The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa on Gaza Casualties, Starvation and Political Bias

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Noam Dworman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by return-guest, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, for a wide-ranging debate about truth, propaganda, evidence, starvation and the Israel-Gaza war. The conversation focuses on John Mearsheimer’s claims about October 7, whether public intellectuals should lose credibility when they make unsupported accusations, disputed casualty reporting in Gaza and the role political bias plays in shaping what people choose to believe. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon, having worked most extensively in Palestine, but also in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He has written and spoken extensively about surgical humanitarian work, the United States’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the political consequences of medical relief work. Twitter/X @FerozeSidhwa Chapters: 00:00 Intro and Twitter fights 08:14 Mearsheimer, October 7, and “good faith” arguments 15:25 Trump, Epstein, and blackmail claims 22:01 The Israel Lobby and the Iraq War debate 34:05 Germany comparisons and collective punishment 37:09 Netanyahu, “Amalek,” and genocide accusations 46:15 Dead children, crossfire, and moral responsibility 47:43 Gaza aid shootings and casualty reporting 50:02 The Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion controversy 55:11 Rashid Khalidi, sources, and historical credibility

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world famous comedy seller. I am the producer of the show. My name is Perriel. For those of you tuning in for the first time, I am with the host of the show, the owner of the ever-expanding world-famous comedy seller. I'm trying to do right by Dan. No, I'm Dorman. Dan is on a cruise ship, hopefully not being haunted by Hunter Virus. We can learn more about

Contovirus by our very special guest, a return guest, Dr. Farozoz Sidwa, who is a surgeon and a humanitarian surgeon having worked most extensively in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso.

That's a terrible introduction. It is? Because he's famous, first of all, he worked in Gaza, and he's famous for writing that op-ed in the New York Times where he exposed that there were babies with bullets in their heads.

First of all, I haven't gotten to that part yet. And second of all, you're saying it's a terrible bio, but I literally got it from him. No, but I know. I thought that you left out the things that were most... Well, now you have it, so you don't need to anymore. Welcome for Oz.

Was there anything else in there you want to say? I don't know. It's so interesting. his um it is it is quite it is quite a his your humanitarian work is really admirable now okay so this we know we froze and I were fighting on Twitter which which um just FYI I did not mean when I said you interrupted me I didn't mean it like you asshole I can't believe you're all I meant was that like we're we're going to get to that we're going to get to it all I should have said is was a contentious discussion and so my like I would say something you would question it I would say which is totally nor, like, that's fine.

I wasn't trying to say that you were, like, trying to stop me from saying, because eventually I said what I wanted to say anyway. Is this recent? It was the clip that the person was showing was just not getting to the whole thing. I have. So before we get to serious matters, did you want to talk about something? Yes, in fact, I did. So, you know, part of my job is to reach out to people and book them.

and sometimes it takes a long time to hunt them down. But I'll get like an onslaught of emails. And I'll sit down once a week and I'll go through them. And, you know, he'll send me a link and that's usually it. So I sent out one of these emails this morning and I got an email back from the person that says, I don't go on shows where the host repeatedly attacked me online and called me a hag. Would you? I thought a despicable hag, actually.

I don't see. Would you? Are you a hag? And I call no on. And I didn't warn her. And I'm like, what the fuck? I'm like, don't you think that like maybe you could give me a heads up? I thought you followed me on Twitter.

All right. I do follow you on Twitter. So let me just say my own defense. This woman who I really want to have on the show, and if she is on the show, believe me, I'm going to be nice to her. I'm not going to call her names. I want to hear what she's coming from. She attacked me.

She called me a moron, all sorts of names. And finally, I said, I had enough of you, you despicable hag. But I think she might be your right. She attacked. Let me finish. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me finish. Go ahead.

Sorry. Ferros is right. You were interrupting. And I wrote back. Yeah. And I mean, bear with me for a minute. Yeah. I said, hi, Debbie.

I actually was not aware of this, then parenthetically, not nice. But before I emailed you, I did coincidentally stumble. across a hag t-shirt from this great designer. And I considered getting one, but I like the perimenopause one better. I sent her the link. It is. It's a famous designer who made a really cool t-shirt that said hag.

I said, bear with me. In any event, I just called Nome and chided him for this. And he said he's sorry, and he promised no name-calling, and said he'd like to bury the hatchet and have you on the show. And she wrote back and said, let him apologize publicly on Twitter in a tweet like he did when he called me a hag. Until then, I consider him a complete wuss.

He's demonstrated that in spades. And I wrote back, I just want you to see like how much loyalty I have. After you said it was not nice and she, go ahead. You're right. It's not nice. I don't like that she called you more and I said, I respectfully disagree, but I pass along. Okay. I haven't followed this feud, but I hope you guys make up. This all stem from the fact that I had this guy, Josh Hammer on. You know who Josh Hammer is?

I know the name. I don't think I know. He's a hardline, uh, um, pro-Israel guy as am I. But he, you know, he makes nice with all sorts of conspiracy theorists and stuff like that and like, uh, uh, defense Anesh D'Souza and Jack Psobio. And I'm like, and I had a much, I was like, why do you, you know, do this? Why do you cover for these conspiracy theories? And we got into Big Fight, and he started calling me names on Twitter, and then she chimed in, this is why I remember it anyway. So, anyway, so that, what's that?

Problem? What she said? No, no, no, go ahead. So that, that's that. So, yes, I will apologize to her. On Twitter. On Twitter. Okay.

Okay, and we'll have her on, and that it should be a good show. Just let it be known. I don't ever call somebody names unless they start. That's not my nature. I'm not a name caller. Anyway, especially let alone. I just don't, I'm not on Twitter that much.

I almost never even call people names even when they do call me names. I just don't understand why grown adults are like sitting on the internet, like calling each other names. I mean, it's ridiculous, isn't it? I have the urge to do it all the time, but I'm like, that's not going to solve. It's not going to help anything.

You're like, I'm a surgeon. I have to be above them. I mean, there's that, there's the professional part of it, but also, like, you know, after, what was it? Why did these two guys start talking about me? I can't remember, but the, there's these, like, anonymous Twitter accounts, you know, like, some of them are, I don't know, I don't actually even know where they come from, but, like, one is a guy named Max, and he's got a pager after his name, and then one's called Strawman, but it's with an X instead of a W, like, you know, they're just kind of anonymous. And, like, they're just the way that, like, when they come at you about something, they, they can't just say like, hey, man, look, you said this. I don't think it's true.

Here's why. And I can't just, like, like, I just try to respond to them as I can. But, like, you know, you're, they're just, I can't even remember, like, the actual words they use, but, like, they're just, like, aggressive over the top. And it's hardly just them. Like, it's, like, half of it, maybe 90% of Twitter. I don't even know. But, like, but, but yeah, they're, because even, even, like, and there, there, there's,

There's plenty of leftists who do it as well. And I'm like politically, I'm definitely on the left. But like the, there's plenty of leftists that do it as well. And like, even people that I really respect do that. And I just, I'm like, guys, it makes you look so weird. But I do have to say, I know his straw strikes, how you pronounce it. Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I haven't seen him quite, quite do that. But maybe, maybe I just haven't. It's not like it's, I don't, again, I don't, I can't say I've like, I haven't done a stats analysis of his Twitter. thing, you know? But the, but yeah, no, there's just a lot of, there's just a lot of that in general. And it's very, I don't know, it just takes away from, it, it just turns Twitter, or it turns any discussion into like, just, you know, yeah, it just, it just me. And again, and, you know, like, it becomes a bar fight. You have Marcus of Queensberry rules, you know, which we need. Anyway, okay, so I wanted to talk, we're going to get to our beef and, and the whole thing, but I wanted to talk with you before,

and this is kind of not going to put you on the spot, about something that I've really spent a lot of time thinking about, and that is, and their related issues. What is the issue of filters or, you know, the lenses through, we each of us see the world through. How do we adjust when we find that our own lens yielded, inaccurate beliefs and conclusions. How do we judge others when their lens,

when we see how they react to their own lenses and filters, yielding inaccurate conclusions, and when does the line between good faith and bad faith get crossed, such that somebody says XYZ, and they've been saying it in good faith, and then they're presented with really powerful evidence that X, Y, and Z were wrong. And then they continue to say X, Y, and Z, and at that point, even if they had really believed it, can we still consider them to be in good faith?

And I'll give you an example, then I'll show you some videos. This is very interesting stuff to me. So one example of a filter that was totally wrong, totally wrong. She had it, everybody had it, was that Trump was an anti-Semite. we heard the i believe the adl you know calling him out as an anti-semite i had countless arguments with liberal jewish people he's an anti-sumite he's gonna sell israel out he's i remember saying no no i really don't i don't see it that way then trump would make some joke you know about to business people at a banquet which was you know and you see he's he's dealing in his jewish tropes of

you know money and blah blah i'm like it's just a joke and then and then at the same time like the observant Jews, the people who being Jewish was most important to them, smart people, they were like voting 98% for Trump. And I'd be like, well, how come the people who care most about being Jewish think this guy is the best friend they've ever had? Like, what do you think they're stupid? And then sure enough, here we are. and Trump is like the last friend Israel has.

He's obviously the best friend Israel has ever had. He's obviously not an anti-Semite. He threw Tucker Carlson under the bus before he threw the Jews under the bus. So all those people who were sure that Trump was this guy. Now, they have to reckon with the fact, holy shit, I was completely wrong about Trump and the Jews, right? But they won't. But that's just one little example.

So then, I guess I'm talking a while before I bring you to the conversation, but it's it. So then you have somebody like Mearsheimer, John Mearsheimer. Now, John Mearsheimer, you know, he became famous, you know, saying how Israel was behind the Iraq war and how the neocons and the Bush administration were really serving Israel's interests, you know the whole thing. Yeah. And, you know, as much as I didn't like that and I did some good faith research and pretty much convinced myself it wasn't true, I had to be open to the fact that it was true. I had to add, and I tried for my own lens, right?

So then I say, well, what's up with Mirashimer? So then recently, play the Mirosheimer clip. What your thoughts on what we are on what we know and what we don't know about what happened on October 7th? I think we have a pretty good sense of what the general picture looks like. I think we don't know the number of Israelis who were killed by the Israeli forces. And you want to remember, it was not just the Hannibal Doctrine. The fact is that the Israelis got caught completely by surprise, and they did not have a very good backup plan. So what they did was they rushed in massive firepower.

And they used that firepower to attack Hamas and the other Palestinian forces that had moved into Israel proper. And they killed a significant number of people, not with the Hannibal doctrine, but just with all that firepower that was brought to bear against Hamas and other Palestinians who were intermingled with all sorts of Israelis. then there's the whole issue of the Hannibal Doctrine, because as we know, the Palestinians were bent on taking many of their captured Israelis back to Gaza. Now, you see, by the way, he pauses there for a second because he doesn't want to say hostages. He said, it captured Israel. And the Hannibal Doctrine calls for killing those people before they get there. So some Israelis were killed.

And the Hannibal Doctrine doesn't call for killing the civilians before they get there. It's, and I had the former head of the Mossad, and I just left the Ami Ayalon about this. What it calls for is that when a hostages are being taken, that they will sometimes still fire on the hostage takers, you know, it's kind of like in this dilemma of what to do. It's not, they don't target their own civilians. When I say that to Ami Ayalone, he says, remember he says,

well, I can't even imagine this, you know, and he's a left-wing guy. Anyway, this is not even my point of the Hannibal doctrine. And then you want to remember, on top of all that, it's consistent with international law for Hamas to try to break out of the concentration camp and to engage Israeli military forces in combat, which means they're going to kill some of them. So the fact that they killed Israeli soldiers is not a case of murder. Now, there were clearly Israeli civilians who were murdered. I'd be willing to bet in the final analysis, however, that Hamas did not murder many of those Israeli civilians. Okay, so hold us.

Don't stop at you. So that's one. This is not the worst thing. So, like, without any evidence that I can find, he thinks that not many Israelis were murdered on October 7th. So that's one thing. And then he continues with something even more outlandish. So what are your thoughts on the role of Epstein and the Epstein files in Epstein's history? in potentially in the U.S.'s treatment of Israel.

When you look at Trump and his behavior towards Israel, and you look at his behavior before he became president, there's good reason to think that the Israelis have the goods on him and that they've made it clear to him that if he gets tough on Israel, they'll reveal certain things. One also can hypothesize that given his very close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the fact that Jeffrey Epstein recorded so much of his interactions with other people and those other people's interactions with young girls and with young women

that maybe there's something there. All right. So that's enough of that. So here we have the guy saying that not many Israelis were killed by Hamas on October 7th and civilians. And B, that Trump is being blackmail. by Netanyahu the Epstein Fas. And I say to myself, and this is first time I'm going to let you in

and I'll have other things to show you. Okay, this is so outlandish and so removed from evidence or even any attempt on his part to display evidence. Can I, is it fair to go back now and say, why the fuck do we ever listen to this guy about the Iraq war?

I mean, if this is the way his mind operates, if a University of Chicago professor has such a flimsy standard before he publicly says to the world these kinds of very serious accusations. Am I to believe he was very, very careful and had a very high standard of proof before he made accusations about Israel influence in the White House or in Iraq war? I say, no. So what do you think about that? I mean, I think there's a lot to talk about there. let's let's take a little let's start with the principles i guess so in i i am not a big fan of like dissecting

what people say on podcasts like this just because it's easy to like when he said i think his words his words were something like i'm willing to bet not or uh not many uh civilians were murdered or something like that. I think if you were to ask him, are you saying that Israel killed like the large majority of the 800 civilians who were 800 something, 840 or something civilians who were killed on October 7th? I would have, and I don't know. I don't know John Mearsheim. I've never met him. I'm guessing he would say, no, no, no, I'm not making a claim about the quantity or anything like that. No, he said it more than once. He did, but I don't. If I say not many Jews were killed in the camps. Right, right. No, I don't jump to

conclusions by what he means about the camps. I completely agree with you. I, I, I, what I would suggest is actually just email him and ask. I don't, I honestly, but like, but regardless. Okay, let's get to the second part. What about the Epstein thing? The Epstein thing. So I personally, and I might get in trouble for saying this, I don't think the Epstein files are, uh, anywhere near as important as people say in trying to like, uh, trying to figure out the, um, the specifics. of the conduct of this person or that person today, you know? Like the, it just, it's very odd to me that people are like, oh, do you think, what about,

like, everyone knows Donald Trump is a, like, totally unfaithful to his wives, hoaring, womanizing, misteen USA-owning guy. Like, it's not, like, hidden or something. So I don't really, or, you know, like, the details of that, remember there was a lawsuit. I don't remember if it was thrown out or not. I can't remember who won. But there was a lawsuit where like the allegations came out that like the, like I think,

I think he and his family were on Time Magazine, a cover of Time Magazine. There was some magazine they were on a cover of. And he had some woman like roll up the magazine and spank him with it. Like, you know, there's a lot out there about Donald Trump that nobody seems to care about at all. So like I don't really. Okay, this does not make him. There's no evidence of, I mean, that he owned Miss Teen USA, somebody's got owned it.

It's not like, I know he's, he's, there's no evidence that he owned Miss Teeny. No, I'm saying there's no evidence that he, that he, I know he made a comment. So actually, that's a really good example right there. You just said there's no evidence that he owned Miss Teen USA. No, no, no, no, no, but you got in, you interrupted yourself in the middle of a sentence. No, I didn't, I didn't say that. You did. Play it back, those are your exact words.

What you were trying to say is there's no evidence that he did anything wrong with Miss Teen USA, but you actually interrupted yourself right in the middle. That's not what I said. I remember, I'll tell what I said. I said, Ms. Tino, I say, somebody's got to own it. And I said, there's no evidence of it. And it meant it was referring to the stuff you're talking about, about the, in proprieties. I didn't mean there was no evidence that he owned Ms. Tien USA.

Exactly. But that's, but this is why I'm saying. Like, when people are, when everybody understood what I, you understood what I meant, too. I did, I did. Everybody would. But I think with, again, again, regardless, I, let me put it this way. Yeah. If what Mirschimer was saying is that very, very, you know, I did.

few Israelis were murdered on October 7th. I think that's completely ridiculous. I am not sure that's what he was saying. And there's a very easy way to figure it out. Just email him and he said it more than once. I didn't want to bore you with other recordings of it. But yeah, listen. I don't keep track of everything John Mearsheimer said and I agree that I don't want to sit here and watch recordings. Okay. We can get on to the next one. But no, but hold on. You asked you asked me like a very, very long, you had a, there was like a 10-minute lead-up to go ahead. So the so in the first question that you started off with was at what point do we lose faith that somebody is actually arguing in good faith? And I think this is a question

that people ask all the time. And I think it does matter at some level because at some point, like for me, if I'm curious about like Laos or, you know, China Politer, like anything that I really don't know anything about at all, I kind of have to assume that whoever I'm listening to or reading is acting in good faith in their in their argument right because i'm not going to sit there and learn how to read chinese and then go look up their footnotes you know like that's just beyond my capability so at some point you have to be willing to trust people for me regarding israel palestine that's something i know a lot about i invest a lot of time in it and so for me i don't really care of somebody's acting in good faith in just i'm talking about in my specific case of talking about

israel palestine and especially the u.s's relationship to the to the israel-palistine conflict when I read the Israel lobby he and Walt wrote that in 2006 or 2007 I can't remember right around there when I read it I thought it was and just to be clear John Mearsheimer's actually said nice things about me so I'm not trying to like pick a fight with him by saying this but I just I didn't think there was any I thought the book was completely ridiculous from start I thought the article they wrote in the London Review of books was ridiculous and I thought the book they wrote was ridiculous and the reason is not because I think they're lying I don't actually think they're I I don't suspect that at all. I don't know as much about Walt, but Meersheimer specifically, he's very much in this realist idea of,

or this realist school of international relations. And he has this idea, like, you know, I saw a talk he gave recently at maybe like the Arab American Institute in D.C. or something like that, yeah, I don't know. I can't remember exactly what it was called. But he got up there. And his line of reasoning with the Islam, Israel lobby and the Iran war specifically is always it's, and I'm summarizing, again, not trying

to start a fight with the guy. He's a much more learned person than I am. But his line of reasoning is always, it's very obvious that the United States had no interest in attacking Iran. Therefore, there must be something else going on. The Israel lobby is the obvious culprit. I wrote about the Israel lobby, wait back. Iraq. No, I'm saying like this attack on Iran now. But this time he's saying the reason is because Trump being blackmailed by the Israelis. Yeah, well, and he also talks about the Israel lobby and all sorts of other stuff. Well, you would think, but actually what he's been saying is that the Israelis have the goods on Trump. Yeah, he said that as well, for sure.

Because of the Epstein files. Yeah. And that would imply that the lobby is actually irrelevant. Yeah, well, and this is, I think, one of the major problems with the book in general. If you look at the book, excuse me, if you look at that book and what they've written, subsequent stuff about it since. If you look at the book and all the arguments in general, it's kind of hard to tell what the Israel lobby is. Like, is it just a, is it a small, is it, you know, the people who work at Apex office somewhere? Is it, you know, what, what is it?

If you read the book and the examples they give, it's kind of just everybody. Like the whole, basically the entire American elite is the Israel lobby. And you actually, Nome Chomsky used to make a, when the book came out, Chomsky made a good point. He said, if anybody believed that this was true, there's a very simple solution to this. Put on your suit and, I'm quoting him almost exactly, put on your suit and tie, and go to the next board meeting of General Electric and Lockheed Martin and all these other corporations that run the United States and tell them, hey, there's this Jewish cabal that's screwing up your control over the world, your profits, etc. So just smash them in the face because you obviously have the capability of doing so. You own the entire country.

Nobody believes this. It's completely silly. But where it gets, I think with Mir Schimer, and again, I don't know the fellow. I don't want to argue with him directly. I'm just trying to respond to what you're telling me or what you're bringing up. With Meersheimer specifically, I think it's because he insists that there is no U.S. interest in attacking Iran or Iraq, actually, if you want to stick with the Iraq example. No, no. The book was Iraq. This interview was about Iran. That's fine. But yeah, exactly. The book mostly focuses on Iraq, but now they're probably, I'm sure they were, I don't know when this was, but I'm sure they were mostly talking about Iran. So the, and that is just silly.

Like, it's completely silly to claim that the U.S. has no interest in controlling the Middle East by force. That's what the U.S. has been doing in the Middle East since 1940. I mean, I actually find everything you're saying interesting and, you know, I'm actually, like, I'm interested. Let me just, let me refine my point. Oh, you want to say, you want to finish? Let me just, I promise, two more sentences. Go ahead. The, it is very silly to claim that the U.S. has no interest in controlling the hydrocarbon reserves and the strategic space of the Middle East by force.

It has had that interest. It has been articulated by the State Department in the mid-1940s. It was one of the major reasons the U.S. even fought World War II. So to claim that all of a sudden this interest just evaporated in some time between, you know, our first and second invasions of Iraq is just silly. Like nothing changed. Nothing changed in world affairs. Yeah.

So I agree with everything you said. But I just want to put a finer point on the point I'm making, which is that it's not that I agree with them or disagree with them. but what he's saying is that he's making two claims that very few Israelis were killed by Hamas and that Trump being blackmailed. Neither of which has any evidence whatsoever. Yeah.

And, you know, when Periel does stuff like that, which she has want to do, and she does quite often, even on Clinton, like she'll say, you know, all the rapes and on Periel, are you sure you know that? What's your evidence? How many times have I... I have no idea about you've never done that. Because I understand so fundamentally

that when you're talking about serious matters, you really have to be sure that you were saying things that you are... that are true and that you can cite a credible source for. When a University of Chicago professor, an influential guy, as influential as him, as he on this whole thing, permits himself these kinds of liberties, the very things he would give his students an F for if they were to hand

in a document as flimsy as what he's saying. My feeling is that, I'm not even sure with good faith or bad faith, that the proper thing for all people to do on all sides, including the people who find what he's saying, music to their ears, is to say, this guy cannot be taken seriously any longer. He is a used car salesman, and whether he's right or he's wrong, he has no methodology that we can discern. He is going to lead me over a cliff if I start repeating the stuff that he says. So that's my feeling. So let me give me another, go ahead.

You want to answer without a good example. Yeah. Again, to my mind, what I'm trying to say is I, when I, whenever I hear anybody speak about something that I actually know something about, I do not, like everybody has a political viewpoint. There's no question about that. So like you're saying, what music to my ears. So it's like, but for me, I've learned that I just, every time I, in the past, every time, in the past, I've said to myself, this guy, this guy's good. This is just totally solid. Like a day later, you just find some complete nonsense.

And so the, it's, no, no, but really, look, everyone in this, I'm sure I, I know I make mistakes in life. We'll get to that. And yeah, and everybody, everybody does. That's fine. But like, but like you're saying, when people, when someone is saying anything out loud or making any claim or writing it down any claim, I don't really care what it is. I always want to, the first question I always ask is, is that true or not? And how can I figure that out? There are, it's not that there's no evidence that Israel killed quite a few people on October 7th.

there's, there is some, and it's not quite a few. There's evidence of some. There's not evidence of quite a few, but we, but whatever the evidence is. I don't know what the difference between quite a few and some is. I, I'm saying, what I, let me, I think it's hard evidence of like under, under 10, hard evidence. It's fine. The last time I checked.

Yeah. Of Israel killing. I'm not saying, I'm not sure that's correct. I'm not saying Israel didn't kill more. I'm saying that when I did my best effort to find out how many, I wouldn't fault and friendly, like, like, who knows why people are. And that's, that's exactly the point that I think is. But I really did.

So I don't care what the number is. Exactly. That's exactly my point. But I don't think it matters at all. But I really did look into it, and it's very hard to find evidence of more than, I think out what the numbers. It's a pretty little number that there's hard evidence of. And then, of course, you can infer maybe there's plus or minus 20% or something. So maybe it's 15.

I don't know. But it's, you know, when you're talking about over a thousand people. The point is none of it doesn't matter. Because whatever Israel did or didn't do, during the October 7th attack, I honestly just don't think it matters that much. Well, let me tell you, let me just, let's not really, like it's, um, it's, I just, I just don't think that's,

I don't know why anybody cares about the answer to this cause. Let me answer, let me just put one thing into here because people don't all know this, but it's a very, I think, strong analogy. When a criminal starts a firefight with the cops, and if the cops then kill innocent bystanders, yeah, the criminal is charged with that murder. Mm-hmm. So, you know, this is, the fact that some innocent Israelis might have been killed in a back and forth with Hamas,

by all standards of morality and law, is still on Hamas's. That's why I don't think it matters. That's why it doesn't matter. But, Mirshan- I don't agree with your, if a criminal, I don't think that's the right analogy to be perfected, but I do agree that it just doesn't matter. The deaths on October 7th were a foreseeable consequence of what Hamas did. No, you certainly do agree with the analogy.

No, no, no, no. You have to agree with the analogy because I'm talking, if they're shooting at people at the music festival, you don't think. I don't agree because cops are obviously the good guys in that analogy and the robbers are obviously the bad guys and there's no there's no antecedent history there. That's why I'm saying. Let's just stop their fact. Are you saying that you think that the people who were mowing down people at the music festival

were not bad guys? I'm saying I think they're both bad guys. I think the Israelis and the Palestinian. It could have been a dad protecting his daughter, or it could be just an innocent, any civilian who went and got their gun and tried to defend against the people being mowed down at the music festival. I think everybody, when they make, when they make things like... Rose, you're a doctor.

How can you say that somebody mowing down people at a music festival or not, no matter what they went through? I just said they were both the bad guys. No, no. But do you agree that people shooting... the people, the music festival are bad guys. That is obviously criminal. Yes.

Okay. That is obviously criminal. And now someone witnessing that would try to- He's obligated to respond. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm totally agreeing with the- There was a shooting somewhere. What country was it in?

Was it Australia? And it was an Arab guy, stepped in and stopped the- Australia, Bondi Beach. It was the Bondi Beach shooting, yeah. So like, if a Palestinian had stepped in to stop Hamas from killing these people at the music festival, would he at least become a good guy? Like, like you're assuming that the people...

I think you're dissecting what I said way too much. Okay, okay, let's move on. No, no, I want to be clear about it, though. Or let me say that differently. I think maybe I was unclear. I was not referred... Like, Yair Golan, right? He, you know, I forget what his position had been previously, but he grabbed his...

He went to a military base, said reinstate me immediately. give me a weapon, drove to the music festival, and tried to rescue people there, and at least by his own account, shot plenty of people there. No one's saying Yair Golan was not a good guy in that moment. Not, no, no, no. But if he killed somebody in the crossfire. Not, no, no, again, that would just be an error. That's, that is a, that is, that is, that is, that is an unfortunate, tragedy that happens while this individual person is trying to do the right thing. That is a very different thing from saying that the Palestinians are robbers coming into Israel, absolutely no reason that has no history behind it, et cetera, to fight the...

I didn't say that. You didn't, but that's what I'm saying. The analogy can imply that, and I'm just trying to clarify that I don't agree with that aspect to the end. That was the only point I was trying to make. Okay, fair enough. So now I'm going to give you another example. Now, this is a harder example, because this is Omar Bartov, and he and I were arguing

about the genocide accusation. And he had written an article, I should have brought the article, where he had actually said defended the killing of the German how do I want to put it fair to him he felt that we were not criminal or committed we had not done anything wrong in the bombing of Germany despite the fact that so many Germans were killed innocent Germans because he said that we had to destroy

Germany to rebuild it he wrote a whole article about it I could send you the article. So I confronted him with his own words about it. Now, and he's going to give a, he's going to give his reason. So go ahead. Play this, Stephen. Your final quote, which is very, to me, very analogous to what Israel is facing. And it's a tough quote.

The suffering of the individual needs to be recorded. And it may tell us a great deal about the nature of an historical event. But we must remember the context, the sacrifice of the German soldier. compared to the Hamas soldier, was made in the cause of genocide and fascism. The struggle of so many Germans to maintain their Reich, to keep Hitler in power, to keep Hamas in power, because you've compared to, it was because Hitler's soldiers fought to the bitter end, as Hamas is fighting to the bitter end,

it was because they fought to the bitter end that their country had to be destroyed. Only then could reconstruction begin. Right, right. So there was no talk of proportionality. So let me let me take you on this point. Imagine imagine if an Israeli said this. Exactly. So let me take you on this point.

The Americans and the British bombed the hell out of Germany, right? They killed about 600,000 civilians in strategic bombing, intentionally. It was not collateral damage. It was intentional. Some were and some weren't, right? Most were because they just couldn't hit the targets. So they bombed cities. And that might have been under different circumstances called a war crime.

But when they came to occupy Germany, what did they do? When they came to occupy Germany, they rebuilt it with a Marshall Plan. In that chapter yet. So if Israel were to say what, by the way, Churchill and Roosevelt always said, they said, we are fighting the Nazis, not the German people. The German people are not our enemy.

Can you think of Netanyahu saying? Yes, he has said that. No, no, no. If I find it, I'm going to cut it in. Okay, so it turns out he said it more than once. I just, I cut one example of it in here. This is Netanyahu saying it. Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists,

not the Palestinian population. Our goal is to rid Gaza of Hamas terrorists. and free our hostages. Once this is achieved, Gaza can be demilitarized and de-radicalized, thereby creating a possibility for a better future for Israel and Palestinians alike. All right. So this is, and this is something he said more than once. So now, this is my question. You have a guy like Bartov. He's staked everything on this distinction that he's drawn. Churchill and Roosevelt said this. Israel doesn't say these things. Then we know now, and he knows, now that actually Israel did say these things.

But he's still going around the world or writing a book saying the very same things that he had said previously. There is no integration, no redirection, no acknowledgement. Oh, well, I stake my argument on this being true and this is not true. So to me, at that point, although he might have not known, it might have been good for, faith, can I still consider the man to be operating in good faith if he just sweeps this under the rug after saying that this was the key distinction? You follow me? I follow you, but you're completely wrong. Okay. No, no, I mean, I don't think this is a, this is a much more straightforward

situation. Okay. So, Bartov is a native Hebrew speaker. Do you speak Hebrew? I can't remember. No, I'm not trying to, I don't either, so not, not. No, I'm not judging you. I'm just saying, I'm just asking. I don't care. No, no, no, I don't. She does, be careful. Do you speak Hebrew?

Really, nice. So the, so, so, you speak Hebrew? Okay, interesting. I, after I talked to you the first time, I started to watch some of your programs. And is, do you call this a program? I don't know. But the, but I saw the one with normal, Vaklis. Yeah, yeah.

And you, he called you over at some point. and he told you that the Israelis describe what they're doing in Gaza as mowing the lawn. And you actually told him you'd never heard that phrase before. I didn't say she was informed. I said she speaks Hebrew. Oh, okay, fair way. But I mean, that's the thing is if you read the Hebrew press and I can only read it for Google translate.

I don't read it. I don't read it. Is it on Instagram? Is it a meme? No, no. She seems like an intelligent person. She is, but she's not interested. Don't be so glib about it.

No, I don't read. That's fair, then. My bet. I just assumed. My bet. I just assumed because you were here. Fair enough. But anyway.

Don't get me started on him now. On Finkelstein. The, um, so what, this is a very, very famous distinction that is not hidden by anybody. Not only Netanyahu, but plenty of Israeli politicians say one thing in English and they say another thing in Hebrew. This is very well documented. It's very well understood. Uh, anybody who reads the English language edition of hearts can see this.

You have evidence that he's never said it in Hebrew? Say that again. Do you have evidence and then Yahoo doesn't say this in Hebrew? He might say it in Hebrew. Guess what else he says in Hebrew? He says, we are fighting all the Palestinians. We are trying to destroy Gaza. Let me finish the point and then please.

Okay, you're going on record about all these things. And if it turns out that we can't find these things, then what will your reaction be? If you, I would be very happy to create a Google Doc with you. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. where we put a long list of Netanyahu Smotrich, Ben-Gavir. No, no, no, don't bring Smotrish-Bengivir. We're not talking about it. I agree with you.

I will stipulate to Smotich and Ben-Givir. Everybody knows Smotrish and Ben-Gavir. I'm sure Netanyahu has his own, you know, he made a deal with the devil knowingly, and this is to his, history will judge him for having done this. Okay. But don't think I'm saying anything positive about Smolchrich and Ben-Gavir. They pop champagne corks at suffering. of others, please, but Netanyahu isn't something else, yeah.

Okay, fair enough. I mean, you know, so what you, you've heard, you've heard his statements about, oh, sorry, sorry, I keep interrupting you. No, no, no, I just want to say that if that's true, I would like that he, and I'm not disputing that it, that it very well could be true, and I'm not a fan of, that he has said these. Yeah, yeah, that he says one thing in Hebrew, then Bartow should say that. Yeah, that's a fair, I completely agree. Yeah, and I don't understand. understand. Look, we heard all that evidence that was brought into the ICJ about all the genocidal statements that the Israelis have made. I don't know why you're putting it in quotes. It's pretty

amazing. Whatever. I'm going to put it in quotes because I believe many of them are absurd. You could listen to my interview with Bartov. I think I demonstrated that they were absurd. You bringing in source evidence of what Amalek, all sorts of things. It doesn't even matter. I believe it's in quote. But anyway, if Netanyahu was on record saying the things that you're saying he said, I don't understand. understand how the lawyers scouring Israeli statements for genocidal statements wouldn't have led with those very statements. Fair enough.

You don't need some oblique statement about Amalek if you have the Israeli prime minister saying, we want to destroy all the Palestinians. But he's the one making the statements about Amalek. What do you mean oblique? Because Amalek is a traditional Jewish reference. I'm saying if he said he wants. Yes, it is. And so, okay.

It's on the frigging Holocaust Museum, just Amalek. It's what they call. And there's two, you can read it. It was a whole Atlantic and a whole. article about it. There's more than one reference. Netanyahu quoted, the article in the Atlantic quotes the actual passage from which Netanyahu was closing, which is not the passage from which the genocide, it's, listen, we could do with the point is that, when Netanyahu made those, if Netanyahu said what you were saying, I believe we would have read about it already in Hebrew,

English, Farsi, whatever. That's what I think. I can't read Farsi either. But the, so when Netanyahu made his comments about Amalek, and this is like October 8th, 9th, 2023. What did Betzelm say? Betzelm? I don't know. Betselm? Tell people who Betzelm is. Betzelm is the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. It's Israel's biggest human rights group. It's certainly a leftist group. Yeah. And so yeah, so what, when, I haven't read the press release since then, but what they, what they said immediately was that every single Jewish person in Israel who has gone through the Israeli education system understands what this means. But this is not true. I'm telling you, you know, you can take your measure of me or of her.

I know a thousand Israelis. This is simply not true. It's just not true. You can say it to you blue in the face. That Selim can say it, it's not true. And that's nothing more I could say than that. No, nobody that I know took this reference to mean genocide of the Palestinians. When I was in Israel in December, plenty of people told me that's exactly how it. Well, you know, you have a certain circle that's very politically.

Of course I do. So you. No, no, no, no, no, no, I don't. Meaning that you have a certain circle. You know a perfect sampling of Israelis. I know a much. It's completely ridiculous. No, the Israelis that I know are a random sampling of Israelis

because I don't know them because of any political associations I have. I know them because one does my sign, one is a waitress, one is a museum, physician. One is in my family. One is Periel. One's her periel's friend. Like, these are not, and they have, and most of them, actually, I have to say, hate Netanyahu. I don't know. I'm not saying they love Nathaniel. Yeah. That wasn't my point. And none of these people, and Israeli journalists. I mean, religious people, non-religious people, religious people, most of all are the ones saying that's not what

Amalek means. You know, your lens, this, guess you, like, you have to be careful about your lens here. You know a bunch of Israelis who were seething about being Jewish, maybe, but definitely about Israel. They're seething about being Jewish. They're seething in some way. And that's how, for instance, you, like, you worked on Finkelstein's book, right? You were his editor or something. I helped edit it.

Yeah. I helped edit some of them, yeah. Yeah. So, like, that's your, I'm not begrudging you, your circle. I'm just, I'm just saying something that actually you. Norman Finkelstein is not Israeli. No, but he, he's not, I wasn't referring to Norman Finkelstein. No, I don't, but I'm saying that.

But that's your, that's, these are, you know what I'm saying. So, um, but if you were to think, like, on the mirror image of you, like, well, my, in my interaction with Israelis is based on my political exposure to them, you couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, I don't have any. You know, I lived in Israel for a year, right? You did? Yes. After college. I think, maybe, may tell us it last time. Or sorry, last 10 months. Now I understand. Now I understand. Yeah. I mean, like I, no, no, I'm just saying, like, it's not like I don't have, I, I don't claim to know Israeli culture or society, like, you know. I'm going to read, I just mentioned, I don't even speak Hebrew, but like, I'm just saying,

it's not, I don't, I think you're assuming that I only know certain people in Israel or certain this or certain that. It's leaving Amalek aside. So there's this whole issue of lens. Now, I question my lens. When you wrote that article in the New York Times about the poor babies with the scans of bullets in their head, you know, eight out of ten, nine out of ten people that I, I agree with,

dismissed it, it's bullshit, whatever, you know, and I didn't. You didn't, no, you didn't.

To your credit. And I, I certainly wanted to interrogate you about it to find out what it was. And then although I, I'll say,

but I don't want to drag you or you might make a defense, although there were certain aspects in the narrative, like contemporary stuff that I felt like, well, why didn't he say it then? Which we could,

you know, which we did argue about. In the end, when clearly on record is saying, I believe this scans are real. I found it ridiculous to think that you had randomly just put that scan on your laptop, on the off chance I asked you to see it. Like, like, I didn't end. And then, you know, we had an hour afterwards. And I told everybody to their consternation, and I said, no, no, I think it's what he's showing is real. And, you know, as I said to you,

it's kind of like this other thing we're talking about, like it's not necessarily a moral admission. Like, you know, in Chicago, whenever you have crossfire going on, yeah, a certain number of people, children get killed, they get shot in the head. So it's like,

I don't know what to make of it. It could be murderers. It does not shock me to think, as I've said before, Israelis are drawn from the human race like every other human. And I would be foolish to, say that no Israeli murdered anybody,

I imagine some might have, certainly isn't a crossfire, I don't know. The second time my lens was really tested was when Israel, at the end, not when we discuss it, when there was a food shortage in Gaza. And I saw those people getting shot,

how it's reported at first, and again, everybody dismissed it, that were people being shot, queuing up for food. I remember saying, no, no, I think this is, that sounds like it's real to me. I don't want to, and sure enough, it was real.

Mm-hmm. I had certain experience in my own life that I understood, kind of, I felt I understood how incompetent, how incompetent people can actually be, how difficult it is to deal with big crowds. I lamented what I did see as a kind of, you know, growing dehumanization on both sides. Benny Morris wrote a really good column about this like 18 months ago where he feared the worst

because essentially kind of what we were talking about when you first sat down about how nurses and doctors become a nerd to suffering. This is 10-X with soldiers and you just get used to killing. You just get used to it. And you get used to suffering and you just create whatever psychological devices you have to just deal with it all. So, you know, I mean, I lost my actual train of thought here, but when I heard that people were being shot merely lining up to get food, I immediately felt that it was real. And sure enough, it was real.

And in the past, other things that I dismissed, they turned out not to be real. Like the thing I had with Rashid Khalidi about the Baptist Hospital, the 471 that were a thing. And he had the nerve to sit here and say to us, again, good faith or bad faith. He says, I know that it's true. because I have friends who work in the hospital.

Remember that? This is what Rashid Khalidi told me. Yeah. And then it turned out not to be true. I'm like, okay. Well, I don't know about that. No, no, we do know. We do know.

You don't know the 471 people were not killed in that hospital? It wasn't that. That's not the exact number that were killed. It was thorough investigation. 100 is the highest investigation. I think it's 100 something. But that's the highest, but most people think it could be a dozen. And it wasn't even an Israeli rocket.

So that's where there's quite a bit of... Okay, let's say it was Israeli rocket. point is that he we were arguing specifically about that large huge large and by the way the hospital wasn't even bombed it was the parking it was the parking yeah and why so he said he said i have friends of work at the hospital it was bombed and i know the casual i don't with casual account he he he attested to the 471 although of course you know it could be 465 whatever right yeah you're saying in that order in that range yeah so again like what is with this guy like he obviously did not have a friend who worked at the hospital, who told him the hospital was bombed, and there's bodies everywhere. He didn't have that. Will he get away with it? Of course he's going to get away with it. But I don't, I mean, again, I don't know.

I didn't, I didn't listen to that conversation. But the, I don't, where did I read this? It was action on armed violence. So there's a, there's a, there's a British group called Action and Armed Violence. I'm almost sure this is their fellow. I think his name's, I think his last name's Gabriel or something like that. But anyway, they have an analyst there, a PhD at the, I think he's at LSC at the London School of Economics. But they have an analyst there who has gone through the Ministry of Health data.

He's done quite a bit of work for them. And what he's said, or one of the things that he says is that, the the Ministry of Health in Gaza is it's constantly impugned in the Western press it's always described as the Hamas Ministry of Health or this or that doesn't distinguish

when combatants and civilians doesn't you know blah blah blah and one of the things he points out is that it's when you actually look at their methodology for counting the dead it's quite conservative and it's quite careful and that this is a oh you know what he was talking about he was talking about

remember in November December of January of from 2023 to 24 there was a time when the Ministry of Health reported numbers from the Gaza media office as well as the actual Ministry of Health count from morgues in Gaza and and once the because the whole northern hospital system was out right the Shiffa was out Indonesian was out Kamala adwan was out so when when the in like I don't know probably February March time the the the ministry Health got the system up and working again. And it started going through, it still had a distinction. It had the people that had been counted from the Ministry of Health System and the people that

have been counted from the Gaza Media Office. So it started going through all of the people in the Gaza Media Office with the Ministry of Health methodology. And it started removing any of those people from the list of dead that it couldn't fully verify. And people jumped on it and said, see, this proves they were lying all along and blah, blah, blah. And this guy, Gorbriol, Uh, Cockerel, sorry, Cockrell is his last name. Matthew Cockrell. Yeah, yeah. The, um, he, uh, he pointed out that this is not evidence of Hamas lying or the media

office lying or the Ministry of Health lying. This is actually evidence of an attempt at robust data collection. They, they were very clear that they were using both of these systems when the other system came back online in the north. My point is these, one of the things he says in that article is that, I'm pretty sure it's him, but anyway, somebody said it, that, uh, these, Even online casualty counts have become an issue of political solidarity or political posturing. You know, like, it's the higher number, it's the lower number.

I'm this. It's a very weird thing where these things that are just factual questions and they're ugly factual. How many children are dead? How many people? You know, that's very ugly. And it's very difficult to talk about dispassionately. Like I remember when we had our first conversation, at one point you wanted to ask, how many children would you expect to be? killed in a war zone like this. And it's a very, and like you're, you're squinting because it's an

ugly question. It is. Nevertheless, it's a reasonable one, right? It's a question that makes sense to ask. And you had a hard time even saying it out loud, which is understandable. But you know what I mean? Like these, these are difficult facts to discuss, but they're also very, you know, Rashid Khalidi is Palestinian. I don't think it's that crazy that he insisted that the higher number must be right. You're dismissing Palestinian lives. Again, what does that say? Yeah, I understand that as an emotional person. But that's the thing, but it is an emotion. He's not, he's not an automaton. He's, he's a, he's a, he's a historian. He has a particular perspective. I don't when I've read several of his books. I've never found that perspective to be hidden in. He has no

footnotes in his books. His books are trash. But anyway, that's my opinion. I mean, if you go to the footnote, like you read a Benny Morris book, you go to the footnote, it shows you exactly the paragraph where he got, you read a Norman Finkelstein book. Yeah, he's very, percest. A footnotes are very, very, like he leaves a breadcrumb for every single thing. So you can actually trace his research. For sure. That's because of Ruse did.

No, no, it's not at all because of me. He's just to that. I defy you to research any claim of Rashid Kalidi that he makes in that book about Palestine. The 100 years war is not a, is not a footnoted book, nor is it meant to be. But his other, his other work is much more of the document. But it's, it's a disgrace to write a book. book that's not footnoted when you're a professor at Columbia University. You should be drummed out

of your position. I remember my father used to say he wouldn't buy a book unless it had footnotes. Because why are you going to read, oh, just trust me on this. I mean, Khalidi has all sorts of accounts of the peace process in his book. And he said, okay, it's a footnote. I don't know if that's really accurate. Oh, it's true. No, no, I'm not saying it's not true that your father said that. I'm saying, I don't know if that's a reasonable way of judging. Like professors often write A memoir, but he's not a memoir, it's not a memoir, it's not a memoir. It's not a memoir. No, but it's largely an account of his families.

No. Yeah, yes, but I'm not. Yes, it is. Well, a hundred years war in Palestine is largely a personal account of his family's involvement in the. Okay, I'm not referring to his claims about his family. I would not expect footnotes. Right, but that's what I'm saying.

It's obviously written in that sense for a more popular audience. It's meant to humanize it. It's not meant to be like cold historical analysis. And furthermore, again, I just want to be clear. I don't respect that, but okay. Fair enough. And, you know, I don't know that he, because people that read it and take it as fact.

And it's just... But again, and this is actually a really good point, or this is an important thing to... What you just said is, is I agree with you. I agree, what was that? I agree with the last thing. Yeah, I wish. Maybe later.

The last thing that you just said, that people are going to read it and take it as fact. I completely agree with you. And that is one of the things that actually is very frustrating for me when it comes to people understanding what, especially our involvement, meaning Americans, our involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict is. I don't, how do you say this? I don't really, I don't like the fact that people feel. feel like you need to have a PhD in this subject to discuss it. And I don't like the fact that everybody claims to have a PhD level understanding of this thing to talk. And like, like, you know,

like I, I, I, I am sure I have read in like the mid hundreds of books on this topic, right? I've read a lot about it. And written a book. And I've written a book, but I've written a lot about it as well. And I've edited, yeah, I've edited at high level work for University of California Press for, you know, for our books in London, for the Institute for Palestine studies. you know, I have some experience with it, but at the same time, if somebody has information, like there's lots of information I don't know, you know? Right. So it's not like, um, so it's the people that know the most that make comments like that.

I think so, because you just, you learn how little you know, you know, like I'm, remember, I sent you that book by Zemmo's after we had our last conversation, defending the whole of that. So I've been rereading it, actually. And I'm just like, oh, my God, I forgot this. Oh, my God, I forgot that. Like, there's just, it's not, you know, it's not my professional work to learn about the Israel Palace. It's something I do as a, you know, not a hobby in the fun sense,

but as a hobby as an aside. So it's, you know, when people take, like, when people say, no, Rashid Khalidi wrote it, so it has to be true, that's just not a serious understanding of the world. Like, Rashid Khalidi is a human being. He has his own biases. He has his own understanding of the world. He has his own position.

I don't want to get bog on to Rashid Khalidi. but I'm making very general. So then obviously, then we come down to our disagreement. And I'm going to say what I said all along. After spending three hours with you, I had a very good impression of you. You seem like a pretty straight guy.

Even in this conversation, I believe that people listening to this who only read your article in the Times, that they're probably like, oh, this is not the fire breathing guy anti-Israel that I expected. If they read the article, they wouldn't have found any of that. Well, okay, fair enough. But in general, people are going to say,

oh, this guy's obviously a little less predictable than I imagine. And we, I mean, you could say otherwise, I think like, you know, maybe the political divide is so great that we would end up hating each other but if not for that, we'd have very easy time hanging out, you know, talking about

stuff like that. I mean, we could hang out, yes. As dudes. Or we could have until you said that. We could just talk about normal things, but okay. No, you get. So I'll just get a little levity.

So, but then we got bogged down on this claim that, now, first of all, I have two questions. First of all, just as an aside, when you were working in hospitals in Gaza, because I've seen there's articles now about how there were gunmen, there were nurses, they were, they were actually, there was Hamas presence in Reuters reported. Did you see any of that, by the way? You didn't see any of that. Did you hear of any of it? Did you hear of any of it? I'm pretty sure there wasn't any. So the, the Reuters report. Tell me, what did Roiders report? Was it the attack on Nassar in like, was it? You don't expect to have the details, do you?

Well, no, no, no, I know, I know, but it's okay. But this is, this is important. So, for instance, the headline is MSF. What does MSF stand for? Yeah, so that's Doctors Without Borders. So MSF issued a statement. Mediciin's en frontier. For somebody who you're saying is not informed. Medicines San Frontier.

Oh, right. Those, yeah. Suspense some Gaza hospital work over presence of gunmen, suspected weapons transfer. Correct. Now, they were the guys, MSF were the ones accusing Israel in the past of things. They're not like a... They still are, yeah. So it seems pretty credible.

So, yeah. So the, so MSF along with other, this is like January of this year, right? I think February. February 14th. MSF put up a statement on their website. It was actually buried in a weird way, but regardless of that. They put up a statement on their website that said it's very vague. It's like it's kind of deliberately vague, if you read it.

And it says there have been gunmen seen at the hospital. This is during the ceasefire. It's after, it's between October of last year and now. we have seen gunmen at the hospital, they have intimidated our staff, things like that. They don't accuse the people, or they don't accuse Hamas of sending the gunmen directly. They then say, and again, I'm this all from memory, so if somebody reads it and I've got some of the details wrong, I apologize. But they then said that we have complained to the Hamas authorities about this, but nothing has been done about it. Now, that can mean a few different things.

A few weeks, gosh, I can't even remember now. Either a few weeks before I got to Nasser, because I went back to Gaza after we spoke. I went in March and April and that I was blocked from going in November. But the, so I can't remember if it was a few weeks before, but I'm pretty sure it was a few weeks after I left.

The hospital was attacked by gunmen, but they were not from Hamas. They were from the Abu Shab clan, which is an anti-Hamas militia. And then Hamas had it out with them. If you knew about that, it would be also, you know, by the way, there's other, like, there's Twitter threads here that have,

Right, right, but multiple examples. And even that guy, Gabriel Epstein, who I think is respected as an Israeli guy who... He's the guy at Winnep, yeah. Yeah, he has a... Diafaz Abdul Fela, who worked as both a nursing emergency room supervisor for the Indonesian hospital, North Gaza, was a commander in the P.I.J's military ambulance unit in Northern Virginia was killed. And he has, you know, the documents here about him being... He was a commander in the ambulance unit?

I, a lot of this is in Arabic. I didn't, I didn't mean to get into the specifics here, but there are, there are, there's, this, this matters. No, but there are, there are, there are long threads making direct accusations against, there are, seven or eight specific people who are accused credibly of being involved in, in Hamas or anti- Correct. And so, so let's, okay, forget the episode. So if that's true, it's interesting, you didn't hear about it. No, no, no, no, I'm not sure it is. The, so, I just want to be clear, is it.

is it unthinkable that there is a nurse at any hospital in Gaza who also at night is a Hamas combatant? No. Of course it's not. That's not unthinkable at all. But they're also in the hospital with guns and stuff, right? No. And this is what I'm trying to emphasize. That is not actually the case at all.

Okay. So the, you know, me, it's not my opinion. 152 total, including me. Well, MSF says they had seen armed men. mass in the hospital compound. Right. And this is what I'm trying to explain to you. If you read the MSF statement, which is, it's still on their website, I'm pretty sure. I have it saved a few.

So you think that they're not telling the truth? Well, so when they put that statement out, there are a few things happen. Number one, Nasser itself put out a statement saying that this is completely false. Now, you would say, well, see, this is the thing. Noam. You're rolling your eyes. Because MSF is, it's an admission against interest. MSF is begrudgingly admitting such things.

MSF is not on the Israeli side of this. It's very, very credible when Hamas says, yes, we murdered somebody, it's much more credible than when Israel said, yes, Hamas murdered something. When MSF says we have evidence that there was gunmen in the hospital compound, why in the world would you not assume that's true? Well, I didn't assume it's true because, like I said, I don't assume anything is true. And so like I said, number one, Nasser put out a statement. Again, I totally agree with you.

That doesn't mean no individual piece of evidence, no individual. claim make something true or not. I then reached out to the people that worked at MSF in the hospital, and they all told me this testimony came from none of us. We did not. I met them when I was at Nosser. I worked with them. They said none of us gave this statement. This statement came from MSF headquarters. I forget if it was France or Belgium or somewhere else, but they came from MSF headquarters and we had no, we were all very surprised to see this. But thirdly, this is what's important. The people might have no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, please, for God, sake, let me finish what I'm saying.

At the, that statement does not actually lay the proper context for what was going on at the time. The context is there is a ceasefire, so it would be normal for Hamas to reassert its police authority and to just show up and, you know, because like, aren't there armed men in American hospitals? Aren't there aren't there aren't people in Israeli hospitals? Of course there are. They're called cops. It's normal.

But there's a big question. There's a big difference between saying the hospital is being mused as a military base, which is not possible during a ceasefire, right? We can all agree on this. So this is what I'm saying. These distinctions are very, very important. It matters what those people were doing. It is normal for there to be armed men in hospitals.

There's armed men in the hospital I work at. There's armed men in the hospital. Your father was that that you were telling me about before we started this. There were armed men everywhere. Yeah, but MSF understands that. So why would they? That's a great question. That was actually all of our questions as well.

But leaving that aside, the other, the next thing that everybody said, I know two people who are working in the emergency room at Nassar and had been there for about five months at that point. They both said this is also complete nonsense. We've never seen any armed presence here at all. I don't know much about this. What I'm trying to say is I don't know if there may or may not have been armed people at Nosser at some point.

It is of no relevance. This is what I'm trying to say. Like, you brought it up. Why did you think it was relevant? Because you were there in the medical system there. I wonder if you'd heard about it or seen it. Right, but why? Why do you care if it's true or not?

Because it was denied for a long time? No. See, again, this is wrong. This is completely and totally wrong. Who denied that an armed person has ever gone into a hospital? No, no, not an armed person in a hospital. That Hamas was using a hospital. Exactly. That's what you're saying. And that's not what the MSF statement says. This is where you, if you don't understand the relevant international law... Are you saying that the MSF statement is not commenting on anything that they think is wrong? the MSF statement points out that there are armed people in the uh or that there have been

on people in the hospital or on the hospital compound i don't remember if they said in the hospital says hospital must remain neutral civilian spaces free from military presence or activity to ensure the safe and impartial delivery of medical care MSF said they're not just saying well that's a statement of fact or principle i suppose and that's true okay but it's in response to what they claim they're identifying it's not saying what you're saying all right i i think let's move on because we're one out of time. So we had this, and this all comes down to Lens.

So, like, as I started by saying, I think you don't trigger in me any of the normal things that I have about somebody I think is full shit, bad faith, whatever it is. And yet we had this disagreement. Now, I think the Gahs, the Hamas is claiming that 474 people died of starvation

in, in the three years of law. Hamas is claiming that at all. The, that's what the website, you know, the Ministry of Health website. 474. And there was all this talk about, you know, hundreds of thousands, starving to death. And I told you at the time, this can't be true. And it wasn't true.

And so, you know, I attribute that to a lens, like friends like Glenn Greenwald, who I actually respect in many ways, he will jump on every anti-Israel story. Like there's never an anti-Israel story. He'll say, that might be a little much for me. I don't know if I believe that one, right? He will believe 100% of every anti-Israel story. So that's a huge flaw of his.

And then, you know, to somebody like me who would like to, I would like, like, like, how are it's, you know, I trust often, I would like to know the person that I can trust who's telling me this bad stuff that Israel is doing, but they're doing it because it's just true and not because they're Glenn Greenwald who was looking for it and his music to his ears, right? So I have the video there because, you know,

this is, we were all on Twitter about it. This is a device that Stephen invented. If you press period, it pauses the video. If you don't press star, whatever you do, don't press star. Okay, it shows all the, it's like Israeli porn comes up. But how do you go back a five seconds or something? What's that?

On the clip we were just on. On the clip we were just on. No, from this keypad, how do you go back a few seconds? Is it the arrow? I thought it was. Okay. No, that blows us up. As long as you don't press it.

So we're going to play this thing that you and I discussed. And then I'm going to let you stop it or rewind it. So you can annotate it, what you think about what we're saying. and you know and you can share with us like why you thought this way whatever it is i think this is interesting i think i am going to say that i think your your lens at that time was was flawed and that doesn't make you a bad person at all no i know that yeah but then the challenge is what i'm saying about bartov is like now that you see some pretty hard evidence can you then Can you integrate it into a, what I, like a closer to predictively reliable lens such that you can interpret things in the future without wildly missing?

Yeah, it's a fair question. So before you start this thing, but you can, you get away. What you're saying, we, you and I have both seen, or we lived it, this is a clip where we start talking about the possibility of starvation in Gaza. and I tell you that the, according to the evidence that existed at the time, it was impossible to estimate that I forget the exact numbers, but that tens of thousands of people had died of starvation in Gaza. Later on, I don't know how long this clip goes for,

if it's 15 minutes, I sure hope not. But later on, I finally got to the point that I'm not saying this is true or it's not true. I'm saying that the best evidence that exists. I cut that part out. No, I know it's in there because I found it. I remember we've taken about it.

No, but I did cut some, I hope I didn't cut that out. I try, because it is 15 minutes. It's later, yeah. But I, but I, but the point is I'm very good about not trying to cut things out. No, no, I know. I didn't think you were trying to. But the, um, uh, and what, what I, I can't remember the exact words, but I said something along the lines.

If it doesn't mean it's true or it's not true, it means we should care enough to investigate. Yeah. And I think that's a completely reasonable, uh, assertion. Yes, of course. The, but what you just said is that we now know it's not true. How do you know that? Because Hamas itself is not even claiming it's true. That is completely ridiculous.

First of all, so you, I just want to be clear. You believe that Hamas is somehow a reliable source of information when it comes to the number of people who've starved to death in Gaza. That's your claim? Hamas has some way of recording this. Hamas, who you, last time I was here, sorry, I keep interrupting you. Play the video because I make the argument said, I don't need to answer you. I make the arguments on the video.

Last time I was here. Yeah. I promise I will play it. Okay. Last time I was here, the first thing we started talking about for like, I don't know, 20 minutes was that Hamas hates its civilian population and doesn't even allow them into the tunnels that you think are bomb shelters, even though they're not. But that doesn't even allow them into the tunnels and doesn't help their civilian population survive.

I didn't say they hate them, yes. You didn't. I mean, you're correct. You did not say that. I don't understand what other conclusion there could be from that. They make martyrs out of them for their purposes. Okay. Yeah.

Gotcha. Is that not true? It's part of their... Let's not get sidetrack. Go ahead. So, yeah. But this is... No, I don't think that's true.

The... Or let me say it differently. Could a Hamas person have decided to do that? Yes, there's no doubt about it. Is that a consistent policy? It seems very hard to believe that. Unless you believe that the Palestinians vote for people who just want to kill them.

That'd be very strange. You know, it's, again, the... With the... That kind of thing is very hard to prove. or disprove, obviously, right? Could it be true in individual circumstances? Sure. Well, there's some reason they don't let them into tunnels

to take cover when the bombs are coming. So, you know. I think it requires the same level. There is some reason, right? Like, they could let them. Yeah, yeah, no, there is, there would be a utility to it. There's no question about that.

And there's some reason they've opted not to do that. And my, you know, Occam's razor is, I explained what it was very clearly. My Occam's razor is they think it's in their interest not to do that, not because they hate these people. I would never, these are their families. Yeah. Anyway, play the video.

You can press start. A much simpler, you brought up Occam's Razor. A much simpler explanation is that the tunnels are for military purposes, and that's what they're using them for. That's why Israel doesn't shelter people on Israeli military basis. That makes no sense. It makes perfect sense, and I think anybody listening can figure that out. But what I'm trying to point out...

There's 300 miles of tunnels, and though they're... Are they all bomb-proof? Do you... They're definitely more bomb-proof than being exposed on the street in these buildings that are being destroyed. Anyway, I don't know if that's true. You said push the period. Yeah, press period.

Yeah, you can send them to the, whatever. Yeah, period is play and pause. Let's take a totally different thing, just for a second. You age. I'm sorry, I know you said you're tired. My hair, let's take a totally different thing. We wrote, me and 98 other healthcare providers wrote an open letter to the Biden administration, telling them what we saw and asking to have a meeting.

We had an, but there's an appendix to that letter too. And the appendix is very detailed or data-driven, I guess you would say. And in that appendix, I went through the integrated food security phase classification data for Gaza. That's the technical group that monitors food insecurity in the world. And if you look at their data, which admittedly everybody admits is not great because it's very hard to get data out of Gaza. But if you look at their data, the minimum number of Palestinians that you can estimate that have died from starvation or starvation-related causes since October 7th of last year is 62,000. Now, it's a huge number. and I sincerely hope it's not true.

And if it doesn't turn out to be true, that would be wonderful. How can it be true? How can it... So... This is your show. No, I'm letting you respond to it in real time. Yeah. Well, what do you find objection to love?

Well, let it play. Let it play. Now, I explain myself. We'd be seeing social media videos of people that look like concentration. You do. Okay. So there we go. So that's one thing. You said we would be seeing.

seeing pictures. There are plenty of pictures. I showed them to you. I showed you some of them. You didn't believe them, but that's fine. Even back then. What I said, now there are plenty more. What I say in the thing is that if 62,000 people are dying of starvation, that means probably three, four times that number on the verge of starvation. So you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who look similar to the liberation at Auschwitz. And that's what I tried to explain to you was not correct. It's not correct for a certain number of people. But when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people, it would be true. It might not be true for the 475 that died, who were infants or whatever it is, but when you're talking about 62,000 people

dying, it has to be true. And I said, with the ubiquity of photos coming out of Gaza, we did see the poor child in the bed starving, in a hospital bed, but we're not seeing people walking around the streets, you know, ribcages out, scrounging for food as we've seen in every famine. I mean, I've seen famines. I personally saw, I can show you a picture of four boys about 10 years old sifting through the garbage for food. Would you like to see it? Yeah. And what are you talking about? I don't know. Well, we can continue to play, but I'm saying that before there were cell phones, before every single person carried a camera. We saw, what percentage of Gossin's had cell phones before October 7th?

I actually do know the answer to this question. I'm going to say 60. It was 50%. Okay. Yeah. So 53% something. So you're talking about a million cell phones? Before October 7th, when there was electricity, when there was internet access.

But we're seeing lots of cell phone videos and footage from Gaza on a daily basis. And as I said, before there were cell phones, when we saw famines in Biafra or Ethiopia, we would see. We would, somehow, we managed to see many, many, many photos of hellscapes of starvation. And we weren't seeing that from Gaza over the course of a whole year. We never saw one. So I said, you're right, we saw a couple kids. Listen, the number is 475. So we all have to, we have to rejigger everything that I'm, all the arguments I'm making in light

of the fact that it turned out to be only 475. So what I was saying was not ridiculous. There weren't 62,000. Nobody's claimed the 62,000. So, okay, continue to play it. Continue to play it. I really, okay, I'm just going to say that the, the question of starvation and how people die of starvation,

what starvation results in how it plays out, is a studied thing that people get PhDs in. I, first, I don't even, I don't, I'm a physician. I don't have the expertise to, like, competently discuss all of its facets. The fact that you are comfortable, and this is the point I was trying to make, we'll play it if you like, but the point I was trying to make because of your response then and just like your response now is precisely that you are willingly substituting this

intellectualized nonsense for the reality of the fact that you don't know, you don't know what has actually happened. We have no clue how many people have starved to death in Gaza. You're claiming that because you read in some news report that Hamas says something. Not a news report. I went to the document. Was the OCH? Went to Hamas' document? No, the document that the same place we get all the casualty counts, which you do cite,

they cite the starvation number. If you want to pick and choose and say, I only want to, the 72,000, that comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health. I literally, so, okay, it's before, what was it, when I was in? Well, what number do you think it is? I have no clue, and that's exactly what I say here. But what is the current speculation? Well, so if you look at Michael Spagat's study, the GMS,

Gaza Mortality Survey, that's the one that was just published, I think, in the Lancet Global Health. In that study, what they found is that from October 7th to January 5th, maybe, early January of 2025 last year, they found, if I remember correctly, it's 8,500 excess deaths. So basically 8,500 deaths from war deprivation, starvation, displacement, whatever you want to call it. I have a very, very long discussion on Zateo about the Ministry of, about the Gaza Mortality Survey. If anyone's interested, if you don't have access to Teo, because I know nobody does, just email me and I can send you a PDF of it. It's totally fine. but I have a very, I literally just wrote a three piece, a three part article about this.

It's thousands of words long if anybody wants to actually get into it. Not about the starvation, but about the violent deaths in Gaza. But the Gaza mortality survey, which is the only actually, the only scientific, attempted scientific estimate of how many people died of, you know, non-violent, not the term is silly, but like indirect deaths, we call them, not direct shooting or bombing. or something like that in Gaza is about 8,500. I'd be very happy to sit here

and talk at length about what is wrong with that survey, but it would take a very, very long. Okay, but you, but you're, and I do want to play more of the video. It's a W.HO reporting these numbers. The notion that we've been, that we've been told so many details about

the suffering, the aid, the people shot in their head, the kids shot there, all these deals, seen so many thousands of video. and photos out of Gaza. But somehow, there's a mass starvation of hundreds of thousands of people. And we, and, and God,

the Hamas itself is not claiming it. Certainly they know. Hamas itself is not making. How are you saying that? Certainly they know. How would Hamas know? How would Hamas know how many people have starved to death

in the Gaza's history? No, they would know whether it's a few hundred or 60,000, As I said, and you haven't gainsayed this, 60,000 who succumbed to it has to imply a multiple of people who are about to succumb to it. And that has to be hundreds of thousands of people on the verge of death. The fact that there could be hundreds of thousands of people walking around Gaza on the verge of death from starvation. And we have no photographic evidence, no testimonial evidence, no WHO claims, no, nobody is claiming it. Nobody's documented that you are clinging to this.

No, I'm not clinging to it at all. You are clinging to it. Okay. Could we continue to play the video? No, no, hold on. Even in this video, do I or do I not say that we don't know how many people have starved to death in Gaza? Well, yes, nobody knows exact number.

Exactly. Let's see what you say. Let's see what you say. See what you say. By 62,000? So this is what I'm saying. We see almost none. No, that's not true, Norman.

And when we, and maybe you could. explain this because what I from time to time when I do see somebody emaciated like that is surrounded by people who are sometimes pudgy yeah so like yeah like what is going on how can one person be starving to death the fact that you can actually ask that question it i know i'm not you explain the answer very well here around friends and family that are overweight so alex de wall is the major is like the preeminent historian of famine in the modern period his his His book, I forget the name of the book. If you read it, he goes into details about how.

So famine almost never affects an entire, famine is not usually like what was happening in a Nazi concentration camp, but that's what we think of in our heads, right? In, when, and again, I'm using the term famine. Let me just, I'm not using that in the IPC's technical definition of it. I'm just using it to mean a time when people don't have enough food and or, and some of them are dying because of that. famine usually happens in in circumstances of scarcity, but it always affects people who have fewer mechanisms to cope with it.

So, like, if you look at the IPC's face classification, it goes one through five. The first level is no food insecurity. The second is there's food insecurity, but by doing things that the family doesn't, they classified at the household level. So by doing things that that household doesn't normally do, for example, selling clothes or sometimes it's sex work, things like that, anything to get money, then they're able to get enough food. The third phase is where those coping mechanisms, for lack of a better term, break down. And now they're using those coping mechanisms, but they don't, they still don't have enough food and they're starting to eat into their savings.

The fourth classification is where even the savings and everything are exhausted, and the fifth is an extreme version, the catastrophe phase. I mean, if again, if there's some IPC. All good information. Right. But so the, so that's, that's the, that's how this is classified. It's not uncommon. It's very, very uncommon for an entire population all to be starving to death. But again, that's, that's the picture we have in our head because we think of like the Americans. That's not the point I was making, but I want to let you finish. Well, but you said there are chubby people next to dying people. That's, that's normal. I understand that there might be different levels of, of who's starving, who's not. But I'm saying, that we see these isolated videos of a child in a bed. And no adult is going to let a child get to that level of starvation while they're eating comfort and maintaining their weight. So it's, you know, listen, you actually, you actually really seem like a good job.

I'm struggling with somebody I want to know, somebody I want to spend time talking to, to enrich my own knowledge of, of thing. You have a lot of life experience that is vital. to the understanding of this conflict that I don't have. But there's certain disconnects in certain things you say that I have trouble accepting. And the notion that there could be, if I'm about $60,000, $30,000. But this is what I'm sorry to say. More people starving in Gaza. Well, everybody has a cell phone.

And we don't know about it. And Hamas is not announcing it. and the Gaza Ministry of Health is not adding it to their numbers. This is a a credulousness.

Well, who am I being credulous towards the integrated food security phase classification? To whoever it is that's saying terrible thing. That is similar to... The IPC, which is funded by the United States, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Whatever. Whatever. It, to...

No, you said they they didn't report it. They said, if this is true, it would be this. Then you said, I said, based on their data, that's the low, but this is my point. And you're saying, yeah, it could actually be that we have 30,000 people have died of starvation.

I don't want, I don't want what I was saying to be misinterpreted. What I said is that with the available data, that's the lowest number that can be estimated. I don't know there, but at the same time. But it's obviously not true. It's, I wouldn't say it's obviously not true. I don't know if it's true. I will bet you $1,000.

I'll bet you $10,000. is that when this is all over, we're not going to find out that on top of all the poor people who have died, 60,000 people starve to death. Okay, fair enough. Like I said, I don't know. We would see the videos. There are people in Gaza. I mean, you would have seen it.

You were there. I did. You saw people, you saw, you put, you saw whole groups of people like Auschwitz victim. So let me, so you, I think you said you saw the one picture of the show. the one picture. Right. So that kid, do you think we admitted into the hospital? But this is what I'm saying. The IPC's numbers say that 495,000

people, about a quarter of the population, are in the catastrophic phase of food insecurity. In that phase, two of every 10,000 people per day, per day, die of starvation and starvation-related causes. That's, and if you calculate that out,

that's the number we came up with. There's a table in the thing. Look, the point, Norm, that I was trying to make with all this, is not that that's the true number or it's not the true number. Exactly what I was trying to say is we don't know. And what's going on in Gaza right now is so extreme that we don't know if we're starving tens of thousands of people. I think that's the point. But we weren't.

Again, I don't know. I really find it frightening that you're willing to say that so. When did we find out how many people died of starvation in the Holocaust? How long did it take? Well, I don't know, but as soon as we got there, we saw something horrible and that happened in terms of starvation. That's true. So when we got there, when we went into Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz or wherever it was,

what we found were the people, you know, like you think of the horrifically skeletal, you know, there's a famous one of a man-folding clothes, you know, it's awful things. what we found the very, very small number of people who were able to survive were the people who were just genetically lucky enough to maintain their immune system during a period of extreme starvation and also extreme slave labor and stuff like that. Can I ask you a technical question? Yes. Go ahead.

Go ahead. No, no. So how is it that the Gaza Ministry of Health has a number of 72,000, but the, you know, but they are not aware, not just of another 60,000 people who were dead, but six. You are the only one claiming 60,000 people have started. I said it's not true. You are the only person claiming to know any number of people who've something. I got a number from your letter. You said the minimum number we can calculate, the minimum number we can calculate based on the two per 10,000, whatever the math, was 60,000. That's correct. And I said, okay, so I'm saying,

So my technical question is, why isn't the 72,000 that the gods and ministry of health has identified riddled with the starvation deaths? Why is there another discrete set of 60, 30,000 people, whatever it is that you think is possible? They're just dead bodies, God, you know, I don't mean, like I'm playing, they're not, they're a dead body like any other dead body, whether they were hit by a bomb or shot or starved to death. Why is that great? group of people somehow not easily countable, why are their families not reporting into the issue of all many, many of the figures I know are because of the family self-report who died. What is keeping this number, whatever you think is possible, the lowest number you think is

possible, 30,000, 50, 40,000, what is keeping this a secret where all the other deaths are being counted? So there's a lot wrong there. Okay. First of all, all the other deaths are not being counted. Again, if somebody wants to read the details about that, just look at my Zateo pieces. I know people know Zateo is some left-wing thing. It certainly is. But if you read my articles...

But you said the Gaza Minister of Health is very thorough. They are very thorough. But they're not very thorough if they can be off by a factor of two or three. Well, no, okay. So you asked a technical question. Fair enough. How do people get counted as dead in the Gaza Strip? When people are brought to... So the Ministry of Health reports numbers from two sources.

One is people who are pronounced dead in hospitals in Gaza or are brought to the hospital. The morgues are always attached to the hospitals in Gaza. Or they're brought, so they either died in the hospital, like in the ER, or after I did surgery on them or whatever. Or they were brought to the front of the hospital and someone just said that person's dead. Just go to the, go to the morgue, right? Now, that number in no conflict in world history has ever been inclusive of every single person who's died of military violence.

That's just perfectly obvious. So the question is to what degree are people missing? Nobody knows the answer to that question. It's a very difficult question to answer. According to the Gaza Mortality Survey, and also according to, well, it's called a capture recapture analysis. It was done by Zana Jamaladeen at the London School.

She's in Britain somewhere. I forget which institution she works at. But that was published in The Lancet in February of last year. year maybe. And the Gaza mortality survey was just probably been open source for a while, but it's published now in the Lansing Global Health, so it's actually gone through peer review. Both of them find that the, and then there's actually another one done by a German demographic institute, but that's really just a complex modeling study, and I don't think people should put too much into it. According to those, according to the actual scientific data that's been collected and

analyzed by professionals, far more experience of public health than I have, the Ministry of Health is undercounting deaths by something like 30 to 40, violent deaths. Only violent deaths, because that's what they looked at, by 30 to 40%. So here's a question. If somebody has been shot or blown up or, you know, whatever acute violent thing happened to them, and 30 to 40% of those people never make it to a hospital, why would you think that people who are slowly starving to death would be brought to a hospital in perfect numbers such that they would be reported as dead by the Ministry of Health?

Like, you can ask the exact, the same question applies to literally any other famine. Why didn't, why isn't it hospital records that we learned the extent of famines of famine deaths in Ethiopia or Biafra or Mozambique? No, no. Or Namibia. I don't think you're understanding my question then. I'm saying that, let's say whatever, whatever, of that 70,000 that have been reported, let's say 30%, well, I don't know, actually not the claim. Let's say it's like hundreds died of starvation according to that number. but let's just, for the sake of argument,

let's say it was 10% died of starvation. The 70,000 number that the Ministry of Health or the 72,000, whatever it is, is only violent deaths. They are not reporting every death from the Gaza Strip. Public. No, and they report starvation deaths as well.

They do not have a regular mechanism for reporting starvation deaths. They never have, because people didn't use to starve death. That's my point. It's the same mechanism. People bring people starving to death to a hospital. People, families report starving deaths to the measure of health.

Everything that somebody does when they find their loved one dead from a bullet wound, they do when they find, or suffering from a bullet wound, they do when they find their loved one starving to death. So why haven't,

why haven't 40% of the violent deaths been counted in that way then? But I'm saying, this is what I'm getting to. Let's say you're right, that 40% of the deaths have not been counted, then it would still break,

that 40% would have to break down according to the ratio within that 70,000. You seem to be saying there could be another huge number comparable almost to the 70,000 violent deaths, which are just not being reported. They're not being filmed.

They're not being testified to. There's no evidence. It's kind of like Mearsheimer with his Trump things. Like, it could be true, except there's no evidence of it. And the people who are, and there's quite a large motivation, considering the fact that it's very, very important for this interest group right now. to win the case that Israel's committing genocide, well, what better evidence could they adduce

to the international court than evidence of 60,000 people who starved to death? Wouldn't that evoke the Holocaust that they're trying to? Like, it defies reason to think, but you're holding out hope, hope against hope that it's true, and I don't understand this lens, for a lot of us. I don't understand the lens.

So you're saying that Hamas would have an interest in revealing this information. Everybody who's an opponent of Israel has an interest in revealing this. Would Israel have an interest? Every journalist. Yeah. I don't know if every journalist is anti-Israel. No, I mean, every journalist who is an opponent.

Yeah. There aren't actually. Ha'Ritz. Come on, dude. We're not going to get into that. So if Hamas would have an interest in proving that this is true, which I agree with you. Well, you could argue it. But regardless of that, I agree with you that from a propaganda standpoint,

they would have an interest in showing it's true. Or for justice, just for justice, not for propaganda. Fair enough. Wouldn't Israel likewise have an interest in proving it's not true? Yes, but Israel's not proving it's not true. Right, you're right, they're not, because they won't let any research teams into the Gaza Strip to actually do the study that would be required to show it's true or not true.

But Hamas can say so. Hamas can document it. They manage to count 72,000. They can count the other 60,000. No, that's not what it. Again, I don't think you understand. Number one, there are entire books written on how to count conflict deaths.

It is not a simple matter. I know you think that you can... It should be because it's what you're saying. No, on a personal level, because it's so clearly to me, and I could be wrong. Like my lens, either my lens is completely... It's not your lens. I think you... No, it is.

Well, maybe it is. I don't know. Through my lens, I'm like, this is, forgive me, do respect. This is, I'm just being, from my lens, what I'm hearing is ridiculousness. Like this, I would stake all my money on the fact that this is what you're saying is not true. not the one saying it. Noam, you are saying that Pete, that this many people start to have. I am saying that with the evidence we had when I made this video, what more than a year ago, that was the only evidence that existed. Is there any more evidence after a year?

Not really. Well, like there's the Gaza mortality survey. But this is, Noam, this is my point. How, if you, it, okay. Why is it no more evidence? Why is it no more evidence after a year? Good. Thank you. You actually asked the question that I couldn't think of how I take it back. How, why isn't there any more evidence? Why isn't there? Sorry. Yeah. How, what would the evidence be?

How does one, since you, I'm assuming you didn't read things like how to conflict does, how does one actually determine that the answer to that question? The evidence would be. You just ask the government. I can answer. The evidence would be in a relatively small population like that. And by the way, you only need to do a sample to then make projections. Correct. The evidence would be that now that the violence, now that the violence, now that the,

the war has stopped, that people would go around and canvassed homes. And, you know, they would say, please come and report your deaths. They would be able to now figure out, okay, we have 72,000 names. Please let us know who else is missing. Like, it should be like in two weeks, in a small area like that, you can walk from one end of Gaza to the other in a day. This is a very small place. And you would just imagine that you could,

collect in how long it's been since the ceasefire is going to be a year soon, that you could collect names of people who are still missing and then inquire, well, okay, we don't even have that. Like, and if they're missing, how did they die? But what you're saying is that the people who are still missing, basically 100% of them must have starved to death. What did I say that? Okay, well, what do you believe?

We're going to end. We have to end. I thank you for coming, by the way, really. You walked into a situation knowing that we had a fight and, you know, but it's something, you know, I, and, you know, I think this is a good faith conversation. What do you actually believe and with what certainty is the answer to this question that we're debating? What's your gut tell you? So if you look at what the Ministry of Health does in Gaza, they have a mechanism for reporting people who have died of, of, of, of, of, of violence in Gaza that are not retrievable for whatever reason.

They're buried under rubble. They're, you know, these bombs are incredibly powerful. They can just obliterate people, you know, things like that. I think I can't remember. It requires like two, it's a legal proceeding. It requires, I think, two non-first-degree relatives. Like, there's a to do about it. I think they've worked through about 15,000 cases so far.

That's included in the 72,000 deaths, the 72,000 violent deaths. I have not seen an attempt to do a new census in the Gaza Strip, which is basically what you're saying. The Spagat study that I mentioned, the Gauz Mortality Survey, is the first attempt to do exactly what you were describing, which is a household mortality survey. Household mortality surveys have traditionally been used in places like, say, Rwanda, where there was mass killings, huge amount of societal disruption. it's hardly surprising that you can't just Google give me everyone's name that died in Rwanda, right? That's not a thing. You know, even like, you know, for, like still,

it took years to figure out how many people actually died on 9-11, like down to the person. It took years and years to figure that out. Yeah, but the margin of error was like 1%. It wasn't. Yeah. Well, yeah, sure, fair enough. And the reason was, but it wasn't,

didn't take years to find out who was missing. It was like, of the people who were known to be missing, they weren't sure did they leave with their girlfriends that died 9-11? There's definitely some of that, for sure. Yeah. No, no, no, but I'm saying, like, these are, these are in... We knew 100% of who was missing.

These are in wealthy, completely open societies. There's no more attacks going on. No one's bulldozing your house. There's no attempt to, there's no difficulty finding food. Your kids still go to school the next day. You know, like, it's... The societal disruption that has happened in the Gaza Strip is enormous. And you've seen the photos of Gaza.

It's leveled. My question was... Right now... You remember my question. No. My question was... what do you think is the most likely truth in this matter? Nobody knows this stuff better than you.

Very few people know better than you. And then you can put a percent. Like I think with 65 percent certainty, it was 30,000 people starve to death additionally. What does your gut tell you based on all your... My gut doesn't tell me anything about it because you can't just walk into a place and figure out how many people starve there.

But you live and breathe this stuff. You know all these details. Right. So like, so let's not take me. I'm hardly the world's leading expert on famine. Alex DeWall, who I think I mentioned in the thing, is the world's leading expert on famine. He's written a very long, it's just a blog post,

it's not peer reviewed, but he's written a very long analysis where he discounts our estimate as well. And he says that's probably not true. I wouldn't have used the IPC data in this way, right? And so, you know, he's on your side in that sense. He says that the number is almost certainly 10,000 or above. 10,000 starvation deaths.

Now, in that case, why wouldn't we still see the video? or the pictures that you see. I agree. That you talk about. I agree. What's his explanation for that? I don't want to speak for Alex Duol.

He's an extremely accomplished... You think he'd come on the show? I would imagine he would, yeah. I can put you in touch of them. Do you want to come on with him? We do it like a Zoom thing? I'm happy to. I don't know that I can add anything to his expertise.

And he really is the world's leading. He's written several books on Starvation. He wrote his PhD thesis on the Dutch Hunger Winter. You'll contribute well to any conversation, in my opinion. But the, no, I'm very happy to. But the, but this is what I'm saying. Like, we, the answer, all of this, let me, okay, here's the answer to your question. I do not know the answer to your question. I am a reasonable enough person to know that I don't know the answer to that question, and I can't answer it with certainty. I can tell you what other experts have said. I can tell you what the Gaza Mortality Survey shows. I cannot reasonably give you a better answer. So your answer to your question, my words in your mouth is that you think, Alex DeWall is probably, it's good enough for him, it's good enough for you. I don't see any reason to discount his estimate

any more than anyone else is. But this is what I'm, you're, you're trying to like logic your way through this, which is fine, but I'm trying to point out to you. Because you kept saying, why wouldn't Hamas show us? Why wouldn't Hamas show us? On the flip side, why doesn't Israel show us? Why doesn't Israel simply allow a research team,

plenty of which have requested access and they've all been denied? Why, and one, including the one that I tried to put together, why wouldn't Israel just allow a research team to go through Gaza, all of it, not just the part inside the yellow line, and survey people like you just suggested? I don't think they're letting anybody in there for any reason, and I'm sure it's not because I'm sure it's not for reasons that you will respect. I'm not defending Israel. I know you're not. But what I'm trying to say is that the reason you're

heavily discounting the possibility of thousands or tens of thousands of starvation deaths is because you're saying Hamas has an interest in showing it. But they don't need the Israelis to research it. They can research it themselves. No, no, no. No one's going to, if Israel goes into their researches... You're seriously telling me that if Hamas puts out a study tomorrow that says, Muhammad the fighter who blew up a tank a few weeks ago has surveyed the population of Gaza, you're going to say, oh, look, they told us the truth. It's ridiculous. I wouldn't believe it. No, no, you're not going to believe it. If Israel... I wouldn't believe it.

goes, you're not going to believe it, but the fact is it's something, just like the 72,000 comes from Hamas, you believe that, you could believe this too. But if Israel goes in with a research team and comes out with a very well. I didn't say an Israeli research team. That's absurd. Nobody would believe that. Nobody would believe it. But that would be, that would be highly suspect. Yes, yes. There are plenty of Europeans that have asked there. Like I've tried to put together such a team as well. No, no, 100%. You're right. You're right. I misunderstood or I misheard you. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Like Israel's not letting an independent reason. independent researchers, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So, but even if it's 10,000, that's still, you know, only 20% of, or less than 20% of what we were, the number we were talking about. So. Correct. And that would be, and I cannot emphasize, and I know you agree, I cannot emphasize enough that

that would be, number one, 10,000 people starving your death is a horrific tragedy. But number two, we would both, the lower the number is the better. Of course. That's what we're, I think we both agree. agree on that. It's not, uh, but, but also the lower the number is the more, I keep coming back to it. And believe me, this is not a bullshit introspection I'm talking about. I mean, for years and years and years now, I've been, like, I know, I got one thing really wrong. I wish, I thought Trump was going to concede the election in 2020. I thought he was because I thought it was in his interest to do so.

I said, I'd give him another week. He's going to concede. He never did. I said, oh, I need to figure out. I need to update my software there. Why did I miss that? So, you know, but in some way, the people who... I don't know that you have to have perfect political predictions. I don't think that proves you misunderstand the world just because some nutcase did something crazy. No, but nevertheless, you try to calibrate.

So I'm just saying that the fact that people were ready to believe that 60,000, not just 60,000, 60,000 was the minimum. That's the way it was expressed. That was the minimum number, meaning it could be 100,000. That could be estimated with the available data, which I repeatedly caveated. Again, you are the only one making this claim. Yeah, but in some way, the people who said, I was ready to believe 60,000 was the minimum. If somebody said they were ready to believe that, that means that they either doesn't listen to me

or they have whatever mental block stops you from understanding. Well, you wrote it in a letter and submitted it to the authority. So it's not like you're just, you know, shooting the shit. shit. I mean, you, you, obviously, it had to be better than I would just say as a matter of integrity. If you don't, if you think something is like, if you think something is likely not true, you're not going to put it in a letter. You only put it in a letter if you think it's more likely true than not. That's not correct. The, um, or, come on. Of course it's correct. No, it's not. You wouldn't write a letter to them. What was the argument I made when we

I have the letter? I wrote the letter. I know what it says. What was the argument I made when we were sitting here talking about it? You said, we don't have great data. That's a statement of fact. What was the argument that I made? I'm not sure what you're getting at. The argument I made was that we don't know. Right. And we should care that we're starving children today. That's what it is, no.

Why is that hard for you to understand? Because, and some people, I don't like this. I'm not saying you're doing it on purpose. Some people express themselves in ways that they can point to something of both sides as a defense. So, yes, you said we don't know. but you also said, based on the data we have, 60,000 is the minimum we could imagine.

And you submitted that in a letter to, who was letter to? The first one was to Biden, then to Trump. Yeah, to the government. So, you know, so then you have to say, well. In a plea to get them to investigate this. Right. Okay, look, look. So, so it's like you said we don't know, but obviously,

obviously if you thought we don't know, but it's, I think this is extremely unlikely. Well, if you thought it was extremely unlikely, you didn't express that in the letter. The letter reads as if you actually believe 60,000 is the minimum. I think you did believe 60,000 was probably the minimum. You weren't 100% sure, but you thought it was likely, no? If we didn't think it was likely, it's not honest to put it in the letter, I think. I guess that's a point of disagreement we're going to have.

Okay. I do not, it's very, I'm having a hard time roughing my head around this. You're saying unless I found convincing evidence that 60,000 or any significant amount of evidence, a preponderance of evidence, sure, that X number of people, that there had been mass starvation in Gaza. Unless I found that evidence, I shouldn't have brought it up. I'm saying I wouldn't write. Oh, go ahead. But that's assuming, or kind of as, I don't even know what the right word is, that implies

that my goal was to blame someone for doing this. My goal was to try to point out to the United States government, both to Biden and to Trump, the savageness of what we were doing to the Palestinians in Gaza. That was my goal. My goal was not to prove that Israel is Nazi Germany or something. Like that wasn't what I was trying to do. I was simply trying to point out that the United States is involved in some serious crimes in the Gaza Strip. This could potentially be one of them. And for some, and you know, I have to be honest, this, the matter of starvation, especially because Gaza is so young,

The matter of starvation really hits people's hearts. Of course. And I was trying, like, it's a letter to a politician. It's a letter to a political office, I should say. So you're saying you suspected it wasn't true, but you thought it was justified the ends? No, there was only this. Like, look, if, if it's, it's, it's 1942. And one guy sneaks a, uh, sneaks a testimonial out of Auschwitz to the, um, to the ICRC,

drops it off at your place. I know you weren't alive. I'm just pretending. Uh, drops it off at your place. And you say, say, wow, wow, this guy's talking about gas chambers and mass slaughter, mass graves, starvation. Yeah, but what if 20% of the people in Auschwitz have cell phones and they can text them and tweet them? We wouldn't need that.

Auschwitz is obviously an extreme example. No, okay. You're missing the point. I'm trying to say that in that case, you could do one of two things. You could say, well, there's not really that much evidence. I'm not comparing the Auschwitz and Gaza. I'm trying to point out the logical inconsistence. But it is a comparison.

If 60,000 people are starving to death, it's like Auschwitz. I'm trying to, the death rate at Auschwitz is much higher than that. I'm trying to point out the logical inconsistency. If you got this information, you're saying you would just throw it in the trash. Oh, it's just one there. You know, I'll hang it on my wall. And when I get to 10 things on my wall, then I'll ask the government of Germany to look into this crazy thing that's going on. No, I understand what you're saying.

And there's something to what you're saying, in my opinion. What I'm trying to get at is, by all indications from the letter and just from the way you came across here and also that on the olive tree, I feel that you absolutely... What's the olive tree? That's the closet. Oh, sorry.

The restaurant does it. that you absolutely believed that you don't know what the number is, but that it was a large number. When you say 60,000 is the minimum, okay, well, what about, froze, could it be 40,000? Yeah, I guess it could be 40,000, 60,000 more likely. If I said, what are the odds that it's 4,500? You'd be like, of course not.

But if you're saying now is like, this is just some evidence. You don't know if it's reliable, not reliable. It could be, you know, somebody said something, so I put it in a letter. I never really believed it. Well, it's not somebody said something. It's the integrated food security phase classification. Yes, yes, yes.

You're right. Actually, that's like, that's the, that is the, and for, it's also the famine early warning system that the run literally by the United States government. Okay. The two, the two most prominent authorities that investigate and report and raise the alarm, famine early warning system. Yeah. Well, in the world, both run by the, by the West, funded entirely by the West,

they were the ones raising the alarm and I was pointing it I'm curious, do you think the IPC was irresponsible in publishing their reports on this matter? I don't know enough to answer that. If they, why, like their report,

the IPC reported this dirty? Was the famine early warning system, irresponsible in reporting this? They reported it to the president. I'll answer you, possibly. And if I were in charge of the IPC and somebody presented this data, I would ask my

staff or my organization, the same questions that I've asked you, well, how come we're not seeing this? How come we're not seeing that? And then I would get answers for them as to why. And then I would preemptively include in my report an answer to the questions that certainly, I'm not unique, probably, in thinking this, preemptively answer the questions that many people will have at a common sense basis like you're saying this, but it's not like Auschwitz where nobody knows what's going on in there. We're seeing pictures every day. If they didn't do that, then I would say that the person in charge that organization absolutely deserves criticism. Why he didn't do that, I don't know. But if you are trying to be an objective purveyor of information, really objective,

and there's an obvious or apparent obvious hole in what you're presenting. Yes, it's irresponsible not to at least speculate. And by the way, studies do that, you read scientific studies. I read them a lot. Very often there'll be a section in theirs, well, what about this? And we're not sure about this. And we have an account. They will actually preemptively try to bring out the questions that a reasonable

scientists will have based on what they're presenting. They didn't do that at all. Have you read the reports? That's why I don't want to answer. No, no, but listen to what you just said. You just said they haven't done that at all. Well, if they had, you would have come up with the answers for me. So the long and short of it is that no scientist would ask how many pictures are there?

That's the... But why are there? Okay. But if you... No, no, but I do want to just point out if you, we already talked about it, but if you do want to know the answer to questions like that, Alex DeWall is the person you should talk to. All right. I want, please, let's do that. And, and, um, uh, I, I don't want to make you sit through the rest of the video.

We've been here too long already. You are really, you're right by me for us, even though I, I do, I do think that this, that there's a lens issue here with one of us. I also want to be, let me be clear. Yeah. I do not deny that I have a particular perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict and more importantly, the U.S. is role in it. That's my, my, I, tell me if I'm wrong, because, you know, that's fine. I think you will, he will. No, that's, yeah, you're like, he won't hesitate. Don't worry.

I think your lens is a, um, is a pro-Israel one, and that's fine. I don't agree with it, but I, I don't think it means you're some monster or something like that. I think, though, that you assume that my lens is a pro-Palestinian one. My lens is one. My lens is one. My lens is one. I don't where I do not want my own government involved in crimes. That's fair enough. I do not like, you know, like last time I, you know, somebody put, because I made the mistake of reading the Twitter comments last time, somebody said, oh, this guy pretends he's not political,

and then he's citing this literature and that literature, and he's obviously read a lot about the history. That was my burner account. But the point is like, when I said I wasn't, I don't think I said I'm not political. I think what I said is I don't have any interest in the political outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. if the...

But you edited Finklestein's book? Yeah. Okay. That's the thing. Well, and to be fair, I did that when I was in my early 20s. And I do, and actually, now that you bring it up, maybe I'm happy to discuss it if you, if you want. My thinking has definitely changed very much in that regard over my lifetime. I'm 44 now.

When I started learning about this, I was 18. It was the second of defaude I broke out when I was a freshman in college, so it was just a big thing on. campus. The lens, or the options for you to be were pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. And it seemed to me that being pro-Palestine was the more decent position. So I took that for a long time. I used to wear a little Palestinian flag on my lapel. A lot of my employees do, yeah. They'll get there. But as I went on, and actually, while I was editing Finkelstein's book, the one called Beyond Chutzpah, which most of the... mostly is about Alan Dershowitz in his ludicrous book, The Case for Israel, I started to realize, because I was living in Israel at the time.

Why were you living in Israel? I worked with a Palestinian Jewish cooperative there that tried to solve intercommunal problems in Haifa. Yeah. So I lived, you know, you know, the Baha'i Temple. It's like, it goes right out to Ben-Gurian Street. I lived, I actually just went back there in December, but I went back to the apartment. I was like, oh, my God. The, if you walk up Bengarian towards the Baha'i Temple, go right and walk.

There's like a little bit of a hill and a curve to the left. I used to live right over there. Does it have to be mutually exclusive to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine? No, I completely agree with it. I don't think it does. But this is my point, is that if you, when it's presented to you, especially as a young, I was young, I was 18, when it's presented to you in this way, you pick aside, you move on with you, go on.

You know, the more I read, and especially when I started to read the human rights reports, I always, you know, my first, is the street right now. I started to realize these are all American weapons. This is all American diplomat. I just started to realize more the role of the United States, which is kind of obvious, but it's not that obvious. It's kind of hidden. So yeah, so my thinking has actually evolved in that way a little bit.

Now, I don't know if it matches up with Norman Fingleston's understanding of things. I honestly have no, I never talked to him about it. So, you know, you have to ask him. I don't know. But the, but when you, when you take the position, and you're actually Israeli. My mom is. Your mother, and one of your parents was also, right? Both your parents.

So, yeah. So, like, if, my mom's actually Palestinian. She was born. It was Palestinian. My mother is. Really? My mother is much more anti-Israel than you, by the way. She is.

Well, but that's the thing. It's like, when you're, if you are Israeli or you are Palestinian, then I understand having, like, sticking to that, it's kind of, I don't want to call it tribal that's degrading, but it's a tribal perspective. fine. But I'm neither of those things. I'm not in any way. I'm not Muslim. I'm not Christian. I'm not Arab. I'm not Palestinian. I know my parents are from a small ethnic and religious minority in Pakistan and they came here and they they, you know, my parents actually left Pakistan because it was hard for them to live as non-Muslims there, you know, so they don't have any great love for,

for what's going on or for like, you know, the work that I do. It doesn't doesn't particularly interest them. But the, but I'm an American. It's really the only national identity. or group identity that I have, other than being male, I suppose. You know, my own ethnic group is like 10,000 people in the U.S., 10 or 20,000 people. It's very, very small. What's it called? The Parsis. I barely interact with them.

There's none near where I live, for example, because it's just a small group of people. So that's my concern. And it's hardly only a concern with Israel, Palestine. Like, remember, I've worked in Ukraine. I've worked in other places. I'm going to go to Ethiopia in September. And you risk your life. Well, that's dramatic.

But this is the point. It's like I think by taking the American, by taking the lens of the question of what is the United States doing here, that's when I think it allows somebody to look, to step back for a second and say, wait a minute, I don't have to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. For these terms, don't even mean anything.

If I accept that the U.S. is deeply involved, I can just ask what is the U.S.'s involvement doing, right? And if I, if that's, when that becomes the question, It's much easier to take a... What do you think the outcome? And this is what gets back to the question of starvation. Can I get a question? Yeah.

Because we do have to go. But just... We had to go 10 minutes ago. It's all. But... And I'm sensitive to your, you know, feelings as an American. What do you think the outcome will be

when America no longer provides aid to Israel, but the Chinese and the Iranians and everything? everyone else continue to provide aid to Hezbollah and Hamas. What do you foresee as the... You didn't read Moses' book that I sent you. So you should read that book. Okay, I will. I will.

He hasn't read my books either. Which books do you? We can get to that at the end. The only bush I... Surely you must have read it. The only bush I trust is my own. That's one of whom. Is it really?

I don't know that one. You're a doctor. You can handle it. It's a great dog. We have to go. I can talk to you for another hour. We have to go. But just to answer the question.

Say whatever your last piece. I completely agree. So I have called for an, you know, me and the other doctors and Amnesty International, lots of us have called for an arms embargo in Israel. That is not the same thing as, and excuse me, I actually said that incorrectly. Me and Amnesty and all the others have called for an arms embargo on the Middle East. That is a, no, no, but this is, this is critically, well, it's not going to happen unless America is making that.

Israel couldn't even get an arms bar. arms embargo in Gaza when they had a fence on Egypt's side and a fence on the Israeli, and every single thing taken in and out was inspected. They had thousands of rockets. You can't get an arms and arms. The rockets are all homemade. But that's the point. If you want to get into the, I will just say one thing.

Arms embargoes. In arms embargoes, where do the explosives from those rockets come from? I don't know what I'm just saying like China and Iran's going to cooperate. You should know the answer to that question. What's the answer? It's all from unexploded. Israeli ordinance. Okay.

In other words, if Israel doesn't drop bombs on Gaza, there is no way to blow anything. You may or may not be right. I am 100% right. This is a well-reported thing in multiple places. Is it actually, this is the lens again, you actually believe that the Ayatollah in Iran was going to get on board an arms embargo against weapons to Hezbollah because Faro's it's so outlandish. Of course, they're dedicated to destruction of Israel.

They have a countdown clock. They have a countdown clock. That's what I've heard over and over. They have a countdown clock in Tehran, the 30 years of destruction of Israel. Hezbollah is not even, they're not. So what happens with the clock at zero? What are you talking about? This is their national cause.

No, it's not. Hezbollah is not Palestinian. They're not Sunni. They just want to. Neither is Iran. So you think Iran would get on board with arms of bargo? If you had read Mao's book. Yeah, but you would think.

What you would see is that he says one of the main failures of Israeli understanding of the, I'm talking about the Israeli government and the strategic sphere, the strategic studies, people, the military. One of the main failures to understand the world that they live in was focusing exclusively on Arab rhetoric, which Iran's not an Arab country, but it would still apply, instead of Arab actions. And he points out that at no point did the Arab world, ever invest enough in its military structure to even potentially threaten Israel. That is simply

a fact of the matter. You can talk about the 1973 war. 150,000 rockets in the north threatened Israel. So, no, and so again, Zev Mao goes through this. He wrote his book in 2006. You really should read it. The, uh, he taught when, uh, he is, he specifically discusses the, the withdrawal. I know just because I was reading it just a few weeks ago. He specifically discusses the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. And he says that every, and again, you said you don't read the Hebrew press, but maybe if you spoke to Israelis at the time, every Israeli analyst was saying, this is a disaster. They're going to start shelling the north. They're going to start shelling the north. They didn't do anything. They didn't do anything. And in fact, if you can think, you might want

to think about this for a second. Hesbollah is the only national liberation group that I've ever, that I know, I've ever heard of. If you can give me a counter example, I'd love to know about it, that has ever liberated a country from occupation and then not taken the country over. They did not take over the government. They did not get rid of the confessional system that keeps the Sunni and the Christian minorities in power. They didn't do any of that. So until 2006 or seven, I can't, when was the 2006 was the, 2006 was the last war, or the war before the last. But anyway, 2006 was the first war between 2000 and 2006.

Hezbollah repeatedly said, you need to give us our captives back. it wasn't until they reached the very end of this request over and over six years of asking for their captives back that they captured three Israeli soldiers on the border and then started a war with Israel. This is my point. If you, there is no one is calling for disarming Israel. You're misunderstanding the call.

The call, and actually there was just an editorial about this in Hart's two days ago. The call is for there to be some level of military parity between Israel and the other states in the region. That's usually how peace is achieved. And if that were to happen, and if, and I'm telling you this, and I mean it honestly, I don't know if you'll believe me, but if that were to happen, and if the Arab world were to start to all of a sudden mobilized to destroy Israel, I would be the first person to sign up as a physician to go work with the IDF. I don't want Israel to be invaded. I don't want Israelis to be massacred. That's completely and utterly, that that would be a crime against humanity. But right now, what's happening is the opposite. Okay. Believe me, I'm not cutting off because I don't like to say, we have to go. I also don't know. We have to go. I also don't know. have much to contribute to this part of your conversation because I don't know much about

that stuff. So I'm not going to read Moses. I'm sure I don't agree with you though. But read I'm telling I sent it to you for a reason. Zev Mos is a conservative Israeli nationalist. He is the governor of governor. You're leaving town tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning. You know, because I'm having dinner tomorrow night

with an Israeli journalist and I would love to have invited you. I don't want to say on the thing, but I'll tell you what we disconnect. But maybe next time I can pull some I'm going to like that off. All right. Foros Sidwa, thank you very much. You are, as Bill O'Reilly, you're a stand-up guy. But, no, no. Remember he used to say that? No, I didn't really want. I made every attempt not to pay attention to him, yeah. No, that was a good show. I suppose. I never saw it. I mean, my dad, my dad loved it. I saw when I was 16, 17. The only part, the only thing I know about Bill O'Reilly is that viral video clip when he goes, fuck it. Well,

We're doing live. No, he's a blowhard in a way, but the show, as opposed to Fox News is unwatchable now, the show, he used to, you could imagine why I said, I think this, I think that, you know, the oil companies are jacking and prize up. He was kind of a populace. Bring me the best expert that disagrees with me. That's like what you say to me. Yeah, like that.

And you would see this. So the debate on the O'Reilly show was compelling, as opposed to what it became later with like Laura Ingram and where they just bring on. people either they agree with or like foils were idiots. Or lunatics, yeah. Yeah, yeah, which I stopped watching. Anyway, all right. You're supposed to say you're a mensch, not your stanz-off guy.

You know what I mean? He knows, you know what a menship. Of course he knows what a mention. You are a mensch. You are a mensch. All right. We'll cut that part out. All right, good night, everybody.

Thanks, man. Nice talking to you guys. Thank you. Thank you.