U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim

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“Huge Miscalculation”: Biden’s Refusal to Push for Gaza Ceasefire Could Drag U.S. into Middle East War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 08, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/8/g ... transcript

Middle East policy expert Trita Parsi says President Biden’s reluctance to press Israel for a ceasefire in Gaza has the potential to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran and its allies in the region. On Monday, Israel reportedly killed a Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon, just days after an airstrike killed a senior Hamas leader in the capital Beirut. Meanwhile, the U.S. has exchanged fire with Yemen’s Houthi forces, who have attacked commercial ships in the Red Sea to pressure Israel to stop its war. “The Biden administration clearly do not want an escalation,” says Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. But the longer Israel’s war on Gaza continues with full U.S. support, the less likely regional actors are to continue showing restraint, he says. “This is not going to work in the long run.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back in the Middle East to meet with leaders across the region. During a stop in Qatar, Blinken warned the war in Gaza could, quote, “easily metastasize into a regional war.” While Blinken is publicly calling for deescalation, the Biden administration continues to face criticism for sending more weapons to Israel while carrying out its own attacks in Iraq and Syria, as well as targeting Houthi forces in Yemen. This comes as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has entered its fourth month, as the U.N. top humanitarian official warns the relentless assault has left Gaza “uninhabitable.” According to Palestinian health officials, the death toll in Gaza is nearing 23,000, including almost 10,000 children.

Israel’s attacks continue to take a devastating toll on Palestinian journalists. By one count, at least 100 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far since October 7th. On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza killed two journalists: Mustafa Thuraya of Agence France-Presse and Hamza al-Dahdouh of Al Jazeera. Hamza was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, who had already lost his wife, daughter, another son and a grandson in an Israeli airstrike in October, and then was wounded in another strike that killed his cameraman, Samer Abudaqa. On Sunday, the BBC’s Julian Marshall interviewed Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy.

JULIAN MARSHALL: Are Al Jazeera operating in Gaza legitimate journalists, as far as Israel is concerned?

EYLON LEVY: I’m not sure what standard we’re using to measure legitimate journalists. We have intense criticism of Al Jazeera in the way that they have been fueling a lot of violence in this conflict with their incorrect reporting.

JULIAN MARSHALL: OK. So, Israel, the Israeli government —

EYLON LEVY: But this is not a relevant question.

JULIAN MARSHALL: The Israeli government is not a fan of Al Jazeera. Is that what you’re saying to me?

EYLON LEVY: Correct.

JULIAN MARSHALL: Right.

EYLON LEVY: We are not big fans of Al Jazeera, that is correct. We much prefer the BBC.

JULIAN MARSHALL: Right. But so, you would possibly prefer Al Jazeera not to have a presence in Gaza?

EYLON LEVY: We’d prefer for Hamas not to have a presence in Gaza, and that is what we’re talking about now.

JULIAN MARSHALL: Well, I’m talking about — I’m talking about Al Jazeera. You would prefer Al Jazeera not to have a presence in Gaza?

EYLON LEVY: We would prefer that all media reporting about this conflict be accurate and not spread lies and disinformation in the way that Al Jazeera has been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His piece for The Nation is headlined “Will Israel Drag the US Into Another Ruinous War?”

Trita, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, we’re talking to you —

TRITA PARSI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — on the Blinken trip through the Middle East, something like the fifth time he’ll be going back to Israel and the West Bank. And when he was in Qatar this weekend and held a news conference the day he arrived in Qatar, Al Jazeera’s reporter Hamza al-Dahdouh, the son of the Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael al-Dahdouh, was killed in a U.S. airstrike on a car that also killed an AFP reporter. Can you talk about the significance of this?

TRITA PARSI: Well, this is the conflict in which we have seen more journalists being killed than in any other recent conflict. And it increasingly appears as if those are not accidents but actually targeted, particularly in the case of this journalist. As you mentioned in your program, his family has been targeted, he has been targeted, and now his son has been killed, as well. It increasingly looks as if Israel is desiring to make sure that Al Jazeera no longer can operate in Gaza. And it is largely thanks to Al Jazeera that we know so much about what has been happening in Gaza, because they had a presence there from before the war began, so they were already there once the war started. This is a tremendous danger, because with what the South Africans are accusing Israel of when it comes to genocide, not having eyes and ears on the ground there completely changes the pictures in terms of what the Israelis can and cannot do.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what this means in terms of an escalation — not a deescalation, although Tony Blinken keeps talking about deescalation — of a wider war in the Middle East, why he’s in the Middle East, having gone from Turkey and Greece to Qatar — he’s going to Saudi Arabia today — to Israel and to the West Bank and beyond.

TRITA PARSI: I think the Biden administration clearly do not want an escalation. They do not want to see a widening of the war. But the approach that they have pursued is one in which they’re trying to maximize Israel’s ability to continue to bomb Gaza, while putting pressure on other actors in the region for them not to escalate, while the administration itself admits that there is no desire in Hezbollah, in Iran for a wider war. So, it’s not as if they want that war, when it comes to Hezbollah, yet the pressure is supposed to be on them, while not putting pressure on the Israelis. This is not going to work in the long run. We’ve already seen that day by day we’re getting closer and closer towards a military confrontation that is much larger than just Gaza. Unless the Biden administration is willing to also put material support on Israel, we will most likely move further into that escalation.

And this is what is so perplexing about the Biden administration’s position. The fastest and easiest way to actually get a deescalation is most likely a ceasefire in Gaza. The groups such as Iraqi militias, the Houthis have made it clear that if there is a ceasefire, they will cease their attacks. Now, we have evidence of that, as well, because when there was a ceasefire in the end of November of last year for six days, there were no attacks whatsoever from the Iraqi militias. They completely stopped their attacks. There were six attacks the day before the ceasefire. But once there was a ceasefire, they were completely stopped. When it comes to the Houthis, there’s only one attack during that period that we can attribute to them, instead of daily attacks. So we have some clear evidence that if there is a ceasefire, there will be a deescalation. Yet that is the option that the Biden administration is unwilling to pursue. Instead, it is going around the region asking other countries to put more pressure on Iran, no Hezbollah, on other actors. Some of that pressure is probably quite needed. But in the absence of a ceasefire, it will probably not be effective.

AMY GOODMAN: As Tony Blinken, as President Biden calls for a deescalation, they continue to provide weapons, circumventing Congress twice, providing artillery shells for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. You quote in your Nation piece retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, who conceded in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.” Can you talk further about this, this contradiction between what the U.S. is saying and actually how much power it has? Give us a history lesson in the past, going back to President Reagan and Lebanon, when the U.S. says, “Stop.”

TRITA PARSI: The Biden administration, I think, has been pushing a narrative that essentially says that Biden doesn’t have the leverage, the U.S. doesn’t have the leverage to be able to stop this. It doesn’t seem to be compatible with reality, because, as you pointed out, the Israeli major general himself admits that all of these weapons are coming from the United States, and if the U.S. were to put a stop to these shipments, then the Israelis would not be able to continue this fight for much longer.

So, a question is not whether the U.S. has leverage — it clearly does. The question is whether Biden is willing to use it. And so far he has not been willing to use it, because he’s actually buying into supporting the Israeli objective of completely defeating Hamas. He seems to want to see Israel do to Hamas what the U.S. couldn’t do to the Taliban.

But we have historical examples. In 1982, when Israel went into Lebanon, and the Reagan administration started to become increasingly concerned about this and viewed it as being detrimental to U.S. interests, eventually Ronald Reagan, both publicly and a private conversation with Menachem Begin, essentially told him, “You have to stop; otherwise, I’m going to freeze the shipments of F-16 airplanes to Israel.” Within 20 minutes, Menachem Begin called back and ordered a retreat of the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have clear examples in the past in which pressure, particularly public pressure, actually has been effective. The reason why Biden is not using it is because he’s bought into the Israeli objective.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, all the polls in the United States show the overwhelming number of young voters are opposed to his position right now when it comes to Israel and the West Bank — people of color, as well. Can you explain, as a person who understands a lot about what goes on inside the Beltway, why Biden is refusing to, in any way, stand up, not just signal on the outside calling for deescalation, but actually making those calls, since he’s had, to say the least, so many with Netanyahu?

TRITA PARSI: I think the Biden administration made a huge miscalculation from the outset. They did not think that there would be this type of a backlash amongst the American public, including his own supporters, against the Israeli campaign. Now when it has happened, it appears that the conclusion in the White House is that they have already lost these votes, they will not be able to gain them back if they shift their position, but if they shift their position, they will likely lose some of the voters that are in support of Israel’s campaign. That calculation, however, seems to leave out a very important component, which is that there’s also another bloc of voters, a bloc of voters that have not yet given up on Biden, but if this war continues, as it now appears that it will, and particularly if it enlargens and drags the U.S. into it, then Biden also risks losing that bloc. And if that bloc is larger than the bloc of voters who support Israel’s campaign, then Biden is compounding his initial miscalculation by further undermining his own ability to get reelected.

AMY GOODMAN: The Iraqi government is blasting the United States after a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed a top commander in an Iran-backed militia in Iraq. On Friday, the Iraqi government announced plans to expel U.S.-led forces from Iraq. Can you talk about the significance of this, Trita?

TRITA PARSI: This is very important, because this is highly problematic for the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government has tried to walk a fine balancing act. They wanted to keep a certain degree of a U.S. military presence in Iraq, at least for the next few years, while at the same time balancing that against the pressure from Iraqi militias and others who want to see the U.S. leave.

Once the U.S. is now actually assassinating leaders of those militias inside of Iraq — in the previous weeks, those attacks were taking place in Syria. Now they’ve also started to take place in Iraq itself. This is highly problematic. It’s a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, according to the Iraqi government, and it further increases the pressure on the Iraqi government to ask the U.S. to leave, which I believe will happen relatively — you know, in the next years or so, it will happen. It’s not sustainable to have the U.S. troops there.

Ultimately, from a U.S. perspective, I think that’s actually a good thing. Those troops in Iraq are essentially sitting ducks, and they’re targets of these Iraqi militias. You take those troops out, and the Iraqi militias don’t have targets to shoot at — and as a result, a tripwire for the U.S. to get dragged into war. At least that one will be removed.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, as we wrap up: A suspected Israeli strike in southern Lebanon has killed a senior commander in an elite unit of Hezbollah earlier today in a move that further escalates tension in the region; the significance of this, from Iraq to southern Lebanon, Trita?

TRITA PARSI: So, you have three major fronts in which the risk of escalation is significant. Of course, you have the Red Sea, with the Houthis attacking ships. You have the Iraqi militias and Syrian militias targeting U.S. troops. And then you have the desire of the Israelis to expand the war into Lebanon and try to take out Hezbollah, as well. The last one is getting really heated up right now. The attack this morning is yet another one. There has already been a bit of a shooting war, but it’s at lower level, between Israel and Hezbollah ever since the start of the war after October 7th, but it is escalating, and it’s getting deeper into both Israeli and Lebanese territory.

One of the things that I think is highly problematic in the way that the mainstream media has covered this is that it talks about how Biden is grappling with how to avoid an escalation of this war. And I genuinely believe that the Biden administration doesn’t want that. But these reports don’t seem to mention that the demand of some of these groups is a ceasefire. And if there is a ceasefire, they would also then deescalate their attacks on U.S. troops, etc. Now, the reporting doesn’t have to say that this is what is going to happen. It should be scrutinizing these statements by the Houthis and the Iraqi militias. But at a minimum, it needs to mention that that is their demand, so that the American public is aware that there appears to exist an option for deescalation through a ceasefire. The fact that it is not mentioned in most mainstream media is highly problematic, because it leaves the public with the wrong impression, that the only way Biden can deescalate is by further escalating the situation by increasing the deterrence and attacking, whether it’s the Houthis or the Iraqi militias. The option of actually going for a ceasefire to deescalate doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the mainstream media, and that’s a major mistake, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, we want to thank you for being with us, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation, “Will Israel Drag the US Into Another Ruinous War?”

We were just talking about Lebanon. The Reuters reporter Issam Abdallah was also killed there. Reuters did an investigation saying it was an Israeli artillery strike that killed him. More than 100 Palestinian journalists have died since October 7th.

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Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate: Israel Is Targeting Media in Gaza to Hide Its Atrocities from the World
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 08, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/8/p ... transcript

More than 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7, when Israel unleashed a ferocious attack on the territory from land, sea and air. On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle killed two more journalists, including Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, who had already lost his wife and other family to Israeli airstrikes. Palestinian journalist Anan Quzmar says media workers are being targeted in order to “shut down the coverage” of Israeli atrocities. Quzmar, a volunteer at the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, says the union has evidence that at least 96 of the 109 journalists whose deaths it has documented “were deliberately and specifically targeted by surgical Israeli strikes against them.” The PJS has filed an amicus brief in support of the Center for Constitutional Rights genocide lawsuit against Israel, citing the unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, saying they have been deliberately targeted for assassination by the Israeli military.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we’ve reported, two more journalists in Gaza were killed in an Israeli airstrike this weekend, among the victims, the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh. Just a few months ago, in October, he also lost 12 family members, including his wife, his 15-year-old son, his 7-year-old daughter and his infant grandson in an Israeli airstrike.

Like his father, Hamza al-Dahdouh worked for Al Jazeera. He was 27 years old. Hamza was reportedly driving in a car with other journalists on a road in Khan Younis when the vehicle was hit. The freelance journalist Mustafa Thuraya, who was a stringer for Agence France-Presse, AFP, was also killed, while a third, Hazem Rajab, was seriously injured. A video showed Wael al-Dahdouh crying next to his son’s body, holding his hand. Wael spoke on Sunday.

WAEL DAHDOUH: [translated] How can someone receive the death of their oldest son and everything in my life after I lost some of my family members, my wife, son Mahmoud and Sham and Adam? How can I receive this? … The world must see with their own eyes, and not with Israel’s eyes. It must listen and watch all that is happening to the Palestinian people. What has Hamza done to them? And what has my family done to them? What have civilians in the Gaza Strip done to them? They have not done anything. The world is blinded by what is going on in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Just last month, Wael al-Dahdouh was injured in an Israeli drone attack while covering the aftermath of an Israeli strike on a U.N. school sheltering displaced people in Khan Younis. His cameraman, Al Jazeera photojournalist Samer Abudaqa, bled to death over the course of more than five hours, as Israeli forces reportedly prevented rescue workers and ambulances from reaching Samer.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate says Israel has killed at least 102 journalists in Gaza since October 7th.

For more, we go to the West Bank. We’re joined by Anan Quzmar, a Palestinian journalist, volunteer at the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which has filed an amicus brief in support of the Center for Constitutional Rights genocide lawsuit against Israel, citing the unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, saying they’ve been deliberately targeted for assassination by the Israeli military.

Anan, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the journalists who were killed this weekend, Al Jazeera’s Hamza al-Dahdouh, amazingly, killed on the day that Blinken arrived in Qatar — Qatar owns Al Jazeera — and Mustafa Thuraya of Agence France-Presse? And then put them in the broader context of how many Palestinians — we’ve not seen this anytime in war, more than a hundred Palestinian journalists, estimates from 70 to over a hundred, dead since October 7th.

ANAN QUZMAR: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me to speak about this, for us, very, very important issue.

Hamza al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Abu Thuraya are just the latest victims of Israel’s calculated and deliberate assassination campaign against Palestinian journalists that has been going on for the last three months. Unfortunately, every time we release a number, we have to update it, within hours sometimes.

Our indications so far, of the 109 journalists, up to this moment, that have been killed by Israel’s genocidal military campaign, indicates that at least 96 of those were deliberately and specifically targeted by surgical Israeli strikes against them, at home or in the line of duty. Twenty-two of those were killed in the line of duty, using sniper fire, drones and surgical airstrikes, similar to the one that took place yesterday that took the life of the two journalists. They were targeted in their car. The munition that was used was big enough to damage the car and kill everybody inside, but it didn’t hurt anybody around, and they were targeted at a moment where there was nobody close to the vehicle at the time. So it’s clearly indicating that they were specifically targeted.

Other than this, there is at least 74 cases of journalists that were killed at home in strikes that specifically hit their flats. Some are in big apartment blocks, where they are on the fifth or sixth floor, and their flat is targeted, and no damage to any or limited damage to other nearby flats or homes.

And in the remaining 13 cases, we were just not able to determine who exactly was the person targeted in the strike. So, for example, we excluded any cases where more than 10 people were killed. We excluded cases where people who were not at the flat or at the location with the journalists, so there is an element of, you know, what Israel likes to call collateral damage.

We’ve also excluded from the 96 that we suggest were — at least 96 specifically targeted, cases like Akram Al-Shafe’i, who a couple of days ago passed away because he was not allowed or he had no access to adequate healthcare — excuse me. And at least at the moment, there is 25 of our journalists are in similar life-threatening situations because of lack of access to medical healthcare.

Also, the wider context of what’s happening now is an indication that these journalists are being targeted. As the previous guest alluded to, Israel’s interest is to shut down the coverage. And our journalists are a main portal and play a key role in uncovering the ongoing military campaign by Israel.

Other than this, many of our journalists received direct and indirect threats and incitement against them that they had personally reported, either publicly or privately, to us, due to fear that the publication of such reports or threats would actually escalate the situation and put them higher up in the bank of targets for Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said —

ANAN QUZMAR: There is also —

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said that 9% of all Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip have been killed since October 7th, and that you feel that press freedom organizations around the world have let Palestinian journalists down. How?

ANAN QUZMAR: After 109 journalists have been killed, we are still hearing the same statements that are calling for investigations. There are clear patterns. Yes, we haven’t been able to establish every single case, but — I am sorry, but three months into a genocidal campaign that has made Palestinian journalists a primary target for them, 9% of our journalists in Gaza have been killed. This is eight points higher than the average across the Gaza Strip. I talked about the threats and the specific targeting, and we are still hearing the same thing. I think if press freedom organizations are satisfied at the level of reaction and outrage that they’ve shown, let alone the action that would actually save the lives of Palestinian journalists, then we should question even the very purpose of their existence, if that’s the best they can do and say.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, can you explain the lawsuit of the Center for Constitutional Rights that you have filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Palestinian journalists, the significance of this, and what this would mean?

ANAN QUZMAR: This lawsuit aims to block any further diplomatic and military support to Israel. It’s just one step, one of many things that we are trying.

But, unfortunately, this assassination campaign has continued. And we’ve seen it as part of a wider escalation of use of violence against Palestinian journalists also in the West Bank — not only journalists, also medics. We have, since the last three months, 47 Palestinian journalists in the West Bank have been arrested. Thirty-three of them are still in prison, 18 of them under administrative detention, and the rest haven’t been faced with any charges at all. This level of escalation of use of force is seen also in regular incursions where the Israeli army targets medical staff and journalists. For example, there has been, where I am, in Tulkarem, regular incursions that have an emerging pattern of trying to maintain a continued presence and curfew over Palestinian cities, almost as a practice in order for the eventuality of needing to control such cities for extended period of times, like I explained. And the focus of these attacks is collective punishment, digging down — digging out, for example, in Tulkarem, the water pipes to cut the water from the locals, shooting at the electricity grid to cut the electricity.

And also, all of this comes with a huge price on our local institutions, that Israel is trying to destroy. And this also goes back to the attack on Palestinian journalists in Gaza. If you look at the profiles of those who are targeted, you see that they are not just targeted for being journalists. They’re being targeted for being an important part of the social fabric. Our famous journalists in Gaza are not what you would expect from an elite journalist sitting outside. These are humble people who have been the foundations of our society for a long time. And alongside our journalists, there’s been lecturers, for example, most media lecturers and journalism lecturers, who are also reported as journalists being killed, but there are actually media lecturers, as well. And we’ve had heads of universities targeted, poets, and you name it. So, one needs to look at the Israeli bank of targets seriously and the deliberate nature of this.

And I would like to end with — I think one of the most striking things is, when you speak to Palestinian journalists in Gaza, they never complain about their own suffering or what they’ve been going through as journalists. They literally want to continue to do their work, to the last drop of their blood, in order to bring an end to this, to stop the genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Anan Quzmar, I want to thank you so much for being with us, a Palestinian journalist with the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, speaking to us from Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank.

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“Complete Hypocrisy”: Activist Bree Newsome Bass on Biden Fighting Racism While Funding Gaza Genocide
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/9/b ... transcript

President Biden delivered his second campaign speech of the year Monday at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist gunman killed nine people in 2015. Biden remembered the victims, spoke of the “poison of white supremacy” and assailed his Republican rivals for not taking racism seriously, but Biden’s speech was interrupted at one point by protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel’s U.S.-backed war has killed over 23,000 people. “There’s no way we’re fighting white supremacy … in the midst of genocide,” says artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass, who criticizes Biden for using the Black church as a political prop. “The last thing that we need is to carry on business as usual.” In 2015, Newsome Bass climbed a 30-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina Capitol to remove the Confederate flag following the church massacre.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to South Carolina, where President Biden delivered his second campaign speech of the year at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 eight Black parishioners and their pastor were shot dead by a white supremacist. Biden remembered the victims.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: On June 17th, 2015, the beautiful souls, five survivors — and five survivors invited a stranger into this church to pray with them. The word of God was pierced by bullets in hate, of rage, propelled by not just gunpowder but by a poison, a poison that’s for too long haunted this nation. What is that poison? White supremacy. Oh, it is. It’s a poison. Throughout our history, it’s ripped this nation apart. This has no place in America, not today, tomorrow or ever.

PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: That’s all right. That’s all right.

PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now!

AMY GOODMAN: As he spoke, Biden was disrupted by activists demanding a Gaza ceasefire.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Without light, there’s no path from this darkness.

PROTESTER: If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!

PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

AMY GOODMAN: As the protesters were removed from the church, supporters of President Biden began chanting “four more years.” He addressed the protesters.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I understand their passion. And I’ve been quietly working — I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza. I’ve been using all that I can to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: Without naming Donald Trump, Biden blasted the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate as a loser who tried to overthrow the 2020 election results by urging his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. A number carried Confederate flags and wore white supremacist and far-right symbols.

Following the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in 2015, following the mass funeral at the University of Charleston arena that thousands came out for, our next guest, Bree Newsome Bass, scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and removed the Confederate flag. As police officers shouted at her to come down, she shimmied to the top of the flagpole, took the flag in her hand and said, “You come against me with hatred. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”

BREE NEWSOME BASS: You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today!

AMY GOODMAN: While Bree Newsome was arrested, along with an ally, it was only after this action that the Confederate flag was formally removed from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was governor of South Carolina at the time. She has faced fresh backlash after she didn’t mention slavery when asked about the cause of the U.S. Civil War during a recent town hall in New Hampshire.

Well, for more, we’re joined in Raleigh, North Carolina, by Bree Newsome Bass, artist, antiracist activist.

Bree, welcome back to Democracy Now! This certainly does take us back. As people debate whether it was Nikki Haley who ultimately forced the flag to come down, we’re going to the woman who actually took it down and risked your freedom to do it. Talk about why you did that then — ultimately, the Legislature would vote to take it down — and how you feel about what’s happening today.

BREE NEWSOME BASS: Yes. And thank you again so much for having me on.

You know, and I want to make it clear: Yes, I did scale the pole and take the Confederate flag down; this was an issue that people had been protesting for years and years and years. And that’s part of what made it so egregious in 2015, when we had the massacre at Emanuel AME and South Carolina refused to lower the flag, because part of the reason why they were refusing to lower the flag is that they had passed a law in the year 2000 saying that it couldn’t be lowered for any reason, after they moved it from the Capitol dome to the flagpole on the lawn, where it was at the time that I took it down. So this had been going on for years and years and years.

And Nikki Haley actually opposed taking the flag down, right up until those massacres occurred and the mounting political protest and, you know, the pressure made it where she basically had to, at that point, support the flag coming down. So, ideologically, she has never really had the stance of being opposed to either the Confederacy or — excuse me — symbols of the Confederacy, and certainly not opposed to racist policies. She went right from the governorship to serving in the Trump administration. And she’s had a number of incidents over the years, where the things that she says or the things that she does directly contradict with her claim of having led the way on taking the Confederate flag down. At one of her recent rallies, she played that song “Find Out in a Small Town,” you know, the song that people really raised a lot of concern about because it was obviously alluding to sundown towns and the racial violence that Black people have experienced here for decades and decades and decades. So this is not new for Nikki Haley. It just shows that she does not really represent antiracism in any real way.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bree, I’d like to ask you — in response to President Biden’s speech, you posted on social media, quote, “How the Black church is used as a prop for white politicians actually proves the point that racism is alive & well & strong.” Could you expand on that?

BREE NEWSOME BASS: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I think that the whole way that the incidents in 2015, both the massacre at Emanuel AME, the refocus on the Confederate flag there in South Carolina, the formal ceremony around taking the flag down, and the way that American politics returns to those moments again and again and again speaks to how relevant it still is, the fact that Black churches are frequently used as, you know, political campaign stops for politicians.

In this case with Joe Biden, you know, he is clearly trying to make an appeal not just to Black voters, but really trying to fend off criticism that he is racist, that he is sponsoring a genocide. And that criticism is completely well founded, because he is sponsoring a genocide, and genocide is the most extreme form of racial violence that there is. And so, to use the pulpit at Emanuel AME in this manner, to make it a prop, essentially, for Joe Biden’s reelection bid, to me, is the greatest assault on truth. I know Joe Biden stood there in the pulpit and said that there is an assault on truth that’s happening right now. Joe Biden is, in many ways, leading that assault. And I know that he’s running against Donald Trump, who we know is also a serial liar, but Donald Trump is not the one who is currently in office right now. It is Joe Biden.

And this effort to use the church, not just the Black church, but the site of racial violence, of a mass murder, to deflect from the fact that Joe Biden himself is bombing churches, bombing mosques, bombing places of worship and murdering many civilians, people who have sought shelter in those places, it just exposes the complete hypocrisy of this entire situation and the vacuum of moral leadership at the top. And that’s why I took offense to it. I think that’s why many people who watched it took offense to it. I’m very glad that the young people stood up and protested, because even though they were few in that audience, they represented the majority of people worldwide.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting, Bree. The polls that have just come out today indicate that Nikki Haley is surging in the polls in New Hampshire. You referenced where she stood on the Confederate flag. I wanted to go back to 2014, when then-South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley suggested South Carolina had resolved its image problem and that having the Confederate flag at the Statehouse was fine because not a single CEO had complained. She was speaking at a gubernatorial debate.

GOV. NIKKI HALEY: You know, the Confederate flag is a very sensitive issue. And what I can tell you is, over the last three-and-a-half years I spend a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag. What is important here is that we look at the fact that, yes, perception of South Carolina matters. That’s why we have everybody answering the phones, “It’s a great day in South Carolina.” That’s why we’re being named the friendliest state, the most patriotic state, and getting all these great accolades. But we really kind of fixed all that when you elected the first Indian American female governor, when we appointed the first African American U.S. senator.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Nikki Haley back in 2014. Bree Newsome Bass, your final comment?

BREE NEWSOME BASS: I mean, I think that says it all, right? So, first of all, she’s saying that it’s OK, the optics are OK. Right? We’re not talking about the substance. We’re not talking about the experience. We’re not talking about whether people are actually experiencing equal treatment under the law. Just the optics. So the optics are fine, because it’s not disrupting business, right? And then the other thing that she offers as evidence that everything is OK is the fact that she’s nonwhite, she is an Indian American woman, and then she points to other people in the administration — excuse me — who are nonwhite.

Well, that’s the entire problem right there. The idea is that so long as we can keep business going as usual, it doesn’t matter that there’s violence, it doesn’t matter that there’s racism. All that matters is the optics. And that is what Nikki Haley’s campaign represents in her falsely claiming that she led the way on taking the Confederate flag down. That’s what Joe Biden’s campaign represents in terms of thinking that all that matters is giving a speech at a church, and ignoring all of the churches that are being blown up and all of the Palestinians that are being killed, ignored the fact that young people are demanding a future, and we have people who are older who don’t seem to care at all that this assault in Palestine is disproportionately affecting children or killing children.

And then, in the case of Nikki Haley, again, she does not truly represent any of the things that she is claiming when it comes to being antiracist. You can say whatever words you want to say, you can put together whatever kind of events you want to put together, but the fact is that the truth is going to be the truth. We see what is actually happening.

And I support all of the disruptions, because the last thing that we need is to carry on business as usual when our democracy is absolutely under attack. Democracy is under attack worldwide. And genocide is the most extreme — the most extreme form of racial violence that there is. So there’s no way that we are fighting white supremacy simply by taking down a flag or having an event at Emanuel AME in the midst of genocide, in the midst of doing away with affirmative action, voting rights, the attack on abortion rights. This is where we are at. It’s a very dangerous place. And I hope that people look beyond the optics and support those people who are disrupting, because the last thing that we need is to carry on with business as usual.

AMY GOODMAN: Bree Newsome Bass, artist, antiracist activist. In 2015, following the massacre of the eight African American parishioners and their pastor by a white supremacist at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, Bree scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and removed the Confederate flag.

[admin]

Why I Resigned: Meet Tariq Habash, First Biden Appointee to Quit over U.S.-Backed Israeli War on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/10/ ... transcript

As the Biden administration faces mounting public and internal criticism for supporting and arming Israel’s 96-day assault on Gaza, we speak with Tariq Habash, who last week became the first Biden appointee to publicly resign from the government to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “It was untenable to work for and represent an administration and president that put conditions on my own humanity, that didn’t believe that Palestinian lives were equal to the lives of other people,” says Habash, a Palestinian American Christian who worked as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education. He details how Biden employees “across the board” are frustrated with the president’s policy on Gaza. “The White House doesn’t even know the level of dissent within its own ranks.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s assault has topped 23,300. On Tuesday, during a trip to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the civilian death toll in Gaza is, quote, “far too high,” but he refused to call for a ceasefire.

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: Facing an enemy that embeds itself among civilians, who hides in and fires from schools, from hospitals, makes this incredibly challenging. But the daily toll on civilians in Gaza, particularly on children, is far too high. … We want this war to end as soon as possible. There’s been far too much loss of life, far too much suffering. But it’s vital that Israel achieve its very legitimate objectives of ensuring that October 7th can never happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Tony Blinken speaking in Tel Aviv after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Blinken met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas today in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. During Tuesday’s press conference, Blinken went on to say Israel must not press Palestinians to leave Gaza and that the region needs to find a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: We continue to discuss how to build a more durable peace and security for Israel within the region. As I told the prime minister, every partner that I met on this trip said that they’re ready to support a lasting solution that ends the long-running cycle of violence and ensures Israel’s security. But they underscored that this can only come through a regional approach that includes a pathway to a Palestinian state.

AMY GOODMAN: Blinken’s trip to Israel and the Middle East comes as the Biden administration faces mounting criticism for supporting and arming Israel’s assault on Gaza.

We begin today’s show with Tariq Habash. Last week, he became the first Biden appointee, and just the second administration official overall, to publicly resign from the Biden administration to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Tariq Habash is a Palestinian American Christian who worked as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education.

In his resignation letter, he wrote, quote, “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives, in what leading human rights experts have called a genocidal campaign by the Israeli government,” unquote.

Tariq Habash, welcome to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for joining us. Can you talk about your decision-making, at what point you decided you had to leave the Biden administration, how long you’ve worked for him, and what you think of what’s happening right now?

TARIQ HABASH: Thank you so much, Amy. And thanks, Juan.

You know, for me, this was an incredibly difficult decision. In a lot of ways, I was working my dream job. I was working for a president who for years touted himself as an individual of empathy, an individual, a president, a leader who cared about our education system, about labor rights, about healthcare, about the environment. In a lot of ways, I was extremely aligned with the entire domestic policy agenda of President Biden. And I was able to work on issues that I truly cared about. You know, I was part of the administration from the very beginning, coming up on three full years working in this administration. And even before that, I volunteered my time as someone who assisted the campaign on the policy development of that agenda with respect to higher education and student debt.

But it was really difficult, as someone who both cared deeply about American democracy and cared deeply about improving the lives of millions of Americans, to also feel like it was untenable to work for and represent an administration and a president that put conditions on my own humanity, that didn’t believe that Palestinian lives were equal to the lives of other people. And, you know, that’s just a really, really hard thing to deal with. And so, for me, it wasn’t a particular moment in time. I think it was a culmination of near daily dehumanization of Palestinian lives in Gaza and the West Bank, and policy and rhetoric that never really shifted over the last three months. And I think we even heard that yesterday from the secretary of state, unfortunately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, I’m wondering: Did you try to express your perspective or your viewpoints to people in the administration? And I’m wondering also what the response was of your direct boss, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, when you decided to resign.

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, I mean, I used every avenue available to me to be able to express my concerns both about the language that the administration, the White House, was using, to express concerns about the policies and how it undermines the president’s message on protecting democracy, on how it undermines our stature across the international community with respect to, like, being humanitarians and caring about human life. And yeah, I spoke with the secretary on numerous occasions about this issue. I spoke with the assistant secretaries. I spoke with the secretary’s chief of staff. They were all extremely understanding of my personal plight and my personal frustration, and, you know, they were very supportive of me on a personal level, emotionally understanding, checking on me to make sure that I was doing OK.

And even in circumstances where the White House did listening sessions and had policy briefings for staff in particular, you know, I was there. I tried to raise concerns, as did many of my peers and colleagues. I think there was a different tone in the reception from the White House than, say, the Department of Education, in particular, but I think the outcomes, unfortunately, didn’t change anything. I think we continued to see a doubling down on the current policies that have led us to where we are today, which is the unconditional support of military funding and resources to an extremist Israeli regime that continues to both indiscriminately bomb Palestinians in Gaza and starve millions of people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and you mentioned that you had participated in President Biden’s original campaign. What do you sense is the implication for his reelection campaign of the deep dissatisfaction not only among employees in his administration, but of young, progressive and liberal Americans across the spectrum?

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are huge implications. I think we’re already seeing those implications. The president is now really gearing up for the 2024 election. We’re months away. And we’re seeing his poll numbers really hitting real lows, particularly in communities that are predominantly minority, predominantly younger. We’re seeing a backlash, I think, in part to these policies and to our response.

And it feels like it’s out of touch with the president’s message around protecting democracy from authoritarianism. I think the president has spoken very directly to the American people about how important 2024 is in terms of protecting our democracy. I think that is absolutely true, but it’s also just not in line with the foreign policy approach to the region, and to Gaza in particular, as we are seeing the president and the administration provide unconditional support to an authoritarian Israeli government.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Habash, what has been the response of your colleagues to quitting? And you talked about the difference between the response of the Department of Education and the White House. Have you gotten word from the White House?

TARIQ HABASH: I haven’t heard from the White House. I have heard from countless colleagues across the federal government, people who I’ve worked very closely with, people who I didn’t have the opportunity to work with, and people who we had numerous touchpoints across the three years that I was at the Department of Education. And that response has been incredibly supportive. I couldn’t imagine the level of understanding and support and alignment with so many people.

I think we’ve heard a lot about the level of dissent across the federal government with the administration’s current policies. I think we’ve seen numerous dissent cables from the State Department be leaked. We’ve seen letters from USAID, from dozens of federal agencies, from interns, dissent within the White House. I mean, it is across the board.

But I think there’s also so much more that we don’t even realize, because there are limitations to how people can share that information and use the channels that are available to them. For me at the Department of Education and other domestic agencies, there aren’t the same types of private channels that State Department has for dissent cables for Foreign Service officers and other employees. I was fortunate because I had leadership that cared about me on a personal level, that wanted to check on me, and told me that if there were things that I wanted to communicate to the White House, to the highest levels of the White House, those messages would be communicated. The vast majority of people don’t have that level of access and support from their leadership, from their agencies, and they don’t have those structures in place. So, I think, in a lot of ways, the White House doesn’t even know the level of dissent within its own ranks. And I think that’s concerning.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Biden spoke at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That’s where the white supremacist Dylann Roof shot dead eight Black parishioners and their pastor in 2015, Clementa Pinckney. Biden’s speech was disrupted when a group of activists started chanting “Ceasefire now!”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Without light, there’s no path from this darkness.

PROTESTER: If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!

PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

AMY GOODMAN: As the protesters called for a ceasefire and were removed from the church, supporters of Biden started chanting “Four more years.” President Biden then addressed the protest.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I understand their passion. And I’ve been quietly working — I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza. I’ve been using all that I can to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering, Tariq, if you think President Biden’s line has changed at all. I mean, reports are he’s called his top aides to the White House, absolutely furious why his poll numbers are so low, when the poll figures show people are so dismayed at what’s happening now. I wanted to quote a retired Israeli major general, Yitzhak Brick, who conceded in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.” He said, “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” Talk about what you think Biden understands and what he needs to do right now.

TARIQ HABASH: I think it’s really important to recognize that, you know, American voters see this as a domestic policy issue just as much as a foreign policy issue. It is affecting what is going to happen in the upcoming election. I think people are really dissatisfied with the response of the administration. I think that we’re seeing that in the church a couple days ago with the protest. We’re seeing it with protests across the country. We’re seeing city councilmembers and local legislators and policymakers take stances to support an immediate ceasefire.

That disconnect from the people is really concerning for American democracy, but it’s concerning because it feels like digging into the current position means that it’s not as valuable to listen to the people and that our policymakers are going to make the decisions that they’re going to make. And I think when we see an administration circumvent Congress by issuing hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to a foreign government and circumventing the processes that are in place, ignoring really important laws to protect both Americans but also abide by international humanitarian law, I think there are significant implications for what that means for America more broadly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tariq, I wanted to ask you — in your work at the Education Department, you were focused particularly on higher education. I’m wondering: What’s your response to what’s been happening on so many campuses across the country and the politicians in — or some politicians in Congress trying to support and build up the retaliation and targeting campaign faced by Palestinian rights advocates at the university campuses?

TARIQ HABASH: I’m so glad you asked that question. I feel like — so, I already mentioned a little bit how, like, Americans don’t feel like this is just an issue away from home, this is also a domestic policy issue. I think that is extremely clear on college campuses, that have for decades been the grounds for public dissent, for protests, for being able to have a free exchange of ideas and communicate on issues that are really difficult. I think American higher education is meant to be a place to allow free speech in all of its forms. I think that’s really important. I think the Department of Education recognizes that.

But I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I think it’s very clear, the overcorrection that we’ve seen by institutions of higher education and their response to the weaponization of language, in particular, on college campuses and by political officials and right-wing extremists. I think, at the end of the day, we need to ensure that students are safe, but we need to provide safe learning environments that do not infringe on their rights to be able to have those difficult conversations, to learn about issues that matter in the world right now. And this particular conflict is the forefront of those conversations in so many ways.

I think when we see students on college campuses show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, when we see students on college campuses condemn the daily atrocities that we see that are starving millions of Palestinians, and decades of oppression and occupation that have led to unequal rights for Palestinians, I think that it’s really important that we separate that from actual hate speech, that is real and dangerous and growing across the country. And I think that, you know, we’ve seen politicians rely on the weaponization of language in order to minimize students’ ability to organize and to speak about some really difficult issues. And we’ve seen that really affect the independence and the integrity of American higher education.

And the risks to academic freedom are very real. And that is a responsibility for the Department of Education. And I think that was one reason for me why it took so long to really take this position, because I did feel an obligation, on the issues that I worked directly on, to be able to help move the ball forward and provide as much support as possible to students across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering — you were still there, Tariq, at the Department of Education when the three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, one from Trinity, one from Haverford and one from Brown, Hisham Awartani, who is paralyzed from the chest down. And I was wondering your response there and within the department, and also if you feel you face a different future than someone like Josh Paul, longtime State Department official who quit over Biden administration policy. You’re a Biden appointee. But if you face something different as a Palestinian American?

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, absolutely. Just to quickly touch on what happened in Vermont, which is absolutely horrific, I think part of the problem is the constant dehumanization of Palestinians. And what we’ve seen both in the language that the White House has used and in what we have seen in terms of coverage here across the United States in the media, making it seem like Palestinians — and, in particular, Palestinian men — are less deserving of support, of humanity, of emotion, that allows people to feel like attacking them is acceptable. And that’s just — that’s a horrifying thing to realize, is that as a Palestinian, as a Palestinian man, as a Palestinian Christian, so may aspects of my own identity are erased on a daily basis. And it’s truly horrifying that we allow that type of dehumanization to exist in our country today. For me, it’s very personal. And, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about your background, Tariq, your family’s background, your history.

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah. You know, I’m an American. I was born and raised here in the United States. But I descend from generations of Palestinians. I am a Palestinian American. Like I said, I’m a Palestinian Christian. My family has been Christians for as far back as we know.

And in 1948, my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles who were alive at the time were forcibly displaced from their homes in Yaffa. And for those who don’t know, it’s on the water, essentially where Tel Aviv is today. And they had to leave everything. They left their homes. They left their businesses. They left their friends. They saw a huge migration, a forced migration of their peers, and massive levels of death. And for them, it was about self-preservation, about preserving future generations of their family. And they walked for miles to find somewhere safe.

And I think it was happenstance that, you know, someone told them, “Oh, we think it’s safe toward the east. Let’s walk that direction.” And as a Palestinian living in America, as a Palestinian living in the broader diaspora, not being able to return, there’s a level of guilt that you have, knowing that a decision that was made 75 years ago to walk east instead of south, toward Gaza, changed the entire trajectory of your life, changed the trajectory of your family’s lives, because, you know, my family has been here in the States for a long time, but I could have very easily been in Gaza. My family could have been in Gaza. It’s extremely emotional. And you feel guilty because you are safe and you can’t do enough to protect lives that are being taken indiscriminately.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans now, Tariq?

TARIQ HABASH: I don’t know. You know, I think this is such an important issue. I’m doing everything I can just to use whatever channels that I have to communicate about how important it is to end the violence immediately, to preserve as many lives as possible. I think we’ve heard the White House and the secretary of state talk repeatedly about minimizing civilian casualties. We can do a lot better than minimizing them. We can end civilian casualties in Gaza and in the West Bank. I think it’s up to us to make that decision, to do a little bit of introspection on our own policies and positions and recognize that it’s been over three months, the military route has been an epic failure, and the only path to peace, as the secretary of state talked about just yesterday, is a diplomatic one.

And when we talk about providing humanitarian aid and increasing the level of aid that’s getting to people in Gaza who are starving, it’s really hard to do that if there is continuous bombing of all of the safe regions. There’s nowhere safe left. There hasn’t been anywhere safe left for weeks and weeks. It’s really important that you end the violence, so that you can provide the level of support that’s needed, if we want to seriously contemplate a future for Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Habash, we want to thank you for being with us, former Biden administration political appointee who resigned last week from the Department of Education in response to President Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. He was the department’s only Palestinian American appointee. He was the first Biden appointee to quit.

***

“Israel Is Starving Gaza”: Israeli Rights Group B’Tselem Says IDF Is Using Hunger as a Weapon of War
STORYJANUARY 10, 2024Watch Full Show
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/10/ ... transcript

Human rights groups say Israel is using starvation as a weapon in the Gaza Strip as Israel severely restricts the delivery of humanitarian aid, medicine and food supplies to millions inside the besieged and bombed territory. In a new report,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem lays out how Israel’s decision to cut off electricity, water and international humanitarian aid to Gaza after a 17-year blockade against the territory has led to a very quick collapse of infrastructure. “The things that impede this provision of food for people who are starving is a declared policy by Israel,” says Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem international advocacy lead. “The Israeli government is at fault, is responsible for this, and this should lead to immediate international action.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Several United Nations agencies, including the World Food Programme, say Israel’s bombardment of Gaza could lead to a famine throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months, unless immediate action is taken. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are now in Rafah, and many are waiting in line for hours for small amounts of food, as aid agencies struggle to meet the demand.

MARIAM AL-AHMAD: [translated] I came here to get food. I’ve been here since 9 a.m. just to get a plate full of food, because the situation is very difficult. We are from Gaza City, and we came to Rafah. The people of Rafah received us and welcomed us, but the numbers are large, and the situation is very difficult. … There is no money to buy food, and there’s no flour. We have no money to buy anything at home. There is no gas or anything that would help us to cook even a plate of lentils. We come here to get this plate of food, and it is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as hundreds of trucks trying to bring aid to Gaza are backed up for miles in Egypt at the Rafah border crossing and have been forced to wait for weeks to enter. On Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron urged Israel to lift barriers on delivering humanitarian aid into Gaza, citing, quote, “real widespread hunger.” Cameron was cross-examined by the Scottish MP Brendan O’Hara.

BRENDAN O’HARA: Two or three minutes ago, in answer, a reply to the chair, you said — and I quote — “One of the things we’d like the Israelis to do is switch the water back on.” Now, that says that they turned it off. It says that you recognize they have the power to turn it on. Therefore, isn’t turning water off and having the ability to turn it back on but choosing not to — isn’t that a breach of international humanitarian law?

DAVID CAMERON: It’s just something they ought to do, in my opinion.

BRENDAN O’HARA: No. Of course they should do it. Every human being would say you don’t cut people’s water supply off. But I’m asking you, in your position as foreign secretary —

DAVID CAMERON: Well, I don’t know. I mean —

BRENDAN O’HARA: — around a point of international humanitarian law. If Israel have the power to turn the water back on that they turned off, surely, that is a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law.

DAVID CAMERON: Well, I’m not a lawyer. My view is they ought to switch it on, because the north of Gaza, the conflict is now effectively over there, and so getting more water and power into northern Gaza would be a very good thing to do. You don’t have to be a lawyer to make a judgment about that. You just have to be a human being.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to immediately increase aid deliveries in Gaza, and Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using starvation as a method of warfare, which violates international humanitarian law.

Well, for more, we’re going to Tel Aviv. We’re joined by Sarit Michaeli, international advocacy lead for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has just published a new report, “Israel is starving Gaza,” that says starvation is, quote, “not a byproduct of war, but a direct result of Israel’s declared policy.”

Sarit, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out exactly what you found and what you feel can be done about it.

SARIT MICHAELI: Well, in very basic terms, almost everyone in Gaza is hungry almost all of the time. Two-point-three million people are surviving mostly on sometimes one meal a day, people skipping meals in order to feed their children, people busy constantly looking for the next meal, for the next source of food for them and their families and children.

And all of this is happening in a place that is pretty much an hour’s drive from here — right? — where supplying humanitarian assistance and food and all the necessities, like water and other things that people rely on, should not be a difficult problem. We’re not talking about some sort of remote region internationally. We’re talking about an area that is accessible, where the things that impede this provision of food for people who are starving is a declared policy by Israel — the fact that Israel isn’t allowing enough trucks in, the fact that Israel isn’t providing the ability, the logistical infrastructure to actually drive this food into Gaza through places where it’s possible to do, and many other decisions taken by the Israeli government that are impacting this, that are making it — making the amount of assistance that is coming into Gaza simply a fraction of what the population need.

And, Amy, you quoted the international experts on this issue. Within a month, they expect almost all of the residents of the Gaza Strip to be up to what is phase three of this scale of horror of hunger. And this is simply unacceptable when it’s very clearly preventable. And the things that were said in the British Parliament by Minister Cameron are very clearly a clarification that this is the result of Israeli policies and actions. This is not just some sort of coincidence or just some unfortunate byproduct of war.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sarit, I wanted to ask you: How is Israel controlling the food supply, especially in Rafah, where Rafah leads into Egypt? So, how exactly does it manage to continue to —

SARIT MICHAELI: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — prevent trucks from getting in?

SARIT MICHAELI: So, Juan, let’s even look at the past situation. I mean, Gaza was on the brink of collapse even before this war began with the horrific October 7th attack by Hamas against Israelis, right? So, this has been a situation of food insecurity since the beginning of the Israeli blockade on Gaza almost 17 years ago. But the Israeli decisions to cut off electricity, to cut off the water supply, that Israel sells Gaza, to not allow all of the movement of the international humanitarian provision of supplies, those decisions made it almost impossible, from the start, for even bakeries to operate and provide for the people. And now what we — so, the collapse was very quick and based on a very long period of deprivation.

But now the issue really is that there needs to be hundreds of trucks entering Gaza every day, and just a fraction of that is entering. This is happening because the Rafah crossing is just not equipped for the movement of goods. Goods should be entering Gaza through other border crossings, that are generally with Israel, not with Egypt. Israel is also prohibiting the provision of food purchased on the Israeli market, so the aid agencies have to bring it from Egypt, which is even more difficult. Plus, there are also many restrictions on the ability to distribute it once it actually gets into the Gaza Strip. And then we see these awful images of desperate people charging these provision convoys that are coming in, and taking what they can, because they are simply so desperate, and the food isn’t reaching some areas of Gaza. So you have a situation where in some areas of Gaza things are only just bad, whereas in others things are just absolutely atrocious. And this is not a very large area.

So, certainly — and I think it’s recognized now by the international community — the Israeli government is at fault, is responsible for this. And this should lead to immediate international action, not simply conversations with Israeli policymakers, but actually clear clarifications that Israel is violating both its legal obligations — i.e. this is a war crime — and also that this is simply an immoral way to treat a civilian population.

AMY GOODMAN: After a visit to the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza, U.S. Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen blasted the Israeli process for screening the aid. Senator Van Hollen spoke to CBS Face the Nation. This is what he said.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Many items that should be allowed to go into Gaza — water sort of filtration systems, other systems like that — were in a warehouse of rejected items that we visited. While we were there, we saw a truck turned away that had a big box from UNICEF, which is, of course, the U.N. organization that helps children. It was a unit to help with water desalinization. It was rejected. And when one item on a truck is rejected, the entire truck is rejected. The other big issue is within Gaza, the so-called deconfliction process, which is just a fancy name for those who are providing humanitarian assistance to have the confidence that they can deliver it without being killed.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk more about this, Sarit? Again, the senator, Van Hollen, is the one who has also called for the release of more information about the Israeli sniper who murdered Shirin Abu Akleh on May 11th, 2022, in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank.

SARIT MICHAELI: Yeah, absolutely, Amy. Well, we certainly appreciate the leadership that Senator Van Hollen and, actually, Senator Merkley are showing on this issue. And it is absolutely crucial that U.S. lawmakers, both from the more progressive part of the Democratic Party but also from the mainstream, security-oriented, kind of more established part of the Democratic Party, are engaging with President Biden to demand action on this issue — simply an unconscionable situation that is unfolding in front of us.

Now, I’d like to refer to the second part of Senator Hollen’s discussion of the dangers inside of Gaza. Yes,, absolutely, there’s been another update by the office of — the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs discussing an additional rejection by the Israeli authorities of another attempt to coordinate the transfer of medical goods into hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip. This was only the day before yesterday, apparently. So, we’re seeing that there are simply so many difficulties in trying to bring the aid, deliver the aid, with safety for the aid providers, obviously, in this area that is bombed.

And this brings us to the essential issue, which is that there needs to be a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. There needs to be a halt to Israeli airstrikes and bombardments in order for this food and aid and assistance — and not only food; medical supplies and other necessities have to be provided. And this is one — the continuation of the hostilities is making this provision far too dangerous and impossible currently. This is one other reason why we need this to stop.

B’Tselem has called for a ceasefire. But, of course, the most important reason for this to stop is to stop the killing of civilians, of women and children and human beings in the Gaza Strip, in a way that absolutely is disproportionate to what is facing Israel right now, and to the policies of, basically, airstrikes bombing residential homes. All of this is one — you know, and the huge death toll, 23,000 Gazans and counting, as a result, you know, that can only be described as a revenge attack after the horrific death toll that Israelis have suffered. But we simply cannot accept. You know, it’s certainly not moral, and it’s certainly not legal, that we inflict such a degree of suffering on Gazans — we Israelis — regardless of how much we have suffered and how horrific we have been affected by this. There is simply no justification for the continuation of this Israeli attack on Gaza, and it has to stop. There has to be a ceasefire.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sarit, I wanted to ask you — you’re talking to us from Tel Aviv. How aware are Israelis of the catastrophic situation so close to where most of them live? And is there any significant portion of the population that cares?

SARIT MICHAELI: Well, unfortunately, Juan, the situation is very, very depressing and just painful when we look at the responses of many Israelis, possibly even the majority of Israelis, to what we see now in Gaza. I think the majority of Israelis still support what we are doing there. There is very little protest or very little rejection of the methods that Israel is employing in its attack against the civilian population of Gaza. The Israeli media doesn’t really broadcast much information about the suffering of Gazans, the devastation, the utter devastation, of infrastructure and the loss of homes, and human beings being killed on a daily basis, on an hourly basis.

But one of the saddest aspects of this is that even when people are aware of it, there are so many politicians and influencers and people who are simply rejecting any need to respect the humanity of people in Gaza. And unfortunately, some of the people who are aware of the huge price, the horrific toll that Gazans are paying, are not — you know, are simply OK with it. And this is one of the most depressing aspects of what is going on now in terms of the total dehumanization of Gazans among many people in Israel.

There are — I should mention there are Israelis who are opposed to this situation. There are Israelis who are calling to recognize the humanity of Gazans. But we are in the minority, unfortunately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, we have less than a minute left, but I wanted to ask you, quickly — you’ve also been monitoring the violence in the West Bank, that has gotten far less attention. Could you talk about what you’ve chronicled?

SARIT MICHAELI: Absolutely, yes. So, since October 7th, there has also been a massive increase in the violence by Israeli soldiers and also security forces and Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. It has led to a really large number of Palestinians killed by soldiers and by Israeli settlers. It has led to takeovers of land by settlers, to the removal, to the forcible transfer of Palestinian herding communities from very large parts of the West Bank. It’s led to, you know, the total destruction of the olive harvest, for example, as a coordinated campaign by settlers to damage the Palestinian economy. And all of these things are happening with very little international attention.

And again, this has got to end. There has to be a recognition of what is going on throughout the West Bank, of Israeli actions there. And as we call when it comes to the situation in the Gaza Strip, there has to be international action to hold Israeli policymakers accountable for their decisions that have led to these horrific results, horrific outcomes.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarit Michaeli, we have to leave it there. We thank you so much for being with us, with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

[admin]

“Nowhere Is Safe in Gaza”: South Africa Lays Out Genocide Case vs. Israel at World Court in The Hague
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 11, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/11/ ... transcript

South Africa began to make its case Thursday at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In their opening statements, South Africa’s lawyers argued that the sheer scale of Israel’s violence, which has so far killed more than 23,000 people since October 7, is part of a political and military strategy aimed at the destruction of Palestinian life, using statements from top Israeli leaders to show genocidal intent. Israel and the United States have both vehemently rejected the charges. South Africa is seeking a provisional measure from the top U.N. court to stop Israel’s military campaign, though a final ruling could take years. We feature highlights from the first day of proceedings at The Hague.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: South Africa has accused Israel of acts of genocide against Palestinians in opening remarks today at a historic hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. At the hearing, South Africa demanded an emergency suspension of Israel’s aerial and ground assault on Gaza, which it said was intended at bringing about, quote, “the destruction of the population of the territory.” In a detailed 84-page document launching the case late last year, South Africa alleged that Israel has demonstrated that intent. The International Court of Justice is hearing South Africa’s arguments today, and we’ll hear Israel’s response to the allegations on Friday. South Africa’s Justice Minister Ronald Lamola addressed the court at the opening of the hearing.

RONALD LAMOLA: Madam President and distinguished members of the court, it is an honor for me to stand here in front of you on behalf of the Republic of South Africa on this exceptional case. “In extending our hands across the miles to the people of Palestine, we do so in the full knowledge that we are part of a humanity that is at one.” These were the words of our founding president, Nelson Mandela. This is the spirit in which South Africa acceded to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide in 1998. This is the spirit in which we approach this court as a contracting party to the convention. This is a commitment we owe to the people of Palestine and Israelis alike.

As previously mentioned, the violence and the destruction in Palestine and Israel did not begin on the 7th of October, 2023. The Palestinians have experienced systematic oppression and violence for the last 76 years.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was South Africa’s Justice Minister Ronald Lamola addressing the court at the opening of the hearing. South Africa lawyer Adila Hassim was next. She began by citing Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza in her opening argument.

ADILA HASSIM: For the past 96 days, Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare. Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry and bombs from air, land and sea. They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall. This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.

AMY GOODMAN: South African lawyer Adila Hassim continued by laying out what South Africa says was a series of genocidal acts, including mass killing, displacement, denial of humanitarian aid, and more. She began on the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

ADILA HASSIM: The first genocidal act committed by Israel is the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, in violation of Article II (a) of the Genocide Convention. As the U.N. secretary-general explained five weeks ago, the level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza. As I stand before you today, 23,210 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces during the sustained attacks over the last three months, at least 70% of whom are believed to be women and children. Some 7,000 Palestinians are still missing, presumed dead under the rubble.

Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches, and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate, in the places to which they have fled, and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli-declared safe routes. The level of killing is so extensive that those whose bodies are found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified.

In the first three weeks alone following 7 October, Israel deployed 6,000 bombs per week. At least 200 times, it has deployed 2,000-pound bombs in southern areas of Palestine designated as safe. These bombs have also decimated the north, including refugee camps. Two-thousand-pound bombs are some of the biggest and most destructive bombs available. They are dropped by lethal fighter jets that are used to strike targets on the ground by one of the world’s most resourced armies.

AMY GOODMAN: South African lawyer Adila Hassim concluded her remarks by outlining the need for an emergency suspension of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

ADILA HASSIM: All of these acts, individually and collectively, form a calculated pattern of conduct by Israel indicating a genocidal intent. This intent is evident from Israel’s conduct in specially targeting Palestinians living in Gaza; using weaponry that causes large-scale homicidal destruction, as well as targeting — targeted sniping of civilians; designating safe zones for Palestinians to seek refuge and then bombing these; depriving Palestinians in Gaza of basic needs — food, water, healthcare, fuel, sanitation and communications; destroying social infrastructure — homes, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals; and killing, seriously injuring and leaving large numbers of children orphaned.

Genocides are never declared in advance. But this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts.

In the Gambian Myanmar case, this court did not hesitate to impose provisional measures in relation to allegations that Myanmar was committing genocidal acts against the Rohingya within the Rakhine state. The facts before the court today are, sadly, even more stark and, like the Gambian Myanmar case, deserve and demand this court’s intervention.

Every day there is mounting, irreparable loss of life, property, dignity and humanity for the Palestinian people. Our newsfeeds show graphic images of suffering that has become unbearable to watch. Nothing will stop the suffering except an order from this court. Without an indication of provisional measures, the atrocities will continue, with the Israeli Defense Force indicating that it intends pursuing this course of action for at least a year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: South African lawyer Adila Hassim. She was followed by attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who outlined what South Africa said was clear evidence of genocidal intent by Israel.

TEMBEKA NGCUKAITOBI: The intentional failure of the government of Israel to condemn, prevent and punish such genocidal incitement constitutes, in itself, a grave violation of the Genocide Convention. We should recall, Madam President, that in Article I of the convention, Israel confirmed that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law, and it undertook to prevent and to punish it as such. This failure to prevent, condemn and punish such speech by the government has served to normalize genocidal rhetoric and extreme danger for Palestinians within Israeli society.

As MK Moshe Saada from the Likud party has said, the government’s own attorneys shares his views that Palestinians in Gaza must be destroyed. I quote: “You go anywhere, and they tell you to destroy them. In the kibbutz, they tell you to destroy them. My friends at the state attorney’s office, who fought with me on political issues in debates, said to me, 'It is clear that we need to destroy all Gazans.'” “Destroy all Gazans.”

Israel is aware of its destruction of Palestinian life and infrastructure. Despite this knowledge, it has maintained — and indeed intensified — its military activity in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Excerpts from South Africa’s arguments at the historic hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of acts of genocide. When we come back, we go to Johannesburg and Jerusalem for response.

***

Palestinian Genocide Scholar & South African Lawyer on “Extreme Urgency” of World Court Case
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 11, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/11/ ... transcript

We speak with guests in Johannesburg and Jerusalem about South Africa’s landmark case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, where judges are being asked to intervene to stop a genocide. “What essentially South Africa is calling for is a ceasefire in Gaza,” says South African human rights lawyer Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh. We also speak with Palestinian genocide scholar Maha Abdallah, who says there is “extreme urgency” for the world to stop the bloodshed. “The court must immediately act,” Abdallah says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now by two guests to discuss South Africa’s historic genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Today marked the first hearing out of two days of arguments, with South Africa outlining its case that Israel has violated the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, saying its three-month assault on Gaza is being conducted with the intent to bring about the destruction of Palestinians as a group.

AMY GOODMAN: In Jerusalem, Maha Abdallah is a Palestinian genocide scholar, a graduate teaching assistant and Ph.D. researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Antwerp. And joining us from Johannesburg, South Africa, Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, South African human rights lawyer, directs the Africa program of the International Commission of Jurists, which is dedicated to defending human rights and the rule of law worldwide.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin in South Africa with Kaajal. If you could start off by talking about the significance of today’s hearing, that finished just before we went to air? What is the International Court of Justice? How unusual is it to bring a kind of case like this? If you could take it from there?

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: Yes, sure. Hi, everybody.

So, to talk about the hearing and the International Court of Justice, the International Court of Justice is a world court which adjudicates issues and cases between states. So it is different from the International Criminal Court in that way. Where the ICJ — where the ICC would prosecute individuals on international criminal concerns, the International Court of Justice only deals with issues between state parties. And this is the reason why South Africa has filed this case before the International Court of Justice.

And it was a pretty remarkable hearing. You’ve said already about the historical significance of this hearing. There have been previous cases at the International Court of Justice dealing with genocide, but those previous cases have not attracted as much attention and interest as this particular case.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Kaajal, could you explain how often it’s been the case that a case has been brought to the ICJ by a country that is not one of the parties involved in the conflict? Because one thinks most recently of the case of Russia and Ukraine, which Ukraine brought, or, in fact, the first genocide case that was heard at the International Court of Justice, which, of course, had to do with Srebrenica, the genocide of Bosnians in the Yugoslavia War.

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: Yes. So, the court can deal with any issues. Issues of genocide, of course, have — there have not been many cases of genocide brought before the court. In this particular case, however, both South Africa and Israel are members of the U.N. They’ve both signed on to the Genocide Convention, and, as a result of their membership of the U.N. and signature of the Genocide Convention, may be held responsible and have responsibilities under this convention. And this is the reason which established South Africa’s grounds for filing the case.

There have been other cases brought against member states who are not — who have not signed the Genocide Convention. Those cases are more difficult. It is more difficult, in particular, to try and enforce any findings or to establish jurisdiction of the court in order to look into those cases. But the court may still make preliminary findings, may make other findings which are and can be very useful in trying to protect individuals who are being affected by genocide and actions connected to genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, if you could begin, Kaajal, just by explaining — of course, the decision, as everyone has said, is likely to take years on the case itself, on the merits — what are the provisional measures that South Africa is calling for in the interim?

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: Yes. So, essentially what South Africa is calling for is a ceasefire in Gaza. They’ve set this out in a number of ways. They’re asking for the blockade in Gaza to cease immediately. They’re asking for the cease of the bombings and the actions which are causing the death of — killing of Palestinians, destruction of their homes, expulsion, displacement, blockade on food, water, medical assistance, as well as the imposition of measures preventing Palestinian births by destroying essential health services which are crucial for the survival of pregnant women and babies. And these are all listed as genocidal actions in the suit. So, there’s a whole range of actions which they’re calling for an immediate cease on. And these are the provisional measures which South Africa seeks at the current time.

AMY GOODMAN: Maha Abdallah, you are a Palestinian genocide scholar. Can you explain the significance of this going to the International Court of Justice, and how people are responding in Israel and Palestine?

MAHA ABDALLAH: Thank you for having me.

This is a historic moment for the Palestinian people in their pursuit for justice and accountability, decades after the imposition of a settler-colonial and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people that has dispossessed and fragmented the Palestinians without accountability and with near-total impunity. So, the fact that Israel today stands on trial is very significant, very important. But, of course, we recognize the possibilities and the different scenarios that are forthcoming.

And the fact that Israel is on trial for the crime of genocide is also significant because, as the application of the South Africa before the International Court of Justice states, that the crime of genocide and the alleged genocidal acts and omissions by the state of Israel are part of a continuum. They do not happen in a vacuum. They’re part and parcel of the ongoing Nakba imposed on the Palestinian people. And for that, there needs to be accountability.

As for the reactions, unfortunately, I have not yet been able to interact with many people. The hearing session just finished. But I know that most of us Palestinians, whether in Palestine or in diaspora or in exile, we have been waiting for this moment, and all eyes have been on the ICJ, on The Hague today. And we have been thinking about the Palestinians in Gaza and how they perceive the current hearing sessions more than 90 days after complete devastation, more than 90 days after significant and extreme and severe loss, destruction and pain inflicted on the Palestinians there for the purpose of the destruction of the group. And, of course, we think of Palestinians in exile who have been also mentioned by the South African ambassador in his introductory remarks, when he spoke about the denial, the deliberate denial, of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, which includes the right of return for Palestinians in refugee camps across the neighboring countries.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, let me just turn — Maha, thank you for that — to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke Wednesday, one day before today’s hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to the hearing.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I want to make a few points absolutely clear. Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population. Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population. And we are doing so in full compliance with international law. The IDF is doing its utmost to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas is doing its utmost to maximize them by using Palestinian civilians as human shields. The IDF urges Palestinian civilians to leave war zones by disseminating leaflets, making phone calls, providing safe passage corridors, while Hamas prevents Palestinians from leaving at gunpoint, and often with gunfire. Our goal is to rid Gaza of Hamas terrorists and free our hostages. Once this is achieved, Gaza can be demilitarized and deradicalized, thereby creating a possibility for a better future for Israel and Palestinians alike.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maha, if you could respond to what he said regarding the case that is now ongoing at the International Court of Justice?

MAHA ABDALLAH: I think this is a baseless statement. And the statements over the past 13 weeks-plus, and even prior to the 7th of October, have been genocidal in intent, have, you know, showcased how Israeli political leaders, Israeli military leaders have the specific intent for — aiming for the destruction of the Palestinian people, using different means and methods, through different policies, practices, laws, military orders. And the fact that there has been an apartheid regime imposed for 75 years, along with a belligerent occupation for 56 years, a blockade and closure on the Gaza Strip, and the incarceration of an entire people, as well, these are all precursors and drivers of genocide. And the genocidal statements that we’ve been hearing since 13 weeks now cannot be simply put aside or disregarded by a simple statement the night before the hearing sessions start at the ICJ.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maha, could you explain — you know, what do you hope will come out of this, knowing that, of course, a decision may take several years, but there could be these provisional measures that are put in place, even though they’re not, in fact, enforceable, the court does not have the capacity to enforce the measures?

MAHA ABDALLAH: The most and foremost important thing to come out of this, from this application and these proceedings at the moment, is for the court to order Israel to stop its aggression, to stop its hostilities, to stop its military operations against the Gaza Strip. And this is particularly important considering the severity, the scale and the gravity of the situation in the Gaza Strip, but also the failure of the international system, of the international community, to come to a consensus and to order Israel at the U.N. Security Council, but also in other spheres, to push it to put an end to this genocidal aggression against the Palestinians.

And as you said, the merits of the case, the actual decision of whether there is genocide or not by the court, will take years. But for the moment, what is mostly important is a need to stop this genocidal aggression, to safeguard and to protect whatever is possible to save at this moment of Palestinian life, of Palestinian dignity and of Palestinian rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, I wanted to ask you about Hamas. It is a nonstate player here. How does it fit into this decision? And also, because there isn’t enforcement, what is the role particularly of the United States, since it sits on the U.N. Security Council, which, of course, is related to the International Court of Justice as a U.N. body?

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: Yes. The South African legal team set out very clearly the position of Hamas in this particular matter. And what they said in their submissions was that the International Court of Justice is there to adjudicate matters and cases between states. Hamas is not a state, and therefore Hamas is not part of this application. No claims have been brought against Hamas, and no claims can be brought against Hamas at this particular tribunal. There are other tribunals in which Hamas can be — crimes against Hamas can be brought, but this is not the appropriate tribunal for that particular issue. So, that deals with the issue of Hamas.

Talking about the U.S. and their involvement in this case, the U.S., as we know, are longtime friends with Israel. If there is — in the event that there is a final decision made by the court and the court makes findings on genocide and genocidal intent against Israel, of course, there is no immediate obligation on Israel to act on these findings, and we don’t expect Israel to comply with these findings, which will then lead to the matter being presented to the U.N. Security Council to try and enforce this compliance. And at that point, with the U.S. being a permanent member of the Security Council, they could, of course, use their veto powers to block any actions against Israel. So that would be a very serious challenge related to compliance of any findings of this court.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Kaajal, apart from the U.N. Security Council, of course, the person who leads the International Court of Justice, of the 15 judges, the president is an American, Joan Donoghue, and the vice president is a Russian, Kirill Gevorgian. So, if you could say — I mean, ostensibly, the judges are supposed to be impartial, but in the most recent case last year with Russia and Ukraine, the only countries to abstain from the vote, which was otherwise 13 people voted for Russia withdrawing from Ukraine, the provisional measure, China and Russia were the only two who did not. So, if you could say, just in terms of precedents, do judges, more or less, make decisions that coincide with the policies of their countries, or is it the case that this is an exception?

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: Yeah, yes. So, judges are supposed to be independent. We expect judges to be independent. Judicial independence is the cornerstone of all democracies. We require judicial independence to be able to support us, and support us to claim our rights and to claim our democracies. It’s a means — it’s a hugely important means of protection.

We’ve seen previously at the ICJ, in the Ukraine v. Russia case, both the Russian and the Chinese judges offer dissenting opinions. I would hope — I would very much hope that the American judge, the president of the court, does feel an obligation to be independent, properly independent, in this matter. There is, of course, no guarantee of this. There is very little which can be done in the event of the American judge dissenting, making findings which are not in line with the majority of the court. And this is essentially the problem of the International Court of Justice, in that it can take on a relatively political slant in the decisions which it issues.

AMY GOODMAN: And now their terms are up — the American, she has had a number of positions at the State Department before, Joan Donoghue — are up in February, so they could be up before this decision is released. Is that right, Kaajal?

KAAJAL RAMJATHAN-KEOGH: I’m not aware of when her term is up, so I can’t really comment on that. But the fact that she’s sitting on the issue of provisional measures means that she will have some impact on what happens as the court makes findings on provisional measures. And if, however, the court decides to go into the merits of the case and proceeds with the matter, then she will no longer sit on the case going forward, but we don’t know who will replace her. So that’s an unknown, but it’s not guaranteed that there won’t be U.S. influence on the case going forward.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Maha Abdallah, just as we wrap up, if you could just give us your final thoughts, your assessment of what the situation is right now in Gaza, what you hope will come out of this?

MAHA ABDALLAH: Again, as I mentioned, I hope that this — that following the hearing sessions and on the basis of precedent by the very same court, where it has issued provisional measures within days’ or weeks’ time on, let’s say, similar cases, but not entirely alike, that the court will order the state of Israel to stop its aggression, to stop its military operations against the Gaza Strip and its people.

The Gaza Strip, as we have seen, there is the large-scale destruction, extensive killings taking place, ongoing and relentless bombardment and killings that are taking place. The catastrophe is so immense that we’re unable to understand or comprehend. Between the starvation, the dehydration, the lack of medical facilities and accessibility to medical supplies, to the most basic necessities for life and dignity, and for life and survival even, together with the fact that it’s under a total siege, blockade and closure that has intensified since the 7th of October, the mass displacement and forcible displacement and transfer of more than 1.9 million Palestinians into areas that are also being targeted and bombed by Israel and its military, all of these require immediate action, and immediate action that should not have taken place today or yesterday, but three months ago.

So, this is — we don’t have time. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the entirety of Palestine, we do not have the privilege of time. So this is why the court — the proceedings before the court, as rightly stated by South Africa in its application, they are of extreme urgency. So the court must immediately act and respond to the urgent situation, again, against the backdrop of the failure of the international system and the international justice mechanisms, as well as the complicity, the open-ended complicity, and support emboldening Israel’s action, emboldening Israel’s atrocities and recurrence and intensification of these violations and grave breaches and international crimes being committed against the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: Maha Abdallah, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian genocide scholar, speaking to us from Jerusalem, and Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, South African human rights lawyer, speaking to us from Johannesburg.

***

Gaza War Fuels Climate Crisis: “Massive” Carbon Emissions from Israeli Bombing
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 11, 2024

Israel’s military assault on Gaza is not just a humanitarian disaster but also generating massive amounts of planet-heating emissions and exacerbating the climate crisis. The carbon emissions from Israel’s bombs, tanks, fighter jets and other military activity in the first two months of the war were higher than the annual carbon footprints of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, according to researchers in the United States and United Kingdom. That is “a really conservative estimate,” says Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani, who reported on the new study. We also speak with Hadeel Ikhmais, head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, who says the climate impacts of the war are in keeping with Israel’s destruction of Palestinian land, water and other natural resources over many decades.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In an exclusive story this week, The Guardian's climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani revealed that, quote, “The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations,” end-quote.

The report is based on new work by researchers in the U.S. and the U.K., and they say even this impact is likely an underestimate. The analysis includes carbon emissions from fuel for aircraft, tanks and other vehicles, as well as emissions from making and exploding bombs, artillery and rockets. It also showed that U.S. cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel accounted for nearly half of all the carbon emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in New York by Nina Lakhani, senior climate justice reporter for The Guardian. Her story is headlined “Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have 'immense' effect on climate catastrophe.” Also with us, in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, is Hadeel Ikhmais, who’s featured in the report, is the head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, their office based in Ramallah.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Nina Lakhani, lay out exactly what you found.

NINA LAKHANI: So, the researchers in the U.K. and U.S., what they did is, it’s the first attempt to calculate the carbon impact, the greenhouse gas impact, of the war in Gaza. And so, information about militaries and about war is very hard to come by, because governments don’t release this data themselves. So, what they did is, for the first 60 days, they looked at all the publicly available information that they could corroborate, including Hamas rockets, the air missions, the ground attacks in Gaza by Israel. And what they calculated is like a really conservative estimate of the carbon dioxide emissions just in the first 60 days.

What they also did is they looked at sort of — you know, gave us a snapshot of the occupation. So they looked at the carbon impact of the Hamas tunnels, which have been constructed since 2007, 2008, and Israel’s iron wall, and they also provided an estimate of the reconstruction costs. So, the conservative estimate they’ve used is that 100,000 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza so far, and the amount of carbon dioxide that will be generated through the reconstruction of those buildings, if that is allowed to go ahead in the coming years.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hadeel Ikhmais, you spoke to Nina for this Guardian report, and you told her — and I’m quoting — “Among all the problems facing the state of Palestine in the coming decades, climate change is the most immediate and certain — and this has been amplified by the occupation and war on Gaza since the 7 October.” So, Hadeel, if you could lay out what were the climate crises that Gaza was confronted with, that Palestine was confronted with, that have now been exacerbated by this now almost three-month-long war?

HADEEL IKHMAIS: Well, we’ve done, through the last years — before even becoming a party to UNFCCC in 2016, we’ve made a lot of research and a lot of studies to find the climate scenarios. And after joining the UNFCCC and ratifying and signing Paris Agreement, Palestine had three very worst — we call them the bad, the worse and the worst scenarios of climate action in Palestine, regarding the heat waves, the droughts, the high unprecedented temperature, the dryness in the rainy season, and also all this fluctuality of fluctuations in the rainfall, in the temperatures, in the increasing of the heat and warm periods, and the decreasing in the colder periods. All of this will make a transformation to the way of life of the Palestinians, from securing the water and also the food security, because Palestine is an agricultural country which relies on the agriculture sector, mainly the olive and livestock, as the first income.

So, all these fluctuations and all these climate scenarios will negatively impacted the livelihood and the basic needs of livelihood in Palestinians in both West Bank and Gaza. And we’ve done assessment to both the high-priority sectors that are vulnerable to the climate action in both West Bank and Gaza. And those are — these are 12 sectors, among them the water and the food security. With occupation, line by line, on the land, in the West Bank and Gaza, will exacerbate the problem by making it very difficult for the Palestinians to adapt and to be vulnerable to these changes — for example, the land confiscation, the water resources restriction, the extraction from the groundwater, the zero shares from the surface waters to the Palestinians —also restrictions —

AMY GOODMAN: Hadeel, Hadeel, I wanted to —

HADEEL IKHMAIS: — also restrictions —

AMY GOODMAN: Hadeel, I wanted to ask you about the impact that comes from Israel’s destruction of renewable energy projects in Gaza. Can you explain what they are?

HADEEL IKHMAIS: Yeah, this is true. And this is very — we’ve been working through the last 10 years on finding energy security resources and water resources from unconventional ways — for example, wastewater treatment, desalination in Gaza, a lot of renewable energy, solar panels — in order to find other resources to Palestinians in Gaza. But with all these — and they are in different shapes. For example, there are big projects, small projects, some entrepreneurship, some small projects for small villages or neighborhoods.

All of these, or basically most of them, were being destructed from the airstrikes and from the war and the last bombardments, among them one big project from the world-funded — from the World Bank and also from the Ministry of Finance in Palestine. Most of these solar panels were destructed. And also, we have another project with the Green Climate Fund, which is the financial arm to the UNFCCC, which is called the water banking, in north Gaza. Also, we don’t know how is the exact damage of this facility, because there is a lack of communication between the technical team in West Bank and Gaza because of the war under, because technical persons and colleagues are under war. So we don’t know how much is the real damage to these facilities. But all the reports from different organizations, from the WHO, from the UNICEF, from a lot of international organizations, show that there are a lot of facilities that have been extremely and mostly damaged because of the airstrikes in different places, regarding to water facilities, water pipelines, energy units, desalination units, wastewater treatment plants, treatment units. All of them were basically partially or completely destructed by the airstrikes.

And all of these things make it very challenging against combating climate change, because we need those infrastructure to be able to have this adaptive capacity, to have water from unconventional resources, energy security, also the health sector that’s been targeted by targeting the hospitals and all the main facilities for treatment, which —

AMY GOODMAN: Hadeel, I wanted to bring Nina in for the last minute and ask you — we just talked about the International Court of Justice and the case that’s been brought before them today. Your recent article on Israel’s intent to flood Gaza tunnels was cited by South Africa in their case today. We just have a minute. Can you talk about this?

NINA LAKHANI: I mean, I think the targeting, it’s been cited as sort of evidence of the collective punishment. You know, there is no life without water and food. And any targeting of water and food resources and supplies, as argued by South Africa, is evidence of genocidal intent.

And, you know, I think just that article and that work and also the work that we’re talking about here regarding the climate impact, you know, it shows that in this situation, the human suffering, the environmental destruction, immediate environmental destruction, and the long-term climate impacts are all interrelated. You know, the carbon emissions may seem very small compared to the global emissions, but they will have a direct impact and an indirect impact on Palestine, on Israel and all of us globally.

And I think that the climate — sort of the carbon analysis of war is something that really hasn’t been thought about. It’s sort of an evolving science and evolving area. But I think, as well as the immediate environmental destruction regarding, you know, what Hadeel has talked about, the sort of targeting of water and food supplies, has to be thought, as — you know, the impact on the global climate is something that we should be thinking about alongside that.

AMY GOODMAN: Nina, we have to leave it there, Nina Lakhani with The Guardian, and Hadeel Ikhmais, head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority.

[admin]

“Gaslighting and Cherry-Picking”: How Israel Is Defending Itself at World Court on Charges of Genocide
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/12/ ... transcript

The second day of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at The Hague saw Israel take the stand, defending against accusations that its government is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. South Africa is demanding an emergency suspension of Israel’s aerial and ground assault on Gaza in front of the United Nations’ highest court. From The Hague, we hear from Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the organization that sued President Biden in November, accusing him of failing to prevent genocide in Gaza. Shamas recaps the two days of hearings and discusses other avenues for holding Israel accountable. “Whether it’s at the ICJ or whether it’s in federal court in the United States, we’re really looking to government to do everything that they can to uphold their duty to prevent an unfolding genocide,” says Shamas.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today, Israel defended itself against accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In one of the biggest cases ever to come before the United Nations’ high court, South Africa accused Israel of acts of genocide against Palestinians and demanded an emergency suspension of Israel’s aerial and ground assault on Gaza. A decision on that request will probably take weeks, though the full case will likely last years. Israel often boycotts international tribunals and U.N. investigations, calling them unfair and biased, but this time, for the first time, they attended the hearing, sent a high-level legal team to defend against the accusations of genocide.

The two-day hearings at what’s called the Peace Palace in The Hague began Thursday with South Africa laying out its case against Israel, saying its three-month assault on Gaza is being conducted with the intent to bring about the destruction of Palestinians as a group. Israel defended itself today against the accusations. At the hearing, Israeli legal adviser Tal Becker criticized South Africa for accusing Israel of genocide.

TAL BECKER: The applicant has now sought to invoke this term in the context of Israel’s conduct in a war it did not start and did not want, a war in which Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations whose brutality knows no bounds. …

The applicant has regrettably put before the court a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture. The entirety of its case hinges on a deliberately curated, decontextualized and manipulative description of the reality of current hostilities.

South Africa purports to come to this court in the lofty position of a guardian of the interest of humanity. But in delegitimizing Israel’s 75-year existence in its opening presentation yesterday, that broad commitment to humanity rang hollow. And in its sweeping counterfactual description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seemed to erase both Jewish history and any Palestinian agency or responsibility.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another clip of the Israeli legal adviser Tal Becker, who talked about the October 7th attack by Hamas, saying Israel had a right to defend itself.

TAL BECKER: First, that if there have been acts that may be characterized as genocidal, then they have been perpetrated against Israel. If there is a concern about the obligations of states under the Genocide Convention, then it is in relation to their responsibilities to act against Hamas’s proudly declared agenda of annihilation, which is not a secret and is not in doubt. …

Astonishingly, the court has been requested to indicate a provisional measure calling on Israel to suspend its military operations. But this amounts to an attempt to deny Israel its ability to meet its obligations to the defense of its citizens, to the hostages and to over 110,000 internally displaced Israelis unable to safely return to their homes. …

Madam President, members of the court, the hostilities between Israel and Hamas have exacted a terrible toll on both Israelis and Palestinians. But any genuine effort to understand the cause of this toll must take account of the horrendous reality created by Hamas within the Gaza Strip. …

Madam President, members of the court, the nightmarish environment created by Hamas has been concealed by the applicant, but it is the environment in which Israel is compelled to operate. Israel is committed, as it must be, to comply with the law, but it does so in the face of Hamas’s utter contempt for the law. It is committed, as it must be, to demonstrate humanity, but it does so in the face of Hamas’s utter inhumanity. …

It is respectfully submitted that the application and request should be dismissed for what they are: a libel, designed to deny Israel the right to defend itself according to the law from the unprecedented terrorist onslaught it continues to face, and to free the 136 hostages Hamas still holds.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now at The Hague by Diala Shamas. She’s a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. In November, CCR sued President Biden, accusing him of failing to prevent genocide.

Diala, thank you so much for being with us. I know it’s very noisy outside. There’s a major pro-Palestinian rally outside the International Court of Justice. This is historic, this two days. Yesterday South Africa accused Israel of genocide. Today Israel defended itself. Can you talk about their major arguments, saying this is an existential battle, they are simply engaging in self-defense?

DIALA SHAMAS: Thank you for having me.

Yes, it really is a historical moment. And I would have preferred to start with yesterday’s argument and just the significance of what we heard yesterday and what we saw yesterday and what all of these people that are here now, even over an hour after the hearings concluded, still chanting and protesting and thanking South Africa, the significance that South Africa brought this petition and started, at the outset of the hearing yesterday, reminding the world and the court that the context is 75 years of apartheid. And, of course, we all know South Africa and the South African people have emerged from a horrific battle against apartheid. They know what abandonment by the international community looks like and feels like. And it is in that spirit that they have come to this court and also were very clear in their statement that they have come to the court out of their legal and moral obligation, but their legal obligation to do something to prevent the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people.

Today we heard predictable arguments in response, nothing that we haven’t already heard over the course of the last three months, and in many ways of what we’ve heard from the Israeli legal wing for the last 20 years, leaning heavily on self-defense — although South Africa, clearly, yesterday, and then today in a brief statement at the steps right here in front of me, reminded the world that self-defense is never a justification for genocide or any atrocity, really.

The other arguments, we heard a lot of more sort of factual disputes and gaslighting and cherry-picking and a lot of complaints that everything is sort of one-sided. And the two other main legal arguments that they leveraged were, essentially, first, that the court shouldn’t have jurisdiction in the first place, that South Africa hadn’t followed the proper procedures, that they hadn’t followed the appropriate protocols of notice to be in the court in the first place. And the second is that South Africa — the relief that South Africa is seeking, the provisional measures, are not something that the court is essentially permitted to grant, you know, citing various arguments to make that point.

So, you can’t be here, and then you can’t do anything about it, and, in the middle, everything we do is self-defense — and complete deflection, and never, at any point, addressing the incredibly powerful arguments laid out yesterday at a hearing for three hours by the South African legal team, the really compelling factual and legal arguments on intent, laying out, you know, the litany of statements by Israeli officials in the highest level of government all the way down to the foot soldiers, showing an environment and showing intent to commit genocide in Gaza, and everything else that was laid out.

So, it was really stark to sit today and listen to the arguments, after a day, yesterday, where, frankly, for the first time in the last three months, we’ve been able to hear, from beginning to end, uninterrupted, a compelling case of what we’ve sort of all seen play out over the course of the last three months. The South African legal team noted that we’ve been watching this on — atrocities on our phones. We have been seeing Palestinians broadcast their killing and the genocidal acts live. And the South African legal team put that out to the world and to the court very compellingly.

AMY GOODMAN: Diala, I want to turn to another clip from today’s hearing. This is Deputy Attorney General of Israel Gilad Noam calling on the court to dismiss the charges.

GILAD NOAM: This case concerns a large-scale armed conflict with tragic consequences for civilians on both sides. Yes, there is a heart-wrenching armed conflict, but the attempt to classify it as genocide and trigger provisional measures is not just unfounded in law, it has far-reaching and negative implications that extend well beyond the case before you.

Ultimately, entertaining the applicant’s request will not strengthen the commitment to prevent and punish genocide, but weaken it. It will turn an instrument adopted by the international community to prevent horrors of the kind that shocked the conscience of humanity during the Holocaust into a weapon in the hands of terrorist groups who have no regard for humanity or for the law. …

For us, provisional measures would lead to a perverse situation. It would effectively allow Hamas to continue attacking the citizens of Israel, to hold 136 hostages in unbearable conditions, to keep tens of thousands of displaced Israelis from returning to their homes, and, essentially, to promote its plan to massacre as many Israelis and Jews as it can.

AMY GOODMAN: Diala Shamas, you’re standing outside The Hague. You watched this argument inside The Hague. It just concluded. Senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, your response?

DIALA SHAMAS: Everything we expected. There were no new arguments raised by the Israeli legal team. Essentially, it amounted to them telling the court, “Trust us. Don’t believe what we’ve been telling the world, what we have been putting out in all of our statements, the statements that have circulated, clearly, you know, with genocidal intent, just saying we want to wipe out the population of Gaza, making comparisons, the famous Amalek quote.” And now they’re just saying, “Well, we were not serious there. Just trust us, that we are a, again, democracy with the rule of law” — this is something that — this is a public image that the Israeli government has, you know, done a lot of work to cultivate over decades, and that they do everything by the book. “And just don’t look at the evidence. Don’t look at everything the South Africans laid out plainly yesterday. Don’t look at everything the world has been seeing. And just trust us that we have procedures that we are following here, and, you know, we’re doing our best.”

And plenty of, you know, sort of concerns — and it’s hard to really figure out where to start picking, but a few really concerning statements about civilians, essentially making the argument that civilians have become targets because the legal team repeatedly stated over the course of their arguments that — you know, that because Hamas is operating in Gaza, Israel has to do what it has to do, and that includes the targeting of civilians.

But again, fundamentally, the claim that’s brought by South Africa here is the claim of genocide, which you can’t — there’s simply no argument that self-defense is a justification for genocide. The South African team has laid out the argument showing intent and also the underlying acts, and everything else is essentially a distraction.

AMY GOODMAN: Diala, the Biden administration is due in federal court later this month. While Israel faces charges of genocide at The Hague yesterday and today, in a case you’re working on with CCR, you’re taking it right to President Biden. Explain the theory of your case and what exactly you expect to happen. And is there any connection between that case in a U.S. federal court and what we’re seeing right now at the U.N.’s highest court, the World Court?

DIALA SHAMAS: Yeah, I couldn’t hear the full question, but I think you’re asking us about the case that the Center for Constitutional Rights has brought against Biden, President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and Austin, and Secretary of Defense Austin, in California federal court, raising failure in their duty to prevent a genocide and complicity in genocide arguments. And that case has a hearing coming up on February — I’m sorry, January 26th, where our team will be standing up in court arguing for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to order the end of military assistance and other forms of assistance, political and diplomatic assistance, to Israel in light of the unfolding genocide.

The relationship is, you know, having to stand up in court and defend that a few weeks after this hearing, and possibly also after the ICJ has issued preliminary measures, is going to put this administration in a — I think it will be one of the first tests that we’ll have of how the U.S. government is responding to the ICJ — an ICJ decision and to the arguments raised here and the arguments that we’re also raising in the U.S. case. I think we’re all going to be looking to how the world responds to any preliminary measures issued by the Court of Justice.

As the South African attorney yesterday said, this is really, ultimately, a test of the very legitimacy of international law and the international legal order. If we can’t stop an unfolding genocide, then what is any of it for? She made a compelling closing argument, citing to a Palestinian, Munther Isaac, who spoke his sort of Christmas sermons, asking the world where — you know, “What will you say where you were when a genocide was unfolding?” And so, whether it’s at the ICJ or whether it’s in federal court in the United States, we’re really looking to government to do everything that they can to uphold their duty to prevent an unfolding genocide.

And having our case in the U.S. is, of course, incredibly important because the U.S. is the biggest supporter of Israel. There’s been investigative reporting showing how much military aid and military support has been indispensable to Israel’s assault and war on Gaza. And yet we’ve also seen repeated statements of unconditional support from the U.S. administration to the Israeli government, despite almost — you know, despite three months of daily attacks on civilians and daily statements showing an intent to destroy the civilian population of Gaza, in whole or in part, the Palestinian population.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Again, in November, CCR sued President Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, accusing them of failing to prevent a genocide. For those who missed yesterday’s show, it was just after South Africa made its case at the International Court of Justice. We wanted to bring you South Africa lawyer Adila Hassim, who helped to lay out South Africa’s case at The Hague.

ADILA HASSIM: For the past 96 days, Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare. Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry and bombs from air, land and sea. They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall. This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s South African lawyer Adila Hassim speaking yesterday before the International Court of Justice, laying out South Africa’s case against Israel, saying it’s engaged in genocide in Gaza. To see excerpts of yesterday, you can go to democracynow.org.

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“They Want to Silence Us”: Knesset Member Ofer Cassif Faces Expulsion for Backing South Africa Genocide Case
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/12/ ... transcript

Israeli Knesset member Ofer Cassif is being threatened with expulsion from Israel’s legislature after he signed a petition supporting South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of acts of genocide. Cassif says the impeachment is based on an antidemocratic law that suppresses free speech. “They want me and my friends to shut up,” he says of the government’s persecution of dissenting legislators. “We’ve been against the war from the beginning because we are against bloodshed.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to bring you response to the two days of the International Court of Justice, the historic hearing. Yesterday, South Africa presented its case against Israel, saying what it’s engaged in in Gaza is genocide. Today, Israel defended itself and said they are simply engaging in self-defense.

We’re going to turn right now to Ronald Lamola, who is the minister of justice and correctional services of South Africa. He’s part of the South African legal delegation. He responded to what Israel said.

RONALD LAMOLA: The state of Israel today has failed to disprove South Africa’s compelling case that was presented before the court yesterday. We stand by the facts, the law and all the evidence we have submitted yesterday. And we believe, and stand very confident, that those facts, the law, still are in violation of the Genocide Convention. …

Under the Genocide Convention, nothing justify genocidal acts currently being committed by Israel. Self-defense is no answer to genocide. Nothing can ever justify genocide. There is no balancing exercise, as Israel has sought to suggest. The prohibition is absolute. It is [inaudible] rule of law. No matter what some individual within the group of Palestine in Gaza may have done, and no matter how great the threat to Israel’s citizens might be, genocidal attacks on the whole of Gaza and the whole of its population with the intent of destroying them cannot be justified at all.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Ronald Lamola, minister of justice of South Africa, speaking outside The Hague.

We end today’s show with an Israeli lawmaker who is backing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, even as he faces expulsion from the Israeli Knesset. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting 70 lawmakers in the Knesset have signed a motion to expel Ofer Cassif from the legislative body, after he signed a petition supporting the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Ofer Cassif is a Jewish lawmaker for the Arab-Jewish Hadash-Ta’al coalition. He denounced the move to expel him, pointing out no action has been taken against lawmakers who have called for the complete destruction of Gaza or backed the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. He has also been critical of the potential criminal negligence of the Israeli government on October 7th, he says.

Ofer Cassif, welcome back to Democracy Now! Thank you for joining us from Jerusalem. Can you talk about what’s happening to you in the Israeli Knesset, where you serve?

OFER CASSIF: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me.

And it’s very important for me, first of all, to emphasize that I am not against Israel or anti-Israeli. I’m against the government of Israel, because the government of Israel is at the moment the most dangerous to the Israeli society and to the Israelis. So my signature in support of this South African appeal to the ICJ is not against Israel. It’s for Israel and against the Israeli government and its policies. I have been saying that.

First of all, already 85 members of the Knesset signed on this. Allow me just very, very briefly to explain the process of expulsion, of impeachment of members of the Knesset. It is based on a law that was enacted on 2016, which is an undemocratic law because, of course, it allows tyranny of the majority. It allows the majority to persecute and suppress not only the freedom of speech, but the very existence of a member of the Knesset as such that belongs to the minority, and one’s, you know, ideas are not exactly acceptable, popular.

Now, the process of impeachment goes as follows. There’s a need of a minimum of 70 members of the Knesset, out of 120, to sign a motion that requests to expel a member of the Knesset. Then, if there is that number, if that number is achieved, it goes to the Knesset committee in which 75% of the members are needed to vote for the impeachment in order to go through to the assembly. And once it goes to the assembly, of 90 out of 120 vote for it, then the member of the Knesset after 14 days is expelled, with the option, of course, to appeal to the Supreme Court.

And we are now on between the first and the second stage. Eighty-five signatures were already collected. And not in the coming week, the week after, next Monday, 22nd of January, I’m about to face the Knesset committee towards my impeachment.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about their arguments, what — some have said your support for the South Africa case indirectly aligns with goals of Hamas and the attack on October 7th. There were allegations by the Israeli members in The Hague today that South Africa is serving as the political wing of Hamas. Your response to all of this, and what it means to you to talk as a Jewish member, an Israeli member of Knesset, being critical of the Israeli government and what they’re doing right now and Gaza, calling it a genocide?

OFER CASSIF: First of all, I’m very proud of my views and beliefs and of my friends’ and comrades’ views and beliefs and our activities, because we are the only ones who totally reject any kind of violence. Accusing us in supporting, implicitly or otherwise, the terrible carnage committed by Hamas on 7th of October is not only a sheer lie — that they are aware of — but it is also incitement, because they know perfectly well — I, personally, and my colleagues, we published time and again in the last 100 days since the massacre committed by Hamas took place, we published everywhere — I think that I said that to you also in one of our former interviews — that we are totally against, we totally condemn the terrible crime against humanity and war crime, this massacre, and the atrocities committed by Hamas. We are totally against it. Accusing me in supporting it, one way or another, this is a sheer lie, incitement, that has nothing to do with reality.

But they want to silent us. They want me and my friends to shut up. They don’t want us to raise our voice against any kind of violence, because, as I said a million times, as someone who continuously for years object and oppose the Israeli occupation and siege against the Palestinian people, we said, I said, explicitly, that even the crimes of the siege and the occupation cannot and will never justify the massacre committed by Hamas. We added that the massacre, the criminal massacre by Hamas, cannot justify the massacre and assault of Israel on Gaza, in which around 30,000 people are already dead, were killed. The vast majority, more than 70%, are innocent civilians, around 10,000 children.

So, raising voice against those things, supporting investigation of those things — and please bear in mind that in the petition that I signed on, there’s no categorical statement, let alone by me, that Israel is guilty in genocide. It does say that it deserves an investigation, impartial investigation. And the government of Israel, one way or another, branches of the government of Israel, cannot pursue an impartial investigation. It’s as if we were asking a thief to investigate oneself if it did steal something or not. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s one of the main things in supporting the appeal by South Africa: to investigate.

On top of that, we’ve been against the war from the beginning because we are against bloodshed. We know that the bloodshed and the terrible assault on Gaza, apart from being in itself criminal and deadly, by definition, it won’t bring security to no one, especially not to the Israelis. We want the bloodshed to stop. We want the war to end for the sake of lives of Palestinians and Israelis alike.

AMY GOODMAN: Ofer Cassif —

OFER CASSIF: The thousands and thousands of Palestinians — just one sentence, please. It’s not only the vast — the so many Palestinians, thousands of Palestinians, who are killed. Israeli soldiers are killed. The hostages are at risk, because the government doesn’t do anything to release them.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, because our show is ending.

OFER CASSIF: This appeal can help them.

AMY GOODMAN: Ofer Cassif, Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset, facing expulsion.

[admin]

100+ Days into Israel’s War on Gaza, Doctors Demand Ceasefire to Address “Apocalyptic” Health Crisis
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/16/gaza#transcript

Worldwide protests this weekend called for a ceasefire while marking 100 days of Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and siege of the Gaza Strip since the October 7 Hamas attack. United Nations humanitarian leaders issued a joint demand Monday for dramatically increasing the flow of aid into Gaza. “The situation is spiraling out of control” in Gaza, says pediatric neurologist Omar Abdel-Mannan, who shares on-the-ground health worker reports of the “apocalyptic” scenes in collapsing hospitals. “This is medieval-style medicine that we are seeing, and this is 100% man-made.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Major rallies calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were held worldwide this weekend, marking 100 days of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Those rallies included one in Washington, D.C., where organizers say 400,000 people protested U.S. complicity in what they called one of the deadliest and most destructive military assaults in recent history. Palestinian health officials say Israeli attacks have killed 158 civilians in Gaza over the last 24 hours alone, bringing the death toll since October 7th to 24,000, though this likely an undercount — the majority of those killed women and children. It’s believed more than 10,000 children have died.

On Sunday, President Biden put a statement marking 100 days since the October 7th Hamas attack and condemned Hamas for continuing to hold more than 100 hostages. But he made no mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, injured or displaced during Israel’s bombardment.

On Monday, United Nations humanitarian leaders issued a joint demand for dramatically increasing the flow of aid into Gaza. This is the World Food Programme’s Palestine country director, Samer AbdelJaber.

SAMER ABDELJABER: Everyone in Gaza is hungry. We are exploring all possible solutions, but none are sufficient in the face of obstacles. There are people starving in areas, and we are not able to give basic food for. … The needs are rising faster than we are able to respond. We need to be able to bring in more supplies, and we need safe access to reach people everywhere in Gaza, not just those who are close to the borders. We need a long-lasting ceasefire to stop the suffering.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Dr. Omar Abdel-Mannan, pediatric neurologist, co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices and Health Workers for Palestine, in constant touch with his colleagues in Gaza, joining us from London.

Doctor, thanks so much for being with us. The assault this weekend, especially in the central and south part, in Khan Younis, is intense, with well over a hundred Palestinians killed just in the last 24 hours. Can you talk about the desperation of people there and what you think could lead to a ceasefire, as millions around the world demanded one this weekend?

DR. OMAR ABDEL-MANNAN: Thank you so much for having me on the program.

So, the situation is spiraling out of control. Many of our colleagues, British doctors who have just come out of Gaza in the last few days, led by Medical Aid for Palestinians, have come out and said the scenes inside the hospitals are apocalyptic, to say the least. They describe scenes inside Al-Aqsa Hospital, which is no longer functioning and has been completely taken over and besieged by the Israeli occupation forces. They described scenes of 500 admissions in a night, many of whom were serious casualties from air raids, the majority of whom were children, children with double above-the-knee amputations of their lower limbs, children with burns down to the bone that are so horrific that they are disfigured for life, and also women and men also being killed and targeted. What we are seeing is a systematic targeting of healthcare facilities, healthcare workers, 370 at least at the last count of whom have been killed, being either killed, maimed, abducted, or even, more so, tortured when they’ve been held captive, as Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah mentioned on the rally in London on Saturday. These are the reports coming outside from there.

What we are seeing is not a war on children. This is a genocidal, uncontrollable massacre of Palestinians at large and en masse. The Israeli occupation forces and the Israeli government has made it very clear that they are now in a situation where they want to either exterminate Palestinians or force them and displace them out of their ancestral home after 75 years of occupation.

And what would lead to a ceasefire? Well, the simple answer is the American government. President Biden, when he comes out and says, on a national address a hundred days of the 7th of October, he feels for the hostages and the families, we all feel terrible about the situation on the 7th of October. But to completely nullify and ignore the tens of thousands — at least 24,000 — Gazans who have been killed in cold blood by an Israeli war machine is, frankly, outrageous. Frankly, the U.S. government and the U.K. government and other Western leaders are complicit in this, because they are arming the same Israeli bombs that are raining hellfire on Palestinian hospitals, Palestinian schools, Palestinian bakeries and water sanitation plans. Make no mistake: This is an attempt to completely wipe out an infrastructure and a public health system for people in Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Doctor, I wanted to ask you — there have been about an estimated 15,000 children born in Gaza since the assault began. Could you talk about the impact on pregnant women with the collapse of all of these medical facilities?

DR. OMAR ABDEL-MANNAN: So, we had an obstetrician that was with this WHO team that just came out of Al-Aqsa. What she described to us, in speaking to colleagues on the ground, is women giving birth in the shelters, in the rubble, in the streets, with no maternal — maternity care for women who are pregnant in the north and central regions of Gaza. That is at least a million people with no access to maternity care. That means women having to go through high-risk pregnancies, having to go through deliveries with no hospital or pre-hospital care, with no midwives, no doctors to help. What that has led to is many, many women dying in childbirth or after from the normal complications that often happen after a high-risk pregnancy. That includes hemorrhage, where they would not be able to have a blood transfusion because of the lack of supplies. That includes women fitting, having seizures, and no medication being given to them to stop these seizures. This is medieval-style medicine that we are seeing, and this is 100% man-made. Again, this could stop right now if there was a permanent and lasting ceasefire. And unfortunately, as I said, the U.K., the U.S. has continued to warmonger and to actually allow Israel to continue in its genocidal tactics.

And the Global South has started to mobilize. And there has been a great awakening for people who were before not aware of the situation in Palestine. But 70 years of occupation now fast-forwarded and sped up at double speed with this genocidal attacks has led to people protesting in the hundreds of thousands across London, Washington, D.C., and other major cities. And as healthcare workers, myself included, speaking on behalf of Health Workers for Palestine and Gaza Medic Voices, we do not accept this. We will not remain silent. We have escalated and will continue to do so. And as a concerned citizen of the world, what we are seeing is a lack of humanity, a lack of response from our leaders, who are impotent, frankly. And now it is the duty of citizens like us to stand up, to protest, to approach our members of Parliament, to put pressure on our governments to act. And if that doesn’t happen, then the next step, which should be happening now, is to boycott, to boycott any Israeli product that is funding a state that is destroying people and killing human beings in their homes, to apply pressure for academic sanctions, for cultural boycott, academic boycott, and sanctions on the Israeli state. And this is the next step, and this is what I’m calling for as a concerned citizen to my fellow colleagues, health workers, and general citizen professionals and nonprofessionals across the world, to start standing up and start speaking up, because we have had enough. We are sick and tired of seeing our own colleagues being killed and maimed en masse.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Doctor, could you talk about your work trying to bring children to the U.K. for medical care from Gaza and the obstacles you’ve faced?

DR. OMAR ABDEL-MANNAN: So, this is work that is being done by colleagues of ours. There are numerous projects that are attempting to bring children to European cities, to European hospitals, to provide care, similar to what the PCRF, the Palestinian Child Relief Society, has been doing so well to the United States previous to the 7th of October. We are in discussions with the relevant bodies to try and make this happen. Many of these children are children who have had complex injuries as a result of direct bombardment and bombing, who need years of reconstructive plastic surgical work. And these will be specific cases that we will try to help, where the need is not met in Egypt, in Jordan or in neighboring countries. But this is, you know, under — this is happening, but watch this space, essentially.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Omar Abdel-Mannan, you have Israel talking about this going on for more than a year. They are saying that Hamas has to release the hostages. Meanwhile, Hamas released a hostage video where one of the hostages is shown saying that two other hostages were killed in an Israeli strike. You have the mass protest of hostage families that took place over the weekend, demanding that it be the first priority to release the hostages. What is your response to the Israeli government, to Netanyahu and to the others in the war cabinet saying first Hamas has to release all the hostages?

DR. OMAR ABDEL-MANNAN: We’ve seen this narrative time and time again. At every interlude in this continued bombardment, we have seen the excuse of hostages, the excuses of human shields, the excuses of Hamas tunnels under hospitals, and many of these have been debunked by mainstream media. The Washington Post, BBC News found that many of these tunnels underneath the hospitals were, in fact, you know, previously used for as ventilation shafts. They’re not even Hamas tunnels. So, this idea of the hostages being released, as you have correctly said, we are seeing the Israelis shooting at their own people. They shot two or three hostages waving white flags, who were Israeli hostages running and fleeing from their captives, and they were shot dead at point-blank range. So, frankly, to me and to all of us who have seen the demasking of the Israeli government’s intentions, these are just purely excuses.

And unfortunately, the mainstream media, many of whom are in the U.K. and the U.S., are complicit in this. They are allowing these narratives. When I go on every TV show and I get asked the first question, “Do you condemn Hamas?” or “Do you know about the tunnels underneath the hospitals?” this is pushing that narrative forward. And frankly, investigations so far, you know, in what remains of Gaza, has shown that these — many of these stories, a majority of whom are not true, simply not true. So, that would be my response.

And again, I am not, and we are not, you know, going to be taken for a ride by the Israeli government’s narrative. We know exactly what is happening here. And the West and the U.K. and the U.S. and other governments, as I said, are complicit in continuing this narrative. And until there is a permanent ceasefire, until there is proper humanitarian aid entering through aid corridors, until there is the end of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the continuing atrocities happening in the West Bank with settlers attacking Palestinians, then we will not stop. And we will continue, and we will mobilize, in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions, against this genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Omar Abdel-Mannan, we want to thank you for being with us, pediatric neurologist and co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices and Health Workers for Palestine, speaking to us from London.

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Israel’s War on Journalists: More Reporters Killed in Gaza in 3 Months Than Any Country Over Entire Year
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/17/ ... transcript

Gaza is now the deadliest place on Earth for media workers. By some estimates, over 110 journalists have been killed there since Israel began its assault on the territory following the October 7 Hamas attack, and the Committee to Protect Journalists says more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. We speak with CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator Sherif Mansour, who says journalists in Gaza are showing great courage amid horrific working conditions. “They really are rewriting what it means to be a journalist today with immense, brave and never-seen-before sacrifices,” Mansour says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza from the land, air and sea continued today, much of it in the southern part of the territory in the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah. At least 163 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Some of the worst shelling hit the western side of Khan Younis, which was designated in the early stages of Israel’s assault on Gaza as a so-called safe zone by Israel. There’s also been intense Israeli bombardment in the vicinity of Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in the city, and tanks and armored vehicles are on the main road leading to the area. Among the places hit in Khan Younis was a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. An eyewitness described the attack.

EYEWITNESS: We saw death with all colors. The tanks entered. We saw everything vividly. It was horrible — random shelling, random fire, random killing. They are coming just to kill and go back home. This is a Nakba. They are just coming to kill children, women, elderly, in the bathroom, in the school, in the hospital, in the street, anywhere. They killed us. They are just coming to kill only. Just that. Just killing.

AMY GOODMAN: The interruption of communications and internet services in Gaza, for days, has continued for the fifth consecutive day, the longest telecommunications blackout of the war so far. This has caused delays for emergency workers to respond to airstrikes and has hampered media coverage from Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh left Gaza on Tuesday, crossing into Egypt, then flying to Qatar to receive medical treatment. Dahdouh has come to symbolize both the suffering and resilience of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. In October, four members of his family were killed, including his wife, his 15-year-old son, his 7-year-old daughter and his grandson, in an Israeli strike on a refugee camp where they were seeking shelter after their home was bombed. Last week, his eldest son, 27-year-old-Hamza, also a journalist, was killed along with another journalist in an Israeli airstrike on their car in Khan Younis. Dahdouh will receive medical treatment in Doha for a wound he received when Israel bombed the area he was in that ended up killing his cameraperson Samer Abudaqa.

By some counts, over 110 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. The Committee to Protect Journalists has found more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist and a Democracy Now! correspondent. His latest piece for The Intercept investigates the killing of Abudaqa. It’s headlined “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” He’s joining us from here in New York. In Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Sherif Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Before we talk to Sharif about the cameraman, the Al Jazeera cameraman who bled to death over five hours, can we put this in a broader context, Sherif Mansour? Talk about the astounding number, the horrific number, of journalists who have died in Gaza.

SHERIF MANSOUR: Well, thank you for having me again, Amy. I’ve already talked to you about this at least twice, and the number only goes higher. The deadly pattern we discussed become more deadly. And we have since talked, talked about the apparent pattern of targeting against journalists, their families. And specifically when we discuss Al Jazeera and al-Dahdouh’s family, they really are rewriting what it means to be a journalist today, with immense, brave and never-seen-before sacrifices. The Palestinian journalists, local journalists — so far, 76 out of 83 we’ve counted since the start of the war are Palestinians. The overwhelming majority are killed by the Israeli army. The Israeli army has killed more journalists in the span of those three months than any other entity or army have done over a course of one year since 1992. This is the most dangerous and the most — we’ve never seen any assignment like this before.

Of course, what we called on is independent and transparent and thorough investigation. We want to see the case of al-Dahdouh, his son, Al Jazeera and others that show a culpability of the Israeli army to be put to public scrutiny by allowing immediate entry to international media and international investigators into Gaza without censorship by the Israeli army. The killing must stop. And for that to happen, the record must be made public, and U.S., European and other allies of Israel need to call Israel on that record and ensure those investigations are made immediately public.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sherif Mansour, what has been the response of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces, given the enormous number of journalists killed? Have they accepted any culpability at all for any of these killings?

SHERIF MANSOUR: The cases of precise attacks by drones against Al Jazeera, which happened at least twice in the last four weeks, included for the first time the Israeli army taking responsibility of doing those attacks, but also doing as they’ve done in the past, when they are held responsible because the case of a journalist is someone who was behind an international news organization. They said they will investigate, but they also push false narratives, claims that they are terrorists or that they were part of an ongoing crossfire, and, as we’ve seen in past incidents before this war, this time around three narratives pushed by the Israeli army, correcting and changing and providing nothing more than a questionable document, with English for the first time, coming from what they said was a terrorist group, but providing no other evidence that support their claim, and have — so far, the outlets, eyewitnesses, and the families of the journalists have denied the Israeli army narratives and showed to the contrary that, for example, Hamza, an Al Jazeera journalist, was approved to travel — before his father, Wael Dahdouh, did yesterday — after Israel vetted him. And if he was wanted by any chance, he wouldn’t have had this approval before he was killed. And other testimony and accounts that we and others are showing the contradicting nature of these narratives, this is also the same narrative we said happened before this war started, in our “Deadly Pattern” report. And it is a pattern of responses designed to evade responsibilities by throwing the word “terrorists,” by also pushing out those narratives until the world look away.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are both calling for Israel to be officially investigated for war crimes and its targeting of journalists, not only in Gaza, but outside of Gaza, because an internal Reuters investigation found that one of its journalists, Issam Abdallah, was killed by an Israeli tank shell fired on him and a group of six other journalists in southern Lebanon on October 13th. Could you talk about these attacks outside of Gaza?

SHERIF MANSOUR: So, we saw the same pattern of disregard for press insignia that we reported before this war, 13 out of 20 journalists killed by IDF fire over 21 years who wore press signs and press insignia showing that they are media personnel. And like those cases, the case of Issam Abdallah show, with independent investigation, physical proof, forensic proof from the scene, in addition to mapping, audio and visual analysis by international human rights groups and international media organizations, that show that those journalists did not pose any threat to Israeli government positions, that they have been seen by an Israeli drone at least an hour, that they were visibly expressing or showing press signs and only their cameras, and the position that they have taken was a high-vantage hill that did not obscure their location with being close to any camera or house that justified that they would have any threat. And all of this and other evidence have shown that what we show in the past, in the cases of at least three journalists that we categorized as murdered before this course, including Shireen Abu Akleh and Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hassin, who were killed in Gaza, that there was no justification for the use of lethal force by the Israeli army. And those and other cases [inaudible] that we call for independent investigation as war crimes, because the Israeli army did not live up to their commitments and obligation under international law.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Shireen Abu Akleh was killed May 11, 2022, outside the Jenin refugee camp. Sharif Abdel Kouddous did a George Polk Award-winning documentary on the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. He’s joining us, as well.

***

How Israel Bombed Al Jazeera Journalists & Blocked Rescue of Cameraman Samer Abudaqa Until He Died
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/17/ ... transcript

We hear from Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, whose recent article for The Intercept documents how Israel bombed two Al Jazeera journalists in mid-December while they were accompanying rescue workers, seriously injuring both. But while the network’s Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh managed to get to an ambulance nearby, his cameraman Samer Abudaqa bled to death from his wounds as Israeli forces prevented medical workers from reaching him for about five hours, despite the desperate entreaties of many foreign journalists to save the life of their colleague. “The world should be outraged about this killing, about all the killings that are happening to Palestinian journalists in Gaza,” says Abdel Kouddous.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, I wanted to ask you about this latest piece you did for The Intercept that’s headlined “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” Give us the tick-tock, the chronology on what happened on that horrific day, when he and Wael al-Dahdouh, who is the Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera, went to the school that was bombed. Tell us exactly what happened.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right, Amy. And when we talk about the killing of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, this was an incident on December 15th where much of the world watched as hours ticked by as Samer Abudaqa was wounded and prevented from getting medical care by Israel and eventually died. And so, that timeline of what happened, I think, is extremely important.

But, basically, Wael al-Dahdouh, who is Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, went with Samer Abudaqa, who’s a 20-year veteran journalist, a cameraman — they went to this school in Khan Younis which had been bombed earlier in the day, and they were accompanied by a team of Civil Defense workers. That team had received — had requested and received approval by the Israeli military through the Red Cross to be in the area. They got there around noon. They spent about two-and-a-half hours in the area. This is according to Wael al-Dahdouh. And as they were wrapping up their coverage, there were these — he said there were hardly anyone in the area. There were drones buzzing overhead. They were just about to leave and go back to the ambulance that had brought them there, when a strike hit them, at about 2:30 p.m.

Wael al-Dahdouh was thrown to the ground. He said when he got up and kind of regained awareness, he realized he was bleeding quite profusely from his arm and that he would bleed to death if he didn’t get medical attention. He looked over and saw the three Civil Defense workers who were accompanying them had been killed instantly. And then, at a small distance away, he saw his colleague, Samer Abudaqa, on the ground. He had been wounded in the lower part of his body. Wael said that he seemed like he was screaming — Wael at that point had lost much of his hearing from the blast — and that Samer couldn’t get up. Wael realized the only chance that both of them had was for him to get to medical attention and get help to bring Samer out, because he couldn’t get up. So Wael somehow stumbled across about 800 meters to the ambulance that was waiting. He begged them to go in and get Samer, but they insisted on evacuating him first to a hospital in Khan Younis and that another ambulance would go retrieve him. There are videos of Wael al-Dahdouh receiving treatment, wincing in pain, calling on people to go get Samer, telling them to coordinate with the Red Cross.

What we understand from Wael and others is that an ambulance did go immediately to try and retrieve Samer from the area, but that they were fired on, or in their area, in their proximity, by Israeli forces. At the same time, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Ramallah, Walid al-Omari, was making calls to the Red Cross — this is around 3:00, 3:30 p.m. — and asking the Red Cross to liaise with the Israeli military to allow for emergency crews to reach Samer Abudaqa in Khan Younis. So the Israeli military knew, at least by 3:00 or 3:30, that there was a wounded journalist who lay helpless that needed evacuation.

And at the same time, news was spreading of Samer Abudaqa’s plight, and there’s a group called the Foreign Press Association, which is a Jerusalem-based nonprofit representing reporters, mostly foreign reporters from over 30 countries, and there’s a WhatsApp group, which has about 140 of these journalists on it. One of the journalists, a freelance reporter and producer based in Jerusalem named Orly Halpern, posted just after 3 p.m. about the Samer’s plight and told the journalists, or called on them, to call Israeli military spokespeople and to demand that Samer be evacuated. And so, the FPA was getting involved. Senior members of the FPA, the Foreign Press Association, were getting involved, calling Israeli military officials, Israeli military spokespeople, senior ones, repeatedly asking for passage for Samer.

And from what we understand, at The Intercept we obtained screenshots of this WhatsApp group from multiple journalists in the group, and also from speaking with people involved in these efforts, that for hours Israel did not give approval to these ambulances. Finally, after about five hours after Samer was initially wounded, a bulldozer was finally approved to go through to reach Samer. But by then, he had already died. He had bled out. He was found with — he had seemed to have removed his flak jacket and had tried to crawl and had died. And it was incredibly tragic. He had lain there. Al Jazeera had posted a live counter of the hours and minutes since he was wounded on its broadcast, and people were just watching. And he eventually died.

And the next day, Al Jazeera announced it was preparing a legal file to submit to the International Criminal Court over what it called the assassination of Samer Abudaqa. And so did Reporters Without Borders, also included his killing in a filing with the ICC, war crimes against journalists killed in Gaza. So, you know, the world should be outraged about this killing, about all the killings that are happening to Palestinians, Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Sharif, in this particular case, there is no doubt that the highest echelons of the Israeli Defense Forces were aware that this journalist was wounded and in need of medical attention.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yes, we have multiple journalists who told — we have screenshots of a WhatsApp group where they’re discussing having spoken to Israeli military spokespeople in those hours and saying, “No approval yet. Ambulances not cleared. Bulldozers not cleared yet.” So, this took hours. And, you know, the Israeli military must have known very early on what the situation is. They’re the ones who had repeatedly bombed the area. They knew there was rubble in the streets. There’s constant — near-constant drone surveillance of Gaza. The Red Cross, we know, was liaising with the Israeli military to try and get approval. And yet they left, or they just didn’t allow — by some accounts, firstly, ambulances were fired on that tried to reach Samer Abudaqa. They returned back — this is the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense — and they were waiting then for approval. They also asked for Red Cross teams to accompany them to the area as a form of protection. And all of this is happening while Samer Abudaqa is lying helpless. The Israeli military is not giving permission. And he eventually died.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, again, that was Wael al-Dahdouh’s cameraperson and dear colleague, who bleeds to death over five hours. And then, in the last weeks, his son, Hamza al-Dahdouh, also an Al Jazeera journalist, is killed in this Israeli airstrike, along with the AFP stringer Mustafa Thuraya, in an airstrike, a drone strike on a car. Sharif, final comments?

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yeah, I think, look, in this country, the journalistic community should be outraged, should be vocal in their outrage, at Israel’s killing of their colleagues in Gaza. And we haven’t seen that.

And let me just end by saying, you know, in 2022, the Pulitzer Board awarded a special citation to journalists of Ukraine for their coverage of the Russian invasion and of the war. And the citation reads, quote, “Despite bombardment, abductions, occupation, and even deaths in their ranks, they have persisted in their effort to provide an accurate picture of a terrible reality,” end-quote. This is the case many times over for the journalists of Gaza, for the Palestinian journalists of Gaza. I doubt they will be receiving any such accolades. And that’s where the problem lies.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharif Abdel Kouddous, independent journalist, wrote this piece for The Intercept, “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” We’ll link to it at The Intercept at democracynow.org. And Sherif Mansour, Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, speaking to us from D.C.

***

“They Don’t Show Gaza”: Gideon Levy on How Israel’s Press Is Failing to Cover the War’s True Toll
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/17/ ... transcript

We speak with acclaimed Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, columnist for Haaretz and a member of its editorial board, about how the Israeli media has covered the war on Gaza, the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and more. Levy says the domestic Israeli media all but ignores the Palestinians being killed, focusing mostly on its own soldiers and the families of hostages. “The Israeli average viewer doesn’t see Gaza at all,” he says. “They are betraying our first mission: to tell the full story.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

From coverage of the war by Palestinian journalists on the ground, we turn to coverage by the Israeli media. What do most Israelis see on TV? How has the Israeli media’s coverage shaped opinions of war? This is a clip from i24NEWS of Israeli military commander Lieutenant Colonel Dotan talking about an alleged Hamas tunnel in an exclusive video shown by the network last week.

BENITA LEVIN: Now the IDF has found tunnels and weapons inside a child’s room inside the Gaza Strip. These visuals were obtained from the IDF, and i24NEWS is now going to be allowed to play that. Let’s take a look.

LT. COL. DOTAN: [translated] During our patrols in the area, we uncovered the entrance to a tunnel under this children’s bedroom, actually under this desk, exactly where the children were supposed to study. We can see very clearly the tunnel, which goes towards the tunnel gallery. We can also see here these RPG missiles, these munitions grouped in the same sector, including military tactical vests and grenades ready for use.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from Israeli media outlet i24NEWS.

For more on Israeli media’s coverage of the war, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Gideon Levy, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, a member of its editorial board, his most recent piece headlined “If It Isn’t a Genocide in Gaza, Then What Is It?”

Gideon, welcome back to Democracy Now!

GIDEON LEVY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what Israelis see on television, where most get their news. We just did this whole piece on the killing of Gazan journalists, Palestinian journalists. We’ve never seen anything like this anywhere in modern history, where you have between 80 and over a hundred Palestinian journalists killed in just a matter of weeks. What do Israelis understand is happening?

GIDEON LEVY: The main question, Amy, is what they don’t see or what they are not being shown, because, as you know, and as your viewers definitely know, Israeli media is quite a free media, commercial-owned, quite liberal, no pressure from the government or secret services or army or things like this. Anything it does, it does voluntarily. And the Israeli media decided, almost wall to wall, maybe except of my newspaper, Haaretz, all the rest — it’s also the TV, also newspapers— they decided that they are part of the Israeli propaganda machinery. They stopped being journalists.

And this, they’re doing two ways. The first one is the most serious one. They don’t show Gaza. The Israeli average viewer doesn’t see Gaza at all. He sees the soldiers. He sees the families of the hostages. He is being told day and night about the Israeli sacrifice. He’s being told day and night how brave are the soldiers. You see it seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and only one thing you don’t see: the suffer of Gaza. And the media decided not to show it, not because anyone pushed the media not to do it. They do it because they know very clear that this is what their viewers don’t want to see, and they want to please them. And by this, they are betraying our first mission: to tell the full story. You know, there are Israelis who wouldn’t care less to see all those terrible images and say, “Hamas is to be blamed. The Arabs are to be blamed. They deserve it. They are barbarian. Everything is fine.” But they have to see what is being done on our behalf. So, that’s the first level.

The second level, which is less important but still must be mentioned, is that Israeli media speaks now only in one voice. There is no room for any critic about the war. There is no room for any question marks. I don’t remember a war in which after so many stages, still the entire media is just a pale echo of the propaganda machinery of the army.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gideon, your newspaper, Haaretz, is somewhat different from the rest of the press. But how widely read is it within Israel, and who reads Haaretz?

GIDEON LEVY: Haaretz is not a big newspaper in terms of quantity, but it is still quite an influential newspaper, both abroad, as you know, because it’s being published both in English and in Hebrew, and also in Israel still parts of the elite are reading it. I don’t want to say that every Israeli reads Haaretz, but every Israeli knows about Haaretz. And through the social media, it has some kind of influence, but it is obviously very limited.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the levels in Gaza we’re hearing about of starvation, that every Palestinian is hungry right now? The babies being pulled from the rubble — I mean, we’re thousands of miles away from you. Tel Aviv is very close to Gaza. What do they see when it comes to casualties?

GIDEON LEVY: Nothing. They hear the figures, but figures are only figures. It’s only statistics. It doesn’t make you feel. It doesn’t make you understand the scale of the tragedy, the scale of the crimes, I must say. You know, you watch all the international networks, and you see Gaza. You see the children dying on the dirty floors of the hospitals, bleeding to death. You see the uprooted people. You see the destruction. You see the suffer of hundreds of thousands of people, and obviously the starvation. And in Israel, you see only the soldiers, only the families of the hostages, only the scenes where you don’t see Palestinians at all. It seems as if they don’t exist.

Now, Amy, that’s not new, because the Israeli media betrayed the coverage of — betrayed its mission by covering in the same way the occupation throughout so many years. It was always dehumanizing the Palestinians as much as possible. But this time we reach a level that I don’t remember such a level, because you can really watch for hours Israeli TV and have no clue what’s going on in Shifa Hospital or in other hospitals or in uprooted neighborhoods, and where are the people, how do they make their living, do they get some food — nothing of this, nothing which might remind us that the Palestinians are human beings. This is almost a taboo: Don’t mention them as human beings.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Gideon, Prime Minister Netanyahu keeps assuring the international community that Israel does not intend to permanently occupy Gaza. But what is he saying domestically to the Israeli people? He even has two Twitter handles, one that’s an official one and then another that is more geared toward sending out incendiary messages to the population?

GIDEON LEVY: Just this morning he was quoted in a private talk, I think, that the war will continue at least until 2025. And nobody sees the end. Nobody knows the end. There is no endgame. There is no plan what to do the day after. And the Israelis start to believe now that this might last for many years, at least the occupation of Gaza — obviously, without intention. Almost everything that Israel did in the last decades was without intention, but it always came out. It never intended to go for wars and always finds itself in war. It never intended to create an occupation of over 50 years, and it came out like this. No, no, the intention is one thing, and the results are another thing. Israel has no plan to leave Gaza in the coming months or years, which doesn’t mean that Israel will stay there, but I don’t see any alternative right now. What will they do?

***

What Happened on October 7? Gideon Levy on Haaretz’s Call to Investigate Kibbutz Killings & More
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/17/ ... transcript

We continue our conversation with the renowned Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who says there are growing questions about the IDF’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack that cannot wait until the end of fighting in Gaza. That includes intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attack, as well as reports of troops killing Israeli civilians when they opened fire on homes taken over by Hamas militants. “The fact is that those people were killed and might have been rescued. It must be investigated,” says Levy.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about your paper, Haaretz, reporting that a group of family members of Israelis who were killed in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7th in the Hamas attack on Israel are demanding a probe into how their relatives died. An Israeli brigadier general recently admitted he ordered an Israeli tank commander to fire on a home where Hamas fighters were holding 15 Israeli hostages. Brigadier General Barak Hiram told The New York Times he had ordered the tank commander to, quote, “break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.” Thirteen of the Israeli hostages died; only two survived. Gideon, you’re a member of the Haaretz editorial board, which recently ran a piece headlined “The IDF Must Investigate the Kibbutz Be’eri Tank Fire Incident — Right Now.” Elaborate on what happened and the investigation your editorial board is calling for now.

GIDEON LEVY: Look, everyone is postponing all the investigation to the day after, and the day after seems to get farer and farer. And we are very concerned that it will never be investigated. But here we have a very concrete case. And families, rightly so, want to know who is responsible for the killing of their beloved ones and how did it happen.

The brigadier general that you just mentioned happened to be a settler. I don’t want to say that it says a lot, but let’s remember that many of our high-rank generals, or more and more of them, are settlers. And settlers have their own ideology. Even when they serve in the army, they have their motivation, which is not always a very secular motivation. It’s not always the motivation of the others.

But in any case, the fact is that those people were killed and might have been rescued. It must be investigated. It’s not very complicated to investigate it. It’s a very concrete and focused event. And we were calling the army to do so. I don’t know. Until now, we didn’t hear from the army. I hope they will do it, because this can have also a lot of consequences in the coming days or weeks or months in Gaza, because this situation might repeat itself. When we will face a house where there are hostages and commanders of Hamas, do we shoot them all dead? I really wonder.

AMY GOODMAN: And you also had a piece on how sexism ultimately killed what are known as the spotters. The Israeli military, the women, who were on the border, who were seeing Hamas gear up, were telling their supervisors it looks like there’s about to be an imminent attack. And some were even told if they’d raise this again, they would be brought up on charges of insubordination. Is that right, Gideon?

GIDEON LEVY: Yeah, we had a big story on this. But, you know, the small stories might overwhelm or overshadow the big story, because the big story, finally, there are two huge question marks. A, what happened on the 7th, and how did it happen? Because all those stories get to one conclusion: that there was no army on this day. There was not — the most sophisticated intelligence in the world, with all the most sophisticated devices, who knows the color of the underwears of each Palestinian, all of a sudden didn’t know anything, after all the money in which was invested there and all the reputation they have. And then came the second question: Where was the army after the attack started? No army whatsoever.

And above all, the question which bothers me more than anything else, and that’s namely, having said what happened on the 7th, as barbaric as it was, whatever it was, there are question marks about certain events on the 7th, but it’s very clear that there was an attack, a very aggressive attack: Does this give us Israelis the right to do anything we want after the 7th forever, without any limits, no legal limits, no moral limits? We can just go and kill and destroy and destruct as much as we wish? That’s the main question right now. The event that you mentioned with those soldiers girls just show how unprepared and unprofessional was the intelligence in the army.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, most of those young women died. Last question, your biggest piece, “If It Isn’t a Genocide in Gaza” —

GIDEON LEVY: Only two survived. Only two survived, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Only two. “If It Isn’t a Genocide in Gaza” —

GIDEON LEVY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “Then What Is It?” We just have 30 seconds, Gideon.

GIDEON LEVY: Listen, the Israelis don’t seem to care that so many innocent Palestinians were killed. They just care how to label it, if it’s genocide or not. And I say it doesn’t matter what is the legal definition. Twenty-four thousand people, most of them innocent people, 60, 70% of them women and children, 10,000 children among them, this is enough of a fact that nobody can deny, by the way, to ask ourselves: Do we really have the right to do it? What does it tell about us, about our moral standards? And, above all, how long will we go on, and where are we aiming to? Another 25,000 killed people in Gaza will guarantee more security to Israel? And even if yes, do we have the right to do so?

AMY GOODMAN: Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist, author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, also a member of the Haaretz editorial board. We’ll link to your piece, “If It Isn’t a Genocide in Gaza, Then What Is It?”

***

“The Logic of Escalation”: From Red Sea to Iran & Beyond, Will Israel’s Gaza Assault Spark Wider War?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/17/ ... transcript

Military actions by various actors across the Middle East are compounding fears that Israel’s assault on Gaza is escalating into a full-blown regional war. In recent days, the United States has carried out strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen who have resumed their attacks on container ships in the Red Sea; Iran has struck targets in northern Iraq, Syria and Pakistan; while Hezbollah and Israel have escalated the intensity of fighting across their border. For a look at where all this is headed, we speak with journalist Spencer Ackerman, who says it’s “the most dangerous moment for the Middle East” he has witnessed in over 20 years of covering war and security. “This is now a conflict with battlefronts ranging across the region,” he says. “We shouldn’t think that absent an active act of deescalation that this won’t continue spiraling outward throughout 2024.” Ackerman writes the Forever Wars newsletter and is the foreign policy columnist for The Nation.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

From northern Iraq to Lebanon to Pakistan to the Red Sea, an array of strikes and counterstrikes over the last several days are compounding fears that Israel’s assault on Gaza could escalate into a full-blown regional war. In just the past few days, the U.S. has carried out strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have resumed their attacks on container ships in the Red Sea. Iran has struck what it said was as an Israeli spy headquarters in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, as well as targeting anti-Iran militants in Pakistan and Syria. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah and Israel have escalated the intensity of fighting across the border.

For more, we’re joined by award-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman, foreign policy columnist for The Nation magazine. His latest piece, “Israel Is Not Promising to 'Scale Back' Its War.” He also publishes the Forever Wars newsletter on Ghost, where his new piece is headlined “Iran’s Opening Shots and the Logic of Escalation.”

Welcome back, Spencer, to Democracy Now! Talk about this possibility of a widening war, and what you’re most concerned about.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Amy, thank you for having me.

I think that in my 20-plus years of covering the “war on terror,” this is the most dangerous moment in — for the Middle East that I’ve seen professionally. You talk about there being the possibility of a full-blown regional conflict. We’re at least at half-blown now. Consider what the battlefields are and have been in this conflict: Gaza, obviously the most important one, the most devastating to humanity, where the Palestinians are experiencing what could and probably should be understood as a genocide, but also southern Israel, northern Israel, southern Lebanon, northwestern Syria, Beirut, northeastern Syria, Erbil, Baghdad, southwestern Yemen, the Red Sea, Pakistan, as well. This is now a conflict with battlefronts ranging across the region, each of which facing pressure to escalate as their various combatants’ objectives are not fully achieved. We shouldn’t think that absent an active act of deescalation, that this won’t continue spiraling outward throughout 2024.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Spencer, this whole idea that we hear almost every day some member of the Biden administration say that they’re trying to prevent an escalation of the conflict in the region, when in fact their actions are quite the opposite?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right, Juan. We heard the Biden administration say most recently that it was deeply concerned about escalation in Lebanon. Well, just in the last 24 hours, the Israeli Air Force has been bombing southern Lebanon, bombing what it says are Hezbollah positions there, but also the United States has taken direct action, not just in the Red Sea, but also on Yemeni soil itself multiple times, three times at least, including most recently yesterday. And, as well, recently it carried out its first drone strike in Baghdad since 2020, which has now strained U.S.-Iraqi relations. So, the United States, while it might say that it’s seeking to contain the conflict, is caught up in the logic of escalation.

And that means we shouldn’t give the Biden administration a pass on this. These aren’t, you know, automatic gravitational forces. These are the accumulations of choices that Biden and his team are making to involve the U.S. more deeply in this spiraling conflict, all of which could be stopped if the United States used its immense influence over Israel to restrain it or stop it from carrying out its collective punishment of Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We often hear, as well, about the Axis of Resistance, supposedly controlled or financed by Iran, but very little about the Axis of Empire, of the U.K., the United States and Israel in the region. To what degree does this axis have more right to control the affairs of the region than those who are actually from countries there?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Quite well said, Juan. Without ceding any of Iran’s claims to regional hegemony, the United States and its allies act as if they are the representatives of the natural and just order of the Middle East, and not, in fact, Western impositions upon the aspirations of the citizenry, the people of these countries, to determine their own affairs.

And we are seeing that quite starkly most recently in Yemen, where one of the most war-devastated countries in the Middle East, as a result of not only U.S. strikes against al-Qaeda targets, what the United States says is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, stemming from something like over the past 15 years, but also a U.S.-backed Saudi and Emirati campaign that lasted seven years before a ceasefire took hold in 2022, that brought not only famine but cholera to this country, that has been engulfed in a foreign-backed, foreign-sponsored and foreign-accelerated civil war, nevertheless, even among people who don’t accept the Houthi movement as the legitimate rulers of Yemen, saw massive demonstrations after the United States and its Western allies started bombing Yemen in retaliation for the Houthi attempt to relieve the siege of Gaza. So you really have the — we really have on full exposure the rejection of U.S. claims to, you know, standing for peace and stability in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer, your piece last week for The Nation is headlined “Israel Is Not Promising to 'Scale Back' Its War,” which you wrote partly as a corrective to a New York Times article that claimed that’s what Israel is planning. If you could explain this and what it means for — I mean, we just heard Gideon Levy, the Israeli Jewish journalist at Haaretz, talking about this war going on for a year or more.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right. Amy, when you listen to what the Israeli government says to its own people, like Gideon mentioned, it talks about a war that will — and this is what Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend — “will last until victory, and no one, not even The Hague, will stop us,” which is an incredibly and ominous thing to say, and probably ought to be tacked on to South Africa’s genocide lawsuit.

What it says to the Americans, as the Americans are feeling the pressure from its Arab allies in the region, and indeed from President Biden’s own supporters in the United States who want to see this war stopped, is that, in fact, it’s scaling down to lower-intensity operations, or more often it doesn’t say that quite outright. It says it will move away from high-intensity operations into what it says is a so-called phase three of its operations in Gaza.

So, what is phase three? Phase three focuses on southern Gaza. Every day we are getting reports of casualties from Gaza, civilian casualties in the triple digits. Israel already made something like 1.7, 1.8 million people —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: — relocate to southern Gaza. So this war is not, in fact, scaling down. It’s moving toward a sustainable path of civilian devastation.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, foreign policy columnist for The Nation magazine, also publishes the Forever Wars newsletter on Ghost. We’ll link to your pieces at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!

[admin]

Palestinian Artist Samia Halaby Slams Indiana University for Canceling Exhibit over Her Support for Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/18/ ... transcript

We spend the hour looking at how artists, writers and other cultural workers in the United States and Europe are facing a growing backlash after expressing solidarity for Palestine. We begin with one of these “canceled” cultural workers: renowned Palestinian American artist Samia Halaby, whose first U.S. retrospective was canceled by her graduate alma mater, Indiana University, after she criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The school’s provost said this week the show would have been a “lightning rod” that carried a “risk of violence.” Halaby expresses her shock and disappointment at the betrayal of “academic freedom” evidenced by the decision. “The administration has lost sight of their responsibility to the community, to the students that are there,” she says, and adds, “This is much larger than I am,” citing the suppression of pro-Palestine student activism around the country and calling it “a kind of attempt at mind control.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Over the past three months, artists, writers and other cultural workers in the United States and Europe have faced a backlash after expressing solidarity for Palestine as Israel has continued its relentless assault on Gaza. Talks and performances have been canceled, artworks deinstalled, exhibits removed, and livelihoods threatened.

Today we speak with two Palestinian American artists. One was canceled by her own alma mater, Indiana University. The other was canceled in Berlin. And we’ll speak with a German American Jewish Holocaust survivor who stood outside the White House for months calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. She was scheduled to speak at a number of schools in her native Hamburg but was told her appearances were canceled.

We begin with Samia Halaby, a renowned Palestinian visual artist, activist, educator and scholar. Samia Halaby’s first U.S. retrospective, which had taken three years to organize, was abruptly canceled by Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art over her criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which she has described as a genocide.

Before we speak with Samia about what happened, let’s turn to a short documentary about her life and work by Palestinian Jordanian filmmaker Munir Atalla. This is Samia talking about moving with her family to the United States as a teenager from Palestine.

SAMIA HALABY: In 1951, my father and mother had come to the decision that it was safer to bring their family up in the U.S. I did not want to come. I was 14 and close to high school. I couldn’t decide between the sciences. It was my mother who finally said, “You always loved art. Why don’t you study art?”

I gained tenure at Indiana University and decided that really I wanted to be in New York. But it’s hard to just pick up and have no money and come to New York, a city I don’t know anybody or anything in. I moved in '76. I continued trying to get a gallery for years. It was total rejection. In this world, people don't see — if you’re Palestinian, don’t see what you make. They see you. And they don’t like us Palestinians.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is another clip of Samia, talking about the process of creating her art and how abstraction can result from a new way of seeing.

SAMIA HALABY: I work on two, three, sometimes four or five paintings at the same time. When I enter and get going, then the paintings begin to permeate my consciousness. The paintings do not arise out of feelings. They arise out of thinking. And I am very scientific in the way I think and plan. But when I do them, I trust my intuitions —

Fulfilling every whim that comes along.

— balancing back and forth between what I intuit is right and what I want to do, and which one wins is hard to tell. When a painting is going badly, I’m feeling badly, but not because my feeling is in the painting. I’m reacting to frustration. But when it’s going well, I’m very happy, because I’ve captured something I’ve wanted to capture.

As I was saying about Palestine, something remains that I almost feel it with my hands I can make it. I put it in a painting, but it’s not a photographic image. It’s what remains visually in memory. It’s something palpable and real. What your iPhone or cellphone is telling you when you take a picture is only a teeny slice of what is in front of it when you take the picture. It’s an image of a fragment of time of reality. But the new abstraction can result from a new way of seeing.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Samia Halaby: A Video Portrait, a short documentary about the Palestinian American artist’s life and work. Samia Halaby’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. And Samia joins us today in New York.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! We’ve told a bit of the story, but you are one of the most prestigious Palestinian American artists, in these permanent art collections around the country. You were doing this life retrospective at your alma mater, Indiana University, worked on it for three years, Samia. Can you tell us what happened right before it was to open?

SAMIA HALABY: Thank you, Amy. I’m really pleased to be with you and to tell my story and tell the story of what happened, which is very important also to the community in Bloomington and Indiana.

Just immediately before, after a lot of work preparing, first I heard a little rumble that someone was paying attention to the fact that I’m Palestinian. Other than that, I had expected, being an alumna and a one-time professor who had been awarded tenure, to be somewhat immune, because I knew the atmosphere in the country. And so, the sudden, sudden cancellation came as a surprise.

It was amazing to know that they would go ahead and act in this way, when a catalog that’s one-inch thick and hard cover had been printed and delivered, plans for the opening were being made, the artwork was picked up by the shippers. Everything was done in so beautifully and excellent museum fashion that, suddenly, after the — few days after the pickup of the paintings, I hear a very brief notice, a two-sentence letter, saying the show is canceled and the art will be returned to me. I wrote two letters suggesting, in very friendly terms, that they reverse this decision, but I have not heard a word back from them.

And, you know, Amy, this was a twin retrospective committed to my relationship to the Midwest. The Midwest had been a place where I had felt was my second home. I really enjoyed my education there. I started as I arrived in the U.S. at age 14. I’m 87 now. And I remember the University of Cincinnati with a great deal of affection for the great education we received there. I remember it being an atmosphere that was very open and radical. My teachers were all inspired by the resistant painters of the time, like Ben Shahn. They were in admiration of the industrial union movement. The Great Depression was still in people’s memory. And the professors were all very enlightened and advanced and talked a lot about academic freedom. My feeling is I wished I could bring that batch of attitudes in those professors to modern, to contemporary American education.

Maybe I’m going on too long, Amy, but my feeling, through words, what happened to me, is that the administration has lost sight of their responsibility to the community, to the students who are there. They’re trying to stop students from moving forward with thinking with their creative process politically. And that’s — they’re being more responsible to pronouncements from the government and from threats, perhaps, from parts of the government, but not at all responsible. A division is taking place in their position of having administrative power, but no responsibility to the real community.

I feel the students — the repression of the students right now in the country, who are the most advanced, the new partnership between the young Palestinians and all they’re doing and the young Jews and all that they are doing. They’re so disciplined and determined and clear-thinking. I’m really in admiration for them. And I think this act of suspension, of cancellation, is as much against them as it is against me and the curator of the show. We mustn’t forget about the curator, a curator beginning their career, to whom this was a very important show, Elliot Reichert, who was magnificent in his — as was all the staff at the museum, magnificent in their effort.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So —

SAMIA HALABY: So I’m very — go ahead.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Samia Halaby, we’d like to get your response to the formal explanation that Indiana University, your alma mater, where you received your master’s degree — the formal response that the university gave to why your show was canceled. The university provost, Rahul Shrivastav, spoke at a faculty council meeting and addressed the backlash over the decision to cancel your show. He called your exhibit a, quote, “potential lightning rod” that could incite protests, and said the three months for it to be on view would require long-term security, adding, quote, “[If] I have to make a decision on keeping a project, a program going when there is a risk of violence or a risk of other incidents, I would err on the side of caution.” So, Samia Halaby, your response to that?

SAMIA HALABY: Well, my response to that is, first of all, they never gave me a reason, and they never responded. And they never even talked to me. So I got the impression that they didn’t like my — from a very brief phone call with the director of the museum, that, one way or the other, my general attitude and support of Palestine and criticism of Israel and U.S. partnership, U.S.-Israel attacking Palestine, and especially the massacre, the unbelievable massacre in Gaza, both destruction of people and of culture, that my anger with that and my support of the Palestinians was the cause.

I think this idea that they’re so terrorized or frightened by me being a lightning rod and the show bringing — I think the students, to their majority, were for the show. They would have been delighted to see the show. I think this idea of a lightning rod for trouble is their imagination, their invention. It’s just a propaganda, you know, invention. I don’t see the — you know, museums guard their work always, guard what is there, and they could have put a second guard on the show, if that’s — they’re so frightened. But canceling it, considering all of the grants they received, all the expenses they went through, is just not reflective of this kind of fear. Museums all over are concerned about art. So, yes, that’s my reaction to that.

You know, I would like to say some more about what’s happening in Gaza, because it connects to art. First of all, I do want to say that this is much larger than I am. There’s suppression of students throughout the U.S. There’s suppression of faculty. There’s one faculty member at Indiana University who’s been censored for — censured for a very minor thing, as an excuse for his true open-mindedness and support of young students.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to —

SAMIA HALABY: To me, the young students are —

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to that point, Samia. I’m looking at a piece in The Nation magazine. On December 15th, Indiana University did — suspended professor Abdulkader Sinno, “a tenured faculty member who has taught at IU for almost two decades and who, until his suspension, was the faculty adviser of the PSC. The supposed reason for the suspension: alleged mistakes in the filing of a room reservation form to support a PSC event, a scheduled public lecture by Miko Peled, an Israeli American IDF veteran and peace activist.” I mean, this is amazing. You know, Miko Peled is the son of General Peled, who, well-known in Israel, fought in 1948 and in the Six-Day War. Miko Peled was going to speak. And so, “the alleged mistakes led the administration to demand cancellation of the event two days before it was scheduled.” They went forward anyway. It proceeded without a hitch, until the administration claimed it was an unauthorized event, and the professor suspended. Samia Halaby?

SAMIA HALABY: You know, my feeling is that they indict themselves with their own words. When they suspend someone and they say the reason is he did something — made a minor mistake in filling a form requesting space for the event, it is ridiculous. You don’t suspend a professor for that kind of thing. And then you make — you create a whole range of excuses to defend the real reason. And it’s similar to my case. You know, in his case, they’re accusing him of misfilling a form. In my case, they’re saying they need — they’re worried that my show is a lightning rod to hostile activity against the show or discord among the students. So, it doesn’t make sense to me that they suspend someone who is so highly respected by the students and beloved of the students. It is unforgivable.

Again, it’s an indication that there is a huge gap growing between administrative layers and the government and the students, professors, workers, staff and general population in this country. You see it very clearly. You see huge demonstrations not only in the U.S., but all over the world, and disregard. This whole disregard of governments to what the people are asking for is, in miniature form, taking place at Indiana University. And it is this very thing I’m talking about, this division in the minds of administrators that they no longer owe anything to the students and to the faculty or to an open atmosphere of learning and discourse, as though disagreement, differences of opinion, is a negative thing. It is a kind of attempted mind control. You know, you can only think that way, and then you’re OK, and you can be a student. But if you want to discourse and see other points of view, you’re not allowed. So, it’s very backward. Very backward.

***

Artist Emily Jacir: Rampant Censorship Is Part of the Genocidal Campaign to Erase Palestinians
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/18/ ... transcript

We speak with award-winning Palestinian American artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir, whose event in Berlin in October was canceled after Israel launched its ongoing assault on Gaza. Jacir decries a pattern of “harassment, baseless smear campaigns, canceling shows, canceling talks” conducted against Palestinian artists in Germany and around the world. “It’s very much part of a coordinated movement,” she says, connecting global censorship of diasporic Palestinian voices with the violent “targeted destruction of culture in Gaza,” which she calls a “part of genocide.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Samia Halaby, we want to bring in another Palestinian American artist into this discussion, the artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir. She was scheduled to speak at any event in Berlin, Germany, in October, but her appearance was canceled. She’s the recipient of prestigious awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, and most recently she won an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize and received an honorary doctorate from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. She is the founding director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, where she was born.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Emily. It’s very good to have you with us. Can you talk about what’s happened to you, actually, not here in the United States, but in Berlin, Germany?

EMILY JACIR: Thank you, Amy, for having me on your show. It’s really a pleasure to be here. I also just would like to begin by expressing my solidarity for Samia and the loss of her show, but also for the curator, Elliot, because he was in Bethlehem last summer and spoke to me at length about this exhibition, so I was quite excited about it.

I was slated to speak in Berlin as part of a workshop at Potsdam University. And when they canceled the talk, they wrote to me and said they were going to postpone it to a more peaceful time — or, to a more peaceful point in time, which, now listening to Samia speaking about the idea of being a lightning rod, this really resonated with me. And this is one of the methodologies that is being used to actually stop us from being able to speak publicly and share our words and share our work. This is another way of doing it, is by saying, “Oh, we’ll just do this in another peaceful time.” But this is the time. This is the time when we should be speaking and having discourse, across the board, around the world. So I don’t buy that that was the real reason.

Again, we have to also take the curator into consideration and try to imagine what kind of pressure, particularly being in Germany, they must have been under. The situation in Germany, as we all know, is one of the most extreme cases of silencing Palestinians. But it’s part of a larger war effort targeting Palestinian voices and intellectuals, using various methodologies, including harassment, baseless smear campaigns, canceling shows, canceling talks. So, it’s very much part of a coordinated movement.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Emily Jacir, could you talk about some of the — there have been numerous incidents in Germany where people have been canceled, for one reason or another having to do with Gaza. If you could just go through some of those people, in particular, the Palestinian artists and writers?

EMILY JACIR: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the first incidents was Adania Shibli, who was slated to receive an award in Germany. That was within the first week of October, if I remember correctly. The list is quite extensive. My sister’s film, Annemarie Jacir, was canceled within weeks also, I think. Her film was canceled. It’s a film about a wedding, and it was deemed too controversial to show on German television. Candice Breitz, as we all know, is another person. There are so many. The list is endless.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we want to go now to a writer, a highly acclaimed writer and author, the award-winning Masha Gessen, who was also canceled, or her award. She was to receive the Hannah Arendt Award in Bremen. We spoke to her in December, shortly after the publication of their New Yorker piece headlined “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.”

In the essay, Gessen wrote, quote, “For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time — in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany,” they wrote.

Gessen went on to explain why the term “ghetto” is not commonly used to describe Gaza. Gessen said, quote, “Presumably, the more fitting term 'ghetto' would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated,” Gessen wrote.

They had been scheduled to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany, but the ceremony had to be postponed after one of the award’s sponsors, the left-leaning Heinrich Böll Foundation, withdrew its support.

Gessen discussed the New Yorker piece and the controversy that followed on Democracy Now! on the very day they had been originally scheduled to receive the award in Bremen.

MASHA GESSEN: A large part of the article is devoted to, in fact, memory politics in Germany and the vast anti-antisemitism machine, which largely targets people who are critical of Israel and, in fact, are often Jewish. This happens to be a description that fits me, as well. I am Jewish. I come from a family that includes Holocaust survivors. I grew up in the Soviet Union very much in the shadow of the Holocaust. That’s where the phrase in the headline came from, is from the passage in the article itself. And I am critical of Israel.

Now, the part that really offended the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the city of Bremen — and, I would imagine, some German public — is the part that you read out loud, which is where I make the comparison between the besieged Gaza, so Gaza before October 7th, and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. I made that comparison intentionally. It was not what they call here a provocation. It was very much the point of the piece, because I think that the way that memory politics function now in Europe and in the United States, but particularly in Germany, is that their cornerstone is that you can’t compare the Holocaust to anything. It is a singular event that stands outside of history.

My argument is that in order to learn from history, we have to compare. Like, that actually has to be a constant exercise. We are not better people or smarter people or more educated people than the people who lived 90 years ago. The only thing that makes us different from those people is that in their imagination the Holocaust didn’t yet exist and in ours it does. We know that it’s possible. And the way to prevent it is to be vigilant, in the way that Hannah Arendt, in fact, and other Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust were vigilant and were — there was an entire conversation, especially in the first two decades after World War II, in which they really talked about how to recognize the signs of sliding into the darkness.

And I think that we need to — oh, and one other thing that I want to say is that our entire framework of international humanitarian law is essentially based — it all comes out of the Holocaust, as does the concept of genocide. And I argue that that framework is based on the assumption that you’re always looking at war, at conflict, at violence through the prism of the Holocaust. You always have to be asking the question of whether crimes against humanity, the definitions of which came out of the Holocaust, are occurring. And Israel has waged an incredibly successful campaign at setting — not only setting the Holocaust outside of history, but setting itself aside from the optics of international humanitarian law, in part by weaponizing the politics of memory and the politics of the Holocaust.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Masha Gessen. Masha Gessen was speaking to us from Bremen, Germany. The award ceremony went from an auditorium of hundreds — they ultimately got the award in someone’s backyard.

Meanwhile, more than 500 global artists, filmmakers and writers and cultural workers have announced a push against Germany’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, calling on artists to step back from collaborating with German state-funded associations. The campaign is backed by the French author, Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux and the Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed el-Kurd. It alleges Germany has adopted, quote, “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine,” unquote.

We’re speaking with Emily Jacir, whose speech was just canceled in Berlin, Germany. And as we wrap up with you, Emily, I wanted to know if you could comment on what’s happening in your birthplace, in Bethlehem. The last time we went to Bethlehem, we were interviewing two pastors there, one of them who set up Christ in the rubble, a crèche scene that showed the baby Jesus in rubble, signifying Gaza. If you can talk about that and the importance of your art, as you continue?

EMILY JACIR: Yeah, I will talk about that, but just to relate back to what everyone else was talking about and how you started, I think it’s really important to consider the way this attempt at creating a culture of fear amongst the arts community globally and internationally is happening through these baseless smear campaigns and defamation, threatening people’s jobs. And I mention this just because, you know, one of the things that happened to me was that there was a letter-writing campaign in which every university I’ve ever taught at internationally, anyone that’s ever given me an award received literally a five-page PDF claiming that I was an ISIS terrorist that supports the rape of women and the killing of babies. People who signed that Artforum letter, and many, many, many of whom are Jewish and Israeli allies that I have worked with for 25 years, also received that letter. In my case, because people know me — they’ve worked with me for 25 years — the letters come off as just absolutely absurd and ridiculous. But if that is happening to me, it begs the question of what is happening to younger artists, people who don’t — people in museums don’t know receiving letters like that. And it’s very targeted and very systematic, and it’s something to consider also in relationship with the targeted destruction of culture in Gaza, art centers being bombed. Why would an art center be bombed? Because part of genocide is precisely silencing artists and silencing a culture’s cultural production. And I feel that that was very important to say that.

In Bethlehem, the situation is quite difficult — nothing compared to Gaza, of course. But we are witnessing incursions every night. It’s been — you know, Bethlehem is a town that very, very much relies on visitors and tourists for its economy, so that, economically, it’s been a disaster. As an art center, our art center in Bethlehem promotes dance and music and art practices and making and residencies of local artists and international artists. We’re doing our very best to both deal with the situation at hand but also provide a kind of way of working with the children now who live in our neighborhood who are trying to handle the situation, both on the ground in Bethlehem but also witnessing what’s happening to Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Jacir, we want to thank you for being with us, acclaimed artist and filmmaker, born in Bethlehem, goes back and forth between Bethlehem and New York, was scheduled to speak in Berlin, Germany, her talk canceled. And Samia Halaby, renowned Palestinian visual artist, activist, educator and scholar, whose first U.S. retrospective was abruptly canceled by Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art over her support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

**

Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram Decries Climate of Censorship After Her Hamburg Talks Are Canceled
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2024/1/18

We are joined by 88-year-old Jewish German American Marione Ingram, who describes how her scheduled speaking tour in Hamburg — the city she fled in the Holocaust — was “postponed” this month amid a wider backlash against those speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ingram has been protesting for months outside the White House calling for a ceasefire, and characterizes U.S. and German pro-Israel policy as “disturbing” and “frightening.” As a survivor of the Holocaust, Ingram says, “My childhood was spent in the first 10 years much the same way as the children of Gaza. I know exactly what they’re going through. I know exactly how they’re feeling.” She argues “it should be an absolute standstill of all governments that you are told over 10,000 children are being murdered. There is no excuse for that.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Marione Ingram. She’s an 88-year-old German American Holocaust survivor who’s been protesting for months outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. She was scheduled to speak this month at eight different schools in her native Hamburg, Germany. She was planning to address students receiving awards recognizing their commitment to social justice activism. Then, in December, she was told by an event organizer that her appearances were canceled. The trip was eventually postponed until May.

AMY GOODMAN: Marione Ingram is author of The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust and also the book The Hands of Peace: A Holocaust Survivor’s Fight for Civil Rights in the American South. She’s joining us from Washington, D.C.

Marione, I’m sorry you had to leave the studio because there was an alarm in the building and everyone had to evacuate, but you’re back now. And you have heard the previous guests, two Palestinian American esteemed artists, talking about having been canceled, like you, Samia Halaby by Indiana University, and Emily Jacir was about to give a talk in Berlin. Talk about the reason you were given for going back to Hamburg, Germany, where you’ve gone a number of times to speak to young people, but the reason why your talks were canceled this month.

MARIONE INGRAM: Good morning, Amy. Yes, a bit of excitement, so I missed — I heard Samia’s explanation of her cancellation — I’m really sorry about that — and missed the other, because we were evacuated.

The reasons for my cancellation have been extremely vague, given a climate in Germany right now of a lot of antisemitic events, apparently. And the only concrete explanation I got from someone was that I, as a Holocaust survivor, would be used by the AfD, which is the Alternative for Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany, which is a neo-Nazi and a primarily antisemitic group. But I was told that they would use my picture and my protest sign in a propaganda — I can’t even figure out what kind of propaganda that would be used for, since they are basically Nazis and would be a destruction of —

AMY GOODMAN: The sign you’re talking about is, standing outside the White House, “Survivor says peace not war”?

MARIONE INGRAM: Yes, yes. But on the flip side, it says “Stop genocide in Gaza.” And that has upset the powers that be, politicians who decide what can be said and what cannot be said.

I have been speaking to students for years, and I was also told by several teachers that right now my presence, talking to students, is of the utmost importance, because the schools in Hamburg are so diverse and there are many students who come from countries where there is war, oppression, poverty, and students in really terrible positions of trying to manage what is going on, conflict with each other. And I was told that my presence is so important because I have a rapport with students, and they were looking forward to expressing their thoughts, because they know that in talking to me and with me that they can say everything that is on their minds without being criticized or ostracized.

I find it extremely — I understand Germany’s sensitivity because of their gruesome history. But Germany has also been the only country, maybe other than Rwanda, that has acknowledged its horrific history, and it has taught this history as a “never again” thing. We must face our history so we can learn from it. So it is surprising to me that Germany has chosen to silence me.

But I think the worst part of it is that they are silencing young people who are experiencing — especially in Germany, they are close to the war in Ukraine. They are troubled by what is going on by the war in the Mideast and the horrific slaughter of innocent people. It should be an absolute standstill of all governments when you are told that over 10,000 children are being murdered. There is no excuse for that.

And then to turn around — America and Germany’s support of Israel’s politics is extremely disturbing and, to me, frightening, because any time any government decides to silence the voices of people who oppose government policies, whatever they may be, this reminds me so much of my childhood. My childhood was spent in the first 10 years much the same way as the children of Gaza. I know exactly what they are going through. I know exactly what they are thinking. And this, apparently, has upset the Ministry of Culture, because I have compared the onset —

AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute to go.

MARIONE INGRAM: The silencing of the last survivor of all three major events in Hamburg — the firestorm, the worst bombing in the European war, and the Holocaust, where I lost almost all of my family — and the silencing of voices like all of our voices when they are most needed is indicative of something more frightening, because I believe when governments decide to silence voices in opposition to the stance that they are taking, then we have to really question very deeply why are they doing it and for what reason.

AMY GOODMAN: Marione Ingram, we’re going to have to leave it there, but we thank you so much for being with us, 88-year-old Jewish German Holocaust survivor, has been protesting, calling for Biden to support a Gaza ceasefire.

[admin]

Meet Tal Mitnick, 18, the First Israeli Jailed for Refusing Military Service in “Revenge War” on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/19/ ... transcript

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to continue the assault on Gaza, we speak with the first Israeli to refuse mandatory military service since Israel’s offensive began over three months ago. Last month, 18-year-old Tal Mitnick announced he would refuse military service in what he called a “revenge war” on Gaza, and was sentenced to 30 days in a military prison. Just released from jail, Mitnick faces another draft summons and says he will refuse “over and over until someone gives up, until the army gives me an exemption.” Mitnick says the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel broke the idea Israel could live with occupation. “We need to keep fighting for a just future,” he says, urging the younger generation of Israelis to use their voices for peace. “We’re the future, and we can change.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Israel is continuing its attacks across the Gaza Strip, from the north to the south, as the number of Palestinian casualties continues to soar. Over the last 24 hours, at least 142 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past three months, 10,000 of them children, thousands of others missing under the rubble presumed dead, making Israel’s assault one of the deadliest, most destructive military campaigns in recent history.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has again rejected calls to scale back Israel’s military assault on Gaza or take steps towards the establishment of a Palestinian state. In a nationally broadcast news conference, Netanyahu vowed to press ahead with the offensive until what he called a “decisive victory over Hamas.”

As Netanyahu vows to continue Israel’s assault on Gaza, we turn now to the first Israeli to refuse mandatory military service since Israel’s offensive began over three months ago. Tal Mitnick is an 18-year-old conscientious objector in Israel. Last month, he announced he would refuse military service, saying, quote, “I refuse to take part in a war of revenge.” He was sentenced to 30 days in a military prison, was just released yesterday morning. Tal Mitnick is joining us now from a studio in Tel Aviv.

Tal, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about why you are refusing?

TAL MITNICK: Thank you for having me on.

I am refusing because, like I said, I refuse to take part in this revenge war. I’m refusing because I want to make a statement about how we need to conduct ourselves in this land. I feel like there’s too much violence here. There’s too much revenge and talk about this side or that side. And we need to talk about how we need to go forward in a future of coexistence, where both Israelis and Palestinians can live together and live with security and peace.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what exactly this means. How did you make this known? Talk about where you served time in prison. And is this just a brief period of days before you’re sent back to prison?

TAL MITNICK: Yes. I got sentenced for 30 days for my first sentencing, and I got another draft order for Monday morning, which means I have to get drafted on Monday morning, where I will go and refuse service once again and probably get sentenced again. And this will happen over and over until someone gives up, until the army gives me an exemption.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the response of your friends, your family. And I was also just wondering — you’re an Israeli, but you have an American accent. Are you American, as well?

TAL MITNICK: My parents immigrated from the U.S., and we spoke English at home. But I’m Israeli and American, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So —

TAL MITNICK: The friends and family response — yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

TAL MITNICK: My friends and family response was, thankfully, mostly very understanding, because people that know me and people that talk to me know that I come from a good place of nonviolence and coexistence. I feel like the people that got to talk to me also inside military prison, a lot of them, Ben-Gvir supporters, they support killing all Arabs. When they got to know me before they knew my political opinions, they understood. They understood that there are people that don’t support this. Sorry, I can hear myself twice.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can possibly blank that out, because we’re not sure how to fix that right now. But just continue to talk, because we don’t hear you twice, but we do hear you very clearly.

TAL MITNICK: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your time —

TAL MITNICK: OK, yeah. So, the —

AMY GOODMAN: — in prison? And where are you —

TAL MITNICK: No, no, go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: — being held?

TAL MITNICK: Yeah. So, I’m being held in a military prison, where other soldiers that have committed crimes inside the military and got sentenced to military prison are also being held. It’s not a fun experience, but it’s also not the worst experience imaginable. It’s not like the experience that Palestinian prisoners are being held under in the West Bank or inside Israel. Yeah, it’s very strict timing, very strict about what you’re allowed to do and when. But this is something that I’m willing to do to make an impact.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you feel the climate is changing among Israelis, and also what Israelis see about what’s happening in Gaza. I mean, we just reported we’re talking about now close to 25,000 Palestinians killed, over 10,000 children, over 7,000 women, many believed to be dead in the rubble. We don’t even know that count. If you watch something like Al Jazeera or you watch other media, since there are only Palestinian journalists there on the ground, you see endless pictures of carnage, of horror, of babies being pulled out of the rubble, dead or alive. What do you see on Israeli TV? We’re talking about people who are just 15 minutes away from Gaza.

TAL MITNICK: So, actually, inside prison, the only source of news that we got was one newspaper called Israel Hayom. And every day on the newspaper, there will be pictures of the soldiers that died. And I remember feeling like — I feel sad, very sad for the soldiers and the families that have to take this great burden of losing someone close to them, but I know that while seeing soldiers dying, I know that this means that there are much more Palestinian civilians dying, which we don’t see in the newspaper.

AMY GOODMAN: Who else are you serving time with in that prison? Who else is there?

TAL MITNICK: Sadly, a lot of the other people there don’t — they are deserters, which means that they served time in the military, and then at some point, for some reason, they went back home and did not come back. Most of these people desert because of socioeconomic reasons, if it’s having to take care of their siblings or go work for their family. And when they come back and turn themselves in, we’re now seeing a very heavy sentencing of those deserters as a part of the fascist persecution and the fog of war. People that went to work for three months to feed their family are now being sentenced to half a year in military prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the overall antiwar movement, if there is one in Israel? I mean, there were massive protests, up to a million people in the streets, which is massive for Israel, around the — Netanyahu wanting to gut the power of the judiciary. Of course, he is under charges himself, and that would help him remain out of prison. But at that point, many reservists said they would not serve in the military. Everything changed after October 7th Hamas attack on southern Israel. If you can talk about why that did not change you? And how large is the antiwar movement, and do you feel it’s growing?

TAL MITNICK: I feel like after the horrendous attack of October 7th against Israeli civilians, there was a very important conception that was broken in Israeli society: the conception that we can live with the siege and with the occupation and not feel it. Now, when that conception is broken, we have a vacuum. And there are two ideas that are trying to pull people: one idea that the right is offering, which is, “We can’t live with occupation. We can’t live with siege. This means we need to wipe all of them out,” and the other idea, the moderate one, the one that makes sense, is that “We can’t live with occupation. We can’t live with siege. We need to step forward for peace.”

Inside military prison, I got asked a lot, “What do you think? We should just stop the war and put our hands up and not do anything?” And I would answer, “No, we need to keep fighting. We need to keep fighting for a just future. We need to stop the physical fighting between us, and we need to very, very aggressively push for a better future.”

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering your response to Prime Minister Netanyahu once again saying “from the river to the sea.” When Palestinian advocates and their allies talk about “from the river to the sea,” the response of the Israeli government has been, “That means they’re for the genocide of Jews, because they don’t want Jews to be there,” the government says. Now you have Netanyahu saying — not that this hasn’t been said before by Likud — but, “From the river to the sea, Israel must control.” Your response to that, Tal? And if you can talk about the word “occupation”? Because in the U.S. media also, there is rarely that word used, that Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza.

TAL MITNICK: The term “from the river to the sea” is very controversial inside of Israel. And I feel like some people that use it, there are people that use it that mean the genocide of Jews inside Israel. But just the term itself, I feel like, does not mean a genocide of Jews; it means freedom of all Palestinians from the river to the sea. When Benjamin Netanyahu uses this term, it does not mean freedom for all from the river to the sea; it means oppression of Palestinians, and it means Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Tal, I’m wondering your response to Jews around the world, particularly here in the United States, like Jewish Voice for Peace, these massive protests that have been held, from Grand Central Station to shutting down the bridges and the tunnels from New York, to highways in California, saying, “We want a ceasefire now.” How do you respond to that? And your final message to other 18-year-old Israelis?

TAL MITNICK: These protests are amazing. These organizations, like Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow, do incredible work. And I support the continuation of these protests all around the world.

And a message to other people my age, other kids, I feel like it’s important to know that we have a voice. I used to think that talking to people is all we could do, but we can change, and people want to hear what we have to say because we’re the future. And this is — yeah, we’re the future, and we can change.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, might you spend months, more than a year in jail if you keep saying no to military service, since Netanyahu says this will go on for more than a year?

TAL MITNICK: Because there’s no policy set for jailing conscientious objectors, I don’t really know how much time I’ll spend in prison, but it could be months.

AMY GOODMAN: Tal Mitnick, 18-year-old Israeli activist, known as a refusenik. He’s refused mandatory military service in the Israeli army, the first conscientious objector in Israel since the Israeli assault on Gaza began over a hundred days ago. He’s just sentenced to 30 days in prison, which he served, for refusing to enlist, was released a few days ago, then will be called up again and says he will refuse again.

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Horrific Traumatic Injuries of Children: British Dr. Witnesses Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Hospitals
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/19/ ... transcript

Before Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza, the territory had 36 functioning hospitals. Now only 16 partially functioning health facilities remain. As Israeli bombs and ground troops approach Nasser Hospital, the largest remaining partially functioning health facility in Gaza, we speak with Dr. James Smith, an emergency medical doctor recently returned from Gaza, where he worked alongside Palestinian healthcare workers to treat patients at Al-Aqsa Hospital. “Every single day, without exception, there were multiple mass casualty incidents at the hospital,” says Smith. “They would include open chest wounds, open abdominal wounds, traumatic amputations, severe full-thickness burns … really some of the most horrific traumatic injuries that I have ever seen.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Israeli forces are pushing further into southern Gaza, with airstrikes and ground troops attacking areas that Israel had previously told Palestinians to flee to as safe zones. Over the past few days, Israel has bombed areas close to Nasser Hospital, the largest remaining semi-functioning health facility in Gaza, located in the southern city of Khan Younis. Gaza only has 16 partially functioning health facilities remaining. Before Israel’s assault, Gaza had 36 hospitals. The hospitals that are still working are operating far beyond their capacity, have been turned into makeshift refugee camps to house the displaced — and makeshift morgues — with health officials describing the situation as catastrophic. The Health Ministry estimates that over 60,000 people have been wounded in Gaza, with hundreds more casualties every day. The casualty count at this point is nearing 25,000, more than 10,000 of them children.

For more, we’re joined by Dr. James Smith, an emergency medical doctor who just returned from Gaza earlier this month, where he worked alongside Palestinian healthcare workers to treat patients at Al-Aqsa Hospital located in Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Dr. James was in Gaza with the organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. He’s joining us now from London.

Dr. James, welcome to Democracy Now! Describe what you saw, what you confronted, the work you were doing, what’s happening at Al-Aqsa Hospital.

DR. JAMES SMITH: Hi, Amy.

So, yes, as you say, I was working with a team. There were 10 of us. Myself, I was with the organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. We were accompanied by colleagues from the International Rescue Committee. And very importantly, we were — it’s important to really reiterate that we were working with our Palestinian colleagues, so doctors, nurses, other healthcare professionals, at Al — sorry, at Al-Aqsa Hospital. Al-Aqsa is a hospital based in the middle area of Gaza, so south of Gaza City and north of Khan Younis.

Myself, I was working in the emergency room. So, we would position ourselves in the ER every morning and, really, at that point, wait to see what the day would bring. Every single day, without exception, there were multiple mass casualty incidents at the hospital. So that’s several patients presenting at a time with traumatic injuries of varying severity. Those patients would require stabilization and then often transfer through to the operating room for surgical intervention. Some patients would require palliative care, if we were able to provide some form of palliative care, and in addition to many, many trauma patients. And by “many,” I mean several hundred over the time that we were working at Al-Aqsa. We were also treating patients presenting with complex medical problems, so people that had suffered heart attacks, for example, had suffered from strokes, and people whose hypertension or diabetes management had been negatively impacted, usually through a lack of access to their usual medication or because they hadn’t been able to see their usual doctor for several months. And then, furthermore, we were also seeing an even greater number of people with, effectively, primary healthcare-level problems.

So, the entirety of the primary healthcare or community care system in Gaza has completely collapsed. In fact, the entire healthcare system, the Ministry of Health has already announced several months ago, has completely collapsed. But that meant that anyone presenting with so-called, well, more minor complaints — coughs, colds, diarrheal illnesses — they were all also presenting to the emergency room to be seen by the doctors and nurses there.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about treating children, Dr. James?

DR. JAMES SMITH: Sure. So, as you’ve mentioned, a significant proportion of the people that have been killed since the start of this escalation are children. We certainly saw every mass casualty incident in the emergency room. There were several children also present. I remember very vividly some of the most traumatic injuries inflicted upon people were inflicted upon children. And they would include open chest wounds, open abdominal wounds, traumatic amputations, severe full-thickness burns to a substantial proportion of the body area — really some of the most horrific traumatic injuries that I have ever seen.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re actually showing images for our TV audience of Al-Aqsa Hospital and of the children and the adults who have been wounded there. You know, it’s really important to point out, if you’re talking about a hospital in normal times that has repeatedly been attacked, it would — and that’s severely compromised in its functioning, but we’re talking about this constant bombardment, where you have people coming in who have been severely wounded. You have people taking refuge there. And is it both like a refugee camp and a morgue?

DR. JAMES SMITH: So, there were several thousand people that had sought supposed sanctuary within the hospital compound itself. And we’ve seen this in several other hospitals across the Gaza Strip. There were reports, for example, of thousands of people sheltering in the Al-Shifa compound before that was surrounded and raided by the Israeli occupation forces. The same was the case at Al-Aqsa. So there were people staying in makeshift tents in and around the hospital buildings. Just up the main street adjacent to the hospital, sort of another IDP camp, internally displaced persons camp, had sort of formed very organically on open land. As the Israeli ground forces moved closer to the hospital and as the bombardment, the artillery and air bombardment, intensified, many of those — many thousands of those displaced people have displaced further south towards Rafah. And that also includes patients who were in the hospital at the time that we were working there. Many of them have also fled, along with many of the staff, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip, and it’s really important to play these clips. Right now Gaza has experienced the longest communications blackout of this Israeli attack for the last three months. I think it’s something like seven days. So it’s really hard to get information inside this intense Israeli bombardment in the vicinity of Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in Khan Younis, the largest remaining semi-functioning health facility in Gaza, and tanks and armored vehicles are on the main road leading to the area. On Wednesday, Democracy Now! reached Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, who works in Nasser Hospital. He described the situation on the ground and the difficulty in getting out any messages. This is what he had to say.

DR. AHMED MOGHRABI: Thank you, sister, for asking about us. Thank you for letting me speak out here. We don’t have internet at all. I managed to get a very weak signal. I can’t upload any of these videos. Here, 90% of people who are already evacuated at the hospital, they evacuated from the hospital. Ninety percent of medical personnel evacuated from the hospital.

And this is my little daughter, actually. She got head trauma Saturday. You know, hundreds of these evacuating people at the corridor, somebody pushed her, and she fell on her head. Now I’m taking care about my — this little girl. She needs medicine. She’s not well. So I stay at the hospital now, but I want to evacuate. The situation is catastrophic, sister. Really, I’m very tired. I’m very tired.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, and the image we’ve been showing as he spoke was Dr. Moghrabi holding his own wounded daughter. I’m wondering, Dr. James, if you can talk about the significance, the medical significance, of a complete — almost complete telecommunications blackout, in terms of ambulances being reached, people being able to communicate to get help.

DR. JAMES SMITH: Absolutely. I mean, this is a catastrophic development. As you’ve mentioned, Amy, this, I think, is the seventh time that the Israelis have suspended access to telecommunications across almost the entirety of the Gaza Strip. This is now day six or seven of a complete sort of telecommunications blackout. It makes it almost impossible to do anything.

So, in the first instance, people can’t reach their families, their loved ones. They can’t communicate with colleagues. They can’t reassure family that they’re OK, or indeed relatives and friends can’t inform family members and so on when somebody has been killed or injured. There have been occasions where the emergency number has not been in use. So, as you say, it’s been difficult to call ambulances or mobilize ambulances to places where there has been an air or artillery strike. It makes it very difficult for health and humanitarian workers to do their essential work —

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Smith, we —

DR. JAMES SMITH: — so they can’t coordinate with each other.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds. What message do you have for the world, just having come out of Gaza? Ten seconds.

DR. JAMES SMITH: The violence needs to end immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. James Smith, emergency medical doctor, just back from Gaza, where he worked to treat patients at Al-Aqsa Hospital.

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Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Decries Israel’s “Inhumane” Assault as Gaza Death Toll Tops 25,000
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
JANUARY 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/22/ ... transcript

Transcript

Palestinian health authorities say the death toll in Gaza has passed 25,000. This comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly affirmed in recent days that he opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, saying Israel must maintain indefinite military control between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. We get an update and speak with Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was detained by Israeli authorities as he and his family fled Gaza in late November. He says that while there must be an immediate ceasefire to stop the suffering, only “a just solution to the Palestinian case” will bring long-term stability to the region. “If there is no peace, … we will unfortunately witness more and more of the killings of innocent people everywhere,” he says.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s 15-week war has topped 25,000. There are reports Israel is blowing up entire neighborhoods of the besieged city of Khan Younis. Al Jazeera reports Israel has targeted hospitals, ambulances and schools in the city where thousands of civilians are sheltering.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports the United States, Qatar and Egypt are pushing Israel and Hamas to take part in what the paper describes as a “phased diplomatic process” involving the release of hostages held in Gaza and the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. After the report was published, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he rejects the proposal because it calls for the war to end. On Thursday, Netanyahu also publicly rejected calls by the Biden administration for the future establishment of a Palestinian state and called for Israel to be in control of the region from the river to the sea.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] I clarify that in any arrangement in the foreseeable future, with an accord or without an accord, the state of Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River. This is a necessary condition. It clashes with the principle of sovereignty. What can you do? I tell this truth to our American friends, and I also stopped the attempt to impose a reality on us that would harm Israel’s security. A prime minister in Israel should be able to say no even to our best friends, say no when necessary and say yes when possible.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Netanyahu faces growing domestic pressure to bring home the remaining 130 hostages held in Gaza. Earlier today, the Israel Knesset session was suspended after hostages’ families disrupted a committee meeting, demanding lawmakers do more to free their loved ones. Protesters also blocked entrances to the Knesset.

For more, we’re joined in Cairo, Egypt, by Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet and author, who was detained by Israeli authorities as he and his family fled Gaza. He wrote about his experience in a New Yorker article headlined “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza.” He’s a columnist, a teacher, a founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, also the author of the award-winning book titled Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza.

Mosab, welcome back to Democracy Now! We talked to you just after you made it out of Gaza, following some of your family members. You had been detained. Can you describe that journey and the family members that are still left in Gaza, particularly your brother’s wife, who is about to give birth?

MOSAB ABU TOHA: [Inaudible] for having me, and thanks to Democracy Now! for the continued coverage of the massacres that are taking place in Gaza.

I was on the show a few weeks ago with you, and I describe the horrific experience that I went through. Just yesterday, I watched a video of merciless Israeli soldiers stripping naked fellow Palestinian civilians, and they were beating them in the face, beating them in the stomach. They are outside in the open in the cold weather. And I’m really surprised, because when some media outlets communicated with the Israeli army about my case, they said, “Well, we deny everything he says. It’s true we took him. We interrogated him. But we did not attack him.” But we can see on videos now that are coming out on social media by Israeli soldiers the merciless treatment of Palestinians. So, everything this army is doing is inhumane, is against whatever a child can think of doing. Even a child cannot do anything like that to a cat or to a mouse.

Yesterday, my wife told me that my son, every time he is going to sleep, he starts to weep and sob and cry out loud sometimes. And he asks about his friends in Gaza. Are they eating well? Do they have water? And what about his parents — his grandparents, sorry, about his cousins?

So, what is going on right now in Gaza is really unprecedented. I can’t think of another case in history where everything is taking place live. And the world leaders are supporting Israel with whatever they can. I was released, thankfully, after a lot of friends and media outlets wrote about my case. But there are still hundreds and hundreds of innocent people who are still under Israeli custody, who are being stripped naked, who are being beaten in the face and thrown outside in the cold.

My parents and my siblings are still back in Gaza. My parents and three of my siblings and their children are in north Gaza, a place where there are only six ambulances for about more than 500,000 Palestinians there. They are running out of food, running out of water. Yesterday, my brother sent me a voice message from his phone, about to cry. There is no bread for the children. There is no medicine for the cold and the flu, not to mention that there is no medicine for people with chronic diseases. And we have been telling the whole world about this on social media, on TV, and no one is listening.

I mean, Israel is accusing Egypt of closing the border with Gaza. But this is a big lie, because from day one, Israel bombed the Rafah border crossing, and they are bombing the aid trucks. And they are not allowing the UNRWA commission general from going to north Gaza. So, this is a very highly official person, and he is not allowed to go to Gaza, because they are saying, “Oh, Hamas is stealing the aid from the people.” But, OK, let international staff go into the north of Gaza and see what’s happening there. Why are you blocking the way between the northern part and the southern part? And they are still.

So, from day one, Israel asked people from the north of Gaza to go south. And now they are continuing to bomb the southern part of the Gaza Strip. So nowhere is safe, whether it’s north Gaza or south Gaza. And there was — yesterday I posted something on social media, and someone with — I don’t know what kind of people they are — and he said, “Why is your brother still in north Gaza?” I mean, do you mean that if he left — if he had left north Gaza, he would live in peace in south Gaza? My friends and my neighbors and my wife’s family are in north Gaza, and they are starving, and many of them were killed. So where do we go?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the telecommunications blackout that went on for something like eight days, and what that means for someone like your sister-in-law when it comes to giving birth?

MOSAB ABU TOHA: Well, Israel was really cruel enough not only to cut off water and food from the people in Gaza, but they also cut electricity. They cut off internet connection. They cut off mobile services and landline services also. So, this is not — I mean, this is not about me calling my brother: “Hi. How are you? Are you still alive?” No, it’s even when someone is being bombed — and many people are under the rubble, by the way, until now. They are under the rubble, and they send sometimes messages from their phone services. I mean, the only way people can communicate with the outside world is using an eSIM card that they could connect to networks outside of Gaza. So, some people would send, “Oh, they bombed my neighbors’ house, and they are under the rubble. Can someone please call the Red Cross? Can someone call the ambulances?” So it’s not only about disconnecting us from each other, but also when someone is wounded, is thrown in the street, and they try to reach out to an ambulance. There is no way they can do that. So, I don’t know what kind of cruelty that lead someone to cut water, food, to cut the connection, and also to cut their lives, for they are ending the lives of everyone in Gaza, especially children.

AMY GOODMAN: Mosab Abu Toha —

MOSAB ABU TOHA: And now my sister, my brother’s wife, is pregnant. Yeah. Sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: And when is she expected to give birth? She’s in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza?

MOSAB ABU TOHA: Yes, she is in the Jabaliya refugee camp. She was staying at a school, at an UNRWA school, with her husband and her three other children. But because the schools are very crowded and there is no water, no toilets to use, so they sometimes go back and forth between their family house and the school, the UNRWA school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp. And by the way, our house was bombed in October, on October 28th. And we were lucky because we were not there, so no one of us was harmed.

But still, they are under the threat of being killed any moment, under the — I mean, not only by the Israeli airstrikes, but also as a mother. My brother’s wife is now pregnant. There is no guarantee that she is going to give birth just like other mothers give birth to their children. There is no cleanliness. There are no clothes for the newborn. There is no formula milk, if needed. There is no medicine for the mother if she needs any treatment. So, many people are dying, not because of the Israeli airstrikes, not because of the bombs, but also because there is not any sign of good life there.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Mosab Abu Toha, about the significance of massive protests around the world and in the United States, particularly led by the Jewish community, what that means to you, and also South Africa bringing this case against Israel, charging it with genocide, to the International Court of Justice.

MOSAB ABU TOHA: I was invited to read during a rabbi event for ceasefire. And we have been seeing the South African attempt to prove Israel’s genocidal attempts to kill as many Gazans as possible. So we have African people who lived under the apartheid system, and we have Jews who were killed during the Holocaust in Europe, so they are now uniting together to stop these massacres. So this tells us, as Gazans, that we share the same suffering with other people. But, unfortunately, this suffering is brought to us by other people now in Israel, Zionists, who are bringing this cycle of violence in to us — and not for a year, for a year or two. It’s been happening even before the Nakba in 1948. So this tells us that suffering is colorless, doesn’t have to be — you don’t have to be a white or a Muslim or an Arab or a male or a female. It’s enough for you to be a human to sympathize with other people and to call for a ceasefire and to stand for your fellow human beings.

And I hope that we can hear similar pleas and similar — and we can see other attempts, not by the free people of the world, but also if there is any free leader in the world who can step in and say out loud to stop the massacres, the nonstop massacres of the Palestinian people, and to call for a just solution to the Palestinian case.

AMY GOODMAN: Mosab, we spoke to you right before Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, the renowned Palestinian poet. I know he was a close friend of yours. I was wondering if you could share your remembrance of him. Talk about his significance and how he died.

MOSAB ABU TOHA: Well, first of all, Refaat’s death is not a unique death. There are many other intelligent and wonderful and lovely people who were killed the same way. And by the way, many people don’t know this, but Refaat’s body is still under the rubble of the house that was bombed. So, I want everyone to imagine that your brother, that your father, that your neighbor was not only killed, but his body is still under the rubble, and the body is starting to decay. I don’t know what remains of Refaat’s body. This really breaks my heart.

I would like to remember Refaat as someone who was always ready to listen to our literary works. He likes — he liked to read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, of John Donne’s poems. He was a huge fan of John Donne. I would like to remember Refaat as someone who loves — who loved to go to strawberry farms and pick strawberries with me and to play pun games.

Refaat is someone who didn’t want to die. And in his poem “If I Must Die,” he didn’t say, “If I die.” “If I must die,” if my death was a necessity, “Let it be a hope. Let it be a tale. Let it bring hope.” And it’s really very, very, very sympathetic and very, very beautiful to see that many people around the world are reading his poem and flying his kite. And I’m sure that Refaat is outside now, seeing — I mean, although his body is still under rubble, but his spirit, his soul is watching everything. He is watching the kites that are flying in the sky of the free world. And I think, I believe, that his only hope right now is that these kites will fly over Gaza to protect the children and mothers and fathers and everyone in Gaza from the Israeli airstrikes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to end by asking about what you are calling for. The Wall Street Journal is reporting the U.S., Qatar and Egypt are pushing Israel and Hamas to take part in what the paper describes as a “phased diplomatic process” involving the release of hostages and the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces. But following the report, Netanyahu said he rejects the proposal because it calls for the war to end. Your response, Mosab?

MOSAB ABU TOHA: OK. So, I don’t think that any ceasefire that is going to be signed between Hamas and Israel is going to end the Palestinians’ suffering. So, if this suffering does not end, I don’t think that there will be peace. What should be called for is a just solution to the Palestinian case. It’s not only about the hostages. It’s not about even the children who are being killed now. Because if there is no peace, if there is, I mean, not realistic peace, if peace is not been reached, I think that we will unfortunately witness more and more of the killings of innocent people everywhere.

What I call for is a ceasefire, because we want to save as many children and many family members as possible. What I’m calling for — I mean, if they can’t, I mean, impose a ceasefire right now, at least get some food and some water and some sanitary pads to the mothers and everyone in north Gaza at least. I mean, I don’t know what makes this world powerless in front of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Mosab Abu Toha, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian poet and author, detained by Israeli authorities as he and his family fled Gaza, a columnist, a teacher, founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, author of the award-winning book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza. We’ll also link to his pieces in The New Yorker magazine.

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“Israelism” on Tour: New Film Examines American Jews’ Growing Rejection of Israel’s Occupation
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
JANUARY 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/22/ ... transcript

Transcript

The new documentary Israelism examines the growing generational divide among Jewish Americans on the question of Palestine, with many younger Jews increasingly critical of Israel and less supportive of Zionism. Simone Zimmerman, one of the protagonists of the film and a co-founder of the group IfNotNow, says she grew up being told that supporting Israel was central to her Jewish identity, but that collapsed once she visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories and saw the system of apartheid under which millions live. “It’s so deeply contrary to our values as Jewish people to support this disgusting oppression and denial of freedom,” she says. We are also joined by Erin Axelman, co-director and one of the producers of Israelism, who says Zimmerman’s journey mirrors their own and those of many other young Jews who realize they “must fight for the freedom and equality of Palestinians while also fighting antisemitism.” The film is on a 40-city screening tour in Canada and the United States after previous efforts to ban the screenings on several campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Six students have sued Harvard University, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment” and tolerating intensifying harassment of Jewish students since October 7th. This comes as reports of antisemitism and Islamophobia have soared nationwide, but there’s been a broader effort to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on college and university campuses and to conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel’s occupation and demands for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The former Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced to resign earlier this month, just weeks after the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down in the wake of a congressional hearing on antisemitism where they were grilled by lawmakers, including the far-right New York Congressmember Elise Stefanik.

The lawsuit against Harvard was filed by two law firms, including the New York-based Kasowitz Benson Torres, which filed similar lawsuits against New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. The firm also has ties to the Trump administration.

The lawsuit refers to student-led marches on Harvard’s campus in support of Palestinian rights as “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty” and singles out a screening at Harvard Divinity School in September of the new documentary Israelism, which examines the relationship between Jews in the United States and the state of Israel, and the disillusionment as they begin to question Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

In a minute, we’ll speak with one of the film’s directors and one of the main subjects. This is the film’s trailer.

UNIDENTIFIED: Some American Jews who come here say, “We came to Israel, and we left from Palestine.”

ABE FOXMAN: The non-Jewish community does not understand our obsession with Israel.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I went to a Jewish day school.

EITAN: Summer camp, organized trips to Israel.

TEACHER: Do you want to go to Israel, too?

STUDENTS: Yeah! We want to go! We want to go!

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Israeli soldiers, they are hot. They’re awesome. They’re strong.

JACQUI SCHULEFAND: We actually have had quite a few of our former students join the IDF. These are kids. These are 18-, 19-year-olds. Amazing.

EITAN: I told my parents, “I don’t even need to apply to college. I am going to just join the Israeli military.”

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Ten percent of my graduating class joined the Israeli army.

EITAN: We were deployed to the West Bank.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I don’t think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me.

LARA FRIEDMAN: When people look at the West Bank today and say this is an apartheid system, it’s not just throwing out a word.

UNIDENTIFIED: Palestinians living, day in, day out, without experiencing a day of freedom.

PETER BEINART: And you see what non-democracy looks like.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: What we’ve been told is that the only way that Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe. The more I learned about that, the more I came to see that as a lie.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Within the Jewish community, there’s been a striking change.

JEREMY BEN-AMI: They’re really angry at the way they were indoctrinated, justifiably so.

ABE FOXMAN: When we talk about we’re losing the kids, we not — we lost them. I think they’re a little super naive.

CORNEL WEST: Any time you cut against the grain, you’re going to catch hell.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: “You are a self-loathing Jew. Go kill yourself. You’re an antisemitic Jew.”

SARAH ANNE MINKIN: The way that we talk about antisemitism isn’t about protecting Jews. It’s about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that?

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: They will do anything to preserve unconditional support for Israel.

LARA FRIEDMAN: The great irony is that there actually is a resurgent antisemitism.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS: Jews will not replace us!

LARA FRIEDMAN: History is not going to judge us kindly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the documentary Israelism.

For more, we’re joined in Toronto by Erin Axelman, co-director of Israelism. The film is now on a 40-city screening tour in Canada and the United States. Here in New York, we’re joined by Simone Zimmerman, Jewish American activist, co-founder of IfNotNow, one of the main protagonists of Israelism.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Erin, let’s begin with you. Why did you make this film?

ERIN AXELMAN: Yeah, this film is really based off my story. It’s based off a story of young American Jews learning a idealized and sanitized version of Israeli history, and really falling in love with that history, but, upon coming into contact with Palestinians and Palestinian narratives, having quite the rude awakening upon learning about the horrific oppression of the Palestinian people.

So, upon learning about the Nakba and the occupation as a young person, I wanted to do all I could in whatever way, big or small, to help change my own Jewish community, as well as to end the horrific oppression of the Palestinian people. And I began trying to come into contact with more and more people who had similar experiences,, and I began to realize that my own story was part of a much larger generational change, as hundreds of thousands of young American Jews begin to realize that to live out our Jewish values to the best of our ability, we must fight for the freedom and equality of Palestinians while also fighting against antisemitism.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the organizations that you chronicle, that you sort of depict in this film, those that are challenging the state of Israel and those that are supporting it, that the other groups are taking on.

ERIN AXELMAN: Definitely. We really — Simone is the main character and protagonist in the film. And we really try to tell a generational story, and I’m telling my own story through Simone, in many ways. We really chronicle a variety of progressive Jewish groups, including IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street and many others.

And then we also, on the right, document a lot of pro-Israel groups. We had Abe Foxman as one of the main characters in the film, the director emeritus and former head of the Anti-Defamation League. We talk extensively about Birthright and AIPAC and other groups that have tried to keep the status quo of unconditional support for Israel alive and well.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s bring Simone Zimmerman into this conversation. Why don’t you tell us about your upbringing, Simone? Talk about your allegiance to the state of Israel, how it was instilled with you, and then talk about your transformation.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Absolutely. I grew up in a Jewish community where, you know, the Holocaust was a formative part of my upbringing, and I saw defending the state of Israel as a core part of what it meant to keep the Jewish people safe. It was a core Jewish commitment for me, so much so that when I actually met anti-Zionist Jews, anti-Zionist Israelis, people who were fighting occupation and apartheid when I was a college student at UC Berkeley, I couldn’t even believe that those people existed. They were an anomaly to me.

And the more I met those students and, more importantly, met Palestinian students, learned about their lives, about, you know, what it means, from the moment that you’re born, to live under a system that deems you lesser, less worthy, that you have to live under occupation and oppression and dispossession just because of who you are and where you were born, I very quickly ran out of answers that felt moral and logical to me to answer the hard questions that I was hearing from these students about how I could justify the oppression that they lived under.

AMY GOODMAN: Simone, I wanted to go to that moment at UC Berkeley — you’re a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley — a clip from Israelism, which features you in 2010 there, when the student Senate failed to override a veto of a bill calling on campus officials to divest from companies that supply weapons that Israel uses in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I just knew it was this bad thing that I had to fight.

BILL OPPONENT 1: It is antisemitism. It is.

BILL OPPONENT 2: You are trying to make me feel marginalized on my own campus.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: And I remember all of us going, “Well, you shouldn’t boycott Israel, because it’s applying a double standard. And you shouldn’t boycott Israel, because it’s unfair to single out Israel.”

BILL OPPONENT 3: Please, I beg of you. I beg you, please, to have compassion and to remember that we are alienating students. And I am devastated by this bill. I am a human being.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I still remember you have these Palestinian students who get up and said, you know, “Jewish students, you are crying about feeling silenced and marginalized. You know, my aunts and cousins didn’t sleep for weeks while bombs were falling overhead in Gaza. What do you have to say to that?”

BILL SUPPORTER: If divestment is hostile, then where do we begin to describe the hostility of a military occupation?

AMY GOODMAN: Simone Zimmerman, if you can talk about that moment at UC Berkeley, what exactly was happening, and how you decided to explore further the kind of questioning that actually also came out of your Jewish education?

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Absolutely. Well, you know, first, I want to say it’s striking to have this conversation right now as the Israeli military has destroyed all the universities in Gaza right now. And for me, I remember when I was in that campus debate, the way that this narrative about Jewish students being unsafe on campus is actually, I think, a deep conflation between being unsafe and being uncomfortable. I was deeply uncomfortable. I did not know about the realities that Palestinians lived under. I was systematically denied an education about that reality. And to this day, we see pro-Israel organizations working to do everything they can to change the topic away from Palestinian suffering onto Jewish discomfort.

You know what? Occupation and apartheid are deeply uncomfortable. We should all be uncomfortable and outraged by what’s happening in Gaza right now. And again, as I already said, the more I listened to Palestinian students testify about their realities, the more it was undeniable to me that I was missing a huge part of the story, and I had to go find out more.

AMY GOODMAN: Erin Axelman, I wanted you to introduce us to Eitan, an American who decides not to go to college first, but to serve in the IDF. We’re about to play a clip of him.

EITAN: From our hands and threw him to the ground while he’s still blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, and they started kicking him for a good few minutes. I was responsible for this man’s well-being. I was responsible to bring him from the checkpoint to the detention center. That was my job. And right outside the fence of the detention center, they grabbed him from me, and they started beating him. I felt responsible, but my commander wasn’t saying anything, so how could I say anything? The entire time that this was happening, a military police officer was standing just inside the fence watching and smoking a cigarette. As soon as these guys were done kicking this Palestinian man, the military police officer tossed his cigarette, he came, brought him inside the detention center. And I didn’t even speak up. I didn’t speak up. And that’s just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Eitan. It reminds me of our previous guest, Mosab Abu Toha, describing being beaten by the IDF. Well, he, Eitan, came to serve in Israel in the IDF. Tell us more about him and his transformation.

ERIN AXELMAN: Yeah, many American Jews are told that to defend the Jewish people and to be a good Jewish person, one of the best things you can do is to join the Israeli military or support the Israeli military. In the film, we extensively interview Hillel educators and an Israel fellow at the University of Connecticut, and they openly brag about how many kids they’ve gotten to serve in the Israeli military. And that is deeply tragic.

And I have had friends, American Jewish friends, who have also served. And they join as young people, as 18-year-olds, thinking that they’re doing a great thing by defending the Jewish people. And then many of them are sent to the occupied West Bank, and they quickly realize that they are actually a cog in a system of apartheid, a system that places you in a different legal system based upon the race you are born into. And so many American Jews, and some Israelis, as well, when they actually realize that this is what they’re doing — they’re not defending the Jewish people; they’re actually defending a settlement expansionist program in the West Bank, that is very literally a system of apartheid — it is devastating, and it is heartbreaking.

Obviously, they’re not the greatest victims. The greatest victims, of course, are the Palestinians who have to face that apartheid. But it’s inspiring to see members of Breaking the Silence, both Israelis and Americans, speak out and say, “We thought we were joining to do something, and we found out that we were actually, again, a part of this apartheid system,” and they are going to do everything they can to end this system of occupation and apartheid. And so, we really wanted to include someone like him, because it’s a common story, and it’s also the story of many of my friends, who were — served in the Israeli military, realized that they were part of a system of apartheid, and are now doing all they can to end that system.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Simone Zimmerman, you didn’t serve in the IDF, but you did go to Israel and the Occupied Territories. You also, for a moment — what was it? For two days? — became the outreach coordinator for the Bernie Sanders campaign, before a campaign was waged against you. Talk about your trajectory, going to the Occupied Territories, coming back, founding IfNotNow.

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I went. You know, I had grown up spending time in Israel. I felt deeply connected to the place. I thought I knew — I thought I knew Israel. But the way that the apartheid system is actually built is such that Israeli Jews don’t actually have to see the reality that Palestinians live under. They can drive on roads. You know, they can drive on the side of the wall where they don’t have to see what is on the other side, the daily horrors and brutality and deep denial of dignity and freedom that Palestinians live under.

And once I saw those realities with my own eyes, once I met people who had been evicted from their homes, who were denied basic freedom of movement, people just like me who want to live in freedom and safety, whose every piece of their lives have been destroyed and constricted by a system of Jewish supremacy, I couldn’t unsee those things. And again, as Erin has already spoke about, this is a story that thousands of Jewish people around the world have encountered. And we know that it’s so deeply contrary to our values as Jewish people to support this disgusting oppression and denial of freedom from another people. And I’ve been part of this generation that includes IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace and many other groups that are taking on an outdated establishment that wants to enforce a pro-Israel orthodoxy and will do everything they can to attack and marginalize and silence anybody who dissents from that viewpoint.

You mentioned at the beginning of this segment the lawsuit going on at Harvard University. I can’t help but bring up right now the attacks that we’ve seen over the weekend on Derek Penslar, the director of a Jewish studies center at Harvard University, a world-renowned Jewish studies scholar. And he has been attacked for being named to an antisemitism task force at Harvard just because he criticizes the Israeli government.

So we’re seeing how far this establishment is willing to go to attack and marginalize anybody who doesn’t toe that very strict and narrow orthodoxy, and increasingly anybody who doesn’t defend this government’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. And it’s absurd, but it’s also deeply dangerous and offensive to those of us who are acting out of a deep place of intellectual integrity, of Jewish values, of a commitment to justice, who want to build a world of genuine safety and freedom and dignity for Jewish people and for Palestinians. And that old guard is more and more desperate to keep any of us out of public life and political life, and certainly not to be legitimized as a legitimate Jewish voice.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Erin Axelman, you’re in Canada. Simone is here in New York. You’re starting yet another tour of the film. As Simone mentioned, Israelism is mentioned in the Harvard lawsuit, equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism or criticism of the Israeli state. Your final thoughts as the two of you travel both countries?

ERIN AXELMAN: Totally. You know, it’s ironic. You know, there was four attempted cancellations of screenings that we had in the fall. And at all of those screenings, it was actually Jewish groups, Jewish student groups or Jewish faculty, who were bringing this to the venue or university. So it’s very ironic that under the guise of protecting Jewish students or fighting antisemitism, administrations or venues are trying to cancel a film brought by Jewish people, made by Jewish people, about Jewish people. And it just shows how confused this moment is, and how all criticism of Israel, even if it’s being made by Jews, is often considered antisemitic, and which is totally absurd and really makes it much more difficult to fight real antisemitism.

And as we’re about to do this screening tour, we’re sure there’s going to be quite a few attempted cancellations. We just found out that Barnard’s president is attempting to unilaterally cancel a screening of Israelism in February. We’re working with the faculty, and we will make this screening happen. And we will fight all attempts to cancel our screenings. And we’ll also be part of the movement to fight back against attempted censorship of any pro-Palestinian or progressive Jewish voices.

AMY GOODMAN: Erin Axelman, co-director of Israelism, and Simone Zimmerman, Jewish American activist, co-founder of IfNotNow.