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

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Israeli Journalist Amira Hass: How Can the World Stand By and Witness Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 19, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19 ... transcript

We speak with Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who is usually based in Ramallah and attended Wednesday’s anti-occupation protest in Washington, D.C., organized by American Jewish peace groups. Hass is the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She decries the marginalization and suppression of the Israeli left, as “extreme fascists” in the Netanyahu government have whipped the Israeli public into one that is “drunk with the will to take revenge.”

Transcript

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: To talk more about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as well as Wednesday’s historic Jewish-led protest in Washington, we’re joined by the longtime Israeli journalist Amira Hass, the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, based in Ramallah. Her latest piece is headlined “With No Water or Electricity from Israel, Gazans Risk Dehydration and Disease.” Hass is the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. Her books include Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege. Amira Hass joins us today from New York.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Amira. If you could talk about this? This is the first time that we’re having you on since this crisis began. Your response to what’s happening and the latest news?

AMIRA HASS: It’s very hard to add anything after, of course, what Mustafa, Dr. Mustafa, said. It was in such details describing the horrors. And unfortunately, I’m not in the country. I came a few days before all this hell started.

And I was yesterday at the demonstration in D.C. after a talk I gave at Georgetown. So, I was in the demonstration not to cover it, but to be part of a group that adds that — first of all, demands to put an end and to declare immediate ceasefire. And I wanted to share my — to be with people that we share common feelings of grief, of fear for the people that we know and that we love, of mourning for the people that we know and we love, people both Jews and Palestinians, people who can say at the same time be — can be emotional and rational, can be appalled by what happened on Saturday, October the 7th, and at the same time say it is not the — history did not begin with October 7, people who grieve and are pained by what is happening.

And I don’t — I feel that every word that I say is hollow, because it doesn’t — it’s not enough. The words that I need do not exist in our dictionaries to describe the horror that my friends in Gaza now go through. And we are here, and, yes, we gather, and we meet, and we talk, and we talk again, and we come on our TV programs, but it’s — we don’t reach the main people. We don’t reach the — as Dr. Mustafa said, we don’t reach the American leaders, who are the only ones who could force Israel to stop this carnage now. And we don’t reach Western countries, who could also put some pressure. And we don’t reach the Israeli public, that is so drunk with the will to take revenge of what happened on October 7th, that does not even know one detail, and even if it knew one detail about Gaza, it doesn’t care, because it just wants revenge.

But revenge, I think, is not enough to explain what is happening. The Israeli government is carrying on the political program of the extreme fascist, messianic, religious, right-wing — settler right-wing party led by Bezalel Smotrich, who already, in 2017, said that he has a plan for Palestinians. They have three options, he told the Palestinians. You either give in and accept that you will never have a state, you will never be free, you will never have your right for self-determination materialized, and then you can live as a fifth-rate, sixth-rate, whatever, individuals in this — in Israel. The second option for you is to emigrate, as we call sometimes by transfer, by willing — willful transfer, expulsion by consent. And the third option, if you don’t agree to give in and if you don’t agree to emigrate and you resist, the Israeli army will know what to do with you. And this is what is happening now both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel is carrying out the plan, the political plan, of these extreme fascist settlers, colonizing right wing.

For years, people on the Israeli left have been warning about the brutalization if things continue, the brutalization that might come to a place of no return. And I never thought that — I always hoped that when I warned about the danger of brutalization, the possibility of brutalization, that this warning would work, that we will not reach it. And I’m so afraid to say now that we reached it, that we’ve reached it, and the world and the Western world is appallingly — appallingly, doesn’t intervene to stop it.

You know, I was at the demonstration yesterday, and I cried. Maybe I don’t — I hold myself not to cry all these terrible days, not much, only sometimes. But I cried when some people spoke about their grandparents, Holocaust survivors. And I felt I was there also to represent my dead parents, who are Holocaust survivors, in this, you know, call to the world to — you know, how can they — how can they stand on the side and do nothing to stop this terrible slaughter? I cannot bear myself talking here safely in New York, when I know what 2 million people — more than 2 million people are going through. And nothing can justify what is being — what Israel, what we, with my tax money, is causing right now. I don’t know if my tax money is now behind the missile that might kill one of my good friends, loved friends in Gaza. This is really appalling, appalling, appalling beyond words.

AMY GOODMAN: Amira, in your latest piece for Haaretz, you write about your family — your friends who are still in Gaza, in Tel al-Hawa, in Gaza City. Israel has ordered Palestinians to leave the northern part and go south. That’s where Gaza City is, in the north. Can you talk about them, what options they have, their decision to stay, and also President Biden giving a major address tonight, coming back and saying he got — he’s going to get the border open so 20 trucks can come in with some supplies?

AMIRA HASS: That’s a joke. Anything which is not a complete ceasefire, immediate ceasefire, is a — you know, “a drop in an ocean” is a cliché, but it’s less than a drop in the ocean.

I mean, my friend, who wrote to me, her brother-in-law is in a wheelchair, half-paralyzed. They couldn’t leave, because they said, “How can we leave the house with him? And we cannot leave him behind.” And her mother is old. So they are there. I cannot even imagine what they have been through. She just sent me a flower this morning. They had a little shred of internet, so she sent me a flower responding to my WhatsApp some hours earlier. I have friends cramped in a school in Nuseirat refugee camp. And a mother, a refugee of ’48, she was a child in ’48 and has seen so many wars since then, expelled from her home —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, and then we’re continuing this conversation.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will post all —

AMIRA HASS: So, I know — I know — yeah, I think of also the sick people, sick parents, that my friends are staying with them because they don’t want to leave them alone dying under the bombing. And so they couldn’t — they didn’t save themselves in order to be with their parents.

AMY GOODMAN: Amira Hass, we’re going to continue this conversation and post it at democracynow.org and play it on Democracy Now! Amira Hass is a longtime Israeli journalist and correspondent for Haaretz in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, normally based in Ramallah.

This is Democracy Now! I’ll be speaking in Charleston, West Virginia, tomorrow night. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.

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“Divide and Rule”: How Israel Helped Start Hamas to Weaken Palestinian Hopes for Statehood
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 20, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/20 ... transcript

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is urging Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s two-week bombardment has topped 4,100. Israel says a ground invasion may be imminent. “This isn’t an effort to try to quell, to destroy Hamas specifically,” says Tareq Baconi, Palestinian analyst and author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. “This is an effort to pursue an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Gaza Strip and beyond the Gaza Strip, as we see the violence rising in the West Bank.” Baconi lays out Israel’s history of enabling Hamas while designating them as terrorists in order to maintain tight control over Gaza. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,400, Baconi says, “that equilibrium has now shattered.”

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.

The death toll in Gaza from Israel’s 14-day bombardment has topped 4,100 as Israel continues to block food, water and fuel from entering the besieged territory. Over 13,000 Palestinians have been injured over the past two weeks.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres traveled today to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to Gaza to demand humanitarian aid convoys be allowed entry.

SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: These trucks are not just trucks. They are a lifeline. They are the difference between life and death for so many people in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Guterres said the U.N. is actively engaging with Israel and Egypt to get the aid trucks into Gaza.

The BBC is reporting Hamas has offered to release some of the hostages it seized during its attack on October 7th in exchange for a ceasefire, but Israel has rejected the deal. Earlier today, the Israeli military said it believes the majority of the 200 hostages seized are still alive.

Israel’s defense minister hinted Thursday a ground invasion of Gaza is imminent, telling troops they will soon see Gaza, quote, “from inside.”

Israel is ramping up its crackdown on the occupied West Bank. Israeli forces killed 13 Palestinians in a raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm.

In recent days, Israel has also detained 750 Palestinians, including lawmakers and journalists.

On Thursday night, President Biden gave a primetime speech from the Oval Office calling for Congress to approve $14 billion for Israel, another $60 billion for Ukraine and some for Taiwan. This comes as HuffPost is reporting there’s a, quote, “mutiny brewing” inside the State Department over Biden’s policy on Israel.

Joining us now in New York is Tareq Baconi, Palestinian analyst and writer, president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group on Israel/Palestine. His recent piece for The New York Review is headlined “Gaza Without Pretenses: For years Israel and Hamas maintained an unstable equilibrium that kept the Gaza Strip contained. But it was always likely to be temporary.” Tareq is author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.

Tareq, welcome back to Democracy Now! Before we go to the history of Hamas —

TAREQ BACONI: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: — I wanted to ask you about the current situation, the latest that we hear, the — looks like a ground invasion is imminent. The Rafah border is still closed, although there had been a deal to allow in 20 trucks of aid, coming from Egypt into Gaza, though those inside, medical groups are saying even a hundred trucks a day wouldn’t quite deal with the crisis and the need inside.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, Amy, as the situation in the Gaza Strip is quite dire, what we see today is really a continuation of efforts by Israel to place the Gaza Strip under a complete blockade. And this has been ongoing for about 16 years now. And then, after the offensive by Hamas on the 7th of October, Israel placed the Gaza Strip under what it called a total siege. What this means is that it’s prevented the entry of water, fuel, electricity and medicine into the Gaza Strip.

Now, this is a form of collective punishment. We have to understand the Gaza Strip has about 2.3 million Palestinians. About two-thirds of them are refugees from homes in what is now Israel. And about half of that are minors and children. This is a form of collective punishment and is essentially reliant on a total dehumanization of Palestinians in Gaza.

What we’re seeing happening at the moment is that humanitarian aid is being politicized, that humanitarian aid to the civilian population in Gaza is linked to political goals. And any form of effort to try to deescalate is being blocked by the U.S. The fact that the U.S. vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution yesterday is an indication of its willingness to allow Israel to continue both its bombardment of the Gaza Strip as well as the strangulation of Gaza’s civilian population through the blocking of entry of humanitarian aid.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what that resolution was that the U.S. rejected.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, it was a resolution that was tabled by Brazil, and it called for an immediate deescalation and a ceasefire. It was a humanitarian ceasefire, which meant that the bombardment from the Israeli authorities would have to cease and allow for humanitarian aid to come into the Gaza Strip and for the restrictions to be eased. However, we see that this continues to — first of all, the U.S. blocked the resolution. And then, when there were agreements to have, as you said, 20 truckloads to enter the Gaza Strip, which is far less than the minimum that would be required to sustain Gaza’s civilian population, there are still obstacles to the entry of those trucks.

We also have to understand that Gaza has — Gaza’s population has been forced by Israeli authorities to evacuate the majority of the northern part of the strip. This has resulted in a forced displacement of about — or, the order was for the forced displacement of 1.1 million Palestinians. Now, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated strips of land in the world. Any form of evacuation is really impossible. There’s nowhere for Palestinians to leave. What that means is that any kind of bombardment that the Israeli authorities are carrying out in the Gaza Strip are killing Palestinians in their thousands. And unlike in previous military assaults, here Israel is actually quite explicit about wanting to target civilian infrastructure, ambulances, healthcare centers, clinics. And the bombing is indiscriminate, as Palestinians in Gaza are reporting, by intent.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking Tuesday about Hamas.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: This is a part of an axis of evil of Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas. Their goal, open goal, is to eradicate the state of Israel. The open goal of Hamas is to kill as many Jews as they could. And the only difference is, they would have killed every last one of us, murdered every last one of us, if they could; they just don’t have the capacity. But they murdered an extraordinary 1,300 civilians, which, in American terms, is like many, many, many 9/11s.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tareq Baconi, you wrote the book Hamas Contained. Can you respond?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, this language that the Israelis and the American officials have been using to demonize Hamas has been entirely based in the effort to depoliticize the Palestinian struggle and to present any form of armed resistance against what is a violent apartheid regime as a form of terrorism. The impact of this is really to try to give Israel a carte blanche to continue dealing with the question of Palestine, with the quest by the Palestinian people to gain their inalienable rights, through force and through a security doctrine. The President Biden’s linking of the attack that happened on 7th October to 9/11 is really a carte blanche for Israel to do what it wants to in the Gaza Strip. And it’s an affirmation that all the lessons that have been learned after Israel’s — after America’s own 9/11 have really been lost.

Now, this language isn’t new. Successive Israeli governments have linked Palestinian resistance generally, and Hamas specifically, to 9/11 and to terrorism, and has used that link in order to reinforce and reentrench its occupation. What we have to understand here is that this isn’t an effort to try to quell, to destroy Hamas specifically. This is an effort to pursue an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Gaza Strip and beyond the Gaza Strip, as we see the violence rising in the West Bank. The effort to link Hamas’s attack to 9/11 is really to give cover to pursue genocidal tendencies that the Israeli political establishment has articulated long before October 7th.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the Israeli military — also Biden very much bonded, sort of bound to this analysis, as well — talks about the Hamas attack on October 7th killing over 1,300 Israelis. Over 200 are being held by Hamas, looks like the majority of them, according to the Israeli government, are still alive. The Israeli government says Hamas uses civilians as human shields. And in this comment of the Israeli military saying they’ve given a green light to move into Gaza whenever it’s ready, the economy minister, Nir Barkat, said in an interview with ABC News, concerns over hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas. Were you surprised by the October 7th attack? And talk about what Israel is saying right now and, of course, what’s happening in Gaza.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, the 7th of October attack was certainly surprising for someone like myself who’s been studying Hamas for a long time, but I imagine also for many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as well as probably for Hamas’s leadership. It was surprising not in its timing, obviously, and not in the offensive — the nature of the offensive and how it took place. But it was surprising mostly in the scale of it and the ability of Hamas to really penetrate into Israeli-controlled territory around the Gaza Strip and to spend the length of time that fighters, Hamas and otherwise, were able to spend in Israeli towns. You have to understand that for many Palestinians and more broadly, there’s a myth of an Israeli invincibility, that Israel is impenetrable, at least from the Gaza Strip, and that its army is unparalleled. And that expectation was probably in the minds of Hamas’s leadership when they were planning and staging this attack. And instead of any form of effective defense on the Israeli side, what we was a complete shattering of this illusion. We saw the reality that actually Israel’s army is not invincible and that the blockade that is placed around the Gaza Strip is perfectly penetrable and that Hamas was able to overturn Israel’s myth of invincibility very, very quickly.

From the beginning, the Israeli Mossad was active in conducting provocations which it sought to attribute to the PLO and its peripheries: attacks on airliners and on the 1972 Olympic games in Munich are therefore of uncertain paternity. The more horrendous the atrocity, the greater the backlash of world public opinion against the PLO. There is no doubt that the Mossad controlled a part of the central committee of the organization known as Abu Nidal, after the nom de guerre of its leader, Sabri al Banna. In 1987-88, just as the first Palestinian intifada uprising was getting under way, there emerged in the occupied territories the organization known as Hamas. Hamas combined a strong commitment to neighborhood social services with the rejection of negotiations with Israel and the demand for a military solution which was sure to be labeled terrorism. Interestingly enough, one of the leading sponsors of Hamas was Ariel Sharon, a former general who was then a cabinet minister. These facts are widely recognized; US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurzer, an observant Jew, stated late in 2001 that Hamas had emerged "with the tacit support of Israel" because in the late 1980s "Israel perceived it would be better to have people turning toward religion, rather than toward a nationalistic cause." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 21, 2001) In an acrimonious Israeli cabinet debate around the same time, Israeli extremist Knesset member Silva Shalom stated:

"between Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas ... Arafat is a terrorist in a diplomat's suit, while the Hamas can be hit unmercifully." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 4, 2001)

This tirade provoked a walkout by Shimon Peres and the other Labor Party ministers. Arafat added his own view, which was that

"Hamas is a creature of Israel which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities, and mosques. Even [Israeli Prime Minister] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarak." (Corriere della Sera, Dec. 11, 2001)

-- 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

-- For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces. The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from, by Tal Schneider

Now, the scale of the attack and the number of hostages that Hamas was able to capture and take back into the Gaza Strip probably exceeded its expectations, which also meant that the retaliation that we now see is also probably far worse than Hamas might have anticipated. Now, that’s not to say that Hamas didn’t anticipate some form of retaliation, because that has always been, at least in the past 16 years, the equilibrium between Hamas and Israel, that Hamas would try to pressure Israel, through rockets or otherwise, to lift or ease restrictions on the blockade, because the blockade itself is a form of violence that’s strangulating 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel would respond with disproportionate military force, military force that would result in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Now, the expectation has always been, from the Israeli side, that this situation is tenable, that it can be sustained, and it adopted what it called the military doctrine of “mowing the lawn,” that it would do this every few years, and then that this equilibrium would be sustained indefinitely. What we saw on the 7th of October was Hamas overturning that equilibrium and saying, “Actually, you cannot have any kind of calm or security for your citizens as long as your boot remains on our necks. The Palestinians will not acquiesce to their imprisonment silently.” So that equilibrium has now shattered.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you if you could talk about Israel’s involvement in Hamas gaining power. In 2009, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for over 20 years, told The Wall Street Journal, quote, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” Another former Israeli official, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, said he was given a budget to help finance Islamist movements in Gaza to counter Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement. Another former Israeli military official, David Hacham, said, quote, “When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.” Your response, Tareq Baconi?

-- A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, by Ian Johnson

TAREQ BACONI: Well, the origins of that is really Hamas emerged as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood chapter in the Gaza Strip. And the Muslim Brotherhood chapter was not a political party. It was a social party. And its operations in the Gaza Strip and throughout the Palestinian territories were actually granted licenses by Israeli occupying forces at the time, so there was a license for the Muslim Brotherhood chapter to operate openly in the Gaza Strip. When Hamas was established in 1987 and became a political party and a military party that was engaged in active resistance against Israel’s occupation, the policies within the Israeli government shifted, and obviously it became less open to allowing Hamas to function. However, that did not deter Israeli authorities from encouraging and promoting divide-and-rule tactics between the Islamist national movement, so Hamas, and secular nationalism around Fatah. And this has always been a tactic that the colonial forces have used globally, and obviously Israeli colonialism is no different. So it has directly and implicitly attempted divide-and-rule policies.

This really turned and came to a head in 2007, when Hamas, after winning democratic elections in 2006, rose to power, and the Israeli authorities, along with the U.S., attempted to initiate a regime change operation, which facilitated a civil war between Hamas and Fatah and allowed Hamas to take over the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israeli authorities have actively embraced the idea that Hamas would be accepted as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip. Now, part of the calculus in that is because of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians. This is a demographic issue. Israel wanted to sever the Gaza Strip from the rest of historic Palestine in order to reinforce its claim that it’s a Jewish-majority state. By getting rid of 2 million Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are refugees demanding return, Israel can claim to be both a Jewish state and a democracy and restructure what is its apartheid regime. Now, in order to do that, it acquiesced to maintaining Hamas in governance, and it claimed that it placed a blockade around the Gaza Strip because Hamas was in power. And obviously this was bought in the international community, using what we were just talking about, the idea that Hamas is a terrorist organization, axis of evil, and, therefore, that this blockade makes sense.

What policymakers don’t understand is that Israel has engaged in blockades around the Gaza Strip and attempted to get rid of the population in the Gaza Strip long before Hamas was even established as a party. But with Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, this created a perfect fig leaf for Israel to maintain the Gaza Strip as a separate strip of land. And to do that, it had to acquiesce and, in some ways, even enable Hamas to maintain its position as a governing authority there. And this also further reinforced its efforts to try to maintain division among the Palestinian leadership and play divide-and-rule policies between the PA and Hamas.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you like to see happen, Tareq, right now? It looks like Israel is on the verge of a ground invasion of Gaza. What do you think needs to happen?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, the most immediate need right now is for a deescalation. World leaders, and specifically the U.S. and the Biden administration, need to understand that this is not a retaliation by Israel towards Hamas. What we are seeing now is the effort by Israel to pursue an ethnic cleansing campaign and to continue the Nakba, which began in 1948 and which has been ongoing since in fits and starts here and there. What we’re seeing is a massive rupture in the daily ethnic cleansing that Israeli authorities are going — are implementing against the Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, as well as in the Gaza Strip. And now we’re seeing that rupture take the ethnic cleansing campaign from a daily continual basis into a significantly more focused attempt at getting rid of millions of Palestinians. We need to deescalate, and we need to ensure that humanitarian aid comes into the Gaza Strip, because this is impacting Gaza’s civilian population. This is a starting step.

The next step needs to be an acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid regime that is maintaining a system of domination against millions of Palestinians. It’s the only sovereign power in the land of historic Palestine, and it allows rights only to Israeli Jewish citizens, not to Palestinians. What happened on October 7th is a testament to the fact that that reality cannot go on. And that overturned the assumption that the U.S. administration as well as regional powers have always had, which is that Israel can continue to act with impunity, without any cost to its citizens. And I believe we cannot go back to that paradigm anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Tareq Baconi, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Palestinian analyst and writer, president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. We will link to your piece in The New York Review headlined “Gaza Without Pretenses: For years Israel and Hamas maintained an unstable equilibrium that kept the Gaza Strip contained. But it was always likely to be temporary.”

When we come back, we continue our conversation with the legendary Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who’s reported from the Occupied Territories for over three decades. Back in 20 seconds.

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Israeli Journalist Amira Hass, Daughter of Holocaust Survivors, Calls for Gaza Ceasefire Now
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 20, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/20 ... transcript

In Part 2 of our interview with legendary Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who has reported from the occupied West Bank and Gaza for over 30 years, she discusses attending Wednesday’s historic protest in Washington, D.C., led by American Jewish groups, calling for an immediate ceasefire, as well as the events leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, the ongoing hostage situation, and what could come next. “How can they say Israel is not responsible?” asks Hass, who says the government has continued its policy of apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians despite decades of international pressure to end the conflict. “Israel did everything possible to foil the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.”

Transcript

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

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

We spend the rest of the hour with the legendary Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who’s reported from the occupied West Bank and Gaza for over 30 years. She’s the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, usually based in Ramallah. Her latest piece is headlined “With No Water or Electricity from Israel, Gazans Risk Dehydration and Disease.”

Today we bring you Part 2 of our conversation. On Thursday, Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I spoke to her after she attended Wednesday's historic protest in Washington, D.C., led by American Jewish groups, calling for an immediate ceasefire. We asked her to describe the scene.

AMIRA HASS: Look, it was people. It was an expression of common grief and shock of people, of Jews, whose main two slogans were “Not in our name” and “Ceasefire immediately.” And for me, it was very important to be there. So I was there as a person, as an individual, as a Jew, not as a journalist. There were quite a few Israelis that I know that live or study these days in the States.

And it was also, you know, like, we all need some kind of — this kind of support, which, by the way, Palestinians are not allowed to hold. Jews are allowed to hold demonstrations. I understand that all over Europe there are places where Palestinians are not allowed to hold demonstrations in solidarity with their slain people in Palestine. So, here, again, we are privileged, the Jews, that we can do things that Palestinians are not allowed to, though I know that here there were some. In the States, there were some demonstrations of Palestinians. But Palestinians are being silenced, as here their sensitivity — that their sense of grief is not being respected. They are called as supporters of terror, whatever. And I was in Boston just before, and I could tell that even the word “Palestinian” is not allowed to be used in all kind of official statements.

I can very much identify with a feeling of being ostracized by the whole world as a Jew, of being not listened to or this feeling — this indifference that the world shows to Palestinians, Palestinians’ plight, Palestinians’ ordeal is so shocking. And I, as a Jew, I say, and the child of survivors and the grandchild of Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany, I can — my identification and sense of identification and anger and despair, I must say — despair — grow larger by the day, by the minute.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Amira, you wrote in one of your recent Haaretz pieces precisely from the position of someone who is the daughter, the child of Holocaust survivors, in a piece headlined “Germany, You Have Long Since Betrayed Your Responsibility.” In the piece, you write about your father, who would tell you as far —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — back as 1992, he himself a Holocaust survivor, when you return from Gaza, he would say, quote, “True, this isn’t a genocide like what we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on for decades.” So, if you could, you know, say a little bit more about your father’s position and the fact that this isn’t also, in a sense, understandably, the position of most people who are survivors, were the children of survivors of the Holocaust?

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: If you could explain a little?

AMIRA HASS: Look, I mean, in 92 years, it was — we could say that it is not genocide. I want to say, I mean, I don’t — as I explain over and over again, I prefer not to talk now, not to dwell into definitions, but to describe the situation. Of course, in '92, in comparison to today, it was like a benign occupation in comparison to today, to what's going on now.

Look, I know I come from a leftist family, so it has been clear that if there is a lesson to the Nazi German industry of murder, which I think is more accurate to say than Holocaust — if there is a lesson, it’s that it shouldn’t be the fate of any people in the world, not just the Jews. And another lesson that my father taught me, he warned about wars. He warned about that during wars things can — things always get worse and worse and without control. And that’s why, exactly why, the Israeli right wing and the messianic religious settler right wing has been always pushing for wars and regional wars, because in order to achieve the grand plan of repeating and completing 1948, the Nakba. I mean, I say again, I say these things, and I don’t believe that we are in this stage, and we are. And we are, and we are, and the world is silent and/or idle. And it was idle during — in so many phases in human history, it was idle.

I want to say something else. At the beginning of 2000, during the Second Intifada, I was contacted by Howard Zinn, the great historian Howard Zinn, who, very much in the vein of my father’s warning about wars, he told me that he thinks of an initiative of people to start talking about war, to outlaw wars at all, you know, not just to say that these are certain crimes in a war. The war is a crime. That’s why I also don’t use the term “war crime,” because the war is a crime. But because wars unleash such barbarism out of human beings, all human beings, that then our ability to return to decent normalcy is so limited. This is the background. This is my background, my parents’ background. And we’ve tried — they tried and I tried, both as an activist and as a journalist, to appeal to people and to the, you know, humanity of people and rationality of people, because this will harm — what’s happening today, the Palestinians are the targets, for sure. But eventually this can harm — this will harm anybody in the region, and it will harm Israeli Jews, and as it does Palestinians in Israel. I’m still talking, and I’m still hoping that it will stop immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: You came on Democracy Now! in February. And at that time, you wrote to us afterwards, saying, “The danger of mass expulsion of Palestinians is nearer than ever since the Nakba. One cannot repeat enough times this message in order for it to remain a warning and not a prophecy.” Can you explain exactly —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — what you mean? Of course, it’s now October. At this point, something like 3,800 Palestinians are dead, but the hundreds of thousands that have been displaced, and then the Israeli army telling the Palestinian population in Gaza that half of them must leave the northern part, the most populated part of the most densely populated place on Earth, and move south.

AMIRA HASS: Look, I must say that I — at that time, when I wrote in February, I thought more about the West Bank. But we see that they are working now in these two fronts that are inseparable, because it’s the Palestinian people in both under Israeli occupation, even though the West Bank — the Gaza Strip is in a different constellation. But just as Dr. Mustafa said, they want to pressure Egypt to open and to allow and to let Palestinians go, because, otherwise, people will say, “Oh, it’s also the fault of Egypt. Why don’t they let all the people flee to Egypt?” They are called in Israel to build — to let Palestinians build there in Sinai, to build a new town and things like that. But in the West Bank also, the danger of mass expulsion, and that’s why, again, I repeat what Dr. Mustafa said, that that’s why the King Abdullah is so alarmed, because he senses that if Palestinians are being pushed, pushed, pushed, they will be pushed towards Jordan. There is a longer, longer-standing Israeli claim that the real Palestine is Jordan, because the majority of people in Jordan are Palestinians. So the danger now exists. And again, I repeat that wars — the right wing wants wars in order exactly to accomplish these plans, that are kind of subdued during normal times. And our normalcy is never normal.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Amira, I want to, in fact, quote to you again from another piece that you wrote, just days after the Hamas assault in Israel. You wrote a piece headlined “Arriving Again at the Cycle of Vengeance.” In this, you write, “As in every Israeli war against the Gaza Strip that Hamas had an interest in, especially given the murder of civilians, one should ask: Does this organization have a realistic plan of action and a realistic political goal, or did it mainly want to rehabilitate its own position in the eyes of Gaza residents? Was its military operation accompanied this time by a logistical plan to assist and rescue Gazan civilians under attack?” So, if you could respond to some of those rhetorical questions that you asked?

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what is going on with the hostages? I mean, now Israel has said — they’ve increased the number — there are 203 hostages, Israeli hostages, who are being held in Gaza. What is their position? And what do we know of what the Israeli state is doing to negotiate or force their release? Presumably, they’re also being affected by this constant bombardment.

AMIRA HASS: Exactly. I have no idea how many people, how many of the hostages. Some of them, I know their relatives. I know one of them who is 85 years old and a very brave journalist, who in — Oded Lifshitz is his name. I just realized it. He’s 85. In the ’70s, he exposed the Israeli — the expulsion of Bedouins in the northern of Sinai. He exposed it in a series of articles. I know some people that are relatives, as I said, of friends of mine.

And we don’t know what’s happening. You know, like, we don’t — I mean, if they are under — they are in the same conditions like every Palestinian now in Gaza. If they are alive, they are without water and electricity. If they are wounded, there is no way to really treat them. They are separated — if they’re separated, how they are held by — some are held by Islamic Jihad. Some are held by Hamas. Where do they hold them? Did they flee from the south to the — from the north to the south? We don’t have answers to all these questions. And I don’t know how many answers the Israeli army has.

You know, at this time, while we are talking, Israel is also arresting, and has arrested and arresting more, Palestinian workers from Gaza, who were in Israel during just when everything started. At first they were allowed to go into Palestinian cities in the West Bank, but now they are arresting them. And I allow myself to suspect that they also want to play with this card when they are negotiating about the release of the Israeli prisoners or, yeah, the people who were abducted.

Look, Hamas proved to be very resourceful when it comes to the military operation. They knew how to neutralize Israeli surveillance facilities, how to neutralize the shooting, automatic shooting. They knew where the military bases were, etc. So they were very resourceful, in a way that I could have said impressive, if not for the atrocities that were committed later. And the atrocities were committed. And I know that it’s not the time to tell Palestinians to pay attention to this, because Israel’s revenge is a hundred times more bloodier, but still there were atrocities.

So I feel there is a tremendous contradiction between the planning of the immediate military operation and what comes aftermath — what is the aftermath, because, for example, the civilian now — the civilian face in the West — in Gaza. If they knew they have such an operation, and they knew that Israel will retaliate ferociously, then why, for example, they did not even — I didn’t know — take care that people have water? I don’t know. I mean, if they can arrange to have so many weapons, they must have also prepared for assisting the civilian population, their civilian population. But I see that this, from what I can tell, from far, I don’t think — I don’t see that this has happened.

I don’t think that Hamas can be erased. It can flourish outside of Gaza. But I don’t understand its political plan right now. Do they want to liberate all of Palestine, so it doesn’t matter if it will take 50 years, 80 years, and at the cost of lives of Palestinians and Israelis, that I don’t know who will return to the country? Who will live in this destroyed country, if this is the plan? If the plan is political, immediate political, is it worse to ask, demand the release of present Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and the cost is so much? I think I know some prisoners in jail now. I don’t think they’ll be happy to be released, thanks to the death of thousands or tens of thousands of Palestinians.

So, right now I see very — militarily, a very apt organization, that indeed gave Israel a very distinctive blow. But I don’t see that there is a political viable position that comes with it. That’s me now. I don’t know. I mean, we are waiting, because just war, just war, just bloodshed, where will it lead us to? Where will it lead the Palestinians to? Now it’s very difficult for people to criticize Hamas. There is a lot of support. But is it a political — does it have a political, logical, human perspective? I don’t see it.

AMY GOODMAN: And the response to the repeated assertions on television, I want to ask you also, because it’s how Americans understand what’s happening, is through the corporate media. I mean, their younger population doesn’t watch television, older population does. If you watch CNN, starting, for example, yesterday, but this was a repetition before, it’s one Israeli Defense Force representative after another. You even have Naftali Bennett — right? — who’s the former prime minister, who is now one of the army, saying, “Are you” — to Sky News — “seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?” But starting yesterday, after the bombing of the hospital, however that turns out, whoever’s responsible for that, throughout the day through today, the lower third of CNN was “U.S. sources, U.S. officials say Israel is not responsible.” That goes larger than the hospital.

AMIRA HASS: Of course.

AMY GOODMAN: Throughout the day, the discussion that it seems Netanyahu was quite victorious in this, whether it’s a lie or whether it’s true, a bigger point, Israel is not responsible. And so I wanted to ask you about that. This is at a time when over 3,500 Palestinians, of course, have been killed. Dozens of other health facilities, actually including that one attacked just a few days before, that IDF did not say they didn’t do. What this kind of coverage means? Because, you know, Noam Chomsky says the media is manufacturing consent for war, in general. But it matters because the U.S. is the most powerful country on Earth and the main weapons supplier to Israel.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. Look, what does it mean, Israel is not responsible? Israel has engineered this since — you know, since the early '90s, when the world pushed Israel and the Palestinians — and the Palestinians wanted this — to have a kind of a compromise. And this is following the Palestinian First Intifada, that had a very clear political message: We want to — we don't want our children — I heard so many activists say that — we don’t want our children to live in the way we lived under occupation, so let’s compromise and have a state, a Palestinian state, alongside Israel. And this was an accepted, an accepted way out from the bloodshed and the crisis and the conflict. And the world supported it, or seemed.

And Israel did everything possible to foil the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. So it only increased and enhanced its colonialist drive during — since the beginning of Oslo. And Israel disconnected Gaza and put it — treated it as a separate enclave with no connections to the people of the West Bank and the rest of Palestine and Israel — not since Hamas came to power, long before, in the early '90s. So, what is not responsibility, not Israel's responsibility? It is Israeli policy that has created such a chain of reactions, that we could tell it. We could say — we said it over and over again, to Israelis, to diplomats, to foreign diplomats, to foreign countries. We warned over and over again. We knew, and we wanted to prevent it from happening. So how can they say Israel is not responsible?

And you know what? Every Palestinian who is killed today in Gaza is registered in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Palestinians are not registered in a separate one. It’s Israel which controls. If a person is not registered, he is there — if a newborn is not registered in the Israeli registry of population, then the newborn does not exist. Israel controls still today. Palestinian Authority is obliged to give every name of a newborn and every change of address to Israel for validation of this change. So what is not responsible? It’s part of Israel. I mean, Israel controls the whole country, controls the people, decides how much water they have, what is the economy they are allowed to have. If they don’t go to universities in the West Bank, Israel decides. Israel decides about every detail of these people. So, what’s happening now is not Israel’s responsibility?

This is — exactly, this is how the majority of mainstream media don’t want to deal with it. They start to deal with the conflict and the cruelty only when it reaches this unbearable top. But there is incremental cruelty and violence and evil and bureaucratic evil, bureaucratic violence, that has been there for years accumulating, one layer, one layer after another. And it shocks everybody, every Palestinian.

You know, Palestinians in Gaza, people who are under 30 years old, have never seen a mountain in their lives. A mountain. They don’t understand the concept of a spring of water coming out of a rock over a mountain. I know it because a friend of — a young friend of mine, she had the chance to come to the West Bank because she has cancer. So her friends tell her, “You are so lucky, because you have cancer, so you could leave the Gaza Strip.” Her brothers are surprised when she tells them about the mountains that she she saw in the West Bank. So, you take from the people for so many years. You take — you take every hope and every horizon, every joy, you take out of them.

And still I want to say, and again I want to say, that the more I hear about this Saturday — and I think that many details are — I mean, I verified about many details, and the atrocities were there. But it taught me that people came — not all, not the majority, a few, but it only tells me how the pressure that has built up, how monstrous it was, to create these monstrous attacks in one day.

AMY GOODMAN: Amira Hass, longtime Israeli correspondent for Haaretz in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, usually based in Ramallah. She’s author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Reporting from Ramallah, and wrote the foreword and afterword to her mother Hanna Lévy-Hass’s Holocaust memoir, Diary of Bergen-Belsen. To see Part 1 of our interview with Amira and also our interview yesterday with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, visit democracynow.org.

I’m speaking tonight in Charleston, West Virginia, at the Grassroots Radio Conference, 7:30 p.m. at the Capitol Theater. Visit democracynow.org for details.

Oh, and happy birthday to Robby Karran! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

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“Nowhere in Gaza Is Safe”: Palestinian Death Toll Tops 5,000 as Israel Rejects Calls for Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 23, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/23 ... transcript

The death toll from Israel’s 17-day bombardment of Gaza has topped 5,000 as Israel intensifies its assault on the besieged territory ahead of an expected ground invasion. Israel continues to reject calls from the United Nations for a humanitarian ceasefire, and relief groups say the aid convoys that have been allowed to enter Gaza are a mere drop in the bucket compared to the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. We get an update from Palestinian scholar Jehad Abusalim, executive director of humanitarian and educational organization The Jerusalem Fund, who describes life in Gaza for those who have stayed and reiterates international calls for a ceasefire. “Israel is just bombing Gaza nonstop, killing as many civilians as it could, simply because it’s being enabled by the international community,” says Abusalim.

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.

The death toll from Israel’s 17-day bombardment of Gaza has topped 5,000 as Israel intensifies its assault on the besieged territory. Palestinian officials say more than 2,000 children have now died in the Israeli attack.

Israel is continuing to reject calls from the United Nations for a humanitarian ceasefire. While Israel has intensified its bombing campaign, it has not yet launched a full-scale ground invasion. The New York Times reports the Biden administration has advised Israel to delay a ground invasion in part to give the U.S. more time to prepare if the war spreads across the region.

On Friday, Hamas released its first two hostages, Judith and Natalie Raanan, a mother and daughter who are dual U.S.-Israeli citizens. They were kidnapped on October 7th during the Hamas attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,400 people. The Israeli army now says it believes 222 hostages are being held in Gaza.

So far, two aid convoys have entered Gaza, and a third is on its way, but the U.N. and relief groups say far more aid is needed — not dozens of trucks, but hundreds of trucks of aid, they say. In Gaza City, doctors in the neonatal section of Al-Shifa Hospital say dozens of babies could soon die if the hospital runs out of fuel.

DR. NASSER BULBUL: [translated] As you can see, all the babies in here are underweight and need intensive care around the clock. But we lack basic medicines, like caffeine citrate and antibiotics, like ampicillin and gentamicin, and surfactant. We have ventilators, but now seven ventilators are not working because we don’t have the right cables to operate them. We are only operating with 10 ventilators, which is a strong sign that the failure of this department is looming. We call on everyone to send the necessary medical supplies for this critical department, or else we will face a huge catastrophe, especially if the electricity is out in these departments, where there are 55 babies. We will lose all those who need electricity within five minutes.

AMY GOODMAN: More than half of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the Israeli assault. This is an 18-year-old Palestinian named Dima Allamdani. She had fled to southern Gaza after Israel ordered Palestinians to leave their homes in the north. Much of her family died in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, where the family had sought temporary shelter as it made its way south.

DIMA ALLAMDANI: [translated] I went to look for my mother, my father and my siblings at the morgue. At first they told me, “Come, see your mother.” They didn’t show me her face, but I recognized her from what she has on her feet. God bless her soul. I felt heartbroken. It was like a nightmare. They opened my father’s coffin, and he had no signs of injuries, but he died. God bless his soul. I had a 16-year-old sister among the dead, and they wrote my name on her coffin since they thought it was me. Her body didn’t have any signs of injuries, but maybe she died from internal injuries. … They also showed me my little sister. She’s in first grade. And they asked me, “Who is she?” At first I didn’t recognize her due to all the cuts and burns on her face. Then they wrote her name on her coffin. I would have never thought that my family would end up like this. I felt heartbroken. It’s a nightmare. I can’t believe it, until now, that they’re all dead, no one left.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel has also bombed the home of Raji Sourani, the best-known human rights lawyer in Gaza City. He and his family survived the attack, his home destroyed. In a message to friends, he wrote, quote, “Israel, Biden and the west who support Israel it in doing these crimes against civilians are criminals. We will have our dignity and freedom and end this criminal occupation. One day we will have those criminals accountable,” he said.

We begin today’s show with Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian scholar and policy analyst from Gaza. He’s the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C.

Jehad, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you lay out for us what you understand has taken place so far in Gaza and the latest word about whether Israel is going to engage in a ground invasion, or when they will? This does not preclude what they’ve done until now, which is the intensification of airstrikes on Gaza, the death toll at 5,000 people in Gaza.

JEHAD ABUSALIM: It appears that Israel has one plan and one plan only, and that is revenge. But revenge is not a plan. Israel is destroying Gaza. Israel has destroyed most of the city of Gaza and many towns and villages across the Gaza Strip, home to more than — homes to more than 1 million Palestinians who are now displaced.

I think the important question now, the challenge ahead of us in the United States, in Europe, around the world, is to push for ceasefire. Ceasefire now is what is needed, because as we witness the continuation of killing, of the destruction of the Gaza Strip, as we witness the failure of world governments to hold Israel accountable and to put a stop to this carnage, to this bloodshed, we are devastated, Amy. Entire families are being erased, wiped out off the map and of the civil registry. So I think for us Palestinians, in Gaza and beyond, and for every person of conscience around the world, the priority now should be ceasefire, to protect civilian lives, to protect the dignity of people and to prevent the situation from spinning out of control. It already did.

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to the Israeli government and military saying they’re going to de-Hamasify Gaza, that this was the worst killing of Jews — 1,400 Israelis killed, including other nationalities and religions, on October 7th — and that if — once they get rid of Hamas in Gaza, Gazans can live there?

JEHAD ABUSALIM: Well, they’re not leaving a Gaza behind for Gazans, for Palestinians in Gaza to live there. They’re practically destroying, carpet bombing the entire city and other towns and villages around, across the Gaza Strip. No one wants to see civilians hurt, regardless of who they are or where they come from or what their ethnicities or faiths or nationalities are. There is an important question that I think we need to grapple with as members of this world who care about people’s lives and dignity: Is there going to be a military solution on the ground? And the answer is, no, there isn’t going to be a military solution. Whatever Israel is engaged in right now is pure revenge. It doesn’t have any strategic value. And it doesn’t have any direction. Israel is just bombing Gaza nonstop, killing as many civilians as it could, simply because it’s being enabled by the international community. No one in the international community is asking the tough questions. Is there going to be a military solution? What will this look like? What will this mean for the region?

The region is about to be engulfed in far more violence, so I think this is a moment where we need courage, we need boldness, and we need the ability to confront the realities that got us to this point, that got us to this terrible situation. As I’m talking to you, you know, I’m thinking about my family, too. My friends receive the news — my friends who are from Gaza and abroad, they receive the news of their entire extended families killed in an instant. There will not be a military solution for this. And the only solution — and I’m happy to talk about this on your show today — the only path forward is to face the situation with courage and ask ourselves, “How did we get here?”

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that solution, that you can see at this point.

JEHAD ABUSALIM: I think there has to be a reassessment of the entire approach towards the Palestine question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as many in the West like to describe it. I think we have witnessed decades of failure, especially by successive U.S. administrations that promised that they would mediate and negotiate and lead Palestinians and Israelis towards a just and lasting peace, but none of these promises have been fulfilled. We’ve witnessed nothing but cynicism, and we have witnessed nothing but continuous enabling of successive Israeli governments to continue with their policies of uprooting Palestinians, ethnically cleansing them, destroying their lives and destroying any possibility for Palestinian statehood and independence.

And I think one of the biggest U.S. failures in foreign policy we have just witnessed over especially this year, as we saw the U.S. administration enabling the most right-wing government in Israeli history, a government that included people like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who casually talked about wanting to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. We heard statements by Israeli officials about the need for a second Nakba. And as Israel and the Israeli settlers, who were backed by the full force of the Israeli state, were attacking Palestinian communities across the West Bank, burning homes, killing people, taking over land, the United States government has given this right-wing government in Israel a visa waiver program that excluded Palestinian Americans, especially those from Gaza, and was pushing for an Israeli-Saudi normalization in a way that empowered Netanyahu’s vision that peace with the rest of the Arab world can be achieved through bypassing Palestinians and ignoring their just demands. So I think there has to be a complete reconfiguration of this approach. And there has to be — and tough questions need to be asked.

AMY GOODMAN: Jehad, I wanted to get your comment on the Israeli military informing Palestinians in Gaza that they would be identified as a partner in a terrorist organization if they didn’t follow forced displacement orders and move south. This message came in leaflets that were dropped from the sky by drones on Saturday, after Israel ordered 1.1 million residents in the northern part of Gaza to move south — of course, not clear if they could ever return. Can you talk about this?

JEHAD ABUSALIM: Let me tell you about my 88-year-old grandmother who lives in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. She is frail, she is old, and she’s ill. She was sleeping in her bed when an Israeli bomb hit the neighborhood where she lives, and she was injured by shrapnel and glass. My cousin, who was taking care of her, had to carry her on his shoulders and run down the stairs, run across the neighborhood as the bombs were falling, carrying a frail 88-year-old grandmother who witnessed more than eight or nine wars so far since she was born. Her entire life has been defined by war, by bloodshed, by aggression, by losing loved ones.

So, I think this entire narrative about north versus south, safe versus unsafe, is nothing but a false narrative that I think we should resist and we should not accept. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. Hundreds of people have been killed and lost their lives regardless of where they reside. That’s why we need a ceasefire now. And this is the demand by Palestinians from Gaza, whether they live in northern Gaza or southern Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Jehad Abusalim of The Jerusalem Fund is in Washington as he talks to us.

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Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer Raji Sourani Describes Surviving Israel Bombing His Home in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 23, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/23 ... transcript

Raji Sourani, a leading human rights lawyer in Gaza, joins us by phone after his home was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Sourani and his family survived the bombing and are now staying with relatives, but he says they refuse to leave Gaza despite Israel’s continuous bombardment. “They want to evict Gaza and create a new Nakba. They don’t want anybody in Gaza. They want us to leave,” Sourani says, “No power on Earth will take me from here. We are the stones of the valley.” Sourani is the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza. He is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We have just been joined on the phone by Raji Sourani, who put this message out after Israel bombed his home in Gaza City. He said, “By a miracle, I survived with my family. My house destroyed tonight by [an] Israeli bombing, at 8:25 p.m. The area I’m living in Gaza city Tal Al Hawa was subject to bombing for almost two hours by F16 rockets. I lived with my beloved wife and son the [longest two] hours and the most horrific time in my life, where the three of us sure we are not going to survive and we will surely die in any coming bomb. We hear the F16. We hear the rocket launched roaring and the explosion whom for 25 consecutive times thinking will take our life.”

Raji Sourani, we have just reached in Gaza. Can you hear us? Raji Sourani is the award-winning —

RAJI SOURANI: Yes, yes, yes, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: — human rights lawyer —

RAJI SOURANI: I can hear you.

AMY GOODMAN: — and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza.

RAJI SOURANI: I do hear you very well.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Raji. We can hear you, as well. Can you tell us what happened? People all over the world expressing concern, as you are a renowned human rights attorney, with your family, not knowing what had happened. What happened?

RAJI SOURANI: I think the world should be worried about the crimes going on against Palestinian civilians, who are for the 18th consecutive day in the eye of the storm. They are the target. They are the target of the F-16s, of the cannons, of the gunships, day or night, 25 hours a day. They almost destroyed — they destroyed Gaza. I mean, it’s unbelievable, this army targeting only civilians and civilian targets — towers, houses, hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, shelter places, ambulances, nurses, doctors, journalists. This is the most political army — this is the most political army in the world. This is the mighty Israel, its might and power targeting civilians. They are doing war crimes, crimes against humanity, persecution for 2.4 million people for the last 18 days.

Unfortunately, this colonial, racist West supporting them by all ways and means. They are supporting them with money, with guns, with airplanes, with all what they need to do this crime. They are complicit by supporting them politically and militarily and politically. It’s shame this is happening in the 21st century, while these war crimes not secret enough. It’s projected live on air, and the entire world see it. And the ICC prosecutor, who issued warrants against Putin because he committed war crimes against civilians, because he invaded and made occupation to Ukraine, and here we have this prolonged military occupation, we have prolonged blockade, which is criminal, suffocated people here, we have five consecutive wars, and this is the sixth, and he is doing nothing. He is doing nothing except, you know, freezing the investigation of the war crimes committed by Israel and the Israeli army.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji, you’re talking about the —

RAJI SOURANI: Gaza in unprecedented crisis —

AMY GOODMAN: Raji, you’re talking about the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan?

RAJI SOURANI: Yes, yes. He is complicit. He is selectively dealing with the Rome Statute, with the investigations, and he’s politically charging the International Criminal Court. Shame on him. He didn’t say one statement, since day one 'til this moment. He should be the backbone of the victims who are suffering in this part of the world. And he sees that, and he knows that, and he receives reports about that. And he's doing nothing.

So, U.S. and Mr. Biden — I’m saying to him — you are complicit. You are part of these crimes, because you are allowing, with your arms, civilians to be targeted and killed. We have almost 1,200 people for almost two weeks under the wreckage and under the destroyed houses, unable to be recovered. We have 57 families deleted, don’t exist anymore, because 20, 25, 30 of them have been killed in one second. We have churches targeted, and people died in it. We have mosques, people sheltered in it, and they were killed. Why you are allowing this to happen? Why you are seeing, watching, supporting Israel? Israel right of defense? Or it should be protecting civilians at the time of war. IHL, international humanitarian law, and human rights, Rome Statute, it’s there —

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

RAJI SOURANI: — simply, Amy, to protect —

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

RAJI SOURANI: — civilians at a time of war. And nobody is protecting us. We are the target of the Israeli army. They want to evict Gaza, and they create a new Nakba. They don’t want anybody in Gaza. They want us to leave. We are not leaving. We are the stones of the valley. We have been here since ever, and we will continue forever. We will not be part of the Israeli plan to evacuate Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji, if you can tell us what happened to your own family? When was your house bombed? And were you dug out from the rubble?

RAJI SOURANI: I’m living in Rimal area, Tal Al Hawa, the nicest place in Gaza. I have my own villa, and it’s nice, with very nice garden. It’s a two-story building. It’s me and my wife Amal and my son Basel. And we were, like everybody, I mean, you know, at our home, watching what’s going on. And out of the blue, the bombing began, began in our area — nothing special, nothing unique, nothing consist danger; otherwise, my sense will tell me, I mean, you know, I have to leave, or I will ask my wife and son, I mean, at least, to leave. But there is nothing, I mean, in that part. It’s entirely civilian, and I can tell — and I have always the reason, I mean, to say that.

And I have — the bombing began, and we thought, yes, I mean, this might be one bomb here or there. But it was very close. And the second, and then we began to realize and feel, you know, there is something big wrong happening, because sound getting closer, closer and closer. We were holding — I mean, we were not thinking or realizing that we are going to survive. That’s not easy. And I was thinking of a lot of things, I mean, my life, how I didn’t really, you know, leave like everybody leave. Should I leave, or should I stay? Why we move just in that place two minutes before the rocket of F-16, GBU-38, hit? And I felt the heat of the flame, and I saw the ball of fire. And every time, especially this one, I thought it’s our end. And this was last one, I mean, with the hit directly to my house, and the house was literally destroyed. Lucky enough, I just moved from the place where we are staying, upon the request of my son, to one tiny corridor inside the house. And if we were where we were, we are gone. We are gone.

So, we waited almost half an hour, unable to speak any words, unable to do anything. And we were really, I mean, a state of human shock. And I waited 'til, you know, there was some siren of ambulances remotely, and that means usually the bombing stopped, and they get the green light to come in. Then we began to climb our way out. But it was rather a mission impossible. And we were lucky, I mean, you know, to get out. And when we get out of the place, we just moved to my brother's house, which is like 800 meters away from the place we are staying. This happened on the 18th. But since then 'til today, I can assure you one thing, that the entire area is of Tal Al Hawa completely abolished almost. Two-thirds of it doesn't exist. This really beautiful area of Gaza doesn’t exist anymore.

So, we survived. We were lucky. But our neighbors, I mean, they lost 29 members, Habboush family, and others and others and others and others and others. We are collecting data. We are collecting information. This is unprecedented. I never, ever thought in my life civilians can be the target of war. They are not with Hamas.

Hamas insulted them, insulted their intelligence, insulted their military. We can understand that. In two hours, they were able to destroy the security wall, which America — which U.S. took it as the standard, and many other countries. And they destroyed it in 15 minutes, and they were able to enter. And they took over 11 military strongholds of Israel, and they killed and captured many of them. And they get back to them in Gaza, and we can understand why they are angry with them. And they took the headquarters of Gaza commandment of the Israeli military army, and they arrested generals, colonel and others, and they brought them, I mean, to Gaza. Israel has the right to be angry, absolutely angry, because Hamas showed their intelligence and their military capability means nothing, and they destroyed this illusion in two hours.

But why they are revenging from us? They should rebel from Hamas. Hamas still, I can assure you, functions like a Swiss watch in Gaza, and they are not affected. I can tell that. I can see that. We feel that. They are unable to minimize their power. They are unable to silence them. They are unable to locate where their soldiers are who were taken as prisoners of war. They are unable to do anything for them. That’s why they are revenging from us. This is the shame on the army. I mean, there is rules of engagement between the army, between the resistance movement and any army. But why civilians are the target? This is the big question. This is shame this is happening, I mean, to us. And I’m telling you —

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

RAJI SOURANI: — the reason they wanted — yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you — the leaflets that were dropped this weekend on Gaza, addressed to residents of Gaza, reading, “Urgent warning to the residents of Gaza: Your presence north of Wadi Gaza is putting your lives at risk. Anyone who chooses not to evacuate from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south of the Gaza Strip may be identified as a partner in a terrorist organization.” These on leaflets. I don’t know if you saw these leaflets, but you have made a decision with your family not to move south. Can you respond to what they’re saying, that anyone who chooses not to evacuate may be identified as a partner in a terrorist organization?

RAJI SOURANI: We have been here since ever, and we will stay forever. And no power on Earth will take me from here. We are the stones of the valley. They have to understand that. And even if they destroy once and again houses on our heads, even if they took our life, we are not moving anymore. Simply, we suffered from the Nakba 75 years. They committed massacres. They killed thousands of Palestinians. They pushed us out. And now it’s time for us not to do that again, at least willingly. We cannot be part of Mr. Bibi’s plan to evacuate Gaza. He said it, from a written statement, in a press conference day one: Gazans should leave Gaza. Where to? Where to? If anybody should leave, people like Mr. Bibi, not us. Enough for the occupation. We want dignity, freedom, end of this belligerent, criminal occupation. Now people from south of Gaza began to come back to north in thousands, because there is no safe haven in Gaza, no safe place in Gaza. And we are not going to be a tool in the hands of racist, criminal, rightist Israeli prime minister. No way. We are not going to do that. We are going to stay in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji Sourani, I want to thank you so much for taking this call, human rights attorney, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Please be safe. I know that it’s extremely difficult, with now the death toll at 5,000. Raji has chosen to stay in Gaza City near his home. People should go to our interviews with Raji over these last two weeks, of course, and beyond, before that. I also want to thank Jehad Abusalim, scholar and analyst from Gaza, executive director of The Jerusalem Fund. Thank you so much both for being with us.

Next up, “Do not use our death and our pain to bring death and pain of other people and other families.” The message of Noy Katsman about their brother Hayim, an Israeli peace activist killed in the Hamas attack. We’ll speak with Noy, as he says, “Not in my name. Not in my brother’s name.” Stay with us.

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Not in My Brother’s Name: Sibling of Peace Activist Killed by Hamas Demands Israel Stop Bombing Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 23, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/23 ... transcript

We speak with Noy Katsman, whose brother Hayim Katsman was a peace activist killed by Hamas militants in the village of Holit on October 7, about how they are demanding the death of their sibling not be used as a pretext for more bloodshed. “What Israel is doing now is very clearly not for the security of anyone,” Katsman says of the bombing campaign. “The real reason is just revenge and killing and distraction [from] the failure of Israel to protect its citizens.”

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.

“My call to my government: Stop killing people.” That’s the message Noy Katsman recently gave during a eulogy for their brother Hayim Katsman, an Israeli peace activist who was killed during the Hamas attack October 7th that killed 1,400 people. Israel now says 222 hostages are still being held in Gaza, after two were released Friday.

Hayim Katsman was an academic, a peace activist, a tender of fruit trees in the Holit kibbutz, about a mile from Gaza. He was credited with saving the lives of three of his neighbors on October 7th. We spoke to his Seattle, Washington, rabbi just last week, because Hayim was a graduate student at the University of Washington.

We’re joined now by Noy, Noy Katsman, who gave the eulogy for their brother.

Noy, thank you so much for being with us from Vienna. Our deepest condolences to you and your family. If you can talk about Hayim, Hayim’s life, and now what’s being done in his name, and your thoughts on what should happen right now? I think the death toll, 1,400 Israelis from October 7th, that time, and now more than 5,000 Palestinians, and the number increases even as this show airs.

NOY KATSMAN: You hear me?

AMY GOODMAN: We hear you perfectly.

NOY KATSMAN: OK. So, first of all, my father — my brother was — so, he did many things. He was also a car mechanic. He was a DJ. He was a brilliant academic. He also was a gardener. He was in charge also of the fruit trees and also of the gardens. Lately, he became in charge of the gardens in Holit. And all of the things he did, he was for peace. He was a DJ, so he was a DJ of — he played almost entirely Arabic music from the Middle East, about Palestine and Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. He was a gardener, and he volunteered in Rahat in the garden. And Rahat is a Bedouin city in the south of Israel, near Be’er Sheva. And he also was — he was a volunteer in Masafer Yatta, where Palestinians are suffering from displacement and terror from settlers and soldiers. So he would go there and help them, protect them and use his knowledge as a car mechanic to fix the 4-by-4 car of the volunteers. And as an academic, his research was about right wing in Israel and the dangers of right wing in Israel, extreme right wing. Like, his thesis was on Rabbi Ginsburgh, and then his doctorate, he wrote about religious Zionism, where it’s my family that we came from.

AMY GOODMAN: Noy, can you talk about what Israel is doing now, the constant bombardment of the Gaza Strip, forcing the dislocation of half the population, and what looks like an imminent ground invasion, as a response to the brutality of Hamas on October 7th? Your thoughts and what you think your brother would have felt?

NOY KATSMAN: OK. So I think the most thing that is bothering me is the lack of responsibility that government in Israel are taking for many, many years. We can start it from '67, when Israel conquered Gaza Strip, and of course didn't give the citizens any citizenship or any rights. It was just a thought that, you know, Palestinians don’t need rights. I mean, they don’t need basic rights; they’ll be happy to be under our control. And sadly — not sadly, but in 1987, so, the uprising of the First Intifada, of course, proved that to be wrong, because Palestinians are also people, just like Jews and Israelis, and they want the same things like people, human beings, want.

Sadly, I don’t think Israel is taking responsibility of anything. I mean, in 2005, we got out of Gaza and were like, “OK!” I mean, we just throw it like we were never connected to it. And like, OK, let’s just let them — like no long process agreement, sustainable agreement. And sadly, after that, the 10, 15 years, Israel is doing everything to strengthen Hamas in Gaza, just because it doesn’t want a two-state solution, so it wants to divide between the Fatah and the Hamas. So, this, of course, failed, because also the Hamas is very terrible to the people in Gaza, especially LGBTs and women, which always suffer from right-wing religious government. And at the end, it of course came to us, because we can put Gaza behind fences or whatever, but the right-wing extremists of Hamas killed Israelis indiscriminately, civilians and also my left brother, who — of course, it very makes sense, you know, that the right wing kill left-wing people, because they just don’t care. They earn from the hate. They earn from the death.

AMY GOODMAN: Noy, we just have —

NOY KATSMAN: Now, some of the — yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Noy, we just have about 30 seconds, and I wanted to ask you to tell us your message to the world today.

NOY KATSMAN: OK. So, what Israel is doing now is very clearly not in the — it’s not for the security of anyone, not to people in Israel, not to people of Gaza. Some people say, “Oh, Israel is — it’s for the good of Gaza people, because we’re going to destroy Hamas.” If that’s the case, so I think Israel should make sure all of the citizens of Israel — of Gaza should have a safe place to be and maybe kill Hamas. But I don’t think it’s the real reason. The real reason is just revenge and killing and distraction of the failure of Israel to protect its citizens, because it was such a failure of protection.

AMY GOODMAN: Noy Katsman, we’re going to have to leave it there, but I thank you so much. And again, condolences on the death of your brother Hayim, which in Hebrew means “Life.” I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

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A former State Dept. official explains why he resigned over U.S. arms sent to Israel
by Rachel Treisman
Heard on Morning Edition
Updated October 19, 20234:02 PM ET

A high-ranking State Department official has resigned in protest of the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Palestine. For 11 years, Josh Paul oversaw arms transfers to U.S. allies while serving as the congressional and public affairs director of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. In a letter explaining his resignation, Paul condemned what he called U.S. “blind support” for Israel as “an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia.” Paul wrote that his greatest desire was to see both Israelis and Palestinians flourish, adding, “Collective punishment is an enemy to that desire, whether it involves demolishing one home, or one thousand; as too is ethnic cleansing; as too is occupation; as too is apartheid.”

-- State Department Official Quits to Protest Biden Administration’s “Blind Support” of Israel, October 19, 2023, by Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow!

A State Department official has resigned from the bureau that oversees arms transfers to foreign nations, citing his objection to continued U.S. military assistance to Israel as its retaliatory bombardment and blockade of Gaza exacerbate a humanitarian crisis there.

Josh Paul was the director of congressional and public affairs at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. In a two-page letter posted on LinkedIn, he said he had made a promise to himself when he joined over a decade ago that he would stay "as long as I felt the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do."

"I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued — indeed, expanded and expedited — provision of lethal arms to Israel — I have reached the end of that bargain," he wrote.

Paul tendered his resignation on Wednesday, the same day that President Biden visited Israel in a public show of support. The president pledged his commitment to its security and promised a congressional request for more defense funding, even as he urged Israelis not to be consumed by their rage and directed $100 million in humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Paul wrote in his letter that he was heartened to see the administration's efforts to temper Israel's response, including its advocacy for the provision of relief, supplies and safe passage for civilians in Gaza.

But he said he could not work in support of a set of major policy decisions — including "rushing more arms to one side of the conflict" — that he believes to be "shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse."

The State Department declined to comment on personnel matters.

In an interview with Morning Edition's Michel Martin, Paul strongly denounced Hamas' attack on Israel and affirmed Israel's right to defend itself. But he said there are "ways to do that that don't involve dislocating a million Palestinians, that don't involve the death of thousands of civilians."

"We never seem to ask, well, what about the Palestinian right? Not to face incursions in their villages, not to be bombed from the air," he added. "So I think looking at this on equal terms, we have to talk about both sides."

Paul said he doesn't expect his departure to lead to an immediate change in policy — an assessment several experts also made to NPR. But he said he hoped to accomplish two things: remove himself from a debate that he found difficult, and show others in the government "that it's OK and possible to stand up."

Paul said he's received a huge outpouring of support after posting his resignation letter — which has since been reposted more than 1,000 times — and hopes his colleagues grappling with similar feelings take that to heart.

"And I hope they see that and that it speaks to them to do the right thing as well, which I know so many of them will," he said.

Paul says this is different from previous moral conundrums

Paul noted in his letter that while his work dealt with many countries, he was particularly well-versed in Middle East issues: He wrote his master's thesis on Israeli counterterrorism and civil rights, spent time working with the Palestinian Authority and Israel Defense Forces while serving for the U.S. Security in Ramallah and has "deep personal ties" to both sides of the conflict.

He wrote that he's "made more moral compromises than I can recall" over his last 11 years in the job. He told NPR that he used his position to fight many times for what he believed to be right, including debates over arms transfers to "a number of unsavory regimes." But this time is different, he says.

"The difference here is that in all of those cases — when those within the department and the interagency with human rights concerns had done all the shaping they could — you knew the next step was for the sale to go to Congress where it would be held, debated, even voted against," he explained. "But with Israel, it's a blank check from Congress. There's no appetite for debate. There's no real debate internal to the administration. And then there's no one to hand the debate off to."

While there is some disagreement on the far left when it comes to support for Israel, Congress as a whole is unlikely to be divided when it comes to supporting Israel, at least in the short term.

Paul said the first thing he'd like the Biden administration to do is "simply follow their own public commitments."

He explains that the administration's new conventional arms transfer policy, enacted earlier this year, explicitly states that no transfers will be authorized under which the U.S. assesses that "it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit, facilitate the recipients' commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

Those include attacks directed against civilians and other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including acts of violence against children.

"So I think for us to look at the current situation and say the answer is as many bombs as Israel asks for, knowing that their use will lead in a direction exactly opposite to our stated policy goals ... it's disappointing, to say the least," Paul said.

Resignation is one option for government officials who disagree with U.S. policy

Experts on diplomacy told NPR that while it's too soon to see what if any ripple effects Paul resignation will have, it's unlikely to impact U.S. policy.

Ronald Neumann, the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy and a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, says there are two things a State Department employee can do when they disagree with a U.S. policy: resign or ask to be moved to another job.

"Often people have to deal with exactly what Josh Paul mentioned in his letter, which is balancing the good they might do by staying in a position or by remaining in a policy fight against having to carry out policy they don't agree with," he adds.

He says such resignations happen periodically. For example: The U.S. ambassador to Panama stepped down in 2018, citing irreconcilable differences with former President Donald Trump, and several State Department officials resigned over objections to the U.S.' Bosnia policy in the 1990s.

"I do not know that any of such resignations have ever had an effect on the department writ large or that they have a major effect on policy," Neumann says, adding that he's not surprised Paul has received support from many coworkers but doesn't expect it to lead to much.

The State Department is the rare cabinet agency with an official internal mechanism that allows employees to voice concerns about U.S. policy, Neumann points out.

It's called the Dissent Channel, and was born out of the Vietnam War. Employees can express policy disagreements in classified messages that go to the secretary of state, without fear of retaliation.

"It's important for that active policy discussion and dissent that people do respect their professional obligation to either keep dissent inside the organization or to do what Mr. Paul has done and resign and take it outside," Neumann said, adding that it's important for people to be able to draw their own line.

Dissent cables don't guarantee changes in policy, though some have happened. A 1992 memo about U.S. inaction towards genocide in Bosnia, for example, is widely credited with helping bring about the U.S.-brokered peace accords there.

The channel usually gets four to five such cables each year, but saw surges at times during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Tom Yazdgerdi, the president of the American Foreign Service Association, told NPR over email that the union hasn't seen any signs that foreign service members are contemplating resigning over the U.S. response to the Israel-Hamas war.

He says there's been more concern about the safety and security of family members of diplomatic personnel working in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beirut — and the State Department has addressed it by providing authorized departure to eligible individuals and employees.

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“Not in Our Name”: 400 Arrested at Jewish-Led Sit-in at NYC’s Grand Central Demanding Gaza Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 30, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/30 ... transcript

SEE VIDEO HERE:





Transcript

We bring you the voices of Jewish Voice for Peace and their allies who shut down the main terminal of Grand Central Station during rush hour Friday in one of New York’s largest acts of civil disobedience in 20 years to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The multiracial, intergenerational movement says about 400 people were arrested, including rabbis, famous actors and elected officials from the New York State Assembly and Senate and the City Council.

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

AMY GOODMAN: Israel is intensifying its aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza. Palestinian officials say the death toll has topped 8,300, including over 3,400 children. On Friday, Israeli ground troops, backed by tanks and armored bulldozers, entered Gaza amidst a communication blackout that cut off contact between Gaza and the rest of the world. Communications have now been partially restored.

On Friday, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in support of a humanitarian truce, but Israel and the United States voted against the resolution.

Massive demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza continued this weekend, including right here in New York City. On Friday night, thousands of members of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and their allies shut down the main terminal of Grand Central Station during rush hour. It’s the largest sit-in protest the city has seen in over two decades. Many wore shirts that said “Not in Our Name” and “Ceasefire Now.” Banners were unfurled, reading, “Palestinians should be free. Israelis demand ceasefire now.” One sign read, “Never again for anyone.” The multiracial, intergenerational movement says about 400 people were arrested, including rabbis, famous actors and elected officials from New York State Assembly and Senate and the City Council.

Democracy Now! was there. Today we bring you their voices, including Rosalind Petchesky, professor of political science at Hunter College.

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

ROSALIND PETCHESKY: My name is Rosalind Petchesky. I’m here with maybe a thousand others, a lot of us Jews. But we are here to protest the genocide that is happening in our name. It has to stop. We are crying every minute. When we listen to your show, we are crying. I have a dear friend, Mohamed, with his little family in Gaza. He almost got blown up today. We can’t let this go on. We believe in justice and the right to live for everyone. But Palestinians have been the victims of oppression for 75 years, and it has to stop. That’s why we’re here, to say 'Not in our name.' I am older than the state of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s Jewish prayers in the background. The sun is going down, and it’s the Jewish Sabbath.

ROSALIND PETCHESKY: It is. And on Shabbat, we have to pray. We have to recommit ourselves to justice. I believe that Judaism and Jewish ethics — this is how I grew up thinking — are about justice and about Rabbi Hillel’s statement: If I am not for myself, who am I? And if I am only for me, what am I doing here? I glossed over it a little bit. And if not now, when? Now! Peace now. Ceasefire now. President Biden and Blinken, listen to what people are telling you, especially the young people and lots of Jews.

PROTESTERS: Not in our name! Not in our name! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live!

INDYA MOORE: My name is Indya Moore. I am standing here, I’m resisting and protesting in solidarity with Jews, trans people, queer people, Black and Brown victims of colonization, and Americans, just like you and I, to stand against our tax dollars being used to decimate Palestinians. And we’re standing for peace. We’re standing for compassion. And we’re standing for self-determinating justice and liberated Palestine.

PROTESTERS: Stop the genocide! Free, free Palestine! Stop the genocide! Free, free Palestine!

SUMAYA AWAD: My name is Sumaya Awad.

AMY GOODMAN: And why Grand Central?

SUMAYA AWAD: Because this is a symbol of New York. This is a symbol of the United States in many ways. And so, we’re here. We’re saying this is ours. This is where we go to work. This is how we get to our children. This is how we go to school. And we want the same thing for Palestinians in Gaza. We want them to be able to live their lives in dignity and freedom.

DR. STEVE AUERBACH: My name’s Dr. Steve Auerbach. I am a pediatrician, licensed physician in the state of New York. I’m here to say that many Jewish pediatricians are calling for stopping the killing of children and their families, calling for a ceasefire now, and not in our name.

I’ve never been prouder to be a pediatrician than when, back on Friday, October 13th, thoroughly mainstream organization, the New York state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said that “We stand with the children of Israel and the children of Gaza. We love all children, all families equally,” and calling for an immediate ceasefire. So, that was back on October 13th. Unfortunately, children and their families continue to be killed. These sorts of collective actions, collective responsibility is illegal. These sorts of mass killings of civilian areas, mass bombings of civilian areas are illegal and immoral.

The United States should be leading to call for a ceasefire now. I’ve never been prouder of the 18 congresspersons who have called for a ceasefire now. And I’m calling on President Biden and Senator Schumer and my assemblyperson, Nadler: Please, please, these are not Jewish values. It is not a Jewish value to be dropping bombs on children, killing children and their families.

SEN. JABARI BRISPORT: I am state Senator Jabari Brisport, the 25th State Senate District in Brooklyn. And I’m here calling for a ceasefire in order to allow for the release of hostages and humanitarian aid. I carry the Not on Our Dime legislation with Assemblymember Mamdani, which will stop New York from allowing for fake charities that claim to be charities to help Israeli citizens but actually fund displacement and destruction and settler violence in Palestinian territory.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you planning to get arrested today?

SEN. JABARI BRISPORT: I got arrested a week ago, and I am going to let others step up today. I got arrested a week ago at a sit-in outside Senator Gillibrand’s office asking her to start calling for a ceasefire.

ASSEMBLYMEMBER ZOHRAN MAMDANI: My name is Zohran Mamdani. I’m an assemblymember for parts of Astoria and Long Island City. And I’m here today to joining thousands of Jewish New Yorkers, rabbis and allies to say that the time is now for an immediate ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to get arrested?

ASSEMBLYMEMBER ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I’m not going to be getting arrested today, because I was arrested two weeks ago, and I was advised to not get arrested immediately after.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you arrested for?

ASSEMBLYMEMBER ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I was arrested for civil disobedience, for disorderly conduct. I was arrested alongside Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s home, calling on him to support the demand for an immediate ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to you that on this Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, thousands of Jews are here at Grand Central saying “Ceasefire now”?

ASSEMBLYMEMBER ZOHRAN MAMDANI: It shows that what we have been told about the consent for this genocide is not true. So many of the Jewish New Yorkers here are struggling through heartbreak and mourning of October 7th, and they have made it very clear that do not use their heartbreak, their tragedy as the justification for the genocide of Palestinians. In over two-and-a-half weeks, we’ve already seen more than 7,000 Palestinians be killed, close to 3,000 Palestinian children, one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes. These New Yorkers, and so many across the state, are saying the time is now for a ceasefire, and if you’re not calling for it, you’re supporting a genocide.

COUNCILMEMBER SANDY NURSE: Sandy Nurse. I’m a councilmember to the 37th District.

AMY GOODMAN: And you represent what area of the city?

COUNCILMEMBER SANDY NURSE: Bushwick, Cypress Hills, Brownsville, East New York, City Line.

AMY GOODMAN: And why are you here today?

COUNCILMEMBER SANDY NURSE: I’m here today to stand in solidarity with Jews, Muslims, allies, because we believe in a free Palestine. We believe in a Palestine without military occupation. We believe that we need to end this genocidal war. And we do not believe that our dollars, our tax dollars, should be used to bomb other children. We don’t believe that unjustified murder of one set of children brings about murder for another set of children. We need to end this war, and we need to move towards a peaceful solution.

SECURITY: Are you a credentialed member of the media? I’m going to ask you, as a courtesy, please to leave the steps. They’re planning an announcement that people are disrupting the steps, and they’re in violation. They’re going to — they’re going to start possibly making arrests. So, if you’re a credentialed member of the media, I’m going to ask you for the same courtesy: if you’d please leave the area. Thank you.

POLICE OFFICER 1: If you refuse to leave this premises, you will be arrested on the charge of criminal trespass. If you do not accompany the arresting officer voluntarily to the prisoner transport vehicle, or if you must be carried, you may be charged with additional crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me your name and why you’re getting arrested?

JOCELYN: My name’s Jocelyn [phon.]. If someone asks for my solidarity and I can give it, that’s what I’m going to give right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Why is this important to you?

JOCELYN: I mean, the blood is on my hands, too. My tax dollars are funding this. And, you know, this is the least I can do.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s your name?

PHI LE: I’m Phi, Phi Le [phon.].

AMY GOODMAN: And why are you getting arrested?

PHI LE: I was born in a refugee camp in the Philippines. I am Vietnamese. I am a child of imperialism. So, I can’t let — I can’t see it go on. I can’t see it continue.

PROTESTERS: [singing] Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

JANE HIRSCHMAN: My name is Jane Hirschmann. I’m here because my family survived the Holocaust, but many did not. My parents were Holocaust survivors. And there’s one thing I learned: Never again means never again for anyone. We don’t condone this, and Netanyahu better stop the bombing of Gaza. You know, this didn’t start with Hamas. This started in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were removed from where they lived in order to set up a Jewish state. And these people that they’re killing in Gaza, they were moved to Gaza because of the 1948 Nakba, which means “catastrophe.” And now they’re going to eliminate them, kill them or move them somewhere else. And it’s got to stop. And Jews, American Jews, have to step and say, “Not in our name. Not with our tax money. You cannot do this kind of genocide in front of our eyes or ever again.”

AMY GOODMAN: Are you getting arrested today?

JANE HIRSCHMAN: Oh yeah, I am. My whole family is here. I’m here with my daughters, my grandchildren — they’re not getting arrested, they moved out — my husband. We’re all here together. There are 13 of us.

PROTESTERS: Never again for anyone! Never again for anyone! Never again, Israel! Never again, Israel!

PROTESTER: I’m here to support the people of Gaza, the people who are currently experiencing a genocide. It’s disgusting that our government has enabled this. And so we’re here shutting down Grand Central to show that we, the people here, will not tolerate that.

JOYCE ROBERTS: They won’t arrest me because I have a cane. They won’t arrest me.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s your name?

JOYCE ROBERTS: I want to get arrested, and they’re refusing.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Are you ready? Are you going to get arrested?

JOYCE ROBERTS: Yes, I want to get arrested.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Let’s do it.

POLICE OFFICER 3: All right, we’ll help you stand up.

JOYCE ROBERTS: OK.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Are you ready? You need help?

JOYCE ROBERTS: I need help standing up.

POLICE OFFICER 2: We’ll put your hands behind your back.

JOYCE ROBERTS: I need my cane.

POLICE OFFICER 4: We’ll get it.

JOYCE ROBERTS: My name is Joyce Roberts. I think that it’s really important that there’s a ceasefire.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Ma’am, let go of your cane one second, please.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Ma’am, can you let go of your cane for a second?

JOYCE ROBERTS: I let go of my cane.

POLICE OFFICER 3: All right. I’ll give it right back to you. I’m going to give it right back to you.

JOYCE ROBERTS: That there’s a ceasefire, that people stop killing each other. We have to stop killing each other. We can’t, we won’t get rid of Hamas. We won’t get rid of an idea. We might get rid of the organization. We might get rid of all of the people in Gaza. All of the Palestinians might be killed. But the idea won’t die. Freedom won’t die.

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

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the historic Jewish Voice for Peace protest on Friday that shut down Grand Central Station in New York City. Protesters were calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. About 400 people were arrested in what’s believed to be the largest sit-in protest New York has seen in over two decades.

Coming up, Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Chicago. She’s one of 18 members of the House who have signed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Stay with us.

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Rep. Delia Ramirez Backs Gaza Ceasefire Resolution in Congress: We Need Diplomacy, Not More Bombings
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 30, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/30/gaza_ceasefire

We speak with Illinois Congressmember Delia Ramirez, one of the 18 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have signed a resolution calling for an immediate deescalation and ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. “The only way we move forward is deescalating,” says Ramirez. “The aid that we send cannot be used to kill innocent lives. It’s unacceptable, it’s not moral, and I can’t stand behind that.”

Transcript

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

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

Israeli tanks have reached the outskirts of Gaza City after Israel carried out its most intense bombardment of the besieged Palestinian territory since October 7th. Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israeli attacks have killed more than 8,300 Palestinians, including nearly 3,500 children. According to Save the Children, that’s more children than have been killed in armed conflicts globally over the course of a whole year. The U.N. agency for Palestine refugees, known as UNRWA, says desperate families broke into U.N. warehouses Sunday, removing wheat and other humanitarian aid. UNRWA says the incident showed people in Gaza have reached a breaking point. The U.N. agency serving Palestinians says Gazans have reached their breaking point after more than three weeks of bombardments and total siege. Israeli strikes have killed at least 59 UNRWA employees, with many more believed to be trapped under the rubble.

On Friday, the U.N. General Assembly voted 120 to 14 in favor of a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian truce and for aid access to Gaza. Israel and the U.S. voted against the resolution, which also calls for the release of captive civilians. Israel believes Hamas and other groups are holding over 220 hostages seized on October 7th during the Hamas attack that Israel says killed 1,400 people.

We’re joined now by two guests. Lara Friedman is with us. She’s president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a former Foreign Service officer who served in Jerusalem, Tunis and Beirut. She has worked on Israel-Palestine and the broader region for over 30 years. We’re also joined by Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who is a congressmember from Chicago. She’s one of 18 members of the House of Representatives who have signed a resolution calling for an immediate deescalation and ceasefire in Israel and Palestine.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Congressmember Ramirez, let’s begin with you in Chicago. Can you explain why you supported this ceasefire resolution?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Look, I want to see safety, and I want to see hostages released. There are 500 Americans and their families in Gaza right now, and I want to make sure that everyone is safe and that we are using our power to be able to deescalate the situation. Bombing ourselves through it is not going to bring the hostages back safely. Bombing us through it is not going to bring 500 Americans back. I really believe — you just talked about it — 8,000 Palestinians have died. The only way we are going to get to long-lasting peace is a ceasefire, is deescalating and using diplomacy.

AMY GOODMAN: How did this resolution come about, Congressmember Ramirez?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Look, we were already two weeks into this conflict. We have not seen any form of deescalation, quite the contrary. And we have seen people starving to death in Palestine, in Gaza at this moment. And so, for a number of us, we understand that if our outcome is peace in the region, that the only way we can get closer to that, where hostages are released, is deescalation and ceasefire. We have to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to prevent a regional war. And the only way you get there is ensuring that the safety of innocent civilians is our absolute priority. You won’t get that through bombing.

We understood, and a number of us co-led the resolution, and more members of Congress in the coming days have also joined the resolution, recognizing that what we’re currently doing now is escalating the situation, not deescalating, and the only way we move forward is deescalating and ceasing fire. That’s the way that you’re going to be able to keep people from dying, protect innocent civilians, 1.2 million children right now in Gaza. The ceasefire is our only way of diplomacy and being able to get to a place of peace.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of response are you getting in support of this resolution? In an earlier interview, you said, “If you ask, 'What about the Palestinians?' it’s almost as if there’s an assumption that you’re saying you don’t announce Hamas.” Can you talk about this? And do you feel that that is changing?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: I think it’s slowly changing. And what I say to people is that I came to Congress to uplift shared humanity. I can denounce Hamas. I can call for the release of hostages. And I could also ask, “What about the Palestinian children?” Right now we have children under rubble. The number that we’re seeing is 8,000, but that is not the accurate, most accurate number. There are people that we have not found. There are families in Chicago and all over the world who have not been able to connect with their family in Gaza. And the reality is that if we care about Israelis, if we care about the Jewish community and their safety, we have to understand that it’s interconnected with the safety and the freedom of Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of aid do you think should go to Gaza? And what about funding for Israel?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Look, Amy, when hundreds of thousands of people have lost their home, thousands of people have died, their communities have completely been destroyed, the question is: What will we do to ensure that people are able to come back to home when they have no home? When we’re talking about substantial humanitarian aid, I don’t mean 30, 40 trucks a day. I mean substantial, billions of dollars of responsibility that we, as the U.S., who has given military aid for such a long time, is responsible to give to help restore a place that has been, in many cases, in many parts of it, burned down to rubble. So, we need to be able to do that.

And I think, secondary, for me to be able to say that I want more money for bombs, it begs the question. Bombs are going to kill people. And in this case, it is killing thousands of civilians. We’ve seen it already in the last three weeks. We have to do everything we can to ensure that we’re honoring international law, that the money we’re sending isn’t killing children, that we are uplifting the humanity of people of Israel and people in Gaza, but, Amy, people in the West Bank. Right now settlers are killing people in the West Bank, and the Israeli government is enabling it. It is letting it happen. The aid that we send cannot be used to kill innocent lives. It’s unacceptable, it’s not moral, and I can’t stand behind that.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering what you think would be a more just U.S. foreign policy. I mean, you, Congressmember Ramirez, are Guatemalan American. We know the history of Guatemala and U.S. aid for the successive military regimes that were responsible for the death of so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans in the 1980s and beyond. If you could comment on putting this in a larger context?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Look, we have to ask ourselves: What is the outcome here? Is it a two-state solution? Is it to be able to bring peace to the region, long-lasting peace? Because if that is the case, we, as the U.S., have to think about the role we have played for the last few decades. We are not at peace. We have seen occupation all over the region. And we have to ask ourselves, if what we want is long-lasting peace, every single resolution, every single bill and every single dollar that we send over, we must ask ourselves: Will this get us to peace? Will this get us closer to a two-state solution? Will this create the kind of policy that will get us to a place where Palestinians and Israelis are safe and free? And if the answer is no, then we need to reassess how we move and the kind of policy that we have had in the region for the last decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to President Biden or his inner circle? At the beginning, he was very clear in saying he told Netanyahu he did not say use restraint. But now the White House is putting out statements that they are, in fact, behind the scenes saying that restraint must be used.

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: I’ve not talked to the president directly. I certainly have been talking to the State Department on a regular basis. And what I have said is, words matter. What we are saying to the American people, what the American people are seeing has a direct impact even for us here. I mean, look, when you see Netanyahu and his own leadership, his own IDF leadership, calling people less than human, animals, that has consequences. We have seen the impact and the growth, increase of hate crime all over the world, antisemitism and Islamophobia. A 6-year-old boy, 30 minutes from my district, was stabbed 26 times because his landlord saw this 6-year-old little boy as a threat to our society, and nearly killed his mother. We have to understand that what we are saying to the people in this moment has real consequences. And we have a moral responsibility to lead from a place of diplomacy, seeking peace at all times and holding accountable the Israeli government for the ways that it is violating international law, for the ways that this ground incursion in this moment is killing innocent lives. We all want hostages out. We also want the 500 Americans and their families out. How we’re moving in this moment is not making anyone more safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Delia Ramirez.

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Middle East Expert Lara Friedman: If Netanyahu Cared About Hostages, Why Did He Launch Ground Invasion?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
October 30, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/30/gaza_hostages

We look at the reluctance in Congress to censure Israel despite growing grassroots pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza. “The narrative on both sides of the aisle is mostly about the right of Israel to defend itself,” says Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “Congress has bought, completely, the framing which says that any Palestinian that dies in Gaza … that’s all on Hamas.” Friedman explains how the normalization of the racist Kahanist movement by Israel and the U.S. helped lead to today’s crisis, and lays out Israel’s approach to the ongoing hostage situation in Gaza.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, former Foreign Service officer who served in Jerusalem, Tunis and Beirut, has worked on Israel-Palestine and the broader region for over 30 years, former director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now, Americans for Shalom Achshav.

It’s great to have you with us, Lara. Can you talk about what’s happening in the Congress now, and if you feel movement, a change in Biden’s position from the beginning of the — after October 7th?

LARA FRIEDMAN: Sure. And thanks for having me.

I do think that we’re seeing, and in the piece that you had before we came on here, we’re seeing real movement in the grassroots. There’s really a surge in energy and a surge in support for Palestinian rights that we haven’t — I think has never been seen before.

I think it still remains to be seen how that’s going to be reflected in Congress. If we just go by the statements that are being made by members of Congress, which, except for a small number — and Congresswoman Ramirez is among them — except for a small number, are, at best, very, very cautious about saying anything that would validate the humanity and the rights of the Palestinian people. The narrative on both sides of the aisle is mostly about the rights of Israel to defend itself, and that is — to defend itself is defined basically to mean Israel can do and should do whatever it wants to do, and it bears no responsibility, has no agency, with respect to the results when it comes to human casualties. Congress has bought, completely, the framing which says that any Palestinian that dies in Gaza from an Israeli bomb or who gets sick or starves or dehydrated or ill or dies in a hospital, that’s all on Hamas. That is not Israel’s fault. Everything is Hamas’s fault, which suggests a new ethos of war that really opens the door for everyone to target civilians.

There’s also the framing of human shields, which basically says, you know, it’s Hamas’s fault that we’re killing your civilians, that we’re killing your children, which, I mean, there is truth to the argument that Hamas has placed itself behind human beings. It raises the question: You know, if bad guys invaded a school, would the United States say, “Ah, for the sake of killing the bad guys, we need to bomb the school. We’re going to kill all the children in the school, because we have to, and it’s the bad guys’ fault”? The inhumanity of it is stunning.

But what we’ve seen, really, since the beginning, since October 7th — and I follow — I do a report every Friday covering every single thing that happens in Congress related to the Middle East and Israel-Palestine — is a deluge of new legislation, of resolutions and of letters, which, by and large, either ignore or diminish the humanity of Palestinians, which directly conflate criticism of what Israel is doing in Gaza or assertions that there is any context, that there is history before October 7th, conflate it with antisemitism, conflate it with support for Hamas and terror. And we’ve seen that with the attacks on the members of Congress, like Congresswoman Ramirez, who have dared to do something like call for a ceasefire, with really despicable language used by members of Congress against their own colleagues on both sides of the aisle. This is coming at them, suggesting that daring to talk about ceasefire is a betrayal of support for Israel and is a form of antisemitism and support for terror.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, you tweeted, quote, “Reminder: 6 mos before Israeli elex that made Kahanists arguably most powerful political force in Israel, the Biden Admin decided to do its part in normalizing Kahanism by removing Kahanist groups from US list of foreign terrorist orgs, where they’d been listed for decades.” For those who don’t understand who Kahanists are, explain the significance of this tweet.

LARA FRIEDMAN: Well, I mean, whole books have been written about the Kahanists. The Kahanists — Rabbi Meir Kahane was an American citizen rabbi from the New York area. He wrote many, many books. His basic philosophy was, you know, all of the land of Israel — and that extends far beyond Israel’s current borders — belongs to the Jews, because it was given to the Jews by God. And he made clear that — I mean, you have to give him credit for honesty — that this wasn’t — that this is not a conflict that was going to be resolved in a way that would address everybody’s rights or needs, that this was going to be a war and that the Arabs were going to have to lose, and this meant removing Arabs. And he was very, very clear. It’s a worldview that is openly racist, openly Islamophobic, almost proudly so, and, in effect, suggests that people who think that there’s some other solution are naive.

That strand of thinking was much, I would say, maligned and disrespected for a very long time. The Kahanist party was outlawed in Israel as a racist party during Rabbi Kahane’s lifetime. He was eventually assassinated. But what’s happened since then is the mainstreaming of his worldview in Israel and, I would say, in the United States amongst many supporters of Israel — a lot of the financing for his work and his thoughts comes from the United States still — and to the point where today you have very powerful people in the Israeli government, very powerful political strands in Israel, which are largely identical, whose worldview is largely identical to that of the Kahanists. The fact that the Biden administration elected to remove the Kahanist parties from the terrorist list — and they were on the terrorist list because of acts of terror committed by acolytes of this movement against American citizens, you know, not in recent years, but it was — I don’t know why they chose that moment to remove them, but it certainly speaks to the mainstreaming and normalizing of this approach to the Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Lara Friedman, can you talk about the hostage negotiations? You have Qatar and Egypt involved in those negotiations, mainly Qatar right now. You have the hostage families, who are a powerful force. We hear their stories repeatedly in the U.S. media, as we should. They should be a model for also the coverage there should be of Palestinian suffering. But those families are calling for this exchange of the hostages — it’s believed there’s more than 220 or 230 of them that are being held by Hamas and other groups in Gaza — and Palestinian political prisoners, Palestinian prisoners, of which I think there are more than 6,600. I think they’re calling it “everybody for everybody.” Can you talk about this?

LARA FRIEDMAN: Yeah. I mean, look, the taking of hostages, the taking of civilian hostages by Hamas — I mean, the October 7th attack was heinous in every aspect. The aspect of taking the hostages brought this home to Israelis in a way that is just — I don’t think anyone who has not spent time in a small country where everyone is — you know, there’s one degree of separation. This is incredibly real and incredibly personal for everyone in Israel.

What is notable is, in past experiences where there have been hostages taken, Israel has sort of turned over every rock possible, done everything possible to get them back. You have negotiations. You have contacts. You have — think of Gilad Shalit. I mean, the entire country mobilizes to get the hostage back — “hostage,” singular, “hostages,” plural. In this context, after October 7th, the issue of hostages is raised constantly by the Israeli government as a reason for why it has to do what it’s doing in Gaza, notwithstanding the fact that carpet bombing Gaza, using deep, deep penetrating bombs that are trying to get at the tunnels, seems like a very likely way to kill your own hostages. There has been a clear signal given — and if you listen to the — if you look at the Israeli media, the contacts that the families of hostages have had with the Netanyahu government, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there isn’t actually a lot of desire on the part of the Israeli government to get the hostages back.

There have been numerous — and it’s been public — from other governments, from negotiators, there have been numerous offers by Hamas to exchange hostages, to release hostages in certain circumstances. There was, you know, a 24 — for a brief ceasefire. And so far, the argument seems to be, from the Israeli side, “We won’t do that, because anything we do would be a victory for Hamas. And that is — that we can’t let that happen, so releasing the hostages is simply not a priority.”

But talking about the hostages and accusing anyone who talks about ceasefire as not caring about the hostages is a wonderful tactic. All of us who are speaking out on this in social media, on media like this, are accused constantly of, “Well, you don’t care about the hostages.” The answer is, no, I care very much about the hostages. I don’t understand why the Israeli government doesn’t care more about the hostages. I would suggest that the Israeli government’s approach to the hostages makes clear that their objectives in this war are not about freeing the hostages. And that, I think, requires further thought.

Sadly, I don’t think Israel is taking responsibility of anything. I mean, in 2005, we got out of Gaza and were like, “OK!” I mean, we just throw it like we were never connected to it. And like, OK, let’s just let them — like no long process agreement, sustainable agreement. And sadly, after that, the 10, 15 years, Israel is doing everything to strengthen Hamas in Gaza, just because it doesn’t want a two-state solution, so it wants to divide between the Fatah and the Hamas. So, this, of course, failed, because also the Hamas is very terrible to the people in Gaza, especially LGBTs and women, which always suffer from right-wing religious government. And at the end, it of course came to us, because we can put Gaza behind fences or whatever, but the right-wing extremists of Hamas killed Israelis indiscriminately, civilians and also my left brother, who — of course, it very makes sense, you know, that the right wing kill left-wing people, because they just don’t care. They earn from the hate. They earn from the death.

-- Not in My Brother’s Name: Sibling of Peace Activist Killed by Hamas Demands Israel Stop Bombing Gaza, by Amy Goodman

Librarian's Comment: As reportage emerges revealing that Netanyahu's right wing cabal had developed a long-friendly financially supportive and militarily tolerant relationship with the Hamas forces that committed the massacre of Israelis, it's worth taking a look at who the primary victims were. I think it's a safe bet that the young people attending Supernova were not voting for Netanyahu, and clearly were not right-wing orthodox Jews with restricted diets and of course, a ban on secular dancing. This was probably the largest group of young, pro-peace Israelis that you could find in the entire country on that day. So, just assuming for the sake of engaging in reasonable speculation that Netanyahu wanted to give Hamas an opportunity to kill a large number of Israelis who he did not like anyway, the massacre of these youthful ravers may also be laid at his door. Clearly he deployed forces to protect the New York transplants known as "settlers" to allow them to continue their killing of Palestinian people, and their destructive revels in Palestinian border towns, while backed by IDF soldiers who made sure that Palestinians could not protect their property or themselves from these rampaging bands of renegade New Yorkers. That also meant that the soldiers were not there to guard against the incursion that made it so easy to roll in and kill hundreds of ravers, and made sure that military forces were deployed so far away that they couldn't prevent the catastrophe from unfolding in its full lurid horror. Finally, we now know that Netanyahu's cabal happily canoodling with Hamas in what it believed was a partnership to undermine the PLO, turned a blind eye to Hamas's military buildup and organization, allowing the well-planned, and apparently well-informed assault to take place.

DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: The festival was called the Supernova Universo Parallelo Festival, the Parallel Universe Festival...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ESTRIN: ...An outdoor trance music festival advertised as, quote, "the essence of unity and love in a breathtaking location." It was only about a couple miles from Israel's border with the Gaza Strip.

-- ‘They Wanted to Dance in Peace. And They Got Slaughtered’: Israel's Supernova festival celebrated music and unity. It turned into the deadliest concert attack in history, by David Browne, Nancy Dillon, Kory Grow

AMY GOODMAN: Lara Friedman, I want to thank you for being with us, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Chicago for being with us, as well.

Next up, as the death toll in Gaza tops more than 8,000, as Israel intensifies its ground and aerial attack, we’ll speak with a doctor in Cairo who’s been trying for two weeks to get back into Gaza. Stay with us.