Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course Israel versus Hamas. Gaza, a slender, twenty five mile long stretch of land bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to its west, Egypt to its south, and Israel to its north and east, is now a war zone. In the wake of Hamas's recent grizzly attack that left more than fourteen hundred Israelis dead and about another two
hundred taken hostage. Israel's military forces appear poised to occupy Gaza to try obliterating the Islamist terrorist group. Ancient religious and cultural animosities and contemporary geopolitical jockeying are the backdrop for this conflict, but this newest iteration appears to have been sparked by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US seeking to normalize diplomatic relations. Hamas, apparently fearful of being isolated in the Middle East, may have opted for mass murder
to derail those talks. Other factors are at play. Decades of simmering resentment about Israel's more aggressive regional stances and military incursions into Gaza in the West Bank, outrage about violence at Jerusalem's All Oxamasque, and perhaps most significantly, broader concerns about Israel's treatment of Palestinians and its most recent push to expand settlements in the West Bank. For its part,
Hamas has routinely called for the destruction of the Israeli state. Iran, while pursuing nuclear weapons, has bankrolled Hamas and another militant group in the region, hes Belah, making it a dangerous and divisive regional wildcard, with Israel warning Gaza's two million Palestinian residents to relocate as more intense warfare draws near.
US President Joe Biden has visited Israel to show support a deadly last you know, as a hospital disrupted some of the plans around his visit, symbolizing perhaps how unpredictable and dangerous this conflict will continue to be. Joining me today to discuss all of this are Mark Champion and Andreas Klute to Bloomberg Opinion columnists with deep experience covering international affairs. Welcome, gentlemen, Hi Jim.
Nice to be here, so Mark.
You arrived in Israel on Wednesday, October eighteenth, and we're recording on Thursday the nineteenth. Things are moving fast and could change. And I know you haven't had much time there yet, but what are your first impressions being on the ground there.
Well, I think the first is what you always get in countries that are war zones are becoming war zones, which is that when you go to the place that isn't you know, directly in the line of fire, then things are completely normal and people, yeah, you know, at restaurants, cafes, their lives go on. They are disturbed, and you know,
there is a sort of genuine unhappy piness. You know, I'm going to do the awful thing and quote my taxi driver from this morning, but he has on his knuckles tattooed, you know, the name of his son, which translates as happiness. And then on the other side, you only live once, and he said, we always have these bad times, and so I keep it there just to remind myself, and I never needed it more than now. And the general feeling is, with few exceptions, they don't
really see a way out that ends happily peacefully. So a lot of intrepidation, but you know, in general, life goes on.
And So how did we get here? Mark, How do we go from diplomatic baby steps meant to bring Saudi Arabia and Israel together to bloody, sprawling combat in the blink of an eye.
That is a huge question and incredibly controversial. So I kind of stepped through the minefield. But essentially, you know, as I can best explain it, what has happened is the result of a series attempts that were made fifteen twenty years ago to get somewhere towards a settlement, never really worked, and increasingly since then the attempt hasn't been made to make something work. So what Israel did was to disengage, move out of Gaza and you know, pull
that troops or administration out. That was back in two thousand and five. You then had elections, Hamas took charge. Hamas even then was committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. And this time later you moved to a period where Hamas has been preparing has always said
it was preparing for a major attack. At the same time, they were increasingly marginalized because of the As you laid out these diplomatic efforts, you already had the Abrams Accords, where some of the Gulf states of Morocco had you know, normalized relations with Israel. Now you had the big one, Saudi Arabia, looking very close to doing so. And all of this was done without any consideration of the Palestinian settlement, which was kind of put on ice some time ago.
And for Hamas, they felt, I think that this was a kind of you know, now or never moment, and they attacked as far as you know, one can gauge with the intent to cause a major conflict, the wider the better. As far as their concerned.
Israeli intelligence had no inkling this was coming. They looked very flat footed, unaware. The Israeli military got taken by surprise in a massive way, one of the most formidable military forces in the Middle East. How did that happen?
Well, I mean that's going to be the subject of a long investigation, you know, once things calmed down. I think already we know it's probably wrong to say that there was no inkling and that there were indications, and Israeli intelligent did have some indications, but the focus, the
political focus, the security focus was elsewhere. It was in the West Bank because of years of fairly aggressive settlement policies, plus issues around Alaksa and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, so you had the security forces diverted to protect settlements since on, and also you know, the intelligence services, their attention was diverted. They were worried about trouble in
the West Bank. They thought that Hamas was happy enough in its running its enclave and that this kind of scale of event wasn't really likely.
Andreas, let's talk a little bit more about Kaza's history, you know, the rise of Hamas and its relationship to the millions of Palestinians and claims to represent.
How does Gaz of you this, how does Ghaz of view the rise of Hamas well? I mean Hamas is an interesting one because just before the attacks or as Mark said, you know, things in the agents seem to be going a lot of us thought in a better direction. And Hamas, who was not so much on our radar screens. They're offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, so they're Sunni, not Shia, like Hisbolla and like the Mullahs in Iran, and they
have this kind of Nihalist approach to the region. As Mark mentioned, is that they basically want to annihilate the state of Israel, and they're domestic or the Palestinian rivals are running very badly at the West Bank, and they are at the same time deeply embedded with Gaza because some Palestinis in Gaza are intertwined with them, but mainly because they're using these men, women, children, babies as human shields.
As everyone's been saying, intentionally, in order to hit Hamas, now you'd have to also be prepared to hit these civilians, genuine civilians every time as well. And in fact, as you know, the Israelis said to the Gas and Palestinians, clear out, we're coming, and as they have been trying to clear out, it's in part Hamas that's blocking them
because they want to maximize Palestinian casualties. And that's something very often overlooked now in all these on the streets of Europe and the Middle East and around the world and on college campuses, is that it's Hamas that wants to maximize Palestinian casualties and deaths and suffering in Gaza, not Israel. So that's this bizarre and frankly, I, like so many things, I think irrational. I don't understand rationally how I mean, I would love local Palestinians in Gaza
to now rise up against them. I would like there to be an effort to liberate themselves from Hamas.
You know, this notion that the Palestinians and Gaza should clear out Andreas is something people can say in the military as they're about to consider occupy in Gaza. But the reality is it's two million people with very few places to go, and they don't have you know, there's not warm welcome for them awaiting in other countries in
the region. So this again feels to me like one of these massive, massive issues here is two million people could instantly become refugees with nowhere to go, refugees within their own.
Land, and that sort of sets the Palestinians apart from the millions of other refugees. I think the UN calculated there's more than one hundred million now in the world. But you know, the Syrians. Now, I covered other refugee crises, you know in Europe, I'm sure marked it as well. The Syrians went to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and then onwards to Europe. The Palestinians in Gaza, as you just said, have nowhere to go and we should point fingers at
Egypt as well, because it's not letting them in. Biden was there and apparently there's some humanitarian eight trucks going into Gaza to bring stuff in, but it is so far Egypt is not letting in these fellow Arabs either, and the Israelis can't let them in because they'd be letting in Hamas as well. So yeah, that's part of the tragedy is these two million are trapped there in the small strip of land with nowhere to go, and they can press their faces against barbed wire, but they
have nowhere to go. And that's the tragedy of the situation. And it's not the Israelis that wanted it this way.
Yeah. I think the cargo that Egypt's gonna let through is twenty trucks or so. That's also not a very massive concession. I can't imagine twenty trucks making a huge difference to two million people, but perhaps it's a start. Well, let's talk a little bit about Benjamin and Yahoo before we go to the break. He's had nine political lives
in Israel. He was attempting to stack the local judiciary while miired in a corruption investigation before the war broke out, and he has spent years rattling Israel's sabers at home Mark, how do you think about him within this whole collision?
Yeah, so I think there are a few things to pick apart there.
You know.
The first thing is that I think Nathan, you know, at this point, is the political version of a dead man walking. So it's a question of time before he's gone because the anger at what is above all an extraordinary security failure will fall on him and correctly so, so you know, that's one part of it. The other is,
you know, how do you assign blame for something like this. Well, the first thing is, in a terrorist attack, you can only assign blame to the terrorists because you know the definition of a terrorist attack is that you are attacking civilians by choice. Nobody forces you to attack civilians. That is a choice. So he does not bear responsibility for that, But he bears responsibility for the policy failure that has
led us here. And I think that is I was speaking today with a former negotiator on the Israeli side with the Palestinians, and he dealt with Clinton, and he dealt with some of the negotiations after and what he was saying is that you know, this is ultimately a policy failure of huge proportions, and it isn't just about security and these sort of things that happened just now that allowed this to happen. It is about the treatment of Gaza, which initially was a fairly well intentioned project
to disengage. It was kind of a recognition that if we aren't going to have a two state solution anytime soon, we need to give some sort of autonomy, self rule and so on. There's no future to occupying the territory.
So it was relatively well meant at the beginning, but increasingly what happened essentially was that Netnunyahu empowered Hamas, and he did so in order to weaken the Palestinian authority because in the World Bank what was happening was that his coalition partners parties of the settlers of expansion, some call it annexation within the West Bank. So that what he wanted was not a negotiating partner for a two state solution in the Palestinian authority or a strong authority.
What he wanted was the ability to give his coalition partners what they wanted without too much interference, and he just parked how much to the side and essentially empowered them by weakening the Palestinian authority. Because when you provide essentially no hope for a solution, where do people turn? He left them nowhere to turn. That was non violent.
On that note, We're going to take a break, Mark, and we'll come right back and pick up our conversation. We're back with Mark Champion and Andreas Klouth Bloomberg opinion columnists, and we're talking about the already bloody and tragic Gaza conflict. Andreas, Joe Biden just traveled to Israel. Was that a good move or a rash move?
I think it was a good move, and he did it very well. He's due to speak from the White House to the American audience tonight, but so far he's managed to hit the right notes, which is very difficult every time he's spoken out since the attacks, and again he did so in Israel. I mean so it almost went south on him. There were political risks and physical risks.
The political risks included something like this horrendous shelling of the hospital in Gaza, which Israeli intelligence now think was a stray rocket from the Islami Jahada, in other words, from as Biden said, the other team, not the Israeli team.
But because of that, half of his itinerary was in effect cancel, because he was going to go to Israel and Jordan to meet with the Palestinian Instrudanians in a there, which is sort of part of the iconography of the trip, the US President coming in and talking to people on all sides. So half of that fell away, which made it harder. But I still think he found very good words in again, as he had already not saying these sentences that you hear in talks to like yes, calm up,
but you know, yes we support Israel. But no, he was genuinely supporting them and calling this Hamastach pure unadult rated evil, and he showed genuine empathy, and he reached into history and there were inklings of his own personal biography of loss that allowed him to empathize with the families of the victims he met. There were sort of echoes of the awareness of the Holocaust in the background,
and that was genuine. So one audience, the israelis I think mark making confirmed this or not, but was genuinely reassured. At the same time, the Palestinians, Arabs and all their friends also genuinely saw how concerned he is to protect them as much as possible, specifically Natanyahu's sitting next to
him as he was speaking. I liked one passage where Biden essentially said, you know, we Americans, after what we went through after nine to eleven, we understand the all consuming rage that has now gripped you because we had that rage. But don't let that be your counselor your guide. It leads to bad decisions. And he said, well, we are democracies, and we're fighting terrorists, and we're going to
set an example by the way we fight. And I think these messages arrived they were intended at Natanyahu, and I think he intended them, but the rest of the world was paying attention to. His primary objective is, of course, to keep this war from widening, and so not just his bollah in Lebanon and Iran, but I think even the people Iran is supplying with weapons, which is Russia and even China and even possibly North Korea. He's assuming they're all listening, and he often repeats that phrase, don't
don't don't. And he's got two aircraft carrier groups parked next to it off the event in the Eastern Mediterranean to make that clear. But he's saying, don't let anybody get ideas. Let the israel Alias do this properly, and let us try to help the Palestinians as best we can. And I think that's such a task for subtlety. And he found the right tones and notes even though half the trip got canceled. So I would say he's been
doing as well as one can possibly do. Whether the intended audiences are all listening, I mean the people demonstrating on campuses and streets and the Mullahs for instance, I don't know.
So it's enough in your mind. The rich symbolism of him being there justifies the visit, even if he's not bringing home many trophies or breakthroughs.
Yes, And to me it reminded there were other visits like that. He was there for seven and a half hours already, as by pure coinstance, seven and a half hours is how long Sehn F. Kennedy was in Berlin in nineteen sixty three. That was a big moment in the Cold War. Two years after the Wall was put up. A lot of people were about to lose heart. He came and after that everyone found their heart their lion's hard after that visit.
But they still had to wait nearly three decades for the wall to come down to well.
Actually, and in this case, I mean, when we get back to this conflict, this may be longer than three decades. I mean, but although at the time, by the way, just before the wall open in nineteen eighty nine, we thought that might be forever. We didn't think it would end in our lifetime. But that was a different kind of conflict, and I think this one is more intractable.
While we're on the US, just one last piece on that, Andreas, which is that the US is wrapping up military hardware support for Israel as well. That has been curious to me, simply because Israel has already been very well funded, it already has a robust military. There's been an argument out there that it actually didn't want outside funding or support because it wanted to show it could fight its own wars. And in a very short period of time, now we
have the US wrapping up military aid to Israel. Explain that to.
Me, I can't explain it. Very well, I mean there's a practical consideration, is that iron Dome, this system which we now see in these early haunting and beautiful images right when it's in action shooting down rockets. But my understanding is that it's been in use so much that they'd need to replenish that AMMO. So America can help great, and of course America should help if there's other ways to do it. I think there is a lot of
symbolism with this. As you said, the israel Raelis are well off compared to the Ukrainians, for instance, had the money have the AMMO. I don't think it's going to come down to that, but I think there's just a domestic American political imperative on both sides to just show where they're with you and we support and therefore in every way it is now in every way possible. So it is not to me politically pause. I don't regard anyone you know that you see the pundits or the politicians.
It is not possible now not to offer that because that's just a task. And the bizarre thing is that this comes at the very time as not half but part of one of the two big parties wants to stop supporting Ukraine for different reasons, but exactly as strategically important for the United States to keep supporting Ukraine against Russia as to support Israel, and Ukraine does need to help more urgently, by which I mean it stops getting it.
And according to the Ukrainians, they might lose against Russia. Israel will could militarily win. It's not about that, it's how they wage the war. Then, as you know, they're now thinking of bundling the Ukraine issue with the Israeli issue, with the southern border with Mexico issue, which is insane, and even with Taiwan, as if like every problem in the world into one package, just to get it past the troglodytes in the House of Representatives on the Republican side, you know, just to get it.
Through the dysfunctional troglodites. Mark. This could obviously all change in a few days between this interview and when this podcast goes live. But what is Israel weighing right now as we watch this unfold.
Well, that's a really good question. I mean, so what clearly President Biden, Joan Chancellor Schultz, British Prime Minister Sanak, maybe Macran's coming to what they all want Israel to be weighing is be very careful how you do this. Think about the day after, because what we know about these kinds of conflicts is that the more people you kill, the more that stirs resentment and creates a fertile recruitment ground for organizations like come US and these organizations, you know,
when you kill them off, they also castasize. The US was pretty successful in neutralizing al Qaeda after nine to eleven over a number of years, and then you know, you go into Iraq, you kill a lot of people, and you have Isis, different organizations, Samem.
Afghanistan, and then you go occupy Afghanistan.
So I think this is you know what President Biden was trying to get at when he was going back to nine to eleven. You know, we made mistakes, and clearly he didn't want to say it, but going into Iraq was a mistake, and you know, you have to think about the day after, which is a great failure of the US going into Iraq not thinking about what will we do with this place when we effectively break it and own it. So the Israelis, you know, I think, will be less naive than the Americans were, you know,
in Iraq. They know all about Gaza, they've been there before. But I think one thing we don't know is how much they're thinking this particular issue through. Are they concerned simply with we just need to go in and deal with Hermas. Everything else will deal with later, or are they trying to think through what will happen the day after? How do we do this so that we don't end up with unintended consequences that actually make it all worse.
And unfortunately, what we see doesn't suggest just from the comments that Israeli leaders have made and from physically what's going on, with the intensity of the aerial bombing in a very small place, it doesn't lead us to think that it's a very reflective moment. It's really an operational one. We just have to get in there and deal with Hermas.
And Mark, what about Egypt? What role does it have to play here?
I think Egypt is just desperately trying to stay out of it.
They want Egypt wants no role.
They want no role whatsoever. And to go back to the idea of you know, Parsonian's leaving God, we sort of have to remember that these are refugees mostly, you know. So we're going back to the you know, nineteen forty eight and the Nakba and so on, and you know, these people who were displaced to where they are, and some parts of the West Bank are refugee camps. They don't look like it anymore because they're forty years old
and they've kind of developed, but they are. And unfortunately, ethnic cleansing is a lot more common than we think. So you know what we just saw in Armenia Azerbaijan, you know, end of thirty years of conflict, what happens one side wins and the other side just leaves, the civilians leave. What do we see in a Pazia? You know, a part of Georgia that the Russians now more or less control. In nineteen ninety two, the small minority up
has kicked out the Georgians population. Ethnic Georgian populations made up half of the population, and they kicked them out and they won't let them back in. Why because demography is everything, you know. So if you are a minority, if Israelis are a minority within it Israel that includes all the Palestinians, then you don't have you can't have a democratic Jewish state. And this is at the heart
of the whole conflict. So when Egypt says don't leave, say stand your ground, what they're saying is that just being there is political. It is a political statement because this is in the end about demography and land. And this is why you ultimately, you know, most people who really think this stuff through, they'll say, I don't know how we get there, but we all know we have to have a two state solution because there isn't another solution.
You can't have a one state solution, because if you have a one state solution, there can't be a Jewish democracy in Israel. And if you have a one state solution, you know it's either going to be that. You know, it's either going to be a Jewish dictatorship, which is no fun for the Palestinians, or it's not going to be a Jewish state and there's not enough trust there understandably for Jewish Israelis to say, okay, well we'll go for that, will have an open election and take the
risk that Hummas runs the place. So this is the great difficulty. You know, how do you get to a two state solution? I think at this point nobody has any ideas, and that's partly why that question about the next day is being pushed aside, because you know, how would you do it if your one narrative about Gaza is to say that, look, we separate, if we disengaged, we did a kind of test run for a two state solution. If we said to the passes, run yourselves,
elect whoever you want. They elected Humas. How do we have a two state solution If Harmas is going to run it dedicated to the destruction of Israel and is a state with the right to arm itself and to buy tanks, how do we do that?
Well, intractable problems And then of course Andreas there's a run lurking and looming out there, aspiring to be a nuclear power, funding terrorism in the region, spending the last several months sort of I don't know how to think about it, at least going through the kobukie of putting olive branches out on the global stage. But if it then turns out that they are more disruptive than they
claim to be, that all becomes problematic. There's been i think some overly aggressive reporting suggesting they were more involved with planning them as attacked than they were. I think that that's been sort of roundly dispensed with, but I still think we have to find out more about Iran's intentions and actions nonetheless in the region. How does this all play out for Iran?
Well, first, one thing I find encouraging, and just from social media, is seeing that the way the Iranian Mullahs are trying to play this great Satan all of that, having everyone on this is not the way the population
is playing it. Actually, So there's memes I've seen, I don't know how you know, representative they are of Iranian not mobs, but aggregations of people not chanting what they're being told to chant, because you know, they've just in on the streets fighting for their own freedom, for women to show their hair and the rest of it. And so the Ranian people again sort of like Hamas and the Palestinians, is like the Mullahs and the Iranians. The Iranian people shouldn't get drawn into this in any way.
The Iranian Mullas, I think, as you just said, I also don't think it's plausible, although I have no idea that they were actually giving orders for Hamas to attack. Now even though they've of course been sending money in weapons, but it didn't rhyme with everything else they were doing. As you said, they've been putting out all of branches.
We just had a prisoner for dollar bank account on freezing exchange, a swap with the US that we thought was going to lead further and maybe to talks to get them to stop moving closer to having nuclear weapons again. And of course they were also on the other hand, observing that Saudi Arabia and Israel and the United States were getting closer, and they were calculating, and I think for them it's like, oh, now Hamas did this, what do we do? And they're expected to try to burn
American flags, Israeli flags, all of that. It's almost like a reflex. Having said that Iran is now the vector, it would be the vector for contagion if this local fire spreads into a global conflagration and inferno. Because of if you remember back to George W. Bush and the axis of evil, Iran was part of that. Nowadays, I keep hearing the axes of resistance, and Iran is part of that again, where it's Russia, Iran, China in China and Russia, they were just with many other countries in
the global South also meeting. They want to have an access of resistance against the US led West, of which Israel and Europe are part as well. And so if Iran, via hisball or something gets drawn in, then Russia and China and North Korea may get drawn in as well, if only because they will at align against what they see as this Western rigged system and will bylining may be tempted to kindle in their own regional conflicts, from
Taiwan to Ukraine or Moldova. And that's I think another subtext of Biden's don't don't.
All right, We're going to take one more break and then I'll come back to continue this very interesting conversation with both of you. We're back with Mark Champion and Andreas Kluth and we're discussing the Gaza conflict. Mark for Israel, is this a turning point or is it retrenchment?
Yes, I mean I don't know, I genuinely don't know. It is a watershed moment. Whatever policies were being followed before, it's clear that they collapsed. So Israel cannot just continue in the same way that it was with the same policies that it had, and the first instance of needing to change that and the recognition that they need to change that is precisely the decision a parent decision leads to prepare to go into Gaza and clear it out.
There was this kind of slightly disturbing terminology that Israel had before for how to deal with Hamas, where they would go in every once in a while with a limited campaign, and they called it mowing the lawn, just trying to keep Humas from growing into the kind of force that could do what it just did. Well, clearly that didn't work. So this is why there really isn't a debate here of any real significance about whether to go in. There's a very strong consensus across the parties.
They brought another party from the opposition into a war cabinet. Benny Gantz, the representative, is if anything more rhetorically hawkish about this then Nettan Yahoo. So the first instance of having to change the policy that is going into Gaza, removing Hamas and making that change. The next will come with the reckoning for Netanyahu, and I hope a reassessment of this policy of weakening the Palasinian authority. Israel does not want to reoccupy Gaza. It does not want to
go back to that. That's just a recipe for a drip feed of coffins of soldiers coming back of you know, engagement and killing of Gaza civilians, which is you know, there's no upside to it. So I don't think Israel has any intention of occupying, but they feel they need to go in. They need to change the game. They need to change regime essentially in Gaza. And when they do that, they have to replace it with something. You know,
what's it going to be. How they're going to do it, They're going to need the engagement of countries like Saudi Egypt, etc. In order to provide some sort of trustible support from the Palatinian side of this new regime that going to come in. You know, it'll be very difficult for the Palestinian authority because they'll be seen is in cohoots with Israel.
But I think that's not worked out yet. But they're going to have to find a new regime of some sort and they're going to have to think about, okay, so we need a partner. We're going to need a Palestinian partner. That we can talk to that is not dedicated to the destruction of Israel, And we need to provide some kind of political path, some hope for the Palestine inside, so that we don't descend into this again. That's what I hope happens. But to be frank, I
don't know. I just don't think that the discourse is that far ahead. You still have a Prime Minister Netanyahu who in order to have that policy you would need him.
To go Ah Andrea Son. If we do come out of this, if we come out of this with a new role for the Palestinian authority, is that a possibility or are we just likely to see years of prolonged cast and conflict. I'm a Palestinian side too.
Well.
No, we touched it when we were talking about that Berlin Wall. But I feel this conflict is more intractable in a way than the Cold War was. And that's the sad thing, is this eternal return to the not the better angels, but the worse angels of our nature, of their nature. But as Mark said, after this, whenever and however this ends, Israel must understand that it must help this Palestinis succeed in their Statelet in their proto state.
It must want them to succeed, because the alternatives that they keep failing, and then we revert to this permanent conflict, and then you have permanent conflict.
How do you make them succeed?
That will require, in part, the next Israeli government to take on the Israeli far right and other settlers, and they must understand we must now make our former enemies succeed in order to turn them into future neighbors. And that is incredibly hard, and I'm not sure that will happen ever or in our lifetime, but that is the only way out.
A last question for each of you. For Mark first, what have you learned since the Guyza conflict began that you didn't know before?
I think I did not understand like the Israelis. I think. I mean I was familiar with Hamas, but I did not understand how carefully they had been preparing and how frankly efficiently they had been preparing for this. And they are a more dangerous fighting force than I perhaps had expected. One of the things that really intrigues me about this is whether what went on in Ukraine would have been
carefully watched by them. This sort of asymmetric warfare. What Hammas did is at a different level to what you know. Terrissare always gaged an asymmetric warfare, but this was at a different level with you know, sort of combined force operations, you know, AirLand and sea, drones, hang gliders, et cetera. And just the fact that you know, a much smaller force in Ukraine was able to force back the second largest military in the world. Who nobody thought that was possible.
That's one of the questions in my mind as to whether you know we are in an era when there is an optimism for smaller forces that they can do this type of thing because they've seen the Ukrainians do it.
And Andrea, the same question for you, what have you learned since the Gaza conflict began that you didn't know before I learned, or.
Maybe I was just reminded of something that I had been starting to deny, that it takes such hard, long, slow work to find the better, to move toward the better angels of our nature. And I think in the Middle East, not in Ukraine and other places, but they were doing it somehow, And then it is so easy and quick and abrupt to go all the way back, and there's always a new nadi or new bottom in
human nature below the brutality. The details of it were just more shocking than I thought we were capable of nowadays, and so it is a very dark and negative note to end on. But I just learned it's easier to go all the way down than to climb that little step up. And of course it's disheartening because at some point we'll have to take the first small step up again, knowing that we can all go all the way to the bottom any moment.
We are out of time. Mark and Andreas, thanks for joining us today and stay safe in Israel. Mark, thank you, Andreas, and I will be watching from Afar here in New York and Washington. Mark Champion can also be found on Twitter at Mark Champion one. Andrea's Kloth's handle is at Andrea's Klouth. Their writing and their videos can be found in the Bloomberg Opinion web site. Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's crash Course, I learned that Hamas is even more murderous and ruthless than anyone might have imagined in recent years, but I've also learned that it's important to separate Hamas from the Palestinian people.
What did you learn?
We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now, and please leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable Ana Maserakas and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sage Bauman, Jeff Grocott, Mike
Nize and Christine Vanden Bilert. Blake Maple says. Our sound engineering and our original theme song was posed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course