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

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 02, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/2/headlines

Israeli Attacks on Gaza Kill Hundreds over Bloody Weekend, Incl. Aid Workers, ICU Director, Reporter
Dec 02, 2024

Health officials in northern Gaza report Israeli attacks killed more than 200 people on Saturday. The dead included 40 members of the al-Araj family, who were killed in a single Israeli strike on a building in the Tel al-Zaatar neighborhood.

Israel has also killed a number of medical professionals and aid workers in recent days. On Friday, a drone killed Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of the intensive care unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia. A separate Israeli drone strike killed chef Mahmoud Almadhoun, who co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen that has fed Palestinians suffering hunger due to Israel’s blockade of food aid. Almadhoun was killed on his way to Kamal Adwan Hospital. On Saturday, Israel bombed a vehicle in Khan Younis, killing five people, including three aid workers with World Central Kitchen. Israel also killed a staff member of Save the Children on Saturday in an airstrike on Khan Younis.

Meanwhile, Maysara Ahmed Salah has become the 192nd journalist killed by Israel. He worked for the Quds News Network.

Attacks also continued on Gaza City, where residents of the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood gathered to clear the rubble and recover the bodies of loved ones killed in an overnight Israeli strike Saturday.

Mohammed al-Zaytouniyeh: “I want to tell the free people of the world that claim freedom and call on human freedom and peace. We ask, 'What has kept you silent for a year and a month?' People are undergoing a genocide, being killed, torn apart. Life is not possible here. It is hell. Other than the fact that there are no hospitals to take in the injured, nor are there cemeteries to take in the killed, nor are there people capable of pulling out bodies from under the rubble. What is the world waiting for? The free people of the world and its organizations, leaders, governments, what are you waiting for? Gaza is being annihilated. Gaza is being annihilated.”

U.S. Approves More Arms for Israel as Netanyahu’s Former Minister Says Israel Guilty of War Crimes
Dec 02, 2024

The Biden administration has reportedly approved another $680 million weapons sale to Israel, including thousands of additional joint direct attack munition kits and hundreds of small-diameter bombs. The deal is separate from the $20 billion arms sales recently approved by the U.S. Senate.

This comes as Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and committing war crimes in Gaza. Ya’alon, who served as Netanyahu’s defense minister from 2013 to 2016, made the accusations several times over the weekend, including in an interview on one of Israel’s biggest television channels.

Moshe Ya’alon: “To occupy, to annex, to cleanse, ethnic cleansing, look at the northern Gaza Strip and settle a Jewish settlement. That’s the point. There is no Beit Lahia. There is no Beit Hanoun. They are operating in Jabaliya and are essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”

France Says Israel Has Violated Lebanon Ceasefire 52 Times
Dec 02, 2024

Israel is continuing to strike Lebanon despite last week’s ceasefire. France has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire at least 52 times. Meanwhile, residents of southern Lebanon continue to return home to assess damage caused by Israel’s invasion, defying threats by Israeli forces not to travel south. This is Hamza al Outa, who ran a soup kitchen out of his home in the city of Baalbek, which was destroyed in the Israeli invasion.

Hamza al Outa: “This kitchen, where we used to cook in the month of Ramadan, we used to cook for special occasions to be able to feed orphans, residents and those in need that nobody is looking out for. … Two thousand five hundred people daily in Ramadan, 30 days, 2,500 people, used to eat the food from this kitchen. Are there rockets in this kitchen? What’s in this kitchen? They did not even show mercy to those in need. Even those in need, they did not spare. Where’s the mercy?”

Syrian Rebels Capture Aleppo in Surprise Offensive; Russia-Backed Syrian Gov’t Launches Air Attacks
Dec 02, 2024

In Syria, opposition forces are pushing toward Hama after launching a surprise offensive to seize most of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. Syrian and Russian forces have launched air attacks on the rebel-held cities of Idlib and Aleppo, a city where rebels were driven out eight years ago by Bashar al-Assad’s forces. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports 446 people have been killed in Syria since Wednesday. The offensive is being led by an armed group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which grew out of the Nusra Front, which had ties to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. We will have more on Syria later in the show.

NYPD Arrests 21 Anti-Genocide Protesters at Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade
Dec 02, 2024

Here in New York, police arrested 21 activists who disrupted the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday. The protesters briefly blocked off part of the parade route, unfurling a banner that read, “Don’t celebrate genocide! Arms embargo now. Free Palestine!” The following day, protests unfolded in malls and other retail sites across the U.S. as shoppers headed to stores for Black Friday sales. Palestinian rights groups had called on consumers to boycott Black Friday in protest.

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“Targeted & Assassinated”: Gaza Soup Kitchen Chef Mahmoud Almadhoun Killed by Israeli Drone
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 02, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/2/ ... transcript

Israel killed more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza on Saturday, including 40 members of a single family. The official death toll in Gaza is now over 44,000, although experts believe that is a vast undercount of the true figure. Israel’s onslaught has continued to kill medical and aid workers in recent days, including three people with World Central Kitchen, the head of the intensive care unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital, a staff member with Save the Children, as well as Mahmoud Almadhoun, who co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen that has fed Palestinians suffering hunger due to Israel’s blockade of vital food aid. Almadhoun was killed in an Israeli drone strike and is survived by seven children, including a newborn baby. His brother Hani Almadhoun joins Democracy Now! to discuss what he calls a targeted assassination. “My brother slowed down the ethnic cleansing of north Gaza, and that’s why he was taken out,” says Almadhoun. “This is a war against the civilians in Palestine.”

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 Gaza. On Saturday, Israel killed more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza, including 40 members of a single family. In recent days, Israel killed three aid workers with [World Central] Kitchen, the head of the intensive care unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital, a staff member with Save the Children, as well as Mahmoud Almadhoun, who co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen that’s fed Palestinians facing hunger due to Israel’s blockade of vital food aid. Almadhoun was killed in an Israeli drone strike. He’s survived by seven children, the youngest just a newborn.

We’re joined right now in Washington, D.C., by Mahmoud Almadhoun’s brother, Hani Almadhoun. He works as the director of philanthropy at UNRWA USA. He co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen with his brother.

Thanks so much for being with us, Hani. Our deepest condolences on the loss of your brother, following the loss of your other brother last year in Gaza. Can you tell us about your brother and what happened this weekend?

HANI ALMADHOUN: Thank you, Amy.

My brother Mahmoud was targeted and assassinated in the morning of Saturday at 9 a.m. He left the house, walked about 30 yards, and a drone was waiting for him and just launched its rocket, killing him on the spot. He was headed to Kamal Adwan Hospital, where for the past three or four weeks he’s been supporting the hospital with food, delivering food for them, delivering produce from other parts of Gaza, and, you know, even blankets. Everything he had, he gave it to the hospital when he felt the bombs were falling nearby and he could no longer cook for them.

He was targeted. When the folks who tried to rescue him, or they thought they could save his life, they tried to take into the hospital, sniper fire fired at them. So they tried again. They were shot at. So, they decided, by then, it was too late. They wrapped him in a blanket, took him home, said final goodbye and buried him in a makeshift grave.

And this is my brother, the humanitarian, the father of seven, the youngest who still does not have a name because there is no office in Gaza to give people names or birth certificates. He was debating — the last argument he had was either to name her Aline or Kawthar. And now she will grow without a dad.

He is my partner. He is my buddy. He’s my young brother, who closed every video he’s ever sent me, “I send this with greetings and appreciation to my friends in the United States of America,” despite the fact that the bombs killed our brother Majed, American bombs. Every video he would send, he would say, “For my friends in the United States of America.” And now he was assassinated, and the target was him. There was nobody else. He is a full-time civilian.

In fact, we miss him dearly, and we’re still processing this, but I worry for his seven kids. The oldest one is Omar, who was targeted four days before the killing of my brother, and he is already receiving medical attention. So, you can imagine having to break the news to a kid who’s 14 years old, telling him that his dad has been killed and now he is the family provider. It’s overwhelming, Amy.

And sadly, my brother is no longer here. We continue to pray for him and tell people, you know, we are still there at the Gaza Soup Kitchen. We’re not closing shop, not because we want to make a statement, but because we want to make sure our families have food to eat. This is hunger and famine, both in north Gaza and south of Gaza. My brother slowed down the ethnic cleansing of north Gaza, and that’s why he was taken out.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned that at the end of every letter he would offer a shoutout to the people of the United States, despite the fact that it was the Israeli military which is armed by the United States that killed another of your brothers. Can you explain what happened last year, Hani?

HANI ALMADHOUN: So, last Black Friday, about November 24th, an American airplane — I believe it was F-16 — dropped a big bomb on our family’s house, killing my brother Majed, his wife Safa, his daughters Riman, Siwar, Omar and Ali, the youngest of him 7 years old. And it’s unfortunate because he’s also a shopkeeper. He did not deserve to be killed using American weapons. It took us a week to recover their bodies. And we just observed the salam, or anniversary, of their killing by Israel.

And now, just a day after that, a couple of days after the anniversary of their killing, we observe the killing of our brother Mahmoud. This was so shocking, because Mahmoud has been — he’s not a nameless and faceless Palestinian like a lot of our family members are. He’s been — established a profile. He’s written an op-ed to The Washington Post. He was on NBC, talked about the work, and people know him. He just solves problems. He started a medical point that was saving lives when Kamal Adwan Hospital was sieged and people could not go. His medical point will really provide lifesaving care. He started a school. It operated for two months. And he put the U.S. flag on the school, and in Hebrew it says, “Please do not bomb,” and it was also bombed. So, even the Israeli press is asking the army what happened there. There was nobody inside that school. They still bombed it. And actually, they hit where it says “do not bomb” next to the American flag, and the sign disappeared because of the explosion. And few days later, they take out Mahmoud, our brother.

And it’s sad, because this is a policy supported by a progressive president, unfortunately. This is — you know, I work and I support the amazing work of UNRWA. As you know, they’re trying to ban UNRWA. And now they’re not only banning UNRWA, the largest humanitarian actor inside Gaza, they’re also going after small shops like our family’s soup kitchen that provided meals for 600 families, found out a way to deliver produce to the hospital. And we believe that’s why he was targeted, because Kamal Adwan Hospital, they wanted to have it lifeless and people leave the north, and Mahmoud delayed that because he delivered flour and canned goods and diapers and baby formula. This is no longer about killing any Palestinian who’s hurting the Israelis. This became about killing any Palestinian who’s helping the Palestinians, like my brother, like the other chefs who were killed in the south.

But this is tragic. We’re not going to be intimidated. Obviously, we grieve for our brother. He’s a good guy, and, you know, we have to take responsibility for his kids and make sure they’re taken care of. But also we’re going to make sure we do this as long as we’re able to, because his memory, that’s what he wanted us to do. And we continue this legacy. That’s why I’m talking to you here.

And this is why I want to make sure people know that real families that we know, that love this country very dearly, are also getting targeted. This is no accident. And they have nothing on my brother, Amy. I feel sorry saying this, but in December, the Israeli army abducts any man in the north. They would release them after 24 hours, after they check their records. Twice, the Israelis abducted him, like the hundreds of Palestinians, and they would release him after 24 hours. That tells you they have no interest in him, but they targeted him because of the humanitarian and lifesaving work in north Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you further, Hani, about what’s happened at Kamal Adwan Hospital. Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout, the director of the hospital’s intensive care unit, was also killed this weekend. If you could comment on what happened to him? And he was killed by an Israeli drone. Your brother, who was known as Chef Mahmoud Almadhoun, knew him very well. In fact, Dr. al-Kahlout had just asked him to help him find some tomato paste? I want to, before you answer, turn to Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout speaking to Al Jazeera before he was killed.

DR. AHMED AL-KAHLOUT: [translated] The explosions shot shrapnel that can break bones. Israeli forces destroyed the water tanks and sewage system for the 10th time. That’s a real problem for the functioning of the hospital. The situation is very dire.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout, who was killed this weekend, head of Kamal Adwan’s intensive care unit. Hani?

HANI ALMADHOUN: Yes, rest in peace, Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout. He’s a friend of the family. He’s our neighbor. He was killed exactly a day before Mahmoud. In fact, he gave my — he was able to give my brother painkillers, because my dad, who’s 72 years old, was hurt two weeks ago by Israeli quadcopter, and we couldn’t find painkillers. The doctor said he didn’t want anything. He asked if Mahmoud can do him a favor and get him tomato paste. Can you imagine this hero saving lives and can’t find tomato paste? And Mahmoud said, “I’ll find it for you.” And he went to the hospital, and boom, that day, the guy was assassinated. He’s the head of the intensive care unit.

Mahmoud has developed a friendship with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hero doctor, solving problems for him. In fact, 10 days before Mahmoud’s assassination, he delivered filtered water for the hospital for their dialysis unit. Can you imagine a civilian figuring out how to deliver filtered water for the hospital, not just for drinking, but also to run the dialysis unit? You can’t imagine how important Mahmoud was for the hospital. The hospital already sent their condolences. They’re worried about lack of his support. In fact, yesterday the shipment of produce that Mahmoud ordered just got to the hospital. You know, they are out of fresh food. They’re eating pasta and rice that’s delivered by UNRWA and the World Health Organization.

But yesterday I was in a conference call with Dr. Hussam, and he said, “Out of the 50 items we need, these organizations are able to deliver six or seven,” and he’s frustrated because he’s not getting the help he needs. And, you know, I’ve met the doctors. They’re not seasoned by any measure. They’re just fresh out of medical school, trying their best, doing things that — even nurses in Gaza are doing operations now, because there’s nobody else to do these things. And it’s unfortunate we continue to do this.

And the cruelty, Amy, my brother survived this genocide for 420 days, and then he’s killed. And he was telling me the day before, “Hani, there might be good news. They’re talking about a ceasefire.” It’s one thing to be killed early in the war and not suffer as much, but he was killed toward, I hope, to be the tail end of it.

He does not deserve to be killed. And I inquire and I challenge the Israelis to publicly say why they targeted my brother. We have full confidence that he is the person we know. He’s a civilian dad who wanted to help his neighbors, and everybody knows him and supported him, and we pray for him.

But also, we want to make sure people there, you know, they can still do things. You know, why are they banning UNRWA? Why is the U.S. defunding the U.N. agency? This is no longer about October 7th and the horrors. This is about ethnically cleansing north of Gaza. The south is also facing starvations. We run a soup kitchen there. And we went from a $1,000 budget to $5,000 daily budget just to get people some rice, because food is not available. But we want to respond. Despite our pain, my cousins and nephews and sister-in-law is cooking for people in four out of the five soup kitchens we continue to run. We’re not going to close, because this is our family, this is our commitment. We don’t cook for people, we don’t eat ourselves.

This is not — and this is risky. You know, it should not be risky. It should not be an heroic act to get water to the hospital. And that’s why I remember the 230 UNRWA staff who were killed, and not just UNRWA. You’ve mentioned the Save the Children. You’ve mentioned other organizations who have lost their staff. And —

AMY GOODMAN: World Central Kitchen.

HANI ALMADHOUN: Yes, correct. And unfortunately that sometimes, you know, Israeli accusations run in the media as a fact, and that’s — nobody challenges whatever allegations are made, because, “OK, it’s good enough for me.” Nobody’s going to push back. And in the case of my brother, we’re pushing back as much as we can.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, of course, you are not the only one who’s accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing. Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and committing war crimes in Gaza. He served as Netanyahu’s defense minister from 2013 to '16, made the accusations several times over television, including on one of Israel's biggest TV channels. This is what he said, and we’re going to end with your comment after this.

MOSHE YA’ALON: [translated] To occupy, to annex, to cleanse, ethnic cleansing, look at the northern Gaza Strip and settle a Jewish settlement. That’s the point. … There is no Beit Lahia. There is no Beit Hanoun. They are operating in Jabaliya and are essentially clearing the area of Arabs.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Your final comments, Hani?

HANI ALMADHOUN: This is our reality. This is the horrors my family faced. We’ve lost our brother last November. He is a full-time civilian, and they killed our brother. This is the price to pay for standing where we were raised. This is the memory of the Nakba. We learned our lesson from our grandparents who were ethnically cleansed. And now we refuse to do the same. But unfortunately, when they kill so many of our family members, our family relocated still in north Gaza, standing by, hoping that somebody watching, somebody listening, somebody from our government will definitely develop a conscience and try to save our people. This is no longer a war against terror. This is a war against the civilians in Palestine, including Gaza. Thank you so much.

AMY GOODMAN: Hani Almadhoun, again, our deepest condolences. Hani is director of philanthropy at UNRWA USA, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen with his brother, Chef Mahmoud Almadhoun. He was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Gaza on Saturday morning.

Coming up, we look at the surprise rebel offensive to retake the Syrian city of Aleppo. Back in 20 seconds.

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A New Front in Syria’s Civil War? Rebels Led by Former al-Qaeda Affiliate Take Over Aleppo
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 02, 2024

Syrian opposition forces have seized most of Aleppo after launching a surprise offensive in recent days that ousted government forces from the country’s second-largest city. The offensive is being led by an armed group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate that cut ties with them in 2017. Syrian and Russian forces have retaliated with airstrikes on rebel-held areas, with the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting 446 deaths in Syria since Wednesday. The rebel advance into Aleppo is the most significant turn in the Syrian civil war since 2020, when rebel forces were forced to retreat to Idlib. The offensive was launched at a time when the key backers of Bashar al-Assad’s government — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — are also focused on other conflicts. “It was a surprise offensive that people did not expect at all,” says Associated Press reporter Kareem Chehayeb.

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 Syria, opposition forces are pushing towards Hama after launching a surprise offensive to seize most of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. Syrian and Russian forces have retaliated by launching air attacks on the rebel-held cities of Idlib and Aleppo, a city where rebels were driven out eight years ago by Bashar al-Assad’s forces. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports 446 people have been killed in Syria since Wednesday. The offensive is being led by an armed group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which grew out of the Nusra Front, which had ties to al-Qaeda and the Islamic state. The rebel advance into Aleppo is the most significant turn in the Syrian civil war since 2020, when rebel forces were forced to retreat from Idlib. The offensive was launched at a time when the key backers of Assad’s government — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — are also focused on other conflicts.

For more, we go to Beirut, where we’re joined by Associated Press reporter Kareem Chehayeb.

Thank you so much for being with us. Can you explain what you understand took place this weekend, Kareem?

KAREEM CHEHAYEB: So, it was a surprise offensive that people did not expect at all, this insurgency led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but there were also other factions and armed groups, including those backed by Turkey. They swept through villages and towns across northwestern Syria, and they made their way into Aleppo. It really appeared early on that they faced virtually no resistance in their insurgency. And they collected vehicles and munitions left behind by the Syrian Army in parts of Idlib province that were under the government’s control.

Over the past two days, we’ve seen a counterinsurgency from the Syrian government, backed by Russia. They’ve launched airstrikes in the areas where the insurgents are present, whether it’s in Aleppo or in Hama, northern Hama province, but also in Idlib, including the city. And this is — the northwest of Syria is basically the last opposition-held bastion there. It appears also the Syrian government and the Army have created like a very strong defensive line in northern Hama. It seems soldiers are trying to sweep into the area to clear forces out. Numbers are still pretty murky, as well. The Syrian Army said today that their airstrikes alongside Russia killed some 400 insurgents. We’re not really sure about numbers of displacement, but there are concerns that it could be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people displaced. We’re trying to get clarity from that as soon as we can.

And there’s a lot of questions surrounding the political implications in Syria. The Iranian foreign minister was in Syria yesterday, met with President Bashar al-Assad, reiterated Iran’s full commitment to supporting Syria, as it has for the entirety of this conflict over the past well over a decade now. And today, upon the Iranian foreign minister’s visit to Turkey with his counterpart, it appears they’re trying to kick off, you know, diplomatic talks, which has been sponsored by Russia, which has over the years tried to bring Turkey and Syria back together in terms of restoring diplomatic ties. So, the coming days will be very crucial in terms of what happens on the battlefield and whether there will be political implications to this surprise attack.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the main group, that seems to have distanced itself from al-Qaeda, claims not to be sectarian? What is your understanding of this group?

KAREEM CHEHAYEB: So, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham did grow out of Jabhat al-Nusra, which was the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. And they basically are the most powerful group in the northwest Syria, notably in Idlib province. Over the years we’ve seen that their leader, al-Julani, has tried to take on a different image. You know, they’ve tried to appeal to minority groups, and you can even sort of see this right now in how they’re going about areas in Aleppo that are majority Christian or Syrian Kurdish, and they’ve sort of said that they’re not there to harm them and that they are — you know, they’re all Syrians and so on, more of a nationalist kind of language in their approach. That being said, there is mixed reporting about how the militants are treating the local residents, so it’s still very unclear. We’re trying to get confirmation on that. But what we do know is that al-Julani and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in particular, have tried to change their — change public perception about them, particularly from non-Muslim, non-Sunni minorities, notably the Christians, the Kurds and the Druze, in recent years.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also ask you about your reporting. I mean, you’re talking to us from Beirut. You filed a report Sunday about an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon, this despite the ceasefire.

KAREEM CHEHAYEB: Yes. So, the ceasefire went into effect last week, but the next 60 days — the first phase of the ceasefire appears to be very rocky. So, during this period of time, Hezbollah is supposed to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon to the north of the Litani. And the Israeli military has presence and control of dozens of villages and towns in southern Lebanon, and they’re still there. And the goal is for both of them to withdraw and to push deployment of the Lebanese army to ultimately become the sole armed presence of southern Lebanon alongside United Nations peacekeepers. That being said, there have been dozens of instances where Israel has struck parts of southern Lebanon and parts north of the Litani. There have been reports of Israeli jets, overflights, drone overflights, and this has pretty much frustrated the Lebanese government, the army.

Now, it’s really unclear what measures they’re going to take. Hezbollah has been very quiet on that front since the ceasefire. They’ve been focusing a lot on commemorating Hassan Nasrallah, their leader, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike back in September, doing some community work and that sort of thing. We do know that the army has been very public about these violations, particularly ones that have struck military personnel, and that they say they have complained, and the Lebanese government is doing the same, apparently.

This is a really big test for the new monitoring framework for the ceasefire, which is headed by the United States and is supposed to bring life back into this U.N. Security Council resolution from back in 2006 which they’re trying to have implemented right now. It’s really unclear what the Lebanese government is going to do beyond that, whether they’re trying to put the trust into the system and hope that Washington will ask the Israelis to maybe — you know, to stop these overflights and these attacks. It’s really unclear. But over the past few days, these issues are still continuing. And it has brought some doubt among some people in Lebanon about whether this ceasefire can hold.

AMY GOODMAN: Kareem, we’re going to have to leave it there.

KAREEM CHEHAYEB: The Israelis have not commented on —

AMY GOODMAN: We hope to do a post-show interview with you.

KAREEM CHEHAYEB: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Kareem Chehayeb is the Beirut-based journalist reporting on Lebanon, Syria and Iraq for the Associated Press.

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 03, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/3/headlines

Israel Kills 12 in Renewed Attacks on Southern Lebanon, Threatening to Unravel Ceasefire
Dec 03, 2024

Israel has renewed its attacks on southern Lebanon, killing at least 12 people and threatening to further unravel Israel’s truce with Hezbollah. With the latest attacks, the U.N. says Israel has committed more than 100 ceasefire violations since agreeing to halt attacks last week. In response, Hezbollah said it had fired rockets at northern Israel as a retaliatory measure. Earlier today, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz warned his military would no longer distinguish between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state if the ceasefire collapses.

Israeli Attacks on Gaza Lead to World’s Highest Rate of Child Amputees, U.N. Says
Dec 03, 2024

Israel has continued its unrelenting assault on Gaza, with attacks on the northern town of Beit Lahia today that killed at least eight people while leaving 20 others wounded. In Gaza City, dozens of civilians are feared trapped under the rubble of a four-story building leveled by an Israeli airstrike.

On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the situation in Gaza “appalling and apocalyptic” and said Israel may be guilty of the “gravest international crimes.” The U.N. reports Israel has killed at least 341 humanitarian workers since it began its massive assault on Gaza nearly 14 months ago. Meanwhile, Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees in the world per capita, with many children forced to endure surgery without anesthesia due to Israel’s blockade. And the World Health Organization reports more than 10,000 cancer patients remain stranded in Gaza, awaiting permission from Israeli authorities to seek care abroad. This is Dr. Mohammed Abu Afsh, director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Afsh: “Tragically, even with the necessary authorizations, they cannot leave. The Rafah crossing is closed. The Erez crossing is closed. The Kerem Shalom crossing is closed. Every exit point around Gaza is shut down. How can these patients leave? They are enduring unimaginable suffering. A mechanism and solution must be devised to allow them to exit Palestine for treatment.”

Trump Threatens “Hell to Pay” as Hamas Says 33 Hostages Were Killed by Israeli Airstrikes
Dec 03, 2024

Hamas said Monday that 33 people held captive in Gaza had been killed by Israeli strikes since October of last year, while other hostages had gone missing. Among those said to have been killed was Omer Neutra, a 21-year-old Israeli American tank commander detained by Hamas after its fighters raided an Israeli army outpost. Hamas also released a video showing Israeli American Edan Alexander, a soldier taken captive by Hamas on October 7, calling on President-elect Trump to negotiate a ceasefire and prisoner exchange. Hamas’s announcements drew a threat of renewed violence from Trump, who wrote on his social media site, “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East … Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.” On Sunday, Trump hosted Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and their son Yair at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

14-Year-Old Becomes Youngest-Ever Palestinian Sentenced to Prison by Israel
Dec 03, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have arrested at least 18 Palestinians over the past 24 hours. On Sunday, the youngest Palestinian ever to be imprisoned by Israel began a one-year sentence. Fourteen-year-old Ayham al-Salaymeh was convicted of throwing stones at Israeli settlers last year when he was just 12 years old. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports the boy was subjected to violence and humiliating treatment during an interrogation.

Meanwhile, B’Tselem has uncovered repeated cases of severe abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in Hebron. Victims describe being randomly seized by soldiers as they went about their daily affairs. They were then beaten and subjected to severe abuse, sometimes in full view of the public and at other times inside military outposts.

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“Acts of Massacre and Ethnic Cleansing”: Haggai Matar on Gaza War, ICC Arrest Warrants & More
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 03, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/3/ ... transcript

We’re joined in our New York studio by +972 Magazine journalist Haggai Matar to discuss the latest developments in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Matar is a former conscientious objector who previously refused to participate in Israel’s mandatory military service during the Second Intifada. At the time, says Matar, he was protesting war crimes committed by former chief of staff of the Israeli military Moshe Ya’alon, who is currently making headlines again after accusing the Israeli military of war crimes. For the Israeli public, which doesn’t “get the news that everyone else in the world is getting,” Ya’alon “just sounds like a madman,” says Matar. He urges protesters around the world to continue pressuring their governments and calling attention to Israel’s “horrific acts of massacre and ethnic cleansing” in an ongoing effort to hold Israel accountable and end its aggression in the region.

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.

Israel has renewed its attacks on southern Lebanon, killing at least 12 people, threatening to further unravel Israel’s truce with Hezbollah. With the latest attacks, the U.N. says Israel has committed more than 100 ceasefire violations since agreeing to a ceasefire last week.

Meanwhile, Israel has continued its unrelenting assault on Gaza, with attacks on the northern town of Beit Lahia today that killed at least eight people. Twenty others are wounded. In Gaza City, dozens of civilians are feared trapped under the rubble of a four-story building leveled by an Israeli airstrike. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the situation in Gaza “appalling and apocalyptic” and said Israel may be guilty of the “gravest international crimes.”

We’re joined now by the Israeli journalist and activist Haggai Matar. He’s an executive director of +972 Magazine and conscientious objector who refused to serve in the Israeli army. He has a new piece in The Nation out today, “For Those Who Know They Have Not Done Enough to Stop Israel’s War on Gaza.”

It’s nice to have you in studio. We usually speak to you in Tel Aviv, Haggai.

HAGGAI MATAR: It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: So, elaborate on that title in The Nation, the piece that you just wrote, for those who do not feel they’ve done enough.

HAGGAI MATAR: Sure, Amy. So, first, it started from a Yom Kippur reflection on myself of why have I not done enough. I’ve been running +972, co-directing Local Call in Hebrew, trying to fight for the rights of Palestinians and push back against the horrific acts of massacre and ethnic cleansing my country has been committing in Gaza. And yet it feels like it’s just not enough. And why have we not done enough? What could we possibly do more? So it started with a very personal reflection, trying to analyze the reasons of not doing enough, and then saying, “Well, we have to commit. We have to double down.”

And especially now with the upcoming Trump presidency, I think this is also a call to Americans saying your government is clearly not going to get any better at this in the near future. We need people on the ground mobilizing and taking action, supporting medias, trying to move the needle and pressuring Israel into ending these atrocities.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Haggai, I wanted to ask you about the International Criminal Court’s historic decision to indict Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In a statement, the ICC said that the Israeli leaders had, quote, “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival.” And how was this news received within Israel? And do you think it will have, in the long term, a major impact on Netanyahu and the policies of his government?

HAGGAI MATAR: Well, thank you, Juan. One of the most heartbreaking realities of the situation is that Israelis don’t get the news that everyone else in the world is getting, the images from Beit Lahia and from Jabaliya, the just atrocities that we’re seeing there, the death, the destruction, the starvation. That is not being shown on Israeli television, in Israeli newspapers.

And therefore, when something like this comes out, a decision from the ICC, basically, the response, from wall to wall — we’re talking about the entire Zionist politics, so that’s about 110 out of 120 members of the Knesset are just saying this is an antisemitic court, this is antisemitic media, like everyone is antisemitic, and, of course, you know, just offering complete support to Netanyahu, even the people who hate him the most.

An exception to that has been, in recent days, Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, a former chief of staff, was actually the chief of staff that sent me to two years in prison for his war crimes, now saying, “Yes, these warrants are justified.” The prime minister —

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that —

HAGGAI MATAR: Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — for one minute, the clip of the former defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and committing war crimes in Gaza. Again, served as the defense minister of Netanyahu from 2013 to '16, made the accusations over the weekend in main television interviews on Channel 12, for example, one of Israel's biggest TV channels.

MOSHE YA’ALON: [translated] To occupy, to annex, to cleanse, ethnic cleansing, look at the northern Gaza Strip and settle a Jewish settlement. That’s the point. … There is no Beit Lahia. There is no Beit Hanoun. They are operating in Jabaliya and are essentially clearing the area of Arabs.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a main Israeli channel, not actually Channel 12, Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Haggai Matar, does he speak to the Israeli public? And explain more the significance of who he is.

HAGGAI MATAR: So, Ya’alon was the chief of staff in the Second Intifada. That’s when I refused the draft because of his war crimes. We were at the time chanting at him, “One day we’ll see you at The Hague.” We never imagined it would be as a witness for the prosecution. To suddenly see him talking about the same sort of actions that he was doing, but clearly much, much worse right now, the ethnic cleansings, the starvation that he’s enforcing, is absolutely incredible.

He’s doing it as part of his attempt to fight against the Netanyahu drive for authoritarianism, so he’s been very active in the kind of so-called Israeli protests for democracy even before the war in Gaza. That has been his policy. I think he connects the dots, as one should, between the attack on democratic institutions inside of Israel and the ethnic cleansing and massacre and war crimes against Palestinians.

However, unfortunately, in interviews where he’s been going on Israeli television, basically, from wall to wall, journalists have been saying, “Are you mad? You are just endangering our soldiers. What are you talking about? There’s no war crimes.” So, because viewers don’t have the context of what has actually been happening, he just sounds like a madman to many people. But I do think it does cause some people pause to think, “Why would someone with his credentials make such serious accusations?”

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Live Report: Activists Occupy Canadian Parliament Building to Protest Gaza War & Arming of Israel
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 03, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/3/ ... transcript

“Canada needs to stop arming Israel and implement an immediate arms embargo.” In Ottawa, over 100 Jewish activists began a sit-in inside a Canadian parliamentary building Tuesday to demand Canada stop arming Israel. Rachel Small, a member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition and a member of the sit-in, says that the Canadian government’s claims that it is halting arms shipments to Israel are obfuscating the fact that Canadian weapons are still being transported via the United States. “We’re here to make sure that they … actually cut off the flow,” says Small. Such protest “is what we should be seeing more of,” adds Israeli journalist and former conscientious objector Haggai Matar.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: Haggai, you asked if people are doing enough. I want to break into this conversation with this breaking news. In Canada, about 150 Jewish activists and allies have just launched a protest inside the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa to demand Canada stop arming Israel.

We’re joined now by Rachel Small, a member of the group Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition.

Rachel, can you describe where you are and what you’re doing and what you’re calling for?

RACHEL SMALL: Thank you. We are in a Parliament Hill building. Right now we have completely taken over the lobby of this building, that has hundreds of parliamentarians’ office in here.

Our demand is clear: Canada needs to stop arming Israel and implement an immediate arms embargo. We know that every F-35 fighter jet, every Boeing Apache helicopter dropping bombs on Lebanon and Gaza right now is full of hundreds of Canadian components. We’re here as Jews to say this violence cannot continue in our name. And we’re here as people of conscience to say that the absolute bare minimum Canada needs to be doing right now is stop arming a genocide.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Haggai Matar, your response to these kinds of actions occurring abroad? Does this have an impact on the Israeli public?

HAGGAI MATAR: Well, first of all, I want to commend the activists on the ground now in Ottawa. It’s incredible. This is the exact kind of protest that people should be taking on in Canada, definitely in the U.S., which is the biggest supplier of weapons and funding and diplomatic support to Israel. So, yes, this is what we should be seeing more of.

I’m afraid that in Israel, again, these protests are usually seen as antisemitic or, in the case of Jews protesting, of self-hating Jews or people that are unhinged. That’s the way it’s being perceived. It’s our job as Jewish Israelis on the ground, talking in Hebrew, talking to people in our communities, to try and help them understand that it’s not the world that has gone mad, it’s us.

AMY GOODMAN: Interesting that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, just met with President-elect Trump in Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Rachel Small, we’re looking at the group of people. One of them, I think, says “Jews for a Free Palestine.” What has been Trudeau’s position? And what’s going to happen to you this morning?

RACHEL SMALL: We have seen an unprecedented wave of resistance across Canada over the past 13 months, many, many thousands of people across the country not only petitioning their MPs, not only protesting, not only meeting with them, but actually holding blockades at weapons factories, doing just really everything we can to get Canada to stop arming Israel.

And that pressure has resulted in the Canadian government taking a stance that we would have not thought possible a year or two ago. They have committed to stop arming Israel. They have, in fact — the foreign affairs minister recently, in fact, said that Canadian weapons are not going to be going and used in Gaza.

Unfortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, we know that they have not tackled all the permits, and they have continued to conveniently send weapons to the U.S. without even requiring a permit. Those are going into every F-35 Israel is using. That is going into Israel’s primary weapons of war.

So we have backed the Canadian government into a corner where they know what the right stance is. They know they need to stop arming Israel. And we’re here to make sure they do it. The broad Arms Embargo Now coalition has come together across the country and has, in fact, gotten 45 parliamentarians to formally endorse the call for an arms embargo. We just need the government to step up and take that action to actually cut off the flow of all weapons to and from Israel. It’s the bare minimum they need to be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Rachel Small, member of Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition. If you’re having a little trouble understanding her, she’s inside the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. There are scores of people behind her, lead Canadian organizer with World — with the group World Beyond War. And in the studio with us in New York, though usually in Tel Aviv, is Haggai Matar, Israeli journalist, activist, executive director of +972 Magazine, a conscientious objector himself. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Haggai, we only have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you about President-elect Trump’s decision to select former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is not only a leading U.S. Christian Zionist who’s openly advocated for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he declared in 2008 that there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. What do you expect from this kind of ambassador from the new Trump administration?

HAGGAI MATAR: So, obviously, Trump appointments and Trump policies are terrifying to us and should be, too, to anyone who cares about the rights of Palestinians. I do want to also point out, however, Trump policies have an inherent contradiction. As an isolationist, Trump does not want to get involved in too many wars. As someone who wants to break deals with Saudi Arabia and Arab Gulf states, he may want to ensure that they don’t drift into the Iran-China field of influence. And those two policies, being pro-annexation and pro-settlements and pro-Israel and being pro-war and wanting to sign deals, they collide. And I think it’s our role on the left to kind of put a wedge in there and try and make sure that it becomes more and more apparent how those policies conflict with each other.

AMY GOODMAN: Haggai Matar, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Israeli journalist, activist, executive director of +972 Magazine, former conscientious objector, refused to serve in the Israeli army.

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 04, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/4/headlines

Israel Bombs Gaza Food Distribution Center, Killing Palestinian Children
Dec 04, 2024

In Gaza, at least five people, including four children, were killed today in an Israeli drone strike on a food distribution center and a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Elsewhere, at least two people were killed when Israel bombed residential buildings in Deir al-Balah, where others remain missing under the rubble. In the Bureij refugee camp, Israeli warplanes struck a U.N.-run school sheltering displaced Palestinians, setting more than a dozen tents ablaze and killing a Palestinian medic. Meanwhile, in Beit Lahia, three medical workers were wounded on Tuesday, one of them critically, when Israel bombed the Kamal Adwan Hospital. The hospital’s director reported quadcopter drones were seen dropping bombs packed with shrapnel. It was Israel’s fifth attack on the hospital in recent weeks. In Khan Younis, a massive line formed Tuesday as Palestinians queued for rations of flour at a U.N.-run food distribution center. Many of them described long and fruitless days searching for bread or other staples amid Israel’s stifling blockade.

Lina al-Basiouni: “This bag of flour we received won’t last a month, not even with careful rationing. We appeal to the United Nations, UNRWA, UNICEF and all international organizations working to support displaced people or Palestinian refugees to preserve our cause, to help us, to do everything they can and dedicate all their efforts to help the displaced in Gaza, because our situation is so difficult.”

Canadian Peace Activists Hold Parliament Hill Protest to Demand Israel Arms Embargo
Dec 04, 2024

In Ottawa, Canada, over 100 Jewish peace activists staged a sit-in protest Tuesday inside a parliamentary building, demanding Canada stop arming Israel. At least 14 protesters were arrested and issued trespass notices. The Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition is demanding Canada cancel all active military export permits to Israel and close loopholes allowing weapons to reach Israel via the United States without requiring permits. They’re also calling on Canada to halt purchases of Israeli military hardware. Click here to see our interview with one of the protesters as the sit-in was taking place.

Syrian Armed Groups Advance on Hama City After Seizing Aleppo
Dec 04, 2024

Syria’s state news agency reports Syrian troops backed by Syrian and Russian warplanes are fighting fierce battles in the central Hama province, as rebels seek to build on their surprise takeover of Aleppo last week. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports the armed groups had captured several settlements just outside Hama city and have begun shelling some neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said Tuesday the United States had carried out strikes in eastern Syria in response to a rocket launch near a base housing U.S. troops. The Pentagon did not say who was responsible for the rocket attacks or who it had fired on. Elsewhere, Israel carried out an airstrike on a car near Syria’s capital Damascus on Tuesday. A Lebanese security source told Reuters the attack killed a senior Hezbollah figure responsible for liaising with the Syrian Army.

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 05, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/5/headlines

Amnesty International Concludes Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
Dec 05, 2024

Amnesty International has concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This is Amnesty researcher Budour Hassan.

Budour Hassan: “We have documented Israel’s perpetration of three out of the five prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention since the 7th of October. These include killing members of the group, causing them serious mental or bodily harm and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. For example, this would include the destruction of essential infrastructure, including homes, agricultural land, water and sanitation infrastructure and infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population. They also include the mass repeated displacement under inhumane and unsanitary conditions. And they also include the deliberate obstruction of entry of lifesaving supplies and aid.”

Israel is intensifying its attacks on Khan Younis in southern Gaza. An attack on an encampment in al-Mawasi, a so-called safe zone, killed at least 21 people. Survivors described a “fireball” that “incinerated” people, including mothers and their children. Palestinians who gathered to grieve the dead responded to the Amnesty report.

Iyad Abu Mustafa: “The time has come for the international community to move on all fronts to question and hold Israel to account for the crimes — war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide crimes — that it is carrying out.”

The massacre in al-Mawasi was just one of multiple deadly attacks launched by Israel over the past day, killing at least 48 people overall. Attacks on the Indonesian Hospital in northern Beit Lahia — which is also acting as shelter — set the facility’s water tanks ablaze.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces are continuing to attack southern Lebanon by air, in violation of a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.

Syrian Gov’t Withdraws from Key City of Hama as Opposition Forces Advance
Dec 05, 2024

Syria’s government says it has withdrawn its forces from Hama as armed opposition fighters began entering the key Syrian city. It’s another major blow to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after opposition fighters last week seized Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city.

Armed groups now control much of Syria’s northern Idlib province, where civil defense workers report Russian airstrikes on five healthcare facilities have killed at least 18 people and injured nearly three dozen others. Doctors and paramedics at Aleppo University Hospital say they’re suffering severe shortages of personnel and medical supplies.

Abdul Razzak: “Hospitals are often put out of service. There’s a lack of staff and equipment. All hospitals are out of service due to the bombing of hospitals.”

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 06, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/6/headlines

Leader of Syrian Opposition Says HTS in Control of Hama as Groups Seeks to Overthrow Assad
Dec 06, 2024

In Syria, the leader of the powerful armed opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a former al-Qaeda affiliate — has declared that opposition forces have taken complete control of the central city of Hama. In an interview with CNN published today, Abu Mohammad al-Julani said his group’s ultimate goal is to overthrow Syria’s authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad. Armed groups now control Hama’s military airport and were seen freeing prisoners from the city’s jails. They’ve since pushed further south, claiming “complete and rapid control” of the northern suburbs of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city. Overnight, thousands of Homs residents fled toward Syria’s western coast. On Thursday, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement pledged its support to the embattled Syrian government, which faces one of the largest challenges to Bashar al-Assad’s authority in 13 years of bloody civil war.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Syrians displaced by violence are struggling to survive amid freezing temperatures. This is Shafiqa Saeeda, a Yazidi Syrian whose family fled to a camp in northern Syria.

Shafiqa Saeeda: “We were staying in al-Shahba. They said the Free Syrian Army would enter the area. We were afraid because there were women with us. We were afraid that they would kidnap them from us. … Our baby grandson was born on the third day here. We were sleeping outside. There was no tent or anything. We didn’t find anything to eat when we got hungry, and there were no ovens to cook. The baby was born here, and we named him Afrin, after our city.”

Israeli Forces Continue Deadly Attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital, Killing 4 Staff
Dec 06, 2024

The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza has again come under intense attack by Israeli forces, who stormed the beleaguered facility, making arrests and ordering others to evacuate. Kamal Adwan’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, also reports many deaths and injuries from Israeli strikes, including four medical workers who were killed. Abu Safiya, who himself was severely wounded in an Israeli attack last month, called the situation “catastrophic.”

“The Ghost of Famine Is Here”: Al-Mawasi Soup Kitchen Strives to Feed Thousands in Southern Gaza
Dec 06, 2024

In southern Gaza, a director of a soup kitchen in al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis, says many families rely solely on one meal per day from his operation, after the World Central Kitchen paused its Gaza distributions following an Israeli airstrike that killed three of its workers last weekend.

Hani Abou al-Qassem: “Now the ghost of famine is beginning to appear here in the southern Gaza Strip. These families can’t afford even the low-priced materials and have no source of food except from this charity. Families are relying on this soup kitchen as their only means, as they found their haven in it. Currently, we are serving more than 800 families, equivalent to approximately 4,000 people.”

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Amnesty International: Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza with Full U.S. Support
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 06, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/6/ ... transcript

Amnesty International has released a landmark report that concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, making it the first major human rights group to do so. The nearly 300-page report examines the first nine months of the Israeli war on Gaza and finds that Israel’s actions have caused death, injury and mental harm on a vast scale, as well as conditions intended to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza. Both Israel and the United States have rejected Amnesty’s conclusion. Amnesty researcher Budour Hassan, who covers Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, dismisses the criticism and says, if anything, Amnesty’s intervention took too long because of how carefully the group gathered and verified its information. “We tried to be absolutely true to the definition of 'genocide' under the Genocide Convention,” says Hassan, who urges U.S. officials in particular to do more to stop the bloodshed. “If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tools to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: In a landmark report released Thursday, Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the first time a major human rights organization has labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza following the October 7th attacks of 2023 as genocide.

This is a video released by Amnesty International to accompany its new report. “'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza” is the name of this video. It features Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard and their Israel-Palestine researcher, Budour Hassan. It begins with a clip of former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

YOAV GALLANT: [translated] We are laying a complete siege on Gaza — no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.

AGNÈS CALLAMARD: For over a year, we’ve witnessed utter carnage unfolding right before our eyes in the occupied Gaza Strip, with no end in sight. Many have described this carnage as the first live-streamed genocide, day after day. What has your government done to prevent this genocide? What have your political leaders done? What are they doing now?

ON-SCREEN TEXT: “'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”

NARRATOR: Israel has been waging an ongoing and devastating offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip. More than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed and tens of thousands injured, nearly 2 million displaced, neighborhoods flattened, aid and lifesaving supplies restricted — all sparking an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.

The term “genocide” has increasingly been used to describe Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But how can we assess whether what is happening is actually genocide? The first treaty to explicitly define and criminalize genocide in international law was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 in response to the atrocities of World War II. To prove genocide has taken place, you need to show that one or more acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention was carried out and that it was “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — in this case, Palestinians.

BUDOUR HASSAN: As part of Amnesty International’s research, we have documented Israel’s perpetration of three out of the five prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention since the 7th of October. These include killing members of the group, causing them serious mental or bodily harm and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. For example, this would include the destruction of essential infrastructure, including homes, agricultural land, water and sanitation infrastructure and infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population. They also include the mass repeated displacement under inhumane and unsanitary conditions. And they also include the deliberate obstruction of entry of lifesaving supplies and aid.

NARRATOR: It is clear the Israel authorities have deliberately inflicted these conditions and knew they would inevitably result in a deadly mix of hunger and disease, which brings us to the other important component of the crime: the intent to destroy.

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] Three, two, one.

PRESIDENT ISAAC HERZOG: It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not were — were not aware, not informed. It’s absolutely not true.

BUDOUR HASSAN: The racist, dehumanizing and genocidal statements call for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and making Gaza unlivable. They provide evidence for Israel’s intent to physically destroy Palestinians. As part of Amnesty International’s research, we reviewed over 100 statements made by Israeli officials, and these statements clearly were echoed by Israeli soldiers on the ground.

BRIG. GEN. YOGEV BAR SHESHET: [translated] Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth — no houses, no agriculture, nothing. They have no future.

NARRATOR: Specific genocidal intent should be assessed through analyzing the most recent conflict, while taking into account a system of apartheid, a brutal occupation and the 17-year unlawful blockade of Gaza — a history of systematic human right violations built on the continuous dehumanization of Palestinians.

BUDOUR HASSAN: We have documented an unprecedented scale, speed and seriousness of inhumane acts in Gaza. Palestinians are facing overwhelming trauma and pain. We have interviewed parents digging up the remains of their children with their own hands. And we have documented the mixture of hunger and disease that has ravaged Gaza, all while the healthcare sector has collapsed completely.

AGNÈS CALLAMARD: This must stop. And for genocide to end, governments around the world must come together, and they must take action, resolute action. You must ask that they stop transferring weapons that are murdering children in their thousands and decimating entire Palestinian families. You must demand that justice be delivered, that all those responsible for the genocide be held to account. Perpetrators benefit from the inaction and the complicity of too many of our political leaders. No war criminals should ever be allowed to walk free, undisturbed, fearless. Let’s put all our instruments into action — national tribunals, universal jurisdiction, International Criminal Court. Governments must do everything in their power to end Israel’s genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard, part of a video Amnesty released along with its 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.

Israel has rejected the charge of genocide, describing the report as, quote, “fabricated” and “based on lies.” This is Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sharren Haskel.

SHARREN HASKEL: Amnesty International thinks that you’re stupid, because they think that in the 101 pages report that they actually produce, you will not read them. In this report, they actually altered and changed the legal terms and definition for what is a genocide, because Israel doesn’t meet those criterias. So Amnesty International had to alter it.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. State Department also said they, quote, “disagree” with Amnesty’s report and continue to find allegations of genocide “unfounded.”

For more on the report, we’re joined by Amnesty International researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Budour Hassan. She’s joining us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Budour, we saw you in this video report. If you can respond to what the Israeli government and the U.S. said, and tell us more about why Amnesty has taken this position, the first among international major human rights organizations, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?

BUDOUR HASSAN: Thank you for having me again, Amy.

Actually, if anything, the question that should be asked: Why did it take Amnesty this long to produce this report? Not why we have adopted this approach in the first place. And one answer to that is, if anything, we tried to be absolutely true to the definition of “genocide” under the Genocide Convention, but also to follow suit with the jurisprudence on genocide, including the main decisions taken by the International Court of Justice on what is genocide. And because we are talking about strict and narrow definitions, our report, and those who can read the legal section — and apparently the Israeli spokesperson failed to read that — will see that we absolutely adopt the definitions and the jurisprudence taken by the International Court of Justice, especially on the interpretation of what is specific intent.

And, in fact, this is why also it took us so long to produce this report, because we wanted to produce something that can be used by those who want to charge Israel with genocide. We wanted to produce strong enough evidence both for the commission of the prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention — in this case, killing Palestinians deliberately, inflicting them life-changing injuries, and inflicting upon them also conditions, destructive conditions, of life that would cause their slow death.

And we found that when we analyzed this conduct — and we based our analysis both on evidence collected on the ground through our fieldworkers, who have been working tirelessly on the ground in Gaza since the 7th of October, and also on the analysis of satellite imagery, on the analysis of all publicly available evidence that we could reach — we found that these prohibited acts were indeed committed.

And the next question was whether these acts were committed intentionally and with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians as a protected group or as such. And then we again followed the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, which is how you infer specific intent. You do infer it through two types of evidence. You do look at the pattern of conduct that the Israeli military has been adopting, which include the scale, severity and seriousness of attacks, the repetition of the attacks, the cumulative effects of these attacks, the totality of evidence that you can find on the ground. And secondly, you also look at the direct evidence, which is the statements that we heard from Israeli officials.

At Amnesty, we looked at more than 100 statements issued by Israeli officials, including 22 statements issued by high-ranking Israeli officials and military officers responsible for the war and security cabinets and responsible what is happening on the ground. We then looked at how these dehumanizing, derogatory and racist statements that called specifically for the destruction and annihilation of Gaza, for equating Palestinians in Gaza, all of them, to Hamas, and for calling for the large-scale destruction of life in Gaza — we saw how these statements were echoed by Israeli soldiers. We verified 62 videos in which soldiers appear to be echoing these statements while celebrating the destruction of Palestinian universities, mosques and agricultural lands.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go directly to the U.S. State Department, who — they have said they disagree with the conclusions of Amnesty’s report. This is an exchange between reporters Prem Thakker and Said Arikat in the State Department press briefing with State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel.

VEDANT PATEL: What I can say, as a spokesperson of the U.S. government and as a spokesperson of this administration, is that the findings of — the accusations of genocide, we continue to believe those to be unfounded. … to provide as it relates to that.

SAID ARIKAT: So, if you’ll indulge me just a little bit.

VEDANT PATEL: Sure.

SAID ARIKAT: I mean, look, we have seen almost 2 million people being forcibly moved from one place to another. This morning — this morning — al-Mawasi was bombed, an area that Israel designated as safe haven for people to go to. They bombed it. They killed 20 people. What does it take? Does it have — do the whole population of Gaza have to be annihilated for you to term it genocide? What are we waiting for on this issue, Vedant?

VEDANT PATEL: Said, I’m just not going to get into —

SAID ARIKAT: Oh, sure. Fine.

VEDANT PATEL: — this rhetorical hypothetical.

PREM THAKKER: So, we’ve seen the targeting of thousands of journalists, medical staff, humanitarian workers, infrastructure workers; the total decimation of agriculture, religious sites, homes, residential blocks; the destruction of neighborhoods, memories, bloodlines. Northern Gaza is ethnically cleansed to a great extent. Doctors, including from America, say that they’ve seen kids deliberately sniped. How many acts of genocide does it take to make a genocide?

VEDANT PATEL: So, look, I am just — I appreciate what you’re trying to do with the way that you phrased that question, but let me just say again unequivocally that the allegations of genocide, we find to be unfounded.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel responding to journalists Prem Thakker of Zeteo and Said Arikat of Al-Quds. If you can respond, Budour Hassan, as you sit there in the occupied West Bank, as you sit there in Ramallah, having just been a major part of producing this report of Amnesty International?

BUDOUR HASSAN: One question that was addressed was how long would it take for the United States to acknowledge the severity of what’s happening in Gaza. The United States administration is not only denying that a genocide is happening in Gaza, it’s denying that human rights violations are being committed by the Israeli authorities in Gaza.

And we know, Amy, probably in four or five years’ time, those very same people who are now denying that a genocide is happening, once they become retired officials, they will say, “It happened under our watch, and we did nothing to stop it.” And they will probably give speeches in which they are awarded money in order to come and say, “We knew that this was happening. We could not stop it.” And unfortunately, this has been happening so often.

And this is — if anything, it’s a damning indictment of the United States’ failure to stop Israel’s violation. If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tool to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, this reminds me of 30 years ago almost exactly, when Madeleine Albright was secretary of state and Bill Clinton was president, and they were continually challenged about what was happening in Rwanda. And they refused to use that term “genocide,” because if they did — well, can you talk about what it would mean, what it would trigger, if they used the word “genocide”? And by the way, in that case, they would later apologize and say they were wrong.

BUDOUR HASSAN: But what would these apologies — how would these victims read the apologies?

AMY GOODMAN: Right. Forget the apology. Talk about —

BUDOUR HASSAN: And I think it’s not only the guilt of —

AMY GOODMAN: Forget the apology. Talk about what it would mean if they use the word “genocide.” What does that trigger internationally, in terms of the world bodies, at the U.N., and the response?

BUDOUR HASSAN: Obviously, considering that genocide is a crime under the ICC statute, and considering that we’re talking about something that is absolutely prohibited — genocide is never justifiable, not even in an armed conflict, which means that those who continue to arm Israel while it is committing genocide are guilty of being complicit. And complicity in genocide is also prohibited under the Genocide Convention. So, the States, part of why they are denying not only that genocide is being committed, but that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity are also being committed, is that they don’t want to risk being accused of complicity in these crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Budour, you are in Ramallah. You’re in the occupied West Bank. If you can talk about what’s happening in the West Bank right now, with members of the war cabinet talking about wanting to annex the whole area? What is actually happening on the ground?

BUDOUR HASSAN: Not to deflect the question, Amy, but just because this report that we worked on was not just addressed to the international community or the court, it was mainly addressed to the victims, I would just ask you to give me just a couple of seconds really just to talk about the victims.

We interviewed 212 people in Gaza, including victims of airstrikes. People who lost their entire families agreed to speak to us to share their experiences, their grief. We went back to interview some of those we interviewed way back in October and November. We went back to interview them in October this year to tell them about the report. And we saw how even a year — after a year had passed since they lost the entirety of their families, the scars of their loss never left them. One of the parents whom we interviewed again told us, “I don’t want people’s sympathy. I want my children back.” And we know that no one can really bring his children back, but he also added that “At least what we can do and what I want you to do is to fight as hell for me to get the justice that my children deserve.” This is a parent who lost his wife, all of his three children, his sister and his parents. And these stories happened all over again.

We also talked to people who face daily humiliation while they are waiting on queues for bread, for clean water for hours upon hours, people who were displaced repeatedly. Some were displaced for 12 times. And if anything, why these people would agree to talk to you is because they are waiting for justice, is because they believe that at least it is our duty to bear witness to the ongoing carnage and to name it for what it is: genocide.

Now, concerning what’s happening in the West Bank, I think all the attempts of Israel is to annex more and more land from the West Bank, including through military orders, including through designating land in the West Bank as state land. It’s part of Israel’s onslaught, and full-throttled onslaught, on Palestinian existence, on this land, on Palestinian memory, on Palestinian presence. This fight, this onslaught, takes many shapes, many forms. In Gaza, we see it in the form of genocide. In the West Bank, we see it in the form of slow but really clear dispossession and mass displacement. More than 300 households have been displaced in the West Bank since the 7th of October, 2023. But what is common between these — among this architecture of dispossession, displacement, dehumanization, be it in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, or the Gaza Strip, is Israel’s ongoing attempt, with the support of the United States, to erase Palestinians from this land.

AMY GOODMAN: Budour Hassan, I want to thank you so much for being with us and also comment that today is the anniversary of the death of Refaat Alareer. He was killed one year ago today in an Israeli strike. His last tweet, “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.” Refaat Alareer is known around the world. He was a professor at Islamic University and an award-winning poet. Budour Hassan, thank you so much for being with us, Amnesty International researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We will link to Amnesty’s report, which has just concluded Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The report is called “'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”

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“All That Remains”: As Gaza Faces Child Amputee Crisis, New Film Tells Story of 13-Year-Old Leyan
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 06, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/6/ ... transcript

Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory since October of last year has killed tens of thousands of people and wounded over 100,000 more, leaving many with life-altering injuries. The United Nations said this week that Gaza now has the highest per-capita rate of child amputees in the world, with many children forced to endure surgery without anesthesia. For more, we look at All That Remains, a new film from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines that follows the story of 13-year-old Leyan Abu al-Atta as she recovers from having her leg amputated due to an Israeli airstrike. “It changed the trajectory of her life forever … but it didn’t even register on international media’s reporting because of all the massacres that were going on,” says Rhana Natour, director and producer of All That Remains. While Leyan’s family was able to raise awareness about her case and secure a medical evacuation out of Gaza to the United States, it did not happen soon enough, and doctors were forced to amputate her leg in order to save her life. Natour says this still represents a better outcome than what is available for most victims in Gaza. “For every Leyan that is able to leave Gaza, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who are not able to leave,” she 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.

We turn now to a grim statistic from Gaza. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world, with many children forced to endure surgery without anesthesia. In September, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, said each day in Gaza 10 children are losing one or both of their legs.

Last weekend, after months of waiting for approval from Israel, eight injured Palestinian children from Gaza arrived in Chicago for medical treatment. It was the largest medical evacuation of injured Palestinian children to the United States.

We turn now to a new film from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines that brings this story to life. It’s called All That Remains. It follows the story of Leyan, Leyan Abu al-Atta, 13-year-old girl whose leg was amputated after she was severely injured in an Israeli strike on Deir al-Balah, in Gaza, last December.

RAGHDA ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Leyan was like a butterfly. She flew here and there. She was very active and didn’t like to stay put.

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Leyan loves fashion. She loves to dress up.

LEYAN ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Today I have for you a poem by Tamim Al-Barghouti.

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] She likes to write and recite poetry.

LEYAN ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] “In Jerusalem graves are arranged, as if they are lines of the city’s history.”

Hi, guys. I’m getting ready for school because we have a test: math.

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Leyan was injured on a Saturday, December 2nd.

LEYAN ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Check this out, people. This is after I got myself ready.

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] The doctor told us we had to choose between the girl or her leg.

ALI ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] What happened to Leyan weighs very heavily on me.

RAGHDA ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] To make her feel better, I tell her, “It isn’t just you. It’s this kid, that kid, that kid. And that’s just who we know.”

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] I took her cellphone to see what she used to film. I wanted to see how she used to be, because I was so sad for her. What touched me when I saw her videos was that she was so ambitious. She was excited about the future and loved to document everything. This made me feel I wanted to see her like she was before, not confined to a bed.

LEYAN ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] I was awake, but I felt like I was in a dream. It didn’t feel real.

My name is Leyan Ali Musa Abu al-Atta. I’m in Egypt, and we’re getting ready to go to America tomorrow.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s 13-year-old Leyan al-Atta. In this next clip from the Fault Lines documentary All That Remains, Leyan’s parents and her older brother describe what happened after she was injured in this Israeli strike on Deir al-Balah.

ALI ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] It was like Leyan was fading away before our eyes, and we were watching our hopes and dreams being destroyed.

ICU! ICU!

AYOUB ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] Her leg looked almost amputated. The doctor told us that the majority of her leg’s tendons were cut. Ten to 15 centimeters of her bones were missing.

RAGHDA ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] There wasn’t any equipment for the doctors to perform proper surgery. The doctor came out and said that the girl was in very bad condition. It was clear on his face.

LEYAN ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] I had a high fever that never went away. And my leg suddenly turned black and blue.

I can’t breathe! Enough already!

RAGHDA ABU AL-ATTA: [translated] We didn’t know what to do. The girl was dying.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from All That Remains, a new Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary. Leyan is now in Philadelphia. She’s being treated at Shriners Hospital.

For more, we’re joined from Washington, D.C., by Rhana Natour. She’s the director and producer of All That Remains.

Rhana, this is a devastating film. Yes, it’s the story of one little girl and her unbelievable courage, but take us on that journey from the day last December when she was injured in this airstrike and then how she and her mom got out of Gaza to Egypt and ended up in Philly.

RHANA NATOUR: You know, Leyan was injured in an airstrike, in an artillery strike on a mosque that happened to be by the school where she was sheltering. And it changed the trajectory of her life forever, and her loved ones’ and her family’s life, but it didn’t even register on international media’s reporting because of all the massacres that were going on.

And after that strike, her family saw that her leg was at risk of being amputated. And they couldn’t get the care they needed, to get the medical care to prevent that amputation from happening. So, her brother, her older brother Ayoub, launched a social media campaign. He reached out to every journalist in Gaza in an effort to make a public plea to get his sister out of Gaza. And they were successful. But it was too late. Her leg was amputated because gangrene had reached up to her leg and was going to kill her if she didn’t amputate that leg.

And Leyan — for every Leyan that is able to leave Gaza, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who are not able to leave. A medical evacuation out of Gaza and her eventual medical evacuation to the U.S. for medical treatment, it’s what I call a lucky ticket for the profoundly unlucky. But it was the best shot that Leyan had at a future. It was the best shot that Leyan had for the chance, even just the chance to be able to walk again on prosthetics.

AMY GOODMAN: So, her leg was amputated in Cairo because —

RHANA NATOUR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — gangrene threatened her life, when she got out —

RHANA NATOUR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — of Gaza, her mother making this devastating decision to leave her other children and her husband, who remain under, to say the least, enormous danger in Gaza, but to be with Leyan?

RHANA NATOUR: Yes, exactly. These evacuations are essential, because the medical system in Gaza is collapsing. But what this does is it means that these families are ripped away from their support system at the exact moment they need it most, when they have a very sick child that needs medical treatment.

At the beginning of this journey of making the film, we thought we were following a medical journey. We wanted to know all about her treatments. And we realized soon after that this was about more than that, that this was not just about a girl who wanted to walk again, but that this was about a girl who wanted to make sure that her life didn’t go unlived, that she didn’t just languish in a hospital bed, and that this was a journey and something that changed the entire trajectory of this family.

Every single member of this family’s life changed as a result of this injury. Her mother had to make the decision. She did not want to leave Gaza, but she had to, to give — to try to save her daughter’s life, essentially. She left behind an 8-year-old boy, who suddenly didn’t have a mom. She left behind her husband, who remains in Gaza today. And we were able to document, with the help of Media Town Productions, who documented the family that Leyan left behind, this 360-degree perspective of what this injury did, because it’s not just an injury that’s physical to one girl, but it’s a traumatic injury of separation for an entire family.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to another clip from your documentary, Rhana, All That Remains, where we hear from the renowned surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent more than a month in Gaza working with Doctors Without Borders in the early days of Israel’s assault there.

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, this is a photo that I took of our operating room after I finished. And the anesthetist is waking the child up, and one of the nurses is writing the child’s name on the box that has their amputated limb. And you can see the box where the limb is in it. This is a limb that’s unsalvageable and needed amputation. This is a surgery that I did on the hand to try to salvage the limb. This is a 14-year-old boy called Amadan [phon.]. So, there are lots of reasons why I take these photographs. Sometimes the memories are so horrendous that you need to see it to believe that it did happen.

It was really the scale, so the scale of children’s amputations. Half of my cases were always children. The delay that was happening in taking patients to the operating room meant that these wounds became infected and gangrenous, and you had to do amputations to save the children’s lives. And as the war progressed and children knew of other children who had lost their limbs, they would come to the operating room screaming, “Don’t take my leg away! Don’t take my leg away!”

Children are not small adults. There’s a difference in the way you treat them. The child’s body is programmed to grow. Even the injured child’s body is programmed to grow. A child that has a war-related amputation needs between nine and 12 surgeries by the time they reach adult age. This growing child needs a new prosthetic every six months, as their body outgrows the length of the prosthesis.

This problem is so complex. So you need to create a system that ensures that these children have the most productive life possible. It is of paramount importance that we continue to plan for tomorrow, because genocide is about there not being a tomorrow. There is a tomorrow for these children. And our job is to make sure that they do not spend the rest of their lives in pain and misery as a result of this injury.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s renowned surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent more than a month in Gaza working with Doctors Without Borders. You can see our interviews with him at democracynow.org. But that’s from the film All That Remains, that’s produced and directed by Rhana Natour.

So, let’s talk about the number of Palestinian children who have lost their limbs. In fact, you document in a piece that you write, Rhana — you tell the story of another teenager, little young girl, named Layan also, who lost both her limbs. The Leyan who is in this documentary is at Shriners in Philadelphia right now, and Layan Albaz is at Shriners in Chicago, Rana.

RHANA NATOUR: That’s correct. And I think what — when I first started reporting on this issue, I thought that the mountain that these kids were climbing medically was getting them access to a prosthetic limb and making sure that they had specialized care from specialized doctors who would be able to make that all happen.

What I soon learned, with the story of Layan Albaz, which I document in the Atavist magazine, is that these injuries are incredibly complicated and difficult to treat in the best of circumstances, even before these specialists that are renowned throughout the entire world. And why? The reason is because, A, children, historically, didn’t typically survive these injuries, and they are surviving multiple very severe and complicated injuries.

To give you an idea of Layan Albaz, she has an above-the-knee amputation on one knee and a below-the-knee amputation in another knee. She had limbs that — she’s a victim of a blast injury. So, these limbs have been eviscerated. The limbs, the bones, the muscles, the tissue, the tendons, the skin, there’s a specialist for each of those things, because they all have to work together in order to accommodate a prosthetic.

And when she finally was able to walk on a prosthetic, I was able to witness what that therapy looks like. She’s operating basically two different instruments at the same time. She has to learn how to master two different instruments, because she has a mechanical knee on one side and she has a prosthetic that looks completely different on the other side, because the injuries look completely different. It is very, very, very difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we have to wrap up right now. We have 30 seconds. The documentary All That Remains, just utterly heartbroken with the divided family. And the most — the strongest figure in this film is this little girl, is Leyan, who is comforting her mother, who came with her, her dad who’s still in Gaza, her brothers. Her spirit is astounding.

RHANA NATOUR: It absolutely is. I mean, these kids survived bombs being dropped on them, buildings falling on them, shrapnel ripping through their body. And they survived all of this, and they still have the fight to fight for their future and demand they have one. It sounds like it’s a depressing story, but I promise you it’s a hopeful one.

AMY GOODMAN: Rhana Natour, I want to thank you for being with us, director and producer —

RHANA NATOUR: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — of the Fault Lines documentary film All That Remains. And all should see it. We’ll also link to your article in Atavist called “Coming to America.”

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/headlines

Bashar al-Assad Ousted as Syrian Leader Following 12-Day Offensive
Dec 09, 2024

In a development that could reshape the Middle East, armed opposition groups have overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria following a lightning 12-day offensive. Assad has resigned and fled to Russia, where he has been granted asylum. Assad’s family had ruled Syria with an iron grip for over 50 years.

Thousands of Syrians living in exile have poured back into the country, while tens of thousands of prisoners held by the Assad government have been freed. At the Sednaya prison in Damascus, rescue workers are now trying to access underground cells at the site, which has been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. Members of the group spoke on Sunday after seizing Syria’s state television.

Syrian rebel: “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful, by the grace of God Almighty, the city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled, and all the unjustly detained persons from the regime’s prisons have been released.”

A deal has been reached to allow Syria’s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali to remain in his position to oversee the state’s institutions until a transition government is formed.

Many Syrians across the globe held celebratory rallies to mark the fall of Assad. Sabri Chikhou took part in a rally in London.

Sabri Chikhou: “We are going towards democracy and building a new Syria with a new system, democratic system. And we will depend on society and establishment, not to the single regime who control every part in our country.”

Israel & U.S. Bomb Syria as Questions Swirl over Future of Post-Assad Syria
Dec 09, 2024

Many questions remain as to what will happen next in Syria, which has been devastated by a 13-year civil war that has been fueled in part by numerous foreign countries, including Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey and Israel.

The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting today on Syria. The U.N. Syrian envoy, Geir Pedersen, has called for an inclusive transitional government to restore a unified Syria.

Geir Pedersen: “All armed actors on the ground maintain good conduct, law and order, protect civilians and preserve public institutions. Let me urge all Syrians to prioritize dialogue, unity and respect for international humanitarian law and human rights as they seek to rebuild their society.”

Israel responded to the uprising in Syria by invading and seizing part of Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 agreement with the Syrian government. Israel also bombed a number of areas, including a Syrian air base and weapons depots. The United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces. We will have more on Syria after headlines.

Israel Kills Dozens in Gaza; Electricity, Oxygen & Water Cut at Kamal Adwan Hospital
Dec 09, 2024

In news from Gaza, an Israeli attack on Rafah killed at least 10 Palestinians who had lined up to buy flour. In a separate attack, Israel struck a home, killing nine members of the same family in the Bureij refugee camp. Most of the victims were reportedly women and children. On Friday, an Israeli strike in the Nuseirat camp killed at least 20 Palestinians, including at least six children and five women. Survivors had to be pulled from the rubble.

Radi Abdulfatah: “There was suddenly an explosion. This was not an explosion; this was a tsunami. Like you see, it took not only one house, but many. There was fire and flames, flames that burned us. They burn us. They damage us. They cut us in pieces. There were bodies in pieces. I was pulled from under the rubble yesterday, and I have stitches in my head.”

Meanwhile, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is warning the lives of more than 100 patients are at risk after Israeli attacks cut off the hospital’s supply of electricity, oxygen and water. On Friday, Israeli troops stormed the hospital compound.

Pope Francis Unveils Nativity Scene of Jesus in Crib Lined with a Palestinian Keffiyeh
Dec 09, 2024

Pope Francis has repeated his call for a ceasefire in Gaza. On Saturday, the pope unveiled this year’s nativity scene at the Vatican. It portrays baby Jesus in a crib lined with a Palestinian keffiyeh. At the ceremony, a top Palestinian official praised the pope for his “ongoing efforts to end the genocide in Gaza and his steadfast support for the Palestinian cause.” Over the weekend, Pope Francis also called on U.S. authorities to commute the sentences of prisoners on death row.

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“Assad Is Gone”: Writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh on Syria, His 16 Years in Prison & Wife’s Disappearance
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024

“We needed to turn this page. … We’ve been under this inhuman condition for 54 years.” Following a lightning 12-day offensive, armed opposition groups have overthrown President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his family’s five-decade rule in Syria. Assad has fled to Russia, where he has been granted asylum, while tens of thousands of political prisoners have been freed. The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a Turkish-backed group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. The release of prisoners from conditions of “hunger, humiliation, extreme despair” is a welcome and hopeful sign for the new balance of power in Syria, says the writer, dissident and political prisoner in Syria from 1980 to 1996, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, but it remains to be seen if others who were disappeared during the Syrian civil war, including al-Haj Saleh’s wife Samira, will be recovered or their fates identified.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour looking at the fall of the Syrian government and its impact on the Middle East and worldwide, after armed forces entered the capital city of Damascus Sunday, bringing an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his family’s more than 50-year rule.

Armed opposition groups have overthrown al-Assad’s regime in Syria following a lightning 12-day offensive. Assad has fled to Russia, where he’s been granted political asylum. Assad’s family had ruled Syria with an iron grip for more than half a century.

Thousands of Syrians living in exile have poured back into Syria, while tens of thousands of prisoners held by the Assad government have been freed. At the Sednaya prison in Damascus, rescue workers are now trying to access underground cells at a site that’s been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a Turkish-backed group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. Members of the group spoke on Sunday after seizing Syria’s state television station.

SYRIAN REBEL: [translated] In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful, by the grace of God almighty, the city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled, and all the unjustly detained persons from the regime’s prisons have been released. The Fatah Damascus Operation Room calls upon the mujahideen brothers and citizens to preserve all the properties of the free Syrian state. Long live a free and independent Syria for all Syrians of all sects.

AMY GOODMAN: As video showed prisoners streaming out of Assad’s notorious prisons, others celebrated inside Assad’s luxurious presidential palace. Scenes of celebration erupted across major Syrian cities. These are just a few voices from Aleppo, from Homs and from the capital Damascus.

SYRIAN 1: [translated] This is something else. Something else. May God help this country. And congratulations to all.

SYRIAN 2: [translated] This is the happiest day of my life. We were reborn. This is the day when the believers rejoice with God’s victory. Thank God. He gave us more than we deserve. Just some advice: Be united, and do not allow foreigners to come between you.

SYRIAN 3: [translated] Our happiness is immense. It’s priceless. Thank God we have no losses and no one has harmed anyone. We are just happy with our victory. We are also happy for the prisoners who have been released after years in prison. May God protect the rebels and grant them victory.

SYRIAN 4: [translated] First of all, I thank God for granting us the chance to see this place once more. After 10 years of fleeing Homs, I am returning today with my head held high in pride. Homs is free now. This is the Homs we dreamed of.

SYRIAN 5: [translated] I am a mechanical engineer. For years we have been waiting for this day. We have been resisting. We have been enduring. We have been holding on. And we’ve been waiting for this day until the regime fell. And finally, the regime has fallen. From now on, the Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one!

AMY GOODMAN: Israel responded to the uprising in Syria by invading and seizing part of Syria’s Golan Heights and bombed a Syrian air base and weapons depots.

The United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

President Joe Biden welcomed the Assad regime’s downfall as a “historic opportunity.”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: After 13 years of civil war in Syrian and more than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar Assad and his father before him, rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office and flee the country. We’re not sure where he is, but there’s word that he’s in Moscow. At long last, the Assad regime has fallen.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on all of this, we begin in Paris with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer, dissident, former political prisoner. He was jailed in Syria for 16 years, from 1980 to 1996. He’s the author of several books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, also co-founder of the award-winning independent media platform AlJumhuriya.net.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Yassin. If you can respond? You were out in the streets of Paris yesterday celebrating with many other Syrians. Assad is now in Russia, where he’s been granted asylum. Your response to what has happened and the lightning speed, would you say, that it’s happened in this last phase of the overthrow of the Assad regime?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Hello, Amy, and thank you for having me.

So, among hundreds of people yesterday, I was at the Republic Square in Paris. We were overwhelmed by emotions, mine, I guess, similar to everybody else, crying, laughing and breathing. It was a rare moment of convergence of mourning and happiness and just feeling alive.

On the personal level, I lived almost all my life under this genocidal regime, and I felt as if tight hands were on my neck, on my throat, and for the first day I regained the ability to breathe. So, it is a great day, glorious day.

Everybody, I guess — of course, myself included — have many layers of feeling about this day. We need to turn out this dirty, criminal, discriminatory, fascist and very reactionary — I guess this is the right word to describe the Assad regime, because many in the West thinks that it is modernist, this is progressive. Far from it. So, we needed to turn out this page. And we are sure that many pages with difficulties, with hardships, with crisis, with struggles, with problems are ahead of us.

But the forever is over. And yesterday was the first day of history with all its problems and tensions and, of course, I mean, apprehensions. So, it was a mixed feeling. And there are many elements for hope. And, of course, there are other elements that I’d like to talk about, if you will allow me.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Why don’t you continue? But why don’t you start off by grounding us in your own experience? I mean, we’re sitting here looking at the Sednaya prison, the freeing of thousands of prisoners, many women, as you see them being told that they are now free. If you can talk about your own experience? Tell us about the Sednaya prison and its significance, and talk about why people were imprisoned.

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: So, in my years in jail, I was not in Sednaya prison. And in those days, in the 1980s and ’90s, it was not the slaughterhouse as Amnesty International said some seven years ago, early 2017, I guess, in a very good report. It was before Sednaya. It was Tadmor prison, in which I spent only my last year of the 16 years, after I finished my sentence, by the way. I mean, look, I was arrested in 1980. I was, among hundreds of my comrades, brought to Supreme State Security Court only in April 1992, so at that time I was in jail for 11 years and four months. It took two years to get a sentence, and I got a sentence of 15 years. Instead of being released — by the way, the day before yesterday was the 44th anniversary of my arrest. Instead of being released in 1995, I was sent with 30 other people to Tadmor prison for an extra year. And Tadmor prison is the Sednaya of today. It is the most brutal jail in Syria. It is — well, it is a torture camp; it is not a prison. It is like Sednaya today.

These places are the factories to manufacture the essence of power in Syria. They are places of torture, of hunger, of humiliation and of extreme despair. And I believe that tens of thousands — you know that now we have 131 people, at least, we don’t know about their fate. So, many of them may be killed. The league of Sednaya prison former prisoners released a report a year and a half ago, I guess, and they took that maybe 30,000 to 35,000 were killed in Sednaya prison, mostly under torture, and some of them were executed. And many, I believe, died of hunger and of diseases.

So, it is — we’ve been under this inhuman condition for 54 years, which is more that a half of the whole Syrian history as a modern polity. Syria appeared only after the First World War. And more than half of its history is under the Assad rule, very thuggish, very corrupt. And you saw that it was rotten from inside. It fell in 11 days, without its foreign protectors, Russians, Iranians, the thugs of Hezbollah and other sectarian militias. The regime, we overwhelmed, so it fell in 11 days, because it is extremely rotten from inside.

So, this was my experience. And I feel very hopeful for the future of Syria because of the release of prisoners, because they gave — they have given the top priority for releasing these prisoners from many places, in Aleppo, in Hama, in Homs and now in Damascus, especially this torture camp of Sednaya.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, Yassin, is the 11th anniversary of the disappearance of your wife. Can you explain what happened to her?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Well, because Syria, especially in 2013, so the third year of the Syrian uprising, is the most brutal, the most painful, the most tragic year of our struggle. So, Syria, by that time, let’s remember that it was the intervention, military intervention, of Hezbollah in Syria. It is the year of the appearance of Daesh, ISIS. It is the year of the chemical massacre. It is the year of the sordid American-Russian deal to absolve the regime from violating the international law, and disarming, taking away its chemical weapons. We find now that they were aware all the time that the regime kept a lot of chemical weapons. So, they were happy, or they were not unhappy, that these arms were used against — only against the Syrian people, now they are targeting them.

So, because Syria, by that year, was turning to a paradise of immunity and unaccountability, many factions seized the opportunity and started to act like the regime. Daesh is one of them. Another, Salafi military formation called Jaysh al-Islam in eastern Ghouta was one. And they took Samira, my wife, Samira Khalil, with Razan Zaitouneh, internationally known human rights activist and very good writer; Wael Hamada, her husband; and Nazem Hammadi, a lawyer and a poet. This happened today 11 years ago.

And for me, it is — as much as I am happy of the liberation of the bigger parts of my country, at the same time I see it as a criterion to judge these new developments now to liberate my wife and my friends, or to know about their fate, and to bring the culprits before justice. This is very important. We know the criminals by names.

And this is an opportunity for me just to say these simple words. This should end now. It is like releasing thousands of people from jail and trying to find out about the fate of others. Samira is one of these people. Samira and Razan and Wael and Nazem are among these people. And we need to know. We need them among us. We need to know about their fate. And we need to see a measure of justice. This will tell if the future of Syria will be better than its past.

AMY GOODMAN: I have a final question, Yassin. In one of your posts, you write, quote, “We can’t embrace HTS’s military effectiveness against the regime while ignoring its ideology.” In this last minute we have, if you can explain, one of the groups, the leading group, that overthrew the Assad regime?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Amy, this was written in January 2013, so 11 years ago. And someone digged it out and published it, republished it on X.

So, of course, as you see, they are very effective militarily, but they have an ideology. And this is one reason why I am a bit worried, because this is one — this tension between the Islamic formation of the new liberators and the general seat of nationalism is one of my sources of worries.

Beside that, Assadism is not yet dead. Assad is gone, very cheaply and very — he showed how sordid and how trivial he was, but Assadism is still there in the form of sectarianism, corruption, thuggery, security complexes. Still we don’t know the fate about them.

And unhealthy — a third reason why I am a bit worried is a brutally unhealthy regional and international environment. You mentioned that the Israelis seized some Syrian lands. And they bombed in Damascus after Damascus was taken from the regime. This is colonial — I am not surprised by it, but Israel has been a plague for us for decades and for generations. But this will not go away from the Syrian memory.

AMY GOODMAN: Yassin al-Haj Saleh —

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: If I have time —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: OK. So, the reasons why I am a bit hopeful — I talked about my worries — is that the release of prisoners, the return of displaced people, from Turkey — from within the country, the camps are almost empty, and from Turkey and from Lebanon. And I guess many people from Europe are planning to go back. It is a Syrianized thing — it is not like what happened in Iraq 20, 21 years ago. The Syrians did it, and with minimal violations so far. I guess this is a sort of basis to build on for a better future.

AMY GOODMAN: Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, former political prisoner from 1980 to 1996, author of several books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy. He was speaking to us from Paris.

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Syrians Are Celebrating Fall of Assad, Even as “the Bigger Picture Is Grim”: Scholar Bassam Haddad
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/ ... transcript

The fall of the Assad family’s 50-year regime in Syria brings with it “many more questions than answers,” says the executive director of the Arab Studies Institute, Bassam Haddad. While the regional and global implications are “not good,” as Israel in particular is celebrating the loss of Assad’s material support for Palestinian and Lebanese armed resistance, Haddad says the immediate relief of those suffering under Assad’s totalitarian regime should not be ignored or invisibilized. Haddad also discusses the political prospects for the rebel forces led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he says will likely form a coalition with other groups as the future of Syria is determined in the coming days and weeks.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at how the Assad family has lost control of Syria after more than half a century of brutal dictatorship, following a rapid advance of rebel fighters. Today, U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Syria. The U.N. Syrian envoy, Geir Pedersen, said an inclusive transitional government is needed to restore a unified Syria.

GEIR PEDERSEN: All armed actors on the ground maintain good conduct, law and order, protect civilians and preserve public institutions. Let me urge all Syrians to prioritize dialogue, unity and respect for international humanitarian law and human rights as they seek to rebuild their society.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel responded to the Syrian uprising by invading and seizing parts of Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 agreement with the Syrian government. Israel also bombed a number of areas, including a Syrian air base and weapons depots. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria was a “direct result” of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East. Assad’s regime is a central link in Iran’s Axis of Evil. This regime has fallen. This is a direct result of the blows we inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime. This created a chain reaction throughout the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. And in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

For more, we go to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Bassam Haddad, associate professor at George Mason University, author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience. He’s the co-founder and editor of the Jadaliyya ezine and is executive director of the Arab Studies Institute at George Mason University. His forthcoming book, Roots, Dynamics, and Transformation of the Syrian Uprising.

Professor Haddad, first, your response to what took place this weekend?

BASSAM HADDAD: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be with you again.

The first thing I’d like to say is that there are so many more questions than answers, so it’s important — especially today, so it’s important to keep that in mind as we go along. I would like to be analytical, but there is no way to avoid the importance and the value of watching what happened and what it means, the collapse of the regime after 54 years — or 71, if you want to consider the Ba’athist rule — what it means to ordinary Syrians who have actually been living under this regime for so many decades.

It is a moment that if you look at all the news, that cannot be overlooked and cannot be trumped by analysis of the bigger picture at this very moment, although the bigger picture is grim, is very problematic, and it’s really important for us to get to it, and I hope we can get to it today. But it is not something that we could underestimate, given the brutality of the regime, not least its lack of ability completely to govern in the past several years, at least after 2019, 2020, and its inability to provide the infrastructure, social services and the basic needs for its people, which actually did play a role in the very rapid march of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham into all of the major cities of Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain HTS, its history, and Julani, its leader, and what you’re most concerned about right now.

BASSAM HADDAD: Well, you know, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a coalition of a lot of groups, primarily Jabhat al-Nusra,which everyone loves to say it’s al-Qaeda-affiliated, although there’s been some sort of break. Nonetheless, it is what it is. As Yassin al-Haj Saleh said, he is worried about the ideology of HTS and some of the potential consequences. And if Yassin al-Haj Saleh is worried about HTS, where Yassin al-Haj Saleh called Hezbollah thugs, you can imagine what — or, how worried everyone else is about the future. But we will get to that.

HTS has actually acted in a manner that is not alone. HTS cannot move out of Idlib and could not have moved out of Idlib without Turkish approval. And even the Turkish government cannot make this decision alone. So, the question is: Who did Turkey connect with, coordinate with, to produce this issue or this campaign or this operation? The second question is: Were there any connections between the ceasefire in Lebanon and what Turkey did today or 10 days ago or right before the coordination took place or around then? And what kind of also coordination took place between Turkey and Russia, as well as between Russia and the potential group HTS and otherwise? Because they apparently, from recent reports, they have actually allowed the Russians to keep their air base. This has to be checked. So, there are a lot of questions.

And I wanted to insist again that at this point, although we can keep going and talk about the regional and global implications, which are not good, but I would like to insist on seizing this moment to recognize what it means for millions of Syrians who are actually very happy that this has happened. Many others are concerned, including those who are actually celebrating. They are concerned about the future. They’re concerned about how this took place, where this is going to go, who’s going to be in the lead. And many are concerned about what this means to the expanding, global, superpower, imperialist, American-Israeli hegemony, domination in the region, in the absence or far weakened, what we call, the Axis of Resistance. This is not a small issue, and it will become part of the major headlines very, very soon.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about this. What would — the amount of Syrian participation in reshaping Syria, will that be challenged because of the international support Syria will need to rebuild, that will include the U.S., players like the Gulf Arab monarchies? Turkey will also be, as you pointed out, and already is, deeply involved. Will that push what happens to Syria in a certain direction?

BASSAM HADDAD: Again, I must reiterate the importance of having so many questions with very, very few answers, because we do not know exactly how this was coordinated and with whom and what are the trade-offs that have actually already been in place.

But it’s going to be a phase, the next phase — or, this current phase is actually not the phase that we can focus on, because, according to the best analysis, the current configuration is not going to be transferred into the next phase. The political and economic and the military configuration today, the people that actually have the guns and are in control, are not likely themselves alone, maybe part of a coalition, a bigger coalition, a more diverse coalition, but not alone, move forward.

There’s so much trepidation in Syria. There’s so much trepidation in Turkey, by the United States, by many of the Arab states that are powerful and will probably be somewhat relied on to help rebuild Syria, about the singularity of a particular group, HTS, and how it need not and should not be the only player in the field. But the questions right now are just that. It’s very difficult to recognize where things are going.

But we do know that the United States and Israel are extremely comforted. Israel, yesterday on Channel 13, called what happened an “accomplishment.” And this “accomplishment” is something that will allow Israel to move forward with its genocide on Gaza, along with the United States. The United States is not just complicit; it’s a full partner in this genocide. And much bigger issues will come to fore in the coming weeks.

And the jubilation, while it’s important today for the people who have been under the boot of the regime — and we cannot underestimate this, no matter how concerned you are about imperialism and global political economy and so on. This has to be recognized, because one of the things that will actually cause me trouble and will cause my phone to blow up in just a few minutes by my own friends is that a lot of people who overemphasize the question of imperialism on a day like this or on a week like this, unfortunately, unwittingly, make the Syrian people invisible, as if they are not important and only global power politics is. And that is something that I would like to caution against.

Despite the fact that, yes, we can analyze that what has just happened is a triumph for global power, like the United States, for imperial designs, for conservative Arab states in the region, for normalizers in the region, and certainly for Israel or anyone who would like to weaken any sort of resistance — forget even Iran and Hezbollah — in the region to these kinds of plans that are not just about land theft and political domination, but also about economic plans and prescriptions that will disempower the working classes in the region and continue to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about HTS and whether you believe it will be one of the leading partners in a new Syria, its background, its running of Idlib, how Idlib, that whole area, was run?

BASSAM HADDAD: I mean, honestly, HTS, first of all, wasn’t in complete control of Idlib. It was the dominant power in Idlib. There are various groups in Idlib that were actually also somewhat powerful. HTS has been able to govern, for the most part.

It is not likely that HTS will ever singularly rule Syria. This is something on which there is regional and international consensus, if not even domestic consensus. Despite everything that we have seen, Syrian society is among the most secular of Arab societies. And even if affinity with conservatism in Islam has grown considerably in the past few years or decades or even more, there is no appetite for what HTS has been advocating for, including its recent — recent as in in the past several years or in 2014, '15, ’16 — a sort of discourse that is exclusionary. Now it says it's repudiating this discourse. Now it’s actually trying to make sure that its forces do not repress, although what we have seen in many parts of Syria are various forms of exclusion, destruction of alcohol stores, burning of Christmas trees and things of the sort, that supposedly HTS has repudiated and tried to correct the path. This new vision or approach of HTS is interesting. It’s probably also coordinated with those who gave it the carte blanche to move forward. In all cases, the HTS is not the kind of apple pie that — well, in Syria, it won’t be apple pie, it’ll be knafeh — that Syrians are looking for.

And in the very, very near future, as the new government is established, as the new military formula is formed and reformed, we will discover that there will be attempts to broaden the coalition and potentially also avoid the horrible mistake that the United States did after its fraudulent and brutal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which is to completely dismantle the state, the ruling party, the army and so on, because that had created the kind of chaos that actually ended up being counterproductive for the invading power and beyond. So, I think it will be a different path than we have seen in Iraq. It will also be a more difficult path, because Syria does not possess the kind of resources like Iraq’s oil at least, or part of it, because it’s not all within the control of the government right now.

So, Syria will have an even more challenging future, economically, socioeconomically and politically. And what I fear is that within a short period, Syria will be off the news, and we will see what I was talking about earlier, the analytical framework of what that means to the region, quite soon actually, as developments take place.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bassam Haddad, we want to thank you for being with us. Of course, we’re going to continue to follow this, founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at George Mason University. We will link to your work at democracynow.org.

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“Remarkable Moment”: After Fleeing Syria, “For Sama” Director Waad Al-Kateab Celebrates End of Assad
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/ ... transcript

“Whatever’s coming next, I don’t believe at all that [it] would be worse than what we’ve been through, what we lived through,” says Syrian activist and filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab as she celebrates the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship to Syrian opposition groups. Al-Kateab, who was forced to flee her hometown of Aleppo with her family in 2016 and now resides in the United Kingdom, says the end of Assad’s rule has reignited the “dream of a free Syria.” Her Oscar-nominated documentary film For Sama, released in 2019, offered a rare glimpse into Syria’s civil war. The devastating personal account was filmed over the course of five years during the uprising in Aleppo and is dedicated to Al-Kateab’s daughter Sama.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the fall of the Assad regime with activist and award-winning filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab. She was forcibly displaced from her hometown of Aleppo with her family in 2016. Her Oscar-nominated film For Sama, released in 2019, offered a rare glimpse into Syria’s civil war. The devastating account was filmed over the course of five years, starting in 2011 during the uprising in Aleppo. Amidst airstrikes and attacks on hospitals, Waad falls in love with one of the last remaining doctors in Aleppo, gets married, has a baby girl Sama, to whom the film is dedicated. When protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad first began in 2011, she was a young economics student who began filming on a cellphone. This is a clip from For Sama.

WAAD AL-KATEAB: [translated] Sama, things have got so bad now. Your dad can’t leave the hospital, so we live here now. This is our room. Behind those pictures are sandbags to protect from shelling.

Yes, I’m coming.

We do our best to make it feel like home.

AMY GOODMAN: The sound of a bomb. We now go to London, where we’re joined by Waad Al-Kateab, Syrian filmmaker, activist, co-founder of Action For Sama.

Your thoughts today? As we listen to the bomb exploding as you’re with your baby, tell us where that was in Aleppo and what your hopes are for the future, Waad?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And just really, I don’t have maybe the right words really to explain. I’ll do my best. Sorry.

But, like, for years, for these last 13 years, I don’t think any Syrian have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. There was something, it was keeping us moving forward, keeping us fighting. And we just, like, didn’t want to lose. And, you know, today, what happened, and this feeling today is just something. I’m over the moon, in one second, happy, dancing, laughing, and then so much crying and pain and grief and mourning, I think. It’s just — I’m so happy and grateful for where we are today.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about what hope you have for the future, how you see a new Syria emerging, and who will be the players, and how people like you, an activist deeply involved with Syria, though you left, forced out of Aleppo, what, like eight years ago, what your plans are? Will you return?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I mean, since the Syrian revolution started in 2011, that was the time when I and so many other Syrians have felt that we belong to this country, we can fight for this country, we can own our country. And, you know, today, we do have the same feeling exactly as 2011. This conversation about what’s going to happen next, who’s going to rule, how the government would look like, all of this conversation, we were thinking about that like 11 and like 13 years ago, as well. And the last five, six, seven years, I think it was just so much of no end and no hope, no justice.

And, you know, today, when we are looking at all of this, yes, there is concern. Yes, there is so much things to worry about. And there’s a huge work to be done. There’s a long path forward. But we can’t, like, forget or not acknowledge and not feel. And this is now a moment, a remarkable moment, in our history, in our life in Syria.

Whatever is coming next, I don’t believe at all that would be worse than what we’ve been through, what we lived through, this for 13 years of being sieged in our own cities, being bombed, being attacked, hospitals, schools, prisoners, people who are detained. Whatever this future would hold, you know, if we managed to go through this, if we are now on the other side — and we are — I don’t believe that whatever happened will be worse than what we’ve been through already.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned now about the possibilities, for example, HTS, the leading the way for the overthrow of Assad; the leader of HTS, Julani, what he represents? How will everyday Syrians or Syrian civil society control the future?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely concern, but they are coming on a long list of concern. For me, this is one thing which is definitely important and fair, but, again, there’s much more things to be looking at, especially today, which I think you mentioned that earlier on, when Israel, you know, at al-Jolan area and the bombing of some areas and stuff in Syria, the Turkish involvement, the U.S. involvement. Like, there’s so many players who are working on Syria. HTS is definitely one of these players.

And it is, like, what we see on the ground, and this is — I think it’s something, even for us, we’re still trying to process and understand. For years, you know, these statements, even when it’s like much less, different from how HTS think, it used to be only statements. It was not matching what was going on on the ground. Today, what we’ve seen in the last, like, 11, 12 days, it was just something so much different, in everything, not just the statements, and how this group and other groups who are — were leading this battle today are thinking, but also on the ground. We all have connection there, and we’ve heard from so many people. We’re looking at all the footage that’s coming out. We did already set up, like, groups where we are organizing what’s going on in the new liberated cities. And what we are hearing from people on the ground are very much similar to what we have seen in the statements.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, let me ask you —

WAAD AL-KATEAB: I have so much hope —

AMY GOODMAN: The voices of Syrian women are so often underrepresented. Your journey from student activist to award-winning filmmaker has been extraordinary. How do you see your role fitting into the future as a storyteller and an advocate? We have 30 seconds.

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I think we’ve seen this dream of free Syria like 13 years ago, and we thought at some point this will never be happening. Today, it is happening. It’s real. We have so much work to be done. We have so much lobbying within our community. You know, like, the Syrian people were divided by the Syrian regime for years, and now is the time to live together, to move forward, to think together, to see this future that’s coming together. And this is now the reality of the situation. So, yes, so much hope, so much amazing feeling, and our hearts still with everyone who’s still waiting for their beloved ones who they were disappeared in Assad’s prisons for so many years.

AMY GOODMAN: And how old is your daughter today?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: My daughter now is 9, and my second daughter is 7.

AMY GOODMAN: Waad Al-Kateab, I thank you so much for being with us, award-winning Syrian filmmaker, her film, For Sama. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10/headlines

Israel Launches Massive Airstrikes Across Syria Following Assad’s Ouster
Dec 10, 2024

Israel’s military has launched a wide-scale assault on Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, bombing military sites, weapons warehouses, airports and army air bases in cities and provinces across Syria, including the capital, Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports in just the two days, Israel has carried out some 340 airstrikes. Meanwhile, the governments of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have condemned Israel’s seizure of more land in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, saying it violates a 1974 ceasefire. Israel seized the Golan Heights in 1967 and later annexed the region. On Monday, the armed groups who toppled Syria’s longtime authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad said a Syrian transitional authority would be headed by Mohammed al-Bashir, an engineer who served as the fifth prime minister of the self-declared Syrian Salvation Government. We’ll have more on Syria after headlines.

As European Nations Freeze Asylum Applications, Austria Will Begin Deporting Syrian Refugees
Dec 10, 2024

The government of Austria says it will begin deporting Syrian refugees following the revolution that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. About 100,000 Syrians have resettled in Austria in the 13 years since Syria’s civil war erupted. Meanwhile, the governments of Belgium, France, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom said they would pause applications for asylum by Syrians. More than 14 million people have fled Syria since 2011. The largest share of refugees — about 3 million — live in Turkey. On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the reopening of two border crossings in southern Turkey, where hundreds of refugees queued up to return to Syria.

Israeli Massacres Across Gaza Target Flour Line, Wipe Al-Kahlout Family Off Civil Registry
Dec 10, 2024

In news from Gaza, multiple massacres carried out by Israeli forces across the war-torn Palestinian territory killed dozens of people since Monday, many of them children. These included an Israeli air attack on a flour distribution line in southern Rafah and strikes on central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp. In northern Beit Hanoun, separate Israeli strikes killed 25 people belonging to two households of the Al-Kahlout family, wiping the prominent Gaza family entirely from the civil registry.

Israel is also continuing its deadly assault on Gaza’s beleaguered hospitals. Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, director of Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, called on international actors to help ensure the safety of health facilities after Israeli attacks injured patients and destroyed parts of the hospital.

Israeli Airstrike Kills 2 West Bank Palestinians in Tubas; Israeli Army Makes Arrests Amid Ongoing Raids
Dec 10, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, at least two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the city of Tubas Monday. The victims were 26 and 32 years old. The attack came about a week after Palestinian authorities reported Israeli soldiers besieged the Tubas Hospital, assaulting and arresting medical staff and patients.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army detained at least 16 Palestinians during raids across the occupied West Bank Monday. Israeli forces have arrested over 12,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since last October.

This all comes as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has released a new report detailing the gruesome abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the city of Hebron. B’Tselem documented the testimonies of over 20 Palestinians, one as young as 14 years old, who described being beaten, sexually assaulted and, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers. We’ll have more on this report later in the broadcast.

Benjamin Netanyahu Takes the Stand in Delayed Corruption Trial
Dec 10, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to a courtroom in Jerusalem today to face multiple charges of corruption, fraud, breach of the public trust and bribery. All three trials have been postponed on multiple occasions, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and later as Netanyahu led Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza. In one case, Netanyahu is accused of enacting regulatory decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the owner of an online news site in exchange for a promise to drop negative stories about Netanyahu. In another case, Netanyahu is accused of accepting champagne, cigars and other gifts from two wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favors.

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“Politics Is Finally Possible”: After Surprise Fall of Assad in Protracted Civil War, What’s Next?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10 ... transcript

As Syrians celebrate the fall of the Assad regime after more than five decades of iron rule, many are grappling with the enormity of what has happened to their country, with nearly 14 years of war leaving much of the country in ruins, killing over 350,000 people and displacing 14 million more. Meanwhile, foreign powers, including Israel, Turkey and the United States, have carried out strikes across parts of the country, and Israel has invaded and occupied additional land in the Golan Heights. For more on the monumental changes underway, we speak with Syrian American political economist Omar Dahi, the director of the Security in Context research network, who has been involved in several peace-building initiatives since the start of the conflict in 2011. He says many Syrians have “mixed emotions” about this moment, celebrating the end of Assad while mourning the immense human cost of the war and confronting the difficult road ahead to rebuild the country. “Politics is finally possible,” Dahi says.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with Syria and the aftermath of the historic collapse of the Assad regime. Israeli forces are continuing to attack key military sites, airports and army air bases in cities across Syria, including the capital Damascus. In just the last 48 hours, Israel has carried out 340 airstrikes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A resident from Qamishli in northeastern Syria described the strikes that took place Monday night.

ABDEL RAHMAN MOHAMED: [translated] The strikes happened at night. We went out after hearing the sounds, and we saw a fire there. Then we realized that Israel struck these locations. We didn’t get a break from Turkey, and now Israel came. Israel has been striking the area for a while now.

AMY GOODMAN: Turkey and the United States have also continued to strike targets in Syria since the lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.

In a message posted to Telegram Tuesday, the rebel commander Ahmed al-Sharaa vowed to hold senior officials in the Assad regime accountable for, quote, “torturing the Syrian people,” unquote.

As different factions of armed groups vie for power and their international backers defend their interests, Syrians are grappling with the enormity of what has happened to their country and what comes next.

In 13 years of war, over 350,000 people have been killed, according to the United Nations, over 14 million displaced. President Bashar al-Assad has now fled to Russia, where he’s been granted political asylum with his family. Syrians are adjusting to the new reality of life after 50 years of rule by the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar.

MAHMOUD HAYJAR: [translated] Today we don’t give our joy to anyone. We have been waiting for this day for 50 years. All the people were silenced and could not speak out because of this tyranny. Today we thank and ask God to reward everyone who contributed to this day, the day of liberation. We were living in a big prison, a big prison that was Syria. It’s been 50 years during which we couldn’t speak, nor express ourselves, nor express our worries. Anyone who spoke out was detained in prisons, as you saw in Sednaya.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the dramatic changes in Syria, we’re joined by Omar Dahi, Syrian American economics professor at Hampshire College, director of the Security in Context research network, where he focuses on political economy in Syria and the social and economic consequences of the war. He was born and raised in Syria and involved in several peace-building initiatives since the conflict began. Professor Omar Dahi joins us now from Amherst, Massachusetts.

Professor, welcome to Democracy Now! First, your response to Assad’s departure, him fleeing with his family to Russia, and what this means for Syria?

OMAR DAHI: Hi, Amy. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I’ve been watching, like many others from outside the country, in shock and disbelief in this past two weeks, and with mixed emotions in many ways. First, shock and disbelief at the collapse of the Syrian regime and the way it happened after 13 or more years of conflict, where there were frontlines that were frozen for the past several years, but suddenly they disappeared. Of course, incredible joy at the personal level and also for millions of Syrians who were directly hurt by the regime, both through the violence of the war, the displacement, the killings and tortures that were taking place, as well as previously, before the war.

It’s been incredible watching the scenes of the liberation of prisoners from prisons like Sednaya, which have been referred to, I think correctly, as “human slaughterhouses.” It’s been incredibly moving to see people celebrating in the streets, people saying that they can finally go home, they can finally speak their mind. So, all that has been really a joy to watch and witness as we kind of see the sequence of events unfold with the — you know, Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia.

Thankfully, this process, which we can talk more about, happened, finally, with as minimal bloodshed as possible, even though there was plenty of bloodshed over the past years. But in the way it had happened, it actually provided a possibility for positive change, at least at the moment.

But this joy is also tempered with lots of other feelings, as well, primarily the costs at which this happened. And I would say the costs are the human costs, that you outlined, which may be even more in terms of the people killed. Entire generations have been destroyed. There is a generation of Syrians that grew up in displacement, in refugee camps, the destruction that happened to the country. All the human cost and the physical cost, I think, it’s hard to say that it was not too high. It’s impossible to say that it was OK that all this happened.

There are other costs, of course. The other cost is the loss of sovereignty of Syria, which has been a process ongoing for 10 years. Syria was occupied and invaded by the United States, by Turkey, on the opposition side. And on the Syrian government side, it drew on its allies to defend itself, Russia and Iran, which came to place the regime in a position of dependency. So, there were multiple foreign types of occupations in the country, which we see what is happening now in the Israeli airstrikes as a continuation of that loss of sovereignty. And I think this is something that Syrians have to grapple with.

There are other costs of the war, as well. There are the empowerment of actors that are not acceptable to a wide variety of Syrian society. Not that there isn’t some backing for them, particularly because they have a certain legitimacy for many Syrians because they fought the government. But the current government in power or the current, you know, HTS is not acceptable to large parts of Syrian society, and there’s already warnings that it’s acting as a de facto power, and people are warning against that.

And, of course, there’s the final thing, which is that this is tempered by the regional context, which is the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine that is empowered by the U.S. And we’ve seen over the past couple days a complete destruction of what was remaining of Syrian Army military assets by Israel, with complete impunity.

So, all of those, we’re trying to take all those contradictions together — joy for the people, joy for the moment that many millions had dreamed of, which is the departure of the Assad family from power, and the feeling that politics is finally possible in Syria. Despite all these contradictions, there is a chance for political life to resume. There’s a chance for advocacy for a collectively better future. And this is something that we all have to try and hold and support.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor, I’m wondering if you could talk briefly about your own family’s history. In the 1990s, your father helped smuggle out names of political prisoners, many of them accused of belonging to the League of Communist Labor, yet the Ba’athist party and the government of your country often talked about being socialist.

OMAR DAHI: Yeah, this was a kind of a spur-of-the-moment post that I did on social media to share these documents that I received after my father passed away three or four years ago. And basically, my father was a lawyer and was among two or three or maybe four lawyers who stepped up in the 1990s to defend a large group of political prisoners, many of them communists, many of them who were accused of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were basically detained without a trial — or not even just a trial, but without a formal charge. They were accused of belonging to this outlawed party of Communist Labor, which was accused by the government of mounting an insurrection against it in the late '70s and ’80s. So, most of those who were detained were detained in the 1980s. They had been disappeared. Their families didn't know anything about them. Most people didn’t know — like many of the people we’re discovering in Sednaya prison today, were not aware whether they were dead or alive or their whereabouts.

So, my father would basically meet with some of those prisoners, when allowed to do so. And really, it was the courage of the prisoners to assemble a lot of this data, to write down their names, their dates of birth, their professions, where they were — when they were arrested, what’s their charge, where they were being held — mostly, in this case, in Sednaya prison — and also if they were in — you know, they needed medical attention, they were traumatized or they were injured in some way.

And I asked my dad why he did this, actually, because, you know, there was no sense that these prisoners would be freed. So, most of them ended up being put on trial en masse and convicted. So, he told me that he had no expectation of justice at that time, but that he felt it was necessary to do it, to use any opening and any chance to expose the hypocrisy of the government, for the same reasons that you mentioned, that he didn’t expect them to actually be — you know, receive a fair trial, which they didn’t, but there has to be a chance to basically put the government’s declared principles against its actions and expose the government.

So, this was a historical document that I was kind of moved to share when the images of the prisoners who were being released from Sednaya. Most of those names in those documents have either, unfortunately, passed away or were released from the prison, so I didn’t expect that there would be some of those people actually there. But, yeah, that’s why I shared that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you also — you mentioned the foreign presence in Syria. Hasn’t the country, effectively, during this civil war been already partitioned, with Turkish troops creating a buffer zone in the north, the Israelis not only recently, in the past few days, entering Syrian territory, but conducting military operations in the territory previous to that, with the Kurds backed by the U.S., ISIS still controlling portions of territory, and the Russian bases in the country? Do you have any sense of the integrity of the country being reconstituted anytime soon?

OMAR DAHI: I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a long-term struggle, and partly because of the reasons you mention, because this is something that has been happening for a decade, and there are kind of entrenched interests that have developed, not just in terms of a foreign occupation, but in terms of the connection of various parts of Syrian society and their ties to those countries in ways that they’ve come to basically be affiliated or allied with them. And this is reminiscent, for people who observe Syria, of the post-independence period in Syrian history, when Syria was a site of struggle by external powers because it was weak, it was politically divided, and various regional powers basically came to have significant influence in the country through Syrian political elites. This was transformed by the Assad family and the Ba’ath Party in ways that actually flipped this around, where Syria consolidated its power and projected its power, at least regionally. But it came at a price, I think, that was high and unsustainable, particularly for Syrian society.

Now this is actually completely shattered. And I think there’s going to be an attempt to rewrite the history of the Syrian conflict in ways that pin the blame completely on the Assad regime, which I don’t think is the case. I think they are primarily at fault for this, not just because of their governance, which was brutal and tyrannical and maintained an exclusive monopoly on power for decades, without recognizing any dissent, without recognizing any political opposition; not just because of their reaction to the uprising when it first started, where they completely closed down any meaningful political transition; but also because even after they won the war, they spent many years refusing any political initiative to reconcile, after they had, with the help of Russia and Iran, won the war, basically. So, the frontlines had been frozen for many years.

But all the other international actors also contributed to the destruction of the country. I think there were ways in which, you know, this fragmentation didn’t just imply an obvious loss of sovereignty in the abstract sense, but also destroyed the economy and fragmented the Syrian national economy. It created kind of perverse war economies in the country. And as you said, Israel has been bombing Syria for the past decade. This bombing escalates after the collapse of the government. They further invaded Syrian territory, and we saw the incursions and the devastation that took place in the last couple days.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about who Mohammed al-Bashir is, the man who’s been appointed the temporary prime minister right now of Syria, and also HTS, its role, listed as a terrorist movement by the U.S., the EU, the U.K. and Turkey — the U.N. special envoy for Syria told the Financial Times that international powers seeking a peaceful transition in the country would have to consider lifting this designation — who Abu Mohammad al-Julani now — his birth name is Ahmed al-Sharaa — is?

OMAR DAHI: Yes. Well, I mean, I’m not an expert on Ahmed al-Sharaa’s personal history. Some of that has come out in recent days about his birth in Syria. He claims he was radicalized by the Palestinian intifada, and he joined al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

And Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is basically a splinter group from al-Qaeda that had basically come — it was based in Iraq and then came back to Syria after the uprising started. And there was a period of time, which maybe your audience will remember, when Syria fragmented into various militias. And there was just as much infighting among those militias, among themselves, between the opposition groups, just as much as they were fighting the Syrian government. So, basically, groups similar to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were fighting each other. And then there was a period of reconsolidation, particularly in the aftermath of the attack on ISIS, and the kind of permanent or the, you know, more or less, consolidation of Syria into various spheres of influence, with a U.S. presence and Kurdish-led political and military groups in the northeast, Turkish control in the northwest. And under the areas that were generally under Turkish influence, there were areas that were directly tied to Turkey and areas in which Turkey had influence, and this is the area that came to be consolidated by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. So, they have a bloody history not just prior to the war, but actually during the war, with respect to even other opposition groups, and kind of, basically, you know, during the time of the rule in the province of Idlib.

Right now and during these past two weeks, there’s been a lot of positive signs in terms of the way they approached the collapse of the Syrian regime, the signs that were verbal, the signs that were actually in actions in terms of trying to protect all government institutions, all public institutions, despite the fact that there have been incidents of looting and sabotage in various ways, but at least they’ve been trying to speak of a national interest in some ways. That, of course, has to be put to the test. There’s already critiques of their rule, because they unilaterally imposed a transitional government on Syria, which most Syrians would reject as something that they don’t have the authority to do. It’s also happening in a context where, of course, Syria is still under economic sanctions, so you’ve had devastation from many years of the war, and you’ve had also devastation of Syrian society because of the crippling economic sanctions, primarily imposed by the U.S. and the European Union. So —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

OMAR DAHI: So, all of that is really going to be, basically, coming into play over the coming days, basically, and months. And we’ll see how the regional context basically influences what’s happening domestically.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us. Of course, we’re going to continue to follow what happens with Syria. Omar Dahi, Syrian American economics professor at Hampshire College and director of the Security in Context research network.

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“Unleashed”: Report Details How Israeli Soldiers Brutalize West Bank Palestinians in Hebron
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10 ... transcript

A new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documents a shocking rise in harassment, detention and abuse of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The report includes testimony from 20 Palestinians who were attacked by soldiers in the city center of Hebron between May and August 2024, apparently chosen at random and detained for spurious or arbitrary reasons. The victims describe being punched, kicked and sexually abused, beaten with rifles, clubs or chairs, being whipped with a belt, having foul-smelling liquid poured on them, and, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers. The violence in Hebron is part of a larger Israeli “war against the entire Palestinian people” and directly connected to the genocidal assault on Gaza, says B’Tselem international outreach director Sarit Michaeli. She says that given the dehumanization of Palestinians by top officials in Israel since October 7 of last year, “it’s not surprising that Israeli soldiers who listen to Israeli leaders will act in a way that reflects this dehumanization.” Michaeli adds that such abuses are often broadcast and celebrated. “None of this is being done in a secretive way. It’s all being done in broad daylight.”

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.

As Israeli raids continue across the occupied West Bank, we turn to a new report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that details the gruesome abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in Hebron. B’Tselem documented the testimonies of over 20 Palestinians between May and August. They describe being punched, kicked, sexually abused, beaten with rifles, clubs or chairs, being whipped with a belt, having foul-smelling liquid poured on them, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers.

One of the Palestinian teens B’Tselem spoke to is Mahmoud Ghanem, an 18-year-old engineering student attacked by five Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in July. A warning to our audience: These testimonies are graphic.

MAHMOUD GHANEM: [translated] They dragged us to the jeep and made us kneel. I was still tied up. Then he blindfold me, grabbed me by the hair and banged my head against the jeep door three times, each harder than before. He hit me violently on my chest and stepped hard on my legs. Then he started punching me in the stomach. One of them grabbed me by the neck and pulled me up until I couldn’t breathe. The other punched me hard in the stomach. Then, while I was trying to catch my breath, he stepped on my testicles.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is the testimony of 52-year-old Yasser Abu Markhiyeh, who lives across from the Gilbert checkpoint in Hebron and is the director of the Ibrahim al-Khalil association in Tel Rumeidah, which is involved in cultural and educational projects in the occupied West Bank. He was questioned, detained and beaten by Israeli soldiers in July.

YASSER ABU MARKHIYEH: [translated] They treated me barbarically and arrested me for no reason. I was in pain and suffered beating, humiliation and mental torture. I was very confused and scared. … When I got to the Gilbert checkpoint by my house, an Israeli soldier demanded my ID card, and I handed it over. He demanded the phone, too, and I handed it over. Then he said, “You’re making a lot of trouble. You gave an interview on Al Jazeera.” And I said, “That’s right. I did.” He tied my hands and ordered me to sit on the ground. The four soldiers from the military post arrived. They blindfolded me, and before they took me away, they hit me on the head and kicked me.

AMY GOODMAN: Those are some of the disturbing testimonies included in B’Tselem’s new report titled “Unleashed: Abuse of Palestinians by Israeli Soldiers in the Center of Hebron.”

Since launching its war on Gaza last October, Israel has intensified attacks across the occupied West Bank, carrying out near-daily raids that have led to the arrest of some 12,000 Palestinians.

For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Sarit Michaeli, the international outreach director for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Sarit, welcome back to Democracy Now! We are seeing images of thousands fleeing Syrian prisons, and hearing the stories of hell inside. You, at the same time, have come out with this report on what’s happening to Palestinian prisoners in Hebron. Describe what shocked you most in what you are learning.

SARIT MICHAELI: I mean, thank you very much, Amy and Juan. It’s good to be with you.

And I think the most fundamental issue is that Israel claims to be a different society to Syria, right? Israel claims to be a democracy. We would argue that this is not the case. But in terms of the standards we have to set, these are just absolutely different standards to what we would expect.

In terms of what we discovered in this report, I think, on some levels, in a sense, the obvious. We’ve seen the increase, the massive increase, in the violence that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians since Hamas’s criminal actions, criminal attack on October 7th, in the slaughter in Gaza, and also in the dehumanization discourse inside Israel. And therefore, on many levels, it’s not surprising that Israeli soldiers who listen to Israeli leaders will act in a way that reflects this dehumanization.

But there is also something extremely shocking about this, because the violence that we documented, it was new, not because there hasn’t been violence by soldiers against Palestinians in the West Bank and in the city of Hebron before, but the scope of it, the scale of it, the fact that it was done in broad daylight, the fact that it was almost random in terms of the choice of victim. It wasn’t people being beaten up for something they allegedly did, like throwing stones or being rude. It was Palestinians being beaten up and facing severe abuse merely for being Palestinians. In some way, it’s as if the soldiers were just revenging Hamas’s attack and kind of imposing this vengeance on all Palestinians. They were selected almost at random, and this was done broadly. It’s very clear that everyone was aware that this was being done.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sarit, very few, according to your report, of the people who were initially detained were even charged with any offense?

SARIT MICHAELI: I think this is exactly the point. It’s not as if Palestinians [sic] arrested someone, had an actual, realistic allegation against them, whether that’s true or not, and then proceeded to beat them up. Soldiers approached Palestinians who were going about their daily business. In some cases, they looked for some sort of so-called, quote-unquote, “excuse” to beat them up, right? So, if they had some sort of photo in their phone that the soldiers could interpret as being problematic from their perspective. Or in other cases, just the mere fact of walking down the street while Palestinian was enough to trigger this abuse. That’s why we talk about this as being quite arbitrary. The victims were selected just by — you know, for just going about their daily business.

Additionally, I think one of the other really relatively new things or the new developments about what we see on the ground is that there were many threats of sexual violence. This is something I think we should be aware of, we should be mindful of, over the past year, you know, sexual — types of sexual violence and threats, in our context.

Additionally, I think several of the witnesses reported that the soldiers were documenting these incidents, presumably to broadcast them then on social media or, in one case, to send to a fiancée, to friends. So, none of this is being done in a secretive way. It’s all being done in broad daylight.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, is Hebron unique in this situation, or is it emblematic of what is going on across the West Bank?

SARIT MICHAELI: So, Hebron is unique in the sense that it is the only Palestinian town or city in the West Bank where there is a constant military presence right in the city center because of the Israeli settlements that are based in the center of Hebron. So, because of that, there is always a constant contact. There’s an interface between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in their daily lives. So, in that sense, Hebron is unique.

But we surmise, we think, and we’ve reached the conclusion that this level of violence would reflect not just the conduct of soldiers, of Israeli soldiers, and other members of the Israeli forces in Hebron city center, but that they are a much broader phenomenon. And as an Israeli organization that includes both Israelis and Palestinians, we look also at Israeli society and at what this indicates about the current moment in our society. And I think this is a really important point, the fact that these soldiers know what the spirit of the commander is. They’re not doing something of their own private initiative. They’re performing abuse that has been called for, has been incited for by Israeli leaders, by politicians, by Israeli media extensively over the past year.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sarit Michaeli, so, you have close to 800 Palestinians dead on the West Bank since October 7th, killed by Israeli soldiers. You have — and settlers. You have 12,000 imprisoned. What are you calling for? What is B’Tselem calling for?

SARIT MICHAELI: Well, we have discussed in detail what we call the silent war that Israel is conducting in the West Bank. On some levels, it’s not totally silent. But this is what one of our witnesses really referred to it.

I think one of the main issues that B’Tselem has been addressing over this past year is the connection between our war against the entire Palestinian people primarily, what we, what my government essentially has been doing in Gaza, the mass killing of civilians, the utter destruction of Gaza, the devastating humanitarian disaster that our government has caused, together — the connection between this and violence and abuse by soldiers and the use of lethal force, very extreme and disproportionate use of lethal force in the West Bank.

These are all connected issues, and they can only be addressed with some level of accountability, not just for the crimes being perpetrated in the Gaza Strip, but also for these crimes, for these abuses. We know accountability isn’t going to come from within. The Israeli system is unwilling and unable to hold Israeli soldiers and Israeli forces accountable. On the contrary, what they are doing is the result of official incitement. And therefore, there has to be international accountability for this. And as we have always stated, the international community has to also act to hold Israeli policymakers accountable for these violations.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarit Michaeli, we want to thank you for being with us, with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The new report, we’ll link to, “Unleashed: Abuse of Palestinians by Israeli Soldiers in the Center of Hebron.”

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 11, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/11/headlines

Israel Declares “Sterile Zone” in Syria Amid Massive Bombing Campaign
Dec 11, 2024

Israel’s military has continued its massive bombing campaign of Syrian military targets, carrying out some 480 strikes within just 48 hours. Israeli defense chief Israel Katz said his forces had destroyed 15 naval vessels, anti-aircraft batteries and weapons factories and were working to create a so-called sterile zone in southern Syria.

Israel Katz: “Together with the prime minister, I instructed the IDF to establish a sterile defense zone against weapons and terror threats in southern Syria, in order to prevent the establishment and organization of terror in Syria and to prevent creating a situation that would be similar to what existed in Lebanon and Gaza before October 7th. We will not allow this. We will not allow threats against the state of Israel.”

On Tuesday, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations called on the Security Council to act decisively to end the bombings, which he said targeted civilian and military infrastructure. The U.N.'s special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, condemned Israel's assault.

Geir Pedersen: “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory. This needs to stop. This is extremely important.”

Pedersen said the United Nations would consider removing the Syrian armed group HTS from a list of designated terrorist organizations, but only if it supports a government that is inclusive of all communities.

Syria’s Interim Leader Calls for Return of Millions of Refugees
Dec 11, 2024

On Tuesday, Syria’s new caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir met with members of Syria’s transitional government, pledging to bring back millions of refugees who fled Syria’s 13-year civil war and to keep Syria’s public services and institutions running after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, human rights groups have confirmed the killing of one of Syria’s most prominent opposition activists. The body of Mazen al-Hamada was discovered inside the notorious Sednaya prison near Damascus alongside about 40 others in the prison morgue who also showed signs of torture.

Israeli Attacks Across Gaza Kill Dozens, Including Children
Dec 11, 2024

Israel has continued its relentless attacks across northern and central Gaza, killing dozens of people, including women and children, in the last day. Earlier today, Israeli forces bombed a residential building in Beit Lahia where displaced families were taking shelter, killing at least 20 people. At least seven Palestinians, all members of the same family, were killed in a separate Israeli attack on a house in the Nuseirat camp. People who lost loved ones were seen sitting and crying amid the destruction, with some victims still trapped under the rubble. This is one of the survivors, Issam al-Hossary.

Issam al-Hossary: “We were sleeping. We didn’t hear the sound of the missile at all. Suddenly, I found myself waking up like this, and I saw the rubble all over me and the children. I found myself trying to remove the rubble and pull out the children, and they were suffocating. I got out of the tent, and as I stepped outside, I saw the people — bodies everywhere, blood and limbs scattered among the trees.”

This all comes as Palestinian health authorities warn dozens of wounded patients receiving care at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza are at risk of dying due to a lack of water and food.

Israel’s Yoav Gallant Welcomed to White House Despite ICC Arrest Warrant for Crimes Against Humanity
Dec 11, 2024

Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has met with President Biden’s special envoy for the Middle East and North Africa, Brett McGurk, at the White House. Their meeting on Tuesday came just weeks after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant against Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Gaza. On Monday evening, the prominent Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C., canceled a planned event featuring Gallant amid protests.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders have selected Brian Mast to lead the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Mast has previously compared Palestinians to Nazis, has said Palestinian civilians “are not innocent,” and called on Israel to destroy more infrastructure in Gaza.

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/12/headlines

Israel Bombs Syria’s Ports; Turkish-Backed Rebels Seize Territory Held by Kurdish Militias
Dec 12, 2024

Israeli forces are continuing a large-scale bombing campaign of Syrian targets following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, attacking the Port of Latakia and a weapons storehouse in Tartus. Israeli troops have pushed deeper into the occupied Golan Heights and a demilitarized buffer zone established by the United Nations a half-century ago.

In northern Syria, fighters with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army have seized more areas, including the city of Deir ez-Zor, amid clashes with U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led militias. Elsewhere, Turkey’s intelligence agency bombed a convoy of trucks driven by Kurdish fighters who had seized heavy weapons and ammunition abandoned by Syria’s military. Fighting in northern Syria has displaced more than 100,000 people.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Jordan for emergency talks on Syria. He heads to Turkey next.

Families of Syria’s Disappeared Search for Loved Ones in Sednaya Prison
Dec 12, 2024

In northern Syria’s Latakia region, opposition fighters set fire to the tomb of Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s longtime authoritarian leader and father of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

Tens of thousands of Syrians are gathering in Damascus today to attend the funeral of opposition activist Mazen al-Hamada, whose body was discovered in a morgue of the notorious Sednaya prison, showing signs of torture. On Tuesday, families of disappeared prisoners continued searching Sednaya for signs of their long-lost loved ones who were locked up under Assad’s brutal regime.

Hayat al-Turki: “I will show you the photo of my missing brother. It’s been 14 years. This is his photo. I don’t know what he looks like, if I find him. I don’t know what he looks like, because I am seeing the photos of prisoners getting out. They are like skeletons. But this is his photo, if anyone has seen him, can know anything about him or can help us. He is one of thousands of prisoners who are missing. I am asking for everyone, not only my brother, uncle, cousin and relatives.”

In Damascus, the leader of the armed group HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has vowed to shut down Assad’s notorious prisons, including Sednaya, and to dissolve Assad’s security forces. After headlines, we’ll get the latest on Syria.

Israel Kills Dozens of Palestinians in Strikes Across Gaza Strip, Incl. Humanitarian Workers
Dec 12, 2024

In Gaza, an Israeli drone strike on a humanitarian aid convoy west of Khan Younis has killed at least 13 people and injured dozens of others. It’s the latest Israeli attack on relief workers, after the U.N. reported last month that Israel has killed at least 333 humanitarian personnel since October 7, 2023.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports other Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours killed seven people, including children, in a bombing of a residential building in Gaza City; another 15 Palestinians were killed when Israel bombed a home west of the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Israeli Sniper Kills Kamal Adwan Surgeon Dr. Saeed Jouda
Dec 12, 2024

Palestinian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Saeed Jouda has died after he was shot by an Israeli sniper in northern Gaza. Dr. Jouda had left retirement to treat patients at the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital, which has endured weeks of bombings and direct attacks on its staff.

UNGA Overwhelmingly Votes for Gaza Ceasefire; WSJ: Hamas Agrees to 2 Key Israeli Ceasefire Demands
Dec 12, 2024

On Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. Just seven countries joined the United States and Israel in voting against the resolution.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that Hamas has agreed to two of Israel’s key demands for a ceasefire in Gaza. For the first time, Hamas has revealed a list of hostages it holds in Gaza, and Hamas has reportedly agreed to a deal that would allow Israeli forces to remain in Gaza temporarily when the fighting stops.

Israeli Forces Withdraw from Southern Lebanese Town as Israel’s Violations of Truce Continue
Dec 12, 2024

The U.S. military said Israeli forces completed their first withdrawal from Al-Khiyam in southern Lebanon as part of a ceasefire agreement reached at the end of November. Israel has continuously violated the truce, including on Wednesday, when its forces struck several southern Lebanese towns, killing at least five people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

U.N. Experts Urge World to Hold Israel Accountable, Call on U.S. and Germany to Halt Arms Supplies
Dec 12, 2024

At the Geneva U.N. headquarters, a panel of experts held a news conference and called for a halt to direct arms transfers to Israel, and a review of Israel’s U.N. membership over its genocide in Gaza. This is U.N. special rapporteur Ben Saul.

Ben Saul: “If lawlessness on this scale and of this extremity has no consequences, then it sends a signal to everybody else that you can behave in the same way, and the whole system begins to break down. … Germany and the United States supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill the Palestinians.”

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After Fall of Assad, “Struggle from Below” Needed to Build a Free & Democratic Syria
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria continues to reshape the country and the greater Middle East. In Damascus, leaders of the armed group HTS have retained most services of the civilian government but vowed to dissolve Assad’s security forces and shut down Assad’s notorious prisons. “People have this sense of regained freedom,” says Syrian architect and writer Marwa al-Sabouni in Homs. Still, she warns oppression in the country has left the populace weakened and vulnerable. “Syria is up for grabs now. … We are completely disarmed.” In northeast Syria, more than 100,000 people have been displaced due to fighting between Turkish-backed forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Israel continues to seize more land in the Golan Heights and has carried out over 480 airstrikes on Syria since Sunday. Swiss Syrian left-wing activist and scholar Joseph Daher explains how civil society is attempting to rebuild democracy through “struggle from below,” and how that could unleash popular support for Palestine. “Israel wanted a weak Assad and is not happy with the fall of this regime,” says Daher. “A democratization process in the Middle East is the biggest threat for Israel.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show looking at the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and how it could reshape the Middle East.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Jordan for emergency talks on Syria. He heads to Turkey next.

This comes as celebrations continue in Syria over the fall of Bashar al-Assad, but many are concerned about what might happen next.

In northeast Syria, more than 100,000 people have been displaced due to fighting between Turkish-backed forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Israel has carried out over 480 airstrikes on Syria since Sunday. Israeli troops have also seized part of the Syrian Golan Heights.

In Geneva, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, Ben Saul, criticized Israel’s actions in Syria.

BEN SAUL: There is absolutely no basis under international law to preventively or preemptively disarm a country you don’t like. I mean, if that were the case, it would be a recipe for global chaos, because lots of countries have adversaries they would like to see without weapons. This is completely lawless, that there is absolutely no basis in international law to do it. But it’s a continuation of what Israel has been doing in Syria for at least a decade.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, in Damascus, the head of the armed group HTS that led the coalition against Assad has vowed to dissolve Assad’s security forces and shut down his notorious prisons, including Sednaya, which has been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

We begin today’s show with two guests. Joseph Daher, a Swiss Syrian left-wing activist and scholar, author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, as well as Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience, he’s in Geneva, Switzerland. And in Homs, Syria, we’re joined by Marwa al-Sabouni, award-winning Syrian architect, urban thinker and writer, author of two internationally acclaimed books, The Battle for Home and Building for Hope.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Marwa, let’s begin with you in Homs. Just describe the scene there after the fall of Assad.

MARWA AL-SABOUNI: Well, thank you for having me, Amy.

The general atmosphere is an atmosphere of relief, of joy, of celebration, like you mentioned in your report. But also there’s this background of apprehension, of uncertainty, of observing what — the strikes that Israel has been conducting since the first moment of the Assad’s fall.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Marwa, could you talk about your piece for Middle East Eye? You wrote, “Syrians have flown the cage. We must not lose our freedom again.” If you could elaborate on the points you make in the piece?

MARWA AL-SABOUNI: Well, primarily, we were, for now over 50 years, under one oppressional regime that, you know, was denying Syrians from all liberties. And now with the lift of this regime, people have this sense of regained freedom.

But like I mentioned in the piece, there are a number of dangers around us, mainly by the foreign powers, which are looking at the map of Syria, proposing division, also planning the future of Syria, mostly by the vacuum and the absence of Syrians from the political scene due to the oppressional regime.

You have something that is rarely on the news, that is the control of the U.S. over the petrol in the eastern part of Syria, where the Kurdish forces, backed by the U.S., do the guarding effort for that. And for the past 14 years, even under the Assad regime, we were denied as Syrian citizens from access to fuel, from access to electricity. We don’t have electricity. Imagine living, you know, and having two hours of electricity within the 24 hours. So, it’s each six hours, you had half an hour of electricity. And imagine how this will reflect on the economy, on health sector, on production and all of that. Also you don’t have heating. You don’t have fuel for commuting. So, each car has access to only 20 liters of fuel every 15 days. So, the U.S., you know, just grabbed this piece of resource and put its hand, while the regime was here, and continues to do that until now.

And so, mainly, Syria is up for grabs now. You have all those powers who can have access to those resources. And now, like your report mentioned, we are completely disarmed. We are in a sitting duck position. And God knows what could happen to the Syrians afterwards.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I’d like to bring in Joseph Daher into the conversation. If you could respond to what Marwa said? You’ve followed Syrian politics for decades. You wrote a book called Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience. Your response to, you know, first of all, the fall of the Assad regime, what you see happening in Syria, the celebrations across the country, Assad statues being toppled and so on, Hafez al-Assad’s tomb being burned? Your response to what’s happened, and then, also, the role of foreign powers in his fall? In particular, you’ve focused on Turkey. Joseph?

JOSEPH DAHER: Thank you. Good morning.

I think the key issues to understand, first of all, following the overthrow of the regime, is how little and small the popular base of the regime was. It fell just like a house of cards. It was weakened structurally, politically, militarily, economically, and was basically surviving because of the assistance of Russia and Iran. And when these two forces were themselves weakened, this allowed the opportunity for the fall of this regime, which had, first of all, initially, a military dynamic which remained dominant, but, as we can see throughout the process, people started to go out in the street, attack symbols of the regime. And we can see in the past few days a large majority of the Syrian people were opposed to this regime, in all its sects, ethnicities. We saw statues being brought down in Kurdish-majority inhabited areas, but also in the coastal areas, Damascus, Aleppo, Suwayda.

So, this is the first thing to say, that for the first time in decades, Syrians have a hope for the future, to build a more equal, democratic, social society. Obviously, there is fear, but fear was existing for the past five decades. But at least there’s an opportunity to be seized.

With this opportunity to be seized, a lot of challenges exist. First of all, I think, internally, the groups, the armed opposition groups, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or the Syrian National Army, are far from being democratic. Quite the opposite, they’ve shown the authoritarian behavior, policies in the past. Therefore, there will be a need to rebuild, you know, democratic movement, new popular organizations, trade unions, feminist organizations, and to rebuild basically struggle from below, to build the possibility of an alternative political structure, you know, social structure.

Again, there’s another kind of threat. There’s also the ethnic division between Arabs and Kurds that must be tackled. It must be tackled. And unfortunately, Turkey is playing a very negative role by pushing, you know, SNA forces, Syrian National Army, which is acting as a proxy of Turkey to attack Kurdish-held areas.

Just to precise something, autonomous administrative areas, where you have the majority of oil production, sold part of its oil to the regime. But even if, you know, the same unity came back and they had access to all the oil in the northeast, it won’t be enough for internal consumption. The vast majority of oil was imported from Iran, was provided from Iran.

And after, I want to speak about the external threat. Obviously, Turkey, I talked about it, but Israel, as well. Israel has no interest to see a democratization process in Syria, just as in the larger Middle East, because it knows it will bring more solidarity with the Palestinian cause. And this is why the day after, the actor that was the regime, the Assad regime, protecting the road with Israel for the past 40 years, preventing any form of resistance, attacked all the military infrastructure’s capacity, so at least a large majority of them, throughout the country to destroy them, to make the future Syrian state weaker and also send a political message to the future people that will be in power in Syria, that any kind of hostile and belligerent position towards Israel will be attacked by Israel and could create instability. So, these are the two main threats, internal and external, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about these Israeli attacks? There have been hundreds and hundreds, well over 500, attacks, as you just began. You have the U.N. the envoy, special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, condemning Israel’s assault. What Israel is trying to accomplish right now in this massive bombing campaign of Syria? And you’ve written a book called Hezbollah. Where that fits into this at this point?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, I think what we’ve seen in the past few days is this demonstration that as soon as the Assad regime fell — and again, it’s important to remind the auditors that contrary to some commentators that saw the Assad regime as a resistant actor against Israel, Israel had to intervene now to bomb massively the military structures, infrastructures of the Syrian state, because it was scared that the main actor protecting its borders for the past 40 years disappeared, and, again, sending a message, a clear message, to the future forces that will be in power in Syria that any hostile position could be punished directly.

Similarly, I think there’s another thing to take into consideration, is that Israel wanted a weak Assad and is not happy with the fall of this regime. Moreover, there have been increasingly documents that have been leaked showing that Assad regime was collaborating, in a way or another, with the Israeli state.

In this perspective, more largely, I think, definitely, Iran and Hezbollah are the great loser of the fall of the regime. But no resistance against Israel can be built with supporting authoritarian regimes or participating in the repression of people struggling for democracy, freedom and social justice. So, the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran is definitely the result also of Israel’s war on Lebanon and attacks in Syria against a pro-Iranian position, pro-Hezbollah position. But more largely, we have seen that these actors have not acted largely in the interests of the liberation of the region, of the popular classes, but, moreover, of the Palestinians.

And one other indicator in this direction is the latest statements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. I personally don’t disagree with — I personally disagree with their politics, while supporting the right of resistance. But they saluted the liberation of the Palestinian people — or, the Syrian population from the dictatorship of Assad. That shows us that, basically, the key importance for a future strategy of liberation for Palestine is connected to the liberation of the population of the region.

And we have to come back to the statement made by Foreign Minister of Israel Avigdor Lieberman in 2011 following the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, that a democratic Egypt is a bigger threat to Israel than Iran. Similarly, a democratization process in the Middle East is the biggest threat for Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go — last month, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, decided to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as the Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. The Biden administration rejected the ICC decision, claiming it doesn’t have jurisdiction to try Netanyahu. Well, this week, a reporter asked State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller if the U.S. would support Assad standing in front of the ICC as a war criminal. This begins with Matt Miller, who’s then interrupted by the Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee.

MATTHEW MILLER: So, we support the work of the ICC. I know that, obviously, we have disagreed with their —

MATT LEE: Wait a second.

MATTHEW MILLER: Hold on. Hold on. I’m going to — let me address it.

MATT LEE: No, you support the work of the ICC —

MATTHEW MILLER: We do support —

MATT LEE: — until they do something like with Israel.

MATTHEW MILLER: We — so, we have had a lot — let me just answer the question.

MATT LEE: And then you don’t like them at all, or the U.S.

MATTHEW MILLER: You know what, Matt? Let me — Matt, let me answer the question, because I was addressing that before you interrupted me. We obviously have had a jurisdictional dispute with them as it relates to cases against Israel. That is a long-standing jurisdictional dispute. But that said, we have also made clear that we support broadly their work, and we have supported their work in other cases, despite our jurisdictional dispute when it comes to Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: A jurisdictional dispute, Joseph Daher, if you could talk about that?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, who will be surprised that the U.S. has double standards? We’ve seen this continuously and that U.S. has never pushed an agenda for real democratization of the region and has foreign policy according to its own geopolitical interests. So, this is, for me, not a surprise to see the difference in this kind of behavior.

We have to remind that the U.S. is the key actor allowing for the continuous genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, for the continuous annexation of lands in the West Bank. Israel would not have been able to continue its genocidal war without the support of the U.S. Actually, Israel is only the implementer of U.S. politics, according to the Palestinians. Similarly, Israel could not have been leading a war on Lebanon without U.S. support.

And finally, Israel informed the U.S. of the invasion of Syrian lands, of the bombing of military infrastructures in Syria, with the support of the U.S., that also are seeking to protect its key ally in the region, Israel. So, it’s not a surprise at all to see these kind of double standards by the U.S. or any kind of Western states.

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, Yoav Gallant, who was one of those charged by the ICC, for whom there is an arrest warrant, just met with Brett McGurk in Washington, D.C., this week.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And before we end, Joseph Daher, if you could talk about what you see unfolding in the next weeks in Syria? You spoke earlier a little bit about the different groups, not just HTS, that are now operating in Syria. How do you see this playing out in terms of the plan that they’ve laid out, and, in fact, of their changing political orientation, ideological orientation, as the head of HTS has suggested they will do?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, there’s a clear strategy by the HTS that started in 2016, following its break with al-Qaeda, to present itself as a rational, moderate actor, not only locally but also regionally and internationally. It has, you know, branded itself as would like to participate any kind of counterterrorist campaigns, that it’s not a threat to the West. It’s also sending messages to regional actors. And we’re seeing a change, according to regional, international actors, towards HTS.

Does that mean that HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a democratic organization? No, far from it. It is an authoritarian organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology and that is seeking to basically consolidate its power now in Syria. One of the latest indicators is the nomination of a prime minister that was previously the head of the government of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s first priority is to consolidate its power in the region it took control over.

And this is a challenge for the Syrian democratic and social aspiration of Syrian popular classes in the country. This is why I was saying that we have a lot of — Syrians, in general, have a lot of hope, but also there’s contradictions and challenges in the space that was opened by the fall of the regime. And obviously, there will be a lot of work of rebuilding to do among democratic and progressive sectors of the society to constitute a bloc to challenge the power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but also of the Syrian National Army.

And the developments in the following weeks and months will depend on the ability of democratic and social groups to develop, and also, according, as I was saying, to regional and international developments, because a lot of the country, despite their differences, also want to see a form of authoritarian stability reimposed on Syria, that basically meaning a damage control for the region.

So, again, the hope is back, but there’s a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of obstacles. But at least, for decades, we have the ability as Syrians to think of a better future. Nothing is done yet, but, again, there’s a lot of hope. And it will depend on the balance of forces within the country and the ability to constitute democratic, progressive bloc, challenging the Arabic-Kurdish division, on the ability of challenging these authoritarian local forces, but also regional and international forces, because none of them have the best interests of the Syrian popular classes.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but I just wanted to ask you about the significance of the finding of the corpse of Mazen al-Hamada. Tens of thousands of Syrians in Damascus now are gathering to attend his funeral.

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, it’s a tragedy, like thousands, hundreds of thousands, of other disappeared, forcibly disappeared, of political prisoners that we don’t know what happened with them. This is a reflection of the barbarism of what was the Assad regime for the past 54 years, a regime that not only killed Syrians, but attacked Lebanese, occupied Lebanon, attacked Palestinians, Palestinian national movement, and has been really a center of authoritarianism and reactionary politics, not only for the Syrians, but for the whole region.

AMY GOODMAN: Joseph Daher, thank you so much for being with us, Swiss Syrian left-wing scholar and activist in Geneva, Switzerland. We’ll link to your recent piece for The New Arab, “From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below.” And thanks also to Marwa al-Sabouni, the Syrian architect and writer in Homs, in Syria. We lost our connection with her in the middle of the conversation.

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Another Winter of War: NRC Head Jan Egeland on Visiting Ukraine & Latest on Sudan, Gaza and Syria
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024

International humanitarian leader Jan Egeland joins Democracy Now! to discuss aiding civilians in war-torn areas of Ukraine, Syria, Sudan and Gaza. In Ukraine, residents are bracing for another winter of war as a Russian offensive reaches within two miles of the key eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. “The population is exhausted, so imagine how it is in the trenches with those soldiers. Many of them have continuously been in battle for two years now,” says Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The courageous humanitarian aid workers … are targeted like the civilian population. Even ambulances are repeatedly hit.”

Transcript

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Ukraine, where residents are bracing for another winter of war as the U.N. estimates 60% of its electricity-generating capacity has been destroyed. Russian troops are now reportedly within two miles of the key eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

The Russian offensive comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has threatened to reduce U.S. support to Ukraine. Trump recently met in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After the meeting, Trump wrote, quote, “Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” Trump wrote.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced Saturday it would send a new $1 billion military aid package to Ukraine that includes drones and ammunition.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the war in Ukraine, the humanitarian crisis there, we’re joined by Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He’s joining us from Chișinău, Moldova, where he’s just arrived after several days in Ukraine. Before that, we spoke to him after he had just left Gaza saying he was broken, and has recently been in Sudan.

Jan Egeland, describe what you’re seeing in Ukraine right now, as we here in the United States see in Paris [President-elect] Trump meeting with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

JAN EGELAND: Well, what I see and those with whom I met are all testament of this third Cold War winter becoming the worst. I’ve been five times now in Ukraine these last three years, and every time you come, people are more exhausted. They have less resources. There is less electricity, less water supply. And there is this relentless bombardment, that has increased tremendously in recent weeks, on civilian population.

I was in one place that is really frontline. It’s Kherson, was the one provincial capital that the Russians were able to take in their offensive in February two-and-a-half years ago. That was then retaken by Ukrainian forces, but the Russians are on the other side the river, Dnipro, so next door. And there is multiple attacks every single day, including the day I was there.

We meet in bomb shelters with the population we serve, and help them there, but were able to create an office now there and do massive also cash relief. So, it’s so important that the United States and the other Western countries continue to support the Syrian people. What USAID is doing through us is giving tens of thousands of families much-needed cash assistance to survive this winter.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jan, if you could also speak about — you were in Kherson, but you were also in Odesa and Mykolaiv. If you could describe the situation on the ground there, and then, also, the difficulties in providing humanitarian assistance? In this year alone, 2024, dozens of humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Ukraine.

JAN EGELAND: Yes, they have, because the courageous humanitarian aid workers, especially from the local frontline organizations that we work with, are targeted, like the civilian population. Even ambulances are repeatedly hit. First night in Odesa — first afternoon in Odesa, we had to go to the bomb shelter underneath, the Norwegian Refugee Council bomb shelter in Odesa, because there was an alert of incoming ballistic missiles.

They hit Zaporizhzhia, which is another city in the south, and a hospital was obliterated, really. I think it’s now — the toll is more than 10 dead, multiple wounded, in a hospital, really.

In Odesa, the ancient city of culture and civilization, there is blackouts all the time, as in Mykolaiv, which, of course, means that life is tough, and on top of that, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced from other locations in the south and from the east of Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, also Russian soldiers, just astronomical, and the reports in Ukraine of recruiters going and almost, basically, abducting men to try to get them to the frontline, people increasingly resisting, and where you see this heading around the issue of whether there would be any kind of negotiation at this point between Zelensky and Putin?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, I mean, the population is exhausted. So, imagine how it is in the trenches with those soldiers. Many of them have been continuously in battle for two years now or more. But, well, what about the future? I mean, I think everybody yearn for peace, ceasefire, an end to the bombardment. But it’s not very clear to see how they could agree on anything, when one side says that they want to annex large parts of Ukraine and the other side says, “We want to liberate all parts of Ukraine.” Well, hopefully, there will be a ceasefire and there will be a negotiated end to this, so that the civilian population that we serve can have a respite in the middle of this madness.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Jan Egeland, just in the previous segment, we were talking about Syria, so I’d like to get your response to these extraordinary events in Syria in the last days. You were in Syria not long ago. And earlier this week, you know, in terms of the response around the world, especially in countries where there are large numbers of Syrian refugees, Austria, although by no means the majority of Syrian refugees — Austria announced it will begin deporting Syrian refugees following the revolution that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. About 100,000 Syrians have resettled in Austria in the 13 years since Syria’s civil war started. Meanwhile, the governments of Belgium, France, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom said they would pause applications for asylum by Syrians. More than 14 million people have fled Syria since 2011.

You tweeted in response to this news, quote, “Hi European populist politicians, you want to push Syrian refugees back to these homes while foreign powers are still bombing and no one knows how and who will be governing the various regions of the country? It would be cruel and reckless. Those who can will voluntarily return.” So, Jan, if you could elaborate on this? First, your response to Assad’s ouster, and then this response from European governments about the status of Syrian refugees already there and applications from Syrians for asylum?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, and when I tweeted this, that you quoted, I had a photo with it that I took myself only four weeks ago in Syria, where you have entire cities leveled to the ground and not rebuilt since the horrific civil war that was going on continuously from 2012 to 2019. And I said this: “Is it this rubble you want to deport people to?”

I know Syria well. I worked with it every week now since 2011. There is jubilation and anxiety on top of each other, and in Damascus, mostly jubilation, because those who have taken over say all of the right things at the moment. But in the northeast, there is a lot of fighting between — and the various armed groups are taking territory from each other, Israel, Turkey trying to bomb the place. The various groups that are now partly or fully in power were listed by many of these Western governments as terrorists. And then they want to deport people back.

I think it’s a testament how bad politics have become in Europe and, for that matter, in the United States, that the idealism, the openness, the biblical saying, “I was a stranger, and you took me in,” that’s gone. Now people are looking at their own navel and really cherishing their nationalism and their xenophobia, it seems. I’m ashamed what are the signals coming out of one European country after the other. This is the time to invest in hope and possibilities in Syria, not to deport people back to a chaotic situation where they will have to live in rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jan Egeland, before we go, we just wanted to address Sudan, which you’ve talked about as the worst crisis in the world. The headlines today, Sudan’s military is accused of carrying out an airstrike on a marketplace in the western region of Darfur, in which more than a hundred people were killed. Emergency Lawyers rights group described the bombing as a “horrific massacre.” The fighting between the Rapid Defense Forces and Sudan, and what needs to be done, the level of hunger there, as well?

JAN EGELAND: It’s just tremendous. And these generals are really willing to fight each other to the last woman and child, it seems. I was in West Darfur, which was bombed three weeks ago, where I saw large parts of the city of Geneina ethnically cleansed from the Masalit people, the African tribe, by Arab militias in this case. In other parts of the country, there is indiscriminate bombing, etc., etc.

But there is also a lot of humanitarian heroic aid workers on the ground, including in the Norwegian Refugee Council, that with, again, assistance from the USAID, is able to provide the daily subsidized bread to a million people every morning through 800, 900 bakeries.

So, we’re there. We’re going to be fighting for the civilian population, but we need attention to this, the biggest crisis on Earth, at the same time as the Middle East is in turmoil, Ukraine is having its worst winter. We need to have — we need to really mobilize international solidarity in the months ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we have just 30 seconds, but our headline today out of Gaza is the bombing of another humanitarian convoy in Gaza. An Israeli drone strike on a convoy west of Khan Younis killed at least 13 people, injured dozens of others. You were not just in Sudan and Ukraine, but also we spoke to you right after you came out of Gaza, and you said you were broken by that.

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, and it’s a pattern. This civilian population and these women and children had nothing to do with the horrors inflicted on Israel on the 7th of October. They are innocent, and they are bombed, and they are starved by this besiegement from Israel, with American arms and American support. It’s the worst part of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Hopefully, that will change, because it’s costing the United States and the Western powers, really. They look at hypocrisy: How come occupation by Russia in Ukraine is bad, and it’s tolerable when Israel is doing exactly the same?

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, joining us from Chișinău, Moldova, where he’s just arrived after several days in Ukraine, before that, Sudan, before that, in Gaza.

[admin]

Cashing in on the War in Gaza
by Ralph Nader
Oct 19, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/c ... ar-in-gaza

Ralph welcomes back William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. They'll discuss the Cost of War Project's latest reports on US military spending in support of Israel, and the humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza. Then, Ralph is joined by Palestinian writer and analyst Sumaya Awad to discuss the mass civil disobedience at the New York Stock Exchange, which was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace to protest the weapons manufacturers that are making millions off the genocide in Gaza.

William Hartung is an expert on the arms industry and US military budget, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War.

In all my years of watching the operations of Washington—including the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq—I have never seen such a servile position by top officials of an administration to a foreign power. Not even close. They are humiliating the United States of America. They are jeopardizing the United States of America—because as you know, the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA have studies and scenarios of blowback. So this war in the Middle East is gonna come back to the US in terms of reprisal and retaliation. And we are not able to anticipate that because we think, as the ruling empire in the world, that we're invulnerable. But we're not invulnerable.

Ralph Nader: The Biden administration is living in the past. They’ve got this “Israel, right or wrong” ideology. They think it's a political detriment to criticize Israel, and the fact that the younger generation is not locked into that point of view. But I think they’re going to hurt themselves more by enabling the war crimes that Israel is committing than they would by taking a stand. And of course, they keep trying to say that they're pushing for a ceasefire…But as long as they're doing the weapons and the financing, that is laughable.

William Hartung: It's just stunning. Given the record of this century—two failed wars, $8 trillion spent, hundreds of thousands killed—and yet they could say with a straight face, “We need a dominant military.” As if that’s the tool that's gonna solve any of these problems, rather than make them worse.

William Hartung: Sumaya Awad is a Palestinian writer and analyst based in New York City, and she is the spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace’s mass civil disobedience event at the New York Stock Exchange. Ms. Awad directs strategy and communications for the Adalah Justice Project, and she is a cofounder of the Against Canary Mission Project, which defends student activists targeted by blacklists for their Palestinian rights advocacy. She is the co-author of Palestine and Elections and co-editor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.

There were over 200 arrests—the majority of them anti-Zionist Jewish New Yorkers, who want to send a clear message both to the US government and the American people that Israel weaponizes their identity in order to justify crimes against humanity and that they are not okay with this. That they refuse for their identity and Jewish people to be weaponized in this way. And that in fact, what Israel is doing and what the US government is funding and politically backing is actively making this country and certainly the rest of the world unsafe not just for Jewish people, but for others.

Sumaya Awad: We are strategizing about how to push back against the role of AIPAC and the grip of AIPAC. I think the reality is that there are many people in Congress that are actually benefiting financially from what is happening in Gaza. We know that at least 50 members of Congress have links to the military-industrial complex—whether that's through stocks or other things. And so it's about unraveling this network, these connections between our government, the way it's profiting from the genocide and then what that means in terms of these elections across the country.

Transcript

Listeners who want to know the history before October 7th, 2023, back to 1948,
ought to read the book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Professor Khalidi, retired Columbia University, a bestseller and worthy of that status. And Hannah, you have an announcement to make.
I sure do, Steve. It's tort law day season. The leaves are falling. The air is brisk. And on Saturday, October 26th at 12 p.m. Eastern, the American Museum of Tort Law is hosting its free virtual panel on blockbuster torts. You can register at tortmuseum.org. And Ralph has a little bit more to say about it. Ralph?
Yeah, this is a wonderful compressed education, listeners, so you bring yourself up to date on one of the great pillars of private law in our country, the civil justice system under the law of torts, the law of wrongful injury, and the remedies you have to go to court, have a trial by jury, get compensation for your losses,
as well as generate deterrence for safer behavior and disclose information through processes of depositions that alert people to various hazards like the opiate drugs, the oil spills, the defective motor vehicles, and many other products that need to be recalled. This is a very good event. It's free, and you'll learn about mass torts, litigation, its pluses and minuses.
You'll learn about the connection between artificial intelligence and harm to people by an expert, and you'll also learn about something most people are not aware of, that most crimes, including street crimes and corporate crimes, are also violations of tort law. And so if the prosecutors and the law enforcers in the Justice Department and
around the country don't do their job on issues like police brutality or cancerous toxic waste emissions by corporations, people can initiate their own lawsuits before trial by jury under the law of torts. So learn all about it. Tell your friends, relatives, coworkers. October 26th, Saturday, 12 noon, Eastern Time, free of charge by Zoom.
And now on to the show. Let's face it. As much as we on this program have posed, exposed, and decried the last year's genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, we are also accomplices. And that's because our tax dollars help pay for this slaughter. If we want our government to divest from this genocide,
one of our first steps must be a brutally honest accounting of what exactly we've been paying for. Our first guest today, William Hartung, is a longtime contributor to Brown University's Costs of War Project, and he has co-authored a recent paper on the cost of U.S. military aid to Israel and its parallel military buildup in the Middle East.
This report tells us what $22 billion has brought us over the past year. And a companion paper analyzing the full humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza describes, quote, the chains of impact leading towards indirect deaths. caused by Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
It examines the impact on population health of the destruction of public infrastructure, livelihood sources, reduced access to healthcare, water and sanitation, and environmental damage. So Mr. Hartung will give us a full accounting. And some of those tax dollars are going straight to American manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Since last October,
Jewish Voice for Peace has been staging mass civil disobedience events in New York, including at Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty, and other cities, demanding the United States stop funding Israel's genocide in Gaza. This past Monday, hundreds of activists from Jewish Voice for Peace gathered outside the New York
Stock Exchange to protest the weapons manufacturers that are making millions of dollars off the genocide in Gaza. That brings us to our second guest, Samaya Awad. Ms. Awad is a Palestinian writer and spokesperson for this latest demonstration. We'll speak to Ms. Awad about the event and the reactions to it. As always, somewhere in the middle,
we'll check in with our irrepressible corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, the human costs of war in Gaza are even greater than we think. David. William Hartung is an expert on the arms industry and U.S. military budget and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center Sustainable Defense Task Force. He's the author of Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq, Avoiding the Next War.
Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, William Hartung. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much, Bill. You've been proven right year after year in your analysis, and we want to get the depth of it in a few moments. Now, in all my years of watching the operations of Washington,
including the Bush-Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq, I have never seen such a servile position by top officials of administration to a foreign power, not even close. They are humiliating the United States of America. They are jeopardizing the United States of America because, as you know, the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA have studies and scenarios of blowback.
So this war in the Middle East is going to come back to the U.S. in terms of reprisal and retaliation. And we are not able to anticipate that, because we think, as the ruling empire in the world, that we're invulnerable. But we're not invulnerable, and our defense and national security agencies have very realistic scenarios of any
possible counterattacks. Now, with that background, William Hartung, you've written a very revealing article for Forbes magazine. this month, and you participated in the costs of war and the human costs of war at Brown University. And so I want to put this question to you. How do you get a handle as a citizenry in a presumed democratic society?
to challenge these entrenched illegalities that are resulting in the risk of a wider war involving Iran in the Middle East with a blowback to the United States. How do you get a handle on it, representing a majority of Americans now who want a ceasefire and an arms suspension to Israel?
Well, I think part of the problem is that democracy is at the speed. People don't feel like they can make a difference and they're not weighing in as strongly as they should. But I think also the Biden administration is living in the past. They've got this Israel right or wrong ideology.
They think it's a political detriment to criticize Israel. In fact, the younger generation is not locked into that point of view. I think he's going to hurt himself more by enabling the war crimes that Israel is committing than they would by taking a stand. And of course, they keep trying to say that they're pushing for a ceasefire.
They're trying to get not being more responsible. But as long as they're giving them the weapons and the financing, then that is laughable. And, you know, every time Blinken or one of those officials says they want a rules-based international order, they can't be taken seriously. And, in fact, I think possibly for years to come,
this is going to hurt the United States standing in the world, diplomacy. people's ability to believe anything or efficient say. So, of course, the first issue is the suffering of the Palestinians. And there was a companion paper to the one I worked on about the human cost, which found that, you know,
the 40,000 direct deaths are just the beginning. The author believes over 60,000 people have died of starvation. There's disease. There may be 10,000 bodies that they still haven't dug out of the rubble. And now they're, of course, spreading deaths and refugees in Lebanon and West Bank.
I think they would love to take the Harris Biden administration into backing them in a war on Iran. And all this is backwards. It's our tax dollars financing this, but Netanyahu is setting the pace. If he attacks Hamas or Hezbollah and they respond, the Biden response is, well, we have to defend Israel.
But Netanyahu is the aggressor here. So that doesn't make any sense. And the question is, how far are they going to go? Are they ever going to stand up to him? And I think only much larger levels of public pressure. I think politicians who are kind of mired in ideology,
the only thing they would understand is if they'd lose their job. And, you know, I don't, we don't take positions as an organization on elections, but people need to make their voices heard and understand also that elections are just one step in the process. On that point, Bill,
they're going the wrong way if they want to win the election, because they're losing votes in the swing states here, like Michigan. It's not just Arab Americans or Muslim Americans. There are a lot of people now who are ready to stay home. They don't have to vote for Trump. They don't have to vote for the Green Party.
They just stay home. And with the Electoral College and razor-thin polls between Harris and Trump, you would think they would be more sensitive to the domestic electoral consequences in the remaining days until November 5th. But they're not. I've had doctors ask, why isn't Biden at least airlifting some of these children, these babies that have horrible burns,
and are dying, or amputees shot by snipers, airlifting them to U.S. hospitals. I mean, never mind the humanity of it. You would think they'd want to do it just in terms of public relations, and they're not even doing that. And the Congress has no fiscal restraints. Tell us about your study on, since October 7th,
how much Congress has shoveled, knee-jerk, without hearings, over the Biden dissent to Israel. Well, we found $17.9 billion in military aid, another $5 billion for stepped-up military operations in the region. And that's probably a low estimate because the U.S. government has been so non-transparent. We're probably missing things. And of course, the costs are going up every day.
It was before they agreed to send the missile banner to Israel, the 100 troops. You know, every time Israel takes another step forward, the U.S. gets behind them. So I mentioned in my article, at the beginning of the Bush invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Lindsay, an economic advisor, said it might cost $200 billion.
And he was slapped on the wrist. The administration said, oh, no, it'll be $50 billion. It was a trillion dollars or more. Now, it doesn't automatically mean that this will go that way, but it means the government inevitably understates the cost of war. And, of course, if our troops get involved,
there's going to be money to take care of the veterans and, you know, possibly aid to help reconstruct the territory that we helped Israel destroy, which is ironic, of course. So the cost could be huge. There's still a push to send more to Ukraine.
They're pushing the Pentagon budget close to a trillion dollars to deal with like a caricature of the military threat they claim is posed by China. And diplomacy is in the backseat. I mean, if anything, this century should have proven that force is not the answer. It wasn't the answer to Iraq. It wasn't the answer to Afghanistan.
It made matters worse. Well, on that point you just made, the Biden-Blinken duo have not engaged in any arms control negotiations. A lot of the nuclear arms control treaties with Russia and others have been very severely shaken or suspended or their time is expired for renewal. Nothing going on. No ongoing nuclear arms or other arms control treaties.
There are no peace negotiations underway in the Middle East. No peace negotiations by the U.S. underway in Ukraine, Russia. The more you add it up... More you wonder, it is not just Trump that's unstable and berserk as he goes around the country. The actual performance and lack of performance and total surrender of U.S.
executive power to Netanyahu's regime represents a different kind of on-the-ground instability and going berserk. It is almost inconceivable, Bill, to try to explain what's going on here. Why are they going this far? What is their thinking here? They're operating like servants of a foreign power. If the Foreign Registration Act applied to government officials,
they'd have to register Biden and Blinken as foreign agents of the Israeli regime. Hands down, evidence. How do you explain it? Well, it's irrational in the sense that it's not good for anyone. It's not good for the future of Israel. It's not good for the possibility of peace in the Middle East.
Even if they eliminate Hamas, they're creating a generation of anger that could well create another one. Just as ISIS grew after Al Qaeda was someone on its back heel. So I think it's kind of a case of ideology kills. They're trapped. in an earlier mindset that says you must support Israel at all costs.
I don't know if they believe this notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. How is it possible when you have people under occupation? I think Netanyahu is the worst case of an Israeli prime minister we've seen in a long time.
And of course, part of this is about his survival and not about the people that he clearly doesn't care about. So it's baffling. I agree. You know, when I was a student, you know, we talked about American empire, economic exploitation, and creating, you know, military dominance in the world.
Even if that's what you were aiming for, this is not going to achieve that. This is going to hasten the decline and lack of influence in the United States, hurt our reputation in the world, hurt our economy. This is the 100th year since the birth of James Baldwin.
And one of the things he said that stuck with me from when I was a teenager was, You know, in a system of oppression, of course, the oppressed are severely damaged. But the oppressors are also damaged because they essentially distort themselves and sacrifice their humanity. And I think that's where we're at right now.
And you either have to stand up or not. You know, we can't let this stand. Well, let's talk about the human costs now in that area. So someone asks you, given all you know about the direct and indirect costs of the war, what's your estimate of death and injury? Because that will change the dynamics.
The press will have a higher sense of urgency. even citizen groups, a higher sense of urgency. Maybe the government would have a higher sense. Maybe there'd be more people in Congress. If they know that 400,000 have died, maybe a million in the next few months will total a million deaths of the 2.3
million Gazans in an area twice the size of the District of Columbia. Packed, crowded, forced into brutal marches. What estimate are you willing to give, absent, you know, strict epidemiological analysis, which are not possible until the war stops, the genocide of the Palestine Holocaust? Well,
the researcher who did the human cost chapter put it at about four times as many indirect deaths as direct, so maybe 160,000 or so, with the understanding that we cannot really know, given that reporters can't get in, human rights people can't get in. But even so, many more people have died indirectly and directly,
and that will continue even if the bomb is set tomorrow because it's disease, it's starvation, it's lack of health care, and not to mention the trauma psychologically of having your family killed, your neighborhood destroyed, you know, living in rubble as a refugee. You know, the cost, human and otherwise, will last for many, many years. I mean,
we're still, you know, paying the cost of helping the vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries and So, never when a war started, the government ever mentioned the fact that the cost can go on forever, both to individuals and the war cells and even our own personnel. So, it's just stunning.
Given the record of this century, two failed wars, $8 trillion spent, hundreds of thousands killed. They can say with a straight face, we need a dominant military. Is this the tool that's going to solve any of these problems and make them worse? Well, privately, Netanyahu must wonder how lucky he is. Here he is before October 7th,
despised by three out of four Israelis for trying to destroy the independence of the judiciary. He's under prosecution by Israeli prosecutors for corruption. He's just not popular. in Israel until October 7, and he's looking at this world, and he's king of the hill. He's twirling the U.S. government around his finger.
He's about to start another war in Iran. The two volleys by Iran produced no damage. Explain to our listeners, the first volley was flagged, and the second one produced some material damage at military bases, but didn't kill anybody except the Palestinian in the West Bank who was hit by falling debris.
What do you mean when Iran sent all these missiles months ago and they flagged it? Well, I think, you know, prior to that, I don't believe Netanyahu let this happen, but I think what Hamas did was terrific. But at this point, the death toll is about 100 Palestinians, every Israeli that died in the Hamas attack,
which is indiscriminate and therefore a war crime. And the Iranian response, I think, was meant for domestic violence, to say we did something, but not to do major damage to Israel and escalate the war. But at this stage, we don't know what will be escalating the war. It's out of control.
If there's any conflict, I can remember it, you know, in decades. And so to let Netanyahu set the pace and follow behind is just irresponsible and unconscionable. Well, how do you, as an observer of Congress, how do you explain the minimal number of members of Congress like Bernie Sanders
and Senator Von Hollen from Maryland and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and a few others are standing up and demanding ceasefire and suspension of arms? But they're in a distinct minority, even among their own Democratic Party. And, of course, the Republican Party, under McConnell and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House,
just are openly using language that says, kill them all. In fact, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, two senators, essentially said that. How do you explain that their positions are contrary to the public opinion in the United States, which is turning against the Israeli-Palestinian holocaust? I mean, it's not like they're hooraying public opinion back home. It's not happening.
How do you explain to our listeners the situation in Congress now? Well, I think, you know, despite the opinion polls, they're in fear for their political lie. If you look what happened to Jamal Baldwin and Cori Bush, about the money that came in against them, even if you look at the students who were being suspended, you know,
for basically exercising free speech and being on the right side of history, it's a very dangerous moment. I remember after 9-1-1 taking a lot of heat from fighting back against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This seems worse to me. You know, I was a student activist at the end of the apartheid period.
You know, we weren't getting suspended. We weren't getting dopped. We weren't getting vilified. We weren't living in universes that ran more like autocracies than democracies. So it's almost like a virus that has yet to be eradicated. And, you know, people need to stand up. And there are organizations certainly, you know, skiing through the Palestine and, you know,
give a voice to peace, but also groups that have been working prior to that, like the Poor People's Campaign, which was anti-militarism building a flank. I think basically we need to go far, far beyond the traditional peace movement and basically realize that this is about the future of this country.
Is it going to be a democracy or isn't it? Can it become a better democracy? You know, people need to figure out what level of risk they're willing to take and they need to take it. But it's so different from how we've been trained to operate. I mean, we live in kind of this infotainment society.
People have felt for a long time you can't really get the government to do big, important things. and of course people who have been down and out i mean you know white male life expectancy is down and many of them have lost their careers and they're being
didn't scapegoat who haven't been answered and some of them are gravitating to that so you know unfortunately the the forces of hate have this imploded message and to convince people that we can you know, build a better country, which takes time, also takes a different attitude that it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it's worth the fight.
And so I think it's going to have to be more like some of the movements that have changed for the country, be it slavery, be it women's suffrage, be it the civil rights movement, environmental movement, LGBTQ movement. Those things involved people organizing for years before the moment came and the public got on board.
I mean, of course, now we don't have a lot of time giving Climate crisis. So, you know, Dr. King talked at the end of his life about the fierce urgency of now. It couldn't be more apt than the situation we're in.
But I do believe that, you know, a lot of people think, oh, you know, fighting is grim. I don't want to hear about it. Actually, people know about it. It's affecting them. The only way to feel better is to try to be something about it. And that's the kind of ethos you have to inject it.
And it's going to take, I think, some old-fashioned face-to-face meetings with your colleagues, friends, and I think also capture the stories of how people have beaten great odds before, the inspirations of greatest people. So we need all of that now. And, you know, whether we can do it in time, we don't know, but that's not the point.
The point is to make the effort. Well, the historical analogy is the Vietnam War, which Congress dilly-dallied and supported the Johnson administration, for example. And then the pressure from the public demonstrations and marches and pressures on members of Congress led Congress to end the Vietnam War. They simply cut off the money. to the Republican administration.
I think it was 1974. They said, we're done. No more money for the Vietnam War. And then the US had to get out. That's the sequence, listeners, that we have to emulate on this situation if there's time. In your Forbes article, and I urge listeners to pick up William Hartung's Forbes article of October 15th, 2024,
called The Human Costs of the Gaza War Are Even Greater Than You Think, you have this harrowing paragraph. You say, Further escalation is a distinct and dangerous possibility. The decision to deploy a battery of US THAAD anti-missile systems to Israel, along with 100 US support personnel, is the next step in that process. In essence,
President Biden is given the power over whether or not the war escalates to Benjamin Netanyahu. When Israel attacks Hezbollah or Iran, the Biden administration pledges to help defend it against the inevitable counterattack. This policy of, quote, Netanyahu right or wrong, which rewards his reckless behavior, with yet more support, must stop. Without a sharp reversal in US policy,
the human and economic costs of supporting Israel's war could easily spiral out of control." Those are your words. Early in the genocidal invasion of Gaza, Biden would lecture publicly Netanyahu to let humanitarian trucks in. He's not even doing that now. We're seeing mass starvation and mass death from lack of clean water and no medicine and health care.
Now, why does he have to go that far in giving Netanyahu and his genocidal army the green light to block thousands of humanitarian aid trucks paid for by the US taxpayer from going into Gaza? Why does he have to go that far? I don't think there's a rational answer. I mean, in some cases,
people in power with their eyes, they believe they're on high, they're trying to get money to cut the considerable action. But as you said in Raza, it's impossible to do that given the scale of the production. So, I would put that in the mind for the folks that are supporting this war that we have to fight.
They never had a psychological state of consciousness. If they're not paying attention, they have to build it and resume the bank. Bill Hartung, you've studied over the years and written about the military-industrial complex. Tell us the role of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
and others who are making a lot of money selling all these arms to the Middle East and elsewhere. What's their role in the influence game over the Biden administration? Well, in the current conflict, they almost don't have to lift a finger because Biden is so all in and so pressured by the Israel lobby.
So they're mostly, the big companies mostly cashing the check. But the tech folks in California, like Peter Thiel, Palantir, they actually had their board meeting in Israel to show support for the war. And when asked about whether he cared about how his weapons were being used, Peter says, oh, we don't keep track of that.
We trust the Israelis. So it's kind of a split. I mean, it's kind of the new tech folks. They're all in, shamelessly so. And I think the big companies would rather just catch the check and not be associated in the public eye with the war. What about the interest, technically speaking,
of these arms manufacturers in testing new forms of weaponry by shipping these weapons to the Israelis? They like to get feedback from the field, don't they? Well, but they're not the ones driving the train in this case. But they will, as they did in Ukraine, once the war starts,
they'll claim that their weapons are the greatest things in flight spread. But in Ukraine, actually, some of their drones, the Wall Street drones, were so poor that they stopped using them and bought Chinese drones. But certainly, you know, they will capitalize after the fact, either as a marketing tool.
But in the case of Israel, there's no need for them to weigh in. There's so much ideology and so much lobbying already. They don't need to lift a finger. Well, in case our listeners at this point, Bill Hartung, feel that there's nothing they can do, they're frustrated, they're fearful, they're anxious, there is something you can do, listeners.
It's called Congress. Congress can stop this cold, and you are outnumbering those 535 senators and representatives. Probably about 20 or 25% already would like an arms cutoff and a ceasefire and moving towards serious peace negotiations over there. Stop the genocide, stop the Palestinian Holocaust. So there it is. Congress is in recess.
They're going around shaking hands, smiling before the election. Hold on to their hand and give them your peace of mind. Tell them exactly what you want done in no uncertain terms and that you're not going to go away. Congress can cut this off and stop it cold. Anna?
Mr. Hartung, could you put the last fiscal year's spending in some historical context? How does it compare to previous years and does the nature of the spending change recently?
Well, the aid to Israel is far and away the highest in the history of the U.S. relationship with the Israeli military. The Pentagon spending as a whole is pushing towards a trillion dollars, which is sort of similar to where it was at the peak of the Iraq and Afghan wars
when there were hundreds of thousands of troops on the sea. And if the hawks have their way, a trillion is just a sign on the highway going higher. So we really need to push back. I mean, we've got natural disasters. We've got the danger of disease. We've got poverty. We've got to invest in education.
You know, there's all kinds of things we need to keep our country strong and resilient. And if we're going to pour so much money into weapons of war, we're not going to be able to do that. This is the first year ever that interest on the debt was higher than even the Pentagon budget.
So, you know, if we're going to make a difference, we have to shift priorities within that budget. And we can't let the Pentagon get in the flu's eyes. And the looming danger, Bill, if there's blowback, there's an attack like 9-11 on the U.S., the forces of concentrated power, both corporate and government,
will try to suppress all dissent and shove aside the priorities you just mentioned to deal with climate violence. to deal with preparedness for coming pandemics and to deal with the normal necessities of life for tens of millions of Americans. That is the danger,
and that is the message that citizens have got to communicate to their senators and representatives, that they are, by a rubber stamp supporting of the terrorist Netanyahu regime, inviting disaster back into the United States. And they're going to be held responsible.
This is not just a conflict far away that people can look at on social media and network television. It's going to come back here, as it already has, in distorting public budgets, depriving the necessities of life for tens of millions of impoverished people, and the crumbling of our public service infrastructure.
Before we end, Bill Hartung, is there anything else you want to say? Just that people should act, and if they don't want to act alone, there's good organizations like the French Media Foundation. There's Action Corps. Josh Paul, who designed over all this, just started a new organization focused on the Hill,
which I think is called something like Change America. There's Dawn, which is the group that was founded by Jamal Khashoggi before his murder. So sometimes that can be helpful to help you focus your pressure, get a sense of what's happening on the Hill. You don't have to feel like you're acting alone.
And there's Code Pink, which lobbies every day on the Hill. There's Veterans for Peace with 100 chapters around the country. There are many organizations, listeners, you can choose to support and swell their ranks. Remember, it's our sovereign power that has been delegated to 535 elected officials in the U.S. Congress.
And it's about time to pull in the reins. Thank you very much, William Hartung. Thank you. We've been speaking with William Hartung. We will link to his work at the Quincy Institute at ralphnederradiohour.com. In an effort to strike at the economic heart of the genocide in Gaza, Jewish Voice for Peace demonstrated at the New York Stock Exchange.
When we come back, we're going to hear how that all went down. But first, let's check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber.
From the National Press Building in Washington, D.C., this is your Corporate Crime Reporter Morning Minute for Friday, October 18,
2024.
I'm Russell Mokhyber. The world's largest corporations have racked up $700 billion in monetary penalties linked to regulatory infringements in 45 countries since 2010. Major banks, especially those based in the United States and Europe, account for more than one-third of the penalties. Ninety-five parent companies have received $1 billion or more in penalties.
These are some of the revelations from data contained in Violation Tracker Global, a new website created by Good Jobs First, which previously produced similar databases focused on the United States and the United Kingdom. Violation Tracker Global documents more than 50,000 regulatory penalties imposed on 1,600 multinational corporations and their
subsidiaries by over 700 regulatory agencies and courts in 45 of the world's largest economies. For the Corporate Crime Reporter, I'm Russell Mokhyver.
Thank you, Russell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. I'm Steve Skrovan, along with David Feldman, Hannah, and Ralph. On October 14th, roughly 500 protesters descended on the New York Stock Exchange to, in the words of our next guest, send a message to the American people that our government is using our tax dollars
to fund a genocide. David? Sumaya Awad is a Palestinian writer and analyst based in New York City, and she is the spokesperson for the Jewish Voice for Peace mass civil disobedience event at the New York Stock Exchange. Ms. Awad directs strategy and communications for the Adala Justice Project,
and she is a co-founder of the Against Canary Mission Project, which defends student activists targeted by blacklists for their Palestinian rights advocacy. She is the co-author of Palestine and Elections and co-editor of Palestine, A Socialist Introduction. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Sumaya Awad. Thank you. It's great to be here. So, Maya,
you were very much engaged in this unprecedented protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange, spearheaded by Jewish Voice for Peace. As you know, they did a demonstration at the Statue of Liberty. They did a huge demonstration at Grand Central Station. And now they're focusing on the military-industrial complex and the profiteering from war by
protesting before the New York Stock Exchange, and over 200 of them were arrested. I don't think there's been that amount of civil disobedience in decades in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Tell us about the reaction to it, both when it was occurring with the police and whether you think it got adequate
coverage in newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, or the television and radio. This is quite an unprecedented, well-organized protest. Yeah, thanks, Ralph. This was what we think, this was the largest civil disobedience protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange to happen. And it was very powerful and sending, you know,
a clear message that there are companies, there are arms manufacturers that are profiting, that are making tens of millions of dollars off of the murder of Palestinians and Palestinian children. There are over 200 arrests, the majority of them anti-Zionist Jewish New Yorkers who want to send a clear
message both to the US government and the American people that Israel weaponizes their identity in order to justify crimes against humanity and that they are not okay with this, that they refuse for their identity as Jewish people to be weaponized in this way.
And that in fact, what Israel is doing and what the US government is funding and politically backing is actively making this country and certainly the rest of the world unfaithful, not just for Jewish people, but for others, because the safety of Palestinians is connected to the safety of other people.
We've seen this firsthand of this country when we see the destruction of the South and the Southeast from these hurricanes, the fact that infrastructure in the US is falling apart, healthcare, et cetera. Meanwhile, we have money, billions of dollars to send to Israel to commit war crimes, to commit the genocide. In terms of the media, you know,
there was a lot of media there, you know, and for sure it disrupted everyday life down there and in front of the stock exchange. I think there are obviously some of the mainstream news that did not cover this or did not cover this adequately because they don't want to show that Israel does not
in fact represent all Jewish people. They don't want to show that it is becoming more and more mainstream to be against what Israel is doing. Well, you know, we've had protests at the New York Stock Exchange during our political campaigns, and we've had hundreds and hundreds of people. And we look up,
and people in the Stock Exchange and the neighboring buildings were looking out the window, and some of them were coming by and chatting. Did you get any feedback from people from the New York Stock Exchange complex down there? So it's a great question.
We didn't have a lot of people stop and join in chanting, stop and ask questions, stop and show support. I don't know how many of them were from the New York Stock Exchange. It was also Indigenous Peoples Day on Monday. So I think a lot of the usual foot traffic down there was maybe decreased a bit,
but we did have a lot of people stop and support. I couldn't tell you where they were coming from. And did you all have pro bono lawyers who managed to follow you down to wherever you were booked and had you released? Or did you have to stay overnight in jail? What was the follow-up by the police arrest?
So the police brought in over four buses to take the arrested protesters, including two MCA buses that they repurposed for this. Everyone got out and we did have pro bono lawyers from the movement with us the whole time at the New York Stock Exchange.
And then who came with us to one police plaza, which is where the protesters were being held. And they all got out within that night. And did you have any other citizen groups in New York City or members of the large New York City Council come and support you? Yes, we had multiple electeds there, actually,
both from the New York City Council, like Alexa Diaz, and we had members of the New York State Senate and the New York State Assembly, like Zohran Mabdani from the New York State Assembly, and New York State Senator Jabari Bruceport was also there. Claire Valdez was also there.
All of these are electeds that come from the GSA chapter in New York, the Democratic Socialists of America, on a city and state level. You know, Somalia, there are at least 16 Israeli human rights groups, ranging from the Breaking the Silence and Refuse Next Reservists, who protested Netanyahu's imperial policies, to Beth Salem, the great civil rights group,
to Rabbis for Human Rights. They put a notice in the New York Times on December 13th, 2023, open letter to President Biden titled, Stop the Human Catastrophe in Gaza. Do your groups ever connect with these brave Israeli human rights groups who are obviously under a lot of pressure now to stay quiet? Yes, of course.
And many of these groups are really doing tremendous, tremendous work. Many of the groups in the Palestine movement, including Jewish Voice for Peace, including Palestinian advocacy groups, like the one that I actually represent, Adana Justice Project, work closely and are in conversation with organizations like Beth Salem and others
that are making it clear that what Israel is doing is wrong and that they are against it, even on the inside. And as far as strategy in Congress, because I know you're doing all these grassroots protests in order to put pressure on Congress, which can cut off appropriations for these arms shipments to Israel and leverage
the Biden administration. There's never been any testimony before Congress by prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates since 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel. They've never been given a voice. AIPAC has dominated the Congress. And there is the House Foreign Relations Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and their counterparts.
need to be given a request by many of these prominent peace advocates in Israel. Some of them are former generals, former mayors, major cities, ministers in the government, former heads of the Israeli CIA and FBI, public intellectuals, very prominent, who despise the Netanyahu regime. Are you making any effort, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and if not now,
to get formal invitations sent to these congressional committees by these prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates who have been working together for years to resolve that conflict. Have you thought about that as an approach which would break the grip of AIPAC and actually get a lot of media?
Who's going to deny the authenticity and experience of these prominent Israelis? Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. And I think that it's a strategy that is on the list of strategies being explored. And I can say with confidence that all of our groups have explored and have used every single tool at our disposal,
especially in the last year. I think that with Congress, with the role of AIPAC and the fact that they've already spent so much money and taken, you know, Cori Bush, they've gotten Cori Bush to lose her election using their money and Jamal Bowman and who knows what's next.
And so we are strategizing about how to push back against the role of AIPAC and the grip of AIPAC. I think the reality is that there are many people in Congress that are actually benefiting financially from what is happening in Gaza. We know that at least 50 members of Congress have links to the military industrial complex,
whether that's through stocks or other things. And so it's about unraveling this network, these connections between, you know, our government, the way it's profiting from the genocide, and then what that means in terms of these elections across the country. So I hope that begins to answer that question. Let's look at the election.
What do you and Jewish Voice for Peace and others think about the Biden administration's presence of full-throttle support, unwavering support for whatever the Netanyahu terrorism does in that region, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, elsewhere, maybe Iran? Do you think the Biden administration is going to lose more votes than gain more
votes by this estranged position and refusal to demand a ceasefire? Because a lot of people are going to stay home. They may not vote for Trump and protest to Biden or for the Green Party, which is a peace agenda party. They just stay home.
How are you reading the pluses and minuses for the election of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? So I can't say much about the elections, but I can say is that I think successive US administrations, US government administrations have all largely had the same line when it comes to
support for Israel and the blank check that the US sends to Israel, whether they are democratic or Republican administration. And I think what we're seeing this year is similar to that, except that The fact that the majority of Americans across party lines have shown that they are critical of Israel,
that they are openly saying and questioning why we send weapons to Israel, and that the arms embargo campaign or movement is gaining ground. More and more Americans across party lines support an arms embargo. And I think all of that goes to show that there is disillusionment with our government.
And that people are increasingly seeing that our government is not actually following the will of the people. And perhaps this is something we've always known, but I think on the issue of Palestine, on the issue of Israel's occupation, that hasn't been the case in the past, but it is now.
The people are seeing that the government is not actually listening to what the majority of Americans want on this. And it's choosing to go forward while giving us like hollow rhetoric about a ceasefire or hollow rhetoric about humanitarian rights. Well, you know, in our interview with William Hartung, I mentioned the analogy of the Vietnam War,
which dragged on year after year, and it was ended when Congress cut off the money in 1974. They just said to the Republican president, no more money, end of Vietnam War. Isn't that your ultimate goal, Congress? Our ultimate goal, yes, is an arms embargo, is for there to be a full arms embargo.
Congress has the power to make that happen. I mean, obviously the sitting president has the power to make that happen very quickly, but Congress has the power to put the pressure on to make that happen. And that is the only way to really get Israel to commit to a full ceasefire and for
the US to stop sending these bombs that are killing Palestinians. So that is, that is our ultimate goal right now. I think ceasefire at this moment comes with arms embargo. There's no other way to get a ceasefire without an arms embargo at the moment. Well, I think another approach that you might take, if you haven't already,
is to join with Jim McGovern and dozens of members of the House who are now cosigning a letter to demand, along with the demands by the established press, to open up Gaza to reporters. from the United States, all foreign countries, and Israel. They are barred by Netanyahu, even Israeli reporters. If you had war correspondents in Gaza,
it would change the dynamics and what Israel's genocidal policies can get away with. Are you supporting all these major newspapers and press organizations who put a full-page ad in the Washington Post in July demanding to open Gaza demanding that Netanyahu allow reporters into Gaza. Are you joining that effort too? I mean,
we definitely support any effort to get journalists into Gaza because that is one of many ways to show the world what is happening. At the same time, we also recognize that we need these media outlets to take seriously and to protect and show support for palestinian journalists who are in gaza you know palestinians
in gaza who are reporting on this and who are risking their lives every day and are being killed for doing it so of course we support the efforts to get journalists and and to lift this ban on journalists because the fact that there is a ban means
you know what what else are they hiding we already think so much on our phone screens and on our televisions. And yet there's more to be covered and Netanyahu doesn't want that. And of course, making sure that we take seriously the work, the effort, the risks that Palestinians in Gaza are taking to show us what is happening.
Well, it's good that you focused on the killing of Palestinian journalists. Over 160 Palestinian journalists and even larger numbers of their immediate family have been targeted by the Israeli military regime. And they've also done everything possible to destroy the communication systems by these brave journalists during all the bombardments that go on day after day.
Let's go to Steve for a question. Samaya, how do you explain to your friends or people who are adamant supporters of Israel that this war, what's going on now, is not good for Israel ultimately? How do you articulate that? I mean, well, I think the bottom line is that any state,
any society that is saying that the only way for them to be safe is to exterminate, to ethnically cleanse another people, that there are some serious question marks about what that means. And I think, you know, Ilan Papad, the famous Israeli historian, wrote in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he wrote something along the lines of,
you know, Israel will eventually dig its own grave. And I think that's what we're seeing right now. The way that this genocide is being carried out, the violence, the brutality of all of it, many have said it's like nothing that we've seen in recent history. And something like that doesn't just happen. That leaves a mark.
You can't just scrub that away. And I think we're starting to see things fall apart within Israel. I mean, no society that is built on genocide and ethnic cleansing, that is built on the occupation of another people, on this really brutal supremacy and racism, that should not exist. right? We should not allow that to exist.
Apartheid should not exist. And so I think we seriously need to think if we want to build a society that is safe for everyone, that is not built on what your religion is, what your ethnicity is, then it means we need to rethink what Israel is and what it stands for and how it came to be. Well,
if any listeners want further elaboration, there was a long article in the New York Times this past Sunday, which is getting a lot of attention, written by a doctor who's come back from Gaza and several dozen other doctors. American doctors and healthcare workers back from Gaza describing their firsthand observation of the massacre, the slaughter,
and the sniper murders, including little children being brought to hospitals with bullets in their heads or in the left side of their back. So this is calculated slaughter of children that's going on. And listeners may want to read that long article that was in Sunday's New York Times. David? David Friedman,
who was Donald Trump's ambassador to the UN, and Jared Kushner have both talked about relocating the Palestinians, ethnically cleansing Gaza and moving them to the Negev. What do you know about this? I mean, I know that it won't happen because I think that as we've seen from the last year, that Palestinians, not just last year,
last 75 plus years, that Palestinians are not going to all leave their land because this is their land. They're not just people that can go to another Arab country. And I think these claims that, you know, this is just a simple transfer or this is what should happen if they want to stay alive,
this reflects not just the deep racism, but the fact that Palestinians are not seen as humans and not seen as equals. And I think as a result, we're seeing what's happening right now, which is just becoming a full regional war. And I don't think that's going to go away.
I think the only way for things to truly deescalate, that's the word that the US government keeps using, deescalate, deescalate, while they continue to fund escalation. The real way to deescalate is for there to be a ceasefire. And I think, like I said earlier, and I'm going to repeat it again, that with a ceasefire,
that means an arms embargo, if we're serious about a ceasefire. Now, of course, the Israelis are applying the Gaza massacre strategy to southern Lebanon and all the way to Beirut and Tripoli. In the north, they're basically using the same technique, blowing up cafes, blowing up apartment buildings, saying, oh, there's a Hezbollah guy.
And they blow up and kill hundreds of people, children, women, innocent civilians in the way they're laying waste to Lebanon. which the Biden administration calls our ally. The Biden administration is allowing this to happen and giving all kinds of weapons of support to destroy one of our allies, Lebanon, in the Middle East,
as part of the servility of the B.B. Biden, B.B. Blinken regime. Anna?
This week's protest was organized for Indigenous Peoples Day. America is a settler colonial state. The parallels have been drawn between America's foundations and the foundations of the Israeli state. It seems like there's this... Dual tension. America, you know, we should be able to look at a settler colonial state committing ethnic cleansing
and see the horrors that we committed and and see a moral obligation to step in and not repeat our own horrific mistakes. But there also must be some reluctance on the part of Americans to confront the gruesome reality. Could you speak to that piece of your strategy?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the contradictions of like, you know, the US honoring indigenous people's day while actually still actively within the United States oppressing and repressing indigenous, the indigenous rights movement and many indigenous communities across the US sort of shows why, like you're saying,
it's the leap to get them to get the US government to take seriously the settler colonialism happening in Palestine. I think it turns out the American people, it's a little bit, a little bit more complicated because I think, I think actually a lot of the American public does not know enough about what is happening in Palestine.
I think this past year has given, you know, there's been more coverage on this than there has been in probably the last few decades, especially with the use of social media. So people are able to see things on their own without having to resort to the mainstream news, which is, you know, as we know, we're biased, understatement.
But I think that there's still a lot of ignorance and there's still a big role that Islamophobia and sort of the fear mongering about the quote, quote terrorists that keeps a lot of people from being able to see what is happening for what it is. And, and, you know,
Ralph just mentioned Lebanon and I think like with Israel's invasion of Lebanon, what Israel is doing with Lebanon and the way that it's provoking Iran. A lot of people seem to be more supportive of what Israel is doing in Lebanon while they're still criticizing what Israel is doing in Gaza.
And I think that's part of that same mindset of, you know, how deep rooted Islamophobia is and that the results of like the post dead off war America and how that the propaganda that's sort of seeped into American society around this. So I hope that sort of starts to answer that question. Well,
to those millions of Americans who don't care what's going on over there, they ought to care about what's going on over here as a result of what's going on over there, and not just the crashing of civil liberties and free speech, but the serious distortion of public budget priorities away from domestic needs in our country,
blowing up areas around the world as part of the U.S. empire, consider Iraq, for example. and what happened in Afghanistan and Libya and elsewhere, and the very real possibility is going to be blowback, as the Department of Defense and CIA and others have been studying scenarios of counterattacks, and that will completely convulse our country, as 9-11 did.
So, citizens of the USA, you've got a few weeks to buttonhole your senators, representatives who are campaigning frantically every day in your community. Give them your opinion, give them your demands, and tell them you want to have town meetings where you set the agenda.
And they come, and they listen to you, and receive your instructions as they return to Capitol Hill. Thank you very much, Samaya, for all your work and the work of Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and many other organizations who are collaborating because they have a uniform interest in peace and justice and are opposing,
with all their civic strength, the destruction of our own democratic society by the concentrated powers of big government and their big business servants. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.