Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza

00:00:00.000 | They end up chanting in front of him, Viva la muerte. Long live death. They have their

00:00:08.060 | counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with

00:00:16.460 | lines like, we love death more than you love life.

00:00:23.980 | The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War in the West,

00:00:29.980 | The Madness of Crowds, and his new book on democracies and death cults. We talk about

00:00:36.200 | Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics,

00:00:43.340 | and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly. As I always try to do for all topics, I will also

00:00:50.900 | talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including on the next episode of this

00:00:55.900 | podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots,

00:01:03.780 | sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast beautiful dark land of the internet. It's hard to know who

00:01:11.020 | to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others.

00:01:19.780 | Some are insightful, and some are delusional. The problem is it's hard to tell which is which

00:01:27.980 | unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor. I recommend you listen to many

00:01:35.800 | sources who disagree with each other and try to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit

00:01:41.860 | the places in question as Douglas as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who

00:01:49.500 | have spent most of their lives living there, whether it's Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia.

00:01:55.520 | Let's try, together, to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and

00:02:04.660 | compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of

00:02:12.460 | nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new

00:02:21.300 | geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked with solving. Let's not mess it up.

00:02:28.240 | This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:02:33.160 | And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.

00:02:37.340 | What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there? Just looking at the big

00:02:44.020 | picture of your understanding of the invasion of February 24, 2022, and the war in the three years

00:02:49.460 | since. Well, I mean, several things. There's political angles which are forever changing. But

00:02:57.300 | on the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for

00:03:06.100 | people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. I'm struck by the way in

00:03:11.940 | which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and much more. It's very easy

00:03:21.700 | to get caught up in the to's and fro's of today's news. But that, to my mind, is that's the single thing

00:03:30.420 | that struck me most in my visits there. It's just the people I've met who are fighting for a cause

00:03:40.180 | which, at that level, is unavoidable, undeniable. So, the thing that struck you that's different from

00:03:48.260 | the media turmoil is just the reality of war. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, people who

00:03:55.300 | have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the

00:04:04.340 | world having been liberated as in late 2022, or the people now organized most recently there in recent

00:04:10.580 | weeks who were just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.

00:04:18.420 | When were you there? Early on in this escalated war of '22?

00:04:24.820 | Yes. First time I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they retook Kurson. And I was back in recent

00:04:32.820 | weeks and was there when the Trump-Selensky blowup happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout

00:04:41.380 | at the front lines when I was watching it. How's the morale? How's the way the content of the

00:04:50.660 | conversations you've heard different from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?

00:04:57.460 | At one level, I mean, nothing has changed much. It's not a total standoff because intermittently

00:05:08.980 | each side gains territory from the others, but it's not. I mean, there have been no very significant

00:05:14.580 | military gains by either side in the interim period. I think my experience of the soldiers,

00:05:21.140 | the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there's an intense optimism about the outcomes of the war.

00:05:29.380 | There's a sense that they're going to win. And the definition of what "win" means was like

00:05:36.260 | all the territory is going to be won back. Yeah. I certainly, on the front lines facing Crimea,

00:05:45.700 | became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to

00:05:51.380 | get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time. And I said, I thought that that was an overreach.

00:05:57.140 | And now I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited a second time,

00:06:07.460 | are more exhausted. The morale, the dreams, the certainty of victory has maybe faded from the

00:06:19.540 | forefront of their minds. Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.

00:06:23.780 | What did you think of the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you're sitting there in the dugout?

00:06:30.420 | Well, it was a very disturbing place to watch it from. Perhaps anywhere it would have been.

00:06:37.060 | And, I mean, obviously it was a meeting that shouldn't have happened. It was far too early.

00:06:45.140 | Why do you think so? There's not enough actual pathways to peace on the table?

00:06:50.340 | Well, I think the mineral deal, I mean, I love the fact that everyone's now an expert in

00:06:54.420 | Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits. But...

00:06:57.220 | I think as I've learned, and we'll talk about Israel and Palestine, I'm learning that everybody's an

00:07:01.780 | expert on geopolitics and history of war on the internet. And now mineral deposits, obviously.

00:07:07.060 | Yes. And I'm really speaking at the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here.

00:07:12.900 | Yeah. No, I mean, what I could see, the deal that the American administration was trying to

00:07:19.620 | get the Ukrainian government to sign. It was sort of too early, too forced. The Ukrainians were ready to

00:07:28.580 | sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure. And I think certainly Zelensky wasn't

00:07:35.380 | actually expecting to go until pretty much the day before. He was obviously visibly tired and exhausted,

00:07:45.460 | again, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long time. And no, I mean, the thing that struck

00:07:52.100 | me, and I said this in my column in the New York Post from there, that the thing that struck me was I said

00:07:57.940 | to some of the soldiers I was with, "What do you make of this?" And one of them just said to me,

00:08:08.100 | "Well, we're advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this." But of course,

00:08:14.660 | everyone has Instagram or scrolls and among dog pictures and the hot women or whatever is

00:08:20.740 | what happened in the Oval. But what struck me was this same guy and saying, "I've got a job to do."

00:08:30.100 | Right. And there's a clarity and a wisdom to that. But your job is bigger than that, right? It's to

00:08:43.700 | understand the politics as well. And what do you think about the politics of that moment? Because

00:08:48.900 | that was a real opportunity to come together and make progress on peace, right? And it, by all accounts,

00:08:57.140 | was not a successful step forward. I don't think by any account, it was a successful step forward,

00:09:02.340 | unless to some extent it was a play, but from DC to say to Putin, "Look, we've daft off Zelensky and

00:09:11.620 | now give us something." That's the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it.

00:09:22.100 | But I think it was just one of those extremely awful political moments. Zelensky was obviously deeply

00:09:33.940 | irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after

00:09:44.260 | the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people in the administration implying that

00:09:52.500 | Ukraine has started the war. And I think that must be, for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland

00:10:01.620 | situation to be in. And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering,

00:10:10.660 | because it would be bewildering. I think the sad thing to me also, on the mundane details of that

00:10:18.180 | meeting, and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it's true that he was also exhausted.

00:10:23.940 | Yes.

00:10:24.500 | There was a dickhead of a reporter that was asked a question about outfit in a way that,

00:10:31.620 | listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. He's an emotional being, for better or

00:10:37.860 | for worse. And there's a dumb dickhead of a reporter.

00:10:42.260 | Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend.

00:10:43.860 | Oh, right.

00:10:44.980 | He is.

00:10:45.460 | Yeah.

00:10:46.340 | The things you know. See, you're a real journalist.

00:10:49.780 | He's from one of the new, I'm all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of

00:10:54.260 | thing. But it means that you get some people in who are sort of, yeah, from blog land, there's nothing

00:11:00.980 | wrong with that. But it means that you get somebody who will do something like that. The problem with

00:11:04.740 | that interaction, as I saw it, was that guy asked that more disrespectful question. And I think it was

00:11:14.660 | disrespectful. I'll very quickly say why. I mean, I think that when a man comes from the realm of war

00:11:22.500 | into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession

00:11:29.300 | that the other man has come from the realm of war. And that if you're sitting in a political environment

00:11:38.180 | where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a

00:11:46.260 | man who's, for whom none of that is metaphorical, I think that's extremely hard to accept.

00:11:59.300 | And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of, you know, Zelensky is

00:12:07.140 | being disrespected by being asked about what he's wearing. When, as everyone knows, you know, Churchill

00:12:14.260 | during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visits. And it's just that, it's to remind

00:12:20.180 | people that you're coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that moment, one of the things

00:12:27.620 | that would have been going through his head would be, but I mean, if, if, if this was Putin sitting

00:12:31.780 | here being assaulted by a journalist, you know, you'd, you'd hope your host stepped in and defended you.

00:12:37.060 | I mean, if, let me try this one out. I mean, if safe, if a, if a journalist in the Oval Office,

00:12:42.740 | if Putin was sitting there or a putative journalist said to Putin, you know, um, everyone knows you've

00:12:49.780 | had a lot of facial work done and, uh, word is you've used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use.

00:12:56.580 | Um, can you comment on, on that? You, you, you'd, you'd, you'd say, well,

00:13:01.460 | that's a kind of disrespectful question for journalists to ask. And it's a little bit,

00:13:07.460 | um, off, off what needs to be gone over. Uh, and it's the same thing with Zelensky with the outfit.

00:13:16.580 | I think it was just petty and, and, and, and threw things off in a bad way.

00:13:20.500 | Yeah. And it was probably research because I think Zelensky was explained this like three years

00:13:26.260 | ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears. And he's been consistent wearing the same.

00:13:30.420 | It's also, by the way, it's, it's an example of the frivolity of a lot of the, of the attempts to,

00:13:35.460 | attempts to understand what's going on. I mean, my view is that, is that since actually most people,

00:13:42.820 | in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always

00:13:47.060 | do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, I mean, every side does it look at

00:13:55.140 | the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House

00:13:59.940 | Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn't want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust

00:14:06.020 | after eight years, because it just, it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama's

00:14:14.740 | foreign policy. It was just the easy shorthand. I think it's the same. We're always tempted to that.

00:14:20.420 | But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin. I think Putin would have been able to

00:14:25.220 | respond himself to that journalist effectively. And he would have done it in Russian.

00:14:33.220 | Oh yeah. The language thing.

00:14:35.140 | Yeah. So I wanted to sort of lay out several just unfortunate things that happen in these

00:14:40.260 | situations. And I think it happens in all peace negotiations. And it's funny how history can turn

00:14:45.860 | in moments like this. I do think there's a dickhead reporter combined with the fact that

00:14:50.340 | the, you know, with all due respect, but Zelensky's English sometimes is not very good.

00:14:55.460 | Yes. And apart from anything else, if he had to agree to not done it in English,

00:14:58.660 | he would have bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.

00:15:02.420 | Yeah. And have the wit, the guy is funny, witty, intelligent. You know, he could do that

00:15:09.780 | in the native language of whether it's Ukrainian or Russian to be able to respond and get the interpreter.

00:15:16.020 | So all of that is really unfortunate. Cause I think on those little moments,

00:15:20.180 | it's a dance and there's an opportunity there, you know, the Republicans, the right wing in the United

00:15:27.620 | States have a general kind of skepticism of Zelensky and, and, but that doesn't mean it has to be that

00:15:34.740 | way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.

00:15:37.140 | It's very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it's happened?

00:15:40.020 | I think the politics in the United States is so dumb that at the very beginning, it could just be

00:15:48.180 | reduced to, well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good, rah, rah, Ukrainian flags. Therefore,

00:15:57.300 | the right must go the opposite. Yeah.

00:15:59.220 | It's sometimes as literally as dumb as that. Let's each pick a side and call the other dumb.

00:16:04.340 | I had a line I used recently, um, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade

00:16:12.020 | their way out of the means. It is so like that, isn't it? Because yes, I mean, I can understand the

00:16:16.820 | people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or,

00:16:22.420 | you know, trans flags in their bio, then put Ukrainian flags in their bio, despite almost certainly not

00:16:28.260 | knowing where Ukraine was. And, uh, if that happens, the inevitable instinct of a lot of

00:16:33.940 | people who aren't really thinking is to say, that's really annoying. These people are really

00:16:39.060 | annoying. I'll sock it to them. But that's where you've got to try to rise above that and say,

00:16:43.380 | actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn't depend on my tolerance for memes online

00:16:48.740 | today. Yeah. So I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened

00:16:56.980 | between Zelensky and Trump. There could have been real camaraderie. I've seen the skill of that just

00:17:03.220 | recently having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi. Here's somebody who has the skill

00:17:10.820 | of, you know, for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin and friends

00:17:19.460 | with Zelensky and friends with Trump and friends with Biden and friends with Obama.

00:17:25.140 | That's very skillful.

00:17:25.700 | And that while still being strong for his country and fundamentally a nationalist figure who's like,

00:17:38.180 | you know, very not globalist, not anything but pro-India, India first, nation first.

00:17:46.100 | In fact, nation first with a very specific idea of what that nation represents.

00:17:51.460 | Cool.

00:17:52.020 | And that, you know, Zelensky could do all of those things,

00:17:54.980 | but have the skill of navigating the Trump room. Because every single leader has their own peculiar

00:18:04.180 | quirks that need to be navigated.

00:18:05.940 | Yes. The obvious one, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky's fault,

00:18:09.620 | but I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say yet again, as he has done for

00:18:13.220 | three years, thank you to America and the American people and American politicians from across the aisle

00:18:18.260 | for your support for my country and its hour of need. We're deeply grateful. And because he for

00:18:24.820 | once forgot to say that.

00:18:26.020 | I think it's not that simple. I think there's a...

00:18:29.060 | It's not that simple. It's one reason.

00:18:30.500 | I think saying thank you, he didn't need to say thank you.

00:18:32.900 | There is just...

00:18:33.460 | That was why Vance, that was what Vance leapt in on.

00:18:35.940 | He's just picking a thing to leap on. There's a whole energy. You have to

00:18:41.460 | acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden, buddy, buddy with the left for the last

00:18:50.340 | four years. There's ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists,

00:18:56.660 | all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. And you basically have to

00:19:03.060 | say a kind word to Trump, which is like showing... There's many ways of doing that, but one of them is

00:19:10.980 | saying feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world's greatest negotiators, right?

00:19:18.020 | I'm glad we're able to come to the table and negotiate together because I believe you are the

00:19:22.980 | great negotiator, mediator that can actually bring a successful resolution to it as opposed to have

00:19:30.420 | an energy of like, it should be obvious to everybody that Ukraine are the good guys and Russia is the

00:19:37.220 | bad guys. There's this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there's a new guy.

00:19:42.820 | You got to like convince the new guy that this global mission that this nation is on, this war

00:19:51.140 | that is in many ways, the West versus the East, that there's ideals, there's whole histories here,

00:20:02.900 | that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right?

00:20:06.740 | Yeah, no, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to

00:20:14.180 | have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky,

00:20:21.220 | not Putin being the dictator. I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the President's

00:20:29.220 | comments on that saying that, the big picture of Putin just saying, right, this is a dictator. And

00:20:35.300 | you know, I think that people can be live enough to be able to recognize that, you know, you can make

00:20:42.660 | criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn't mean you have to fall full Putin. And again,

00:20:49.940 | unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don't have that capability.

00:20:53.780 | Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?

00:20:59.540 | He's a dictator who's very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal

00:21:07.060 | opposition. He's kleptomaniac of his country's resources, has enriched himself as much as he could,

00:21:15.540 | as he has with the cronies around him. He's not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia,

00:21:25.620 | but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth and killed people on their, our soil,

00:21:33.300 | using, as it happens, weapons of mass destruction. The use of polonium in the center of London,

00:21:42.260 | not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of

00:21:48.580 | people in a charming cathedral city like Salisbury, not good. If the sort of apologists of Putin would

00:21:55.060 | say, well, he's just a sort of tough man who's looking after his house business. Well, I don't

00:22:00.020 | think, even if you think he has the right to do that, that he should be doing it in third countries,

00:22:05.300 | deliberately using weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British

00:22:12.740 | citizens. Yeah, I mean, that's just for starters. What do you make for, do you think he's actually

00:22:20.500 | popularly elected? No. Do you think the results of the elections are fraudulent? Yes. I mean,

00:22:30.740 | do you think it's possible that it's just that the opposition has been eliminated and he's

00:22:35.700 | legitimately popularly elected? It definitely helps a chap if he's killed all of his opponents.

00:22:42.580 | something by using the term chap in that context is just marvelous.

00:22:46.420 | I mean, seriously, if people are worried about, this is another of the sort of slightly Alice

00:22:55.380 | in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky is people are saying, well, he's a dictator because

00:23:00.180 | he hasn't held elections during a total war of self-defense. And it's like, well, you know,

00:23:07.140 | if you're really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods,

00:23:12.980 | you'd at least notice that the Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.

00:23:18.260 | But this doesn't mean that you have to say that therefore they should have Western style elections

00:23:24.900 | and, and, and freedom that Russia is, is ready to go and become a Western liberal democracy. It

00:23:29.860 | doesn't mean any of that at all. It's just at least note that this is what Putin is.

00:23:34.820 | What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in 22?

00:23:40.100 | It's what he's said for years, which is the basic, the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

00:23:46.420 | Do you think there's empire building components to that motivation?

00:23:52.260 | I would trust most my friends in Eastern Central Europe who certainly do think that there's a

00:24:01.220 | reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on

00:24:06.500 | defense. And it's because they're very worried. I don't think they're faking it. I don't think

00:24:13.140 | they're faking it for me or for anyone else. I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, the Estonians,

00:24:17.780 | and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.

00:24:22.900 | Do you think there's a possibility that the war continues indefinitely?

00:24:29.860 | Even if there's a ceasefire and the peace reached, the war will resume and he will seek expansion even

00:24:37.300 | beyond Ukraine? Yes. And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire,

00:24:45.620 | it'll be a temporary pause. And whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the

00:24:53.460 | opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the

00:25:00.260 | American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine, that that's all he wants and that he has no

00:25:08.100 | history of rhetoric or actions that suggests anything else. And again, it's one of the reasons why it's

00:25:15.460 | useful traveling to places and seeing things with your own eyes, because I very much remember being in

00:25:19.700 | the country of Georgia after Putin tried to invade in 2008. So I just, again, people don't have to be

00:25:30.500 | the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause just to recognize that, that it doesn't seem to be the case,

00:25:37.460 | that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin's vision.

00:25:40.820 | Do you see value and maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? You know, somebody like

00:25:48.500 | John Mearsheimer's formulation of all this, that in these invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, it's using

00:25:58.820 | military power to expand the sphere of influence in the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics.

00:26:05.860 | It's interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is there's been an act of sort

00:26:11.140 | of necromancy of certain figures were totally, totally debunked in the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer,

00:26:20.500 | and in the case of Israel, people like Finkelstein. And it's been interesting because these are people

00:26:26.980 | that one hadn't heard of for some years because they were not listened to, usually for good reason.

00:26:34.020 | But by the way, first of all, I'm very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because

00:26:39.300 | most people to some extent will say that they are a realist in foreign policy.

00:26:45.860 | Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.

00:26:53.300 | I would like to meet them.

00:26:54.340 | A surrealist foreign policy analyst.

00:26:56.580 | We did mention Alice in Wonderland.

00:26:59.140 | Yeah. I mean, maybe we should introduce the term, but I mean, if you want to say,

00:27:05.460 | if you want to look gimlet out, eyed out across the world, you're a realist. I think the steel man of

00:27:11.780 | their argument would be Russia has, or believes it has a sphere of influence and is regrettable,

00:27:21.220 | But there's very little we can do about that.

00:27:23.300 | That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.

00:27:29.780 | Well, to expand on that, steel man, isn't this how superpowers operate in the dark,

00:27:36.660 | realist slash surrealist way? Meaning the United States uses military power

00:27:43.780 | to have a sphere influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military

00:27:52.420 | power to expand its sphere of influence.

00:27:54.820 | And political power, yeah. More importantly, in the case of China.

00:27:57.620 | Political power.

00:27:58.740 | Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas, Hong Kong being the obvious one.

00:28:05.060 | But behind that, isn't there always a kinetic threat?

00:28:09.380 | Oh yeah, of course, yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and

00:28:12.900 | students who are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course.

00:28:20.420 | Okay, countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence.

00:28:24.740 | I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to

00:28:28.820 | try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime.

00:28:36.660 | And it's not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not,

00:28:45.700 | for instance, it is true that if Russia had, if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kyiv in the

00:28:52.260 | first weeks of the war in 22, he would have gone straight on to other places. And, you know,

00:28:59.540 | maybe he would have done, maybe he would have taken his time, maybe he wouldn't have done. And this is a

00:29:04.100 | very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year.

00:29:10.100 | You know, my friends in Georgia, I thought, were wildly off the mark when they were believing that

00:29:17.700 | after 2008, they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was

00:29:24.340 | completely unlikely, and I still think it's unlikely and almost certainly undesirable for Europe and for NATO.

00:29:30.180 | Because you've got to be very careful as, and obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been

00:29:35.620 | since the '90s is, you know, are you going to set up a tripwire to start World War III? And that's not a small thing to consider.

00:29:44.020 | So what do you think the peace deal might look like? And what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?

00:29:56.180 | I just thought it would be, regrettably, the Ukrainians seeding some territory in the east,

00:30:04.500 | and then making sure they rearm during whatever peace period comes afterwards.

00:30:13.620 | And probably all four territories of Donetsk-Lukhan's separation are on.

00:30:22.500 | You couldn't lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. But I mean, I think that,

00:30:27.220 | and I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian seeding

00:30:32.260 | territory is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens

00:30:40.260 | who do not want to live under Putin's rule, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine,

00:30:46.500 | and much more. And, you know, I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian

00:30:55.620 | occupied areas. And it's brutal for the Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So when people say,

00:31:10.420 | well, obviously, you know, Donetsk has to be given to Putin, I think that that is not as easy a thing if

00:31:19.380 | you're in Ukraine, as it is if you're sitting in New York, say. And by the way, I think that on the

00:31:25.380 | issue of, there is a school of thought that is, that obviously, President Trump, to some extent, was

00:31:31.460 | floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or

00:31:39.380 | anything else, you get this great, you get a kind of buffer zone of American businesses and investment,

00:31:45.540 | and therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to

00:31:52.820 | invade. I don't follow that idea, because not least, there were Americans in the regions that were

00:32:01.140 | invaded in 22, and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are

00:32:07.380 | international financial interests in the region does not mean that the dictatorship will not

00:32:12.340 | either militarily or covertly take over. I don't see American minors as being an effective buffer zone

00:32:23.380 | against Putin. By the way, what did you learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from

00:32:30.580 | those regions? Well, I mean, it's heartbreaking, because the only schooling is Russian schooling.

00:32:41.700 | obviously teaching the Russian language, Putin's view of history, and effectively indoctrination.

00:32:47.780 | And people can quibble with that term, but it's Putin-esque indoctrination schools.

00:32:54.100 | And any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out.

00:33:03.460 | And there were, I spoke to children and parents who'd had school friends who'd had, for instance,

00:33:08.820 | the Russians set up in 22 and 23 summer camps for the children of some of the areas that have been

00:33:16.020 | occupied, and the children went off to the camps and then they didn't come back. They were just stolen.

00:33:21.460 | I mean, it's thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion. That's not a small thing.

00:33:29.140 | It's not got very much attention. But yes, I mean, children who would hide whenever the Russian

00:33:35.620 | troops came to the door. One teenage boy who described to me how when his mother was out,

00:33:44.260 | a woman came around the house, knocked on the door, and gave him his papers, and said that he had to

00:33:52.980 | attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army. I mean, this is not good. And that's obviously what

00:34:03.940 | life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I just have it in mind

00:34:10.260 | when people say things like, well, obviously these regions have to be handed over. It's very, very hard

00:34:16.660 | if you're Ukrainian to concede to that. Yeah. And even if they are as part of the negotiation handed

00:34:22.740 | over, I think it'll probably be generations or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people.

00:34:30.260 | Absolutely. And I would have thought never. What do we know about this kidnapping of children,

00:34:36.980 | the stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?

00:34:41.620 | Yeah. Some of them were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine. Not all, by any means. But some were.

00:34:48.100 | And it's a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families.

00:34:54.340 | Many of the Russians said, well, look at these Ukrainians. They don't even look after their

00:35:00.100 | children. Therefore, we will look after them. And I was recently, when I was there, looking into this

00:35:06.340 | story, because it's a very interesting question as to why it hasn't had more attention. You know,

00:35:11.300 | one thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago now in northern

00:35:17.780 | Nigeria, and the appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram completely gained the world's attention. And I

00:35:26.500 | was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who'd been taken by the Russians had not gained similar

00:35:32.180 | attention. There's a slight similarity with the war in Israel, which I'm sure we'll come on to. But

00:35:37.140 | I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages. And the Ukrainians knew,

00:35:45.620 | this is my estimation of the terrain, is that the Ukrainians knew that if they made a great deal about

00:35:53.940 | this, or as it were, more than they did, that the children would effectively be the most effective

00:35:59.620 | bargaining chip. And I do think there's considerable truth in that. Because if you look at, for instance,

00:36:06.420 | the way in which pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the

00:36:14.340 | kidnapped Israelis, you'll see that it's a pretty effective tactic for any totalitarian regime or terrorist

00:36:25.620 | terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you're attacking

00:36:31.060 | pressure their government to do something in terms of concession. It's a very effective tool. And I think

00:36:39.780 | that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine, partly for that

00:36:44.660 | reason. As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me,

00:36:53.300 | it's obvious that there's just a flood of propaganda on both sides. Now, of course, when you go there and

00:36:59.540 | directly experience it and talk to people, uh, but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda.

00:37:06.340 | So unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it's hard to know. Like I speak to people on the Russian

00:37:12.100 | side. Uh, which makes me realize, I mean, you, you can be completely lied to, maybe I am in the United

00:37:29.700 | States as well and just be unaware. Um, maybe earth is run by aliens. Maybe the earth is flat. So I don't

00:37:38.260 | know. Maybe you've taken mushrooms. I have before this and I finally see the truth.

00:37:43.940 | And it's you that are deluded Douglas. Okay. But, uh, back to the, our round earth discussion,

00:37:51.300 | round of shills that we are, uh, how do you know what is true? You, you can tell it when

00:37:57.940 | the bare facts become not true. Like you can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything

00:38:08.020 | caused the invasion of 2022, except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.

00:38:15.140 | Yeah. There's a, there's a hilarious thing that happens. And I think you've actually speak about

00:38:20.500 | this, that, uh, people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected

00:38:26.340 | leader. Always, always.

00:38:28.420 | So the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of like NATO started

00:38:35.300 | the war, right? Which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that. Like that

00:38:41.540 | NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever, sure. But they forget to say

00:38:47.220 | like other parts of that story. Well, yes, of course. I mean, and I mean,

00:38:51.940 | of course, to some extent it's rather, you know, that there's a, there's a very, the most irritating

00:38:55.860 | type of question asker at any event is the person who says, I was disappointed that in your 30 minute

00:39:01.860 | talk, you didn't address X. And I tend to say, well, looking forward to coming to your next talk,

00:39:06.900 | where in 30 minutes, you'll cover everything that could possibly be covered. Um, there's always

00:39:11.380 | stuff that's going to be left on the sides. There's always going to be stuff that's left

00:39:14.660 | unaddressed. There's always going to be other angles. There's always going to be somebody else who,

00:39:18.500 | who, who, who has this interesting perspective and you can't cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover

00:39:23.380 | everything other than the central things, then it's suspicious. Many years ago, I was at a debate in

00:39:30.420 | London, uh, and there was a debate about the origins of world war II and, uh, Pat Buchanan talking of

00:39:38.500 | necromancy was one of the, the, the, the speakers and, um, Andrew Roberts historian was one of the people

00:39:50.420 | on the other side. And at one point, you know, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining

00:39:57.940 | in Poland, in the mid, you know, something like this. And the moderator, I remember it was just,

00:40:04.340 | it was just a melee. And the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says, Andrew Roberts, why did

00:40:09.700 | world war two begin? And he says, world war two began because Hitler invaded Poland.

00:40:15.460 | And it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a mush. They were just so lost in all the

00:40:24.500 | intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about, about the origins of a war that you've,

00:40:29.700 | you forget to mention the thing that's most important. And certainly my experience as a journalist and

00:40:39.540 | writer is that one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people

00:40:46.180 | are certain to tell you that what you've seen with your own eyes didn't happen or hasn't happened.

00:40:52.180 | And it helps to steal you. Yeah. For that moment. It's a gradual thing that happens where

00:41:00.100 | the obvious thing starts being taken for granted and people stop saying it because it's like the boring

00:41:05.620 | thing to say at a party. And then all of a sudden over time, you just almost start questioning whether,

00:41:12.900 | whether, you know, like the obvious thing is even true. I don't know what that,

00:41:17.060 | how that happens in psychology. Yeah. I think it does. I think it does. I've observed it in a lot of

00:41:22.260 | different places, which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget. Everything else is what

00:41:27.380 | you remember. And some of us are for some reason wired in a way where we, we don't, we try not to

00:41:32.180 | forget the important thing. Remember the obvious thing. Yeah.

00:41:35.060 | Yeah. Yes. And as you say, no, I'm not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what

00:41:39.780 | is true because what a douchebag you'd be if you were that guy.

00:41:44.020 | Nobody likes Captain Obvious at a party. Okay. Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator,

00:41:51.700 | a successful negotiator that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?

00:41:57.860 | It's possible. We'll have to see. I think it's just too early and complicated to tell.

00:42:04.500 | That he wants to bring a peace seems to me to be obvious. He stated it a lot of times.

00:42:09.380 | Whether he can, we're just going to have to see. It's extremely hard to see some of the parameters

00:42:17.380 | of the peace still. And I would suggest that the most one, not the most difficult, but one of the most

00:42:24.500 | difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe.

00:42:31.140 | I just, it doesn't matter because we've, we, we in the West, we, some of the countries in the West

00:42:39.300 | have said it before that we'd secure their, their peace. And we haven't. And so what other than NATO

00:42:49.140 | membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the

00:42:54.260 | Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured?

00:43:00.100 | I can't see.

00:43:01.780 | I think, uh, there's not going to be ever a guarantee that you can trust. I think the way you have a

00:43:09.540 | guarantee, implicit guarantees by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as

00:43:16.420 | possible. So you have partnerships with, uh, the, uh, uh, the Middle East have partnerships with India,

00:43:22.980 | perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe, all of which are

00:43:28.100 | still suggests that if there's enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another

00:43:36.660 | Russian invasion. There will be financial pressure. Yeah. That would be, uh, you know,

00:43:43.860 | Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. Uh, I think a world that's

00:43:54.100 | flourishing, it would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.

00:44:00.100 | It would be ideal. It would be ideal if, if, if they were, if, uh, the regime and Moscow wanted it,

00:44:07.220 | but that's that not, I mean, there, again, you get into the thing of, you know, uh, people accused of

00:44:13.940 | Russophobia, but I mean, um, the, the, I do believe that after the fall of the wall, uh, Russia was ill-treated

00:44:22.260 | by the West, not treated with the, uh, some of the courtesy that it required. I do think that,

00:44:29.140 | and at the same time, that doesn't justify, uh, the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.

00:44:37.460 | Right. But let's descend from the surrealist to the realist. It's very possible for Russia to,

00:44:44.900 | uh, be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and that being wrong while also not doing

00:44:53.540 | it because they're afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.

00:44:59.620 | It's possible, but the alliance they formed with this sort of rogue, uh, alliance with China to a

00:45:06.100 | considerable extent, North Korea, not useful. Uh, and Iran is, um, something they seem to find

00:45:16.820 | bearable. It's not a very, it's not a very good alliance in most people's analysis, but it's an

00:45:22.100 | alliance. It's bearable, but I don't think maybe you disagree with this. I don't think the Russian

00:45:28.740 | people or even Putin, uh, wants to be isolated from the West. I think it wants to be friends with the

00:45:35.940 | West and with the East and with everybody who just also wants Ukraine. Right. And there's,

00:45:42.340 | uh, uh, how does the Rolling Stones song go? Which one?

00:45:47.860 | Uh, not the satisfaction one. Simply with the devil.

00:45:53.300 | That's the one you got me on that one. No, like there, there's interests,

00:45:58.420 | whether it's expanding the sphere and influence, that's one thing on the table,

00:46:02.660 | the table, but that can be put aside. If you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations.

00:46:07.860 | And, uh, if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations,

00:46:13.940 | then that prevents Russia from invading.

00:46:16.740 | I think the premise is one that I've seen before. Um, there was a famous, uh, what was his name?

00:46:24.420 | Norman Angle. He wrote this book was a fantastic bestseller in his day where he believed that Europe

00:46:32.660 | would be in a period of endless Canty and peace because the prospect of European powers going to

00:46:39.140 | war was so economically unviable. The book was reissued after world war one. Um, and I never got the second

00:46:49.380 | edition, but I assume it was significantly rewritten. That's a very kind of cynical take that just because

00:46:55.220 | the book is wrong, I'm not saying just the book. So I'm saying that the, that the idea that

00:46:59.140 | that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any

00:47:07.940 | significant preventative device to madness breaking out is, is not something I see,

00:47:15.940 | could deter some people, right? It could deter some very, very rational, economically driven

00:47:22.500 | actors, but it, it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war

00:47:28.660 | and to invade and to go mad. Okay. Well, I would argue that in the 21st century, one of the reasons

00:47:34.420 | we have much fewer wars is because of the much more, well, so there's a few tools here on this, on the

00:47:42.500 | geopolitical stage. One of them is that you were just much more interconnected economically, globally

00:47:49.220 | interconnected. And that, that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace. There's a lot of

00:47:56.020 | money to be made from peace. There's also a lot of money to be made from war. There's just, there's a

00:48:01.140 | lot of interest attention. And I, I'm just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using. The

00:48:08.020 | alternative is what military force. That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one, but

00:48:16.020 | unfortunately it has its downsides also. And after three years of war and the hundreds of thousands

00:48:23.220 | dead, you have to start wondering what are the options on the table?

00:48:28.340 | I agree. I'm, I'm obviously for economic cooperation, but my only caveat is not to think that that is

00:48:39.300 | something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of, uh, despots,

00:48:50.260 | tyrants, extremists who want something else.

00:48:54.260 | Yeah. But, uh, can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin?

00:49:00.260 | No.

00:49:00.500 | A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is

00:49:06.260 | Putin bad, victory must be achieved, NATO membership required.

00:49:13.300 | there's this kind of like, uh, but what's the, what's the, what's the, you have to come to the

00:49:19.700 | table to, to end the killing is one and, uh, to have different ideas of how to, uh, have a non-zero

00:49:29.940 | chance of peace. So that, you know, the options are, it seems to me the only option,

00:49:37.460 | not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There's of

00:49:42.500 | course other radical options. There's, uh, there's, uh, Russia joining NATO or something like this,

00:49:49.220 | or there's, um, giving, you know, doing flirting with world war three, essentially giving nukes to

00:49:56.660 | Ukraine or something like this. There's like crazy stuff or a totally new military alliance with

00:50:03.620 | France and, and, and Britain and Germany and, uh, European nations and Ukraine or some weird network

00:50:11.540 | of military power that threatens Russia in some way, or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between

00:50:19.060 | India, China and Ukraine, something like this, just some really out there ideas. And I think that's how

00:50:26.740 | the world, that that's how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.

00:50:33.300 | And look, it could be, I, I, I, I hope you're, uh, I hope your idea is right. Um, I think it's about the,

00:50:41.860 | well, it's certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say is,

00:50:49.540 | and also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world.

00:50:57.140 | And some people don't dream as you dream. I think we'll talk about this in your new book,

00:51:04.660 | death cults. That one is an easier one for me to understand to the story that you're describing.

00:51:12.580 | I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.

00:51:19.620 | Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm not by any means urging you to regard

00:51:23.460 | Vladimir Putin as a millinarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.

00:51:29.380 | I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.

00:51:34.260 | From your lips to God's ears.

00:51:38.660 | Can you steel me on the case for and then against Zelensky as the right leader for Ukraine at this

00:51:43.380 | moment? Is he the right person to take it to the, the, the point of peace?

00:51:48.500 | We'll see if, if, if, if, if he can, then he, then of course he is, you know, he deserves enormous

00:51:55.220 | respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation

00:52:02.500 | in a time of incredible peril, um, for playing the international game of getting support for his

00:52:09.620 | country well. Um, and sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that,

00:52:17.140 | can be the person who also brings about a peace deal and sometimes not.

00:52:19.940 | I think there's a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people,

00:52:26.340 | the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who, uh, did the destruction

00:52:36.260 | and to be able to compromise on anything.

00:52:40.500 | That's, that's possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though, sort of slightly presupposes that

00:52:48.580 | Putin doesn't have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard. I've noticed this in

00:52:54.660 | a lot of conflicts. It's extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven't seen

00:53:02.020 | what you've seen or gone through what you've gone through and say, you know, it's time to get around

00:53:06.340 | the negotiating table and just, you know, you think you didn't see what I saw or you didn't go through

00:53:12.980 | what I went through. Who are you to tell me? Goes back to that thing of the visitor from the land of

00:53:19.140 | war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about

00:53:27.140 | getting around negotiating tables, but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things and, um,

00:53:36.020 | it's, it's, it's very hard for somebody who hasn't seen it to tell the person who has that they should

00:53:42.260 | act differently. And the sad thing

00:53:46.420 | about humanity is both the, the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are

00:53:54.500 | right. Yes, that's a struggle. That's definitely a struggle. It's like asking somebody to forgive. I've seen

00:54:03.860 | that a lot, a lot of ends of conflicts. People say, you know, the important thing is that we forgive

00:54:08.980 | and move on. And then the other person says, you know, your child didn't die of shrapnel wounds.

00:54:17.780 | Yeah, this is, you know, I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelensky.

00:54:22.260 | By the way, people privately, the people that message me is, is all love and support. Even the people that disagree,

00:54:28.180 | in Ukraine, Ukraine soldiers, uh, people online are ruthless. They're misrepresenting me. They're lying.

00:54:33.780 | People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying.

00:54:36.580 | Yeah. Good God, Lex, you discovered a new, uh, phenomenon.

00:54:42.580 | I'm a real radical intellectual.

00:54:44.500 | Nothing misses your eye.

00:54:48.420 | I see the truth and I'm unafraid to point it out. Uh, no, there's a degree,

00:54:55.140 | this, this idea that you

00:55:00.820 | need to compromise with the person, with the leader of a nation you're at war with.

00:55:08.660 | And in so doing to some degree are forgiving their actions because the actual feeling you have

00:55:15.620 | is you want it to be fair. And the definition of fair, when you've seen that much suffering

00:55:20.500 | is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die

00:55:28.180 | because you've seen towards suffering. But the other side of that is, yes, there's children that have

00:55:34.660 | died. But you go coming to the negotiation table, other children from dying. Yes, of course.

00:55:41.220 | And so like, there is just, you had this kind of way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective,

00:55:47.860 | that it's naive to say, to come to the negotiation table. And it is for a person from the land of war,

00:55:55.060 | but the very smart, intelligent, and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right

00:56:00.660 | in some deep sense about the long arc of history. For them, it is the right thing to come to the

00:56:08.420 | negotiation table to end the war killing. The one thing I would add to that though is,

00:56:13.700 | don't forget that it also depends on whether or not there's a clear shot of winning.

00:56:19.220 | Sure. If there's a clear shot of winning, and that's the most important. The most important

00:56:26.100 | thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that. It's simply winning and losing. And if you

00:56:33.220 | have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you're near it, then having somebody else come in and

00:56:41.060 | saying, why not stop just before victory is very hard. That's one of the many, many complexities of

00:56:49.860 | the conflict we're talking about. You know, what's the other big complexity of that? Because the clear

00:56:54.580 | shot of winning is like a man walking through the desert, seeing water. It could be during war, it really

00:57:01.380 | is an illusion. So here's what happens. The really complicated aspect of negotiation is in order to negotiate

00:57:10.980 | peace from a place of strength. You have to have victory in sight.

00:57:18.020 | Yes.

00:57:18.820 | And so the temptation from that position is to not negotiate, is to keep pushing forward to achieve

00:57:25.620 | victory. And this, I would say, hindsight is 20-20, but this is the failure in 22 and two occasions

00:57:36.820 | to achieve, to negotiate a ceasefire in peace. One in the spring, because Ukraine was in a real big,

00:57:47.940 | I would say, position of strength, having fended off the Russian forces around Kyiv. That's one. And then,

00:57:55.620 | as you mentioned, in the fall of 22 with Kherson and Kharkiv had a lot of military success. They were in a place

00:58:03.380 | of strength. And from that place, they've decided to keep going because victory was in sight. But that

00:58:09.780 | was also an opportunity to make peace. It's perfectly possible, yes.

00:58:13.780 | That's the hard thing. It's very hard. It's all hard. But again, victory can be won in wars,

00:58:22.260 | and is often won in wars. And you're right, they can also grind on because nobody

00:58:28.020 | has the capability to make a breakthrough. It's the case, I mean, the wisdom about civil wars tends

00:58:36.660 | to be that they sort of burn out after about 10 years or so for similar reasons.

00:58:43.940 | When you're in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?

00:58:48.500 | It's a very good question. And you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or

00:58:55.380 | political leaders?

00:58:56.100 | Military and political leaders. It just feels like, like I said, man in the desert seeing water. I think

00:59:02.260 | there's a sense that victory is so close. There's times in a war when you feel like victory is close.

00:59:11.140 | No, you're right. And then it just slips away.

00:59:14.100 | Yes, it's an interesting insight. It's like the way in which there's a force in nature,

00:59:19.780 | which is that if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Extremely hard to amass

00:59:32.820 | an army somewhere and then say, let's go back. Yes, you're right. No, it's one of many,

00:59:39.620 | many interesting aspects to warfare. I think the sad thing about successful wars,

00:59:47.140 | at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader, which I would argue that Zelenskyy

00:59:55.700 | really unified Ukraine in this fight, in the beginning of the war. You have to be that and,

01:00:03.700 | like you said, after you amass the army and have military success, to be able to step back and make

01:00:09.540 | peace. Those two just don't often go hand in hand. Because again, as a wartime leader, especially one who's

01:00:19.140 | seen the suffering firsthand, walking away is tough. Especially also combined with that,

01:00:28.100 | just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things, you know, once

01:00:34.660 | the war ends, there has to be investigations. Because the war wasn't won, you might not turn out to be,

01:00:41.300 | when history looks at it, the good guy. And a leader doesn't want to, a leader always wants to be the good

01:00:47.860 | guy. And so there's just all psychological complexities that are, and you look at this whole picture,

01:00:53.540 | uh, in, in the basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish,

01:01:01.700 | you just ask the question, okay, so what is the thing I would like to see?

01:01:07.300 | There's so many historical analogies that you can give, but just surely not rewarding.

01:01:16.740 | Putin's actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land

01:01:32.420 | in the future. So yeah, and, but this is nuanced because like you, it's very probably good to be the

01:01:39.940 | boring person at the party that says dictatorships are bad. Uh, democracies are good. Many of the

01:01:48.180 | ideals of the West are good. Democracies are better. Better? Yes. Yeah.

01:01:51.860 | Uh, that sounds like animal farm, but yes, two legs better. Um, but yes, democracy is better and, uh,

01:01:59.300 | invading countries is bad. Uh, but world war three is bad too. So after you say something is bad,

01:02:10.420 | what's the next step? Cause military intervention in a lot of these conflicts,

01:02:14.340 | it'll be about deterrence. Yeah. But what's, what's effective deterrence that we're going to have to

01:02:20.020 | keep going over for a long time to come. My question is how can we achieve peace in April,

01:02:27.940 | in May, right? Not like the adults at the table all seem to tell me, well, it's a process. It's

01:02:37.860 | complicated. You know, there is, it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter

01:02:43.620 | and they're still, um, maybe initial ceasefire and the ceasefire is broken and there's more people

01:02:49.620 | dying. And it's that mess. It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying

01:02:58.420 | every single day. I mean, of course, like we were all every, almost everybody, not everybody, but almost

01:03:03.220 | everyone would like the killing to stop immediately. Of course. No, like I, I think that is the boring

01:03:08.180 | thing at the party. Yes, but they don't say it often enough. Not often. There has to be a frustration.

01:03:12.980 | They should say more. There has to be a frustration. I don't understand why Putin, Zelensky and Trump

01:03:19.140 | can't just meet in a room together without signing anything. Leaders meeting and discussing and like

01:03:26.580 | the human connection. There's so many layers of diplomats. It's the problem I have with a managerial

01:03:32.180 | class. I don't, they schedule meetings really well. They don't get shit done. And I, I would love it if

01:03:37.940 | people got shit done. So the soldiers get shit done. They have, they're fighting the reality of the war.

01:03:45.780 | And then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the, on the scale of nations and geopolitics,

01:03:52.820 | but like this diplomatic meetings. And I share your frustration about it at the same time. I think,

01:04:01.140 | well, I share your frustration because I've seen it all, a lot of it, you know, in my own eyes,

01:04:05.940 | I mean, there was a botanine I was with the other week and they were hit just after I left their base.

01:04:11.220 | And you wouldn't believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body.

01:04:16.660 | And I share your frustration with that. At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing

01:04:30.020 | is that you do, and I've seen this elsewhere, you, you, you will put pressure on the people you can

01:04:36.180 | pressurize and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can't pressurize. And that is

01:04:42.900 | one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply you can put America can put extraordinary

01:04:53.380 | diplomatic, uh, uh, diplomatic financial intelligence, military risk, pressure on Ukraine.

01:05:01.060 | And it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it's much easier to pressure Zelensky.

01:05:10.180 | And that's one of the many things that makes it harder is that the temptation to rush for peace,

01:05:16.180 | accepting that peace is the most desirable thing, accepting the horrors of war, which,

01:05:20.820 | you know, we can linger on, but you, you accepting all that. If somebody says, we've got to get peace

01:05:27.860 | today. And the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it'll be that it'll be

01:05:32.820 | the person who you compression most easily, who will be the person that you pressure. And as a result,

01:05:39.860 | have an outcome, which yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a

01:05:46.660 | situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. And that's extremely ugly and

01:05:55.220 | common common thing to happen. Yeah. And that's the other boring thing to say. The boring truth that, uh,

01:06:01.940 | the easy shortcut here is, uh, is to punish Ukraine and you just have to not do it. Let's keep being the

01:06:10.500 | boring people of the party. Yeah. Well, nobody's going to invite us. All right. Let's go from one

01:06:18.980 | complicated conflict to, uh, perhaps an even more one complicated one, Israel and Palestine.

01:06:29.540 | Can you, uh, take me through what happened on October 7th, as you understand it. And as you outline

01:06:42.180 | at the beginning of the book, well, the book on democracies and death cults is a mixture of firsthand

01:06:47.780 | reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that's been going

01:06:56.500 | on since the seventh of October, but the war's been going on a lot longer. And also I suppose on the,

01:07:02.740 | what for me is one of the overwhelming questions, which I'm sure we'll get to, which is the reaction

01:07:07.300 | in the rest of the world. Obviously on the seventh itself, it was a brigade sized attack on Israel from

01:07:16.260 | Gaza. Uh, Hamas broke through the security fence and, uh, attacked all the softest targets they could.

01:07:27.220 | Uh, they swiftly overwhelmed things like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the

01:07:36.980 | communities in the South, uh, uh, very peaceful peace neck effect free communities of the kibbutz sim as

01:07:43.860 | they're called the communities, um, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped. And of course they,

01:07:53.780 | from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people

01:07:58.260 | people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party and rampaged through that with RPGs and

01:08:05.860 | Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more. And, uh, got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel

01:08:16.660 | places like off Akim and sterat important towns and carried out their massacres there as well.

01:08:24.100 | We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the

01:08:33.140 | war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into Northern Israel from Southern

01:08:39.460 | Lebanon. But the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar

01:08:46.500 | massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrot Israel from the center.

01:08:51.060 | The interesting reason why I think it'll be found out in the future, but why they didn't

01:08:56.580 | coordinate better was Hamas didn't trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know

01:09:02.180 | exactly when they were going to do it. That wouldn't be in for it wouldn't be intercepted.

01:09:06.660 | The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and

01:09:11.620 | trains and arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but

01:09:19.380 | they didn't get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might have thought

01:09:24.900 | they were capable of. I think from the Israeli side, uh, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most

01:09:32.020 | catastrophic intelligence and military failures since the foundation of the state.

01:09:36.820 | And I think there are several reasons why one is a perception problem. What a lot of

01:09:45.300 | military commands and others described to me as the conception, the conception that had prevailed in

01:09:51.620 | Israel for some years and security military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and

01:10:00.420 | governing Gaza and, you know, lining their pockets and living in, uh, Qatar and becoming billionaires. But

01:10:10.420 | that like many other terrorist groups and, you know, cults that they would end up becoming just corrupt and

01:10:21.860 | not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That's the first thing was there was

01:10:27.620 | just a massive error of the conception in Israel. And then, then the multiple manifold security and

01:10:37.860 | military failures of the day and leading up to the day. Um, and there will be a, there already have been

01:10:46.340 | quite a lot of people held to account for that and they're doubtless will be in the future as well.

01:10:50.820 | Um, the, the single, uh, thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way

01:11:00.820 | was the number of people who described to me, you know, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that,

01:11:09.140 | you know, you know, they'd said to their children, don't worry, the army will be here in minutes.

01:11:14.100 | And they weren't, you know, in many places, it was many hours till the army got there.

01:11:19.780 | Um, and there are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings.

01:11:29.060 | Other things were very, I discovered were very human failings.

01:11:35.780 | I don't want to overstress the failure of the army because actually certain units and things

01:11:41.060 | got down very fast. There was a unit of Devan who got down to the junction, you know, by, within about

01:11:46.580 | an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting and joined in the fight. And then there were self-starters

01:11:54.900 | who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just like broke orders and just realized the

01:12:01.140 | magnitude of what was happening and said, we need it in the south, go and fought very hard for hours,

01:12:07.940 | days, in some cases. But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable. I mean, as, as usually

01:12:15.220 | happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You, you, you know,

01:12:21.940 | what it's, you can see it in hindsight, but you can't see when you're in it. And one of the things that

01:12:28.660 | made it very complicated was for instance, Hamas coming in, uh, taking uniforms off dead Israelis,

01:12:37.300 | uh, wearing them, uh, coming in with Israeli style, um, apparatus on them. There's a Muslim doctor I

01:12:49.700 | quote in the book who I interviewed who describes how he was going to his, he's an Israeli Muslim Arab,

01:12:56.500 | and he was going to, he's a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning.

01:13:01.300 | The rockets start coming in because the rocket started first and then the full invasion. And he

01:13:08.180 | described to me how, um, you know, he's one of the members of this group, the United Hatsala, which is

01:13:13.860 | a first responders group. And, um, they sort of, you know, they get an alert and it tells them that,

01:13:19.460 | you know, a car has crashed nearby and they, they, they put on their, uh, you know, first aid kit and

01:13:25.540 | so on and go. And he got one of those alerts, one of the junctions and, uh, realized there was a car

01:13:31.380 | that something had happened and there were some dead bodies and he, he stops and he sees these men dressed

01:13:37.380 | as soldiers. Uh, and they just start, and he's wearing his Hatsala gear and they start firing at

01:13:43.140 | him. And he just thinks, what the hell, what the hell is going on? And, uh, they turned out to be Hamas

01:13:50.340 | dressed as Israeli soldiers. They, uh, used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault.

01:13:58.660 | And, uh, in the end they shot him and left him and he survived. He's a very, very brave man.

01:14:05.540 | Um, so there was a lot of confusion like that. There's a girl whose father, uh, I interviewed,

01:14:13.860 | she was at the Nova party and, uh, I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after

01:14:22.020 | and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. And he described how in the last moments

01:14:28.820 | of his daughter's life, she phoned him on her phone. Like a lot of people, you know, he reassured her

01:14:33.700 | the army would get there and so on. And, uh, her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on

01:14:39.620 | her lap and she was obviously panicked and they'd managed to get into a car and escape the party.

01:14:44.180 | But they went to, uh, uh, a community where they thought they'd be safe in the south of Israel. And

01:14:49.140 | they were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman and he wasn't a policeman.

01:14:54.980 | He was Hamas dressed as police and, uh, she died as she was shot and killed as well.

01:15:01.220 | And, um, so there was a lot of confusion like that. Uh, it, it, hopefully we're, you know, the world will

01:15:12.980 | find out exactly what went wrong. Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe.

01:15:19.220 | But I mean, it, it, it was a complete catastrophe.

01:15:23.060 | Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened?

01:15:27.380 | So there's a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land because it's such a giant

01:15:33.060 | intelligence failure. It seems that there is, um, some manipulation on the inside for political

01:15:39.940 | reasons or for, you don't need to go into conspiracy land. I mean, I think there are people who say that

01:15:45.540 | there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were trying, that were withholding the

01:15:50.020 | information. I don't know. Again, people will find out, um, there's an awful lot of politics inside

01:15:57.780 | Israel and, uh, it's, it's, it's hard to know that at this stage. I think that most people are sort of

01:16:05.380 | still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti Israel, who just believe that, you know,

01:16:13.460 | Israeli military and particularly intelligence dominance is so, so strong that there must have

01:16:20.420 | been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened? I don't think you need to go

01:16:24.660 | into that. I think that, I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base

01:16:31.940 | are on the record. They've said, I've spoken to myself and they, who said that they had been warning

01:16:38.180 | in the weeks running up the seventh, that they were seeing, uh, maneuvers and training by the border,

01:16:44.660 | which suggested that Hamas was, was going to do something like this. And, and they say that they

01:16:51.220 | were ignored. The, you speak to some of the more senior commanders about that. And they say, the thing

01:16:56.820 | is that this stuff was happening all the time. So it's very hard, it's very hard to know at the moment.

01:17:03.140 | Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history and, uh, the governing

01:17:12.020 | ideology of this group?

01:17:14.740 | Well, Hamas in a way, quite easy to understand because they, they say what their ambitions are.

01:17:22.260 | They say what their beliefs are. They say it, said it from their governing charter onwards.

01:17:26.900 | And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as it were, in trying to understand them is

01:17:32.100 | that they, they tend to do what they say and, um, act on what they believe. The primary aim of Hamas

01:17:39.220 | Hamas is to destroy the state of Israel and then C. They're not an unusual group, sadly. The,

01:17:46.500 | the bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think,

01:17:50.580 | is that, is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they

01:17:57.460 | want to do. And I give a number of examples in the book of this, but I mean, the most, uh,

01:18:05.220 | obvious is the case of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, who is generally regarded as having

01:18:13.220 | orchestrated and, and, um, arranged the 7th of October. He, uh, we know a fair amount about him

01:18:21.060 | because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza. And, uh, he was

01:18:31.940 | released in the prisoner swap for the, he's one of the more than 1,000, uh, Palestinian prisoners

01:18:38.820 | inside Israel who was released in his, in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier.

01:18:44.340 | And, uh, Yahya Sinwar in prison in Israel, um, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his

01:18:55.220 | life because Yahya Sinwar had a brain tumor. And, uh, this, this dentist identified this and, uh,

01:19:02.580 | actually sent him to the hospital. And the Israelis famously, uh, removed the tumor and, and, and saved

01:19:08.180 | Sinwar's life. But this dentist used to speak to him in, in the prison, not fairly regularly and, and has

01:19:15.380 | related, not least to the New York times, his conversations with Sinwar. And, uh, Sinwar said in

01:19:22.820 | one of those conversations, he said, you know, he said, uh, uh, at the moment, you Israel are strong.

01:19:29.860 | Um, but one day you'll be weak and then I'll come.

01:19:34.100 | And, uh, that's, that's what he did.

01:19:38.340 | Is it a hatred of Israel or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations or the level of, uh,

01:19:48.260 | religion?

01:19:48.820 | Both. It's both. I mean, it, it originates from a religious mindset, but it's of course, political as

01:19:55.700 | well. Um, I mean, the Hamas charter, of course, some people sort of think the Hamas charter is of no

01:20:03.540 | significance. And I often notice this sight of hand that, that, that people do again,

01:20:08.900 | it goes back to what I was saying earlier. Um, forget everything other than the most important

01:20:13.380 | basic things, but the Hamas charter, uh, among other things, quotes the hadith that, you know,

01:20:19.300 | the end times will not come until all of the, the, the, the, the rocks and the trees shout out,

01:20:24.900 | oh, uh, oh Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come and kill him. And, uh, that, that is so Hamas is

01:20:33.620 | both obviously anti-Israeli, obviously, and anti-Jewish, obviously. Um, it's, it's, uh,

01:20:40.980 | and by the way, I mean, um, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book, but is of

01:20:50.020 | the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked, it's not as

01:20:54.420 | if there'd be a right community to act and a wrong community to attack, but the many of

01:20:58.740 | the communities they attacked were communities, which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living

01:21:05.060 | in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. Uh, there's a woman who, whose name has become relatively

01:21:11.780 | famous since certainly is famous inside Israel, Vivian Silva, who was a peace activist who spent

01:21:16.980 | every weekend, um, driving Gazan children from, uh, the border to if, if they had very rare medical

01:21:26.580 | needs that could not be seen attention to within inside Gaza would drive them to Israeli hospitals.

01:21:30.900 | And she spent every weekend doing that worked for all of the sort of left wing peacenet organizations

01:21:36.180 | in Israel. And for a while after the seventh, uh, her neighbors and others thought that, uh,

01:21:43.620 | she had been taken captive into Gaza and that she, there was a hostage poster for her. And there were

01:21:48.340 | appeals by the various peacenet organizations for Hamas to hand her over, but it turned out she'd been

01:21:54.980 | burned alive in her home. And this wasn't discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA

01:22:00.900 | left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers. Um, so there were,

01:22:09.140 | there were a lot of, just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope as it's, it's called in Israel,

01:22:14.340 | in the area around Gaza, who, who would have been the people who, you know, wanted to live peacefully

01:22:22.180 | with, uh, the Gazans someday. And those, there's a certain among the many, it's not an irony,

01:22:28.020 | but just among the sort of pains of the day is that is that so, so overwhelmingly, these,

01:22:36.500 | these are the people that, that Hamas brought hell to the response to October 7th by Israel.

01:22:44.420 | Can you steal me on the case that Israel went too far?

01:22:47.300 | Well, the case that, that started from very early on that, that critics of Israel had was the,

01:22:54.180 | the claim that, I mean, I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October before Israel had done

01:23:00.420 | anything in response was the claim that, uh, Israel must act proportionately in response. And I,

01:23:09.380 | I have a critique of this that I've often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality

01:23:15.700 | in warfare. Um, and at the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately.

01:23:22.260 | And the proportionality of the rest of the, much of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should

01:23:29.060 | express in warfare is to, is to have an equal, um, an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides.

01:23:37.620 | I don't think there's any, um, uh, law of war that says that, you know, if you kill 1200 people and

01:23:46.500 | you kidnap another 250, that as it were, the other side's allowed to do the same back. But that's what

01:23:53.140 | a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gaza side, they say

01:23:58.900 | Israel has acted disproportionately and has over reacted.

01:24:06.580 | that one is a, is a, is, is tricky because, you know, it's, it's, it's my belief that, I mean,

01:24:12.100 | again, this is a basic thing, but it has to be stated that 9 million citizens of Israel,

01:24:17.220 | if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would have meant in American terms,

01:24:21.700 | you'd be talking about, uh, a day on which if, if the attack had happened in America,

01:24:29.620 | where 44,000 Americans were killed in one day and 10,000 American citizens taken hostage,

01:24:36.500 | nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred that America would not do whatever it

01:24:46.420 | needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who'd been taken.

01:24:52.980 | So just on that point, I agree with you a hundred percent, America would do, would hit hard back.

01:24:59.300 | And I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that, but it's also possible that, uh,

01:25:04.980 | the military industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan,

01:25:12.500 | which means extend far beyond hitting back and actually do a thing that's destructive to everybody,

01:25:19.620 | including America financially and the flourishing of America and the flourishing of humanity broadly

01:25:25.540 | and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism. Uh, if that's a real thing, uh,

01:25:34.020 | the war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress.

01:25:41.940 | It probably made more terrorists than not. So there's a justified feeling of hitting back and, uh,

01:25:48.340 | going after somebody like bin Laden in the case of 9/11. And then there's just the actual implementation.

01:25:54.180 | Um, and it seems like the implementation can sometimes, um, unintended or unintended have consequences that are

01:26:04.340 | bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. Now this, this is a general statement. And now we'll

01:26:11.700 | look at Israel where things are small land. Everything is very compact. There's a lot of complexities that are

01:26:22.340 | well studied that we've talked about extensively. Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the

01:26:28.740 | seventh were, uh, to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. And many people said that you could

01:26:35.300 | do one, but not both. Um, and, uh, I actually think they've gone a long way to doing both by no means

01:26:44.900 | everything. There were still hostages as we're speaking, held in Gaza, including a young American.

01:26:49.860 | Um, and Hamas is not completely destroyed. It's very, very significantly degraded, but it's not

01:26:57.700 | completely destroyed. But those are the two aims. Um, I believe that I mean, I've seen as much of the

01:27:08.980 | war as any outside observer. I don't know. There might be some exceptions maybe, but, and so I think I can

01:27:17.620 | say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven't done. Um, the,

01:27:24.100 | the opera, there were various operations at the beginning, various, uh, plans which didn't happen,

01:27:32.660 | like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa

01:27:38.580 | complex, which is called a hospital, but also at the very least the Hamas command headquarters.

01:27:45.460 | And, um, um, there was a, there was a plan to maybe go and, uh, um, do that fast, but it was,

01:27:51.700 | it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen.

01:27:57.860 | The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a period of making sure that when they

01:28:03.780 | went into Gaza, they didn't do so in any way blind, but Gaza is a very built up area and population wise is, is, is, is, um,

01:28:14.260 | is densely populated something by the way, which the people who, who claim frivolously that Israel has been

01:28:22.020 | committing genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the garden population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. It's almost double.

01:28:30.020 | Um, but yes, it's, it's a densely populated area and it's an incredibly difficult place for the train of

01:28:38.820 | war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas goes back a bit to our conversation earlier, but this

01:28:45.380 | is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really don't play by the rules. In fact, they, they use the rules of

01:28:52.260 | war, the laws of war completely to their own advantage. You know, it has to be reiterated.

01:28:58.980 | You are not meant to, uh, disguise your army as civilians. You're not meant to use places of, uh,

01:29:10.340 | care like hospitals as bases for your military operations. You're not meant to use schools

01:29:18.900 | and places of worship as operating centers of war. And Hamas does all of these things

01:29:27.060 | and has always done so. And it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a

01:29:36.020 | two for one offer. You, you, you get to operate everywhere. And if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that

01:29:46.020 | this is a war crime because how could they attack this group of civilians, these people who are dressed

01:29:53.620 | as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque and so on. And that's why, that's why

01:30:02.420 | everybody who's been to Gaza, who's seen the fighting knows the same thing, which is, this is just

01:30:08.420 | incredibly difficult, difficult warfare of a kind that, that American troops have seen in the last 20

01:30:17.140 | years in Fallujah and elsewhere, uh, Kurdish, uh, militia, the Peshmerga saw when they were fighting as our

01:30:26.180 | frontline troops in the war against ISIS, similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched,

01:30:33.620 | uh, uh, uh, bases. Uh, you know, again, it can't be stressed enough that Hamas has used the years

01:30:40.340 | since he's ready withdrawal from 2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network. And again, it's obvious,

01:30:49.380 | but it has to be remembered when is, and I quote one of the Hamas leaders in the book saying this

01:30:55.700 | in an interview, when they build their tunnels, they do so in order that their tunnels are used

01:31:01.460 | by them Hamas to store their weaponry, to secure their fighters and to hold hostages.

01:31:09.700 | They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of Gaza and civilians, avoiding aerial

01:31:16.900 | bombardment. And, you know, the, uh, every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country

01:31:27.380 | which does build, uh, bomb shelters for its citizens and, um, a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs.

01:31:36.740 | Can you discuss the flow of money here? So how does Hamas, how does Hamas the leadership

01:31:45.380 | use the money? So you started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you

01:31:50.740 | just lay it all out? Uh, because I think that's an, that's an important part of the picture here.

01:31:56.340 | It's totally corrupt. Every Hamas leader who's, uh, now dead died a billionaire.

01:32:05.700 | With a B. With a B. To say that they used Gaza's resources or the, the, the resources that came into

01:32:17.060 | Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters. Um,

01:32:24.180 | Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do

01:32:33.700 | the seventh and everything since. Um, they militarized the whole of the Gaza. They, um, by the estimations

01:32:44.580 | of troops I've been with there, they, every second to third house had weaponry stashed there, bombs,

01:32:52.340 | RPGs, Krasnikov's rockets, tunnel entrances, uh, the network that they just embedded

01:33:03.300 | all these years was, was total. They, they, they, you know, one of the many, many tragedies of this

01:33:11.060 | is that whatever you're reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005,

01:33:20.420 | it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving

01:33:28.020 | statelet. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It's just that Hamas,

01:33:34.900 | the PLO before them decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create

01:33:42.500 | a Palestinian state. And that is to the great, great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza,

01:33:49.540 | to put it at its mildest.

01:33:50.820 | So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money to get sent by Qatar, by everybody.

01:33:58.260 | So they're putting in their pocket and then the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as

01:34:02.660 | well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's not just about the stealing of money. It's,

01:34:06.820 | it's about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor. I mean, that's those,

01:34:12.500 | those two things, but the corruption is, uh, a signal from an economic perspective,

01:34:17.540 | but it's also a signal of deep moral corruption because they're screwing over the Palestinian people.

01:34:26.740 | Yeah. It's a cynicism, certainly. Yeah. Okay. And then with the money they do spend

01:34:31.700 | on the Palestinian cause, they're not doing that to, uh, build up

01:34:37.140 | Gaza. They're doing it to, uh, strengthen the militaristic capabilities of the terrorist organization

01:34:46.020 | of Hamas. You have, maybe you can correct me on this, um, have said that

01:34:55.620 | the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas.

01:35:03.140 | Yes. Because they've elected them. They elected them. The what ifs are endless, but

01:35:07.220 | very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza, um, after 05. But

01:35:16.740 | Hamas were elected and they then 2007 killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main

01:35:26.100 | challenger, Fatah, uh, killed them, threw them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes

01:35:32.180 | through the Gaza. And from that point, they had total control. And you know, this is difficult because

01:35:40.500 | you, you, you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way, justifying

01:35:46.900 | collective punishment. Uh, if you talk about this, but it should be born in mind that,

01:35:53.060 | you know, Hamas had effectively 18 years to run the Gaza. And that's, that's the time that it takes from

01:36:07.060 | the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. And in 18 years, they could have presided

01:36:14.900 | over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive, productive for their people,

01:36:26.340 | for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world. And they didn't,

01:36:32.820 | they spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred,

01:36:41.860 | which obviously is, was most dangerous to the Israelis, but it was obviously disastrous

01:36:53.780 | for the people of Gaza. And, you know, there is, um, there's just, if you speak to soldiers who were

01:37:01.380 | there in 2014, when Hamas started a war again, um, one of a set of rounds of war since 2005. If you speak

01:37:11.620 | to the soldiers who were there in 2014, going house to house, and who were also involved in the war since

01:37:17.060 | 2003, they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population.

01:37:24.820 | The marked increase in just, I mean, the most, I mean, it's so banal in a way to even cite, you know,

01:37:32.500 | like the numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the

01:37:39.780 | learned elders of Zion. There are so many what ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken,

01:37:45.460 | but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of using their time and power

01:37:51.620 | to build up their infrastructure, radicalize the population, and encourage them to believe that they

01:37:58.980 | could destroy the state of Israel. And then on October the 7th, they gave it their best shot.

01:38:06.260 | And by the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective

01:38:13.380 | punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing,

01:38:19.860 | this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th.

01:38:24.580 | They have been fighting a house-to-house war against this terrorist group. They do do aerial strikes.

01:38:34.740 | Gaza is very, very badly beaten up as the buildings, I mean, the infrastructure that existed.

01:38:43.460 | There aren't many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by

01:38:56.260 | the Israelis. It's been extremely concerted. It's extremely difficult. But when people say,

01:39:05.140 | well, this must be collective punishment, I think that the people who say that,

01:39:08.580 | simultaneously, that's not true. And also,

01:39:15.540 | you know, there is not a hostage who's come out, who Donald Trump made this, President Trump made this

01:39:24.660 | point recently. There is not a hostage who's come out who I've spoken with, who found any Ghazan,

01:39:32.980 | Palestinian, who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them. If you, if you look at the footage

01:39:43.300 | from the 7th that Hamas recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on,

01:39:49.380 | you will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified Ghazan

01:39:59.540 | the civilians and so on. And the civilians saying, why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you've

01:40:05.540 | cut and why are you bringing her here? It's all celebration. It's all celebration. And it's the same

01:40:13.940 | with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held

01:40:20.420 | in who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.

01:40:24.340 | Yeah, the celebration, I do wonder what percent of the population they represent, but there's something

01:40:32.580 | really dark. There's several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there's a deep

01:40:39.380 | indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews. And there also could be a place of just

01:40:46.340 | deep desperation. And it's a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you're

01:40:53.940 | on the side of fighting for freedom

01:40:57.460 | in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out of desperation

01:41:05.060 | out of extremely harsh conditions. Because the way we're kind of speaking about this with the celebration,

01:41:11.620 | it's very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace that I just am very hesitant to project,

01:41:21.940 | especially on the general populace.

01:41:23.300 | You don't have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words.

01:41:27.060 | I'm sure you've heard one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I'm sure you've heard

01:41:34.900 | the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and

01:41:41.220 | calls back home. Have you heard that?

01:41:45.220 | I quoted it in the first chapter of the book. He calls back home and he says to his father who picks

01:41:54.660 | up. It's on WhatsApp. I think he's on the phone. He's saying, "Turn onto WhatsApp because I can show

01:41:59.460 | you." He says, "I've killed 10 Jews with my own hands. O father, your son has killed 10 Jews." And his

01:42:06.660 | father is saying, "Where are you? Where are you?" He goes, "I want to show you, Dad. I want to show you. I've killed

01:42:11.620 | Jews with my own hands. Your son." Put mother on the phone. Mother comes on the phone. The brother

01:42:18.180 | comes on the phone. This is one of many, many stories from the day that suggest something which I would say

01:42:36.020 | is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil. First of all, those phone calls are somehow

01:42:42.420 | uniquely horrific. But I've also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their

01:42:51.220 | parents and Russian soldiers to their parents. And they have not as intense and not as horrific,

01:42:58.580 | but they have a similar nature to them. There's an aspect of war where you

01:43:06.100 | dehumanize the other side in order to fight that war. So we have to remember that that element is

01:43:17.060 | going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.

01:43:20.100 | It would be a strange type of simple sort of, I don't know, pride in war to go into an 80-year-old

01:43:32.020 | woman's house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body and her body in its final

01:43:44.580 | moments and send it round to all of that woman's friends on her phone on her Instagram account.

01:43:50.260 | You may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised if there were

01:44:00.660 | even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, "Mom, you won't believe

01:44:08.260 | my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 80-year-old woman." That's quite unusual, even in warfare.

01:44:17.540 | And that's one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types,

01:44:27.780 | which makes them different from other people.

01:44:30.660 | But that's the channeling of evil and hatred and anger in the human spirit, but that doesn't make

01:44:38.420 | that person evil.

01:44:39.620 | No, I disagree.

01:44:40.900 | You commit that once.

01:44:43.060 | I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used.

01:44:49.380 | And it's very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this. But of everything I've seen,

01:44:58.260 | there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other

01:45:06.020 | than evil. The things that happened at the Nova party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all

01:45:14.420 | appalling, but it was especially appalling because, first of all, it's the sort of party which people

01:45:19.700 | like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger, might have been at. And so everyone knows

01:45:26.900 | the world of a dance party in all night, you know, rave in the desert to commune with nature and the

01:45:34.260 | universe and to take some psychedelics and to, you know, expand your consciousness and your love and

01:45:41.700 | all of that sort of thing. The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered

01:45:52.660 | people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just massacring them and raping them.

01:46:02.420 | And I mean, I give examples of the first-hand accounts of people who survived, but I mean, it's

01:46:08.660 | beyond belief of almost anything else I've covered in war. And it's because it seems so...

01:46:18.740 | I mean, an army facing another army is one thing. A terrorist group in civilian clothing

01:46:30.180 | facing a group of young people at a dance, unarmed, and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend

01:46:49.380 | unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere. So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of

01:47:00.580 | Palestinians in Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response?

01:47:05.780 | Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there

01:47:14.740 | on the first time a couple of days early and into the ground invasion when the citizens of Gaza were

01:47:25.620 | coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to

01:47:32.660 | stop the hostages being taken south, deeper into Gaza, and to try to stop Hamaz's leadership from

01:47:39.780 | making it south. It actually didn't really work because they'd already got a lot of the hostages south.

01:47:46.900 | It was an attempt to keep Hamaz there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way in,

01:47:54.260 | in the end, dragged all the way in anyway. But yes, I mean, watching the citizens of Gaza moving

01:48:01.220 | through the humanitarian corridor and everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests,

01:48:08.100 | checked for particularly young men of military age.

01:48:11.380 | I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think this is terrible, but this is a terrible

01:48:21.460 | thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been misgoverning the place

01:48:27.300 | that they lived in. And of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going

01:48:36.100 | through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger

01:48:48.820 | that they had come to this point because of the fact that they had elected a terror group to run

01:48:55.940 | their territory. And one of the things obviously is that, you know, a lot of people like to say,

01:49:01.300 | and it's true of course, that, you know, this didn't all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true.

01:49:08.260 | And this particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th,

01:49:13.620 | without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th. It wasn't like they were forced to

01:49:20.820 | liberate themselves or something, as some of the defenders of Hamas claim.

01:49:28.180 | But the conflict of course goes back a lot earlier, but you will have to always keep on contending with

01:49:35.700 | this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called

01:49:44.500 | the Arab-Israeli conflict, and now has become interestingly rebranded the Israeli-Palestinian

01:49:50.900 | conflict. But there is one absolutely essential issue to this, which cannot be forgotten, which is

01:49:57.140 | is, do the Palestinians want a state, or do they want to destroy the Jewish state?

01:50:06.420 | And if they want to destroy the Jewish state, as they've tried many times, it's a disaster for them.

01:50:14.660 | It's a total disaster for them. If they want to create their own state, they've already had several

01:50:22.100 | very good shots at it, one of which is Gaza post 2005. But they've never shown in their leadership

01:50:31.220 | the desire to live with a Jewish state. And that's a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

01:50:39.860 | Can you still imagine the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices that

01:50:46.820 | describe the Gaza situation as an occupation? The West Bank too, and in the case of Gaza, open-air prison?

01:50:55.460 | The, to take them in order, there's nothing about Gaza that was an open-air prison.

01:51:02.660 | They had ability to trade, they had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers.

01:51:10.580 | Egypt wasn't so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, still isn't. But at the time of the

01:51:17.780 | 7th, there was actually an interesting, one of the things the international community was pushing for

01:51:22.260 | was for more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz crossing and others to

01:51:28.020 | work in Israel, because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.

01:51:33.540 | And this, the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted, it was being pushed on

01:51:41.220 | Israel by the international community a little bit too fast for Israel's comfort, but it happened.

01:51:46.100 | That completely came to an end, and that dream is done, gone, since the 7th of October.

01:51:54.420 | Can you clarify the dream, the normalization?

01:51:56.340 | The normalization dream.

01:51:57.460 | Between Gaza and Israel.

01:51:58.820 | Israel.

01:51:59.460 | Gone.

01:51:59.460 | There will be, yeah, no normalization. No, not after that. And one of the reasons is

01:52:05.540 | the number of people, again, who I've spoken with who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians,

01:52:12.420 | worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to

01:52:18.180 | work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth.

01:52:21.300 | One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the Kibbutz Sim,

01:52:26.340 | the communities in the South, was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed

01:52:32.980 | house-to-house maps of those communities. I spoke with one man who, his community, they had a security

01:52:44.260 | officer, chief, and Hamas came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then which

01:52:51.060 | families. I've seen the maps myself. They came in with incredibly accurate information about these

01:53:00.740 | communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the brothers, by the workers,

01:53:06.260 | by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.

01:53:12.740 | There's a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel.

01:53:17.220 | What are they saying? What are they feeling? And what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still

01:53:26.580 | camaraderie to some degree, or is it completely destroyed?

01:53:31.220 | My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary. I mean, if you've worked beside

01:53:41.380 | somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust again. And that,

01:53:48.420 | particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast.

01:53:53.860 | The very beginning there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the, you know,

01:54:00.100 | 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis. I actually think one of the few sort of positive

01:54:09.060 | news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has, by and large, held. There hasn't

01:54:19.060 | been an intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn't been more activity, terrorist activity in

01:54:29.140 | the West Bank in Judea and Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful, along with the

01:54:33.780 | Palestinian Authority, to some extent cooperating to keep that down. But, you know, there wasn't a war on,

01:54:40.980 | a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.

01:54:47.460 | So I think that the sort of coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some

01:54:53.140 | terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular as it could happen, of Muslim Arab Israelis

01:55:02.820 | carrying out acts of terror in, as it were, sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack

01:55:09.300 | myself, uh, uh, late last year, um, and, uh, in a town called Hedera. And those things have happened,

01:55:19.060 | but they, it's, it's not, that, that particular catastrophe has not occurred.

01:55:24.820 | Can we talk about, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil,

01:55:31.940 | they refer to him as evil. On the spectrum between good and evil, as a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?

01:55:38.260 | Well, he's certainly not evil. Uh, interesting if people, uh, looking at this conflict were to be

01:55:45.620 | reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister,

01:55:50.820 | it would be sort of, uh, telling, I would say. Can we just actually linger on that point?

01:55:55.300 | There is a point you've made, uh, multiple times, which is we're more eager to, to criticize and maybe

01:56:02.500 | even, uh, over-exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders.

01:56:08.820 | Yes.

01:56:09.860 | It's a dark, weird, other quality of, uh, discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.

01:56:18.020 | Well, isn't it also, I mean, not to be flippant for a moment, it's a little bit like,

01:56:23.940 | who do you show your worst sides to? The people you love.

01:56:29.140 | You, it's like, you know, my intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people

01:56:38.740 | who are closest to me because I, um, um, if I express it to absolutely everybody I met at the

01:56:44.900 | party or a social setting, it would be, it'd be hard. I mean, there's a tendency to lean heavily on

01:56:50.180 | the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. Um, and something similar

01:56:59.220 | happens in international politics. You, you pressure the people who will listen. I mean, it's, it's one

01:57:06.740 | of the, I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last years, you know, people sort of ignoramuses

01:57:12.100 | in the governments in places like Britain, you know, will say we need to put more pressure on the

01:57:18.260 | Israelis to do X. And you go, well, you know, in part, that's because they will listen. If you go,

01:57:28.420 | we need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to, to persuade them that Hamas are really bad

01:57:34.420 | and they shouldn't be doing this. Right. What the hell do you think they're going to do? They're

01:57:38.580 | going to listen to you. They're going to give a damn. You're talking totally different worlds,

01:57:43.780 | not just a different language, it's a different world. And by the way, that happens in Israel.

01:57:47.460 | I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the hostage families forum

01:57:53.220 | came about, uh, I spent a lot of time there, a lot, got to know a lot of the families and, um,

01:57:57.700 | they're remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that

01:58:02.980 | a lot of them, oh, they protest outside Netanyahu's house. They use klaxon horns and make sure he doesn't

01:58:10.660 | can never sleep. They, uh, will, you know, put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied

01:58:16.820 | hands and, and so on. And I have, you know, I think as much sympathy as you can for these families,

01:58:26.740 | the plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is

01:58:35.220 | intolerable, but there's a reason why the families protested Netanyahu. And that's because Sinhua didn't

01:58:46.820 | care. That wouldn't work. If you said, are you, you know, understand my plight? I'm a Jewish mother

01:58:57.460 | and my daughter is thing. You think Sinhua and the heads of Hamas care? You think the leaders in Qatar

01:59:05.700 | who host them care? The Qatari Amir's mother, when Sinhua was killed, praised Sinhua. You couldn't talk

01:59:15.780 | that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel

01:59:20.420 | because that, first of all, he's somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured.

01:59:27.860 | And secondly, it's simply the only person you can pressure. There's no one else. Hamas doesn't care.

01:59:32.980 | Hezbollah doesn't care. The Iranian revolutionary government doesn't care.

01:59:36.660 | Yeah. So let's just sort of say once again, the, uh, the obvious thing that, uh, what, while it is

01:59:43.860 | possible to discuss, uh, Hamas, uh, soldiers as freedom fighters, I'm not one of the folks that

01:59:53.220 | can take that perspective. It's a tough one to take. I don't see how you can call them freedom fighters.

01:59:57.620 | So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war.

02:00:02.980 | There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain

02:00:10.180 | in a, uh, in a real way, not in, not using the words of good and evil, but in a, in a very deep human sense,

02:00:17.700 | from that place, from that place of desperation, from your home and your family's destroyed,

02:00:24.180 | doesn't matter why, doesn't matter if there's evil all around you that caused it, doesn't matter. The, the facts are the facts.

02:00:30.820 | And from that place, somebody who's fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter.

02:00:39.540 | I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience.

02:00:45.380 | But Hamas is very clearly, since we're talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil.

02:00:53.780 | Okay. Now you can still, in that context, discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for

02:01:02.100 | this moment. And whether he goes too far, whether he's too politically selfish in the decisions he makes,

02:01:11.140 | whether he's too much a warmonger, whether he's utilizing the war, uh, for his own political gains,

02:01:20.260 | and is, uh, not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own

02:01:28.980 | political, uh, maintaining power. That's a perspective that I could steal, man. And that's a perspective

02:01:35.700 | worth discussing. And that's the perspective many in Israel hold when they criticize Netanyahu. He's

02:01:40.980 | increasingly less and less popular. That's wrong. The opinion polls last month when he was in Washington,

02:01:46.020 | showed him at an all time high, you know, but you were saying I, I make my own poll. And according to my poll,

02:01:51.220 | um, I'm the greatest, I'm the nicest and the coolest person in the world.

02:01:56.420 | A hundred percent of people agree. So I didn't mean to laugh that much. Yeah.

02:02:01.460 | You laughed a little too much. It's more than the joke. Yeah.

02:02:05.300 | But you were saying, I mean, yeah. Okay. Let's steal, man, the criticism of Netanyahu.

02:02:10.020 | Can you, and then steal, man, the case for him that he's the right leader actually at this moment.

02:02:16.500 | The most devastating thing that anyone can come up against Netanyahu is, is, uh, that the seventh

02:02:22.660 | happened on his watch. Um, after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Golda Meir, who is a very distinguished

02:02:32.340 | prime minister of Israel and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the, the political hit

02:02:39.060 | for the Yom Kippur invasion, um, by Israel's Arab neighbors happening on her watch. And, um, and I

02:02:47.780 | thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel and without would always hold

02:02:55.060 | that against him. Um, the, uh, I suppose that the, one of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this

02:03:05.940 | thing of Israel being divided in the year before the seventh because of the judicial reforms.

02:03:10.420 | Um, I think there's a strong case with judicial reforms in Israel, but, um, it's a sort of niche

02:03:18.460 | Israeli governance issue, which we don't have to get into. The point is, is that Netanyahu and his

02:03:23.880 | government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms. And, uh, it was very divisive and on the

02:03:31.260 | streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend, there were protests and the, uh, police were tired

02:03:39.100 | because they'd spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned

02:03:44.540 | raucous, not to say violent, but sometimes violent. And, uh, you could say, well, if you see that something

02:03:53.020 | is dividing your country this much, why don't you stop? There is a claim by some people that one, one of

02:03:59.500 | the things that prompted the seventh was that Hamas and his backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division

02:04:06.220 | in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population, you know, a significant chunk of it every week on the streets,

02:04:13.340 | shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought good. Now's the time. In other words,

02:04:19.340 | what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier, when he was in, um, in a prison in Israel was, you know, this thing,

02:04:26.940 | one day you'll be weak and then I'll strike. Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought Israel

02:04:35.820 | was very weak. It had been divided and therefore the time strike. There's an argument against that,

02:04:40.300 | which is that the seventh was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process

02:04:46.780 | in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, look,

02:04:53.820 | this is, you know, if you, if your, your, your nation was divided, don't push through anymore on that.

02:04:59.100 | There's, there's lots of things like that. You could say that, that Netanyahu was one of the people

02:05:04.220 | responsible for the conception. You could, uh, there are critics of his, including critics who are in the

02:05:09.900 | war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on, on, uh, Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah.

02:05:17.500 | Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. Um,

02:05:22.620 | so I, there's them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I would say I've interviewed,

02:05:30.140 | I think every political leader in Israel from right to left pretty much. And, um, I have to say, I don't

02:05:37.340 | think there's any of them that wouldn't have responded similarly to the seventh of October to the way he

02:05:43.580 | has. Can we, okay. So that's inside Israel, outside of Israel, you know, uh, despite what

02:05:51.180 | he said, uh, he is one of the most hated people in the world, just the raw quantity relative.

02:05:56.860 | He's loved by a lot of people, but there's a lot of people that, you know, there's a lot of psychological

02:06:03.260 | effects that might explain that. I mean, it's sort of strange to, to, to, if, if, if, if there is a

02:06:07.820 | widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of eight to nine million people.

02:06:13.740 | Yeah. That's, that might mean something more than, uh, a hatred of the, the military actions

02:06:19.980 | and the policies of the one person. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a, there's an awful lot

02:06:24.940 | of people to hate in the world. There's a lot of wars in the world. It's, it's always of interest to me.

02:06:30.060 | And obviously it's on the one things I go into on, on democracies and death cults is this question of

02:06:34.700 | like, why is this so galvanizing for so many people? And I think that is a very, very interesting

02:06:42.700 | question. Like why, by the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else like

02:06:50.060 | that. When people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy in the last 30 years or so,

02:06:57.500 | it's very interesting. There's a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz.

02:07:02.860 | Yeah. Um, and they all say, well, you know, Wolfowitz, you mean deputy under secretary of defense

02:07:13.580 | under George W. Bush, you think he guided everything. Why would that be other than the fact that his name,

02:07:25.260 | as Mark Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish?

02:07:29.660 | I mean, I do. And I do. So I do think that the, there are very deep things at play.

02:07:41.740 | Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does for a lot of people is a kind of devil. And you have to say,

02:07:54.460 | well, why is that now? Of course, some people will say, well, that's because he, uh, uh, his terrible

02:08:00.140 | hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his

02:08:08.540 | his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people and that that's his life's mission.

02:08:17.660 | And on that basis, I think he's been by any measure, historic leader. He has warned the world

02:08:29.180 | about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism

02:08:37.260 | across the region, across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the seventh, he has

02:08:45.980 | held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep, um, international pressure

02:08:55.340 | at the tolerable level to do all sorts of things. But most importantly, to oversee the two war aims

02:09:05.340 | that he set out at the beginning, I thought, let me just express this. I thought like a lot of people,

02:09:12.540 | when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they're all dead. They're all going to be dead.

02:09:19.820 | We'll never see them again. And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis.

02:09:24.940 | But although there are still hostages being held, and as I've always said, the war could end tomorrow

02:09:32.540 | if they were handed back. Um, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow

02:09:38.300 | if they were handed back. Uh, nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu, but the Israeli

02:09:46.300 | government, um, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen.

02:09:58.140 | And Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded.

02:10:05.180 | And you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like, but they

02:10:11.900 | are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of 2023.

02:10:21.260 | their leadership has almost all been killed. Uh, the second tier of leadership, almost all gone.

02:10:29.740 | And, um, this is a just response to what Hamas did.

02:10:37.820 | The moment, Netanyahu's reputation in Israel was a little low early on because of what had happened.

02:10:48.860 | But, and there's no doubt. And as I, I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean, there's

02:10:53.820 | General Slim had this phrase, uh, you know, from defeat into victory, Israel isn't at victory yet

02:10:59.980 | in this conflict. But, uh, when in September last year, there were a set of operational successes,

02:11:08.540 | so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day's news was, there was one day I remember when

02:11:16.780 | after the, um, after the, um, after the Assad regime fell, when, um, the Israeli air force took out the

02:11:22.460 | entirety of the Syrian air force, uh, in a day because they didn't want it falling into the hands of

02:11:28.780 | the new jihadist administration in Syria. It was story number four on the BBC news website. Um,

02:11:35.500 | the leadership of Hezbollah, gone, gone. The, the, the second and third tiers of Hezbollah,

02:11:45.260 | gone or wounded, uh, Iran's Rolls Royce destroyed. Um, these are very, very significant military

02:11:57.980 | achievements and are in my mind a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas and other Iranian

02:12:09.740 | proxies to destroy the Jewish state. Um, would another Israeli leader have been able to hold

02:12:16.860 | firm as Netanyahu has? I don't know, but I do know that any of them would have done something similar

02:12:26.140 | or would have tried to do something similar because there's no country on earth, no democracy on earth,

02:12:31.100 | which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.

02:12:35.340 | to the point, the underlying point you made of why do so many people want to call him evil?

02:12:46.540 | And so the implication is it's not just a hatred of Israel. There's an ocean of hatred for the Jews.

02:12:54.060 | Yes. Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?

02:12:59.980 | I would say there's one reason in particular. It's a stupid and gullible person's easy answer.

02:13:08.380 | Why is, why do certain things happen in the world? What is, what is our explanation of chance or unfairness or

02:13:18.700 | any number of things?

02:13:21.740 | Easiest, easiest, stupidest person's explanation is there's a small group of people doing it.

02:13:30.780 | Let's not say stupidest, because there's something in the human mind that craves a nice,

02:13:35.500 | clean theory of everything, right? That explains all the problems. It's not just stupidest.

02:13:39.900 | Let me rewrite it. Lowest grade.

02:13:42.460 | Right, because I have that desire, too, to simplify everything.

02:13:46.780 | Be a bit anti-Semitic, what?

02:13:52.700 | We've all been very anti-Semitic here and there. Just get a few vodkas. I mean, no.

02:13:56.700 | To find, I mean, maybe as a mathematician in me, to find a simple explanation for everything.

02:14:02.940 | Right.

02:14:03.500 | Actually, that's nice for everything.

02:14:05.500 | Yeah, yeah, no, no.

02:14:06.220 | Historians do this.

02:14:07.260 | Absolutely. I agree.

02:14:08.220 | Like, analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed. It's so nice to have one, especially if it's a

02:14:14.540 | counterintuitive explanation. It's one of the favorite go-tos, right? It's an explanation for all

02:14:19.900 | the problems in the world.

02:14:20.860 | Yeah. It's the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.

02:14:24.620 | Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my

02:14:29.900 | job? Why did I not get the job? Because so, even on the personal level-

02:14:33.820 | Oh, especially on the personal level. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.

02:14:39.260 | Yeah. And it's just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history,

02:14:46.220 | you just always return back to the hits, I guess. And what is it special about the Jews as a group

02:14:52.380 | that people love to hate? Is it just because it's a small number of people?

02:14:55.580 | I think several things. One is successful. One is small and, without by any means saying this is a

02:15:03.660 | general rule, but disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times.

02:15:13.340 | prominent is a word I would use. Prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places. It's not

02:15:21.420 | a full explanation. I mean, you know, all sorts of historical reasons why Jews were involved in

02:15:26.540 | banking. But then there are lots of historic reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in

02:15:32.460 | banking. And to this day, you don't find many people who blame all international finance problems on the

02:15:39.260 | Scots. So there are just like easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.

02:15:45.100 | We should also mention, you know, banking for some reason. Money is a thing that people go to,

02:15:50.060 | but Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and

02:15:54.620 | engineering, mathematics, and the arts, and so on.

02:15:59.100 | A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable.

02:16:03.100 | I don't want to use the word stupid again now, a different type of person.

02:16:11.740 | I'm triggered already.

02:16:13.020 | A different type of person would look at that and say, "That must mean they took something from me."

02:16:17.340 | And that's, you know, the most zero-sum game there is. It's an endlessly fascinating subject,

02:16:26.780 | because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable

02:16:30.140 | temptation of the human

02:16:34.940 | spirit at its ugliest and cheapest.

02:16:38.700 | But because it's back in our day, it bears some analysis again.

02:16:49.580 | And I would say two things about it. One is, as I and others have said many times in the past,

02:16:58.380 | one of the fascinating things about antisemitism is that it can cover everything at once.

02:17:05.260 | So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for

02:17:13.100 | being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms. They can be hated for being religious and for being

02:17:23.500 | anti-religious and producing Marxism, for instance. Hated for religiosity and secularism.

02:17:30.780 | They can be hated for most recently not having a state and therefore being rootless cosmopolitans.

02:17:39.740 | And also hated for having a state.

02:17:43.260 | And that makes it something very unusual, actually, in the history of human bigotry and

02:17:52.220 | bias and ugliness. But the real thing is, one of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman says at the center

02:18:02.540 | of life and fate, almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism is Grossman's genius,

02:18:08.140 | that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn't say in an entire life,

02:18:16.140 | even after a life of study. But there's this passage in Life and Fate that I quote in my book,

02:18:22.140 | which just bowled me over when I read it some years ago. When he says, you know,

02:18:27.580 | the interesting thing about antisemitism, he says you can meet it everywhere in the Academy of Sciences

02:18:34.380 | and in the games that children play in the yard. But Grossman's great insight is, he says,

02:18:41.180 | everywhere it tells you not about the Jews, but about the person making the claim. And the most

02:18:48.060 | important gift he gives in his analysis is when he describes it as a mirror to the person who is making

02:18:55.900 | the claims, culminating in this phrase I've been trying to make popular, which is he says, "Tell me what

02:19:03.020 | you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you're guilty of." It's a searingly brilliant insight.

02:19:10.060 | the Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power.

02:19:20.380 | The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes.

02:19:28.940 | The Turkish government accuses the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation.

02:19:39.180 | Do you know Northern Cyprus? The Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s.

02:19:50.060 | Cyprus is an EU member state and Turkey is in NATO.

02:19:54.220 | So, you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state, like the people who accuse Jews

02:20:04.540 | of something, almost without fail, is the thing they're guilty of. Look at the supporters of Hamas and

02:20:14.300 | Hamas. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.

02:20:21.180 | Hamas? Hello? What were you doing on the 7th? You see, there are these crazy guys online

02:20:32.380 | who claim, repeatedly claim, that for some reason, Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet

02:20:41.260 | them, whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital. It just erupts occasionally. These

02:20:48.700 | people go around and say, "Oh my God, the IDF are rapists." You go, "Excuse me?

02:20:55.500 | You're the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, 'Believe all women.' Then from the 7th of October said,

02:21:07.500 | 'Believe all women, except for Jewish women who say they've been raped or seen their friends raped."

02:21:12.220 | And then you say, "Aha, the Jews are rapists." You've been carrying water for rapists and then go

02:21:19.900 | and accuse the Jews of rape. I mean, it just works. Every way you do it, it works. I do think the thing

02:21:27.340 | of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild. I mean, it is wild. By the way,

02:21:36.540 | there's an interesting thing on this that I try to get into in the book, which is this thing of,

02:21:41.660 | "Why did so much of the world respond the way it did?" I mean, we're sitting in New York. There was

02:21:45.900 | not one protest against Hamas in New York after the 7th of October. The "Believe all women" crowd

02:21:54.060 | didn't come out against Hamas' rapes. The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to

02:22:02.140 | the killing of Israeli children or anything. Nobody did it. Nobody did it. The one thing

02:22:09.100 | that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who'd been attacked.

02:22:15.340 | And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from here in Times Square on

02:22:19.980 | October the 8th, October the frigging 8th, the protests are in Times Square against Israel justifying the

02:22:27.500 | attacks that were still going on. And this is something that deserves deep self-examination on

02:22:35.260 | behalf of people in the West who've seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society. I mean,

02:22:41.340 | degraded parts but parts, bits of the universities and so on. And I think there's an explanation

02:22:47.980 | for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection. When you and I last talked on

02:22:53.820 | camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West, and I remember saying to you there that

02:22:58.300 | one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased, unfair,

02:23:08.700 | and inaccurate estimation of the Western past. Whereby, you know, America's original sin had to

02:23:16.380 | be identified and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin. Does Ghana have an

02:23:22.220 | original sin? No one knows. No one really would think it polite to point one out. And, you know,

02:23:29.180 | you go on and on with these things that I identified in the war on the West, these sins of the West,

02:23:36.700 | and they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we're sitting

02:23:43.980 | in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide,

02:23:54.940 | and a couple of others you can throw in probably.

02:24:01.260 | One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that one of the deep problems

02:24:07.980 | of setting up that system of thought, pseudo-thought, non-thought, would-be thought,

02:24:13.500 | is that there's nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there's nothing you can do about it.

02:24:22.780 | If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave, what are you going to

02:24:29.340 | do? There's no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn't do it, and there's no one in

02:24:35.980 | life who could accept the apology. And I remember setting it up there in the war on the West. I set up

02:24:41.500 | this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our

02:24:52.300 | societies. But I would say that since October the 7th, there has been an answer for a certain type of

02:25:02.300 | person, which is, I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white

02:25:11.020 | supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more. I've been told all of these things. I have been put in an

02:25:20.140 | un-get-outable of situation of moral burden that can never be relieved because I can't ask anyone's

02:25:30.860 | forgiveness and nobody can forgive me. But ah, here's a country which I can accuse of all of these things

02:25:43.180 | in the here and now. Load my energies, my guilts, my burdens onto, and what's more, I might be able to

02:25:55.580 | end it, and by doing so would relieve myself. And in other words, I tweak Grossman with the people in

02:26:08.300 | America and elsewhere who've fallen into this trap. I tweak him by saying,

02:26:12.860 | "On this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I'll tell you what you've been told you're guilty of."

02:26:21.260 | Yeah, it's an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the

02:26:27.820 | sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of

02:26:36.700 | engagement online. Is this, so I watch it like a curiosity, like I'm an alien observing Earth.

02:26:45.580 | Is this dangerous to you, or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, you know,

02:26:53.260 | let's say, cosplaying as Nazis? It's just fun to trigger the libs.

02:26:59.340 | It could be all of those things. I think it is, and a lot more. I mean, taboos, you know,

02:27:08.140 | taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online

02:27:13.180 | who have grown up knowing that, you know, since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was taboo,

02:27:21.980 | and they've run out of, it goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit, you know,

02:27:26.780 | the, they sort of run out of, they've got bored of that, you know, Holocaust, schmolocaust, they'd say,

02:27:33.500 | you know, I've heard enough about that. And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction

02:27:42.220 | as a result. But I don't think that's the main, I think that's like a detail compared to the real

02:27:48.140 | thing. The real thing is that anti-Semitism is back. And there is a certain type of person who's

02:27:54.860 | loving it.

02:27:55.740 | Is it really back? So I watch a lot.

02:27:57.820 | Well, it never goes away. It's just that, it's just that it's, it's, it's, it's since the seventh,

02:28:03.100 | I think that it's had a great resurgence. And this isn't to say, and I'm just a steel man,

02:28:07.660 | that doesn't mean that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. No, it doesn't.

02:28:12.300 | But as I have often said, if you don't ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims

02:28:20.380 | in Syria, not any interest in genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen,

02:28:29.420 | but on the 8th of October, you're on the street with a placard attacking Israel.

02:28:33.500 | I'm sorry, you're an anti-Semite, for sure. You may not know you are,

02:28:37.260 | but that's what's motivating you.

02:28:39.500 | It gets a lot of engagement.

02:28:41.340 | I watch it.

02:28:42.300 | It does.

02:28:42.700 | I watch it.

02:28:43.500 | But I mean, it's, it's one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean,

02:28:49.420 | it's like, if you, if you say that there's like a massive pedophile ring run by prominent

02:28:53.900 | politicians, it might be total horse shit. It's likely to be total horse shit, but it'll

02:28:59.820 | also get a hell of a lot of engagement.

02:29:01.900 | Yeah. But that's still the, so the pedophile ring, like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.

02:29:06.540 | Yeah. Which is very interesting.

02:29:08.060 | Yeah. And it's like, great. All right, cool. Let's, let's get behind that conspiracy.

02:29:12.460 | Uh, but the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still, that's the greatest hits still.

02:29:20.700 | It is. And I mean, you see it with, I mean, some of the people who've made minor celebrities of

02:29:25.420 | themselves with a sort of made up version of history with a smattering of this and a little

02:29:33.500 | bit of that. And then the just asking questions and, you know, I'm not saying, but, and all,

02:29:39.500 | there's certain, you know, rhetorical sites of hand that have, have helped this along. But as I said

02:29:45.660 | earlier, it's just a, the, the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking

02:29:52.060 | for a pattern and looking for meaning. And I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in

02:29:59.500 | the case of Israel is so extraordinary is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you

02:30:08.620 | that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians another state

02:30:17.500 | and that if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world.

02:30:26.460 | And irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians have been given to several states,

02:30:34.300 | the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be

02:30:47.260 | seen on its face to be preposterous. There is no reason why if the Palestinians got another state,

02:30:55.740 | either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the

02:31:04.460 | economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women

02:31:15.180 | or anything else. It, it, it would solve the, the most likely thing is you simply have another failed

02:31:25.340 | Arab state run by a sort of proxy of Tehran. That's the best case scenario. And by the way, even lifelong

02:31:31.980 | defenders of the Palestinian cause, like Salman Rushdie, he said recently, he said, he said,

02:31:37.420 | I've always been a supporter of the Palestinian people and their cause, but it is an unavoidable fact

02:31:42.620 | that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it would simply be at best another front for the

02:31:47.580 | Iranian regime in Iran, the best. So why the passion about the, why the unbelievable wild passion about

02:31:55.740 | this? Why the, and, and I say some of it can be, should be argued out and so on. And some of it can

02:32:04.140 | be explained, but, but there's definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of

02:32:11.820 | this excites something within me. This excites something within me.

02:32:16.940 | Yeah. There's some, there's some, there's something compelling to people about hating Jews.

02:32:21.340 | Look at the, look at the prominence of, of, or, you know, semi-prominent people who are willing to play

02:32:26.620 | around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and somehow it's done by the Israelis or the Jews.

02:32:33.260 | I mean, I mean, look at the, like this, this shit is going around.

02:32:38.220 | I have to admit, you know, I'm, I, there's a part of my brain that's pulled towards conspiracies.

02:32:42.780 | There's something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what's really going on

02:32:49.820 | behind the scenes. Because the real world, when you don't look at the conspiracies, first of all,

02:32:55.100 | it's complicated. And second of all, it's kind of boring. It's a bunch of incompetent people.

02:32:58.620 | Usually opening up Pandora's boxes. They don't understand.

02:33:02.140 | Yeah. It's pushing buffoons. And I've been, uh, I mean, I've, I've, uh, walked around and hung

02:33:09.580 | around with a lot of powerful and rich people. And like, the thing I learned is they're just human

02:33:14.140 | beings. There's not, I'm yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.

02:33:25.980 | You never got that invite?

02:33:27.340 | No. In fact, like a lot of people in the positions of power, they're just not good.

02:33:32.300 | I mean, I'm just continuously disappointed that they're not ultra, I love competence.

02:33:37.660 | The places where I've seen competence, inklings of it is in a low level, like soldiers, like low level,

02:33:45.820 | uh, what do you call that? People that do stuff with their hands. So, uh, builders of different

02:33:50.220 | kinds, like engineering, like craftsmen, like I've seen.

02:33:53.420 | Yes. Because you've got, because you've got a very specific,

02:33:55.920 | task that could be highly complicated, but you get to apply yourself to, and to solve.

02:34:01.120 | Yeah. Over years, you've mastered it. It's passed across generations and so on,

02:34:06.080 | but like States craft and like that, that kind of stuff.

02:34:09.440 | Well, it's because there's so many variables. I mean, this is, this is one of the reasons when

02:34:14.000 | you were trying to lure me on to prognostications on Ukraine. And I was saying, I just, I've seen enough

02:34:20.160 | to know that I just don't know because I know the amount of things that can change all the time.

02:34:24.320 | I was, some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK when, um, uh, uh, Boris

02:34:33.520 | Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. And I mentioned to this friend, I said, well, you know,

02:34:38.880 | it's, it's, it's pretty bad luck for Boris that, you know, he came in to do one thing,

02:34:44.800 | which was Brexit. And then there's a global pandemic from Wuhan, you know, and he's got to like mug up on

02:34:51.760 | that and then gets it really wrong. But anyway, and I was really struck by the fact that this man,

02:34:58.000 | a matter of great insider happened to disagree politically, but said to me, but Douglas is always

02:35:04.240 | like this. And he said, you know, I mean, look at Tony Blair came into power in 1997, wanting to reform

02:35:13.520 | education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East. And I, I do. I mean, as I say,

02:35:22.640 | one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories, not to say

02:35:29.040 | that there aren't some that do actually turn out to be, you know, to have something in them.

02:35:32.960 | And that happens. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true.

02:35:37.040 | Lab league. Um, but, but in general, the, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall

02:35:46.880 | into this is, as I say, it's a very low grade, low resolution. Look at the world where people

02:35:52.560 | clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and

02:36:02.880 | the number of events. I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me,

02:36:10.400 | I won't name the country, but said to me, can you help us out with, with just how to cope on the,

02:36:17.760 | about with the date and understand the day to day struggle we're having with the cycle?

02:36:25.040 | And I said, well, right, what are you talking about? And they said,

02:36:28.080 | our experience in government is that every day, something comes up, which we have to firefight.

02:36:35.520 | And that's what we do that day. And then the next day, something else comes up, which we have to

02:36:41.600 | firefight. And we, we're not getting our policies done. And I, and I just thought for me, that rings

02:36:49.760 | an awful lot truer than that. That country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family

02:36:58.400 | telling them, yeah, I just, you know, it's like, come on.

02:37:05.120 | So, you know, that's, I do, before I forget, when I ask you about Iran, what role do they play in

02:37:10.240 | this conflict? It's such a, it's fascinating how it seems like Iran is, uh, fingerprints are everywhere

02:37:20.960 | in the Middle East. And it's also fascinating that, you know, I have a lot of friends, my best friend is

02:37:28.320 | Iranian. It's fascinating that the Islamic revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership

02:37:33.520 | perspective backwards in such a drastic way. And that they're still in power. That confuses me

02:37:41.520 | because I know that now it's possible. I don't know the people of Iran. Sorry to make the obvious

02:37:47.600 | statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran and a lot of them, everybody I know there opposes

02:37:55.600 | the regime. And they're brilliant, educated, thoughtful, worldly people. And it confuses me that there's this,

02:38:06.640 | this is one of the, I would say, uh, one of the greatest nations on earth.

02:38:12.000 | It's certainly one of the great cultures of the cultures, the peoples of Iran.

02:38:16.560 | Yeah. And then you look at that and then you look at the leadership

02:38:20.480 | when they're behind most of the terror groups in the region, certainly. Yeah.

02:38:26.080 | Can you just speak to that? And how is it still the same regime since 1979?

02:38:32.800 | I know, as you know, I start on democracy and death cults with the, the flight taking the Ayatollah

02:38:37.680 | Khomeini, Khomeini rather, uh, from Paris to Tehran.

02:38:41.680 | The flight that you say you wish never happened. I think it's one of the two worst journeys of the

02:38:47.600 | 20th century. What's the other one? Was it Lenin's train getting to Petrograd?

02:38:53.280 | Oh, yeah.

02:38:54.320 | Oh, it's about the transportation.

02:38:57.280 | It's about, yes, I know. I'm really a transport guy. No, I, um, wait till my book of 10 best journeys.

02:39:04.720 | Yeah. Across the world.

02:39:06.880 | No, um, just as the train to the Finland station brought the basilis of Bolshevism into Russia.

02:39:15.200 | So the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran brought the basilis of

02:39:23.920 | Khomeiniism, the most radical form of Shiite Islam to Tehran and to Iran. And it's one of the great

02:39:33.600 | tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. Like you, actually, I have a lot of Persian friends

02:39:41.840 | and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in

02:39:48.560 | pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and, and, and so on. Her father had been an Ayatollah

02:39:55.040 | before the, the overthrow of the Shah. But, and you know, everyone had criticisms of him, but, um,

02:40:02.720 | when you saw what came after him, it just, uh, it was among other things, uh, what I learned from her

02:40:09.680 | and other friends from that region was that I suppose two things. One is, of course, is that

02:40:17.440 | it's a sort of central conservative insight. You know, things can always be worse. They can always

02:40:22.080 | be worse. Never say this is rock bottom because, yeah, you know, like you might have a Shah with

02:40:31.120 | hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini

02:40:38.480 | butchering them all. And, um, including the people who helped him get to power, like the communists and

02:40:44.720 | the trade unionists who, who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the

02:40:49.600 | Ayatollah until he didn't need them anymore. Um, but the other thing I learned from that particular

02:40:55.760 | friend and, and others was that was this, this thing that, and again, it's very hard for the Western

02:41:04.320 | mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as

02:41:08.720 | fanaticism, real fanaticism and real ideological and real religious fanaticism. And the thing that

02:41:14.160 | I described leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the

02:41:20.640 | West to forget because we haven't seen it in a while. You know, we get very, um, distant echoes of

02:41:28.400 | it in our own societies, really. And we're highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways.

02:41:35.280 | Um, but Khomeiniism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed

02:41:49.360 | to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the really

02:41:58.000 | the biggest questions really that, that has to be understood, the answer to which has to be understood,

02:42:04.080 | which is, it's what Solzhenitsyn says at one point in Gulag Archipelago in that passage where

02:42:10.160 | he describes when we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor's door

02:42:17.920 | and we knew our neighbor was being taken away. Why did we not stop them?

02:42:25.600 | And in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, you know, it's the same answer as whether

02:42:39.040 | it's Hamas governing Gaza with the people, whoever the people in Gaza are who would have liked to have

02:42:43.520 | seen them overthrown. You know,

02:42:47.520 | people don't realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other

02:42:57.760 | guy might kill you. And that, you know, when the green revolution in 2009 started in Iran,

02:43:10.000 | why was it put down? Why didn't it work? Why, like you, the sort of Iranians who I

02:43:17.360 | really hope one day get their country back, why did all these smart young students and others,

02:43:23.200 | why after they came out, why was it put down? It was put down because the Bastyej militia

02:43:28.880 | will shoot you in the head and they'll take you to a prison, as they did with the Iranian students,

02:43:36.000 | and they'll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way

02:43:45.120 | to tell the rest of society not to do it again. You know, we know it happens like that from films,

02:43:53.760 | but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale,

02:44:02.880 | on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality. And that's how they stay in power.

02:44:09.760 | And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, but you know,

02:44:17.280 | thinking about this sort of, you know, what I've just described as a sort of a problem in democracies,

02:44:22.400 | is that we just, you know, we like to think everyone thinks like us, and you know, we'd like

02:44:26.160 | everyone to sort of be like us. And we, we believe fictions that we're taught in films like, you know,

02:44:31.600 | everyone basically wants the same things as us. And you go, you haven't stepped outside the walls of the

02:44:38.640 | city, if you think that. But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of why, why we sort

02:44:47.120 | of sing, singly fail to understand that this is possible. And Homanism is both very specific

02:44:57.920 | and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are

02:45:05.280 | not that far in our past. I mean, you know, there's a moment in, uh, um,

02:45:12.720 | when Oriana Falaci interviewed the idol of Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few Western journalists to do

02:45:19.920 | so. She says to him, these people in the street, this movement, this revolution you've begun,

02:45:28.320 | it's guided by hate. It's hate. It's all hate. And Khomeini says, no, no, it's love. It's love.

02:45:37.840 | And, and it's actually a scene that, that, that appears in the satanic verses of Rushdie where that

02:45:47.040 | exact same thing happens. But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but

02:45:50.720 | how can you explain to a Western mindset that that's, that's something that's going on. There

02:45:56.560 | are people directed by this hate that calls itself love, this, this. And I was reminded of a book I

02:46:05.680 | haven't read since I was probably a teenager or something. It made a great impression on me then.

02:46:10.880 | Did you ever read the tragic sense of life? Uh, Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist

02:46:18.400 | philosopher who died in the thirties. Unamuno had a encounter with students at the university in

02:46:24.400 | the thirties when he realized, I mean, this is the, the, the early period of the Francoists,

02:46:28.480 | de Rivera and all those people. Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up

02:46:35.760 | from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of phalangist,

02:46:41.600 | Francoist ideology already. They end up chanting in front of him as he's trying to defend the principles

02:46:50.080 | by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, "Viva la muerte, long live death,

02:47:00.080 | long live death." And he tries to explain them, this is, this is a necrophilic chant.

02:47:07.840 | Yeah, but those young men in free Francoist Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts

02:47:18.480 | today. They are the people who, who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like,

02:47:28.560 | we love death more than you love life. Yeah, that's the line you return to. That's a

02:47:34.160 | really difficult line to load in. Because if you base your whole existence on that notion,

02:47:42.080 | then, um, well, you're a danger to the world.

02:47:50.480 | That's a good foundation for committing evil. Um, I have to ask because you mentioned that interview,

02:47:58.000 | you had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7th. And I've been very fortunate to

02:48:07.280 | get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders. It looks like I'll interview Vladimir Putin and others.

02:48:13.200 | I want to have a general question about how do you interview people like this?

02:48:18.240 | Maybe to put your historian hat on, of like, how do you approach the interview of world leaders

02:48:26.080 | such that you can gain a deeper understanding in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world.

02:48:35.600 | So I have, I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps in the long arc of history, add compassion to the world.

02:48:47.200 | But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts.

02:48:51.840 | And, you know, maybe it's more useful to think about from a historian perspective of how you

02:48:59.360 | need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill, FDR during World War II.

02:49:09.120 | It's not, you know, I think about this a lot, especially if it's, uh, you know,

02:49:17.200 | two, three, four, five hour conversation.

02:49:19.120 | Well, there's a lot of, uh, weight on you when you do those conversations, isn't there?

02:49:24.240 | From where? So like where, who's watching? Is it historians 20 years from then?

02:49:29.520 | Who knows? I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I, I, I suspect there's a weight on you because every

02:49:39.600 | major world leader you interview and you've done some amazing ones, but I mean, you, you, presumably

02:49:46.320 | you have a set of people saying you've got to ask him about this. You've, you, you can't not address

02:49:53.200 | this. And, and that's a very challenging one because of course, although in an interview with

02:49:59.520 | a politician, it should not, it should not be supine nor can it be endlessly interrogative

02:50:09.680 | because that you're not the prosecutor and they don't have to be the guilty party answering to

02:50:16.000 | you. And I've noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others who

02:50:22.320 | go in with a set of sort of those things. And they, and, and at some point, the other party can just,

02:50:28.880 | just, I don't need this. And people criticizing you, we don't realize that you just can't do that.

02:50:34.640 | Yeah. I suppose what journalists behave the way they do. Although I have increasingly less and less

02:50:40.400 | respect for the journalists, uh, the average journalist, I have more and more respect for

02:50:46.640 | the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases. Uh, because a lot of the

02:50:52.400 | journalists seem to be signaling to their own in, in group, but there is a lot of pressure on, uh,

02:51:01.280 | people in that situation to ask the, what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question?

02:51:06.000 | Uh, the adversarial question that the, the world leader, the person is ready for, they've answered

02:51:16.160 | that question. And what you're trying to do is, I guess, one, to signal that you've asked the question

02:51:23.680 | to push them. Yes. Uh, two, you're trying to like, just create drama because really what people,

02:51:31.200 | people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person, they hate them.

02:51:37.040 | And they want you to like, make them piss their pants or something, or just start crying and run

02:51:43.200 | out. Yeah. Walk out in a way that it's embarrassing for them. They could be like, look at that pathetic

02:51:49.040 | person. Uh, and that reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can't

02:52:00.160 | stand up to a tough question. Yes. But mostly like I'm, I'm starting, I have to do a lot of thinking

02:52:06.720 | because you get attacked a lot. If you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually

02:52:13.760 | have a chance to reveal who the person is. There, there's a very interesting mind that Robin Day,

02:52:19.600 | who was quite a distinguished interviewer back to a very distinguished interviewer back in the day,

02:52:23.120 | uh, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK, uh, Robin Day,

02:52:29.280 | who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully said the problem with the new approach

02:52:34.880 | as he saw it from the nineties of political interviewing was he said, if you think the

02:52:38.400 | person you're speaking to as a liar, you should get them to reveal that they're a liar. Don't just call

02:52:44.640 | them a liar. And I think that is, again, it's something that a lot of people sitting on the

02:52:51.200 | other side of the screen don't realize is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to

02:53:00.560 | their face, but it doesn't do anything. And it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar

02:53:07.600 | and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that's, that's something else. But yes, I mean,

02:53:12.160 | I can, I hear you. You're, you're obviously, you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do.

02:53:19.040 | It's also difficult because one of the things that I don't think anyone really understands is that,

02:53:25.760 | is that in the end, it's just you. Yeah. I'm sure they, you have this about Putin.

02:53:31.120 | Like people say, I know exactly how you can, you know, they could give endless advice.

02:53:36.560 | The end is you sitting down and talking to him. It's, it's like, everybody knows how to behave on

02:53:44.240 | the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it in person. It's actually pretty

02:53:49.440 | difficult as I mean, it's very difficult because you've got all this weird behind the scenes stuff

02:53:53.760 | as well. You've got all of the games that people play. I mean, yeah, with, uh, you know,

02:53:58.400 | I interviewed Zelensky, you know, I'm pretty fearless in general. And he was a very human and

02:54:04.560 | fascinating human, but there is soldiers with guns standing all around.

02:54:08.640 | And you didn't have anyone? No one was packing on your side?

02:54:13.360 | I had one friend, a security person who was also crazy. You never know. He could turn on.

02:54:18.640 | You've been infiltrated.

02:54:21.200 | Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, uh, that doesn't have any effect. And by the way,

02:54:24.720 | I should mention that, uh, because it's, it's hilarious to me, but, um, process wise.

02:54:31.040 | No, with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they don't, they said it was scripted and all this

02:54:38.240 | kind of stuff. I would never do anything scripted. They don't get to have a say in anything.

02:54:43.840 | I asked to have complete freedom. Uh, sometimes you'll have people on the team very politely nudge,

02:54:50.720 | like, Hey, can you, uh, and I'll very politely say, thank you. You know, like smile, but that

02:54:57.280 | doesn't mean I have to fucking do it. I could do whatever the hell I want. The com, this actually,

02:55:02.720 | by the way, with world leaders, it doesn't happen. It happens more with CEOs because they have like,

02:55:07.520 | usually PR and comms people. They'll just be like very politely. Hey, you know, the thing about,

02:55:15.040 | about, you know, when they, that sexual assault, harassment charges, there's no reason to really

02:55:22.480 | linger on that. You don't have to do that. Yeah. One of my favorite things anyone has ever said,

02:55:28.080 | you know, it's only ever happening. I know a couple of cases of this happening in private,

02:55:32.800 | some friends, some, uh, a friend of mine once years ago was debating against the, this is before the

02:55:39.600 | war, the civil war in Syria was debating something to do with the middle East. And one of the people

02:55:44.320 | on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London. The then Syrian ambassador in London says

02:55:49.600 | something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And, uh, my friend stands up and starts

02:55:54.800 | talking about a sad seniors massacre of the Palestinians in hammer, where they killed like

02:56:00.240 | 10,000 Palestinians in a day. Um, and my friend starts talking about the hammer massacre by, uh,

02:56:05.680 | a sad senior and the, the big fat Syrian ambassador like stands up to respond. And he says, that is,

02:56:13.600 | that is none of your business. And my friend was like, oh, I thought we were going to get it in denial.

02:56:20.640 | Uh, let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu. Um, because I also have the opportunity

02:56:27.200 | to do a three hour interview with him at this stage. And I've been, if I'm just being honest,

02:56:34.800 | very hesitant to do it. And I just don't know how a conversation there could, um, help add compassion

02:56:46.640 | to the world. And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large

02:56:53.520 | number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to

02:57:03.200 | post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don't want to lose the part of me that's,

02:57:09.280 | that's vulnerable to the world.

02:57:11.360 | I think people have very little understanding of things. If they're willing to say that because

02:57:16.560 | you're sitting down and talking with somebody, you are ego platforming them, uh, um, advancing

02:57:24.400 | their cause, being used, being a shill or whatever like that, you might be actually just finding some

02:57:30.080 | things out, which I think something you do expertly. And another thing that your critics wouldn't realize

02:57:36.240 | is, is that they, you know, life is long and, you know, hopefully God willing, both around for a long

02:57:44.080 | time. And therefore you don't blow everything up at the request of some twat online. But I do think

02:57:51.440 | that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their

02:57:57.920 | opinion and no one else's really. And, and just, you just keep your own guiding light. That's what's

02:58:02.960 | always done for me is that I, I, I've always said, I just don't really, I wouldn't care if I was the

02:58:08.640 | only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole

02:58:15.440 | planet disagreed with me, but it doesn't fundamentally, that's not right. I'll send you

02:58:20.880 | Churchill's great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says the bit, he says one of the most

02:58:28.800 | wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelensky,

02:58:35.120 | because one of Churchill's greatnesses was his magnanimity. And when his great political opponent,

02:58:46.320 | Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used

02:58:54.240 | the opportunity. And we might even say that some politicians in our day wouldn't be able to resist

02:58:58.240 | the opportunity. He could have used the opportunity to say, "You see, I was right."

02:59:04.240 | And Chamberlain didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he's led us into this mess. And you

02:59:07.680 | should have all listened to me. Because that would have been a good time. It would have been

02:59:12.800 | a good time to say that that would have been one for the win, as they say. But Churchill doesn't do that

02:59:18.160 | in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world,

02:59:27.040 | and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn't even mention the name of Hitler.

02:59:33.520 | He says, "What will never change his flaws?" He says, "Desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace."

02:59:38.720 | And he says, "The curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man."

02:59:44.160 | But then he has this great passage where Churchill says, a beautiful, resonant passage about how he says,

02:59:56.000 | "It's not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any

03:00:03.280 | great extent the unfolding course of events." And he says, "For one phase, men seem to have been right,

03:00:08.800 | and in another they're proved wrong." And then there's a different scale of values emerges.

03:00:14.000 | And he says, "What is the worth of all this?" He says, "The only guide to a man is his conscience.

03:00:21.040 | The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions."

03:00:27.680 | And in fact, he says, "It doesn't matter what happens." If you have this, he finishes it,

03:00:34.080 | he says, "However the fates may play, that if you have this shield to guard you," he says,

03:00:43.200 | "You march always in the ranks of honor." All that can guide a man is that.

03:00:52.160 | If you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it's a

03:00:59.120 | challenge. And then you get buffeted by the to's and fro's of the waves of popular opinion.

03:01:06.240 | And that's dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold on to what you believe,

03:01:13.440 | a million, billion foes don't matter.

03:01:17.520 | Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about a great biography of Churchill.

03:01:22.720 | Churchill himself made mistakes and admitted the mistakes, and we can even say, was proud of the

03:01:30.160 | mistakes. I mean, learned from them. Learned from them. That's all the best you could do.

03:01:34.800 | The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.

03:01:39.280 | That's what TR said about them in the man in the arena speech. TR. Yeah. Ah, the old TR.

03:01:48.560 | Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created.

03:01:56.880 | Norm Macdonald, Churchill, and Teddy Russell.

03:02:03.120 | Did we do Norm? I think we did it before coming on air.

03:02:06.720 | Oh, before coming on air. Yeah. Well, he's always in everywhere in the, in the air around us.

03:02:12.720 | One of the, one of the great comedians.

03:02:16.160 | Um, all right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on?

03:02:21.520 | Human civilization. You've been covering some of the darker aspects, the madness of crowds,

03:02:30.400 | the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars. Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds,

03:02:37.440 | and there's a smile on Douglas Murray's face, what's the source of the smile? The, the warmth.

03:02:42.960 | Endless numbers of things.

03:02:45.600 | Endless numbers of things. I mean, I get, I get enormous encouragement from smart young people,

03:02:53.760 | actually. That's one of the way. That's just the best thing ever.

03:02:56.960 | Um, I was in Kiev the other week and I was asked to speak to some students at the university and

03:03:07.440 | irrespective of the rather, you know, tricky situation that they are in. It's just great to,

03:03:15.440 | as you know, to speak to a room full of students about things and then hang around afterwards and

03:03:23.600 | just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do and

03:03:30.080 | and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were going to

03:03:37.040 | get wrong and how much, you know, you had to learn and how much you were going to enjoy it and, and

03:03:42.960 | seeing the, uh, the opportunities they have in front of them if, if things go right and, and, uh,

03:03:50.080 | just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time. It's it's, that's the best thing.

03:03:54.240 | I mean, it's just, yeah, they're, uh, you can see endless possibility in their eyes and there's, uh,

03:04:00.960 | they're not like burdened by, um, let's say, uh, the cynicism that builds up.

03:04:07.360 | But even the cynicism though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I've got quite a deep,

03:04:13.280 | well spring of it, but I mean, you can't only fall into that because

03:04:18.080 | there's so much else it doesn't cover. It'd be like spending your life being ironic, you know?

03:04:23.200 | Uh, so that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly

03:04:36.480 | Ukraine, Israel, has that changed you?

03:04:42.320 | Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?

03:04:48.880 | Uh, that's a very difficult question to answer. I don't know. Differs day to day.

03:04:57.360 | So sometimes there's a heaviness there because of the things you've seen.

03:05:01.680 | True. Yeah, I, I, at times, at times.

03:05:04.480 | You regret some going as much as you have to the front lines?

03:05:10.800 | No, no. One of the reasons why war is for writer kind of the ultimate subject

03:05:21.520 | is because you see life, weirdly, at its ultimate. Very, very strange, strange thing. But,

03:05:33.920 | you know, it just, it is the truth. Death, when it's in front of you, is something which

03:05:44.080 | gives, uh, uh, terrible clarity to everything. And, uh, it, you see how people will love and even

03:05:55.680 | sometimes laugh more, how they'll, um,

03:06:01.360 | there's an essay by Montaigne that's always on my mind, why we weep and laugh at the same time.

03:06:11.040 | Uh, everything's just more. And, um, and people, the real thing is the people, you see the, the,

03:06:19.760 | the very, very best of people and the very worst and they're beside each other.

03:06:25.440 | There's some, uh, so I've gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line

03:06:31.520 | in Ukraine. And there is some level of like all the bullshit niceties or whatever it is of,

03:06:38.240 | of, uh, civilian life is all stripped away. It just seems more honest somehow.

03:06:42.720 | Yes, absolutely. Uh, absolutely. Well, I mean, I couldn't agree more. And then there's the wild

03:06:49.680 | clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of the, of,

03:06:55.760 | I joked, I think I mentioned, I joked about this with some Ukrainian soldiers in 22, because

03:07:02.800 | they wanted a cigarette and, uh, and, and, and we, and we stepped outside, I accompanied them outside

03:07:08.800 | because they weren't allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which there were rockets falling.

03:07:17.280 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I said to him, isn't it strange that fear of secondhand smoke

03:07:24.240 | has superseded this, but I, I don't know.

03:07:32.720 | It's seeing the humor in that, uh, uh, when you're on the front line, when you're fighting in a war,

03:07:39.360 | the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. And the

03:07:45.280 | absurdity of life is just right there. That's right. So honest and it's so beautiful. And

03:07:50.880 | that's why a lot of soldiers are traumatized. They're destroyed by war, but they also miss it.

03:07:55.920 | That's right. That's right. Absolutely. Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

03:07:59.840 | There's an intimacy to the whole thing. Absolutely. Well, that's right. I mean,

03:08:02.720 | everyone says, you know, I never felt more alive, you know?

03:08:05.760 | Yeah. And I wouldn't, uh, I wouldn't do anything different.

03:08:12.800 | Well, I hope just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and, uh, not listening to anybody and

03:08:20.880 | I'll try to, uh, learn to do the same. Douglas, I'm a huge fan. Thank you for doing this.

03:08:26.240 | It's been a great pleasure. Right back at you.

03:08:28.240 | Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray.

03:08:32.480 | to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave

03:08:38.560 | you some words from Bertrand Russell. The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always

03:08:46.240 | so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:08:55.760 | Bye.

03:08:57.760 | Bye.

03:08:59.760 | Thank you.

Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza | Lex Fridman Podcast #463

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