454. Urban Warfare, Civilian Casualty, & Human Shields | John Spencer

This episode features Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discussing the complexities and ethical dilemmas of urban warfare with guest John Spencer, a military veteran and academic specializing in this field.

1. Urban areas are increasingly becoming the main battlegrounds in modern conflicts due to their strategic and economic importance.
2. Armies face significant ethical and strategic challenges when fighting in densely populated urban settings.
3. The use of human shields and civilian infrastructure by combatants complicates military operations and poses serious moral dilemmas.
4. Technological advancements have transformed the nature of urban warfare, necessitating new strategies and doctrines.
5. The importance of preparing civilian populations for potential urban conflicts is critical for national defense.

1. Introduction to Urban Warfare

John Spencer introduces the topic of urban warfare, discussing its increasing prevalence and strategic importance. He shares insights from his military background and subsequent academic career focusing on the challenges and complexities of fighting in urban environments. John Spencer: "Urban warfare has evolved significantly over the decades, reflecting the profound impact of urbanization and technological advancements on military strategy."

2. The Human Cost

The discussion shifts to the ethical considerations and human costs associated with urban warfare, emphasizing the difficulties in distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants. John Spencer: "The nature of urban warfare forces military leaders to make difficult decisions that can have profound ethical implications."

3. Strategic Implications

Spencer explores the strategic implications of urban warfare, including the use of human shields and the challenges of achieving military objectives without causing excessive civilian casualties. John Spencer: "Urban warfare requires not just military might but also a deep understanding of the urban landscape and its socio-political dynamics."

1. Education on Urban Warfare: Civilians and military personnel alike should be educated about the realities and complexities of urban conflicts.
2. Community Preparedness: Urban communities should develop preparedness plans that include evacuation procedures and shelters.
3. Ethical Training for Soldiers: Military training should emphasize ethical decision-making in urban environments to minimize civilian casualties.
4. Investment in Technology: Invest in technologies that can help minimize collateral damage and improve the accuracy of operations in urban settings.
5. International Collaboration: Nations should collaborate to develop international guidelines for conducting warfare in urban areas to protect civilian lives.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with urban warfare expert and scholar John Spencer. They discuss the ongoing war in Israel, the ideology of Hamas, their capture of western universities, the complexity of the tunnel system beneath Gaza, the underlying roots of anti-Semitism, and the reality of war in the mess of politics.
John Spencer is an award-winning scholar, professor, author, combat veteran, national security and military analyst, and internationally recognized expert and advisor on urban warfare, military strategy, tactics, and other related topics. Considered one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, he served as an advisor to the top four-star general and other senior leaders in the U.S. Army as part of strategic research groups from the Pentagon to the United States Military Academy.

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Jordan B. Peterson
Hello, everybody. I have the opportunity today to talk to John Spencer, and we talk about urban warfare. Now, John had a long military career as an on the ground infantryman, both as a regular serviceman and as an officer and in combat in both positions. And then he came to develop an academic career where he focused specifically on the complexities of urban warfare. And that was actually a relatively newly developed field because most wars in the past haven't been fought in an urban environment.

But the planet has radically urbanized. And so it was necessary for a new discipline to be developed to concentrate on that. That happened to be particularly relevant at the moment because the conflict between Israel and Hamas is essentially a conflict of urban warfare. Now, there are other elements to it as well, which we also discuss, the public relations element. So the conversation focuses primarily on Gaza and Israel and what the Israelis are attempting to accomplish and what the barriers are there and the nature of urban warfare, the complexities of urban warfare, and the strictures and opportunities that the Israelis have as a consequence of the October 7 events.

So I found the conversation extremely enlightening, and I hope that you'll concur. So welcome. All right, well, we might as well dive right in. So we're going to talk a fair bit today about the state of the world in general with regard to all the wars that are currently raging. But I think we might as well zero in on urban warfare as such.

That's your particular area of expertise. So maybe we can start if you just outline for everybody watching and listening, why is urban warfare your specialty, and what does that mean exactly? As an academic, I think you understand I fell into an area where nobody was doing research on it. So that's why urban warfare became my specialty. I spent 25 years in the army, and of course, I had my own urban warfare experiences.

John Spencer
I was part of the invasion into Iraq, and I went back and during the height of the violence, basically the sectarian violence. But in around 2014, I became an academic looking at megacities, really any city bigger than 10 million for the four star of the army who said, look at something that we're not thinking about right now. So for over a year, I looked at only megacities, and could you accomplish a military mission in there? Then I moved to West Point. I was teaching strategy, you know, full breadth of military history to military theories, to different challenges or changes in the character of warfare.

But I also stood up a research center that I now work for, the modern war institute, which was, we also saw a gap in people understanding the wars that are going on now, historians cover wars that happened in the past, and they're really rigorous about how they do that. Embedded journalists kind of COVID modern wars, but really, like an actual study of what's going on now. There was a gap, so we created the modern war institute, and I started writing about urban warfare, and it went viral. So, like an academic, it's just like a dream come true. Like, what do you mean?

There's an area that nobody is studying in urban warfare. As I dug into even the institutional approach, the militaries don't study urban warfare because in our doctrine, for years, we've been writing avoid and bypass at all times. Don't do it. Right. I mean, even this dead chinese general that never existed, Sun Tzu said, the worst thing you can do is attack a besieged city because it's been the fact.

And there's a huge history of war, right? And there's a huge history of fighting for cities, but not in cities. That started to change, really, in the 21st century, where militaries got smaller, the advancements in technologies made it doesn't make sense to stand out in the open as a military, even if you're a big military. The urban areas, with the urbanization of the world, population growth, the size of people's militaries, the rise of non state actors, all war moved into cities. And arguably even on state on state warfare, like today, we see Russia and Ukraine.

The decisive battles, the battles that actually determine the future of the wars are happening in the urban areas. Urban areas have always been the prize, the object, the capital city, the economic engine of nations. But militaries have not wanted to fight in cities for all the reasons they don't want to fight in cities today. Okay, so, okay, so a couple of things there. So one of the things you pointed out in your 2022 book was that in the 1950s, there were 80 cities in the world with populations of more than a million, and now there's more than 500.

Jordan B. Peterson
So that is an unbelievably radical change. And the cities are also much, much bigger. And so is that part of the explanation for why there was no specific study of urban warfare until 2014? I mean, that's kind of shocking. And so is it merely the consequence of the fact that the world is urbanized so much that no one was paying attention to this?

Is it the fact that maybe people didn't want to pay attention to it because fighting in cities is such a complicated affair? What accounts for that? All of it? It really becomes, as I was working for a four star general in charge of the entire US army, over a million man force. I understood that militaries are also institutions with cultures.

John Spencer
So there actually was an office a long time ago that studied urban operations. And because of institutional change, there was a decision made like, well, we don't need that office anymore. Absolutely. Wow, that's unbelievable. It is.

And there's been many recommendations to include congressional recommendations, like, you should have a center, an academic program. I mean, there is a jungle at one time, a jungle warfare center, arctic warfare center, desert warfare center. Never an urban warfare center. It is the war, the battle that nobody wants. Right.

Even though it's the war in the battle. Think of any war ever where the urban hasn't been the deciding factor. Yes. One of the reasons we have urban warfare is like, you know, ancient siege warfare. You sent your army forward of your castle to destroy the other army that's approaching rather than go into siege warfare, because that doesn't end well for both sides.

There's a long term cognitive kind of historical reason for that. Then some of it's also cultures don't like change in militaries to include those that lead the military. Want envision a future war of army against army. Right, right. What do they say?

Jordan B. Peterson
The military is always 100% prepared to fight the last war. Yeah. One of my previous war. They do. They say generals always fight the last one.

John Spencer
One of my mentors say that's not even true. Militaries want to fight the war they're comfortable with. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
And to imagine that war. That's right. Okay. Now you said, too, that it's particularly dangerous for modern armies to be out in the open as a consequence of technological transformation. Okay.

So one of the things that I've noticed maybe, you know, and I don't know how accurate this is, but I've been like, I like to think about how things can go catastrophically wrong. Like to. I'm prone to. And it seems to me that as military equipment gets larger and larger and more expensive, that it's very much in the interest of the people who would be fighting such gigantic machines to produce very small and very inexpensive means of bringing those things down. And so we have drones now, obviously, and they're extremely inexpensive and easy to pilot.

And so you said that it's very hard on armies to be out in the open. Okay, so what does that mean exactly? Why is it hard for them to be out in the open? And how potentially devastating is that? And I guess maybe I'm curious about how that is it the Houthis that are wreaking havoc and shipping in the Middle east.

John Spencer
Yes. Right. Well, they seem to me to be the emergence of the kind of warfare that might be successful against giant equipment. And so can we talk about that a little bit? What is it about being out in the open?

Jordan B. Peterson
And how has warfare shifted because of, like, extremely new technology? Yeah. So what we say in, like, teaching strategies, that's the character of warfare is always changing. The weapons, the technologies, the tactics, the nature of war never changes. It's human.

John Spencer
It's for political objectives. It's enduring. That aspect of the evolution of aerial platforms from balloons that were literally in the 18 hundreds in wars to drone warfare today is an evolution of that air power environment. This is why I found myself in a place called Nagarna Karabakh in 2021. In 2020, there was a massive war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over this area called Nagarna Karabakh.

And the use of drones to include with israeli drones that the Azerbaijanis has, they wreaked havoc against an older military standing in the open. So I went there because everybody said that's the future. That was the future of drone warfare, when actually the war came to an end, a decisive end, over one city called Susha, which 400 special forces climbed a cliff and infiltrated the city. All these other things were a factor in that. The drone technology to build a sea, your enemy, if you can see them, you can kill them.

All that. But that urban train, again, because it was the objective, became one of the critical factors. So, yes, the evolution of technologies matters on where war happens, who has power, who doesn't. I mean, from the evolution of the nuclear weapon and the ideology of, or the thoughts about a tackler nuclear weapon, which was meant to destroy a military in the open. And that's kind of gone as the nuclear deterrence and all that has evolved not to be a thing anymore.

Now it's for national defense survival kind of acceptable. There's so many aspects to this and why we understudy this aspect of strategy. How do the tools impact the political decisions or the actual where combat happens? And this is why I get to study urban warfare, because, one, nobody was studying it. Two, there's also the evolution of it migrating into cities as all these people without the weapons.

Like, who's going to stand toe to toe with a state actor like the United States, Russia, China, nobody. But lots of people still want power. They still want all the different things that people fight wars for in the city. He said a long time ago. That hasn't changed these power structures.

So why wouldn't if you pull a military into an urban area, it's called the great equalizer. You can take away its power. You can force them into places they don't want to go. You can break apart. You can make their aerial platforms less effective.

You can make their weapons less effective. You have ready made defensive positions in buildings that you would never have anywhere else on the planet. So that's a pronounced advantage for the defender. Absolutely. A 15 to one advantage, depending on how you calculate combat power and if you get there first, even some.

So I. One of my studies is I found out there was a lot of urban legends about urban warfare, like things that have happened in the past. We, as a kind of human civilization, we remember what people write about history, not necessarily what happened. So I'm going back and looking at all the urban battles, working my way back, like, what actually happened there. And a lot of them are actually meeting engagements like the Battle of Stalingrad, like nobody was in Stalingrad defending it, really.

They hadn't prepared defenses, but the terrain made it be this massive political battle that made no sense. Same thing in Ukraine and Bakhmut. But if somebody's actually in an urban area and prepares it, let's talk like, in Gaza for 15 years prepares it, I can defend it against the world's biggest military for a certain amount of time. Defenders usually lose an urban terrain, but war is not about destroying the other military. That never was the objective of Hamas.

It's about that political strategy and time, and if I can get into an urban area, this is why I wrote a book for Ukraine in 2022. I wrote a little handbook based on all that I had learned about urban warfare, and it went viral. It was just about, how do you hold an urban area for some amount of time so the situation can change? And it went viral because there's this giant gap of knowledge, even though it's there because there's nobody studying it. Okay, so let's talk about.

Jordan B. Peterson
Let's talk about Gaza, because that's almost entirely urban warfare. Yes. Okay. And so you said that the defenders have a 15 to one advantage. So what's your.

What's going on in Gaza? What's your assessment of the situation? I don't mean politically. I mean militarily. Are the Israelis successful in their venture, and how are they conducting the war, in your estimation?

I know so little about the actuality of the situation on the ground that it's. Well, any information is useful. So how do you conduct? I don't even have the foggiest idea how you'd go about conducting an urban battle? Sure.

John Spencer
It's one is I've written things because I've studied the history of this. When I tell people that nobody has faced the challenge that Israel faced in Gaza, it's not from an opinion, it's from an analytical statement of the size of the military. So it's a 40,000 defending force that had 15 years to prepare an urban defense, which included 400 miles of tunnels ranging from 15ft to 200ft underground. And the reason it kept going deeper underground, if you know, if you've ever studied Israel, is because Israel developed weapons technology that could hit farther underground. So Hamas just kept going deeper underground.

So now they're at a range in many places where no military munition can reach. And unique to Hamas, like, everybody has tunnels. I wrote in my little book for Ukraine, like, start digging. Because if you're underground, you can negate, whether being observed or hit. Right, but unique to the world.

There's 400 miles in Gaza built solely underneath civilian structures, homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, for the sole reason to use this thing called lawfare, which is when there's a history of war. Matter of fact, one of my mentors, Colin GRz, says the evolution of war. Most efforts to limit the brutality of war have actually caused more brutality. Do you ever notice that you search something online and then immediately you're hit with ads for products related to your search? That's because Internet providers like Verizon and at and T can legally collect and sell your online activity to ad companies who use it to target you.

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John Spencer
Because after World War two, the Geneva conventions, we said never again were we going to try to punish the civilians to get their political government to give up fighting, because war is a contest of will. Yeah. It's not about destroying the other military, really. It's about convincing the military to give up. Give up or the political government to.

Jordan B. Peterson
Give up or convincing the civilian population to overthrow it. Right. But we said, as a globe, those who follow the law of war, we wouldn't do that anymore. We wouldn't carpet bomb Tokyo and kill 300,000. We wouldn't do Dresdens.

John Spencer
We wouldn't do these things. You have to target only military targets. So in the urban area, that's where the most constraint on the use of force. Again, why a military wouldn't want to go into urban areas, I can't do whatever I want onto the other military because he's intermixed between protected objects and protected populations. So especially if you're not a law of war following organization, you want to pull that military in there.

In Gaza, though, Hamas not only built 400 miles of tunnels, but it built underneath all these structures, and they weaponize the law of war. This is why every hospital in Gaza has. Hamas has been found in it, because hospitals are protected places. The staff, so they're hiding within the law. Fundamentally, some people call it a human shield.

But again, what unique to the challenge that the IDF faced on October 8 was not a combatant, although they are a terrorist organization, but it's an army. It's a power, a political structure with a vast army who has a human sacrifice strategy. And in my history, my study of war, I've never found that. Not the. Okay, so explain the human sacrifice strategy.

Yeah, human. Well, I'll explain human shield. Human shield strategy means that you put your people in front of you so the other military can attack you, so they'll restrain themselves. And the same thing, if you use protected buildings like mosques, hospitals, schools, that's more of human shield strategy, as in, you know, that that other force can't directly attack you without actually going through the laws of war on notifications and all these things. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
And that means that they'll lose the public relations battle, let's say. I mean, one of the things I thought when this conflict started was that really all that the Palestinians, the Hamas, Hamas needed to do in Iran, let's say, behind it all, was hold out long enough to let the Israelis obtain a victory at a cost that was too great on the human relations front. Right. Is that as Israels victory mounts and the human cost of that is broadcast, that would mean defeat for the Israelis on the public relations front. And my suspicions were that, I dont know what you think about this hypothesis, but my, my sense was that Iran prodded the Palestinians into the October 7 attack so that they could undermine the Abraham accords, and so they provoked the Israelis into the response that we've seen, hoping that that would turn certainly the islamic, the arab world viciously against the Abraham accords and cause the west and Iran's enemies undue trouble.

So far, the Abraham Accords have held, but we've seen the consequences of the public relations battle that's been produced as a result of Israel's foray into Gaza. So is that in accordance, in any way with your understanding of the situation? Absolutely. I mean, okay, so that is what. You think is happening?

John Spencer
Absolutely. Why are we so stupidly taken in by the iranian maneuvers then? Because it seemed obvious to me right from the beginning that that was the strategy. So why do you think it is, for example, that there's so much noise and protest on the universities? That's essentially in favor, really?

Jordan B. Peterson
Fundamentally in favor of what the Iranians are doing. Why is that succeeding? Because our world's greatest academic institutions are creating the dumbest people. Yeah. Who can't critically think.

John Spencer
You can't critically think of, like, literally just the get your facts straight on what you did as you are aggrieved by, or that you're so opinionated by? Well, Kymani himself had tweeted out two days ago his thanks to american universities for providing him with the support that they've provided. Well, even if you say free Palestine from what? Yeah. The river to the sea.

From the river to sea. I study strategy, right. So I try to stay out of politics. Although war is the pursuit of political objectives. What you just stated, with Iran's direct funding, training and direction to its proxies, which include, doesn't matter what their religion is, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraq, Shia.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Like, these are all known facts, and there is an element of proxy warfare which is within the global, international order of a thing. Right. Proxy warfare. It's a thing.

John Spencer
Now, Iran being unique in history as the world's global exporter of terrorism. I lost soldiers in Iraq, two iranian forces crossing into Iraq, training Iraq, shia militias to attack the United States. But that was known. But in this sense, I can tell you that that's a part of the strategy, of course, of what happened on October 7. But from a military strategy, what you briefed as well is Hamas attack on October 7 while I walked that ground and understand it as an invasion, not a terrorist attack.

It was an invasion of Israel with the intention to go as far north as they could, to activate all the West bank, to activate Hezbollah, and to really do a large scale attack. I see. Oh, I see. So it was part of a much broader plan. Why didn't that work?

Hundreds of Israelis, many of them without even weapons, standing in the door, standing in what I would call the hot gates. I mean, there's so many moments that I walked that ground in southern Israel where just like an off duty named police person in a vehicle dying at a critical point, which has slowed that advance down. There's one just so ordinary Israelis, many of them ordinary Israeli or off duty. Oh, yeah. Who?

70 year old men who used to serve in the military, heading south to stand in the door to prevent them from heading towards Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem, to other places. But their maps actually said it. Hamas maps said where they were headed, and they just didn't get there because of many situations. And I hope those stories get out, and I can tell you many of them, where they ran into an Israeli who was willing to fight for their nation, which is a big part of war as well. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
So the Israelis had a population that was ready at the individual level to protect the country. So they weren't defending, they weren't depending only on their military to stop this invasion. There's lots to that, as in, absolutely. A nation is built with this security apparatus, both the actual military, whose job is to defend the nation, and then you have the security forces. There is a cultural aspect of living in Israel where you've been attacked so many times that you have to be ready, whether it is the bomb shelter that you have to jump into, or the actual.

John Spencer
How many times Israel as a nation has had to fight back. I mean, five nations at one time. I understand that history, and I've walked much of that ground that happened again. So does that imply in some way that one of the strategic necessities, when urban warfare is a likelihood, is that the general population itself needs to be prepared to fight. Trained and prepared to fight.

I mean, this is, again, going back to my. My injecting myself into the Ukraine war in a unique way through Twitter. Yeah, I made a tweet, a seven thread tweet, on February 26 of 2022, two days after the invasion. As a guy who studied urban warfare for 20 years, just if I was standing in a city in Ukraine, this is what I would do. Because most civilians don't know how to resist, even if they have the will to resist.

But this is why, again, the history of war and why we can look at what Israel has done in Gaza under the political constraints and why it has done the things it's done. The United States wouldn't have done it that way. The whole purpose of war is to rapidly overwhelm your enemy, not destroy them all. So they lose that will to fight. So, like Russia's invasion of Kyiv, the whole point was to rush it, get into the center, take out the government, raise the russian flag, war is over.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. But the people resisted because they had the will. They didn't have the way. So, yes, if you're. This is called total defense.

John Spencer
And it goes. It's way back in european history, all the european countries had this concept of if invaded, we're all going to stand up. Whether the finnish gun culture, the Polish, this idea that you're going to resist, defend. Some people call it resistance. I call it total defense.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right, right. It is a big part of actual having a society, especially if you have somebody. This, again, which no military has faced in modern history, where Gaza is 2 miles from Israel and is attacking. That proximity to an existential threat is real, is clear, if not evidenced by October 7, which actually factors into the law of war, like proportionality. This is one of the terms that started getting misused on October 8.

John Spencer
This number of Israelis died. So you can only proportionally kill that. Like, that's not the way the law of war works. The law of work says you can respond with the appropriate force proportionally to achieve the goal. Like, that's minimal necessary force in a sense, like the common law doctrine.

Jordan B. Peterson
Absolutely right. So you shouldn't use any more force than necessary to achieve your valid military aim, which in Israel's case, would have been the elimination of a potential future threat of the same type they faced on October 7, I presume. A real threat. Yeah. And this is, again, going.

John Spencer
So this back to that human sacrifice strategy. Nobody will to include these kids on college campus, won't listen to the words that Hamas say they imagine some aggrieved. And I know you've covered this a lot about that. Who's the oppressed and who's the oppressor? You won't take the organization's words and actions for what they are.

So a human sacrifice strategy that nobody has done. Nazis, Japanese, ISIS, where they state and act in a way that they say they need as many of their population, their population, to die as possible to achieve their political goal of the war. Okay, so it seems to me that there would be two tiers to that, then. So tell me if I've got this wrong. I mean, my sense with regards to the Palestinians in general, and this is especially true in Iran, is that the iranian powers that be would use all the Palestinians as sacrificial victims at any moment if they could provide an effective thorn in Israel's side and in the side of the west.

Jordan B. Peterson
And then my sense is, too, that the Hamas leadership, given its history, is sufficiently corrupt financially and economically and under the sway of Iran as well, so that it has no qualms whatsoever about using its citizens as cannon fodder for its. What its designs on Israel in the west. Is there anything. Is that an accurate analysis? I think so.

John Spencer
I mean, Iran's willingness to sacrifice all its proxies, that's pretty rational. Well, why wouldn't they? Yeah, I mean, you know, apart from what you might regard as humanitarian concerns, which I don't really think apply in the current situation in the least. Take them for their words. Strategy.

They call Israel the little Satan. Yeah, right. America, the great Satan, wants to destroy both through the use of this exporting of terrorism and the pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Yeah, like they say these things. Yeah, right.

Jordan B. Peterson
Well, that seems to be exactly what's happening. But the difference Hamas, I don't think you can classify as a cannon fodder. Again, listen to the words they say they need, because they believe in their ideology that martyrdom is the path. So they're willing to martyr all of their population to achieve their political goal, not to achieve some geographic ideal of a new place. Their goal, stated and written, is the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews in the world, and their path to that is the death of their population that they act.

Okay, so you're saying that it isn't only that the civilians are being manipulated by the Hamas leadership in Iran, but that they're participating in this as a consequence of the fundamental doctrine of Hamas. Correct. Right. Okay. So then I guess my question would be, to what degree are the palestinian citizens, especially the younger ones.

And I suppose this is partly what the compassionate people on the university campuses are getting at. I mean, if you're 1516 years old and you've been bombarded by iranian propaganda since you were even younger than that, into believing that your best pathway forward is martyrdom, then to what degree can you be held responsible for the fact that you believe it? And so what? I mean, I have the same conundrum, for example, with regards to the protesters on american campuses. I mean, a lot of these kids have been propagandized throughout high school into this victim victimizer narrative, and they buy it completely.

And it's very unfortunate, and I think that they're very dangerous in consequence. But I've seen the consequences of that propaganda among young people. It's very demoralizing, and it's also extremely effective. We did a study in 2016 looking at the predictors of support for politically correct authoritarianism, which is very relevant with regards to what's happening on the campus. One of the things we found was that even having had one politically correct course at any time in your life was a significant predictor of sympathy with politically correct authoritarian views.

Now, there were other predictors. Not being very bright was one of them. So, low verbal iq, while that's relevant, low verbal iq was a good predictor, comparatively speaking, and so was being female and having a feminine temperament. And the fourth best predictor was ever having been propagandized. How much of the doctrine that's.

I know maybe I'm taking you out of your area of specialty here because this is a more political or even a theological question, but how much of the propaganda story that's driving the palestinian civilian cooperation with Hamas do you think is a consequence of planned propagandization at the hands of the Iranians? And how much? A lot.

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John Spencer
I mean, this is this. So this is the problem with the ramifications of this war, right? Because it would be a proven iranian strategy. Spend decades radicalizing the culture from primary school on the books, the payment structure, the pay for slave program of the Palestinian Authority, all those are multi decade approaches to radicalize a population to achieve your political goals. So, absolutely, that's there from me as my expertise, though.

This is where I think we've definitely reached that point in the war against Hamas and Gaza. Is this how do you defeat an ideology? That's for sure. Right. I work in the world of strategy and war, but I am fighting on a daily basis of now people who have spent their PhDs in counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and saying that you're creating more enemy or more terrorist than you're killing.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right, right. You're. Because of the military. Because of the military. Right, right.

So it's a. Even if there's a short term victory, that doesn't mean that you're ensuring the long term victory. Quite the contrary. Right, right. And do you think that's how happening in Gaza?

John Spencer
It's bullocks. It's a fallacy of thinking, and I think it's anti intellectual. Okay. Okay. Explain why.

That's like saying you cannot remove Hitler and the nazi regime or dismantle its military because you'll further radicalize the german population who believe in the nazi ideology. Okay, well, you can imagine a circumstance under which that might occur, but the one that you just laid out obviously didn't occur. Quite the contrary. The defeat of the nazi regime really meant, all things considered, the defeat of the nazi ideology. Okay, so let's go back to Hamas.

Yes. What do you think the israeli strategy is at the moment? How is that playing out? Are they being successful? Do you think it's a good strategy?

Jordan B. Peterson
And do you think it has a chance at defeating this ideology? I mean, if it's fostered by Iran?

I haven't been able to envision what a pathway to victory for the Israelis looks like. So tell me what you think about that. So I actually got to go visit. You know, I've been into Gaza twice. In December in Hamas tunnels, and in February with the idea of incanunis.

John Spencer
I interviewed the prime minister, like, what are your strategic goals you gave to the military? I interviewed the head of the IDF, multiple subordinate commanders. The objectives for Israel, the path to victory, which is always hard to define in war. Right. Right.

Now at this point, tricky problem. There's already people who have said it's a strategic failure for Israel already, and the war is not even known. Yeah. But it is very clear. What was the objectives?

Number one, bringing the hostages home. So of the 240 hostages taken on October 7, it's a clear war goal to bring them home. And Israel has brought over half of them home. There's 124 left in Gaza. The other one was to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military capability.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. Okay. But then the question is, who exactly is Hamas? How do you distinguish them from the civilians? And what are the.

So you said you can respond proportionately. So you're going to remove Hamas military capacity. But if Hamas is in some ways indistinguishable from the palestinian civilian population, then how do you know when you've. How do you know when you've won? Right.

In a manner that's going to matter in the future? I love this. I love this specificity that most people don't ask. How do you distinguish in a situation like this, where Hamas is using human sacrifices, wearing civilians? There's not a single Hamas military building in Gaza.

Right? Right. Not one. So how do you move forward? I actually want the laws of war uphill.

John Spencer
There's actually very clear guidance, even with a non state actor not wearing a uniform. What classifies as a combatant or non combatant or as a person partaking in the hostilities? As in you're shooting at the idea you're a combatant person. Right? Yeah.

Now, who's in Hamas? This is actually my business to the IDF. Like, they have aboard, like, walls of every member of Hamas military, from brigade commander, battalion commander, company commanders, and either exes for killed and captured as they're breaking apart. The goal of dismantling a military is never just like we talked about in the beginning, to destroy all of them, to kill every member of Hamas. It's never been the golden war.

And always after the war, once you remove that power, whether it is the japanese emperor or Hitler himself, there's still going to be tens of thousands of. You have to reconcile them. You had to do de radicalization programs. You have to disarm people. Those are all.

Jordan B. Peterson
And that is possible? It's possible. Proven. Everything worked in Germany, worked in Japan. I can't tell you what that looks like.

John Spencer
The day after. But I can tell you it will never even begin to work if Hamas stays in power. Yeah. So the path to victory. Step one is remove Hamas from power.

Step two is remove its military. That means targeting those people that are identified in the way that you already described, targeting enough of them. Until what? Who gives up in this situation? How would the Israelis know when Hamas is actually being sufficiently defeated?

Yeah. So in this case, again, it's measurable. It's literally like, measures of effectiveness and measures of performance are pretty clear on how do you remove a form from power is when they're the leadership. That is the power. Right.

Just like when, if Zelenskyy would have left Ukraine, it would have went a lot differently. Right. Because the leadership is a symbol of the power. And if you. If it gets broken apart, then another power can be put in place.

And like now, that person is in power. Right. We've done. We bring our powers with us. Right?

Invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq. We brought people with us who said that they would be the new power. Right. That's the challenge of the day after. But from the actual objective of the war, Hamas is still empowered.

It's not an insurgency. It's not a counter and terrorist campaign. Hamas is a political body ruling Gaza through. It's now somewhat broken apart units, but it's still there, it's still in power, in publicly stating things and negotiating all this stuff. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
So it's still a recognizable entity. That's right. Okay. It's not. Once it gets to the point where it's not a functioning organization, even from the political apparatus to military, it's really definable militarily.

John Spencer
You say you can destroy a military when it can't do its assigned mission, attack or defend, and it can't reconstitute itself. That's pretty easy. Politically, you could probably apply the same metric. It can't rule in its assigned geographic location. Right.

Now, one of the reasons that you have so many broken apart Hamas members from fighting, it's because they still think they'll win. Right. Because the will hasn't been destroyed. Why would you give up? Your leadership's still safe in southern Gaza.

The message is, continue to resist until the IDF has stopped. This goes back to your question about, again, military strategy is not that complicated as we want to make it. Yes, defeating ideology is very complicated from a military strategy. Both sides had a grand strategy. I already told you what Hamas is, but they also had a military strategy.

Hamas military strategy was never to defeat the idea on the field of battle. It's never been. Like you said, they actually have a strategy that's based on time for the international community, namely the United States, like the United States has in almost every one of Israel's wars to stop the Israel saying, look, I know you have the right to self defense, whether it's the six day war, Yom Kippur war, you name it. Say, I know you had the right of self defense, but you need to stop. Right, right.

Jordan B. Peterson
So that's. Hence the protests on american campuses. That's the Hamas strategy working. Right, right, of course, of course. But this is not much of that.

All right, so after October 7 and the campus protests emerged, and very rapidly, how much of that was a consequence of a strategy that was conscious, that was put in place consciously by iranian actors or proxies in the aftermath of October 7, how much of it was spontaneous consequence, let's say, of the victim victimizer narrative. Like, to what degree has Iran managed to co opt actors in the west that can organize those sorts of protests? Yeah, all organized, all history learned. I mean, I can take you back to battles in which the United States would stop through that use of social media, al Jazeera and others saying, they're being. They're violating the laws of war.

John Spencer
Too many civilians are dying. They're being disproportionate and to stop. But within Israel's context, I mean, I don't want to take away from Yahya Senwar sitting in jail for many, many years, thinking of what are the weaknesses of Israel, its reliance on the United States, its casualty aversion, like, it doesn't. IDF has. Israel has stopped wars from a very low number of IDF casualties.

Hostages, of course. I mean, a nation that small, you know, they've held a single guy for years and gotten thousands of prisoners in exchange. Hamas has. Right, right. So, yes, Iran, in this larger picture of the geopolitical situation.

Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, so that's why you made reference earlier to this idea that the attempts to reduce brutality can make it worse. Right. Because when you change the rules, you open up new strategic possibilities that are put in place in consequence of being able to manipulate the rules. This is the western. We call it the liberal democracy, the liberal dilemma.

Yeah. Right. And the enemies of western societies have learned that war is always a contest of will of three populations. The military is fighting, of course, the politicians who are ordering the militaries to fight, but their populations. Yeah, we lost the Vietnam war not because of the field of battle, of course, because the american population said, we don't see the interest in this and the crank eyed effect.

John Spencer
So the actual, that social media effect was there in the Vietnam war. Sure. So the contest of three, three wills that have led to this point. Absolutely. But that weakness has also led to an aversion.

So this is my, again, because I've been in this field with the United nations and Human Rights Watch and human rights groups who have risen in their vocal power to say that's not okay, whatever it is. So now that's weaponized. That's why you have Gaza. Yeah. That's why you have 400 miles of tunnels underneath civilians.

That's why you have every hospital serving as a military purpose. Tunnels. Well, it's also why the iranian psyops agents, let's say, can twist the moral force of the west to their own advantage. That's why you have urban warfare. Okay, expand on that.

If I, as we've been talking, if I'm a non state actor or a great, my actual long strategy is to defeat you. I'm not trying to defeat you. I'm trying to turn your population against you. So I pull you into urban areas, show you photos of dead children. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. And you will stop your government and force your government to do things that they don't even want. And this has been the lichen example. Have you heard of the 2000 pound bomb? Is it the bunker buster?

Yeah. How awful it is to use an urban warfare. No, I don't know about that. So one of them. Of the many criticism against the IDF's operations in Gaza has been the use of bombs.

Yeah. Matter of fact, there's a misnomer that if you bomb less, there'll be less civilian casualties. And we can talk about if you want. But one of the biggest things to include the us administration, because of this belief of the use of one bomb called the 2000 pound bomb, is that they've used so many of them that nobody else would have done that, that Israel is purposely trying to cause destruction. Okay.

Yeah. It's a vilification of one. Right. Right. That's an effective communication strategy.

Right. Because it sounds monstrous, a 2000 pound bomb. And. Okay, I can see how that would work effectively. And then you found a bunch of human rights groups which can tell you how much, how, what size of the explosion is, how much concrete it.

John Spencer
Then you find different people who say, well, we didn't use that many of those in the last 30 years and Israel's used this many. We used over 5002 pound, 2000 pound bombs in the one month of the invasion of Iraq. You know why? Because there were military complexes underneath buildings. Right, right, right.

Jordan B. Peterson
So you have to go deep. A 2000 pound bomb only goes 50ft underground. A bunker bus. Right, right. And I just told you I was in 150ft underground in a Hamas tunnel in December.

John Spencer
But all the criticism of 2000 pound bomb and Israel's use against a combatant in underground structure says it's just abhorrent that they would use this tool in war. I think it puts us national security at risk. So when next time, when you send my brothers and sisters or our military into war, you're going to say that they can't use a 2000 pound bomb against an enemy underneath certain buildings or in a bunker. That's really where we've gone. But it's the evolution of this hitting at the liberal democracy or the liberal dilemma to say that you can find a different way.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah, got it. Okay, so tell me what Israel is doing and has done. So they're fighting urban warfare, you said, with a 15 to one disadvantage. Fundamentally. Now, my understanding is that the IDF is doing what it can do to minimize non combatant targets.

Do you believe that? That's the case? I've written with evidence that Israel is doing more to prevent civilian casualties than any military has done in the history of war. Okay, okay, okay. So you think that's valid?

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John Spencer
And this is why I went back in February, like, I wanted to see it for myself, not just the access to information everybody else has. I wanted to ask them, like, how are you doing this, given the complexity of a combatant who uses the human sacrifice. Yeah. Right. So the number one thing that people have done, although, again, the strategy to win wars is to do it rapidly.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. So. And is that also because opposition to the war mounts as it. Yeah, as it's protracted, whereas politics. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. So the more dragged out it is, the more dragged out of victory, the more costly it is on the public relations side. That's right. I mean, the losers start to look like victims, or if they have. I mean, this is.

John Spencer
Ukraine had to hold for a while. It had to slow Russia down from achieving an overwhelming coup d'ame, which is overthrow the government and the fight's over. Right, right. So it's always to get in there and rapidly achieve your goals. Yeah.

If you can slow the army down, then all these other political elements. Sure. What Israel did, though, was implemented things to prevent civilian harm. After October 7, they waited three weeks before they entered Gaza. Right.

They did evacuation. That is the overwhelming number one thing that any military has ever done in the history of war to prevent civilian harm is evacuate cities. Although you. Well, and that's a very strange thing in this situation because the city is the target. This was the misnomer, too, that I saw, that Gaza is the densest place on earth.

I saw that on October 8 and I studied cities for a living. Like, they're not even. It's not even a top 100.

It has ten massive cities, a total of 24 cities that are very dense. But there's also. It's not one continuous urban area. But you are right that in any war I've studied, there's never been a population trapped in the combat area. Although in the 20, 1617 battle of Mosul, a city of a million, the iraqi government told the civilians to stay in the city, 850,000 of them to stay in the city during the battle because they didn't have a place for them to go.

Eventually it told them to go, but because of Egypt, the palestinian people of Gaza had nowhere to go. Right. So Israel explained that. Why did the Palestinians have no place to go? Because of Egypt.

There's a long history there to include. There's a city, Rapha, that used to be on both sides. And that history escapes our campuses. Yeah, yeah, you might say that. Yeah.

That Egypt destroyed the homes of 100,000 people on their side and evacuated all those people because they're a bunch of smuggling tunnels going in between and terrorism on their side. Right. They don't want a radicalized population. Right. So they don't want to bring in the Palestinians.

Jordan B. Peterson
Well, it is the case, if I've got this right, that the arab world in general has refused to take palestinian refugees in any great numbers. That that is the case. And this is the reason, the reason that you just described, depending on what. Nation you're talking about. Absolutely.

John Spencer
Some say it's because they don't want to force displacement, so they use that as an excuse. But for Egypt, it's very clear they share the border with Gaza. Okay. It would be very easy for them to open that side up of the Sinai. And these kids need to look on the map.

I mean, where Egypt is in this giant desert called the Sinai, it is not rational to say that Egypt couldn't have opened their side up created a humanitarian zone outside of the combat area. It's just not rational. So where did the palestinian refugees that Israel allowed to escape go? They went to a place that Israel established. And nobody's asked this question, like, why did Israel create the al Muwasi humanitarian zone on the south western edge of Gaza?

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. I haven't even heard of that. Yeah, that's the giant, over a million people humanitarian tent zone that Israel designated in October for all the displaced people to go because it's the one area they knew Hamas did not have immense defensive positions set up like tunnels. I see, I see, I see. So how did Israel ensure that when all the refugees went to this zone that hadn't been militarized, let's say, by Hamas, that it wouldn't just be as infiltrated by Hamas as Gaza itself is?

Like. So how do they know that the refugees are refugees and not military combatants? Great. It's a good question. I know you have some of them identified, but.

Okay. It's a good question. So, initially, little control. So. Yeah.

Right. Okay. Because it was quick. Yeah. Israel did move forward and split Gaza in half along what's called the Wadi Gaza.

John Spencer
This is a river that splits Gaza almost in half. I mean, it's 25 miles, but they split in half. 850,000, which is actually an effective metric of evacuations. So the world said, you can't do it. I don't know if you remember that.

When Israel announced evacuations to protect civilian life before they moved in to get their hostages and destroy Hamas, the world said, you can't do that. You can't evacuate a million people. That literally was the statement from the United nations and others. You can't do that. Israel did it and successfully evacuated 850,000 below that.

But you're right. Many Hamas leadership and hostages removed during that time as Israel was allowing for the protection of civilians, rather than, like other militaries invading a territory, do it with overwhelming force to achieve quickly. Right. Quickly. Right, right.

Jordan B. Peterson
So they took the risk of the hit on the public relations side, because. They know from their own history that they have to keep international will even after October 7. Yeah, international will and the United States, who started making recommendations on day one of what Israel could or couldn't do. Like, Israel wanted to go in with a larger force, and there was discussions at the political level, all wars, politics. You can't go in with five divisions.

John Spencer
You have to use four divisions. And now we're in. Rafael, you can't go in with two divisions. You got to go in one division. That's what you saw.

But Israel learned, so Israel did. By time I visited in Kanyuna. It's interesting, as we go through all the metrics and all the things that Israel has done that no military has done in history, I went in with the division commander who talked to me about, basically the political atmosphere was that you had to bring the civilian casualties to zero. That's literally what the statements were, which would mean the war needs to stop. So you had a division in Gaza, in Khan Yunus, which is another Hamas strong point, doing operations with the overwhelming backdrop of, you can't have a civilian casualty.

So they did. An example of how they prevented that, basically, the migration of Hamas, although it's still inaccurate to say that that migration is not showing Israel as successful, because dismantling the military means taking away its military capability. So Hamas wasn't moving with this 20,000 rockets. Right. It wasn't moving with its deep buried military weapons production plants.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. Okay. In all its weapons supplies. You still gotta get in there and clear that and discover it. And this is why.

So at least they're disarmed. That's right. Even if they're there. Yeah. There's still gonna be tens of thousands.

Of radicalized people who didn't go along with the evacuation on the palestinian side because they had the option. So now the simple minded consequence of what you said, my understanding of that would be that while Israel gave the civilian population ample time to clear out, and many people did. Okay. So now if Israel goes into Hamas territory, into the Gaza, and there are civilians there that are being killed, like, those are people who didn't leave or couldn't leave. Okay.

So. Yeah. Or forced not to leave. Hamas also didn't allow their own population to leave. How much of their own population?

It's hard to measure any approximation. I mean, there are 850,000 that did. Evacuation leaves, you know, 250,000 or 150,000 still there. Okay. 150,000 still there.

John Spencer
Still there. Right. But this is, again, because I've studied every urban battle that's ever happened, there's always about 10% that stay. Uh huh. Okay.

Jordan B. Peterson
So that's not. That's not historically abnormal, but it's abnormal. For Hamas to set up checkpoints, to not let people. Not let people go, to shoot at people trying to leave, to fire from the humanitarian safe route. So this is standard, too.

John Spencer
Evacuate the cities, create the road that you want them to use. Hamas would put rockets next to that so they could use media to say Israel is striking the zones that they told people to leave. That's a fact. That's happened. Right, right.

Jordan B. Peterson
I see. Okay, so there's 150,000 people left. Okay, so then Israel moves in. Yep. Okay, so what.

What do they. How do you move in? What does that look like? Building by building, fighting. Like, what.

What does that look like? What's that like for the people who are on the ground? Yeah, it starts with, like any military would, striking known military locations. Okay, so that's airstrikes, fundamentally. Okay.

Okay. That's like. That's standard military operation to include in urban warfare. If you know there's an enemy bunker or an enemy headquarters or an enemy formation, you would always want to strike them as far away as you can, especially if you've done everything to move civilians out of harm's way possible. Right, right.

John Spencer
This is the ideal. Like the 2000 pound bomb you can't use in an urban area, which they're actually saying it doesn't matter if there's zero civilians there. You can't use that bomb. Oh, right. Okay.

Jordan B. Peterson
Well, that's obviously a propaganda maneuver, so. Okay, so one advantage of clearing the civilians out, then, would be that there would be, in principle, fewer restrictions on your ability to use air power. So why doesn't. Why don't the Hamas forces just move everything that they have into the tunnels? I imagine they did that to some degree.

John Spencer
This is why they have 4 miles of tunnels. Right? Right. So why have anything available to be bombed? So this is what I faith.

When I went there in December and interviewed brigade commanders that were fighting there, they would have a two week battle on a single block, because Hamas wasn't in the buildings, they were underneath, running in a 400 miles in a stretch of only. There are layers and webs of tunnels underneath at varying depths. It was so hard to imagine. I've never studied that. We call it the three dimensional war.

But to know. So, this is a funny thing about me going into continus. I was in continus, a lot less activity, but I was taken to a location where they were searching for a tunnel. And later that they found that tunnel, I was standing on top of an uncleared Hamas tunnel on the surface. And that's what the IDF faced every moment, every step they took into Gaza.

And then the houses were basically rigged to blow. There were absolutely Hamas left behind. And this is why northern Gaza was chosen first. It was the military strong point of Hamas, of its battalions with assigned geographic areas to hold with a vast tunnel network of caches all throughout the urban terrain. Same thing that you would teach somebody to do.

If you. Okay, so this whole tunnel network, it was produced over what period of time? At least 15 years. 15 years. So some present already when the ID, while the IDF were there before they gave up the Gaza and gave it to the palestinian people.

Jordan B. Peterson
So it was obviously prepared under the assumption that Israel would eventually move in. Yes. Okay. But it wasn't for the purpose, again, their defensive tactics. So they spent 15 years, which is unique in urban warfare, to prepare their terrain for solely military defense, but not to, because defenders usually lose.

John Spencer
All they had to do was hold the IDF long enough for the international community in the United States to turn. To turn them off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay.

So that dictates. Absolutely. It's been the strategy, the tunnels. I wrote this article, you know, war is a contest of politics, but I wrote the article in like November, like this. This is the first war I've studied where the underground is more important than the surface.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right, right. Because the Hamas are in the tunnels, the hostages are in tunnels. The tunnels are the key methodology to achieve the strategy. Sure, sure, sure. How effective has been.

How effective has Israel's invasion of Gaza? Bean then if the Hamas terrorists can just retreat to the tunnels and have all the tunnels been identified or does anyone even know that? Yeah, well, since they knew, since the. And I study underground warfare as well. I was doing underground warfare conferences in Israel in 2018 in Hezbollah tunnels and Hamas tunnels.

John Spencer
No, they don't. They don't even know how many tunnels. Yeah. Right now the estimate went from 300 miles to 400 miles, but they found tunnels that they couldn't have imagined. Just the size of them, the depth of them.

How effective had they been at finding and destroying. Is it possible to destroy them? All? Right. But if they're so dug underneath every structure in Gaza, they're not going to destroy them all.

They've had to make critical decisions on which ones to destroy, and there's not enough explosive in the world to do so. They've made really tough decisions on which ones they find to destroy and how to destroy it, mainly because they tried this flooding thing for a little while, which it didn't work. I thought it was really innovative attempt. It actually worked for Egypt along the Egypt Gaza border to flood the tunnels because they were made of sand and they kind of collapsed down. But these are billions of dollars Jordan used that would have gone to the palestinian people.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. Billions of dollars to use to build these. And that's aid money. Yeah. Well, and money that they take from, you know, they basically.

John Spencer
The market that they drive up the prices and Hamas takes that money. So both direct aid money given to Hamas, but also Hamas subjugation of its population into poverty involves the population having. What about funding from places like Iran? The direct funding for the construction of the tunnels? Is that also part of the strategy?

Absolutely. But Iran has helped in many ways. Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away, learn how Cappella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu. But again, and what do you make.

Jordan B. Peterson
Of the knowledge of the international community, let's say the UN, for example, with regard to the presence of these tunnels? I mean, how much of the fact that these tunnels existed has come. Who has it come as a surprise to? And who knew? So this is the idea of who is the United nations?

Yeah, there's a good question. Or who is UNRA, the United Nations Organization in the palestinian areas? Right. So in Gaza, the UN voice in Gaza is unrwa. So we're rational people that, like, have facts and can make deductions off facts.

John Spencer
If there are Hamas data centers underneath UNRA headquarters, or if there's Hamas tunnels underneath UNRWA facilities, schools, mosque, hospitals. But UNRWA, who has been there for 15 years, says that we did not know about that. To me, that doesn't make logical sense. Well, it's either a confession of incompetence or malevolence. It's one of the two, because how could you not know?

It's just a lie. Of course you knew. This gets the idea of, where do we get information from? Gaza. So Hamas is the ruling power, has been the ruling power for 15 years, and you can't work in Gaza, much like the Baath regime in Iraq, unless you're a member of Hamas.

And you could not be, like, a radicalized martyr, fundamentalist Hamas. But you can bet your dollar you can't say anything without the threat to your life if you don't even believe in the ideology. This gets to our number of civilian casualties, like the Gaza health ministry, which is the Hamas run Gaza health ministry, and that we will believe their word without even questioning to where we have the national leaders of the world parroting the number, which I tell you as a scholar of this, there is no number. There's no way to know how many civilians are dying on a daily basis, down to the single digit period, or that nobody will acknowledge that the Gaza health ministry provides a number to the world that, according to them, includes every death that happens in Gaza, no matter the cause, right? Right.

So it doesn't matter if it was a Hamas rocket that landed on a house, since 20% of the 13,000 rockets Hamas has fired have landed in Gaza. Doesn't matter if that death was caused by Hamas. And the Hamas number also includes any reported missing person, whether it's a social media post or a family member saying, I don't know where this person is. That goes on Hamas list of dead personnel. But the world just runs with 37,000 palestinian.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right? And I've seen that number radically adjusted multiple times, which is an indication of its. Well, of its comparative reliability. But this gets to the college kids that, like, just know what the number is. The number is every death that's happened in Gaza, no matter the cause.

You know, I've had some friends who've been looking at the social media warfare end of this who are trying to understand what information the college kids who are protesting are getting and why they believe it. And TikTok in particular, is flooded with images that suggest that the IDF are barbarians beyond belief and that the casualty rates are extremely high. And once you click on one of those, then that's all you get in your feed. And that seems to be particularly effective. The use of imagery of injured children, for example, seems to be particularly effective for women.

And, of course, the majority of the protesters on the Ivy League campuses are women. And so they're the targets of this particular Psyop. And so that's another. It's a dream for Russia, right, to have this access to the youth's mind? Yeah, absolutely.

It's Russia, China and Iran. It's a dream that they had this algorithm that feeds it. You don't have to do the work. There's actually a battle in my work, in urban warfare history, where the United States was defeated because of this, the first battle of Fallujah. I don't know if you remember that, but there were four american contractors that were killed in the city of Fallujah in April of 2004.

John Spencer
The US president ordered. Because they dismembered american citizens, burned them all and hung them from their bridge. Oh, yes. Yep. The US president ordered the Marines to go in and get those responsible for that action.

So the Marine Corps, over their objections, launched an operation. Al Jazeera was sitting in the hospital airing photos of children that had been casualties of the operations and trumping up numbers of civilian casualties, unverifiable. And six days into the battle, the iraqi governing council, the us allies, all threatened to disband if the United States didn't stop its battle. That was basically an echo to what we have today, where you can defeat a superior power easily through the use of information warfare. The pictures of children, like, why did those resonate?

I know that's your field of study. That resonates very strongly to include me. Yeah, of course I have children. I don't want to see any children. I've seen children.

And this, again, goes back to the. Even these kids won't acknowledge what Hamas is. When I was. Well, children are the ultimate victims, right? The ultimate innocent victims.

Jordan B. Peterson
And so if you're playing a victim, victimizer, ideological game, then obviously pictures of hurt children are incredibly effective weapons in that regard. And, of course, if there is a war, there's going to be hurt children. So it's a strategy that's very difficult to counter, that's for sure. But there's an ideology that the IDF would do it purposely. When I can show you the video of October 7, where Hamas psychopaths, like, it's like Jeffrey Dahmers, we're standing over.

John Spencer
Over children making a death moan and laughing over top of them. Yeah. I've been in war and seeing children injured, and every individual, doesn't matter who he was, is dying in their hearts to help that child. So the idea that the IDF would purposely harm a child isn't backed up by evidence. Now, do civilians get caught in between two warring factions?

Yes. But despite going back to our statement that the IDF have done everything anybody's ever thought of and created ways that nobody's ever thought of. I mean, they have drones with speakers going back to drones that go into enemy held territory and announce to the civilian, please leave. This is a combat area. They've used technologies to track every cell phone in an area now, whether it's on or off, to know if there's civilians there.

And they won't even allow their military into that area until a certain population gets out. Okay, so. All right, so are the Israelis meeting with any success in their military ventures? Are they winning the battle against Hamas, all things considered, do you think? Absolutely.

Jordan B. Peterson
Do you think so? Okay, so what's the evidence for that? Yeah, the evidence is if you can go by hostages. So half the hostages home? Yeah.

Okay. Right. There's 124 left in hostage or left in Hamas hands. Basically, whether it's a dead body or a living person, it's really hard to. Tell how many of them were freed alive.

Do you know? I don't know what the exact number was, but most of them were feed during that temporary ceasefire where over 100 were released by Hamas at great military disadvantage to Israel to do that exchange. Most people don't recognize that. Like, the fact that during that ceasefire, Hamas forced civilians to reoccupy places like Khan Yunus. They increased the population of a city by 300% during that ceasefire so that their human sacrifice strategy would work better.

John Spencer
That kind of escaped the national media. Yeah. Surprise, surprise. So they hostages hamas. How do you.

Jordan B. Peterson
What do you make of the fact that something like that, for example, escaped the national media? Like, how is that possible, even? I mean, I understand some of the foundations for much of the talking points, but most of the world doesn't. Like, they don't know what that number means. They don't know what the details are to that number.

John Spencer
They don't question it. Or when you attack a 2000 pound bomb, they don't know who are the groups. So part of it's just lack of depth of inquiry, let's say. Or there's a global. A global deficiency of an expertise in this type of warfare.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yes. You said even among the military. Yeah. Right. So you'd expect that in spades among what passes for journalists these days, where they.

John Spencer
Of course, it's all bad. Like, where's hell? Where is killing? Right. We've done.

We've agreed that we're going to do not do certain things. And Israel is following every measurement that we've ever had back to their successes of their objective to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military. From a straight analytical perspective, they dismantled Hamas military to include areas it controls physically. Don't get me into the ideology part, but remove the rockets. So there were 4000 rockets fired on October 7, more than it had been fired during the entire second Lebanon war.

On day one, there has been 13,000 since. Now there are a lot less. Those rocket supplies have been taken away. Now they're still shooting them because they still think they're going to win from Rafa and from right next to the humanitarian zone. But from the actual measurement of what a military is, its fighters, its supplies, its production capabilities, its tunnels, Israel has been very successful in clearing dense urban terrain, very slow, very methodically, despite the constraints of the world.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. At one point, they had one brigade in Gaza, because the world said, you gotta do a different way. That one brigade in Gaza, that was. Now, they wanted to finish this quickly in Rafa with two divisions in the world, said the United States, according to reports, said, you can't do that, use one division. But they have been very successful in reducing those military supplies.

John Spencer
Now I can't. Who's winning? Are they achieving metrics along that goal to achieve all three of their objectives, to include secure the borders? Because they have also put in many. Nobody talks about them.

Large construction projects, new roads to create a different security environment, a buffer zone, new roads going into Gaza to include the new humanitarian entry points and roads into Gaza. Nobody talks about. They're being very successful in doing these military measures, but it won't matter. None of this will matter. If Hamas.

That was October 6. The leadership. Just that core leadership survives the war. It doesn't matter. Whatever metric they.

Jordan B. Peterson
So where. Where are the Hamas leadership located physically? Where are they? Southern Gaza. Okay.

And how successful has. We're in Gaza. Right. Because it goes back to the cognitive if maybe some of them have escaped, but, like, going back to even the good guys like Zelenskyy, if he would have left, that is less of a victory than if you stay. So I believe that that leadership is still in Gaza.

Okay. And do you have any sense of what proportion of the Gaza hierarchical leadership is still intact? I think that was a senior leadership. They've gotten one of the senior. Senior leadership.

John Spencer
But this goes back to, like, when. You hear how many of those people in leadership positions are crucial. Five or six. Okay. Okay.

Jordan B. Peterson
So it's a handful of people. I mean, if Yahya Senwar survives this war, he's achieved victory. They'll make statues out of him. He will be the great terrorist that weakened Israel on the global international stage and struck at United States credibility. Iran will make statues of Yahya senuar.

John Spencer
If he survives this war, he will be the great victor of this war. And let alone if October 7 becomes Palestinian Independence Day. Right. If the world says, we don't care, palest, everybody agrees Palestine is a state. Right?

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. How many countries. There's european countries that have already accepted it as a state, at least? Spain. Yes, ma'am.

Norway. I don't remember all the countries, but. Yeah, it would be, if you like. It's almost anti intellectual. How do you not understand that if October 7 leads to a creation of something, despite all the challenges, it would lead to greater violence.

No logic gets in the way of virtue signaling ever. Right. There's no hypocrisy like moral hypocrisy. This is where I can't tell you who's going to win this war. I can't.

John Spencer
If Israel is stopped because of real pressure, because, like, the weapon shipments that have been threatened to be withheld, that has nothing to do with the operations in Gaza. That has to do with 100,000 Hezbollah attacking in the north. Northern Israel is currently under fire, as we're speaking, because Hezbollah has been attacking. And the real threat is that you won't have the supplies to push them back. Yes.

Southern Lebanon is called. How serious is the situation in northern Israel with regards to Hezbollah right now? It's an existential threat. You don't get more serious than that. There are 80,000 Israelis who can't go home for the last eight months at a huge financial cost to the nation of Israel, but they're literally now trying to burn it all down.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's an existential threat, which I think people just discount, like. Yeah. And you think that they'll just stop if. If Israel stops in Gaza?

You think they never want to underestimate the depth of anti semitism? Sure. And you have to believe, since none of this makes logic, that there's something else behind this, all of this insane. Jealousy of the successful minor, of the perennially successful minority. And then underneath that, what would you say?

Why are the Jews the canary and the Colby? Because they're the perennial successful minority. Okay. The successful in any enterprise are always a minority. So when a culture goes after the Jews, it's one step away from going after the successful themselves.

And when a culture goes after the successful themselves, then it's. Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capella University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track. We care about your success and are dedicated to.

Kymani
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Jordan B. Peterson
And so. And then you might say, well, why would people go after the successful? It's like, well, that's a story as old as time. That's the story of Cain, right? The first two human beings in the biblical account are Cain and Abel.

And Cain is murderously resentful and bitter of success. Right. And that makes him murderous. It makes him a rebel against God and makes his descendants genocidal. Yeah.

John Spencer
What do you think? Right. Well, that's. That's exactly. Nothing has changed.

No. So this is why the reasons people go to war hasn't changed since ancient times. And why do you. Of the many reasons. Well, we also think that people go to war to win.

True. Right? Yeah. No, no. The people who are really serious about going to war are perfectly happy to lose.

Jordan B. Peterson
So as long as the loss comes at sufficient cost. So actually dealing with an enemy whose desire is to win, that's a pretty easy battle. It's the people whose desire is to burn everything to ground and dance in the ashes. Those are the people that are very, very difficult to defeat. There's.

That spirit is alive in those campus protests, for sure. The protests of the radicals. They would burn everything to the ground. This is why. This is not this idea that this is some type of an Israel Palestine issue, that it's some type of an Israel arab world issue.

John Spencer
The arab world has addressed terrorism successfully in many parts of the arab world. Their way there, you're actually perpetuating the violence, believing that you could just do something, it would all stop. That's not the reality of truth. And I agree with you. I mean, the one factor the college kids don't want to acknowledge is that there are 2 million arab Israelis living side by side in Israel.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. Right. Yes. Like, oh, they don't care. And they're.

And they're not trying to. To emigrate. Right, right. Because things are as good for them as they would, better for them than they would be anywhere else in the arab world, with the possible exception of the UAE. Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, the Houthis in Saudi Arabia, there are issues. I mean, it's not every, it's not all good, of course. But I think this goes back to your original, the opening comments about the normalization with Israel, arab nations going back to Saudi Arabia. You're right.

John Spencer
Like, I'm not trying to win anything. I'm preventing actual prosperity. I want to burn it down. Oh, 100%. 100%.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. Well, everything around the Abraham accords, once the Democrats came into power, irritated me to death because I knew, I knew enough about the situation in the Middle east at that point to know that the Saudis would have signed the Abraham accords. Right. And now, of course, that was the last thing Iran wanted. Like, seriously, the last thing Iran wanted.

And we were that close to having that happen. And then it got scuttled. And part of the reason for that was that the Democrats were absolutely 100% unwilling to do anything that would give the Trump administration credit for anything positive. And I think that's unforgivable. Like, absolutely unforgivable.

But on the positive side, so far, the Abraham accords have held. I know that the signes have pulled back and are just sort of waiting in the wings and not trumpeting the fact that they've signed a peace deal with Israel. But it's very, very positive that the accords have still been maintained intact. So in that way, Iran hasn't obtained the victory that they'd hoped for. Now, you just said that you don't know who's fundamentally, if Israel can win this war.

So do you want to. What do you think's going to happen? Like, what's your. I absolutely know they can. Yeah.

John Spencer
I don't know if they will. Yeah. Yeah. I can understand that. Those are very different.

I know. They could have. A long time ago. Right. Yeah.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. They could have. So my. My world owns. The United States owns much of the suffering that's happened in Gaza.

Okay, elaborate on that. By prolonging the war. Yeah. Right. By saying you have to find another way.

Yeah. In war, there's no history of you. But find a different way. The world has. Find a different, unspecified way that's never been tried before under impossible circumstances.

Right. Or let's apply a paradigm that isn't war like counterinsurgery. Just do raids and strategic strikes, and in a few years you'll get your hostage. Right. Yeah.

Right. It's maddening. But the world owns some of their suffering. Yes. Egypt owns a lot of it, but the world owns a lot.

John Spencer
When they constrained Israel and told Israel, you can't continue, literally, like, you cannot finish Hamas in southern Gaza, in Rafa, you can't do it. I mean, I can't. We can't. They own some of that, so. Absolutely.

But I can't tell you, because war is politics and Israel is reliant on allies for its survival, for the survival of the 10 million Israelis, it cannot do it alone. So they could be forced. Even though it puts Israel under an existential threat going forward, it could be forced to stop in Gaza and told that eventually. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. Eventually you'll get your hostage back. Eventually we'll figure out a way to remove Hamas from power, try this, force a government on them, things like that. Yeah. This is why you can't.

John Spencer
You don't know who's. And that will determine whether everything, everybody is already. I just read a foreign affairs piece saying Israel's already had a strategic failure. What are you talking about, a strategic failure? The war is not over.

Jordan B. Peterson
Do they mean strategic failure on the public relations side? No, they mean this. Yes. On this ideology, though, that you're created more. Oh, I see.

John Spencer
This is the metrics of how many people in the palestinian community support Hamas, who approved of the October 7 attack, who think it was a good thing and still have increased the support of Hamas. Like, those are metrics. I got it. That has nothing to do with the achievement of those things that we've been talking about in this war, removing Hamas. Now, that's an important thing to get conceptually distinct.

Yes. Right. Right. So your proposition is the military objectives that would be relevant and important can be achieved even if the public relations battle within the palestinian population isn't going in the direction that you'd hope it would, because you use Japan, say, in Germany as an, or even the uninformed. International global perception of the way it's going.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. Well, the thing is that most of any given population will go along with the norms that are currently in place. We saw that during the pandemic, for example. And, you know, there's good and bad in that. The bad is, is that if the bad actors get the upper hand, a very large number of people will go along with them.

But the good is that if the good actors get the upper hand, then many of the people who went along with the bad actors will shift position. Right. Right. Okay. Well, that's a very useful thing to understand conceptually.

So strategic advice like, im so glad that Im not in a position of having to make the kinds of decisions that the israeli leadership have to make now. I mean, God, that must be awful in 15 different dimensions. But youre a military strategist, so whats the best way forward for Israel? Can you see a best way forward for Israel? And if so, what might it be?

John Spencer
I do, although I don't have access to all the information, although I've interviewed many of the leadership, it is threading the head of the needle because I am a military strategist. But I also then understand it's not just about military strategy, it's about the politics of war. This is when I was asked, how long would this war take? I was always asked that in October, November. Yeah, well, no one ever can make that prediction.

Yeah, but it's irrelevant. How long does Israel have before Israel's, the will to allow Israel to defend itself runs out? Right. Which is his story. Right?

Jordan B. Peterson
Of course. Of course. So that's definitely the question. My, with no affiliations, military strategic recommendation was don't stop. If you stop, you'll see October 7 in the future.

Of course, that seems starkly self evident to me. Well, why wouldn't you? Because all it would have proved was that it was successful. Right. Because Israel, its public relationships are seriously damaged on the international front.

Hamas basically remains intact. Iran doesn't give a damn that it was at the cost of Gaza. That's irrelevant. So it's a foreign diplomacy insanity, just trying the same thing over and over, like getting out of Gaza, sending Gaza aid, money, economic, humanitarian, everything, hoping that they would give up their stated grand. Strategy even though they've stated it.

John Spencer
Yeah. And they clearly just say it. Yeah. Right. To include after October 7.

October 7 was just a warm up. It's very difficult for western liberals to believe that people who write down their evil intent actually mean it. I get this in, you know, I work and I do a lot on the social media world where people want to break apart your argument. So on that, they'll say, they wrote that down before. That's not what they want today.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, right. Okay. What about the news conferences they're doing today where they say they're going to keep doing October 7 over and over again and I don't care how many I need. My population like, that isn't stuff they said before. That's what they've said since October 7.

Yeah. Well, part of it too, is that naive liberal types really lack imagination for evil. Yes. And that's a big problem because one of the things that's a consequence of that, for example, is like there's a proclivity for naively compassionate people to view even violent criminals as victims. And the reason for that is imagine that you're trying to understand the motive for a violent crime.

Well, you could understand that there are conditions under which that might be intensely enjoyable as a perpetrator, but you have to go very, very dark places in order to understand that. And so instead of doing that effort, and that is an effort, and it's a moral effort because it reveals something profoundly disturbing about the nature of the human soul. You might say the easiest thing to think is, well, nobody could possibly undertake an action like that unless they'd been brutalized and were victims. And so then you fall into the pathology of feeling sorry for the, like, the truly sadistic psychopaths. And that's a really bad strategy.

I mean, the really dark sadistic actors, they weaponize that compassion in a second. It's part of the pathology. And modern naive liberal people, especially if they're young, they have no idea. They have no idea about it. They don't want to have any idea about any of that.

John Spencer
This is where I think you should force them to watch Israel's October 7 video where you see 2000. At least psychopaths with that capability, who show who for whatever, rape is not resistance. Right. Everything that is seen there, the burning, all of that. If somebody believes that evil doesn't exist, all they have to do is watch Hamas videos.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. You'd think that'd be enough to convince people, but I don't think it would. I think people would watch that. You see, the thing is to watch that and then to understand it is traumatizing. Yes.

Right. Because you have to reconfigure your vision of what human beings are like and capable of so profoundly that you really have nothing left, especially if you're naive. And naive people are much more likely to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. And so what people generally do instead is they watch, but they don't really watch. And they see, but they don't really see.

Right. And then their rationalizations and their previous ideology just kicks back in. Or they won't watch. This is so, I can understand that, but it's not helpful. This is what I've faced in my world of urban warfare is like, how can you not see these pictures of destruction and say that Israel's not purposely doing that to harm?

John Spencer
Because I can show you every urban warfare scenario where the defender defended every building that looks like that. Why does every battle that I can explain to you why does the biggest battle of the Iraq war was the 2004 battle of Fallujah, not the battle of Baghdad? Because if the defender moves in there, it's a very destructive battle. But I face that now, like, I don't care what you say, John Spencer. Israel is evil and they're trying to destroy Palestine.

Like, all the evidence, everything they're doing is actually to prevent harm. No. What's the evidence that people are swayed by? Evidence. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
That isn't generally like motion. Well, people, the more naive people are and the more ignorant they are, the more they view the world through lenses of radical simplification. And one of the most simplified lenses is victim, victimizer narrative. And it's perfect because you can explain everything with it. You can explain history, you can explain economic relations, you can explain the family.

You can explain the relationships between men and women and parents and children. It's all power. One's a victim, one's a victimizer. So that explains the whole world. You can learn that in five minutes.

But there's another advantage to it, too. Is that so? Imagine you want to simplify the world because that's easy. But then the other thing you want to do is you want to take your place as a moral actor in the world so that you're elevated in your moral status. Well, if you've identified the victim properly, all you have to do is announce your allyship with the victim.

And now you're the Messiah. And so the victim victimizer narrative is the perfect hyper simplification, both conceptually and morally. And that's what's promulgated on university campuses in the name of education. It's like, well, everything's a victim victimizer dynamic. That's the power thesis of the postmodernists.

Let's say it's the power thesis of the Marxists. You just view it through a lens of power. Identify the oppressed, ally yourself with them. All your existential and conceptual problems are solved, right. Unbelievably pernicious.

And, you know, the Jews are taking the brunt of that now because they've been cast as victimizers. And so hence the massive rise of anti semitism on the side of the radical left, which is, you know, par for the course historically brutal. Yeah, I think the fear, fear mongering has a bit of that. People fear what they don't understand. And since they don't have a mental construct to understand war, it's all bad, it's all wrong.

John Spencer
They just want it to stop. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, you know, and as a first pass approximation, war is bad is not a bad theory. But the problem is, is that problem is, is that there are worse things than war.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. And that's when. And to understand that, you see, you have to look into darkness. And that's. That's a rough thing to ask of people, even though it's necessary.

All right, sir. Well, on that happy note, we could probably bring this section of our discussion to a close. I want to talk to you about some things that are probably more personal. I'm going to do that on the daily wire side. So those of you who are watching and listening, thank you for this, by the way.

That was extremely instructive. I really appreciate the opportunity personally to, you know, to ask you the questions I did ask you, because I'm trying to get my understanding of this situation in Israel and in relationship to Hamas and the Palestinians. Right. And I've looked at this a lot and I've talked to a lot of people. And, you know, it was useful to me to test out some of the conceptions I had against your knowledge to see if I'm like, way the hell out in right field as it would be.

And hopefully it's real useful for everybody watching and listening to, hearing a more detailed analysis of the situation that Israel finds itself in. So I think what we'll do on the daily wire side for all of you watching and listening is I'd like to find out more about your military career and how you entered the academic world and why you picked urban warfare specifically as your target of inquiry. And we'll probably delve a little bit more into the details of urban warfare as well. So if all of you who are watching, listening want to join us, we'll do that on the daily wire side. So thank you very much for, yeah, and thanks for coming here today to do this in person.

It's always better to do it in person. Yeah, you bet. You bet. Yep.

Kymani
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