by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
October 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/22/headlines
Israeli Troops Separate Men from Women and Children, March Displaced Palestinians at Gunpoint
Oct 22, 2024
Israeli forces have barred rescue teams from reaching Palestinians trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings as Israel’s siege on the northern Gaza Strip continues into its 18th day. On Monday, Israeli drones equipped with loudspeakers hovered over shelters for displaced Palestinians in Beit Lahia, blaring messages ordering them to flee through military checkpoints. Witnesses say Israeli soldiers entered the shelters, separated men from their families at gunpoint and instructed women and children to move southward. The mass expulsion came amid continued unrelenting Israeli attacks, including a strike on Beit Lahia that killed 15 Palestinians, including children.
Gaza’s Health Ministry reports at least 115 Palestinians have been killed over the past 48 hours; 500 more were wounded, bringing the reported number of people wounded in Israel’s yearlong war to more than 100,000, with nearly 43,000 killed — though both figures are likely to be a vast undercount.
Northern Gaza’s last three operational hospitals remain besieged, with more than 350 patients trapped inside Al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals. Dr. Marwan al-Hams is the director of Gaza’s field hospitals.
Dr. Marwan al-Hams: “Israel has not allowed the entry of any medicine, treatment and medical supplies to the north of Gaza. In addition, the Israeli occupation is preventing the entry of food and nutrition for the medical teams and patients inside the hospitals, and it is directly targeting the hospitals.”
Meanwhile, Gaza officials say Israeli forces have blocked the entry of more than a quarter of a million trucks carrying food and other vital aid into Gaza in the last year, as Israel is accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.
13 Killed, 57 Injured Near Lebanon’s Largest Hospital as Israeli Bombs Rain Down on Beirut
Oct 22, 2024
In Lebanon, rescue workers are searching for civilians trapped under the rubble of their homes after Israel’s military carried out more than a dozen strikes overnight on Beirut and its southern suburbs. At least 13 people, including a child, were killed and 57 others injured in an Israeli airstrike near the Rafik Hariri University Hospital, Lebanon’s largest public medical center. Separately, 50 medical workers and 15 patients were forced to evacuate the Al-Sahel Hospital in southern Beirut Monday after Israel’s military claimed — without evidence — it’s home to a secret, underground Hezbollah bunker containing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold. Doctors insisted there’s nothing hidden beneath the hospital and took reporters on a tour of its lower floors to disprove the claims.
In Israel, air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv earlier today as Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets from Lebanon. Hezbollah said the attacks targeted a military base south of Tel Aviv, as well as a naval base northwest of Haifa.
Meanwhile, Syrian media is reporting at least two people were killed and three others injured Monday when an Israeli guided missile slammed into a car in Damascus. Israel’s military claimed responsibility, saying the strike killed the head of Hezbollah’s money transfers unit.
Israeli Officials Join Settler Groups to Call for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
Oct 22, 2024
Israeli Cabinet members and officials with the ruling Likud party called Monday for the reestablishment of illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza and for the ethnic cleansing of the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke from a conference of settler groups and ultranationalists near Israel’s border with Gaza, where he declared, “We will encourage voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us.” The conference was organized by the Nachala Settlement Movement, whose leader, Daniella Weiss, said thousands of settlers are set to move to Gaza.
Daniella Weiss: “We came here with one clear purpose. The purpose is to settle the entire Gaza Strip — not just part of it, not just a few settlements, the entire Gaza Strip, from north to south. Thousands of people are ready to move to Gaza now. As a result of the brutal massacre of the 7th of October, the Gaza Arabs lost the right to be here ever, so they will go to the different countries of the world. They will not stay here.”
Blinken Heads to Israel for 11th Visit Since Israel Launched Full-Scale Assault on Gaza
Oct 22, 2024
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Tel Aviv for talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders. The State Department claims Blinken’s trip is aimed at reviving failed Gaza ceasefire negotiations, yet the Biden administration continues to refuse calls for an arms embargo against Netanyahu’s government amid record U.S. military assistance to Israel. This is Blinken’s 11th visit to the region since Israel launched its latest war on Gaza last October.
Meanwhile, calls are growing for U.S. officials to investigate reports of the Israeli army using abducted Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, often forcing them to walk ahead of Israeli soldiers to inspect underground tunnels and buildings. The use of human shields is a war crime.
In related news, a group of over 60 House Democrats are demanding the Biden administration “take immediate action to advocate for unrestricted, independent media access” to Gaza, as Israel has blocked foreign journalists from entering over the course of its yearlong war.
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“The Gaza I Know Is Gone”: Israel’s Rampage Continues as Survivors Struggle for Food, Water, Safety
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
October 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/22 ... transcript
Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 over the past two days, according to Palestinian health officials. This comes as Israel continues to carry out a brutal siege on northern Gaza, which has been described as a “surrender or starve” policy of ethnic cleansing. As the military demands that tens of thousands of Palestinians leave the north, senior government ministers are pushing for new Jewish settlements in Gaza. Meanwhile, images and video have emerged from northern Gaza showing Israeli forces separating Palestinian men from their families and taking them away. Almost all aid has been cut off to the region, with hospitals under siege and barely able to function. “It’s a deliberate strategy of humiliating, terrorizing and punishing the civilian population,” says Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada, who is originally from Gaza and is following developments closely as chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: “The smell of death is everywhere.” Those are the words of the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, who is urging Israel to end its siege of northern Gaza. Lazzarini said, quote, “Our staff report they cannot find [food, water] or medical care. The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied. In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.” The words of UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini.
According to Palestinian health officials, Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 just over the past two days. Israel has ordered all Palestinians to flee their homes in Beit Lahia or face a new round of attacks. One drone strike in Beit Lahia killed 15 people, including women and children.
AMY GOODMAN: Images and video have emerged from northern Gaza showing Israeli forces separating Palestinian men from their families and taking them away. Almost all aid has been cut off to the area as Israel implements what’s been described as a “surrender or starve” policy. Hospitals in northern Gaza are under siege and barely able to function. This is Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.
DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] This situation means we are under what can be called a real genocide taking place against our people in the northern Gaza Strip. The health situation has completely collapsed. The world must act immediately to secure a safe humanitarian corridor to provide blood, supplies, medicines, equipment and medical staff, or the wounded will die in the coming few hours. Therefore, the world must understand what is happening now in the northern Gaza Strip: genocide, deliberate killing. Anyone who moves in the street is shot at. It’s clear that we are witnessing a real massacre against those present. …
Of course, the medical staff numbers are very low, and the volume of injuries is not at all proportional to the space available. Therefore, we had to implement the difficult triage system for cases. We had to leave some to die and some to live. Therefore, our capabilities are very limited. And so, the situation is catastrophic, my dear friend. The world must come now with pictures and words and images to see what is happening in the northern Gaza Strip: a real genocide against everyone who moves in the northern Gaza Strip.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital.
We’re joined now by Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza City. He’s chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. He’s joining us from Copenhagen.
Muhammad, welcome back to Democracy Now! It is so critical to have you with us. As you speak with people who are in northern Gaza, the devastating, horrific images that are coming out of there, under siege for more than two weeks, you’ve been in touch with a colleague of yours who is the mother of a 1-year-old. Can you describe what you’re hearing on the ground?
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, it’s a very close colleague of mine. She wrote me, basically this morning, that last night was the most violent since the war started. There was constant bombardment and shelling arbitrarily in the northern part of Gaza from 8:00 in the evening until 7:00 in the morning nonstop. It was an airstrike or a shelling literally every other second. The amount of it, the sheer intensity of it, was insane. And it’s been driving her very, very sort of — very worried about the survival of her family, but also suicidal by the mere thought that their turn is next at any moment. So, she’s saying, “I’m having these thoughts about how do I keep my son and husband alive, how do I stay alive myself. Give me advice where to go. What should I do? How should I get food?” And I cannot find any answer to any of these questions. There’s literally, literally, literally nothing is safe, and no access to food or water anymore.
Israel is implementing now a strategy that is in northern Gaza premised on four different pillars, one of which is mass starvation, quite literally mass starvation. The other one is mass killing and producing mass casualties, wounded people on mass scale. And then, the third one is shutting down all hospitals simultaneously, so that people with these wounds are destined to die if they don’t move south. And the last pillar is the mass expulsion, where you literally see Israel ordering people every day, “Move south. Move south.” And then they literally round them up from schools and hospitals and force them to line up on a death march and move to the south. I have friends who lost family members on some of these death marches, where you have to walk for dozens of kilometers under scorching heat or in the cold without any assistance, on foot, under constant fire, fully starved, with an empty stomach. And some people collapse and die on the way. I have never seen anything like this.
But on the other hand, I’m seeing Israeli politicians and media celebrating the footage of these death marches with utmost glee and utmost joy, that they see that this is the ultimate picture of victory. They are very open and honest that what they are doing now in northern Gaza has nothing — nothing — to do with Hamas. It has everything to do with the Palestinians in there. And they say that the reason why they want to depopulate it is because Palestinians believe that displacement is a thousand times worse than the war. It’s a deliberate strategy of humiliating, terrorizing and punishing the civilian population.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Muhammad, can you explain? Why is that? Why do Gazans think that displacement is a thousand times worse than the war? And if you could elaborate on how the Israeli press, in particular — you said a little about that now — how the Israeli press is covering the devastating conditions that you’ve just described in northern Gaza?
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, basically, the reason why they find it a thousand times worse is that as soon as you cross the line dividing Gaza, the Netzarim Corridor — it’s a four-kilometers-wide area that Israel has turned into a military zone dissecting Gaza in two halves — as soon as you cross it, you will never return north again. You have to kiss your home and your loved ones goodbye. You will never see your family members that are literally just a few minutes on the other side. It’s something like the Berlin Wall, but way more atrocious.
And once you cross to the southern side, what you will find there is an insanely overcrowded tent city, just tents upon tents upon tents, surrounded by mountains of garbage and pools of sewage water, heavily infested with diseases, no protection against the weather, no protection against the rain, and just left doomed to your own fate, basically surviving of handouts, humanitarian aid that is barely coming in. So, people find this as an absolute nightmare. And once you cross to the south, Israel is playing with people in the south like a ping-pong, moving them around like chess pieces all the time, moving them from Deir al-Balah to Khan Younis, and then from Khan Younis to Mawasi, and then from Mawasi to Khan Younis again, and back to Nuseirat. It’s a nonstop nightmare. And this constant instability, this constant uncertainty, is one of the worst things you can do to someone that is heavily shell-shocked and traumatized and in pure survival mode.
Israeli media has been very honest since at least August. So, Israel’s Channel 12, the most-watched Israeli television, they said in August that, quote, “The central victory in Gaza, the central victory, is the psychological warfare that is waged upon the Gazan population in northern Gaza.” Depopulating northern Gaza, for them, is the ultimate victory image. And they are very honest that amongst the people that will move out of northern Gaza are the Hamas members. They are not concerned with fighting Hamas in the north. They just want everybody to move out. Now Israel’s main liberal newspaper, Haaretz, has been warning since — for many weeks, but yesterday they came and officially said, the editorial board, they said Netanyahu’s government is now, quote, “paving the way to building settlements in Gaza,” building the path or facilitating the path to building Jewish-only settlements in northern Gaza after emptying it completely.
So, for Gaza’s population to be moved into an overcrowded, unlivable tent city, pure sand and rubble and the desert, and be shell-shocked all the time and squeezed more and more and more into tinier and tinier places, it is an absolute nightmare. And that’s the Israeli strategy. The reason why they adopt these strategies, what they themselves brag about, is that the images of these death marches count as a victory image for Israeli political parties and for the Israeli public to show that, look, the Palestinian public are being humiliated, are being terrorized, are being collectively punished, and with the sort of excuse that this pressure might at the end lead Gaza to either surrender or face complete demise.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Muhammad, you know, today, Antony Blinken, U.S. secretary of state, arrived in Israel, his 11th trip to the region since October 7th, 2023. If you could say whether you think anything might come out of this trip of his? There was talk earlier, which seems obviously to be false, that once Yahya Sinwar was killed, Israel would be more open to ceasefire negotiations.
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Yeah, I’ve been told that exact same thing repeatedly by American officials, by European officials and people from Israel, and even Arab officials, who kept saying that if Israel manages to get Sinwar, the war would stop, or we would double or significantly increase the momentum to end the war. But as soon as Sinwar was killed, you see every single one of those people playing dumb and deaf, just abandoning Gaza to its fate.
These performative visits and performative declarations, that there is a breakthrough, that the negotiations are happening, are just there as a pretense to buy time. There has been a deal on the table since at least July 2nd, the deal that President Biden put himself, that Hamas accepted fully on July 2nd with slight amendments in the updated formula, and Israel, as well. The message that the Qataris got from the Israelis is that Israel, as well, accepted that formula. And nonetheless, right after that ceasefire proposal was put on the table, Netanyahu went forth and killed the top negotiator in Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, and has been unleashing one massacre after another in Gaza and putting ludicrous terms that even his own security military establishment disagreed with completely, maintaining the occupation of Gaza in the Netzarim Corridor and Philadelphi, and merely having a six-week pause after which the war goes on again. So, these pretenses, Blinken’s visit, etc., it’s there just to buy time. It’s there to soothe people and pacify them and numb their outrage at what’s happening and unfolding in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, I want to ask you about the Israeli Cabinet members and officials with the ruling Likud party calling Monday for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza and for the ethnic cleansing of the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants. The far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke at a conference of settler groups and ultranationalists near Israel’s border with Gaza. This is what he said.
ITAMAR BEN-GVIR: [translated] We can return home to Gaza, and we can do another thing: to encourage Palestinian emigration out of Gaza, encourage emigration, encourage emigration. It’s the best and most moral solution, not by force, but by telling them, “We’re giving you the option: Leave to other countries.” The land of Israel is ours.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about the significance of this, Muhammad Shehada? He was then cheered after he said this. And also talk about whether you think that Netanyahu right now is pushing for a war with Iran that would serve the U.S. election to get Trump elected, his true ally.
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Yes, absolutely. So, in terms of Iran and Netanyahu’s ambition, yesterday, Israel’s top right-wing journalist, Amit Segal, he said it openly and publicly, that we want Trump to be back, because if he is back in office, Israel will get away with annexing major parts of the Gaza Strip and will get away with as much, for instance, in Lebanon or vis-à-vis the Iranians. He is actively trying to sabotage Kamala Harris’s campaign. It’s no secret.
But in terms of the Israeli security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the U.S. — every time that point is raised to them, they try to dismiss it or downplay it by saying this is a fringe minority in Netanyahu’s government. No, it’s not. Now you have at least half of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition that are officially, openly in favor of such plan of depopulating Gaza’s half and building settlements there and taking over and annexing parts of it. But the other half, the sort of silent half in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, many of them are also in that direction, even people in the Israeli opposition.
Now you have the Israeli political map vis-à-vis Gaza is fragmented between three different preferences. Number one is the one you mentioned, Amy, about resettling the Gaza Strip, building Jewish-only settlements in Gaza. Number two is the Netanyahu preference, building an Israeli military government, a military dictatorship, to rule the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future, and if the world is not happy with that, then a joint Arab or joint international mission to do Israel’s dirty work in Gaza, to pay for Gaza’s — sustaining life in Gaza on a humanitarian scale and do the sort of dismantling, disarmament of Hamas. And number three, the defense establishment, the moderate position and the opposition position is that Israel will rule Gaza militarily for the foreseeable future, a military occupation will stay in Gaza, but they don’t want to do anything with Gaza’s civilian aspect of governance. They want to outsource it to anybody else, so that they don’t have to pay anything for running Gaza. And you heard, for example, Israel’s former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who’s supposed to be the opposition to Netanyahu, a moderate, relatively speaking. As soon as Sinwar was killed, he said, “We will stay in Gaza for the foreseeable future.”
So, this is a very scary spectrum that you have on hand, that is setting forth the agenda for an indefinite war. And the only reason you can sort of change that, influence a change in there, is by basically pressuring Israel and cutting off the weapons supply. Without conditioning the weapons supply or cutting it off, there’s no hope of any positive alternative coming out of this.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Muhammad, before we end — we just have a minute — we would like to ask about your family. You recently saw in Egypt both your grandmother and your cousin. You say people who have even managed to get out look like ghosts of their former selves. If you could tell us what it was like, how your grandmother and your cousin appeared to you?
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, it’s a thought that I have to wrestle with all the time, is that the Gaza that I know is gone. And it’s not just the loved ones that were killed. I stopped counting how many I lost. And it’s not just the homes that were bombed. But it’s the physical debilitation, the physical weakening of the people in Gaza, even the ones that came out of it.
I got a message from my mom when my grandmother came out, and she said, “By the look of it, your grandma’s not going to be here for long. You have to come immediately and see her.” I went to see her. She was — before the war, she was this healthy, beautiful woman with a lot of jewelry on her hands, and she was very proud, traditional Palestinian clothing all the time. Now she was just mere skin and bone, with her feet swollen up in a very frightening way and complications with the digestive system nonstop. And she was bedridden completely, completely incapacitated.
I saw my cousin on the street, who was also a healthy, tall, beautiful woman in Gaza with smooth skin. That was her reputation, how she’s seen in the family. I saw her in the street. I didn’t recognize her. She did. And basically, she had shrunken. Her back is arched. She was skin and bone, a shorter person than the one I’m used to, with curled-up skin, very darkened skin, very rough skin. And I couldn’t recognize her anymore.
And I fear for the same fate of everyone I know in Gaza, that they have been changed and turned into ghosts physically, but also the mental debilitation. Before this war started, you had about 90% of Gaza’s population with PTSDs and 70% with persistent depressive disorder symptoms. Now it’s way, way, way uglier than that. Now I hear suicidal thoughts from everyone I know. And Gaza is culturally religious. There is the belief that suicide is the gateway to eternity in hell. But what Israel has done in Gaza is that it’s now pushing people to believe that God’s hell, no matter what, is going to be way better than the nightmare that is inflicted on Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we want to thank you for being with us, writer and analyst, originally from Gaza City, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, speaking to us today from Copenhagen.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by the acclaimed writer and activist Naomi Klein. She’ll discuss her new essay, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war,” as well as how conspiracy theories are impacting everything from the U.S. presidential election to hurricane relief. She writes about conspiracies in her book, now out in paperback, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Back in 20 seconds.
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Naomi Klein: Israel Has Weaponized October 7 Trauma to Justify Its Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
October 22, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/22 ... transcript
More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. “Though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7, this is a preexisting agenda,” says Klein, whose latest essay for The Guardian explores how Israel “has made trauma a weapon of war.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue our coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, we turn now to look at “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.” That’s a headline to a recent essay in The Guardian by our next guest, the award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, who examines how memorials to the October 7th attacks have stirred support for Israel’s limitless violence.
She writes, quote, “It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran.”
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein is professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is now available in paperback. She’s the author of many other books, including The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Naomi, it’s great to have you back in our New York studio, but horrifying during these times. If you can respond first to what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, in Lebanon, and then if you can relate it to this piece that you just wrote for The Guardian?
NAOMI KLEIN: Sure. Well, I think the first thing that we — what we need to understand, and I think we have seen this in the clips and in your previous interview, is that though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7th, this is a preexisting agenda. I mean, this is the settler movement, Ben-Gvir. I mean, all of these figures have always wanted Gaza depopulated. They’ve always wanted to settle Gaza. They’ve always believed it is part of so-called Greater Israel. So does Netanyahu. It’s part of their coalition agreement dating back to 2022 — right? — that they want the whole thing, and also the West Bank, by the way.
So, you know, I’ve written before about how states of shock are often exploited very cynically to ram through a preexisting agenda. And I think that’s absolutely what we’re seeing. But in order for that to work, the state of shock needs to be continued, heightened. There can never be a recovery. So the Israeli society needs to be reshocked and kept in this kind of trauma loop. And that’s what this piece about the kind of trauma industry is about.
And I want to be very clear: People have a right to grieve their loved ones. This is not about families gathering in grief. This is not about the right to remember and honor. It’s about state-orchestrated and -manipulated trauma. It’s a memorialization from above — right? — not from below, for a very specific end. And people in the Netanyahu government have been very clear that really what they’re doing with the way they are telling the story of October 7th is creating what they call a new national identity. And it’s a national identity that uses the trauma of that day to create a story that fuses October 7th with the Holocaust, and then uses that as the excuse for the genocide that we’re seeing right now.
So, you know, when we think about the horrors, that you’ve already outlined today on the show and, frankly, every show — right? — the deliberate starvation, the torment of an entire population, the torture of an entire population, the deliberate humiliation — how do you — and I think we all ask ourselves this question: How are people able to rationalize it? Right? And they’re able to rationalize it because within their information bubbles, they are being fed this constant story of “this is what they did to you,” a whole industry of reexperiencing it.
I mean, what I write about in this piece is all of these immersive, so-called memorialization kind of technologies, so it’s not only people in Israel, but in the diaspora, who are encouraged to put on VR goggles and reexperience October 7th as if it happened to them, immersive tunnels where you can go into the Gaza tunnels. It’s really an attempt to transfer trauma far and wide.
And in a state of trauma, you don’t really think. It’s pure emotion. It’s pure reaction. You can’t be analytical. You’re not going to be empathetic towards others. It’s about monsterizing the other and fusing your identity with the people in those houses, at the Nova music festival, in the tunnels. It’s very deliberate. It’s extremely manipulative. And it’s how you turn off any compassion or empathy or sense of ethics or morals.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, you point out that a number of hostage family members, in response to the state memorializations, as you put it, on October 7th, said, “Do not use our family members’ names. We don’t want to be a part of this,” as they fight for —
NAOMI KLEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — their family members to be released and a ceasefire, an end to Palestinian anguish.
NAOMI KLEIN: Oh yeah. I mean, this is — the way in which the government is weaponizing, instrumentalizing the deaths on October 7th and the hostages, the people who are most opposed to it are the families themselves, right? So, I begin the piece with the fact that, originally, the government’s plans for October 7th was to have this huge public event in the south. There were going to be thousands of people, I think 7,000 people. And they wanted to have, you know, members of the families there to testify. And kibbutz after kibbutz that was really, you know, on the frontline, like kibbutzim like Be’eri, said, “We’re not participating in this.” Then family members said, “Not only are we not participating, you can’t use our child’s name. You can’t use their image,” which is to not say that they’re not grieving. They had their own private, dignified ceremonies, vigils, you know, for people who are still alive. They just didn’t want any part of the pageantry and the weaponization of the government. They didn’t — and that was withheld.
You know, of course, the way my piece has been responded to through the sort hasbara channels is, you know, “Naomi Klein says we don’t have a right to grieve,” ignoring the fact that it’s the families themselves who have the most to grieve who are actually objecting the loudest within Israeli society.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could say, Naomi — you know, you just mentioned, which your piece talks about at length, the conflation of October 7th with the Holocaust. First of all, what that makes possible?
NAOMI KLEIN: Right.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Some of the examples of the ways in which that’s happened through these different memorialization practices that you outline? And then, whether an argument can be made for whether this is not precisely a kind of a trivialization of the Holocaust, a kind of banalization of it, which is precisely what survivors and scholars of the Holocaust warned against?
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. Yeah, I think it’s extraordinary, because one of the things that is happening from the same people who are trivializing the Holocaust in this way, they’re also — if you say what’s happening in Gaza is genocide, you know, they’ll throw their arms up in horror and say, you know, “That is impossible,” despite the immense scale and the deliberate plans and all of the markers, the announcements of intent — now, I’m not going to go into that. But they think nothing of saying that October 7th was — as if 80 years had not passed, as if it was not another continent, as if it was not another group of people, as if the power dynamics were not flipped on their head, that this day just grafts onto the Holocaust, as if it was 1945.
And so, this goes from everything from the Shoah Foundation adding another chapter — so, the Shoah Foundation, which is, you know, an incredibly important archive of testimonies of Holocaust survivors, now has added testimonies from survivors of October 7th. March of the Living tours of Auschwitz, now you hear from survivors of October 7th. So it’s a total conflation of these events. You know, in the piece, I tell a kind of extreme story of — they call it an art project. I wouldn’t call it an art project, but it’s some — it was a bizarre kind of stunt of taking — creating a juxtaposition of the iconic memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Berlin and hanging a pair of mocked-up bloodied pants that were to symbolize sexual violence on October 7th and suspending them over that memorial with drones and then saying “Never again?” — question mark — as if this is all the same event.
Now, Nermeen, you asked about: Well, what are the implications of this? The implications are that if you do conflate these events, of course, it justifies any response, right? And more than that, if you cast Palestinians as Nazis, if you create this continuum, this absolutely false continuum, then it actually, post facto, does a lot more work than that, because then, if Palestinians are Nazis, then the original crime in the creation of the state of Israel, which is the Nakba, which is the mass, forced ethnic cleansing, displacement of hundreds of thousands, more than 700,000, Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, is, like, after the fact, justified, right? So, if they’re Nazis, then the original crime that Israel can’t look at in its founding is sort of, after the fact, justified. This is the psychology of it. Of course, it makes no sense. But this is why it’s very dangerous, and it’s why we’re seeing this acceleration of kind of finish-the-job Nakba from Israeli politicians.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask, Naomi — one of the people that you cite in your piece, I mean, on the question of grief and grieving, is historian Gabriel Winant, whose piece in Dissent, which you take from, is headlined “On Mourning and Statehood.” It was a response to Joshua Leifer, a journalist, in the same journal, in Dissent. But I’d like to read a short excerpt. This is not what you quote, but it’s from his original piece. He writes, “The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief.” Now, Gabriel wrote that piece less than one week after October 7th. Now it’s over a year, over 42,000 Gazans killed. If you could elaborate on this? Because this is something that people have struggled with, you know, because, as you said earlier, people have a right to grieve what happened on October 7th, and yet there is this massive discrepancy.
NAOMI KLEIN: Massive asymmetry in who’s grievable, right? I mean, this is Butler’s term, Judith Butler’s term, that within a vastly unequal, white supremacist society, you have lives that are treated as more grievable than others. And so many justice struggles are about asserting that every life is grievable. And so, I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement is about asymmetrical grief in so many ways.
I mean, personally, I don’t think — I think there’s sometimes this idea that you can tell people not to grieve, because — you know, to sort of balance the scales. I don’t think grief is a very obedient emotion, from my experience. It’s highly disobedient and unruly. And I think it is dangerous, actually, to tell people that they can’t have the emotions that they’re having. I think it’s more constructive to try to redirect those emotions into a project that is liberatory, that is in solidarity, you know, create containers for grief that are not the weaponized containers or instrumentalized containers that are using that grief and turning it into a justification for genocide. So, you know, I have respect, but disagreement, with that position. But we need to wrestle with it.
You know, in the piece, I also quote a scholar, a Lebanese Australian scholar, Ghassan Hage, who talks about how he felt this pressure to grieve those deaths in a certain way after October 7th, in a way that he described as “supremacist mourning,” which had encoded in it the idea that these lives were more important, more precious than Palestinian lives, Lebanese lives. And that’s what we must reject on all counts.
The other thing that’s been pointed out many times is that you can’t really mourn when the bodies are still piling up, when there are bodies still under the rubble, when cities are being turned to dust. Mourning is something, actually, that you do once it’s over. And it’s not over.
AMY GOODMAN: You also quote Marianne Hirsch, a professor emerita at Columbia University, and you end your piece by applauding the group, Israeli Palestinian group, Zochrot, which means “remembering.” Talk about both.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. I mean, Marianne Hirsch is a wonderful scholar of different forms of memorialization and the way in which these sort of top-down — this top-down pageantry memorial creates a false experience, a sort of — she doesn’t use this term, but a prosthetic trauma.
The remembering, you know, if you break down the parts of the word “remembering,” it’s really putting the pieces of the self back together again. And the work of Zochrot, which is — you know, they’ve been doing work for many years, which is really about putting the pieces — like, Israel is based on erasure — right? — erasing the presence of — it’s every settler-colonial state — the United States, Canada, Australia. They’re all about erasing the original Indigenous presence there, renaming towns, denying that there are burial grounds. So, it’s actually the opposite of memorialization that happens. And so, what would real remembering mean in violent settler-colonial states? And it would be actually putting the pieces of the self back together again, which is this deeper form of remembering.