Introduction and Guest Background

My guest today is Jason Pack, who is an acclaimed author and Middle East expert. Jason is the author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, a seminal work that explores the intricate dynamics of post-Qadhafi Libya and its implications for the broader international system. He’s also the host of the excellent Disorder podcast and a senior analyst for emerging challenges at a NATO college in Rome. With over two decades of research in the Middle East, Jason brings a unique perspective. to understanding the complexities of the region’s geopolitics, especially as it relates to the ongoing global challenges. This is Jason’s second appearance on the show. We first spoke back in May of 22, in episode 55. That time, we explored Jason’s excellent book and his concept of the global enduring disorder. You can find a link to that episode at the top of the show notes. Today, Jason joins me to discuss the recent escalation of violence in the Middle East, how it relates to the idea of the global enduring disorder. and what we might need to consider when looking for enduring and just solutions in the region. Jason, welcome back to The Voice Of War.

It’s nice to be back. I wish we could be chatting under better circumstances.

 

Absolutely, and I guess much like last time, there’s more disorder in the world. And unfortunately, many are paying the price for that disorder. But as I mentioned in the intro, I will provide a link to our previous chat where people can find out a bit more about you and a bit more detail about your background. But perhaps for those who have not come across your work previously, it might be useful to just get a glimpse of your career. So how do you describe what you do?

Sure. Sure, I wish my career had been less relevant to the situation we find ourselves in, but it’s even more relevant. I grew up in Manhattan, Mass, and I’m not Middle Eastern in any way, and I’d never been to the region. And I was studying science in Massachusetts, particularly biology. I thought I was gonna become a doctor. Then this little thing happened called the 9-11. And… I felt that I should do something for my country. I probably would have joined the army if Gore had been president. And maybe I just say that now and I wouldn’t have had the courage then, but I do believe that I would have done that. I felt that I needed to do something to help my country, to help the West, to inform policy. And I thought, well, Israel has been done enough and people in New York in particular, they understand that. I moved to Beirut and I was in Beirut. And then I had my Fulbright in Egypt that got transferred to Syria. And I stayed on, I lived in Syria for about two years. I got into graduate school in England. I realized I didn’t wanna be an academic. I got recruited to work in Libya. And for the last almost 15 years, I’ve been doing mostly Libya. In between there. I did a master’s in Jerusalem that I don’t usually put on my resume, but since this conflict has been coming out, I’ve been releasing new facts about myself. So yeah, I studied in Jerusalem for two years. My Hebrew is reasonably good. I can understand Israeli radio. I read the newspaper in Arabic. And I have to say, I’m one of the few people who can say that they’ve been in Gaza and Damascus.

Yeah, yeah.

and in Israeli Kibbutzim, and I was in Southern Lebanon during the 2006 war. And I’ve also worked with the various Gulf states, such as the UAE and Qatar, as it pertains to their destabilizing influences in the post-Arab Spring states like Libya and Egypt. So it kind of has all come together for me. I didn’t train for this moment, but in a way, a lot of what I’ve done in my career has given me some insights into

this really broken moment.

Global Enduring Disorder Explained

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that’s perhaps also an explanation as to why your podcast has been doing so well, because some of the episodes and excellent episodes, by the way, have really focused in on what’s going on. So giving you a background, I’m not at all surprised to hear that you’re featuring more prominently now, given what’s going on in the region. But perhaps before we get into the region proper, that I really like to do, it might be worthwhile also recapping for us, for those who haven’t come across the term before, what you mean by global enduring disorder in the first place.

Sure. It’s a term that I thought was kind of novel when I coined it in 2018. Then as I was writing the book in 2019 and 2020, it was less novel and more people were saying it. By the time it was published and there was the Ukraine War, it was totally obvious. And now I feel like every op-ed by Thomas Friedman is in some way referencing my concept. What do I mean? I had an inclination in my experiences working in Washington, DC during the Trump period that we were living through a novel historic era and that it wasn’t the post-Cold War world anymore. The certitudes of that era of American leadership, of ever expanding globalization, of the more internationalist candidate in American politics always winning the elections, of

a bipartisan approach to certain foreign policy issues, that had all fallen apart. And that on the opposite side, the challenges we were facing were quite different than those of the Cold War or post-Cold War periods. So a key tenet of the enduring disorder is the idea that there are powers in the world who don’t propose an alternative order. They are just happy to disorder the world. So as a contrast, very simple one is to contrast Stalin

with Putin. Both adversaries, both very evil and dynamic and genocidal and all that, but Stalin, he had an order in a box. Read your Lenin, read your Marx, do this, kill your dissidents, adopt these economic reforms, accept our Soviet advisors, and call yourself a socialist people’s republic. And any place from Cuba to Zaire to…

Ukraine could accept this. You sign up and then in a shipping container, it says, join the Soviet system, do this, this. Putin, there is no Putinist economics. There is no, oh, I wanna conquer Ukraine and then they are going to ideologically adopt the Putinist method of governance. Orban is a Putin ally, but he doesn’t follow a Putin system.

Disorder vs. Order in International Politics

Putin was happy to promote Trump, but he doesn’t have him do Putinist ideological or economic behaviors. Putin is just happy for there to be a lot of different disorder and different disordering and neopopulist movements, but he doesn’t care that they’re part of a system. It is just about promoting disorder. So what I was postulating before the war in Ukraine even started was that many actors like Orban, Trump, Putin, to some extent, Boris Johnson, but definitely Brexit as a phenomenon,

They don’t propose an alternative order. They just propose an alternative disorder. And that this is novel to our historic period because in the Cold War, it was a struggle between two kinds of order. Even World War II, even the Napoleonic Wars, there were struggles between different orders, usually an older or reactionary order and a new and sometimes totalitarian order. But the orders were fighting each other. I don’t look at even China as an ordering power. I look at them as a disordering power.

Yeah, okay.

Certainly Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, these are disorderers. There’s no Hamas plan for governance of Israel. They don’t plan to win and impose a new order. They certainly didn’t have a system in place on October 7th when they broke through. They just had a rampage. You know what I mean? So we need to contextualize that this historic period is unique in that the forces of order don’t work together as well as they used to.

you know, the UN and EU and stuff don’t work very well anymore. And then our opponents don’t have an alternative order. So that’s like the first bit of my concept.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean that. interesting on so many levels, because if I was to push back, I could perhaps even say that aren’t they maybe just reordering rather than disordering? So trying to reorder the global order or the Pax Americana as we’ve come to know it since World War II. Is that perhaps what they’re trying to do rather than merely creating disorder? Because even disorder, one would assume have to have some goal or an end state. So even if we use someone like Hamas. you know, an absolutely absolute agent of disorder, especially right now. But there is an end state that disorder, whether it’s, you know, as the charter states, the extermination or elimination of Israel as an entity, you know, between the river and the sea or something else, or whether it’s the Islamification or the, you know, jihadist kind of worldview. I don’t know if that. Yeah. Yeah, of course.

US Hegemony and Regional Dynamics

I think you’re giving them too much credit. And I can’t prove it, but I would even say that the difference between ISIS and Al-Qaeda is that Al-Qaeda, they have a legitimate order, whether it’s Sharia law or certain visions of like regime change, particularly in Saudi Arabia. And then ISIS embraced violence for violence’s sake. They were so brutal in Libya, particularly in Darna and then Sirte that the local inhabitants just kicked them out. You know what I mean? It wasn’t even functional as an order even in and of itself. So again, what I’m saying on this point is not provable and the objections slash challenges that you raise are very, very valid and I embrace them. All I’m postulating is for intelligent people like yourself or listeners in the Australian defense establishment to think about this as a lens because

There’s no one way of looking at the world. Is it capitalist versus communist? Is it authoritarian versus democratic? No, those things are partially true. Is it right versus left? Is it woke versus traditional? I am proposing another lens of orderers against disorderers. And this is not exclusively the lens that you should look at the world, but it isn’t something that you shouldn’t think about. It should be one of the 10 things to think about. And I thought that I made a kind of novel contribution in that…

Yeah.

No, absolutely.

I’m trying to coin the post post-Cold War period as having this as a very salient dynamic. There were orderers and disorderers in the Habsburgs. There were orderers and disorderers in the 30 years war and the piece of Westphalia. So this is not new, but it may be slightly more salient since the invasion of Iraq and then the Arab Spring, and then the fact that Obama

And then Trump more so began to withdraw from American overseas engagements. So yeah, I see a trajectory where this is a more salient dynamic than it had been previously.

Middle East Conflict and Global Interconnections

That’s great. And that’s perhaps even an extension to what we talked about in our first chat, because we did talk about the preeminence of US power in the world. And for those interested, I really recommend that episode. But maybe it’s a good segue towards what we’re seeing now in the Middle East, because I suspect you can also draw a link between that American withdrawal from the region and beyond to perhaps what we’re seeing happen in Israel and Palestine at the moment.

Well, when there was American hegemony in the Middle East, it was not used wisely to try to solve the Israel-Palestine question. It promoted some of the more grandiose territorial ambitions of the Israelis, unfortunately, and it did not curb some of the more hateful, antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and frankly, conspiratorially anti-colonial ambitions of certain Arab actors. So that American hegemony was wasted. We let… we let our allies, be they Arab allies or Israeli allies, you know, go to their extremes. I think one president, if he had been in charge for 20 or 30 more years, would have solved it, and that’s Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton had become dictator for life, and particularly if Rabin was not assassinated, we probably would have solved this problem. But other than that, the American presidents have mostly just let the worst impulses of their allies.

Rain.

OK. All right. Well, then how does to maybe boil down more specifically to the current conflict? How does the current or how is the current conflict a manifestation of the enduring disorder?

Great, Maz, I believe that it is a manifestation because another principle of the enduring disorder, which we didn’t have time to get to heretofore, is that conflicts that appear different in kind are actually interrelated. So climate change and the war in Ukraine are connected, and tax havens and Putin’s use of cyber misinformation to manipulate our elections are connected. Unfortunately, in the Israel-Palestine conflict,

the phenomenon of decentralization of violence, upscaling of the kind of technologies that lesser powers can have, and misinformation and Twitter wars and all of that connects the Israel-Palestine issue to all of these other conflicts, to Ukraine, to Trump, to Brexit. It’s actually all connected. And I have to say,

Iran, Russia, and Regional Power Games

As someone from New York who has been dealing with the 9-11 and then the Israel-Palestine and then being in Syria and Iraq, when I woke up on October 7th, I knew it was bad, but I did not grasp the absurdity of what people would be shouting on the streets in London in their protest marches. And then the craziness of what Ben Gavir and Israeli settlers and settler violence would be. This is actually so much worse than the 9-11. Why? Because the very nature of the enduring disorder and the way in which misinformation and just the crazy polarization of our identity-based debates play out online, makes it worse. If the 9-11 had happened 20 years later, it probably would have been the same. There’d be the same conspiracy theories and blah, blah. But the 9-11 happened in a simpler time. So I feel like it didn’t have the ability to have all these enduring disorder media elements as well as interconnection with other conflicts. So another principle of the enduring disorder is that the West’s ability to work with our allies is diminished based on a lack of attention and a lack of people giving a shit. And what do you know? As soon as there’s this war in Gaza,

The Speaker of the House is like, oh, we’re not going to give money to Ukraine. People don’t care about that anymore. And what do you know? Ukraine is off the headlines, and we’re going to actually end up giving them less arms because we’re giving some of those arms to Israel. That’s really dumb. The Israelis have enough arms. The problem with their conflict is not that they don’t have like enough howitzers or artillery pieces. I think that they need a lot of support and they deserve support, but they certainly don’t need more bombs and we shouldn’t be giving them to them.

But the enduring disorder is that all this shit is connected. It’s all jammed up in one. It’s what in Hebrew is called a balagan. And in Arabic, unfortunately, the term fawda because of the TV series has acquired a bad connotation here, but it’s a muhlatbat. Inkhilat ma’abad, to give some Arabic, everything is mixed up together. And that’s another phenomenon of the enduring disorder. And we see that in Israel, Gaza.

Right. So how is then which aspects of Israel Gaza are then connected to the world? I mean, of course, it’s Iran. You know, most commentators and pundits are making that obvious link, but perhaps less obvious is the link to Russia, you know, or how what strings and levers Russia’s pulling in the region. So perhaps you can you can explore some of those kind of strands that link this very, very tiny speck. on the globe, you know, that’s heavily contested to what we’re seeing play out in geopolitics or on the global chessboard.

Well, let’s talk about it first on merely the geostrategic level that you mentioned. Then let’s go to the media and discourse in the level. And so to start with the first level, it’s not impossible that Hamas received training from Russia or coordinated with the Russians. There was a degree of sophistication in their operation plans from communications

American Foreign Policy and The Muslim Brotherhood

you know, Gaza barrier fence. And now of course I’m not doing this colonialist condescending thing of saying, oh, well Arabs couldn’t have coordinated such a sophisticated operation. No, of course they could have. Of course they could have. And they didn’t even need Iranian help. But we know that Hamas operatives were in Moscow and were meeting with Lavrov in March of this year. And we also know that there have been a connection between Russian intelligence and Hamas through Iran. I’m happy to send you Jonathan Weiner’s article in Middle East Institute of yesterday, where he speculates about intelligence sharing through Russia. And I really admire Jonathan Weiner as a mentor, and he’s someone who would know having been special envoy for organized crime under Clinton and then special envoy to Libya under Obama, where he was dealing with the Russians. In terms of the connection of these things, whether or not

Right, yeah, absolutely.

they directed or helped plan it. Let’s say that the Iranians are honest. They were surprised. And then they’re like, oh my God, you did too much. We just wanted you to do a little less. That doesn’t matter really. They are elements of disorder, the Iranians and the Russians, and they say that the Zionist entity this, and you need to wipe it off the map, and you need to whatever. And therefore they have been cheerleaders for this. Even if they did not facilitate this exact attack, the Iranians facilitated an environment where attacks like this can happen and get applauded in the broader extremist, Islamist community, both Shia and Sunni. So it almost doesn’t matter if they gave that tactical help, but maybe they did, right? On this geostrategic level, let’s say that they didn’t know about it. Putin is licking his chops. He was potentially on the verge of losing. And now it seems, particularly if Biden doesn’t win the election,

He’s gonna ride out the war as a stalemate and he will have won. And a large part of that is because this has so distorted the globe and it really pits a lot of Democrats against each other, just as it does the Labor Left. I mean, Keir Starmer has a different position than a lot of the backbench. Corbynistas and Starmerites are just at each other’s throats because you can divide even the white Christian left between those on the center left who might support

certain Israel notions and those who are like, end the war now, cease fire now. Do you know what I mean? The Israelis have no right to even attack in Gaza at all. And so this is an issue which so polarizes even centrist opinion in Europe. I don’t know the Australian debate, but I assume that it’s reasonably similar. I can’t comment, but the left is more divided than the right.

Qatar’s Strategic Role

Oh, it’s, yeah, it’s the same. Yeah.

in most European and North American contexts on this issue, which is perfect because for Putin, that divides the one block which was firmly against him. So yeah, it’s geostrategically genius. It’s almost so genius that it would be amazing if he hadn’t thought of doing something like this. Now, to get to how it’s all connected, I postulate that the Middle East

in the period 2011 until 2023 had three blocks. The disorderers and that’s Iran and Russia counts as an internal power in the Middle East because they essentially occupy Syria, right? So Russia is a Middle Eastern power, but so Iran and Russia and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Yemen and certain Libyan militias and some jihadis and whatever, these are the disorderers. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they don’t.

but they just disorder and they’re happy to have misinformation and violence and whatever. Then you have the, I’m willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood, but we’re American allies. And so those are the Turks, the Qataris, the Western Libyan, what was the GNC, then the GNA, now the GNU. These are connected to various Misrahtan militias and linked to Um, you know, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, essentially. And then, of course, Morsi in Egypt for the period of time that he was in Egypt. This is a Muslim Brotherhood linked group. Um, and now you have the Omanis kind of straddling this camp. They’re willing to some extent work with the Brotherhood. Then if you pause this, you have the third grouping, which is the American allies who will not under any circumstance work with the Muslim Brotherhood and oppose it as their top.

regional thing. So the Emirates is at the top of that league table. Emirati foreign policy since 2011 is about eradicating the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s the primary goal of the Emiratis, right? They back the Zintanis in Libya and Haftar just to kill the Muslim Brotherhood like malicious. They spearheaded and funded the coup against Morsi to put Sisi in power. And what does Sisi do? He puts all these Muslim Brotherhood guys in jail. So you have the Emiratis at the top.

Pathways to Peace and Regional Governance

Then you have their protegees who are the Saudis who are more powerful, but it’s really important to keep in mind that Mbz is still MBS’s mentor and Mbz kind of has a fatherly approach to MBS. So the Emiratis, the Saudis, then you have the Egyptians who are their client, they get paid by the Emiratis and the Saudis and so they do that as well. And you have the Israelis.

because during this whole period, there has been Netanyahu dominance. Obviously, Naftali Bennett was prime minister for like two and a half minutes. It barely counts. You’ve had an uninterrupted period of Netanyahu dominance. And he is no different regionally than the Saudis and the Emiratis, who he created a peace treaty essentially with them, because he supports their regional approach, which is the pure eradication of Muslim Brotherhood linked groups. So if we zoom out, the problem with these three groups is

Within the orderers and the American allies, you have two groups which are at war with each other, those who support it and are willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood and those who oppose it. So Donald Trump really further exacerbated this by facilitating and exacerbating the blockade of Qatar between 2017 and January, 2021. And…

Trump, of course, was in the pocket of the Saudis. He went to Saudi Arabia. He touched the golden orb. He visited the Emiratis. He did the Abraham and Accords in a way that tried to weaken Qatar, strengthen the Emiratis against the Qataris. He was very happy for this Cold War to be going on between the Emiratis and the Qataris. And everything else that he did in the Middle East was subordinate to supporting the Emiratis against the Qataris. This is

Reflections, Solutions, and Hopes for the Future

Right, okay, that’s interesting. It’s not something I’ve heard before, contextualizing that sense, yeah.

Oh yeah, I mean, we could talk a whole pot about this. We could talk about the different Washington think tanks, the ones that are funded by the Emiratis and that are Zionist in a certain way, and those that are funded by the Qataris and that they work with the Turks and are pro-NATO in another way. This Emirati-Qatari issue has become the most important partisan fissure in Washington about how the Middle East is seen and viewed between Democrats and Republicans. But…

And so just on that Emirati Qatar point of difference, what is their principal cause of the frictions between those? And of course, yeah, so get please.

Well, if you’re a hard right Republican, Trumpian or non-Trumpian, you don’t want to work with the Muslim Brotherhood. You want the Emiratis to eradicate them. You might support Haftar in Libya. You’re certainly happy that the Jordanians crack down on Muslim Brotherhood or linked groups, that the Saudis are funding an anti-Muslim Brotherhood Islam now. That’s a hard right, both archcon, neocon, and Trumpian neopopulist position. If you’re a Democrat,

— Yeah.

You believe that people in the Islamic world have the right to vote for Muslim Brotherhood parties and that political Islamism is here to stay and it’s going to have a role in the governance and administration of a lot of the Islamic world. So if Morsi was duly elected, he should be allowed to run Egypt, like Obama thought. And Biden certainly believes that the Muslim Brotherhood, as it exists, is something that we need to work with. And therefore he’s willing to work more with the Qataris.

Whereas isolating the Qataris was the primary goal of the Trump administration throughout the region. Rather than isolating the Iranians, he isolated the Qataris. What I call for is to move from these three camps to two. You have to unite the pro-Muslim brotherhood and anti-Muslim brotherhood groupings of American allies, get them on the same page as orderers, and unite them against the disorderers. and I believe that we could use the war in Gaza, we can pivot to the solution, but that we could use the war in Gaza to get to that point. It’s gonna be a tough sell, as they say, but if we don’t do it, we’re divided against ourselves. It’s like, remember at the beginning of the Ukraine War, or in the lead up to it, even better, in the lead up to it, the French and the Germans were like, no, no. We don’t want to give an ultimatum. Olaf Schultz said, no, we will never raise defense spending and we’re not going to attack even if they, you know, we’re not going to take away Nord Stream 2. And Biden said, no, you have to say that the Nord Stream 2 is off the cards if they continue to mobilize and put the troops on the, you know, the Belarusian border with Ukraine and the Russian border with Ukraine. And Macron went to…

Moscow and sat at that long table with Putin. And Biden was like, don’t do that. That just encourages him. So the West was divided, an Anglo-American camp, which said, he’s gonna invade. What we need to do is say, if you do this, we’re gonna hit you so hard, deterrence. And then the Germans and French were like, no, let’s have negotiations, let’s make nice. He’s not gonna invade. We’ve had this in the Middle East with other dynamics of

having our allies divided against themselves. And you can’t make coherent policy when your allies are divided amongst themselves.

OK. And I want to get to that prospect for peace or one of the solutions that you put forward in your recent foreign policy article in a minute. But just before I assume too much of a of myself, but also of our audience. It’s the elephant in the room. You keep mentioning the Muslim Brotherhood as the key dividing feature in the Middle East. Can you give me a quick recap on the importance of them? Yeah.

Sure. I just want to be clear. I don’t think that the Muslim Brotherhood is in reality the key dividing feature in the Middle East. It’s rather that there has been a right-wing Republican and to some extent Tory and Emirati, Saudi and Israeli view that this is the case. And as a result of this view, since the Arab Spring, people have been terrified that there’s going to be Muslim Brotherhood takeovers in places like Syria and Libya.

– Well, at least in narrative, then. Yeah.

In Libya, it’s the reason that we didn’t give enough support. And in Syria, it’s the reason that we didn’t back the Sunni Islamists who were the only ones who might topple Bashar al-Assad. The groups that we worked with, like, I don’t know, the Syrian Democratic Congress and the this, that, they were so weak because the only people who had any power other than the Kurds, of course, I’m saying other than the Kurds, among Sunni Arabs, the only ones that had any power in Syria were different kinds of Islamists. But we were not willing to work with them.

because of this fear that, oh my God, there is limousine and that, you know, when the dictator is gone, it’s gonna be even worse than Morsi, it’s gonna be a brotherhood led regime. And so we just haven’t been on the same page about this. And Trump, because of Jared Kushner’s ties to the Emiratis and 666 Fifth Avenue, and let’s not even get into it, but there is a multi-decade long connection between the Kushner and Trump organizations and the Emiratis and Emirati money, they were instantly put into this debate.

and they adopted the Emirati anti-brotherhood position, hook, line, and sinker. And so they have just been pursuing the right wing of the Republican party and to some extent, Boris Johnson. Like keep in mind, you might’ve heard of Liz Truss’s aide who was a lobbyist for Haftar and a lobbyist for the Emiratis. The Emiratis have penetrated a lot of the right and they pursue this.

anti-Muslim Brotherhood agenda that we can’t work with any grouping in the Middle East who is Sunni and Islamist. I think that’s insane because we need to work with all of the American allies together against the real threat, which is the Iranians and the Russians and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas. So that’s my view, but I’m a Democrat, so that’s why I see it.

Okay. That’s so many strains that we could pick apart there, but I do want to focus on this article that you put out because I thought it was a really poignant article and you provide some nuance, I think that’s lacking quite often in our discourse about the Middle East writ large, but particularly the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. I think it was titled, Qatar is the key to Middle East peace. So firstly, I think you’ve set the context for us why you see Qatar as a unique player in the region, but perhaps explain for us why is Qatar positioned to usher in peace and stability and prosperity in the region as you view it.

Great. So it’s not like the Qataris are going to solve the problem single-handedly, but rather that they’re like the swing state. You want to win an American election, you need to get either Ohio or Florida. Is Ohio or Florida more important than California or New York economically? No, obviously not. It’s just that’s the swing state. So Qatar, to my mind, and Turkey, to a lesser extent, but the Qataris are the ones who are important in this conflict.

They have the relationships with Iran, with Hamas, with the Taliban, with Russia, with the Ukrainians, and with Israel and with America and with NATO. They are the swing player. That’s why all of the hostage releases, yes there is some Egyptian role, but all the discussions are happening in Qatar. The Qataris are the ones delivering the hostages. Make no mistake about it. They allow the Mossad

as honest brokers between the Mossad and Hamas. Who else can do that? The Emiratis can’t do that. CIA can’t do that. Even the Chinese can’t do that. The Qataris have these relationships. The Qataris released the kidnapped Ukrainian boys that the Russians have kidnapped in Donbass. The Qataris got…

the American dual nationals out of Iran in exchange for our releasing the Iranian prisoners. They are the swing player in the Middle Eastern system. Unfortunately, in the past, particularly under the former emir, they had a legacy of promoting not just Muslim Brotherhood link groups, but Jihadi link groups. Not so great. And they were not necessarily a great player in Libya. It’s kind of embarrassing. They supported a lot of…

jihadi linked and very extremist militias. But I blame that on the current Amir’s father. And even though the current Amir has been in power since 2013, he didn’t really find his feet for a while because he was surrounded by all of his father’s advisors. His father abdicated rather than died. And that’s a very difficult position to, you know, if you’re running one of these Gulf shectums, to just like switch policy.

one minute to the next, you know, because your dad could replace you or, you know, his advisors, you know, throw you in the Red Sea or whatever. But if you look at it, there is a trend that they’re gradually moving away from supporting those kind of groups. And they’ve been fulfilling a super interesting role, which is hosting the political wings of Islamist and Jihadi movements so that the West can parlay with them. And I get really angry when

Hehehehe

People particularly on the Republican or Zionist right say, we should punish the Qataris. They host the Hamas leadership. The reason they host the Hamas leadership is in 2012, Obama asked them to. They never used to host the Hamas leadership, but when Hamas had its falling out with Bashar al-Assad because Assad was cracking down on Sunni Islamists, Obama sent an envoy to Qatar and said, please invite Ismail Haniya to come to Doha. so that you can keep him in a golden cage in a five-star hotel, because it might be useful for us to be able to talk to him. So the reason that they have this role is we asked them to. They’re not busy funding Hamas. We essentially, we and the Israelis said, we’re not gonna fork up a billion dollars to replace all the infrastructure that Operation Protective Edge blew up in 2014. There was the last… Gaza-Israel War, 2014, it’s called Protective Edge.

Mowing the grass.

Does the American taxpayer want to pay for that? No, we got the Qataris to pay for it. So then you can’t, as many on the right do, say, look at those stupid Qataris. They’re busy funding Hamas. It’s like, no, we, the American and Israeli taxpayer, decided to not pay for this. And we asked the Qataris to donate the money to fix this infrastructure.

But hasn’t Israel even given money in support of that? I mean, in support of funding Hamas indirectly through Qatar?

Yes, and that I don’t support. That’s a Netanyahuism. So that’s the part.

The whole kind of keeping the split between the West Bank and Gaza, diminish cohesion, et cetera. Yeah.

Netanyahu is a cynical actor, Matt. He’s like Trump. In fact, you might say he’s worse than Trump because he is a more intelligent version of Trump. It’s scary. He knew even in the 1990s at what was called the Y River Accord, how to disrail the asrub process because he understood if he worked more with Hamas, he could undermine Fatah. and the Palestinian authority, and then he’d never have to deliver a Palestinian state, and they could continue to build the settlements, and he would be essentially prime minister for life. It’s cynical and it’s horrible. So that was going on, exactly as you say. But what I was referring to before is rather the phenomenon that the Qatari should not be blamed for supporting, you know, infrastructure in Gaza. We asked them to do it.

It also washes the hands of the West broadly, but US specifically, since Hamas has been listed as a terrorist organization complete. Firstly, it’s military arm, but then Hamas as a political institution, organization was then listed as a terrorist organization. And therefore, because we do not negotiate with terrorists, this allows a cutout of Qatar to be the facilitator of those discussions. indirectly so that your hands are ultimately clean as the righteous West.

The Qataris are the cutout. That’s exactly right. It’s also important that we have the El-Odeid Air Force base there. We have a lot of special forces there. We have army there. It’s not like the Qataris are anti-Western. Do you know what I mean? It’s just really important to get that out there. What the problem is, is that they have funded some destabilizing actors, and they have this proxy fight against the Emiratis and the Saudis. I believe-

At least the perception.

No, of course, yeah, yeah.

we can work with the Qataris, get everyone on the same page, and work together to have post-war governance of Gaza. It’s very interesting, today, as we’re speaking, Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, published an article in Haaretz calling for a NATO force to do peacekeeping in the administration of Gaza after the war.

Yeah.

I don’t hate this idea, but I don’t love it because it’s white, mostly Christian troops in Gaza in an overtly neocolonial relationship. I would argue it isn’t really neocolonial. It’ll just be a trusteeship. It’ll be a UN resolution and peacekeeping, but it’s still not a great idea. What I would like, what I would like is to have a Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Egyptian force controlling the borders

Yeah, definitely.

It’s not a good look at the very least. Yeah.

teaching in the schools, making sure that there isn’t the insane anti-Semitism in the school books that has been until now, and making sure that there are not so many dual-use items that are going into Gaza, making sure that the tunnels aren’t rebuilt, and then also taking some pride in it and funding scholarships. You know, you do really well in high school. You can go study in the Gulf. You do really great in university, and we fund your studies in Europe. That kind of stuff. And that’s my solution is a medium term.

for a pan-Arab condominium for Gaza, which then culminates in elections. And it has as a precursor to it, the Israelis have to acknowledge that Gaza is completely Palestinian and that the Palestinians have sovereignty there, and that the West Bank has Palestinian sovereignty with minor territorial swaps, and that there’ll be no new settlement activity. And if they don’t acknowledge that, then they don’t get this Arab help in you know, rebuilding and securing Gaza and taking the occupation off their hands.

And I think that’s a key point because I think firstly, we’re talking about post-war. So we don’t actually know how this war ends. It will end at some point or wars do end, but we also need to address some of the root causes that have brought us to where we are. So not necessarily Hamas per se, but even Hamas didn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a product. It sustains its life on the oppression of Palestinians, et cetera. despite the fact that it might have completely other goals or destabilizing goals, or there might be a proxy for Iran slash Russia. But in its narrative, it fuels a Palestinian, or it’s fueled by a Palestinian resistance, wish for freedom, end of the oppression, end of apartheid, et cetera, et cetera, all the settlements. So these things need to be addressed if we are ever to have a just peace, not just… the region but also globally as you rightly pointed out this is a globally destabilizing war contest right.

Given how geostrategically unimportant Gaza is, it’s shocking that this is about the most destabilizing from a rhetorical and media perspective of any conflict. Ukraine is…

Well, what do you think why that is? Why do you think that is? Because I agree, and I had my own thoughts as to why, but be kind of here, because it is, as you rightly point out, it is so polarizing across the whole world, certainly the West.

It’s very difficult to say a lot of my thoughts in an interview that’s gonna be recorded. It has to do with the weird ways in which Jews and antisemitism is something which is broadly motivating. I believe it is the less socially acceptable hatred. It’s not acceptable really to hate on blacks and Hispanics. People do, but they are embarrassed to do it or they conceal that they do it. This is a hatred that is something that people, billions of people in the globe allow themselves to do this. The unique position of Jews and Israelis in tech and finance and in the global system. It is a proxy for many other cultural wars about the West and capitalism and the role of the Pax Americana and the fairnesses and unfairnesses of that. This conflict is rhetorically tied up in all of these complex issues. And then 340 million Arabs and 1.4 billion Muslims have been fed, many of them, not all of them, but more than half have been fed a rhetoric that the injustices that the Israelis perpetrated and the Palestinians are essentially the worst injustices of human history.

you know, worse than Hitler and worse than what Bashar al-Assad has done to his own population. And therefore, it’s very activating given how much propaganda there has been about this. This is a very activating conflict, even though geostrategically, if people cared as much about it as they did about who wins the Madagascarian elections, then it wouldn’t matter what is or is not happening in Gaza, which is not geostrategically important. But people care more about it than they care about Ukraine.

But Ukraine is tremendously geostrategically important because of its location in Crimea and gas transfer and NATO expansion. I mean, that’s what’s so interesting is that not as many people care about Ukraine because they don’t understand the issue and everyone has a bloody opinion about Israel and Gaza.

It’s interesting. I mean, the way I see it is… It’s the media that cares about it, which is why the people care about it. Right. Because if it wasn’t televised as much as it is, or at least for the, or at least for the bulk of the population, that’s unaffected. Right. So, so, you know, and I take your point about, kind of anti-Jewish sentiment, somewhere lurking beneath the surface, but I don’t believe that is the case for the thousands that are marching, you know, pro Palestine or to stop.

No, I don’t think that that’s fully fair. I just want to push back slightly.

the bloodshed in Gaza at the moment. I don’t, if that were true, then we live in a much worse world than I choose to believe. But I do, and I’m also a child of Sarajevo, so I understand what that kind of bombardment does to people and what that kind of suffering does to people. And what impact images of, you know, countless children being killed in Gaza right now have on the human psyche. And perhaps I’m naive here, but I would like to believe that most of those people protesting against the continuous bombardment of Gaza do so out of good intentions as opposed to due to an anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli sentiment. And I’m not sure if we agree on that.

So can it be some of both? I think probably the majority of people who are protesting and marching in Westminster, and I don’t know what the situation is in Canberra or Melbourne, are, as you say, they’re not motivated by anti-Semitism. They are motivated by how absurd it is that, you know, 5,000 children have been killed, which is absurd and it shouldn’t have happened. But there’s one problem with this, Maz. Where were those people protesting when…

Yeah, it’s very similar.

40 or 80,000 kids were killed in the Syrian conflict, and a million people were displaced, and 100,000 were killed. I didn’t see anyone protesting in… And no, no. It’s because people care.

And this is why I’m saying that’s the media, because if we didn’t see it, we didn’t have it like this. It wasn’t like this. It wasn’t 24-7 coverage.

Right, because people care. That’s why the media covers it.

I think it’s a must be there’s a there’s a there’s a relationship there. OK, so I mean, it’s and the way I see it is also people care because it’s Israel, right? Because Israel is pinned as a democratic state, as one that embraces the just war tradition that we so dearly hold to our heart in the West anyway, right? And this is now the country that we’re funding, we’re providing arms to, etc. And in many people’s eyes, they’ve overstepped what we would consider moral and ethical and justified, notwithstanding the horrors of October 7th. Right. And I don’t hear as much as someone like Piers Morgan wants people to condemn Hamas. And I certainly have condemned Hamas for what they’ve done, of course. Right. But we don’t hear people defending that act who are protesting against the ongoing bombardment of Gaza. At least not in the… in this kind of grand narrative that this is anti-Israel, anti-Jew. Of course, there are those who are even at Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I’m sure you’ve, or Sydney Opera House, you’ve heard of the chants, you know, Gasta Jews, etc. Look, we also have to understand the human dynamics of our herd mentality. People are stupid when in a crowd, one idiot needs to yell something and people will jump into a chant. Again, I’m not defending it far be it from me to defend something as abhorrent as that, but we need to understand how crowds work. The madness of crowds. You know, this is all part of it.

Mass, if I can jump in, I agree with everything that you’ve said. The majority of people are not motivated primarily by anti-Semitism, but there is a perverse fascination with Jews and Israel and Zionism and the crimes of Zionism. There are crimes of Zionism, obviously, displacement and lots of killings and arbitrary arrests and torture and bombing and all that. But there’s a bloody double standard because…

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I agree

We needed to get rid of ISIS and we did a lot of stuff in Mosul and Raqqa. Very few people were protesting. Civilians got killed. If the Israelis would do exactly the same as the American forces did through our Kurdish and other allies in Mosul and Raqqa, they would have hell on their hands. And God forbid some crazy Mexican gang would break through the fake wall that Trump never built.

and they would go on a rampage in Texas, God forbid. But could you imagine what the response would be? We would just, you know, destroy all the cartels in Mexico that did this. People would not get as incensed. It’s something about that it’s the Israelis doing it. And that’s my belief having lived there. It’s, yes, it’s the Holy Land, but the Israelis are held to some kind of microscope, which is absolutely insane. They don’t do themselves any favors though.

Yeah.

because they have nutcases in the government and Netanyahu is a cynical bastard who’s willing to work with Orban and other anti-Semites to promote his cause. And I’m not defending anything about Israeli policy. I’m talking about this bizarre obsession that before you cast blames about how neocolonialist and settler-colonialists, you know, these Israelis are, you have to realize that Australia and America are settler-colonial societies where we…

Of course, yeah, yeah. Who’ve wiped out their locals, right? Yeah.

either we either indirectly genocided the indigenous peoples or we actively genocided them. So do you know what I mean? And therefore that’s the part that pisses me off is that I see so many people being like who am I? We’re just Americans or Australians and Canadians but those evil, look at those evil Israelis over there.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess the difference is that it’s happening today, right. And again, you know, there seems to be, again, a double standard as you.

Yeah, but Iraq and Mosul and whatever just happened two minutes ago. And I guess that there are some differences in kind here, but there is a degree of hypocrisy. I would like to support, use all that energy to support the Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid and then the moderate Palestinian leadership, not washed up guys like Abu Mazen.

I couldn’t agree more. I agree. And I agree.

Yeah.

and to support our Arab allies. But all of this criticism and it’s genocide and it’s baby burning and it’s whatever, missing the point. We’ve got to have a solution. Otherwise the world is just going to be tearing itself apart and we’re stuck in this enduring disorder.

I agree.

Yeah, I agree. And I do agree with what you’re saying, that there’s something peculiar about Israel. I mean, I’ve been in my mind. I do see. See it as Israel is, you know, one of us, when I say one of us, one of the Western liberal democracies, or that’s how it’s, you know, pitched as and that’s how we, you know, have come to know it. Also, you know, America, Australia, Canada, France, some of the biggest expat populations of. of Israelis and Jews in all the biggest pockets of Jewish populations globally. So it’s unsurprising that this features and trends quite prominently in those countries, therefore the West. All of these things, I think, come into play, but it doesn’t, as you rightly point out, it doesn’t bring us any closer to a peaceful and just solution, which is where your idea about Qatar comes into play.

I believe that this is an unsolvable rhetorical problem. The wrongs to the Palestinian people will essentially never be solved, and the historical wrongs to Jews from the Roman expulsion in AD 70 to the Holocaust will never be solved. And therefore, it’s like, we’re really sorry Palestinians, and we’re really sorry Jews and Israelis. You’re never going to get what you want.

Yeah.

And therefore, we’ve just got to move past it. And for me, the way to move past it is to acknowledge that there’s Palestinian sovereignty over a Palestinian state and Israeli sovereignty in an Israeli state, and they both have to be equal, and good fences make good neighbors. I would go directly to that if you could, but you can’t, because the Palestinian state would need to, you know, be demilitarized and have a different tradition and not have these jihadi groups running a part of it and whatever.

So what I propose is a medium-term way to get us to there. And the only way that can be done to my mind is to internationalize. The Israelis have proven not just Netanyahu, but every leader since Rabin was killed, they cannot be trusted to do the diplomacy to get to a peaceful outcome themselves. So I don’t actually look at Israel as a Western country. I look at it as a Middle Eastern country.

Yeah.

And in the Middle East, there’s these like belonging issues. You know what I mean? Like we are Shia and you are Alawite and you’re Druze and we’re connected. Israel has these bizarre belonging dynamics and the inter-tribal and other things. Look at it like a Middle Eastern country. And then you begin to understand like, that’s why you have the constitutional reform crisis and the.

– Yeah, that’s well said. Yeah, it’s really well said.

who are the ultra-orthodox have their issue with the secularists and they want to prevent them from having abortions and they want to have like, you know, Jewish religious courts get to say who is a Jew and this business has to be closed on Saturday. It’s a Middle Eastern country. And it has all these fissures in it. We, in the West, but working with our non-Western allies, need to have an international process. The Israelis and Palestinians cannot solve this. And the Bill Clinton approach would have worked if it lasted enough years, but we’ve then essentially backed off and let them get crazy and make settlements and kill each other and let them receive Iranian funding. No, that’s gotta end. And we have willing allies. I think that one of the things that’s better now than under the Clinton period is the Gulf States have really come into their own. The Gulf States went from being nowhere. to being small powers to now being medium powers. The UAE has less than a million nationals and 10 million people residing in the territory, but it’s a medium power globally. The UAE punches at the weight globally of like the Scandinavian countries or like, I don’t know, in certain instances, Canada. It’s an-

How has it done that? Given this size and as you said, such a massive expat population, how has the Emirates become what it is? And then how do you cross this divide between the UAE and Qatar that you’ve pointed out?

Well, both the Emiratis and the Qataris and the Saudis have become medium powers. One, they have a huge amount of disposable cash that they’re willing to fund think tanks, fund political campaigns, fund researchers. They all have top-notch research institutions in their countries. And they’re extremely important in funding American and British political campaigns. After the Russians, the Emiratis were the most important, you know, kind of surreptitious influencers of our election. Emirati money is enormously important in funding the Tories and the Republicans in the U.S. The Qataris are not as direct in their funding of Democrats, but they’re very important in how they fund the global left. Huge amounts of money to research institutions and universities, probably among non-Western countries funding American and British universities, the Gulf countries do the most. Then they have cultural capital. I mean, they own a lot of the most important British and French football teams. And those are beloved institutions, not for me, because I don’t like European football, but those are beloved institutions for a lot of people. So the amount of soft power, you don’t see Canada owning tons of English Premier League football teams, but the Gulf countries do. So, I mean, their medium power. status extends to even things like sports. The Qataris just had the World Cup. They fund a lot of movies. So American Hollywood movies are funded by golf countries. And then they have trained up a very elite core of diplomats who are willing to do mediation and that kind of stuff. So yeah, these are players now. And what I say is great. You wanna be able to own Paris Saint-Germain?

Amazing.

You want to have your opponents getting to own Man City and Nottingham this and whatever. I don’t even know which ones they own. Well, now you’ve got to take some responsibility in the global system. And we’d like you to take this responsibility in your backyard by rebuilding the Palestinian infrastructure, controlling the borders there, and making sure that some craziness like this never happens again.

Okay, so why haven’t they done that? I mean, if it’s in their interest, I guess, and if I’m reading within the lines, it is in their interest. This return of some enduring order within their region is in their interest because they also, I mean, you know, what you’re describing there is the pinnacle of irregular warfare, right? The extension of politics through war, but also war by other means of gray zone warfare or irregular warfare. So if, you know, whether it’s a… supporting criminal gangs or buying football clubs where you’re securing cultural capital, this is perhaps an extension of their influence, therefore, you know, their regular warfare means. And we know the small nations, the way they get onto that middle stage of becoming a middle power is through gray zone warfare, irregular warfare, et cetera. So why haven’t they already tried to solve this problem because they’re an interest?

Well, it’s not as directly perceived in their interest as maybe it should be. The Emirati’s gray zone warfare is funding Haftar to fight against Qatari funded Misrata and Tripoli militias in Libya. That they perceive in their interest and they just fight it out. This is a much more longer term play, which is that they need to realize that they wanna live in an ordered world.

Yeah, right.

and that the Emiratis will never defeat Qatari proxies entirely, and the Qatari proxies will never defeat Emirati proxies entirely. You’ve got to live with each other. And that the real enemy is Iran and Russia. And I think that they’re open to this realization, but it’s taken a long time. And they have, you know, not a mature diplomatic presence globally. MBS is younger than me.

The Qatari emir has only been in power for 10 years. So they’re getting to this realization and we’ve never given them a role. I think that we’ve condescended to them, unfortunately. One of the things I write in the foreign policy piece that you mentioned, and I guess we’ll put in the show notes is…

course here.

We need to say we’re really sorry. You were right, we were wrong. We the West were wrong about a lot of things about how this conflict should be done. You were right. They’ve been telling us we needed to get everyone on the same page against Iran. They were telling us that we needed to do certain steps and to deal with jihadi militants in a certain way, and we didn’t do it. So we need to say we’re really sorry.

This puts the Qataris in the position of Raoul Wallenberg or other righteous gentiles who in the Holocaust delivered Jews from being slaughtered. The Emir did this. This is not being presented enough in the media this way.

No, I mean, every time you see at least over the last couple of days, and we’re obviously now coming to the end of the now extended pause, you do see that it’s Qatar, Qatar and Egypt supported by the US and even the Israelis. When the Israelis present it, it’s they thank the US for their role. So the role of Qatar is appears to be diminished.

Not only that, but it’s not worded as they saved these Jews’ lives. But they did. They did. And I think that is extremely relevant, and we need to build new narratives here, all of which is to incentivize the Qataris and the Emiratis to work together, that they can try to bring peace to Palestine, and that they can help in this medium term period, because you can’t get directly to elections in Gaza. It’s not like we can force the Israelis to

yeah, of course.

leave and then have a Palestinian election and they’re going to be self-governing in 2024. That’s a joke and a half. Do you know what I mean? There would be infinite clan warfare, Hamas would have a resurgence. It would just be a complete chaos, much worse than Libya. And look what happened in Libya when you rushed to elections. So they need a mandatory trusteeship. And I don’t think that we can deliver it. If there was a different world than the one we live in, Ehud Olmert’s plan could work. Oh, NATO can go in there.

– Yeah.

I don’t see that. And the difference between what I’m proposing and what Thomas Friedman and Brett Stevens and other mostly centrist and center left American Jewish commentators are proposing is that they propose a version that doesn’t include Qatar. They say, well, the Qataris are tainted with Hamas, the Qataris are too close to the Islamists, blah, blah. Let’s just let the Emiratis and Egyptians run it. And I’m like, no, that won’t work because if you leave the Qataris on the outside, They’re not going to be able to bring the Islamists along to accept this. We need to reformulate a new kind of Sunni Islamism, which is non-Jahadi, which is more like a Marqali-Sulafist approach, like what the Saudis are about, which is quiet to Salafism. And I don’t see that happening without Qatari leadership.

So Qatar could become the Switzerland of the Middle East. If given the chance, basically.

Well, no, it’s more than the Switzerland or the Middle East because the Swiss don’t lead global initiatives. It’s more like a swing state, like in Ohio or Florida, and being the one that makes the whole thing happen. And I guess maybe even more like Norway, where Norway actually does the negotiation. They facilitate the thing. They’re more like Norway than like Switzerland.

I guess they facilitate them, right? Yeah.

– work yeah

Interesting, interesting. Noting our time and the many strains that we could pick up on. I just want to throw the floor across to you for a last comment, perhaps focusing on how do you see this unfolding given that we’re not at the end of the war yet. What are you most concerned about and perhaps what are you hopeful of, you know, to get to hopefully something like you’re suggesting.

So what do I think is going to happen? I think that the war is going to restart and it’s going to be horrible. It doesn’t mean that it has to though. It doesn’t have to. So the war is going to restart. What I’m hoping for is that the Israeli right-wing settler nutcases, Ben Gavir and Smotrich, will be upset that the war has not been sufficiently brutal and displaced sufficiently many Palestinians. They’ll quit the cabinet. Netanyahu will replace them. with Gantz and maybe even Yair Lapid, then the fulcrum of Israeli politics will have really moved to the center left. And at some point, hopefully they can get rid of Netanyahu. And if they can get rid of Netanyahu, then we have an Israeli partner, which I think can work with the kind of things I’m saying. I hope Biden gets that if he doesn’t do well on this, he’s not going to win the election. He’s got to somehow solve the Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, Israel-Gaza stuff, and choose a different VP than Kamala Harris, or he’s not gonna win. So he’s gotta ditch Harris, he’s gotta solve these issues, and I think that maybe he could do that. It’s unlikely, but he could. And then, hopefully, we’ll begin to work with the Gulfies, because I think that they’re open to this. Like, it’s worth pointing out that in addition to Omertz Abed, Abdul Fattah Sisi, the Egyptian dictator,

He wrote, we’re gonna need a pan-Arab condominium to administer Gaza. He said it just a few days ago. I’ve been saying this for months. I actually said something like this in 2005. I was living in Jerusalem then, and there was the Hit Nat Gut. And I’m like, you know, this isn’t gonna work. We can’t let either the PA or Hamas or whoever run it. They need to have like a pan-Arab thing. So this is something which is 20 years in the making, but now is the moment to seize on it. So I think that’s a great place for us to stop and let me say it’s really a pleasure to chat with you. You bring out great energy always in your guests.

That’s wonderful. And on that note, Jason, thank you for returning to the voices of war. And I look forward to hosting you again in the future because your insights are always many and varied. And I do like the way you can weave in the kind of macro, the geostrategic to the very kind of local as we should be doing. So thank you very much once again for your time.

pleasure was mine. I look forward to having you on my pod. And please everyone check out the Disorder Podcast, where we talk not only about Israel, Palestine and Ukraine, but about how everything is interconnected from climate change and cop to tax havens and migration flows and the way that this conversation showed how those things are all interconnected. You can really find that with great guests in the Disorder Podcast. So I hope you come and join me on that as well sometime, Mas. Bye for now.

Absolutely would love to. See you later.