Moral Clarity On Hamas, Israel, And Terrorism

>> Tom Church: This is the libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution. Today we're discussing the horrifying terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. I'm your host, Tom Church, and I'm talking to the libertarian professor Richard Epstein. Richard, here at the Hoover institution is the Peter and Kiersten Bedford senior fellow at NYU.

He's the Lawrence A Tisch professor of law and at the University of Chicago. He is a senior lecturer. Now, on October 7, Israel suffered the most catastrophic attack in its history when Hamas fighters invaded from Gaza and went on a murdering spree. And I say murdering because among the now 1200 people confirmed dead in Israel, many of them were just civilians, women and children, the elderly, the unarmed.

Hamas live streamed their heinous acts, they took prisoners, and now they're going to suffer the consequences of being truly at war with Israel. Richard, five days into the conflict, Israel has conducted hundreds of ice airstrikes in Gaza. It's killed an estimated 900 people there. I think many more will die.

It's just the beginning, and it is not conducting limited military operations like it has in previous flare ups in the last 15, 20 years. This is war, and I think Hamas is over. But the thing is, Richard, Hamas cannot defeat Israel's military. We all know that. It cannot hold territory.

It doesn't have a chance of doing what it says it wants to do. So why, Richard, why in the world did they choose this course of action? What is their objective?

>> Richard Epstein: So complicated to say, but let me tell you what I think is happening. I think they were relying on some kind of a domino theory.

They believe that if they struck a deadly blow, the deep resentments that Arabs throughout the world have against the state of Israel would lead them to mobilize and to join them. They hoped that there would be systematic uprisings in the West bank. They thought there might be some sort of assistance from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has been stirring but not moving.

They thought maybe even that the Iranians would be drawn into this particular war, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, for all I know. But I think that the gamble was they were not going to go it alone. Let's think, the second thing was there was sufficient hatred there, sufficient resentment because of the long period of occupation and surroundment and so forth, that many of them just wanted to take revenge on the Jews independent of what the consequences were.

Those words are extremely brave and those consequences start to come in. And then once they do, what you do is you hear Palestinians shrieking that we have to be very careful to make sure that we don't damage women and children, the kinds of people whom they murdered. Remember, there were decapitations of infants in their beds that these people managed to conduct.

So the Israelis have a terrible problem. They also have a hostage problem. They can't rescue the hostages. They're probably separated in small groups. Some of them are not even under the control of Hamas. My guess is that if they took a large number of these hostages, there's probably a substantial fraction of them who died because they didn't have their medicine, their food, heart attacks and frights and so forth.

And so what the Israelis seem to have concluded, and I can't disagree with them, is at this particular point, hostages are lost. So holding them is no longer a bargaining chip on the part of Oman. I haven't seen any effort to sort of try to extricate them by some kind of deal, and it's certainly not gonna be a deal in which you're gonna surrender territory in order to recover the hostages.

It would be suicidal to do that. It would be a massive amount of victory and so forth. So what's gonna happen is the Israelis are gonna keep pounding. And just to put the point on the table, right now, the single biggest problem that the Israelis have to face is what are they gonna do with women and children on the Palestinian side?

My own belief, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is what the Israelis do, is say, here's a beach where you can go and you will get safe passage out of Gaza. All the women and children who want to leave, no military people, maybe it's from military people, are allowed to go.

And then either the Israelis move them to safety or they get Arab nations to move them to safety or the United States or Europeans to move them to safety. My guess is there's a substantial chance that Hamas will try to block all of that stuff and keep these people as human shields.

But at that particular point, the locusts of the blame turns back to Hamas and not to Israel. So I strongly urge them to try to find some way to separate these things so that they don't have to slow down the attack. And if all the civilians and all the children are out of this situation, then they could even bring their fury.

Look, the position in Israel, I think, has to be this. We're not trying to limit Hamas, we're trying to annihilate it. We do not want any power, vestige of power to exist in the people who are there. We don't want them to come back under a different name.

Are you able to have to completely disband the operation, have to capture kill orbits, main leaders? There's nothing short of that which is going to prevent the repetition of this, because we know even if they're without arms today, they will have arms again tomorrow at some particular point, because the Iranians who've managed to supply them thus far will find yet another way to beat some of these blockades.

It's not that easy to do 100% blockade, and so you have to face all that stuff. So the first priority for Israel is essentially destroy Hamas. But I do think that's perfectly compatible with finding a way to extricate the children or make it very clear that if they're captive in their own country, it's Hamas, the devils that they already are, who are doing it.

And remember, they've done this thing to their own children before. They are not against using human shields, even their own people, if they think it's going to perpetuate their war. That simply shows how sick and depraved they are. But that has to be made evident to everybody in the world, and the right way to do it is to give that limited kind of protection.

>> Tom Church: I wanna get to, in a little bit how Hamas fights, how Israel fights the conduct of war. But first, back home, first, there are some concerning responses going on in american universities, also american cities and other cities throughout the world. I think the Harvard student groups were the first on the scene with a statement blaming Israel, putting no blame whatsoever on Hamas for these terrorist activities.

There is a day of solidarity planned across college campuses. We've seen protests in Times Square, the Sydney Opera house saying things like, decolonization is not a metaphor. Protesters claiming that they will liberate the land by any means necessary. And closer to home for you Richard, news out of NYU, Winston and Strawn, the law firm has revoked the job offer to a three sorry, NYU law student body president based on students statements made about Hamas and its actions.

And of course there are universities and university presidents who have had issued statements that have been less than satisfactory. I'd like to know, Richard, what would you like to say to these students and organizations that believe Israel is the only party to blame for this violence?

>> Richard Epstein: Well, first of all, I don't know if I'd want to even talk to them, but to say in effect, when somebody slits the growth of a child, you're gonna blame it on some kind of colonial path, is in effect to have a kind of doctrine which, if you were paused systematically, would mean that every Palestinian on the NYU campus could murder any Jew on exactly the same thing.

Because why does it make a difference to these feuds if it turns out it's in Israel or in the Gaza Strip or anywhere else? And then I'd say in terms of the moral theory, it's just totally depraved. You cannot essentially excuse the sorts of behaviors that you want.

And you can say Israel, that what you have to do is to lie down so that we could commit more of it. The whole thing has become I think, a complete farce. And that what has to happen is that you judge the Israelis for the responses that they do.

That's gonna be a battle over whether or not there's, quote unquote, excessive force and response, enormous force is gonna be totally justified. And then with respect to the women and children issue, which I. Which I take very seriously. I think the separation that I mentioned earlier is going to do with it.

What I think the university administration has to do, and I've said this before, is they have to think seriously about imposing sanctions on people within the university who make these kinds of statements. You will remember a couple of weeks ago they had this meeting at Penn called Palestine Write, W-R-I-T-E.

Which was a celebration through the Wolf Institute of Humanities of the Palestinian Culture, literary tradition, art, and so forth. And I was again shutting that thing down, not because I thought it was a good idea for Penn to host it. But I thought it would be inappropriate to shut something down if they're stupid enough to want to run it.

The question I would want to ask now is ask all the people who came to that situation where any of them is prepared to condemn what Hamas has done. Either they were all silent, or do some of them approve of it? I think it's really important to do this because it's a kind of a litmus test.

The argument has always been made on the Jewish side that these organizations are just fronts for a virulent form of anti-Semitism. And if it turns out that there's no condemnation and there's approval, then that validates that particular charge. And means that everything is done by a Palestinian group has to be understood in some serious way as an anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist situation, and it has to be condemned.

So when I look around at the statements here at NYU, at Harvard, at other places, what I see is a condemnation of the violence. But I don't see any condemnation of the people who have ordered it. So you mentioned the woman at NYU. I mean, first of all, there's a real question of whether she should be allowed to continue on as head of the student bar association, even if she's allowed to say in class.

I think there's a serious question as to whether or not, given the outright forgeries and fraudulent statements that she makes, the utterly unhinged account of everything that has happened. There's a real question of whether or not she should be subject to suspension in some way. And I think there's a real issue on the question of good moral character as to whether or not all these instances have to be reported to the bar.

I think it's courageous and correct of Winston & Strawn saying, we just don't want you around here with that kind of stuff. And if Winston & Strawn can take it, it seems to me that the universities can take it and the entire bar association can take it. And I do think, in effect, these students have to be held to account.

What I said about the Penn situation, with the Penn right or the Palestine right situation, is when people start to disrupt at that particular point, the sanctions have to be appropriate. So one of the incidents that happened at Harvard some weeks ago, during their welcoming ceremony, a student, Palestinian student, marches up.

Screams at the tops of his lungs that Israel is a colonial power, it's apartheid. Harvard has to divest itself and condemn all these activities. And of course, nobody did anything about it. Well, that's an open invitation to say, if you're not gonna do anything about that. You're not gonna do anything about anything else, except perhaps actual physical violence.

That's a form of moral cowardice on the part of the leadership. And I mean, the dean of the Harvard Law School, he comes up and he starts to say, we really condemn all this. And anybody that is in Israel and wants counseling, please get it. But again, no clear statement that the content that was conveyed in those memos is utterly unacceptable in a civilized university.

And until the university start debating that, what's happened is you can see why it is that the complete deterioration of academic standards in hiring and promotion in universities has a very bad effect. Go back and ask yourself how many times people have said this is a structurally racist economy.

How many times have they said that all forms of white supremacy dominate the set of institutions that we have? And then you look at the composition of the faculties, and essentially, of the administration. And you probably can't find a conservative, libertarian, or Republican anywhere amongst them. And the groups that get celebrated and fitted are people like Ibram Kendi at Boston University.

Anti-racism becomes a platform of that university. Black Lives Matters come out today with a statement foursquare behind what Hamas had. These people should not be allowed to remain in the universities that we have. And what we have to do is you have to completely restructure the faculties. You cannot have a balanced university discussion if 99% of your administrators are very hard on the left, verging on socialism or worse.

You have to have a much more representative situation. I just received, because I'm a Hoover fellow, a letter from Stanford asking me what it is I think ought to be done with respect to the new president and so forth. I think the first two words I would say is, you have to start over.

You have to bring into office a transformative president who's prepared to get rid of all the academic rot and one-sided situation that has taken over the political life of a great university. I'm not sure that they're prepared to do it, but that's the only way that this thing can happen.

If you want to have fair discourse on a campus, you have to have both sides come and you can't say to any conservative, well, we'll leave you on the faculty so long as you don't open your mouth. But the moment you start to say something, then we're going to start thinking about all sorts of sanctions we could lever against you.

The way Princeton went after Joshua Katz, for example, on similar kinds of ground. They have to be very, very careful. They're not gonna suspend people because of heretical statements and all the rest of that. They have to respect the free street treatment, but the thing they have to do is they have to restaff their personnel from top to bottom.

I was one of these panels a couple of years ago in which some journalists made the very perceptive observation. He said, look, universities have all these wonderful sounding situation, talking about the importance of free speech and open discourse on campus. And then they have the bunch of people who are, basically, warriors for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The big difference is, there's no institutional presence that is to back up the free speech situation. And there are thousands of officers who are going to back up the DEI situation. You have to change that particular balance. In my own view, there should be no DEI programs on any campus.

I think it's just a terrible kind of situation to give a partisan group that kind of control over the situation. And so one of the things you have to do is pull back on all of the stuff associated. Because what has happened is DEI and various kinds of political movements have skewed the process of appointments, skewed the process of admissions that starts to take place.

So that inside the universities, folks like myself, and I'm 80, so they're not worried about me for ten years from now, we are an isolated minority, whereas everybody else has the dominant role. And you can't survive at Stanford or anywhere else with that kind of fatal imbalance. I'm not saying this to basically silence any given person.

But I am trying to say very clearly that you're kidding yourself if you think that you can keep academic quality and academic neutrality up by going only to one side of the political ledger. And ignoring everybody else on the grounds that we are somehow or other above all these partisan phrase.

In fact, they're just very much a part of this situation. And it's the long term rot that we're seeing in American academic universities. That lead to the kind of outbursts you've seen at Stanford, NYU, not so much, but a little, the one woman, Columbia, and so on. We have to be able to stop all this stuff.

And to make it clear that there's no excuse for the kind of barbarity and violence that has started to take place. And unless universities are prepared to cleanse their own houses, what the alumni ought to do is simply stop giving to them, or give only to their preferred programs and not to the general university.

I regard this as a moral crisis of the highest order. The most touching thing about this is you listen to the people. For example, on the Israeli dispute with respect to judicial reform, they were denouncing everybody there in the worst possible terms. Bret Stephens basically called anybody who disagreed with him an idol or no-gooder and so forth, or a dummy.

And then today, he writes a Saying, let's look at the Israeli left, and we can't do this anymore. He was talking about himself as somebody who essentially had to learn the lesson that you can play that particular game. And you have to, when you're dealing with all these things, never engage in political threats that essentially could be heard not only by people inside your company, but heard by people everywhere else.

And there's no question in my mind that Hamas thought that one of the things that influenced their willingness to attack was they believed that a fractured Israeli public might not be able to respond effectively, and that's one of the reasons they win it. They read that thing wrong, everybody pulled back.

But I think, to me, the thing that one must understand is that the two state solution is dead, dead, dead. The only way that you could protect Palestinians from their own leaders is to have them run enclaves inside Israeli, dominate its borders. The whole theory is to encourage commerce at the low level and to prohibit military force, that the Palestinians are all too willing to engage against other people, even their own people, and so forth.

So there's got to be a new realism about this. There is not a shred of chance that you will ever see anything that gives independent Palestinians military power on the borders of Israel. And it's for the protection of their own people, as well as everybody else. The phrase that one wants to use in cases like this is never again an old Holocaust phrase that comes to life again.

But I think everybody in Israel now realizes that they were living a life of delusion and dreams when they thought that they could simply tame the tiger and make sure that you would have a fine, wonderful, cooperative relationship between utter devils on the one hand and ordinary Israeli people on the other.

>> Tom Church: Richard, I wanna turn to how this war is being fought on each side. There's a way that Israel wages war versus how Hamas wages war. Because there are apologists for Hamas that argue that the only way for them to fight back against Israel and overwhelming power is by doing what they're doing, targeting civilians indiscriminately, firing into Israel to fight back literally any way that they can.

Any resistance is legitimate. This isn't just nobody's on the Internet. One Yale professor, actual Yale professor, tweeted, settlers are not civilians, this isn't hard. The George Washington Students Association wrote that it rejects the distinction between civilian and militant, settler and soldier. They explicitly say that every Palestinian is a civilian, even if they hold arms, and any Israeli settler is a soldier, even if they don't.

So is that enough of an excuse to fight in the way that Hamas fights?

>> Richard Epstein: No, it's the most obscene kind of statement that is possible. I mean, you get butchers who has hint excused and the victims turn out to be the criminal. I mean, it's very clear that if Israel, for example, had gone into Gaza without provocation in order to eradicate Palestinians, I would be the first to denounce anything that the government had done.

But the Israelis have always done exactly the opposite. They're not a colonialist. The whole strategy that Israel has tried to follow without success for 70 or 80 years runs as follows. We have to be able to win over economic gains for the Palestinians by offering them various kinds of incentives, create various job opportunities, development agencies, and so forth.

And the theory is, and it's the correct theory, if we can persuade large numbers of Palestinians that there's more to gain from trade than there is from so-called freedom, i.e, the ability to be butchered by your own government. What will happen is Israel and the Palestinians will essentially be able to produce a low level peace on the ground that will preclude heavier military action.

The Palestinians on the other side, who are war-like, know exactly what the effort is. And so they do everything within their power to disrupt it, lest that it take hold. So if you wanted to put a plant in Palestine or in the West Bank, a Jewish plant with Palestinian workers, they'll bomb it, because the moment they do that, people will not go back.

This goes back to the 1930s when there were signs of cooperation after the Israelis, at very high expense, managed to clear some of the swamps of malaria and everything else, planted orange groves, and tried to hire Arab workers from Palestine in order to man them. And what happened is the program was successful.

And so the Palestinian militants essentially went forward and started killing people in order to disrupt these kinds of operations. And so there is no peace whatsoever. The Palestinians are under any delusion. And remember, you did not ask them what they want, right? I tell you what they want.

Do you think they want a two-state solution?

>> Tom Church: No, they don't, no.

>> Richard Epstein: They want, essentially, Palestinians to own all of what is currently Israel and all the Israelis to leave.

>> Tom Church: To leave, well, I mean, I think, Richard, we know what it would look like at this point, right?

>> Richard Epstein: It would be a bud blast, that's what they want. I mean, one of the things that's always so striking is you look at any Palestinian event and you look at the map on the back, and essentially it has all of Israel, all the West Bank, and all of Gaza under the name of Palestine.

And will any Jews be allowed to live there? Maybe 10% of the population is over 90, and then they'll butcher them anyhow. Their solution is either you leave or we kill you. And unless they're very explicit about what it is they want, then they're just teasing themselves in line.

I have yet to see anybody in this entire situation be as explicit about what I have just said. It's only the Iranians that we wish to erase Israel from the face of the globe, but Hamas is exactly the same kind of philosophy.

>> Tom Church: It's part of the constitution, yeah.

>> Richard Epstein: Yeah, so what they have to essentially say, these learned academics, is that the only way that Israel will be destroyed is through military force. But we don't give a darn as to whether they live or whether they die, whether they go. But the one thing they're not allowed to do is to stay in their own homes, run their own civil institutions.

When we take over, they will either be slaves, dead, or departed. That's the position they want to take, and that's just a moral monstrosity of the highest order. These people are kidding themselves when they start talking out what they want is a recognition of freedom and dignity like any other individual.

They say that when it turns out, it's to their interest. But if you're asking them what their ultimate position is, the question you have to ask is they're prepared to kill every man, woman, and child in Israel as a combatant in order to establish exclusive and complete control over what they regard as Palestine.

And I think the answer frightening enough to that question is, yes. That's exactly what they want to do, which is why they cannot be allowed to do anything whatsoever. The whole staunch, that there'll be sort of short-term compromises, all of those compromises will be just opportunistic. What you'll do is, we'll give you back the hostages, you give us a fort here or territory there, and then they'll do it again, and they'll nibble away until they think the country is sufficiently small that they could then overwhelm it.

And what Israel, I think, has now understood is that any step in that direction is a first step on a fatal path. And that's why essentially, within the israeli circles, everything has changed. Hostages are second. First is annihilation of Hamas, and the second ought to be the protection of innocent children and women in Palestine by the kind of proposals that I've said.

But if they don't want to agree to that, then all of these deaths are gonna be on their head. These are vile people. And it turns out if you don't understand the good and evil distinction, if you really become some kind of a fancy Yale moral relatives like the jackasses who read those statements to you, then the world's gonna end up in bloodshed.

Congratulations to all those people who think this is appropriate way to do business.

>> Tom Church: Well, two more here for you, Richard. One, I wanna talk about how Israel is going to conduct this war. I mean, this is not going to be limited conflict like Operation Castle led 3 weeks Lebanon war, 34 days.

This seems like they're in it to get rid of Hamas. And I wanna know about Israel's logistical response. What are they allowed to do within international law at this point in response to terrorism in their borders? I mean, we are going to see image, there are going to be civilians killed in Gaza.

We've seen some mosques bombed in Gaza because Israel says, this is an arms depot, and then there are secondary explosions because it is an arms depot. And so I'd like to know a way to interpret this in my head as we see the results from 300,000 reserve troops called up in Israel going into Gaza to get rid of Hamas.

What is an acceptable behavior on the part of the Israel.

>> Richard Epstein: Okay, well, the first situation is utterly unacceptable to round up women and children, put them in a separate place and then slaughter them, which is exactly what it was that Hamas had done. The really hard cases come up when it turns out that the military operation is embedded inside civilian situations.

One of the things that you said has been long true with respect to Palestine is that, if they want to launch rockets, they'd like to do it from a residential area. The theory is they're not gonna try to hit the racket because they're going to hit the Palestinian, or the innocent citizens who are there.

They want to put arms in mosques because you're not supposed to hit mosque. The moment it turns out, you embed your people amongst your own people, that is your military operations amongst your civilians. The civilians become fair game, and the obligation is to try to minimize the attack on them as you go after the topics.

But you cannot stop all military operations because they're gonna be some collateral damages. And the Israelis have always tried that. And so for example, they have explosives that can go to the top of the building and blow up the fifth floor, but not the fourth floor, because the fifth floor is where it turns out the Hamas is.

They've always followed that. They've always tried to give individual warnings as to where they're attacked, but these are no good whatsoever, why is that? You tell them, we're gonna attack x building. But the Palestinians do in Hamas order, is they then take a bunch of civilians and put them on the roofs of the building, which is subject to attack.

So what the Israelis have said is the correct thing to say, look, everything here is fair game, just get out. Because there's no building that's gonna be safe, because we know that Hamas has so distributed its various military assets that they're gonna be in every part of town, and we don't have the time to figure this out.

And so what you then do is what I've said is, give them the safe harbor out. I regard that as an absolutely critical part of the Dran strategy. And if Hamas doesn't want to do that, then all this boy bloodshed is on their particular shoulder and they will have to bear at least some portion of the world.

But otherwise, there are no particular restraints. Let me go back to the question about individual responsibility. And there is clearly a doctrine of proportionality, and there is a doctrine about excessive force. When you are dealing with a particular situation, if it turns out somebody has basically taken your book from you and you could grab it back from them.

You are not allowed to kill them, in order to recover the book, it has to be minimum force to receive the situation. Then there are other cases where it turns out there's a proportionate principle which actually has more bite to that. What it says is, I wanna take this book back, but I can't just grab it back.

The only way I could get it back, is to kill somebody. And there's no lesser, more restrictive means that we'll succeed. The general principle of disproportionate situation says, you can't take the book. You have to wait a while, bring a lawsuit, go to the international court, or just suffer the loss.

We're not going to allow you to murder people for trivial offenses, this is not a trivial offense. And Hamas has basically made it very clear that its response to the high seas crested is to say, if you continue to attack, we'll kill more hostages. So there is no proportionate force limitation when somebody is trying to kill you.

And there's no real excessive force limitation in this particular case, because nobody can think of a lesser way in which you could attack Hamas and get its leaders. If you could, the Israelis would wanna do it anyhow. And so it basically, is open season, subject to the one or the two caveats I made.

Isolated civilian populations may not be touched, and the Israelis should seek to create isolated civilian populations so they don't have to touch them. Other than that, I think what the basic situation is, if there's an officer in Hamas, you kill them on site. That's what they're doing to all the Israelis when they get away with it.

And the fact that Israel has overwhelming power is a source of stabilization because it means they won't try this thing again. And to make it even more stable, eliminating Hamas and its various proxies, subsidies and alliances of one kind or another, will do an immense benefit for everybody inside the Palestinian situation.

And if you could rid them of all of these terrible pestilential forces, one of the things you do after peace is secured and they're removed, is you try to organize an international relief situation to help the situation get better on the ground than it would otherwise be. But the first thing that preconditioned for every form of amelioration of that sort is the extinction of Hamas.

I think it's very clear when you read the Israeli reports, nobody's prepared to play the kind of finessing games that they did with the early invasions in Conor. We'll get a peace pile, we'll slow them down, five years, we'll take it again. But you may be prepared every five years to take a minor berger incursion that's gonna cost you 100 or 200 people, because it's probably less costly than occupying it.

But when Israel decided to pull out in 2005 from Gaza and take out its secretaries, what it did is it turned the whole thing over. Within a year, the Hamas won an election, and they've never lost an election since then.

>> Tom Church: I don't know how many elections they've had.

>> Richard Epstein: It doesn't matter, they can have as many or few as they want. And what they do is if anybody who dissents from their rule, they kill their own people. And so everything that the Israelis try to do to make this nice, I mean, they basically had greenhouses and so forth in various parts of Gaza.

They left them in pristine positions and conditions, and basically Hamas blew them all up. And well, that's a sign of what it is that these people are lying. And one of the things that was problem with Hitler and everybody else is, through the 1930s, virtually everybody says, he really doesn't mean what he said.

There was only one person who was essentially of high position, who got it consistently right at that time, and that was Winston Churchill with his dire warnings that were widely ignored or downplayed. You remember, his famous remark after Munich about DeChambal? And it's worth remembering, he said the chain one, you had a choice between dishonor and war.

You chose dishonor, and you got war. And that's what the situation is there. The only way you can make an honest evaluation of the situation to understand that, forget about Palestinian people as a group, the Hamas ruling situation is an unmitigated disaster. It's a terrorist organization of the worst possible kind, and that extermination is the only kinda solution that will work.

My guess is, I mean, I've seen people at the local JCC going from pacifist on the one hand to exactly this kind of view, on the other hand. Because when you start to see those pictures and know that it was all unprovoked, you don't have any sympathy on the other side.

I mean, in fact, so many people that I know, one of the serious problems that they have, this is not one that I suffer from, although I suffer from everything else. Is, they realize that they were played for fools, on a matter of life and death, and they worked.

The number of people who were shrieking about Netanyahu, who was the worst creature on the face of the earth a week ago, are now the people who are backing his coalition. And they were silly and mindless the first time around. In fact, they did everything they could to demonize this guy with fake criminal prosecutions, restrictions on his freedom, his inability to make coalitions to the left, and then they blame him as a devil.

And what happens is, they have a lot of responsibility on their hands, and they have to basically shake it off and get all wing again. But I think Israel as a country has moved 90 degrees to the right with respect to this. I think any peace candidate who tried to run today would probably get 1% of the vote.

The whole situation has gone completely mad. I've never seen, when you look at correspondence and speech and conversation, a group of people who've had this level of collective anger and so forth. And they're furious at everything that has happened to them, and they're sick to their stomachs that they bought all of this nice talk about how it is.

If you're nice to Hamas, they will be nice to you. That just was not true, Abbas is a different figure. He's much slyer, not a good man, a terrible man, in fact. But there are quantitative differences. And of course, the Israelis have never attacked the West bank, except in Geneva, where there were things.

But remember, in 2002 or 3, I can't remember which year, in March, there were 900 deaths because of Palestinian explosives in public markets and various kinds of slaughters everywhere else, which prompted the construction of a wall that actually did some bidding. So you're trying to talk about their track record.

These are people who cannot be trusted, and there's no deal that you can make that can allow them to maintain even a bb gun. What you have to do is you have to wipe those guys out, and you're doing a massive favor for all the Palestinians who will be rid of their yoke.

>> Tom Church: That will do it for this episode of the Libertarian podcast with Richard Epstein. As always, you can learn more if you head over to Richard's column. It's The Libertarian, which we publish on Defining Ideas at hoover.org. If you found this conversation thought provoking, please share it with your friends and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're tuning in.

For Richard Epstein, I'm Tom Church, we'll talk to you next time.

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