Dave Smith critiques Coleman Hughes's Joe Rogan appearance, challenging his dismissal of the International Court of Justice's genocide ruling and his reliance on unverified IDF casualty estimates. Smith argues that decades of occupation and blockade, not just current conflict, drive Gaza's suffering, while exposing alleged Israeli strategies to bolster Hamas as an asset to prevent Palestinian statehood. Citing former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the episode reveals a calculated effort to maintain control over the West Bank by denying independence, suggesting that the war's true goal is preserving the status quo rather than achieving strategic victory or moral clarity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Gas Digital Network Intro00:03:16
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Okay, so on our last episode, I was singing the praises of Coleman Hughes after his appearance on The View.
And then Coleman, who's got a new book out.
I have a feeling, by the way, I have not read the book.
I have a feeling I'd like it very much.
I liked what he had to say on The View.
I think he's got good takes on race relations and stuff like that.
But then because he's out promoting this new book, he just went on the Joe Rogan experience and totally betrayed me because I'm sitting here having praised him for his take on The View.
And then he went off on the war in Gaza, if you can even call it a war.
Anyway, let me get into this.
And I thought he got it all wrong.
So I thought for this episode, I would respond to his segment on the Joe Rogan experience where he's talking about the war.
And we could kind of go through this and break it down a little bit.
So let's do that.
Let's start it here.
This is Coleman Hughes on the Joe Rogan experience.
Of course, I should say to start, Joe Rogan is my guy.
I love him to death.
Unbelievable comedian, by the way.
People know Joe Rogan, I think, at this point, so much more for the podcast and UFC and stuff.
But goddamn, go down to the comedy mothership one night when he's performing and watch Joe Rogan set.
One of my favorite things to do when I'm down there is watch Joe Rogan do stand-up comedy.
And of course, he's the best conversationalist in the United States of America.
And so here, here is the conversation between him and Coleman Hughes.
Age gap is 30 years, which is just wild.
Right.
But there is a difference between Mike Tyson and a regular person.
There just is.
I listened to your podcast with Kurt Metzger, who I know and I've been on his podcast, had a great time on his pod.
He's a fun dude.
He is.
Verifying Gaza Death Counts00:14:43
But I think I disagree with you both kind of on the Israel issue on the idea.
There was one point where you were kind of saying it's almost as if the Jews are doing what was done to them.
Well, what is genocide?
I'm saying that when you're killing 30,000 innocent civilians in response to something that killed 1,200 innocent civilians and you're continuing to bomb an area into oblivion, which is what it looks like when you're looking at Gaza, there's many people that have made the argument that that is at least the steps of genocide or a form of genocide.
You're destroying thousands and thousands of people's homes and and killing them.
So when you say 30 000 civilians, it's not 30 000 civilians that have been killed, though how many thousands have been killed?
So, according to Gaza Health ministry, which is it is run by Hamas, the number they have is 32 000, but they don't distinguish between Hamas and civilians.
How many members of Hamas are there?
40 50 uh, 40 000, something like that, it's.
I don't think the number is known, but it's tens of thousands.
So Hamas says 32 000 people have been killed, civilians and soldiers.
Israel says 13 000 soldiers have been killed by Israel.
So if you just being let's not doubt either number, they could both be literally, but like but.
But if both of those numbers are accurate, which they may or may not be that would be 13 000 soldiers killed, 19 000 civilians killed which, for urban combat in the Middle East, is a very normal ratio.
All right, let's pause it right here.
I can see, um, there's already, there's already so much uh to talk about with this.
So um, first of all, by the way, this is why I never call it a genocide um, because it's just once you, once you call what's happening a genocide, the debate always turns into semantics.
It the debate always turns into, well, is this a genocide?
How do you define genocide what?
What do most people think of when they think of genocide?
And and it's just like i'm just not interested in having that debate.
The truth is that look, i'm not an expert in international law.
There is a legal definition for genocide.
Many people who are experts in international law have argued that this meets the threshold of being a genocide, of what the technical, international legal definition of genocide is and, of course, as i'm sure everybody knows, the International Court OF Justice essentially ruled that it was plausibly a genocide.
Do with that what you will.
I just leave that to the side and i'm just trying to argue that it's wrong.
What's going on?
Let's get into the, the numbers here.
So, first of all, I don't know where uh mr Hughes got the number 40 000 um uh, Hamas militants, uh I i've heard Israel claim 30 000 before.
Of course, they've never backed that up with anything, but i've heard 30.
I don't know he heard 40.
I don't know where he got that from um.
In terms of the uh, the numbers I the, the numbers that Israel claims of Hamas guys that they've killed uh, has changed drastically, many different times they've.
Most recently, I know, the embassy in London had said 12 000, and then in Tel Aviv they said 10 000, and other times they've said 9 000.
There's the problem you have here when you go um.
Okay, so look, by the way, this is another thing you you don't hear me harp on when I talk about this is the number of dead.
The 30 000 people have killed or whatever.
The latest numbers from the health ministry are um.
But anyway, he is right that.
So you have this health ministry in Gaza which is I don't know exactly if it says they are Hamas or they're run by.
They're certainly kind of like under the umbrella of Hamas.
And so when they put out these numbers, it's I understandably where a lot of people have the reaction of like, okay, but like, what am I trust in Hamas to keep accurate numbers?
And so I understand where that's people's initial reaction.
The issue that you have is that there have been many, many military campaigns in Gaza.
And this since 2005, 2006, or 2006, I guess, they've actually been pretty accurate with their numbers.
This is why a lot of international organizations do take their numbers because they've been accurate after like they've gone in and been verified in the past.
And actually they've even downplayed the numbers.
When I say downplayed, I should say the numbers turned out to be higher than what the Gaza Health Ministry was claiming.
So that's why people tend to go, eh, if they're saying this, it's probably somewhere in that ballpark.
They've done a decent job of keeping these numbers in the past.
As far as the IDF claiming the number of soldiers, whatever, Hamas militants that they've killed, the reason why there's an asymmetry between these two things is that number one, they share none of their methodology.
They just assert these are the numbers.
The other thing about it is that obviously there's, look, if you're trying to figure out how many people get killed, right?
Which is, he's right when he says that Hamas is not telling you who was who, who was a militant, who was a civilian.
They're just telling you the number of people killed.
That's, that's correct.
But if you're trying to count the number of people killed, well, I mean, there's certain like ways you can do that.
I mean, if you have dead bodies, you can count that as that's a dead person.
If a building collapses and you know there were X amount of people in there and they're unaccounted for now, and you can assume, okay, they died in the rubble.
There's there's ways that you can count that and be fairly accurate.
In terms of counting how many of the people killed were Hamas, Israel will admit that this is complete guesswork.
And by the way, they won't show you how they got this guesswork.
That they won't really, they will not back several different newspapers, both Israeli newspapers and international newspapers, have asked them, like, how are you getting these numbers?
They won't share that, but they'll say that it's through interrogations and satellite imagery and like a couple other factors like that.
But if you could just imagine, right?
If you are like, if your house was bombed and let's say there's five people who live in your house, it'd be pretty easy for you to figure out like, okay, two of us are still alive.
That means three people died, right?
Okay, that's a totally different thing than if you go, we have intelligence that there's a Hamas operative in a tunnel underneath a building and we blew up the building.
Do we know if that guy survived?
Do we know how many were down there with him?
They're saying they interrogated someone and he told them he believed there were two people down there.
So now they're going to count that as two people.
And by the way, they're not even showing you the records of where they interrogated the guy.
They're not even show.
So, no, I mean, you have one number, which is coming from an organization who has historically kind of gotten the number of dead people somewhat close.
And then you have the IDF just telling you a number.
And obviously, they're totally incentivized to make that number as high as possible to tell you, oh, yeah, so they can hide behind this defense that, like, oh, we're just trying to kill Hamas.
We're not trying to kill innocent people.
And so All I'm saying is for multiple reasons, it makes much more sense to trust the numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry than it does to trust the numbers coming out of the IDF.
And that's not just me saying, oh, because like they're the good guys and they're the bad guys.
I'm not saying anything like that.
I'm saying that one of them have been historically accurate in the past and one of them have a reasonable methodology of how they can account for these numbers.
And the other one is just playing guesswork and is totally incentivized to drive up the numbers.
Aside from that, the real issue with the war in Gaza is not just the amount of casualties that they've been able to count so far.
The issue is what is the excess mortality of all of this going to be?
There were over 2 million people in Gaza when this war started, about half of them children.
Gaza City has been destroyed.
There's very few even somewhat functioning hospitals in all of Gaza.
There's hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of starvation.
So what is, and the war isn't stopping today.
You know what I mean?
So what is the result of all of this going to be?
That to me is the even more important question.
All right, let's keep playing.
If you wanted to look at it cold and objectively.
Yeah.
But I don't still, I hope it doesn't come across cold because.
But it's mostly women and children that are dying, that are, that are dying because they're in a place where these terrorists are, right?
I mean, this is, it's not because the terrorists on purpose embed themselves with the civilian population, which is a war crime, which is true.
So let's pause it already.
Let's pause it again.
So as Rogan points out, and this appears to be the data, this is, by the way, one of the reasons why people are skeptical of the IDF's claim that they've killed 10,000 Hamas guys or 12,000, as Hughes says here.
I don't know, whatever the latest number, they seem to just throw these numbers out and then never explain the discrepancies.
But if it's true that 70% are women and children, right, of the 30,000, the math just isn't adding up to Israel's numbers.
So that's kind of the issue you have here.
If 70% of the dead are women and children, well, first off, you're going to have a tough time selling people that the women are Hamas militants.
I don't know if you're familiar with radical Islamists, but that's not exactly how they tend to roll.
The children, sure, you could argue that there's a group in there that's being considered children that are whatever 15 to 17 or something like that, and that they're actually working for Hamas, that they're actually militant Hamas members.
But a large percentage of those children are going to be younger than fighting age, and a large percent of the men who died are going to be older than fighting age.
So again, if you just look at the numbers, it doesn't seem to be adding up.
But again, that's not like, that's not really where I hang my hat on these debates.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, let's keep playing.
Clearly employed when you see them when the IDF went into that hospital and found the Hamas.
Yes.
Yeah.
So it's real.
It's not just a conspiracy theory.
We know that that's real.
But it's still, you're still talking about 20,000, whatever it is, of innocent people getting bombed into the Stone Age.
And then there's this, like, what are the pressures that are being put on people that are trying to deliver aid?
How difficult is it?
So my understanding of the aid issue, and I've looked into it quite a bit, is that the aid is getting into Gaza.
They've gotten over a quarter ton of food into Gaza since the beginning of the war, which is pretty similar to the food that was getting in.
The problem is it's not getting to the people, especially in the north, because the north is a war zone.
So it's getting through the border.
Israel's allowing it in.
But then what happens is the IDF doesn't control the delivery.
The delivery is controlled by humanitarian organizations like UNRWA and just other whole bevy of humanitarian organizations.
And they have these aid convoys going to people, but then Hamas hijacks it.
Random gang of people, Palestinians hijack it, hungry civilians hijack it.
And it's an absolute mess in terms of distributing the aid.
And that's why you see, and it was a problem in the war in Iraq, too.
What was the case when it was being reported?
It's very difficult to know when you're getting the Hamas version of a story and then you're getting the Israeli version of a story.
What happened when there was the aid truck and people started getting shot?
The one last night.
No, it was a while ago.
Okay.
So yes, that was a couple weeks ago.
I don't have the full detailed version up to date of what happened there, but I believe it was, it had something to do with a clash between the IDF and other Palestinians that were involved in distributing the aid.
Because what you have is you have Hamas, but you also have powerful families in Gaza that you could call them sort of criminal syndicates or whatever, but they're powerful, important families as well that are also taking the aid sometime.
And these are the families that if Israel is allowed and goes into Rafah and defeats Hamas, one of the possibilities is that they want to get these powerful Palestinian families to take over the Gaza Strip.
And these people are also involved in the distribution of aid or in the hoarding of aid or in the stealing of aid or in the taking of aid and then selling it for very high prices on the secondary market, which is why it may not be getting to everyone in the north.
So it's those people that the Israeli soldiers shot?
War Crimes and Aid Accusations00:07:09
No, I think it turned into, it could have been a panic firefight and they killed, they killed civilians.
Okay, let's pause it right there.
Because I just think right there, that shows the bias like so blatantly.
I don't know.
Do you guys watch this and not see it?
Do you not see it?
Joe brings up the example that like, hey, in this war zone, I've seen footage of when aid is being brought in and desperate people are running up for the aid, they get mowed down by the IDF.
And by the way, hilariously, in a very dark sense, Coleman doesn't know which time he's referring to.
He goes, oh, you mean the time last night when that happened?
And Joe Rogan goes, no, I'm talking about the time a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, yeah, because this has happened several times.
Several times.
Coleman's response here, and I'm sorry, I know that like I, you know, Coleman does this good thing where he's kind of got this Sam Harris style of delivery where it's so emotionless and calm that it gives this perception that, oh, this is just logic and reason.
And I know I'm an emotional asshole, and but you know, I think it's kind of appropriate when babies are being slaughtered.
But regardless, just think about the bias here.
He's talking, he's giving you, it starts with, hey, these desperate people are trying to get a little bit of the food that humanitarian organizations are sending in and they're getting mowed down while they try to get it.
Oh, the time you're talking about, oh, no, a different time.
Oh, yeah, this has happened several times.
Oh, well, here's what's happening.
And then he just goes off on the corruption of the people in Gaza and how there's wealthy families who hoard the food for themselves and all this, which is true.
But like, then Joe has to bring it back and go, yeah, but again, so what is happening here when the IDF is mowing down these people?
And his response is, well, and granted, himself admitting he doesn't know anything other than that about the story, which by the way, there isn't much more to know because the IDF isn't saying anything.
And we just know what we see.
But his immediate default is, well, it could have been a panic where they killed civilians.
So we'll talk all about the corruption of the people in Gaza, but then we'll give all the benefit of the doubt to the people mowing down innocent civilians who are starving trying to get some food.
I just think about that.
Now, yes, it is true, by the way, that there are all types of problems with getting aid into Gaza.
I don't know what he meant when he said a quarter ton.
I think he misspoke because that certainly isn't enough.
But regardless of that, yeah, I mean, Gaza, after being occupied by Israel from 1967 till 2005, has had a full blockade on the country since 06, maybe 2007.
Is that a full blockade on the country?
They're essentially an Israeli prison, right?
Israel moved all of the IDF out of Gaza to the perimeter and surround it and control what comes in and what comes out.
And so, yes, in that, you know, imagine sending a bunch of aid into a prison.
Yeah, it's not getting distributed equally to all of the prisoners.
The tougher prisoners are taking more of it for themselves and all of that.
But if the story was that this prison that's been surrounded had a little bit of food come in because the people inside it are starving and all of the guards and the warden have surrounded the perimeter.
And then as people are rushing toward the food, the guards just start mowing them down.
I don't, your first reaction is to condemn the prisoners for not sharing it equally.
And in fact, Joe had to bring you back onto topic where you basically, your answer is, I got nothing.
Maybe they panicked.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe they did it in cold blood.
Like, why is that off the why is the only piece of evidence you have here is somebody mowing down innocent people?
And you're like, well, let's just assume that they panicked and let's talk about how fucked up those people are that they weren't being good to each other.
I'm sorry.
Like objectively, how does anyone not see this as like an unbelievable bias?
What caused the panic firefight?
I don't, I don't think there's details.
That I don't know.
So the accusation was that they were shooting people that were trying to get aid.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
No, by the way, just to pause it here, because I think Joe kind of underspoke there.
The accusation isn't that they were shooting people who were trying to get aid.
They were shooting people who were trying to get aid multiple times.
Mr. Hughes here has no explanation for it.
So the default is, ah, they panicked, you know, just one of those things.
You panicked.
I could see it.
See desperate people running for food.
How are you going to not panic?
You know.
Okay anyway, let's keep playing the case I.
I think it's very unlikely.
Is it possible?
Yeah, it's possible, absolutely there.
My assumption is that there is going to be war crimes in this war.
Right, because and I know Kurt would probably say i'm i'm, i'm doing the tragedy of war thing, but it's actually a legitimate point, in every single war, even the just ones, there are war crimes by berserk soldiers, by the good guys.
Yeah, that doesn't mean it's genocide and that doesn't mean it's not a just war, That important thing.
Let's pause it right there.
Yes.
Okay.
It doesn't mean it's genocide.
It doesn't mean it's not a just war.
It also doesn't mean it isn't genocide.
And it doesn't mean it is a just war.
So I don't know why that I don't know what value that statement has.
But, you know, I do, there is something about this argument, which is one of the ones that you come against a lot.
It's like, it's amazing how many people will use the argument when you're being critical of the way Israel is conducting this assault on Gaza.
We'll say, it's a war and war is hell and war crimes happen during war.
The old war is hell justification, which I would think at the very least, if your defense is war is hell, well then wouldn't wouldn't the onus be on you?
Like if war is hell, then you go, oh, okay, well, my default position is I'm anti-hell.
I'm anti-war crime.
And then it would seem if you're conceding that war is hell, that the unbelievable onus would be on you to prove that there is no other way to go about this, that this is the only thing we could do is conduct the war in this way.
And God, yes, it's tragic and we wish we didn't have to do it.
But obviously now, 100% of the burden is on me to prove that this must be done and that there are no other options.
It's like instead people use it as this like get out of war crime free card.
Oh, war is hell.
Yeah.
So, you know, yeah, it's going to happen.
Yeah, it's war.
You know, you're going to shoot at desperate people who are trying to get some food.
War.
Like you just get to say a word and then the debate ends.
It's like, yeah, war is hell.
That's why you should never fight one unless you absolutely have no other option.
Why This War Is Different00:15:52
And there are so many other options for Israel in this scenario.
So many short of this.
Okay, let's keep playing.
The war crimes thing, because I think when you're asking someone to follow and obey rules, when you're also asking them to murder people that they don't even know and that these are the bad people, like you have it in your head that those are the people that you have to kill and you're getting shot at and you're watching your friends die and you're, you know, two years into this now, whatever it is, you know, when you're in Ukraine, for instance, you know,
you're two years into getting shot at and like, I'm sure they do some horrific shit if they catch people or if they get someone that they think is on the other side or someone who looks like they're on the other side.
It's you're you're asking a person to do an insanely evil and horrific thing, but then stop when the rules don't apply.
And some people are not going to do that.
That's right.
And I think that the fundamental difference between Israel and Hamas is Israeli society, however imperfectly, is not going to celebrate the monsters on their own side when they're really found to be monsters.
They're not going to hand out candies to people who kill Palestinian civilians like Hamas does.
Okay, let's pause it right there.
Because again, this just demonstrates the incredible bias and also just like the lack of knowledge about Israeli history that this is the difference that Israel isn't going to celebrate the people who kill innocents.
Are you crazy?
The entire history of the Israeli cabinet and the Israeli prime ministers have been war criminals.
Like disproportionately, there have been people who have fought in the wars because again, Israel isn't that old and they had wars in the 40s and in the 60s and in the 70s.
So many of their leaders have been...
Look, Menachem Begin was the leader of the Stern gang for a while.
He was an open terrorist.
Not like I'm accusing him of being a terrorist, like a self-described terrorist who killed innocent people right before the creation of Israel in order to drive out the occupying British.
That was their justification, that terrorism is a legitimate tool to drive out an occupying force.
That's who the Israelis were right up to the creation of Israel.
And of course, I mean, you know, separating what the IDF has done to the Palestinians from terrorism is just, yeah, because they're our government who does it.
But the idea that Israel doesn't celebrate the people who they're not going to give them candy, they give them salaries and benefits.
Because it's done by a military rather than a gang, then somehow it's okay.
It's not terrorism anymore.
This is the bias here that there's like, it's not, you know, people will often accuse people who are critical of Israel of a moral equivalency.
If you ever even like speak about the atrocities on both sides, they've, they actually have a term called both siderism.
They'll say, oh, you're, you're basically just talking about both sides, like, because you're only allowed to talk about one side.
If you talk about the other side, their whole argument falls apart.
So they don't like that.
But this, this, the truth is that all we're doing is having one standard rather than two.
Why isn't the standard just killing innocent people?
And then you go, okay, who, which side has had more innocent people killed?
It's not close.
And then to say that, like, well, the difference is that they wouldn't celebrate them.
Of course they do.
They enshrine them.
And these people are revered.
People like Menachem Begin.
He went on to be the prime minister of Israel after being a terrorist.
And like a real deal terrorist, not even a state acting terrorist, you know, an independent militia.
Oh, my feeling about it is still that, you know, any nation that suffered what Israel did on October 7th, everyone in the country would be saying, you have to go get these guys.
You have to eliminate this organization that did this.
And if they're, and they're 80% finished with that job, it would make no sense at this point to stop before you've cut out the last 20% of the cancer or before you've put out the last 20% of the fire.
So let's pause it right here because this just says it all, right?
It's like, again, it's this, you know, they accuse us of both siderisms, but this is just one siderism.
Nobody, no group of people would take October 7th and not respond to it.
Okay, fair enough.
Fine.
But what about the other side of that equation?
What group would take what the Palestinians have been through?
They haven't been through this since October.
They've been through this since 1940 fucking seven.
And then really since 1967.
What group would take that?
What group would take being occupied by a foreign military for decades?
What group would take being under siege for 15 years?
What group would take that?
So that's okay.
You could ask the same exact question of the other side, but you're only justifying one side of this with the same logic.
And as far as this, again, now Coleman has, you know, at first where he's like, well, we don't really know about these numbers.
Now he's just accepted them as fact and said, oh, 80% of Hamas has been wiped out.
Listen, first of all, this is all nonsense.
There's been absolutely no evidence to show for this.
This is just the government of Israel asserting something.
They just asserted the total number to begin with, and then they asserted the number that they've taken out.
The idea that we're operating with it, 80% of them being taken out as fact is just not in the realm of reality.
But even if that were the case, I mean, just think about the mindset here.
I mean, you've taken out 80% of them.
What sense does it make to not take out the other 20%, right?
Like, what argument could there possibly be?
Oh, here's a really easy one.
You're killing babies.
Like, I don't know how many images of babies being killed have you seen since this war started?
I've seen many more than I needed to.
Okay.
So that, first of all, that would be one argument against it.
What sense does it make?
Well, you wouldn't be slaughtering all of these innocent people, which never seems to come up.
It always seems to be that in that the foundation that what every pro-Israel argument is based on is that those babies just don't matter as much.
They just don't matter as much.
You would never be making this calculation if it involved innocent Israeli babies getting slaughtered.
Well, what sense does it make to stop now?
We're almost done.
We'll just keep, I don't know, another couple thousand of them got to die, whatever.
Another, you know, a few tens of thousands more and the collateral damage outside of that and the second and third effect, you know, deaths.
Eh, that's all right.
Now we got to get Hamas.
Can't live with them.
All right.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
Even with all of the absolute suffering that is real on the Palestinian side, you know, so that that's how I feel about it.
And I think it's really, it's very, very distinct from genocide because genocide is when you're trying to maximize civilian casualties.
I think Israel, however imperfectly, is doing the opposite.
They're trying to minimize civilian casualties.
Okay, we could just pause it right there too.
I love this claim being made.
They're trying to minimize civilian casualties.
It's like, okay, what is that even compare to what?
Like, maybe they could try a little bit harder.
Yeah, there have been military engagements that Israel has fought in the past where they were at least attempting to minimize civilian casualties.
This cannot be described that way.
Now, let's keep playing.
That's interesting.
What would people say that would disagree with you when they talk about targeting mosques, targeting hospitals?
And we know that some of the targeting hospital stories are just not true.
Like the New York Times printed a story saying that the hospital was bombed and that X amount of people died.
When it turns out the bomb actually hit the parking lot of the hospital and a very small amount of hospitals.
We talked about that last time.
So there is some, but there have been, for sure, targeting of mosques.
Like, for instance, do you think that's because Hamas uses these mosques?
Absolutely.
So when they're blowing up their infrastructure and bombing the mosques and bombing whatever the schools, they're doing it because Hamas is in those schools.
They're doing it because they have good faith intelligence that Hamas is in those schools.
And they tell them that these people are using human shields and they just, they say, well, the most important thing is getting rid of Hamas.
Yeah, the laws of war say you cannot target a church, a mosque, a hospital.
But if the enemy turns that hospital into a military operation site, as Hamas does, which is it's routine for them, then it can become legitimate.
You have to do a proportionality assessment.
Is it worth killing this many civilians to get the bad guys?
And that's a judgment call that I think reasonable people can disagree on on a case-by-case basis.
And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I would disagree with that I would agree with every bombing that Israel has made.
I'm certain there's one that that was not worth it.
You kill too many people for.
But that's a judgment call that armies are allowed to make in times of war.
And Hamas is the one that turns these civilian locations into military operation sites, which is a war crime.
This is the way I would put it succinctly.
If you ask the question, what is unique about this war?
What is different about this war than all of our other wars?
It's not the civilian death toll.
The ratio of combatants to civilians is, I think it's better than the American armies was when we got ISIS out of Mosul.
That was like 10,000 civilians dead to kill 4,000 ISIS.
This is 19,000 civilians dead to kill 13,000.
It's not that, you know, what's unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of, is you have an army in Hamas that has perfected the art of embedding itself and meshing itself with civilians so that you cannot hit them without hitting the people around them.
Other armies have done this.
All right, let's pause it right there.
So, you know, if we're thinking about what's unique about this war, there's something else that pops into my mind that's kind of unique.
It's a little bit different than other wars.
And it's that Israel has occupied this territory and kept them a stateless people since 1967.
Over 50 years, because they won a six-day war in 1967, they have occupied Gaza, or as they'll say, we disengaged in 2005.
Okay, so they occupied them militarily from 1967 to 2005.
And then in the following years, put a full blockade around the country.
Literally control their airspace, their sea space, what goes in, what doesn't go in, the electricity, the food, the internet, how far you can fish off of the coast they control.
They've totally dominated these people and kept them stateless the entire time, living under totalitarianism.
And then after decades and decades and decades of that, the toughest gang in this prison broke out and attacked a bunch of people in Israel.
And their response now is to light up the prison.
That's also a little bit different than what most people see during war.
So that would be another unique aspect to this, not just the fact that this, you know, that the toughest gang in this prison in this densely populated area also exists within this densely populated area.
All right, let's keep playing.
Affected it to the extent that Hamas has.
No army that I know of in military history has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they don't use to shelter the civilians, but they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque.
So this is a challenge no army has faced.
And so that's what makes this war different.
And yes, I agree with all of the absolute tragedy and suffering of the Palestinian people, but what creates that is the way Hamas fights.
Okay, so let's pause that for a second there, too.
This is just such utter bullshit that what creates the desperate situation for the Palestinians is Hamas.
It's this target.
If it wasn't for that, they wouldn't be in this desperate position.
Even though, of course, the people in the West Bank who did not elect Hamas to be their ruling gang, who are not ruled by Hamas, they are also, they've also been oppressed since 1967.
They've also been occupied since 1967.
Look, Hamas didn't start until the 1980s.
The refugee crisis started in 1947 and 1948.
That's when those people got forced into Gaza.
Okay.
And then from 1967 on, they were living under Israeli military occupation.
But now years later, we're going to go back and say, oh, it's because of Hamas.
If it wasn't for Hamas, all these people wouldn't be suffering.
This is just like an empirical question that you can test.
It's like, no, they were suffering well before Hamas was created or helped.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
One of two things.
We can either say, well, Israel just, Israel doesn't have a clean shot.
And so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it's too much to bear.
But then we are essentially creating a situation where terrorists have found the perfect solution, which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies, and then hide behind your own people and they can do nothing about it.
It's a perfect strategy.
Can we live in a world where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy?
I don't think so.
All right, let's pause it there.
I mean, this is pretty easy to take down.
This is just a very blatant false binary.
So the idea is that Israel can either do what they're doing right now or they can go, you got us on October 7th, and therefore we can't do anything.
And again, this is just, I feel like you would only say this if you didn't know anything about the history of this conflict.
And the truth is that before Netanyahu, Israel always dealt with their terrorism process as with assassination campaigns and special operations.
They never just treated it like a military problem.
Now, they had wars.
They had wars with neighboring countries that they treated as a military problem, but they never just treated the terrorism issue from the refugee crisis that the state of Israel created and said, okay, we're just going to just have the military just level the place.
Justifying the Takeover of Gaza00:02:00
They never dealt with it in this way.
And no serious person, I'm sure there are some people out there who says, but no serious person is saying that after October 7th, Israel had no right to try to capture and kill the people who were involved in October 7th, or even to say that because the people involved were Hamas militants, therefore all Hamas militants are now fair game.
That's not really what people are arguing.
People are arguing with over this territory that is essentially yours.
This is part of your country.
There's a certain point where if you've had control of it since 1967 to 2024, you can't even really describe this as an occupation anymore.
It's an annexation.
This is part of your country.
And the people in this part of your country have zero rights, zero natural rights, political rights, nothing.
Okay.
And it's like, yeah, you don't get to just mow them down at that point.
That's the argument.
Not that Israel can't do anything.
It's very ugly to watch.
It's heartbreaking.
And I completely understand why people don't think the way I think when they see the videos.
I completely get it.
But I don't think we can actually live in a world where that's allowed to be a strategy.
I appreciate your perspective.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
You clearly know more about it than I do.
But also One of the fears is that people wanted the people in power in Israel wanted Hamas to be in power in Gaza because they wanted an enemy that they could fight with impunity, you know, that they could attack.
Almost like they could justify what they really want to do, which is take over Gaza.
This was the fear that a lot of the people that delve hardcore into conspiracy theories about.
Like there's people that I've heard that call it a false flag.
There's two different things.
Likud Party Conspiracy Claims00:09:38
One is that they wanted Hamas, they wanted Hamas to stay in control of Gaza.
And one is that...
Because they could justify, they would justify attacks and that they would always have someone to attack.
They would always have some reason to push forward.
I think the things I've heard are two kind of conflicting theories.
One was that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power and was essentially paying them off.
Right.
He was funding.
Yeah, but the whole world was funding Gaza, the EU and America too, because we don't want people to starve.
But the idea was we're going to keep Hamas in place because Hamas is so scary and terrible and everyone recognizes they're a terrorist organization.
And they don't.
Unless you're on a college campus.
Right, right, right.
And Hamas doesn't even pretend to want the two-state solution.
Whereas Palestinian Authority is more moderate.
They've become close or seemingly come close.
So if you're an Israeli prime minister against a two-state solution, the way that people have argued is that Netanyahu wants to keep the Palestinians divided, Palestinian Authority and Hamas here.
This way, he'll never be pressured to do a two-state solution because Hamas doesn't even want it.
So that's the idea is that Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas in power.
And that was based on comments that he made at a meeting, although there was never a video of the meeting, but it seems like something he might say.
Let's pause it right there.
So now, I will at least appreciate that Coleman concedes that it sure does seem like something he might say.
So when he, what he's referring to, the comments that Warren on videotape, where he kind of dismisses, yeah, we never really had him on tape.
So, you know, whatever.
There's been pieces written about this.
I believe the first one was in the Jerusalem Post, but there's been pieces written about this in Horetz, in the Times of Israel, in the New York Times.
The best piece you can read on this that I would recommend is an easy read is over at antiwar.com.
It's a piece written by, of course, the great Scott Horton and his guy, Connor Freeman, who's also been on the show before.
Let me see.
I think I have it up here somewhere.
Yeah, it's what was the title of it?
Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired.
It was written on October 27th of last year by Scott Horton and Connor Freeman.
Now, okay, so they go through all of this in the piece.
I'm not going to read the entire thing, but this was, so essentially what happened was this was Netanyahu speaking at a closed-door meeting to the Likud party, which is his political party.
They're the right-wing party in Israel.
There's a couple parties that are even further right-wing than them, but think of them kind of as their Republicans, but several steps to the right of Republicans.
I mean, these are, you know, they have a level of nationalism in Israel, in large part due to the nature of the state.
It's a tiny little country, but there's a level of nationalism there that we just don't have in this country.
And there's also a level of, I mean, the Likud party's founding documents were all about like how all basically the West Bank and Gaza are all part of Israel.
And they essentially want from the river to the sea.
They use different language, but that's essential.
They're a very right-wing party, very harsh on the Palestinians and certainly are opposed to a two-state solution, which has been what just about every president since Jimmy Carter has won, at least since Jimmy Carter, maybe before him.
But so they're against that.
You know, the Americans who are footing the bill for Israel, they want them to have a two-state solution.
The Likud party is against it.
Now, the quote that he's talking about where he says, well, we never really got it on camera.
So like, I don't know, presumably it doesn't count.
The reason that the story was Lahav Harkov was the woman who ran the story first for the Jerusalem Post.
And basically what happened was somebody who was in the meeting came and told her that Netanyahu said this.
And then she verified it with somebody else who was at the meeting.
And you said, yes, Netanyahu said this.
And then a third person from the meeting who was a government minister of some sort, he came out and in his memoir independently also wrote, I was in this meeting and this is what Netanyahu said.
So multiple eyewitnesses from his own political party have come out and said, yes, Netanyahu was saying that we need to support Hamas.
We need to prop them up and fund them.
They are for so we can divide the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and we never have to give them a Palestinian state.
Anybody who's against a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas was his line.
And so, yes, we've got multiple people who were at this meeting in his own political party coming out and saying this.
And you can understand where, look, even within the Likud party, okay, even within the party who's the most like, fuck these Palestinians.
They're animals.
We can do whatever we want to them.
We're never going to give them their freedom.
They're never going to get their own state.
Even within that group, when Benjamin Netanyahu is like, the plan is to bolster Hamas.
You can imagine where there's even some people in that group who are like, I'm a little uneasy with that.
I'm a little uneasy with this strategy of propping up the terrorists on our doorstep who want to kill all of us.
Okay.
So multiple people confirmed that he said this.
But it's not just that.
It's not as if we're just going off of that.
There's quotes over and over and over again from high level people in Netanyahu's government, in the governments prior to him, who have all come out and talked about this.
I'll read you just a few quotes on the topic.
Okay.
So here is, this is in 2005.
Ehud Barak, who was the prime minister before Netanyahu, or I should say in between.
He was before him, but Netanyahu had served a term before him.
It was around the year 2000.
He was the prime minister.
He warned against the Likud strategy and said that it could blow up in their faces.
And he said, this is his quote, Netanyahu's strategy to keep Hamas alive and kicking, even at the price of abandoning the citizens in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah.
So he's saying basically that this is Netanyahu's strategy.
And he uses the same phrase that Netanyahu was quoted as saying there when he says Netanyahu's goal was to keep the South on a constant low flame.
And this was Netanyahu's argument that he could control the height of the flame.
Basically, we can prop up this terrorist organization, but we can control how much damage they can or can't do.
Okay.
By the way, Ehud Barak in general is actually a kind of interesting guy who says the quiet part out loud a lot.
He's got some really good, some really good quotes.
Okay.
And Barack continued to say, it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there's no one to sit with and no one to talk to.
If the PA strengthens, there will be someone.
So in other words, he's saying the lefties in Israel who, if it was the Palestinian Authority, were there, it'd be like, hey, we should give them their own state because these guys want to make a deal.
Whereas if it's Hamas, you shut that pressure down.
This is what Ehud Barak is saying as he's criticizing what Netanyahu's strategy is.
Okay.
Bezalel Shmotrich, whose name I'm probably butchering, but he was the, he was the religious Zionist, the leader of Israel's religious Zionist party, the current finance minister.
And he made it even more explicit.
And speaking to Horetz, so this is one of the biggest Israeli newspapers.
And he said point blank, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset on the international playing field in this game of delegitimization.
Think about it for a second.
The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset.
It's a terrorist organization.
No one will recognize it.
Nobody will give it status at the International Criminal Court and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN.
And he goes on to say, no need for an American veto.
So it's not just that multiple eyewitnesses saw Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly explaining that this was his strategy.
By the way, I've just picked a couple of quotes here.
They're all, we could do the rest of the episode on these quotes.
They all acknowledged that this was their strategy, that this was it.
So they never have to give the Palestinian people, those innocent civilians, they never have to give them freedom because we will prop up this terrorist organization.
And then we can look around and say to the world and to the left here in Israel, what are you going to do?
We got no partner for peace.
It's Hamas.
As they say, Hamas can't go to the International Court of Justice and present an argument to them.
They can't get resolutions that the UN passed.
They can't do anything.
They're a terrorist organization.
They're the perfect ones to have in charge of Gaza.
How this does not blow up the narrative that people like Hughes and all the other Israeli supporters are attempting to use?
Using Hamas as an Excuse00:02:23
Because now you think about it like this, right?
He's admitted there are innocent civilians.
But you know what?
A lot of them got to get slaughtered because of Hamas, because of this awful organization.
But when you know this part of the story, you're like, but wait a minute.
So Israel supported Hamas with the goal of screwing over those innocent civilians.
And now you're telling me they get to use Hamas as the excuse for why it's okay to slaughter those people?
I'm sorry, think that through.
And of course, people like Coleman Hughes don't want to think that through.
And that's why he'll just say, I mean, it wasn't on videotape or anything like that.
It's like, okay, well, a lot of these other quotes were given to newspapers.
They were said publicly.
Oh, and by the way, we have multiple eyewitnesses that say, yes, this is what Netanyahu said in his own political party, by the way.
Not like his political enemies are saying this.
His own political party who are just like a little uncomfortable with this plan.
And look, Gaza has been under a total blockade during the rise of Hamas.
Israel decides what goes in and doesn't go in.
And they know what's going on here.
And they were working with Qatar to get them these funds.
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Incentives to Keep the War Going00:11:16
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All right.
Let's get back into the show.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
But then the other theory, which kind of conflicts with that, they can't really both be true, I think, is that Netanyahu wanted the attack to happen as a pretext to take over Gaza, which I think makes no sense.
I mean, the first theory is not crazy.
It's not at all crazy that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power so that because imagine if Palestinian authority and Palestinian authority are here, they could link up and say, we want a state.
And then Netanyahu would have to be the guy saying no two-state solution.
But if they're divided, he never has to deal with that.
What doesn't make sense at all is that he somehow false flagged the October 7th so that he could take over Gaza for two reasons.
One, nobody has wanted to take over Gaza, not even Egypt.
Nobody wants to run it.
There's no strategic advantage for Israel to run it.
Well, if Israel occupies it, so if it's no longer Gaza, if it's part of Israel, like Israel has expanded its boundaries throughout its history, right?
Sure, but nobody has actually the Gaza Strip.
Israel is very focused on the West Bank.
The West Bank has religious significance to Jews.
They call it Judea and Samaria.
It's where so many of the things in the Bible happened.
So Jews have an attachment to the West Bank.
Many do.
Even some secular Jews.
Jews have no attachment to the Gaza Strip whatsoever.
Again, Egypt didn't even want it.
Egypt occupied it for 20 years in the middle of the 20th century.
And they didn't even want it back after their war with Israel because it has no strategic value and it was more of a headache to manage than it was worth.
Secondly, October 7th is basically the worst thing for Netanyahu's legacy ever.
Everyone in Israel, his popularity has only declined because of this event because he seemed to have let it happen.
And the second the war is over, he's basically going to be run out in shame.
So why?
What if they protest it?
All right, so let's pause it there.
Because of course, Coleman here is going through like the incentives, and he's saying, which I don't exactly get his point, that these two theories, of course, the first one that Netanyahu wanted to bolster Hamas isn't, I think, is beyond a theory.
I mean, they're overwhelmingly, all of the people said it in their own words.
But then he says, well, there's this other theory that like he let October 7th happen.
And that just is contradictory with like that one doesn't make any sense.
I'm not claiming, I've never seen good enough evidence that to support anything like that, to claim that they wanted October 7th to happen or that they let it happen or it was a false flag or anything like that.
I don't think that's right.
But of course, when he's going over why this is impossible because of the incentives there, oh, this ended up looking very bad for Netanyahu.
Yeah, that doesn't really work as an argument.
Maybe it.
ended up looking really bad for him, but he thought it would be something better.
I mean, certainly it stopped the 20% of Israelis who were out in the street protesting him.
And the other incentive that he doesn't mention there is he goes, well, look, as soon as the war is over, Netanyahu's screwed.
Okay, but what incentive does that create now?
An incentive to keep the war going.
Now, his point about how what Israel really wants is the West Bank.
That is true.
He's absolutely right about that.
They want Judea and Samaria.
They don't as much care about Gaza.
But look, so what's the whole plan here?
You prop up Hamas in Gaza, and then you keep building your settlements on the West Bank.
And then you could sit here and say, look, we disengaged.
We disengaged.
We don't occupy Gaza anymore.
We have them under total blockade.
They're surrounded, but we don't occupy them anymore.
So look, we were trying to do something nice, right?
This is what everybody says.
Every pro Israeli guy will almost go, oh, we kind of gave them a two-state solution in 2005 when we moved out of Gaza.
But what did they do?
They kept building more settlements in the West Bank.
I'll leave it on this, okay?
And this is from Sharon, who was the prime minister when they disengaged in Gaza, when they went from military occupation to just surrounding the place and blockading it.
And this is what his senior advisor, Doug Weisglass, told Horetz.
He said, quote, the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.
Now, just to be clear, so in 1979 at Camp David, Israel agreed to move toward a two-state solution.
This process started in 93 with the Oslo Accords, where basically they, and this is what they called the peace process.
This was going to be the process of eventually giving the Palestinians freedom.
And Israel said they agreed to do that.
The talks collapsed in 2000 and Yasser Arafat wanted to continue the talks.
Israel said no.
America said no.
By the way, a great book about this, the one that I recommended to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which I don't think he's read, was called The Truth About Camp David, written by Clayton Swisher.
It's an excellent book if you want to understand what happened at those negotiations there.
This guy goes around, he interviews, spent three years interviewing all the key players who are involved.
This is what happened.
At the end of it, Arafat wanted to keep negotiating and everybody else bailed on it.
Anyway, just so you know, so this was, so this happened in 2000, but Israel was still kind of on the hook for this peace process.
You had agreed that you would eventually give these people their freedom.
And so this, now, again, just to understand that, here's what Dub Weisclass is saying.
The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.
And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.
Effectively, the whole package called the Palestinian State with all that it entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.
And all this with a U.S. presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
So you get it?
This is what they're saying in their own words.
It lines up actually with Coleman, what Coleman's saying.
Oh, we'll leave Gaza.
And now there's no more talk of a peace process and we can get our hooks into the West Bank.
Because he's correct.
That's what they really want.
I'll continue and then we'll wrap on this.
And this is more from Doug Weisklass.
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde.
It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process within the Palestinians.
The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in the interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political plitical pressure.
It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.
That's what this is about.
They would prop up Hamas.
They would disengage in Gaza because if they do that, they never have to give the innocent Palestinians their freedom.
That's what the plan is.
To rule them forever.
Now, I'm sorry, that's just unacceptable.
And like any decent person can't look at that.
And you could sit here all you want to and go like, well, according to their numbers, the ratio of militants killed to civilians isn't that different from these other conflicts.
By the way, I'll defer to like Daryl Cooper and guys like this on that who actually have real military experience and understand the logistics of conflicts like this way better than I do.
And he'll be the first to be like, not at all.
This is not just like the way America conducts their wars at all.
And that actually we put our boys at much, much greater risk to make sure that we didn't indiscriminately kill civilians the way that Israel is.
But regardless of that, that's not even what I'm focused on.
That you could sit here and say, well, the ratio isn't that bad or, well, war is hell.
What are we going to do?
No, listen.
I'm not taking the position that this was an inside job or anything like that.
So fine.
But it's clear as day that the entire disengagement from Gaza and then the entire strategy of propping up Hamas was so they never have to give the Palestinians their independence.
That these people never get out from living under the thumb of Israel.
And why is that?
Well, Coleman already just told you, because they want the West Bank.
Israel was granted, not granted, they were recommended in 1947 under the partition plan, 54% of what is today Greater Israel.
The Arabs rejected this because they only owned, the Jews only owned like 5% of the land or something like that.
They were a minority of the population.
They were like, why should they get the majority of this thing?
It's not fair.
It doesn't make any sense.
But this is what the UN partition recommendation recommended.
And immediately a war broke out over that.
At the end of the war, Israel didn't take the 54% that was recommended to them.
They took 78% of the whole thing.
Then after the war in 1967, they took control of 100% of it, 100%.
The conversation now, when they talk about a two-state solution, it's not over whether Israel should get that initial 54% or not.
That's a given.
It's not over whether Israel should get that 78% or not.
That's a given.
The conversation is over that last remaining 22%.
Okay.
And Israel has embarked on this process to get that, to make sure that they never have to give that last 22% to the people who inhabit it.
They never have to give them that.
And as Coleman just said, that's the plan.
They want Judea and Samaria.
So that's why they did all of this.
So that they would never have, that's why they don't want to give a Palestinian state, right?
Because if you give the Palestinians their own state, you're giving up on Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank.
You're giving up on that.
That's their sovereign territory now.
The Plan Against a Palestinian State00:00:35
So what are we going to do?
We're going to blockade instead of occupying Gaza and prop up Hamas in Gaza so we never have to give them the West Bank and we can keep building our settlements there.
Defend that.
Come up with a justification for that, Coleman.
Please.
Tell me how that's okay.
All right.
Happy to talk to Coleman Hughes anytime, by the way.
I do like the guy, aside from his Israel takes.
Seems like a good enough guy.
I don't know him or nothing, but I do like the guy.