Good evening. Um, this is Clive Stafford Smith here, and today we're gonna talk about some fairly contentious things. Um I want to begin by asking you if everyone in the world is anti-Semitic or are they all end Islamophobic like they were two years ago? Or in the end, are we just all missing the point of what's going on? There are various principles I'm gonna just get into, and we may as well get some of them up front. Um there's just all this madness happening that says that it's anti-Semitic to say that Netanyahu's totally wrong in what he's doing. Well, it's not. Um principle number two, of course, uh, and I say this from uh feeling deeply within my own Jewish heritage, is the lesson of the Holocaust is not that we should get a Holocaust in next time, and we'll explore that. And finally, there is the important one that Donald Trump seems to have missed, which is Alfred Nobel declined to establish a Nobel War Prize for a good reason. Now, first I just want to say I've got some personal interests in this. This up here is my father and his father, Albert. And I grew up on that stud, Chiefley Park stud, which was the apparently, I don't know if this is really true, but apparently the oldest uh stud farm in the world. And certainly there were cedar trees above our house that were in the Doomsday Book in 1086. Uh, and before 1942, my grandfather was just uh secretary. Um, and somehow after 1942, he became the owner of this immensely valuable piece of property in Newmarket. And uh I had no idea about this business of being Jewish uh until I was in my 30s. And my dear wife and I were up in Croma with my father, Dick, and he was talking, and he suddenly comes out with the fact that both of his parents are Jewish. I had no idea about that. Um, I had been in a Jewish fraternity, as we'll discuss. Many of my best friends in college were Jewish, um, but I was the statutory goy, according to them, in the fraternity. Uh, so I'm sitting there drinking a beer in this pub and digesting this fact. I'm very pleased to discover a little ethnicity in my background. And Emily has my dad under cross-examination about how his father inherited this incredibly wealthy stud from Robert Sherwood, a very rich man who was never married and died without issue, which of course we all know was a euphemism back then in the 40s, uh, 30s and 40s. And suddenly Em says to Dad, Oh, it's obvious, Dad, Dick, your father was having a gay affair with Robert Sherwood. And he thought, Oh, God, my father was terribly homophobic, and this was not going to go down well, and there was this awful silence. And finally, my dad looks up from his beer and he says, Do you know? You may have a point. And then he says, At my father's funeral in 1958, his best friend came up to me and said, Dick, I be I hope you'll be more of a man than your father was. And I wondered for the last 40 years what on earth he meant. And I'm sitting there thinking, what kind of person would say something like that at a funeral? Um, but my dad became convinced his dad was gay. I later confirmed it that my grandfather was a member of the Roysterers Club, which was a way deep in the closet group of gay people, including him and Mr. Sherwood, in Newmarket back in the 1930s. So I was proud of that too. I mean, to have a gay Jewish grandfather suddenly, after thinking it was just a boring guy called Smith, was a big step forward. Um, that's one of my interests, is while I've always had a great sympathy with Israel um and and my Jewish friends, I discovered I effectively was one, um, or at least in some ways. I have another interest, which is I have a deep and very personal relationship with so many Muslim people. And I have to say, before and before George W. Bush and and uh Osama bin Laden made me do it, I really didn't. I didn't know many uh Muslim people, but I've represented literally hundreds of them since then. And some of my best friends are Muslim, including Marzambegh here, Shakarama, both British people in Guantanamo Bay. Uh, and so it deeply offends me when people are Islamophobic as well as being anti-Semitic. And I have a third personal interest as well, and that is that my um gay Jewish grandfather, who I never met, by the way, was a pacifist. And in World War I, he refused to fight and kill German people. He didn't have anything against them. Uh and he did, though, volunteer to be an ambulance person. And I found his diaries, or little parts of them, in the notes when I was writing a book about my father, and he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, as we would now call it, for from being an ambulance driver in a series of awful things on the Italian front. And the Italian front, I didn't know anything about it. I'm obsessed with World War I and its folly, but not the Italian part. And Grandpa was involved in the 10th, 11th, and 12th totally pointless battles of the Azzonzo River over just uh north of Venice, uh, which achieved absolutely nothing. And that's where he saw the horrors of war and became even more of a pacifist. And I inherit a lot of that from him. I think war is a really, really unwise way to solve problems. Now, you know, you look at Israel. I got very interested in Israel when I was very young. I was really just seventh when the 1967 war happened, and somehow that filtered into my conscience, and I saw Israel as a David against the Goliaths of the three countries that attacked Israel at the time, and something of a hero, um, uh as a sort of heroic nation protecting itself. Um, and and that went on for quite a while. I went to Israel for the first time when I was about 11 and saw it. And it's just extraordinary when you see Israel that if you're where the West Bank is, the western part of the West Bank, it's just nine kilometers at its narrowest point to the Mediterranean Sea. I mean, you could almost spit across there. And the fact that Israel is just incredibly in jeopardy is something that's just so obvious when you're there. But also it's important to understand the psyche. Uh, and there were a bunch of people who I admired back then who got Nobel Prizes, and we'll talk about them in a minute. And there are people I didn't admire, but they were still way better than the people that than the attitudes we have now. Ariel Sharon, for example, not my favorite human being, nevertheless was uh a big part of the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. And one of the things attributed to him is the statement, what you can see from there, you can't see from here. And more recently, um, Omar Bartov in America, who's written a book called I'm a Genocide Scholar, I Know It When I See It, and is saying it indeed that's what's been happening in Gaza, says, I think it's very hard to be dispassionate when you're in Israel. And that's true. And let's just talk a little bit about why that's true, because we need to understand it before we say what a dreadful individual Mr. Netanyahu is, and how he's responsible for an awful lot of the anti-Semitism that my people are suffering at the moment. So let's go through a bit of it. And you know all of this, it's just important to be reminded about how Jews were kicked out of everywhere. You know, in England there were just waves of it. Jews were officially banned from the whole of Great Britain from 1290 to 1655 when Oliver Cromwell uh said that it wasn't illegal anymore. And a lot of this was based on this guy, Ramon Lull, who wrote a piece about trying to convince people objectively that Christianity was right. And part of Christianity being so right is that, well, everything else is so wrong. And so, you know, people forget, of course, that, you know, if Jesus is your guy, he's Jewish. But um a big part of the persecution of Jewish people throughout those years was based on Christianity and how the Jews killed Jesus, supposedly. Um, and it goes back a much further than that, really. I mean, you go back before the Common Era and you find Judea being having Jews kicked out of Judea way back when 732, 576, 73 CE. And then the Romans, of course, did it every other week, it seems, that they had a purge against Jewish people. So that had been going on for ages, and it went on throughout the Middle Ages. And if you're Jewish, you have every reason to be paranoid. One of the reasons my grandparents didn't tell me they were Jewish, was, and and my granny, frankly, was pretty anti-Semitic herself, but she was desperate not for it to be known. She uh, her name was Whisker, which was obviously a corruption of a Russian name. Um, my grandfather's name was Smith, which was a wise choice because who knew where that came from, but obviously adopted when he got to England from Russia. Um, so all of this anti-Semitism had gone on for a long, long time, and it gives at least understanding to us, not justification, but understanding to some of the attitudes you see in right-wing people uh in Israel today. Uh, and then you get to this. I took my son to Germany. Um, we went to Berlin and we went to Sachsenhausen and the Holocaust Museum, and it's really moving. And my son was only about eight or nine at the time, but he really got it about the horrors of the Holocaust. And you have these mad people who think the Holocaust didn't exist. But you also have people who are even madder. There's a story I just wanted to tell you about this chap, his name is Sam Jones. I got uh cross-examine him on television one time in Louisiana, and I'd prepared for it. And you'd be surprised if you come to my office in Dorset. There's a copy of Mein Kampf on my bookshelf. And I was searching for it, and I even went to David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to his bookshop. He didn't have it. But I found it on my mother's bookshelf, and it was bought in 1932 or 33 by my grandfather. And sure enough, my grandfather wanted to know what was coming towards Jewish people at the time, and it is shockingly badly written. But I wanted to use this book to cross-examine this executioner just to see if I could get him to say some stupid things, which actually turned out to be far too easy. And I read the quote: they are vermin, and like vermin, they should be extirpated, uh, which Hitler used for Jewish people. And I asked him if he thought that quote, those words, I didn't tell him where it came from, um, applied to my clients on death row. And he said, Yeah, yeah, that sounds just right, after I explained what the word extirpated meant. Um, so I said, Look, Mr. Jones, you know, funny this attitude, but that quote comes from a book called My Struggle or Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. And Sam Jones said, Oh, great man, that Hitler. And you know, this is a problem. You you get a lot of this madness today, which is not just Holocaust denial, it's people who genuinely think that what Hitler was doing was okay. And anti-Semitism is never very far under the surface. But then neither's Islamophobia. I mean, it's only the last little while that we've been getting um endless stuff from Kirstamer about anti-Semitism, and don't get me wrong, I'm an anti-anti-Semite. Um it's wrong, wrong, wrong. But more recently, between 9-11 and just recently, it was all Islamophobia, right? And if you saw a woman with a burqa walking down the street, you knew that poor woman was going to be in for it. And endless, endless Islamophobia. And another thing that's always very close to the surface is war and war as a solution for things. And this is where we just seem to have totally lost the plot. Because I remember back in the 60s, 70s, um, there was just a huge effort to resolve what was going on in the Middle East through peace. And indeed, you had um, you know, the PLO getting together with the Israelis and all winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and Jimmy Carter winning the Nobel Peace Prize for helping out. And there was a real hope, and there were plans. And sometimes you had the two-state solution, sometimes the one-state solution, but at least they were having solutions, solutions. Uh, and this was happening when Rabin was Prime Minister, Shimon Perez was the foreign minister, and from 48 to 77, there was a left-wing coalition in Israel for most of the time. And there was an effort to swap land for peace after the wars and to try to work out something that would have peace in the long term. The difference is that this year, um, now there are four out of 120 members of the Nesset who are Labour Party members. And this just reminds me of what it was like when I was young. I was in this fraternity called Tau Epsilon Phi. I don't know why I joined a fraternity. It's a terrible idea. There's an American thing where you all get together in a house and someone does the cooking for you and all the rest of it. And I didn't need that. I'd been away at boarding school since I was eight, so uh I really didn't need it. But all my friends were in TEP. And so I did join. I I wouldn't stay at the TEP house and I wouldn't go through the hazing process. I said, look, I got waterboarded in school, I don't need that stuff. Um but it was very interesting because there was a big split that even then, and now we're talking about 1978, 79, I saw as uh a sort of microcosm of Israel. That there were two um Jewish fraternities there in um in North Carolina, UNC. And it was amazing the anti-Semitism. I mean, here am I, someone who comes across very much as a wasp. Um, I went down to one of the sororities to set up a party, and uh my TEP brothers said they won't do it because they're anti-Semites. And I said, Oh, you know, leave it to me. I got a British accent, and uh, I'll talk them into it. So I'm talking to these young women just down the street from us, and they're all excited about having a party with these people with British accents. Then I said which fraternity I was in, I was cut cold. They wouldn't do it. It was just phenomenal, just the anti-Semitism in that university. But in within the two Jewish fraternities, there was very much a breakdown. ZBT got into all sorts of trouble for various bad stuff. And my stereotype about them, probably unfair, was that they and some of my right-wing brethren at the Tep House were just they were Jewish enough to want to make money in America, never go to Israel, send money to Israel so Israel could have wars. Um and I didn't really like that. My best friend in Tep was Al Rosenthal, and he was a lovely guy whose plan was to go to Israel, join a kibbutz, and work for peace. And that was the other half. And it's the way I always saw Israel. And back then it was uh equipoise with maybe the Al Rosenthals in um the ascendancy in Israel for a while, but now it's very much not the case. The right-wing populism that uh we see in Trump and that we see in Farage and that we see Keir Starmer trying to emulate as many Farage has already been in Israel for quite a while. And that populism is based on fear-mongering and offering violent non-solutions to problems, just like what's going on in Iran right now. So we get to the real issue. Who is to blame for the chaos in the Middle East? And you know, no one's gonna beat me to the post when I say that Osama bin Laden and Hamas, what they did was just barbaric in 9-11 and October 7th. It's just fundamentally wrong. And it's not Islamophobic to say that. There is never a solution. But it's also not Islamophobic to say, and this is true, and I know it's controversial, but it's just the truth, that a lot of the anti-Semitism that we're facing today is caused by Netanyahu. And let's look at um at some of the consequences of that and and how, even though people rebel against it, I think we can prove that point. There's another principle that ties into it, which is if you're Netanyahu, and everyone talks about the distinction between Zionism and being Jewish and Israeli, and of course there's a distinction, but people don't see that distinction. So if you're an extremist of any stripe, people see the people around you as being the same. And, you know, it's just not the case that back in World War II we were looking at Hitler and saying, well, there's a lot of really good Germans in Germany. We didn't do that. We blurred that distinction. No one looks at what's going on in Britain right now from the outside. And remember, it's hard to be dispassionate on the inside, it's e much easier on the outside. I got a much better view of Britain when I moved to America. Um, but no one sees Farage and thinks, well, he's being a racist xenophobe, but there were lots of good British people, partly because the Labour Party are trying to copy it. So that's one point that what the leaders of countries do inevitably falls back on everyone else. And maybe that's not fair, but that's just a fact. So we we have to bear that in mind when we look at what our leaders are doing. The other thing is that just, you know, just to set in perspective whether we can criticize Netanyahu, let's criticize Keir Starmer for a minute. I've got to say that they're gonna get crushed in the upcoming elections, right, Labour. And there's a reason for that. And I've given a talk on that before about uh about coming up with positive ideas to combat our negative populism. But that's not what Keir does, unfortunately. He reaches in to the playbook of the of the hate-filled um people. He doesn't mean to do it, he just that's just the way he is. And he is to blame for the Labour Party being where it is now. And it this was a debate we had in America. Who's to blame for the loss of respect of America? Is it really bin Laden and what he did in 9-11? No. I mean, what he did in 9-11 was awful, but what we did in response to 9-11 was also awful. And that's what really lost us uh the respect of the world so much. And so then you get to the question: is who is to blame for the rise in disaffected people who go around doing mad things? Well, you know, obviously the mad people and bin Laden and the various people who are putting this out as a sensible way to live, yeah, they've got a lot of responsibility on that, but so do we when we do dreadful things and we fail to inspire people with a better choice. And, you know, you've got to think, and this is this is a fact that just really gets me every time, that when the US was investigating bin Laden, we found a complete list of Al-Qaeda's extremist uh membership from about September the 10th, 2001. There were 170 names on it. You could put the entirety of Al-Qaeda on one sheet of paper back in front. Um, and yet, if you looked 13 years later, there was a caliphate, an ISIS caliphate in Syria, and all sorts of nutty people around the world doing horrible things. And they'd reached into our own societies insofar as they were taking people out who um were inspired in a perverse way to go to Syria and to join ISIS and so forth. And when you look at the extremist things that have been done, where people have been killed in our countries, whether it be American America or Britain. Almost all of them have been done by American and British people who have watched the hypocrisy of our actions abroad and then decided the right idea was to do something horribly criminal. Now it's wrong, it's crazy, but that's what's happening. And if you don't see that's what's happening, you're going to have the wrong answer to the questions. All of this is not to say that we should hate Kirstarmer in America, because hatred's always wrong. But we've got to look at what the real solutions are. There are lots of other things going on in the Middle East that I think a lot of people in Britain and America are just not familiar with. I went there working for the Jordanian Palestinian prisoners in Guantanamo, and I got taken in by the secret police and all sorts of stupid stuff. And 60% of Jordanians are Palestinian. And that means this chap, King Abdullah, has to control the 60%. And what they do is that they use hatred of Jewish people in Israel as the mechanism to control the Palestinians by making them despise Jewish people. And, you know, I didn't go around saying, hi guys, I'm Jewish. But I was funded by George Soros, and my email address was related to that at the time. And a local NGO, you know, human rights organization wouldn't work with me because a Jewish guy was funding my work. It was just shocking. And it got far worse than that. This is not a picture of Colonel Lally Burzak, because I couldn't find one. I know exactly what he looks like, and I still couldn't find one. Because they took me in, um, and they took me into the secret police headquarters because I was going around trying to help the Gitmo, the the Jordanians, for goodness sake. Um, and I go into this, you know, I got on a taxi. I I was refusing to go. I was busy. I there's people who were interrupting me and I was pissed off. But finally I went because they start getting very threatening. And I got in a taxi. I told them where I wanted to go, which was the secret police headquarters. The taxi driver went pale and dropped me off about 400 yards away and told me to walk. I walk there and then I go in there, and there's this long, you know, one of those things you see in the movies, a long whitewashed corridor with little black doors every now and then, and I'm told to go into a particular room. And there's these two guys sitting behind the desk. And I do my best. Hi, I'm Clive. Um, nice to meet you. What are your names? And these guys said, we do not use names in this building. And I suddenly realized, you know, I hadn't told anyone where I was going, and uh things could go bad. So I start pulling the uh the sort of arrogant Westerner thing and saying, I've told my British and my American embassies to come and get me if I'm not out in an hour, and I'm gonna find out who you are. And sure enough, the guy with the red hair was Colonel Ali Borjak, who was notorious for torturing people and who had been the first person, uh, first real torturer too, into Guantanamo Bay from abroad. And those people try to crush dissidents and channel their hatred towards Israel. And it's the old divide and conquer, you know, don't let them hate us because we're just a small group of King Abdullah's mates controlling the country, hate the Jews. That's not the only thing. You know, Yemen, I went to Yemen on the same work, and this is true of everywhere I went, but these are just stories that stand out. I was working in Yemen with an NGO who were up for helping me, supposedly, till they discovered I was part Jewish. And they, their, their organization was called Yid. And I just couldn't believe they didn't know that that's a slur, that's an insult, saying you're a Jewish person. And they were incredibly anti-Semitic and just had very little idea of human rights. It wasn't their fault. It was just a society that was uh again being manipulated with hatred for Israel rather than despising the people who are trying to control them. And of course, that's true of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is behind a lot of this, they didn't mean it, but they were behind the whole um Islamic ethos of bin Laden and the people like him. And 15 out of 19 of the 9-11 attackers were Saudi. You know, if Donald Trump wanted to declare war on someone, it would be Saudi Arabia. We can't leave the US out. We give $300 billion to Israel mainly for weapons. Now we do now nothing. That's not always been true. Obviously, Jimmy Carter was a great example of someone who tried to do peace. But now we just pour money into the region that is used to violently repress people, and so we carry some of the blame too. And then, of course, Netanyahu's to blame. I mean, the man's attitude towards all this is crazy, crazy. The idea that he's going to solve anti-Semitism by slaughtering the people of Gaza, by repressing the people of the West Bank, by locking people out with unfair trials, by invading South Lebanon and then prompting America to attack Iran. I mean, he single-handedly turned the Iranian opposition into being quite supportive of the current Ayatollah regime. And it's just idiotic because the Iranians are past masters of anti-Semitism, and he's just stirring that up. And as if he thinks that bombing them is going to solve the problem, he's just deranged. And so there are lots of people we could blame, and it's just wrong not to take everyone into account when we're talking about anti-Semitism. The same's true of Islamophobia. The lead up to 9-11 was all a very similar thing, and it's been colonialism for hundreds of years that has created these regimes in the Middle East that um that were repressing their people. And we, the Americans, are seen as a big part of that problem. The British, of course, were a big part of the problem by drawing all the lines. So all of these phobias and isms um are not simple. But there's a few things that are simple, and this is what we need to really get down to. I talked about this last time. You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace. I hope you've all listened to Michael Franti and Spearhead and their song on that, because you should think about that every day. You can't bomb anything into peace. Now, let's look at the things that people have tried to do in solutions. You know, Netanyahu did the Gaza, he invaded Lebanon, he attacked Iran. We know that that's just madness. Then you see some other things that Israel's doing, and these are classic no responses. You will have read that Israel's passed a new death penalty law that effectively only targets Arabs. You know, as someone who's done death penalty defense for years, I just can't believe he does that. The death penalty, of course, has always been a myth designed to cover up the fact that governments are not doing anything real. But Israel has a particular history, and I was always proud of Israel that, yeah, they did execute Adolf Eichmann. I wouldn't have done it because Eichmann was patently mad, and Eichmann would have hated being sectioned into a mental hospital far more than they would being tried in a very big trial and uh and hanged. But you know, Israel's only executed two people since its foundation, and the other was Mayor Tobiansky, who was executed very rapidly uh as a spy against Israel in the early days in 1948. And he was executed in 48, exonerated in 1949. So 50% of the people that Israel has um has executed have been the wrong people. But just imagine how this is gonna go for Israel, the death penalty is a classic example of something that's just gonna spur anti-Semitism and achieve nothing good. So they're gonna have this unfair trial of some person, and it'll probably be a young um Palestinian of some sort who's done some terrible thing because he's desperate. And he's given the choice of either having a horrible time in prison for the next 50 years or being hanged. Now, you don't have to buy into the notion that a jihadist gets to be martyred and goes straight to heaven. Maybe he'll think that. A lot of people in Guantanamo did think that. And the threat of the death penalty was just not a great threat against someone who's going to get heaven out of being executed. But the other side of it is you ask this young lad, what would you rather? Would you rather be uh in prison forever, being mistreated by the Israelis? Or would you rather be the name that everyone's heard of in the most publicized trial in the history of Israel since Eichmann, um, where your name becomes synonymous with the heroic um defense against the Israeli oppressor? Well, of course they're gonna go for that. So the death penalty in this sense is not just a useful response to what's going on, it's utterly counterproductive. Uh, and it's gonna harm Israel and Jewish people. I mean, I'm just not a big fan of that. But Starmer does the same thing. You know, the thing about prescribing Palestine action is it's just monumentally stupid. Before he did that, and before he used terrorism law against a bunch of people who were holding signs up saying that they uh opposed genocide, um, you know, there were a lot of people who are probably on the fence about what was going on in Gaza and remembered what happened to Israel and so forth. But now Parliament Square is packed with octogenarian people, including an 83-year-old Catholic nun who are getting hauled away by the police. And single-handedly, Starmer has turned thousands and thousands of people uh into opponents of the Israeli regime. Now, again, they're gonna conflate opposing Starmer and opposing Nessanyahu with opposing Jewish people. He is creating anti-Semitism by what he does. It's just immensely stupid. We should be trying to calm everyone down, not ramp it up. And, you know, I look, I'd love to do a whole talk on that because there's just so much about Palestine action prescription that's stupid. I don't support Palestine action. I I don't support violence ever. But um but I certainly support the right for a bunch of people to hold a sign saying whatever they think. I mean, that's just it's just ridiculous to ban that. But then, you know, there are other things that we do that are just not very sensible. I think charging Netanyahu and the ICC is just not very sensible. Because one of the experiences I had in Gitmo was it was very hard to get British people to sympathize with my clients to begin with. Between 2002, February the, you know, January the 11th, that they first started getting there, February the 19th that we sued. Between them and 2004, we had a very hard time. I got lots of hate mail from British people just like I did Americans. But then the Americans charged Marzenbeg and one other person as two of the six people who they were first going to give the death penalty to in Guantanamo Bay. And suddenly everything changed. And the British reverted to their national sport, which was dashing America, and everyone was on my side on that. And it was because they'd picked on our Muslims, and you just shouldn't do that. The same's true with Netanyahu. He's never going to go to trial. Um, he's and he his position typically is this is anti-Semitic. No, it's not. The ICC charged the head of the military wing of Hamas at the same time, who's also never going to get tried because the Israelis killed him. But um, but they're never going to try Netanyahu. But he uses that just like the ayatollahs use what's going on in Iran, to whip up support in their own people against these interventions from abroad. And charging him is just pointless. He's not going to achieve anything. Now, the question is what we can do, and there is an awful lot that we can do. That's not something we're going to cover all today, but um we we should always go back to what Ariel Sharon said, which is yeah, it's different from inside Israel than it is from Gaza. And the Israelis have to see that, just as the people in Gaza have to see the Israeli perspective. I've had discussions with various Muslim friends of mine who I respect immensely and I love dearly, who think we should abolish Israel because they blame it all on the Balfour Declaration, they blame it all on the British and then everyone else. Um, and we should turn the clock back to 1915. That's just silly. We may as well say that the British should have India back and most of Africa. It's just absurd. And we can't do that. But that is the level of anti-Israel sentiment, is that it should be abolished. We can't have that. Um, but there are some recognitions we must have. In the last 2,000 years, the two reasons that have caused the most wars, without any doubt, are nationalism, so national identity in your country and religion. And you put nationalism and religion together, and you've really got a problem. And you've got that problem in Israel, you've got that problem in a lot of the Middle East. Um, but there are ways to think about it. And we've got to have certain things we're thinking about all the time. The first simple one, and I was trying to do this with Imran Khan when he was prime minister. He wanted to do this over Kashmir, was to make him the president of law while Modi was the president of war over Kashmir, because we've got to solve that problem, and there are lots of litigation we can do in Kashmir. But there is also in Israel, and we need to be bringing that. I was sort of interested by the whole flotilla idea because I was trying to do something a teeny bit similar a few years back when we were supporting a bookshop in Gaza, where we had 350,000 books we were going to deliver to Gaza. But the real thing that struck me then is this blockade that the Israelis are applying against Gaza is totally illegal. You can't, under the law of the sea, have a naval blockade unless it's a declared war and it has narrow aims about um hampering your enemy. And so we should be dealing with that in international courts, and we should be pushing that issue not just as a matter of putting Netanyahu in the dock, but as declaring the whole attitude towards Gaza criminally illegal. But there's actually a much more important principle, and the second principle is this. The first principle I should just enunciate is that you you want to be the president of peace, uh not the president of mayhem. Um, the second one is that if you're given two choices, there's always a third. And one of the problems that's going on, there's very little talk in Palestine-Israel about peace in the first place. But when we do, we talk about only two solutions. There's the there's the one-state solution and there's the two-state solution. But those aren't the only solutions. And we've got examples of this. I I was, I'll never forget this. When I was in university, I interviewed a British former Prime Minister, I won't name him because he's so shocking, um, who um I was asking him about what we should do. This is 1980, what we should do to solve the Irish problem, as we always called it in England. Uh, and he said to me, I think we should tow Ireland out in the out into the middle of the Atlantic and sink it. Just coming from a prime minister, this is pretty shocking, right? Really stupid. Um, the solutions we have, I mean, the Protestants in Ireland stereotypically want to be in the UK, the Catholics stereotypically want to be in a united Ireland, those aren't the only two solutions. And slightly by mistake, I think, uh, when we voted to join the EU, we created the solution, which was instead of being either in the UK or in the Republic of Ireland, everyone was both. They were all in Europe. It was fabulous. And one of the true tragedies of Brexit is we tried to destroy that. But that was the third solution for the Irish issues, and it was the obvious one. And if there's one argument stronger than all the rest that we should get back into Europe, is that. But we're gonna have to go a bit further than that, right? But nevertheless, if you look at Palestine and Israel, that's gotta be a solution. We have to think outside the box. So it's not forcing everyone into one state, it's not having two states that are constantly at war. There's gotta be a way that we help foster a peaceful solution that involves some sort of protectorate for everyone, where the world's agreement is on the line, not to make it a political football between Russia and America or between whoever and whoever else, but to protect everyone within the boundary of what is Palestine-Israel. That has to be the solution. And we got to start talking about it because right now we're not talking about anything of the sort, and that's very sad. Thank you.