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Jasim Azzawi: Hello and welcome to Jasim Azzawi Show. Today’s October 18th, 2025, and I’m delighted to be joined by a former diplomat and ambassador Craig Murray from London. Welcome to the show, Ambassador.
Craig Murray: Thank you very much, Jasim.
JA: Okay, I need to ask you a question that I asked my previous guest. Did you think perhaps the peace plan as was constructed and displayed and promoted worldwide was constructed in haste?
CM: Well, it certainly came together much quicker than anybody anticipated. As you know there are very few pundits, including me, who were predicting a month before it happened that it would happen. It took people by surprise and it certainly happened very quickly. I’m still surprised by the number of countries who got behind it by the depth of support it got – including Russia, of course, which really rather surprised me. I’m not quite sure I accept the narrative that it really was kickstarted by the attack on Doha. Certainly here in the UK, the media commentators have almost all said that the Israelis, Netanyahu, overreached by attacking Qatar and that caused Trump to lose patience and insist that Israel agree to a ceasefire. I’m really not certain I agree with that, because I still find it very, very hard to believe that the Israelis could have attacked Doha at all without some degree of American complicity, given the very substantial American base in Qatar.
So that whole narrative, I’m not certain of. But certainly it came together at a speed nobody could have expected, and of course was delivered to the world unfinished because it’s not a finished piece by any means; it’s like 20 headings.
JA: If I may offer you two explanations and you have the liberty of chopping them out or accepting them. One of them is the exhaustion. After two years, Israelis were not able to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, and that is the destruction of Hamas, return of the hostages and kicking Hamas out, disarming Hamas – that did not happen, except for the return of the hostages. The other one is perhaps the full force of the Trump personality – somehow dawned on him that is it’s backfiring on him, all this complicity you mentioned or perhaps the support, the traditional American support to Israel. Would any of these explanations add to what you said earlier?
CM: I think certainly Trump must have been worried by the extent of the change in American public opinion – and I think we’re all surprised by that. I’m not sure I ever believed that I would see a time when public opinion in America and the opinion polls showed more sympathy for Palestine than for Israel. But we’ve actually reached that stage – and it was beginning to split Trump’s own MAGA movement, with quite a lot of people in the substantive wing of Trump’s movement being anti-Israel. So certainly for the genocide to continue in a way, it was a political threat to Trump – he had a political motivation. I certainly accept that. I think – and here we come on to, I suppose, a broader question: I think Netanyahu hasn’t actually really accepted the ceasefire at all. I don’t think Israel has entered into this deal in good faith. I think the Israelis have entered into the deal on the basis they will get their living hostages back and then they can break the deal and resume attacking Gaza.
JA: And you’re expecting that? You’re expecting that to happen?
CM: Very much so. Yes. Yeah. I was in Lebanon from October last year till February this year for 5 months, and there, you know, it became extremely obvious that after the ceasefire deal was signed, the Israelis had no intention whatsoever of honouring the ceasefire. In fact, the Israelis occupied more Lebanese land after the ceasefire than they occupied during the fighting, and have broken that ceasefire over 4,000 times. Even this morning, they they’ve killed more people in Lebanon. They kill people in Lebanon every day.
JA: They killed more people today in Palestine: 12 people were slaughtered today.
CM: Yeah, exactly. And that’s been going on every day since the so-called ceasefire with almost no Western media attention.
JA: Let me go back to what you just said about the United States, this MAGA movement fracturing just a little bit: the Steve Bannons and the people around Trump. And he said, “In your lifetime, you never thought you would see this transformation”. The question is: is it transient, or is it permanent – is it revolutionary; is it something we have never seen since World War II; is it a reaction to the pictures, the starvation, the devastation – and it’s only a question of time before the Zionist movement and APAC, you know, they are back in the saddle dictating the story.
CM: I think this is a step change. I think it’s a permanent change in public perception of Israel across the entire world. It’s not a perception with which the political class have kept up, because the entire mechanism of Zionist control of the media and of Zionist control of politics – through APAC, for example, through donations, through the massive money of people like the Adelsons – but that mechanism is all still in place keeping politicians and media in line. I think they’ve lost the people permanently, and I think it has a profound effect upon Western society because the people have lost faith in both the political class and in what their media is showing them.
JA: I think what was acceptable – what was perhaps a measure of contrition, because of what happened during World War II, for the Jews – I think that story no longer holds water anymore and consequently we’re going to move into a different story, a different dimension.
CM: I think that’s absolutely right. And also the accusation of antisemitism has lost its force. Because of what happened in World War II, it was the worst thing you could be accused of. You know, I can’t think of anything worse than being accused of being an antisemite – but now, they’ve accused the United Nations of being antisemitic, the International Court of Justice of being anti-Semitic; they’ve accused Amnesty International of being antisemitic; they’ve accused Human Rights Watch of being antisemitic – that the phase has lost its meaning.
So, many of – if you like – the tools with which they controlled the narrative have been broken. And also, of course, we shouldn’t forget we’re somewhere between one and two years away, I expect, of the International Court of Justice finding that this is a genocide, and that also will have very serious implications.
JA: That sword that used to be hanging over the head of politicians, members of parliament, editors, and what have you – the “antisemitism” – is engendering derision and laughter and ridicule. Now it has a reverse effect. When somebody throws that label at you, people look at you: “Are you for real? You want to kill thousands and thousands of people, and then when I say that’s a genocide, you’re calling me an antisemite”.
CM: You’re precisely right. It’s antisemitic, apparently, to oppose genocide which strips the word of its meaning.
I should also say another word which has lost its meaning is “terrorism”. You know, we have more than 2,000 people charged with terrorism in the UK for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action. More than 2,000 people including lawyers, including judges, including …
JA: How do you explain that?
CM: I think more than 40 people over the age of 80 have been charged with terrorism. I’ve been detained and questioned for terrorism myself. My friend George Galloway was questioned … it’s really … Again, they are sort of in desperation to retain control, I think; they are almost destroyed their tools.
JA: How do you how do you explain that? You know, I studied in the UK. I lived more years in the UK. I’ve never seen what you just explained. So, you know, we’re talking about Westminster democracy; we’re talking about the mother of all parliaments; we’re talking about British liberalism – you have the right to say anything and write anything. So when I hear you saying about people being labelled “terrorist” or put in prison – or, in your case, a very famed diplomat – to be subjected to such horrendous treatment, it boggles my mind. People who are watching us right now, they say: is the ambassador talking about the UK?
CM: It’s astonishing. And again, these are things which, you know, I honestly did not believe I would see in my lifetime. It’s quite extraordinary! People who very plainly have no connection to terrorism whatsoever being charged as terrorists for their opinions. In my case, I was questioned because I stated that in international law, an occupied people have the right to armed resistance. And that’s purely a statement of the law – I mean, that’s factually a statement of the law – but that led to me being questioned as a terrorist by the police.
And these things are extraordinary, and it’s because of panic. It’s because they have lost control of the narrative. But the question is: why is Zionism, and why is Israel, so important to the political class that they are willing to turn on their own people and upend all those freedoms, and the basic principles of democracy, in order to support Israel? Why is Israel that important to them?
JA: Is it possible it’s the donor class, for instance: money?
CM: I think, strangely enough, I think the answer is that simple. I think the answer, largely, is money. And it’s quite simply that our politicians have been bought. All of the holders of the five most senior offices of state in the United Kingdom are members of Labour Friends of Israel, for example, and they’ve all received hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from the Israeli lobby.
One of the strange things is, how little money it costs to do this. For example Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary who put through the prescription of Palestine Action: she’s received about £255,000 from Israeli lobby donors. So, you know, we’re not talking about it costing hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. You can actually buy a political system.
I should say this also goes to the fact that the quality of the political class has declined enormously over the last few decades. You don’t have people of integrity with great professional backgrounds, who have done other things in their life, going into politics.
JA: And that is a horrible indictment of the British political class, Ambassador Murray.
CM: I think that’s true. There’s a very good book by Peter Oborne called The Triumph of the Political Class, where he actually analyzes this and explains how nowadays, the people who are in power, very few of them have ever done anything except be in politics. They go up this … And they’re not the people really running the country. All of them are the tools of some very wealthy men, or group of men, who stand behind them and finance them; and the people we see are rather puppets. They’re not the people actually in power; they are just the stuntmen.
JA: In light of what you just said, how do you when you hear Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, say this is a self-defence by Israel. He never called it a “genocide”. To this day, he refuses to call it a genocide, despite the United Nation called it a genocide. I mean, I understand that perhaps he has a connection with Israel and all that, but … shouldn’t personal integrity as well as the interest of the state of Britain be at the forefront of this categorization?
CM: You would hope so. And certainly it’s very, very hard to reconcile the positions of the British government with international law; they’re just not in accordance with international law.
They have, of course, to keep denying it’s genocide, because they’ve been complicit in the genocide. It’s not simply that they provided diplomatic and political support. They provided practical support: they’ve provided intelligence coordination; they’ve had an RAF flight circling Gaza throughout this two years, providing targeting information to the Israeli military; they’ve continued to provide weapons to Israel, despite a partial ban that came in rather late; there have been British military flights taking British special forces in and out of Israel; they’ve been training Israeli soldiers in the UK. So, you know, they are complicit. They have no choice but to deny it, because they are complicit in the genocide.
JA: That begs the question, Ambassador Murray: people in this part of the world and the rest of the world they see the thousands upon thousands of people in Oxford Street in Trafalgar Square; in my alma mater, Manchester, hundreds of thousands of people are on the street, you know, with their banners, with their condemnation. Are the people in Downing Street and Whitehall as well as Parliament – they don’t see these people. Isn’t this supposed to be a popular democracy?
CM: Oh, we don’t care – bluntly. I mean, you may remember the Iraq War, when Iraq was invaded on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction. And two million people marched in the streets of London. Tony Blair didn’t care – he didn’t care at all! They’re interested in the hard realities of power and finance. And those people marching in the streets of London or Manchester, as far as they’re concerned, you know they are just “the people”.
I think we have to get away from this idea that Western democracy is a meaningful concept anymore. And I really don’t believe that it is. There are no levers of power that people have which can affect the government. You can do everything you’ve learned to do in terms of popular democracy, you can have – opinion polls show – 80 to 85% of the people of the UK support the Palestinian cause rather than the Israeli cause. But there’s nothing you can do to make the politicians do anything about it.
And of course, all of the main political parties have been firm supporters of Israel. You couldn’t vote Conservative instead, because they’re just as bad. The Liberal Democrats are almost as bad. There hasn’t been a sort of anti-Zionist alternative you can practically vote for. The political class are all bought up, in effect.
JA: Was that was that one of the reasons why there is this there is this condemnation of what you call “the liberal democracy”?
CM: I think the system is undoubtedly failing. It’s been affected by populism. You can’t divorce this from the vast increase in the disparity of wealth in the wealth gap. You know, the wealth of society is increasingly concentrated to an extraordinary degree in a very, very small number of people; and for most people the enjoyment of life is fairly limited. People are struggling just to get by. Poverty is on the increase. There hasn’t been any increase in general real wages since 2008. And people are suffering from resentment, and that resentment is being channelled against immigrants. They … basically, rather than blaming the billionaires who have all the money, people are being encouraged by the media – which is controlled by the billionaires – to blame immigrants for their poverty. And that is the big difficulty.
JA: I am torn into two halves while I’m listening to you, Ambassador Murray. From one end, I saw the cascades of recognitions of the state of Palestine (although Keir Starmer and Britain were almost the last ones); yet from the other side, I see there is no hope. There is no way you can convert these recognitions into reality, into two states: a state of Palestine and a state of Israel. Now people are talking about “peace” – and by that I think they mean “ceasefire”. They are not talking about recognizing the creation of a state of Palestine within an irreversible time period and on such-and-such day there will be there will be a state. We’ve been in Oslo since 1993, so that’s 32 years ago. We are kept spinning around ourselves that peace is coming, that this Arab-Israeli struggle is going to come to an end.
CM: I think you have to realize that the UK government, I don’t think, meant it at all when they said they would recognize the state of Palestine. It was a symbolic act designed to try to placate opposition within their own political party … to people who were very upset by the complete support for Israel that Keir Starmer had been given. He had to do something to placate that. I don’t think they have any intention.
And if they meant it, for example, they would have made their consulate … the British consulate in East Jerusalem should be a British embassy, if we now recognize the state of Palestine. Why don’t we have an ambassador to Palestine? Whereas instead we have a consulate in East Jerusalem which is subordinate to the embassy in Tel Aviv. So, you know, we haven’t actually done anything that indicates we recognize the state of Palestine. It’s purely deceitful words.
And there’s nothing in the Trump plan that provides any coordinated plan for getting to a state of Palestine.
And also you have to look at what Macron said. Macron assured Netanyahu about a month ago that when France spoke of a state of Palestine, they meant something which would be demilitarized, which would not have control of its own borders, which would not have its own airport or ports, and that Israel would still in effect be in control of it. Well, this is what I call the Bantustan solution. You know, those of us who fought apartheid in South Africa remember this, that the ultimate goal was …
JA: That is exactly what Itzhak Rabin said at the time when he was getting into the Oslo … he said, “I’m going to give them something. It is never a state, but just a little bit over autonomy. Nothing, nothing more, nothing less.”
But ambassador, when I’m listening to you, when people around this part of the world are listening to you, they have this dichotomy. They say, “My god, look at the ambassador – he’s talking as if he’s one of us! And yet we know that he belongs to the country that made that promise, that Balfour Declaration. They were the first original sin: they were the arsonists who created this fire and who lets this entire region burn!” And yet, history tells us, people change and countries change. And when I’m listening to you, as a former diplomat and an ambassador of high caliber, saying what you just said; and yet, in the same light, listening to you refer to Keir Starmer, there is a split vision between what reality is and what we hope and have ambition and dream about.
CM: The first thing I might say in reply to that is I’m not English. I’m Scottish.
JA: That’s why, Ambassador – believe me, in this part of the world, people love the Scottish and they love the Irish; but the British, I’m not so sure.
CM: Yeah, exactly. And I very much take the view that we are ourselves still colonized by the English, and need to find our independence and escape from English colonialism. And you’ll find there’s very much stronger support for Palestine and for anti-colonialism – anti-imperialism – in Scotland. And the Scottish government has instituted a total boycott of everything … the Scottish government, of course, comes … Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, so it comes under Westminster, but everything the Scottish government controls – which are things like, you know, all the domestic stuff, education, transport, all those things – in everything the Scottish government controls, the Scottish government is boycotting Israel completely. Not just the Occupied Territories; it’s boycotting Israel. So partly that explains why I have a different perspective; I have a Scottish perspective.
But also I do think that what Starmer has done actually departs from the traditions at least of upholding international law, which you would normally expect from the British Labour Party. I do think this is really a major break with British tradition, and I’m ashamed of what the British government does. I’m ashamed of the current British policy on Palestine.
JA: In the last 5 to 10 minutes that I have with you, Ambassador, let me benefit from your experience and insightful analysis. Here it is. Is there a second strike against Iran?
CM: I think there will be a strike against Iran. I don’t think it’s quite as imminent as people think, but I think there is a coordinated desire for regime change in Iran. I don’t think that’s something that either the Americans or the Israelis are going to give up on.
And one thing I would say is: I think we have to be realistic about the unfortunate degree to which the Greater Israel plan is succeeding. You know, Israel is occupying parts of southern Lebanon and has no intention to leave. Israel is now … not only has it achieved American recognition of its annexation of the Golan Heights, it has spread out from the Golan Heights into a territory perhaps two or three times as big again which it is occupying in Syria. And Israel is declaring that – apparently contrary to the so-called ceasefire plan – it’s going to remain in a large buffer zone in Gaza permanently. So, Israel is still expanding. This is all part of the Greater Israel project, and part of that project continues to be to neutralize Iran. I don’t think there’s any chance at all that will not happen and that they will not attempt that.
JA: I have a small comment and then I would like to offer something else. And the small comment is that in the June strike against Iran – contrary to the American and Israeli belief that the regime is going to disintegrate and collapse, and the politicians they’re going to scurry and leave the country – the reverse has happened. And the people, the Iranian people, they rallied around their leaders. They hate it. They do disagree with it; and call it what you may, but they rallied around it. Now, one idea that is spreading in this part of the world – and I want to pick your brain about it – and that is, the strike will be coming perhaps sooner than people think for a very simple reason: Netanyahu wants to forget about Gaza. Gaza has been nothing but a disaster for him personally as well as the United States. So, what is the better way to forget about Gaza? To strike Iran, to escape the noose that is coming very close around his neck.
CM: Yeah, I can see that. I should say I agree 100% with what you said about how counterproductive their attempts at regime change were. They had the opposite effect. As you as you say, the Iranians are very proud people with a very, very ancient history. It’s perhaps the oldest continuous state on Earth. So that was always likely to be the case.
The difficulty with Iran, of course, is Iran can hit back. You know, they [the Israelis] can attack, essentially, a defenceless and practically disarmed people. They talk about disarming Hamas. The truth is, Hamas have never had anything much more than side-arms and a few homemade pipe-rockets with no real warheads. Gaza has never been able to fight back, whereas Iran can fight back. And even though its capabilities may have been degraded to some extent, if you attack Iraq again, you’re going to get more damage in Tel Aviv again. And I’m not sure that they want to take that just at the moment.
What I do think is actually what we are going to see is a resumption of attacks on Gaza. That that’s my prediction for what for what happens next. Probably within 3 to 4 weeks, they’ll say Hamas weren’t disarming, or they’ll say they weren’t pulling back behind a withdrawal line, or people were encroaching on a withdrawal line, or not enough bodies have been returned. There’ll be some reason given and they’ll resume the attack on Gaza, because of course there they can just massacre people at very little risk to themselves. this t
JA: This delusion about Hamas giving up its arms … people in this part of the world, they just can’t understand it. How can somebody who is fighting for their liberation, for decolonization, give up the very arms they use in order to achieve that goal?
CM: Yeah. I think the idea that Hamas will surrender its arms particularly to the Israelis is a is a delusion. It’s very, very unlikely to happen. There may be some token surrendering of weapons – rather as we’ve seen with Hezbollah in Lebanon, there’s been some token handing over of weapons. But for me it’s simply astonishing. You have a people who have been subject to a genocide, and the world is demanding that the people who have suffered the genocide are the ones who must give up their weapons – not people who committed the genocide. You know, if you step back and just think of it logically it is utterly crazy. It is utterly crazy.
JA: It’s more crazy than that, Ambassador. The very people that suffered the genocide during World War II, now they are committing the genocide against the people who received them in their homes and let them have a decent life.
CM: Yeah. It’s horrible. It really is quite extraordinary. And it’s very hard for people … you know, there’s so many people, particularly older people in the UK, who were brought up with this whole atmosphere of complete sympathy to the Jewish people because of the appalling things that happened to the Jewish people – the Holocaust, all of that was very real. And so, people want to be sympathetic to the Israelis to some extent, but they’ve made it impossible. It’s simply impossible to sympathize with Israel.
JA: I have a final question for you, Ambassador Murray, and that is – it’s kind of philosophical and historical at the same time – given your background as a Scotsman and somebody who knows the meaning of colonialism, I would like you to consider yourself as a British, as an Englishman, and review this 80 years of horror that this part of the world has gone through because of the promise, because of the Balfour Declaration. Do you do you think the British – the English – class, in their inner monologue, they ask the following question: “Is it worth it? Did we really do that?” I mean the Balfour Declaration, as well as the creation of Israel, was a direct result of the 1917-era when the British treasury was pretty much empty and they wanted money, they wanted the American banknotes, and they thought perhaps the Jewish strong force in the United States can help them get that money. Now after 80 years, do they ever ask the question: “Was it really worth it?”
CM: I think – and the first thing I’ll say is, I don’t think those people in power have much historical knowledge at all, and I don’t think they particularly consider … I think it’d be very wrong to think of them as educated and rounded people who think deeply about things beyond their own immediate personal advantage, because I think sadly that’s what motivates most politicians. I think the Balfour Declaration is one of those things that in retrospect was extremely important and disastrous. I don’t think at the time anybody particularly took it seriously. I don’t think it was made or signed with a serious intent to actually put it into effect. It was, as you say, a placatory thing to people who they thought might give them some money, but there was no actual attempt to implement it at the time. There’s no real attempt to implement it until of course the horrors of the Second World War brought these matters much to the fore.
So sometimes things in retrospect were very important and were taken lightly at the time and not really intended. And I think that’s the category I’d put the Balfour Declaration in.
JA: The historian, and the diplomat, and the Scotsman, Craig Murray. Thank you so much for being a guest on the Jasim Azzawi Show.
CM: Thank you, Jasim.
JA: We have reached the end of this show. Join me tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to have two distinguished guests: the former leader of the British Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the former Chief of Staff of Colin Powell, the late Secretary of State of the United States. Until then, good night. [Music]
