Alright, welcome from Parliament, Atte Kaleva. Since we're filming this on a Friday — you were on A-studio, Yle's current-affairs program, on Thursday, and you released that clip, which Yle (Finland's public broadcaster) also picked up, where you talked about the bounty money Hamas uses against Jews. In my opinion, that discussion went pretty reasonably. Would you agree, and can you explain this bounty money for a start? Yes—
—it was a good discussion. I was allowed to speak and no one talked over me, so thank you for that — and I also got to visit Yle after a long time, so maybe I'm not on some blacklist after all. But it's actually not Hamas that pays this bounty money — it's whoever's in power in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, meaning the PLO and Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas's group. They call it a 'Martyrs' Fund' themselves, but 'pay for slay' is the more common term for how it's
described. There's a set tariff: if an Arab kills a Jew — an Israeli, that is — they get a reward under that tariff, a payment, essentially bounty money. If the attacker dies in the attack — becomes a martyr — the money goes to their relatives instead.
Or if they end up in an Israeli prison, then — the relatives get a kind of monthly allowance.
And there are clear tariffs for all of this. The UN has a lot of documentation on it.
They have statistics on how it's paid out. And Israel, which collects tax revenue in the West Bank and remits it to the Palestinian Authority, deducts from that tax pool an amount — many, many millions — matching what the PA has paid out in bounty money. So, in a way, Israel ends up being part of funding this bounty money itself too.
Right, thank you — and on my own mistake: I immediately assumed this was the work of the murder squad that organized October 7th, meaning Hamas, but there are nuances here. As we're recording this, Trump and Netanyahu have apparently reached some kind of agreement and given, well, Hamas — hopefully neither Hamas nor Fatah — this kind of deadline for the 20-step plan. But in a way, since that
background got muddled, since I have those Middle East researchers — the best experts in Finland — let's have you explain the different factions here. In a way, Netanyahu has successfully crippled Iran's military but left its theocratic regime intact. Then there's Abbas and Fatah. No — Iran's military hasn't been crippled, but Iran's air defense has been. Yeah. And then, in a way, these are the pieces on the Middle East board — who's currently against Israel and the Jews, and who's with
Trump, or the Americans. Yeah, this is a long story, but I'll try to condense it a bit to spare you and the listeners.
If we look at Israel first — Israel has a rather peculiar electoral system. The whole country isn't a single constituency in parliamentary elections, and the threshold for entering parliament is quite high, which — for this and other reasons — means the system produces a lot of small single-issue parties in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. They don't have many seats, but they can hold very firm red lines on specific issues — both from the liberal side, but also
from the very fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox Jewish side, as we now see in Netanyahu's governing coalition. So there are these small movements.
These very radical figures — like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. And since there are many of these small parties, each able to set their own red-line issues, once you get enough of those red lines, governing the country becomes quite difficult. So in a sense, you could say Netanyahu is a hostage of these small extremist movements in his government. But Netanyahu himself has long opposed the two-
state model. Netanyahu has supported Hamas — or allowed Qatar to support Hamas — because he's known that as long as Hamas holds power in Gaza, it's hard for Western countries to recognize a Palestinian state and say there's a commitment to a two-state solution, since you can't commit to a two-state solution where one state, Israel, is a democracy and the other, Palestine, is run by a terrorist organization. So that's Netanyahu's calculation. But now that's shifted a bit. Let's look at
the Palestinian side. Elections were held there, Palestinian Authority elections, in 2006. Israel had withdrawn fully from Gaza — there were thousands of greenhouses, a lot was produced there, they were very successful businesses, and many Palestinians worked in them. Israel withdrew, left the greenhouses and everything else behind, and they were immediately looted, and that business came to an end. But in those Palestinian Authority elections in 2006,
in Gaza, free and democratic elections put Hamas in power, and on the West Bank, Fatah, the successor of the PLO. Well, Fatah disputed those results in the Gaza area too, and it turned into something close to a civil war between them — Hamas and Fatah — and Hamas members killed Fatah members and drove the rest out. They took control of Gaza, and Fatah governs the West Bank. So these are two
completely separate things: Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah.
Quick question — have there been elections in either since? No, not since then. So this is one where — well, the terrorist organization Hamas has of course ruled Gaza very authoritatively, but Mahmoud Abbas, who's there — he's already 89 — is also quite unpopular. He's accused of corruption, the leader of Fatah on the West Bank, and the grounds for those accusations are probably fairly solid. He's not liked.
He's also an extremist thinker — not particularly moderate, even though he presents himself that way. Back when he was studying in Moscow in the '80s and wrote his dissertation there, he stated, among other things, that the Holocaust was a conspiracy between the Nazis and the Zionists to get Jews to move from Europe to Palestine. So, in a way, it's as if the Nazis and the Zionists had orchestrated the Holocaust together.
and then against the Palestinians — it's pretty delusional material, what comes out of there. But of course, back then, after '67, these were Russian-backed Arabs. When Israel was founded, the Finnish left also looked very closely at Israel, because it had pioneered the kibbutz system, and the left saw it as a kind of collective farm.
A bit like a collective farm — over there, socialism was working, doing well, even producing pretty good results. Unlike the collective farms, the kibbutzim actually produced. But all that changed in '67, and what's probably behind it is this general leftist view where the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, was 'good' — the Soviet Union supplied 'peace weapons,' while the United States was 'evil' and U.S. weapons were 'offensive weapons.' So everything
the United States supported was bad, and everything the Soviet Union supported was good. And since the United States has traditionally supported Israel — the Soviet Union, although it never particularly loved the Arabs, automatically positioned itself as the opponent of the U.S. to contain American influence, and started supporting this Arab group, out of which the term 'Palestinians' was later coined. And that's, in a way, the reason why even Finnish and European leftists today support Palestine so
strongly and are anti-Israel. But there's also the fact that there are jihadist groups active in the Palestinian territories as well — Palestinian Islamic Jihad among them — and there are a huge number of others across the whole region, but these are the main groups: Hamas, and then Fatah.
Is jihad a holy war, by the way? Yes, jihad means holy war, a kind of struggle. The Quran recognizes two types of jihad. There's the greater jihad, meaning a person's internal struggle — as Christians might put it — against un-Islamic urges. So if, say, someone wants to drink beer but doesn't, that's fighting the greater jihad against that un-Islamic impulse. Then there's the lesser jihad, the external jihad — and if the Islamic community, the Ummah,
is threatened or attacked, then ultimately every able-bodied Muslim man is obligated to defend the Ummah against that outside aggressor. And this concept of jihad — we could make a whole podcast episode just on how the concept of jihad has evolved. I also want to get into the internal divisions among Islamists, because right now we've covered sort of the inner layer, the geography of Israel — but if we zoom out from there to the bigger picture, now that we've covered Israel and Palestine, there are these
other surrounding countries. There's Iran, which of course exerts influence through proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen — and traditionally also through Assad's Syria. Assad was an Alawite, not Shia, but was counted as Shia. So when we talk about the 'Shia axis' in the Middle East, that's Iran, Syria, Hezbollah. Well, now Israeli intelligence has crushed
Hezbollah's operational capacity — practically eliminated it, or you could say struck it down, with that pager attack. It was absolutely, incredibly skillful. Among others, the Iranian ambassador's pager also exploded in that operation — I wonder where he'd gotten a Hezbollah pager? Well, then there's Hamas, which has now been neutralized, or is in the process of being neutralized, and then there are still the Houthis in Yemen.
But the Saudis are very afraid of Iranian influence, because the Saudi Shia population is located on the Persian Gulf coast, in the Dammam area, where Saudi Arabia's oil and gas are produced. And they fear that if Iran manages to stir up separatism there, it could jeopardize Saudi oil production — which would be an existential problem for them. So Iran, Assad's Syria, and these proxies were one side. Well, since then, Assad has fallen — he's been ousted from power.
Hezbollah has been taken out of the game. Russia has been part of this imperialist— why? Well, not really. Russia did fight in Syria, but on Assad's side, because they have a naval base there — the last Russian naval base in the Mediterranean — so they wanted to keep Assad in power to maintain a foothold in the area. But once Assad fell, Iran's influence there has now been fairly effectively contained.
Then there's another group — basically Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt — Sunni Muslim countries that oppose Iran. It's a fairly loose coalition, but Israel also belongs to it in effect. So these are Iran's enemies, or the countries Iran regards as its enemies. And then there's one more group: Turkey and Qatar, which lean more toward the Muslim Brotherhood — or, well, they're not the Brotherhood exactly. You can't
really say that, but there are certain sympathies toward the Muslim Brotherhood, which, in turn, other Sunni countries in the region view as a terrorist organization — in some countries, as a revolutionary terrorist organization.
So this whole cocktail is quite a mess, you could say. Hopefully listeners can keep up with this at least somewhat — but yeah, I'm also curious about this Sunni-Shia divide. No worries, this is always good, you can summarize it if you lose the thread. So, this Sunni-Shia divide within the Islamic world — and actually, even Iran... I think when Israel carried out that strike and left the theocrats, the old men, alive, it was in the hope that maybe there'd be an uprising and
the people themselves would topple that theocratic tyranny. But there's also the old Persian Empire — in a way, Iran has apparently always been the dominant regional power. Yes, Persia has long been a very dominant power, and Iran also sees itself as the leading state of Shia Islam, the torchbearer, so to speak — and that's surely part of what weighed on Israel's calculations too: that if they'd eliminated the entire leadership and the country had slipped
into the kind of chaos Iraq slipped into, that would have been a disaster for everyone, because then no one knows what comes next. So I do understand there needs to be something a bit better — someone able to lead the country rather than total chaos. Yeah.
Netanyahu's power right now is really substantial. Haven't the Israelis also gone in to rescue Christian minorities? Yes — and the Druze.
Yes. Many Druze live in Israel, on the Golan Heights. I've actually been to a Druze village there, and they seemed very satisfied with their lives under Israeli rule, because they get full civil rights and can live in peace — unlike in Syria, where they were oppressed. And now that this Islamist — well, Sunni Islamist, former jihadist... though how 'former' he really is, that's what we're
not able to say for certain yet — but this Assad, who was Shia, oppressed Sunnis and also the Druze. Even so, Christians actually had a fairly decent situation under Assad. But now the Christians and the Druze are afraid of this new administration. So it's not like — the Middle East is just that kind of place, there's no such thing as the Americans always being the 'good guys.'
Yeah. Let's also bring in the American angle here — in Trump's first term, I think it was his son-in-law Jared Kushner who made a genuinely significant achievement, in my opinion — the Abraham Accords. In a way, they managed to bring at least part of this Islamic bloc quite close to establishing bilateral relations with Israel. Yes — if it had been anyone but Trump, it probably would have been a Nobel, a Nobel Peace Prize
worthy achievement, the Abraham Accords. But that was also one reason for Hamas's terrorist attack. There were several reasons behind it, but one was surely that they wanted to disrupt the Abraham Accords process — they didn't want the Saudis and others normalizing relations with Israel. Another reason was that Hamas quite cleverly calculated that if they carried out a sufficiently brutal terrorist attack, it would provoke Israel into such strong retaliation that world sympathy would swing toward the terrorist organization,
which in itself sounds foolish. But now we see that's exactly what's happened — Hamas's strategy has actually produced pretty good results for them, since so many European countries have now recognized Palestine, giving them what they wanted. So here we have this really, perhaps, unholy alliance. So — didn't the Khomeini revolution, which turned a fairly progressive Persian state into a strict theocracy, actually happen with strength provided by the left?
It did, it did. Specifically, it involved progressive university youth, then the Marxists, and then Khomeini's Islamists.
and once they'd ousted the Shah — and there were these other Mujahideen groups too — once they took power, the revolution ate its children, as it usually does, and Khomeini's faction killed, imprisoned, or exiled the other Islamists, the Marxists, and the progressive university crowd alike. And it feels really jarring that people like Greta Thunberg join a leftist flotilla
to promote things like rainbow rights there. It feels, frankly, really naive.
Well, that's exactly what it is. Just look at these protests — they carry the Palestinian flag in perfect harmony with the hammer and sickle and the rainbow flag. So in Greta's flotilla, you've got Islamists, communists, and LGBT activists literally in the same boat — without realizing, especially among the LGBT activists, that once the Islamists come to power, they
kill the LGBT activists first, then the communists. If the communists — the Marxists — come to power in that region, they'll kill the Islamists first, then the LGBT activists. And if the LGBT activists come to power, they'll do everything they can to stop either of the other two groups from rising.
Yeah, it's very strange. But now, with this second Trump administration — well, as we're recording this, apparently Netanyahu and Trump have reached some kind of 20-point peace plan, some sort of understanding, and Trump has strongly hinted that at least some faction within Hamas is already on board. Trump gave Hamas a very Trumpian deadline here, and at least according to BBC
sources, Hamas isn't quite close to accepting it yet. But we could move on — or do you want to explain more of the pieces on the board in this region first? Well, no, I think that's basically covered — it's quite confusing, and especially the fact that if an ordinary person, who hasn't dug into this deeply, just reads the news feed, it can be very hard to understand why different countries or actors behave the way they do. It takes a fairly deep
understanding of the region to see how it all fits their way of operating.
It works logically, even if that logic isn't obvious just from reading the news — but once you understand the basics of their thinking, their actions make sense. Yeah. I've got maybe two small points.
I had Keir Giles on as a guest, and he described this incident — the WhatsApp leak, where JD Vance and American war decision-makers' WhatsApp group leaked, and Vance said something like, 'we'll smash these Houthis to pieces with bombs, and the Europeans should really handle this.' So, in a way, that shipping-disruption group has been dealt with fairly well. And, in a way, Netanyahu has
very aggressively dismantled Iran's regional threat with this direct strike. And now, in a way, it's — you can't really call it a power vacuum, but the pieces are starting, in my view, to fall into place the way they did around the acceptance of the Abraham Accords. Yes, I see it the same way — I now dare to be, let's say, cautiously optimistic about this Trump peace, or rather — this isn't really a peace plan from Trump, it's
a ceasefire plan. It aims to stop the killing, get a ceasefire in place, free the hostages, and disarm Hamas. Then the actual peace plan comes after. Earlier this summer, France and Saudi Arabia made a joint statement that the Arab countries of the region signed onto — Finland joined too — and it looked a bit further ahead at these steps. But what's exceptional about this Trump plan is that it involves all the regional actors in some way — excluding Hamas
for now — because if you look at the Oslo Accords in the early '90s, the surrounding Arab countries weren't involved.
Peres and Arafat — well, somehow it still came close to succeeding. It was close, but you have to remember that right around the early '90s, after the Soviet collapse, a huge number of very fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox, extremist Jews had moved to Israel from Eastern Europe, and they couldn't accept making any agreements with the Arabs. And since that group is fairly influential, and there are quite a lot of them in Israel
already, Netanyahu has to take them into account.
So pressure is needed on the Arab side, the Palestinian side — and that's provided by the Sunni Persian Gulf Arab states, now that Iran's influence has been largely snuffed out. But pressure is also needed on Netanyahu and his administration. And the only person in the world who can pressure Netanyahu is the President of the United States. If Trump puts his own prestige on the line — if he says he'll become the figurehead of this transition government — then his
prestige is fully staked on seeing this process through. So it doesn't really matter if someone like Netanyahu says 'I don't accept the two-state model,' as he stated in Hebrew after their joint press conference.
First he says in English, 'yes, yes, we're in,' but then immediately turns around and tells his own supporters in Hebrew that they don't accept the two-state model. Trump is such an unpredictable actor, which at this point might actually be a real asset, because you really shouldn't anger him — nothing good comes of that. Netanyahu knows very well that, to use a mafia term, Trump is someone capable of making him an offer he can't refuse.
Mm-hm. In a way, there's a kind of one-and-a-half-state model here. At the time of this recording, Finland hasn't recognized Palestine, and there's a real question of what could actually be recognized when the criteria for statehood aren't met. There's this duality — but in a way, there could be a one-and-a-half-state model, where Gaza and the Palestinian areas are handled separately, and then you bring the surrounding Arab states into it. And now let me bring in a Finnish
angle to this whole mess — Tony Blair is apparently being considered as a kind of state-monitoring commissioner to lead this oversight commission. And as we know, Sanna Marin works at the Tony Blair Institute, so maybe we'll soon see Sanna Marin as a peacemaker in Gaza, maybe even playing some role there. So could it be that after being Finland's Prime Minister, the next step is the premiership of Gaza? But — I mean, I...
I lived in London for 13 years, and I was there during Tony Blair's New Labour era — and then, when he made that deal with Gordon Brown, things went downhill, and really it was just before he went off with George W. Bush to do the Gulf War. But up until then, I thought he was a brilliant politician. And actually, I interviewed Martti Ahtisaari (Finland's former President and Nobel Peace laureate) for my thesis on negotiation, and he seemed to admire Tony Blair's style in the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland,
so, I have a soft spot for Blair — not a Sanna Marin fan, but sort of a Tony Blair fan. Well, I'm not — I'm not a Sanna Marin fan, and I'm not really a Blair fan either, but I will say Blair achieved quite a lot. He made some mistakes too — big ones, like the whole business of the intelligence reports claiming weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and others — those were mistakes. But he's also achieved good things, and I'll
say that if Sanna Marin — if her partying has calmed down a bit now, I don't know if it has or not, but photos still seem to turn up on Instagram fairly often — but if, say, Mapio's turnover is in the millions, then, well, she's a proper capitalist now. Yeah, yeah, like a socialist who got rich and realized it wasn't so much fun after all. But yes, yes — if she can play some kind of role as a player in this,
then as a Finn, I welcome it — because it's good for our country's brand and everything, it's worth it for us. Or I mean, I'd say that when Sanna Marin is there, through the Tony Blair Institute, implementing the agreement Trump brokered, I at least won't be reminding her, 'hey, weren't you a socialist just a moment ago — what happened?' Yes — but to get this 20-point plan
to the finish line, Netanyahu needs to put pressure on — well, the Jewish-conservative... no, sorry, the ultra-Orthodox bloc — and get them to tolerate this. Maybe the West Bank piece will be handled one step at a time — Gaza first, then the West Bank later — to push Hamas out, since there's probably no benefit to anyone but Hamas in that, because the hostages are probably mostly
dead by now, but there's presumably someone left there. And then Israel will probably release some Arab prisoners in exchange, and if we can get the surrounding Arab states to support and take part in this monitoring committee, then the pieces are starting to fall into place — and Netanyahu was already made to apologize for that missile strike, and he did apologize. So, yeah, it really does look like — for the first time, like I said, maybe for the first time in history — there's now a kind of
genuinely serious prospect that this conflict could actually be resolved sustainably. There's one more thing, though — the people of Gaza have suffered the most under Hamas's rule. They've been battered by Hamas, and then they've also been the target of Israeli countermeasures. There's a lot of bitterness, resentment, hatred of Jews, antisemitism, and a sense of hopelessness there. The population there is very young on average. So, in some way,
we should be able to — or rather, not us, but the international community, this coalition running the transitional administration — create economic incentives for these Gazans, young people and older people alike. It's in their interest to stop terrorism and move toward a market economy.
In Gaza, it could actually become, say, the Dubai of the Mediterranean. They could declare a free-trade zone, start trading, and once people see that kind of economic outlook — that this brings prosperity, that our standard of living rises when we're part of this — then the appeal of going out to the desert to wage jihad shrinks quite a bit, once you realize you actually have something to lose. So Trump's real-estate project, even though it
was mocked, has a small kernel of truth in it.
Yeah, it was again this 'Orange Man Bad' narrative — whatever Trump says, you're supposed to laugh at it to prove you're a good, conscious person. But actually, that local 'Riviera' idea — of course the population can't be forcibly relocated, that would be a war crime, it can't be done.
But why couldn't Gaza become a Riviera, or a Dubai? What's stopping it? Right now that area is full of killing, misery, poverty, death, and suffering — but it doesn't have to stay that way. It's enough that Hamas is pulled out of there and the mindset of Gazans shifts — that they say, 'okay, we no longer want to hold onto hatred, because we're the ones who suffer from it. We accept Trump's plan.' Trump is, after all, a highly credible actor in that region — in the Arab countries, and you have to remember that in Israel he's
more popular than Netanyahu. Mm. By the way — I've been following Lebanon through Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who's a really sharp — well, mathematician — but a pretty annoying political commentator. So, in a way, is the Levant this kind of somewhat unifying region, with a positive culture of its own?
The Levant is exactly that kind of thing — the Levant region is known from the Quran, referred to as part of the Fertile Crescent areas. So it stretches from the Mediterranean, through Jordan and Syria, along the twin rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, to the Persian Gulf. So it was, in a way — well, in the time of the Quran they obviously didn't know these modern states, and very fundamentalist Muslims might refuse to even talk about
Syria, for instance. To them, this whole area is 'Sham,' meaning the Levant region in Arabic. That's why ISIS — or Daesh — was 'Dawlat al-Islamiya fi ash-Sham,' meaning the Islamic State in the Levant, not of Syria, not of Iraq, but in the Levant region. And this — but it's still like that among Muslims in that area, so the influence runs
deep enough that when Syrians cross the border, they don't really see it as a man-made, secular border — it feels different to them, more fluid. Yeah. Is there, again, for this piece — well, Jordan and Egypt? Because here in Finland it's always forgotten that Gaza actually shares a border with Egypt too. Yes, but in a way — Egypt and Jordan probably don't want those people
from there to then form, say, an opposition movement — absolutely not. Both countries have quite big problems with the Muslim Brotherhood. As I said, Hamas was never really organically part of the Muslim Brotherhood, but was founded in very close connection with it. In Egypt, after Mubarak fell, the only functioning opposition force was specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, which then got elected to power in free elections. And after that, the Brotherhood grabbed even more power for itself than Mubarak
ever had. And then the army had to overthrow the Brotherhood when they were already seizing power for themselves. Sorry — in Jordan there are many Palestinian refugees, and they pose a clear threat there, a clear opposition, and also a kind of revolutionary movement. The Jordanians don't want any more Palestinians in their own country. The Egyptians certainly didn't want any more Hamas sympathizers either. And really, no country in that region
views the Brotherhood very positively, except perhaps Qatar and, to some extent, Turkey. Everyone else feels this is a revolutionary opposition force whose influence needs to be contained within its own borders. Yes — and all this, from Trump's earlier real-estate proposal, there was also that other point behind the Abraham Accords, that some part of the Gaza population should be relocated. In this new
plan, that's no longer mentioned. So, in a way, for Gaza they now want, specifically for the current population, functioning conditions. Trump, after all, operates in foreign policy the way he does in everything — a bull-in-a-china-shop approach, where he goes crashing through and sees how the pieces land. I've noticed a pretty clear pattern in how he acts: first he throws out something completely insane, something everyone knows is impossible, and everyone's horrified by it — but then once it's walked back
a little, it already sounds much more reasonable, because there's already been discussion about the completely insane version. It's a bit like a negotiating tactic, and Trump is a dealmaker — he wants to make deals, he's a strongly transactional actor. So now, if we could — if we got a solution out of that area, the Gaza Strip, that would benefit Gazans, Israelis, the surrounding Arab countries, and the United States, and the only losers would be
Iran and Hamas — well, that's starting to sound pretty attractive to me, and a lot of actors in the region feel this is such an attractive prospect now that a better deal really isn't achievable. And Iran has been brought pretty much to its knees in this whole affair. Iran — well, the Iranian military is surely still fairly capable, and, as you said, the ayatollahs are still alive and still running the country. But what's really notable is
the fact that Israel has managed to paralyze Iran's air defenses almost completely. Right now, the Israeli Air Force — or the U.S. — can fly over Iran pretty much as they please.
That leaves some very, very vulnerable targets in Iran — fixed targets, uranium enrichment plants, other nuclear-weapons facilities, government sites — all exposed to airstrikes. And when Israel carried out those strikes, and the U.S. made its precision strike, none of the other countries in the region protested at all. Yeah — I actually did an episode about that with Teresa Lahti and Onni Rostila, which I named, somewhat mischievously,
'bunker-buster bombs,' which were used to hit the nuclear enrichment facility built inside the mountain.
But yeah, it is kind of unbelievable — if these Shahed drones have become one of the most important weapons in Russia's war of aggression, then how is Iran itself so helpless with its own drone defense? But Israel is apparently on a completely different level, since they've got those 'David's Sling' systems — which we're also buying here, actually, as an air-defense system. Yes, they are, and Israel's air force is certainly on a completely different level than Ukraine's too, so you have to
say Israel has, in military technology, quite a lot of capabilities that basically no one else has — they've been forced to develop them out of necessity, when you look at how narrow the country is at its narrowest point, and how small it is, surrounded by hostile Arab states. So it's understandable — they've simply had to be significantly better than everyone around them. By the way — these ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have a lot of children and thereby keep gaining more and more of a
vote share in Israel — is it true they don't even have to serve in the army? Yes. Yeah — wasn't there someone recently saying, 'you have to join the army now, you can't just opt out of national service anymore'?
Well, it was the former Defense Minister, Gallant, who said — why should you get out of army service? The reason goes back to when Israel was founded and was immediately attacked by all the surrounding Arab countries.
And at that time, there were very few of these ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Many of them actually opposed the founding of the State of Israel, because their belief was that Israel could only be established once the Messiah came to Earth — and according to their understanding, the Messiah hadn't appeared yet, so founding the state was, to them, an abomination. But then Ben-Gurion got them on board by promising they wouldn't have to do military service. For men,
it's mandatory — three years in Israel, two years for women. Back then, the group was so small that Israelis figured, fine, they're doing a kind of spiritual service instead — reading the Torah, praying — that's their version of conscription, while everyone else does actual military service. But now there are so many of these ultra-Orthodox Jews that, quite understandably, people are asking, 'why do I have to serve three years in the army while that
Orthodox guy...' — and Gallant tried to change this, so Netanyahu fired him. Yes, but that pressure is building now too — there's pressure on that front as well, so you can't really hold the line forever, as I understand it. At least some of them also oppose expanding autonomy in the West Bank, in a way.
Yes, of course. And the Oslo Accords' Areas A, B, and C, which divided the whole territory so some parts were administered by Israel, some by the Palestinians, and some were a mix. Well, Israel hasn't cared much about those divisions for a long time — they keep building settlements in violation of international law without hesitation. And that's certainly something that has to be part of this Trump initiative, for the peace to be sustainable — so, by some
means, the Israelis need to rein in the resistance from these ultra-Orthodox Jews against the two-state agreement, this peace agreement, and especially against the ceasefire agreement — they need to get their own house in order. And of course, the pressure from Trump specifically — the pressure he can exert on Israel, if he chooses to — plays an absolutely crucial role, because there's nowhere else that kind of pressure can come from. Doesn't Netanyahu himself have a bit of a
situation, where — he's obviously quite an old man now, he's been in power for far too long, and in a way, under the shadow of this war, since October 7th, he pushed through his coalition and this Gaza counteroffensive. So, didn't he sidestep some kind of filibuster-type obstruction by pushing through a constitutional reform, and in a way, is he being prosecuted over that, or something else? Well, before this
terrorist attack on October 7th, '23, Israel didn't actually have a constitution — they have a collection of Basic Laws instead, because they never had time to write a constitution. As soon as the state was founded, they came under attack almost immediately, when the Arabs tried to drive Israel into the sea and kill all the Jews, so they had to defend themselves and never got around to writing a constitution. But they do have a Supreme Court that acts as if it were a constitutional court, ruling on whether
some bill the government wants to pass is in keeping with the spirit of these Basic Laws or not. This constitutional-style Supreme Court — it's become politicized, it's been accused of leaning very left, and the problem is that the judges themselves choose their own successors. When one of them dies, the remaining judges pick the replacement. So, as the court has drifted left, the leftist judges keep choosing new
leftist judges. Mm-hm. And this is what's led Netanyahu to accuse the court of being politicized, and Netanyahu is trying to claim for himself — or rather for the head of government, the prime minister — the right to appoint new judges to the Supreme Court. That didn't sit well with the left-wing opposition, or of course the Supreme Court itself, and he's accused of this being, essentially, unconstitutional under Israel's Basic Laws — as if
it were unconstitutional. Yeah, by the way — I think Nalle (Björn Wahlroos, the Finnish business magnate) once wrote a piece for Libera (a Finnish free-market think tank) arguing that we should have a constitutional court here too. But after chatting with Heikki Westman here, whom I invited as a guest, I've actually changed my mind — Finland's system is pretty good, because these constitutional judges would end up just as politicized, most likely. I don't know if they'd drift left quite as easily in Finland, but the risk is definitely there. So I like the fact that within a reasonable time
you can actually revise these heavyweight laws in Finland.
Yes — and there's this constant accusation that the Constitutional Law Committee, which handles our preliminary review — not post-review — no, since I sit on it myself: in the Constitutional Law Committee we review laws that might touch on fundamental rights, human rights, or international treaties, checking whether they're compatible with the Constitution. If they're not, they have to be passed through the constitutional procedure — either a two-thirds majority, or left pending until the next parliamentary term, or a five-sixths majority if urgent,
as happened with border security legislation, for example. So the constitutional legislator deliberately wanted to leave this kind of backdoor open, so things aren't completely set in stone, but still so that no government can restrict people's fundamental rights with a simple majority. And I think that's a good thing. And when people say the Constitutional Law Committee has become politicized — of course it has, because I don't leave my values at the door when I go into that committee, as if I could just forget my values, my views, my old
ideology, and all that — what I think is right and how things should work.
But what keeps it from being politicized is that when I go in there, I no longer wear the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) jacket.
None of the parties do — because in parliament we have party discipline, where usually in votes, as a government party, you press the green button for government proposals, even ones you personally might not think make much sense. I still press green because I'm committed to the government program as a whole. But in that committee, I don't think that way — instead, I listen to the experts and form my own judgment on whether something can be done, even when the bill itself is a bit silly, in my opinion. But the question is,
whether it can be passed through the regular legislative process or needs the constitutional one.
But then, if we had this constitutional court that people like Nalle and company imagine would somehow spare us this politicization — I'd have one question for them: who appoints those judges? Well, if they appoint themselves and a leftist clique forms, then you end up like the situation in the US, so it seems it can just as easily tilt the other way. And when you also consider that if a right-leaning person in Finland goes to study law, what do they study? Criminal law, some
corporate law — something where you can actually earn a good salary. Whereas leftists gravitate more easily toward this constitutional-law kind of specialty in their studies, so you could argue the field is already a bit politicized at that stage. Yeah, an interesting theory — but let's get back to Netanyahu. So, in this deal, he could get
something like — well, if he now concedes, against his own values, to at least start recognizing Gaza, then maybe there's a carrot in it for him — that he won't get immediately lynched back home. Yeah, or why couldn't there be something like Netanyahu getting some kind of immunity and arrangement, so that he could, say,
step down from his position as Israel's head of state into some kind of advisory role — like an associate of Marin's, or something like that — so he could basically wash his hands of it. He wouldn't have to make those difficult changes himself, but it would open the door to something that could — well, there certainly are options. But for the first time in history, I really see that there's now a genuine situation, or since
the start of this conflict, there's now, for the first time, a somewhat credible plan for how we could achieve a lasting peace — one that, practically speaking, would address all the other facets of this massive, multi-layered problem. The only ones losing out would be Iran, Hamas, and Islamist groups, and it seems that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — where the money is, and who haven't really seen any
major wars lately — if they could be brought on board with this, and then Egypt and Jordan would tolerate it, then this could actually move forward. When I talk to representatives of these countries, unofficially, a very strong message comes through: they're completely fed up with the Palestinians' constant victimhood narrative, and with the fact that so much money has been poured in there — you know how much, billions and billions — and
what has it achieved? Just terrorism, hostility, and violence. Yes, but these countries can't send troops into Gaza themselves — there can't be Saudi troops, or troops from Morocco or elsewhere, if there's a risk of Arab-on-Arab fighting breaking out. So they can't end up fighting Hamas operatives directly — someone else has to do the dirty work first to clear the way, and then they can come in with a clean slate to stabilize security in the Gaza area. Yes.
Yeah. Let's also talk about Greta Thunberg's rather confusing turn from climate activist to, well, a full-blown woke-leftist inside her bubble, and then into this — maybe it's wrong to call it Islamist, but nonetheless — this kind of Hamas-aligned activist for the region. What happened here with this flotilla?
Right — it wasn't long ago that Greta had to cross the Atlantic in a sailboat, because otherwise she'd have polluted so terribly much. And now these flotilla boats were chugging along on marine diesel — quite a few of them, dozens. So how much fuel did that burn? Greta doesn't talk about that anymore, like it's already been forgotten. Then I saw videos of how the flotilla members had packed everything.
Not much aid can even fit on those boats anyway, but they'd packed it into plastic containers and woven baskets and thrown them into the sea, hoping that, God willing, they'd drift to the Gaza shore and help the starving people there. And I thought — here we are, forced to keep the caps attached to milk cartons because of some silly EU rule, or drink through paper straws so no plastic ends up in the sea — and these people are throwing plastic into the sea on purpose. They even threw their phones in, so
it wasn't — it was purely a kind of virtue signaling, moral posturing, a stunt to boost their public image, this whole flotilla. It wasn't about actually wanting to help the people of Gaza, it was about getting publicity. Yeah, I think they were even playing ABBA from a helicopter, and then they were offered some kind of screening where they'd watch, well—
by the way, a couple of journalist friends of mine have watched that Israeli-compiled video of the October 7th atrocities, and apparently it's pretty devastating — but Greta's group didn't want to watch it. Actually, Greta had already been offered this before, on an earlier flotilla attempt on the same mission — when they were detained, she was given sandwiches and some juice, and then asked if she wanted to watch it,
and she turned it down and said she didn't want to watch it — 'no way.'
It's somehow like, when the ideology is that strong, it just doesn't — yeah, that's when facts give way. And then it's just this — this Palestinian cause — which really is very strange. And of course, like I mentioned before, this Islamism, Marxism, communism, and LGBT activism, this whole 'woke' thing — what unites all of them is that they oppose Western society. They oppose the West, they oppose capitalism, and
the market economy. That's what's behind it all — that's what's behind Antifa too. Now the question is: who benefits? Which power benefits from the fact that the West has these kinds of fifth columnists eroding Western cohesion from within? Could it be Russia, Iran, even China? Well, China isn't quite as actively destabilizing, but Russia certainly is. Yeah. Well, maybe then, in typical Trumpian fashion, Hamas was given a very short
acceptance window, and it was hinted at, with a bit of a stick, that if you don't accept, we'll keep going with Netanyahu down that path — presumably following the same pattern as with Iran. So, tougher measures will follow. Is it your view that Hamas could actually humble itself and dissolve? Well, if you think about it from a Western, logical perspective, that would certainly make sense. They're also guaranteeing Hamas members that if they repent and disarm, they'll get either amnesty
or safe passage out of Gaza. But which country would take them? That wasn't specified in the agreement. Hardly anyone is eager to take them in. But when I think about this particular Salafist, Muslim-Brotherhood-style mindset that Hamas has — it's actually worked out quite well for them. They've achieved their goals — by killing Israeli civilians and
killing their own civilians too, they've reached their goal, in that several countries have now recognized Palestine. They've gotten the reward they were aiming for with those terrorist acts, so you could say the terrorist attack has actually been quite successful from their point of view.
They don't care at all whether their own civilians die, or Israeli civilians for that matter, since they don't value human life at all. So now, if I think about what could actually make them change course at this stage — because given the current mindset, and now with this threat from Trump — it contains exactly what you said: that we'd give Netanyahu a free hand in Gaza. So Hamas might actually be thinking they could provoke Israel into even stronger
reactions, which would make Western support for Hamas grow even stronger.
Not for Hamas exactly, but for Palestine — meaning, in practice, for Gaza under Hamas — so that even more countries might recognize Palestine. So I'm not sure they have any interest in not continuing this war down to the last Palestinian civilian.
Mm. Yes, that sounds plausible. Thank you. Now that you've made quite a mess of these leftist Greta Thunbergs and, well—
peaceful nuclear weapons — well, you made a name for yourself a few years back, if I recall, referencing Kirsi Piha, with 'no communists in Helsinki, no communists anywhere.' It was probably meant as a kind of counter-phrase to 'no Nazis — no Nazis anywhere.' I laughed out loud at it, but it raised eyebrows a few years ago. So, I suggest we move over to the insider side and talk
a bit about how, in the latest poll — thanks to Keskisarja's bold statements, perhaps, and thanks to the Finns Party's (Perussuomalaiset) budget discipline, maybe — the Finns Party has finally recovered a bit as the third-largest party. So I'd like to spar with you a bit on whether we're looking at the final days of civilized conservatism bowing to the left. Well, this isn't—
so, well, let's save that for the insider side. That was my guest Atte Kaleva — and since you've watched or listened this far, please subscribe to the channel, and see you on the insider side. Thank you.
Thank you.