Discussion on Public Reaction to Gaza Situation (Part 2)

Charted this kind of demographic change on the ground. And it strikes me that when this really began to bite in politics recently was over Gaza. Just to recap three years ago, there's the Hamas led terrors of October 7th, and then Western governments gave the green light to Israel to do whatever it liked to Palestinians. But then something changed and Western governments are forced to take Palestinian suffering seriously because it begins to affect them in their own elections. And Nazarene, you were at the forefront of documenting this. Your writing about Palestine and Gaza has been brilliant. And you were so early in spotting what this might mean for the Labour government in Britain, the kind of backlash it would follow. So one question I just want to briefly get from you is what do you think drove that? Was it that the backlash? Was it the scale of destruction? Was it technology in the smartphones we could all see this on? Was it the ethnic minorities? Like, where would you briefly put that kind of burden of responsibility? I think it was a combination of many things. I think it was the particular nature of the genocide. It was the fact that there was this huge groundswell of public opinion across ethnic minorities, but also interlocked with white people of certain politics that have actually increased in number over the past few years in support of Palestine. But I think it was also because of the pace of destruction. This was an assault on Gaza and a resultant genocide that unfolded almost too quickly for alibis to be made. Western politicians couldn't get up on their podiums and say, well, you know, Israel has the right to defend itself and the casualties are actually not that high compared to what Israel could do because the casualties were immediately went stratospheric. And I remember in those first few weeks, people were on the ropes. You could tell people, the Western spokesman, Western politics, Western government spokesman and spokeswomen would get on podiums and they would be stuttering and gulping and diverting because they just had no way of answering these questions. There was a real sense that.