Rory Stewart

speaker

24,987 appearances 93 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 5d ago

Rory Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 93 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 16.

Appearances

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The Rest Is Politics · 560. Trump's Hamas Disarmament 'Deal' and Europe's FIFA Boycott · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

I mean, people try, and your friend Jonathan Powell did a lot of this, and a lot of the Middle East peace process has been about this. voice-verified

Can you have a partial disarmament, a partial withdrawal, trust-building measures? voice-verified

But in the end, what needs to happen, we can see what the end game is. voice-verified

The end game is there needs to be voice-verified

legitimate governments that control these territories, so a Palestinian government which actually has statehood and controls the West Bank and Gaza, and in the way that Jordan does, has a stable voice-verified

ordered state which doesn't pose an existential threat to Israel and doesn't get bombed by Israel, but is able to run its own affairs. voice-verified

And the same would be true in Lebanon. voice-verified

Now, the complicating factor, and I want to throw back to you on this, is that probably the biggest elephant in the room is that Israel are going into elections on October the 29th. voice-verified

And usually elections are a very, very difficult time. voice-verified

for Palestinians and neighbors, because Israeli politics is increasingly right-wing, and the main candidates are going to be competing to show that they are very, very tough on national security. voice-verified

And they're going to be looking at Gaza, they're going to be looking at Lebanon, they might look at Syria, they're going to be looking at Iran, they're going to be looking at the West Bank, potentially as ways of demonstrating they're tough on national security. voice-verified

Over to you. voice-verified

This is the absolute key. voice-verified

I mean, I talked in the opener about the gap between Israeli military success and political failure. voice-verified

The fundamental truth since October 7th is that Israel has deployed precision weapons. voice-verified

It's inflicted incredible damage on the infrastructure of Gaza, killed tens of thousands of people. voice-verified

And it was doing it, claiming that it would completely eliminate Hamas. voice-verified

It has entirely failed to eliminate Hamas. voice-verified

And the story floating around in the background, which is driving all of this, is that the Israeli security establishment knows that if it withdraws from Gaza at the moment, there is a very strong likelihood that Hamas will take control. voice-verified

There is also, and this also affects elections, that if elections were held in the Palestinian Authority, including the West Bank, voice-verified

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