we are back and we are joined now by david hurst, co-founder and editor and chief of middle east, i his recent peace for middle east eyes entitled israel has already lost the gaza war, it just doesn't know it yet. david thanks so much for coming on the show today, thank you for having me. so uh, i almost want to start with where your peace ends with this sentence, israel may win each battle as the americans did in vietnam, but it will lose the war. can we work back from there? what brings you to that hypothesis based on what we've seen of, a year and a half of genocide at this point? well, it's not an original thought, it's been said by quite a few people who have actually.

fought quite hard on israel's behalf, not least its former chief, it is the feeling that they win every battle because technologically they're just so much so far superior to the palestinians and what the palales can reply, but that there are two things that israel is is not under israel, it can't crush the... of spirit, or is the palestins would say the palestine resistance, which could be violent or or non-violent, and the more it tries to to basically kill, the more it's actually hitting a civilian population and just generating another generation of fighters in 10, 20 years time, which is exactly who is fighting this war right now, if you think of the generation that's fighting this war, this is a post-oslow generation.

that has seen no progress since oslo in its in in their own national aspirations and some have sold their taxes for guns and i've i've interviewed them. the other thing that is that has changed in this war is international opinion and and that's where the parallel with vietnam comes in. um, in fact if you go back, lbj was told by the cia in 1967. 'there was a stalemate with the viet kong, but it took seven more years to actually pull out and and and and another president under nixon to pull out of vietnam, here what we have is a quite rapidly deteriorating situation of israel's image internationally, and i think there is a mark change of tone now, 80 months on, i mean for me, everything is israel.'

criticized of today could have been said in october or november 2023, but yeah, the fact that it's being said now is is i think interesting. what do you make of that then? um, is it the the what, what do you make of the change in kind of liberal posture towards this? and i, i, we can expand outside of the united states here, the european union, i know, said, i guess two days ago that they're reviewing their... political agreements with israel, um, you see the prime minister in the uk with a little bit more of a chiding tone towards the israelis, where do you see that shift have having happened? yeah, and there's also joint statement of condemnation by by britain, france and canada, and that could lead to an early recognition of the state of palestine by all three countries in the not too distance future. now i don't know, i just don't...

what has led to this, because for someone like me that's been covering uh uh this uh and covering every death uh not me personally my website every doctor killed every hospital destroyed every child stard to death you can say why are you what's actually changed is it statements about mass starvation coming from the un? is it because israel is only today allowed 90 trucks in after i think 11 weeks of total bloccade? is it the clumsy attempt to cover up the killings of the those red cresent first respondents in raffa? is it the fear that when the international court of justice actually comes to a ruling on genocide? every leader, every leader that allowed israel's campaign to continue under a sporous banner of a right to defend itself, could be regarded in law as an enable or genocide. or is it lip gloss? another form of cover. now the cinical, the cinic me says it's the latter because hours after the...

foreign secretary david lamy announced sanctions on israel and raf plane took off from a british base of acquiteria in cyprus to conduct a surveillance mission over gaza and lammy is not suspending arms. supplies or parts of drones or parts for the f-35s, so and only weeks before lamy met his counterpart gideon sar, israely foreign minister in what's called a private visit, yet sar is a key member of the cabinet that collectively stopped all food going into gaza, so you could say this is just to cover cover a a very shaky position, but that said i think... the cumulative effect on israel will be real diplomatically. uh, you mentioned the oslo process, can you take us back a little bit into that history and explain to people what how uh that more pro israel agreement than is traditionally uh written

about in the west uh aided and embeded, i guess the the choking off of um... potential diplomacy in the aftermath of it and increase the the the level of, i guess, impunity that israel has experienced in in the decades since. yeah, that just going into that thing, that there's something very, very concrete that oslo allowed. oslo allowed the biggest wave of settlement the west bank in the history of the conflict, and so you had peace, and you had this massive... sudden wave of settlers turning up in in the west bank, i forget the numbers, but if you go back over the figures, it's very clear that i think oslo uh produced for israel something like 325,00 settlers that hadn't been there before, so so so that's what was a a gain for the concept of greater israel,

because you got to remember that israel is not terribly interested in gaza biblically or historically or ideologically or religiously, it is far more interested in the west bank which just continues to call judea and samaria. um, what oslo did was provide a process that never came to anything for the palestinians, but provided concrete gains for the israelis, settlers i've already mentioned, but it also provided this, this paradigm and this myth that if only the palestinians got them themselves together, they had the right leadership if only there was the right alignment of stars in with the israeli public. 'you'd have a palestinian state, which of course never ever happened, um, and that all of that has come the basis of what i would call the friends of israel or liberal zionism, um, the idea, the belief in a homeland for the jews that could

enable, that was an israel for all its citizens, that could also enable a palestinian state to be born in a two-state solution, that is very much...' hands and he has really set himself a life's mission of preventing stifling a palestinian state at birth, that is what he will go down in history for, and that is what he is proudes of, and he said it openly now, he and and and in fact on the question the palestinian state, this is the one issue in a very very divided israel. which has people is really say a civil war boil boiling between liberals and hardliners on on the judicial front, that's one point of agreement, there are votes in the kineset which are near 100% votes on the question of whether a palestinian state

should ever be allowed to be born um there's complete consensus on on the palestinian question but between the so-called opponents of netanyahu and netanyahu himself, and i and i think that answer is no, that the answer is no, basically, yeah, basically the answer is no, and and i think the international community have yet to catch up with the reality that the two state solution was something that could have happened in with the arab peace initiative in 2002, the saudi arabian plan, but that train has left the station, yes, um, i mean the... uh, there was i think uh some some polling out of the university of tel aviv that shows that an overwhelming majority of israelis support donald trump's ethnic cleansing plan for gaza, so the the scope, the scope of what is liberal and

what is conservative thought within israel is quite different than i think a lot of westerners would like to imagine or what we've been told about what political consensus is in israel um... but i i the the the part that's just so striking to me is we've been having conversations about how uh biden's foreign policy was so... disastrous in part because he had this very archaic commitment to the post world war i system of alliances and not speaking to enemies but building up nato building up aucus uh and not neces being hawkish with with china um not reengaging in the iran nuclear deal which was obama's arguably greatest

uh pattern and orthodoxy and this death spiral that we've all been watching, um, but if it's not paired with a policy of restraining israel, then i guess is there a benefit just purely to breaking up this orthodoxy or this way of thinking, because it just seems like trump is mostly only interested in corruption here, well i mean i think that's a very very good point and i can't really answer it in in a in a short form, i mean, uh, i think the biden biden's foreign policy uh collapsed um

uh under the weight of what was going on in gaza, i think he had leavs and he had room uh to conduct liberal interventionism and continue conduct that classic set of foreign which failed in iraq, afghanistan, yemen, libya, syria and russia when i was in russia. in during the in the 1990s, that was a form of liberal intervention completely collapsed, it produced putin um, you can, but he still had the opportunity of the wheel room within that failed policy of applying a lot, lot more pressure on netanyahu, principally by cutting off the arms and saying so, but netanyahu knew he never would, netanyahu has got a very, very clear reading of what's going on in in in capital hill. um and he's always had an iron grip on analysis of just how weak the democrats are um and and how he and how he can

manipulate the republicans and it could now be paradoxically that trump who's only interested in his pocket and where the next golf force is going and his next visit to the queen and how much money he he he's loading up in his in his personal complete corruption could... actually prove more of a problem to than bidon could, because he really doesn't, he's he only thinks in transactional terms about, doesn't think of good or evil, he doesn't doesn't care a dam about palestinians and his plan is to create a larger ethnic cleansing, three times larger in fact of palestinians and actually happened in 1948, and considering that all of this conflict arises from that one single event, in 1948, how much more conflict are we storing out for ourselves? general, even if you smash hamas, smash hezbollah,

even if the whole place goes quiet and and and the whole place falls on under israely military control, and everything's quiet, you're going to store up a huge explosion in 10, 20 years down the line, so it is so imperative now that we change our thinking about. that democrats change their thinking about israel, that progressives changed their thinking about israel, and it's so imperative, i think that we have a clear sighted view of actually what, which country we're supporting, when we say we're a friend of israel, what sort of israel, are we a friend of a party, are we a friend of genocide, are we a friend of ethnic cleansing, of course we're not, and we've got to stop thinking of israel in these sort of idealized terms of a country that is genuinely good, but is just being overtaken, been seized by the wrong sort of people, it's not that anymore, and uh, there has to be a rethinking of the west

relationship with israel, whatever happens to the palestinians in gaza, whatever happens to hamas, you brought uh, i hadn't planned on on playing this for you, but but you uh, you brought me here, because when we're just speaking about how the democrats need to uh kind of have a a reckoning with liberal zionism, and with support for israel, there is a a fork in the road and you have even it's not just members of the squad in the house or the more progressive members like alexandria. some senators like chris van holland who you wouldn't have said is going to be a an advocate for palestinians, he's he's diverged from his own leader in the senate, who i like to call here mr. 17% approval rating, chuck schumer, this is from a little while ago, but this is what this is how he speaks about israel, and and you've done decades of reporting

in the middle east, this is almost indistinguishable from how... every republican speaks about both the united nations and international aid organizations. this is under a minute, but i i'd love your response here, david. so yes, it's very emotional, and to almost all jewish people, we all have relatives and we know about this has happened. again, genocide is a vicious, vicious word to use. i will say it's a word that a un special committee has used. please, the un has been. anti-israel, anti-semitically against israel, double standard, was my idol, he became famous when in 1976 they tried to pass a resolution, zionism is racism, to say that the jewish people should not have a state, when every other people should have a state is anti-semitism, the old double standard, and the

international organizations, i have no faith in them being fair, these same international. organizations when horrible things go in in darf or china or whether they look the other way, that's actually the opposite of the truth, these international organizations and the united nations are western in their construction by definition, and the criticism of like the icc for example has been that they basically will prosecute warlords or leaders in poor countries that the united states have has problems with and doesn't go after. the the people most align with the west uh when they commit human rights atrocities, but the icc had no choice in the case of benjamin netanyahu, and in response the united states is sanctioning the international criminal court, i there's just your response to that, david, because it sounds like every republican, yeah, this is a leading democrat politician

arguing against a rules-based world. example of how how that whole system of liberal unism is undermining itself, he said many many claims there, which were all very, very mixed up, all about jew's right to a homeland, all about which is b for, we're not talking about jewish right to a home, we're talking about the palestine right to a homeland as well, we're not talking about the the right of

jewish self-determination, i come a family from a family of of jewish refugees from half my family went to h, the other half didn't, some was zionist, others weren to link what has happened to all jews, the suffering of all jews to what's happening in israel, it's exactly what israel does, and as someone who is jewish, i'm uniquely offended by that, i have to stop froting at the mouth, because i know that's not the case, i know it's not true, i know that you is... does not stand for all jews and there is a big big movement of american jews uh saying not in my name and they are at the forefront of demonstrations against gaza and i think that is a positive thing i'm afraid chuck schumer belongs into has has put himself into the dustpin of history he's put himself in

many in many ways an honorable man on on on many other issues but he's himself on israel literally on the wrong side and he and he's justifying whether you call it genocide, i'm not a international lawyer, but an of lot of lawyers seem to think that that's a word that can only be used, but we cannot have a situation and we cannot tolerate a situation where one politician after another, one generation of politician after another says those sort of things and and in so doing divides you... genocide occurred in ins a genocide is occurring in sudan, but it cannot happen by israel at the hands of israeli troops when there's the evidence. gaza war is unlike vietnam, the most filmed and documented war ever, and and the evidence of of that, even from the mouths of

israeli politicians or even from even from the latest opposition figurean saccused israel of of having a hobby of killing babies, if anyone else said that you would call that anti-semitic or blood, this is... saying this, so i think that clip shows you very, very clearly what has to change within the democrat party and to change for the side of fairness, for the side of decency, and also for the sake of israelis and also for the sake of jews around the world, because that sort of performance has to stop. yep, i mean, you mentioned vietnam, gaza is 141 square mil. you wrote this in your piece, in the span of eight years, the us dropped more than five. million tons of bombs in vietnam, making it the most bombed place on earth. by january of this year, israel has dropped at least a hundred thousand tons of bombs on gaza.

i just want to repeat that, in the span of eight years the us dropped 5 million tons of bombs on vietnam, a much larger larger swath of territory than 140 odd square miles, 100 thous tons of bombs on gaza. yeah. and yeah, go ahead, david, i mean in in terms of historical com, that is comparison of per square mile, per square mile, it works out at something like 18 times as many bombs, but in terms of historical bombings that have horrified the world since, there's a there's a massive amount of of work done on on the bombing of dresdon and the bombing of hamburg um uh whether that was a war crime or not by by the raf. um and the fire bombing that took place, it turns out that if you compare the amount of bombs dropped on american bombs generally dropped on on gaza, that is more than was dropped uh

on hamburg and dresdon and coventry in in the whatever it is seven years of the world world world war ii, and that was within two or three months, so there's an immense so... 'you know we we talk about biden's weakness, what actually happened was that biden sanctioned this enormous dropping of american bombs, this could not have been possible before, and i don't make that claim sort of loosely or lightly, there was an israeli general, i forget now whom an air force officer who said, had america not resupplied us with those two thousand pound bombs um within two we would have had to stop bombing gaza within two months, so there are two elements to this war, one is the'. who total nature of it um triggered by by the hamas attack, the other is the length of time it has been permitted to go on, i mean blaire stopped, blair, but he was one of the leaders who

who stopped an early incursion into gaza, um, and just after 44 days and said, right, enough already, that's it, finished, but that hasn't happened, and so for israel has behaved and netanyahu has behaved in a way that is... completely predictable uh with his alliances and and with what he says, what is i couldn't have predicted in october 2023 is how long the west, america, britain, france would have tolerated this, now they're coming to the end of it, but why is it taken so long and so many dests to do so in terms of the overarching theme of your peace, like the the they the the the they're winning these battles, they will win every battle like... palestine doesn't have an air force, doesn't have an airport, like the i mean a lack of symmetry here, they control the borders of the area that they're bombing, like there's no way for

this to be an equivalent military conflict, and yet overall because of the barbarity, i i think you're right um in in the overarching view of of israel's loss here, um, david, thanks so much for your time today, middle east eye does wonderful work, everybody should check it out - uh, thanks so much for your time, they really appreciate it. thanks, "the big problem today is the global tide is turning against israel,

the the scale and scope of the crisis, the daily images on global media and social media is so vast that you know vast amounts of humanity is horrified. israel political entity is weaker now than it has ever been, we know that netanyahu is trying to squeeze the lemon to buy more time for himself. international conference on humanity and freedom, december 3rd, 2025, in tehran. key topics on the...

agenda include fundamental human rights and social freedoms from the islamic viewpoint, a comparative analysis of fundamental rights in iran and other legal systems, freedom in islam and the west. people's rights and freedoms, a cross national comparative study with a focus on iran. deadline for paper submission. 21st, 2025. for more information, please visit our website, www.hurmellat.ir.

the headlines, over two dozen palestinians have been killed in gaza after israeli forces open fire on aid seekers near the net-sitting quarter. iran's foreign ministry spokesman says tehran has prepared a raft of proportionate measures. in case the international atomic energy agency adopts an anti-iranian resolution and protest against trump's immigration policies continue in los angeles with police uh in the us city making mass arrests after curfew kicks in.