Making Sense with Sam Harris - #362 — Six Months of War

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Sam Harris and Josh Szeps (episode co-host) speak with Douglas Murray about the ongoing war in Gaza. They discuss public opinion about the war, the prospect of a widening conflict with Hezbollah and Iran, whether the Iron Dome was a mistake, the sentiments of Israeli Arabs, the global problem of Islamism, the risk of a resurgent right-wing in Europe, the crisis at the southern border in the US, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, it's been six months since October 7th, 2023, and the blizzard of moral confusion about the atrocities committed on that day and about Israel's response to them remains something to behold. In this episode, I speak with Douglas Murray and Josh Sepps about the current state of the war and public opinion. Several things have happened

since I recorded this conversation with Douglas and Josh, however. Most notably, the IDF accidentally killed some of the staff working for Chef Jose Andres' aid organization, World Central Kitchen. This was obviously a tragic accident, and yet much of the world has responded as though it weren't an accident at all, and that it is somehow plausible that the IDF is intentionally murdering aid workers. The fact that so many people have responded in this way tells you everything you need to know about the status of Israel and the level of moral intelligence out there. Some people have asked me if the ongoing carnage in Gaza,

and in particular this killing of aid workers, has changed my view of the war. The short answer is no, which might be surprising to some of you. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has listened to what I've said previously about the war. I've released several solo podcasts since October 7th, in particular The Sin of Moral Equivalence, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil, What is Islamophobia,

and Five Myths About Israel and the War in Gaza. If you've listened to any of those, Israel and the war in Gaza. If you've listened to any of those, you probably understand what I think. But I'll make a few very condensed points here, which might help explain why I think Israel absolutely has to win this war, and that any call for a ceasefire, especially one that doesn't first demand the return of the hostages, is not only absurd, butene. Now, generally, I'm very hawkish on the topic of jihadism, and I have been ever since September 11th, 2001. While my views here are widely mischaracterized and often misunderstood, I make no apologies for them. Anyone who thinks that we can compromise with jihadists either doesn't understand jihadism or is some species of lunatic. But please believe me when I say that I wish I never had to touch this topic ever again. It is vile, and confusion about it, especially on the part of secular liberals, is also vile.

Nothing reduces my faith in humanity more than routinely confronting educated people who have no capacity to discern the moral hierarchy here. The difference is so stark and so simple. the difference is so stark and so simple. For instance, there are people who use their own children as human shields, or worse, as bombs. Or there are people who kill their own daughters for the crime of getting raped because they have stained the family's honor. There are people who care more about violence done to a truly terrible book

than about the destruction of whole societies. And at this point in human history, the overwhelming majority of people who are this confused about how to live good lives are Islamic extremists, and the worst of these are jihadists. Now, Hamas is a jihadist organization. In my view, that's all we need to know about it. The question of how it got that way is fundamentally uninteresting, as is the question of why so many Palestinians have come to support it. It would be like asking in 1941 how the SS became so radicalized. And why do so many millions of Germans support it? That's an interesting question now, right now that Nazism has been defeated.

But in 1941, there was nothing to do but kill Nazis. I feel exactly the same way about jihadists. In fact, jihadists are worse than Nazis, in my view. They don't have the same power the Nazis had in the 30s and 40s, which is a very good thing, and we should keep it that way. But their ideology is actually worse. Jihadism is essentially Nazism plus an expectation of paradise. It's Nazism plus religious fanaticism. Nazism plus an eagerness to be martyred and to see their children martyred. There are many differences between Nazism and jihadism, of course, but they only make the Nazis look comparatively benign.

Nazism was a quasi-religious phenomenon. These people were not rationalists. It was basically racist mysticism anchored to a cult of personality. But the Nazis didn't use their own women and children as human shields. That would have been worse. How could you have made Auschwitz worse?

Well, you could have given the guards a belief system that made them feel actual religious ecstasy as they herded innocent people into gas chambers. That would have been worse. And it would have been worse had these beliefs been central to the worldview of a majority of ordinary Germans, and therefore difficult to separate from their other religious beliefs that gave their lives meaning. That would have been worse than what Nazism actually was, and that would have made it harder to purge from German society after we had killed a sufficient number of committed Nazis. As I've made clear many times before, my support for Israel in this conflict is not born of my identity as a Jew. It's not born of my attachment to the religion of Judaism, of which I have none.

And while the eruption of global anti-Semitism in response to October 7th has changed my sense of the vulnerability of Jews everywhere, of Jews everywhere. My support for Israel in this war isn't due to a special focus on the problem of anti-Semitism, or a special connection to Israel as a country. It's born of a special connection to civilization, to the norms of open societies, to individual rights and freedom of thought, and to secularism and rational, and basic decency, that is to everything that jihadists seek to destroy. Which is to say that if Denmark were fighting a war against jihadists, who had just murdered 1,200 innocent people and taken hundreds hostage, I would express precisely the same support for the Danes. And if you doubt this, just take a look at what I wrote and said during the Danish cartoon controversy, which obviously had nothing to do with Israel or

Judaism. Or go back and see what I said or wrote about any other eruption of Islamist insanity in the last 20 years. Conversely, if the Israelis were as captured by religious fanaticism and intolerance as the Palestinians are, if they had literally elected a death cult of aspiring martyrs to run their government, if their main cultural product for decades had been suicide bombing, I wouldn't care who won this war. Again, for me, the conflict is between civilization and its enemies. Now, as for the loss of civilian life in Gaza, it's absolutely horrific. As I've said before, there is no argument that makes sense when you're watching the bodies of dead children pulled from rubble. But as terrible

as the destruction of Gaza is, Hamas is ultimately culpable for what has happened there since October 7th. There was a ceasefire on October 6th, and at that point Gaza was getting more international aid than almost any place on earth. Hamas was using that aid to prepare for war, and then they started that war by butchering over a thousand people and taking hundreds hostage. And Hamas could stop the destruction of Gaza at any time. They could not have started the war in the first place and could have used the billions in international aid to create a peaceful society on the Mediterranean. But obviously that was not a life project that interested them. They are, after all,

jihadists. But at any point in the past six months, they could have returned the hostages and surrendered, or perhaps just returned the hostages and gotten safe passage to Qatar, and the loss of innocent life in Gaza would have stopped. Ask yourself, how is it that everyone has forgotten the hostages? How is it that Americans have forgotten, or perhaps never even knew, that there are American hostages among them? These are not prisoners of war. They're hostages. How is it that all the pressure and condemnation has been on Israel and not on Hamas? It is completely surreal. As I said before, apart from knowing that Israel really must destroy Hamas, I haven't known how they should go about doing that. Surely the strategy of bombing and occupying Gaza can be debated. But after October 7th,

what can't be debated is whether Israel is justified in doing what it needs to do to destroy Hamas. And it does seem quite plausible that some significant invasion and destruction and occupation of Gaza was the only way to do that. There was probably a better way for the Allies in World War II to have defeated the Nazis. And if I had been alive then, I certainly hope I would have felt compassion for the non-combatants of Dresden and Hamburg and Cologne and Munich. I wouldn't want to have to defend every aspect of those Allied bombing campaigns today. I'm sure that some of what we did was morally indefensible. That way of waging war was worlds apart from what the IDF has done in Gaza. There's no comparison. But the reality was that Germany started that war. And that mattered. Germany

produced the SS and the Einsatzgruppen and produced the ultimate example of genocide, to which all other genocides are compared. And Hitler was extraordinarily popular among the Germans all the while. There was no clear line of demarcation between Nazis and ordinary Germans, because so many millions of Germans fully supported the aims of the Third Reich. Well, the Palestinians have given us Hamas, an avowedly genocidal death cult. And Hamas remains quite popular in Gaza and the West Bank. This matters.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until jihadism is destroyed. And in my view, it has to be destroyed just as emphatically as Nazism was at the end of World War II. It has to be seen by ordinary Palestinians and the so-called Arab street and Muslims worldwide to be discredited. And given how much international pressure has been brought to bear on Israel, I'm not sure how likely that outcome is. Of course, Israel has made some terrible mistakes in Gaza, and the recent killing of aid workers is the latest example. But this is the kind of thing that happens in every war. There are always friendly fire incidents where the good guys

wind up killing their own soldiers to say nothing of innocent noncombatants. Every conflict the U.S. has been in has produced horrors of this kind. We bombed weddings and funerals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember Pat Tillman? We killed our own celebrity football player. Killing anyone but the bad guys amounts to an act of spectacular self-harm, especially for Israel, which has held up to greater scrutiny and to higher standards than any other nation, and under conditions that are objectively more challenging than any other

nation has ever faced. Now, hopefully, Israel is busy learning whatever lessons it can learn to make fewer tragic mistakes. But none of its mistakes, however terrible, suggest that Israel is on the wrong side of this conflict, or that they should stop fighting before destroying Hamas. They are fighting an urban war against a terrorist regime that is doing everything within its power to maximize the loss of civilian life on its own side. The lengths to which Hamas has gone to ensure civilian casualties is unprecedented, again, on its own side. Linger over this detail for a second. This gets my vote for the most perverse behavior in human history. No one else does this. Using your own people as human shields?

Relying on the fact that your enemy will care more about the lives of your own children than you do? about the lives of your own children than you do? How is it that so many people in the media and on podcasts, to say nothing of the activists and the college students and the TikTok zombies, can't see the asymmetry here? It is everything. And everything we care about only exists on one side of this divide. It really is safe to say that no army has ever faced the challenge that Israel is confronting in Gaza. Hundreds of miles of tunnels

under hospitals and schools and mosques and homes, built to shelter jihadists, not innocent men, women, and children. The innocent men, women, and children are meant to stay in place as human shields to protect the tunnels? This is totally diabolical and totally new. And there's good reason to believe that the IDF has done a better job in waging this war ethically than we have done in any of our past engagements that didn't present nearly the same challenges. At some point, I'll have a military expert on the podcast who can discuss these claims in detail. And as I say in today's conversation, I don't think the war will end here.

I don't see how Israel can stop before they destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, I don't see how this war stops until they or we topple the current regime in Iran. Israel just assassinated some Iranian commanders in Damascus, and now the world is waiting for Iran's response. Even if Iran doesn't respond, or responds in a way that's calibrated not to escalate things, after October 7th, I don't see how Israel can live with the current regime just whittling away on a nuclear weapon. It is the very definition of an existential threat.

In any case, none of what I just said entails support for Netanyahu or any hard-right government in Israel, much less for the building of settlements in the West Bank. It's absolutely clear that Israel needs to sideline its own religious fanatics, and I've been saying as much for 20 years. But to equate the fanatics of Israel with Hamas is to once again fail to understand the problem of jihadism. We have to have some sense of proportion. Anyway, I cover some of this ground with Douglas and Josh in today's conversation. Again, this was recorded about 10 days ago,

before the killing of the aid workers, which seems to have marked some kind of tipping point for world opinion. I caught Douglas and Josh toward the end of their tour of Australia, where they were doing a series of public talks. Douglas Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator. He has written several books, including The Strange Death of Europe, The Madness of Crowds, and The War on the West, and he has been tirelessly covering the aftermath of October 7th and the war in Gaza. Josh Zeps is an independent journalist who left legacy media to focus on his own platform, which is Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Zeps, a podcast, a live events operation,

and a YouTube channel. Today we discuss the war in Gaza, the common confusions about it, the prospect of a widening war with Hezbollah and Iran, whether the Iron Dome was a mistake, a point which Douglas raises which is interesting to contemplate, the sentiments of Israeli Arabs, there are certainly glimmers of hope there, the problem of Islamism in Europe, the risk of a resurgent right-wing in Europe, the crisis at the southern border in the U.S., and other topics. And now I bring you Douglas Murray and Josh Zeps. I am here with Douglas Murray and Josh Zeps. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. So good to be able to make it, Sam.

Very good to be with you. So I hear you are completing your conquest of Australia, Douglas, facilitated by a local. That's right. Where are you in the tour? It's the most barbarous invasion. We've had it before. It's nothing new. I'm in Melbourne.

We're in Melbourne today. We've done five cities down under and wonderful audiences. And yeah, it's been wonderful. It's been really terrific, actually. The audiences everywhere have been very, very positive. Nice, nice. audiences and uh yeah it's been wonderful it's been really terrific actually the audiences everywhere have been very very positive and yeah nice and tonight's the last show it's funny it is funny how the different cities have a different complexion and when you know you've got an audience of 60 plus jews that might be a slightly different flavor of response than the younger

crowds in second tier cities i don't know if you find that, Douglas. Everyone's good. He says diplomatically. As a famous atheist back in the day, I can tell you my average groupie for probably a decade was a 70-year-old man. So I know that crowd. They're a cool young atheist as well, Sam Westall. Yeah, it took a while though. So, Douglas, you have been omnipresent in coverage of the war in Gaza, at least online. I mean, I'm not, because I'm seeing it all broadcast to YouTube in general. But how much time have you spent in Israel at this point since October 7th? I've been there since October. I've been there pretty much nonstop until a couple of weeks ago. Then I went to South Africa and now in Australia,

so yes, about five months. Can you give a general impression of what it's like there and how Israel feels? We hear reports of just, there are various political schisms. I mean, we hear reports of just, I mean, there are various political schisms. I mean, it's widely reported that politically the government is in disfavor, but everyone is quite united around the war. I mean, can you dissect out the sense of what it's like politically and socially there?

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, Israel was incredibly divided until the 7th. It had a year of incredible protests over the judicial reforms. One friend of mine rather darkly joked to me in Tel Aviv in November, Hamas was stupid if they'd have left us alone, we'd have killed each other within a year. It was an extraordinarily divided nation. And that all disappeared on the 7th of October. Everyone had a sort of realization of what the hell are we doing? And, you know, look at what

the reality is that we're really up against. It was a sort of almost biblical-like moment of reuniting. And since then, really, politics has come back in recent weeks and months, it's true, but it's come back very slowly. The unity since the 7th has meant that, you know, discussions of who's up, who's down, who should lead, who shouldn't were a second order priority, not least because the war cabinet is a unity cabinet and includes at least two people who would be contenders for the prime ministership aside from Netanyahu. And, you know, there is now discussion about that sort of thing, but it's all second order priority. Most Israelis know that whoever was in charge, whoever is in charge would do something very similar to what Netanyahu is doing.

is in charge would do something very similar to what Netanyahu is doing. And there's no time to have elections. The first priority for pretty much everybody in Israel is simply winning the war. Does everyone agree that it's no time to have elections? Pretty much, yeah. I mean, Netanyahu approval ratings are very low. I mean, talking about like 25% and things like that. he wouldn't win an election if it took place tomorrow. But an election in Israel takes several months. And you can't do without a government for that kind of time during a war. I mean, when you say that regardless of who was in power, the war would be being prosecuted the same way that it is. And regardless of who was in power, the situation would be being prosecuted the same way that it is and regardless of who was in power, the situation would be basically the same. I do think that overlooks the fact that who has

been in power since 2008 gives a different valence to the way that the world responds to the current conflict. Because if October 7th had happened in a context in which Israel had made repeated overtures for peace rather than aggressively building settlements in the West Bank and emboldening Hamas in Gaza to split the Palestinians and detonate any possibility of a long-term two-state solution, then maybe radical anti-Zionists would have less support. I think they'd have the same support anyway. I think maybe they'd buy themselves a few seconds with something like that. My view is that settlements aren't remotely the problem. Of course, there are no settlements in Gaza, and Hamas just did what they did anyway. And as for international sympathy for Israel,

we saw how long international sympathy lasts. I think it lasted under 24 hours. And there still have been no protests anywhere around the world by the anti-Israel protesters, not one protest by them asking for the release of Israeli hostages. My view is that all those people have decided on their side a long time ago. decided on their side a long time ago and uh well i mean after the i mean after october 7th you had india lining up in support you had saudi arabia giving condolences you had you know a certain unity and now you've got chuck schumer saying that you know even he's yeah i think it's always like that every war in israel i've covered it It's something I've been mentioning around here, but some point as Neil Ferguson made very, very well the other week at Bloomberg, but

the two wars I've covered in the last two years, Ukraine and Israel Hamas, it's only Israel that's ever called to draw or to win only a little bit. When know, when I was with the Ukrainian army as they were advancing and retaking territory from the Russians a couple of winters ago, nobody said, you know, don't advance too far, guys. You know, you're losing international support. Worried about the civilian body count or anything like that.

Don't be too rough on the Russians. Everyone just wanted them to win. Go get them. And with Israel, it's just totally different it's it's it's you know it's always like this they they want the idf to do a little bit in return but don't do too much two-state solution don't upset people it's a totally different morality as applied in my view to israel it's it's say not just a not just a you know sort of two-tier morality, but a third-tier morality where, of course, democracies are expected to behave better than despotisms. But then Israel is meant to behave better than the democracies.

It's meant to have a lower body count in its wars than the Americans do in theirs. the Americans do in theirs, you know. And I mean, I just think it's a triple standard, which everyone who observes the wars involving Israel is now used to. What do you make of the reasons for that beyond it being a symptom of, albeit an unacknowledged one, of anti-Semitism? Well, it's also to do with the world's obsession with this particular Middle East conflict. Everybody thinks they know how to answer this problem. It's probably one of the world's obsession with this particular Middle East conflict. Everybody thinks they know how to answer this problem. It's probably one of the world's most intractable problems, but everyone seems to think they have an answer to it.

Nobody can tell me what the answer is to the problems of Yemen. Nobody can tell me what the answer is to the problems of the Kurdish people, their desire for statehood. Nobody can tell me the solution to the jungle weed militia problem. Everyone thinks they know about the Israel-Palestinian question. And it's sort of taught us, it's taught us sort of geopolitics 101. And also, if you want to demonstrate you care about the world, you know, this is what you're meant to know about. I think a lot of latent things come out in it. And it's different for different people. My view is that a lot of Westerners, particularly Europeans, they actually love wars involving Israel because it

gives them a chance to attack the Jews. It gives them a chance also to say, you see, maybe what we did in the 20th century wasn't so bad that even the Jews are doing it now. That's why they use things like the Warsaw Ghetto, concentration camp, genocide, all those terms about the Israelis. It's a very deep thing that bubbles up there. You see, we're all capable of it. Maybe we're not so naughty. Well, some people will say, certainly in the US and the UK, that the crucial difference is that we're implicated in what Israel does because we sell them weapons. This is a point that, you know, Noam Chomsky always makes. Yes, a brilliant observer, first-hand observer of geopolitics.

But I mean, you know, this, to my eye, is just clearly bullshit because we sell Saudi Arabia weapons. And in fact, they're the largest buyer of our weapons, I believe. And, you know, as you know, they've killed something like 400,000 people in Yemen fairly recently. And one could well ask, where are all the protests? You know, where are the convulsions of conscience throughout our universities? You know, it hasn't happened, and I think it won't happen because what really seems to be energizing here is a hatred of the West and, you know, to a degree that has surprised many of us, a hatred of Jews as somehow the, strangely, some kind of apotheosis of Western

oppression. That's right. Yes, with the Jews as the top of the oppressor hierarchy. Josh and I have been talking about this a bit recently. I mean, yeah, if you do that oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized interpretation of all of the world, that you start with America, and then go everywhere else,

you see, this is where you end up. I mean, again, with the selling of arms and so on the idea that we are complicit i mean that is such uh self i mean such narcissist narcissistic bs apart from this is why you see protests on campuses demanding that you know everyone in the faculty of um literature should could call for an immediate uh ceasefire the Middle East, and why haven't they? This is why you get the council chamber in Chicago disrupted, with people calling not for a ceasefire in Chicago, which is much needed, but for a ceasefire in Gaza. What do you think you're doing?

This is none of your business. You're not even remotely close to this. You think that the war cabinet in Israel is going to hold off the war because the faculty of humanities at Berkeley has asked them to? But the preposterous thing of that is, yes, this sort of thing of, oh, we're implicated. Sorry, first of all, no. And secondly, again, why are you so obsessed with this, America and the world. I mean, you know, there is a much bigger military commitment that has been going on to Ukraine in the last few years. And I do not see even 10 students, and quite rightly not, standing outside a faculty building saying we're complicit in the death of

innocent Russians. If they were to play that game, there are other places they could do it as well. Why? It's not just, and again, it comes back onto the why was there not one protest calling for the return of the hostages? It comes back to what Josh was saying about the losing of sympathy. I don't think the sympathy is there. I think there's a pathology there, an utter pathology among particularly young people who've been taught into it. And this idea of the world and the idea of the world as colonizer and colonizer, the idea of the world as simply finding the oppressor, everyone, and the oppressor is always the

white European. And so I think this is a pathology and people were taught into it, so they should be taught out of it. I mean, my interest on my podcast and in these shows is to try to take the most generous interpretation of our opponent's arguments instead of the most caricatured one. And it strikes me that there are 8 billion people in the world, some cohort of which have no sympathy for Israel and are irredeemable anti-Semites. And that at the fringe, there is a large number of people who are winnable,

many of them Jews, many of them progressive Jews. It's obvious to me that there's a double standard about Israel. Many of the things that you say are true, and yet it's not hard to understand why this conflict would inflame people and interest people. This is a part of the world that is the center point, the bullseye of the three big monotheisms. It's like, you know, it has everything. It's catnip. It's a war made for TikTok. It's got a lot going for it as something that you're going to care about. And the idea that it's not our business, well, if you're a Jew, Israel is your business by default, because what happens

to Israel happens to the diaspora to some extent, and what Israel does gets blamed on the diaspora to some extent. So the anti-Semitism that a Jew feels in the West is linked in some way to what a hard right coalition government in Israel might do. In some way, we are hostages of their policy as well. The fact that recently, policy as well. The fact that recently, the hard right coalition in Israel, instead of making any sounds about what Gaza looks like after the war or what Palestine looks like in 50 years, instead carved out another two and a half thousand acres of land in the West Bank for settlement. And Smotrich gave a speech, the finance minister, a hard right guy, gave a speech saying that he believes in an Israel that includes Judea and Samaria, that is the West Bank, means that you've got the most senior Jew in American politics ever. Chuck Schumer, a man whose bona fides are unquestioned, who actually split with his own president, Barack Obama, to oppose the Iran nuclear deal and side with Israel, coming out and saying, guys,

he's not saying the problem is that you should only win half or the problem is that you should be nice to Gazans. He's saying the problem is you don't have a plan. You've run out of ideas. There is no next day plan for Gaza. What do you think you're doing? You're going to lose the most important thing in the world, which is America. Well, first of all, my belief is the position of diaspora Jews like everyone else is, unless you've got skin in the game, not your business as well. When people say this affects me as well, okay, there's something in that. But unless you have children who are likely

to serve and risk their lives in the IDF and so on, the extent to which you're really committed is very limited. And secondly, when it comes to Judea and Samaria, I don't think there's anybody who is not ideologically motivated, who believes that the West Bank can be handed over to the Palestinians as a territory in its entirety, never. It's too much of a strategic vantage point. If you stand in the hills in Judea and Samaria, as I have at nighttime, and look over Israel, you see Ben-Gurion Airport, Haifa, Tel Aviv, all these within very, very easy rocket distance. And knowing what all Israelis do since withdrawal from Gaza and the firing of rockets that began immediately, that would happen from there as well.

So my view has been for a long time, but it's certainly solidified in recent months that the idea that the West Bank could be in Palestinian hands unless the Palestinians suddenly prove themselves to be remarkably peaceable people is for the fairies. Well, there are models that you would demilitarize it and that portion of the hilltop would be a no man's land or whatever. But you can't trust them. And this comes back to the thing, why trust them? How can you trust them?

Since 2005, the world made Israel trust the Palestinians. Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush made them have elections in Gaza. This idea of the outside world gave Israel a Hamas terror state right next door, having ripped thousands of Jewish families from their homes in Gaza, totally stripped Gaza of all Jews, gave the land over to the Palestinians, and they have got rockets ever since. And then they got October the 7th. Who would trust the Palestinians in the West Bank?

Nobody could trust them. But, and this gets to the Chuck Schumer point, it's quite easy for somebody outside, Jewish or non-Jewish, to say, look, this is a matter of trust. You know, I mean, like, it's important you, you know, we need to move towards peace. And so I go, yeah, yeah. Is it your house? Is it your house that's going to get hit by the first rocket? Is it your children who will be called up in 15 years time for yet another round of this bloody war? Have you got skin in the game? If not, you cannot trust somebody else on somebody else's behalf. That's my thing. If somebody said to me, Douglas,

your security in your home, I know better about it. I know how you'll be most secure. I go, yeah. Is it going to be you in the bomb shelter? What are you going to do when my kids are called up? The risk is too high. But I don't think it's about trust. The Israelis haven't even put forward a trustless, trust-proof plan. You could set up a day after the Gaza war proposal that was so ridiculous that you knew that the Palestinians were never going to accept it because it involved the interception of everything going into that state and total demilitarization. And at least some portion of the global community that is currently siding with radical anti-Zionism would be able to say, well, Israel is at least trying, and the only impediment to a Palestinian state

is Palestinian intransigence. They haven't seen Palestinian intransigence in the 50 years of Palestinian intransigence, 75 years of Palestinian intransigence the world hasn't seen. I don't believe it. I don't believe that the world would suddenly change its opposite. Well, maybe not, but you also don't have a future for Israel if it ends up being a complete pariah state. Nobody wants to do business with or ally with or create a strategic alliance against Iran and China with a state that is behaving in ways that nobody regards as

acceptable except for you and the hard right in Israel. I don't agree that's the case. It's only me and a smaller brother. I don't agree with that at all. Firstly, of course, in geopolitical terms, people like to side with states that are strong and are winners. And as for the pariah thing, I mean, one detail of that, of what you just said that's important, of course, is that it's Iran that's been encouraging the South African government to try to make Israel a pariah state. And so, I mean, you can complain about a state becoming a pariah state, which doesn't help in an access of unity against Iran. But if it's Iran that's making the state more of a pariah state, then, I mean... Well, Iran's going to Iran, aren't they? But also, as for the sort of day after plan, again, I don't see, first, I don't believe the world is going to sort of rifle through a 20-page or 3,000-page plan from the war cabinet and say, ah, now we're convinced, fantastic, finish the war in Gaza, and there's a great plan for the day after.

But what's more, that again is part of the triple standard involving Israel. When we went into Mosul to get rid of ISIS, nobody said, but where's your plan? Where's your plan, America? We did, actually. No, nobody cared about that. We did. Before the Iraq war, I was on a radio show. No, no, hang on, not Iraq. And I said, what's the plan? I'm saying the ISIS war. More recently, a more recent counterinsurgency war. The remit was just to defeat ISIS, right? It was defeat ISIS.

No one made the moral probity of defeating ISIS contingent upon anyone having a plan for what to do after ISIS was defeated. ISIS was acknowledged to be pure evil. to be pure evil. And the question here, I mean, I think there's this mystery that we're to some degree glossing over, and I think certainly your pushback against Douglas glosses over it, Josh, which is that why is it that there's such a glaring sin of omission here on the part of almost the whole world, which would be the acknowledgement of the shocking moral disparity between the two sides, right? And this conflation, it's as though the IDF and as though the Israeli government were the moral equivalent of Hamas.

And it's as though you can, with a clear conscience, articulate a demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, which is understandable given all the carnage in Gaza, but it shouldn't be possible to even form the sentence demanding a ceasefire without first calling for, as Douglas pointed out, a return of the hostages. And really, I would say without first calling for an unconditional surrender of Hamas. I mean, that, if you want to get back to zero, as, you know, untenable as zero actually was, you have to acknowledge that there was a ceasefire on October 6th, and Hamas, a group of sheer barbarians, committed atrocities of a sort that no one should be able to make the slightest apology for.

This is not resistance. It's barbarism. And the fact that not only can't the world acknowledge that clearly, we live in a world where the UN has brought more charges against the state of Israel than it has brought against all other countries on earth combined, right? I mean, this includes Iran and Sudan and North Korea and countries that have actually committed genocides, you know, this includes Iran and Sudan and North Korea and countries that have actually committed genocides, you know, in the case of Sudan. So that is the starting point that's so bizarre here. Completely true. And it's utterly outrageous. And I mean, I did a 100-minute long rant on uncomfortable conversations wrestling through exactly those

issues. And I guess there's 10 minutes of sort of head nodding agreement and throat clearing that we could have done before we started talking about this, about all of those issues. But I think the juicier question is the question, frankly, of whether or not the future of Israel is best served by what it's doing now, or whether the critics of Israel's current position, and indeed the critics of the hard right tilt that Israel has taken since 2008 have grounds to be concerned as friends of Israel. My problem is that we can cast this into a dichotomy between the good guys and the bad guys and the good guys support Israel and the bad guys don't. And of course, the other dichotomy exists as well. But I worry that when we do that, when we're letting down a friend

and jeopardizing Israel's future by not helping... Well, just one question for you guys on the point of the erosion of support, such as the support was ever given. I mean, there was certainly support from the United States, and that appears to be eroding to some degree in the Biden administration. And then as you point out, someone like Schumer has said some surprising things. So to what degree do you view that as a sincere erosion of support? And to what degree is it just a panicked Democratic party signaling to a local audience that all you good people in Michigan should really still vote for us because we're worried.

Well, by the way, you can tell that it is cynical because at the same time as signaling all of their concern, Biden has, in my view, quite rightly gone around the back of everyone and done another arms shipment to Israel. So he's saying one thing and doing another. and for once I'm quite pleased with that, although it's very cynical. It's a very strange position for a country to be in, that the United States, because of a couple hundred thousand voters in Michigan and elsewhere, would tell an ally not to win a war.

I'm always fascinated by playing this the other way around. And imagine in the post 9-11 world, for instance, a prime minister of Israel calling up an American president and saying, now steady how you go. We're very worried about our polling in Caesarea. It would be preposterous. It is preposterous in my mind. I actually think it's a sign of a weak ally. I've seen this a few times in my life, but it's a sign of a weak ally when an ally not at war calls an ally at war and implies that their situation not at war is somehow worse or tricky and that the war should adapt to their electoral concerns continents away. Well, to what degree is this mirrored on the Israeli side where you have Israel seemingly

incapable of communicating to the rest of the world in English in a way that's persuasive because I worry that perhaps Netanyahu, for similarly cynical and personal reasons, is playing a Trumpian game with his own political future. But perhaps any Israeli prime minister would have to play to domestic politics to keep some coalition together. So to what degree is Israel's failure to be as transparent and as soul-searching and as willing to make obvious concessions to the concerns of the world publicly any missteps in the war thus far and its own commitment to humanitarian purposes in Gaza, et cetera, I still think that the rest of the world wouldn't much care. It would buy them maybe 15 minutes of leeway, and then people would be just as condemning of them attempting to win a war in the first place.

But maybe not. I do think it's true that their messaging has been fundamentally inadequate. But it's always inadequate. I mean, every war I've covered in Israel, the messaging is inadequate because it just always is going to be because the world demands more than any country could give. demands more than any country could give. I mean, I remember in the 2006 war, people complained about IDF reporter restrictions. I remember seeing it firsthand that one of the reporter restrictions was that you weren't allowed to say exactly where a rocket landed. And a French journalist said where a rocket landed at a hospital in Svat in the north and promptly Hezbollah rocketed that hospital. So there are

some rules that the Israelis try to abide by, which the world doesn't understand and then learns. But in the current conflict, one of the things that's just stunning to me is the fact that, you know, we've had months now of Holocaust denial in real time. And again, this isn't a fringe. This includes, you know, contributors at papers like The Guardian, who have said that they don't think there's, you know, enough evidence that there were rapes on the 7th of October, that sort of thing. These same people, you know, just this past week, one person at Al Jazeera claimed that the IDF had gone into the Shifa hospital this past week when they did the raid, which was very, very successful in rounding up hundreds of Hamas fighters and indeed commanders.

One source told Al Jazeera that the IDF had gone in and raped women in the shifa hospital now i as a journalist know immediately that doesn't even pass the bs test not even remotely why would israeli soldiers run into a hospital and instead of arresting him as people like take a pause to rape women. I mean, they don't behave like that, I can say with confidence having been with them. But why would they do it? It's a preposterous claim. And yet this claim immediately went around the world.

And people like, again, maybe the most prominent contributor, the Guardian newspaper, immediately went online and said, overwhelming evidence that IDF soldiers raped women at the Shifa Hospital. And this was the same person who, having seen the 42-minute video of October the 7th and the GoPro videos, said that he had not seen enough evidence of rape on the 7th. So we are, again, we're dealing with people who claim that they are simply weighing up the evidence. But they're not. They're weighing up one set of evidence and another set of evidence. And they are really just, they have chosen their side. And in my mind, in a way, that's fine. I have a side in this. I would like Israel to win.

I would like the liberal democracy in this conflict to win. But a lot of other people have decided they would like Israel to be eradicated. They would like it to be wiped out. They don't mind when the people chant from the river to the sea on the same demonstration they're on. When people at the demonstrations in London, for instance, they just found out the other week about these Houthis in Yemen. They'd never heard of them before, but they were so hot for them immediately, these demonstrators, that as the Houthi militia were firing missiles

at British and American vessels, these people on the streets of London were shouting, Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around. shouting, Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around. As the Yemenis have sentenced another dozen gay guys to death, including one by crucifixion for being gay, these people have no, they're not even slightly bothered by any of this. They don't mind that there are protests with people calling for attacks on British and American naval vessels. None of this bothers them. They simply have decided whatever it takes, whatever it takes to eradicate. And they, of course, they, I mean, these people don't have a day after plan. You know, these people don't have a day after plan. What's their day after plan after you've got, you've made the

state of Israel Judenrein, after you've cleared all Jews from the river to the sea, what do you do? Is there an orderly process of putting people on trains and sending them back to Iraq and Iran and Yemen and Morocco? Is there any orderly post-day-after plan any of these people have? I'm open. I'd love to hear it. My suspicion is, of course, that all of these moral nincompoops have. I'm open. I'd love to hear it. My suspicion is, of course, that all of these moral nincompoops have no plan at all. They're just hot for one thing,

which is to destroy the Jewish state and to create what would be yet another failed Arab state. We know what the day after plan would be for Israel's actual enemies. I mean, again, the moral asymmetry here is so glaring because Israel's actual enemies, I mean, again, the moral asymmetry here is so glaring because Israel's actual enemies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the regime that controls Iran at the moment, if not the Iranian people themselves, their aspirations are explicitly genocidal, right? That's the day after. It's October the 7th on the much bigger scale. That's the day after. It's October the 7th on a much bigger scale.

As you know, I view this situation through the larger lens of jihadism and Islamism versus the West or open societies generally. I think we can leave aside the question, which we've all touched to one or another degree, about to what degree Islam itself is invariably a part of this problem. But that, you know, in my view, that really is for the world's two billion Muslims to figure out, right? I mean, they have to figure out whether they're going to effectively repudiate the doctrines around martyrdom and jihad and blasphemy and apostasy and the rights of women, et cetera, that make Islam such a wellspring of intolerance. But it's just to say, the problem is much bigger than Israel and Hamas, and it's much bigger than global anti-Semitism, though I think I share everyone's shock at what a massively resurgent problem that turned out to be. But I mean, this is why I think parsing the history here, which everyone is eager to do, and many of the listeners to this podcast are eager

to have me do it, I think parsing the history is a fool's game because everyone, you know, each side, and perhaps there are more than two here, have their completely discordant and there are more than two here, have their completely discordant and incommensurable views of the history. And it simply doesn't matter. Going forward, I think we have to focus on what the various groups want to accomplish now. And what would they do? What would each group do if they had the power to do it? And there again, I think we come back to a crystal clear asymmetry, which is one side would actually commit a genocide. And to focus narrowly on Hamas for the moment, that's absolutely clear. They have said they want to perpetrate October 7th again and again and again and again. And I think the idea that there's a bright line of demarcation between Hamas and the Palestinians is a delusion at this point.

It's not to say that all Palestinians share this genocidal intent. But most of them do. All the polls show that. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly enough due so as to make any notion of a two-state solution with real states more or less unthinkable at this point. states, right? More or less unthinkable at this point. So I'm wondering what you think the solution is even in principle now. I mean, like, I just, you know, I don't see how, I'll just give you my view of it and feel free to debunk it, but I consider, I don't consider it especially informed,

it's really just based on my doing the moral math around this dichotomy between the two sides. But I don't see how the war stops with Hamas. First of all, I don't see how Israel can do anything other than truly eradicate Hamas. I mean, if they reduce Gaza to rubble and there still is an effective core of Hamas that rises up and takes control over the rubble, core of Hamas that rises up and takes control over the rubble, that is a loss, right? And it's a loss that will be triumphantly spun by jihadists everywhere. So Hamas has to be destroyed, but I don't see how they can live with the status quo in the north. So I don't see how they avoid the imperative of destroying Hezbollah. And frankly, I don't see how we avoid the imperative of destroying Hezbollah. And frankly, I don't see how we avoid the imperative of destroying the regime in Iran either, right? So I don't see where this stops. And I certainly

don't see how we reboot to a status quo where anyone with a straight face is talking about a two-state solution. Well, this is my view, and it's too few people outside of Israel actually understand this reality. One of the least covered stories of this entire war are the tens of thousands of Israeli families who are not allowed to be in their homes. They are effectively refugees. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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