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