What is the ultimate endgame here? And if this is Zionism, then did it go wrong or was this always wrong?

Yeah, look, I mean, this is a question that obviously has been raised partly because I wrote a book called What Went Wrong.

So if something went wrong, and it's not me because the people said that I went wrong, that's the main problem.

But if it isn't me, then if something went wrong, then maybe something was right initially, right? That's the...

So logical, the question.

And I'm a historian, so I look at things not whether they should have happened or we like that they happened, but why they happened, what were the reasons for this, and what happened over time.

So there are reasons for why Zionism began.

So

Um, but you are a scholar in this subject, and for those who are watching who are just curious why this constitutes a genocide, explain to me i- in simple terms why you now believe this is a genocide.

So first of all, hi, and thanks for having me.

Um, look, I mean, like you, I think, um, I initially, um, let's say in November 2023, um, it appeared to me that the IDF was already, uh, carrying out war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity, but I did not think at the time that there was enough evidence to say that this was a genocidal campaign.

There had been declarations by Israeli political and military figures, people with executive authority, that appeared to have a genocidal content, but it was not clear that this was being implemented on the ground.

And I changed my mind in the spring of 2024 when I concluded that the official war goals of Israel, which were to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages, were not the actual goal of the campaign itself.

The campaign was geared to accomplish something else, which was to make Gaza as a whole uninhabitable for its population by systematically destroying buildings, including universities, schools, mosques, parks, water plants, museums, whatever, um, would be, um, a- available for the population after the war to live in, but also to reconstitute itself as a group.

So it appeared to me at the time, and of course now there's far more evidence to show that, that the goal was to push the population out of places where it was living under the cover of saying, "Well, th- this is going to be an area of operations," then to move into those areas, totally flatten them, as had been said in the initial statements by these leaders, um, and concentrate the population increasingly in the southern part of Gaza, of the Gaza Strip, on the Egyptian border, with the goal of somehow getting rid of them, moving them out.

Mm-hmm.