I give an example where they decided that we are, Communism, we are in 1948 in the Egyptian Declaration of War.

I love this. The Egyptian Parliament is asked by the Egyptian Prime Minister to issue a declaration of war so Egypt can enter the 48 war. And when he explains what they're declaring war on, he says Zionism, nihilism, and atheism. Because he thinks Israel is communist. Why does he think Israel's communist? Because it was super communist, right? Mapai, the ruling party, Mapam, the Palmaq Party, the party of the most elite forces.

They're all very socialist parties, deep socialist. And some of them were even pretty communist. And the Kibbutz movement was the elite of the Yishuv and the elite of the fighting forces of the Yishu. And also, who's arming the Jews? The Americans recognize Israeli independence in 11 minutes. Truman makes a big show of it. And for the entirety of this catastrophically existential emergency,

places on Israel an arms embargo. America placed an arms embargo on Israel at the moment when Israel was most likely to be destroyed. So did Britain. Who supplied the arms? The checks. At the direct order of Comrade Stalin. Why did Stalin give the order to give arms to the Jews? Because he thought they were the vanguard of world communism.

Hungarian would turn pro-American. We were kind of super-socialist pro-American. And by 56, Stalin had handed the Egyptians a whole new army. But in 48, the Egyptian theory of us that were some foreign patriot, you know, spearhead of some foreign empire, in this case, was perfectly rational. They were literally arming us and Stalin thought the same thing. And so this theory that we have a patron and it's the only reason we survived, this theory that we are something external that's fragile and even though it looks strong can actually be filled by anti-colonial means, it's never stupid. It always makes sense. And my only argument is it's nevertheless incorrect.

And if you genuinely think, for example, the campaign in the United States focuses on detaching American support for from Israel. Because if America stopped supporting Israel, so goes the theory of the entire anti-Israeli campaign in America. What happens to Israel? It falls. My argument to these people is, if America stops supporting Israel, Israel will be a little bit weaker.

And in Israel that's a little bit weaker, which its enemies see is weaker and therefore ramp up their attacks on it, will be in Israel that fights in order of magnitude more ferocious. You are bringing upon yourself in Israel that will defeat you even faster and more brutally and worse. Dear Iran, dear Lebanon, dear anybody, Chisbalah in me, not I wish Lebanon was as good a friend as can be. You're bringing about in Israel, you misunderstand us if you think that just because we have a patron and a helper, an ally, that we would not stand without it, that we would fall. So this is my view.

My view is that the Palestinian movement and the Palestinian cause has been sold, sold by certain ideologues and certain ideologies, and some of them are Western and some of them are Muslim, a terrible, terrible misunderstanding of us. And I want them to wake up from it. And I want them so badly to wake up from it to understand that we're a tribe in the Middle East that's not going anywhere. And you have to start planning for that. Because then they'll do good things. They'll have good strategies. They'll engage Israeli society. We had 30 years of peace processing

where no Palestinian leader ever spoke to the Israeli public. Because the Israeli people doesn't really exist. It's an illusion, a fiction, an imperialist, colonialist thing that if you just terrorize it, it leaves, it evaporates. No, we are a tribe. We're not going anywhere, and you need to be assuming that and proceeding with that strategic understanding. So much so that sometimes I secretly hope

that the boycott movement and the sanctions movement and the anti-Israel movement and the detach America from Israel movement, I hope it succeeds. And I hope it succeeds for one reason. I don't actually hope it succeeds. But if it does succeed, here's the huge silver line. They won't have an excuse when we win again.

And they'll wake up. And they'll finally see us for what we really are, which is a people living in its land that has nowhere to go. and if it had any worlds to go, wouldn't go there anyway. And then we can start actually making peace. That's my hope. This, I think, is quite classic of where it's a very audacious belief

that by knowing the history of someone else, you can criticize them correctly and achieve something. And it's, I find it very very, interesting that your approach to solving the Middle East is so much like couple's therapy. It's the exact same methods, which would work. But the, so here's one thing. You know, in conflicting parties don't understand about each, about each other. I think you mentioned sometimes, which is when it comes to making a deal now,

which is that the Israelis believe that if Hamasas and has its way, it will kill everyone. And you say that the, the guys, and still believe this about the Israelis. And I have to ask you, do they really believe it? Is that what they've been told? And is that what they believe? And if so, yeah, may I take it from there?

Yes, they really believe it. Ordinary people, ordinary people walking in the street, not sense-making elites, academics, journalists, people trained on the talking points, trained to resist talking points, which is just another kind of talking points. Ordinary people in their secret heart of hearts, totally anonymous, telling us things anonymously,

tell us that if the other side had its way, we would disappear. And that's 90% of Israelis and 90% of Palestinians. That's one particular poll, but a very big, significant poll, a few months ago of Gazans and of Israelis. And so that, by the way, if you believe that, you have a very high tolerance for the suffering

on the other side. If you believe the other side wants your extermination and would do it in a blink of an eye, and you have to actually defeat their leadership, even if it's engaged in a guerrilla war that is extraordinarily costly to their civilian population to go after it. In the words, if the activists here

are concerned about the civilian suffering in Gaza believe that if Hamas remains in Gaza, Hamas will continue forever to try and murder you until you're all dead, you activist in Norway. The activist in Norway might go home. And it would have a higher tolerance sport. So there are two interesting questions. One is, do they actually believe it?

Every data point we have, every poll where you ask it in a different way, all ultimately says basically a similar thing. It's incredibly hard to empathize, incredibly hard to empathize if that's what you believe across that divide. That's the first thing. And the second thing, ask Palestinians, how much they empathize with the suffering of Israelis on October 7? And you'll find almost none, just literally almost none, including humanitarian, you know, aid workers who are genuinely

humanitarian, not Hamas sort of using humanitarian aid as a salary, you know, fraud. But but genuine Palestinian liberals, humanitarians who want good, who want good, who want good, for Israelis and Palestinians and all humanity, they will still emotionally tell you, and I've done this and they've said this, I'm having a hard time empathizing, I've got to say. Not even sympathizing, which is actually feeling your pain, but even just acknowledging or understanding your pain, I really have a hard time. If you all could, you Israelis, you would wipe us all out. So, yes, that does exist on both sides, and that drives a lot of this. And by the way, it also means that we're very immune to international pressure.

Okay? If you think the other side would exterminate you, how much do you care what Norwegians think about you? I mean, if every Norwegian concluded that Israel is right, would Palestinian behavior change in any way? And ditto the other way. So it's something that if the world understood, I think it would be a lot smarter in how it ends, how it deals with all of us, how it talks to us. So that's one thing. The second thing is, are they right? Are they right?

Chamas would absolutely exterminate every last Jew. It's literally the promise of the redemption of Islam. They say it every day. I have never seen a data point that suggested that they don't simply believe it and would do it. I mean, just literally read Chahmas literature. It's all there. What about ordinary gossans? And when you get into ordinary gossans, it gets complicated.

And I'll explain why it gets complicated. Ordinary gossens still think October 7 was glorious. And part of what they think was glorious about it wasn't bursting out of the concentration camp, as an activist in Norway would put it. Or a Palestinian elite translating to English, the talking points they're selling would put it. What was glorious was the humiliation of the Jews.

That's how it's talked about in Arabic. You mentioned bin Laden explaining that he opposed certain policies. In Arabic, bin Laden doesn't care about American policies. In Arabic, bin Laden talks about Islam. In English, he's a polemicist. He explains that in English that he's, you know, oh, if only America hadn't, you know, driven Saddam out of Kuwait and put soldiers in Saudi Arabia to do so,

we'd have no problem with America. Ordinary Gazans is a complicated story, and here's why it's a complicated story. The humiliation of the Jews is part of the way that Palestinians understand their own story and their own place in a much larger Islamic world. One of the great problems of being under Israeli rule for Palestinians. And this is true of certain religious elites, but it's also true of the world. people who listen to those religious elites and grow up listening to those religious elites is the humiliation of Islam itself yeah and if you yourself are the weak

Muslim that is that that that is under the under the thumb of the weakest thing that has ever pushed Islam back which is the Jew the Zionist Jew this is not the Byzantine Empire this is not modern the British Empire this is the for God's sake the Jew come on Don't ever get pushed back by the Jew. If you're that part of Islam, you yourself are the shame of Islam. You yourself are the weakest thing in that world of Islam that has to justify itself to Islam. Al-Aqsa is such a central anchor of Palestinian identity, in part, in part, it's bigger, it's complex, because it is an anchor of dignity in a larger Islamic world and discourse and sense of

And so the humiliation of the Jews is really important as a response to the sense of being humiliated and therefore being a humiliation not just internally between Israelis and Palestinians, but to a larger Muslim and Arab world. And at the same time, Gazans also tell us that they absolutely don't want Hamas to rule afterwards. They want them gone. Ghazans will tell us they're proud of October 7 and don't want Hamas in Gaza. in the same breath, in the same person, in the same poll sometimes, depending on how it's asked. And when you read that, you understand that they also kind of understand that Hamas destroyed them.

And that there's no future with Hamas because they'll keep doing this one thing. There are a one-trick pony. And therefore that they also blame Hamas. I'm hearing the protesters. Isn't that fun? Don't you feel important? And also, therefore, that they should blame Hamas for some significant portion. of what's happening to them because they know that if Hamas sticks around,

it'll continue happening to that. And all of those things are all happening at once inside people's minds. I am of the opinion that ordinary people are profoundly deep. And if you think you understand the ordinary person, then you are being shallow. Because ordinary people think six things at once.

They are coherent things. They fit together, even if they're complete paradoxes. Jonathan Hink wrote this wonderful book the righteous mind where he tries to trace out how people think about about politics, about morality, about religion. And he talks about how we don't actually rationalize our way through much, because if we were to rationalize through everything, we'd never get to breakfast. What we do is we take these mental shortcuts. We have certain experiences. They create certain intuitions about those experiences, and we leap into those intuitions born in those

experiences. Or, in other words, prejudice. Prejudice is an extremely useful tool, humans desperately neither. Try not to apply it to human beings. But you are prejudiced toward a certain kind of, you know, food, a certain kind of politics, a certain kind of culture, a certain kind of, and that prejudice is a mental shortcut because you can't rationalize your way through everything. Ordinary people have very deep intuitions, born in deep experiences. The experiences are sometimes contradictory, so the intuitions are. You can't look at gossens and say they love chamas. You also can't look at dozens and say, they're not Hamas. They both are Hamas and hate Hamas and wish Hamas was gone all at the same time, because they're human beings. And so the answer is complicated. If Israelis

could, they would live in a world where nobody hates them, wants to kill them, and they would have a land that's defensible, meaning the West Bank. But if Israelis thought that there was a way to be in peace without all of it, they still today, I think, would majority pick it. They just don't believe that that's possible. And so Israelis themselves can think six things at once. And if you want to poll them, depending on how you phrase the question, you'll discover that they're extremely right-wing or surprisingly left-wing, and it'll be based on your poll.

It won't actually tell you anything about that. There are things that crop up where I keep, they sort of accept it as if they're true. And I keep asking myself, well, this is going to be right. There's another one, which is, after October 7th, we thought, the world would understand. Did anything really think that? I have mostly heard that from Dayaas Birch is.

I have not heard that from Israelis. I thought that the elites of the West had a better sense of what was broken in parts of the Muslim world, had a better sense of what better sense of what Islamism and Salafist ideas really were, had a better sense of what they meant, noticed that these are ideas and ideologies, the animating ideas of Hamas that drove Hamas to do what it did and be what it is. The Hamas that wanted this war, and wants this war to continue, and wants this war for all time, the Hamas that is willing to sacrifice Gaza

on the altar of the destruction of Israel. The Hamas that is willing to sacrifice Gaza on the altar of the destruction of Israel, the Hamas that even now won't return the hostages. Why are they holding the hostages? Now, knowing Gaza's city is about to happen. The only reason that they're still holding them is that he doesn't want this war to end. This is the war. It has built those 500 kilometers of tunnels unprecedented in the history of war, tunnel entrances in every neighborhood and street in Gaza. The only way to destroy that system is the destruction of the urban landscape. That's what you saw in those pictures of the disruption of the urban landscape. You could say you must not do it.

You could say the price is too high. But if you need to get Hamas out and destroy its infrastructure and remove its war-fighting ability, that's what it takes. Chahmas made sure that's what it would take. Thoughtfully, carefully, it bent Gaza's entire economy to building that project. Gazan did almost nothing else. It's the single biggest thing Gazans have ever built. By far, that tunnel system.

But if our brothers and sisters outside, they would, immediately reverts to a numbers game. They'd say, you know, a few hostages. It would work itself out. That's what they'll say. Just to stop the killing. Yes. No, I'd love to hear how it would work itself out.

And I'd love for the killing to stop. I would love everything they're asking for. None of it's available to us until Hamas is gone. Hamas won't end this war. If we achieve a ceasefire in which Hamas were, takes Gaza, every dollar, every Euro, every Norwegian croner, will go into, that goes into Gaza will be spent on the next round of war. And if you don't understand that, you don't understand what's going on. And if you understand it and want an Israeli withdrawal and ceasefire

the gifts of Hamas control of Gaza again anyway, you're just Hamas. You are glad. You are gladly sacrificing the Palestinians on the altar of the destruction of Israel. Because you have this vision, this ideology, this hatred of the West, you project out of the Israelis, whatever it is, whatever cookie, weird, nutty abstraction, you live in a world that is an ideological simulation of the world instead of the world itself, and real human beings don't actually register in your mental landscape. Whatever it is, in other words, you're a sociopath, whatever it is, that's all you're doing. So I don't know how to do this.

Now, if Hamas were to say, okay, look, we screwed up. This was wrong. I mean, strategically wrong. Never mind morally wrong. We think all the Jews should die. But fine, we lost. This was a bad calculation. So we're going to leave and we're going to disarm.

And here's your hostages. And now Israel, good luck living in a world in which everyone hates you. That would be a move that you could argue would be good for Palestinian strategy. But they won't do it. because it's not about being good for Palestinians. It is only about the destruction of Israel, even at the cost of every last Palestinian. And if you don't know why,

if you don't know what the Muslim brothers are, if you don't know the ideologies, if you don't know the sense of shame in Islam, if you don't know these questions, that Hamas tries to answer, how does Islam rise up from centuries of weakness and redeem itself? It begins by pushing back the weakest thing

that ever pushed Islam back, which is Zionism. If you don't understand why they're willing, to sacrifice their own society and the altar of the destruction of Israel. And you don't know it empathetically, seriously, knowledgeably, as if it's, like, in a way that you would believe that you could be swept up in this idea. You don't understand what's happening. So, you know, you could argue the Israelis have been totally wrong. The strategy has been terrible.

I have to say, don't tell anybody, let's keep it in this room. I have argued multiple times that the Israeli strategy is mistaken in some significant ways, including coming out very strongly on the question of hunger now, which was something just disastrous for Israel, but obviously mostly for the people who are going hungry in Gaza. You don't have to like Israel or you don't have to like the Israeli strategy.

You certainly don't have to like a war, any war. But if Hamas remains in Gaza, nothing changes. Luis is going to walk around with the microphone. That's what you said you were going to do? Thank you, Your Honor. Do you feel like taking the question? My experience is people will need minutes. You said you want questions. I'm up for it. Whatever. Yeah, let's do it. Can you yell your

question and we'll repeat it? It's just probably faster that way. It's been a hell of a ride. Too many topics. And yeah, so we can take some questions. Well, let's start here. And do we make them short so several people can ask them. Yeah, make them short. We have a lot on our hearts. Okay, no desert question. Yeah, yeah. No question. Before Oslo, even Israeli left, never negotiated with terrorists. In Shimo Paris and Rabin, when they started talking with Parapath, it was under the

same. Everyone was against negotiating with terrorists. Given that fact, and given the fact that we know that Sinwar was given in a hostage deal in 2011 for Gilachalit, And October 7th was a direct result of that, and it also incentivized him to take more hostages. How can we just justify another hostage deal where we may release another single one? How do we justify another hostage deal? Given sine war, given... Look, I'll put it real simple. We taught our enemies that hostages are a strategic life

liability of ours. But you can take our people and we will fall. We will collapse. And we need to teach our enemies the opposite. And obviously the enemy, the nature of an enemy, is to find that weakness and drill into it as hard as they can. And they've done it. And they've fundamentally changed the rules of the game because of it.

The Israelis' attitude on the question of hostages will be very different from Nawa. And one of the things that you see that in is, how shall I put this, nobody in the Nakhba force who isn't in an Israeli jail is going to survive the next decade, no matter what country they hide in. And the Israelis will hunt them down for all time. And we're going to be a lot more circumspect. I don't know that anyone looking at Gaza says today, yes,

hostages, is there a strategic liability? We should take more of their hostages. And that's not what the logic of Gaza has been, but it's not entirely not there in the many pieces of the logic of how the Gaza war has been fought. Suddenly from Hamas to extract from them vast, massive costs they can't endure

is part of it. So, yes, they have taught us that. We have to exact costs that they cannot endure. That it's seen in the region is unendurable from Hamas. We also have to make sure that the hostages aren't taken again. I have all of this, I'm beating around the bush to not say,

I'm opposed to hostage exchanges in the future. And that means you don't start with the next one, because nobody believes you. So maybe you start with this one. And that's a catastrophic violation of everything it means to be Israeli. And we should take out the rage of that kind of thinking on the people who forced us into that kind of thinking, on everything that is Hamas,

on this earth. I don't know why their Hamas leaders still alive in Doha. I don't give a shit what Qatar is or how much money it's spent on which Israeli officials. I don't understand why Hamas is still alive anywhere in any way. And also, I don't know how we get out the last ones. In other words, Hamas is holding them for a reason, the last leverage, continuation of what, how would they ever give up the last hostage? Being given Gaza back? Well, we can't give gossip back. So if the last ones aren't coming out, declare it. What I wish Benjamin Netanyahu would do, and in fact I wish he had done it a year and a half ago, was get up in front of Israelis and say the era of negotiating for hostages is

over. And that means Israelis are going to die. And I'm the Prime Minister and woe for, woe to me for being the Prime Minister in these dark days. Yes. But nevertheless, that is the thing I can contribute to my people. I will make this terrible, evil, bad decision that must be made for a better future. I will destroy Hamas. We will never negotiate again, and I will resign at the end of the war. That would be what I wish he had done. And pussyfooting around on that question has essentially let Hamas believe that he can still play the game. Now, I have just said that I kind of wish our Prime Minister had condemned Israelis to die. And I get that. And I get that. And that's one of the reasons that.

There's no future for Gaza with Hamas in it. So if you care for Palestinians, you also should have wished that Netanyahu had done that. As a journalist, we're experiencing here in Norway, and I think throughout Europe as well, the BBC journalists that take the point of view and the numbers Hamas are giving as a kind of a truth, and always putting down, the version of the Israelis on whatever thing that is coming out from the situation. This makes us here in Norway, Jews here in Norway, live in a world where things do not at all align.

We don't understand, and how come the versions are so decided. from the world of media on the point of taking the point of view and the pictures and the narrative of the Hamas. I was wondering if you have any kind of explanation for exactly that, when the Hamas is not mentioned at all, and the hostages are not mentioned. It is only a blatant and legitimized hate of Israel. Yeah, there are a few points to be raised here. One of those points is that most journalists are bad at their job. And partly that's structural. I describe to you being the guy in the room,

supposed to explain to the country what's happening in the room, and is structurally, inherently, the least qualified person in the room to explain what's happening in the room. A journalist does not learn the thing that they learn the skills to tell stories, but they don't learn the subject matter which can be infinitely complex. And so journalists are inherently at a disadvantage, and that's just what journalism is, almost. In other words, before I even come to blame them for anything, they are in this massive disadvantage. They don't know enough to know how little they know. and because they have all the gaps in their knowledge filled by a doctrine,

in the American right, they sometimes sort of lump this, all these doctrines with wokeness. They call it woke. I don't know what you would call it, but it's a kind of sense of what the world order is, and it fills every gap. And so there's no doubts, there's no questions. We all know how things proceeded, where they come from, what's happening,

whatever the heck is happening in Norwegian culture is probably what's secretly happening in the Middle East. as well because why would it be any different and and therefore all the all the holes are filled in and and so journalists have to they're not taught in journalism schools and frankly in the professions never mind the schools at the newspapers they're not taught to search for the inexplicable things for the questions that don't quite fit the things that don't give an example I had a conversation I thought it was a conversation he thought

I was yelling at him, with an American journalist in Israel once, where I said, I don't mind that you're anti-Israel. I don't, because there's real suffering in Gaza, and Israel is vastly more powerful than Hamas. And you come to this conflict, and you say to yourself, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to demand answers first and more aggressively from the powerful side. And the other side is suffering much more. That's journalism.

That's totally kosher. Come here with an anti-Israel prejudice is not at all necessarily actually a bigoture. It might be a completely reasonable starting point for journalism. My complaint about you is that you're totally uncurious. You're an uncurious person. You're a person who thinks they know all the answers before having asked the questions to the point where you don't even know what the questions are. For example, why does Iran want to destroy Israel?

Iran has no border with Israel, has no interest in Israel, and yet has spent some significant portion of its GDP on the destruction of Israel across two generations. Why? Are they stupid? Yes. Is it for Palestinian rights?

Does the Ayatollah regime that doesn't give Iranians' rights care about Palestinian rights? Why? Actually explain to me. Why? So I can understand it because I'll tell you a secret. They're not stupid. Nobody's stupid. Why?

And if you don't know why, you have no idea what they're going to do. You have no way of knowing whether the smarmy, you know, geopolitical think tanks in London who all say that they'll never use the bomb, you don't even know what to ask them. You don't even know how to challenge them.

Most elites rest on their laurels without checking themselves. They don't know as much as they think they know. That should be tattooed in backwards letters on the forehead of every journalist. Your job is to walk up to the elite and say, you're probably wrong, and then learn the subject just well enough to start to sniff out what the elite is missing. Every elite, of every kind. So you have no idea about the Israeli-Ran war, nothing.

And you're not curious to find out. That is a breakdown of journalism. That is why you're useless, and that is why the West is stupid. That is why the West can't achieve what it wants in this world. They can barely understand the world. It doesn't have a debate about the world that has any connection to reality. You can look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and friends, I have good Israeli friends who know more than me about Israel and know more than me about Palestinians.

And they come to very different conclusions from me. Agreeing with me is not a sign of wisdom. But Western journalists don't even understand the debate between us. They're just ignorant. And that ignorance is almost the entirety of your debate. By the way, people who appreciate Israel like Israel here in Norway. It's an intuition. You kind of have a sense of who the enemy is.

How many people in the room can find their way around Muslim texts? How many people in this room know Netanyahu's coalition math? I mean, there might be three or four of you and you're being modest, but my point is, you yourself, right? And I appreciate that you think that our enemies are evil and we're generally trying to do the right thing. I think that's generally true of us, minus all the problems and mistakes that we do make along the way,

sometimes bad ones. But the debate is just empty. And so these journalists, they don't respect themselves enough and they're craft enough to understand that they are the prophets standing outside the monarchy, telling the monarchy that God will judge them.

And they don't understand that that is their task, and so they're not journalists. If you agree with the prevailing, wisdom, you're useless, and nobody needs to read you or know what you said. And if journalists were taught that in journalism school, even for exactly one hour, that one hour would validate the entire project of a journalism school. That's my opinion. I just need to check to see if I'm right or wrong.

But Hamas released pictures of a hostage called Eviatan David, who is pictured digging his own grave. Has anyone seen those pictures in Norwegian media? No. And here's why that's a problem. Not because I need you to know my story, I don't care, but if you have opinions about us and you don't understand that we saw those pictures, not only did we see those pictures, while the whole world was raging about hunger in Gaza,

the Israeli press was talking at the top of the hour at every news broadcast about hunger in Gaza, and the needle was moving on the question of hunger in Gaza, that's when Hamas releases pictures of starved Israelis. And Israelis went around noticing that the only people who are physically emaciated at Holocaust level imagery that they have ever seen come out of Gaza, including online, minus children who look that way

not because of hunger, were actually the Israeli hostages. You know what those pictures did? They knocked the hunger in Gaza story off the top of the Israeli news cycle. Now, if you don't understand that Israelis saw that because your journalists are playing propagandists because they think the war is about their emotions,

then you don't understand what's happening. Those journalists did not strike a blow for Palestinians. Those journalists made you more ignorant of what's actually going on and what will come going forward. You know less because they think they're campaigning instead of challenging. You can challenge and come at the Israelis

as aggressively as you want. But actually challenge everyone. Challenge. That's the only thing a journalist is. And there are very few journalists left in the West that are like that. What Israelis think will have more effect on the future of Palestinians than what Norwegians think.

And if Norwegians cannot see Israelis anyway, it can't understand anything about what they see. Because they're literally not being shown anything that Israelis are seeing. It's happening, but they can't see it. Norwegians are not capable, therefore,

because they literally don't have the fact of distinguishing between Gazans and Hamas, of understanding the catastrophe that Hamas represents in the future, not now, in the future for Gaza, in understanding the division of interest between Palestinians and Hamas itself, and how you build out a new Israeli conversation on Palestinians that makes that

distinction so that there can be a future. You are useless. I keep saying this, there's nothing you can do for Gaza, the Hamas won't undo. You think that for Gaza, you're going to hide what Israelis see from your regions, and you've done something for Gaza, you haven't done something for Gaza, you've done something for Hamas, and therefore you've done something against Gaza. Now, everyone and his grandchild is recognizing Palestine for whatever reason. What, Is your take on that, what will happen? How is this going to play out? And in what way will this affect Israel in any way, shape, of form?

Or the Palestinians should happen. Part of the Palestinian argument is that the only reason the Jews have a state is that the world gave it to them. The empires, the patrons, the UN, the British Empire, etc. We can replicate that. The world will give it to us, and then we'll have it. That is not why the Jews have a state. That was a kind of diplomatic acceptance, a diplomatic validation.

But hundreds of thousands of Jews capable of fighting for themselves and defending themselves and winning wars against invading armies built themselves and used the empires of the day every chance they got, obviously. So did Palestinians. That's why the Palestinians teamed up with the Nazis quite so assiduously. There weren't a whole lot of options, and they needed an empire and a backer and a funder and an armor and a trainer. And that's how the Jews used the British. And that's absolutely true.

But that doesn't mean the Jews could have been just wiped away had they not had international recognition. The Palestinian story that we are fake, that we are a construct imposed on the land from the outside, like colonialism, like imperialism, that Palestinian narrative is the narrative that says if the whole world recognizes Palestine, Palestine is. 140 countries recognize Palestine today.

How's that going for them? That is not enough. As long as you tell Israelis, we are your death for all tongue, which is what Hamas tells Israelis every damn day, then it doesn't matter that France and Britain will recognize a Palestine. And I'll say more than that. If they recognize a Palestine in a way, in a timing, in a discourse that explicitly makes it about Hamas, I know Kirstarmer tried to correct and say, I don't like Hamas, I hope Hamas is gone. But I'm definitely going to recognize Palestine as a direct result of Hamas' strategy,

then you have hurt the ability of the Palestinians to establish a serious polity that can stand on its own two feet. When Hamas is gone, Hamas the organization, Hamas the story. And I don't mean the story of the Palestinian experience. I mean the story of the Jews that Hamas tells Palestinians. When that story no longer makes sense to Palestinians because it has been proven to be a catastrophic failure because the Jews cannot be corrobored out of the place.

when that story is gone, then all the pressure will finally work. If there's no death coming from every corner an inch that I pull out of, if my children aren't in danger from a withdrawal, then the world has a moral case to make to end military rule over Palestinians. Then the Israeli left might have a chance to come back to life after being destroyed in the Second Intifada 25 years ago. I mean, I'm coming out as a secret life. lefty here, don't tell anybody. I would love to live in a world where it makes sense to once again

hope for those kinds of outcomes. But it depends on the death of the story that that suicide bomber at Kaot in 2001 was carrying when he blew up on us, which was a great tragedy from his perspective, because he was hoping to blow up on the children of Jerusalem. And so everything that strength in Hamas is the demolition of the Palestinian cause. And everything that weakens Hamas strengthens the Palestinian movement and the Palestinian cause, the one that doesn't want to just destroy Israel, the one that actually wants to build a Palestine.

And every idiot outside this hall is working just hand in hand with everyone who hopes for the worst for the Palestinians. Obviously, they're too ignorant, stupid, and self-important to understand that, which I respect. young, but that's actually what they are. Obviously, they're too stupid to understand that they're old, but that's what, so let the British recognize the state of Palestine. Who cares? Let the French recognize it.

Let them security council recognize it and sanction Israel and boycott Israel and throw us all to the dogs and let all our enemies gather because they think we're weak and come in us. And when they've lost that next round, then we'll have this conversation again. Let it all. I don't understand it. Folks, I don't, I'm an idiot, okay? Every day I wake up, I look in the mirror and I say, I'm an idiot. I don't understand anything that's happening.

What do they think they're going to accomplish? You have to actually build the polity. You have to destroy the thing that tells the Israelis that building a Palestinian state is massively catastrophically dangerous for you. Because that thing, Hamas, the ideology, not just the organization, that thing makes it impossible to establish a Palestine. even if God on high comes down and says to us, how does the Talmud say, with the voice of a thin silence.

Yay, verily, establish a state of Palestine. Not if it kills my kids. Not if it kills my kids. What do the rabbis say to God's own voice? It isn't in the heavens. Shut up. Not if it kills my kids. Until Hamas is gone, none of it matters.

It is Westerners talking to themselves about their own self-righteousness. Yes. Yes. And that's it, yeah. Two more. And then the rest of you will have to do what I've been doing all the time, which is speak to a baby inside my head. I come from the political left. For me it was obvious from the first day what a disaster Hamas was.

I still want to invite you to think loud. What would have happened? What would have been in this situation? situation. If the government of Netanyahu had delivered a historical speech saying something like, we need to take out Hamas, they are the most calculating evil planning force as possible. We need to take them away. We cannot do it alone because if we go into Gaza, They hide behind the civil and they hide in the hospitals and they hide everywhere. There's no option we can do it because they just, this is a trap for us.

What if they had delivered a speech saying, so we invite the rest of the world to solve this bloody problem because we cannot do it alone. And I mean, and between the lines of saying that we hide between the, we go now into the bombing road shelter, we leave our soldiers to protect us, but we not go into Gaza because we cannot do it alone. You, the rest of the world, have to understand what monster Hamas is, and we need to take them out from all political, from all military, from all social influence. Why didn't they deliver such a siege? The simple answer is that his government would have fallen instantly if he had said that, that he's not going after Hamas and Gaza,

but asking the world to come do it. That's a violation of the basic Israeli ethos that we don't need everybody else. But your question is powerful. You come from the political left. Yes. And you came here to listen on October 7, on these issues. on these issues. Right, as a protest against the civil of the left.

So I'm not part of it. Yeah. Just for both of it. Well, so thank you for being here. Let me strengthen the question even. Let me double down on the question. What if Nizania had gotten up and said, we're going into Gaza. It's a whole new kind of war.

I'll be frank. All our plans don't mean anything anymore. We have to now fight inside tunnels. No army has done that in that scale. in that scale. There's no way to get to Hamas without going through the cities. And there's no way to go through the cities

without demolishing everything above the tunnels. And so much of the cities are, you know, Israel tells everybody where it's going in before it goes in. So everything's also booby-traff when it finally goes in. So it's safer to destroy the building than to send soldiers in to risk their lives in the building. All of that's true. Gaza is about to suffer disastrously.

And you're about to see it. and Al Jazeera and all the state entities that are making sure that on TikTok, every child in the West is being fed images of horrific trauma from war. I've spoken, by the way, with young people in the West who are deeply anti-Azer protesters. It took 15 minutes of back and forth for them to calm down and want to talk. And by the time they want to talk, I've discovered kids who are traumatized. They are traumatized because their source of information,

but also social experience, which is that phone, that TikTok feed, has been algorithmically fed massively horrific images for months and months and months and almost two years. And there isn't an image that doesn't get fed that. And there's studies that it's 10 times as much Gaza on TikTok than on Instagram. The difference being the influence of China versus the influence of a company in America that has no algorithmic requirements set by government policy.

And so it's a foreign influence. operation, which if it happened for every war everywhere would be a wonderful thing because there'd be harder to make war because everybody would feel the war. But it's not. It's only for the one war because that's an ideologically convenient war, and that's what makes it bigotry, but that doesn't, you know, exonerate Israel from anything you got. But the point is these kids are actually traumatized. They're in post-traum.

They come out of these images and months and months of these images, knowing that not all of it is real, but enough of it is real for it basically to be real, that they actually are traumatized. And so I, Netanyahu, in this imaginary speech, I'm going to tell you, this is, you know, this is, as they say in English, the excrement is going to hit the fan. And it's going to spread everywhere. And it's going to be horrifying.

And we're going to do it because Hamas can't survive this. And nobody has an idea of how to get them out. You all have all these clever ceasefire ideas, but that's not how this works. They die. Hamas goes. Hamas does not survive this. And ever, forever, for all time. We're going to hunt them everywhere.

And I want you to know, if Netanyahu, it only said, and I want you to know that then Gaza will be rebuilt. And it will remain Gaza and Palestinian. And it will be a beautiful Emirate, and we were about to build a great regional alliance of Arabs and Jews, and that regional alliance is what will build it. And this attempt to destroy it is what will fix it. In other words, we will do what we have to do.

and love us, you can hate us. You're probably going to hate us afterwards. But I promise you, as with denazification in Germany, this is about rebuilding a better place for Gazans. Now, he didn't say that until Israel had utterly catastrophically lost the information war among its best friends. And he didn't say it because of Ben-Vir and Smothertrich, because of politics. And I still blame him for it because soldiers died in Gaza, friends of mine died in Gaza,

and their death was less useful because of his politicking. And so I do not come here free of anger at my government at all. And if he had said that, you would have had an easier 22 months. And the argument about genocide and Israeli intent in Gaza would not have become, because Smotrich got to decide what the Israeli intent was because he's the only voice speaking. And all of that is absolutely true. If he's just given that speech,

I frankly think we could have held on to parts of the left never mind the right now maybe I'm naive but we certainly would have held on to some of our best friends they could have delivered a speech such as a mirror to show the rest of the world how weak the rest of the world is so let me just finish with this we would not give a speech asking the rest of the world to fix something and then show the rest of the world that they're not going to fix it

and the reason we're not going to do that is because there isn't really such a thing as the rest of the world I don't know if you know the international community is kind of there only when it wants to feel good about itself, but not actually there when anybody needs them. Ask the Sudanese, ask the Yemenis, ask the Syrians, ask the Bosnians. Bosnia bled for four years until Bill Clinton decided to bomb Serbia for two weeks, and it was all over. The world doesn't come in. The world doesn't save you.

The world doesn't rescue you. If you plan for the world to be there for you, you will be disappointed and sometimes catastrophic. so. So he would not have given a speech that asked the world for anything. Israel is mostly ignore you the rest of the world. By the way, that's healthy. You ignore most of the rest of the world as well, because you're regular, ordinary people living real lives. But Israel will do what it needs to do. And I wish we had a leadership that at least said, you know, that said and then also acted in ways that guaranteed that after what we have to do happens and we have to do it. You can't rebuild Gaza until we do what we have to do. Even if you try, you try and then we have to do,

even if you try, it doesn't matter what you think of it. It literally can't happen. Then Gaza has a new day. It's weird because I come to you here not to tell you Israel's right. I come to you here to tell you Gaza will have a better future. And if people stop supporting Hamas and start supporting Gaza, it'll come soon. And the Israelis will sacrifice for their own inches,

but those interests do correspond if Hamas can be removed to Gazan's inches in the long term. So there's no reason not to be hopeful that there's a business. better day at the end of all this tragedy. But it depends on wisdom and wisdom on part of the Israelis, wisdom on the part of the world, and ultimately wisdom on the part of the other world that can actually conduct the denotification of Gaza that we are desperately need. Pretty much ending it on an optimistic note, not too optimistic, but at least we can imagine that future of a Gaza that will be rebuilt, of fighting the voices that actually imagine this and

and maybe we should now when we have to leave here on a practical note we have to just spread out don't engage with what's going on outside and maybe it's time for us to like to take home from this conversation those things like let's talk about the future let's talk about how this

is actually how this is actually going to look like how we're going to envision this this new Middle East and there are voices out there and but they're not standing out right outside here with Greta who came in their boat, that there are out there in the Norwegian society. And I really believe that all of us who go home and do the jobs that the journalists are not doing, be curious, ask the right question, lay the foundation for a better tomorrow.

Really lay down all the cards. No dehumanization of anybody on any side. And let's just have the conversation. So, and... I'll go out to Adam. I've done some of these things on this topic and you are an extraordinarily beautiful audience. Great questions. We're enjoying our journey for some rationality in all of this.

You can join the calls and calls. We should definitely listen to Khadiv's podcast. Ask Khalid. Anything? With this conversation is about a lot of things. So it's great. And I think this is what we need to do these days to keep our of afloat. Thank you so much for being. Thank you so much.