 Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mark Sidwell. I'm the director of research here at the Henry Jackson Society. I'm really pleased to see everyone here in the room with us and everyone who's watching online. Thank you so much for being here. This event on the Israel hammers conflict understanding the moral stakes. You know, the Henry Jackson Society stands for defending the free society at home and abroad. And often a lot of the time that takes us into the real, the real details of what's happening on the ground. But this afternoon's event is a chance to perhaps stand back a bit and take a wider, more philosophical perspective on how should we understand the moral stakes in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, which began with the atrocities on October the 7th. Particularly as Israel faces increasing criticism from Lord Cameron in the UK, who's been accused of sniping at Israel and suddenly from senior figures in the Biden administration as well. But at the same time, the US and the UK are still offering their official support for Israel's war of self defense. How should we think about the moral stakes here? Well, I'm delighted that joining us to give us his perspective is Dr. Yaron Brooke, who was the executive director at the Ein Rand Institute for 17 years and continues as the chairman of the board there. Dr. Brooke was born and raised in Israel. He served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence and earned his BSC in civil engineering in Haifa before he then moved in the 1980s to the United States, where he received his MBA and PhD in finance at the University of Texas in Austin and became an American citizen in 2003. He has authored many, many books, the most recent of which I think was Free Market Revolution. And he's currently also the host of the Aaron Brook show podcast where you can find him discussing other matters. But more importantly, he's very passionate on this issue and he's a very thoughtful man. And I'm really delighted to have a chance to hear from him on this vital topic today. So without further ado, Yaron, I'll hand over to you. Thank you, Mark. And thank you all for being here and for joining us today. So October 7 was obviously a horrific day. You know, I'm not going to detail all the horrors of that day, the barbarism, the complete disrespect for human life and human dignity that Hamas exhibited towards Israeli civilians. It really was an expression of you got a sense from the videos that we saw that they were taping of a sense of nihilism and of real hatred. The intent of Hamas was clearly genocidal. They can't actually do it. They can't manifest the genocide, but that is their intent. Whether it's October 7 and what we saw on the ground or whether it's a statement like that we see here in the streets of London and New York and everywhere from the river to the sea. I mean, what does from the river to the sea mean? It basically means no Israel. It means Israel must be replaced. And what happens to the Jews who live in Israel? You know, you might ask, well, they can't stay there. That's very clear. They either need to, in the words of some protesters, go back home. And we could ask where that is. I wonder if the Iraqis and Baghdad would take the 100,000 Iraqis who were kicked out of Iraq to come to Israel. The Moroccans will take 600 Jews back or the Egyptians, the tens of thousands where exactly or the polls for that matter would take, where exactly are they going to go? They can't go. They won't go. So the alternative, of course, is killing them. And that's really what the river to the sea means. It means the slaughter of Israelis. It means the killing of the Jews between the river and the sea. And October 7 wasn't like a one off thing that they did succeeded and went back. I mean, senior people in Hamas have said our plan is to repeat this as often as we can. If we have the capabilities, there will be a second, a third, a fourth, October 7. The bottom line is Hamas is, it's not like they're hiding their intent. Hamas is explicit about the fact that their intent is to destroy Israel. What they want to do is the complete and utter destruction of Israel and the elimination of the Jewish population in Israel. It's in their charter. And it's in every single one of the speeches of their senior officials. We also need to think about what alternative Hamas offers to the Palestinians, whether in Gaza or in this new state that they want to create. Hamas is not exactly a Democratic or a freedom fighting organization. Freedom is not their concern. Freedom in a sense of, in a sense that I think is important, which is the freedom of individuals to pursue their lives, the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they see fit. You know, freedom is a tricky word, right? Everybody seen Braveheart? I've seen the movie Braveheart. Remember when the Scots, you know, they are freedom and they run into battle? What do they mean by freedom? Of course. No, they don't mean freedom of course. They mean they want to be ruled by a Scottish king, not an English king. They still want to be ruled. So freedom is not freedom as I think we mean it in a modern sense of the freedom of individuals to live their lives based on their own choices, their own values, their own conclusions in pursuit of their own values, ultimately in the pursuit of their own happiness. That is not a concept that they were talking about in Braveheart. And it's certainly not a concept that Hamas is talking about. We have to remember Hamas is an Islamist organization. Hamas is dedicated to Islamism, not just Islam, which is just a religion, but a particular interpretation of Islam. The interpretation of Islam, which says that a state must be ruled by Sharia law. A state is just temporary because the goal ultimately is world domination. It sounds ridiculous to us, world domination. That's absurd, but they take it seriously. They are the offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They used to be the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine. They are part of a global network of Islamist organizations that includes ISIS and al-Qaeda. And yes, they all hate each other and all fight with one another. And that's to our benefit that saves us the logic stand from having more terrorist attacks against us than what otherwise would. But their goal is ultimately the destruction, not just of Israel, but the destruction of the West and the Islamization of the world. And what about the status of the Palestinian people? Palestinians, at least in Gaza, elected Hamas. Indeed, Gaza and the West Bank voted for Hamas in an election that Bush, the President Bush, forced Israel to allow in the Palestinian territories. Israel did not want Hamas to run, to allow them to run. They did not have to use them as a legitimate political party, given that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The Bush administration insisted Hamas be allowed to run. And Hamas, unsurprising to many of us, won. A significant portion, a majority of Palestinians voted for it. A denigration of civil war with the Palestinian Authority took over the Gaza Strip. But the Gaza Strip has had, the Hamas has had in the Gaza Strip, the support of its population. They've not been uprising against it. They've not been demonstrations against the Hamas. There's been very, very little opposition to Hamas rule. In spite of the fact that Gaza has suffered from no freedoms and a very, very weak economy, people there are, you know, significantly poor, with the exception of Hamas leadership, that seems to be quite wealthy and lives quite well. So what happened on October 7th was not just Hamas. What happened on October 7th was Gazans. You know, some of the Hamas combatants after they were in Israel came back to Gaza and told people, go, go, go. Now's your opportunity, kill Jews. Now's your opportunity to go and steal stuff and get stuff. And Palestinians did. They left their homes and they crossed the border. You saw some of the pictures of the wild celebrations as the Hamas, as Hamas brought back hostages, rape victims, bodies of dead girls. Those are the people. Those are not all card carrying members of Hamas that can be easily identified. So one has to say that the problem here and the problem that Israel faces is not with Hamas. I think Israel has made a strategic mistake. And the West generally has made a strategic mistake, but the West is hopeless when it comes to these things. In calling this a war against Hamas. We didn't fight the Nazis. We fought Germany. We didn't fight Japanese. I don't know whatever the name of the fascist political party that ruled Japan. We fought Japan. The war going on in Gaza is against the Palestinians. And we refuse to acknowledge that. It means we will, we will not win or Israel will not win cannot win. I mean the same thing happened after 911. The war we launched after 911 about who did we fight against terrorism. We fought against the equivalent of kamikaze pilots. You can't fight a war against a tactic. Terrorism is a tactic. We refuse to name the enemy. Indeed, the clarity slumber religion apiece and bush invited to celebrate the Ramadan at the White House in October, a month after 911. And we went to fight. Salam Hussein who had nothing to do with the enemy and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years in an attempt to bring them. I don't know democracy. Again, without considering who the enemy is and who needs to be defeated and what our goals actually are. So the West, West has been hopeless since 911 and well before that in defining the enemy and fighting the enemy. And therefore we did not win the Iraq war. We did not win the Afghan war. You can see that in the reestablishment of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations within Afghanistan. The Taliban is back to exactly the same behavior. It was engaged in before the war. And of course he rocked today is just a satellite in a sense of Iran. As is Syria, as is Lebanon. So if anything, all our battles in the Middle East, all America's battles in the Middle East and the bits of all basically led to much more power for the Iranians. And a lot less influence for us. The West is weaker in the Middle East, not stronger in the Middle East. So let's talk a little bit about how one evaluates people. In countries from moral perspective. Because it's tricky to evaluate even individuals from our perspective and it, but I'm going to suggest that one has to, and one can one should know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Generally, one wants to associate in life with the good guys and stay away from the bad guys. That is the opposite strategy will lead to a fairly destructive life. What is the standard of good and evil? What is the standard of moral goodness and moral evil? Well, in my view is the opportunity for individual human flourishing. That which is good for human life, that which is good for human flourishing, that which supports human life is good. That which is destructive to human life, that which destroys the capacity of individuals to flourish in their lives is bad. It's why individual freedom is good. It's why democracy broadly understood is a good thing. Generally, democracy is protect the rights of individuals to live freely. And authoritarianism is bad because authoritarianism generally restricts the ability of individuals to live free. Authoritarianism, evil, political freedom, good. By that standard, how does one evaluate Israel and how does one evaluate Gaza? Well, Gaza is clearly Gaza, Hamas, but even the Palestinian Authority are clearly anti-life. They have no respect for the individual. The Hamas is a type of theocracy. The Palestinian Authority is just a type of thuggish authoritarianism. It is a society Gaza, but the West Bank as well as society is dominated by violence, suppression of any debate. There's no concept of free speech. There's no concept of freedom of religion. It is authoritarian, tribal, centrally planned in terms of the economy and violence towards your own people. You dissent, you're killed. You're gay, you get thrown off a building. Women, women don't have full rights. They're treated as whatever the husband wants. Honor killings, okay. No big deal. The Hamas government, it is a government, got billions and billions and billions of dollars of aid from the United Nations, from the United States, from the European Union, from Qatar, from Iran, from Saudi Arabia, billions and billions and billions. That money did not go to building infrastructure. It did not go to building hotels on some of the most beautiful beaches in the entire Mediterranean. It did not go to building industrial infrastructure. It went to buying weapons and building tunnels and establishing an infrastructure for war. War is what they care about. War is what they exist for. Indeed, one of the original stories which I think illustrates this really well is, you know, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 with Prime Minister Sharon at the time, decided that withdrawal separation would be Israel's right strategy, let them have an essence of their own state. And then if they do something against Israel, Israel can legitimately defend itself by attacking them. It hasn't worked out quite that way in terms of international legitimacy. But because at the time there was the Intifada, second Intifada, Palestinians were blowing up buses, they were blowing up restaurants, thousands of Israelis were being killed, hundreds were being killed on a regular basis over the period, thousands were killed. So the idea was disengage. So Israel left Gaza. But Israel has settlements in Gaza. They were thriving settlements in Gaza where Jews lived and where there was agriculture and there was industry. And when they left and they were forced out, they had to be literally dragged from their homes by the Israeli military to get them out of there, taking them buses and moved out of Gaza. But they left behind an amazing infrastructure. Small factories, greenhouses, things that the Palestinians could have taken and used to build their own economy. What the Palestinians do, well, the day after the Jews had left, they went and smashed everything and destroyed everything. This again is nihilism, self-destructive and anti-life mentality. And therefore, many moral mentality. On the other hand, Israel and Israel is, you know, dramatically a flawed country. And in other times, I would do a talk on all the problems with Israel and why it's a real problematic country. But overall, you could do that same talk about the UK and the same talk about in the United States and talk about any Western country. And it is a Western country. It's basically a society that values freedom. It values the individual. It values production and wealth creation and economic liberty. It values debate, disagreement, and it values the rights of the people who live in it, including Muslims, Christians and Jews. They have under the Israeli law, Israel doesn't have a constitution, equal rights to Jews. They are not treated differently. Indeed, Arabs serve in the Knesset, in the Israeli parliament. They have served in the government. Some of them serve in the military. Those who choose, they have the privilege of choosing whether they serve in the military. The Jews in Israel do not. They have a conscription. To me, it is clear when comparing those two in terms of what they have done, what they stand for, what they strive for, who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. So, I want to quickly deal with maybe two issues and I'll try to keep it to about half an hour and then I'll take your questions. Israel is being accused in this war. Yeah, maybe it's a good country, but in this war it's committing genocide. It is killing indiscriminately, according to the Hamas, 31,000 I think the latest number is of Palestinians have been killed. I mean, this is bizarre and absurd. First of all, to keep a log of how many people are killed. There's a war going on. Israel needs to win this war. The enemy is hiding behind civilians. What's it supposed to do? Ask for them to release their hostages. Ask Hamas to surrender. Hamas, if Hamas surrender tomorrow, no civilians will die. But Hamas will not surrender. Israel to defend itself must destroy the organization, the political organization, military organization that made October 7th possible. And it must do whatever is necessary in order to do that. Israelis have exhibited, I consider a ridiculous level, a self-sacrificial level of care in terms of fighting this war. This is urban combat, urban combat, the likes we've probably never seen in the West. I don't know of the last war in which such urban combat. This is not even compatible to Mosul, where the Americans went in. It's not compatible to any battle in modern history that we're familiar with. We're talking about a very, very small piece of land, one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Two million people live here, close to half of them under the age of 18. Hamas knew all this, right? They lived there. They controlled the territory. They decided to launch a war from such a territory and to incite the Israelis. Israel has killed few civilians per pound of explosive drop than probably in any war in history. About a significant proportion of Israeli casualties are the result of either friendly fire, that is, other Israelis killing them, or the result of being overly cautious in dealing with the so-called civilians. By the way, Hamas are all dressed in civilian clothes. They're already violating the Geneva Convention and the fact that they are fighting, you know, not wearing uniforms. How are you supposed to identify them? Who are you supposed to shoot? Remember, Israel shot its own hostages because they were afraid they were being fooled by somebody, speaking Hebrew, pretending to be a hostage and could be a suicide bomber, could be a Hamas. Israel's doing, I think, and it's doing it partially because that's how it thinks about war, that's how Israelis think about war, but partially because of intense international pressure. It is overly concerned with civilian casualties. And, you know, this is the cause for why this war is going so slowly. Why haven't they been, why haven't they captured Rafa yet? Israel is the city in the south of Gaza. They haven't gone there yet. Partially again, international pressure, partially concerned with not wanting to kill civilians. Now, when was like that? And it makes, it makes the claim that Israel is involved in genocide laughable, laughable. Israel could wipe out the Gaza Strip in three days if it really wanted to and kill everybody there. And it could probably find an excuse to do it. They're doing the exact opposite. They're sacrificing their own kids, you know, to prevent the death of Palestinians, something which I think is wrong and I think they will pay a heavy price for as we move into the future. Finally, I just want to say a little bit about what explains the support from the West that Hamas has received. I mean, it's stunning. I didn't see it coming. I mean, this is the thing that stunned me most. October 7th, I could believe. I know enough about Hamas and intelligence failures. This is not the first intelligence failure Israel has committed. And as somebody who's been in intelligence, you only know a fraction of the intelligence failures that Israel does or any intelligence. Israel is probably better than most or maybe better than everyone, but it's still not perfect. What really shocked me is the extent of the hatred that came out the day after was the 35 Harvard clubs. The day after October 7th already initiated the statement supporting Hamas and attacking Israel. The demonstrations, the faculty members celebrating October 7th literally saying how good they felt when they heard the news of October 7th. Something is really rotten and sick in Western culture. If a significant number of our people express this. And this isn't just Middle East immigrants. This isn't just Muslims. This is across the board. Most of the people demonstrating in America are Americans. I don't know how many generations, you know, maybe Tucker could find out. So what explains this? And really, this is a consequence of the modern left agenda and the modern left's teaching at our universities. This is what has been taught at universities for 20 years. The intersectionality, the anti-colonialism or the post-colonialism. The whole mentality of oppressor oppressed and dividing the world into oppressor oppressed. The whole philosophy of equity. The whole philosophy of equity, the idea that the moral idea is equality of outcome. Equality of outcome. And if there's no equality of outcome, if somehow some people have more than others, then they must have exploited. They must have oppressed. So you divide all of humanity into oppressors and oppressed. Based on not even your individual success rate, but your group success rate. If you happen to be white, you're generally richer than Hispanics or blacks in America, and therefore you must be oppressing Hispanics and blacks. And given that there's a history, a true history of oppression, there's some basis for this. Then what we need is to oppress now the whites so that Hispanics and blacks have the opportunity to rise up. Because the only way these things move, these groups can move is through oppression. One group oppressing the other. It's the only way they don't understand economics. The markets don't mean anything to them. So the only way some people haven't, some people haven't, it's all a zero sum world because some people took from the others. And Israel is, from their perspective, white, although it's not particularly white, right? From their perspective, it's white. But what it is clearly is successful. It's rich. It's, you know, people have a good life in Israel. It's Western culture, which is quite successful. And therefore they must be the oppressor. Palestinians are poor, suffering, struggling. They must be oppressed. And automatically that gives you a moral coding for who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. The oppressors are bad. The oppressed are good. And you don't even need to know the details. Anything the oppressed do is justified. Anything the oppressor does is bad. We saw this a little bit, not to this extreme with BLM. You can have riots where they burn down people's homes, people's businesses. And that's okay because they're oppressed and they can express themselves in this way. And everybody else is the oppressor. Anybody who's successful is the oppressor and it's okay for them to suffer. When in Chicago, some of the rioters broke into Louis Vuitton stores and other luxury stores along the American mile in Chicago and took luxury goods. The mayor of Chicago came out and said it's a little bit of redistribution of wealth, so what? But of course this is all false. Israel did not become Israel because it oppressed. Israel became Israel because of the freedom it allows its citizens. It became successful. It chose to be successful. It was not predetermined to be successful. Indeed, when I lived in Israel, Israel was fairly poor. God's is the way it is. Not because it has to be the way it is. Not because there's some oppression, not because there's some conspiracy. It is the way it is because they've chosen to be this. They've chosen a path that has led to their poverty and it's led to their failure. Freedom leads to prosperity. Oppression leads to poverty. And that is what is manifested in Israeli Palestinian conflict. Okay, just a word on peace and then I'll take your question. So is peace possible? Well, not today. Who would you have peace with? I mean, this whole idea of a ceasefire and negotiating. Who are you negotiating with? People who want to kill you? We don't negotiate with people who want to kill us. Who are committed to killing us. You'd think that the West had learned by now that people who say, no, no, no, we want to take your territory. We want to control the world and not people you negotiate with. Not people you sit down and have a chat with. Not people who you compromise with. The only path to peace is Israeli victory. It's the conviction among the Palestinians that they cannot defeat Israel. That Israel will not disappear and therefore complete change in the mindset of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, I don't believe that will happen. Not the kind of victory. Israel will not win the kind of victory that will do that to the Palestinians. What we need today is a fundamental shift in the Palestinian culture. We need a shift that allows the Palestinians to recognize in the existence of Israel an appreciation of the values that Israel represents, the values of civilization, a focus on individual liberty, and a focus on human flourishing. When the Palestinians are ready to embrace those, peace will be easy. Two-state solution, one-state solution. It won't matter that much anymore. But until that happens, peace, sadly, is impossible. Thank you. Thank you very much, Aaron. A very bold and comprehensive take on the whole situation. We're going to have some time for questions now. I'll just take advantage of being chaired to ask one myself. That question of the sort of shift in cultures. I talked earlier about a good example being who are Israel really fighting and the wars against Germany and Japan, against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan. And of course, when we look at both of those countries, which at the time seemed appallingly repressive and sort of global monsters, they're now extremely successful, greatly liberalized. You were saying that there wasn't much hope until there's this shift in culture. How does the path to that shift will have to come through military victories? Is that the only way? I think that's the only way. I mean, it could come through military victory, occupation and reeducation. I just don't think the Israelis have the will or the international community, the willingness to allow Israel to do that or for the international community to do that. The reality is, why did Japan shift? Why is Japan today America's best friend? Why are they so liberal and so freedom-loving? Not because anything happened intellectually within Japan. It's not like somebody arose a liberal. It's because they were thoroughly defeated. Without Hiroshima Nagasaki, and I know people are horrified by this, but without dropping the bombs on Hiroshima Nagasaki, Japan would not be as great of a place as it is today. It just wouldn't. What that did was it convinced the Japanese unequivocally that they had lost and that they had no chance of ever winning. And as a consequence, when General MacArthur, who was basically the military commander of Japan after the war, wrote a constitution. He and his aide basically sat in the room and wrote a constitution for Japan, took it to the emperor and said, this is your new constitution. Didn't ask for a vote. Didn't ask for their input. He handed them a constitution. And because of the position America was having thoroughly defeated the Japanese, the Japanese were in a position to say, okay, we screwed up. We need something different. Maybe this is the right path. And they were accepting of it. So that happened in Japan. Same thing happened in Germany. I mean, Churchill was, I know today he's vilified for this, but it was very smart in flattening Dresden. It wasn't maybe militarily essential at the time, but it was essential for the defeat of Germany, the thorough unequivocal defeat. I mean, my interpretation of World War One is, and this goes against most people's interpretation, that the problem with World War One is that Germany was not humiliated. It was not defeated. Germany came out of World War One thinking we could have won. Just a few things different and we could have won. And it was ready to try again. Coming out of World War Two, there was no question they were ever going to win, right? It was done. They were demolished, completely destroyed. And as a consequence, they accepted that defeat and changed course. And this time, their own leadership care for Germany ultimately had much more of a liberal history than Japan did. So they had some intellectual resources in which to draw in order to do that. But they exited that war knowing that the path they'd been on was wrong. It was evil. It was bad. And they would have to do it differently in the future. And until the Palestinians, that happens to Palestinians I don't see. And the boys are on negotiations. Every time, every single time the West says cease fire, Hamas and the Palestinians go, yeah, we can win this. You know, we've got a chance. Every time the West goes after Israel, the Palestinians think, okay, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to fold. They're going to fold. We can, we can still, we can make it. And there's just no sense of defeat among the Palestinians. There's no sense that this is to crush them. And now we're building them now, we're building them a port to provide them with more aid. What have they done exactly to deserve Western aid? I know this is horrible because people are, people don't have food. But what have they done? I mean, again, if Hamas surrenders tomorrow, the war is over. It's very easy. And as long as we prop them up with aid, as long as we prop them up with talk of cease fire, the war will go longer, more people will die. It gets extended. The war's already taken too long. Israel took too long to start it. It's taken too long to finish it. And it's going to go on for months, months and months and months because of the Biden administration because of the West. So yes, America always seems to be supporting Israel and always undermines it in the background. This happened. This has happened. We go back to 1973 war, where the US flew huge quantities of supply stays well and helped them out. And at the same time, put massive pressure on them to stop and to compromise and to sell out. And America does that constantly, gives with one hand and takes with the other. And the taking with the other is unbelievably destructive because it emboldens the other side. Just one more thing before we come to questions. So there are obviously a lot of people who are very well meaning, I think, and, you know, I'm looking at what's happening in Gaza. And I'd see the scale of the death and the suffering and indeed the hunger and simply want it all to stop. And I was wondering, you know, you said a great deal. What would be your best argument for them? Is it what you just said about this is longer because we are not. I'd say it's easy to stop it again. But if those people were honest, then what they will be, what would make the headlines everywhere is Hamas, you need to surrender. Egypt put pressure on Hamas to surrender. Egypt could take Rafa. Egypt could help Israel. Egypt right there on the border. You know, stop this, right? The way to stop the humanitarian crisis is for Hamas to go away. And for this hostage just to be released. It's simple. But, you know, telling Israel to stop means, okay, so this will be longer. But then what happens next? Do we fight this war again in five years? In 10 years? In 20 years? When do we fight it again? I mean, I've been saying in 1994, I was living in the United States already. I called my parents up when the Oslo agreement was signed. And I said, a lot of blood is going to be spilled now. You basically signed the agreement that will spill thousands of lives. Israeli and Palestinian. And it's exactly what happened. As soon as Yassar al-Fard came back to the West Bank, terrorism spiked. Every time, every time Israel negotiated with him, terrorism increased. Every time Israel got tough with him, terrorism declined. And the ultimate was he got offered almost everything he wanted. By Houd Barak in Cam David in 1999, he turned it down, went back home. And the second that he started, which was unbelievable, be bloody. And, you know, at some point we've got to learn. And then every time we went to the Gaza in the past, going to Gaza for a few days, bomb it, do a few things, kill a few people, come back. And then go back and then come back. And every time you know that you're not making any difference, you know they're just postponing. And that's what led to October 7th. If Israel had not did it for the last 20 years, there would have not been October 7th. Israel showed weakness. Israel continued to accept the idea that rockets could fly into its civilian population. Because, I mean, in some sense, this is horrible to say, but I think it's true. The worst thing for Israel was the fact that it has the Iron Dome, because it pretended that it was safe. The Iron Dome gave it a sense of security. So, yes, they fly hundreds of rockets a day as well. They knock down 99% of them. Big deal, we can live with that. Really? I mean, you're living to live with somebody flying, let's say London. Rockets are just flying into London and you just, you can knock most of them down. So you're okay. So you're living to live that way, running to airway shelters every few months. It has to end. And Israel can't continue to allow this to happen. And the only way it ends is finishing this. So if anything, those people should, one, tell Hamat to surrender. Two, they should encourage Israel to speed it up. Let's take some questions in the room. Andy, either, and then this lady here, we'll take those two and then we'll come back. Yeah, just a question about the thorough defeat of Hamat. Because when Germany was defeated, it was thoroughly defeated throughout Europe. You've got Iran, you've got Islam, you've got crime states all around. So how is Hamat's defeat? And the second question that goes with that is that the constitution is imposed on Western Germany and also imposed on by an external, by the winning power. You're also surrounded, Gaza and West Bank is surrounded by Arab states, Muslim states, hundreds of millions of Muslims. And the acceptance of, it would be so much pressure for that not to be accepted. Even if there was a thorough defeat of Hamas in a way that I can't see as practical. But where would you see influence from the Arab world or Islamic thinking that could actually give a different vision of a prosperous society that is acceptable to Palestinian thinking? The first one was the thorough defeat of Hamas when you got Iran. Yeah, absolutely right. So in the long run, there will be no peace in the Middle East for anybody. As long as Iran is around, or as long as this regime in Iran is around. This has been true for 40 years. And we in the West have been delaying it for 40 years. In 1979, Iran declared war in the United States by taking its embassy hostage. That's a declaration of war, right? And the United States did nothing. They negotiated arms for hostages. That was Ronald Reagan. You know, Iran was created the Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early 1980s. They managed to kill 244 Marines and their barracks in Beirut on a mission that Ronald Reagan sent in to basically protect Yesor Afat and allow him to leave Lebanon and to go to Tunisia. Basically Ronald Reagan gave Yesor Afat his personal guarantee of safety out of Beirut to, and you know, we can go on and on and on. I mean, every single crisis at the end of the day is Iran and American appeasement. And those are the combinations. And until the United States figures out that they need to take out the Iranians. I don't think Israel can. It might be able to, but the world would go apoplectic if tried. It has to do with, the United States has to do it, or at least Israel has to have the United States support to do it. And until it does it, we're not going to get any kind of settlement anywhere in the Middle East. And there's just, you know, regime change is now an evil word, but there's no alternative. And the beauty of Iran, and I know this was said about Iraq, it's actually true about Iran. The beauty of Iran, different from Iraq and different from any other Middle Eastern country, is that Iran has a population that doesn't, that wants to be free. It has a significant percentage of the population. And you saw this last year, or what is it now a year and a half ago, with the gold revolution, right? I mean, I thought one of the most moving things that I've seen in many, many years and something that didn't get enough press in the West. In America, no European leader talked about, but these girls going out and demonstrating against the regime. I mean, the courage that they had, goosebumps. I mean, it was truly inspiring. And again, very little support from the West, which again reflects our complete moral bankruptcy. So yes, nothing will happen without taking out even. And maybe Iran is a model, right? Saudi Arabia will never support a truly free Palestinian authority. No other Middle Eastern country will, why? Because it'll be a direct threat to them. They're on people, my demand is the same. I mean, as much as, what's his name? What are the initials of the Saudi? As much as MBS pretends to be westernizing influence and a civilizing influence, he wants to rule. He wants to be king when his uncle dies and he intends to be king. And he attends Saudi Arabia to be a kingdom. And yes, he wants it to be diversified and rich. But he has no interest in liberty and freedom and free speech. If you're an atheist in Saudi Arabia, you go to jail for the rest of your life. If you can maintain your life. If you criticize the regime, you get flogged and sent to jail. There is no liberty in Saudi Arabia. And we again in the West pretend, you know, Donald Trump could go dancing with them and Obama can bow to them. And Biden can say a few nasty words about them, but then he runs groveling to them. We pretend because we're cowards. We're literally cowards because there's nothing they have on us. United States today produces more ill in Saudi Arabia by a long shot. And but we're cowards, so we won't fund them. And the same is true of the rest of it. It's like the Gulf States. We all, you know, a lot of Westerns go to Dubai and sit and have a good time and everything. These are not countries that represent liberal democracy. They're not countries that represent freedom or individualism or any of these things. And they are not interested at the end of the day in a model Arab state, let's say in Palestine that is free and democratic and liberal because that will be a lot of fun to their own regimes to their own to their own thing. So it's going to be very, very, very difficult. But what's the alternative? The alternative is occupying these territories with a strong hand. Nobody wants that. Certainly not Israel. The alternative is to kick out the population and send it elsewhere. Nobody will let Israel do that. And most Israelis don't want that. We're stuck. And this is why it's very, very, very hard to be optimistic about the long-term prospects for the region. Slightly different because you started about the West. I'd like to ask you if you were surprised, which I wasn't, of the enormous amount of anti-Semitism in the West. Me, Jewish girl, woman, I was not surprised and I was warned by my Israeli friends that this would surely happen. I suppose, do you agree that this was, I don't mean to say given moment, but anti-Semitism is always there. That because of October the 70s, it gave the West the opportunity to come up with and blame, excuse me saying this, I didn't even say myself Israel as being at fault. Yeah. So I, while I think anti-Semitism is always there in the background, maybe and it has been since the birth of Christianity. It's always in the background. It ebbs and flows. It has ups and downs over the years. I do think that it was, it was not a major force up until the last decade or so. Certainly in the United States and I know more about the United States because that's where I live. But, you know, I've experienced a little bit of anti-Semitism in the US, but not a lot. Nothing dramatic, significant. And I don't think it was, and most of it, most of it came from the right, not from the left. Most of it was the white supremacists and just people who are ignorant, just, you know, people who just don't know any better and are really ignorant that sometimes occupy the American right. What I think was surprising was the extent of it on the left. And I think that is a direct consequence to what the left has been teaching for the last 20 to 30 years. And of course, when we really think about it, how much difference is there in the modern terms between left and right? You know, they seem at the extremes to become one. But the whole identity politics that the left has embraced. And the whole idea that you're bad because you're white and you have to, you know, white fragility, you have to, you have to feel guilty because your ancestors enslaved. And by the very nature of the skin color, you are somehow flawed and a bad person and so on and you should blame yourself for every bad in the world. That mentality, that ideology is easy to apply to Jews. Jews in America are successful. If you think about the size in the population and how much they were presented in Nobel Prizes and Wall Street and academia, everywhere, it's absurd. Something must be, they must be a conspiracy. I mean, how could they be so well represented? And so it opens it up to, well, they must be oppressed. They must be the oppressor. And who are they oppressed? And, you know, in America, it's minorities and the fact that Jews are minority and the fact that Jews were killed not that long ago in a Holocaust, that's ancient history. Look how well they've done since. They must have captured the power since then. But it's all this power dynamics of the modern left. If you remember that it drives this point where the poorer you are, the more suffering you are, the more virtuous you are. There's a whole theory of this intersectionality called intersectionality where you don't just take one aspect. You say, okay, if you're black, you're oppressed, but if you're black women, you're even more oppressed. And if you're black, woman and gay or even more virtuous is a black woman who is, you know, doesn't have a defined agenda. That is the ultimate in virtue, right? That's the ultimate in virtue because it's the most oppressed. So you're quite virtue with oppression, which has origins in, I don't know, we could argue in Christian thought. But in modern, this is a modern twist that's very original, very, very, very, very powerful. And that's why they were so quick. They knew it. They knew the Jews had to be the bad guys because the Jews are the successful ones. A lot of questions. Yeah, a lot of questions. And we're a bit out. We've got about 10 minutes or so. We might be able to stretch a little bit, not too much. I'm going to give you one from online, but just hold your thought. And I'll also get another question from the room at the back there with the glasses. I'm going to, but I'm just going to do the online question first. So someone from online is asking about how much, how much sort of bore in mind Israel's reaction when it planned October the 7th. And perhaps whether they have been surprised by what Israel was actually done. Let's just get the other question as well and then you can answer. So a quick question. It's really related to the overestimation. I think it's one of the concepts that actually was developed in Tel Aviv University in terms of mathematics. Do you think it's the very naive to think that you could easily remove the head of state, like in the case of Hamas from Palestine, and then leave it to Palestinians to decide what they do next because they've been indoctrinated for almost 30 to 40 years. And yeah, is it kind of overestimation of the power spoke by Israeli military? Because I remember you stated about the Gaza Strip could be easily wiped out within minutes. But and it is true. It's about airstrikes and so on. The question is related more because Israelis are trying to conduct the operations in a very nuanced manner. They're trying to preserve people's lives. They're knocking on the house before the strikes are happening. And it's never been seen in Dresden or Japan or anywhere else. It has to be given the credit. And I think when you mentioned Japan and specifically Dresden, I don't think it could be compared because it's all what the Israelis are doing. They're going above and beyond. So could you please make a comment on the naivety of removing the state without casualties? Well, I think it is naive. I think the knocking and Israel's effort is self-destructive. I don't think that going to this extent to preserve civilian casualties is something that helps Israel in the long run. I think it hosts it. I think it shows a weakness. It shows a caring for the Palestinian civilians over Israeli soldiers, which I think is a mistake. No army has ever won a war over the long run, right? Real victory by caring more about the civilians of the enemy state than about its own soldiers. No country. And I think that's why the capacity of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki is relevant. There we didn't care and we won. And we won the peace. We didn't just win the war. In terms of capturing or killing the leadership Hamas, I think all that is possible. And I wouldn't be surprised if the leaders in Qatar ultimately eliminated. I certainly hope they are. But you're right. That is not enough. What is required is a re indoctrination and a reeducation of the Palestinian people. That will take a generation that takes a long time. But who's going to have the will to do it? Who's going to do it? So no, I just don't see an optimistic path here unless Israel is dedicated to occupying, changing the, you know, UN, the UN, which now European countries are funding again. UNRA is the one responsible for the education institutions, the way they're teaching genocide. So is Israel willing to kick out UNRA and replace them in the schools with teachers that are approved by Israel? Will the world tolerate that? Will anybody tolerate that? I mean, no, the answer is no. The fact is that we in the West are committing ourselves to endless war. And that's what we want. It appears until, I guess, we die out until we commit suicide. I mean, it really does appear that we've got a death wish. What was the question? About Hamas sort of planning. Yeah, I think they underestimated Israel's response. I really do think they were surprised by it. I also think they underestimated their own success. I thought they would, they thought they'd kill a few people and they'd come back. They did not know the music festival was going on. They encountered that by chance, so they didn't know in advance. So that that gave them opportunity to kill a lot of people and rape and do the horrible things that they did. And then they walked into some of these settlements with no resistance because, you know, because the Israelis weren't armed. Historically, Israelis were always armed, particularly those who lived by the border. And over the last few years, Israelis have been disarmed. The weapons have been taken away from them, locked up in places that are hard to get. And this is the consequence of disarming Israeli population, particularly next to the border. So the success of Hamas was a surprise to Hamas. And the response of Israel was a surprise to the Hamas. Yeah, I think we've got time for three more. Lady there on the right and this gentleman here. I just wanted to ask about your observations on the psychology of Israelis. If you listen to the BBC, the impression given is that there's a much bigger resistance against the actions of the Israeli government. I'm hearing across any of the alternative media, which would suggest that there's a lot of insolvency among Israelis. And yet there seems to me to be a potential weakness which is around the understandable concern for hostages. If Hamas did give back all the hostages tomorrow, what would the thinking be in terms of how one would continue? I mean, I think that would really create a split within Israel. I do think there's a split. I read, I often read how it's, which is kind of the left newspaper in Israel, but it's considered the most intellectual of these really newspapers. It's the New York Times of Israel. And it's definitely on the side of this has gone on too long and this has been a failure and we need to negotiate. We need to find something else. They don't have solutions, but they have a lot of doubts that they place on the current strategy. So that represents some Israelis resolve. But I think overall, Israelis are committed to seeing this through for the most part. And yes, there's some, there's some leftists who oppose this in most the intellectuals. But think about all those people team of settlements along the border, where a lot of the murder and rape and horrors happened. Those settlements were all, you know, the residents were all really leftists, peaceniks, right? These were people who committed to peace with the Palestinians. And so the left has been shaken dramatically in Israel. And even in the left in Israel, you now see a commitment to fight to get involved, see before. But in spite of all that, I still think Israel's overall, in spite of the result, pretty weak. It's not willing to do the things. A specific point, though, of the understandable concern about hostages. I wonder whether there's been a change in part at all since the return of Gilad Shaleed. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, Gilad Shaleed, I think he was accepted that that was a ridiculous trade, thousands for one soldier, and it again set up, I think, October 7th. But there is this view that Israel will do anything for the hostages and will sacrifice anything for the hostages. You know, I said from day one, I said, Israel must fight this war as if the hostages are dead. Otherwise, you can't win. And it's turned out that way. They've compromised, they've slowed down, they've cut deals all because they care about the hostages. You can do that. And half of them are probably all dead, sadly. You know, our count of the Gaza Wall is very clear and determined. And if I understand it correctly, it's a kind of descendant, Jabotinsky's famous iron wall speech with 1920s. One of these people who want the land, we want the land they're going to hate us. That's to be expected. So we need an iron wall, which we will advance as necessary. And at the end, they'll get tired of dashing themselves against it. So it's this idea of a violent pedagogy, which has been tried for some decades. And I think, you know, it's a clear educational prospect, but is it working? Is it possible that in Gaza now, and the West Bank as well, you've got a population which is ineducable, partly because of its emotions, which will have been heightened by the latest round. And because it's underlying religious antagonisms because of indoctrination and intimidation. So if all these are operating, do you really have any grounds to think that these Palestinians are going to give up? And isn't it likely that they are also looking at this and saying, well, strategies of provocative escalation work pretty well in places like Algeria in the past. This will get will for us in the next 100 years or so. Can you be sure you're going to win in the end? I'm not. I wish I was sure that I was going to win. And then partially because I think I'm not sure my side is committed. And I think this side is in a way that we are not. But, you know, at the end of the day, this can be Algeria for the simple reason that in Algeria, defense had some way home to go, in a sense. There's some way for them to go and somewhere where there was accepting to take them in. Nobody's taking 8 million Jews, you know, out of Israel. They will either die there or they'll, and they'll probably fight in order to keep themselves there. But this is not, Algeria is not the solution. Now, I don't think the Palestinians realize that. I think the Palestinians are still hoping for that, for somehow an Algerian solution where they all go home. But look, I'm not optimistic. As I've said, I think you're right in terms of some of this being tried. I think it's been tried poorly. You know, I don't think Israel has done a good job in setting up the iron wall, as you'd call it. I don't think it's been good at unequivocally showing the Palestinians they cannot win. I mean, there's so many examples of this in second and to father, I've shown since in the troops, they surround our thoughts home. They're about to enter and kill him. And just like Ronald Reagan a decade or so earlier, this time George Bush calls our show on this is you can't kill. You just can't. Well, okay. So, so we're weak, right? So there's no iron wall. We're bashing our heads against the wall and we're the ones, you know, and this is at the time. But I don't know how many of you remember the second into father, but buses would be blown up restaurants were blown up people just dying left and right. And the Bush administration was no can't can't kill yourself. You can't can't stop him. You can't send him out of the territories you have to live with him. Why? What is the logic of it what by what moral political military standard you keep the enemy alive and you keep him functioning. I mean, the reality is that the West is committed to and Israel is part of that is committed to suicide. And they meet acting as if they they're quite ready for it. So they keep prolonging it, but we don't want to win. Thank you very much for the speech. The strategic objectives that Israel formulates is going to be a product of the norms that it inhabits and its resources that it has available. And international law conventions have evolved significantly since World War Two. So when you say that Israel's big strategic mistake is that it said that it was seeking to dismantle Hamas and not that it was going to war with the Palestinians. Are you advocating that Israel commit to Dresden in Gaza? What would be something feasible that Israel could do because it doesn't operate in a vacuum? So it's very challenging because it doesn't operate in a vacuum and because international norms in the West, not anywhere else as the Russian military, if they abide by these principles. In the West, international norms have evolved to not winning. The West today is committed to one thing, not winning, not defeating our enemy. And this is why bin Laden called us a paper tiger. Absolutely. So to the extent that Israel is insisting on playing by the norms of the Western world, the modern Western world, it's committed to not winning. It has to abandon those norms if it's going to win. Now what does that look like? I don't think it has to look like Dresden, but it has to look like more than it's done. It should have been faster, more devastating. It should have used more air power so as to protect the troops on the ground. But they needed to move fast. They did it for about two weeks. Maybe the plans weren't drawn up. I don't know. That would be shocking if they didn't have plans to invade Gaza until October 7th, right? But maybe, who knows, given the failures of Israeli military, they should have moved fast, devastating, enormous firepower and they should have said, this is not Hamas is the government. Hamas is the government of the Palestinians. It's not some terrorist organization within the Palestinians. It's the governing body of the Palestinians. This war is with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have to be brought to their knees and the government needs to surrender. And we demand, just like Churchill did, unconditional surrender of the Palestinian government, call it Hamas. And done what was necessary. Now, I don't know, does that mean 30,000 would have died? Maybe less. Maybe if he'd done it fast and brutal at the beginning. Maybe if he'd killed 30,000, you know, it's hard to even say these things, but maybe if he killed 30,000 in the first two weeks, you don't kill anybody afterwards because it's all over. Or maybe it means more. I don't know what those numbers look like. And I'm not sure anybody knows what those numbers look like. And what does Israel do in order to shift away from that Western defeatist mentality? I think it shifted a little bit after October 7th, but, you know, Biden didn't go to Tel Aviv, didn't go to Israel to show support for Israel. Biden went to Tel Netanyahu to behave himself. And to get a good photo up because he's running for president, right? But you know that the West from the beginning said, yeah, we're going to support you, but you have to show restraint. You have to do all these things. There was an opportunity in Israel to see that shift. The world didn't let it. And I don't know how you break out of that. It requires a real philosophical change and real courage, which nobody in the West today seems to inhabit. I mean, if 9-11 didn't wake us up, if the bombings here in London didn't wake you up, then what's it going to take? If London being taken over every Saturday or Sunday by hundreds of thousands of protesters, who are unruly, what is it going to take? I'm not sure what it's going to take, but it's hard to, you know, the only reason to be optimistic, right? The only reason really to be optimistic is not because we're any good, not because we know what we're doing and not because we have any strategy. Or there's anybody on the horizon politically who is going to make any changes. The only reason to be optimistic is that our enemy is very weak. Our enemy is poor, weak, unsophisticated, and generally dumb. Iran might fix itself, right? When Hamini dies, there is a chance, it might be a small chance, but there's a chance that he gets replaced with somebody more modernizing and that it starts moving towards secularization. There's, you know, all these Islamic groups, they hate each other. If they all work together, they'd be a real force. They hate each other. The West will probably survive because at the end of the day, we do a decent job at assimilating people. And they, in the end, don't want to commit suicide. They don't want to die. The immigrants, they want to just become Westerns. They want to take care of their family. They want to do all this stuff. They might go out in the street and demonstrate, but they're not actually going to take up arms. So we'll survive because our enemy is weak, not because we are strong. And that assumes that China leaves us alone, right? Well, that's another kettle of fish. On that small mode of optimism, we're very much out of time. I know there are more questions, but thank you all so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you.