368. Trump's Plan for Gaza

What exactly does Trump mean by "taking over" Gaza? How have others reacted to Trump's proposals? How serious is he? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in an emergency livestream, recorded on Wednesday 5th February 2025. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to receive early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, enjoy ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, receive our exclusive newsletter, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and join our members’ chatroom on Discord. 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] Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Theo Young-Smith, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 3:23Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, welcome to a very unexpected episode, a live stream of the Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:33Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart, and we're both straight back off a plane. We were in Syria yesterday, then in Beirut. And we're just back. And while we were on the plane, in fact, the White House tweeted out, the US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it to President Donald J. Trump, which is the reason for this podcast, to try to get into that a little bit. Shall I do a very quick attempts to summarize what Donald Trump at least is saying before we get into what it actually means for the world?

• 4:05Alastair Campbell?

  On your go.

• 4:06Rory Stewart?

  So that's the first bit, this clear statement, the US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too, which was from his standing up press conference with Netanyahu. And then there were a series of other comments that he made. Benjamin Netanyahu is of course visiting the United States at the moment. He said the US would own Gaza, be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, get rid of the destroyed building and level it out.

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  And then he suggests very clearly that the people

• 4:47Rory Stewart?

  who currently live there, the Palestinians, whose territory it is, whose country it is, being relocated to Jordan and Egypt.

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  Initially, it looked like this might be people being optimistic, a temporary location so that he was going to move them out while he rebuilt Gaza and they would come back. But on being pushed further on that, that doesn't seem to be the idea anymore. He said, I envisage the people living there, the world's people. I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world will be there. Palestinians also will live there. Many people will live there. And on the US's relation to this territory, he said he saw, in inverted commas, a long-term ownership position, right? I'm going to stop there. Can we just, I mean, just before we get any further into what this might mean in the

• 5:43Rory Stewart?

  real world outside Trump's head? I think we've become so used to Donald Trump in just a few short weeks that we forget about just how these things are supposed to happen. So we just take a step back for a second. What would normally go into a US president making a new announcement on a very radical new plan for Gaza?

• 6:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the thing about this one is that you, well, it is, it is a pretty much a reversal or a total upending of what has been the United States' approach to Israel, Palestine, since the creation of Israel in 1948. With varying degrees of success and enthusiasm, most American presidents have sort of taken on the responsibility of, of trying to lead towards some sort of settlement which allows Israelis and Palestinians to live alongside each other. And Trump has essentially come along with this and said, no, we don't, we don't believe in that at all. What we believe is in turning the Gaza Strip into a kind of beach-style, beachfront development

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  that probably will be run by Jared Kushner. And if you think back, let's just think back a bit. Trump's first term at this stage, I just checked, at this stage of Trump's first-term presidency, we'd got through the row about the size of the inauguration crowds. We'd had a few kind of mad personnel things going on, well, that's been repeated. And then we were into sort of, you know, Trump sort of trying to play around with Medicare and Obamacare and all that stuff. This time, this is just the latest in a series of absolutely upending announcements. You know, we had Canada to be the 51st state, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, we're going to take over Greenland, we're going to take back the Panama Canal, we're going to have

• 7:38Alastair Campbell?

  a global trade war. And now we've got this. Now, everybody's saying this thing, it's become a bit of a cliche. You know, you have to focus on what he does, not what he says. But what he says is a signal, you, you talked about inside Trump's head. That's where a lot of this stuff is happening. One of the most laughable parts of his, of his press conference, where he talked about, you know, how much he'd read history. I mean, according to people who know Donald Trump, he's never read. He hasn't even, he didn't even read the book that he wrote, never mind any other sort of great history books. He doesn't necessarily understand this. He doesn't even try to understand this. He even talked, Rory, I don't know if you've heard the bit where he said that, you know, I've looked at all the pictures, I've got a better understanding of what's happening in Gaza than anybody.

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you don't have a better understanding of Gaza, what's happening in Gaza, than the people who recently have been walking mile upon mile upon mile, because, hey, guess what, Donald? They do want to go back to their homes, even though they've been demolished. They do want to live there.

• 8:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Alastair Campbell?

  So what he's done is, is essentially is saying, this is now America. And bear in mind, Rory, part of his shtick to become president again was no more wars. We're going to be out of the wars. But what he's done today, I think you could make the case, has exacerbated the possibility of the ceasefire not holding. I think it's exacerbated the possibility of the Saudi Israeli normalization situation being, being set back. And it's exacerbated the possibility of there being a real outpouring in the, in the entire region of anti-Trumpism, anti-Americanism. So he's set back, I think he's setting back any progress that you might have been hoping for.

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  Um, let, let's just, just do a, a quick, uh, I guess, summary of where we are with, with Gaza itself. So Gaza was, of course, where the horrifying October 7th attack was launched from. And Gaza has been the site of this unprecedented Israeli retaliation in which Israel has killed almost 50,000 people, including a lot of women and children, and of course, a lot of.

• 9:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think we're, I think we're above that now, Rory. I think, I think the latest figures is way above that.

• 9:53Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so it's, this is the Gaza we're talking about. And it's a Gaza in which 70% perhaps of buildings, maybe 80% have been destroyed. The economy has, there's an image for people watching, just as a sort of reminder of, of what it looks like. And you would, you would have seen this in drone footage, people would have seen this in, in many images, but that's a before and after shot. Here's another before and after shot.

• 10:17Rory Stewart?

  And so it's a situation which the economy has collapsed, water's gone, electricity's gone. People have gone from being in a middle income country to being one of the poorest countries in the world, dependent on international food aid. Yep. So there are broadly speaking, four things that could happen to Gaza. There is the realistic, there's the pessimistic, there's the optimistic, and then there's the Trumpian.

• 10:49Rory Stewart?

  So the Trumpian, we've heard a bit about, and you've explained that, and you're quite right. I mean, he talks about it being a lovely piece of property on the Mediterranean with lovely weather, and it could be a Riviera. And I think in his mind, he seems to think that he's going to just redevelop it as a property developer. And it's going to be a fancy beach resort. And when he says the world can live there, I guess he envisages it as a sort of one of those islands off the coast of Dubai. So let's kind of park that for a moment. Then we've got the pessimistic. The pessimistic is that Israel wants no responsibility for Gaza and wants to spend no money on Gaza. It also, for security reasons,

• 11:34Rory Stewart?

  wants to control the borders into Gaza, and it wants to be able to launch strikes into Gaza whenever it feels threatened.

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  And in that scenario, Gaza will probably continue indefinitely to be a one of the most horrifying places on earth.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  The super optimistic scenario, which is the scenario which Britain and the international community has been trying to get to, is a scenario in which Israel at least accepts that Gaza should be reconstructed, facilitates it by allowing the borders to open, allows political structures to be put in place, and then maybe with money from Saudi and UAE and some support from Egypt and Jordan and with the United Nations and international players, there is some sort of post-conflict reconstruction plan for Gaza.

• 12:35Rory Stewart?

  And then the realist position, which is probably the toughest of all, but is the one that's most likely to lead to things actually improving, is a situation which would be very difficult for Israel, which was a situation where you would have a genuine Palestinian Authority in charge in Gaza, because I don't think Saudi or UAE are going to want to provide security, challenge terrorists on the ground. It would have to be Palestinians doing that, Palestinian Authority. It would have to probably be there with the consent of Hamas, or it would be in a civil war, an armed civil war with Hamas. And the reconstruction

• 13:15Rory Stewart?

  would happen brutally slowly, but it would be led by the people of Gaza. And then, and then finally, you've got the Trump position. Over back to you.

• 13:23Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you, you said in your earlier question, you know, what would in normal times, because we all accept now we don't have a normal president. In normal times, what would have happened? You would have had a sense of this coming. You've got, everybody knew that Trump was going to be seen in Yahoo. Even before the meeting, the White House were briefing the press that this was going to be looking at a long-term plan to try to rebuild, end the war, rebuild Gaza, get people back into their homes. Even within the White House, that was where they thought they were. And then you had this sort of, almost like a kind of unfolding drama. You know, I said on the main podcast that we put out this morning, that you've got to think inside Trump's head as though he's, he's

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  in his own never-ending reality TV show. The Canada tariff show, that didn't go totally according to plan. That Trudeau guy, he hit back a bit hard than I thought he would. So I sort of, I presented it as a win, but deep in his heart, he knows that wasn't great. Need a new story today. Oh, I've got Bibi coming in. Let's do something really big and dramatic about Gaza. So he was, he was sitting at his desk, signing a few executive orders. And he sort of started to float the idea about, you know, maybe the Gazans just have to leave Gaza. And then by the time he'd got to the press, then he did another one when he had, Bibi was in for a little sort of fireside chat, the cameras came in. He developed the plan a little bit more. And then come the press conference, out with all this absolutely amazing stuff, the US will own Gaza. Now, the thing is,

• 14:52Alastair Campbell?

  Normally, an American president who's going to make a big policy announcement would get a bit of international humanitarian legal advice. Um, excuse me, Mr. Lawyer, is this, is this legal? And anybody who knows anything about international law would be saying straight away, no, Mr. President, it's not, doesn't give a damn about that. You go back to the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, all of these things will tell you, you cannot do this.

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  Because you're ethnically cleansing, you're ethnically cleansing a population, you're forcibly removing the population that doesn't want to move. That doesn't want to move, and in this case, an entire ethnic group.

• 15:29Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, correct. In fact, to be fair, you've been saying for some weeks that what he said about moving all the Gazans into Egypt and Jordan is ethnic cleansing and, and that, so it's, so it's illegal, um, it's not clear where you get any authority at all for it. And the way presented, presented it really was a case of, you know, you can take the, you can take the, the property developer away from being a property developer, but you're never going to stop Trump talking and behaving like a property developer. The whole thing was, we're going to build these beautiful homes, you're going to have some amazing, create, create all these amazing jobs. And then this, this idea that, you know, we've just come back from Syria, as you say, and I was, I was talking to a friend on the way back from the airport and I said, it was

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  amazing being in Syria. People just coming up to us when they recognize that, you know, we're clearly not Syrian, they could just come out the whole time saying, welcome, welcome, nice to have you here. And this friend of mine said, yeah, the exact opposite reaction that they get whenever they try and go anywhere. And so Trump's fine about saying, two million refugees, what's not to like about it? But, you know, build a wall in Mexico. And it's just, it's like it's, it's happening over there without, a bit like the AIDS thing that we talked about in the main podcast, the PEP far. No concept of the impact that this actually has on real people, real families who right now, as if they haven't been through enough, have to wake up and find Donald Trump wants to turn this into the 51st state.

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  And he's doing it in the place which has of course been the centre point of much of the instability of the world for the last 80 years.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 17:04Rory Stewart?

  And he's doing it with probably the four most important American allies in the world. So involved in this are Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Saudi.

• 17:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Rory Stewart?

  And he doesn't seem to have consulted with any of them.

• 17:19Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  The only one who's who's happy is Israel because Netanyahu takes this as, and this probably is the biggest story hiding under this whole thing, is what didn't happen in the press conference. And what didn't happen in the press conference was any significant pressure on Netanyahu to formalize or make a ceasefire.

• 17:36Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 17:36Rory Stewart?

  And Netanyahu would have taken away from this. He has a complete carte blanche from Trump to do whatever he wants.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  Which is why, which is.

• 17:44Rory Stewart?

  Trump is talking in much more extreme language than even even actually Smotrich or Ben Gavir have said.

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  And it's why we've we've said many times that in a sense, you kept saying, why is Netanyahu, why do they keep on with the bombing? Why are they doing this? The answer is they were waiting for Trump. Trump has arrived. I mean, the the one of the most fulsome tributes to Trump came from Ben Gavir. And he said that, you know, he's absolutely right. The only solution to Gaza is for the Gazans to leave Gaza.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  And and then they can they can settle.

• 18:15Rory Stewart?

  And this, of course, is is is what Smotrich has been quite explicit about in the West Bank as well, where he has, you know, he refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. And he says that the Palestinians who live in the West Bank um either submit or leave or will be killed. So.

• 18:32Alastair Campbell?

  As does the new American ambassador.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  As the new American ambassador. He also refers to Judea and Samaria. Yeah.

• 18:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  I don't think he's he's said the stuff about being killed here, but I I think the so we've got Israel. If we look at the other countries, Jordan, Jordan already has a very fragile situation. Its economy is in trouble. It's been hosting huge number of refugees already, million refugees from Syria, millions of Palestinian refugees historically. The majority of the population in Jordan is of Palestinian descent. If Jordan were to take another million refugees, it would totally upset not just the Jordanian economy, but it would mean that Jordan was living with a overwhelming majority of its population being Palestinian. And those Palestinians would be so angry with the Hashemite monarchy that Jordan would become seriously politically unstable. So it's not an option for Jordan.

• 19:23Rory Stewart?

  Uh, Egypt. Now, Egypt, I think, is in a slightly different position, but Egypt, for other reasons, historically, has not wanted to have a very large Palestinian population imposed on it, partly because it's economically fragile, it doesn't want more refugees and it doesn't want more instability. Saudi, again, can't really countenance this. I mean Saudi wants, still, despite the unreliability of Trump and the way he behaves, a defence deal with the US. They still somehow think it's worth trying to push for some kind of security guarantees out of the United States. But they can't sign up to something of this sort. What they will probably do and what UAE will probably do is

• 20:05Rory Stewart?

  is not say a great deal that explicitly. You'll get some from ambassadors, but yeah.

• 20:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, the Saudi government was once the first to respond and basically said, you know, we unequivocally reject this, this proposal. And frankly, practically, everybody has. Russia, China, the UK. Fairly sort of moderate language, but right around the world, people are basically saying, what on earth are you talking about?

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  And then I guess the final bit, which we, is at the centre of the whole thing, of course, the people of Gaza themselves. And the people of Gaza themselves will not want to move. I mean, now Trump's idea seems to be that you could build them lovely accommodation somewhere else. I notice he's not offering his own country, but in someone else's country. And that you'd give them money and they'd think, this is great. I'm going to get some lovely money and I'm going to get a new house somewhere else.

• 20:57Rory Stewart?

  And there are many reasons why they wouldn't do that. One of them is, of course, they wouldn't believe it for a moment. You're not going to leave your home believing you're going to be given a large lump of cash. And who's giving you the large lump of cash? Sure as eggs is eggs. Donald Trump, who's just shut down USAID, is not proposing to.

• 21:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he also, he also was very explicit, other than a bit like the Mexicans will pay for the wall. Other countries will, will pay for this. And on the, and on the point about accommodation, Roy, you and I yesterday, driving back from Damascus to Beirut. We went through the Bekah, Bekah Valley and, you know, mile upon mile of refugee camps, which you, however you think, I was, I was, I'd, I'd never done it in daylight before. And just these, it's literally just grey, it wasn't, you couldn't even call it tents. It was grey canvas. And as you said, there are children in their teens who have lived in places like that forever. So Trump will try and give the idea that this is, we're going to give them a nice little condo and they're going to have a nice little place to stay.

• 21:56Alastair Campbell?

  This is just a sort of big, bold idea that gets the world talking, which is what he loves. And he doesn't know where it's going to go. He doesn't necessarily care where it's going to go, but it's him dominating the space, dominating the airwaves and just getting everybody else to react.

• 22:11Rory Stewart?

  So here's a weird thing. So Ben Shapiro, who is a, uh, somebody I know who does a podcast in the US, very big podcast, very big right wing podcaster, um, says, undoubtedly the most extraordinary and unexpected element of Trump's first term was his remaking the Middle East, a Nobel Prize worthy accomplishment by thinking outside the box, recognizing actual hard realities and ignoring the conventional idiocy of the blob. He's doing the same now with Gaza. This vision is absolutely transformative. And then this is the key. You, you talked about the, the leader principle where, uh, whatever the leader says, it's right. And, and this is where Ben Shapiro articulates this. He says, whether this is his final

• 22:53Rory Stewart?

  vision of the region, number one, two, a negotiating tactic to achieve better deals, or three, something else, there's no doubt that Trump's creative thinking is breaking the mold and changing things. Let Donald J. Trump cook. So it's, um, I, I'm struggling for the literary analogy with this, but it, it's very much what when we were talking in Switzerland to the former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, whenever you call him out on one of Trump's statements, he says, he's a businessman. It's a negotiating tactic, you know, maybe he's just saying he wants to take ownership of Gaza and drive out the population. But in fact, what he's doing is he's saying it to pressure the Palestinians into a two-state solution.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Rory Stewart?

  It, it, what do you, what do you make of that sort of strange language where, you know, it doesn't matter whether he, he might be doing this, he might be doing that, he might be doing something else, but there's no doubt he's a genius. There's a plan.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. What, what I think we're, we all try to do is to make sense of stuff that actually deep in our hearts, we think is probably nonsense. So he comes out with this, I, I, if you were going to do this and you genuinely wanted this to work, I do not believe for one second that the place to launch that is at this sort of step by step dribble out through the day engagement with Bibi Netanyahu. You would want to get the Saudis on board, you would want to get the, the, the UAE to sort of not to reject it immediately. You probably would want to think that, you know, maybe this is a place where I can be a unifier, I can try and bring the United Nations back into this. You'd have had a plan for this.

• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  This feels to me like he's just think, oh shit, we've got Bibi coming in tomorrow, we've got to think of something big. We can't just sort of, you know, we can't just have sort of, you know, few talking points thing. So, and, and, and this is big, this is unbelievably big. This is like, you know, this is, as I said earlier, a total reversal of, of, of longstanding American policy. Now, he could argue, I was elected to change American policy, I was elected to be a disruptor, I'm going to disrupt. But I think the Shapiro's and the Musk's of this world, the people who refuse to accept that he actually might just be a bit stupid and say really stupid, irresponsible, reckless things, they find reasons to say, this is actually a really clever thing to do. And I, I just think, you know, we're going to get, we're going to have to get used to

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  this. I showed you some day, I showed you some data on the play, Rory, and, you know, here we are talking about him. Eight out of 10 of our most listened to episodes last year were about Donald Trump. You know, we're slightly playing his game. He, he, he just wants the whole world to be talking about him all the time. And the way to do that is to keep having ideas. Doesn't matter where they go so far as he's concerned, because by tomorrow he'll be on to another one.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  The, the, one of the things that I think is a real risk here, probably the most likely risk. So I think let's assume, I mean, I've been wrong about things in the past, but it seems at the moment that the overwhelming likelihood is this isn't going to happen. Because how could it happen? I mean, you'd have to send in the US military and drive Gazans out at the point of guns and you'd have children and women being driven out by American soldiers into countries that don't want to take them. So assuming he isn't actually going to do that, he might, he might, I suppose, conceivably, but let's assume it's not going to happen. Then the problem is this, that he's been talking about it now for longer than we think.

• 26:17Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he's crystallized it today, but he started on this a couple of weeks ago. And actually, Jared Kushner was giving some versions of something that sounded similar a few months ago.

• 26:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the waterfront, the waterfront in Gaza could be very valuable, he said. Israel should move them out and clean it up.

• 26:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  That's what Mr. Kushner said.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  So part of the problem is that if, for better or worse, Donald Trump has got this thing stuck in his head and he begins to dig in and it doesn't happen and everybody rejects it, Saudi rejects it, UAE rejects it, Jordan rejects it, Egypt rejects it, the Gazans rejected. The likelihood, it seems to me, is that he then will get angry and he will use this as a justification to do absolutely nothing. He will say, I produced my plan, you didn't like my plan, there's now going to be no US support, there's going to be no US money, UNRWA is shutting down, Jordan's not getting any money. And remember, Jordan, forty percent

• 27:20Rory Stewart?

  of key parts of its security and government budget rely on the United States.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:24Rory Stewart?

  That'll be cut off. And he will use this as an excuse to do something which will make the situation in Gaza unbearable. Because I'm afraid the brutal reality is that.

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  Without the United States, there is no incentive really for Saudi or UAE to get involved. Their main reason to get involved is not actually that they want to help Gaza, it's they want a defence guarantee from the US. Europe, in its current populist mood, feeling that its economy is struggling, is not going to lean in and take the full responsibility on Gaza. Israel is not going to do anything to facilitate, certainly Hamas having any role, but probably not the Palestinian Authority either, if Smritri and Ben Gavir have anything to do, that they want the fighting to start again. And so what we've really heard, basically, is Trump saying Gaza will remain in horror for the next four years.

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. There was a very, the ambassador during his first term, a guy called David Friedman, he was another one who was saying, this is great, thinking outside the box, he needs something to break this. And then, I think, sort of slightly gave the game away, because he was clearly sort of so excited by the whole thing. And he went, is this Mar-a-Gaza or Gaza Lago? And this notion that you can just turn something like the Gaza Strip, no, listen, by the way, don't get me wrong, if you could, you know, we were in Beirut yesterday, last night and this morning. And it was quite, I found it quite astonishing. You're driving through the city, you've got this incredible, beautiful view down to the

• 29:02Alastair Campbell?

  Mediterranean, you've got some fantastic sort of scenery, you've got wonderful buildings. And then every few hundred yards, you just see this bombed out building, okay?

• 29:12Rory Stewart?

  Which has been hit by an Israeli

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hit by an Israeli in recent weeks, yeah. Yeah. And so, and you think, yeah, well, I could see why maybe you wouldn't want to come here on holiday with that still going on. Or, you know, the fact that when we went to Syria, we did so, having been given the very formal advice by the Foreign Office, this is not a clever, not a very sensible thing to do. As it happens, felt, you know, where we were perfectly safe. Now, the point I'm making is that you can see why, the idea of a big vision to turn this into something more positive, more economically vibrant, so, fine. But to do that at the expense of 200, 2 million people being told they've got to move from their homeland. And also, I'll tell you the other thing which I think is, goes to the heart of this.

• 29:56Alastair Campbell?

  I've told you before about a discussion I was involved in with Tony Blair and George Bush and Dick Cheney. And we were talking about democratization and I I made the point that, you know, every time you people talk about democracy. The world hears you saying, America, you think everybody wants to be like America. And I think particularly now with Trump in power, I think an awful lot of people do not want to be like America. And this idea that the people of Gaza are going to go, wow, we could get a casino, we could get a golf course. Maybe Donald Trump will drive his his little, his little, you know, mobile thingy ball on the golf course. They want their own place, they want their own culture, they want their own, they want their own future and they want to be able to build it.

• 30:38Rory Stewart?

  I mean, there's one small thing which is, I mean, which is just another, maybe a good way of illustrating the extent to which Trump hasn't bothered to think this through, which is that even in the most optimistic idea, which some of his supporters were spinning a couple of days ago, that his plan was to remove everybody and then build a really nice place and bring all the Palestinians back again.

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  You can't do stuff like that because you lose all the property boundaries. I mean, the reason why you, when you reconstruct any place that's been devastated by war, you do it with the people there, is that you're reconstructing their homes, you're not building, I mean, unless I suppose you're Stalin's Russia. You're not suddenly building a whole series of brand new apartment blocks with no resemblance to the pre-existing footprint. I mean, how on earth do you sort out people's claims, their compensation, their ownership, their buildings or any of this stuff? We we've got, we've got some very interesting stuff coming in now from different people.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  One person I thought, which was quite good, let's just try to get it up, is somebody saying where a miracle lacks, the biggest fallacy of Trump's plan is to think the problem is with the land. And just to expand on that for a second, give that back to you. That the point is that even if you moved all the Palestinians just over the border to Egypt. And then you moved Israelis into Gaza. Why would that really suddenly solve Israel's security problems? You would still have some very, very angry Palestinians sitting on the edge of your new bit of Israeli territory. You're just pushing your problem a bit further up.

• 32:24Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. There was a very, the, the, the other thing, I think, the, the reason why this, I suspect will be really eating into the hearts of the Palestinians is because one of the things that kind of is, you know, part of their mindset, part of their culture, part of their focus and why they feel so strongly in the way they do is that, you know, eight hundred thousand were forced to leave their home, their homes back in nineteen forty eight for the creation of the Israeli state. And this feels, you know, if you suddenly have the American president coming along saying the only way now to, to, to sort of fix this is to move people out. It feels like another kind of expulsion, another rejection.

• 33:04Alastair Campbell?

  And the way that he framed it, you know, everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the US owning that piece of land. Well, who's he spoken to? Who has he actually spoken to? Because I've got to be honest, I've, I've read a lot of reaction to this. And apart from the, the kind of, you know, the total cheerleaders like Musk and the, the kind of, you know, the, the, some of the people we've talked about so far, virtually everybody seems to be saying, this is nuts and it's dangerously nuts.

• 33:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think the reason it's sort of fits them with the zeitgeist is that it's completely-

• 33:39Alastair Campbell?

  Zeitgeist, or it's zeitgeist.

• 33:41Rory Stewart?

  Zeitgeist. Is it's completely abstract. Um, it's got, I mean, it's got no, the, the thing it doesn't, so you can sort of, as you say, um, imagine that if you were sitting in Mar-a-Lago and looked quickly at a picture on a screen.

• 33:59Rory Stewart?

  You would say, okay, this this looks absolutely terrible. And and then he says, you know, the war is going to continue and people having a miserable life. So wouldn't it be better if they lived somewhere else? And we cleared all this and made some nice new buildings. And he can probably develop that a bit more. And if you really wanted to play out the Trump position, you could say, well, actually, Gaza doesn't have the complicated religious claims that Jerusalem has, for example. It's a very, very interesting bit of territory with a strong history, but it's not bound up in the same way that that it's not part of the historic state of Israel and it's not it's not where the prophet's Dome of the Rock was located or any of this stuff, right?

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  The the problem is that it's just not listening to anyone talking about any real people.

• 34:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Rory Stewart?

  The the heart of it is he's not asking himself, what well, what do the Gazans think? You know, what would they do? Or, you know, we're going to move everyone to Egypt and Jordan. Did the would the Egyptians and Jordanians accept this?

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

  But they don't, but he doesn't care.

• 35:00Rory Stewart?

  The Saudis are going to pay. Are the Saudis going to pay? I mean, and and here's here's Wig. I'm going to come to you on this one. Does no one understand how different spouting nonsense about Israel Gaza is compared to tariffs? So I think just to push you on that for a second, that's a good point from Wig, that he's that, yes, you're right, to some extent, it's reality TV.

• 35:24Rory Stewart?

  But it's a level of irresponsibility and recklessness going right and punching the very most sensitive thing in global politics at the moment, alienating absolutely Central American allies in Egypt, Saudi, Jordan. I mean, it it it's a it's a sort of move beyond tariffs, isn't it?

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, absolutely. But, you know, if you look at the what what happened in relation to tariffs, the big target were also people that actually most Americans, particularly Canada, would see as allies. They don't think they're at war with Canada. They may think they've got a problem with Mexican drug cartels and so forth, but they don't think they're at war with Mexico. And likewise in the Middle East, okay, let's give, let's give him some credit where it's due. The Abraham Accords and that sort of move towards the normalization of relations between some of the really the powers in the Middle East that have had such difficult relations over so many decades. That was a good thing. That was a good thing. And yet this is seems to me goes against that because he cannot resist

• 36:29Alastair Campbell?

  the idea of having these big, bold plans where people like Shapiro, people like Musk, whatever, people like McCarthy, they will give them some kind of intellectual coherence that actually they probably don't deserve. And there was a, in the, the car on the way back from the, the airport, I was listening to an interview with, um, he was the Justice Minister in the Palestinian Authority, from Gaza. And he, he said something I thought really quite moving. He said, look, we've, we've been here for thousands of years and we want to stay here. And it made me think of, you know, things like the Highland Clearances and the Irish Potato Famine and all of these things where bigger powers suddenly decide that you are just pawns in my game.

• 37:14Alastair Campbell?

  And the game that Trump is playing at the moment is I can reshape the world. And I've got this sort of, I'm, I'm not a president, I'm an emperor. And if you're an emperor, you can, you know, we've talked before about their obsession with Julius Caesar and this idea that, you know, so he starts off, he's going for Canada. He's going for Mexico, he's going for Greenland, he's going for Panama, he's renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. And now, out of nowhere, he's going to turn part of the Middle East, not into American influence, but literally American owned. It is off the scale. And I just, and let me just, just finally, this final little point. Yeah. I really do hope, I, when we were in the States, we met some people who were,

• 37:58Alastair Campbell?

  you know, the, uh, Arabs from Michigan, who basically said, yeah, there's something about, there's something about Kamala Harris I don't quite like. Uh, well, you know, they've now got Trump and how's that going for Gaza right now?

• 38:14Rory Stewart?

  The extraordinary, one of the many extraordinary things about it is that it's going to damage him with his voters much, much less than you could ever imagine. So you, we can explain this, other people can explain this till the cows come home. Right. I mean, this should be a fantastic litmus test that lets the entire world see this guy is completely irresponsible, alienating his allies, doesn't do his homework, doing something incredibly dangerous and is actually the reverse of what he said he was doing, which is making a more peaceful world, as you said at the beginning. And yet we have got to a state where his charisma and people's contempt for the Democrats is so

• 38:56Rory Stewart?

  much that literally, I mean, this is where he said it, didn't he? When he said, you know, I can shoot someone dead and Yeah. in Fifth Avenue, nobody care. I don't think his supporters will care at all. I don't think this is likely to have any effects on his net popularity. They will feel probably that let me, let me try some thoughts. A lot of people who are pro-Israel will think, well, great. I mean, I'm not listening to detail of this, but it sounds like it's good for Israel and bad for Palestinians. So good on him. Other people who will say, well, it's beating up a bunch of Muslims and they're terrorists and troublemakers. So great. If you talk about, you know, what the impact will be on Jordan and Egypt, they'll think, well,

• 39:38Rory Stewart?

  screw Gordon and Egypt, we're not interested in Jordan, Egypt anyway. And they love probably the sense of raw power. I mean, this, this is this thing we've talked about in the past, which I think is a very, very worrying thing. I, I've, I've been spending too much time recently looking at American bro podcasts and some British tech bro podcasts. And they're usually kind of really well put together, young men who spend quite a lot of time in the gym and invest in, I'm being a bit mean here, but invest in cryptocurrency and love reading biographies of, of American billionaires and they love sharing.

• 40:16Rory Stewart?

  Tech tips and and life hacks.

• 40:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  And and one of the things they absolutely love about Trump is the idea that he's a disruptor. They've got in his head that he's a guy like, you know, they keep using this analogy. Elon Musk came along, looked at electric cars and realised that they were spending all this money on lithium batteries. And he took it back to first principles and worked out, reversed engineer it. You didn't need so many, so much lithium and he made a much cheaper electric vehicle. And Trump is like that. And I don't know what it would take to to damage.

• 40:52Rory Stewart?

  This group, short of him launching and losing a major war. I I can't actually see what he can do that can, I mean.

• 40:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, yeah, Rory, but just on that, I mean, look, we we I've said right at the start that he's a very different Trump to the first term Trump. But ultimately, he's the same person. And I don't think that much of what he does is going to work because I don't think he sticks at things. He moves on to the next episode, he moves on to the next thing.

• 41:17Alastair Campbell?

  So I where where there is a massive gap at the moment, there is no coherent Democrat campaigning opposition against him. You see bits and bobs of it here and there. They really, really are in a bit of a state. We, you know, Tommy Vita, ex Obama guy, and leading this weekend. And I think he accepts the Democrats really haven't got their act together. He's definitely using this first few weeks and months to really impose himself in a way that he maybe didn't first time around. Very good question here from Will Taylor, Rory. Guys, that's us. Are we going to do an emergency podcast anytime Trump opens his mouth? Don't we have to an obligation to consider whether it's credible? And that's a fair point because I, as I've said earlier, I do think this is partly about.

• 41:59Alastair Campbell?

  Tommy Vita said that, you know, he will always get joy out of outraging and upsetting people like us. Okay, that that owning the libs thing is part of what he does. But I think if you've got the elected president literally saying, Will, that he that the the the the policy of the United States now is to turn Gaza into an American owned extension of the United States, that is worth talking about. I agree, though. My instinct is always with Musk and Trump to say, let's just hold back for a while. But I think on this one, we we're right to do this.

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  We we I think we have to because, I mean, I I look, I don't want to seem hysterical, but. There are, I'm increasingly believe that it feels like the 1930s now. It feels like the 1930s with the way that obsequious business people and media magnets are justifying horrendous statements. It feels like the 1930s when you've got the dominant party in Austria talking about removing Austrian citizens, who are not white Austrian citizens, and where the AFD appears to have people right at the core of them who are talking about basically expelling Muslims.

• 43:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  And where we're getting into these debates which feel very 1930s with people saying, oh, well, you know, if you assimilate as a Muslim, you're okay, but if you're not assimilating, you're too alien. We're going to have to remove you from the country. And I don't think it would have been appropriate in the 1930s, standing up against fascism to say, well, we'll just ignore these people. You know, we don't want to give them airtime because the fact is, that's all very well when they're running for office. But when he is the president of the most powerful, wealthiest country on earth with the largest military on earth, no, you can't ignore what he says.

• 43:45Alastair Campbell?

  There's a question here from Ayap Noah, who I think is an Israeli. I really hope Rory and Alistair don't start talking about Ben Gavir and Smotrich like they're anomalies. This is a deeply rotten society. I mean, that is an interesting point. It's the weather. We probably do, I think, still have a view of Israel as having a very, very sizable liberal population. However, you know, we've seen, and we talked about this to Yuval Noah Harari and to others, we've seen Israelis who absolutely despise Netanyahu, who nonetheless do feel very threatened, do feel very motivated by a more nationalistic sense of who and what they are.

• 44:24Alastair Campbell?

  There was one question which I can no longer find, but it was somebody who was saying that what these, all this stuff, here we are, Elaine Chalas, to what extent is this pronouncement on Gaza? Distraction politics, diverting the world and its media from the illegality of the ongoing dismemberment of the US state by Elon Musk. This relates to the whole thing about, you know, getting access to federal information, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you've got to be careful with Trump because he is, that is what he's good at. What he's brilliant at is kind of playing the media, attacking the media, undermining the media. And getting them to dance to his tune. I don't mean dance to his tune, say that they think he's great, that lots of them do. But dance to his tune and where he wants them to go, they go.

• 45:09Rory Stewart?

  Um, we've been challenged by somebody again on the, on the Smotrich Bengavir thing. So let, let, let's be clear, Smotrich Bengavir are very, very fringe extremists. Right. They have a few percentage of the vote in Israel. Where you're absolutely right, Alistair, though, is that Israeli support for the war is very, very high and encompasses the majority of the population and the majority of the population, a lot of polls have not favoured a ceasefire. You're also right that I notice now that people are more and more reluctant to talk about Palestinians. And people are less and less interested in the idea of a two-state solution.

• 45:54Rory Stewart?

  And Netanyahu, who is a wily politician, senses that.

• 45:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 45:59Rory Stewart?

  Um, I think many Israelis feel that it's very difficult to disentangle Hamas from Gaza and were very shaken when the hostages were returned to see people in Hamas fatigues. And that's a problem for Netanyahu because he promised that he'd destroyed Hamas and they're clearly very much still there. And I think at the heart of it is that many Israelis, understandably, having been through this attack which completely threw them off balance and reminded people of the horror of pogroms, want to try to live in a zero-risk environment. And that's a very unfair thing to say, but I'm afraid it's true. And the problem with trying to live in a zero-risk environment is you put a hundred percent of the risk on someone else.

• 46:44Rory Stewart?

  So there's no longer a practical conversation happening about what exactly happened on October the 7th. How could you have prevented it? What kind of standoff would you need?

• 46:54Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 46:55Rory Stewart?

  How would you prevent Hamas posing a significant security threat to Israel?

• 47:02Rory Stewart?

  The desire now is one hundred percent security. And one hundred percent security does not at the moment seem to be consistent with allowing Gaza to have a its own administration and rebuild itself because uh so many Israelis are concerned that if it were rebuilt, tunnels would be rebuilt, Hamas infrastructure would be rebuilt, and they would be at threat again.

• 47:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there's a there's a comment here from somebody called Lyle saying Trump understands people way better than you guys. Well, I'd say that, Leo, Lyle, he understands some people way better than we do. And he understands those Americans who put him in power way better than we do, possibly. But I think going around different parts of the world, uh there is this sort of massively well organized, well funded, very far right campaign. I think Trump's part of it, must be part of it. We've got elements of it here in the UK and around Europe. But I think most decent people around the world are actually utterly revol- utterly revolted by Trump. And I find it sad that so many people, Rory mentioned the ones in business, but there's also people in politics right around the world

• 48:09Alastair Campbell?

  who feel that because he's been re-elected, somehow they have to stop telling their own truth. And I don't think that that is the way to deal with Trump. I think the way that people have stood up to this today, better than they did, say, over sanctions. We've got question time coming out tomorrow, Rory, and there was the there was the question, you know, why Canada is a member of the Commonwealth? And we've got very, very close ties, but I I did you hear any of our politicians standing up and speaking up for Canada? Um, you know, we've got to understand this guy, this we we saw when we're in Davos, we're talking to some people who would sort of describe themselves as kind of geo strategic experts. And they were basically saying, it's a very, very interesting question today as to whether the biggest threat to the UK comes from America or China.

• 48:54Alastair Campbell?

  Um, now, it's it's weird that we even might even allow that into our thinking. Yeah, and I I would still say, no, it's China. But I just think we've got to understand, we're dealing with somebody here is not just unpredictable, but he's utterly unreliable because it's all about him.

• 49:11Rory Stewart?

  We we had a challenge from E plus you saying, Rory, you're wrong. Um, uh Shin Bet Mossad, the army would oppose the occupation of Gaza. That's absolutely right. Israel does not want to be an occupying power in Gaza. Because that would be like what Israel did in Lebanon from nineteen eighty to the mid two thousands. They don't want soldiers being killed, they don't want the responsibility of Gaza, they don't want the cost of trying to occupy Gaza. But on the other hand, they do not want, certainly Netanyahu's coalition do not want a strong, successful Palestinian state running Gaza, and they don't want a situation which is almost inevitable, which is the state reaching some kind of understanding with Hamas, which have a big de facto presence on the ground.

• 49:54Rory Stewart?

  So Israel is between a rock and a hard place, and the likelihood is what they will do is not occupy Gaza, not take responsibility for reconstructing, but nor will they allow the Palestinian Authority to establish itself in Gaza. Instead, it will continue being pummeled to rubble, and there will be occasional humanitarian convoys let in, but never enough, because Israel will continue to demand that it can stop those convoys at any moment, that it worries that things are getting into Gaza, that it doesn't want to get into Gaza. And it will continue, but let me, so that was me replying to the challenge on the chat. Can I come back to your bigger point, though?

• 50:35Rory Stewart?

  I was talking to a Syrian friend two days ago about this, and he said, when is the world going to come together and stand up to Trump? When are people going to actually unify? Now, you talked about this in relation to Canada, but why are we not yet seeing a really strong unified response? Britain, EU, Canada, G7 saying, no, we profoundly, particularly since, as you've said before, our instincts is he's some, he's a bully who responds to strength.

• 51:12Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I mean, I don't know when the next G7 gathering would be, and of course, at the moment, you've got Trudeau on the way out, you've got Sholz probably on the way out, you've got Macron weakened. But just, let's just imagine that the G7, the next G7 was taking place next week, okay? Let's just imagine it was. You've got seven people that have always been presented, we had the bit when it became G8 and the Russians were there, but generally these are seven countries that have a lot to agree on. What would the G7 have said if it met, the leaders met next week at a time when Trump is saying, "Hey Trudeau, your piddling little country should just be part of mine"?

• 51:54Alastair Campbell?

  That, you have to, all night now, let's say there was a meeting of NATO heads of government tomorrow, what is the Prime Minister of Denmark meant to say across the table with NATO members there to Trump who's basically saying, "I can take over a huge chunk, Greenland, a huge chunk of your country"? So I think we've got to stop pretending and stop kidding ourselves that we're living in normal times with a normal American president. We're dealing with somebody who I think, you're right, I think people are going to have to stand up. This is a very good example of where it could happen. I actually think for, you know, one of the, maybe even one of the permanent five leaders to say, "Maybe it's time just to have a bit of a clear the air kind of discussion at the United Nations about this." Or maybe we need to, you know, if we're now talking about such a fundamental change in

• 52:39Alastair Campbell?

  the Middle East, let's have a special G7, let's have a special meeting of the, of the key players in the Middle East. Because what you can't do is just have every world leader every day wake up and see what rubbish he's come out with overnight, and then have all these kind of cheerleaders saying there's method in the madness.

• 52:57Rory Stewart?

  And one of the problems which Sarah Khan, who's one of our subscribers, just pointed out in the comments, is that from the point of view of many people, Biden was not that great on international law either. And that, that will be true for people who feel strong solidarity for Gaza and Palestinians. It's also true for the Gulf Arabs. So part of the problem is we're positing it that there is, was an old world where you could sort of, if you were the Gulf or the Palestinians, you could rely on Europe and the United States, and now suddenly Trump's come in. From their point of view, they would say, for example, let's take the Houthis. So the Houthis fired rockets at Saudi and the US did not protect Saudi, and Biden refused

• 53:42Rory Stewart?

  to declare the Houthis a terrorist group. As soon as the Houthis fired rockets at Israel or at ships trying to get to Israel, Biden intervened and launched airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, right? That would be an example of people thinking there's double standards here. They will also think, well, actually, in the end, Biden caved into every Israeli demand there was. And so one of the challenges, I guess, is for people like you and me who feel very, very strongly that Biden was much, much better than Trump, is trying to explain something which is quite difficult, which is he's much better than Trump despite all his flaws, despite all the hypocrisy. And of course, Europe is a much better ally than Trump.

• 54:27Rory Stewart?

  Again, despite all its hypocrisy, despite all its history, despite all its flaws. And that's a more difficult argument than just a kind of black and white hero against villain argument.

• 54:35Alastair Campbell?

  There's somebody just put a thing in the chat saying that there's quite a lot of people saying we've got Trump derangement syndrome. I'm not sure about that, but anyway. Maybe we have, but there's somebody saying that, you know, Biden actually did fail on this. And what he's trying to do, what Trump is trying to do is to shake things up. Because the truth of here we go. Red bucks, what progress between Hamas and Israel are you talking about AC? I guess I'm talking about the ceasefire. The back and forth slaughter will continue forever unless something monumental is done. Trump is trying to shake things up. That is the sort of, you know, the disruptive. That's the saying, he's a disruptor. He'll shake things up, see what? And there's an argument of that. You could say there's an argument for that. By the way, the other thing that people are saying in the chat is that we was pointless

• 55:16Alastair Campbell?

  burbling on about the International Criminal Court because America is not a party to it. However, I checked on this earlier today. Under the Rome Statute, Palestine is a party to the ICC. And that means that if there are any Americans who take part in such a program inside Palestine, they would be covered by the International Criminal Court. So it's not as simple as just saying because America is not involved. But anyway, yet again, was that, did that even go across his desk? I doubt it.

• 55:48Rory Stewart?

  Can I finish? We're coming to the end, but just let's just finish with a final difficult question for you.

• 55:56Rory Stewart?

  How does Keir Starmer handle this? Because, again, a bit 1930s. We've got a guy who's going around insulting aggressively a lot of the rest of the world while occasionally tempting a bit of a charm offensive. Against Britain, you know, yeah, he keeps saying, you know, really likes Keir Starmer. And, you know, he might give them a softer trade deal than he'd give other people. And so there will be big pressures when Britain is worried about its economy and its growth and this kind of thing to think, well, maybe, maybe we shouldn't, you know, speak up too much. Maybe we should let Europeans speak up. Maybe, you know, if we're, if we're gentle with them, we might be able to get away with stuff.

• 56:38Rory Stewart?

  What's, how, how, how is, how is, I mean, you know, on the one hand, we're calling people to come together and stand up against Trump. On the other hand, and this is the problem I'm giving you, you're the, let's imagine you're the comms director and number 10. How do you balance that against the real politique of what Starmer may want to get out of Trump?

• 56:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, again, we talked about it this briefly on the main podcast this week about how this, the right in particular are trying to force upon Keir Starmer this false choice between, you can either be with America or you can be with Europe, you can't be with both. I think he's got to, to try to maintain good relations with both. I, I do think in terms of economic and diplomatic power, far more should be invested in, in Europe, particularly with Trump being so unreliable. But in terms of this specifically, I actually think that I was quite encouraged by the way I, as soon as, I, I, I shouldn't do this, but as soon as I got off the plane and we, you and I were both sort of looking at our phones as we sat on the plane this morning and just checking on all the things that Trump had said and done.

• 57:37Alastair Campbell?

  And one of the first things I did was I texted David Lowry and said, you can't sit this out, you've got to say something about this. Anyway, by the time I, I got home, both Keir Starmer and David Lowry had said something and, and Keir Starmer was asked about it at PMQs. And he, he was, he was fairly moderate in the language, but he basically said that, you know, the, the Gazans want to live there, they want to go home. He talked about how, you know, these two images in his mind, one was of the Israeli hostages being reunited with their families. But then the other was of these thousands and thousands of Gazans, you know, trudging, walking to their homes because they did want to rediscover.

• 58:21Alastair Campbell?

  They did want to see how badly damaged they were. They did want to see whether they could. Could rebuild. So I think he's sticking to the British position is which is that we've got to ultimately keep trying to work towards a two-state solution. What he hasn't done is come out and said the sort of things that you and I've said because, you know, we are no longer political players, as it were, involved in in this. We're, as it were, commentating from the from the outside. But I think I think the important thing is there's got to be values and principles at the heart of this. And the the values and the principles say the British role in this should be to keep pressing and keep arguing and fighting for proper justice for the Palestinians, security for the Israelis, and and work towards a two-state solution.

• 59:04Rory Stewart?

  Good. Let's let's finish on that. And remember that the thing that's been lost in all of this is the question of peace for Gaza and reconstruction for Gaza. He's just thrown this completely irrelevant, unworkable plan down on the table by doing so, taken all the pressure on Israel to think seriously about what the future of Gaza could be, how reconstruction could happen, what kind of government it would have, the interests of the Palestinians being completely ignored. And the world is flailing around dealing with the US president who is, in a way that wasn't true really in his first term, is trying to set himself up, not as he claimed

• 59:47Rory Stewart?

  in his in his inaugural address, as an agent of peace, but as an agent of chaos.

• 59:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just remind people, the main podcast this week is already up. We talk about Syria, we talk about Trump and tariffs, we talk about Germany, we talk about Rory and JD Vance arguing about God, we talk about Heathrow and Gross. Q and A is up overnight and tomorrow into tomorrow. And then on Monday, the interview that Rory and I have just come back from Syria doing with the new president of Palestine, new president of Syria, Ahmed Al Sharar, which I think you will find very, very interesting. And by the way, one of the reasons we did this emergency podcast is because plenty of our subscribers were telling us that they wanted to. So if you want to become a subscriber, go to the rest is politics.com. Thank you for listening and watching.

• 1:00:35Rory Stewart?

  Thank you again. Bye bye, guys.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:01:06Speaker 05

  I'm not the first man.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only begins October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:01:12Speaker 06

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% agave. 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Espolone Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. 80% proof. Copyright 2026. Campali America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.