Hi, everybody. We're continuing our series on questions being sent in from the internet.

The next question is a really good one. Who benefits from the conflict between Israel and the

Palestinians continuing? Who benefits from the continuation of the conflict?

I want to tackle this question in a couple of complicated ways.

One, this conflict is an arena for a great many powers

to play all sorts of important power games.

Iran uses the Palestinian question as a power play

in the Arab world to make a case that the Shia are a vanguard of justice and truth and ultimately

power where the Sunni have failed, to make the case that Iran needs to lead the Muslim Arab world.

Turkey is deeply involved. It is ideologically close to Hamas. It is exactly that Sunni Muslim Brotherhood ideology,

and it funds a great many of the activist networks in places like East Jerusalem and certainly

is a big supporter of Hamas over the years, including hosting Hamas leadership in Ankara and

Istanbul. Turkey is also using the Palestinian question to make a bid for primacy in the Muslim

societies of the Middle East. And you have China involved in Iran because Iran is anti-American,

and China wants to build out networks and alliances that push back against

American power. And you have the interventions of all kinds of powers and all kinds of

movements. And one of the big ones is Western, progressive, anti-imperial, third-worldist,

anti-colonialist ideology. And that really describes a surprisingly large swath

of Western elites who look at this place as a kind of stage on which the great morality play

in which they believe their own societies are engaged, in which they themselves are embedded,

in which their political identity is invested, in which they themselves are embedded, in which their

political identity is invested, is playing out. And all of these different groups, all intervenes,

...