Hello and welcome to Oh God What Now, the No Bullshit Politics podcast. I'm Andrew Harrison.

We've had a brilliant response to our New Look Tuesday editions, where we step aside from day-to-day politics and instead go for a deep dive into bigger, wider topics.

The additions on the real meaning of AI for our economy and our future, and on whether Trump could seek a third term.

I've had some of the best comments we've ever had while doing the podcasts.

They are, as the young people say, evergreen episodes.

So if you miss them, do go back and listen. Today,. As the young people say, evergreen episode. So if you missed them,

do go back and listen. Today, we tackle the big one, the vast consequences of the conflict in

Gaza, triggered by Hamasas massacre on October the 7th, 2023, and then aggressively escalated by

Benjamin Netanyahu. From the violent realignment of Iran's power to instability in Egypt and Jordan,

from the humanitarian devastation in Gaza, famine, mass death and displacement and cultural destruction,

to the horrific fate of Israeli hostages and the birth of a new global protest movement,

the enormity of these years, has been hard to take in. What will the long-term consequences be?

Is there any end in sight to the horrors in Gaza,

or of Netanyahu's hardliners, led Israel into a cul-de-sac of occupation and continuing violence?

And is it possible to avoid wider regional escalation?

Here to help us understand all this is a friend of the pod and a UCL professor of politics and international relations. She specializes in conflict, political violence, Middle East politics and foreign policy. She coordinates UCL's Israel-Palestine initiative and she is the author of Gaza, The Dream and the Nightmare, which is published in October. Welcome back, Dr. Julie Norman. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Good to have you here. Can you tell us a bit about UCL's Israel-Palestine initiative? Because reading around it, I think it's been a bit controversial. Yeah, just a little bit as things in this nature tend to be. So this is an initiative that we started shortly after October 7th, and it was really set up by student requests to be a place

where students from any or all backgrounds can come together to learn about and discuss the broader

Israel-Palestine conflict from a lot of different perspectives.

So we've had a lot of different speakers, different backgrounds, different opinions, different

beliefs, often using very different terminology,

and just trying to have a space where those kinds of conversations can happen.

Yeah, and it's been, there have been sort of student protest against it because it hasn't

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