"What's Israel Doing?" with WSJ Reporter Marcus Walker

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One year on from the Hamas attack, Josh is sick of biased bickering about why Israel is in the right or in the wrong. Here, he brings you an informed, impartial, big-picture account of where Israelis and Palestinians find themselves.

Marcus Walker is a senior reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and the friend to whom Josh turns when he needs to understand the Middle East. A Brit based in Rome, Marcus has been deployed to Israel as a journalist seven times since October 7th, interviewing the most influential players and embedding himself in the conflict. No one knows the country's mood better.

Enjoy this bracing, eye-opening assessment of the fate of the Jewish state and its Palestinian subjects.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gahde, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And here's a dangerous question for you.
0:09.4	Will there be an all-out war with Iran? Does Israel want an all-out war with Iran? What exactly is Netanyahu's
0:18.8	strategy at the moment? What will become of Lebanon, of Hezbollah? Is there a plan for Gaza? Is the two-state solution even feasible anymore? In this week, the one-year anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, there's a lot of chattering about who's right, who's wrong. Has Israel been justified in
0:40.9	its response? You know, how can we kind of play the sides off each other? And I wanted to take a drink
0:47.4	from a cool, refreshing mountain stream. And any time I want to take a drink from a cool, refreshing
0:53.9	intellectual mountain stream,
0:55.7	I turned to one of my oldest, closest friend, Marcus Walker, who is a reporter, a senior reporter
1:00.7	of the Wall Street Journal based in Europe. He used to run their economics coverage, including
1:06.9	during the financial crisis and during the Eurozone crisis. And he went and lived in Greece and reported from the front lines there.
1:13.3	He's a fluent German speaker.
1:14.7	So he's interviewed Angela Merkel and reported from Berlin.
1:18.1	And he has been being sent to Israel.
1:21.3	He's now based in Rome where he runs the Southern Europe Bureau for the journal.
1:25.5	But he's been being sent to Israel to do some really interesting
1:29.7	deep dives for the Wall Street Journal, for mainly it's American readers, into what's going on,
1:35.3	giving context there. His recent article is entitled Israel's invasion gamble risks a quagmire in Lebanon.
1:42.5	And he had an essay prior to that entitled Netanyahu's War,
1:45.8	the tactics of a political survivor. I highly recommend Marcus's reporting in the Wall Street
1:51.0	Journal. It's brilliant. He's not a neocon. He's not an Israeli hawk. He's not a Rupert Murdoch. He's
1:57.1	not a Rupert Murdoch hack. He's a really, really thoughtful and well-informed English guy,
2:04.6	Oxbridge-educated and generally sort of a bit of a European lefty.
2:09.5	But with a deep understanding of where Israel's head is at,
	...

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