Piers Morgan and Ambassador Hussam Zomlit detail Gaza's devastation, citing 42,000 Palestinian deaths and the destruction of 90% of hospitals, while arguing the conflict stems from decades of occupation rather than October 7th alone. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak joins to critique Netanyahu for leading a war without an endgame, warning that rejecting Arab League proposals risks an inevitable regional war with Iran. Both hosts agree on the necessity of a two-state solution but clash over Hamas's role, ultimately suggesting current strategies ignore fundamental realities and threaten long-term stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Defending Palestine Against Genocide00:04:42
Herzog came out and said there is no distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people.
So at that moment I had to sit here in front of you and defend our people against Israeli genocidal mindset and genocidal aggression.
You talk about genocidal, but do you accept that the language Hamas uses about Israel is clearly indisputably genocidal?
I don't know what language you're talking about.
Yes, you do.
But Hamas, come on.
Ambassador, you do.
I don't.
I am here to speak on behalf of Palestine.
I want you to put your finger on what hurts the most.
That in some reason our blood has a different color.
That we are a lesser, you know, we have a lesser of a god, something of a sort.
That we are the children of a lesser god.
You're not lesser people to me.
It is the terrorization of the people on the West Bank.
This is a state-sponsored terrorism.
Do you see a future for Hamas in any political role after it?
Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the chilling prospect of an all-out war with Iran have dominated news coverage for weeks.
It can be easy for us to forget that the war in Gaza still rages on.
The Palestinian death toll since October the 7th is now 42,000, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.
As far as we know, there's no Israeli exit strategy, and opinions on who should control Gaza after the war remain deeply divided on all sides.
Ambassador Hussam Zomlit was born in a refugee camp in Rafah.
He's now the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK and previously held the same post in the United States.
It's been a year since our first interview and I'm delighted to say he joins me in the studio now.
Ambassador, great to see you again.
Good to be back.
What a year it's been.
I just wanted to start by asking you what it's been like for you.
I mean, you're Palestinian.
You were born in Rafah.
I know you've lost family members in this dreadful war in the last year.
You've also had to be the Palestinian ambassador to a major country through this period.
What's this been like for you?
Nightmare.
And until this moment, there is a feeling in me that this could not be true.
I tell myself, no way, no way this could happen.
No way in one year we see the normalization of mass murder, senseless of children, of women, mass destruction of civilian structures, of hospitals, of homes.
Remember, our first interview a year ago, part of the discussion from your side was insisting that the Ali hospital was not bombed by Israel when 500 people, innocent people taking shelter in that hospital died.
And then since then, Israel has destroyed 90% of Gaza's hospitals.
As we speak now, Israel is targeting the only remaining standing hospital in the north of Gaza, Kamal Odwan, a hospital.
So at that time, I was thinking maybe that was the exception to the rule targeting al-Ahli hospital.
Then it became the rule itself.
Israel has destroyed, according to the UN, 78% of all of Gaza's structures.
That's 70% of homes, 80% of schools, 90% of hospitals, and 100% of universities.
Would have I thought that on the 21st century this was possible?
It is possible to literally murder with impunity?
I wouldn't.
So still there is a small little part in me think that maybe this is a nightmare and you and I will wake up to find out that actually we have learned the lesson of the 40s and the 30s.
We have stuck to our international order.
We have made sure that we prevent wars and if wars erupt, we make sure there are rules for wars.
And if these rules are violated, there are consequences and that's why we build the international judicial system.
Part of me is still hoping that we haven't lost everything.
Because what Israel did in Gaza and in Palestine does not stop at the borders of Israel and Palestine.
My fear is now not only for my children, for all of my life, I wanted to have a different future for my own children and the children of the Palestinian people.
A future that doesn't look like the way their parents and their grandparents live.
A future where they can be free on their own land, a future where they can have a government elected by them that can provide and protect them and give them the opportunities and the prosperities and the potential and all that all other nations enjoy.
But now I fear for the children of the world, Piers.
Truly.
I really do, from the bottom of my heart, because since when we allow for the normalization of this carnage, madness, senseless behavior.
Caution Regarding Israeli Narratives00:14:52
It's a powerful way to start this interview, and I absolutely empathize with what you've just been saying.
Not least your desire to want all Palestinians to have exactly the same human rights that I have, that the Israelis have, and so on.
I've been saying that from the start.
As you know, I've also had a position from the start that Israel had a right to defend itself.
I've had, as I've expressed many times, I've had a genuine moral quandary about what that right looks like, how you defend yourself against Hamas, what you do if you decide you're going after what they perceive to be a terror group when they live amongst the civilian population.
I don't have all the answers for this.
I have watched the carnage with the same utter dismay that you have.
But I come back to October the 7th.
It's not because I think it all started there.
I know it didn't.
I know this goes back many decades.
But the catalyst for what we've seen in the last year began on October the 7th.
I think when we last met, it was about a week after what had happened.
And I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I can't remember exactly how you phrased it.
You were certainly saying, look, to understand why this has happened, you need to understand the history.
You need to understand how people have been feeling.
And almost that this was not inevitable, but this, it can be explained by the history.
Now you've had a chance to really think about that.
When you go back to October the 7th, what do you feel about what happened that day?
Listen, Piers, we have been absolutely clear.
I was clear with you.
I have been clear with all other media outlets and in public engagements and private.
And our position in general as the state of Palestine, the government of the state of Palestine and the PLO is very clear.
We do not condone in any way or shape targeting civilians from all sides.
That's our strategy, that's our DNA, that's our national movement, that's our history.
And look at the numbers.
You will find out that, you know, our policies are backed by deeds, not just by words.
So this isn't about that discussion.
This was all about the world on the 7th have suffered from some sort of an amnesia where everybody just snapchat that moment or snapshot that moment.
And the whole world wanted just to focus on that moment when in fact on the 6th of October the UN released a report saying that that was the deadliest year for Palestinian children ever.
2023 before the 7th of October.
What we were trying to do here and say is, hang on, guys.
History did not begin there.
And the 7th of October did not happen in a vacuum.
And you cannot just keep in this business of blaming the victim all the time because it doesn't serve the cause of peace and the cause of clarity.
Let's zoom out a little bit.
That's what we try to do.
And then since then, I have to say, the world has been discovering what we have been saying.
Because guess what?
On the 7th of October, Israel asked you, peers, and the rest of the media in the world and everybody, look, lock, lock at the 7th of October, look at Israel, look at Palestine, look what happened to us.
And then the world did.
Everybody looked at it.
And guess what?
Nobody in the world liked what they saw.
What they saw was military occupation that is lasting for decades.
What they saw was unprecedented suppression and oppression, colonization, theft of land, besiegement of Gaza, and the population of Gaza is the most densely in the world.
And there are 80% of them are refugees who were forced out of their homes.
And 50% under 18.
And 50% are under 18.
And, you know, the whole segregation system, the apartheid system that is documented by various human rights organizations, including the UK-based one, Amnesty.
And then the world was looking.
Israel wanted the world to come in its help on the 7th.
But then what happened was the opposite.
And you want the proof?
Look at the international opinion, the public opinion, I mean.
Look at the British public opinion.
Look at the polls.
I mean, 80% of the British people are completely pro-recognition of the state of Palestine, arms, embargo, and what have you.
All that, because when the world looks deeply into the issue, they don't like what they see.
They don't like what Israel has been doing for all these decades.
They don't like impunity.
They don't want to see anybody above the law.
And this brings me to the key conversation here that you and I had at Detrim.
The first one is the issue of this, does this whole thing happen in a vacuum?
And I was telling you, this happened, did not happen in a vacuum.
There was a situation of total maltreatment of the Palestinians over decades, total denial of our rights, and this is the root cause.
This is the root cause.
Okay, but let me just on that point.
Let me just put the counter argument about some of what you said.
What Israelis have been saying very forcefully is that since 2005, they moved out of Gaza.
Now, I've held them to account because I believe that what they showed after October the 7th was they still have an ability to control energy supplies into Gaza, water supplies, food supplies and so on.
That is indisputably a form of occupation.
So they take issue with me when I say that, but I believe that is indisputable.
But they say, look, Hamas took charge in 2005.
Hamas was given billions of dollars.
And Hamas used that money to build a huge tunnel network amongst civilian population quite deliberately so that if Israel ever came after them in that terrain, they knew that the collateral damage to civilians would be enormous, which is exactly what's happened.
But the Hamas squandered the money and the goodwill and the political power that they were given in 2005.
And that all they really did was spend all that time building a, as Israel would say, a terror network, including tunnels, and arming themselves via Iran, ready to carry out what was one of the worst terror attacks of modern times, where 3,000 of them poured over the border, killed 1,200 people, wounded nearly 7,000 more people, and caused the kind of carnage that you're talking about in relation to what then came back the other way.
Do you understand that that is a big argument on the Israeli side, that Hamas had a chance to transform Gaza and went the other way?
You know, I would really ask you, peers, to be cautious about following the Israeli narrative.
What did you think of the argument?
Please, please, I think it's nonsense.
And the Israelis themselves know it's nonsense.
Why?
I'll tell you why.
Because number one, you don't say that I left a territory when you have besieged it from land, air and sea and turned the life of 2, 3.3 million, 50% less than 18%, into hell on earth.
According to many British officials, an open air present.
And we shouldn't even call it a present because presidents at least have gone through some sort of a legal process.
That was collective punishment for a period of 18 years.
That's number one.
Number two, if you think Hamas or Hezbollah for that matter are the cause of the conflict, think again.
They are the product of the conflict.
And this is what we are trying to drive home here.
This obsession with the consequences, the obsession with the symptoms has got to end.
Because, you know, the obsession with the symptoms has gotten us where we are today.
This, what the ICGA now describes as plausible genocide.
We have got to focus on the root cause.
And then, okay, let's imagine, for the sake of the argument, that Hamas did what they did on the 7th of October.
And they killed how many, you said?
1,000 people.
No, they killed 1,200 people.
They wounded 27,000.
Okay.
Israel, since then.
We're not imagining that.
That is what happened.
You're not disputing.
Well, read Israeli newspapers, please, because sometimes even some Israeli newspapers are better than British newspapers or American, for example.
But are you disputing that number of people with the United States?
No, I'm not.
I'm not.
But many Israeli newspapers, very good investigative reports came out to say that many of those people, particularly the civilians, were bombarded by their own military.
Please go back to Haaretz and reports.
This is not the conversation here.
And the conversation is not to dispute any numbers, but to make sure that we do not follow the Israeli narrative blindly because they have been wrecking and spreading propaganda and lies all along.
But all the ways of the people.
But on the point about spending the money they got in the way that they did.
Let me answer.
Is that not a dereliction of their duty to their people?
They received the money via Netanyahu.
Yes.
And if you ask Netanyahu why he did that, because he wants to break the backbone of the Palestinian...
He wants to separate the PLO from Hamas.
I get it.
Okay, good, I understand that.
Good that you understand.
The world understands that.
It suited Netanyahu to have the Palestinian vote, if you like, split in two.
It suited him.
Of course, divide and rule.
Have them at each other's throats.
The divide and rule.
I have said that.
So you want to look at the big brother here in this equation.
The superstructure that is the cause of all this, rather than just the symptoms.
You see what this conversation...
And then since the 7th, okay, Israelis say 1,200 people were killed by Hamas.
Some reports say they were killed, many of them killed by their own military.
Nonetheless, how many Israel has killed since then?
Palestinians?
42,000.
You just said in your report.
By the way, Lancet and other very respected members.
They said high numbers, aren't they?
186,000.
Because they count also those who were killed by other means, by starvation, by lack of medicine.
180,000 people.
I've seen those reports.
186,000.
Let's stick with the 42,000.
Okay?
You know, of the 42,000, there are 16,900 children.
And there are 11,700 women.
700 odd number.
So the vast majority of that number are children and women.
And how many would be Hamas members?
Let's take a recognition.
You make the calculation.
Well, you know those figures.
You must know how many Hamas.
I don't.
I really don't.
How do you know the first two parts?
Because it's the official Bureau of Statistics that have released the...
The Hamas Health Authority are not revealing then how many members of Hamas.
I am the ambassador of the state of Paris.
I'm giving you the official figures of the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics.
I get it.
I'm just curious why you don't know how many combatants have been killed.
We don't know because we don't know who was a combatant.
We know who was a civilian, so we can confirm.
We have the ID numbers, the photos, the stories, the names.
The reason I'm pushing it is Israel said at least at least 15 to 20,000 people are lying.
They're not lying.
Is that wrong?
They're lying.
Look what they're doing in Lebanon.
The same playbook, the very same.
I'm going to come to Lebanon.
More than 2,000 have been killed in Lebanon, mostly civilians.
Nonetheless, let's go back a bit.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
What's the ratio here?
The ratio.
And by the way, those who are maimed, imputated with those who are killed are 150,000, more above 150,000 Palestinians.
So if you take killed and maimed over the Israeli casualties, that's 150.
Massively high, yes.
Yeah, that's 150 to 1.
If you only take those killed, that's what?
That's 35 to 1.
Okay?
So what does that mean in numbers?
That means a life of an Israeli is worth 150 Palestinians.
It's in percentage.
Well, it doesn't mean that.
It means...
No, no, it means that...
What Israel would say is that's not what they would say is if the enemy that you're attacking who have said?
Who said, by the way, just to remind you, several weeks after October the 7th, the official spokesman for Hamas said publicly on camera, if we can do this again and again, we will.
So there's an existential threat to Israel which they have to defend.
Okay, of course they will defend themselves.
Their argument is, by trying to get rid of Hamas, they've had to attack areas with civilians.
They're lying.
Yesterday, is that not true?
They're lying.
They are deliberately targeting civilians.
I mean, yesterday I was on SKY and they brought this investigation about the killing of that child, hand Rajab, five years old.
Please look at that, i've read it.
But and I was on on there and she the the the, the Anker, was trying to uh uh, bring about some sort of admission by an Israeli spokesman.
And of course I watched the interview you, you did watch with Yada Hakim yes, and I told Yalda, you are wasting your breath because they will never, because guy had found some documentation that showed the idea were operating the area outside, of course, so they will deny anything, but they targeted her car and the car of her family for hours.
How many bullets I forgot?
Like 100, 300 bullets.
You tell me they were not targeting these civilians, but let me ask you so?
So here's my question.
I don't want to make an argument, I want to.
I, I want to talk about what you started a year ago in this show here okay, which is the proportionality.
Yes, remember the proportionality, okay.
So, if it is about proportionality, then let's, let's see.
Uh exactly, if we look at only the, the number of people killed, forget about maimed and ammutated.
So the ratio is here, if every, every Israeli, two percent of every Israeli, is worth a Palestinian, two percent now, why i'm saying this?
What is enough for Israel?
What is enough for you, Piers?
Uh uh, it's not.
It's not about 300 of henrajabs for every Israeli.
Yeah, a thousand of henrajabs for every Israeli.
Let me answer you.
Or Aisha, can I answer you?
What is international law?
Well, let me ask you where our values are ambassador, let me ask you, I think it's too much?
Yeah okay okay, and I have done for.
No, I don't think it's too much.
I don't think it's too much.
Not one Palestinian Palestinian, civilian or a child should have been killed.
Not one.
One is too many.
One is too many.
But then you must accept them by the same criteria, no Israeli civilian should have been killed.
I just told you from the beginning, civilians should not be targeted by any civilization.
You live in the UK at the moment.
Let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you a hypothetical.
No, no, but before you ask me, because I want you to ask.
I've got to ask you another question.
I want you to put your finger on what hurts the most with us.
It's this.
It's the logic that you started and many of your colleagues here that make us feel that our lives do not matter as much.
I understand.
That in some reason our blood has a different color.
Remember the one-fifth in the US vis-à-vis the black community?
That we are less of a human being.
That we are a lesser, you know, we have a lesser of a god, something of a sort.
Well, you're not to me.
That we are the children of a lesser God.
To be clear.
The Pain of Feeling Unvalued00:15:01
When in fact, when in fact, we are the birthplace of Christianity.
We are the original Christian.
And the birthplace of many civilizations.
You're not lesser people to me.
When in fact, the people of Palestine have been the pillar of the region.
When in fact, wherever they go, they build these countries.
And you know the statistics.
We come from a very ancient, very rooted society.
You know that we are one of the most, if not the most, educated.
You started by saying that I was born, I was in a refugee camp, and here I am.
I hold a PhD from your country here, from the University of London.
I was teaching at Harvard University because my society invested so much in me.
I want you and the rest of the world see us from that present dehumanization.
I do.
Hamas, Hezbollah, this and that.
This is a people struggle for 100 years.
And the people have been not giving up the absolute right for freedom.
Let me ask you a question.
It's going to be the same question I asked you before.
Do you not believe that Hamas squandered the chance they had by spending all that money on a tunnel system from which they could then launch an attack and then hide in the tunnels?
Did they not act as a dereliction of duty to their own people?
They knew when they did what they did on October the 7th, they knew what Israel would do.
They were immediately sentencing to death thousands of their own people.
Now, I look at it as dispassionately as I can.
I say, why would you do that?
Why would you immediately condemn to death thousands, if not tens of thousands, of your own people by launching a terror attack on such a scale that Israel would have felt it had no choice?
And they knew that.
So, Hamas to me, Hamas to me, from 2005 onwards, have squandered the money they got.
They squandered the opportunity they had.
They did nothing to enhance the lives of Palestinian people.
Would you agree with that?
You know, you asked me about the official position of the state of Palestine.
Hamas is a militant group.
Would you agree with what I just said?
And I'll tell you all about it.
I'll tell you all about our plans and how our plans are being quashed.
No, about Hamas.
Hamas is part of the Palestinian people.
Am I wrong?
Israeli.
Hamas is part of the Palestinian people.
And at one point, and now today in Cairo, there is a dialogue between Fatih al-Hamas.
These are the main political actions.
Am I wrong, Ambassador?
In what I say?
I was in Gaza two weeks before the 7th of October.
And I was born in Gaza.
I went to visit family.
And at that time, I saw that, number one, people think that Gaza is just left for one group.
No, the Palestinian government was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every month.
So there is the Palestinian government.
There is the international community.
The only one that Israel is trying to shut down that has extensive.
So Gaza was serviced in a way, despite the very adverse situation by our government and the UN.
And the international...
There has to be a moment of revision at one point that the Palestinian people have to, and they have the right to ask of groups from them what the cost benefit.
Of course.
But for the time being, Netanyahu, his government, Israel, the military did not allow us to breathe.
On the day one, on the seventh, Netanyahu came out and said, I am going to be after the Palestinian people.
And hell he did.
And then the president of Israel, who is seen to be a non-Netanyahu figure, Herzog, came out and said, it's the Palestinian nation, world by word, that is responsible.
We are after them.
There is no distinction, he said, between Hamas and the Palestinian people.
So at that moment, I had to sit here in front of you and defend our people against Israeli genocidal mindset and genocidal aggression.
There is no time to discuss Hamas or anybody else.
And then we go back to this whole idea of dehumanization, which is linked to this conversation.
Which is linked to Hamas.
You want to keep talking about Hamas.
No, no, I don't.
I want to talk about your obsession.
I can see you don't want to talk about Hamas, okay?
And maybe you can't.
I understand given your position.
But let me ask you this.
You talk about genocide a lot, but do you accept that the language Hamas uses about Israel is clearly indisputably genocidal?
Well, I don't know what language you're talking about.
Yes, you do.
But Hamas.
Come on.
Ambassador, you do.
I don't know.
They are wedded to the ideology of eradicating Israel.
I'm not here to speak on behalf of a group.
I am here to speak on behalf of Palestine.
The Palestinian people and the Palestinian...
One last question on them then.
Do you see...
I want to answer.
I'm going to ask you a bigger picture question.
Do you see a future for Hamas in any political power role after this?
Yes.
We do?
Yes.
As far as they commit, adhere to the framework of the Palestinian national institutions, the PLO, and there is a dialogue right now.
And I believe we have advanced a great deal.
Hamas accepted the idea of a state of Palestine on the 1967 borders.
In Beijing, there was a meeting.
They came out with a statement.
There is a lot of pressure and movement.
So we agree that there is no one group that can take the Palestinian people in the direction of war or peace without consulting the national front.
But asking about Hamas and Zionic and exterminating the other, I haven't seen anything written, but I have read the Charter of Likud.
I'm sure you did.
You did too.
Likud, for your viewers, are the ruling party of Israel now, right?
You know, in the Charter, they say the land of Israel is from the river to the sea.
Complete extermination, erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians.
Why don't you talk about that?
But it works both ways, I agree.
Why you don't talk about it?
Why the world doesn't talk about it?
You know what's the difference?
You know what's the difference?
There's no difference.
No, no, no.
There is a difference.
The difference is Israel is a state actor in the UN, so it has a set of responsibilities.
Why?
Hamas is a group.
But if you ask me, I want to compare Israel as a state actor.
But if you ask me, compare it to us.
Compare it to us.
And ask me what is our policy.
Ask me what is our vision.
What are we doing for the last year?
What we have done to contain the madness of Israel.
That's the question.
So Hamas's charter says...
Hamas' charter, original charter, the complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law.
I don't know where did you get that from.
That's the chart, the original charter.
Who sent it to you?
And we are not talking about this.
Hamas or any other Palestinian faction, they must be part of our national based on our acceptance as per the Palestinian national equilibrium, national consensus, that what we are after is the end of Israel's occupation that began in 1967, the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state on that land with Jerusalem as its capital, resolving the issue of Palestinian refugees in accordance with international law,
respecting the right to go back to their homes and farms and respecting international legality.
Let me respond.
Legality.
Let me respond.
Anybody who agrees with that and with our commitment is absolutely welcome.
Let me respond.
Leave it to us.
Hamas is a Palestinian issue.
But why aren't we discussing all the Israeli Kahanist groups in the government now?
Hamas is not in government.
Why aren't you?
Can I get a word in?
Can I get a word in?
Ask me about Smodric.
Ambassador, I'm going to...
I'm literally about to tell you that.
Ask me about Ben Griffith.
Speak.
Okay, speak, please.
Literally about to say to you, there are many things I'm sure we find agreement on.
Not least the essential need out of this for a two-state solution.
Palestine must have its own state.
I believe that Netanyahu has to go.
I believe Ben Gavir and Smodric and these right-wing headbangers on his cabinet all have to go.
They have been talking in genocidal language.
It's completely outrageous.
And I think that Netanyahu, in his desperation to get back into power, did a deal with the devil with these guys.
And we saw his attempts to thwart the power of the Supreme Court before all this, causing huge protests amongst his own people.
So on all that will be in agreement.
The settlement expansion on the West Bank has been appalling and outrageous, right?
On proportionality in Gaza, it's gone way too far, is my belief.
But one of the things I won't agree with you about is that I think that on October the 7th, Hamas, by the scale of what they did and the glee that they showed in the way they did it, with their cameras showing everything proudly to the world, the kidnapping of over 250 people, including babies, Holocaust survivors, young women, the appalling abuse of women, the appalling way they gunned down and set fire to families.
In that moment, they abrogated their right to have any power coming out of this.
And I'm surprised that you, as the ambassador to the UK, think that they should have some power coming out of this.
Well, I told you that they are part of the Palestinian people.
And at one point, dialogue is happening right now.
And the dialogue has been taking a long time.
So we make sure that we are in one ship.
The Shib has a captain.
Who will run Gaza at the end?
Only the Palestine Liberation Organization, the state of Palestine, and the government of the state of Palestine, that is the PLO, that has formed of late, only three months ago, a new government made of technocrats.
It's not made of Fatih or Hamas or any technocrats, professionals who can go and do the huge, humongous job of rebuilding Gaza, of providing recovery.
Who else has to help with that problem?
Only Palestinians can only be governed by Palestinians because there are so many dubious things.
Who's going to help you rebuild them?
We have our own money that Israel is stealing right now.
And by the way, Israel is not just waging war on Gaza, it's waging war in the West Bank.
You mentioned the settlements.
The settlements, there is the settler terrorism, terrorism.
I think it's appalling, the settlements.
Appalling.
No, no, no.
But when settlers go to villages in the middle of the night and burn homes and cars and kill people, is that terrorism?
Yes.
Is that terrorism?
I think it is.
Can you say it?
Yes.
It's what?
I think it's terrorism.
It's terrorism.
And who is sponsoring that settler terrorism?
What's the state that is harmful?
I agree.
Israel is allowing it to happen.
The government's allowing that to happen.
Excellent.
And it's completely wrong.
Excellent.
So it's a terrorization of the people on the West Bank.
I agree.
This is a state-sponsored terrorism in the West Bank.
But also, there is another war happening.
Israel is trying to collapse the Palestinian Authority.
They have withheld funding for months.
Smotrich is on an onslaught against the Palestinian institutions.
So is Netanyahu.
And the whole idea is what you just started by describing.
They don't want to see anyone.
They have to have anyone central national.
No, it's not about it.
It's not about that.
No, no.
But it is about that.
No, no, no.
Don't reduce it.
We have a mindset.
This has been for decades.
That's a big mistake to think if Netanyahu goes, everything will be hubbly-bubbly.
Everything will be just Rosi.
We have a mindset to change in Israel.
And that's why we have a plan.
That's why we have a plan.
And the plan is very clear.
Number one, accountability, because we want to make sure that never, ever, this will happen again.
We need to see war Kremlin's criminals behind bars.
But how do you guarantee Hamas won't do what they did again?
They've already said they want to.
Accountability.
And what we need to do with the full force of the international law, we have courts, we establish courts together to make sure no one will get away with murder.
What did you feel about?
Let me bring you Lebanon.
Don't block.
I've only got about five more minutes.
I want to ask you about Lebanon.
Right.
And what's been happening there with their attacks on Hezbollah, the Pager attacks with the Walkie-Talkies, and then the subsequent attacks to take out the leadership.
They would argue from October the 7th onwards, the first thing Hezbollah did was fire a bunch of rockets at Israel.
They've carried on firing them all year.
And at some point, Israel, having seen 70,000 of its people displaced, is entitled to defend itself.
Your response?
The same story.
You know, Hezbollah was created in 1982 because of Israel's occupation, military invasion of Lebanon.
And since then, Israel has been occupying Lebanon until 2006.
Israel left Lebanon in 2006.
There were a Lebanese area according to the Lebanese Shema farm.
Still Israel occupies.
And that's the context.
But you know, last time, the first time we had this conversation, you and I agreed, disagreed, disagreed almost on everything.
How about we agree?
We have been.
How about this?
So you think we have been in the last five weeks?
How about we agree on some foundational?
Because, you know, there is a lot of distraction and what's the word, deflation.
Let's agree on Fusion.
The first thing that we need to agree on is huge, unprecedented historic injustice has befallen the Palestinian people for 100 years.
Since the Nakba, at least, of 1948 and the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing of two-thirds.
Then came the occupation.
Why not?
Then came...
Hang on.
Did we respond?
I agree.
Okay, you agree.
You agree.
And you agree that Britain had something to do with that.
Yes.
Okay.
You remember the Belford Defense?
That was a colonial arrogance where we were turned into...
We were cancelled as a people.
So we were turned into non-Jewish minorities, when in fact we are the original people who lived there for a millennium.
Then came the occupation.
I would also point out, though, that hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were also displaced at the same time.
Displaced from where?
From their own homes.
No, no, in Arab countries.
I'm talking about my country.
I know.
But I'm saying it was...
My father's land.
I know.
My father's home was taken.
I understand.
You're taking it in isolation.
What I'm saying is in that period.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were also displaced from their homes.
All refugees.
All refugees have the right to go back.
All of them.
I disagree with that.
You agree with that?
I think the principle is sound.
We have to be consistent here.
So when I say Palestinian refugees, all refugees who have a righteous claim.
Now, my father was born in Rafah refugee.
I'm sorry, I was born in Rafah refugee camp.
And me and my father are only 40 minutes away from his original town.
And he could never go back.
Only once he drove me there before the 90s, so there were no checkpoints.
We could drive anywhere.
And he showed me his home.
He showed me his farm.
And as a child, I was looking around.
He couldn't actually identify his home unless he found that fig tree somewhere there because he planted it.
And as a child, I was six, seven years old.
The one question in my head at that moment was, father, why aren't we living here?
It's beautiful.
It's nice.
It's green.
Why are we in a refugee camp with all that?
And my father couldn't answer that question for many years later because he wanted to shield me from that horror that he has gone through in 1948 and the Nakba.
But then came the occupation.
Do you agree that the rest of historic Palestine, the 22%, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza are occupied territory?
I think that there is an element of occupation that has been...
What do you mean?
What element?
I wouldn't describe it.
Can you be half-pregnant?
Well, because I've heard the arguments from the Israeli side about what they feel is the land they're entitled to and why.
And some of it they make compelling arguments about.
So I do believe when Israel says there's been no occupation of Palestinian people, I think that is simply wrong.
Why We Remain in Refugee Camps00:09:00
It's false.
But I do understand there are territorial disputes over land.
Pierce.
And it goes back a long period of time.
And both sides, you know, the best piece I've read about this, Ambassador, let me tell you, Jonathan Friedland, the Guardian journalist, Jewish guy.
Yeah, I know him.
And he wrote a very fair piece saying, you know, you could construct a very good argument for both sides going back to 1948.
That you could see that why both sides feel so aggrieved.
And it involves displacement of people, it involves land disputes and so on.
It involves the conflict, the warfare, everything.
You could construct an argument on both sides, but there are points that I would agree with you about.
I mean this belief of you not saying that there is occupied territory.
This is the Uk official policy, long-standing conservatives labor.
This is the international consensus, this is the UN Security Council resolutions and, by the way, that was not a Palestinian demand, that this is the occupied territory and and in the occupation, it's a Palestinian concession, because for many Palestinians, our land is from the river to the sea.
However, we accepted international legitimacy that the occupation only began in 1967 and this is a historic process of a colonial project.
We're not going to discuss it now.
But there is military occupation right, and part of that military occupation is suppression subjugation apartheid, because we don't have the same rights like they do.
We don't vote like they do.
They control our rights.
Okay, we don't have the rights.
So, within this context, I really want to allow me you've asked me many questions and please answer.
I've got to wrap it up okay, but within this context, what do you think we should do.
What should we be doing?
Well, I think that how can we react to this?
How can we resist this?
Well, I well, how can we defend ourselves?
Not with terrorism.
Okay, with what, tell me spend?
Well, not by pouring thousands of terrorists over a border and with everyone say, with with what?
With, not with what, it's a good question.
With what?
No no, I want you to tell me.
I don't know the answer.
If if if okay, ask.
Ask any other nation that were occupied.
Ask the Algerians when France occupied them and colonized them.
Ask the South Africans.
You know what I honestly believe about these things.
Do we have the right?
Let me just do we have.
Do we have the right to listen?
Let me answer you like this, I remember the troubles in northern Ireland and people saying it was intractable, it could never be resolved, that it was too deep, it had gone generational and people had lost too many people on both sides, they would never get peace.
And what actually?
What did it in the end were people who, who were genuinely great leaders at the time Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Mitchell in America and others came together and they just went at it until they found peace.
Good right, and so my point is, it can be done, but I honestly believe the way it gets done is through inspirational leadership.
We did that and yes, Arafat brought all of us to a peace, and then he walked away.
No, he didn't yes, he did.
Come on, come on, interview Bill Clinton about that.
No, come on, come on.
No no no, no.
Saddest thing in his whole tenure was that he had the deal.
No no listen, that's not true.
A year later, an Israeli killed its Haqq Rabbin, and then he that bullet did not an extremist did it.
That bullet did not just kill Haqq Rabbin And it killed the whole peace process.
I agree.
And then Israel has undermined the power.
But Arafat did walk away from the deal.
But that's not true.
That is not true.
He was not offered what the minimum Palestinian is.
Bill Clinton told me he was.
What the maximum we could offer.
Clinton has captured Israelis.
I'm only wrapping you up because I have Ehud Barak, who is the former Prime Minister of Israel, waiting.
We're waiting patiently.
We've had, I think, 50 minutes or so, probably a much longer interview than the first time.
It's great to have you here.
I would love to continue this conversation.
I get the passion.
I get the history.
I get you're from Rafah.
I get it's personal to you.
You know a lot more about the intricacies of all this than I do.
I'm trying to help you get to a place where Palestinian people can live in peace and security and with the same human rights as everybody else.
That is absolutely what I agree with you about.
But I think you're a great spokesman for them.
But think with me how we get to peace.
That's the key question.
And follow what we are doing.
We are trying to just give an alternative path whereby it's about the legality, the ICG and the UN.
It's about bringing political momentum with the region.
It's about the anti-tote to Netanyahu.
And we need help right now.
Yeah, I just don't think you can do it with Hamas.
But on that, we'll disagree.
It's good to see you, Ambassador again.
Don't leave us alone.
I enjoy the conversation.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well, 51 years ago, Ehud Barak led a covert Israeli raid into Lebanon to kill three top PLO officials.
It was the first time that Lebanon became an arena for conflict between Israel and its enemies, but very clearly not the last.
Barak became the IDF's most decorated soldier in history and later Israel's prime minister.
And he joins me now.
Mr. Barak, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
I was just having a fascinating conversation with the Palestinian ambassador to the UK.
I'm sure you heard some of that.
Ultimately, do you share his big picture, which is there has to, in the end, out of this, be a two-state solution where Palestinian people live with the same human rights as everybody else?
Sure, they have the same human rights.
Every individual Palestinian who will not participate in a barbarian attack against Israel or in some terror attack, they deserve the rights of every human being.
I want to make two notes about your conversation with the Palestinian gentleman.
One about the very beginning, and the second one about Camp David, which you mentioned with Clinton.
So about the beginning, you know, I'm older than all of you, so I remember the 48th war.
So during this war, it's true that 650,000 Palestinians left what became Israel.
But at the same time, during the same war and two years after, 650,000 Jews, as you have mentioned, from the whole Arab world came to Israel.
We never called them refugees.
We called them brothers.
We tried to absorb them with many mistakes along the way, many sorrows and pains.
But now more than half of the Israeli population is the offspring of these refugees, so to speak, who came from the Arab world.
Now, I once told Arafat, Camp David, in front of Clinton, Israel and we Israel will never be apologetic about what happened to the Palestinian refugee.
Not because we don't understand the suffering, of course we understand, but because of the causal chain.
Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish people, accepted the General Assembly resolution about making two states in former Palestine, a Jewish state side by side with an Arab state.
The Jewish state was supposed to be three cantons, hardly connected to each other, without Jerusalem, without even a corridor to Jerusalem.
The Palestinians rejected it and called upon Arab five armies from all around the emerging new Israel to kill the baby before it can stand on its feet.
That was the essence of 48.
And we survived it.
So we will never be morally kind of responsible for the tragedy.
But we understand that they were suffering.
We expected them to do the same, to call these refugees brother and to find a way to let them live.
Another note about the recent, even recent, the generation ago, Camp David, we, unlike the urban legends about it, Clinton and myself never told Arafat, take it or leave it.
We never tried to dictate it.
I told him in front of Clinton, Mr. President, you can have reservation from any or all the paragraphs of this document.
We don't ask you to swallow it and say yes.
We asked you only to take it, and it was a far-reaching proposal, better than anything he ever seen, covering metaphorically 90 plus percent of whatever he can think of.
We just said take it as a basis for future negotiations.
The fact that Arafat did not accept, rejected it, and turned deliberately, you know from intelligence, deliberately to terror makes him the responsible.
And that's the reason why Clinton, till these days, was the one who rejected it.
Yeah, I've had the same conversation with President Clinton.
I've interviewed him several times about this, and that's exactly how he articulated it to me.
And I think that was the great opportunity, which got sadly completely squandered.
Missing the Strategic Opportunity00:08:09
Let me ask you, where do you feel we are now?
Many people are extremely fearful about what has happened in the last two weeks and feel that Israel is barreling its way not just through Gaza and now through Lebanon, but also ultimately to a head-to-head direct conflict with Iran, who they believe are responsible for fueling all this anti-Israel terror hatred through Hezbollah, through the Houthis, through Hamas and so on.
Are you as fearful or is there a strategy to this that we don't quite understand?
I think that basically we are more led by events than leading it.
So the Hezbollah joined the event a year ago, immediately after the 7th of October last year.
Hezbollah joined on their own initiative and started to hit.
They caused us leaving, creating, you have mentioned it earlier, some 70,000 Israelis from the north, from the Lebanese border, are refugees in our country, beyond the 60,000 from the south who became refugees.
So Israel had a compelling imperative to act in Gaza to make sure that Hamas will not reign politically over Gaza anymore and cannot threaten Israel from there.
And then Hezbollah joined, and then the Houthis joined.
We never had any conflict with them.
And it's always orchestrated in a way by Iran.
So basically, Israel is not responsible for it.
But having said that, we were stuck in Gaza for too many months.
I think personally, it could have been over within three months, eight months ago, we could pull the weight to the north and hit the Hezbollah.
But it happened for another reasons only right now.
But in the last three weeks, or in the last four weeks, Israel regained both the self-confidence of Israel in their own armed forces, intelligence, air force, whatever, even the government in a way.
Israel resumed or regained its deterrence and the respect from neighbors.
And we are now on the verge of a regional war that I'm not sure it's inevitable.
I don't think that anyone really needs it, but it can happen because Israel now has a compelling need to respond to Iran.
You know, neither the UK nor other sovereign on earth would accept second time in half a year having a major unprecedented anywhere else on earth of some 180 ballistic missiles landing on your small country.
Israel will have to respond forcefully, and I believe it will do it.
But how does, let me ask you, how does this all end?
How will it end?
How does all this end?
I mean, if people look at it and just the endlessness of the world.
I can tell you how it will end.
It's clearly not, it bodes ill to all players.
I think that Iran is vulnerable.
I think that Hamas exposed to be extremely vulnerable.
I think that Hezbollah is vulnerable in Gaza.
But it's true that Israel is the strongest power in the region, but not omnipotent.
So in order to want this full-scale regional war, I think we better have the Americans on our side.
We better have this alliance of the blessing, as Netanyahu described it in the UN, backed by Europe, on the United States, Israel, some like-minded countries in the rest of the world, and deployed vis-à-vis the axis of rogue state led by Iran with all these proxies that you have mentioned, and backed by Russia and in a way indirectly by China.
So that's the right deployment.
That's the major failure of our government.
The government it leads in spite of the valor and sacrifice and devotion of fighters on the ground and heroic fighting.
It doesn't work without a strategy.
And Israel, basically, the grave mistake of our government, they're leading a war without any apparent strategy.
Not vis-à-vis Hamas, not vis-a-vis Hezbollah, not vis-à-vis Iran.
Yes.
Not vis-à-vis the proposal that is on the table from day one almost by President Biden to join hand with this alliance that he proposed.
And Netanyahu talked about it by the UN, but did nothing to let it emerge in the last year.
Yeah, you see, I completely agree.
I don't see what the longer-term strategy is, either for what happens in Gaza, what happens in Lebanon, what happens with Israel itself.
I mean, I'm not quite sure whether Netanyahu understands what he's doing, other than he's seen his own poll numbers improving the more he's gone after Hezbollah.
So he's now more popular than he's been for a year in Israel because people like what he's been doing with the pages and the walkie-talkies and all the rest of it.
But ultimately, I don't see an endgame here, and I certainly don't see any sign of peace.
Look, I don't see either a simple endgame, but in a way we are now into it.
So it's not the time to discuss the very long-term horizon.
But I say Israel had to have a strategy because I'm a great believer in an old Roman saying, if you do not know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.
And you can find the equivalent even in Alice in Wonderland.
We had to define from day one what we expect in the morning after the war in Gaza against the Hamas.
It would shorten the war dramatically.
It would have enabled us to bring back the hostages.
It would enabled us eight months ago to turn to the Hezbollah and deal with them separately.
I think that what the Israel government missed, probably out of self-imposed blindness, is the fact that Sinwar is not afraid from another 10,000 Gazans, innocent Gaza being killed, or from another 5,000 terrorists of his own being killed.
The only thing he's afraid of is the possibility that someone will replace him in power in Gaza.
And it happens that the only someone who can replace him and can and will be legitimate in the minds of international law, international community, neighboring Arab countries, those who have a good relationship with Israel and the Palestinians themselves, is the Palestinian authority.
So namely what our government missed by self-imposed blindness is the need to respond to President Biden's proposal and allow the Americans to arrange with the Arab neighbors that an inter-Arab force will enter backed by a majority resolution of the Arab League to take control of Gaza from Israel for limited period,
let's say nine months with provision to stretch it over another nine months, during which they have to bring back what Biden called revised or strengthened Palestinian authority to control Gaza.
Turning Politics Into Religious War00:02:07
That should have been the idea.
And of course the Israeli government did not accept it because Netanyahu is politically had what I call the unholy alliance with extremist racist messianic Jewish supremacy nuts in his government who wants basically their vision is to ignite a full-scale clash about the Temple Mount to turn our whole conflict with the Palestinians,
which is basically political and territorial, to turn it into a religious war against the whole Islam world.
And basically that's our mistake.
I should tell you something else that will help to clarify the picture.
Several thesis, core thesis of Netanyahu collapsed on 7th of October.
Number one was Hamas is an asset, Palestinians saw it as a liability rather than the other way around.
Second was you can navigate Israel in the Middle East, very tough neighborhood, with Israel very different from the neighbors, without ever making any tough decisions that needs courage, character and determination.
And the third one was that you can break out to the Muslim world and to the Arab world by having normalization with Saudi Arabia without ever dealing with the big elephant in the room, the Palestinian issue.
These three core concepts collapsed and they are at the basis of this whole failure.
We cannot say we have also a failure of our intelligence on 7th of October, failure of our operational forces, but the basic, the fundamental mistake is the strategic vacuum created by those wrong thesis about reality of Netanyahu, which he tried to implement.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Ehu Barak, Israeli Former Prime Minister, thank you so much for joining me.