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Oct. 10, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:29:54
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #759
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Time Text
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Good afternoon, folks.
Welcome to the podcast.
The Lotus Eaters for the 10th of October, 2023.
I'm joined by Bo and Dan.
Hello.
We're going to be talking about what has happened recently in Israel.
Now, before we begin, I apologize.
I have a bit of a case of the sniffles, so I'll do my best not to cough and splutter, but I may not be able to avoid it.
And we are going to try and make sure that this coverage is sensitive and neutral.
Well, no, no, not objectively.
It's just where possible, if possible, sort of impossible.
Yeah, where possible.
It's a minefield, right?
Yeah.
We are definitely not going to make everybody happy with this one.
It's impossible with a subject like this.
So before we begin, should we talk about our particular investment in the subject?
Because I have to be honest, I don't really want to have anything to do with the Middle East.
On a personal level, I'm not particularly invested in one side or another.
That's not to say that I'm in favor of one side killing the other or anything like that.
It's just such a horrific minefield, I don't want to get involved.
That's how I feel about it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm neither a Muslim nor a Jew.
A Jewish person, sorry.
I say Jewish people instead of Jew, lest I incur the terrifying wrath of Michael Rappaport.
Yeah, not really invested.
Obviously I'm a history fan, and ancient history as well is really my forte.
So the history of it is sort of endlessly interesting to me, but the actual fighting on the ground It's, you know, I don't have a dog in the game.
So that's where I come to it.
I feel very much like an outside observer here.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is something I've followed for many years.
And I'd say that, you know, with maturity comes looking at it with a little bit more nuance.
I think it's very easy sometimes to look at these and just put people into categories and just say, OK, the Israelis, the Gazans, as if as if these are gestalt entities with a single mind.
Actually what you've got here is a group of interests, factions, individuals and they are basically being treated as a collective and it has entered this blood feud which is horrendous quite frankly.
That's a really good point actually, we should probably say right off the bat.
Within both the Arab and Israeli camps, it's actually a patchwork quilt of all different things.
It's sort of endlessly complicated, almost.
Just all Arabs don't think the same thing.
Yeah.
But even all Jewish people, Israelis, there's a vast spectrum of different opinions.
It's very important when you look at the factions at a minimum to do something like distinguish the Israeli people from the Israeli government.
And even within the Israeli government, of course, you've got the factions, you've got the neocons, and you've got various other groups within that.
And of course in Gaza, you've got to bear in mind that the Hamas in Gaza, when they're not killing Jews, they're killing other people in Gaza who oppose them.
So it's not like anybody here has a collective identity.
The Jewish side, you've got people in Israel who are sort of, you know, on one end of the spectrum, the sort of pro-Oslo agreement type, can't we all live together, can't buy our types, all the way to the other end of the spectrum, sort of ultra-orthodox who don't even recognise Israel.
Israel itself isn't good enough.
So yeah, a vast array of opinions and obviously on the Muslim side it's probably even more, there's an even bigger diversity of thought perhaps.
Okay, so with that said, shall we get into the events of what has happened in the last few days?
Yeah, so on Saturday the 7th of October at about 6.30am, Hamas announced the start of its latest Operation Alaska Flood, I believe they call it, and it started out with firing 5,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
They also launched a large number of militants across the border through various means, A lot of those initially converged on the kibbutz, small sort of communal farms that were based around the Gaza Strip, where they began a combination of indiscriminate killings, murders, rapes, everything, as well as a lot of hostage taking.
That hostage taking includes at least nine Americans, ten Brits, and also a range of other nationalities.
The murders, the indiscriminate killings, have been quite indiscriminate.
They've included families, you know, women, children.
I've seen some truly horrific videos of a room full of mostly children slaughtered.
There was Paragliders landing amongst a music festival, again a very international crowd where at least 260 people were killed.
Now at this stage, and these numbers are going to move.
Provisional.
Yeah, these provisional numbers are that we think at least 900 Israelis were killed and another two and a half thousand were injured and come in some cases very severely.
And it's going to include whole families.
So we've got this tweet here.
So this is a family.
If you're listening to this, this is mother and father.
We've got two girls here, I think both aged, what was it about?
Yeah, two daughters aged six and a four-year-old son.
This entire family was wiped out.
There are many cases like this one, but I wanted to give you a face to put to some of this.
I mentioned that hostages have been taken.
I watched, before I came on, a horrible video of an Israeli father whose wife and two daughters, aged five and three, have been taken as hostage back into Gaza.
He's now making social media videos begging Hamas to let him trade places with them, or at least his children.
We've got here a video of this is one of the Israeli boys who has been taken back into Gaza.
It looks like to be about a four or five year old boy and he's been handed over to the Palestinian children and the Palestinian children are being encouraged to pull on his hair to beat him with sticks.
And this one is actually a relatively mild video, even though we filtered it out.
You can imagine what might be going on to some of the people in Gaza at the moment, especially the women, because of course we saw women being dragged around.
on the back of pickup trucks having been, you know, assaulted, you know, very severely.
Now the Gazans, the Hamas, have said that they will start executing these hostages one at a time on video if any bombings occur.
Now there have been bombings and I'm not sure what the state of those hostages are.
That remains an unknown at this point.
But they've got at least a hundred of them.
Now the response to this, as you can imagine, this is, given the shocking nature of this, this is one take, this is Dr... Just before we go on, I think one thing that was particularly shocking about this was the pride with which Hamas was taken with the attack itself.
There was so much footage of the victims of this being proudly broadcasted by Hamas themselves.
I think that's really what One of the reasons people are so just surprised is the level of savagery.
And there's numerous examples of Israelis being killed and then them taking the phone of the person and locating the contact mother and just ringing up and gloating about just killed your children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's pretty awful.
Yeah, I'm not really sure why anyone who's aware of Hamas or extreme Islamism, why you'd be all that surprised.
I mean, Hamas, for example, it's the implacable enemies of the state of Israel.
It's their raison d'etre to destroy Israel.
Well, not surprised by the actions of Hamas, but it is shocking.
To people in the West.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not shocking, but to be surprised or taken unawares that that's what they are.
Because this sort of thing has happened in Europe, you know, the Bataclan murders, for example, in Paris, but this was happening, you know, at scale.
But the thing is, With what has happened in Europe and when Europe goes to war, we don't parade around the victims of the people and say, look at how destroyed and humiliated and how much suffering we've created on purpose.
And the Western media does everything they can to kind of hide or conceal that when that happens in the Bataclan massacre and things like this.
They do everything they can to conceal that because Well for many reasons and I'm not going to speculate now I think about it but uh and so this the fact that this has just been bombed straight out on social media so someone's eating their breakfast and suddenly they've got some Hamas militant gloating over the raped and desecrated corpse of an Israeli girl um pretty shocking stuff and I can understand why it's really upset a lot of people.
Yeah, and we're coming to this later, but it may have been a deliberate tactic to make it as shocking as it could be.
But certainly there was glee from those doing this.
So this is a tweet from, I believe he's a tech guy.
Can we hover over the profile?
I think he's a...
Um, yeah, so, so I'm not sure if he's Silicon Valley or, um, or otherwise, but this is, um, you know, a Jewish guy, I believe in Silicon Valley, who's a, who's a, who's a tech, um, investor.
And, and this sort of response is, um, you can go to the tweet now.
Uh, this sort of response is an example of some of the strength of feeling.
I mean, he, he's calling here to, to basically Dresden, um, uh, Gaza.
What, what, what, what's Dresden a, uh, a, a reference to though?
Well, it was heavily bombed right at the end of World War II, and there was a firestorm, firebombing, incendiary bombing, and as you can see from that picture, very largely destroyed.
It's a type of carpet bombing type thing.
Some of the accounts are awful as well.
I remember reading one account of, I think it was a woman, who came out from underneath, out of a bunker or shelter or cellar or something, and the street itself is just on fire and melting and she like falls over and The, the cobblestones have melted and goes into it.
And so it's like, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, even my worst enemies.
So.
Yeah, Dresden was an awful set of events and to basically call for this to happen to Gaza is understandable given what he has just witnessed on his social media feed but it's also completely barking insane.
Well the thing about Dresden is that obviously a lot of completely innocent people were incinerated in that Well, the vast majority would have.
Yeah, any living thing.
Men, women, children, animals, the whole lot.
The thing about Gaza City or the Gaza Strip is it's extremely densely populated.
I think there's just over 2 million people there.
That's right.
It's one of the most densely populated places.
I think it's just a joke.
Anyway, extremely densely populated.
And also, do you know that half of them are children?
It's got a very low age profile, Gaza.
So half of those 2 million are children.
And although they did vote for Hamas in 2006... Some of them did.
Right, that's what I was going to say.
Not all of them did.
I know there's a lot of them that are essentially innocent.
We're vehemently opposed to Hammers, yeah.
Certainly nearly all the children will be innocent.
So it's cool for them to get Dresdened.
Yeah, and this is my concern.
Those events that we witnessed were utterly horrific and inhuman and all the rest of it.
No one denies that.
But you can't call for collective punishment.
Let's go to the next one, which is the Sophie one.
I'll let you do it, John.
I'll let you do it.
So Israel has decided to cut off the water and electricity supply into Gaza.
This is an example of a very low resolution take that I have issue with.
She says, if you go into a country, rape, murder, kidnap their women and their elderly, their children and parade their dead bodies on trucks and celebrate that, don't cry victim when they shut off your water or electricity supply, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yeah, but the thing is, what she's done there is this classic thing here, is she's reduced all of Gaza down to a single mind, a single entity.
You know, if you go into a country, you know, don't cry when this then happens to you.
The point is, is the water and electricity is not just getting shut off for the people who support Hamas, it's getting shut off for the people who have opposed them throughout as well.
Now, you've got to bear in mind that this Gaza Strip is basically next to a desert.
This is not the sort of place where you want to be without water for very long.
You don't want to be anywhere without water, but you certainly don't want to be there.
It's insanely punitive to shut off the water.
Yeah, I mean I can understand why they're doing it, but it is It's hardly going to, because I would have thought the strategy would try and be to attack the legitimacy of Hamas in Palestine.
I think shutting off the water for the Gaza Strip is probably not going to be doing that.
If anything, it's going to make the argument from Hamas probably seem stronger.
The Israelis want to, the Jewish state wants to wipe you out and oh look, they're going to make you all die first.
Well, this is the entire cycle of violence thing.
So, let's say that you were a 10-year-old boy back in 2006 when Hamas came into power, and your dad was strongly opposed to Hamas, and he brought you up the right way and he said, don't believe this nonsense propaganda that you're getting thrown at you all the time to hate the Jews and all the rest of it.
Um, and then, um, you know, Hamas, um, were basically set up in your apartment building, in your apartment building, got airstruck and your, your dad died.
Right.
And you, you're now, you then are taken and raised amongst a Hamas, a Hamas-morting family.
Um, and they constantly remind you your dad was killed by the Israelis.
And you're, what, what is that kid going to turn out to do?
And that kid could, that kid, that hypothetical could have been one of the ones racing into Israel, murdering them.
So, you know, with the best will in the world, this is a cycle of violence that keeps on escalating, has keep on escalating.
We come into some of the background on that because I do think that Hamas overwhelmingly deserve blame on this.
But it is a process of ratchet that has gone on ever since they came to power.
I will also point out, I don't have a link for it, but Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, has said, and I'm going to read a quote from him here, by the end of the war all our enemies will know it was a terrible mistake to attack Israel.
Now let me just stress that bit again, by the end of the war all our enemies will know.
He didn't say by the end of the war Hamas will know.
He says all of our enemies will know.
And I think we need to come on a bit later to what he might have meant by that.
But basically heads up, I think he means Iran.
No doubt.
He further went on to say what we will do to our enemies will echo for generations.
So, you know, they're not messing around.
As I mentioned earlier, within a three-hour period, there were 130 airstrikes on Gaza.
Now, it is a densely populated area.
If you airstrike into Gaza, because Hamas have a habit of integrating their military facilities with civilians, when you do this you end up killing civilians.
I know that's not the Israelis' intention.
They're not trying to do it.
But it happens.
None the worse.
This is a video of a guy carrying the body of his dead daughter.
Now, I have no idea who this guy is.
Maybe he's a die-hard Hamas supporter.
Maybe he isn't.
He's certainly not a Hamas militant, I would imagine, because he would have been in Israel.
Um, if he was, um, but one thing I am damn certain of is that whatever that is, six year old girl, I'm pretty certain she wasn't a Hamas militant.
Um, now this is, this is also heartbreaking.
This is, this is also awful.
Um, for we know this family was, was dead set against any of this taking place, but now they've been wrapped up in it as well.
And you know, if, if.
It is this sort of action that just results in this getting more and more extreme every year as it goes by.
And then a final tweet, while I'm wrapping up the current events, is basically somebody who claims to have connections to this.
It's probably right.
He says, I'm talking to my sources and the IDF Special Forces.
There's going to be a huge retaliation.
Over 100,000 Israeli soldiers already on the border with Gaza, and they think that that's going to go up to a quarter of a million soldiers, and they're going to push into Gaza and go street to street.
Now, Even somewhere as densely populated as Gaza, street-to-street fighting is going to be a militant's dream.
Yeah, it's the only option they've got, really, to actually do significant military damage to the Israeli army.
I mean, it's like urban combat in the modern age is just the worst.
So I don't envy anyone getting involved in any of this.
And that's what's going to be coming.
So that's the background on the last couple of days.
Bo, did you want to give us a bit of perspective on the last couple of millennia?
Just summarise about 5,000 years, Bo.
Where to begin?
Right, well one of the things I thought worth saying is although there's the West Bank and there's the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, I think one of the most important things to sort of try and wrap your mind around, your head around, is Essentially the fact that both factions, both sides, both religions, consider the same bit of land to be theirs by divine right.
So Judaism is the much older religion?
Yeah, of course.
And there was a Jewish state there for a long time?
Yeah, before I go back to recap some of the ancient history, I want to say a word about the Temple Mount.
So in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, there's a big open bit of ground, about 30, 35 acres square.
It's called the Temple Mount, or the Muslims call it the Al-Aqsa compound.
And in there is the Dome of the Rock, the famous, everyone will be aware of it, the Golden Dome of the Rock, which is a shrine.
And then near it, right near it, is a big mosque, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
And at the side of that Temple Mount is the remains of the Western Wall of the Second Temple.
The Jewish Most Holy Second Temple.
The Wailing Wall, you would have seen.
Was it destroyed by Hadrian?
Titus.
70 AD.
Now, even though Hamas are specific to the Gaza Strip, you can see even on their logo, their emblem, there's the Dome of the Rock is on it.
So this is an absolutely key thing.
Under the Dome of the Rock, or in the Dome of the Rock shrine, there's an open bit of ground where there's the rock, the bedrock.
Which is the very, very top, the most pinnacle point of Mount Moria.
In Jerusalem, there's three rivers, but two of them particularly form or create a ridgeline.
Going back to the age of King David, of David and Goliath fame, the Jewish people decided that that was sort of extremely sacred.
In fact, it's a spot where Abraham was supposed to have the so-called binding of Isaac, where God asked Abraham to kill his own son.
When God saw that Abraham was prepared to do it, sort of let him off.
He could sacrifice a lamb instead.
That spot That's some Jewish people, all of them.
It depends how orthodox they are.
But a lot of them consider that to be sort of the center of the world, the center of the universe even.
It's that spot, the pinnacle of Mount Moria.
Now in Islamic tradition, they consider that the spot where Muhammad ascended to heaven.
on a winged horse creature.
Oh, is that when he cut the moon in half with the sword?
There's all sorts of things connected to it.
So in other words, it's extremely, extremely sacred to both of them.
The exact same spot.
Now, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, there's just endless layers to the onion of conflict.
But at the very bottom of it, you could argue, is that, or that's one of them, that's one of the key sticking points, is that that one spot under the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, in the Al-Aqsa compound on Temple Mount, that they both absolutely coveted.
Now that is something which would be very, very, very difficult, possibly impossible to ever...
It's a dilemma, right?
It might be impossible to ever square that circle.
So what you're saying is both sides want exclusive access to... Basically, it's a bit more complicated than that.
So, well, shall I go back and do a bit of ancient history?
A little bit of background, a little bit of context to it.
So yes, Judaism is much older than Islam.
If you go back to the truly ancient world, a thousand years BC plus, When the Assyrian kings, the king of kings, and the Egyptian pharaohs ruled the known world.
We go back to those times.
We're told there was 12 tribes of Israel.
You've got the Dan, the Levi, the Reuben, the Benjamins, and so on.
There's a King Saul, and eventually King David, again of David and Goliath fame.
Just as a quick thing, King David's supposed to have lived about 800 B.C., something like that, isn't it?
Well, it's about 1000 B.C., pretty much around 1000 B.C.
supposed to have lived.
And at that point the Jewish people had sort of a movable tabernacle, the tabernacle of Moses.
And David decides he's going to create a temple, the first temple.
He decided to put it on, basically build it on the top of Mount Moriah, which is today where the Al-Aqsa compound is.
Then his son Solomon basically builds the temple, finishes the temple, and that's the first temple.
Now we know when we did the episode on, one of the episodes on the Assyrians, people if you've seen that one might remember we talked about the episode when Zanakarib It invades the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the siege of Lachish, and one of the many sieges of Jerusalem that there have been.
And King Hezekiah or Zedekiah successfully just about defends it, perhaps with an intervention from God himself.
Then you go on, there's been so much, even Alexander, Alexander the Great in the 300s BC did a siege of Gaza, right?
He ended up capturing the King of Gaza and dragging him around behind his chariot.
So who was the King of Gaza?
He wasn't a Jew then, he was a...
He would have been.
Oh, he would have been.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Anyway, I can't remember the name of the king of Gaza that Alexander ended up dragging behind his chariot, Achilles style.
But the point is, I mean, Alexander largely bypassed Jerusalem, it seems.
It's hardly mentioned in Arrian and Curtius, the main accounts of the campaigns of Alexander.
Because the reason I ask is one of the key claims that you get on both sides is that they basically accuse the other of being an interloper.
They've always been there first.
Well, I'm still talking about long before David Muhammad.
So, I missed out there.
I can only hit the highlights here.
Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.
Destroyed the first temple.
It was he that was supposed to have destroyed Solomon's temple.
A generation or two later, Darius releases, allows a lot of Jewish people to return to Jerusalem where they rebuild a temple, the second temple.
Eventually, I mean, Pompey invades that part of the world and does a lot of damage, but it wasn't until Titus in 70 AD, where Titus, Vespasian's son, destroyed the Second Temple, absolutely razed it, apparently used the site as a rubbish dump, a literal, actual rubbish dump.
That didn't put an end to revolts in Judea, the Roman province of Judea, even in the age of Hadrian.
So again, what is that?
40, 50 odd years later, something like that, in that ballpark.
Again, Hadrian did a number on them.
I'm reminded of a tweet by Brett Weinstein.
Flipping the bird to the Arch of Titus in Rome.
Some Jewish people to this day hold it against the ancient Romans to have done such things.
So yeah, talk about holding a grudge.
I wouldn't go and flip off Mont Saint-Michel because William the Conqueror's harrying of the North, but there you go, each to their own, I suppose.
Through to, I mean, it can really only hit the highlights here, but through to the Middle Ages, you know, you've got sort of, well, sorry, let's start, let's go with the age of Mohammed then.
So his, the date of his death is usually given as 632, is that right?
I think something like that.
So anyway, in the 7th century AD, Islamic armies overtook what we would call the Holy Land and built their shrine.
I mean, the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of... the Al Aqsa Mosque dates from the very late 600s.
So, you know, fairly shortly after, a generation or two after Muhammad is supposed to have lived.
But nonetheless, the Dome of the Rock is one of the oldest buildings in the Islamic tradition.
It's the third most holy site after the Great Mosque in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina.
So, you know, you can see there's hundreds of years has passed between the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus and the building of the Dome of the Rock in the late 600s.
Was it the Umayyad Caliph built that?
So there's quite a few hundred years have passed in that time.
Yes.
Nevertheless, from that point onwards, both faiths claim it as absolutely sacred.
So through the Middle Ages, we've got, let's talk about the Frankish Crusaders invading that part of the land, that part of the world.
Of course, as Christians, they were less interested in the site of the Jewish temple or the any mosque, they were interested in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
In fact, the Knights Templar, the temple, as referred to in the name of the Templars, is Temple Mount.
Yes.
So all three of the Abrahamic traditions absolutely revere Jerusalem, parts of Jerusalem.
I mean, this is the land of Jesus.
There's no way around it.
If you ever go to Jerusalem or Israel, it's just filled with holy sites.
Absolutely filled with it, everywhere you go.
I mean, Bethlehem is just south of Jerusalem.
You can see it on the map there.
Where Jesus was apparently born.
It's right there.
Yeah, I mean, Jesus was supposed to have been executed just outside Jerusalem, isn't it?
So, okay.
After the Crusaders were booted out by Saladin.
It took several hundred years for the Crusades to finally come to an end.
Ultramar, the land where the Franks controlled all different kingdoms up and down the Levant.
Eventually the Ottomans, we'll just have to skip ahead, just montage through the centuries.
Eventually that part of the world comes under Ottoman control.
Of course their sultans sat in Constantinople, Istanbul, modern day Turkey.
They controlled it for a long time.
Now, where this story can start getting a bit more resolution on it, I think, perhaps, is World War I. I've said this before in various Epochs and various times, that our modern world is in lots and lots of ways, in many, many ways, an echo, a reflection of what happened during World War I and after.
And the Middle East, or the Near East, I should probably call it the Near East rather than the Middle East, is absolutely no exception.
So the Ottomans controlled everything from Constantinople all the way down to all of Arabia, past Medina, down into Yemen basically.
Now one of my favourite or most interesting personalities from history is, and I've said this a great number of times, is T.E.
Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.
And that story is really where the British Empire help the Arabs to shake off Ottoman control.
That's what that story is, in World War I.
Now we, the British Empire, already controlled Egypt.
So we'd already kicked the Ottomans out of Egypt in the 19th century.
That's with the reconquest of Sudan, and Omdurman, and all that sort of thing, and Gauden, all that sort of thing.
We tried to attack across the Sinai up into Gaza earlier on in World War I and failed.
A couple of times they tried sort of Western Front style frontal attacks on Gaza.
But coming from Egypt?
Yeah, coming from the south essentially.
I mean it's quite difficult because there's a lot of desert to go through.
Yeah, the Sinai desert's no joke.
We tried that, but the Ottomans actually were quite good fighters, and they had a lot of help from the Germans.
Because, if it's not obvious, the Ottomans were on the German side in World War One.
Now, we failed to take Gaza a few times in these frontal attacks, so we decided to change tack a bit.
We decided to get intelligence services, people like Lawrence of Arabia, To get involved with the Arabs, sort of the true Arabs in the middle of Arabia.
So there's the Sheriff, the Sharif of Mecca, King Hussein, later King of the Hejaz.
Hejaz is on the western side of Arabia.
And we help them, they're sort of true Bedouin types, you know.
So today we talk about the Palestinians being Arab.
Now it's a difficult, it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Okay, so they are sort of ethnically you would say Arab, but they're not the same thing as Bedouin Central Arabian type Arabs, not exactly.
So the Near East is really a patchwork of all different types of people.
So you're saying that they're kind of their own thing?
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's like confusing an Englishman with a Spaniard.
We're not quite the same thing, are we?
Yes.
We're sort of very similar, ethnically.
We might have the same religion.
That's the thing I really wanted to ask you.
We're not the same.
So often you hear the claims that, OK, yes, maybe Judea used to be a Jewish kingdom, but then they left it.
Um, and then they only came back afterwards and tried to throw off the people that were already there.
Um, but my understanding is that's not the case.
There has been continuous occupation, sorry, a continuous presence of the Jews there, but it was only really after the Second World War that you got the mass influx.
Well, after the First World War.
First World War.
And then another massive influx straight after World War Two.
Yeah.
That's right.
And the same thing with the, with the Palestinian people, because It's easy to be suspicious of that because, for example, the most famous Palestinian, Yasser Arafat, I mean, he was an Egyptian.
But is there an identifiable, and I think you were talking about it there, an identifiable Palestinian group that has been in this area for a long period?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, there's people that are, if you want for a better expression, indigenous people.
of Arab descent there.
So I was just going to say then, just quickly, I'll montage through it even quicker.
We eventually, with the British Empire and sort of the Bedouin Arabs, with the help of Lawrence of Arabia, eventually push all the way up into the Levant, what is modern day Israel basically.
It was under the command of Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby.
Very interesting and fascinating figure.
I'd like to do an episode about the life and career of Allenby.
Lloyd George said he wanted him to take Jerusalem in time for Christmas 1917 as a present to the people of England.
That always comes up in time for Christmas.
The amount of times that comes up in history.
Did it work this time?
Oh yeah, we got there just in time.
A famous picture of him entering Jerusalem on foot.
Yeah, because he thought it wouldn't be proper to enter on horseback.
And actually T.E.
Lawrence is right there beside him.
But they pushed far beyond that in the end, all the way up to Damascus.
Now, that King Hussein of Mecca, he had four or five sons, but three important ones.
Faisal, Who's played by Seralic Guinness in the film, Lawrence of Arabia.
Faisal who ends up, we end up making him king of Iraq, the newly formed Iraq, what used to just be called Mesopotamia.
He had another son, Zayed, who went on to become a sort of prince of Iraq and Syria.
It's a bit complicated.
But another one, Abdullah, Who became king of Jordan, I believe.
So anyway, this family, they're connected to the Hashemite families.
We ended up basically partitioning this whole part of the world.
Now people talk about the Science Pico Agreement.
Well, at Versailles, they didn't end up really going with the Science Pico Agreement exactly.
But nevertheless, the Near East sort of gets partitioned between the French, this is very low resolution, between the French and the British, and we end up taking control of Palestine.
It's called the British Mandate in Palestine.
All throughout the interwar period.
When we gave it that name, Palestine, we basically just said, yeah, all of that, including what's Israel.
So we just called the whole thing Palestine.
Yeah, yeah.
The British mandate in Palestine, yeah.
Must mention the Balfour Declaration, where the Foreign Secretary at the time, Balfour, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild saying, we support some sort of Jewish state in this region.
So that's the thing, the British leader Lloyd George made promises to both sides.
He sort of promised the Arabs that they would have various states in that region.
But Balfour also promised Jewish people something as well.
So it's very difficult.
Anyway, through the interwar years, both the Arab-Palestinians, I'll just have to start calling them that, and the Jewish peoples, there's sort of all sorts of fighting amongst themselves and against us.
Anyway, after World War II, there's another massive influx of Jewish people.
In 1948, Britain decides, along with most of its empire really, is to sort of abandon it and give up the empire.
We handed it over to a UN.
The UN would take over.
Well, literally the day before, David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, declares independence for an Israeli state in 1948.
That sparks off the first Arab-Israeli war.
There's a war.
The Jewish people essentially win it, but they don't get access to Jerusalem.
Skip ahead to 1967, the Six Day War, where there was Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt all declare war on Israel all at the same time.
And within six days flat, Israel beats them all.
That was a remarkable victory, that one.
Right, yeah.
There's Moshe Dayan with the eyepatch, you might have seen him, one of their great military generals.
Anyway, they end up taking lots of territory, including the whole of the Sinai and all of the West Bank, what we'd today call the West Bank, on the West Bank of the River Jordan, that's why it's called that.
And they decided at that point That they wouldn't occupy the Temple Mount.
It seems like opinion's a bit different now, but back then even a lot of rabbis or orthodox Jewish thought was that they didn't necessarily need or want to occupy the Temple Mount.
It's sort of so sacred you don't need to pray there.
You can pray at the Wailing Wall.
Right.
Now, a lot of Jewish people and politicians today don't necessarily think that.
They think they should be able to.
I'll get into that in a moment.
So they didn't occupy the Temple Mount, or the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, if you want to call it that.
But they were, for the first time in centuries, able to visit the Wailing Wall and pray there.
and whale there in lament for the Second Temple.
That's why it's an obstruction of the Second Temple back in 70 AD by Titus, as we mentioned.
OK now, going on, ever since then, just nothing has stopped.
There's the Yom Kippur War in, what, 73?
Where Israel had to take the Golan Heights.
What else is there?
Just some of the highlights.
There's the Camp David Accords.
Where, eventually, Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt.
Sadat got himself executed off the back of that.
Not executed, sorry, assassinated.
It just goes on and on and on.
So you mentioned the first Intifada.
So that starts in, what, 1987?
We've got to mention the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
One of their main factions is Fatah.
You mentioned Yasser Arafat there, he was their leader from what, the 60s all the way through to, he didn't die until 2004 or something.
And then you would have the Oslo Agreements, where was it, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, again at Camp David, with Bill Clinton this time, agree things that neither side really kept to, but especially the Fatah side.
Yeah, this is what starts happening a lot from this point.
The Americans come along with their ideas of democracy, but basically don't work in populations like these.
Right.
Yeah.
So some people, some Israelis said at the time, there's no point trying to agree some sort of two-party state because they'll never, the other side will never, you're just giving them extra rope.
I wanted to come back to the two-state solution later on because, I mean, they're getting to the point of a solution to this mess is, I mean, it's utterly intractable.
But yeah, we will have to come back and talk about that.
They've tried many times.
I mean, the Oslo agreements in what, 1993 was that?
Yeah.
Was a decent shot at it, but neither side, I think particularly the Arab side, are not really capable of keeping it.
They don't want to keep it.
An organisation like Hamas has got no intention of having a two-party, a two-state solution.
Can I quickly run through, as I understand it, the history of Hamas?
Because I think this is the main to the discussion as well.
Shall we talk about the 80s and 90s?
Yeah, so Hamas founded in 87.
It's an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, as I understand.
And then this is really where the cycle starts to get bad for the people of Gaza.
So they started off in the 80s and 90s as sort of low level.
Well, I say low level.
There were attacks, but they were escalating attacks.
By the early 90s, I'm sure we all remember when we were young people, the news out of Israel all the time with these suicide bombings.
So they would go into cafes where a bunch of young people were and blow themselves up and take a whole bunch of Israeli kids with them.
They described themselves as an army, but they didn't go and fight the idea if they went and blew up teenagers.
Now, and this is where the whole cycle begins, because of course, in response to teenagers being blown up, Israel starts saying, OK, well, we're going to put a border fence up.
We're going to start placing restrictions.
So that continues.
Then in 2006, there was an election, because again, this is the US idea of, well, we bombed Japan and Germany and then we gave them democracy and it all worked out.
Yeah, but trying to push democracy onto low IQ populations in the Middle East doesn't bloody work the same way.
Trying to push democracy onto people who have a spiritual worldview?
Or a religious dogma that's got nothing really to do with what politicians decide amongst themselves.
One thing I'd like to say just before we get on to 2006 is that in about the year 2000, Ariel Sharon, who at the time was, I mean, he was a war hero as far as Israel was concerned.
In about 2000, when he was only the leader of the opposition, he wasn't even the leader I believe, he decided to enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Not do a speech there or anything, or not pray there or anything, but just to enter it.
And that sent the Palestinians a bit crazy.
It started the second intifada, which didn't end until like 2005-2006, when in Gaza it got so bad Israel said, right, we're just going to pull out entirely 100% of Gaza, the Gaza Strip, and you can control it.
And everyone thought, and they allowed them to hold elections, everyone thought, well, Fatah would win that, PLO would win Any elections.
Turns out Hamas won by a very large margin.
I mean, that's how I ended up controlling the West Bank.
So I remember that because I was sort of fully grown up.
I was already like 25 or whatever.
I remember thinking, that's bad.
Yeah.
Oh, definitely.
That's pretty bad.
But my point about, you know, not all of Gaza is four square behind Hamas.
I think there's 132 seats in their legislative council and Hamas won 74 of them.
their legislative council and Hamas won 74 of them.
So it's a bit over half, but there was plenty of opposition Of course, the first thing that Hamas did once they'd run that election was promptly set about murdering all of their opposition.
Well, they just had a bit of a civil war with Fatah straight away.
And they haven't held any elections since, which is very telling, isn't it?
And then basically since then, what there's been is there was the rocket attacks, so I'm sure we all remember the rocket attacks.
Kidnappings, a lot of kidnappings.
Tunnels, if you remember them, a lot of tunnels going underneath the border.
Well even Egypt, Sandy, we can't leave that out, that's sort of beyond the pale.
Well, Hamas is declared a terrorist organisation by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, it's not just America and Israel.
Well, there's also the Muslim Brotherhood, which is an implacable enemy of the Egyptians, the Saudis, a whole bunch of them, so even other Arab nations that aren't fans of Hamas in any way.
But basically what I wanted to explain is, because you then start to get into the cycle of the bombings, the suicide bombings, the rocket attacks, the kidnappings, the tunnels.
Every time this happens, the Israeli response is, OK, well, we're going to increase restrictions some way.
So, I mean, there's even a naval blockade of Gaza because of the rockets coming in.
There's an extremely tight border system around it.
So when the people in Gaza say they're kind of kept in a prison, well, yeah, they are.
But that's because of the events of, you know, ever since they've elected Hamas, that have basically pushed these, you know, it's ratcheted up this entire time.
It's one of those things if you've got...
A feral animal or somebody who's mentally ill who will not listen to reason and cannot be controlled.
What do you do with that?
What do you do with that?
You have to put them in a straitjacket or something.
They have to be physically restrained.
What else?
You've got no other choice.
In this case, they're the authority in control of two million people.
Yeah, I know.
It's a terrible state of affairs.
Yeah.
So let's just quickly explore the proposed solution.
So you've got the one state solution, which I would be very surprised if anyone in Israel really wanted to agree to.
So the one state solution is basically it's just all Israel, all people in Gaza and the West Bank have Israeli citizenship and you're free to do as you please.
I suspect if we got the one state solution, well you'd just basically have what you had for the last two days.
They would just run riot.
Just to be clear as well, Israel's like 30% Arab, as I understand it.
So it's not like it's ethnically homogenous or anything like that.
It's more that you're going to give access to the civilian population There's loads of people who would probably do terrible things.
There's loads of Israeli Arabs.
I think there's even been a general in the IDF who was an Israeli Arab.
Loads of professional people in Israel are Arabs.
One point I'd like to make is that if you try and have resolution above and beyond what the BBC tell you, or CNN, is that in fact the real situation is extremely complex.
So there's obviously the Sunni Shia schism.
Hezbollah is Shiite and Hamas are Sunni.
You've got Salafists, Wahhabists, Alawites.
There's the Druze people, the Circassian people.
It goes on and on and on.
Just to say this, just the Palestinian Arabs, it's like, well, that's really low resolution.
That in itself is too low resolution.
But yeah, one state solution definitely isn't going to work.
But there are lots and lots of Arab Israelis right there.
It's not just like every Israeli is Jewish.
No, it is a Gaza problem.
It is a Hamas problem primarily.
Hmm, well yeah.
Even that's low resolution I grant you, yeah.
And they are, yeah, it's their raison d'etre.
They're absolutely committed to extermination of Israel.
The destruction of Israel.
So moving on then, the two-state solution being separate states for the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Which has been pushed for a long time and consistently fails because it's just not working.
What's the three-state solution?
Well, the three-state solution is the only one that I think could work, which is basically Gaza goes to Egypt and the West Bank goes to Jordan.
That sort of feels viable.
And the reason why it feels viable is because basically then you would have a situation where if there was attacks on Israel, it would be attacked from another state.
And so Jordan and Egypt would be incentivized to basically keep the population control.
And then you would have Arabs policing other Arabs, which would probably be far more brutal than the way the Israelis do it.
But, um, you know, when, when an Arab beats up another Arab, nobody around the world cares, not least other Arabs.
The problem is, Jordan and Egypt have no interest.
That's what I was going to say.
I doubt either would go for that.
Yeah, well let's go on to the geopolitical landscape then, because one of the things that was said by the Israelis is, oh well, the people in Gaza should just leave, and of course they can't.
Because Egypt seals the border at the south, the Israelis seal the border up or else, and of course have a naval blockade.
What are the options here?
Well, I mean, there's a huge number of people in Gaza who desperately want a passport from another Arab state.
They want to get out, but they can't because nobody wants to take them.
It is very convenient for other Arab states to say, oh, look at that.
Isn't that awful?
But they don't lift a finger to help the situation in the slightest.
Isn't that cynical?
Yeah, very cynical.
I mean, everybody involved in this at a state level is incredibly cynical.
But the Palestinian people, particularly those in Gaza, the innocent ones anyway, are just completely being used as pawns.
Yeah.
And this is my big concern with this stuff because, I mean, I'm sure we've all seen that tweet of the woman from the IDF who wrote in Intelligence and she's saying, there's no way that this was an accident.
Well, see, I tweeted about this.
I just assumed the board was militarized.
What happened?
But then people did give me fairly reasonable explanations of how they'd got through.
What was the best reasonable explanation?
Well, the reasonable explanation is it was attacks, apparently, at low interest areas.
Um, and so there was something like 40 guard station.
They were overrun by militants.
They used bulldozers to tear down the wall and, uh, new gliders to get over it in other parts.
Um, and it apparently just came as a surprise now.
Okay.
Fair enough.
That's how they physically got in.
But is it reasonable to believe that Israeli intelligence had no idea?
Yeah, my only concern on this is, I mean, I've never worked in intelligence, so I don't know, but I would imagine the key issue, especially in the age of electronics, the issue is not trying to find intelligence, it's trying to filter it.
Yeah.
But they probably, I mean, they probably pick up on 400 plots to invade Israel every single day and have for the last 20 or 30 years.
The issue is filtering it down.
But yeah, there are serious questions being raised because now the Egyptians are coming forward and say, well, we tried to warn you that something like this was going to happen and it was ignored.
So there is some speculation that this was allowed to happen, or that filtering mechanism went wrong somewhere up the track.
And my concern with this is, is I'm worried that, okay, in what world does this attack make sense for Hamas, right?
Because Hamas cannot win against Israel.
They can't.
But, if they can drag somebody like Iran into it, and make this a regional conflict, suddenly their chance of success shoots up dramatically.
Doesn't mean it's going to happen, but it does shoot up dramatically.
Yeah, they have to use a kind of like, judo move.
Yeah.
Like, as in, provoke Israel to commit atrocities in Gaza.
And maybe that's why these attacks were horrific and as broadcast as they were.
Entirely possible.
Just a quick thing as well.
As I understand it, these tactics actually seem more advanced than usual for Hamanas.
Yeah.
Like, where did they get 5,000?
Because normally, because a lot of people say, well, how did the rockets get past the Iron Dome?
So, well, apparently it was just overwhelmed with the just sheer volume of rocket fire.
But of course, how do you get 5,000 rockets into a barricaded, blockaded, open-air prison?
Yeah.
First of all, I don't think Iron Dome's ever been 100%.
No, no, no.
It's not that it's 100%.
It's interesting that Hamas are Sunni, I believe, but get a lot of their funding and arms from Iran, which is obviously Shiite.
And possibly Qatar as well.
And Qatar, yeah.
Their leader usually resides in Doha, in Qatar.
They get a lot of backing from Turkey.
You'll find Erdogan shaking hands with the leader of Hamas.
Which gives way to my regional conflict point.
So I think it's one of two things probably.
Either that, that they're playing some 3D chess trying to get Iran involved in a much much wider conflagration.
Or...
They just don't care, necessarily, about the repercussions to themselves.
Here's just a chance to butcher a load of Israelis, and it's as simple as that.
We're just going to do that.
To be pure animalistic, we're just going to hurt them, and we're not even thinking about what happens the following day.
What I'm saying is, if there is a tactic, Actually, it does kind of make sense.
It makes tactical, it doesn't make any moral, there's no moral justification, but there is a strategic justification for making these attacks as horrific as possible.
And then, and I've heard a whole bunch of Hamas spokesmen go out and say, oh yeah, Iran helped us.
Yeah, well, and you see the war hawks in America banging the drum about Iran constantly, specifically the Nikki Haley types and lots of other people, but just because It probably is that Iran has funded this.
One thing I would point out, the doctrinal differences between Iran and Hamas and things like that, I imagine they become very remote when you're dealing with what they consider to be an illegitimate Jewish settler colony in the Middle East.
They can agree on that only?
Yeah, exactly.
They can agree on that.
We're both Muslims, we'll have the philosophical conversation about who's the right kind of Muslim later.
And so I can totally see how they would be able to work together.
But possibly if I had to guess I'd say it was more likely that it is Hamas in collusion with Iran or it seems very likely in fact.
I'm just saying it's a possibility that Hamas are just acting on their own.
Well, not on their own, but politically.
With no further intent.
You see where this leads us, because the neocons in Israel and US have been champing at the bit for war with Iran for decades.
I don't think they're going to let this opportunity slip.
I think that basically Hamas has given it a push.
And the neocons will take it from here, thank you very much.
So we could be in a situation where Hamas and the neocons in the US and Israel all have the same objective, which is war with Iran.
Now you've got to remember that Iran is not as isolated as we like to think it is.
I mean, it's just been invited to join BRICS, with China in it.
You just laid out the connections between Turkey and a whole bunch of other nations around it.
Now, probably my base case is that this conflict will be like all of the other ones, which is basically they'll be fighting for a couple of months, and then there'll be a ceasefire, and then it will just simmer.
That's probably what's going to happen.
But it's also not impossible that this turns into a regional conflict that draws in multiple countries, and then it starts drawing in the US, China, all the rest of it, and you're in a World War III situation.
I don't think that's going to happen, but it is possible.
Yeah, the idea that Iran and Israel are on a collision course with each other, it does seem quite likely as well.
It's hardly not, it's hardly unprecedented as well.
Yeah, yeah, that's not a hot take.
So, I mean, Iran, the leaders of Iran, ever since 1979 and the Islamic revolution in Iran, it's been part of their Talking points to roll Israel into the sea.
Yeah.
Things like that.
Things on that level.
Which completely lines up with Hamas.
It's the same sort of thing.
Complete destruction of Israel.
And from Israel's point of view, they say things like, Iran is our number one antagonist, our number one enemy.
We will not, I've seen Old Nettie say more than once, we will not let them get nuclear weapons.
Which is probably why they keep getting assassinated by scientists.
Well, this is the essential neocomposition, because they firmly believe that it's only a matter of time until Iran gets nuclear weapons, and they also firmly believe that as soon as Iran gets nuclear weapons, they'll be passed to people like Hamas, who will then take them into Israel and use them.
So they believe it is an existential risk to take out the leadership of Iran before they get to the point of nuclear weapons, which is why you can see some people are making the claim that maybe this one was allowed, this attack was allowed, that, you know, the intelligence I don't know if I believe that or not, I've got no idea.
But, you know, we will find out more in the years ahead.
But you can see that it's not completely inconceivable that I.E.' 's return because it was judged that a small attack now is preferable to allowing a million people die in Jerusalem in a nuclear attack ten years down the line because this is the moment that they need to go after Iran.
Well, it's a thing that has happened throughout history a number of times is that you sort of allow an attack on yourself And it gives you a case of spell eye.
For the greater good.
Calls for war.
The thing that springs to mind is sort of maybe the Mukden Bridge incident or the Marco Polo Bridge incident in Japan and China.
You sort of either fabricate or just simply turn a blind eye to allow yourself to be attacked.
Or even fabricate it yourself.
And then you've got the political reason to do a war that you want.
That's very cynical to suggest that the Israeli intelligence services must have turned a blind eye.
I can understand the narrative behind it.
You said it's possible, and I think it's possible.
But who knows?
We'll have to see how this thing breaks, which way it goes, what comes out.
And I'll tell you, the other thing that concerns me is not just the situation over there, but the situation over here.
Because we now have large Arab populations, and of course the ideological left in this country is full square behind a lot of this thinking.
Well, on that note, let's go and speak to the ideological left.
I don't know where you've got this lined up, John, but can we go for the first one from my bit, please?
Not this one.
Yeah, no, no, go back.
Sorry.
So, yeah.
Let's talk about what the left's reaction to the attack in Israel a bit.
This is, as you can see, with 23 million views and 100,000 likes, pretty much just the summary of the ideological left's position on the Hamas attack in Israel.
As you can see there, Najma Sharif has said, what do you all think decolonization meant?
Vibes, papers, essays, losers.
Not like this, then what?
Show us lol.
Right.
So in response to seeing Israeli women and children being raped and massacred and carted off as sex slaves, just like things were done in the old days.
This was one Somali woman's.
She lives in Minnesota, by the way.
So I don't know what right she has to talk about decolonization, but this appears to be what they want to happen.
The word decolonization has been used a lot in the past few days because it's an old word.
And so you've got someone like Ashley here who's like, well, this is a totally stable reaction.
It's like, yeah, but what did she literally telling you?
What do you think decolonization meant?
She's this is a stable reaction because they've been saying it for years.
This is what they mean.
This is, in fact, what they want to happen to you.
Such a mask off moment.
Well, the thing is, the mask has never really been on.
It's just I know nobody's been listening to.
Yes.
Nobody has been listening to.
And so there was quite a backlash to to people like him.
Uh, famous porn star Mia Khalifa, who decided she was fully on board the yes, Israeli women and children need to die.
Um, can please someone tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones horizontal.
Now, again, I'm just using a couple of these examples, uh, because they're just emblematic of what we have seen.
And there's just been.
As soon as this happened, it was just a slew from the left of just, Oh, this is good.
We need more of it.
Pretty awful.
This got her fired, incidentally, from Playboy.
Playboy is run by a Jewish man, and he was like, well, that's disgusting.
And so she replies, well, you know, I'd say my supporting pastimes lost me business opportunities, but I'm more angry at myself for not checking whether or not I was entering into businesses with Zionists.
It's like, really?
Right.
So Zionists are bad, and it's actually okay when they're getting slaughtered.
Says one Lebanese porn star who can't return to Lebanon because of her career.
What is there to say really?
I can't comment on this.
I suspect Mia Khalifa hasn't got a particularly nuanced view of the conflict.
It's not really her.
It's not really her.
What do I know?
Perhaps she's a scholar.
It's not really her.
This was just emblematic of the popular response from the sort of the modern left.
And of course, she's like, well, I want to make this clear.
There's no way it should perform a way of inciting violence.
But you'll see what they have automatically done.
And we'll go through a few more.
You'll see exactly what they do is assume that Hamas are the legitimate authority of Palestine and just characterize them as Palestinians.
The Hamas attack.
No, no, no.
There's no 4D chess going on.
There's no international political game being played.
It's not that they're a tyrannical terror group that took over, killed their opposition and prevented any further elections and prevent any kind of peace process from going forward due to a kind of medieval style honor and hubris where they think that they'll be able to somehow just believe hard enough and take over and destroy Israel and kill all the Israelis.
No, this is just totally normal, totally legitimate as if they're a representative government.
Um, and so again, this is what the Palestinian freedom fighters is how she characterizes Hamas.
It's like, okay, they seem to be awful.
You know, I don't know how to describe it else.
Um, but, uh, I mean, she was genuinely reveling in this, that she deleted this.
As you can see, it's, uh, some Palestinians driving past an Israeli police car and shooting.
Uh, this is a Renaissance painting, she says.
I mean, that's just awful, but at least some Israeli is being murdered by a Palestinian, which seems to be entirely the sentiment.
She ended up walking this back a bit saying, well, I mean, I didn't say that Hamas were the Palestinians.
It's like there was Hamas doing it and you kind of did harmonize the two.
And then we get this one by Rivka Brown.
Now you're thinking, who's Rivka Brown?
Can we, can we hover over?
Okay.
If she's trying to make the argument that they're doing this for democracy... And human rights.
And human rights.
be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide as gardens break out of their open air prison and hamas fighters cross into their colonizers territory the struggle of freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn't apologize if she's trying to make the argument that they're doing this for democracy and human rights and human rights let's let's remember that the moment that hamas won their one election they immediately set about murdering the opposition and there's never been an election since whatever hamas are doing it's not for bloody democracy I don't think we'd say it's for human rights either.
No, I think both of those claims are rather weak, to be honest.
No, they're clearly doing it for Islam, or for jihad, or whatever it is, or for their land.
But no, democracy and human rights is certainly not.
But that's the commissioning editor at Navarra Media.
No backlash there.
I mean, imagine if that was Rory saying something similar.
This will not impact her career in the slightest, if anything.
Not even slightly.
I think Aaron Bastani's got a comment on that tweet.
Does he?
If we were to ask him, what do you think of that?
I retweeted this and tagged him, so this is an interesting statement, Aaron.
No reply.
He replies to a lot of my other stuff, just not this one.
Quite telling, isn't it?
So yeah, and it's not just, of course, these people on Twitter.
There have been, as you can see, communists out in the streets with pro-Palestinian activists, where they cheer that this attack happened because they want this attack to happen.
They want these people to be dragged into the streets, raped and murdered.
They want the children to be kidnapped.
They're saying it, they're just totally open about it.
And then you've got like a GB News commentator.
Palestinians have done more in five minutes than Zelensky has done with 75 billion.
Humiliation is an understatement.
As if this is wonderfully impressive, what Hamas have just done.
Again, this is someone who's on GB News.
Like, this is crazy.
Extraordinary.
And yet, we've just had a week where, what happened to Lawrence Fox?
Yeah, this is fine.
Yeah, exactly.
Lawrence Fox comments on whether he finds a woman attractive, three people fired.
Celebration of the murder and rape of women and children.
I've never been able to understand the connection between leftism and Islam.
It's never really made sense to me.
It is purely because they see Islam as a revolutionary force that can destroy the West.
But it will turn on them immediately after traditionalists and conservatives.
As he did in 1979, it was an alliance between the left and the Islamists.
And the moment the Islamists had power, the left were put up against them all first.
How do they not know that?
They don't know anything.
These are Marcuse's radicalized students who don't realize that once they bring around the revolution, that's going to be the first case.
They are genuine, true believers.
They're insane.
I like how someone can be a feminist and an Islamist apologist at the same time.
How does that make any sense?
How does that make any sense?
I've seen raped women being dragged around on the back of pickup trucks by the Islamists.
I did see one Western feminist tweet, you know, revolutionary uprisings against colonialism shouldn't involve rape of women.
And I retweet it and go, okay, but they do, what now? - But it does. - Obviously she probably did her account, so.
But like, you know, you've got the very ideological position.
But I think really what it is, is they never think they're gonna lose control, right?
That's what I think it is.
I think they have such a superior view of themselves and such an inferior view of the colonized that they think that these people will never actually be in control, running through the streets, shooting people, raping people, blah, blah, blah.
So they think it'll never be that.
They always assume there's going to be some Western power structure that can impose law and order, which of course is not always true.
They should look into Lebanon.
Yeah, so I had a look at this and in 2021, because you'll notice that they We'll complain shortly about collective punishment.
So in 2021, a poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe that Hamas is most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.
Only 14% preferred Fatah, which I think is interesting because you get people like Mehdi Hassan.
They're like, well, Israel cutting off the water supply and electricity to Gaza is collective punishment.
Okay, so is butchering a group of Israelis collective punishment for the actions of the state of Israel?
I mean, he's not wrong, but it's just how do you not see that both sides are doing collective punishment on each other?
Exactly.
Both sides believe in collective punishment.
So when the Palestinian defenders go, oh, well, you can't do this to us.
This is collective punishment.
Well, you can't just go into a music festival and butcher a bunch of Israeli teenagers because that is also part of your collective punishment.
So no side is any better than the other.
But at least the Israelis are civilized.
I would say, like, I retweeted, I think it was Jeffrey Miller, who's just like, look, when one side doesn't rape and murder women and children in the street, but bombs people and kills, causes civilian casualties, and the other is proudly presenting the sort of 7th century savagery as being good and noble, I actually am going to side with just the ones that are slightly more civilized.
I have to draw it out a bit.
I mean, I have to make a clear distinction between Hamas and the population, although I acknowledge a lot of the population supports it, and also the Israeli people in the Israeli government.
Well, I'm against the collective punishment of both, but the point being...
They have no position to complain, because they're all cheering on the murder of women and children, and innocent civilians, and then saying, oh, don't collectively punish us.
Well, you are in favor of collective punishment, as long as it's going the right way.
I can just get up some of these, which are just remarkable.
And so this is how they rationalize it.
They view the Israelis as not civilians, right?
When you steal the land of others and deny them basic human rights, you don't really get to be a civilian.
So literally, as you can say, they're committed to a course of action where any one of them can be murdered at any time and they have to go, yes, it's okay to murder me because I'm an American living on indigenous soil.
So if a Native American killed me, well, I'm not really a non-political civilian.
So there is no such thing as just civilian casualties.
Lefties just shouldn't try and do logic because it goes terribly wrong.
It's like, no, they're being perfectly logically consistent.
It's just what they're advocating for is just monstrous and it would be awful.
So yeah, then I suppose we'll go to the threat of what's going on in European cities.
So for those listening, this is a large group of, I would imagine, Arab-Australians stood outside the Sydney Opera House chanting, gas the Jews.
And there are populations like this now in every western city.
Is that the ISIS flag there?
Yeah.
Because we have, in the West, we have driven the most amount of immigration that we could possibly manage.
And so we now have large populations in all of our cities who are, as we can evidently see here, in favor of the extermination of another group of people who live in those cities.
Yeah, and Sadiq Khan had to put out a statement saying we will protect the Jewish citizens of London, and it seemed very much like a pointed message to a certain demographic to say don't even think about it, which is very interesting, I thought.
But I mean, how do we, I mean, so let's say my worst case scenario plays out, it escalates to a war with Iran that becomes a regional conflict.
And then basically it becomes perceived as what it really is, which is a Muslim Jewish war.
Yeah.
If that's happening.
And then what you're then going to get is you're going to get the social media feeds of both sides filled up with dead kids all the time.
So these populations are going to be fed a constant stream of dead Muslim children and vice versa on the other side.
How does this not blow up every European city?
Well, there is, I think, going to be bloodletting in the streets.
Yeah.
Secretarian violence, bombings, all the rest.
I mean, we're already seeing shops in Golders Green, a very Jewish area of London, getting smashed.
It's only a matter of time until some young Jewish kid gets dragged off the street and... Well, there was some Jewish who was shot in Egypt shortly after the attack.
I mean, Egypt, okay, but this could be happening in European cities.
Yeah, I'm not saying that.
But yeah, so it just appears that we have a large number of people who live here now who are deeply invested in this country.
And the Western world made a choice to get as many of them as it possibly could.
Yes.
And we are now going to have to deal with the fallout of the fact that multiculturalism is a sick joke that doesn't work.
Well, the problem with multiculturalism is that the different cultures have brought their own baggage with them and aren't prepared to stay in the prescribed boundaries that the state and progressives thought that they would.
Oh, well, we can make them live side by side and there'll be no problem.
It's like, okay, but what happens when you have an intractable problem like this that is something that spills out regardless of where in the world these people are?
Yeah, and it's not our problem.
I understand that there's a British history involved in all of this, but now it is very much a problem of everybody who lives in a European city.
None of them are saying, oh, the British are a responsibility.
No.
We are definitely bystanders to this conflict.
Yeah, exactly.
Thoughts?
Not many.
I mean, it's all pretty self-evident, isn't it, what's going on.
It's interesting that some have got Palestinian flags, some have got ISIS flags, some have got Lebanese flags.
I saw a lot of people in London with Turkish flags.
Because so what I think is interesting is a lot of this isn't necessarily ethnic and seems to be religious.
Right.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Are you Palestinian?
Are you an Arab?
Are you Muslim?
Yeah.
And then because there is.
Well, yeah.
Well, I saw I saw lots of.
Uh, people on Twitter, uh, saying things like, these are my people.
And then you check the buyers and then I'm from Turkey.
And it's like, okay, so when you say my, you must mean the UMA, right?
Not they're Turkish, obviously not ethnically.
And, and in Europe, we, we think much more in terms of ethnic lines, right?
So, you know, when we're, when the British, you know, when we are bombing Germany, I don't think, oh, that's Dresden.
That's my people, you know, cause I'm like, okay, but there were Germans, but that's not how these people are looking at this conflict.
It's interesting that there's, in a terrifying way, that there's, from Morocco to Indonesia, a collective solidarity.
Yeah, with Palestine.
To be fair, that sort of collective identity, group identity, is something that actually most groups do, with the exception of white Europeans.
Possibly, yeah.
We just don't see the world in that way.
We tend to have an out-group preference, if anything, particularly on the left.
And on that basis, we filled up our cities with people who have a very strong in-group preference, and in many cases, centuries-long blood feuds.
And we are now going to come up against the reality of what we've done to our cities when global events spiral out as they look like they're about to.
And I think it's worth adding as well that there is moral wrong on both sides here.
Both sides of a litany of things that have been done to them by the other.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's not necessarily completely fair to just utterly dunk on Muslims here.
I mean, where Ben-Gurion declared Israel in 1948, there was going to be repercussions to that.
Did they not think that there would be sort of endless repercussions?
There were atrocities done.
Against the Arab population of Palestine.
There were atrocities done.
And the settlers thing, you know, obviously they don't, in my opinion, don't deserve death or anything.
And of the two sides, the Israelis do seem to be, or are, less barbaric.
But there is a long list of mistakes, shall we say, on their side.
Yeah, there are lots of dead people on both sides.
Just the idea that both engage in collective punishment, just right there.
Yeah, they do.
Just right there.
I mean, so you're gonna, then you're locked into a cycle of violence.
Relief is unavoidable at this stage.
So I mean, we're going to have to watch this one with trepidation because of course, um, it'd be nice to think that, you know, this won't be wrapped up neatly in a couple of weeks, but it seems unlikely.
And this is, this is going to, well, I mean, this is the new current thing.
I mean, I mentioned before we came on air that I went to the BBC homepage, I went to Sky News, I went to CNN and did a search control F for Ukraine.
A lot of peep.
This has been bubbling under the surface for many years.
And as you can see, like this is the response to them attacking Israel.
They attacked Israel.
The Hamas, the Muslim world as far as they view it, attacks Israel.
And then they get out and they're cheering it on.
We've stepped into something here that I really don't want to be a part of.
Well, just as I say, at its heart, or one of the many things at its very heart, Temple Mount, the Al-Aqsa compound there.
That's sort of an intractable dilemma.
There's no solution to any of it.
Right.
So not only is it not going to go away in a couple of weeks, It may never go away or make, let's never say never.
We've got tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years left in civilization.
It's right.
Yeah.
I don't see ever coming to an end in anyone's lifetime.
That's a life today.
No, of course not.
Um, should we go to the video?
Yes.
Happy birthday, Dan, an excellent team and an interesting man during interesting times.
Cheers.
Yeah, let's get to the next one.
Yeah, that's right, Dan.
This is a special birthday cameo, and it's just for you.
Hey, yo, Dan.
I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, you know?
I traveled for miles to put a smile on your face.
Yo, Dan.
Happy birthday.
You're cool.
and part it.
I'm here to say happy birthday to you.
This takes the cake.
This is so cool.
You Daniel, today it's all about you.
Okay, we'll leave the rest of them, we'll do them tomorrow or next week.
Appreciate that.
It just feels totally wrong.
The Shadow Band has sent us a chat on Rumble, which is, thanks for having Bo on, his depth of knowledge of ancient history always makes these a lot of fun to watch.
And Sophie echoes the sentiment, saying... That's very kind of you.
Yeah.
I never re-watch these podcasts anymore, would I?
Of course, it's a current events podcast, but I'll have to re-watch this one and take notes.
Bo is really shining here, there is so much.
Yeah, you get some really valuable perspective on that.
Oh, thanks.
Hope it wasn't too biased one way or the other.
I think the main problem is just that because there's such a long history in the region, you have to skip over so many details.
Because one of the things I want to point out is Judaism as a religion is not the same Judaism of King David.
These things have changed over the 3,000 odd years that we're dealing with.
Same with Islam and Christianity over those thousands of years.
There's just so much to talk about.
Tom Holland's book, In the Shadow of the Sword, which is largely, nominally about Islam, actually talks a lot about Judaism.
Yeah, that's a good book, that one.
Yeah, it's a very good book.
Yeah, no, it's really great.
We can do a book club on it sometime if you want.
I've read it.
Ethelstan says, regardless of your position on the conflict, who started it?
Who is the rightful claim?
Who has committed the worst atrocities?
I think there are two indisputable things here.
One, this was an appalling attack, barbaric in its nature, that specifically targeted civilians.
Two, it's terrifying to see so many people celebrating the attack.
I do not see British people, pro or anti-war, celebrating the streets as the bombs landed in Baghdad or Kabul.
Yeah, but the thing is, that's the thing, isn't it?
We go to war as part of a kind of political necessity.
These people are at war for deeply held, deeply rooted emotional beliefs like you can call it mental blood feud.
Sprung to mind there, do you remember when there was a female US soldier, Lindy something, in Abu Ghraib jail doing things that were unseemly?
Yes.
Our reaction to that was to be horrified.
Yeah.
And to sort of endlessly apologize essentially for it.
Yeah.
Rather than revel in it and dance in the streets.
Yeah.
It's the reveling which is so shocking about it.
But do you remember after 9-11 all sorts of people were literally dancing in the streets?
Just to steel man the opposition point, they would say, well, for the last 50 years or whatever, we've been living in an open air prison and constantly maligned, degraded and stifled with no help.
And therefore, this is a just attack, an oppressive force.
And it's not that there's no truth to that.
I'm not in any way trying to justify.
I want to make that absolutely clear actually.
Both sides have done disgusting criminal things to each other.
Just in this case, it was Hamas though this time.
And how could you not?
On both sides of probably no people or family members have been killed in this conflict.
How do you not take that rage into your next encounter with them?
That Texas gal says, really looking forward to this.
I can honestly say the whole situation has just confused me.
The propaganda on both sides is always so over the top I don't know what to believe.
Well, I mean, whenever whenever there's some sort of breaking event like this where it's highly charged and I mean, there has been a lot of fake footage going around and fake claims.
Honestly, I tried to leave it a few days at the very least before I have any kind of take on anything because it's just The nature of the business.
Lord Nerevar says, so how, pray tell, did the nation with the most advanced intelligence network in the world, 70 years experience dealing with Hamas, managed to miss the 5,000 rockets being prepped to Tel Aviv, and the old boys Fortnite gliding over the border fence, and face the Almonds?
Well, I mean, that is a question because, of course, Netanyahu was having internal political problems, right?
And suddenly, I imagine they seem less relevant now, which is one of the pillars that's strengthening that argument.
But of course, I have no idea.
I've seen nothing.
I've got no reason to think other than the kind of conspiratorial view of it.
Yeah.
Gregory says thank you in advance for this I've always been confused what the conflict is between the two this might explain why there's so much hate for Israel um yeah and why there's hate for Palestine as well to be honest I haven't watched Ben Shapiro's podcast on it yet but I've seen his tweets it's just like I don't like what this is turning people into at all, you know.
I actually quite enjoy Ben Shapiro's commentary usually, but then as soon as it's like Hamas attacking Israel, he's just like, right, wipe them all out.
I find him obnoxious.
It becomes tribal incredibly quickly.
Sorry?
It becomes tribal instantly.
I don't like it at all.
Andy says, I haven't got a dog in this fight, so I hope the UK still is well clear of this asshole.
Yeah, we're not going to.
Maria says, the wider Western world needs to wake up to the fact that barbarians at the gates don't care to discuss terms.
They seek to eradicate Western values and ideology, no matter how weak such values and ideology has become.
Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons why it's so concerning.
There are so many of them in our cities.
Bongun says, little perspective on the electric and the water.
I agree that turning off the water is a bit far, but Israel has been supplying the entire Gaza Strip with free water and electricity for decades.
But that's probably because they don't have access to water.
Well, they can drill wells, but that in itself is insufficient.
Right, right.
Citizen Philosopher Detroit says, Welcome to the next 18 months of free Palestine from every leftist you know.
It's almost like the barbarism and brutality of the Palestinian terrorists is irrelevant because of the Marxist framing of Israel as an oppressor, lest the normies want brutality because viva the revolution.
Yeah, we're never going to hear the end of this.
I think, um, I think it would be conveniently forgotten that Hamas led this horrific attack when in Lace's 18 months time, the Israelis have blown the crap out of Gaza.
Yeah, we'll see.
I mean, it's a big, it's a fairly big strip of land.
Let's just say a couple of million people in it.
I don't know how that you can't really.
They couldn't actually carpet bomb it, I don't think.
And even if they sent a quarter of a million men to go street to street, that's still a massive, massive operation that would take a long, long, long, long time.
I don't know if you remember in Iraq, the Americans, the Second Battle of Fallujah.
In Iraq, it's street to street, house to house, room to room fighting like this.
It's brutal as it gets.
It's quite stacked up, so it will be up and down stairs as well.
I mean, it's an absolute nightmare to try and fight that.
It would be a nightmare, yeah.
It would be an absolute nightmare, yeah.
And I tell you, where my concern is that it's leading, it will lead to getting so bad that there's some sort of solution offered, which is something that one might say, well, let's just take them all to Europe then.
Really, they can't go to any other Arab-speaking nation in the Middle East?
No, because that would have happened a long time ago if any Arab... I mean, this has been proposed numerous times that some other Arab nation takes it and it's just a point-blank no.
Biggie Bigfoot says, it's maddening to me that people on the left are choosing the optics of supporting Palestine over the condemnation of literal terrorism.
Meanwhile, the more NPC types confused as to which side they should be supporting, fearing they will be labeled as either Islamophobic or anti-Semitic by their own ideological BS.
The whole affair is eye-opening, to say the least.
Yeah, and I think that's really just... The thing is, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, I don't want to take a side.
It's like we said, there's crimes on both sides and There's claims on both sides and it's not my business.
But when you've got Western leftists saying, yeah, that's good.
We should decolonize here too.
Well, that is my business.
I do have a side and actually now at least we know what they mean by decolonization.
Ignacio says, I'll be blunt, even though I don't have that much to do with Israel, for my self-interest, I'm more in support of Israel just for the fact that it results in Islamist deaths and keeps them in check.
Are Israelis perfect angels?
No, but the Islamists are outright savage barbarians.
Well, I mean, that is definitely one perspective on it as well.
I mean, I don't really see what choice Israel has either way, but to announce they have to de-Hamasify Gaza, right?
Yeah.
Like they don't, they don't have much choice.
I'm sure it, I'm sure it has to be that, but achieving it is going to be terrific.
Yeah.
To me, like, like this is going to be the worst kind of warfare from anyone's perspective, really.
Room clearing of a whole city of 2 million people.
Yeah.
That's 25 miles long and eight miles wide.
Yeah.
And it's probably full of young men who are desperate to kill you.
Yeah, well, and also, like I mentioned earlier, half of them are children.
So the collateral damage is going to be significant, and then that's going to inflame everything in the Muslim world.
Anyway, I guess we'll leave it there.
Thank you for joining us, folks.
I hope we've managed to do this some justice.
And, well, I guess we'll see you tomorrow.
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