Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "What's Israel Doing?" with WSJ Reporter Marcus Walker

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"What's Israel Doing?" with WSJ Reporter Marcus Walker · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and here's a dangerous
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question for you. Will there be an all-out war with Iran? Does Israel want an all-out
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war with Iran? What exactly is Netanyahu's strategy at the moment? What will become of Lebanon,
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of Hezbollah? Is there a plan for Gaza? Is the two-state solution even feasible anymore?
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In this week, the one-year anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, there's
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a lot of chattering about who's right, who's wrong, has Israel been justified in its response?
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How can we play the sides off each other? I wanted to take a drink from a cool, refreshing
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mountain stream. Any time I want to take a drink from a cool, refreshing, intellectual mountain
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stream, I turn to one of my oldest closest friends, Marcus Walker, who is a reporter, a senior
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reporter at the Wall Street Journal, based in Europe. He used to be run there economics coverage,
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including during the financial crisis and during the Eurozone crisis, and he went and lived
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in Greece and reported from the front lines there. He's a fluent German speaker, so he's
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interviewed Angela Merkel and reported from Berlin, and he has been being sent to Israel. He's
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now based in Rome where he runs the Southern Europe Bureau for the journal, but he's been
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being sent to Israel to do some really interesting deep dives for the Wall Street Journal, for
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mainly it's American readers, into what's going on, giving context there. His recent article
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is entitled Israel's Invasion Gamble, Risks a Quagmire in Lebanon, and he had an essay prior to that
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entitled Netanyahu's War, The Tactics of a Political Survivor. I highly recommend Marcus's reporting
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in the Wall Street Journal, it's brilliant. He's not a Neocon, he's not a, you know, an Israeli
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quark, he's not a Rupert Murdoch hack. He's a really, really thoughtful and well-informed
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English guy, Oxbridge educated, and generally sort of a bit of a European lefty, but with a deep
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understanding of where Israel's head is at. He's interviewed all of the major players in Israel,
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and he spent enough time there in recent months to understand the conflict in a way that I
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could not possibly, I thought it would be useful to get his perspective on the sort of 30,000
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foot view of where we've been, where we are, and where we are going. I have you enjoying as much
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as I did the one, the only Marcus Walker. So how many times have you been to Israel since October 7th?
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Do you know? So I've now done four long stints in Israel. How long has it started to feel long
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after about two weeks? I've been staying there, no offense to the Israelis, but it must have
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felt very long for them. Yeah, so I've been there for about three weeks at a time, but also I've
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been editing coverage from afar, so I've been involved as an editor, as well as a writer
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Yes, right. And is this mainly just because of a big or news organization like the Wall Street
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Journal, although they have a lot of people in the Middle East don't have so many to cover the
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magnitude of everything it's been going on, so they bring in trusted people like you.
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Exactly, when there's a story this huge, then it's often all hands on deck, and they ask
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the experienced foreign carte ones to go and help the local bureau, which is often extremely
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stretched, getting noticed keepers all. And so what's your general sense of the arc of the past
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12 months as you've been popping in and out? From what point of view, from the
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I guess what it feels like to be there, like I assume we can understand we can imagine what it was
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like on your first trip, everybody traumatized still in the wake of trying to grapple with a calamity,
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but are they still in that mode? The Israelis on the street, the Israelis who you talk to,
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or is it too hard to generalize about a big complicated society?
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I would say it's still like that. There is still a sense of just being a trauma,
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and the anniversary of October 7 has also perhaps refocused people's attention on that.
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People have talked about what happened once again, but the sense of trauma has been there throughout
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the past year. Israel is a country still traumatized by this, and it is an open wound also,
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because there are still 101 hostages in Gaza who were taken that day.
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Well, there are still 101 hostages missing. We don't know how many of them are alive in Gaza,
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do we? Well, that's the number that's thought to be in Gaza who were taken that day, so it is thought
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that as few as half might still be alive at this point. But of course, the Israelis won all of
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their people back, or at least many of the Israelis, and I'm sure we'll come to that as it's
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an extreme divisive point. But overall, I would say it is still very, very fresh in the memory
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that has not receded into the past at all, so this has left the country in a traumatized mood,
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and also very divided about how it came about, and about the government's handling on the
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sense. Yeah, I mean, the government's handling of it since is what I find curious, and I'm curious
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about how locals think about it, because I saw some poll being quoted the other day on the
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anniversary of October 7th that happened in the week after October 7th saying, do you think how
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long do you think the military campaign as a result of this is going to last? And it was like,
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the majority of Israelis thought it was going to be over within three months, whatever the
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Israel was going to do in Gaza. And the number who thought it was going to still be, you know,
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a fully fledged military campaign a year later was vanishingly small. It was like a few percentage
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points or something. Did they retain a sense of surprise? It became clear, I would say,
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sometime around the beginning of this year that this was going to be a very long war with no
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end in sight. I think that that is indeed, well, that was a surprise to many people, because
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early on there was a sense of being a ticking clock for Israel to take a military action against
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Hamas and Gaza. Early on there was a sense of an international ticking clock, which was very
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short. The wider world tolerates an offensive against Hamas, but free for possible. Then there
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was an American clock, which was giving more latitude to Israelis, but not too much. You know,
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Biden also wanted this to be really over the end of the last year. But then there was Netanyahu's
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clock. And this is why many people in Israel would say we've ended up with a much longer war because
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he has been following a political strategy of playing for time in order to change the narrative
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and really create the foundation for his own political comeback. And fourthly, there's an
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Israeli military clock, which is not as long as Netanyahu's, but longer than the American,
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because the Israeli military thought that it's going to take at least a year to complete their
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military goal of destroying Hamas as a significant military force that can threaten Israel again.
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So I think a lot of the story in the past year can be seen as being about the tensions between
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these four different timetables that these different groups had in them. That's an interesting
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way of putting it. So just on the military clock, when you say that they knew that it was going to
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take a year to be able to destroy Hamas' military capabilities, has that goal been achieved?
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Pretty much. And it depends how high you set the bar, but many people in the Israeli military
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have been open to a ceasefire for some time now. They've said, look, we're pretty much done here.
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We've really reduced them to lots of isolated guerrilla cells and no longer a functioning
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army that could launch a large-scale attack like October 7 anymore.
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If the idea of eliminating them totally, as Netanyahu says, I keep saying, total victories is the
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goal. It's not shared by the generals. They think that's unrealistic. And for some time now,
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they've been saying, look, we're at the point where the threat to Israel from the House of Masses
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is dismantled and it's time to do a ceasefire deal and get our hostages back. And this has been,
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no, I would say, this was the story for the last few months until the latest escalation in Lebanon,
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which has really changed the conversation completely in itself. Yeah. And so from the outside,
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it's hard to know how much of the latest escalation is attributable to the Netanyahu clock in the
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sense that he doesn't want to go down in history as the man who allowed October 7th to happen.
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So he needs to build up some other narrative about himself that will drown out that failure.
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And how much this is a strategic Israeli clock or goal of like October 7th taught us anything.
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It's that we don't, you know, we can't keep kicking the can down the road. We've reached the
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end of the road that this is an intolerable situation. And we have to act on it. We have to think
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about this on a much grander scale than simply addressing Hamas and Gaza. We have to get real
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about the dangerous territory that we live in and start confronting Iran and degrading Hamas.
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It's a mix of both. I mean, Hezbollah. It's absolutely a mix of both. And on the strategic side first,
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perhaps there are, you know, long-term and sort of post-October 7 ways of looking at it. You know,
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in the long-term, Israel has been facing the growing strength and missile arsenal of Hezbollah
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for many, many years since the rather unsuccessful 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon where they tried to
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punish Hezbollah for kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers. And we drive them away from the
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border that didn't achieve very much except for UN resolution that was never implemented.
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And just verify that UN resolution that conflict between Israel and Lebanon ended with a
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resolution that said what? It said that Hezbollah should retreat away from the Lebanon, Israel
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border and should actually be dismantled. And the Lebanese government army, the army of the
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state of Lebanon, should be the one to protect the south of Lebanon, not this armed share militia
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backed by Iran. And that resolution 1701 from the Security Council was the only thing Israel
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really won from that short war in 2006. And it was never implemented. Instead, Hezbollah became
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stronger and stronger. In the intervening periods, many of its soldiers went to fight in the Syrian
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Civil War and played a big role in ensuring that the Arab Assad, Hezbollah expanded and became
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blessed with a guerrilla or terrorist army and more of a conventional army, a quasi-conventional army,
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which was also heavily armed in the years after that by Iran, including with the missile last
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oldest, bigger than that of most NATO countries. Okay, so the last time that there was an all-out
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conflict between a hot conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, as you said,
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it ended with the United Nations resolution. And the status quo henceforth was supposed to be
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that there are no Hezbollah rockets in southern Lebanon that can threaten Israel. That just never gets
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enforced. And I guess Hezbollah and Iran call Israel's bluff and assume that they're not going
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to want to reinvade after a long and painful invasion. And they're right. And so Israel just
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allows this build-up of massive weaponry in southern Lebanon. But why is the opportunity to take it
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out, taken now? Yeah. So obviously, October 8th last year is an important moment here. The day
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after Hamas's attack on Israel, Hezbollah started firing missiles at a strip of land in northern
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Israel. And that was sort of joining, but not joining, showing solidarity with Hamas and putting
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one foot into the water without waiting in fully. Because Hezbollah didn't want this war to happen
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now. They weren't ready for it. It's not their war, it wasn't their decision, but they sort of felt
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they had to support Hamas to some extent. And for many, many months, this became a limited war
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in both directions. Correct me if I'm wrong, Marcus. But presumably they also knew that they could
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get away with it to an extent that they couldn't on October 6th, because Israel had another concern
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on its hands. It's a strike of opportunism, presumably, to go, well, they're not going to start diverting
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all of their focus on dealing with Hezbollah in the north after what's just happened in the south.
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So let's take some pot shots. Well, we have the freedom just... Yes, absolutely. And the Israelis
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believe that Hezbollah was preparing its own attack on northern Israel. They believe they found
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their intelligence gathering has shown that there was such a plan to launch a ground attack
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on northern Israel too, but at a time of Hezbollah's choosing. So Nasrallah wanted to fight this,
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you know, on his times, when he wanted... Nasrallah was the head of Hezbollah.
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He... Nasrallah was the long time head of Hezbollah from the early 90s onwards,
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and it was assassinated in September. And so in the past year,
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Nasrallah thought that he could fight a limited war against Israel,
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chucking missiles at military and civilian targets in a narrow band of northern Israel,
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which depopulated that band. It forced the evacuation of the population.
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And... So how many people are we talking about there?
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So the government, the Israeli government,
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organized the evacuation of about 60,000 people, but possibly several tens of thousands of
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others, civilians left the north of Israel. So a whole strip of land was becoming
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depopulated. And so now, Israel is a very small country. Do you know how many... Do you know how many
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have left the southern Israel since October 7th? I don't know how many have come back,
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but yeah, I mean, that both the population of the... What is really called the Gaza envelopes,
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are the communities around the borders of Gaza, that was obviously devastated and then
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evacuated, and the north too, was evacuated. So Israel had lost, you know, habitable safe land
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at both ends. Just to reiterate, for people, you know, this is a country the size of a postage stamp
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in the first place. And I think we obviously think that, of course, in and around Gaza,
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it's understandably a shit show. But I don't think a lot of people reflect on the fact that
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then you've also lost this significant chunk of habitable land in the north, and you've got
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60,000 plus people. So those ones who were who were forcibly evacuated by the Israeli government
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for their own safety to get them out of range of Hezbollah rockets, or rather into the range of
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Israelis, missile defense shield. Those people are we're still living in hotels on the taxpayers'
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dime. Yeah, in many central Israel. Many of them are. Yeah, but by the way, the zone that was
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targeted by Hezbollah was often targeted with Russian-Cornit missiles, which are small anti-tacking
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missiles in origin that fire line of sight. So they're laser-guided and they fire at you in a
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straight line. They can't be intercepted by Iron Dome. So there's no defense against them,
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really. Right. That's going to go up in the air. No. They go straight close to the grounds and
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blow up your house. Jays, as far as firing them at the kibbutzes along the northern border,
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and that's why people had to leave. It was no longer safe. So that was the main weapon,
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really, these Russian missiles that made it impossible to live up their safety. So the Russians
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are selling them to the Iranians and the Iranians are giving them to Hezbollah? It seems that way,
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yes. Right, yes. The weapons seem, by and large, to come from Iran, but to be the
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manufacturers Iranian or Chinese or Russian for most of their arsenal. You mentioned a
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shit show around Gaza. Yes and no, the people who lived there on the Israeli side thought that
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they were protected by these really military. They didn't think that they would be vulnerable to
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this kind of attack. And you asked about the mood. This is, I think, an important part of the
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mood. People feel abandoned. People felt that, you know, they couldn't understand how this could
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happen. How these really state and military and the vaunted intelligence services could fail to see
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this coming and fail to protect them on the day because on October 7, the Israeli military was
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extremely slow and disorganized and responding to the attack, which led, which led and asked
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go on the rampage in these kibbutzes for hours and hours. Right. So the thinking was even if they'd
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been able to breach the border, which of course was conceivable, you would expect that they,
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that within five minutes of hiding out in your, in your bunker, all of these guys should be shot
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in the head by Israeli snipers. The Air Force should be stopping them on, you know, before they get
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you. Yeah. But there was a complete failure of Israel's defenses that day. So people who thought
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they were safe and living under the protection of, you know, Israeli state and military still feel
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a great, great sense of abandonment and of a breakdown of the state. This is, I think, a very
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important part of the mood. And I would say that this, you know, something that I've learned from
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these visits and to Israelis is how this taps into the whole Israeli identity and to Jewish history.
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And this is why October 7 was so triggering for Israelis because the whole point of Israel was,
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of the state of Israel was to protect the Jewish people from being unprotected and at the mercy
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of people who want to kill them in pogrom type attacks. This was the Jewish experience throughout
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history of being killed while helpless, well, undefended. And the whole point of the state
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of Israel was to make sure that never happens again. And instead thousands of Israelis found
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themselves at the mercy of a kind of pogrom again. And just causing on that, Marcus, sorry,
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have you spoken to military, I'm sure you spoken to military experts, Israeli military experts,
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about why it happened? Yeah. So, you know, among military people, including generals,
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including some who were involved in responding that day, there is an enormous sense of shame
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and failure about October 7. They really felt like, yes, this was a complete breakdown.
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And I think that you have to understand that and how deeply that sits in their side key to
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understand everything that has happened since, including the ferocity of Israel's military response
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in Gaza. And if you spend much time in Israel, you quickly understand that they feel
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that nobody outside Israel understands this and understands why this was so traumatic for them.
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Now, why did that military failure happen? Why did the intelligence system that much
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warranted agencies failed to see this and why was intelligence ignored? Most notoriously,
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there was an army base man by mainly female observers of the Israeli military that was monitoring
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activity inside Gaza and that saw preparations for the attack. They passed on the information
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and it was ignored and that military base in the halos was overrun on October 7 and many of
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those female observers were killed and some of them asked ill hostages in Gaza. So, this was
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a momentous failure of the whole system. And it is a sense that nobody has really been
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held to account for this. Yeah, and sorry, it's already interrupt again, but I think there's
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I can understand the intelligence failure somewhat. I mean, you've got an experienced
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jihadist death cult who has learned a lot from its colleagues, presumably in ISIS and elsewhere
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and knows that the Israelis are spying on everything and knows that it needs to hand
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right notes and has presumably a wealth of support among Hamas areas that it's operating in
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Gaza and so I can somehow forgive the intelligence failure. What I don't understand is do we have
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a clear idea of why there weren't tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers stationed near Gaza
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in Israel in case such a thing should happen. Yes, absolutely. So, this gets us into the wider
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picture of Netanyahu's Israel and what the political priorities were and Netanyahu's strategy over
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many years to managing Hamas and Gaza. The fact is that there were very few Israeli troops stationed
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in that region, in the south, whereas there were a large number of battalion stationed in the West
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Bank who were protecting the settlers. These illegal Israeli towns that had been built on
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Palestinian land in the West Bank and are being protected by the Israeli military,
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pretty much in contravention of international law, instead of protecting Israeli civilians who
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are mostly peace-nicks who live near the border of Gaza. So, you know, under international law,
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all of the settlements are illegal and nearly nobody in the world recognizes the annexation
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of East Jerusalem either and there are about 500,000 Israeli settlers, plus the Jewish population
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of East Jerusalem and protecting those settlers and the roads to their settlements and so on,
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took a very large number of Israeli troops. So, there were many, many battalions in the West Bank,
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but there was nearly nothing in the south and the very thinly manned military outposts
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around Gaza were quickly overrun and butchered. Now, the why wasn't there more in the south?
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That gets us to Netanyahu's strategy for managing Hamas over many years and here he has faced
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much blowback for a strategy that, however, he said was also widely shared inside Israel in Israeli
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politics and by the military and that was to rely on economic development in Gaza,
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financial incentives to facilitate money flowing to Hamas from Qatar,
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which Netanyahu actively encouraged and even lent on the Qataris to continue.
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And the theory was that basically they can be tamed with a combination of money and occasional
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air strikes and their exchanges of rockets and Israeli air strikes, which Israelis
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referred to as mowing the grass every now and then. And the theory was that with economic
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development, the time gap between these short shot mainly conflicts can grow longer
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and that Hamas would become less of a threat. The belief was that it was deterred.
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Now, this turned out to be an utterly disastrous strategy that completely misreads
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and a sinwa and his deterred, so Yahya sinwa, who is now the head of us, was released in a hostage
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exchange by Israel and quickly went about preparing, this is years ago. Over the past decade,
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really imposed his own iron grip on Hamas in Gaza. And he is a psychopath, basically.
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He is a fanatic who is utterly convinced of the long term victory of his side of an Islamist
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she had over Israel and he believes that he is taking steps towards that even if his generation
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won't see the final victory. Now, part of the cynical view of Netanyahu's complacency
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about Hamas in Gaza is that it actually serves the interests of the far right in Israel to have
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Hamas in Gaza, because it makes the possibility of a Palestinian state more unacceptable to the rest
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of the world. It gives them the ability to say, we have no partner for peace. There is Hamas in Gaza,
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there is the Palestinian Authority, which is this moribund corrupt organization in the West Bank,
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who can we possibly do a deal with, and that if you had a small liberal democratic or as
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small liberal and democratic institution as exists in the Arab Muslim world, ruling Gaza,
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then it would increase the pressure on Israeli hawks to talk to them about the possibility of a
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Palestinian state. Is that true or is it cynical? No, it absolutely. Well, it is both cynical and
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it's true. But this was a strategy and not only among the far right, some of whose leaders
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said Hamas was an asset, but Netanyahu too. And I've spoken to people,
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both to him and they say yes, that the theory was that if you keep the Palestinians divided,
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if Hamas is strong, then you don't need to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, the PA,
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and you don't need to talk about the two state solution, which is Netanyahu's least favorite
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topic. So that was absolutely part of the strategy for managing the Palestinian question.
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It was this combination of keeping Gaza and the West Bank divided, avoiding negotiations,
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and believing that a mixture of economic incentives and cake-in-all-air strikes can contain
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the whole conflict. So there was this idea of managing and containing the conflict with the
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Palestinians, not solving it. I mean, it's amazing that you wouldn't follow a precautionary principle,
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even if that was your outlook. And also in addition to those things, post tens of thousands of
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troops in stations along the border, I mean, that's what is extraordinary to me, given what you
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say about the DNA of the Israeli state being. So predicated on the requirements that Israeli
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lives be free from random terrorism and rape and slaughter from neighbors. I think this is also
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given the DNA of Hamas. Being a movement committed to the destruction of Israel, the belief that it
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could be tamed with economics was quite extraordinary. Well, I mean, what do you say to people in the
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West who say, well, Hamas took the destruction of Israel out of its charter. Yes, they're bad guys,
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but all revolutionary anti-colonial movements are bad guys. Nelson Mandela was paling around the
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terrorists when South Africa was in apartheid state and you sort of do what you have to do in order
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to liberate your people. What do you say to that? Well, it was clearly wishful thinking in the case
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of Hamas and especially in the case of Sinoa. And the thing is there were plenty of Israelis
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who knew Sinoa that they had gotten to know him when he was a prisoner in Israeli prisons for a long
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long time. And they knew absolutely that this guy is like a hard-nosed, clear-eyed fanatic who
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believes in his religious mission to destroy Israel in the long term. And if you look at Sinoa's
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statements down the years, he viewed the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza
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as a best, a holding pattern, a temporary thing that might last for a generation, but eventually
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should be a springboard for driving the Jews out and destroying the Jewish state. So there was
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a massive amount of wishful thinking here. But I think that October 7 tells us a lot about
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the complacency in Israel in the last 10 to 15 years when it really seemed as if the Palestinian
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question was a secondary question. And Israel thought of itself as this booming tech economy,
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a startup society. And they believed that after they had defeated the second
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interferer that the Palestinian question was manageable and that they could shrink the conflict.
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They could reduce it to an ever smaller problem without really answering it because there was
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no answer, because there was no partner on the Palestinian side. The Israelis believed.
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So this is a failure on a par with and perhaps even bigger than 9-11 in America. After 9-11,
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there were many Americans asking themselves, how could this complacency have happened?
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How could the security have been so lex? How could these people trained in Afghanistan,
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have come and done flight courses in Florida and said, don't bother teaching us how to land,
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we don't need that part. How did the US agencies fail to pick up on the many, many signs?
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The same kind of thing happened in Israel last year.
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In terms of a failure of imagination? Yes. A complacency and a failure of imagination,
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that throughout the society and the state and the intelligence agencies that led to the
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misreading the situation. In some ways, the entire past 20 minutes has just been my interested
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aside from the original question that I asked you to answer, and then sidetracked you from,
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which was his baller and Lebanon. After the UN agreement, not to station rockets,
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since southern Lebanon gets completely ignored, then October 7th happens, October 8th happens,
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and his baller starts firing on Northern Israel. Israel evacuates all of this entire region of the
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country and these people are still being housed in hotels. Is it then just somewhat inevitable
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that at some point they're going to have to take out his baller's rockets and can they not do
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that from the air and is the ground incursion like a strategic entry point to some bigger
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configuration that Netanyahu's government is trying to stir up with his baller and Iran,
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like where are we? Okay. So, briefly on the chronology in the past year with Lebanon,
31:02
and as well as other his baller leader miscalculated by thinking that he can keep Israel trapped in this
31:08
limited war of, you know, an exchange of rockets and air strikes across the border, but within a
31:14
narrow zone, the problem is that the situation he had created was intolerable, namely the north of
31:19
Israel was inhabitable, uninhabitable. The Israeli military has been wanting to take on his baller.
31:28
For many months, they wanted to end the worn guys, have a ceasefire, get the hostages out,
31:33
and then hit his baller hard. It was Netanyahu who was dragging his feet on this for many, many months,
31:42
dragging his feet on the ceasefire deal, often raising new demands, making a ceasefire deal with
31:48
Hamas more difficult in the eyes of Israel's own negotiators and the frustrated Americans and
31:55
Arab governments trying to mediate, but also not wanting to take a decision on going to war in Lebanon.
32:02
Now, this may be because Israel has a very unhappy experience of its war in Lebanon,
32:07
you know, in 1978, 82, and 2006, invasions of Lebanon didn't bring Israel the security that it
32:14
wanted, despite sometimes achieving tactical gains, the ultimate result was not good for Israel,
32:21
but the military really has been pushing Netanyahu in the direction of escalation in Lebanon.
32:27
So, around the same time that the Gaza war was really winding down to some extent, because it's
32:34
just really ended up as a kind of whack-a-mull war where the Israelis go back into the same areas again
32:41
to suppress Hamas's attempts to revive itself. The Israeli military felt that it can now free
32:48
up enough resources to shift the war to the north. When was this? This is a couple of months ago?
32:54
Yes, so this is in recent months and so we get to September and then the Israeli military
33:01
really pushed Netanyahu into taking a decision finally to go after Hezbollah. And it began
33:08
as we saw with this incredible attack on Hezbollah's pages, you know, that their secure communication
33:13
system, that they had bought especially, that they had ordered from a company that turned out
33:19
a front for the Mossad, for Israeli intelligence. And it's still not quite clear because, you know,
33:27
sources are saying slightly contradictory things, but some in Israel say that there were
33:34
fears that Hezbollah was growing suspicious about these pages, so that Israel had to decide whether
33:40
to use it or lose it. Right. And do you know what the timeline is for an operation like that? I
33:46
mean, I've assumed that that would have been in place before October 7th. Yes. Many years. Many years.
33:52
Yes. So a lot of what the Israelis have done has really been the fruit of intelligence work
34:00
and preparations over many many years. Since the 2006 war, Israel's military and intelligence
34:06
services have been preparing astronauts, have been trying to infiltrate Hezbollah with spies,
34:12
with technology. And so they've been preparing for this for many many years.
34:18
And so in some ways, does this reflect, does this maybe partly loop back to their complacency about
34:25
Gaza and Hamas in the sense that they've had their eyes on the prize, which is that there's this
34:31
formidable military force, which is this Iranian proxy, and there will be a reckoning with Hezbollah.
34:37
So let's get all of our ducks in a row for that show down.
34:41
Let me have the intelligence effort focused on Lebanon and their infantry battalions focused
34:47
on the West Bank. Right. Right. And so in both areas, they neglected Gaza and Hamas.
34:54
Good moment to be in that situation. Yeah. The Israelis left the door wide open as far as
35:01
he could see in many ways. Also, Israel's internal political conflict, which in the months after
35:08
Netanyahu came back, the end of 2022, Netanyahu won elections with a coalition of Israeli
35:16
coup party and far-right partners and religious parties and then began this judicial reform as they
35:23
build it, which is really to empower Israeli judiciary and the Supreme Court. And that led to
35:28
enormous divisions in Israeli society, where many people felt that it was undermining Israeli
35:34
democracy and massive street demonstrations, divisions within the government too. And the
35:40
saying, well, I saw this and thought, you know, Israel is a deeply divided society in disarray,
35:46
and this is his moment to attack. Right. So the Hezbollah, you know, the pulling the trigger
35:53
by the Israelis on the degradation or the massive degradation of Hezbollah. I think we all know
36:00
that anyone who's been reading newspapers over the past couple of months knows roughly what happened,
36:05
the pages all explode, and then subsequently, then my phone is the next day. The walkie-talkie
36:10
is explode. Then there's a targeted stripe on the head of Hezbollah, who is assassinated.
36:16
Yeah. It was quite an incredible sequence. Yeah. So the Hezbollah leadership can't
36:21
phone each other. So they meet in person and then the Israelis blow them up.
36:27
And then they seem to have assassinated several other, you know, people. I mean, the next leader,
36:32
Safeedin, has also been killed in peers. And now that the most senior official is retaining the
36:40
the title of a deputy general secretary. I would do the same. Yes.
36:46
I asked. Right. Yes. Hezbollah has no leader at the moment. It's not me. Yeah. I just bring the
36:52
coffees. That's pretty much where they are. So they are in complete disarray at the leadership
36:59
level. And the Israeli military wants to use this to really go after them. So they have been
37:05
pounding both the missile arsenal, as best they can, that Hezbollah had built up. So these
37:13
Israelis, these Iranian-supplied missiles, which Hezbollah, it was feared, could fire Israel in
37:20
such huge numbers that they swamp Israel's head offences. Those have not been fired. That
37:25
has not happened. They're still firing, you know, dozens of rockets a day at Northern Israel,
37:30
but the long range Arajas against Israeli cities has not happened. And that may well be because
37:37
they're in disarray or because physically, Israelis have managed to take out a lot of those
37:41
missiles and missile launches. But this is really, I think the mood in the Israeli military now
37:47
is cupidium. We've been preparing for this for years, and this is our chance to take out
37:54
and extremely, you know, the most dangerous of the enemies on Israel's border. So they put
38:00
boots on the ground and they try to clear out southern Lebanon. What is the strategy beyond that?
38:07
Do we know? Presumably, I don't want to occupy southern Lebanon again. I assume. I mean,
38:12
I don't know if they want to occupy Gaza again. They know it's the big question. Yeah.
38:21
Once you start covering Israel, you start thinking there seems to be no strategy here. It's all
38:27
tactics, but what's the plan? And then you find out that that's actually a cliche and that it's
38:32
been a recurrent pattern in the history of Israel's conflicts with the Palestinians and with its
38:38
neighbors. There is no plan. There is no strategy. They are sometimes extremely effective at tactics,
38:45
at intelligence, at, you know, at military strikes. But it leads them deeper and deeper into
38:52
qualmires and the political gain in terms of actually making Israel more secure can often be
38:58
very elusive. And that was the case with all three Lebanon wars. And now they're getting
39:04
themselves to the, the cusp of a dilemma when they sent in ground troops. What are they doing?
39:10
They are, for the moment, trying to drive back Hisbola forces from the border and destroy their
39:16
arms caches. So in a lot of tunnels, Hisbola had built undergrounds. Near the border, they have
39:22
large stashes of these Russian-cornet missiles and other weaponry. So they're trying to blow that
39:27
up. Okay, but then what? If they pull out, then Hisbola can come back when there's a ceasefire,
39:33
which they will be eventually. They just rebuild. And then the threat will simply return.
39:38
If they hold the ground, however, then they will be back into the business of occupying southern
39:43
Lebanon. Why is there a third option, Marcus, which is that you actually implement what the
39:48
United Nations said should be implemented in 2006. But you don't rely, I mean, you don't
39:53
place an unfair burden on the Lebanese army to do it. Why can't you get the Saudis and the
39:59
Qataris and the Emirates and, I don't know, the Jordanians under, I don't know, French military
40:09
supervision since the French claim to care so much about their former colonial areas to create
40:16
a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, which just, they just sit there and make sure that Hisbola
40:21
like everyone claims to care so much about this conflict and to care so much about the Palestinians.
40:25
But when it comes to simple things that the international community could do, like
40:30
not make a binary choice between either Israeli occupation or
40:35
jihadist groups firing rockets into Israel, there's, you know, it's tumbleweed.
40:41
Wait, so we haven't yet seen this discussion about southern Lebanon, about international actors
40:46
or Arab states sending groups. We have seen it about Gaza. So for many, many months, there's
40:51
been much discussion about what combination of the Palestinian Authority and perhaps, you know,
40:57
soldiers from other Arab states could play a role in a post-Hamas regime in Gaza. But nothing
41:07
has happened there. And nobody is in the war. Isn't that incredibly hypocritical of the Arab
41:13
world? They claim to care about the Palestinians. Well, nobody wants to put boots in the ground
41:19
and then be shot out by Hamas. That's one thing. Yeah, no shit. But also, everybody wants,
41:26
everybody outside Israel wants the Palestinian Authority to play a leading role in the governance
41:31
of Hamas. But Netanyahu has said actually no way those guys should play no role.
41:37
And his far out coalition partners are adamantly against it. And they instead want to
41:45
return to Israel occupying Gaza, or at least the part of it, and to rebuilding settlements
41:52
in Gaza or a part of it. So really, it is more of the political disagreement over who should rule
41:58
Gaza that has led to that discussion going nowhere. In the case of Lebanon, no one is yet talking
42:05
about third parties coming in except for the UN, really. There's this UN, peacekeeping force
42:11
UNIFIL, which has been there forever. And however, it has been utterly unable and unwilling
42:18
to really challenge, as well as control of the territory. They've played more of an observer role
42:23
than anything else. No, the problem is that Lebanon is a broken state with a deeply divided
42:32
society, and that there is no actor that is able for reason-willing to push aside his
42:38
ballad right now. There are actors who are able, surely. I say the French slightly ingest,
42:45
but a large Western military would be able to presumably just create a buffer in which
42:54
his ballad rockets can't be installed. Nobody wants to get themselves into an endless
42:59
guerrilla war, which is what the Israeli military doesn't want to do either. It's easy to send
43:05
in troops and take the ground, then you find people are shooting at you, and you're stuck there.
43:11
The Israeli's occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years until they pulled out in 2000 after
43:17
having taken it. But of course, people should at you if you're Israeli. People might not shoot at you
43:21
if you're an Arab coalition. The French and the Americans sent peacekeepers into Lebanon and were
43:28
attacked in the early 1980s, and were attacked by Islamists, by Hezbollah, and were killed in
43:36
large numbers, in bombings in Beirut, and so that they don't have a good memory of the experience
43:40
of sending peacekeepers into Lebanon. The problem is that the Lebanese states doesn't really have
43:52
the means to push his ballad aside. The Lebanese army, the army of the official government,
43:57
is weaker than Hezbollah, and it's also a conscript army that recruits from the Shia population as
44:02
well. So if it were ever ordered to take on Hezbollah, it would split into two. I mean, I think that's
44:08
a non-starter. It's also just unfair to expect a Lebanon get so torn apart by its proximity to Israel
44:18
and the meddling of Iran that it has enough to deal with without firing it to.
44:25
Maybe we'll see this kind of discussion. I doubt that it will be like French or American troops
44:29
playing a peacekeeping role. Perhaps you'll see some discussion about the role of other Arab
44:34
countries. I mean, I'm not saying it's likely, Marcus. I'm just saying it doesn't accord
44:38
with the way the world seems to claims to care about the issue. Like, you know, you just have to
44:44
talk about Israel anywhere on the Arab street, and you can whip up 100,000 people to be marching
44:50
in the street screaming about it as if it's the most important thing that they care about. You
44:54
know, you can talk to anyone wearing a veil in Sydney about Palestine, and they say that it's like
45:00
the most important thing to them as a Muslim to support their Muslim friends. But when it comes to
45:07
actually sending money or shedding any blood on their behalf in order to secure the situation,
45:14
they don't give a shit. I wonder if it's just because they want Israel to go away.
45:20
Well, obviously, there's a huge gap between Arab governments and populations in much of the
45:27
know, the sunny Arab world, the governments which are generally authoritarian governments
45:34
don't really have a problem with Israel. And before October 7, we're on a track towards
45:40
normalizing relations, in the case of more and more countries with Israel. They want to do business
45:45
with it. They want Israeli technology, and they want a security arrangement with the US,
45:51
which was part of the package, aimed at containing Iran, which is seen as more of a regional threat.
45:58
However, the populations feel very differently. So a lot of these Arab leaders, such as
46:03
MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, he seems to tell every visitor who comes, that he
46:10
doesn't give a damn about the Palestinians personally, but his society is so angry about Gaza that
46:16
if he pursued normal diplomatic relations with Israel now, he would be assassinated.
46:24
But then they just call the Arab streets bluff and say, all right, it's got nothing to do with
46:30
the Crown Prince, but we're going to have an international coalition where you can
46:33
conscript yourself and you can put your hand up to be a peacekeeper in Gaza. You guys on the Arab
46:39
street in Riyadh say that you care so much about the Palestinians. You can come and join a volunteer
46:45
army that will be peacekeeping in Gaza and in southern Lebanon. Go at it.
46:50
Yeah, I'm not sure these rallies would be so keen on a volunteer army of, a volunteer militia
46:56
of people grab from all over the Arab world, that there's a sort of peacekeeping al-Qaeda
47:02
that people would sound like after Israel, I think. In the case of money, it's a different question.
47:09
I mean, the Gulf countries are willing to put in money and they have been putting in money.
47:15
I mean, they financed Gaza in the last 15 years and they've also been financing the PA.
47:23
However, they're very frustrated about the corruption of the PA and they want to know who will
47:28
be governing. Basically, they want a reformed PA with corruption cleaned out to rule both the Palestinian
47:35
territories, Gaza and the West Bank. So, money is a different matter from peacekeeping or
47:41
sending in a stabilization army. Yeah, I mean, money is an easy way to make it look like you're doing
47:45
something without actually having any skin in the game. I mean, one thing that they, another
47:49
obvious thing that they could do is the UAE and Qatar have insatiable appetites for workers
47:58
and they ship in millions of people from Bangladesh and Pakistan to build their stadiums and their
48:05
airports. They could provide working visas to Palestinians to come and do those jobs.
48:11
Why aren't they doing that? Well, there is this long-running,
48:17
some Israeli critique of these Arab countries that says, why don't they give permanent residency
48:23
status to the many Palestinians who are now a second or third generation refugees? Why are they
48:29
kept in this refugee state? Well, there's that too. Yeah, I mean, it's like the guy who we met,
48:32
Markis and I were to the listener. Now, we went to Lebanon a few years ago and I remember we met
48:38
that bloke in that Palestinian bloke in a suburb in Beirut who, you know, you ask him
48:45
worries, you ask him what he is and he is a Palestinian, but he's never been to Palestine,
48:50
his parents have never been to Palestine. He's a stateless descendant of people who were once
48:58
in the territory that is now Israel and yet he can't be the Lebanon one allowed him to be a
49:04
fully fledged Lebanese citizen. He can't travel. That's ridiculous. That's like me saying that I'm
49:12
Polish and, you know, Australia not giving me full rights as an Australian because my grandparents
49:19
were kicked out of a Polish village by the Nazis. Yeah. I think this system of maintaining
49:29
Palestinian refugees, obviously, it's deeply unjust in the countries where they live,
49:34
where there are great limits on the jobs they can do. They can't really become
49:39
full members of the countries where they're living, such as in Lebanon. But also it has been,
49:46
I think, pretty unhelpful in terms of resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflicts because it has
49:51
helped to perpetuate this idea that one day they will be a great return of the refugees.
49:58
And the idea of return and of a right of return has made it very difficult both for Israel
50:06
to negotiate a settlement and also for Palestinian leaders who wanted a two-state solution
50:13
to sign a formula and then go back to their people and say, sorry guys, there won't be a great
50:17
return. You're not going to return to your village which no longer exists. You're going to be a
50:22
citizen of a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza for these Jerusalem as its capital.
50:28
Because there's a large part of the Palestinian population for whom the inherited ambition is
50:33
to return to historic Palestine. Right. So if it's a precondition of solving this mess that you
50:40
disabuse them of that notion, how do you do that? Because the Israeli right thinks you do that by
50:46
winning, by crushing all of their aspirations and making it obvious to them that that's never going
50:50
to happen. And most of the rest of the world thinks you do that by being compassionate and being
50:59
the bigger party and extending an olive branch and swallowing your pride and accepting the risk
51:05
of creating a Palestinian state and you make them a real offer and you go back and you try again
51:10
and you keep trying until something sticks. Many people on the Israeli right don't want to reconcile
51:19
the Palestinians to having a small state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza at all. They want
51:25
the West Bank for Israel and they would very much welcome it if other countries made the
51:31
descendants of Palestinian refugees, residents and citizens of their own countries. The argument
51:36
you're often hit from people on the Israeli right is there are so many Arab countries. There's only
51:40
one Jewish country. Palestinians should go to one of the many other Arab countries. So it will be
51:46
very convenient from the point of view of the Israeli right if the Palestinian diaspora were
51:52
absorbed and lost its Palestinian national aspirations. Would they, they would like want to give
52:03
Gaza to Egypt and if you could snap your fingers and if the Netanyahu, LeQudnix and the people
52:11
to his right, did you could say to them, okay, the West Bank becomes a demiltrized part of Jordan
52:19
with entry checkpoints between Jordan proper but it's all part of Jordan and you lose it and
52:25
the settlers leave and Gaza becomes Egypt and then there's no more talk about a Palestine. Do you
52:32
think they take that deal? No, I don't think anyone has really wanted that. That was the situation
52:39
between 1949 and 1967. Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem
52:49
and now I don't think anyone's really calling for that to happen again. In terms of Gaza.
52:53
I'm not saying would they, are they calling for it and saying would that be? No one wanted.
52:57
No one wanted it. No, no. I mean the diminishing share of Israeli society that wants a peace settlement
53:03
all that believes one is feasible supports the two-state solution meaning a state of Palestine in the
53:09
West Bank or at least most of the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital or at least
53:16
some of East Jerusalem, right? That's about as far as Israeli peace camp such as it still is,
53:22
is willing to go. Whereas the Israeli rights either they want to annex the West Bank or they want
53:31
to have this sort of de facto undeclared annexation with the continued growth of settlements
53:38
and the Palestinians either leaving or accepting a subordinate status within this undeclared
53:44
greater Israel. Now Gaza, the far right wants leading politicians on the far right want to bring
53:52
back settlements into Gaza which Israel withdrew from in 2005 when it pulled out its settlers and
53:59
troops. They want to go back and just remind people there were there were town there were Jewish
54:04
Israeli towns in Gaza like I think sometimes people think that the pull out in 2005 was a
54:09
military pull out because there had been some kind of security operation that the army had been
54:14
involved in in Gaza but it wasn't just that there were there were settlements I mean there were
54:19
Israeli there was settlement there was a relatively small number of settlers compared with with the
54:22
West Bank which is why it was relatively easy for Ariel Sharon the prime minister at the time
54:28
to pull them out even so that there was you know much resistance from from the settlers at the time
54:35
but they pulled out because the security burden of protecting this small number of sectors
54:40
in this you know densely populated Gaza an extremely hostile Gaza strip just made no sense
54:46
from his old point of view. But the ideologues of greater Israel on the far right including some
54:51
people in the housing house coalition want to annex the northern part of Gaza under one proposal
54:58
and bring back settlements there and part of their rationale is that this would be an apt
55:04
punishment for for over seven the belief is that you know since Sinwa would recognize his defeat
55:10
only if he loses land so this kind of discord is out there on the far right to and how do they
55:16
reconcile with their long term like the long term sustainability of the Israeli state like coming
55:22
back to your point about like what is the strategy like what is the long term strategy for a secure
55:27
Israel if it is if it absorbs demographically a large number of Arabs in the West Bank you know
55:36
if all Palestinians become essentially Israelis even if you treat them as second class citizens I
55:43
mean are they talking are they imagining a state which is essentially a formalized apartheid state
55:48
where Jews are you know were palace Arabs have to wear a you know
55:54
so some version of a star of David a yellow star of David on their jackets in order to not be allowed
56:01
you know sit up the back of buses or something like what are they envision envision how do you retain
56:05
a liberal democratic Israeli state if you are sitting on top of the West Bank and Gaza so I would
56:12
say that overall in Israel there are very few answers except on the far right the far right has
56:19
has a clear answer to this which is what the land is all ours and they need to either accept subordinate
56:25
status for example they you know the Palestinians in the West Bank might have local autonomy they
56:29
might be able to vote in their local elections but they wouldn't be able to no vote in elections for
56:34
the national parliament so they accept second class citizen status and can they go into Israel
56:40
or do they stay behind the wall well yeah that depends on you know these are not thought through
56:45
proposals but the the general vision would would would be that they have to accept inferior status
56:51
or leave but in most of Israeli society in politics there is simply no answer and this is something
56:59
that the no answer in terms of what is the long term what's the end game and this was expressed
57:07
rather vehemently in a rant the other day by the Jordanian foreign minister when he was speaking
57:12
at the UN he said you ask any senior Israeli official like what is your end game what how is this
57:18
supposed to what's your solution on the Palestinian questions and you simply do not get an answer
57:23
and he expressed the frustration of many sunny Arab governments that you know many countries
57:29
in the region are waiting really for for Israel to to join the region to have normal diplomatic
57:34
relations to become part of the club to trade and really all that is needed is an answer on the
57:42
Palestinian question which has to be a revival of the two state solution but you know Israeli politics
57:47
has simply turned against that that was what the Jordanian foreign minister was saying and it's
57:52
true the two state solution in Israel it's is pretty much dead politically as it is among the
57:57
Palestinians for the time being and there is no alternative answer that is why this idea of
58:03
managing the conflicts grew into the dominant discourse not solving it but but containing it
58:10
coping with it from from year to year I mean it's just like incredibly depressing when you hear
58:18
it put like that I mean I suppose to be as generous as possible to the pro-Israeli well I hate
58:24
using that term because it sort of equates right wing Israelis with Israel but the
58:29
harsh on Palestinian perspective when you say like there's no strategy like what's the long term
58:38
strategy everything is tactical and it doesn't solve the problem the Israelis might say well we had
58:44
a strategy it was that when the British put an end to British Palestine there was going to be a
58:49
Jewish state and an Arab state and instantaneously the Arabs invaded and so we tried to do our best
58:57
and then they invaded again 20 years later and tried to kill us all and then six years after that
59:04
they tried to kill us all all over again and we tried to grow our way towards some kind of an
59:10
accommodation as they were blowing up our planes and school buses over the course of decades and
59:16
nonetheless we made offers to recognize a state over the course of the 90s and 2000s and we didn't
59:25
receive a single counter offer we didn't even receive unreasonable counter offers we just received
59:30
total crickets and nothing so there was a strategy and there is no so what do you expect us to do
59:38
exactly yeah absolutely so there is that narrative and that has even been dominant almost
59:44
almost monopolistic since the second interferer in the early 2000 and the story is yeah we know
59:52
we repeatedly just explain the second interferer the second interferer came after the after
59:56
yes or arafat walked away from well that that reading in itself so let's go back to the 1990s
1:00:03
you had the Oslo Accords and Israel under sort of U.S. mediation Israelis and the Palestine
1:00:09
liberation organization that by yes arafat did this deal whereby the you know the PLO became
1:00:17
well the party that that ran it fatar became that the governing party of a new Palestinian authority
1:00:24
in parts of the West Bank and Gaza so they got a kind of local autonomy and in return they helped
1:00:30
they recognized Israel and they helped the Israelis on security so they became their security
1:00:36
partners tasked with arresting you know jihadi terrorists from Hamas and at the Islamic jihad and
1:00:45
the Palestinian hope was that this would be the embryo of a Palestinian state but the the final
1:00:51
status peace talks never really came about because trust on both sides collapsed on the Palestinian
1:00:57
side they they were unable and perhaps also unwilling to really put an enter terrorism which
1:01:02
increased under the Oslo years and on the Israeli side they were unable and unwilling to take on
1:01:08
the settler lobby instead the settler population in the West Bank actually doubled during the Oslo
1:01:13
years and the Palestinians saw this and said hang on are you talking to us in good faith
1:01:18
if you're eating up the land that is supposed to become the Palestinian state so you know trust on
1:01:23
both sides collapsed and then there was this notorious summit in the year 2000 that camp David
1:01:29
where arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister who who Barack failed to answer all of the difficult
1:01:36
you know final status questions and the Israeli narrative is we offered them everything they
1:01:41
said no and chose terrorism but I think that in reality there was a lot of blame to go around
1:01:47
on the Palestinian side the Israeli side and the American side who did a terrible job as mediators
1:01:55
I mean Bill Clinton's perspective is certainly that it was arafat's fault he writes in his
1:01:59
autobiography that arafat said to him you're a great man Mr President and he said to arafat no
1:02:04
I'm a failure and you made me one well Clinton wanted his legacy at that moment he wanted
1:02:11
you know a Middle East peace deal to be his greatest legacy and so you know he was very frustrated
1:02:16
as were some of his people but now fundamentally there are four different difficult issues
1:02:21
when it comes to the two-state solution do you have the rest of the conversation go to
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