The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Omer Bartov on the Genocide Debate - Hamas Must Be Destroyed (But Not This Way).

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Omer Bartov discusses his recent article in The New York Times accusing Israel of genocide. A contentious conversation. Links: https://newrepublic.com/article/96369/hitler-wwii-middle-east-islam https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2004/12/19/an-end-full-of-horror/f62352ab-2561-45bf-ad33-e1368d1e81cd/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/ (https://archive.ph/tnIVC) https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-human-rights-expert-william-schabas-a-strong-case-that-israels-response-constitutes-the-crime-of-genocide-a-da7e4524-ab3b-40e4-b409-f8fca9c081b8 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/world/middleeast/hamas-gaza-israel-fighting.html

There is a very harsh thing that anybody would come to if they read Bartov, which is, what do you do? You know, I have come to start saying that, and these people I'm about to list, they don't like each other, but that people like Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson and Bartov and the pro-Hamas people, they've created a school of thought which I call the One More Chancers. What do I mean by the One More Chancers? Yes, of course, the Nazis were terrible. Yes, of course, Hitler was horrible. But you know what? Look at all the people that died in World War II.

They should have just given him one more chance. They didn't have to bring the world to 60 million deaths over Poland. Yes, of course, if he continued, but you know what he said he was going to stop at Poland, maybe he would have. Why not? Why not give him one more chance? Putin. Of course, Putin is terrible, but you know, are we really going to bring the world to the brink of World War III over Ukraine? You know, Ukraine has a lot of ethnic Russians and it's always been, you know, it's always been kind of a Siamese twin with Russia. Let's

give him one more chance. By all means, if he goes into another country, that will be our limit. What about Hamas? Everything that they say implies they want to let Hamas stay in charge. They should let Hamas stay in charge, even though they promise to do it again. So what are they saying? Give them one more chance. And I didn't get to ask him. And then if they do it again, yes, by then all means, but we're going to give them one more chance.

This is Live From the Table, the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller available wherever you get your podcasts, available on YouTube for that multimedia experience. This is Dan Natterman, comedy seller, comic, along with Noam Dorman, comedy seller, owner, along with Perry L. Ashenbrand, our producer and an on-air personality as well. We have with us, we're honored to have with us

Professor Omer Bartov, excuse me, Professor Omer Bartov. He's a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and he just wrote a fairly talked about article for the New York Times called I'm a Genocide Scholar, I know it when I see it. He's not in studio. He's coming to us through the miracle of video conferencing. Please welcome Amir Bartop to our show.

How are you, sir? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. I'm expecting a fairly intense discussion today and looking forward to it. By the way, just before I start, I thought you're 72 years old, is that correct? 71. 71, you look terrific.

Thank you. Yeah, okay. So, look, obviously this is a very difficult topic for anybody Jewish and although this is, I was thinking about how difficult this is for me and then it occurred to me It must be quite difficult for you as well Even on the other side maybe even more so in some way on the other side of the position. So I Just prepared some Comments here that I want to read at the top to frame the conversation. I hope you'll bear with me

It's more than I usually do but This is just so important to me. I just wanted to make sure I had all my thoughts gathered. So I'd like to make this conversation your chance to convince people like me. Your column, to me, seemed geared towards the people who already lean your way, but it didn't really deal at all, in my opinion, with the counterarguments that were certainly on the tip of the tongue of anyone like me who read it. I think most of us would agree that the most persuasive arguments contend with the most powerful versions of the other guy's positions and then dispose of them. To me, here's the central tension. Hamas has developed the strategy

of putting a huge number of civilians between itself and any legitimate military target, a disproportionate number in the language of the laws of war. Your answer, it's a purely theoretical answer in my opinion, is that Israel just needs to find a different way to deal with this threat and accomplish its goal of defeating Hamas. A goal I think which you agree is a worthy goal. You can correct me if I'm wrong. But the practical truth, in my opinion, is that what you're saying is that Hamas has developed the ultimate royal flush winning hand strategy and Israel must capitulate and leave them in power because there is no way to transfer or translate your theory into

reality. We've watched this for two years now. Nobody's really, I think, made a convincing case that there is. I intend to quote Omer Bartov extensively today, but here's one of my favorite quotes of yours. You said, the absence of clarity is the beginning of complicity. And I think that's right because there's issues which are easy to avert your eyes from, but you follow them step by step.

The answers can be very disturbing. One thing that bothers me very much about your column and the genocide debate is kind of a sort of glibness of it, in my opinion, again. As I said, it resonates with those who already agree with you, but it doesn't deal with the long list of complexities that would be needed to persuade skeptics like me, who require a high evidentiary standard to prove the most evil of all crimes, that my people are guilty of the most evil of all crimes, or for that matter to convince the ICJ, which in 2015 ruled that genocide must be the only inference that could reasonably

be drawn from the acts in question. Every Israeli action, even if excessive, even if it's disproportionate, is explainable to me as a countermeasure to a Hamas strategy. In fact, it requires no intellectual strain at all, I think, to even have a intuitive what these strategies would be if you read about what Israel's up against. Further, channeling, now maybe this isn't right, channeling Potter Stewart's quip about pornography, you say you know it when you see it.

But to me, the situation in Gaza bears little resemblance to historical genocides, and I'm no expert, but I tried to read up on it. When is a genocidal regime ever faced an enemy strategy specifically designed to make civilian casualties and horrible destruction inevitable? When before has a victim of genocide ever bragged, commenting, this was in the Wall Street Journal where they intercepted Sinwar's communications, commenting on the death of

their own people, that their strategy is working and we have them just where we want them. Further, we're dealing with the intricacies of Israeli coalitional politics, where statements from opposition figures and journalists may be colored by the same political derangement syndromes that we've seen for the last 10 years in this country. People hate Netanyahu. No matter what he says, they will say he's wrong. It's worth noting that some of Netanyahu's current fiercest critics themselves were accused of war crimes over and over again by academics like you, maybe not you, but people in your

milieu. Yes, the death toll is horrific. It should force, you know, I hate to, when I read this, I feel like it comes across as insincere. People who know me know that it's not. The death toll is horrific and it has to force any decent person to check and recheck and recheck again their moral arithmetic because whatever your opinion might be about the exaggeration of the casualty numbers, one's opinion might be, the truth is certainly bad enough. Very bad. Yet, Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw approximately 200,000 civilians vaporized instantly, and you and the other scholars don't classify that as genocide.

Iran-Iraq war claimed 500,000 to a million lives, including 65,000 casualties on the first day in 1987. No one even wondered about whether it was genocide, let alone the four million civilians that died in the Congolese Civil War. Yet, you've likened all these other incidents to second-degree murder, while what Israel is committing is first-degree murder. What makes this case particularly unique is that Israel faces an explicitly genocidal enemy itself, one that you have written about as the modern-day carriers of the torch of Nazi-like anti-Semitism, stating,

this is Usain, when they say they will kill you, they will kill you if you do not kill them first. In every conceivable way, Hamas deliberately embeds and puts civilian population between itself and the Israeli army, making Palestinian casualties not an unfortunate by-product, but a central component of this strategy. Israel consistently articulates military objectives, degrading Hamas's capabilities, eliminating total networks, getting the hostages back, stopping the rocket attacks. So let me begin with this question. Given the ICJ's stringent legal standard, the genocidal intent must be the only reasonable

inference. How can you dismiss the reasonable inference that Israel's actions, however disproportionate they may be, even if you consider them war crimes, are motivated by legitimate security concerns against an enemy that explicitly calls for Jewish destruction or Israel's destruction? Can you point to any historical examples of genocide where the perpetrator faced such an existential threat and where that threat deliberately used its own civilian population as both shield and propaganda weapon? Welcome, Omer Bartov.

So that's my, I didn't read it as well as I'd like to have, but I think you get the point. So you can respond directly and of course in any way you want to. You read it well. Thank you. Look, I mean, I can't respond to everything you said. If I had it in front of me, I'd be happy to respond to a variety of things that you said. But let me just speak about a few things here. I'd be happy to respond to a variety of things that you said. But let me just speak about a few things here.

I wrote about Hamas, what was it, 20 years ago, something like that, in the New Republic. That's I think what you're quoting. Hamas, its founding charter is a very strange document, I think from 1988, if I remember correctly. It cites at length passages from a fraud document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So it's anti-Semitic, it's insane, and it clearly caused for the destruction of the state of Israel. And the Jewish people, right, have let the rocks and trees say, there's a Jew behind me, come out and kill him or something like that.

Yeah, it's more focused on Israel, but it does cite from the Quran as well. So Hamas is not a particularly nice organization. In fact, Can I just stop? I don't know. I'm not going to pepper you, but just on that issue, because I think it's important because I feel like you're shifting the nuance. You said Hitler could not have put it better.

That was your quote about the Hamas charter. That's not about Israel to me. That's about Jews. But continue. Go ahead. In 2015, a man who is now the Minister of Finance in Israel and the Minister within the Ministry of Defense in Israel, which means that he's in charge of the West Bank, said Bank said in a speech that Hamas was an asset to Israel. Now why did he say that? Precisely for the reason that you cite, that Hamas for Israel

was the best card that it could hold to the rest of the world, that it could do nothing about the Palestinians, but just manage the conflict, which was Netanyahu's policy for a very long time. Indeed, Netanyahu had a deal with Qatar that Qatar would provide millions and millions of dollars to Hamas. These dollars would be handed over to Hamas in big bags full of money, cash, by the Israelis, so as to maintain Hamas in power. Why? Why was Israel maintaining Hamas in power?

It's the same reason we gave bags of cash to the Iranian mullahs to buy them off. No, I mean, if you want me to respond, you have to let me speak as long as you did. Go ahead, sorry. want me to respond, you have to let me speak as long as you did. Go ahead. Sorry. The reason was, as Smoltrich explained, and as Netanyahu made this policy, that for Israel, Hamas was a very good thing. The problem for Israel was a Palestinian Authority. Because the Palestinian Authority is not as corrupt, as unpopular, but has international recognition.

Hamas has no international recognition. Everybody thinks about Hamas that it's a terrorist organization, that he ruled brutally in Gaza over the Palestinians there. And so the policy of Israel was, under Netanyahu, and you know he's been prime minister for a very long time, with very short intervals, the policy was, we want Hamas in Gaza because then we can say that we can't do anything about the Palestinians. They are ruled by these people, these people are crazy, they want to destroy us. Now this policy of managing the conflict, which seemed to be very successful, exploded on October 7 when Hamas actually broke out of this cage that they were in in Gaza surrounded by a multi-billion electronic

fence and murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians. And it was then that a different decision was made. That is, if we can't manage with Hamas, which had been the policy, had been the Israeli policy, then we have to destroy Hamas. And Netanyahu spoke and speaks to this day about an absolute victory against Hamas. So what does an absolute victory against Hamas mean? How do you accomplish that?

The policy of Israel, as I understand it, in destroying Hamas, since it is hiding in tunnels, tunnels that were built with the millions of dollars that came from Qatar that were handed over by the Israelis to Hamas, since they are hiding in these tunnels and since they are in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, that's where they fight from, since that is the situation, how do you accomplish an absolute victory over Hamas? You destroy Gaza. You destroy everything. You level every building there.

You make the whole area level. And then, since the argument immediately after October 7th was that there are no uninvolved people, the very president, the president of the state, was not even from the Likud party, was the former head of the Labour party, said that. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d'etat, murdering their family members who were in Fatah. There's a short memory in the world.

Israel evacuated Gaza unilaterally in order to show that it's willing to make peace. I was a member of that cabinet. We said to our nation this will be Hong Kong of the Middle East. Listening to your answers in the last few minutes, I'm a little confused because on one hand you say that Israel abides by the rules of war and is very careful to avoid the loss of civilian life in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time, you seem to hold the people of Gaza, the civilians of Gaza responsible for not removing Hamas. And therefore, by implication, that makes them legitimate targets.

No, I didn't say that. But by implication, you said that. I did not say that. I want to make it clear. I was asked something about separating civilians from Hamas. But with all the respect, with all the respect, if you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me Am I allowed to defend myself? We are fighting terror Humanity has to decide are we accommodating terror are we fighting terror? We are fighting terror and we saw the worst atrocity possible

We see the most atrocities possible by a whole campaign of a movement which has major support with our neighbors. Major. Major. They believe. Many people believe in it. I agree. There are many, many innocent Palestinians who don't agree to this. So there's a consensus in Israel. There are no people uninformed. Everybody is involved. Then you have to move the people out of there too. You have to empty the territory, level it, move the people to Indonesia, to Libya, to Ethiopia. That's the countries that are being now negotiated with to accept those people who would be forcibly deported from there. And then, well, then the territory will be yours, and you can build a nice either, you know, vacation homes

funded by Trump or Jewish settlements. Let me just finish this last one. I spoke a long time, someone, but then after that, let's get a quicker backtrack. Just this last point. Now, you can say that Hamas has a general side of intent against Israel. It obviously does not and has never posed an existential threat to Israel because it doesn't have tanks, it doesn't have airplanes, it doesn't have artillery, it doesn't have a navy. It had between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters mostly equipped with AK-47s and rocket launchers.

But it would have maybe had it been able to do it. And the answer to that genocide, the intent by Israel, and that's my final argument, is that if you want to eliminate that threat, you have to respond by genocide. You have to destroy Gaza entirely, remove its people and level it. And that's what Israel is doing right now. Okay, so a few things. First of all, I do think that my answer is apt that Netanyahu thought he could buy off Hamas along the same way that Obama thought he could buy off Iran. Liberal people are a little hypocritical on that, I've always thought.

They were all for the idea of buying off Iran, but they criticized Netanyahu for buying off Hamas. However, as we all, I think, know that what it would have looked like to not buy off Hamas I mean the Israeli blockade of Gaza was bad enough Without what it might have looked like looked like if Netanyahu had made sure not an extra dime Not an extra this in other words a full court press on Hamas was not going to be supported by the world But that was the the only alternative. Well, okay, and, well, I'd get into alternatives, but as far as, you know, I was more on the left.

I lived through, you know, Camp David and Taba, and I saw just recently Bill Clinton with tears in his eyes when he described Arafat walking away. And then the second Intifada was launched. I saw a clip the other day of Arafat's wife saying that Arafat told her, I'm going to start an Intifada. This was what Israel got in return for its righteous liberal policies. And then again with Olmert, then again in 2014 when Abbas wouldn't answer Obama.

And I think just like the Palestinians have a psychology which we should be mindful of and deserves talking about, Israel has a psychology. We tried this, they blew up our children. We tried that psychology we tried this they blow up our children we tried that we tried this now and and we and i think that i don't say this lightly. That better netanyahu policy if he's right and if they are right and i think they are right that there is no appetite. right that there is no appetite for peace on the other side. God forbid we should ask of them one leader, one like a Sadat to say, hey, you know what? That deal you offered us, that was actually quite good. And let's sit down and no more children dying. Let's see if we can work this out. Exactly what Sadat did. There's actually a template for this. It's not even unprecedented what we're asking to say, you know what, the world doesn't understand this.

We understand this. We benefit by divide by our enemies being divided because it takes the pressure off of us, not because we're evil, but because forgive me if this is his mentality, but because they're evil. If they would say to us and mean it, we want to lay down our arms and we want peace with you, of course we would say yes. And by the way, if we would say no, the Israeli people would throw us right out of office just like they moved to the left with Sadat.

But the world doesn't understand this. The world gets more and more in the throes of the underdog. So you know what? This might be the best thing. Let's just tread water this way. I don't regard that it's real politique. I don't regard that as an immoral or irrational reaction if he's correcting his assumptions that right now there is no appetite for peace.

Anyway, I'll let you respond to that and then we'll go on to something else. Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by no appetite for peace. What I can say is, if you talk about the peace with Egypt, and I was in that war in 1973, I experienced it personally as a soldier. In 1972, Anwar Sadat, then president of Egypt, suggested to Israel that he would sign a peace with Israel if it returned the Sinai Peninsula. But he didn't want Gaza. He didn't want Gaza back. Right. And do you know what the Minister of Defense then said, Moshe Dayan? I don't remember. He said, better Sharm El-Sheikh, which is the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where people like

to go and scuba dive and all that, better Sharm El-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm El-Sheikh. Yeah, but then he changed. No. That was in 72. Why did he change his mind? Because of the war of 73. The war of 73 killed 3,000 Israeli soldiers, some of my friends died in that war. And then after

the war, which was, you know, Israel kind of won it, but it was a really bad war with lots of losses. It shook the country terribly. It was the most dramatic thing that happened until October 7, and that was October 6 of 1973. After that, still under a lot of pressure from two American administrations and the shock of the war, Israel said, you know what? Okay, you can have the Sinai and we'll take the peace. All right. Let me just say, in a certain way. This is unknowable and and anybody can cherry-pick anything I just recently read Kissinger's book about great leaders and he went into this chapter a little bit and what I recall

I hope I'm getting it is right. Is that what he described is that in 72? Sadat was considered to be a lightweight that no one really took seriously this is still in the shadow of the genocidal attacks in 1948 under the flag of Drive the Jews into the Sea. The attack by Jordan that led to the... Every pickle that the Arabs find themselves in kind came after their attack right the reason these territories are occupied is because they attacked and Kissinger said that at some point

It became clear that actually Sadat was cut from a different cloth than they ever had imagined an Arab leader might be cut from and than they ever had imagined an Arab leader might be cut from. And once he broke through that barrier of mistrust, he found himself on the other side of a table of a very different group of Israelis, including that very same Moshe Dayan. So that's the Kissinger. That's not my interpretation. But Kissinger, as opposed to us, he was there in the room. He spoke to the characters involved.

I'll just say one thing about that. as opposed to us, he was there in the room. He spoke to the characters involved. I just want to say one thing about that. I wouldn't want the Sinai, except for the buffoon. I'll just say one thing on that. That on the second or third day of the Yom Kippur War, the war of 1973, Moshe Dayan said, this is the fall of the third temple. Moshe Dayan was totally shaken by what was going on. Of course.

So it was when Israel, which was flush with victory after 1967, and said, ah, nobody can do anything to us. We beat the hell out of those guys in six days. What can they do to us? Suddenly, he realized that, well that Israel also has limits to its power. And Israel forgot that lesson. And I remember that very well personally. I don't know about Kissinger, but I was actually right there. Israel forgot that lesson. October October 7, 2023, the huge fiasco by the Israeli army, which knew, had all the information about a coming attack by Hamas, had young female soldiers reporting from right across

the fence saying, these guys are preparing an attack and their officers sitting in the back say, ah, forget it, you are young women, what do you know? And half of them were killed and another third of them were taken hostage. That was the kind of euphoria of power that Israel began to feel again, because it had been occupying those people for decades without any possibility by Palestinians, neither Hamas, nor the PLO, nor Fatah, nor anybody, to present any existential threat to Israel, ever. The existential threat was by the Syrian army, was by the Egyptian army, but those Palestinians never presented any existential threat.

They've always been far, far weaker than Israel, and the Israelis got quite happy with them, and they said, we weaker than Israel. And the Israelis got quite happy with that. And they said, we can manage it. All right, I agree that arrogance is a part of the story of Israeli disasters. It's unique to the Israelis, but it's certainly part of the, it can be part of the national character, but anybody can be drunk with overconfidence.

Yet, I've told this story, I want to try to speed it up. My father was a very skeptical Israeli. And I remember when he was very skeptical of Sadat and all of it. And the story I'm about to tell, I'm sure it echoes a million stories that you're aware of. And we were in our bedroom, watching the TV, and Sadat came on the air, and my father began to weep, to weep, because he said, oh, he means it. He means it.

Give them whatever they want. We don't need the… because the Sinai was not what Israel wants. What Israel wants was the buffer, the buffer of the Sinai. And that's my position on it. As far as the existential threat goes, I don't know. I think that Hamas, existential threat is a word that gets thrown around. Does it mean usually like with existential threats, the United States was all kind of an existential threat. Well, the United States is not going to stop existing, but it can bring such damage to us and not just in violence, but in

forcing us to live in a way that a free country doesn't want to live, that it's a threat to our existence as we feel we have the right to have. And Hamas has been a long time beyond a threat that any other nation in the world would live with. And this time, they actually showed that they might have been an existential threat because it wasn't a far gone conclusion that Iran wouldn't join in, that Hezbollah wouldn't join in. They imagined that this would happen. We didn't know that the pager existed, let alone that they would work.

Netanyahu was reported as saying to Galant when he was reluctant to go to the north, all of Tel Aviv will be on fire. Now does that mean Netanyahu said that Israel ceased to exist? No, but it's enough that all of Tel Aviv will be on fire. That's enough of a threat. It doesn't have to be existential for a nation to say it's over the line. Now I want to read a little bit more about the New Republic. I want to understand how your thinking has changed. You say Hitler could not have said it better. These people must be taken at their word.

If a self-proclaimed liberation organization calls for the extermination of the Jewish state, do not pretend that it is calling for anything else. The absence of clarity is the beginning of complicity. And you go on to conclude, most liberal minded, optimistic, well meaning people are loathe to believe this. I agree with you on that. They would rather think that fanaticism is merely an epiphenomenal facade for politics, that opinions can be changed, that everyone can be corrected and improved.

No, there are those who practice what they preach and are proud of it. This is far tough talking. They view those who act otherwise, who compromise and pull back from the ultimate conclusions as weaklings, as targets to be easily conquered and subdued by their own greater determination and ruthlessness.

And then finally you say, when they say they will kill you, they will kill you if you do not kill them first. Now imagine if an Israeli leader said this today, you would accuse him of genocidal intent. No, my friend. I'll tell you what is so interesting to me in what I wrote all those years ago. That we have reached the situation now that because of Israeli transages, because you know, I wept, I'll just give you this anecdote, in 1995 I was sitting with my then six-month-old daughter on my lap and I was watching reports on the assassination of Rabin, not a man that I loved in particular, but was a pretty brutal general. But he had come to the conclusion

that the occupation had to end. And for that he was assassinated. And I sat there and cried, and I don't cry very often, because I realized that that was the end of any possible peace for at least a generation. And of course, it's much more than a generation. But it wasn't. So let me, let me now, now, what this situation has created is that now we have these kind of bloody-minded people on both ends. What I said about Hamas, and it's true about Hamas today, it's true about the people who are now in the Israeli cabinet. I don't know if you read Hebrew, if you follow the Israeli media,

but I can tell you the people... Before we deal with the cabinet, let's deal with Hamas, the other ones who attacked and refused to give up hostages. No, right now, right now, what is going on at this very moment is scores of Palestinians being killed every day. 17,000 dead children. Who are the people who are doing that? The people in charge of that are people like Ben-Gur and Smotrich. These people have exactly the same mentality as Hamas. They want exactly the same thing. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I just want to know if you still stand by your words, and I'll add more to that. By all available means of political, judicial, and if necessary by the

use of legitimate force, for these are people, you're talking about Hamas, who mean what they say. If you do not destroy them, they will destroy you. This is your words. Correct. It's fine if you don't believe them anymore, but I'm looking for clarity. Do you no longer think Hamas stands by what it says? Do you no longer think they're the threat that has to be destroyed? They are a threat that has to be destroyed.

Okay. So, we agree on that. So, how do you destroy them? So, how do you destroy them? So how do you destroy them? That's the next question. The first, we've established something that we both agree that the war aim to destroy Hamas legitimate. No, because that's not the war aim. If it were the war aim, what would destroying Hamas look like now? Right. That is the question. Okay. That's the question. Exactly. How do you destroy Hamas? Do you destroy Hamas by destroying

Gaza? Tell me how you do destroy Hamas. You destroy Hamas in two ways. A, you operate against them militarily. B, you provide an alternative. And the Israeli government has been adamant, Netanyahu has been adamant about not providing an alternative. Who is going to rule Gaza if Hamas is moved out? The IDF doesn't want to do it. Israel doesn't want to do it. Egypt doesn't want to do it. The US doesn't want to do it.

Who will do it? Well, the only people who can do it, wait? The only people who can do it are the Palestinians. And that's exactly what Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gur do not want. They don't want the Palestinians to rule over themselves. And so the only way to prevent that, to destroy Hamas, is to destroy Gaza. And that is what they're doing. And the people in the Israeli cabinet, I don't know if you follow it or not, but the people in the Israeli cabinet, what they are talking about

is removing the entire population. Did you hear what the minister of defense, the new one, Israel Katz, said just a few days ago? He ordered the IDF to create a humanitarian city in Rafah. Now, Rafah does not exist. It's a pile of rubble. He wants to take the people that had been moved to the coast, 600,000 people, and put them in a tent city over the ruins of the city of Rafah, surrounded by a fence, and

not let them out until they leave Gaza. That is to create a concentration camp for 600,000 people which will eventually accommodate all two million people so that they could be moved out. That is the final victory. So this mentality is precisely the same mentality as that of Hamas. I think this guy is a jackass. And he's a minister of defense. He does not say anything that Netanyahu does not allow him to say.

He's basically a puppet for Netanyahu. That's why he removed Garland. You know what? Time will tell. I'm going to predict now that that's not going to happen. I hope not. If it does happen. And then but let me just add because I, you know, Hamas and this, what's his name?

Shikaki, is that the name that the pollster, the Palestinian pollster? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. By all accounts, maybe until very recently, Hamas represented the kind of self-determination of peoples of the Gazan people. This idea of regime change, putting other leaders in charge, I actually have more sympathy for that discredited notion than other people do. I think Gaza would be a very good candidate for a Western imposed regime change. And it was, you know, when Hamas was weakest? Hamas was weakest during the successful part of the Oslo Accords, when people were talking about creating a new Hong Kong in Gaza.

Right. And of course, Hamas, I think we will agree this much that all those billions of dollars, if it had been a Sadat in charge of Gaza, we would not be in this situation. They would have, Israel, as much as you might think they're bloodthirsty, they don't want the rockets coming in. They didn't pull out of Gaza for the intention of terrorizing Gaza. They pulled out of Gaza because they wanted to be rid of Gaza. I mean, there's a certain common sense. Sharon didn't say I've got it

Let me get all the settlers out and I'll take out all the graveyards and I'll take all this flak and then we'll be able To terrorize them. Obviously he was trying to get this problem off his plate He was he was naive but you at one of the things that had gotten under your skin You, one of the things that had gotten under your skin was this kind of conflation of the innocent victims in Germany who were killed in Dresden or wherever, and Japan, with the Holocaust victims. And I have it here, it was a review of a book. You criticize the German people recasting themselves as victims. Let me just preface this by saying, obviously we all know that if Hamas would take safe passage and release the hostages, whether Smotrich and Netanyahu...

What do you think would happen then? I think that the Israeli people, because it's a democracy, it's very important. I don't know what's in somebody's heart, but I do have confidence that if Hamas were to take safe passage and release the hostages, there would be an Israeli public was already 5149 barely hanging by thread in favor of the right wing government as it had four elections in five years, whatever it was, was not going to ask for ethnic cleansing of Gaza if the Gazans released the hostages and Hamas left. There is no constituency. I think that is derangement. I'm afraid that you're naive about the Israeli public. You get to my point.

About the Germans recasting themselves as victims. You said Germany now hosts a minor cottage industry on the victimhood of the Reich's civilians. Hastings, that's the author you're reviewing, is especially concerned with the fate of the German victims of the Allied bombings, the mass expulsions from Eastern Europe. Yeah, by the way, they ethnic cleansed the Sedatelet.

But, and here's your final quote, which is to me very analogous to what Israel's facing, and it's your final quote, which is 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 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 so so there was no no talk of proportionality so nothing so let me 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 the Marshall Plan.

So if Israel were to say, what, by 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… Netanyahu, yes he has said that. No, no, no. If I find it, I'm going to cut it in. 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. Because I recall him saying. The whole point is that Israel could have said after October 7, we are going to destroy Hamas. We want to also rid Gaza of Hamas. We want to liberate the population of Gaza from the rule of Hamas. And once we destroy Hamas, we are going to build Gaza together with you

so that you have a decent place to live in and will give you autonomy, will give you whatever. None of that was said. What was said was there are no uninvolved people. Everybody is involved. We are going to flatten them. They won't have any water. They won't have any energy. They will have nothing. They are human animals and will treat them like human animals. Hamas is human animals. They did not. Everybody claims that. It is simply not true.

I saw a post on that. So there are two Gallant quotes about this. One is a short video snippet. We have no way of knowing what he said before or after it or whether he referred to Hamas. And the second is a cell phone camera of a speech he gave to his troops. We are imposing a complete siege of Gaza.

There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly. You saw what we are fighting against. We were fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against. Gaza won't return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas.

We will eliminate everything. If it doesn't take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months. We will reach all places. There is no way that our brothers, our children, our parents will be killed weeks or even months, we will reach all places. There is no way that our brothers, our children, our parents will be killed and we won't react because we are a state. So we understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation.

It'll change back 180 degrees and they'll regret this moment. They will regret it. I should note here that there's a tremendous amount of worthwhile information about this topic in the Atlantic magazine article called What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza? Journalists and jurists point to damning quotes from Israel's war cabinet as evidence of genocidal intent but the citations are not what they seem." By Yair Rosenberg. For instance, about the last quote that I just read, he informs us that a misleading

version of it spread all over the world before it was finally corrected. Quote, the misleadingly truncated version of Galant's quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC, the New York Times has made the same elision twice and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of the Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in the Washington Post where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said the quiet part out loud, while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about.

Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant's words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa's legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel's genocidal intent. It served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel's war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of the Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib. The clip, since viewed more than a half a million times, simply skips over, there will be no Hamas in its translation.

Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. After this article was published, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. Bloomberg's mistaken translation originated with the Associated Press, which also corrected the error. The New York Times corrected both articles containing the same error as did the Guardian and NPR. It's important to note that Bartov is referring to the first quote that I played, the news

conference one. I cannot find the context for it, so I'm unable to determine whether anything was said which would indicate if Galant had already made a reference to Hamas. It is simply not true. I saw a post on that. You can listen to that in Hebrew. Nobody says Hamas. He says they are human animals and will treat them as such. But they is a pronoun that could mean Hamas. How do you know that they refers to... I actually have a lot to say about this. I'm going to expand your point, but I have a lot to say. So first of all, there's an

article in the Atlantic magazine, not exactly a flaky outlet, which says that the sentence prior was cut out and that he did refer specifically to Hamas. It's simply untrue. I mean I listened to that news conference. Okay, I'm going to grant you for the sake of argument because this is as a matter of grammatical common sense. I mean we don't have to overlay our notions of trigger warnings and microaggressions. When a people know who their enemy is, and I'm going to read you some tweets here from October 7th and October 8th. Every time they say the enemy who we're fighting, they don't have to say Hamas. It's like, he's gay, now there's anything wrong with it.

Everybody knows, and I'll read you from October 7th, Prime Minister Netanyahu. We are embarking on a long, difficult war. The war was imposed on us by a murderous attack by Hamas, security cabinet statement. Political security cabinet convened tonight and made a series of operational decisions aimed at destroying the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

October 8, following the war that broke out due to the murderous terror attack on Israel by Hamas. There was a concern that the motivation to the terrorist elements blah blah blah blah around the country. Dear citizens of Israel, we've begun, I emphasize we have only begun to strike at Hamas. This quote after quote, the images of destruction ruined from Hamas strongholds in Gaza are just beginning. We have eliminated hundreds of terrorists.

Never talk about Palestinians Every place that Hamas operates from will be turned to ruins October 9th We always knew who Hamas is now the whole world knows Hamas is Isis We will defeat it just as enlightened world of it October 9th the horrors of the horrors that Hamas is committed We haven't seen since the atrocities of Isis October 9th again at the beginning of the war, this is the beginning of the war, I instructed to do five immediate things.

First is repel, there was still terrorists running around. Then second action being carried out at this moment, the shift to a massive attack against Hamas with unprecedented intensity. And I could go on, I have like five other statements here. You all go on, Hamas, October 7th, Hamas made a grave mistake this morning. So like this is to me

Blatantly Unfair you have as an Israeli citizen I hear over and over my leaders saying Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas not one saying the Palestinians by the way Always Hamas Hamas Hamas and then one time the guy may be speaking in artfully says, we're fighting human animals. Aha. He means this. No, no, no good faith person. I'm sorry, this on this one, this I have dig on this. That is a nonsense argument. Okay. That shall we compare it to the 24 seven exhortations of by the Hutus to go out and slaughter the Tutsis 24-7 songs written to it. So it compares it you're the expert. Tell me the genocidal rhetoric which was surrounded 20 to 1 by mentions in the proper way they the the Houthis slaughtered

800,000 people in a hundred days with bare hands and blunt objects and machetes in a hundred days with bare hands and blunt objects and machetes while the radio played kill them, kill the cockroaches, exterminate them over and over and over again. And it was nobody saying we only mean this. It's so, again, you say, you know, when you see it, that's, that's, this harkens to these genocides that you know. One statement by Galant, and by the way, let's just, let's also rehabilitate Gallant that since then we know he's been against Netanyahu. He's been against anything which he would be for if he did mean what you were saying. He's the one saying end the war. We've accomplished our objectives.

Let's be careful. And I mean, there's, there's a mountain this mountain this high to rehabilitate this man's character. So listen. It's a three-word sentence. It's terrible. I have to leave you in five minutes. I can sit and listen to you now for the next five minutes. That's fine.

Okay. But if you want to get some response. One more question after this. Go ahead. Because this is, I did not know that I was getting into the situation where I would have to listen to you ranting about this. If you want me to respond, you have to listen a little bit. Okay. And then one question after. I don't know how closely you follow events there. You obviously have strong opinions, but I don't know how well informed you are about the situation on the ground. The situation on the ground, whatever Netanyahu has said or didn't say or whatever you quote for him or you don't quote for him, is now that there is no Gaza.

That the whole place has been reduced to a pile of rubble. Gaza that the whole place has been reduced to a pile of rubble, that a minimum of 60,000 people have been killed, of them at least 17,000 children. Estimates are that it goes up to over 100,000. You're talking about 5% of the population. That's just killed. That all the hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, museums, parks, cafes, water plants, everything has been destroyed. There is no place to live there. That you have a generation of children who, even if they survive it, have suffered from severe malnutrition, from no medical help, from nothing. And that is in the name of, as Netanyahu said to quote him, that it's

culture or civilization against barbarism. So whatever you want to quote from him, what has been accomplished in Gaza up to now is its entire eradication. Now, was that meant from the beginning? We'll have to see. There were statements at the beginning that were clearly genocidal and were as incitement to soldiers. When Netanyahu said, remember Amalek, everybody in Israel, I don't know about you, but everybody in Israel knows exactly what it means. Remember Amalek, everybody in Israel, I don't know about you, but everybody in Israel knows exactly what it means.

Remember Amalek means wipe them out. These statements were made right at the beginning and one could have said at the time, yeah, people were angry because so many Israeli citizens, Jewish and not Jewish, there were quite a number of non-Jews who were slaughtered by Hamas as well, people were angry at that. And it might have been just statements made in the heat of the moment. But several months later, it became clear that this was a systematic operation aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable. That is the main point. And you can't do away

with it with all kinds of rhetoric and citing this and citing that. How will that stop? I don't know how it will stop. It looks like the only power in the world that can stop it is the American president, and he does not seem inclined to do so, nor the previous one was. And so this will continue. And the goal, as I told you, and it's clear because if you listen to the Israeli media,

you hear it all the time. The goal is to empty Gaza of its population. It may not succeed, but right now, the population has been completely debilitated. You have distribution points. Since late May, Israel has been distributing food in four points, although two of them are closed now. In those weeks, since the end of May, well over 800

people were killed trying to get food by Israeli troops using gunfire, tankfire, and artillery as crowd control. That's what you're seeing right now. Let me get back in, if you don't mind. First of all, I agree with you very much about this food thing in the aid distribution. I blasted them, uh, on the show and I was out in front of it when friends of mine were giving the benefit of the doubt. I said, there was no excuse that you read about people getting shot because they didn't know whether

to go left or right. This is just a shame. It's just a shame. They should be ashamed. And, of course, if you don't have it within you to be sympathetic to these poor people being shot, it's also playing into their hands and one of the most damaging things that ever happened to their strategic interests, which in an ironic way is the only reason one might assume that it's not intentional and just incompetence. But I want to say,

a few things, and I have one question, if you don't mind, I know you want to go, I have one question, if you don't mind, I know you want to go. When they talk about the shootings, the bombings of, and by the way, lawyers sign off on every single bombing, sometimes two lawyers and a card, bombings of schools. You cannot buy into that. You don't seriously buy into that. You cannot buy into that. You know that the IDF says on every illegal killing, on every killing, like destruction of ambulances, it says, we acted according to international law and if we didn't, we

will investigate. No, that I agree with you. Have you seen the results of any investigation? I think you're mixing two different categories and I'm only going to skip over it because I know we're about to run out of time and I want to get to the more important things. If you were going to stay, I would talk about it. Now I lost my train of thought. But I remember that there is a clarity, I forget your quote now about absence of clarity is a complicity, that when, where is it? I have it here when they are fighting from these areas

the laws of proportionality still Control but to continue to call them hospitals and mosques and schools You really break into two different languages Because by international law and I have the the quotes, I'm sure you know them better than I do. Once a school or a mosque or a hospital is used for military purposes, it is now a military

target. Again, proportionality still rules, but as I see it, there is no target. Hamas has gamed that system. They will make sure it's always disproportionate. People were criticizing Israel for killing 200 or 300 people to get their hostages out. Sure, we understand this now. Just as long as you can surround your target with enough civilians, the world will always say it's disproportionate. There's an article in the New York Times, anybody can Google it. It's one of the best ones I've seen. We talk about in the headline, it was how Hamas fights.

And it was based on videos and interviews with both Hamas and Israeli soldiers, like bullet points, using Hamas hospitals as command centers and weapon storage, using children as lookouts, rigging civilian homes with explosives and booby traps, turning entire residential areas into deadly zones long after combat, disguising fighters as civilians, using ambulances, storing weapons in children's bedrooms, creating tunnel networks under hospitals, school, UN facilities, storing weapons in mosques, launching rockets in near religious sites. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

I read that much. It goes all the way down into bullet points. And then of course, now we can say this is BS, but it's the New York Times, I'm not reading some right wing rag. And you know, if this is true, then again, that's why I criticized you at the beginning, then I would hope in your argument about genocide, you're saying, listen, I know they do this, I know they do that. But here's why despite all these things, rather than you just give a casualty number 53,000 died, I think that was your number 60.

And you don't even try to separate how many might be civilians from as if a casualty count is relevant to genocide. After as I said, 200,000 people evaporated in japan that was in genocide and final question you seem to have. Eliminated the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide you're not actually listen the show you could you could ask me about it and then i'm asking. me about it and then I could tell you. Okay. This is the last issue, but let's really examine it. There is a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ethnic cleansing is actually not well defined in international law. It comes as forcible displacement. But generally, ethnic cleansing is the attempt to move an ethnic group from a particular territory that another group wants for itself.

And once you move it out, then you don't care about it. And in point of fact, most of the genocides in the 20th century began as operations of ethnic cleansing, as one group trying to remove another group. Even the Holocaust was like that. Initially, what the Germans wanted to do was to rid themselves of the Jews, just to have them leave one way or the other. But they took over more and more territory in which there were more and more Jews and there was no place to move them to anymore. And so they chose to kill them. So ethnic cleansing and genocide are often connected. That's one thing that's-

It was like a gateway drug, as it were, but it's not... One becomes the other, yes. Now, the final thing I want to tell you is this, and then I really have to go. The final thing is this. Hamas is an organization that had to be fought, and maybe it had genocide intent. But if you think that the question, that the answer to genocide is genocide by a country that actually can do it, that is to try to bring- But she didn't answer my question. Wait, wait, wait. Haven't you described ethnic cleansing, not genocide? I'm getting there.

Sorry. If you let me finish. Sorry. I'm getting there. Sorry. If you let me finish. Sorry. If you try to resolve the problem with Hamas by emptying Gaza, by ethnic cleansing of Gaza, emptying it

of its own whole population so that there won't be any place to hide, right? Destroying all the buildings so there won't be any place to hide. And there is no place for these people to go because the borders are closed. Israel won't let them go into its own territory. Egypt won't let them go into its own territory. They are running around the Gaza Strip. They're being moved from one safe zone to another, which is then bombed,

and then they're moved to another safe zone, and meanwhile they're dying. That makes that ethnic cleansing operation into a genocide operation. That's precisely what is happening in Gaza. In November 2024, the former chief of staff and former defense minister, Moshe Yaron, who is a hard right guy, said, what do you think is happening in northern Gaza? It's ethnic cleansing. And when I spoke with him, because I've known him for 50 years, we were in office at school together, I said to him, you know, ethnic cleansing usually ends up as genocide. And he said to me, yes, it's true, but they don't have shooting pits there. Meaning, it doesn't look like Babi Yar.

It doesn't look like the Holocaust. But that was… You're saying ends up, but you've accused Israel of genocide now. Because this is what it is doing now. This is precisely what it's doing. Going to become genocide or it is genocide? It is genocide. It is the concerted attempt.

You have to understand genocide is a process. The intent is to destroy, and that's the definition of genocide. The intent- What does the ICJ, how does the ICJ, I have it in front of me, how does the ICJ define the term destroy? It hasn't ruled yet, but the intent according to the UN, no, the ICJ is not ruled on Gaza yet. The ICJ is adjudicating it. I didn't ask you about Gaza, the term destroy.

No, no, no, no, no. The definition is not by the ICJ, the definition is by the UN from 1948. And the ICJ court, which interprets the statute as, they have interpreted it many times. And the definition is the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part as such. What is destroying? That's the definition. What is destroying? To destroy it as a group in whole or in part as such. That's the definition. Destroy is to destroy it as a group. No, the ice cream here, I got this from that textbook by William Shabass. One of yours, he says, quote, the international court and other international tribunals have

consistently affirmed this now interpretation stating that destroy must be taken in its material sense, physical or biological. Yes. Physical destruction, death, it has to be killing. And William Chabas, who I met just recently at a conference, has said in print, has said, this is absolutely genocide. I've got to go. Sorry. Because of ethnic cleansing, he I have Shabazz's thing here. He doesn't make

your arguments. And by the way, he's he's been paid as a Palestinian consultant. So I don't know what to make of it. Okay, I've got to go. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Hello, Shalom. I knew he wouldn't stay. I asked him to find destroy. It's just amazing. Yeah.

You want to do a little, uh, sure. Sure. Cool. You want to keep recording? I'll cut them. Just record. Are we still recording? All right.

So I don't know. Like what do you, what do you want to say about it? I don't listen. I don't want to. I don't like when guests sign off when things get hot. I can't prove that, you know, but it didn't feel like he said I gotta go soon until it got a little hot. I don't wanna bad mouth somebody after they leave,

even if they're not here to defend themselves by their own decision. But it's certainly fine to discuss in a way, but I wanna limit it to facts and not any personal attacks. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, he spoke mostly about the intent to empty Gaza of its population.

Alleged intent, because it's true that there had been something said like that, but there's many things said to the contrary. Go ahead. And that's, if true, is bad enough, but it's not genocide. And I wasn't clear at the end, he said it could lead to genocide, and then he said, but it's already led to genocide. So I'm not sure. The whole notion also that destroy in part is a weird definition because in part could theoretically be two people. So the idea of destroy in whole or in part seems like an odd definition to me. I suppose, as I said, in part could be, as I said, a few people and that's theoretically in part. I want to say something about this ethnic cleansing or removing everybody from Gaza,

but I want to just put two things into the record. Just give me a second. And by we didn't get to discuss the siege, there's this, what's the US? St. Louis then? Is that it? The St. Louis, the ship that was turned away from the United States? Yeah, you know, it's just interesting that this is a such an important event in history that the America and Cuba turned away this boat of nine hundred something Jews or something like that. Egypt shut its gate

to its fellow Arabs. Despite all the accusations of genocide. And this doesn't seem to register on the radar of these people. Like, Galant had a siege on Gaza for a certain amount of time, but it was a siege with an exit. He shut the front door. He did not shut the back door. It was the Egyptians, their own people, He shut the front door. He did not shut the back door It was the Egyptians their own people who shut the back door And when I say their own people Hamas's charter actually talks about one Arab nation. Go ahead I was just going to say that You know when people

Sort of don't answer the question that you're asking and People sort of don't answer the question that you're asking. Yeah, it drives me crazy. And they say, oh, you know, like he said, like, I didn't realize I was going to have to sit here and listen to you, X, Y, and Z. Like that's always a little bit of a red flag for me because it seems like the questions were not really being answered wholly. Am I? Well, I think he, you know, he didn't expect to be challenged in that way, which is very common.

Why would he not be challenged? Well, because nobody seems to expect to be challenged whenever they come on this show. But why wouldn't you just do like a super quick Google search of like any of the number of really high profile guests we've had on the show. They figure it's a comedy club owner, you know, and you know, how bad could it be? And they just assume that they certainly don't expect what they get. And yes, they could watch a couple of episodes and apparently they don't do that. Look, I don't know, but it did seem like he was suddenly

in a big hurry to sign off. So as far as this, I just had it here. So this guy Shabazz, who is a, wrote I think what seems to be the standard textbook about genocide and the reason I looked them up is because I try to always, if I can, if I prepare for an interview, I try to, if possible, limit myself to the sources that the people I'm interviewing have themselves used, so I don't get hung up in this disparagement of the source.

And this guy Shabazz, who was accusing Israel of mass murder, and by the way, there was a controversy about this guy because he did work as a Palestinian consultant for some small thing. Now that's not, you know, that may or may not be fair, but certainly if somebody worked as a consultant for the IDF, people would, with justification, be skeptical of, you know, because it's not just that it took money, it's that you went to work for those people, so it betrays, or it might very well betray a pre-existing sympathy with that cause, right? But Derspiegel did an interview with this guy, said, you have consistently been an advocate of a narrower interpretation of the term genocide. When you represented the country of Myanmar before the ICJ, you also presented arguments for why the

country is not committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. I hope I'm pronouncing it close. As such, your argument that the manner in which Israel is conducting the war in which Gaza Strip could constitute genocide is surprising. And this is very interesting what he writes because I found this is an issue that there is not the ICJ, but there are like local country courts, like the German courts, that are trying to expand the definition to include cases where someone isn't being killed, essentially ethnic cleansing. And he says international law is constantly evolving. It's not just about what is in international treaties, but also about the legal interpretations

expressed by the states in their official statements over the years. That is what the courts look at. In the early 2000s, the judges at the Yugoslavia Tribunal and the ICJ, for example, chose a narrow interpretation. That's the interpretation we thought existed until today, right? Rooted in the convention's drafting process, meaning rooted in the words of the convention. And by the way, I also looked up like the legislative history. It's very clear what they meant by destroy. It was physical or biological, biological meaning like sterilizing all the women, something like that.

I thought to myself, I'm reading again, okay, this convention will never lead to convictions, but it seems that countries are no longer following this now or interpretation. In the case of Myanmar and others, they have shown that they are now interpreting genocide more broadly. Meaning my argument for the other country was, you know, back in the days when they interpreted narrowly, but now that it looks like, it seems like they are now interpreting genocide more broadly, I believe it is likely that the judges will be carried along in the wave of broader interpretation.

In other words, they're changing the standard for Israel. I don't think any other way to read that. But even given the old interpretation, is there any way to accuse Israel of genocide and not accuse the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as genocide? I don't think so. And by the way, did Professor Bartov explicitly say that he did not believe those were genocides? Yes, he explicitly said yes. I don't know how you can, unless you say well there was different times.

I can read it here. This is Bartov. What was the strategy of the Americans and the Brits in bombing cities in Germany or America in the fire bombing and the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities? The goal was not to destroy the German people as such or the Japanese people as such. bombing cities in Germany or America in the fire bombing and the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities. The goal was not to destroy the German people as such or the Japanese people as such. The goal was to win the war and they were doing it by all means possible. They were doing it very brutally and one might very well have found these actions to be war

crimes subsequently. But the goal was not genocide in the sense they had no interest in destroying the Japanese people and culture or the German people. And in fact, right after after the war they started rebuilding those countries so that's a distinction ethically you may say war is horrible and people shouldn't do all those things but those are the legal distinctions and to my mind they actually matter it is important to make that distinction and the questioner says it's important to say I'm sorry and the question says why

is it important and he says it's important to say that this is first-degree murder and that is secondary murder, meaning that Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 600,000 civilians, that was all second-degree murder. But what Israel is doing, not by killing them, but by, in his mind, planning to have them all removed from Gaza is the greatest crime of all. Worse so than even the atom bomb. Yeah, I don't think there's any reasonable case. That's a stretch, right?

Well, I mean, it is or it isn't, you think he'd be ready to come on and say it, defend it. There's a common sense, sometimes common sense can be misleading, but it does seem a kind of common sense way. Are you sure that's worse? That's destroying, again, the impart thing I don't quite get, but you know. In part means that if you want to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza because they're Palestinian, but you don't kill all the Palestinians somewhere else, then I guess that means...

Well, if you're killing all the Japanese in Hiroshima... Well, no, not in Hiroshima, right. Yeah, I don't know how you can say that that's not...if you're going to say that what Israel's doing is genocide. Yeah, and he does say somewhere else that at the cleansing in genocide is that in genocide you intend to kill the people wherever they are. Meaning, which I meant it was one of my questions to ask him is like, well, but they're not killing them in the West Bank or in in

in Israel itself. Look, you know, if you have enough people die in booby-trapped buildings, as I alluded to, I said, what do you do? Well, this is interesting actually. Israel got in a lot of trouble and it probably was a war crime because what they started to do, it was reported, was force Palestinians to go first into these buildings. Did you read about that? And tunnels. Now, let's accept for the sake of argument that that's a war crime. But it also tells us something very clearly, almost unimpeachably, which is that the soldiers are actually sincerely worried

about these buildings being booby-trapped and these tunnels being booby-trapped, or people hiding to kill them so much so They're putting these Palestinians in first now the world says to them You know what? You can't do that. You need to go in first and then Israel says, you know what then we're just gonna knock them down We can't go through this. We're just gonna knock them down. That's a very common sense reaction as a matter of fact, I just saw an article now that the last Hamas is busily trying to booby trap all the last

remaining structures in Gaza. So, and this goes back to my initial thing, it's like, and he never really addressed it. What you're saying is that they've deconstructed this whole logic such that there is nothing Israel can do because anything Israel does is wrong. You can't knock down the buildings. You can't put the Palestinians in first. What can you do? Also your question. Go die? Of when you use a hospital or a kindergarten or a mosque or a school rather, it ceases to be that once you're using it as a military base, that was also something that didn't really get. Last week we played those videos of all the Palestinian leaders bragging about this strategy

of human shields. So this is not really, I think is not really in question, but if it is in question, now's your time, bro. You know, don't put an article in the New York Times about, I know it when I see it like pornography. Say, as I said in the beginning, the advocates of Israel say this, this, this and that, and by the way, this is not true.

That's not true. That's not true. That's not true. And, you know, you know, I would listen, but they don't. I say, what, what, how would Israel defeat Hamas? Israel does have to defeat Hamas, right? They do have to defeat Hamas. No, Noam, you're right. How would they do that? Well, you know, 1973, okay. Now am I being unfair to him, Tiana?

I don't know if Tiana was listening. No, no, I think you gave him the room to. I want to say one more thing about the ethnic cleansing. In this interview in the New Yorker, it was asked, oh no, this is not the New Yorker, this was in, I don't have the source here, but this was on the issue of this, it's a decision called the Georgiak decision, which is called an outlier by that expert that wrote the textbook about the, where they kind of breaking down the distinction between ethnic cleansing kicking everybody out

which is what we did to the Germans in the Sudetenland and Killing everybody you'd think this you'd think in any kind of sane world You would not reduce those wildly different things, I mean wildly different things. I mean, would it be the Holocaust if all the Germans were just simply kicked out of Germany and were still alive today? Oh, the Jews. The Jews. I mean, would it be Holocaust if all the Jews were kicked out?

I mean... Well, it happened. It happened in the Arab countries and nobody considers that a genocide and Jews don't consider that a genocide. But just the notion that this both genocide, it would be genocide if they killed 6 million, but you know, it's genocide just the same if they just force us to go live somewhere else. That to me is rightly distinguished.

Now I understand they are correct that it can get muddy because he's right that the people who are committing the cleansing at the same time might be committing genocide and one can lead to the other. So, and then what I believe they're afraid of is people kind of getting away with genocide by pleading at the cleansing and kind of like there's a panel of multiple judges, kind of like juries. So they kind of agree by compromise to the lesser charge. Right? This is, this is a real kind of dynamic. I don't dispute that it might actually happen, but that is quite different than saying, you know what, since so many premeditated murders get pled down to second degree murder or manslaughter, we're going

to call them all first degree murder. We're going to just eliminate the, the, the logical category distinction of wildly different intentions. And, well, let me just continue along that line. There is a very harsh thing that anybody would come to if they read Bartov, which is, what do you do? You know, I have come to start saying that, and these people I'm about to list, they don't like each other, but that people like Darrell Cooper and Tucker Carlson and Bartov and the pro Hamas people, they've created a school of thought which I call the One More Chancers. What do I mean by the One More Chancers? Yes, of course the Nazis were terrible. Yes, of course Hitler was horrible. But you know what? Look at all the people that died in World War II. They should have just given him one more chance. They didn't have to bring the world to 60 million deaths over Poland. Yes, of course, if he continued,

but you know what he said he was gonna stop at Poland? Maybe he would have. Why not give him one more chance? Putin. Of course Putin is terrible. But you know, are we really gonna bring the world to the brink of World War III over Ukraine? You know, Ukraine has a lot of ethnic Russians

and it's always been kind of a Siamese twin with Russia. Let's give him one more chance. By all means, if he goes into another country, that will be our limit. What about Hamas? Everything that they say implies they want to let Hamas stay in charge. They should let Hamas stay in charge even though they promise toas stay in charge, even though they promised to do it again. So what are they saying? Give them one more chance.

And I didn't get to ask him. And then if they do it again, yes, by then all means, but we're gonna give them one more chance. Despite the fact that this guy wrote the article saying, if you don't be naive, you have to kill them or be killed. You have to destroy them or be destroyed. We had to destroy Germany to rebuild it. Every, you know, like all the notions of what he said go out the window. You have to kill them or be killed. You have to destroy them or be destroyed. We had to destroy Germany to rebuild it.

All the notions of what he said go out the window. Essentially what he's coming down to, I think this is 100% fair, give them one more chance. Now I've asked somebody, maybe it was Matthew Cockerill, okay, you want to give them one more chance. Now, what about this blockade that Israel had that was so, supposedly so awful? It turns out the blockade leaked like a sieve. Here we are two years later, they still have bullets, they still have weapons.

So obviously if they can get in that number, that amount of ammunition, they were able to get in anything they wanted and the raw materials to build rockets. So is the world going to support a blockade that means business now against the people who are perpetrated October 7th, who are swearing to do it again? You know what the answer to that is?

No, they won't. So they got Israel in every direction. They have to stop. They can't treat them from a... They propped up Hamas, but they will... I guarantee you the world is not going to be happy when Israel does the opposite of propping up Hamas now, they will, I guarantee you, the world is not gonna be happy when Israel does the opposite of propping up Hamas now, even if it's not through violence.

If the opposite of propping up Hamas means, we're gonna sift through every single grain of sand that goes in there, they're being so cruel. So what is Israel to do? And if, and my final thing I'll say, his argument that you had to destroy Germany to rebuild it is morally very, very close or even worse than Israel's flirtation with the idea that we don't want to give them one more chance and maybe throwing them all out, let me tell you, there's nothing, I do not want them to throw them all out, it is a

horrible, horrible, unimaginable outcome. I don't think it's practically even possible or it's gonna happen, no No one's going to take them. But what I'm saying is that the logic of it, if you examine it, say, look, if you're going to, if we don't respect regime change anymore, meaning imposed from the outside, and you are going to continue to support Hamas, and you are going to promise to support Hamas and you are going to promise to do it again. And technology is becoming more and more, lethal technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous, cheaper. I said this last week, we saw that Operation Spiderwebs drone attacks in Ukraine for $80 a drone or something. Hamas will get thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them

and swarm Israel. And Israel says, and again, the only logic you'll hear to refute this is, it's ethnic cleansing. Yes, yes, but they're saying, forget about that for a second. What do we do? Make peace. Well, yes, Hamas says they'll never make peace. We tried to give this.

He didn't really deny it. Clinton tried. Allmer tried. Like, what do they do? Why are they in this situation? Because they attacked in 48, because they attacked in 67, because they went home from Camp David, because they went home from Allmer. This is a fucking nightmarish situation.

Was there any committer of genocide that he knows it when he sees it, which was in an impossible situation? He didn't answer that either. No, like what, like, like, like, what does he, has he, has he engaged with any of the, the difficult questions, Dan? I don't know, I'm sorry. I was just, I,, I was just, we got Suzy coming, so.

Hi, Suzy. Are you staying for Suzy? It depends if, well, my whole schedule changed in a million different ways, but it's possible I could change for some of it, stay for some of it. So that's how I feel about this dude. I think that your point in the beginning as well, when you said, you know, your arguments

seem to have been geared toward people who are predisposed to agreeing with you, but I'm interested in like what you have to say to people like me who are skeptical. And you know, every time I'm getting ready to interview one of these people, I'm talking about one of the world's scholars. I research it and I say, I'm, I'm, he's, what am I doing? I'm just going to get fucking steamrolled. He's going to pull out stuff. I like, who am I be talking about?

And I'm always like, Oh no, it's just another dude. You know, I don't know all right um so I'll edit it down and cut out the the dead spaces any last comments Dan what do you think you think well no he could he prove the genocide case to you well he first he said it was genocidal intent because they all said killing everybody and then you I think adequately contested that and said no, they just meant Hamas and then he just kind of changed the definition and said, well, it doesn't matter what they say, it matters what they do.

So as to the, this is very, very important. I'll cut this in earlier. Anybody can go to the Atlantic magazine and read the article about the key Israeli war cabinet quotes and how they were misused. This Amalek thing is really something. First of all, it's already been retracted by various news organizations. NPR retracted it, BBC corrected it, still uncorrected by Mother Jones. The Hague monument, I think for the Holocaust, also says, refers to Amalek.

So in the context of all those tweets I read, Netanyahu says, remember what Amalek did to you. Now there was some story in the book of Samuel, which they kill all the women and children, but in the printed prime minister's remarks, you can Google it everybody, he refers to Deuteronomy 25, 17-18. Why the first choice matters, Deuteronomy recalls a sneak attack. He was he was harkening to the sneak attack.

Samuel refers to killing the Amalekites, but the Deuteronomy refers to reprisal to the sneak attack. And I'm just repeating here what I already said. In the real work, the Amalek monument at the Hague Holocaust memorial uses the same Deuteronomy quote. So Netanyahu, this is their genocidal attempt. Netanyahu had the nerve to quote the same biblical verse that's on

the Holocaust monument. And in the reports to the ICJ by the South African team, they put in the Samuel verse, even though they certainly had to know that it wasn't the right verse. And as I said, it's corrected on NPR and BBC Digital. So this is the bottom of the barrel level of these charges. As I say, anybody should just go and say, Google, what was the genocidal rhetoric in Rwanda? What was the genocidal rhetoric in Germany?

In Darfur, Darfur actually may not have been a the genocidal rhetoric in Germany? In Darfur, Darfur actually may not have been a big genocidal rhetoric one, but I think in Bosnia there's all sorts of it. It's so, it's so discrediting. It's just it's just discrediting. Anyway, okay, thank you very much everybody. Good night.