Piers Morgan and Mehdi Hasan Have Heated Debate Over Israel: ‘It’s Not About Destroying Hamas!’

Former MSNBC presenter Mehdi Hasan told host Piers Morgan Tuesday that if he were Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he’d have had the “self respect” to “quit” after the October 7 terror attack because he was “responsible” for it, having “botched security at the border” and “propped up Hamas” for years.

Hasan was responding to a prompt from Morgan as to what he’d have done if he were in the Israeli leader’s position.

In a ranging interview on the freshly rebranded online-only Piers Morgan Uncensored, Hasan and the host went head-to-head on Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas in Gaza. The show opened, however, with the hypothetical.

Morgan: “Let me just take you back to October the 7th. I want you to imagine, and it’s a bit of a leap, I admit, but I want you to imagine that you are the Prime Minister of Israel when that atrocity happens in Israel. What do you do?”

Hasan: “That’s a great question. So, short answer is I resign because I’m responsible for that attack. I’m the one who botched security at the border. I’m the one who propped up Hamas with money from Qatar over the years and allowed them to be propped up as a way to divide the Palestinian people. I’m the one who’s had millions of my own people on the streets for months protesting against my authoritarian reforms to the judiciary. So I have some shame, I have some self-respect, I have some honesty, and I say, ‘I quit. Let someone else do this because I’ve failed for 20 years.’

Morgan: “OK, Netanyahu did not do that. And interestingly, although the majority of Israelis would like him to go, they also want him to finish the job in destroying Hamas. There’s not much ambiguity in terms of how Israelis feel about the mission plan.”

As the pair discussed the demand for action, Hasan compared the Israeli military campaign to the United States’ response to the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 and the country’s subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Hasan told Morgan: “Only one member of Congress, not [Senator] Bernie Sanders, [Representative] Barbara Lee of California, voted to oppose that war. Two decades on, many people would say she was vindicated, even though she was an isolated voice and she was going against a tidal wave of opinion from liberals and conservatives who said: ‘We have to do something.’ And I get that. After an atrocity happens, people want to do something. But the best leaders, the most strategic leaders, the most moral leaders are the ones who can take a pause, take a breath, and say, are we going to make the situation better or worse? Are we striking out strategically or just for the sake of vengeance and revenge?”

He added: “I think a lot of Israelis, despite supporting Netanyahu, would argue it didn’t have to be done like this. There are different ways to retaliate against Hamas. The irony is no Israeli government has done it like this before. This is the greatest death toll for Palestinians of any war in Israel’s post-1948 history… The statistics speak for themselves. Piers, you know them, you’ve said them on this show. The level of killing, the number of kids killed. You have one former UN official saying this is the highest kill rate in the world since Rwanda, right? Of any conflict since Rwanda. Do not tell me that the only response to a brutal attack on civilians in Israel on October the 7th was to produce a conflict that had a kill rate equivalent to Rwanda’s. Sorry, I don’t accept that.”

Playing devil’s advocate, Morgan countered that from the “Israeli perspective” Gaza had “35,000 Hamas soldiers, warriors, terrorists… embedded amongst a civilian population where half of that population are under 18” years old and asked his guest: “How else do you get rid of Hamas if you don’t go about it in the blunt, brutal manner that Israel is doing? And if you do it the way they’re doing it, how do you avoid the kind of casualty rate of people under 18, given that that’s half the population?”

Hasan replied: “You do it by not deliberately targeting civilian targets and schools and hospitals and cemeteries and mosques and universities and churches. You don’t have snipers shooting at hospitals or Christian women inside a church. That’s how you avoid the casualties.” He continued that “countless episodes from history show us this is not how you defeat a guerrilla movement, a resistance movement, a terror group, as you say, whatever words you want to use.”

Hasan argued “Hamas is a symptom of the problem” but “as long as you treat Hamas as the problem, rather than as a symptom of the problem, you’re never going to get rid of Hamas.” He said that in years to come it will “just [face] another version of Hamas” by creating “tens of thousands of […] people who have lost their kids, their spouses [and] their siblings.”

Morgan agreed: “I feel the same way… I think you can’t kill the ideology. And in fact, all you will do is entrench the ideology. I think that’s what I don’t think Israel has thought through to a logical end game, which is you’re not going to get rid of the thinking that inspired Hamas, because a lot of people will have suffered such appalling grief with their close family.”

However, Hasan accused him of being “too generous to the Israelis” and that the premise of his questions reflected “a little bit of naivety” about the country’s intentions.

Morgan: “What do you think they’re trying to do?”

Hasan: “I think they’re trying to take back Gaza. I think they’re trying to erase the resistance in Gaza. I think they’re trying to get rid of the people from Gaza. You know, they’ve mowed the lawn, as they put it, in previous wars. This time they’re going in to erase the population. You know, there’s a plausible genocide.”

Morgan: “OK, but let me ask you this….”

Hasan: “If you listen to Israeli officials, as you know, it’s laid out in the South African petition. They are very genocidal in their approach to flattening and burning down Gaza. It’s not about destroying Hamas. And if it was about destroying Hamas, why have Netanyahu and [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and others talked about how Hamas is an asset to Israel? Why do they say that openly, Piers?”

Morgan: “Well, he was clearly massively deluded, I think, Netanyahu, about having anything to do with Hamas. I think Netanyahu’s plan was quite straightforward, which was to separate Hamas from the Palestinian Authority and create a split in the Palestinians at an official level. And he thought that that was the best way of preserving security for Israel. He couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Watch above, via Piers Morgan Uncensored.