Haviv Rettig Gur on Gaza Hunger

Happy birthday. Hey, hey, hey. Hi everyone. Um, my name is Raphaela. Um, and thank you for joining the Free Press live stream. Um, usually I'm behind the camera as the executive producer of Honestly with Barry Weiss. Um, but today I'm here to, um, talk about a very, very important topic, which is the aid situation in Gaza. Um, whether you know or not, there's widespread hunger, who is to blame, why the issue of aid, um, is as important as the ground war itself. Um, especially, you know, after the past two years of the western media headlines, um, falsely reporting mass starvation, um, and in the past few days, it really does seem like there is a serious and growing crisis. So, a lot of questions have emerged, um, particularly from the Free Press listeners, and so we have here Ratiker, who is, you know, our go-to voice on topics such as these. Um, Haviv is the host of Ask Haviv Anything. Um, he's also our Middle East analyst here at the Free Press, and he just published a really, um, enlightening and thoughtful piece on this issue called Israel's Winning One War While It Loses Another. Haviv, thank you so much for being here with us.

Raphaela, thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

Um, and one quick note before we dive in for people who are tuning in, if you have questions, please put them in the chat. Um, our producers will send them over to me, and I'll try to get to as many as possible. Um, so let's dive in. Basically, you know, for the past four months, as I mentioned, we saw all of these, you know, pretty baseless headlines. You know, back in June 2024, there was one that was quote, "Children are dying of starvation in their parents' arms as famine spreads throughout Gaza." In May of this year, one read that the UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours under Israeli aid blockade. And these headlines sort of just became so common. And what became clear early on is that many were exaggerated or sensationalized. Um, but now there are similar headlines, for example, quote, "Immediate threat of starvation in Gaza." And there does seem to be a real crisis. And so the question I want to put to you is, what is the level of that crisis and what is the state of hunger in Gaza as it stands today?

It's extremely difficult to get good data. Um, and the reason it's hard to get good data is that, um, the, in as much as there is civil infrastructure in Gaza, it is to some degree or another, depending on the place, controlled by Hamas. The need to maintain, um, an information war has dominated Hamas's own communication and people who step out of line. We've seen hundreds of people hunted down, killed, disappeared in the streets, um, by Hamas. Um, and there's just videos of that online. In other words, if people go looking, they'll find videos that are purposefully by the perpetrators themselves put on the internet as a warning, uh, to other Gazans. And so there's no clear, um, reliable information flow out of Gaza. What you would have said, you know, 20 years ago, a Gazan hospital issuing data would have been real data. Um, that is not something we have out of Gaza right now. Uh, the Israelis relied on UN data about the quantity of food either that has gone into Gaza in the last six months, which was far more than, um, in theory, Gazans should have needed. Um, and that data today, right at this moment, says that there's plenty of food in Gaza. And yet there have been, um, Israeli economists, especially one particular professor of economics at, uh, Hebrew University, whose numbers really kind of set everybody on on fire in Israel. Israelis who are, because of this litany of, of, of warnings and threats and claims of famine and starvation already in Gaza that have never, ever panned out. There's simply never, there were real, um, specific and very time-limited, um, areas of Gaza because of a specific operation during a specific moment over the last 22 months where there were supply problems that caused hunger in certain narrow areas. But widespread famine, starvation was simply not something we had seen despite this constant litany of claims about it. And the data now tells us that the quantitative data about how much food has gone in and should be in Gaza is not true. It's the food did go in. The food is there. It doesn't reflect the level of hunger. There is real hunger. It is widespread. Many, many Gazans, I don't know to tell you if it's 30% or 60%, but it's, it's not marginal. It's not single digits. Um, many, many Gazans don't have easy access to food or didn't last week. There's now a massive aid surge. Hopefully, the things I'm telling you now, or which is what we know from last week, is no longer the case or increasingly not the case. There is real hunger.

And one of the ways that, um, that that was understood was that, um, we all stopped paying attention to the UN data about how much food went in and we started to pay attention to prices in the markets. And the prices, and we've talked about this also on the last live stream on the Free Press, um, where my mention of this really kind of went viral on social media, and thank, thank goodness, I mean, that was a really important seven minutes conversation. But, um, but so people who who tuned into the last one might have heard this, but the prices of sugar, the prices of flour, the prices of oil, the prices of the, of the staples of the Gazan diet, of the food supply, um, have soared from, you know, threefold because of the war, which is something that happens to food during wartime, uh, to 30-fold and even 80-fold in some places. And that reflects the fact that people can't get food, right? So, yes, enough food went in. Some of the reasons that that food has not reached the people, um, some of the reasons are absolutely Hamas. We know Hamas has stockpiled. There's footage that came out of the tunnels showing that Hamas fighters have massive amounts of tunnels. But that's not the explanation. That's not a sufficient explanation to really explain the gap between the quantitative numbers and the price numbers. And it looks like a lot, a lot of Gazans, ordinary people have stockpiled as much food as they could, which is a totally and utterly rational and reasonable way to behave in a situation where you, you have good reason to expect in two months, or you can't be sure that in two months there won't be food scarcity. But the stockpiling caused the scarcity. And my argument in the piece and also, um, on a podcast, on the podcast episode, etc., was that the Israeli, uh, the Israeli officials who tracked the quantitative UN numbers and thought that everything was fine were disastrously incompetent. The debate now underway in social media and among pundits is, were they incompetent or were they actively purposefully trying to starve Gaz, the Gazan population? I'm going to leave that debate aside. It's very much a politicized debate. It depends heavily on who you vote for. It, it is deeply uninteresting to me. What's interesting to me is the situation on the ground. As far as I understand it, the Israelis were absolutely convinced that everyone talking to them about hunger, even now, even in June, July, has been lying, just like they've been lying for 22 months because the UN data still showed the quantities were enough. I'm arguing that that view, that they were complacent in that way, which seemed to them justified, that was disastrously incompetent because how could you possibly think that something as complex as food distribution in a population in wartime is something you can measure to within a month's supply? Obviously, people are going to stockpile. And if 40% of Gaza stockpiled an extra month's worth of food because they have children at home and they don't want to be afraid, that's another 40% of Gaza that doesn't have that month's food. And so, um, the answer obviously is you don't play games with aid and you surge as much as possible. And the real, absolutely legitimate Israeli concern that Hamas was stealing a tremendous amount of UN aid. There's UN reports that for entire months, you know, you'd have a thousand trucks go in and 800 of them would disappear, uh, to the UN. And a great deal of that taken by Hamas. Some of it taken by other groups and and factions and organized crime organizations. Great. Fine. You don't want Hamas to use that aid, um, hijacking of aid to fund its war effort. Then you flood Gaza with so much aid that it's worthless, that the prices crash. That's the solution. That's the answer. That's the only reasonable strategy.

And just to add some numbers here, like in September 2023, flour for a 55-pound sack was around $14. That's obviously before the war. And just last week, Amit Seagull posted, um, an essay on our pages which basically put a really, um, illuminating table that showed how that same sack of flour was over $1,000. Um, and that very much speaks to your point of aid coming in but not trickling down to, um, a lot of people who really need it because of, um, questions at the distribution sites and looting, as you've mentioned. So, I want to get into the question of distribution. Um, just to like sort of tee this up, one of the main, main things that changed, um, around May was that aid distribution was controlled by UNR. Um, this was the agency that had controlled Gaza's aid for decades. We know now that it was deeply tied to Hamas. Um, and that was sort of the status quo for decades. Hamas was the ruling party in the strip. Um, and they partnered on all sorts of things for years: food, schools, hospitals. Um, then, of course, post-October 7th, that relationship caused a lot of deep concern. I think nine, um, UNR staffers were fired for their connection to the October 7th massacre. And as you've mentioned, Hamas is accused of stealing aid from these UNR-run distribution sites, um, which they use to control the population, as you also mentioned, and fund their war effort. So, basically, the US and Israel decided, let's try something new. They turned to a new entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And Haviv, I'd love if you could just tee up, um, how this plan came about and what the plan was.

So, you know, it's actually interesting because there was a lot of, um, it was, it's actually difficult to know exactly who controlled it and how it came about. For a long time after the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's founding, it wasn't clear if Israel was involved. And then it turned out Israel was involved, you know, and, and, and there was a lot of sort of journalists chasing around and sniffing around and trying to figure out what it all means. Uh, I, I find it uninteresting. Um, if Israel was involved in a massive effort, including funding, apparently a large part of it, uh, to get a large amount of aid into Gaza, good. My complaint is it wasn't more rather than that it was that it was less. The goal of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was to create an aid distribution system that absolutely was could not fall into Hamas's hands. And the way they would do it was instead of having convoys of aid going all over Gaza, which is very vulnerable to, um, ambush by Hamas, um, and not just Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and also criminal organizations, um, you would actually have distribution centers that Gazans came to. That was the theory. Um, I think it is safe to say at this moment, um, it has been operating throughout May, June, uh, July, or beginning in May, uh, in June, July, um, that it has been a failure. Now, what does a failure mean? About half of the food Gazans needed went in through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and they did it fairly well. But outside of the compounds of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, you had almost impossible crowd control situations. The idea that you would have people coming, sometimes walking long distances, um, from tent encampments of 100,000 people coming into this aid distribution center, the crowd control you needed, you, you had several incidents where, um, Hamas would actually attack from within the civilians coming in, killing, including American contractors, um, and, and Israeli soldiers, uh, who had come in from the urban fighting in the north of Gaza and were then deployed around these aid distribution centers without a reset of their orders. In other words, they are still thinking in terms of urban warfare, uniformed soldiers in a city in which the guerrillas are embedded better than the civilian population. So, for example, if civilians come close to Israeli soldiers in the middle of Jabalia, where there's ongoing gun battles between IDF soldiers and Hamas, you know, just in the last two weeks, um, the IDF soldiers' standing orders are, you shoot in the air to threaten them, to warn them off, then you shoot at the ground to warn them off, and then you target the actual people because if they're still coming close to you and you're standing there, you know, fully cognizant that you're a soldier, you're in uniform, um, then there is a very good chance that they are a Hamas operation that's trying to attack you. Uh, soldiers have been dying. Israel has lost, I don't remember the exact numbers, uh, per day, but, but, uh, there have been, I think, a dozen soldiers in the last, in the last, uh, 10 days or so, or 12 days. Um, and so there, that's the scale. There has, this is a reasonable way for urban warfare soldiers to behave in a battlefield situation. American troops in Fallujah, for example, that, that is a reasonable way for them to behave at an aid distribution site where 100,000 people need to come pick up a box containing five days' worth of food for their family. And it's chaotic by definition, by nature. That those very IDF soldiers using those very, um, orders, standing orders, and methods, uh, ended up actually shooting and killing people coming to the aid centers. Not all the people dying on the approach to the aid centers were from IDF shootings. There was also absolutely Hamas. We have actually video footage of Hamas, um, through violence and through, with gunmen trying to stop people, including opening fire on them, as they went to these aid distribution centers because Hamas was desperate for the system to fail. But far too many. We, we literally don't have numbers exactly, and the people claiming it are very much committed to one narrative or another. But there's no doubt that it happened. And so on the question, yeah, please.

I just want to jump in and ask, you know, my understanding is that there were Israeli officials who raised real questions about the feasibility of GHF, GHF, excuse me. And it could have been anticipated that Hamas would embed in civilian populations that were approaching the aid sites, that there would be these massive crowds, and that they would do, frankly, as you've said, everything in their power to sabotage these sites. And what I want to understand, and I think a lot of people are asking, is how did GHF and the contractors involved walk into this situation? Like, it just, I think too many seems like it could have been avoidable. And so I would love for you to speak to that.

I, I have to say, I don't know. Maybe it's because, um, I, I know more about what's happening from the Israeli side than from the GHF side, from the American contractors, from the American people running it. Um, I don't know of tremendous errors made by the GHF staff itself. In other words, I, I, to my understanding, the theory was that the compound itself of GHF distribution, no IDF soldier was allowed into. They had their own security. Some of it was Palestinian, some of it was American contractors. Um, getting into it, the, the perimeter around the compound was IDF. Getting into it, they had to pass through, um, various IDF installations meant to protect the sites from Hamas attacks, which happened. Um, so I, I know that the standing orders given to IDF and what I'm saying to you now is something that is accepted by the generals of the Southern Command of the of the IDF. In other words, they understand that there was this error and in fact have repeatedly, um, told journalists over the last month to six weeks that they are correcting the errors that were in place around these centers. So, so it's not like the Israelis themselves don't understand that this was very, very poorly managed from their end. Um, but, uh, I don't know that GHF did anything wrong. The great, I think problem was more fundamental than implementation, which was, you had four centers. Four centers were built out. Four centers is not enough to get to the Gazan population. There was almost nothing in the north. There was almost no way to get send aid to the north. Very early on, even as GHF is ramping up, trying to get this done, trying to fight back against a lot of criticism that it was a stooge of Israel, etc., um, the Israelis were forced to let in aid trucks in the old system to northern Gaza because GHF couldn't build a center in northern Gaza. It wasn't pacified enough. It was still too dangerous. Various other reasons. So, um, the whole system was conceived. What's important to me, um, is not the, the, the moral finger-pointing. The moral debate is critical. It's important. People should engage in it. Obviously, um, desperate people couldn't get food. But what's important to me is how did the system make it crash so terribly, just, just get run so incompetently? If we accept that taking humanitarian aid out of Hamas's hands or making it no longer an asset for Hamas is foundational to bankrupting the Hamas war effort, then why isn't this something that all the clever, competent people in Israel were focused on to get right? And, and that's, and that's, I think, what the essential point is, um, beyond the debate about about the actual suffering of the civilians. Um, and now what we're seeing really is the GHF operation is still going. The Americans want to double down on it. Incidentally, if it's delivering half the food Gaza needs every particular day, don't stop it. Don't, don't shut it down. Add to it more systems in more places. And that's what we're seeing now as the Israelis really understand clearly over the last two weeks that there's a real hunger crisis. Forget about the screaming people overseas who were screaming before when there wasn't one. Now there is one. The, you know, the boy cried wolf and cried wolf and cried wolf, eventually there was a real wolf, right? So you have to actually know that there is also sometimes an actual wolf. Um, and there's been massive aid being rushed in together with all kinds of allies. The IDF has coordinated and asked even, uh, from the Prime Minister's office, no less, um, for the UAE, Jordan, other countries to bring, um, emergency stocks of their aid in. They've been airdropping aid. They've been sending, you know, hundreds of trucks in. So the hope is that if you just throw everything as quickly as possible, the, the hunger, which is a specific category of problem, it is not starvation. Starvation is an urgent medical emergency. Hunger is, um, undernourishment that can be temporary. It can be extended. It can be a huge problem over the long term. We're at a state of widespread hunger, and if we rush a lot of aid in to every corner and nook and cranny of Gaza, we will not reach starvation. And so also in the international debate where those two words are flipped, it's a problem because it doesn't also clarify how much can be done to fix it. And so the pressure is literally just a moral conversation instead of also a very practical conversation, how to get this done. It was a tremendous error, just an deep and profound incompetence that what it ended up doing for the Israelis, and I'll stop the, I'll stop with this, um, was, until now, Hamas had only ever achieved any kind of ceasefire, um, by releasing hostages. And because the Israelis screwed this up so badly, Hamas now has daytime ceasefires every day so that the aid can get through more safely, just to get that aid out without releasing a single hostage. In other words, even just in Israeli terms of the Israeli military effort, this is a military setback on top of the actual hunger, etc. So that's where things stand. I am very, um, you know, angry at, at, at, at how this happened, and, and, and I think that a lot of lessons are being learned, um, within the Israeli government, the Israeli army, but also, I think, uh, all of the people who observe Israel and analyze Israel and the war effort in Gaza. At the same time, um, I'm optimistic that it is turning around because there is now, you know, nothing like an emergency to focus the mind. There is that focus and there is that understanding now.

And just to stay on this for another moment, you know, to switch the focus to the IDF that you've mentioned around the perimeter, I think a lot of people, Israel's critics and just people generally observing are looking at the picture and thinking, you know, Israel can carry out such sophisticated attacks, the attack in Lebanon, the attack in Iran that took out top political, um, and scientific targets, but they can't quite do, um, crowd control and manage Hamas at the aid sites and are finding it just like quite confusing. I think. Do you have any like additional explanation on on why they can be so area and just like really, like what you're saying, I mean, it has been a failure both strategically and the aid itself?

Yeah, I, I have written that and said that, how could a country so competent here be so incompetent there? How could the specific generals be so competent in one thing and so incompetent in another? Um, and, uh, so I am one of the guilty parties that, uh, has said that. Uh, but I don't think that's fair. And the reason I don't think that's fair is that, um, Gaza is an entirely new kind of war. And, um, and so, you know, for example, um, Professor John Spencer from West Point has made this argument in a paper, and it's absolutely correct in all the data, that no army in the history of war has provided quite so much aid, food, medical supplies, etc., uh, to the population of the enemy and to the military of the enemy through providing aid to the population of the enemy. And he's right. This is an unprecedented thing that the IDF is doing, pushing this kind of aid into Gaza. And by the way, from the beginning of the war, but he's also, and by the way, he's for pushing the aid in. He's not saying it's unprecedented, don't do it. He says, do it. That's absolutely the necessity. But at the same time, that's obviously the most basic foundational thing that they have to do, morally, strategically, because this is a whole new kind of war. Now, is the fact that it's unprecedented to have an an army do this also demonstrates just how unprecedented this kind of war is? A war in which an enemy can be as dug in as Hamas is has never been fought in the history of warfare. There's never been an enemy, uh, buried under 500 kilometers of tunnels, you know, in a 25 kilometer territory. Just the sheer scale of Hamas being hunkered down, the sheer, um, dogged willingness to see the destruction of Gaza. Um, Al Qassam, one of the leading Hamas leaders, just last week talked about the Gazan population as a sacrifice laid on the altar, you know, for, for the, um, for the Muslim nation. Um, this is a particular version and strand of Islamic ideology, of of Islamist ideology, that Hamas clings to, that they're willing, um, I'm, I'm, I'm saying something that Palestinian activists in the Palestinian diaspora in, you know, Washington and London have started to say in criticizing Hamas, that Hamas is willing to fight this war to the death of the last Gazan child. In other words, there was, we've just had, you know, criticism of Israel is absolutely legitimate. I've just done it a lot in the last week. But the fact is that Hamas and Israel, in effect, maybe this wasn't the intent, but the effect was that they played a game of chicken with Gazan humanitarian aid. And Israel blinked. Now, obviously, Israel blinked. Obviously, Gazan suffering is a greater cost on Israel. You don't have to believe the Israelis are deeply moral people to understand it. I happen to think they try to be. I don't know. But, but nobody has to agree with me on that. But obviously, the Israelis are more hurt by Gazan civilian suffering than Hamas is. Hamas's war effort, in many ways, depends on it. It doesn't have another strategy for survival except the world being so horrified at Gazan civilian suffering that it jumps to Hamas's rescue. That's what it hopes will happen. So it needs that suffering. Right? So that simple fact, that simple fact tells you, um, that, that, that, um, there is a a profound imbalance here. There's a profound imbalance, and this was an absolutely wrong-headed strategy. You don't play chicken when the other side simply doesn't care if you crash. That is an extremely stupid tactic to to pursue.

Yes. And I want to bring in a listener question because I think it really perfectly ties into what you're saying. A lot of people in the chat are asking, why should Israel provide aid to essentially the oppos, the enemy population? I mean, you know, we don't see this in other war zones, right? Ukraine is not receiving aid from Russia. That was the example given in the listener question. Um, and you're saying something very different, which is flood the strip with aid. Um, and so can you just tee up why it's in your view in Israel's interest to supply the population with aid?

So, let's, let's set aside all moral questions, the entirety of the moral debate, and just be purely cold strategic. Um, just in the cold strategic frame of mind. Um, Hamas's war effort at this point is sustained essentially by global support for the Palestinians, global sympathy for the Palestinians. When you go to, um, articles and and op-eds in and and and editorials in the Washington Post or the New York Times, and you read about the war in Gaza, it will be awfully hard for you to discover, uh, Hamas's role, Hamas's willingness to watch Gazans die, Hamas's pursuit of watching Gazans die, Hamas's murder of Gazans who have marched in their thousands over the last, um, you know, several months, um, angrily against Hamas and demanding that Hamas end the war and leave Gaza. All of these things have happened. They have, they are buried in every part of of Western media. And, and when, and when, you know, you then look at this support that, um, the Palestinian side gets, a lot of it from tremendously decent people who just care about these terrible images of a war they're getting on their phones. But the core activists are supporting actual Hamas. And Hamas looks at this and it says, to, to Gazans, it says this, by the way, publicly. It says this to Gazans, the world will come in our favor. We are winning this, even though we look like we're losing it, and the further destruction of Gaza is only going to give us a greater victory down the road. That is Hamas's argument at this moment. That means that denying Hamas that global support, as much as is possible, because it's an active campaign by organized activist groups and organizations with tremendous funding from several governments in the Middle East. But doing as much as you can to deny them that, um, is going to undermine Hamas's war effort. It's not about what the soldiers on the ground can do anymore. They've done what they can do. Hamas has very few assets and very few soldiers and has drafted unmasked kids down to 15 years old into its ranks just to keep up the guerrilla war. So Hamas, in, in a military sense, is, is degraded tremendously. But it says it has this political backing. It has the backing of Qatar. It has the backing of Turkey. It can still get money through essentially cash apps on Gazan phones from overseas, and, and that's sustaining the war effort. So, um, again, we're leaving the moral questions aside. We're just talking cold strategy. Starvation in Gaza sustains the Hamas war effort. Therefore, if all you are worried about is strategy, don't let starvation happen in Gaza. Now, that is a frustrating thing. If you, for example, um, notice that it is the first time in the history of war, as you know, uh, uh, Professor Spencer points out, that this scale of of aid and food and medicine has gone from an army to the enemy civilian population. But that is how you win this war, independently of the moral question again. That is literally how you win this war. So the detaching of Hamas from the civilian population, the denying of Hamas the ability to drive civilian suffering is should be, and I think should have been from the very beginning, foundational to the Israeli war strategy. It takes away Hamas's fundamental argument within itself and to the Gazan population that it has any chance to win, and that's how you bring them, uh, to lose.

Do you get a sense of, um, Gazans on the ground who they feel is responsible for this situation, and if their anger has been redirected towards Hamas in a new way as time goes on? Can you just speak, do you have anything you can speak to on that?

We have an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence. Um, I mean, thousands of of data points of people and small protests and big protests and an old woman screaming at, at, at a Hamas gunman and thousands and thousands of data points. Um, and polls show complex things. Um, when a, when, when Gazans are asked, uh, in polls, various questions, like, do they think October 7th was a good idea? They'll still support the October 7th massacre. But then when they're asked, do they want Hamas to rule Gaza after the war? You know, the vast majority will say no. There is a sense that even if, um, they don't like the Israelis, they don't love the Israelis, they profoundly hate the Israelis, um, they get, they do believe that Hamas and its strategy, its strategy now, what is it sticking out the war for? What, what's the goal? Why, why not hand the Israelis those last 50 hostages? What are they holding them to achieve? Now, the Israeli demand is that they disarm and the leadership exile. That's the Israeli war conditions. But Hamas is what the leadership of Hamas demands to still rule Gaza the day after. As if anybody knows how to rebuild Gaza, hand concrete to people who built that tunnel system so they can rebuild that tunnel system. At this point, Hamas is only negotiating for its own survival. And Gaza is trapped in that Hamas attempt to survive. And Gazans are saying it, and Gazans know it. Um, I don't have good polling data right now. The, the good polls are, are old. They're from many months ago. Um, but, um, there is no love lost for Israel, and growing anger on the ground expressed publicly, um, at Hamas among Gazans. Both of those things are true.

Um, so today Steve Witkoff and Mike Huckabee are going to see these GHF aid sites. Um, they'll probably look around, say improvements can be made, but do you think there are really ways to improve the distribution? It just seems like a totally intractable problem.

Yeah, I think there, you know, when you're at the bottom, there's only, you can only go up. Um, and, and, and I don't, I don't mean to say that about GHF because I think a lot of the weaknesses are not GHF's fault. I think a lot of the weaknesses are, you know, grand strategic rather than implementation. Um, yes, absolutely. Um, they visited, uh, the distribution site in Rafah, um, um, all the way on the southern, uh, Gaza Strip. Um, and there was talk about exact, and what one of the things that they're doing, uh, Huckabee, who is the ambassador to Israel, and Witkoff, um, is trying to figure out how you upgrade massively and fix these problems because the Trump administration wants to expand so that it fills the gaps that we now understand were, were huge, were, were disastrous, um, gaps that we we should have had solutions for, but we thought that there was, so we, being the Israeli officials involved in this, not me, but, Um, I, I think, I think we all thought, in other words, I think that those UN numbers really made a lot of people complacent, and, and I do include myself in that, and, and also the, the crying of wolf for so many dozens of months also made me complacent as well. So let me include myself in that. The, the simple answer is IDF soldiers can't come out of urban warfare zones and protect, uh, a distribution. It's, those are the wrong soldiers with the wrong orders and the wrong training, and the wrong way of doing things, and it's going to end badly, obviously, and it has ended badly too many times for this to be a confusing thing for, uh, for the Israeli military. Um, and the simple answer is many, many more centers, many, many more ways to distribute. Um, it's great, by the way, if you, if you send out as much aid as possible in the old system, truck convoys that Hamas steals, but then you also expand the GHF mechanism, double it, triple it, quadruple it all over Gaza. And so, anyone who doesn't get off the trucks can also just go and get packages at these distribution systems, then you've both solved the Hamas problem plus prevented any of these gaps from developing. And so, there are all of these kinds of solutions that I think are fairly obvious. In other words, if we just walk through what exactly has happened, you know, any three people among our viewers right now will be able to piece together, uh, some of these solutions. And so now the, the bureaucracy has to, has to do it and has to do it with a speed much faster than than bureaucracies are usually used to. Um, I want to sort of pan out the larger strategy question which you touched on, but I just want to take a beat here and I want to do that by reading, um, a portion of your piece that you published in the Free Press, um, which was just so good. I encourage everyone, um, who's tuning in to go read it after this live stream. Um, but basically you say, Hamas's fundamental plan for survival, their main strategic weapon against Israel is Gaza's humanitarian suffering. It is the catalyst for international pressure on Israel that Hamas argues will be, will yet be its salvation. And it's working now. Global attention on the humanitarian crisis has crashed down on Israel, allowing Hamas to secure daily pauses in fighting. This is something they only ever achieved in the past for hostage releases. This was a military setback, and at no point did Israel respond to the narrative, much less control it. Israel has largely succeeded in the ground war, but it has it has utterly failed in the humanitarian war in understanding the role of humanitarian aid in the strategy of the enemy. And I just want to add on, you know, sort of the conventional wisdom after October 7th was that the government misunderstood Hamas. Now we're almost two years later, and it seems like that hasn't really changed. Um, and I would just love for you to speak to why there's this misunderstanding that continues.

Um, the, so the simple answer is I don't know. Um, one of the truisms I learned, uh, from my dad, who, uh, was once a, a prosecutor of organized crime and the Jerusalem police, uh, is that a lot of things that look like conspiracies are just, just incompetence and stupidity. In other words, never underestimate the power of just, uh, a system not being good at what it's doing. Uh, so, you know, uh, AAMS Razer says, incompetence itself is its own answer. Um, but I, I think that, um, most Israelis right now, 60% of Israelis, depending on how you ask the question, it'll be a little higher, a little lower, uh, genuinely believe that government policy on the war in Gaza is set in a way that it wasn't on Iran, in the way that it wasn't in Lebanon, is set, a lot of it, by coalition politics. Uh, Netanyahu has a coalition that includes, everybody knows this, uh, very, very far-right parties, the most far-right parties in Israeli politics. Uh, among the parties of his coalition, and he needs them to keep his coalition afloat. In other words, if he loses them, he loses a vote and his government falls. And one of the things that those parties are demanding publicly, openly, explicitly, is, um, pressure to get as many Gazan civilians out of Gaza and clearing areas of Gaza for Israel to build Israeli settlements in Gaza. And if that is the public debate within the coalition, and Netanyahu has already said that that is not his policy. But he only ever said that responding after international pressure to certain ministers in his government saying the opposite, and he needs their votes. And so, for example, the, the beginning of the surge in aid was voted on by the Israeli cabinet on Saturday. Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. The leaders of the two farthest right parties, Bet Salis Matri and Itar Bengir, two ministers in the cabinet, are observant Jews. They, you know, um, they, uh, observe the Sabbath, so they don't answer the phone, etc. Um, but they are members of the Israeli government that votes on questions of war. And therefore, under Jewish law, uh, under Jewish religious law, if you're an observant Jew on the Sabbath, but you're also a doctor and the pager beeps, you have to go into the hospital. You're required to save a life. You're required to take care of people's lives and, and, and make decisions that could be life or death decisions on the Sabbath. You're not allowed to observe the Sabbath. In that case, Netanyahu held a vote without Smotrich and Ben-Gvir on the Sabbath to surge the aid without calling them and notifying them of the meeting. And the excuse afterwards that was delivered by the Prime Minister's office was that they did not want to force Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to violate the Sabbath, which is just an incredible concern for the spiritual well-being of these two men by the Prime Minister. Uh, I'm being sarcastic. Uh, Smotrich himself, um, said, you know, this was a ridiculous keeping me out of the loop because you were doing something you knew I would oppose. And so that moment tells us that these politics are real. These politics are something Netanyahu feels he has to maneuver around. He didn't want Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in the meeting where the vote was happening because he didn't want opposition within the meeting. He didn't want leaks. He didn't want them to try to torpedo it in one way or another, to threaten real political consequences. Um, and so those politics are absolutely there. The question is, how influential are they? Is Netanyahu limited in doing some of the things that you would think would be part of a good Gaza strategy? For example, articulating the day after. The Allies in World War II destroyed Germany. They, they devastated Germany, but they also said, "We're going to build a post-Nazi, non-Nazi, anti-Nazi Germany in the wake of this. We're only destroying Germany because the Nazis are holding on to power to the end." Israel isn't saying that. And so, Israel should say that. Now, why won't Netanyahu say it? He has, by the way, quietly in various ways said it. Ron Dermer, the minister closest to him at the strategic level, has said it. Why won't Netanyahu just say it? And the answer is he has these coalition problems. So, um, some of the incompetence may literally just be that conversations, serious planning on Gaza is overwhelmed and impossible inside those kinds of political constraints that Netanyahu finds himself and that Netanyahu placed himself in. He's the one who put together this coalition. Um, that critique is a critique shared by a majority of Israelis today. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Smotrich threatened to resign over increasing aid. Is that right?

Yes. And repeatedly. And Ben-Gvir even did resign and then came back. Yes.

How do you explain that? I guess in the sense of, you know, people say he's constrained by his, um, far-right allies, but they haven't actually resigned, um, or or broke down the coalition over, you know, his his choice to exclude them from the meeting or increase aid. What do you make of that?

There are two elements. One is the actual resignation, which I think he feels would be dangerous. Um, but I think he's more, he's safer, um, on that score, just politically, than than I think he calculates, unless he knows this better than me, which he very well probably does. Um, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir can't afford to, their base, to their voters, to be the element that topples a right-wing government and potentially brings to power a center-left government. And so I don't think they actually can follow through with an actual toppling of an Netanyahu government. So even if they resign from the government, I suspect they'll still vote with the coalition in the Knesset that they're not part of, uh, just to keep it up. And one of the ways I know this is on a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with our conversation today. The ultra-Orthodox draft exemptions is tearing apart Israeli politics at this moment, and they're trying to pass a bill, and they're having trouble doing it, and a lot of people are angry about it. The ultra-Orthodox parties left Netanyahu's government. They have, they have abandoned the coalition, just, just in the last two weeks. And they're still voting with the coalition. The coalition hasn't collapsed. So it's, it's, it's sort of to, they, they're doing it, but also not doing it. That's probably what the far-right would do in, if they, if they carried out this, this threat. But I think the fear Netanyahu has is that he'll be left alone as the only right-wing government leader who is seen to be doing things that all of his coalition partners will then campaign in the next election on proof that he is actually left-wing, and they're the only tough on Gaza right-wingers who actually are willing to do what it takes to defeat Hamas. He doesn't want to have that campaign run against him, which could be quite costly for him in the next election. So, um, it's, it's a tiny bit more complex than just losing them, but fundamentally, those are the political calculations I think he has to deal with. I think he thinks he's dealing with. Um, so while there is this, I think we can say mess at the distribution sites and this massive challenge in terms of the internal politics that you're speaking about, um, on the global stage, for a lot of observers who are not sympathetic to the war effort or to Israel, um, they see the state becoming more and more of a pariah, and I think this is largely because of the way Western media has characterized, often inaccurately, what's happening on the. And so I just want to pivot to this information war that you've written really eloquently about. Um, and I want to go back even to basically October 2023. You know, sort of the first massive headline that called into question, um, the authenticity of a lot of these sources was from the New York Times, and it read, "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital." Palestinians said, "Of course, now we know that wasn't true." They walked it back. Um, the way that they issued the correction was, you know, it, it didn't blast out to everyone, of course, who read the headline. Um, and now, you know, fast forward almost two years later, it sort of seems to be like a similar situation. There was an image of a child on the front page of the New York Times again. Um, and the child looked to be really in a, a terrible physical position. Um, and it was, you know, the, the reason stated was hunger, right? Circling back to the beginning of the conversation, but of course, there was no mention that this child actually did have cerebral palsy. Um, and to me, you know, the most interesting element here is a story about a child with cerebral palsy in a war zone is bad enough, right? And so the fact that that wasn't mentioned and it was sort of taken out of context, I think is quite telling. Um, and I just want to ask you, when you look at headlines like this from the New York Times, at this point, are you viewing it as mere negligence or something darker like, um, knowing villainization? And, um, if you could speak to that.

So, just a really important caveat. Um, it's a, it's a terrible, painful war, and Gazans are absolutely, um, suffering. And now we know, um, and we have known really since May. I actually was on a live stream on the Free Press on May 16th, 17th, 18th, something like that, where I first talked about this, which means that I had been reading other people who were actually talking.

About this being serious. Um, so hunger is absolutely there. So I, I want to just say that, you know, it's not that Palestinians aren't suffering. 500 people did not die in an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli hospital. It didn't happen. It never happened. And every single media outlet put it on their front page. And when questions were raised, they slowly started tweaking headlines, but would not take it off the front page, and for hours and hours and hours and hours, um, they kept it up there. And then the fact that it wasn't true at all. It was 24 people in a parking lot, not by Israel, but by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired. That correction traveled nowhere. In other words, that did not follow when the head of UN Relief said, uh, that 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours. And it was actually a discussion about how there was an estimate by UN Relief that, uh, he told this to the BBC about a month ago, um, that if nothing changed, given the data they had now, then over a year, there was a possibility in one of the worst-case scenarios that there would be 14,000 dead babies, and he wanted to say the words, "14,000 dead babies," just to, you know, trigger the amygdala, get people to pay attention. What came out of his mouth was, "14,000 dead babies are going to be dead in 48 hours." That, that headline was everywhere. And there are people who measured this stuff and said there had been, there were, um, 4 billion social media impressions. Now, the fact that it isn't true, can't be true, that it was two orders of magnitude beyond any possible logistical possibility, didn't matter afterwards.

But it, it was. And what we saw now with the New York Times was really quite egregious because, um, I, I, I actually, I'm actually going to put out there a request. Um, a lot of these claims and a lot of these pictures that, that really set the West on fire were kids who had pre-existing conditions that specifically made them look like that. And some of them also face hunger. In other words, it's also not that the hunger isn't part of the story, but the way it was framed by the media was that that child is what emaciated children look like. And to frame it that way, they actually had to cut out the healthy sibling standing next to the children to create that image. And the image was the mother holding them in the PETA pose. It was everything to try and trigger, um, you know, the human brainstem of, of, of very, very decent people in a way that didn't reflect the reality on the ground.

My fear is not that everybody in the world is going to hate me. Um, I'm, I'm an Israeli Jew. I mean, you know, after the 20th century, that is just not a thing that we are as concerned about as maybe sometimes we should be. I don't know. I, I'm kind of proud that we're not. My fear is that there's actual deep starvation in Gaza, even if it's in some places and it's in narrow places. But if we can know those places, then we Israeli journalists can then pick up the phone to some Israeli generals and make sure that that's the target of the next aid drop. That was my concern. And so I went to exactly three pictures that I could find of emaciated children broadcast in the Western press. All three of the ones I found, and I have not been able to find ones that don't follow this rule. And I am literally putting out a request for people to do this research because I will literally take a finding of real starvation and emaciated children to the Israeli officials and, and, um, and make, in other words, it, it matters. Let's, let's be journalists here for a minute. Let's crowdsource this journalism for a minute. Every single case I found was a pre-existing condition. Every single case I found of emaciated children was that. And that doesn't mean there aren't, and I'm not claiming I've done a research project that's that's, you know, comprehensive. Um, but that means that systemically throughout the media, that's what they cherry-picked. And someone is providing it for them because they're not going out there looking for it. And so on the ground in Gaza, there was a specific journalist who works with Turkish media that are pro-Hamas who provided these pictures to the New York Times. And so yes, there is a system. It is systemic and it is planned and it is, um, professionalized and well-funded to produce this imagery.

And on the American side, the way I put it in an angry, uh, tweet, I think a well-thought-out tweet with data, but nevertheless a frustrated tweet was, they don't have to lie to you. They could just tell you about actual Gaza suffering, but they're lying to you anyway about non-existent Gaza suffering. And so there's a, a problem here of American media lying to Americans in a big way. And I'm not talking about the debate of is the starvation Israeli incompetence, which I argue and I give a lot of details to explain why I think it, or Israeli, um, um, evil and intent, malice. That's a separate thing that I'm not going to get into. That's a separate debate. Just literally reporting to you things that are not true. 55 million people saw the New York Times, uh, tweet or subs or follow the New York Times Twitter feed and saw their picture of the emaciated child. Um, the correction they put out on the New York Times PR, uh, Twitter feed, which has, I think, 90,000 followers, something like that. And so they very, very quietly pretended to issue a correction that is fundamental to understanding a story in which the imagery was purposefully intended by Hamas-supporting, uh, photographers, you know, on the payroll of Turkish institutions that support Hamas to manipulate Western, uh, media. You should have sympathy for Gazans, and your mainstream media is explicitly and demonstrably lying to you.

I want to bring in a subscriber question that I think is really relevant here, which is, why does Israel have such a bad PR operation to add nuance to these claims? And I'll add, you know, from your piece, you highlighted that Bibi doesn't have an clearly identified English-language spokesperson. Why is that?

>> He literally doesn't have an English-language spokesperson. Yes. When, uh, some of the media outlets, uh, I know of one, so I know at least one tried to reach out to, uh, Israeli officials about the, uh, UN Relief claim about the dead babies that were going to die in 48 hours. Uh, there wasn't a person they knew how to call. They could call all kinds of supporters of Israel who are pundits online, you know, in various places in the world. They can't actually get an answer out of the Israelis. Um, there isn't, and, and so the spokesperson element doesn't exist. Never mind, uh, any kind of serious, you know, damage control, um, story crafting, narrative shaping. Think of a political campaign of a politician you like, right? You kind of hope they have some serious experts in marketing and in messaging and in storytelling who just do that basic baseline competent part of what is a fundamental part of this war.

When you tell Israelis, we need, we need to be able to tell the story as Israelis understand it, or as the Israeli state understands it within Israel, we're having raging debates about these things. So, not there's no Israeli view, but how the mainstream of Israelis at least understand the question of, of, of the future of Gaza, etc. When you, when you say something like that, then Israelis dismiss it as, you know, "We don't stand in judgment before the world. We refuse." That's not what the Zionist Jew does. And then you say to them, "Okay, but Hamas thinks it's winning because of it. Shouldn't we at least create some contested narrative? Some, shouldn't we at least point to the most egregious lies? Shouldn't that be something?" Um, the New York Times won't publish sometimes, uh, a serious reputation by any Israeli voice because there really isn't an Israeli voice for them to come after. Now, I, I blame them. It's not hard to get that Israeli. You can develop those contacts, and there's plenty of New York Times people on the ground in Israel who are Israelis and know how to get in touch with anybody. But nevertheless, the Israeli state is not hard to pen, is not easy to penetrate on these questions. So the Israelis are utterly absent, totally absent to the point where, um, there's a journalist, Kahana, is fairly pro-Hamas, who actually has said publicly that he asked the Prime Minister's office, "Why do you not even have a spokesman?" And the answer that he got was, um, that they told him, "Netanyahu is the spokesman." I just never, okay, now you like Israel, haters, I don't care. Just the incompetence of that answer and that sense that that's not really an arena of war is, um, is, is astonishing.

Uh, why is it that way? I have, uh, answered this question a few times. I'll answer it here now. It is profound. It is deep. It is cultural. It is old. The, um, the Zionist movement, sorry to get historical. I'll, I'll do this very quickly. This is the 22nd version. The Zionist movement begins in the 1880s, the political modern Zionist movement, in response to mass pogroms that begin in the Russian Empire in 1881. And those are experienced as a crash of a, of a kind of faith that many Jews had in integration, in the new liberalism, in new parliamentarism of Europe, in, in modernity and and solving their problems, emancipating them from the ghettos, allowing them into universities. Jews in the Russian Empire in those days can't live in most Russian cities by law, right? They can't go to university by law in many places. And all of these laws are changing and everything is opening up for them. And then suddenly Europe pivots in the 1880s to these massive anti-Semitic politics, um, that just erupt in just orgies of violence, uh, over the next 40 years that send millions of Jews fleeing Europe. The Zionist movement is born by really among integrationists who wake up from this experience to say, "Wait, wait a second. Maybe these new modernizing societies are a lot less liberal than they pretend, and they're these murderous impulses, and we have to get the hell out." That's the original argument. And one of the arguments made by these early Zionist thinkers like Leo Pinsker or Theodore Herzl is that when a Jew comes to an anti-Semite, the, the definition of an anti-Semite for them, it isn't even necessarily someone who hates a Jew so much as someone who has a morality play running around in their head. And the Jew is a character in that play. So when they look at a Jew, they don't see a human. They see a, a caricature in, in their own story of themselves that's important to them. When a Jew stands in front of an anti-Semite and attempts to explain themselves and to explain that they're not the evil thing in the anti-Semite's morality play, it can't be done. You can't penetrate that fog. It's that story that they tell themselves is too important to them for you, for them to care that there's a three-dimensional human on the other side. And so explanation often becomes justification. You then try and justify yourself to someone who hates you, who has shrunk you down to a story. And justification is dehumanizing. And therefore, the early Zionist thinkers explain, "Jews are not allowed to justify themselves anymore to anti-Semites, to anyone who will pigeonhole him into a, into a morality play because it's dehumanizing."

This is such a deep thread in Israeli Jewish culture that it is almost, it's one of those things that are so obvious and and shared and unanimous and assumed that Israelis don't even know how to talk about it because everybody just agrees with it. So, we never have to mention it. Um, Ben-Gurion in the 1950s when the UN would come out against Israel would say, "Schmoom UN, UN, who cares about the UN? Who cares about what the world thinks?" And just to bring that point home, how deeply that comes runs in Israeli culture. The state of Israel has founded a public diplomacy ministry in the cabinet in the government five times over its existence since the '70s, and it keeps closing it down because it keeps not knowing what to do with it. And the last time the Israeli state closed down its public diplomacy ministry was the week after October 7th, where the public diplomacy minister got up on national television and, I'm going to paraphrase her, I apologize to her, I don't remember the exact quote, but she got up and she said, "This ministry is kind of a fake ministry. It's a, when coalition talks are happening, usually prime ministers like to found extra ministries to hand people jobs to make them satisfied to make coalition talks easier. And this is one of those ministries." And, you know what? Wasting public money in peacetime in order to make coalition talks easier is legitimate. But I, she said, will not waste public funds on something so stupid as public diplomacy in wartime. And so she resigned right there and then, and her ministry was shut down. And nobody in the Israeli political system thought it was strange that the Israeli government shut down the public diplomacy ministry because a war started. The budgets, the staffing of the Foreign Ministry is gutted. It's much, much, it's one of the weakest ministries in the Israeli government. Um, Israelis literally do not know how, do not believe it's a thing. And when they come to explain or justify, they have a cultural aversion to it that's really profound and fundamental to being Israeli. And so the long story short is this is, I believe, truly one of the most beautiful and inspiring things about Israelis, that they have such a difficulty culturally in explaining themselves to the world because they refuse to justify themselves to the world in a war like this. It is a disastrous military liability. And so the Israelis need to, you know, a little bit grow up, wake up, and and do this seriously, take this issue seriously.

And I mean, now we're seeing, you know, the effects of the failure to add the nuance or explain. I mean, you know, these headlines keep trickling in about, um, European allies, countries across Europe, um, weighing recognizing a Palestinian state. And as you've pointed out, um, it's not so much that they are making moves to recognize the state. It's that it seems, and you'll correct me if you disagree with this characterization, but they might be okay recognizing a state under terms that are favorable to Hamas, um, and and not holding up, you know, the aim of ending the war with Hamas out of power. That seems like the biggest risk here in all of this. Is would you say that is a fair characterization?

Yeah. What's interesting in following the, um, this sort of domino effect of European countries, I think Finland just a couple hours ago, um, said something similar, that they're now going to recognize a Palestinian state. Some of it is just literally frustration with the Israelis. Um, Israel speaks only in the voice of those extreme ends of Israeli politics that are saying to Europeans that certainly in European terms, that Israel is the villain. In other words, if, if Smotrich is getting up and saying, "We're going to empty Gaza," is the only thing that they hear, and it's actually, there isn't another strong, serious, you know, Israeli voice representative of Israel saying other things because of Netanyahu's political problems and because he literally has no spokesman. Um, then the Europeans are concerned that a war against Hamas that they might support is actually a war that is more shaped by Smotrich than the Israelis will admit. And, and that concern is driving a lot of these people to, um, to say, and of course, domestic politics and large Muslim constituencies. It's not an accident. This began in France. All of these things put together, um, uh, come together to create this domino effect of countries announcing they're going to recognize the Palestinian state. But there's an enormous diversity among these different leaders and how they're doing it. So Kier Starmer of Britain probably did it, you know, in the most stupid imaginable way. Uh, he literally said, "If there's a ceasefire by September, I won't recognize a Palestinian state by the UN General Assembly in September. If there isn't a ceasefire, I will recognize a Palestinian state." In other words, Kier Starmer just informed Hamas that if they don't have a ceasefire, if they manage to just walk away from the ceasefire and not agree to a ceasefire by September, then they will get this tremendous prize of a British recognition of a Palestinian state. And if they do agree to a ceasefire and hostages come out, then they won't get this tremendous prize. Hostage families in Israel are horrified at the British Labour Party and have written against them and screamed against them and said that they are in, they've given Hamas the biggest incentive anyone has ever given them to keep their family members in those dungeons in Gaza. That is about as dumb as you can do it. I mean, it really is astonishingly incompetent. I, my heart goes out to the British that this is their leadership. I'm sorry to be so, I'm genuinely flummoxed how that came out of his mouth.

Macron in France, who I think is less pro-Israel ironically than the British leadership, um, more critical, more easily critical. He, by the way, um, kicked Israel out of the, uh, defense trade shows in Paris over the last two years, um, in part because Israel is the main competitor for many weapon systems and he didn't want them presenting for that reason, but he pretended it was a big moral reason. Macron has actually done something much, much more intelligent, which was, um, among other things, talk about Hamas as one of the conditions, Hamas actually has to disarm and leave. Well, if that's a condition, the Israeli war victory conditions have to be met for that recognition, then now Hamas is incentivized to walk away because then the Palestinians really pocket something valuable, as opposed to Hamas being incentivized to stick to their guns and keep the war going, which is the British position. Um, and Macron has also put together a, a conference on two states with the, with the Arab League that produced a statement that for the very first time the Arab League said, all the usual stuff. For the very first time, it said, "Hamas has to put down its arms and walk away." And among the signatories was Qatar, Hamas's main funder and patron. And so, and we've heard from the, from the Trump administration, um, I think this morning I read this, um, the Trump administration officials telling, I don't remember who, I, I think it's the Wall Street Journal, that, uh, they are hearing from the Qataris profound frustration at Hamas because even they don't know what the heck Hamas is holding out for anymore. And so there is a pro, if, if recognition of one kind or another is at least contingent on a better future for Gaza, on a better Gaza, on a Gaza that doesn't have a Hamas in it, on a Gaza that can therefore actually be rebuilt, on a Gaza that can be policed, on a Gaza that can be rehabilitated and have that new dawn, then it's not catastrophically incompetently stupid. If it's a gift to Hamas. In other words, if it's premised on the Israeli war conditions being fulfilled, you can agree or disagree with the actual politics, but, but it's at least not this massive gift, as massive a gift. At least Hamas will still claim, obviously, that it drove the war that created the, the recognition, but don't literally give Hamas the recognition in the way that Kier Starmer is suggesting. So, it's, it's, it's a bigger, more complicated question, and the way different countries are doing it tells us a lot about who does understand what's going on in the Middle East and who really just, unbelievably, does not.

>> One just last question before we close out. You mentioned the 22 Arab countries, including Saudi, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, that signed this declaration condemning October 7th, you know, saying Hamas must end its rule in Gaza, release the hostages, hand over the weapons. Uh, one, were you surprised by this? Two, what does this indicate about the future of the conflict?

>> Yeah, so I learned two things from this. Uh, Qatar was very significant. I would not have thought that Qatar would have signed it. Um, and that tells me that I think that Qatar smells the end. It wouldn't turn on Hamas unless, even just at the most, you know, thin rhetorical level, unless it thought that, uh, it was, it was kind of reading the room among the Arab League and saying, there's, there's no future for Hamas. Um, the Saudis stand ready. Everybody, everybody wants to be the one that saves Gaza. Nobody is willing to patrol a Gaza where Hamas is killing their soldiers. And so Hamas leaving really is the precondition not just for the Israelis, it's the precondition for the Saudis, the Emiratis. It is now a precondition really for the Qataris. There isn't a future for Gaza with Hamas in Gaza. It is weird that in the West, the tilt against Israel, the idea that one, um, one professor who has, you know, been screaming against Israel for a very long time, American professor, put it, I thought beautifully on Twitter, he said, um, "Israel is now for a generation going to be the genocidal state. It's over for Israel." Such a beautiful framing of just a way of telling that story. That's happening in the West, and while that's happening in the West, uh, the Arab world has turned on Hamas, and the Arab world wants to move forward with normalization, end all the endless wars on Israel that have convinced the Israelis that they have to be in endless wars with the Middle East. Um, and, and I think that, you know, there is a sense among, uh, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Egyptians, even now the Qataris, that, uh, the, the, the efforts, the various efforts over the decades to destroy Israel weren't worth it. They were massively destructive. They didn't destroy Israel. Israel continued to thrive and prosper. It lost the support of the French and it got the support of the Americans. It lost the support of, I don't know, what the British and got the support of the French. The, the idea that Israel is only maintained by some foreign power is not true. The Israelis are strong. The Israelis have nowhere to go. The Israelis are not something the Arabs need to waste blood and treasure for all time trying to remove. And so we need to move forward. So in the Middle East, there is a kind of de-radicalization on Israel happening despite the images out of Gaza, despite public opinion being deeply, deeply anti-Israel throughout the Arab world. Um, there's a frustration with all of those ideologies that have claimed to be able to remove Israel, and Hamas is now the last one standing essentially, and a desire to move ahead. Uh, just when in the West, uh, there's this collapse, um, uh, which we are seeing. I don't know how much sticking power it has, how much it's the news cycle, certainly the activist campaign for the Palestinians, um, that does support Hamas, that part of it, that does support Hamas, wants it to be there forever, um, but we're seeing a lot of positive developments and movements on the ground in the Middle East.

>> I think that's a good place to end. David's piece in The Free Press is "Israel's Winning One War While It Loses Another." Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to all the subscribers who tuned in and listened and shared questions. Thank you.

>> Thank you.