America's Road to Tehran - Part 2

0:01The podcast is all about the second part of our relationship between Iran and America. This podcast is going to take us to the Mujahideen. It's going to take us to Afghanistan. It's going to take us to Palestine. It's going to take us to Gaza. And it is going to take us right up to the bombing of Tehran, which is going on as we speak. I hope you enjoy it. It's all coming up in a couple of minutes.

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2:14David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. John is giggling here. We were doing some good impressions. We may well do them towards the end of the podcast. Maybe not. It is a very, very, very serious podcast to do today because it's the second part, John, of our relationship between Iran, America, Israel, the Middle East, all that. We brought you up to the revolution. So we started last time in around 1940-odd. Yeah, yeah, yeah. listeners all the way up to the Iranian Revolution. This particular piece will be from 1978, 9, to probably October 7th. It's a whistle stop tour of the Middle East, the politics, the economics.

3:05But what we've done so far is we've done Mossadegh being deposed and the imposition of the Shah. Yes. And the corruption of Iran and then the Ayatollah writing that open letter. Yes. Which was quite something. Quite something. But basically, if you want to get a sense of how we're framing this, 1944 to 1980, you can see the West's involvement in Iran and the region in general as the end of the British-French influence and the rise of the American influence.

3:43David McWilliams: Yeah. And the period, let's say 1980, where we're going to start all the way through to now, is really the era of American dominance. And in effect, American mistakes in the region. But also, it was up until now, up until 1979, the whole driving force for the Americans was for Iran to be the bulwark against Russia. And of course, the British influence there was more about money. It was more about money. And now what we're going to look at, we're going to look at still the idea that America's obsession up until the early 1990s was against the Soviet Union. And everything is framed against that.

4:24So the mistakes the Americans made, the Mujahideen, Afghanistan, all those were largely the result of the Americans' obsession with the Soviet Union. The 1990s until now is what I would describe as the Israelization of American policy. So there's various different phases, but we're now at the culmination of what I would call the Israelization of American policy. Certain people are saying that in actual fact,

4:50David McWilliams: the Israelis are the ones that forced the American hands in the last couple of weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also it was the, you know, this is the time when Lebanon became a player in that, but you did a duck there. I have spent some time in Lebanon recently, and I'm going to tell you about a patchwork that is Lebanon and the road from Beirut to Balbek, John. Okay, so I'm going to paint a picture for you. Do. Because Beirut at one stage was like the Paris of the Med. Well, it was the Paris of the Med. It was the banking center of the Mediterranean. It was the finance center of the Middle East.

5:26It was under French tutelage, but under Christian rule from the 1940s until the 1970s. And in fact, it was the Israeli eviction of Palestinians which changed the map of Lebanon profoundly and led to the PLOization of Lebanon in the 1970s. It also emboldened the Shia in the south of Lebanon. and it created a situation where the Christian majority in Lebanon, the Maronite Christian majority, became a minority in their own country. And that is basically the background noise. But I was there, as you said, a couple of years ago, making a documentary, which is yet to go out, John. It's still in production.

6:12David McWilliams: Still in production. It's part of the long induction period of documentaries. Anybody who's made documentaries will know. Sometimes you go, you film for a while, that's in the can, then you do anything. Continuity is always a bit of a problem. there because we need to come back to you. You've either gained weight or lost weight. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll be on a Zempic, John. I'll be on a Zempic. I will look like a hollowed out shrimp for the next time. But the interesting thing about Lebanon, you can see the map of the Middle East when you're in Lebanon. So Baalbek is an extraordinary, probably the most best preserved Roman ruins in the world, are in a city called Baalbek, which is on the Syrian border of Lebanon.

6:52To get there from Beirut, of course, you have to drive through the very famous area, the Beka Valley. So basically in Beirut, you have Beirut's divided between Christians and Muslims. Southern Beirut is very, very Muslim. Northern Beirut is very, very Christian. And I was staying in a place called Ashrafia, which is a Christian area. Right. And the reason the Christians live in the north is because northern Lebanon is quite Christian. All the way up the coast is quite Christian. Southern Lebanon is essentially Muslim. But in order to get from Beirut to Baalbek, you have to drive through this Beka Valley.

7:33And the typology is very interesting because Lebanon is an incredibly mountainous country. So you get the sea, beautiful Mediterranean, then you go into the mountains, then you go into this Beka Valley, which is very, very famous. It's home to the Druze. The Druze is a very ancient community there. But it's home to lots of other ethnic communities and I'm going to tell you that. And then you arrive in Baalbek and you start to rise up as you go towards Syria. Nice. Sounds fabulous, mate. What a road trip. It's an amazing country.

7:58David McWilliams: So if you're into Roman ruins, John, if that's your thing, if listeners, if there are people into Roman ruins, if you can get to Baalbek, it's really well worth seeing because they are unbelievably well-preserved, number one. And number two, there's nobody there. Yeah. Because there's no tourists in Lebanon. Nobody goes to Lebanon. And that, again, is a contrast to what it used to be in the 1960s, where it was the tourist hub of the Mediterranean. So it's part of the hippie trail as well. It's an extraordinary place. It's a really, really extraordinary place. But as you drive from Ashrafia, the Christian area, so you get into a little minibus, right?

8:36And you drive from Ashrafia, then down towards south Beirut, and then into the Beka Valley. And what you see is every time there's an ethnic change in the neighborhoods, different banners announce where you're going. So, for example, as you go through the Sunni area, there will be massive, big, big posters of MBS. Saudi Arabia support the Sunnis. And then you go through a Palestinian area, which is a Palestinian refugee camp. Even though the Palestinians have been there for years, they still live in refugee camps. then you see massive big posters of Yasser Arafat. Yeah. Then as you go in, fascinating.

9:17Still, still. Yasser is still very much the sort of deification. And, of course, our friend Sinwar, Yaya Sinwar of Hamas. Yeah. Right? And then you go into the Shia areas, and what you will see is massive posters of Putin. Right, okay. And Ali Khamenei, who was just killed last week. Yeah. Because Putin, of course, supports Iran. Yeah. Iran supports the Shia. The Shia are supported by Hezbollah. And so you know you're in a Hezbollah area because you see massive big posters of Vladimir Putin in the middle of Lebanon. It's bonkers. Bonkers.

9:54David McWilliams: And then you go to the Druze area and you see big posters of a guy called Wali Jumlat, who was their main leader, who still is their main leader. Yeah. And then you arrive at the Syrian border. Yeah. Just tell me a little bit about the Druze. So the Druze are an ancient community. They are a Muslim community, an offshit, Muslim adjacent religion. Right. Are they Shia? They are. No, they're Druze. They're Druze. The Druze are a complete identity on their own. They live in Lebanon and in Israel. The Druze in Lebanon don't particularly like the Druze in Israel because the Druze in Israel have become Israeli.

10:31Right. And they are the people who live on the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights were taken by the Israelis from the Syrians in the 1967 war. The Druze are also very prominent in the IDF. They have become very, very expert soldiers for the Israelis. So the Druze in Lebanon are a little bit upset with the Druze in Israel because the Druze in Israel have decided... Well, the reason they have is because they're quite afraid of other Arabs and other Muslims. So the other Muslims don't regard the Druze as being their brothers. Right. So the Druze are kind of caught in, should we be friendly to the Jews in order for the Jews to protect us from the Palestinians?

11:17David McWilliams: Because historically, the Palestinians haven't been that friendly to the Jews. So it's like minority communities always have to make very hard decisions. Because it's like, who's my enemy's enemy? Who's going to protect us, etc.? So the Druze in northern Israel are very active in the IDF. And they tend to be translators because they speak Arabic. and they tend to be used extensively by the IDF in infiltration of the Palestinians because the Druze are Arabic speakers. Are they respected by the IDF and the Israelis? I couldn't tell you. I don't know much about the internal politics of the IDF, but I think they are.

11:52I think they very much are. I think they're very much seen as Israelis. But the Druze in Lebanon are also a minority community that have been constantly negotiating with the Maronite Christians who are the dominant Christian sect the Greek Orthodox who are there, the Catholics who are there, the Protestants who are there. I mean, there's an amazing amount of different Christian offshoots in Lebanon, number one. And then, of course, you have the Sunni Muslims who live in the center of Lebanon and the south of Lebanon, you have the Shia. And the Shia, of course, are Hezbollah. Yeah, yeah. So you've got all these things.

12:30But what I'm saying is that one drive, it's only about three quarters of an hour because Lebanon's a small country. It's tiny. It's tiny. That one drive gives you the arc of politics, economics, geostrategy of the Middle East, because Lebanon has been the country that has suffered most. Yes, it has.

12:50David McWilliams: Suffered most for a variety of reasons. We might even do a whole podcast on Lebanon, John, itself, because it is so fascinating. And now it is being pulverized again by the IDF or the Israeli Air Force who are bombing southern Beirut. And southern Beirut is where the Palestinians who were kicked out of Israel in the 40s and 50s, many of them went first to Jordan. And then the Jordanians didn't welcome them. And they went to Lebanon. And the PLO set up in Lebanon. And that was the basis for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which kicked off a whole host of problems for the Americans, which we're going to talk about in this particular podcast.

13:35No wonder, like, I mean, there's many reasons for the anger building in the Middle East and in that part of the Middle East, but particularly in southern Lebanon with those guys. Because they have been, since 1940s, been kicked out of Israel. Of course, it's just going to foment and foment. But the Lebanese Christians can't stand them. Yeah, I mean, they're hated from all angles. Well, let's go in. So we mentioned Hezbollah. Hezbollah are client operation of Iran. This brings us back to Iran. So we have the 1978 revolution, the 1979 American hostages, you might remember that, Jimmy Carter, total disaster for the Americans.

14:17David McWilliams: They got it so wrong. They got it so wrong. So basically you have, Iran goes from being America's client state of America under the Shah, to about a month later, literally, describing America as the great Satan. So the Americans think, okay, we have lost Iran. The British, as you said, were much more worried about the amount of money they were losing. The Americans were much more worried about the strategic loss of Iran because their fear was that Iran unmoored would allow the Soviets fill the vacuum. But of course, the mullahs were not interested in the Soviets because the mullahs are religious.

14:55The Soviets were atheists. But what did the Iranian revolution trigger? It triggered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the northern border. So the Soviets thought, okay, hold on a second. Into this vacuum, we are going to position ourselves. And they took over, invaded Afghanistan. And this was regarded as pretty much the Soviets going into their backyard. yard. Everyone thought they were going to occupy it. They thought they were going to win. And the first couple of years, they did. They basically imposed a sort of a puppet Soviet government, a communist government. Everything was fine. And then the Americans realized, hold on a second, we've lost Iran.

15:41We've lost Afghanistan now.

15:43David McWilliams: Our only mate is Pakistan. So Pakistan was a nuclear power, pro-American nuclear power, and our other mate is Turkey. So what are we going to do? and they said, let us do the following. Let us create a paramilitary force in Afghanistan. Yeah. We will finance them through Pakistan and we don't really care who they are. And who they were was the Musha Hadin. Yeah. And the Musha Hadin means actually blokes who are into jihad. Yeah. Musha Hadin. Okay, that's a title. It's like a Dunleary boot boy gang from the 70s. quarter boys blokes who are into jihad that's our gang but like the the miscalculation and the misunderstanding is phenomenal can I just tell you one thing you know back to BBC World Service when I was in World Service Afghanistan the Darien Pashto service was part of my remit I know it's fascinating it was brilliant but one of the old fellas there used to tell me that when the Russians had invaded Afghanistan all the Mujahideen lads up in the mountains would listen, be listening to the World Service.

16:55And every morning they'd get up and do their prayers and they'd have a bit of brekkie or whatever they did. And they'd wait for the morning news program from the World Service. From London. Which always started with, dar London day. And once they heard that, they charged down the mountain. Oh, that was the signal. That was the signal. Cool. Hilarious.

17:16David McWilliams: Dar London day. So these guys, when they weren't listening to you, John, They were fermenting anti-Soviet attacks all the time. Now, of course, the Mujahideen did something that hadn't been done before. It was a call to arms for all Muslims who were into fighting the infidel. And one of those Muslims was a man called Osama bin Laden. And Osama bin Laden was not only a fighter, but of course the American money was channeled to the Mujahideen via Pakistan and via Saudi Arabia. And Osama bin Laden was from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, so he was incredibly well connected. So he was actually a financial bag man in the beginning.

18:04Yeah. Giving money to the Mujahideen who were, through the 1980s, attacking the Soviets at the behest of the Americans.

18:12David McWilliams: So still the American obsession is Russia, right? It's not the various ethnicities. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the Iranians decided in the 1980s, in the early 1980s, to support Hezbollah. Now you think Musha Adin is the blokes who like a bit of jihad? Hezbollah means the party of God. Yeah. So this is what you're dealing with, right? Yeah, yeah. And the party of God, Hezbollah, were in South Lebanon. So why were they in South Lebanon? They're in South Lebanon because they are Shia Muslims and the Iranians are Shia Muslims. The minority sect within the Muslim tribe, the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni Muslims.

18:58But these are Shia Muslims. The actual distinction is theological, is interpretations of Muhammad and Muhammad's sons.

19:06David McWilliams: We don't have to go into it. Think of it Catholic Protestants. Broad Christian church, different interpretations, right? So Hezbollah in South Lebanon are actively fermenting anti-Israeli sentiment, right? They are also arming the Palestinians in Lebanon, the PLO. They're in a tacit arrangement, the Hezbollah and PLO. the Israelis decide under Ariel Sharon in 1982 to invade Lebanon, to expunge the PLO out of Lebanon, out of Beirut, to protect what the Israelis would say their northern border. This opens up a whole chasm because, of course, who goes into Lebanon in the civil war? American Marines.

19:56Allegedly keeping the peace. Yes, of course. And, of course, Hezbollah has probably its most glorious day when they bomb the American embassy and American marine barracks and they killed 242 American marines. So suddenly then the Americans are not only on a collision course with Iran but they're on a revenge course in the last 40 years against Hezbollah. Right? And can I just stop there? Prior to this, it was, as you said, it was primarily an anti-Russian action but now this had become like a clash of civilizations and a clash of religions at this stage. So it became anti-Muslim. Because the Iranians had upped the ante and said the Americans are the great Satan, the Americans figured, well, how are we going to deal with this?

20:46Now, the Americans are not dumb. I know people think they are. They double deal. They deal all sorts of divide and conquer strategies. One of the divide and conquer strategies was, of course, a man called Saddam Hussein. Yeah. So Saddam Hussein is sitting there. he is the leader of Iraq. Yeah. The Americans... And Sunni. And Sunni, and a very secular, very anti-religious guy. Yeah. Hated religious factions because he understood that there was a massive Shia minority in Iraq. Yeah. And he didn't want them to become infected by this sort of fundamentalism. So what he does is he decides, because Iran is incredibly weakened now because of the revolution, because they are under sanctions because they have no mates.

21:35They're neither with the Soviets nor are they with the Americans. They are weak. And he starts the Iran-Iraq war. This war went on for eight years. Yeah. Between Iran and Iraq and very much like the Ukraine-Russian war was in effect like the First World War. Neither side really made any particular... And what was interesting about that at the time as far as I remember was not reported on widely. it was you get a little blip of it now and then so no one really understood the ins and outs of well and nobody really cared nobody really cared now the interesting remember we mentioned Nasser in the last episode yeah and the guy in Suez who was the leader of Pan-Arabism Saddam Hussein decided that he would take up that mantle so he was the leader of the Ba 'ath party which was a socialist party yeah which was related to the Assads in Syria which was related to the Ba 'ath Party in Egypt.

22:31And he said, I'm going to be the boss of the Arabs. And how I'm going to show this is we're going to attack the infidel Persians, who are not only not Arabs, but they're Shia Muslims, right? So that war is going on. The Americans are quite happy to supply Iraq with weapons. He's basically America's man. But then something very odd happens. The Americans decide also, through the back door, to start selling arms via Israel to Iran, which is an extraordinary thing. Why was that? Because they decided that if they couldn't determine who was going to be the boss man, at least they'd have a dog in the fight.

23:13Right. So they're just back in both horses. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the classic old colonialist strategy. Yeah. Let's back the two classes of natives

23:22David McWilliams: and see which native actually turns up, right? but they got caught in the Iran-Contra affair. You might remember Oliver North. I do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Little tributary, right? So the Americans start selling arms to the Iranians. Yeah. Highly secretive. Oliver North was the man in the middle of it. They're selling arms to the Iranians through Israeli arms dealers. Yeah. Right, so imagine how weird this is. And Oliver North was Reagan's guy. Oliver North was Reagan's guy, But they were taking the money that the Iranians paid the Israelis. Yeah. And that money went to America. And that money was diverted to the Contras in Nicaragua, who were fighting the Sandinistas, who were supported by the Soviets.

24:09David McWilliams: So it's all this great Cold War. And of course, they got rumbled. It's that the paranoia against Russia was just phenomenal. Phenomenal. Right. So everything is seen through the CIA. I mean, the CIA, back to Stuart Copeland's dad, right? The CIA are obsessed with commies, like Lee Harvey Oswald, all this sort of stuff, right? Who killed Kennedy? We're in the realms of the conspiracy theory, John, right? Reds under the bed. Reds under the bed. The only good red is a dead red. All that good. Joe McCarthy, one of the greatest Irish Americans. What do we give America? Ronny Reagan, Joe McCarthy, all the anti-communist people.

24:45David McWilliams: Anyway, it's true, most of the anti-communist people were Irish Americans. We did not cover ourselves in glory. But shh. Yeah, exactly. Shh. Right. So what we have, we have Iraq is involved in a war against Iran. Saddam is the American man. The Americans are in Lebanon. Hezbollah are being supported by Iran. Yeah. Israel has just invaded Lebanon. Yeah. Massacres all over the place. Ariel Sharon being the main military commander for the Israelis, right? Now, what does Saddam do? Saddam - Builds a palace or two? Builds a palace in a lovely, yeah, yeah. He'd have a lovely cinema room. Yes. To Dar es Saddam.

25:30But Saddam gets paranoid rightly because he realizes, hold on a second, the Americans are backing the Iranians. Yeah. So Saddam becomes increasingly paranoid and anti-American. And this inflects his worldview. And he believes that the only way in which he can secure Iraq's potential is to invade Kuwait. Right. And amazingly, the Americans actually gave Saddam the green light initially to invade Kuwait, which is amazing. So Saddam doesn't want to get into a scrap of the Americans, right? He doesn't like them, but he gambles that they won't actually defend Kuwait. And the reason he gambles is that the ambassador, the American ambassador to Baghdad, kind of gives him a reassurance.

26:28And I'm going to quote you the text. Saddam asks his foreign minister, a guy called Tariq Aziz, to figure out what the Americans will do. And he says, we're going to take back the waterways in North Kuwait. And he says, what is the United States' opinion on this? This is a quote. This is all in telegrams. And the Americans come back, the ambassador. She's a woman called April Glaspy. She's the American ambassador to Iraq. And when Saddam says, what is the American opinion of this? She replies, we have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait, replied the ambassador.

27:07David McWilliams: She went on to clarify what she meant. She said, Secretary of State James Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction first given to Iraq in the 1960s that Kuwait and the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. Saddam, therefore, was given the green light. And the following week in August of 1990, he invades Kuwait. Why did they take that position, given the fact that Kuwait is a huge oil producer? and would affect the global oil price. It is unbelievable why they took that decision and that position. What it did do is it signaled to Saddam, I'm going to get away with this. Yeah. But of course, once the invasion of Kuwait happened, George Herbert Bush, the old Bush senior, who was, of course, John originally, the head of the CIA.

28:00David McWilliams: Yes, of course he was. Okay, we're back to the CIA, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He changed his mind and said, we're going to go in, we're going to create a coalition, and we're going to eject Saddam from this. But... And did that have something to do with the oil price? It had to do with the reaction. The oil price, they realized then, and fascinating, the Americans switched then from talking about regimes and different regimes to talking about the American interest, which was oil, and only oil. And of course we know that although they defeated Saddam, they didn't actually take Baghdad. They stopped.

28:36Do you remember that? Yeah. They put in no-fly zones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is all going on in the 1990s. Iran is quietened in a way. The war has stopped with Iraq. Iraq involves itself in Kuwait. Kuwait precipitates a global coalition. Saddam is persona non grata. All the while, what is happening in Palestine, John? Well, I want to get to that. But first, I want to do this. Fair enough.

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31:15Okay, Mac. Middle East in the 1990s. Yes. Where are we now?

31:21David McWilliams: This is when David McWilliams arrives in Israel. Yes. Well, then it all changes. Well, then it all changes. It all changes, okay? As, bizarrely, the economist for a large Swiss bank in the region. I mean, how much spoofology was going on there? Or al-fresco spoofology, right? The FOPs arrived. The FOPs arrived in Tel Aviv in Ramat Gan, which was an Iraqi Jewish colony. Right, okay. So when I arrived, I had no idea, and I arrived in Little Baghdad. They're all Iraqis. Wide-eyed. Wide-eyed. and how is, here I am. Anyway, it was a fascinating time. So why is this time important? It's because in the 1980s, the late 1980s, we have the first intifada.

32:08So the first intifada is an uprising of the Palestinians, largely in the West Bank, not so much Gaza, in the West Bank and Jerusalem. They are absolutely pissed off with the fact that they have been occupied since 1967. They are absolutely frustrated at the fact that since 1967, about 200 ,000 Israeli settlers have begun to occupy their land in the West Bank against all UN regulations and all UN norms. Eastern Jerusalem is being settled by Israeli settlers. And gradually, but progressively, the Green Line, which was the distinction between the West Bank and Israel, becomes a non-event in the sense that Israelis continue to expand into Palestinian territory.

32:58At the same time, because Palestinians are quite well-educated. So the Palestinians were by far and away the most educated Arab people in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe as a result, this could be controversial, of their large Christian element and the Christians were richer and better educated than the Muslims in the area. Because during the Ottoman Empire, the Christians managed to play quite a clever game with the Ottomans. But be that as it may, you have an educated Palestinian class. They are disenfranchised. They're living in the West Bank. The Israelis are occupying them. I've been there.

33:41Anybody who's been in Palestine will know the way the Israelis treat the average Palestinian is appalling. It's absolutely appalling. And I'm talking even back then in the 90s, you'd get on a bus and the Israeli soldiers would be aggressive and violent and all that sort of stuff. But they see them as second-class citizens. It's constant aggression. So obviously the Palestinians, the Palestinian street explodes in the First Intifada. And the First Intifada, you might just Google it.

34:08David McWilliams: If you're listening to this and you're of a certain age, you don't remember these stuff, just Google the First Intifada. The reaction to the First Intifada is interesting. The Israelis realize under Rabin, we have to make peace here. So there is a cohort of Israeli labor politicians. Now, this is important because our friend Bibi is a member of the Likud Party. The Labor Party in Israel, very briefly, are basically the establishment of Israel. They're the people who established the Israeli state. They are Kayyem Herzog, these people. They are Ashkenazi Jews, largely intellectuals, largely from Eastern Europe.

34:50Gold in my ear is probably the one that people remember the female prime minister of Israel. They come from a socialist tradition in the main. They come from kibbutz tradition. And they were saying, look, we need to make peace with the Palestinians. We can't have this intifada going on. They have a right. And it's the Labour Party that brought the Oslo Accords to the table in 1994. And they said, we have got a peace deal with Yasser Arafat. And this is it. It's the two-state solution. All the stuff that we now know is mainstream. But this was brought by the Labour Party in response to the Intifada.

35:28Can I just ask you, like, all the way up till now, obviously Israel was a major player in the area. But in the 1990s, it really kind of cemented its position. It cemented its position. and a lot of this to do with internal American politics. So the 1990s is the decade after Reagan's decade. What happens in Reagan is the Republican Party shifts to the right and becomes captured by evangelical Christians. And evangelical Christians in America have a bizarre relationship with Israel. It's a biblical relationship. So suddenly the relationship between secular Israeli Labour Party and the Democratic Party, which would have been fused through the Jewish lobby in America, which would have been very strong and quite pro-Israeli, but not always pro-Israeli, quite pro-Israeli.

36:23That gets replaced by an evangelical idea where Israel becomes messianic for Christian Americans, right? And therefore the Israeli footprint begins to be seen all over American politics. It's also the beginning of a thing called AIPAC, the American Israeli Parliamentary Committee, which is the world's most ferocious lobby group. Now, typically, AIPAC is related to the Likud party, not the Labour party. Right. The Likud party, just very briefly, comes from a guy called Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was a Jewish guy from Odessa, and he set up the Likud party. It got into power in the late 1970s for the first time ever under a guy called Menachem Begin.

37:11Yeah. Menachem Begin, for an Irish audience, will be interesting because his nom de plume, his nom de guerre, that he had during the revolution, the revolt, the Israeli revolt against the British

37:22David McWilliams: in Palestine was Michael Collins. Really? He was a mass fan of Michael Collins. Really? Wow. So the Israeli separatists against the British took the blueprint of guerrilla warfare in Ireland in the 1920s as their roadmap to independence. So there's a lot of weird things going on. There's a lot of weird things. A lot of Irish nationalist Israeli haters now would probably not like to hear this. But in actual fact, the most nationalist of all the Israelis, the ancestor of Bibi, Menachem Begin, was a big fan of Michael Collins. So there we are. And actually, just from an evangelical perspective, if you want to hear how they really think about Israel, just listen to the American ambassador to Israel, the current American ambassador to Israel, who's your man, Mike Huckabee, who's absolutely out and out evangelical.

38:15because they believe the end of days will occur in Sumeria. In the biblical lands, yeah. Yeah, and the actual valley of Armageddon. Yeah, so all that stuff. So that's just a little sidebar. So what we're seeing is two things. One is the evangelical. The second is the arrival of Likud, which are a right-wing party. And the third is the arrival of a character called Benjamin Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahu is the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in the Israeli diplomatic service. He's very suave. He's very, very polished. He's very mendacious. He's a young man, but he has got star quality.

39:01No, he's a very dark fucker, right? But he has star quality in Israel. Why? Because you might have heard of something called the raid on Entebbe.

39:10David McWilliams: Yes. Do you remember the raid on Atembe? 1975. Yeah, Uganda. Idi Amin. Yeah. So Idi Amin allows PLO terrorists safe passage after they hijack an Israeli plane. Yeah, which was all the rage at the time, hijacking planes. Hijacking planes. In fact, I'm reading a book at the moment called The Revolutionists, which is going to explain, I'm going to do a podcast on it, the relationship between the hard left Marxist liberation Europeans and Islamic terrorism. how the left in Europe became allied to the most right-wing Islamic people. Right, okay. Which is why the Irish left are protesting in favour of the Iranian regime, which makes no sense, right?

39:55David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we'll come back to that. So the PLO, I think it was the Liberation Front of Palestine, I can't remember, which is People's Front of Judea stuff, right? Okay, it's the INLA, the IPLO, the Real IRA, all that sort of stuff, right? But Idi Amin want to be big balls on the international stage. I'll give you, say, Favon. So all the cameras of the world are focused on him. The Israelis put together a sort of a special forces team. They go in, they rescue. They lose one commander whose name was Johnny Netanyahu, who was Bibi Netanyahu's older brother. And Johnny Netanyahu becomes a superstar in Israel.

40:34You know, young, good-looking, athletic, heroic, and he gets shot protecting old Jewish people.

40:42David McWilliams: Bibi, being ever the cynic, says, I might not necessarily be the hero, but I can actually get some grace on the back of this. So Bibi's always bigging up the Netanyahu name, but we know the Netanyahu name was made up because the real name is the Polish name. Oh, okay. Because what happened was when the Polish immigrants came to Israel, They decided, because they didn't want to be called Glickstein, Greenberg, Flickstein, all those Yiddish names, they adopted Hebrew names. They Hebrewized all their surnames. Okay, yeah. And Netanyahu comes from the city Netanya, which is a city in Israel. Right.

41:17David McWilliams: But it's only a make-y-uppy name. Right, okay, okay. Because he's actually Polish. He's not Israeli at all. Yeah, yeah. He's not a Sabra. Sabra, the original Jews in Israel. He's from somewhere in Poland. Anyway, but my point is, he arrives in 1996. So why is this important? Because the man who made peace with the Arabs, Yitzhak Rabin, is murdered by an Israeli fanatic in 1995 when I was there. Oh, you were there at the time? Yes. In 1996, Bibi arrives as head of the Likud party, and he's still in power now. He has been in power on and off since 1996, but he has always been a presence, a malignant, dark presence at the core of Israeli politics.

42:04And he will do anything to stay in power, as we know. In fact, many people would say that the reaction to October 7th has simply been an exercise in keeping Bibi out of court where he is being charged with corruption and taking gifts and all this sort of stuff. So all the while, John, you have Bibi gets in. He is instrumental in tearing up the Oslo Accords. He frustrates the Palestinians at every juncture. He basically says, we're not going to do this, right? We don't need to do this. We've got American support. There's a second intifada in 2000. The second intifada goes on to 2004. It sets up the leadership of the Palestinians, a guy called Marwan Barghouti who is in prison at the moment may well be the only man who can bring peace.

42:59He is like the Nelson Mandela of the Palestinians but he's still in an Israeli prison. And he's not going to get out when Bibi's in. Not going to get out but I would say they have to let him out because he's the only man that can actually do the deal on the part of the Palestinians. He's the only man that the Palestinians respect. He's the only man that even Hamas respect. Yeah. So what we have we're in the late 90s we're talking about The Intifada, we're talking about Palestine. We had mentioned a chap called Osama bin Laden a couple of minutes ago. Osama bin Laden orchestrates a thing called the Twin Towers.

43:32Remember that one? I do, yeah. Okay, the Twin Towers leads the Americans to decide that they're going to shore up the Middle East. What does that mean? They're going to get rid of Saddam. There's no evidence, no connection between Saddam and the Twin Towers at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

43:46David McWilliams: But they go into Afghanistan, they get rid of the Taliban. Mullah Omar, you might remember, who was a very good man on a motorbike. He's always escaping on motorbikes. He's a slightly Benny Hill sort of character. But the war in Iraq, precipitated by the Twin Towers, precipitated by Osama bin Laden, precipitated the Mujahideen. These are all the American. His calculations are legendary. And then that brings us up to 2006, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the emergence of Hamas. So speaking of Hamas, Hamas come on the scene in 2006. The Israelis pull out of Gaza as part of the Oslo Accords. And they say, okay, we're gone.

44:22People forget that. The Israelis weren't occupying Gaza for a long time. Fatah, which is the... No, but they still had controlled borders. They controlled the borders. They controlled the borders. But what happened is there is an insurrection within the Palestinian movement. So the PLO, Yasser Arafat, turns into Fatah, which are the Democratic-elected Palestinian Authority, the PA, the Palestinian Authority. Yeah. Within the Palestinians, there is a perception that they have become Israeli patsies. Right. Basically, all they're doing is they're basically implementing Israeli policy in the West Bank.

44:58Were they? Do you think? I think they probably were. Yeah, I think they probably were. I think it suited the Israelis. Had the Israelis not been led by someone like Bibi, this wouldn't have happened. But Bibi's very happy for the Palestinians to be divided and to be at each other's throats. So emerges a movement called Hamas. And Hamas win an election. in Gaza in 2006, a free and fair election, and they never have another one. So these are not democratic people, right? And of course what they do is they kill their opponents, the Fatah, and they take over Gaza. And who is calling the shots? A guy called Yahya Sinwar from prison, which the Israelis release as part of a prisoner exchange subsequently, and he goes on to orchestrate the October 7th attacks on those Israeli settlements over the border.

45:52But during this period, between about 2006 and 2023, before October 7th, what I distinctly got the impression was that the Israelis had achieved what they wanted to achieve, the right wing, the liquid Israelis, which was basically neutralizing Palestine as a global issue. So although there was occupation in the West Bank, although the number of settlers were from 200 ,000 to 700 ,000 in the West Bank, there was a perception that the Arabs had given up on the Palestinians. And this was the Abraham Accords. This was the idea of normalization of relations between Israel and UEA. First of all, Israel and Egypt in 1977, then Israel and Jordan, then Israel and the UEA.

46:45And the whole prize was the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia under MBS. Yeah. Right? Now, that freaked out the Iranians because the Iranians were back in Hezbollah, number one. The background noise, of course, is the invasion of Iraq, 2003. The real winners in the invasion of Iraq are the Iranians because they managed to get a Shia leader in Iraq put in place. They also managed to get their guy Assad in place in Syria. Yeah. They had the Hezbollah in South Lebanon. So they had a Shia arc all the way from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Yeah. Any normalization of relations between the Israelis and the Saudis was a red rag to the Iranians.

47:40So it is thought that the reason Hamas attacked Israel on October the 7th was to derail the process whereby the Israelis and Saudis were actually normalizing relations. because that would have meant that the Palestinians would have no sponsor except Iran. And the Palestinians, Hamas understood that Iran was still an enemy of America, whereas, and they would therefore be isolated. And so in order to put the Palestinian question back on the international media, the calculation of Sinwar, I think, was that they would strike into Israel, the Israelis would strike back but the Americans and public opinion in the West as they saw the mounting casualties and death and destruction of Palestinians would force the Israelis to stop and then the Palestinians would have achieved themselves being back in the news and the Israelis would have lost popular support and the Israelis would have stopped.

48:50I don't think Sinwar's... Another miscalculation. Massive miscalculation. I mean, there are other kind of conspiracy theories around Israel knew this was going to happen and all that kind of stuff. But I think... The whole thing is the fog of war. The fog of war. But I think the miscalculation was enormous. Number one, the Palestinian homeland in Gaza has been totally destroyed. Yeah, yeah. Number two, Assad, their sponsor, is gone. Yeah. Right? Syria has changed sides, shifted sides. Syria is now, in effect, a ward of Turkey and Turkey's in NATO. Hezbollah have been destroyed in South Lebanon.

49:33Hamas have been destroyed in Gaza. Iran has been pulverized. And the Israelis are close to doing that deal with the Saudis. Yeah. So I think, you know, when I was in Serbia the other day, when I was on the Gavriel Princip street, right? I thought to myself, you know, Yaya Sinwar is the Gavriel Princip of the Palestinians. Right, yeah. Starts a war with a spectacular act intending to set off a whole series of broadly positive ramifications for the Palestinians. And it's turned out to be absolutely appalling in the same way as Princip, didn't realize that the Austrians would actually turn a local war into the First World War.

50:25Sinwar didn't realize that what he was dealing with is this Israeli-American axis, which we now know, as of this week, John, will stop at nothing to get their way. And in effect, you know, what Sinwar has done, he poked a dog. They believed that dog's bark was going to be worse than its bite. And I suspect that was a dreadful miscalculation. And that's where we are right now. Live there.

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