they end up chanting in front of him<br>"Viva<br>Lamuete long live death." They have<br>their counterparts today they are the<br>people who who taunt Americans<br>Westerners Israelis and others with<br>lines<br>like "We love death more than you love<br>life."<br>The following is a conversation with<br>Douglas Murray author of The War in the<br>West The Madness of Crowds and his new<br>book on democracies and death cults we<br>talk about Russia and Ukraine and about<br>Israel and Gaza douglas has very strong<br>views on these topics and he defends<br>them brilliantly and fearlessly as I<br>always try to do for all topics I will<br>also talk to people who have different<br>views from Douglas including on the next<br>episode of this<br>podcast we live in an era of online<br>discourse where grifters drama farmers<br>liars bots sickopants and sociopaths<br>roam the vast beautiful dark land of the<br>internet it's hard to know who to trust<br>i believe no one is in possession of the<br>entire truth but some are more correct<br>than others some are insightful and some<br>are delusional the problem is it's hard<br>to tell which is which unless you use<br>your mind with intellectual humility and<br>with rigor i recommend you listen to<br>many sources who disagree with each<br>other and try to pick up wisdom from<br>each also I recommend you visit the<br>places in question as Douglas has as I<br>have or at least talk face to face with<br>people who have spent most of their<br>lives living there whether it's Israel<br>Palestine Ukraine or<br>Russia let's try together to not be cogs<br>in the machine of outrage and instead to<br>reach toward reason and compassion<br>there is no Hitler Stalin or Mao on the<br>world stage today plus there are<br>thousands of nuclear weapons ready to<br>fire human civilization hangs in the<br>balance the 21st century is a new<br>geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked<br>with<br>solving let's not mess it<br>up this is the Lexman podcast to support<br>it please check out our sponsors in the<br>description and now dear friends here's<br>Douglas<br>Murray what have you understood about<br>the war in Ukraine from uh your visits<br>there just looking at the big picture of<br>your understanding of the invasion of<br>February 24th 2022 and the war in the 3<br>years since well I mean several things<br>there's<br>a political angles which are forever<br>changing<br>but on the human level as as you know if<br>you visit troops frontline troops you<br>have that admiration for people<br>defending their country defending their<br>homes defending their families i'm<br>struck by the way in which that is at a<br>remove from the sort of political noise<br>and the media noise and and much more um<br>it's very easy to get caught up in<br>the twos and fros of today's news but uh<br>that to my mind is is that's the single<br>thing that struck me most in my visits<br>there uh is just um the the people I've<br>met who who are fighting for a cause<br>which at that level is unavoidable<br>undeniable so the thing that struck you<br>that's different from the the media<br>turmoil is just the reality of war yeah<br>of course i mean um you know people who<br>uh have either lived<br>under Russian occupation from invading<br>armies and then come back out into the<br>world having been liberated as in late<br>2022 or the people now organized most<br>recently there in recent weeks who were<br>just getting on with their job as<br>soldiers<br>uh whilst the world was talking about<br>them when were you there in early on in<br>this escalated war of 22 yes first time<br>was in uh I was with the the Ukrainian<br>armed forces when they retook Kersan and<br>I was back in recent weeks and was there<br>when the Trump Sinski blow up happened<br>in fact I was with I was in a Ukrainian<br>dugout at the front lines when I was<br>watching it how's the morale how's the<br>way the content of the conversations<br>you've heard different on the from the<br>two visits separated by I guess two<br>years one<br>level I mean nothing has changed much<br>you know it's a sort of it it's not a a<br>total standoff because intermittently<br>each side gains territory from the<br>others but it's it's not I mean there<br>have been no very significant military<br>gains by either died in the interim<br>period i think uh my experience of the<br>the soldiers the people of Ukraine early<br>on in the war there's a intense optimism<br>about the outcomes of the war there's a<br>sense that they're going to win and the<br>definition of what win means was like<br>all the territory is going to be one<br>back yeah I I certainly uh on the front<br>lines facing Crimea was uh became quite<br>familiar with people who thought that<br>the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even<br>be able to get Crimea back and that<br>struck me even at the time and I said I<br>I thought that that was an overreach and<br>uh now I<br>think the people the soldiers at least<br>in my experience when I visited the<br>second time are more exhausted<br>the morale<br>the dreams the certainty of victory<br>has has maybe faded from the forefront<br>of their minds well 3 years of war will<br>tire out anyone what did you think of<br>the blow up between Zilinski and Trump<br>as you're uh sitting there in the dugout<br>well it is it was a very uh disturbing<br>place to watch it from perhaps anywhere<br>would have been<br>um<br>and I mean obviously it was a meeting<br>that shouldn't have happened it was far<br>too early why do you think so there's<br>not enough actual pathways to peace on<br>the table well I think the mineral deal<br>I mean I love the fact that everyone's<br>now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian<br>mineral deposits but I think uh as I've<br>learned and we'll talk about Israel and<br>Palestine i'm learning that everybody's<br>an expert on geopolitics and the history<br>of war on the internet and now mineral<br>deposits obviously yes the I'm really<br>speaking at the edge of my mineral<br>deposit knowledge here but no I mean I<br>from what I could see the deal that that<br>uh the American administration was<br>trying to uh get the Ukrainian<br>government to sign was was sort of too<br>early to<br>um forced the Ukrainians weren't were<br>ready to sign a deal but were obviously<br>under intense pressure um and I think<br>certainly Zalinski wasn't expecting to<br>actually wasn't expecting to go until<br>pretty much the day<br>before<br>um was obviously visibly tired and<br>exhausted again as you are after that<br>amount of pressure for that long a time<br>and um no I mean the thing that struck<br>me and I I said this in my column in the<br>New York Post from there that uh the<br>thing that struck me was I said to some<br>of the soldiers I was with uh you know<br>what do you make of this and um you know<br>one of them just said to<br>me well you know we're advised not to<br>follow too closely the ins and outs of<br>the politics of this you know and um but<br>of course everyone has Instagram or<br>scrolls and among dog pictures and the<br>you know the hot women or whatever is um<br>you know what happened in the oval and<br>uh but what struck me was this same guy<br>and saying "I've got a job to do." Right<br>and uh there's a<br>clarity and a wisdom to that but uh your<br>job is is is bigger than that right is<br>to understand the politics as well and<br>what do you think about the politics of<br>that moment because that was a real<br>opportunity to come together and make<br>progress on peace right and it from by<br>all<br>accounts was not a successful step<br>forward i don't think by any account it<br>was a successful step forward<br>unless to some extent it was a play but<br>from DC to say to Putin look we ded off<br>Zalinski and you know now give us<br>something that's the only uh remedial<br>idea I have about what might have been<br>behind it but I think it was just one of<br>those extremely uh I mean just<br>awful political moments<br>um Zalinski was<br>obviously<br>deeply irritated by the the the<br>interpretation of the war that he was<br>hearing from<br>Washington uh it was only a week after<br>the Trump comments about Zalinski being<br>a dictator<br>um and people in the administration<br>implying that Ukraine has started the<br>war and I think<br>that's that must be for Zalinski a<br>pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to<br>be<br>in and uh I had significant sympathy for<br>him in finding it<br>bewildering because it would be<br>bewildering i think the sad thing to me<br>also on the mundane details of that<br>meeting and just the unfortunate way<br>that meetings happen I think it's true<br>that he was also exhausted yes there was<br>a of a of a reporter that was<br>asked a question about outfit in a way<br>that listen Zilinski everybody has their<br>strengths and weaknesses he's an<br>emotional being for better or for worse<br>and there's a dumb of a<br>reporter Taylor Green's boyfriend<br>he is the things you know see you're a<br>real journalist he's he's from one of<br>the the new I'm all for opening up the<br>White House press pool and all that sort<br>of thing but it means that you get some<br>people in who are sort<br>of yeah from Blogland there's nothing<br>wrong with that but it it means that you<br>get somebody who will do something like<br>that the problem with that interaction<br>as I saw it was that the that guy asked<br>that well disrespectful<br>question and uh I I think it was<br>disrespectful and I I'll very quickly<br>say why i mean I think that I think that<br>when a man comes from the realm of war<br>into the realm of peace the people in<br>the realm of peace should have some<br>respect or at least concession that the<br>other man has come from the realm of war<br>and that if you're sitting in a<br>political environment where you talk<br>about people being destroyed and<br>decimated and defenistrated and much<br>more to a man<br>who's for whom none of that is<br>metaphorical I think that's extremely<br>hard to to<br>accept um and I think that probably also<br>at that moment there was a sort of sense<br>of you know Zilinsky is being<br>disrespected by being asked about what<br>he's<br>wearing when as everyone knows you know<br>Churchill during World War II used to<br>wear his fatings uh on foreign vis to<br>remind people you're coming from the<br>realm of war and I think that probably<br>in that in that moment one of the things<br>would have been going through his head<br>would be but I mean if if if this was<br>Putin sitting here being assaulted by a<br>journalist you know you'd you'd hope<br>your host stepped in and defended you i<br>mean if let me try this one out i mean<br>if if a if a journalist in the Oval<br>Office if Putin was sitting there or a<br>putitive journalist said to Putin you<br>know um everyone knows you've had a lot<br>of facial work done and uh word is<br>you've used the same guy that Berlesi<br>used to use um can you comment on on<br>that you you'd you'd you'd say well<br>that's a kind of disrespectful question<br>for journalists to ask and it's a little<br>bit um off off what needs to be gone<br>over uh and this the same thing with<br>Zalinsky with the outfit i think it was<br>just petty and and and threw things off<br>in a bad way yeah and it was poorly<br>researched because I think Zilinski was<br>explaining this like 3 years ago at the<br>beginning of the war why he wears what<br>he wears and he's been consistent<br>wearing the same it's also by the way<br>it's an example of the frivolity of a<br>lot of the of the attempts to attempts<br>to understand what's going on i mean my<br>view is that is that since actually most<br>people in fact everybody cannot be an<br>expert on everything one of the things<br>that we always do is to seize<br>on minor and really quite unimportant<br>things i mean for I mean every site does<br>it look at the way in which the American<br>right for years talked about the<br>Churchill bust leaving the White House<br>Oval Office in the Obama years i I<br>didn't want to hear another darn thing<br>about the Churchill bust after eight<br>years because it just it was in lie of<br>trying to understand and actually<br>critique Obama's foreign policy it was<br>just an easy<br>shorthand i think it's the same we we're<br>always tempted to that but the thing is<br>I think you mentioned Putin i think<br>Putin would have been able to uh respond<br>himself to that journalist<br>effectively and he would have done it in<br>Russian oh yeah the language thing was<br>Yeah so I wanted to sort of lay out<br>several just unfortunate things that<br>happen in these situations and I think<br>it happens in all peace negotiations and<br>it's funny how history can turn in<br>moments like this i do think there's a<br>reporter combined with the fact<br>that the you know with all due respect<br>but Zilinsk's English sometimes is not<br>very good yes and apart from anything<br>else if he had have agreed to not done<br>it in English he would have bought<br>himself the extra seconds in some of his<br>replies that he needed yeah yeah and<br>have the wit the guy is funny witty<br>intelligent you know he could do that in<br>the native language of whether it's<br>Ukrainian or Russian to be able to<br>respond and get the interpreter<br>so all of that is really unfortunate<br>because I think on those little moments<br>it's it's a dance and there's an<br>opportunity there you know the<br>Republicans the the right-wing in the<br>United States have a general kind of<br>skepticism of Zilinski and and but that<br>doesn't mean it has to be that way it<br>can turn it can change it can evolve<br>it's very interesting why it has<br>happened why do you think it's happened<br>i the politics in the United States is<br>so dumb that at the very beginning it<br>could just be reduced to well the left<br>went Putin bad Zilinski good rahrh<br>Ukrainian flags therefore the right must<br>go the opposite it sometimes is<br>literally as dumb as that let's each<br>pick a side and call the others dumb i I<br>had a a line I used recently um the<br>necessity of people who live too long<br>online to try to wade their way out of<br>the memes it is sort of like that isn't<br>it because yes I mean I can understand<br>the people who find it very irritating<br>that so many people who would put BLM<br>flags or pride flags or you know trans<br>flags in their bio then put Ukrainian<br>flags in their bio despite almost<br>certainly not knowing where Ukraine was<br>and uh if that happens the inevitable<br>instinct of a lot of people who aren't<br>really thinking is to say "That's really<br>annoying these people are really<br>annoying i'll sock it to them." But<br>that's where you've got to try to rise<br>above that and say "Actually funnily<br>enough the fate of a country doesn't<br>depend on my tolerance for memes online<br>today." Yeah so I think the memes can be<br>broken through in meetings like the one<br>that happened between Zilinsky and Trump<br>there can been real camaraderie i've<br>seen the skill of that just recently<br>having researched deeply and interacted<br>with uh Narendra Modi m here's somebody<br>who has the skill of you know for his<br>country for his situation being able to<br>somehow be friends with Putin and<br>friends with Zilinski and friends with<br>Trump and friends with Biden and friends<br>with Obama was to go for and<br>that while still<br>being strong for his country and like<br>fundamentally a nationalist figure who's<br>like you very not globalist not uh<br>anything but pro- India India first<br>nation first in fact nation first with a<br>very specific idea what that nation<br>represents sure and that you know<br>Zilinski could do all of those things<br>but have the skill of navigating<br>uh the Trump room because every single<br>leader has their own peculiar quirks<br>that need to be navigated yes the<br>obvious one i mean I don't want to make<br>it sound like it was all Zilinski's<br>fault but I mean the obvious one was at<br>the beginning of the meeting to say yet<br>again as he has done for three years<br>thank you to America and the American<br>people and American politicians from<br>across the aisle for your support for my<br>country and it's our need we're deeply<br>grateful and because he for once forgot<br>to say that i I think it's not that<br>simple i think there's a It's not that<br>simple it's one reason i think saying<br>thank you he didn't need to say thank<br>you there's that was why Vance that was<br>what Vance leapt in on he's just picking<br>a thing to leap on there's a whole<br>energy you have to acknowledge in your<br>way of being that you have been very<br>Biden buddy buddy with the left for the<br>last four years there's ways to fix that<br>listen these people are complicated<br>narcissists all of them biden Trump you<br>have to navigate the complexity of that<br>and you basically have to say a kind<br>word to Trump which is like showing<br>there's many ways of doing that but one<br>of them is saying uh feeding the ego by<br>acknowledging that he is one of the<br>world's greatest negotiators right I'm<br>I'm glad we're able to come to the table<br>and negotiate together because I believe<br>you are the great negotiator mediator<br>that can uh actually bring a successful<br>resolution to like as opposed to have an<br>energy of Like it should be obvious to<br>everybody that Ukrainian are the good<br>guys and Russia is the bad guys there's<br>this whole energy of entitlement that he<br>brought he forgot that there's a new guy<br>you got to like convince the new guy<br>that this global mission that this<br>nation is on this war that is in in many<br>ways the west<br>versus the east that this there's ideals<br>there's whole histories here that this<br>is a war worth winning you have to<br>convince them right yeah no sure and he<br>obviously failed on that occasion um but<br>as I say it must be bewildering to have<br>landed in a place where people were<br>seriously talking about Ukraine starting<br>the war right and Zalinski not Putin<br>being the<br>dictator i I I did the front page of the<br>New York Post the day after the<br>president's comments on that saying that<br>the big picture of Putin just saying<br>"Right this is this is a dictator." And<br>you know I think the people can be uh<br>live enough to be able to recognize that<br>you know you can make criticisms of<br>Zalinski or the Ukrainians but it<br>doesn't mean you have to fall full<br>Putin and again unfortunately a lot of<br>people in our time don't have that<br>capability can we go right into it what<br>is your strongest criticism of Putin<br>he's a dictator who's very<br>bloody as repressive as you can be of<br>political opposition internal opposition<br>he's kleptomaniac of his country's<br>resources has enriched himself as much<br>as he could uh as he has with the<br>cronies around him uh he's not just<br>acted to<br>uh destroy internal opposition in Russia<br>but has gone to other countries<br>including my own country of birth and uh<br>killed people on there our soil using as<br>it happens weapons of mass destruction<br>the use of pelonium in the center of<br>London is not good the use of incredibly<br>dangerous nerve agents that could kill<br>tens of thousands of people in a<br>charming cathedral city like Salsbury<br>not good if the sort of apologist of<br>Putin say "Well he's just a sort of<br>tough man who's looking after his house<br>business."<br>Well I don't think even if you think he<br>has the right to do that that he should<br>be doing it in third<br>countries deliberately using uh weapons<br>that are meant to show that you could<br>take out tens of thousands of British<br>citizens yeah i mean that's just for<br>starters what do you make for uh Do you<br>think he's actually popularly elected no<br>do you think the the results of the<br>elections are fraudulent<br>yes i mean do you think it's possible<br>that it's just that the opposition has<br>been eliminated and he's legitimately<br>popularly elected it definitely helps a<br>chap if he's killed all of his opponents<br>something by using the term chap in that<br>context is just uh marvelous but you<br>know I know I mean but I mean seriously<br>you you uh if if if people are worried<br>about this is another of the sort of<br>slightly Alice in Wonderland things<br>recently about Zilinski is people are<br>saying why why hasn't he's a dictator<br>because he hasn't held elections during<br>a total war of self-defense and it's<br>like<br>well you know if you're really really<br>passionate about free and fair elections<br>in that neck of the woods you'd at least<br>notice that that Russian elections are<br>not free and fair in any meaningful<br>sense but this doesn't mean that you<br>have to say that therefore they should<br>have western style elections and and and<br>freedom that Russia is is ready to go<br>and become a western liberal democracy<br>it doesn't mean any of that at all let's<br>just at least<br>note that this is what Putin is what do<br>you think is the motivation for his<br>invasion of Ukraine in 22<br>it's what he's said for years which is<br>uh the basically the reconstitution of<br>the Soviet Union do you think there is u<br>empire building components to that<br>motivation i would trust most my friends<br>in Eastern Central Europe who certainly<br>do think that there's a reason why the<br>Baltic countries are the countries that<br>are spending highest in percentage of<br>GDP on defense and it's because they're<br>very worried i I don't think they're<br>faking it i don't think they're faking<br>it for me or for anyone else i think the<br>Lithuanians the Latians the Estonians<br>and others are genuinely worried for the<br>first time in some decades do you think<br>there's a<br>possibility that uh the war continues<br>indefinitely even if there's a ceasefire<br>and the peace reached the war will<br>resume he will seek expansion even<br>beyond Ukraine yes<br>and uh the most obvious thing is that if<br>Trump manages to negotiate a<br>ceasefire it'll be a temporary pause and<br>whoever comes in as president after<br>Trump uh Putin will use the opportunity<br>to advance again uh yes again one of the<br>things that I have heard from parts of<br>the American right and others is that<br>all he wants is Ukraine that that's all<br>he wants and that he has no history or<br>of rhetoric or actions that suggest<br>anything else and again it's one of the<br>reasons why it's useful traveling to<br>places and seeing things with your own<br>eyes because I very much remember being<br>in the country of Georgia uh after Putin<br>tried to invade in 2008<br>so I just again people don't have to be<br>the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian<br>cause just to recognize that that it<br>doesn't seem to be the case that that<br>Ukraine is the only thing in Putin's<br>vision do you see value and uh maybe<br>depth and power to the realist<br>perspective of all this you know<br>somebody like John Mir Shimemer's<br>formulation of all this that uh in these<br>invasions of<br>Georgia of Ukraine it's using military<br>power to expand the sphere of influence<br>Mhm in the region in a cold calculation<br>of geopolitics it's interesting one of<br>the one of the fascinating things about<br>the last few years is there's been an<br>act of sort of necromancy of certain<br>figures who were totally totally<br>debunked uh um in the area of Ukraine<br>Mia Shimmer and uh in the case of Israel<br>people like Finkelstein and uh it's been<br>interesting cuz these are people that<br>one hadn't heard of for some years<br>because um they were not listened to for<br>usually for good reason but by the way<br>first of all I'm very skeptical of the<br>term realist in foreign policy<br>because most people to some extent will<br>say that they are a realist in foreign<br>policy very few people are surrealists<br>in foreign policy very few people are<br>unrealists i would like to meet them a<br>surrealist foreign policy analyst we did<br>mention Alice in Wonderland so yeah I<br>mean maybe we should introduce the term<br>but I mean if you want to say if you<br>want to look gimlet out eyed out across<br>the world you you're you're a realist i<br>think the steelman of their argument<br>would<br>be Russia has or believes it has a<br>sphere of influence and is regrettable<br>but there's very little we can do about<br>that<br>that would be about the best version of<br>that argument that you can make well to<br>expand on that Steelman isn't this how<br>superpowers<br>operate in the dark realist/s surrealist<br>way meaning the United States uses<br>military<br>power to uh have a sphere influence over<br>the whole globe really uh China appears<br>to be willing to use military power to<br>expand its sphere of influence and<br>political power yeah more importantly in<br>the case of China political power<br>non-kinetic warfare to take over areas<br>Hong Kong being the obvious one but<br>behind that isn't there always a kinetic<br>threat oh yeah of course yeah i mean you<br>disappear some book sellers and and uh<br>students are protesting of course i just<br>but but to go back to this yeah of<br>course okay countries believe they have<br>or or would like to have spheres of<br>influence i do think at some point that<br>the so-called realists on that have to<br>try to decide how much leeway that<br>allows you to give to a fairly rapacious<br>uh<br>regime uh and it's not I mean it's it's<br>not the easiest calculation always to<br>make you have to work out whether or not<br>for instance it is true that if if<br>Russia had if Putin had managed to go<br>all the way to Kiev in the first weeks<br>of the war in 22 he would have gone<br>straight on to other places and you know<br>maybe he would have done maybe he would<br>have taken his time maybe he wouldn't<br>have done and this is a very fine<br>calculation that<br>changes every week let alone every year<br>you know my friends in Georgia I thought<br>were um wildly off the mark when they<br>were believing that after 2008 they<br>could get for instance either NATO<br>membership or EU membership and I I<br>thought that was completely unlikely and<br>I still think it's unlikely and almost<br>certainly undesirable for Europe and for<br>NATO because you you've got to be very<br>careful as and obviously this is one of<br>the issues with Ukraine and has been<br>since the '90s<br>is you know are you going to set up a<br>trip wire to start World War II and<br>that's not a small thing to consider so<br>what do you think the<br>uh the peace deal might look like and<br>what does the path to peace look like in<br>Ukraine in in the coming weeks and<br>months i have thought it would be uh<br>regrettably the Ukrainians seeding some<br>territory in the<br>east and then um making sure they rearm<br>uh during whatever peace period comes<br>afterwards and probably all four<br>territories of uh<br>dasparation you couldn't lay any of that<br>out because it has to be negotiated on<br>but I I mean I think that and I think<br>the ease with which non- Ukrainians are<br>currently speaking about Ukrainian<br>seeding territory is is concerning<br>because these territories include<br>hundreds of thousands of<br>Ukrainian citizens who do not want to<br>live under Putin's rule and people who<br>have families in the rest of Ukraine and<br>and and much more and um uh you know I I<br>recently<br>interviewed children who had managed to<br>get out of the Russian occupied<br>areas and um it's it's it's brutal for a<br>Ukrainian to be growing up in that<br>territory so I when people say well<br>obviously you know Donetsk has to be<br>given to Putin I I think that that<br>is not as easy a thing if you're in<br>Ukraine as it is if you're sitting in<br>New York say um and by the way I think<br>that on the issue of there is a school<br>of thought that that is that obviously<br>President Trump to some extent was was<br>floating in recent weeks which is that<br>if if a deal is done a business deal in<br>relation to minerals or anything else<br>you get this great you get a kind of<br>buffer zone of American businesses and<br>investment and therefore American<br>business people in the region which<br>would<br>effectively warn Putin not to invade i<br>don't uh follow that idea because not<br>least there were Americans in the<br>regions that were invaded in 22 and they<br>left fast and we know from Hong Kong and<br>other places that just because there are<br>international financial interests in the<br>region does not mean that a dictatorship<br>will not either um militarily or<br>covertly take over i I don't I don't see<br>American miners as being an effective<br>buffer zone against Putin by the way<br>what did you um learn from talking to<br>the children Ukrainian children from<br>those regions well I mean it's it's it's<br>heartbreaking because the only schooling<br>is u Russian schooling uh obviously<br>teaching the Russian language Putin's<br>view of history and effectively<br>indoctrination and and people can<br>quibble with that term but it's Putin<br>indoctrination<br>schools and any children or families<br>that do not want that effectively have<br>to hide and um not go out and there were<br>I spoke to children and parents who'd<br>had school friends who for instance the<br>Russians set up in 22 and 23 uh uh<br>summer camps uh for the children of some<br>of the areas that have been occupied and<br>the children went off to the camps and<br>then they didn't come back but they were<br>just stolen um I mean it's thought that<br>around 20,000 Ukrainian children have<br>been stolen in this fashion that's not a<br>small thing<br>it's not got very much attention but<br>um yes I mean children who would hide<br>whenever the Russian troops came to the<br>door uh one teenage boy who described to<br>me how when his mother was out a a woman<br>came around to the house knocked on the<br>door um and gave him his papers uh and<br>said that he had to attend the next week<br>to sign up for the Russian army<br>this is I mean this is this is this is<br>not good and that's obviously what life<br>is like for thousands of people behind<br>the Russian lines in<br>Ukraine i just I just have it in mind<br>when people say things like you know<br>well obviously these regions have to be<br>handed over it's not it's it's very very<br>hard if you're Ukrainian to concede to<br>that yeah and even if they are as part<br>of the negotiation handed over I think<br>it'll probably be<br>generations or never that that could be<br>accepted by the Ukrainian people<br>absolutely and I would have thought<br>never what do we know about this<br>kidnapping of children the stories of<br>the thousands of children that the the<br>Russian forces kidnapped um some of them<br>were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine<br>not all by any means but some were and<br>it's a very complicated story actually<br>because many children were taken from<br>their families uh many the Russians said<br>"Well look at these Ukrainians they<br>don't even look after their children<br>therefore we will look after<br>them." And I was I was recently when I<br>was there looking into this story<br>because it's it's a very interesting<br>question as to why it hasn't had more<br>attention you know one thinks of for<br>instance the abduction of the Chibbach<br>school girls some 12 years ago now in<br>northern Nigeria and that appalling<br>abduction of 300 girls by Boka Haram uh<br>completely gained the world's attention<br>and I was very interested into why the<br>Ukrainian children who'd been taken by<br>the Russians had not gained similar<br>attention there's a slight similarity<br>with the war in Israel which I'm sure<br>we'll come on to but uh I do think that<br>one reason is that they were effectively<br>hostages and the Ukrainians knew this is<br>this is my estimation of the terrain is<br>that the Ukrainians knew that if they<br>made a great deal about this was it were<br>more than they did that the that the<br>children would effectively be the most<br>effective bargaining<br>chip and I do think there's considerable<br>truth in that because if you look at for<br>instance the way in which um pressure<br>has been put on the Israeli government<br>by the Israeli population about the<br>kidnapped Israelis you'll see that it<br>it's it's a pretty effective tactic for<br>uh any uh totalitarian regime or<br>terrorist group to operate in a way that<br>means that the population of the country<br>you're attacking<br>pressure their government to do<br>something in terms of concession it's<br>it's a it's it's a very effective tool<br>and I think that story was partly played<br>down not just outside of Ukraine but<br>also within Ukraine partly for that<br>reason as a truth seeker as a<br>journalist how do you operate in that<br>world where at least to me it's obvious<br>that there's just a flood of propaganda<br>on both sides now of course when you go<br>there and directly experience it and<br>talk to people<br>uh but those people are still also<br>swimming in the propaganda so unless you<br>witness stuff directly sometimes it's<br>hard to know like I I speak to people on<br>the Russian side and there's they're<br>clearly first of all hilariously enough<br>they almost always say there's that<br>there's no propaganda in Russia of<br>course<br>uh which makes me realize I mean you you<br>can be completely lied to maybe I am in<br>the United States as well and just be<br>unaware um maybe Earth is run by aliens<br>maybe the Earth is flat so I don't know<br>maybe you've taken mushrooms i have<br>before this and I finally see the truth<br>and it's you that are diluted Douglas<br>okay but uh back to our round earth<br>discussion round earth shills that we<br>are uh how do you know what is true you<br>you can tell it<br>when the bare facts become not<br>true like you can tell it<br>when somebody is willing to claim that<br>everything caused the invasion of 2022<br>except for Vladimir Putin invading<br>Ukraine yeah there's a there's a<br>hilarious thing that happens and I think<br>you've actually speak about this that uh<br>people are generally just much more<br>willing to criticize the democratically<br>elected leader always always so the<br>interesting thing that happens is these<br>wise sages that do the narratives of<br>like NATO started the war right which<br>there is some interesting geopolitical<br>depth and truth to that like that NATO<br>expansion created complicated<br>geopolitical context whatever for But<br>they forget to say like other parts of<br>that story well yes of course i mean and<br>I mean of course to some extent it's<br>rather you know there's a there's a very<br>the most irritating type of question<br>asker at any event is the person who<br>says "I was disappointed that in your<br>30inut talk you didn't address X." And I<br>tend to say "Well looking forward to<br>coming to your next talk where in 30<br>minutes you'll cover everything that<br>could possibly be covered." Um there's<br>always stuff that's going to be left on<br>the sides there's always going to be<br>stuff that's left unressed there's<br>always going to be other angles there's<br>always going to be somebody else who who<br>who who has this interesting perspective<br>and you can't cover it nevertheless if<br>you cover everything other than the<br>central things then it's suspicious<br>many years ago I was at a debate in<br>London and there was a debate about the<br>origins of World War II and uh Pat<br>Buchanan talking of necromancy was one<br>of the the the the speakers and um<br>Andrew<br>Roberts historian was one of the people<br>on the other side and at one point you<br>know they got so completely stuck into<br>issues of iron ore mining in Poland in<br>the mid you know something like this and<br>the moderator I remember it was just it<br>was just a melee and the moderator turns<br>to Andrew Roberts and says Andrew<br>Roberts why did World War II begin and<br>he says World War II began because<br>Hitler invaded<br>Poland and it was a magnificent moment<br>because everything had been a marsh they<br>were just so lost in all the intricate<br>and clever and interesting things that<br>you can talk about about the origins of<br>a war that you you you<br>forget to mention the thing that's most<br>important<br>and certainly my experience as a<br>journalist and writer is that one of the<br>reasons why you need to go and see<br>things with your own eyes is because<br>people are certain to tell you that what<br>you've seen with your own eyes didn't<br>happen or hasn't<br>happened and it helps to steal you yes<br>for that moment it's a gradual thing<br>that happens where the obvious thing<br>starts being taken for granted and<br>people stop saying it because it's like<br>the boring thing to say at a party and<br>then all of a sudden over time you just<br>almost start questioning whether whether<br>you know like the obvious thing is even<br>true i don't know what that how that<br>happens psychology yeah I think it does<br>i I think it does i've observed it in a<br>lot of different places which is the<br>important thing is the only thing you do<br>forget everything else is what you<br>remember and some of us are for some<br>reason wired in a way where we we don't<br>we try not to forget the important thing<br>remember the obvious thing yeah yes and<br>as you say not wanting to be the boring<br>guy at the party who reiterates what is<br>true cuz what a douchebag you'd be if<br>you were that guy nobody likes Captain<br>Obvious at a party okay is it possible<br>that Donald Trump is a<br>mediator a successful negotiator that<br>brings a stable peace to Ukraine it's<br>possible we'll have to see i think it's<br>just too early and complicated to tell<br>that he wants to bring a peace seems to<br>me to be obvious he stated it a lot of<br>times<br>um whether he can we're just going to<br>have to see it's extremely hard to see<br>some of the parameters of the peace<br>still and I would suggest that the most<br>one not the the most difficult but one<br>of the most difficult is that there is<br>no peace guarantee on paper that the<br>Ukrainians can possibly believe<br>i I just it doesn't matter because we've<br>we've we in the west we some of the<br>countries in the west have said it<br>before that we'd secure<br>their their peace and we haven't and<br>so what other than NATO membership which<br>is not possible in my view what other<br>than NATO membership would reassure the<br>Ukrainians that they are going to have<br>their borders secured and the peace of<br>Ukraine secured I I can't see I think uh<br>there's not going to be ever a guarantee<br>that you can trust i think the way you<br>have a guarantee implicit guarantees by<br>having military and economic<br>partnerships with as many partners as<br>possible so you have partnerships with<br>uh the uh the Middle East you have<br>partnerships with India perhaps even<br>with China with the United States with<br>many nations in Europe all of which<br>still suggests that if there's enough<br>financial interests in<br>Ukraine they would prevent another<br>Russian invasion there would be<br>financial pressure yeah there would be<br>uh you know Russia needs to be friends<br>with somebody either China or the West<br>um I I think a world that's flourishing<br>would have Russia<br>trading and being friends with the West<br>and the East thought it would be<br>ideal it would be ideal if if if they if<br>the regime in Moscow wanted it but<br>that's that not I mean again you get<br>into the thing of you know people<br>accused of Russophobia that I mean um<br>the I I do believe that after the fall<br>of the wall uh Russia was illreated by<br>the west not treated with the uh some of<br>the courtesy that it required I do think<br>that and at the same time that doesn't<br>justify<br>uh the actions of Russia in the last 20<br>years right but let's descent from the<br>surrealist to the realist it's very<br>possible for Russia<br>to uh be on the verge of military<br>invasion of these nations and that being<br>wrong while also not doing it because<br>they're afraid to hurt the partnerships<br>with the West and with China it's<br>possible but the alliance they formed<br>with this sort of rogue alliance with<br>China to a considerable<br>extent North Korea not useful<br>uh and Iran is<br>um something they seem to find bearable<br>it's not a very it's not a very good<br>alliance in most people's analysis but<br>it's an alliance it's bearable but I<br>don't think maybe you disagree with this<br>i don't think the Russian people or even<br>Putin<br>uh wants to be isolated from the West i<br>think it wants to be friends with the<br>West and with the East and with<br>everybody he just also wants Ukraine<br>right and<br>there's How Does the Rolling Stones song<br>go which one<br>um not the satisfaction one sympathy<br>with the devil that's the one you got me<br>on that one no like there there's<br>interests where there's expanding the<br>sphere and influence that's one thing on<br>the table but that can be put aside if<br>you want to maintain the partnerships<br>with these nations and uh if Ukraine has<br>strong economic partnerships with those<br>nations then that prevents Russia from<br>invading i think the premise is one that<br>I've seen before um there was a famous<br>uh what was his<br>name norman Angel he wrote this book<br>which was a fantastic bestseller in his<br>day where he believed that Europe would<br>be in a period of endless cantian peace<br>because the prospect of European powers<br>going to war was so economically<br>unviable the book was reissued after<br>World War I um and I never got the<br>second edition but I assume it was<br>significantly rewritten that's a very<br>kind of cynical take that just because<br>the book is wrong i'm not saying just a<br>bookstore i'm saying that that the idea<br>that cooperation on an economic and<br>other levels is<br>any significant preventative device to<br>madness breaking out is is not something<br>I see could deter some people it could<br>deter some very very rational<br>economically driven actors but it it<br>fails to take into account all of the<br>other things that motivate people to go<br>to war and to invade and to go mad okay<br>well I would argue that in the 21st<br>century one of the reasons we have much<br>fewer wars is because of the much more<br>gloss tools here on this on the<br>geopolitical stage one of them is that<br>we're just much more interconnected<br>economically globally interconnected and<br>that that is always a present pressure<br>on the world to keep peace there's a lot<br>of money to be made from peace there's<br>also a lot of money to be made from war<br>there's just there's a lot of uh<br>interest tension and I I'm just<br>presenting one of the tools that a<br>leader should be using the alternative<br>is what military force that is an<br>interesting one sometimes a useful one<br>but unfortunately it has its downsides<br>also and after 3 years of war and the<br>hundreds of thousands dead you have to<br>start wondering what are the options on<br>the table i agree i'm I'm obviously for<br>economic<br>cooperation but my only caveat is not to<br>think that that is something which is of<br>ultimate interest or even at the top of<br>the list of interests of uh despots<br>tyrants extremists who want something<br>else yeah<br>but uh can you read the mind of Vladimir<br>Putin no<br>a lot of the ideas I hear about peace<br>is Putin<br>bad victory must be achieved NATO<br>membership required yeah there's this<br>kind of<br>like but what's the what's the there you<br>have to come to the table to to end the<br>killing is one and uh to have different<br>ideas of how to uh have a nonzero chance<br>of peace so that you know the options<br>are it seems to me the only<br>option not the only option but the<br>likeliest option is a lot of strong<br>economic partnerships there's of course<br>other radical options there's<br>uh there's uh Russia joining NATO or<br>something like this or there's<br>um giving you know doing flirting with<br>World War II essentially giving nukes to<br>Ukraine or something like this there's<br>like crazy stuff or a totally new<br>military alliance with France and and<br>and Britain and Germany and uh European<br>nations and Ukraine or some weird<br>network of military power that threatens<br>Russia in some way or maybe some big<br>breakthrough partnership between India<br>China and Ukraine something like this<br>just some really out there ideas and I<br>think that's how the Well that that's<br>how the world finds a balance and<br>realigns itself in interesting ways and<br>look it could be i I I hope you're<br>uh I hope your idea is right um I think<br>it's about the well certainly the most<br>peaceful way for this to be resolved<br>my only caveat as I say is and<br>also never forget to factor in that<br>people want different things in this<br>world and some people don't dream as you<br>dream i think we'll talk about that so<br>in your new book death cults that one is<br>an easier one for me to understand to<br>the story that you're describing<br>i am more hesitant to assign<br>psychopathy to leaders of major nations<br>sure yeah yeah yeah i'm I'm I'm not by<br>any means urging you to regard Vladimir<br>Putin as a millinarian madman who cannot<br>be in any way understood<br>i think he could be negotiated and<br>reasoned with from your lips to God's<br>ears<br>can you steal me on the case for and<br>then against Zilinski as the right<br>leader for Ukraine at this moment is he<br>the right person to take it to the the<br>the point of peace we'll see if if if if<br>he can then he then of course he is you<br>know he deserves enormous respect for<br>galvanizing his people for being elected<br>in the first place for galvanizing his<br>nation at a time of incredible peril<br>um for playing the international game of<br>getting support for his country well<br>um and sometimes the person who does<br>that not there are many people like that<br>can be the person who also brings about<br>a peace deal and sometimes not i think<br>there's a degree to which he may have<br>seen too much<br>suffering of the people the land he<br>loves to be able to sit down at a table<br>with a world leader who<br>uh did the destruction and to be able to<br>that is very hard<br>compromise on anything<br>that's that's possible again it puts the<br>onus on him though sort of slightly<br>presupposes that Putin doesn't have the<br>same human instinct on that it is<br>extremely hard i've noticed this in a<br>lot of conflicts it's extremely hard the<br>way in which outsiders come in and<br>others who haven't seen what you've seen<br>or gone through what you've gone through<br>and say you know it's time to get around<br>the negotiating table and just you know<br>you think you didn't see what I saw you<br>didn't go through what I went through<br>who you'd tell me goes back to that<br>thing of the the visitor from the land<br>of war and the visitor from the land of<br>peace the visitor from the land of peace<br>can easily talk about getting around<br>negotiating tables but the visitor from<br>the land of war has seen other things<br>and<br>um it's it's very hard for somebody who<br>hasn't seen it to tell the person who<br>has that they<br>should act differently and the sad<br>thing about humanity is both the the<br>person from the land of peace and the<br>person from the land of war are right<br>yes that's a<br>struggle that's definitely a<br>struggle it's it's like asking somebody<br>to forgive i've seen that at a lot lot<br>of ends of conflicts people say you know<br>the important thing is that we forgive<br>and move<br>on and then the other person<br>says you know your child didn't die of<br>shrapnel wounds yeah this is you know I<br>got a lot of heat for interview with<br>Zilinski by the way people privately the<br>people that messaged me is all love and<br>support even the people that disagree in<br>Ukraine soldiers uh people online are<br>ruthless they're misrepresenting me<br>they're lying people online are ruthless<br>and misrepresenting and lying good god<br>Lex you've discovered a new uh<br>phenomenon i'm a real radical<br>intellectual<br>nothing misses your<br>eye i see the truth and I'm unafraid to<br>point it out uh no there's a<br>degree this this<br>idea that<br>you need to compromise with the person<br>with the leader of a nation you're at<br>war with and in so doing to some degree<br>are forgiving their actions because the<br>actual feeling you have is you want it<br>to be fair and the definition of fair<br>when you've seen that much suffering is<br>for him and everybody around him and<br>maybe even all of the people on the<br>other side to just die because you've<br>seen too much suffering but the the<br>other side of that is yes there's<br>children that have died but you go<br>coming to the negotiation other children<br>from dying yes of course and so like<br>there is just you had this kind of way<br>of speaking about it embodying that<br>perspective that it's naive to say to<br>come to the negotiation table and it is<br>for a person from the land of war but<br>the very smart intelligent and not naive<br>person from the land of peace that is<br>often right in some deep sense about the<br>long arc of<br>history for them it does it is the right<br>thing to come to the negotiation table<br>to end the more killing the one thing I<br>would add to that though is you know<br>don't forget that it it's also depends<br>on whether or not there's a clear shot<br>of winning<br>sure if there's a clear shot of winning<br>and that's a the most important the most<br>important thing in wars is not uh final<br>negotiations or anything like that it's<br>simply winning and losing and if you<br>have a clear shot of winning and you can<br>take it and you're near it<br>um then having somebody else come in and<br>saying "Uh why not stop just before<br>victory is is is very hard." That's one<br>of the complex one of the many many<br>complexities of the conflict we're<br>talking about you know what's the the<br>other big complexity of that because the<br>clear shot of winning is like a man<br>walking through the desert seeing water<br>uh it could be during war it really is<br>an illusion so here's what happens the<br>really complicated aspect of<br>negotiation is in order to<br>negotiate peace from a place of<br>strength you have to have victory in<br>sight yes and so the temptation from<br>that position is to not negotiate is to<br>keep pushing forward to achieve victory<br>and this I would say<br>uh hindsight is 2020 but this is the<br>failure in 22 and two occasions to<br>achieve to negotiate a ceasefire and<br>peace one in the spring because there<br>was a Ukraine was in a real big I would<br>say position of strength he have having<br>fended off the Russian forces around<br>Kiev that's one and then as you<br>mentioned in the fall of 22 with with<br>Hersan and Hardgave had a lot of<br>military success they were in a place of<br>strength and from that place they've<br>decided to keep going because victory<br>was in sight but that was also an<br>opportunity to make peace it's perfectly<br>possible yes that's the hard thing it's<br>very hard it's all hard but I'm just<br>again<br>it's victory can be won in wars and is<br>often won in wars uh and you're right<br>they can also grind on because<br>nobody has the capability to make a<br>breakthrough uh it's a case I mean the<br>wisdom about civil wars tends to be that<br>they sort of burn out after about 10<br>years or so<br>uh for similar reasons when you're in<br>the war can you actually know that a<br>victory can be won it's a very good<br>question and<br>um you mean troops on the battlefield or<br>military leaders or political leaders<br>military and political leaders it just<br>feels like like I said man in the desert<br>seeing water i think there's a sense<br>that victory is so<br>close there times there's times in a war<br>when you feel like victory is close no<br>you're right it's and it just slips away<br>yes it's an interesting insight it's<br>like the way in which um there's a<br>there's a force in nature which is that<br>if you amass an army<br>[Music]<br>um amassing it will pull you in to using<br>it<br>extremely hard to amass an army<br>somewhere and then say let's go back<br>yes you're right no it's it's one of<br>many many interesting aspects to warfare<br>i think the sad thing about successful<br>wars at least in the modern day is it<br>takes a great military leader which I<br>would argue that Zalinski really unified<br>Ukraine in this fight in the beginning<br>of the war mhm you have to be that and<br>like you said after either you amass the<br>army and have military success to be<br>able to step back and make peace that<br>those two just don't often go hand in<br>hand because again as a wartime leader<br>especially one who has seen the<br>suffering firsthand<br>[Music]<br>walking away is uh is tough especially<br>also combined with that just the<br>realities of war where there is probably<br>corruption that there There is things<br>you know once the war ends there has to<br>be investigations because the war wasn't<br>won you might not turn out to be when<br>history looks at it the good guy and a<br>leader doesn't want to a leader always<br>wants to be the good guy so there's just<br>all psychological complexities that are<br>and you look at this whole picture<br>uh in in the basic sense if you want<br>Ukraine to flourish if you want humanity<br>to flourish you just ask the question<br>okay so what is the thing I would like<br>to<br>see there's so many historical analogy<br>you can give<br>but just<br>surely not<br>rewarding Putin's action ictions in any<br>way would be a good way to deter him and<br>other dictators from trying to grab<br>land in the<br>future so yeah and but this it's nuanced<br>because like you it's very probably good<br>to be the boring person at the party<br>that says dictatorships are bad<br>uh democracies are good many of the<br>ideals of the west democracies are<br>better better yes that sounds like<br>animal farm but yes two legs better but<br>yes democracy is better and uh invading<br>countries is bad<br>uh but World War II is bad too<br>so after you say something is bad what's<br>the next step cuz military intervention<br>in a lot of these conflicts it'll be<br>about deterrence yeah but what's what's<br>effective deterrence that we're going to<br>have to keep going over for a long time<br>to come my question is how can we<br>achieve<br>peace in<br>April in May right not like the adults<br>at the table all seem to tell me well<br>it's a process it's complicated you know<br>there it just feels like this is a thing<br>that might go into the next winter and<br>there's still um maybe initial ceasefire<br>and the ceasefire is broken and there's<br>more people dying sure and it it's that<br>mess it seems like civility and<br>politeness<br>ignores the fact that people are dying<br>every single day i mean of course like<br>we all almost everybody not everybody<br>but almost everyone would like the<br>killing to stop immediately of course no<br>like I I think that is the boring thing<br>at the party yes but they don't say it<br>often enough not often there has to be a<br>frustration there has to be a<br>frustration i don't understand why Putin<br>Zilinski and Trump can't just meet in a<br>room together without signing<br>anything leaders meeting and discussing<br>and like the human connection there<br>there's so many layers of diplomats it's<br>the problem I have with a managerial<br>class i don't they they schedule<br>meetings really well they don't get<br>done and I I I would love it if people<br>got done so the soldiers get<br>done<br>they have they're fighting the reality<br>of the war and then the leaders have the<br>capacity to get done on the on the<br>scale of nations and geopolitics but<br>like this diplomatic meetings and No I<br>agree i share your frustration about At<br>the same time I think<br>um I share your frustration because I've<br>seen it all a lot of it you know with my<br>own eyes i mean there was a batan as I<br>was with the other week and they were<br>hit just after I left their base and you<br>wouldn't believe what a thermabaric bomb<br>can do to the human<br>body<br>and I share your frustration with that<br>at the same time one of the things that<br>happens if you are<br>rushing is that you do and I've seen<br>this elsewhere you you will put pressure<br>on the people you can<br>pressurize and you will not put enough<br>pressure on the people you can't<br>pressurize and that is one of the<br>worrying things that could happen with<br>this simply you can put America can put<br>extraordinary<br>uh diplomatic financial intelligence<br>military pressure on<br>Ukraine and it can put significant<br>pressure on Putin but it's much easier<br>to pressure Zalinski and that's one of<br>the many things that makes it harder is<br>that the temptation to rush for peace<br>except accepting that peace is the most<br>desirable thing accepting the horrors of<br>war which you know we can linger on but<br>you accepting all that if somebody says<br>we've got to get peace today and the<br>three of them around a table the most<br>likely thing is that it'll be that it'll<br>be the person who you can pressure most<br>easily who will be the person that you<br>pressure and as a result have an outcome<br>which yes might stop the killing as soon<br>as possible but might also set up a<br>situation which rewards the aggressor<br>and effectively punishes the victim and<br>that's an extremely<br>ugly and common thing to happen yeah and<br>that's the other boring thing to say the<br>boring truth that uh the easy shortcut<br>here is<br>uh is to punish Ukraine and<br>you just have to not do it let's keep<br>being the boring people of the party<br>yeah well nobody's going to invite<br>us all right let's go from<br>one complicated<br>conflict to uh perhaps an even more<br>complicated<br>one Israel and<br>Palestine can you uh take me through<br>what happened on October 7th as you<br>understand it and as you outline at the<br>beginning of the book well the book on<br>democracies and death cults is a mixture<br>of firsthand reporting and observation<br>interviews and a wider reflection not<br>just on the war that's been going on<br>since the 7th October but the war that's<br>been going on a lot<br>longer and also I suppose on the what<br>for me is one of the overwhelming<br>questions which I'm sure we'll get to<br>which is the reaction in the rest of the<br>world obviously on the 7th itself it was<br>a brigades size attack on Israel from<br>Gaza uh<br>Hamas broke through the security fence<br>and uh attacked all the softest targets<br>they could uh they swiftly overwhelmed<br>things like the observation base in<br>Nahal<br>they ran through the communities in the<br>south uh very peaceful peace neck effect<br>communities of the kibbutim as they're<br>called communities<br>um and murdered and raped and burned and<br>kidnapped<br>and of course they from their point of<br>view had the great good fortune of also<br>coming across hundreds of young people<br>dancing in the early hours of the<br>morning at a dance party<br>and rampaged through that with RPGs and<br>Kashnikovs and grenades and hammers and<br>more and uh got within well 20<br>kilometers into<br>Israel on places like Offakim and Sterat<br>important towns and carried out their<br>massacres there as well we now know that<br>the plan was that Hezbollah did the same<br>thing from the north hezbollah joined in<br>the war within 24 hours by starting<br>firing rockets again in very large<br>numbers into northern Israel from<br>southern<br>Lebanon but the plan was that they would<br>do the same thing from the north and<br>carry out similar massacres there and<br>effectively be able to meet in the<br>middle and gar Israel from the center<br>the interesting reason why I think it'll<br>be found out in the future but why they<br>didn't coordinate better was Hamas<br>didn't trust any line of communication<br>to Hezbollah to let them know exactly<br>when they were going to do it that<br>wouldn't be in it that wouldn't be<br>intercepted the Iranian revolutionary<br>government in Thran which obviously<br>funds Hamz and Hezbollah and trains and<br>arms knew of the plan it was a very<br>successful attempt to annihilate the<br>state but they didn't get close to that<br>but they got worryingly closer than<br>people might have thought they were<br>capable of i think from the Israeli side<br>uh it was obviously one of the most if<br>not the most<br>catastrophic intelligence and military<br>failure since the foundation of the<br>state and I think there are several<br>reasons<br>why one is a perception problem what a<br>lot of military commanders and others<br>described to me as the conception the<br>conception that had prevailed in Israel<br>for some years and security military<br>establishment was that<br>Hamas were content with being corrupt<br>and governing Gaza and you<br>know lining their pockets and living in<br>uh Qatar and becoming billionaires but<br>that like many other terrorist groups<br>and you know cults that they would end<br>up becoming just corrupt<br>and not losing their ideology but the<br>ideology becomes secondary<br>that's the first thing was there was<br>just a massive error of the conception<br>in Israel and then then there the<br>multiple manifold security and military<br>failures of the day and leading up to<br>the day um and there will be a there<br>already have been quite a lot of people<br>held to account for that and there<br>doubtless will be in the future as well<br>um the the single<br>uh thing I heard which I heard most and<br>which was most distressing in a way was<br>the number of people who described to me<br>you know who survived the massacres in<br>the south who said that you know they'd<br>said to their children don't worry the<br>army will be here in minutes and they<br>weren't you know many places it was many<br>hours till the army got there um and<br>there are reasons for that there are<br>some reasons that will be military<br>failings leadership<br>failings other things were very I I<br>discovered were very human<br>failings i don't want to overstress the<br>failure of the army because actually<br>certain units and things got down very<br>fast there's a unit of Dan who got down<br>to the junction you know by within about<br>an hour 90 minutes of the massacres<br>starting and joined in the fight and<br>then there were self starters who I<br>write about in the book extraordinary<br>people who just like broke orders and<br>just realized the magnitude of what was<br>happening and said we're needed in the<br>south go and fought very hard for hours<br>days in some<br>cases but the complexities on the ground<br>were unbelievable i mean as as usually<br>happens in warfare but what they call<br>the fog of war is a very real thing you<br>you you know what it's you can see it in<br>hindsight but you can't see when you're<br>in it and one of the things that made it<br>very complicated was for instance Hamas<br>coming in<br>uh taking uniforms off dead Israelis<br>uh wearing them uh coming in with<br>Israeli style um apparatus on them<br>there's a Muslim doctor I quote in the<br>book I interviewed who describes how he<br>was going to his he's an Israeli Muslim<br>Arab and he was going to he's a doctor<br>he was going to his shift at the<br>hospital at 6:30 in the morning the<br>rockets start coming in because the<br>rockets started first and then the the<br>full invasion and he described to me how<br>um you know he's one of the members of<br>this group hat the United Hatsella which<br>is a first responders group and um they<br>sort of you know they get an alert and<br>it tells them that you know a car has<br>crashed nearby and they they they put on<br>their uh you know first aid kit and so<br>on and go and he got one of those alerts<br>at one of the junctions and uh realized<br>there was a car that something had<br>happened and there were some dead bodies<br>and he he stops and he sees these men<br>dressed as<br>soldiers uh and they start and he's<br>wearing his hats gear and they start<br>firing at him and he just thinks "What<br>the hell what the hell is going on and<br>uh they turned out to be Hammaz dressed<br>as Israeli soldiers they uh used him as<br>a human shield to try to protect from<br>any air assault<br>and in the end they shot him and left<br>him and he survived he's a very very<br>brave man um so there was a lot of<br>confusion like that there was a girl<br>whose<br>father I interviewed she was at the Nova<br>party and uh I met him at one of the<br>reunions of the party in the weeks after<br>and the reunions of the survivors and<br>the family and so on and he described<br>how in the last moments of his<br>daughter's life she phoned him on her<br>phone like a lot of people you he<br>reassured her that army would get there<br>and so on and and her boyfriend was shot<br>in the head and was lying on her lap and<br>she was obviously panicked and they<br>managed to get into a car and escape the<br>party but they went to a a community<br>where they thought they'd be safe in the<br>south of Israel and they were told to<br>stay where they were by somebody who she<br>said was a policeman and he wasn't the<br>policeman he was Hermes dressed as<br>police and uh she died she was shot and<br>and killed as well And um so there was a<br>lot of confusion like<br>that uh it<br>it hopefully we you know the world will<br>find out exactly what went wrong israel<br>will find out exactly what went wrong<br>that led to this catastrophe but I mean<br>it it was a a complete catastrophe do<br>you have a sense of how such an<br>intelligence failure could have happened<br>so there's a a bit of a temptation to go<br>into conspiracy land because it's such a<br>giant intelligence failure it seems that<br>there was um some manipulation on the<br>inside for political reasons or for you<br>don't need to go into conspiracy land i<br>mean I think there are people who say<br>that there were parts of the<br>intelligence network and so on that were<br>trying that were withholding the<br>information i don't know again people<br>will find out um there's an awful lot of<br>politics inside Israel and uh it's it's<br>it's hard to know that at this stage i<br>think most people are sort of still<br>Israeli and not Israeli including people<br>who are anti-Israel who just believe<br>that you know Israeli military and<br>particularly intelligence dominance is<br>so so strong that there must have been<br>some kind of conspiracy otherwise how<br>could this have happened i don't think<br>you need to go into that i think that I<br>mean for instance some of the young<br>women at the observation base have are<br>on the record they've said I've spoken<br>to them myself and they who said that<br>they had been warning in the weeks<br>running up to the 7th that they were<br>seeing uh maneuvers and training by the<br>border which suggested that Hamas was<br>was going to do something like this<br>and they say that they were<br>ignored that you speak to some of the<br>more senior commanders about that and<br>they say the thing is that this stuff<br>was happening all the<br>time so it's very hard it's very hard to<br>know at the moment<br>can you talk through your understanding<br>of who and what Hamas is its history and<br>u the governing<br>ideology of this group well Hamas in a<br>way quite easy to understand because<br>they they say what their ambitions are<br>they say what their beliefs are they've<br>seen it said it from their governing<br>charter onwards and you also have the<br>advantage with Hamz that they as it were<br>in trying to understand them is that<br>they they tend to do what they say and<br>um act on what they believe the primary<br>aim of Hamas is to destroy the state of<br>Israel and then see they're not an<br>unusual group sadly the the bit of it<br>that is hard for some people to<br>understand I think is that is that they<br>really do mean what they say and that<br>they really do mean what they say they<br>want to do and I give a number of<br>examples in the book of this but I mean<br>the most<br>uh obvious is the case of Yakya Sinoir<br>the Hamas leader who is generally<br>regarded as having orchestrated and and<br>um arranged the 7th of October he uh we<br>know a fair amount about him because he<br>was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for<br>murdering Palestinians in<br>Gaza and uh he was released in the<br>prisoner swap for the he was one of the<br>more than 1,000<br>uh Palestinian prisoners inside Israel<br>who was released in his in a swap for<br>Gilead Shalit the abducted Israeli<br>soldier<br>and uh Yaya Sininoa in prison in Israel<br>um talked to among others a a dentist<br>who ended up saving his life because<br>Yaya Sinoir had a brain tumor and uh<br>this this dentist identified this and uh<br>actually sent him to the hospital and<br>the Israelis famously uh removed the<br>tumor and and and saved Sino's life but<br>this dentist used to speak to him in in<br>the prison fairly regularly and and was<br>related not least to the New York Times<br>his conversations with Sinoir and<br>uh Sinoir said in one of those<br>conversations he said you know he said<br>at the moment you Israel are strong<br>um but one day you'll be weak and then<br>I'll<br>come and uh that's that's what he did is<br>it a hatred of<br>Israel or is it a hatred of Jews is it<br>on the level of nations or the level of<br>uh religion both it's both i mean<br>originates from a religious mindset but<br>it's of course political as well<br>um I mean the Hamas charter of course<br>some people sort of think the Hamas<br>charter is of no significance and I<br>often notice this slight of hand that<br>that that people do again it goes back<br>to what I was saying earlier um forget<br>everything other than the most important<br>basic things but the Hamas charter uh<br>among other things quotes the hadith<br>that you know the end times will not<br>come until all of the the the the rocks<br>and the trees shout out oh oh Muslim<br>there's the Jew behind me come and kill<br>him and uh that that is so Hamas is both<br>obviously anti-Israeli obviously and<br>anti-Jewish obviously um it's it's<br>uh and by the way I mean um one of the<br>many painful stories I tell in the book<br>is of the fact that so many of the<br>people in the communities that they<br>attacked it's not as if there'd be a<br>right community to act and a wrong<br>community to attack but that many of the<br>communities they attacked were<br>communities which deeply deeply dreamed<br>of the idea of living in peace with<br>their Palestinian neighbors uh there's a<br>woman who whose name has become<br>relatively famous since certainly famous<br>inside Israel Silva who was a peace<br>activist who spent every weekend um<br>driving Gazan children from uh the<br>border to if if they had very like rare<br>medical needs that could not be seen<br>attention to within inside Gaza would<br>drive them to Israeli hospitals and she<br>spent every weekend doing that worked<br>for all of the sort of left-wing peace<br>neck organizations in Israel and you for<br>a for a while after the seventh her<br>neighbors and others thought that uh she<br>had been taken captive into Gaza and<br>actually there was a hostage poster for<br>her and there were appeals by the<br>various peace nick organizations for<br>Hamz to hand her over but it turned out<br>she'd been burned alive in her home and<br>this wasn't discovered for quite a long<br>time because there was so little DNA<br>left of her that it was very hard to<br>identify the remains as being hers um so<br>there were there were a lot of just a<br>lot of people in the Gaza envelope as<br>it's it's called in Israel in the area<br>around Gaza who who would have been the<br>people who you know wanted to live<br>peacefully with uh the Gazans someday<br>and those there's a certain among the<br>many it's not an irony but just among<br>the sort of pains of the day is that is<br>that so so overwhelmingly these these<br>were the people that that Hamas brought<br>hell to<br>the response to October 7th by Israel<br>can you steal me on the case that Israel<br>went too far well the case that that<br>started from very early on that that<br>critics of Israel had was the claim that<br>I I think I first heard it on about the<br>8th of October before Israel had done<br>anything in response was the claim that<br>uh Israel must act proportionately in<br>response and I I have a critique of this<br>that I've often expressed which is that<br>there is such a thing as proportionality<br>in warfare<br>um and at the same time Israel is always<br>accused of acting<br>disproportionately and the<br>proportionality that the rest or much of<br>the rest of the world seems to think<br>Israel should express in warfare is to<br>is to have an equal um an equal level of<br>suffering or killing on both sides i I<br>don't think there's any um uh law of war<br>that says that you know if you kill<br>1,200 people and you kidnap another 250<br>that as it were the other side's allowed<br>to do the same back but that's what a<br>lot of people think and then when they<br>see the death toll escalating on the<br>Gazen side they say Israel has acted<br>disproportionately and has overreacted<br>that one is a is a is is tricky because<br>you know it's it's it's my belief that I<br>mean again this is a basic thing but it<br>has to be stated that 9 million citizens<br>of Israel if you extrapolate that out to<br>what the 7th of October would have meant<br>in American<br>terms you'd be talking about uh a day on<br>which if if the attack had happened in<br>America where 44,000 Americans were<br>killed in one day and 10,000 American<br>citizens taken hostage<br>nobody can tell me that if such an<br>atrocity<br>occurred that America would not do<br>whatever it needed to destroy the groups<br>that had done that and to retrieve the<br>hostages who've been taken so just on<br>that point I agree with you 100% America<br>would do would hit hard back and I think<br>a lot of Americans would feel justified<br>in that but it's also possible that<br>uh the military-industrial complex and<br>the politicians would do something like<br>the war in Iraq and Afghanistan which<br>means extend far<br>beyond hitting back and actually do a<br>thing that's destructive to everybody<br>including America financially and the<br>flourishing of America and the<br>flourishing of humanity broadly and the<br>region and the stability and the war on<br>terrorism<br>uh if that's a real thing uh the war in<br>Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe<br>succeed in defeating terrorism or even<br>making progress it probably made more<br>terrorists than not so there's a<br>justified feeling of hitting back and uh<br>going after somebody like Bin Laden in<br>the case of 911 and then there's just<br>the actual implementation<br>mhm and it seems like the implementation<br>can sometimes<br>um un intended or unintended have<br>consequences that are bordering on war<br>crimes if not downright war crimes now<br>this this is a general statement and now<br>we'll look at Israel where things<br>are<br>small land everything is very compact<br>there's a lot of complexities that are<br>well studied that we've talked about<br>extensively well the two stated aims of<br>the Israelis after the 7th were uh to<br>get the hostages back and to destroy<br>Hamas and many people said that you<br>could do one but not<br>both um and I actually think<br>they've gone a long way to doing both by<br>no means everything there are still<br>hostages as we're speaking held in Gaza<br>including a young American Um and Hamas<br>is not completely destroyed it's very<br>very significantly degraded but it's not<br>completely destroyed but those are the<br>two aims<br>um I believe that I mean I've<br>seen as much of the war as any outside<br>observer<br>i don't know there are some exceptions<br>maybe but and so I think I can say with<br>considerable certainty what the Israelis<br>have and haven't<br>done um<br>the the oper there were various<br>operations at the beginning various uh<br>plans which didn't happen like storming<br>straight in and getting for instance as<br>many hostages as possible out of the<br>Shifa complex which is called a hospital<br>but it's<br>a al also at the very least the Hamas<br>command headquarters and um there was a<br>there was a plan to maybe go and uh do<br>that fast but it was it was avoided<br>because of the number of deaths on all<br>sides that would be likely to happen the<br>Israelis did actually hold back at the<br>beginning there was a a period of making<br>sure that when they went into Gaza they<br>didn't do<br>so in any way<br>blind the Gaza is a very built up area<br>and populationwise is is is um is<br>densely populated something by the way<br>which the people who who claim<br>frivolously that Israel has been<br>committing genocide never take account<br>of which is the fact that the garden<br>population has boomed since the Israeli<br>withdrawal in 2005 it's almost<br>doubled um but yeah it's a densely<br>populated area and it's an incredibly<br>difficult place for the train of war<br>because of one thing in particular which<br>is that goes back a bit to our<br>conversation earlier this is a much more<br>extreme example i mean Hermes really<br>don't play by the<br>rules in fact they they use the rules of<br>war the laws of war completely to their<br>own<br>advantage you know it has to be<br>reiterated you are not meant to<br>uh disguise your army as<br>civilians you're not meant to use places<br>of uh care like hospitals as bases for<br>your military operations you're not<br>meant to use schools and places of<br>worship as operating centers of<br>war and Hamas does all of these things<br>and has always done so and it does so<br>with the very obvious reason that for<br>them the whole thing is a two for one<br>offer you you you get to operate<br>everywhere and if the Israelis operate<br>anywhere you claim that this is a war<br>crime because how could they attack this<br>group of civilians these people who are<br>dressed as civilians these people merely<br>fighting from a mosque and so on and<br>that's why that's<br>why everybody who's been to Gaza who's<br>seen the fighting knows the same thing<br>which is this is just<br>incredibly difficult difficult warfare<br>of a kind that that American troops have<br>seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah<br>and elsewhere uh Kurdish<br>uh militia the Peshmerga saw when they<br>were fighting as our frontline troops in<br>the war against ISIS similar house to<br>house but by no means with the same<br>entrenched<br>uh uh bases uh you know again it can't<br>be stressed enough that Hamas has used<br>the years since the Israeli withdrawal<br>from 2005 to build this<br>vast underground tunnel network<br>and again it's obvious but it has to be<br>remembered when is and I quote one of<br>the Hamz leaders in the book saying this<br>in an interview when they build their<br>tunnels they do so in order that their<br>tunnels are used by them Hamas to store<br>their<br>weaponry to secure their<br>fighters and to hold hostages<br>they do not build their underground<br>tunnel networks for the safety of guards<br>and civilians avoiding aerial<br>bombardment<br>and you know<br>the every difference in the world seems<br>to me to exist between a country which<br>does build uh bomb shelters for its<br>citizens and um a government which<br>builds bomb shelters for its bombs<br>can you discuss the flow of money here<br>so how does Hamas how does Hamas the<br>leadership use the money so you started<br>to talk about the tunnels but how much<br>corruption is there can you just lay it<br>all out uh because I think that's an<br>it's an important part of the picture<br>here it's totally corrupt every Hermes<br>leader who's uh now dead died a<br>billionaire with a B with a B to say<br>that<br>they used Gaza's resources or the the<br>the resources that came into Gaza for<br>their own ends is to just vastly<br>understate matters<br>um Hames used everything that came in to<br>build the infrastructure of terror that<br>allowed them to do the seventh and<br>everything<br>since um they militarized the whole of<br>the Gaza they um by the estimations of<br>troops I've been with there they every<br>second to third house had weaponry<br>stashed there bombs RPGs Kashnikovs<br>rockets tunnel entrances<br>uh<br>the network that they just embedded all<br>these years was was total they they they<br>they you know one of the many many<br>tragedies of this is that whatever<br>you're reading of the rights and wrongs<br>of the Israeli withdrawal in<br>2005 it was an opportunity for the Gaza<br>to become something else it could have<br>become a thriving state it could have<br>been a thriving Palestinian state it's<br>just that<br>Hamas like the PLO before<br>them decided that they wanted to destroy<br>Israel more than they wanted to create a<br>Palestinian state and that is to the<br>great great detriment of the<br>Palestinians of Gaza to put it at its<br>mildest so just to outline here<br>leadership of Hamas are stealing the<br>money that gets sent by Qatar by<br>everybody so they're putting in their<br>pocket and then the by the American<br>taxpayer by the European taxpayer as<br>well yes well yeah but I mean it's not<br>just about the stealing the money it's<br>it's about using the the money and the<br>infrastructure to annihilate your<br>neighbor i mean that's those those two<br>things but the corruption is uh a signal<br>from an economic perspective but it's<br>also a signal of deep moral corruption<br>because<br>they're screwing over the Palestinian<br>people yes a cynicism assassinate yeah<br>okay and then with the money they do<br>spend on the Palestinian cause they're<br>not doing that to uh build up no Gaza<br>they're doing it to uh strengthen the<br>militaristic capabilities yes of the<br>terrorist organization of Hamas<br>you<br>have maybe you can correct me on this um<br>has said<br>that the people of Gaza have some<br>significant responsibility for the<br>actions of Hamas because they've elected<br>them they elected them the whatifs are<br>endless but very unwise of the George W<br>bush administration to push for<br>elections in Gaza<br>um after '05<br>but Hamas were elected and<br>they then 2007 killed the other<br>Palestinian faction that was their main<br>challenger Fata uh killed them threw<br>them off rooftops dragged their bodies<br>behind motorbikes through the Gaza and<br>from that point they had total control<br>and you know this is is difficult<br>because<br>you you can get into the realm of being<br>accused of advocating or in any way<br>justifying collective punishment<br>uh if you talk about this but it should<br>be borne in mind<br>that you know Hamas had effectively 18<br>years to run the<br>Gaza and that's that's the time that it<br>takes from the birth of a child to the<br>end of their formal<br>education and in 18 years they could<br>have presided over and<br>produced a generation of young<br>gazins who were<br>productive productive for their people<br>for their society for their neighbors<br>for the rest of the world and they<br>didn't they spent 18 years<br>indoctrinating the children of Gaza into<br>a death cult and into a genocidal hatred<br>which obviously is was most dangerous to<br>the<br>Israelis<br>but it was obviously disastrous for the<br>people of Gaza<br>and you know there is um there's just if<br>you speak to soldiers who were there in<br>2014 when Hermes started a war again<br>um one of a set of rounds of war since<br>2005 if you speak to the soldiers who<br>were there in 2014 going house to house<br>and who were also involved in the war<br>since<br>2003 they all say the same thing which<br>is the marked radicalization of the<br>Gazin population<br>the marked increase in just I mean the<br>most I mean it's so benile in a way to<br>even cite it but you know<br>like the numbers of copies of mine camp<br>in Arabic in an average Gazen household<br>the protocols of the learned elders of<br>Zion there are so many whatifs and other<br>paths that Heramaz could have taken but<br>that was the one they took they decided<br>to take the path of using their time in<br>power to build up their infrastructure<br>radicalizes population and encouraged<br>them to believe that they could destroy<br>the state of<br>Israel and then on October the 7th they<br>gave it their best shot uh and by the<br>way there is no organized collective<br>punishment of the citizens of Gaza<br>collective punishment would just be<br>dropping bombs with no purpose across<br>civilian areas carpet bombing this sort<br>of thing this is simply not what the<br>IIAF and the IDF have done since the<br>7th um they have been fighting a<br>house-to-house war against this<br>terrorist group they do do aerial<br>strikes gaza is is is very very badly<br>beaten up as a the buildings I mean the<br>the infrastructure that that existed<br>um it's uh there aren't many buildings<br>standing but this is not the result of<br>just wild and imprecise bombing by the<br>Israelis it's been extremely<br>uh<br>concerted it's extremely uh difficult<br>but when people say well this must be<br>collective punishment I think that the<br>people who say<br>that simultaneously that's not<br>true and<br>also you<br>know there is not a hostage who's come<br>out who Donald Trump made this President<br>Trump made his point recently there is<br>not a hostage who's come out who I've<br>spoken with<br>who found any<br>gazen<br>Palestinian who expressed even the<br>slightest human kindness to<br>them if you if you look at the footage<br>from the seventh that Hamas recorded<br>themselves of them taking young Jewish<br>women into Gaza and so<br>on you will notice<br>that the trucks and the motorbikes and<br>so on are not stopped by horrified<br>guards and civilians saying "Why have<br>you got this this Israeli girl who<br>you've whose tendons you've cut and why<br>are you bringing her here?" It's all<br>celebration<br>it's all<br>celebration and it's the same with there<br>are a couple of cases of hostages who<br>managed to escape from the civilian<br>houses they were being held in who were<br>immediately returned by the citizens<br>they<br>met yeah the celebration I do wonder<br>what percent of the the population they<br>represent but there's something really<br>dark there's several ways to explain the<br>celebration<br>it could be that there's a deep<br>indoctrination where you do legitimately<br>hate<br>Jews and there also could be a place of<br>just deep<br>desperation and it's it's a kind of<br>relief that you have to convince<br>yourself that you're um on the side of<br>fighting for<br>freedom in order to justify to yourself<br>that this is the right way to fight out<br>of desperation<br>out of extremely harsh conditions<br>because the way we're kind of speaking<br>about this with the celebration it's<br>very easy to project a kind of evil on<br>the<br>populace that I just am very hesitant to<br>project especially on the general<br>populace you don't have to project it<br>onto them you can just listen to their<br>own words<br>what i'm sure you've heard the one of<br>many audio recordings you hear from the<br>morning but I'm sure you've heard the<br>audio recording of the young man who<br>ends up in one of the communities in the<br>south of Israel and uh calls home calls<br>back home have you heard that yes I've<br>heard it i quoted in the first chapter<br>of the book he he calls back home and he<br>says uh to his father who picks up it's<br>on WhatsApp i think he's he's on the<br>phone he's saying "Turn on to WhatsApp<br>because I can show you." He says "Um<br>I've killed 10 Jews with my own hands oh<br>father your son has killed 10 Jews." And<br>his father is is saying "Where are you<br>where are you?" Go "I want to show you<br>Dad i want to show you i've killed Jews<br>with my own hands your<br>son put mother on the phone." Mother<br>comes on the phone the brother comes on<br>the phone<br>um this is<br>um one of many<br>many stories from the<br>day that suggest<br>uh something which I would say is not<br>just indoctrination but yes evil first<br>of all those phone calls are somehow<br>uniquely horrific but I've also heard<br>recordings of phone calls made by<br>Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and<br>Russian soldiers to their parents and<br>they have not as intense and not as<br>horrific but they have a similar nature<br>to<br>them<br>which there is an aspect of war where<br>you uh dehumanize the other side right<br>sure in order to fight that<br>war so we have to remember that that<br>element is going to be there in a time<br>of war in a time of desperation it would<br>be a strange type of um uh simple sort<br>of I don't know pride in<br>war to go into an 80-year-old woman's<br>house and kill her on her<br>floor and then film her dead body and<br>her body in its final moments and send<br>it round to all of that woman's friends<br>on her phone on her Instagram<br>account<br>um it's it's you may have heard<br>different things from me but I mean I I<br>would be surprised if there were even<br>the most viciferous of Russian<br>soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and<br>saying "Mom you won't believe my luck i<br>managed to rape and kill this<br>80-year-old<br>woman." It's that's that's quite unusual<br>even in warfare<br>um and and that's one of the things<br>about Hamas and the what I describe as<br>the death cult<br>types which makes them different from<br>other people but that's the channeling<br>of evil and hatred and anger in the<br>human spirit but that doesn't make that<br>person evil no I disagree<br>you commit that once i think that there<br>is such a force as evil in the world and<br>I think it uh it can descend and it can<br>be used and it's very hard to find a<br>non- theological way to talk about this<br>but of everything I've seen um there are<br>actions that people like Hamas committed<br>on the 7th that cannot be described as<br>anything other than<br>evil the things that happened at the<br>Nova party were especially appalling i<br>mean it was all appalling but it was<br>especially appalling because first of<br>all it's a sort of party which people<br>like you and I or at least you and I<br>when we were younger might have been<br>at and so everyone knows you know the<br>the world of a dance party in all night<br>you know rave in the desert to commune<br>with nature and the universe and to take<br>some psychedelics and to you know expand<br>your consciousness and your love and all<br>of that sort of thing<br>the the fact that people doing<br>that at 6:30 in the morning then<br>encountered people coming in to the<br>party<br>on trucks and military vehicles and<br>just massacring them and raping them and<br>I mean I I give examples of the<br>firsthand accounts of people who<br>survived but I mean it's beyond belief<br>of almost anything else I've covered in<br>war and it's because it seems<br>so I mean an armed an army facing<br>another army is one thing<br>a terrorist group in civilian clothing<br>facing an army is another<br>thing but a terrorist group facing a<br>group of young<br>people at a dance<br>unarmed and doing what they did is is<br>is pretty hard to comprehend unless you<br>use the lexicon of evil somewhere<br>so that<br>stated can you empathize with the<br>suffering of uh Palestinians in Gaza<br>with the destruction that resulted as a<br>response yes um what has happened in<br>response is terrible terrible for the<br>citizens of Gaza<br>i was there in um on the first time<br>couple of days early in into the the<br>ground invasion<br>uh when the citizens of Gaza were coming<br>south i was in the middle of the strip<br>and the um the humanitarian corridor had<br>been set up to try to stop the hostages<br>being taken south deeper into Gaza and<br>to try to stop the leadership from<br>making it south it actually it didn't<br>really work because they just they'd<br>already got a lot of the hostages south<br>it was an attempt to keep Hamz there and<br>fight them in the north so as not to be<br>dragged all the way in in the end<br>dragged all the way in anyway but uh yes<br>and I mean watching the the citizens of<br>Gaza moving through the humanitarian<br>corridor and you know they everyone was<br>check being checked for for bombs<br>suicide vests checked for you know<br>particularly young men of military age<br>um and uh you know I mean you look at<br>this tide of human misery and you think<br>this is terrible but this is a<br>terrible thing that had been brought<br>upon them by the people who've been<br>misgoverning the place that they lived<br>in<br>and of course on a human level you feel<br>terrible that these people are going<br>through this at the same time human<br>empathy for them can coexist<br>beside an unspeakable<br>anger that they had come to this point<br>because of the the fact that they had<br>elected a terror group to run their<br>territory and one of the things<br>obviously is that you know a lot of<br>people like to say and it's true of<br>course that that you know this didn't<br>all start on October the 7th absolutely<br>true uh this particular round this<br>particularly intense round of war<br>started on October the 7th without doubt<br>Hamas did not have to attack on October<br>the 7th it wasn't wasn't like they were<br>forced<br>to liberate themselves or something as<br>some of the defenders of Hamas<br>claim uh but the conflict of course goes<br>back a lot earlier but it you you will<br>have to always keep on contending with<br>this fact that there is one<br>central issue to the paradigm of that<br>conflict what used to be called the Arab<br>Israeli conflict and now has<br>become interestingly rebranded the<br>Israeli Palestinian conflict but there<br>is one absolutely essential issue to<br>this which cannot be forgotten which<br>is do the<br>Palestinians want a<br>state or do they want to destroy the<br>Jewish<br>state and if they want to destroy the<br>Jewish state as they've tried many<br>times it's a disaster for them it's a<br>total disaster for them<br>if they want to create their own state<br>they've already had several very good<br>shots at it one of which is Gaza post<br>2005 but they've never shown in their<br>leadership the desire to live with a<br>Jewish<br>state and that's a catastrophe for the<br>Palestinians<br>can you steal me out the case of the<br>lived experience of Palestinians and pro<br>Palestinian voices that describe the<br>Gaza situation as a occupation the West<br>Bank do and uh in the case of Gaza open<br>air prison the to take them in order um<br>there's nothing about Gaza that was an<br>open air prison they had ability to<br>trade they had the ability to um to move<br>in and out in increasing numbers<br>egypt wasn't so keen on allowing<br>Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt still<br>isn't but uh at the time the seventh<br>there was actually an interesting that<br>one of the things the international<br>community was pushing for was for more<br>Palestinians to be coming into Israel<br>every day through the crossing and<br>others to work in Israel because they<br>can make a a better living in Israel<br>than they can in Gaza<br>and uh this the the as it were<br>normalization route was slowly being<br>attempted was being pushed on Israel by<br>the international community a little bit<br>too fast for Israel's uh comfort but it<br>happened that completely came to an end<br>and that that dream is done gone since<br>the 7th of October can you clarify the<br>dream the normalization relation<br>normalization dream between Gaza and<br>Israel<br>gone uh there will be yeah no<br>normalization no not after that and one<br>of the reasons is the number of people<br>again who I've spoken with who employed<br>Palestinians worked with Palestinians<br>worked alongside Palestinians encouraged<br>more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza<br>in order to work in Israel and these<br>were their brothers and sisters and so<br>on and so forth one of the reasons why<br>the massacres of the seventh was so<br>successful in the kibbut sim the<br>communities in the south was because of<br>the number of the terrorists who came in<br>with detailed houseto-house maps of<br>those<br>communities i I spoke with uh with one<br>man who his community they had a<br>security officer chief and uh Hamas came<br>in they knew to go and kill him and his<br>family first and then which families it<br>was just I've seen the maps myself they<br>were they came in with incredibly<br>um accurate information about these<br>communities how did they have them<br>because it was given to them by the by<br>the brothers by the workers by the<br>people of Gaza who were coming in and<br>out so there is nobody that will trust<br>that ever again there's a lot of<br>Palestinians that have lived and<br>flourished inside<br>Israel uh what are they saying what are<br>they feeling and what are the Israelis<br>feeling about them is there still<br>camaraderie to some degree or is it<br>completely destroyed my observation at<br>the beginning was that everyone was<br>extremely<br>wary uh I mean you know if if you've<br>worked beside somebody and then found<br>out they sold out your<br>family you you will never trust again<br>and that in particular in a small<br>country like Israel the word of that<br>happening goes out very fast<br>the very beginning there was intense<br>intense fear about that including of the<br>you know 20% or so of the population who<br>are Arab um<br>Israelis i actually think one of the few<br>sort of positive news stories of the<br>period is that that population within<br>Israel has has by and large held it's<br>not there hasn't been an inifardada<br>[Music]<br>um one of the reasons why there hasn't<br>been more activity terrorist activity in<br>the West Bank and Judea and Samaria is<br>because the Israelis have been very<br>careful along with the Palestinian<br>Authority to some extent cooperating to<br>keep that down but you know there wasn't<br>a a war on a full war on three fronts<br>for instance which was at risk of<br>happening um so I think that the sort of<br>coexistence within Israel has pretty<br>much held there are some terrible<br>examples far too<br>regular but not as regular as it could<br>happen of um Muslim Arab Israelis<br>carrying out acts of terror in as it<br>were sympathy with Hamas i was in the<br>middle of one such attack myself uh uh<br>late last year<br>um and in a town called Hideera and<br>those things have happened but they it<br>it's it's not that that particular<br>catastrophe has not occurred can we talk<br>about Benjamin Netanyahu for a lot of<br>people who spoke of evil they refer to<br>him as evil on the spectrum between good<br>and evil as a leader where does<br>Netanyahu fall well he's certainly not<br>evil interesting if people uh looking at<br>this conflict were to be reluctant to<br>use the word evil of Hamz and eager to<br>use it of the Israeli prime minister it<br>would be sort of telling I would say can<br>we just actually linger on that point<br>there is a point you've made uh multiple<br>times which is we're more eager to to<br>criticize and maybe even uh<br>overexaggerate the criticism of<br>democratically elected leaders yes it's<br>a dark weird other quality of uh<br>discourse at parties at for mentioned<br>parties isn't it also I mean not be to<br>be flippant for a moment it's a little<br>bit<br>like who do you show your worst sides to<br>the people you<br>love you it's like you know my intense<br>irritability is something that tends to<br>be felt most by people who are closest<br>to me because I I'm if I express it to<br>absolutely everybody I met at a party or<br>a social setting it would be it would be<br>hard I<br>there's a tendency to lean heavily on<br>the people who are closest to you the<br>people<br>who will put up with<br>it um and something similar happens in<br>international politics you you pressure<br>the people who will listen i mean it's<br>it's one of the I mean one of the things<br>you hear a lot in the last years you<br>know people sort of ignoramuses and the<br>governments in places like Britain you<br>know will say we need to put more<br>pressure on the Israelis to do X and you<br>go well you know in part that's because<br>they will listen if you go we need to<br>put more pressure on the Ayatollah in<br>Iran to persuade them that Hammas are<br>really bad and they shouldn't be doing<br>this right what the hell do you think<br>they're going to do they're going to<br>listen to you they're going to give a<br>damn you're talking totally different<br>worlds not just a different language is<br>a different world and by the way that<br>happens in Israel i mentioned it earlier<br>but happens in Israel when the hostage<br>families forum came about uh I spent a<br>lot of time there a lot got to know a<br>lot of the families and um they're<br>remarkable but one of the things you did<br>notice from them as well was that a lot<br>of<br>them they protest outside Netanyahu's<br>house they clack and horns make sure Y<br>doesn't can never sleep they uh will you<br>know put up great big posters by his<br>house of him with bloodied hands and and<br>so on<br>and I have si you know I think as much<br>sympathy as you can for these families<br>the plight of knowing that your child is<br>sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year a<br>day an hour is<br>intolerable but there's a reason why the<br>families protested<br>Netanyahu and that's because<br>Sinoir didn't care<br>that wouldn't work if you<br>said are you you know understand my<br>plight i'm a Jewish mother and my<br>daughter is thing you think Sinoir and<br>the heads of Hamas<br>care you think the leaders in Qatar who<br>host them<br>care the Qatari Amir's mother when<br>Sinoir was killed praised<br>Sinoir you couldn't talk that language<br>to these people but you can talk that<br>language to the elected prime minister<br>of Israel because that first of all he's<br>somebody who might listen to your<br>pressure could be pressured and secondly<br>is simply the only person you can<br>pressure there's no one else hamas<br>doesn't care hezbollah doesn't care the<br>Iranian revolutionary government doesn't<br>care yeah so let's just sort of say once<br>again the uh the obvious thing that uh<br>while it is possible to discuss<br>uh Hamas uh soldiers as freedom fighters<br>I'm not one of the folks that can take<br>that perspective it's a tough one to<br>take i don't see how you can call them<br>freedom fighters so this goes to the man<br>from the land of peace and the man from<br>the land of war there is a lived<br>experience of what it means to grow up<br>in Gaza and if you fully load that into<br>your brain in a in a real way not in not<br>using the words of good and evil but in<br>a in a very deep human sense from that<br>place from that place of desperation<br>when your home and your family is<br>destroyed doesn't matter why doesn't<br>matter if there's evil all around you<br>that caused it doesn't matter the the<br>facts are the facts and from that<br>place somebody who's fighting for you<br>can feel like a freedom fighter i think<br>it should be called out that yes it can<br>feel that way from the lived experience<br>but Hamas is very clearly since we're<br>talking about Netanyahu Hamas is<br>evil okay now you can still in that<br>context discuss the degree to which<br>Netanyahu is the right leader for this<br>moment and whether<br>he goes too far whether he's too<br>politically selfish in the decisions he<br>makes whether he's too much a<br>wararmonger whether he's utilizing the<br>war<br>uh for his own political gains and is uh<br>not caring about the death of civilians<br>in Gaza for example but more caring<br>about his own political uh maintaining<br>power that's a perspective that I could<br>steal man that's a perspective worth<br>discussing and that's a perspective many<br>in Israel hold when they criticize<br>Netanyahu he's increasingly less and<br>less popular that's wrong polls last<br>month when he was in Washington he<br>showed him at an all-time high you know<br>but you were saying I I make my own poll<br>and according to my poll um I'm the<br>greatest i'm the nicest and the coolest<br>person in the world<br>100% of people agree so I didn't mean to<br>laugh that much<br>you laughed a little too much it's more<br>than the joke yeah but you were saying I<br>mean the Yeah okay let's steal man the<br>criticism of Netanyahu can you and then<br>steel man the case for him that he's the<br>right leader actually at this moment the<br>the the most devastating thing that<br>anyone could come up against Netanyahu<br>is is uh that the seventh happened on<br>his watch<br>um after the Yam Kapoor war in 1973 gold<br>mayor who was a very distinguished prime<br>minister of Israel and a remarkable<br>woman but she effectively took the the<br>political hit for the Yamapour invasion<br>um by Israel's Arab neighbors happening<br>on her watch And um and I would have<br>thought that most critics fair-minded<br>critics of Netanyahu inside Isra without<br>would always hold that against<br>him<br>um the<br>uh I suppose that the one of the<br>criticisms you hear a lot as well is<br>this thing of Israel being divided in<br>the year before the 7th because of the<br>judicial reforms um I think there's a<br>strong case for judicial reforms in<br>Israel but um it's a sort of niche<br>Israeli governance issue which we don't<br>have to get into the point is is that<br>Netanyahu and his government were<br>pushing these reforms through judicial<br>reforms and uh it was very divisive and<br>on the streets of Tel Aviv and other<br>cities every weekend there were protests<br>and the uh police were tired because<br>they'd spent week after week on overtime<br>policing these protests which often<br>turned rockous not to say violent or<br>sometimes violent and uh you could say<br>well if you see that something is<br>dividing your country this much mightn't<br>you stop there is a claim by some people<br>that one one of the things that prompted<br>the seventh was that Hamas and its<br>backers in Qatar and Iran saw the<br>division in Israeli society saw the<br>Israeli population you know a<br>significant chunk of it every week on<br>the streets shutting down highways<br>shutting down services and so on and<br>thought good now's the time in other<br>words what I quoted Sinoir as saying<br>earlier when he was in um in prison in<br>Israel was you know this thing one day<br>you'll be weak and then I'll<br>strike maybe that is one of the things<br>that<br>Sinoir thought israel was very weak it<br>had been divided and therefore the time<br>to strike there's an argument against<br>that which is that this the seventh was<br>in preparation and being planned before<br>the judicial reform process in Israel<br>began so you can look at it several ways<br>but you could use that you could say<br>"Look this is you know if you your your<br>your nation was divided don't push<br>through anymore on that." There's<br>there's lots of things like that you<br>could say that that Netanyahu was one of<br>the people responsible for the<br>conception you could uh there were<br>critics of his including critics who<br>were in the war cabinet who thought that<br>he was too focused on on uh Hamas and<br>not focused enough on Hezbollah other<br>people think he was too focused on<br>Hezbollah and not enough on<br>Hamas um so I there's them and many<br>other criticisms that people make of him<br>i would say I've interviewed I think<br>every political leader in Israel from<br>right to left pretty much and um I have<br>to say I don't think there's any of them<br>that wouldn't have responded similarly<br>to the 7th of October to the way he has<br>can we okay so that's inside Israel<br>outside of<br>Israel you know uh despite what he said<br>uh he is one of the most hated people in<br>the world just the raw quantity relative<br>he's by a lot of people but there's a<br>lot of people<br>that you know there's a lot of<br>psychological effects that might explain<br>that i mean it's sort of strange to to<br>to if if if there is a widespread global<br>loathing of the prime minister of a<br>country of 8 to 9 million people yeah<br>that that might mean something more than<br>uh a hatred of the the military actions<br>and the policies of the one person yeah<br>i mean you know there's a there's an<br>awful lot of people to hate in the world<br>there's a lot of wars in the world<br>it's it's always of interest to me and<br>obviously some of the one things I go<br>into on democracies and death cults is<br>this question of like why is this so<br>galvanizing for so many people and I<br>think that is a very very interesting<br>question like<br>why by the way let me do a quick<br>addendum to that you can notice<br>something else like that when people<br>talk about the Republican failures in<br>foreign policy in the last 30 years or<br>So it's very interesting there's a<br>certain type of person who will<br>immediately mention Paul<br>Wolfwitz yeah um and they will say well<br>you know Wolitz you go you mean deputy<br>under secretary of defense under George<br>W<br>bush you think<br>he guided<br>everything why would that be other than<br>the fact that his name as Mark Stein<br>once said starts with a nasty animal and<br>ends Jewish<br>i mean that's a good one so I do and I<br>do so I do think that the<br>the there are very deep things at play<br>it's a good line you know the the the<br>there are very deep things at play<br>netanyahu irrespective of anything he<br>does for a lot of people is a kind of<br>devil and you have to say well why is<br>that now of course some people will say<br>well that's because he uh his terrible<br>hawkishness and his actions and so on<br>and so forth<br>the case for Netanyahu is that he sees<br>it as his historic purpose to defend the<br>only homeland of the Jewish people and<br>that that's his life's<br>mission<br>and on that basis I think he's been by<br>any measure historic<br>leader he<br>has warned the world about the threat<br>from the Mullers in Tehran he warned<br>about Iranian revolutionary expansionism<br>across the region across Iraq Lebanon<br>Syria<br>Yemen and after the 7th he has held<br>together a very very difficult set of<br>challenges to keep um international<br>pressure at a tolerable level<br>to do all sorts of things but most<br>importantly to oversee the two war aims<br>that he set out at the beginning i<br>thought let me just express this i<br>thought like a lot of people when I<br>heard about the<br>hostages my immediate instinct was<br>they're all dead they're all going to be<br>dead we'll never see them<br>again and that was the attitude of a lot<br>of<br>Israelis but although there are still<br>hostages being held and as I've always<br>said the war could end tomorrow if they<br>were handed back<br>um or at least the beginning of the end<br>of the war could begin tomorrow if they<br>were handed back uh nevertheless because<br>of the actions of not just Netanyahu but<br>the Israeli government<br>um most of the hostages have been<br>returned did not expect this to<br>happen and hemaz has not been completely<br>destroyed but it has been very very<br>significantly degraded and you end up in<br>the definition of what a total<br>destruction of Hemaz would look like<br>but<br>they are not anywhere near the<br>capability they<br>were in November of<br>2023 their leadership has almost all<br>been killed<br>uh the second tier of leadership almost<br>all<br>gone and um this is a just response to<br>what Hamas<br>did the moment Netanyahu's reputation in<br>Israel was at a low early on because of<br>what had<br>happened but and there's no doubt and as<br>I I say in the final chapter of the book<br>I mean there's general Slim had this<br>phrase uh you know from defeat into<br>victory israel isn't at victory yet in<br>this conflict but uh when in September<br>last year there were a set of<br>operational successes so<br>extraordinary that I mean it was just<br>like every day's news was there was one<br>day I remember when after the um after<br>the Assad regime fell when um the<br>Israeli air force took out the entirety<br>of the Syrian air force uh in a day<br>because they didn't want it falling into<br>the hands of the new jihadist<br>administration in Syria it was story<br>number four on the BBC news<br>website um the leadership of Hezbollah<br>gone gone the the the second and third<br>tiers of<br>Hezbollah gone or<br>wounded iran's<br>Rolls-Royce<br>destroyed um these are very very<br>significant military<br>achievements<br>and are in my mind a just response to<br>the attempts by Hezbollah Hamas and<br>other Iranian proxies to destroy the<br>Jewish<br>state um would another Israeli leader<br>have been able to<br>hold<br>firm as Netanyahu<br>has i don't know but I do know that any<br>of them would have done something<br>similar or would have tried to do<br>something similar because there's no<br>country on earth no democracy on earth<br>which could possibly not respond to such<br>an<br>atrocity to the point the underlying<br>point you<br>made of<br>why do so many people want to call him<br>evil and so the implication is it's not<br>just a hatred of Israel there's an ocean<br>of hatred for the Jews yes<br>why is there so much hatred for Jews in<br>the world i would say there's one reason<br>in particular it's a stupid and gullible<br>person's easy<br>answer why is why do certain things<br>happen in the world<br>what is what is our explanation of<br>chance or unfairness<br>or any number of<br>things easiest easiest stupidest<br>person's explanation is there's a small<br>group of people doing it let's not say<br>stupidest because there's something in<br>the human mind that craves a nice clean<br>theory of everything right that explains<br>all the pro it's not just stupid let me<br>rephrase lowest grade right cuz I lowest<br>I have that I have that desire too to<br>simplify everything like be a bit<br>anti-Semitic what<br>uh we've all<br>we've all been bit anti-semitic here and<br>there and just get a few vodkas i mean<br>no uh to find I mean maybe as a<br>mathematician I mean it's like to find a<br>simple explanation for everything right<br>actually it's that's nice for every<br>historians do this absolutely i agree<br>analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed<br>it's so nice to have one especially if<br>it's a counterintuitive explanation it's<br>one of the favorite go-tos right is an<br>explanation for all the problems in the<br>world it's the lowest resolution<br>analysis imaginable why is there traffic<br>why did my wife leave me why did my wife<br>cheating on me why did I lose my job why<br>did I not get the job because So even on<br>the personal level oh especially on the<br>personal level why did I not get<br>everything somebody must have held me<br>back yeah and it's just that hatred of<br>Jews has been such a popular go-to<br>throughout history you just always<br>return back to the hits I guess and I<br>What is it special about the Jews as a<br>group that people love to hate is it<br>just cuz it's small number of people i<br>think several things successful well one<br>is small and um<br>um without by any means saying this is a<br>general rule but um uh<br>disproportionately highly accomplished<br>uh in certain fields at certain<br>times um uh prominent is a word I would<br>use prominent slightly beyond their<br>numbers in certain places um it's not a<br>full explanation i mean um you know all<br>sorts of historic reasons why Jews were<br>involved in banking um but then there<br>are lots of historic reasons why the<br>Scottish people my own were involved in<br>banking and to this day you don't find<br>many people who blame all international<br>finance problems on the Scots um so<br>there are just like easy grooves for<br>people to fall into it seems to me we<br>should also mention you know banking for<br>some reason money is a thing that people<br>go to but um Jews have been<br>disproportionately successful in the<br>sciences and uh engineering mathematics<br>yes in the arts and so on a sensible<br>person would try to work out why that is<br>and and see what is replicable<br>uh a um<br>uh I don't want to use the word stupid<br>again now a different type of person I'm<br>triggered already a different type of<br>person would look at that and say "That<br>must mean they took something from me<br>and uh that's you know the the the most<br>zero sum game there is i I it's an<br>endlessly fascinating subject because it<br>seems to me that anti-semitism is almost<br>certainly a sort of ineradicable<br>um temptation of the<br>human spirit at its ugliest and<br>cheapest um<br>but but it it because it's back in our<br>day it bears some analysis<br>again um and I would say two things<br>about it what one is<br>um as I and others have said many times<br>in the past one of the fascinating<br>things about anti-semitism is that it it<br>it it can cover everything at once so<br>the Jews get hated for being rich and<br>for being poor<br>both for being the Rothschilds and for<br>being Eastern European Jews escaping the<br>pograms they can be hated for being<br>religious and for being anti-religious<br>and producing Marxism for<br>instance hated for religiosity and<br>secularism<br>uh they can be<br>hated for most recently not having a<br>state and therefore being ruthless<br>cosmopolitans and also hated for having<br>a<br>state and that makes it something very<br>unusual actually in the history of human<br>bigotry and<br>um you know bias and<br>ugliness but the real thing is one of my<br>great heroes Vasley Gman says at the<br>center of life and fate almost<br>everything that is worth saying about<br>anti-semitism and it's Gman's<br>genius that he could say in three to<br>four pages what most people couldn't say<br>in an entire life even after life of<br>study but there's this passage in the in<br>life and fate that I quote in my book<br>which is just bowled me over when I read<br>it some years ago<br>when he says you know the interesting<br>thing about anti-semitism he says you<br>can meet it everywhere in the um in the<br>academy of sciences and in the games<br>that children play in the yard but<br>Gman's great insight is he says<br>everywhere it tells you not about the<br>Jews but about the person making<br>the claim and the most important gift he<br>gives in his analysis is when he says<br>describes it as a mirror to the person<br>who is making the<br>claims culminating in this phrase I've<br>been trying to make popular which is he<br>said he says tell me what you accuse the<br>Jews of I'll tell you what you're guilty<br>of it's a searingly brilliant insight um<br>the<br>uh the the Iranian revolutionary<br>government accuses Israel of being a<br>colonial<br>power the Iranian revolutionary<br>government has been colonizing the<br>Middle East throughout our<br>lifetimes the Turkish government accuses<br>uh uh uh the Jewish state of being uh<br>guilty of occupation<br>do you know northern Cypress the Turks<br>have been<br>occupying half of Cyprus since the<br>1970s cypress is an EU member state and<br>Turkey is in<br>NATO so you can do this on and on the<br>people who accuse the Jewish state like<br>the people who accuse Jews of something<br>almost without fail is the thing they're<br>guilty<br>of look at um the supporters of Hamas<br>and Hamas one of the things they say is<br>that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate<br>killing<br>hamz hello<br>what were you doing on the 7th you see<br>there are these crazy guys online who<br>claim repeatedly claim that for some<br>reason Israeli soldiers will rape<br>Palestinians when they meet them whether<br>in a prison or on the battlefield or in<br>a hospital it's just it erupts<br>occasionally these these people go<br>around and saying "Oh my god the IDF are<br>rapists." Excuse<br>me you<br>You're the<br>ones who spent the years after 2016<br>saying "Believe all women." Then from<br>the 7th of October said "Believe all<br>women except for Jewish women who say<br>they've been raped or seen their friends<br>raped." And then you say "Aha the Jews<br>are rapists." You've been carrying water<br>for rapists and then go and accuse the<br>Jews of rape i mean it just works every<br>way you do it it works<br>i do think the thing of psychological<br>projection in the case of Israel is is<br>is wild i mean it is wild by the way<br>there's an interesting thing on this<br>that I try to get into in the book which<br>is this thing of why did so much of the<br>world respond the way it did i mean<br>we're sitting in New York there was not<br>one protest against Hamas in New York<br>after the 7th of October the Believe All<br>Women crowd didn't come out against<br>Hamaz's rapes the um Black Lives Matter<br>movement did not turn their attention to<br>the killing of Israeli children or<br>anything nobody did it nobody did<br>it the one thing that did<br>happen very prominently was that people<br>came out to attack the people who' been<br>attacked and as I say in the opening of<br>the book I saw that myself down the road<br>from here in Time Square on October the<br>8th october the freaking 8th the<br>protests are in Times Square against<br>Israel justifying the attacks that were<br>still going<br>on and this is this is something that<br>deserves deep self-examination on behalf<br>of people in the West who who've seen<br>this movement overwhelm parts of our<br>society i mean degraded parts but parts<br>bits of the universities and so on<br>and I think there's an explanation for<br>it by the way which again goes back to<br>that issue of projection when you and I<br>last talked on camera um we were talking<br>about my last book The War on the West<br>and I remember saying to you there that<br>um one of the things I was talking about<br>in that book was the deeply<br>deeply wildly biased unfair and<br>inaccurate estimation of the western<br>past whereby you know America's original<br>sin had to be identified and the<br>original sin is slavery so America has<br>an original sin does Ghana have an<br>original sin no one knows no one really<br>would think polite to point one out um<br>and you know you go on and on with these<br>these things that I identified in the<br>war in the west these these these sins<br>of the west and they have in recent<br>years been reduced to the claim that<br>countries like the one we're sitting in<br>are guilty of<br>what<br>colonialism settler colonialism white<br>supremacy slavery<br>uh<br>genocide and a couple of others you can<br>throw in<br>probably one of the things I remember<br>saying to you when we spoke about that<br>was the the one of the deep problems of<br>setting up that system of thought pseudo<br>thought non-thought would be<br>thought is that there's nothing you can<br>do about it even if it was true there's<br>nothing you can do about it<br>um if it turned out that your ancestors<br>in the 18th century once owned a slave<br>what are you going to do there's no<br>mechanism to forgive or be forgiven<br>because you didn't do it and there's no<br>one alive who could accept the<br>apology and I remember setting it up<br>there in the war in the West set up like<br>this this very<br>very<br>risky<br>dangerous unforgivable unforgiving thing<br>that had been set up about our<br>societies but I would say that since<br>October the<br>7th there has been an answer for a<br>certain type of person which<br>is I am from a society where I have been<br>told I am guilty of settler colonialism<br>white supremacy uh uh genocide ethnic<br>cleansing and more i've been told all of<br>these things i have been put in<br>an ungetoutable of situation of<br>moral burden that can never be relieved<br>because I can't ask anyone's forgiveness<br>and nobody can forgive<br>me but<br>ah here's a<br>country which I can accuse of all of<br>these things in the here and now<br>load my energies my guilts my<br>burdens onto and what's more I might be<br>able to end it and by doing<br>so would relieve myself and in other<br>words to like just to I quote I tweak<br>Grossman with the people<br>in America and elsewhere who've fallen<br>into this trap i tweak him by<br>saying "On this occasion tell me what<br>you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you<br>what you've been told you're guilty<br>of." Yeah it's an interesting kind of<br>projection uh just to observe some of<br>the<br>uh sociological phenomena here on top of<br>all this it does seem that hatred of<br>Jews gets a lot of engagement online mhm<br>is this so I watch it like a curiosity<br>like I'm an alien observing Earth uh is<br>this dangerous to you or is it just a<br>bunch of trolls and grifters you know<br>let's say cosplaying as Nazis it's just<br>could be both fun to trigger the libs it<br>could be all of those things i think it<br>is and a lot more<br>um I mean<br>taboos you know taboos can be fun to<br>break I suppose and I suppose there are<br>some people<br>online who have grown up knowing that<br>you know since the Holocaust<br>anti-semitism was taboo and they've run<br>out of goes back to what we were saying<br>earlier a bit you know the they sort of<br>run out of they've got bored of that you<br>know holocaust schmolicourse they'd say<br>you know I got I heard enough about<br>that and maybe those people have gone<br>off in a<br>direction as a result but I don't think<br>that's the main I think that's like a<br>detail compared to the real thing the<br>real thing is that anti-semitism is back<br>and uh there is a certain type of person<br>who's loving it is it really back so I I<br>watch Well it never goes away it's just<br>that it's just that it's it's<br>it's since the seventh I think that it's<br>had a great resurgence this isn't to say<br>and still man that doesn't mean that any<br>criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic no<br>it doesn't but as I have often said if<br>you don't ever express any interest in<br>the murder of Muslims in Syria not any<br>interest in uh genocide in<br>Sudan killing of hundreds of thousands<br>of people in Yemen but on the 8th of<br>October you're on the street with a<br>plard attacking Israel i'm sorry you're<br>an anti-semite for sure you may not know<br>you are but that's what's motivating you<br>it gets a lot of engagement i watch it<br>it does i watch it but I mean it's one<br>of several things you can always see get<br>huge engagement i It's like if you if<br>you say that there's like a massive<br>pedophile ring run by prominent<br>politicians it might be to total<br>horseshit likely be total horseshit but<br>it'll also get a hell of a lot of<br>engagement yeah but that's still so the<br>pedophile ring like Epstein Island that<br>kind of stuff which is very interesting<br>it's like great all right cool let's<br>let's get behind that conspiracy<br>uh but the Jews thing the hatred of Jews<br>is still that's the greatest hits still<br>it is and I mean you see it with I mean<br>some of the people who've made minor<br>celebrities of<br>themselves with a sort of madeup version<br>of history with a smattering of this and<br>a little bit of that and then the just<br>asking questions and you know I'm not<br>saying but and all there are certain you<br>know rhetorical sites of hand that have<br>have helped this along but as I said<br>earlier it's just a the lowest grade<br>explanation of a certain type of mind<br>looking for a pattern and looking for<br>meaning and I mean I can give you just<br>one quick example of why that in the<br>case of Israel is so<br>extraordinary is the number of otherwise<br>semi-intelligent people who will tell<br>you that the problem is<br>simply that the Israelis need to give<br>the Palestinians another<br>state and that if they do it will solve<br>the problems of the region and the wider<br>world<br>and irrespective of the fact that the<br>Parisian has been given to several<br>states<br>the explan the claim that this<br>particular land dispute would unlock<br>every other injustice in the world<br>should be seen on its face to be<br>preposterous<br>there is no reason why if uh the<br>Palestinians got another state either in<br>Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria<br>the West Bank there is no reason why we<br>should expect the economy of Yemen to<br>boom it would not inevitably lead to the<br>mullers in Tehran giving equal rights to<br>women or anything else it it it would<br>solve the the most likely thing is you'd<br>simply have another failed Arab state<br>run by a sort of proxy of Thran that's<br>the best case scenario and by the way<br>even lifelong defenders of the<br>Palestinian cause like Salman Rushi he<br>said recently he said there he said<br>"I've always been a supporter of the<br>Palestinian people and their cause but<br>it is an unavoidable fact that if<br>another state was given to the<br>Palestinians it would simply be at best<br>another front for the Iranian regime in<br>Iran at best." So why the passion about<br>why the unbelievable wild passion about<br>this why the and and I say some of it<br>can be should be argued out and so on<br>and some of it can be explained but but<br>there's definitely a realm of it a layer<br>of it which is simply at that level of<br>this excites something within<br>me this excites something within me yeah<br>there there's some there's some there's<br>something compelling to people about<br>hating Jews look at the look at the<br>prominence of of of or you know<br>semi-prominent people who are willing to<br>play around with the idea that 9/11 was<br>an inside job and somehow it's done by<br>the<br>Israelis or the Jews i mean I mean look<br>at the like this this is going<br>around i have to admit you know I'm<br>there's a part of my brain that's pulled<br>towards conspiracies there's something<br>compelling and fun about a simple<br>explanation for things what's really<br>going on behind the scenes because the<br>real world when you don't look at the<br>conspiracies first of all it's<br>complicated and second of all it's kind<br>of boring it's a bunch of incompetent<br>people usually opening up Pandora's<br>boxes they don't understand yeah it's<br>pushing buffoons and I've been uh I mean<br>I've I've uh walked around and hung<br>around with a lot of powerful and rich<br>people and like the thing I learned is<br>they're just human beings there's not<br>I'm yet to be in a room where<br>exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are<br>plotting<br>you never got that invite no in fact<br>like a lot of people in the positions of<br>power they're just not good i mean I'm<br>just continuously disappointed<br>that they're not ultra I love competence<br>yeah the places where I've seen<br>competence inklings of it is in uh<br>lowlevel like soldiers like lowlevel uh<br>what do you call that people that do<br>stuff with their hands so uh builders of<br>different kinds like engineering like<br>craftsman like I've seen Yes because you<br>got because you've got a very specific<br>task that could be highly complicated<br>yes but you get to apply yourself to and<br>to solve yeah over years you master it<br>it's passed across generations and so on<br>but like state craft and like that that<br>kind of stuff well it's because there's<br>so many variables i mean this is this is<br>one of the when you were trying to lure<br>me on to prognostications on Ukraine<br>earlier i was saying I just I've seen<br>enough to know that I just don't know<br>because I know of the amount of things<br>that can change all the time i I was<br>some years ago I was talking to a a<br>former public servant in the UK when um<br>uh uh Boris Johnson was prime minister<br>and co started and I mentioned to this<br>friend I said well you know it's it's<br>pretty bad luck for Boris that you know<br>he came in to do one thing which was<br>Brexit and then there's a global<br>pandemic from Wuhan you know and he's<br>got to like mug up on that and then gets<br>it really wrong<br>Anyway and I was really struck by the<br>fact this man a man man of great insight<br>who happened to disagree politically but<br>said to me "But Douglas is always like<br>this." And he said you know look at Tony<br>Blair came into power in 1997 wanting to<br>reform education in the UK ends up<br>trying to remake the Middle<br>East and I I I do I mean as I say one of<br>the reasons why I am scornful of<br>conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy<br>theories not to say that there aren't<br>some that do actually turn out to be you<br>know to have something in them and that<br>happens a lot of things are called<br>conspiracy theories that turn out to be<br>true lab league um but but in<br>general the the suspicion and the scorn<br>I have for people who fall into this is<br>as I say it's a very lowgrade<br>lowresolution look at the world by<br>people who clearly have never seen<br>the wildness of actions in the world and<br>the way that they reverberate and the<br>number of events i mean I once spoke<br>some years ago to a politician who<br>literally said to me I won't name the<br>country but said to me c can you help us<br>out with with just how to cope on the<br>about with the the day to and understand<br>the<br>daytoday struggle we're having with the<br>cycle and I said what are you talking<br>about and they said our experience in<br>government is that every day something<br>comes up which we have to<br>firefight and that's what we do that day<br>and then the next day something else<br>comes up which we have to firefight and<br>we we're not<br>getting our policies done and I and I<br>just thought for me that rings an awful<br>lot truer than that that country gets<br>the odd phone call from a member of a<br>Jewish<br>family telling them yeah I just you know<br>it's like come on<br>so you know that's I I do before I<br>forget want to ask you about Iran what<br>role do they play in this conflict such<br>a It's fascinating how it seems like<br>Iran is uh fingerprints are everywhere<br>in the Middle<br>East and it's also fascinating that you<br>know I have a lot of friends my best<br>friend is Iranian it's fascinating that<br>the Islamic Revolution in Iran took the<br>country from the leadership perspective<br>backwards in such a drastic way and that<br>they're still in power that confuses me<br>because I know now it's possible I don't<br>know the people of Iran<br>sorry to make the obvious statement but<br>I just have a lot of friends in Iran and<br>a lot of them everybody I know there<br>opposes the regime and they're brilliant<br>yes educated thoughtful worldly<br>people and it confuses me that there's<br>this is one of the I would say<br>uh one of the greatest nations on earth<br>certainly one of the great cultures of<br>earth cultures like the peoples of Iran<br>and then you look at that and then you<br>look at the leadership<br>when they're behind most of the terror<br>groups in the region certainly yeah can<br>you just speak to that and how is it<br>still the same regime since 1979 i know<br>as you know I start on democracies and<br>death cults with the the flight taking<br>the<br>Ayatollah from Paris to Thran the flight<br>that you say you wish never happened i<br>think it's one of the two worst journeys<br>of the 20th century what's the other one<br>was it Lenin's train getting to Petrorad<br>it's always about the transportation<br>it's Yes I know i'm I'm really a<br>transport guy no I<br>um wait till my book of 10 best journeys<br>um across the world no um just as the<br>train to the Finland<br>station brought the basselus of<br>bulcheism into<br>Russia so the flight coming from Paris<br>bringing the ayati to Thran brought the<br>bassilus of Hmenanism the most radical<br>form of Shiite<br>Islam to Thran and to Iran and it's one<br>of the great tragedies of the modern era<br>what happened there like you actually I<br>have a lot of Persian friends and I had<br>the great good fortune early in my life<br>to have a very close late friend who had<br>grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran was<br>very fond of the sha and and and so on<br>her father had been an ayatollah before<br>the the overthrow of the sha but and you<br>know everyone had criticisms of him but<br>um when you saw what came after him it<br>just uh it was among other things uh<br>what I learned from her and other<br>friends from that region was that I<br>suppose two things one is of course is<br>that it's a sort of central conservative<br>insight you know things can always be<br>worse they can always be worse never say<br>this is rock bottom<br>because yeah you know like you might<br>have a sh with hundreds or even<br>thousands of political prisoners in<br>cells but you could always have<br>butchering them<br>all and um including the people who<br>helped him get to power like the<br>communists and the trade unionists who<br>who simply were fighting against the sha<br>and then were very useful for the idler<br>until he didn't need them anymore<br>um but the other thing I learned from<br>that particular friend and and others<br>was<br>that was this this thing<br>that and again it's very hard for the<br>western mindset very hard for the<br>American mindset in particular that<br>there is such a thing as fanaticism real<br>fanaticism and real ideological and real<br>religious fanaticism and the thing that<br>I describe leads to the death cult<br>mindset that fanaticism is something<br>which is very easy for the west to<br>forget get because we haven't seen it in<br>a while you know we get very um distant<br>echoes of it in our own societies really<br>and we're highly attuned to hear them<br>which is good in some<br>ways um but<br>homism not only vastly set<br>back the Persian people the Iranian<br>nation but has managed to keep it in<br>subjugation since 1979 and your question<br>of why gets to one of the<br>really the biggest questions really that<br>that has to be unders the answer to<br>which has to be understood which is it's<br>what Soljan Nitsson says at one point in<br>Gulag archipelago in that passage where<br>he describes when we heard the footsteps<br>on the<br>staircase and the knock was on our<br>neighbor's<br>door and we knew our neighbor was being<br>taken<br>way why did we not stop<br>them<br>and in the case of the revolutionary<br>government in<br>Iran you know it's the same answer as<br>whether it's governing Gaza with the the<br>people whoever the people in Gaza are<br>who would have liked to have seen them<br>overthrown you<br>know people don't<br>realize that despite the rhetoric and<br>everything else everything changes if<br>the other guy might kill<br>you and that you know when the green<br>revolution in 2009 started in<br>Iran why was it put down why didn't it<br>work<br>why like you my the sort of Iranians who<br>I really hope one day get their country<br>back why did all these smart young<br>students and others why after they came<br>out why was it put down it was put down<br>because the Bas militia will shoot you<br>in the<br>head and they'll take you to a prison as<br>they did with the Iranian students and<br>they'll rape you with bottles and kill<br>you<br>and even a little bit of that goes an<br>awfully long way to tell the rest of<br>society not to do it again you know we<br>know it happens like that from<br>films but too few people<br>understand that regimes like that in<br>Thran operate like that on a grand<br>scale on the biggest of scales and with<br>the ultimate of brutality<br>and that's how they stay in power and<br>one other thing on that by the way which<br>is I was I was reminded of this the<br>other day but you know thinking about<br>this sort of you know what I've just<br>described as a sort of a problem in<br>democracies is that we just you know we<br>like to think everyone thinks like us<br>and you know we'd like everyone to sort<br>of be like us and we we believe fictions<br>that we're taught in films like you know<br>everyone basically wants the same things<br>as us and you go you haven't stepped<br>outside the walls of the city if you<br>think that but the second thing is this<br>thing of the death cults of<br>why why we sort of sing singly fail to<br>understand that this is<br>possible<br>and homism is both very specific and<br>also very strongly linked to<br>totalitarian and radical and extremist<br>death cult movements that are not that<br>far in our past<br>i mean you know there's a moment in uh<br>um when Ariana Falachi interviewed in<br>1979 one of the very few Western<br>journalists to do<br>so she says to him "These people in the<br>street this movement this revolution<br>you've<br>begun it's guided by hate it's hate it's<br>all<br>hate." And Hani says "No no it's love<br>it's<br>love<br>and and it's actually a scene that that<br>that appears in the satanic verses of<br>Rushi where that exact same thing<br>happens but I was thinking about this<br>recently because I was thinking what how<br>can you explain to a western mindset<br>that that's that's something that's<br>going on there are people directed by<br>this hate that calls itself love this<br>this and I was reminded of a book I<br>haven't read since I was probably a<br>teenager or something made a great<br>impression on me then did you ever read<br>the the tragic sense of life uh Miguel<br>de Unimuno great Spanish existentialist<br>philosopher died in the 30s unamuno had<br>a encounter with students at the<br>university in the 30s when he realizes I<br>mean this is the the the early period of<br>the<br>Francoists Da and all those people you<br>know is at this meeting and the chant<br>goes up from the eager students who have<br>fallen into this sort of<br>philangist Francoist ideology already<br>they end up chanting in front of him as<br>he's trying to defend the principles by<br>which he has lived his life they end up<br>chanting in front of him viva<br>leuete long live<br>death long live<br>death and he tries to explain to them<br>this<br>is this is a necrophilic chant yeah but<br>those young<br>men in prefranist Spain shouting long<br>live death they have their counterparts<br>today they are the people who who taunt<br>Americans Westerners Israelis and others<br>with lines<br>like "We love death more than you love<br>life." Yeah that's the line you return<br>to that's a really difficult line to<br>load<br>in because if you base your whole<br>existence on that<br>notion then um well you're a danger to<br>the<br>world that's a good foundation for<br>committing<br>evil um I I have to ask because you<br>mentioned that interview you had a good<br>interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after<br>October<br>7th and I've been very fortunate to get<br>the opportunity to interview a few world<br>leaders it looks like I'll interview<br>Vladimir Putin and others one I have a<br>general question about how do you<br>interview people like<br>this maybe to put your historian hat on<br>of like how do you approach the<br>interview of world<br>leaders such that you can gain a deeper<br>understanding in the hope that that adds<br>to the compassion in the world so I have<br>I have a deep sense that understanding<br>people you might<br>hate helps in the long arc of history<br>add compassion to the world but even<br>just to add understanding is difficult<br>in those kinds of<br>contexts<br>and you know maybe it's more useful to<br>think about from a historian perspective<br>of how you uh need to interview somebody<br>like Hitler or Stalin or<br>Churchill FDR during World War II<br>m it's not you know I think about this a<br>lot especially if it's uh you know 2 3 4<br>5 hour conversation well there's a lot<br>of uh weight on you when you do those<br>conversations isn't from where so like<br>where who's watching is it historians 20<br>years from then who knows I mean the<br>whole data might be wiped I<br>I I suspect there's a wait on you<br>because every major a world leader you<br>interview and you've done some amazing<br>ones but I mean you you<br>presumably you have a set of people<br>saying you've got to ask him about this<br>you you can't not address this and and<br>that's a very challenging one because of<br>course although in an interview with a<br>politician should not should not be<br>supine nor can it be endlessly<br>interrogative because like you're not<br>the prosecutor and they don't have to be<br>the guilty party answering to you and<br>I've noticed the number of people who<br>interview people world leaders and<br>others who go in with a set of sort<br>of those things and and they and and at<br>some point the other party can<br>just I don't need this and people<br>criticizing you don't realize that you<br>just can't do that yeah i suppose why<br>journalists behave the way they do<br>although I have increasingly less and<br>less respect for the journalist um the<br>average journalist i have more and more<br>respect for the great journalists as my<br>respect for the average journalist<br>decreases uh because a lot of the<br>journalists seem to be s signaling to<br>their own in in group<br>but there is a lot of pressure on uh<br>people in that situation to ask the what<br>I would say is the dumb question why is<br>it the dumb question uh the adversarial<br>question<br>that the the world leader the person is<br>ready for they've answered that question<br>and what you're trying to do is I guess<br>one to signal that you've asked the<br>question and to push them yes uh two<br>you're trying to like just create drama<br>because really what people that ask you<br>to ask that question they want you to<br>embarrass that person they hate them and<br>they want you to like make them piss<br>their pants or something or just start<br>crying and run out yeah walk out in a<br>way that it's embarrassing for them they<br>could be like "Look at that pathetic<br>person." Uh and that reveals to me<br>nothing except maybe the weakness of the<br>interviewee that they can't stand up to<br>a tough question yes but mostly like I'm<br>I'm starting I I have to do a lot of<br>thinking because you get attacked a lot<br>if you ask questions from a place of<br>curiosity that actually have a chance to<br>reveal who the person is there's a very<br>interesting line that Robin Day who was<br>quite a distinguished interviewer back a<br>very distinguished interviewer back in<br>the day said about Jeremy Paxman who was<br>a very interrogative interviewer in the<br>UK robin Day who was quite good at being<br>rude to politicians but carefully said<br>the problem with the new approach as he<br>saw it from the ' 90s of political<br>interviewing was he said "If you think<br>the person you're speaking to is a<br>liar you should get them to reveal that<br>they're a liar don't just call them a<br>liar." Yeah y and I think that is again<br>it's something that a lot of people<br>sitting on the other side of the screen<br>don't realize is that it may satisfy<br>them that you call a person a liar to<br>their face but it doesn't do anything<br>and it actually reveals nothing<br>if somebody is a liar and they reveal<br>themselves to be a liar then that's<br>that's something else but yes I mean I<br>can I I hear you you're obviously you<br>have lot of different<br>voices telling you what to<br>do it's also difficult cuz one of the<br>things that I don't think anyone really<br>understands is that is that in the end<br>it's just you<br>i'm sure they you have this about Putin<br>like people say I I know exactly how you<br>can you know they could give endless<br>advice the end is you sitting down<br>talking to him<br>it's it's like everybody knows how to<br>behave on the presidential debate stage<br>but only a few people have done it in<br>person it's actually pretty difficult as<br>I mean it's very difficult because<br>you've got all this weird behind thes<br>scenes stuff as well you've got all of<br>the games that people play i mean yeah<br>with uh you know I interviewed Zilinski<br>you know I'm pretty fearless in general<br>and he was a very human and fascinating<br>human but there is soldiers with guns<br>standing all around<br>and you didn't have anyone you no one<br>was packing on your side I I had one<br>friend security person who's also<br>Ukrainian so you never know you could<br>turn on<br>you've been infiltrated yeah exactly no<br>I mean that doesn't have any effect and<br>by the way I should mention that uh<br>because it's it's hilarious to me but um<br>process-wise with Narajod and with<br>anyone they don't they said it was<br>scripted and all this kind of stuff i<br>would never do anything scripted they<br>don't get to have a say in anything I<br>asked i have complete freedom uh<br>sometimes you'll have people on the team<br>very politely nudge like hey can you uh<br>and I'll very politely say thank you you<br>know like smile but that doesn't mean I<br>have to do it I I could do<br>whatever the hell I want you the comm<br>this actually by the way with world<br>leaders it doesn't happen it happens<br>more with CEOs because they have like<br>usually PR and comms people they'll just<br>be like very politely hey you know that<br>thing<br>about you know when they that sexual<br>assault harassment charges they've had<br>could we just There's no reason to<br>really linger on that we don't have to<br>do that yeah one of my favorite things<br>anyone has ever said in adver or it's<br>only ever happened I know a couple of<br>cases of this happening in private some<br>friends some a friend of mine once years<br>ago was debating against the this is<br>before the the war the civil war in<br>Syria was debating something to do with<br>the Middle East and one of the people on<br>the other side was the then Syrian<br>ambassador in London the then Syrian<br>ambassador in London says something<br>about the Israeli treatment of the<br>Palestinians and my friend stands up and<br>starts talking about Assad senior's<br>massacre of the Palestinians in Hammer<br>where they killed like 10,000<br>Palestinians in a day um And my friend<br>starts talking about the hammer massacre<br>by uh Assad senior and the the big fat<br>Syrian ambassador like stands up to<br>respond and he says that is that is none<br>of your<br>business and my friend was like oh I<br>thought we were going to get into denial<br>uh let me just ask you one more thing<br>about Netanyahu<br>um cuz I also have the opportunity to do<br>a 3-hour interview with him at this<br>stage and I've been if I'm just being<br>honest very hesitant to do it and I just<br>don't<br>know how a conversation there could um<br>help add compassion to the world and<br>that particular topic no matter how well<br>you do it you do take on a very large<br>number of people that will just make it<br>their daily activity to hate you and to<br>write about it and to post about it and<br>to accuse you of things in some sense I<br>don't want to lose the part of me that's<br>that's v vulnerable to the world people<br>have very little understanding of things<br>if they're willing to say that because<br>you're sitting down and talking with<br>somebody you are ego platforming them uh<br>um advancing their cause being used<br>being a shill or whatever like that you<br>might be actually just finding some<br>things out which I I think something you<br>do expertly and another thing that your<br>critics wouldn't realize is is that like<br>you know life is long and you know<br>hopefully God willing both around for a<br>long time and therefore you don't blow<br>everything up at the request of some<br>online mhm but I do think that a<br>superpower of a kind is to identify the<br>people whose opinion you care for and<br>worry about their opinion and no one<br>else's really and and keep and just you<br>just keep your own guiding light that's<br>what's always done it for for me is that<br>I I I've always said I just don't really<br>I wouldn't care if I was the only person<br>with my opinion and billions of people<br>disagreed i mean I might be curious if<br>the whole planet disagreed with me it<br>doesn't fundamentally that's not<br>why I'll send you Churchill's great<br>speech on the death of Chamberlain<br>i mean it he says the He says one of the<br>most wise and brilliant<br>things i was thinking about it slightly<br>earlier when you were talking about<br>Zilinski but he because because one of<br>Churchill's<br>greatnesses was his<br>magnanimity and um when his great<br>political opponent Chamberlain<br>died in 1940 and Churchill had just<br>taken over as prime minister he could<br>have used the opportunity and we might<br>even say that some politicians in our<br>day won't be able to resist the<br>opportunity he could have used the<br>opportunity to say "You see I was right<br>and Chamberlain didn't know what the<br>hell he was doing and he' let us into<br>this mess and you should have all<br>listened to me because that would have<br>been a good time." Yeah it would have<br>been a good time to say that that would<br>have been one for the win as they say<br>but Churchill doesn't do that in his<br>great eulogy for Chamberlain he talks<br>about how hard it is for mankind to<br>operate in the world and how you can do<br>it successfully he very movingly says he<br>doesn't even mention the name of Hitler<br>he says what were Neville Chamber's<br>flaws he says desiring of human peace to<br>be seeking peace and he says and he his<br>the curses he had was he was led astray<br>by a very wicked man and then but then<br>he has this great<br>passage where he Churchill<br>says beautiful resonant passage about<br>how he says it's not given to men<br>happily for them for otherwise life<br>would prove intolerable to foresee or to<br>predict to any great extent the<br>unfolding course of<br>events and he says in for one phase men<br>seem to have been right and in another<br>they're proved wrong and then there's a<br>a and there's a different scale of<br>values emerges and he said he says what<br>is the worth of all this he says the<br>only guide to a man is his conscience<br>the only shield to his memory is the<br>rectitude and the sincerity of his<br>actions and he he says it doesn't matter<br>what happens if you have this finishes<br>he says with however the fates may play<br>that if you have this<br>shield to guard you he says you march<br>always in the ranks of honor<br>all that can guide a man is is<br>that if you lose sight of it and some<br>people do and maybe everyone does at<br>some point then it's a challenge and<br>then you get buffeted by the twos and<br>fros of the waves of popular<br>opinion but um and that's<br>dangerous but if you keep<br>sight and hold on to what you<br>believe a million billion foes don't<br>matter yeah that is the path we were<br>talking offline about a great biography<br>of<br>Churchill uh Churchill himself made<br>mistakes and admitted the mistakes and<br>was we can even say was proud of the<br>mistakes i mean learn from them learn<br>from them that's all the best you could<br>do the worst you could probably do is<br>being afraid of making mistakes that's<br>what TR famous said about them in the<br>man in the arena speech<br>tr yeah ah the old TR those two have<br>made quite a few mistakes but are in the<br>end some of the greatest humans ever<br>created norm McDonald<br>Churchill and TM<br>i think we did it before coming on air<br>oh before coming on air yeah well he's<br>always an everywhere in the in the air<br>around<br>us one of the one of the great<br>comedians um all right what gives you<br>hope about this whole thing we have<br>going<br>on human civilization<br>you've uh been covering some of the<br>darker aspects the madness of crowds the<br>madness of geopolitics the madness of<br>wars sometimes when the sun shines<br>through the clouds and and there's a<br>smile on Douglas Murray's face what's<br>the source of the smile the the<br>warmth endless numbers of<br>things endless numbers of things i get I<br>get enormous<br>encouragement from smart young people<br>actually that's one of the way that's<br>just the best thing ever<br>um I was in Kiev the other week and I<br>was asked to speak to students at the<br>university and irrespective of the<br>rather you know tricky situation that<br>they are in it's just great to as you<br>know to speak to a room full of students<br>about things and then hang around<br>afterwards and just answer all the<br>questions you can and hear from them<br>about their lives and what they want to<br>do and remembering what you were like at<br>their age and<br>how goofy you were and how much you were<br>going to get wrong and how much you know<br>you had to learn and how much you were<br>going to enjoy it and and seeing the the<br>opportunities they have in front of them<br>if if things go right and and uh just<br>smart young people giving enormous<br>encouragement all the time it's it's<br>that's the best thing i mean it's just<br>yeah they're uh you can see endless<br>possibility in their eyes and there's uh<br>they're not like burdened by<br>um let's say uh the cynicism that builds<br>up even the cynicism though I mean you<br>can resist that i mean I've got quite a<br>deep wellspring of it but I mean you<br>can't only fall into that because<br>there's so much else it doesn't cover<br>it' be like spending your life being<br>ironic you know<br>[Laughter]<br>uh so that said you have seen a lot of<br>war especially recently and directly<br>Ukraine Israel<br>Has that changed<br>you has that dimmed some of that warmth<br>and light uh that's a very difficult<br>question to<br>answer i don't<br>know differs day to day so sometimes<br>there's a heaviness there because of the<br>things you've seen yeah i I at times at<br>times you regret some going as much as<br>you have to the front lines<br>no<br>no one of the reasons why war is for a<br>writer kind of the ultimate<br>subject is because you<br>see life weirdly at its<br>ultimate very very strange strange thing<br>but you know it just it is is the truth<br>death when it's in front of you is<br>something<br>which gives uh a terrible clarity to<br>everything and<br>uh it it you see how people will love<br>and even sometimes<br>laugh<br>more how they'll<br>um there's an essay by Montaigne that's<br>always on my mind why we weep and laugh<br>at the same time<br>uh everything's just more and<br>um and people the real thing is that<br>people you see the the very very best of<br>people and the very worst and they're<br>beside each other there's some<br>uh so I've gotten a bunch of chance to<br>interact with soldiers on the front line<br>in Ukraine and there is some level of<br>like all the nicities or<br>whatever it is of of uh civilian life is<br>all stripped away it just seems more<br>honest somehow yes absolutely absolutely<br>well I mean<br>I couldn't agree more and and there's<br>the wild clarity about things not<br>because of enemies or anything like that<br>but because of the<br>of I joked I think I mentioned I joked<br>about this to some Ukrainian soldiers in<br>22 because one of the cigarette and uh<br>and and we and we stepped outside i<br>accompanied them outside because they<br>weren't allowed to smoke<br>indoors in this hotel which there were<br>rockets<br>falling yeah<br>and I said to him "Isn't it strange that<br>fear of secondhand<br>smoke has<br>superseded this?" But I I don't know<br>it's and seeing the humor in that<br>uh when you're on the front line when<br>you're fighting in a war the humor of<br>that is somehow just perfectly delicious<br>you could just laugh all day about that<br>and the absurdity of life is just Yes<br>right there and it's so honest and it's<br>so beautiful and that's why a lot of<br>soldiers are traumatized they're<br>destroyed by war but they also miss it<br>that's right that's right absolutely oh<br>my god yes yes yes yes yes there's an<br>intimacy to the whole thing absolutely<br>worse i mean everyone says you never<br>felt more alive you<br>know yeah and I wouldn't uh I wouldn't<br>do anything<br>different well I hope just like<br>Churchill you keep fighting the good<br>fight and uh not listening to anybody<br>and I'll try to uh learn to do the same<br>douglas I'm a huge fan thank you for<br>doing this been a great pleasure right<br>back at you thank you<br>thanks for listening to this<br>conversation with Douglas Murray to<br>support this podcast please check out<br>our sponsors in the description and now<br>let me leave you with some words from<br>Bertrren Russell the problem with the<br>world is that fools and fanatics are<br>always so certain of<br>themselves and wiser people so full of<br>doubts thank you for listening and hope<br>to see you next time - They end up chanting in front of him,<br>"Viva la muerte."<br>Long live death.<br>They have their counterparts today.<br>They are the people who<br>taunt Americans, westerners,<br>Israelis, and others with lines like,<br>"We love death more than you love live."<br>- The following is a<br>conversation with Douglas Murray,<br>author of "The War on the West,"<br>"The Madness of Crowds," and his new book,<br>"On Democracies and Death Cults."<br>We talk about Russia and Ukraine<br>and about Israel and Gaza.<br>Douglas has very strong<br>views on these topics,<br>and he defends them<br>brilliantly and fearlessly.<br>As I always try to do for all topics,<br>I will also talk to people<br>who have different views from Douglas,<br>including on the next<br>episode of this podcast.<br>We live in an era of online<br>discourse where grifters,<br>drama farmers, liars, bots,<br>sycophants, and sociopaths<br>roam the vast, beautiful<br>dark land of the internet.<br>It's hard to know who to trust.<br>I believe no one is in<br>possession of the entire truth,<br>but some are more correct than others.<br>Some are insightful and<br>some are delusional.<br>The problem is it's hard<br>to tell which is which<br>unless you use your mind<br>with intellectual humility and with rigor.<br>I recommend you listen to many sources<br>who disagree with each other<br>and tried to pick up wisdom from each.<br>Also, I recommend you visit<br>the places in question,<br>as Douglas has, as I have,<br>or at least talk face to face<br>with people who have spent most<br>of their lives living there,<br>whether it's Israel,<br>Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia.<br>Let's try together to not be<br>cogs in the machine of outrage<br>and instead to reach toward<br>reason and compassion.<br>There is no Hitler, Stalin, or<br>Mao on the world stage today.<br>Plus, there are thousands of<br>nuclear weapons ready to fire.<br>Human civilization hangs in the balance.<br>The 21st century is a<br>new geopolitical puzzle<br>all of us are tasked with solving.<br>Let's not mess it up. This<br>is a Lex Fridman podcast.<br>To support it,<br>please check out our<br>sponsors in the description.<br>And now, dear friends,<br>here's Douglas Murray.<br>What have you understood<br>about the war in Ukraine<br>from your visits there?<br>Just looking at the big<br>picture of your understanding<br>of the invasion of February 24th, 2022,<br>and the war in the three years since?<br>- Well, I mean, several things.<br>There's political angles,<br>which are forever changing.<br>But on the human level, as you know,<br>if you visit troops, frontline troops,<br>you have that admiration for<br>people defending their country,<br>defending their homes,<br>defending their families.<br>I'm struck by the way in<br>which that is at a remove<br>from the sort of political<br>noise, and the media noise,<br>and much more.<br>It's very easy to get caught up<br>in the tos and froes of today's news.<br>But that to my mind,<br>that's the single thing<br>that struck me most in my visits there<br>is just the people I've met<br>who are fighting for a cause<br>which at that level is<br>unavoidable, undeniable.<br>- So the thing that struck<br>you that's different<br>from the media turmoil is<br>just the reality of war?<br>- Yeah, of course.<br>I mean, you know, people<br>who have either lived<br>under Russian occupation<br>from invading armies<br>and then come back out into the world<br>having been liberated as in late 2022,<br>or the people now organized<br>most recently there in recent weeks<br>who were just getting on<br>with their job as soldiers<br>whilst the world was talking about them.<br>- When were you there?<br>Early on in this escalated war of '22?<br>- Yes, first time was in,<br>I was with the Ukrainian armed forces<br>when they retook Kherson,<br>and I was back in recent weeks,<br>and was there when the<br>Trump-Zelensky blowup happened.<br>In fact I was in a Ukrainian<br>dugout at the front lines<br>when I was watching it.<br>- How's the morale?<br>How's the way the content of<br>the conversations you've heard<br>different from the two visits<br>separated by, I guess, two years?<br>- At one level, I mean,<br>nothing has changed much,<br>you know, it's not a total standoff<br>because intermittently<br>each side gains territory<br>from the others.<br>But, I mean, there'd been no<br>very significant military gains<br>by either side in the interim period.<br>- I think my experience of the soldiers,<br>the people of Ukraine early on in the war,<br>there's a intense optimism<br>about the outcomes of the war.<br>There's a sense that they're going to win.<br>And the definition of what win means<br>was like all the territory<br>is going to be won back.<br>- Yeah, I certainly on the<br>front lines facing Crimea<br>became quite familiar with people<br>who thought that the<br>Ukrainians in late 2022<br>would even be able to get Crimea back.<br>And that struck me even at the time.<br>And I said I thought that<br>that was an overreach.<br>- And now I think the<br>people, the soldiers,<br>at least in my experience when<br>I visited the second time,<br>are more exhausted.<br>The morale, the dreams,<br>the certainty of victory<br>has maybe faded from the<br>forefront of their minds.<br>- Well, three years of<br>war will tire out anyone.<br>- What did you think of the blowup<br>between Zelensky and Trump<br>as you're sitting there in the dugout?<br>- Well, it is, huh,<br>it was a very disturbing<br>place to watch it from,<br>perhaps anywhere would've been.<br>And, I mean, obviously it was a meeting<br>that shouldn't have happened.<br>It was far too early.<br>- Why do you think so?<br>There's not enough actual<br>pathways to peace on the table?<br>- Well, I think the mineral deal,<br>I mean, I love the fact that<br>everyone's now an expert<br>in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits.<br>- I think as I've learned,<br>and we'll talk about Israel and Palestine,<br>I'm learning that everybody's<br>an expert on geopolitics<br>and the history of war on the internet.<br>- And now mineral<br>deposits, obviously. Yes.<br>I'm really speaking of the edge<br>of my mineral deposit knowledge here.<br>No, I mean, from what I could see<br>the deal that the American administration<br>was trying to get the<br>Ukrainian government to sign,<br>it was sort of too early, too forced.<br>The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal,<br>but we're obviously<br>under intense pressure.<br>And I think certainly Zelensky<br>actually wasn't expecting to go<br>until pretty much the day before,<br>was obviously visibly tired and<br>exhausted, again, as you are<br>after that amount of<br>pressure for that long time.<br>And no, I mean, the thing that struck me,<br>and said this in my column<br>in the "New York Post" from there,<br>that the thing that struck me<br>was I said to some of<br>the soldiers I was with,<br>you know, "What do you make of this?"<br>And you know, one of them just said to me,<br>"Well, you know, we're advised<br>not to follow too closely<br>the ins and outs of the<br>politics of this," you know?<br>But of course everyone<br>has Instagram or scrolls,<br>and among dog pictures and the, you know,<br>the hot women or whatever is, you know,<br>what happened in the Oval.<br>But what struck me was<br>this same guy, and saying,<br>"I've got a job to do."<br>- Right, and there's a<br>clarity and a wisdom to that.<br>But your job is bigger than that, right?<br>Is to understand the politics as well.<br>And what do you think about<br>the politics of that moment?<br>Because that was a real<br>opportunity to come together<br>and make progress on peace, right?<br>And it, by all accounts, was<br>not a successful step forward.<br>- I don't think by any account<br>it was a successful step forward,<br>unless to some extent it was<br>play from DC to say to Putin,<br>"Look, we duffed off<br>Zelensky, and, you know,<br>now give us something."<br>That's the only remedial idea I have<br>about what might have been behind it.<br>But I think it was just<br>one of those extremely,<br>I mean, just awful political moments.<br>Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated<br>by the interpretation of the war<br>that he was hearing from Washington.<br>It was only a week<br>after the Trump comments<br>about Zelensky being a dictator<br>and people in the administration<br>implying that Ukraine has started the war.<br>And I think that must be for Zelensky<br>a pretty "Alice in Wonderland"<br>situation to be in.<br>And I had significant sympathy for him<br>in finding it bewildering<br>because it would be bewildering.<br>- I think the sad thing to me also<br>on the mundane details of that meeting<br>and just the unfortunate<br>way that meetings happen,<br>I think it's true that<br>he was also exhausted.<br>There was a dickhead of a reporter<br>that asked the question<br>about outfit in a way that.<br>Listen, Zelensky, everybody<br>has their strengths<br>and weaknesses.<br>He's an emotional being,<br>for better or for worse.<br>And there's a dumb dickhead of a reporter.<br>- Marjorie Taylor<br>Greene's boyfriend. He is.<br>- The things, you know. See,<br>you're a real journalist.<br>- He's from one of the new.<br>I'm all for opening up<br>the White House press pool<br>and all that sort of thing,<br>but it means that you get some people in<br>who are sort of, yeah, from a blog land.<br>There's nothing wrong with that,<br>but it means that you get somebody<br>who will do something like that.<br>The problem with that<br>interaction, as I saw it,<br>was that that guy asked that,<br>well, disrespectful question.<br>And I think it was disrespectful,<br>and I'll very quickly say why.<br>I mean, I think that when a<br>man comes from the realm of war<br>into the realm of peace,<br>the people in the realm of peace<br>should have some respect<br>or at least concession<br>that the other man has<br>come from the realm of war.<br>And that if you're sitting<br>in a political environment<br>where you talk about people<br>being destroyed, and decimated,<br>and defenestrated, and much more<br>to a man for whom none<br>of that is metaphorical,<br>I think that's extremely hard to accept.<br>And I think that probably<br>also at that moment<br>there was a sort of sense of, you know,<br>Zelensky is being disrespected<br>by being asked about what he's wearing<br>when, as everyone knows, you know,<br>Churchill during World War II<br>used to wear his fatigues<br>on foreign visits.<br>And it's sort of just that.<br>It's to remind people<br>that you're coming from the realm of war.<br>And I think that probably in that moment,<br>one of the things that would've been<br>going through is head would be,<br>but I mean, if this was Putin sitting here<br>being insulted by a journalist, you know,<br>you'd hope your host<br>stepped in and defended you.<br>I mean, let me try this one out.<br>I mean, if a journalist<br>in the Oval Office,<br>if Putin was sitting there,<br>or a putative journalist<br>said to Putin, you know,<br>"Everyone knows you've had<br>a lot of facial work done,<br>and word is you've used the same guy<br>that Berlusconi used to use.<br>Can you comment on that?"<br>You'd say, well, that's a<br>kind of disrespectful question<br>for journalists to ask,<br>and it's a little bit off<br>what needs to be gone over.<br>And it's the same thing with<br>Zelensky with the outfit.<br>I think it was just petty and<br>threw things off in a bad way.<br>- Yeah, and it was probably researched<br>because I think Zelensky explained this<br>like three years ago at<br>the beginning of the war<br>why he wears what he wears,<br>and he is been consistent<br>wearing the same.<br>- It's also, by the way, it's<br>an example of the frivolity<br>of a lot of the attempts to<br>understand what's going on.<br>I mean, my view is that<br>since actually most people,<br>in fact, everybody cannot<br>be an expert on everything,<br>one of the things that we always do<br>is to seize on minor and really<br>quite unimportant things.<br>I mean, every site does it.<br>Look at the way in which<br>the American right for years<br>talked about the Churchill bust<br>leaving the White House Oval<br>Office in the Obama years.<br>I didn't want to hear another darn thing<br>about the Churchill bust after eight years<br>because it was in lieu<br>of trying to understand<br>and actually critique<br>Obama's foreign policy.<br>It was just an easy shorthand.<br>I think it's the same. We're<br>always tempted to that.<br>- But the thing is, I<br>think you mentioned Putin,<br>I think Putin would've been<br>able to respond himself<br>to that journalist effectively,<br>and he would've done it in Russian.<br>- Oh yeah. The language thing.<br>- Yeah, so I wanted to sort of lay out<br>several just unfortunate things<br>that happened in these situations.<br>And I think it happens in<br>all peace negotiations.<br>And it's funny how history<br>can turn in moments like this.<br>I do think there's a dickhead reporter<br>combined with the fact that the,<br>you know, with all due respect,<br>but Zelensky's English<br>sometimes is not very good.<br>- Yes, and apart from anything else,<br>if he had have agreed to<br>have not done it in English,<br>he would've bought<br>himself the extra seconds<br>in some of his replies<br>that he needed, yeah.<br>- Yeah, and have the wit.<br>The guy's funny, witty,<br>intelligent, you know,<br>he could do that in the native language<br>of whether it's Ukrainian or Russian<br>to be able to respond<br>and get the interpreter.<br>So all of that is really unfortunate<br>'cause I think in those<br>little moments, it's a dance,<br>and there's an opportunity there.<br>You know, the Republicans,<br>the right wing in the United States,<br>have a general kind of<br>skepticism of Zelensky,<br>but that doesn't mean<br>it has to be that way.<br>It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.<br>- It's very interesting<br>why it has happened.<br>Why do you think it's happened?<br>- Politics in the United States is so dumb<br>that at the very beginning<br>it could just be reduced to,<br>well, the left went, "Putin<br>bad, Zelensky good, rah rah,"<br>Ukrainian flags, therefore the<br>right must go the opposite.<br>Sometimes it's literally as dumb as that.<br>Let's each pick side<br>and call the other dumb.<br>- I had a line I used recently<br>with the necessity of people<br>who live too long online<br>to try to wade their way out of the memes<br>because it is sort of like that, isn't it?<br>Because yes, I mean, I<br>can understand the people<br>who find it very irritating<br>that so many people<br>who would put BLM flags,<br>or pride flags or,<br>you know, trans flags in their bio<br>then put Ukrainian flags in their bio<br>despite almost certainly not<br>knowing where Ukraine was.<br>And if that happens,<br>the inevitable instinct of a lot of people<br>who aren't really thinking is to say,<br>"That's really annoying.<br>These people are really<br>annoying. I'll sock it to them."<br>But that's why you've got<br>to try to rise above that,<br>and say, "Actually, funnily<br>enough, the fate of a country<br>doesn't depend on my tolerance<br>for memes online today."<br>- Yeah, so I think the<br>memes can be broken through<br>in meetings like the one that happened<br>between Zelensky and Trump.<br>There could've been real comradery.<br>I've seen the skill of that just recently<br>having researched deeply and<br>interacted with Narendra Modi.<br>Here's somebody who has<br>the skill of, you know,<br>for his country, for his situation,<br>being able to somehow<br>be friends with Putin,<br>and friends with Zelensky,<br>and friends with Trump,<br>and friends with Biden,<br>and friends with Obama.<br>- [Douglas] It was very skillful.<br>- And that while still<br>being strong for his country<br>and from like fundamentally<br>a nationalist figure<br>who's like, you know, very non globalist.<br>Not anything but pro India,<br>India first, nation first.<br>In fact, nation first<br>with a very specific idea<br>what that nation represents.<br>And that, you know, Zelensky<br>could do all of those things,<br>but have the skill of<br>navigating the Trump room.<br>Because every single leader<br>has their own peculiar quirks<br>that need to be navigated.<br>- Yes, the obvious one,<br>I mean, I don't wanna make it sound like<br>it was all Zelensky's fault,<br>but I mean the obvious one<br>was at the beginning of the<br>meeting to say, yet again,<br>as he has done for three years,<br>"Thank you to America,<br>and the American people,<br>and American politicians<br>from across the aisle<br>for your support for my<br>country in it's hour of need,<br>we're deeply grateful."<br>And because he for once<br>forgot to say that.<br>- I think it's not that simple.<br>- It's not that simple? It's one reason.<br>- I think saying thank you. He<br>didn't need to say thank you.<br>- Well, that was what Vance leapt in on.<br>- He's just picking a thing to leap on.<br>There's a whole energy.<br>You have to acknowledge<br>in your way of being<br>that you have been very Biden<br>buddy buddy with the left<br>for the last four years.<br>There's ways to fix that.<br>Listen, these people are<br>complicated narcissists,<br>all of them, Biden, Trump.<br>You have to navigate<br>the complexity of that.<br>And you basically have to<br>say a kind word to Trump,<br>which is like showing, there's<br>many ways of doing that.<br>But one of them is feeding the ego<br>by acknowledging that<br>he is one of the world's<br>greatest negotiators, right?<br>"I'm glad we're able to come to the table<br>and negotiate together<br>because I believe you<br>are the great negotiator,<br>mediator, that can actually<br>bring a successful resolution."<br>- Yeah, yeah, yeah.<br>- As opposed to have an energy of like<br>it should be obvious to everybody<br>that Ukrainian are the good<br>guys and Russia is the bad guys.<br>There's this whole energy of<br>entitlement that he brought.<br>He forgot that there's a new guy.<br>You gotta like convince the new guy<br>that this global mission<br>that this nation is on,<br>this war that is in many ways<br>the west versus the east.<br>That there's ideals, there's<br>whole histories here,<br>that this is a war worth winning.<br>You have to convince them, right?<br>- Yeah, no, sure.<br>And he obviously failed on that occasion.<br>But as I say, it must be bewildering<br>to have landed in a place<br>where people were seriously talking about<br>Ukraine starting the war<br>and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator.<br>I did the front page<br>of the "New York Post"<br>the day after the president's<br>comments on that saying that.<br>There's a big picture<br>of Putin just saying,<br>right, this is a dictator.<br>And you know, I think the<br>people can be lithe enough<br>to be able to recognize that, you know,<br>you can make criticisms of<br>Zelensky or the Ukrainians,<br>but it doesn't mean you<br>have to fall full Putin.<br>And again, unfortunately,<br>a lot of people in our time<br>don't have that capability.<br>- Can we go right into it?<br>What is your strongest criticism of Putin?<br>- He's a dictator who's very bloody,<br>as repressive as you can<br>be of political opposition,<br>internal opposition.<br>He's kleptomaniac of<br>his country's resources,<br>has enriched himself as much as he could,<br>as he has with the cronies around him.<br>He's not just acted to destroy<br>internal opposition in Russia,<br>but has gone to other countries,<br>including my own country of birth,<br>and killed people on their, our, soil<br>using as it happens weapons<br>of mass destruction.<br>The use of polonium in the<br>center of London, not good.<br>The use of incredibly<br>dangerous nerve agents<br>that could kill tens<br>of thousands of people<br>in a charming cathedral city<br>like Salisbury, not good.<br>If the sort of apologist of Putin say,<br>"Well, he is just a sort of tough man<br>who's looking after his house business."<br>Well, I don't think even if you think<br>he has the right to do that,<br>he should be doing it in third countries<br>deliberately using weapons<br>that are meant to show<br>that you could take out<br>tens of thousands of British citizens.<br>Yeah, I mean that's just for starters.<br>- Do you think he's<br>actually popularly elected?<br>- No.<br>- Do you think the results of<br>the elections are fraudulent?<br>- Yes, I mean.<br>- Do you think it's possible<br>that it's just that the<br>opposition has been eliminated<br>and he's legitimately popularly elected?<br>- It definitely helps a chap<br>if he's killed all of his opponents.<br>- Something about using the<br>term chap in that context<br>is just marvelous.<br>- But, you know, but I mean, seriously,<br>if people are worried about.<br>This is another of the sort of slightly<br>"Alice in Wonderland" things<br>recently about Zelensky<br>is people are saying,<br>"He's a dictator because<br>he hasn't held elections<br>during a total war of self-defense."<br>And it's like, well, you know,<br>if you're really, really passionate<br>about free and fair elections<br>in that neck of the woods,<br>you'd at least notice<br>that Russian elections<br>are not free and fair<br>in any meaningful sense.<br>But this doesn't mean that you have to say<br>that therefore they should have<br>western-style elections and freedom,<br>that Russia is ready to go and become<br>a western liberal democracy.<br>It doesn't mean any of that at all.<br>It's just at least note<br>that this is what Putin is.<br>- What do you think is the motivation<br>for his invasion of Ukraine in '22?<br>- It's what he's said for years,<br>which is basically the<br>reconstitution of the Soviet Union.<br>- Do you think there's<br>empire building components<br>to that motivation?<br>- I would trust most my friends<br>in East and Central Europe<br>who certainly do think that.<br>There's a reason why the Baltic countries<br>are the countries that<br>are spending highest<br>in percentage of GDP on defense,<br>and it's because they're very worried.<br>I don't think they're faking it.<br>I don't think they're faking<br>it for me or for anyone else.<br>I think the Lithuanians,<br>the Latvians, the Estonians,<br>and others are genuinely worried<br>for the first time in some decades.<br>- Do you think there's a possibility<br>that the war continues indefinitely,<br>even if there's a ceasefire<br>and a peace reached,<br>the war will resume?<br>He will seek expansion<br>even beyond Ukraine.<br>- Yes, and the most obvious<br>thing is that if Trump<br>manages to negotiate a ceasefire,<br>it'll be a temporary pause.<br>And whoever comes in as<br>president after Trump,<br>Putin will use the opportunity<br>to advance again, yes.<br>Again, one of the things that I have heard<br>from parts of the<br>American right and others<br>is that all he wants is Ukraine.<br>That that's all he wants,<br>and that he has no history<br>of rhetoric or actions<br>that suggest anything else.<br>And again, it's one of the<br>reasons why it's useful<br>traveling to places and seeing<br>things with your own eyes<br>'cause I very much remember<br>being in the country of Georgia<br>after Putin tried to invade in 2008.<br>Again, people don't have to<br>be the greatest supporters<br>of the Ukrainian cause just to recognize<br>that it doesn't seem to be the case<br>that Ukraine is the only<br>thing in Putin's vision.<br>- Do you see value and<br>maybe depth and power<br>to the realist perspective of all this?<br>You know, somebody like John<br>Mearsheimer's formulation<br>of all this that in these<br>invasions of Georgia, of Ukraine,<br>it's using military power to<br>expand the sphere of influence<br>in the region in a cold<br>calculation of geopolitics.<br>- It's interesting.<br>One of the fascinating things<br>about the last few years<br>is that there's been an<br>act of sort of necromancy<br>of certain figures were<br>totally, totally debunked.<br>In the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer,<br>and in the case of Israel,<br>people like Finkelstein.<br>And it's been interesting<br>'cause these are people<br>that one hadn't heard of for some years<br>because they were not listened<br>to, usually for good reason.<br>But by the way, first of all,<br>I'm very skeptical of the<br>term realist in foreign policy<br>because most people to some extent<br>will say that they are a<br>realist in foreign policy.<br>Very few people are<br>surrealists in foreign policy.<br>Very few people are unrealists.<br>- I would like to meet them.<br>- A surrealist foreign<br>policy analyst. (laughs)<br>- We did mention "Alice<br>in Wonderland," so.<br>- Yeah, I mean maybe we<br>should introduce the term.<br>I mean if you wanna say,<br>if you want to, look,<br>gimlet it, eye it out across<br>the world, you're a realist.<br>I think the steel man of their argument<br>would be Russia has or believes it has<br>a sphere of influence<br>and it is regrettable,<br>but there's very little<br>we can do about that.<br>That would be about the best<br>version of that argument<br>that you can make.<br>- Well, to expand on that steel man,<br>isn't this how superpowers operate<br>in the dark realist/surrealist way,<br>meaning the United States<br>uses military power<br>to have a sphere of influence<br>over the whole globe, really?<br>China appears to be willing<br>to use military power<br>to expand its sphere of influence.<br>- And it's political power, yeah,<br>more importantly in the case of China.<br>- Political power.<br>- Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas.<br>Hong Kong being the obvious one.<br>- Behind that, isn't there<br>always a kinetic threat?<br>- Oh yeah, of course. Yeah.<br>I mean, you disappear some booksellers<br>and students who are<br>protesting, of course.<br>But to go back to this, yeah, of course.<br>Okay, countries believe they<br>have or would like to have<br>spheres of influence.<br>I do think at some point<br>that the so-called realists on that<br>have to try to decide how much leeway<br>that allows you to give to<br>a fairly rapacious regime.<br>I mean, it's not the easiest<br>calculation always to make.<br>You have to work out whether<br>or not, for instance,<br>it is true that if Putin had<br>managed to go all the way<br>to Kyiv in the first<br>weeks of the war in '22,<br>he would've gone straight<br>on to other places.<br>And, you know, maybe he would've done,<br>maybe he would've taken his time,<br>maybe he wouldn't have done.<br>And this is a very fine calculation<br>that changes every week,<br>let alone every year.<br>You know, my friends in Georgia<br>I thought were wildly off the mark<br>when they were believing that<br>after 2008 they could get,<br>for instance, either NATO<br>membership or EU membership.<br>And I thought that was<br>completely unlikely.<br>And I still think it's unlikely<br>and almost certainly undesirable<br>for Europe and for NATO<br>because you've gotta be very careful.<br>And obviously this is one<br>of the issues with Ukraine<br>and has been since the 90s, is, you know,<br>are you gonna set up a trip<br>wire to start World War III?<br>And that's not a small thing to consider.<br>- So what do you think the<br>peace deal might look like?<br>And what does the path to<br>peace look like in Ukraine<br>in the coming weeks and months?<br>- I just thought it would be, regrettably,<br>the Ukrainians ceding<br>some territory in the east<br>and then making sure they re-arm<br>during whatever peace<br>period comes afterwards.<br>- And probably all four territories<br>of Donetsk, Luhansk,<br>Zaporizhzhia, Kherson?<br>- You couldn't lay any of that out<br>because it has to be negotiated on.<br>But I mean, and I think the ease<br>with which non-Ukrainians<br>are currently speaking about<br>the Ukrainians ceding<br>territory is concerning<br>because these territories<br>include hundreds of thousands<br>of Ukrainian citizens<br>who do not want to live<br>under Putin's rule,<br>and people who have families<br>in the rest of Ukraine,<br>and much more.<br>And you know, I recently<br>interviewed children<br>who had managed to get out of<br>the Russian occupied areas,<br>and it's brutal for the Ukrainian<br>to be growing up in that territory.<br>So when people say, "Well,<br>obviously, you know,<br>Donetsk has to be given to Putin,"<br>I think that that is not as easy a thing<br>if you're in Ukraine<br>as it is if you're<br>sitting in New York, say.<br>And by the way, I think<br>that on the issue of,<br>there is a school of thought<br>that obviously President Trump<br>to some extent was<br>floating in recent weeks,<br>which is that if a deal<br>is done, a business deal,<br>in relation to minerals or anything else,<br>you get a kind of buffer zone<br>of American businesses and investment,<br>and therefore American<br>business people in the region,<br>which would effectively<br>warn Putin not to invade.<br>I don't follow that idea<br>because not least there were<br>Americans in the regions<br>that were invaded in<br>'22 and they left fast.<br>And we know from Hong<br>Kong and other places,<br>just because there are<br>international financial interests<br>in the region does not<br>mean that a dictatorship<br>will not either militarily<br>or covertly take over.<br>I don't see American miners<br>as being an effective<br>buffer zone against Putin.<br>- By the way, what did you learn<br>from talking to the<br>children, Ukrainian children,<br>from those regions?<br>- Well, I mean, it's heartbreaking<br>because the only schooling<br>is Russian schooling,<br>obviously teaching the Russian language,<br>Putin's view of history, and<br>effectively indoctrination.<br>And people can quibble with that term,<br>but it's Putinesque<br>indoctrination schools.<br>And any children or families<br>that do not want that<br>effectively have to hide and not go out.<br>And I spoke to children and parents<br>who'd had school friends<br>who, for instance,<br>the Russians set up in<br>'22 and '23 summer camps<br>for the children of some of the areas<br>that have been occupied.<br>And the children went off to the camps<br>and then they didn't come back,<br>but they were just stolen.<br>I mean, it's thought that<br>around 20,000 Ukrainian children<br>have been stolen in this fashion.<br>That's not a small thing.<br>It's not got very much attention,<br>but yes, I mean, children who would hide<br>whenever the Russian<br>troops came to the door.<br>One teenage boy who described to me<br>how when his mother was out,<br>a woman came around to the<br>house, knocked on the door,<br>and gave him his papers,<br>and said that he had<br>to attend the next week<br>to sign up for the Russian army.<br>I mean this is not good.<br>And that's obviously what life is like<br>for thousands of people behind<br>the Russian lines in Ukraine.<br>I just have it in mind<br>when people say things like, you know,<br>"Well, obviously these regions<br>have to be handed over."<br>It's very, very hard if you're a Ukrainian<br>to concede to that.<br>- Yeah, and even if they are<br>as part of the negotiation<br>to hand it over,<br>I think it'll probably<br>be generations or never<br>that that could be accepted<br>by Ukrainian people.<br>- Absolutely. And I<br>would've thought never.<br>- What do we know about<br>this kidnapping of children?<br>The stories of the thousands of children<br>that the Russian forces kidnapped?<br>- Some of them were in<br>orphanages in Eastern Ukraine,<br>not all by any means, but some were,<br>and it's a very complicated story actually<br>because many children were<br>taken from their families.<br>The Russians said, "Well,<br>look at these Ukrainians.<br>They don't even look after their children,<br>therefore we will look after them."<br>And recently when I was<br>there looking into this story<br>because it's a very interesting question<br>as to why it hasn't had more attention.<br>You know, one thinks of, for instance,<br>the abduction of the Chibok school girls<br>some 12 years ago now in northern Nigeria.<br>And the appalling abduction<br>of 300 girls by Boko Haram<br>completely gained the world's attention.<br>And I was very interested into<br>why the Ukrainian children<br>who'd been taken by the Russians<br>have not gained similar attention.<br>There's a slight similarity<br>with the war in Israel,<br>which I'm sure we'll come on to,<br>but I do think that one reason<br>is that they were effectively hostages,<br>and the Ukrainians knew,<br>this is my estimation of the terrain,<br>is that the Ukrainians knew<br>that if they made a great deal about this,<br>as it were more than they did,<br>that the children would effectively be<br>the most effective bargaining chip.<br>And I do think there's<br>considerable truth in that<br>because if you look at, for instance,<br>the way in which pressure<br>has been put on the Israeli government<br>by the Israeli population<br>about the kidnapped Israelis,<br>you'll see that it's a<br>pretty effective tactic<br>for any totalitarian<br>regime or terrorist group<br>to operate in a way that<br>means that the population<br>of the country you're attacking<br>pressure their government<br>to do something in terms of concession.<br>It's a very effective tool.<br>And I think that story<br>was partly played down,<br>not just outside of Ukraine,<br>but also within Ukraine,<br>partly for that reason.<br>- As a truth seeker, as a journalist,<br>how do you operate in that<br>world where, at least to me,<br>it's obvious that there's<br>just a flood of propaganda<br>on both sides?<br>Now of course, when you go there<br>and directly experience<br>it and talk to people,<br>but those people are still also<br>swimming in the propaganda.<br>So unless you witness stuff directly,<br>sometimes it's hard to know.<br>Like I speak to people on the Russian side<br>and they're clearly, first<br>of all, hilariously enough,<br>they almost always say that<br>there's no propaganda in Russia.<br>- [Douglas] Of course.<br>- Which makes me realize, I mean,<br>you can be completely lied to,<br>maybe I am in the United States as well,<br>and just be unaware.<br>Maybe earth is run by aliens.<br>Maybe the earth is flat.<br>So I don't know.<br>- Maybe you've taken mushrooms.<br>- I have before this and<br>I finally see the truth.<br>And it's you that are diluted, Douglas.<br>Okay, but back to our<br>round earth discussion,<br>round earth shills that we are,<br>how do you know what is true?<br>- You can tell it when the<br>bare facts become not true.<br>Like you can tell it when<br>somebody is willing to claim<br>that everything caused<br>the invasion of 2022,<br>except for Vladimir<br>Putin invading Ukraine.<br>- Yeah, there's a hilarious<br>thing that happens,<br>and I think you've<br>actually speak about this,<br>that people are generally<br>just much more willing<br>to criticize the<br>democratically elected leader.<br>- Always. Always.<br>- So the interesting thing that happens<br>is these wise sages that do the narratives<br>of like NATO started the war, right,<br>which there is some<br>interesting geopolitical depth<br>and truth to that, like<br>that NATO expansion<br>created a complicated<br>geopolitical context, whatever.<br>But they forget to say like<br>other parts of that story.<br>- Well, yes, of course.<br>And I mean, of course to some extent,<br>it's well that, you know,<br>there's the most irritating<br>type of question asker<br>at any event is the person who says,<br>"I was disappointed that<br>in your 30-minute talk<br>you didn't address X."<br>And I tend to say,<br>"Well, looking forward to<br>coming to your next talk,<br>where in 30 minutes<br>you'll cover everything<br>that could possibly be covered."<br>There's always stuff that's<br>gonna be left on the sides.<br>There's always gonna be stuff<br>that's left unaddressed.<br>There's always gonna be other angles.<br>There's always gonna be somebody else<br>who has this interesting<br>perspective and you can't cover it.<br>Nevertheless, if you cover everything<br>other than the central<br>things, then it's suspicious.<br>Many years ago at a debate in London,<br>and there was a debate about<br>the origins of World War II<br>and Pat Buchanan, talking of necromancy,<br>was one of the speakers.<br>And Andrew Roberts, the historian,<br>was one of the people on the other side.<br>And at one point, you know,<br>they got so completely stuck into issues<br>of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid,<br>you know, something like this.<br>And the moderator, I<br>remember, it was just a melee.<br>And the moderator turns to<br>Andrew Roberts and says,<br>"Andrew Roberts, why<br>did World War II begin?"<br>And he says, "World War II began<br>because Hitler invaded Poland."<br>And it was a magnificent moment<br>because everything had been a mush.<br>They were just so lost in all<br>the intricate, and clever,<br>and interesting things<br>that you can talk about<br>about the origins of a war<br>that you forget to mention the<br>thing that's most important.<br>And certainly my experience<br>as a journalist and writer<br>is that one of the reasons why<br>you need to go and see things<br>with your own eyes<br>is because people are certain to tell you<br>that what you've seen with your own eyes<br>didn't happen or hasn't happened,<br>and it helps to steel you for that moment.<br>- It's a gradual thing that happens<br>where the obvious thing<br>starts being taken for granted<br>and people stop saying it<br>because it's like the boring<br>thing to say at a party.<br>And then all of a sudden over time,<br>you just almost start<br>questioning whether, you know,<br>like the obvious thing is even true.<br>I don't know how that<br>happens from psychology.<br>- Yeah, I think it does think.<br>I've observed it in a<br>lot of different places,<br>which is the important thing<br>is the only thing you do forget.<br>Everything else is what you remember.<br>And some of us are for<br>some reason wise in a way<br>where we try not to forget<br>the important thing.<br>- Remember the obvious thing, yeah.<br>- Yes, and as you say,<br>and not wanting to be the<br>boring guy at the party<br>who reiterates what is true<br>because what a douche bag<br>you'd be if you were that guy.<br>- Nobody likes captain obvious at a party.<br>Okay, is it possible that<br>Donald Trump is a mediator,<br>a successful negotiator,<br>that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?<br>- It's possible. We'll have to see.<br>I think it's just too early<br>and complicated to tell.<br>That he wants to bring a peace<br>seems to me to be obvious.<br>He stated it a lot of times.<br>Whether he can, we're<br>just gonna have to see.<br>It's extremely hard to<br>see some of the parameters<br>of the peace deal.<br>And I would suggest that<br>one, not the most difficult,<br>but one of the most difficult<br>is that there is no<br>peace guarantee on paper<br>that the Ukrainians can possibly believe.<br>It doesn't matter because we in the west,<br>some of the countries in the<br>west, have said it before,<br>that we'd secure their<br>peace and we haven't.<br>And so what other than NATO membership,<br>which is not possible in my view,<br>what other than NATO membership<br>would reassure the Ukrainians<br>that they are gonna have<br>their borders secured<br>and the peace of Ukraine secured?<br>I can't see.<br>- I think there's not<br>gonna be ever a guarantee<br>that you can trust.<br>I think the way you have a<br>guarantee, implicit guarantees,<br>by having military and<br>economic partnerships<br>with as many partners as possible.<br>So you have partnerships<br>with the Middle East,<br>you have partnerships with<br>India, perhaps even with China,<br>with the United States,<br>with many nations in Europe.<br>- All of which still suggests<br>that if there's enough<br>financial interests in Ukraine,<br>they would prevent<br>another Russian invasion.<br>- There would be financial pressure, yeah.<br>There would be, you know,<br>Russia needs to be friends with somebody,<br>either China or the west.<br>I think a world that's flourishing<br>would have Russia<br>trading and being friends<br>with the west and the east.<br>- Thought would be ideal.<br>It would be ideal if the<br>regime in Moscow wanted it.<br>I mean, there again, you get<br>into the thing of, you know,<br>people accused of Russophobia.<br>But I mean, I do believe that<br>after the fall of the Wall,<br>Russia was ill treated by the west,<br>not treated with some of the<br>courtesy that it required.<br>I do think that, and at the same time,<br>that doesn't justify the actions of Russia<br>in the last 20 years.<br>- Right, but let's descend<br>from the surrealist<br>to the realist.<br>It's very possible for Russia<br>to be on the verge of military<br>invasion of these nations,<br>and that being wrong,<br>while also not doing it<br>because they're afraid<br>to hurt the partnerships<br>with the west and with China.<br>- It's possible, but<br>the alliance they formed<br>with this sort of rogue<br>alliance with China<br>to a considerable extent,<br>North Korea, not useful,<br>and Iran is something they<br>seem to find bearable.<br>It's not a very good alliance<br>in most people's analysis,<br>but it's an alliance.<br>- It's bearable, but I don't think,<br>maybe you disagree with this,<br>I don't think the Russian<br>people or even Putin<br>wants to be isolated from the west.<br>I think it wants to be<br>friends with the west,<br>and with the East, and with everybody.<br>He just also wants Ukraine, right?<br>And there's, well, how does<br>the Rolling Stones song go?<br>- Which one?<br>- Not the satisfaction one.<br>- "Sympathy with the Devil."<br>- That's the one. You got me on that one.<br>No, like there's interests,<br>whether it's expanding<br>the sphere of influence,<br>that's one thing on the table.<br>But that can be put aside<br>if you want to maintain the<br>partnerships with these nations.<br>And if Ukraine has strong<br>economic partnerships<br>with those nations, then that<br>prevents Russia from invading.<br>- I think the premise is<br>one that I've seen before.<br>There was a famous, what<br>was his name? Norman Angell.<br>He wrote this book,<br>which was a fantastic<br>bestseller in his day,<br>where he believed that Europe<br>would be in a period of<br>endless Kantian peace<br>because the prospect of<br>European powers going to war<br>was so economically unviable.<br>The book was reissued after World War I,<br>and I never got the second edition,<br>but I assume it was<br>significantly rewritten.<br>- That's a very kind of cynical take<br>that just because the book is wrong.<br>- I'm not saying just the book wrong,<br>I'm saying that the idea that cooperation<br>on an economic and other levels<br>is any significant preventative device<br>to madness breaking out<br>is not something I see.<br>Could deter some people.<br>It could deter some very, very rational<br>economically driven actors,<br>but it fails to take into<br>account all of the other things<br>that motivate people to go to war,<br>and to invade, and to go mad.<br>- Okay, well, I would argue<br>that in the 21st century,<br>one of the reasons we have much fewer wars<br>is because of the much more.<br>- The bomb.<br>- Well, so there's a few tools here<br>on the geopolitical stage.<br>One of them is that we're just much more<br>interconnected economically,<br>globally interconnected,<br>and that that is always a present pressure<br>on the world to keep peace.<br>There's a lot of money<br>to be made from peace.<br>There's also a lot of<br>money to be made from war.<br>There's a lot of interest, attention.<br>And I'm just presenting one of the tools<br>that a leader should be using.<br>The alternative is what, military force?<br>That is an interesting one,<br>sometimes a useful one,<br>but unfortunately it<br>has its downsides also.<br>And after three years of war<br>and the hundreds of thousands dead,<br>you have to start wondering<br>what are the options on the table.<br>- I agree.<br>I'm obviously for economic cooperation,<br>but my only caveat is not<br>to think that is something<br>which is of ultimate interest<br>or even at the top of the<br>list of interests of despots,<br>tyrants, extremists who<br>want something else.<br>- Yeah, but can you read<br>the mind of Vladimir Putin?<br>- No.<br>- A lot of the ideas I hear<br>about peace is Putin bad,<br>victory must be achieved,<br>NATO membership required.<br>But you have to come to the table<br>to end the killing is one,<br>and two, have different ideas<br>of how to have a non-zero chance<br>of peace so that, you know?<br>It seems to me the only option,<br>not the only option, but<br>the likeliest option,<br>is a lot of strong economic partnerships.<br>There's of course other radical options.<br>There's Russia joining NATO<br>or something like this.<br>Or there's giving, you know,<br>flirting with World War III essentially,<br>giving nukes to Ukraine<br>or something like this.<br>There's like crazy stuff.<br>Or a totally new military alliance<br>with France, and Britain, and Germany,<br>and European nations, and Ukraine,<br>or some weird network of military power<br>that threatens Russia in some way,<br>or maybe some big breakthrough<br>partnership between India,<br>China and Ukraine, something like this.<br>Just some really out there ideas.<br>And I think that's how the<br>world finds the balance<br>and realigns itself in interesting ways.<br>- Look, it could be. I<br>hope your idea is right.<br>I think it's about,<br>well, it's certainly the most peaceful way<br>for this to be resolved.<br>My only caveat, as I say, is,<br>and also never forget to factor in<br>that people want different<br>things in this world,<br>and some people don't dream as you dream.<br>- I think we'll talk about that,<br>something in your new book, "Death Cults."<br>That one is an easier<br>one for me to understand<br>to the story that you're describing.<br>I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy<br>to leaders of major nations.<br>- Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.<br>I'm not by any means urging<br>you to regard Vladimir Putin<br>as millenarian madman who<br>cannot be in any way understood.<br>- I think he could be<br>negotiated and reasoned with.<br>- From your lips to God's ears.<br>- Can you steer me on the case<br>for and then against Zelensky<br>is the right leader for<br>Ukraine at this moment?<br>Is he the right person to<br>take it to the point of peace?<br>- We'll see. If he can,<br>then of course he is.<br>You know, he deserves enormous respect<br>for galvanizing his people,<br>for being elected in the first place,<br>for galvanizing his nation at<br>a time of incredible peril,<br>for playing the international game<br>of getting support for his country well.<br>And sometimes the person who does that,<br>not there are many people like that,<br>can be the person who also<br>brings about a peace deal<br>and sometimes not.<br>- I think there's a degree<br>to which he may have<br>seen too much suffering<br>of the people of the land he loves<br>to be able to sit down at a table<br>with a world leader<br>who did the destruction<br>and to be able to.<br>- [Douglas] That is very hard.<br>- Compromise on anything.<br>- That's possible. Again, it<br>puts the onus on him though.<br>Sort of slightly presupposes<br>that Putin doesn't have the<br>same human instinct on that.<br>It is extremely hard,<br>I've noticed this in a lot of conflicts,<br>it's extremely hard the way<br>in which outsiders come in<br>and others who haven't<br>seen what you've seen<br>or gone through what you've gone through,<br>and say, you know,<br>"It's time to get round the<br>negotiating table and just,"<br>you know, and you think,<br>"You didn't see what I saw.<br>You didn't go through what I went through.<br>Who are you to tell me?"<br>Goes back to that thing<br>with the visitor from the land of war<br>and the visitor from the land of peace.<br>The visitor from the land of peace<br>can easily talk about getting<br>around negotiating tables,<br>but the visitor from the land<br>of war has seen other things.<br>And it's very hard for<br>somebody who hasn't seen it<br>to tell the person who has that<br>they should act differently.<br>- And the sad thing about humanity<br>is both the person from the land of peace<br>and the person from the<br>land of war are right.<br>- Yes, that's a struggle.<br>That's definitely a struggle.<br>It's like asking somebody to forgive.<br>I've seen that at a lot<br>of ends of conflicts.<br>People say, you know,<br>"The important thing is that<br>we forgive and move on."<br>And then the other person says, you know,<br>"Your child didn't die<br>of shrapnel wounds."<br>- Yeah, you know, I got a lot of heat<br>for an interview I did with Zelensky.<br>By the way, people privately,<br>the people that message me,<br>is all love and support.<br>Even the people that disagree<br>in Ukraine, soldiers.<br>People online are ruthless.<br>They're misrepresenting me. They're lying.<br>- People online are ruthless?<br>Misrepresenting and lying?<br>Good god, Lex, you've<br>discovered a new phenomenon.<br>- I'm a real radical intellectual.<br>- (laughs) Nothing misses your eye.<br>- I see the truth and I'm<br>unafraid to point it out.<br>No, there's a degree.<br>This idea that you need to<br>compromise with the person,<br>with the leader of a<br>nation you're at war with,<br>and in so doing to some degree<br>are forgiving their actions.<br>Because the actual feeling you have<br>is you want it to be fair,<br>and the definition of fair<br>when you've seen that much suffering<br>is for him and everybody around him,<br>and maybe even all of the<br>people on the other side,<br>to just die because you've<br>seen to much suffering.<br>But the other side of that<br>is, yes, there's children that have died,<br>but you coming to the negotiation table.<br>- Will stop other children<br>from dying. Yes, of course.<br>- And so like there is just,<br>you had this kind of<br>way of speaking about it<br>embodying that perspective that it's naive<br>to say to come to the negotiation table.<br>And it is for a person<br>from the land of war,<br>but the very smart, intelligent,<br>and not naive person<br>from the land of peace<br>that is often right in some deep sense<br>about the long arc of history,<br>for them it is the right thing<br>to come to the negotiation<br>table to end more killing.<br>- The one thing I would add<br>to that though is, you know,<br>don't forget that it also<br>depends on whether or not<br>there's a clear shot of winning.<br>- [Lex] Sure.<br>- If there's a clear shot of winning,<br>and that's the most important.<br>The most important thing in wars<br>is not final negotiations<br>or anything like that,<br>it's simply winning and losing.<br>And if you have a clear shot of winning,<br>and you can take it, and you're near it,<br>then having somebody<br>else come in and saying,<br>"Why not stop just before<br>victory?" is very hard.<br>That's one of the complex,<br>one of the many many complexities<br>of the conflict we're talking about.<br>- You know, the other<br>big complexity of that?<br>Because the clear shot of winning<br>is like a man walking through<br>the desert seeing water.<br>During war, it really is an illusion.<br>So here's what happens.<br>The really complicated<br>aspect of negotiation<br>is in order to negotiate peace<br>from a place of strength,<br>you have to have victory in sight.<br>- Yes.<br>- And so the temptation from that position<br>is to not negotiate,<br>is to keep pushing forward<br>to achieve victory.<br>And this, I would say, hindsight is 20/20.<br>But this is the failure<br>in '22 and two occasions<br>to achieve to negotiate<br>a ceasefire and peace.<br>One in the spring because<br>Ukraine was in a real big,<br>I would say position of strength,<br>having fended off the<br>Russian forces around Kyiv.<br>That's one.<br>And then as you mentioned<br>in the fall of '22<br>with Kherson and Kharkiv, had<br>a lot of military success.<br>They were in a place of strength.<br>And from that place, they've<br>decided to keep going<br>because victory was in sight.<br>But that was also an<br>opportunity to make peace.<br>- It's perfectly possible, yes.<br>- That's the hard thing.<br>- It's very hard.<br>It's all hard, but again,<br>victory can be won in wars<br>and is often won in wars.<br>And you're right, they can also grind on<br>because nobody has the capability<br>to make a breakthrough.<br>I mean, the wisdom about civil wars<br>tends to be that they sort of burn out<br>after about 10 years or<br>so for similar reasons.<br>- When you're in the war,<br>can you actually know<br>that a victory can be won?<br>- It's a very good question.<br>You mean troops on the battlefield<br>or military leaders or political leaders?<br>- Military and political leaders.<br>It just feels like, like I said,<br>man in the desert seeing water.<br>I think there's a sense<br>that victory's so close.<br>There's times in a war when<br>you feel like victory is close.<br>- [Douglas] No, you're right.<br>- And then it slips away.<br>- Yes, it's an interesting insight.<br>It's like the way in which<br>there's a force in nature,<br>which is that if you amass an army,<br>amassing it will pull you in to using it.<br>Extremely hard to amass an<br>army somewhere and then say,<br>"Let's go back."<br>Yes, you're right.<br>No, it's one of many, many<br>interesting aspects to warfare.<br>- I think the sad thing<br>about successful wars,<br>at least in the modern day,<br>is it takes a great military leader,<br>which I would argue that<br>Zelensky really unified Ukraine<br>in this fight in the beginning of the war.<br>You have to be that, and like you said,<br>after you amassed the army<br>and have military success<br>to be able to step back and make peace.<br>Those two just don't<br>often go hand in hand.<br>Because again, as a wartime leader,<br>especially one who has seen<br>the suffering firsthand,<br>walking away is tough.<br>Especially also combined with that,<br>just the realities of war<br>where there is probably corruption.<br>That there is things, you<br>know, once the war ends,<br>there has to be investigations.<br>Because the war wasn't won,<br>you might not turn out to<br>be, when history looks at it,<br>the good guy, and a leader<br>always wants to be the good guy.<br>So there's just all<br>psychological complexities.<br>And you look at this whole<br>picture, in the basic sense,<br>if you want Ukraine to flourish,<br>if you want humanity to flourish,<br>you just ask the question,<br>"Okay, so what is the<br>thing I would like to see?"<br>- There's so many historical<br>analogies that you can give,<br>but just surely<br>not rewarding Putin's actions in any way<br>would be a good way to deter<br>him and other dictators<br>from trying to grab land in the future.<br>- So yeah.<br>And it's nuanced because<br>like it's very probably good<br>to be the boring person at the party<br>that says dictatorships are<br>bad, democracies are good.<br>Many of the ideals of the west are good.<br>- Democracies are better.<br>- Better, yes. That<br>sounds like "Animal Farm."<br>But yes, two legs better,<br>but yes, democracy's better<br>and invading countries is bad.<br>But World War III is bad too.<br>So after you say something<br>is bad, what's the next step?<br>Because military intervention<br>in a lot of these conflicts.<br>- It'll be about deterrence.<br>- Yeah, but what's effective deterrence?<br>- That we're gonna have to keep going over<br>for a long time to come.<br>- My question is how can we achieve peace<br>in April, in May, right?<br>The adults at the table<br>all seem to tell me,<br>"Well, it's a process. It's complicated."<br>You know, it just feels<br>like this is a thing<br>that might go into the next winter,<br>and there's still maybe initial ceasefire,<br>and the ceasefire is broken,<br>and there's more people dying.<br>And it's that mess.<br>It seems like civility and politeness<br>ignores the fact that people<br>are dying every single day.<br>- I mean, of course,<br>like almost everybody,<br>not everybody, but almost everyone<br>would like the thing to<br>stop immediately of course.<br>- No, like I think that is<br>the boring thing at the party.<br>Yes, but they don't say it often enough.<br>- They should say it more.<br>- There has to be a frustration.<br>I don't understand why<br>Putin, Zelensky, and Trump<br>can't just meet in a room<br>together without signing anything.<br>Leaders meeting and discussing,<br>and like the human connection.<br>There's so many layers of diplomats.<br>It's the problem I have<br>with the managerial class.<br>They schedule meetings really well.<br>They don't get shit done.<br>And I would love it if<br>people got shit done.<br>So the soldiers get shit done.<br>They're fighting the reality of the war.<br>And then the leaders have<br>the capacity to get shit done<br>on the scale of nations and geopolitics.<br>But like these diplomatic meetings.<br>- No, I agree. Look, I share<br>your frustration about it.<br>At the same time, I think.<br>I share your frustration<br>because I've seen it all.<br>A lot of it, you know, with my own eyes.<br>I mean, there was a battalion<br>I was with the other week<br>and they were hit just<br>after I left their base.<br>And you wouldn't believe<br>what a thermobaric bomb<br>can do to the human body.<br>And I share your frustration with that.<br>At the same time,<br>one of the things that<br>happens if you are rushing<br>is that you do, and I've<br>seen this elsewhere,<br>you will put pressure on the<br>people you can pressurize<br>and you will not put enough pressure<br>on the people you can't pressurize.<br>And that is one of the worrying things<br>that could happen with this.<br>Simply, America can put extraordinary<br>diplomatic, financial, intelligence,<br>military pressure on Ukraine.<br>And it can put significant<br>pressure on Putin,<br>but it's much easier to pressure Zelensky.<br>And that's one of the many<br>things that makes it harder<br>is that the temptation to rush for peace,<br>accepting that peace is<br>the most desirable thing,<br>accepting the horrors of war,<br>which, you know, we can linger<br>on, but accepting all that,<br>if somebody says, "We've<br>got to get peace today,<br>and the three of them around a table,"<br>the most likely thing is<br>that it'll be the person<br>who you can pressure most easily<br>who will be the person that you pressure.<br>And as a result have<br>an outcome, which yes,<br>might stop the killing<br>as soon as possible,<br>but might also set up a situation<br>which rewards the aggressor<br>and effectively punishes the victim.<br>And that's an extremely ugly<br>and common thing to happen.<br>- Yeah, and that's the<br>other boring thing to say,<br>the boring truth, that<br>the easy shortcut here<br>is to punish your Ukraine, and<br>you just have to not do it.<br>- Let's keep being the<br>boring people at the party.<br>- Yeah. Well, nobody's gonna invite us.<br>All right, let's go from<br>one complicated conflict<br>to perhaps an even more complicated one,<br>Israel and Palestine.<br>Can you take me through<br>what happened on October 7th<br>as you understand it<br>and as you outline at the<br>beginning of the book?<br>- Well, the book, "On<br>Democracies and Death Cults,"<br>is a mixture of firsthand<br>reporting and observation,<br>interviews, and a wider reflection,<br>not just on the war that's been going on<br>since the 7th of October,<br>but the war that's been<br>going on a lot longer.<br>And also, I suppose on the what for me<br>is one of the overwhelming questions,<br>which I'm sure we'll get to,<br>which is the reaction in<br>the rest of the world.<br>Obviously on the 7th itself,<br>it was a brigade-sized<br>attack on Israel from Gaza.<br>Hamas broke through the security fence<br>and attacked all the<br>softest targets they could.<br>They swiftly overwhelmed things<br>like the observation base in Nahal Oz.<br>They ran through the<br>communities in the south,<br>very peaceful peacenik,<br>effective free communities,<br>of the kibbutzim as they're<br>called, the communities,<br>and murdered, and raped,<br>and burned, and kidnapped.<br>And of course, they,<br>from their point of view,<br>had the great good fortune<br>of also coming across<br>hundreds of young people<br>dancing in the early hours of<br>the morning at a dance party<br>and rampaged through that<br>with RPGs, and Kalashnikovs,<br>and grenades, and hammers, and more.<br>And got within, well, 20<br>kilometers into Israel<br>places like Ofakim and<br>Sderot, important towns,<br>and carried out their<br>massacres there as well.<br>We now know that the<br>plan was that Hezbollah<br>did the same thing from the north.<br>Hezbollah joined in<br>the war within 24 hours<br>by starting firing rockets again<br>in very large numbers into northern Israel<br>from southern Lebanon.<br>But the plan was that they would do<br>the same thing from the north<br>and carry out similar massacres there<br>and effectively be able<br>to meet in the middle<br>and garrot Israel from the center.<br>The interesting reason why I think,<br>it'll be found out in the future,<br>but why they didn't coordinate<br>better was Hamas didn't trust<br>any line of communication to Hezbollah<br>to let them know exactly<br>when they were gonna do it<br>that wouldn't be intercepted.<br>The Iranian revolutionary<br>government in Tehran,<br>which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah,<br>and trains and arms, knew of the plan.<br>It was a very successful<br>attempt to annihilate the state,<br>but they didn't get close to that.<br>But they got worryingly closer<br>than people might have<br>thought they were capable of.<br>I think from the Israeli side side,<br>it was obviously one of<br>the most, if not the most,<br>catastrophic intelligence<br>and military failure<br>since the foundation of the state.<br>And I think there are several reasons why.<br>One is a perception problem.<br>What a lot of military<br>commanders and others<br>described to me as the conception,<br>the conception that had prevailed<br>in Israel for some years<br>in the security military establishment,<br>was that Hamas were<br>content with being corrupt,<br>and governing Gaza and, you<br>know, lining their pockets,<br>and living in Qatar, and<br>becoming billionaires.<br>But that like many other terrorist groups<br>and, you know, cults<br>that they would end up<br>becoming just corrupt and<br>not losing their ideology,<br>but the ideology becomes secondary.<br>That's the first thing was<br>there was just a massive error<br>of the conception in Israel.<br>And then there are the multiple, manifold<br>security and military failures of the day<br>and leading up to the day.<br>And there already have<br>been quite a lot of people<br>held to account for that,<br>and there doubtless will<br>be in the future as well.<br>The single thing I heard,<br>which I heard most and which<br>was most distressing in a way,<br>was the number of people who<br>described to me, you know,<br>who survived the massacres in the south,<br>who said that, you know,<br>they'd said to their children,<br>"Don't worry, the army<br>will be here in minutes."<br>And they weren't, you know.<br>In many places, it was many<br>hours till the army got there.<br>And there are reasons for that.<br>There are some reasons that<br>will be military failings,<br>leadership failings.<br>Other things, I discovered,<br>were very human failings.<br>I don't want to overstress<br>the failure of the army<br>because actually certain units and things<br>got down very fast.<br>There's a unit who got down<br>to the junction, you know,<br>by within about an hour, 90 minutes,<br>of the massacres starting<br>and joined in the fight.<br>And then there were self-starters,<br>who I write about in the book,<br>extraordinary people who<br>just like broke orders,<br>and just realized the magnitude<br>of what was happening,<br>and said, "We're needed in the south, go,"<br>and fought very hard for<br>hours, days in some cases.<br>But the complexities on the<br>ground were unbelievable.<br>I mean, as usually happens in warfare,<br>but what they call the fog<br>of war is a very real thing.<br>You can see it in hindsight,<br>but you can't see when you're in it.<br>And one of the things that<br>made it very complicated<br>was, for instance, Hamas coming in,<br>taking uniforms off dead<br>Israelis, wearing them,<br>coming in with Israeli<br>style apparatus on them.<br>There's a Muslim doctor I<br>quote in the book I interviewed<br>who describes how he was going to his,<br>he's an Israeli Muslim Arab,<br>and he was going to, he's a doctor.<br>He was going to his shift at the hospital<br>at 6:30 in the morning.<br>The rockets start coming in<br>because the rockets started first<br>and then the full invasion.<br>And he described to me how, you know,<br>he's one of the members of this group,<br>the United Hatzalah, which<br>is a first responders group,<br>and they sort of, you<br>know, they get an alert<br>and it tells them that, you<br>know, a car has crashed nearby,<br>and they put on their,<br>you know, first aid kit,<br>and so on and go.<br>And he got one of those alerts<br>at one of the junctions,<br>and realized there was a car<br>that something had happened<br>and there was some dead bodies.<br>And he stops and he sees<br>these men dressed as soldiers,<br>and they start, and he's<br>wearing his Hatzalah gear,<br>and they start firing at him.<br>And he just thinks, "What the hell?<br>What the hell is going on?"<br>And they turned out to be Hamas<br>dressed as Israeli soldiers.<br>They used him as a human shield<br>to try to protect from any air assault.<br>And in the end, they shot him<br>and left him, and he survived.<br>He was a very, very brave man.<br>So there was a lot of confusion like that.<br>There was a girl whose<br>father I interviewed,<br>she was at the Nova party,<br>and I met him at one of<br>the reunions of the party<br>in the weeks after,<br>the reunions of the survivors<br>and the family and so on.<br>And he described how<br>in the last moments of<br>his daughter's life,<br>she phoned him on her<br>phone like a lot of people,<br>and he reassured her that army<br>would get there and so on.<br>And her boyfriend was shot in the head<br>and was lying on her lap, and<br>she was obviously panicked.<br>And they'd managed to get into<br>a car and escape the party,<br>but they went to a community<br>where they thought they'd be<br>safe in the south of Israel.<br>And they were told to stay where they were<br>by somebody who she said was a policeman.<br>And he wasn't a policeman,<br>he was Hamas dressed<br>as police and she died.<br>She was shot and killed as well.<br>And so there was a lot<br>of confusion like that.<br>Hopefully, you know,<br>the world will find out<br>exactly what went wrong,<br>Israel will find out<br>exactly what went wrong<br>that led to this catastrophe.<br>But I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.<br>- Do you have a sense of how<br>such an intelligence failure<br>could have happened?<br>So there's a bit of a temptation<br>to go into conspiracy land<br>because it's such a giant<br>intelligence failure.<br>It seems that there is some manipulation<br>on the inside for political reasons, or.<br>- You don't need to go<br>into conspiracy land.<br>I mean, I think there are people who say<br>that there were parts of the<br>intelligence network and so on<br>that were withholding the information.<br>I don't know. Again, people will find out.<br>There's an awful lot of<br>politics inside Israel<br>and it's hard to know that at this stage.<br>I think most people are sort of still,<br>Israeli and not Israeli,<br>including people who are anti-Israel,<br>who just believe that, you know,<br>Israeli military and particularly<br>intelligence dominance<br>is so, so strong<br>that there must have been<br>some kind of conspiracy,<br>otherwise how could this have happened?<br>I don't think you need to go into that.<br>I think that, I mean, for instance,<br>some of the young women<br>at the observation base<br>are on the record.<br>They've said, I've spoken to myself,<br>who said that they had been warning<br>in the weeks running up the 7th<br>that they were seeing maneuvers<br>and training by the border,<br>which suggested that Hamas<br>was going to do something like this.<br>And they say that they were ignored.<br>You speak to some of the more<br>senior commanders about that,<br>and they say the thing is that this stuff<br>was happening all the time,<br>so it's very hard to know at the moment.<br>- Can you talk through your understanding<br>of who and what Hamas is,<br>its history and the governing<br>ideology of this group?<br>- Well, Hamas, in a way<br>quite easy to understand<br>because they say what their ambitions are.<br>They say what their beliefs are.<br>They've said it from their<br>governing charter onwards.<br>And you also have the<br>advantage with Hamas that they,<br>as it were in trying to understand them,<br>is that they tend to do what they say<br>and act on what they believe.<br>The primary aim of Hamas is<br>to destroy the state of Israel<br>and then see.<br>They're not an unusual group, sadly.<br>The bit of it that is hard<br>for some people to understand, I think,<br>is that they really do mean what they say<br>and that they really do mean<br>what they say they want to do.<br>And I give a number of<br>examples in the book of this,<br>but I mean, the most obvious<br>is the case of Yahya Sinwar,<br>the Hamas leader, who<br>is generally regarded<br>as having orchestrated and<br>arranged the 7th of October.<br>We know a fair amount about him<br>because he was in prison<br>in Israel in the 2000s<br>for murdering Palestinians in Gaza.<br>And he was released in the prisoner swap.<br>He was one of the more than<br>1000 Palestinian prisoners<br>inside Israel who was released<br>in a swap for Gilad Shalit,<br>the abducted Israeli soldier.<br>And Yahya Sinwar, in prison in Israel,<br>talked to among others a dentist<br>who ended up saving his life<br>because Yahya Sinwar had a brain tumor.<br>And this dentist identified this<br>and actually sent him to the hospital.<br>And the Israelis famously<br>removed the tumor<br>and saved Sinwar's life.<br>But this dentist used to<br>speak to him in prison<br>fairly regularly and has related,<br>not least to "The New York Times,"<br>his conversations with Sinwar.<br>And Sinwar said in one of<br>those conversations, he said,<br>you know, he said,<br>"At the moment, you, Israel, are strong,<br>but one day you'll be<br>weak and then I'll come."<br>And that's what he did.<br>- Is it a hatred of Israel<br>or is it a hatred of Jews?<br>Is it on the level of nations<br>or the level of religion?<br>- Both. It's both.<br>I mean, it originates<br>from a religious mindset,<br>but it's of course political as well.<br>I mean the Hamas charter, of course,<br>some people sort of<br>think the Hamas charter<br>is of no significance.<br>And I often notice this sleight<br>of hand that that people do.<br>Again, it goes back to what<br>we were saying earlier.<br>Forget everything other than<br>the most important basic things.<br>But the Hamas charter, among other things,<br>quotes the hadith that, you know,<br>the end times will not come<br>until all of the rocks<br>and the trees shout out,<br>"Oh Muslim, there's a Jew<br>behind me, come and kill him."<br>And so Hamas is both obviously<br>anti-Israeli obviously<br>and anti-Jewish obviously.<br>And by the way,<br>I mean one of the many painful<br>stories I tell in the book<br>is of the fact that so many of the people<br>in the communities that they attacked,<br>it's not as if there'd be<br>a right community to attack<br>and a wrong community to attack,<br>but that many of the<br>communities they attacked<br>were communities which deeply,<br>deeply dreamed of the idea<br>of living in peace with<br>their Palestinian neighbors.<br>There's a woman whose name<br>has become relatively famous since,<br>certainly famous inside<br>Israel, Vivian Silver,<br>who was a peace activist<br>who spent every weekend<br>driving Gazan children from the border<br>if they had very like rare medical needs<br>that could not be seen or<br>attended to with inside Gaza<br>would drive them to Israeli hospitals.<br>And she spent every weekend doing that.<br>Worked for all of the sort of left wing<br>peacenik organizations in Israel.<br>And, you know, for a while after the 7th,<br>her neighbors and others<br>thought that she had been<br>taken captive into Gaza.<br>And actually there was<br>a hostage poster for her<br>and there were appeals by the<br>various peacenik organizations<br>for Hamas to hand her over,<br>but it turned out she'd been<br>burned alive in her home.<br>And this wasn't discovered<br>for quite a long time<br>because there was so<br>little DNA left of her<br>that it was very hard to identify<br>the remains as being hers.<br>So there were just a lot of<br>people in the Gaza envelope,<br>as it's called in Israel,<br>in the area around Gaza<br>who would've been the<br>people who, you know,<br>wanted to live peacefully<br>with the Gazans someday.<br>There's a certain among the<br>many, it's not an irony,<br>but just among the sort<br>of pains of the days<br>is that so overwhelmingly<br>these are the people<br>that Hamas brought hell to.<br>- The response to October 7th by Israel,<br>can you steel man the case<br>that Israel went too far?<br>- Well, the case that<br>started from very early on<br>that critics of Israel<br>had was the claim that,<br>I mean I think I first heard<br>it on about the 8th of October<br>before Israel had done<br>anything in response,<br>was the claim that Israel must act<br>proportionately in response.<br>And I have a critique of this<br>that I've often expressed,<br>which is that there is such a thing<br>as proportionality in<br>warfare, and at the same time,<br>Israel is always accused of<br>acting disproportionately.<br>And the proportionality that<br>much of the rest of the world<br>seems to think Israel<br>should express in warfare<br>is to have an equal level<br>of suffering or killing<br>on both sides.<br>I don't think there's any law of war<br>that says that, you know,<br>if you kill 1200 people<br>and you kidnap another 250,<br>that as it were,<br>the other side's allowed<br>to do the same back.<br>But that's what a lot of people think.<br>And then when they see the death toll<br>escalating on the Gazan side,<br>they say Israel has<br>acted disproportionately<br>and has overreacted.<br>That one is tricky because,<br>you know, it's my belief that,<br>I mean, again, this is a basic thing,<br>but it has to be stated that<br>9 million citizens of Israel,<br>if you extrapolate that out<br>to what the 7th of October<br>would've meant in American terms,<br>you'd be talking about a day on which<br>if the attack had happened in America<br>where 44,000 Americans<br>were killed in one day<br>and 10,000 American<br>citizens taken hostage.<br>Nobody can tell me that if<br>such an atrocity occurred<br>that America would not<br>do whatever it needed<br>to destroy the groups that had done that<br>and to retrieve the<br>hostages who'd been taken.<br>- So just on that point,<br>I agree with you 100%.<br>America would hit hard back,<br>and I think a lot of Americans<br>would feel justified in that.<br>But it's also possible<br>that the military industrial<br>complex and the politicians<br>would do something like the<br>war in Iraq and Afghanistan,<br>which means extend far beyond hitting back<br>and actually do a thing that's<br>destructive to everybody,<br>including America financially,<br>and the flourishing of America,<br>and the flourishing of humanity<br>broadly, and the region,<br>and the stability, and<br>the war on terrorism,<br>if that's a real thing.<br>The war in Iraq and Afghanistan<br>did not maybe succeed<br>in defeating terrorism<br>or even making progress.<br>It probably made more terrorists than not.<br>So there's a justified<br>feeling of hitting back<br>and going after somebody like<br>Bin Laden in the case of 9/11.<br>And there's just the<br>actual implementation.<br>And it seems like the<br>implementation can sometimes,<br>intended or unintended, have consequences<br>that are bordering on war crimes,<br>if not downright war crimes.<br>Now this is a general statement,<br>and now we'll look at Israel<br>where things are small land,<br>everything is very compact.<br>There's a lot of complexities<br>that are well studied<br>that we've talked about extensively.<br>- Well, the two stated aims<br>of the Israelis after the 7th<br>were to get the hostages<br>back and to destroy Hamas.<br>And many people said that you<br>could do one, but not both.<br>And I actually think they've<br>gone a long way to doing both,<br>by no means everything,<br>there are still hostages as<br>were speaking held in Gaza,<br>including a young American.<br>And Hamas is not completely destroyed.<br>It's very, very significantly degraded,<br>but it's not completely destroyed.<br>But those are the two aims.<br>I believe that, I mean I've<br>seen as much of the war<br>as any outside observer.<br>I don't know if there are<br>some exceptions maybe,<br>and so I think I can say<br>with considerable certainty<br>what the Israelis have and haven't done.<br>There were various<br>operations at the beginning,<br>various plans which didn't happen,<br>like storming straight in<br>and getting, for instance,<br>as many hostages as possible<br>out of the Shifa complex,<br>which is called a hospital,<br>but it's also at the very least<br>a Hamas command headquarters.<br>And there was a plan to<br>maybe go and do that fast,<br>but it was avoided<br>because of the number<br>of deaths on all sides<br>that would be likely to happen.<br>The Israelis did actually<br>hold back at the beginning.<br>There was a period of making sure<br>that when they went into Gaza,<br>they didn't do so in any way blind.<br>But Gaza is a very built<br>up area population wise,<br>is densely populated.<br>Something, by the way,<br>which the people who claim frivolously<br>that Israel has been committing genocide<br>never take account of,<br>which is the fact that the<br>Gazan population has boomed<br>since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005.<br>It's almost doubled.<br>But yeah, it's a densely populated area,<br>and it's an incredibly difficult<br>place for the train of war<br>because of one thing in<br>particular, which is that Hamas,<br>goes back a bit to our<br>conversation earlier,<br>but this is a much more extreme example.<br>I mean, Hamas really<br>don't play by the rules.<br>In fact, they use the rules<br>of war, the laws of war,<br>completely to their own advantage.<br>You know, it has to be reiterated.<br>You are not meant to disguise<br>your army as civilians.<br>You're not meant to use<br>places of care like hospitals<br>as bases for your military operations.<br>You're not meant to use<br>schools and places of worship<br>as operating centers of war.<br>And Hamas does all of these<br>things and has always done so.<br>And it does so with the very<br>obvious reason that for them,<br>the whole thing is a two-for-one offer.<br>You get to operate everywhere<br>and if the Israelis operate anywhere,<br>you claim that this is a war crime<br>because how could they attack<br>this group of civilians,<br>these people who are dressed as civilians,<br>these people merely fighting<br>from a mosque and so on.<br>And that's why everybody<br>who's been to Gaza,<br>who's seen the fighting,<br>knows the same thing,<br>which is this is just<br>incredibly difficult, difficult warfare<br>of a kind that American troops have seen<br>in the last 20 years in<br>Fallujah and elsewhere.<br>Kurdish militia, the Peshmurga,<br>saw when they were fighting<br>as our frontline troops<br>in the war against Isis.<br>Similar house to house,<br>but by no means with the<br>same entrenched bases.<br>You know, again, it<br>can't be stressed enough<br>that Hamas has used the years<br>since the Israeli withdrawal from 2005<br>to build this vast<br>underground tunnel network.<br>And again, it's obvious,<br>but it has to be remembered,<br>and I quote one of Hamas<br>leaders in the book<br>saying this in an interview,<br>when they build their tunnels,<br>they do so in order that their<br>tunnels are used by them,<br>Hamas, to store their weaponry,<br>to secure their fighters,<br>and to hold hostages.<br>They do not build their<br>underground tunnel networks<br>for the safety of Gazan civilians<br>avoiding aerial bombardment.<br>And you know, every<br>difference in the world<br>seems to me to exist between a country<br>which does build bomb<br>shelters for its citizens<br>and a government which builds<br>bomb shelters for its bombs.<br>- Can you discuss the flow of money here?<br>So how does Hamas, the<br>leadership, use the money?<br>So you started to talk about the tunnels,<br>but how much corruption is there?<br>Can you just lay it all out?<br>Because I think that's an important part<br>of the picture here.<br>- It's totally corrupt.<br>Every Hamas leader who's now dead<br>died a billionaire.<br>- With a B?<br>- With a B.<br>To say that they used Gaza's resources<br>or the resources that came<br>into Gaza for their own ends<br>is to just vastly understate matters.<br>Hamas used everything that came in<br>to build the infrastructure of terror<br>that allowed them to do the<br>7th and everything since.<br>They militarized the whole of the Gaza.<br>By the estimations of<br>troops I've been with there,<br>every second to third house<br>had weaponry stashed there,<br>bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs,<br>rockets, tunnel entrances.<br>The network that they just<br>embedded all these years<br>was total.<br>You know, and one of the<br>many, many tragedies of this<br>is that whatever you're reading<br>of the rights and wrongs of<br>the Israeli withdrawal in 2005,<br>it was an opportunity for the<br>Gaza to become something else.<br>It could have become a thriving statelet.<br>It could have been a<br>thriving Palestinian state.<br>It's just that Hamas,<br>like the PLO before them,<br>decided that they wanted to destroy Israel<br>more than they wanted to<br>create a Palestinian state.<br>And that is to the great, great detriment<br>of the Palestinians of Gaza,<br>to put it at his mildest.<br>- So just to outline here,<br>leadership of Hamas are stealing the money<br>they get sent by Qatar, by everybody.<br>So they're putting in<br>their pocket and then.<br>- By the American taxpayer<br>and by the European taxpayer as well, yes.<br>Well, yeah, but I mean,<br>it's not just about<br>the stealing the money,<br>it's about using the money<br>and the infrastructure<br>to annihilate your neighbor.<br>I mean that's the real.<br>- Yeah, those two things,<br>but the corruption is a signal<br>from an economic perspective.<br>It's just also a signal<br>of deep moral corruption<br>because they're screwing<br>over the Palestinian people.<br>- Yes. A cynicism, certainly, yeah.<br>- Okay, and then the money they do spend<br>on the Palestinian cause<br>they're not doing that to build up Gaza,<br>they're doing it to strengthen<br>the militaristic capabilities<br>of the terrorist organizational of Hamas.<br>You have, maybe you<br>can correct me on this,<br>have said that the people of Gaza<br>have some significant responsibility<br>for the actions of Hamas<br>'cause they've elected them.<br>- They elected them.<br>The what ifs are endless,<br>but very unwise of the<br>George W. Bush administration<br>to push for elections in Gaza after '05.<br>But Hamas were elected,<br>and they then in 2007<br>killed the other Palestinian faction<br>that was their main challenger, Fatah.<br>Killed them, threw the off rooftops,<br>dragged their bodies behind<br>motorbikes through the Gaza.<br>And from that point,<br>they had total control.<br>And you know, this is difficult<br>because you can get into the realm<br>of being accused of advocating<br>or in any way justifying<br>collective punishment<br>if you talk about this.<br>But it should be borne<br>in mind that, you know,<br>Hamas had effectively 18<br>years to run the Gaza.<br>And that's the time that it<br>takes from the birth of a child<br>to the end of their formal education.<br>And in 18 years they could<br>have presided over and produced<br>a generation of young Gazans<br>who were productive for their people,<br>for their society, for their neighbors,<br>for the rest of the<br>world, and they didn't.<br>They spent 18 years indoctrinating<br>the children of Gaza<br>into a death cult and<br>into a genocidal hatred,<br>which obviously was most<br>dangerous to the Israelis,<br>but it was obviously disastrous<br>for the people of Gaza.<br>And you know, if you speak<br>to soldiers who were there<br>in 2014 when Hamas started a war again,<br>one of a set of rounds of war since 2005.<br>If you speak to the soldiers<br>who were there in 2014<br>going house to house<br>and who were also involved<br>in the war since 2003,<br>they all say the same thing,<br>which is the marked radicalization<br>of the Gazan population.<br>The marked increase in just, I mean,<br>it's so banal in a way to even, you know,<br>the numbers of copies of<br>"Mein Kampf" in Arabic<br>in an average Gazan household,<br>"The Protocols of the<br>Learned Elders of Zion."<br>There are so many what ifs<br>and other paths that<br>Hamas could have taken,<br>but that was the one they took.<br>They decided to take the path<br>of using their time in power<br>to build up their infrastructure,<br>radicalize the population,<br>and encouraged them to believe<br>that they could destroy<br>the state of Israel.<br>And then on October 7th,<br>they gave it their best shot.<br>And by the way, there is no<br>organized collective punishment<br>of the citizens of Gaza.<br>Collective punishment would<br>just be dropping bombs<br>with no purpose across civilian areas.<br>Carpet bombing, this sort of thing.<br>This is simply not what<br>the IAF and the IDF<br>have done since the 7th.<br>They have been fighting<br>a house-to-house war<br>against this terrorist group.<br>They do do aerial strikes.<br>Gaza is very, very badly beaten up<br>as the buildings, I mean, the<br>infrastructure that existed,<br>there aren't many buildings standing.<br>But this is not the result<br>of just wild and imprecise<br>bombing by the Israelis.<br>It's been extremely concerted.<br>It's extremely difficult.<br>But when people say,<br>"Well, this must be<br>collective punishment,"<br>I think that the people who say that<br>it's simultaneously that's not true.<br>And also, you know,<br>there is not a hostage who's come out,<br>President Trump made this point recently.<br>There is not a hostage who's<br>come out who I've spoken with,<br>who found any Gazan Palestinian<br>who expressed even the slightest<br>human kindness to them.<br>If you look at the footage from the 7th<br>that Hamas recorded themselves<br>of them taking young Jewish<br>women into Gaza and so on,<br>you will notice that the trucks,<br>and the motorbikes, and so on<br>are not stopped by horrified<br>Gazan civilians saying,<br>"Why have you got this Israeli<br>girl whose tendons you've cut<br>and why are you bringing her here?"<br>It's all celebration.<br>It's all celebration.<br>And it's the same with,<br>there's a couple of cases of<br>hostages who managed to escape<br>from the civilian houses<br>they were being held in,<br>who were immediately returned<br>by the citizens they met.<br>- Yeah, the celebration.<br>I do wonder what percent of<br>the population they represent,<br>but there's something really dark.<br>There's several ways to<br>explain the celebration.<br>It could be that there's<br>a deep indoctrination<br>where you do legitimately hate Jews,<br>and there also could be a<br>place of just deep desperation.<br>And it's a kind of relief that<br>you have to convince yourself<br>that you're on the side<br>of fighting for freedom<br>in order to justify to yourself<br>that this is the right way<br>to fight, out of desperation,<br>out of extremely harsh conditions.<br>Because the way we're kind<br>of speaking about this<br>with a celebration,<br>it's very easy to project a<br>kind of evil on the populace<br>that I just am very hesitant to project,<br>especially on the general populace.<br>- You don't have to project it onto them,<br>you can just listen to their own words.<br>I'm sure you've heard one<br>of many audio recordings<br>you hear from the morning,<br>but I'm sure you've<br>heard the audio recording<br>of the young man who ends<br>up in one of the communities<br>in the south of Israel and<br>calls home, calls back home.<br>Have you heard that?<br>- [Lex] Yes, I've heard it.<br>- I quote in the first<br>chapter of the book.<br>He calls back home and he says<br>to his father, who picks up.<br>I think he's on the phone.<br>He's saying, "Turn onto WhatsApp<br>because I can show you."<br>He says, "I've killed 10<br>Jews with my own hands.<br>Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews."<br>And his father is saying,<br>"Where are you? Where are you?"<br>"I want to show you,<br>dad, I wanna show you.<br>I've killed Jews in my<br>own hands, your son.<br>Put mother on the phone."<br>Mother comes on the phone. The<br>brother comes on the phone.<br>This is one of many,<br>many stories from the day<br>that suggests something which I would say<br>is not just indoctrination,<br>but, yes, evil.<br>- First of all,<br>those phone calls are<br>somehow uniquely horrific.<br>But I've also heard<br>recordings of phone calls<br>made by Ukrainian<br>soldiers to their parents<br>and Russian soldiers to their parents.<br>And they have, not as<br>intense and not as horrific,<br>but they have a similar nature to them,<br>which there's an aspect of war<br>where you dehumanize<br>the other side, right,<br>in order to fight that war?<br>So we have to remember that that element<br>is going to be there in a time of war,<br>in a time of desperation.<br>- It would be a strange type of,<br>simple sort of, I don't know, pride in war<br>to go into an 80-year-old woman's house,<br>and kill her on her floor,<br>and then film her body<br>in its final moment,<br>and send it round to all<br>of that woman's friends<br>on her phone on her Instagram account.<br>You may have heard<br>different things from me,<br>but I mean, I would be surprised<br>if there were even the most<br>vociferous of Russian soldiers<br>phoning back home to Moscow and saying,<br>"Mum, you won't believe my luck.<br>I managed to rape and kill<br>this 80-year-old woman."<br>That's quite unusual, even in warfare.<br>And that's one of the things about Hamas<br>and what I describe as<br>the death cult types<br>which makes them different<br>from other people.<br>- But that's the channeling<br>of evil, and hatred,<br>and anger in the human spirit,<br>but that doesn't make that person evil.<br>- [Douglas] No, I disagree.<br>- You commit that once.<br>- I think that there is such<br>a force as evil in the world,<br>and I think can descend,<br>and it can be used.<br>It's very hard to find<br>a non theological way<br>to talk about this,<br>but everything I've seen there are actions<br>that people like Hamas<br>committed on the 7th<br>that cannot be described as<br>anything other than evil.<br>The things that happened at the Nova party<br>were especially appalling.<br>I mean, it was all appalling,<br>but it was especially<br>appalling because first of all,<br>it's a sort of party which<br>people like you and I,<br>or at least you and I<br>when we were younger,<br>might have been at.<br>And so everyone knows, you know,<br>the world of a dance party<br>and all night, you know,<br>rave the desert to commune<br>with nature, and the universe,<br>and to take some psychedelics,<br>and to, you know, expand your<br>consciousness, and your love,<br>and all of that sort of thing.<br>The fact that people doing<br>that at 6:30 in the morning<br>then encountered people<br>coming in to the party<br>on trucks and military vehicles<br>and just massacring them and raping them.<br>And I mean, I give examples<br>of the firsthand accounts<br>of people who survived,<br>but I mean, it's beyond belief<br>of almost anything else<br>I've covered in war,<br>and it's because it seems so.<br>I mean, an army facing<br>another army is one thing.<br>A terrorist group in civilian<br>clothing facing an army<br>is another thing.<br>A terrorist group facing a group<br>of young people at a dance,<br>unarmed, and doing what they did<br>is pretty hard to comprehend,<br>unless you use the<br>lexicon of evil somewhere.<br>- So that stated,<br>can you empathize with the<br>suffering of Palestinians in Gaza<br>with the destruction that<br>resulted as a response?<br>- Yes.<br>What has happened in response<br>is terrible, terrible<br>for the citizens of Gaza.<br>I was there on the first time<br>a couple of days early<br>into the ground invasion<br>when the citizens of<br>Gaza were coming south.<br>I was in the middle of the Strip<br>and the humanitarian<br>corridor had been set up<br>to try to stop the hostages<br>being taken south deeper into Gaza<br>and to try to stop the Hamas leadership<br>from making it south.<br>Actually, it didn't really work<br>because they'd already got<br>a lot of the hostages south.<br>It was an attempt to keep Haas there<br>and fight them in the north,<br>so as not to be dragged all the way in.<br>In the end they were dragged<br>all the way in anyway.<br>But yes, and I mean watching<br>the citizens of Gaza<br>moving through the humanitarian<br>corridor, you know,<br>and everyone was being checked<br>for bombs, suicide vests,<br>checked for, you know,<br>particularly young men<br>of military age.<br>And you know, I mean, you look<br>at this tide of human misery<br>and you think this is terrible,<br>but this is a terrible thing<br>that had been brought upon them<br>by the people who had been<br>misgoverning the place<br>that they lived in.<br>And of course, on a human<br>level you feel terrible<br>that these people are going through this.<br>At the same time, human<br>empathy for them can coexist<br>beside an unspeakable anger<br>that they had come to this point<br>because of the fact that they<br>had elected a terror group<br>to run their territory.<br>And one of the things<br>obviously is that, you know,<br>a lot of people like to say,<br>and it's true of course,<br>that, you know, this didn't<br>all start on October 7th.<br>Absolutely true.<br>This particular round,<br>this particularly intense round of war,<br>started on October 7th without doubt.<br>Hamas did not have to<br>attack on October 7th.<br>It wasn't like they were forced<br>to liberate themselves or something<br>as some of the defenders of Hamas claim.<br>But the conflict of course<br>goes back a lot earlier.<br>But you will have to<br>always keep on contending<br>with this fact that there<br>is one central issue<br>to the paradigm of that conflict.<br>What used to be called<br>the Arab-Israeli conflict<br>and now has become interestingly rebranded<br>as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<br>But there is one absolutely<br>essential issue to this<br>which cannot be forgotten,<br>which is do the Palestinians want a state<br>or do they want to<br>destroy the Jewish state?<br>And if they want to<br>destroy the Jewish state<br>as they've tried many times,<br>it's a disaster for them.<br>It's a total disaster for them.<br>If they want to create their own state,<br>they've already had several<br>very good shots at it,<br>one of which is Gaza post 2005.<br>But they've never shown<br>in their leadership<br>the desire to live with a Jewish state,<br>and that's the catastrophe<br>for the Palestinians.<br>- Can you steel man the<br>case of the lived experience<br>of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices<br>that describe the Gaza<br>situation as a occupation,<br>the West Bank too, and in the<br>case of Gaza, open air prison?<br>- To take them in order,<br>there's nothing about Gaza<br>that was an open air prison.<br>They had ability to trade,<br>they had the ability to move in and out<br>in increasing numbers.<br>Egypt wasn't so keen on<br>allowing Palestinians from Gaza<br>into Egypt, still isn't.<br>But at the time of the 7th,<br>there was actually an interesting,<br>one of the things the<br>international community<br>was pushing for was for more Palestinians<br>to be coming into Israel every day<br>through the Erez crossing<br>and others to work in Israel<br>because they can make a be<br>a better living in Israel<br>than they can in Gaza.<br>And this, as it were, normalization route<br>was slowly being attempted<br>as being pushed on Israel<br>by the international community<br>did a little bit too fast<br>for Israel's comfort, but it happened.<br>That completely came to an end.<br>And that dream is done, gone,<br>since the 7th of October.<br>- Can you clarify the dream?<br>The normalization.<br>- The normalization dream.<br>- Between Gaza and Israel.<br>- Gone. There will be.<br>- Really?<br>- Yeah, no normalization.<br>No, not after that.<br>And one of the reasons<br>is the number of people,<br>again, who I've spoken with,<br>who employed Palestinians,<br>worked with Palestinians,<br>worked alongside Palestinians,<br>encouraged more Palestinians<br>to be coming from Gaza<br>in order to work in Israel,<br>and these were their brothers and sisters<br>and so on and so forth.<br>One of the reasons why<br>the massacres of the 7th<br>were so successful in the kibbutzim,<br>the communities in the south,<br>was because of the number of<br>the terrorists who came in<br>with detailed house to house<br>maps of those communities.<br>I spoke with one man who, his community,<br>they had a security officer,<br>chief, and Hamas came in.<br>They knew to go and kill<br>him and his family first,<br>and then which families.<br>I've seen the maps myself.<br>They came in with incredibly<br>accurate information<br>about these communities.<br>How did they have them?<br>Because it was given to<br>them by the brothers,<br>by the workers, by the people of Gaza<br>who were coming in and out,<br>so there is nobody that<br>will trust that ever again.<br>- There's a lot of Palestinians<br>that have lived and<br>flourished inside Israel.<br>What are they saying,<br>what are they feeling,<br>and what are the Israelis<br>feeling about them?<br>Is there still comradery to some degree<br>or is it completely destroyed?<br>- My observation at the beginning<br>was that everyone was extremely wary.<br>I mean, you know, if you've<br>worked besides somebody<br>and then found out they<br>sold out your family,<br>you will never trust again.<br>And that, particularly in a<br>small country like Israel,<br>the word of that happening<br>goes out very fast.<br>The very beginning<br>there was intense,<br>intense fear about that,<br>including of the, you know,<br>20% or so of the population<br>who are Arab Israelis.<br>I actually think one of the few<br>sort of positive news<br>stories of the period<br>is that that population within Israel<br>has by and large held, there<br>hasn't been an intifada.<br>One of the reasons why there<br>hasn't been more activity,<br>terrorist activity, in the<br>West Bank, in Judea and Samaria<br>is because the Israelis<br>have been very careful<br>along with the Palestinian authority<br>to some extent cooperating<br>to keep that down.<br>But, you know, there wasn't<br>a full war on three fronts,<br>for instance, which was<br>at risk of happening.<br>So I think that the sort of<br>coexistence within Israel<br>has pretty much held.<br>There are some terrible<br>examples, far too regular,<br>but not as regular as it could happen<br>of Muslim Arab Israelis<br>carrying out acts of terror<br>in, as it were, sympathy with Hamas.<br>I was in the middle of one such<br>attack myself late last year<br>in a town called Hadera.<br>And those things have happened,<br>but that particular<br>catastrophe has not occurred.<br>- Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu?<br>For a lot of people, we spoke of evil,<br>they refer to him as the evil.<br>On the spectrum between good and evil,<br>as a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?<br>- Well, he's certainly not evil.<br>Interesting if people<br>looking at this conflict<br>were to be reluctant to<br>use the word evil of Hamas<br>and eager to use it of the<br>Israeli prime minister.<br>It would be sort of telling, I would say.<br>- Can we just actually<br>linger on that point?<br>There is a point you've<br>made multiple times,<br>which is we're more eager to criticize<br>and maybe even over<br>exaggerate the criticism<br>of democratically elected leaders.<br>- [Douglas] Yes.<br>- It's a dark, weird, other<br>quality of discourse at parties,<br>aforementioned parties.<br>- Isn't it also is, I mean, not<br>to be flippant for a moment,<br>it's a little bit like who do<br>you show your worst sides to?<br>The people you love.<br>It's like, you know,<br>my intense irritability<br>is something that tends to be felt most<br>by people who are closest to me<br>because if I express it<br>to absolutely everybody<br>I met at a party or a social<br>setting, it'd be hard.<br>I mean, there's a tendency to lean heavily<br>on the people who are closest to you,<br>the people who will put up with it,<br>and something similar happens<br>in international politics.<br>You pressure the people who will listen.<br>I mean, one of the things you hear a lot<br>in the last year is, you know, people,<br>sort of ignoramuses in the governments<br>in places like Britain,<br>you know, will say,<br>"We need to put more pressure<br>on the Israelis to do X."<br>And you go, "Well, you know, in part<br>that's because they will listen."<br>If you go, "We need to put more pressure<br>on the ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them<br>that Hamas are really bad and<br>they shouldn't be doing this."<br>Right, what the hell do<br>you think they're gonna do?<br>They're gonna listen to<br>you? They don't give a damn.<br>You're talking totally different worlds.<br>Not just a different language.<br>It's a different world.<br>And by the way, that happens in Israel,<br>I mentioned it earlier,<br>but it happens in Israel.<br>When the Hostage Families<br>Forum came about,<br>I spent a lot of time there,<br>got to know a lot of the<br>families and they're remarkable.<br>But one of the things you<br>did notice from them as well<br>was that a lot of them,<br>they protest outside Netanyahu's house.<br>They use klaxons and horns and<br>make sure he can ever sleep.<br>They will, you know, put up<br>greatly big posters by his house<br>of him with bloodied hands and so on.<br>And I have, you know, I think<br>as much sympathy as you can<br>for these families.<br>The plight of knowing that your child<br>is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year,<br>a day, an hour, is intolerable,<br>but there's a reason why the<br>families protested Netanyahu.<br>And that's because Sinwar didn't care.<br>That wouldn't work.<br>If you said, you know,<br>"Understand my plight.<br>I'm a Jewish mother and<br>my daughter is thing,"<br>you think Sinwar, the heads of Hamas care?<br>You think the leaders in<br>Qatar who host them care?<br>The Qatari emir's mother,<br>when Sinwar was killed,<br>praised Sinwar.<br>You couldn't talk that<br>language to these people,<br>but you can talk that language<br>to the elected prime minister of Israel<br>because first of all,<br>he's somebody who might<br>listen to your pressure,<br>could be pressured.<br>And secondly he's simply the<br>only person you can pressure.<br>There's no one else. Hamas doesn't care.<br>Hezbollah doesn't care.<br>Iranian revolutionary<br>government doesn't care.<br>- Yeah, so let's just<br>sort of say once again<br>the obvious thing that<br>while it is possible<br>to discuss Hamas soldiers<br>as freedom fighters,<br>I'm not one of the folks that<br>can take that perspective.<br>It's a tough one to take.<br>- I don't see how you can<br>call them freedom fighters.<br>- So this goes to the man<br>from the land of peace<br>and the man from the land of war.<br>There is a lived experience<br>of what it means to grow up in Gaza.<br>And if you fully load that<br>into your brain in a real way,<br>not using the words of good and evil,<br>but in a very deep human sense,<br>from that place, from<br>that place of desperation,<br>when your home and your<br>family's destroyed,<br>doesn't matter why, doesn't<br>matter if there's evil<br>all around you that<br>caused, it doesn't matter.<br>The facts are the facts.<br>And from that place, somebody<br>who's fighting for you<br>can feel like a freedom fighter.<br>I think it should be called out that,<br>yes, it can feel that way<br>from the lived experience,<br>but Hamas is very clearly,<br>since we're talking about<br>Netanyahu, Hamas is evil, okay?<br>Now you can still in that context<br>discuss the degree to which Netanyahu<br>is the right leader for this moment<br>and whether he goes too far,<br>whether he's too politically selfish<br>in the decisions he makes,<br>whether he's too much a warmonger,<br>whether he's utilizing the war<br>for his own political gains<br>and is not caring about the<br>death of civilians in Gaza,<br>for example, but more caring<br>about maintaining power.<br>That's a perspective<br>that I could steel man,<br>and that's a perspective worth discussing,<br>and that's a perspective<br>many in Israel hold<br>when they criticize Netanyahu.<br>He's increasingly less and less popular.<br>- That's wrong.<br>Poll's the last month<br>when he was in Washington<br>showed him at an all time high.<br>But you were saying.<br>- I make my own poll.<br>And according to my<br>poll, I'm the greatest,<br>I'm the nicest, and the<br>coolest person in the world.<br>100% of people agree.<br>- Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh that much.<br>- Yeah, you laughed a little too much.<br>- Too long.<br>- More than the joke, yeah.<br>- But you were saying.<br>- Okay, let's steel man<br>the criticism of Netanyahu,<br>and then steel man the case for him.<br>That he's the right leader<br>actually for this moment?<br>- Well, the most devastating thing<br>that anyone could come<br>up against Netanyahu<br>is that the 7th happened on his watch.<br>After the Yom Kippur<br>war in 1973, Golda Meir,<br>who was very distinguished<br>prime minister of Israel<br>and a remarkable woman,<br>but she effectively took the political hit<br>for the Yom Kippur invasion<br>by Israel's Arab neighbors<br>happening on her watch.<br>And I would've thought that most critics,<br>fair-minded critics, of Netanyahu<br>inside Israel and without<br>would always hold that against him.<br>I suppose that one of the<br>criticism you hear a lot as well<br>is this thing of Israel being divided<br>in the year before the 7th<br>because of the judicial reforms.<br>I think there's a strong case<br>for judicial reforms in Israel,<br>but it's a sort of niche<br>Israeli governance issue,<br>which we don't have to get into.<br>The point is is that<br>Netanyahu and his government<br>were pushing these reforms<br>through, judicial reforms,<br>and it was very divisive.<br>And on the streets of Tel Aviv<br>and other cities every<br>weekend there were protests.<br>And the police were tired<br>because they'd spent week after week<br>on overtime policing these protests,<br>which often turned raucous,<br>not to say violent,<br>was sometimes violent.<br>And you could say, "Well, if you see<br>that something is dividing<br>your country this much,<br>mightn't you stop?"<br>There is a claim by some people<br>that one of the things<br>that prompted the 7th<br>was that Hamas and its<br>backers in Qatar and Iran<br>saw the division in Israeli society,<br>saw the Israeli population, you know,<br>a significant chunk of it<br>every week on the streets,<br>shutting down highways, shutting<br>down services and so on,<br>and thought, "Good, now's the time."<br>In other words, what I quoted<br>Sinwar as saying earlier<br>when he was in prison in Israel<br>was, you know, this thing,<br>"One day you'll be weak<br>and then I'll strike."<br>Maybe that is one of the<br>things that Sinwar thought.<br>Israel was very weak, it had been divided,<br>and therefore the time strike.<br>There's an argument against that,<br>which is that the 7th was in<br>preparation and being planned<br>before the judicial reform<br>process in Israel began.<br>So you can look at it several ways,<br>but you could use that.<br>You could say, "Look, you know,<br>if your your nation was divided,<br>don't push through anymore on that."<br>There's lots of things like that.<br>You could say that Netanyahu<br>was one of the people<br>responsible for the conception.<br>There are critics of his,<br>including critics who<br>were in the war cabinet,<br>who thought that he was<br>too focused on Hamas<br>and not focused enough on Hezbollah.<br>Other people think he was<br>too focused on Hezbollah<br>and not enough on Hamas.<br>So there's them and many other criticisms<br>that people make of him.<br>I would say I've interviewed, I think,<br>every political leader in<br>Israel from right to left,<br>pretty much.<br>And I have to say I don't<br>think there's any of them<br>that wouldn't have responded<br>similarly to the 7th of October<br>to the way he has.<br>- Okay, so that's inside Israel.<br>Outside of Israel, you<br>know, despite what he said,<br>he is one of the most<br>hated people in the world.<br>Just the raw quantity.<br>Relative, he's loved by a lot of people,<br>but there's a lot of<br>people that, you know,<br>there's a lot of psychological effects<br>that might explain that.<br>- I mean, it's sort of strange<br>if there is a widespread global<br>loathing of prime minister<br>of a country of 8 or 9 million people.<br>- Yeah, that might mean something<br>more than a hatred of the military actions<br>and the policies of the one person, yeah.<br>- I mean, you know, there's<br>an awful lot of people<br>to hate in the world.<br>There's a lot of wars in the world.<br>It's always of interest to me.<br>And obviously some of<br>the one things I go into<br>"On Democracies and Death Cults"<br>is this question of like<br>why is this so galvanizing<br>for so many people?<br>And I think that is a very,<br>very interesting question.<br>Like why? By the way, let me<br>do a quick addendum to that.<br>You can notice something else like that<br>when people talk about<br>the Republican failures<br>in foreign policy in<br>the last 30 years or so.<br>It's very interesting.<br>There's a certain type of person<br>who will immediately<br>mention Paul Wolfowitz.<br>And they will say, "Well,<br>you know, Wolfowitz."<br>And you go, "You mean Deputy<br>Under Secretary of Defense<br>under George W. Bush?<br>You think he guided everything?"<br>Why would that be?<br>Other than the fact that his<br>name, as Mark Stein once said,<br>starts with a nasty<br>animal and ends Jewish.<br>- [Lex] That's a good one.<br>- So I do think there are<br>very deep things at play.<br>- [Lex] That's a good line.<br>- You know, there are<br>very deep things at play.<br>Netanyahu, irrespective<br>of anything he does,<br>for a lot of people is a kind of devil.<br>And you have to say, well, why is that?<br>Now of course some people will say,<br>"Well, that's because of<br>his terrible hawkishness,<br>and his actions, and so on and so forth."<br>The case for Netanyahu<br>is that he sees it as his historic purpose<br>to defend the only homeland<br>of the Jewish people<br>and that that's his life's mission.<br>And on that basis, I think<br>he's been by any measure<br>a historic leader.<br>He has warned the world<br>about the threat from<br>the mullahs in Tehran.<br>He warned about Iranian<br>revolutionary expansionism<br>across the region, across<br>Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen.<br>And after the 7th, he has held together<br>a very, very difficult set of challenges<br>to keep international pressure<br>at the tolerable level,<br>to do all sorts of things,<br>but most importantly to<br>oversee the two war aims<br>that he set out at the beginning.<br>I thought, let me just<br>express it this way.<br>I thought like a lot of people<br>when I heard about the hostages,<br>my immediate instinct<br>was they're all dead.<br>They're all going to be dead.<br>We'll never see them again.<br>And that was the attitude<br>of a lot of Israelis.<br>But although there were<br>still hostages being held,<br>and as I've always said,<br>the war could end tomorrow<br>if they were handed back,<br>or at least the beginning<br>of the end of the war<br>could begin tomorrow if<br>they were handed back.<br>Nevertheless, because of the<br>actions of not just Netanyahu,<br>but the Israeli government,<br>most of the hostages have been returned.<br>Did not expect this to happen.<br>And Hamas has not been<br>completely destroyed,<br>but it has been very, very<br>significantly degraded.<br>And you end up in the definition<br>of what a total destruction<br>of Hamas would look like.<br>But they are not anywhere<br>near the capability<br>they were in November of 2023.<br>Their leadership has<br>almost all been killed.<br>The second tier of<br>leadership almost all gone.<br>And this is a just<br>response to what Hama did.<br>The moment Netanyahu's<br>reputation in Israel<br>was at a low early on<br>because of what had happened.<br>And there's no doubt,<br>and as I say in the final<br>chapter of the book,<br>I mean, there's General Slim<br>had this phrase, you know,<br>from defeat into victory.<br>Israel isn't at victory<br>yet in this conflict,<br>but when in September last year,<br>there were a set of operational<br>successes so extraordinary<br>that, I mean, it was just<br>like every day's news was.<br>There was one day I remember<br>after the Assad regime fell<br>when the Israeli Air Force took out<br>the entirety of the<br>Syrian Air Force in a day<br>because they didn't want<br>it falling into the hands<br>of the new jihadist<br>administration in Syria.<br>It was story number four<br>on the BBC News website.<br>The leadership of Hezbollah gone, gone.<br>The second and third tiers<br>of Hezbollah gone or wounded.<br>Iran's Rolls Royce destroyed.<br>These are very, very significant<br>military achievements<br>and are in my mind a just response<br>to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas,<br>and other Iranian proxies<br>to destroy the Jewish state.<br>Would another Israeli leader<br>have been able to hold<br>firm as Netanyahu has?<br>I don't know, but I do<br>know that any of them<br>would've done something similar<br>or would've tried to do something similar<br>because there's no country on<br>earth, no democracy on earth,<br>which could possibly not<br>respond to such an atrocity.<br>- To the point, the<br>underlying point, you made<br>of why do so many people<br>wanna call him evil?<br>And so the implication is it's<br>not just a hatred of Israel.<br>There's an ocean of hatred for the Jews.<br>- Yes.<br>- Why is there so much<br>hatred for Jews in the world?<br>- I would say there's<br>one reason in particular.<br>It's a stupid and gullible<br>person's easy answer.<br>Why do certain things happen in the world?<br>What is our explanation<br>of chance, or unfairness,<br>or any number of things?<br>Easiest, easiest, stupidest<br>person's explanation<br>is there's a small group<br>of people doing it.<br>- Let's not say stupidest<br>'cause there's something in the human mind<br>that craves a nice, clean<br>theory of everything, right,<br>that explains all the problems.<br>It's not just stupidest.<br>- Okay, let me reiterate.<br>Lowest grade, lowest grade.<br>- I have that desire too,<br>to simplify everything.<br>- Be a bit antisemitic, what?<br>- We've all been<br>antisemitic here and there.<br>Just get a few vodkas in me. No.<br>To find, I mean, maybe<br>it's a mathematician in me,<br>that it's like to find a simple<br>explanation for everything.<br>Actually, that's nice for<br>everything. Historians do this.<br>- [Douglas] Absolutely. I agree.<br>- Analyzing why the<br>Roman Empire collapsed.<br>It's so nice to have one,<br>especially if it's a<br>counterintuitive explanation.<br>It's one of the favorite go-tos, right,<br>is an explanation for all<br>the problems in the world.<br>- It's the lowest resolution<br>analysis imaginable.<br>- Why is there traffic?<br>Why did my wife leave me?<br>Why did my wife cheating on<br>me? Why did I lose my job?<br>Why did I not get the job?<br>Because, so even on the personal level.<br>- Oh, especially on the personal level.<br>Why did I not get everything?<br>Somebody must have held me back.<br>- Yeah, and it's just that hatred of Jews<br>have been such a popular<br>go-to throughout history.<br>You just always return<br>back to the hits, I guess.<br>And what is it special<br>about the Jews as a group<br>that people love to hate?<br>Is it just 'cause it's<br>small number of people?<br>- I think there's several things.<br>One is small and without by any means<br>saying this is a general rule,<br>but disproportionately highly accomplished<br>in certain fields at certain times.<br>Prominent is a word I would use.<br>Prominent slightly beyond their<br>numbers in certain places.<br>It's not a full explanation.<br>I mean, you know, all<br>sorts of historic reasons<br>why Jews were involved in banking.<br>But then there are lots<br>of historic reasons<br>why the Scottish people, my<br>own, were involved in banking.<br>And to this day, you<br>don't find many people<br>who blame all international<br>finance problems on the Scots.<br>So there were just like easy grooves<br>for people to fall into it seems to me.<br>- We should also mention, you<br>know, banking for some reason,<br>money is a thing that people go to,<br>but Jews have been<br>disproportionately successful<br>in the sciences, and<br>engineering, mathematics,<br>and the arts and so on.<br>- And a sensible person would<br>try to work out why that is<br>and see what is replicable.<br>I don't wanna use the<br>word stupid again now.<br>A different type of person.<br>- I'm triggered already.<br>- A different type of person<br>would look at that and say,<br>"That must mean they<br>took something from me."<br>And that's, you know, the<br>most zero sum game there is.<br>It's an endlessly fascinating subject<br>because it seems to me that<br>antisemitism is almost certainly<br>a sort of ineradicable temptation<br>of the human spirit at<br>its ugliest and cheapest.<br>Because it's back in our day,<br>it bears some analysis again.<br>And I would say two things about it.<br>One is, as I and others have<br>said many times in the past,<br>one of the fascinating<br>things about antisemitism<br>is that it can cover everything at once.<br>So the Jews get hated for<br>being rich and for being poor,<br>both for being the Rothchilds<br>and for being Eastern European<br>Jews escaping the pogroms.<br>They can be hated for being religious,<br>and for being anti-religious<br>and producing Marxism, for instance.<br>Hated for religiosity and secularism.<br>They can be hated for most<br>recently not having a state<br>and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitans<br>and also hated for having a state.<br>And that makes it something<br>very unusual actually<br>in the history of human<br>bigotry and, you know,<br>bias and ugliness.<br>But the real thing is,<br>one of my great heroes<br>Vasily Grossman says<br>at the center of "Life and Fate,"<br>almost everything that is<br>worth saying about antisemitism<br>and it's Grossman's<br>genius that he could say<br>in three to four pages what<br>most people couldn't say<br>in an entire life, even<br>after life of study.<br>But there's this passage<br>in "Life and Fate"<br>that I quote in my book,<br>it just bold me over when<br>I read it some years ago,<br>when he says, you know,<br>the interesting thing about<br>antisemitism, he says,<br>you can meet it everywhere<br>in the academy of sciences<br>and in the games that<br>children play in the yard.<br>But Grossman's great insight is he says<br>everywhere it tells<br>you not about the Jews,<br>but about the person making the claim.<br>And the most important gift<br>he gives in his analysis<br>is when he describes it as a mirror<br>to the person who's making the claims,<br>culminating in this phrase I've<br>been trying to make popular,<br>which is he says, "Tell me<br>what you accuse the Jews of.<br>I'll tell you what you are guilty of."<br>It's a searingly brilliant insight.<br>The Iranian revolutionary government<br>accuses Israel of being a colonial power.<br>The Iranian revolutionary government<br>has been colonizing the Middle East<br>throughout our lifetimes.<br>The Turkish government<br>accuses the Jewish state<br>of being guilty of occupation.<br>Do you know Northern Cyprus?<br>The Turks have been<br>occupying half of Cyprus<br>since the 1970s.<br>Cyprus is an EU member<br>state and Turkey is in NATO.<br>So you can do this on and on.<br>The people who accuse the Jewish state,<br>like the people who<br>accuse Jews of something,<br>almost without fail, is the<br>thing they're guilty of.<br>Look at the supporters of Hamas.<br>One of the things they say<br>is that Israel is guilty<br>of indiscriminate killing.<br>Hamas? Hello?<br>What were you doing on the 7th?<br>Have you seen there're<br>these crazy guys online<br>who repeatedly claim that for<br>some reason Israeli soldiers<br>will rape Palestinians<br>when they meet them,<br>whether in a prison,<br>or on the battlefield,<br>or in a hospital.<br>It's erupts occasionally.<br>These people go around and say,<br>"Oh my God, the IDF are rapists?"<br>I go, "Excuse me?<br>You're the ones who spent<br>the years after 2016<br>saying believe all women,<br>then from the 7th of October said<br>believe all women except for Jewish women<br>who say they've been raped<br>or seen their friends raped.<br>And then you say, 'Aha,<br>the Jews are rapists.'<br>You've been carrying water for rapists<br>and then go and accuse the Jews of rape."<br>I mean, it just works every<br>way you do it. It works.<br>I do think the thing of<br>psychological projection<br>in the case of Israel is wild.<br>I mean, it is wild.<br>By the way, there's an<br>interesting thing on this<br>that I tried to get into in the book,<br>which is this thing of why<br>did so much of the world<br>respond the way it did?<br>I mean, we're sitting in New York.<br>There was not one protest<br>against Hamas in New York<br>after the 7th of October.<br>The Believe All Women<br>crowd didn't come out<br>against Hamas's rapes.<br>The Black Lives Matter movement<br>did not turn their<br>attention to the killing<br>of Israeli children or anything.<br>Nobody did it. Nobody did it.<br>The one thing that did<br>happen very prominently<br>was that people came out to attack<br>the people who'd been attacked.<br>And as I say in the opening of the book,<br>and I saw that myself<br>down the road from here<br>at Times Square on October 8th,<br>October the frigging 8th,<br>the protests are in Times<br>Square against Israel<br>justifying the attacks<br>that were still going on.<br>And this is something that<br>deserves deep self-examination<br>on behalf of people in the<br>west who've seen this movement<br>overwhelm parts of our society.<br>I mean, degraded parts, but parts,<br>bits of the universities and so on.<br>And I think there's an<br>explanation for it, by the way,<br>which again goes back to<br>that issue of projection.<br>When you and I last talked on camera,<br>we were talking about my last<br>book "The War on the West."<br>And I remember saying to you there<br>that one of the things I was<br>talking about in that book<br>was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased,<br>unfair and inaccurate<br>estimation of the western past<br>whereby, you know, America's original sin<br>had to be identified, and<br>the original sin is slavery.<br>So America has an original sin.<br>Does Ghana have an<br>original sin? No one knows.<br>No one really will think<br>it polite to point one out.<br>And, you know, you go on<br>and on with these things<br>that I identified in<br>"The War on the West,"<br>these sins of the west,<br>and they have in recent years<br>been reduced to the claim<br>that countries like the<br>one we're sitting in<br>are guilty of what?<br>Colonialism, settler<br>colonialism, white supremacy,<br>slavery, genocide, and a couple of others<br>you can throw in probably.<br>One of the things I remember saying to you<br>when we spoke about that<br>was that the one of the deep problems<br>of setting up that system of thought,<br>pseudo thought, non-thought,<br>would be thought,<br>is that there's nothing<br>you can do about it.<br>Even if it was true, there's<br>nothing you can do about it.<br>If it turned out that your<br>ancestors in the 18th century<br>once owned a slave, what are you gonna do?<br>There's no mechanism to<br>forgive or be forgiven<br>because you didn't do it<br>and there's no one alive who<br>could accept the apology.<br>And I remember setting it up<br>there in "The War on the West."<br>I set up like this very,<br>very risky, dangerous,<br>unforgivable, unforgiving<br>thing that had been set up<br>about our societies.<br>But I would say that since October 7th,<br>there has been an answer for<br>a certain type of person,<br>which is I am from a society<br>where I have been told I am<br>guilty of settler colonialism,<br>white supremacy, genocide,<br>ethnic cleansing, and more.<br>I've been told all of these things.<br>I have been put in an<br>un-get-out-able-of situation<br>of moral burden that can never be relieved<br>because I can't ask anyone's forgiveness<br>and nobody can forgive me.<br>But, ah, here's a country<br>which I can accuse of all of these things<br>in the here and now,<br>load my energies, my<br>guilts, my burdens onto,<br>and what's more I might be able to end it,<br>and by doing so, would relieve myself.<br>And in other words,<br>I tweak Grossman with the<br>people in America and elsewhere<br>who've fallen into this trap.<br>I tweak him by saying,<br>"On this occasion, tell me<br>what you accuse the Jews of,<br>and I'll tell you what you've<br>been told you're guilty of."<br>- Yeah, it's an interesting<br>kind of projection.<br>Just to observe some of the<br>sociological phenomena here<br>on top of all this.<br>It does seem that hatred of Jews<br>gets a lot of engagement online.<br>So I watch it like a curiosity,<br>like I'm an alien observing earth.<br>Is this dangerous to you or<br>is it just a bunch of trolls,<br>and grifters, you know, let's<br>say cosplaying as Nazis?<br>- Could be both.<br>- It's just fun<br>to trigger the libs?<br>- It could be all of this. I<br>think it is and a lot more.<br>I mean, taboos, you know,<br>taboos can be fun to break, I suppose.<br>And I suppose there are some people online<br>who have grown up knowing that, you know,<br>since the Holocaust,<br>antisemitism was taboo.<br>And they've run out of,<br>it goes back to what we<br>were saying earlier a bit,<br>you know, they sort of run out of,<br>they've got bored of that, you know.<br>"Holocaust, schmolocaust," they'd say.<br>You know, "I've heard enough about that."<br>And maybe those people have gone off<br>in a funny direction as a result,<br>but I don't think that's the main.<br>I think that's like a detail<br>compared to the real thing.<br>The real thing is that<br>antisemitism is back<br>and there is a certain type<br>of person who's loving it.<br>- It really back?<br>- Well, it never goes away.<br>It's just that since the 7th,<br>I think that it's had a great resurgence.<br>And this isn't to say, I just assume,<br>and that doesn't mean that any criticism<br>of Israel is antisemitic.<br>No, it doesn't.<br>But as I have often said<br>if you don't ever express any interest<br>in the murder of Muslims in Syria,<br>not any interest in genocide in Sudan,<br>or killing of hundreds of<br>thousands of people in Yemen,<br>but on the 8th of October<br>you're on the street with<br>a placard attacking Israel,<br>I'm sorry, you're an antisemite for sure.<br>You may not know you are, but<br>that's what's motivating you.<br>- It gets a lot of engagement. I watch it.<br>- It does, it does.<br>- I watch it.<br>- But I mean, it's one of<br>several things you can always see<br>get huge engagement.<br>I mean, it's like, if you say<br>that there's like a massive pedophile ring<br>run by prominent politicians,<br>it might be total total horseshit,<br>it's likely to be total horseshit,<br>but it'll also get a hell<br>of a lot of engagement.<br>- Yeah, but that's still,<br>so the pedophile ring,<br>like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.<br>- Yeah, all which is very interesting.<br>- Yeah, and it's like,<br>"Great. All right, cool.<br>Let's get behind that conspiracy."<br>But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews,<br>that's the greatest hits still.<br>- It is, and I mean,<br>you see it with, I mean,<br>some of the people who've made<br>minor celebrities of themselves<br>with a sort of made up version of history<br>with a smattering of this<br>and a little bit of that,<br>and then the just asking questions.<br>And, you know, "I'm not saying, but,"<br>and all, there are certain, you know,<br>rhetorical sleights of hand<br>that have helped this along.<br>But as I said earlier,<br>it's just the lowest grade explanation<br>of a certain type of mind<br>looking for a pattern<br>and looking for meaning.<br>And I mean, I can give<br>you just one quick example<br>of why that in the case of<br>Israel is so extraordinary,<br>is the number of otherwise<br>semi-intelligent people<br>who will tell you that the problem<br>is simply that the Israelis<br>need to give the<br>Palestinians anther state,<br>and that if they do,<br>it will solve the problems of the region<br>and the wider world.<br>And irrespective of the fact<br>that the Palestinians have<br>being given to several states,<br>the claim there, this particular<br>land dispute would unlock<br>every other injustice in the world,<br>should be seen on its<br>face to be preposterous.<br>There is no reason why<br>if the Palestinians got<br>another state either in Gaza<br>or in parts of Judea, in<br>Samaria, the West Bank,<br>there is no reason why<br>we should expect the<br>economy of Yemen to boom.<br>It would not inevitably lead<br>to the mullahs in Tehran<br>giving equal rights to<br>women or anything else.<br>The most likelihood thing<br>is you'd simply have<br>another failed Arab state<br>run by a sort of proxy of Tehran.<br>That's the best case scenario.<br>And by the way, even lifelong defenders<br>of the Palestinian cause,<br>like Salman Rushdie,<br>he said recently, he said,<br>"I've always been a supporter<br>of the Palestinian people and their cause,<br>but it is an unavoidable fact<br>that if another state was<br>given to the Palestinians,<br>it would simply be at best another front<br>for the Iranian regime in Iran."<br>The best.<br>So why the passion,<br>why the unbelievable<br>wild passion about this?<br>And I say some of it can be, should be,<br>argued out and so on, and<br>some of it can be explained,<br>but there's definitely a<br>realm of it, a layer of it,<br>which is simply at that level<br>of this excites something within me,<br>this excites something within me.<br>- Yeah, there's something<br>compelling to people<br>about hating Jews.<br>- Look at the prominence of,<br>you know, semi-prominent people<br>who are willing to play<br>around with the idea<br>that 9/11 was an inside job<br>and somehow it was done by<br>the Israelis or the Jews.<br>Like this shit is going around.<br>- I have to admit, you know,<br>there's a part of my brain<br>that's pulled towards conspiracies.<br>There's something compelling and fun<br>about a simple explanation for things.<br>What's really going on behind the scenes?<br>Because the real world,<br>when you don't look into conspiracies,<br>first of all it's complicated,<br>and second of all, it's kind of boring.<br>It's a bunch of incompetent people.<br>- Usually opening up Pandora's<br>boxes they don't understand.<br>- Yeah, it's pushing buffoons.<br>I mean, I've walked around and hung around<br>with a lot of powerful and rich people,<br>and like the thing I learned<br>is they're just human beings.<br>I'm yet to be in a room<br>where exceptionally brilliant<br>psychopaths are plotting.<br>- (laughs) You never got that invite?<br>- No.<br>In fact, like a lot of people<br>in the positions of power,<br>there's just not good.<br>I mean, I'm just continuously disappointed<br>that they're not ultra.<br>I love competence.<br>The places where I've seen<br>competence, inklings of it,<br>is in low level, like soldiers.<br>Like low level, what do you call that,<br>people that do stuff with their hands?<br>So builders of different<br>kinds like engineering,<br>like craftsmen, like I've seen.<br>- Yes, because you've<br>got a very specific task<br>that could be highly complicated,<br>but you get to apply<br>yourself to and to solve.<br>- Yeah, over years you master it.<br>It's passed across generations and so on.<br>But like statecraft and<br>like that kind of stuff.<br>- Well, because there's so many variables.<br>I mean, this is one when<br>you were trying to lure me<br>onto prognostications on Ukraine.<br>I've seen enough to know I just don't know<br>because I know of the amount<br>of things that can change<br>all the time.<br>Some years ago I was talking to<br>a former public servant in the UK<br>when Boris Johnson was prime<br>minister and COVID started.<br>And I mentioned to this friend, I said,<br>"Well, you know, it's<br>pretty bad luck for Boris<br>that, you know, he came<br>in to do one thing,<br>which was Brexit,<br>and then there's a global<br>pandemic from Wuhan, you know,<br>and he's got to like mug up on that<br>and then gets it really wrong."<br>But anyway, and I was really struck<br>by the fact that this<br>man, man of great insight,<br>happened to disagree<br>politically, but said to me,<br>"But, Douglas, is always like this."<br>And he said, "You know,<br>look at Tony Blair.<br>Came into power in 1997<br>wanting to reform education in the UK.<br>Ends up trying to remake the Middle East."<br>And I mean, as I say, one of the reasons<br>why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists<br>and most conspiracy theories,<br>not to say that there aren't some<br>that do actually turn out to be, you know,<br>to have something in them.<br>And it happens.<br>A lot of things are<br>called conspiracy theories<br>that turn out to be true, lab leak.<br>But in general, the suspicion<br>and the scorn I have<br>for people who fall<br>into this is, as I say,<br>it's a very low grade, low<br>resolution look at the world<br>by people who clearly have never seen<br>the wildness of actions in the world<br>and the way that they reverberate.<br>And the number of events.<br>I mean, I once spoke some<br>years ago to a politician<br>who literally said to me,<br>I won't name the country,<br>but said to me, "Can you help us out<br>with just how to cope and<br>understand the day-to-day struggle<br>we're having with the cycle."<br>And I said, "Well, what<br>are you talking about?"<br>And they said, "Our<br>experience in government<br>is that every day something comes up<br>which we have to fire fight.<br>And that's what we do that day.<br>And then the next day<br>something else comes up,<br>which we have to fire fight.<br>And we're not getting our policies done."<br>And I just thought, for me,<br>that rings an awful lot truer<br>than that that country<br>gets the odd phone call<br>from a member of a Jewish<br>family telling them.<br>Yeah, you know, it's like, come on.<br>So, you know.<br>- I do before I forget<br>want to ask you about Iran.<br>What role do they play in this conflict?<br>It's fascinating how it<br>seems like Iran fingerprints<br>are everywhere in the Middle East.<br>And it's also fascinating that,<br>you know, I have a lot of friends.<br>My best friend is Iranian.<br>It's fascinating that the<br>Islamic revolution in Iran<br>took the country from the<br>leadership perspective backwards<br>in such a drastic way and<br>that they're still in power.<br>That confuses me because I know,<br>now it's possible I don't<br>know the people of Iran,<br>sorry to make the obvious statement,<br>but I just have a lot of friends in Iran,<br>and a lot of them, everybody I know there,<br>opposes the regime and they're brilliant,<br>educated, thoughtful, worldly people.<br>And it confuses me that<br>there's this, I would say,<br>one of the greatest nations<br>on earth in terms of.<br>- Certainly one of the<br>great cultures of earth.<br>- The cultures, like the peoples of Iran.<br>And then you look at that<br>and then you look at the leadership<br>when they're behind most<br>of the terror groups.<br>- In the region, certainly, yeah.<br>- Can you just speak to that<br>and how is it still the<br>same regime since 1979?<br>- As you know, I start "On<br>Democracy and Death Cults"<br>with the flight taken<br>of Ayatollah Khomeini<br>from Paris to Tehran.<br>- The flight that you say<br>you wish never happened.<br>- I think it's one of<br>the two worst journeys<br>of the 20th century.<br>- What's the other one?<br>- Lenin's train getting to Petrograd?<br>- Ah, yeah. It's always<br>about the transportation.<br>- Yes, I know. I'm really a transport guy.<br>No, wait till my book of 10 best journeys.<br>- Across the world.<br>- No, just as the train<br>to the Finland station<br>brought the basilisk of<br>Bolshevism into Russia,<br>so the flight coming from Paris<br>bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran,<br>brought the basilisk of Khomeiniism<br>the most radical form of Shiite<br>Islam to Tehran and to Iran.<br>And it's one of the great<br>tragedies of the modern era<br>what happened there.<br>Like you, actually, I have<br>a lot of Persian friends.<br>And I had the great good<br>fortune early in my life<br>to have a very close late friend<br>who had grown up in<br>pre-revolutionary Iran,<br>was very fond of the Shah and so on.<br>Her father had been an ayatollah<br>before the overthrow of the Shah.<br>And you know, everyone<br>had criticisms of him,<br>but when you saw what came after him.<br>It was among other things<br>what I learned from her<br>and other friends from that region,<br>was that I suppose two things.<br>One is of course is that<br>it's a sort of central<br>conservative inside me.<br>You know, things can always be worse.<br>They can always be worse.<br>Never say this is rock bottom because.<br>- (laughs) Yeah.<br>- You know, like you might have a shah<br>with hundreds or even thousands<br>of political prisoners in cells,<br>but you could always<br>have Ayatollah Khomeini<br>butchering them all<br>and including the people<br>who helped him get to power<br>like the communists<br>and the trade unionists<br>who simply were fighting against the shah<br>and then were very<br>useful for the ayatollah<br>until he didn't need them anymore.<br>But the other thing I learned<br>from that particular friend<br>and others was this thing that,<br>and again, it's very hard<br>for the western mindset,<br>very hard for the American<br>mindset in particular,<br>that there is such a thing as<br>fanaticism, real fanaticism,<br>and real ideological, and<br>real religious fanaticism,<br>and the thing that I describe<br>leads to the death cult mindset.<br>That fanaticism is<br>something which is very easy<br>for the west to forget<br>because we haven't seen it in a while.<br>You know, we get very distant echoes of it<br>in our own societies, really,<br>and we're highly attuned to hear them,<br>which is good in some ways.<br>But Khomeiniism not only vastly set back<br>the Persian people, the Iranian nation,<br>but has managed to keep it<br>in subjugation since 1979.<br>And your question of why<br>gets to one of the really.<br>The biggest questions really,<br>the answer to which has to be understood,<br>which is it's what Solzhenitsyn<br>since says at one point<br>in "Gulag Archipelago"<br>in that passage where he describes,<br>"When we heard the<br>footsteps on the staircase,<br>and the knock was on our neighbor's door,<br>and we knew our neighbor<br>was being taken away,<br>why did we not stop them?"<br>And in the case of the<br>revolutionary government in Iran,<br>you know, it's the same answer<br>as whether it's Hamas governing Gaza<br>with whoever the people in Gaza are<br>who would've liked to<br>have seen them overthrown.<br>You know, people don't realize<br>that despite the rhetoric<br>and everything else,<br>everything changes if the<br>other guy might kill you.<br>And that, you know, when<br>the Green Revolution in 2009<br>started in Iran, why was it put down?<br>Why didn't it work?<br>Like you, the sort of Iranians<br>who I really hope one day<br>get their country back.<br>Why did all these smart<br>young students and others,<br>why after they came out,<br>why was it put down?<br>It was put down because the Basij militia<br>will shoot you in the head,<br>and they'll take you to a prison<br>as they did with the Iranian students,<br>and they'll rape you with<br>bottles and kill you.<br>And even a little bit of<br>that goes an awfully long way<br>to tell the rest of<br>society not to do it again.<br>You know, we know it happens<br>like that from films,<br>but too few people understand<br>that regimes like that in Tehran<br>operate like that on a grand scale,<br>on the biggest of scales,<br>and with the ultimate of brutality.<br>And that's how they say in power.<br>And one other thing on that, by the way,<br>which is I was reminded<br>of this the other day,<br>but, you know, thinking<br>about this sort of, you know,<br>what I've just described<br>as a sort of a problem in democracies<br>is that we just, you know,<br>we like to think everyone thinks like us.<br>And, you know, we'd like<br>everyone to sort of be like us.<br>And we believe fictions that<br>we're taught in films like,<br>you know, everyone basically<br>wants the same things as us.<br>And you go, "You haven't stepped outside<br>the walls of the city if you think that."<br>But the second thing is this<br>thing of the death cults<br>of why we sort of singly<br>fail to understand<br>that this is possible.<br>And Khomeiniism is both very specific<br>and also very strongly<br>linked to totalitarian,<br>and radical, and extremist<br>death cult movements<br>that are not that far in our past.<br>I mean, you know, there's a<br>moment when Oriana Fallaci<br>interviewed the Ayatollah<br>Khomeini in 1979,<br>one of the very few western<br>journalists to do so.<br>She says to him, "These people<br>in the street, this movement,<br>this revolution you've<br>begun, it's guided by hate.<br>It's hate, it's all hate."<br>And Khomeini says, "No,<br>no, it's love, it's love."<br>And it's actually a scene that appears<br>in "The Satanic Verses" of Rushdie,<br>where that exact same thing happens.<br>But I was thinking about this recently<br>because I was thinking<br>how can you explain to a western mindset<br>that that's something that's going on.<br>There are people directed by this hate<br>that calls itself love.<br>And I was reminded of<br>a book I haven't read<br>since I was probably a<br>teenager or something.<br>Made a great impression on me then.<br>Did you ever read the<br>"Tragic Sense of Life,"<br>Miguel de Unamuno?<br>A great Spanish existentialist philosopher<br>who died in the 30s.<br>Unamuno had a encounter with students<br>at the university in the<br>30s when he realized.<br>I mean, this is the early<br>period of the Francoists,<br>de Rivera and all those people.<br>Unamuno is at this meeting<br>and the chant goes up<br>from the eager students<br>who have fallen into<br>this sort of philangist<br>Francoist ideology already.<br>They end up chanting in front of him<br>as he's trying to defend the principles<br>by which he has lived his life.<br>They end up chanting in front of him,<br>"Viva la muerte."<br>Long live death. Long lived death.<br>And he tries to explain to them<br>this is a necrophiliac chance.<br>But those young men in pre-Franco Spain<br>shouting, "Long live death,"<br>they have their counterparts today.<br>They are the people who<br>taunt Americans, westerners,<br>and Israelis, and others with lines like,<br>"We love death more than you love life."<br>- Yeah, that's the line<br>you've returned to.<br>That's a really difficult line to load in<br>because if you base your whole<br>existence on that notion,<br>then, well, you're a danger to the world.<br>That's a good foundation<br>for committing evil.<br>I have to ask because you<br>mentioned that interview.<br>You had a good interview<br>with Benjamin Netanyahu<br>after October 7th,<br>and I've been very fortunate<br>to get the opportunity<br>to interview a few world leaders.<br>It looks like I'll interview<br>Vladimir Putin and others.<br>One, I have a general question<br>about how do you interview<br>people like this?<br>Maybe to put your historian hat on<br>of like how do you approach<br>the interview of world leaders<br>such that you can gain<br>a deeper understanding<br>in the hope that that adds to<br>the compassion in the world?<br>So I have a deep sense<br>that understanding people you might hate<br>helps in the long arc of history<br>add compassion to the world.<br>But even just to add understanding<br>is difficult in those kinds of contexts.<br>And, you know, maybe it's<br>more useful to think about<br>from a historian perspective<br>of how you need to interview<br>somebody like Hitler,<br>or Stalin, or Churchill,<br>FDR during World War II?<br>You know, I think about this a lot,<br>especially if it's, you know,<br>2, 3, 4, 5 hour conversation.<br>- Well, there's a lot of weight on you<br>when you do those<br>conversations isn't there?<br>- From where? So like who's watching?<br>Is it historians 20 years from then?<br>- Who knows? I mean, the<br>whole data might be wiped.<br>I suspect there's a weight on you<br>because every major world<br>leader you interview,<br>and you've done some amazing ones,<br>but I mean, presumably you<br>have a set of people saying,<br>"You've got to ask him about this.<br>You can't not address this."<br>And that's a very challenging<br>one because of course,<br>although in an interview with a politician<br>it should not be supine,<br>nor can it be endlessly interrogative<br>because you're not the prosecutor<br>and they don't have to be the<br>guilty party answering to you.<br>And I've noticed the number of<br>people who interview people,<br>world leaders and others,<br>who go in with a set of<br>sort of those things.<br>And at some point the<br>other party can just say,<br>"I don't need this."<br>And people criticizing<br>you don't realize that.<br>You just can't do that.<br>- Yeah, I suppose why journalists<br>behave the way they do.<br>Although I have increasingly<br>less and less respect<br>for the average journalist.<br>Have more and more respect<br>for the great journalists<br>as my respect for the<br>average journalist decreases<br>because a lot of the journalists<br>seem to be signaling<br>to their own in group.<br>But there is a lot of pressure<br>on people in that situation<br>to ask what I would say<br>is the dumb question.<br>Why is it the dumb question?<br>The adversarial question<br>that the world leader,<br>the person, is ready for.<br>They've answered that question.<br>And what you're trying to do is I guess,<br>one, to signal that you've<br>asked the question to push them.<br>- [Douglas] Yes, yes.<br>- Two, you're trying to<br>like, just create drama<br>because really what people<br>that ask you to ask that question,<br>they want you to embarrass that person.<br>They hate them and they want you to like<br>make them piss their pants or something,<br>or just start crying and run out.<br>- Walk out.<br>- Yeah.<br>Walk out in a way that<br>it's embarrassing for them.<br>They could be like, "Look<br>at that pathetic person."<br>And that reveals to me nothing<br>except maybe the weakness<br>of the interviewee<br>that they can't stand<br>up to a tough question.<br>But mostly I have to do a lot of thinking<br>'cause you get attacked a lot<br>if you ask questions<br>from a place of curiosity<br>that actually have a chance<br>to reveal who the person is.<br>- There's a very interesting<br>line that Robin Day,<br>who was quite a distinguished<br>interviewer back,<br>who a very distinguished<br>interview back in the day,<br>said about Jeremy Paxman,<br>who was a very interrogative<br>interviewer in the UK.<br>Robin Day, who was quite good<br>at being rude to<br>politicians, but carefully,<br>said the problem with the<br>new approach as he saw it<br>from the 90s of political<br>interviewing was, he said,<br>"If you think the person<br>you're speaking to is a liar,<br>you should get them to<br>reveal that they're a liar.<br>Don't just call them a liar."<br>And I think that is, again,<br>it's something that a lot of people<br>sitting on the other side<br>of the screen don't realize<br>is that it may satisfy them<br>that you call a person<br>a liar to their face,<br>but it doesn't do anything and<br>it actually reveals nothing.<br>If somebody is a liar<br>and they reveal themselves to be a liar,<br>then that's something else.<br>But yes, I mean, I hear you.<br>Obviously, you have a<br>lot of different voices<br>telling you what to do.<br>It's also difficult<br>because one of the things<br>that I don't think<br>anyone really understands<br>is that in the end it's just you.<br>I'm sure you have this about Putin.<br>Like people say, "I know<br>exactly how you can," you know?<br>They could give end endless advice.<br>In the end, it's you<br>sitting down talking to him.<br>It's like everybody knows how to behave<br>on the presidential debate stage,<br>but only a few people have done it.<br>- In person it's actually<br>pretty difficult.<br>- It's very difficult<br>because you've got all this<br>weird behind the scenes stuff as well.<br>You've got all of the<br>games that people play.<br>- I mean yeah, you know,<br>I interviewed Zelensky.<br>You know, I'm pretty fearless in general<br>and he was a very human<br>and fascinating human,<br>but there is soldiers with<br>guns standing all around.<br>- And you didn't have anyone?<br>No one was packing on your side?<br>- I had one friend, security<br>person, who's also Ukrainian.<br>So you never know. He could turn on.<br>- You've been infiltrated.<br>- Yeah, exactly. No, I mean<br>that doesn't have any effect.<br>And by the way I should mention that,<br>because it's hilarious to me,<br>but process wise with<br>Narendra Modi, with anyone,<br>they said it was scripted<br>and all this kind of stuff.<br>I would never do anything scripted.<br>They don't get to have<br>a say in anything I ask.<br>I have complete freedom.<br>Sometimes you'll have people on the team<br>very politely nudge like, "Hey, can you?"<br>and I'll very politely say "Thank you,"<br>you know, like smile.<br>But that doesn't mean I<br>have to fucking do it.<br>I can do whatever the hell I want.<br>By the way, with world<br>leaders, it doesn't happen.<br>It happens more with CEOs<br>'cause they have like<br>usually PR and comms people.<br>They'll just be like very politely,<br>"Hey, you know the thing about, you know,<br>that sexual assault<br>harassment charges they had?<br>Could we just? There's no reason<br>to really linger on that."<br>- "We don't have to do that."<br>One of my favorite things<br>anyone has ever said.<br>It's only ever happening, I know of,<br>a couple of cases of this<br>happening in private.<br>A friend of mine once<br>years ago was debating<br>against the, this before<br>the the civil war in Syria,<br>was debating something to<br>do with the Middle East.<br>And one of the people on the other side<br>was the then Syrian ambassador in London.<br>The then Syrian ambassador<br>in London says something<br>about the Israeli treatment<br>of the Palestinians.<br>And my friend stands up<br>and starts talking about<br>Assad senior's massacre of<br>the Palestinians in Hama,<br>where they killed like<br>10,000 Palestinians in a day.<br>And my friend starts talking<br>about the Hama massacre<br>by Assad senior.<br>And the big fat Syrian ambassador<br>like stands up to respond.<br>And he says, "That is, that<br>is none of your business."<br>And my friend was like,<br>"Oh, I thought we were<br>gonna get a denial."<br>- Let me just ask you one<br>more thing about Netanyahu<br>'cause I also have the opportunity<br>to do a three hour interview<br>with him at this stage.<br>And I've been, if I'm just being honest,<br>very hesitant to do it.<br>And I just don't know<br>how a conversation there<br>could help add compassion to the world.<br>And that particular topic,<br>no matter how well you do it,<br>you do take on a very<br>large number of people<br>that will just make it their<br>daily activity to hate you,<br>and to write about it,<br>and to post about it,<br>and to accuse you of things.<br>In some sense, I don't<br>wanna lose the part of me<br>that's vulnerable to the world.<br>- People have very little<br>understanding of things<br>if they're willing to say<br>that because you're sitting<br>down and talking with somebody,<br>you are ergo platforming<br>them, advancing their calls,<br>being used, being a shill,<br>or whatever like that.<br>You might be actually just<br>finding some things out,<br>which I think is<br>something you do expertly.<br>And another thing that your<br>critics wouldn't realize<br>is that like, you know, life is long<br>and, you know, hopefully, God willing,<br>both around for a long time<br>and therefore you don't blow everything up<br>at the request of some twat online.<br>But I do think that a superpower of a kind<br>is to identify the people<br>whose opinion you care for<br>and worry about their opinion<br>and no one else's really.<br>And you just keep your own guiding light.<br>That's what's always done it for me<br>is that I've always said I wouldn't care<br>if I was the only person with my opinion<br>and billions of people disagreed.<br>I mean, I might be curious if<br>the whole planet disagreed,<br>but it doesn't fundamentally.<br>I'll send you Churchill's great speech<br>on the death of Chamberlain.<br>I mean it.<br>He says one of the most<br>wise and brilliant things.<br>I was thinking about it slightly earlier<br>when you were talking about Zelensky<br>because one of Churchill's<br>greatnesses was his magnanimity.<br>And when his great political<br>opponent, Chamberlain,<br>died in 1940<br>and Churchill had just taken<br>over as prime minister,<br>he could have used the opportunity.<br>And we might even say that<br>some politicians in our day<br>won't be able to resist the opportunity.<br>He could have used the opportunity to say,<br>"You see, I was right.<br>And Chamberlain didn't know<br>what the hell he was doing.<br>And he led us into this mess.<br>And you should have all listened to me."<br>Because that would've been a good time.<br>Yeah, it would've been<br>a good time to say that.<br>That would've been one<br>for the win, as they say.<br>But Churchill doesn't do that<br>in his great eulogy for Chamberlain.<br>He talks about how hard it is for mankind<br>to operate in the world and<br>how you can do it successfully.<br>He very movingly says,<br>he doesn't even mention<br>the name of Hitler,<br>he says, "What were Neville<br>Chamberlain's flaws?"<br>He says, "Desiring of human<br>peace, to be seeking peace."<br>And he says, "The curse that he had<br>was he was led astray<br>by a very wicked man."<br>But then he has this great<br>passage where he, Churchill,<br>says a beautiful resonant<br>passage about how he says,<br>"It's not given to men, happily for them,<br>for otherwise life<br>would prove intolerable,<br>to foresee or to predict<br>to any great extent<br>the unfolding course of events."<br>And he says, "And for one phase,<br>men seem to have been right<br>and in another they're proved wrong.<br>And then there's a different<br>scale of values emerges."<br>And he says, "What is<br>the worth of all this?"<br>He says, "The only guide<br>to a man is his conscience.<br>The only of shield to memory<br>is the rectitude and the<br>sincerity of his actions."<br>And he says it doesn't<br>matter what happens.<br>He finishes, he says,<br>"However the fates may play,<br>that if you have this<br>shield to guard you,"<br>he says, "you march always<br>in the ranks of honor."<br>All that can guide a man is that.<br>If you lose sight of<br>it, and some people do,<br>and maybe everyone does at some point,<br>then it's a challenge.<br>And then you get buffeted<br>by the tos and froes<br>of the waves of popular<br>opinion, and that's dangerous.<br>But if you keep sight and<br>hold on to what you believe,<br>a million billion foes don't matter.<br>- Yeah, that is the path we<br>were talking offline about<br>the great biography of Churchill.<br>Churchill himself made mistakes,<br>and admitted the mistakes,<br>and was, can you even say,<br>was proud of the mistakes, I mean.<br>- Learned from them.<br>- Learned from them. That's<br>all the best you could do.<br>The worst you could probably do<br>is being afraid of making mistakes.<br>- That's what TR famous said<br>about the man in the arena speech.<br>- TR. (laughs) Yeah.<br>The old TR.<br>Those two have made quite a<br>few mistakes, but in the end,<br>some of the greatest humans ever created.<br>Norm McDonald, Churchill.<br>- Did we do Norm? I think we<br>did it before coming on air.<br>- Oh, before coming on air, yeah.<br>Well, he's always and<br>everywhere in the air around us.<br>One of the great comedians. All right.<br>What gives you hope about this<br>whole thing we have going on,<br>human civilization?<br>You've been covering some<br>of the darker aspects,<br>"The Madness of Crowds,"<br>the madness of geopolitics,<br>the madness of wars.<br>Sometimes when the sun<br>shines through the clouds<br>and there's a smile on<br>Douglas Murray's face,<br>what's the source of the<br>smile and the warmth?<br>- Endless numbers of things.<br>Endless numbers of things.<br>I mean, I get enormous encouragement<br>from smart young people actually.<br>That's one of the ways. That's<br>just the best thing ever.<br>I was in Kyiv the other week<br>and I was asked to speak to<br>some students at the university,<br>and irrespective to the rather, you know,<br>tricky situation that they are in,<br>it's just great to, as you know,<br>to speak to room full<br>of students about things<br>and then hang around afterwards<br>and just answer all the questions you can,<br>and hear from them about their lives<br>and what they want to do.<br>And remembering what you<br>were like at their age,<br>and how goofy you were,<br>and how much you were gonna get wrong,<br>and how much, you know, you had to learn,<br>and how much you were gonna enjoy it.<br>And seeing the opportunities<br>they have in front of them<br>if things go right.<br>And just smart young people<br>give me enormous encouragement<br>all the time.<br>That's the best thing. I mean, it's just.<br>- Yeah, you can see endless<br>possibility in their eyes.<br>And they're not like burdened by,<br>let's say, the cynicism that builds up.<br>- Even the cynicism though.<br>I mean, you can resist that.<br>I mean, I've got quite a<br>deep well spring of it,<br>but I mean, you can't only fall into that<br>because there's so much<br>else it doesn't cover.<br>It'd be like spending your<br>life being ironic, you know?<br>(laughs)<br>- So that said, you<br>have seen a lot of war,<br>especially recently and<br>directly, Ukraine, Israel,<br>has that changed you?<br>Has that dimmed some of<br>that warmth and light?<br>- That's a very difficult<br>question to answer.<br>I don't know. Differs day to day.<br>- So sometimes there's a heaviness there<br>because of the things you've seen?<br>- Sure, yeah. At times, at times, yeah.<br>- Do you regret some<br>going as much as you have<br>to the front lines?<br>- No, no.<br>One of the reasons why<br>a war is for a writer<br>kind of the ultimate subject<br>is because you see life<br>weirdly at its ultimate.<br>Very, very strange, strange thing.<br>But, you know, it is the truth.<br>Death, when it's in front of you,<br>is something which gives a<br>terrible clarity to everything.<br>And you see how people will love<br>and even sometimes laugh more.<br>There's an essay by Montaigne<br>that's always on my mind,<br>"Why We Weep and Laugh at the Same Time."<br>Everything's just more.<br>And the real thing is that you see<br>the very, very best of<br>people and the very worst.<br>And they're beside each other.<br>- So I've gotten a bunch of chances<br>to interact with soldiers on<br>the front line in Ukraine,<br>and there is some level of<br>like all the bullshit niceties<br>or whatever it is of civilian<br>life is all stripped away.<br>It just seems more honest somehow.<br>- Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.<br>Well, I mean, I couldn't agree more.<br>And there's a wild clarity about things,<br>not because of enemies<br>or anything like that,<br>but because of the.<br>I think I mentioned this.<br>I joked about this with some<br>Ukrainian soldiers in '22<br>because they wanted a cigarette.<br>And we stepped outside, I<br>accompanied them outside,<br>because they weren't allowed<br>to smoke indoors in this hotel,<br>which there were rockets falling.<br>- [Lex] Yeah, yeah.<br>- And I said to one of them,<br>"Isn't it strange that<br>fear of secondhand smoke<br>has superseded this?<br>But I don't know.<br>- And seeing the humor in that.<br>When you're on the front line,<br>when you're fighting in a war,<br>the humor of that is somehow<br>just perfectly delicious.<br>You could just laugh all day about that.<br>And the absurdity of<br>life is just right there.<br>And it's so honest and it's so beautiful.<br>And that's why a lot of<br>soldiers are traumatized,<br>they're destroyed by war,<br>but they also miss it.<br>- That's right. That's right.<br>Absolutely. Oh my God,<br>yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.<br>- There's an intimacy to the whole thing.<br>- Absolutely. Well, that's right.<br>I mean, and everyone says, you know,<br>"I never felt more alive," you know?<br>Yeah, and I wouldn't<br>do anything different.<br>- Well, I hope, just like Churchill,<br>you keep fighting the good fight<br>and not listening to anybody,<br>and I'll try to learn to do the same.<br>Douglas, I'm a huge fan.<br>Thank you for doing this.<br>- Been a great pleasure,<br>and right back at you.<br>- Thank you.<br>Thanks for listening to this conversation<br>with Douglas Murray.<br>To support this podcast,<br>please check out our<br>sponsors in the description.<br>And now let me leave you<br>with some words from Bertrand Russell.<br>"The problem with the world<br>is that fools and fanatics<br>are always so certain of themselves,<br>and wiser people, so full of doubts."<br>Thank you for listening, and<br>hope to see you next time.