Jonathan Sacerdoti

And I believe that that is quite representative of the Palestinian cause, because if you look for a true partner for peace in the Palestinian mainstream, in Palestinian politics, even the so-called moderates like Fatah,

who have control of the Palestinian Authority, haven't had an election for years.

The Palestinian president had a four-year term.

That was decades ago.

These people are deeply corrupt.

They've punished and seized control of their own people and abused them.

They don't protect them.

And their overriding unifying feature, culturally, politically, and ideologically, is resistance against Israel.

Effectively, the removal of Jews from that land, the removal of Jews from Israel, and that's what from the river to the sea means.

It means the removal of Jews from there, not a two-state solution, not living side by side in peace, not cooperation.

but extermination.

And what we saw on October the 7th was a manifestation of that.

The intention was to invade in the south, to work north, and the hope was that Hezbollah in the north, in Lebanon, which is also backed by the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, would join in, and in their dream, in their sick fantasy, they would meet in the middle and carry out the kind of slaughter that we saw throughout the whole country.

That's a very real threat.

It's not a fantasy.

And I think there's a tendency among people here who choose to oppose Israel to sometimes overlook just what the threat actually is and just who the enemy actually is of Israel and why it is so robust in its reaction.

Look, I don't have a lot of time for such a theory because I think it involves imagining a government and a military which is willing to sacrifice people in a way that I just don't believe that the Israeli government was its own people.

I do think there were obviously failings in allowing October the 7th to happen, in failings in intelligence or in listening to intelligence or in mobilising the military quickly enough.

There were a number of failings and there's been some resistance to inquiry within Israel, certainly since then, during the war, into finding out why that happened.

But I don't personally subscribe to the conspiracy and it will lead us into discussion of Jews in the UK and the West more broadly because I think it's typical of some people to assume conspiracy and to assume the worst of Israel, the Jewish state, in trying to understand what happened.