Uncensored - Piers Morgan - 20240902_douglas-murray-on-israel-protests-uk-riots
Aired: 2024-09-02
Duration: 50:59


=== Hostages and the Philadelphia Corridor (07:13) ===

[00:00:00]  We're so full of our own expectations and presumptions that we always think that wars end by some kind of compromise.
[00:00:08]  They don't.
[00:00:08]  There's these aggressive expansionist settlements, which is illegal.
[00:00:12]  It shouldn't be happening.
[00:00:13]  Would you defend that?
[00:00:14]  I regard it as being a second order issue.
[00:00:17]  They're the whole dispute about this.
[00:00:18]  It's not to those who are being killed because we have people on the streets of London calling for jihad.
[00:00:24]  Why are we in this position?
[00:00:26]  What has Britain got out of this?
[00:00:28]  You appear to be advocating directly for mob rule to take part if it comes to it.
[00:00:35]  I still cannot understand how a society can be so insane that it can welcome in people who want to destroy it.
[00:00:43]  Well, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in Israel in the biggest civil unrest since the beginning of the Hamas war.
[00:00:50]  Today, the country is at a standstill amid a general strike.
[00:00:53]  It was called after the IDF recovered the bodies of six hostages from an underground tunnel in Rafah.
[00:00:59]  Fury at Hamas is a given, but Hamas is not the focus of his protests.
[00:01:03]  The anger is directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who's accused of blocking a ceasefire and hostage release deal to save his own political life.
[00:01:12]  Douglas Murray spent six months in Israel covering the war in Gaza, writing and broadcasting extensively in defense of Israel's actions.
[00:01:19]  This summer, he faced his latest brush with cancelled culture after racially charged riots caused havoc in Britain.
[00:01:25]  And I'm delighted to say he joins me now to discuss all this.
[00:01:27]  Douglas, great to have you back on our sensitive.
[00:01:31]  Really good to see you again, Piers.
[00:01:32]  It's been too long.
[00:01:33]  It has been too long.
[00:01:34]  You're my first guess since the summer break.
[00:01:37]  So much has gone on, not least in Israel with this war with Hamas.
[00:01:42]  A massive development, obviously, over the weekend with the killing of six hostages by Hamas as it's believed the IDF were moving in to try and rescue them.
[00:01:53]  First of all, your reaction to that.
[00:01:57]  Well, I mean, nobody can be particularly surprised by now about the brutality of Hamas, but I think still people are shocked.
[00:02:05]  I think everyone's shocked that they would be holding on to hostages for almost a year in tunnels underground, making them undergo who knows what amount of torture and deprivation, only then to kill them maybe hours before they were going to be rescued by the IDF.
[00:02:25]  You know, one of them was an American citizen as well.
[00:02:29]  I think there's a lot of question, there are a lot of questions in America about how it could be that an American citizen could be held hostage and then brutally executed like this.
[00:02:40]  But yes, I mean, this is, you know, this is what Hamas does.
[00:02:44]  And by the way, all the people who said, you know, that Israel shouldn't go into Rafah, that they shouldn't go any further south, as I think I said to you before, Piers, months ago, of the two aims in this war that the Israelis have, to destroy Hamas and to get the hostages home.
[00:03:01]  It was clear a long time ago that the hostages had been taken south, precisely to Rafah and other places there.
[00:03:09]  And this is why the IDF has moved in.
[00:03:12]  This is why they've been fighting all these months.
[00:03:15]  The interesting development in Israel itself is the very angry reaction towards Benjamin Netanyahu.
[00:03:24]  A lot of people in Israel saying, look, we understand the need to get rid of Hamas.
[00:03:30]  We want to get rid of Hamas.
[00:03:31]  But our biggest priority is getting the rest of these hostages out.
[00:03:34]  There are believed, I think, to be 97 hostages unaccounted for, of which 33 are feared to have been killed, which leaves 64 or so who may still be alive there.
[00:03:46]  And the question that many are asking in Israel is, are they all going to get killed as Netanyahu continues to prosecute the war in which he's doing so?
[00:03:56]  And if that is the case, then shouldn't there be a hastening of a peace deal of some kind?
[00:04:04]  You know, the thing is, Piers, is that public sentiment, public mood at such times is obviously incredibly febrile.
[00:04:12]  It's so grotesque that these poor young people should have been so close to being rescued only to be executed by Hamas.
[00:04:20]  My view is that it's understandable there's grief and there's outrage in Israel, but it is very important, like with some of the headlines worldwide.
[00:04:28]  We had CNN and the BBC and others in recent days reporting the murder of these hostages as though they sort of died of natural causes and their bodies were then rescued from the tunnels.
[00:04:39]  What happens in these situations, in my view, is that because there's very little really that the public can do, certainly in Israel, to pressure Hamas, I mean, Hamas does what they want and what they want is genocidal.
[00:04:53]  But it is possible to pressurize a democratically elected government.
[00:04:58]  And we've seen that in our own country.
[00:05:00]  We see that around the world.
[00:05:02]  If there's a group that you can do nothing to persuade and somebody else who is vulnerable to persuasion or at least to political and democratic pressure, it's quite commonplace that you would focus on the second.
[00:05:16]  I just think that it's worth remembering that as far as I understand it, the stumbling block in the negotiations has been the issue of the Philadelphia corridor, which is the Gaza-Egypt border.
[00:05:27]  And just very quickly, the reason why that matters as an issue and why, as I understand it, it's such a sticking point in the negotiations is, of course, the Egypt-Gaza border is where the rockets have been smuggled in from for years into Gaza, where much of the munitions and guns and much more has been smuggled in.
[00:05:48]  And Israel, as I understand it, is simply trying to make sure that that corridor is no longer able to be policed, as it were, solely by the Egyptians, but should also have Israeli oversight as well.
[00:06:01]  I mean, that's a long-term issue, of course.
[00:06:03]  People have focused on the short-term issue of the hostages, and that's quite understandable.
[00:06:08]  But in the long term, if there isn't just going to be an endless groundhog day-like repeat of these wars in Gaza, it is necessary, as I see it, to stop Gaza being remilitarized after this war.
[00:06:24]  The problem internally for Netanyahu is his own defense minister, Jov Gallant, on Thursday got into a screaming argument with him during a cabinet meeting, specifically about the Philadelphia corridor.
[00:06:38]  His belief, which many share in Israel, is that that is a deal-breaker for Hamas for any kind of ceasefire deal that involves returning the hostages.
[00:06:47]  And that whatever you think of Hamas, if you're trying to get to a position where those hostages are returned, then there's got to be some compromise here with Hamas.
[00:06:57]  He says that if the Philadelphia corridor, which Netanyahu has made an absolute deal-breaker his end in recent weeks, if that remains the case, then there is simply no chance of Hamas ever agreeing to any ceasefire deal to return the hostages.

=== Distinguishing Terrorists from Victims (14:58) ===

[00:07:14]  And there are concerns now internally, politically in Israel, that Ganak may well resign, and that may well potentially cause a fall of dominoes, which could end up with Netanyahu's government falling.
[00:07:29]  Well, again, I mean, politicians fall out all the time in Israel, like everywhere else.
[00:07:35]  That's not surprising itself that Gallant and Netanyahu might be in disagreement on something.
[00:07:41]  But again, I mean, I'd come back to this point.
[00:07:45]  Asking Hamas to do something nice, asking Hamas to compromise, is not a very straightforward thing.
[00:07:53]  You know, Sinois himself, who planned and plotted the 7th of October, is an utter fanatic.
[00:08:02]  And this is something, by the way, that we in the West have sort of forgotten about.
[00:08:07]  We use the term fanatical to describe anyone about their football team as a supporter and so on.
[00:08:13]  But a real fanatic, somebody willing to kill and die and doesn't care about that.
[00:08:22]  And Sinois, everything we know about him is that he is precisely of that type.
[00:08:29]  We know, I mean, there's an account in the New York Times last year of the Israeli doctor who saved Sinois's life when he was in prison in Israel some 13 years ago or so now.
[00:08:41]  His life was saved by an Israeli doctor.
[00:08:43]  And Sinois said to this doctor, he thanked him for saving his life, but he said to him, you know, one day, he said, currently you're strong, but one day you'll be weak and then I'll attack.
[00:08:55]  You know, one of the young people murdered by Sinois and his forces on the 7th was the nephew of the doctor who saved his life.
[00:09:04]  This is Sinoa.
[00:09:05]  This is Hamas.
[00:09:06]  You could literally save the life of Sinois and he'll still come back to kill you.
[00:09:13]  Tell me that such a person is a reasonable negotiating partner.
[00:09:17]  Well, he certainly is a terrorist and Hamas are a terror organization.
[00:09:22]  And I've completely concurred with you from the start of this that what they did on October the 7th was of such a heinous scale that Israel obviously had to respond with massive force as they've done.
[00:09:33]  But you'll also be aware as we head towards the first anniversary of what happened there that this is an ongoing, increasing, massive problem worldwide for Israel and its reputation because so many people, including the UK now under Labour government, they've just announced as we're talking they're going to suspend some arms sales to Israel.
[00:09:55]  30 of 350 licenses will be suspended due to a clear risk the weapons will be used by Israel in a way that could breach international law.
[00:10:04]  So there is increasing pressure, as you know, around the world for this to get resolved.
[00:10:09]  Increasing views expressed by many countries that what Israel's now doing constitutes a war crime.
[00:10:17]  And you and I have debated that many times.
[00:10:20]  But do you not feel that something has to give here, that this has to get resolved somehow?
[00:10:26]  And that the only way to do that is, as with all these situations, you have to eventually compromise in some way.
[00:10:34]  And the problem for Netanyahu is that people think he is completely incapable of offering Hamas any compromise.
[00:10:42]  And therefore, there is no deal.
[00:10:43]  So the families of the hostages still there and hundreds of thousands of protesters in Israel on the street to Tel Aviv right now, they are of the firm belief that it's his own intractable position on this, which is not going to allow any kind of ceasefire to be achievable.
[00:11:02]  But there again, if I can say so, Piers, it's the same thing, which is the presumption that it's Netanyahu who is uncompromising.
[00:11:11]  We end up with this, again, because Netanyahu is a democratically elected leader, and so it's assumed that some pressure can be brought to bear on him.
[00:11:19]  In my view, it is not Netanyahu who's uncompromising.
[00:11:22]  It's Hamas that's uncompromising.
[00:11:24]  They could have handed back the hostages last October.
[00:11:29]  They could have not done this.
[00:11:31]  I mean, they could have tried to build a state since 2005 when Israel withdrew from the Gaza and handed the place over to them.
[00:11:38]  Hamas could have used the billions of dollars and pounds and Euros that British and European and American taxpayers gave them since 2006.
[00:11:51]  They could have used those billions of dollars to build up Gaza.
[00:11:55]  They could have made a booming, in the good sense of the term, Mediterranean paradise.
[00:12:01]  They could have created wealth for their people.
[00:12:03]  But you know what they did?
[00:12:05]  They built down instead of upwards.
[00:12:07]  They built a tunnel network bigger than the London Underground for all of those years.
[00:12:11]  And they squirreled away the money just like Yasser Arafat did before them and they made themselves rich.
[00:12:16]  Why was Ismail Hanir worth billions of dollars?
[00:12:20]  Why does Khaled Mashal worth billions of dollars?
[00:12:23]  Why are their children like princelings who live in apartment complexes in Doha?
[00:12:30]  Because they took the money of Americans and Brits and Europeans and they took it for themselves and kept the people of Gaza in miseration and poverty.
[00:12:39]  There has been since 2005 a complete counterfactual of what could have happened.
[00:12:45]  But the Hamas leadership didn't want that.
[00:12:48]  They have said themselves they want to use Palestinian children and their lives in order to pressurize the world.
[00:12:56]  These are fanatics.
[00:12:57]  They want the death of their own citizens, their own citizens, in order to get world opinion turned against Israel.
[00:13:06]  Again, how do you negotiate with that?
[00:13:08]  The assumption always is in the West today, because we're so sort of fat and lazy in our expectation that peace is the norm and that historically it's the norm.
[00:13:20]  We're so full of our own expectations and presumptions that we always think that wars end by some kind of compromise and coming around the table to use the cliché.
[00:13:31]  They don't.
[00:13:32]  Historically, most wars end because one side wins and one side loses.
[00:13:38]  And one of the reasons, in my view, why there is these endless rounds of war in this region is because the Israelis are never allowed to win and Hamas in this case are always allowed to draw.
[00:13:52]  And I think that that is simply to set up the precursor for the next conflict.
[00:13:57]  If Hamas come out of this with a fighting capability, then there will be another round of this war in a couple of years.
[00:14:04]  So when David Lamy and others say what we need to have is a peace deal, I'd say on what terms?
[00:14:11]  Everybody wants peace except for Hamas and the fanatics.
[00:14:15]  Everybody else wants peace.
[00:14:17]  All of these people in the south, these kibbutzniks and the party goers and others who were murdered on the 7th, all dreamed of peace with their Palestinian neighbors and brothers and sisters.
[00:14:26]  Who stopped that peace being possible?
[00:14:28]  Hamas, from 2005 and again to this very day.
[00:14:34]  I want to play you a clip.
[00:14:35]  This is from an Israeli podcast with Elon Levy that you did in March about, well, you seem to infer something about all Palestinians being complicit.
[00:14:44]  I want to play the clip and then get your response to it.
[00:14:47]  I treat the Palestinians in Gaza in the same way I would treat any other group that produced a horror like that.
[00:14:57]  They're responsible for their actions.
[00:15:00]  They're responsible for their actions.
[00:15:02]  They've voted in Hamas, knowing what Hamas are.
[00:15:06]  They allowed Hamas to carry out the coup, killing Fathar and other Palestinians and dragging their bodies behind trucks in the West Bank, in Gaza.
[00:15:19]  Do you actually hold all Palestinians culpable then for what Hamas have done?
[00:15:27]  Well, all Palestinians aren't, as it were, free game just because of this.
[00:15:31]  No, not at all.
[00:15:32]  Of course not.
[00:15:33]  And all their lives matter.
[00:15:35]  The point I made there, and a point I've made for many years now, is that you cannot separate out completely the Palestinian people and their leadership.
[00:15:44]  The leadership is there for a reason.
[00:15:45]  They get elected, albeit they tend to have one election once and then just stay in power, as is the case with the PA in the West Bank, and as is the case with Gaza in Hamas, in Gaza with Hamas.
[00:16:00]  I've had many conversations with many Palestinians over many years now, in which they have tried to say, well, look, you know, we don't like our leadership or our leadership isn't good, but, you know.
[00:16:13]  The thing is, Piers, is that if you have a vote, for instance, and you vote for Hamas, then there are consequences to that.
[00:16:22]  And for all of these years, Hamas has been ruling the Gaza.
[00:16:27]  It would obviously be much better for the Palestinian people if they had not voted in a genocidal terrorist group as their government.
[00:16:35]  But there is a butt.
[00:16:36]  There's a but.
[00:16:37]  There's a but, and this is the majority of Palestinians actually did not vote for Hamas.
[00:16:44]  They got 44% of the vote.
[00:16:46]  So it's not true to say that the majority of Palestinians, or all of them, voted for this.
[00:16:51]  They didn't.
[00:16:54]  More than half of Gaza, of the Palestinian people there, voted against these people.
[00:17:00]  And you could also say that many others who voted for them might well have done because they were terrorized into doing so.
[00:17:06]  And I just think that we've got to be careful, haven't we, about distinguishing between people who genuinely vocally support Hamas and people who are either terrorized into doing so or who actually voted against them and have then seen their country dragged into an abyss.
[00:17:20]  And I completely agree with you about everything you say about Hamas and absolutely no way can they have any power coming out of this.
[00:17:28]  But to blame all Palestinian people, I think, is a big stretch.
[00:17:34]  I don't blame all Palestinian people by any means.
[00:17:36]  But look, Piers, if you just take the situation Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas is, I think, famously as a joke goes, something like 18 years into his first four-year term in office leading the Palestinian Authority.
[00:17:50]  And he's the guy, by the way, who David Lamy and others see as being the more viable negotiating partner.
[00:17:58]  This man is less bad than Hamaz, but so far away from being a good negotiating partner that, again, a deal that's been on the table for years, literally since 1948, he still can't come to the table on.
[00:18:15]  This is the situation in the West Bank.
[00:18:17]  I remember years ago, I was staying in Ramallah, and I was having meetings with young Palestinians and others, and they kept coming back to the same thing, which is, yes, these people are in power, but there's nothing we can do about it.
[00:18:29]  And I remember once saying to one, you know, the problem is, whether it's Hamas in Gaza or the PA in the West Bank, all peoples who have been governed by terror entities like this are, of course, always themselves at risk.
[00:18:48]  But the history of human liberation, apart from anything else, has always been people standing up to the tyrants who would rule over them and govern them.
[00:18:58]  So when Hamaz seizes control of Gaza after the election and kills the members of Fatar and others, they then make a deal with Fatah shortly afterwards.
[00:19:08]  And then another one.
[00:19:10]  So where is, you know, the fine art of this, Piers, is to find the very obvious blue water between Fatar and Hamaz.
[00:19:19]  But they keep on destroying that clear blue water.
[00:19:23]  You mentioned indeed.
[00:19:25]  Okay, but you mentioned the West Bank.
[00:19:26]  What about the aggressive expansion of the settlements that's been going on for the last year, which has been condemned by everyone, including the United Nations and others now?
[00:19:36]  You know, that has been going on.
[00:19:38]  A lot of Palestinian families are being either killed or uprooted or thrown out of their homes as there's this aggressive expansion of settlements, which is illegal.
[00:19:46]  It shouldn't be happening.
[00:19:47]  I don't think anyone could look at this and say what Israel has been doing and what Israelis are doing, these settlers there, is right and proper and legal.
[00:19:56]  Would you defend that?
[00:19:58]  Well, look, I mean, the thing with the settlements, first of all, I mean, I regard it as being a second order issue because there's a whole dispute about say they're being killed and displaced.
[00:20:14]  There's a territorial dispute in the West Bank that you could see some of the borders.
[00:20:21]  It would be as famously as Ziffy Livni said, it would be the world's ugliest border.
[00:20:25]  But you can see in the West Bank what a final status settlement could look like.
[00:20:29]  I mean, it's there.
[00:20:30]  There are areas where the Palestinians are more numerous and there are areas where the Israelis are more numerous.
[00:20:35]  And pretty much you can see with some land swaps what the Kavat would look like.
[00:20:39]  But here's the thing.
[00:20:40]  The reason why there isn't a final status settlement there is because of one thing, which is that it is not about whether or not Hahomar or other bits of East Jerusalem or the West Bank should have certain areas which should be made clear of Jews, which is, remember, that's the deal.
[00:21:02]  That in a final status agreement, the Palestinian areas in the West Bank, just like Gaza, must have no Jews in them.
[00:21:09]  That's the absolute baseline from which everything starts.
[00:21:11]  That's what everyone's agreed on on all sides.
[00:21:13]  I don't know why, but that's the agreement.
[00:21:15]  But I would say it's not about that.
[00:21:18]  Find out what Yahya Sinoa in Hamas or Mashal or any of the other leadership of Hamas in recent years or the leadership of Fatar, what they actually want.
[00:21:31]  And you see again and again, it is not about a settlement dispute on a hill somewhere in Samaria.
[00:21:40]  It's about whether or not Israel has the right to exist from 1948 to this day or not.
[00:21:47]  It isn't that every single statement, and I can't stress this enough from the Palestinian Authority of Fatah as well as Hamas, is that the Jews should be out of Haifa, that the Zionists should be out of Tel Aviv, that the Israelis must not be in Jerusalem.
[00:22:03]  You see that they don't want an inch of this ground in this area to be governed by Israel and for Jews to be able to live in it.

=== The Right to Exist Debate (08:03) ===

[00:22:12]  I wish that these people who have come to this mad situation, if they cared about their own people, an insane situation.
[00:22:22]  I wish that their forebears in 1948 had accepted the offer to have a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state.
[00:22:29]  I wish that at every point since, when a deal could have been made, whether it was at Camp David or many times since, I wish the Palestinian leadership had cared enough for the Palestinian people that they had accepted the offers on the table.
[00:22:45]  But again and again since 1948, they have said, no, we will sit this out and one day the Israelis will disappear and that's what we're holding out for.
[00:22:56]  And that is the worst possible thing that they could have said to the Palestinian people, wherever they are, inside Israel, in the disputed areas, or in Gaza.
[00:23:05]  The worst thing they have said to now several generations of Palestinians is, we will not accept 99% of a state if there is a Jewish state.
[00:23:17]  That is the reason there is not peace today.
[00:23:20]  That is the reason there is not a final status settlement agreement.
[00:23:23]  It could have been there for decades, just like the Gaza.
[00:23:27]  This could have been so different.
[00:23:29]  And the responsibility of that, for that, in my mind, does not sit on one Israeli prime minister or another or a dispute in a war cabinet.
[00:23:42]  It is on the fundamental inability and reluctance of the Palestinian leadership since 1948 and before to just accept that the Jews have the right to exist in their historic homeland and have a state which they can defend.
[00:23:59]  And whether it's Mahmoud Abbas or Yahya Sinwa, they have spent all of these decades misleading their own people and leading them into the precisely the situation of immiseration and now the horrors of Gaza that we see today.
[00:24:14]  It is on that leadership and their failure of leadership, and it's a tragedy.
[00:24:18]  Why is it then that so many, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to blame Netanyahu?
[00:24:28]  Not because they support Hamas or what they did or try to defend what they did or anything like that.
[00:24:32]  But because they believe that Netanyahu massively dropped the ball with what happened October the 7th.
[00:24:37]  It was a massive security failing for which he will be held accountable when this is over.
[00:24:41]  He's facing corruption charges, which he will be held accountable for in court when this is all over.
[00:24:47]  And he won't have the control of the judiciary or the military when that day comes.
[00:24:52]  A lot of people in Israel now believe that Netanyahu is continuing to propagate this war for self-interested reasons.
[00:25:01]  And they are taking to the streets in gigantic numbers now to express that anger because they believe that that is costing the lives of hostages.
[00:25:11]  As I say, I mean, they're on the streets out of grief, I think, first and foremost.
[00:25:16]  I mean, grief and horror at the situation.
[00:25:21]  Could they be right with that narrative about Netanyahu, that actually it's not in his interest to end this war?
[00:25:30]  I mean, look, I think it's a sort of cynical and easy explanation that, as it were, the war is going on because Netanyahu simply wants to remain in power.
[00:25:39]  He's already the longest serving Israeli prime minister.
[00:25:41]  So, I mean, I don't think he particularly needs to stay in power.
[00:25:47]  We can look into the psychology of him, but there's not much point.
[00:25:50]  And as for the trials and so on, we'll see what happens with that.
[00:25:54]  But the thing that is surprising to me, as it were, again, is that people don't see that you can put pressure, exert pressure on a democratically elected leader very easily in any democracy.
[00:26:11]  And that is where people tend to apply pressure because they have the right to.
[00:26:16]  But as I say, and we've been in this situation before in other democracies, we've had it in Britain as well.
[00:26:22]  If there's nothing you can do about a terrorist group, it's quite commonplace to put the anger and level the blame at democratically elected leaders on whose watch things have happened.
[00:26:34]  That's just inevitable.
[00:26:35]  But it's one of the things that democracies have to be aware of when they're dealing with death cults like Hamas, is the death cults operate by a totally different standard than the standards of the democracies.
[00:26:48]  And all of the difference in the world exists in that gap.
[00:26:54]  Final question about Israel before we move on to other topics.
[00:26:58]  How does this end?
[00:26:59]  You know, I've had guests on, pro-Israeli guests, who say this ends effectively with Israel controlling Gaza as an occupying force.
[00:27:10]  You know, Netanyahu has hinted at that.
[00:27:11]  But that, of course, is completely unconscionable and unacceptable to any Palestinian.
[00:27:16]  So how does this end?
[00:27:20]  Well, I mean, your guess is as good as mine, Piers.
[00:27:24]  The stated objectives of Israel's war, as I say, to return the hostages and to destroy Hamaz, which is, as I understand it, is to make sure that Hamaz is operationally incapable.
[00:27:35]  And by the way, they've had a very considerable success in that, not just of killing the leadership of Hamas, but among other things, also stopping the perpetual rocket fire, which has gone on for years from Hamas around Gaza into Israel.
[00:27:48]  As the months have gone on since last October, instead of the daily air raid sirens that used to go on in major cities like Tel Aviv, there's now almost no rocket fire out of Gaza because Hamas has been made so operationally incapable.
[00:28:03]  That's a point that very rarely gets brought out.
[00:28:06]  It's not a small thing to stop rocket fire happening all the time against the civilian population.
[00:28:12]  But as for how it ends, I don't see any appetite in Israel among almost any politicians or the public to have to continue or have to re-occupy Gaza.
[00:28:26]  I don't know of any Israeli who is desperate to be in charge of making sure that Gaza is on a day-to-day basis running well and peaceably.
[00:28:36]  It has been such a hell for such a long time.
[00:28:40]  Whatever you think of Ariel Sharon's pullout in 2005, most people would look back at it now and say, look, the Israelis didn't want to have to be in control of the Gaza then.
[00:28:51]  It was a perpetual nightmare.
[00:28:54]  They withdrew, a new nightmare began.
[00:28:58]  What the final agreement can be the day after Hamas, it'll probably be, it should be, in my view, some kind of international effort, the basis of which you can kind of see, I think, some of the Gulf states, obviously not the terrorist sponsors in Qatar, but some of the Gulf states that the Emiratis and others have expressed an interest in being involved in some way.
[00:29:21]  The Saudis will probably have to be involved, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, maybe all of these people who express concern about the Palestinian peoples and who've done so little for them for so many decades could actually do something about that concern, put money in, help with a peacekeeping force, help with a police force, and much more.
[00:29:38]  The one thing that cannot happen is that Gaza is built back up under Hamaz, and we have the same war in the same region a few years down the road.
[00:29:47]  And so what it looks like the day after, I don't know.
[00:29:50]  But you know, that's the thing about wars.
[00:29:52]  If you start a war as Hamaz did on the 7th, you don't know how it's going to end.
[00:29:58]  The one thing that Israel knows is what is impossible to tolerate.
[00:30:02]  And what is impossible to tolerate is a situation where Hamaz has control of the Gaza again and continues to fire rockets again and then does October the 7th again and again as its leadership have said they wanted to do.
[00:30:14]  On that, I completely agree with you.

=== Why Hamas Fighters Live in London (06:10) ===

[00:30:16]  Let's turn to a situation here in the UK several weeks ago, which were these riots that we saw erupting.
[00:30:24]  It was a bizarre story to watch.
[00:30:27]  I was in America at the time because it was precipitated by the appalling murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance-a-thon event by what it turned out to be a young man who was born in Wales.
[00:30:45]  His parents were Africans.
[00:30:47]  They come here legally to the country.
[00:30:50]  They were legal migrants here.
[00:30:52]  By all estimation from reports I've read, good members of the community who just happened to have a son who appears to have gone crazy and done a heinous crime.
[00:31:02]  And obviously he's now facing a court case which will determine that.
[00:31:07]  What he wasn't was Muslim or an illegal immigrant to this country or on any terror watch list.
[00:31:15]  And yet that became very quickly a false narrative promoted all over social media by a lot of people like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate and others who were fueling complete disinformation about who had perpetrated the crime.
[00:31:30]  And as a result, large numbers of thugs came out, right-wing thugs, to exact revenge against people who had nothing to do with it, which were Muslim communities, people living in asylum seeker hotels or mosques containing Muslims and so on.
[00:31:50]  So the whole thing was a bemusing thing to watch unfurl.
[00:31:55]  It showed social media at its worst.
[00:31:57]  It showed agitators at their worst.
[00:32:00]  And it was dealt with very quickly.
[00:32:01]  And we'll come to how it was dealt with in a moment.
[00:32:04]  But in the middle of all this, you got dragged into this for comments you said, not while it was going on, but last year in an interview with the former Australian Deputy Prime Minister.
[00:32:15]  We've got the clip which caused all the problems for you.
[00:32:18]  Let's play this.
[00:32:20]  I think I know that the British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing.
[00:32:29]  These paid people came into our house.
[00:32:32]  Many of them broke into our house illegally.
[00:32:34]  Many of them were never wanted here.
[00:32:37]  I don't want them to live here.
[00:32:39]  I don't want them here.
[00:32:41]  In the UK.
[00:32:43]  It's different.
[00:32:44]  Our police force behave differently and policing by consent and all of these sorts of things.
[00:32:48]  But clearly they've lost control of the streets.
[00:32:51]  Now, is it time to send in the army at some point?
[00:32:54]  Probably yes.
[00:32:55]  But if the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in and the public will have to sort this out themselves.
[00:33:01]  And it'll be very, very brutal.
[00:33:04]  Now, this was deliberately put back out to try and cancel you.
[00:33:08]  And a lot of people, Alistair Campbell, all of the usual suspects, Mehdi Hassan and others, wanted you cancelled for these outrageously inflammatory remarks, which were not said while these riots were happening.
[00:33:20]  Just to clarify, who were you talking about in that interview?
[00:33:27]  It's very clear.
[00:33:27]  It was actually after October 7th, I said, why are we in Britain so stupid that we allowed people like former Hamas military commander in the West Bank to live in London?
[00:33:41]  Why?
[00:33:44]  What did we in Britain get out of allowing terrorists to live in our midst?
[00:33:50]  Why is the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iran who wrote the book justifying the murder of the British novelist Salman Rushdie?
[00:33:59]  Why did the man who wrote the book justifying and calling for the murder of a British novelist, why is he living in London?
[00:34:07]  Why has he been living in London for the last 20 years?
[00:34:09]  What has Britain got out of this?
[00:34:11]  Why are we so crazy in Britain that we would give sanctuary to people who want our way of life over?
[00:34:19]  And I've still never had a response to that question.
[00:34:23]  I've asked it for many years and I've written extensively about it and I still cannot understand how a society can be so insane that it can welcome in people who want to destroy it.
[00:34:34]  But let's park that for a second.
[00:34:38]  The situation in Southport is, as you say, it's a very interesting example of what can happen with social media.
[00:34:43]  I don't care about these agitators like the people you mentioned, let alone Alistair Campbell, who's a fascinating man in the projection that he is able to do.
[00:34:57]  It's extraordinary.
[00:34:58]  He's a very bizarre man.
[00:35:02]  I mean, the idea that we need to listen to Alastair Campbell talking about truth in public life is kind of preposterous to me and anyone else with a long-term memory.
[00:35:10]  But anyway, I don't care about these people.
[00:35:12]  They just go around behaving as bullies and then as victims.
[00:35:16]  It's amazing.
[00:35:17]  But the Southport thing is extremely important to linger on for a moment.
[00:35:23]  Because actually it goes back to something we were talking about earlier.
[00:35:26]  Southport was such a heinous crime in an area where, I mean, you know, unfortunately we've got sort of used to terrorist attacks in some of our major cities.
[00:35:40]  But an appalling, brutal attack like this on the weakest and most vulnerable target is something which so horrifies people that of course they scour around looking for people to blame.
[00:35:57]  Now we'll see when the trial comes up if there were any motivations or, as it were, inspirations for this vile young man who did this.
[00:36:09]  But I have to say, having covered a lot of terrorist incidents in my life, one of the things that anyone who's wise knows is just wait, just wait and see who is responsible before you start sounding off.

=== Lessons from Uncoordinated Riots (02:59) ===

[00:36:26]  And unfortunately, there's lots of people who don't have the discipline to do that.
[00:36:33]  Some people who in the immediate aftermath of something are just, as I say, scouring for people to blame.
[00:36:38]  I think that there are several lessons to be taken from this, though.
[00:36:43]  One is we cannot be in a situation in our society in Britain or anywhere else where we are only one madman's attack from responses like this happening.
[00:36:57]  I have argued for decades now that if we had a sensible asylum policy and a reasonable immigration policy and we didn't allow thousands of people to come into the country illegally every few months, that we could have a reasonable kind of migration policy like we had in the 1990s when tens of thousands of people were net migration a year.
[00:37:21]  We don't have that situation in Britain now.
[00:37:23]  We do have thousands of people coming illegally all the time and never being returned and we had net migration of almost three quarters of a million in the last year of a Conservative government that had promised in election after election to bring immigration, net legal migration down to 1990s levels and they didn't.
[00:37:43]  Labour, Conservative, the Liberal Democrats, all in government promised to bring down net migration and to stop illegal migration and instead they ramped it up and ramped it up and ramped it up.
[00:37:55]  The consequences of that are totally predictable.
[00:38:00]  When people say now that my book The Strange Death of Europe was prophetic, I say it wasn't prophetic.
[00:38:05]  You didn't need to be a prophet to see the loss of trust in society, the scouring around for people to blame, the much more.
[00:38:15]  You didn't need to be a prophet to see that.
[00:38:17]  You just had to have your eyes open and be willing to say what you saw with them.
[00:38:21]  And too few people were willing to do that.
[00:38:23]  And when you have a situation like Southport, it reminds you that the situation which our politicians have created in Britain is such that you are only one madman's behavior away from having significant civil unrest.
[00:38:38]  And the problem for the Starmer government is they resurrected the EDL, that as I understand has not existed as an organization for 10 years, and they've been desperately trying to say that these were coordinated and people were coordinated.
[00:38:53]  And that was, by the way, why I got sort of dragged into this madness, was because people were desperate to have people they could say were responsible for the terrible outrages that happened in communities across the north of England, including, by the way, Muslim gangs of Muslim men caught on camera, some of them with weapons, some of whom, by the way, were being advised by a policeman to leave the weapons in the mosques so that they didn't get into trouble.
[00:39:21]  And that's an amazing thing to see, but again, kind of to be expected.

=== The Peril of Mob Rule Advocacy (07:20) ===

[00:39:26]  But what is it about our society that people were looking for people who they could say had coordinated this?
[00:39:34]  I would say it's much worse than that.
[00:39:38]  Would that there were clear coordinators here because you could go after the people.
[00:39:42]  But there weren't peers.
[00:39:43]  As I understand it, from what I can see, this was angry crowds of people that sometimes became mobs and they weren't coordinated.
[00:39:55]  That is much harder and much more worrying because it's a very important thing.
[00:39:58]  Well, I would take slight issue.
[00:40:00]  And the rest don't seem to know what to do with that.
[00:40:02]  I'm going to take slight issue because I think when you have massive followings on social media like Andrew Tate, and I challenged him about this before I went away and we had a pretty fantastic exchange, but also Tommy Robinson, who's been allowed back onto X by Elon Musk, which I don't think was a good decision, but we can debate that another time.
[00:40:21]  But when they have these big followings and they are actively promoting completely wrong information, suggesting that the perpetrator was an illegal Muslim immigrant to the country on a terror watch list, that's when the trouble starts.
[00:40:36]  I suppose my question for you, Donald, would be...
[00:40:38]  Well, let me just ask you a question for you, which is this.
[00:40:41]  I accept that what you said in this clip had nothing to do with what was happening and it was ridiculous that it got brought in.
[00:40:47]  The point I would pick you up on is on a second occasion, you posted on X ahead of a planned pro-Palestine march on Remembrance Sunday last year.
[00:40:57]  They planned to defame our war dead and desecrate the cenotaph.
[00:41:01]  If such a march goes ahead, then the people of Britain must come out and stop these barbarians.
[00:41:06]  And I would simply ask you on both of these cases, you appear to be advocating directly for mob rule to take part if it comes to it.
[00:41:16]  And well, I'll give the chance to explain what you really mean if that's not the case.
[00:41:20]  But you have a big position of influence.
[00:41:24]  I think you're a very, very smart guy.
[00:41:25]  I love having you on the program.
[00:41:27]  I love talking to you.
[00:41:28]  It's been a great conversation today.
[00:41:30]  But when you say things like the people of Britain must come out and stop these barbarians or the public will have to sort this out themselves, do you see that there is a peril there in somebody like you with a big following appearing to advocate mob rule?
[00:41:48]  Well, of course they're not for mob rule.
[00:41:52]  Look, why is our country in this position, Piers?
[00:41:57]  Why is it that tens of thousands of people, in fact, hundreds of thousands sometimes, were shutting down the centre of London week in, week out, something by the way the French government wouldn't allow in Paris, but was happening week in, week out, with people being intimidated on the streets of London and other cities, with anti-Semitic and racist abuse from these marches every single week, all the time.
[00:42:25]  Nobel government just sort of said, look, okay, we get the point, but you don't have the right to intimidate people.
[00:42:31]  Why do we have people outside Westminster Abbey calling out jihadist chants?
[00:42:38]  Why do we have people on the streets of London who you've some of whom you've you've I've seen you countering on your show calling for jihad on the streets of London?
[00:42:48]  Why are we in this position that on the 11th of November, on the day that is most sacred to the British soul, where we remember our forebears who fought for our freedom, that we should have a threat of hundreds of thousands of people who hate Britain, who never ever carry a British flag, would never ever do anything that is patriotic for Britain.
[00:43:18]  Why are we in this situation in Britain?
[00:43:21]  I would tell you why, again, it's because our government has lost control of the borders for years.
[00:43:26]  And now we are a very low trust, very febrile society in Britain, where we used to be very high trust and where we didn't used to be at risk of having riots at any moment because of one madman anywhere in the country.
[00:43:41]  We're in this situation because generations of politicians of all parties have brought us here.
[00:43:47]  That is on them.
[00:43:49]  But my question is always, why has it got to be always a one-way street on the toleration?
[00:43:56]  We are forever being told about how tolerant we have to be.
[00:43:59]  But it seems to me that the people saying that are highly intolerant of us and our traditions.
[00:44:06]  The reason why the cenotaph matters is because it is a holy place in the British psyche.
[00:44:11]  The reason why the statue of Churchill, which is always being attacked, is so sacred to us, is because it speaks to the sacrifice of our forebears and the knowledge that we in Britain are a good country, who have been a force for good in the world, overwhelmingly,
[00:44:27]  and that we have people in our country now who do not believe in that, who believe we have been a force for evil in the world, who march against our country, who threaten to despoil our holy places and our very identity.
[00:44:43]  The British public should not endlessly be putting up with being insulted and defamed.
[00:44:50]  And my belief is that we have the right to stand up for our traditions and a right to stand up for our holy places and our holy days.
[00:44:58]  And that and the situation we're in is that if anyone does say we must, you know, if people are going to threaten to attack the cenotaph, we should defend it.
[00:45:10]  People will say the people who defend it are far-right extremists.
[00:45:13]  By the way, something they would never say against the people the other way around who would deface the cenotaph.
[00:45:20]  So, you know, we have been transformed as a society into an incredibly febrile, low-trust society.
[00:45:28]  And as Nadim Sahawi said in the Times the other week, he wrote a piece where he mentioned me and he said that Douglas Murray has said for years that what is now happening would happen.
[00:45:40]  And as he said, I never did it in the spirit of glee.
[00:45:44]  I did it in deep lamentation.
[00:45:47]  I did it in deep lamentation because I could see what was being done to Britain and the British people.
[00:45:53]  And I warned against it.
[00:45:55]  And Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP and others all just merrily went along the way of making our society something different.
[00:46:06]  I never wanted that.
[00:46:08]  I don't think the British people wanted that.
[00:46:10]  We never voted for that.
[00:46:11]  When we were asked whether we wanted it, we said no.
[00:46:14]  And they didn't listen.
[00:46:16]  So we'll see what happens in the years ahead.
[00:46:19]  And we'll see if Starmer and Co. have any idea of how to solve the problems that generations of politicians have caused in Britain.
[00:46:27]  But no, I did not want to be in a society in Britain where we have jihadists living in our midsts, where we have terrorists that we welcome in, where we give every advantage to people who hate us, or at the very least do not like us.
[00:46:44]  I never wanted that to be the case.

=== Low Belief in British Leadership (04:12) ===

[00:46:46]  I'm extremely sad that it is the case.
[00:46:49]  I'd love to see it turned around.
[00:46:52]  I know how it could happen.
[00:46:54]  I have very low belief that we have anyone in charge in Britain who knows what to do about this.
[00:47:01]  But it's a problem they've brought on our society, and I profoundly wish that they had not.
[00:47:07]  We've run out of time.
[00:47:08]  Douglas, I could talk to you for hours.
[00:47:09]  Just finally, you've got a speaking talk coming up, which begins in Florida.
[00:47:13]  It's through America.
[00:47:14]  You know America extremely well.
[00:47:16]  You've lived there, worked there for many years, as I have.
[00:47:19]  Just very quickly, the dynamic of this presidential race has obviously dramatically changed with Joe Biden pulling out, Kamala Harris coming in.
[00:47:28]  There's no doubt she's got a bit of momentum that she's built, which Biden certainly didn't have.
[00:47:34]  Who is going to win this election?
[00:47:38]  I'm not going to make a prediction, Piers, because I know, like you do, that if a week was a long time in politics in the 1970s, these days a weekend is like a year.
[00:47:51]  I mean, it's only a few weeks ago that there was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
[00:47:57]  It's only a few weeks ago that the Democrat media in the U.S. was pretending that Joe Biden had another four years in him and he'd never been fitter and in better health.
[00:48:06]  And wow, did he have it in him?
[00:48:08]  And he was all pepped up.
[00:48:10]  That's only a few weeks ago as well, feels like a few years.
[00:48:15]  So I don't know.
[00:48:16]  These are long, long weeks and long months.
[00:48:18]  There's a long way to go in this campaign.
[00:48:21]  I think that there's one thing particular to watch out for, which is that the Kamal Harris bounce, which I would have to say, I would not have expected.
[00:48:30]  I mean, six months ago, the idea that Kamala Harris would be the Democrat nominee was the sort of stuff of laughter.
[00:48:38]  Okay, now she is.
[00:48:40]  The thing to watch out for is, is she going to say anything about actual policy?
[00:48:47]  Are she and Walsh going to put any meat on the bone?
[00:48:51]  I suspect not.
[00:48:52]  And it's going to be very interesting to see whether the American media lets them get away with that.
[00:48:58]  Harris Walsh sat down for an interview the other day where Wals, her running mate, looked like an emotional support animal, frankly.
[00:49:05]  He was sort of sitting by her side, nodding and sort of asked a couple of questions at the end, and it was awful.
[00:49:12]  But the really interesting thing is, Piers, is that all the criticisms you can make of Trump and the Republicans, and we could go through and we could rehearse all day.
[00:49:20]  But there has been quite a lot of discussion of what would happen in a second Trump administration.
[00:49:29]  The Harris-Wals administration, it's totally unclear to me what they plan to do.
[00:49:35]  Are they going to do anything?
[00:49:38]  What is their plan on inflation?
[00:49:39]  I mean, all you get is that Kamala Harris will say, you know, inflation is a really big problem, and that's why it's a problem.
[00:49:44]  We need to get a lot of money.
[00:49:45]  You know what's going to be a massive night, Douglas?
[00:49:47]  I've got to wrap it, but the big night is going to be the 10th of September when Trump gets on that debate stage with Kamala Harris.
[00:49:56]  The last debate had unbelievably huge ramifications.
[00:50:00]  And I've got a feeling this one could decide the election.
[00:50:06]  It could do, but look at how far out of the election it is.
[00:50:10]  It's still weeks ahead.
[00:50:11]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:50:12]  It's in September for an election in November.
[00:50:14]  But just one final thing.
[00:50:15]  It's possible that Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh will get away with this.
[00:50:18]  I'll tell you why.
[00:50:19]  Because we have a good example in Britain.
[00:50:21]  Almost nobody was running to the polls in Britain, desperate to vote for our current prime minister.
[00:50:29]  Some people are desperate to run to the poll to vote for Kamala Harris.
[00:50:32]  It's true, and I didn't foresee that.
[00:50:34]  But the way in which Starmer and the Labour Party came in was we'll say nothing about what we're going to do until after we get nobly voted into office.
[00:50:43]  Now, of course, we're being told about the taxes.
[00:50:45]  Well, it's the Joe Biden baseman strategy.
[00:50:49]  Will Harris Wals get away with the same maneuver?
[00:50:52]  They might do.
[00:50:53]  We'll see.
[00:50:54]  We will.
[00:50:54]  Douglas, great to talk to you.
[00:50:56]  Thank you very much indeed.
[00:50:57]  Great pleasure, as always.
[00:50:58]  Thanks, Piers.