Name: Writer Coleman Hughes Explains What Started the Israel-Hamas Conflict
Uploaded: 2023-10-20T17:32:15.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Writer Coleman Hughes Explains What Started the Israel-Hamas Conflict' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Writer Coleman Hughes Explains What Started the Israel-Hamas Conflict' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-20. Transcript available.

Right now, the belief is that, and I think we'll know more about this in a few
years,
that a few things happen all at the same time. It was a perfect storm.
First, Hamas has been planning this attack for two years,
and one of the leaders of Hamas actually said that they've been strategically lulling
Israel to sleep
by making it seem like they're no longer interested in a conflict the past two
years.
And Israel, even just a week before the attack, allowed more Gazans to come
over the border
and work in Israel as basically a reward for good behavior.
They thought Hamas has gone into this mode where they're more concerned about
the economics of the Gaza Strip
than about attacking Israel. So Israel was asleep at the wheel.
Israel also had transferred a lot of IDF that would normally be at the Gaza
border
to the West Bank. It was also the Sabbath. It was also a major holiday.
It's also, they've had the biggest protests in a generation, almost the same
way America was during 2020.
Israel has been for the past several months over their judicial reform.
So you put it all together.
Can you go into that a little bit, please?
Yeah. So basically the judicial reform in Israel, Israel is not like the United
States.
They don't have a constitution. They don't have this kind of really beautiful,
genius system of checks and balances that we have where, you know, the
president can veto Congress and the Supreme Court has a check on everyone.
Right. And everyone keeps each other in check. Israel just has a single
parliament.
They call the Knesset, a prime minister that has a lot of control over that
parliament because he leads the majority coalition.
So basically in Israel, the president and their Congress have a lot more power
than in America, historically.
The Supreme Court doesn't have the power to say no to them.
But over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has been basically grabbing more
power for itself under these things called basic laws, where they can now say
to the Knesset, no, you cannot implement that policy in the West Bank.
It violates human rights.
They can they can be they have more powers to check the majority party.
And that's come to a head now because the Supreme Court is perceived as left
wing and sympathetic to the Palestinians, just like in America right now, the
Supreme Court is perceived as right wing.
And the Benjamin Netanyahu is obviously Likud, he's the right wing party, and
he's gone into coalition with these ultra kind of right wing religious and and
so it's come to a head where basically the right in Israel feels the Supreme
Court is just expanding its own power and is anti-democratic.
And now they want to judicial form is basically stripping the Supreme Court of
the power it's grabbed for itself over the past 30 years.
Now, the left in Israel views the Supreme Court as the only protection against
human rights violations and the violations of minority rights.
So the left is feels the Supreme Court is a great defender of Israeli human
rights and the right feels that the Supreme Court is an undemocratic
institution that's been expanding its own power for 30 years and now needs to
be reined in so that the majority can govern.
That's torn apart the country.
It's absolutely the number one issue every day protests all over Israel.
So you put all this together with Hamas backed by Iran and you and you you also
throw in the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the verge of a peace deal,
which is huge.
It would be the biggest news in the Middle East in a very long time if Israel
and Saudi Arabia made peace.
It would basically put kind of the death nail in the coffin for Hamas because
Saudi Arabia is the biggest holdout now in terms of who has not made peace with
Israel.
So Hamas from the point of view of Hamas and Iran, they think this is a this is
a last chance.
Kind of we have to attack now kill this deal or we're dead forever.
And they plan this thing meticulously for two years intentionally lulling the
Israelis to sleep.
And they have brilliant success much more success than they expected to.
Now, some people have said it's an inside job.
I don't believe it is.
I think if it is, we'll know that from reporting that comes out in the next two
years.
But at this point, I believe the theory that it was an incredibly successful
attack by Hamas and a perfect storm.
Well, that all connects and makes sense if that's the case.
What's terrifying is there doesn't seem what's always terrified me about the
Middle East is that there doesn't seem to be a clear way to resolve this.
I mean, if Saudi Arabia and Iran or rather Israel came to some sort of an
agreement and made peace and were able to establish that long term, that'd be a
great step in the right direction.
But other than that, like when you look at what's happened now, oh, my God, the
rhetoric from both sides, it's just didn't we learn anything from World War Two?
Didn't we learn anything from the Holocaust?
Didn't we learn anything from human beings' ability to other human beings to
just turn them into a thing that's not them, dehumanize them?
And that there's this impulse to do so that existed forever.
Because when we were tribal people that probably barely had a language, you had
to be absolutely terrified of marauding male tribes that came over your border
and wanted to kill you and take your resources and steal your women.
Because that's what they did.
And so we have this ability to look at other human beings as an other and get
ruthless and horrifyingly violent because that was the only way for us to
survive for thousands of years.
So it's ingrained in our system, but it's it's now it exists in the context of
global war.
And it exists in a time where you can manipulate media and spread false
narratives and governments are allowed to use propaganda.
They're allowed to lie to people if it's for the overall better good of the
nation.
It's wild and that's the root of the issue.
The root of the issue is how every human being sort of reluctantly admits that
there's almost no way to stop all wars.
Right now, if you if you had a magic solution to stop all wars in the world,
what would it be?
It doesn't exist.
That's terrifying because the thing that we are scared of the most is global
thermonuclear war.
The thing that everybody should be the most terrified of that we get so stupid
that we wipe every human being off the face of the planet and we're more than
capable of doing it some insane number of times over and that they're playing
with the very first steps of that game.
They've moved the first pawn out onto the chessboard of the global thermonuclear
war chess game.
That is fuck the world.
Yeah, everybody every single nation is involved in any every conflict and if
all these people controlling resources over a group of gigantic people with
their their representative and they're saying these people the bad people and
they're saying you're the bad people.
That's it's just like human beings have always done.
It's like literally a part of our system.
So I agree with you that we are built and hardwired for deep levels of violence.
We we.
Those of us that have been lucky enough to live in safety and security.
We may not realize the violence were capable of because we've never had to
survive.
Right.
But I do believe that there is a difference.
You mentioned the lessons of World War two.
Right.
We were capable of violence.
Hitler was capable of violence.
But we were not the same as Hitler.
Right.
There was an imperative for us to defeat him at almost any cost.
And we did horrible things in that war.
But people understand that there was a good side and there was an evil side.
Yes.
Now, I don't know if you or most of your listeners feel this way about Israel,
but I do.
I think that in this situation, Israel is the good guy and Hamas is the evil
guy.
I think some people feel Hamas is just acting like anyone would if you had
taken their land
and their their freedom fighters that go a little bit overboard.
I don't think that's what they are.
I think they are a death cult that really believes what they write in their
charter in
the late 80s that they want to annihilate every single Jew in Israel and
replace it with an Islamic
state and eventually have a state like ISIS.
And that what they did on October 7th with the, you know, the barbaric
slaughter, that that's the point for them.
That is what they want to do to all of Israel.
And the difference is that Israel, though, though, like the American army, it's
like there's been many excesses, much to criticize.
If Israel wanted to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinians the same way Hamas
wanted wants to annihilate Israel.
Hamas would be gone and there would be no Palestinians in Gaza.
We know that Israel could obliterate them overnight.
Why don't they?
Well, for mixed reasons, but because they don't want to.
They want to live in peace fundamentally.
And so I don't think the two sides are equivalent here, though.
They're both capable of that that universal among humans, which is cruelty.
I don't think these two sides are the same.
I really think this is a situation where there is a good guy and a bad guy.
What solution could possibly be created that would somehow or another calm this
down at this point?
After that attack, it's so horrifying.
But then the response is horrifying, too, where who knows how many civilians
have died in Gaza?
Yeah.
So we're terrified of both.
And then there's this narrative that what was the thing with the hospital?
Oh, yeah.
So this has been going on the past 48 hours.
Basically, what happened is the entire media, the Gaza Health Ministry, which
is run by Hamas,
said that Israel just bombed a hospital and killed 500 people.
The entire media ran with this story.
New York Times, BBC, everyone said 500 killed an Israeli airstrike on hospital.
And obviously, this is monstrous, if so.
Right.
This is why would Israel bomb a hospital?
Israel is known to have at least a policy of not bombing hospitals because
Israel feels that it wants to generally respect what a war crime is.
Right.
That's the policy, at least.
So this this went viral.
So then it turned out, actually, most likely it actually turned out 100 percent
the hospital wasn't bombed.
It was the parking lot next to the hospital.
So that was the first inaccuracy in the story.
Then it turned out it's very, very unlikely to be an Israeli airstrike and was
almost certainly not a Hamas rocket, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
This is the other Palestinian terror group in Gaza.
They launched a bunch of rockets.
One of them was a dud and landed in the hospital parking lot.
And and this is on video.
Al Jazeera showed the video by accident.
And that's how it that's how it's part of how it's been confirmed.
What do you mean by accident?
So they were they were showing this in real time.
I think it happened at like 6:59 exactly as either 6:49 or 6:59.
They were showing live footage of or footage they had they had just taken of a
bunch of rockets leaving the Gaza Strip to go to Israel.
And one of the rockets you could see it was it was screwy.
It kind of blew up and then you see a big explosion in Gaza right at that time.
Turns out that's the exact time the hospital allegedly blew up.
So that's how they knew it was a rocket from inside an accidental rocket from
inside Gaza rather than the Israelis airstriking it.
Hmm so then all the New York Times BBC they all started slowly changing their
headlines to from 500 killed in Israeli airstrike to 500 killed in blast to you
know at this point they may be saying parking lot next to hospital killed only
50 to 100 people.
This is still an evolving story and we're talking on on Thursday.
So by the time it actually hit the hospital itself it hit the parking lot next
to the hospital and did damage to the hospital.
The latest is that it the hospital still standing and it was only the parking
lot next to the hospital and all a bunch of cars may have exploded as well.
So.
That's the latest because they have pictures now the next day they took
pictures in the hospitals there.
I thought they had photos of the hospital that was bombed out.
The New York Times when they reported it first they showed a picture of a
different place in Gaza that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike not the
hospital.
Oh my god yeah so this is a this is now you know I think there's a emerging
consensus that it was a parking lot probably not 500 people probably more like
50 or 100 which is again tragic every life is tragic.
But that basically the legacy media took Hamas word as as fact and then has had
to backpedal.
you

Writer Coleman Hughes Explains What Started the Israel-Hamas Conflict

Right now, the belief is that, and I think we'll know more about this in a few
years,
that a few things happen all at the same time. It was a perfect storm.
First, Hamas has been planning this attack for two years,
and one of the leaders of Hamas actually said that they've been strategically lulling
Israel to sleep
by making it seem like they're no longer interested in a conflict the past two
years.
And Israel, even just a week before the attack, allowed more Gazans to come
over the border
and work in Israel as basically a reward for good behavior.
They thought Hamas has gone into this mode where they're more concerned about
the economics of the Gaza Strip
than about attacking Israel. So Israel was asleep at the wheel.
Israel also had transferred a lot of IDF that would normally be at the Gaza
border
to the West Bank. It was also the Sabbath. It was also a major holiday.
It's also, they've had the biggest protests in a generation, almost the same
way America was during 2020.
Israel has been for the past several months over their judicial reform.
So you put it all together.
Can you go into that a little bit, please?
Yeah. So basically the judicial reform in Israel, Israel is not like the United
States.
They don't have a constitution. They don't have this kind of really beautiful,
genius system of checks and balances that we have where, you know, the
president can veto Congress and the Supreme Court has a check on everyone.
Right. And everyone keeps each other in check. Israel just has a single
parliament.
They call the Knesset, a prime minister that has a lot of control over that
parliament because he leads the majority coalition.
So basically in Israel, the president and their Congress have a lot more power
than in America, historically.
The Supreme Court doesn't have the power to say no to them.
But over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has been basically grabbing more
power for itself under these things called basic laws, where they can now say
to the Knesset, no, you cannot implement that policy in the West Bank.
It violates human rights.
They can they can be they have more powers to check the majority party.
And that's come to a head now because the Supreme Court is perceived as left
wing and sympathetic to the Palestinians, just like in America right now, the
Supreme Court is perceived as right wing.
And the Benjamin Netanyahu is obviously Likud, he's the right wing party, and
he's gone into coalition with these ultra kind of right wing religious and and
so it's come to a head where basically the right in Israel feels the Supreme
Court is just expanding its own power and is anti-democratic.
And now they want to judicial form is basically stripping the Supreme Court of
the power it's grabbed for itself over the past 30 years.
Now, the left in Israel views the Supreme Court as the only protection against
human rights violations and the violations of minority rights.
So the left is feels the Supreme Court is a great defender of Israeli human
rights and the right feels that the Supreme Court is an undemocratic
institution that's been expanding its own power for 30 years and now needs to
be reined in so that the majority can govern.
That's torn apart the country.
It's absolutely the number one issue every day protests all over Israel.
So you put all this together with Hamas backed by Iran and you and you you also
throw in the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the verge of a peace deal,
which is huge.
It would be the biggest news in the Middle East in a very long time if Israel
and Saudi Arabia made peace.
It would basically put kind of the death nail in the coffin for Hamas because
Saudi Arabia is the biggest holdout now in terms of who has not made peace with
Israel.
So Hamas from the point of view of Hamas and Iran, they think this is a this is
a last chance.
Kind of we have to attack now kill this deal or we're dead forever.
And they plan this thing meticulously for two years intentionally lulling the
Israelis to sleep.
And they have brilliant success much more success than they expected to.
Now, some people have said it's an inside job.
I don't believe it is.
I think if it is, we'll know that from reporting that comes out in the next two
years.
But at this point, I believe the theory that it was an incredibly successful
attack by Hamas and a perfect storm.
Well, that all connects and makes sense if that's the case.
What's terrifying is there doesn't seem what's always terrified me about the
Middle East is that there doesn't seem to be a clear way to resolve this.
I mean, if Saudi Arabia and Iran or rather Israel came to some sort of an
agreement and made peace and were able to establish that long term, that'd be a
great step in the right direction.
But other than that, like when you look at what's happened now, oh, my God, the
rhetoric from both sides, it's just didn't we learn anything from World War Two?
Didn't we learn anything from the Holocaust?
Didn't we learn anything from human beings' ability to other human beings to
just turn them into a thing that's not them, dehumanize them?
And that there's this impulse to do so that existed forever.
Because when we were tribal people that probably barely had a language, you had
to be absolutely terrified of marauding male tribes that came over your border
and wanted to kill you and take your resources and steal your women.
Because that's what they did.
And so we have this ability to look at other human beings as an other and get
ruthless and horrifyingly violent because that was the only way for us to
survive for thousands of years.
So it's ingrained in our system, but it's it's now it exists in the context of
global war.
And it exists in a time where you can manipulate media and spread false
narratives and governments are allowed to use propaganda.
They're allowed to lie to people if it's for the overall better good of the
nation.
It's wild and that's the root of the issue.
The root of the issue is how every human being sort of reluctantly admits that
there's almost no way to stop all wars.
Right now, if you if you had a magic solution to stop all wars in the world,
what would it be?
It doesn't exist.
That's terrifying because the thing that we are scared of the most is global
thermonuclear war.
The thing that everybody should be the most terrified of that we get so stupid
that we wipe every human being off the face of the planet and we're more than
capable of doing it some insane number of times over and that they're playing
with the very first steps of that game.
They've moved the first pawn out onto the chessboard of the global thermonuclear
war chess game.
That is fuck the world.
Yeah, everybody every single nation is involved in any every conflict and if
all these people controlling resources over a group of gigantic people with
their their representative and they're saying these people the bad people and
they're saying you're the bad people.
That's it's just like human beings have always done.
It's like literally a part of our system.
So I agree with you that we are built and hardwired for deep levels of violence.
We we.
Those of us that have been lucky enough to live in safety and security.
We may not realize the violence were capable of because we've never had to
survive.
Right.
But I do believe that there is a difference.
You mentioned the lessons of World War two.
Right.
We were capable of violence.
Hitler was capable of violence.
But we were not the same as Hitler.
Right.
There was an imperative for us to defeat him at almost any cost.
And we did horrible things in that war.
But people understand that there was a good side and there was an evil side.
Yes.
Now, I don't know if you or most of your listeners feel this way about Israel,
but I do.
I think that in this situation, Israel is the good guy and Hamas is the evil
guy.
I think some people feel Hamas is just acting like anyone would if you had
taken their land
and their their freedom fighters that go a little bit overboard.
I don't think that's what they are.
I think they are a death cult that really believes what they write in their
charter in
the late 80s that they want to annihilate every single Jew in Israel and
replace it with an Islamic
state and eventually have a state like ISIS.
And that what they did on October 7th with the, you know, the barbaric
slaughter, that that's the point for them.
That is what they want to do to all of Israel.
And the difference is that Israel, though, though, like the American army, it's
like there's been many excesses, much to criticize.
If Israel wanted to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinians the same way Hamas
wanted wants to annihilate Israel.
Hamas would be gone and there would be no Palestinians in Gaza.
We know that Israel could obliterate them overnight.
Why don't they?
Well, for mixed reasons, but because they don't want to.
They want to live in peace fundamentally.
And so I don't think the two sides are equivalent here, though.
They're both capable of that that universal among humans, which is cruelty.
I don't think these two sides are the same.
I really think this is a situation where there is a good guy and a bad guy.
What solution could possibly be created that would somehow or another calm this
down at this point?
After that attack, it's so horrifying.
But then the response is horrifying, too, where who knows how many civilians
have died in Gaza?
Yeah.
So we're terrified of both.
And then there's this narrative that what was the thing with the hospital?
Oh, yeah.
So this has been going on the past 48 hours.
Basically, what happened is the entire media, the Gaza Health Ministry, which
is run by Hamas,
said that Israel just bombed a hospital and killed 500 people.
The entire media ran with this story.
New York Times, BBC, everyone said 500 killed an Israeli airstrike on hospital.
And obviously, this is monstrous, if so.
Right.
This is why would Israel bomb a hospital?
Israel is known to have at least a policy of not bombing hospitals because
Israel feels that it wants to generally respect what a war crime is.
Right.
That's the policy, at least.
So this this went viral.
So then it turned out, actually, most likely it actually turned out 100 percent
the hospital wasn't bombed.
It was the parking lot next to the hospital.
So that was the first inaccuracy in the story.
Then it turned out it's very, very unlikely to be an Israeli airstrike and was
almost certainly not a Hamas rocket, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
This is the other Palestinian terror group in Gaza.
They launched a bunch of rockets.
One of them was a dud and landed in the hospital parking lot.
And and this is on video.
Al Jazeera showed the video by accident.
And that's how it that's how it's part of how it's been confirmed.
What do you mean by accident?
So they were they were showing this in real time.
I think it happened at like 6:59 exactly as either 6:49 or 6:59.
They were showing live footage of or footage they had they had just taken of a
bunch of rockets leaving the Gaza Strip to go to Israel.
And one of the rockets you could see it was it was screwy.
It kind of blew up and then you see a big explosion in Gaza right at that time.
Turns out that's the exact time the hospital allegedly blew up.
So that's how they knew it was a rocket from inside an accidental rocket from
inside Gaza rather than the Israelis airstriking it.
Hmm so then all the New York Times BBC they all started slowly changing their
headlines to from 500 killed in Israeli airstrike to 500 killed in blast to you
know at this point they may be saying parking lot next to hospital killed only
50 to 100 people.
This is still an evolving story and we're talking on on Thursday.
So by the time it actually hit the hospital itself it hit the parking lot next
to the hospital and did damage to the hospital.
The latest is that it the hospital still standing and it was only the parking
lot next to the hospital and all a bunch of cars may have exploded as well.
So.
That's the