178. Israel At War

How did Hamas launch one of the largest invasions on Israeli territory in recent history? What happens now? Will this conflict have geo-political ramifications throughout the Middle East? Join Rory and Alastair for this emergency episode of The Rest Is Politics. The CNN interview Rory mentions was with Palestinian National Initiative leader Mustafa Barghouti. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, 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.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, we've been trying for a couple of days now to get together and do something on what's been happening in Israel and Gaza. And we put out a question to listeners this morning, saying, "What would you like to ask us about what's happening in the Middle East right now?" And I can tell you, the single most asked question was asking Rory for one of his explainers. Now... So take us from the beginning of Thai to where we are now in two minutes.

• 2:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, without getting in trouble from every side.

• 2:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is the problem. You know, I've noticed that already. Twitter is the worst place in the world to debate this issue. I've discovered that, which is why I've stopped debating it on there. It's virtually impossible to say anything that is nuanced, that is not black and white about this situation. And the truth is, as you know, and as we'll hear from you very, very shortly, you need a bit of nuance in this because it is so steeped in difficult history and very, very complicated. So why don't you just try and give us a bit of a background?

• 2:48Rory Stewart?

  I'll give it a go and with apologies to people because there's a lot of sensitivities here. So essentially, going back 3,000 years, state of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community and they were displaced just under 2,000 years ago, basically by the Romans. And large Jewish communities formed then in many places, in places like Iraq and Yemen, also in Central East Europe and in Spain and Portugal and in many other places too. And then at the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th, beginning 20th century, there was the beginnings of a Zionist movement pushing for a homeland for the Jewish people, driven by the fact that Jews had experienced appalling discrimination and brutal pogroms,

• 3:32Rory Stewart?

  murderous attacks on them over many, many hundreds of years, but mounting particularly in Central East Europe in the late 19th century. The British got behind this with the Balfour Declaration about the time of the First World War. And there was increasing Jewish movement back to the former state of Israel. But of course, during the nearly 2,000 years, this had become very much a place dominated by Arab Muslim communities. So the Jews were moving back into a populated place. And the British, initially after the First World War, set up a mandate where they were trying to balance the interests of Arabs and Jews, found themselves in the middle of an increasing civil war.

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  And the Brits were actually targets of terrorist attacks from both Arabs and Jews. And then, of course, the defining horror of the Second World War, the Holocaust, in which 6 million European Jews are killed and which absolutely demonstrates to the world the extremity of the threat that Jews face and the requirement for a Jewish homeland, which then drives into large numbers of Jews moving to Palestine after the war. And 1948, led by David Ben-Gurion, the setting up of the State of Israel, driven by actually an Israeli military assault that takes a lot of the territory

• 5:00Rory Stewart?

  previously held by Arab communities and involves many, many Arabs being displaced from their homes. And that State of Israel, that 1948 state, is then recognised largely by the international community, although not by many Palestinians. And that remains the situation until 1967, when it then faces a simultaneous attack by Egypt, Syria and belatedly Jordan. And in the 1967 war, Israel won a very, very rapid victory, about six days. And it took a lot of territory which was outside the 1948 borders. So it took Gaza, which we're going to be talking about today. It took the West Bank, which had previously been controlled by Jordan. Gaza had previously been controlled by Egypt.

• 5:43Alastair Campbell?

  And just so we're clear, that is why when people talk about the occupied Palestinian territories, that is what they're talking about.

• 5:51Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. When most people talk about the occupied Palestinian territories, they're talking about those bits that were taken by Israel after 1967. Now, there's a detail here, which is that there are also parts of the Palestinian movement who reject the original State of Israel and the 1948 borders. But broadly speaking, when people talk about the occupied Palestinian territories... They're talking about these areas. There was then another war, which is important to us because it was the anniversary of that war that triggered these recent attacks. Almost exactly 50 years ago, a Yom Kippur War, where there was another attack, which Israel again beat off, but with much more difficulty. Fast forward, and in the 1990s, and we're now coming into stuff that you began to connect with person in your professional life.

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  There were then a series of peace talks, particularly around Oslo. And the conclusion of Oslo was that territories would be divided into categories A, B, and C. So there would be Palestinian territories, there would be territories under mixed control, and C, which were going to be Israeli territories. And the idea was to push ahead with a two-state solution. A Palestinian Authority emerged on the West Bank with its capital at Ramallah. And in Gaza, another form of Palestinian Authority emerged. And the challenge there was that these territories are not contiguous. They didn't form a joined-up country.

• 7:12Rory Stewart?

  In fact, increasingly, because of Israeli settlers who've been putting houses and settlements in beyond the 1967 boundaries, it actually is a series of tiny enclaves, over 100 little enclaves, divided by checkpoints and walls. Fast forward to 2004, 2005, and Israel withdraws from Gaza. And that's the first big move. They actually remove a few thousand settlers who are there, forcibly remove a few thousand settlers, and hand it over to Palestinian control. Not long after that happens, a movement called Hamas, which is a much more radical Islamist

• 7:54Rory Stewart?

  group, much more strongly associated with terrorism, takes over the Gaza Strip, which is this bit that runs basically from Egypt along the coast, along the edge of Israel. And the Palestinians are then divided between this Hamas-controlled area, which is the Gaza Strip, and the rest, which is controlled by the former PLO Fatah government. Then there were Intifadas, there were Israeli attacks, both fights in reprisal against attacks from Hamas out of Gaza, reprisals about attacks from Hezbollah, which is another group which is based in southern Lebanon. And fast forward. To where we were about a week ago. And a week ago, Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, was on the record saying the Middle East had never been so peaceful.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  And the reason I think he thought that is that Israel had developed a special missile protection shield, which meant it was increasingly difficult for these Palestinian groups to fire either from Hezbollah Hamas rockets into Israel and do damage. There hadn't been that number of attacks. And most of the focus in Israel, as we picked up on the pod over the last few months, has actually been not about Palestine. It's been an internal Israeli fight between liberals and conservatives to do with challenging the way in which the Israeli government is moving in a populist direction, has brought in far right people like a man called Smotrich, the finance minister, pushing to overturn the independent judiciary in Israel.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

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

• 9:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I thought it was a very, very good explainer. And there will doubtless be some people who will object to some exclusions and some inclusions, and I'm afraid that's the that's the nature of what we're talking about.

• 9:38Rory Stewart?

  Look, I don't want to ventriloquize for people, but broadly speaking, if you want to see the view of, I suppose, a pretty middle of the road Palestinian politician, there is a great interview, which you will share in the links, which has just been done on CNN, nine minute interview, in which a Fatah politician gives his views on the situation. But broadly speaking, from the Palestinian point of view, they would say, yes, there's been a terrorist attack. And most of them would say they would not in any way condone the killing of civilians. What would then happen is they would then say, you need to understand that Gaza is, from their point of view, a prison camp with really no ability for people to go in and out.

• 10:19Rory Stewart?

  It's a humanitarian disaster where people lack basic supplies and that at the root of this violence is an Israeli occupation, which Palestinians will then explain, and you'll see it better if you're interested in this interview on CNN. Explains involve breaking territory into tiny enclaves, checkpoints, and what they experience. As an apartheid state and they called it an apartheid state because they feel that they are not being given full civil and democratic rights. And if they were given full civil and democratic rights, the situation would be very different. That's the Palestinian point of view. Israeli point of view, there are many Israeli points of view, but they would start by saying, listen, understand that these are very serious enemies out there.

• 10:59Rory Stewart?

  That Hamas, back in the 1990s, had a founding charter dedicated to the complete elimination of the state of Israel. That states like Iran were committed to the elimination of Israel, that the 67 war and the Yom Kippur war were designed basically to wipe them off the face of the map. That they feel that they have been marginalized and attacked unfairly at United Nations forums for decades. While other countries like China and Zimbabwe and Cuba haven't been attacked in the same way, they feel it's an existential threat. They would emphasize that the Israeli army warns civilians before it attacks buildings. They will emphasize, and again, there are many different views on this 1967 territory, but some Israelis would say the territory they took

• 11:44Rory Stewart?

  is essential for protection of the state of Israel, that the Golan Heights, for example, were artillery positions from which the Syrians rained rockets down on them. And that Israel's right to defend itself involves being very realistic about the significant threat that Palestinians pose. So somewhere there are those two positions and there will be 500 other positions. We look forward to the conversation.

• 12:07Alastair Campbell?

  We had lots and lots of questions, as I say, but one of them was about good books to read. And there is actually, there was a brilliant play about the Oslo Accords. And I think from memory it was called Oslo. It was published as a book. It's worth getting hold of that. Absolutely amazing play and it's one of those plays that you can read and get a sense of the drama. And just before we go on to what's happening now, coincidentally, and I didn't know that Jake Sullivan had said that, that is pretty remarkable. And just before these attacks, literally the day before the the latest attacks by Hamas, which have been bigger and more violent and more deadly than anything we've seen from them before. And that anything the Israelis have endured before, which is why they're calling it nine 11 plus Pearl Harbor in one.

• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  But our good friend, The New European, had a five-page spread in last week's paper called Eighteen Days That Shook the World about the Yom Kippur War that you mentioned. And I think you're right that that was one of the key moments in the history. And I just want to read sections of it because it is so, partly because it's so dramatic, it also gives you an indication of how quickly these things can escalate to almost unimaginable heights or depths, depending how you're looking at it. Because this almost frankly caused World War III and almost caused Israel to go nuclear. So if I just give you this section, so this is, you said earlier, Syria and Egypt have attacked.

• 13:37Alastair Campbell?

  At the start of the war, the US and USSR had requested support from their respective allies. On the Golan Front, Syrian forces got direct support from Soviet military personnel. It was estimated around 20 were killed in action. The Americans were initially reluctant to come to Israel's aid. Then during the night of October 8 to 9, so that's exactly today as we're recording, 50 years ago, after being told by her Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, that Israel was facing defeat, the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, authorised the assembly of 13 tactical nuclear weapons. The readying of these weapons was done overtly as a signal to the United States. Then Nixon's in the middle of all sorts of scandal, Kissinger's dealing with this.

• 14:20Alastair Campbell?

  And here's an interesting situation in Europe. With the exception of Portugal, the Netherlands and military-ruled Greece, European nations refused to even allow US planes carrying supplies for Israel to refuel at their bases. The Arab states, in response to US interventions, cut oil supplies and threatened embargoes, leading to the 1973 energy crisis. And if I go right to the end, when you said there, Rory, about people feeling that this had never been safer and that Israel felt secure. When there finally was a ceasefire after this, after the Yom Kippur War, which went on for 18 days, there was little rejoicing in Israel.

• 15:01Alastair Campbell?

  The failure to foresee the attack was the greatest failure in Israeli history. One analyst blamed arrogance, lack of understanding of the abundant intelligence and disregard for the enemy. The military historian John Hughes Wilson described it as a classic example of confusing political aspirations with hard facts. For good or ill, Israel would never make the same mistakes again.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  Gosh, and here again, so to remind people of what actually happened, so 6:30 in the morning, Hamas out of Gaza, which is this coastal strip adjoining Egypt, fired perhaps 5,000 rockets, the Israelis are saying 2,500 rockets. And then about an hour later, they tore through the barriers, through the fences that divide Gaza from Israel. Some coming in from boat, one person coming in from air, bulldozers ripping down the Erez crossing, and simultaneously drove, in some cases 20, 30 kilometers into Israel, and began the most violent series of terrorist attacks.

• 16:05Rory Stewart?

  Some of them were directed against military targets, so you'll see images of commanders, Israeli commanders being, one of them, I think, in his boxer shorts, being kidnapped and taken into a car, tanks being seized, Gaza divisional headquarters being stormed, and the Zikin base. So, you know, a big military frontal attack, but also the real horror at the centre of things, which people will have focused on, which was that there was a festival taking place, and people had been dancing up all night, and 7:30 in the morning, sun was rising, just come to the end of the festival, and into the middle of the final stages came a group of terrorists on bikes and trucks and began opening fire on the crowd, killed

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  something like, it's difficult to know, 250, 260 people, and then went back across the border, taking over 160 hostages, and some of the fighters remained on the ground, continued to fight, holding police stations. In border towns, the Israeli military then mounted a counter-strike, which has probably killed about 400 people. The thing to say, obviously, before we go any further in this, is that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, a very clear terrorist organisation. This isn't the first time they've done this. Some people are saying, you know, why did they hit women and children? The truth of the matter is that Hamas has been behind indiscriminate suicide bomb attacks. They had an explicit policy of targeting civilians since the mid 1990s.

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  Recognised the terrorist organisation by the EU, by the US, and actually much more recently by the UK 2022, I think, and Australia 2023. But much of the rest of the world does not recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation. They treat them as the legitimate government because they're the elected government in the Gaza Strip. Over to you.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  I think what we're seeing is beyond anything that the Israeli people have seen. As you say, within the Palestinian context, there has been a lot of bloodshed, there's been a lot of anger, it's been building. I do think that once this thing hopefully calms down, hopefully settles down, though I think this could be a long, long, long time. But there are some massive questions for the Israelis. They have perhaps the most vaunted intelligence agency in the world. They really will be asking themselves some very, very hard questions as to how this happened. Because when you watch the scenes that you described there, with the fences being attacked,

• 18:38Alastair Campbell?

  with people arriving on hang gliders, with the levels of armoury that were available, it seems to me remarkable that the Israelis literally did not seem to have a whiff of this. Or if they did, they were certainly not very well prepared. And I think what's happening now, quite rightly, there's been massive widespread condemnation, a little bit like Ukraine, though we should be careful. Not to imagine that it's universal. I think we saw in the debate at the United Nations last night that the straight divide in that body was on display again. But generally, a sense of absolute outrage and condemnation and support, certainly in most of the countries

• 19:19Alastair Campbell?

  that where most of our listeners are, support for Israel's right to defend itself. But now, slightly into unknown territory, because the hostages, which we should, with taking of civilian hostages, taking of any hostages in this situation, a war crime, that does complicate things further. A lot of talk already about whether there will be a ground offensive by Israel into Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places on earth, by the way.

• 19:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  Two million people in a strip roughly 25 miles long, very narrow strip of land. So the fear that there must be in that place will be horrendous. And meanwhile, Jews around the world, I mean, this is, this was brought home to me in the very calm and peaceful setting of my morning swim this morning, talking to some Jewish people who are regular swimmers there, who are feeling that sense of fear, anxiety, real concern and dread about what, about what's happening and not, not, not least because they know people there.

• 20:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And with reason also, not just because the horror coming out of Israel, but also because an Egyptian policeman opened fire and killed two Israeli tourists. Little bit on Gaza. So Hamas is something that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood. And different to the PLO and Fatah, it was from its beginning, an Islamist organisation, very much sort of, I know, I mean, it's a misleading way to put it, but it's in the broad tradition of Muslim Brotherhood and even the Taliban. It's a group that very much prides itself on religion. It's has very conservative social codes, but it's not imposing them entirely. I mean, there's been some examples of it, but it's not legally imposing them on the population there. Their brand was being cleaner, less corrupt than the previous government.

• 21:10Rory Stewart?

  But from the moment they've taken over, they have faced a blockade. So although Israel withdrew from Gaza, it controls six out of the seven of the border crossings. It controls all the air access and sea access to Gaza. It provides all the electricity, all the water supply, all the telecommunications for Gaza. And the Israeli army reserves the right to enter Gaza whenever it feels it has a security reason to do so. The trade from Gaza, the economy of Gaza really collapsed after these blockades were put in place because people didn't want to do business with a terrorist group. It's kept afloat with support from, in different ways, Turkey, Qatar and Iran. Iran putting the support more into the military attacks.

• 21:54Rory Stewart?

  Qatar are very focused on humanitarian support for people. It's, I think, the 160th poorest country in the world now in GDP per capita. You know, real shortage of water supplies, sewage. And, and one of the questions going forward is, I suppose, two questions. One of them is, is your point about the potential Israeli response inside Gaza because it's not going to be possible for Israel, as it were, to reoccupy Gaza. If you think about the fighting Mosul, where the Iraqi army tried to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, that was a multi-year operation that involved destroying most of the city. And I don't think we should be expecting Israel to be attempting to try to do house-to-house

• 22:37Rory Stewart?

  fighting in a place of 2.2 million people. But there's going to be a lot of pressure now being put by Israel on countries to cease all forms of support for Gaza. But that, of course, will also mean that you're on this knife edge between providing support, development support, which keeps the Hamas government alive, but also preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. So Qatar is a very odd example of this. Qatar is criticised often by Israeli politicians for providing support to Gaza, but then often says that behind closed doors, they're encouraged to continue to provide support to Gaza by factions within the Israeli government because they don't want a humanitarian crisis there.

• 23:14Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Rory, well, we've Got lots, lots more to talk about in this area, so let's just take a quick break.

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• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  On the point of the humanitarian crisis, first of all, when the Israelis are saying to the people in Gaza, they're essentially advising them to move out. It's very, very hard to know where they go in such a densely populated place where they can't come and go freely. And what I find really difficult in this whole conversation is, and this is, I think we talk a lot on the podcast generally about how we try and do this thing about disagreeing agreeably. Honestly, watching the debate unfold, particularly on social media, but also on some of the television stations I've been sort of trawling through, it's virtually impossible.

• 25:08Alastair Campbell?

  To have this debate without people getting very, very quickly into polarised spaces. And I think that at the moment, you know, when you see, and I'm not criticizing this at all, I can see as per nine eleven, the desire for countries like the UK, the US, Germany to signal solidarity. And so this thing of, you know, lighting up public buildings with the Israeli flag and so forth. And that's, that's fine for now. But I think that at some point, one of the best contributions to this debate I saw was when we were waiting for Joe Biden's address to the American people the other night, Alistair Burt, former Foreign Office Minister, former Middle East Minister, one of your colleagues, was filling in for, when I say filling in, he was being interviewed at the time when, just before Biden was coming

• 25:53Alastair Campbell?

  on. So Alistair Burt asked this question, Rory, to us, why has so little international attention been paid to resolving issues between Israel and the Palestinians over the last couple of years, when it was clear that tensions were steadily rising, and there were many warnings that something very bad was going to happen? And I think that when you were talking about that period when Clinton was in charge and Yasser Arafat and Rabin were meeting at the White House, and there was that sense of progress, there was a real focus by large parts of the international community on this as being not just the central issue in the Middle East, but one of the central issues anywhere in the world. The Middle East in our public debate in recent years has become about some of these other

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  countries you've been talking about, the ones with oil, the ones with money, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates. The focus on the Middle East and the Israel Palestine question has been negligible from a time when it used to be one of the most dominant issues of global debate.

• 26:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think, I think a lot of things changed. And so the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who'd been instrumental in bringing together the Oslo Accords, so this actually very famous Israeli general, kind of national hero, who made a very radical step to try to reach out towards peace with Palestinians and was then assassinated by a extreme extremist Jewish nationalist who was against him, then led to a period where the Israeli left Largely vanished and a lot of the politics we've been talking about in Israel reflects the fact that the Palestinian supporting two-state solution supporting Israeli left largely lost confidence, partly because of that, partly because they felt that Palestinians

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  weren't making the progress that they were hoping for, partly because the Palestinian Authority has proved to be very useless and corrupt and has lost a lot of support. But it's also that, as you say, as Israel's become economically more and more powerful and Saudi and UAE and others have developed confidence, Trump drove through the Abraham Accords, which effectively normalized relations between Israel and some of the key Gulf states, meaning that Palestinians had very much been marginalized. And definitely, as Alistair Burt says, you know, when I was in Jordan, there was a palpable sense that people felt it no longer was anything that anyone was concentrating on. And the two-state solution felt increasingly implausible, it's more and more difficult

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  to imagine that it would ever happen, partly because these figures like Smotrich, Ben Gavir, who are the far-right Israelis, you know, made very, very explicit statements about essentially providing no acknowledgement for the Palestinian territories at all. I mean, Smotrich was on the record saying that he wanted to retake those territories and the Palestinians would have to either be subjugated or leave or be killed. And this was part of the coalition. I mean, Guy was the finance minister who was saying this. So I think there are two things that we maybe, before we close, that we need to look at. One of them is what does this mean to internal Israeli politics and what does it mean to the international picture?

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  I think internal Israeli politics, there's going to be two opposing tensions. One of them is it will strengthen some people on the right who will say, we always told you, you needed to be tougher on the Palestinians, look at this, Hamas has revealed as they always have been as terrorists dedicated to the complete extinction of the state of Israel, we need to go much, much harder. And that will undermine.

• 29:27Rory Stewart?

  Some of the voices pushing for peace and some of the remaining voices on the Israeli left. On the other hand, it's an incredible humiliation of the Israeli government, a total intelligence failure. And there will be a push for a national unity government to say, well, let's bring in a broader coalition, get rid of the far right, get Israel together again. Very important to mobilize the reservists who were essentially on strike because they were so horrified by the judicial reforms. And that then moves us the international picture. And I think internationally, there are going to be two things we have to watch. One of them is that Iran is very closely associated with this Hamas attack and is boasting about the fact that Ayatollah Khamenei met with the leader of Hamas, that Iranian funding is going in.

• 30:12Rory Stewart?

  So you can expect a risk of the Israeli government and others taking retaliatory action against Iran. You can also see this as a deliberate attempt to break the talks that were going on between Saudi and Israel, that Hamas has done it in order to deepen the divisions again within the Middle East and draw attention in the most horrifying way through this terrorist attack to the ongoing situation and hope that that begins to move people more into talks again.

• 30:40Alastair Campbell?

  There's an awful lot of stuff in Harret's newspaper, one of the main Israeli dailies today, that is very, very, very critical of Netanyahu, the sense that the Israeli government, he's had to essentially do a deal with people even well to the right of him to form the government that he did. And this has been so far down their list of priorities that you do sort of have the sense that the more militant end of the Palestinian population, that they can see no way out. And that is not, by the way, I can, even as I say those words, I can, I can feel people going to their tweets to say, this is attempting to justify. It doesn't justify it in any way at all.

• 31:21Alastair Campbell?

  But I think that unless what has happened, the reason why Hamas became as powerful as they did within the West Bank was because they felt that the Palestinian Authority under the Fatah party were going nowhere, were giving a lot, recognition of Israel, et cetera, without getting anything in return. And that that having been done, they saw no sense of progress at all. I'm not talking about progress towards a two-state solution. I'm talking about progress in any shape or form in the reality of their daily lives. And that is not going to be addressed between this government and the Palestinians. It will, for now, be entirely seen, I suspect, as a security situation. But at some point,

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  there has to be a return to a political process. Otherwise, this thing just goes round and round and round. And we'll be back in a few years talking about another war and giving it another name.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  And I think at the heart of it is something you was right at the centre of your working life in Ireland, which is that understandably Israelis look at Hamas and they say, here is a murderous, brutal terrorist group that has just gone into the middle of a music festival and mown down 260 people. And rhetoric is effectively about extinguishing the state of Israel. I mean, it's changed it. It now talks about a right of return. But there is deep, deep antisemitic rhetoric, hate speech coming out of Hamas and all this sort of thing. And that therefore feels to many, many Israelis as though it's impossible to imagine any kind of conversation with them at all. As I, you know, I felt very

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  much with the IRA that, you know, the idea of talking to people who seemed in the 80s to be absolutely committed to driving the British entirely out of Ireland, who were killing innocent civilians in hotel bombings, seemed incomprehensible.

• 33:13Alastair Campbell?

  There's a question here. James McDune, do you think that the Israel-Palestine scenario is more complex than the troubles in Northern Ireland? Does the fact that it shares a border with other Islamic nations and isn't geographically isolated mean that a Good Friday start agreement will always be unattainable? I mean, there's a couple of things I'd say to that. The first is that the Good Friday agreement felt unattainable for a long, long time. I mentioned to you earlier, recently watching Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, listening to the people telling their stories, they felt it was unattainable. But it happened. So right now, today, in the middle of October 2023, a two-state solution, and I saw David Lammy this morning at the Labour Party conference, he made his

• 33:53Alastair Campbell?

  speech and absolutely unequivocal support for Israel, but also saying that we have to keep having hope that there can one day be a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace. In the current contest, that sounds almost an absurd thing to say, but you have to hang on to that hope. And you can only get there ultimately through some sort of political process. And the reason why, I mean, the level of planning that must have gone into this operation, and whether, where they were getting their arms from, and whether Iran was directly supplying, and all that stuff, we don't know. But in a way, I think what they're maybe trying to do, a bit like when

• 34:35Alastair Campbell?

  the IRA sort of had the judgment, they said to themselves that we can bomb away all we want in Northern Ireland, but unless we actually take these bombs to the British mainland, we're not going to inject ourselves into this process. So I guess I'm throwing this one back to you. Do you think that part of what's going on is that Hamas are trying to get into the bigger picture, start to be considered one of the players in finding some sort of resolution to this? Or are they so hardline militant terror organisation that there is no way that this is going to end, other than with a bloody long battle between them and the Israelis?

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And the truth is, of course, that like all these groups, there are all those things, there are appear to be, or have been in the past, slightly more moderate factions of Hamas. And, you know, negotiators have dealt with them and talked to them. And that's one of the reasons why Norway, for example, I think, has refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation. And then there are Hamas deputy ministers on record, spreading blood libels about Jews and claiming they sort of mashed up, you know, Christian babies into matzah biscuits. And I mean, it's a horrifying mixture of extreme terrorists with murderous intent. And people who are trying to imagine some kind of political settlement and return

• 35:57Rory Stewart?

  to 1967 borders and all this kind of thing. But the standoff in the end, if I sort of go back to the central explainer, is that there are two completely irreconcilable, at the moment it feels like, visions of what's going on. For Hamas and many Palestinians, they want an absolute return to the 1967 borders. And the truth is that there has been a lot of Israeli settlement beyond the edge of the 1967 borders, and no Israeli government is currently remotely considering removing all those communities and returning to those borders.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  On the contrary, they've been developing, they've been adding to it.

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Well, thank you very much. And I know that listeners will have very strong opinions. And if you want to get in touch, do by all means, please send us your tweets.

• 36:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you explained that very, very well. I actually came off Twitter when, just because it's impossible. It's like, it should be possible to condemn unequivocally what has happened, whilst at the same time worrying about the nature of the Israeli government, worrying about the fate of innocent children and others who have had a hellish life anyway, now in one of the most densely populated areas of the world, fearing what is about to hit them, whilst at the same time only beginning to imagine the utter horror if you had been at that festival, or are related to somebody who was at that

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  festival, or you're related to somebody who's been taken hostage. But the way our debate polarizes so instantly around anything now, it was almost like, you know, well, you're either 100% this side, 100% that side, and at the moment, you have to be 100% on, on the side of, of Israel. And ultimately, we've got to get to a place where there's a, the re-establishment of a serious grown-up political process, where major world powers are engaged and involved, and put in the hours and the effort to try to get people to, to coexist. Otherwise, we've had it.

• 37:58Rory Stewart?

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

• 38:02Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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