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Oct. 24, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:38
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Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Existential Moment for Hamas 00:08:18
Live from New York, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening, New York, and welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Most of the world stood in lockstep with Israel after the attacks on October the 7th.
Anyone with a shred of humanity has condemned those attacks for what they were, a barbaric terrorist massacre of innocent people and the biggest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
But more than two weeks on, with grief now turned to anger, Israel is facing difficult questions of its own.
Almost 6,000 people in Gaza have been reportedly killed, according to the Hamas-run authorities.
That death toll will surely soar with any ground invasion.
And those of us who had the basic human compassion to be sickened about October the 7th should also be horrified by the loss of innocent lives in Gaza too.
President Macrow of France visited Israel today and said this.
The fight must be merciless, but not without rules.
Because we are democracies which fight against terrorists.
Well, he's right.
Rules matter.
They're what separate the enlightened world from the terrorists who want to rip it apart.
Targeting civilians, as Hamas did, is a war crime.
But how can Israel invade Gaza to remove Hamas without killing many, many civilians?
Hamas is merciless.
Hamas sees death as the beginning, not the end.
Hamas makes martyrs of its dead.
They won't hesitate to use its own civilians as human shields.
They're firing rockets from the grounds of schools, mosques, UN buildings.
Gaza is a labyrinth of tunnels with families packed into cities like sardines.
How can Israel possibly invade Gaza while maintaining the distinction between civilians and combatants, which it must do under humanitarian law?
How far can Israel go before it loses international support?
When would it allow proper aid to Palestinian civilians?
How can Israel invade without jeopardizing the lives of the hostages who are still trapped?
Well, today, two more of those hostages were released.
I don't buy the spin from those now vaunting how well the hostages say they were treated.
Hamas seized these innocent people from their homes and held them as prisoners while slaughtering 1,500 others.
They're nothing more than bargaining chips now in its sick conquest.
I fully support Israel removing every last trace of Hamas.
But even if it succeeds in doing that, there will only be more questions.
What happens to Gaza after that?
Israel could wage a war to decapitate Hamas and leave Gaza in total ruins, relying on neighbors it doesn't trust to pick up the pieces.
It could occupy and repress Gaza, sowing the seeds for a new wave of hate.
It could reinstall the toothless Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, even though for years it's propped up Hamas precisely to keep the Palestinians divided.
As former President Obama warned today, some of Israel's actions now could harden Palestinian attitudes for generations and erode global support for Israel.
I'll be the first to admit I don't have all the answers to these incredibly difficult questions.
Israel undoubtedly faces an existential threat.
Hamas wants to kill as many Jewish people as it can, all of them, if it could.
So Israel must defend itself.
I know it cannot sacrifice the region's stability and breed the next generation of terrorists either in the process of that defense.
Well, now to discuss the conflict in Israel, I'm joined by retired Army General and former CIA Director General David Petraeus.
General, great to have you on the program again.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Are you confident that we will, in the next few days, perhaps weeks, see a full-blown ground invasion by Israeli forces of Gaza?
I think it is very, very likely.
I think it's essentially inescapable.
If the mission for the military is to destroy Hamas, that can't be done from the air.
And clearly, then they will face these enormous challenges that you have described.
And I hope that as part of announcing the onset of the operation, that there will also be a vision provided for the Palestinians in Gaza after Hamas is destroyed.
As you'll recall, when we did the surge in Iraq, we sought to separate the Sunni Arab population from al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents.
And we laid out: here's what life could be like for you when they are gone.
And I think that has to be done here as well.
I agree very much with what you laid out.
Hamas has brought this existential moment on them.
This is their fault, their horrific actions, keeping in mind that 1,400 innocent Israeli citizens would equate to 50,000 Americans per capita.
So we need to keep this in perspective, how significant that has been for a country of 9.3 million people.
And the 200 hostages would be 7,000.
So again, the magnitude of this to the Israelis, the recognition that you noted as well, that Hamas is founded on the notion of destroying Israel and of killing as many Jews as is possible.
I think there's no choice for the Israelis, but after further, as ideally precise as is possible, airstrikes, because as you note, hearts and minds will matter here.
And they have to be very conscious of that.
Urban combat is inevitably destructive.
There are inevitably innocent civilian lives lost, especially in a scenario that is as challenging as this one.
An enemy who doesn't wear a uniform, uses human shields, will use the hostages in that role, fights from within the civilian populations, 300 miles of underground tunnels under Gaza City, and so forth and so on.
So this will be a very, very hard fight, inevitably destructive.
But the hope has to be that out of this will come something better, not just for Israel, but for the Palestinian people in Gaza.
And so that vision of what follows has to be sorted out.
And I think it ideally would be announced at the same time as they announced the ground operation.
And I think there should be a vision for the people, the Palestinian people in the West Bank as well.
I mean, you've written this fascinating and very timely book, Conflict with Andrew Roberts, in which I saw an interview you gave last weekend, I think it was in the Sunday Times, and you were talking about the reality of these situations where you can take a town or city as you did in Iraq, but the real problem may start when you take a town or city.
In other words, once you assume control somewhere, assume for a moment that Israel takes control of Gaza, what do you then do?
It can be as difficult an issue as getting in there.
It can be more difficult, frankly.
And we experienced this as a commander of the 101st Airborne Division, a two-star general.
During the invasion, we took the first major city.
We were ordered to do that.
Three days of very tough fighting.
The enemy collapsed.
And I called my boss and I said, hey, I've got good news and bad news.
Good news is we own Naja.
He asked, what's the bad news?
We own Najaf.
What do you want us to do with it?
And there wasn't a plan for that.
We ended up having to leave military forces for it.
But then we had an even bigger challenge after we took Baghdad, toppled the regime, and all the bureaucrats we needed to run the country melted away.
And again, we had inadequate post-conflict planning.
In fact, inadequate would probably be charitable.
And then we compounded that by pursuing policies that increased the numbers of individuals who had an incentive to oppose the new Iraq rather than to support it by firing the Baath Party all the way down to the level of bureaucrats we needed to run the country.
Most of them were Western educated and quite secular.
And of course, also fired the army without telling him how we would enable them to provide for their families.
So it also raises the issue of conducting operations in ways that don't create more bad guys than they take off the street by their conduct.
And again, this all of these, the Israeli leaders are keenly aware of these particular challenges, these paradoxes, these difficulties of conducting operations in very densely populated urban areas against an enemy who we should also note is willing to blow himself up to take Israeli soldiers with him.
Iran's Grand Plot Revealed 00:04:00
They will stop potentially as we saw in their offensive.
Right.
And general, there is a theory that this is part of a much bigger operation being conducted by Iran, that they have enabled and trained and facilitated and armed Hamas to commit an outrage so appalling on the scale that we saw on October the 7th that it deliberately goads Israel into perhaps over-responding,
wiping out large chunks of Gaza, causing huge anger and resentment, huge civilian deaths, dismantling in the process all the moves that have been made to normalization between Israel and countries like Saudi Arabia and whatever.
That this is all part of a grander plot by Iran.
Do you buy into that theory as being potentially what's going on here?
And should Israel be very wary that it might be being lured into that precise trap?
I think that's arguable.
So I don't completely buy into it, but certainly Iran is sitting on the sidelines, having funded, equipped, directed, often trained surrogate groups.
Hamas is one of those.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, an even more powerful one.
Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen.
Again, they have enabled all of this.
Whether there's a truly grand strategy such as you laid out, I think is certainly not validated, but it certainly is plausible.
And so again, the conundrum for Israel is how to accomplish a mission that I think does need to be performed, the destruction of Hamas and also their allies, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
And as you will have known, the Israelis are not just taking out these terrorist groups, they have also said they want to dismantle the Hamas political wing, which means that they're going to take down essentially the government of this territory as well.
And that begs the question: okay, who is going to take their place?
That's a huge question.
You noted the Palestinians and the West Bank don't want to ride in on Israeli tanks to take over.
The optics of that would be more than a little bit difficult.
But there does have to be the idea, the vision for the future.
It can't be left until later on, or the Israelis will end up owning it.
And that probably will be very difficult as well.
So again, that has to be resolved.
And let's keep in mind that what follows the Hamas political wing will not only be handing out humanitarian assistance and restoring basic services and rebuilding damaged infrastructure.
They're also going to have to have a counterinsurgency element, a hard edge with a lot of intelligence, because there will be remnants of Hamas and the Islamic Shihad that will try to reconstitute.
And we have seen what happens when an IA has taken off a group like the Islamic State.
We destroyed them during the surge, kept them down for three and a half years after that.
Our combat forces left.
The Iraqis took their eye off on it.
And within a couple of years, you had a caliphate, the first ever, in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria.
We had to go back in to help to advise, assist, and enable the Iraqi security forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces to eliminate that caliphate and to keep an eye on them ever since.
So that's another aspect to this that will be very challenging as well.
General Petraeus, as I say, your book couldn't be more timely.
It's called Conflict.
It details all manner of conflicts.
And this is one of those where it seems intractable right now.
But history shows us that peace can be forged if the right people have the right mentality about it.
And I can only hope and pray that is the case here and that things don't escalate even further than they already have.
I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
Minimizing Casualties in Conflict 00:14:54
Welcome back to Piers Boggin Our Center Live from New York City.
I'm joined now by Ambassador Mark Regev, the senior advisor to Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu and former ambassador to the United Kingdom.
He joins me live from Tel Aviv.
Mr. Reggae, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I wanted to start by reading what Barack Obama, the former U.S. president, has come out and said in the statement.
He said, Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence.
But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters and it must abide by international law.
He says the world is watching and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire.
Already thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the bombing of Gaza, many of them children, hundreds of thousands forced from their homes.
The Israeli government's decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen the growing humanitarian crisis, it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel's enemies and undermine long-term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.
What's your response to that?
So there's a dilemma here.
On one hand, we want to hit Hamas and destroy its military machine and end its political rule over Gaza.
And at the same time, of course, we don't want to see the civilian population of Gaza suffer unnecessarily.
In many ways, they too are victims of Hamas's oppressive rule.
So we've got to try to balance those two.
And what we're trying to do, and you can be the judge if we're succeeding or not, is we're trying to hit Hamas hard, ultimately to destroy Hamas.
And at the same time, offer as best we can solutions to the civilian population of Gaza who are not the targets of our operation.
I guess what critics would say is that five, six thousand civilians in Gaza have already been killed, which is four times as many as died in the appalling terror attacks of October the 7th.
And that if there's a ground invasion, that number will exponentially rise to perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians.
And they would question whether that is proportionate.
And also they would say, well, it's fine to say to Palestinian people, you've got to get out of northern Gaza.
But if all their homes are getting leveled in the process, where do they go back to?
Where do these people live at the end of this?
What happens to them?
So let's discuss what you've raised.
Number one, when this is over, I'm sure there'll be a massive reconstruction effort inside the Gaza Strip to build homes that have been destroyed.
And I think there'll be international support for that.
But we have to destroy Hamas.
Now, I'd like to be able to tell you, Pierce, that there won't be civilian casualties.
To make a promise, yes, there won't be.
But that would be illogical.
You've covered wars.
You know, there hasn't been a war in modern history where there haven't been civilians caught up in the crossfire.
But what we can do as a democratic country is make a maximum effort to keep those casualties as low as is humanly possible.
Now, you're right when you say to me that asking civilians to move from the north to the south, that's not easy.
A lot of people, it's very difficult for them to move.
I understand that.
It can be very threatening to ask people to move.
They don't like moving.
But surely that is, in the real world, that is preferable to a situation where they're caught up in the crossfire and possibly be casualties.
And they have moved in their masses.
Hundreds of thousands of people have moved from the north to the south.
And now our challenge, and we're working with the international community on this, is to see what humanitarian facilities we can build in the south for those internally displaced people.
And we're partners in that.
One of the major issues you're going to have, and we just discussed this with General David Petraeus, who knows better than most what happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan in response to 9-11, is that you've got to win hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, or ultimately you'll just create more problems going forward than you even have now.
How do you win hearts and minds if thousands of these civilians are dying on a daily basis?
That surely will have the opposite effect.
And like I say, these numbers are likely to dramatically increase.
And world opinion, you know already, is turning against Israel, which seems extraordinary so soon after the scale of those terror attacks, but you know that it is.
There has been some very disturbing anti-Semitism that we've seen around the world.
Does it not concern you that the strategy that Israel is currently adopting, coupled with a potential ground invasion imminently, may actually have the opposite effect to what you hoped for, that you get rid of Hamas, perhaps, but in the process, you create something far worse?
So first of all, people are describing Hamas and not Israelis.
International leaders have described Hamas as worse than ISIS.
And when the German chancellor was here last week, he said they're like the Nazis.
And so you ask what is worse than Hamas.
I'm not sure there is a lot worse than Hamas, though maybe we'll be surprised, yes, but I'm not sure that's pretty low, Hamas, and I'm not sure you can get a lot worse.
But can I raise one issue that needs to be said?
All the numbers coming out of Gaza about civilian casualties, they're all provided by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health.
Now, as you know, better than many, that Hamas doesn't have a democratic rule.
There's no civil society, independent civil society in Gaza.
It's an authoritarian regime.
And if you would believe the numbers coming out of Hamas, I mean, we're only killing innocent civilians.
Well, obviously, that's not true.
They don't even record a single Hamas fighter who has been killed.
And now that's clearly impossible.
I don't deny there have been innocents caught up in the conflict.
But the numbers that are coming out that are announced every day by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, that's clearly propaganda.
I mean, once again, have you heard a single announcement about combat fatalities on their side or what I'd call terrorists that we've killed?
Not one.
Well, I think in a way, you've highlighted one of the big problems you're going to face going forward with a ground invasion.
How do you tell somebody who's a combatant from a civilian?
It's going to be incredibly difficult.
General Petraeus, again, was talking about that.
Let me ask you, you're an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Many Israelis, I mean, the polling currently suggests that the majority of Israelis are absolutely furious of what they see as him dropping the ball in terms of security and intelligence, enabling Hamas to commit this outrage.
Many think he should have resigned, but he hasn't even apologized publicly for those failings on October the 7th.
Why not?
First of all, Israelis are entitled to be angry.
I mean, the Hamas, a brutal enemy, caught us unexpected, surprised.
And there's a whole series of failures.
I mean, you talk about at the top with the Prime Minister, but there's a whole series of failures that need to be investigated.
Why was it that our intelligence didn't pick up on this brutal attack before it happened?
I mean, we pride ourselves in Israel on having excellent intelligence services.
You know, we're very proud of our Mossad and the Shinbet and so forth.
And yet they took us by surprise.
And that's, you know, Israelis are asking, what happened?
And then there's, how did they cross the fence at so many points and succeed in just coming and raiding our communities?
I mean, we spent a lot of money and technology.
We were told many times that the fence is impassable.
And yet they just stormed it and came across our side of the world.
Well, one of the reasons.
One of the reasons, Mr. Reggae, that people say the ball may have been dropped here in such a spectacular and deadly manner is because Prime Minister Netanyahu, for most of the year, has been fighting mass social protests and unrest over his attempt, as his critics put it, to usurp the authority of the Supreme Court.
And that that has distracted defense and intelligence operatives away from what they should have been doing, which is protecting the Israeli people from exactly the kind of attack that happened on October the 7th.
And that for that reason, because it's all on Netanyahu's watch, and he's the one who's been waging this attack on the Supreme Court's authority and creating the social unrest, that because of that, he should take personal accountability and step aside.
So I think in many ways, I mean, we Israelis, as you know, have been having a very polarized political debate.
We're very passionate about our politics in Israel.
And there are people who hate the Prime Minister and there are people who love the Prime Minister.
And our society has had this very, very, you know, demonstrations against the government and demonstrations for the government and so forth.
But maybe the Hamas, the brutal Hamas massacre on October 7th, that was to a certain extent a slap across the face.
Because let's be frank, I know that part of southern Israel where they struck and they killed our people.
I mean, frankly, they massacred our people, yes.
They didn't ask us how we vote.
They went into Kibbutzim, which are on the left, yes, and they went into Sterot, which is politically, it's a Likud bastion.
They don't care if you vote left or right, if you're secular or religious, if you're for or against the government's proposed judicial reforms, they killed us.
They killed us randomly.
They killed us brutally.
They beheaded us.
They raped.
They burnt people alive.
You reported all this last night.
I don't have to repeat the atrocities that were committed.
And for Israelis who are passionate about their politics and we like a good argument, but this is a wake-up call.
And that is why you saw a major opposition party that has had nothing nice to say about the prime minister join the government for the duration of the conflict.
This is a time for unity.
This is a time to win.
I mean, we didn't want this war.
They declared it on us when they're a brutal attack.
But now we have to win this war.
And you've seen at the highest political level, a major opposition party joining the government for the duration.
And there will be a time when this is over.
There'll be a time for politics.
There'll be a time for lessons learned.
After previous conflicts, we've had commissions of inquiries.
We've had all sorts of investigations, parliamentary investigations, judicial investigations.
I don't know what will happen this time.
But for me as an Israeli, it's very important that if there are lessons learned, that we learn those lessons.
Yes, what happened on October 7th when they crossed the border the way they did, taking us by surprise, slaughtering our people, that's clearly something that needs to be examined very thoroughly.
When it comes to the moral line, what is your red line in terms of what Israel can do to get rid of Hamas?
What would be too far for you?
That's what people are asking right now.
They understand that Israel is in a rage, that the people are shocked, they're in trauma.
I've talked to Jewish friends of mine who feel genuinely fearful and traumatized by what has happened.
There's no denying that.
And the protests, the anti-Semitic nature of these protests since has been repellent and also adding to that fear.
But what is the red line for Israel?
I mean, is there a moral line that you won't cross here or are all bets off when it comes to getting rid of Hamas?
First thing that needs to be said is that as much as people are angry, and rightly so, we haven't been shooting for the hip.
And people have been talking about this ground invasion.
What is it?
For two weeks now, and it's still not happened.
And so we are very thinking steps ahead.
We're planning, we're preparing, and we'll go in where we're ready to go in.
We're not acting out of rage.
I mean, we're angry, but our behavior is judicious.
And once again, we're looking not just what happens tomorrow, we're looking what happens next week and next month and next year.
We're thinking this through very carefully.
And that's important to be said.
On the larger issue, look, when we send our soldiers into Gaza, we know they're going to be facing a formidable enemy, an enemy that's fighting, you know, that's run the Gaza Strip for the last 16 years.
They've got bunkers, they've got tunnels, they've got their defenses.
And our young soldiers going into battle, I'm telling you openly, we know not all of them will come back alive.
It'll be very fierce fighting.
And then you raised the issue of the hostages.
What will they do to the hostages in the framework of such a battle?
And then there's avoiding as much as best you can civilian casualties.
We've got all these issues.
But having said that, I spoke to some of our young soldiers who are going into battle.
And look, Israel understands that this just needs to be done.
We have to do it.
Look, we don't and refuse to live anymore next to this as a next-door neighbor.
And as was said, Hamas is in many ways worse than ISIS.
And I think if you ask me, what is our model, what is our red line?
We watched very carefully what the West did, what England and the United States did in leading the fight against ISIS to destroy the territorial control they had in parts of Syria and Iraq.
They had what they call the caliphate.
They had territorial control.
They were removed and we will remove them the same way.
Now, once again, in the fight against ISIS, there were innocent civilians in places like Mosul who were caught up in the crossfire.
And that's not a good thing.
But unfortunately, that happens in war.
And I think we will model ourselves on the same high standards as other Western armies.
We'll fight our enemy ruthlessly and do our best in a complex combat situation to safeguard the civilian population as best as possible.
But if some of the criticism is, well, you can't do this because there will inevitably be civilian casualties, no.
That didn't apply in the fight against al-Qaeda.
That didn't apply in the fight against ISIS.
We will do our best to minimize casualties.
But if someone says you can't destroy Hamas for fear of civilian casualties, that doesn't apply to any other country.
It doesn't apply to Israel either.
Mark Ragev, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
My pleasure.
Welcome back to Piers Borg and Uncensored, live from New York City.
Well, British Iraqi rapper and pro-Palestine activist Kareem Dennis, better known as Low Key, has been a powerful and influential pro-Palestinian voice before and during this conflict.
Defending Journalism's Sacred Duty 00:15:53
The official version of his track Terrorists was taken off YouTube after the Hamas attacks on October the 7th, 14 years after its initial release.
He's been highly critical of what he says is media bias and accused me of taking a pro-Israel slant on this show.
Well, I'm joined now by Low Key, who's at our London studio.
Loki, thank you very, very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, Pierce.
I mean, on the issue of whether I'm pro-Israel, I don't have a horse in this race or this war.
I try and be balanced.
I try and have all kinds of views.
I think we've had more pro-Palestinian people on this show in the last two weeks than any other news show in the world.
They've been getting huge audiences.
So I would take issue with that charge that somehow I'm slanted one way or another.
I think this whole thing is a complete tragedy.
I know that you've been committed to the plight of the Palestinians for a long time, going back at least 15 years from what I can see in terms of you traveling to Gaza.
What was your reaction when you first heard about these attacks on October the 7th?
Well, let's be clear.
Reading the testimony of survivors of October 7th from kibbutz Bi'iri, like Yasmin Purat, was extremely harrowing.
What she alleges is not only that her husband was killed in the initial takeover, but also she then says that the Israeli military tanks fired on the room where the hostages were, killing 12 Israeli civilian captives.
We have also seen fantastic work in the Haretz newspaper by Amos Harrel, where he speaks at length about Brigadier General Rosenfeld, who was in charge of the Aretz crossing.
Now, when this military base was taken over, what he says, Amos Harel in Haretz, the well-known Israeli newspaper, he says that Rosenfeld, when he realized that the base was overtaken, called in an airstrike.
This is in Haretz.
These are not my words.
These are the words of Amos Harel.
What we then saw is since October the 7th, 22 Israeli civilian detainees killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes.
The Israeli military has something called the Hannibal Directive.
The Hannibal Directive was developed in Lebanon in the 80s by the Israelis with the clear understanding that they do not want the other side to take hostages.
So for example, you have the case of Hada Golding in 2014, what Israel called Operation Protective Edge, which killed over 2,200 Palestinians.
But when this Israeli soldier was taken captive by the Palestinians, Israel then proceeded to kill everyone, including the civilians in the area around where he was kept and the soldier himself.
So what Israel has, unfortunately, is a policy of killing captives.
If you look at the case of Gilad Shalit, this was an Israeli soldier.
Allow me to finish on the other side.
You can't just keep talking.
You can't keep talking about that.
No, no, no, no.
I have one last point to make, and I hope that you'll allow me to make it.
In the case of Gilad Shalit, what happened was one Israeli soldier led to a thousand Palestinian prisoners being released.
There is a clear understanding within the Israeli military and political elite that they do not want people to be kidnapped.
So therefore, they unfortunately, as history has shown us and as the directive within the Israeli military shows, they take action to kill their own captives that have been taken by the other side.
Right, let me respond to you.
You tweeted on October the 7th the arrogance to believe you could keep two million trapped in an open-air prison indefinitely.
That appears to have been your only comment about what happened.
So just for the record, do you condemn what Hamas did that day?
I condemn the genocidal conditions which have created this violence.
Every heartbeat, every human heartbeat is sacred to me.
And that is what has compelled me to work as I have for the last 15 years to save lives, to save lives.
We have a lot of people dying, Piers.
But what's the problem?
No, no, no.
We do not have a clear picture of what happened on October 7th because unfortunately, too much of the media has relied on the Israeli military talking points, which are given directly to them.
Until neutral observers are able to establish the facts of October 7th, I will not, I will not allow the talking points of the Israeli military to become dominant of what happened on that day.
You know, you are subject to a genocide and war.
This punishment in Ghaza is real.
Let me respond.
You are the only pro-Palestinian person I've had on the show in two weeks who has tried to make out that this just didn't happen on October the 7th.
Or somehow perpetrated by Israel.
You're misrepresenting what I understand.
Well, I've got two questions.
They're very straightforward.
Do you believe that 1,500 people were slaughtered, including 260 people at a music festival?
You're a musician.
And secondly, do you condemn the people who did it?
They're not divisible.
Piers, I would like to quote something that you just said to the former spokesperson for the IDF.
This was your exact sentence not long ago.
You said, it's difficult to tell between combatants and non-combatants.
So the implication of what you said was somehow it was understandable that Israel has killed a Palestinian child every 15 minutes in Ghaza.
I didn't say that.
For the last time, somehow they couldn't tell that those children were not combatants, according to you.
I didn't understand that.
I didn't say that.
And I have said it is absolutely appalling, the number of children who are dying in Gaza.
It's appalling and it will get worse.
I make no bones about that at all.
And I have to say, and I have to say...
So you have to start.
You have to start surely from a humanity point of view.
I can absolutely express my horror at the deaths of Palestinian innocent civilians, as I have done many times over the years.
I think it's horrifying.
And I think this is why I have a serious problem with the proposed ground invasion, because I think it will create unbelievably large numbers of civilian casualties.
And I'm not sure that the strategy will work.
But I'm just curious why you, who is, I know you care about people.
I know you care passionately about the Palestinian civilians, but you're the only pro-Palestine voice I've had who's even tried to suggest that what Hamas did on October the 7th was not as bad as we think.
So is that what you think?
What do you think?
But what do we think, Piers?
The information is not clear.
As I've said to you, all human life is sacred.
Hamas haven't even tried to hide it.
It's sacred.
But you're not trying to hide anything.
You're trying to hide something.
No, no, no, no.
With respect, you are definitely trying to dissemble him.
And I'll explain why.
I've given you an opportunity to simply say whether you condemn what Hamas did, which, by the way, they have brazenly boasted about.
They've posted videos celebrating what they did.
There is no doubt about what Hamas did.
They want you to know what they did.
They want me to know that.
They want the world to know.
They killed Jewish people in the main and in Israel with impunity.
260 people at a music festival, babies, grandmothers.
They kidnapped 200 people.
God knows what's happened to them.
Now, you can shake your head, but what you can't do is deny that that happened because Hamas have admitted it brazenly and with a great price.
So secondly, if they've admitted it, do you condemn what they did?
I absolutely mourn the loss of all human life in this conflict.
And I have struggled for 15 years of my life in a way that, Piers, to be honest, you haven't, okay?
And I take you as an empathetic person with a high level of emotional intelligence, okay?
I have struggled for 15 years of my life to stop the killing, for a ceasefire now, to stop deaths.
But I have to say, Piers, that actually this line of questioning, unfortunately, on a personal level, is somewhat hypocritical.
And I'll explain why.
On April 18th, 2022, you said the exact phrase that you feel like Nelson Mandela walking out of prison on the long road to freedom of speech.
Today, there is a statue for Nelson Mandela outside parliament.
Now, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Beit Salim, and even the Harvard Law School have said that Israel practices apartheid against the Palestinian people.
Do you know what the ANC struggle against apartheid entailed?
Are you aware that the ANC are believed to have very unfortunately, horrifically, and terribly taken the lives of children and civilians in their struggle against apartheid?
So, Piers, you seem absolutely content to not only compare yourself to Nelson Mandela, who served 27 years in jail for what they described as terrorism at the time, but yet you cannot see what the vast majority of human rights organizations in the world see when they look at the Palestinians.
When you look at UN Resolution 194, paragraph 11, the Palestinians have the right to return home.
Almost a million of them were displaced in 1948 with the foundation of the state of Israel.
And what we are now on the brink of is Palestinians, millions of them, being driven into the Sinai desert with help of the US Delta Force with help in a manufactured, an Israeli manufactured humanitarian catastrophe in Israel.
There is a 23% infant mortality rate.
Let me say something.
I completely agree with you about the plight of the Palestinian people.
I've tweeted about this for the last two weeks.
No, no, to be fair, you haven't, Piers, and this is not journalism.
Shireen Abuja was journalism.
Yasser Murteja was journalism.
Mu'tez Azaiza, that's journalism.
Palestinians are reaching out from the cage that Israel has put them in, and they are trying to speak to the world.
And they are being met with cold indifference.
And I would say to you, Piers, I would say to you that that gentleman that you've just had on the show, Mark Regev, he belongs in The Hague.
David Petraeus, you know, Piers, you made your reputation as opposing the invasion of Iraq.
Well, I would ask you, journalist to journalist, how could you justify the interview you just gave to the head of US forces in that illegal occupation of Iraq that David Petraeus led?
He was then the head of the CIA.
Both of the individuals that you have just had on this show deserve to be in The Hague tried for war crimes.
I am not anything like them.
I have not hurt a fly.
Those two men have.
Why are they given the respectability that you gave them with your interview?
And why am I interrogated as if I am somehow someone that could hurt a human being?
Well, certainly in Mark Regev's case, I pushed him hard on all the positions that Israel wasn't currently adopting.
That wasn't hard.
Let me explain, because I did a tweet today, and I meant every word of this.
I said, I have great respect for anybody who in the immediate aftermath of this appalling terror attack said it was outrageous and appalling.
There are 1,500 Palestinians still under the rubber in Gaza.
Exactly.
You've had your say.
They're still under the rubber.
They're still under the rubber.
Stop bringing them up.
I said those whose instinctive reaction was not to feel that.
And I think you're one of them because your reaction was to say the arrogance to think you could keep 2 million people trapped in an open-air prison indefinitely, as if somehow that justified what happened that day.
It didn't justify what you said.
You know exactly what you're doing.
And you should be able to do that.
The point when that tweet was sent, the point when that tweet was sent.
You've not seen anything happening.
You've had your criticism of me, and that's fine.
You're perfectly entitled to it.
Like I said to you, all you said about me, I believe in free speech.
You're entitled to your opinion of me, of David Petraeus, of Mark Reggev.
But I'm also entitled to judge you as somebody who did not find it in themselves to express anything involving any unjust race or any...
I've just expressed it.
And people haven't.
This is not journalism.
The idea of us comparing our moral compasses.
And somehow I have a deficient moral compass.
Somehow I am a moral monster.
You know what's true?
I am not.
The people that have shown a cold indifference to the ethnically cleansed Palestinians, dispossessed, one in three, every refugee in the world is Palestinian.
They are the largest refugee population.
Those who have turned a blind eye to their suffering are those that need to be seriously interrogated about their moral compass.
And I would ask you, I would ask you before we end the show, no, I would ask you that I am able to read out the names of the 20 Palestinian journalists who have been killed in hands.
Because I have two more guests.
There's 20 journalists.
So I'm being censored now.
And I'll tell you something else.
You're not being censored.
This badge.
Zoom in on this badge.
This badge was given to me by an employee of this building who said they were told they could not wear this badge because it was the Palestinian flag.
You talk about uncensored.
This is censored.
This badge.
I haven't told anybody that.
I'm an employee in this building.
I have told nobody they can or can't wear a badge.
So that's a ridiculous thing to say.
I'm in New York.
But good to see you, Loki.
I appreciate you coming on the programme.
Welcome back to Peers Organisers.
I'm joined by my PACNA, the founder of Within Our Lifetime, Nadine Kiswani, and the broadcaster and journalist, Emily Austin.
Okay, Emily, what did you make of that exchange I just had with Loki?
I just dislike how you ask a clear, clear-cut question and the question never seems to be addressed on any of your interviews, quite frankly.
It seems like they use the airtime as an opportunity to deny the question and just spread their own narrative and it just, it's pointless.
The debate is pointless.
It's a one-sided conversation and there's no actual conversation.
Here's my question.
Oh, but what about this pin?
Right.
I mean, Nadine, my problem with it was, I've interviewed some pro-Palestinian voices in the last few weeks who were emphatic immediately.
Let me make it clear.
What happened on October the 7th was a disgusting terrorist attack, an abomination.
And then they go on to talk about the plight of the Palestinian people and maybe the historical conflict and so on.
And I have great respect for people that do that.
I've got to say, I really struggle with anyone who just cannot have the humanity to start by saying what happened on October the 7th was appalling, an outrage.
Do you feel it was?
I think Palestinians are tired of that being the starting point constantly when right now there are 6,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, over 2,500 of them children, 33 mosques leveled, hospitals leveled.
So we're tired of that being the main goal of the conversation.
It's not the main goal.
The Nakba as Starting Point 00:02:26
It's the starting point of this war.
But hang on, it's the starting point of this war.
It's not the main goal of what I want the conversation to be.
The starting point was when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, were expelled from their homelands during the Nakba, which my grandparents, which my grandparents fled Palestine because of the nakbah, because of the massacres and the rapes that they heard.
So to me, that's the starting point.
That's my experience.
Let's go with that for a minute.
Let's start with the nakba, because the only nakba is the part that people forget to address.
1948, after the partition plan, the Jewish state called in the Arabs to live prosperously and peacefully in the land.
But what happened the very next day, not even 24 hours later, is the alleged nakba, where the Arab leagues declared war on the Jewish state, that we just agreed to have our two-state solution.
And what did they tell their people?
Leave the state.
Let us get the land back.
Let's ethnically cleanse the Jewish people.
And once we defeat them in this war, you will come back to the land.
So the only nakba was a catastrophe that you guys, the Arab leads, waged a war that you could not win.
And that is why, I'm sorry, your grandparents had to leave their homes.
That's completely ahistorical.
I don't represent the Arab League.
I'm Palestinian, and I'm speaking on behalf of the Palestinians.
But why do you find it hard to just start, given this war, this latest war that's erupted, began with a terror attack on October the 7th, why is it hard to not just say, that was terrible?
I don't see you asking Regev if he condemned the slaughter of innocent civilians.
She can't do it, can you?
No, she can't because she's the same woman who said every Zionist before they die should hear pop pop before they die.
So she probably agrees with the massacre, so why would she condemn them?
I think the media is part of manufacturing consent for the people.
We're talking about you.
I'm speaking here, and I'm not interested in speaking to genocide deniers.
The media is manufacturing consent for genocide against the Palestinian people, just like they did with the lie of the weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the murder of over a million Iraqis.
And there's been many lies that have been repeated all over the news, including on your show, where CNN had to rescind.
And even you said in subsequent interviews about the 40 beheaded babies.
I haven't seen a single shred of events.
I have not seen a single shred of evidence about these accusations coming out.
I was actually deliberately misquoted.
But look, we've got to leave it there for the little pause.
That's the end of our television program tonight.
We're going to continue this discussion on our YouTube channel, but keep it uncensored.
going to keep it uncensored and keep this conversation going because I find it genuinely fascinating.
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