Douglas Murray: evaluation

Transcript context

…You commit that once. I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used. It’s very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this. But everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil. The things that happened at the Nova Party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because first of all, it’s a party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger might have been at. And so everyone knows the world of a dance party in all night raving in the desert to commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing. The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just massacring them and raping them. I mean, I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived, but I mean, it’s beyond belief of almost anything else I’ve covered in war. And it’s because it seems so… I mean, an army facing another army is one thing. A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing. A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance unarmed and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere. So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of Palestinians and Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response? Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there on the first time a couple of days early into the ground invasion when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south deeper into Gaza and to try to stop the Hamas leadership from making it south. It actually didn’t really work because they’d already got a lot of the hostages south. It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way… In the end, dragged all the way in any way. But, yes, and I mean watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests, checked for particularly young men of military age. I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been miss governing the place that they lived in. ook at this tide of human misery and you think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been miss governing the place that they lived in. And of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because of the fact that they had elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things obviously is that a lot of people like to say, and it’s true, of course, this didn’t all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th. It wasn’t like they were forced to liberate themselves or something that some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict of course goes back a lot earlier. But you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become interestingly rebranded, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there is one absolutely essential issue to this which cannot be forgotten, which is do the Palestinians want a state or do they want to destroy the Jewish state? And if they want to destroy the Jewish state as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them. If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots to do it, one of which is Gaza post 2005. But they’ve never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s the catastrophe for the Palestinians.…

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