Biden’s Middle East Policy “Leading Us into a War Whose Aims We Have Not Defined”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript
President Biden says he holds Iran responsible for the drone killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan and that he has decided on a U.S. response. Tehran has denied any involvement in the attack and threatened to “decisively respond” to any U.S. retaliation. Responsibility for the strike was claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a term used to describe a loose coalition of militias that oppose U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. “This is leading us into a war whose aims we have not defined, whose exit we cannot envision,” says Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who warns that “continued warfare in Gaza by the Israelis is a direct threat to U.S. national interests.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran has threatened to, quote, “decisively respond” to any U.S. attack on Iran following President Joe Biden’s linking of Tehran to the drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded 40 at a military base in Jordan. President Biden announced Tuesday he had decided how to respond to the drone attack, though he did not say what that response would be. Outside the White House, Biden responded to a reporter’s question on whether he holds Iran responsible for the deaths of the three U.S. soldiers.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I do hold them responsible in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it. … I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran has denied any involvement in the attack, which targeted Tower 22, a secret U.S. base in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border. Responsibility for the strike was claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a term used to describe a loose coalition of militias that oppose U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Aden shot down an anti-ship cruise missile on Tuesday launched by the Houthis in Yemen, the latest attack targeting U.S. forces in the region.
For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He’s authored three books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel.
Trita, welcome back to Democracy Now!
TRITA PARSI: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about what took place at this remote base, the killing of the three U.S. soldiers, injuring of about 40 others, and the drumbeat by Republicans, as well as Democrats, as well as the media in the United States, for President Biden to militarily respond? What would this mean?
TRITA PARSI: It obviously depends on how Biden responds. If Biden is thinking about responding in terms of attacking Iran on Iranian soil, then, as the warning came from Tehran, it’s very, very likely that there will be a forceful response by the Iranians, which will bring the United States right into a shooting war with Iranians, which is something that the administration says that they have been seeking to avoid. They have been repeating that message several times in the last couple of days.
I think it is important to note that all of this was predicted. From the very beginning, it was clear. As long as there was no material pressure on Israel to cease its bombardment in Gaza, this eventually would lead to a situation in which the United States would be faced with an attack that actually had left Americans killed. If you take a look at the statistics, there were about 60 attacks by these Iraqi militias against U.S. troops and bases during the first two-and-a-half years of Biden’s presidency. Since October 17th, however, when Israel went into Gaza, there’s been more than 160 attacks just in these last 100 days. At some point, one of those attacks was going to kill Americans. And the president has essentially accepted this risk, continued to allow Israel to bombard Gaza, in his own words, indiscriminately, knowing very well that the game of statistic was simply such that at some point the Iraqi militias would succeed and Americans would die.
Now we are in that situation, instead of raising questions about this entire strategy as to why we are putting U.S. troops at risk in order for Israel to continue to indiscriminately bomb and kill and slaughter people in Gaza. Instead, there’s been this frenzy about pushing us further into war. And this is how these endless wars begin, tactical responses to attacks by the other side that in the moment may come across as legitimate because, of course, these attacks against U.S. troops are unacceptable, without any recognition, however, that this is leading us into a war whose aims we have not defined, whose exit we cannot envision.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Trita, when you say that these are legitimate questions of attacks on U.S. troops, but what the heck are U.S. troops continuing to do — be in these countries? This Tower 22, for instance, the U.S. troops in Syria clearly have no authorization from Congress to be there. And importantly, in Iraq, the Iraqi government has been calling for the United States to withdraw the few troops it still has in Iraq from the country, but the U.S. is not disposed to even listen to the government of the country in which its troops are located.
TRITA PARSI: You’re absolutely right. These are the moments where these questions should be asked, which is: Why are we there in the first place? As you noted, the troops in Syria do not have any legal authorization to be there by the U.S. Congress. The troops in Iraq, you know, for such a long time we’ve said that they should be pulled out. Nothing has happened yet. And the essential pretext for keeping them there, which is to fight ISIS, has long expired, because ISIS has been weakened. It’s not been completely eliminated, but these countries, who have far greater stake in the defeat of ISIS, are now capable of handling that on their own, without direct U.S. involvement, and certainly direct U.S. presence, in that fight.
So, we have to really ask ourselves: Why do we continue to have a broader policy in the Middle East, in which we are positioning more than 50,000 American troops in various places in the region right now, in which they’re essentially made to be sitting ducks? And tripwires and a single attack against them can lead to several deaths, which then, again, immediately will cause the rise of these calls for a broader war in the region. This is to the detriment of our own interests.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of blaming Iran as directly responsible for these attacks? Every time we hear of one of these resistance groups, it’s always with the adjective the “Iran-backed” or the “Iran-financed” group. Is it your sense that these groups have their own independent life, or is the Biden administration correct in ascribing all of the real motivation coming from Iran?
TRITA PARSI: I think there’s two exaggerated narratives here. One is the Iranian one, in which they’re essentially claiming that they have no control over these groups at all and that they’re completely independent. That is not true. But also the other narrative, the Washington narrative, is not true, one that claims that the Iranians completely control these different groups and that they have no agency of their own. Clearly, they do have agency of their own. On numerous occasions they have acted against the express wishes of the Iranians, particularly in the case of the Houthis. And even in the case of these Iraqi militias, what has happened just in the last 48 hours is that, clearly, there’s been a lot of back-door diplomacy between the Iranians and the United States, and now the Iraqi militias have come out and said that they’re ceasing their attacks on the U.S. troops at this point. And it’s clear that the Iranians have put some pressure on them to essentially deescalate.
I would suspect that the option that the president is considering right now is to do some form of attack inside of Iraq or Syria, probably give the other side ample heads-up in order to evacuate those specific buildings, nevertheless be able to say that he has responded, make sure that it’s not too damaging, but sufficiently strong to be able to calm some of the voices in Washington, but then leave it at that and ensure that there’s some deescalation afterwards. In the short run, that may work, and it might not be a bad plan. In the longer run, however, as long as there is no ceasefire in Gaza, it is really difficult to foresee that these attacks against U.S. troops will end indefinitely. As long as there’s no ceasefire, I suspect that they will resume at some point, which means then that a continued warfare in Gaza by the Israelis is a direct threat to U.S. national interests because of the manner that it puts U.S. troops at risk in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, your colleague at Quincy, Bill Hartung, wrote on X, quote, “On the question of Iran’s role in the deaths of three U.S. servicemen, President Biden said 'I do hold them responsible in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people who did it.’ Does he feel the same way about the 26,000 deaths caused by U.S. weapons in Gaza?” Bill Hartung asked. Your response, Trita?
TRITA PARSI: Well, I think Bill is absolutely correct. And I think, whether we agree or not with that argument, we have to recognize that is the sentiment throughout the Middle East right now, and probably throughout the larger part of the world, in which the United States is held responsible for what Israel is doing, not just because providing all of these weapons — more than 10,000 tons of weapons have been shipped since October 7th; president has bypassed Congress twice to get them to Israel even faster — but also because of the very active effort by the Biden administration to block a ceasefire. That has twice happened in the Security Council. That means that the large part of the world do see the United States as directly responsible for this. And that, again, is to the very severe detriment of U.S. interest itself and of U.S.’s global standing.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, we want to thank you for being with us, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Coming up, a shocking raid on a Jenin hospital in the occupied West Bank by undercover Israeli forces dressed as doctors and Muslim women in headscarves kills three Palestinians. We’ll speak with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah. Stay with us.
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“An Act of Assassination”: Mustafa Barghouti Slams Undercover Israeli Raid on Jenin Hospital
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript
In a shocking raid on a hospital in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, three Palestinians were killed by undercover Israeli assassins disguised as Muslim women and doctors. Citing no evidence, the Israeli military claimed the three men it targeted were involved in planning an imminent attack and were using the hospital as a hideout. Hospital officials said there was no exchange of fire and that the three men were asleep. One of the men had been receiving treatment at the hospital since being injured in an Israeli drone attack on October 25 and was partially paralyzed. Our guest, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, decries the silence of Western governments in the face of the incident’s brazen and multipronged “violation of international humanitarian law.” It’s part of an extensive pattern of Israeli impunity on the world stage, says Barghouti, while “all the condemnation, all the collective punishment, is directed only at one people: the Palestinians.”
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.
Thousands of Palestinians took part in a funeral procession Tuesday in the occupied West Bank for three Palestinians killed by Israeli assassins in a shocking undercover raid on a hospital in Jenin. Surveillance footage from the Ibn Sina Hospital shows around a dozen undercover Israeli forces storming the hospital, guns raised, wearing white doctor’s coats or hospital scrubs and dressed as Muslim women wearing headscarves. One of the undercover troops carried a rifle in one arm and a folded wheelchair in the other.
The Israeli military claimed the three men it targeted were involved in planning an imminent attack and were using the hospital as a hideout, without providing evidence. Hospital officials said there was no exchange of fire and that the three men were asleep, indicating the raid was a targeted killing. One of the three men killed had been receiving treatment at the hospital since being injured in an Israeli drone attack on October 25th and was partially paralyzed.
This is Naji Nazzal, medical director at Ibn Sina Hospital.
NAJI NAZZAL: [translated] They killed the three youth — Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi and Mohammed Jalamneh — in their room while they were sleeping on their beds in the room. They were killed in cold blood with direct gunshots to the head.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 380 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7th, while more than 6,300 people have been arrested.
For more, we go to Ramallah, where we’re joined by the Palestinian physician, activist, politician Mustafa Barghouti. He serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Dr. Barghouti. If you can start off by laying out exactly what you understand about this assault on the Jenin hospital? Who was killed? Who were these undercover assassins who moved in dressed as Muslim women in headscarves, dressed as doctors and hospital staff?
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, it is clear that those who assassinated the three Palestinians in the hospital are a Israeli military group, a special security group that is called the Arabists here. They usually act and dress as Palestinians in various places, and this is not the first crime they committed. But, by the way, this same group was taking photographs with the minister of internal security, the fascist, Ben-Gvir, recently, and he published that photo, and he praised them as heroes.
What they’ve done is really unacceptable and represents a very serious violation of international humanitarian law in four different issues. First of all, they dressed as doctors, as nurses, as health professionals. And they put one of them, one of the assassins, on a wheelchair and dragged him into the hospital. This way, they are endangering actually all medical personnel, because from now on nobody will be sure that he’s dealing with a doctor or somebody who’s disguising as a doctor.
Second, they penetrated the hospital in an illegal manner, very early, in the very early hours of the morning. And they have no right to enter the hospital without even notification and without any alarm. And in principle, they are not allowed to enter the hospital.
Third, they attacked a patient who was handicapped, who was paralyzed, in his bed, while he was sleeping, and shot him in the head, and shot two others who were accompanying him in the same room — three Palestinians — in an act that can only be called as an act of assassination and illegal execution of Palestinians.
In every aspect of international humanitarian law, they have violated the law. They are continuing that. They are proud about it. They’re praising themselves for doing it. And that is all happening because the world is allowing Israel to be impunitive to international law and impunitive to any law, as a matter of fact.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dr. Barghouti, I also wanted to ask you what’s going — in terms of what’s going on in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 380 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians, and supposedly there is no Israeli military activity going on in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But could you talk about that other war, that the rest of the world is not paying any attention to?
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Yes. Actually, Israel is reoccupying the whole of the West Bank. I mean, since the 7th of October, not only they’ve killed 380 people, but more than that. They are allowing settlers to wander around with guns, and these settlers are behaving as terrorists, terrorizing Palestinian people. And in addition to that, the Israeli army has arrested, since the 7th of October, 6,300 Palestinians in the West Bank, including no less than 200 children, including women. They kidnap people, and they put them in jail without trial, without any legal process, without even charges. And in addition to that, they have divided the country in 224 small islands, with 650 military checkpoints, each of which has become a point of harassment for people and a very dangerous spot, because Palestinians could be killed for no reason. And the Palestinian Authority has lost any authority. Practically, Israel took over all of the West Bank, although West Bank is not under the government of Hamas, as they claim and regard in Gaza.
But that’s not the only thing. All these violations happen, and instead of punishing Israel or blaming Israel for its violations of international law, we see many Western governments, including United States of America, punishing the Palestinians. And if you’ll allow me to speak about that, I think the whole case of UNRWA was used by Israel to distract attention from the ICJ resolution, which indicted Israel for a plausible genocide. Instead of punishing Israel, they took up this case where Israel is claiming that some workers in UNRWA have been engaging in military actions, without any proof, without investigation. And then you found 12 European countries and United States of America and Canada and Japan cut off support to the only organization that is providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, that is the only bridge to humanitarian aid in Gaza. We are subjected to collective punishment. Palestinians, who are the victims of the Israeli aggression, of the possibility of a genocide, are subjected to collective punishment by these governments, none of whom have condemned this Israeli attack on the hospital.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of the U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller at a briefing on Tuesday. He was being questioned about the Israeli raid on the Jenin hospital by the Associated Press reporter Matt Lee.
MATT LEE: This operation that the Israelis launched in Jenin, the hospital today, what — do you have any comment on that? Is this something that you think is problematic, or is it something that you look at with envy, like this is some kind of great Mission: Impossible mission that we wish that we could also do?
MATTHEW MILLER: So, I’d say that we strongly urge caution whenever operations have the potential to impact civilians and civilian installations. That, of course, includes hospitals. We do recognize the very real security challenges Israel faces, and its legitimate right to defend its people and its territory from terrorism. Israel, of course, has the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but those operations need to be conducted in full compliance with international humanitarian law.
MATT LEE: Well, do those operations include going into hospitals and murdering people in their beds, regardless of whether they’re —
MATTHEW MILLER: So —
MATT LEE: — you know, they are suspected or even known terrorists? Is that OK with you guys?
MATTHEW MILLER: So, there was a lot in the premise of that question. Obviously, they — we did know that they went into —
MATT LEE: Well, you don’t think that they went in —
MATTHEW MILLER: We — well, hold on. We —
MATT LEE: — and killed complete — people who were completely innocent, do you?
MATTHEW MILLER: So, let me say that this —
MATT LEE: Because if you did think that, then you would be condemning it, right?
MATTHEW MILLER: We certainly would, but I would say that Israel has said that these were Hamas operatives. They have said that one of them was carrying a gun at the time of the operation. So, I’m not able to speak to the facts of the operation. You’d have to pass some kind of legal judgment, know all of the facts of the operation. But as a general matter, they do have the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but they need to be conducted in full —
MATT LEE: Including in hospitals?
MATTHEW MILLER: So, we want them to conduct their operations in compliance with international humanitarian law.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller being questioned by the AP’s Matt Lee. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, if you can respond to what he’s saying specifically here? And also, overall, then, talk about the attacks in West Bank and Gaza on the healthcare system, going right to Nasser Hospital, which is the largest hospital after Al-Shifa. It’s in southern Gaza, and it has been under siege for the last few days. But start with the spokesperson.
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: There are many things to say here, but let me start by what he said about the proper legal process. Israelis should not have entered the hospital. They should not have disguised as doctors and nurses. This is all violation of international humanitarian law. But even if they wanted, they could have arrested these three guys and charged them and give them a due legal process, instead of executing them on the spot, just on the basis of their suspicion. What is the legal here? What is the legal system here? Israel now can say about anybody that he’s a Hamas terrorist or a terrorist or anything else and then kill him in the street, and nobody will condemn that. United States of America has no right not to condemn this action.
And it is unacceptable that they continue to use double standard because they don’t want to criticize Israel. Why? Because they know that they are participating with Israel in what could be perceived or condemned as an act of genocide by supplying Israel with weapons, by supplying Israel with soldiers even. They’re supplying Israel with advisers in its terrible attacks on Gaza.
And on the other hand, Gaza — Israel has been continuously persistent in attacking all hospitals, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. They have subjected Tulkarem hospitals to attacks. They’ve subjected Jenin hospitals to attacks. They’ve subjected hospitals in Nablus to attacks. And they continue to do that in Gaza, where they’re bombarding the hospitals, bombarding the hospitals, killing patients, killing doctors, killing nurses. And add to that the fact that Israel has killed in Gaza, up to now, 304 of our colleagues, medical doctors, nurses, first aid providers. In addition, they injured 300 others while they were performing their medical duties. And they have arrested 90 of these health workers, including the director of Shifa Hospital, who is subjected now to torture in Israeli concentration camp in the Negev near Be’er Sheva.
This is the exact behavior of Israel. Do we hear any condemnation from the United States of America or from the United Kingdom? No. All the condemnation, all the punishment, all the collective punishment, is directed only at one people, which are the Palestinian people. We don’t understand how could these countries that claim that they are struggling — that they claim they support human rights, they claim they support democracy, they claim they support international law, and at the same time not only they are allowing these crimes to happen against the Palestinians, but they are actually participating in them.
That’s what’s happened in Jenin, like what’s happening now in Gaza, where, by the way, 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, if we include the 7,000 under the rubble, and more than 65,000 people have been injured. That is more than 4% of the population of Gaza. Had this happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 12 million people killed or injured in less than three months. Proportionally, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza after three months is more than all Americans killed in all America’s wars since the 18th century. Is that acceptable? Is that allowable? That is the question that should be directed to Biden administration and to the American administration. How could they continue to allow Israel to be so impunitive to international law? And how could they allow this act of collective punishment against the Palestinian population when it comes to UNRWA and other health, humanitarian services?
By the way, the International Court of Justice decided there should be support to providing humanitarian supplies to Palestinians, and Israel should be responsible for that. What do we see in reality now in Gaza? I’ve been talking to our 30 medical teams working there. They say there is a decline in the amount of support that is coming, in an unprecedented manner. What they get is absolutely not enough, less than 100 trucks daily, while what they need is 1,000 trucks daily, considering the terrible situation. We have people in the north and in the center of Gaza who are calling us, saying they are starving. They have no food. They have no medical supplies. Our colleagues have to operate on people, injured people, without anesthesia. And 600,000 people, according to the World Food Programme now, 600,000 Palestinians now in Gaza are starving. What does the United States of America do about that? Do they do anything, or just protect Israel and provide protection for this Israeli aggression?
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, we want to ask if you can stay with us 'til after break. We're going to talk about that conference that took place in Israel. Almost a third of the Israeli Cabinet was there. A number of the Cabinet members addressed the conference, calling for the Israeli resettlement of Gaza. We’re talking to Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, activist and politician, who serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. We’ll also be joined by a reporter for +972 Magazine. Oren Ziv will join us from Tel Aviv. He covered the conference of thousands of Israelis. Back in 20 seconds.
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Israeli Cabinet Members Join Settler Event of Thousands Calling for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript
We speak with an Israeli reporter who covered a major conference in Jerusalem calling for Palestinians to be removed from Gaza in order to rebuild Jewish settlements. The conference was attended by about a third of the Israeli Cabinet, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both of whom have long been involved in the extremist settler movement in the West Bank. Conference-goers were greeted by a huge map of planned illegal settlements in Gaza, and the atmosphere was joyful and celebratory, in contrast to what Israeli journalist Oren Ziv with +972 Magazine says is a somber atmosphere in Israeli public life following the October 7 Hamas attack. “This is not just a bunch of extremists; it’s the government,” adds Palestinian physician and activist Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah.
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.
Thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem Sunday for a major conference calling for Palestinians to be removed from Gaza in order to rebuild Jewish settlements. The conference, organized by the settler group Nahala, was dubbed “Settlement Brings Security in Victory,” was attended by almost a third of the Israeli Cabinet. Among the most high-profile speakers was Israel’s Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
ITAMAR BEN-GVIR: [translated] Today everyone already understands that fleeing brings war and that if you don’t want another 7th of October, you have to return home to control the territory.
AMY GOODMAN: Speakers at the conference called for the Israeli settlement of Gaza and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Another prominent speaker on Sunday’s conference was Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
BEZALEL SMOTRICH: [translated] We were settling our land from width to length, controlling it and fighting terror always and bringing, with God’s help, security to all of Israel. You know what the answer is: Without settlement, there is no security.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Oren Ziv, a reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine who covered the settler conference in Jerusalem on Sunday. His piece is headlined “Turning Zeitoun into Shivat Zion: Israeli summit envisions Gaza resettlement.” Staying with us is Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, speaking to us from Ramallah.
Oren, why don’t you start off by just describing this conference, the significance of it, and what shocked you most as you covered it?
OREN ZIV: Thank you for having me, first of all.
I have to say this is the last event in a series of events and protests of the settler movement calling to what they say is going back to Gaza, returning to the settlements that were evicted by Israel in the 2005 disengagement.
This event was significant because thousands of people took part in it in West Jerusalem. They gathered in a big hall. I could say half of the participants were youth or college students. And you had mostly religious right-wing settlers.
There at the entrance, you had a big map, a huge map, showing the different settlements they plan to establish in the Gaza Strip, some of them literally on top of Palestinian villages and towns that exist and, of course, unfortunately, were destroyed by the Israeli aggression in the recent months.
Inside the hall, we had speeches of, as you said, ministers, parliament members. Four out of five of the — representatives of four out of five of the parties that are in the coalition of Netanyahu’s government were there, 11 ministers and 15 parliament members, so a big support from the government, and also settlers’ leaders and activists.
For me, personally, the most shocking thing was not only the plan to establish the settlements, but the fact that people there were dancing and singing, being happy and joyful. And this is important to understand that in the Israeli public atmosphere, this is something you barely see since the attack of 7 of October. You don’t see public events where people are joyful, not because, you know, most of the Israeli public ignore the horrific reality in Gaza, but because of the war, because of the attack of 7th of October, because Israeli soldiers are being killed every day in the war. You don’t see many of those events. And it shocked even mainstream Israelis to see ministers and people who take those decisions regarding the war dancing, was very shocking for many people. And I think this is because while the vast or big parts of the Israeli public is still in shock, the settler movement see this war as an opportunity to expand their plans to settle in Gaza.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Oren, I wanted to ask you — apparently, the British Foreign Minister David Cameron, I think some reports are saying, reacting to this conference over the weekend, reaffirmed Britain’s position that there must be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m wondering your thoughts about how some of these Western countries continue to support the war in Gaza while maintaining a two-state solution that they know the Israeli government has made clear it has no intention of following through on.
OREN ZIV: Yes, I think this conference made it very clear, because ahead of the hearing in The Hague, the ICJ hearing, official Israel, Netanyahu and other members of more the center kind of part of the government, tried to portray a picture that Israel will not stay in Gaza, will not settle in Gaza, this is a temporary war. And this event and the participant of senior members of the government makes it very clear that, A, they don’t want any two-state solution — but this we’ve seen over the years — but, more importantly, that they don’t care about the international law. They don’t care about the ICJ procedure. It doesn’t threaten them to continue to express those opinions.
One could think that after ministers and the prime minister himself were quoted in the South African appeal to the court — this were the evidence, actually, what the Israeli politician, the genocidal discourse they were promoting in the beginning of the war — one could think they will be a bit more careful. But the opposite. This was not — it’s important to mention this was not only a conference talking about settling in Gaza. It was very clear, and most of the speakers talked about what they call is the encouraging immigration or forcing people from Gaza. So it’s very clear that the settlement movement is on the account of the residents of Gaza.
Daniella Weiss, one of the settlers’ leader who was leading the conference, when we asked her, “What would happen to the Palestinians if your plans come true?” she said, “They would leave. They would have to leave. We don’t give them food. We don’t give them water.” She was talking about the siege. And she said, “They would leave. They would have to spread around the world.” Also, Minister Ben-Gvir, who was a bit more careful in his language, said, “We have to encourage immigration from Gaza.” So this was a consensus in the conference.
AMY GOODMAN: Oren, we just played a clip of Bezalel Smotrich, who’s a Cabinet member. I’m looking at a Times of Israel article that says — from a few years ago — that the former Shin Bet deputy chief, Yitzhak Ilan — he was the former deputy head of Shin Bet security service — “reportedly told a political gathering that Smotrich was a 'Jewish terrorist,' who planned to blow up cars on a major highway during the 2005 Gaza disengagement,” when the Israeli settlers were forced out, by Israel, of Gaza. Can you talk about the significance of this today, what, almost 20 years later, who Smotrich is? He was held for three weeks, questioned by Shin Bet, ultimately wasn’t charged. Apparently, they didn’t want to endanger their sources, who talked about him being found with massive amounts of gasoline.
OREN ZIV: Yes, this is true. Smotrich was a security prisoner. He was suspected in that but not convicted. But this shows us, together with Ben-Gvir, that — I personally documented and saw him attacking Palestinians, attacking Israeli left-wing activists along the years, before he became a parliament member and a minister. So, these are people that are well known from the right-wing extreme activities. And unfortunately, today, they decide the policies. They lead Israel.
And I think this is why also Netanyahu and kind of the more center-right part of the government cannot say this is not official Israel, this is not the official line, because we’ve seen Netanyahu, ahead of the ICJ, and we’ve seen other speakers of Israel saying, “Well, they’re ministers, they’re parliament members, but they’re not in the war cabinet. They don’t take the decision.” This is, of course, just rhetoric to protect Israel from being accountable, I think, when we see such a big number of ministers, senior ministers, and parliament members taking part in this conference, that is callingly open to transfer, to displace Palestinians from Gaza.
And maybe more important, I think this discourse, it’s important to say, also encourages soldiers on the ground, right-wing soldiers, settler soldiers, or just ordinary soldiers that hear this rhetoric on Israeli mainstream media, on social media. It encourages them to carry out war crimes. The war itself is horrific enough, but I’m afraid that this rhetoric by members of the government encourages or gives the feeling to the soldiers on the ground they can do anything, because if Israel, according to this conference, will eventually control the Gaza Strip, it means soldiers on the ground — and we’ve seen that on TikTok, on Instagram, on social media — can do whatever they want, because it belongs to Israel. So they can explode houses. They can vandalize. They can steal property. They can do whatever they want, because this eventually will be Israeli property.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Dr. Mustafa Barghouti back into the conversation. Doctor, your reaction to this conference and to these post-invasion plans of the Israeli — of a good portion of the Israeli government?
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are known to be fascists, of course, and sometimes they are described as psychopaths. But they are not really only psychopaths. They are the ones who are deciding the Israeli government policy. And none of their statements, fascist statements, was ever negated by Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. And these guys are representing what can be called Jewish religious extreme fundamentalism combined with Jewish supremacy thinking. And they believe that the whole of the land of Palestine and Jordan, as well, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Syria are supposed to be Jewish land.
And these guys are practically repeating — confirming, actually, what had happened in 1948, when Israel, as a settler colonial project, committed 50 massacres against Palestinians and evicted people from 520 communities and then razed them to the ground. They want to repeat what Israel did in 1948, another Nakba against Palestinian people. And they are speaking openly about three war crimes simultaneously: the war crime of ethnic cleansing, the war crime of collective punishment and the war crime of genocide. They want to evict everybody from Gaza. And that’s, by the way, what Netanyahu himself called for in the very first days of this war. That’s what Gallant called for when he said that Palestinians are “human animals” and should be treated as such.
And what you’ve seen in this conference, this is not just a bunch of extremists; it’s the government, the Israeli government. Twelve ministers of the Israeli government attended that meeting and supported it. Fifteen members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, attended it. So you are talking here practically about the official Israeli policy, which is directed at ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and then settlements, not only in Gaza. As a matter of fact, also in the West Bank, we are now subjected to settler terror — settlers’ terror, which has evicted already 30 Palestinian communities from their land, from their homes in the West Bank. Sixty percent of the West Bank is now practically forbidden for Palestinians and is allocated to the Israeli settlers.
And we don’t have to go far. All we need — all you need to do is to show the map that Netanyahu has shown in the United States or in the United Nations two weeks before the war in Gaza. He showed the map of Israel including the annexation of all of the West Bank, all of Gaza Strip and all of the Golan Heights. What everybody must understand, that this is the Israeli official government policy. And that’s why it has to be punished. That’s why it has to be sanctioned. And that’s why it has to be exposed. And Israel cannot be allowed to continue to be absolutely unaccountable to international law and absolutely impunitive to international law.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, activist and politician. We also want to thank Oren Ziv in Tel Aviv, a reporter and photojournalist with +972 Magazine.