Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

Returning to the program today, we have Moin Rubani.

He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

His writing appears all over the place, including in Zateo and Middle East Eye.

You can find his work on his new substack.

He's at moinarabani.substack.com.

And we always like to speak with Muirubani because he has a deep and profound way of

making the seemingly incredibly complex, very simple and intelligible.

He's one of my favorite people to listen to

Mouin Rabani. Thank you so much for coming back on Garver Fries today.

Nathan, thank you very much for having me, and you've set the bar very high from the outset.

Well, you just helped me understand things, Mouin.

And what I want to help me understand first is what's

actually going on with the, you know, the negotiations. We're going to say there are negotiations

happening between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. Now, my impression has often been that what seem like negotiations are not

really negotiations, that from my understanding that has developed over a period of time,

Israel has a long-term plan that has existed for nearly 100 years, which is to depopulate Palestine, to whatever degree

it realistically can. And so at every stage, we need to be considering Israel's position

in light of the long-term plan, which is to try and, you know, reduce the number of Palestinians to a minimum.

And yet, if you read the newspaper, you sort of read of a tussle, a back and forth over

little terms of this and that.

But can you tell us, you know, when we read about these ongoing negotiations are stalled,

...