156. Labour on the defensive, Machismo in Spain, and Israel on a knife-edge

What is the existential threat to democracy that's unfolding in Israel? Why is Labour on the policy defensive after defeat in Uxbridge? Is Spain now the most polarised country in Europe? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. That's nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:13Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:16Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:18Alastair Campbell?

  And rarely Rory, we both are absolutely desperate to talk about the same thing, which is Israel, to which we're going to devote most of the second half of the podcast. And we're also going to, we're going to kick off with the continuing fallout from the by-elections last week. Can't believe that we're still talking about ULEZ and whether Labour and the Tories should ditch all their, what David Cameron used to call the green crap. And I think we should also have a chat about what's been going on in Spain with their rather interesting elections, where I hope we've got more interesting things to say than a lot of the pretty bang average commentary that I've been reading.

• 1:55Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, let's start with ULEZ. So just to remind listeners, who, those few people who might have missed out on our by-election special. The surprising thing in the by-elections was that although Labour did spectacularly

• 2:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, in Yorkshire, where it took Nigel Adams's seat, so defeated a sitting Conservative MP with a majority of more than 20,000, so hugely optimistic and a great sign from Labour's point of view for how they do in the election. A seat with a smaller majority, which was Boris Johnson's old seat in Alxbridge, which he was holding with a majority of 7,000, to their complete astonishment, the astonishment of most of the commentary, except for possibly you and one commentator who I saw in the New Statesman. And they failed to take. And the Conservative campaign, which allowed them to hold that seat, was a campaign in opposition to

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  extending the ultra-low emission zone out to outer London, which would have charged people with cars that were considered polluting a great deal of money. And this was the centerpiece of Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor's policy. And it's one that the Labour candidate supported. But after the result where Labour lost that seat, it slightly seemed as though Keir Starmer, Labour leadership, has been backpedaling. And they've been less keen on the ultra-low emission zone. They've slightly been shifting the blame onto Sadiq Khan's policy. And it's raised a whole question about how much they're prepared to trade beliefs and environmental policies to win votes.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, just one small point of that. Danny Beals, the candidate, did actually come out against the policy. But it was well into the campaign by then. And look, I've been quite troubled by this whole thing, to be honest. And it has given it a feeling of Labour somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The result in Selby, as you say, was utterly stunning. And the one thing that we know, because they have the help of such a biased right-wing press, who also influence the agenda of the broadcasters, the Tories are very, very, very good at framing an argument. And I just, for the life of me, can't understand how they've allowed the whole debate about these elections to become about Ule's.

• 4:14Alastair Campbell?

  We had a question from a guy called Jeff Spink, how on earth did Johnson not get named as the father of Ule's? This is a policy that was designed by Boris Johnson when he was mayor. That Sadiq Khan is taking forward, in part because he believes in it, and I support him in those beliefs. And believes strongly in it. I mean, he's written a whole book on air pollution, hasn't he? But also because the UK government has made local authorities, in this case Sadiq Khan, take on the development of clean air policy. And so this is a policy which I think Labour, they seem to be to have gone into the campaign without a clear line. And so therefore the line developed. The Tories seized on this to make it almost a single

• 4:59Alastair Campbell?

  issue campaign, which is utterly ridiculous when you think that the newly elected Servag MP can do literally nothing to change it. And Keir Starmer said something I think a bit worrying to my mind. He said that we're doing something wrong if the Tory party is putting our policies all over his leaflets. I don't agree with that at all. In 1997, I loved it when the Tories came out and said, if you vote Labour and get a minimum wage, it'll cost a million jobs. Because it gave us the opportunity to go out and argue against that. I loved it when they said, if you have a Scottish Parliament, you'll break up the United Kingdom. Because we could go out and argue why we felt there should be a Scottish

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  Parliament. So I think that it's exposed a kind of defensiveness, which I think is not the best way to go into, the best mindset with which to go into a general election. And I do think on the bigger point about the environment, I mean, here we are, what have people been watching on the news in the last couple of days? Corfu, terrible fires, and going right to the heart of this debate about climate change and about clean air. And so I just think that sometimes politicians have to be big and bold and brave and say, look, yeah, okay, well, we're going to take that one on the chin, we move on. And the other point to make, Rory, we never won Uxbridge. That was, people keep making these comparisons with nineteen ninety seven and now.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  We did not win Uxbridge.

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  No, John Randall of Uxbridge held on to it.

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And we, but we did, Labour did win last week, Selby, another seat which we didn't win. So this, I'm afraid, is, I think that we, Labour were just outdone in politics.

• 6:41Rory Stewart?

  Reminder for people listening who don't live in London about what this whole thing's about. So people will remember that in the centre of London, something called the congestion charge. And then outside the very, very centre of London, where the congestion charge was, was this thing called the Ultra Low Emission Zone, which covered, I suppose, sort of zones two and three on the Tube map. And then this is a push to take the Ultra Low Emission Zone out to the very edges of London. I mean, Uxbridge is right out by Heathrow Airport, far, far west of London. Bringing another two million people within the Ultra Low Emission Zone. And if you've got a petrol car made before two thousand and six, or a diesel car, I think, made before twenty sixteen,

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  you have to pay twelve pounds fifty a day to drive it. You can get a little bit of assistance if you're on various forms of benefits towards getting a new car, two thousand pound grant. But the problem from the point of view of people in outer London is they will be charged, particularly people on lower incomes with older cars, if you had a diesel car, which is ten years old, twelve pounds fifty a day. And what they would say is that it's much easier in central London to get buses, to get tubes and have other forms of transport. So they feel it, I mean, these, these outer London areas, as you're aware, traditionally were more working class areas than central London. So they feel this is a tax on working class people with older cars who are very reliant on their cars to get around. Now, I agree with you one hundred percent.

• 8:08Rory Stewart?

  It's a policy that needs to be implemented. It's a policy that I backed when I was running for mayor of London. But I was very aware when I was backing it that I was taking a huge political risk. And the reason this matters, I suppose, is that, putting aside the chat around the by-elections, it's a classic test of environmental policy going forwards. Because environmental taxes, the kind of things you need to do to change behaviour, are almost always regressive. They almost always hit the poorest people hardest because it's the poorest who find that more of their money is spent on transport, more of their money is spent on energy and heating compared to wealthy people where it's a smaller proportion of their budget. So big, big challenge for, for environmental policy.

• 8:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I agree with that, but 4,000 people died of asthma in London last year. These are facts that just did not emerge in this debate because I think Labour kind of hid away from it. And I think there was a, there was a good attack to be mounted on the Tories, their hypocrisy. The fact that they were lying about the nature and the history of the policy. You know, I actually think the very fact that Johnson, well, we were having this by-election because Johnson had left Parliament because he was exposed for the whole world to see as a total liar. Yeah, that should have been more relevant, shouldn't it? Absolutely. Therefore, you'd have thought that his successors lying about the policy and its history could have been made part of the debate.

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I'm not saying that that should have sort of tried, Labour should have come along and said, let's not talk about the cost of it and we'll talk about that. And I also think in the aftermath, I don't like this sort of, you know, a lot of people around the Labour leadership seem to be, you know, dumping on Sadiq Khan and saying he was being difficult and he didn't want to trim the policy. When we did the, the podcast on the, on the by-elections on Friday, I made the point that I think that what has to happen in these circumstances, if you've got a, a Labour leadership that is trying to get elected nationally, a Labour figures, be it Sadiq Khan or a council leader or Andy Burnham, whoever it might be, in power now, you have to have, you have to have discussions and you have to come agreements.

• 10:12Alastair Campbell?

  But I don't like all this kind of dumping on him and, and so forth. So I hope Labour learns some lessons about, about the way this, this campaign has gone. They should not have allowed the expectations to run out of hand. You know, the expectation was so high that they would win, that not winning became seen as a defeat. And I certainly don't think they should have allowed this defeat to lead to a wholesale review of policy. And we're talking about them, I think because people are looking for better standards than the Tories. The Tories are also now talking about, because of this by-election, because of their success, they're going to do more, to quote David Cameron again, dumping on the green crap. And I hope they don't. Yeah.

• 10:53Rory Stewart?

  Couple of things. Sadiq Khan, I think, has been looking for an issue where he can show real courage, and this is a good moment for him. He is a dominant figure in London politics. It's going to be incredibly unlikely that a London Tory mayoral candidate can defeat him now.

• 11:10Alastair Campbell?

  Especially the ones they keep picking.

• 11:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. London's a very, very Labour city, and actually, the Tories are very unpopular around the country. So this is the moment where Sadiq Khan will be feeling that he has the political capital. What's the point of being Mayor of London unless he can take a bit of risk? He can almost certainly take through a policy that's a bit unpopular, but still win an election. And you would have thought that was something to get behind. But it does mean that as we go into the general election, we're going to face this problem. And I think it's going to be a theme all the way through this podcast, because it's true of Spain, and it's true in spades of Israel, which is, how does the progressive left, the Labour Party equivalent, respond to right-wing populism? Do they get dragged

• 11:55Rory Stewart?

  further right? Do the right-wing populists end up defining the debate so that Keir Starmer finds himself completely unable to say anything about the environment, to say anything about higher taxes or higher spending, unable to say anything about immigration, unable to say anything about the European Union, because basically the debate has been defined by the populist rights, and he doesn't want any gaps between him and them?

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the answer to your question is actually in the question. It's about who manages to define the parameters of the debate. And if you allow your opponents to define those parameters, it's very, very hard. I'm not pretending that it's easy to take on these populists, but you have to have very strong, clear positions that people are willing to support. Before we leave the UK, I got a message from Bridgette Phillips' office saying that you were wrong in what you said about childcare, that there had not been a promise of, as it were, universal childcare, and also there had not been a promise of free school meals for all. There is a promise of massive expansion of childcare, but it does not quantify as childcare for all.

• 12:59Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. Well, I think that the dispute here is, and I'm largely here following The Guardian, is whether the Labour Party signaled that it was going to be more radical and then rode back, or whether it's Bridgette Phillips' office is trying to say to you, they were always planning to do something much more modest than people hoped.

• 13:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or they were trying, they were, they were planning something very, very radical, but not as radical as it was described by the time Rory Stewart presented it. So mellifluently on the rest is politics.

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Thank you. All right. Hopping on to Spain. So Spain, quick reminder of people. Spain, I think people underestimate what a big country it is, forty seven million people. So just there behind Germany, Britain, France and Italy, fifteenth largest economy in the world. But unlike those other countries, a country that became a democracy much more recently, so became a democracy in the nineteen seventies after the death of Franco, dominated in the nineteen eighties. So I think we talked about this in the podcast, but dominated by Felipe Gonzalez.

• 13:58Alastair Campbell?

  Fine man.

• 13:58Rory Stewart?

  Their equivalent to the Labour Party through to ninety six, then a man called Aznar. So it then swung back to their equivalent to Conservative Party.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  Just don't Aznar, by the way, he smoked, he smoked the biggest cigar I've ever seen in my life.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, apparently that's a big thing in right wing politics in Spain.

• 14:14Alastair Campbell?

  What, cigar smoking?

• 14:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, when people try to define what makes a vox, it's machismo and cigar smoking. But actually, strangely, far right politics in Spain, some people say is less kind of Franco-esque, less anti-immigrant than you'd expect. It's more about kind of macho guys smoking big cigars.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Aznar, I remember once at a European summit in Nice, and Tony and Aznar were having a, I think they were quite friendly. Tony went to Aznar's daughter's wedding, I think it was. And Aznar, we'd had dinner and then Aznar said to one of his people, get me one of my cigars. And the guy went away and he, and he got one for Tony as well. And I mean, I don't think Tony knew what to do with it. It was so big. How does he get it in his mouth? It was like, you know, anyway, he lit the cigar and sort of merrily puffed on it all evening. Sorry, I interrupted your flow.

• 15:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, no. So basically, the story is that Spanish politics has seemed from the outside pretty regular. After the thirteen years of Felipe Gonzalez, it then swapped back and forward from, as it were, their equivalent of Labour to Conservatives, back to Labour, back to Conservatives, back to Labour again, with everybody getting six or seven years in office.

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  And that brought us basically up to May of this year, where Pedro Sanchez, so according to the Labour Party PSOE, was back in power again, did badly in the May elections, triggered an election, and it seemed likely that Spanish politics was going to follow its normal rhythm, swing back towards the right again. And it's true, there according to the Conservative Party, PP, got the most votes, but they didn't get enough to get a majority in Parliament. They were going to form a coalition, people expected, with Vox, which is a small far-right party, the sort of machismo cigar-smoking proto-Franco party. And they dropped from 52 seats to 33 seats. So this, in the speech, and the reason I keep talking about cigars,

• 16:10Alastair Campbell?

  is that in Sanchez's great speech, where he greets the results, and Sanchez is an interesting-looking man, he's quite kind of good-looking from a certain angle, looks a bit like George Clooney, appears in his blue jeans, denim shirt, gives a speech in which he says, "This is a defeat of machismo." He took a big risk here, because he, you know, perhaps he, sometimes political leaders have a sense of things that the polls and the pundits and the public even don't necessarily have. Because I think the conventional wisdom that was forming was that it's a massive risk and it's going to end up with their Tory party in coalition with, as you say, the far-right Vox. But what seems to have happened is that the public

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  have taken a good look at Vox and thought, "Hmm, don't want you in government." And there's just a lot of interesting things happened. So, and we're talking about, you know, Labour winning but looking like they'd lost. I mean, Sanchez, in a way, lost, but he's looking like he won. And likewise, the PP, they won, but because they can't form a government, they're going as losers as well. And the other thing that's of course very interesting in their politics is Catalonia and the Basque Country with separatist movements. And Sanchez did very, much, much better than he expected in those areas. And though he probably won't be able to form a government, he might, I think the other law, I think the right are not going to be able to form a government. I think Sanchez can only think about it by doing it with the hard left and with

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  the independence parties, which would damage, which would, you know, and that was one of the reasons he did so badly in the local elections, because people felt he was too supportive of the independent parties, independence parties, and outside those areas, most Spaniards want to keep Catalonia and the Basque territory. And so what you see is that it's not essentially polarised, but we've seen a sense of political stalemate here. So I think the smart money is probably on another election within a few months. And, you know, it's possible, because the whole, we're back to expectations, because Sanchez did better, it's possible actually that that gives a sense of momentum to him, and that he actually might think, well, next time I can get it over the line.

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, we've got a great leading episode coming, which go into Spain more for people who'd like to learn more about Spain, with Miriam Gonzalez, who set up a fantastic new movement in Spain to try to define policies, particularly in the central ground, where she goes into this. But to remind people, I think Spain is the sort of odd shadow of France. In both cases, broadly speaking, five parties emerged, the old traditional equivalents of the British Conservative and Labour Party, and then a centrist party, a far left and a far right party. In Spain, what happened is that the centre party basically collapsed, disappeared. Vox has performed quite badly, and Podemos has also, which was the left wing party that came out of austerity with an amazing kind of Jeremy Corbyn-esque

• 19:09Rory Stewart?

  guy with a ponytail, sort of communist with a ponytail. Those smaller parties went, and the old left and right parties have reasserted themselves. Whereas in France, of course, what happened is the centre under Macron came through and won. The old left and right have vanished, leaving the extreme left and the extreme right in the centre.

• 19:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, in fact, you mentioned Miriam there. Her take on the election is that actually the vote ought to have been seen as a vindication of the more moderate parties over the extreme ones, because the two main parties, the PP and the PSOE, got 68% of the vote, which is pretty good. However, because they barely speak to each other, certainly can't reach an agreement, the ones holding the balance of power are the two extreme independentist parties. And Sanchez got into trouble in public opinion with them, because they are run by and represented by, or amongst their leaders, people who are frankly, very, very close to the former terrorist organisation ETA. And he got into a bit of trouble with

• 20:12Alastair Campbell?

  that. And then the Catalonian party likewise, their leader's under a European arrest warrant. So it's quite, it's quite hard to say, right, I'm putting my coalition together, I'm going to go with the extreme left party, I'm going to go with one former terrorist party, and I'm going another one with a leader who's under a European arrest warrant. That feels quite unstable to me. That's why I think an election is probably more likely.

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, all of this is much, much more mild and much more moderate than the subject we're going to go on to now after the break, which is Israel, which is politics at an existential tragedy. I mean, on a scale far beyond what we're talking about in the Oxford by-election in Spain. So should we take a quick break and then come back and get into Israel?

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• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart. And me Alastair Campbell. And we've both thought that really the central theme for this week has to be Israel. I've just returned from Israel where I saw my friend Yuval Noah Harari and we're going to be interviewing him on the podcast later this week for leading. He's been right at the very centre of these huge protest movements, been going on for more than 20 weeks in Tel Aviv. Over 100,000 people in the street and they basically represent the more liberal progressive side in Israel taking on this right wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  And it's a very, very strange echo in many ways of a lot of the things we talk about on this podcast. There are elements of it that feel like Democrats against Republicans, like taking on Trump because for many people, and you'll pick this up when we talk to Yuval, they feel it's an existential threat to their entire conception, their country. People are beginning to talk about just leaving the country entirely. It obviously has echoes of the way people feel about Brexit remain. It's a sort of culture war in which often more working class people endorsing the right wing populists and particularly people from more Middle Eastern Jewish ancestry as opposed to European Jewish ancestry who felt marginalized and very much pitched

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  as by the populists as the people against the elite, trying to characterize the kind of liberals in Tel Aviv as the elite. But all of that made much, much more dangerous and risky because this is not Britain, this is not the United States, it's not even populism in Turkey. This is Israel with a full scale occupation, with very difficult military relationships with its neighbours, with nuclear weapons, with an ultra orthodox community, with a religious Zionist community who are pushing very, very hard on religious laws. So what's your sense of the whole thing from looking at it from your end?

• 24:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I find the whole thing incredibly depressing. It just feels to me like the place is on the edge. You know, we said briefly last week that we couldn't see a way forward currently in the Israel Palestine issue. Well, you throw this into the mix and it just makes the very, very difficult feel like it's completely and totally impossible. And I suppose it's interesting to explain what this is all about. So you have a situation where Israel doesn't have a written constitution, doesn't have a second chamber, so they have a very, very powerful parliament, a very, very powerful government. The only real check on it is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has annoyed Netanyahu at times.

• 25:30Alastair Campbell?

  It refused, for example, to let him appoint somebody to his government who had been a criminal, who'd been inside prison and when he came out of prison, part of the deal was that he wouldn't go back into public life. Netanyahu tried to get him back, the court stopped him. His argument is the court is too political. I think we've heard that in lots of countries where they've tried to shut down the power of the courts. But the other big thing here, of course, you mentioned the religious element, is that two of the most powerful members of the government now, a guy called Itamar Ben-Gavir, who's the Minister of National Security, and Bezal Smotrich, who's the head of the religious Zionism Party and is the Finance Minister. They are, it's hard to know what you'd call them. I suppose in the, you mentioned

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  the Trump comparison, where there is an element of kind of white supremacy around. I guess this is about Jewish supremacy.

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So I think that it's much more extreme than Trump. So if the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the equivalent of Trump, in other words, somebody who's flirting with these people, whipping them up, the big difference here is this would be like Trump putting in his cabinet, in his senior positions as Secretary of the Treasury, or, you know, Secretary of Responsible Security, Homeland Security, people who were literally the equivalent of the January 6th insurrection people. I mean, these people are very, very far out. So the man that, Ben Gavir, who you mentioned, who's got the security job, is somebody who until recently had a picture on his wall of a Jewish terrorist who had killed 26 Palestinians

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  in an attack in a mosque. He was associated with a banned party that was actually associated itself with Jewish terrorism and came out of that tradition. And recent events, as this gets whipped up, involve recently a Israeli soldier shouting to settlers, "This will all be sorted out when Ben Gavir comes", because he and Smotrich are not remotely interested in Palestinian rights, two-state solution. In fact, their vision is that all the territory that Israel took, not just in the 1940s, but in 1967, right, which was the territory that stretched all the way, Golan Heights, West Bank, all the way to the Jordan River,

• 27:49Rory Stewart?

  stuff that used to belong to Syria and Jordan, and indeed a bit that used to belong to Egypt, is going to become the permanent Israeli homeland, that this was the traditional religious area of the Jews. And Smotrich has called himself a proud homophobe. We've not seen anybody in Trump's cabinet calling himself a proud homophobe. He's somebody who's been out saying, as far as he's concerned, the Israeli army are much too wimpy, they should just go in hard into all the areas. He doesn't care about Oslo, doesn't care about areas A, B, and C. So he's basically saying- The entire Palestinian Authority region, Ramallah, Nablus, all these areas should simply become part of Israel. And as for the Palestinians, well, obviously, he's not going to give them votes, because if he gave 6 million Palestinians votes, the Israelis

• 28:34Rory Stewart?

  would be outnumbered in their own country. So he's basically proposing that they just put up with living as second-class citizens within Israel. And when somebody said, what happens if children chuck stones, Smotrich said cheerfully, oh, we would either kill them, imprison them, or expel them. So this is very, very hardcore stuff.

• 28:55Alastair Campbell?

  And they're also, you know, one of the reasons they want to get rid of the Supreme Court is because the Supreme Court might say, do you know what, they do have some rights, and you can't just go in and wipe them out when they've done nothing wrong.

• 29:06Rory Stewart?

  Bit of a reminder then of just take people back through the history. So after the Second World War, there is an explosion of violence, and David Ben-Gurion, who's basically the leader of modern Israel, spearheads an attempt in the late 40s where essentially the Israelis fight their way to take control of a territory and set up a nation. And during this period, 700,000 Palestinians are pushed out, it's called the Nakba, pushed out of their houses. But a lot of the world, de facto, recognizes those borders in 1947. And Israel continues for the next 20 years to run this territory. And Jordan has what we now call

• 29:47Rory Stewart?

  the West Bank and half of Jerusalem. In 1967, Arab countries, led by Nasser, leading Egypt, but also the Syrians and the Jordanians, announce that they're about to move on Israel, and Israel launches a preemptive strike and in six days wipes out the entire Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian air force, advances forward, captures the Golan Heights from Syria, takes Gaza from Egypt, and pushes right the way to the Jordan River, taking back Jerusalem and all the West Bank from Jordan, and sits there. And the world basically says, this is an illegal occupation and endless

• 30:30Rory Stewart?

  Debates in the European Union over the last fifty six years have tried to work out what Israel's relationship is to this new territory. And here I think it's worth bearing in mind that from the point of view of many Palestinians in here in Jordan and indeed many Palestinians in the West Bank. It's all a bit moot because they actually don't accept what happened in the nineteen forty's, let alone in the nineteen sixty's. But anyway, it's the nineteen sixty's bit that's been the main international dispute. From that moment onwards, as you say, many Israelis, particularly the religious nationalists, thought this was a huge God given vindication of Israel's rights to the territory that the Jews had lived in two thousand seven hundred years earlier.

• 31:13Rory Stewart?

  And time of King David, they start referring to Judea and Samaria, and they start building settlements. And people like Smotrich, who is the finance minister, very much comes out of this settlement movement. He lives outside the edge of a settlement. They see themselves as people who are deliberately reclaiming the land for the Jews that God has promised to them. And they're doing it by taking land that is occupied by Israel and is supposed to be owned by Palestinians. They will just occupy Palestinian farms, they'll drive people out and then they'll sit there and then they'll demand that the Israeli government provides some water supply, electricity, security to defend them. Now, this has been back and forth for fifty years. The Israeli governments have said, well, we're in favor of a two-state solution.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  A two-state solution basically means the Palestinians are going to get back most of the areas that were taken in sixty seven. But we're going to have to do something about these settlements. And their first big move is when they left Gaza, they took the settlements out and handed Gaza back to the Palestinians. That was seen in two thousand and five as the big betrayal by people like Smotrich. Smotrich cut his teeth in those fights around Gaza. And these settlers are absolutely determined that every inch of the West Bank and the Golan Heights is a permanent bit of Israel. And they don't care about the fact that there are millions of Palestinians living there.

• 32:34Rory Stewart?

  And of course, if they try to take back those areas and hold those areas, they can only do it through a form of apartheid by denying civil rights and voting rights to those Palestinians, otherwise they disappear.

• 32:44Alastair Campbell?

  What was your sense when you were there in recent days of where people think this goes? Because, I mean, Netanyahu is obviously a very, very powerful figure. And he's been Prime Minister several times, way, you know, he was Prime Minister when Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he's been Prime Minister since, you know, the mid nineties, he's been in and out of power, but he's been the longest serving Prime Minister in the country's history. He's actually, although he's pretty right wing, I think he will be, he's also quite a pragmatist, I think. I'm not a hundred percent convinced, I know he's become a hate figure for these people out in the streets, I'm not a hundred percent convinced he'll be entirely comfortable with what's

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  going on. He does actually quite like to be liked, he likes to be feted in Washington and the other great capitals of the world, and Joe Biden has very much got him on, you know, he's got his calls on hold at the moment. And this thing is not over. As the vote went through, the opposition of state, they just didn't bother to vote, they said, well, you're going to win, so just get on with it, you're going to own this on your own. Massive protests in the streets, as you say. And I was listening on a, on a German podcast I was listening to, they were working out that of all the people who'd taken part in protests over the last twenty eight weeks, since they began, if the American people were protesting on the same scale, we'd be talking about more than sixty million people. If British people were protesting on the same

• 34:10Alastair Campbell?

  scale, we'd be talking about thirteen million British people out on the streets. So that's how many people are engaged in this now.

• 34:18Rory Stewart?

  It's a subject of such extreme contradictions. So when I was in Tel Aviv, people wanted to talk about nothing else. They saw it as the central issue in the world. And remember, for the protesters, they are not talking about Palestinian rights at all. The protesters are Israelis, they're almost entirely Jewish Israelis, not Arab Israelis, they're there with Israeli flags. They are arguing basically for a progressive liberal vision of the world against the ultra orthodox religious nationalist coalition around this populist right wing government.

• 34:54Alastair Campbell?

  But are they also worrying that there's a danger that Israel is on the road to becoming a theocracy? On a kind of mirror image of an Iran or a Saudi Arabia that where religion is the driver of the politics.

• 35:07Rory Stewart?

  We'll get into this when we we talk to Yuval, but I mean, Naval, for example, is is gay, he's married to a man. Tel Aviv is a very, very liberal city. And one of the things that this right wing government is trying to do, I mean, you know, as I say, their finance minister says he's a proud homophobe and organized a big anti-gay rights march and is very, very bound up with this issue. They're trying to do things like back the rights of religious Jews to refuse to serve gay couples. There's a lot of culture war going on, so there's a lot of talk about how feminists are taking over the Israeli military. But you also have a huge attack on secular Jews.

• 35:49Rory Stewart?

  So Smotrich is saying he doesn't recognize Reform Jews as really being Jews at all. And there are moves to try to say that the traditional rule, which is if you had one Jewish grandparent, you could come to Israel, is being challenged on the grounds that you need to check whether that grandparent was actually orthodox, religious. In other words, the whole nature of Israel, the sort of Israel that existed from the 40s, 50s, the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israel of David Ben-Gurion, the Israel of Golda Meir, which was dominated by people who were very, very proud of their Jewish identity but were not religious. I mean, these were came out of movements in the 20th century, secular atheist, agnostic

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  people who kept Jewish holidays, but in a very non-religious way. They did it in English, they they got rid of a lot of festivals. And that is now being totally challenged, partly by the birth rate. So, you know, the ultra orthodox, now 25% of the children in primary school are ultra orthodox now, and it'll be nearly 50% by 2050. And then you've got the orthodox settlers like Smotrich, who are, you know, are a different form of religious conservative. But Equally religiously conservative, challenging the whole liberal identity of Israel.

• 37:09Alastair Campbell?

  This piece of, specific piece of legislation was drawn up by somebody called Simcha Rothman, who is part of that religious Zionism movement. And the other thing that I think people should be aware of is that we've talked quite a lot in this context about Trump and, and America. American forces are very, very, and I don't mean military forces, I mean political, right wing political forces are right at the heart of this because there's something called the, the Chollet Policy Forum, which is a nationalist libertarian Israeli think tank. And a bit like some of our O P think tanks are funded by some of these right wing American billionaires that like to have their influence felt around the world. So there's,

• 37:53Alastair Campbell?

  this does link. And of course, Israel's always had a very, very politically quite dependent on its links with America. Very rare that you hear American politicians ever criticizing Israel, even when they've done some pretty grim stuff. But it'll be very interesting to see whether this moves the dial of the debate in, in America. I'd be surprised if it doesn't to some extent, though doubtless.

• 38:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, there's, there's a strange American group, which is, there's also Christian fundamentalists in the U S, which are part of the Trump coalition. And Trump actually became a close friend of Netanyahu, when Netanyahu was the deputy ambassador in Washington in the 1980s, and then the permanent representative to the U N. And of course, it was Trump who, partly out of a favor to Benjamin Netanyahu, moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and brought together these Abraham Accords, which were all about reconciling Israel with UAE, for example. But this American right, particularly the Christian American right, have these messianic views, which basically are very, very anti Muslim, very anti Arab, and, and

• 38:52Rory Stewart?

  see the religious Zionists as being the sort of fifth column for achieving their own dream of a Messiah, coming back to the sort of, you know, it's the book of Revelation, a Messiah coming back to Jerusalem. What, one more thing I, I think, which we talk about a lot, but is really being revealed in Israel, is the link between populists. In the sense of culture wars and populism in the sense of crime and corruption. That the main reason that Netanyahu has found himself, and he's in some ways occasionally sounds quite liberal, right? I mean, in some ways, he's a bit like Trump. He's got sort of past where he's often made some quite liberal comments and has now allied himself

• 39:34Rory Stewart?

  with the far right. The reason he's done it is that he was under corruption charges and people were so disgusted at his refusal to leave politics that he kept insisting on standing when he's basically about to go to jail, that most of the more moderate parties refused to serve with him, forcing him to pick up this very, very weird coalition of ultra orthodox and religious Zionists. But there's also another bit of corruption going on, which is that there's this major crime figures who are absolutely at the centre now of the way the Likud Party, Likud Party is the sort of conventional kind of conservative party, sort of mainstream right wing party that Netanyahu runs. But there are these, there's a guy called Raf Kaim Kadoshi, who is, you know, a serious imprisoned

• 40:17Rory Stewart?

  crime boss, who is to be found inviting publicly the head of the Likud Party's Judicial Commission that's meant to be scrutinising all these laws about Supreme Court to his house for parties. So there's a lot of really nasty stuff going on with corruption scandals, crime figures, all bound up with this new populist movement. And I guess it's about shamelessness.

• 40:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we know a bit about that ourselves. I think that where it goes now is pretty, I think it's going to be very tense for a while. You've got this situation where the military reserve, some of the military reservists, and that sounds like sort of territorial army, but they're not really like the territorial army. These are people who are on, they may have other jobs and so forth, but they've trained in the military and they're always on standby. And quite a lot of them, particularly in the air force, which is kind of essential to the Israeli Defence Force, are basically saying they're not going to serve. And it'll be, you know, and basically, the extremists in the government are basically saying, well, if you do that, you're a traitor and we can, you know, we've got every right to. To do whatever we want with you, but it's interesting how many of the very, very, very senior

• 41:28Alastair Campbell?

  voices in the defence and security infrastructure, you've got the former head of Shin Bet, which is the security agency, a guy called Nadaf Hageman, he is basically backing those who now refuse to show up for duty. You've got the former head of Mossad, which is their kind of MI6 and which has a very, very fearsome reputation. Tamir Pardo, he basically says that he hopes Netanyahu is one day in front of a court, held accountable for this. He says, we've become Iran or Hungary. We are ostensibly a democracy. In practice, we're a dictatorship. And the former Shin Bet chief, Yoram Cohen, he has come out against it. The guy who ran the Navy SEALs has come out

• 42:09Alastair Campbell?

  against it. You've got doctors talking about going on strike. And so the, you know, it's not impossible to imagine a kind of civil war emerging from this.

• 42:18Rory Stewart?

  And it's very weird, isn't it? Because what you're seeing is that the progressive left is being forced in some ways to make common interests with the military in order to win this argument. And the military, which, you know, most countries traditionally would be seen on the conservative side, are now lining up behind the progressive left because they think that the strategic implications of this are catastrophic. They think if people like Smotrich push ahead with their vision, you're going to end up with a completely untenable situation with the occupation and a completely untenable situation with neighbours. But it's also a reminder of how

• 42:57Rory Stewart?

  much Israel has changed. Because when I was talking about this world of the 40s, 50s, 60s, even the 70s and 80s, the military were the great, great heroes of the state. I mean, a lot of these people that that were Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Moshe Dayan, all these people were, you know, military heroes, great, great kind of generals. And even even on the Likud side, Ariel Sharon, again, was one of the, you know, big generals. This was a politics dominated. Not by people who'd served a few years in the military. Benjamin Netanyahu served a few years in the special forces, five, six years, and his brother was killed in the Entebbe raid.

• 43:37Rory Stewart?

  These people I've just been talking about were literally the chief of the army staff, the lieutenant generals, the heroes of the six-day war, the heroes of the Yom Kippur War, the people who actually put the entire Entebbe raid together. And they dominated Israeli politics for a period of sort of 20, 30 years. But they were also the figures, I mean, Shimon Peres and Rabin, despite coming from this military background, were the guys that got the Nobel Peace Prize after Oslo for dealing with Arafat. So the military and Mossad have often been, not from the point of view of the Palestinians, who see them as very much agents of a brutal occupation, but within the context of Israeli politics, have often felt as though they're more in the centre than on the right.

• 44:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, mentioning some of those names as well, and of course, you know, some of those were prime ministers in the time that we were in government. And whenever you go to Israel and you're with the political leaders, you get a very, very strong sense immediately of the particular security challenges that they face and the risks that they're under the whole time. I think I may have told you before that, I think it was Sharon that we were having a meeting with in his house. And to this day, I wouldn't be able to tell you where it is because the journey to get there was like something out of a James Bond film, where we were escorted by military and police outriders.

• 45:00Alastair Campbell?

  We were put into this thing, which I thought was where we'd arrived, in a garage. But in fact, the garage turned out to be a lift for the car. And then the car went up and then it came out somewhere else. And then we finally arrived at the guy's house. And I was just thinking with Netanyahu, because he's obviously had a couple of health scares in recent weeks, he's been in hospital a couple of times. I was actually thinking, if the guy dropped dead, who takes over? I mean, are these people, because these extremists are now, it seems to me, to be calling the shots. And you had a very interesting situation earlier in this this whole saga, which, as we say, has been going on for months and months now. You had the Defence Minister, a guy called Gallat.

• 45:42Alastair Campbell?

  He had, he actually put his foot down at one point and was arguing against this reform. Netanyahu sacked him or tried to sack him. And that led to one of the biggest protests, I think we talked about it on the podcast before. Eventually Netanyahu backed down for that time, but he's now got completely got the thing through. And what happens now with the Defence Forces is a very interesting question. If these reservists literally do refuse to serve, then that, they would argue, the government would argue, is putting the security of the state at risk.

• 46:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Alastair Campbell?

  And that's what I mean about how this thing's on a knife edge.

• 46:21Rory Stewart?

  Because, of course, ever since the Six Day War, it's the air force that the state has been very, very dependent on to neutralise attacks from neighbouring countries. I think a couple of things just to finish on. One is, we talk a lot about electoral systems, and we also talk about the way in which traditional right and left-wing parties disappear in different countries. Israel is an extreme example of both. It's a very, very extreme proportional representation system, even more extreme than the past. You only had a 1% threshold to cross. I think it's now a 3.5% threshold.

• 46:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Rory Stewart?

  But it's still a very low threshold, where you can end up with these small radical parties coming in. But it's also a case of a country where the traditional Labour Party, and in Israel's case, actually called the Labour Party, which dominated Israeli politics basically in different names from the creation of the state, and then in its own name, right the way through to the early 2000s, has basically disappeared. I mean, it's gone from having, you know, 35 seats down to, I think, now only four seats left in the Congress. And there really isn't a left left in Israel. What we sort of think of as a progressive left is a party, the blue and white party, which is run by yet another ex-general Benny

• 47:35Rory Stewart?

  Gantz. But he's somebody who, by the standards of the old left, sounds pretty right-wing. And this is one of the reasons why here in Jordan, nobody is even thinking about this. From their point of view, so many of the Palestinians I speak about are just not paying any attention to what's happening. They sort of have a plague on both your houses. It's a bit like if I were to talk to strong Labour supporters about the fight between moderate conservatives and far-right conservatives in the Conservative Party in Britain, people would be like, a plague on both your houses. We don't care whether Rory Stewart runs the party or not. Boris Johnson runs the party. We're all a bunch of Tories who voted for austerity. So the same point of view, from Palestinian point of view, this is all minor stuff. It's kind of slightly nicer settlers against nastier settlers.

• 48:18Rory Stewart?

  But basically, they are not taking on board the fact that this could be an existential threat to Palestinians as well. If the wrong people win, it's not as they imagine. Well, it's all the same. They're all a bunch of Israelis. If the wrong people win, things will get much, much worse. Because, as you say, a bunch of religious conservatives with theocratic views, who want to separate women from men on buses, who want to crack down on the Sabbath, who are beginning to introduce more and more strong religious rules, are going to find themselves in possession of one of the most powerful militaries in the world, nuclear weapons and a situation of military occupation.

• 48:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. That's a very important point you make about the Labour Party. Because, of course, for most of our adult lives, the Labour Party has been a really, really dominant force in Israeli politics. And indeed, leaders which for a country of seven million have become truly global political figures, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, as he said, Perez, even Eud Barak, who was their leader when Tony was first elected in 1997. And then Perez, of course, came back in, I think it was 2003, Barak came back. I'm just looking at a list now. Go on, Roy, I'll give you five million pounds.

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  Don't say that, because I'll probably get it right. Don't say that. But anyway, you don't bet. Five pounds. Come on, man.

• 49:44Alastair Campbell?

  The last four leaders of the Labour Party.

• 49:46Rory Stewart?

  In Israel?

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  I can't do the last four leaders. No.

• 49:50Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Well, the one that was four ago was a guy called Isaac Herzog. And if Jonathan Power were here, he'd say, ah, yeah, another one you helped and lost. Because just as I single handedly lost the Colombian referendum in his eyes likewise. But at that time, of course, they were, they were dealing, the Labour Party were struggling at that time with this question that you posed earlier. How do you counter this really vicious right wing populism? Which Netanyahu mastered for a while, but I've got a feeling out of this that Netanyahu is going to become the ultimate victim of it.

• 50:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I, I think it's, it's that sense that he's lost control that's terrifying people because it's not really just this vote. This vote, which is about whether the courts can act in a particular way. The reason it terrifies people is they see it as the beginning of a much, much bigger set of movements and they just don't believe Netanyahu when he says that he's just going to do this and he's going to stop. They see this as that because he's lied a lot in the past. They don't, they don't trust him and he thinks this is just the beginning of things that are much worse.

• 50:58Alastair Campbell?

  He's, he's not in control. He's very good at the public presentation in politics. He did an address to the nation last night. There was quite a lot of, oh, well, you're new speaker in it. This is going to strengthen the country. This is going to bring us together, all this sort of guff. But he, these guys are now very, very, very powerful within that government and within that culture and they've been planning this for decades.

• 51:23Rory Stewart?

  Good. Well, on that depressing note.

• 51:26Alastair Campbell?

  Very depressing.

• 51:27Rory Stewart?

  We'll be speaking to Yuval, who's one of the big, big leaders of the liberal progressive demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the right wing government and we'll be speaking to him tomorrow and it should be out on leading on Monday.

• 51:38Alastair Campbell?

  Fabulous. Looking forward to that. I'll see you soon.

• 51:41Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.