- The Rest Is Politics podcast promotes its ad-free listening, newsletter, chat room, and early access to live show tickets on therestispolitics.com.
- Big box retailers like Walmart and Target are supporting Senate Bill 1838, which would eliminate credit card rewards.
- A pharmacy benefit manager explains their role as a middleman between insurers and patients, often prioritizing their own profits over patient needs.
- The hosts of The Rest Is Politics discuss recent events in the Middle East, including the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and the polarization and misinformation surrounding the issue.
- They praise Joe Biden and Antony Blinken for their leadership and efforts to address the situation, but also highlight the US's disengagement from the region in recent years.

- The US has a pattern of getting involved in crises after they happen, rather than preventing them.
- The focus in the Middle East has shifted towards the Gulf countries, such as Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
- Biden and Blinken have handled the current crisis well, but Trump was a disaster in foreign policy.
- Human stories from both Israelis and Palestinians are important in understanding the conflict.
- Social media is spreading misinformation and old footage, making it difficult to discern the truth.
- There is a need for proper content moderation on social media platforms.
- There is confusion about the terms Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian, and their respective populations.

- The Arab world consists of 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, excluding Iran and Turkey.
- Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh are considered part of South Asia.
- Understanding the Sunni-Shia split is crucial in understanding the context of the region.
- There is speculation about Israel launching a ground invasion, particularly targeting tunnels in Gaza.
- A ground offensive would result in brutal urban warfare and high civilian casualties.
- The definition of civilian casualties in war is often based on proximity to military installations.
- There are concerns about Hamas using hospitals, which could make them legitimate targets.
- The aftermath and governance of Gaza after a potential Israeli invasion are major concerns.
- The world will need to come together to address the costs of rebuilding Gaza and Ukraine.
- The international focus on Ukraine may be shifting away, causing concern for its leadership.

- The situation in Ukraine is causing fatigue and concern, with fears of it escalating into a larger conflict.
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- The Rest Is Politics podcast offers ad-free listening, a newsletter, chat room, and early access to live show tickets on their website.
- Big box retailers like Walmart and Target support Senate Bill 1838, which aims to eliminate credit card rewards.
- The podcast discusses recent events in the Middle East, highlighting the conflict between Hamas and Israel and the spread of misinformation.
- The hosts praise Joe Biden and Antony Blinken for their leadership in addressing the situation, but also note the US's disengagement from the region in recent years.
- The focus in the Middle East has shifted towards the Gulf countries.
- Social media plays a role in spreading misinformation and old footage, emphasizing the need for content moderation on these platforms.
- There is confusion regarding the terms Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian and their respective populations.
- Understanding the Sunni-Shia split is crucial in understanding the context of the region.
- There are concerns about a potential Israeli ground invasion in Gaza, which could result in high civilian casualties.
- The aftermath and governance of Gaza after an invasion are major concerns.
- The international community needs to address the costs of rebuilding Gaza and Ukraine.
- The situation in Ukraine is causing fatigue and concerns of escalation into a larger conflict.
- The Polish government has been accused of bias and propaganda in the media.
- Recent elections in Slovakia and Hungary have halted the consolidation of power by populist leaders.
- The voice referendum in Australia, led by Peter Dutton, ultimately failed.
- The New Zealand election resulted in a more balanced distribution of power between parties, with the National Party winning a significant majority.
- Chris Luxton, the new Prime Minister of New Zealand, has a business background and entered politics in 2019.
- The Labour Party, led by Jacinda Ardern, suffered a significant defeat in the election, despite her handling of COVID-19.
- Issues of law and order and crime played a role in the election, with voters wanting harsher sentences and more offenders in jail.

What is the next stage in the war between Israel and Hamas? How important is Joe Biden's impending visit? Is it possible to be both victim and oppressor?

Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions, followed by a discussion of The Voice referendum in Australia and the election results in Poland and New Zealand.

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Welcome to the rest of this Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

Of course, we're going to focus a great deal on what's happening in the Middle East.

But there's also been a series of very remarkable events around the world.

So in the second half, we will touch on an incredible result that seems to be emerging in Poland, where the right wing populist government that's dominated Poland since 2015 looks like it's been pushed out.

New Zealand, where Chris Hipkins, who we interviewed on Leading, lost the election by a pretty large margin.

And the voice referendum, which we've been hearing a lot about in Australia on rights for Indigenous peoples, which has also been lost.

But Alastair, a quick reminder of people where we are.

On the 7th of October, Saturday, Hamas crossed the border from Gaza.

It now appears that 1,300 people were killed, many of whom were civilians, and 199 hostages were taken.

Then Israel began to respond with bombardments.

6,000 bombs were dropped in 6 days on Gaza.

So to put that in context, that's 7,700 were dropped in the whole Libyan war.

If you see the footage, which CNN and others are producing, that means that you're often seeing bomb after bomb after bomb if you're sitting in Gaza just going off in different buildings again.

To put another fact in context, when the UK was talking about being the second largest contributor to air operations in Syria, the UK was flying 2 bombing missions a day.

And then October 12th, Israel told 1.1 million people in the northern bit of Gaza that they had 24 hours to evacuate.

And It's very difficult to get figures out, but there is a total siege.

The water supply for Gaza comes from Israel.

The electricity for Gaza comes from Israel.

That's been cut off, so people are reliant now on trying to find what water remains.

In some cases, that is dirty water, that can be water which people are trying to, that's bottled water smuggled across borders.

That's in some cases, apparently salt water.

The generators are now what people are relying on to keep hospitals going, but of course they're running out of fuel.

And according to the government in Gaza, 2,750 people have been killed since the bombardment started and 9,700 wounded.

Over to you on what you're picking up in terms of conversations around the Middle East in Britain at the moment, for example?

Well, I think maybe we should start with some of the things we've been talking about on the podcast with the interviews we've done, first with Yuval Noah Harari, and then most recently, went out yesterday, the Palestinian ambassador.

And I think what I'm getting a sense of, both in that region and here, is how quickly this issue has become so polarized, how hard it is for people to get a sense of what's really happening.

I think that we're seeing some really bad stuff on social media in particular.

I think the media is the mainstream, a lot of the mainstream media as well.

There's been some great stuff from places where you might expect it, but also some pretty bad stuff as well.

But I think in the UK context, I think Rishi Sunak started out in a very bad place, kind of Israel right or wrong.

I think Keir Starmer reflected that a little bit too much as well, but I thought by yesterday in the statement in the House of Commons, they were in a better position.

You mean that both Rishi Sunak and Kirstahmar started by sounding as though they were not really pushing for restraint in Gaza and now they've moved to a position where they're saying, we absolutely recognize Israel's right to defend itself but we call it to uphold international humanitarian law in the way it deals with Gaza.

And Rishi Sunak I guess has announced over 10 million pounds worth of humanitarian relief now to Gaza.

The European Union's now announced over 70 million euros of humanitarian relief from Gaza.

So that's what you're talking about, right?

Yeah, I think at the start, it was, last Saturday, it was so horrific, it was so awful, the scale of terror was so horrendous that I think that the politicians around the world felt the need absolutely to be with Israel.

But I think 1 of the things that came through, actually with Yuval, but also certainly with the Palestinian ambassador, was the worry that Netanyahu would take that and only hear the bits that said, essentially, green light for whatever you do.

And I think what's happened over the last few days has been a recalibration.

And I do think a lot of that was down to the fact that Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, have been so much more balanced and shown in a way that it's possible to be unequivocally supportive of Israel whilst at the same time pointing to the need for restraint, the need to obey the norms of international law, the need not to go to the depths of the terrorist as it were.

And maybe a good point to kick off is the fact that Joe Biden, when our podcast which we're recording today, Tuesday, goes out, Joe Biden is likely to be either on his way to or in Israel itself.

Now, it's so rare for a president to go to a war zone, but he did go to Ukraine as well.

Honestly, we've talked before about Joe Biden and you've been saying for months that we think he's too old.

But I really think the guy's got incredible leadership skills and his experience in this area is I think gonna be absolutely vital.

And I think we should also give a little, you know, word of praise to Antony Blinken as well, because the guy is, you know, he's been touring the region.

He's working really hard to get humanitarian routes opened into Gaza.

He's absolutely supportive of the Israelis, but at the same time, cognizant of all the other tensions in that region, the need to keep...

They've got so many pressures on them, so many balls in the air.

But I think he and Biden did a pretty good job so

The problem though, I guess, is that they really took their eye off the ball.

The US has massively disengaged from the region.

The two-state solution has seemed less and less important to US politicians over the last decade.

This started really with President Obama, who wanted to get the US out of the Middle East, focused more on China and Asia Pacific.

It accelerated under Donald Trump, who supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, which was a very, very provocative act because of course, Jerusalem is meant to be an international city and East Jerusalem is very much meant to be part of the Palestinian territories.

And Joe Biden hasn't really, since he's come into office, brought the focus to the Middle East.

And we saw it with Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor, who's along with Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Joe Biden, the President, gave a speech saying that the Middle East seemed to be more peaceful than it had been in 2 decades just before this all happened.

With the caveat, he did have a caveat, Rory, he said, but the 1 thing you know about that region is you never quite know what's going to happen.

But I think that the basic story is that the populism of Trump led to a form of isolationism.

And Jake Sullivan wrote a big piece just before they came into office, arguing for a foreign policy for the middle class.

And this basically was a foreign policy in the US, which was going to focus much, much more on thinking about American interests.

And it was going to be more cautious about global free trade deals.

Biden's really backed off a lot of the free trade stuff.

And we've seen that in the Pacific partnership.

But more generally, the liberal global order that we talk about a lot cannot work without the US.

And it's fine that the US is now getting involved, but the pattern has been with Ukraine, with Israel, with the coups in Africa, with what happened in Sudan, that the US is coming in once the crisis has happened, but it's not leaning in before the crisis.

No, I mean look, Trump as the Palestinian ambassador indicated and I think we all recognize and Zaid Raad said the same, Trump is a disaster on so many fronts but in foreign policy and in this area, absolutely a total disaster.

We've also talked before, and this again I think we're seeing through this lens as well, the extent to which the Middle East has not in recent years been about Israel and Palestine.

Alastair, I'm just interrupting for a second, but I guess what you're saying is it's more about the Gulf.

So Qatar, UAE, Saudi have all become the central gravity.

That's where the wealth's been, that's where the focus has been.

That's why Antony Blinken is having to sort of, you know, tick all of those boxes as well.

No, you're absolutely right that this has been a failure of global strategic leadership.

My point about Biden and Blinken is that now that we are in this crisis, and crisis it really is, that they thus far, I think, have handled it extraordinarily well.

And I think that of itself has had an impact upon the other leaders, including our own.

We should probably put in the newsletter an interview I saw, I think it was on the BBC, with the mother of 1 of the Israelis who'd been killed.

And I think that 1 of the reasons we wanted to talk to Yuval and the ambassador, They both had families who'd been involved in this.

Yuval had members of his family directly caught up in an attack on 1 of the kibbutzins.

And the ambassador, Hussam Zomlot, who lost several members, close members of his family, in the early strikes on Gaza.

He told us the story of his sister who opened her home to people who were fleeing and she now had, I think he said, 150 people living there.

And I do think these human stories are incredibly important.

And the interview that I'm talking about was a woman who said that even though she'd lost a child, she did not want her child to be used as an excuse for vengeance and the last thing that Israel needed is war.

And I think there are more Israelis saying that than maybe we realize from the media coverage because obviously the political leaders and the military action dominates this debate.

And if you look at Netanyahu, and you look at the defence minister, their language is so kind of militaristic.

And Likewise, when we talk to the Palestinian ambassador, it is so much about what they feel about what's being done to them.

We had a very interesting discussion with him about whether you can be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time.

I think he actually was pretty reflective.

It took us a while to get there but I think he became quite reflective about that.

So what's happening inside the public opinions of both Israeli and Palestinian?

If you think about Gaza, 1 of the points that I thought 1 of the points that both Kirstein and Rishi Sunak made is we must not confuse Hamas with Palestine.

We mustn't confuse Hamas with the people who live in Gaza.

There will be many, many, many supporters of Hamas.

But a lot of these people who are fleeing, they are as angry about Hamas as many, many Israelis are because they realise what they're doing to their country as well.

So I think that is trying to sort of explain to people the nuances and the complexities in the way that people now communicate in politics and the way that media conducts itself in politics is very, very hard.

But that's I think what we're trying to do.

We talk a lot about the way in which social media polarizes and creates this kind of populist environment.

And there's 1 of the problems here is that ex-Twitter is really out of control.

I mean, 1 of the things that Elon Musk seems to have done is made significant cuts to the staff when he took over.

And part of that has affected attempts to really moderate and put content in context.

So I open up my phone this morning and I read, Hamas ripped open a pregnant Israeli woman's stomach, killed the fetus, then killed the mother.

Hamas raped women and girls, mutilated their bodies and then shot them.

And I then try to go online to find out whether this is true or not.

And this is not just, I mean, this is not a random post.

This post was 1.1 million views, which a lot of people who I know have liked and forwarded and shared.

On the Palestinian side, equal news is going out.

Pictures of Israelis using phosphorus bombs, pictures of injured civilians, interviews with Israeli soldiers saying they're going to kill, or reservists saying they're going to kill every woman and child, and then posted back to this thing.

And there is not any proper content moderation.

So, you know, we were in a situation in which a story went out, a really important story, went out claiming that Hamas had killed and beheaded 40 babies.

This was 5 days ago, and this really dominated the news cycle and was a very, very important part of people's perceptions of what Hamas had done.

So much so that Joe Biden himself said that Hamas had beheaded babies, which was seen as a US confirmation, official confirmation, from which he's now had to backtrack and admit that actually the President of the United States was going on social media seeing this stuff and not actually checking with the CIA.

Well if you remember when we did our first discussion on this, I mentioned it because I thought it was true and then you made the point straight away, well that has not been verified.

It shows how easy it is to fall into the traps of seeing stuff and believing it.

We should also share with people a very long article that I sent to you from Bellingcat.

They did an amazing job at focusing on specific stories that they have been able to establish were not true.

And again, as you say, on both sides, so they're all doing this.

And the use of video, the use of old video footage that is being presented as of now.

And I think that I think this is a terrible thing to say because we both argue against being overly cynical.

But I think at the moment, when we're looking at social media, I think it's wise to start from the possibility that what you're seeing is not often what it says it is.

So when I read this thing, it's got 1.6 million views.

So you sort of assume that it might be true, But then you get into it and there are statements on the web saying that this claim that a woman's stomach was cut open and the fetus was killed is actually lifted from a 40-year-old allegation made in the Lebanon war.

And then, as you say, I mean, Social media is dominated by reposting old footage.

Some people may have seen some mesmerising footage of a man being stalked by a cougar on a run in America.

But it then turns out that it's 3 years old.

Now, that doesn't matter so much for a comical thing as somebody being stalked by a cougar.

But what's happening here, and there's been great stuff, I really want to recommend BBC Verify, where BBC Verify is taking these videos, using image capture, going back on the web and finding that often this is footage from previous Hamas-Israeli fights from years ago, or it's footage from Ukraine which people are pretending is footage from Gaza.

So the white phosphorus bombs that people were posting on the Palestinian side to accuse the Israelis of war atrocities turn out to be footage from Ukraine being applied to Gaza etc etc.

The other thing I wanted to do Roy, you did a brilliant job in 1 of your explainers in the start of the thing but once I got a question this week from somebody who said, please don't read out my name.

I'm embarrassed to ask this publicly, but when I hear people say Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, I actually don't know what they mean.

So if I can just give a very brief explainer so people understand the difference.

Arabs are people who speak Arabic as a native language, and there are around 470 million of those.

Muslims are people who practice the religion of Islam, and there are somewhere between 1 and a half and 2000000000.

That's around 25% of the world and it's the fastest growing religion in the world.

Palestinians are Arabs who live and have lived through history as it were in a certain geographical region in the Middle East.

And that's something that we talked about to the ambassador.

And there are around 7 million Palestinians in the area, 5.3 in what's called now the state of Palestine, that's 3.2 million in the West Bank, 2.1 million in the Gaza, 1.7 million in what are known as the 1948 territories and around 7 million in the diaspora.

MG just quickly on that, of which a loss in Jordan.

So 1 of the reasons why people are really nervous about the conflict developing and becoming regional is that by some measurements, almost the majority of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian descent.

And the links there are very strong, but also of course, links very, very strong into Lebanon.

Most Arabs are Muslims, but there also are Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs.

And then if we talk about the Arab world, the Arab world is basically, it's 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

So when we talk about Iran, Iran is not an Arab country, Turkey is not an Arab country.

And when we talk about the Middle East, usually includes the 22 Arab countries.

And then Turkey is sometimes viewed as part of the Middle East and sometimes part of Europe.

And when we talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, they're basically South Asia.

good to do because I think we underestimate this.

There's a book actually that's just been written by Barnaby Rogerson on the Sunni-Shia split, which I think is another very important thing to understand this context.

But I remember all the way through over the last 20 years working on Iraq and Afghanistan, how often I was in meetings with senior politicians who didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, for example, and would have struggled with a lot of the things you just said.

I think finding the space for politicians, many of whom have spent their lives in domestic policy and suddenly find themselves in foreign policy positions to take the time to understand things that of course everybody in the region understands or takes for granted, but people internationally are really struggling to disentangle.

Can I just move you on quickly onto the question of the ground invasion?

So the question now is what will Israel do next?

The clearing of the announcement that people had 24 hours to evacuate, move from northern Gaza to southern Gaza, moving a million people, was also combined with hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists being mobilized and very large Israeli military presence around the Gaza border.

So the assumption is that the next stage following the bombardment will be an Israeli ground offensive targeted particularly at the tunnels.

Hamas has tunnels running all the way under Gaza City and around, which cannot really be accessed purely through aerial bombardment and will require special, if the Israelis want to tackle them, special engineering teams going into this very dangerous fighting in tunnels.

That of course is also almost certainly where many of the hostages, many of these 199 hostages will be being held at the moment.

So this is, I think, something that is at the center of what Joe Biden and other international leaders are trying to get involved in, which is to say, be very, very thoughtful about what the next stage is.

Because yes, Israel can mount a ground offensive, it can go in, but it will be brutal urban warfare because Hamas has presumably been expecting this for some time and will have prepared with booby traps that will be like the fight around Mosul.

There will be inevitably very, very large numbers of civilian casualties.

And that won't just be because Israel is trying to avoid the rules of war, it's because it's impossible really to fight in urban areas without civilians being killed.

That's partly to do with the way that civilian casualties are defined.

During the fight in Mosul after 2014, the RAF, for example, claimed that it only had a record of 1 civilian casualty, despite the fact that thousands of civilians have been killed.

That's because they define a civilian casualty as somebody who is nowhere near a military installation or command post.

If there's a command post or a military installation under the way in which wars conduct at the moment, civilian casualties are not counted.

1 of the moments at which Husam, the Palestinian ambassador, seemed to me to get really quite angry and emotional was when he was talking about those politicians, including some of our own, who were saying that Hamas hide their soldiers inside hospitals.

And the reason that he was so kind of emotional about that is because he said that in the current climate, Israel takes that as, well, if they're using hospitals, that then becomes a military target.

And I did think amongst all the messages around the evacuation when they were sort of dropping leaflets and putting out messages on social media and on television and radio, the 1 that was asking people to vacate hospitals was in a sense the most alarming.

But that's what the thinking is, is that they're basically saying, well, if you're going to have Hamas soldiers inside hospitals, they become a legitimate target.

So I guess you're right that when then that gets bombed and people die in there, that they're not necessarily counted as a civilian in a way that we would expect it.

So I was in Mosul a few months ago and the most striking thing in this, the second city in Iraq, which was taken by ISIS, the most striking thing that you see there is the hospital on the river, which was hit very, very hard.

I mean, it's a kind of shattered building because the coalition, the US, the UK, the Iraqis argued that it had become a bomb making factory and that ISIS were making bombs in the middle of this hospital.

The 1 thing they will not do, I imagine, is launch this whilst Joe Biden is in the region.

I wonder if perhaps the most significant reason why Joe Biden himself wants to go there is of course to show solidarity with Israel, but it's also that he can be there, he will presumably get pretty fully briefed on exactly what the plan is likely to be, and this will allow him perhaps to influence and shape that.

And the questions that the American administration will be asking is what next?

And It will be influenced also by the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that they will be saying, look, you can win potentially the military stage of this, but what's the post-war plan?

So let's say Israel goes in and it kills a lot of Hamas terrorists and deals with their stockpiles of weapons and gets rid of their command centers.

Because Hamas was the government of Gaza.

So who's Israel gonna bring in as a government?

Are they gonna try to occupy it and govern it themselves?

In which case, Israel would be directly responsible for the water supply, the electricity, the sanitation, and find itself dealing with a very, very angry insurgent population that will almost certainly be attacking them all the time.

And it will then feel very much like an extreme version of the occupation of Iraq.

I mean, much more extreme, because the occupation of Iraq, the US and the UK did not have the history that Israel has in Gaza.

If on the other hand, they're not proposing to do that, then the danger is they leave a vacuum behind.

And when is Israel going to provide the support to rebuild the infrastructure which is being destroyed?

Because obviously at the moment, Israel's very, very angry.

They've cut off the water supply, they've cut off the electricity, and they've dropped at least 6,000 bombs.

But at some point, Israel needs to work out whether they want there to be a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

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Israel-Gaza: What Happens Next