Conflicted S4 E16: What Was Hamas Thinking?

Thomas: Welcome back, dear listeners. This is Thomas Small here with my co-host, Aimen Dean. Hello, Aimen.

Aimen: Hi, Thomas. How are you?

Thomas: I'm well. It's been a rather sad and hugely worrying few days.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: This is an emergency episode that we feel we have to produce as the world is reeling from the tragic events in Israel and Gaza. Conflicted was born to explain why situations like the current one are happening, because it's all connected in the cauldron of events over the past century and beyond in the Middle East.

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What we want to do today is to give you a bit of context on Hamas, to tell you how we got to this point and with the larger forces at play here to speculate on what the weeks and indeed years to come might hold.

We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 10th of October, the previous Saturday. So, three days ago Hamas, the political rulers or if you like, of the Gaza Strip, an Islamist militant group with direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, they launched a horrific incursion into Israel across the border there.

As of this recording, the death toll now stands at 900 Israelis, according to Israeli media, and more than 700 Palestinians in Gaza as a result of Israeli reprisals, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. And just this afternoon, the Israeli military announced that they had killed 1500 Palestinian militants on the Israeli-Gaza border.

So, that's where it stands now, according to at least what the media is telling me. How about you, Aimen? I mean, give me your immediate reaction when you sort of woke up on Saturday or whenever you realised what was going on. What was your immediate reaction? Were you surprised?

Aimen: For me, the moment I woke up and I realised that something like this is happening, I thought to myself, goodness, this is not going to end well. Because the images of Hamas militants on cars and on pickups, going into Sderot and into the southern suburbs of Ashkelon, it's like, wow, how could that happen? How did they break out of that high security, high tech wall that the Israeli military built around Gaza?

And it was like bewilderment, just like the rest of the globe, we were all shocked. And as the day unfolded, the absolute horror of what was happening, car after car, coming back to Gaza, bringing with them alive and dead soldiers and later civilians, young and old. And I was telling myself, this is without doubt, the 9/11, not only of Israel, but of the entire Middle East.

Thomas: The 9/11 in terms of the death count? I mean, I think far more people died on 9/11 than died on Saturday. But I guess if you're talking about the population-

Aimen: Yeah. On Saturdays, the numbers actually are approaching 1,240 as of the latest count from the Israeli side as well as 3000 wounded.

1,240, and still, there are some of the kibbutz and some of the settlements that hasn't yet been fully searched. The death toll for Saturday could reach 1500 Israelis.

This is among a population of 6 million. 9/11 happened of 3000 dead in a population of 330 million. So, you can imagine that the proportion of what happened was tremendous.

Thomas: Yeah.

Aimen: And the problem for me here, Thomas, is that there was nothing happening prior to the events of 7th October of 2023 that prepared us mentally and made us aware that something is about to happen.

Thomas: But did we just take our eyes off the ball, Aimen? I mean, it did come the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when in a surprise attack an Arab coalition led by Egypt did give Israel a big bloody nose.

Were we just kind of lulled into naive quiescence? I mean, how did this happen? You said, Aimen, you just said, how did they cross the border? How the hell did this happen without the Israelis knowing about it, for goodness sake?

I mean, all sorts of reports are coming in left and right about Netanyahu being told in advance by Egyptian intelligence but deciding to ignore the intelligence. Most of the troops were up in the north thinking that maybe the next attack would come from Hezbollah. It's just such a monumental failure.

Aimen: It is, and I can tell you that history will confirm what we talk about in this episode. But the initial reports coming out of Gaza, that reliance on Chinese, Huawei phones and tablets and laptops that are run by in-house Chinese design systems that are unfamiliar to Israeli hackers might have contributed partially to the sense of signal intelligence blindness that the Israelis suffered from, coupled with a high-tech training that Hamas militants received from Iran and other international players.

We don't need to mention their names at the moment. Not to mention the fact that, in this day and age, if you combine cyber security hack with signal intelligence blindness, with an enemy that is sleeping on the wheel, with some jamming equipment, if you bring all of this, you reach what we call the perfect storm. And this is what happened on 7th of October.

And I think it is a monumental intelligence and security failure. And I think heads will roll once this bloody war is over. But for the time being, all I can tell you is that on the first day, Hamas gave Israel the bloodiest nose it had in its entire 75 years of existence.

Thomas: Well, for my sins, I have become knowledgeable about things to do with terrorism and war in the Middle East. I say for my sins, because temperamentally, I hate violence. I hate bloodshed.

I cannot watch these YouTube clips, these TikTok videos that are flying around where Hamas have revealed precisely what they did to those victims of their violence on that day. I can't watch it.

I can read descriptions of it. I can hardly read them, frankly. I mean, I don't even want to repeat the sort of things that we're hearing about and seeing about this attack, the sort of brutality waged against children, against women, against old women. This is beyond unspeakable.

Now, I know that in the wars that have waged on and off almost constantly between Israel and the Palestinians, since 1948, much life has been lost. Many civilians have died. And it's easy possibly to be overtaken by a tremendous sense of moral outrage when one such occasion occurs.

But there does seem to be something, especially callous and brutal and calculated about this attack beyond anything that we've seen before. It seems to me. Also given the fact, Aimen, that the leaders of Hamas and their Iranian overlords who would've given the green light for this attack, must have known that the Israeli state and the Israeli people would never stand for it and would unleash an almighty unholy shit storm of fire upon Gaza in retaliation.

And yet, they still launched the attack knowing that it would result as it is now resulting in many, many hundreds and probably thousands of civilian deaths on their side. Why would they do that?

Aimen: All my life, Thomas, I have condemned stupidity. I condemned utterly with horror, and I stood against what bin Laden did when he unleashed the wrath of America on Afghanistan and Iraq when he smashed those aircraft through his deluded recruits into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

I completely, on this podcast, condemned the stupidity and utter stupidity of Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait and invited the wrath of the United States and the International Coalition to destroy Iraq and destroy its culture, its heritage, its progress, its institutions. And to bring it back to the Stone Age because of his stupidity.

I am someone who believe that stupid people are far more destructive than shrewdly calculated villains. And this is the problem. You see, when I look at any conflict, and I am unfortunately, Thomas, for my sins, old and new, a graduate of the sad and utterly brutal school of war.

I spent six years of my life in four war zones. One of them was extremely genocidal, the Bosnian conflict. I spent 14 months of my life there from the age of 16 until the age of 17.

And I've seen my fair share of mass graves, charred remains of the old and the young. I've seen young girls’ survivors of rape that lasted for two years in the death camps. And I've seen my fair share of brutality in Afghanistan, my fair share of brutality in the Caucasus and what war does to the mental wellbeing of people in the Southern Philippines.

And I can tell you that I always believed after all the time I spent in the conflict (and I was young at the time between the age of 16 to the age of 22), that war is the ultimate failure of human reason.

And the problem with people who start wars is that they cannot finish them. Once you start it, it's like a fire, like an arsonist. You don't know when you can finish them, because if it gets out of hand, if it gets out of your control, it'll consume everything around you, including possibly those who you love and those who you are supposed to protect.

That is why I even in this podcast when you were telling me about Iran and how much I am condemning Iran all the time, and yet when you ask me what is the solution, I said, no, we can't absolutely wage a war against Iran because wars will have an uncertain outcome, and it will cause death, destruction, suffering, and refugees in the millions and deaths in the hundreds of thousands. War is not preferable.

And on this podcast, I said that if there is a time machine, I would go back and I will warn the Syrian people that it is better to live under Bashar, than to do the uprising, because it's going to lead to a much worse situation.

You see for me, when I look at the conflict, I look at the facts. You and I, Thomas, are students of history, and we love looking at history from an objective point of view.

And the problem with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that you can't start talking about it until you start feeling that, like it happened to me before in Bosnia, that you are walking in a minefield. You are walking literally in a minefield.

And actually, it happened before that I stepped in a mine. But thank God, through his divine providence, nothing happened. In fact, there were four mines linked to each other. For them not to have exploded was a divine miracle. Maybe my mother was watching up from there. Thank you, mom.

Nonetheless, what I'm saying is that it is a minefield. You say a wrong word, the left will curse you, you say another wrong word, the right will curse you. You state the fact and the pro-Palestinians, they accuse you of supporting genocide.

And if you say another word, and the pro-Israelis will immediately tell you, you are antisemite. It's like, guys, just calm down. Everyone, please just take a breath and let us examine the facts.

Thomas: I know this very well, Aimen. Because if you remember when we set out last season to record our two episodes on Israel-Palestine, so the first one covering Zionism and the War of Israeli independence, or the Nakba in 1948, and the next one about the two great wars in ‘67 and ‘73 between the Arabs and the Israelis, both of which Israel soundly won, and which left the cause of Arab nationalism, at least in tatters.

So, we've done episodes on those. And if you remember, when we set out to begin recording them, I confessed that I'd sort of postponed doing episodes on Israel and Palestine, because the idea of it terrifies me because I hate upsetting people. And there is no cause on planet earth more divisive than the cause of Israel and Palestine.

And yet, I will say scenes like the ones I saw on the news here in Britain yesterday of pro-Palestinian protestors outside the Israeli embassy in London, justifying the Hamas attack on Saturday.

And I cannot understand how people seeing the tactics of a group like Hamas, a Sayyid Qutb inspired, revolutionary, militant vanguard movement, utterly opposed to anything but the most absolute and radical political goal, how they can see these tactics played out in front of them, and not just totally condemn them regardless of any political — it's beyond politics this.

I don't understand it, and I don't like feeling angry. I try to remain balanced and as you say, fact driven. But this has made me angry. How have we reached this place where the Islamists and the, let's say, broadly speaking, liberal leftist coalition of the world, they can't understand that this is just terrible.

We’ve spent a lot of time this season discussing Islamism, discussing Sayyid Qutb, and discussing the Muslim Brotherhood. And the question of when do moderate means become radical, when the end is radical or which groups employ radical means to achieve radical ends? Whether the Muslim Brotherhood can be considered moderate when it's ends are radical.

And here we see this being played out in real time in front of us because … and sadly, we don't have time to do as we would normally do a proper multi-episode series arc on Hamas, and we will do that, I can tell you that much now. But for now, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

Aimen: Absolutely.

Thomas: And it comes out of the Muslim Brotherhood. But actually, more interestingly, from the point of view of this season of Conflicted, it emerges precisely out of that debate that we talked about in a previous episode, between moderate and radical voices within the Muslim Brotherhood, those voices who opposed Sayyid Qutb's vision and those voices who supported Sayyid Qutb's vision.

This conversation, this debate was going on in the 70s and in the 80s, and it unleashed really explicitly horrible groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, most importantly, who were just like overtly brutal pursuing jihad against civilians in Israel, overtly.

In contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood, which at that time had explicitly adopted a more moderate, less Sayyid Qutb style position, saying, no, no, the Jihad against Israel must be delayed until the whole Muslim world is united around the Muslim Brotherhood Project and has returned to upstanding personal piety.

So basically, until the Muslim world was Muslim Brotherhood, we shouldn't launch a jihad against Israel. Well, the Qutbist wing were opposed to this. And these extremely radical groups were emerging in the late 70s and the early 80s, launching terrible attacks and just basically advocating direct aggression.

And in response to this, the so-called moderate Muslim Brotherhood felt forced to create its own to semi-radical wing, Hamas, which then in each instance, becomes more radical as it pursues its radical end.

I mean, Aimen, this is right, this is what happened because as you are keen to tell me all the time, at every stage of the way since it's emergence officially in 1988, Hamas has opposed, resisted, undermined, and destroyed any realistic or unrealistic attempt to create something like a peaceful solution between Israel and the Palestinian authority. Every time.

Aimen: Of course, I mean, the whole project for Hamas is to the so-called liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the so-called historical Palestine. This is why you hear always the chants of the leftists and the Islamists in the streets of London, New York, Chicago, and in Paris and Berlin, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”

So, the whole idea is that, okay, fine, I mean, it is really the uprooting of all the Israelis and sending them to Europe and Latin America, wherever, I mean, so it is to some extent genocidal and ethnic cleansing aim and goal.

But Thomas, the problem is not here, apart from the fact that Hamas sabotaged and derailed every single possible attempt at peace, whether it is Oslo in 1993, between ‘93 and ‘96, they launched countless number of suicide bombings against civilians and buses, and in nightclubs and everywhere in Israel.

Thomas: Suicide bombing dear listener, which I might say was a tactic that they learned in training camps in southern Lebanon from Hezbollah. So, when you listen to our two episodes on Hezbollah coming up, just keep that in mind now.

Aimen: Absolutely.

Thomas: Now you can really see what Hezbollah means for the region. They trained those guys to do that.

Aimen: Absolutely. And then you have the fact that after that, when a Barak and Yasser Arafat were finally on the verge in Camp David to have a second Camp David, and that finally we will have 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Thomas: This is in 1999. Yeah.

Aimen: Exactly. In Camp David. Hamas went on a spree of suicide bombings. Sharon responded with a visit to the Temple Mount, and the second intifāḍah started, and then from 2000 until 2006, they killed 700 Israelis in suicide bombings.

I mean, they just relished for destruction. They are the ones who brought Ariel Sharon, from being an opposition figure, hated by the majority of Israelis into a national hero again. That is Hamas. They are the divine answer to the Israeli right-wing prayers.

Thomas: Exactly. You understand that. You see the dynamic at play, that their radicalism has caused an in response an increasing right-wing, more paranoid security conscious Israeli state to evolve over the last 30 years. It's endless. And this is only going to get worse now, unimaginably worse.

Aimen: Which brings us, Thomas, now to the last six months. What happened? What are-

Thomas: Yeah. What happened, Aimen?

Aimen: The events that led to the horror that we are seeing today, and again, I am calling upon the listener to be objective and to listen to reason and not to follow one's own prejudices here.

Just relax, don't think that you know everything about the issue. Remember that there are many things that we could talk about among them, the question of Gaza being an open-air prison and everything and all of that.

But you have to remember, Gaza is ruled by Hamas, which has overthrown the Palestinian authority in a military coup 16 years ago. And that led to the blockade of Gaza because Gaza is ruled by a organisation that years prior was prescribed by America, by Canada, by the European Union, by the Arab world, even for God's sake, by many countries, in the Arab world, as a terrorist organisation.

You can't ask the world to deal with a terrorist organisation, even if they were in control of a territory, that is the reason for the blockade.

Hamas could have ended the blockade anytime if they just accepted the authority of the Palestinian government to come back to the territory, and that would have ended the blockade. That is the reason for the blockade. Now we come back to it.

As you know, six months ago, Saudi Arabia embarked on a policy of rapprochement and de-escalation in the entire Middle East, they agreed to a brokered, a Chinese brokered non-aggression pact with Iran to try to de-escalate and to end the war in Yemen.

Thomas: We have an episode on this coming up, dear listener. Yeah.

Aimen: Absolutely. And at the same time, to be able to decrease the tensions that finally, peace can come to Yemen, and tensions can be reduced between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia also wanted to pursue a normalisation of relations with Israel.

Thomas: And sorry, Aimen, this is following the historic Abraham Accords in which the UAE and a basket of other Arab states normalised relations with Israel.

So, Saudi Arabia wanted to do the same. And in fact, even when the Abraham Accords were signed a few years ago, everyone knew that that was a kind of test scenario. It was a sort of prologue to the big kahuna, the kingdom normalising relations with Israel.

Aimen: Absolutely. So, for Saudi Arabia, they have two sets of demands, one set of demands that concerns Saudi Arabia and one set of demands that concern in the Palestinians. As far as the demands that are concerning Saudi Arabia, the Saudi is aware, of course, asking the U.S. for certain concessions, one on advanced weaponry, including the F-35 jets, and a military pact.

But the most important among them is for Saudi Arabia to have a nuclear civilian program built and operated by the U.S. according to golden standards of safety that would prevent Saudi Arabia from building their own nuclear weapons using American technology.

So, the whole idea is that Saudi Arabia would receive American nuclear technology built and operated by American engineers with golden standards of safeguards to prevent the nuclear weapons proliferation. Now, why is that?

In the Yemen episode of the first season, and we come full circle again, we talked about water and water desalination and how it is important for Saudi Arabia, a land that has no rivers or lakes to procure water, for its population. And as the population increased-

Thomas: Not just important, in that episode, Aimen, you very powerfully explained that if Saudi Arabia lost its access to clean water, fresh water from desalination plants within three days, it would just collapse. So, we're talking-

Aimen: Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas: Existentially vital question, access to fresh water. Yeah.

Aimen: So, the Saudis made their own presentations to the Americans over the past months, and they asked for the nuclear power to be able in the future, a future that has no fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are a finite, and one day they will run out.

So, how would the Saudis procure and secure drinkable water for their population without power, without energy? And therefore, the nuclear energy is the answer, not solar, not wind, because the solar and wind are not the intense dispatchable source of energy that is needed to operate large water desalination plants.

Thomas: So, the Saudis reached out to the Americans and basically said, look, in exchange for normalising relations with Israel, we would like you to continue to extend your military umbrella over us.

Aimen: Absolutely.

Thomas: We would like you to come to our defence in the case of any war, let's say, with Iran. And then also we would like you to oversee and provide for us civilian nuclear technology in order to run our desalination plants for our drinking water.

Aimen: Not only that, Thomas, not only for water desalination, but also for grand projects that are not yet being announced, in order to push water into the interior of Saudi Arabia, especially into the empty quarter, in order to create basins of water the size of Qatar and beyond, even.

In order to create a new microclimate to alter the weather and to actually create more and more clouds and then rain, and then, alter the cycle of climate and to actually fight climate change and global warming in that region, altering the weather and reducing the temperature up to 10 degrees by 2050.

So, there are projects that are designed in order to do that, but they need nuclear power. So, this is the Saudi set of demands. What are the demands that the Saudis have on behalf of the Palestinians, again, that the majority of the West Bank as well as Gaza with extra land for Gaza to be the basis for a Palestinian state based on the Jared Kushner maps with some alterations with East Jerusalem, especially the holy sites to be part of the Palestinian state and to be it’s capital.

So, the Saudis were very happy with this, and actually about seven months ago, around the time they signed that Accord with the Iranians and the Chinese for the de-escalation, Saudi Arabia released some of the leading Hamas members that were serving time in Saudi jails for financing terrorism.

And they started using them as in a way to negotiate with Hamas to tell them, look, in order for this to work, we need you to start a reconciliation process with the Palestinian authority.

Thomas: The PLO. Yeah. So, yeah, just so everyone understands, Hamas and the PLO have been locked in a terrible struggle since 2006, which sort of climaxed in 2007 with Hamas taking over Gaza completely expelling or killing the PLO's security apparatus there.

And so, since that time, the Palestinian Territories have been totally divided with two separate governments. One, the West Bank with a president who is a PLO member, Mahmoud Abbas, and the other Gaza with a Hamas government, as you stated, Aimen. A radical, militant terrorist organisation governing the state there and inevitably clashing with Israel.

Aimen: Exactly. So, now the Saudis were asking Hamas to start a reconciliation process, and they told them that we cannot achieve a Palestinian state that will encompass both Gaza and the West Bank without the reconciliation and without Hamas accepting to step back, just little, to allow a political and bureaucratic administration to come back into Gaza under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

So, the Palestinian Authority comes back to rule in Gaza, and they would allow Hamas to be the security apparatus of Gaza. So, it is a sweet deal to an extent.

Thomas: So, you're saying about seven months ago, the Saudis opened up direct negotiations with Hamas in pursuit of that aim of getting Hamas to allow the Palestinian authority, which was established following the Oslo Accords in 1994, allow it back into Gaza.

And do you have any sense, based on what you've heard, what sort of cooperation the Saudis were receiving from Hamas in this effort? Was Hamas indicating that they were open to that?

Aimen: They indicated they were open, and they were ready, and they are happy to do so all the way until a week before the attacks. Until a week before the attacks, they were assuring the Saudis that their aim and their goal, and it was through Qatari mediation, that their aim and their goal is to actually allow the Palestinian authority to come back.

And that is why the Saudis appointed an ambassador to the Palestinian authority. And called him actually the Ambassador to the State of Palestine. And he went there, met with the President Abbas presented him with Saudi lands and updated him on the Saudi progress for the Palestinian demands.

And there were 24 demands. Some of them I know, some of them I don't, but all I know is that there was a tremendous progress happening to the point where Mohammed bin Salman himself, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the one who is going to take this giant leap, went and approved two things.

First, he approved the fact that he's going to talk to the American people through Fox. And he gave that interview where he said, we are closer than ever to a normalisation of relations with Israel.

And the second is that during the G20 meeting, at the beginning of September, countries participating, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, India, all of them signed an agreement for the IMEC, which is the IMEC, the India Middle East Europe Corridor, this giant amazing, trade route that would link India to the UAE, to Saudi Arabia, to Jordan, to Israel, to Greece and Italy.

In order to create this economic zone that would bring in talent and services and goods and commerce and trade and would generate a lot of opportunities for India and for Greece and will revive the economy of Jordan.

All of this was signed, and everyone was celebrating, and everyone thinking that we are now living the age of the advance of peace.

Thomas: Less than a month ago.

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Before we go on, I want to know throughout all of this period of negotiation with the Palestinians, what sort of negotiations were going on with the state of Israel and how did the state of Israel greet Mohammad bin Salman's plan for a two-state solution in the Jared Kushner model, et cetera?

Because the state of Israel has its own interests, hasn't always played fair in negotiations with the Palestinians. So, what position was Netanyahu taking during these negotiations?

Aimen: For Netanyahu, a Palestinian state is a price worth paying if it meant a complete economic, commercial, and political alliance and integration with the Saudis, because it is a $1.1 trillion economy next door, and it's growing so rapidly.

It is the leader of the Sunni Muslim world. It is the custodian of the two holy sites. It'll be truly the children of Abraham coming together finally, after 3000 years, and guess what, we were literally six weeks away from a big announcement, almost six weeks away from a big announcement.

However, Iran and their coalition of the forces of darkness decided that this is the time to strike, and this is the time to derail the progress of peace.

You see, I would have sympathised a little bit with Hamas, if the Israelis committed a huge massacre and they retaliated in kind, I would've said, “Oh God, the Israelis, they've done it again. They killed a bunch of Palestinian kids. Now look what's going to happen.”

But that wasn't the case. There was nothing immediately preceding the events of seven October to justify, the levels-

Thomas: Yes, no provocation of any kind. It was totally out of the blue.

Aimen: Exactly. It's completely out of the blue. And when you learn about the motive to derail a peace that would have brought decent living standards to tens of millions of people from India all the way to Rome, including to the Palestinians themselves.

And finally, finally, we have a Palestinian state like every time, and this is the problem with Hamas, every time there is a Palestinian state about to happen, ‘93, ‘94, ‘96, ‘99, every time there is a progress, they come and derail everything.

Thomas: Well, I mean, we have to make it clear to the listener that Hamas is against a two-state solution. They are opposed to the existence of Israel. That is important.

Aimen: Exactly.

Thomas: They do not accept a two-state solution. They have always rejected it. Now, you mentioned Iran. I want to talk more about Iran because two things.

First, Iran and Saudi, all those months ago, sign an agreement, a kind of peace deal, if you like, explicitly about Yemen, but in general, everyone thought, “Oh, thank God, Iran is seeing reason, and the Saudis are slightly dampening down their own nationalist sort of rhetoric, and everything's going to be fine.”

Well, now, Iran has gone, if what you're saying is true, Iran has gone and knifed the Saudis in the back by green lighting, if not explicitly helping Hamas achieve this terrible atrocity, derailing the Saudi's peace plan with Israel. Is that right?

Aimen: Exactly. I mean, this is why-

Thomas: Does this mean that the peace between Saudi and Iran is just ripped up now, that we can assume that that's done now?

Aimen: They are hurt. I mean, the Saudis, from their part, they are deeply hurt, and they feel that they have been played. And also, at the same time, it is clear that Iran wanted to sideline Saudi Arabia while they were preparing for a showdown with the Israelis.

You see, Thomas, the issue here is that the motives, I always ask people, “Oh, Gaza is an open air-prison. Oh, Gaza.” First of all, Gaza is not under occupation. The Israelis left Gaza in 2005 and dismantled the settlements inside Gaza and left because of the terrible security situation.

It wasn't blockaded even; it was only blockaded that two years later when Hamas killed and exiled the Palestinian authority officials and security apparatus. And where did they flee, these Palestinians who they were expelled, where did they go? They went to Israel, funny enough. It was Israelis who received them.

So, we have to talk about the fact that they are brutal organisation oppose to the peace process completely. And they never accept the right of Israel to exist.

So, now I will ask you a question. Forget everything, even if some people on the left always question Israel's right to exist. I will say this, any group in an Islamic theology point, in a cultural point, in a human point, in a DCC point, from the point of view of all of the verticals I mentioned, your responsibility as a leader is the welfare and the wellbeing of the people that you lead.

So, you Hamas, as a leader in the Gaza Strip, your responsibility is the welfare of the people that you lead. The fact that Hamas kept a tight hold on power is the reason why Gaza is blockaded because they are a prescribed terrorist organisation.

Legally, any organization uses suicide bombings more than 150 times, in its history is a terrorist organization by any … imagination. So, you cannot be legally recognized as a responsible political entity entrusted with the welfare of the people that you lead, or you rule.

Therefore, you have to make way for the Palestinian authority, which is recognized by the international community, by the United Nations, to come back and to take place. And the blockade will go.

You didn't do that. Okay, fine. At least can you stop building missiles and acquiring explosives and training in tens of thousands of young men and indoctrinate them into death cults.

Can you stop that and actually concern yourself with the welfare of your own people in terms of education, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of food, in terms of medicine?

Thomas: I want to go back to what — you raised the question of Iran's motive here, and this is what I'd like to press you on, because in the last season of Conflicted, we did an episode on, weirdly enough, the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis.

Aimen: Yeah.

Thomas: And in that episode, you illumined all of us, me and all the dear listeners to this salient and rather surprising fact that the Azerbaijani states, military intelligence, and security capacity, which has grown so remarkably in the last 20 years and has enabled them now to have the upper hand in their ongoing dispute with Armenia, which had the upper hand in the early 90s.

We told this whole story, you made it clear that that has happened largely because at some point in the past, the Azerbaijani government reached a very close accord with the Israelis who have been helping them militarily and in terms of intelligence, giving them advanced drone technology and creating on Iran's doorstep, a little Israeli foothold.

Much like the larger foothold that Iran has to the north of Israel with Hezbollah and to some extent off and on, but usually to the south of Israel in Gaza.

So, is that dynamic at play here, because we've all seen at present the Azerbaijani actions in Nagorno-Karabakh and the scenes of humanitarian sadness there, et cetera.

So, is this something that the Iranians are saying, “Look, you're building a foothold on our doorstep. Well, we can push a button and we can threaten you from the doorsteps that we've already erected.” Is that there?

Aimen: It is partially part of there, but what is happening right now, Thomas in the Middle East is what I call the rearranging of the Mexican standoff within the Mexican standoff. At the moment there is-

Thomas: How confusing.

Aimen: Yeah, seriously. Yeah. So, what is happening right now is that Iran was holding two guns to the head of Israel, one from the north, which is Hezbollah, and one from the South, which is Hamas and the Gaza Strip.

So, what happened is that Israel then turned on Iran and created a two guns to the head of Iran, one in Azerbaijan and one in the KRG, in the Kurdish Regional Government in a Iraq where the Mossad and the Israelis have a presence there also.

So, they turned two guns to the north and the northeast of Iran from there. At the same time, Iran, this is the other Mexican standoff, Iran pulled two guns on Saudi Arabia's head, one from Iraq from the north with Iraqi militias backed up and trained by Iran and with the Houthis from North Yemen, threatening the southwest of Saudi Arabia.

So, Saudi Arabia, through many geopolitical moves made it favourable for them to have the Taliban in Afghanistan. And through a lot of engineering and political machinations, they were able to oust Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, or the former prime minister of Pakistan now, who was more pro-Iranian.

And they managed to get a pro-Saudi, anti-Iranian government, and even more pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian head of the military, General Asim Munir. So, they are now pointing two guns at Iran’s back from the East, which is Pakistan, and Taliban in Afghanistan.

Thomas: Aimen, you weren't supposed to make me laugh like this during this most serious episode of Conflicted. We're talking about serious, serious war here, but you have just painted quite a comical picture of four handed men pointing guns at each other, from every corner.

Okay, so, I understand the two standoffs now. So, what's the move? So, Iran has pulled one of the triggers.

Aimen: Yes. They pulled one of the triggers, which is Hamas and Gaza, but they don't want to pull the two, which is the other one, which is Hezbollah. And this is where we have to look forward. What's going to happen?

Thomas: Yeah. What is going to happen? I would've thought Israel is already bombing the hell out of Gaza. They've amassed, I think something like 170,000 troops along the border now.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: They have said that we should be preparing for a ground invasion. They will reclaim Gaza, that the withdrawal that they affected in 2005 is now going to be undone. They're going to conquer Gaza again. Is this the case? I mean, Hezbollah can't stand by and allow that to happen without attacking.

Aimen: Yeah. Because you see, there could be the miscalculation here that Israel will not dare invade Gaza by land. And the answer is, I think the Israelis will say, try me. You just killed 1,250 of my citizens in one day, and the number could be rising, and you expect me — and especially with the discovery of beheaded babies today.

That I think was the final straw as far as the Israelis were concerned. The optics were so against Hamas here.

Again, as I said to you, Hamas failed its own people because this was unnecessary provocation. So, Israel will go in by land. Hezbollah will be given the instructions by Iran. You can't let one of my pistols, that pistol pointing to Israel's southern flank to be demolished.

I don't think Hamas expected that there will be a massive invasion. They expected massive bombardment. I don't expect they expected a massive invasion.

Thomas: But do you think Iran expected that kind of action from Hamas, that degree of brutal, barbaric attacking civilians in that brutal way? Or do you think even the Iranians are thinking, “Holy fuck, what have we made? These are monsters.”

Aimen: No, I think they expected, because today's speech by Ayatollah Khamenei at the Iranian military college was very clear. He said, “For everything they have done, I kissed their heads, and I kissed their hands.”

So, he blessed everything they've done. And this is an indication that something big is about to happen. Even the Houthis in Yemen could be engaging with their long-range ballistic missiles and drones.

And this is why the Saudi military is on high alert, the Jordanian military on high alert, the Egyptian military on high alert-

Thomas: Well, and the U.S. they've sent an aircraft carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Aimen: Exactly the U.S.’s Gerald Ford task force. It's a fleet of 12 large vessels armed with destroyers and submarines with missiles and tomahawks and the cruise missiles. I mean, 75 fighter jets, including the F-35 and the F-18 super hornets.

I mean, we are now on the brink of a regional war, and it's an 80% probability, I give it that Hezbollah will intervene and that will drag in possibly Syria into the conflict too.

All I'm saying, Thomas, is that those who were cheering for Hamas must understand that you do not poke the dragon unless if you have a plan B, plan C and plan Z. And unfortunately, Iran and Hezbollah and Assad of Syria, the butcher of children, I think they taught Hamas well, too well, in fact, for them to go and butcher children for no good reason. Just pure vengeance.

And remember that you are dealing in Israel with a Jewish population that still remember the horrors 75 years ago of the Holocaust. And the fact that the Jewish population of the world until now, until 2023 did not yet recover to the 1939 population.

There were 15 million Jews in the world in 1939, and today there are only 14 million. It shows you that these people are going to get hysterical and absolutely bloody and vicious and savage in the defence of their race and their religion and their culture, do not test them.

Thomas: So, right now, I can imagine having sent an aircraft carrier to the Eastern mid, President Biden is telling Netanyahu, basically, please exercise restraint. I mean, I'm not saying that that will happen. I'm not even saying that that should happen. I don't know. I think that if the Israelis want to invade Gaza and put some authority down there in the face of what just happened, it makes sense to me.

The question is that how — I mean, it's not going to happen, as you say, Israel will sort out Gaza now, they can't not. Netanyahu's whole persona is strong on security, strong, strong. He can't not.

So, I mean, Hezbollah will attack. So, Israel will fight back. Now, it might be that Israel has the capabilities more or less to defend itself from attackers both north and south, without it spilling over into a massive war.

But if you're saying Iran thinks, oh, we're going to lose Hamas and we're going to lose Hezbollah, then the Houthis fire into Saudi Arabia. And then what, the Pakistani military invades Iran from the East? What is the possible game here?

Aimen: Well, all I can tell you is that I can't see that far into the future because this reminds me of the book, The Guns of August, published in 1954, which showed how each general during the 1914 preparation for the World War I, thought it's going to be short war. And each one was second guessing the other general, and then it dragged on, it became the biggest slaughter in human history until then.

All I can tell you, Thomas, is that I have a feeling that the Israelis are going to push as many people of the population of Gaza into Egypt, into Sinai, and they will pressure the Egyptian government, which is strapped for cash and burdened with heavy debt that need to be serviced. I mean, there is $27 billion of debt that need to be paid over the next 10 months, and the Egyptian government doesn't have the cash for it.

Imagine if Western powers and Gulf powers are coming to Egypt and say, well, here it is, debt, forgiveness, lots of cash, take these people in. It is ironically, in order to protest against what they call ethnic cleansing, they achieved what they always were complaining about, which wasn't actually happening ethnic cleansing.

And you end up with the irony that after 3300 years of the Israelites leaving Egypt through Sinai, wondering in the desert, 40 years hoping to get into the holy land, and finally they get onto it, that the Philistines who were preventing them from coming into the holy land were to be expelled by the same people who came from Egypt and sending them into Sinai, well into Egypt through Sinai.

The irony of history, all I'm saying is Hamas did not carry out the duty of care and carry out its most sacred task of looking after the people they were governing.

The priority is not to take your population into a conflict they cannot withstand. And you know what the consequences are going to be. And this is why I condemn Hamas and I condemn what Hamas did, and I condemn what Hamas stood for.

Someone will say, “Well, what about the Israelis? The Israelis are killing people and doing and doing and doing.” And I would say, what did you expect them to do? Yes, they might be on the wrong side of history. Yes, they might be occupiers in the eyes of so many. Yes, they might be an illegal entity in the eyes of many, but what do you want them to do? To stand like sitting ducks and just take the bullets in the head one by one?

Well, they tried that in the 1930s and the 1940s, it didn't end well for them, and they are not going to repeat this again. That's why they always have that annual remembrance where they say, “Never again.” And you don't mess with people who always say, “Never again.”

And Hamas, while I bleed for the children and women and the innocent people of Gaza, I look at what happening to them. And I feel that they were killed by the Israeli bombs. But the ones who pulled the trigger on this were the people who they should have trusted, which is their leaders, Hamas.

Thomas: And people that they should not have voted for in 2006.

Aimen: Absolutely. It's a lesson to the rest of the Muslim world and the Arab world. Do not trust the Islamists. Do not trust people who believe in transnational ideologies.

Give your vote, give your backing, give your support only to those who support the model of the nation state, the modern nation state that care about the human, that want to create life that does not bitterly and utterly create death cults.

Thomas: Well, I'm the American in this conversation, and for me, this almighty tragedy is yet another nail in the coffin of 20 years, 22 years, 21 years of American foreign policy in the region being really one president after another, foolishly pursuing bad policies based on bad analysis of the situation, beginning with the response to 9/11, especially the invasion of Iraq, which empowered Iran.

And then proceeding with Barack Obama's absolutely idiotic idea of triangulating between Israelis, Iranians and Saudis through the Iran nuclear deal, thinking that if we could bring Iran in from the cold, all will be well. To Donald Trump's rather erratic pursuit of politics in general.

And now with Biden, Lord have mercy on us all. And we see where this ends, that this is just terrible. For the first time on this podcast, Aimen, I'm not conflicted. This is just terrible. Hamas is just terrible. And they must be destroyed. They cannot be allowed to remain.

Aimen: Exactly. But unfortunately, how do we achieve that without hurting civilians? And the problem is you can't. I mean, I'm not condoning-

Thomas: No, that's true. I understand that.

Aimen: Collective punishment.

Thomas: No.

Aimen: I’m not condoning collective punishment. I'm not condoning the mass killing of civilians. But how do you deal with a group like that? Even if you say, okay, I give them their state.

They were a state, they were a de facto state for 16 years. What have they done with the piece of land and the 2 million population they were given? They were behaving like ISIS. They were suffocating freedoms. They were not exactly the model that people want to.

But let's say for argument's sake, that Israel is totally wrong, and Hamas is totally right, which is impossible. Then I ask people, what is the perfect solution? For me, the perfect solution is for Jordan to take back the West Bank and for Egypt to take back Gaza. And we go back to 1967. That's it, to May 1967. Let us go back to those days is better.

Thomas: But Aimen, you're as naive as the leftists who support Hamas, with that. I do not think that exactly the King Abdullah of Jordan is clamouring to take back-

Aimen: No, no, no. He doesn't want them. And funny thing is that even the Egyptians don't want the Palestinians.

Thomas: Of course, they don’t.

Aimen: And neither with the Jordanians. And this is why, for those who support, support the Palestinian cause. But please do not support Hamas.

Thomas: Well, we're going to wrap it up there, dear listener. We were meant to be releasing two episodes on the history of Hezbollah beginning this week, but instead of this week, that will start next week.

And it'll be weird because that episode was recorded before this one. And you'd think we might mention the fact that there's a massive war going on, possibly even a war involving Hezbollah. So, you'll have to just bear with us.

But if there is a war going on involving Hezbollah, those episodes will give you a much more detailed explanation of where that movement came from, who its backers are, what its ideological commitments are.

Thank you for putting up with this rather quickly assembled emergency podcast episode on the latest outbreak of Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. It shocked everyone. It shocked me. We weren't ready for it. We had a vague plan, and we even know more or less when we were going to do it, a plan to do a series on Hamas.

But if we'd known that this was going to happen, we might have moved that forward. Anyway, I hope it has helped to clarify the situation. Thank you, dear friend, Aimen, for providing us with so much context and so much interesting intelligence that only those who are in the know, know about. And you are one of those, dear friend.

Aimen: Thank you.

Thomas: And if I may just say, as a non-Middle Easterner, but one with a great love in his heart for all of the Middle East, Aimen, I'm sorry, that war and strife and terror and bloodshed has come again to that part of the world.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: I know that you fight what must seem sometimes like a lost cause.

Aimen: Yeah.

Thomas: To keep peace and prosperity on the up there. Anyway, we can't lose hope.

Aimen: Yeah. This is why I always say my cause is the nation state, and now people understand why transnational ideologies should be crushed.

[Music Playing]

Thomas: Well, I think that those 170,000 Israeli troops amassing on the Gaza border would agree with you in this instance, Aimen.

Aimen: Yeah, exactly.

Thomas: Right. Well, that's it. We'll be back next week, dear listener, with the first of our two-part episode on the history of Hezbollah. Stay tuned.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.