Jake Wallis Simons - The Hamas Hoax That Fooled The West...

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Go to livemomentous.com and use promo code ACAST for up to 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code ACAST. Hello and welcome to the Winston Marshall Show. With me, Winston Marshall. I sat down with the author, journalist, and host of The Brink Podcast, Jake Wallace. And we discussed, amongst many things, the recent recognition of various countries, including the United Kingdom, of a Palestinian state. We looked at what this meant, the significance of it, and...

the practicalities of it. We also took a look at the recent UN report condemning Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. We looked at the history of the UN. We looked at their complicity in the war in Gaza against Israel on the side of Hamas. We looked at the history of aid and supplies into Gaza as well as the accusations of famine.

and starvation we also took a look at the propaganda war as it's unfolded not just since october 7th but actually going all the way back to 1947 and as well as that we look at Cease fire what that looks like. What is the latest? That's all with Jake Wallace Simons. Before you hear from Jake, I just wanted to say.

Thank you for your continued support. Remember to press subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts from. And if you head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk, not only will you enjoy ad-free listening and exclusive content, But you'll hear an extended conversation between me and Jake where we explore his idea of the centrist fundamentalist, the liberal globalist, which he has written about in his latest book. That's all at Winston Marshall. But without further ado, Jake Wallace Simons. Jake.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. We had your podcast partner, Andrew Fox, on, and it was a phenomenal interview giving a clear, concise take of the... war in Israel Hamas war up until that moment. And you have been a prolific writer, journalist, and you've got a new book, Never Again, How the West Betrayed the Jews and itself, which I hope we're going to get into. But actually, what I was hoping...

to start with is the various most recent issues regarding the Israel-Hamas war. I note as we speak, and I think it's important to do in all these conversations, all started on October 7th. with 1,200 Israelis killed and 251 taken hostage as we speak now. There's something like 50 hostages remaining in Gaza and about 20 odd are believed to be alive. It's also important. to note as per the un that's 64 000

Gazans have been killed since the beginning of the war, according to the UN. 46% of them are women or children. According to the UN Genocide Report, which we are going to discuss and get into, I'm sure you have... qualms that we will address with that report. Before we do, we've got to talk about the Palestinian recognition. So, Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has joined along with Canada, Australia in...

announcing for the first time in history that the UK recognises a Palestinian state. I wanted to get your take on this. Let's start by... you steelmanning Starmer's position. Why would Keir Starmer do this now? In a war between Israel and Hamas, he is giving... Hamas exactly what they wanted, and Hamas leadership have come out and said, this is the fruits of October 7th. They're grateful that Starmer has done this. And if anything, it seems to me to be an incentive for...

Hamas to continue and for the war to continue. But Islam presumably doesn't want the war to continue. In fact, he said he wants Israel to stop. So what do you think is the best case?

to support Starmer doing what he's done? Well, thank you for having me. And that's quite the question to begin with. I think that we need to recognize that what we're seeing now with the recognition of a Palestinian state... is an expression of a psychological problem that we have in the West, which is that we've been so convinced that the best way to achieve peace is to treat everybody as friends.

that we've forgotten how to treat enemies as enemies, how to recognize enemies, and then how to treat them as enemies. And when it comes to the Israel-Hamas conflict, That instinct to want to treat everyone as friends, convinced that that's going to make everybody like us and everybody, you know, make peace with us, that instinct is clouding our judgment. And it leads to...

woeful foreign policy decisions like this latest one of recognising a Palestinian state. It's really the culmination of a stance that the West has held for quite a long time, since shamefully soon after October the 7th. where the West began to support Hamas, basically, or the Palestinian side, and didn't hold firm with Israel. That unity behind Israel didn't last very long, if it lasted at all.

On October the 8th, the UN Security Council met and did not manage to unanimously pass a resolution condemning October the 7th. On October the 8th, they didn't manage to... passed a resolution until November the 15th. And that call called for humanitarian pauses and aid before it condemned anything else. You know, November the 15th, UN Women wasn't able to condemn.

the mass rape, mutilation, necrophilia of October the 7th. You know, I heard recently just all these little details from October the 7th keep coming out and there is always the small details that stick with you. This one was... of a Palestinian father and son who both raped the same woman before killing her. Coming to your question, I backed into it, but the argument in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state,

relies upon seeing people as nice, seeing everyone as essentially like us. You know, it's something that's known as the Wickhamist fallacy. You know, everybody basically has the soul.

of an old boy who went to Winchester College and all you've got to do is treat them decently and then that old boy will come out and there'll be a jolly good egg and you can make peace. I mean, that's what led to us invading Iraq, invading Libya and thinking that all you've got to do is get rid of the regime and naturally...

democracy will emerge because it's everyone's natural state. We can talk more about that. But I think that that is the psychology that underpins the recognition of a Palestinian state. And the argument that follows it is, look, you know,

The problem is with Israel. We can see it. We've seen the pictures, which we can come back to as a line. You hear it from... all of our political leaders, including Keir Summer, when he announces an anti-Israel policy, we've all seen the pictures coming out of Gaza, which to you and I is pretty dubious because who's serving those pictures up and what do they show and what do they not show?

It's the basis on which we make foreign policy, apparently. We've seen the pictures. We believe that Israel's got to stop this genocide. Therefore, recognizing the Palestinian state is just a fair thing to do. Oh, and we're also pro-Israel. We're pro-your security. This is the kind of, you know, everyone's friend.

approach, which has no enemies. And when there's no enemies, there's no friends either. Right. Okay. So just to counter some of your points, although I don't necessarily disagree, Starmer has... come out with his recognition of Palestine criticizing Hamas. So it kind of goes against the logic of the action, but he still says Hamas must return the hostages. And it's also the case that the UK have given supplies to Israel. So you say that...

Israel's quote-unquote allies have not supported Israel, but there has been support in terms of weaponry. Oh, look, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the UK has not supported Israel at all. And you're right that Keir Starmer has condemned Hamas in speeches, rhetorically. He's even imposed...

sanctions on Hamas recently as a counterweight to recognizing the Palestinian state. And in the report on that, on that story in the telegraph, you could see an amazing line which said, this is the first time Hamas has been targeted with such sanctions since the beginning of the war by Britain.

Yes, he says things like that. I condemn Hamas, I've got family in Israel, the hostages must be released. But that really feels to me, I'm afraid to sound cynical, but it feels to me as a little bit of, you know, few crumbs to throw the Jews while we advance an agenda which is harmful to them. If he really wanted, if he was serious about excluding Hamas from power,

and countering its objectives. He would have made recognition of a Palestinian state contingent upon some demands from the Palestinians. So he would have said, okay, I'll grant you a Palestinian state if Hamas surrenders.

If it releases the hostages, for example, if the Palestinian Authority renounces terrorism, if it pledges to no longer pay money out of public funds to reward... convicted terrorists, if it pledges to take all the school books filled with incitement out of Palestinian schools, etc. If it pledges to have elections, you know, President Mahmoud Abbas is in his 21st year of a four-year term.

These are elements of reform that we want to see. And if you do that, then we'll recognize a Palestinian state. But instead, he said, look, we'll recognize a Palestinian state first and foremost. and then would you mind not sponsoring terror maybe? I mean, we've got into this weird position where-

Britain is recognising a Palestinian state and then it would seem to be obliged to categorise, to sanction that new state as a state sponsor of terrorism because Mahmoud Abbas pays rewards to terrorists. You know, it's this absurd position where we... Apparently, according to- So you're talking about the pay for slay there? The pay for slay. Right. Yes. Okay. So let's just unpick this because just rewinding a moment from pay for slay. So what's not clear about Starmer's announcement is who is-

which government he is acknowledging as the government. Because there's Hamas who run Gaza, who were democratically elected, although have now established an authoritarian... rule. I'm not sure how popular they are or unpopular. There's different varying reports on their population within Gaza. And then in the other Palestinian territories,

You have Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO, actually more specifically the PA, the Palestinian Authority. The PLO is a worldwide group. And then you have Fatah, who Abbas is also the leader of. So it's not clear. who Starmer is recognizing as the leader of this state. Has he said it's Abbas? Clearly he must have said it's not Hamas. What do we know about that?

specific detail? Well, I mean, it would be, yes, it's Abbas, it's the Palestinian Authority. Has he said that? Yes, I believe so. That's the British position. Okay. So from that, then we get to the pay for sleigh. This needs to be coloured in it because I think a lot of people don't actually know about this. So can you just explain the pay for sleigh? Sure. I mean, there's something that I reported on at The Telegraph in 2014, years and years ago. It's been around for a long time.

So the Palestinian Authority, which is propped up with significant amounts of aid money from international donors such as ourselves, uses, and is shot through with corruption, of which I could talk about for a long time, uses some of that money... to pay handouts to anybody convicted of terror offences and their families. So it's presented as a kind of welfare.

So this person, he tried to blow up some Jews in Tel Aviv. He's been sentenced to 20 years in prison, let's say. We're going to pay a sum of money every month or every year, I think it's every month, to his family. to look after them while he's in prison. And it's got a mechanism built into it. So the longer you're convicted for, that means the more serious your crime is, the more money you're entitled to. So it functions as an incentive.

A financial incentive. So if I'm a young Palestinian sitting in Ramallah or somewhere else, Nablus, and I think to myself, you know what, I want to go and stab some Jews at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. But who's going to look after my family if I get killed or if I get arrested? Don't worry, President Abbas to the rescue. Is it the case that this fund is only available if they actually attack Israelis specifically? Or is it anyone that's taken...

into prison or caught by... As far as I understand it is if they are convicted of terror offences. Specifically convicted of terror offences. I believe so. So this is part of Abbas's...

This fund, it's come to them, and they've not condemned it all. It's still in place. It still exists. It's something which they do. I remember, again, confirming it when I reported on it back in 2014, ringing up the Ministry of... it's called now prisoners or something and getting them to confirm it on the phone we reported it it's now everyone knows it over the years

There's been some significant pressure on Abbas to stop doing that. And he has said on a few occasions, yeah, we're going to stop doing it. They've even announced we're not doing it anymore. And then it emerges a couple of weeks later, oh, they're still doing it.

Okay. And so now that the UK has recognised the state of Palestine, it's now going through the rigmarole again saying, right, now we would like you to please remove the incitement books from the children's schools. We would like you please to stop paying this money to terrorists. And he's going, yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. Okay. So that's been said now? Yes. Okay. When was that said? Well, that's part of the... So after recognition, there followed this peace plan.

put forward by European powers led by Macron. And it included a number of requests. So you got to condemn Hamas and condemn October the 7th, which Abbas did. Now he condemns October the 7th. Fantastic. Great.

Took him two years, but brilliant. And they've been putting pressure on him, like I say, to reduce incitement in schools and to stop paying terrorist salaries. But like I said, he said that he would do those things many times before and hasn't done them. So the question is, what is his incentive to do it now? He's got the recognition. Is there anything in Macron's plan that...

is an incentive for him to achieve anything. Yes, I mean, there are further, so, you know, if you want to further normalise relations, so if you want a French embassy in Ramallah, for example, if you want the various different benefits of bilateral... interaction, then you then take these steps to become a normal state, but we recognized you already. So I think it strikes me as underpinning all this, as I say, is this profound naivety.

thinking that you can expect the Palestinian Authority to reform almost out of goodwill. Because the lesson that you've given them is that you don't actually have to do anything to get what you want. Recognition has been provided without any preconditions. Now they're saying, okay, do this, that, you know, A, B and C, stop incitement, et cetera, and we'll give you further benefits. But all they need to do is wait for another October the 7th and everyone will be outraged against Israel.

And then all those benefits will come their way without them having to do anything, the same way as recognition came their way. So really, they're on a trajectory of success without having to give any kind of commitment. or bend to European demands. And they know that. And they know that we don't know that. And so that's how it's going. Jake, hypothetically, if the war was over, or when it's over, and the hostages...

were returned. Do you think that there should, at that point, have been a conversation about recognising a Palestinian state if those conditions had been met? I am not against a Palestinian state in principle. I think that any negotiations for a Palestinian state should involve Israel. I mean, it's been remarkable to see this supposed peace plan from all these neocolonialists. European powers, Britain and France, as if it was 1916 or over again, 1917 or over again.

trying to impose peace on Israel with carrots and sticks, and Israel's not even there. In the vote in the UN General Assembly, the Israeli seats were notably absent. It was extraordinary, extraordinary stuff. It felt like... You're an assembly that just happened this weekend. Yeah. I mean, it was like, I couldn't help but think back to the Battle of Mosul when we fought Islamic State. 2016, 17, I think it was.

And Britain and America provided bombs from the air. The Iraqis and Kurds went into Mosul. In a campaign that Amnesty International described as a humanitarian catastrophe, described many civilian casualties due to crude bombardments and irresponsible targeting, wrote to... our Defence Secretary and the Americans as well, in protest. By some estimates, up to 40,000 civilians were killed in that campaign. Imagine if Israel would have responded in the UN.

by saying, look, these civilian atrocities that Britain and America are participating in are awful, and therefore we're going to recognise the Islamic State. That's how it feels. That's how it feels. And you know, I know someone, I met someone who was a veteran of that campaign. He was an American Special Forces officer. The American forces weren't on the ground officially, weren't fighting, but he was a spotter. So he was embedded with Iraqi forces.

in Mosul. When they said, look, there's a sniper in that building, he would radio in, 2,000 pound bomb would be dropped, no more building, no more sniper, no more anybody else in the building. His personal assessment was that at times, the coalition forces killed up to 60 civilians per combatant. Up to 60.

You know, Israel is accused of, you know, the UN, the world average is nine civilians per combatant. So one fighter, one terrorist, one enemy, nine civilians killed. That's the global average according to the UN. For urban warfare. For all warfare. For all warfare. Presumably it's higher in an urban situation. Higher in an urban setting. And you'd expect it to be far higher, somewhere like Gaza, where not only is it one of the most densely populated places on earth, but Hamas is using.

a strategy of human sacrifice. You know, every single civilian in Gaza could fit, could have fitted at the beginning of the war, and could now, in the tunnels. safe from bombardment. In London, civilians went into the underground to be safe from bombardment. The same thing in Berlin. In all other conflicts in the world, people go underground to be safe from bombardment. They could have done that. Hamas didn't let a single one in.

Yeah. So this will tie into the UN genocide report. But before we go there, I just wanted to ask, with the recognition from Keir Starmer, there is now an embassy for Palestine in... London. And aside from the fact that Londoners now have to invest in their own domestic iron dome kit, what do you think is the significance of that here? The embassy in London? Yeah.

You know, there's a bit in my book where I cite some research, recent research from April this year by two neuroscientists called Scott Barry Kaufman and Craig Newman. It's a massive piece of research involving 200,000 people across 70 countries into the differences between people who grew up in an autocracy and the people who grew up in democracies.

And they found that, overwhelmingly, people who grew up in autocracies, so without a democratic tradition, whether it's a terrorist state or dictatorship, have what they call the dark triad, three key... qualities are much more prevalent within them and they are narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. much more prevalent among anybody brought up in those countries. And in the democracies, three other qualities are prevalent called the light triad, which are humanism.

Kantianism, so seeing people as being valued in their own right, not as a means to an end, and humanitarianism, those sorts of things. And so it's not difficult to see when you get people who have risen to the top. of authoritarian societies, you're likely to have a very high preponderance of those dark triad qualities, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. People who've risen to the top of democratic societies

Many of them have the light triads, and the two together sets the stage for manipulation. So yes, when I see the Palestinian embassy being set up in London... I worry. The dark triad though, this is, we're talking about sort of the extreme five percentile of people. It's not a commonplace. No, it's much higher. I mean, I can't remember exactly the figures, the statistics of it, but you do find it more commonly actually in...

in the West amongst politicians and amongst people who've risen to the top. So, I mean, I wouldn't like to speculate about any individuals, but you do find it more commonly in politics, for example, in the West. But amongst society, 200,000 people studied. across the world, 70 countries, it's generally more prevalent in an autocratic or dictatorship population than it is in the West.

necessarily seem to be so immediately relevant for the embassy, but rather the idea or rather the fact that the British government, and I think there's several other countries, have promised Garzan's to have refuge here in the UK. So it's more the idea of these different civilizations blending together. What I'm trying to say is that we're being played. That's what I'm trying to say. We're being played. Our government...

our diplomatic elites, the grown-ups and supposed grown-ups in the room, are being played. The media is being played. We're being played. I mean, you can look at other psychological research. There's another psychologist I quote in the book, Orly Peters, who talks about

cognitive empathy versus emotional empathy. Emotional empathy being what we have, you can feel somebody else's pain, you can feel what they're feeling, you can empathise with their suffering. Cognitive empathy meaning you can see how other people think, what makes them tick. I can work out what your psychology is so I can manipulate you. In the West, we have emotional empathy. Hamas has cognitive empathy. It doesn't take a genius. They look at what makes us tick, look at our feelings.

And their ability is to work out how to get in there and manipulate our emotions to their gain. And that's what we see on a global scale at the moment. And that's what we see in the recognition of the Palestinian state. Okay, so we're being manipulated by these pro-Hamaz forces. And this is perhaps why, as Netanyahu says, Israel are losing the propaganda war. Because on this front, on the propaganda front, Hamas know exactly the game they're playing.

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, you can see that one of the tells is that whenever a Western leader starts to talk about Israel and Gaza, rather than talking about facts, they talk about pictures. They're talking the language of feelings. The pictures coming out of Gaza are awful. Well, of course they're awful. Wars are awful, which is why we try not to start them, which is why Israel tried not to start, which is why it only...

responding. The only party that wants war, that wants death, is Hamas. They started the war. They committed those horrendous atrocities in the knowledge that it would lead to the destruction of their own. their own territory and the killing of thousands of civilians, but did it because they embraced death as a mechanism to get what they want. In Macron's plan, is there any pressure for...

Abbas to recognize territorially that Israel exists? Is it, is in the Starmer's recognition of a Palestinian state? is there a recognition that there's two states? Do the Palestinians have to give up on the idea of from the river to the sea? Yeah. Well, I mean, technically, the Palestinians did recognise that. Abbas did recognise that back in the 90s. It's been in...

technically, it's been done. But not officially? Yes, officially. In the same way as Netanyahu officially recognised the need for a two-state solution in the Barry Lund speech famously decades ago. So it's there if you want to find it. but it's not there in any meaningful, heartfelt way. Ah, okay. So let's come to this UN report accusing...

Israel of committing genocide at four out of five of the acts described in the 1948 genocide convention. I think that this is quite key, particularly for the front of this conversation we've already had some people listening. if they are let's say anti-israel or or not coming from the same place as you they might uh say yeah but israel are committing a genocide this is actually it's not really

about thinking everyone's nice. It's actually thinking Israel have gone too far. It's not been commensurate. It's the war since October 7th is not balanced or whatever that means. To be honest, I'd find it harder.

strong amount that position however the genocide report as it's being dubbed which was released september 16th does um accuse israel of such a crime and i wanted There's a couple of details I want to go through it with you, but I just wanted to get your take about how much of this report you take seriously, what legitimacy it has. your initial response to it? It's just propaganda, I'm afraid to say. The UN has a halo effect.

It's got a lot of authority. People hear the UN and they assume it's the arbiter of truth, it's impartial, it's the international authority. And yet, if you look into the UN's history, you can see for decade after decade, it has been bias not just against Israel, but also in many ways against the West. The UN during the Cold War was a battleground of the Cold War, where the Soviet Union used the corridors of the UN to

trying to tilt the balance against the West and in particular against Israel. My previous book, Israelophobia, went into this in some detail in that the Russians, the Kremlin, had a team of anti-Zionists, so they were called Zionologists, and their task was to take old-fashioned czarist anti-Semitism, the protocols of the elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and so on and so forth, and rebrand it or reskin it for the modern age as it was during the Cold War. And they invented

various different smears. We'll see if any of them are familiar to you. They invented the idea of an apartheid state. They invented the idea of a white supremacist state. They invented the idea that Israel is like the Nazis, that Zionism is racism. And of course, that Israel is conducting genocide. These were all invented by Soviet propagandists in the Kremlin.

and disseminated around the world at huge expense via radio broadcasts, via leaflets, via embassies, placing conditions before they made bilateral relations with other countries. to absorb this propaganda. And particularly on the left, in the West, all those little student groups and small newspapers, some of which Jeremy Corbyn was involved with, that were sponsored by the Soviet Union.

placing the Soviet ideology into the mainstream. That was all sponsored and created by the Soviets. And of course, universities was a prime target. So all this stuff dates back to the Cold War and the UN was a prime... battleground for this. In 1975, the UN famously passed the resolution Zionism is racism under the influence of the Russians during the Cold War. There are all these new states emerging from post-

imperial Britain and France. And they sided against the West on the whole. They were anti-colonialist states giving a majority to the Soviet bloc in the UN against the West. That infamous resolution, Zionist racism, wasn't repealed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But it did a lot of damage during that period. And to this day, you know, if you look at...

the UN Human Rights Council, which was chaired most recently by Iran, famously. It's condemned Israel more than all the other countries in the world by an order of magnitude. It has its agenda. that it must follow every single time it meets, has a famous or notorious item called Item 7, which dictates that it has to debate and discuss the human rights situation in Palestine at every single meeting. This is a body.

that has responsibility for all human rights abuses all over the world, from the Uyghurs in China to North Korea to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, all over the world. And yet it's mandated at every single meeting. to discuss and condemn Israel. The UN has seven different bodies investigating Israel in different ways, and the human rights in the Palestinian territory is totally disproportionate.

It's filled with Israelophobia because Israel is taken as the most vulnerable point of the West, of Western democracy. And up until now,

Western countries, particularly in the Security Council, have resisted this urge to attack the West and Israel as its proxy. What we're seeing now, unfortunately, is Western powers such as Britain and France, both of which are... permanent members of the Security Council, beginning to side with our enemies, side with the enemies of Israel and our own enemies, as I've said in my book, you know, betraying the Jews and itself, betraying ourselves in this, because…

we don't see what they're doing. And because we're influenced by the pictures and not the facts. So that's a very interesting insight into the UN. But let's come to this report more specifically. It seems it's difficult for me to strong land this position because it's not a position I'm convinced of. But for clarity, I'll say how I understand it. And then I'll try and come to this report.

Israel is in a war with Hamas. As you've even mentioned in this conversation, Hamas are hiding behind civilians of who they govern. Hamas themselves chose... the theater of war to be Gaza. They started on October 7th and then retreated back into Gaza. And they could end it by returning the hostages and surrendering. Instead, they would rather this war is prolonged. And as you mentioned, actually, if you consider all of these things, the death count high as it is and war is terrible.

I think that goes without saying, but just in case it doesn't, war is terrible. Despite all those things, the death count over a two-year war is not as... It's not in the genocide territory to me, considering the population of Gaza. So the UN then make this report saying they're arguing that in fact it is a genocide. And that there's a deliberate attempt to wipe out Gazans because of the people that they are. And I think this is...

is hooked on to some of the things said by the Israeli high command. And I'll read it. I'll just read a few of these because it'd be worth like tackling them. Actually, before I do that, anything you want to comment on what I've just laid out there? You open the fridge. There's nothing there. So what's it going to be? Greasy pizza? Sad drive-thru burgers? Dish by Blue Apron is for nights like that. These are the pre-made meals of your dreams.

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Israel's been accused of genocide since long before October 7th, ever since the Soviet times. Genocide's always been a stick with which to beat Israel. And it's got a particular satisfaction for anti-Semites, because the word genocide came into play to describe the Holocaust. after 1945. And so the inversion has a particular sense of a frisson of enjoyment, I think, for a certain sort of person. The UN's genocide report is notable. Look at the broad brushstrokes. It's notable for...

almost in complete absence of Hamas in the report. No mention of the hostages or Hamas. Now, if you take any war... They didn't mention Hamas at all? Might have mentioned them once or twice towards the end, but basically they've been erased. You read the report, you would get the impression that Israel started the war as a war of extermination of Palestinians like the Nazi Holocaust. And if you take any war with two groups of people...

fighting each other, and civilian casualties, of course, in all wars. And you remove one set of combatants, then you're left with a genocide. And that is what the UN has done. And they backed it up with, as you say, those various different quotes from Israeli leaders.

which are taken, I hate to use the phrase, out of context, but are actually taken out of context. Sometimes even they've erased the bit after the comma that makes clear that what they're talking about is not Palestinians, but Hamas. Of course, the Israelis have used strong language.

is a war. For example, Gallant's famous phrase, the human animals, he was not talking about Palestinians. He was talking about Hamas, the rapists, the murderers, the mutilators, the necrophiliacs, the kidnappers, human animals. Perfectly accurate. All Palestinians? Of course not. Yeah. So it's precisely because the anti-Israel types themselves...

have conflated Hamas with Palestinians or forgotten that Hamas exists, that they hear all of these things as if it's been said about Palestinians. It's a hoax. It's a dodgy dossier. And it's a hoax. And it's not the only hoax that the UN has been guilty of perpetrating recently. There's the famine hoax as well. Okay, wait, hang on a sec. We'll come to that because I want to look at the aid and famine situation.

Just for clarity for listeners, I've just got a couple of these things that this report quoted Israeli high command of saying. Prime Minister Netanyahu, this is...

He was reported to have said in November 2023, two is the IDF. This is a holy war of total annihilation. This was a biblical reference. They also mentioned President Isaac Herzog, implying... collective palestinian guilt although i'm not sure there's an actual quote and i also know that it was an implication of collective so i mean you're in the realm of implication rather than

explicit sayings. It seems a bit dodgy. But then there's Joab Gallant and he was talking about complete siege and no electricity, no food, no fuel. I don't know if the report mentions Smotrich, but it certainly doesn't help the narrative broadly, the things he said. Most recently, he's saying there's going to be a sort of real estate bonanza in Gaza. Which, for those of us seeing the horrors of war, it's a pretty tasteless thing to say at this point. But he's also, he famously said far more...

explicitly shocking things about... I should say that if you see a smile across my face, it's not at the things, at the situation, it's at the way it's been used by the UN. It's a smile of disbelief, basically. Which bit? Well, the whole thing, I mean, look, the burden is on the UN. If you've got a situation where you've got the most powerful military in the region, with the military capacity to wipe out every single garden in an afternoon...

and it hasn't done so, and you're wishing to call it a genocide, the burden's on you to prove it. How can you have a genocide that isn't a genocide? How can the Israelis... I mean, the Israelis are pretty good at stuff. How can they... This is a pretty bad genocide, given that, you know, Gazans are... More than two million of them are still alive. They're still being fed. They've still got their mobile phones, able to post stuff from the strip. I mean, if you go on...

Go on to Snapchat, which my kids have, and you can go on to this thing called heat maps. You can see what Gazans are posting from inside Gaza in real time. You can zoom in. Do that. Loads of food. Loads of food. No one's starving.

No, I'm starving. And all the pictures of people who have been apparently starving have all been discovered to have congenital health problems or cancer or whatever. This is the famous Daily Express photograph. The New York Times had to apologise. I don't want to deny the suffering in Gaza, but it's a war.

This genocide, famine, it's a hoax. So I will come back to the famine thing, but a classic sort of, I think Piers Morgan has said this a lot. And so I think there's a lot of people who think this. If it's the case, as you described, that Israel is actually incredibly efficient, and if you look at how they've waged the 12-day war against the Iranians, the precision against Hezbollah across Lebanon,

particularly with the Pedro and Walkie Talkie plot. And you see how even more recently they took out the Houthi high command in Yemen and you see their operations in Syria. It's so precise. to the point where there's even reports of individuals in their apartment blocks in Tehran being taken out by Mossad-run drones. And then you look at Gaza, and it is total desolation.

I mean, near total. It's completely wiped out. And I guess the Piers Morgan... view is, if Israel are so efficient in all these other theatres of war, why is it that they have not been able to be as efficient and precise in Gaza?

I think it's because Hamas have proven themselves to be much cleverer than Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. This is a different war. Hamas, you know, Iran... is trying to fight to destroy Israel militarily. Hezbollah existed with the same goal of destroying Israel militarily. Hamas' goal is to destroy Israel's existence in the international community.

is to destroy Israel's standing in the hearts and minds of every person in the world. And it's doing that by fighting the war of propaganda. So it knows it's going to lose the shooting war, but it doesn't want to win the shooting war. It wants to win the propaganda war. And that's its strategy. And that is Israel's weak point, because Israel does not focus on the propaganda war. It focuses on the shooting war, deeply embedded within the Israeli psyche.

is this idea that we're not going to explain ourselves. We're going to be just really satisfied that we're doing the right thing, and you're going to hate us anyway. And that comes from decades and decades of persecution. You know, the Jews who ended up in Israel had nowhere else to go. different lineage from Jews like my family in Britain who were here from before the war, fought for Britain in the Second World War and so forth.

They were refugees from tough countries with tough backstories who'd seen atrocities and massacres. And their experience was that growing up in anti-Semitic countries, whether it's the Soviet Union or anywhere else, Trying to explain yourself as a Jew would just humiliate yourself, because they're going to hate you anyway. So me trying to plead with you to see me as a human being only demeans me.

You know, you can pick my pockets of my humanity, you know. You know, as the saying goes, an antisemite might accuse... a Jew of theft, not because he thinks he's stolen anything, because he wants to have the satisfaction of seeing him turn out his pockets. Prove to me that you're a human being and I'll enjoy it even more. So that's the Israeli heritage. The Israeli psychology was forged.

in that idea of, you're going to hate us anyway, we're no longer going to excuse ourselves, explain ourselves, we're going to do what's right according to our system of morals, which we gave the world, by the way, millennia ago. and it's up to you whether you side with us or not. We're going to be good for ourselves and strong for ourselves. Fast forward to now, and that has become their Achilles heel, and Hamas knows it. Hamas is clever enough to know it.

Israel is fighting the actual war. Hamas, via its propaganda skill, has spun it as a genocide. And the idiot comfort democracies have taken Hamas's side, taken them at their word, allowed ourselves to be manipulated. and the results you can see. Okay, so then the problem Hamas surely would have, if they're playing the propaganda war on the international level, then at the local level, the Gazans...

presumably with their families being obliterated, so many of them being killed, they are going to revolt against that. And we've seen pockets of that, little bits of that, but surely it's untenable. To what extent can Hamas survive from within Gaza and the own people of Gaza? I think it's important to understand what Hamas is. I mean, of course, it's as you...

No, it's an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's part of the Muslim Brotherhood, really. Muslim Brotherhood's main headquarters, one of them is now in Britain. We can talk about that separately. Which one? Where is it? Well... The Muslim Brotherhood, it used to be based more in the Middle East, but because of it, it's the wellspring of jihadism. It's where Hamas came from, Al-Qaeda came from, ISIS came from, even the Iranian regime was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But because of its jihadi threat to nation states, it's been banned where it was established in Egypt, in Jordan, in the Emirates, in Bahrain, across the Arab world, been driven out. And so it's begun to take root more and more in the West. And Britain is one of the places where the Muslim Brotherhood is very, very active. But it's an undercover organisation. It isn't banned. Faraj said he would ban it. In my book I call, which Faraj has kindly enjoyed,

I call extensively for him, for the government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. This is another conversation we can talk about this. Do you want to talk about it now or separately? Well, yeah, of course. I care that the Muslim Brotherhood are operating in my country, believe it or not. There's a whole chapter in my book on Islam and the relations between Muslims and Jews.

which we can talk about maybe separately. But in terms of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is the wellspring, as I say, of global jihadism. In 2015, two senior security officials in Britain, Sir Charles Farr and another one who escapes me, produced a report on the Muslim Brotherhood, which concluded that it was a national security risk.

The Muslim Brotherhood, its end aim, its final aim is jihad, violent jihad, but it prefers to work incrementally across generations, gradually inserting itself into the democratic body politic. In Britain, it dominates many Muslim communities, it dominates many mosques. It seeks to isolate Muslim communities from the mainstream, preventing assimilation.

And it has many different organisations, from youth groups to mosques and other facilities for the local community, which instils in them a sense of isolationism, a sense of extremism. and carries with it heavy penalties for assimilation or for calling out October 7th, for example. Almost no Muslim voices in Britain have done that, partly because of threat of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So the Muslim Brotherhood is doing that. It also has an operation in Parliament trying to get favourable laws passed to it. I don't even need to mention the impending criminalisation of Islamophobia. But it's doing this covertly. It's doing it covertly. So the Muslim Brotherhood will never be out in the open. It has many different shell organizations, charities, often according to some reports.

The charities will appear under different names. The Emiratis actually just did a, this was about a year ago, called out Britain for not banning lots of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups, which included things as ridiculous as like... a Wembley car garage.

Yeah. I mean, the Emiratis have been putting pressure on us for a long time to try to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. They released recently, just a few months ago, a list of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, and something like eight of them were based in Britain. Money gets from these charities to Hamas and to other jihadi organisations. So the Muslim Brotherhood really has Muslims in Britain in a vice, preventing.

assimilation and seeking over many generations to take over the country and implement Sharia law here. That is their goal. That's not the same as every Muslim, but it's dominant. organization in Britain and elsewhere. So that's why in my book, and Faraj has wonderfully echoed that pledge to ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a starting point.

before you start to look at the problem of Muslim assimilation in Britain. It's weird that Starmer's government, who can ban the Palestine Action Group, which I'm not sure I actually support prescribing that group. I think that those involved in... This was a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago. A couple of members of Palestine actually broke into an RAF or British military. And I think that they should have been shot on the side. If anyone breaks into British military, they should be.

absolutely dealt with like that. But instead, the government prescribed the group. It's not totally apparent to me that they are a terrorist group, but if they are able to do that, how are they not able to prescribe? the Muslim Brotherhood. It seems it would be an easy... I mean, it's just, it's appalling to me where you look at, sorry, John Jenkins, that was the other person. Jenkins and Farr was the report from 2015. Look at that report 10 years ago.

10 years ago, recognising the Muslim Brotherhood as a national security risk. This was a report which was classified, but some of it was made public. And I'm going from the public records. So it was an extensive... analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood and the threat that they pose to Britain, to Muslim assimilation and integration and to the future of our democracy and to jihadism. Nothing has been done. Nothing has been done. Like I say, we're...

We're idiots. We try to see people as friends, whoever they are, and we can't see enemies when they're enemies. Let's go back then to my question about Hamas' leadership within Gaza. And given that they're waging this war... and the sort of propaganda international level. I see videos of individuals who might rebel in Hamas, but they get executed.

To how long can a totalitarian clack last in a place with a population of 2 million, over 2 million, before the people revolt against them and turn against them? Muslim Brotherhood, I came to that because that's where Hamas grew out from. They are explicitly part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their charter is openly anti-Semitic. It mentions the protocols of the elders of Zion as proof that the Zionists are evil, for example.

But when it arose in the 80s, it was in contrast to the previous Palestinian rulers, the PLO and so on, who were living the life of Riley, who were quite corrupt, who were jet-setting around the world. And Hamas was more a street movement. You know, we're of the people. We actually care.

We're suffering like you. We are sharing your burden. We're the grassroots. And so it comes a lot of local Palestinian support, which continues to this day. A lot of Palestinians see Hamas as the real heroes, the real... movement of the people. And even today, support for Hamas is quite high. It's very difficult to tell from the polls because

Polling amongst Palestinians is difficult. I mean, polling in general is difficult, but amongst the Palestinians is even more difficult, and particularly in Gaza, it's more difficult still for obvious reasons. But support for Hamas is quite high. It's very likely that if there was an election tomorrow...

in the West Bank and in Gaza, Hamas would still win. It would win in the West Bank as well? Yes, definitely. Yes, absolutely. Well, that's where it won before. I mean, the last time there were elections in the early 2000s, Hamas won in Gaza and in the West Bank. So they're actually winning the propaganda war. I'm not saying it's definite. I'm saying it's possible. I mean, some polls have put them up to 70% support. So other polls think that's exaggerated. I wouldn't like to cast...

you know, polls are difficult even in Britain before elections, as we know. So I wouldn't like to say categorically one way or the other. But what is definite is that Hamas has, even now, a strong groundswell of support from within certainly in gaza deeply radicalized communities and in the west bank too i mean it's literally in their school system it's with their they imbibe radicalism in their mother's milk you know

We have Cubs and Scouts. They have jihadi training camps for kids where they enact, dress up as Hamas. operatives and enact kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers with their parents cheering. This is a sort of brainwashing that goes on from a very, very young age indeed. I would say that, I mean, this is totally anecdotal, but the... few gardens that I have spoken to.

and all of whom happen to be anti-Hamaz, but all of them are also anti-Israel. So I've not actually, and perhaps you've met Gazans who are pro-Israel, but I've not actually met them. So even if they were to turn on Hamaz, I'm not sure it's evident that they... No, no. I mean, you know, I've got a friend who's Gazan who, you know, in my former life as a foreign reporter, he was my fixer in Gaza.

And he's now out, actually, of Gaza, which is another story. But from the beginning of the war, I kept in touch with him, actually, in a way, more in touch with him more regularly than with people in Israel in some ways. And from the beginning, he hated Hamas. He would always refer to them as the dogs. He didn't want to speak openly or mention their name in case he was overheard at the time. And then as the war wound on, he became more

able to speak freely and call them by their names. But he hates Hamas. He was supporting the IDF from the beginning, just wanted the IDF to win and beat Hamas. But I don't think that there's much love in his heart for Israel. I mean, he sends a message to Shabbat Shalom or whatever, but I take that with a slight pinch of salt.

But there are people like him who do oppose Hamas. There are clans and armed groups who are increasingly rising up against Hamas a little bit. In fact, sometimes I look at Gaza and I think there's more of a resistance to Hamas there than there is... Here in Britain. There's certainly more marches against Hamas there than here in Britain if you take out the Jews. And there's at least one sort of paramilitary anti-Hamas group operating in the south, I think. That's right, in Rafakh.

Look, we've mentioned a couple of times famine and aid. Before we get to the accusations of famine, I wondered if... Even I've struggled a little bit in this domain to get a clear picture throughout the duration of the war. I wondered if you could paint a picture... over the last two years of the AIDS situation. And forgive me if that's a laborious task for you, but there's so much noise about this.

But most famous, of course, in the spring, there was an actual blockade of aid. But then the GHF have come in after this, an American-backed group. The UN have been accused of... by Israel of not, you know, of aiding Hamas. Hamas have been... accused of taking all the aid at various points. And Israel will say, oh, well, actually, it's a problem of distribution rather than, you know, we're giving it to them, but it's not getting distributed within.

Gaza. And then, of course, Egypt did a deal with Israel, Egypt to stop using the RAFA border if Israel guaranteed aid getting in. I wonder if you could just... give me a simple terms history over the last years if you don't mind of the aid situation wow that's uh that's quite a big big question how long have you got i think i i think really uh in general terms aid has been

weaponized as a propaganda tool since the very beginning of the war. If you look at people talking about famine in Gaza, it's almost up until October 7th, back until October 7th. I mean, people will use that. immediately as a reflexive

as a reflexive reaction to try to blame Israel. Famine was talked about for a very, very long time indeed. I mean, I was looking at my own columns I've written for The Telegraph and I was debunking the famine myth for months ago, months ago before it was made official by the UN. Aid has been difficult. Israel, initially it was delivered under the auspices of the United Nations. That was problematic.

Because the UN is hand in glove with Hamas. According to Israeli intelligence, 1,200 UN staff members are members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. UN staff members, is this working for UNRWA? in Gaza, mainly for UNRWA. Mainly for UNRWA. Yeah, I'm not sure entirely, but I'm not sure the exact figures, but predominantly UNRWA. But if they're working for UNRWA, they don't have any sway, do they, at the top level of the UN?

Right? Because UN is a huge... No. Well, I mean, the top level is something different. I mean, we can talk about that. We can talk about Francesco Albanese. We can talk about Tom Fletcher and other high-ranking UN officials who are controversial. shall we say. But even within Gaza, there were a number, I think it was 12, identified UN staff who took part in the atrocities of October the 7th.

10% of UN staff in Gaza is thought to be members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. So it's a deeply compromised organization. Gaza works hand in glove with Hamas and has a monopoly over aid and has a very cushy sort of position. Really, its orientation is to... keep the Palestinians in stasis until they can reclaim Israel. That's kind of the agenda that the UN is indulging.

Israel's been contending with that through the war. They're trying to fight a war against a jihadi enemy that's hiding under civilians and trying to encourage civilian casualties for propaganda gains. with a UN that's delivering aid that's also compromised by the enemy. It places Israel in an almost impossible position. And it got to the point where, last year in March, where things came to a head.

because Hamas, in stealing or being given a portion of the aid, is able to sell it. So the aid is given freely for Gazans. Hamas takes control of the aid. uses it to give to its fighters first, sells it to the population, can control prices up or down, uses that money to pay its fighters, and if the population misbehaves, it can change access to aid.

Hamas's control of the aid, or part in controlling the aid, enabled it to raise money to keep itself going and to keep the population under its control. So Israel was trying to destroy it militarily, but the aid was really the key. to Hamas' grip on the Gazan people and the Gazan economy and its ability to keep itself functioning as a fighting force. And that was being enabled by the UN. And so for that reason, Israel...

took responsibility away from the UN and instead said, right, we'll do it ourselves with the Americans. That was the birth of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And that was the catalyst for a huge backlash from the United Nations. accusing Israel of weaponizing famine as a weapon of war, accusing Israel of the genocide allegations really began to mount up. Why did that trigger that backlash? Because the UN was losing its business model.

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The UN was losing its authority in Gaza. It was losing its ability to be an actor in how the thing was playing out. And the UN, in having the aid taken away from it, it was a sense of pique. And now we're going to throw everything at Israel. So the anti-Israel propaganda from the UN really ramped up then. You had Tom Fletcher, British UN humanitarian chief, back in May.

Accused in saying on the Today programme on Radio 4 that 14,000 babies would die within two days as a result of Israel's actions. That was a claim that was repeated by 13 MPs in Parliament. creating the impression that Israel was killing 14,000 babies or allowing them to die through starvation. Two days later, when those 14,000 babies didn't die, nobody noticed, nobody cared.

This is the sort of propaganda that's coming out from the highest levels of the UN. Because that's just after the blockade finishes, right? Yes. So he was saying that by moving from the UN to the GHF... That's what the- Yes. I mean, Israel's strategy was- The problem with talking about Israel's failings is that Israel is a democracy like any other, in some ways.

It has bad actors. It has bad politicians. It has villains. It has failings. Every country does. Every democracy does. But the problem with discussing Israel's flaws... is that there's a tendency in the air that whenever you take one of those bad actors or one of those failures, people take that and characterize the entire country by that.

So it's as if, you know, we looked at our own history, let's say our invasion of, a disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It's like people taking that and saying, okay, look at what Britain has done, therefore Britain is a genocidal country. You know, always like taking, you know, take any other, any other one of our many sins. as a country, and characterizing it by that. And then you get to a stage where people think that Israel and Hamas, they're kind of the same. In fact, Israel is worse.

Because that's like the Nazi. Israel's like the Nazis. It's not. It's a democracy doing its best and making mistakes. And one of those errors was probably was stopping the aid from going in for a period of time. There were huge stockpiles of aid that was being held by Hamas. Israel's strategy was to stop the aid going in until their stockpiles would run dry. That would prevent Hamas from further exploiting their stockpiles.

and then begin to give it out for free to the Palestinians. So when Israel- But weren't they more explicit than that? I think it was a new strategy of war to try and speed up. the war to bring it to a close. I thought that it was actually more open. Am I wrong to think that?

They were more openly saying, as a strategy of war, we're going to do this blockade because what we've tried before hasn't worked. Yeah, it was in the context of trying to stop Hamas from keeping itself alive with the aid. Right, right.

Yeah, and so it did that, but then that handed the other side a huge propaganda victory, because they say, look, Israel's starving, Gaza, nobody's going in. Now, it didn't mention any of the stockpiles or the fact that nobody was actually starving. Then Israel commences this GHF.

project, which has been, according to Andrew Fox, my co-podcaster who's gone and seen it firsthand, is extraordinarily successful, but has been beset with difficulties. But essentially giving the food to the Palestinians without requiring them to pay for it.

which was a departure from the previous regime. So then they've got a new problem now. This is where the GF, it's accusations against the GHF that, well, there was... some accusations that they were now killing Garzans, but then it turned out some members of the GHF had been killed themselves. And we see some of these videos where Garzans are running towards the aid, whereas GHF are saying, don't shoot.

Because they're dealing with these desperate people trying to get aid, but also Hamas could be amongst them. And Hamas, we know, are trying to sabotage. the whole operation, as well as trying to kill these individuals. So you've got this very tense situation. The GHF, how it's working, seems a nightmarish task to take on.

Yeah, exactly right. It may very well be that there are some Israeli soldiers who shot wrongly, who killed people wrongly, of course. I mean, that happens in war. You've got 300,000 soldiers in action in a war zone. You always have errors, you have bad apples, you have crimes. We had it in Iraq. I've mentioned that already. You remember the

the pictures of torture that coalition troops took part in with that guy with the hood on and the electrocuted and the dog menacing the naked man. I mean, those were our people, you know. So these things happen in war. Not that I'm excusing it for a moment, I'm not, I'm condemning it. But by and large, Israeli forces abide by all the humanitarian conventions and the rules of war.

But you then had the UN in retaliation for Israel taking away its monopoly on aid, refusing to cooperate to deliver aid into the people, which it was hopefully supposed to be doing. So Israel had these... has these big distribution centers where the people would have to come and get it. Sometimes it's quite dangerous. The UN could help with distribution with its networks, refused to do it. So you had those scenes of aid.

sitting there in the sun rotting because the UN was refusing to distribute it so that it could blame Israel. for the starvation it was causing. So talk about war crimes and starvation as a weapon of war. The UN was using the starvation as a weapon of propaganda. As soon as it was exposed by journalists, the UN began to deal with it.

This brings us to the famine accusations. The UN has now officially declared famine. If you look into that report, again, I call it a dodgy dossier, you can see that all the methodology is wrong. For a start, it declares famine in Gaza City, in a city, only in the city, not in the whole strip. for the first time in history, that famine's only been declared in the city and not in a whole country or a larger area. And if you look into the detail of it, one thing that really jumped out to me...

was that by the UN's rules, this is from memory, so forgive me if I'm not exactly right, but I think I'm correct in these figures. There has to be 180 excess deaths per week, I believe it is, or is it per day? in order to qualify for a famine. In Gaza, the entirety of the Gaza Strip, that figure was six. Not 186. Just regards to starvation. Yes. Six. And by the way, before the war…

when Hamas was in charge with lots of money coming in from Qatar, there was malnutrition and starvation then because Hamas is not running a responsible government and poor people starve because they're not getting welfare and so on and so forth. So that's another thing. But yes, six rather than 118. And if you look into the report, it says that

The way it gets around that is that the UN says that we are speculating that the true number of deaths are far higher because they haven't all been counted. That takes us from 6 to 180. So it allowed itself the license to magnify the number of deaths speculatively 30 times. 30 times in order to accuse Israel of famine. And look, Gaza...

is the most photographed and filmed war in history. If there were people, if there were 180 people plus starving to death daily, weekly, I bet you that that would be filmed. There will be pictures galore. We wouldn't be able to move for the pictures. But the only pictures we've seen have been people with cancer, with other health defects, not starving, passed off as pictures of starvation, famously on the front page of the New York Times and Daily Express and elsewhere.

It is a hoax that the UN is complicit in, that the media is taking and running with and is informing government policy. When Prime Minister Starmer announced he was going to recognise a Palestinian state... He mentioned in that statement, the pictures coming out of Gaza. It's a hoax. Look, the last thing I want to talk about before we move over to Substack is ceasefire. So...

This has come up. There's been various talks and obviously failed talks throughout two years. And the latest is... Actually, I was hoping you might help me make sense of the latest, which is that... I think Hamas have asked Trump for a new ceasefire. They have agreed that they'll release half the hostages. But this comes off the back of a, in principle, rejected ceasefire, I think, by Israel, where Hamas would return all the hostages but not disarm. And for Israel...

They obviously want the hostages back, but they weren't prepared to accept Hamas not surrendering or not giving up. all their arms. Now, I might have misunderstood that because, again, it's quite a nebulous, cloudy issue. What do you understand the ceasefire situation to be right now? Well, I believe that Hamas made an offer of...

half or part of the hostages, not all of them. And from the Israeli point of view, Netanyahu said, we want all of them. That's it. We're not going to take any half measures. That's the impasse. I mean, essentially, we're looking at... a zero-sum game here, which is difficult. Normally, as Golda Meir famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, you want us dead, we intend to survive. Between those two, there's not much room for a compromise.

And that's what we're looking at when it comes down to the end game, which we're looking at now. Hamas will not release all the hostages, or it's very unlikely to. Because that's the only card they've got left. That's the only card they've got left, unless they're under immense military pressure with some kind of...

outlet that's that's what um national is gambling on that put enough military pressure on hamas and eventually they'll just give up total victory this idea of total victory um but once hamas gives up the last hostage then it has no cards left um israel wants all the hostages back. If Israel pulls out, leaving hostages there in Gaza, the conditions for further conflicts are there.

and leaving Hamas in power in any way or existing in any form from Israel's point of view is unacceptable because who would after October the 7th? Which responsible country would? But so, do you think... Let's say Hamas agreed to give all their hostages back, but not to surrender. So they remained in power. You don't think there's any way in which that is acceptable?

Personally, I think that is definitely acceptable because Hamas is practically destroyed now already. I mean, all of their various tiers of leadership have been killed, apart from the few in Qatar, which Israel missed recently.

the tiers of leadership have been destroyed. So you're relying on very young and inexperienced commanders and often, you know, teenagers with guns, picking up guns and enjoying the fight. There are more tunnels than people think. I've heard estimates of up to 40% of the tunnels still. there so that's a serious problem but as a kind of light infantry force that it was at the beginning of the war, that's been got rid of. It's now a guerrilla insurgency force to all intents and purposes.

So that goal of beating Hamas has almost been achieved, or has been achieved, depending on your assessment. It's the hostages that's the real sticking point. Do you think Netanyahu would share your opinion? What do you know about Netanyahu's take on that? Would he accept that? Well, look, I mean, there's...

Obviously, you can't speak for him, but I just... Yeah, I can't speak for him. And there's a spectrum, you know, let's know is a deeply divisive character in Israeli politics and has been since long before October the 7th. There were protests against him since even before... the judicial reforms of the year before the war. What's going on now is there's many different views of it. Supporters of Netanyahu would say that he is

going for total victory against Hamas to destroy it finally, to get rid of the tunnels, to get the hostages home via military pressure. Opponents of Netanyahu say that Doing so is likely going to kill the hostages because they'll be either killed in the bombardment or executed as soon as Israeli forces get close. Hamas is almost destroyed or destroyed anyway. And they say he's only doing so...

because prolonging the war will keep his political coalition together and keeps him out of court and so on and so forth. So they're suggesting corrupt motivations. it's difficult to know what's really going on from the outside. I'm not an Israeli journalist, I'm not in Israel. But I think what's definitely true is that Israel has no good options right now. If it calls a ceasefire and pulls out, it's leaving its hostages there. And it's leaving Hamas, a rump of Hamas in power.

There isn't any viable plan at the moment for another force to take over in Gaza, an independent force of Arab countries or international force or anything like that. But if it keeps going and it goes into Gaza City and... campaign comes to its full fruition, it risks the hostages being killed and more condemnation from the international community. So Israel really is in a tight spot. Yeah. You say that, and then I think again of Starmer recognizing...

giving Hamas the reward that he has, I think, is how absurd the whole thing is. Yeah, I mean, actually, you know, the way that Britain, every country did its recognition of, say, to Palestine slightly differently. The way in which Britain did it was, I think, the most deplorable of all of them. Because Keir Starmer didn't even pretend that it was a legitimate recognition of a legitimate state. Normally, when you recognise a state,

It passes the four requirements of the Montevideo Convention. It's recognised as having all the apparatus of a state and functioning like a state. It benefits another country, Britain, to have bilateral relations with it. So we recognise it as a state, open embassies and so on. On this occasion, he used it as a weapon. It was a weapon against Israel. He said to Israel, either you surrender, pull your forces out of Gaza, leave your hostages there, leave Hamas in power to the extent that it is.

or we'll recognize a Palestinian state. At that point, Hamas, which had been engaged in negotiations, according to Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, Hamas pulled out the negotiations. thinking, well, look, we've got British recognition if the war carries on, so let's just carry on the war. It's unconscionable. There wasn't even a pretense this was a legitimate recognition. It was merely an attempt to pressure Israel not to win the war.

And, you know, when you see Trump and Starmer at Chequers, giving that joint press conference, it's very obvious to me that Trump, I'm no fan of Trump, he's got a lot of faults. But Trump's orientation, his center of gravity, is that he wants Israel to win.

Starmer's center of gravity is that he wants Israel to lose, to give up. That's the difference between them. And for all the elaborations of recognizing a Palestinian state, of all the, you know, helping Israel, not helping Israel. That's what it boils down to. If Britain, France and the other European countries had wanted Israel to win from the beginning, all the pressure from the start would have been on Hamas to release the hostages and give up.

That's what should have happened in a sane world. We look at the liberal democracy under fire, the jihadi state. Let's put all the pressure on the jihadis. You shouldn't have taken the hostages. You shouldn't have done October the 7th. Give up, give them back.

and then we'll finish. Instead, the pressure went on Israel. Don't fight the war. You're killing civilians. Stop. You're doing genocide, you're doing famine, all these overblown accusations because we've seen the pictures produced by Hamas and disseminated into the media. We had it totally upside down. It's a moral, topsy-turvy world that we're living in. And yeah, it comes to something when Trump seems like the grown-up and Keir Starmer seems like the deplorable child. Yeah.

Accusing Starmer of wanting Israel to lose sort of implies that he's a smart guy. And actually, I think he's more of a midwit, and he might have been caught up in all of the... bluster and propaganda that he's lost his moral clarity. And because you've got to mention Starmer has family in Israel, so he says, and I believe his wife is from his wife's side.

So it doesn't fully make sense to me that he just desperately wants Israel to lose. There's more that he just doesn't, he can't make sense of the mess of the propaganda that's before him, not least because most of it's coming from... ranks of his people, the people who support him. Yeah, I mean, Starmer is a weakling Prime Minister. He has no...

no moral fiber at all, as far as I can see, no principles that he won't trade in for other principles in the demands of expediency. And of course, he's facing hard left insurgency from within his own party, hemorrhaging support to Corbyn, the Zara Sultana, the Greens, the Gaza independents. And so I think his solution to that is to pay lip service to the Jewish.

to Jewish people while shafting them with his policies. Yeah, yeah. Well, in my opinion, it's a real low point for my country. And I'm not sure we can call ourselves Great Britain anymore. Before we go to the subject, just seeing as we've mentioned the... a lot of the numbers on the death toll. We haven't actually mentioned how many IDF soldiers would have been killed in Gaza. Do you know that answer?

I don't know, off the top of my head, it's about 800, something like that. 800, okay, so that's actually quite high. Don't quote me on that, but I, yeah. Okay, well, let's say it's in that ballpark. That is quite high. So at a certain point, there's a trade-off of the hostages. And, you know, if there's 20 odd left and, you know, how many IDF soldiers are going to be killed trying to get them back.

just another part of the moral complexities of war, I guess. Israel is a remarkable country in so many ways. It's remarkable... I suppose it can be summarised by saying that it's one of the happiest countries in the world, according to the UN happiness rankings. At the beginning of the war, it was the fourth happiest country in the world behind three Scandinavian countries. Now it slipped down to eighth after two years of war. By contrast, Britain is 24th. The US is further behind. Italy is 40.

So it's much happier than us. It's a young country with a high birth rate above replacement, the only country in the OECD that has that. And it's got a great cultural coherence. It understands who it is. It understands its values and it understands its peoplehood, all of which are things that we have jettisoned in the name of inclusivity and diversity, which are things I go into in my book.

Israel knows who it is, and it isn't going to compromise on those things. Part of that is the ethos of national service. Everybody in Israel sees everyone else in Israel as part of a wider family. They would sacrifice their lives for each other and do so. ethos of the IDF is that you send your children to serve in the army, and the army will do everything it can to get your kids back. That's the sacred vow.

that bonds the culture together in a way that we can only dream of these days with our social divisions. And so the fact that there are hostages in Gaza Israel doesn't do that calculation of how many soldiers are going to die to get them back. It thinks that's our sacred commitment. That's who we are as a people to get them back, whatever the cost. Jake, a great pleasure speaking with you. Before we head over to the substack.

to discuss the brilliant concept of centrist fundamentalism. This applies more to Britain, I think, but this is something we can explore in the show. I want to explore with you a little bit of a... Perhaps different from this topic. Is there anything you'd like to bring attention to viewers and listen to? Not least your book, Never Again, How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself. But is there any, your podcast, of course, The Brink.

with Andrew Fox. Is there anything else you'd like to bring attention to? Those two things, really. I mean, the book in a sentence is really, it looks at... anti-Semitism as a symptom of where the West has gone wrong, how the West has lost itself since the Second World War, since the Cold War, with the spread of centrist fundamentalism, which we're going to be talking about as a dominant ideology.

opening the door to the new radicalism, which is progressive radicalism, Islamist radicalism, and white supremacy, which we see mainly in the States and in Europe. So that's the thesis of the book, and it finishes with looking at the science of social change. and how we can change, turn our society around from the current situation, which Sir Roger Scruton described as down with us, a down with us mentality, how we can restore our old values by instating

up with us as an ideology. I look at the science of doing that. And I think that if we do that, antisemitism will be drastically reduced. And the brink you kindly mentioned as well that I present with, Andrew Fox has been on your podcast as well, the former.

parachute regiment officer uh he and i fit together quite well i think with my i'm a former foreign reporter so we've been both been all over the world doing things and seeing things um and our first guest coming up this week is barry weiss yeah fantastic i look forward to listening

Jake, a great pleasure. Let's head over to Substack. Thank you for listening to the Winston Marshall Show with our guest, Jake Wallace Simons. Remember to head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk to enjoy ad-free viewing and listening. but also to have an extended exclusive conversation between me and Jake Wallace Simons, where we explore his idea of the centrist fundamentalist, the liberal globalist, and how this all stems back to the post-World War II.

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