Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - One Year Since October 7th - with Douglas Murray

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

Share episode on X: https://tinyurl.com/5n8kcm5m Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7F7Pq-XI40&t=2914sVisit our website: https://arkmedia.org/ UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS:If you are interested in our upcoming Call Me Back live events, you can find further registration details here: PHILADELPHIA-AREA — September  9 — Join us this Monday night in Lower Merion, just outside of Philadelphia, for a discussion about Israel, the Middle East and the U.S.-Israel relationship with combat veteran and national security expert Dave McCormick, who is running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. To register, please go to: Dan-and-Dave.eventbrite.com NEW YORK CITY — September 24 — Join us for the first major live recording of Call Me Back, held at the Streicker Center, co-sponsored by UJA Federation of NY, and featuring Amir Tibon on the official launch date of his book The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel's Borderlands. To register, please go to:  streicker.nyc/events/tibon-senor NEW EPISODE / NEW SERIESSince October 7th, on this podcast we have tried to present Israel’s dilemmas and challenges as Israel responded to a genocidal attack from Gaza and what is now a multi-front war. We have tried to do this by talking to Israelis – Israeli journalists, political figures, historians and other thought leaders, and different people from Israel’s civil society. We have tried to provide historical context and perspectives from various actors in the U.S.-Israel relationship from both sides of that relationship.We did not think we would still be recording these episodes – with this focus – for one year. And yet, here we are — approaching the one-year anniversary of October 7, which will be regarded as one of the darkest days in Jewish history (and one of the darkest days in the history of Western Civilization).Most of our episodes have been shaped by weekly and daily news developments. But as we approach the one-year anniversary, we wanted to take a step back, and spend extended time with a few of our previous guests and thought leaders who are not our go-to analysts.We asked each one of them to take a longer horizon perspective, to look back at this past year and the year ahead. In each conversation, we will try to understand the larger lessons these guests have learned as we approach this grim milestone. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this series was filmed in a studio and is also available in video form on our YouTube channel. You can find a link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7F7Pq-XI40&t=2914sWe begin this series with a conversation with Douglas Murray – war journalist, columnist, and bestselling author. We will be dropping one of these long-form conversations with a different guest each week between now and the first couple weeks after 10/07. On Sunday, September 8, Douglas Murray will kick off his first ever US Tour with Live Nation. Long before Oct 7, Douglas was a widely read journalist, bestselling author, and one of the most prescient intellectuals in the world. Since Oct 7, he has also become one of the strongest voices for Israel and the Jewish people. Douglas will be sharing experiences from his time in Israel post October 7, including never before seen footage from his time in Israel. Tickets can be purchased through Live Nation’s website: https://www.livenation.com/artist/K8vZ917blC7/douglas-murray-events 

The case in question was, it was two boys, they went with their father into the shelter and the Hamas terrorists threw a grenade into the shelter. And the father threw himself on the grenade. And his two sons, one of them lost his hearing and the other lost his eyesight in one eye. And they're in such distress and confusion. And one of them says to the other, he's dead. He's dead. And the other says, he's not.

He said, I saw it. I saw it. And then the terrorist comes in and helps himself to food in the fridge. One of the boys, 11 and 13, I think, the younger one said to the terrorist, that's my mother's food. And the terrorist said, where's your mother? I want her too.

So yes, this is a profound form of evil. Since October 7th, on this podcast, we have tried to present Israel's dilemmas and challenges as Israel responded to a genocidal attack from Gaza in what is now a multi-front war. We've tried to do this by talking to Israelis, Israeli journalists, political figures, historians, and other thought leaders, and different people doing extraordinary things from Israel's civil society. We've tried to provide historical context and perspectives from various actors in the U.S.-Israel relationship from both sides of that relationship. To be honest, Ilan and I did not think we would still be doing these episodes with this focus for one year. And yet, here we are, approaching the one-year anniversary

of October 7th, which will be regarded as one of the darkest days in Jewish history, and I believe one of the darkest days in the history of Western civilization. Most of our episodes have been shaped by weekly and sometimes daily news developments, but as we approach the one-year anniversary, we wanted to take a step back and spend extended time with a few of our previous guests and thought leaders who are not necessarily our go-to analysts. I asked each one of them to take a longer horizon perspective, to look back at this past year and the year ahead. In each conversation, I will try to understand the larger lessons these guests have learned as we approach this grim milestone. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this series was filmed in a studio and is also available in video on our YouTube channel. You can find the link in the show notes,

or you can also find details on our live recording at the Stryker Center in New York City on the evening of September 24th with Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, and an event I will be doing in the Philadelphia area at the Lower Marion Synagogue with combat veteran and national security expert Dave McCormick on the evening of Monday, September 9th. We begin this series with a conversation with

Douglas Murray, war journalist, columnist, best-selling author. We'll be dropping one of these long-form conversations with a different guest each week between now and the first couple of weeks following October 7th. But now, here is Douglas Murray on one year since October 7th. This is Call Me Back. I'm pleased to welcome you, Douglas Murray, scholar, thought leader, journalist, best-selling author, and very vocal defender of Israel and the Jewish people to this conversation that we are releasing in the lead up and around the one year anniversary of October 7th. It's hard to believe it's been a year.

And we are having these conversations with thinkers and observers, and in your case, a real actor, a real protagonist in the story of Israel and the Jewish people since October 7th, who have really struck a nerve with our listeners and our community, our Call Me Back community. So thank you for doing this. Thank you. This is a series, as I mentioned, that we'll be having leading up to October 7th, but you are about to embark on a series of your own, which is a series of live lectures that you will be doing sponsored by Live Nation beginning on September 8th in Fort Lauderdale, and then you go to Miami Beach at the Fillmore right after that, and then a series of shows,

I think culminating in New York City here at the Beacon Theater. And we're gonna post in the show notes the details on how to register and buy tickets for these events. But you're showing, for the first time in those shows, footage that you had captured during your entire time in those shows footage that you had captured during your entire time in Israel.

Is that right? Yes, that's right. It's a six-city tour with Live Nation starting 8th of September, Fort Lauderdale, 10th of September in Miami Beach, and going on to LA, DC, New York, Denver. I haven't done a tour like this in the US before and there's just so much to talk about, so much to address

and yes, from my many months in Israel since the 7th I've captured a lot of footage of where I've been from the sites of the massacres on the 7th to inside Gaza and much more and I'll be sharing that for the first time

as well as being joined on stage for Q&A with my monk debating partner, Natasha Hausdorff, who's going to join me on stage. Who's a force of nature in her own right. He's terrific. So to get details on these concerts, if you want to purchase tickets, go to Douglas Murray Live Nation.

You can search Douglas Murray Live Nation. Do Live Nation, search for Douglas Murray, and make sure you put my name in and not Taylor Swift or something. Right. I'd like to think there's some overlap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the Venn diagram is quite narrow. And again, we'll post all the information. Douglas, I mentioned that you've been one of the most vocal defenders of Israel and the Jewish people. Before October 7th and before your decision to not walk but to run to israel in the days after october 7th you had this connection to israel and the jewish people where does that come from um i've had it for many years i've been to israel many times over the years uh the first war i saw there was in 2006 the second lebanon war the Hezbollah war it's a country and

the people in the subject that gets under my skin I mean it's uh it's always been to me um an intellectual um issue I I don't like the intellectual dishonesty which in my view has always wrapped itself around Israel, the double standards and triple standards that are applied to Israel, the lies that are spread about the country during wartime. Again, I saw that in 2006 with my own eyes, and I've seen it plenty more in the years since. And I suppose it's also an emotional issue in many ways as well, at least has become so, because I feel very deeply this, among other things, that the extraordinary lack of empathy which so much of the world has towards Israel and towards the Israeli people, the world seems so callous about it.

Not all the world, thank goodness, but much of the world. From the 7th of October onwards, much of the world from the 7th of October onwards. Much of the media was obsessing about not about the atrocities, which I knew were going to be covered over far too fast. But all move on to this question of Israeli retaliation. Or actually, just the day we're speaking the day before, the New York Times front page proposed the issue of a potential ceasefire deal at the moment as being between people who wanted peace and people who want vengeance inside Israel. That's absolutely typical in my view. if an equivalent number of Americans were killed on one day as were killed in Israel on the 7th, or an equivalent number of Americans were kidnapped as were kidnapped in Israel on October 7th.

I don't think Americans will like it very much if the world said, these people trying to get back their American children, they're so vengeful. Right. Growing up, where in the UK did you grow up? I grew up in London Did you know many Jews growing up? Some yes, it was never a particular issue. I mean I never was particularly aware of

You know, I had family had Jewish friends have Jewish friends still and But I never until I was sort of I I suppose, coming to political awareness at university at Oxford, it never occurred to me that the things that we had heard about in history might still be going on. And then, yes, I saw it. And I realized that many of the things that I thought had been confined to history books were not. And that's probably also something that galvanizes me but but yes I mean it was not

by any means I'm not from a political family or anything like that I had the great pleasure of taking my parents to Israel some years ago and being their tour guide and also driver which is pretty scary if you know Israeli driving but we know it was not a it was not a central part of upbringing but I think the one thing that was a central part part of my upbringing was knowing the difference between truth and lies and Knowing the difference between good and evil This this may seem like too personal question, but I'm gonna ask it anyways. Are you a

Religious person or have you become more religious? I was very religious growing up. I was brought up an Anglican Christian. I suppose I have always been pretty religious until roughly my mid-20s. I had an extended atheist period, which I swiftly realized was... It's a rite of passage. It's probably a rite of passage. As somebody quipped, I tried atheism but i kept on having doubts the false prophets of atheism yes i i i i think i might describe myself as a christian

agnostic these days you know maybe one of the many things that that deeply matters to me in the case result is that of course israel is a country for anyone who has been brought up Christian, has any connection still to the Christian faith. It's a place that absolutely jangles with resonance and meaning. Since October 7th, I watch you all throughout the media, especially on British media, which is its own blood sport. And you're almost like a bodyguard. That's how I feel. You're almost like a bodyguard. That's how I feel. You're almost like a bodyguard on behalf of the Jewish people, taking these bullets, firing

back rhetorically. And these are people that are not your people. And it can be exhausting. I mean, I try to do a fraction of what you do, and it's exhausting. Has it taken a toll on you? No. I think it's not just a pleasure and an honor, but a duty to do what I try to do. I wouldn't want to live in a world in which lies were forever just able to be thrown around unaddressed. And it's not just lies, of course, a lot of it is

just ignorance. And you can always lament the ignorance of your age and everybody in every age has done so but there is a presumption in our own time that people are meant to have views on absolutely everything and you know as twitter x can show you people are also experts in absolutely everything and their expertise changes from week to week of course but when they decide that they're experts in the Middle East, and specifically on the Israel-Palestinian conflicts, you just discover reservoirs of ignorance so wide and deep. And so I tried a lot since the 7th to simply unpick and unpack

some of the misunderstandings that people have. And they are legion. I mean, immediately after the 7th, I did an interview on a British channel in which the interviewer asked me, perfectly reasonably, about the question of proportionality and conflict. And I said what I had to say about that pretty swiftly.

But I don't think it takes a toll on me. I mean, I'd hope not. It's what I do. And I always encourage more people to do it too. In the days after October 7th, for so many of us, the reality of what happened, the horror, was a very visceral feeling. And like all crises, the moment passes.

Or maybe it just begins to feel a little numb to us. So I want to just take people back to those early days and remind them what we were all seeing and hearing, and you were on the ground seeing and hearing. So can you describe that? Yeah, I mean, I went straight to the south, to the communities there that had been most viciously attacked on the 7th. Places like the community of Berry, near Oz, it's a community of 400 people, about one in four people in the community

were either killed in their homes or kidnapped into Gaza. These beautiful communities in the south where, you you know they're sort of idyllic really they're not always very rich communities by any means in fact some of them are really pretty poor but it's a pretty blissful life you know families you know all know each other the children can run around safely to go there after what had been done to them and to see it with my own eyes and they were still collecting body parts and you know some people were killed in their safe rooms because the doors didn't lock because they never expected this every house had a safe room but it was a safe room from the pretty regular bombardment of missiles

from gaza that you could shut the doors but you couldn't lock them so as you know I went house to house you know where the bodies had been found or where the where the remains of a body had been found I mean there was one body identified only six weeks ago I mean 10 months after the 7th because there was so little of the body left. These are scenes of horror and of such magnitude. Elderly man living alone, you know, just burned alive in his house. You know, two young boys, you know, who got stuck in the safe room of their house on their own. And their grandfather walked me through the remains of the house where his grandsons had been on the phone to him that morning and he was desperately trying to tell

them how to hold the door closed with the terrorists on the other side and they held out as long as they could but they couldn't hold out for long and then i you know i spent a lot of time with the hostage families in the immediate aftermath as they were getting organized and heard their stories and heard firsthand from people like the first responders and you know people like the policemen in sterot who held out for a long time a long long battle again i've been to sterot many times over the years i've sat in the bomb shelters there um but i never expected to see But I never expected to see, and they never expected to see, Hamas military vehicles coming down the main street in Sderot

and firing rocket-propelled grenades at people and buildings. And so, yes, I spent a lot of time in the morgues with the people who were trying to work out what had happened. And then was able to be embedded with the IDF and go into Gaza through one of the fences that the terrorists had come through on the day to see the Israeli response as they searched for the hostages and as they tried to find Hamas terrorists. You describe in these images, I just saw a news report about how Israel had just taken out, really just taken out like like in the last couple of days, one of the senior Hamas military commanders whose image the IDF knew from footage because he was in a home with an Israeli family in a kibbutz on October 7th. He had just personally

slaughtered a parent. And then he was sitting in the kitchen area with his little kids going in the fridge and drinking a soda after he just murdered their father and I was like wait he did what that's one that's often on my mind I saw the other terrorists who was involved in that in maximum security prison in Israel in April the case in question was it was two boys, they went with their father into the shelter and the Hamas terrorists threw a grenade into the shelter and the father threw himself on the grenade. And his two sons, one of them

lost his hearing and the other lost his eyesight in one eye. And there's terrible footage of them in the home. And they're in such distress and confusion. And one of them says to the other, he's dead, he's dead. And the other says, he's not. He said, I saw it, I saw it. And then the terrorist comes in and helps himself to food in the fridge. One of the boys, 11 and 13, I think,

the younger one said to the terrorist, that's my mother's food. And the terrorist said, where's your mother? I want her too. So yes, this is a profound form of evil. And there's one other thing I should say about that, by the way, and I've tried to make this point a lot and have sometimes been misinterpreted for saying this, but it's just worth reiterating that. One of the things about the seventh that is so disturbing

is not just the scale of the barbarity and the viciousness of it, but the pride that the terrorists had in their acts. I had my late friend George Weidenfeld, who died some years ago, who was an emigre from Nazi Austria. He said he'd never thought this before, but he had come to realize there might be even worse forms of anti-Semitism than Nazi anti-Semitism.

Hamas have not been able to achieve by scale what the Nazis were able to achieve. But that's not from want of trying. It's for want of the resources to do so and the opportunity to do so. One of the things that makes Hamas different is that they actually broadcast their crimes to the world. Himmler, in his famous speech to the SS and others when the final solution is getting underway, says to him, we're writing a chapter our history that we will not be able to talk about but we need to get it done and so on and so forth some level they knew what they were doing had to be hidden from the world

that's why when vasily grossman goes into treblinka in 44 he has to piece together what has happened here. Hamas broadcast on GoPro and on video camera. They seized video phones from their victims and used it to record their murder and then sent it to their families of the murdered on WhatsApp. They broadcast what they did to the world. They were so happy about it. They were so happy about it. They were so proud about it. Anyone who doesn't think that we're dealing here with a would-be genocidal organization just needs to go and look at the way

in which Hamas and their fellow terrorists behaved on the 7th and question whether these are people who you could talk down my you know you often learn some of the most obvious but somehow difficult to articulate things from young people my 16 year old son when we were in Israel over Passover, over Pesach last April, we'd gone down south with our kids, went to Kibbutz Neroz. We went to the Nova Musical Festival site. In the previous summer, we had gone to Eastern Europe. My mother's a Holocaust survivor. We went to Kosice, Slovakia, her hometown, where she was taken by the Nazis. We went to Auschwitz, where her father was taken and murdered. My mother was hidden out by righteous Gentiles. And my 16-year-old son says

to me, the night after we had gone down to the Gaza envelope in southern Israel, he said, you know, this may sound come off insensitive or weird. He said, but I found today harder than going to Auschwitz with Safda, with his grandmother. And I said, why? And he said, because as horrific as what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust was, as a teenager, so far removed from that horror show. I just was able to believe that that was humanity in a time completely disconnected from my own. Humanity in the era of black and white. Black and white footage seems so different. It's a different world. He said, I just assumed that people were different now. What he meant by different

was like more enlightened or had learned the lessons of and therefore wouldn't repeat or whatever. He just assumed that was another generation's experience and that would not be an experience that would ever occur in his generation. And then we go down to Southern Israel and we see a version of it again. And that was what was so chilling to him

is wait, this could happen again? The people who broke into Israel on the 7th, you know, there were, it's now thought maybe up to 6,000. Right. Those, you know, whether it's the terrorists in the first waves or the third and fourth waves of people who were Gaza civilians who came to loot or sometimes just to enjoy themselves with knives and whatever else they could get their hands on it's the biggest difference in the world living in the world of peace and the world of war and there's nothing nothing bigger than that divide that gap when people get back into the realm of war, of horror, never forget it.

But it seems absolutely impossible. There was a survivor of the Nova Festival who at one of the reunions said to me, you know, what would you do if this happened in your country? And I didn't say to him, but I thought, well, it has has not on this scale but it has you know the the Parisians who were in the Bataclan theater in November 2015 were meant to be enjoying an evening of heavy metal

music and when the first Kalashnikov fire came from the Isis terrorists most people thought it was either a sound problem with the speakers or that somebody had set off firecrackers. In the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, when the ISIS affiliate Omar Mateen went in and killed 49 gay people, most people thought at the beginning somebody had thrown around firecrackers. And when a suicide bomber went into the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in the arena in 2017 and detonated, nobody could believe it. One of the guards who saw him standing around looking suspicious with his backpack filled, as it turned out, with a suicide bomb and nails and things packed into it. Didn't report the guy, by the way, because he thought he might be accused of Islamophobia. But anyway, it seemed impossible, I think, to the guards in Manchester Arena that somebody would bring

a bomb packed with nails into a concert predominantly being attended by teenage girls in a British city. But all of this seems absolutely impossible until it happens. One of the many things that I've thought of a lot in the last year has just been that, again, that terrible lack of empathy. Because the world did have great sympathy with Paris when the terrorists went through the Bataclan theatre and hunted down Parisians and shot the Parisians in wheelchairs in the disabled section one by one. The world did have sympathy with them.

The world did not blame, nor should they have blamed the citizens of Manchester for having the audacity to attend a pop concert in their home city. And nobody would think of blaming or having anything but sympathy for the people in Orlando going out for night clubbing. Why should it be that the Nova survivors just be bewildered by the world's lack of empathy? That a couple of the survivors went to Britain a few months ago to speak to people there about what had happened. They were detained at a British airport and treated like war criminals by some officials who seemed to believe these victims were perpetrators of some kind.

And that's this unique thing about Israel and so much of the world's hostility to Israel is that it accuses the victims of being perpetrators always. So that the only explanation for why the world has not spent more time supporting Israel and getting its hostages back is that much of the world seems to think that those hostages are in some way guilty. I think there are times when a flare goes up and you see exactly where everyone is standing. We knew, for instance, the corruption of American academia, wow, has it exposed itself in the last year.

If you want your child to be a good person, don't send them to an Ivy League. Pretty good rule now. And I hope people remember this is where people were found out. This is where they were seen. The flare went up and they were seen shrugging, eyeing up a death cult with something like glee and admiration. The city we're sitting in at the moment, just yesterday,

the demonstration with people waving the flag of Hamas on the streets of New York. On the weekend that an American citizen was found dead in the dungeons of Gaza. Imagine what you have to be like, what pit of hell you have to be in as an individual. That an American citizen has just been cold-bloodedly murdered after being held hostage for almost a year by these people and you fly the flag of the murderers in new york city how dare they how dare they and they always do the same thing by the way because these people and the ones in the west are such cowards oh the only people in america outside of maybe a bit of williamburg, who still deeply fear the coronavirus.

Oh, of course, they're deeply in fear of getting COVID. Yeah, that's why they wear masks over their faces at every one of their disgusting demonstrations. The women, I presume, who were marching through New York yesterday with the Hamas flag so proudly waved, don't even have the guts to show their nose or their mouth. So maybe there is something to be gained from the thought that they know they're doing something despicable. In the days after October 7th, would you have predicted everything you're describing, that we'd be here a year later, and what you're describing in terms of the world's reaction pretty much so going in you're getting ready you're flying to israel and you you know that

israel's in for a long war but you know that we here we're also in for a war yeah of course because because our institutions in america and the west are so rotted one of the things i expected and i wrote about many years ago in a book, but which has come horribly true, is the sectarian nature of much of the response. It's very, very troubling. I expected it, and I'm very fearful about it. A lot of the attack on Israel in the last year in the West has been driven by people who are driven by sectarian, ideological, millenarian, religious politics. And still, the West is not strong enough to identify it and call it out for what it is. But there is a reason why certain politicians and public figures and others

just are very happy playing footsie with Hamas. Okay. So I want to ask you about that because I'm asked a lot to comment on what Jews and those who are directly connected to Israel should learn from October 7th and what we should fear based on what we've learned from October 7th. What would you tell people who have no connection to Judaism or no connection to Israel? Just people who live in the United States in the UK in Europe in the West. What does this mean for the West? What should those who care about the future of the West and Western civilization and Western ideals? Take away from the world's response to October 7th? And what should worry them? They should know this, that they could be next and will be.

It's happened here before. America is especially good at going back to sleep because America has not had a war of this kind in its history, really. Europe is tired of war and believes that it's consigned it to the past. A lot of people are angry at Israel for still living in this world in which people invade you and you have to defend yourself. And they blame Israel for being the cause of that. But people should simply know it will come to them as well and the the people who massacred their way through the south of israel on the 7th are the same people whose

labors i have seen in for instance northern nigeria where it's the christians who are hunted down literally chased across the fields running away from from their churches, being chased by Islamists, terrorists, killed in the fields, their bodies just left, who have suicide bombings on Easter Sunday in their church. The world does not pay much attention to these conflicts, that conflict in particular in northern Nigeria, but it's not a coincidence that the same behavior is manifested against the jews and the christians by these islamists and time cultists if you just like living in a secular liberal in maybe every sense of the term society you would be really careful that you don't open the door up to a wolf to enter the chicken coop and to a great extent we

have we've been blithe about that and so yeah I said think that it could happen to you and also if it did happen to you or when it happened to you you would also know who your friends were in the immediate aftermath. The next day I heard that there was going to be an anti-Israel protest in Times Square and I went down to see that and to record it. That was on October the 8th when people were still fighting in the communities in the south of Israel. Hamas was still in Israel. Hamas was still in Israel. And there were still Gazans looting the homes of murdered Israelis when these people organized an anti-Israel protest in Times Square. And that was one of the things that made me realize early on,

ah, you know, this is going to be bad. And some people have said to me in the last year, well, there was a moment at the beginning of the war where everyone was on Israel's side. Oh, no, they weren't. Oh, no, they weren't. And I will not have them rewrite that history. There has not been, there was not one anti-Hammaz protest of any size anywhere in America or in Britain or in Europe. So spare me the idea that at the beginning of this, immediately after the massacre, everyone was sympathetic to the Israelis. And it was only when Israel started to respond to the aggression that it lost these friends. It's absolutely crock narrative. If people were honest about it, they would admit that this is the one conflict

in which when citizens get massacred, there is no outrage of any meaningful size, any institutions or public bodies against the people who did the massacres. No American campus had anti-Hammaz protests on October the 8th, 9th, 10th onwards, and not to this date. I think there's something very peculiar about war that will always interest me, that it shows you people at their best and their very worst.

When people don't know if they might live tomorrow, they know what matters to them more today and The truth is is the trauma that the Israeli public have been through from the seventh is also in its non going trauma and I this way I would say that the war will not be over until Israel's military and intelligence dominance is reasserted. And that's because what the seventh did, I think, at a very deep level for Israelis and Jews in the diaspora was to shake that core belief, which is this at least is the place we safe, not completely safe, but we have an army. We have intelligence infrastructure.

How come it happened here? And, you know, we don't know all of the explanations. We won't do until an inquiry like that after 73 takes place. But I think that the deepest level that is the real Israeli trauma is the parents I've spoken to in the hospitals and elsewhere who promised their children that the IDF would be there in minutes. Whether it was people on their phones to their children trying to escape the Nova Party or people in the safe rooms of the kibbutz communities the communities in the south saying to their children always you know don't worry the idf will be here in minutes and they weren't and that's that's a very very challenging thing i want to talk about the war one year in what is your assessment as to where the war is right now where it's going well it's gone on longer than anyone would like like

everyone i mean i hope it finishes as soon as possible i having seen the idf in action in gaza i can tell you this i mean these young men and women are extraordinary under conditions that i don't think any modern army has had to face i I mean, you know from Iraq, battles like Fallujah, similar, but not on this scale or for this duration. And not having to fight an enemy that's in tunnels. Yes. I mean, all of the infrastructure of Hamas is dedicated to making it as possible as they can that civilians will be killed

by the Israelis. Many terrible things are happening along the way. I mean, one that's always in my mind is the three hostages who walked out of a building and they were shot by a soldier, an IDF soldier. And I remember speaking to somebody in Gaza after that, and he said, look, Douglas, I mean, every day, every day we have people coming out of buildings

with white flags and the hands in the air. And then from the middle of them will come people firing clash the cops dressed in exactly the same way. So and I'm the reason why that's often in my mind is, is that that was one of the quite a number of times in this war where a terrible thing that happened was again used against the Israelis. Much of the media reported that terrible thing as, look at the Israelis, they're so cruel, they even shoot their own people who have been held hostage. No, this is, again, that's just the treat of a society

that has no knowledge of war anymore. But so yes, I think that the war's gone on longer than anyone hoped. I think that the situation with the hostages has remained what I thought it would be, which is that Sinoir would, till the end, be holding the best hostages as he would see it, close to him as possible, in order to eke out his own life. I do think that the situation is not over until the north is addressed. Israel's border with the north. Yeah, I lived for many months with citizens of a northern town who had been displaced and it is

Always been on my mind that you know You cannot have tens of thousands of Israeli families unable to be in their own homes because of Hezbollah rocket fire into the north of Israel I've been to their home cities more often than they have in the last year. No, the ghost towns, many of these. The ghost towns, and with a lot more even before recent events, with a lot more going on than either side admitted in terms of constant exchange of fire and so on. Again, the world pays no attention to it, always talks about Palestinian refugees, and nobody talks about the Israeli refugees or the internally displaced people. Other things have gone slightly better than I expected. I was not displeased at events in Tehran the other week. Whoever it was

who ensured that a certain Hamas leader attended the coronation in Tehran and didn't make the journey back, it's an example of the necessary deterrence that Israel has to reestablish. So I think some of the deterrence has been reestablished. I'm concerned, like everyone is, about what happens in post-war Gaza, how it's run, what it looks like, and how everyone in the region and internationally can ensure that this isn't a war that has to happen again in another 15 years. You mentioned the hostages. This is unique.

The tunnel system is unique, right? You talk to those who've worked on counterinsurgency, this isn't really even a counterinsurgency, but fighting in war is the idea that there's something equivalent to the London Underground in Gaza where Hamas can hide, and the idea of has to fight them and navigate these tunnels, many of which are like meat grinders and booby trapped. But the hostages, what a dilemma for

Israel's leadership. Yeah, it's terrible. Because they say that there's these twin goals, which are defeating Hamas and never letting Hamas be a force, at least in Gaza again, and returning the hostages. Not so easy to do both of those. No. On parallel tracks. No. What have you learned about Israel in terms of how it's wrestling with this hostage dilemma? Oh, it's terrible. I mean, it's terrible, and it's what Hamas wanted. But is there something unique to maybe the Israeli value system? Well, yes. But I mean, of course, you know, the Israelis have always believed that, you know, you don't leave anyone behind. It's a key issue in the army. It's a very important principle in the army, that.

And at the same time, and there was a bit of divergence of opinion immediately after the 7th, even among some of the families who didn't join the hostage forum, because they said, we will not have our loved one exchanged for 1000 Palestinian murderers out of Israeli prisons. I mean, one of the things that the world again, always misreports is they always say it is things like a prisoner swap, as if a two year old baby stolen from the kibbutz in the south of Israel, swapped for 500 Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons, is just a swap of prisoners. And again, the international media never reports what these people have done, that they are bomb makers, that they are suicide vest preparers, that they are facilitators of attacks or have carried out knife attacks or gun attacks or any number of other things

They don't report that they just say prisoner swap but of course it's an incredibly difficult moral dilemma and has been for the Israeli government from the beginning because You know Hamas is is I mean that its leadership is clever. It's evil and wicked, but it's clever. And Sinoir, what we know about him from his time in Israeli prisons, was he, you know, he worked this out where he used his time in prison to study and to study Israeli methods of war and tried to understand his enemy. We'll obviously see what happened with the hostages, but he knew that. And he knew it

from the handover of terrorists that he was included in, that the best thing in the world, and he said this before, the best thing in the world for a Hamas person in prison in Israel is to hear that their fellow terrorists back home have kidnapped an Israeli soldier. So that's the best news you can get Because then you know, you've got a chance of reliefs even if you're in for life That was how he got out as one of the thousand or more Palestinians who were swapped for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit So I think because as you know, and your listeners will know because of that

unbelievable deal. I mean, it was seen by many as crazy at the time, seen by many as crazy in hindsight. But that led to Sinois getting out, which led to the seventh. I don't know what I'd do in that. This isn't to denigrate the leadership of Israel or anyone else. It's an impossible situation impossible it's just an impossible situation and that's why I mean in recent days I think the Israeli government has been put the war camp has been put in an equally impossible situation with this dispute over the

the corridor in the south and the Philadelphia corridor and the dispute over whether or not that should be the sticking point as opposed to the imminent release of the hostages. Now I've done some media in recent days as I know you haven't we try to explain this to people but I only hear one thing from the western media which is why is Benjamin Netanyahu being so belligerent. It's as though Hamas is a sideshow in all of this regardless of what one thinks of Netanyahu the there's a sense that that that the prime minister so belligerent. It's as though Hamas is a sideshow in all of this. Regardless of what one thinks of Netanyahu, there's a sense that the prime minister of Israel has sole agency over whether there is going to be a hostage. And that is a real problem in a democracy. But there's a trust deficit in Israel.

So yes, it's absurd that that's how the conversation is being framed. On the one hand, on the other hand, the media here in the West points to, well, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis are storming the streets to protest their government. So I think unique in war time, where you have a leadership that's fighting a war, a war that the overwhelming majority of Israelis from right to left support at the same time as having serious questions about the prime minister. If you're grief stricken, as anyone would be if you had family members who you knew were being held in dark tunnels and had been for almost a year, if you're that grief-stricken um i mean you'd do anything to get them back

but the leadership of hamas does not care about the tears of israeli mothers it does not care and there's nothing the families can do frankly to persuade hamas to give back their loved ones there is no leverage that an ordinary person can have over Hamas. And this is a very common problem in democracies, and it's one we just have to be aware of. There's a risk always. There is always a possibility that if you cannot affect the person who's responsible. You will affect the next people in line who you think you can persuade. David Lammy in the UK. Foreign Secretary of the new Labour government.

Secretary Blinken. I don't think that Yashar Sinwa much cares for their advice. And he doesn't have to pretend to and that's that's the trick that's a trip that people can make and i think a lot of people have it's it's a i mean i think everyone knows this in some kind of domestic scenario where you know if there's some somebody who will not listen to you and somebody who may you might disproportionately exert your anger upon the person who might listen. Let me ask you about, you mentioned Lamy, the foreign secretary. Just today, as we're sitting here, he announced that he was limiting some defense exports or some licenses to UK defense contractors in their supply and sales to Israel. Literally

days after we learned of these six Israelis slaughtered by Hamas while Israel is in the midst of fighting what is a defensive war. What on earth is he and his government thinking? What agenda do they think they're advancing in pursuing this? Do you think the timing was intentional? It could have been intentional. It's rather difficult to read the mind of David Lammy because it suggests there is something to read. This is a man who, when he did Celebrity Mastermind some years ago, was asked in the general knowledge which English King succeeded Edward IV, and he said Edward III. David Lammy is not our best, and he's not the worst either, but he's a weak man with not very much understanding of the situation in the Middle East. He's trying to appease a very virulent wing of his party,

very virulent wing of the Labour Party, that includes people who are just pro-Hamas. And, you know, the other thing is, I mean, I hate to say this, I sound like I'm beating up my own country. I adore Britain, obviously, and I wish that it had not had this descent into second-rate-ness that it seems to be suffering. But there is something pretty special about David Lammy, or indeed any British foreign secretary at the moment, telling other countries, let alone allies, how to run a war. It's sort of audacious to do that. And also, of course, in the case of Israel, so bizarre because of the double, triple standards again. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Britain now, a man who nobody voted for with any excitement,

probably not even Mrs. Starmer, is said just this week that we will continue to support Ukraine with whatever it takes, with whatever it takes with whatever it takes and at the same time the pretty minimal arms exports of the uk and the uk should become should be rather rather more humble about its arms export industry because it's not a roaring trade in any case um but yeah they they've suspended some of the licenses in order to appease a small and virulent faction of extremists and racists in the Labour Party. It's ugly because it could set up a sort of tumbling effect where country after country does similar things. It requires a great deal of diplomacy from the Israelis not to say to the British quite how useless they are these days.

Or how much the British depend on Israeli arms exports to their own country and cyber defense capabilities. I want to wrap this up on a, dare I say, more optimistic note, which is difficult to do as a Jew. It doesn't come naturally. No, no. It's sort of like it's an out-of-body experience. I'm trying to imagine what has to happen in the years ahead for us to look back at this period and saying, yes, it was brutal.

Yes, it was difficult. Yes, it was daunting. Yes, it was brutal. Yes, it was difficult. Yes, it was daunting. Yes, it seemed impossible. But Israel came out of it as difficult as it seemed at the time, stronger. The only analogy I can think, and it's imperfect, in the 1970s, if you look at the first half of the 1970s in Israel, 1972, you had the Munich Olympics, Israeli athletes slaughtered. 1973, Israel surprised by the Yom Kippur War, completely obliterating Israel's sense of triumphalism. That was the legacy of the 67 Six-Day War. 1974, you had the Maalot Massacre up in Israel's north where a Palestinian terror group came, infiltrated Israel

from Lebanon and took hostage in May of 1974 over 100 Israeli school children slaughtered, many of them first time that had been done, that kind of terror attack, slaughtering children, a precursor really to October 7th, 2023. The Soviet Union really clamping down on Soviet Jews that wanted to move to Israel and sending them to prisons and starving them and basically making it impossible for them to leave. 1975, the UN General Assembly passes a resolution comparing, not comparing, defining Zionism as racism. So that was the first half of the 1970s for Israel and the Jews. My father was very active on behalf of Jewish communal life in the United States, on behalf of Israel, on behalf of Soviet refuseniks. I was a little boy at the time, but in the peak of his

activism, that was the Jewish struggle at the time, that picture I just painted. And then you have 1976, you have the Entebbe terror attack, which on the one hand was also Jews being separated from others in the sense that Jews were taken hostage because they were Jews and are going to be slaughtered. And then this incredible rescue operation. And then there's a sense that things start to turn. And only a year after that, 1977, Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt,

which was behind every, in one way or the other, behind every major war against Israel since its founding, flies to Israel, 1977, just a year after Entebbe, and gives a speech before Israel's parliament, before its Knesset, and says, I want a peaceful resolution, a treaty with Israel. And then, of course, two years later, in 1979, you have the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and the largest country in Israel. I mean, people don't understand

how significant that was. And it would be like today's Saudi Arabia. It would be like MBS not only wanting to normalize with Israel, but flying to Israel and speaking before the Knesset. It was an astonishing thing, given what Israel had been through. So on the one hand, you have those years of horror and one bad event after another, and then it like turns. And that peace treaty, by the way, with Israel and Egypt is as complicated as it is,

it's held. Paint a picture for me of what you think has to happen for us to, you know, here Israel's in the middle of the seven front, effectively a seven front war. And its borders are shrinking, not expanding, because Israelis can't really live in the south. And as you said, they can't really live in the north. And so what is already a tiny country is getting smaller and is under siege from so many directions Can you paint a picture of what it would look like or and how we get there for Israel?

to look back this period and say yeah, it was bad and What well what I've said from the beginning of this conflict is that Israel has to be allowed to win And on my belief is the reason why there have been endless rounds of conflict in the north and in the south is because Israel Is prevented from winning. Winning is not the same thing as drawing. Somebody said to me last October, I remember in London, said, you know, you shouldn't look at everything in such a binary light, Douglas.

Not everything is binary. He was a very wise Jewish rabbi, as it happened, a relatively wise Jewish rabbi Abandoned we were in disagreement about something and I said I disagree with you And some things are totally binary and he said like what I said win lose Completely binary And for winning it's not just that the winning side needs to have won, the losing side needs to know they've lost. My view is that this war can be over when Hamas and Hezbollah have lost,

and when people in the region as well as internationally realize that there is no good future for anyone in the region in trying to wipe out the Jewish state. Now, that obviously all goes back to iran we there's a lot we haven't touched on i know perhaps most obviously that you know what's the problem in the region iran iran and did i mention iran um if iran is emboldened by all of this of course everything goes in the wrong direction and there's no good future for anyone in the region. But if Iran's power ambitions are pushed back, by which I mean the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran

and that terrible government that's misgoverned Iran since 1979 is somehow pushed back, then, you know, there is every reason to be hopeful about the future. One of the amazing things in the last year is, not just that, I mean, the Accords you refer to, the peace treaties have held, but that the Abraham Accords have held. And the Saudis joining it is not completely off the table, and indeed could be done quite fast after the war. And in fact, one of the reasons the Abraham Accords have held is because the Saudis give cover for it. Yep. And you can see, I can see the possibility in the region of, you know,

some kind of unified rebuilding in Gaza. But all of it is predicated on Iran not being allowed to continue to poison every well it can in the region. If other countries, I mean, the Emiratis are most obvious in a way, who've been remarkable through all this as well, if they can be on the rise and Qatar and Iran cannot be, then I think that'd be good for everyone, be good for the region. But if various countries are allowed to continuously meddle and use the Palestinians as their pawns in a regional power game, then not only Israelis will suffer, but the Palestinians will suffer. And there's no need for them to. There's no reason for them to.

It all just depends on whether or not the men of violence, the death cultists, can be pushed back or not. If they can be, there's no reason that another 18 years from now, the citizens of Gaza and elsewhere in the region are able to build instead of destroy. To my mind, it all relies on one thing, realization that the Jewish state is not going anywhere. And that if you want to destroy it, you will destroy yourself and your own society. And that's what's happened. That's the story of Hamas. That was the story of the PLO.

This war will almost certainly have produced a new generation of leaders inside Israel, which is one of them. I mean, I think it already has. Just amazing men and women of the young generation. This time of trial has, as often happens, but particularly so this past year, has thrown up and produced remarkable people who've stepped up to the moment, like the young men and women of Israel have. My hope would be that a new generation of Palestinian leaders and others will come along at some point. Maybe, I mean, I never thought that I would see in my

lifetime things that MBS has managed to do in Saudi Arabia in a few years. You know, it just goes to show you can. You can surprise everyone. I tell young pro-Israel activists today that when I was a young pro-Israel activist, I like to still think of myself as young. When I was younger, a younger pro-Israel activist, we used to talk about Saudi Arabia the way we today talk about Iran. Yep. About Saudi Arabia the way we today talk about Iran. Mm-hmm. Yep, and it was the same note

I got many years ago. I met that lovely man who was the former Israeli ambassador to Tehran in the 1970s under the Shah and I just Think of that now it seems impossible But it was so then these things can change and it'll all depend on who the heroes are in the region crush and kill Sinhwa and his terrorist friends and make sure that the earth is salted over after the remains of Hamas are gone. And people may see that there is no future in that death cult. Is that your message? 5.5 million Palestinians that live within Gaza and the West Bank?

It has to be that the Jews aren't going anywhere and that they can have a homeland, the Palestinians, beside the Jewish homeland. And it's there as it has been since 1948. There are lots of things that are stopping it, but the main thing is whether your priority as Palestinians is the creation of a Palestinian state or the destruction of the Jewish state. If it's the first, they will get a Palestinian state. If it's the destruction of the Jewish state that they seek first and foremost, they won't get a Palestinian state. So you're not ruling out a Palestinian state? I mean, I think it's unlikely at the moment because of what has gone on. It's certainly not the, I mean, as one left-wing Israeli leader said to me last year, at the

very least, this isn't the time to talk about it. Palestinians who voted in Hamas and allowed them to take over the Gaza should not be rewarded with another state. I see Gaza as having already been given to them as a Palestinian state, and it was one they got to vote on and everything Else and we know what happened. I don't think you should give the Palestinians endless States Certainly not after the terrorist attacks. It looks like a reward for the terror but you know the main

Reason there isn't one is is as I say goes back to that very very first thing Are you willing to live side by side with the jewish state or not and if you're not you will not destroy the jewish state but you will destroy the opportunity to have a palestinian state 30 40 years from now you're reflecting on all these extraordinary experiences you've had covering wars and covering political events and covering revolutions. And when you think of this past year, what do you think the one story or one image that will be etched in your memory when you reflect on this time?

When I think about extraordinary, for better or for worse, times I've lived through, 9-11, being in New York, in the days after 9-11, I have certain images that my mind just goes right to when i think about my time in iraq i've when someone says what was your time like in iraq i have certain images that are certain stories that just my mind almost like a default naturally goes to um i don't think it's only one thing i think it's two things simultaneously. I was once some years ago in Israel over Memorial Day and Independence Day, which, as you know, one comes straight after the next.

Memorial Day, the sirens go off, everybody gets out of their cars, and there's silence. It's a collective moment. It's a collective moment. And people visit cemeteries and so on. And old comrades get back with their former battalions and remember their lost comrades. And then Independence Day is celebrated.

And suddenly the fireworks and people dancing. It's as crazy as a Jewish wedding. And for Israelis, it connects. We have the joy yes we experience the joy because we have independence and freedom we have the independence of freedom because of the sacrifices of exactly and it feels like a very jewish thing you can never choose a bit of life and this but it's always all together. The whole thing is always wrapped up together so I think I will I think I hope will have in my mind always that thing of the horror and at the same time

the desire to preserve life So that even even in the worst times in the worst worst places, after the worst atrocities, this knowledge that you have to say yes to life, and you have to continue with life, and that you need to preserve and protect life. And as I say, with the hope that out of all of the horror, good things will come, and life will continue, and people will continue to find a way to thrive and it'll be fine. They'll be fine. Well, when that metaphoric flame went up after October 7th that you articulated and the sky was illuminated and we saw who was with us and who wasn't, you, Douglas, have been with us. And I pray you stay healthy so you keep doing what you're doing and from strength to strength really.

And thank you for this conversation and for everything you're doing. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.