Andrew Roberts (7:12)

Thank you very much indeed. The answer is that I'm very old and I take a lot of time. Some of those books you mentioned, Napoleon took six years, Churchill took four years. That's how it's done.

Dan Senor (7:22)

And here's my question, and that's not what this podcast is about. But I'm genuinely interested and I've always. I should also mention that I am a huge fan of your own podcast, Secrets of Statecraft, which I've been on, which is a great history podcast. But my question, I guess, is when you're writing one of these, are you working on the other as well? Because I'm struck by the close proximity between your biography of Napoleon and Churchill, the close proximity and publishing dates.

Andrew Roberts (7:47)

You're thinking about the next one. Certainly you're not working on the next one because obviously it takes up all of your time to work on the one you're working on, but you're always in those extra moments during the day, you're always thinking about the next one. Yeah.

Dan Senor (8:03)

Okay. Well, speaking of a topic that we hope people are thinking about, which is the historic precedent for President Trump's idea, I know a frustration of yours. There's such a lack of understanding and basic knowledge of history among so many people who comment on these news developments and current events, that we want to take a step back and go through that history. So you published this piece, which we'll link to in the Washington Free Beacon, outlining these historical precedents for what President Trump is recommending for Gaza. So I guess the first question is, how would you compare how Hamas and the Palestinian population in Gaza finds itself in terms of the choices and options before it, after having started this war on Israel's border and now the war is winding down and ending, how they think about the choices they have relative to the choices that most countries or societies that start wars find themselves in.

Andrew Roberts (8:59)

Yes, I think that what President Trump essentially was saying was two things. Firstly, the sovereignty, the choice of destiny of the Palestinian people had essentially been transferred out of their hands, and that he and Israel and other players in the region have the right to essentially override Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza in so much as it's ever existed in the first place. The second thing, of course, that he talked about was population transfers and huge. What essentially would be mass deportations. And the assumption of most of the response to that globally has been a surprising one, in my view, as an historian, which is that the Palestinians retain their sovereignty despite their actions on 7 October, and that no deportations can take place without their active approval. And actually, if you look into the past, Certainly the past 130 years or so, that has not been the case. It tends to be true that the witness of history is almost universal in this, that if you attack your neighbour in an unprovoked sort of surprise attack, and then you subsequently lose the war, that happens as a direct response to that, you actually usually lose both your government and your sovereignty. And very often actually transfers take place that you don't want or support, but which, frankly, you just have to put up with. So that's really all my article was about. It was taking the reader chronologically through 10 or so examples, and frankly, if I'd had the space, I could have given another. Certainly five or six readers have been sending me emails saying, what about Greece and turkey in the 1920s? Yeah. Actually, that would also have been an extremely good way of reinforcing the point that mass deportations and population transfers do take place. They're not very nice things. No one's happy with them. It's not a particularly pleasant thing to have happen, but very often, actually, it does alter the whole terms of reference of the future and it does bring peace.

Dan Senor (11:11)

When I read your piece and I reached out to you, I thought the most important thing we could do is literally just go through some of the examples, because I really don't think most people understand what happened to each of these examples. And I want to go in reverse order. So the most recent one, I think was. Or one of the most recent ones was what happened to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Because you can just describe briefly what happened, meaning how the war was started and how the war ended in terms of comparing it to this situation we're.

Andrew Roberts (11:38)

Discussing when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and communism came to an end in Eastern Europe between then and the early 1990s, you had Yugoslavia essentially collapse as an integral nation state, and the various tribal and ethnic groupings there fell out with one another. A huge, essentially civil war broke. The Serbs invaded Bosnia and lost, ultimately because NATO bombed them. That was the point at which the Serbs lost the control that they had and essentially also lost their control over their own destiny as a sovereign people and had to put up with population transfers that took place at the Dayton accords in the mid-1990s. It was made much worse by the fact that the Serbs had carried out an appalling, monstrous massacre at Srebrenica in July of 1995, where they killed 8,000 innocent Bosnians, which obviously has overlaps with the monstrous events of 7 October, 2023 in southern Israel. So you have a precedent there, essentially one of many, for the loss of sovereignty and for the population transfers.

Dan Senor (13:00)

Okay, so now I want to go back to World War II and post World War II. You talked about the experience of the ethnic Germans that were living in Czechoslovakia. So can you talk about their brief history right before World War II and then how things ended for them at the end of World War II?

Andrew Roberts (13:16)

Yes. What the Sudeten Germans, who made up a majority of a region in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1938, did under their leader, Conrad Henlein, was essentially to ask Adolf Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia, or at least threatened to invade and allow the Sudetens to join the Third Reich. Then, of course, in March of 1938, only six months later, Hitler invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia and fought the Second World War, lost it. And when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia in 1945, huge population transfers took place where the Sudeten Germans were essentially picked up along with lots of others from East Prussia and Silesia and so on, millions of them, and moved hundreds of miles to the west to live in what was to be Germany. And it was an enormous transfer of population. And the reason that it could be done was because the Sudetens did not have sovereignty. They had fought that war and lost it.

Dan Senor (14:22)

In your piece, you compare the relationship that the Sudeten Nazi leader in Czechoslovakia had with Hitler in Nazi Germany. You compared that relationship to the relationship Yehisinwar had with the Islamist regime in Iran.

Andrew Roberts (14:35)

Oh, yes, absolutely. He was an acolyte. He was not a direct puppet in that he didn't just do everything that Hitler wanted. He was trying to encourage Hitler, of course, to go further. And he fitted in perfectly with Hitler's overall plan to bring Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich and bring indeed all Slavs into a sort of slave position to the Aryan race in Southeast Europe. So, yes, he's almost exactly the same kind of figure. He was admired by Hitler, I think, in the way that the Iranians used to admire Sinwar. They used him. But he was ultimately the sort of catalyst for what Iran wanted.

Dan Senor (15:21)

And what was the number of it? 3 million Germans had to leave their homes.

Andrew Roberts (15:25)

If you add all the population transfers that were taking place in that part of Europe in 1945 and 1946, you get to about 14 million.

Dan Senor (15:35)

Okay, but in this particular case, you say the Sudetenland and the surrounding areas, they embarked on the 300 mile journey westwards, meaning from Czechoslovakia towards Germany under conditions of extreme deprivation. I'm quoting from the piece here in the Free Beacon, carrying only what they could carry. Once they reached Germany, whose new borders were drawn by the victorious Allies as they had lost all sovereignty, they had settled and made the best of it.

Andrew Roberts (15:56)

Yeah, this was the thing. They were only able and allowed by the Red army to take what they literally could carry. And they were a crushed group of people. So they arrived in Germany totally poverty stricken. However, Germany in the late 1940s, 1950s had an economic miracle taking place. And these were many of the most hard working and quite often educated people who were really willing to and had to because they had nothing to make the German economic miracle the success story that it was. And quite a lot of those Sudeten Germans and their children and grandchildren today are actually extremely successful and wealthy people. The assumption that you have to stay in perpetuity as a poverty stricken refugee is only really true when it's UNRWA that is taking care of you in Gaza. That isn't the case all over the rest of the world. There are plenty of people, look at the Vietnamese, for example, in the United States, many of whom came with nothing and many of whom have done extremely well here. So I think it's really a council of despair to assume that if you're forced out of your country, you're going to be poverty stricken for generations. That that only really happens if you're kept in your country and treated as a refugee by the United nations in perpetuity.

Dan Senor (17:16)

Staying with World War II, the Vichy government of France. Can you explain the Vichy government of France how they came into power and then the decision they made during the war, yeah.

Andrew Roberts (17:27)

They were the elected government of France when the Nazis invaded. They were elected in the pre1940 elections.

Dan Senor (17:33)

But they chose sides. They chose the Nazi side.

Andrew Roberts (17:37)

They were allies of Hitler. There were different ministers, you know, felt different things at different times, but they were allies of Hitler. They bombed Gibraltar, at one point, the British possession of Gibraltar in Spain. They had a series of fights against the British in Syria. They didn't do much to oppose the Americans when the Americans landed in North Africa in November of 1942. But they stayed in existence as the official government of France until after D Day. And so what you have there is again the defeat and collapse of Vichy after D Day. And the Allies become the sovereign power. Essentially, they chose the Free French under de Gaulle, who had been allies of theirs, to run France. And so you have in the Vichy experience as well, a group of people who fight and lose a war and therefore don't have the right afterwards to continue as the government.

Dan Senor (18:36)

The Japanese experience. Japan chooses to bomb Pearl harbor in December of 1941 and therefore draw themselves into the war effectively. Can you describe the consequences of that decision?

Andrew Roberts (18:49)

Well, again, an unprovoked attack that obviously leads to the deaths of nearly 3,000Americans. Actually, per capita. 7 October was a much higher loss for Israelis than Pearl harbor was for Americans. But it has the thing that it has in common of being a surprise attack attack. And what surprise attacks do in history, again and again is, yes, they give you an immediate tactical advantage. Of course they do. And America lost important warships in Pearl harbor as well as the 3,000 people. But what they also do is to organize and immediately create a burning sense of resentment amongst the people who have been attacked in this unprovoked way. And you see it again and again in history. The Korean War is another example of the way that this happens. And there are lots of other examples too. There's a great line by Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the surprising thing in history is that we continue to be surprised by surprise attacks because they happen so often. Every decade has one, pretty much. And so what happened with the Japanese is that when, of course, they ultimately lost, they too lost their sovereignty. Douglas MacArthur was in complete control of Japan until 1952, seven years after the war, the Japanese did not have control of their own destiny.

Dan Senor (20:13)

Okay, so you mentioned North Korea, the Korean War. North Korea launched its vicious unprovoked attack on South Korea in June of 1950. Talk a little bit about that war, the scale of it in terms of how many Casualties and then how things ended.

Andrew Roberts (20:30)

Yes. Well, the thing about the Korean War is that the opposition to the unprovoked North Korean attack was led by the United States. Also, it was a United nations effort because at that time the Russians did not not veto a United nations response to Korea. And so you had many countries, dozens of countries taking part. But essentially it was the Americans that led it, including Douglas MacArthur, the commander in chief of the UN forces. Only three months or so after the initial invasion, Douglas MacArthur executed an extremely impressive counterattack at Inchon, where the American forces stormed ashore and were able to recapture Seoul and then push on into North Korea. Now, there are a lot of military historians that will argue that that was a mistake and it was the thing that triggered the Chinese to get involved. The losses, as you mentioned earlier, were enormous. The Chinese lost a million troops. The North Koreans, about 2 million South Koreans, 600,000 or so, 40,000 United States personnel were killed. It was a horrific war. The North Koreans did lose some territory, and the war still is continuing to this day. But there, again, the wars do not end in the way that the people who start them think they're going to. Otherwise they wouldn't start them.

Dan Senor (22:02)

Yeah, I would add to that. Wars don't end in the way that the people who start them think they will end. And the same should be true for those in the region who give cover to those who start the wars. We had Amit Segal on recently, who's an Israeli political analyst, and he simply made the point point that all these governments in the Middle east think, oh, yeah, the Palestinians, Hamas, they can do this, they can do that, and everything will just go back to the way it was before they started the war. And we'll continue providing support for them and we'll rebuild and we'll just put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And there's no cost, not only for Hamas to starting a war, but there's no cost for these other Arab governments to not do anything to prevent Hamas from coming into power.

Andrew Roberts (22:42)

Well, of course. And the very fact that Hamas has usefully, in a way helpfully stated publicly and on the record, that as soon as they're in a position to, they will carry out another 7th of October should underline for everybody in the region, but obviously especially Israel and the United States and its allies, that that cannot be allowed to happen, that Hamas cannot and must not be allowed to continue to be the government of Gaza after this whole thing is over. Because if so, all we will be doing is waiting for the next attempt.

Dan Senor (23:18)

I want to stay, just taking our little tour here through history. I want to stay closer to the period of the Korean War just before it, which is back to just after World War II and the partition of India in 1947, which resulted in millions of people from that area having to move in big numbers. You will be able to describe the history better than I can. So can you just walk us through that?

Andrew Roberts (23:42)

Yes. I go into this in some detail in my book, Eminent Churchillians, which is about Lord Mount Battle Pattern's transfer of power in India from the British to the Indian and Pakistanis, but also the nitty gritty of how the dividing line, the partition line, was drawn and what happened in the immediate hours and days, subsequently weeks, once the partition line was made public and it became clear to millions of people that Hindus were on the Pakistan side of the border and Muslims were on the Indian side of the border, and they were going to be minorities in these two future entities, and also, of course, Sikhs. So essentially 14 million people crossed the border, sometimes in trains, but very often on foot, and were prey to the organized gangs and militias of the other side, which very often stopped the trains and massacred everybody on board. Modern historians think that it was over half a million, some say as many as three quarters of a million. A truly terrible thing. And this is what happens when population transfers are not properly policed by the power in charge. In this case, it should have been the British army that was up there, but the British army was being withdrawn. So it's the sort of tragic example of how not to do it. When the Germans were transferred, it was in horrible circumstances, as we mentioned earlier, of poverty and destitution, but they weren't being preyed upon by local populations who wanted to massacre them. And that's what did happen, happen on the northwest frontier of India.

Dan Senor (25:22)

Okay, I left out one more recent event, which was the Argentinian military dictatorship suddenly invading the Falkland Islands in April of 82.

Andrew Roberts (25:33)

That's right, yes. With that one, you have the story of a fascist dictatorship, a military junta which decided, for its own reasons to do with trying to shore up its own popularity, to invade these British Islands, the Falkland Islands, that are hundreds of miles off the coast of Argentina. And it might have come off, actually, if British leadership hadn't been shown in the way that it was by Margaret Thatcher, who threw away essentially 30 years of British appeasement of people who incurred on British imperial territory, which essentially is what the Falklands are, and decided to fight back, sent a task force, pretty much the whole of the Royal Navy, those 8,000 miles from Britain to the Falklands, and then in a very short and sharp campaign that was over in about two months, expelled the Argentinians from the Falklands and recaptured the islands. And the interesting thing about this is, of course, it was a surprise attack, an unprovoked attack, but also it led to the Argentinian junta being overthrown by the Argentinian. They had so lost prestige as a result of their defeat that they were forced out of government. And Argentina has been a democracy ever since.

Dan Senor (26:59)

Andrew, one could argue, I'm not arguing this, but one could argue that the war in Gaza is different from all of these examples from history that you are walking us through in one very important sense. And that is, is there so far is not a clear victor here. Hamas has not been so far thoroughly defeated in the way that the Nazis or the Japanese were in World War II. And so this is 16 months in, and Israel is in this temporary ceasefire with Hamas. Israel wants all its hostages back and it wants Hamas gone from power forever. But right now, Hamas is still in Gaza, and most of the Palestinian population, it seems, is still terrified of the re emergence of Hamas. Hamas wants Israel out of Gaza and wants to reemerge as the leadership of Gaza. And so they're in this negotiation where each side thinks they're on a pathway to a very different outcome. Israel's calculating, yeah, we can negotiate this deal because we're still going to get all our hostages back and make sure Hamas is gone. And Hamas is saying, yeah, we can negotiate this deal because we get Israel out of Gaza and we reemerge running Gaza. So in that sense, it feels different from all these other examples because there was something definitive about all these examples. And this one still feels like we don't know the end of the story yet.

Andrew Roberts (28:22)

That's right, yes. All of these other examples actually do have a definitive defeat, and that is not present. We conceive from the way that the Hamas fighters are in control when they hand over the hostages, the way they're celebrating and firing weapons in the air and essentially uniformed troops in the streets, that shows that the government of Hamas is still in control. So the loss of sovereignty that comes about again and again in history doesn't take place until Hamas has been defeated. And of course, that's going to be much more difficult to do also because they're about to get 900 of their most murderous and vicious soldiers return to them. The assumption that this is a ceasefire that's going to hold forever seems to be ludicrous to me, because it won't hold forever. It'll hold for as long as Hamas want it to.

Dan Senor (29:17)

Andrew, you talk about the term ethnic cleansing. I know genocide has an international legal definition. I'm not even sure the term ethnic cleansing is an international legal term. But it's a term that's thrown around a lot. And you can demonstrate rate cases where ethnic cleansing has actually taken place. Now, we've heard the term thrown around a lot as it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza. And also it's thrown around a lot in terms of Trump's plan for Gaza. So can you walk us through the intellectual dishonesty of how that term is used in the current situation and compare it to these other cases in history?

Andrew Roberts (29:54)

The first term it came into popular use was in the early 1990s with regard to what the Serbs were trying to do in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That was where you got the phrase ethnic cleansing for the first time. And it was the forcible flinging out of the Bosnians. And it's happened many times since Rwanda, of course, on many occasions since what Trump is certainly not talking about. It strikes me, although it's very difficult with Mr. Trump to be absolutely certain the exact meanings of all of his phrases. But he's not talking about threatening annihilation if they don't move. He's talking about population transfers of large numbers of people outside Gaza for a better life. And this is one of the ironies of all of this, because the international community had for years and years, and especially United nations, said that Gaza is an open air prison, it's a concentration camp, it's important, impossible to live there. And so on blaming this all, of course, on Israel. But now there's a chance of the Gazans actually being moved out of Gaza according to the Trump plan. Suddenly instead, it's a beloved homeland that it would be a crime ever to allow people to leave when the actual concentration camps were open. Nobody said that they wanted to stay there. Everybody was trying to get out as quickly as they could for obvious reasons. So that I think underlines the appalling hypocrisy of organizations such as the United nations and the Secretary General there in trying to have it both ways. Essentially, either Gaza is one thing or it's the other, but it can't be both. But that's the essence really, with regard to ethnic cleansing. You mentioned genocide. This also, I think, is something that has been wildly misunderstood. There is a specific explanation for what genocide is. And what Israel did in Gaza is certainly not genocide. It doesn't fit into any of the overarching things that you need in order to have genocide, including the desire to wipe out an entire people. Even if you take the numbers that Hamas give out, which you shouldn't, because every dictatorship always lies about numbers. They always have throughout history. A classic example would be Joseph Goebbels, who claimed that a quarter of a million Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden. No modern historians, to put it at between 20 and 25,000. Still an awful lot of people, but nothing like a quarter of a million. And that's essentially what the Gaza Health Ministry, which is an offshoot of Hamas, the Hamas propaganda ministry has been doing. It's been lying systematically. They are not going to find 47,000 bodies under the rubble in Gaza. But even if, even if they were to, it would still. Once you divide 47,000 by the 2.3 million Palestinian, Gazans still only makes a little over 2% of the population. Now, a genocide is something like what happened when Adolf Hitler attempted to wipe out European Jewry between 1939 and 1945, where he killed 50% of European Jews. The idea that in a war, 2% of people die, which will of course include, I suspect, the majority of those people will be Hamas fighters who were killed by the idf. It comes nowhere near the definition of genocide. And yet, when I got off the plane day before yesterday at San Francisco Airport to come hear the Hoover Institution, there was a gigantic billboard on the side of the road saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And it's the assumption of millions of people who use TikTok and have been following this war. From a pro Palestinian stance, you see this the entire time, every Saturday in my home city, London, where the Palestinian demonstrators claim that genocide is taking place. It simply is not. And neither would ethnic cleansing be taking place if the Gazans were given the opportunity to live in a better place than Gaza.

Dan Senor (34:16)

Before we let you go, I know you're a historian, so you're not asked to predict the future. And even a historian who's written 24 books, books can't be called on to predict the future. That said, just at a very high level, we're just spitballing here. We're not going to hold you to this. How do you think Trump's plan could work out in practice? I mean, no Arab state is offering refuge to the people of Gaza, to the Palestinians. Even before October 7, no Arab state would agree to grant citizenship to Palestinians. So just thinking it through, like if you had a magic wand what is a way this could work in a practical level?

Andrew Roberts (34:51)

It can't. Nobody wants them. They've turned down endless peace opportunities. And of course no other Arab nation is going to want to have hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians. So that's not going to work. And also, it's always suited the Arab states actually to have the United nations taking care of these millions of people in Gaza because they see that it's inherently destabilizing for Israel. So they're perfectly happy. They don't care about whether the Palestinians are happy. They're using them for their own political ends. It's one of the greatest tragedies in world history, in my view.

Dan Senor (35:28)

So what does Trump do then?

Andrew Roberts (35:30)

There's no way the Jordanians are taking them. The Hashemite Kingdom wouldn't last two minutes if they suddenly took millions of Palestinians. The Egyptians certainly don't want them. They've had quite enough trouble trouble with their own Muslim Brotherhood. Also, of course, the United nations are perfectly happy continuing to let this fetid pot boil in the same way that it has for 75 years. So no, I'm not about to say that there's a part of the world where suddenly all of those people can sort of be picked up and suddenly they'll magically found a new Singapore and they'll all be well off and happy, contented, prosperous people.

Dan Senor (36:08)

All right, Andrew, thank you for this quick but important history lesson. It was extremely important. I hope this conversation makes its way into more and more circles that are hyperventilating in response to what the President has laid out and look forward to having you back on in the future.

Andrew Roberts (36:25)

Thanks very much Dan. I've much enjoyed it.

Dan Senor (36:32)

That's our show for today. Before we go, one Housekeeping Note ARC Media, the humble home of this podcast, is looking for a purpose driven Chief Operating Officer to help facilitate our plans for the future. If you are interested in applying for this position, please follow the link in our show notes. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with others who might appreciate it. Time and again we've seen that our listeners are the the ones driving the growth of the Call Me Back community. So thank you. To offer comments, suggestions, sign up for updates, or explore past episodes, please visit our website ark media.org that's ark media.org where you can also find transcripts with hyperlinked resources designed to deepen your understanding of the topics we cover. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Bennett. Additional editing by Martin Fuergo Stav Slama is our director of operations Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan. Senor.