The View From Inside Israel With Tom Gross

>> Andrew Roberts: Tom Gross is a British journalist and Middle East expert, who appears a good deal on Arabic, Israeli, Turkish, and Persian opposition TV. Tom, you don't have any official position, but you do know many very influential people. How did that come about?

>> Tom Gross: Well, first of all, nice to be with you, Andrew.

Well, I hope I know influential people, because I have something interesting to add to their thoughts on matters of foreign policy. And I have built up interesting connections over the years in a number of countries. But I might also add that, in a way, I was lucky that because my parents, who were both literary figures in London, they knew a lot of prominent people in the worlds of culture, people like Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Isaiah Berlin, AJ Eyre.

And as I was growing up, we often had drinks, parties at home, and I often chit chatted to such eminent people. My godmother had one godmother, Sonia Orwell, the widow of George Orwell. So obviously, that gave me an extra interest talking about Orwell with my godmother, who didn't have children herself.

So I had a particularly close relationship with Sonia, my godmother. So I think as an adult, I have felt comfortable when somebody at a senior rank, even somebody who's been in the intelligence services, even ahead of an intelligence service in more than one country, or former defense ministers in Israel or US senators have approached me.

I think I've sort of been unfazed by them, because I've sort of felt it normal to be surrounded as a child with people who are very successful people like Harold Pinter.

>> Andrew Roberts: And how did your connections with people like Vaclav Havel and Shimon Peres and Elie Wiesel come about?

That wasn't just your parents, was it?

>> Tom Gross: No, no, so Harvel, I took an early interest in communism growing up, and not a communist, anti-communism, I should say. I first went as a 13-year-old with my grandmother, who had been a sort of secular Jewish woman from Berlin, but also spent time in Prague before Hitler.

And she wanted to go back and see Prague and see East Berlin. And she took me when I was 13, and then on another trip, I was 15, through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin, to communist Prague. So I had an early interest in how awful dictatorships could be, and then I went back as a student to Czechoslovakia.

And because I was going as a student, I could sort of bring stuff back and forth. So a woman who was a family friend, Diana Phipps Sternberg, who is of Czech origin, she was a friend of Harvel of the Harvel family, and she wanted me to bring some things to Harvel, who had just been in house arrest as the dissident in Czechoslovakia.

So I first met Harvel a year before the Velvet Revolution of 1980 that brought to an end communism in Eastern Europe. And I then met Harvel again a year later after he, amazingly, became president in 1990, and I met him a number of times afterwards. So I think he was grateful to the fact I'd been one of the people who had brought him stuff from the West and also brought stuff out from Prague to his friends in dissident circles.

People like Karel Schwarzenberg, who later became Czech foreign minister in London, with the other people you mentioned, Shimon Peres, Elie Wiesel, and so on. That comes later when I was increasingly interested in the Middle East and writing about that and analyzing and advising people. I met people over the course of years and some impressive people.

But I also would like to say I met people who are completely unknown, which I think gave me some insights. I have friends who were born in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Jews who came as children to Israel. I have working class Moroccan Jewish friends. I have Palestinian friends. I have Kurdish friends from Iraq.

So I think it's quite important that on the one hand, I know some highly successful, famous people who even won Nobel prizes. But I also very much value knowing and learning from ordinary people, too. I think it's the juxtaposition of the two that's given me some insights.

>> Andrew Roberts: You were, of course, in New York on 9/11 as well.

Tell us about the insights that that gave you and your recollections of that terrible day.

>> Tom Gross: Yes, I'll never forget that day. It's quite strange, really. I had been the correspondent in Jerusalem for the Sunday Telegraph, and the so-called Second Intifada had been raging in Israel. I'd witnessed Islamic terrorist attacks both from Hamas and also from Fatah, the other main Palestinian faction in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

And I actually wanted to take a break, cuz I was just exhausted at that point from covering the Middle East. I filed my final report before leaving for three months to New York. My final report was on, I think it was September, the 9th, 2001. It was the 100th Palestinian suicide bombing.

I remember that, because I'd written it was the 100th suicide bombing. I flew to New York for a planned three month break on September 10th. I went to stay with some friends in lower Manhattan, and boy, did I have a rude awakening on my first morning on September, the 11th, because, of course, that's when Al-Qaeda flew airplanes into the trade towers that was nearby.

I had actually just told the Sunday Telegraph editor that I'm happy to do some filing from New York. And he said, no, no, no, we have somebody there. But then it turned out their correspondent had been on holiday in Cuba, so he was desperate to get hold of me.

All the phone lines were down in the end, managed to make a connection, and I did some reporting. It was horrendous. But because I had already covered a lot of terrorism in the Middle East, I was kind of a little bit more steely about it than other people.

And I was less emotional, I was more rational. I had already written about Al-Qaeda, so I knew quite a lot, both about Al-Qaeda, about the methods of Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, and so on. But on a human level, there was panic all around. Some people were doing things like filling up the baths with water, and preserving electricity, and storing up on food.

I actually said the opposite. I said, look, it's terrible, but it's now going to be quite safe, because no airplane's allowed to fly now through American airspace, and there's more security than ever. So I was more interested from the beginning in the kind of analytical and political ramifications, rather than fearing there'd be another attack there and then in New York.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And of course, 9/11 brings us on naturally to 7th of October, 2023. What do you think went wrong with Israeli intelligence and their systems on that day? We have had at least an incredible Incredibly high regard, of course, for the Israeli intelligence services. What happened?

>> Tom Gross: Well, clearly they took their eye off the ball.

I'd say there were two answers. The immediate one is that some people were not doing their homework, just like some people in American intelligence were not paying attention right before the 911 attacks. So clearly, I think it was also probably a fade of imagination on behalf of some of the more senior people at Israeli intelligence, a little bit like 911.

It was such an audacious attack involving so many Hamas terrorists, about 3000, hitting so many targets, killing so many people, taking so many hostages, firing so many rockets. That I presume, and obviously there has yet to be an inquiry to actually conclude anything, but I presume some people at the more senior levels, maybe there were intelligence clues there, but they couldn't piece them together.

They didn't imagine Hamas were capable of carrying out such a widespread attack. That's my presumption. But of course, it's only three and a half months ago and there's yet to be an inquiry, so we'll have to wait and see. I'll just say one other thing on that. There's also another failure, which is a deeper one.

The very idea that we could ever have quiet with Hamas or we could ever rely on a terror group to keep the peace, whether it's Israel or any other country. I think it's an idiotic idea which many, many people were foolish enough to believe in.

>> Andrew Roberts: Do you think there's any truth to the idea that the domestic political upheaval in Israel at the time had any effect in one way or another with regard to the Hamas attack?

 

>> Tom Gross: Well, yes and no. On one hand, there are intelligence reports that Hamas has been planning this for almost a decade and in detail for more than two years. So it's not immediately linked to the six months of internal unrest over the judicial reform proposals of the Netanyahu government.

On the other hand, there were huge demonstrations week after week, lots of IDF senior reservists, including intelligence figures, saying they would refuse to serve the government of Netanyahu because they didn't like its policies. And I'm sure that that weakened the deterrence of Israel and gave ideas to Hamas and to their overlords in Iran that israeli society was weak and ripe for attack.

And I think actually since October 7th, they've been surprised at the resilience and the union, the coming together of Israeli society.

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned overlords in Iran. Say a few words about the relationship between Iran and Hamas and whether or not you think that there was a sense in Tehran that this was going to happen?

 

>> Tom Gross: Well, we know there was a sense, because apparently,, they have been practicing for such attacks, not just by Hamas but also by Hezbollah proxies in southern Lebanon. I don't know if Iran would have had operational detail about the exact nature or timing of the October 7th attacks.

From what I understand from intelligence sources in Israel, Hamas is very compartmentalized, and only about four or five people would have had knowledge of the entirety of the October 7th attacks. So, for example, one unit of Hamas would have known they had to take hostages. Another would have known they were gonna attack from the air.

Another would have known they were attacking kibbutzim, and so on. Only four or five people would have had intimate knowledge of the entirety of the plan. It's not clear whether the Iranians would also have had detailed knowledge, but certainly, they have funded and encouraged, both in practical terms and in ideological terms, Hamas to carry out such genocidal attacks.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: This enormous number of hostages that were taken, first of all, could you tell us about how they've been treated, from what we know of the ones who've been released, and what we think is happening to the rest at the moment?

>> Tom Gross: Well, they have been treated inhumanely and sadistically.

About 250 hostages were taken, including as young as an eighth-month-old baby. That baby just celebrated his, or not celebrated, but he had his first birthday being called the saddest birthday in the world only a couple of days ago. That baby's called Kfir Bibas, now one year old. And among the hostages who are still there are 85-year-olds, including a man who was a kind of Israeli peace activist and used to drive very sick Palestinians when they didn't have advanced medical treatment in Gaza for cancer or something, used to drive them to hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

And even then, Hamas, they've released his wife, but they haven't released him. So Hamas did release some hostages in return for convicted Palestinian attempted murderers and other criminals. They released some of the children and some of the female hostages, and they also released some of the Thai nationals, and they also released two or three Russians as, and I quote, a gesture to Vladimir Putin, close quote, some Russian nationals they were holding.

But the other hostages they're holding, including young females, 18 and 19, I fear that they've been sexually abused and possibly raped. And one of the reasons Hamas broke off the previous truce where they had said they would release all the female hostages is precisely because they didn't want those hostages relating or being examined by doctors and so on as to what was done to them.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: The hostages' families, of course, have tremendous political power in Israel at the moment. Have they got too much power? What kind of say are they having over the Israeli government's decision-making, military decision-making?

>> Tom Gross: Well, I don't think they're having any say over it, and I don't think expression of power.

Look, it's heartbreaking for the families of the hostages. Some of their sons are being tortured. A number of hostages have already died in captivity. Even the ones not being tortured, who have been kept deep, deep underground in very humid conditions, without proper oxygen, they will pick up all kinds of physical and psychological ailments that they may never recover from.

So it's completely understandable that the hostages' families are demonstrating on a regular basis, and they have lots and lots of sympathy. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the Israeli government is going to change its war aims purely on the base of protests by hostages' families. If Hamas were to offer a realistic further pause in the fighting with the release of some hostages for Israel to supply more aid or to have a one-week ceasefire, I suspect there will be popular support and the Israeli government would agree to that.

But Hamas are not offering that. And some of the media reporting makes it sound like Netanyahu could just agree to some kind of hostage swap. Hamas are not offering it. And there are reports that even Qatar, which is the other country besides Iran to influence Hamas, Qatar claim that they have no longer got enough influence on the Hamas leadership in Gaza.

So even when they have suggested to the Hamas leadership a temporary pause with a partial swap between Palestinian prisoners and hostages, the leadership in Gaza is not interested.

>> Andrew Roberts: How many Palestinian casualties are there now in Gaza, would you say? Because we obviously can't believe the reports of the health ministry there, which is a propaganda arm of Hamas, but obviously there have been large numbers.

And what proportion of them are Hamas fighters, do you think?

>> Tom Gross: Andrew, this is one of the most crucial points about the whole war, and it's really not being reported. It's deliberately being avoided by so called respectable media like the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC. We know that approximately 9,000 Hamas terrorists fighters, operatives, call them what you will, have been killed, which represents about 25% of Hamas fighting force, of about 35 to 40,000 men.

So about 9,000 Hamas people have been killed in the course of fighting. The Hamas health ministry claims that about 25,000 people have been killed in general. If for one moment we believe that, and it's almost certainly a big exaggeration. We then have to also conclude, based on past conflicts, that 1 to 2,000 of those people are Palestinians killed by misfired rockets shot by Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In fact, in one of the past rounds of fighting a few years ago, 25% of fatalities in Gaza were killed by Palestinian rockets which misfired. And like the rocket that hit the hospital that Israel was wrongly blamed for by the BBC and New York Times and others, that was fired, we now know for sure, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Israel does not aim at hospitals. So what I want to say is if we take the Hamas figure, which is almost certainly exaggeration of 25,000, deduct nine and a half thousand Hamas fighters, deduct, let's say, one and a half thousand Palestinians killed by other Palestinians. Also deduct some people who have died of natural causes, because Hamas seems to be adding on people who have died of old age or other such things, cancer, whatever.

The ratio we get to of combatant to civilian deaths is something like 1.5 civilians to 1 combatant. Now, the United Nations, no friend of Israel. Their research says that since 1945, the average death ratio in armed urban combat is nine civilians to one combatant. That's conflicts across the world.

And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the estimated deaths are about three to five civilians for every Taliban or ISIS or Saddam Hussein fighter. So in other words, Israeli care and caution in not killing civilians is greater than practically any other army in modern history. But that is not being reflected in the public discourse, even by President Biden who in one of his unscripted moments, wrongly accused Israel of having indiscriminate bombing, which is just nonsense.

If Israel had had indiscriminate bombing in such an urban area as Gaza, we would have tens and tens of thousands of deaths.

>> Andrew Roberts: And the IDF rules of engagement therefore, must be different, in a sense, much more ethically advanced than a lot of urban warfare that we've seen even in recent years.

Tell us about that. What do IDF soldiers do that say American troops in Iraq or British troops in Basra don't do?

>> Tom Gross: I'm not for one moment suggesting that there's a lack, there's not ethics among American and British troops. Of course, there always.

>> Andrew Roberts: No, neither am I, I hasten to add, but what are the rules of engagement that mean that 1.5 civilians to.

 

>> Tom Gross: I think there are two big differences. First of all, Israeli intelligence, in spite of their I failure to predict October 7, Israeli intelligence remains brilliant. So they have very, very good intelligence of exactly who, where there's a fighter, where there's civilians and so on, which is why there was an assassination of a senior Hamas figure in south Beirut, in Hezbollah suburbs, three or four weeks ago.

And if you look at the film footage, his exact apartment was taken out. He and three other senior Hamas guys were killed, and not a single other person was even harmed at all. Also in Damascus yesterday, some Hezbollah, sorry, some Iranian revolutionary guard leaders, four of them were killed.

Again, not a single other person was injured. Israeli intelligence is second to none. So I can only presume, though I'm not an expert on this, that when British troops were battling ISIS in Mosul or Saddam's forces in Basra, they simply didn't have the intelligence that Israel has. Even since October 7, Israel's high tech sector, which is kind of unrivaled, have devised artificial intelligence using face recognition technology and all kind of heat sensors to identify armed men in Gaza from above.

So Israel, it's not just that the IDF has codes of ethics. They're also able to implement them. And one final point. The Israeli army is a people's army. Very few people have joined it because they enjoy fighting. The average person now risking their life in Gaza does so because he's protecting his own wife and children.

Or indeed, there are lots of female armed troops in this battle at the moment, too. There's a guy I saw on TV who's a dentist, another person who's a high tech worker, another person who's himself a doctor. So these aren't people who want to join an army. And there's also in Judaism, although not perfect, but there's a conscience of code of ethics, not just because they care about Palestinian lives, but because they think it's important for one's own moral fortitude and ethical.

What's the word? Code of ethics, to do everything one can not to harm civilians.

>> Andrew Roberts: Israel's been criticized for using bunker buster weaponry, these 2000 pound bombs which destroy entire tunnel networks. What's your response to that?

>> Tom Gross: Well, lots of people in Israel are criticizing the government of Netanyahu for being too weak.

If Israel was really using as heavy weaponry as it might, there wouldn't still be so many tens and tens of miles of Hamas tunnels three and a half months into the war that are still there. Be three quarters of the Hamas fighting forces able to basically be taking refuge in these tunnels.

So I think that any use of heavier bombs by Israel is being done in a very careful and cautious way. If Israel was trigger-happy, I think more Hamas people would have died and the war would have been shorter already.

>> Andrew Roberts: What about criticisms that say that Israel is essentially using malnutrition, even starvation, against Palestinian?

 

>> Tom Gross: I think, as far as I'm aware, this really is propaganda. And you have to remember that the westerners who are based in Gaza are not politically neutral. These are people who identify with the Palestinian cause, working for organizations like Anura, the UN agency, or even the Red Cross and others.

And I think that if there was genuine malnutrition of the kind we see right now in Yemen and Ethiopia, we would have a lot of film footage we have heard since the beginning of this conflict on October 7 almost every day. There were reports in October and November that Gaza was gonna run out of electricity within hours.

There are gonna be no hospitals within hours. People are gonna starve to death within hours. They've been saying this for three or four months. They also said this, by the way, in previous bouts of conflict, in 2009, in 2012, in 2014. I think we can be sure if someone was really malnourished, we would see film footage of malnourishment.

So with all due respect to people like David Cameron, the British foreign secretary, who wrote an article that began with this premise that 90% of people in Gaza were malnourished. It was in his first paragraph, an article that appeared in many newspapers, including the Guardian and in the Israelites newspaper, Haaretz.

Even Haaretz, which is very left wing, very anti-Netanyahu, can't find any evidence of this. And there are lots of Israeli NGOs. If there was real malnourishment, there would be protests within Israel against the Israeli government. I don't know anyone that would want to see a single child starving.

Now, having said that, of course, it's very difficult conditions for lots of people in Gaza, just like it is for many people in Israel. There is a war on, a war that Hamas started, a war that Israel didn't seek. And because the Palestinian population, sorry, because Hamas have embedded themselves with the Palestinian population, Israel's in a very difficult position.

So Israel is supplying food and fuel, even though Hamas steals a lot of it for itself, and uses that fuel to continue, even now, firing rockets at Israel. I was in the south of Israel. I'm in Israel at the moment, visiting here. I was in the south of Israel three days ago and 50 rockets within an hour were fired at one Israeli town in southern Israel.

Even now, Hamas has enough fuel to do this. And again, I think the reports of malnourishment are greatly exaggerated.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell us about the BBC. How is that perceived in Israel and the BBC coverage of this?

>> Tom Gross: It's an embarrassment. Not just in Israel, okay? The BBC, what can I say?

In Israel, elsewhere, a really magnificent historic reputation. Even now, classic BBC comedies like Yes Minister or classic nature documentaries of David Attenborough, the reruns are still showing on Israeli TV. Israelis love them just like other people love them. Fawlty Towers and so on. And yet BBC News has been taken off the main network, whereas Al Jazeera remains, because it is lie after lie after lie.

I'm not just talking about small things. This is worthy of Pravda. And I've spoken to people in the BBC, and that doesn't mean everyone in the BBC, but they're in such a groupthink that they just can't see themselves. It's a bit like going to Jeremy Corbyn's inner circle.

And I'm sure your American listeners are familiar with Corbyn, until recently, the leader of the British Labour Party, who said the person he most admires in foreign policy was Eric Honecker, the former dictator of East Germany, and his friends Ramas and Hezbollah. That is the mentality of some BBC people.

And I think they probably think they're telling the truth, but they absolutely are not.

>> Andrew Roberts: Did the world reaction surprise you? The way in which, in Instagram, pro-Hamas sentiment outweighs pro-Israel sentiment by something like ten to one? The response of the classic example, obviously, with the Ivy League universities in America, Harvard and so on.

My assumption is, knowing you, Tom, that you'd be shocked but not surprised. Is that a fair assumption?

>> Tom Gross: That is a fair assumption. Look, I've been covering for many years, let's call it bias or ignorance of the Middle East, and there are many reasons for it that we might get onto in a bit.

But nevertheless, I am startled. I am startled that the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in the world, live on TV in Congress, can give I don't know what answers that a seven-year-old should be ashamed of and even afterward not apologize properly. If it were just been one like the president of Harvard, but not the others, but all three of them, and no doubt others would have done so too, had they been there.

And they answer questions like robots. I'm also disappointed by the sheer numbers of people demonstrating, particularly in America. I think we've known for a while that some Europeans are very anti-Israel, but we've seen big demonstrations across the United States, from Los Angeles to New York to Washington, DC, to Chicago.

We've seen a lot of idiocy. We've seen not chance for peace. That would be one thing. We've seen chants from the river to the sea. And yet I read a survey the other day that 86% of Ivy League college students said they supported the chant from the river to the sea.

But less than half of them knew which river and which sea that would, of course, be the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And a couple of them, when they were asked which river and which sea, somebody said the Caribbean Sea, and somebody said the Atlantic Ocean. So these are-

 

>> Tom Gross: Ivy League students. Okay, another interesting thing from the same. These are pro Palestinian activists. So less than a quarter, less than 25% of Ivy League coffee college students knew who Yas Arafat was, and more than 10% of them thought he'd been a prime minister of Israel. So for one, even at my stupidest as a teenager, I wouldn't dream of going to demonstrate about, I don't know, the Kashmir conflict without educating myself a little bit as to where Kashmir was and what it was all about.

So, honestly, these are supposedly clever people, and it is just shocking the level of ignorance, I don't think, just about Israel or the Middle East. I mean, you as a historian. And all of us should be aghast at the level of ignorance of history and geography of the next generation of western leaders.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And you mentioned there are several reasons for bias. Go into some of them. Apart from obviously straightforward antisemitism? On top of that, what which has existed in every society for thousands of years and is a meta sizing cancer in the human soul. Other than that, what are the other reasons for this terrible disparity of sympathy that we've seen in the western world?

 

>> Tom Gross: Well, I would say that a lot of it. Well, first of all, I'd say there are two kinds of antisemitism. There's the conscious kind, but I regret to say there's a lot of subconscious or unconscious antisemitism that I think is motivating people, tied in with other things.

It's tied in with the idea that Israelis are all white or Jews all white, whereas, of course, about 50% of the Israel population are Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews. In other words, their ancestors have been living in Morocco or Iraq or Yemen or indeed Ethiopia. And indeed, 20% to 25% of the Israeli population are not Jewish at all.

They're Druze and Arabs and so on. And yet they, too are the victims, in a way, of antisemitism. But some of it, I'd say, is just plain anti-Westernism. Israel is a western country, a democracy. It's a kind of western self hate. It's a kind of Post-Marxist nihilism by spoilt rich kids at Ivy League universities that really, if it's not exaggerating climate change and then saying we have to ban airplanes and cars and stuff and let's just destroy capitalism, then it's just another front.

Let's say gender wars, let's get rid of the whole idea of male and female and so on. It's just another front in a kind of Post-Marxist attack on western civilization. And Israel is the fool, guy. Look, at the same time, there's a certain amount of sympathy for Palestinians, and I have sympathy for Palestinians.

And Israel is perceived to be the stronger party, the occupying force. So, of course, there is understandable sympathy for the perceived underdog, the Palestinians. But what there should be is people asking questions as to why there isn't a Palestinian state when they've been offered one many times. Whose thought is that, and so on.

Instead of just blaming Israel or America.

>> Andrew Roberts: Do you think the Israeli position in areas like Instagram and social media would have been strengthened if the GoPro footage of 7th October had been more widely disseminated? Or was Israel right in trying to only show that really to, I don't know, as a parliamentarian, I was offered a viewing of it the other day, but it certainly isn't more widely disseminated.

Should it have been?

>> Tom Gross: Well, it has been widely disseminated between, with Islamists and anti Semites on telegram channels and TikTok and so on, and not on Instagram. Should Israel have put out footage? Well, first of all they want to respect victims. Some of the people shown are rape victims and they want to preserve anonymity.

Some of the people have been hacked to death and beheaded. And how do you think their mothers feel in their videos being shown? So I think initially Israel didn't feel they needed to, they felt was overwhelming evidence of the war crimes of Hamas. And they didn't feel that people like Owen Jones of the Guardian or others would be casting doubt on the atrocities of October 7th because the Palestinians themselves were admitting it and celebrating it.

But over the last three and a half months, it's clear that a lot of people have been muddying the waters. And therefore, very late in the day, the New York Times and just a couple of days ago, the Guardian, three and a half months later, have finally run a proper news report on the systematic rape.

It wasn't just one or two Hamas guys individually raping people. This was organized mass gang rape that happened on October 7th, ordered by Hamas.

>> Andrew Roberts: You've mentioned the Red Cross, tell us a bit more about the role of NGOs and the way in which they have been exhibiting huge anti Israel bias.

 

>> Tom Gross: Well, basically they're part of a racket. And over the years, those people who have called them out on it, including the former founder of Human Rights Watch, one of the biggest supposed human rights groups in the world. Have criticized human Rights watch for taking money from Qatar and past Saudi Arabia and then smearing Israel out of all recognition.

By the way, I don't want to say for one moment that Israel is perfect, Israel, like every country on earth, gets things wrong and should be called out for it by the media and NGOs and UN. But this isn't what's happening, they are holding Israel up to a standard that no other country has ever been held up to an impossible standard and adding some lies on top of it.

And this is exactly what the many NGOs have done. And one could say they are themselves biased or prejudiced. But I'm afraid to say it's also a bit of a racket, they get more funding if they smear Israel. They don't get lots of nice funding, both from Arab governments and individual people, if Oxfam or Save The Children run an appeal for Yemen, they just don't get the same funding as if save the children or whatever put an emergency appeal for Gaza.

They get ten, maybe 100 times more funding because they are playing on the goodwill of ignorant people in Britain and elsewhere, who have been misled by the BBC, who have covered, especially on the World Service, almost 24 hours a day. They are covering Israel, making it seem like Gaza is in rubble when most of Gaza is not in rubble in certain areas and so on.

Whereas they haven't covered the BBC know, let's say, Yemen or some other very, very bad war, or let's say what's happening in South Sudan, which is a genocide. What's happening right now is Arab militias are murdering non Arab black people.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, that brings us on, obviously, to the genocide hearings by the International Criminal Court at the moment brought by South Africa.

Tell us your thoughts on that.

>> Tom Gross: Well, again, it's preposterous. Look, south Africa, first of all, they are allies of Hamas. Since October 7th, they've welcomed senior Hamas leaders from Qatar have been and hugged, and so from Iran as well. They've hugged some of the leadership at the ANC in South Africa.

I'm no expert on South Africa, but from what I understand, they're in dire economic straits. There are all kinds of internal problems, actually, to answer one of your previous questions and combine it with this. Israel as a useful scapegoat, or rather the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a useful scapegoat, just as Jews were useful scapegoats in the past for wars and famine and the ills of capitalism.

So now the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a useful scapegoat for others. So the South African government can divert attention from their own domestic problems, and indeed, their treatment of African migrants, for example, in South Africa, as well as enormous corruption, by sort of championing the cause, not of the Palestinians, but of Hamas at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

But this is not genocide. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand this isn't genocide. This is done for a kind of show trial or PR reasons, and it's a kind of theater in a way. And very sadly, by using terms like genocide and apartheid, not only is it not nice for Israel or for Jews, but what about the poor victims of actual apartheid in South Africa when they say Israel has apartheid, as the South African government has done?

Well, the Supreme Court justice that just voted against the Israeli government is an Israeli-Arab. He was the deciding vote. Or let's say, the main news reader on Arab TV, Israeli TV, who interviewed me the other day, Lucy Aharish. She is a Muslim Arab, secular female Israeli. Or sport, 25 Israeli Arabs have played for the Israeli national football team, or doctors and pharmacists.

So things aren't perfect in Israel. There's a certain amount of discrimination against the Arab minority as there is discrimination against minorities in, I think, every country on the planet. But to use terms like apartheid and genocide, it makes me sad, because how are young people going to understand what real apartheid was or real genocide was, whether in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge or Rwanda or the Holocaust?

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Is there any evidence of anti-Hamas sentiment among ordinary Palestinian civilians in Gaza? If there were a free and fair election tomorrow, who would win?

>> Tom Gross: It's very hard to know. There are those people who think that Hamas does have widespread support in Gaza. I think it's impossible to know because there is no free media, there is no free discourse.

I think if you immediately held an election, Hamas may have some support. But if you gave people a chance to freely listen to different opinions and views and have proper access to a wide range of different possibilities for the future, I very much hope that a great number, hopefully, a majority of Palestinians, would not support Hamas.

But I can't quite say what I want to say, which is if you look at the population in, let's say, Iran, where large segments of the population have risked their lives and in some cases been shot dead in the last year or two protesting over the hijab and other things in Iran, I don't know is the answer.

If I might say one more thing, it's a bit like Russia. Vladimir Putin has such a grip over media, although it's less than Hamas's grip. In fact, Russia is holding elections this year. I've no doubt Putin will win. And the sad thing is that he probably is genuinely getting a majority of Russians to vote for him, but they haven't had proper access to information and so on.

I don't think we can call it a free and fair election in Russia because they are not in a position and other alternative candidates will not be able to run proper campaigns. So it's a bit meaningless, the elections in Russia and indeed in Iran. So it depends what kind of election and what would go before it in Gaza.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You see this situation getting wider, obviously, with the Houthis, it already is, but with regard to Hezbollah, in particular, with regard to Syria and so on?

>> Tom Gross: Well, Iran is the kind of godfather of all these movements of the HSs, as I call them, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and some other militia in Iraq and Syria.

So it's partly up to Iran. If I was Iran, they, as we know, are moving as fast as they can to try and acquire a nuclear arsenal. If I was Iran, I wouldn't want a wider war, when I say Iran, I mean the regime, until I had a nuclear arsenal, because I wouldn't want to risk it.

That would be me if I was the rational person. But I don't know how rational the Iranian regime is. My sense so far is they have not unleashed Hezbollah to the extent they might do, precisely because Hezbollah is a kind of gun breathing down Israel's neck. They want to keep for later use.

The question is whether Israel can live with this. There are those in Israel who say that Israel cannot live with the threat from Hezbollah. We have an October 7th from the north from Hezbollah waiting to happen. Right now, Israel's already on a war footing. You have about 20% of the Israeli population, not just from the south near Gaza, but from the north, near the Lebanese border, have been evacuated.

People don't quite realize 20% of Israelis are under internally displaced, internally evacuated at the present time, 28 towns in the north. The Israeli economy is on a war footing. We have a US naval carrier, warship, I can't remember which one now, Eisenhower, I think it is, or maybe George W Bush, off the coast of the east Mediterranean, off the coast of Israel and Lebanon.

And therefore, Israel may not have a better moment than to take the initiative with Hezbollah rather than wait until Hezbollah takes the initiative with Israel by attacking it.

>> Andrew Roberts: Where have the Abraham Accords been left by all of this? Where do you think they stand at the moment, and where are they going to go?

 

>> Tom Gross: I think they are solid, because I think pretty much every Arab government wants normalization with Israel. I'm sure your listeners know this already, but just to remind people, the Abraham Accords happened under the Trump presidency, before the president Biden presidency, and under a Netanyahu government. And Israel had normalization of peace agreements with four Arab countries, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, to add to the two existing deals Israel had with Jordan and with Egypt.

And many other Arab countries, the most important of which is Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure want to follow suit. Because they have concluded some time ago that Israel is a winner, that Israel has all kinds of technological know-how that it wants, not in military, but in things like how to grow vegetables in the desert, irrigation, solar energy, water technology, and so on.

And I think that MBS, the de facto leader, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, in spite of, let's call it a checkered human rights record, nevertheless, on balance, is probably a positive force. A reformer who realized that realizes that Saudi Arabia's young population cannot be forever overly Islamic, they can't rely on oil, and he wants to modernize Saudi Arabia.

A bit like the UAE has already been doing, and he realizes that Israel can be an important partner in this. And Saudi Arabia and Israel already have quiet relations a little bit under the table. And I know this because I myself have had private talks with people like the Saudi ambassador to London, who is the first cousin of the crown prince.

And he knows exactly that I spend time in Israel. I go there regularly. I know policy makers in Israel, which I suspect is one reason why the Saudis kind of reached out to me in the first place.

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned President Biden. He's reportedly asked Netanyahu to shift, to, quote, targeted operations, unquote, in Gaza.

First of all, obviously, what do you think about that? And secondly, how do you think a future President Trump might deal with the Middle East?

>> Tom Gross: I think that President Biden's initial reaction to the October 7th attacks was supportive of Israel. I think he relied on his kind of instincts.

He's been a senior person on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He's been involved in foreign policy for three or four decades. And I would say, broadly speaking, he's friendly towards Israel. And I think his initial reaction to October 7th, one of sympathy. But since then, the kind of State Department foreign policy establishment has regained the upper hand, a bit like they have in London and Paris, too.

And I now think he's regurgitating, I call it, nonsense. Israel has been targeted. One moment, he says Israel needs to be more targeted, needs to go slower. On the other hand, they say they have to hurry up and be Hamas. They can't do both. They can't win a war in weeks and not be allowed to shoot weapons.

Israel has been very targeted. That doesn't mean it's perfect. It would have been impossible, given the situation, given the urban makeup, the way Hamas is firing rockets at Israel from inside schools and UN complexes and offices. Often, what Israel's doing is literally hitting the Hamas rocket launching squad as they are firing rockets at hospitals in Israel.

The only hospitals that have been hit have been hit by Palestinians. Ashkelon, which is a city south of Tel Aviv, the main hospital, has been hit three times by Hamas rockets. So when they are firing rockets at Ashkelon Hospital, Israel will strike back to prevent more rockets being fired by that rocket team, even if that rocket team have positioned themselves in the location of civilians.

On other occasions, Israel has not hit back, and Israeli civilians have been killed as a result of Israeli caution. So I think Biden, his comments, and maybe to placate the progressive wing of his own party, maybe to placate people like the New York Times opinion writers, to make him sound like he's on board.

But it's hard to know whether that's actually policy or he's just making some off-the-cuff remarks, vis-a-vis Trump. President Trump in his previous term of office was an ally of Israel. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. He produced the Trump plan, which I actually think is a good plan.

It wasn't taken seriously, but I suspect that in the end, that Trump plan may have the, what's the word, the seeds of a future settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, even a two-state solution within that Trump plan that was never taken very seriously. But it's a very detailed and serious plan he came out with.

Anyway, with Trump, he has been supportive of Israel. What concerns me is there's an isolationist wing to the Republican Party, the kind of Tucker Carlson wing, let's call it. And I don't know how much influence some people around Trump at this point have, in that it really is America first.

And he just doesn't want to be very involved with anything that's not directly on America's borders. So possibly, if Trump comes back to power, if a year from now, in fact, it's exactly a year when we're gonna have inauguration of the next president. If that is Trump, which it may well be, given the opinion polls, we may see a Trump that's similar to his first term, that had rather good policies in the Middle East, which pushed back Iran.

Iran was more timid after the hard position of Trump that has been under Biden. And he helped oversee four peace deals. Now, if it was a Democrat, if Obama had overseen four peace deals, Obama would have got a second Nobel Peace Prize. No one even suggested giving Trump even one.

And it's a magnificent achievement, not easy. And I suspect a second Trump term would see probably an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal. However, I don't know how engaged he be. Maybe if he picks someone like Mike Pompeo, another senior, to come back to cabinet or someone like Mike Pence who was in Israel a few days ago-

 

>> Andrew Roberts: I don't think you're going to be finding either of those people, frankly, in a future Trump administration, Tom.

>> Tom Gross: Well, maybe, I don't know about Pompeo.

>> Andrew Roberts: Anshel Pfeffer, the very anti-Netanyahu journalist, has written in the Times about the Israeli war cabinet essentially being split on important issues, including the one about hostages, for a pause.

Tell me, is this what you're hearing too?

>> Tom Gross: Well, yes, that's been widely reported in the Israeli press. Anyone who knows Israeli politics or Israeli democracy knows how robust it is. And as Golda Meir, the first female prime minister of Israel, famously said, two Israelis, three opinions, or everybody wants to be prime minister, she also said.

So it would be incredible if there weren't some ruptures and differences of opinion in an Israeli cabinet. It will be a world first. So I've no doubt there are some slight differences. What's being reported is one member of that cabinet who's the least important of the five members of the war cabinet, which is General Eisenkot, wants to put more emphasis on hostages.

But he's also a political rival from a different party of Prime Minister Netanyahu. So, yes, there may be differences. And you know what? That's okay. The whole point is they should be robust debate. There's no exact right way to conduct this war or any war. It's important that there are discussions and disagreements.

And Israel being a small country and talkative people, these things get leaked. So the reports may be true, but I don't think they'd affect the war. Eisenkot is not the prime minister. And I'd say one of the healthy things about Israel is that it's a democracy and is that there are debates.

And in fact, one of the things I think critics of Israel don't spend enough or don't understand enough, and it's true in conflicts throughout the world. It's vital to understand the difference, the real deep difference between democracies and dictatorships. And now I know it, having spent time as a teenager in communist East Europe, crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin to east Berlin, there's all the difference in the world.

And one of the advantages of Israel, what makes it robust, is it's a vigorous, open democracy where people debate things. And even with disasters like October 7th, which is the biggest disaster, I think, in Israeli history, bigger than the Yom Kippur War. Nevertheless, Israel will recover and move on, just like the United States did after 911, whereas Hamas and Arabic paid ships suffer from being dictatorships.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Pfeiffer also implies, though, that Bibi Netanyahu won't survive politically even to the end of this operation against Hamas. What do you think about that?

>> Tom Gross: My initial feeling after October 7th was, no Israeli or any prime minister could survive such a horrendous massacre happening on his or her watch, even if he's not responsible for it.

But they've got a 64 seat majority coalition in the 120 seat Knesset. I don't see any sign that that's about to crumble. I, on the other hand, don't think that Netanyahu can win another election. But this government's only one year and one month into a four or five-year term.

It only came to office less or twelve and a half months ago. I suspect this government will stay in power for at least another two or three years. But I think Netanyahu, who first came to office in his first term, it's long ago, 1996, that's when I was first a correspondent on the Middle East.

I remember when he came to power a year after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. And then Shimon Peres, the caretaker prime minister, lost an election to a youthful Netanyahu. So that's 28 years ago, 1996. And although Netanyahu's been a good prime minister in many ways, I don't think it's healthy for any society to have a leader stay in power too long.

And I think Netanyahu himself knows he can't recover from October 7th. But that's not the same thing that Anshel Pfeffer and others think, that they want to wake up tomorrow morning and find out there's been a coup within the Likud Party or the opposition against Netanyahu. I don't think Netanyahu is gonna go anywhere in the next months or the next year, personally.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Have the West Bank Israelis made the situation worse? The idea that settler violence in the West Bank, which we hear about constantly, is in some way an active reason for all of this violence, or is that just an adjunct to it?

>> Tom Gross: I think it's an adjunct.

Look, I personally am, in theory for two states, I think that every people have the right to self-determination, whether it's the Kurds or Tibetans or Palestinians. What they don't have is the right to use independence to then go on a genocidal rampage against their neighbors. And that is what Israel fears.

So I don't think the settlement of the West Bank by Israeli settlers is helpful. I am not a supporter of it. On the other hand, and some, by all means, only a few settlers are very extremist, even racist, and I do not support them. Having said that, some of the media reporting about supposed settler violence is so exaggerated.

Most of the supposed violence have been acts of self-defense. As Palestinian terror groups have been shooting at settlers, they have literally shot them back, sometimes where they've already been injured. They are hardly any cases of random, unprovoked violence against Palestinian civilians by West Bank settlers. So on the one hand, I'm not a supporter of the settlement movement, but that doesn't mean they should be defamed or used as a scapegoat.

And we know from Gaza, in 2005, Israel left Gaza. Jews have been present in Gaza pretty much for the last 3000 years, but not since 1995. Ariel Sharon, he closed down and destroyed 21 Israeli settlements. After 1995, no Jews, whether settlers or civilians or army, was left in Gaza.

Did that stop Palestinian attacks on Israel? It did not. We've had 18 years of rocket fire and other attacks. So I think it's a kind of, if only it was as simple as saying, yes, let's remove Jewish settlers from the West Bank and peace will break out. If only it was that simple.

Unfortunately, it's not, and I don't think scapegoating the settlers or indeed scapegoating Netanyahu, it's wishful thinking. The problems are much deeper than that, and it's not quite so easy to solve this, it's not. Look, maybe the settlers make it more complicated, but it's a small factor in the overall reasons why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is continuing.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned two states, or what's sometimes very often called a two-state solution. Do you think all of this has brought the prospect of that closer, or is it just as far away as ever?

>> Tom Gross: In the immediate term, I don't see any appetite at all for any Israeli leader of left or right, or indeed the Israeli public to trust a Palestinian state.

Or at least unless the only way this would come about is, look, I was a supporter of Palestinian democracy. I now think you can't have it overnight. So what I'd like to see is someone like Mohammed Dahlan, who is a fatter Palestinian authority secular leader who is in exile in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

He's a Gaza native. If he was made, let's say, governor of Gaza and with the support of the UAE and the Saudis, rather than what we have now, which is Qatar, which is basically Muslim Brotherhood aligned with Iran back in Hamas. If someone like Dahlan could oversee the rebuilding of Gaza, where they would actually turn Gaza into some kind of mini Dubai with a thriving economy, with beautiful hotels on the coast of the Mediterranean.

And they wouldn't spend all their money acquiring an arsenal to attack Israel, and build a metro that's bigger than the London Underground or the New York subway under Gaza. We're talking about 500 miles of deeply built tunnels and hundreds of thousands of rockets they've been building. If you have somewhere at Dahlan, under the auspices of the UAE, run Gaza, and although it seems expensive, we're talking about a population of 2 million.

If you look what Qatar say spent on the last World cup, building stadiums and a metro, we look at what Saudi is spending on Neom, the new city that they're building near Jeddah. It's not that expensive to build up a kind of mini Dubai or Singapore. Among the Palestinian population are quite a lot of entrepreneurs and high-tech engineers and so on.

There are people who can build a thriving economy, and it Could have been built since Israel left in 2005. The problem has been Hamas, and the problem's been ideology. It's not that there couldn't be a perfectly nice state in Gaza, they could be. Singapore was also a small state, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are small, Bahrain that I visited a few months ago is small.

Okay, it's tiny. But if you have a government that wants to build a nice state and that state can and enjoy good relations with Israel, and in time, because I believe in democracy, I would like to see a transition to democracy in that state. And you bring back someone like Salam Fayyad, who was briefly Palestinian prime minister, and used to work for the World bank in Washington, DC.

And I know privately that he thinks Fatah and Hamas are both repulsive because the Fatah leadership in Ramallah is hardly any better than Hamas. But as long as Anthony Blinken and Macron and David Cameron put their faith in Abbas, the Palestinian leader, Ramallah, it's hopeless. He's a Holocaust denier.

He's a dictator. He has no vision for the Palestinian people. It's not a question of money, they have got more money per capita than Europe got post war in the Marshall fund. It's not a question of money, it's a question of getting the right governance there.

>> Andrew Roberts: I think that's a high point.

I think that's a positive vision that I'm going to end on and ask you the two questions that I always ask all of my guests. The first one is, what are you reading at the moment? What biography or history book are you reading?

>> Tom Gross: Well, I just want to say something about history in general for a moment.

And look, I read so much news, I don't just read the western press, I read in translation, the Syrian government news agency. I read the Hamas and Islamic Jihad websites. I read the Iranian government websites. Then, unfortunately, I wish I had more time to read history, and I urge everyone to read as much history as they can.

But right now I've been reading, actually, a biography of a dear friend of mine and a kind of mentor, the publisher George Weidenfeld, who died four or five years ago. It's a new book called the Maverick by Thomas Harding, mainly about George Weidenfeld's publishing career, which was interesting.

Weidenfeld published Lolita, he published all kinds of prominent books.

>> Andrew Roberts: He published the first ten books that I wrote, actually-

>> Tom Gross: There we are, he published Robert.

>> Andrew Roberts: He was a great mentor of mine. Yeah, a wonderful man.

>> Tom Gross: The greatest historians, Andrew Roberts, but what I want to say is what's not known.

And this will be left to another later biography is George Weidenfeld's political influence behind the scenes was second to none. He was, of course, the chief aide to the first president of Israel, Ezra Weizmann, back in 1948. He worked for the BBC in counterintelligence during the Second World War.

He was Austrian born and a fluent German speaker. He was a Holocaust refugee from Vienna. But also later on, I know, and it's in the public domain, so I can mention it now. That he was involved in things like helping persuade Germany sell Israel a submarine, which supposedly can be fitted with underwater nuclear missiles.

And he was involved with negotiations between Israeli intelligence and German intelligence and Angela Merkel, and I can say this cuz this is in the public domain. I spoke to George about this and other matters while George was alive. He was also involved in Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. If you remember, some Carmelite monks opened a center in Auschwitz, in the death camp, which was very upsetting to the Jewish world.

And George, who was a personal friend of Pope John Paul II, he negotiated, associated between the World Jewish Congress and John Paul II to have this convent, whatever it was. Moved from Auschwitz to another location in Poland. So I think, I'm interested in this memoir of George, but I'm waiting for the second one, which will be about politics as well.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, I've read that Harding book, it's a good book, but as you say, there's a lot more to, I remember George was. He was a sort of constant guest at the Castel Gandolfo by the pope. And all of those popes that he had painted, the paintings of the popes in his wonderful apartment in Chelsea embankment.

Yes, a great man, and well done, that's a good book. What If is the next one, what's the counterfactual that you enjoy or you sometimes think about?

>> Tom Gross: Well, there are many, but off the top of my head, I'm going to go back to 2009, where there was the so called Green Revolution anti regime in Iran.

If you remember, there were mass protests in Iran, and the people were literally calling on Barack Obama, who had just come to power, I think he had already got his Nobel Peace prize. And they were begging him for American help, whether it would just be satellite imagery and so on.

And there were, I think, millions of people on the street of Iran. And unlike other countries we mentioned, like Russia and Hamas, I know many Persians both inside Iran and outside Iran. I have no doubt that probably the majority, but certainly a very, very large number of Iranians want to overthrow the Islamic regime.

And they would quickly install a pro-Western, hopefully democratic government in Iran, in Persia. And that was a missed historic opportunity, if the government had been overthrown in 2009, I don't think we would have, for example, the Houthi attacks. Now, I'm not sure we would have had October 7th of Hamas.

I think Hezbollah would have been greatly weakened, and all kinds of other things would have been-

>> Andrew Roberts: And the nuclear program would have been binned, yeah.

>> Tom Gross: The nuclear program and many other things would have come, and just to add one more thing, one could also go further back 1979, the Islamic Revolution itself.

Many people think that President Jimmy Carter had he backed up the Shah, the Shah wasn't perfect, he was much better than the regime that followed, that Khomeini would not have come to power. And again, we wouldn't have had radical Shia Islam, we wouldn't have had the counter reaction of radical Sunni Islam that led to ISIS, and horrible other things.

>> Andrew Roberts: And Obama did essentially shun the Iranian opposition at that time, didn't he? Why?

>> Tom Gross: I think just idiocy, misguided appeasement of the regime, an idea that his own negotiating skills would bring about some grand bargain with the regime. One of the places I like giving interviews for is Persian opposition television stations, they are huge.

One of the channels that I speak to that's based in London, just on Instagram, they have 13 million followers, and many more on Telegram and Twitter and so on. Most of these people are inside Iran. I look in translation at the comments when they're doing reports on Israel, for example.

Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is more popular amongst Iranians than he probably is in Tel Aviv, and certainly than he is in London and New York. And the Iranian people, they despise Obama, okay, because they regard him as a traitor. I don't think Obama did it on purpose, I think he's naive, misled by some of his advisors, the sort of John Kerry types.

That's why I feel a bit sorry for Biden, I think Biden's instincts may be at the right place, but some of his people in the State Department and elsewhere, it's a kind of naivety, I don't think they mean badly. They just think, let's just sit down and speak about it with the ayatollahs.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Tom Gross, thank you so much for your tremendous expertise. You've given us an awful lot to think about in this Secrets of Statecraft podcast.

>> Tom Gross: You're welcome, Andrew, happy to be on with you.

>> Andrew Roberts: On the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft, I'll be talking to Matt Pottinger, who served in the White House in various senior roles on the National Security Council.

And was senior director for Asia, where he led the Trump administration's work in the Indo Pacific region and, in particular, its shift on China policy.

>> Hoover Representative: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.