History’s Case for Trump’s Gaza Plan - with Andrew Roberts
Following a gut-wrenching 48 hours for the Bibas family and for all of us, six living hostages were released from Gaza today, including two who had been held there not for a year, but a decade. Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, and Tal Shoham were abducted on October 7, 2023. Avera Mengistu, an Ethiopian-Israeli, and Hisham al-Sayed, an Israeli Arab, had crossed into Gaza in 2014 and 2015, and were then taken hostage by Hamas.
Hamas’s decision to release more living hostages than originally planned today is believed – according to our Israeli sources – to be a response to a sustained American pressure campaign. Part of that pressure includes President Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to take control of Gaza and relocate its entire population.
Two weeks since its unveiling, Trump’s Gaza proposal has continued to drive headlines and debate around the world. Though that proposal is already impacting the policy decisions of various stakeholders in Gaza, it is still largely perceived as a shocking, unprecedented idea. For this episode of Call Me Back, we sat down with a historian who argues that Trump’s plan is in fact aligned with the outcome of many modern wars.
Andrew Roberts is a British historian, member of the House of Lords, and the author of 24 books, including the New York Times bestseller, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. In a recent article for the Washington Free Beacon, Roberts writes, “peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated…lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both.”
To read more by Andrew Roberts on this topic, go to the Washington Free Beacon: https://freebeacon.com/israel/the-historical-case-for-trumps-riviera/
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
AR: It tends to be true that the witness of history is almost universal in this, that if you attack your neighbor in an unprovoked sort of surprise attack, and then you subsequently lose the war that happens as a direct response to that, you usually lose both your government and your sovereignty, and very often actually transfers take place that you don't want or support, but which frankly you just have to put up with.
DS: It's 10:00 AM on Saturday, February 22nd here in New York City. It is 5:00 PM on Saturday, February 22nd in Israel, as six hostages have been welcomed back home. There's been a lot of dramatic and excruciating developments over the past 48 hours, so we are doing something we typically do not do which is releasing this episode on Shabbat. We typically try to have a day of rest, even here at call me back, on Shabbat, but there has just been so much happening. We've been getting a ton of questions. We are going to release today, and also because there's all this very intense news, this introduction, my introduction today will be longer than usual, so please bear with us. After a brutal 24 hours for the Bibas family and for all of us, six hostages were released from Gaza today. They are Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, Tal Shoham and Avera Mengistu. A sixth hostage, Hisham Al-Sayed, an Israeli Arab, was spared the humiliating ceremony and was transferred to Israel by the Red Cross later in the day. As all of you know, late Thursday, Israel determined that the body of a woman Hamas had released from Gaza was not, in fact, the body of Shiri Bibas, or the body of any Israeli hostage. On Friday, in an announcement that summoned a new wave of shock and heartbreak, the IDF found that Kfir and Ariel Bibas were not killed in an Israeli airstrike, as Hamas had originally claimed. According to forensic examinations by multiple authorities, the young boys were murdered at the hands of their captors in November of 2023. Kfir was just 10 months old and Ariel was four years old at the time of their murder. And then on Friday, so just yesterday, Hamas handed over the body of what they claimed to be Shiri Bibas. They handed the body over to the International Red Cross. Hours after being transferred to Israeli authorities, Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the Bibas family was from announced that its former resident, Shiri Bibas had been murdered in captivity. To be clear, formal confirmation on the details around Shiri Bibas has not yet been communicated by Israeli government authorities, but we are monitoring that closely. And despite Hamas's overt breach of the ceasefire agreement, today, as I mentioned earlier, Hamas released six Israeli men, the last living hostages, to be released in this first phase of the ceasefire hostage deal. In return, Israel is expected to release some 600 Palestinian prisoners. 50 of them were serving life sentences, and 47 had been re-arrested, and put back into prisons after their release in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit deal in which over a thousand Palestinian prisoners had been released for the one Israeli. Hamas's decision to release more living hostages than originally planned, today, is believed, at least according to our Israeli sources, to be a response to a sustained American pressure campaign from the U.S. administration. Part of that pressure includes President Trump's proposal for the U.S. to take control of Gaza and relocate its entire Palestinian population. In another response to that proposal, Arab leaders met in Saudi Arabia on Friday to develop their own plan for post war Gaza that would serve as an alternative to President Trump's. First time, it seems, that we are actually getting new ideas out of the Arab world and specifically the Sunni Gulf. On Friday the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE and Bahrain, gathered in Riyadh in an attempt to hash out a plan for the future of Gaza in response to President Trump's plan for the U.S to quote take over Gaza, remove its residents and turn Gaza into quote a Riviera. Later that day, President Trump said, and I quote here, “the way to do it is my plan. I think that's the plan that really works. But I'm not forcing it. I'm just going to sit back and recommend it.” Close quote. Now, I think the U.S. press is over interpreting and over reacting to this interview that President Trump gave to Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio on Friday, in which he appeared at least according to some to be backing off his plan. That is not how I heard it. Again, as I've said repeatedly in previous episodes of this podcast, my sense is that President Trump has been putting provocative ideas out there because he's not about to sign up for the same old trajectory that we are currently on. The rebuilding of Gaza, Hamas being left in charge for all practical purposes and a population of some 2 million Gaza Palestinians on Israel's border that are mostly radicalized. Trump was basically saying, here's my idea. You don't like my idea? Show me yours. And while the U.S. President's proposal for Gaza has continued to dominate political conversation in Washington and the Middle East and in European capitals, the historic precedent for this plan has barely been discussed. One would be forgiven for thinking that what he proposed has never happened before. As our guest today is so keenly aware, Trump's idea is in fact nothing new. Andrew Roberts is a British historian and member of the House of Lords. He is the author of an astounding 24 books, including several military histories and biographies. His latest book was co-authored by General David Petraeus and is titled, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Today, we're going to hear from Andrew in a conversation we taped last week. Andrew Roberts on history's case for Trump's Gaza plan. This is call me back. Andrew Roberts, he's the author of an astounding 24 books. I don't know, Andrew, how you managed to bang all these out because these are not quick reads, but you know, I'm in awe. So Andrew Roberts, thank you for coming on the podcast.
AR: Thank you very much indeed. The answer is that I'm very old and I take a lot of time. Some of those books you mentioned, Napoleon took six years, Churchill took four years. That's the, that's how it's done.
DS: And here's my question. And that's not what this podcast is about, but I'm genuinely interested, interested in, I've always, I should also mention that I am a huge fan of your own podcast, uh, Secrets of Statecraft, which I've been on, um, which is a great, uh, history podcast, but my question, I guess, is when you're writing one of these, are you working on the other as well? Because I'm struck by the close proximity between your biography of Napoleon and Churchill, the close proximity in publishing dates.
AR: Uh, you're thinking about the next one, certainly, you're not working on the next one because obviously it takes up all of your time to work on the one you're working on. But you're always in those extra moments during the day, you're always thinking about the next one. Yeah.
DS: Okay. Well, seaking of a topic that we hope people are thinking about, which is the, um, as I said, the historic precedent for President Trump's idea that I know frustration of yours, there's such a lack of understanding and basic knowledge of history of among so many people who comment on these news developments and current events that we want to take a step back and go through that history. So you published this piece, which we'll link to in the Washington Free Beacon outlining these historical precedents, uh, for what President Trump is recommending, uh, for Gaza. So I guess the first question is, how would you compare how Hamas and the Palestinian population in Gaza finds itself in terms of the choices and options before it, after having started this war on Israel's border. And now the war is, you know, winding down and ending, how they think about the choices they have relative to the choices that most countries or societies that start wars find themselves in.
AR: I think that what President Trump essentially was saying was two things. Firstly, that, um, the sovereignty, the choice of destiny of the Palestinian people had, uh, essentially been transferred out of their hands and that he and Israel and other players in the region have, um, the right to essentially override Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza in so much as it's ever existed in the first place. And the second thing, of course, that he talked about was population transfers and and huge, um, essentially would be mass deportations. And the assumption of, uh, of most of the response to that globally has been, um, a surprising one in my view as an historian, which is that the Palestinians retain their sovereignty despite their actions on the 7th of October, and that no deportations can take place without their active approval. And actually, if you look into the past, certainly the past 130 years or so, that has not been the case. It tends to be true that the witness of history is almost universal in this, that if you attack your neighbor in an unprovoked sort of surprise attack, and then you subsequently lose the war that, uh, happens as a direct response to that, you actually, usually, lose both your government and your sovereignty, and very often, actually transfers take place that you don't want or support, but which frankly you just have to put up with. So that's really all my article was about. It was taking the reader chronologically through ten or so examples. And frankly, if I'd had the space, I could have given another, certainly five or six. Readers have been sending me emails saying, what about, you know, Greece and Turkey in the 1920s? Yeah, actually that would also have been an extremely good, um, way of, uh, of reinforcing the point that mass deportations and population transfers do take place. They're not very nice things. No one's happy with them. It's not a, uh, particularly pleasant thing to have happen, but very often, actually, it does alter the, uh, the whole terms of reference of the, of the future. And it does bring peace.
DS: When I read your piece and I reached out to you, I thought the most important thing we could do is literally just go through some of the examples, because I really don't think most people understand what happened in each of these examples and I want to go in reverse order. So the most recent one I think was, or one of the most recent ones, was what happened to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. You can just describe briefly like what happened, meaning how the war started and how the war ended in terms of comparing it to this situation we're discussing.
AR: When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and communism came to an end in Eastern Europe between then and the early 1990s, you had Yugoslavia essentially collapse as an integral nation state, and the various tribal and ethnic groupings there fell out with one another, a huge, essentially, civil war broke out and the Serbs invaded Bosnia, and lost ultimately, because NATO bombed them. And that was the point at which the Serbs lost the control that they had and essentially also lost their control over their own destiny as a sovereign people, and had to put up with population transfers that took place at the Dayton Accords in the mid 1990s. It was made much worse by the fact that the Serbs had carried out an appalling, monstrous massacre at Srebrenica in the July of 1995, where they killed 8,000 innocent Bosnians. And so, uh, which obviously has overlaps with the, uh, with the monstrous events of the 7th of October, 2023 in Southern Israel. So you have a precedent there, essentially one of many for the loss of sovereignty and for the population transfers.
DS: Okay, so now I want to go back to World War II and post World War II. You talk about the experience of the quote unquote ethnic Germans that were living in Czechoslovakia. So can you talk about their brief history right before World War II, and then how things ended for them at the end of World War II?
AR: Yes, what the Sudeten Germans who made up a majority of a region in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1938 did under their leader Konrad Henlein was essentially to ask Adolf Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia, at least threatened to invade and allow the Sudetens to join the Third Reich. Then, of course, in the March of 1938, only six months later, Hitler invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia and, uh, and fought the Second World War, lost it. And when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia in 1945, huge population transfers took place where the Sudeten Germans were essentially picked up along with lots of others from East Prussia and Silesia and, uh, so on millions of them, and moved hundreds of miles to the west to live in, uh, what was to be Germany. And it was an enormous transfer of population, and the reason that it could be done was because the Sudetens did not have sovereignty. They had fought that war and lost it.
DS: In your piece, you compare the relationship that the Sudeten Nazi leader in Czechoslovakia had with Hitler and Nazi Germany. You compare that relationship to the relationship Yahya Sinwar had with the Islamist regime in Iran.
AR: Oh, yes, absolutely. He was an, he was an acolyte. Uh, he was not a direct puppet in that he didn't just do everything that Hitler wanted. He was trying to encourage Hitler, of course, to go further. And he fitted in perfectly with Hitler's overall plan to bring Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich and bring indeed all Slavs into a sort of slave position to the Aryan race in Southeast Europe. So, so yes, he's almost exactly the same kind of figure. He was admired by Hitler, I think, in the way that, uh, the Iranians used to admire Sinwar. They used him, but he was ultimately the sort of catalyst for what Iran wanted.
DS: And, what was the number of it? Three million Germans had to leave their homes?
AR: If you add all the population transfers that were taking place in that part of Europe in 1945 and 1946, you get to about 14 million.
DS: Okay, but in this particular case, the Sudetenland, I think, and, and the surrounding areas, they embarked on a, on the 300 mile journey westwards, meaning from Czechoslovakia towards Germany, under conditions of extreme deprivation, I'm quoting from the piece here in the Free Beacon, “carrying only what they could carry once they reached Germany, whose new borders were drawn by the victorious allies as they had lost all sovereignty, they had settled and made the best of it.”
AR: Yeah, this was the thing, they were only able and allowed by the Red Army to take what they literally could carry. They were a crushed group of people. So they arrived in Germany totally poverty stricken. However, Germany in the late 1940s, 1950s had an economic miracle taking place. And these were many of the most hardworking, and quite often educated people, who were really willing to, and had to because they were, they had nothing, to make the German economic miracle the success story that it was. And quite a lot of those Sudeten, Germans, and their children and grandchildren today are actually extremely successful and wealthy people. The assumption that you have to say in perpetuity as a poverty stricken refugee is only really true when it's UNRWA that is taking care of you in Gaza. That that isn't the case all over the rest of the world. There are plenty of people. Look at the Vietnamese, for example, in the United States who, many of whom came with nothing and, uh, many of whom have done extremely well here. So I think that, um, it's really a council of despair to assume that if you're forced out of your country, you're going to be poverty stricken for generations. That only really happens if you're kept in your country and treated as a refugee by the United Nations in perpetuity.
DS: Staying with World War II, the Vichy government of France. Can you explain who was the Vichy government of France, how they were elected, I mean, how they came into power, and then the decision they made during the war?
AR: Yeah, they were the elected government of France that were, um, that when the Nazis invaded, they were elected in the pre 1940 elections.
DS: But they chose sides, they chose the Nazi side.
AR: They were allies of Hitler. They were different ministers, you know, felt different things at different times, but they were allies of Hitler. They bombed Gibraltar at one point, the British possession of Gibraltar in Spain. They had a series of fights against the British in Syria. They didn't do much to oppose the Americans when the Americans landed in North Africa in November of 1942, but they stayed in existence as the official government of France until after D Day. And so what you have there is again, the defeat and collapse of Vichy after D Day, and the Allies become the sovereign power, essentially. They chose the Free French under de Gaulle, who had been allies of theirs, to run France. And so you have, in the Vichy experience as well, a group of people who fight and lose a war and therefore don't have the right afterwards to continue as the government.
DS: The Japanese experience. Japan chooses to bomb Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, and therefore draw themselves into the war effectively. Can you describe the consequences of that decision?
AR: Well, again, an unprovoked attack, that obviously leads to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. Actually per capita, the 7th of October was a much higher loss for Israelis than Pearl Harbor was for Americans. But it has the thing that it has in common of being a surprise attack. And what surprise attacks do in history again and again is yes, they give you an immediate tactical advantage, of course they do. And, you know, America lost important warships in Pearl Harbor as well as the 3,000 people. But what they also do is to organize and immediately create a burning sense of resentment amongst the people who have been attacked in this unprovoked way, and you see it again and again in history. The Korean War is another example of the way that this happens, and there are lots of other examples, too. There's a great line by Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the surprising thing in history is that we continue to be surprised by surprise attacks, because they happen so often, you know, every decade has one, pretty much. And so what happened with the Japanese is that when, of course, they ultimately lost, they too lost their sovereignty. Douglas MacArthur was in complete control of Japan until 1952. That's seven years after the war. The Japanese did not have control of their own destiny.
DS: Okay, so you mentioned North Korea, the Korean War. North Korea launched its vicious, unprovoked attack on South Korea in June of 1950. Talk a little bit about that war, the scale of it in terms of how many casualties and how things ended.
AR: Yes. Well, the thing about the Korean war is that the opposition to the unprovoked North Korean attack was led by the United States. Also, it was a United Nations effort, because at that time the Russians did not veto a United Nations response to Korea. And so you had many countries, dozens of countries, taking part, but essentially it was the Americans that led it, including Douglas MacArthur, the commander in chief of the UN forces. Only three months or so after the initial invasion, Douglas MacArthur executed an extremely impressive counterattack at Inchon where the American forces stormed ashore and were able to recapture Seoul and then push on into North Korea. Now there are a lot of military historians that will argue that that was a mistake and it was the thing that triggered the Chinese to, uh, to get involved. The losses, as you mentioned earlier, were enormous. The, uh, Chinese lost a million troops. The North Koreans about 2 million, South Koreans 600,000 or so, 40,000 United States personnel were killed. It was a horrific war. North Koreans did lose some, some territory. And the war still is continuing to this day. But there again, you know, wars do not end in the way that the people who start them think they're going to, otherwise they wouldn't start them.
DS: Yeah, I would add to that. Wars don't end in the way that the people who start them think they will end. And the same should be true for those in the region who give cover to those who start the wars. We had, uh, Amit Segal on recently, who's an Israeli political analyst. And he simply made the point that all these governments in the Middle East think, oh yeah, the Palestinians, Hamas, they can, they can do this, they can do that. And everything will just go back to the way it was before they started the war. And we'll continue providing support for them and we'll rebuild. And we'll just put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and there's no cost, not only for Hamas to starting a war, but there's no cost for these other Arab governments to not do anything to prevent Hamas from coming into power.
AR: Well, of course, and, and the very fact that Hamas has, usefully in a way, helpfully, stated publicly and on the record that, um, as soon as they're in a position to, they will carry out another 7th of October should underline for everybody in the region, but obviously especially Israel and the United States and its allies, that that cannot be allowed to happen, that Hamas cannot and must not be allowed to continue to be the government of Gaza after this whole thing is over. Because if so, all we will be doing is waiting for the next attempt.
DS: I want to stay just taking our little tour here through history. I want to stay closer to the period of the Korean War just before it, which is back to just after World War II and the partition of India in 1947, which resulted in millions of people from that area having to move in big numbers. You will be able to describe the history better than I can. So can you just walk us through that?
AR: Yes, I go into this in some detail in my book, Eminent Churchillians, which is about Lord Mountbatten's transfer of the transfer of power in India from the British to the Indian and Pakistanis, but also the nitty gritty of how the dividing line, the partition line was, was, uh, drawn. And what happened in the immediate hours and, and days, subsequently weeks, uh, once the partition line was made public, and it became clear to millions of people that, uh, Hindus were on the Pakistan side of the border and Muslims were on the Indian side of the border and they were going to be minorities in these two future entities. And also, of course, Sikhs. So essentially 14 million people crossed the border, sometimes in trains, but very often on foot. And were prayed to the organized gangs and militias of the other side, which very often stopped the trains and massacred everybody on board. Modern historians think that it was over half a million. Some say as many as three quarters of a million. A truly terrible thing. And this is what happens when population transfers are not properly policed by the power in charge. In this case, it should have been the British Army that was up there, but the British Army was being withdrawn. So it's a sort of tragic example of how not to do it. When the Germans were transferred, it was in horrible circumstances, as we mentioned earlier, of poverty and destitution, but they weren't being preyed upon by local populations who wanted to massacre them. And that's what did happen on the northwest frontier of India.
DS: Okay. I left out one more recent event, which was the Argentinian military dictatorship suddenly invading the Falkland Islands in April of ‘82.
AR: That's right. Yes. With that one, you have the story really of a fascist dictatorship, a military junta, which decided for its own reasons to do with trying to shore up its own popularity to invade these British islands, the Falkland Islands that are hundreds of miles off the coast of Argentina. And it might have come off actually if British leadership hadn't been shown in the way that it was by Margaret Thatcher, who threw away essentially 30 years of British appeasement of people who incurred on British imperial territory, which essentially is what the Falklands are. And decided to fight back, sent a task force of pretty much the whole of the Royal Navy. Those, uh, 8,000 miles from Britain to the Falklands, and then in a very short and sharp campaign that was over in about two months, expelled the Argentinians from the Falklands and recaptured the islands. And the interesting thing about this is, of course, it was a surprise attack, an unprovoked attack, but also, it led to the Argentinian junta being overthrown by the Argentinians themselves. They had so lost prestige as a result of their defeat that they were forced out of government, and Argentina has been a democracy ever since.
DS: Andrew, one could argue, I'm not arguing this, but one could argue that the war in Gaza is different from all of these examples from history that you are walking us through in one very important sense, and that is there so far is not a clear victor here. Hamas has not been so far thoroughly defeated in the way that the Nazis or the Japanese were in World War II. And so this is 16 months in and Israel is in this temporary ceasefire with Hamas. Israel wants all its hostages back and it wants Hamas gone from power forever. But right now, Hamas is still in Gaza and most of the Palestinian population, it seems, is still terrified of the re-emergence of Hamas. And Hamas wants Israel out of Gaza and wants to re-emerge as the leadership of Gaza. And so they're in this negotiation where each side thinks they're on a pathway to a very different outcome. Israel's calculating, yeah, we can negotiate this deal because we're still going to get all our hostages back and make sure Hamas is gone. And Hamas is saying, yeah, we can negotiate this deal because we get Israel out of Gaza and we re-emerge running Gaza. So in that sense, it feels different from all these other examples because there was something definitive about all these examples, and this one still feels like we don't know the end of the story yet.
AR: That's right. Yes. All of these other examples actually do have a definitive defeat. And that is presently conceived from the way that the Hamas fighters are in control when they hand over the hostages, the way they're celebrating and firing weapons in the air and essentially uniformed troops in the streets. That, that shows that the government of, uh, Hamas is, is still in control. So, the loss of sovereignty that comes about again and again in history doesn't take place until Hamas has been defeated. And of course that's going to be much more difficult to do, also because they're about to get 900 of their most murderous and vicious soldiers returned to them. The assumption that this is a ceasefire that's going to hold forever seems to be ludicrous to me because it won't hold forever. It'll hold for as long as Hamas wants to.
DS: Andrew, you talk about the term ethnic cleansing. I know genocide has an international legal definition, I'm not even sure the term ethnic cleansing is an international legal term, but it's a term that's thrown around a lot. And you can demonstrate cases where ethnic cleansing has actually taken place. You know, we've heard the term thrown around a lot as it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza, and also it's thrown around a lot in terms of Trump's plan for Gaza. So can you walk us through the intellectual dishonesty of how that term is used in the current situation, and compare it to these other cases in history.
AR: The first time it came into popular use was in the early 1990s with regard to what the Serbs were trying to do in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That was where you got the phrase ethnic cleansing for the first time. And it was the forcible flinging out of the Bosnians. And It's happened many times since. Rwanda, of course, on many occasions since. What Trump is certainly not talking about it strikes me. Although it's very difficult with Mr. Trump to be absolutely certain of the exact meanings of all of his phrases, but he's not talking about threatening annihilation if they don't move. He's talking about population transfers of large numbers of people outside Gaza for a better life. And this is one of the ironies of all of this because the international community had for years and years, and especially the United Nations said that Gaza is an open air prison, it's a concentration camp, you know, it's impossible to live there and so on. Blaming this all of course on, on Israel. But now there's a chance of the Gazans actually being moved out of Gaza, according to the Trump plan. Suddenly, instead it's a beloved homeland that it would be a crime ever to allow people to leave. You know, when the actual concentration camps were open, nobody said that they wanted to stay there. Everybody was trying to get out as quickly as they could for obvious reasons. So, that I think underlines the appalling hypocrisy of organizations such as the United Nations and the Secretary General there in trying to have it both ways, essentially. You know, either Gaza is one thing or it's the other, but it can't be both. That’s the essence really with regard to ethnic cleansing. You mentioned genocide. This also, I think, is something that has been wildly misunderstood. There is a specific explanation for what genocide is. And what Israel did in Gaza is certainly not genocide. It doesn't fit into any of the overarching things that you need in order to have genocide, including the desire to wipe out an entire people. Even if you take the numbers that Hamas gives out, which you shouldn't, because every dictatorship always lies about numbers. They always have throughout history. A classic example would be Joseph Goebbels, who claimed that a quarter of a million Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden. No, modern historians put it at between 20 and 25,000. Still an awful lot of people, but nothing like a quarter of a million. That's essentially what the Gazan Health Ministry, which is an offshoot of Hamas, the Hamas propaganda ministry has been doing. It's been lying systematically. They are not going to find 47,000 bodies under the rubble in Gaza. But even if, even if they were to, it would still, once you divide 47,000 by the 2.3 million Palestinian Gazans, still only make a little over 2% of the population. Genocide is something like what happened when Adolf Hitler attempted to wipe out European Jewry between 1939 and 1945, where he killed 50% of European Jews. The idea that in a war 2% of people die, which will of course include, I suspect, the majority of those people will be Hamas fighters who were killed by the IDF. It comes nowhere near the definition of genocide. And yet, when I got off the plane the day before yesterday at San Francisco airport to come hear the Hoover Institution, there was a gigantic billboard on the side of the road saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And it's the assumption of millions of people who, you know, use TikTok and have been following this war from a pro Palestinian stance. You see this the entire time every Saturday in my home city, London where the Palestinian demonstrators claim that genocide is taking place. It simply is not, and neither would ethnic cleansing be taking place if the Gazans were given the opportunity to live in a better place than Gaza.
DS: Before we let you go, I know you're a historian, so you're not asked to predict the future. And even a historian whose written 24 books can't be called on to predict the future. That said, just at a very high level, and we're just spitballing here, we're not going to hold you to this. How do you think Trump's plan could work out in practice? I mean, no Arab state is offering refuge to the people of Gaza, to the Palestinians. Even before October 7th, no Arab state would agree to grant citizenship to Palestinians. So just thinking it through, if you had a magic wand, what is a way this could work at a practical level?
AR: It can't. Nobody wants them. They have turned down endless peace opportunities, and of course no other Arab nation is going to want to have hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians. So that's not going to work. And also it's always suited the Arab states actually to have the United Nations taking care of these millions of people in Gaza because they see that it's inherently destabilizing for Israel. So they're, they're perfectly happy. They don't care about whether the Palestinians are happy. They're using them for their own political ends. It's one of the greatest tragedies in world history, in my view.
DS: So what does Trump do then?
AR: There's no way the Jordanians are taking them. The Hashemite kingdom wouldn't last two minutes if they suddenly took millions of, uh, Palestinians. The Egyptians certainly don't want them. They've had quite enough trouble with their own Muslim Brotherhood. Also, of course, the United Nations are perfectly happy continuing to let this fetid pot boil in the same way that it has for 75 years. So no, I'm no, about to say that there's a part of the world where suddenly all of those people can sort of be picked up and suddenly they'll, uh, magically found a new Singapore and they'll all be, uh, they'll all be well off and happy, contented, prosperous people.
DS: All right. Andrew, thank you for this, uh, quick, but important history lesson. And, um, it was extremely important. I hope this conversation makes its way into more and more circles that are hyperventilating in response to what the president has laid out and I look forward to having you back on in the future.
AR: Thanks very much, Dan. I've much enjoyed it.
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