Douglas Murray: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, let’s steelman the criticism of Netanyahu. And then steelman, the case for him that he’s the right leader actually. Well, the most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is that the 7th happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1933, Golda Meir who is very distinguished prime minister of Israel, and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch. And I would’ve thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel would always hold that against him. One of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the 7th because of the judicial reforms. I think there’s a strong case for the judicial reforms in Israel, but it’s a niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and its government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms, and it was very divisive and on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend. There were protests. And the police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say violent. Well, sometimes violent and you could say, “Well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, might you stop?” There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the 7th was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population. Significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, “Good. Now is the time.” In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier when he was in prison in Israel was this thing, “One day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll strike.” Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time to strike. There’s an argument against that which is that the 7th was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, “Look, your nation was divided. Don’t push through anymore on that.” There’s lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. There were critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah. Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. There’s them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I’ve interviewed, I think every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much, and I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them that wouldn’t have responded similarly to the 7th of October to the way he has. Okay. So that’s inside Israel. Outside of Israel, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world. Just the raw quantity. Relative, he’s a loved by a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that… there’s a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.…

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