The Rest Is Politics: 178. Israel At War

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

And me, Rory Stewart.

Now, Rory, we've been trying for a couple of days now to get together and do something

on what's been happening in Israel and Gaza.

And we put out a question to listeners this morning saying,

what would you like to ask us about what's happening in the Middle East right now?

And I can tell you, the single most asked question was asking Rory for one of his explainers.

Now, so take us from the beginning of time to where we are now in two minutes.

Yeah, without getting in trouble from every side.

Well, that is the problem, you know, I've noticed that already.

Twitter is the worst place in the world to debate this issue.

I've discovered that, which is why I've stopped debating it on there.

It's virtually impossible to say anything that is nuanced,

that is not black and white about this situation.

And the truth is, as you know, and as we'll hear from you very, very shortly,

you need a bit of nuance in this because it is so steeped in difficult history

and very, very complicated.

So why don't you just try and give us a bit of a background?

I'll give it a go and with apologies to people because there's a lot of sensitivities here.

So essentially, going back 3000 years, State of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community

and they were displaced just under 2000 years ago, basically by the Romans.

And large Jewish communities formed then in many places in places like Iraq and Yemen,

also in centuries in Europe and in Spain and Portugal and many other places too.

And then at the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century,

there was the beginnings of a Zionist movement pushing for a homeland for the Jewish people,

driven by the fact that Jews had experienced appalling discrimination and brutal pogroms,

murderous attacks on them over many, many hundreds of years,

but mounting particularly in centuries in Europe in the late 19th century.

The British got behind this with the Balfour Declaration about the time of the First World War

and there was increasing Jewish movement back to the former State of Israel.

But of course, during the nearly 2000 years, this had become very much a place dominated

by Arab Muslim communities. So the Jews were moving back into a populated place.

And the British initially, after the First World War, set up a mandate where they were trying to

balance the interests of Arabs and Jews, found themselves in the middle of an increasing civil

war. And the Brits were actually targets of terrorist attacks from both Arabs and Jews.

And then of course, the defining horror of the Second World War, the Holocaust in which

6 million European Jews are killed and which absolutely demonstrates to the world the extremity

of the threat that Jews face and the requirement for a Jewish homeland, which then drives into

large numbers of Jews moving to Palestine after the war and 1948, led by David Ben-Gurion,

the setting up of the State of Israel, driven by actually an Israeli military assault that

takes a lot of the territory previously held by Arab communities and involves many, many Arabs

being displaced from their homes. And that State of Israel, that 1948 state, is then recognized

largely by the international community, although not by many Palestinians. And that remains the

situation until 1967, when it then faces a simultaneous attack by Egypt, Syria and belatedly

Jordan. And in the 1967 war, Israel won a very, very rapid victory about six days. And it took

a loss of territory, which was outside the 1948 borders. So it took Gaza, which we're going to

be talking about today, it took the West Bank, which had previously been controlled by Jordan,

Gaza had previously been controlled by Egypt. And just so we're clear to that, that is why when

people talk about the occupied Palestinian territories, that is what they're talking about.

Absolutely. When most people talk about the occupied Palestinian territories, they're talking

about those bits that were taken by Israel after 1967. Now, there's a detail here, which is that

there are also parts of the Palestinian movement who reject the original State of Israel

and the 1948 borders. But broadly speaking, when people talk about the occupied Palestinian

territories, they're talking about these areas. There was then another war, which is important

to us because it was the anniversary of that war that triggered these recent attacks. Almost

exactly 50 years ago, a Yom Kippur war, where there was another attack, which Israel again

beat off, but with much more difficulty. Fast forward. And in the 1990s, we're now coming

into stuff that you began to connect with Palestinian professional life. There were then

a series of peace talks, particularly around Oslo. And the conclusion of Oslo was that

territories would be divided into categories A, B, and C. So there would be Palestinian

territories. There would be territories under mixed control and C, which were going to be Israeli

territories. And the idea was to push ahead with a two-state solution. A Palestinian

authority emerged on the West Bank with its capital at Ramallah. And in Gaza, another form

of Palestinian authority emerged. And the challenge there was that these territories

are not contiguous. They didn't form a joined up country. In fact, increasingly, because of

Israeli settlers who've been putting houses and settlements in beyond the 1967 boundaries,

it actually is a series of tiny enclaves, over 100 little enclaves, divided by checkpoints

and walls. Fast forward to 2004, 2005, and Israel withdraws from Gaza. And that's the first big

move. They actually remove a few thousand settlers who are there, forcibly remove a few

thousand settlers, and hand it over to Palestinian control. Not long after that happens, a movement

called Hamas, which is a much more radical Islamist group, much more strongly associated with

terrorism, takes over the Gaza Strip, which is this bit that runs basically from Egypt

along the coast, along the edge of Israel. And the Palestinians are then divided between this

Hamas-controlled area, which is the Gaza Strip, and the rest, which is controlled by the former

PLO, the Fatah government. Then there were Interfadars, there were Israeli attacks, both

fights in reprisal against attacks from Hamas out of Gaza, reprisals about attacks from Hezbollah,

which is another group, which is based in southern Lebanon. And fast forward to where we were about

a week ago. And a week ago, Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, was on the record

saying the Middle East had never been so peaceful. And the reason I think he thought that is that

Israel had developed a special missile protection shield, which meant it was increasingly difficult

for these Palestinian groups to fire either from Hezbollah, Hamas, rockets into Israel and do

damage. There hadn't been that number of attacks. And most of the focus in Israel, as we picked up

on the pod over the last few months, has actually been not about Palestine. It's been an internal

Israeli fight between liberals and conservatives to do with challenging the way in which the

Israeli government is moving in a populist direction, has brought in far-right people

like a man called Smotrich, the finance minister, pushing to overturn the independent judiciary in

Israel. And that was broadly the situation when on early Saturday morning, the attack started.

Well, I thought it was a very, very good explainer. And there will doubtless be some people who will

object to some exclusions and some inclusions. And I'm afraid that's the

nature of what we're talking about. Look, I don't want to ventriloquize for people.

But broadly speaking, if you want to see the view of, I suppose, a pretty middle-of-the-road

Palestinian politician, there is a great interview, which you will share in the links,

which has just been done on CNN, nine-minute interview, in which a Fatah politician gives

his views on the situation. But broadly speaking, from the Palestinian point of view, they would say,

yes, there's been a terrorist attack. And most of them would say they would not in any way condone

the killing of civilians. What would then happen is they would then say, you need to understand

that Gaza is, from their point of view, a prison camp with really no ability for people to go in

and out. It's a humanitarian disaster where people lack basic supplies and that at the root of this

violence is an Israeli occupation, which Palestinians will then explain. And you'll see it better if

you're interested in this interview on CNN. Explains involve breaking territory into tiny

enclaves, checkpoints, and what they experience as an apartheid state. And they called it an

apartheid state because they feel that they are not being given full civil and democratic rights.

And if they were given full civil and democratic rights, the situation would be very different.

That's the Palestinian point of view. There are many Israeli points of view, but

they would start by saying, listen, understand that these are very serious enemies out there,

that Hamas, back in the 1990s, had a founding charter dedicated to the complete elimination

of the state of Israel, that states like Iran were committed to the elimination state of Israel,

that the 67 war and the Yom Kippur war were designed basically to wipe them off the face of

the map, that they feel that they have been marginalized and attacked unfairly at United

Nations forums for decades, while other countries like China and Zimbabwe and Cuba haven't been

attacked in the same way. They feel it's an existential threat. They would emphasize that

the Israeli army warns civilians before it attacks buildings. They will emphasize, and again,

there are many different views on this 1967 territory, but some Israelis would say the

territory they took is essential for protection of the state of Israel, that the Golan Heights,

for example, were artillery positions from which the Syrians rained rockets down on them.

And that Israel's right to defend itself involves being very realistic about the

significant threat that Palestinians pose. So somewhere there are those two positions,

and there will be 500 other positions. We look forward to the conversation.

We had lots and lots of questions, as I say, but one of them was about good books to read.

And there is actually, there was a brilliant play about the Oslo Accords. And I think from

memory it was called Oslo. It was published as a book. It's worth getting hold of that,

absolutely amazing play. And it's one of those plays that you can read and get a sense of the

drama. And just before we go on to what's happening now, coincidentally, and I didn't

know that Jake Sullivan has said that, that is pretty remarkable. And just before these attacks,

literally the day before the latest attacks by Hamas, which have been bigger and more violent

and more deadly than anything we've seen from them before, and that anything the Israelis

have endured before, which is why they're calling it 9-11 plus Pearl Harbor in one.

But our good friend, the new European, had a five page spread in last week's paper called 18

Days That Shook the World about the Yom Kippur War that you mentioned. And I think you're right

that that was one of the key moments in the history. And I just want to read sections of it,

because it is so, partly because it's so dramatic, it also gives you an indication of how quickly

these things can escalate to almost unimaginable heights or depths, depending how you're looking

at it. Because this almost, this almost frankly caused World War III and almost caused Israel to

go nuclear. So if I just give you this section, so this is, as you said earlier, Syria and Egypt

have attacked. At the start of the war, the US and the USSR had requests for support from their

respective allies. On the Golan front, Syrian forces got direct support from Soviet military

personnel. It was estimated around 20 were killed in action. The Americans were initially reluctant

to come to Israel's aid. Then during the night of October 8-9, so that's exactly today as we were

recording 50 years ago, after being told by her defense minister Moshe Diane that Israel was facing

defeat, the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, authorised the assembly of 13 tactical nuclear weapons.

The readying of these weapons was done overtly as a signal to the United States. Then Nixon's

in the middle of all sorts of scandal, Kissinger's dealing with this. Here's an interesting

situation in Europe. With the exception of Portugal, the Netherlands and military ruled

Greece, European nations refused to even allow US planes carrying supplies for Israel to refuel

at their bases. The Arab states, in response to US intervention, cut oil supplies and threatened

embargoes leading to the 1973 energy crisis. If I go right to the end, when you said there

already about people feeling that this had never been safer and that Israel felt secure,

when there finally was a ceasefire after the Yom Kippur War, which went on for 18 days,

there was little rejoicing in Israel. The failure to foresee the attack was the greatest failure

in Israeli history. One analyst blamed arrogance, lack of understanding of the abundant intelligence

and disregard for the enemy. The military historian John Hughes Wilson described it as

a classic example of confusing political aspirations with hard fact. For good or ill,

Israel would never make the same mistakes again. Gosh, and here again. To remind people of what

actually happened, 6.30 in the morning, Hamas out of Gaza, which is this coastal strip adjoining

Egypt, fired perhaps 5,000 rockets. The Israelis are saying 2,500 rockets. Then about an hour later,

they tore through the barriers, through the fences that divide Gaza from Israel. Some coming

in from boat, one person coming in from air, bulldozers ripping down the areas crossing,

and simultaneously drove, in some cases, 20, 30 kilometers into Israel and began the most

violent series of terrorist attacks. Some of them were directed against military targets.

You'll see images of commanders, Israeli commanders being, one of them, I think,

in his boxer shorts being kidnapped and taken into a car, tanks being seized, Gaza

divisional headquarters being stormed, and the Zikim base. A big military frontal attack, but

also the real horror at the center of things, which people will have focused on, which was that

there was a festival taking place and people had been dancing up all night and 7.30 in the morning,

sun was rising, just come to the end of the festival, and into the middle of the final stages

came a group of terrorists on bikes and trucks and began opening fire on the crowd, killed

something like, it's difficult to know, 250, 260 people, and then went back across the border

taking over 160 hostages. Some of the fighters remained on the ground, continued to fight,

holding police stations in border towns. The Israeli military then mounted a counter strike,

which has probably killed about 400 people. The thing to say, obviously, before we go any further

on this, is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, very clear terrorist organization. This isn't

the first time they've done this. Some people are saying, why did they hit women and children?

The truth of the matter is that Hamas has been behind indiscriminate suicide bomb attacks.

They had an explicit policy of targeting civilians since the mid-1990s, recognize the

terrorist organization by the EU, by the US, and actually much more recently by the UK 2022,

I think, in Australia 2023. But much of the rest of the world does not recognize Hamas

as a terrorist organization. They treat them as the legitimate government because they're the

elected government in the Gaza Strip. Over to you.

I think what we're seeing is beyond anything that the Israeli people have seen. As you say,

within the Palestinian context, there has been a lot of bloodshed, there's been a lot of anger,

it's been building. I do think that once this thing hopefully calms down, hopefully settles

down, though I think this could be a long, long, long time, but there are some massive questions

for the Israelis. They have perhaps the most wanted intelligence agency in the world.

They really will be asking themselves some very, very hard questions about as to how this happened,

because when you watched the scenes that you described there with the fences being attacked,

with people arriving on hand gliders, with the levels of armory that were available,

it seems to me remarkable that the Israelis literally did not seem to have a whiff of this.

Or if they did, they were certainly not very well prepared. I think what's happening now,

quite rightly, there's been massive widespread condemnation. A little bit like Ukraine,

though, we should be careful not to imagine that it's universal. I think we saw in the

debate at the United Nations last night that the straight divide in that body was on display again.

But generally a sense of absolute outrage and condemnation and support, certainly in most of

the countries that where most of our listeners are, support for Israel's right to defend itself.

But now, slightly into unknown territory, because the hostages, which we should be taking of civilian

hostages, taking many hostages in this situation of war crime, that does complicate things further.

A lot of talk already about whether there will be a ground offensive by Israel into Gaza,

which is one of the most densely populated places on earth, by the way. Two million people in a

strip, roughly 25 miles long, very narrow strip of land. So the fear that there must be in that

place will be horrendous. And meanwhile, Jews around the world, this was brought home to me

in the very calm and peaceful setting of my morning swim this morning, talking to some Jewish people

who are regular swimmers there, who are feeling that sense of fear, anxiety, real concern and

dread about what's happening, and not least because they know people there.

Yeah, and with reason also, not just because of the horror coming out of Israel, but also because

an Egyptian policeman opened fire and killed two Israeli tourists, a little bit on Gaza. So

Hamas is something that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, and different to the PLO and Fatah,

it was from its beginning an Islamist organization, very much sort of, I mean,

it's a misleading way to put it, but it's in the broad tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood and even

the Taliban. It's a group that very much prides itself on religion. It has very conservative

social codes, but it's not imposing them entirely. I mean, there's been some examples of it, but it's

not legally imposing them on the population there. Their brand was being cleaner, less corrupt than

the previous government, but from the moment they've taken over, they have faced a blockade. So,

although Israel withdrew from Gaza, it controls six out of the seven of the border crossings,

it controls all the air access and sea access to Gaza. It provides all the electricity,

all the water supply, all the telecommunications for Gaza, and the Israeli army reserves the right

to enter Gaza whenever it feels it has a security reason to do so. The trade from Gaza, the economy

of Gaza, really collapsed after these blockades were put in place because people didn't want to

do business with a terrorist group. It's kept afloat with support from, in different ways,

Turkey, Qatar, and Iran, Iran putting the support more into the military attacks.

Qatar are very focused on humanitarian support for people. It's, I think, 160th poorest country in

the world now in GDP per capita, real shortage of water supply, sewerage. And one of the questions

going forward is, I suppose, two questions. One of them is your point about the potential Israeli

response inside Gaza, because it's not going to be possible for Israel, as it were, to reoccupy

Gaza. If you think about the fighting in Mosul, where the Iraqi army tried to retake Mosul from

the Islamic State, that was a multi-year operation that involved destroying most the city. And I

don't think we should be expecting Israel to be attempting to try to do house-to-house fighting

in a place of 2.2 million people. But there's going to be a loss of pressure now being put by

Israel on countries to cease all forms of support for Gaza. But that, of course, will also mean

that you're on this knife edge between providing support, development support, which keeps the

Hamas government alive, but also preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. So Qatar is a very

odd example of this. Qatar is criticized often by Israeli politicians for providing support

to Gaza, but then often says that behind closed doors, they're encouraged to continue to provide

support to Gaza by factions within Israeli government, because they don't want a humanitarian

crisis there. Okay, Rory, well, we've got lots, lots more to talk about in this area. So let's

just take a quick break. On the point of the humanitarian crisis, first of all, when the

Israelis are saying to the people in Gaza that essentially advising them to move out,

it's very, very hard to know where they go in such a densely populated place where they can't

come and go freely. And what I find really difficult in this whole conversation is, and

this is, I think we talk a lot on the podcast generally about how we try and do this thing

about disagreeing agreeably. Honestly, watching the debate unfold, particularly on social media,

but also on some of the television stations I've been sort of trawling through, it's virtually

impossible to have this debate without people getting very, very quickly into polarized spaces.

And I think that at the moment, when you see, and I'm not criticizing this at all, I can see,

as per 9-11, the desire for countries like the UK, the US, Germany to signal solidarity,

and so this thing of lighting up public buildings with the Israeli flag and so forth.

And that's fine for now. But I think that at some point, one of the best contributions to this

debate I saw was when we were waiting for Joe Biden's address to the American people the other

night, Alistair Burt, former Foreign Office Minister, former Middle East Minister, one of your

colleagues, was filling in for, when I say filling in, he was being interviewed at the time when,

just before Biden was coming on. So Alistair Burt asked this question to us,

why has so little international attention been paid to resolving issues between Israel

and the Palestinians over the last couple of years, when it was clear that tensions were

steadily rising? And there were many warnings that something very bad was going to happen.

And I think that when you were talking about that period when Clinton was in charge and

Yasser Arafat and Rabin were meeting at the White House and this was that sense of progress,

there was a real focus by large parts of the international community on this as being

not just the central issue in the Middle East, but one of the central issues anywhere in the

world. The Middle East in our public debate in recent years has become about some of these

other countries you've been talking about, the ones with oil, the ones with money, Saudi Arabia,

Qatar, United Arab Emirates. The focus on the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine question

has been negligible from a time when it used to be one of the most dominant issues of global

debate. Yeah, I think a lot of things changed in it. So the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin,

who'd been instrumental in bringing together the Osir Accords, so this actually very famous

Israeli general, a kind of national hero who made a very radical step to try to reach out towards

peace with Palestinians and was then assassinated by a extremist Jewish nationalist who was against

him, then led to a period where the Israeli left largely vanished and a lot of the politics we've

been talking about in Israel reflects the fact that the Palestinian supporting, two-state solution

supporting Israeli left largely lost confidence, partly because of that, partly because they felt

that Palestinians weren't making the progress that they were hoping for, partly because the

Palestinian Authority has proved to be very useless and corrupt and has lost a lot of support. But

it's also that, as you say, as Israel has become economically more and more powerful and Saudi and

UAE and others have developed confidence, Trump drove through the Abraham Accords, which effectively

normalized relations between Israel and some of the key Gulf states, meaning that Palestinians

had very much been marginalized. And definitely, as Alistair Burt says, when I was in Jordan,

there was a palpable sense that people felt it no longer was anything that anyone was concentrating

on. And the two-state solution felt increasingly implausible, more and more difficult to imagine

that it would ever happen, partly because these figures like Smotrich Ben Gavir, who are the far

right Israelis, made very, very explicit statements about essentially providing no acknowledgement

for the Palestinian territories at all. I mean, Smotrich was on the record saying that he wanted

to retake those territories and the Palestinians would have to either be subjugated or leave or

be killed. And this was part of the coalition. I mean, Guy was the finance minister who was

saying this. So I think there are two things that we maybe before we close that we need to look at.

One of them is, what does this mean to internal Israeli politics? And what does it mean to the

international picture? I think internal Israeli politics, there's going to be two opposing tensions.

One of them is it will strengthen some people on the right who will say,

we always told you, you need to be tougher on the Palestinians. Look at this. Hamas is revealed

as they always have been as terrorists dedicated to the complete extinction of the state of Israel.

We need to go much, much harder. And that will undermine some of the voices pushing for peace

and some of the remaining voices on the Israeli left. On the other hand, it's an incredible

humiliation of the Israeli government to total intelligence failure. And there will be a push

for a national unity government to say, well, let's bring in a broader coalition, get rid of the far

right, get Israel together again. Very important to mobilize the reservists who were essentially on

strike because they were so horrified by the judicial reforms. And that then moves us to the

international patron. I think internationally, there are going to be two things we have to watch.

One of them is that Iran is very closely associated with this Hamas attack and is boasting about the

fact that Ayatollah Khomeini met with the leader of Hamas, that Iranian funding is going in. So

you can expect a risk of the Israeli government and others taking retaliatory action against Iran.

You can also see this as a deliberate attempt to break the talks that were going on between

Saudi and Israel, that Hamas has done it in order to deepen the divisions again within the Middle

East and draw attention in the most horrifying way through this terrorist attack to the ongoing

situation and hope that that begins to move people more into talks again.

There's an awful lot of stuff in Haaretz newspaper, one of the main Israeli dailies today,

that is very, very, very critical of Netanyahu. The sense that the Israeli government, he's had to

essentially do a deal with people even well to the right of him to form the government that he did.

And this has been so far down their list of priorities that you do sort of have the sense

that the more militant end of the Palestinian population, that they can see no way out.

And that is not by the way, even as I say those words, I can feel people going to their tweets to

say, this is attempting to justify, it doesn't justify it in any way at all. But I think that

unless what has happened, the reason why Hamas became as powerful as they did within the West Bank

was because they felt that the Palestinian Authority under the Fatah party were going

nowhere, were giving a lot, recognition of Israel, et cetera, without getting anything in return,

and that that having been done, they saw no sense of progress at all. I'm not talking about progress

towards a two-state solution, I'm still talking about progress in any shape or form in the reality

of their daily lives. And that is not going to be addressed between this government and the

Palestinians. It will for now be entirely seen, I suspect, as a security situation. But at some

point, there has to be a return to a political process. Otherwise, this thing just goes round

and round and round. And we'll be back in a few years talking about another war and giving another

name. And I think at the heart of it is something you was right at the century, your working life

in Ireland, which is that understandably, Israelis look at Hamas and they say,

here is a murderous, brutal terrorist group that has just gone into the middle of a music festival

and mown down 260 people and is rhetoric is effectively about extinguishing the state of

Israel. I mean, it's changed it. It now talks about a right of return, but there is deep,

deep anti-Semitic rhetoric, hate speech coming out of Hamas and all those sort of things.

And that therefore feels to many, many Israelis as though it's impossible to imagine any kind

of conversation with them at all. As I felt very much with the IRA that the idea of talking to

people who seemed in the 80s to be absolutely committed to driving the British entirely out of

Ireland who were killing innocent civilians and hotel bombings seemed incomprehensible.

There's a question here. James McJune, do you think that the Israel-Palestine scenario is more

complex than the troubles in Northern Ireland? Does the fact that it shares a border with other

Islamic nations and isn't geographically isolated mean that a Good Friday start agreement will

always be unattainable? I mean, there's a couple of things I'd say to that. The first is that the

Good Friday agreement felt unattainable for a long, long time. I mentioned to you earlier,

recently watching once upon a time in Northern Ireland, listening to the people telling their

stories, they felt it was unattainable. But it happened. So right now, today, in the middle of

October 2023, a two-state solution, and I saw David Lammey this morning at the Labour Party

conference, he made his speech and absolutely unequivocal support for Israel, but also saying

that we have to keep having hope that there can one day be a two-state solution where

Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace. In the current contest, that sounds

almost an absurd thing to say, but you have to hang on to that hope and you can only get there

ultimately through some sort of political process. And the reason why, I mean, the level of planning

that must have gone into this operation and where they were getting their arms from and whether Iran

was directly supplying and all that stuff, we don't know. But in a way, I think what they're

maybe trying to do, a bit like when the IRA sort of had the judgment, they said to themselves that

we can bomb away all we want in Northern Ireland. But unless we actually take these bombs to the

British mainland, we're not going to inject ourselves into this process. So I guess I'm

throwing this one back to you. Do you think that part of what's going on is that Hamas are trying

to get into the bigger picture, start to be considered one of the players in finding some

sort of resolution to this? Or are they so hardline, militant, terror organization that there

is no way that this is going to end other than with a bloody long battle between them and the

Israelis? Yeah. And the truth is, of course, that like all these groups, they're all those things,

there are appear to be or have been in the past, slightly more moderate factions of Hamas. And

you know, negotiators have dealt with them and talked to them. And that's one of the reasons

why Norway, for example, I think has refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization.

And then there are Hamas deputy ministers on record, spreading blood libels about Jews and

claiming they sort of mashed up Christian babies into mats or biscuits. And I mean, it's a horrifying

mixture of extreme terrorists with murderous intent, and people who are trying to imagine some kind of

political settlement and return to 1967 borders and all this kind of thing. But

the standoff in the end, if I sort of go back to the central explainer,

is that there are two completely irreconcilable, at the moment it feels like, visions of what's

going on. For Hamas and many Palestinians, they want an absolute return to the 1967 borders.

And the truth is that there has been a lot of Israeli settlement beyond the edge of the 1967

borders. And no Israeli government is currently remotely considering removing all those communities

and returning to those borders. On the contrary, they've been developed, they've been adding to it.

Exactly. Well, thank you very much. And I know that listeners will have very strong opinions.

And if you want to get in touch, do by all means please send us your tweets.

Well, I think you explained that very, very well. I actually came off Twitter just because it's

it's impossible. It's like, it should be possible to condemn unequivocally what has happened,

whilst at the same time, worrying about the nature of the Israeli government,

worrying about the fate of innocent children and others who have had a hellish life anyway,

now in one of the most densely populated areas of the world,

fearing what is about to hit them, whilst at the same time, only beginning to imagine the

utter horror, if you had been at that festival, or related to somebody who was at that festival,

or you're related to somebody who's been taken hostage. But the way our debate polarizes so

instantly around anything now, it was almost like, you know, well, you're either 100% this side,

100% that side. And at the moment, you have to be 100% on the side of Israel.

And ultimately, we've got to get to a place where there's a reestablishment of a serious

grown up political process where major world powers are engaged and involved,

and put in the hours and the effort to try to get people to coexist. Otherwise, we've had it.

Right. I agree. I agree. Thank you. And goodbye.

See you soon.

you

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