Gareth Cliff
History Matters
Gareth Cliff and Judge Dennis Davis - History Matters
- Gareth took the leap from traditional radio in May, 2014 with the launch of cliffcentral.com, pioneering online media and podcasting in South Africa. Gareth is one of South Africa’s radio’s most irreverent radio and television personalities with a career spanning 25 years. He kicked off his radio career at Campus Station Radio TUKS, Pretoria. Later graduated to 702 talk show where he replaced the legendary John Berks on the 702 Breakfast Show in 2001. And three years later joined National Youth Station 5FM, where he remained as the breakfast show host before launching cliffcentral.com. Gareth was a judge on South Africa’s, “Idols,” for 11 sessions, posted the, “Gareth Cliff Show,” on Mnet, and most recently, “So What Now,” on ENCA. He has won numerous awards for best radio and television personality. Has written two books and regularly hosts events both as an MC speaker and conference facilitator, both locally and internationaly. For any of you who spend any time with Gareth, he is South Africa’s heart throb and darling. Wherever we go, Gareth is constantly, constantly swabbed. So, today Gareth is going to talk with Judge Dennis Davis on how history matters. Thanks, Gareth, a million thanks for joining us today. We’re looking forward to your presentation. And of course, Dennis, thank you as always.
Thank you.
Thanks. Bye-Bye.
Absolute pleasure. Gareth, I was listening to Phoebe. I kind of can’t think, I think, were you 10 years old when you started radio?
Listen, I don’t look it and I don’t feel it, but I’ve been in it a long time.
Ya, and I just wanted to emphasise Wendy’s points. I want to start with, obviously, as we discussed beforehand, you had made an intervention into this awfully complex situation that I would suspect everybody’s listening to us feels and way beyond that and bearing in mind the fact that, you know, you are somebody who’s extraordinarily well known within the South African discourse because of your media personality. I’m going to read part of it because I’m not sure that everybody has read what you wrote, and then I want to talk to you about it. So this is a summary, an extensive summary if I may say, of what Gareth wrote. “I am not a Jew, I’m not a citizen of Israel, I haven’t even visited Israel. I don’t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem. And I don’t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I’ve read about Abraham, Moses, David, et cetera, et cetera. I know about the British, the Bellevue Declaration, Ben-Gurian Golda Meir. I know a bit about the six day war and the Intifada. I might not have a personal stake in the holy land, but humanity certainly does, and I’m a human being. The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who are kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated, and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in Sovereign Israel, where human beings too. Those who did it to them are not. Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers as a music festival, or watching a child up, say five year old child being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew, while children of a similar age laugh and mock him. We don’t know that child’s fate. And for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It’s depraved to even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed or talked about territory or Gaza being an open air prison, reeks of moral bankruptcy. If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, pressure, and poverty, but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture, ameliorate children. I don’t have to listen to your reasons.”
And he continues. “So if you swarm the Israeli embassy in London, waved Palestinian flags and called for genocide. If you went down to Times Square to celebrate the victory for decolonization against quote, ‘Apartheid Israel,’ unquote, if you sang along to quote, ‘Cast the Jews,” unquote chance at the Sydney Opera House, or hung a one settler, one bullet, that Palestinian flag over Grayston Bridge in Johannesburg, then you’re telling me who you are. Well, I see you and you’re my enemy. I’m one of those people who believes civilization is a real thing. I’ve resisted the poison of moral relatives in humanity departments of universities across the West who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilization versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection.“ And then it continues. "It’s always interesting to note that only western and liberal democracy tolerate and give sucker to the most heinous arguments in positions in public protests. You couldn’t pick it on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban, Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollah’s of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, excuse me, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave. Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, but in Europe never reckoning what happened in the Holocaust and their growing Muslim populations and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East.” Right? And then he says, “Hamas aren’t hiding the war. Their leader Ismail Haniyeh, safely scuttling in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated their Jews, not territory one or gods and lives saved. I’m afraid there are only two sides in a war your allies and your enemies. On September the 11th of 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.” It’s a very powerful statement. And I wanted just to start with on what basis you actually, I mean, what prompted you to do this?
Well, I’ve never really-
'Cause very few people- Sorry. Carry on.
I’ve never really made a secret of the fact that I not only believe, I mean, it sounds such a facile thing to say, but that Israel has a right to exist. That the establishment of Israel after the Second World War was a moral imperative which the world undertook, because largely of the horrors of the Holocaust. And this is not, you know, news to anybody. None of this stuff is particularly novel. I have many friends. I have a business partner, I have close associates and people who I treasure very dearly in my life who are Jewish. As I said in the article, I myself am not, I feel like many of us adopted a little Jewishness over that weekend because we want to show solidarity with a country. And I know that there are subtle differences. For example, you know, there are lots of South African Jews who don’t necessarily agree with the idea of Israel, and they don’t consider themselves Zionists. But for better or worse, I’ve always thought Israel was a really stellar place that by and large makes a bigger contribution to humanity than any other country of its size. I feel that the establishment of that country was absolutely necessary. And I feel that it’s continued thriving in the face of no less than I think it’s eight to 14 countries that are hell bent on its destruction, is a bull walk of civilization in that part of the world, of democracy, of freedom, of liberty, of free expression, of many of the practises which we in the west regard as being essential to continued happy and free existence. And that stuff is not to be underestimated. And I study history as a matter of interest and as something that I put to work at university as well. It’s an ongoing and abiding passion of mine.
And I have to say that this situation on Saturday, a week now, a week and a half ago, was deeply, deeply distressing to me. I found myself sitting in the office on Monday, feeling very down about the state of the world and what had just occurred and the brutality and barbarism of what everyone had had to bear witness to and what the people in Israel had had to go through. And I said to my business partner who’s often chided me and said, “Please, can you just stop talking about Israel? It just gets us into trouble.” It causes us, you know, clients get frightened and run away because they don’t like controversies. She said, “Why are you worrying about Israel? You don’t have a dog in this fight.” And the last time she told me that, she phoned me from New York and I’d spoken that day about an Israeli soldier who’d been kidnapped and taken across the border. It was a big story. I think it was probably three years ago. And she said to me, “Please, stop talking about this.” And I put down the phone to her, and about two hours later, just as I was about to go to sleep, I got a call from a guy who said, “Hey, Gareth, we’re going to come kill you.” And I suddenly thought, well, maybe Arina’s got a point, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this. And so for the last two years, I’ve tried to be a good boy and mostly just, you know, mind my own business. But I think there is a urgent call for people to have some moral backbone on this story. And it will allow us, as per the article, which you’ve very kindly read out, it’ll allow us to very quickly ascertain who are our friends and who are our enemies. And I don’t like talking like that, but we are at war and Israel’s at war, and this could very well bleed over into much bigger conflict. I hope it doesn’t, but with Iran and America, with what we’ve already seen boil over in Ukraine and Russia, there is ample appetite in that part of the world for things to get a lot worse very quickly. And I’m absolutely devastated by the fact that this is not a war that Israel asked for.
No, I think that’s right. But let me ask you a number of questions I flow from this. Firstly, have you had people phoning you just to say, we’re going to kill you as a result of your state?
Not this time, not this time. I think you would have to be a completely shameful human being to, while the the bodies are not even recovered. And while we’ve heard horrific stories of how people who are trying to identify babies are having the most absolutely appalling emotional time, just trying to get through the process of doing what they would do in, you know, an autopsy situation, ordinarily. While that’s still going on, while these people are not yet identified, to call up someone and threaten them death just because they support Israel, I think you would have to be a complete psychopath. So, so far, so good. But you can already see the tide turning. You can already see the international media starting to equivocate on this. They’re starting to, I mean, that story about the hospital which was supposedly bombed, which yesterday was all the rage in every major international newspaper in the West. It was taken verbatim from Hamas without question that 500 people had been killed in an Israeli rocket attack, turned out with just a few hours of time passing in between. And absolutely no shame on the part of the media that just went ahead and printed this propaganda, that not only had that rocket come from within Gaza, but that it had not even hit the hospital. But 15 minutes after it had supposedly gone off and now there’s ample evidence to prove that in fact, it didn’t hit a hospital, landed in a parking lot, it was fired from Gaza. But within 15 minutes, Hamas had already said, 500 are dead, and everyone couldn’t wait in the international news to start reporting this so they could say, “Oh, you see the two sides,” and in order to be clever and nuanced and sound like you know what’s going on, you must say it’s equal.
Yes. But of course, as somebody pointed out last night when I was watching some of the coverage, you try to tell that to people on the Arab Street. In other words we’ve got to a point that to some extent actual rational information doesn’t count. And that puts one in an incredibly precarious situation.
Well, I mean, look, fake news has been a term which we bandy about all the time. I’ve got a stamp that someone sent me as a gift, fake news, and I take it out of my desk and I just put it onto articles that I can tell are nonsense. But you could call anything that, and these days it is very difficult to ascertain the truth. And do people even care about the truth? Well, I do, and I think it does matter. And I’m not one of those people who likes using euphemisms or doesn’t see a situation like this for what it is, or tries to grey some things that are very black and white. I think that if you don’t have clarity on those things, you don’t know how to act in the world.
So accepting as one should your proposition that there is no standard, there is no basis of any kind by which you could justify what happened on that Saturday. In fact, I’m reminded of when I gave a lecture on Hannah Arendt, who said that she justified the support of the capital punishment execution of Eichmann, because there are some people such as Eichmann, who by their conduct have revealed that you do not want to share the world with humanity. And I think that’s true of Hamas and I think that’s where one should start. But I suppose the question, which of course people are struggling with, is how does one then respond to the fact that Palestinian children are dying too?
No, look, I think it is one thing to be completely cold and feel nothing for the death of children in any country and under any circumstances, especially because these are by definition innocent people who have been caught sometimes in the crossfire and sometimes on purpose. And I think that’s an important distinction too. If it’s on purpose, then the people who are doing it are especially evil.
And we know that.
If it’s by mistake, these are, look, we’ve also got to be realistic about what war means, because I had two grandfathers, one who bombed Italy and probably in bombing Italy in the Royal Air Force, probably killed civilians. I have no doubt that some of them were, you know, bystanders, innocent as they may have been, while his target may have been fascists, the other who was in North Africa must have done a similar thing to people who were not Rommel’s soldiers. And yet during a war, these are expected things. And again, I feel very, very sorry for any person in Gaza who also does not support Hamas. And there must be many people who don’t because Gaza is an awful place to live. And most of the reason that it’s an awful place to live isn’t Israel. Most of the reason is Hamas, they’re spending absolutely not a single cent on building any infrastructure, on allowing people to live in decent and sanitary circumstances. They spend every cent they get on military infrastructure, which they then place under civilian targets because they know Israel is trying its best not to kill civilians. Otherwise they would have no incentive to put those bases under hospitals and nursery schools and god knows what else. So I have sympathy for these children, I have sympathy for these civilians, but unfortunately Israel is expected to respond in some way. There is not going to be a way that they can do this and remain absolutely divine and without blemish.
All right, but let’s assume for the purpose of debate, again, just to debate this with you, if you take for example, something that Ehud Barak said, who was once upon a time the Israeli Prime Minister, head of the Israel Defence Force, said he’s not against going into Gaza, by the way, but he says you’re never going to root them out completely. It’s not possible. So where does it leave-
But I remember it wasn’t so long ago that the Americans said that in Mosul, it took them seven years to get rid of all the tunnels and all the insurgents, and that was in Iraq.
Yeah. So what I suppose I’m saying is where does that leave us? I think the condemnation is absolutely right. I suppose what people are struggling with, do we then just batten down the hatches for years of war?
Hasn’t Israel been in a perpetual state of readiness and some of the criticism that has come in for Israel, because again, you know, it is not surprising to me that it is the Jews who are going, let’s be a little self-reflective. What could we have done better? How could we have prevented this? There’s not a single person in Hamas who’s saying, perhaps we should have done that attack a little differently. Maybe we could have caused less death here or more there. Or there’s absolutely no self-reflection going on on that side. So while all of us here on this session are busy talking about how perhaps we can go forward and what we could do better and how we can save more lives and that sort of thing, this is not a conversation that’s happening on the other side.
Well, it depends. I agree. Hamas can’t be part of any equation. I think that’s absolutely clear. But there’s a massive leap between that and saying, we write off all the Palestinians.
No, you can’t write off all the Palestinians. It is interesting to me that this is now Israel’s problem because not one of the other Arab nations is saying, “Oh, we’ll take your strays and your weak and your children and your innocents.”
No, no, that’s true. And that’s happened for a very long time.
So Israel, again, you know, the Jews must fix this. It must be Israel that fixes this. It must not be Egypt who could open their border. They have opened their border for relief to come in and Israel has sent relief in. But I don’t hear a single solitary sound out of Jordan, out of Saudi Arabia, out of the UAE, out of Qatar, out of Iraq, out of Syria.
Well, I don’t think you will, obviously, I think that’s absolutely right. Well, I don’t want to be held to that standard by the way, in Israel, but would it not also be true that there were right wing fundamentalist Israelis who partly got us into the mess by dividing the country in the first place?
These are arguments which we can have and they’re valid. And I’m not by any means going to say that these are things that we must ignore because now we’re in a state of war because that’s often an excuse politicians make. But Israel is a complicated place. What do they say, if you put three Jews in a room, you get 12 opinions. But it is a complicated place because the people there are trying to, in a part of the world where there is no other participant in this conversation, they’re trying to do the best they can, not only for themselves, but also for their neighbours to ensure a long-term and sustainable peace there. Or at least a coexistence where people can come to terms on some sort of values. But the big problem here is that those values are not evident. And you mentioned Ehud Barak, the last time he proposed a proper peace there and was willing to give just about everything that was requested before the peace was even put into play, and it was still rejected.
Yeah, I think that.
It makes me think that perhaps, perhaps there isn’t a desire to sort out territory. There isn’t a desire to sort out politics. Actually, it just boils down to, we don’t want the Jews here.
I definitely think that the Arafat position at the end was exactly that. That he’d rather want to be a revolutionary than actually have, I think your point is well made. But I suppose the counter to that was that Rabin was quite close to getting somewhere and he was killed.
Yes, and that was by a right wing Israeli.
Correct. And I always thought at that time when he died, that a lot died with him. So its a complicated situation.
Of course. Could have, would have, should have.
I’m just putting to questions that obviously are in the public domain and I’m interested in your view on them, obviously.
Yeah, look, I’m also not going to tell you that I’m an expert, although it seems to me that Twitter is absolutely chockfull of experts on the Israeli Palestine all of a sudden. And we’ve got, all of a sudden, people I didn’t even know understood where Israel was on a map, are suddenly giving me long and complicated histories about the, you know, the Temple Mount and Al Aqsa and all kinds of things that I didn’t know they even understood just five days ago.
You see on the counter position to the questions I put to you, which is to what extent, you know, has Israel got to think very deeply over time about how you deal with reaching some peace of Palestinians absent Hamas, I must make that clear, which quite obviously is rightly so, has to bring an international community because without that, you know, they’re just going to continue in some way or another. I suppose I’m interested in the fact on the other side is that so much of this seems to endemically show a form of antisemitism.
That’s it, you know, that’s it. I mean, you’ve put your finger on it. And that is precisely what’s at the heart of this. In fact, I think if any one paragraph in that article that I wrote is in any way insightful, it is the fact that we must not underestimate the incredibly long history of antisemitism. And it seems to be the source of all other prejudice because it was there before any of the others. And I talk about it as a big gaping wound in humanity. And every time it gets closed off and starts to heal just a little bit, usually after something absolutely awful has happened to Jewish people, then some monstrous collective comes and claws it open again. It’s the never ending gift for the worst people in the world.
So let me then just ask you stuff that we, that you and I, in a sense look at closer to home. Can you possibly explain to me the government’s attitude to all of this?
Look, I don’t think that they are very thoughtful about any of this. I don’t believe, you know, you never ascribed to malice what can be explained away by incompetence and ignorance. And in the case of our government, that’s usually a safe bet. I think that there is this ANC idea that the friends that they had during the struggle, of course, they make a crazy exception for all the Jews who helped them during the struggle. Suddenly those people have been side lined, you know, important names like Dennis Goldberg suddenly don’t occur to them. No, no, they’re on the Palestinian side. These people, I mean, when they went and arrested people at Lily’s Leaf in Rivonia, there were more Jews there than black people. Ironically, this seems to escape our ANC. I gave a lecture in April of this year at the Pixley ka Isaka Seme Foundation. Now he was the founder of the ANC in the early 1900s. A very, very interesting man. He also managed to secure the sovereignty of Swaziland and Lesotho at a time where, you know, a black lawyer from South Africa, what were the chances that he would ever be taken seriously? This man was an incredible mind. He studied in America at Columbia, he studied in the UK as well. And then he made representation to the British Parliament to have those two countries declared sovereign states, a truly incredible human being.
The reason they asked me to go and deliver this lecture about him, is because they could not find anyone in the ANC who knew anything about Pixley ka Isaka Seme. So they don’t have a very good memory. Even if they say they do, it’s more of a, given the option of choosing the right or the wrong thing, the ANC will almost always choose the wrong thing, especially because anyone who they would’ve considered part of the brain’s trust of old, many of whom were SACP members and so on, are either dead or have quietly disappeared into the shadows because they’re embarrassed by what they see now. And the ANC feels it’s got this comrade ship with Palestine and the people in America at university campuses who are walking around in keffiyeh’s feel that they have a brotherhood or a companionship with Hamas and largely with Palestine. But then also there are people who are actively saying, “No, no Hamas, I’m with them.” You know, these are the children of rich white Americans on the east and west coast. And the reason that’s happening is because there has been a pervasive, and I mentioned it briefly in that article, a pervasive leftism, which has morphed from Marxist class divide into a kind of racial grievance and then a gender grievance, and now a transgender grievance. And there’s this group of people now who found, they found companionship with each other in feeling like victims. And whenever they see someone being victimised by someone else, even in the most simplified possible way, they will choose the side of the victim regardless of the facts. And I think that this is what ties a lot of people in the world together for bizarre and unknown reasons, because they’re actually not looking at it in anything but the superficial.
I think that’s right. I mean, I dunno how you explain someone at SOAs in the UK saying that the people who were at that music festival, essentially, well, you know, what do you expect when you have a music festival on stolen land? It seems to me that there’s such an egregious level of antisemitism and I often, I mean, that makes me feel totally desperate because of course it plays in to precisely this problem. But let me get back to the president. Or two things. I firstly found it astonishing that when he rocked up, you know, with the keffiyeh, et cetera, the Palestinian, whether I like it or not, he’s entitled to choose what side he wants to support, that he’s prerogative. One votes him in or out accordingly, but that he did not make one mention of 1300 Jewish lives, seemed to me that he was really signalling that Jewish lives count for less in their world than anything else. And when you couple that with even more bizarre conduct of our Minister of Foreign Affairs, having discussion with the head of Hamas, I mean, you can’t make this up if you tried, and then when she says it’s humanitarian aid. I mean, what are we talking about,?
Dennis, it is despicable.
We’re living in a country where the government of the day, I know it’s done this in Ukraine, Russia, et cetera. I know it cosies up to all sorts of authoritarian governments, but this is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. How does one explain this?
Again, I think it’s just they’re amateurs for starters. I don’t think these are professional people and cadre deployment has proven that a minister, I think of transport-
I think that’s letting them off the hook.
No, no, no. I’ve got more, don’t worry. This is the entry point.
Yeah.
So I think they’re hopelessly incompetent and amateurish about everything they do. And our foreign policy since, I think, really it got absolutely dreadful at the time of Mighty Mashabane when she took over as foreign, DERCO, as they call it, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation. And from there, it’s just slid into complete disarray. You mentioned Ukraine, Russia, I mean, the same Minister Naledi Pandor came out and said, “Oh no, no, we’re on the side of Ukraine.” And then had to revise that just a few hours later when the Presidency said, “No, we’re on the side of Russia,” and we’ve been cosing up to Russia probably for the same inconceivable and illogical and ridiculous reasons that we’re cosing up to Palestine or Hamas in this respect. But I don’t think that there’s an understanding of morality. And you brought up stolen land now. This is something which comes up in South Africa all the time and we treat it like it’s a real thing, and we shouldn’t, this is nonsense. This de colonisation left-wing nonsense, which is promulgated by academics in the Western world and would not be allowed to be taught in any of these countries that they profess to stand up for. I don’t think that we are dealing with people who have, you cannot treat them as people with good faith. You’re actually dealing with bad actors. You’re dealing with people who are deliberately deceitful and misleading. And when Cyril doesn’t say anything about 1300 dead people, innocent dead.
Not only that, by the way.
He’s telling you something, showing you who he is,
The manner in which they were killed.
Yeah. But to him, it’s moral equivocation. Oh, but now they’re going to bomb Garzas, same thing to him. It’s totally the same thing.
But when the Minister of Foreign Affairs actually talks to the lead of Hamas, I’m sorry, I found that terrifying.
Well, I found it disappointing, but I actually, I expected-
You weren’t surprised?
I expected them to be wrong footed about it. You know, where expectation meets reality that creates happiness. And my expectations are so low for this government that I can’t begin to tell. But I think what they’ve done here, they’ve miscalculated in a big way because Cyril Ramaphosa tried to, he tried to sort of smooth things over a little after, you know, there was a very genuine, and I think honest and heartfelt outcry from the Jewish community in South Africa, which is really small now. And you know this, there used to be 10 times the number of Jews in South Africa.
Well, there were 120,000 and then now there’s down to about 60. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I have friends all over the world who used to be here. They now are in Sydney and they’re in Canada, and they, wherever else they are, perhaps my numbers are wrong, but the community’s small and to just, and by the way, they meant outsize contribution to this country. Not only in terms of the struggle, but in terms of business, in terms of philosophy, in terms of academia. They’ve done a tremendous job, this tiny community of people in South Africa. And for them to just be ridden over roughshod by a man who has not even had the decency to express for a moment some sort of care for the lives of those who died, and as you say, for the manner of their death, we are not dealing with an honest actor here. I think he has completely ruined his relationship. I hope he has. I hope that the people who thought that he was still a good guy a couple of months ago, have seen him for what he is now.
Gareth, I wonder if we could, 'cause I see lots of comments and I want to ensure that we deal with them, but I wanted to ask you, I mean, you are a person who works in the media and you’re prominent in this regard and you know about it. So what are we supposed to do now? I mean, faced with a barrage of this hatred against essentially the concept of Israel. And I want to make it that point, there are very big differences within Israel about how it should fashion itself. I mean, I made a remark about right-wing people. Well, I know that there’s huge anger with other Israelis as there was before in relation to them. But the idea that one thing that’s happened is everybody is united behind the fact that the state of Israel has an inalienable right to exist. And the question is, we seem to be, as you rightly said, it doesn’t take a couple of weeks and you lose the propaganda war.
Yeah. Because first of all, the media have shown their cards on this Hamas Hospital story I told you about. You know that they want to, it is in their interest. Their political erogenous zones are turned on by the idea that they can create this bipolar situation where the two sides are equal, you know, a cycle of conflict and everything’s bad. I mean you hear such absolutely puerile statements from people like, “Well, I’m against dead people on either side.” Well, that’s like saying you’re against bad things. That’s not a moral position to say you’re against bad things.
Would you accept-
And the media are not going to help us here. So I run my own private media business. Our audience has grown and grown and grown. And thankfully, I always joke that I traded in, you know, a hundred thousand radio listeners for 10,000 of our listeners. And it was the best deal I ever made. And Stan Katz always used to say something, which made me happy, which is you reach the audience that counts, not count the audience you reach, which is what most media organisations do. And being on Lockdown University tonight, I’d rather talk with, and we’ll obviously take questions and comments later.
We’ll do that shortly, yes.
Talk with the people here than go and attend the 25 man protest outside the US Consulate in Sandton today, where people were waving Palestinian flags. And most of them, if you ask them any questions about this, will either have the talking points which are widely distributed and anticipated by almost anyone who is paying attention, or they dunno why they’re there. They’re just in solidarity with the people who they regard as being the victims, because they’ve been told that that’s the story. We’ve got to fight harder, Dennis, we’ve got to tell people the truth. And I do think the truth matters. And I do think ultimately the truth does come out. And we have to stand up for what we believe in. And we must tell people that this is where we stand. I’m not afraid of telling people I’m a Zionist, I’m not afraid of telling people why I believe Israel, not only has a right to exist, but is an exemplary state in many ways. And by its existence, all of humanity is enriched. And you cannot say that in certain circles because you’re afraid that you’ll be, you know, you’ll be killed, you’ll be threatened. And I understand this, this is perfectly normal for survival instincts to kick in for you to say, it’s not worth me becoming some sort of soldier for this cause. But I think it is. If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for everything, is the old adage. And I think that there are some things worth standing up for. And one of those patently is civilization. You know, again, the things that we regard in the West as being important, the things that have led to the flowering of human rights all over the world, of free speech, of education, of philosophy. These are the contributions of people over the last two, sometimes 5,000 years, many of them Jews who have made the world a better place for all of us. Even those Palestinians who absolutely hate them so much. So either you stand for it or I don’t really have time for you. I’m going to make that something I’m going to spend the rest of my life doing. And if I’m on my own, too bad,
There is, however, me put this to you. There is, however, quite an interesting response coming from people who are both either pro-Israel, I think of Thomas Friedman, who’s been critical, but there’s no doubt he’s pro-Israel, or extraordinarily Israelis such as David Grossman, you name others, who essentially have said exactly what you have, but have also been quite critical of where we should be going. Now, how do you deal, what is your response to people like that?
Well, I think media has changed so much, and perhaps you can also tell me what your thoughts are on this, but being in it, sometimes I don’t get to see it from the outside, but maybe you have a better view of this. Perhaps there are people who are listening now who have a much better view than both of us.
I’m sure there are, yeah.
But the media world has changed so much now. In America, we know, it’s, you know, you watch MSNBC, you have a left bias, if you watch Fox, you have a right bias and they serve you what you want to hear. And they do that because, like the internet, clicks and eyes and ears equals advertising revenue. And it’s all commercial. And it’s very difficult to find out what really is true and what the sensible position on something is, because it is in the interests of Fox News to make something salacious and tasty and lovely for their audience. Now, I think on this matter, anyone who listens to me will know exactly where I stand from the onset, I’m not trying to be CNN, I’m not pretending to be objective on this. And I think that if you can be upfront about these things and let people know that this is our position. I mean, I had a meeting with our staff the other day where we said to them, this is where we stand. If you don’t like it, come and talk to us. But if you’re really uncomfortable about it, then maybe you should think about working somewhere else, because this is what we care about. And I think it’s very important. You mentioned those Friedman and Grossman just now who are, yeah, I mean these are people who are really, really thoughtful. They’re trying to look at this from all sides and be as circumspect as they can about where Israel may have faulted over the years. And Israel’s not perfect, no country is, no human being ever obtained the level of perfection that some of these people want. But we mustn’t make the mistake then of putting them in the same category as people who are completely amoral.
I know, a good point. And that happens unfortunately a lot because if you take Rothman, you take Friedman, you take a Arari, I mean, these are very serious people who are essentially articulating kind of a whole range of moral questions and you’re dead right, we need to actually be as big a shul as possible here, with, you know, my own view is you have to have an overlapping consensus, which means we all agree that Hamas’s behaviour is such that you cannot, as you rightly say, you’ve put yourself beyond humanity. And secondly-
Well, we don’t all agree this is part of the problem.
No, no. I’m saying-
There are actually people-
This is what we have to-
There are people in-
No, no.
Are people in Congress in the United States, there’s of course Rashida Tlaib who will not condemn the killing of children.
No, no, no. I’m not, you misunderstand me. I think that’s what we have to work towards. The fact of the matter is you’re dead right. We can’t do that because pernicious effects of antisemitism and the kind of false news that you talk about, fake news, makes it very, very hard. I accept that. That’s what I was saying. That’s what I’m struggling to, you know, see how we can develop a response. Let me give you an example. We’ve sent out an invitation to the Minister of Foreign Affairs to be on my television programme. Surprise, surprise, she doesn’t want to be there.
Of course not.
Of course, 'cause she’s not prepared to justify the egregious behaviour. Unfortunately, that’s the problem.
Well, she can’t justify it because she hasn’t actually thought about it very much. I heard from somebody who I can’t name because they’re a friend of mine and they know what happened that actually the call came from Hamas, but she took it.
Yes.
Now, even if that’s true, it doesn’t make it any better.
Oh sure. If you got a call from-
I think she’s thought about this and if she were on your show, she knows it would go very badly for her. And so her calculation is, oh, well I don’t have to worry about this with Dennis.
No, I don’t have-
Elections next year. Let me keep my head down.
That’s the problem of unaccountable government. Yes, I agree.
Q&A and Comments:
Gareth, I need to turn to the questions. There are a whole lot of them and I’m going to read them out. and ask you, you know, the ones that are relevant. I suggested to Arthur that the link to this presentation be sent to the Florida’s US governor who seems to believe ignorance of history makes it vanish. I don’t think-
You’re talking about DeSantis in Florida?
Yeah.
And Arthur, I’m afraid you’ve got that one by the tail instead of by the front. The only books they’ve banned about history and the only teaching that they’ve stopped is critical race theory, which again, is part of this big bucket of leftist nonsense, which many of the anti-Semites in America seem to be the biggest proponents of. There’s a big overlap there and it’s not always an overlap, but there is an overlap. And all that Governor DeSantis has done in terms of books is said that they wouldn’t like children to read sexually explicit material in school libraries. There’s no other book outside of school libraries that’s been put on this list. And if you can find one for me, I will accept that you win, but I don’t think you can.
Okay. Ellen, my television show is called, “Judge for Yourself,” and it’s on national television. Can you, as Sarah says, can you please send his article to the BBC? It’s an important point. I forgot to mention that. I mean, it’s amazing how the BBC have been reluctant to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, quite extraordinary.
Yeah. Well, the BBC is also overrun with this sort of ideological nonsense, which is widespread now, and especially I’m afraid to say, among young people, there are lots and lots of young people who accept blindly the kind of nonsense that makes someone in the western world pro-Palestinian or gives them a reason to equivocate about whether or not this or that response is proportionate. You know, what’s the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? When you start to blur those lines and you teach young people this sort of thing when their heads are still soft and they’re at university trying to establish an identity and impress their friends and be part of something, then don’t be surprised when 20 years later, this is the result, that the BBC is run by a bunch of ideologically driven and western civilization hating people. This is what they are.
Yeah. I’m afraid so. I’m going to gloss over some because somebody has set out the famous quote, which of course is quite white, and at the end of the day, there’s no one left to speak for me.
Yeah. Then Helen says, “Palestinians interviewed on the streets of Cairo last night, refused to believe that the rocket fired on the hospital was fired by Palestinians.” It’s an Israeli lie, is the quote, nevermind a conversation with Hamas operatives discussing and admitting the rocket was fired by them was overheard and recorded. I mean, I think we’ve discussed that and that’s the problem we face. Sally, I greatly appreciate the tone of the opening statement. Yes. And sorry, here comes the question.
Q: I’ve also found that Carte Blanche report by the global media of any and all statements, Hamas without doing any due diligence very troubling. Where is the National Red Cross in all of this? No one is offering to take the Gazan refugees for respite care.
A - No, no one is hurrying to get any Gazans. And that’s because the last thing that Egypt needs is another Muslim brotherhood. And that’s, you know, Hamas is an offshoot of that. Jordan has many times over said, no thank you. We won’t take control of the West Bank and we want nothing to do with it. You’ve got generations now, not just a generation, generations of people who’ve been from an early age raised to hate, raised to become terrorists. Of course not all of them do. But a great many of them will become those sorts of people and will carry very antisemitic ideas and views their whole lives long. And it’s very difficult to just have those people assimilate into your society. You know, if that’s how they’ve grown up, if that’s what they’ve been taught when they were young, you know, the same thing. We learned the same thing in South Africa with racism, didn’t we? And it is not the responsibility of a nation like the United States to take in Garzans because that will lead to domestic problems on a very, very terrifying level for them. So I think it’s clear, it’s not in the interest of any of the Arab countries to climb in and help solve this problem. They actually don’t want the Garzans or the West Bank Palestinians, by the way. They’re quite happy for that to be Israel’s problem. Israel’s a useful scapegoat in that respect too. 'cause Israel’s always the bad guy and they can sit in their countries and go, you’re not coming here,
Q - Reagan says, does Britain not have some sort of responsibility for helping you find a solution to the ongoing conflict, if you consider their role in the first place if we’re talking about history?
A - Well, I mean this is like talking about Britain’s responsibility to Zimbabwe some 40 years later.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, these are interesting things to bring up and I mentioned in my article, Belfour declaration and all the rest of it, but then Britain equally has a responsibility to Saudi Arabia, to Kenya, to Jamaica, and to various other parts of the world. And frankly, Britain’s not a powerful empire anymore. And I don’t even think scarily that the United States is, and we can’t expect them to have unlimited resources. I mean, we’ve seen the US is doing much of what it can, not necessarily all and not necessarily nothing for the Ukraine. And it’s not going very well. We’re not seeing any resolution here. There’s no off ramp on the way. So where are these resources meant to come from? What do you want Britain to build an island just off of the Levant and let the Palestinians have that?
Yeah.
[Wendy] Can I jump in? You know, I’d just like to say, I think it’s going to be up to the Arab leaders to help solve the solution. You know, those are the people who are going to actually make the difference. And there many very extremely well educated Palestinians who know, who live abroad. So I think a coalition of like-minded Arab leaders and Palestinians.
I think that’s right.
[Wendy] Would be the answer.
I think that’s right.
[Wendy] That’s the first thing. Yeah, that’s the first thing. The second thing, that’s the narrative as well that needs to be corrected about Israel being an apartheid state. And the other thing is that Gaza is occupied territory. I think that’s a narrative that is never been corrected. It’s not by Israel. And that’s an ongoing narrative, especially for the youth.
Israel hasn’t set foot in the Gaza since 2005, 2006.
I mean that’s amazing thing. It’s not an occupation per se.
Yeah. And it’s a difficult argument to make for occupation, but it’s just taken as a fact. So again, Wendy, you’re right, but who’s going to listen, and I do agree with you about the Arab nations. There was going to be a series of very important breakthroughs in just the last couple of weeks. We were assured that Saudi Arabia and Israel were going to normalise, normalise in inverted commas relations, which meant that they would’ve started talking to each other as equals, that they would’ve opened up trade. We already know that EL AL is flying in and out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that Mohammed Bin Salman has all kinds of ideas about creating an economic block in the Middle East, which can start to trade like the EU does as as a power player in the world. And he very much wanted Israel to be a part of that. But surprise, surprise, Iran knew this was going to happen and it was imminent. And what did they do? They said, “Greenlight guys, go ahead Hamas.”
But it’s because-
Obviously Saudi Arabia and Iran are not-
It’s also true, it’s also true that Biden was trying to push Netanyahu into, this is before, into a slightly different policy, to put it mildly with regard to the West Bank, because that was what the Saudis were wanting. And tragically this has now completely destroyed all these possibilities for the-
Well, I dunno if you saw any of Joe Biden in Israel this week. The man is barely awake. And if we are going to rely on him to prevent World War III, we’re in for a really horrible time. He broke off mid-sentence and indicated that he needed to go and have a nap. I mean, he’s barely conscious at the moment.
Well, I haven’t done badly on some things. Anyway, let me move on. There’s one question for me. I’m not surprised, Michael says that I, to blame a right-wing government group in, sorry, right-wing group in government in Israel is the most self-hating statement anyone could make. 300,000 Israelis voted for them. Are we all lunatics? And I wouldn’t put it that far, but what I would say is this, that I’m not the one who’s only saying that, read Grossman, read Friedman read Halevi, read all of them. They’re saying the same thing. And so the real question here is how do we pull together? There could be no, and by the way, that in no way justifies anything. If we start with the proposition that Hamas were absolutely egregiously in breach of any laws of humanity. And then from there, one talks.
Yeah, I mean we don’t start by pointing fingers at Israel.
No, no.
You don’t use victim blaming. Your skirt was too short.
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s true and I agree with that. But I’m just saying, I think there is a real debate and it’s going on at the moment and you know, I find the notion that anybody who disagrees with somebody within Israel, self hating is absolutely abominable. Precisely-
[Wendy] I just want to jump in here. I want to jump in just say to Michael, Michael, I think what Dennis is saying is why poke the bear when you don’t need to?
I want to move on. I’ve got a lot more questions which are more relevant.
Q: Sally says, can we name the elephant in the room? Islam is a real problem. It’s golden age was centuries ago, but it has gone backwards rather than forwards. It’s not embracing the modern world, there no Muslim democracies. And it’s a huge problem.
A - That’s a good point. I’m a big fan of at least some, I don’t agree with everything that he’s written and his position on things like lockdown. Since we’re in Lockdown university, I thought were a bit questionable. But Sam Harris is very clear on this point too. He says that Islam remains for the ideals and the values that we hold dear in the western world, an existential threat because it is at loggerheads. These are mutually exclusive magisteria on matters like free speech, women’s rights. And to imagine that you can just whitewash the parts that don’t fit and that everybody will be okay with that is not a possibility. And we’ve seen many attempts to do this and to just make it look like everyone’s getting along kumbaya. But it is a problem. Douglas Murray this week called for the British government to revoke the citizenship and the passports of all those people who were joining anti-Israel protests, not because they were anti-Israel, but because they were shouting terrorists slogans. And there’s an act that they promulgated, I think in 2006 in the UK where they said, if you are essentially suborning terrorism, they can throw you out of the country. And he’s saying, if Rishi Sunnak and company, if you rarely mean what you say, you need to do this.
- Right.
Q: David says, what purpose do the Palestinians possibly serve with Islamic states in global political strategies? Could this explain the lack of sounds coming from the Islamic states in resolving conflict? It’s a complicated look.
A - We’ve also got to remember that the Arab world is not monolithic either. And I think Wendy hinted at this earlier and you’ve made overtures to this too, Dennis that in the, you know, Islamic world is a very complicated place. And the Arab world is a very complicated place. And you know, Hezbollah who are Shia can’t agree with Hamas who are Sunni. And we’ve got Iraq who don’t necessarily like anything about Saudi Arabia. Vice versa. We’ve got countries that are trying to kind of hold the middle ground. We’ve got countries that are absolutely hell bent on fighting with their immediate neighbours rather than Israel, others that are completely obsessed with Israel. I do think at this point, and this is going to be an unpopular point of view, I think the greatest diplomat since probably Shimon Peres when it came to sorting out anything really, really meaningful in the Middle East, has been Jared Kushner. And I think he got us about as close to those Abraham Accords as we were going to come to finding real lasting resolution here. And I know that’s not going to please everybody because people are, you know, emotional about anything to do with the Trump administration. But I think he did Israel and the Arab world a big favour by just bypassing Palestinians and going straight to the Saudis.
But I do think that at some point there’s going to be a hell of a lot more work that’s going to have to be done by both sides to actually vindicate those promises. And I think that’s in sense what Hamas didn’t want. And when you play into-
Usually what Hamas doesn’t want is what we should have.
Of course. But by the way, that means when we actually respond, we should think what they want least.
Yeah.
That’s another matter. Right. Somebody asks, do you equate antisemitism with anti-Zionism on the part of Palestinians?
I do in this case, not all Palestinians, but I think that antisemitism is, you see, we’ve unfortunately, I think the last Holocaust survivors are on their way out now, there are not very many living histories of that. And despite, and I have to again, give credit to all the museums all across the world, all the monuments, all the memorials, all the material that’s been aggregated over the years. As a historian, I think it is essential that we make as much of a memory box as we can of the Holocaust. But for most kids at school, this is not something which they’re learning about. They don’t learn much about anything anymore in history. It’s not a priority, and it certainly isn’t a priority. You know, we used to, we used to think Ahmadinejad was the only Holocaust denier, now it seems to me that there are a lot more of them, and they’re saying it openly and this is appalling. So people have a very short memory and they don’t study history. People in South Africa don’t even know the history.
Q - Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. What price says Wolf, will Ramaphosa and the ANC face internationally for their bias stance?
A - None. Because we don’t matter internationally. Nobody’s sitting waiting for South Africa’s say so on anything. None. We have lost, we’ve squandered all our moral, ethical, political capital on really bad alliances with the very worst people in the world, and cozying up to the nastiest dictators and autocrats that we could find. It is almost as if we have the very worst character assessments available, and then we go with every detail, that terrible character assessment, and we expect things to be different when we get there. It’s confounding to me, but no one’s sitting around going, wait, can we wait for Cyril Ramaphosa to chime in on this before we make a decision? No one.
Somebody says, I object to your referencing to the big bucket of leftist nonsense. It’s over simplification. It’s larger than the current discussion.
Well object, if you will, but it’s there. There’s plenty of evidence for it. Go and tell me what’s going on in American college campuses then, explain that away. If you object to it, you must give me a reason why you object to it and why you have a better philosophy, why you can trace the roots of this pro-Palestinian, and in this case also anti-Semitic, the growth of this anti-Semitism on college campuses. I mean, we’ve got Jewish students who are fearful on campuses in America, for God’s sake. They’re fearful to even say that they support Israel or that they’re Jewish. You have people taking their yamacah’s off and putting them in their pockets in America. Outrageous.
I see people taking an entirely opposite view to people like Arari and Friedman who say they bring much sanity with which I agree. But let’s leave that aside.
Q: There is a question which Tommy asked, which is a Holocaust survivor. In one sentence, she says, what should Israel’s response be?
A - Look, I think there is nothing that they’ve done so far that I object to and they have to act against Hamas. They have to take on Hamas, and in the process of doing that, they’re going to do some things that are going to keep losing them fans along the way. Right? There’s going to be a drop off. There’s also going to be a lot of propaganda. We’re going to see pictures that are going to be horrible of many people suffering in Gaza. But this is the result of riding the tiger. You know, there’s that-
Sorry,
There’s that adage, which I remember I thought was opposite at the time of, of the Afghan war. “There was a young lady from Nigel who smiled as she rode on the tiger. They returned from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger,” and that’s the face of terrorism. You think you contain it. People have tried this, you know, in all sorts of ways and times of places, never worked.
I accept that.
You got to fight head on.
Q - But here’s the proper question. I, sorry, I misread somebody else’s question. The question she asks. I’m a Holocaust survivor regularly talking to school children and always getting questions afterwards. What would you say in a simple sentence if asked, to justify the Israeli response?
A - I would say, if someone comes into your house while you are sleeping and they murder your wife and they kill your children and they torture whatever other relatives are in the house, they take your grandmother away in her wheelchair and take her across the border and hold her captive. You are duty bound to defend your family, your property, your country. And anyone who says to me that they don’t feel that, that’s their responsibility, probably shouldn’t have a family. Because that’s, to me, the most obvious conclusion we can draw from this. It is nothing less than someone walking into your house and doing this out of nowhere.
That it’s an egregious act. I agree. But I think what the question is putting reminds me of when Michael Dukakis was contesting the American presidential election against George W. Bush. And the question was put to him because he was an abolitionist, the death penalty. What would you do if your wife was raped and murdered? And he gave a long answer and the New York Times response was, that was a terrible answer. The real answer is, I’m not in a position to make a rational judgement . That’s why we have courts of law.
Well, the international courts of law also seem to equivocate, no use to us on this. The UN has been useless. The UN has done nothing to help anything in this situation to help either side to do, all they do is is George or in the words of Winston Churchill, but not to prevent war war. They are now a moribund and unnecessary vestigial organ of the 1940s. What I would say about your comment, first of all, you’re the only person I’ve ever heard quote Michael Dukakis, so thank you for that.
No, I’m not quoting him for that. I’m quoting the New York Times.
Well, I mean, still I haven’t heard the name Michael Dukakis in so long.
No, I know. But as an abolitionist of the death penalty, and as a judge, it always struck me as important. But let me move on. David says, “In an incisive article, Philip van Niekerk, without defending the brutal slaughter of women and children quoted Henry Luke, who said, Netanyahu has deprived Palestinians of hope for the future and peaceful outlets to express their frustrations.” JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Your comment.
Well, I mean, look, you can see in humanity these cycles of peace and war. And you can see how ultimately people are forced to, at some point stand up for what they believe in. And usually it leads to violence of some kind. And as I said at the beginning of this, my fervent hope is that we don’t let this spill over into, you know, a global conflict, 'cause it could very easily become that. And I think Iran is itching for a war. It would suit Iran to have a war, and they would be willing to risk quite a lot of what they’ve built up in that country and what they think they stand for in order to take this to war. Of course, it’s always useful to have enemies if you’re looking for something to fight against. And Iran has been for a long time, you know, the great Satan, America, all of that stuff, the Ayatollahs haven’t stopped that rhetoric for years. But what I think is important here is that the rest of us in the world, because Israel they’ve been wrestling with this, it’s interesting that the name Israel comes from precisely that, wrestling with God or you know, figuring things out with God. They’ve been wrestling with these problems for every year of their existence for 75 years. And there has never been a moment where they could take that peace for granted. It’s going to eventually come down to the rest of us deciding whether we’re going to stand up for a sovereign nation, which has earned its place in the world. Even if you have problems with the way it was originally created, maybe you have a problem with the way that it’s behaved. Maybe you have a problem with the way that it’s treated Palestinians. And again, it’s always interesting to me that there’s two standards. You know, there’s a standard for Israel, which is that you have to be an absolute apogee of humanity and everything that you do, make sure that you do nothing wrong, for God’s sake, don’t kill a single civilian because you’ll have blood on your hands for a generation or three. And everyone else’s standard is much, much lower.
Q - Well, possibly, I mean that, yeah, that’s certainly a debate, but it’s interesting looking at these questions, Gareth, there are a lot of people who agree with you and are very, very grateful. There are other people who say, take a different view, shows a division. For example, Reeva says there are many Palestinians who want peace and co-existence. What do you do with them?
A - Well, you know, that’s like South Africans who don’t believe that we should have our government side with Palestine. They should vote accordingly and make their voices heard like we are here tonight.
Q - Well, how do you make your voices heard in an occupation in the West Bank?
A - Well, I mean, that’s the first problem, right? Is that these governments are not really governments. They haven’t had an election there in-
No shocking, right? I agree absolutely.
And of course I must, and again, there’s, you know, you get the government you deserve, which is what I say to South Africans all the time. If we have a terrible government, it’s because that’s what people are voting for. That’s what people want. If Gaza and the West Bank have terrible governments, then part of that’s on them. But the ones who really want to change things, you’ve got to be willing to risk something. And we know, I mean, Wendy even said that there are tremendously clever and in incredibly valuable opinions coming from Palestinians all over the world. But there’s a reason they’re not in Palestine anymore.
Well, there are a number of reasons for that, Gareth. It’s not binary.
Well, it’s certainly not because they want to be in there.
Well, I don’t know. Certainly the ones I speak to when I go to academic conferences, and many of them, and I agree with you, there’s an unbelievably intellectual, secular Palestinian community. How one deals with them is an interesting debate, which one should have. But I suppose we can’t do that now.
Q: One final question. Michael says, “Saudi Arabia paid Jared Kushner handsomely with 2 billion in his new hedge fund, the side offering Israelis a new location and shopping destination. What on earth have the Africa Accords done for the present?
A - Abraham Accords. Yeah. Well, I mean, they were for the first time, bringing us to a point where Israel and Saudi Arabia were actually talking, and the UAE were talking to each other. I mean, this is much more progress than having every possible camp David Accord thrown back in your face by Yasser Arafat. We made no progress before this. And it’s fine to bring up what Jared Kushner’s been doing since then.
But there was no progress. I mean, so there were accords were signed, but what progress was there? Yes, it’s true.
Well, the progress was that, I mean, for starters, I mentioned that EL AL now flies into those countries, for God’s sake.
That’s wonderful.
But I mean, you can go and visit there and if you turn out to have an Israeli passport, you’re allowed in for the first time ever.
Yeah. And I don’t think that’s what’s being asked of you. I think what’s being asked of you is to what extent that changed the trajectory so that we got into a better space.
What it did is it immediately sidelined the Palestinians themselves as troublemakers and the the bigger players, the people who could,-
Yes, that’s the problem.
The same way-
That’s the problem.
I mean, there’s no perfect way to do this, right. There’s no perfect way to do this.
Agreed.
So someone’s going to come up short. They’re all going to get up from the table and be unhappy they didn’t get a good deal.
Are you really advancing the proposition that we should sideline the Palestinians and ignore them?
Well, that’s what Saudi Arabia was willing to do. So ask them
No, they know with respect, they were not, that was the point. They wanted some concessions from Netanyahu. There’s a massive literature on that.
So then Netanyahu wasn’t always arguing in good faith either, but this is what we’ve got.
That’s a problem.
And at the time you have Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Salman and Jared Kushner, there’s going to be a deal that’s not going to please everybody,
It’s deal. No, the only question I ask is not the deal. But when you say it’s sideline the Palestinians, I’m not certain how that solves any problem.
Because the governments of Palestine, the people who have declared themselves very often leaders are not necessarily interested in a peace. Perhaps their interest is in keeping this going.
I mean, Yasser Arafat didn’t die a poor man.
I’m not suggesting he did. Certainly Kushner is extremely wealthy too. But let’s leave that aside.
Sure.
The real point, I suppose is this, which is why there’s a real divide in the questions. There are those I think who argue, we batten down the hatches, do the best we can, respond accordingly. And it’s perfectly justified in terms of what Hamas did. There’s another group who says it’s perfectly justified to make proportional responses, difficult as that is. And-
What is a proportional response? A proportional response would mean Israel should go into Gaza and kill exactly 1,300 people and make sure it’s exactly the same number of babies-
With respect, that’s not what international law says, but leave it aside, the proportion-
That’s what people are talking about. It’s a motive.
That’s not proportionality in terms of the international law, with respect. What I’m asking is a different question. Everybody agrees with you in relation to your starting point. I suppose the real question I’m putting to you is do you simply just circumvent the Palestinians entirely or is there some point in which one has to engage with them on some basis and somehow?
I think that the fact that you haven’t heard a single word from Mahmoud Abbas tells you-
He’s useless. I accept that.
But that tells you everything you need to know. So are you really seriously going to tell me that we need to include him at the table when we discuss what’s going to happen next?
I don’t know.
When he’s completely sidelined himself.
No, I don’t know who has to be included. And that’s not my question. My question is, can you ignore the Palestinians per se?
I think that there are a lot of things.
I if we both are working from the proposition that I don’t want any more deaths. I certainly don’t want to live through, and I’m sure nobody living in Israel wants to live through what they did on that Saturday. And frankly, I’m quite sure that nobody wants to see children die on any side. The real question is how do we move? Is this an opportunity-
Okay, so what I think was going to happen and what may have had a chance of success here is that by Israel talking to the Saudis or the UAE or other important players in that area, they could have then taken some of the concessions that those countries wanted to make with regard to Palestine into considerate. But they’re dealing with a sane and in good faith partner rather than a partner who is actually incentivized to keep things as they are, fractious.
Yeah, well, certainly from Hamas and it’s possibly, I dunno where Abbas stands, he’s utterly useless. I accept that. And the Palestinian authorities utterly corrupted. But there are all sorts of reasons for that, which we possibly-
So who do you deal with?
I don’t know. But then thank goodness I’m not the Israeli prime minister. I don’t know. And I suppose none of us know, that’s the point. It’s just a conceptual question rather than-
You’re also one of the only people who’s ever said, thank goodness you’re not the Israeli prime minister. I’ve met a lot of people in the last two weeks have said if they were, and I don’t doubt that they mean it, if they were.
You know, I’m old enough to know that there was a time in South Africa when I had debates of this kind, and people said, who’s the government got to talk to, the ANC are terrorist organisation? It’s just, by the way, the ANC entirely different to Hamas in the sense that they tried their very best not to actually attack civilians.
Absolutely. And-
With all of their flaws, with all of their flaws, with which I agree with you a hundred percent. I think it is,-
And this is why I find the Israeli apartheid terminology so unhelpful.
I agree.
And this idea that, you know, there are all these shortcuts that are thrown out like the open air prison, Israeli apartheid, decolonization. These are all catchphrases that are written up by spin doctors who are trying to simplify what is a complex situation so they can get easy likes, essentially, because we live in a world that likes, this is the unfortunate reality is that this will be a story for a little while longer for those of us who care about it even longer than that. But for most people, they’ll tyre of it just like they did of Russia and Ukraine. And of every other thing that’s happened in this media age where everything is about conspicuous consumption.
We’ve way exceeded our time. I want to firstly thank you, and I think this sort of engagement is precisely the kind of rational, respectful engagement that’s terribly important. It’s hard to do it now because understandably, people are in desperate pain. But I do suspect it’s the kind of conversation we’re going to have to have as we go forward, one way or another as to how we’re going to deal with it. And the fact that you’ve been able to engage in this, in the manner, and I must say, reflecting many of the messages, people are very grateful for the fact that you stood up and essentially made a moral statement of a kind, which actually it’s impossible to distance oneself from. So thank you for that, and thank you for your openness in debating these matters with me. Even if I put some difficult questions to you.
No, thank you. I expected nothing less. So I was actually looking forward to speaking to you again, Dennis. And thank you to everybody for their questions.
Yes.
Just one other thing I’d like to throw in there, shame on all the other people who are not Israeli and not Jewish and who haven’t added their voices, though they feel that their conscience dictates that they should be on our side, that they haven’t spoken up. Shame on you because this is not a difficult question.
Well, that was why I was so troubled by the way this government has dealt with these matters. But thank you very much.
Sure. Thank you.
[Wendy] Okay thank you, Gareth. Thanks. Thanks Gareth. And thank you very, very much Dennis, for interesting, thoughtful presentation. You know, I think just one thing that I’d like to add is that those Arab countries who have aligned themselves to the West, certainly in terms of the leadership, their big challenge is that their views and the views on the ground, there’s a huge disconnect. And this is the challenge that they’re going to have to overcome. And we can just pray that there’s a peaceful resolution going forward. So I just want to thank you both very much and to all those who are on with us.
Thank you, Wendy.
[Wendy] Thank you very, very much.
Thanks Wendy.
[Wendy] Thanks guys. Take care. Thanks. Night night, bye.