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

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“A Sea of Misery”: Gaza Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen, Says NGO Head/Ex-CNN Journalist Arwa Damon
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 9, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/9/a ... transcript

Award-winning journalist Arwa Damon has just returned from a humanitarian trip to Gaza in her capacity as the founder of INARA, the International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children. Damon describes the overwhelming need for aid under Israel’s siege of the territory. “Nothing goes in and out of Gaza without Israel’s approval. That includes aid, and that includes people,” she says, calling the Israeli military’s rules for what is allowed in “illogical” and arbitrary. “The zone needs to be flooded, not only with aid … but also with humanitarian workers,” concludes Damon. We also discuss the mental health crisis gripping the population, U.S. military assistance to Israel and how anti-Arab racism and fearmongering in Western media coverage has and hasn’t changed in the post-9/11 era.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli warplanes bombed areas across northern Gaza today while ground troops conducted raids as the assault on the territory entered its seventh month. Forensic experts from Gaza’s Health Ministry are still removing bodies from the yard of Shifa Hospital, once the largest medical facility in Gaza, that was burned down and destroyed by Israeli forces. Health officials say the number of dead following Israel’s raid on Shifa is still not known, but is in the hundreds.

Meanwhile, in the south, Palestinians who tried to return to Khan Younis, Gaza’a second-largest city, following the withdrawal of Israeli troops Sunday, say it is now unlivable. An estimated 55% of the buildings in the Khan Younis area, around 45,000 buildings, have been destroyed or damaged, according to two mapping experts at City University of New York and Oregon State University who have been using satellite imagery to track destruction.

This comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has escalated his pledge to invade Rafah, where more than 1.4 million Palestinians — well over half of Gaza’s population — are sheltering. In a video statement Monday, Netanyahu said, quote, “It will happen. There’s a date,” he said, without elaborating. He spoke as Israeli negotiators were in Cairo discussing international efforts to broker a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

The official death toll has now topped 33,300, including over 14,000 children. That number does not include thousands missing under the rubble and presumed dead. Nearly 76,000 people have been wounded.

Israel has been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, where the spread of hunger and malnutrition has been described as unprecedented, with famine setting in.

For more, we’re joined by Arwa Damon. She just returned yesterday from a humanitarian trip to Gaza. She’s an award-winning journalist and the founder of INARA, the International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza. Arwa Damon is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. She previously spent 18 years at CNN, including as a senior international correspondent. Arwa Damon joins us now from Istanbul, Turkey.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Arwa. Can you start off by talking about what you saw in Gaza and what you think needs to be done?

ARWA DAMON: You know, on the one hand, that would seem like a simple question. And yet, on the other hand, it’s so extraordinarily difficult to actually put what I witnessed into words. In fact, Gazans themselves can’t actually grasp the fact that this has become their reality.

In Rafah, in the southern area of Gaza, where you have a crush of about 1.5 million people, it feels as if you’re moving through a sea of misery. There is no empty space left. Tents are spilling out of both U.N. shelters and other makeshift shelters that have emerged. They’re spilling out onto the sidewalks. There’s stalls that have been set up. The movement of people clogs the streets. You have people having to move around on donkey carts because there’s not enough fuel or diesel to power vehicles. And then you just have the sheer need of this entire mass of humanity that is — to a certain degree, feels as if it’s absolutely suffocating, because they need everything. They are reliant on others for just about everything, from food to water to medicine to baby formula to diapers.

We stepped out in this one area called Mawasi, which is sort of a beachy area. It was Gaza’s beachfront. And there, it’s just tent after tent after tent in the sand. There’s no sewage systems, and so sewage is sort of running along these makeshift canals. There’s no proper toilets. There’s no nothing. And all of the mothers there are just shoving these emaciated babies at you, you know, begging for proper formula, begging for proper care. They’re begging for medicine for children who are epileptic. You walk into a tent, and with each step your foot takes, a cloud of mosquitoes and flies just swarms up. I mean, it’s inexplicable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Arwa, Israel has in recent days said that it’s opening up new entry points into Gaza for aid. Could you talk about the aid that you saw coming in, which still has not reached the level, the number of trucks per day, before the war even started?

ARWA DAMON: Right, and there’s a number of things that I think everyone would be best served to understand about aid and distribution. So, yes, if more aid is able to get in, absolutely that is going to help. However, when it comes to getting aid to those who need it, it is beyond just opening up additional crossings. The aid trucks that come into Gaza all get searched by Israel, and that is a process that can take around two to three weeks to begin with. You do see aid being distributed. The problem is that the quantity of the aid is insufficient.

Additionally, it’s important to note that once the aid gets inside Gaza, getting it distributed within this, you know, tiny little space, yet at the same time extraordinarily difficult to navigate area, poses great and additional challenges. There’s a process that’s called deconfliction — this exists in all war zones — whereby which aid organizations wanting to reach a certain area will notify warring parties about their intent and will secure permissions to be able to safely move to that area. This is a process that has not and does not work inside Gaza. And the tragic, horrific strike that we saw on the World Central Kitchen convoy is clear evidence of that. And that really sent huge shockwaves within the humanitarian community, because the World Central Kitchen has some of the best deconfliction mechanisms, has some of the best lines of communication to the Israeli side.

And so, you have these additional layers upon layers of challenges. Add to all of it, the lack of aid has created a very understandable level of panic among the population. What that means is that whenever aid arrives to a certain area, there is chaos and there is panic. And this is why you keep hearing people speaking about the need to flood the zone. The zone needs to be flooded not only with aid, so that people can stop panicking and have a certain measure of confidence that they will be getting a stable supply to food, water and other basic necessities, but also the zone needs to be flooded with humanitarian workers, people who know how to address this level of a humanitarian crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk, as well, about the impact of this war, the mental health impact, especially on the children of Gaza, that you have spoken so eloquently about in recent days?

ARWA DAMON: I’ll give you one example. A mother came up to me, and she was — she had heard about the fact that, you know, we do work with mental health, specifically with children. It’s also important to note that, you know, when an area, a population is still in crisis, is still in an emergency, all you can really provide is basic mental health, especially for children. And what does that actually look like? It really just looks like a distraction, so creating activities and ways for them to express themselves that can sort of help them distract themselves from all of the horror and the nightmare that they’re going through. But this mother comes up to me, and she says, “I don’t know what to do with my 7-year-old right now, because every single night he screams at the top of his lungs, and he goes into what look like convulsion and seizures.” And he started doing this after he saw his sister’s head blown off during a strike that hit their home, that also wounded other siblings.

You know, you walk around Gaza — and I’m talking specifically about the children right now, but you see this also very deeply in the adults. And you know that sparkle that’s normally supposed to exist in a child’s eye? It’s not there anymore. That’s not to say it can’t come back and it can’t be brought back with these activities. You know, there are these beautiful, heartwarming moments where you are able to create a scenario for a child to be able to laugh and smile, albeit briefly.

But you really feel as if you are walking through a population that is — they’re ghosts. And they describe themselves as ghosts. They’re ghosts of their past. They’re the ghosts of who they used to be. And they’re constantly haunted by the ghosts of everything that they have lost. And the trauma doesn’t end. It comes at them from multiple different directions every single day. The mental health impact of this is unlike anything that I personally have ever seen 20 years working in war zones, just the immediacy of the need, the speed with which this all happened. And even people in Gaza, when you talk to them right now, you know, despite having lived through this for six, seven months, they still tell you that they feel as if this can’t be real. Right? Like, this can’t have happened. This has to be a nightmare from which one day they’re going to wake up.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa, you have said — you’ve pointed out that what’s happening in Gaza right now is absolutely egregious, that the Western world, the ones providing the weapons, cannot pressure Israel into allowing more aid and medical staff. Can you talk more about that? I mean, this isn’t, you know, a natural disaster, where an earthquake happened and people can’t get to the people. Explain exactly Israel’s role in preventing this aid from getting to those in need.

ARWA DAMON: So, nothing goes in and out of Gaza without Israel’s approval. Nothing. That includes aid, and that includes people. There’s a whole process for that. And this is a process that actually existed before October 7th. It is, since October 7th, extraordinarily and excruciatingly long. In addition to that, since 2008, there has been a list of items that are banned entry to Gaza. This list also exists to the West Bank. Now, since October 7th, there have been additional items, that are not part of this list, that have been rejected. There is no formality to this rejection. We in the humanitarian space end up finding out about items being repeatedly rejected, and, as such, there’s no point of trying to send them in, because of repeat rejections. These items range from things like solar panels to wheelchairs to certain kinds of medicine to sleeping bags in some cases — anything that the Israelis say can be deemed to be dual-use. But the problem is that it feels very illogical, and, again, there’s no formality to it, so you don’t know if an item is going to get rejected until you actually try to send it in. Some organizations have even had children’s toys be rejected. You know, you try to put together these hygiene kits for families, and the nail clippers in them get rejected, and, as such, the entire truck gets completely turned around. And so, it’s extraordinarily difficult to try to navigate that kind of a situation. And, obviously, this creates an even greater and more desperate need inside Gaza itself.

Now, what is very difficult to comprehend, as you were saying there, is the fact that Israel is an ally to the United States and other very powerful Western nations. Is this the first time that we’ve seen an area under siege? Absolutely not. Look, I covered Syria very extensively. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, a dictatorship, along with their Russian allies, did, yes, put entire neighborhoods and areas in Syria under siege. But there we were talking about a dictatorship with Russia as its ally. We saw ISIS besiege entire areas in both Syria and Iraq. But we’re talking about ISIS. We’re not talking about a democratically elected nation-state that is an ally of the United States. And that is what makes it so difficult for anyone inside Gaza to comprehend how it is that the United States is allowing Israel to continue to besiege the Strip in such a way. And remember, it was on day one that Israel cut off electricity, water and basically vowed to cut off any form of assistance. They cannot comprehend this. They cannot comprehend how it is that this is being allowed to happen to them — on top of that, happening to them, and the United States is still continuing to fund the war effort.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, I want to ask you about the journalists killed, estimates between 90 and 130, 140 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza alone. You were an award-winning journalist for CNN for 18 years, covered the U.S. attack on Iraq. I wish we saw your reporting more. You mainly did it for CNN International, which would show the picture of the statue of Saddam Hussein coming down in a split screen with the casualties of war, whereas CNN domestic would just show the statue of Saddam Hussein coming down hundreds of times. But your reporting was extremely important. I want to talk about seeing the images of casualties on the ground in Gaza. Right now Israel doesn’t allow international journalists in, and domestic journalists in Gaza, so many of them, have been killed. Can you talk about the significance of this? Because that leads to people around the world caring, to put more pressure.

ARWA DAMON: You know, this is the first time, I would argue, that Gazans have control over the way that their story is being told. And that has made, to a certain degree, the understanding that the Western world has about what’s actually happening in Gaza and the toll of all of it shift slightly, because the Western media does not control Gaza’s story anymore. Gazans do.

I have to say, I mean, I have so much respect and admiration for all of Gaza’s journalists, because, you know, when we go into a war zone, wherever it is, as journalists, there comes a point when we get to rotate out. Right? You can tap out. You can say, like, “I need a break. Send in the next crew.” They have not been able to tap out for six months. And they’re not reporting on something that is happening to a different population. They’re reporting on their own people, what’s happening to their own families and to their own loved ones.

This ongoing effort, however, it would most certainly seem, to try to silence Gaza’s journalists is extraordinarily disturbing. But it is, sadly, part of this whole overarching desire to control the narrative. And right now, though, it’s not working, because Gaza’s journalists and Gazans, they’re not going to stop. And they deserve to be commended for that and for the awareness that they’re actually raising about what is happening to them.

And it’s very, very disturbing, but to a certain degree makes sense from a PR perspective, that Israel is not allowing Western journalists in, because if the scenes that Gazans are witnessing every single day were part of the regular broadcasts that are happening, there would be a much bigger and stronger outcry than what — than anything that we’re seeing right now.

I mean, you know, I went into the European Hospital, which is basically southern Gaza’s currently largest and only really remaining, you know, significantly functioning hospital. You walk into the hospital courtyard, the outdoor pathways, and it’s streams of tents, and there’s sewage lines running next to the tents. And this is inside a hospital. And people have crammed themselves into the hospital corridors themselves. You have bed after a bed of injured and the injured children with amputations, with horrific burns. I walked into the ICU, and there, there was a 10-year-old boy, and the ICU nurse said he’s a gunshot victim. He took a gunshot bullet straight to the head. It’s just —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Arwa, I wanted to ask you —

ARWA DAMON: I mean —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We only have about a minute for this segment, but I wanted to ask you — we’ve mentioned that you were a CNN reporter for 18 years, covered many conflict zones. How do you look at the coverage of CNN since October 7th and the degree to which not only CNN but most Western media outlets are always deferring to Israel to make sure that Israel gets a chance to comment on every single story that they write or that they produce?

ARWA DAMON: You know, October 7th happened, and then the coverage began, and I immediately was catapulted back to the post-9/11 era. And I was in New York when 9/11 happened. And I just — my hair stood on end, because it was the same level of, you know, dehumanization that we saw back then. It was the same sort of panicked, kind of one-sided, to certain degree, reporting that we saw back then. And it was extremely upsetting, because one would hope that, you know, we, the journalism world, the Western journalism space, would have learned the lessons of post-9/11 and that we wouldn’t sort of default into this whole dehumanization of the other.

And I think it’s really important that all journalists are cognizant and should know — you know, we go all over the world. You know, there’s a basic fact that we should all know, and that is that people, we’re the same. We love the same. We laugh the same. We live the same. We feel pain in the same way. And yet there was this default back into this dehumanizing rhetoric, this sort of “us against them” issue. And it was absolutely devastating and gutting and heartbreaking to witness and see that we defaulted back into sort of that same rhetoric and that same dehumanization of a population, that perhaps, you know, for very superficial reasons, we don’t perceive as being like us, and this desire to sort of inflict collective punishment on an entire people.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, I want to thank you for being with us, just returned from a humanitarian trip to Gaza, award-winning journalist with CNN but now founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children, also nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, spent 18 years at CNN as a senior international correspondent.

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“Empty Words”: Kenneth Roth on Biden’s Criticism of Israel While U.S. Keeps Weapons Flowing
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 9, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/9/k ... transcript

Lawyers representing Germany at the International Court of Justice delivered their concluding remarks at The Hague today in a case brought by Nicaragua, which has accused Germany of facilitating the commission of genocide in Gaza by providing military and financial aid to Israel. Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier, and Nicaragua has asked the United Nations’ top court for emergency measures to halt its material support to Israel. While the United States is the leading arms supplier to Israel, it “has a much more limited acceptance” of the ICJ’s jurisdiction, according to our guest Kenneth Roth. A visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and formerly the longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, Roth details Nicaragua’s case against Germany, as well as the U.S. government’s stance toward Israel. Despite President Biden’s public condemnation of the recent World Central Kitchen aid convoy attack and the “huge leverage” of ongoing U.S. military assistance, the administration’s warnings to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are “empty words,” says Roth. “Joe Biden never backs them up with consequences,” and his reelection campaign is taking progressive voters for granted as domestic dissent grows in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Roth adds.

Transcript

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

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

As we continue on Gaza, lawyers representing Germany at the International Court of Justice delivered their concluding remarks at The Hague today in a case brought by Nicaragua, which has accused Germany of facilitating the commission of genocide in Gaza by providing military and financial aid to Israel. Nicaragua has asked the U.N.'s top court for emergency measures ordering the German government to halt its support to Israel. Germany is Israel's second-largest arms supplier after the U.S. In 2023, Germany approved arms exports to Israel valued at over $353 million, roughly 10 times the sum approved the previous year.

For more, we’re joined by Kenneth Roth, visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for nearly 30 years as the executive director of Human Rights Watch. He’s joining us now in New York.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Ken. It’s great to have you with us. Can you explain why Nicaragua is simply taking on Germany, and the significance of this case, another case being brought to the U.N.’s top court?

KENNETH ROTH: Obviously, the United States would have been the ideal target. The U.S. is the principal armer of the Israeli military. But the U.S. has a much more limited acceptance of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. It basically has to consent to every suit. And it was not going to consent to this suit. Germany has a much more open-ended acceptance of the jurisdiction, so Germany being the second-largest armer of the Israeli military, it was the target.

Now, in terms of the significance, the court has already found that this is a plausible case of genocide. And Nicaragua is saying, “Germany, you are arming potential genocide.” They also have added that Germany is arming actual war crimes, violations of international humanitarian law, which it clearly is. Now, there is a precedent for this. If you remember back to Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, he was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone, and is actually currently serving a 50-year prison term in Britain for that crime. So, the International Court of Justice is a civil court. It’s not a criminal court. But Nicaragua is basically pursuing the same theory, saying, you know, “This is at least war crimes. It’s plausible genocide. You’re arming it. That’s aiding and abetting. You should stop.” That’s the essence of the case.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you, Kenneth — there were 40 Democratic members of Congress, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who have written to President Biden, urging him to halt new arms transfers to Israel in the wake of the killing of the World Central Kitchen aid workers. What’s your sense of the prospects for possibly halting or at least significantly reducing U.S. arms shipments to Israel?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, you know, Juan, that has been the line that Joe Biden has been unwilling to cross. He has spoken, at this point quite eloquently, pushing Israel to stop bombing civilians, to allow more food and humanitarian aid into Gaza. But these, from Netanyahu’s perspective, are just empty words, because Joe Biden never backs them up with consequences. And the obvious consequence, the obvious huge leverage that the U.S. government has, is the $3.8 billion in annual military aid it gives Israel and the regular shipment of arms, you know, almost every week in the course of this conflict. And Biden has not been willing to explicitly condition those, that aid, those arms sales, on ending the bombing and starving of Palestinian civilians.

Now, we heard last week that in the private phone call with Netanyahu, Biden suggested that at some point in the future this might be conditioned, you know, that U.S. relations will depend on how Israel responds. But it was all very vague. And, of course, Netanyahu responded with equal vagueness. He says, “OK, at some point I’ll open up the new crossing into northern Gaza to allow more food aid in, but that will take a few weeks, and I’m not saying anything about whether I’ll impose the same kind of obstructions in the north as I’ve imposed in the south. And I won’t say anything about Israel’s shooting at Palestinian police officers so that there’s chaos when you try to distribute the food. You know, none of that is on the table.”

So, in essence, Biden is not using this huge leverage, despite the pleas of an increasing number of lawmakers in Washington, you know, despite rapidly changing U.S. opinion polls saying Americans are tired of the U.S. actively supporting these war crimes, this plausible genocide in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Why is he doing this? I mean, it is amazing to see the split in the Democratic establishment. I’m not just talking about the protesters on the streets, who definitely are driving this split. But, you know, you have now Senator Warren of Massachusetts saying she believes Israel’s assault on Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. You have Christopher Coons, who I consider a Biden whisperer, who is now talking about halting weapons sales to Israel. But you have Biden resisting, though he has talked about a ceasefire. Why is this so difficult for him? What do you think it would take, especially now that you have Netanyahu saying that he’s set the date certain for an invasion of Rafah?

KENNETH ROTH: He just won’t tell us what that date is, yes. Amy, that’s the big psychoanalytic question, and we just don’t know. I mean, part of it, I think, is that Joe Biden, you know, who is an older man, as we know, thinks of Israel back in 1967, when it was the David surrounded by the Goliath of all the Arab states attacking Israel. He doesn’t think of Israel today, the regional superpower, a nuclear-armed state, a state that has been occupying Palestinian territory for decades and is imposing apartheid. You know, that’s just not in his mind.

More to the point, he seems to be making a political calculation. And he’s always been focused on the movable middle, the handful of independent voters who could go either way in the six swing states. And what he seems to be discounting is the progressives. And clearly, the Michigan primary was a bit of a wake-up call, suddenly the large number of “uncommitted” votes in a swing state. And so, we’ve seen him being more attentive. But I think he still calculates that progressives have no place to go. They’re not going to vote for Trump, and abstaining is effectively a vote for Trump, so when push comes to shove in November, they’re going to have to hold their nose and vote for Biden. And that seems to be what is pushing him at this stage.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ken Roth, I want to ask you to stay with us as we continue our discussion about U.S.’s foreign policy, visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for nearly 30 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch.

When we come back, Rwanda marks 30 years after the 1994 genocide. We’ll speak with a survivor, and we’ll look, with Ken Roth, at how the U.S., France and other nations stood by, refusing to say the word “genocide,” afraid it would trigger, force the use of the Genocide Convention. Stay with us. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “The Meaning of Death” by the Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, a survivor of the 1994 genocide. In 2020, he was found dead in his cell in Rwanda after being arrested days earlier. The song was released a decade ago, banned in Rwanda.

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Israel’s Ultimate Goal Is to Make Gaza Unfit for Human Habitation: Middle East Analyst Mouin Rabbani
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/10/ ... transcript

President Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza a “mistake” and urged Israel to call for a temporary ceasefire to allow in more aid in a televised interview on Tuesday. While Israel has pledged to open new aid crossings, the U.N. said on Tuesday that there has been “no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza,” and the Biden administration has not actually changed its policies or withheld any arms transfers to Israel. “Words are cheap, and statements are a dime a dozen,” says Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani, who explains Israel can safely ignore statements if policy remains unchanged. “What really matters is not what these people say, but what they do.” Rabbani also speaks about the United Nations considering Palestinian statehood, ongoing negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire, and Israel attacking the Iranian Consulate in Syria.

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 in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

President Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza a “mistake” and urged Israel to call for a temporary ceasefire to allow in more aid. Biden’s comments came in an interview that aired Tuesday on the Spanish-language TV network Univision. In his remarks, Biden highlighted the Israeli airstrike last week on an aid convoy that killed seven workers with the food charity World Central Kitchen, six of those aid workers international.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach. I think it’s outrageous that those four — or, three vehicles were hit by drones and taken out on a highway, where it wasn’t like it was along the shore. It wasn’t like it was a convoy moving there, etc. So, what I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks a total access to all food and medicine going into the country. I’ve spoken with everyone, from the Saudis to the Jordanians to the Egyptians. They’re prepared to move in. They’re prepared to move this food in. And I think there’s no excuse to not provide for the medical and the food needs of those people. And it should be done now.

AMY GOODMAN: Following the airstrike on the World Central Kitchen convoy last week, Biden called Netanyahu and warned for the first time the U.S. would be forced to change its policy if Israel did not change its policies on Gaza. Israel responded by pledging to open new aid crossings. However, the U.N. said Tuesday there’s been, quote, “no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza,” unquote, and the Biden administration has not actually changed its policies or withheld any arms transfers to Israel.

This comes as Human Rights Watch is calling on governments to impose targeted sanctions on Israel and suspend arms transfers, to press the Israeli government to ensure access to humanitarian aid. The rights group has accused the Israeli government of using starvation as a weapon of war. At least 32 people, including 28 children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in northern Gaza, where famine is setting in. In the south, at least 5% of children under age 2 were found to be acutely malnourished.

Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes continue across Gaza, including dozens of strikes in Gaza City, as well as in central Gaza, where an airstrike hit a home in the Nuseirat refugee camp today, killing at least 14 people, including five children.

For more, we’re joined by Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. He’s an editor of Jadaliyya and host of the Connections podcast. He’s a contributor to the new book, Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. He was previously a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us —

MOUIN RABBANI: Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: — here in studio in New York. I wanted to start off with a clip yesterday. Foreign minister — British Foreign Minister David Cameron stood with Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a news conference. They were at the State Department. Cameron said Britain’s position on arms sales to Israel was unchanged.

DAVID CAMERON: The latest assessment leaves our position on export licenses unchanged. This is consistent with the advice that I and other ministers have received. And as ever, we will keep the position under review. Let me be clear, though: We continue to have grave concerns around the humanitarian access issue in Gaza, both for the period that was assessed and subsequently.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have Blinken and Cameron shaking hands. Can you talk about what President Biden is saying, what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, and why what the U.S. does matters, not to mention Britain saying they’re continuing arms sales?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, President Biden referred to Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as a “mistake.” I mean, a mistake is when you take a wrong turn at a traffic light or perhaps when a surgeon removes the wrong kidney. But when over the course of six months, half a year, you kill tens of thousands of people, with perhaps additional tens of thousands buried under the rubble and decomposing, that’s not a mistake. That’s a deliberate policy. And that’s why Israel has been hauled in front of the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide.

I think the second issue here is that words are cheap, and statements are a dime a dozen. And Israel, over the decades, has learned that it can safely ignore statements, whether by U.S. or European decision-makers, that are essentially playing to the gallery. Because what really matters is not what these people say, but what they do. And when the United States, United Kingdom, the European Union indicate that there is not going to be any consequences, that Israel will continue to be allowed to act with impunity, that there will be no consequences for Israel’s actions, then Israel’s leaders, whether Netanyahu or any of his predecessors, know that they can safely ignore statements such as the ones we’ve been hearing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mouin Rabbani, I wanted to ask you — the U.N. Security Council is going to make a formal decision on Palestine’s bid for full U.N. membership this month. But the U.S. will likely veto this if it is approved, and the U.S. is saying that Palestine needs to negotiate statehood with Israel before it is granted statehood by the U.N. Your response to this, since, obviously, when Israel was admitted into the U.N., the Palestinians were not asked to first negotiate Israel’s statehood?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, I think the U.S., despite several statements over the years to the contrary, has had a consistent position against Palestinian self-determination, against Palestinian statehood. It has recently voted against several resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly reaffirming the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. And essentially, what the U.S. government is saying is that it will not support Palestinian statehood unless Israel does so. And Israel’s position is crystal clear on this matter. It rejects Palestinian statehood. So, in other words, the U.S. is subcontracting its position on Palestinian statehood to Israel and adopting it as its own.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I also wanted to ask you about Prime Minister Netanyahu claiming that the date is set for the attack on Rafah, but at the same time Palestinians are being allowed to return to Khan Younis after Israel basically destroyed that city. Your response to that?

MOUIN RABBANI: I think that’s a situation that is a little unclear, because both the United States and the Europeans have come out against an Israeli ground operation in Rafah. Netanyahu has claimed the date for that operation has already been set. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has said that no such date has been set. Netanyahu has also been saying that if Israel does not enter Rafah, it will not be able to win this war. And this may be a maneuver by Netanyahu to essentially claim that it is because of the United States and it is because of the Europeans and their opposition to an operation in Rafah that Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip has failed, and then also to use these differences with the U.S. for domestic political reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: Mouin Rabbani, can you talk about what’s going on in Cairo right now, the negotiations between Hamas and Israel? Can you talk about the prisoners and the hostages? I know that’s being debated. I mean, I think in the West Bank it’s something like 8,000 people have been taken prisoner, many of them children, since October 7th. And you have something like 130 hostages, Israeli and other foreign nationals, taken by Hamas and other groups on October 7th. And then the whole issue of a ceasefire and letting aid in?

MOUIN RABBANI: Yes, there are a number of issues that are being negotiated. One of them is an exchange of captives. Another is — and for that, formulas are being discussed about how many captives, how many Palestinian captives Israel will release in exchange for the Palestinians releasing the Israeli and other captives in the Gaza Strip.

A second concerns a ceasefire, whether it will be temporary or permanent. And Hamas and Palestinians are, of course, insisting that a temporary pause in fighting, during which there’s an exchange of captives, and then this genocidal assault resumes, doesn’t really make sense.

A third issue is an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

And a fourth, and apparently the most important sticking point, is whether or not Palestinians who have been displaced, primarily from the northern Gaza Strip, many of whom are now in the Rafah region, will be allowed to return to whatever is left of their former homes. And, in fact, it is on this issue that, according to reports, Israel is proving the most obstinate. It has stated that it would allow women and children, but not military-aged men, to return to the northern Gaza Strip. The Palestinians are insisting that such return be unrestricted. And there’s apparently now a proposal where Israel would withdraw from this barrier that it established to bisect the Gaza Strip and that it would be manned by Egyptian forces to ensure that no armed men would go from the southern to the northern Gaza Strip. Whether this is something that will be accepted by both parties remains to be seen. But it’s interesting that of all these issues we’ve been hearing about, it is actually Israeli opposition to the return of displaced refugees to the northern Gaza Strip that is proving to be the main sticking point.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s Israel’s goal in all of this?

MOUIN RABBANI: I believe it’s to make the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation. Of course, Israel entered this war hoping and intending to eradicate and eliminate Hamas as a government that is an armed force, and thought it could do so within a matter of weeks, if not a few months. That has proven to be an abject failure. But I think there’s a wider objective here, that it had an almost insatiable lust for revenge after October 7th. It wanted to make an example out of the Gaza Strip in order to deter Palestinians or any of its surrounding adversaries from ever considering an attack on Israel like this again. And I think it also has a long-standing issue with the presence of so many Palestinians, particularly Palestinian refugees from 1948, on its border — this is a policy that goes back to the 1950s — and has seen in this crisis, and, more importantly, in the unconditional Western support it has received since October 7th, to resolve its Gaza problem, if you will, to either displace the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip or to make it unfit for human habitation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mouin, I wanted to ask you — there’s a lead story in today’s New York Times that’s claiming that Iran has been flooding the West Bank with weapons in an effort to basically stoke an uprising of Palestinians on the West Bank. I’m wondering your sense of that, because the report doesn’t talk much about all of the repression and attacks and killings of Palestinians that have been occurring in the West Bank, especially since the October 7th attack by Hamas.

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, there’s a reason people refer to The New York Times as American Pravda. I mean, in this particular report, there’s virtually no evidence of any significant Iranian arms deliveries to the West Bank. And when you consider how limited Iranian arms deliveries to the Gaza Strip have been, it doesn’t really make sense to believe that there are significantly more weapons being delivered to a territory that is under much more intensive Israeli control.

And again, you know, there’s been this decadeslong attempt to seek to show the Palestinians as somehow not having any legitimate grievances of their own, as always acting on behalf of someone else’s agenda rather than on behalf of their own rights and interests. You know, it used to be they used to be Soviet proxies. Then they became jihadists. Now they’re Iranian proxies. Who knows what they’ll be tomorrow? But even if Iran didn’t exist, this conflict and this Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation would essentially be undiminished. And, you know, this particular article makes a lot of claims, but provides virtually no evidence to substantiate those claims.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what Israel did in Damascus, bombing the Iranian Consulate. Now they’ve reopened one there.

MOUIN RABBANI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly is going on? We’re hearing all kinds of reports that Iran and the U.S. have made a deal, that if the U.S. gets its ceasefire in Gaza, that Iran won’t attack U.S., which is arming Israel. We hear GPS is turned off in Israel so that Iran can’t attack Israel.

MOUIN RABBANI: Yes. Well, in contrast to many previous Israeli attacks on Iranian targets in Syria, this one targeted the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, which is sovereign Iranian territory. And the Iranians have indicated that, from their point of view, the response would need to be direct, rather than through, for example, allied militias, and that, from their point of view, they would launch an attack directly from Iranian territory onto Israeli territory.

Apparently, according to news reports, the Iranians have made an offer to the Americans, which is that if the Americans impose a permanent ceasefire and put an end to this genocidal Israeli assault of the Gaza Strip, that will be considered a closure of the file, also because I think the Iranians and many others, for that matter, believe that it’s an Israeli ambition to further escalate this war regionally and seek to draw the Americans into a direct confrontation with Iran. It’s a little unclear. I mean, we’ve seen indications from the Americans that this is something they’re considering. But thus far, at least, we haven’t seen confirmation that they are actually going to act on this proposal and impose a ceasefire.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to get back for a moment to the negotiations over a ceasefire. We keep hearing in the U.S. press that the holdup is Hamas not agreeing to the conditions of a deal that’s already on the table. I’m wondering your thoughts about this, because it seems to me that it’s much more in the interest of Israel to continue not having a ceasefire while it continues to conduct its operations, rather than Hamas.

MOUIN RABBANI: That’s correct. And I think we also need to recognize that when we hear the term “American proposal,” what we’re really talking about is an American proposal that has been closely coordinated and approved by Israel, so it’s essentially an American-communicated Israeli proposal.

And as we were discussing previously, there are fundamental elements of this proposal that are unacceptable, not only to Hamas, but to Palestinians generally. The idea that you would have a six-to-eight-week pause in fighting, and then this genocidal assault would resume in full force, is, I think, completely nonsensical. The idea of Palestinian men not being allowed to return to their former homes in the Gaza Strip, that Israel would still continue to have control over the delivery of aid to the Gaza Strip. And so, these are all issues that are under discussion.

But as we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Israeli killings of the World Central Kitchen staff, it literally takes only a phone call from the White House to resolve these issues. And so, I think it’s fair to assume that if the United States really wanted a ceasefire, it would only take another phone call. And the absence of that phone call, I think, is also a policy statement from Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to that Lloyd Austin hearing in the Senate —

MOUIN RABBANI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — where the conservative Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton was questioning the U.S. defense secretary, this as protesters were being taken out of the room, calling for ceasefire. I think something like 50 people were arrested in the Senate cafeteria calling for a ceasefire. This is Cotton questioning Austin.

SEN. TOM COTTON: I want to address what the protesters raised earlier. Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?

DEFENSE SECRETARY LLOYD AUSTIN: Senator Cotton, we don’t have any evidence of genocide being created.

SEN. TOM COTTON: So, that’s a — that’s a “no,” Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza?

DEFENSE SECRETARY LLOYD AUSTIN: We don’t have evidence of that, to my knowledge, yeah.

SEN. TOM COTTON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: “We don’t have evidence of” Israel committing genocide in Gaza. Your final response, as we begin to wrap up?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, Cotton had a similar incident with CIA Director William Burns a few weeks ago, and he failed to get a clear response from Burns. Here, of course, you have secretary of defense essentially not wanting to implicate himself and his department, so it was kind of an obvious answer for Lloyd Austin to give.

AMY GOODMAN: Mouin Rabbani, we want to thank you so much for being with us —

MOUIN RABBANI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — Middle East analyst, co-editor of Jadaliyya, host of the Connections podcast, contributor to the new book, Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. Mouin Rabbani was previously senior analyst for the International Crisis Group.

***

Breaking the Silence: Israeli Army Veterans Tour U.S. & Canada to Speak Out Against Occupation
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/10/ ... transcript

Democracy Now! speaks with two former Israeli soldiers who are members of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group of Israeli army veterans. The group’s education director, Tal Sagi, describes growing up in a settlement and joining the military without understanding what occupation was. “We’ve been told that this is security and we have to control millions of lives and we don’t have other options,” says Sagi, who says Israeli society is not open to ending the occupation. “We’re trying to say that there are other options.” We also speak with Breaking the Silence deputy director Nadav Weiman about why the group is touring U.S. colleges and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. “We stood in checkpoints. We raided homes. We attacked Gaza from the air. We fought from the ground,” says Weiman. “So, when you bring reality, you bring real conversation about the occupation, and you bring real conversation about Gaza.”

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 in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

The official death toll in Gaza has topped 33,400, including over 14,000 children, with over 76,000 people wounded. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced, around 70% of Gaza’s population, while famine is setting in. The International Court of Justice has ruled there’s plausible case Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has also exploded, with over 450 Palestinians killed in the last six months and at least 14 villages and towns forcibly depopulated.

Among those speaking out against the violence are Israeli soldiers themselves. Breaking the Silence is an anti-occupation group led by veterans of the Israeli army. The group was founded in 2004, 20 years ago, in the aftermath of the Second Intifada.

We’re joined right now by two members of Breaking the Silence. Nadav Weiman is the group’s deputy director. He served in the West Bank and Gaza from 2005 to 2008. And Tal Sagi is the group’s education director. She served as a soldier in Hebron, one of the largest cities in the West Bank.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Nadav, let’s begin with you. Why are you in the United States and then headed to Canada? And your reaction as you listen to these numbers mounting in Gaza, where you were an Israeli soldier, though albeit many years ago, over 33,000 Palestinians dead?

NADAV WEIMAN: Yeah. So, we are over here to speak about what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank, because we believe that what is happening in the West Bank, it’s not a secret that belongs to us as soldiers. It’s something that the international community should know, because the international community is a part of it. And we saw the discourse happening over here in the States about what is happening in Israel and Palestine, and that’s why we did a campus tour the last two weeks — Tal was here with me — spoke in a lot of campuses all around, met a lot of students, because the conversation about the occupation happens everywhere, right? And we, as former soldiers, we want to be a part of it and saying supporting Israel, it’s not supporting the occupation. Supporting Israel is supporting peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Tal, talk about your experience in the military and why you chose to be a part of Breaking the Silence. And how many former Israeli soldiers, or even current ones, do you feel, share your point of view? Occupation, I have to say, in the U.S. media, is actually rarely talked about right now.

TAL SAGI: So, it’s not only here. We are not talking about it, either. And, actually, I grew up in a settlement in the West Bank, and I served in Hebron in the West Bank. And while serving, I was a tour guide. I used to take groups of soldiers for tours in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. And I didn’t know what occupation is, while taking these tours in this huge Palestinian city, surrounded by soldiers, and there are settlements in the middle of the city. And I didn’t know that the city is under military control, while I’m taking part of this military control, while I’m a settler myself. I didn’t know where is the Green Line or what is the Green Line or anything about these things. So, it took me a lot of time to realize that.

But the fact that I didn’t know that is not a mistake. We don’t know these things. As Israelis, we are not — we’re never taught these things, because, you know, it’s something that for years we’re taking part of and we’re doing, and we don’t want to stop controlling millions of lives of Palestinians for so many — we’re doing it for so many years, and we don’t want to stop, because we want to make sure that we have the control over the land. And we see now also how we don’t have any other future. That’s all we get. We have been told that this is security and we have to control millions of lives and we don’t have other options. And we’re trying to say that there are other options. But it’s really hard to say to the Israeli society, because we don’t know that there are other options.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tal, you said that you didn’t know that you were participating in the occupation. What were you taught in school in Israel about the Arabs and the Palestinians around you?

TAL SAGI: So, I knew Palestinians from the other side of the fence. The settlement that I grew up in was surrounded by fences separating the settlement from the Palestinian villages around us. And I know — I knew that they’re not allowed to go into the settlement. I knew that I can go into the Palestinian village. And we never had any interaction, even though we lived so close to one another, and I could see everything that is happening in the other side of the fence and hear everything that is happening there. And I knew that they are my enemies. I knew that they all want to kill us. That was the only thing I knew about Palestinians. And also we called them Arabs, like they’re all one big Arabs and like one big enemy. So that was the only thing I knew about them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nadav Weiman, I wanted to ask you: What’s been a reception that you’ve received on the — especially on the college campuses, given the fact that any discussions about Israel and Palestine have been so charged in recent months, not only the reception from the students, but from the administrations at these various colleges?

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Nadav couldn’t hear you, Juan, but Juan’s question to you was: What is the reception of the students and the administrators in all the college campuses? You’ve organized this with J Street. Talk about what kind of reception you’ve gotten.

NADAV WEIMAN: Yeah. So, it was quite interesting, because our lecture managed to bring together Israeli students that came to study here in the U.S., Jewish American students and also Palestinian Americans. And I think that when you speak about the reality firsthand — right? We did it. We stood in checkpoints. We raided homes. We attacked Gaza from the air. We fought from the ground. So, when you bring reality, you bring real conversation about the occupation, and you bring real conversation about Gaza.

So, the responses were quite amazing. There was really in-depth question and very interesting conversation around what is happening now, but what the future holds for us, and also, very important, what the U.S. can do to stop the war at the moment and to release all hostages and to enter as much humanitarian aid as possible to stop the humanitarian crisis and the starvation in Gaza at the moment. So the responses was very, very good, I’ve got to say.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you about what has been the response since October 7th to Breaking the Silence, your group of former soldiers in Israel, speaking out on behalf of both Palestinians and those who are anti-occupation within Israel?

NADAV WEIMAN: So, from the very beginning of after October 7th — I’ve got say, October 7th, for an Israeli activist against the occupation, was very hard. You know, yes, I ran with my children and my wife to the shelter in Tel Aviv. But immediately, we started call to all of our testifiers, activists, donors in the Gaza envelope. And eventually, some of them didn’t answer. And two of them were murdered on October 7th, and one of them was a very good friend of mine. And this is how we started, right? You know, the blood was boiling. Everybody was angry.

But then, on October 8th, we became a revenge army, and we started to do — and we started the airstrikes in Gaza. And, of course, that we in Breaking the Silence, we know how it works, right? We know how airstrike looks like. We know how fighting in Gaza looks like. So, after a couple of weeks, we and other NGOs in Israel, we called for ceasefire, to release all hostages, to enter humanitarian aid into Gaza. And obviously, obviously, the right wing in Israel is against it, because the right wing in Israel believes that we need to continue fighting. And I don’t even understand the goals of the fighting now in Gaza. I think the number one goal is to release all hostages. So, yes, there was some aggression against Breaking the Silence. But in couple of months, we will publish our report with hundreds of testifiers that would come to us. Then we expect another wave of violence.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Tal Mitnick. In January, the 18-year-old, who refused Israeli military service, was sentenced to 30 days in a military prison. Democracy Now! spoke with Tal after he was released about what he witnessed while incarcerated. He then went right back into prison.

TAL MITNICK: 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: So, that was Tal Mitnick, 18 years old, has been sentenced and sentenced again to military prison. How common is it for a soldier to say no, a refusenik, as you call them?

NADAV WEIMAN: Not common at all. I served in the Israeli special forces. We were 12 in my team. I served in a snipers’ team. And standing in front of your friends in mid-operation or before operation and say, “Hey, no, we have to stop, because it’s against the Fourth Geneva Convention, or it’s against international human law,” it really doesn’t happen, because a unit — doesn’t matter if it’s a platoon, a company or a team — it’s a family. And standing in front of your family members, your brothers, saying “no,” it is very hard. This young man, that did it before his army service, I think it’s quite unique in the Israeli society. We have a couple of those each year, but the general soldiers and general public, they go to the army as they were requested by the state of Israel.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nadav Weiman, you served in the IDF in both Gaza and the West Bank. Could you talk about your experiences there and how that shaped your views of the occupation?

NADAV WEIMAN: Yeah. So, I served between 2005 to 2008 in a special forces unit. And me and my team served just after the Second Intifada, but when the IDF really pressured the Palestinian population like we are in the Second Intifada. So we arrested a lot of people. We searched for all kinds of things. But mainly we did sniping operations.

You know, when you want to do sniping operations inside Palestinian cities or villages, you don’t have a hill or a forest to take cover in. So, what we used to do is something that is called “straw widow.” It’s a codename in the IDF of taking a private Palestinian family’s house and turning it into a military post. You choose a house that looks best for you. Maybe it’s tall. Maybe it has big windows. Then you call the Shin Bet. You make sure that every one of the family members are innocent, are not connected to terror. And then, in the middle of the night, you come. You sneak into the neighborhood. You break the door down. You grab everybody from their beds, because then they cannot really resist you, put them in one room, and then use one of the rooms — the parents’ bedroom, for example — as our sniping post. We put our sniping rifles. And after that, if one of the family members wants to eat, they want to drink, they want to take medicine, they want to pray, they need authorization from us, because it’s our house. It’s not their house anymore. And then you shoot from their houses. The minute you do that, the armed convoy come, and you go back to the base. But that’s the West Bank.

In Gaza, when I did the same thing, “straw widows” in Gaza, in 2008, you don’t infiltrate. You don’t do it quietly in the middle of the night. When we approached the houses, the fenced-off houses of Gaza, after cutting the fence and walking over there, a tank came and rammed one of the walls of the house and knocked it down, because they told us that every house in Gaza is booby-trapped. And then, when we got inside the house, we took all of the men, from 16 years old until 80 years old, and we put them on a truck, drove them back to Israel for interrogation. And then, when we put our sniping rifles on the rooftop, we saw there was lots of new greenhouses that we didn’t see in the aerial photograph. So we called the D9 bulldozer, that smashed everything down so we will have a clean line of fire. And I think that’s the difference between the ongoing occupation with settlements and checkpoints in the West Bank and the occupation by siege that we have in Gaza since 2007 and the level of brutality or firepower that we use over there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, there’s clearly a lot to talk about here, and we’re going to ask you to stay for a few minutes for a post-show. Nadav Weiman is deputy director of Breaking the Silence. Tal Sagi is education director. They’re on a tour on college campuses around the United States and Canada and making their way to the Canadian Parliament.

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“We’re Responsible for This”: American Surgeons Return from Gaza, Call for End of U.S. Culpability in Genocide
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 11, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/11/ ... transcript

We speak with two doctors who’ve just returned after two weeks at the European Hospital in Gaza. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter are co-authors of a new piece for Common Dreams titled “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.” They describe a hospital “hanging on by a thread,” with the majority of patients being young children, and bombing targeted at Muslim Palestinians “concentrated at the time of evening prayer.” “Genocide was the overwhelming impression that I got,” says Perlmutter. “This is dehumanization. The purpose of this is to kill a population.” He also says, of U.S. responsibility in this genocide, “We’re buying the bullets and the gun for the gunman who’s going to the school and killing the children.” “If our support stops, the occupation stops,” adds Sidhwa, urging other Americans to push political leaders and public discourse against the country’s support of Israel. “We have to raise the domestic cost for these policies.” Dr. Sidhwa and Dr. Perlmutter worked with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration with the World Health Organization in Gaza. Collectively, they have previously volunteered medical assistance in the West Bank, Haiti and Ukraine, and after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Boston Marathon bombing.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where Palestinians marked the end of Ramadan as Israel’s six-month assault continues. In a minute, we’ll speak with two doctors just back from volunteering at the European Hospital in Gaza who co-authored a new piece for Common Dreams headlined “We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.”

In it, they wrote, quote, “As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering. Collectively, we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have worked in the deprivation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of … the war in Ukraine and attended primary trauma services to those injured in the Boston Marathon. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a patient.

“But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being unable to properly treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by the two surgeons who wrote that piece. In Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Dr. Mark Perlmutter is with us. He’s an orthopedic hand surgery specialist who just returned Monday from volunteering at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. He worked with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration with the World Health Organization. He’s currently president of the World Surgical Foundation, immediate past president of the International College of Surgeons. And in Salt Lake City, Utah, we’re joined by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who’s also just returned from European Hospital. He also worked with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I mean, those words that you wrote in this piece — and we thank you so much for joining us on the day after you finally both got back to the United States. I wanted to just read one more part from your piece and get Dr. Feroze Sidhwa to respond.

As you talked about European Hospital, you said, “We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world.”

Dr. Sidhwa, describe your two weeks there in European Hospital and what this meant, how it compares to other work you’ve done around the world.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Sure. Thanks for having me.

The things that struck me about working at Gaza European Hospital were — there were a few. One was the actual state of the hospital. The infrastructure of the hospital is completely overwhelmed, because the — not only the massive casualties that it’s receiving, and also having to deal with the normal medical problems that this hugely displaced population has coming down from the north, but also the infrastructure is just completely overwhelmed by this humongous displaced persons camp that’s not only outside of the hospital, but actually inside. Every square inch of the hospital, the hallways, even the wards, is taken up with tents that people have constructed from the detritus of their house. And so, it’s just — it’s completely overwhelmed. Sanitation is impossible. Even basic cleanliness is impossible. And the hospital is just barely hanging on by a thread in terms of functionality.

And the other thing that was really causing the hospital major problems is that the staff themselves is extremely not only traumatized, but they haven’t even been paid since October 7th. A hundred percent of the staff are just working on a voluntary basis. And that’s in the middle of still having to provide for their own family’s safety, their own family’s food provisions, sanitation, things that normally are just happening automatically. The medical students displaced from the north all came down and just spontaneously decided to volunteer at Gaza European Hospital. They’re kind of running the emergency room as best they can, while other physicians have been displaced. They’ve been — some of them have been killed. Some of them have been threatened by the Israelis and have left because of that. So it’s a very difficult situation.

The second thing that really struck me was the degree of violence that was being utilized. The magnitude of injury that’s caused by the bombs that — the U.S. bombs that Israel is using is really dramatic. These weapons are — the blast effect is incredible. They throw the environment itself through these patients. And I don’t even just mean large pieces of shrapnel like from the tile floor and the wall, or whatever, being ripped up and thrown into people, which that happens, too, but literally just the dust, the debris, everything is just embedded in the patient’s skin. And again, it makes clean surgical operations just simply impossible. You’d have to rip the person’s — all of their skin off to make them — to sanitize anything.

And then, the third thing was the evidence, like you mentioned, that we wrote, the evidence of the directed violence specifically at children. I mean, you can maybe argue that a bomb went off and a kid just happened to be nearby, but it’s not believable that the best-trained marksmen in the world accidentally shot a 3-year-old boy in the head, accidentally shot a 2-year-old girl twice in the head, accidentally shot — you know, it just goes on and on. And that was — I knew about it before I went, but to see it in person was really pretty shocking.

And I think the last thing that I would say that struck me was the attempt of the Palestinians to maintain their dignity and their humanity even in such really horrifying circumstances. They stayed in family units as much as they could. They tried to continue their traditions of Ramadan. Even though they’re all desperately hungry and thirsty, they would still fast during the day. And it was the maintaining of their culture, maintaining their family units, maintaining their belief that the future can be better. That was really quite dignified, in my opinion, and it was very, very impressive to see.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Mark Perlmutter, you know, you and Dr. Sidhwa sent us a number of extremely graphic videos and photos, some of which we are showing for our television viewers. If you could explain why you think it’s important for American audiences to see these graphic images, and then also explain why you, as an orthopedic hand surgery specialist, why you made the decision to go to Gaza?

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: Absolutely. First, happy birthday to you again.

I’d like to echo what my newfound best friend Feroze had said. And realistically, what impressed me the most was the overt genocide that I was suspecting was going on. That’s what brought me there. I was involved into a telehealth network providing advice to young orthopedic surgeons providing surgery in Gaza. And when I realized, based on direct feedback, that these very misplaced pins and screws were being performed by trainees without guidance because their attending orthopedic surgeons were killed or captured and imprisoned inside of Israel, and that they were flying without instruction, that I’d make a commitment to go. When I got there, echoing what Feroze had said, genocide was the overwhelming impression that I got.

There are distinct signs of genocide. First of all, the bombs are cluster bombs. We’ve taken small pieces of shrapnel, dozens of pieces of shrapnel, out of toddlers, infants and teenagers. The country is 50% children, if not more. Overwhelmingly, our victims were children. I would say 70-75% of the people that we operated on were elementary school age or younger. The injuries were devastating. As Dr. Sidhwa said, the world’s best marksmen are not going to shoot a kid in the forehead twice and in the abdomen. These are midline shots directly aimed, and that doesn’t happen by accident.

Secondly, the bombing was concentrated at the time of evening prayers. It happened all day long, but it was distinctly, purposefully concentrated when the Muslims were gathered together in tight units, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, praying to God, while they’re being bombed. And the cluster bombs are infinitely more effective when the intended target is concentrated into a smaller location. That defines genocide. The cluster bombs are illegal. The snipers, aimed distinctly at children, are unethical and illegal.

And then, of course, the way that you dehumanize a population is to kill the humans. You deprive them of their medical schools, their clinics, their ambulances. Sure, there was a big American and worldwide — justified — outcry when the World Central Kitchen vans were distinctly and purposely bombed right through the center of their hoods, but prior to that, 200 ambulances were targeted by the red cross — in this case, it’s a red crescent — very prominently displayed on top of an ambulance. They have very modern ambulances. There was no mistaking that they were ambulances that were bombed. Two hundred were destroyed, along with the paramedics. Doctors were distinctly shot. An orthopedic surgeon was shot in his knee while he’s operating on a patient, because the soldier commanded him to leave the operating room and he refused to abandon his patient, quite ethically. He had his knee blown out across the room. He was immediately fixed by his trainees. And two days later, he was imprisoned by Israel for 45 days, according to him, a juice box every other day, blindfolded the entire time, dropped off at a nonroad prison — border to crawl for three kilometers until somebody rescued him, blind in one eye because a rifle butt exploded his right eye. This is dehumanization. This is the — the purpose of this is to kill a population.

Food delivery. When we left, there was tens of miles of incoming food trucks, four lines. The entrance into Gaza and the exit road into Gaza were all lined on both shoulders of the road with tens of miles of food trucks parked bumper to bumper to bumper, trying to get into the country, of course which is limited by the IDF or the Israeli government. Why aren’t they letting the food in, if not for to deprive the population of the substance that they need to survive? This is another definition of genocide. There’s no reason why they can’t let even inspected food trucks in. The product can be inspected. I’m sure it should be inspected. But this is life-sustaining materials. The hospitals, if we didn’t bring our orthopedic implants, if we didn’t bring our dressings, if we didn’t bring medicines, they would be devoid of all of this — another definition of genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Perlmutter, explain about the photos, the photos and the videos, why you think those are so important for American audiences to see, the ones that you and Dr. Sidhwa sent.

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: Well, because the American public, and I’m sure the German public, the two societies that are most responsible for sustaining this genocide, their media is being sterilized. If they saw pictures of babies with 10 pieces of shrapnel in its 1-year-old forehead and throughout its face, if they saw a 12-year-old missing all of their limbs and burnt, like we said in our letter, like an ignored hotdog on a grill, if they actually saw the dehumanization, the degree of it, the ubiquitous, widespread nature of it, then they would open their eyes and realize that we’re responsible for this. The big reason why I went is mea culpa. My tax dollars are paying for the bombs that are killing children, and that’s horrible.

You know, we have a lot of school shootings in the United States. If a gunman goes into a school and starts killing children, the American response, the world given response is, a sniper team goes in and tries to take out the offending gunman, regardless of their age. The Israeli response is to drop a bomb on the school to kill the gunman, but also incinerate the hundreds and hundreds of children, perhaps thousands, that could be living in that school, and incinerate them all just to get the single gunman. What America doesn’t understand is that the Hamas soldiers comprise less than one-tenth of 1% of the population of Palestine, of Gaza. The analogy of killing innocent children in a school just to kill the single gunman holds. If an orphanage had an infected rat sneak into it, you don’t incinerate the entire orphanage to get rid of the rat that snuck into the orphanage. But that’s exactly what we’re doing, except that we’re giving the bombs to Israel to bomb the orphanage. We’re buying the bullets and the gun for the gunman who’s going into the school and killing innocent children. We’re responsible.

And we have to open our eyes as a society and realize that it’s not just seven aid workers that unfortunately died, but there were 17,000, 18,000 children that are shredded like paper. They just don’t happen to be white children. And we have to open our eyes and care about them as much as we care about the seven aid workers that very unfortunately died.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask both of you a question, starting with Dr. Perlmutter. I mean, your credentials, you are an orthopedic surgeon. You are head of the World Surgical Foundation, past president of the International College of Surgeons. You’re both American. Dr. Perlmutter, you’re from a Jewish American family. Your twin is an Orthodox Jewish woman. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is Zoroastrian. I wanted to ask you, Dr. Perlmutter — you wrote two emails to the U.S. Embassy in Israel when you went, pleading with them not to attack European Gaza Hospital, saying, “We’re deathly afraid of being bombed again as we were this morning.” What happened to you? And did the U.S. Embassy respond to you?

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: I sent them two letters, one when the bombs were shaking in the — they were shaking the fillings out of our teeth. It is as if lightning struck inches away from you. That’s how much vibration the hospital ground sustained. The bombs did not actually enter into the walls of the hospital. They completely surrounded the hospital. The entire event occurred specifically to destroy the population outside the hospital. We were in fear of our lives. We were particularly in fear of our lives right after the bombing of the U.N. — I’m sorry, the World Central Kitchen convoy. While we were in full knowledge that doctors were being kidnapped and targeted, almost a hundred journalists were killed, the destruction of multiple ambulances, we felt targeted from the beginning. So, as we were approaching the end of our trip and after we’ve heard that all other hospitals were being thoroughly destroyed and their surgeons being kidnapped, we were in fear of our own lives. More importantly, we were in fear of the tens of thousands of people that sought refuge in that hospital compound, hoping that a hospital would not be targeted.

And so I wrote the American Embassy, to both the Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv offices. They sent me a return email acknowledging receipt of my first email. I’ve received no response from them. I got acknowledgment from the first email that I sent. I sent a second email saying, “This is the day we’re leaving. Could you please inform the IDF that our convoy, just like the World Central Kitchen’s convoy, is leaving at this time, on this date. This is the vans — this is what the vans look like. This is the timing that we’re going to leave.” And I received no response from them, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: You are talking to us from the hospital — you’re in your scrubs — in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. And, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, you’re in Salt Lake City, on your way back to Stockton, California, where you work. I’m looking at your piece again in Common Dreams, Dr. Sidhwa. You write, “No amount of medical care could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here. … Israel has dropped so much American ordinance on Gaza that it now exceeds the explosive force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Can you talk about what you would say if you got to speak to President Biden? We interviewed Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who had just returned from Gaza. We believe he’s the first doctor on the ground in Gaza to actually directly address the president. He handed him a letter from an 8-year-old Palestinian orphan and then walked out of the White House. He said, “What can be said about what is happening here right now?” It was the day after the attack on the World Central Kitchen. What is your message, and not only to the president, but around the world, Dr. Sidhwa?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: I don’t think I would say much to Joe Biden. I think he knows exactly what’s going on, and I don’t think it’s important to him. I don’t think he cares if Palestinians are murdered like roaches and ants. But to the rest of Americans who have normal human values, they do care.

And, you know, one of the other things that Mark and I wrote in that piece is that the blood on the trauma bay floor and the operating room floor was dripping from our hands. And that’s — I think that’s accurate. Again, we provide the crucial military, economic and diplomatic support. Your viewers are no surprise to that. And that makes us responsible. If our support stops, the attacks stop. If our support stops, the occupation stops. It’s instant. It’s been proven a hundred times. It’s not hard to see.

And so, that’s what I would say to people, is if you want to stop participating unwittingly in these — in some of the worst crimes that I’ve ever seen in my life, then you need to organize, and you need to raise the cost to people like Joe Biden, because that is the only thing they care about. The U.S. is attempting to manage the Middle East with the system that it put in place since the Arab Spring. And the Palestinians are just kind of an annoyance to that system. They don’t want to — the U.S. doesn’t want Saudi Arabia to have its ruling family shaken, the Jordanian ruling family shaken. These are the — but we have to raise the domestic cost for these policies, which, like Mark said, are really, truly and genuinely genocidal in nature, that it’s dramatic.

So, I would say to people that, you know, you know what’s going on, so stop thinking about it all that much and just start acting. Go to your houses of worship, go to your community centers, go wherever it is that you go, and talk to people and say, “Look, let’s go talk to our congressman in person. Let’s demand a meeting.” If you’re a veteran, put your uniform on and go — I’ve had several veterans reach out to me — put your uniform on and go talk to your congressperson. Film it. Put it online. Do anything you can to embarrass these people and to make it obvious to the world that they are not acting with normal human decency in mind. They’re acting with purely cold, almost Mafia-like political calculations. And the only way that we are going to stop this is by raising the cost to them of doing so. That’s what I would say to people, I think.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Sidhwa, of course, the justification, the continued justification, for Israel’s assault is the fact that they’re targeting Hamas militants. You treated — we’ve just heard from both of you about the number of children you treated, mostly, as you said, elementary school children or below the age of elementary school. You dealt with numerous mass casualty events while you were at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. How many military-age males did you treat?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: I can count them on one hand. I think it was probably four or five. And not one of them — you know, obviously, like Mark said, the people who are actually in Hamas or the other Palestinian militant organizations is an extremely small number, even of military-age men, in the Gaza Strip. But we treated a hand — literally a handful, five at the very most, that I can remember, military-age men, while we were there, for any injury at all. And the overwhelming consensus in the hospital was that if actual militants were to come in, they would actually come in with their — I don’t know the technical terms, but with their unit and with their commander, and they would be spirited away from the hospital as soon as they were well, well enough to be taken out of the hospital. That never happened once to anybody, so I seriously doubt that I encountered a single combatant while I was there. It was a 100% civilian — I think the people I cared for were 100% civilians, even including the military-age men that I took care of.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Finally, Dr. Perlmutter, if you could say, you know, what you think the medical needs there are now? I mean, there are no fully functional hospitals left at all. You’ve said that you could operate 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for years, and not make a dent, because the needs are so great. So, what can be done for people in Gaza suffering in this way as this war goes on?

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: All right, two points. First, I’ve seen more orthopedic injuries in my two weeks there than I have seen in my entire 30-plus years of practicing and the additional 10 years of training before that. If I operated 12 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take me 20 years for me to make a notable dent, a minuscule dent, in the amount of orthopedic-alone pathology that’s there. The extent of damage, of carnage is that widespread.

In order to make a difference, it’s not by supplying supplies. It’s by eliminating the genocide. It’s eliminating — it’s imposing controls on Israel. It’s by reaching out, as Dr. Sidhwa said, to our senators. That letter that you read, I sent a copy of that to every single sitting U.S. senator. I called Chuck Schumer’s office from Gaza while I’m being bombed, and spoke to his secretary and said, “The noises in the background are American bombs being dropped by American warplanes, gifted, essentially, to Israel. And I’m in fear that they’re going to kill me. I’m in bigger fear that it’s going to keep me up all night with another dozen shredded children and women.” As Dr. Sidhwa said, I don’t think I saw one person who would qualify as a military combatant. The victims were civilian, virtually 100%.

I would echo his plea to please contact your state senator and House of Representative and the federal ones, as well. Share with them the knowledge that the sterilized history that they’ve been receiving and the sterilized facts that they have been receiving are, in fact, inaccurate, that there’s true bloodshed that’s going on, at our hands, that we’re paying for. And they need to wake up and realize that it’s not the payoff from the Israeli political action committee that really matters to keep their jobs moving forward and their reelection occurring. What really should matter is the ethical basis of what they’re charged to do, and that’s to maintain the viability of the United States’s image and our leader as a democratic nation supporting perfect ideals, and not advancing their own personal agenda by supporting a state that’s recklessly killing innocent women and children, something that every American should stand against.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mark Perlmutter, we want to thank you so much for joining us, orthopedics hand surgery specialist, president of the World Surgical Foundation, immediate past president of the International College of Surgeons, speaking to us from now his hospital in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in his scrubs, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, trauma surgeon, speaking to us from Salt Lake City, heading back to Stockton, California, where he works. They just returned Monday from volunteering at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. We’ll link to the piece they co-authored in Common Dreams, “We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.”

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Israeli Scholar Neve Gordon on Israeli Mass Surveillance in Gaza & the Use of AI to Kill Palestinians
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/12/ ... transcript

We go to Part 2 of our conversation with Israeli scholar Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for British Society of Middle East Studies. Gordon talks about the “massive surveillance apparatus” Israel has imposed on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the use of artificial intelligence tools to bomb targets despite the high error rate in those systems, and the shock of the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed some 1,200 Israelis. “The state seemed not to be functioning, so most Israelis were in great pain, were in great fear,” he says. “My fear is that most Israelis are still trapped, still stuck in that October 7th moment and unwilling to lift their eyes to see basically the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip.”

Watch Part 1 of this interview: Road to Famine: Israeli Law Prof. Neve Gordon on Israel’s History of Weaponizing Food Access in Gaza

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’s continued aerial and ground assault on Gaza killed dozens of Palestinians today, including in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, in Gaza City and in Rafah, where three-quarters of Gaza’s population have been displaced to. The official death toll in Gaza has topped 33,600, including over 14,000 children, the actual toll expected to be far higher with thousands of people missing and presumed dead under the rubble. More than 76,000 people have been wounded.

For more on Gaza, we turn to Part 2 of our conversation with the Israeli scholar Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for British Society of Middle East Studies, author of a number of books, including Israel’s Occupation, co-author of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, co-editor of Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel. He joined Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh and I from London last week. I began by asking him about Israeli surveillance in Gaza.

NEVE GORDON: So, every state needs to impose a massive surveillance apparatus on its society — and its largest manifestation is the Central Bureau of Statistics — because in order to manage a society, you need to know a lot about it. You need to know different patterns of occupation, age, gender, race. You need to know their habits and so forth. And so, when Israel enters the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the first thing, or one of the first things, it does is it begins to monitor and survey the population it is managing, which also tells us a lot about its intentions and the fact that it had no intention of withdrawing from Gaza and the West Bank after the war in 1967, because you don’t put in place such a massive surveillance apparatus, where you look at every letter sent, you look at — you go in and see how many refrigerators people have, how many stoves they have, what kind of crops they’re growing in their agricultural fields, everything like that — you don’t put that in place if you’re planning to leave, but you put it in place if you plan to manage the population.

And Israel managed the Palestinian population until Oslo, where basically the Oslo Accords can be understood as the creation of a subcontractor, Palestinian Authority, that it would take over the management of the daily life of the Palestinians. And the PA then creates its own Central Bureau of Statistics. And Israel changes then the kinds of surveillance that it carries out vis-à-vis the Palestinian population, because it is no longer responsible for the life of the Palestinians — the PA is — but now it is responsible for the security of Israel in relation to the Palestinian body. So it surveys the Palestinian body only insofar as it helps Israel ensure its so-called security. And so we see a change in the surveillance apparatus. And we see what I call in my first book a move from a politics of life, a politics where Israel is planting 200,000 or so trees in the Gaza Strip, versus a politics of death, where Israel is uprooting 200-or-so thousand trees in the Gaza Strip.

Now, over time, technologies develop. The military develops new technologies of surveillance. And one friend who works in the Israeli intelligence basically told me, “We can see almost everything in the Gaza Strip, whether it’s through our Zeppelins, whether it’s through our drones, whether it’s through satellites and different devices.” And Israel monitors every little step in the Gaza Strip. Every SIM card in the Gaza Strip is monitored. A lot of times when they say they’re targeting a person, they’re targeting the SIM card. So, what we have is a whole massive apparatus of surveillance that has existed for years for military use.

But what is new, or relatively new — I think it was first put to use in 2021 — is the use of AI system. It’s the kind of feeding of the data that Israel collects through its surveillance system to a machine that uses algorithms then, basically, to create different kinds of networks and to identify Hamas operative or different Palestinian fighters or other issues, because the bottleneck in the different cycles of violence that Israel has had — and as I mentioned, it had five since 2008 — was always the targets, the kill targets, because it would take an intelligence officer sometimes days or weeks to kind of figure out a target. And here you can put the data into the machine, and the machine — as the article in +972 tells us, the machine, within a limited amount of time, can produce 37,000 human targets. Now, the machine itself, the Israelis itself, are set telling us that there’s a 10% error rate even in that machine, even according to Israel, yet that Israel ignored that 10% error rate, and then it just started using this machine algorithms to bomb people in Gaza, as you said.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Neve Gordon, this is the first time that we’re speaking to you since the October 7th attack, so I want to ask you — you’ve just quoted an Israeli intelligence official who told you that, given the extensive surveillance system that they have in place in Gaza, they can see almost everything that happens there. So, in light of that, could you tell us what your initial response was to the Hamas attack in Israel, and then what’s unfolded since? Of course, you’ve said that, and you say in the piece, that the speed and scale of the devastation of Gaza that’s ensued is “unparalleled in history.” So, if you could talk about that?

NEVE GORDON: So, the October 7th attack, as an Israeli Jew, was both horrific and devastating. A former graduate student of mine was killed on that day. A music teacher from my children’s school was killed on that day. His wife was killed on that day. And a friend that we thought was kidnapped was also — turned out to have been killed on that day. And it was a very, very painful moment for me, and it was a very, very painful moment, I think, for most Israelis. And the audience needs to understand that Israel is a small country, and the degree of separation between either a person that was killed or a person that was kidnapped in Israel, the maximum degree of separation is probably one degree. So everyone knew someone or knew someone that knew someone. And there was this kind of immense pain. And alongside that pain, there was also a major fear, because everything seemed to have collapsed. The major IDF intelligence apparatus was not working. The defense system was not working. The fence was breached without any problems. And the whole apparatus of the state seemed not to be functioning. So, most Israelis were in great pain, were in great fear. But also immediately came this notion of revenge, kind of a sense we have to hit back, we have to hit back hard, and so forth. And my fear is that most Israelis are still trapped, still stuck in that October 7th moment and unwilling to lift their eyes to see, basically, the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip.

And that’s what we’ve been seeing in the past six months, is this horrific devastation, massive killings of civilians. We have — I mean, Hamas killed 30 Israeli children on October 7th, and that is horrific. Israel has killed close to 15,000 children, not counting those that are under the rubble, since October 7th. We need to understand that figure: 15,000 children have been killed. We have women — thousands of women have been killed. And thousands of innocent men have been killed. Israel categorizes all the men as terrorists, but thousands of these men were not fighters. They were just men that were in their homes with their wives, with their children, and their homes were bombed. And so, we see the massive displacement of 1.7 million people. We see 70% of the Gaza Strip now in basically rubbles. We see systematic attacks on the healthcare, that the healthcare is now — which is the institution responsible for saving lives. It’s now completely shattered. So, it’s all been very devastating for me, as an Israeli Jew, to watch this kind of horrific violence unfolding in the Gaza Strip, with friends and friends of friends, again, dying. It’s not as if I don’t have friends in the Gaza Strip. And then we see the academia and education system. I mean, all the universities have been bombed in the Gaza Strip. We have almost half the schools are either damaged or destroyed. One-third of these schools are irreparable. So, one-third of the children, even after the war, will not have schools to return to. So, it’s just complete devastation, and it’s beyond words at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you can comment on the breaking of the establishment consensus, and if it matters, if you think it will lead to the end of the occupation. You wrote years ago, 15 years ago, a book called Israel’s Occupation. But here you are in London. You have Chef Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, seven people killed — one Palestinian, three British men, some part of the special forces — they were protecting the others, did not succeed in doing that — Australian, a Canadian American. In the United States, you have this odd situation where the president talks about being broken-hearted, and at the same time continues to push for massive amounts of military weapons to go to Israel. You have the mass protests in London, where you are, hundreds of thousands marching, and those calling for an end to military support of Israel. How has this shifted over time? And do you think that this has reached a critical mass, that Palestinians are now becoming full-fledged people in the eyes of the world and the establishment governments, and that Israel is the one being questioned?

NEVE GORDON: Well, we’re not yet where Palestinians have become full-fledged people in the eyes of the world. And we can see that very clearly through the attack on the World Central Kitchen, because, on average, every day, an aid worker has been killed in Gaza since the war began, but it becomes an international issue that all the political elite is discussing only when the aid workers are foreigners. So that shows us the deep-rooted racism that still exists.

However, there is a massive change. I’ve been at it for maybe 40 years now, and there is a massive change. And the massive change is that the Palestinians have managed to globalize their struggle. And civil society, from Sri Lanka and India to the United States through Europe and Africa, is with the Palestinians. And the civil society around the globe are horrified what they’re seeing, and have been now for the past half-year, particularly here in London with these massive demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people, have been telling the political elite, “Hey, you’re not seeing what’s going on.” And it seems that, finally, after six months of the kind of devastation that I was describing before, this is having some kind of impact on the political elite. And so, we see different — as you mentioned earlier in the program, we see different countries now questioning the weapons trade with Israel. We see that happening in Spain. We saw a ruling in the Netherlands. We see now the law professors and judges in the U.K. protesting the trade and saying that it’s illegal. And we see slowly the political elite changing their voice. But it’s slow. It’s too slow. And what I would suggest is that civil society just needs to continue going out there and creating these thousands of stories of protest every day, until the political elite begins hearing what we have to say.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Neve Gordon, is there any indication of even an incipient change in civil society in Israel? We’ve seen these massive, unprecedented protests, but, of course, those are against Netanyahu, not about a ceasefire in Gaza. But what do you hear about what the situation is on the ground in Israel, how people are thinking of what happened on October 7th and how this war will end?

NEVE GORDON: So, building up to October 7th, there were weekly protests for 35 weeks in a row, with hundreds of thousands of people going to the street against the judicial overhaul and against Netanyahu. That’s about half the Jewish population was against Netanyahu, and half the Jewish population was for Netanyahu. Come October 7th, and the glue that kind of glued these two camps together was revenge. And they wanted revenge against the Palestinian people. And so, the protests dissipated.

We see now the protests reemerging in the past few weeks, with about something around 10,000 people now protesting against Netanyahu. That’s about, I would say, 10% or less than what we saw before October 7th. Then we have protests for the return of the hostages. And so, you’ll get about 2,000, 3,000 people going to those protests. And then the ceasefire protests are sometimes with a hundred or 200 people. And it’s, frankly, often very dangerous to take part in those protests. People can be violent against you in the streets and so forth.

We see at the same time right-wing organizations scanning the different petitions Israelis are signing, looking at what they’re signing, and if an Israeli will sign a petition for a ceasefire or against arms trade with Israel, these right-wing organizations will go — if it’s, let’s say, a lecture in a university, will go to the students and mobilize the students against the lecture, so students ask the university to suspend or fire the professor. And we’ve seen several faculty members across the country being fired. We’ve seen it across the country. Mainly the people that have been targeted are Palestinian citizens of Israel, but also several Jews have lost their jobs due to basically empathy with the Palestinians and call for a ceasefire.

So, the situation in Israel is that the freedom of speech, for example, that I enjoyed when I lived in Israel, has been really curtailed, contracted. And things that people could easily say before October 7th, it’s very difficult to say today, sometimes even very dangerous to say them, and particularly if you’re a Palestinian citizen.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Gordon, I know you have to go soon, but I wanted to ask you about Prime Minister Netanyahu saying he’s going to ban Al Jazeera. Now, it’s not as if Israeli Jews are big aficionados of Al Jazeera, but the significance around the world of what it means? We saw this, you know, at the time, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld talking about Al Jazeera as a terror network. That’s when Al Jazeera was covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And we see it again now. You talk about what Israelis see versus what Palestinians are experiencing, the horror of the devastation of Gaza. Yet Al Jazeera is perhaps one of the only global networks that brings the voices of Palestinians and Israeli officials to the Arab world, in a way we do not see in the United States, even with CNN, with MSNBC, rarely interviewing a Palestinian. If you can talk about what the significance of this is?

NEVE GORDON: So, as you said —

AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention how many journalists have been killed in Gaza.

NEVE GORDON: Exactly. So, Israel has killed over a hundred journalists in Gaza. And why are journalists being targeted? Because journalists channel information to the world outside. And the Al Jazeera, since October 7th, has been probably the best global network, the best network, that has managed to cover at least part of the horrors that are taking place in the Gaza Strip, and managed to confront Israeli policymakers and discuss these issues. And Israel does not want the world to see what is going on.

A lot of commentators have said this is the first genocide that the world sees taking — unfolding in front of their very eyes. And I think that is something to think about. And I think that Israel has begun thinking about it. It knows the kind of violence that it’s carrying out. It knows that Al Jazeera has managed to get this violence out there into the world. I’m sure other networks are also looking at what Al Jazeera is doing, and using some of its information. And Israel wants to put a stop to this information so it can carry out the kind of crimes that it’s been carrying out, without it being seen by such a great audience.

So, there is a systematic attack, both inside Israel, in terms of the Facebook, the social media pages of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, that are getting information from Gaza and kind of amplifying it to the world. There is the — we have to remember, there’s the internet blackouts that Israel has put on the Gaza Strip. And there’s the targeting of journalists. And I think the banning of Al Jazeera is just another step in a whole series of steps about how do we manage to restrict the information from getting out of the Gaza Strip so the world won’t see what we’re doing, the kind of — the eliminationist project that we’re carrying out, we, as Israelis, are carrying out in the Gaza Strip.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Gordon, just before we end, if you could tell us how you think this war will come to an end, the status of the negotiations, what’s likely to happen, what will it take for a ceasefire to be declared, for a prisoner exchange to take place?

NEVE GORDON: I think we’re in a major bind here. I think Netanyahu, as many people have already said, has a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the war, because the minute the war ends, Netanyahu will have to go back to the Israeli public, and they will demand accountability, not only accountability for the three corruption trials that he’s undergoing, but, more importantly, for accountability for October 7th and for the hostages and so forth. So Netanyahu has this kind of vested interest of continuing this war, and maybe even creating a geopolitical crisis that extends far beyond Israel, that goes to Lebanon. We saw the attack on the Iranian Embassy in Syria the other day, and so forth.

I think he will be willing for a short ceasefire to carry out a hostage exchange. And I really, really hope that that happens very soon and that the hostages are released, and that all the Palestinian political prisoners that are being held in Israel are also released.

But if I understood your question correctly, I think you’re also asking about the bigger picture. What about the day after? And I think the problem is not Netanyahu. The problem is the Israeli regime. And I think that if Gantz enters into power or anyone else, not much is going to change under the sun. I think what we need to aspire for is a real change in the regime.

People are chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” So, now, from the river to the sea, there’s millions of Palestinians that are not free. And the way I would imagine the kind of future I would aspire for Israel would be, yes, from the river to the sea, everyone will be free, meaning that we’ll have a state there where both all the Palestinians, the Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, are all citizens of that state, the Jews that are now there will be citizens of that state, and it will be a Jewish — a kind of a state for all its citizens, and not a state, a regime, where Jewish supremacy, as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem calls it, is the kind of paradigm through which the regime carries out its legislation, its policies and practices.

So, I think a lot will have to be done. There was a great piece in The New York Times the other day by Tareq Baconi, calling on policymakers to abandon the two-state solution. I think Tareq Baconi is right. I think the situation in Israel — and Israel admits to it — that it controls the area from the river to the sea. And so the situation is that there is one state. The one state is a settler-colonial apartheid state. And our project now is how to democratize it.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli scholar Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for British Society of Middle East Studies and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for British Society. He is the author of several books, including Israel’s Occupation, and co-author of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, co-editor of Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel. To see our full interview with Neve Gordon, you can go to democracynow.org.

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Is Regional War at Stake as Israel Weighs Response to Iran? Roundtable from Tehran, Tel Aviv & D.C.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/15/ ... transcript

The Middle East is bracing for the possibility of regional war after Iran responded to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus with a major drone and missile attack Saturday. The attack caused little damage inside Israel, as it intercepted nearly all of the drones and missiles with help from the United States, Britain, France and Jordan. Iran’s government described the attack as a defensive maneuver after Israel’s unprovoked strike on its embassy killed some of Iran’s top military brass. This was “a performative operation to send a message,” says journalist Reza Sayah, who joins us from Tehran. But while Iran “does not want to escalate matters,” Israel may be preparing to do just that. Washington, D.C.-based analyst Trita Parsi says that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been trying to instigate conflict between the U.S. and Iran for “more than two decades,” and given that Biden has demonstrated an unwillingness to “draw any red lines for Israel publicly,” these latest provocations could become a prime “opportunity” for such a war. Crucially, Iranian restraint “cannot last forever,” warns our final roundtable guest, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who touches on both Iran’s own sovereignty and increasing global pressure for Israel to end its war on Gaza. “Gaza is still starving and bleeding, and we shouldn’t forget it,” says Levy.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: The Middle East is bracing for possible retaliation from Israel after Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria. The Iranian attack caused little damage inside Israel, which intercepted nearly all the drones and missiles, with help from the United States, Britain, France and Jordan. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for maximum restraint Sunday at an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting.

SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: The Middle East is on the brink. The people of the region are confronting a real danger of a devastating, full-scale conflict. Now is the time to defuse and deescalate. Now is the time for maximum restraint.

AMY GOODMAN: As we broadcast, Israel’s war cabinet is reconvening to debate how to respond to Iran’s first-ever direct attack. Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz has vowed Israel will retaliate against Iran.

BENNY GANTZ: [translated] In the face of the Iranian threat, we will build a regional coalition and exact the price from Iran in the fashion and timing that is right for us. And most importantly, faced with the desire of our enemies to harm us, we will continue to unite and become stronger.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden has reiterated his, quote, “ironclad” support for Israel, but he reportedly told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States will not participate in any retaliatory strikes against Iran.

At the United Nations Sunday, Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Saeid Iravani defended the missile and drone attack on Israel, saying it was done in self-defense.

SAEID IRAVANI: These countries, especially the United States, have shielded Israel from any responsibility for the Gaza massacre. While they have denied Iran’s inherent right to self-defense against the Israeli armed attack on our diplomatic premises, at the same time they shamefully justify the Israeli massacre and genocide against the defenseless Palestinian people under the pretext of self-defense.

AMY GOODMAN: Iran’s attacks on Israel may add new momentum for the U.S. Congress to approve more aid for Israel as the House returns to session today.

For more, we go to Tehran, where we’re joined by Reza Sayah, freelance journalist based in Tehran, where he joins us from. Trita Parsi is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joining us from Washington, D.C. And later we’ll speak with Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist and author in Tel Aviv. He’s columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, a member of its editorial board. His most recent piece is headlined “If Iran Attacks Israel, the Blame Lies on Israel’s Irresponsible Decision-makers.”

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Reza Sayah, let’s begin with you in Tehran. Can you talk about the response there in Iran’s capital after Iran retaliated against Israel for bombing the Iranian Consulate in Damascus?

REZA SAYAH: Well, the people of Iran have had a variety of responses and sentiments. And I think it’s important to remind everyone that neither myself nor any journalist can sit here and tell you that a population, an entire population, has a single feeling, a single voice, a single sentiment, but this is what you hear oftentimes in Western news media, are journalists describing what an entire population is feeling or saying. That’s simply not the case. There are different competing sentiments in every population, and that is the case here in Iran.

There’s a segment of the population here in Iran that are staunch supporters of the clerical establishment, staunch supporters of the supreme leader. They believe that it’s the duty of every Muslim to support and help the oppressed, and they view Gazans and Palestinians as the oppressed. They’re following very closely the events in Gaza over the past six months. They were outraged when Iran’s Consulate was attacked in Syria. And they cheered Iran’s response over the weekend when they fired those rockets and those drones in Israel. That’s one segment of the population.

There’s another segment of the population in Iran that are staunch critics of the government. They have a very different view. They want reform in the government. Some want the government gone. They don’t mind when senior officials of the Revolutionary Guard are assassinated. They don’t mind when the establishment is undermined, when the Revolutionary Guard is undermined. They believe that the Iranian government, instead of funding Hezbollah and Hamas, should help the people. So they were — they are and they remain critical of Iran’s role in this conflict.

But it’s important to point out that most people here in Iran are, remarkably, continuing their lives. Obviously, some people are worried. They see the headlines. They wonder what’s going to happen. But remarkably, they continue their lives. Schools are open. Stores are open. Businesses are open. And I think that speaks to the resilience of the Iranian people, who’ve faced so many challenges over these last 40-plus years — the isolation, a horrible economy, inflation, a lack of jobs. But somehow they continue living while monitoring what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who died in the attack on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus? At least two Iranian generals. Is that right?

REZA SAYAH: Yeah, these were two Iranian generals that had significant roles in Iran’s presence in Syria and the reported operations that Iran has conducted against U.S. targets in the region, in Syria and Iraq. And it’s important to note that many people within the government continue to remind everyone that this was an act of war by Israel, even though Israel has not confirmed that it conducted the attack on the Iranian Consulate. Iran continues to remind the international community — they did it at the U.N. Security Council meeting — that Iran’s attack on Israel was a response to an act of war that Israel carried out against the Iranian Consulate, which is seen as Iranian soil.

It is also important to point out that Iran’s response took two weeks. And that is in line with how Iran has reacted to similar incidents and assassinations in recent years. You’ll recall the assassination of General Soleimani, the top-ranking Revolutionary Guard general, in Iraq in 2020. You’ll recall Iran’s response was to attack a U.S. airbase in Iraq, but just as they did with this attack in Israel, they took a lot of time. It is reported that they even announced what they were going to do. And that’s a clear indication that Iran does not want to escalate matters with Israel and the U.S. and regional allies, that this was, as many say, a performative operation to send a message, and calculated in a way where Iran doesn’t want to escalate matters. And you saw Iranian officials explicitly say that, for them, the matter is over. Now we wait to see if Israel agrees, if it’s over for them, if they retaliate, and what Iran does after that.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, interviewed on CNN.

WOLF BLITZER: Give us your assessment of an appropriate Israeli response to what Iran has now done.

JOHN BOLTON: Well, what Iran did tonight that I think was most significant was the firing of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles from its territory directly at Israel. Almost certainly at this point, none of those missiles contained a nuclear warhead. But you never can tell when the next firing, the next salvo of ballistic missiles might contain a nuclear warhead. So, I think among the many targets Israel should consider, this is the opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And I hope President Biden is not trying to dissuade Prime Minister Netanyahu from doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was John Bolton speaking on CNN. We’re also joined by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, speaking to us from Washington, D.C. Trita, can you respond to what Bolton said and also how Washington is responding right now?

TRITA PARSI: Well, I think you saw there, in John Bolton’s response, he used the word “opportunity.” And this is how some of the hawks view this. They see this as an opportunity to materialize the war between the United States and Iran and Israel that they have been seeking for more than 25 years. And that includes Bibi Netanyahu. I think it should not be forgotten that Netanyahu has been trying to start a war between the United States and Iran for more than two decades and has seen him being actually rebuffed by several presidents in a row, who may have been very hawkish on Iran, who may themselves have contemplated the idea of going to war with Iran, but who nevertheless rejected the pressure from Netanyahu to do so on behalf of Israel. But Bolton is reflecting that view, the idea that this is an opportunity to have a much larger war in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about President Biden saying that Israel has the “ironclad” support of the U.S., but telling Netanyahu after this attack that the U.S. would not participate in any kind of retaliation, though the U.S. intercepted, I think they said, how many drones and something like six missiles and 90 drone strikes on the — with the Iranian attack? Jordan also participated, as did Britain and France.

TRITA PARSI: I think what Biden is saying here is quite contradictory, because at the end of the day, there will be no distinction between offensive and defensive measures in the second the war actually breaks out. So, consider this scenario. The United States does not support and does not participate in Israel’s counterstrikes against Iran, and the Israelis may follow Bolton’s advice and try to target Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Iranians then respond in kind with a much larger barrage of missiles. Clearly what they did this time around was choreographed to minimize damage and make sure that there’s no casualties. Next time around, they won’t do that. Once the Iranians have started their counterstrikes, then the United States is dragged into the war, because Biden said that he will participate in the defensive measures. And then, regardless of what the previous measure was by the United States, the U.S. will be at war in the Middle East. And as a result, Netanyahu now has a clear pathway on how to drag the United States into this war. All he needs to do is to escalate further. The U.S. will reject that, but then the U.S. will be there once the Iranians are responding. And at that point, any distinction between offensive and defensive is meaningless.

If Biden instead makes it very, very clear that it does not lie in the U.S.’s interest to have any escalation in the region and draws a red line in front of Iran and in front of Israel, he will then not need to come to the defense of Israel, because there will not be a war to begin with. That would be a much better pathway that serves U.S. interests, that prevents any regional escalation. But so far we have seen that Biden, even though he apparently is frustrated privately, he does not feel comfortable to draw any red lines for Israel publicly. And the ones that he has drawn privately, Netanyahu has systematically ignored for the last seven months.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Trita Parsi, who’s executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, has written several books on Iran and the United States. We’re going to continue with him and Reza Sayah, freelance journalist in Tehran, and we’ll be joined by Gideon Levy, who is Haaretz columnist, on the editorial board of Haaretz, wrote the article “If Iran Attacks Israel, the Blame Lies on Israel’s Irresponsible Decision-makers.” Back in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Khooneye Ma,” “Our House,” by Marjan Farsad. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The Middle East is bracing for Israel to retaliate amidst claims — calls for restraint after Iran fired over 350 drones and missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian Consulate in Syria that killed two Iranian generals and a number of other military officers. We are joined by guests in Tehran and Washington, D.C., and now to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Gideon Levy, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz and a member of its editorial board, his most recent piece headlined “If Iran Attacks Israel, the Blame Lies on Israel’s Irresponsible Decision-makers.”

In it, Gideon writes, quote, “For several years now, Israel has provoked Iran constantly, in Lebanon, Syria and also on Iranian soil, and has not paid any price. It would be foolish to believe that the rope Israel has stretched will not break. That moment may have come.” He ends by writing, “Just don’t say, again, that there was no choice. There was a choice: not to kill. Even if it is deserved, even if it is permitted and even if it is possible. The person who sent the assassins put Israel at risk of war with Iran.”

Gideon Levy, you are joined — you are joining Reza Sayah, a freelance journalist in Tehran, Iran, and Trita Parsi, one of the heads of the Quincy Institute. Can you respond to Iran’s attack and what Israel did to provoke that, the bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus? Did that surprise you?

GIDEON LEVY: Nothing surprised here. The only thing which surprised, really, was the defensive capability of Israel, together with its allies. It was really impressive. But it’s not a guarantee for the future. When I wrote my article, it was before the attack came. And still I thought that the assassination in Damascus was unnecessary. The problem with the Israeli armed forces and intelligence organizations is that whenever they see an opportunity, they take it, without thinking about the consequences, without thinking about the price. And until now it was working for them, because Iran didn’t react ’til now directly on Israel, only through its proxies. But it was very clear that this cannot last forever.

So, those who send the assassinators to assassinate on Iranian soil, on an Iranian diplomatic mission, those two generals and five more, those had to think what will be the next day. And the next day came, and we were attacked. And luckily enough, we didn’t suffer out of this attack. The only conclusion right now should be: No, don’t you dare to retaliate now, because then we will be in a regional war, and that’s a new game.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what Benny Gantz said — as we broadcast right now, the war cabinet, Israel’s war cabinet, has reconvened — what Netanyahu said. Of course, they are competing with each other. If Netanyahu were to go down, it’s perceivable Benny Gantz would become the next prime minister. But talk about what’s happening within that war cabinet.

GIDEON LEVY: Amy, it’s for long time that I claim that those who want to get rid of Netanyahu are obviously right, but the hope that the alternative will be any better on core issues — for many issues it will be much better, but on core issues, like apartheid, the occupation, continuing the war in Gaza, will be very, very disappointed. And here we go. Benny Gantz, who is the alternative, who is the liberal alternative, who is the dovish alternative of Israel, he speaks exactly like Netanyahu and would act exactly like Netanyhau when it comes to core issues or core questions like launching an assassination, like launching a war, like using the military power of Israel. And that’s really very, very depressing that there is no alternative thinking in Israel and no lessons out of the experience. All the assassinations that Israel committed, all of them, never led to anywhere. Nothing good came out of them, except of the ego of the organizations who stood behind it. And here comes this Benny Gantz, the big hope of the liberal Israel, and suggests to continue the war, to make it worse, to go for a regional war with Iran. That’s really, really, very depressing.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned, Gideon Levy, that what’s happening with Iran now is taking attention away from what’s happening in Gaza, where the death toll just continues to mount, over — close to 34,000 people, just the official death toll, is expected to be much higher, and where the resistance was mounting in the United States, for example, on President Biden not to arm Israel, given what’s happening in Gaza, that now the House, which is notoriously divided, is perhaps coming together around giving more aid to Israel?

GIDEON LEVY: It goes without saying, Amy. Not only Gaza is forgotten. Also look what is happening in the West Bank — pogrom after pogrom, and nobody cares anymore. The army collaborates in those pogroms. We have videos from the last days in which the army not only stands aside, but many times take part of those pogroms against the Palestinians. And nobody pays attention to it — not to speak, obviously, about Gaza — because everyone is now concerned about Iran. But Gaza is still starving and bleeding, and we shouldn’t forget it, even not for a moment, like we shouldn’t forget the hostages who are still there. But it seems that now everyone is only concerned about retaliating Iran. This would be such a major, maybe fatal, mistake.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring back in Reza Sayah. You were based in Cairo, Egypt, when you covered the negotiations between Israel and Hamas in 2014 as Israel launched its assault on Gaza then. Can you talk about what unfolded back then and how it compares to the negotiations that are taking place, what, in Doha and Cairo now for a ceasefire?

REZA SAYAH: Well, obviously, back then, what took place, as is taking place right now on a smaller scale, was the killing of lots of innocent civilians. But one thing that sticks out in my mind in 2014, in covering that conflict, was the Israeli government’s flat-out refusal to negotiate. There were so many instances when I was talking to Hamas leaders who were in Cairo. And in these instances, they would tell me that the Israeli officials who were supposed to show up for those negotiations simply would not show up. And this was something that was not widely reported by Western and U.S. media, the Israeli government’s seeming unwillingness to negotiate with Hamas. Eventually, there was negotiations, and that war ended, but in subsequent years leading up to this conflict, the cycle of war continued. But that’s something that sticks out in my mind in that 2014 conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask about Jordan’s position in all of this, Trita Parsi, what role it plays. You had the United States, Britain, Jordan, France all intercepting some of these drones and missiles.

TRITA PARSI: Yes, numerous countries participated in the interception of these missiles. And the only reason they could do so was because the Iranians had given them 72 hours’ heads-up, deliberately, because the entire purpose of this exercise was not to inflict damage but to restore what the Iranians believe is their deterrence and showcase their capability. And as Gideon said, the shooting down of these missiles was quite impressive, but I think we also have to keep in mind that there might be a different scenario in the future in which there is no forewarning of these attacks, and as a result, France, Britain and the United States will not be able to prepare for and participate, in this extent, in the shooting down of the missiles. And then, as a result, it’s not entirely clear to what extent the Israeli air defenses would be capable of handling what would likely be a much larger barrage of missiles shot at Israel. So, I think the Israelis may have also picked up that at the end of the day, a military confrontation, even though Israel, of course, is much stronger than Iran, and certainly the U.S. is, but, nevertheless, will be very, very damaging to Israel, as well. And that, I think, is one of the key messages the Iranians were trying to send.

The Jordanians are, of course, caught in the middle there, because all of these different things are then flying over Jordanian airspace. And the Jordanian position has been that they’re defending their airspace. They are not defending Israel. This is not done in order to necessarily help the Israelis. It’s to make sure that Jordan asserts that no war should be taking place on its territory or in its airspace. That, nevertheless, is a tough position for the Jordanians to take, given the very, very strong sentiments that are now boiling over inside of Jordan because of the population’s frustration with what is happening in Gaza and their perception that the Jordanian government, and the Arab world at large, have been helpless and not done enough to prevent the slaughter.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask Gideon Levy if you’ve been surprised by the amount of conversation going on between Iran and the United States, perhaps not directly. And also I want to put that question to Reza Sayah. But where the result is, you have United States saying they will not participate in Israel’s retaliation, if they retaliate against Iran?

GIDEON LEVY: First of all, I would say we always portray Iran as a crazy state, as an insane state. It might be described like this. But in this case, it was very measured. Very measured. I wish the United States and Iran would have spoken much more. I wish the agreement, the nuclear agreement, would be still valid, and we would be in a much better place and safer place, rather than what both Donald Trump and Netanyhahu arranged us, canceling this agreement, which was the best way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. The more they speak, the better — under the table, above the table, behind the curtains, any way to talk to them. I still believe that every regime has its own interests, and dialogue is, by the end of the day, the best way, even if it’s the Satan of Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk, as you talked about what’s happening also on the West Bank, if you can talk about the most recent news about the death of one of the most prominent Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli prison, died of cancer, novelist Walid Daqqa, who spent the past 38 years locked up for his involvement in an armed group that abducted and killed an Israeli soldier in 1984, rights groups pressuring Israel to release him, saying he was in dire need of medical attention, Amnesty International calling for his release, saying that since October 7th he had been tortured, humiliated and denied family visits? You’ve written about this.

GIDEON LEVY: I’m following this story for many, many years. I even visited Walid once in jail many years ago. It’s one of those horrible stories which tells you much more than the story itself. Walid Daqqa is an Israeli. He is not a Palestinian from the West Bank. He’s an Israeli Palestinian. He, by the way, didn’t murder. He participated in a group which kidnapped an Israeli soldier and then killed him, some of them. He was not involved in it. But he was charged for murder and everything fined. He sat 37 years for this murder, much more than any murderer in the world — in Israel, not in the world. He, in this period, changed his — declared that he had enough with terror, declared that he regrets any terror actions. He’s exactly the style of leadership that we should look forwards, those Palestinians who change their minds and clear terror as a tool.

But, no, for Israel, no Palestinian is good enough, and here, in the last years, started really a sadistic behavior toward him and his family. No visits. When he started to be ill in cancer, when he got no visits half the year now, they didn’t even inform the family that he’s dying. They didn’t even inform the family he died. And now it’s already 10 days. They don’t even return the body, and don’t let them mourn in their home. I mean, what is more sadistic than this? And what is more the face of this current government of Israel? When it comes to Palestinians, Israeli Palestinians or Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, sadism is the name of the game.

AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to give Reza Sayah the last word. In U.S. media, we don’t often hear from people in Tehran. You’re a freelance journalist there in the capital of Iran. You’ve been covering Iran’s relationship with Hamas, particularly in the aftermath of October 7th. Could you expand on this, and what you think it’s most important for people to understand outside of Iran, and particularly here in the United States?

REZA SAYAH: Well, I think, from the people’s standpoint, the people here are resilient. Most of them are peace-loving people who do not want war.

And I want to follow up on Mr. Levy’s thought about how Iran is often portrayed in Western media to the American and Western audience as a radical, reckless, violent government. And I think a lot of thoughtful analysts will tell you that a radical entity, a radical government, would not last for 45 years like the Islamic Republic has. And these analysts will tell you that the reason that they have survived for these 45-plus years is that they’re not reckless, that they’re very calculating and they’re measured.

And they understand, at this very high-stakes juncture, that there are forces that perhaps Israel wants to bait them into a wider war. And I think Iran understands that that would be a mistake. I think many here understand that if they get baited into a wider war, it would be a distraction to what’s happening in Gaza, that has served the establishment here well by getting them a lot of political clout. And it would also potentially galvanize and unite Israel with its Western allies, Western allies that have been critical of Israel in their operation in Gaza.

So, at this hour, they’re waiting to see what Israel does, if Israel retaliates. But history has shown that if Israel retaliates, Iran is going to be aware of what their responses could cost, and they’re going to take a measured response. It’s obviously a very high-stakes chess game, and a lot of people anxious to see what happens in the coming days.

AMY GOODMAN: Reza Sayah, I want to thank you so much for being with us, freelance journalist in Tehran, Iran; Gideon Levy, a Haaretz columnist, member of its editorial board, and we’ll link to your articles; and Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

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Yanis Varoufakis Banned from Germany as Berlin Police Raid & Shut Down Palestinian Conference
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/ ... transcript

As Germany intensifies its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, we speak with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, one of the planned speakers at a conference in Berlin last weekend that was forcibly shut down by police. The Palestine Congress was scheduled to be held for three days, but police stormed the venue as the first panelist spoke. Germany’s Interior Ministry had also banned some conference speakers from even entering the country, including Varoufakis, the Palestinian British surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta. “This is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice,” says Varoufakis.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: As the official death toll in Gaza nears 34,000, we begin today’s show looking at Germany’s intensifying crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices. On Friday, police in Berlin shut down a three-day Palestinian conference just moments after it began. In addition, Germany’s Interior Ministry banned several speakers from even entering Germany or addressing the Palestine Congress conference remotely. The Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta opened the conference, but his remarks over a live stream were cut short when Berlin police raided the conference site.

SALMAN ABU SITTA: We have never seen before these daily scenes, one massacre after another, homes demolished over the heads of the occupants, bodies pulled from under the rubble, surviving child with all his family killed. We have never seen before people deliberately denied food and water, children starved to death and killed when rushing to get food. We have never seen before all means of life systematically destroyed — hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, libraries, ancient monuments, mosques, churches, universities, cemeteries, bakeries, apartment build—

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 1: Live stream, we ask you — so, for all people on the live stream, the police is standing right in front of us, and they ask us to stop the video.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 2: They are — they’re even trying to take away this microphone!

AMY GOODMAN: That was a live stream capturing the moment when German police raided and shut down the Palestine Congress conference in Berlin just minutes after it began.

On Friday, German authorities also detained and questioned the Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress. Dr. Abu-Sittah, who is the nephew of Salman Abu Sitta, who we just watched interrupted, spoke to Middle East Eye after he was barred entry.

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Upon arrival, I was stopped at the passport office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil, that I will — and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress but was denied entry to Germany. German authorities defended the decision to shut down the Palestinian conference, citing German laws against so-called hate speech. When Dr. Abu-Sittah came out of Gaza, we interviewed him, and you can go to democracynow.org to see that conversation.

We’re joined right now by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. He was also banned from entering Germany and barred from engaging in any political activity there. Varoufakis is a leader of the pan-European progressive movement DiEM25, which helped organize the Palestine Congress.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece. His most recent book is Technofeudalism; What Killed Capitalism is the subtitle. Yanis Varoufakis, can you explain what happened in Berlin?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: To give you a vignette, Amy, of the absurdity, which would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic, of what went on, during the morning, just before the police burst in, as you described so accurately, there was a young man who — an attendee of the congress, a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace, which together with the MERA25, DiEM25, we co-organized the Palestine Congress. And this young man, as he approached the police cordon — there were two-and-a-half thousand policemen preventing our attendees from attending the congress. Anyway, he was approaching, and he had a little placard that he had written with his own hand, and it read “Jews against genocide.” And for that, he was apprehended, arrested, manhandled. And while the police were manhandling him, he turned around humorfully, or half-jokingly, and said to them, “Would it have been all right with you if it said 'Jews in favor of genocide'?” at which point, of course, they were far more angered and manhandled him even more fiercely. I’m conveying this to you, Amy, and to our listeners and viewers because this shows the absurdity of the whole thing.

The police entered the building, the venue, a few minutes before I was due to deliver my talk via video link. As a result, what I did was I recorded my talk, and I posted it online from Greece, from Athens, where I’m even now. And the next day, I found out that a ban, as you put it, was slapped on me by the German authorities, a ban that harks back to laws against Nazism, a law that has only been used recently for ISIS operatives. That was used against me.

Allow me just to briefly say that the rationale behind this is the Germans’ Staatsräson, the logic or rationale of the German state, to protect Jews, which is of excellent rationale. I wish every state had it, each one of us had it, to protect Jews. Except that this is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice, in the final analysis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yanis Varoufakis, the federal interior minister of Germany not only applauded the police action, but she described the event, the conference, as an Islamist conference. What do you think of that characterization of the Palestine Congress?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Isn’t it remarkably farcical that our Jewish comrades who helped us co-organize, put together this congress have been dismissed as Islamists? Let me be clear: There were no Islamists in this. And in any case, the reason why our congress has been so, let’s say, unpopular with the German political system is because the German political spectrum — and this is not just the government; this is also the opposition, including some members of the left, I say with deep regret, some of my former comrades — they insist on equating acts of terror, atrocities against civilians — which every soundly thinking person in the world should condemn, and I condemn, of course, and so do all the organizers of this congress — equating, however, violence against civilians with a principled resistance to an apartheid state which is part of a project of systematically ethnically cleansing the population of the Palestinians. That is what they do not want.

They do not want a congress like ours, especially one that includes progressive Jews. That is the main thing that they detested, that they were Jewish demonstrators, Jewish activists, Jewish intellectuals, Jewish speakers with us, with one voice, saying one thing, one thing alone: equal political rights, civil liberties, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I’m neither a Jew nor a Palestinian. I don’t have a view as to how this will be accomplished. But I think every single human person on this planet has an obligation — not a right, an obligation — to demand, from the river to the sea, equal political rights. And the German political establishment does not want to listen to this. They simply want to associate anyone who opposes Netanyahu’s government, or any government in Israel that perpetrates genocide, essentially, to be associated, to be stigmatized as an antisemite, which, by the way, it is the antisemite’s greatest dream come true.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Germany has also banned the display of the Palestinian flag. How do you think the suppression of pro-Palestinian protest in Germany — has that spread to other countries in Europe? What’s your sense of what’s going on throughout the rest of the continent?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Not formally. The Palestinian flag has not been banned formally. But I can tell you that even here in Greece, anyone who is sporting the colors of Palestine walking on the street risks — seriously risks — being assaulted by ultrarightists, being arrested, apprehended by police for some pretext. The bourgeois, liberal, democratic rights and principles have all been sacrificed on the altar of enabling Israel to complete the genocide which is carrying out — that it’s carrying out not just in Gaza but, as we heard before in the news bulletin, in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. In the same way that in the 1930s we all had an obligation, a duty, an ethical commitment — or should have had one — to support Jews and to show our solidarity to the Jewish people who were suffering from the Nazi regime, from the Croat Nazi regime, from the Greek fascists and so on, we have a duty today to end the genocide in ancient Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanis Varoufakis, as a former finance minister, a vocal critic of austerity, how do you perceive Germany’s position on the war on Gaza in light of its significant arms sales to Israel? I mean, you have Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of Justice, saying that by providing weapons for Israel to carry out this war, that it’s engaging in crimes against humanity or war crimes.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, Amy, it’s interesting and, I think, not coincidental that on the Monday before the invasion, the incursion by the German police into our Palestinian Congress in the venue in Berlin, I happened to be in Milano, in Italy, in Milan. And I was giving a speech to a gathering of hundreds of financial analysts, the top, the crème de la crème of European financial experts. And in it, unbeknownst to me of what was going to happen later on that week, I outlined dire prognostications about the long-term damage inflicted upon Germany and Germany’s social economy by decades of austerity, combined with impressive largesse finances, what you call in the United States quantitative easing. And, you know, I was really surprised, because here I am, a lefty, addressing a gathering of hundreds of financial experts. Those hard-nosed financiers actually applauded me. And afterwards, they came to me, and they said that they agree with what I was saying. And I have to tell you that when that happens, I get really worried, because if these hard-nosed financiers, many of them German, came to me and they said that they agreed with my prognosis that the German business model is kaput, is in dire straits, I start feeling very uncomfortable.

So, I think there is a connection, because here you have a political system in Germany which understands in its bones that the economic dominance that the German industrial model had within the European Union for so many decades is now waning. And when such a regime feels threatened, feels that its economic prowess and authority and dominance is waning, it’s really very easy for that to translate itself into movements that essentially fan the flames of increasing, and increasingly farcical, authoritarianism.

***

Under Cover of War in Gaza, Assault on West Bank Intensifies: Palestinian Journalist Dalia Hatuqa
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/ ... transcript

The Western corporate media is failing in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, says Palestinian independent journalist Dalia Hatuqa. “A lot of what’s missing from the bigger portrait … is the Palestinian voice,” says Hatuqa, who applauds local journalists in Gaza for providing the world a crucial window into what’s happening there while international reporters are blocked by Israel from entering the territory. “Nobody knows Gaza better than the Gazan journalists on the ground.” Hatuqa also speaks about her latest piece for The Century Foundation about rising Israeli state and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, which she says can accurately be described as pogroms. “The fog of war has allowed Israel to perpetuate crimes at a very large scale, not only throughout the West Bank, but including occupied East Jerusalem.”

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.

The Intercept is reporting The New York Times has instructed its reporters to avoid using the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory” in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. The Intercept's report is based on an internal memo from the Times. One newsroom source told The Intercept, quote, “I think it's the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel,” they said.

Today we’re joined by a Palestinian journalist who’s been highly critical of how the Western media has portrayed Israel’s war in Gaza. Dalia Hatuqa is an independent Palestinian journalist specializing in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, usually based between Amman, Jordan, and Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She was a close friend and colleague of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in the occupied West Bank May 11th, 2022. Dalia’s latest piece for The Century Foundation is headlined “Under Cover of Gaza War, Assault on West Bank Accelerates.” Dalia joins us now in our New York studio after speaking last night at the Columbia Journalism School.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. This was also the topic of your panel at the Columbia J School last night, the issue of how the conflict is being covered. What do you think is most important for people to understand, Dalia?

DALIA HATUQA: Well, I think that a lot of what’s missing from the bigger portrait or the puzzle, so to speak, is the Palestinian voice. So, in order to find out what’s going on in Gaza, we need to not just rely on Western journalists coming into Gaza. I know that’s very important, and it’s a demand by a lot of us and by, you know, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other journalism rights groups. But it’s also to amplify Palestinian voices, because, ultimately, nobody knows Gaza better than the Gazan journalists on the ground who are actually doing the work that they’re doing right now. And in a way, these journalists, not only are they fighting for their lives while doing all of this, they’re also resorting to extraordinary measures to be able to cover what’s going on. And speaking to journalists on the ground, they tell us that what we’re seeing from them is only like 10% of what’s happening in Gaza at the moment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dalia, I wanted to ask you — the Western press does have the opportunity to cover what is going on in the West Bank, and yet, this — as you wrote in a recent piece, more than 4,000 West Bank Palestinians have been displaced just in 2023, the highest number ever recorded. What is going on in the West Bank, from what you’ve been able to see?

DALIA HATUQA: Basically, in the West Bank, the fog of war has allowed Israel to perpetuate crimes at a very large scale not only throughout the West Bank, but including occupied East Jerusalem. And in the West Bank, we’ve got what a lot of even Israeli officials have admitted are pogroms that are going on by and being perpetrated by Israeli settlers, especially in villages around Nablus, for example, which are in the north, where there are many settlements surrounding villages. We’re not talking about just, you know, the torching of houses and the torching of cars and whatnot. We’re talking about people getting killed by armed settlers.

And while they’re being armed and attacking Palestinians, they’re also being helped or aided by Israeli soldiers, whose job, technically, is to be there to not allow such things to happen, but in a way, you know, sometimes they just sit by idly and not do anything, or they actually participate in these attacks. That’s why when you look at the U.N. figures, a lot of times we see, you know, 10 Palestinians have been killed by settlers, two Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, but then there is a line that says three Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers and/or soldiers. So, we don’t know, because they are part of the system that’s subjugating these Palestinians, that’s, you know, carrying out all this violence against them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And it’s not just those who are killed, but also the detentions of Palestinians in the West Bank. Could you talk about the conditions that they’re facing in Israeli custody?

DALIA HATUQA: The detentions, honestly, they’re atrocious, and they are the least talked about, even among Western journalists, who actually haven’t been really mentioning this at all. We’re talking about the least amount of, you know, livable situations that can be — that any detainee can live in. So, they get water up to two hours a day now. Sometimes they don’t get to shower. The food that they get is rotten. I’m talking about the detainees in — the 9,000 or so in Israeli prisons. They don’t have access to their families. They don’t have access to lawyers. The people who have come out have come out with — some have had their limbs amputated because of the extended use of handcuffs. So, honestly, the conditions are really harrowing, and there’s not much access.

And right now, as we speak, I was just seeing that there is a detainee who died in, actually, an Israeli hospital a few days ago, and his body is still being withheld. And his family has not been able to put him to rest, because — even though he had already carried out his sentence, 30 or more years, which is, quite frankly, a devastating thing for the family, because they’re unable to get any kind of closure.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking, of course, about Walid Daqqa. Human rights groups, everyone had asked for him to be released, as he was there for almost 40 years and he was dying of cancer. Speaking of people who have died, not in prison, but outside, the last time I spoke to you was just after Shireen Abu Akleh was killed May 11th, 2022, as she was a dear friend of yours, the Al Jazeera Arabic reporter, outside the Jenin refugee camp, all laid out now, determined to be an Israeli sniper who killed her. As her colleagues tried to reach her, they shot at them, clearly wearing “press.” It wasn’t in the middle of any kind of skirmish. They were just standing outside. This issue of journalists being killed, that you spoke of before — the memorial for Shireen, outside Jenin, has now been bulldozed over, destroyed by the Israeli military. But even in Gaza — and you took this up last night, you and your colleagues on the panel, of what’s happening to journalists. Even you were surprised, you said, as we spoke before the show, by learning about when David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, asked, “How do you know that journalists are targeted?” Talk about the response.

DALIA HATUQA: Basically, we were very lucky to have a journalist from Gaza who managed to leave the coastal enclave, the besieged coastal enclave, to Qatar. Her name is Ameera Harouda. And she had to leave, obviously, because, you know, for her well-being and her family. She has four kids. Anyways, she was talking about the fact that journalists would get phone calls from Israeli authorities, military authorities, basically questioning them about their work, especially if they worked for Qatar, which is a little strange, considering that Qatar is the go-between, you know, between Israel and Hamas for the talks to reach a ceasefire and to release the hostages. And in the meantime, also CPJ was talking to a few journalists who were released after being detained, and they had been taken away for 33 days, made to sit in squatting positions, in horrific conditions. They came out, you know, having lost 30 kilos or so.

There’s a lot going on in that sense, but also the targeting of journalists. People know because there are UAVs or drones, as we say, constantly hovering in Gaza. It’s so perpetual that people in Gaza, if they don’t hear a UAV, they think something’s wrong. UAVs have been part of the Gaza skyline for years, long before October 7th.

AMY GOODMAN: And even the phone calls from the Israeli military to journalists, threatening them?

DALIA HATUQA: Yes, absolutely. And in the West Bank, they do the same thing. They call them in. They say, “We want to have a chat with you.” And then they don’t come out, because, you know, they take them in. They can put them in administrative detention, which, as you know, is basically when you put people in or Palestinians in prison without any kind of — without any kind of proof or without charging them. And it’s very easy to do that. I mean, right now there’s a young Christian girl who’s a student. She’s in administrative detention for four months. And I know that the archbishop of Canterbury was calling for her release. So, all these things are intertwined. There’s a lot of things going on that don’t — that are far-reaching. It’s not just about journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: And the journalists who are being detained in Gaza are being questioned about their reporting?

DALIA HATUQA: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Interrogated for hours?

DALIA HATUQA: Absolutely, because what — the questions that they were being asked is, “Why did you write this? Why did you say this? Do you talk to Hamas people?” Of course they talk to Hamas people. It’s their job. It’s like how you talk to Israeli forces. You’re going to — how you talk to Israeli military personnel or government officials. I mean, that’s your job as a journalist. Your job is to talk to people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you, Dalia Hatuqa — you’re usually based in Amman, Jordan, or in Ramallah in the West Bank, but you’re here in the United States now. What’s your message to the American public and to the Biden administration, given that this country is the largest supplier of weapons and military aid to Israel?

DALIA HATUQA: I think, honestly, the American public has been very instrumental in working with Palestinians. Large segments of the American public have been working with Palestinians. I’ve seen a lot of support. I’ve seen a lot of support among Israelis, you know, the few Israelis who get it. I’ve seen a lot of support among American Jews, and I believe that they are one of the Palestinians’ biggest allies.

But my message, obviously, to Biden is, I mean, there’s a lot at stake right now. The Biden administration can do so much, and that’s been proven over by the fact that, you know, once Biden put his foot down, several steps were taken by Israel in order to open the border crossings, or some of the border crossings, into Gaza. But I believe that taking this kind of blind support for Netanyahu is leading us nowhere.

And as an American, as well, not only as a Palestinian, I have bigger fears of what’s to come, come November, because if Biden loses the election — and he might, because of the situation, because of what’s going on in Gaza — then we are doomed, basically, to have another four years of a Trump administration. So, in my mind, I’m like, you know, we are doomed in the Middle East, we’re doomed in the U.S. And I know that’s a lot of doom and gloom, but, honestly, these are some of the thoughts that people, especially dual nationals like me — these are some of the thoughts that they have.

AMY GOODMAN: Dalia Hatuqa, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian independent journalist, usually based between Amman, Jordan, and occupied Ramallah — that’s Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

***

“I’m Jewish, and I’ve Covered Wars. I Know War Crimes When I See Them”: Reporter Peter Maass on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/ ... transcript

We speak with veteran journalist Peter Maass about the Israeli war on Gaza and his new opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” Maass, who was a senior editor at The Intercept until earlier this year, has spent decades covering wars, including the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s that killed about 100,000 people over nearly four years. He says many of the same war crimes he reported then are part of Israel’s current assault, including sniper attacks on civilians, bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on bread lines and besieging whole populations by preventing food and other aid from entering. “What seems to be unfolding in Gaza is even worse than what I saw in Bosnia,” says Maass.

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.

We end today’s show with journalist Peter Maass, who has written an opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them,” unquote. Until recently, Peter was a senior editor at The Intercept. He’s the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. He covered the Bosnia war for The Washington Post and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times Magazine.

Peter, welcome to Democracy Now! You begin your piece in The Washington Post by saying, “How does it feel to be a war-crimes reporter whose family bankrolled a nation that’s committing war crimes? I can tell you.” Lay it out for us.

PETER MAASS: Well, my great-great-grandfather was Jacob Schiff, who was a financier at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, one of the wealthiest people in the country probably, who donated a lot of money and organized the movement of Jews, persecuted Jews, from Europe, largely from Russia but also from other countries and Russia, to any safe haven that would have them, including America, but also, significantly, British-controlled Palestine. And then, his son-in-law, my great-grandfather, Felix Warburg, who married Jacob Schiff’s daughter, continued that process of supporting and helping to organize the migration of persecuted Jews from Europe to British-controlled Palestine. This is before World War II, the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet you say they were anti-Zionists. Can you explain?

PETER MAASS: Well, they were non-Zionists, which was actually different, significantly different, from being anti-Zionists. There was a movement amongst American Jews and Jews elsewhere, in Europe, that was called non-Zionism. And for them, the non-Zionists, the point was Jews should be able to go to British-controlled Palestine. They need to go to British-controlled Palestine because they need refuge from the persecution they’re suffering in Europe.

But they were against the establishment of a Jewish state, for two reasons. One is that they were concerned that if there were a Jewish state, then all of the antisemites, in America and elsewhere, would look at Jews who are not living in this Jewish state and say, “Ah, you know, your loyalty is actually to this other country.” And that would kind of increase suspicions of Jews and make them seem lesser citizens in the countries that they were living in. And then, the second concern, which was one that a lot of people had but that non-Zionists also had and pronounced, was they were concerned about violence between Arabs and Jews. They just kind of said, “Look, you know, if one side, the Jews or the Arabs, for that matter, try to exert total control over a state that’s going to be established there” — because, remember, at this time, Palestine was under the control of the British Mandate — “then it’s going to be really violent.” My great-grandfather referred to it as a shooting gallery.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Peter, you also covered the wars in Croatia and in Bosnia. And could you talk about how your journalism there helps inform your perspective of what’s going on? Because many, of course, of our listeners and viewers are not familiar with those wars and the war crimes committed there.

PETER MAASS: In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia, which was a kind of conglomeration of different republics, five or six — I forget the precise number, actually — began to fall apart. And instead of falling apart peacefully, it fell apart violently. And there was first a war when Slovenia, one of the republics, seceded. And then there was an even larger war when Croatia, another one of its constituent republics, seceded. And then, when Bosnia did the same — this was in 1992 — this was, unfortunately, the largest war of all.

There were a significant number of Serbs who lived in Bosnia. And Slobodan Milošević, who was the leader in Belgrade of kind of all Serbs in the country, organized the kind of provisioning of military materiel and soldiers, guerrilla fighters, paramilitaries, to go in and basically fight against the Muslims and Croats in Bosnia who wanted to have an independent state and who voted in a referendum for an independent state. And the war there, which I went to cover, it was not your ordinary war of army against army. It was a war of paramilitaries committing atrocities against defenseless civilians, largely Muslims, some Croats, and it also consisted of sieges against the few cities that were able to resist the onslaught. Sarajevo was one of these cities. Srebrenica was another one of these cities.

And so, I was there covering this war, seeing terrible things happen that are not supposed to happen in war. I mean, wars are violent. Civilians get killed in wars. But it’s not always illegal. In this case, there were civilians right under my window in Sarajevo getting shot by snipers, and I wrote about that. There were civilians whose houses were getting bombed. There were civilians who were standing in bread lines who were getting bombed and killed. There were aid shipments of medicine and food that were being prohibited from entry into these so-called safe areas, because they were supposed to have been protected by the United Nations but were not. And so, I was there reporting on this.

And in 1993, a year after this war began, there was an international criminal tribunal that was set up to investigate war crimes and possible genocide that was occurring at the time in Bosnia. And that tribunal subsequently did hold a number of trials, including of senior Bosnian and Serb leaders — the military leader Ratko Mladić, the political leader Radovan Karadžić and the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević — in which the charges included genocide. And both Karadžić and Mladić are now in jail for the rest of their lives on charges that include genocide. So I was reporting on this genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: As you compare what you saw in Bosnia to what you saw in Gaza, you write in that piece, “When I reported from besieged Sarajevo, I stayed in a hotel that was smack on the front line, with Serbian snipers routinely firing at civilians walking under my window. … On a spring day in 1993, I heard the familiar crack and whistle of a sniper’s bullet, followed by an awful scream. I went to my window and saw a wounded civilian trying to crawl to safety. Writing in The Post more than three decades ago, I described the man’s desperate shouts as 'a mad howl of a person pushed over the edge. It came from the lungs, from the heart, from the mind,'” you write in The Washington Post. You also write about disturbing video footage from Gaza that shows Hala Khreis walking on a so-called safe route in January with her grandson, 5-year-old Tayem Abdel, who was holding a white flag when she was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper. Talk about the comparisons, or what you call the rhymes.

PETER MAASS: Yeah. I mean, God, I remember those stories so well. This is the most — there are so many disturbing things going on in Gaza now and in the West Bank. But as the Israeli attack began, after the Hamas attack on October 7th against Israel, you know, we began seeing these videos and reports emerging from these very brave journalists in Gaza of what was happening — and, for example, that video of this grandmother being shot, obviously quite intentionally. And everything that I was seeing — flour line massacres in Gaza, for example, airdrops of humanitarian aid that killed some of the people they were intended to help because they landed on top of these people — also happened in Bosnia. I began seeing just the same kinds of incidents, that were the constituent elements in Bosnia of genocide, also happening in Gaza, but — kind of most disturbing in a way — at a scale that was larger than Bosnia. I mean, for example, you know, in Bosnia, over the course of its four-year war, there were something like 7,000 or 8,000 children killed, which is terrible. In Gaza, over the course of just six months, there have been more than 13,000 children killed. So, you know, I just could not help but see not only the parallels, but also how what seems to be unfolding in Gaza is even worse than what I saw in Bosnia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we have less than a minute left, but I’m wondering your perspective on how the U.S. media has been covering the war in Gaza.

PETER MAASS: It’s been a real mixed bag. And it was a real mixed bag in Bosnia. And we’re all kind of captives of our experiences. And so, I covered the war in Bosnia, and I also covered other wars. So, you know, I may be talking too much about Bosnia, but I think it is relevant. In Bosnia, there was exceptionally good coverage, I think — and I’m biased on this, but I think — from the journalists who were on the ground, largely foreign journalists, but also a lot of Bosnian journalists — really good coverage of actually what was going on. But then, in the foreign capitals, in Washington, D.C., but also London and France — France and Britain were very important elements of the international community at the time — the reporting was terrible, because it reflected the kind of briefings that the journalists were getting from all their government sources and all the think tank people, and they were just saying, “Oh, it’s a mess there. These people —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds, Peter.

PETER MAASS: — “plan to kill each other.” So, we have the same problem now, where there’s a lot of bad coverage coming out of the capitals, such as Washington, although from the ground itself, reporting is quite excellent.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Peter Maass, journalist, former senior editor for The Intercept, author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. We’ll link to your latest piece in The Washington Post. He also covered U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks so much for joining us.

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No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/17/ ... transcript

Democracy Now! speaks with two of the Google employees who were arrested staging sit-ins on Tuesday at the company’s offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military. “Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide,” says Google software engineer Mohammad Khatami, who was arrested in New York. Google worker-organizer Ray Westrick, who was arrested occupying CEO Thomas Kurian’s office, says “more people are willing to organize and risk their jobs in order to take a stand against complicity in genocide.” We also speak with No Tech for Apartheid organizer and former Google worker Gabriel Schubiner, who calls on the tech industry to divest from Google and Amazon services. “Technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to remove technology from this deep complicity with the Israeli occupation,” Schubiner 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 in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

Several Google employees, at least nine, were arrested Tuesday evening after staging sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York and in California to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. The sit-ins, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, took place at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale, California, and the 10th floor commons of Google’s New York office, which is right around the corner from Democracy Now!

Protesters are calling for Google to withdraw from a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Last week, Time magazine reported Google’s work on the project involves providing direct services to the Israeli military.

The sit-ins were accompanied by outdoor protests at the Google offices here in New York and in Sunnyvale, San Francisco and Seattle, Washington. Workers and outside activists have opposed the contract since it was signed in 2021, but protests have ramped up over the past several months since Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza.

No Tech for Apartheid says Google is enabling and profiting from Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to develop a “kill list” to target Palestinians in Gaza for assassination with little human oversight. The Israeli military is also using Google Photos for facial recognition across Gaza and the West Bank to identify and detain Palestinians en masse.

No Tech for Apartheid has published an open letter, co-signed by 18 other groups, that demands Google and Amazon immediately cancel their work on Project Nimbus. The letter has gathered more than 94,000 signatures from the general public.

For more, we’re joined by two of the arrested Google workers. Ray Westrick is with us. She’s a Google worker-organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, among the workers who occupied Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale, California. She’s joining us from Sunnyvale. And here in New York, we’re joined by Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who was arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York. He’s joining us along with Gabriel Schubiner, a former software engineer at Google Research and an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign. And before that, he was with Jewish Diaspora in Tech.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Mohammad, let’s begin with you. You were, just hours ago, in the jail —

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: — in the local police precinct. Talk about why you were willing to get arrested.

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah. Well, rather than, you know, consider the demands that we’ve been raising for years now and listening to workers and considering the things that we’ve been raising, Thomas Kurian and Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide. So, we were willing to get arrested for that, because at this point we aren’t willing to be lied to by our higher-ups anymore. We aren’t willing to be disrespected by our higher-ups anymore. And we wanted to take that to the offices and make sure it was understood by them, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: How do you sense is the support that you have among other Google workers, the degree of the dissatisfaction with the policies of Google?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah. I mean, Google has done a really good job at creating a culture of fear and retaliation against workers in general. But what we noticed was beautiful. So many people came up to our sit-in and basically showed support and felt that they were inspired by the work that we were doing, and felt inspired to speak out, which is exactly what we were going for. We want workers to feel like we have the power to choose where our technology is going and who we’re contributing to. So I felt really happy to see that, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Ray Westrick, you’re on the West Coast. You were arrested in California. Talk about this Project Nimbus and why you were willing to get arrested, and what the response — were you in the offices of the Google Cloud CEO?

RAY WESTRICK: Yes, we sat in at the office of Thomas Kurian, the Google Cloud CEO, to protest Project Nimbus, which is a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military between Google and Amazon. We also were demanding the protection of our co-workers, especially our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim co-workers, who have been consistently retaliated against, harassed and doxxed for speaking out about Project Nimbus and, you know, the humanity of Palestinians. So, we were there in solidarity with them. We were there to protest the contract, which is being directly sold — providing technology directly to the Israeli military as it inflicts a genocide on Palestinians in Gaza. And yeah, that is why we chose to sit in Thomas Kurian’s office.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ray, could you — was there any response from the CEO or his office? And are you concerned about losing your job? Why — when did you decide to take this action?

RAY WESTRICK: Yeah. We did not receive any response from the CEO. And I think it’s really telling that they would rather let us sit there for over 10 hours and arrest us for peacefully sitting in his office than have leadership engage in our demands in any way at all. So, we’ve received no response from the CEO, and we were forcibly removed by the police.

And I — working at Google has been, you know, an honor. I really love my team. I love the work I do. But I can’t in good conscience not do anything while Google is a part of this contract, while Google is selling technology to the Israeli military, or any military. And so, it was a risk I was willing to take, and I think it’s a risk a lot of my co-workers are willing to take, because a lot of people are really agitated about this and have consistently made their demands clear and have faced retaliation for it. So, I chose to sit in, knowing the risks, out of care for the use of our technology, out of care for the impact of our technology and care for my co-workers.

AMY GOODMAN: For our radio audience, I wanted to let people know that Ray is wearing a T-shirt that says “Googler against genocide,” with “genocide” in the famous multicolor of “Google,” that it’s so well known for. I wanted to bring Gabriel Schubiner into this conversation, a former software engineer at Google Research, an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, and ask you — you know, we had you on more than a year ago — this is before Israel’s latest attack on Gaza — talking about exactly this. And you were with a Jewish organization of Google workers at that time speaking out. Talk about the whole history of Project Nimbus.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And the resistance against it.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Yeah. Thank you so much.

So, Project Nimbus was signed in May of 2021 while bombs were being dropped on Gaza, while Palestinians were being evicted from Sheikh Jarrah and beaten at Al-Aqsa Mosque. That was really a point — when we found out about Project Nimbus, personally, for me, it was a turning point, where I no longer felt able to continue doing my work without engaging and organizing. There was a group of people that felt very similarly, so we started a petition. We were connected, got connected with Amazon workers, with community organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, and spun a campaign out of that.

I want to be clear: Like, the campaign really is driven by worker concerns and worker needs around the ethical use of our labor, as well as the direct workplace concerns of the, like, health and safety concerns around working at a company that is facilitating genocide. We’ve known for a long time that this project was directly targeted at the military. It’s been reported in press that Google was giving trainings directly to the IOF. We know that Google gave trainings directly to Mossad. We know that the IOF —

AMY GOODMAN: When you say ”IOF,” explain the term.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: I’m sorry, the — yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Because people are used to hearing ”IDF,” Israeli Defense Forces.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Right, yes. Yeah, it’s Israeli occupation forces, just to indicate, so we’re not repeating their messaging that their really aggressive repression of Palestinians is an act of defense. We know that it’s an act of occupation, so we say ”IOF.”

And so, we’ve known for a long time that this project was directly targeted at the Israeli military. But it was only recently, through this last contract that Google signed directly with the IOF, that we recognized that Google was really doubling down, that this contract is directly intended to facilitate military use. And we know that Google was chosen over other companies because of the advanced AI technology that they’re able to offer. So, given that we’ve learned how the IOF is using AI in this war, we really see this as like a really critical campaign for Palestinian liberation.

To speak to your point about the resistance against the project, we’ve been working against this project as workers for — since it was signed three years ago. We have been doing organizing. We have been doing, you know, base building and labor organizing. We’ve had protests externally and internally. We’ve had signed petitions. We’ve done outreach to our executives through internal forums, through chatrooms, through every available means, because, I think — you know, understanding, like, this contract really is — like, it really is an incredible issue for our work, like, all workers’ labor at Google. So many workers’ labor is contributing directly to this project, because all of the technology at Google is like deeply intertwined with each other. So, yeah, so we see this as really important, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gabe, I wanted to ask you — the average person, who’s not a Google worker, who might support your stand and who uses Google multiple times a day around the world, what are you calling for them to do?

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Right. So, I mean, we’re calling for everyone around the world to really, like, help us with awareness, like, help us make it known that Google is a war profiteer. I think Google is so deeply embedded in people’s lives — right? — that it’s hard to ask for a boycott. But I think we’re calling specifically on people in the tech industry to divest from Google and Amazon. Google Cloud services and Amazon Web Services underlie a vast majority of the internet, but there are other options. So, technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to, like, remove technology from this deep complicity with Israeli occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammad Khatami, can you talk about your own family background and why you so particularly care right now about what’s going on in Gaza?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah, yes. So, I come from a Muslim family. I was raised Muslim. And it’s really hard to wake up seeing the images of children slaughtered and know that your — you know, the work you’re doing is contributing to this. I’ve lost sleep. It’s just been extremely difficult to focus on work and think that you’re working for something that is contributing to the mass slaughter that’s taking place. And for speaking out against that, I’ve literally been called a supporter of terrorism, which is something that —

AMY GOODMAN: Called by?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: You know, by co-workers and HR and people in the company, a supporter of terrorism, which is, you know, something — it’s like a schoolyard insult. It’s something I haven’t heard since middle school. And that’s just an example of the retaliation and the harassment and the hatred that we face just for speaking up against our work being used in this way.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about losing your job?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Absolutely. But it doesn’t — it’s not even important to me at all compared to working for something that is meaningful and having a good impact on the planet. I don’t want to have any association with this genocide. And I would hope that Google would change their mind about it, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ray Westrick, where do you see this movement going from here? And can you talk more about the Jewish-Muslim alliance around this among Google workers and former Google workers?

RAY WESTRICK: Yeah. I only see this movement growing and continuing to apply pressure. We received so much support during the sit-in. I’ve received so many personal messages from people, you know, thanking me for being vocal, and asking how they can be more vocal and get more involved. So I think this is absolutely growing. I think Google knows that this will continue, that, you know, workers are very agitated about this and will continue to speak up and apply pressure. And I think that’s why it was important for them to silence us. But this movement is growing, and more people are finding out about this, and more people are willing to organize and risk their jobs in order to take a stand against complicity in genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank —

RAY WESTRICK: And yeah, I think this has been a really unifying campaign for people of all backgrounds. And I know, specifically, a lot of us came together because we were specifically concerned about how Google has treated and retaliated against our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim colleagues, especially, like Mohammad mentioned, a lot of them have experienced harassment and doxxing for speaking out in like the appropriate channels at Google and have been consistently ignored and harassed and retaliated against. And so, we had to come together to say that we can’t let this happen anymore. We have to come together in protection of our co-workers and each other and in protection of, you know, the ethical use of our technology, to make sure that we’re not building technology that’s being used for harm. So, I think it’s been a really unifying campaign that is really grounded in taking care of each other and really grounded in making a positive impact and not facilitating more harm with technology.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Ray Westrick and Mohammad Khatami are both Google workers who were arrested yesterday, Ray in the offices of the Google Cloud CEO in Sunnyvale, California, and Mohammad here in New York. Also Gabriel Schubiner, a former software engineer at Google Research and an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, before that, with Jewish Diaspora in Tech.

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Meet USC Valedictorian Asna Tabassum: School Cancels Commencement Speech by Pro-Palestinian Student
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/18/ ... transcript

Amid widespread repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campuses across the United States, we speak to University of Southern California valedictorian Asna Tabassum, whose commencement speech has been canceled for what the university claimed were “safety” reasons after Tabassum became the subject of an online anti-Palestinian hate campaign led by pro-Israel groups. “When I had asked for details regarding the security concerns,” says Tabassum of learning about the cancellation, “I was offered no information and was told it was not appropriate for me to know.” Tabassum, a first-generation South Asian American Muslim graduating with a major in biomedical engineering and a minor in resistance to genocide, says the unprecedented cancellation of her speech has been “heartbreaking.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today we’ll look at the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campuses across the United States. In a moment we’ll look at Wednesday’s congressional hearings where the president of Columbia University was grilled for hours about accusations of antisemitism on campus. But we begin with the University of Southern California, which continues to be rocked by controversy after canceling the commencement speech of its valedictorian for what it claimed were “safety” reasons after she became the subject of an online anti-Palestinian hate campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! co-host Juan González and I interviewed Asna Tabassum, who is a first-generation South Asian American Muslim on Wednesday. I began by welcoming her to Democracy Now!

ASNA TABASSUM: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you give us the chronology of what happened? I mean, to be the valedictorian of this elite university, the University of Southern California, is such an enormous achievement. Can you talk about when you learned you’d become the valedictorian and when you learned you would be giving the speech at graduation? And what happened next?

ASNA TABASSUM: Absolutely. So, part of the selection process of becoming valedictorian is the willingness to give a speech during commencement. And so, when I got the call, I believe in the second week of March or so, it was during Ramadan, and I was incredibly happy to receive the honor and incredibly grateful. And that was the moment I also knew that I would have the chance and the opportunity to address my peers during commencement.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when did you hear that the university had changed its mind? And who contacted you?

ASNA TABASSUM: Of course. So, I was contacted by the administration on Monday, actually, this past Monday, shortly before the statement was released, that I would unfortunately no longer be allowed to give the commencement address for the class of 2024.

AMY GOODMAN: How typical is that, Asna? Does the valedictorian always give the speech?

ASNA TABASSUM: Yes, as far as I know, in history of USC. And in fact, I asked the provost this himself, you know: Has this ever happened to a USC valedictorian? And in fact, I think we both agreed that, to the best of our knowledge, it has never happened before.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly did he say when he explained to you it was for safety reasons? Did he talk about — talk to you about what the threats are?

ASNA TABASSUM: So, that’s exactly the question here, is that I received no details as to what the security threats or what the security concerns were. You know, I heard that there were hundreds and thousands of emails sent to the university, but I was given no clue as to what the contents of these emails were, as well as, for example, the university had said that there were other security concerns in relation to having a big event such as commencement. But, you know, even details there were unclear. And so, when I had asked for details regarding the security concerns — for example, were they security concerns about me or my classmates? — I was offered no information and was told it was not appropriate for me to know.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, were you aware that pro-Israel student groups were targeting you on on social media, that a group called We Are Tov posted a photo of you on its Instagram account and claimed that you were, quote, “openly” — that you “openly promote antisemitic writings”?

ASNA TABASSUM: It’s honestly heartbreaking, yes. Once I was shortly — once I was announced on social media, through USC student media, it only took a few hours before such posts began circulating. And it launched a very generalized and, honestly, very hateful and disappointing campaign to remove me as valedictorian, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue that wasn’t raised by the provost, but in your Instagram bio, you link to a pro-Palestine landing page that reads, in part, “learn about what’s happening in palestine, and how to help.” Some students took to social media to express their opposition to it due to the language on the landing page. The website states, quote, “zionism is a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land.” The website also states, quote, “one palestinian state would mean palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of israel,” end-quote. Can you talk about that and talk about when you linked to that page, and your feelings about this?

ASNA TABASSUM: Sure. So, there are a few points that I’d like to clarify. The first is that a university and students have the responsibility to engage in productive and meaningful discussion. And we’re allowed to learn from one another’s ideas and express those ideas so that we can all grow. And I think that that’s the beauty of an academic institution.

But another factor that I’d like to bring up is that there are other form — there are other pieces of information in that link. You know, there are paragraphs and information relating to the two-state solution, as well, as well as the one-state. The sentence right after the one you just quoted talks about coexistence between Arabs and Jews. You know, there’s a lot of factors here. And my goal in putting the link in my bio is simply to inform my fellow peers in the small ways that I can. But, ultimately, what I want people to take away is for people to inform themselves, come to their own conclusions, and then advocate for what they believe in.

And so, in no way am I advocating for hate. I am only advocating for human equality and for the sanctity of human life when I say that Palestinians, as well as Jews, as well as Muslims and Armenians and anyone else who is invested in this conflict, has the equal right to life and the equal privilege of the fullest extent to life.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you tell us more about yourself? You’re majoring in biomedical engineering and minoring in resistance to genocide. What inspired you to follow these courses of study?

ASNA TABASSUM: This is my favorite question, especially because, you know, as you might know, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, and I wish people more talked about my biomedical engineering major, as well, because I think it’s an important part of who I am and my worldview.

That being said, the way that I see my major and my minor working together, for the very same goal, is that, you know, my minor in resistance to genocide allows me to study the human condition at possibly one of its worst conditions, and then biomedical engineering is my way of learning technically how we can improve the human condition through increasing health accessibility.

And so, the ways that I specifically see this are, for example, when I learn about the Rwandan genocide or the Holocaust or various other forms of genocides and conflicts through my minor, I look at the ways in which healthcare and health are impeded and the ways in which the quality of life are impeded, so that I can build devices and health technologies, using my major and using the education and the information I learn in my major of biomedical engineering, to see how we can develop low-cost and accessible point-of-care devices, so that we can improve the ways in which people experience healthcare when they are at their most in need of healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, if you were giving the speech — I mean, this speech would be given in May — right? — at graduation. So isn’t there still a possibility that USC could change their mind? What would your speech be? What would you say to the USC community?

ASNA TABASSUM: So, you know, I actually have not considered and actually started writing my speech. But, of course, this experience is informing me how I want to go about it. But, ultimately, my message is one of hope. I think something that I truly believe in, given my familial background and, you know, the way I was raised, is that education is such a privilege. And using the ways that we have learned how to learn, it’s incumbent upon us to look at the world and see what we see, and then take information and make conclusions so that we can change the world in the ways that we want to. And so, in accordance with my message of hope, I also want to do a message of inspiration, so that our graduates and my peers can feel empowered to take on issues of world concern and see themselves in positions of making change.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve talked about an online hate campaign against you. Can you describe more what you have received?

ASNA TABASSUM: Sure. You know, I’ve received incredibly disappointing comments. And I think it’s an unfortunate part of, you know, expressing who you are and expressing what you believe in. But I do want to call attention to the overwhelming support. And I think that anybody who is watching this unfold is seeing that various communities, from Muslim communities to Jewish communities to South Asian and first-generation American communities, all coming together to see this as something bigger and as something representative of a collective voice. And so, you know, while there is hatred out there, I do want to give my kudos to the people who have been seeing the inspiration and seeing the hope as this unfolds.

AMY GOODMAN: University of Southern California valedictorian Asna Tabassum. She joined us Wednesday on Democracy Now! after USC cancelled her commencement speech for what it claims are “safety” reasons after Asna became the subject of an online hate campaign.

***

The New McCarthyism: Congress Grills Columbia Univ. President Amid Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Speech
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/18/ ... transcript

In nearly four hours of grueling congressional testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, the president of Columbia University, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, said she had taken serious action against accusations of antisemitism on campus in recent months amid Israel’s assault on Gaza, including dismissing or removing five faculty members from the classroom, suspending 15 students and suspending two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Shafik’s visit to Capitol Hill is the latest in a series of hearings on alleged antisemitism at elite U.S. private schools. In December, similar hearings led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Our guests Nara Milanich and Rebecca Jordan-Young, both professors at Barnard College and Columbia University, respond to the televised hearings. “What happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody,” warns Jordan-Young. “What we got was a live performance [of President Shafik] throwing the entire university system under the bus.” Adds Milanich, “Antisemitism here is being used as a wedge. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a very different political agenda.”

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: The president of Columbia University was grilled at a congressional hearing Wednesday about allegations of antisemitism on campus. In nearly four hours of grueling testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, Minouche Shafik said she had taken serious action against the accusations, including dismissing or removing five faculty members from the classroom in recent months for comments related to Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as suspending 15 students and two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Shafik’s visit to Capitol Hill came after a December hearing that led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

AMY GOODMAN: In the run-up to the congressional hearing, a group of Jewish faculty at Columbia and Barnard penned an open letter addressed to President Shafik expressing their concerns about, quote, “the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses” and labeling the hearings a, quote, “new McCarthyism.”

During yesterday’s testimony, Lisa McClain, the Republican congressmember from Michigan, questioned Shafik over a number of pro-Palestinian slogans, including “from the river to the sea.”

REP. LISA McCLAIN: My question to you: Are mobs shouting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or “Long live the [intifada]” — are those antisemitic comments?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting. And I have heard —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask. So let me repeat the question. When mobs or people are shouting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” or “Long live the [intifada],” are those antisemitic statements? Yes or no? It’s not how you feel. It’s —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I hear them as such. Some people don’t. We have sent a clear message —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: So, is that yes? So, is that yes?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: We have sent a clear message to our community.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I’m not asking about the message.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yeah.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: Is that fall under definition of antisemitic behavior? Yes or no? Why is it so tough?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Because it’s a — it’s a difficult issue because —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I realize it’s a difficult issue.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: — some people hear it as antisemitic, other people do not.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: But here’s the problem, is when people can’t answer a simple question, and they have a definition, but then they can’t — “Well, I’m not really sure if that qualifies.”

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: So, we’ve done —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I’m asking a simple question. Maybe I should ask your task force. Does that qualify as antisemitic behavior, those statements? Yes or no?

DAVID SCHIZER: Yes.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: Yes. OK.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Later in the hearing, Republican Georgia Congressmember Rick Allen brought up the Bible in his questioning of Shafik. He cited the Old and New Testament and asked Shafik if [she] wanted Columbia University to be cursed by God.

REP. RICK ALLEN: Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Probably not as well as you are, Congressman.

REP. RICK ALLEN: Well, it’s pretty clear. It was the covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear: “If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.” And then, in the New Testament, it was confirmed that all nations would be blessed through you. So, you do not know about that?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I have heard that, now that you’ve explained it.

REP. RICK ALLEN: OK.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yes, I have heard that before.

REP. RICK ALLEN: So, it’s now familiar. Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God, of the Bible?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Definitely not.

REP. RICK ALLEN: OK. Well, that’s good.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Much of the questioning on Wednesday focused on Columbia’s handling of faculty. New York Republican Congressmember Elise Stefanik led the charge. She grilled the president about her testimony on both the protests at Columbia and about professor Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics who chairs an academic review committee.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Dr. Shafik, you realize that at some of these events, the slurs and the chants have been “F— the Jews,” “Death to Jews” —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yeah.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: — “F— Israel,” “No safe place, death to the Zionist state,” “Jews out.” You don’t think those are anti-Jewish?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Completely anti-Jewish, completely unacceptable.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: So you change your testimony —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Horrible.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: — on that issue, as well? So, there have been anti-Jewish protests.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I didn’t get to finish my sentence. So, what I was going to say there were protests that were called that were — that had a —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: That’s not what you were asked. You were asked: Were there any anti-Jewish protests? And you said no.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: So, the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: I’m not asking what it was labeled.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: — labeled as an anti-Israeli government policy. But anti —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: The question wasn’t what it was labeled.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: But antisemitic incidents happened, or antisemitic things were said. So, I just wanted to finish —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: It is an anti-Jewish protest. You agree with that? You change your testimony?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Congresswoman, anti-Jewish things were said at protests, yes.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Thank you for changing your testimony. Another instance when you changed your testimony is you stated that professor Massad was no longer chair, then you stated he’s under investigation. He is still chair on the website. So, has he been terminated as chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Congresswoman, I want to confirm the facts before getting back to you. I can confirm that he’s —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Did you confirm he was still the chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I need — I need to confirm that with you. I want — I need to check.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this: Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I think that would be — I think I would, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: In a statement emailed to Democracy Now!, professor Joseph Massad said Republicans had, quote, “fabricated statements” about him and that it was, quote, “news to him” that he was under investigation. He said no one had spoken to him about his chairmanship of the committee in question.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Nara Milanich is a professor of history at Barnard College, part of Columbia University, who co-wrote an open letter to President Shafik titled “Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism.” Professor Milanich is a member of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. And professor Rebecca Jordan-Young is also with us, professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, at Columbia. She’s a member of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. She’s also a member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young, let’s begin with you. Your response to these hearings yesterday?

REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG: My response is — well, first, let me just thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. It’s so important.

My first response is that what happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody, regardless of their feelings on Palestine, regardless of their politics. What happened yesterday was a demonstration of the growing and intensifying attack on liberal education writ large.

So, there was an opportunity yesterday for President Shafik to come forward to mount a robust defense of the university as a unique site for debate of difficult ideas, for the fact that slogans can’t be reduced to soundbites, that in fact that what happens at the university is deep discussion, deep thought, and that, in fact, instead, what we got was a live performance of her not just throwing protesters and specific professors under the bus — which we somewhat anticipated, as awful as that was — but, in fact, throwing the entire university system under the bus, throwing out established policies and procedures of the university, throwing out rules that have been established by the American Association of University Professors for decades as best practices, actually announcing unilateral decisions on faculty members on live television, which she doesn’t actually have the authority, and the university, to do. And I could say more, but really I was astonished. It went worse even than any of us had expected.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Professor Nara Milanich, if you could also respond, what most struck you about the hearing, and what Professor Young just said, that the debate, rather than it being a debate about difficult questions, it became extremely narrow, and professor — President, Columbia president, Shafik seemed to capitulate almost entirely, as Professor Young said, threw the entire university apparatus under the bus? If you could respond to that? What was your sense?

NARA MILANICH: So, my sense, one of the things that I learned is that congressional hearings are kind of like social media, which is to say they are wonderful places for political performance, for political theater, for soundbites, for “gotcha” moments, for interrupting one another. They are really terrible spaces to have deep debates about serious and contentious issues. And academic freedom is one of those issues. What goes on on campus and what is happening on campus right now is one of those issues. Where my freedom to speak ends and your right to be free of harassment begins, those are really difficult questions. And a congressional hearing, Twitter are not the places to be litigating these issues.

The place to be talking about these issues is on college campuses, in classrooms, in university quads, in dorm room hallways, right? Universities are precisely the place where we should be having these deep and difficult conversations. And instead, we have seen, time and again, that university administrators are ceding this conversation to people who have very different motives — right? — and who are engaging on these issues for very, very different reasons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could talk, Professor Young, about the establishment of this congressional committee, to begin with, and what we saw happening in December, which led to the resignation of two of the presidents of the top universities in the U.S.?

REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG: Well, I think it’s been clear from the very beginning that this task force, that this committee, was actually never about antisemitism. This was about a broad attack on liberal education. And, you know, we have many people on this committee who have never before expressed any concern about antisemitism.

And what we saw was that antisemitism, or a particular interpretation of that, a very precise, very politically aligned interpretation of that, has been procedurally split off from discussion about all other forms of harassment, discrimination, violence, etc. — and this is really contrary to what we do in the university; certainly it’s contrary to what we do in my field — where, broadly, this has been created and used as an opportunity to attack all forms of liberatory, critical scholarship. It’s been a place where critical race studies have gotten attacked. It’s attacking DEI. And throughout, unfortunately, the university presidents who have been questioned, and yesterday President Shafik among them, and the rest of the members of the Columbia leadership, played along with this willingness to split these groups apart. But it’s absolutely against what we do both in scholarship and justice activism. We try to help students understand the intertwined nature of systems and power and oppression and discrimination.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could say, in the past, how has Columbia University — in other instances of harassment for other reasons, how has Columbia University dealt with those complaints of harassment, persecution, etc., by students or by faculty?

REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG: Well, there are disciplinary procedures in place, and have been for a very long time. And they involve members from all sectors of the university that both develop the policies and who are involved in adjudication of particular complaints.

What we’ve seen happening in the run-up to this particular hearing is it looked like the university was doubling down, or tripling down, on just how much surveillance and policing they could demonstrate ahead of time to say, “Look, we are a surveillance campus. We’re a law-and-order campus. There won’t be protests on the university campus.” Columbia has historically been a center of protest and free speech, which is essential for our role as preparing students to be active members of a democracy. And instead, what’s happening now is an arrogation of the right to decide all of those procedures just at the level of the administration, to actually treat protest itself as dangerous and as violent, which is really, really bone-chilling to me.

The other thing that they’ve done is actually outsource a lot of the investigations and the hearings, especially that our students have been subjected to, to law firms and private investigation firms that are not in any way aligned with understanding the mission and the history of the university as a site for deep and principled disagreements.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar, one of only two Muslim congressmembers, questioning Columbia President Shafik.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen anti-Muslim protests on campus?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I have seen — we have had pro-Israeli demonstrations on campus.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: No, no, no.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: But not —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Just a protest that was against Muslims?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Not — no, I have not seen —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen one against Arabs?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have not.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen one against Palestinians?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have not.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen against — one against Jewish people? Have you seen a protest —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: — saying, “We are against Jewish people”?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have — I have seen — no.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: OK. Thank you for that clarification. There has been a rise in targeting and harassment against antiwar protesters, because it’s been pro-war and antiwar protesters, is what seems like, correct?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Correct. There has been —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: OK. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Congressmember Ilhan Omar, one of two congresswomen — Muslim congresswomen in the House. In January — Congressmember Omar also in this hearing brought up the attack on pro-Palestinian students in January, who say they were sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical. Eight students were reportedly hospitalized, complaining of burning eyes, headaches and nausea and other symptoms. Organizers allege the attack was carried out by two Columbia students who were former members of the Israeli military, using a chemical weapon known as “skunk” that the Israeli military and security forces regularly deploy against Palestinians. Professor Young, if you can comment on that incident, of what happened and what happened to these students?

REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG: Yes, absolutely. First, I’ll just say that in the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate, I was an organizer against — I was an anti-apartheid organizer. And I was involved in a lot of demonstrations on my campus. My colleagues, students all around the country were faced with a lot of condescending policies and a lot of pressures from administrations and crackdowns. Never, ever have I seen something like what happened on the Columbia campus.

Never, first of all, have I seen a situation where the administration sets up students to say that protests themselves are problematic — you can’t be against a war, you can’t be against indiscriminate bombing of civilians. I mean, what’s getting lost in this is the situation in Gaza.

And at the same time, what we saw is that the university did not respond to that attack on our students. Students were never contacted. The students who were actually attacked with that chemical weapon were not supported until after the fact. After intense pressure from faculty, the administration said that they would offer them some resources. But they also said that students who were subject to this skunk attack would not be exempt from the sanctions imposed on them for protesting.

And I also think it’s important to say that these policies against protest are not long-standing policies. They’re new policies, that have been created on the fly, sometimes after the fact of particular demonstrations. And the inquiry hearings that are being held are getting more and more draconian, so that there’s a dragnet, basically, of sweeping up all kinds of students that they target, often because of wearing hijab, often because of being near other students, being friends with students who are protesting. So, it’s sweep everybody up, ask questions later. And again, it’s so chilling to me.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Milanich, in your open letter, in the open letter that you wrote prior to this hearing to Columbia President Shafik, you said it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism is rampant on Columbia’s campus. So, why do you think that so many people are convinced that this is the case? And as Professor Young said, nothing like what’s happened at Columbia has happened in the past with protests. How do you understand why this has happened?

NARA MILANICH: Yeah. So, I think this is a really important question. And I had the opportunity to author this letter, open letter to President Shafik, in advance of her testimony with almost two dozen of my colleagues who identify as Jewish. And it’s important to know here that Columbia has a large Jewish population, of Jewish faculty and Jewish students, but there is no such thing as a Jewish opinion — right? — on campus. This is a really heterogeneous group, a diverse group, people with very different experiences, different identities and different politics, different ideas, different relationships, or even nonrelationships, with Israel, right? And we had the sort of impression, the sense, that people were speaking for us, right? People were assuming that we needed to be protected, that we felt vulnerable, people assuming that we all shared a particular political point of view. And we wrote this letter to President Shafik to clarify that, to explain sort of the diversity of different political opinions on campus and to question this idea of a single, hegemonic Jewish position or voice or experience.

And the letter goes on to implore President Shafik not to capitulate to this kind of politics of weaponizing antisemitism. One of the remarkable things that we have seen in recent months, since the fall, are the ways that right-wing politicians have suddenly discovered — they’ve had a come-to-Jesus moment and have discovered Jews and have discovered the scourge of antisemitism. And, of course, many of these folks are people who flirt with white nationalism — right? — in their everyday life, which is to say with actual antisemites, right? So, we wanted to make the case, and that my colleague has made, as well, that antisemitism here is being used as a wedge. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a very different political agenda. And that is a broader and deeper kind of desire or effort to insert politics into the university.

So, we can see how right-wing politicians, even yesterday, on display in the congressional hearings, have a bigger agenda, a bigger ax to grind. They are interested in undermining academic freedom, in attacking wokeism. This is not about antisemitism so much as attacking areas of inquiry and teaching, whether it’s about voting rights or vaccine safety or climate change — right? — arenas of inquiry that are uncomfortable or inconvenient or controversial for certain groups. And so, this is essentially what we’re seeing, antisemitism being weaponized in a broad attack on the university. And I think that’s really worrisome. And we’re all sort of looking to November to think about what happens then. I mean, if this is what is going on now, what happens if Trump is reelected, and then we get these inclinations coming not just from Congress, but also from higher up?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. Nara Milanich is a professor of history at Barnard-Columbia. She co-wrote the open letter to President Minouche Shafik titled “Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism.” We also want to thank professor Rebecca Jordan-Young in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College-Columbia, member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

***

Columbia Students Risk Arrest, Suspension to Maintain Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Campus
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/18/ ... transcript

Students at Columbia University and Barnard College in New York have set up dozens of tents to occupy the South Lawn of the campus to create a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Democracy Now! spoke to some of the student-activists, who say they are occupying the space, despite the administration’s threats of suspension and disciplinary action, as part of a demand that the Ivy League school divest from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli occupation. “It seems like the repression is only getting worse and worse,” says Maryam Alwan, a student-activist with Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. As Columbia University President Shafik testified before Congress about accusations of antisemitism at the school, Democracy Now! spoke to Columbia and Barnard College students yesterday who set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment early Wednesday morning with dozens of tents, occupying the South Lawn of the campus outside the main library. As we broadcast, students have been threatened with suspension and discipline action but are still refusing to leave until their demands are met. They spoke about what they’re calling for.

PROTESTERS: Down, down with occupation! Down, down with occupation! Up, up with liberation! Up, up with liberation!

MARYAM ALWAN: My name is Maryam Alwan, and I’m with Columbia SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. And we are here today to demand that Columbia divest immediately from all stakes in Israeli apartheid. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed. And as we speak, our president is testifying in front of the House in a game of political theater that is conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. We want to focus the attention on what’s going on in Gaza and tell Columbia that we are not going anywhere. No matter how much government suppression we face, we will keep fighting until they divest.

They have been completely repressive. I mean, we’ve faced police brutality. We have faced countless policy changes. I mean, my group, along with Jewish Voice for Peace, was suspended in the fall semester completely illegitimately. And I filed a lawsuit to counter that action. And it seems like the repression is only getting worse and worse and worse. But the more they repress us, the more we rise up. And that’s why we’ve escalated — that’s also why we’ve escalated here today.

Not only are they not listening to us when we peacefully protest, when we attempt to just pass referendums for student voices to even be heard, they don’t even want to listen to the students. They don’t want to know what the students think. And so, we’re here to tell them that we will take up space and presence on this campus, and they’re not going to be able to erase our support for Palestine.

PROTESTERS: What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If Gaza doesn’t get it, shut it down!

SOPH: My name is Soph. I am with Jewish Voice for Peace at Columbia. And I am here today because I will not stand by while thousands and thousands of people are dying because of our tax dollars in this country, as Columbia’s money is going towards a genocide. The money that should be funding our education is going to the bombs that are dropping on Gaza right now. Columbia is a majority share — has massive amounts of shares in various organizations, like Lockheed Martin, that are supplying Israel with bombs right now, and we will no longer be complicit.

In a campus like this that is filled with repression, that is — every day we wake up, and the administration tries to silence us more and more. We are here to say, “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.” We will not be complicit. We will stand in solidarity, because we know that we keep us safe.

We refuse to believe that Israel is in any part related to our Judaism. In fact, our Jewish values inform why we’re here, why we’re standing in here — Jewish values of tikkun olam, of love, of appreciation, of respect, of mutual liberation. And so, as Jews, we are here to say that we will always support the liberation of Palestine, because that is what historically Jews have done. We have stood up for other oppressed peoples, because we know that there can be no freedom until we are all free.

PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine!

SARAH BORUS: My name is Sarah Borus. I’m a student at Barnard College. And I’m here because I was raised as an anti-Zionist Jew. It is important for me to stand with Palestine. I go to a university that is actively profiting off of the genocide of Palestinians and then is hiding behind Jewish students by saying that they want to crack down on us because of antisemitism. But as an anti-Zionist Jew, I know that that is the farthest thing from the truth. They are doing that because they know that we are on the right side of history, that they are doing something that is profoundly wrong. And it is our job during this genocide to come out and resist.

There were Jews protesting against this genocide who were harassed and then attacked with a chemical weapon. That is not being addressed. This is — quite frankly, we’re seeing McCarthyism once again. And our administrators need to be aware of the experience of anti-Zionist Jews, the way that antisemitism is being weaponized in order to crack down on this movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the South Lawn of Columbia University, where students have set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Special thanks to Democracy Now!’s Hana Elias and Tey-Marie Astudillo and Eric Halvarson for that report.

***

Israel Considers Attacking Iran and Invading Rafah as Netanyahu Seeks Lifelines to Stay in Power
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/18/ ... transcript

New reporting indicates that the Biden administration has approved Israel’s plan to attack Rafah in exchange for Israel not launching counterstrikes on Iran. “Israel is almost certainly going to respond to the Iranian strike in some way,” says Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. Now “it has the benefit of being able to dangle both threats”: an invasion on Rafah that would heavily increase the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza, or an attack on Iran that would likely spark a wider regional war. While Israeli approval of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drastically waned, Zonszein suggests that its military campaign shows no signs of stopping. “Israeli society is largely a right-wing society. It is a society that has not spoken about or thought about Palestinians or the occupation except when it’s forced to. And it’s a society that has gotten used to acting with impunity.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israeli forces have killed at least 11 people, including five children, in strikes on the southern city of Rafah. Israel has repeatedly attacked the city ahead of an expected ground invasion. There are new reports the Biden administration has approved Israel’s plan to attack Rafah in exchange for Israel not launching counterstrikes on Iran.

The latest article by our next guest is headlined “Why Israel-Iran War Is a Lifeline for Netanyahu.” In it, she writes, quote, “Just days ago, much of the world’s attention was on the impending famine in Gaza, and on Israel’s failure to achieve its war objectives of toppling Hamas and returning hostages more than six months into the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was under pressure from U.S. President Joe Biden to allow in sufficient humanitarian aid and reach a cease-fire, as well as appeals from Israeli protesters to seal a hostage deal and hold new elections.

“But at night on Saturday, April 13, all that faded instantly as Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in much-anticipated retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed senior Iranian military [officers] in Damascus, Syria, on April 1.”

AMY GOODMAN: That article is by Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. She’s joining us now from Tel Aviv.

Mairav, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by just continuing your argument? Lay out what you think has happened in the last few days.

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: Thanks for having me.

Well, essentially, we have an ongoing war, for months and months, that Netanyahu has orchestrated in a way that, clearly, he’s talking about a total victory, that most Israelis now understand he’s not able to achieve. He has lost a lot of legitimacy both at home and abroad. At the same time, many Israelis have supported the war effort. They’re in trauma. And so you have this chaotic situation.

And just days ago, we started to see what looked like, at least rhetorically, cracks in what has been U.S. support for Israel’s war effort in Gaza. And just as things started to seem to change a little bit, primarily as a result of an absolute humanitarian disaster, man-made, in Gaza, all of a sudden attention has gone elsewhere, to another very worrying development with Israel and Iran.

Now, I can’t speak to Netanyahu’s intent on the decision to strike the Damascus consular facility on April 1st, but what I can say is that when you’ve lost legitimacy, and when former security officials and even some current ones are telling everyone that Netanyahu is not fit to lead and is not fit to be providing any kind of safety and security for Israelis, and then he takes the decision to strike a consulate, then that’s clearly something that he took into account. In other words, it could have either led to nothing, or it could have led to what we saw, and in which case he’s now basically, you know, benefiting from the fact that all the world now has to kind of cooperate with him. The Western capitals, surely, some Arab countries, as well, have no choice but to kind of band together against this Iranian threat.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mairav, could you explain? Your article before this one, earlier this month, is titled “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society.” Explain what you mean by that, and what you think the problem is with people focusing only on his being the head of Israel, Netanyahu, and taking all the decisions.

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: Right. Well, I mean, it’s important to understand some of the nuances. I mean, basically, Israeli society is largely a right-wing society. It is a society that has not spoken about or thought about Palestinians or the occupation except when it’s forced to. And it is a society that has gotten used to acting with impunity.

After the Hamas October 7th attack, which was truly unprecedented for Israelis, there was huge consensus for the war, and there’s been almost, you know, complete apathy to what’s happening in Gaza. Israelis are not really interested or emotionally capable of handling that. And there’s been a dehumanization of Palestinians for a very long time. So you have this kind of consensus and just support for Israel’s war effort.

At the same time, you have a leader, specifically Netanyahu, but also the far-right government in general, that many liberal secular Israelis don’t support. And so you have a situation in which the Western capitals in the world, that have pretty much unconditionally supported Israel, have found a way to try and kind of split between, you know, criticism of Netanyahu but supporting Israeli society at large. Now, I understand why they’re doing that, but it’s just important to understand that even if you took Netanyahu out of the equation and you put somebody else, some of his political rivals, in the leadership positions, their approach to the Palestinian issue is almost identical. There’s really no difference there. So, the Israelis that are protesting Netanyahu now are not protesting him about his policies on Palestinians. They’re protesting him about his attacks on their own freedoms and the fact that kind of the same rights violations that Israel has been doing for years are now starting to seep into their own world.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Mairav, about this possible trade-off that’s being reported, U.S. wanting Israel not to attack Iran again, but they can invade Rafah?

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: I think all of this is largely theater and largely performative. I mean, basically, Israel has been dangling the threat of an invasion in Rafah for months now. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s something that it plans to do. But the U.S. pushback on it, while firm rhetorically, hasn’t really been convincing. You know, I’m not convinced that the U.S. is actually about to withhold aid or that the U.S. or Biden were actually going to stop Israel from invading Rafah, because they largely support the war effort.

And Israel is almost surely going to respond to the Iranian strike in some way. And it’s understandable, you know, if we understand the ways Israel works, that it would do so. I think it’s also understandable that Israel, you know, would now — since it hasn’t already responded, it’s now going to consider its options in how it can do that and how it can leverage that situation. So, now, in effect, it has the benefit of being able to kind of dangle both threats — we’re both going to attack Iran, and we’re going to attack Rafah. And so, ultimately, those things are still the case. You know, so I —

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. We’ll link to your piece in Foreign Policy. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!

[admin]

“No Palestinian Is Safe”: Renowned Feminist Scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Arrested in Jerusalem
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/19/ ... transcript

Israeli police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem on Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, though the university later reinstated her. We speak with anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud, who describes Shalhoub-Kevorkian as a mentor and inspiration to her and many others. “We hold the Hebrew University of Jerusalem responsible for the arrest and detention because of its persistent and public repression of her academic freedom, which led directly to yesterday’s arrest,” says Ihmoud, who teaches at College of the Holy Cross and is co-founder of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “We see this as yet another example of Israel attacking Palestinians wherever they are, whoever they are. It underscores that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s racist apartheid rule.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: Amidst crackdowns on pro-Palestinian voices on campuses coast to coast in the United States, we begin today’s show in Israel, where police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. The professor holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship. She was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. But then the university reinstated her. She spoke on Democracy Now! in March after her suspension.

NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: The question remains whether what is teachable, what is what should be written, what is publishable, what is what we can speak as scholars that are studying state criminality, as opposing to what is going on, as opposing to what the state is doing, is not accepted, so they throw us out of the university. And this is the same policy that the state of Israel is doing outside. So, it’s silencing. It’s preventing people from speaking. It’s threatening. It’s punishing. And it’s also done in a very degraded and undignifying manner. Calling my students a day before the end of the first semester and telling me, “You’re suspended,” is something that is beyond any expectations. But this is — and stressing it’s a Zionist institution. “You can’t abide by these rules, you’re out.”

My only concern, Amy, today is the safety of students, the safety of my students, Jewish and Palestinian, that are standing against genocide, standing against the war, refusing to see the continuous and ongoing atrocities. My really concern is the silencing of dissent all over the world, because we see it in academic institutions. The question: If we think that academic institutions should work according and by the orders from the state, I don’t know why we’re having academic institutions. Academia and research requires that we’re attentive to details, to what goes on to the life of women, men, children. And I am really concerned today. And, of course, I must clearly state that the behavior of the university is a behavior that is threatening the safety of our students, the safety of colleagues that are speaking against the genocide, and my own personal safety as a person who lives in Jerusalem, and the safety of my family.

AMY GOODMAN: That was last month. After professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s arrest on Thursday, over a hundred professors around the world released a statement calling for her immediate release, calling her arrest an attack, quote, “on all Palestinian scholars, students, and activists who bring to light the violent and genocidal nature of the Israeli state,” they wrote.

Today, professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian had a hearing, where a judge ordered her release. But she has not been released, as the Israeli government is reportedly appealing.

For more, we’re joined by Sarah Ihmoud, a Chicana Palestinian anthropologist, assistant professor of anthropology and peace and conflict studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She’s founder of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is her mentor.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Professor Ihmoud. If you can start off by giving us the latest? We spoke to her when she was in London after being suspended by Hebrew University. They then reinstated her, she went home to Israel, and she has now been arrested. What have you heard of this hearing and why she was arrested?

SARAH IHMOUD: Thanks for having me, Amy, and thank you for bringing light to the case of professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who, as you noted, is an internationally renowned feminist scholar and human rights activist who has been working to bring attention to the situation of Palestinian women and children under Israeli military occupation for the past three decades.

As far as we understand, professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was violently arrested from her home in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City yesterday around 5 p.m. The police raided her home and confiscated her belongings, including her laptop, some books, from what I understand, as well as a poster of the Palestian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, as you noted, has been subjected to violent repression and harassment by the Hebrew University for speaking out against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And she was suspended from her teaching duties in March, though later reinstated once it became clear that there was no basis for the allegations against her. Ultimately, we hold the Hebrew University of Jerusalem responsible for her arrest and detention because of its persistent and public repression of her academic freedom, which led directly to yesterday’s arrest.

And we see this as yet another example of Israel attacking Palestinians wherever they are, whoever they are. It underscores that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s racist apartheid rule, not even someone like Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is both an Israeli and American citizen and a world-renowned and respected feminist scholar. And it’s important to note, as well, that Israel routinely holds Palestinians captive and imprisons them without trial, without due process and under inhumane conditions, including children, and that this is just both unjust and illegal. And this is an attack on her as both a Palestinian and a scholar who is rightfully speaking out against Israel’s well-documented human rights abuses and ongoing genocide.

So, as far as we understand, the Jerusalem court magistrate had ordered her release under the condition of a 20,000-shekel bail. However, the court, the state — the state and the police are appealing, and they have taken her to the central court, where they’re still holding her. So we are still waiting further details about whether she will be released or whether the state will continue holding her.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how you know her, Professor Sarah Ihmoud?

SARAH IHMOUD: Of course. Thank you, Amy. I have known professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian for over a decade. I first met her in occupied East Jerusalem when I was a graduate student just beginning to pursue my Ph.D. dissertation research. And she has become one of my dearest friends and mentors over the past decade. She’s someone that has really opened my eyes, and many across the world, to the intimacies of Israeli settler-colonial violence and repression in occupied East Jerusalem and across the Palestinian territory.

Her work has focused on specifically the conditions of women, how patriarchy and colonialism intersect to shape the lives of women, and what justice looks like for Palestinian women. And her work has also really taken a central imperative to understanding the conditions of Palestinian children and speaking out against the persistent human rights abuses of Palestinian children in occupied territory. She is the scholar who founded the concept of unchilding to help us further understand, as scholars across the world interested in children’s rights, how settler-colonial states typically shape the lives and limit the futures of children, Indigenous children and racialized children, across the globe. So her work has been absolutely pathbreaking and important not only in the Palestinian context, but in global contexts where populations are facing racialized and gendered repression and violence.

And she has been a beloved mentor to many, including myself. And she has always centered love in the way that she cares for her students, for scholars in her community. And she continues to center that ethics and method of love in the work that she does in the community and with her students across the Hebrew University and beyond.

AMY GOODMAN: In addition to being a professor at Hebrew University, she also taught at Queen Mary University in London. We spoke to her in London. Another professor there is Neve Gordon, the Israeli scholar, who we also recently did an interview with. He just tweeted, the judge — “Nadera Hearing: The judge to police: I can understand that you wanted the arrest to conduct searches, but so far you have not found anything that justifies the arrest and I have not received any other explanation. The pages you found are an expression of opinion,” the judge said. As we wrap up, Professor Ihmoud, the significance of this, and why you feel she’s being targeted right now?

SARAH IHMOUD: Absolutely. Thank you. I think, you know, it’s important to stress the absurdity of her portrayal by the police as dangerous. And yet this follows a history of Palestinians, generally, and Palestinian women, in particular, being portrayed as a dangerous threat to Israeli security. Obviously, we see how the entire population of Gaza has been dehumanized, and that has provided the pretext for Israel’s continued genocidal assault on the entire civilian population of the Gaza Strip. And of course Israel sees professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian as dangerous, because her work for the last several decades exposes exactly the opposite, of course — that is, the humanity of the Palestinian people in the face of the inhumanity of the Israeli state in its quest to continue to occupy, terrorize and brutalize the Palestinian people and repress our movement for liberation.

So, we are calling on international scholars, activists and people of conscience everywhere to continue maintaining pressure for her immediate release and for all of the charges against her to be dropped. We are outraged by this unlawful action, and we refuse the continuing silence and violence by the Israeli state and its institutions against the Palestinian people and for those who, like professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, continue being a voice of light and love, standing for justice and liberation. Again, professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian has always centered her love for her people, for her students’ safety and security. And it’s important that we follow in her footsteps in the path that she has been taking herself and leading us in embodying hope and the necessity that we continue speaking out against Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah Ihmoud, we want to thank you for being with us, Chicana Palestinian anthropologist, assistant professor of anthropology and peace and conflict studies at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she’s speaking to us from. She’s a founder of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested Thursday in Jerusalem at her home.

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Over 100 Arrested at Columbia After Univ. President Orders NYPD to Clear Pro-Palestine Student Protest
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/19/ ... transcript

Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik on Thursday called on New York police to forcibly clear a student occupation on the lawn of the school, which had been dubbed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, resulting in over 100 arrests. The protesters were demanding the Ivy League school divest from firms and institutions that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but Shafik ordered the raid a day after being questioned on Capitol Hill about ongoing pro-Palestinian protests on campus. The move caused outrage among students and many faculty, who decried it as censorship and a violation of academic freedom. The renowned professor and presidential candidate Cornel West, chair of the Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary, joined students Thursday in solidarity with their protest and told Democracy Now! they “represent the best … of the human spirit,” and lauded them for “fighting in the face of domination and occupation and subjugation, and doing it with tremendous determination.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

Here in New York, riot police moved in on a peaceful student protest encampment, arresting at least 108 people at Columbia. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD to clear the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the campus’s South Lawn, where Columbia and Barnard students had set up one day earlier to demand university leadership divest from Israel. New York Police Chief John Chell said Shafik identified the demonstration as a “clear and present danger,” but that officers found the students to peaceful and cooperative. Shafik warned all students participating in the encampment would be suspended. At least three suspensions of Barnard students were confirmed Thursday before the arrests, including Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Congressmember Ilhan Omar.

Thursday’s showdown with the NYPD was the largest arrest on the Columbia campus since 1968, when police arrested over 700 students protesting the school’s ties to the Vietnam War and its plans to expand in Harlem by building a gymnasium there.

Following the arrests yesterday, students gathered on the campus throughout the night as large protests continued and are ongoing. Students got support from many Columbia faculty online and a visit in person from Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West, just nearby, who is also a 2024 presidential candidate. Democracy Now! spoke to professor West after he climbed a fence to visit with the encamped protesters.

CORNEL WEST: Well, you know, in light of our stand in deep solidarity with our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters who are undergoing vicious genocide, wrestling with apartheid conditions for so long and still being ethnically cleansed, we want the world to know that their suffering does not have the last word. There is resilience, and there’s a willingness to fight.

And Columbia president ought to be shame on herself that she cannot zero in on an actual genocide taking place before our very eyes, and be concerned about a potential and possible call for genocide of Jews. Nobody here is calling for the genocide of Jews. Nobody is here calling for annihilation. We’re calling for the end of an actual genocide and the end of an actual annihilation.

How sad that Columbia University could teach so many courses on the canonical texts of Western civilization and can’t listen to Diderot or Karl Marx. They can’t listen to a Martin Luther King Jr. They can’t listen to a Muriel Rukeyser. Most importantly, they can’t listen to the cries of our precious Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

So, I’m in deep solidarity with these students. They represent the best, not just of Columbia, not just of the American empire, but the human spirit, fighting in the face of domination and occupation and subjugation, and doing it with tremendous determination.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s presidential candidate and Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West speaking to Democracy Now! at Columbia University in the midst of the protest. Special thanks to Hana Elias. President Shafik called in the New York police a day after she testified in the U.S. Congress.

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“Fear and Terror”: Gaza Photographer Ahmed Zakot on Documenting the Carnage of Israel’s Assault
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/19/ ... transcript

As Israel continues bombarding the Gaza Strip, we speak with a Palestinian photographer who recently fled the territory with his family. Ahmed Zakot has been documenting Gaza for the last 25 years, and two of his photographs were just featured in a project by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and published by Rolling Stone earlier this month in a piece titled “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.” One of Zakot’s photos shows a Gaza neighborhood lit up by Israeli airstrikes at night, while the second is of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes with their belongings in a scene reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba that displaced some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. “It reminds me [of] what my grandfather told me about this displacement. It’s the same [that] happened since 1948 — now we are in 2024,” Zakot 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.

Israeli warplanes bombed areas in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip as well as the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza City over the last day, killing at least four people. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports the Israeli military has deployed more troops in areas adjacent to Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, where some 1.3 million Palestinians — more than half of Gaza’s population — are seeking shelter. Israeli airstrikes have been pounding agricultural land in the eastern parts of Rafah this morning.

The official death toll in Gaza is nearly 34,000 Palestinians killed, over 14,000 of them children. Thousands more are missing and presumed dead under the rubble. Nearly 77,000 have been wounded. That’s 100,000 Palestinians killed or wounded since October 7th.

This comes as a picture by the Gaza-based Reuters photojournalist Mohammed Salem has been chosen as the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year. It shows a Palestinian woman, Inas Abu Maamar, caressing the wrapped body of her dead niece Saly in the Nasser Hospital morgue in Khan Younis in October.

Well, today we’re joined by a Palestinian photographer who was able to leave Gaza 10 days ago with his family. Ahmed Zakot [@ahmedzakot] is a photographer who’s documented Gaza for the past 25 years. Two of his photographs are featured in a U.N. OCHA project. Ahmed Zakot joins us now from Cairo, Egypt.

Ahmed, welcome to Democracy Now! You’ve just recently left Gaza. Can you talk about the journey you took and why, as a photographer who’s documented Gaza for the last quarter of a century, you decided to leave with your family?

AHMED ZAKOT: Thank you so much, and I’m very happy to join you today.

Actually, what forced us to leave Gaza is to be safe and to keep our family lives safe. As you know, it’s a war ongoing since seven months. And it’s a very, very hard war. I’m working since 25 years. This is the first war that I faced. It’s a very, very strong war. And we don’t know how we are be patient to keep to stay alive during this seven months. Actually, this war is keeping and still ongoing on Gaza Strip. So, each month, we talk to us that this war will stop and the international community will stop this war, but, actually, no one — nothing changed, and the war is still ongoing until this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed, you left, but you have two brothers, their wives and children. Where are they in Gaza right now? What circumstances are they living in?

AHMED ZAKOT: Yeah, of course. I left two brothers, wives and their children in Khan Younis at al-Mawasi area, that the Israeli army said it is a humanitarian area. But, actually, nowhere, no place in Gaza Strip are safe, because I was there, and we are — all of us, we lived in tents on this area. This area, it’s like desert — no water, no food, no useful food. And it’s a danger areas, because the Israeli army, by time to time, targeted tents and targeted many targets over there. So, we are seeking and we are trying to evacuate them from Gaza Strip as soon as possible to follow us here in Egypt to be safe, because, as I said, this war are still ongoing. The situation of my family and all the Palestinians’ situation are very, very catastrophic and very, very bad over there. No one can live, and no one can guarantee that he will wake up the next morning, he is alive, or he is not wounded.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed Zakot, so many of your photographs feature children, also ambulances. Can you talk about your focus right now as you photographed in Gaza these last six months?

AHMED ZAKOT: Yes, of course. Our coverage this war is different about many last wars in Gaza. As you know, Gaza Strip occurred four wars, at least. And I covered them, but this war was special, and because of — it’s special about me as a photojournalist for 25 years because the intensive hits, the intensive heavy attacks on the neighborhoods, the cities, the buildings, and also it hits the civilians, the innocent people, actually. So it’s different. This is the first time I felt the fear and terror of this war on me and on my brothers, my family, completely, actually.

So, I can’t explain this war, because it’s a very, very big war. We can say each area that we went and cover it, we can say it’s like an earthquake hit this area, not bombard and bombs hit this area. There are a lot of destruction buildings in each single piece and place in Gaza Strip. So, we are focusing on children, women and on the ambulances’ teams and all of the civilians that were hit on this war.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed Zakot, two of your photographs are featured in an OCHA project. That’s the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It’s a project called —

AHMED ZAKOT: Yes, of course. I’m —

AMY GOODMAN: — “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.” One of them was taken on October 9th, the other on November 10th. Can you describe these photographs that you chose for this project? In your description of the photograph from October 9th, it says, “It was as if flames were spewing from the jaws of Israeli tanks and the F-16 missiles, I took this picture from the 19th floor of a skyscraper in Gaza. In my 25-year career as a photographer, I never felt such fear and distress.”

AHMED ZAKOT: Yes, of course. This picture — yes —

AMY GOODMAN: “I felt that I was filming a cinematic movie scene, I had to remind myself that it is all too real. I don’t have the words to describe this picture, but I know the terror I felt watching the flames lighting up Gaza in a night drowned in darkness with the electricity cut-offs on Gaza.” We’re, Ahmed, looking at your picture as you talk to us about it, that picture you took in October.

AHMED ZAKOT: Yes, of course. This is the first time that I captured such this picture, because, as I said and as I explained, I thought myself that I’m shooting or capturing a cinematic scene, because this is the first time I saw a heavy of air attacks on a simple area. It was al-Rimal neighborhood. It is the beautiful neighborhood in Gaza. And this night, it was because of the heavy and the intensive attacks from the airstrikes, they are lighting the area amid of this darkness. As you know, Gaza are suffering from power cut for many years, since 2006. But this time I felt that Gaza is lighting, but not with electricity, by the lights comes from the bombs and airstrikes from the F-16 warplanes. So, this picture are still stuck on my mind until now, and will stick in my mind forever, because I felt that really I’m in a cinematic scene, not in a real war that’s hitting the areas and the buildings over there.

AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to end —

AHMED ZAKOT: This is why this picture are still stuck and has a story with me.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed, I wanted to end with your other photograph, from November. It is a photograph of thousands of displaced Palestinians fleeing south. You wrote, “As I was taking this picture; I remembered my grandfather telling me about al-Nakba and how he was displaced. I started crying.”

AHMED ZAKOT: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about —

AHMED ZAKOT: Of course, I remember this picture. So, I was crying. I stopped my capturing pictures at that day especially, because I remembered my grandfather’s story that he told me before he passed away in 2002. He told me about al-Nakba stages, when the Israeli forces forced them to leave the original cities in Israel to the southern cities in Gaza Strip. So, he told me one word, that this scene will not get back at this time. So, when I captured this scene, I remembered this word from him that when he told me this sentence, that when he told me before he passed away, that this scene will not get back.

But now we are shooting this picture. We are shooting this situation, this displacement for this people, for those people who are suffering. As you see in the picture, they are carrying their belongings at their help and weak hands. So, they are fleeing from the northern cities of Gaza Strip to the southern cities. So, it reminds me what my grandfather told me about this displacement. It’s the same happened since 1948 — now we are in 2024, or 2023, by the way. So, this reminded me and stuck my heart. I stopped my work and keep crying, away from my friends that we are together at that day.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed, can you talk about how you got out of Gaza with your family? Can you talk about — what? An adult has to pay something like $7,000, $8,000. It’s $2,500 for a child. Explain the circumstances, how you get out, as the Israeli military says it is intent on now attacking Rafah, where people leave from.

AHMED ZAKOT: So, yes, we are leave Gaza — we are left Gaza by I coordinating with the Egyptian Press Syndicate, and they arranging that to me and to my family because I’m a journalist. So they helped me to do that. Really, really, I appreciated that for them and very thankful for them, because they helped me to leave Gaza here to Egypt to at least stay for maybe one or two months, until the war will stop. So, I will get back to my city, to Gaza, to the Gaza Strip, to keep working and to keep sending messages and to keep covering the suffers of my people in Gaza Strip.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed Zakot, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian photographer, forced to leave Gaza with his family 10 days ago.

Coming up, we will look —

AHMED ZAKOT: Thank you so much.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the U.N. project, the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, and the work of more Palestinian photojournalists. Stay with us.

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U.N. Photo Collection Shows Gaza War Through the Lens of Palestinian Journalists
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 19, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/19/ ... transcript

The Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, organized by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collected work from 14 Palestinian photographers who were each asked to share one image that captured the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the last six months. We speak with Charlotte Cans, head of photography at OCHA, about the project. “It’s one thing to say there’s a war and it’s horrible, and it’s another thing to see an image of a child being pulled out from the rubble. It really hits you differently,” Cans says of the motivation behind the project. “It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photojournalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza.”

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.

On Thursday, I spoke with Charlotte Cans, head of photography for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, about the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project she has led. She asked 14 Palestinian photographers to share one image taken in the Gaza Strip over the last six months that they want the world never to forget. A warning to our TV audience: The interview features graphic images. She speaks from Paris, France.

CHARLOTTE CANS: Thank you very much, Amy, for having me and having us and talking about this project, which is very special indeed.

I think, you know, the first thing is that a couple of weeks into the war, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the situation in Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis, it’s a crisis of humanity. And I think, for me, for us, this is what, you know, started it all, because the assault that we’re seeing on the population of Gaza is unprecedented in brutality, scope and intensity. And the figures speak for themselves. In six months, you had over 100,000 people killed and wounded, 70% of whom are children and women. You know, this staggering number, as well, that the number of children killed in Gaza is higher — in six months, is higher than the number of children killed in four years of all the wars combined all around the world. You have three-quarters of the population displaced. Famine is imminent. Law and order are breaking down. Humanitarian aid is actively blocked, and on and on and on. And, you know, I think these figures are so staggering that they defy comprehension. And so, for me, and for us, it was really important to try to humanize these numbers, to make them real and to make them understandable.

And I think it’s quite paradoxical, because there’s been an overflow of images and stories on Gaza, flooding our phones, flooding our screens, you know, for six months, but somehow, somehow, it is — it is not getting across. And I could see it in my direct environment, you know, talking to friends and families. I could see that people didn’t really understand what was going on in Gaza. Yes, they know there’s a war in Gaza, and they know that wars are bad and horrible. But it’s one thing to say there’s a war and it’s horrible, and it’s another thing to see an image of a child being pulled out from the rubble. It really hits you differently.

And so, I think, for us, it was really — as the U.N., as OCHA, which is the humanitarian arm of the U.N., it was really important to elevate these stories coming from Palestinian photojournalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza, because, as you know, international foreign journalists have been banned of entering Gaza independently. None of them have, except from Clarissa Ward, who went in for like two hours at the end of sometime in December. So, Palestinian photojournalists are the only ones, are the only window into the suffering of people in Gaza. And so it was really important for us to go to them and to try to share and elevate again the incredible, tragic testimonies that they are reporting and covering, day in, day out, for the last six months.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Charlotte Cans, can you talk about how you reached out to Palestinian photojournalists?

CHARLOTTE CANS: Yeah, that’s a really good question, because it’s been incredibly difficult. It’s been a process that has been going on for weeks. It took us over three months to put this project together. And, you know, as you know, the communications have been really, really difficult with Gaza. I think, you know, it got better recently, but in December, January, up until February, there were like constant blackouts. So it was hard to get a hold of people. And you would get a hold of someone, and then the person would not be responding for days on end. And suddenly you had, you know, an answer, and they were like, “Yes, I’m really happy to participate. I will send you images,” and then nothing again for a couple of days. So it was this constant back-and-forth.

And I just want to say here that, you know, the way we made it happen also has been through an incredible photojournalist called Tanya Habjouqa, who’s been based in Jerusalem, Ramallah for the past 25 years. Tanya is an award-winning photojournalist. She knows the country and the region inside out. And she had an incredible networks of, you know, colleagues, Palestinian colleagues. And so, through Tanya, as well, we were really able to reach out to a number of them, bring them on board. And, you know, it was a combination of, again, her network, word of mouth. And also, Amy, to be honest, you know, they are being killed also, Palestinian photojournalists, so there are not that many of them left in Gaza, to be honest, and this is tragic.

AMY GOODMAN: So, introduce us to some of the photographs that are in this collection.

CHARLOTTE CANS: OK. So, I think — let me actually — I’m just taking it in front of me. I think, you know, there’s one photo for me that hits me really hard. It’s the photo from photographer Jehad Al Shrafii [@jehad_alshrafi]. Jehad is a 22-year-old Palestinian photographer from Gaza. And he took this image of Ibrahim, who’s a 12-year-old boy, like any other boy in the world, who had his arm amputated because of his injuries in the last six months. And we can see him, on the image, trying to brush his teeth. And he’s holding the toothbrush with his mouth and the paste, the toothpaste, in his left hand. And he’s trying to do something as simple as brushing his teeth. And you can see in this image how difficult it is and how his life has been turned upside down.

And I think, you know, with the number of children killed in Gaza and wounded — and I think, again, this is pretty unprecedented compared to other conflicts and wars around the world, you know. And when we say — I think it’s Save the Children, had this terrible statistic a few months ago, which was that 10 children per day, on average, have lost an arm or a limb in the war. And when you see that, when you see Ibrahim trying to brush his teeth, you understand what that means. It’s his life has — his life has been shattered. But it’s not just his life. It’s his family’s life, as well, because he will need a caregiver for years to come. So, again, it’s like, you know, through the war, it’s entire families who are being affected. And I think this image really hits, you know, very hard to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlotte, introduce us to Belal Khaled [@belalkh] and his picture.

CHARLOTTE CANS: Yeah. So, Belal is a very interesting, you know, character and person. He used to be a calligraphy artist, and he is still a kind of calligraphy artist, but he was, you know, making a living as a calligraphy artist also before the war. He’s also a photojournalist. He’s an incredible photographer. His images are stunningly tragic, very often.

There’s a couple of images of him in the project. One of them is of a little boy who is, Amy, the color of ashes. He’s sitting on a hospital bed crying, and there’s blood dripping along his face. And Belal, in the text that accompanies the photo — because that’s something very special to this project. It’s not just the images. It’s the personal texts that the photographers have shared to accompany the images, where they explain their emotions and the backstory to the image and what the story means to them. And Belal has these words with this image. He says that this child, when he got to hospital, was crying for his bicycle. And he kept saying that he wanted his bicycle, he wanted his bicycle, not having fully comprehended what had just, you know, hit him. So, this is a really strong image.

There’s another one from Belal, which is incredibly strong, as well, where you see a family. And I think this is very special, because in many images that we’ve seen on Gaza, quite often it’s one parent or the other with their dead child, but in this image you see the entire family. You see the mother, you see the father, you see the brother, and you see this dead child in their arms. And their grief and their suffering is so raw in this image. It’s incredibly strong.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read the quote that Belal Khaled sent. He said, “A Palestinian child was carried to al-Nasser Hospital, pulled out from rubble. At the hospital his aunt recognized him and started screaming his name. 'This is Diya'a, this is Diya’a…’. When his siblings, mother and father arrived, their pain was unforgettable. He had left their home to get some wood for heat when he was killed in an airstrike.” The family forms a cocoon around his shrouded small body. Tell us about the photographer Jehan Kawera [@jehan_kawaree].

CHARLOTTE CANS: So, Jehan is a young female photographer. There’s a couple of them in the project. We have three female photographers represented, with Jehan, Mariam Abu Dagga [ @mariam_abu_dagga] and Samar Abu Elouf [@samarabuelouf]. So there’s three of them.

Jehan has this poignant image of a young girl who’s lying on a hospital floor. It’s a very graphic image. It’s very hard. You can see the hands of a health specialist trying to, you know, fix something, her drip, or whatever that is. But what is striking in this image is that she’s got her right hand lying on the floor, and in her right hand, there’s a piece of candy. And it’s this, you know, typical candy that kids in many different places of the world eat that is very recognizable. And seeing this young girl, this — she’s probably 6 or 7, no more, lying on the floor with a piece of candy in her hand.

And the quote, again, of Jehan is incredibly, incredibly powerful. And I have it in front of me, actually, Amy. I don’t know if I can read it to you. But she says that she could not hold herself up when she saw this little girl “gasping for breath, and the piece of candy, still stuck in her hand stained with blood.” She “will never forget when she was carried to the mortuary.” And she says here, “The candy fell at my feet on the blood-soaked ground.”

And again, I think what is so strong with this project, again, is that these images hit you because they make this suffering so relatable. These are not just random kids. When you recognize the piece of candy in her hand, you can see all the kids that you know, your own kids, your nephews, your nieces. And that makes it, again, particularly strong.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Saher Alghorra [@saher_alghorra]?

CHARLOTTE CANS: Yes. So, Saher has an incredible image in the project where you see a dad — it’s in a white tent — screaming. And the dad is in a bit of a hallucinatory state, as he says himself in his text. And right next to him lying on the floor is the body of his dead child, covered by white cloth. And Saher has been documenting the war for the last six months for many different outlets. He’s a really strong photographer. He just won Picture of the Year, actually, for his work. And again, you know, this image is — the suffering is so raw and so eerie. Yeah, it’s just — it just hits you, you know, directly. It just stabs you in the heart, really, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And then there’s Mahmud Hams [@mahmudhams]. It’s similar, but different. He says, “Mohamed El-Aloul is a cameraman for Anadolu news agency. He is my friend. We spend a lot time together, and we also often cover the war together. Four of his children were killed in an airstrike. His wife was severely injured. When he heard what happened to his family, it was early morning, and we were together at the hospital. We went to the morgue at Al Alqsa. I knew his children. All I could do was to be there, with him, crying.”

CHARLOTTE CANS: Yeah, absolutely. Mahmud is a photographer for AFP, Agence France-Presse, who’s been covering 30 years of war in Gaza. And I think this image is very strong, as you say, Amy, because it talks about, you know, the fact that, again, these Palestinian photojournalists are being killed in this war. And they are not just witnesses. They are victims, as well, whether they are being killed or wounded or whether they are being displaced with their families. And this, again, makes it very, very special in, you know, what we’re seeing unfolding in Gaza right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And what you know of Mohamed El-Aloul, the cameraman who lost his children? He’s wearing — of course, he’s wearing the press vest.

CHARLOTTE CANS: Yeah, exactly. And I think in this incident where the house where he was staying in got targeted by an airstrike, he lost three of his children and his brother on the strike. So, again, we’re talking about entire families being detonated.

AMY GOODMAN: And Anadolu news agency, where is it?

CHARLOTTE CANS: So, Anadolu is a Turkish news agency. It’s one of the big news agencies, again, based, headquartered in Turkey.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about Mohammed Zaanoun [@m.z.gaza].

CHARLOTTE CANS: So, Mohammed Zaanoun is also one of the, you know, main photojournalists who’s been reporting on this war since the beginning. He’s working for several news agencies. He’s working — you know, he’s been working for Al Jazeera. He’s been working for Le Monde. He’s been working for several, for a couple of others.

His images are all very striking. There’s a couple in the project. There’s one of where you can only see the feet of a child, and you only see that it’s tiny feet in the photo — you don’t know who it is — completely buried under the rubble. And Mohammed has this caption, which says, “A child’s feet were all that were visible from the rubble. The little girl was killed along with three of her brothers by an Israeli air strike in Khan Yunis market. The mother, she lived, but was hopeful for hours that they would be pulled out alive by the paramedics, from the rubble where her home once stood.”

And I think this photo is incredible, Amy, as well, because, you know, it’s probably — again, when people have seen them, it’s one which really stayed with them. It’s graphic in a way, but it’s not graphic in another. But the emotion that you have when you see this image, again, you know, very strong, and it makes you understand, again, what we were talking about before: What does this war look like, day in, day out, for people and families and children in Gaza? You know, seeing a child’s feet under the rubble, you know, again, makes you understand the war quite differently than just reading about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlotte Cans, head of photography for OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She coordinated the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project. Charlotte said these are not just photojournalists; these are also civilians. They’re witnesses and victims to the horrible conflict that we’re seeing unfolding in front of our eyes. We particularly thank Charlotte for this interview. She was in Paris after the passing of her mother this week.

[admin]

Historic Gaza Protests at Columbia U. Enter Day 6; Campus Protests Spread Across Country
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/22/ ... transcript

Columbia University canceled in-person classes Monday as campus protests over the war in Gaza enter a sixth day. The protests have swelled after the school administration called in the police to clear a student encampment last week, resulting in over 100 arrests. Solidarity protests and encampments have now sprouted up on campuses across the country, including at Yale, MIT, Tufts, NYU, The New School and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Palestinian reporter Jude Taha, a journalism student at Columbia University, describes events on campus as “an unprecedented act of solidarity” that student organizers are modeling on antiwar protests in 1968. She says Columbia University President Minouche Shafik’s claims of an unsafe environment on campus are contradicted by the generally calm and productive atmosphere among the protesters, adding that the school’s heavy-handed response, including suspensions and evictions, is being seen as “an intimidation tactic” by organizers.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin here in New York, where Columbia University has canceled in-person classes today as campus protests over Israel’s war on Gaza enter a sixth day. Classes will be held online today. The protests have swelled after the arrest last week of over 100 students who had set up an encampment to call for the school to divest from Israel. Organizers say at least 50 students have been suspended from Barnard, 35 from Columbia. A growing number of Columbia and Barnard alumni, employees and guest speakers have also publicly condemned or announced they’re boycotting the prestigious institutions.

Over the weekend, solidarity protests and encampments also began on other college campuses here in New York City at NYU, at The New School, as well as across the country, including at Yale, MIT, Tufts, Vanderbilt and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

We’re joined right now by two guests. In a moment we’ll speak with Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, who addressed students participating in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s campus multiple times last week. But we begin with Jude Taha, Palestinian Jordanian journalist and journalism student at Columbia University Journalism School. She’s on Columbia’s campus here in New York, where the student-led Gaza Solidarity Encampment is still underway. She’s joining us from her school at Columbia Journalism School right now.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jude. Can you lay out what’s happened over the weekend, what are people’s demands, and the fact that today, the president — who all this happened a day after she testified before Congress — has shut down the university for in-person classes, all online today?

JUDE TAHA: Thank you for having me.

Right now what we’re seeing at Columbia is an unprecedented act of solidarity, set up by students who initially set it up on the South Lawn and then faced violent arrests and a lot of repression from administration and ended up moving to the opposing lawn. And what we’re seeing right now is just swaths of people, initially without tents, sleeping on the ground, in sleeping bags, some of them without sleeping bags, on grass, outside in the cold, under the rain.

And what we’re seeing is just they have three solid demands. The first is divestment. The second is for Columbia to disclose their financial investments and the financial records, especially in relation to their workings with Israel. And the third is amnesty toward students. The students have been very clear in the fact that they are not moving, that they are very set in their demands.

Some negotiations are happening, from what I’ve heard from organizers at the encampment. However, nothing has been announced yet. I know there are a few things that came up yesterday that were a bit surprising, which was the repitching of the tents. Organizers have said that the administration is aware of the tents; however, that does not necessarily mean that they agree. Organizers held a town hall last night where they emphasized that, obviously, with an act of solidarity and act of protest as large as this, to take over the space in the lawn comes a level of risk. And they are very comfortable in that. They are making sure everyone is aware. There is transparency, and there’s just a community being built. And they are very clear in their demands. They have three top demands, first and furthermost which is divestment.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jude, if you can talk about the whole progression of what happened, from Shafik, President Shafik, testifying before Congress to these, I won’t say “unprecedented,” arrests — over a hundred students were arrested — but since, I think, 1968, the protests against the Vietnam War?

JUDE TAHA: I think what had happened initially was students showed up at the lawn at around 4:30 a.m. They are members of a solidarity group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which is made up of many student groups. And they had been planning this for months, according to my interviews with organizers. They studied the 1968 protests. They studied the tactics used. And they were prepared to go. Initially, we did not know this as outsiders. The tents were set up, and a lot of people were caught off guard. But this has been something that the organizers have planned for, especially in relation to Minouche Shafik’s hearing. But what happened is, after they set up tents, we quickly saw an outpour of support. Picket lines were forming. Students were joining from outside. And initially what I saw to be like 40 to 50 students is now, on the opposite lawn, nearly a hundred to a hundred students coming in and out of the encampment.

The arrests were shocking. However, what was truly inspiring to see is that students did not let that deter them. Shortly after the arrests were carried out and after protests were surrounding the lawn where the original encampment was at, students starting jumping into the opposing lawn and pitching up tents there. And this is a reaction not only to Columbia’s silencing of students and the fact that students feel unheard, uncared for and not represented well by the institution that they attend, but this is also, very much so, focused towards the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the way the students are feeling, seeing the massacres happen every day, with nearly over 30,000 people have been killed. Their frustration is that they are complicit in this and their university is complicit in this. And they want to make sure that their voices are heard. And they want to make sure that what they’re asking is met. And so, this is inspired by the 1968 protests. They just decided to follow course.

AMY GOODMAN: So, something unusual was tweeted on Friday. You’re speaking to us from the Columbia J School, from the Columbia Journalism School.

JUDE TAHA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I had just been at the protest after the arrests, the encampment on Thursday night. To say the least, it was not easy for anyone to get in who did not have a student ID. Even that won’t get you in right now. It was a true lockdown. And the next morning, at about 10:00, where you are, the Columbia J School tweeted, “Columbia Journalism School is committed to a free press. If you are a credentialed member of the media and have been denied access to campus, please send us a DM. We will facilitate access to campus.” This is a direct rebuke of the president, of President Shafik?

JUDE TAHA: I cannot — I cannot speak to that. I do know that our dean, Jelani Cobb, is very committed to having a space where freedom of press can thrive. And I know that Dean Cobb has been incredibly supportive of the students who have been reporting on this and is very interested in ensuring that media has access and that information is being transferred clearly and accurately. Whether it is a direct rebuke, that is unfortunately not something I am aware of.

However, I will say that since then, facilitating entrance has been increasingly challenging. I am not sure of the dynamics of the journalism school. I have been speaking with multiple journalists who are coming in to cover the encampment, and increasingly it’s been harder and harder to try and get them in. There has not been really any clear guidelines that I can share about what does that entail for the journalism school to facilitate, but what I have also been seeing is people are believing that the facilitation through the journalism school means access to the encampment. And I would like to emphasize the encampment is not facilitating with the journalism school. It is an entity that is functioning on its own. And it is a living space as much as it is, you know, a private space within the university. Students are very vulnerable there. They’re also very hesitant to speak to media. But while they do believe that the media presence is important, there has been this notion of belief that the journalism is facilitating access into the encampment, which is not true. The journalism school is helping facilitate entrance into campus for credentialed press.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you also can talk about what the police chief said in response to the Columbia president? New York Police Chief John Chell said President Shafik identified the demonstration as a “clear and present danger,” but that officers found the students to be peaceful and cooperative, Shafik warning all students participating in the encampment would be suspended. And the level of suspensions, Jude, if you can talk about that, both at Columbia and even more at Barnard, and what exactly this means? Students are locked out of their rooms almost immediately and lose their meal cards in addition to everything else?

JUDE TAHA: Yeah. To be quite honest, we have — me and a few other journalists have been reporting on this for months now. We are familiar with these students. We are familiar with these demands. And we were present from day one, from nearly 6:00 in the morning, in the original encampment. And there was no instance of violence that I am able to report. The protesters were incredibly peaceful. Their demands are largely focused on divestment. And they have community guidelines that they are asking everyone who is entering the encampment to abide by. And the community guidelines are to ensure safety, are to ensure that everyone feels comfortable in the space and to ensure that Gaza is being centered first.

In relation to what the police chief said, I have to agree that I was not able to identify any violence or any danger that is present from these students, especially right now in the second encampment, where there is a thriving community, where people are bringing food, blankets. Students are leaving their belongings, their personal belongings, for hours with no worry that they will be taken. There is no fear amongst them.

Therefore, it is truly an intimidation tactic, and the response that we have seen from President Minouche Shafik has been incredibly disheartening toward students. Students have been evicted. An organizer that I’ve spoken to yesterday is terrified. They are not comfortable walking out alone. They had to leave the state. They are being given 15 minutes to access their belongings. They are being suspended, with waiting for an appeal or waiting for a meeting with administration to understand the grounds of the suspension or what that entails. They are leaving students in limbo. The students do not feel supported. They do not know where they’re going. And it is incredibly disheartening and terrifying, for some are 18-, 19-year-olds, to be deserted by their campus.

And another thing is that the organizers have made it clear that this is an intimidation tactic by the administration, and especially in relation to President Shafik’s email that was sent at 1 a.m. last night. The organizers have stated that this is an intimidation tactic to try and scare people who are in the encampment out of their solidarity with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and with the demands of the movement. But a lot of students are learning these risks, and they’re banding together and they’re standing together to demand amnesty. It is unclear why this is happening or the levels of suspension. Students who have been suspended but have not been evicted are concerned about when are they going to lose access to their housing. And students who have lost access to their housing were not given any clear instructions, as far as I know, for where to go next. So it is just this great limbo. And these students are sacrificing a lot for the movement and for the demands that they are asking for, but they are not being met with any support from administration or guidance. And it is unclear what President Shafik is citing when she says “danger.” And therefore, that is leaving a lot of organizers confused as to what is actually happening.

AMY GOODMAN: And among those arrested was Congressmember Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, both suspended and arrested. And finally, very quickly, before we go to professor Mamdani, the J school speaker for May 15th — and this is a long time away, so we’ll see what happens — is the Haaretz Israeli reporter Amira Hass, deeply critical of the occupation, of the war on Gaza, lived in Gaza, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have lived there for years. Is that right?

JUDE TAHA: Yep, that is correct. As far as we know, that has not been changed. The speaker has been chosen for quite a long time now. And as far as I know, that has not been changed.

***

“No Due Process”: Columbia Prof. Mamdani Slams Arrests & Suspension of Students at Gaza Protests
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/22/ ... transcript

We speak with Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia who has spoken with many of the pro-Palestine protesters camping out on school grounds to show solidarity with Gaza and demand the school divest from Israel. He says there is growing outrage from faculty after the school’s leadership called in the police to raid the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and conduct mass arrests, while administrators have started suspending and evicting some students. “There has been no due process on the Columbia campus,” says Mamdani.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Mahmood Mamdani. Mahmood Mamdani is a Columbia University professor who addressed students participating in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the South Lawn in Columbia’s campus, professor of government and the author of a number of books, including Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.

Professor Mamdani, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can just respond to what’s happening? Describe the scene as you gave your address to the students. You’ve spoken several times at the encampment.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: I was asked by the Columbia divest committee to give a talk on the historical origins of the divestment campaign, particularly in South Africa. And I gave a talk which basically outlined that divestment was a response to settler colonialism. And I explained to them how you identify settler colonialism as a regime which has different sets of rules and laws for different groups of people in the same society; and, secondly, the point of these different rules and laws is to regulate unequal access to public resources, all the way from residence to occupation to public health to education and so on; and, finally, that this state, which enforces this unequal treatment, institutionalized, legally enforced unequal treatment of different groups, this state, its sovereignty is under the group that benefits from this inequality. So that’s the talk that I gave.

And the next day, I was invited back to talk again, because we had organized a faculty panel on antisemitism. And the point of this panel was to consider the report, the first report, of the antisemitism task force set up by the university. There were five of us on the panel. And I was invited to talk about that, which I did. And I told them that we went through this report, we combed through this report, because we had been — prior to the issue of the report, there had been a faculty discussion on what is antisemitism. And the co-chair of the panel had sort of said that, “No, we don’t have a definition of 'antisemitism,' but we know it when we hear it or when we see it.” She was using a judge’s response to a question decades ago on what you understand by “pornography.” But the problem was that this particular panel was supposed to educate the campus. So, for the rest of us who don’t know it when we see it or hear it, what is antisemitism? So we were reading the report to see if there was an answer in this.

And there was only one sentence in this report which referred to antisemitism, and that sentence said, roughly — I’m just paraphrasing it here — that many Jewish students who support the state of Israel are afraid, and many other Jewish students who are critical of the state of Israel are also afraid. So, this was no evidence of antisemitism. This was evidence of a dividing, of an increasing polarization amongst Jewish students, those for and those against the state of Israel. Apart from that, the entire report was like a law-and-order report. It was all about what kind of regulations, what kind of notice needs to be given in advance, where students can gather to demonstrate, where they cannot gather to demonstrate, the hours, etc., etc.

Prior to that report, there had been a statement signed by 18 deans of Columbia University which identified a set of slogans, which they said, believed had created and incited the climate on campus. And these slogans included “from the river to the sea,” “intifada,” “by any means necessary,” etc., etc. There were, I think, about six, seven slogans. I had written a piece in the Spectator saying —

AMY GOODMAN: The student newspaper.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: The student newspaper.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The Spectator, the Columbia University newspaper. So, I had written a piece in it saying that these seven, eight different expressions indicated the lines of differences within the campus. And what’s the point of saying that these should not be discussed? If we want a discussion, then we should promote a discussion on this, not silence different voices on it.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response, very quickly, to the president, to the White House, to read you a statement from Andrew Bates, the White House deputy press secretary, who said, “While every American has the right to peaceful [protest], calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous — they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America. And echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable. We condemn these statements in the strongest terms,” the White House deputy press secretary said. Your response, Professor Mamdani?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I think calls for violence against any group of students, against Jewish students, against non-Jewish students, these are despicable. They need to be taken seriously, and they need to be dealt with. But we need to be sure that all disciplining is done after proper investigation and due process. There has been no due process on the Columbia campus. There has been no proper investigation. The Columbia University president spoke to the University Senate and laid out her plans. And the Senate disagreed unanimously, and still she went ahead. In the past, the response to differences on the Columbia campus have been negotiations. She has not resorted — she has not even talked about negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, do you plan to go back to give a speech? And your final comments on the lockdown right now, all in-person classes canceled, online classes only, Professor Mamdani?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: There is a 12:00 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in law library. I will attend that meeting. And then there is a 2 p.m. gathering of faculty on the steps of law library, and I will also be attending that gathering.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we thank you so much for being with us. Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of government in the anthropology department at Columbia University who’s addressed the students participating in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s campus several times last week.

***

“Collective Punishment”: As Gaza Assault Continues, Israel Ramps Up Violence in Occupied West Bank
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/22/ ... transcript

As the death toll in Gaza tops 34,000 Palestinians killed since October 7, Israeli forces and settlers have continued to ramp up violence in the occupied West Bank. The army killed at least 14 people during a two-day raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm over the weekend, and separately killed a Palestinian ambulance driver near Nablus as he was trying to reach Palestinians injured in an attack by Jewish settlers. Ramallah-based writer Mariam Barghouti says the Israeli military and armed settlers “are trying to continue the illegal annexation of lands in the West Bank” and says Israel is deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, just as in Gaza, to make life unbearable. She also responds to reports that the Biden administration is preparing to sanction the Netzah Yehuda battalion, a notorious unit within the Israeli military composed of ultra-Orthodox soldiers that is accused of carrying out human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank. “It should not be against a select few. This entire regime is engaging in crimes against humanity, and it is U.S.-sponsored. It is being paid for by American tax dollars.”

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.

We turn now to the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians staged a general strike Sunday after Israeli forces killed at least 14 people during a raid that lasted more than 50 hours on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm. The residents of Nur Shams said the Israeli siege left the refugee camp uninhabitable.

AHMAD AL-AZZEH: [translated] Seeing it is not like hearing about it. You can see with your eyes what happened: destruction, Gaza number two. What happened is that they left no trees, nor people, nor stones. It is unbearable, uninhabitable by humans. What happened is destruction. Destruction. They turned the camp into something uninhabitable. It is terrible.

AMY GOODMAN: In a separate attack, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reports Israeli settlers shot dead a Palestinian ambulance driver south of Nablus as he was trying to reach Palestinians injured during a raid by Jewish settlers.

For more, we go to Ramallah, to Mariam Barghouti, Palestinian writer and journalist. Her recent op-ed for Al Jazeera is headlined “Palestinians and the world must not lose hope.”

Mariam, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can explain what happened over the weekend, not only — just in the occupied West Bank overall?

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: Thanks for having me back, Amy.

So, what we have seen in the West Bank, across the weekend and in general and in this month, is an intensification and escalation by the Israeli military, as well as armed Israeli settlers, that are trying to continue the illegal annexation of lands in the West Bank. The concentration of these attacks, as we have seen earlier, have been in Tulkarm and Jenin, which is north of the West Bank. And that is because there is few youth groups that are engaging in armed confrontation. But as you have seen, the Israeli military, just as it is conducting in Gaza, is trying to focus on the attack of the civilian infrastructure. It is making any life for Palestinians unbearable, and it is using excessive violence and slaughter to do so. So, what we are seeing is a disregard for Palestinian lives. And we are seeing it happen in the most brutal and savage ways, that I don’t think any of us really could have imagined.

And over the weekend, Palestinians went on a strike, yesterday, in mourning of 14 Palestinians killed in one of the longest siege being conducted by the Israeli military on Nur Shams refugee camp. This is an attack on Palestinians that were already displaced from their homes in 1948 only to have the same army come back and attack the generations that came afterwards that chose to fight for life. Fourteen were killed, and of those, two were children, which is on brand for Israel. A fifth of all Palestinians killed in the West Bank were children, as we have seen in Gaza, where nearly half of all Palestinians killed are children and minors.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of Nur Shams, the refugee camp there in Tulkarm?

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: The significance of Tulkarm and Nur Shams is like the significance of Jenin refugee camp, is like the significance of the Old City in Nablus, in that it allows for youth who have refused to be silenced, who have witnessed the brutality engaged against them, from arrests under administrative detention by the Israeli military to the continuation of Israeli settler attacks. So, you have the Nur Shams Brigade, and you have the Jenin Brigade, which is youth with very humble weapons, that are no match — no match — for Israel’s nuclear army, who have chosen to confront the Israeli military.

And we need to keep in mind that the Israeli military went and engaged in an offensive, in an attack on the refugee camp, and these youth engaged in confrontation to try and protect the refugee camp from the destruction. And what Israel did is go ahead and greenlight an attack on the civilian infrastructure in order to punish Palestinians in a punitive and collective measure, which, again, is part of Israel’s policy in order to ensure the pushing out of Palestinians, in order to ensure the erasure of Palestinian existence and to create the space to replace them by Israeli settlers.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariam, the Biden administration is reportedly preparing to issue sanctions on Netzah Yehuda, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli military unit accused of committing human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has vowed to fight any sanctions on the battalion. The Guardian reports soldiers from the unit were accused in the death last year of Omar Assad, a 78-year-old U.S. citizen who died of a heart attack after being detained, bound, gagged, then abandoned by members of the unit. Can you tell us more about them?

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: I mean, I think, in this regard, it’s really fruitless to give more attention to the Biden administration’s symbolic gestures, that are very hollow. Likewise, Benjamin Netanyahu is corrupt, known for corruption, has engaged in crimes against humanity. These sanctions mean nothing in light of the billions of dollars that the U.S. Congress just approved for Israel in support, again, for this military that is conducting crimes against humanity.

And in regards to sanctions in order to preserve citizenship rights — right? — the dual citizen, let’s go back to Shireen Abu Akleh, who was a journalist, was wearing a press vest that had the press insignia on it, and still was shot and killed on May 11th, 2022, by the Israeli military. And until now, no accountability was held — none — for Shireen Abu Akleh, who was press, who was a dual citizen with the United States and Palestinian. So, the Biden administration is really trying to scurry, using these words like “sanctions,” while putting amendments of it’s against a select few. It should not be against a select few. This entire regime is engaging in crimes against humanity, and it is U.S.-sponsored. It is being paid for by American tax dollars. And the U.S. is also sending soldiers on the ground to engage in these crimes. So I think these are just hollow.

AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to get your response to the breaking news that Israel’s chief of military intelligence has resigned. Major General Aharon Haliva is the first senior Israeli official to resign over Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. In a statement, he said his office, quote, “did not live up to the task we were entrusted with.” Many see this as a direct hit on Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for him to resign, as well.

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: I think Haliva’s resignation again is telling of how the Israeli security institution is failing. It has constantly tried to showcase to the world that it is an institution that provides national security, when it is an institution that perpetuates crimes of persecution and apartheid. And what is happening now is his resignation is an attempt to evade future accountability as a commander or as a senior position in this institution of repression and abuse. So, again, what I see as an evasion of accountability for what is to come, because Israel is committing and engaging in crimes of genocide, in not just Gaza but in the West Bank and as well as against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, where the Israeli police shot and killed four Palestinians with Israeli citizenship so far.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mariam Barghouti, I wanted to ask you about the attack on journalists. You mentioned Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed May 11th, 2022 — May 11th, 2022 or ’23, was it?

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: ’22.

AMY GOODMAN: '23, 2023 [sic]. The memorial — 2022. But I wanted to ask you about the other journalists. I mean, it's about 100 Palestinian journalists who have been killed since October 7th.

MARIAM BARGHOUTI: Thank you for asking that, Amy. The numbers are actually higher than that. It’s closer to 135 Palestinian media personnel being attacked and killed since October 7th by the Israeli military. And this is really important, because what Israel is doing is targeting journalists. It is not accidental. It is a strategic attack with precision in order to attempt and control the narrative of what is happening on the ground. And, you know, as Palestinian journalists, there’s not a lot, right? There’s few media personnel. So, this attack is very dangerous, because the more and more we’re risking our lives, the more and more we’re getting killed, with the impunity being provided to Israel, then more and more it is able to try and control the narrative and dub its attack and its attempt at erasing Palestinians as self-defense, when it is de facto the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of a population under the pretext of defense.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariam Barghouti, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian journalist in the occupied West Bank, in Ramallah. We’ll link to your piece at Al Jazeera, “Palestinians and the world must not lose hope.”

***

“Enormous Expansion of the Law”: James Bamford on FISA Extension, U.S.-Israel Data Sharing
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
April 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/22/ ... transcript

President Biden has signed legislation to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite years of protest from rights groups and privacy experts who say the law is routinely used to conduct warrantless surveillance on millions of American citizens. The Senate approved the FISA bill on Friday in a 60-34 vote, and critics say it not only reauthorizes domestic spying but also dramatically expands its scope. “It’s an enormous amount of data that they’re collecting and very few rules” limiting its collection, says investigative journalist James Bamford. He warns that personal information collected by U.S. intelligence is also shared with Israel, which uses the data to target people in Gaza. “The U.S. has got to stop supplying all this data and the targeting materials,” he says. Bamford’s new article for The Nation is headlined “The NSA Wants Carte Blanche for Warrantless Surveillance.”

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.

President Biden signed legislation to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, despite warnings from privacy experts the bill could greatly expand the ability of the government to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance. The Senate approved the FISA bill Friday in a 60-to-34 vote. Critics included Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who described the bill as, quote, “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”

SEN. RON WYDEN: If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anybody with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone or a computer. … If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will and force them, in effect, to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by James Bamford, longtime investigative journalist, who writes about this in his new piece for The Nation headlined “The NSA Wants Carte Blanche for Warrantless Surveillance.” In 1982, Jim Bamford published The Puzzle Palace, the first book exposing the inner workings of the NSA, much larger than the CIA.

Jim Bamford, thanks so much for being with us again. Explain what this FISA law now allows.

JAMES BAMFORD: Thanks, Amy.

Well, it’s an enormous expansion of the law. It started out fairly modestly, and now it’s expanded enormously. Few people understand how much data really is collected. The NSA has this enormous facility out in Utah, a data center. It’s five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. And it holds up to a zettabyte or a yottabyte. That’s the highest numbers there are in terms of storage of data, enormous amounts of data. And that’s what is going to happen now, is the expansion of the law, the expansion of the collection of data. And a lot of that data will be American, Americans who have no idea they’re being eavesdropped on, because they’re going to become repositories in that data center.

The way the law works right now is that if you want to eavesdrop on an American in the United States, then you need a warrant. However, if you’re calling somebody outside of the United States, another person outside the United States who’s not an American citizen, then you have really no rights. They can eavesdrop on that conversation as much as possible. They can collect all those conversations and store them in the Utah data center. And then the FBI will then have the opportunity to go in there and search for whatever they want without a warrant. So, they could get your email address or your name on Facebook or whatever they — whatever identifying information they can, and then search that database to see what communications you have had outside the United States. So, it’s an enormous amount of data that they’re collecting and very few rules in terms of warrant requirements to obtain that data.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the parallels you see between the illegal eavesdropping from the Watergate scandal of the '70s then and the warrantless surveillance permitted under Section 702 that's just been signed off on so it wouldn’t lapse?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, after Watergate, there was a focus on eavesdropping. But again, that was a very long time ago, and that was when most people communicated on telephones. And there was no data collection. There was no email. So it was microscopic compared to what there is today.

The way it works is the NSA has satellites all over outside the Earth collecting satellite data from digital receivers, from communications devices, from iPhones and so forth. They have taps on undersea cables that come ashore. It’s called cable heads. And they have facilities there to pick up the data. All that data funnels into both NSA in Maryland and also in Utah. So there’s an enormous collection of data that I don’t think people have really a real concept of how much the NSA collects. It’s just enormous compared to what it was in the days of Watergate.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, I wanted to ask you about another new piece you’ve written for The Nation, headlined “How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza.” Earlier this month, we spoke to Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham, who first reported this story for +972 and Local Call headlined “'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” I asked him to describe the program.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: After October 7th, the military basically made a decision that all of these tens of thousands of people are now people that could potentially be bombed inside their houses, meaning not only killing them but everybody who’s in the building — the children, the families. And they understood that in order to try to attempt to do that, they are going to have to rely on this AI machine called Lavender with very minimal human supervision.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about this, Jim Bamford, and also talk about Palantir and what it is?

JAMES BAMFORD: Israel has an equivalent of the NSA. It’s called Unit 8200. They’re very sophisticated. It’s basically the same type of organization as the NSA. And Palantir is one of the companies that’s given — it’s an American company that’s based in Denver, and it has given an enormous amount of assistance to Unit 8200 in terms of targeting. And that goes to the military. So, the military targets civilians, lots of civilians. Most of the people killed were civilians. Women and children have been the people who have been targeted in the Occupied Territories, in Gaza. So, the NSA gives Unit 8200 an enormous amount of data from what it collects. When I interviewed Ed Snowden back in Moscow after he went to Moscow, taking all the data from NSA, he said that was one of the worst offenses he saw when he was at NSA, that they were giving all this American data, Palestinians talking overseas to relatives or friends in Palestine and the occupied territory, and NSA was giving that data to Unit 8200.

So, you have Unit 8200 that’s collecting a lot of data from the United States, from Americans. They’re using it for targeting. And Palantir is one of the companies that’s enormously sophisticated in terms of targeting. So, what the problem is here is that you’re getting information from the United States that the Israelis are using to target the civilians in Gaza. And there’s been 33,000 killed now, so it’s just an enormous problem that the U.S. has got to stop supplying all this data and the targeting materials to Gaza — or, rather, to the Israelis to target Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, we’d like to do Part 2 of this discussion and post this online at democracynow.org. James Bamford is a longtime investigative journalist. We’ll link to your pieces for The Nation magazine, one called “The NSA Wants Carte Blanche for Warrantless Surveillance,” and the other, “How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza.”