The Paul Wells Show - Janice Stein on the war in Gaza

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

It’s been four months since Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, leading to the war in Gaza. Is there an end in sight?    Foreign policy analyst Janice Stein joins Paul to weigh in on the crisis in the Middle East, the other crises that the world is facing, and the importance of embracing uncertainty in conflict.   Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation at the University of Toronto and the Founding Director of the Munk School.   This interview was recorded at the Munk School.

What's a podcaster to do when the world seems like it's going from bad to worse? You would not believe how many people told me, call Janice. There's no clear path forward. There's no path forward which does not involve serious risk. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in- in residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. Okay, today I think I need to start with some first principles. You've heard me say I'm affiliated with the Munk School at the University of Toronto. Well, what's the Munk School? It's a place for studying and teaching about global affairs it

was launched in 2000 with a lot of money from peter monk a prominent businessman and it's become one of the world's leading centers for studying international relations now the first director of the monk school was janice stein she's one of the country's sharpest thinkers about Canada's place in the world. She's a fellow at the Royal Society of Canada. She's been a Massey lecturer. She's an honorary foreign member of the American Academy. You've seen her on TV a million times. I could go on like this all day.

For decades, she's been a trusted advisor to every Canadian government. And for our purposes today, what matters is that she's fearless a trusted advisor to every Canadian government. And for our purposes today, what matters is that she's fearless and eloquent. So when I was looking for somebody to talk to about the crisis in the Middle East and the pile of other crises we're facing these days, a lot of people said, have you asked Janice? So I took their advice. We met at the school she built in front of a big audience because she always draws a crowd. And here's how that conversation went. The only insight I had as I was walking over here is that so much of what's happened since October 7th was easier to predict on October 7th than the attacks of October 7th were.

It feels like everyone got sort of knocked into their old and worn grooves by that tragedy. I think that's absolutely right, Paul. Nobody expected those attacks, in both senses of the word, those attacks and those attacks. Now, there are obviously exceptions. We know about spotters, women spotters on the Israeli side of the fence.

There are individuals who stood it. There always are. And when we look back, it's so easy to find the needle in the haystack of the people who thought, but that's not how it is at the time, of course, because people who do expect it are a tiny minority, and they're overwhelmed always by people who say, that's not possible, you're alarmist, you're over-exaggerating.

So if we think about this, this is a failure at every level. It is an intelligence failure in an obvious way. And there is a whole group of us who study intelligence failures to try to understand how people blind themselves, because that's really what it is when you have an intelligence failure. There was a defense failure, because even after the attacks began, this is a very small country, it should not have taken long to move forces from the center of the country to the south where the attacks were happening, but it did. So it was a defense failure, and it was an even deeper strategic failure,

because this had been a deliberate part of the Netanyahu government. And let me just take a minute to describe the strategy. At the time, it's not difficult to understand what people might have thought this worked. Hamas has been clear all along that it would not accept the state of Israel, a Jewish state, on the territory of mandatory Palestine. Occasionally, it approached a truce, two years, 10 years, 20 years, but it has always been very clear. Given those constraints,

a strategy which allowed Palestinians to come in to Israel and work, which allowed neighboring Arab countries to invest in the Gaza economy, which is a Palestinian economy. And in fact, and this is one of the great tragedies, when that attack occurred in the fall of 2023, the Palestinian economy in Gaza was better than it had ever been. And there were more opportunities for people to work. And people were crossing the border with work permits. So it's not, and the reason I say this is because in retrospect, people say, well, how could anybody have considered that strategy? But when you think about it at the moment, living next to

a government, because that's what Hamas is. It's a government. It was elected in Gaza by Palestinians in 2006 through an election. It is government. And what everybody missed, here's the piece everybody missed, there are wings, different wings, different factions in Hamas, as there are in many movements. There is a political wing, and there's a military wing.

Political wing lives in Doha, in Istanbul, in Beirut, but it does not live in Gaza. The military wing lives in Doha, in Istanbul, in Beirut, but it does not live in Gaza. The military wing lives in Gaza. And in about, we know now, but we did not know before, in about 2021, there was a fierce fight inside Hamas. The military wing won and effectively regarded governing that part of Palestine as a hindrance, as a diversion from the fundamental mission,

which was to attack. Now, I mostly want to talk about the regional and global effects and how this horrible series of events fits into the broader global horrible series of events. But two questions that are more local to Gaza and to Israel. First of all, it's now very close to four months since October 7th, and the hostages are not returned. At some point,

does this delegitimize Netanyahu's government? Netanyahu's government was delegitimized the day the attack happened. There's no question about it. Israel's a democracy, for better and for worse. And some days, let me tell you, let me let me just in a sense for our listeners take a tiny detour and say this is the purest form of democracy because it is a complete proportional representation it reflects opinion better than any other system in the world we in canada have a first past the post system which distorts opinion more than any other in the world. We in Canada have a first-past-the-post system, which distorts opinion more than any other in the world. The only way you can dissolve parliament is if parliament dissolves itself. And every government in Israel is always a coalition government. This particular

coalition government is the most right-wing, the most extremist, the most fanatical government. There are two parties in that government that have never before in the history of Israel been in government. And the only reason they are in government is because Netanyahu faces criminal charges. no charges. And the other parties would not join with him as prime minister in government after they've had five elections in three years. Only these extraordinarily right-wing parties would. And unless five members of Netanyahu's party leaves the government, there's no way to dissolve the parliament. These two right-wing parties will not do it, and they will not do it because there's no road back for them. Once this government goes, I think it is inconceivable

that those right-wing elements will ever be acceptable as coalition partners again to anybody. He already, if an election were held today, which it's not, he would lose by an overwhelming number of seats. He would lose. He would lose more than a third of the seats he has in Parliament. Is that a strong incentive to keep the conflict going? Yes.

There's no question about it. You know, I think the easiest way to talk about this is if Britain had kept Nebo Chamberlain in office into 1942, right? This is a prime minister who, the moment the war ends, will be confronted with at least two, if not three, official investigations, and it's inconceivable that he will survive these investigations. It's inconceivable. So what's the plan then? You keep the war going.

Of course, it's a democratic dilemma of the deepest kind. I would say that this prime minister is conflicted. There is a genuine conflict of interest, and there should be ways of removing on an extraordinary basis when a prime minister has this kind of conflict of interest. But there are no constitutional provisions to do that. We don't have it either. No government has it. No government has it. The other question that I've been pondering

comes at it from a different angle, but I assume probably quite closely connected, which is that when this heinous attack happened, when the hostages were taken, so many Western commentators, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, many others said, you Israel now have a robust right in international law of self-defense. Yes.

But watch yourselves. Don't get drawn into an overwhelming response that will poison your image around the world. Could that restraint have been reasonably contemplated and exercised? That is a great question. We could spend the rest of the hour on that. That is a great question because I was among those

who agreed strongly with Tom and said much the same thing. But I've asked myself, is that reasonable? And so let's talk about that for a moment, if in fact it's reasonable. Somebody wrote a very, very interesting article in which they looked at the advice that the United States has given to Ukraine because Ukrainians, you know, Ukrainian generals, Ukrainian senior officers were trained by NATO and by the Americans and said the following. The United States wanted Ukraine to fight the way NATO fights, and it couldn't. And the United States wanted Israel to fight the way the United States fights, and it couldn't. And the United States wanted Israel to fight the way

the United States fights, and it couldn't either. I frankly think there was no military path that could have brought the hostages home, nor any military path that could remove Hamas. But in the Middle East, after an attack of that order of magnitude, which was deliberately targeted civilians and women, there's no doubt about that, despite things you may have read. It deliberately targeted women and perpetrated sexual violence against women.

It was because they're part of the documents, that's why I say that, that were captured. You can't do nothing. And so there's a real dilemma here. And I think no matter what they would have done, there would have been the sources of the criticism would have been different, but there would have been criticism. And that's, in a sense, the genius of what Hamas did, frankly. That's the goal, right, is to put your adversary in a box.

And that's, frankly, what Hamas did. And it's easier for Hamas. It's easier for Hamas to do this because when Hamas, one of the spokespeople for Hamas was asked just recently, well, don't you feel some sense of responsibility for the 25,000 plus? I'm sure it's more, frankly. I think the number will be much higher. Palestinians who've been killed, the answer that came back from Hamas, no, that's not our problem. That's for the UN. Now, that's the government that answers that way. So if you think that way, then it's easier to put your adversary in this kind of a box, right? So I think there was no military strategy that would have worked, including doing nothing.

So Friedman is still peddling the notion that the horrible weight of judgment in the absence of an Israeli rebuttal would have crushed Hamas. You don't buy it. No, I don't because, and that's an argument that we can test, right? Because Hamas is not the only such organization in the world. If we look, for instance, at what the rapid support forces are doing in Sudan, the rapid support forces in Sudan are the successor to the Janjaweed that committed the genocide in Darfur. They're that next generation down twice, are now one of the two factions that are fighting in Sudan and terrorizing the population.

I don't notice that the horrible weight of judgment has constrained them. Including on overpasses around Toronto, there's not a lot of horrible weight of judgment. I think, and again, that's a very tragic lesson of the Middle East, that waiting for the horrible weight of judgment is a horrible decision for any society. It didn't work in Iraq and in Syria, where we had probably the deepest uprising after the Arab Spring was in Syria. Assad is still in power. So what's happening in the broader region now? Clearly that preoccupied Joe Biden in the early days after October 7th.

He sent aircraft carriers into the Gulf, and his very strong message to Hezbollah, to Iran, was don't. And it seems to have worked a bit. So let me just stop you there for one second, Paul, because in my field, we never know if it works or not. And I say that in all honesty. It's very, very difficult. We have to wait years often until somebody talks

or even longer until the archives open up. And here's why. We have the problem of the dog that doesn't bark. So the United States sends one aircraft carrier, then another aircraft, and nothing happens. And we we say it worked but we don't know we can't claim that because maybe they never intended to attack in the first place and if you claim that it works here actually in fact overvaluing the deployment of military assets in this one case Hassan Nasrallah, who is the leader of Hezbollah

in southern Lebanon, actually gave an interview and said, I was astonished that he talked this openly to a Beiruti newspaper. He said, in fact, you know, we were deliberating about whether to attack or not because we had promised him us that we would come to their assistance. And then those aircraft carriers showed up and we changed our mind. So we have one of the rare cases where we know that a deployment actually worked. What we have instead are just a sort of nonstop cavalcade of small regional flashpoints harassing actions, attacks.

Three American servicemen killed just the other night. In an accident. In an accident. Yeah. They were killed by an Iranian drone that would have been intercepted had an American drone not gotten in the trajectory. Yeah. Yeah. had an American drone not gotten in the trajectory. Still, it's the kind of region and the kind of time

when nasty accidents can certainly happen. Yes, yes. Do you think that there's still... The great thing is you just told me we can't know. We have to toss out causality. Without good evidence, yes. We're like color commentators at a Vegas casino, basically. Correct.

That's what I am, a color commentator at a Vegas casino. Could it still totter wildly out of control into a much broader regional conflict? Miscalculation can always happen. And that's why we worry a lot about friction. We have deconfliction lines. we worry a lot about friction. We have deconfliction lines.

We were very, very concerned when China shut those down because, you know, American and Chinese aircraft fly very, very close to each other over the Straits of Tehran and naval frees come very, very close to each other. So everybody in their right mind worries about accident.

That having been said, I think people read the codes here well enough that we will not fall over the edge of the cliff here by accident. The route to falling over the edge of the cliff is different. And you hear it in the United States right now. You hear it in the response of some of the Republicans, both in the Senate and in the Congress, who are saying it is a disgrace that President Biden

has allowed Americans to be killed, American servicemen, we must respond with force. If we don't respond with force, they will see us as weak. So it's not that the war will escalate accidentally. It's frankly, and I'm going to use a term that some of you might find surprising. There are honor cultures that operate, that continue to operate, and it is dishonorable to appear weak.

It is dishonorable not to respond to the death of soldiers when they're attacked. And that is a more powerful driver of escalation than anything else. It's not strategic. It's not instrumental. It's what I call culture that drives it. I want to take a pause from asking

you to be an analyst. That's why sports are so great. Because we can cheer for those teams and let it all out and then nobody gets hurt except the football players who do what they do to themselves. Are there times when you wish you'd gone into sports analysis?

That's the folks here version of the question I was going to ask. Absolutely. I am one of those people who was born with an athletic bone in my body when I was a little kid and the volleyball came at me. I ducked because I thought it was going to hit me. But I love competitive sports, and I think that's what it is. It's a release, right, to watch people play a game in a very intense way without hurting themselves and without doing fundamental damage.

And then there's a code at the end of it, right? There's a ritual. No matter how much you hate the people who beat you and humiliated you, you walk up and you skate by and you shake hands. And that's true for women. That's true for men. If the world could operate that way, Paul,

we'd be a lot better off, wouldn't we? Yeah. But there are rules and there's referees. We'll stay on this little side path this much further. I obviously wasn't very athletic growing up either, right? I played one season of Little League Baseball. There was one guy on the team who threw a baseball the way it's supposed to be thrown,

and the immediate conclusion I drew was, don't go anywhere near that kid. but the question about being a sports analyst is it would surely have felt less futile be times than trying to make sense of this world do you ever think that your your job is to ride in after the after the fact and make sense of events that made no sense while they were happening you have to be very careful with that because I'm a political scientist, but I actually spent my undergraduate years reading history, which is still my first left, and I read it all the time,

especially by good writers. And one of the traps is that when we look back, we impose more order than there is at the time. And I actually think our job is to recreate the uncertainty, the chaos, the doubt, if it's there, that people feel when they have to make these decisions, to try to find the words to convey the uncertainty that people have in the moment. And I think that's one of the weaknesses of historians sometimes

is they tell us a smooth narrative. They trace the thread for us in ways that the people living through it at the time would never recognize well and i've read you know many uh biographies of great historical figures where the the author says at the very beginning the hardest job is to realize that things weren't obvious at the time that's right that it was paralyzing uncertainty over what the next step should be. That's right. And you know, if you're in the government, leave aside the particular government that's in Israel, right? And which I think I can say is, you know, a mortal threat to the country. That's the only way I can describe it. But leave that aside for a moment. There's no clear path forward now. There's no clear path forward. There's no path forward which does not involve serious risk.

And I always say the further you are away from the conflict, the more you draw maps. And we have filing cabinets by the thousands full of plans by people who are far removed from the geography of the conflict, the closer you get, and this is true of any conflict, the closer you get to the ground, the more you're aware of the uncertainty, the danger of what you don't know, and the less confident you are in saying, this is the way forward. So we're talking about contingency.

Just to finish for a moment on Winston Churchill, who is everybody's war hero, right? Well, he was wrong about everything. He got one thing right. But he was wrong about everything. He got one thing right. But he was wrong about everything else in his life. But he got one really big thing right at the time that Britain needed a leader to get everything right. But we just need to understand, right?

It wasn't that listening to Winston Churchill throughout his career would have created a storyline of success it wouldn't have so we're talking about contingency uncertainty unpredictability not just as confounding variables in but as the as the stuff of the Let me distract you for one minute. If this takes too long, just put your little finger up and I'll stop, okay? You're making my job easy tonight and I don't mind.

Well, I actually spend a lot of time talking to both our corporate leaders and our political leaders in this country about why uncertainty is so important. We can't tolerate most of us. We can't tolerate the uncertainty. It's just so psychologically painful for us. So what do we do?

We play a joke on ourselves, and we kid ourselves that we can make a probability estimate, and we say things like, that's likely, or that's not likely, or that's very likely, we've no clue. Because the only time we really know whether something's likely or not is if we have large, large, large, large numbers of cases, and we've done the thing an infinite number of times.

So if I asked everybody in this room, what's the likelihood of pulling an ace of spades out of a deck of cards? Everybody would give me the right answer. Because you repeat the same experiment over and over and over and over a million times. What's the likelihood that if Israel withdraws from Gaza, Hamas will actually change its charter and say, Hamas will actually change its charter and say, we agree to a two-state solution. How can you answer that question?

You can't. So you can look back at other revolutionary movements that have had to make those decisions and see under what conditions. But actually, the honest answer is, I don't know. I don't know. So this is what you tell political leaders and business leaders? Well, every time I'm asked, and actually I'm after our corporate leaders because it's really fascinating because the world of probability, which is what we are all so comfortable in, was a world of Newtonian physics, right? It's actually not the world of the physics

of the last century, which is increasingly quantum, right? Where we have qubits that effectively move and change. And you know, Heisenberg got that absolutely right. He said, the very fact of measuring something changes it. Yes. Right? But you never know that from the social scientists and historians who mislead themselves all the time, that they can tell you the probability of rare events.

So when I'm asked, what's the likelihood of this? I say, I can't answer this question. It's uncertain because we have too few priors for me to answer. And I say that in the most libertine voice and I stop because I want the person

who's going to make that decision to know what they're doing. They're gambling doing they're gambling they're gambling with things that are fundamentally important to the to their society to their children to their elders to their community they're gambling because they can't know so the thing that torments me is that once you're done giving that advice and you leave the room yeah three communications advisors come up to them and say so she was nice now minister i remind you she was idiotic we don't make any claim except success and progress we don't talk about anything except

our strategic objectives and we don't talk about uncertainty and complexity because you know they don't want to hear that. And our opponents will mark us down for it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's what they do say. And it ultimately comes down to a judgment about democratic publics. So, and I'll give you an example. Let me take one that is still a fairly hot topic, all right?

And I have empathy for the people. You can tell I do. I have empathy for people who have to make these decisions because they can't know in many cases. So at the beginning of COVID, when we didn't have enough masks in this country, we had public health officials say, don't bother to wear a mask.

It doesn't make a difference. Yeah. Right? Now, there was evidence. Otherwise, no doctor or nurse you've ever seen in a hospital would have a mask on. They're not fun to wear, but they do. So what we really needed was,

we don't have enough masks. We don't have enough masks. We don't have enough masks. So we're asking you not to wear them because we need to save them for our health care providers. There's a reluctance to trust publics with hard decisions. There is a reluctance to trust publics by saying, this is new, this virus. We don't know much about it.

So what I'm telling you today, I will probably change two or three weeks from now. And thank God that I will, because that means I'm learning something. I think the biggest challenge that we face is not disinformation. None of the things we're talking about, it's that we don't trust

our publics with the best information we have and with the limits of the knowledge that we have at any given time it's funny because in the early days of covid i was speaking a lot to david nailer who you will know better than i do yes very well he's a medical researcher and former president of this university who Who always tells you when he doesn't know. Exactly. And he wrote the after action report on SARS,

the 2003 outbreak. Yes, he did. And he kept saying to me, and I hope I'm not speaking out of school. Oh, well. Communication is key. Communication is key.

Why are these people not communicating? And I think it's because a whole generation has come up that has a different understanding of what communications is. Communications is don't tell people what's going on. Tell people that we're doing the right thing. Yeah, that's not communication, though. I know. That's not communication. And for me, it's, frankly, it's not a struggle because communication is education. It's giving people the tools to understand

why you're making the decision you're making at the moment. And do they join with you in agreement or do they not? If you don't know, say you don't know. And actually, I find, I've been a teacher all my life. What, you know, where I bring students into the conversation in two minutes is when I'm asked something and I say, I don't know. That's a really great question.

I'm going to go and read about that. I'll come back next week and tell you the answer, but I don't know. All of a sudden I'm a human being. Why doesn't that work with our political leaders? I don't understand. I remember once I was on Jean Chrétien's campaign bus in 97, I think it would have been my first campaign.

Eddie Goldenberg came, Chrétien's brain, policy advisor, came to the back of the bus. Oh no, Chrétien had a brain of his own. I know. Okay. Eddie was smart enough to know that Chrretsch had Kretsch's brain. He came back to shoot the breeze and we would say, so what's going to happen next?

What's going to happen next? And Eddie said, I don't know. And well, isn't it going to be, Block's going to make such and such a move? And Eddie said, I don't know. And he went back to the front of the bus and one of my colleagues, Paul Adams at the CBC said, it's the amazing thing about Eddie is he actually sucks knowledge out of the room.

Stuff you thought you knew and then suddenly you don't know it anymore. Yeah. It's a handy skill. But also the other side of that is there is something refreshing about humility. We've lost it in our politics, right? I'm here, I'm, you know, my job is to work for you. That's my job. That's what I do.

I work for you. And I don't know everything. We've got a little bit of time left. Let me road test one of my big theories. You can tell me the dangers of hubris. 9-1-1 happened. The United States went into Afghanistan with all that they had, and it went well in the first instance.

And then it didn't. They went into Iraq with everything they had and discovered later that they had delivered Iraq to Iran, essentially. Yeah. And they've never gone into anything with all that they had since. The Arab Spring, Obama's response was very limited. He ignored his own red line in Syria. And it seems to me that that has left,

whatever the wisdom of the earlier full throttle method, American reluctance has left a power vacuum which bad people are benefiting from. Do you buy it? No. I understand why I make the argument, though, Paul. Let me say that in different periods of history, different uses of force are acceptable, right? different uses of force are acceptable, right?

And it was no surprise to me that going to Afghanistan would end the way it did. Afghanistan's a very complex society. It's a multicultural society. It has a long, rich history, and people come in from outside and disrupting with not a lot of knowledge. We didn't have in Canada, I remember just being gobsmacked, frankly, in our Department of Global Affairs. It wasn't called Global Affairs at the time, but it's the same department. And in D&D, we did not have a single pastor or diary speaker when our forces went in. But how can you go into somebody else's society without anybody who speaks the language

or knows anything about the culture or understands anything about the way society works, right? You know the end of the story before the beginning, once that happens. And the same in Iraq. Iraq had a Sunni government that was brutal in its repression of its Shia majority. It shouldn't have been rocket science to figure out.

And the result of actually both of those wars was to empower Iran. So if you're seeing an empowered Iran because its own neighborhood, what the United States did in remarkably unstrategic decisions was to remove any conceivable challenger to Iran. And Iran is by far the largest with, again, an age-old culture, one of the oldest in the world with a remarkable history of science and innovation and medicine, very deep, very rich. And the United States just effectively removed any

challenge in the neighborhood. Well, that's what you're seeing today. That's the culmination of what you're seeing today because Iran has been able to organize the Shia communities that are in their very large community in Lebanon. They are in Bahrain. They are a majority of the population in Bahrain as well. And they're all different. All the Shia communities are both similar and different. Let me put it that way. There's never a single culture because religion, where it grows up and flourishes, acquires the culture. It engages with the culture in which it

lives. And so the differences matter just as much as the similarities. But there is a history in this part of the Middle East of Sunnis dealing less than fairly with Shia. And Iran has exploited that. And every single one of these brush fire conflicts that you're seeing right now is supported by Iran, financed by Iran, but not organized by Iran. And that's an important difference, right? The door is open to Iran because of frustrations and clear playing field. So if you actually look back at those decisions, they were terrible. They were terrible.

During these moments of crisis, critics of the incumbent Canadian government, whatever its stripe, say Canada is powerless to affect this in any way because our government has screwed it up. Can you envisage a Canadian government that would have more influence on this sort of stuff? So I think that is an entirely unreasonable criticism of any Canadian government, and this is not a partisan comment, right? So Canadians, like other cultures, love, we love to tell ourselves stories about ourselves. And how true those stories are about ourselves doesn't ourselves that's not the most important point to the story and I understand that because stories are magical and they're wonderful so truth is only one criteria

for the story we've never been influential in the Middle East we've never had relationships in the Middle East when I say that everybody says yeah but what about Lester Pearson at Peacekeeping in Suez. Well, Lester Pearson had very little interest, if any, in the Middle East. He had huge interest in his two most important allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, who were at loggerheads with each other. And the reason Pearson came up with a peacekeeping force

was to provide a solution to a conflict between his two closest allies. It had nothing to do with the Middle East. Despite the fact that we are a French-speaking country, we've never really, we've spent a lot more attention and effort on the Francophonie in Africa. We have not really engaged with Lebanon and Syria in a systematic way. So to be blunt, we have no relationships, deep relationships in comparison to other countries that do. We have no assets, military, and we haven't built the cultural leverage in this part of the world. Now, why should that be a problem for us? We're a small country.

That's not where we chose to invest and make a real effort. Why is that a problem? Leave that to others, and just acknowledge that you're leaving it to others, and actually, if you want to do something that would be helpful and useful, invest more in reinforcing a civic culture in this country in which the message of the civic culture is despite conflicts that are going on fiercely and in very violent ways in other parts of the world,

we disagree, but we don't engage in the kind of thing that breaks apart our own society because we're Canadians and we're in Canada as well as being Jewish and Lebanese and Iranian and Palestinian. I think that's where a government could play a much more engaged and enlightened role than they are now. Where would make a difference? So you've been editing me all night.

Let me... The only problem is that the people... Go for it. The young people I know who are angriest about what's happening in that region right now are by and large not members of diaspora communities. They have values that they've learned and that they believe are not being honored.

I hear that all the time from my own students. And I think that is a perfectly legitimate perspective to have, Paul. But as I said, you know, we have spent a lot of time this fall in my class talking about this. It is not an option not to talk about it. But how you talk about it, it matters.

And we are a community, and when people feel intimidated or frightened, they cannot learn. And so we all have a duty of care to each other. You know, it's really interesting. I said this, and I got no pushback, none. I said, it's very important that you feel able to disagree and express your own view in class, but do it with a filter because you're part of a community. Here's the filter. How can I say what I want to say in the least hurtful way? And that's the rule we used. And we used it the whole semester. There's an obligation

by leaders and teachers and others and filmmakers and writers to set expectations that legitimate entirely the most fundamental disagreement, but do not legitimate personal and violent and cruel attacks in the course of making those arguments. There's no place for that in a classroom if you're committed to learning. And that's on each and every one of us in that community. And that's the reaction I get from the students in class, and we were able to talk about the war. So as people look around for somebody to...

some frame for understanding what's been going on, and someone to blame. The institution of the North American University has come in for some heavy scrutiny. Yeah. Two university presidents have lost their jobs. Yeah. And there's a lot of defensive crouch going on

in university administrations. How do you believe this university, how do you believe universities are holding up? So let me say honestly, I think this university has been exemplary. Have we had issues? Yes. That would be foolish to say we haven't had issues.

But we've been exemplary, right? Partly because our president got out ahead of this two years ago, long before anybody else did. So we had a commission on anti-Semitism and one on Islamophobia, and he accepted all the recommendations. So, for instance, like every other university and every other large institution, We have diversity, equity, and inclusion officers, but they are trained in recognizing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. That's part of the regulation, right? Now, that is part of what you saw in those hearings was an evident double standard, which is one infuriated people.

You saw two great failings. One is an evident double standard, and that's not acceptable. Wherever the cook crumbles, whichever side it crumbles, it's just not okay. And people know it and see it and recognize it, and that's not okay. The second problem, and I've seen this, and this is a more generic problem of leadership. I believe leaders are the biggest part of the solution and the problem.

Leaders really help to give voice to cultures and to institutions. So the second part was they were coached by lawyers and by the same legal firm. And they were asked a moral question and they gave a legal answer. We don't choose many lawyers as presidents of universities for good reasons, right?

We choose whom we hope are people who will provide intellectual inspiration and moral inspiration because that's ultimately what universities are for. That's why we have them, and that's why they're worth fighting for and safeguarding because I do not believe that anybody should be interfering in these processes from the outside. No politicians, no donors, no nobody. We have to sort this out ourselves. But when a leader hides behind legalisms, that's a failure of leadership. And it was unfortunate.

I put, you know, I'm a woman. We finally had women presidents. I just put my head in my hands when I watched that. You know, one was not very experienced. And it was a tragedy, frankly. The other was coached. Take a risk the other way. Take a risk the other way. Take a risk the other way. If you're thinking about the students who are listening to you.

So when you're asked that kind of question, you say, first of all, any genocide of any kind, cultural genocide, economic genocide, military, is abhorrent. And stop, because it is. You don't have to be. And just stop. And then say, no one on my campus has called for that, which is, was corrupt, but they lost sight of it.

Right? And then thirdly, were they to call for it, and our university policy didn't cover it, I'd do something about it. Right? And then thirdly, were they to call for it and our university policy didn't cover it? I'd do something about it. That comes from a different place than a lawyer can take you. And I see this over and over. And I see it in the private sector. I see it at the CBC, where the lawyers get in the room. It's not about the lawyers. Lawyers should never be decision makers. Lawyers should give you the best possible advice and you should say, thank you, folks. That's been very helpful to me.

And they should leave. And you should make your decision because you speak for your community. So we've amended Shakespeare. First, let's thank all the lawyers. Thanks, everyone, for coming out. We'll see you again soon. A little bit of housekeeping before we're done. I'm the inaugural journalist in residence at the Munk School. I have to say that every time because Munk is what makes this podcast series possible,

and I'm grateful for their help every time. The Paul Wells Show podcast is produced by Antica Productions. Laura Regehr and Kevin Sexton are the producers, and Stuart Cox runs the joint, and he's here tonight. Thanks, Stuart, for everything you do to make me sound good. And thanks most of all to Janice Stein.