00:08:10.360Hamas took over, I won't go through the details, in 2007, through a military coup.
00:08:16.140They killed the other Palestinians, the PLO people that were actually,
00:08:21.540the political leadership of Gaza when Israel transferred, when Israel left.
00:08:28.060So from 2007 to 2023, 16 years, Hamas, which is a terror organization, everybody agrees it's a terror organization,
00:08:39.520including Canada and Europe, the United States, has been using billions in international aid,
00:08:46.780diverting, siphoning off, we can go into the details, a lot of naivete.
00:08:52.240Canada resumed funding under the current government, under the federal government,
00:08:57.140resumed funding for this United Nations Refugee Works, or Relief Works, I think it's called, agency UNRWA,
00:09:04.200which is, we're going to help the poor Palestinians.
00:09:08.500What did they do with most of the money?
00:09:10.120They built these huge networks of tunnels, concrete, so they couldn't be penetrated by bombs.
00:09:18.960And then they started to manufacture missiles, a lot of Iranian aid.
00:09:23.300So the first thing is that they've been working on this.
00:09:25.560I'll try to make it short, otherwise I'll be here for an hour and a half, just doing the history.
00:09:29.180No, no, no, please continue, no, Gerald, please continue, because, I mean, these are things that many of our viewers and listeners are not aware of,
00:09:37.120and so it's brilliant, please continue.
00:09:39.680Okay, I'll try to do it in headlines also, then we can do it.
00:09:43.060But, so this was a terrorist entity that had lots of resources, ostensibly, to help humanitarian aid, help build houses,
00:09:52.940but that was stolen for these, for this infrastructure.
00:09:55.880And for many years, the Palestinians tried, the Hamas tried to tunnel, and they did a few times successfully,
00:10:03.800underneath the barrier, there's a border between Gaza and Israel.
00:10:08.920Again, there's no Israeli occupation in Gaza, nobody there.
00:10:12.160And they tried to fly over, they tried to climb over, they tried to tunnel under.
00:10:19.260And this happened time after time, and they built, and they then began to fire missiles.
00:10:23.060So, in 2000, in December 2008 already, through January 2009, we had a three-week war where Israel went in to try to,
00:10:31.980we got missiles that were fired, there was a kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, killing of others.
00:10:37.120Israel tried to go in and respond to that, and it worked for a couple of years.
00:10:41.140And then we had, of course, Israel was condemned by the United Nations, all sorts of other types of what we call the cult of international law and human rights,
00:10:51.900which is another aspect of this soft-powered demonization or propaganda.
00:10:55.400So, it happened then, it happened in 2014, another major Israeli, another Hamas attack started with this huge construction of tunnels
00:11:06.140that Israel mostly caught and exploded, but that led to an Israeli attempt to go in and destroy that whole infrastructure in 2014.
00:11:14.880And then again in 2021, even this year, there were some smaller skirmishes of missiles being sent, no entry into Gaza itself by ground troops.
00:11:25.780So, we've sort of been planning what was called, there were different rounds or cycles that Israel was trying to, it was containment.
00:11:34.060Israel, the Israeli, I'd say the entire Israeli military and political establishment, there are a few exceptions actually,
00:11:42.560said, okay, we can control, we can control this from the outside.
00:11:45.900We can prevent them from killing our people by occasionally responding, by destroying a few of their tunnels
00:11:53.160and some of their missile manufacturing capabilities, and that gives us a few more years of quiet.
00:11:59.080From what we see now, and there's a, they built this very expensive underground barrier for tunnels.
00:12:06.820So, the Israeli perception was, they're going to try to come from the ground, and we've put an end to that.
00:12:13.060What we saw on Saturday was the, first of all, a very quick strike on the Israeli intelligence early warning basis right next to Gaza.
00:12:25.380There were a group of Israeli-trained Israeli intelligence officers who watched the defense and were supposed to warn and sound the alert.
00:12:37.620They were, what we saw was from the air, quadcopters, little drones that you buy on Amazon or wherever else you do,
00:12:46.060and maybe manufactured by Iran that I, we haven't gotten the information, dropped rocket-propelled grenades,
00:12:54.400small weapons that exploded and killed in a very short time.
00:12:58.260There were also apparently hang gliders that came over, terrorists and hang gliders.
00:13:06.020They've been practicing, but we didn't think that this was going to be put together.
00:13:09.680Nobody thought about this being put together in a coordinated way, and nobody then expected this to happen.
00:13:16.640There was no scenario that said, if this happens, this is what we do.
00:13:21.380And immediately afterwards, just like ISIS, you may remember that ISIS ran through Iraq and Syria in pickup trucks,
00:13:31.860armored pickup trucks with mags and other forms of automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weapons.
00:13:38.760So they drove through this fence, and in a few minutes, they were in the Israeli civilian areas, the towns, small towns that are 10 minutes,
00:13:53.020five minutes away from the border, and they just began to kill and massacre.
00:13:58.320And the Israeli, because the eyes and ears of the Israeli military intelligence had been killed, nobody knew what was going on.
00:14:05.180They knew that something bad was happening, but they couldn't respond in a coherent way immediately.
00:14:12.360And I'll just add one more aspect to this, which is going to be part of the discussion.
00:14:17.740There were approximately 2,500 young people, mostly, at a rave, at a dance party, right in that area.
00:17:02.000The world, including the Canadian ambassador in Israel who follows now the sort of European slogans and myths of Israel's always guilty, will condemn us.
00:20:56.240And if Iran can be stopped here or even pushed back, they're not at North Korea stage at all yet.
00:21:06.520But if we leave it alone for six months or a year, they will be.
00:21:09.780That's something that I'm sure is part of the discussion in the Israeli government, with the American government particularly, what do we do about this?
00:21:18.120Because what we've been doing up until now hasn't worked.
00:22:44.200The numbers that I see are about 1.4 million maybe residents and perhaps less because of significant departures through the sea, through Egypt in the last few years.
00:24:11.020What we hear about now, which seems to me, the framework, in rough terms, is somewhere between a two- and three-month period where, first of all, what we see now, where there's as much elimination, destruction of the terrorist infrastructure from the air as possible in Gaza.
00:24:30.060Followed by a major ground offensive to destroy what can't be destroyed from the air, and that's mainly those concrete-lined kilometers of underground tunnels that Israel has tried to destroy from the air previously and probably needs to be done from the ground.
00:24:52.060Plus all the missile storage areas, and perhaps also taking as many of the Hamas leadership into captivity or wars for them.
00:25:05.520That also depends on how the hostage, whole hostage issue gets resolved, which perhaps we can talk about, too.
00:25:11.660So, and then the third month is to establish some sort of a long-term framework where most of the Israeli troops can be withdrawn.
00:25:20.860Maybe an alternative government in Gaza, something like that.
00:25:24.680That's what we talked about before, maybe involving some sort of international coalition.
00:25:29.760It's hard to see how this is going to develop, but that's the discussions that are being held in Israel.
00:25:36.080Yeah. Critics of Israel will say, well, there's context in history going back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and all of the various conflicts with its Arab neighbors.
00:25:51.420They'll also point to the creation of these settlements and blockades by land, sea, and air of the Gaza Strip, not only by Israel, but also by Egypt.
00:26:03.080You know, what do you say to people who, critics of, you know, who pin the blame on Israeli policy and that this is basically an outcome of mistakes that perhaps Netanyahu made, you know, as a prime minister?
00:26:24.540First of all, I divide up these critics into different groups, and each one has a different approach in terms of response.
00:26:37.060To some degree, the first group are, let's take the easy ones, or not easy, but the ones who just don't know.
00:26:42.320They don't know the history. They don't know the details.
00:26:44.160They see some headlines. They listen to some propagandists.
00:26:47.020It's all Israel's fault, Netanyahu, whatever.
00:26:49.160So you educate. You try to educate. And that's hard.
00:26:53.400It's hard because in mainstream media, 90% CBC, Globe and Mail, New York Times, BBC, there's what we call the Palestinian victimization narrative.
00:27:10.080What they don't tell you is that the Palestinian society, going back to 1948, supported by the United Nations, there's this organization, UNRWA, which has a budget of 1.1 or 1.2 billion U.S. dollars a year,
00:27:29.240which teaches, they do education, and they do all sorts of other things.
00:27:33.800Where do they educate? Because these are all defined, Palestinians are still, see themselves, and are defined by UNRWA and the UN as refugees.
00:27:43.780From 1948, there are very few refugees still alive from 1948, from a terrible war which they started, and which they have never said, end of war.
00:27:54.540We accept Israel. We accept Israel. We want a two-state solution. We all hear all this noise about a two-state solution that comes out of standard Canadian talking point from the Trudeau government, from the global affairs, from ambassadors.
00:28:08.840You know, Palestinians never talk about a two-state solution. It's a myth. It's a slogan.
00:28:15.580They don't see Palestinians as having agency. They don't listen to what they have to say, what they teach their children.
00:28:20.600So, first thing I say is, if you can find, or Israel has to deal with a situation where you have, not just in Gaza, but in West Bank, you have a Palestinian population,
00:28:32.460four or five million people total, who have never accepted the legitimacy of Israel, whose only goal is to erase Israel from the map, to slaughter, to kill, to evict.
00:28:44.880And we're in a population over nine, close to 10 million people. That's not going to happen.
00:28:49.900We had a terrible tragedy. Lost maybe 2,000 people.
00:28:57.120So, and I want to add that other point, because I think it's really important.
00:29:04.100I've had many conversations with diplomats around, Western diplomats, including in global affairs.
00:29:08.940And every time I go to Ottawa and the Pearson building, or I talk to the ones here, or whatever, for many of them, I accept from this list people like Norman Spector, who really do understand it,
00:29:22.040when they just don't pay any, they don't know anything about the Palestinian society.
00:29:28.420They don't say to Palestinians, look, we'd like to help you.
00:29:32.020We are helping you, but you cannot continue to expect, demand, prepare, attack to destroy Israel.
00:29:41.560That's not an acceptable basis for anything.
00:29:45.740Canadians, with all due respect, are small players.
00:29:49.480Europeans, which provide a lot more aid and are really the best friends of the Palestinians, absolutely don't want to deal with it, refuse to deal with it, refuse to recognize it.
00:29:59.620So, it goes back to your question, I said the two groups, a few groups.
00:30:03.500The first group is those that can be educated.
00:30:09.100Yes, that comes to the second group, or I'll add to this.
00:30:13.500The constituents, Israelis see this all the time.
00:30:16.820And that's why in Israeli elections, what's called the Israeli left, the Israeli peace camp,
00:30:21.680after the Oslo agreements blew up on our faces, we had one that seems we were totally stunned by the fact that 1,100, 1,100 Israelis were murdered
00:30:33.680in bus bombings and other mass bombings, what we call Arafat's war, and Palestinians call the second intifada.
00:30:41.680And that was after the Oslo peace accords, where there were no new settlements, there was a plan to go towards,
00:30:51.040the idea was some sort of, it wasn't formal, but a two-state solution based on this initial agreement,
00:30:57.040establishing a Palestinian authority, bringing Arafat back to Gaza,
00:31:00.680and then later on in Ramallah, Palestinian capital, Palestinian economy,
00:31:06.360Israeli withdrawal from large parts of what they called Palestine.
00:31:11.660That was all used to prepare for this other, for that terror, round of mass terror.
00:31:17.740So, from an Israeli perspective, realistically, as much as people might want to have peace,
00:31:24.820there's no horizon, and therefore, getting back to your question,
00:31:28.540I'm an academic, I go around, then I'll try to come more directly,
00:31:32.920that what happened was that the relatively small fringe Israeli settlement movement,
00:31:38.800what's called the far right, became more, had greater influence.
00:31:44.840So, they're a small part of the current government,
00:31:47.900but they're necessary in order to have a majority.
00:31:50.980It's like the NDP is in the, for the liberals.