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Oct. 19, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:23
20231019_piers-morgan-uncensored-ehud-barak-and-hasan-piker
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Intent vs Retribution 00:03:59
From the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored for all the politics and tribalism that charges the debate about Israel's war.
The one thing we should all be able to agree on is surely that every innocent life lost is a tragedy.
Thousands of people have been killed already, all leaving behind families who have to live with unspeakable grief.
The difference between the Hamas attacks and the Israeli retribution is intent.
Israel may be cavalier about civilian deaths and to use that awful phrase, collateral damage.
But killing civilians is not their aim.
The Hamas terrorists, on the other hand, wanted to kill as many innocent people as they could.
When it comes to blame and condemnation, that's an important distinction.
When it comes to grief and sympathy, there's no difference.
And many of our celebrities seem to have forgotten that.
To be clear, actors, musicians, and artists are under no obligation whatsoever to air their views on geopolitics.
They're perfectly entitled to.
It's a free country.
But I think we probably all rather hear less of them than more about this stuff.
But when they do speak out, they should try not to let the gleaming intensity of their virtue signal blind them to some basic decency.
More than 2,000 British actors, including stars like Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan, and Maxim Pike, have signed an open letter which condemns the war in Gaza.
We are witnessing a crime and a catastrophe, they wrote.
Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble.
Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes, but aiding and abetting them.
We demand that our governments end their military and political support for Israel's actions.
And on it goes.
Not one single word in this letter mentions the Hamas terror attacks.
Not one single word mentions the 1,400 people in Israel who were butchered.
Northern 200 men, women, and children snatched as hostages.
Don't they care about them?
Did they not know that happened?
Or do they think perhaps that Jewish lives matter less than Palestinian lives?
I don't know the answer.
Only they know that.
Like so many people in this crisis, they've let their political views get in the way of basic perspective and human decency.
Well, now the Battle of the Hearts and Minds, traditionally played out through diplomacy and propaganda, is being played out online.
My next guest has almost half a billion views for his provocative commentary online, making him hugely influential.
Hassan Pika streams live under the name Hassan Abbey.
His analysis of the Israel-Hamas war has taken a highly critical stance towards Israel and Western media.
And he's been calling me out for my coverage.
Because he only cares about Israeli citizens.
He does not care about Palestinians as human beings.
That's why it's apples to oranges.
He's like, one side is a human, the other side is a barbaric monster child.
I never said that, obviously.
He says that he liked nothing more than to come on to uncensored and call me a baboon in a suit to my face.
Well, here I am, a baboon.
And he can join me now.
I'm joined by Hassan Hassan.
Thank you very much, indeed, for coming on.
Thank you for having me, Piers.
It's very early here in Los Angeles, California, but I'm going to try to do my very best to not do my British accent while I'm here.
Well, I appreciate that.
And listen, I appreciate you coming on.
Explain to me why you consider me a stenographer for the Israeli government, given that in the last week, I think more than any other host in the world, I have given lengthy platforms to pro-Palestinian voices to articulate that side of the argument.
No, I do have to commend you.
You certainly have had more pro-Palestinian voices than the rest of the British media and certainly the rest of Western media in general.
Now, as far as saying that you're a stenographer, I said that journalists are not supposed to be stenographers.
And yet, when it comes down to it, in most circumstances, in whatever conflict we may be in, there are stenographers for Whichever party is aligning with the American State Department and the interests of the West in general.
The Stenographer Accusation 00:09:39
And Israel happens to be the one in this ongoing conflict.
But it's interesting that you call me a propagandist, because I want to play you.
This was your reaction to when the hospital got for the record.
No, no, I'm not calling you.
No, no, I'm just saying.
I'm going to put it in the middle.
I'm saying I am.
Okay, well then I'm saying I am.
I just want to put it and play it.
Okay, I'm going to play the clip.
This is your reaction to the bombing of the hospital the other night.
While I was in the process of getting ready for the stream, Israel enacted one of the singular worst strikes they have done thus far.
And an airstrike, an Israeli airstrike hit the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, where thousands of civilians were seeking medical treatment and shelter from the relentless bombing campaign.
Now, interestingly, when you were saying that, I was coming on air too.
And I took a position based probably on 30 years of being a journalist, including running major newspapers, working at CNN and others, of waiting, of just saying, I think we should just wait and see what has actually happened here, get clarification, see who's actually to blame before we start passing judgment.
You raced in to assume, as many people did, by the way, including the New York Times, BBC, mainstream media, and of course, most of the Arab world then followed, that this was clearly, indisputably an Israeli airstrike or miss hospital.
And yet all the evidence now suggests very strongly that it wasn't.
That in fact, this was a rocket that misfired coming from a terrorist inside Gaza.
So my question for you is this.
I wouldn't go that far.
Why would you be so certain in what you said before you knew?
Okay.
So first and foremost, before we get started on this conversation, let's understand something very important here.
There's no electricity in Gaza.
Internet is patchy in Gaza.
There's no food in Gaza.
There's no water in Gaza.
This is all by design.
This is because Gaza is under a brutal blockade, a brutal occupation by the Israeli government.
Okay?
So that plays a role in the fog of war and misinformation that gets spread.
Having said that, however, you made it seem as though there is a certainty that this was 100% not an Israeli airstrike.
No, I didn't.
I didn't.
And instead of saying that.
I literally just said it's not a hospital.
Okay, sorry.
I said the evidence.
The evidence is increasingly pointing to this not being an Israeli airstrike.
And that is expert evidence from people who have no skin in the game at all.
Yes.
Well, I don't know which expert you're talking about because I think Channel 4 did a pretty good job.
As a matter of fact, I would say Channel 4 did probably the best job so far in analyzing everything that the IDF has said.
But the reason why I believed, and I still do believe that the likelihood is that this was an Israeli bombing campaign wasn't only because of the singular verifiable video, the phone video from the balcony that had all of the markings of an airstrike, the fact that the Israeli Air Force was enacting a bombing campaign in the region at the time, according to the Al Jazeera live streaming footage that everyone is using but doesn't understand.
The fact that the digital media person for the IDF immediately came out and said that this was actually an airstrike that hit a Hamas target and that he was sad that there were casualties at the end of the day, but this was a Hamas target and celebrated it.
And more importantly, I guess, the fact that this hospital had been bombed by Israel.
This hospital had been bombed by Israel on Saturday.
22 hospitals have, as a matter of fact, been bombed by Israel since this last saga in the occupation.
And this hospital had been bombed directly by Israel where the cancer ward was destroyed.
Israel has been bombing all of these hospitals.
Israel has been calling all of these hospitals to evacuate over and over and over again.
The medical professionals at the hospital had been called by the Israeli government the day prior.
And everyone on the ground assumes that this is an Israeli airstrike.
They are the ones who experienced the situation.
So you have a single thing.
If you watch the BBC account of all this last night, by their verify unit, which was specifically set up by the BBC to be completely dispassionate in these investigations.
And they reached a pretty clear conclusion based on circumstantial evidence, I'll make that clear, that this would not have been an Israeli airstrike, including, for example, the size of the crater, which bears no relation to the size of craters normally left by Israeli air.
So look, my point is, neither of us know for sure, but you took to your airwaves immediately because actually your, I wouldn't even say unconscious bias, your admitted propagandist bias on your part was that you wanted that to be an Israeli airstrike.
It suited your narrative.
And I would say that that in itself, in its own way.
You wanted it to be an Israeli.
Well, you know, you accuse me being a stenographer.
I try and be fair and get to the truth.
In your case, I don't think you try to do that.
I think you appeal to your audience, appeal to your base, and you don't really care whether the facts are there or not.
This is entirely unfair because you just said circumstantial evidence favors that this was not an Israeli airstrike.
I gave you all of the circumstantial evidence that it does favor that this is an Israeli airstrike.
The reason why, however, circumstantial evidence is not enough.
And the one thing that I will concede to, because when more information did come out, and no, I do not mean when Israel said that they did not bomb this hospital and it was actually Hamas, and then they turned around and went, never mind, it's not Hamas, it's actually Islamic Jihad.
And then they said, we have more evidence coming out in a couple hours.
And then the evidence came out, and it turns out it sounded like the phone conversations that they were able to intercept supposedly sounded like, by experts at the very least, to be completely false and completely made up.
I don't think syntactic.
I don't think, even as you're saying that.
Let me finish.
I think you're a smart guy.
I think you've looked at all of this, and I think in your heart, you know this was probably not an Israeli airstrike.
And I'm just curious why you would, instead of admitting that as facts change, that is not what I'm saying.
That is not what I'm saying.
I don't understand why you would double and treble down when you're going to be able to do that.
You're asking me to be on your show.
You're asking me to be on your show.
Do you want to talk?
Yes.
If you're asking me to be on your show, and I want to be on the show, thank you so much for having me on your show.
Let me explain exactly what I said, and let me explain to you why I think still, to this very moment, until there is a third-party investigation that is concluded by the UN, the International Criminal Court, or specifically a forensic analyst that looks at the situation, is allowed to be on the ground.
This is not just my perspective.
This is Beth Selim as well, which is an Israeli organization that has also demanded a third-party investigation occur.
I am not going to, I am not going to conclusively say that this was not my fault.
I don't expect you to fault.
Because I just gave you, because I, and not because I'm a propagandist.
As far as me being a propagandist goes, everyone is a propagandist.
I'm just honest about it.
You're a propagandist.
We have our biases.
I'm curious who you think I'm a propagandist.
I'm honest about my bias.
Who do you think I'm a propagandist for?
Who do I think you're a propagandist for?
Whichever you're, every media person is doing propaganda.
But who for?
I've got to be doing it with somebody.
You think it's a bad word?
I don't.
That's just the difference.
This is a semantic question.
Dude, I think it's actually quite a serious charge.
Hassan, I think it's a serious charge to level, not on a podcaster, but as a journalist who's broadcasting around the world, who has a reputation, I believe, for being fair and impartial, actually, on these issues.
It's quite a charge to just say, I'm a stenographer of the Israeli government, or I'm a propagandist.
I don't think there's any evidence that I'm either of those things.
I'm curious who you think I'm doing.
While we're having this conversation, 3,000 peers, while we're having this back and forth, 3,840 Palestinians have been ruthlessly slaughtered in the last incursion into Gaza.
I feel like this is an incredibly selfish, self-centered conversation to have.
You asked me to be on here.
You wanted to hear my perspective.
I'm willing to give it to you.
I don't want to talk about like whether the, I don't want to talk about Noam Chomsky-style manufacturing consent conversations about how the media is operating at the behest of Canada.
I think there are dead people.
Listen, Hassan, I only asked you because you're the guy that called me a propagandist and called me a baboon in a suit.
I was curious as to why.
You don't want to say what I'm doing the propaganda for.
We'll move on.
We'll move on.
I agree with you.
I said, yeah.
There's a bigger pitch here.
Let's move on.
Let's take a short break.
Hassan, let's take a short break.
I want to come back.
I want to talk to you about what happened on October the 7th, get your reaction to that.
Welcome back, Hassan.
Pika is still with me.
Hassan, I want to just play you a clip of something that you said about the October 7th terror attacks, and in particular, the attack at the music festival, which killed 260 people.
Look at this guy.
Violence Required for Maintenance 00:15:37
You know what shouldn't happen?
Killing 260 people at a music festival.
No, you're right, man.
That just happened on its own because, like, bad guys wanted to do bad things.
You're right.
Dude, if they subjugated you to a open-air prison your whole life, you're going to break out eventually when you realize that there is no other way to get out of it.
I mean, it sounds to me there, Hassan, that you are in some way saying they had it coming.
Were you?
No, I wouldn't say that they had it coming.
I think that Michael Brooks used to say, analysis is not justification.
And while obviously civilian casualties and horrific barbaric acts that were committed on October 7th are completely unacceptable, the important thing to make sure that it never happens again is to analyze what are the conditions as to how it happened to begin with.
And I think Ehud Barak is going to be on in a little bit as well, or maybe he's on before me.
And I'm almost certain that while he has held the keys to the conversation and held the levers of the power in this conversation in many key and critical points, I would go so far as say that he is among many others who also recognize that the bib Netanyahu administration is responsible.
This is not just my assessment.
This is 85% of the Israeli population's assessment at the time.
This is years and years and years of refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority.
Don't take my word for it.
I would agree.
He said that if you want to thwart any kind of Palestinian nation state, you must do everything you can to only negotiate with Hamas.
We control how high the fire goes.
He has given cash to Hamas by way of Qatar.
There is no bigger fan of Hamas than Bibi Netanyahu, which I hope one day you can maybe interview and then you'll ask him to.
No, no, I actually did interview him a few months ago, and I did actually spell out to him that there have been a lot more Palestinian deaths this year so far up to the point of the interview than Israelis and what he intended to do about it.
He said then he didn't believe in collective responsibility, which is now this hot phrase in this whole crisis about whether you would hold all people in Gaza responsible for Hamas.
Interesting to see if when they just launch a ground invasion, it'd be interesting to see if they keep to that word.
You know, I'm not a defender of what Bibi Netanyahu has been doing in Israel.
In the last year, his attack on the credibility and integrity of the Supreme Court, I think, has been a disgrace.
And I think it has fractured society in Israel.
I also think that it's caused so much social unrest and had such big protests that you could argue it's taken the eye off the ball of the people who should have been defending the border because they've been trying to sort out what's been going on domestically internally inside Israel.
So I think it's a catastrophic failure of intelligence, of security, of defense, all of those things.
I'll be amazed, frankly, if Netanyahu survives this.
So I'm certainly not here to defend him, even if you do view me as a stenographer for his government.
My question for you, I think, is this: I've had a lot of problems trying to get people on the pro-Palestinian side to separate two things.
That you can say, as I believe and you believe, that the Palestinians have been maltreated for decades.
That this situation where they are effectively, I mean, I don't even call it an occupation because Israelis aren't in Gaza.
They pulled out in 2005, but they still control the ability of Gaza.
Well, this is why I call you a propaganda.
I'm just saying the phraseology is confusing to me because the reality is Israel exercises control over people in Gaza.
It allows them in and out.
It allows them to turn on the tap of water and so on and so on.
I get all that.
They don't actually live there because they can't live side by side with the people.
That's why it's called an open-air prison.
Right.
I don't disagree with that.
It's the world's largest open-air prison.
But Hassan, I don't disagree with you.
And I have pointed this out for a long time as a journalist.
So we don't disagree about the appalling plight of Palestinian people.
But the issue comes that if you can't separate that ongoing dispute between Israel and Palestine from the absolutely appalling barbarism of October the 7th, which was on a whole different scale to anything we've seen, where 1,400 people, Holocaust survivors, babies in their cribs, you know, young women taken, tortured, abused, shocked, beheaded, it was reported, and so on.
If we can't look at that collectively with a general humanity and agreement that that is an absolute atrocity, then there's something wrong with this.
And I find that the tribalism on both sides is now so toxic and so frenzied that you get people who literally can't.
We've had a bunch of actors, right, signing this statement saying they want a ceasefire in Gaza and calling Israel war criminals and so on.
But they don't say a word about the Hamas attacks that precipitated this.
And I find that really hard to accept.
But do you agree with them?
If they had said, for example, that October 7 attacks were brutal and massacres occurred and then they said everything else, that Israel is committing war crimes, would you agree with them?
Well, okay.
Here's what I would honestly say about that.
Is Israel not allowed to defend itself from the worst terror attack we've seen since 9-11?
Is it not allowed to defend itself after 1,400 people in Israel are butchered in that way?
And the question then, if you assume that they are able to defend themselves, as any pure democratic country is the same, that is the IDF line.
This is the line that everyone is.
Let me ask you this.
It then becomes a question of how can they defend themselves?
If their mission now is to get rid of Hamas, a terror organization that's committed one of the worst acts of terror ever seen, if that is their stated aim, then what they are doing is consistent with that, isn't it?
No.
Here's why this is actually an abject failure.
And this is not just my perspective on the matter.
I'm just a dumb idiot with a Twitch stream who is live reacting to the news and trying to make sense of everything as it's ongoing.
I usually have a policy of not covering breaking news.
And sometimes that policy is violated.
But ultimately, I am not held up by the same journalistic standards, even though I think I do a much better job than most other news outlets in general.
So let me just say this really quickly.
You said Israel has a right to defend itself.
Absolutely zero people think that this is a ridiculous statement.
However, how Israel is defending itself is collective punishment.
Now, collective punishment in the form of depriving 2.2 million people of electricity, collective punishment in the form of depriving them of water, of food, collective punishment in the form of 51 people dying in the West Bank where there is no Hamas in the West Bank,
and yet 51 people have died because in the West Bank, settlers that are occupying Palestinian territory in violation of the international law, settlers who are doing an act of colonial terrorism, and this is not my statement on it, this is international law, that are doing horrifying things by simply just existing there and maintaining the presence with an occupying force in the form of IDF,
who is ritualistically humiliating Palestinians in a structure that B'Tsellim, an Israeli organization, calls the permit regime, where every waking moment of Palestinians' lives in the West Bank are absolute hell, where they have no legal recourse.
51 Palestinians have died, and that was before the Ramullah, the Ramullah protests that happened last night, and the Israeli forces were opening up with live fire on protesters last night.
So who knows what that death toll has become?
This is all a product of Israel being an apartheid state.
This is a violent apartheid state.
There is no way to be a peaceful apartheid state.
Let's listen to this.
It is a violence.
It is violence required for its maintenance.
Okay, listen.
And that violence is frustrating people.
I hear people.
That violence is radicalizing people.
Hold on.
As far as Israel, as far as what Benjamin Netanyahu has done, as far as the war government, what they have done, peers, going into Gaza and bombing Gaza and killing 3,480 Palestinians so far in Gaza.
1,000 plus children out of all of those casualties.
22 hospitals being bombed.
A bakery, the only remaining intact bakery being bombed yesterday.
These are horrifying crimes that you would openly say are horrifying and unjustifiable when Russia does it.
But when Israel does it, Israel has a right to defend itself.
This is identical to the same talking points that I've heard from every Israeli administration official.
It's the same talking points that I've heard from American politicians championing the exact same talking points.
It's the same thing that I've heard from everyone else in the media.
You might have been against the Iraq war, and you use that, but you're using that for evil, in my opinion, at this point, if you are not sitting here and condemning those acts of war crimes, those acts of violence, those acts of collective punishment.
Well, I would say to that, that I think the death of any child in this conflict is horrific, absolutely horrific.
But the question comes down to me that after an act of terror, as we saw on October the 7th, Israel should be able to defend itself and should be able to go after the people that perpetrated that, who live amongst civilians in Gaza deliberately.
And the question for me becomes down to what is proportionate.
I don't know the answers, then.
I'll be honest with you.
I don't know what that answer is.
I do know the answer to that.
I do know the answer to that.
Last night I had Dr. Ofar Kassif, an Israeli Knesset member who was expelled, suspended for 45 days for saying what I believe is the truth, championing the exact same position of the Haaretz's editorial board.
There are a lot of thoughtful people, a lot of formative Holocaust scholars, a lot of historians that all agree on the same point.
The reason why violence that even penetrates through the Israeli security blanket that people thought existed, that penetrated through that iron dome, the iron wall, if you want to call it that, is because of years and years of oppression and years and years of violence, which is a necessity to maintain an apartheid state.
And this has to stop.
There's only two ways out of this.
Either you engage in full-blown ethnic cleansing.
And if you listen to the likes of Smotrich, or if you listen to the likes of Itamar Ben-Givir and these very unfavorable, unpopular, far-right figures, if you listen to Netanyahu and his Likud government, they say that they are interested in going in that direction,
the ethnic cleansing direction, the ethnic displacement direction, or the only way out of this for a real solution is to move towards peace, to genuinely have, to genuinely end the blockade, the end the apartheid, the end the occupation, and create a pathway towards citizenship for all people with a right to return for all 14 million Palestinians, 5 million of which live under Israeli occupation.
It's brutal.
And then the rest living in diaspora.
These are not unreasonable requests.
These are requests that understand the dignity and the humanity on one side and does not simply treat them as their colonial subjects.
And it's the only way to create economic security and prosperity in the region.
If it was as simple as that, I'm sure that would have happened already.
I would say this.
I agree with a lot of what you've just said.
Not all of it, a lot of it.
I don't think you could ever achieve peace now with Hamas controlling Gaza.
I don't think you can achieve peace with Netanyahu in charge of Israel, actually, after this.
I don't think his own people will want him to be in charge of Israel down below when they examine exactly how this happened.
But we will see.
But Hassan, I've got to leave it there.
Look, it's good to talk to you.
You know, you're an important, influential voice to a lot of people.
And I think we have a lot of common ground.
And there are some things that we disagree about.
But I suspect it's not as much as you think.
You know, I do think that the core problem here has got to get resolved in a way that's been completely ignored for decades.
And until it gets resolved, until the plight of the Palestinian people is resolved, until all these young people in Palestine feel there's some sense of hope and they can get out of what effectively is, as you say, a prison camp, then nothing is going to change.
I don't think it justifies any...
Well, let me just say, I've got to finish it, but I don't think it justifies in any way what happened on October the 7th.
But I do agree with you that until that core problem gets resolved, there will never be peace.
Hassan, I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
And since the next, I'll be joined by the former Prime Minister and IDF General, Ehud Barak, who's been listening to that interview.
Welcome back to what says that I'm joined now by Israel's former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.
Mr. Barak, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I greatly appreciate it.
I want to start by playing you an extract from an interview I did with Prime Minister Netanyahu back in March in the middle of all the big social unrest in Israel over his attempts to usurp the power of the Supreme Court.
Listen to this.
We don't believe in collective punishment.
I go after the terrorists.
I go after those who support the terrorists.
But I don't believe in collective punishment.
It seems to me part of Netanyahu's problem has been that for political expediency, he's had to pack his cabinet full of very hard-right people whose incendiary rhetoric has done nothing but fuel a lot of fury amongst the Palestinian people.
Would you agree with that?
You know, the nomination of these two racist messianic, we call it in Yiddish michiganares, is a grave mistake on Netanyahu.
They are a pariah within the Israel society, but it has nothing to do with the crisis we are now facing.
The barbarian massacre that happened in October 7th started to be prepared before Netanyahu government, more than a year ago, before Netanyahu government was ever established.
And it has nothing to do whatsoever.
They are huge damage to Israel in more than one way, but they are not the direct cause of this event and these attacks.
When you heard about the scale of what happened on October the 7th, how did that affect you personally?
You've been a prime minister of Israel.
You've been a general in the defense force.
What was the personal impact on you?
October 7 Personal Impact 00:12:05
Look, I witnessed our people.
It was the most severe blow that Israel suffered since its establishment.
We had never such an event within 24 hours.
It's much more than 1,400, probably will end up with 1,800.
And several hundreds were caught as hostages.
And they were slaughtered, slaughtered, literally.
It's not just a terror, it's a crime against humanity.
No one can remember such pictures since probably Eastern Europe during World War II under the Nazi rule.
And that, of course, it shocked the public, but we are a defiant species.
We know how to unite when we face an external threat.
We are united.
We mobilize over 300,000 reservists to make sure there is enough force to avoid any kind of further surprise and to be able to have a major offensive in the Gaza Strip.
We got support from the whole world.
Prime Minister Sunak is now in Israel, but Biden was there yesterday.
Aircraft carrier is closing even some British vessels.
And we enjoy a lot of support.
And the third element, which is very important, you know, in a way, it's not just a failure of the intelligence, a failure of the operational side.
And in spite of heroic response of the soldiers on the ground, it's still a major failure of our defense system.
But it's also a major failure of the political level.
And basically, they lost the trust of the people and both the government and, in a way, the military.
And important step was the creating some four days ago of a war cabinet made of Netanyahu and other four people.
Two of them were added from the opposition leaders, Gantz and Eisenkond.
Both are career generals before they turn into politicians.
Both were commanders of the armed forces of Israel and both are very responsible, cool-headed, balanced people.
So, in a way, they're joining the war cabinet make more citizens, including myself, more quiet about the decisions that might come out and translate it by the armed forces into action.
If this attack had happened on your watch as Prime Minister, would you have resigned?
You know, it depends to what extent I would feel the situation.
I don't want to answer it right now because there is the question, of course, on the air in regard to Netanyahu.
I think that now we have to focus first and foremost on response.
We have to do something.
No modern state can afford having it.
You mentioned earlier 9-11.
You think in the terms of the populations like Americans, having 9-11 with 50,000 people killed, not 3,500.
So it's a major blow.
We have now to focus.
We have to eradicate any military capability of the Hamas.
Isn't that demanding enough jobs?
Mr. Barrett, let me just jump in there because the Geneva Convention outlaws collective punishment.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, when I interviewed him back in March, said he did not believe in collective punishment and he wouldn't exercise collective punishment in the way he dealt with Palestinians.
But many would argue, including my previous guest, Hassan Paika, that the fact that 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed in the last 10 days since October the 7th does constitute a form of collective punishment.
How do you go after Hamas given that they are living amongst the civilian population in Gaza without exercising a collective punishment?
Are we not seeing that now?
Israel is committed to the international law.
No Israeli commander ever get an order to a pilot to launch a bomb on a hospital.
That's a crazy idea and we can later on talk about it.
So we are basically committed to it.
It's a major constraint on our operation.
The right way is to warn everyone.
We cannot afford not acting against the Hamas.
So we announce on the first day every one of you Gazans who know that the place where he lives or the place where he works, there is now or there was in the past, let's say two years, any Hamas activity, a launching pad for a rocket, a lab, munition or weapons kind of a depot, a kind of operational office or what or training site, whatever.
You should leave the place because we are going to hit it.
And we say that once and again every day, some four days ago, we announced all Gazans are asked to move to the southern part of the Gaza Strip in order to allow us to hit the arrest.
A half a million moved, another half million did not move.
The Hamas deliberately used them as a human shield, deliberately.
Let me ask you this.
What is a proportionate response?
3,500 Palestinians have already died.
If there is a ground invasion with support from the air, perhaps the sea as well, by Israel, that number is going to massively increase.
You're going to see tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed here.
At what point does it become disproportionate?
Or indeed, as critics are already saying, a war crime.
I strongly believe that if people will be focused enough to understand that we are going to come, we are going to come with ground forces as well, because you cannot eliminate these barbarian Daesh-like or al-Qaeda-like groups that are slaughtering civilians in our border.
I am confident that if the UK, the Great Britain, would have 10,000 British citizens slaughtered literally by a Daesh-like group over your border that jumped in, you would take whatever steps.
I don't want to go into history and remind you of Dresden and other operations.
I want to remind you that the UK, as well as the United States, sent its forces over half of the globe in order to destroy Daesh.
These are enemies of mankind, and we have to get rid of them.
We take all I agree with you, but what happens, Mr. Barack?
What happens?
No, you cannot pierce.
You cannot ask me why the citizens of Gaza are not leaving the places where we announced them days ahead of time.
We are going to go there.
It will be tough.
We will use fire because we had to get rid of the forces.
Well, it may be, Mr. Barack, let me put it to you.
It may be because this is their home.
These are their houses.
This is where all their possessions are.
It may be that they think to themselves, why should I leave my home?
I'm not responsible for what Hamas did.
Why am I going to think because of it?
If you or me would have faced the choice whether to be killed as a result of staying there or leaving it and stay alive, I would at least, I know that I would have lived.
And they have the right to live.
They have the right to.
Where are they going to go, Mr. Barack?
Let me ask you: where are all these Palestinian people going to end up?
Where will they live?
Where will they live?
Don't ask me how it will end up.
Once they leave, they move to the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
There is enough place for them.
We are not going to operate for 10 years.
It might take several weeks or probably two months if there are more people inside it.
We will fight Hamas.
We will eradicate their infrastructure and their capability of repeat this crime.
Israel cannot afford having Hamas attacking us in this way again.
And I am confident that any elected government of any country on earth would have done the same.
And it's not inevitable that they will kill en masse.
They can leave.
They can leave now when we are speaking.
They can leave tomorrow.
They can leave the next day.
It's not coming within a few hours.
But you cannot blame us for the fact that Hamas coerced people to stay as their human shield.
You will end up with impunity to a kind of Daesh-like terrorist because they always can a handgun hand some people, including the hostages, I might say, as a kind of human shield for them.
And that will paralyze humanity from being able to struggle with its worst enemies.
And we are not going to stop it.
I'm confident that we are doing our best.
Every target is checked more than once by different teams to make sure that it's legitimate.
Okay, Mr. Barack, I'm going to leave it there.
All I would say is the world is watching and Israel has got to...
I believe in Israel's right to defense, but there is going to be a tipping point if Israel is not careful.
If too many Palestinian civilians are slaughtered in revenge for what happened October the 7th, the world's mood will change.
And that will be a dangerous moment for Israel and for the world.
But listen, we'll have to see what happens.
And I realize I have one remark to make.
We heard the same from the Americans.
Even without this advice, which I fully respect, we are doing it anyhow.
We fully understand.
We have several constraints on the operation.
One is the hostages.
The second is the risk that it will spread to the north and become a regional war.
The third one is the question to whom we will pass the tort.
Once we clean the area from Hamas, we are not going to stay there for we need some player to take it.
Let's think of Arab multinational force that take responsibility for three or six months and bring the original recognized owner of the place, which is the Palestinian Authority, or any other variation on this.
And the last sincere constraint is the international law.
We fully understand that this universal support of Israel will erode as the number of collateral damage, which happen to be the kind of vague definition.
It's basically people who are innocent and are killed.
We don't like to kill people who are innocent.
I understand that.
We understand that the legitimacy erodes.
Responsibility in Free Speech 00:04:56
I have to leave it there.
I understand that.
But this collective punishment issue, if it looks more and more like that is what is happening, that will be a breach of the Geneva Convention.
So we're going to have to wait and see how this all plays out.
Promise I have to leave it there.
I'm sorry.
I do appreciate it.
I understand.
We won't break the Geneva Convention.
I would hope that would not be the case.
Edward Barak, I really appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
Oh, Matto says, I'm joined now by my Pat Talk TV's international editor, Isabel Oston, talk to me contributor Paul Larone.
Adrian, I want to play a clip.
This is King Charles at the mansion house in the city of London yesterday talking about modern-day discourse, how we talk to each other.
Take a listen.
Even in the most fractious times, when disagreements are polished, paraded and asserted, there is in our land a kind of muscle memory that it does not have to be like this.
That the temptation to turn ourselves into a shouting or recriminating society must be resisted, or at least heavily mitigated whenever possible.
Especially in the digital sphere where civilized debate too often gives way to rancor.
You know, it really struck a nerve on me because I've been doing a lot of pretty contentious interviews since October the 7th.
And they've been getting huge numbers of views online in particular around the world on YouTube.
10 million watched the Basam Youssef interview, for example, Ben Shapiro, 6 million and so on.
But that's led to an absolute avalanche of abuse and threats and everything else.
Whatever you say, right?
Because on both sides, there are a lot of extremists who will not tolerate any deviation from their worldview of this.
And obviously, it's historic, passions run high.
The worldview is very fractured about Israel and Palestine.
But I thought Charles hit the right tone here, Paula, is that we've got to somehow get back to being able to, I've said this a lot in the show, to get back to understanding that what free speech means is respect and tolerance for people's views, even if you really disagree with them.
And a responsibility for yourself in terms of what you are saying.
So if you're advocating free speech, then by all means, remember that you also have a responsibility, don't you, in terms of what it is that you want to communicate to the other person.
I think King Charles absolutely nailed it.
And it's what was needed because quite frankly, we're not getting that from our politicians and we're not getting that from our Prime Minister.
Sometimes the sheer volume of it just absolutely takes your breath away, doesn't it?
I mean, when you're in the public eye, as you are and I am to a lesser extent, you grow used to the kind of base level of viciousness and unpleasantness and always the attribution of the wrong motives.
You know, the impugning of one's integrity.
Whatever one is saying or whatever point is being argued, it's always it must be about your private.
Well, I had a guest earlier saying that I was a propagandist for the Israeli government, but I actually told him, well, who am I doing the propaganda for?
He didn't actually want to say that again.
Right.
Because he knows that's ridiculous.
Obviously, I'm not.
And the questioning of all people in the last 10 days would show that.
But I've been struck by people taking clips from interviews that I've done with whoever it may be, Bassam Youssef or the Palestinian Ambassador, whoever it is, taking clips and then deliberately twisting the meaning of those clips and putting that out as fact and them getting 10 million views for what is a lie whilst calling me a liar.
I mean, it's quite shocking.
It is.
And I'm not quite sure how you stop it.
It's really, really difficult.
You push back and they'll clip that and distort it again.
And it's been hugely important already in this conflict.
I was just looking at some figures.
More than 40,000 fake accounts promoting pro-Hamas narratives.
And ordinary people, quite understandably, it's hard enough for those of us that have supposedly got some expertise, find it very, very hard to distinguish some of this stuff.
I know lots of journalists who are just not putting their head over the parapet on this.
They don't want to face the blowback.
I get it.
You know, I'm not in that position.
I'm a strident person by nature.
I call things as I see them.
I don't come at things from a partisan position.
And you have to do it, but Mike, it is important that you continue to do it.
I've got to tell you, it is full on.
It's full on.
It is absolutely important that you continue to do that.
And I appreciate that this is slightly sidestepping.
But we see what happens to presenters whose lives have been threatened, whose lives have been lost because they have dared to speak out or act in a way that whatever, for whatever reason, the member of the public didn't like.
You have got to keep doing that.
Because if you don't, then others will be too fearful.
And you're seeing that already.
We've got to leave it there.
Thank you both very much indeed.
I appreciate it.
That's it from me.
Next week we'll be live from New York, whatever you're up to.
Keep it uncensored.
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