Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JUST JOSH SPECIAL: Sinwar's Dead. Now Bibi, End the War!

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JUST JOSH SPECIAL: Sinwar's Dead. Now Bibi, End the War! · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It should not be an idea
• 0:07
  that is even remotely dangerous to say that a psychopathic, Jew-hating butcher of Israelis
• 0:13
  and Palestinians alike is dead and that's a good thing. Nor should it be dangerous to
• 0:19
  suggest that this is the moment for the Israeli government to end the war once and for all.
• 0:24
  But those two things are controversial to two different groups of people, and I just
• 0:29
  want to address them today. And if you heard that Sinwara is dead, but you're not entirely
• 0:33
  sure what it means, here are my two cents, because I've been following this reasonably closely.
• 0:37
  I got myself into a little trouble earlier today when I woke up and saw that YAH-HAL Sinwara
• 0:42
  had been assassinated. He's the head of Hamas and the head of the leader of Gaza, because I shot
• 0:48
  off a tweet. And let me tell you, nothing good ever comes of shooting off a tweet. You can shoot
• 0:55
  off many other things in the bedroom, for example, but don't ever shoot off a tweet and think
• 1:00
  things are going to go well. I said, perhaps clumsily, this is the greatest day for Palestinians,
• 1:06
  since Israel pulled out of Gaza nearly 20 years ago. And then I said, all pro-Palestinians who
• 1:12
  aren't Jew haters or supporters of a jihadist death cult should celebrate. And then I said,
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  Allahu Akbar, Sinwara, as if I was sort of saying, you know, Yippee Kaya, motherfucker, Sinwara.
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  I got a text from a friend of mine who is extremely pro-Palestinian saying, you've flagged it as
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  the greatest day for Palestinians, big call to make as a non-Palestinian. You've used an Arabic phrase
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  in your caption and the term Jew haters. They write, you don't reckon some people just don't
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  want to be occupied and denied basic human rights irrespective of the faith of their oppressors.
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  I mean, I reckon this is all gross and the deviation from what you profess to make space for
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  reasoned conversation. And I said, well, actually, you should listen to the episode before last
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  with the reporter Marcus Walker, who's spent a lot of time in Israel since October 7th and is a
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  sort of floppy head lefty Englishman. And he has some really good insights into Sinwara
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  than I hadn't realized. And she said, she will not listen to that episode because I didn't
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  interview a Palestinian for it. Marcus isn't Palestinian. I have interviewed Palestinians,
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  but I didn't in that episode. And this person said that she quote, won't listen to a conversation
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  with the rhetoric and Arabic language appropriation like this. It's truly off and gross, she repeated.
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  She said, the Arabic language, this is in a text to me. The use of Jew haters as though that is what
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  drives people to care about or to kill the named Palestinians. Maybe this is what you really think,
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  but totally and visually and language wise, there are so many red flags in that post that
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  isn't what your brand usually professes. So I deleted the tweet. I don't normally delete the tweet,
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  but I said to her, listen, if you're this confused about it, someone else is going to be confused
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  about it as well. I didn't say any of those things. My point was, I am the person who cares about
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  the killed and named Palestinians. Sinwara was the proud Jew hater and anyone who is not also a
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  proud Jew hater should, like me, celebrate his death. But social media is the place where nuance
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  goes to die. So let's bring in some nuance here. There are two impediments really to Palestinian
• 3:26
  liberation. There's right wing Israeli hawks who have stalled the peace process since 2008,
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  when it came very, very close to an agreement between the left wing Israeli government and Mahmoud
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  Abbas. Since then, Netanyahu and his cronies have been in power, and they are a huge impediment
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  to peace in the Middle East. The other impediment, perhaps even a significantly more problematic one,
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  is jihadists who just want to kill as many Jews as possible and cause Israel to crumble as a state.
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  That was very much Yahya Sinwara, who was assassinated.
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  We've eradicated, in other words, one of the two impediments to the liberation of Palestinians
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  and to peace in the Middle East, and we've done so using the only tool that jihadists understand,
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  which is bloodshed. My point now is that it's time to remove the other impediment, which is the Netanyahu
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  government, using the tools that we use in the civilized world, not the kinds of tools that people
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  like Sinwara use, uses, which is democracy. Let's just backtrack about Gaza here and who's
• 4:41
  Sinwara was, right? So, 70 years ago, Gaza was part of Egypt. Israel existed alongside it. It was
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  supposed to have been part of an Arab state that lived alongside Israel when the country was
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  created in 1948 by a United Nations resolution, but the Arabs didn't want that. Israel was happy with
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  that at the time. The Arabs didn't want that. So, Jordan invaded the West Bank, Egypt invaded Gaza,
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  and Egypt sat on Gaza for the next couple of decades. Well, it gets a bit hazy around the Suez
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  crisis in the late 50s, but we don't have to go into details. Basically, what happens then in 1967,
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  as anyone who knows basic Middle East and history knows, is that the Arab states were gearing up
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  for a massive push to get rid of this country that was less than 20 years old at the time,
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  drive all the Jews out of the region that had already been driven out of all of the other
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  countries in the Middle East, which is why a lot of Israelis feel that it's problematic when
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  Palestinians talk about having the right to return to territorial Israel to Tel Aviv because
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  their great grandparents came from there when the Israelis are saying, well, my great grandparents
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  came from Syria, they came from Iraq, the majority of people who live in Israel didn't
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  parachute in from Europe after World War II. They're indigenous to the region. They've been living
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  around in Arab countries all of their lives, and now they've come to create one single Jewish
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  state amidst a billion Muslims living in, well, it's a half billion Arab Muslims who live in
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  Muslim Arab states. Nonetheless, putting that to the side, the Jews have been evicted in the 40s
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  from all of the other countries. They come and they set up Israel, and then the Arab armies
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  basically want to drive them out altogether. Israel preemptively invades, and so successful
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  that it takes over the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Now Sinwar, the leader of
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  Hamas and the leader of Gaza, was not a man who used barbarism and brutality in order to achieve
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  other ends. The man was a psychopath. He used barbarism and brutality against other Palestinians
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  because he loved barbarism and brutality. He was cut from a kind of ISIS cloth. He was known as
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  the butcher of Han Yunus. Han Yunus is the town in Gaza where he was born because he killed his
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  fellow Palestinians in Hamas in order to purge Hamas and make his way up through the ranks.
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  He was arrested by Israel because he also killed some Israeli Israelis at the time,
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  and he was in an Israeli prison until some of you may remember. In 2011, Hamas orchestrated a
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  breakout from Gaza. They kidnapped an Israeli, and they exchanged him for a thousand Palestinian
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  prisoners. One Israeli for a thousand Palestinian prisoners, and the man behind organizing that
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  and agreeing to that prisoner swap was BB Netanyahu. He released Sinwar from the Israeli
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  Jail, and Sinwar went back to Gaza, and he has been the leader of Gaza ever since he murdered
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  the top Hamas commander in Gaza eight years ago in 2016, Mahmoud Ishtawi, who was engaged in
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  internal power struggle with this guy, Sinwar. Then Sinwar becomes the leader of Gaza.
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  He's not entirely the leader of Hamas. You might remember that back in July, the leader of Hamas was
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  assassinated by the Israelis when they blew him up in he was visiting Iran.
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  And at the time over the past eight years that Sinwar has been in charge, this guy has been
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  as ruthless as psychopaths. You could imagine engaging in the most horrendous terror campaigns
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  against his own people. Quite apart from, we often frame October 7th in the current conflict
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  as Israel versus Gaza or whatever, but it reminds me of a line that an Israeli military expert once
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  said, which is, this is not us against them. This is some of them and some of us against most of us
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  and the most of them. That really, this is about people who want conciliation, peace, mutual respect
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  on both sides. Unfortunately, that's a dwindling fraction of the population on both sides. But nonetheless,
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  we still exist versus those who don't. And in that respect, Sinwar and the most brutal and violent
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  Zionist religious zealots have more in common with each other than either of them does with the
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  bulk of the Arabic or Palestinian people on the one hand or the Jewish or Israeli people on the other.
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  Sinwar was a horrendous dictator. His brother, Muhammad, who is probably taking his place now
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  is the kind of person who is legendary in Gaza for if you're walking along the street and you look
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  at him the wrong way, he has you executed. It's that kind of a regime. So just be careful when
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  you're expressing support for a Palestinian solidarity that you're not accidentally expressing
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  support for the tyrants who have ruined that benighted enclave. So Sinwar worked with the official
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  head of Hamas, the terrorist group, when he was the leader of Gaza. This is before July when he
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  became the leader of Hamas to align the group with Iran more, to align the group with Hezbollah more,
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  to learn from the lessons of ISIS and the Syrian civil war. And you got to remember, like, you know,
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  Hamas, there's so much to say here, but they actually got involved in the Egyptian civil war in 2013
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  on the side of the Islamists and jihadists in Egypt. And that caused Egypt to close its
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  border with Gaza. You know, we talk a lot about the Israeli blockade on Gaza, which has been so
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  brutalizing to Gaza's everyday lives and was imposed after Hamas came into power because Israel,
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  you know, as I mentioned, occupied it from 1967 after it scored it in a win in a war in which
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  Egypt had been about to invade it. Didn't really know what to do with it in 2005. The right-wing
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  Israeli Prime Minister says, you know, there's no point in continuing to build Israeli homes and having
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  to secure the peace in Gaza. Let's just get out of there altogether and let the Garsens have it.
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  This was regarded as being a peacenick sort of move. Sadly, thanks largely to the Bush administration,
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  which in the wake of 9-11 was very besotted by the idea of fostering democracy in the Arab world,
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  encouraged elections. Many Weiser minds said, hang on, I'm not sure you actually want the Garsen
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  people voting because they're really choosing between a couple of terrible binary choices, where
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  you've got a corrupt Palestinian authority, which is moderately pro-Israel, and then you've
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  got this radical jihadist death cult, and there are no sort of civil institutions after years of
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  Israeli military occupation that moderate Garsens can vote for. Needless to say, they haven't
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  vote anyway, and Hamas wins. And as a result, there's this blockade on Gaza because obviously,
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  if you have in your charter that you want Israel to cease to exist and you'll just want to kill as
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  many Jews as possible, the Israelis who control your borders are going to want to know what's going
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  in and what's going out. We're talking about a very small parcel of land. We're talking about
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  Gaza being as close to major cities as the outskirts of any large metropolitan area are, and we're
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  talking about innocent people's lives well within the shooting range of rockets. So 2013 comes
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  around and there's the whole Arab Spring thing. You remember that, and there's a revolution in Egypt,
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  all over the joint, and Hamas backs the jihadists in Egypt. No, this has nothing to do with Israel,
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  right? This has nothing to do with Jews. People who think, oh, well, this is all just a,
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  it's a prison break. It's a reaction to occupation. If it's a reaction to occupation, then why are
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  they supporting jihadists in Egypt, which has no territorial conflict with Gaza at all? And you
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  know, it's hardly in cahoots with Israel, with the exception of not wanting to wipe them off the
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  map anymore because they've made peace. So Egypt blocks the southern border. Gaza is not just
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  occupied. It's not just an enclave inside of Israel. It has a border with Egypt. So Egypt is like,
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  we're not going to have these jihadists come across the border. In actual fact, it's the Israeli
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  government that starts to try to normalize relations with Hamas and things. The pragmatic thing
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  for Hamas to do is not to poke us, poke the bear in the eye and have us wipe them out. They're
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  going to want some kind of an accommodation. So on October 6th of last year, the day before
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  the attacks, I mean, you had unprecedented numbers of Palestinians coming into and out of Israel
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  from Gaza, working in Israel itself. Israel gave Gazans 18,500 jobs. I mean, like there were 18,500
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  workers crossing that border every single day to go into Israel. And that was freed up considerably
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  by the Israeli government. At a time, we might add when zero people were going across into Egypt,
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  Egypt wasn't allowing any Palestinians in. And none of the other Arab states that claim to
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  profess that profess so much sympathy for the Palestinian cause were allowing any Palestinians to
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  come and work under work visas there. The Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar
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  have a huge appetite for labor, but they'd rather ship in Bangladeshies and Pakistanis to build their
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  stadiums than to allow Palestinians work visas the way that the Israelis were. Nonetheless,
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  this is not to exclude the barbarism of the Israeli blockade. It's just to put it in context of
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  the way that Israeli security officials regarded the need for maintaining secure borders with Hamas.
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  So at this time, Sinwar is really one of the masterminds where he decides to increase the alliance
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  between Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and become something of an Iranian proxy. And to beef up
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  Hamas' military capacity with a view to one day launching a massive reckoning that will trigger
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  a regional war that could spell an end to Israel and drive the Jews into the sea once and for all.
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  Sometimes you hear it said that Hamas removed from its charter some years ago the desire to eradicate
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  the state of Israel. Sinwar himself was always very clear that the reason why that was done
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  was because they wanted to make it more likely to get a Palestinian state so that that Palestinian
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  state would be a launching pad for terrorist attacks on Israel and would be the staging ground
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  for an eventual invasion of Israel that would wipe the Jews out of the area and kill as many of
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  them as possible. He was unapologetic about this. This is not me being anti-Arab, this is not me being
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  anti-Palestinian. I have said a bazillion times that I care about the Palestinians enormously.
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  I regret their suffering. I think it's inexcusable what the Netanyahu government has been doing in
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  the building of settlements, the illegality of it, the cruelty of it, the apartheid system that
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  they have in the West Bank, all inexcusable. In Sinwar's own words the man was a proud Jew hater
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  and wanted to kill as many Jews as he could. He was an ideological radical ISIS-style madman
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  and a psychopath who killed many Palestinians as well as Jews. He received a lot of aid
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  from the Gulf states. The Gulf states wouldn't give work visas, work permits to Palestinians,
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  just as countries like Lebanon and Egypt don't allow Palestinian refugees and the descendants of
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  the Nakba to become citizens and to get permanent work visas, which they could if they cared about
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  Palestinians as much as they say they do, but they want to maintain the Palestinian situation in
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  Gaza and the West Bank as miserable as possible to put as much pressure on Israel via the international
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  community to come to a two-state solution. So they're cynically using Palestinians as pawns
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  in this. The Palestinians are getting fucked from all over the place. They're hostages of the
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  Israeli blockade, they're hostages of the Egypt border closure. Palestinians are hostages of the
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  refusal of Arab states to provide work permits while Israel did their hostages of the refusal
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  of Arab states to provide security in the form of peacekeepers who could come from Arab states
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  and secure Gaza so that it isn't left to the whims of either jihadist death cult terrorists or
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  the Israeli military. The Palestinians are hostages of the refusal of Israel to provide security
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  after everyone gave them shit for being a colonizing power and they pulled out in 2005.
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  And the Palestinians are hostages of Arab leaders who have betrayed them time and time again.
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  You don't hear that. You just hear that they're hostages of Israel. That's the kind of double
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  standard, which is the way that anti-Semitism works in the 21st century. So Sinwar as the head
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  of Gaza, starts receiving a lot of foreign aid, right? In the 2010s, the attitude of the Gulf
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  states and the Arab world is let's just build up Gaza and in the absence of any Israeli occupation,
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  let's see what that enclave can be. And what do they spend the money on?
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  They could build up and build skyscrapers and turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Mediterranean,
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  notwithstanding, of course, the Israeli blockade, but if they changed their posture towards Israel,
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  you could have imagined it. Instead, they build down, they build tunnels, massive tunnels,
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  huge networks of tunnels. And unlike a normal country's government, unlike even Israel's
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  government, which uses rockets to protect people, Hamas uses people to protect its rockets.
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  It puts residential areas on top of some of the most militarily significant tunnels and hides
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  its weapons there. Thus, Gaza has been basically a prison camp since 2005.
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  Another aside about Sinwar is that he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008.
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  He survived the brain cancer because he got the world's best medical attention.
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  Did he get the world's best medical attention from his fellow Palestinians in Gaza? No,
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  did he get the world's best medical attention from other Arab leaders who claim to care a great
• 19:00
  deal about the Palestinians? No. Sinwar, the butcher of Hanyunas, the man who struck fear into the
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  hearts of Palestinians and Jews alike, was given the world's best medical attention by Israeli doctors,
• 19:16
  by Israel, and they cured him of his brain cancer. Just imagine for a moment the shoe being on
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  the other foot and a mass murdering psychopath who intentionally targets women and children and
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  their own populations of women and children from, say, the, I don't know, Israeli side. I can't
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  even imagine such an Israeli, but imagine that there's the Jewish mass murderer who's a radical,
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  religious zealot and that person gets caught in Gaza. I mean, you don't even have to
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  imagine that person. Imagine just a Jew getting caught in Gaza and being given the best medical
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  attention and innocent Jew before they were dragged through the streets and thrown off a building.
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  My point is simply that it is a precondition of Palestinian liberation that they be freed
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  from Israeli occupation and from the jihadist death cult that required the Israeli occupation
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  before 2005 and then the blockade since 2005. What has just happened is that we have removed
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  the main jigsaw piece in that puzzle, the head of Hamas, the head of Gaza. It's a day for
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  tremendous celebration, but it's only the beginning of what could be the end. There are people
• 20:44
  in Palestine who could be a Palestinian Mandela. If you listen to my conversation with the Wall
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  Street journalist, journalist Marcus Walker, earlier this week, he says a person like, for example,
• 20:59
  Marwan Baguti, Palestinian activist who's currently in an Israeli prison could be a Palestinian
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  Mandela, but he makes the point that even if he is a Palestinian Mandela, at the moment, there
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  is no Israeli FWDClack. And that's what has to change. This has to be the moment at which
• 21:20
  Bibine Netanyahu, a man who I've long called a corrupt little hack, is pushed from power in Israel.
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  A new coalition is formed. A moderate center left party declares an end to the war,
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  and this is considered victory. The whole point of going in after October 7th was to eradicate
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  and devastate Hamas. It's now time to rebuild Gaza. It's time to take whatever tiny tendrils
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  of trust still exist in the rubble and the calamity of the hostilities and try to tend to them.
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  It's time to start tending to the garden instead of mowing a lawn and try to foster some green
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  shoots between Palestinians and Israelis. The only way we do that is by speaking frankly and
• 22:11
  bluntly about the evil on both sides, remembering that it's some of us and some of them against most
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  of them and most of us and not allowing ourselves to be radicalised and to respond to tweets like mine
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  with disingenuous, probably famed outrage about how anyone who is celebrating the death of a
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  psychopathic mass murderer must be denigrating the aspirations of the people who he claimed to
• 22:42
  represent, but in fact did not. So, Yippee Kaya, Motherfucker, Sinoir, let's turn the page
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  and look forward to a new chapter in the Middle East.