Gaza Doctor Says Hospitals Have to Choose Who Lives and Who Dies Amid Worsening Humanitarian Crisis
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 31, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/31 ... transcript
As Israeli tanks and other ground forces enter Gaza, we speak with a doctor in the besieged territory. Dr. Hammam Alloh is working at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the area, and says tens of thousands of people have sought shelter to escape Israel’s heavy bombardment. He describes making harrowing decisions with rapidly dwindling supplies, such as not resuscitating a patient who went into cardiac arrest because of a lack of ventilators. He also remains steadfast in staying at the hospital, despite Israeli demands to evacuate south. “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?” he says. “This is not the reason why I became a doctor.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Top United Nations officials are expressing growing alarm over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as the enclave’s last remaining hospitals are on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of fuel, as Israel intensifies its ground invasion while rejecting growing calls for a humanitarian ceasefire. Palestinian health officials say over 8,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed over the past 26 days. The head of UNICEF said, “The lack of clean water and safe sanitation is on the verge of becoming a catastrophe.” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestine refugees, repeated his call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, saying it’s, quote, “become a matter of life and death for millions.”
PHILIPPE LAZZARINI: The current siege imposed on Gaza is collective punishment. Two weeks of full siege followed by the trickle of aid last week mean that basic services are crumbling, medicine is running out, food and water are running out, fuel is running out. The streets of Gaza have started overflowing with sewage, which will cause a massive health hazard very soon.
AMY GOODMAN: In north Gaza, Israel attacked areas next to the Indonesian Hospital Monday, where Dr. Moaeen al-Masry said the staff is struggling to treat patients.
DR. MOAEEN AL-MASRY: [translated] The damage has been caused to more than one area in this unit. The damage has directly led to the disconnection of the electricity line of this unit. As you know, this means no electricity for the patients and injured here, which directly threatens their lives and could lead to the death of many of these patients. … In a few hours from now, the power will be cut due to the limited fuel available in the generators. Running out of fuel means power will be cut, meaning certain death for many of the patients in the ICU, some of whom need respirators, as well as patients in the surgical suites and patients in other units who numbered around 240 or 250.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Gaza City, where we’re joined by Dr. Hammam Alloh, who works at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza.
Dr. Alloh, thanks so much for joining us. I know you’ve just left the hospital a few minutes ago. You told Jewish Currents yesterday, “I had to stop the resuscitation of a patient who went into cardiac arrest in the dialysis unit, because if she made it back to life, we had no ventilator to offer her. We have to prioritize patients who are younger, healthier. We have lost the ability to provide true care.” If you can talk about the situation right now at your hospital and overall?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Hey. Thank you for contacting me.
This is not an incident I would really love to keep remembering, but this is — what you just said was exactly what happened to me. As physicians, we are trained to resuscitate patients who go into cardiac arrest, hoping they would make it back again to life, and consequently put them on ventilators to help them live again, go back to life. But I had to stop my co-nurses and my physicians from doing this. They asked me, “Why are you asking us to stop resuscitating the patients? It’s like you’re asking us to kill her.” I told them, “We have no better options. We have no other choices, because in case she makes it back to life, we have no ventilators to offer her. And if there is any, we would prevent a younger, healthier injured patient from entertaining that victory — I mean the ventilator.” So, I don’t know if you would imagine the amount of regret, the amount of sadness I’m living with since this happened with me, but I’m sorry to say there was no better options to go for except stopping that resuscitation.
And if this tells us anything, this tells us how things are really getting worse and worse. I was talking to a journalist an hour ago or so, and he kept asking me, “You told me a week earlier that things are bad. And are these now the same? Because you’re telling me things are very bad, as well, now.” I told him, “Yeah, this was probably a very strange answer from my side, because things were really bad one, two weeks into war, but now they are getting really worse.” We have patients admitted to emergency departments where they shouldn’t be admitted, where there should be vacant beds for newcomers, for new patients. We have patients admitted to dialysis unit. You know, dialysis unit is a closed unit where you offer a service, and when you’re done with your patients, you close your doors. But we can’t do this anymore. We are allowing people to live in the unit, actually. And we are admitting now patients who need care other than dialysis patients.
As the few trucks that were allowed in with aid to Gazan people actually is almost nothing compared to what we need, and there was — many of the contents of these trucks that were allowed into Gaza had water, gloves and gauze, and this is not what we are looking for. We are looking for devices, medications, things of really major help and concern for providing real healthcare for people in need. Number of injured patients is increasing. The number of people with chronic medical illnesses who need regular follow-up and regular maintenance of and the provision of medications is increasing. We are not capable of providing the care, other than keeping people dying from death. This is the only thing we can do. And we can’t properly provide this care, because we are getting — we are running out of medications and supply.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, you’ve said, “Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day.” If you can talk about that in the hospital, which, as you said, is not just a hospital for sick people? Thousands are taking refuge at Al-Shifa and al-Quds and the other hospitals. And also, we’re talking to you as you just left Al-Shifa. How do you comfort your family? What’s happening to your family as you’re at the hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I tell them at least we still have a house with a door to close. But many thousand refugees, people like us, who used to live in dignity have no longer houses and no doors to close to protect them as they are surrounded by wastewater, by garbage. They don’t have a liquid, continuous supply of clean water to drink. Many of them have a lot of missing members of their families. They don’t know if they are alive or not. I tell them at least we still have a house to live in, but they don’t have. And surprisingly, my 4- and 5-year-old kids, they accept this as a comfort, as a better situation compared to those refugees living — they are living actually in hospitals, but it’s not like they are living inside the hospital departments. Many of them do not have enough space to go into hospital hallways, so they are living around the buildings and in the garden. So, yeah, surprisingly, my very young kids accept this.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli military has dropped thousands of pamphlets warning people where you are, in northern Gaza, to leave. Why don’t you go with your family south?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: And if I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare. So we can’t just leave.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Health Organization talked about this issue of telling doctors to leave their patients, choosing your own lives over your patients. Can you talk about that choice, since so many patients can’t leave — for example, babies in incubators?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients? I’m asking you, Ma’am. Do you think this is the reason I went to med school, to think only about my life? This is not the reason why I became a doctor.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what’s happening to the hospitals? Just in our headlines today, we talked about, and in the last few days, the attack on the Indonesia Hospital. The Turkish Hospital is the only cancer hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of these places, both as a sanctuary, thousands of people taking refuge, and for patients?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah. Indonesian Hospital is providing healthcare for over 400,000 citizens in the Gaza Strip. And this part of the Gaza Strip is being split from the rest of the Gaza Strip. If this hospital stops providing care, so we are exposing many thousand Palestinian souls to the dangers of disease and death.
Turkish Hospital, with its very modest capabilities even before war, was the only hospital providing care and medications for cancer patients from around the Gaza Strip. It was airstruck yesterday. I don’t know how many patients and healthcare professionals were wounded. And many patients are dying now because they are not safe with their families to go to receive care and to continue their chemotherapy.
Ministry of Health has declared two hours ago also that the electricity would be cut off from Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital, representing 40% of the healthcare power in the Gaza Strip and providing services for many machine-dependent patients, like the ventilated patients and the hemodialysis patients. So, if electricity is cut out from this hospital, so we are directly deciding those patients are going to necessarily die. Ventilated patients will die in minutes. Dialysis patients will die in hours to days after stopping their hemodialysis. Many patients are now being treated with the modest supplies we have. Many diabetic patients are now being admitted to hospital because of their insulin is not being kept in the refrigerator, so it’s not working. We are out — we ran out of many medications, like antifungal medications. We have a patient who died earlier this week with mucormycosis. This is an invasive, ugly type of fungal infection that killed her because we had no amphotericin to offer her. So, my very simple answer to your question is that death is coming to so many people in the Gaza Strip, in hours to days, if this continues the same way it’s going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Alloh, the Middle East Eye reports on a baby who died, says, “His death certificate has been issued before his birth certificate.” A 1-day-old baby has been killed by Israeli bombing in Gaza. Israel, the military, the government, says that Al-Shifa, your hospital, is Hamas —
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — the site of Hamas command and control. Can you respond to that, Dr. Alloh?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I’ve been working this hospital for over two years, and I never saw this. So, I’m no lawyer, I’m no attorney, but this is how I am simply replying. I never saw this for over two years. If this is true, I would see at least a clue.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the shipments of aid coming in. Normally, in normal times — if there’s ever a normal time in Gaza — over 400 trucks a day. We’re talking about a trickle of trucks now, maybe a dozen, maybe eight in a day. Have you ever seen this aid arriving at the hospital? And can you talk about what you need right now?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Well, that number you just mentioned that was allowed into Gaza Strip is actually — is actually what you were referring to. It is nothing compared to what we need, nothing compared to the shortage in supplies, machines and medications we are in need for. The only thing, came just as I was leaving the hospital today, was a carton of IV fluid bottles. This is the only thing I saw. And I don’t really know if this came through the aid trucks in the few couple of days, or that was from the stores of the Ministry of Health. In addition, I happened to ask about in the hospital administration, and what they mentioned that was all about the gloves and gauze. And this is not what we are actually only in need for. This is what maybe the least we care for, the least we are in need for. So this is, again, nothing compared to what we are in need for in terms of supplies and medications.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Hammam Alloh, your message at this point to the United States, where we’re based, and to the world?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Actually, the message hasn’t changed since the beginning of this war. First, we need this war to end, because we are real humans. We are no animals. We have the right to live freely.
Second, if you were, and your citizens, to live under these circumstances, what would you do for them? This is what we exactly would like you to do for us as a superpower country, as the United States, because we are really as human as your U.S. citizens are.
We were expecting more — earlier, I mean, solutions for that humanitarian and healthcare catastrophes and the crises, but what we are seeing, mainly through trucks allowed into Gaza, is nothing compared to us. So, we are being exterminated. We are being massly eradicated. And you pretend to care for humanitarian and human rights, which is not what we are living now. To prove us wrong, please do something. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, speaking to us from Gaza City, where he works at the largest hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital. Please be safe.
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I hope I will be. Let’s hope, both together, I will be. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. Coming up, we speak to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Palestine Will Be Free” by the Lebanese Swedish singer Maher Zain, who sung at an Istanbul solidarity protest on Saturday.
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Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Gaza War, Hostages & the Context Behind Current Violence
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 31, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/31 ... transcript
We speak with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé about Israel’s escalating war on Gaza, as well as a leaked document from the country’s Ministry of Intelligence that suggests permanently expelling Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai Desert in Egypt. “This is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation,” says Pappé. He also says the only way to secure the release of the more than 200 hostages held by Hamas is to agree to an all-for-all swap for the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel, including many women, children and elderly people. “This is the only way to release the people who were taken.” Pappé is a leading critic of the Israeli occupation, a professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His books include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples and The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge.
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.
Internal Israeli government documents have revealed the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible transfer of the entire population of Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. The 10-page document, which is dated October 13th, has been published in full by the Israeli news outlets Local Call and +972. The document recommends transferring all Palestinians to Egypt, then setting up a, quote, “sterile” zone of several kilometers near the border between Egypt and Gaza. In addition, the document recommends Israel then prevent the, quote, “return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel,” unquote.
Fears of a new Nakba, or Catastrophe, have been growing ever since Israel ordered all Palestinians living in Gaza City and in north Gaza to vacate their homes and head south. On Monday, Palestinian U.N. Ambassador Riyad Mansour accused Israel of trying to depopulate Gaza.
RIYAD MANSOUR: They want to depopulate the Gaza Strip completely from the entire population and throw them in the lap of Egypt in the Sinai Desert. … No one should justify our killing or find reasons to give more time to the killer. Call for an end of this assault on an entire nation. Stop the killings in the West Bank by settlers and occupation forces and the forced displacement underway there.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Haifa in Israel, where we’re joined by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. He’s professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He’s the author of several books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, as well as The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Fifty years ago, Ilan Pappé fought in the Israeli military during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, has since become a leading critic of Israel’s occupation.
Professor Pappé, welcome back to Democracy Now!
ILAN PAPPÉ: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can start off by talking about your take on what’s happening today? You just heard the doctor in Gaza, who just left Al-Shifa a few minutes ago.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, I think — Amy, it’s good to be back on your program. Thank you for having me.
I think what we are seeing now, what unfolds in front of our eyes, is a genocidal situation, by which people are targeted, whether they are children, babies, in hospital or in schools. And this is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation. The pretext for that kind of savagery is revenge for what the Hamas did on the 7th of October, but I think the real intention here is not just revenge but trying to exploit what happened on the 7th of October to create new realities in historical Palestine. You called it a new Nakba. I think that this is — the Nakba has never really ended for the Palestinians, so it’s a new horrific chapter in the ongoing Nakba that the Palestinians are suffering here. So, this is a really horrific situation that can only be stopped from the outside, because there is no motivation inside Israel to stop the operations, nor to care more about the lives of innocent people, despite what the Israeli army claims to do in the field itself.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a short clip of Prime Minister Netanyahu speaking over the weekend.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember, and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants, who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the ’73 October War and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country. We have always said, “Never again.” Never again is now.
AMY GOODMAN: And I want to play Netanyahu from last night.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Calls for a ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to the Israeli prime minister, Professor Pappé?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. I think the main attempt here is to make sure that people do not understand the context in which the Hamas operation occurred, to totally dishistoricize that event, to forget about the 15 years of inhuman siege on Gaza, of 56 years of a ruthless occupation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and 75 years of not allowing refugees to come back to their homes. I think this is an attempt to Nazify the Palestinians, which is not new, by the way. The Israelis, every now and then, use it. If you remember, Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat in the bunker in 1982 to Hitler in the bunker. The Nazification of the Palestinians is meant to, first of all, license Israeli policies without any consideration to international law or human rights, and, secondly, to divert us from talking about the real issue here, which is not the Hamas or its actions on the 7th of October, but rather the situation that bred this kind of violence. Rather than talking about the symptom of violence, we should talk about the source of violence. And the source of violence has not changed. We have millions of Palestinians for years being oppressed, ruled and controlled by Israel, and they are fighting with the means that they have. And this is going to go on, unless, of course, there is a willingness to go back to the negotiation table and ask why the violence erupted in the first place and what are the best ways to prevent another cycle of violence in the future.
There’s a second reason for Netanyahu’s rhetoric. Of course, he doesn’t want the Israeli media or the international community to deal with his own problems, that were very acute before the 7th of October, and to say, “This is now a situation where you cannot at all — well, this is a domestic issue. You cannot talk about me or my failures. This is a moment of existential threat to Israel.” And therefore, this kind of rhetoric will continue. And it’s very dangerous, not to mention the fact that it abuses — when they use the Holocaust, it abuses the Holocaust memory, because with all the horror of what happened on the 7th of October, this is not the Holocaust. And there’s no comparison between Palestinians, who act after years of oppression and siege, to Nazis, who just target Jews because they are Jews. There’s no comparison. This whole language is not the one to be used. And I think that Netanyahu is trying to galvanize a very vindictive Israel behind him. And the results of this kind of policy are unfolding in front of our eyes, and we just had this horrific and very moving kind of report that you had with the doctor from Gaza before me.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pappé, can you talk about the hostage families? They don’t get a lot of attention, what they’re calling for, though they get tremendous attention for who these hostages are, and the people who were killed on October 7th. But there are many. For example, we interviewed Noy Katsman, the brother of Hayim, who was killed by Hamas on October 7th. He said his brother was a peace activist, and he himself said, “Not in my brother’s name.” He called for a ceasefire. And I wanted to ask you about this force of the hostage families and about the everybody-for-everybody proposal. On Friday, just after we got off the broadcast, it said, you know, “imminent major release.” And some thought that Netanyahu was pushing forward with the invasion more quickly because he didn’t want this possibility to happen. But explain the proposal of all hostages, over 200 of them, in return for all Palestinian prisoners, and who these prisoners are, close to 7,000 of them.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, I think that not everybody among the families, because I don’t think they’re all made of the same cloth, but many of them understand that the only way to bring their dear ones back home is this kind of an exchange of prisoners. We are talking about thousands of Palestinians who are incarcerated in Israeli jails, many of them without trials. And they are kind of — the allegations against them vary, from actual participation in guerrilla or violent actions against Israeli citizens or soldiers, and those who are incarcerated for being a member of a Palestinian organization. Some of them are very young. Some of them are women. Some of them are very old and have been there for a very long time. And some of them were just recently incarcerated without trial in the West Bank. They are all part of the Palestinian liberation movement. And it needs a very different Israeli perception of the Palestinian struggle and those who participated in its struggle to be able to say, indeed, this is only way forward — namely, to release all of them, to the last one, and receive all of the people who were taken by the Hamas on the 7th of October.
What I can tell you, Amy, which is very interesting, is that former generals in the Israeli army, former heads of the Israeli Mossad and Shabak, the secret service, are supporting this kind of exchange. And this is a very important position that they are holding. And that may explain the fear on Netanyahu’s side to let this issue extend longer, because the voices that are calling for such an exchange are not coming from the extreme Israeli left or the liberal Zionists. They’re coming from some very powerful people, who were heading some of Israel’s most important institutions, such as the Mossad, the army and the secret service.
Will it take place? I don’t know. It depends very much on how things unfold on the ground itself with the invasion, that nobody in Israel gives the Israeli public any details of how it goes on, but it seems that it doesn’t go as well as the Israelis claim it does, and depends a lot, of course, on the international community, because quite a few of the people who are held by the Hamas have also dual citizenship. But there’s no doubt, Amy, this is the only way to release the people who were taken on Saturday. Neither Israeli commando salvage operation nor piecemeal deal will bring all the people back. This is a situation where you can solve the problem and not delay it for another five or six years, with babies and old people who might not survive a long stay in captivity.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pappé, you were born to German Jewish parents who fled German persecution, the Nazis, in the 1930s. You fought in 1973 in the Israeli military. Can you talk about your life trajectory and how you came to write a book talking about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the response in Israeli society, your university, University of Haifa, and how you ended up at Exeter?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, it was — Amy, it was a journey. There was no one moment of epiphany or awakening that makes you actually take positions which will frame you as a traitor in your own society, and definitely would leave you with no reference group in your own society. For me, it was a journey that had many important stations, such as spending some time as a postgraduate student outside of Israel; having an Arab supervisor; looking, as an historian who was interested in the history of my own country, in the documentation that became available about 1948. So, all these possibilities outside to meet Palestinians on equal footing, to be able to research as a professional historian history or documentation that revealed evidence that contradicted, in a very significant way, the narrative on which I grew up on, all this led me to a moment where I thought that I understand what is going on in historical Palestine, what went on in historical Palestine. And I saw quite clearly, at least from my perspective, who were the victimizers, who were the victim, who was the colonizer, who was the colonized, who was the ethnic cleanser, and who was the victims of ethnic cleansing.
And because my parents came from Germany, and because we lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, exactly because of that legacy, I felt I could not be indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians, nor did I want to be part of the society that caused this suffering. And I think that as the years go by and the research becomes more and more intensive, and my understanding and relationship with the Palestinians become increased and widened, I am even more confident today than I was in the early years of my career, either as an activist or as a professional historian, that I’m very at peace with my moral positions toward Israel and Zionism.
In 2006, that position led to pressure from my university to leave the university and to resign. So I had no choice. I had to resign, and I had to leave. I was very lucky to be offered a position in a university in Britain, where I founded the Centre for Palestine Studies. I am still a citizen of Israel. I’m still going to Israel and spending time in Israel and spending time in Britain, trying to divide between the two places. And I still believe that what I cherish as human rights, as human morality, is the only basis for better life for everyone concerned, Jews and Palestinians alike, in a state in the future that would be based on equality, that would not discriminate against people because of their nationality, religion or culture, and one which will rectify past evils and would allow refugees to return, and hopefully build a state that would radiate and influence the Middle East as a whole.
AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky.
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“Horrific”: Resident of Jabaliya Refugee Camp Speaks Out After Israeli Airstrikes Kill Over 50
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/ ... transcript
We get an update on Gaza’s largest refugee camp, Jabaliya, which was hit by a massive Israeli airstrike Tuesday that destroyed housing blocks in the densely populated settlement and killed at least 50 Palestinians and wounded over 150 others. Israel claims it was targeting a Hamas commander accused of helping to orchestrate the militant group’s October 7 attack inside Israel. Yousef Hammash, who was born and raised in Jabaliya and is the advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, describes it as a “small city within a city” and “one of the most crowded places on Earth.” Speaking from Khan Younis, Hammash also chronicles dire humanitarian conditions in the so-called safe southern region of Gaza and says he hopes his two young children “can see a brighter future.”
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.
Massive Israeli airstrikes on Gaza’s largest refugee camp, Jabaliya, killed at least 50 Palestinians Tuesday and wounded over 150 others, sparking new outrage over Israel’s 26-day bombardment of the besieged territory. Israel bombed the refugee camp again today. Numerous residential buildings collapsed in Tuesday’s blast, trapping families under rubble. One engineer from Al Jazeera, Mohamed Abu Al-Qumsan, reportedly lost at least 18 members of his family, including his father and two of his sisters. A long line of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets were placed outside the Indonesian Hospital in the refugee camp, where doctors scrambled to treat survivors.
DR. SUAIB IDAIS: [translated] A large number of injured have come to us after the large explosion that shook the entire Jabaliya refugee camp. Hundreds of injuries, hundreds of martyrs. They were just sitting in their homes. They were targeted while they were in their homes. Children, all martyrs. Children, women, elderly. We have no idea what to do. There are injured everywhere. All the volunteers went down hand in hand just to help people.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli officials acknowledged carrying out the airstrike on the refugee camp, describing it as a, quote, “wide-scale strike” targeting a Hamas commander accused of helping to orchestrate Hamas’s October 7th attack inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,400 people in Israel and the capture of over 220 hostages.
The attack on Jabaliya came as the United Nations and aid groups issued new dire warnings about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. James Elder of UNICEF said Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children.”
JAMES ELDER: The numbers are appalling. Reportedly, now more than 3,450 children have been killed. Staggeringly, this number rises significantly every single day. Gaza has become a graveyard for children. It’s a living hell for everyone else. And yet the threats to children go beyond bombs and mortars. I want to speak briefly now on two of those: water and trauma. The more than 1 million children of Gaza have a critical water crisis. Gaza’s water production now, its capacity is at 5%, 5% of its daily output. So child deaths to dehydration, particularly infant deaths to dehydration, are a growing threat.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier today, the Rafah border crossing with Gaza was opened to allow dozens of Egyptian ambulances in to evacuate injured patients.
We go now to Gaza, where we’re joined by Yousef Hammash, advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who lives in the Gaza Strip with his wife and two children. He’s from the Jabaliya refugee camp but is joining us today from Khan Younis.
Yousef, thanks so much for joining us again. You grew up in, you were born in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Can you talk about the significance of what took place yesterday?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, yes, proudly, I’m born and raised in Jabaliya camp as a refugee. And Jabaliya camp was not a place that — for us to consider. It’s more than a place. And the place where they attacked is the center of the Jabaliya camp. It’s the heart of the camp. And everyone knows that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Jabaliya camp is the most densely populated — the most densely populated place in Gaza. And so, people who doesn’t know how it’s Jabaliya camp, it’s a block of concrete. Houses are next to each other. And the widest street in Jabaliya camp is half a meter. And 90% of the houses are one roof. It’s one floor. And it’s one of the most crowded places on Earth.
The attack yesterday, the massive amount of casualties, it was, first of all, the massive bombardment, and also because it’s very populated place. And I don’t think, both, yeah, I mean, the Israelis really care about that, and they want to target someone. And I’m not sure about these accusations, who were they targeting, what’s going on there. But it’s a really horrific situation. And if you look to the images, what was going on, it’s really horror.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to the Israeli military saying they bombed — they aimed for the alleyways, not the buildings, and that they were going for one of the commanders of Hamas, and that people should have left, that they warned Palestinians to leave northern Gaza and go south?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: First of all, if they are pushing people to leave, where people should go, first of all? I was lucky because I have relatives in the south in Khan Younis. But thousands of people are in the streets or in UNRWA schools, and there is not enough place for anyone anymore in the south. And even there is no safe passage for people to move from the north toward the south. People cannot leave their houses without knowing where they are going. And this is one thing. If you live in Jabaliya, it means that you can handle your situation and keep up and with handling your needs in Jabaliya. If you are going to a new place without somewhere to go, and even doesn’t know where to go, how people will keep up when they are displaced? This is completely illegal, first of all. And you cannot push more than 1 million people to move in a few days. And until now, for example, since few days, even the roads have been cutted between — they split Gaza in two parts. How people are going to go from Jabaliya in the north or Gaza City towards the south? This is the first thing. And the other thing, I think the images and the amount of casualties can answer what the Israeli forces are saying.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you a clip of the IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, who appeared on CNN, where he was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
WOLF BLITZER: But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians, men, women and children, in that refugee camp, as well, right?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. I mean, we — as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south. We —
WOLF BLITZER: Yeah, I’m just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill this Hamas commander. By the way, was he killed?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: I can’t confirm, yeah. There will be more updated. He, yes, we know that he was killed. About the civilians there, we’re doing everything we can to minimize.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can respond to the IDF Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I just need to understand what they did to minimize the loss, casualties, the loss of civilians. And asking people to leave is not a justification. This is not a justification to use this massive amount of bombardment targeting something. And even then, they cannot confirm it. And it’s a bit weird how world is looking to that and how they are trying to justify the killing of civilians. This is unacceptable, how to justify killings of that amount of civilians by saying that you ordered everyone to evacuate. First, even this is illegal to push — these people are forced to flee, and also, there is no place that people can go to.
And even here in Khan Younis, people who were displaced, people like me, we are facing tragedy to provide our daily need, like water and bread. And everything is challenging here because there is not enough space in the south to host all these hundreds of thousands of people who fled from Gaza and the north. People who decided to stay there, they don’t have any other solution. They don’t have any other options. And there is nothing on this planet can justify killing civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: You are in Khan Younis, Yousef Hammash, where you moved. Were you living in Jabaliya?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I’m born and raised in Jabaliya camp. Yes, I live in Jabaliya.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about who lives there. Talk about the refugee camp, this largest refugee camp, how it was established.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this northern — refugee camps all across Gaza have been established after the Nakba 1948 and then have been expanded more and more. It became small cities. It’s a block of concrete. It’s not like the other camps that we see on the planet, like what’s seen now in Khan Younis, for example. They had to designate another camp which is a tent camp. No, it’s a small city within the city, as the refugee camp. And it’s very densely populated. I know every corner there. I know the people who live there are refugees. And this is generations of refugees who are living in this refugee camp, who is getting expanded day by day because the amount of people are getting more and more, and there is no solutions also for refugees. So it became not a refugee camp. It became a small city within a city. This is how the camp. It’s different than other camps in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you moved with your family to other family in Khan Younis. After the Israeli military told people to move south, dropped thousands of pamphlets and said they would consider you terrorists if you didn’t, they bombed Khan Younis. Is that right? They bombed places in the south, where they said you should go.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: Even here in Khan Younis, it’s not safe. Yesterday, 50 meters away from us, they bombed a family. Eighteen members were killed. And it take us until the daylight to evacuate people who were killed, and most of them were children. There is no safe place all over Gaza. And that’s also another reason why people are not leaving. It’s not safe in the north. It’s not safe in the middle area. It’s not safe in the south also. All across Gaza Strip, the bombardment didn’t stop since the first day. So, this is another reason why people are not moving from the north, because it’s not different. Every day there is a lot of bombardment in Rafah, in Khan Younis, in Deir al-Balah, in the middle area, in Gaza City and the north. There is no difference wherever you are in Gaza City. You are always thinking when you are going to be the next target.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re there in Khan Younis. In an interview you did with Channel 4, you said it took you five hours to look for one liter of fuel in Khan Younis. If you can talk about why fuel is important? And respond to what the Israeli military is saying, why they’re not letting any fuel come in, which runs hospitals, of course, saving lives, the incubators that have premature babies in them, etc. What this fuel shortage looks like for you, not only you as a person, a Palestinian in Gaza, but as advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, where you’re responsible for so many refugees?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, unfortunately, even as humanitarian actors, we cannot do our own, because there is no difference between anyone here. Everyone is under the same circumstances. Fuel is very important because there is no electricity at all. Even when we have one week — one time per week, we have water from the municipality because they have schedule for each area. We need the fuel to push the water from the municipality lines up to the houses. That’s why everything is challenging. And it’s a matter — it’s a layer of complexities. If you have water, you need fuel to push it to the house. To find water, you need to find a way to get it. And it’s almost impossible. Five hours, and I was lucky to did it. Since three days, we are trying to find another liter, and I couldn’t make it. I was lucky because I found someone who’s a friend of mine, and his car was having some fuel. Now, unfortunately, since three days, we don’t have fuel. Today we have the water again that’s from the municipality lines. And unfortunately, we couldn’t push it to the house. So we have had to fill small gallons, and we had to create lines of us inside the house to hand each other, to push, to get — to carry the water to the house tanks. Everything is challenging. And day by day, everything becomes more impossible. And it’s layers above layer of complexities and needs. We don’t have electricity. We don’t have fuel. We don’t have water. And we are lacking everything. We don’t have access for our basic needs.
And unfortunately, we don’t see that effort to push to allow for fuel, for other basic needs for Palestinians. Even these trucks that came in on a daily basis, the maximum amount of trucks reached 50 trucks per day. Before this war started, Gaza was having more than 500 trucks per day, without that amount of need from the war. So, it’s really unacceptable how the world is behaving toward that. It’s not a victory that they succeeded to manage to get these trucks to come. This is not a victory for anyone. This is a drop in the ocean of needs.
AMY GOODMAN: Yousef Hammash, they cut off communication again. We didn’t even know if we’d be able to talk to you. But now the electricity, at least where you are, is back on. Can you talk about the significance of this cutting off of cellphone and electricity, that also happened over the weekend, what it means for you? And also, what’s happening at Rafah today?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this is the second time —
AMY GOODMAN: But first start with, yes, the cutoff.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this is the second time that — so, this is the second time that they isolated us from the rest of the planet. We didn’t have access to phone calls, internet or even radio stations. So, literally, we didn’t know what was happening in the next city. We were completely isolated inside our houses. And here to find internet, I think there is a lot of chaos around me, because I need to go to a cafe where there is — at least they have generator, they have some electricity, so I can have access to internet to have this interview with you. Everything is challenging. And being isolated from the rest of the world, we wasn’t knowing what’s happening in the north or in Gaza City or anywhere else in Gaza. We were just completely in a blackout. I don’t know how it’s acceptable to do this to us. And I don’t think we are — we are very good people in coping. We have a very good coping mechanism. But we cannot cope with this. We didn’t have communication. It’s lacking us from everything.
And this is very dangerous, especially for the emergency situations. You cannot call an ambulance. When they did it a few days ago, it was for two days, 36 hours. People who were trying to get an ambulance after an attack, or even if they have a medical situation inside the house, they had to go to the hospital, informing them, and bring them back with them to the house to take someone who is, for example, very sick, or even if they were injured from an attack. It’s an impossible situation without connection. And this is the second time we see it. This time, it was around 14 hours. And let’s hope — because we cannot find alternatives, let’s hope they are not going to keep continuing doing that, because this is not only affecting us as people who have become more isolated, it’s affecting the emergency situation, the emergency response from the medical teams and civil affairs teams. It’s really dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: How old are your children, Yousef? Yousef, you’re frozen. How old are your children?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, I have two children. Ilya is 5 years old, and Ahmed, two-and-a-half. And hopefully, we will manage to stay alive during this chaos and madness, and they can see a brighter future. And because — my son Ahmed is 2 years old. He have witnessed a lot. My 5-years-old daughter witnessed more than a lot for a child to witness from this madness around us. And I feel, again — I keep saying that to myself, and I can tell you clearly, I feel guilty because I brought my children in this place. I feel responsible towards my children, and I regret having them in this chaotic situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Yousef Hammash, I want to thank you so much for being with us, advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, born in the Jabaliya refugee camp. We have 30 seconds. Your final message — we are based here in the United States — to the U.S. government, to the American population, and also globally around the world?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I think the world needs to react and to act seriously stopping this madness. I think it’s more than enough for us to suffer and to see what we are seeing currently. World need to extend and hold their responsibilities toward us as a human being. It’s more than enough since the first day. Now we’re stopping — we have already stopped calculating days, because it’s all similar, all its amount of bombardment and horror nights. The world needs to stand and hold their responsibilities toward us as human beings.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you, Yousef Hammash, for making the effort, despite all of these difficulties to speak to us today. Again, Yousef Hammash is the —
YOUSEF HAMMASH: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: — advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, grew up, was born in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by Craig Mokhiber, top U.N. official in New York, who’s resigned, saying the U.N. is failing to stop what he calls a “genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Giving Up Everything” by Natalie Merchant. Natalie Merchant recently signed an open letter titled “Artists Call for Ceasefire Now,” alongside actors like Joaquin Phoenix, the playwright Tony Kushner and Miranda July, the letter supported by Oxfam American and ActionAid USA.
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"Text-Book Case of Genocide”: Top U.N. Official Craig Mokhiber Resigns, Denounces Israeli Assault on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/ ... transcript
A former top United Nations official in New York joins us for an in-depth interview about why he has resigned after publicly accusing the U.N. of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber is a longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. His resignation letter (embedded below) has gone viral. In one of his first interviews since leaving his post, Mokhiber tells Democracy Now! the U.N. follows a “different set of rules” when addressing Israel’s violations of international law, refusing to utilize its enforcement mechanisms and thus “effectively” acting as “a smokescreen behind which we have seen further and worsening dispossession of Palestinians.” He says it is an “open secret inside the halls of the United Nations that the so-called two-state solution is effectively impossible,” and calls for international actors to push for a “new paradigm” in the region based on “equality for all.” We also discuss the inaction of the International Criminal Court, global suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy, bad-faith accusations of antisemitism and more.
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.
A top United Nations official in New York has resigned and accused the United Nations of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber is a longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had worked at the United Nations since 1992 and lived in Gaza in the 1990s.
In a letter addressed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, Craig Mokhiber wrote, “In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.”
Craig Mokhiber went on to write, “What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations 'to ensure respect' for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities,” unquote.
On Tuesday, the U.N. released statement about Mokhiber’s resignation, saying, quote, “I can confirm he is retiring today. He informed the U.N. in March of his upcoming retirement, which takes effect tomorrow. The views in his letter made public today are his personal views,” the U.N. said.
Craig Mokhiber joins us now in New York, the first day he’s not working for the United Nations.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Thank you, Amy. Good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about why you left.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I originally registered my concerns in writing to the high commissioner in March, as you heard from that statement, in the wake of a wave of human rights violations on the West Bank, including the pogrom Huwara at that time. And at that time, I complained, really, about what I saw as a trepidatious response by many in the United Nations, and an effort to try to silence some of the human rights critique of U.N. officials, including myself. And I admit to feeling a great deal of frustration, and at that moment indicating that I would be resigning from the U.N., effective this month. So, of course, the situation got much worse since then, which is why I was — particularly the events in Gaza — which is why I was compelled to write this latest letter to the high commissioner, to put on record my very serious concerns about how we were failing to address the unfolding events in the Occupied Territories.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the United Nations, the United States, the West, U.K. should be doing right now?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think there is an obligation on the part of all member states of the United Nations, including those states in the West, to respond in accordance with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law. My central point in the most recent letter was that we had effectively left international law behind when the international community embraced the Oslo process, which sort of raised up notions of political expediency above the requirements of international law. And that was a real loss for human rights in Palestine. I think there is an obligation on the part of all states not just to respect international humanitarian law and international human rights law, but, under the Geneva Conventions, to ensure respect. And it’s clear that many states, including the United States itself, have not only — are not only in breach of their obligation to ensure respect vis-à-vis those states over which they have influence — in this case, Israel — but have been actively complicit, actively engaged in arming, in diplomatic cover, in political support, intelligence support and so on. That is a breach of international humanitarian law. We need the opposite of that. We need all states, members of the United Nations, to use whatever influence they have to ensure an end to these attacks on civilians in Gaza, to ensure as well accountability for the perpetrators, redress for the victims, protection for the vulnerable there.
It’s interesting, Amy. We have a formula at the United Nations that is applied to virtually every other conflict situation. But when it comes to the situation in Israel and Palestine, there’s a different set of rules, apparently. And that’s, I think, a big source of my frustration. Where is the transitional justice process? Where is the U.N. protection force to protect all civilians? Where is the tribunal for accountability? Where is the action on the part of the Security Council, the only mechanism in the United Nations that has enforcement to ensure protection in the Occupied Territories? Obviously, every effort in the Security Council is vetoed by the United States itself, a further indication of the kind of complicity about which I am referring.
And I think the other thing that needs to happen in the international community is that we have to abandon the failed paradigms of the past on a political level and get back to the roots, which is international law, international human rights. What has happened in the context of the so-called Oslo process, the two-state solution, the U.N. Quartet, is that they have acted effectively as a smokescreen, behind which we have seen further and worsening dispossession of Palestinians, massive atrocities, such as those as we are witnessing now, the loss of homes and land, further settlement activity. You know, it’s an open secret inside the halls of the United Nations that the so-called two-state solution is effectively impossible now — there’s nothing left for a sustainable state for the Palestinian people — and takes no account of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people. The new paradigm has to be one based upon equality of all people there, equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews. And that needs to be the new approach.
And I think, as well, you know, it’s interesting that this year we are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. That same year, the Nakba occurred in Palestine, and apartheid was adopted in South Africa. We have seen, because of a consistent international law and international human rights approach in the U.N. and the international community, that apartheid in South Africa fell. We did not take the same approach in Palestine. We’ve deferred to these political processes. And as a result, not only have we not seen an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people, we’ve seen a continuing worsening of the situation.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re a longtime human rights lawyer. I want you to respond — I played this already for Yousef Hammash in Gaza right now, in Khan Younis, to respond, but I’d like you to respond to it, as well. After Israel’s attack on Jabaliya yesterday, the IDF spokesperson, Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, appeared on CNN and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
WOLF BLITZER: But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians, men, women and children, in that refugee camp, as well, right?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. I mean, we — as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south. We —
WOLF BLITZER: Yeah, I’m just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill this Hamas commander. By the way, was he killed?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: I can’t confirm, yeah. There will be more updated. He, yes, we know that he was killed. About the civilians there, we’re doing everything we can to minimize.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s saying they’re doing everything they can to minimize. He’s talking about Ibrahim Biari, whom it identified — Israel has identified as Hamas’s commander of the Jabaliya center battalion, saying he was killed in those recent strikes. Can you respond to every aspect of what he said? They were trying to get a high-value target, as they put it, and they are not trying to kill civilians.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think what’s important in that interview is that is another of many indications of intent on the part of Israeli authorities, that will be very important in a court of law. He has said very openly that they knew of the concentrations of civilians there, and yet, in violation of the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, and on the pretext of killing one combatant, wiped out the better part of an entire refugee camp, densely populated refugee camp. And I think what’s been interesting in this war is the very open statement of intents. I referred in my letter to the case for genocide which is happening now. And, you know, “genocide” is a very politicized term, often abused. But in this case, the hardest part of proving genocide has been proven for us with these very open statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials, including the prime minister and the president and senior Cabinet ministers and military officials, who in their public statements have indicated very clearly their intention not to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and to carry out the kinds of wholesale slaughter that we are witnessing in Gaza. That is not a justification in international law, saying that there was a combatant there, for that very disproportionate use of firepower against what was a civilian target. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in all of Gaza, from the north to the south.
The other thing is this claim that, “Well, we told them to move south, and therefore we can kill everybody who didn’t move.” This is an extremely dangerous and unlawful tactic that is being used, first because we know that evacuations in Gaza in the best of times, in this densely populated small territory with 2.3 million civilians crowded in, with very limited infrastructure, is a huge challenge. But most of Gaza has been bombed into rubble. It is just not physically possible for civilians to move en masse in the ways that Israel has required them to do so. And we know, already well documented, that when they do so, they’re still subjected to bombings even in the south of the Gaza Strip. So, all of this, it seems to me, is evidence of intent and a prima facie case for violations of the laws of war.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel has called for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to resign, after he said Hamas’s October 7th attack did not happen in a vacuum. This is Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan.
GILAD ERDAN: Mr. Secretary-General, the U.N. was established to prevent atrocities, to prevent such atrocities like the barbaric atrocities that Hamas committed. But the U.N. is failing. The U.N. is failing. And you, Mr. Secretary-General, have lost all morality and impartiality, because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism. And by tolerating terrorism, you are justifying terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Craig Mokhiber, your response?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, of course, you can imagine why the ambassador would want to start the clock only in October and to ignore the decades upon decades of persecution against the Palestinian people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, inside Israel proper. But that is not the kind of assessment that leads to peace or leads to an improved situation on the ground. The secretary-general was doing his job. He had condemned the loss of civilian life in the Hamas attack, and he also criticized not just what Israel was doing in Gaza, but all of the events that have led up to this situation.
And that’s what I mean by a need to break from the failed paradigm of the past. We really need to get into something that says that human beings are entitled to human rights under international law and that the duty of the international community is to ensure protection for all under the rule of law, but also accountability for perpetrators and redress for victims.
So, I am not surprised at that statement. We’ve seen a lot of extreme statements from that particular ambassador, a lot of theater, as well. I don’t think we should allow it to distract us to what’s happening on the ground, which is the wholesale loss of life of innocent civilians in their thousands, including thousands of children in the Gaza Strip, and the need to get to an immediate ceasefire and then to shift into a new approach that will prevent this from happening again and again and again.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering about the role of Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. I think he was in Rafah just a few days ago. We see the world’s response, or the West’s response, when it came to Russia invading Ukraine and occupying Ukraine. Karim Khan, very soon after, opened a whole investigation into crimes against humanity that Putin was committing in Ukraine. Can you respond to the difference in approach to Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the Occupied Territories, officially, international law, the OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, there has been a stunning inconsistency with the rapidity with which the court was able to move and the prosecutor was able to move with regard to Ukraine and the years upon years in which it has dragged its feet with regard to Palestine. This is just one of many critiques of the court, including the fact that it does not have a very strong record of holding Northern countries — Israel, the United States and others — to account for their crimes under international criminal law, and yet is very anxious to move forward on cases in the Global South.
Now, that is not to condemn the court. The court is a young institution. It needs to be strengthened. It needs to insulate itself from the kinds of political pressure that have led to its inaction in the case of Palestine. But our hope, ultimately, is the peaceful resolution of disputes through the use of international law. And if that’s going to happen, we need a robust and fair International Criminal Court that doesn’t provide for exceptionalism for powerful countries of the North, like Israel, for example, but that holds all perpetrators of international crimes to account. The court has a long way to go before it’s going to have the reputation that will bring confidence globally that it’s meeting its mandate under the Rome Statute.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the white supremacists who took part in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. She made the comment in response to a question from Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
PETER DOOCY: Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?
PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: What I can say is what we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that. Remember, what the president decided to — when the president decided to run for president is what he saw in Charlottesville in 2017, when we — he saw neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Charlottesville with vile, antisemitic just hatred. And he was very clear then, and he’s very clear now. He’s taken actions against this over the past two years. And he’s continued to be clear: There is no place — no place — for this type of vile and despite — this kind of rhetoric.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President Biden’s spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre. Craig Mokhiber, your response?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think one of the most disturbing aspects of this current situation in the North, in countries like the U.S. and in Europe, has been this rather unprecedented crackdown on human rights defenders speaking up to defend the human rights of people in Gaza during this situation. And that has come from official statements that try to critique in that way people who are defending human rights, and to compare them with far-right neofascist protesters, for example. I mean, it’s an outrageous comparison to make. And it doesn’t stop there. We have also seen very strong efforts on the part of government institutions, including local governments and state governments and the federal government, and universities and employers and others to punish people for daring to speak up, criticizing the human rights violations that are happening, or criticizing the U.S. role in these violations.
But I think what is most hopeful, Amy, and where there is a glimmer of hope, which has, I have to say, moved me very much, it’s that people are not allowing themselves to be intimidated by these tactics. We have seen massive demonstrations, in all parts of the country and in Europe, from people many times risking arrest, risking police beatings, risking other consequences, because they refuse to allow this to go forward and to have the human rights claim be silenced. And I think most encouraging, we have seen — you know, just a few blocks from here a few days ago, we saw a large group, organized by Jewish Voices for Peace, IfNotNow, of Jewish protesters standing up and saying, “Not in our name,” and taking over Grand Central Station, and in one move stripping away the Israeli propaganda point that they are somehow acting in the defense of Jews. Jewish people are not represented by Israel. These protesters have made that perfectly clear. Israel pushes an old antisemitic trope that it somehow represents Jewish people around the world. Not only is that not factual, but it’s very dangerous. And everyone needs to know that Israel is a state that’s responsible for its own crimes, and that responsibility does not extend to our Jewish brothers and sisters, many of whom are standing up alongside Muslim and Christian and others in demonstrations across this country and across Europe, saying that this must end.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to a comment in The Guardian by Anne Bayefsky, who directs Touro College’s Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust in New York, who accused you of overt antisemitism, saying you used U.N. letterhead to call for wiping Israel off the map. Craig Mokhiber, if you could respond?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, Anne Bayefsky is a well-known entity amongst human rights defenders. She has made a career of attacking anyone who dares to criticize Israeli human rights violations, in particular. I have responded to this idea of wiping Israel off the map by saying I’m not looking for an end to Israel, I’m looking for an end to apartheid. And it’s very telling, what Anne Bayefsky tweeted in her attack on me. She accused me of antisemitism, and the quote that she took from my letter to prove that was my call for equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews. I had to reply to her tweet by saying that she had become a parody of herself, because if calling for equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews is a new form of antisemitism, then there’s no conversation to be had.
But I don’t think people are falling for these smears anymore. They are almost automatic. But the point needs to be made again and again that criticism of Israeli human rights violations is not antisemitic, just as criticism of Saudi violations is not Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is not anti-Buddhist, criticism of Indian violations is not anti-Hindu. If any of those are true, then there is no international human rights framework. And if only the case of Israel is true, well, that’s a racist proposition that only Palestinians can’t have their human rights defended in this globe. So, I don’t think anyone listens too much to those kinds of smears anymore. And luckily, people are speaking up louder, not lowering their voices, to demand human rights in the Occupied Territories.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you go off to do, Craig Mokhiber? I mean, you have been at the United Nations for decades. Talk about your plans now. Today is your first day that you’re not working at the U.N.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I intend to remain involved in the cause of international human rights, in which I’ve been involved since 1980, in fact. There’s no question about that. I will do it under my own name, unconstrained by diplomatic protocol and the constraints of the U.N. I will continue to support my colleagues. I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m criticizing the whole U.N. You know, U.N. humanitarian workers, U.N. human rights workers, the UNRWA colleagues in Gaza, dozens of whom have lost their life just in the last couple of weeks under Israeli bombs, are doing absolutely heroic work all around the world. But I want to try to influence the political side of the house to take up a more realistic and principled approach to this particular conflict, one based in international human rights, one based in international humanitarian law, and one based in achievable goals, if not in the immediate term, of a paradigm based upon equality, an end to apartheid, and, as I said, equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your final response to the protesters just yesterday in Washington, D.C., in the Senate, repeatedly disrupting Secretary of State Antony Blinken while he was testifying before the Senate on President Biden’s request for $106 billion for Ukraine, Israel and militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. A group of protesters with members of Muslims for Just Futures and Detention Watch Network, sitting behind Blinken, held up their hands covered in fake blood. He was also interrupted by members of CodePink, including the former State Department official Ann Wright, who resigned over the Iraq War. This is what she said.
ANN WRIGHT: Three thousand five hundred kids dead. Come on. I’m an Army colonel. I’m a former diplomat. I resigned on that War in Iraq that you talked about. That was a terrible thing. And what you’re doing right now in supporting Israel’s genocide of Gaza is a terrible thing, too. Stop the war! Ceasefire now!
AMY GOODMAN: She was holding a sign as she was taken out by security, “Ceasefire in Gaza.” Craig Mokhiber, your final comments?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: This is where I find the most hope, Amy. I have lost confidence in official institutions of government after all these years in the international human rights movement. I am losing hope in international — important parts of international institutions. Where there is hope, it is in civil society. It is in those ordinary people, here in the United States and elsewhere, who are willing to stand up and demand respect for human life and for human rights. And these kinds of protests in the halls of Congress, before the State Department, in front of the White House, in Grand Central Station, in the streets, everywhere, particularly with this climate that is trying to —
AMY GOODMAN: Three seconds.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: — suppress critique of these current policies, it’s only going to come from civil society —
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Mokhiber —
CRAIG MOKHIBER: — that these will be shaken loose.
AMY GOODMAN: — we thank you so much, international human rights lawyer.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/ ... transcript
We get an update on Gaza’s largest refugee camp, Jabaliya, which was hit by a massive Israeli airstrike Tuesday that destroyed housing blocks in the densely populated settlement and killed at least 50 Palestinians and wounded over 150 others. Israel claims it was targeting a Hamas commander accused of helping to orchestrate the militant group’s October 7 attack inside Israel. Yousef Hammash, who was born and raised in Jabaliya and is the advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, describes it as a “small city within a city” and “one of the most crowded places on Earth.” Speaking from Khan Younis, Hammash also chronicles dire humanitarian conditions in the so-called safe southern region of Gaza and says he hopes his two young children “can see a brighter future.”
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.
Massive Israeli airstrikes on Gaza’s largest refugee camp, Jabaliya, killed at least 50 Palestinians Tuesday and wounded over 150 others, sparking new outrage over Israel’s 26-day bombardment of the besieged territory. Israel bombed the refugee camp again today. Numerous residential buildings collapsed in Tuesday’s blast, trapping families under rubble. One engineer from Al Jazeera, Mohamed Abu Al-Qumsan, reportedly lost at least 18 members of his family, including his father and two of his sisters. A long line of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets were placed outside the Indonesian Hospital in the refugee camp, where doctors scrambled to treat survivors.
DR. SUAIB IDAIS: [translated] A large number of injured have come to us after the large explosion that shook the entire Jabaliya refugee camp. Hundreds of injuries, hundreds of martyrs. They were just sitting in their homes. They were targeted while they were in their homes. Children, all martyrs. Children, women, elderly. We have no idea what to do. There are injured everywhere. All the volunteers went down hand in hand just to help people.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli officials acknowledged carrying out the airstrike on the refugee camp, describing it as a, quote, “wide-scale strike” targeting a Hamas commander accused of helping to orchestrate Hamas’s October 7th attack inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,400 people in Israel and the capture of over 220 hostages.
The attack on Jabaliya came as the United Nations and aid groups issued new dire warnings about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. James Elder of UNICEF said Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children.”
JAMES ELDER: The numbers are appalling. Reportedly, now more than 3,450 children have been killed. Staggeringly, this number rises significantly every single day. Gaza has become a graveyard for children. It’s a living hell for everyone else. And yet the threats to children go beyond bombs and mortars. I want to speak briefly now on two of those: water and trauma. The more than 1 million children of Gaza have a critical water crisis. Gaza’s water production now, its capacity is at 5%, 5% of its daily output. So child deaths to dehydration, particularly infant deaths to dehydration, are a growing threat.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier today, the Rafah border crossing with Gaza was opened to allow dozens of Egyptian ambulances in to evacuate injured patients.
We go now to Gaza, where we’re joined by Yousef Hammash, advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who lives in the Gaza Strip with his wife and two children. He’s from the Jabaliya refugee camp but is joining us today from Khan Younis.
Yousef, thanks so much for joining us again. You grew up in, you were born in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Can you talk about the significance of what took place yesterday?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, yes, proudly, I’m born and raised in Jabaliya camp as a refugee. And Jabaliya camp was not a place that — for us to consider. It’s more than a place. And the place where they attacked is the center of the Jabaliya camp. It’s the heart of the camp. And everyone knows that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Jabaliya camp is the most densely populated — the most densely populated place in Gaza. And so, people who doesn’t know how it’s Jabaliya camp, it’s a block of concrete. Houses are next to each other. And the widest street in Jabaliya camp is half a meter. And 90% of the houses are one roof. It’s one floor. And it’s one of the most crowded places on Earth.
The attack yesterday, the massive amount of casualties, it was, first of all, the massive bombardment, and also because it’s very populated place. And I don’t think, both, yeah, I mean, the Israelis really care about that, and they want to target someone. And I’m not sure about these accusations, who were they targeting, what’s going on there. But it’s a really horrific situation. And if you look to the images, what was going on, it’s really horror.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to the Israeli military saying they bombed — they aimed for the alleyways, not the buildings, and that they were going for one of the commanders of Hamas, and that people should have left, that they warned Palestinians to leave northern Gaza and go south?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: First of all, if they are pushing people to leave, where people should go, first of all? I was lucky because I have relatives in the south in Khan Younis. But thousands of people are in the streets or in UNRWA schools, and there is not enough place for anyone anymore in the south. And even there is no safe passage for people to move from the north toward the south. People cannot leave their houses without knowing where they are going. And this is one thing. If you live in Jabaliya, it means that you can handle your situation and keep up and with handling your needs in Jabaliya. If you are going to a new place without somewhere to go, and even doesn’t know where to go, how people will keep up when they are displaced? This is completely illegal, first of all. And you cannot push more than 1 million people to move in a few days. And until now, for example, since few days, even the roads have been cutted between — they split Gaza in two parts. How people are going to go from Jabaliya in the north or Gaza City towards the south? This is the first thing. And the other thing, I think the images and the amount of casualties can answer what the Israeli forces are saying.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you a clip of the IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, who appeared on CNN, where he was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
WOLF BLITZER: But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians, men, women and children, in that refugee camp, as well, right?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. I mean, we — as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south. We —
WOLF BLITZER: Yeah, I’m just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill this Hamas commander. By the way, was he killed?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: I can’t confirm, yeah. There will be more updated. He, yes, we know that he was killed. About the civilians there, we’re doing everything we can to minimize.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can respond to the IDF Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I just need to understand what they did to minimize the loss, casualties, the loss of civilians. And asking people to leave is not a justification. This is not a justification to use this massive amount of bombardment targeting something. And even then, they cannot confirm it. And it’s a bit weird how world is looking to that and how they are trying to justify the killing of civilians. This is unacceptable, how to justify killings of that amount of civilians by saying that you ordered everyone to evacuate. First, even this is illegal to push — these people are forced to flee, and also, there is no place that people can go to.
And even here in Khan Younis, people who were displaced, people like me, we are facing tragedy to provide our daily need, like water and bread. And everything is challenging here because there is not enough space in the south to host all these hundreds of thousands of people who fled from Gaza and the north. People who decided to stay there, they don’t have any other solution. They don’t have any other options. And there is nothing on this planet can justify killing civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: You are in Khan Younis, Yousef Hammash, where you moved. Were you living in Jabaliya?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I’m born and raised in Jabaliya camp. Yes, I live in Jabaliya.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about who lives there. Talk about the refugee camp, this largest refugee camp, how it was established.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this northern — refugee camps all across Gaza have been established after the Nakba 1948 and then have been expanded more and more. It became small cities. It’s a block of concrete. It’s not like the other camps that we see on the planet, like what’s seen now in Khan Younis, for example. They had to designate another camp which is a tent camp. No, it’s a small city within the city, as the refugee camp. And it’s very densely populated. I know every corner there. I know the people who live there are refugees. And this is generations of refugees who are living in this refugee camp, who is getting expanded day by day because the amount of people are getting more and more, and there is no solutions also for refugees. So it became not a refugee camp. It became a small city within a city. This is how the camp. It’s different than other camps in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you moved with your family to other family in Khan Younis. After the Israeli military told people to move south, dropped thousands of pamphlets and said they would consider you terrorists if you didn’t, they bombed Khan Younis. Is that right? They bombed places in the south, where they said you should go.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: Even here in Khan Younis, it’s not safe. Yesterday, 50 meters away from us, they bombed a family. Eighteen members were killed. And it take us until the daylight to evacuate people who were killed, and most of them were children. There is no safe place all over Gaza. And that’s also another reason why people are not leaving. It’s not safe in the north. It’s not safe in the middle area. It’s not safe in the south also. All across Gaza Strip, the bombardment didn’t stop since the first day. So, this is another reason why people are not moving from the north, because it’s not different. Every day there is a lot of bombardment in Rafah, in Khan Younis, in Deir al-Balah, in the middle area, in Gaza City and the north. There is no difference wherever you are in Gaza City. You are always thinking when you are going to be the next target.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re there in Khan Younis. In an interview you did with Channel 4, you said it took you five hours to look for one liter of fuel in Khan Younis. If you can talk about why fuel is important? And respond to what the Israeli military is saying, why they’re not letting any fuel come in, which runs hospitals, of course, saving lives, the incubators that have premature babies in them, etc. What this fuel shortage looks like for you, not only you as a person, a Palestinian in Gaza, but as advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, where you’re responsible for so many refugees?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, unfortunately, even as humanitarian actors, we cannot do our own, because there is no difference between anyone here. Everyone is under the same circumstances. Fuel is very important because there is no electricity at all. Even when we have one week — one time per week, we have water from the municipality because they have schedule for each area. We need the fuel to push the water from the municipality lines up to the houses. That’s why everything is challenging. And it’s a matter — it’s a layer of complexities. If you have water, you need fuel to push it to the house. To find water, you need to find a way to get it. And it’s almost impossible. Five hours, and I was lucky to did it. Since three days, we are trying to find another liter, and I couldn’t make it. I was lucky because I found someone who’s a friend of mine, and his car was having some fuel. Now, unfortunately, since three days, we don’t have fuel. Today we have the water again that’s from the municipality lines. And unfortunately, we couldn’t push it to the house. So we have had to fill small gallons, and we had to create lines of us inside the house to hand each other, to push, to get — to carry the water to the house tanks. Everything is challenging. And day by day, everything becomes more impossible. And it’s layers above layer of complexities and needs. We don’t have electricity. We don’t have fuel. We don’t have water. And we are lacking everything. We don’t have access for our basic needs.
And unfortunately, we don’t see that effort to push to allow for fuel, for other basic needs for Palestinians. Even these trucks that came in on a daily basis, the maximum amount of trucks reached 50 trucks per day. Before this war started, Gaza was having more than 500 trucks per day, without that amount of need from the war. So, it’s really unacceptable how the world is behaving toward that. It’s not a victory that they succeeded to manage to get these trucks to come. This is not a victory for anyone. This is a drop in the ocean of needs.
AMY GOODMAN: Yousef Hammash, they cut off communication again. We didn’t even know if we’d be able to talk to you. But now the electricity, at least where you are, is back on. Can you talk about the significance of this cutting off of cellphone and electricity, that also happened over the weekend, what it means for you? And also, what’s happening at Rafah today?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this is the second time —
AMY GOODMAN: But first start with, yes, the cutoff.
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, this is the second time that — so, this is the second time that they isolated us from the rest of the planet. We didn’t have access to phone calls, internet or even radio stations. So, literally, we didn’t know what was happening in the next city. We were completely isolated inside our houses. And here to find internet, I think there is a lot of chaos around me, because I need to go to a cafe where there is — at least they have generator, they have some electricity, so I can have access to internet to have this interview with you. Everything is challenging. And being isolated from the rest of the world, we wasn’t knowing what’s happening in the north or in Gaza City or anywhere else in Gaza. We were just completely in a blackout. I don’t know how it’s acceptable to do this to us. And I don’t think we are — we are very good people in coping. We have a very good coping mechanism. But we cannot cope with this. We didn’t have communication. It’s lacking us from everything.
And this is very dangerous, especially for the emergency situations. You cannot call an ambulance. When they did it a few days ago, it was for two days, 36 hours. People who were trying to get an ambulance after an attack, or even if they have a medical situation inside the house, they had to go to the hospital, informing them, and bring them back with them to the house to take someone who is, for example, very sick, or even if they were injured from an attack. It’s an impossible situation without connection. And this is the second time we see it. This time, it was around 14 hours. And let’s hope — because we cannot find alternatives, let’s hope they are not going to keep continuing doing that, because this is not only affecting us as people who have become more isolated, it’s affecting the emergency situation, the emergency response from the medical teams and civil affairs teams. It’s really dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: How old are your children, Yousef? Yousef, you’re frozen. How old are your children?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: So, I have two children. Ilya is 5 years old, and Ahmed, two-and-a-half. And hopefully, we will manage to stay alive during this chaos and madness, and they can see a brighter future. And because — my son Ahmed is 2 years old. He have witnessed a lot. My 5-years-old daughter witnessed more than a lot for a child to witness from this madness around us. And I feel, again — I keep saying that to myself, and I can tell you clearly, I feel guilty because I brought my children in this place. I feel responsible towards my children, and I regret having them in this chaotic situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Yousef Hammash, I want to thank you so much for being with us, advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, born in the Jabaliya refugee camp. We have 30 seconds. Your final message — we are based here in the United States — to the U.S. government, to the American population, and also globally around the world?
YOUSEF HAMMASH: I think the world needs to react and to act seriously stopping this madness. I think it’s more than enough for us to suffer and to see what we are seeing currently. World need to extend and hold their responsibilities toward us as a human being. It’s more than enough since the first day. Now we’re stopping — we have already stopped calculating days, because it’s all similar, all its amount of bombardment and horror nights. The world needs to stand and hold their responsibilities toward us as human beings.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you, Yousef Hammash, for making the effort, despite all of these difficulties to speak to us today. Again, Yousef Hammash is the —
YOUSEF HAMMASH: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: — advocacy officer in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, grew up, was born in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by Craig Mokhiber, top U.N. official in New York, who’s resigned, saying the U.N. is failing to stop what he calls a “genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Giving Up Everything” by Natalie Merchant. Natalie Merchant recently signed an open letter titled “Artists Call for Ceasefire Now,” alongside actors like Joaquin Phoenix, the playwright Tony Kushner and Miranda July, the letter supported by Oxfam American and ActionAid USA.
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"Text-Book Case of Genocide”: Top U.N. Official Craig Mokhiber Resigns, Denounces Israeli Assault on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/ ... transcript
A former top United Nations official in New York joins us for an in-depth interview about why he has resigned after publicly accusing the U.N. of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber is a longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. His resignation letter (embedded below) has gone viral. In one of his first interviews since leaving his post, Mokhiber tells Democracy Now! the U.N. follows a “different set of rules” when addressing Israel’s violations of international law, refusing to utilize its enforcement mechanisms and thus “effectively” acting as “a smokescreen behind which we have seen further and worsening dispossession of Palestinians.” He says it is an “open secret inside the halls of the United Nations that the so-called two-state solution is effectively impossible,” and calls for international actors to push for a “new paradigm” in the region based on “equality for all.” We also discuss the inaction of the International Criminal Court, global suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy, bad-faith accusations of antisemitism and more.
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.
A top United Nations official in New York has resigned and accused the United Nations of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber is a longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had worked at the United Nations since 1992 and lived in Gaza in the 1990s.
In a letter addressed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, Craig Mokhiber wrote, “In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.”
Craig Mokhiber went on to write, “What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations 'to ensure respect' for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities,” unquote.
On Tuesday, the U.N. released statement about Mokhiber’s resignation, saying, quote, “I can confirm he is retiring today. He informed the U.N. in March of his upcoming retirement, which takes effect tomorrow. The views in his letter made public today are his personal views,” the U.N. said.
Craig Mokhiber joins us now in New York, the first day he’s not working for the United Nations.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Thank you, Amy. Good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about why you left.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I originally registered my concerns in writing to the high commissioner in March, as you heard from that statement, in the wake of a wave of human rights violations on the West Bank, including the pogrom Huwara at that time. And at that time, I complained, really, about what I saw as a trepidatious response by many in the United Nations, and an effort to try to silence some of the human rights critique of U.N. officials, including myself. And I admit to feeling a great deal of frustration, and at that moment indicating that I would be resigning from the U.N., effective this month. So, of course, the situation got much worse since then, which is why I was — particularly the events in Gaza — which is why I was compelled to write this latest letter to the high commissioner, to put on record my very serious concerns about how we were failing to address the unfolding events in the Occupied Territories.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the United Nations, the United States, the West, U.K. should be doing right now?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think there is an obligation on the part of all member states of the United Nations, including those states in the West, to respond in accordance with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law. My central point in the most recent letter was that we had effectively left international law behind when the international community embraced the Oslo process, which sort of raised up notions of political expediency above the requirements of international law. And that was a real loss for human rights in Palestine. I think there is an obligation on the part of all states not just to respect international humanitarian law and international human rights law, but, under the Geneva Conventions, to ensure respect. And it’s clear that many states, including the United States itself, have not only — are not only in breach of their obligation to ensure respect vis-à-vis those states over which they have influence — in this case, Israel — but have been actively complicit, actively engaged in arming, in diplomatic cover, in political support, intelligence support and so on. That is a breach of international humanitarian law. We need the opposite of that. We need all states, members of the United Nations, to use whatever influence they have to ensure an end to these attacks on civilians in Gaza, to ensure as well accountability for the perpetrators, redress for the victims, protection for the vulnerable there.
It’s interesting, Amy. We have a formula at the United Nations that is applied to virtually every other conflict situation. But when it comes to the situation in Israel and Palestine, there’s a different set of rules, apparently. And that’s, I think, a big source of my frustration. Where is the transitional justice process? Where is the U.N. protection force to protect all civilians? Where is the tribunal for accountability? Where is the action on the part of the Security Council, the only mechanism in the United Nations that has enforcement to ensure protection in the Occupied Territories? Obviously, every effort in the Security Council is vetoed by the United States itself, a further indication of the kind of complicity about which I am referring.
And I think the other thing that needs to happen in the international community is that we have to abandon the failed paradigms of the past on a political level and get back to the roots, which is international law, international human rights. What has happened in the context of the so-called Oslo process, the two-state solution, the U.N. Quartet, is that they have acted effectively as a smokescreen, behind which we have seen further and worsening dispossession of Palestinians, massive atrocities, such as those as we are witnessing now, the loss of homes and land, further settlement activity. You know, it’s an open secret inside the halls of the United Nations that the so-called two-state solution is effectively impossible now — there’s nothing left for a sustainable state for the Palestinian people — and takes no account of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people. The new paradigm has to be one based upon equality of all people there, equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews. And that needs to be the new approach.
And I think, as well, you know, it’s interesting that this year we are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. That same year, the Nakba occurred in Palestine, and apartheid was adopted in South Africa. We have seen, because of a consistent international law and international human rights approach in the U.N. and the international community, that apartheid in South Africa fell. We did not take the same approach in Palestine. We’ve deferred to these political processes. And as a result, not only have we not seen an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people, we’ve seen a continuing worsening of the situation.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re a longtime human rights lawyer. I want you to respond — I played this already for Yousef Hammash in Gaza right now, in Khan Younis, to respond, but I’d like you to respond to it, as well. After Israel’s attack on Jabaliya yesterday, the IDF spokesperson, Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, appeared on CNN and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
WOLF BLITZER: But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians, men, women and children, in that refugee camp, as well, right?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. I mean, we — as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south. We —
WOLF BLITZER: Yeah, I’m just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill this Hamas commander. By the way, was he killed?
LT. COL. RICHARD HECHT: I can’t confirm, yeah. There will be more updated. He, yes, we know that he was killed. About the civilians there, we’re doing everything we can to minimize.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s saying they’re doing everything they can to minimize. He’s talking about Ibrahim Biari, whom it identified — Israel has identified as Hamas’s commander of the Jabaliya center battalion, saying he was killed in those recent strikes. Can you respond to every aspect of what he said? They were trying to get a high-value target, as they put it, and they are not trying to kill civilians.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think what’s important in that interview is that is another of many indications of intent on the part of Israeli authorities, that will be very important in a court of law. He has said very openly that they knew of the concentrations of civilians there, and yet, in violation of the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, and on the pretext of killing one combatant, wiped out the better part of an entire refugee camp, densely populated refugee camp. And I think what’s been interesting in this war is the very open statement of intents. I referred in my letter to the case for genocide which is happening now. And, you know, “genocide” is a very politicized term, often abused. But in this case, the hardest part of proving genocide has been proven for us with these very open statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials, including the prime minister and the president and senior Cabinet ministers and military officials, who in their public statements have indicated very clearly their intention not to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and to carry out the kinds of wholesale slaughter that we are witnessing in Gaza. That is not a justification in international law, saying that there was a combatant there, for that very disproportionate use of firepower against what was a civilian target. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in all of Gaza, from the north to the south.
The other thing is this claim that, “Well, we told them to move south, and therefore we can kill everybody who didn’t move.” This is an extremely dangerous and unlawful tactic that is being used, first because we know that evacuations in Gaza in the best of times, in this densely populated small territory with 2.3 million civilians crowded in, with very limited infrastructure, is a huge challenge. But most of Gaza has been bombed into rubble. It is just not physically possible for civilians to move en masse in the ways that Israel has required them to do so. And we know, already well documented, that when they do so, they’re still subjected to bombings even in the south of the Gaza Strip. So, all of this, it seems to me, is evidence of intent and a prima facie case for violations of the laws of war.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel has called for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to resign, after he said Hamas’s October 7th attack did not happen in a vacuum. This is Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan.
GILAD ERDAN: Mr. Secretary-General, the U.N. was established to prevent atrocities, to prevent such atrocities like the barbaric atrocities that Hamas committed. But the U.N. is failing. The U.N. is failing. And you, Mr. Secretary-General, have lost all morality and impartiality, because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism. And by tolerating terrorism, you are justifying terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Craig Mokhiber, your response?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, of course, you can imagine why the ambassador would want to start the clock only in October and to ignore the decades upon decades of persecution against the Palestinian people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, inside Israel proper. But that is not the kind of assessment that leads to peace or leads to an improved situation on the ground. The secretary-general was doing his job. He had condemned the loss of civilian life in the Hamas attack, and he also criticized not just what Israel was doing in Gaza, but all of the events that have led up to this situation.
And that’s what I mean by a need to break from the failed paradigm of the past. We really need to get into something that says that human beings are entitled to human rights under international law and that the duty of the international community is to ensure protection for all under the rule of law, but also accountability for perpetrators and redress for victims.
So, I am not surprised at that statement. We’ve seen a lot of extreme statements from that particular ambassador, a lot of theater, as well. I don’t think we should allow it to distract us to what’s happening on the ground, which is the wholesale loss of life of innocent civilians in their thousands, including thousands of children in the Gaza Strip, and the need to get to an immediate ceasefire and then to shift into a new approach that will prevent this from happening again and again and again.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering about the role of Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. I think he was in Rafah just a few days ago. We see the world’s response, or the West’s response, when it came to Russia invading Ukraine and occupying Ukraine. Karim Khan, very soon after, opened a whole investigation into crimes against humanity that Putin was committing in Ukraine. Can you respond to the difference in approach to Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the Occupied Territories, officially, international law, the OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, there has been a stunning inconsistency with the rapidity with which the court was able to move and the prosecutor was able to move with regard to Ukraine and the years upon years in which it has dragged its feet with regard to Palestine. This is just one of many critiques of the court, including the fact that it does not have a very strong record of holding Northern countries — Israel, the United States and others — to account for their crimes under international criminal law, and yet is very anxious to move forward on cases in the Global South.
Now, that is not to condemn the court. The court is a young institution. It needs to be strengthened. It needs to insulate itself from the kinds of political pressure that have led to its inaction in the case of Palestine. But our hope, ultimately, is the peaceful resolution of disputes through the use of international law. And if that’s going to happen, we need a robust and fair International Criminal Court that doesn’t provide for exceptionalism for powerful countries of the North, like Israel, for example, but that holds all perpetrators of international crimes to account. The court has a long way to go before it’s going to have the reputation that will bring confidence globally that it’s meeting its mandate under the Rome Statute.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the white supremacists who took part in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. She made the comment in response to a question from Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
PETER DOOCY: Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?
PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: What I can say is what we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that. Remember, what the president decided to — when the president decided to run for president is what he saw in Charlottesville in 2017, when we — he saw neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Charlottesville with vile, antisemitic just hatred. And he was very clear then, and he’s very clear now. He’s taken actions against this over the past two years. And he’s continued to be clear: There is no place — no place — for this type of vile and despite — this kind of rhetoric.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President Biden’s spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre. Craig Mokhiber, your response?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I think one of the most disturbing aspects of this current situation in the North, in countries like the U.S. and in Europe, has been this rather unprecedented crackdown on human rights defenders speaking up to defend the human rights of people in Gaza during this situation. And that has come from official statements that try to critique in that way people who are defending human rights, and to compare them with far-right neofascist protesters, for example. I mean, it’s an outrageous comparison to make. And it doesn’t stop there. We have also seen very strong efforts on the part of government institutions, including local governments and state governments and the federal government, and universities and employers and others to punish people for daring to speak up, criticizing the human rights violations that are happening, or criticizing the U.S. role in these violations.
But I think what is most hopeful, Amy, and where there is a glimmer of hope, which has, I have to say, moved me very much, it’s that people are not allowing themselves to be intimidated by these tactics. We have seen massive demonstrations, in all parts of the country and in Europe, from people many times risking arrest, risking police beatings, risking other consequences, because they refuse to allow this to go forward and to have the human rights claim be silenced. And I think most encouraging, we have seen — you know, just a few blocks from here a few days ago, we saw a large group, organized by Jewish Voices for Peace, IfNotNow, of Jewish protesters standing up and saying, “Not in our name,” and taking over Grand Central Station, and in one move stripping away the Israeli propaganda point that they are somehow acting in the defense of Jews. Jewish people are not represented by Israel. These protesters have made that perfectly clear. Israel pushes an old antisemitic trope that it somehow represents Jewish people around the world. Not only is that not factual, but it’s very dangerous. And everyone needs to know that Israel is a state that’s responsible for its own crimes, and that responsibility does not extend to our Jewish brothers and sisters, many of whom are standing up alongside Muslim and Christian and others in demonstrations across this country and across Europe, saying that this must end.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to a comment in The Guardian by Anne Bayefsky, who directs Touro College’s Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust in New York, who accused you of overt antisemitism, saying you used U.N. letterhead to call for wiping Israel off the map. Craig Mokhiber, if you could respond?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, Anne Bayefsky is a well-known entity amongst human rights defenders. She has made a career of attacking anyone who dares to criticize Israeli human rights violations, in particular. I have responded to this idea of wiping Israel off the map by saying I’m not looking for an end to Israel, I’m looking for an end to apartheid. And it’s very telling, what Anne Bayefsky tweeted in her attack on me. She accused me of antisemitism, and the quote that she took from my letter to prove that was my call for equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews. I had to reply to her tweet by saying that she had become a parody of herself, because if calling for equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews is a new form of antisemitism, then there’s no conversation to be had.
But I don’t think people are falling for these smears anymore. They are almost automatic. But the point needs to be made again and again that criticism of Israeli human rights violations is not antisemitic, just as criticism of Saudi violations is not Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is not anti-Buddhist, criticism of Indian violations is not anti-Hindu. If any of those are true, then there is no international human rights framework. And if only the case of Israel is true, well, that’s a racist proposition that only Palestinians can’t have their human rights defended in this globe. So, I don’t think anyone listens too much to those kinds of smears anymore. And luckily, people are speaking up louder, not lowering their voices, to demand human rights in the Occupied Territories.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you go off to do, Craig Mokhiber? I mean, you have been at the United Nations for decades. Talk about your plans now. Today is your first day that you’re not working at the U.N.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, I intend to remain involved in the cause of international human rights, in which I’ve been involved since 1980, in fact. There’s no question about that. I will do it under my own name, unconstrained by diplomatic protocol and the constraints of the U.N. I will continue to support my colleagues. I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m criticizing the whole U.N. You know, U.N. humanitarian workers, U.N. human rights workers, the UNRWA colleagues in Gaza, dozens of whom have lost their life just in the last couple of weeks under Israeli bombs, are doing absolutely heroic work all around the world. But I want to try to influence the political side of the house to take up a more realistic and principled approach to this particular conflict, one based in international human rights, one based in international humanitarian law, and one based in achievable goals, if not in the immediate term, of a paradigm based upon equality, an end to apartheid, and, as I said, equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your final response to the protesters just yesterday in Washington, D.C., in the Senate, repeatedly disrupting Secretary of State Antony Blinken while he was testifying before the Senate on President Biden’s request for $106 billion for Ukraine, Israel and militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. A group of protesters with members of Muslims for Just Futures and Detention Watch Network, sitting behind Blinken, held up their hands covered in fake blood. He was also interrupted by members of CodePink, including the former State Department official Ann Wright, who resigned over the Iraq War. This is what she said.
ANN WRIGHT: Three thousand five hundred kids dead. Come on. I’m an Army colonel. I’m a former diplomat. I resigned on that War in Iraq that you talked about. That was a terrible thing. And what you’re doing right now in supporting Israel’s genocide of Gaza is a terrible thing, too. Stop the war! Ceasefire now!
AMY GOODMAN: She was holding a sign as she was taken out by security, “Ceasefire in Gaza.” Craig Mokhiber, your final comments?
CRAIG MOKHIBER: This is where I find the most hope, Amy. I have lost confidence in official institutions of government after all these years in the international human rights movement. I am losing hope in international — important parts of international institutions. Where there is hope, it is in civil society. It is in those ordinary people, here in the United States and elsewhere, who are willing to stand up and demand respect for human life and for human rights. And these kinds of protests in the halls of Congress, before the State Department, in front of the White House, in Grand Central Station, in the streets, everywhere, particularly with this climate that is trying to —
AMY GOODMAN: Three seconds.
CRAIG MOKHIBER: — suppress critique of these current policies, it’s only going to come from civil society —
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Mokhiber —
CRAIG MOKHIBER: — that these will be shaken loose.
AMY GOODMAN: — we thank you so much, international human rights lawyer.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Sat Nov 04, 2023 12:17 am
“This Is Your Money”: Palestinian Father Pleads with Americans to Stop Funding Israeli Assault on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 02, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/2/ ... transcript
As the overall death toll from Israel’s 27-day bombardment tops 9,000, we speak with Just Vision’s Fadi Abu Shammalah in Gaza about his family’s experiences on the ground as the besieged territory runs out of water, food and fuel. “We have only one thing: that we are being killed,” says Shammalah, who calls for Americans to “keep going” in demonstrations for Palestinian rights. “We are being killed by your taxes.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Gaza.
PALESTINIAN CHILD: [screaming]
NERMEEN SHAIKH: A Palestinian child screams out, “We did nothing wrong! We did nothing wrong!” as Israel bombs the Jabaliya refugee camp for a third day in a row, this time hitting a school run UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. At least 195 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza’s largest refugee camp in a series of devastating Israeli airstrikes in recent days. The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement, quote, “we have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
The overall death toll from Israel’s 27-day bombardment has topped 9,000, including 3,700 children. UNICEF is warning children are paying the heaviest price in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Khan Younis, where we’re joined by Fadi Abu Shammalah. He is Just Vision’s outreach associate in Gaza and the executive director of Gaza’s General Union of Cultural Centers. His recent op-ed for The New York Times is headlined “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?”
Fadi, if you can talk to us about the last few weeks through the eyes of your three children — Ali, 13; Karam, 10; and Adam, 5?
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: Thank you so much, Amy and Nermeen, for having me in this interview in a very critical situation.
I start from, from the heavy airstrike and the shelling over all of Gaza Strip every single minute that we have been bombed. The numbers talked about, 10,000 rockets have been launched over Gaza Strip. More than 12,000 of civilian people have been killed. Hundreds of people, civilian people, are still under rubbles, and [inaudible] are not able to rescue them and pull them out from under the rubbles.
Or should I talk about the entire neighborhoods that’s flattened, the road that is cut off, the water, the severe shortage of water, the severe shortage of food, fuel? We don’t have electricity for more than 20 days now or more. I don’t know, to talk about the UNRWA shelters, that it has around more than half-million of displaced people.
Israel asked us to evacuate the Gaza City and the north, because in there — and they killed, they assassinated, they targeted the convoy of cars while they were traveling and evacuating to the south of Gaza Strip. Should I talk about the live video that’s recorded by and broadcasted by a journalist, Palestinian local journalist? His name is Hassan Saifi. He filmed and recorded a video while the tank launched and bombed a civilian car while they were evacuating to the south.
What should I talk about? That we don’t have bread? That we don’t have water? We don’t have fuel. Nothing. We have only one thing: that we are being killed. There is — and, of course, with a green light with the international community, with the U.S. administration. This is the situation. People are scared. From what? For being killed. Really, we are having now a second Nakba, if you know it. The first one happened in 1948. We feel that it’s another Nakba that we are going through, to go through it.
The most horrible thing for us, that’s the officials. The Israeli officials say that we are human animals. Human animals? Animal humans? I don’t remember exactly. Like, we are treated like animals. You know what happen to animals? They’re slaughtered. So, we are slaughtered now by the Israeli genocide government. This is what’s happening now. Like, they now [inaudible]. This is what is going on here, a genocide. A real genocide and massacre is happening now. Like, in previous wars, we used to have like 10 persons of a family is killed. Now the whole building, the entire neighborhoods is bombed, flattened. It’s happening in Jabaliya for three days, in Nuseirat, in Khan Younis city, in every single mid-Gaza Strip cities. This is what is happening here now.
I’m a father of three kids, as you have mentioned. They think that I’m a hero. I’m not. I’m scared exactly like them. I’m scared of the bombing. I’m scared of not having water. We were lucky that we had yesterday, before yesterday, drinking water. We have been without drinking water for around a day. Like, we don’t have electricity here. Like, we are also lucky that we have two solar panels at the roof of my family. I’m evacuated, by the way. I’m originally living in Gaza City, but I’m already evacuated to my parents. So I’m so lucky that my parents’ home — are living in Khan Younis refugees camp.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fadi —
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: I can’t imagine that there’s millions — millions — [inaudible] evacuated their homes. Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fadi, you’re speaking now — as you said, the international community, led by the United States, has been supporting Israel absolutely in its operation in Gaza. If you could say, what is your message to Americans as Gaza is under this systemic — systematic military assault that is ongoing? And you’re describing the devastating conditions under which you and all these children, your own, of course, three children — but we’ve just said 3,700 children have been killed in Gaza. What is your message to Americans?
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: I would say that I’m so, so, so proud of the hundred thousands of Americans who went to demonstrate for us. We are here in Gaza Strip. Believe us, we are following the news, and we feel, like, more comfortable when we’re watching in TVs, like, thousands and hundreds of thousands of American peoples who went to the streets in order to support us, to express the sympathy and in solidarity with the Palestinian people here in Gaza Strip. That makes us more relaxed and comfortable that we are not alone, that there is a lot of people who they still have a live heart. That’s my message to you: Please keep going. We are listening to you. We are following you. I’m sure that no one can stop our voice, our voices for justice. Please keep doing what you’re doing now, because at the end, I’m sure that the U.S. administration will listen to you and stop, or at least [inaudible] the green light that it’s giving to the Israeli government of killing us.
But, please, this is your money. This is the taxes money that you are paying to the American administration. It’s used by buying bombs and rockets and providing it to [inaudible] government. We are being killed by your taxes now. Please say no to your administration, that’s [inaudible] this unlimited, unlimited and ongoing support. The Israeli occupation are checking the humanitarian aid that’s entered Gaza Strip. It’s milk for kids. It’s a medicine. It’s white flour for making bread. So, can you at least make double check this support by the American administration, where it goes, what it’s used for? It would be like our main priority for you guys in the U.S.
I will say it again, and I have mentioned it before, that I was in the U.S. in March, and I met tens of Americans, of people. I was so lucky that I have met them in March. I saw these people who have live hearts, who still have conscience, and they believe in justice. We are depending on these kind of people, who can stay the truth, and they can tell the truth, and they have the courages, and they are brave enough to say to their administration, that “Stop of standing with the massacre’s implementers, with the occupation.”
It’s not about Gaza. It’s not a war between Israel and Hamas anymore. It’s a war between the Israelis, in the most strong forces in the Middle East, against a civilian people. Like, look at West Bank. They don’t have Hamas there. How many one is killed since October 10 — 7? Sorry.
As Palestinians, we are off of the double standards by the international community. And I’m talking about the politicians, about the governments, not the people, because we also followed the great demonstration in the street in the European Union, also hundreds of thousands of people. Also in London, like half-million of British people were in the streets.
Come on, people all over the world know the truth. You can’t hide it. It happened in the past that a lot of media were hiding the truth. But now we have social media. We have Zoom. We have WhatsApp. We have a lot of applications that people in Gaza Strip and in Palestine that can use, and that we can keep telling the truth for what is going on now here in Gaza Strip. No one will stop us. We have a lot of English speakers. We will keep telling the truth loudly. We will not stop. We will keep speaking up, until the international community will respect our willing and self-determination and, of course, stop the horrific genocide that is happening now.
The numbers, again, the numbers of the killed people, it’s not the truth. Yeah, that’s right. It’s not the real number, of course, because we have a lot of missed people. We have a lot of killed people who are still under rubble, the rubbles. Another horrific number, by the way, it didn’t happen before, that the number of the injured people is double of the killed people. It’s horrible. Like, the bombing, they meant to kill the people while they are bombing the civilian peoples here. You can see. Of course, millions and billions of people over the TVs, they can watch. They can judge what is going on here. You can see. Like, come on! It’s entire neighborhoods. Entire neighborhoods, they bombed it. Like, it’s crazy. And, of course, if Israel has no one to tell them that they have to stop, they will keep killing us.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fadi, I want to ask —
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: They only — yes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask, Fadi, you — I mean, these attacks are taking place in response to the Hamas attack on October 7th. Obviously, as you’ve said, it’s a genocide that’s taking place. But I want to ask you about the response that Israel has had to nonviolent resistance by Palestinians. You wrote in 2018 a piece called “Why I March in Gaza.” Explain what the response was of Israel to this nonviolent resistance, the Great March of Return.
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: Oh, that’s [inaudible], by the way. In fact, the Israeli provision is very [inaudible] in killing the Palestinians, even if they are struggling with nonviolence, even if they are staying at their homes, even if they are in West Bank. For example, they kept invading and invading the West Bank cities and towns, and they killed a lot of Palestinians there. And there is — by the way, like couple of months ago or few months ago, there is American old man. He had been detained under hard circumstances until he died. I mean, what this 67-years-old, that man, has done for the Israeli occupation?
Even when Palestinian — and, by the way, the nonviolent struggle, it didn’t happen and started in the 2018 in what we have named and called the Great March. The Palestinians were creative in starting the anniversary [inaudible] in the 1987, when the First Intifada happened, started. What happened there? Even so, the Israeli occupation were killing us, arresting us, shooting at us, demolishing homes. This is the policy of the — an apartheid country. That’s the — I’m so surprised sometimes when someone — as I watch an interview that’s like it’s defending on the Israeli occupation.
Like, we did it in 2018. We were marching. I was there. I participated there, and I was one of the witnesses of the Great Return March. What happened? Snipers. They were, like, [inaudible], if he will shoot the knee of the kids. I know many kids that they have been — their legs were amputated by the snipers. They killed more than 350 in this nonviolent resistance, and also what happened by the U.S. administration at that time. I mean, this [inaudible] eliminate, or I would love, of course, to be stopped. So, whenever and whatever the Palestinians will do, we will — I mean, Israel will keep killing us. It started before 1948, and it will keep going until they have the support from the European, with the U.S. administrations. They will keep killing us, until one day the entire world will believe, like, [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: Fadi Abu Shammalah, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Fadi is Just Vision’s outreach associate in Gaza, executive director of Gaza’s General Union of Cultural Centers, speaking to us from Khan Younis, which has also been bombed repeatedly. We’ll link to your New York Times piece, “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?”
Coming up, the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on a recent trip to the occupied West Bank and how it changed him. Stay with us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks Out Against Israel’s “Segregationist Apartheid Regime” After West Bank Visit
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 02, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/2/ ... transcript
As pressure builds for a ceasefire after 27 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates joins us in a broadcast exclusive interview to discuss his journey to Palestine and Israel and learning about the connection between the struggle of African Americans and Palestinians. “The most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is,” says Coates, who calls segregation in Palestine and Israel “evil.” “There’s no way for me, as an African American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.” Coates acknowledges the suppression of those advocating for Palestinian rights but says this is not new for Black writers and journalists. “I have to measure my fear against the misery that I saw.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As pressure builds for a ceasefire after 27 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we spend the rest of the hour with the acclaimed author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. This summer, he spoke at a literary festival in the West Bank that connected the Palestinian struggle with decolonization struggles around the world. In Ramallah, he opened his remarks with a comparison between the struggle of African Americans and Palestinians.
In recent weeks, Coates joined dozens of other writers and artists in signing “An Open Letter from Participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature,” that was published in The New York Review of Books and called for, quote, “the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine.”
AMY GOODMAN: Last night, Ta-Nehisi Coates participated in another event hosted by organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, in the James Chapel at Union Theological Seminary here in New York City. It was called “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.”
Ta-Nehisi is the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. We Were Eight Years in Power is another book, An American Tragedy, and his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle. His novel is titled The Water Dancer. In 2014, he wrote an award-winning cover story for The Atlantic magazine headlined “The Case for Reparations.”
Ta-Nehisi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, under extremely difficult circumstances. Last night, this remarkable event almost didn’t happen. I mean, it was in the James Chapel of Union Theological Seminary, but venue after venue had said no to this gathering. And without almost any publicity, well over a thousand people turned out, but the place only held 300, so people went over across the street to another place of 300, overcrowd, overflow, and then thousands watched on the live video stream. Can you talk about your experience being in the West Bank, going to the Occupied Territories, and how it changed you?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Oh wow. I spent 10 days in Palestine, in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper. I’ve had the great luxury over the past 10 years of seeing a few countries. I have not spent more time or seen more of another country or another territory than I did this summer.
I think what shocked me the most was, in any sort of opinion piece or reported piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I’ve read about Israel and about the conflict with the Palestinians, there’s a word that comes up all the time, and it is “complexity,” that and its closely related adjective, “complicated.” And so, while I had my skepticisms and I had my suspicions of the Israeli government, of the occupation, what I expected was that I would find a situation in which it was hard to discern right from wrong, it was hard to understand the morality at play, it was hard to understand the conflict. And perhaps the most shocking thing was I immediately understood what was going on over there.
Probably the best example I can think of is the second day, when we went to Hebron, and the reality of the occupation became clear. We were driving out of East Jerusalem. I was with PalFest, and we were driving out of East Jerusalem into the West Bank. And, you know, you could see the settlements, and they would point out the settlements. And it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the world where some people could vote and some people could not. And that was obviously very, very familiar to me. I got to Hebron, and we got out as a group of writers, and we were given a tour by our Palestinian guide. And we got to a certain street, and he said to us, “I can’t walk down this street. If you want to continue, you have to continue without me.” And that was shocking to me.
And we walked down the street, and we came back, and there was a market area. Hebron is very, very poor. It wasn’t always very poor, but it’s very, very poor. Its market area has been shut down. But there are a few vendors there that I wanted to support. And I was walking to try to get to the vendor, and I was stopped at a checkpoint. Checkpoints all through the city, checkpoints obviously all through the West Bank. Your mobility is completely inhibited, and the mobility of the Palestinians is totally inhibited.
And I was walking to the checkpoint, and an Israeli guard stepped out, probably about the age of my son. And he said to me, “What’s your religion, bro?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’m not really religious.” And he said, “Come on. Stop messing around. What is your religion?” I said, “I’m not playing. I’m not really religious.” And it became clear to me that unless I professed my religion, and the right religion, I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk forward. So, he said, “Well, OK, so what was your parents’ religion?” I said, “Well, they weren’t that religious, either.” He says, “What were your grandparents’ religion?” And I said, “My grandmother was a Christian.” And then he allowed me to pass.
And it became very, very clear to me what was going on there. And I have to say it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.
And so, the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Ta-Nehisi Coates, last night you were asked about the significance of Martin Luther King’s words on Vietnam. You said it’s taken you years to, quote, “understand nonviolence as an ethic” and that you understood that ethic in Israel. Could you explain?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, sure, I mean, and I think the thing to do is just to proceed off of what I said. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to the fight against segregation. His was a segregated society. The Occupied Territories are segregated, de jure segregated. It’s not, you know, hard to understand. There are different signs for where different people can go. There are different license plates forbidding different people from going different places. Now, what the authorities will tell you is that this is a security measure. But if you go back to the history of Jim Crow in this country, they would tell you the exact same thing. People always have good reasons, besides, you know, “I hate you, and I don’t like you,” to justify their right for imposing an oppressive regime on other people. It’s never quite that simple. And so, that was the first thing.
But the second thing I think that you’re referring to is, you know, I — you know, this is like really personal for me, because I came up in a time and in a place where I did not really understand the ethic of nonviolence. And by “ethic,” I mean the notion that violence itself is corrupting, that it corrupts the soul. And I didn’t quite understand that. If I’m truly honest with you, as much as I saw my relationship with the Palestinian people and as much as it was clear what the relationship was, it was at the same time clear that there was some sort of relationship with the Israeli people, too. And it wasn’t one that I particularly enjoyed, because I understood the rage that comes when you have a history of oppression. I understood the anger. I understood the sense of humiliation that comes when people subject you to just manifold oppression, to genocide, and people look away from that. I come from the descendants of 250 years of enslavement. I come from a people who sexual violence and rape is marked in our very bones and in our DNA. And I understand how when you feel that the world has turned its back on you, how you can then turn your back on the ethics of the world. But I also understood how corrupting that can be.
I was listening, actually, to my congressman last night, or I guess it was two nights ago, talk on the news. And a journalist asked him, “How many children, how many people must be killed to justify this operation? Is there an upper limit for the number of people that could be killed, when you would say, 'This is just too much. This just doesn't — this just doesn’t, you know, compute. This does not add up’?” And I will tell you, that congressman couldn’t give a number. And I thought, “That man has been corrupted. That man has lost himself. He’s lost himself in humiliation. He’s lost himself in vengeance. He has lost himself in violence.”
I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again: “the right to self-defense.” What about the right to dignity? What about the right to morality? What about the right to be able to sleep at night? Because what I know is, if I was complicit — and I am complicit — in dropping bombs on children, in dropping bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble sleeping at night. And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can sleep at night.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Ta-Nehisi, last night, as I said at the beginning, I think Union Theological was the fifth place that PalFest had turned to for this event. I want to point out who was there. Among the speakers was you, you know, a MacArthur “genius” fellow; was Michelle Alexander, the remarkable author and lawyer; Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University; and others. And you being at Union Theological, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King is known for that speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam,” that he gave across the street at Riverside Church, but he started at Union Theological. So many people came, he had to go across the street for it. But can you talk about this difficulty in speaking out? I mean, just last week, we spoke to Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is the Vietnamese American Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who was on a book tour for his latest memoir, and the 92nd Street Y, now known as 92NY, canceled his conversation about his memoir because he had signed on to a letter — I think it was signed by 750 other people — calling for a ceasefire. The U.N. secretary-general has called for a Gaza ceasefire. Can you talk about what it means to break the sound barrier, and if you were nervous about coming out and speaking about Gaza, about the West Bank, even going, to begin with, knowing what you would feel responsible for doing once you came out?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I wasn’t just nervous. I was afraid. You know, I hear people talk all the time about how fearlessness is a necessary quality. And I have never had that. I’ve never had that in my life, and I certainly have never had that in my career.
I spent five days with PalFest when I was over there, and then I spent another five days with a group of Israeli Jews. And I knew that whatever I was going to see — like, I had a sentiment. I couldn’t express it like I just expressed it for you right now, because, obviously, I hadn’t been there. But I had a sentiment that what I was going to see was not going to be great. And I know that, A, because of my upbringing, and I know that, B, because of my vocation as a journalist, you can’t behold evil and then return and not speak on it. And segregation is evil. There just is no — there’s no way for me, as an African American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.
One of the hardest things was to come back and then to read the rhetoric of certain African American politicians who are defending this regime. And I just — I couldn’t understand it. You know, I wanted to know if they had been to Hebron. You know, I wanted to know if they had been to Masafer Yatta, if they had been to Susiya, if they had been to Tuba. Had they seen? Had they really seen what is actually happening here? I don’t know how anybody who benefits, who stands on the shoulders of our ancestors’ struggle against Jim Crow, against segregation, could see what is happening right now, could see the bombs being dropped, 9,000 people dead, an ungodly number of them children, in service of Jim Crow and segregation, which we have exported, and be OK with that. I don’t — I don’t understand it.
So, yes, I have my fears. I do. I do. You know, I’m afraid right now, sitting here talking to you. But I have to measure my fear against the misery that I saw. I have to measure my fear against the promises that I made to the Palestinians who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts, to the Israeli Jews who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts, to the Holocaust survivors who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts. I have to measure it against my own ancestors, against Frederick Douglass, against Ida B. Wells, who certainly faced off against things that were much, much more perilous than going someplace, coming back and telling people what you saw. This is the minimum. It’s scary, but it’s also the minimum. And the fact that people are trying to suppress speech is not an excuse for you not to speak. It’s always been this way for Black writers and journalists. This is our tradition, you know? And so, I feel — as I do feel the fear, I also feel that I am in good company, because I’m in the company of my ancestors.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Ta-Nehisi, I want to ask you about the way in which this conflict is in fact being represented in the media and, as you pointed out, politicians, congressmembers, but also the White House. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the white supremacists who took part in the deadly —
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I saw it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: — Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. She made the comment in response to a question from Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
PETER DOOCY: Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?
PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: What I can say is what we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that. Remember, what the president decided to — when the president decided to run for president is what he saw in Charlottesville in 2017, when we — he saw neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Charlottesville with vile, antisemitic just hatred. And he was very clear then, and he’s very clear now. He’s taken actions against this over the past two years. And he’s continued to be clear: There is no place — no place — for this type of vile and despite — this kind of rhetoric.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Ta-Nehisi Coates, that’s the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Your response?
TA-NEHISI COATES: You know, I don’t want to personalize this. I’m sure she’s a very, you know, nice person and a very, very kind person. But, you see, all of us stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King. All of us stand on the shoulders of the nonviolent struggle. And on King’s birthday, the White House, like it’s done for years, stands up, and, you know, it praises Dr. King, and it talks about Dr. King as our modern-day prophet. I don’t know how these people do that and sleep at night. I don’t know how you compare people who are trying to stop a war, who are very much in the tradition of nonviolence, who are trying to stop bombs being dropped, literally, on refugee camps, to neo-Nazi protesters. It’s disgraceful, to use her own words. It’s disgraceful. It’s reprehensible. It is offensive, as far as I am concerned, to the shoulders on those whom we stand right now. I just — I don’t understand it.
I would extend this further. I mean, I think hearing President Biden himself — and here I will personalize it — downplay the number of Palestinian deaths, to say that he doesn’t believe the Palestinians, I just — when his own State Department was citing those figures only months ago, you know? At some point, you know, there’s that saying: When people show you who they are, you have to believe them. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do the political calculus on this. And I think at a certain point we have to just stop and say, “They believe it.” They believe it. They believe bombs should be dropped on children. They just think it’s OK. They think it’s OK, or at the very least they think it’s the price of doing business.
That’s not an ethic I can align myself from, because, as I’ve said several times in this interview, I come from a history where people wanted to make the exact same calculus about us and took stances that we would now say are immoral. But, see, the test isn’t what you did in the past; the test is what you do in the moment right now. I’m a writer. I would be much more comfortable — I was working on a book about this. I would be much more comfortable sitting at home writing about this, before I’m here talking to you guys right now. It is not my nature to talk about things that I have not written about yet. But one has to balance one’s responsibility against the suffering, against the death, against the body count. And to see what is coming out of this White House right now is just — it’s morally reprehensible. Again, I don’t know how people sleep at night.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been talking about Dr. King. His daughter, Dr. Bernice King, who heads The King Center, lawyer, Martin Luther King’s youngest daughter, responded to a post by the comedian Amy Schumer, who shared a video of Dr. King condemning antisemitism and defending Israel’s right to exist. Bernice King wrote, quote, “Certainly, my father was against antisemitism. He also believed militarism (along with racism and poverty) to be among the interconnected Triple Evils. I am certain he would call for Israel’s bombing of Palestinians to cease,” Dr. Bernice King said. And so, if you could comment on this and also talk about how the issue of Palestinians, the Occupied Territories, the occupation, has been raised in the Black community, the Movement for Black Lives, for years now, and the pressure you come under when you do?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, and, look, I think it’s very, very important to talk about the force of antisemitism in history, indeed in American history, in fact. It’s a very, very, very real thing, and I don’t think you can understand the events of the moment without understanding that.
And I think, over the past few weeks especially, much has been made about the historic alliance between Black folks and Jewish activists and Jewish folks and that sort of thing. And it’s a very, very real thing. It’s a very, very important thing. But I think, like any alliance, it is at its best when it grounds itself in moral principle, not in a kind of gang truce, not in a kind of “I had your back, so you’ll have mine.” A moral alliance that is transactional is actually, in fact, not a moral alliance. And we have always been at our best — you know, when I think about the Jewish civil rights workers who went south and put their bodies on the line for the civil rights movement, I like to think — and I think it’s true — that that was not a transactional arrangement. That was not, you know, an attempt to say, “Look, I’m doing this because I think you’ll have my back in the future.” They did it because it was right. They did it based on principle.
And so, you know, I think some of the frustration that certain, certain people feel about the lack of African American support for this war comes from this notion that we should have people’s back as they drop bombs to try to defend a segregationist apartheid regime. We shouldn’t do that. And we haven’t done that. That’s the history that you allude to, I mean, going back to Angela Davis, to SNCC, to Black Lives Matter. I stand here, or I sit here, very, very humbly as a latecomer to the cause, but someone who has come to the cause nonetheless. We have to stand on principle, Ma’am. We have to stand on principle. And if I’m a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, I’m also a latecomer to the cause of nonviolence, but I’m here now. You know? And knowing what that has meant to our history, you know, to our — there is no way in the world that we can leverage the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, there’s no way in the world we can leverage the weight, the ancestry of our movement, in defense of a war, in defense of indiscriminate bombings on refugee camps. We just — we can’t do that. We can’t do that. We would be a disgrace to our ancestors.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ta-Nehisi, last night, just to end, you said — we’ve just spoken about the fact that it was so difficult for the Palestine Festival of Literature to find a venue for last night’s event. Your own books here in the U.S. have faced book bans, and yours aren’t the only ones, of course. But you’ve said that when people resort to these measures — book banning, limiting public discussions — these are weapons of a weak and a decaying order. Could you explain what you mean by that, and why there is, despite the horror of the moment, some scope for optimism?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I think if you — and a lot of this is, you know, actually from my time talking to Rashid Khalidi, Professor Rashid Khalidi up at Columbia. And one of the points he made — you know, I came back from Palestine, and I just was glass-eyed. I didn’t understand. I had this deep-seated feeling that, in fact, I had been lied to. And I began consulting people and talking to people. And so, I got to spend some time with Professor Khalidi.
And one of the things he said to me was, never has the movement — this is somebody who’s been fighting this war for his entire life. He said, “Never has the movement been as powerful as it is right now.” And, you know, I had to take that in. I also have to take in the fact that, like, when I think about what I did not know, and when I did not know, it wasn’t that I had competing sources and I didn’t know where to turn. The way I think Americans have traditionally, up until very recently, you know —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Ta-Nehisi.
TA-NEHISI COATES: — saw this struggle — sure. I’m sorry about that. I will just say that I’m very optimistic about the fight, and I think we’re going to win. I’ll leave it there. Sorry about that.
AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed writer, National Book Award winner, spoke at an event last night organized by Palestine Festival of Literature here in New York. We will link to the live stream.
Before we end, this update from Gaza: The Palestinian WAFA news agency is reporting at least 27 people were killed today in an Israeli bombing of an UNRWA school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 02, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/2/ ... transcript
As the overall death toll from Israel’s 27-day bombardment tops 9,000, we speak with Just Vision’s Fadi Abu Shammalah in Gaza about his family’s experiences on the ground as the besieged territory runs out of water, food and fuel. “We have only one thing: that we are being killed,” says Shammalah, who calls for Americans to “keep going” in demonstrations for Palestinian rights. “We are being killed by your taxes.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Gaza.
PALESTINIAN CHILD: [screaming]
NERMEEN SHAIKH: A Palestinian child screams out, “We did nothing wrong! We did nothing wrong!” as Israel bombs the Jabaliya refugee camp for a third day in a row, this time hitting a school run UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. At least 195 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza’s largest refugee camp in a series of devastating Israeli airstrikes in recent days. The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement, quote, “we have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
The overall death toll from Israel’s 27-day bombardment has topped 9,000, including 3,700 children. UNICEF is warning children are paying the heaviest price in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Khan Younis, where we’re joined by Fadi Abu Shammalah. He is Just Vision’s outreach associate in Gaza and the executive director of Gaza’s General Union of Cultural Centers. His recent op-ed for The New York Times is headlined “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?”
Fadi, if you can talk to us about the last few weeks through the eyes of your three children — Ali, 13; Karam, 10; and Adam, 5?
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: Thank you so much, Amy and Nermeen, for having me in this interview in a very critical situation.
I start from, from the heavy airstrike and the shelling over all of Gaza Strip every single minute that we have been bombed. The numbers talked about, 10,000 rockets have been launched over Gaza Strip. More than 12,000 of civilian people have been killed. Hundreds of people, civilian people, are still under rubbles, and [inaudible] are not able to rescue them and pull them out from under the rubbles.
Or should I talk about the entire neighborhoods that’s flattened, the road that is cut off, the water, the severe shortage of water, the severe shortage of food, fuel? We don’t have electricity for more than 20 days now or more. I don’t know, to talk about the UNRWA shelters, that it has around more than half-million of displaced people.
Israel asked us to evacuate the Gaza City and the north, because in there — and they killed, they assassinated, they targeted the convoy of cars while they were traveling and evacuating to the south of Gaza Strip. Should I talk about the live video that’s recorded by and broadcasted by a journalist, Palestinian local journalist? His name is Hassan Saifi. He filmed and recorded a video while the tank launched and bombed a civilian car while they were evacuating to the south.
What should I talk about? That we don’t have bread? That we don’t have water? We don’t have fuel. Nothing. We have only one thing: that we are being killed. There is — and, of course, with a green light with the international community, with the U.S. administration. This is the situation. People are scared. From what? For being killed. Really, we are having now a second Nakba, if you know it. The first one happened in 1948. We feel that it’s another Nakba that we are going through, to go through it.
The most horrible thing for us, that’s the officials. The Israeli officials say that we are human animals. Human animals? Animal humans? I don’t remember exactly. Like, we are treated like animals. You know what happen to animals? They’re slaughtered. So, we are slaughtered now by the Israeli genocide government. This is what’s happening now. Like, they now [inaudible]. This is what is going on here, a genocide. A real genocide and massacre is happening now. Like, in previous wars, we used to have like 10 persons of a family is killed. Now the whole building, the entire neighborhoods is bombed, flattened. It’s happening in Jabaliya for three days, in Nuseirat, in Khan Younis city, in every single mid-Gaza Strip cities. This is what is happening here now.
I’m a father of three kids, as you have mentioned. They think that I’m a hero. I’m not. I’m scared exactly like them. I’m scared of the bombing. I’m scared of not having water. We were lucky that we had yesterday, before yesterday, drinking water. We have been without drinking water for around a day. Like, we don’t have electricity here. Like, we are also lucky that we have two solar panels at the roof of my family. I’m evacuated, by the way. I’m originally living in Gaza City, but I’m already evacuated to my parents. So I’m so lucky that my parents’ home — are living in Khan Younis refugees camp.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fadi —
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: I can’t imagine that there’s millions — millions — [inaudible] evacuated their homes. Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fadi, you’re speaking now — as you said, the international community, led by the United States, has been supporting Israel absolutely in its operation in Gaza. If you could say, what is your message to Americans as Gaza is under this systemic — systematic military assault that is ongoing? And you’re describing the devastating conditions under which you and all these children, your own, of course, three children — but we’ve just said 3,700 children have been killed in Gaza. What is your message to Americans?
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: I would say that I’m so, so, so proud of the hundred thousands of Americans who went to demonstrate for us. We are here in Gaza Strip. Believe us, we are following the news, and we feel, like, more comfortable when we’re watching in TVs, like, thousands and hundreds of thousands of American peoples who went to the streets in order to support us, to express the sympathy and in solidarity with the Palestinian people here in Gaza Strip. That makes us more relaxed and comfortable that we are not alone, that there is a lot of people who they still have a live heart. That’s my message to you: Please keep going. We are listening to you. We are following you. I’m sure that no one can stop our voice, our voices for justice. Please keep doing what you’re doing now, because at the end, I’m sure that the U.S. administration will listen to you and stop, or at least [inaudible] the green light that it’s giving to the Israeli government of killing us.
But, please, this is your money. This is the taxes money that you are paying to the American administration. It’s used by buying bombs and rockets and providing it to [inaudible] government. We are being killed by your taxes now. Please say no to your administration, that’s [inaudible] this unlimited, unlimited and ongoing support. The Israeli occupation are checking the humanitarian aid that’s entered Gaza Strip. It’s milk for kids. It’s a medicine. It’s white flour for making bread. So, can you at least make double check this support by the American administration, where it goes, what it’s used for? It would be like our main priority for you guys in the U.S.
I will say it again, and I have mentioned it before, that I was in the U.S. in March, and I met tens of Americans, of people. I was so lucky that I have met them in March. I saw these people who have live hearts, who still have conscience, and they believe in justice. We are depending on these kind of people, who can stay the truth, and they can tell the truth, and they have the courages, and they are brave enough to say to their administration, that “Stop of standing with the massacre’s implementers, with the occupation.”
It’s not about Gaza. It’s not a war between Israel and Hamas anymore. It’s a war between the Israelis, in the most strong forces in the Middle East, against a civilian people. Like, look at West Bank. They don’t have Hamas there. How many one is killed since October 10 — 7? Sorry.
As Palestinians, we are off of the double standards by the international community. And I’m talking about the politicians, about the governments, not the people, because we also followed the great demonstration in the street in the European Union, also hundreds of thousands of people. Also in London, like half-million of British people were in the streets.
Come on, people all over the world know the truth. You can’t hide it. It happened in the past that a lot of media were hiding the truth. But now we have social media. We have Zoom. We have WhatsApp. We have a lot of applications that people in Gaza Strip and in Palestine that can use, and that we can keep telling the truth for what is going on now here in Gaza Strip. No one will stop us. We have a lot of English speakers. We will keep telling the truth loudly. We will not stop. We will keep speaking up, until the international community will respect our willing and self-determination and, of course, stop the horrific genocide that is happening now.
The numbers, again, the numbers of the killed people, it’s not the truth. Yeah, that’s right. It’s not the real number, of course, because we have a lot of missed people. We have a lot of killed people who are still under rubble, the rubbles. Another horrific number, by the way, it didn’t happen before, that the number of the injured people is double of the killed people. It’s horrible. Like, the bombing, they meant to kill the people while they are bombing the civilian peoples here. You can see. Of course, millions and billions of people over the TVs, they can watch. They can judge what is going on here. You can see. Like, come on! It’s entire neighborhoods. Entire neighborhoods, they bombed it. Like, it’s crazy. And, of course, if Israel has no one to tell them that they have to stop, they will keep killing us.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fadi, I want to ask —
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: They only — yes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask, Fadi, you — I mean, these attacks are taking place in response to the Hamas attack on October 7th. Obviously, as you’ve said, it’s a genocide that’s taking place. But I want to ask you about the response that Israel has had to nonviolent resistance by Palestinians. You wrote in 2018 a piece called “Why I March in Gaza.” Explain what the response was of Israel to this nonviolent resistance, the Great March of Return.
FADI ABU SHAMMALAH: Oh, that’s [inaudible], by the way. In fact, the Israeli provision is very [inaudible] in killing the Palestinians, even if they are struggling with nonviolence, even if they are staying at their homes, even if they are in West Bank. For example, they kept invading and invading the West Bank cities and towns, and they killed a lot of Palestinians there. And there is — by the way, like couple of months ago or few months ago, there is American old man. He had been detained under hard circumstances until he died. I mean, what this 67-years-old, that man, has done for the Israeli occupation?
Even when Palestinian — and, by the way, the nonviolent struggle, it didn’t happen and started in the 2018 in what we have named and called the Great March. The Palestinians were creative in starting the anniversary [inaudible] in the 1987, when the First Intifada happened, started. What happened there? Even so, the Israeli occupation were killing us, arresting us, shooting at us, demolishing homes. This is the policy of the — an apartheid country. That’s the — I’m so surprised sometimes when someone — as I watch an interview that’s like it’s defending on the Israeli occupation.
Like, we did it in 2018. We were marching. I was there. I participated there, and I was one of the witnesses of the Great Return March. What happened? Snipers. They were, like, [inaudible], if he will shoot the knee of the kids. I know many kids that they have been — their legs were amputated by the snipers. They killed more than 350 in this nonviolent resistance, and also what happened by the U.S. administration at that time. I mean, this [inaudible] eliminate, or I would love, of course, to be stopped. So, whenever and whatever the Palestinians will do, we will — I mean, Israel will keep killing us. It started before 1948, and it will keep going until they have the support from the European, with the U.S. administrations. They will keep killing us, until one day the entire world will believe, like, [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: Fadi Abu Shammalah, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Fadi is Just Vision’s outreach associate in Gaza, executive director of Gaza’s General Union of Cultural Centers, speaking to us from Khan Younis, which has also been bombed repeatedly. We’ll link to your New York Times piece, “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?”
Coming up, the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on a recent trip to the occupied West Bank and how it changed him. Stay with us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks Out Against Israel’s “Segregationist Apartheid Regime” After West Bank Visit
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 02, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/2/ ... transcript
As pressure builds for a ceasefire after 27 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates joins us in a broadcast exclusive interview to discuss his journey to Palestine and Israel and learning about the connection between the struggle of African Americans and Palestinians. “The most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is,” says Coates, who calls segregation in Palestine and Israel “evil.” “There’s no way for me, as an African American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.” Coates acknowledges the suppression of those advocating for Palestinian rights but says this is not new for Black writers and journalists. “I have to measure my fear against the misery that I saw.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As pressure builds for a ceasefire after 27 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we spend the rest of the hour with the acclaimed author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. This summer, he spoke at a literary festival in the West Bank that connected the Palestinian struggle with decolonization struggles around the world. In Ramallah, he opened his remarks with a comparison between the struggle of African Americans and Palestinians.
In recent weeks, Coates joined dozens of other writers and artists in signing “An Open Letter from Participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature,” that was published in The New York Review of Books and called for, quote, “the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine.”
AMY GOODMAN: Last night, Ta-Nehisi Coates participated in another event hosted by organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, in the James Chapel at Union Theological Seminary here in New York City. It was called “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.”
Ta-Nehisi is the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. We Were Eight Years in Power is another book, An American Tragedy, and his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle. His novel is titled The Water Dancer. In 2014, he wrote an award-winning cover story for The Atlantic magazine headlined “The Case for Reparations.”
Ta-Nehisi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, under extremely difficult circumstances. Last night, this remarkable event almost didn’t happen. I mean, it was in the James Chapel of Union Theological Seminary, but venue after venue had said no to this gathering. And without almost any publicity, well over a thousand people turned out, but the place only held 300, so people went over across the street to another place of 300, overcrowd, overflow, and then thousands watched on the live video stream. Can you talk about your experience being in the West Bank, going to the Occupied Territories, and how it changed you?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Oh wow. I spent 10 days in Palestine, in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper. I’ve had the great luxury over the past 10 years of seeing a few countries. I have not spent more time or seen more of another country or another territory than I did this summer.
I think what shocked me the most was, in any sort of opinion piece or reported piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I’ve read about Israel and about the conflict with the Palestinians, there’s a word that comes up all the time, and it is “complexity,” that and its closely related adjective, “complicated.” And so, while I had my skepticisms and I had my suspicions of the Israeli government, of the occupation, what I expected was that I would find a situation in which it was hard to discern right from wrong, it was hard to understand the morality at play, it was hard to understand the conflict. And perhaps the most shocking thing was I immediately understood what was going on over there.
Probably the best example I can think of is the second day, when we went to Hebron, and the reality of the occupation became clear. We were driving out of East Jerusalem. I was with PalFest, and we were driving out of East Jerusalem into the West Bank. And, you know, you could see the settlements, and they would point out the settlements. And it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the world where some people could vote and some people could not. And that was obviously very, very familiar to me. I got to Hebron, and we got out as a group of writers, and we were given a tour by our Palestinian guide. And we got to a certain street, and he said to us, “I can’t walk down this street. If you want to continue, you have to continue without me.” And that was shocking to me.
And we walked down the street, and we came back, and there was a market area. Hebron is very, very poor. It wasn’t always very poor, but it’s very, very poor. Its market area has been shut down. But there are a few vendors there that I wanted to support. And I was walking to try to get to the vendor, and I was stopped at a checkpoint. Checkpoints all through the city, checkpoints obviously all through the West Bank. Your mobility is completely inhibited, and the mobility of the Palestinians is totally inhibited.
And I was walking to the checkpoint, and an Israeli guard stepped out, probably about the age of my son. And he said to me, “What’s your religion, bro?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’m not really religious.” And he said, “Come on. Stop messing around. What is your religion?” I said, “I’m not playing. I’m not really religious.” And it became clear to me that unless I professed my religion, and the right religion, I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk forward. So, he said, “Well, OK, so what was your parents’ religion?” I said, “Well, they weren’t that religious, either.” He says, “What were your grandparents’ religion?” And I said, “My grandmother was a Christian.” And then he allowed me to pass.
And it became very, very clear to me what was going on there. And I have to say it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.
And so, the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Ta-Nehisi Coates, last night you were asked about the significance of Martin Luther King’s words on Vietnam. You said it’s taken you years to, quote, “understand nonviolence as an ethic” and that you understood that ethic in Israel. Could you explain?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, sure, I mean, and I think the thing to do is just to proceed off of what I said. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to the fight against segregation. His was a segregated society. The Occupied Territories are segregated, de jure segregated. It’s not, you know, hard to understand. There are different signs for where different people can go. There are different license plates forbidding different people from going different places. Now, what the authorities will tell you is that this is a security measure. But if you go back to the history of Jim Crow in this country, they would tell you the exact same thing. People always have good reasons, besides, you know, “I hate you, and I don’t like you,” to justify their right for imposing an oppressive regime on other people. It’s never quite that simple. And so, that was the first thing.
But the second thing I think that you’re referring to is, you know, I — you know, this is like really personal for me, because I came up in a time and in a place where I did not really understand the ethic of nonviolence. And by “ethic,” I mean the notion that violence itself is corrupting, that it corrupts the soul. And I didn’t quite understand that. If I’m truly honest with you, as much as I saw my relationship with the Palestinian people and as much as it was clear what the relationship was, it was at the same time clear that there was some sort of relationship with the Israeli people, too. And it wasn’t one that I particularly enjoyed, because I understood the rage that comes when you have a history of oppression. I understood the anger. I understood the sense of humiliation that comes when people subject you to just manifold oppression, to genocide, and people look away from that. I come from the descendants of 250 years of enslavement. I come from a people who sexual violence and rape is marked in our very bones and in our DNA. And I understand how when you feel that the world has turned its back on you, how you can then turn your back on the ethics of the world. But I also understood how corrupting that can be.
I was listening, actually, to my congressman last night, or I guess it was two nights ago, talk on the news. And a journalist asked him, “How many children, how many people must be killed to justify this operation? Is there an upper limit for the number of people that could be killed, when you would say, 'This is just too much. This just doesn't — this just doesn’t, you know, compute. This does not add up’?” And I will tell you, that congressman couldn’t give a number. And I thought, “That man has been corrupted. That man has lost himself. He’s lost himself in humiliation. He’s lost himself in vengeance. He has lost himself in violence.”
I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again: “the right to self-defense.” What about the right to dignity? What about the right to morality? What about the right to be able to sleep at night? Because what I know is, if I was complicit — and I am complicit — in dropping bombs on children, in dropping bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble sleeping at night. And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can sleep at night.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Ta-Nehisi, last night, as I said at the beginning, I think Union Theological was the fifth place that PalFest had turned to for this event. I want to point out who was there. Among the speakers was you, you know, a MacArthur “genius” fellow; was Michelle Alexander, the remarkable author and lawyer; Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University; and others. And you being at Union Theological, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King is known for that speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam,” that he gave across the street at Riverside Church, but he started at Union Theological. So many people came, he had to go across the street for it. But can you talk about this difficulty in speaking out? I mean, just last week, we spoke to Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is the Vietnamese American Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who was on a book tour for his latest memoir, and the 92nd Street Y, now known as 92NY, canceled his conversation about his memoir because he had signed on to a letter — I think it was signed by 750 other people — calling for a ceasefire. The U.N. secretary-general has called for a Gaza ceasefire. Can you talk about what it means to break the sound barrier, and if you were nervous about coming out and speaking about Gaza, about the West Bank, even going, to begin with, knowing what you would feel responsible for doing once you came out?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I wasn’t just nervous. I was afraid. You know, I hear people talk all the time about how fearlessness is a necessary quality. And I have never had that. I’ve never had that in my life, and I certainly have never had that in my career.
I spent five days with PalFest when I was over there, and then I spent another five days with a group of Israeli Jews. And I knew that whatever I was going to see — like, I had a sentiment. I couldn’t express it like I just expressed it for you right now, because, obviously, I hadn’t been there. But I had a sentiment that what I was going to see was not going to be great. And I know that, A, because of my upbringing, and I know that, B, because of my vocation as a journalist, you can’t behold evil and then return and not speak on it. And segregation is evil. There just is no — there’s no way for me, as an African American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.
One of the hardest things was to come back and then to read the rhetoric of certain African American politicians who are defending this regime. And I just — I couldn’t understand it. You know, I wanted to know if they had been to Hebron. You know, I wanted to know if they had been to Masafer Yatta, if they had been to Susiya, if they had been to Tuba. Had they seen? Had they really seen what is actually happening here? I don’t know how anybody who benefits, who stands on the shoulders of our ancestors’ struggle against Jim Crow, against segregation, could see what is happening right now, could see the bombs being dropped, 9,000 people dead, an ungodly number of them children, in service of Jim Crow and segregation, which we have exported, and be OK with that. I don’t — I don’t understand it.
So, yes, I have my fears. I do. I do. You know, I’m afraid right now, sitting here talking to you. But I have to measure my fear against the misery that I saw. I have to measure my fear against the promises that I made to the Palestinians who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts, to the Israeli Jews who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts, to the Holocaust survivors who welcomed me into their homes and gave me the facts. I have to measure it against my own ancestors, against Frederick Douglass, against Ida B. Wells, who certainly faced off against things that were much, much more perilous than going someplace, coming back and telling people what you saw. This is the minimum. It’s scary, but it’s also the minimum. And the fact that people are trying to suppress speech is not an excuse for you not to speak. It’s always been this way for Black writers and journalists. This is our tradition, you know? And so, I feel — as I do feel the fear, I also feel that I am in good company, because I’m in the company of my ancestors.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Ta-Nehisi, I want to ask you about the way in which this conflict is in fact being represented in the media and, as you pointed out, politicians, congressmembers, but also the White House. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the white supremacists who took part in the deadly —
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I saw it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: — Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. She made the comment in response to a question from Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
PETER DOOCY: Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?
PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: What I can say is what we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that. Remember, what the president decided to — when the president decided to run for president is what he saw in Charlottesville in 2017, when we — he saw neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Charlottesville with vile, antisemitic just hatred. And he was very clear then, and he’s very clear now. He’s taken actions against this over the past two years. And he’s continued to be clear: There is no place — no place — for this type of vile and despite — this kind of rhetoric.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Ta-Nehisi Coates, that’s the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Your response?
TA-NEHISI COATES: You know, I don’t want to personalize this. I’m sure she’s a very, you know, nice person and a very, very kind person. But, you see, all of us stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King. All of us stand on the shoulders of the nonviolent struggle. And on King’s birthday, the White House, like it’s done for years, stands up, and, you know, it praises Dr. King, and it talks about Dr. King as our modern-day prophet. I don’t know how these people do that and sleep at night. I don’t know how you compare people who are trying to stop a war, who are very much in the tradition of nonviolence, who are trying to stop bombs being dropped, literally, on refugee camps, to neo-Nazi protesters. It’s disgraceful, to use her own words. It’s disgraceful. It’s reprehensible. It is offensive, as far as I am concerned, to the shoulders on those whom we stand right now. I just — I don’t understand it.
I would extend this further. I mean, I think hearing President Biden himself — and here I will personalize it — downplay the number of Palestinian deaths, to say that he doesn’t believe the Palestinians, I just — when his own State Department was citing those figures only months ago, you know? At some point, you know, there’s that saying: When people show you who they are, you have to believe them. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do the political calculus on this. And I think at a certain point we have to just stop and say, “They believe it.” They believe it. They believe bombs should be dropped on children. They just think it’s OK. They think it’s OK, or at the very least they think it’s the price of doing business.
That’s not an ethic I can align myself from, because, as I’ve said several times in this interview, I come from a history where people wanted to make the exact same calculus about us and took stances that we would now say are immoral. But, see, the test isn’t what you did in the past; the test is what you do in the moment right now. I’m a writer. I would be much more comfortable — I was working on a book about this. I would be much more comfortable sitting at home writing about this, before I’m here talking to you guys right now. It is not my nature to talk about things that I have not written about yet. But one has to balance one’s responsibility against the suffering, against the death, against the body count. And to see what is coming out of this White House right now is just — it’s morally reprehensible. Again, I don’t know how people sleep at night.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been talking about Dr. King. His daughter, Dr. Bernice King, who heads The King Center, lawyer, Martin Luther King’s youngest daughter, responded to a post by the comedian Amy Schumer, who shared a video of Dr. King condemning antisemitism and defending Israel’s right to exist. Bernice King wrote, quote, “Certainly, my father was against antisemitism. He also believed militarism (along with racism and poverty) to be among the interconnected Triple Evils. I am certain he would call for Israel’s bombing of Palestinians to cease,” Dr. Bernice King said. And so, if you could comment on this and also talk about how the issue of Palestinians, the Occupied Territories, the occupation, has been raised in the Black community, the Movement for Black Lives, for years now, and the pressure you come under when you do?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, and, look, I think it’s very, very important to talk about the force of antisemitism in history, indeed in American history, in fact. It’s a very, very, very real thing, and I don’t think you can understand the events of the moment without understanding that.
And I think, over the past few weeks especially, much has been made about the historic alliance between Black folks and Jewish activists and Jewish folks and that sort of thing. And it’s a very, very real thing. It’s a very, very important thing. But I think, like any alliance, it is at its best when it grounds itself in moral principle, not in a kind of gang truce, not in a kind of “I had your back, so you’ll have mine.” A moral alliance that is transactional is actually, in fact, not a moral alliance. And we have always been at our best — you know, when I think about the Jewish civil rights workers who went south and put their bodies on the line for the civil rights movement, I like to think — and I think it’s true — that that was not a transactional arrangement. That was not, you know, an attempt to say, “Look, I’m doing this because I think you’ll have my back in the future.” They did it because it was right. They did it based on principle.
And so, you know, I think some of the frustration that certain, certain people feel about the lack of African American support for this war comes from this notion that we should have people’s back as they drop bombs to try to defend a segregationist apartheid regime. We shouldn’t do that. And we haven’t done that. That’s the history that you allude to, I mean, going back to Angela Davis, to SNCC, to Black Lives Matter. I stand here, or I sit here, very, very humbly as a latecomer to the cause, but someone who has come to the cause nonetheless. We have to stand on principle, Ma’am. We have to stand on principle. And if I’m a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, I’m also a latecomer to the cause of nonviolence, but I’m here now. You know? And knowing what that has meant to our history, you know, to our — there is no way in the world that we can leverage the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, there’s no way in the world we can leverage the weight, the ancestry of our movement, in defense of a war, in defense of indiscriminate bombings on refugee camps. We just — we can’t do that. We can’t do that. We would be a disgrace to our ancestors.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ta-Nehisi, last night, just to end, you said — we’ve just spoken about the fact that it was so difficult for the Palestine Festival of Literature to find a venue for last night’s event. Your own books here in the U.S. have faced book bans, and yours aren’t the only ones, of course. But you’ve said that when people resort to these measures — book banning, limiting public discussions — these are weapons of a weak and a decaying order. Could you explain what you mean by that, and why there is, despite the horror of the moment, some scope for optimism?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I think if you — and a lot of this is, you know, actually from my time talking to Rashid Khalidi, Professor Rashid Khalidi up at Columbia. And one of the points he made — you know, I came back from Palestine, and I just was glass-eyed. I didn’t understand. I had this deep-seated feeling that, in fact, I had been lied to. And I began consulting people and talking to people. And so, I got to spend some time with Professor Khalidi.
And one of the things he said to me was, never has the movement — this is somebody who’s been fighting this war for his entire life. He said, “Never has the movement been as powerful as it is right now.” And, you know, I had to take that in. I also have to take in the fact that, like, when I think about what I did not know, and when I did not know, it wasn’t that I had competing sources and I didn’t know where to turn. The way I think Americans have traditionally, up until very recently, you know —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Ta-Nehisi.
TA-NEHISI COATES: — saw this struggle — sure. I’m sorry about that. I will just say that I’m very optimistic about the fight, and I think we’re going to win. I’ll leave it there. Sorry about that.
AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed writer, National Book Award winner, spoke at an event last night organized by Palestine Festival of Literature here in New York. We will link to the live stream.
Before we end, this update from Gaza: The Palestinian WAFA news agency is reporting at least 27 people were killed today in an Israeli bombing of an UNRWA school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Sat Nov 04, 2023 12:20 am
Another Nakba? Israeli Intel Ministry Proposes Expelling Every Palestinian in Gaza to Egypt
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
A leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry dated less than one week after the October 7 Hamas attack proposes the permanent transfer of Gaza’s residents to Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the document’s authenticity but dismissed it as a mere “concept paper,” while Egypt and much of the Arab world has publicly opposed the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians. But the exposed plans have confirmed many Palestinians’ fears that Israel’s ultimate goal during its current offensive is their ethnic cleansing from Gaza, a reenactment of the 1948 Nakba that saw about 700,000 Palestinians pushed out of their homes and turned into refugees during the creation of Israel. For more, we hear from Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, a writer for +972 Magazine and Local Call, who says that while the Intelligence Ministry is not particularly powerful, “this is an official state document essentially recommending the government to carry out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” Meanwhile, radical settlers in the West Bank are increasingly using the war on Gaza as cover to push Palestinians out of their homes and villages, often under threat of lethal violence. “Death is now everywhere, and things are deteriorating really, really quickly,” says Abraham.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Israel is facing growing international condemnation for its 28-day assault on Gaza. More than 9,200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past four weeks, including at least 3,800 children, this according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.
On Thursday, a group of U.N. experts released a statement to express their, quote, “deepening horror” over Israel’s repeated airstrikes on the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest in Gaza, that have killed at least 195 people in recent days. The group of experts said, quote, “The Israeli airstrike on a residential complex in the Jabalia refugee camp is a brazen violation of international law — and a war crime. Attacking a camp sheltering civilians including women and children is a complete breach of the rules of proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians,” they said. Residents in Jabaliya say entire sections of the refugee camp have been leveled.
HASSAN AHMED RAYAN: [translated] The area has been completely destroyed. There are no Hamas fighters here. These are all civilians. They are all innocent people. No resistance here. There was a bakery here and houses. One of them had 100 people inside, and another had 50 people. This is destruction. This is a war against God and his prophet. It’s a war of extermination.
AMY GOODMAN: As Israeli troops encircle Gaza City and intensify its aerial bombardment, there are growing questions over Israel’s long-term plan for Gaza. One Israeli government office, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, has proposed the permanent transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. In a document dated October 14, the small governmental body stated the forced displacement of Gaza civilians to Egypt would, quote, “yield positive and long-term strategic results.” It lays out a three-stage process — the establishment of tent cities in Sinai and the opening of a humanitarian corridor, followed by construction of permanent cities in northern Sinai, and the creation of a, quote, “sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt” — and says, quote, “The return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel should not be allowed,” unquote.
Many Palestinians in northern Gaza have refused to follow Israeli orders to vacate their homes, out of fear they will never be allowed back. It’s unclear how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his Cabinet have responded to the proposals, but the Biden administration has publicly opposed plans for the mass transfer of Palestinians. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is in Israel today, where he’s reportedly seeking a humanitarian pause to the bombing. Blinken is also planning to travel to Jordan, where he’s expected to assure Jordan that the U.S. opposes transferring Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan.
For more, we’re joined by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem who reports for +972 Magazine and Local Call. He helped expose this proposal in his piece headlined “Expel all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.” Yuval has also reported on the growing number of attacks on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank. He joined us Wednesday during a rainstorm in Jerusalem. I asked him to talk about how he knows the document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is real.
YUVAL ABRAHAM: I know it’s true because I verified it in front of the Intelligence Ministry. And as you said, Amy, it’s a document that essentially asks the question: What will happen to Gaza’s civilian population after the war? And this Intelligence Ministry writes policy pieces and shares them with the defense establishment inside Israel. And, I mean, as you have mentioned, the 10-page document goes quite into detail and explicitly recommends this process of forced transfer. It also recommends to frame it in front of the international community as a humanitarian necessity, as something that is better than the alternatives that it poses in the documents, which is that the population will stay and die in their tens of thousands.
Now, I think it’s important to stress that this ministry is a small ministry. Despite its name, it does not actually deal with classified information, and it is not actually responsible for an Israeli intelligence organization. And it is not considered a very consequential or influential ministry in Israel. However, this is an official state document essentially recommending the government to carry out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And it has been written in a time when these ideas are making their way into the Israeli mainstream public discourse and to Israeli media.
I think, Amy, you know, a lot of us, a lot of people in Israel, are feeling shock. They feel a need that things will not return to the way they were before October 7th. They talk about security, especially after all of the atrocities that were committed by Hamas on October 7th, and the people who were illegally kidnapped and taken to Gaza and the murders. And I think we have politicians who have no political vision for the future. And they are, unfortunately, using this sense of wanting security to commit horrible and terrible war crimes in Gaza and killing already more than 3,000 children.
And I think this document and this bombing campaign are both a reflection of a worldview that only has force in its disposal to try and deal with a political problem. And the dangerous thing about this worldview is that it always fails. And when it fails, there are calls to use more force and more force. And if you push this worldview to the extreme, you will eventually end up with ideas like the ideas that we are reading about in this document.
And that’s why — and this is the final thing that for now I will say — that’s why, you know, as an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom. And if we do not have a long-term political vision for the future that will end the situation where I have rights and freedom of movement and a way to vote, and Palestinians who are living next to me don’t, we are not going to have security. And I am very worried that — you know, I feel that this war on Gaza will not bring us security, and it will end, even if we topple down Hamas, by killing so many Palestinian civilians, we will create the next Hamas. And I don’t think it’s — I think this killing is unjustifiable. And I worry that the next war will come, and they will say, you know, “It didn’t work. Now we have to use even more force and even more force.” And even though this document right now might not seem feasible, I think this is the dangerous route that we are currently in. And this is why it’s so important to contextualize things and talk about a long-term political solution to the problem. And our leaders are not doing that right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval, can you talk about where this document comes from, who it went to and how real it is?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yes. So, this document came from the Intelligence Ministry, which has a very small budget. And it seems like they have initiated it. They usually send out their documents to the Israeli different government offices and to intelligence organizations and the Israeli security establishment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what it means to have exposed it, and how they’re responding?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. You know, for me, this is very, very worrying and troubling, because the government has not really acknowledged the paper at all. And none of us really know what the endgame of the government is in Gaza. I think in Israeli media, it has been downplayed as something that is going to harm Israel’s legitimacy for the war abroad. A lot of people are not taking it very seriously. This ministry is not considered, as I said, a very influential ministry. But we did not hear any clear and cut rejection of the document by the government. And yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the right-wing Israeli Misgav Institute is, who has a similar proposal?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Sure, yeah. It’s a very interesting and strange story. So, this right-wing think tank called Misgav, which is headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, who was — he’s a very close associate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he’s a very senior former Israeli security figure. And they published, a little over two weeks ago, a report that has the same identical conclusion, that Israel needs to transfer, forcibly transfer, all the civilians in Gaza, in Gaza to Egypt.
And this report was authored and written by Amir Weitmann, who is also a Likud member and an associate of Gila Gamliel, which is the Likud member who heads the Ministry of Intelligence, who wrote a report with the same conclusions. Now, these connections between the Likud and the right-wing think tank are also apparent because a month ago the Ministry of Intelligence has hired this Misgav Institute to carry out research as a freelancer for the government ministry.
Now, officially, the Ministry of Intelligence — you know, I’ve spoken to sources there — they’re claiming, you know, “This document, we completely stand behind the recommendation, and we offered it independently.” If you asked me, it’s very clear that there is a mix here between the government ministry and this extreme right-wing think tank. And it all seems to be coming back to different sorts of officials in the ruling party, the Likud.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the role of Egypt? Earlier this month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he would reject the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians into Sinai, which is Egypt. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT ABDEL FATTAH EL-SISI: [translated] Egypt rejects any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue by military means or through the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land, which would come at the expense of the countries of the region. The idea of displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt simply means that a similar situation will occur by the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan. This means that the idea of a Palestinian state that we are discussing and that the international community is discussing will no longer be possible.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s what President Sisi said, the Egyptian president. And this just came in from Ynet. Middle East Eye reported on the Israeli news outlet, saying, “Israel is proposing writing off a significant chunk of Egypt’s international debts through the World Bank to entice the cash-strapped Abdel Fattah el-Sisi government to open its doors for displaced Palestinians.” Again, that’s according to the Israeli Ynet news site. Yuval?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Wow. Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that the fact that Egypt is refusing to open its borders is one of several reasons why this forced transfer plan will not manifest. You know, I think that it is a feasible scenario, if they do open their borders and tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians leave Gaza, that at least some of them will not be allowed to return. This has happened in 1967 and 1948.
And the document, which, by the way, you can read in full on the +972 Magazine website or the Local Call website, actually deals with this. It says — it reads in the document that Egypt will have an obligation under humanitarian law to allow for Palestinian civilians to flee and enter and find refuge in its territory. And it calls on enlisting the United States and other Western countries to pressure Egypt to do this. Now, you know, everything — we’re in a situation of extreme fog, and it’s unclear how this will develop, but the fears are completely justifiable.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval, I want to thank you for bearing through this rainfall in Jerusalem. But I wanted to go to another piece —
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to another piece that you’ve written, saying, the headline, “Settlers take advantage of Gaza war to launch West Bank pogroms.” While the U.S. government, before Hamas’s surprise October 7th attack that killed up to 1,400 Israelis — the U.S. government, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, something like 10 days before, said the Middle East is quiet now, and we can move on to other issues. But, in fact, in the West Bank, it was the deadliest year in years, right? You had more than a Palestinian a day being killed either by the Israeli military or Jewish settlers. And now, since October 7th, Israeli settler attacks have resulted in at least 115 Palestinian deaths, more than 2,000 injured, nearly 1,000 others forced to flee their homes. Can you talk about what it’s like to be in the West Bank, this increased Jewish settler violence? And also, you have a friend who was the target of the violence?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yes, yes, Amy, of course. I mean, I’ve just received a text message 123 Palestinians have been already killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the war, and seven of them have been actually murdered by Israeli settlers. And I spend a lot of my time in the West Bank, specifically in a region called Masafer Yatta, which is a region in the southern edge of the West Bank, a community of villages that for decades have faced really intense pressure and violence from the Israeli army, that constantly destroys their homes and refuses to give them permits, and from settlers that have been attacking them. And I think what is happening now is that settlers and soldiers are using this chaos of the war to continue and to end sort of this forced transfer.
And it was extremely horrifying to be there over the past few nights. We’ve had incidents where settlers entered one village — it’s called Susiya. They grabbed a boy and his father, and they told them, “You have 24 hours to leave the village, or we are going to murder everybody in the village.” We had an incident where one settler went down to the village and actually shot a Palestinian who was standing next to the mosque. There are incidents of torture, of abuse, of humiliation. And it’s happening every night. Like, I stayed up last night with a family. They’re not sleeping. And everybody is just — like, we see the settlers entering the village.
And I think that, you know, according to human rights organization, Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 13 Palestinian communities have already been displaced in the West Bank due to this settler violence. And yeah, and it will just increase and increase as long as the war continues, the bombing on Gaza continues and this situation continues.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, this is a man who, what, in the last 15 years was convicted in Israeli court of being — supporting a terrorist organization and inciting violence against Palestinians. He announced the purchasing of 10,000 rifles for Israelis in West Bank settlements. Can you talk about what that means? Has that been carried out? And what supporting settler violence — what that means, particularly now?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, of course. So, what is going on right now is a complete inability to even differentiate between who is a soldier and who is a settler. Is it a settler that is in reserves? Is it a settler that received a weapon from Ben-Gvir and put on, you know, his army uniform? Are these soldiers? There is a complete confusion. And we are seeing a lot of, quote-unquote, “independent settler initiatives,” where they are putting on soldier uniforms and going into villages and harassing Palestinians. This is happening all over Area C. This is the way the military refers to it, which is essentially all of the open territories in the West Bank, where there are 180 small Palestinian villages and all the Israeli settlements. And Israel’s policy for many years has been to try to forcibly evict these 180 communities.
And I think now with many more settlers receiving weapons, with all of these incidents of murder and threats, this eviction is taking place. And I think, definitely, the arming of so many people is part of that process, which is, you know, understood in Israeli society also as a response to October the 7th, the need of people to be armed to be able to defend themselves. At least in the West Bank, these weapons are used to evict Palestinians from their homes.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, how have Israeli activists and international charities been involved in supporting Palestinians in the West Bank?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: So, I’m not sure about international charities. I mean, I know that a lot of them have supplied these communities that are at risk of forced transfer, little homes that you can live in, because Israel always comes and destroys their homes. They can’t get building permits. And it was extremely ironic. Like, I was in a village called Zenuta, in this area of Masafer Yatta, two days ago, and the residents were dismantling all of these homes using their own hands. And they were essentially leaving the village. I spoke to a 70-year-old person who told me that — you know, we drank tea, and he said, “This is probably the last time I will drink tea in this place that I grew up in.” So, these international organizations — you know, all of this support is now just being dismantled by the residents, who are afraid for their lives.
I think what we, as Israeli activists, are trying to do there — and this is also not always working, but the fact that we are Israeli, the fact that we speak Hebrew, gives us a certain privilege. And when these attacks happen, we try to deescalate the situation. We try to make sure that the settlers that are attacking the village see us, that we are first, that we can film them, that there are journalists here. We try to talk in Hebrew. But things — you know, death is now everywhere, and things are deteriorating really, really quickly. And I feel like all of the things that we were previously doing are now not working.
And, you know, again, I have to ask the world to wake up, to call for a ceasefire. If we continue to destroy Gaza like this, it will destroy us, as well. We will not have security in the future, and it will destroy the West Bank and the possibility of ever living here in equality and in peace between Israelis and Palestinians. So it’s time to change course and talk about the political issues at hand.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem who reports for +972 Magazine and Local Call. We’ll link to his article “Expel all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.”
When we come back, we speak to Josh Paul. He recently resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Palestine. Back in 30 seconds.
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State Department Official Resigns, Says Israel Is Using U.S. Arms to Massacre Civilians in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned last month to protest continued arms sales to Israel amid its bombardment of Gaza, writing in a viral letter that one-sided U.S. support for Israel is “shortsighted,” “destructive” and “contradictory.” Media reports say many others inside the State Department are equally frustrated with the U.S. role in the conflict. Paul tells Democracy Now! he tried to raise his concerns with his superiors but found “no appetite for that discussion” and that unlike all other U.S. arms sales that take humanitarian concerns into account, Israel gets a blank check. Paul says the overall message inside the Biden administration is: “Don’t question the policy because it’s coming from the top.”
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.
Amidst growing international condemnation of Israel’s monthlong assault on Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back in Israel today to meet with Israeli officials, where he continued to emphasize Israel’s right to defend itself following the October 7th Hamas attack. Meanwhile, the White House continues to dismiss calls for a full ceasefire, saying instead any pauses in fighting should be temporary and localized.
This comes as the independent news outlet In These Times reports the White House has requested an unprecedented loophole in arms spending to allow it to, quote, “be able to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy, without oversight from Congress or the public,” unquote, “even as experts say Israel has been using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit war crimes,” unquote.
Meanwhile, a new HuffPost report cites five current and one recently departed State Department official who say their, quote, “expertise and standard decision-making processes are being treated as largely irrelevant to President Joe Biden’s strategy on the war, which prioritizes support for Israel,” unquote. One official described, quote, “particular concern about the town hall for the department’s branch on human rights. Managers, who described the branch as ’State’s conscience,’ indicated that they aren’t sure if they are getting through to more senior officials.”
For more, we’re joined by Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned last month in protest of Biden’s push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst its siege on Gaza, calling it “shortsighted,” “destructive” and “contradictory.” In his resignation letter, that went viral, Josh Paul wrote, quote, “We cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse. … I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people — and is not in the long term American interest,” unquote. Josh Paul is former director of congressional and public affairs for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in the State Department, which oversees arms transfers to Israel and other foreign nations.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh Paul.
JOSH PAUL: Thank you very much for having me. I’m glad to join you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you elaborate on why you decided to resign — you’re a veteran State Department official — why you said no?
JOSH PAUL: Yes, thank you. I decided to resign for three reasons, the first and most pressing of which is the very, I believe, uncontroversial fact that U.S.-provided arms should not be used to massacre civilians, should not be used to result in massive civilian casualties. And that is what we are seeing in Gaza and what we were seeing, you know, very soon after the October 7th horrific attack by Hamas. I do not believe arms should be — U.S.-provided arms should be used to kill civilians. It is that simple.
Secondly, I also believe that, you know, as your previous guest identified, there is no military solution here. And we are providing arms to Israel on a path that has not led to peace, has not led to security, neither for Palestinians nor for Israelis. It is a moribund process and a dead-end policy.
And yet, when I tried to raise both of these concerns with State Department leadership, there was no appetite for discussion, no opportunity to look at any of the potential arms sales and raise concerns about them, simply a directive to move forward as quickly as possible. And so I felt I had to resign.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about that. Talk more about what kind of dialogue goes on at the State Department and if you, for example, have met with Tony Blinken, the secretary of state, not to mention President Biden, to voice your concerns. And what about other veteran State Department officials?
JOSH PAUL: So, typically, there is a very robust policy process in the State Department for arms transfers. And there are a lot of those, right? So, we’re talking about about 20,000 arms sale cases a year that the State Department processes, which could be anything from bullets to radios to fighter jets. And for each of those, there is a lengthy process, sometimes, that looks at, you know, what are the pros and cons of the sale, what are its human rights implications. That has not happened in this context for Israel. And as I say, when I raised those concerns against the existing laws, against the existing policies, there was no appetite for that discussion.
I have not personally spoken to Secretary Blinken about this, nor, certainly, to President Biden. But I know that in the time since I left, there has been increasing discussion within the State Department, but has not led to any change of policies. In fact, as you heard earlier on your show, Vice President Harris was just saying yesterday that we will not place any conditions whatsoever on our arms to Israel. And that is unlike any arms transfer decision I’ve ever been a part of. There’s always discussion about should we condition this to address human rights issues.
AMY GOODMAN: So, who is leading this, Josh Paul? Who is preventing this? Who is suppressing all of this discussion within the State Department?
JOSH PAUL: I honestly think, in some ways, that it’s coming from the very top of the U.S. government and from the Biden White House. You know, there are many in the State Department, and across government, who have reached out to me in recent weeks, since I left, to express their support, but also to say how difficult and how horrific they are finding U.S. policy, and yet are being told, when they try to raise these concerns, “Look, you can get emotional support if you’re finding this difficult. We’ll find you something else to work on. But don’t question the policy, because it’s coming from the top.”
AMY GOODMAN: The HuffPost has this new piece that reports, “A task force on preventing atrocities did not meet until two weeks into the war, and officials say department leaders are telling them their expertise won’t affect policy.” Explain what goes on.
JOSH PAUL: So, whenever there is a crisis, as there is right now in Israel and Gaza, the department sets up a task forces or multiple task forces that are uniquely shaped to address that crisis. So, for example, in the context of an earthquake, they might bring in experts on refugee issues, on weather issues, on disease issues, you know, that sort of broad swath of people.
In the context of Gaza, they have set up a task force to look at this problem, but, according to the report you cite, it does not include the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, who are responsible for U.S. support to refugee issues. So, it is either a stunning oversight, or it is an intentional disregard for the humanity of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: At a meeting on October 26th, a State Department source told you they recalled a top official advising staff to shift their focus away from Israel-Palestine and seek to make a difference in other parts of the world?
JOSH PAUL: So, I don’t believe that that was a conversation that I had with someone, but that is in the same report in The Huffington Post that you cite, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, they’re directing them not even to make comments on this, just stop talking about Israel-Palestine.
JOSH PAUL: Yes, that’s right. And I think, look, I mean, that reflects a tension or a censorship — right? — that we are seeing not only in the U.S. government. I think what’s interesting here is this censorship that has existed and expanded to colleges and universities, where you talked about the doxing. I’ve also heard from many people across the American private sector, both from the Arab American community but also more broadly, from all sorts of diverse communities, who have said, “We are afraid to speak up on this, because we are in fear of our jobs.” It’s the same climate in government. And that is just not American.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to ask you about this In These Times report that the White House has requested an unprecedented loophole in arms spending to allow it to be able to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy, without oversight from Congress or the public.
JOSH PAUL: Yeah. So, we provide Israel with $3.3 billion a year in foreign military financing, which is the State Department and U.S. government’s primary functional — primary mechanism for funding the sale of arms to other countries. Of note, you know, we typically provide — setting aside Ukraine — about $6 billion a year in foreign military financing around the world. So Israel already gets more than half of that.
The language in the supplemental request that the Biden administration set up — sent up would remove the requirement to notify Congress of any arms sales conducted under that funding. Typically, there is a process where, for any major defense sale, Congress is notified of it. And there’s actually a process prior to the formal notification where Congress gets to ask questions, poke, prod, delay, and then, if it wishes to oppose the sale, can raise a joint resolution of disapproval on the floor. What this proposal would do is, essentially, destroy all of that, remove all of that, remove that congressional oversight, remove that congressional ability to object. It is unprecedented. I have never seen anything like it. And I cannot imagine that the committees of jurisdiction are viewing it very favorably, because it is just such a damaging approach that also sets horrible precedent for other countries with whom future administrations may decide they don’t want Congress to be involved.
AMY GOODMAN: Since you were in charge of arms sales, what does this $14 billion that — well, it looks like both houses want to send it to Israel.
JOSH PAUL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s just that the House one is controversial because they want to take that $14 billion from the IRS, and also they want to sever the funding for Israel from the funding for Ukraine. And Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, says he won’t consider this bill. But it sounds like there is enough support in both houses for that extra — not the $3.8 billion or $3.3 billion yearly aid to Israel, but an extra $14 billion. You’re the expert on arms sales. What would it be used for?
JOSH PAUL: Yeah, and let me just say, I think there is, you know, almost or near-unanimous congressional support for this further military assistance to Israel. And I think what’s fascinating about that is also there’s a massive disconnect between where Congress is on these issues and where, I think, if you look at the polling, the American public are. And I think the current crisis is really crystallizing that difference. I don’t think it will make any difference in terms of the passage of this package, but it may do down the line.
With regards to this package specifically, it includes $3.5 billion in foreign military financing. Israel can draw on that to purchase essentially what it wants. And what’s unusual about this, as well, in addition to the removal of the notification, is that Israel would be entitled, under the proposal sent to Congress, to spend all of this money within its own defense industry. Israel is, of course, a top 10 exporter of arms around the world, often competing with the United States. And the idea that we will be providing funding to subsidize that competition is really unimaginable.
But on top of that, the package also provides further funding from the Defense Department side for air and missile defense for Israel, for Iron Dome. And let me be clear: My concern here is on lethal assistance to Israel. When it comes to protecting civilians from rocket attacks, I believe that they should be. I don’t believe anyone should have to live in fear of their homes — in their homes from rockets raining down on them, although I believe that’s the case whether they are in Israel under the Iron Dome or whether they are in Gaza, for example. And, of course, we never ask that question.
The funding, finally, would also include research and development funding for equipment, such as there is an experimental laser project called Iron Beam, which the U.S. and Israel are working together on, an air and missile defense system. If this is an emergency request, why are we looking at research and development for projects that have not even materialized yet? That doesn’t sound like an emergency to me. So, as with the arms transfers I saw when I was departing from the department, I think there is just a rush to push everything they can while they feel there is a window of political opportunity here where there will be no significant opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of response was there to your resignation?
JOSH PAUL: So, to my resignation, I would say there has been an overwhelming response that I have heard from folks or from colleagues inside not only in the State Department, but across the U.S. government, actually, on the Hill, in the Defense Department, in the uniformed military services, including in combatant commands around the world. People have reached out to me to say, you know, “We fully agree with you.” You know, obviously, everyone has their own personal circumstances. You know, I think if we had universal healthcare, it would make it a bit easier for people to stand up on principle. I myself am, you know, trying to figure out what I do next on healthcare. But the point is that so many people have reached out to say, “We hear you. We agree with you.”
And I think, you know, one of the things I found is that a lot of people can be in individual offices and say, “There is no — I can’t speak up, because I will lose my job. I will put my career in jeopardy. And there’s no one else here I can talk to.” And yet I’m hearing from someone else just a few desks over who is saying the same thing. So I think there really is a communications crisis, a transparency crisis within the U.S. government, and a policy crisis, because when you can’t talk about foreign policy, when you can’t debate, when you can’t criticize, you don’t end up with good policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Paul, why was this the last straw for you? I mean, for example, if you were in charge of weapons sales, presumably you were dealing with Saudi Arabia, notoriously authoritarian. U.S. agencies concluded, even in just one case, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for this. You oversaw arms sales to them, presumably. Why Israel?
JOSH PAUL: So, let me just be clear: I was one of multiple people involved in the arms sales process. Arms sales themselves are a presidential authority that is delegated to the secretary of state, and then, through the secretary of state, to the undersecretary, who is actually responsible for approving them, for the most part. But you’re right. And as I said in my resignation letter, in my time in the department, I dealt with many morally challenging, controversial arms sales.
I think what made the difference for me here is that for all of those previous instances, even under the Trump administration, mind you, there was always room for discussion and debate and the ability to mitigate some of the worst possible outcomes, to delay sales until crises had passed, so that they weren’t contributing immediately into a humanitarian crisis, to work with Congress and be confident that once the policy debate had ended in the State Department, there would be a congressional piece to it, too. And Congress generally has stood up in the past repeatedly on matters of human rights and arms sales. What was different here was that there was none of that. There was no debate. There was no space for debate. And there was also no congressional appetite or willingness to have debate.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s going to be a major march in Washington tomorrow. Three hundred fifty people were arrested in Philly. We’re going to play some clips of a major protest in Boston that happened last night. How much does grassroots protest like this, the thousands of people who are protesting around the country, the shutdown of Grand Central by Jewish groups just last Friday night, have on the State Department, on the White House?
JOSH PAUL: So, I don’t think it has much impact on the State Department. And that’s OK, because I think policy processes are meant to happen within a policy framework, [inaudible] and the problem is they’re not happening.
I think it does have an impact on the White House. I think we’ve seen a significant change in tone in the last few weeks, not because there is a sudden deep care, frankly, for Palestinian civilian casualties on their own merits, but because there is a sense that there is a political crisis here developing for the Biden administration, that many people are saying, you know, “We’re just going to sit out the next election. We have lost faith in this White House, in this administration.” So, I think that does have an impact.
And let me also say I have found it incredibly moving, as well, to watch these protests. You know, I was up on the Hill for meetings this week and last week and came across, in one office, a sit-in that was happening, where there was a group of Jewish students singing peace songs and holding up signs that said “Save Gaza.” I found that incredibly moving. And I think it also tells Congress and it tells this administration that they are not in line with much of American public opinion. I think it’s a much-needed message.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Paul, veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned last month in protest of a push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst the attack on Gaza, thanks so much for joining us.
JOSH PAUL: Thank you very much for having me.
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Boston Interfaith Rally Urges Senators Warren & Markey to Support Gaza Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
At least 23 people were arrested in Boston on Thursday as faith leaders and clergy led a peace rally to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The interfaith protest targeted Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to pressure them to stand up for Palestinian lives. We share footage and voices from the rally.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We end today’s show with voices from the streets of Boston, where hundreds of faith leaders and clergy rallied Thursday to demand Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey support a ceasefire.
PROTESTER 1: Our elected officials must act. They need to hear from us. We are going to meet with them today. We’re going to send a delegation of faith leaders to bring our letters, our prayers. We are grounded in faith, in many faiths, in many spiritual traditions. We have so many people in our bones. We have the moral courage that our elected officials do not have. And we will keep acting until they have it.
And now we’ll hear from Shir Lovett-Graff, a Jewish community and spiritual leader.
SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: My grief, our grief, is used by the Israeli military, funded by the United States, to enact violence on thousands of Palestinians every day. How can we navigate this grief when it is used to fuel rhetoric that is Islamophobic, racist and antisemitic?
PROTESTER 2: We’re going to begin walking. We’ll follow the banner that says “ceasefire.” And we’ll be praying with our feet.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
NAKIYA HUSSAIN: My name is Nakiya Hussain [phon.]. We’re watching a genocide unfold. I think that the fact our tax dollars are going to pay for this is horrifying. I want change. I want us to see humanity and care about all lives.
PROTESTERS: Hey, Warren, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today! Hey, Warren, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today!
ELSA: My name is Elsa. I’m the daughter of Holocaust refugees. And I’m here because it’s outrageous to me the Israeli government is committing genocide in the name of people like my parents. And I work with Jewish Voice for Peace. We demand a ceasefire now, before even more innocent lives get lost.
JILL: I’m Jill. I’m active in Jewish Voice for Peace. I am here to demand Senator Warren declare a ceasefire and to stand up for justice. She usually does stand up for justice in different kinds of ways. For some reason, she just can’t seem to stand up for Palestinian lives. They are bombing everything — churches, hospitals, roads. There’s no place to go. So we are demanding Warren to do the right thing.
PROTESTERS: When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Ceasefire! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!
RAMI: My name is Rami. I am here today marching because I think we need to have a ceasefire. I think it’s really important that the world see that Jewish community believes in a ceasefire and thinks that what Israel is doing right now is wrong, and that the Jewish community is not a monolith, and there isn’t one uniform perspective standing with Israel on this one.
PROTESTERS: Hey, Markey, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today! Hey, Markey, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today!
LEORA: My name is Leora. I am a rabbi in Jamaica Plain. Anyone who’s here today might be risking things to be here, relationships or employment. And I’m so proud to be here, across many kinds of difference and united in our call for a ceasefire now. We mourn for all of the dead, and we fight for all of the living.
MOHANAD MOSSALAM: Even refugee camps and hospitals are not safe.
My name is Mohanad Mossalam. I am a khatib here in Massachusetts, in Malden. If ceasefire is not now, when will it be? Are they waiting for the entire population of Gaza to be completely wiped out? Are they waiting for 10 more thousand, 20 more thousand people dying before they call for ceasefire? Enough is enough.
PROTESTERS: I do not come here alone. I carry my people in my bones.
PROTESTER 3: So, we’re here at the office of Senator Warren. We’re a group of faith leaders across the spectrum of the world’s religions, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza right now. Children are dying. That blood is on our hands if we stand silent. And we can be silent no longer.
PROTESTER 4: We’re so glad you’re here, and we’re so grateful for those inside.
LEORA: Inside, a number of people are occupying the lobby of the federal building. They will be there until the senators call for a ceasefire or until they are escorted out.
PROTESTER 5: I’m now very glad to introduce Boston City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who introduced the ceasefire resolution to Boston City Council.
TANIA FERNANDES ANDERSON: Peace and love to everyone. As-salamu alaykum. Shalom. And peace in every language. Paz sea contigo. I am here to simply repeat and echo your heartfelt sentiments and your fight and your tears and all of your sacrifice and your bravery for being here, and for every day that you’ve sacrificed, for every night that you’ve looked through social media, the tears that you’ve shed, the prayers that you’ve put out into the universe.
PROTESTER 6: They’re arresting people now.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
REV. REDEEM ROBINSON: Reverend Redeem Robinson. What’s happening right now is a grave injustice. We have faith leaders here who come to pray and demand that Senator Warren calls for a ceasefire, and people are being arrested? This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all. We are calling on Senator Warren to call for a ceasefire. She has a moral duty as a Christian woman to call for a ceasefire. She got faith leaders here at her office being arrested. This is a shame.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
HILARY RANTISI: We have been grieving, grieving the killing of our people, the grieving — grieving our fragmentation, the separation of our people into different enclaves, into different areas — West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem.
My name is Hilary Rantisi. So, when you ask a Palestinian where they’re from, they will tell you where they’re from, from before 1948. My family is from — both from Lydda and from Gaza. I was born in Jerusalem, and I grew up in Ramallah. So, as a Palestinian, I have a West Bank ID that only allows me to travel to Ramallah, to be in the West Bank. I can’t go to Jerusalem, where I was born. I can’t go to Gaza, where my grandmother is from. And I can’t go to Lydda, where my father was born and his father was born. But, for me, I am from all these places, and you can’t separate Gaza from me, you can’t separate Jerusalem from me, you can’t separate Lydda from me. So I’m here as a Palestinian recognizing the pain and all the history that all of my family and my ancestors have borne for all these years.
PROTESTERS: Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from protest in Boston last night calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. At least 23 people were arrested. This comes as 13 Democratic senators call for short-term cessation of hostilities in Gaza.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
A leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry dated less than one week after the October 7 Hamas attack proposes the permanent transfer of Gaza’s residents to Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the document’s authenticity but dismissed it as a mere “concept paper,” while Egypt and much of the Arab world has publicly opposed the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians. But the exposed plans have confirmed many Palestinians’ fears that Israel’s ultimate goal during its current offensive is their ethnic cleansing from Gaza, a reenactment of the 1948 Nakba that saw about 700,000 Palestinians pushed out of their homes and turned into refugees during the creation of Israel. For more, we hear from Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, a writer for +972 Magazine and Local Call, who says that while the Intelligence Ministry is not particularly powerful, “this is an official state document essentially recommending the government to carry out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” Meanwhile, radical settlers in the West Bank are increasingly using the war on Gaza as cover to push Palestinians out of their homes and villages, often under threat of lethal violence. “Death is now everywhere, and things are deteriorating really, really quickly,” says Abraham.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Israel is facing growing international condemnation for its 28-day assault on Gaza. More than 9,200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past four weeks, including at least 3,800 children, this according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.
On Thursday, a group of U.N. experts released a statement to express their, quote, “deepening horror” over Israel’s repeated airstrikes on the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest in Gaza, that have killed at least 195 people in recent days. The group of experts said, quote, “The Israeli airstrike on a residential complex in the Jabalia refugee camp is a brazen violation of international law — and a war crime. Attacking a camp sheltering civilians including women and children is a complete breach of the rules of proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians,” they said. Residents in Jabaliya say entire sections of the refugee camp have been leveled.
HASSAN AHMED RAYAN: [translated] The area has been completely destroyed. There are no Hamas fighters here. These are all civilians. They are all innocent people. No resistance here. There was a bakery here and houses. One of them had 100 people inside, and another had 50 people. This is destruction. This is a war against God and his prophet. It’s a war of extermination.
AMY GOODMAN: As Israeli troops encircle Gaza City and intensify its aerial bombardment, there are growing questions over Israel’s long-term plan for Gaza. One Israeli government office, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, has proposed the permanent transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. In a document dated October 14, the small governmental body stated the forced displacement of Gaza civilians to Egypt would, quote, “yield positive and long-term strategic results.” It lays out a three-stage process — the establishment of tent cities in Sinai and the opening of a humanitarian corridor, followed by construction of permanent cities in northern Sinai, and the creation of a, quote, “sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt” — and says, quote, “The return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel should not be allowed,” unquote.
Many Palestinians in northern Gaza have refused to follow Israeli orders to vacate their homes, out of fear they will never be allowed back. It’s unclear how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his Cabinet have responded to the proposals, but the Biden administration has publicly opposed plans for the mass transfer of Palestinians. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is in Israel today, where he’s reportedly seeking a humanitarian pause to the bombing. Blinken is also planning to travel to Jordan, where he’s expected to assure Jordan that the U.S. opposes transferring Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan.
For more, we’re joined by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem who reports for +972 Magazine and Local Call. He helped expose this proposal in his piece headlined “Expel all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.” Yuval has also reported on the growing number of attacks on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank. He joined us Wednesday during a rainstorm in Jerusalem. I asked him to talk about how he knows the document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is real.
YUVAL ABRAHAM: I know it’s true because I verified it in front of the Intelligence Ministry. And as you said, Amy, it’s a document that essentially asks the question: What will happen to Gaza’s civilian population after the war? And this Intelligence Ministry writes policy pieces and shares them with the defense establishment inside Israel. And, I mean, as you have mentioned, the 10-page document goes quite into detail and explicitly recommends this process of forced transfer. It also recommends to frame it in front of the international community as a humanitarian necessity, as something that is better than the alternatives that it poses in the documents, which is that the population will stay and die in their tens of thousands.
Now, I think it’s important to stress that this ministry is a small ministry. Despite its name, it does not actually deal with classified information, and it is not actually responsible for an Israeli intelligence organization. And it is not considered a very consequential or influential ministry in Israel. However, this is an official state document essentially recommending the government to carry out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And it has been written in a time when these ideas are making their way into the Israeli mainstream public discourse and to Israeli media.
I think, Amy, you know, a lot of us, a lot of people in Israel, are feeling shock. They feel a need that things will not return to the way they were before October 7th. They talk about security, especially after all of the atrocities that were committed by Hamas on October 7th, and the people who were illegally kidnapped and taken to Gaza and the murders. And I think we have politicians who have no political vision for the future. And they are, unfortunately, using this sense of wanting security to commit horrible and terrible war crimes in Gaza and killing already more than 3,000 children.
And I think this document and this bombing campaign are both a reflection of a worldview that only has force in its disposal to try and deal with a political problem. And the dangerous thing about this worldview is that it always fails. And when it fails, there are calls to use more force and more force. And if you push this worldview to the extreme, you will eventually end up with ideas like the ideas that we are reading about in this document.
And that’s why — and this is the final thing that for now I will say — that’s why, you know, as an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom. And if we do not have a long-term political vision for the future that will end the situation where I have rights and freedom of movement and a way to vote, and Palestinians who are living next to me don’t, we are not going to have security. And I am very worried that — you know, I feel that this war on Gaza will not bring us security, and it will end, even if we topple down Hamas, by killing so many Palestinian civilians, we will create the next Hamas. And I don’t think it’s — I think this killing is unjustifiable. And I worry that the next war will come, and they will say, you know, “It didn’t work. Now we have to use even more force and even more force.” And even though this document right now might not seem feasible, I think this is the dangerous route that we are currently in. And this is why it’s so important to contextualize things and talk about a long-term political solution to the problem. And our leaders are not doing that right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval, can you talk about where this document comes from, who it went to and how real it is?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yes. So, this document came from the Intelligence Ministry, which has a very small budget. And it seems like they have initiated it. They usually send out their documents to the Israeli different government offices and to intelligence organizations and the Israeli security establishment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what it means to have exposed it, and how they’re responding?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. You know, for me, this is very, very worrying and troubling, because the government has not really acknowledged the paper at all. And none of us really know what the endgame of the government is in Gaza. I think in Israeli media, it has been downplayed as something that is going to harm Israel’s legitimacy for the war abroad. A lot of people are not taking it very seriously. This ministry is not considered, as I said, a very influential ministry. But we did not hear any clear and cut rejection of the document by the government. And yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the right-wing Israeli Misgav Institute is, who has a similar proposal?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Sure, yeah. It’s a very interesting and strange story. So, this right-wing think tank called Misgav, which is headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, who was — he’s a very close associate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he’s a very senior former Israeli security figure. And they published, a little over two weeks ago, a report that has the same identical conclusion, that Israel needs to transfer, forcibly transfer, all the civilians in Gaza, in Gaza to Egypt.
And this report was authored and written by Amir Weitmann, who is also a Likud member and an associate of Gila Gamliel, which is the Likud member who heads the Ministry of Intelligence, who wrote a report with the same conclusions. Now, these connections between the Likud and the right-wing think tank are also apparent because a month ago the Ministry of Intelligence has hired this Misgav Institute to carry out research as a freelancer for the government ministry.
Now, officially, the Ministry of Intelligence — you know, I’ve spoken to sources there — they’re claiming, you know, “This document, we completely stand behind the recommendation, and we offered it independently.” If you asked me, it’s very clear that there is a mix here between the government ministry and this extreme right-wing think tank. And it all seems to be coming back to different sorts of officials in the ruling party, the Likud.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the role of Egypt? Earlier this month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he would reject the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians into Sinai, which is Egypt. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT ABDEL FATTAH EL-SISI: [translated] Egypt rejects any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue by military means or through the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land, which would come at the expense of the countries of the region. The idea of displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt simply means that a similar situation will occur by the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan. This means that the idea of a Palestinian state that we are discussing and that the international community is discussing will no longer be possible.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s what President Sisi said, the Egyptian president. And this just came in from Ynet. Middle East Eye reported on the Israeli news outlet, saying, “Israel is proposing writing off a significant chunk of Egypt’s international debts through the World Bank to entice the cash-strapped Abdel Fattah el-Sisi government to open its doors for displaced Palestinians.” Again, that’s according to the Israeli Ynet news site. Yuval?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Wow. Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that the fact that Egypt is refusing to open its borders is one of several reasons why this forced transfer plan will not manifest. You know, I think that it is a feasible scenario, if they do open their borders and tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians leave Gaza, that at least some of them will not be allowed to return. This has happened in 1967 and 1948.
And the document, which, by the way, you can read in full on the +972 Magazine website or the Local Call website, actually deals with this. It says — it reads in the document that Egypt will have an obligation under humanitarian law to allow for Palestinian civilians to flee and enter and find refuge in its territory. And it calls on enlisting the United States and other Western countries to pressure Egypt to do this. Now, you know, everything — we’re in a situation of extreme fog, and it’s unclear how this will develop, but the fears are completely justifiable.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval, I want to thank you for bearing through this rainfall in Jerusalem. But I wanted to go to another piece —
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to another piece that you’ve written, saying, the headline, “Settlers take advantage of Gaza war to launch West Bank pogroms.” While the U.S. government, before Hamas’s surprise October 7th attack that killed up to 1,400 Israelis — the U.S. government, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, something like 10 days before, said the Middle East is quiet now, and we can move on to other issues. But, in fact, in the West Bank, it was the deadliest year in years, right? You had more than a Palestinian a day being killed either by the Israeli military or Jewish settlers. And now, since October 7th, Israeli settler attacks have resulted in at least 115 Palestinian deaths, more than 2,000 injured, nearly 1,000 others forced to flee their homes. Can you talk about what it’s like to be in the West Bank, this increased Jewish settler violence? And also, you have a friend who was the target of the violence?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yes, yes, Amy, of course. I mean, I’ve just received a text message 123 Palestinians have been already killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the war, and seven of them have been actually murdered by Israeli settlers. And I spend a lot of my time in the West Bank, specifically in a region called Masafer Yatta, which is a region in the southern edge of the West Bank, a community of villages that for decades have faced really intense pressure and violence from the Israeli army, that constantly destroys their homes and refuses to give them permits, and from settlers that have been attacking them. And I think what is happening now is that settlers and soldiers are using this chaos of the war to continue and to end sort of this forced transfer.
And it was extremely horrifying to be there over the past few nights. We’ve had incidents where settlers entered one village — it’s called Susiya. They grabbed a boy and his father, and they told them, “You have 24 hours to leave the village, or we are going to murder everybody in the village.” We had an incident where one settler went down to the village and actually shot a Palestinian who was standing next to the mosque. There are incidents of torture, of abuse, of humiliation. And it’s happening every night. Like, I stayed up last night with a family. They’re not sleeping. And everybody is just — like, we see the settlers entering the village.
And I think that, you know, according to human rights organization, Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 13 Palestinian communities have already been displaced in the West Bank due to this settler violence. And yeah, and it will just increase and increase as long as the war continues, the bombing on Gaza continues and this situation continues.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, this is a man who, what, in the last 15 years was convicted in Israeli court of being — supporting a terrorist organization and inciting violence against Palestinians. He announced the purchasing of 10,000 rifles for Israelis in West Bank settlements. Can you talk about what that means? Has that been carried out? And what supporting settler violence — what that means, particularly now?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, of course. So, what is going on right now is a complete inability to even differentiate between who is a soldier and who is a settler. Is it a settler that is in reserves? Is it a settler that received a weapon from Ben-Gvir and put on, you know, his army uniform? Are these soldiers? There is a complete confusion. And we are seeing a lot of, quote-unquote, “independent settler initiatives,” where they are putting on soldier uniforms and going into villages and harassing Palestinians. This is happening all over Area C. This is the way the military refers to it, which is essentially all of the open territories in the West Bank, where there are 180 small Palestinian villages and all the Israeli settlements. And Israel’s policy for many years has been to try to forcibly evict these 180 communities.
And I think now with many more settlers receiving weapons, with all of these incidents of murder and threats, this eviction is taking place. And I think, definitely, the arming of so many people is part of that process, which is, you know, understood in Israeli society also as a response to October the 7th, the need of people to be armed to be able to defend themselves. At least in the West Bank, these weapons are used to evict Palestinians from their homes.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, how have Israeli activists and international charities been involved in supporting Palestinians in the West Bank?
YUVAL ABRAHAM: So, I’m not sure about international charities. I mean, I know that a lot of them have supplied these communities that are at risk of forced transfer, little homes that you can live in, because Israel always comes and destroys their homes. They can’t get building permits. And it was extremely ironic. Like, I was in a village called Zenuta, in this area of Masafer Yatta, two days ago, and the residents were dismantling all of these homes using their own hands. And they were essentially leaving the village. I spoke to a 70-year-old person who told me that — you know, we drank tea, and he said, “This is probably the last time I will drink tea in this place that I grew up in.” So, these international organizations — you know, all of this support is now just being dismantled by the residents, who are afraid for their lives.
I think what we, as Israeli activists, are trying to do there — and this is also not always working, but the fact that we are Israeli, the fact that we speak Hebrew, gives us a certain privilege. And when these attacks happen, we try to deescalate the situation. We try to make sure that the settlers that are attacking the village see us, that we are first, that we can film them, that there are journalists here. We try to talk in Hebrew. But things — you know, death is now everywhere, and things are deteriorating really, really quickly. And I feel like all of the things that we were previously doing are now not working.
And, you know, again, I have to ask the world to wake up, to call for a ceasefire. If we continue to destroy Gaza like this, it will destroy us, as well. We will not have security in the future, and it will destroy the West Bank and the possibility of ever living here in equality and in peace between Israelis and Palestinians. So it’s time to change course and talk about the political issues at hand.
AMY GOODMAN: Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem who reports for +972 Magazine and Local Call. We’ll link to his article “Expel all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.”
When we come back, we speak to Josh Paul. He recently resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Palestine. Back in 30 seconds.
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State Department Official Resigns, Says Israel Is Using U.S. Arms to Massacre Civilians in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned last month to protest continued arms sales to Israel amid its bombardment of Gaza, writing in a viral letter that one-sided U.S. support for Israel is “shortsighted,” “destructive” and “contradictory.” Media reports say many others inside the State Department are equally frustrated with the U.S. role in the conflict. Paul tells Democracy Now! he tried to raise his concerns with his superiors but found “no appetite for that discussion” and that unlike all other U.S. arms sales that take humanitarian concerns into account, Israel gets a blank check. Paul says the overall message inside the Biden administration is: “Don’t question the policy because it’s coming from the top.”
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.
Amidst growing international condemnation of Israel’s monthlong assault on Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back in Israel today to meet with Israeli officials, where he continued to emphasize Israel’s right to defend itself following the October 7th Hamas attack. Meanwhile, the White House continues to dismiss calls for a full ceasefire, saying instead any pauses in fighting should be temporary and localized.
This comes as the independent news outlet In These Times reports the White House has requested an unprecedented loophole in arms spending to allow it to, quote, “be able to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy, without oversight from Congress or the public,” unquote, “even as experts say Israel has been using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit war crimes,” unquote.
Meanwhile, a new HuffPost report cites five current and one recently departed State Department official who say their, quote, “expertise and standard decision-making processes are being treated as largely irrelevant to President Joe Biden’s strategy on the war, which prioritizes support for Israel,” unquote. One official described, quote, “particular concern about the town hall for the department’s branch on human rights. Managers, who described the branch as ’State’s conscience,’ indicated that they aren’t sure if they are getting through to more senior officials.”
For more, we’re joined by Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned last month in protest of Biden’s push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst its siege on Gaza, calling it “shortsighted,” “destructive” and “contradictory.” In his resignation letter, that went viral, Josh Paul wrote, quote, “We cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse. … I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people — and is not in the long term American interest,” unquote. Josh Paul is former director of congressional and public affairs for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in the State Department, which oversees arms transfers to Israel and other foreign nations.
Why I Resigned From the State Department
by Josh Paul
Counterpunch
October 19, 2023
Today I informed my colleagues that I have resigned from the State Department, due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel. To further explain my rationale for doing so, I have written the attached note.
I joined the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (PM) over 11 years ago, and have found it a fascinating job with engaging, and often immensely challenging – intellectually and morally – tasks and objectives. I have been proud in my time of service to have made many differences, both visibly and behind the scenes, from advocating for Afghan refugees, to pushing back (with not insignificant results) on pending Administration decisions to transfer lethal weapons to countries that abuse human rights, to sculpting policies and practices that advance human rights, to working tirelessly to advance those policies and decisions that are good and just; from our global humanitarian demining efforts to our support for Ukraine’s defense in the face of murderous Russian aggression.
When I came to this Bureau, the U.S. Government entity most responsible for the transfer and provision of arms to partners and allies, I knew it was not without its moral complexity and moral compromises, and I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt I the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do. In my 11 years I have made more moral compromises than I can recall, each heavily, but each with my promise to myself in mind, and intact. 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..
Yes, PM can still do an immense amount of good in the world: there is still, sadly, a great need for American security assistance – a need for American arms and defense cooperation to defend against the multiple military perils that democracy, democracies, and humanity itself, face on this earth. But we cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse.
Let me be clear: Hamas’ attack on Israel was not just a monstrosity; it was a monstrosity of monstrosities. I also believe that potential escalations by Iran-linked groups such as Hezbollah, or by Iran itself, would be a further cynical exploitation of the existing tragedy. But I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people – and is not in the long term American interest. This Administration’s response – and much of Congress’ as well – is an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia. That is to say, it is immensely disappointing, and entirely unsurprising. Decades of the same approach have shown that security for peace leads to neither security, nor to peace. The fact is, blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the interests of the people on both sides. I fear we are repeating the same mistakes we have made these past decades, and I decline to be a part of it for longer.
I am not ignorant when it comes to the situation in the Middle East. I was raised surrounded by debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; my Master’s thesis was about Israeli counterterrorism and civil rights (in researching it I met two men who have since been among my lifelong heroes, Uri Avnery, and an Israeli Palestinian advocate I shall not name here); I served for the U.S. Security Coordinator, living in Ramallah while advancing security sector governance within the Palestinian Authority and liaising with the IDF; and, I have deep personal ties to both sides of the conflict. Those who know me best know that I have opinions, and they are strong ones. But this is what is at the core of them: that there is beauty to be found everywhere in this world, and it deserves both protection, and the right to flourish, and that is what I most desire for Palestinians and for Israelis. The murder of civilians is an enemy to that desire – whether by terrorists as they dance at a rave, or by terrorists as they harvest their olive grove. The kidnapping of children is an enemy to that desire – whether taken at gunpoint from their kibbutz or taken at gunpoint from their village. And, 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.
It is my firm belief that in such conflicts, for those of us who are third parties, the side we must pick is not that of one of the combatants, but that of the people caught in the middle, and that of the generations yet to come. It is our responsibility to help the warring parties build a better world. To center human rights, not to hope to sideline or sidestep them through programs of economic growth or diplomatic maneuvering. And, when they happen, to be able to name gross violations of human rights no matter who carries them out, and to be able to hold the perpetrators accountable – when they are adversaries, which is easy, but most particularly, when they are partners.
I acknowledge and am heartened to see the efforts this Administration has made to temper Israel’s response, including advocating for the provision of relief supplies, electricity, and water to Gaza, and for safe passage. In my role in PM, however, my responsibilities lie solidly in the arms transfer space. And that is why I have resigned from the U.S. Government, and from PM: because while I can, and have, worked hard to shape better policy making in the security assistance field, I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse, and which I wholeheartedly endorse: a world built around a rules-based order, a world that advances both equality and equity, and a world whose arc of history bends towards the promise of liberty, and of justice, for all.
And I would note with concern in parting, as regards competitions well beyond this current conflict, that if we want a world shaped by what we perceive to be our values, it is only by conditioning strategic imperatives with moral ones, by holding our partners, and above all by holding ourselves, to those values, that we will see it.
I want to close by noting that while bureaucracy is not without its automatons, and that, as I have learnt, physical courage comes easier than moral courage, I have had the privilege of working with a large number of truly thoughtful, empathetic, courageous, and good civil servants, and many of them can be found in PM, from its entry level to its most senior level. As they carry on advancing the interests of the nation and the world in a field in which, perhaps more than any other, it is easier to be better than it is to be good, I can say without hesitation that they are the best. I wish them continued success, strength, and courage. And I wish all of us – peace.
Josh Paul, October 18, 2023
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh Paul.
JOSH PAUL: Thank you very much for having me. I’m glad to join you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you elaborate on why you decided to resign — you’re a veteran State Department official — why you said no?
JOSH PAUL: Yes, thank you. I decided to resign for three reasons, the first and most pressing of which is the very, I believe, uncontroversial fact that U.S.-provided arms should not be used to massacre civilians, should not be used to result in massive civilian casualties. And that is what we are seeing in Gaza and what we were seeing, you know, very soon after the October 7th horrific attack by Hamas. I do not believe arms should be — U.S.-provided arms should be used to kill civilians. It is that simple.
Secondly, I also believe that, you know, as your previous guest identified, there is no military solution here. And we are providing arms to Israel on a path that has not led to peace, has not led to security, neither for Palestinians nor for Israelis. It is a moribund process and a dead-end policy.
And yet, when I tried to raise both of these concerns with State Department leadership, there was no appetite for discussion, no opportunity to look at any of the potential arms sales and raise concerns about them, simply a directive to move forward as quickly as possible. And so I felt I had to resign.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about that. Talk more about what kind of dialogue goes on at the State Department and if you, for example, have met with Tony Blinken, the secretary of state, not to mention President Biden, to voice your concerns. And what about other veteran State Department officials?
JOSH PAUL: So, typically, there is a very robust policy process in the State Department for arms transfers. And there are a lot of those, right? So, we’re talking about about 20,000 arms sale cases a year that the State Department processes, which could be anything from bullets to radios to fighter jets. And for each of those, there is a lengthy process, sometimes, that looks at, you know, what are the pros and cons of the sale, what are its human rights implications. That has not happened in this context for Israel. And as I say, when I raised those concerns against the existing laws, against the existing policies, there was no appetite for that discussion.
I have not personally spoken to Secretary Blinken about this, nor, certainly, to President Biden. But I know that in the time since I left, there has been increasing discussion within the State Department, but has not led to any change of policies. In fact, as you heard earlier on your show, Vice President Harris was just saying yesterday that we will not place any conditions whatsoever on our arms to Israel. And that is unlike any arms transfer decision I’ve ever been a part of. There’s always discussion about should we condition this to address human rights issues.
AMY GOODMAN: So, who is leading this, Josh Paul? Who is preventing this? Who is suppressing all of this discussion within the State Department?
JOSH PAUL: I honestly think, in some ways, that it’s coming from the very top of the U.S. government and from the Biden White House. You know, there are many in the State Department, and across government, who have reached out to me in recent weeks, since I left, to express their support, but also to say how difficult and how horrific they are finding U.S. policy, and yet are being told, when they try to raise these concerns, “Look, you can get emotional support if you’re finding this difficult. We’ll find you something else to work on. But don’t question the policy, because it’s coming from the top.”
AMY GOODMAN: The HuffPost has this new piece that reports, “A task force on preventing atrocities did not meet until two weeks into the war, and officials say department leaders are telling them their expertise won’t affect policy.” Explain what goes on.
JOSH PAUL: So, whenever there is a crisis, as there is right now in Israel and Gaza, the department sets up a task forces or multiple task forces that are uniquely shaped to address that crisis. So, for example, in the context of an earthquake, they might bring in experts on refugee issues, on weather issues, on disease issues, you know, that sort of broad swath of people.
In the context of Gaza, they have set up a task force to look at this problem, but, according to the report you cite, it does not include the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, who are responsible for U.S. support to refugee issues. So, it is either a stunning oversight, or it is an intentional disregard for the humanity of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: At a meeting on October 26th, a State Department source told you they recalled a top official advising staff to shift their focus away from Israel-Palestine and seek to make a difference in other parts of the world?
JOSH PAUL: So, I don’t believe that that was a conversation that I had with someone, but that is in the same report in The Huffington Post that you cite, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, they’re directing them not even to make comments on this, just stop talking about Israel-Palestine.
JOSH PAUL: Yes, that’s right. And I think, look, I mean, that reflects a tension or a censorship — right? — that we are seeing not only in the U.S. government. I think what’s interesting here is this censorship that has existed and expanded to colleges and universities, where you talked about the doxing. I’ve also heard from many people across the American private sector, both from the Arab American community but also more broadly, from all sorts of diverse communities, who have said, “We are afraid to speak up on this, because we are in fear of our jobs.” It’s the same climate in government. And that is just not American.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to ask you about this In These Times report that the White House has requested an unprecedented loophole in arms spending to allow it to be able to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy, without oversight from Congress or the public.
JOSH PAUL: Yeah. So, we provide Israel with $3.3 billion a year in foreign military financing, which is the State Department and U.S. government’s primary functional — primary mechanism for funding the sale of arms to other countries. Of note, you know, we typically provide — setting aside Ukraine — about $6 billion a year in foreign military financing around the world. So Israel already gets more than half of that.
The language in the supplemental request that the Biden administration set up — sent up would remove the requirement to notify Congress of any arms sales conducted under that funding. Typically, there is a process where, for any major defense sale, Congress is notified of it. And there’s actually a process prior to the formal notification where Congress gets to ask questions, poke, prod, delay, and then, if it wishes to oppose the sale, can raise a joint resolution of disapproval on the floor. What this proposal would do is, essentially, destroy all of that, remove all of that, remove that congressional oversight, remove that congressional ability to object. It is unprecedented. I have never seen anything like it. And I cannot imagine that the committees of jurisdiction are viewing it very favorably, because it is just such a damaging approach that also sets horrible precedent for other countries with whom future administrations may decide they don’t want Congress to be involved.
AMY GOODMAN: Since you were in charge of arms sales, what does this $14 billion that — well, it looks like both houses want to send it to Israel.
JOSH PAUL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s just that the House one is controversial because they want to take that $14 billion from the IRS, and also they want to sever the funding for Israel from the funding for Ukraine. And Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, says he won’t consider this bill. But it sounds like there is enough support in both houses for that extra — not the $3.8 billion or $3.3 billion yearly aid to Israel, but an extra $14 billion. You’re the expert on arms sales. What would it be used for?
JOSH PAUL: Yeah, and let me just say, I think there is, you know, almost or near-unanimous congressional support for this further military assistance to Israel. And I think what’s fascinating about that is also there’s a massive disconnect between where Congress is on these issues and where, I think, if you look at the polling, the American public are. And I think the current crisis is really crystallizing that difference. I don’t think it will make any difference in terms of the passage of this package, but it may do down the line.
With regards to this package specifically, it includes $3.5 billion in foreign military financing. Israel can draw on that to purchase essentially what it wants. And what’s unusual about this, as well, in addition to the removal of the notification, is that Israel would be entitled, under the proposal sent to Congress, to spend all of this money within its own defense industry. Israel is, of course, a top 10 exporter of arms around the world, often competing with the United States. And the idea that we will be providing funding to subsidize that competition is really unimaginable.
But on top of that, the package also provides further funding from the Defense Department side for air and missile defense for Israel, for Iron Dome. And let me be clear: My concern here is on lethal assistance to Israel. When it comes to protecting civilians from rocket attacks, I believe that they should be. I don’t believe anyone should have to live in fear of their homes — in their homes from rockets raining down on them, although I believe that’s the case whether they are in Israel under the Iron Dome or whether they are in Gaza, for example. And, of course, we never ask that question.
The funding, finally, would also include research and development funding for equipment, such as there is an experimental laser project called Iron Beam, which the U.S. and Israel are working together on, an air and missile defense system. If this is an emergency request, why are we looking at research and development for projects that have not even materialized yet? That doesn’t sound like an emergency to me. So, as with the arms transfers I saw when I was departing from the department, I think there is just a rush to push everything they can while they feel there is a window of political opportunity here where there will be no significant opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of response was there to your resignation?
JOSH PAUL: So, to my resignation, I would say there has been an overwhelming response that I have heard from folks or from colleagues inside not only in the State Department, but across the U.S. government, actually, on the Hill, in the Defense Department, in the uniformed military services, including in combatant commands around the world. People have reached out to me to say, you know, “We fully agree with you.” You know, obviously, everyone has their own personal circumstances. You know, I think if we had universal healthcare, it would make it a bit easier for people to stand up on principle. I myself am, you know, trying to figure out what I do next on healthcare. But the point is that so many people have reached out to say, “We hear you. We agree with you.”
And I think, you know, one of the things I found is that a lot of people can be in individual offices and say, “There is no — I can’t speak up, because I will lose my job. I will put my career in jeopardy. And there’s no one else here I can talk to.” And yet I’m hearing from someone else just a few desks over who is saying the same thing. So I think there really is a communications crisis, a transparency crisis within the U.S. government, and a policy crisis, because when you can’t talk about foreign policy, when you can’t debate, when you can’t criticize, you don’t end up with good policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Paul, why was this the last straw for you? I mean, for example, if you were in charge of weapons sales, presumably you were dealing with Saudi Arabia, notoriously authoritarian. U.S. agencies concluded, even in just one case, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for this. You oversaw arms sales to them, presumably. Why Israel?
JOSH PAUL: So, let me just be clear: I was one of multiple people involved in the arms sales process. Arms sales themselves are a presidential authority that is delegated to the secretary of state, and then, through the secretary of state, to the undersecretary, who is actually responsible for approving them, for the most part. But you’re right. And as I said in my resignation letter, in my time in the department, I dealt with many morally challenging, controversial arms sales.
I think what made the difference for me here is that for all of those previous instances, even under the Trump administration, mind you, there was always room for discussion and debate and the ability to mitigate some of the worst possible outcomes, to delay sales until crises had passed, so that they weren’t contributing immediately into a humanitarian crisis, to work with Congress and be confident that once the policy debate had ended in the State Department, there would be a congressional piece to it, too. And Congress generally has stood up in the past repeatedly on matters of human rights and arms sales. What was different here was that there was none of that. There was no debate. There was no space for debate. And there was also no congressional appetite or willingness to have debate.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s going to be a major march in Washington tomorrow. Three hundred fifty people were arrested in Philly. We’re going to play some clips of a major protest in Boston that happened last night. How much does grassroots protest like this, the thousands of people who are protesting around the country, the shutdown of Grand Central by Jewish groups just last Friday night, have on the State Department, on the White House?
JOSH PAUL: So, I don’t think it has much impact on the State Department. And that’s OK, because I think policy processes are meant to happen within a policy framework, [inaudible] and the problem is they’re not happening.
I think it does have an impact on the White House. I think we’ve seen a significant change in tone in the last few weeks, not because there is a sudden deep care, frankly, for Palestinian civilian casualties on their own merits, but because there is a sense that there is a political crisis here developing for the Biden administration, that many people are saying, you know, “We’re just going to sit out the next election. We have lost faith in this White House, in this administration.” So, I think that does have an impact.
And let me also say I have found it incredibly moving, as well, to watch these protests. You know, I was up on the Hill for meetings this week and last week and came across, in one office, a sit-in that was happening, where there was a group of Jewish students singing peace songs and holding up signs that said “Save Gaza.” I found that incredibly moving. And I think it also tells Congress and it tells this administration that they are not in line with much of American public opinion. I think it’s a much-needed message.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Paul, veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned last month in protest of a push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst the attack on Gaza, thanks so much for joining us.
JOSH PAUL: Thank you very much for having me.
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Boston Interfaith Rally Urges Senators Warren & Markey to Support Gaza Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 03, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/3/ ... transcript
At least 23 people were arrested in Boston on Thursday as faith leaders and clergy led a peace rally to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The interfaith protest targeted Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to pressure them to stand up for Palestinian lives. We share footage and voices from the rally.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We end today’s show with voices from the streets of Boston, where hundreds of faith leaders and clergy rallied Thursday to demand Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey support a ceasefire.
PROTESTER 1: Our elected officials must act. They need to hear from us. We are going to meet with them today. We’re going to send a delegation of faith leaders to bring our letters, our prayers. We are grounded in faith, in many faiths, in many spiritual traditions. We have so many people in our bones. We have the moral courage that our elected officials do not have. And we will keep acting until they have it.
And now we’ll hear from Shir Lovett-Graff, a Jewish community and spiritual leader.
SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: My grief, our grief, is used by the Israeli military, funded by the United States, to enact violence on thousands of Palestinians every day. How can we navigate this grief when it is used to fuel rhetoric that is Islamophobic, racist and antisemitic?
PROTESTER 2: We’re going to begin walking. We’ll follow the banner that says “ceasefire.” And we’ll be praying with our feet.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
NAKIYA HUSSAIN: My name is Nakiya Hussain [phon.]. We’re watching a genocide unfold. I think that the fact our tax dollars are going to pay for this is horrifying. I want change. I want us to see humanity and care about all lives.
PROTESTERS: Hey, Warren, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today! Hey, Warren, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today!
ELSA: My name is Elsa. I’m the daughter of Holocaust refugees. And I’m here because it’s outrageous to me the Israeli government is committing genocide in the name of people like my parents. And I work with Jewish Voice for Peace. We demand a ceasefire now, before even more innocent lives get lost.
JILL: I’m Jill. I’m active in Jewish Voice for Peace. I am here to demand Senator Warren declare a ceasefire and to stand up for justice. She usually does stand up for justice in different kinds of ways. For some reason, she just can’t seem to stand up for Palestinian lives. They are bombing everything — churches, hospitals, roads. There’s no place to go. So we are demanding Warren to do the right thing.
PROTESTERS: When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Ceasefire! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!
RAMI: My name is Rami. I am here today marching because I think we need to have a ceasefire. I think it’s really important that the world see that Jewish community believes in a ceasefire and thinks that what Israel is doing right now is wrong, and that the Jewish community is not a monolith, and there isn’t one uniform perspective standing with Israel on this one.
PROTESTERS: Hey, Markey, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today! Hey, Markey, what do you say? We demand a ceasefire today!
LEORA: My name is Leora. I am a rabbi in Jamaica Plain. Anyone who’s here today might be risking things to be here, relationships or employment. And I’m so proud to be here, across many kinds of difference and united in our call for a ceasefire now. We mourn for all of the dead, and we fight for all of the living.
MOHANAD MOSSALAM: Even refugee camps and hospitals are not safe.
My name is Mohanad Mossalam. I am a khatib here in Massachusetts, in Malden. If ceasefire is not now, when will it be? Are they waiting for the entire population of Gaza to be completely wiped out? Are they waiting for 10 more thousand, 20 more thousand people dying before they call for ceasefire? Enough is enough.
PROTESTERS: I do not come here alone. I carry my people in my bones.
PROTESTER 3: So, we’re here at the office of Senator Warren. We’re a group of faith leaders across the spectrum of the world’s religions, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza right now. Children are dying. That blood is on our hands if we stand silent. And we can be silent no longer.
PROTESTER 4: We’re so glad you’re here, and we’re so grateful for those inside.
LEORA: Inside, a number of people are occupying the lobby of the federal building. They will be there until the senators call for a ceasefire or until they are escorted out.
PROTESTER 5: I’m now very glad to introduce Boston City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who introduced the ceasefire resolution to Boston City Council.
TANIA FERNANDES ANDERSON: Peace and love to everyone. As-salamu alaykum. Shalom. And peace in every language. Paz sea contigo. I am here to simply repeat and echo your heartfelt sentiments and your fight and your tears and all of your sacrifice and your bravery for being here, and for every day that you’ve sacrificed, for every night that you’ve looked through social media, the tears that you’ve shed, the prayers that you’ve put out into the universe.
PROTESTER 6: They’re arresting people now.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
REV. REDEEM ROBINSON: Reverend Redeem Robinson. What’s happening right now is a grave injustice. We have faith leaders here who come to pray and demand that Senator Warren calls for a ceasefire, and people are being arrested? This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all. We are calling on Senator Warren to call for a ceasefire. She has a moral duty as a Christian woman to call for a ceasefire. She got faith leaders here at her office being arrested. This is a shame.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
HILARY RANTISI: We have been grieving, grieving the killing of our people, the grieving — grieving our fragmentation, the separation of our people into different enclaves, into different areas — West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem.
My name is Hilary Rantisi. So, when you ask a Palestinian where they’re from, they will tell you where they’re from, from before 1948. My family is from — both from Lydda and from Gaza. I was born in Jerusalem, and I grew up in Ramallah. So, as a Palestinian, I have a West Bank ID that only allows me to travel to Ramallah, to be in the West Bank. I can’t go to Jerusalem, where I was born. I can’t go to Gaza, where my grandmother is from. And I can’t go to Lydda, where my father was born and his father was born. But, for me, I am from all these places, and you can’t separate Gaza from me, you can’t separate Jerusalem from me, you can’t separate Lydda from me. So I’m here as a Palestinian recognizing the pain and all the history that all of my family and my ancestors have borne for all these years.
PROTESTERS: Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from protest in Boston last night calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. At least 23 people were arrested. This comes as 13 Democratic senators call for short-term cessation of hostilities in Gaza.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
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“Paradigm-Changing Moment”: Public Opinion Shifts on Palestine. Will Gaza War Hurt Biden Reelection?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... _one_state
Transcript
As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 10,000, calls for ceasefire are growing around the world. “This is a paradigm-changing moment,” says Shibley Telhami, who discusses the shifting public opinion on conflict in Israel and Palestine and its potential impact on Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Telhami is a professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy.
AMY GOODMAN: The heads of 18 United Nations agencies and NGOs have issued a rare joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, expressing shock and horror at Israel’s monthlong bombardment. The statement read in part, quote, “We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. It’s been 30 days. Enough is enough. This must stop now,” unquote. But Israel is rejecting all calls for a ceasefire or even a humanitarian pause as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the West Bank nears 10,000 over this past month.
U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is continuing a trip throughout the Middle East. Blinken is in Turkey today after stops in Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Jordan and Iraq. This comes as fears grow of a broader regional war. On Sunday, an Israeli strike on a car in southern Lebanon killed three children and their grandmother. The strike came two days after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a major address.
We begin today’s show looking at diplomatic efforts to halt Israel’s bombardment, which began October 7th after Hamas launched a surprise attack that Israel says killed over 1,400 people. Israel says about 240 hostages were taken during the attack.
We’re joined by Shibley Telhami, professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, also a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy. He’s co-editor of the book The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?
Professor Telhami, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you start off by talking about this horrifying landmark moment? Nearly 10,000 Palestinians have been killed; mass protests around the world; Secretary of State Blinken going to Tel Aviv, then surprising people by going to Ramallah, went to Jordan, met with Arab leaders, then on to Iraq — the significance of that? Now in Turkey. What you feel needs to happen now?
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Well, first of all, in terms of this moment, which you asked about, obviously, anyone with a heart — that doesn’t matter whether you are Jewish or Arab or Christian or whatever — the scale of horror is just unbearable. And we haven’t seen that in, certainly, years, but perhaps decades, in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But I think it’s even bigger than that. It’s beyond the humanitarian heartache that we all witness every day, and we have witnessed also in the attack on Israel. I think it is — you know, those people who think this is just another cycle of violence are really not capturing the moment.
This is a paradigm-changing moment. This is a moment that’s likely to really shift the way we think about the conflict. It is likely to shift the way people in the region think about the United States, because of its role. And I think, therefore, even people who are thinking about “Let’s think about the morning after,” are not coming to grips with what a morning after might look like, if there is a morning after. So I think it’s a moment that is bigger than most of us realize, because those moments in history usually are evaluated after the fact, not while you’re going through it. We know it’s horrendous, but we’re not grasping the implications.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about President Biden right now. Polls show that before all of this took place, I mean, when he was elected, he had something like 59% of the Arab American vote. We’re now talking about something like 17%. And we’re talking about key states like Michigan — Dearborn, for example. Can you talk about the significance of this nationally, and then globally, where he stands in the Arab world?
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Yeah, I think nationally, obviously, we already see implications of this. We see it in various polling that has been taken. His popularity has dropped among Democrats, coincidentally around the same time that this war started and is going on, and we don’t know that that’s directly related to it, but perhaps it is. But I have conducted a poll through our University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll two weeks after the war, and there was a bump in the sympathy for Israel, but when it comes to the Biden administration’s evaluation, more people said he was too pro-Israel than said he is too pro-Palestinian. And obviously, in terms of the implications for voting nationally, more likely to vote for President Biden because of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, we have far more people saying they’re less likely to vote for him than more likely to vote for him. So it has implications way beyond Arab and Muslim Americans, because our poll cannot possibly capture Arab and Muslim Americans in the sample. But we do know that in the sample, based on, you know, reporting and other polls that have been done, Arab and Muslim Americans are extremely frustrated. I know definitely that some of the Arab American leaders have conveyed to the secretary of state directly that the president is likely to lose Michigan because of his stance. So, I think the president — my own view is this war is going to hurt him.
But globally, it’s also going to hurt him a lot, because I think people can’t — people understood his support for Israel after the horrific Hamas attack; what they can’t understand is his inability to condemn the actions that have resulted in such mass destruction and killing in Gaza, and his seeming complicity in that. And that’s really something that goes against the — you know, after the Soviet — sorry, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we know that he tried to defend a liberal — the notion of a liberal international order, and certainly a rules-based international order, and opposed, in principle, targeting civilians or recklessly endangering them and war crimes. And what we see, he’s not able to do that with regard to Gaza. I think this is going to undermine his standing globally, not just in the Middle East, not just in the Global South, but beyond.
AMY GOODMAN: You also said in a recent interview there’s a level of shock you haven’t seen even during the Iraq War, that you’d bet Biden today might even supersede Benjamin Netanyahu as the most disliked leader in the Arab world, Professor Telhami.
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Yes. And as you know, I took a position against the Iraq War in 2002, when people were talking about it, to the point that I helped organize an ad for international relations scholars in The New York Times September 2002, saying the Iraq War is not in America’s national interest. It was hard for us to break through an antiwar message through the regular media. And at that time, I also conducted a poll in the Arab world that showed that George W. Bush had become even less popular in the Arab world than then-hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
And I bet the same is taking place at the moment. This is a moment — as I said, it’s a paradigm-shifting moment. And I think that it’s going to be very hard for Biden to recover from it. It’s very hard for people to listen to him when he is speaking about a promise of peace or a promise of two states. They had not trusted him before this in the Arab world — the public opinion, I’m talking about. And I think after this stance, it’s going to be impossible.
AMY GOODMAN: Shibley Telhami, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, also senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy, co-editor of the book The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?
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Voices from Largest Pro-Palestinian Protest in U.S. History: Stop the Siege on Gaza Now!
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... e_nov_2023
Transcript
Tens of thousands marched from Washington, D.C.'s Freedom Plaza to the White House Saturday in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Democracy Now!'s Messiah Rhodes, María Taracena and Hany Massoud spoke to protesters who condemned the U.S. government’s support for Israel and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. We also play excerpts from speakers at the protest rally, including lawyer Noura Erakat, musician Macklemore and writer Mohammed El-Kurd.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As the Health Ministry in Gaza says the death toll from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza for the last month, since October 7th, when Hamas attacked, has reached nearly 10,000 Palestinians. People took to the streets around the world this weekend to call for a ceasefire. They marched in Paris; in London; in Jakarta, Indonesia; in Milan, Italy; in Dakar, Senegal; in Athens, Greece; in San Francisco; in Turkey and more. On Saturday, in Washington, D.C., tens of thousands, perhaps 100,000 — organizers say as many as 300,000 — people marched from Freedom Plaza, which they dubbed “Gaza Plaza,” to the White House in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Democracy Now! was there. Democracy Now! producers Messiah Rhodes and María Taracena spoke with some of the protesters.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine!
AHMAD MALKAWI: I’m Ahmad Malkawi. I’m here to support stopping the war in Gaza now.
MESSIAH RHODES: How far did you travel to get here? And what would you say to Joe Biden if he was here right now?
AHMAD MALKAWI: I traveled nine hours from Kentucky, Louisville, Kentucky. Joe Biden, stop. Please stop the war. No more war.
OMAR ALKHALDI: My name is Omar Alkhaldi. We traveled from Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s absolutely unbelievable, what’s going on in Palestine right now. How many more children need to die?
MESSIAH RHODES: How does it feel to see all this support here right now?
OMAR ALKHALDI: Hamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. It’s very, very nice. We have a lot of people here today. There’s over maybe 100,000 people here in support of Palestine. And that shows that the crimes of Israel are coming out. Right? They’re losing the media war at the end of the day. A lot of people are being complacent with what’s going on in Israel, and they’re on the wrong side of history, unfortunately.
SARAH: My name is Sarah [phon.]. I’m an Egyptian American. And I am inspired to be here to stand for what is right. And what is right is to stop the genocide and to stop the ethnic cleansing.
MARÍA TARACENA: And who are you here with?
SARAH: I’m here with my family, my mother.
SARAH’S MOTHER: I feel terrible. I can’t sleep during the night. I can’t imagine what’s gone on. They kill kids, infant, women. That’s not fair, not fair for anybody, any human being.
MARÍA TARACENA: What is your message to mothers in Gaza?
SARAH’S MOTHER: I support her all the way. I wish was here right now. I feel sorry for her, but I can’t do anything, just to come here to support her.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
NASSER ABU SITTA: Nasser Abu Sitta. I’m from Gaza, Palestine. And I am here to urge everybody who is making decisions in this government to stop killing children, stop destroying the city. That’s not how wars are fought. This is not how we resolve the problems. We are just making it worse.
MARÍA TARACENA: You’re from Gaza. Do you have family there? Are you in touch with anyone there right now?
NASSER ABU SITTA: I do. We are in touch on and off as situations allow.
MARÍA TARACENA: How are they? What are they describing to you? And what does it feel like to be here as this is happening?
NASSER ABU SITTA: They have been through so many wars, and this is the most horrifying experience they ever had. They are, just day and night, bombardment, behind them, above them, around them. And they are lucky to be alive. That’s how they look at it.
MARÍA TARACENA: Where in Gaza is your family?
NASSER ABU SITTA: Well, it depends what day you’re asking. They moved four times so far, from one place to the other.
PROTESTER 1: [chanting in Arabic]
JEFF WALKER: My name is Jeff Walker. I think it’s important for us to be here today because we see oppression happening all over the place, you know, and I think, like, if we allow oppression to continue to happen without saying nothing, then it’s going to continue to exacerbate.
MESSIAH RHODES: And why is it important to bring your kids here today? Why be here today?
JEFF WALKER: I always tell them to be on the right side of history, you know? And absolutely, it’s because the things that’s happening to Palestine are the things that we’ve also been subjected to, you know, in our time in America here, as well. And so, I tell my kids to understand what’s going on in this country, and let them know that — give them a quote that Malcolm X said, you know: The media will have you praising oppressor and shaming the oppressed. And so I just want my kids to mindful of, you know, how Palestinians stood up for us and spoke up around Black Lives Matter, then we also gotta speak up for them, as well.
MARÍA TARACENA: What’s your name? Where are you from? And what inspired you to be here with your children, with your family?
RAJA DIAZ: I’m Raja. My name is Raja Diaz [phon.]. I’m Palestinian. This is Suhaila. She’s just turned 1. And we just had a beautiful birthday party for her, right after everything happened. I was going to cancel because of what’s happening in Gaza. But then I looked at the children there, and I said, “For the children’s sake, I’m going to have something for her and other children to enjoy,” because they — what crime do they have? They don’t know what’s happening. And I’m here with my Palestinian children to give a voice for the Palestinians that are there back home that have no voice and are being killed by this brutal occupation and genocide that the U.S. — we live here, and our tax dollars are supporting this. And this is a big problem, a big issue, and we want this to end as soon as possible. We don’t want no money for Israel. They’re committing war crime after war crime, and nothing is being done. It’s ridiculous. No other place in the world gets this immunity. No other place.
MARÍA TARACENA: What’s your message to mothers in Gaza that have lost their children and have lost sometimes multiple of their family members?
RAJA DIAZ: It’s absolutely horrific. You know, me and my mom, we watch these videos, and we just cry and cry and cry. But we’re going to tell them: Be strong and keep moving forward, because we’re not going to stop fighting for you.
NAWAL KHALIL: They killed our kids! They don’t have gun! They don’t do any crime! Why? Why? I ask why then. This is the blood on your hand! You killed the kids! Why? This what they do for you, these kids. Oh my God!
MESSIAH RHODES: What are you holding? What’s your name?
NAWAL KHALIL: My name is Nawal Khalil. I am here because — to support Gaza. They killed babies. Babies, they don’t have gun. Why? Why? I want to ask why then. Why they kill the babies? Give me an answer, please! Please!
PROTESTER 2: They give them time to kill. This is our president. He give more time, long time, to kill more.
PROTESTERS: What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!
HADDY ALREZ: My name is Haddy Alrez. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. So, we drove down. These are my kids and my nieces and nephews. My parents lived through the 1948 wars and were displaced and were in the Occupied Territories since — until 1973, until they left with five kids, me being the youngest, to the U.S., just to provide us with a better life. So, seeing all of this unfold and listening to my parents’ stories feels like a repetition of what happened in '48. And to somebody in our family, that is a personal experience for all of us. Even though I grew up in the United States, you know, we live it through our parents and our parents' stories. And it feels like it’s 100-fold now. You know, it was very traumatic for them, what they went through. They lived in caves, they lived under trees, until they made their way to the West Bank. Their town, my father’s village, was completely annihilated. Nothing is left. When I went to visit, the one time I went to visit in the mid-'90s, I went with my dad. And I'll never forget him standing on the side of his village, what used to be his village, that’s overcome with all just bush and overgrown in a small canyon, and how my dad looked looking out into the land, which he never went back to for 22 years.
MAHMOUD: My name is Mahmoud. I’m a physician in Boston. Come here in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are going through a genocide right now. As a healthcare worker, we stand with our healthcare colleagues in Gaza right now who are under undescribable circumstances to do their jobs. And right now the situation is beyond belief right now. They’re doing surgeries without anesthesia. They’re doing surgeries without electricity or without water. It’s just something no doctor should ever, you know, be quiet about. I’m carrying this poster in solidarity of the healthcare workers in Gaza. Some of the people who passed away over there are colleagues of us, physicians. Some of them were faculty at the medical school over there. The previous dean of the only medical school in Gaza was killed in an Israeli strike. So, the least we could do is, you know, to let the people their names and show their pictures, and let them know, you know, that they’re not numbers. And they died trying to do what they took an oath to do, is to save human life.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Long live Palestine! Long live Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine!
AMY GOODMAN: Just some of the voices of the tens of thousands of people — some say 100,000; organizers, 300,000 — who came to Washington, D.C., from around the country Saturday to join the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Before the march to the White House, speakers addressed a rally in a packed Freedom Plaza, which they dubbed “Gaza Plaza.” We begin with Noura Erakat, Palestinian human rights attorney, associate professor at Rutgers University.
NOURA ERAKAT: We are all here to charge this administration with genocide. … Israel and the United States are jointly complicit in the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. Together, they are rending international law worthless and irrelevant. Every single tribunal, from Nuremberg to Rwanda, from Bosnia to Cambodia, every prosecution at the ICC, was meant to atone for our moral failures, to protect us from ourselves.
And today we fail to stop. Today we fail to stop the skies from crashing down in white phosphorus flames onto Palestinian dreams, memories, potential, onto Palestinian babies not old enough to beseech you to have mercy upon them.
We are here now with them and for them to demand a ceasefire. We are here because Palestine reveals the naked hypocrisy of Western universalism. It reveals our enduring colonial reality, and it offers a glimpse into a future without colonialism.
Falastin, Falastin, where a valiant peple have always existed, where survivors and fighters continue to affirm that they belong to a land upon which there is a life worth living. [speaking in Arabic] We — we — are like olive trees like the ones that our ancestors planted. We are unshaken. We are unmoved. We are undeniable. Stand with us in this promise. We promise, Palestine still promises, that we will all be free! Free, free Palestine!
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Macklemore on deck.
MACKLEMORE: Peace, everybody. You know, first and foremost, this is absolutely beautiful to observe today. I didn’t expect to be on a microphone, but — there are thousands of people here that are more qualified to speak on the issue of a free Palestine than myself. But I will say this. They told me to be quiet. They told me to do my research, to go back, that it’s too complex to say something, right? To be silent in this moment.
In the last three weeks, I’ve gone back, and I’ve done some research. And I am teachable; I don’t know enough. But I know enough that this is a genocide. And we are scared. We are watching it unfold. We have been taught to just be complicit, to protect our careers, to protect our interests. And I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not afraid to speak the truth!
You know, my daughter — my daughter said to me this morning, she said — she’s 8 years old. She said, “Dad, when we protest today, when we march today, how are the people in Palestine going to know that we’re showing up?” Look at this. Look at this. The world is watching what we do right now in this moment of injustice!
There is no side in humanity. We lead with our hearts. We speak the truth. We shut down the propaganda. And we march forward. Free, free Palestine!
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine!
MACKLEMORE: Free, free Palestine!
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine!
MACKLEMORE: Thank you.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 2: The very courageous comrades of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
SARAH IHMOUD: Over 10,000 Palestinians have been martyred, and 70% of those killed in this genocide thus far are women and children. Today in Gaza, there are half a million displaced Palestinian women and girls. Fifty thousand pregnant women are waiting to give birth, with 5,500 expected to deliver next month, without water, without food, without fuel, without life-saving medicine or medical equipment.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: Shame! Women have resorted to taking birth control pills to stop their menstrual cycles because of a lack of sanitary pads. Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: This targeting of Indigenous women’s bodies and sexualities is woven into the genocidal fabric of Israeli settler colonialism.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: But our love and care for each other, our insistence to live, our persistence to give birth to the next generation of Palestinians on our homeland, to hold ground amidst the most unlivable conditions, is a testament to the fact that we refuse to die quietly! We refuse the terms of our vanishment. We are a people who teach life and keep creating life, in spite of genocide, through our revolutionary love, our love for each other and our love for our homeland. And that love is something the colonizer can never take away from us! To know this, to feel this love deeply, is to know that we have already won.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Next up, we have brother Nihad Awad from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
NIHAD AWAD: From the beginning of the bombardment of Gaza, we spoke to President Biden the language of logic, the language of law, the language of humanity. We appealed to him to take a moral position, to recognize 2.3 million civilian residents trapped in Gaza under the attack of the Israeli forces from every imaginable type of modern weaponry, to call him to call for a ceasefire. All these calls and the calls from the world community fell on deaf ears.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: As the images of the genocide increased, he dehumanized the Palestinians and dismissed their suffering. He denied — he denied the dead Palestinians the right to be acknowledged as dead.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: He insisted that should be — there should be no ceasefire. The State Department asked their staff not to talk about deescalation.
We have discovered the language that President Biden understands, and let me share it with you. The language that President Biden and his party understand is the language of votes in 2024 elections. And our message is: No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No votes in Michigan. No votes in Arizona. No votes in Georgia. No votes in Nevada. No votes in Wisconsin. No votes in Pennsylvania. No votes in Ohio. No votes for you anywhere, if you do not call for a ceasefire now.
After hearing — after hearing this message in the past week and a half, and the fact that 60% — 66% of Americans support a ceasefire, the president, the secretary of state, Democratic senators and representatives started to change their tone.
We will make our voices heard more and more. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. A White House official told a friend of mine that the community has a short memory. A few months, then they will forget. And let me tell them — let me tell them: In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Next up, we have Mohammed El-Kurd.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I want us to take a few minutes to consider the magnitude of loss of life currently happening in the Gaza Strip. I want us to consider what it means to lose 10,000 people, for 10,000 people to be killed by Israeli warplanes. Consider their families and their grief. Consider their lovers. Consider the people missing them. Consider our martyrs’ lives, their grievances, their hobbies. And most of all, most of all I want you to consider the fear, the fear that they must have felt as warplanes dropped over their heads, the fear they must have felt minutes before they were killed.
And I want you to compare that fear, I want you to measure that fear against your own fear. It does not compare. I understand it. We’re are all afraid of losing a job, of losing a friend, of being ostracized, of being shamed. I called my father earlier. I told him I was coming to this march. He said, “Stay away from the cameras.” We’re all afraid, but this fear does not compare.
They want us to think that we are paying personal prices, but we have our community. They want us to think that we are alone, but we have our people supporting us. If they come for you, if they come for you, if they take your job, if they fire you from school, if they expel you, do not think of yourself as a casualty. You are not a casualty. You are fuel for the movement. You are part of the struggle. They want us to be silent, but we know silence will not protect us. Fear and silence will do nothing but allow this carnage to go on unchecked. Silence is a sign of consent in the empire. Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from Saturday’s massive rally in Washington, D.C., calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history. Special thanks to Democracy Now! producers Hany Massoud, Messiah Rhodes and María Taracena.
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Why Did Israel Kill My Son? Palestinian Poet Speaks from Hospital Bed After Airstrike Destroys Home
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ahmed_abu_artema
Transcript
Gazan poet, journalist and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema describes how he lost five members of his family, including his 12-year-old son, in an Israeli airstrike on his house on October 24. Abu Artema was seriously injured and sent Democracy Now! an audio message from his hospital bed. “Israel didn’t bombard my house, didn’t kill my child by mistake. It’s the Israeli strategy,” he says. “The Israeli problem is the Palestinian existence itself.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
Shortly before today’s show, Democracy Now! reached the Palestinian poet, journalist and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema, who lost five members of his family last month when they were killed by an Israeli airstrike. He survived the blast but was seriously injured. The dead include his 12-year-old son. Artema helped inspire the Great March of Return, a series of weekly nonviolent protests in Gaza that began in 2018. Israel responded to the protests by killing over 200 protesters, including 46 children. Artema recently wrote an article for The Electronic Intifada headlined “Why did Israel kill my son?” He sent us this audio message from his hospital bed.
AHMED ABU ARTEMA: In the morning of October 24th, I was sitting with my children in the living room of the house of my family. It’s a house of three floors. There were about 40 members in the house at that moment. Suddenly I became unconscious. Maybe after a few minutes, I wake up again. I saw dust and rubble surrounding me everywhere. I knew at that moment that the house where I was with my children was bombing. My hearing at that time was gone. I didn’t hear anything, but I looked around me. I looked around me. I saw my two children, Hammoud and Batool, screaming and sticking to me and pointing to my other child, my oldest child, Abboud, their brother. And they are shouting. Abboud was lying on the floor. The people came and took us from the rubble, and we went to the hospital by ambulance.
I knew that my four — four ladies at that place, my two aunts and my father’s wife and my cousin, were killed at the same time, at the first time of the bombing. My child Abboud and my niece — she’s about 10 years old also — they were in critical condition. A day after, they were killed. The majority of the family, most of them were injured.
This is what happened with me, and this is an example of the daily Israeli bombing against Gaza. Israelis are claiming and saying that it’s a war against Hamas. But where is Hamas? Take my house as example. Four women and two children were killed in this Israeli strike. And this is what’s happening every day. Thousands, the vast majority, of the victims of this Israeli war until now are innocent women and men and children, complete families. Israel is targeting the families.
Israel declared it clearly that its problem is with the Palestinians themselves, not with a faction or with a group. The Israeli problem is the Palestinian existence itself. So it’s not by mistake. Israel didn’t bombard my house, didn’t kill my child by mistake. It’s the Israeli strategy. It’s the Israeli mindset of genocide against the Palestinians. Israel look at us as nothing. We are nothing, we are human animals, in their perspective. So they don’t care to remove all the Palestinian cities, to kill all the Palestinians.
The most horrible, that the world is still allowing for this Israeli genocide to happen. This is the horrible thing. Israel is supported completely by the United States administration. The missile that killed my son Abboud, and the missiles that killed thousands of the Palestinians are U.S.-made. So, we are subjected to genocide. This is the most important message.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian poet Ahmed Abu Artema, who inspired the Great March of Return protest years ago. Last month he lost five members of his family, just a week or two ago, including his son, in an Israeli airstrike. He was injured in the strike, recorded this message from his hospital bed.
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Jewish Voice for Peace Health Adviser Dr. Alice Rothchild on Gaza Catastrophe as Health System Fails
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... are_crisis
Transcript
Israel says it is responsible for an attack on a convoy of ambulances outside Gaza’s largest hospital on Friday that killed at least 15 people. Meanwhile, doctors in Gaza lack the resources to provide adequate care to the sick and injured, thanks to Israel’s blockade of water, food and fuel from entering the besieged region. For more on the rapidly deteriorating state of medical care in Gaza and Israel’s illegal targeting of medical providers, we speak with Dr. Alice Rothchild, a retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine and is a member of the steering committee of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Gaza Health Ministry has announced the Palestinian death toll in Gaza has now exceeded 10,000 from Israel’s monthlong bombardment. On Friday, at least 15 people died when an Israeli airstrike hit a convoy of ambulances outside Gaza’s largest hospital.
We’re ending the show with Dr. Alice Rothchild, retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine, was last in Gaza in August. On Friday, Dr. Rothchild participated in a nonviolent protest to shut down the Federal Building in Seattle, where Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington has an office, urging the senator to call for an immediate ceasefire. Dr. Rothchild is on the steering committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council and mentor liaison for We Are Not Numbers, on the board of Gaza Mental Health Foundation.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Rothchild. If you can talk about the attacks on hospitals right now? You have the attack on the ambulance convoy. Israel said it’s because they were transporting Hamas fighters. You have the attack on the hospitals, like Al-Shifa, the largest. Israel says it’s because command and control is underneath. Can you comment on all of this and the number, the death toll at this point?
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, this is an appalling situation in terms of the death toll. And there are multiple international laws, starting with the Geneva Accords, that are being violated. You are not allowed, under any circumstances, to bomb hospitals, to bomb health centers, to bomb ambulances. This is against international law. Israel has —Israeli military has for years, with multiple different attacks, accused health facilities of sheltering, quote, “terrorists.” They have never produced good documentation. And even if there were, for instance, tunnels under a hospital, you are still not allowed to bomb a hospital. So this is a grave violation of international law and also part of the situation where civilians are dying in massive numbers and being injured in massive numbers.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you comment on the level of protest that you’re seeing right now and the amount of suffering that you’re seeing right now in Gaza? You have these 18 groups, rarely, issuing a joint statement, NGOs, along with U.N. agencies, demanding a ceasefire. And what this would mean, and what Senator Murray has said to you as a representative of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, as you shut down the Federal Building in Seattle?
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, I think that I’ve been doing this for — solidarity work for 25 years, and this kind of response is unprecedented. And I think it’s a reflection of the unprecedented nature of the Israeli attack. And Senator Murray has not been willing to call for a ceasefire. But people all over this country and all over the planet are calling for a ceasefire, because we must stop this bombing, and we must stop all of the civilian death.
It is clear that the Israeli military is not doing a war to destroy Hamas, whatever that means. It is a war to destroy Gaza and destroying the infrastructure and killing thousands of people. You know, over half the homes are destroyed. A third of the hospitals are destroyed. It’s just a massive, massive catastrophe for this region. And there is thought that this is all part of an Israeli plan to run Gazans out of Gaza and displace them into Egypt. There are all sorts of horrific ideas going around. So, the response to this is all being seen internationally.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the health situation? We just came out of the third total blackout of Gaza, with health organizations, human rights groups begging the Israeli government to turn back on the electricity, the cellular service, because of what it means for people, organizations that are trying to coordinate their surviving workers on the ground to help the Palestinians.
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, the health system is catastrophic. It has collapsed. And if you think about it, what it means not have electricity, you cannot call an ambulance. You’re in labor. You cannot communicate with anyone. Hospitals can’t communicate with each other. They can’t pump water into the system. There is no — almost no water at all that’s clean. That means you can’t wash your sterile instruments. You can’t wash wounds. There’s a lack of antibiotics. People are dying of infection.
I mean, it goes on and on and on, if you think about not having water, not having electricity and also not having food. There is now a serious risk of starvation. The average Gazan is living on two pieces of bread a day and spending hours searching for water. And people are starting to drink agricultural water, so we’re seeing an uptick in diarrheal diseases, respiratory infections, chickenpox. You know, this is a humanitarian and health catastrophe that is basically being live-streamed in front of our eyes.
AMY GOODMAN: And the position of the Biden administration? We just have 30 seconds at this point.
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: The position of the Biden administration is entirely inadequate and utterly outrageous. Biden needs to call for a ceasefire. The U.S. is sending — planning to send Israel more weapons, that will only create more havoc. So, Israel should not be getting weapons, and Biden must, must, must call for a total ceasefire. That is absolutely necessary from a humanitarian, healthcare, political, human and moral point of view.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Alice Rothchild, we thank you for you for being with us. We’ll continue our conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine, was in Gaza in August, on the steering committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... _one_state
Transcript
As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 10,000, calls for ceasefire are growing around the world. “This is a paradigm-changing moment,” says Shibley Telhami, who discusses the shifting public opinion on conflict in Israel and Palestine and its potential impact on Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Telhami is a professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy.
AMY GOODMAN: The heads of 18 United Nations agencies and NGOs have issued a rare joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, expressing shock and horror at Israel’s monthlong bombardment. The statement read in part, quote, “We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. It’s been 30 days. Enough is enough. This must stop now,” unquote. But Israel is rejecting all calls for a ceasefire or even a humanitarian pause as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the West Bank nears 10,000 over this past month.
U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is continuing a trip throughout the Middle East. Blinken is in Turkey today after stops in Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Jordan and Iraq. This comes as fears grow of a broader regional war. On Sunday, an Israeli strike on a car in southern Lebanon killed three children and their grandmother. The strike came two days after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a major address.
We begin today’s show looking at diplomatic efforts to halt Israel’s bombardment, which began October 7th after Hamas launched a surprise attack that Israel says killed over 1,400 people. Israel says about 240 hostages were taken during the attack.
We’re joined by Shibley Telhami, professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, also a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy. He’s co-editor of the book The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?
Professor Telhami, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you start off by talking about this horrifying landmark moment? Nearly 10,000 Palestinians have been killed; mass protests around the world; Secretary of State Blinken going to Tel Aviv, then surprising people by going to Ramallah, went to Jordan, met with Arab leaders, then on to Iraq — the significance of that? Now in Turkey. What you feel needs to happen now?
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Well, first of all, in terms of this moment, which you asked about, obviously, anyone with a heart — that doesn’t matter whether you are Jewish or Arab or Christian or whatever — the scale of horror is just unbearable. And we haven’t seen that in, certainly, years, but perhaps decades, in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But I think it’s even bigger than that. It’s beyond the humanitarian heartache that we all witness every day, and we have witnessed also in the attack on Israel. I think it is — you know, those people who think this is just another cycle of violence are really not capturing the moment.
This is a paradigm-changing moment. This is a moment that’s likely to really shift the way we think about the conflict. It is likely to shift the way people in the region think about the United States, because of its role. And I think, therefore, even people who are thinking about “Let’s think about the morning after,” are not coming to grips with what a morning after might look like, if there is a morning after. So I think it’s a moment that is bigger than most of us realize, because those moments in history usually are evaluated after the fact, not while you’re going through it. We know it’s horrendous, but we’re not grasping the implications.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about President Biden right now. Polls show that before all of this took place, I mean, when he was elected, he had something like 59% of the Arab American vote. We’re now talking about something like 17%. And we’re talking about key states like Michigan — Dearborn, for example. Can you talk about the significance of this nationally, and then globally, where he stands in the Arab world?
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Yeah, I think nationally, obviously, we already see implications of this. We see it in various polling that has been taken. His popularity has dropped among Democrats, coincidentally around the same time that this war started and is going on, and we don’t know that that’s directly related to it, but perhaps it is. But I have conducted a poll through our University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll two weeks after the war, and there was a bump in the sympathy for Israel, but when it comes to the Biden administration’s evaluation, more people said he was too pro-Israel than said he is too pro-Palestinian. And obviously, in terms of the implications for voting nationally, more likely to vote for President Biden because of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, we have far more people saying they’re less likely to vote for him than more likely to vote for him. So it has implications way beyond Arab and Muslim Americans, because our poll cannot possibly capture Arab and Muslim Americans in the sample. But we do know that in the sample, based on, you know, reporting and other polls that have been done, Arab and Muslim Americans are extremely frustrated. I know definitely that some of the Arab American leaders have conveyed to the secretary of state directly that the president is likely to lose Michigan because of his stance. So, I think the president — my own view is this war is going to hurt him.
But globally, it’s also going to hurt him a lot, because I think people can’t — people understood his support for Israel after the horrific Hamas attack; what they can’t understand is his inability to condemn the actions that have resulted in such mass destruction and killing in Gaza, and his seeming complicity in that. And that’s really something that goes against the — you know, after the Soviet — sorry, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we know that he tried to defend a liberal — the notion of a liberal international order, and certainly a rules-based international order, and opposed, in principle, targeting civilians or recklessly endangering them and war crimes. And what we see, he’s not able to do that with regard to Gaza. I think this is going to undermine his standing globally, not just in the Middle East, not just in the Global South, but beyond.
AMY GOODMAN: You also said in a recent interview there’s a level of shock you haven’t seen even during the Iraq War, that you’d bet Biden today might even supersede Benjamin Netanyahu as the most disliked leader in the Arab world, Professor Telhami.
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Yes. And as you know, I took a position against the Iraq War in 2002, when people were talking about it, to the point that I helped organize an ad for international relations scholars in The New York Times September 2002, saying the Iraq War is not in America’s national interest. It was hard for us to break through an antiwar message through the regular media. And at that time, I also conducted a poll in the Arab world that showed that George W. Bush had become even less popular in the Arab world than then-hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
And I bet the same is taking place at the moment. This is a moment — as I said, it’s a paradigm-shifting moment. And I think that it’s going to be very hard for Biden to recover from it. It’s very hard for people to listen to him when he is speaking about a promise of peace or a promise of two states. They had not trusted him before this in the Arab world — the public opinion, I’m talking about. And I think after this stance, it’s going to be impossible.
AMY GOODMAN: Shibley Telhami, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, also senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy, co-editor of the book The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?
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Voices from Largest Pro-Palestinian Protest in U.S. History: Stop the Siege on Gaza Now!
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... e_nov_2023
Transcript
Tens of thousands marched from Washington, D.C.'s Freedom Plaza to the White House Saturday in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Democracy Now!'s Messiah Rhodes, María Taracena and Hany Massoud spoke to protesters who condemned the U.S. government’s support for Israel and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. We also play excerpts from speakers at the protest rally, including lawyer Noura Erakat, musician Macklemore and writer Mohammed El-Kurd.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As the Health Ministry in Gaza says the death toll from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza for the last month, since October 7th, when Hamas attacked, has reached nearly 10,000 Palestinians. People took to the streets around the world this weekend to call for a ceasefire. They marched in Paris; in London; in Jakarta, Indonesia; in Milan, Italy; in Dakar, Senegal; in Athens, Greece; in San Francisco; in Turkey and more. On Saturday, in Washington, D.C., tens of thousands, perhaps 100,000 — organizers say as many as 300,000 — people marched from Freedom Plaza, which they dubbed “Gaza Plaza,” to the White House in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Democracy Now! was there. Democracy Now! producers Messiah Rhodes and María Taracena spoke with some of the protesters.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine!
AHMAD MALKAWI: I’m Ahmad Malkawi. I’m here to support stopping the war in Gaza now.
MESSIAH RHODES: How far did you travel to get here? And what would you say to Joe Biden if he was here right now?
AHMAD MALKAWI: I traveled nine hours from Kentucky, Louisville, Kentucky. Joe Biden, stop. Please stop the war. No more war.
OMAR ALKHALDI: My name is Omar Alkhaldi. We traveled from Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s absolutely unbelievable, what’s going on in Palestine right now. How many more children need to die?
MESSIAH RHODES: How does it feel to see all this support here right now?
OMAR ALKHALDI: Hamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. It’s very, very nice. We have a lot of people here today. There’s over maybe 100,000 people here in support of Palestine. And that shows that the crimes of Israel are coming out. Right? They’re losing the media war at the end of the day. A lot of people are being complacent with what’s going on in Israel, and they’re on the wrong side of history, unfortunately.
SARAH: My name is Sarah [phon.]. I’m an Egyptian American. And I am inspired to be here to stand for what is right. And what is right is to stop the genocide and to stop the ethnic cleansing.
MARÍA TARACENA: And who are you here with?
SARAH: I’m here with my family, my mother.
SARAH’S MOTHER: I feel terrible. I can’t sleep during the night. I can’t imagine what’s gone on. They kill kids, infant, women. That’s not fair, not fair for anybody, any human being.
MARÍA TARACENA: What is your message to mothers in Gaza?
SARAH’S MOTHER: I support her all the way. I wish was here right now. I feel sorry for her, but I can’t do anything, just to come here to support her.
PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
NASSER ABU SITTA: Nasser Abu Sitta. I’m from Gaza, Palestine. And I am here to urge everybody who is making decisions in this government to stop killing children, stop destroying the city. That’s not how wars are fought. This is not how we resolve the problems. We are just making it worse.
MARÍA TARACENA: You’re from Gaza. Do you have family there? Are you in touch with anyone there right now?
NASSER ABU SITTA: I do. We are in touch on and off as situations allow.
MARÍA TARACENA: How are they? What are they describing to you? And what does it feel like to be here as this is happening?
NASSER ABU SITTA: They have been through so many wars, and this is the most horrifying experience they ever had. They are, just day and night, bombardment, behind them, above them, around them. And they are lucky to be alive. That’s how they look at it.
MARÍA TARACENA: Where in Gaza is your family?
NASSER ABU SITTA: Well, it depends what day you’re asking. They moved four times so far, from one place to the other.
PROTESTER 1: [chanting in Arabic]
JEFF WALKER: My name is Jeff Walker. I think it’s important for us to be here today because we see oppression happening all over the place, you know, and I think, like, if we allow oppression to continue to happen without saying nothing, then it’s going to continue to exacerbate.
MESSIAH RHODES: And why is it important to bring your kids here today? Why be here today?
JEFF WALKER: I always tell them to be on the right side of history, you know? And absolutely, it’s because the things that’s happening to Palestine are the things that we’ve also been subjected to, you know, in our time in America here, as well. And so, I tell my kids to understand what’s going on in this country, and let them know that — give them a quote that Malcolm X said, you know: The media will have you praising oppressor and shaming the oppressed. And so I just want my kids to mindful of, you know, how Palestinians stood up for us and spoke up around Black Lives Matter, then we also gotta speak up for them, as well.
MARÍA TARACENA: What’s your name? Where are you from? And what inspired you to be here with your children, with your family?
RAJA DIAZ: I’m Raja. My name is Raja Diaz [phon.]. I’m Palestinian. This is Suhaila. She’s just turned 1. And we just had a beautiful birthday party for her, right after everything happened. I was going to cancel because of what’s happening in Gaza. But then I looked at the children there, and I said, “For the children’s sake, I’m going to have something for her and other children to enjoy,” because they — what crime do they have? They don’t know what’s happening. And I’m here with my Palestinian children to give a voice for the Palestinians that are there back home that have no voice and are being killed by this brutal occupation and genocide that the U.S. — we live here, and our tax dollars are supporting this. And this is a big problem, a big issue, and we want this to end as soon as possible. We don’t want no money for Israel. They’re committing war crime after war crime, and nothing is being done. It’s ridiculous. No other place in the world gets this immunity. No other place.
MARÍA TARACENA: What’s your message to mothers in Gaza that have lost their children and have lost sometimes multiple of their family members?
RAJA DIAZ: It’s absolutely horrific. You know, me and my mom, we watch these videos, and we just cry and cry and cry. But we’re going to tell them: Be strong and keep moving forward, because we’re not going to stop fighting for you.
NAWAL KHALIL: They killed our kids! They don’t have gun! They don’t do any crime! Why? Why? I ask why then. This is the blood on your hand! You killed the kids! Why? This what they do for you, these kids. Oh my God!
MESSIAH RHODES: What are you holding? What’s your name?
NAWAL KHALIL: My name is Nawal Khalil. I am here because — to support Gaza. They killed babies. Babies, they don’t have gun. Why? Why? I want to ask why then. Why they kill the babies? Give me an answer, please! Please!
PROTESTER 2: They give them time to kill. This is our president. He give more time, long time, to kill more.
PROTESTERS: What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!
HADDY ALREZ: My name is Haddy Alrez. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. So, we drove down. These are my kids and my nieces and nephews. My parents lived through the 1948 wars and were displaced and were in the Occupied Territories since — until 1973, until they left with five kids, me being the youngest, to the U.S., just to provide us with a better life. So, seeing all of this unfold and listening to my parents’ stories feels like a repetition of what happened in '48. And to somebody in our family, that is a personal experience for all of us. Even though I grew up in the United States, you know, we live it through our parents and our parents' stories. And it feels like it’s 100-fold now. You know, it was very traumatic for them, what they went through. They lived in caves, they lived under trees, until they made their way to the West Bank. Their town, my father’s village, was completely annihilated. Nothing is left. When I went to visit, the one time I went to visit in the mid-'90s, I went with my dad. And I'll never forget him standing on the side of his village, what used to be his village, that’s overcome with all just bush and overgrown in a small canyon, and how my dad looked looking out into the land, which he never went back to for 22 years.
MAHMOUD: My name is Mahmoud. I’m a physician in Boston. Come here in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are going through a genocide right now. As a healthcare worker, we stand with our healthcare colleagues in Gaza right now who are under undescribable circumstances to do their jobs. And right now the situation is beyond belief right now. They’re doing surgeries without anesthesia. They’re doing surgeries without electricity or without water. It’s just something no doctor should ever, you know, be quiet about. I’m carrying this poster in solidarity of the healthcare workers in Gaza. Some of the people who passed away over there are colleagues of us, physicians. Some of them were faculty at the medical school over there. The previous dean of the only medical school in Gaza was killed in an Israeli strike. So, the least we could do is, you know, to let the people their names and show their pictures, and let them know, you know, that they’re not numbers. And they died trying to do what they took an oath to do, is to save human life.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Long live Palestine! Long live Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine!
AMY GOODMAN: Just some of the voices of the tens of thousands of people — some say 100,000; organizers, 300,000 — who came to Washington, D.C., from around the country Saturday to join the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in U.S. history. Before the march to the White House, speakers addressed a rally in a packed Freedom Plaza, which they dubbed “Gaza Plaza.” We begin with Noura Erakat, Palestinian human rights attorney, associate professor at Rutgers University.
NOURA ERAKAT: We are all here to charge this administration with genocide. … Israel and the United States are jointly complicit in the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. Together, they are rending international law worthless and irrelevant. Every single tribunal, from Nuremberg to Rwanda, from Bosnia to Cambodia, every prosecution at the ICC, was meant to atone for our moral failures, to protect us from ourselves.
And today we fail to stop. Today we fail to stop the skies from crashing down in white phosphorus flames onto Palestinian dreams, memories, potential, onto Palestinian babies not old enough to beseech you to have mercy upon them.
We are here now with them and for them to demand a ceasefire. We are here because Palestine reveals the naked hypocrisy of Western universalism. It reveals our enduring colonial reality, and it offers a glimpse into a future without colonialism.
Falastin, Falastin, where a valiant peple have always existed, where survivors and fighters continue to affirm that they belong to a land upon which there is a life worth living. [speaking in Arabic] We — we — are like olive trees like the ones that our ancestors planted. We are unshaken. We are unmoved. We are undeniable. Stand with us in this promise. We promise, Palestine still promises, that we will all be free! Free, free Palestine!
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Macklemore on deck.
MACKLEMORE: Peace, everybody. You know, first and foremost, this is absolutely beautiful to observe today. I didn’t expect to be on a microphone, but — there are thousands of people here that are more qualified to speak on the issue of a free Palestine than myself. But I will say this. They told me to be quiet. They told me to do my research, to go back, that it’s too complex to say something, right? To be silent in this moment.
In the last three weeks, I’ve gone back, and I’ve done some research. And I am teachable; I don’t know enough. But I know enough that this is a genocide. And we are scared. We are watching it unfold. We have been taught to just be complicit, to protect our careers, to protect our interests. And I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not afraid to speak the truth!
You know, my daughter — my daughter said to me this morning, she said — she’s 8 years old. She said, “Dad, when we protest today, when we march today, how are the people in Palestine going to know that we’re showing up?” Look at this. Look at this. The world is watching what we do right now in this moment of injustice!
There is no side in humanity. We lead with our hearts. We speak the truth. We shut down the propaganda. And we march forward. Free, free Palestine!
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine!
MACKLEMORE: Free, free Palestine!
PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine!
MACKLEMORE: Thank you.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 2: The very courageous comrades of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
SARAH IHMOUD: Over 10,000 Palestinians have been martyred, and 70% of those killed in this genocide thus far are women and children. Today in Gaza, there are half a million displaced Palestinian women and girls. Fifty thousand pregnant women are waiting to give birth, with 5,500 expected to deliver next month, without water, without food, without fuel, without life-saving medicine or medical equipment.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: Shame! Women have resorted to taking birth control pills to stop their menstrual cycles because of a lack of sanitary pads. Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: This targeting of Indigenous women’s bodies and sexualities is woven into the genocidal fabric of Israeli settler colonialism.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
SARAH IHMOUD: But our love and care for each other, our insistence to live, our persistence to give birth to the next generation of Palestinians on our homeland, to hold ground amidst the most unlivable conditions, is a testament to the fact that we refuse to die quietly! We refuse the terms of our vanishment. We are a people who teach life and keep creating life, in spite of genocide, through our revolutionary love, our love for each other and our love for our homeland. And that love is something the colonizer can never take away from us! To know this, to feel this love deeply, is to know that we have already won.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Next up, we have brother Nihad Awad from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
NIHAD AWAD: From the beginning of the bombardment of Gaza, we spoke to President Biden the language of logic, the language of law, the language of humanity. We appealed to him to take a moral position, to recognize 2.3 million civilian residents trapped in Gaza under the attack of the Israeli forces from every imaginable type of modern weaponry, to call him to call for a ceasefire. All these calls and the calls from the world community fell on deaf ears.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: As the images of the genocide increased, he dehumanized the Palestinians and dismissed their suffering. He denied — he denied the dead Palestinians the right to be acknowledged as dead.
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: Shame!
PROTESTERS: Shame!
NIHAD AWAD: He insisted that should be — there should be no ceasefire. The State Department asked their staff not to talk about deescalation.
We have discovered the language that President Biden understands, and let me share it with you. The language that President Biden and his party understand is the language of votes in 2024 elections. And our message is: No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No votes in Michigan. No votes in Arizona. No votes in Georgia. No votes in Nevada. No votes in Wisconsin. No votes in Pennsylvania. No votes in Ohio. No votes for you anywhere, if you do not call for a ceasefire now.
After hearing — after hearing this message in the past week and a half, and the fact that 60% — 66% of Americans support a ceasefire, the president, the secretary of state, Democratic senators and representatives started to change their tone.
We will make our voices heard more and more. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember. A White House official told a friend of mine that the community has a short memory. A few months, then they will forget. And let me tell them — let me tell them: In November, we remember. In November, we remember. In November, we remember.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES 1: Next up, we have Mohammed El-Kurd.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I want us to take a few minutes to consider the magnitude of loss of life currently happening in the Gaza Strip. I want us to consider what it means to lose 10,000 people, for 10,000 people to be killed by Israeli warplanes. Consider their families and their grief. Consider their lovers. Consider the people missing them. Consider our martyrs’ lives, their grievances, their hobbies. And most of all, most of all I want you to consider the fear, the fear that they must have felt as warplanes dropped over their heads, the fear they must have felt minutes before they were killed.
And I want you to compare that fear, I want you to measure that fear against your own fear. It does not compare. I understand it. We’re are all afraid of losing a job, of losing a friend, of being ostracized, of being shamed. I called my father earlier. I told him I was coming to this march. He said, “Stay away from the cameras.” We’re all afraid, but this fear does not compare.
They want us to think that we are paying personal prices, but we have our community. They want us to think that we are alone, but we have our people supporting us. If they come for you, if they come for you, if they take your job, if they fire you from school, if they expel you, do not think of yourself as a casualty. You are not a casualty. You are fuel for the movement. You are part of the struggle. They want us to be silent, but we know silence will not protect us. Fear and silence will do nothing but allow this carnage to go on unchecked. Silence is a sign of consent in the empire. Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Are we afraid?
PROTESTERS: No!
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from Saturday’s massive rally in Washington, D.C., calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history. Special thanks to Democracy Now! producers Hany Massoud, Messiah Rhodes and María Taracena.
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Why Did Israel Kill My Son? Palestinian Poet Speaks from Hospital Bed After Airstrike Destroys Home
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ahmed_abu_artema
Transcript
Gazan poet, journalist and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema describes how he lost five members of his family, including his 12-year-old son, in an Israeli airstrike on his house on October 24. Abu Artema was seriously injured and sent Democracy Now! an audio message from his hospital bed. “Israel didn’t bombard my house, didn’t kill my child by mistake. It’s the Israeli strategy,” he says. “The Israeli problem is the Palestinian existence itself.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
Shortly before today’s show, Democracy Now! reached the Palestinian poet, journalist and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema, who lost five members of his family last month when they were killed by an Israeli airstrike. He survived the blast but was seriously injured. The dead include his 12-year-old son. Artema helped inspire the Great March of Return, a series of weekly nonviolent protests in Gaza that began in 2018. Israel responded to the protests by killing over 200 protesters, including 46 children. Artema recently wrote an article for The Electronic Intifada headlined “Why did Israel kill my son?” He sent us this audio message from his hospital bed.
AHMED ABU ARTEMA: In the morning of October 24th, I was sitting with my children in the living room of the house of my family. It’s a house of three floors. There were about 40 members in the house at that moment. Suddenly I became unconscious. Maybe after a few minutes, I wake up again. I saw dust and rubble surrounding me everywhere. I knew at that moment that the house where I was with my children was bombing. My hearing at that time was gone. I didn’t hear anything, but I looked around me. I looked around me. I saw my two children, Hammoud and Batool, screaming and sticking to me and pointing to my other child, my oldest child, Abboud, their brother. And they are shouting. Abboud was lying on the floor. The people came and took us from the rubble, and we went to the hospital by ambulance.
I knew that my four — four ladies at that place, my two aunts and my father’s wife and my cousin, were killed at the same time, at the first time of the bombing. My child Abboud and my niece — she’s about 10 years old also — they were in critical condition. A day after, they were killed. The majority of the family, most of them were injured.
This is what happened with me, and this is an example of the daily Israeli bombing against Gaza. Israelis are claiming and saying that it’s a war against Hamas. But where is Hamas? Take my house as example. Four women and two children were killed in this Israeli strike. And this is what’s happening every day. Thousands, the vast majority, of the victims of this Israeli war until now are innocent women and men and children, complete families. Israel is targeting the families.
Israel declared it clearly that its problem is with the Palestinians themselves, not with a faction or with a group. The Israeli problem is the Palestinian existence itself. So it’s not by mistake. Israel didn’t bombard my house, didn’t kill my child by mistake. It’s the Israeli strategy. It’s the Israeli mindset of genocide against the Palestinians. Israel look at us as nothing. We are nothing, we are human animals, in their perspective. So they don’t care to remove all the Palestinian cities, to kill all the Palestinians.
The most horrible, that the world is still allowing for this Israeli genocide to happen. This is the horrible thing. Israel is supported completely by the United States administration. The missile that killed my son Abboud, and the missiles that killed thousands of the Palestinians are U.S.-made. So, we are subjected to genocide. This is the most important message.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian poet Ahmed Abu Artema, who inspired the Great March of Return protest years ago. Last month he lost five members of his family, just a week or two ago, including his son, in an Israeli airstrike. He was injured in the strike, recorded this message from his hospital bed.
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Jewish Voice for Peace Health Adviser Dr. Alice Rothchild on Gaza Catastrophe as Health System Fails
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 06, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/6/ ... are_crisis
Transcript
Israel says it is responsible for an attack on a convoy of ambulances outside Gaza’s largest hospital on Friday that killed at least 15 people. Meanwhile, doctors in Gaza lack the resources to provide adequate care to the sick and injured, thanks to Israel’s blockade of water, food and fuel from entering the besieged region. For more on the rapidly deteriorating state of medical care in Gaza and Israel’s illegal targeting of medical providers, we speak with Dr. Alice Rothchild, a retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine and is a member of the steering committee of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Gaza Health Ministry has announced the Palestinian death toll in Gaza has now exceeded 10,000 from Israel’s monthlong bombardment. On Friday, at least 15 people died when an Israeli airstrike hit a convoy of ambulances outside Gaza’s largest hospital.
We’re ending the show with Dr. Alice Rothchild, retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine, was last in Gaza in August. On Friday, Dr. Rothchild participated in a nonviolent protest to shut down the Federal Building in Seattle, where Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington has an office, urging the senator to call for an immediate ceasefire. Dr. Rothchild is on the steering committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council and mentor liaison for We Are Not Numbers, on the board of Gaza Mental Health Foundation.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Rothchild. If you can talk about the attacks on hospitals right now? You have the attack on the ambulance convoy. Israel said it’s because they were transporting Hamas fighters. You have the attack on the hospitals, like Al-Shifa, the largest. Israel says it’s because command and control is underneath. Can you comment on all of this and the number, the death toll at this point?
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, this is an appalling situation in terms of the death toll. And there are multiple international laws, starting with the Geneva Accords, that are being violated. You are not allowed, under any circumstances, to bomb hospitals, to bomb health centers, to bomb ambulances. This is against international law. Israel has —Israeli military has for years, with multiple different attacks, accused health facilities of sheltering, quote, “terrorists.” They have never produced good documentation. And even if there were, for instance, tunnels under a hospital, you are still not allowed to bomb a hospital. So this is a grave violation of international law and also part of the situation where civilians are dying in massive numbers and being injured in massive numbers.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you comment on the level of protest that you’re seeing right now and the amount of suffering that you’re seeing right now in Gaza? You have these 18 groups, rarely, issuing a joint statement, NGOs, along with U.N. agencies, demanding a ceasefire. And what this would mean, and what Senator Murray has said to you as a representative of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, as you shut down the Federal Building in Seattle?
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, I think that I’ve been doing this for — solidarity work for 25 years, and this kind of response is unprecedented. And I think it’s a reflection of the unprecedented nature of the Israeli attack. And Senator Murray has not been willing to call for a ceasefire. But people all over this country and all over the planet are calling for a ceasefire, because we must stop this bombing, and we must stop all of the civilian death.
It is clear that the Israeli military is not doing a war to destroy Hamas, whatever that means. It is a war to destroy Gaza and destroying the infrastructure and killing thousands of people. You know, over half the homes are destroyed. A third of the hospitals are destroyed. It’s just a massive, massive catastrophe for this region. And there is thought that this is all part of an Israeli plan to run Gazans out of Gaza and displace them into Egypt. There are all sorts of horrific ideas going around. So, the response to this is all being seen internationally.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the health situation? We just came out of the third total blackout of Gaza, with health organizations, human rights groups begging the Israeli government to turn back on the electricity, the cellular service, because of what it means for people, organizations that are trying to coordinate their surviving workers on the ground to help the Palestinians.
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: Well, the health system is catastrophic. It has collapsed. And if you think about it, what it means not have electricity, you cannot call an ambulance. You’re in labor. You cannot communicate with anyone. Hospitals can’t communicate with each other. They can’t pump water into the system. There is no — almost no water at all that’s clean. That means you can’t wash your sterile instruments. You can’t wash wounds. There’s a lack of antibiotics. People are dying of infection.
I mean, it goes on and on and on, if you think about not having water, not having electricity and also not having food. There is now a serious risk of starvation. The average Gazan is living on two pieces of bread a day and spending hours searching for water. And people are starting to drink agricultural water, so we’re seeing an uptick in diarrheal diseases, respiratory infections, chickenpox. You know, this is a humanitarian and health catastrophe that is basically being live-streamed in front of our eyes.
AMY GOODMAN: And the position of the Biden administration? We just have 30 seconds at this point.
DR. ALICE ROTHCHILD: The position of the Biden administration is entirely inadequate and utterly outrageous. Biden needs to call for a ceasefire. The U.S. is sending — planning to send Israel more weapons, that will only create more havoc. So, Israel should not be getting weapons, and Biden must, must, must call for a total ceasefire. That is absolutely necessary from a humanitarian, healthcare, political, human and moral point of view.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Alice Rothchild, we thank you for you for being with us. We’ll continue our conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Retired OB-GYN who has long worked in Palestine, was in Gaza in August, on the steering committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Fri Nov 10, 2023 3:00 am
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund: Israel Is Threatening to Bomb Gaza’s Only Pediatric Cancer Unit
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 07, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/7/pcrf
Transcript
As the U.N. secretary-general repeats his call for an immediate ceasefire, the death toll in Gaza has topped 10,000, including 4,000 children. We speak to an American doctor who just left Gaza and the founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which runs the only pediatric cancer unit in Gaza. Israel has just ordered the hospital with the unit to be fully evacuated. “They’re not getting care right now because their hospitals are under attack,” says PCRF founder Steve Sosebee, who describes medical workers trying to evacuate to Egypt or continuing to provide care while sheltering in the hospital. “We can’t heal their bodies until this conflict stops.” Dr. Barbara Zind, a pediatrician who arrived in Gaza to support the PCRF a day before the Hamas attack, describes finding shelter and rationing food and clean water. After nearly a month trapped in Gaza, she was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing and arrived back home on Monday.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel is threatening to bomb a children’s hospital in Gaza that houses the enclave’s only pediatric cancer unit. Earlier today, the Israeli military ordered the immediate evacuation of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City. Israel already shelled the hospital two days ago.
This comes as Palestinian health officials say the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including 4,000 children, since October 7th, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing up to 1,400 people while seizing about 240 hostages.
On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres repeated his call for an immediate ceasefire.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day. More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organization.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with two guests. Steve Sosebee is the president and founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization that provides medical and humanitarian aid to Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank. The fund runs the pediatric cancer unit inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. He splits his time between the occupied West Bank and Kent, Ohio, where he joins us today.
And we’re joined by Dr. Barbara Zind, pediatrician who traveled to Gaza October 6th to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. After nearly a month trapped in Gaza, she was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing and arrived back home Monday. She’s joining us from Grand Junction, Colorado.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Steve Sosebee, let’s begin with you. Can you talk about what’s happening at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City and the overall collapse of the medical system in Gaza? We saw a tweet of yours a few days ago asking, had the hospital bombed? You have a ward there, the only one for children with cancer.
STEVE SOSEBEE: Yeah. In 2019, we opened the first and only pediatric oncology department in the Gaza Strip, based on the fact that every child prior to that, every single child in Gaza with cancer, had to travel outside for care that they couldn’t get locally. And that was a problem, because that required permits from the Israeli military, which were often either delayed or not provided for these kids with cancer. So we opened. We started a campaign through grassroots fundraising and raised enough money to open a cancer department in the main pediatric hospital in Gaza City, where, since 2019 until October 7th, hundreds of children had had life-saving care, professional care, through local services and through the support of our international teams coming in. We provide chemotherapy drugs, child life services, and training for doctors and nurses in that department, in addition to any other support those kids possibly need.
Now, since October 7th, obviously, due to the conflict on the ground in Gaza, the services there have been disrupted significantly; however, the department itself is full of children, full of patients with cancer, and, in addition, their families, who are seeking refuge. Many of them have had their homes destroyed and have no other place to go. So the department itself and the hospital itself is full of refugees, full of people seeking shelter and seeking aid.
And in addition to that, the doctors who provide — the oncologists who work at that hospital had to flee Gaza City or have not been able to access the hospital on a regular basis to provide therapy and treatment for the patients. And some of the nurses themselves have had their homes destroyed and family members killed, and they continue to provide services as much as they can.
However, two days ago, there was a threat to Gaza, to the hospital itself, and it was struck yesterday. About 30 hours ago, it was struck by a rocket, and the floor above the department was destroyed, and part of the department itself was destroyed, killing some children and — not in the department itself, but in the hospital — and destroying part of the department that we had built. Now, as of today — and some of the family members have fled. But, unfortunately, there’s no — we’re trying to get them south, out of Gaza City, so possibly evacuating them out of Gaza and getting them continued care in Egypt or in Jordan. But, unfortunately, Gaza itself is encircled.
And now, as of now, there was a report this morning from the Israeli military that they are demanding the evacuation of the hospital because they consider it a combat area. And, unfortunately, a lot of the families have no place to go. They have no place to be evacuated to. And there are still literally hundreds of children and patients within that hospital and the increasing sound of bombings and shootings around the department, around the hospital, is increasingly making it difficult for anybody to leave at this time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve Sosebee, could you talk about what the lack of medical care was for the children in Gaza even before October 7th and before the beginning of this horrific round of Israeli attacks?
STEVE SOSEBEE: Yeah. So, we started our organization over 30 years ago during the First Intifada to provide medical care for children who were getting — who were being injured on the ground as a result of the uprising and the use of force against the civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and over the years evolved into an organization that brings volunteer medical teams in on a regular basis to the Gaza Strip and West Bank to provide free specialized medical care to those kids. And over the last few years, we’ve been the main organization on the ground in Gaza bringing in international teams of volunteers with — providing a variety of different kinds of specialized surgical services and medical services, including pediatric oncology, pediatric cardiac surgery, pediatric neurosurgery, general pediatric surgery, orthopedic, so on and so forth, which don’t exist or are underdeveloped within the health sector in Gaza, in an attempt to fill the significant gap of children not having access to quality specialized care and not being able to access that care that may exist in the West Bank or may exist outside of Gaza. We were developing those services locally within the Gaza Strip and treating thousands of children a year in Gaza with these very specialized services. Unfortunately, and this is how Dr. Zind got stuck in Gaza, is that we have teams rotating on a regular basis in Gaza from all over the world, and she was there at the time of the closure, along with another specialist who was developing artificial limbs for amputees, children who are amputees.
And unfortunately, there are literally thousands of kids in Gaza, in addition to those who are being injured now — and we already know that number is graphically high — that there’s thousands of kids in Gaza who have nontrauma-related injuries who need medical care, kids who are born with congenital defects, kids with heart problems, kids with cancer, kids with cystic fibrosis, kids on dialysis. These are children, in addition to those thousands of kids who have been injured over the past month, who need specialized care they can’t get in Gaza. And as a result of the hospitals now running out of fuel and not able to provide services, as a result of hospitals running out of drugs and services, as a result of specialists being killed and being injured or not able to access the treatment centers, as a result of hospitals closing, thousands of children in Gaza, in addition to those who are being injured, are going without specialized care, and many of them are even dying. And that’s actually a huge concern to us. And we hope that we’re able to get these kids out as quickly as possible to provide them care outside if they cannot get care within Gaza. But, of course, we’re asking, more importantly, for a ceasefire and enabling our medical teams, who are standing by, ready to go to Gaza and continue to provide services there — we have several surgical missions ready to go at a moment’s notice if we can access Gaza and be able to relieve the doctors there and provide those services directly to those kids.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Dr. Barbara Zind, a pediatrician who traveled to Gaza to support the relief efforts of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Dr. Zind, could you talk about your experience while you were there during this Israeli bombardment?
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Yeah. I had arrived on October — November? I can’t remember which month. October 6 for a three-day mission to see about a hundred children that the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund is sponsoring with chronic diseases. And then, the morning after I arrived, I was just walking along the beach and saw those missiles fired, and, after that, ended up joining other humanitarian aid staff and volunteers going — over the next month going to, you know, three different U.N. sites for safety, and finally one last place, and then getting there the day that the Rafah border opened with our names on a list to exit.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Barbara Zind, talk about why you got involved with Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and then what it was like, if you can take us on that journey. You were one of a number of foreigners, specialists, humanitarian relief workers inside Gaza as the bombardment began. Can you talk about where you went, whether you were able to get clean water, more importantly, everyone around you — not more importantly, but equally, everyone around you, how you took shelter? You were on TV. We saw you as a bomb went off next to you. You jumped.
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Well, yes. I mean, I was fortunate, much more fortunate than the Gazans themselves, in that we were able to — we had administration. The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund worked with other humanitarian organizations, and they could see safe places to move.
I’ve been with this organization since 2010, going over to the West Bank and Gaza almost every year, except for the years I couldn’t because of COVID. And it’s because of all the great things that they do. It’s because the children that I see — I’m not a surgeon, but I fill — they help fill in the gaps, medications, special schooling, everything that these children with chronic diseases can’t get through the Ministry of Health, and that includes just diabetics getting insulin, and so, really, life-saving medications that can’t be fully provided through the governmental services and health services that are there.
So, throughout that month, we went — we started in Gaza City and with continuous bombardment, and then everyone was supposed to go to the south. We went to another U.N. facility in the south. That one was just thousands of people coming in the gates. Usually people go to U.N. schools, but the U.N. schools were already full when they ordered the evacuation of the northern part of Gaza, and so people just went to this — it was a vocational school. So it really didn’t have facilities. And those people started building things right away. They took wooden pallets. They took bricks. They just started just building a place for their families. And these are extended families, so they are large families. Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund has a staff member who’s in the last U.N. facility that we were at, and he’s with 150 family members. He has eight children. He has 19 siblings. So, his close relatives are 150 people, and they are living in that southernmost camp.
We were fortunate in that we had clean water delivered, but for — and we had 50 people using one toilet versus 400 to 600 people per toilet. I mean, even in our group of a lot of medical workers, we had an outbreak of diarrhea. I can’t imagine what it was like outside of our camp as far as that. They had limited water. They had a certain amount of drinking water, which ran out. Our drinking water started to run out. Definitely, our water for washing and running the toilet was running out right before we left. We were fortunate to have food, but at the last few days, we ended up computing how much food we needed for 50 people. And at 800 calories a day, we had enough for two days, until we were able to have a driver go all the way to Gaza City, a dangerous drive, to bring some other foods. But I don’t know what — but we knew that the grocery stores were going to be empty. But out in the camp, they were giving one pita bread per person and, initially, a can of meat for two people. And then that went down to four people while we were there. So, the United Nations was supplying some food, but so limited for those people.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Zind —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Zind, I’m wondering — I’m wondering about the issue not just of the life-and-death travails that the Palestinian people are confronting with this bombing, but also if you could talk some about what you see in the terms of the mental health, the long-term — we’re talking about a population, a complete population, that’s been traumatized now for years, and now especially with this bombing. Your sense of what the mental health needs of these children will be for years to come?
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Well, I think a lot of times I’ve described Gaza on a good day. So, in these other missions that I’ve gone to Gaza, they’re just constantly, constantly under siege, really. I mean, food is limited a lot. I mean, fishermen can only go out so far, and that’s — they can’t go to the international water boundaries for fishing. And so, food is always limited. Medications are limited. Sixty-five percent of Gazans are on humanitarian aid all the time. So, when we talk about humanitarian aid coming in, it’s not just for this conflict. I mean, they’re always needing humanitarian aid based on limitations of food and clean water. There’s no surface water. So these children live under that stress all the time. They’re wonderful, resilient people, but I can’t imagine, you know, what it’s like to be a child and be with a family that’s moving around, has really no place to go that’s safe.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Steve Sosebee back into the conversation. This is Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who was interviewed on CNN on Sunday.
GILAD ERDAN: There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In coordination with the U.S. and the U.N., we allowed a number of trucks entering Gaza now with food and medicines to reach almost 100 trucks every day. So we don’t see the need for humanitarian pauses right now, because it will only enable Hamas to rearm and regroup.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to this, Steve Sosebee? He doesn’t see — this is the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He doesn’t see a humanitarian crisis on the ground right now. And if you can also weave in, for example, the children in your cancer ward? How are they possibly getting chemotherapy right now?
STEVE SOSEBEE: Well, that’s an interesting point of view. It’s coming from a political perspective and not a realistic one and not based on reality. The fact is, on the ground, that there is an obvious humanitarian crisis. This is described not only by people on the ground there, but by the United Nations and by other, let’s say, objective points of view.
The humanitarian crisis is obvious. There is no fuel that’s been delivered to Gaza since October 7th. And what does that mean? Well, all of the hospitals in Gaza, every single one of them depends on fuel to run generators. They’re not connected to the electrical grid, because the electrical grid’s shut down since October 11th, so that, then, even when it was operating, it only provided electricity for three or four hours a day, as we all know, prior to October 7th. So, therefore, the hospitals are running out of fuel. They’re not able to operate. They’re not able to provide ventilation for children in the intensive care unit who are severely injured, and there’s hundreds of them. They’re not able to provide electricity for babies in incubators in the neonatal units increasingly. The fuel is running out. We know that in Shifa Hospital, there’s only one generator working now. The Indonesian Hospital has run out of fuel. And other hospitals have closed. And so, I don’t know what humanitarian crisis he’s not seeing.
In addition to that, as Dr. Zind just mentioned, children and people there are on a significant calorie diet, and that’s affecting the entire population. One-point-five million people in Gaza out of 2.2 [million] are displaced. They’re living in warehouses, in tents, in other — in makeshift places, in U.N. schools. And those schools are being hit. There are no safe places in Gaza. We’ve seen the casualty toll, as you mentioned at the beginning of this program, of over 4,000 children who have been killed so far in one month. Four thousand children, that would be hundreds of thousands of American children, if that was compared to our population in the U.S. And that’s not counting the over 1,000 children who are buried under rubble, some of them alive right now, slowly dying. And that’s not a humanitarian crisis. The lack of medication, doctors are operating on children without anesthesia, without pain medication. That’s not a humanitarian crisis. There’s over 200 children who are burned from bombing of their homes, and the doctors don’t have dressings. They don’t have anesthesia. These kids are getting Tylenol, while they have third-degree burns all over their bodies. That’s not a humanitarian crisis. I don’t know what world he’s living in or what world he’s watching, but for those of us who are actually watching with open eyes and open hearts and open minds, this is a humanitarian crisis that we’ve never seen before, and it’s 2023. This is unacceptable that this is happening in this modern world. And it’s happening with modern weapons, and these modern weapons are being paid for by our American tax dollars.
Now, your question about the children in the cancer department, they are running out of drugs. They’re running out of chemotherapy. They’re running out of adequate treatment. The kids who were in remission are falling out of remission. There’s literally dozens of children in Gaza with cancer who are not getting adequate care, not because they don’t have the facility to get that care. We built that and opened it in 2019, and it’s an excellent facility. They’re not getting care, not because the doctors there aren’t qualified and the nurses aren’t qualified to treat them. They are. They’re not getting care because their hospital right now is under attack. It’s been hit by — it was bombed two days ago. The doctors don’t have access. The nurses don’t have access.
The children themselves are living in a state of absolute terror, as was mentioned earlier. If we want to talk about the mental health situation, it’s affecting the entire population in Gaza Strip, and it’s going to be a generational conflict, or a generational issue. How do you solve an entire population that’s been exposed to conflict and war — children — over 1 million children have been traumatized now, and they’re going to live the rest of their lives with this trauma, and it’s impossible to treat it. Why? Because the source of the trauma is not going away. It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder; it’s current traumatic stress. And we can’t solve it. We have a mental health program. We can’t heal these children. We can’t heal their hearts, we can’t heal their souls, and we can’t heal their bodies, until this conflict stops. And it’s not going to stop until there’s a political will on the part of everybody who believes in peace, in justice, in freedom, in equality to take a stand and put an end to this situation once and for all.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Sosebee, I want to thank you for being with us, president and founder of Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, speaking to us from Kent, Ohio, and Dr. Barbara Zind, pediatrician who traveled to Gaza October 6th to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. She was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing weeks later and arrived back home in Grand Junction, Colorado, this week.
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“No Ceasefire, No Votes”: Arab American Support for Biden Plummets over Gaza Ahead of 2024 Election
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 07, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/7/arab_americans
Transcript
As protests across the U.S. denounce President Biden for refusing to support a ceasefire in Gaza while arming Israel’s deadly bombardment of Palestine, polls conducted by the Arab American Institute reveal Biden’s support among Arab American voters is plummeting, dropping from 59% to 17% since the 2020 presidential election. “Something horrible is happening to these people, and this administration is turning a blind eye to it,” says James Zogby, the institute’s president. “There are going to be electoral consequences.” He argues the United States has “blown it” in the Middle East after decades of “disappointments.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
“No ceasefire, no votes” and “In November, we remember,” those were two chants we heard Saturday in Washington at the largest rally in U.S. history for Palestinian rights. Protesters denounced President Biden for refusing to support a ceasefire in Gaza while sending more arms to Israel as it continues its monthlong bombardment that’s killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including 4,000 children. Polls show Biden’s support among Arab Americans is plummeting. This is Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR — that’s the Council on American-Islamic Relations — speaking at Saturday’s rally.
NIHAD AWAD: No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No votes in Michigan. No votes in Arizona. No votes in Georgia. No votes in Nevada. No votes in Wisconsin. No votes in Pennsylvania. No votes in Ohio. No votes for you anywhere, if you do not call for a ceasefire now. … We will make our voices heard more and more. In November, we remember. In November, we remember.
AMY GOODMAN: Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR, said he was speaking in his own capacity.
We are joined now by Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, joining us now from Washington, D.C.
It’s great to have you with us. If you could talk about these figures, that I’m sure the White House is looking at carefully? In 2020, President Biden had something like 59% support of the Arab American community. Right now it’s at something like 17%. James Zogby, if you can talk about Biden’s stance right now on Israel and Gaza?
JAMES ZOGBY: Thanks, Amy. It’s been a long time since we’ve been together, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Look, yeah, the poll is one that we did to get a read on the community. I have never seen, in the 27 years we’ve been polling, my brother and I have been polling Arab Americans, we never saw a movement this dramatic over this short a period of time. The last time we polled Arab Americans was just a few months ago, and the drop since then has been even more precipitous than the drop since 2020.
This issue resonates. It’s big. It’s important. It also is part of a general national trend. Arab Americans are not immune from what the rest of the culture is feeling, and that is that President Biden just is not in control of his own presidency and how he is being portrayed to the American people and to the world. They didn’t elect a Reaganite foreign policy advocate, a neocon who was fighting for freedom there to have freedom here, that kind of rhetoric that comes from the White House. They voted for somebody that focused on a whole bunch of domestic issues to bring domestic peace and tranquility after four years of Donald Trump. And that’s not what they’ve gotten. And I think that, coupled with the Gaza situation, most certainly, is driving these negative numbers. They are deeply disappointed with the position he’s taken on this conflict, and they just are jumping ship.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jim Zogby, could you talk about some other aspects of the poll, what the support for a ceasefire was, and also whether there were gender or age or religious differences in those you polled?
JAMES ZOGBY: What was really significant was that across the board — when you get numbers that high, a flip that high or numbers in the 70% range on several questions, like support for a ceasefire, or how important is the Palestinian issue to you, or how disappointed are you with the president’s performance on this issue — all of those numbers were two-thirds or greater. When you get numbers that great, you expect, across the board, to see the crosstabs reading that way. And we did. There was virtually no difference in terms of majorities, regardless of religion, regardless of whether born here or immigrant, or gender or age. Pretty much across the board, there’s frustration and deep disappointment with this president.
And the question I keep getting asked is: Can Biden win them back? The visceral reaction to this issue is so great that in order to do that, something dramatic has to come from the White House. And I’m not sure that the president has the wherewithal to do it. Look, I’ve heard two things from people at the White House. The one is, they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump, because they don’t want — you know, they don’t want back what he was doing during his four years, and so they’ll come around in a year. I told them that — when I heard that, I said, “That’s insulting and dismissive. You have to earn that vote.” They might just as well stay home. They might vote for Cornel West. They might just not vote at all. And it’s not a given that young Arab American women, who want control over their bodies and their healthcare, that older Arab Americans, who want protection for their Medicare or an expansion of healthcare — it’s not clear that they are going to make the decision to vote at all, if they don’t have something to vote for. It worked the last time: “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy.” I’m not quite sure it will work this time.
And, you know, I’ve got an article coming out in The Nation tomorrow that makes the point that it’s not just Arab Americans who are affected this way. It’s young people. It’s progressive Jews. It’s Black, Latino, Asian voters. There’s a significant decline that this president is encountering across the board. And, you know, Gaza is playing into it. It is a sort of a canary-in-the-coal-mine issue. It’s one that sort of is speaking to a broader sense of dissatisfaction. And the White House has to get a handle on that, not just dismiss it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of broader sense of dissatisfaction, you worked with Bernie Sanders for two of his campaigns. How do you understand his insistence only on calling for a humanitarian pause and not a ceasefire?
AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, let me play a clip of Bernie Sanders, who was interviewed this weekend on CNN.
DANA BASH: I want to just clarify one thing, Senator, if I might. You support a humanitarian pause in Gaza. Some of your fellow progressives say that there should be a full-on ceasefire, which would require an agreement on both sides to halt the fighting. Do you support a ceasefire? And if not, why not?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel. And I think, what the Arab countries in the region understand, that Hamas has got to go.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders being interviewed by Dana Bash of CNN. In fact, just a few days ago, Bernie Sanders’ office was occupied by a group of progressives protesting that he wasn’t calling for a ceasefire, among other senators. Jim Zogby?
JAMES ZOGBY: Look, you know, I have no idea. I’ve called the senator, didn’t get a call back; left him a couple messages, text messages, didn’t hear back. And I’m disappointed and, frankly, confounded. I don’t understand the thinking here. One could easily take the sentence that he spoke about “You don’t have a ceasefire with a group like Hamas” that blah, blah, blah, and stick in the Netanyahu government of the most extremist rightists in the country that are today, while under the cover of Gaza, taking armed settlers to evacuate Palestinian villages and force people to leave their lands, leave their orchards and their homes. This is a crazy extremist government. And, yes, Hamas is a group that has done and does evil things, just like the Netanyahu government does evil things. The question is — that’s why you need a ceasefire. And to say we can’t have peace with them, it’s what the Palestinians say: We can’t have peace with the Netanyahu government.
But the problem is that the United States has to act like the adult in the room, and we haven’t. We’ve been the cheerleader, the coat holder, the enabler and the funder of one side, digging the hole deeper every single day. And the result is, is that we’re locked in a conflict here, on Israel’s side, that has no good end in sight. Those who think, “On this path, we’ll eliminate Hamas,” forget what happened in Beirut in '82, forget what happened in Lebanon in 2006, or what happened in Afghanistan or Iraq. You don't eliminate. What you do is you create the conditions for something more virulent afterwards. You’re not going to get rid of Hamas. I mean, the million-plus people who have been forced to leave their belongings, their memories, the neighborhoods that they lived in now reduced to rubble, and flee to the south, where there’s no infrastructure to take care of them, the families of the 10,000 who have died, 4,000 of whom children, they’re not going to say when this is over, if it’s ever over, “Oh, we love Israel. Let’s have peace.” There is going to be the seed — there are the seeds being planted today for Hamas 2.0 or something more virulent. And I don’t understand how the folks in the White House or the State Department just don’t get it, and say, “This is not going to end well.” At the end of this path, with the exception of more dead bodies, more anger and more virulent extremism, we’re going to be right back where we started. It’s a failure of the United States, not of Hamas and of Israel, but the United States. We have not shown the leadership — that we ought to be showing, given the fact that we’re funding this damn thing — to stop it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, James Zogby, you’ve been, for decades now, an expert in public opinion and polling. And it’s not just the United States or England and France where we’re seeing unprecedented demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and opposed to Israeli bombardment and the invasion, but also across the Global South. In the rest of the world, outside of the Western countries, there is virtually no support for the United States’ policies and Israel. I’m wondering if you could talk about that?
JAMES ZOGBY: Yeah. We’ve just finished a poll in 12 Arab countries. I should add, my brother does the domestic polling. We played the game of Risk, and he took one side of the board, and I got the other side of the board. I do polling in the Middle East and some polling in Europe. We’ve done some polling on Ukraine with European countries, their attitude toward it.
But in the Arab world, we’ve blown it. There wasn’t actually much of a bounce when Joe Biden got elected. The damage done by George W. Bush, the disappointment in Obama making promises in Cairo that excited people and then blaming the Arabs for not delivering on the promises he made, and then Trump and the chaos of four years. People have told me there, “We’ve been on a roller coaster with your country for the last 20 years, and, frankly, we’re dizzy right now. We don’t know what we’re getting.” They, too, hoped for calm when Joe Biden got elected. And instead of calm, they have two big wars, and they’re being forced to choose. And frankly, they can’t, because they have decided, as European countries are deciding, that they have to make their own decisions, and they have to do what’s in their interest. And their people are watching what is happening in Gaza and saying, “Hell no, we’re not going to do this anymore.” Even countries that have made peace with Israel, their public opinion has turned decidedly against Israel and decidedly against the prospect of living in harmony with that country. Damage has been done here.
And I don’t understand, in all of my conversations with people at the White House and the State Department, that they don’t just get it. I don’t know what they’re taking in the morning that makes them think, “Today is going to be a better day. Israel is going to kill more people, and Arabs are going to say, ’Let’s have peace with Israel.’” It doesn’t work that way. And I’ve been down this road now for the last 40, 50 years doing this work full time, and, frankly, it gets worse, not better. And those who think you win a victory in a war where you kill lots of civilians, their heads aren’t screwed on right. And frankly, we need new thinking on this, but the guys in the White House aren’t capable, I think, of that kind of new thinking. And it’s really — it’s deeply disturbing, because the hole we’re digging is one that’s going to take a generation to get out of.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Zogby, I wanted to ask you a few quick questions. I see you have a TV behind you, and I was looking to see if there was a crack in the screen, because I was wondering of your comments on the coverage by the mainstream media. A word you almost never hear — and I’m not talking about Fox, I’m talking about MSNBC and CNN, places where you appear — rarely do we hear the word “occupation,” and why that is so significant in understanding how to end this. We’re not just talking about Gaza; we’re talking about the West Bank. When you had the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, saying, right before October 7th, you know, “It’s peaceful there in the Middle East. We’re moving on to other issues,” yet at that time you had at least a Palestinian a day being killed in the West Bank by settlers or by the Israeli military. Now I think, since October 7th, the number is well over 150. The OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza and the West Bank. Question: How we should be talking about this issue, what you think would be the most honest? And do you think there’s a difference between Biden and Trump, not on other domestic issues, but on Israel-Palestine?
JAMES ZOGBY: Joe Biden promised us a lot. He issued not just a platform plank, that was one that they made some accommodations to us about, but they issued a separate policy statement for Arab Americans. And I remember when we wanted language that talked about the equality of human needs and rights, and they issued that statement that both Israelis and Palestinians are equally deserving of, and then there were a litany of words that followed it. Three-and-a-half years later, we’re still waiting for the delivery on the equal promise of. All that Palestinians have gotten has been a green light for Israel to run roughshod over the West Bank, take more land, build more settlements, demolish more homes, more restrictions on Palestinian rights, Jerusalem the same, and Gaza worse. It’s been a huge disappointment.
And frankly, I don’t — I recall some interesting things in the platform debate that still trouble me, because I remember back in '88 when I was negotiating with Madeleine Albright on the Dukakis-Jackson platform issue, we wanted the word “Palestinian” in the platform. And she told me, she said, “If the P-word even appears in print in the Democratic Party platform, all hell will break loose.” I told her, I said, “Don't play Chicken Little with me. The sky is not going to fall. We can do it and live with it. I mean, it’s not rocket science to say there are Palestinians in this conflict.” The party had never even mentioned the word up 'til then, and it didn't that year, either.
What troubled me in 2016 and 2020 was that we couldn’t get the word “occupation” in the platform. They wouldn’t use the word “occupation,” which was Trump language. Trump wouldn’t use “occupation,” either. In fact, they changed the human rights report from reporting on the Occupied Territories to putting it all in one thing. That was the — what do you call it? — by U.S. Ambassador Friedman. Trump’s ambassador wanted it that way. There was no occupation. The Biden administration deals with it as if it were an occupation in language, but not in practice. Not in practice. We have not put conditions or terms on Israel to deal with Palestinians as an occupied people. And so, we’ve kind of come a ways, but we haven’t come anywhere at all, from not using the P-word to not using the “occupation” word. Frankly, it’s maybe a little bit of a semantic thing.
But Palestinians are living under a brutal occupation. It’s an apartheid occupation. And they are also being victims of a genocidal attack on Gaza right now that is killing the infrastructure, killing the people, forcibly evicting over a million people from their homes in the north to move south, where there is no capacity to care for them. They’re living in tents, without water, without power, without healthcare. The hospitals in the south are not capable of dealing with all the issues. And the Israelis are treating the people in the north as if, as the general says, they’re all animals and deserve to die. If that’s not genocide, I don’t know what is.
And yet, this administration, if they can’t use the word “occupation” — and, for God’s sake, they won’t use the word “apartheid” — they can’t use the word “genocide.” Something horrible is happening to these people, and this administration is turning a blind eye to it. And I’m sorry, but when they say, “We’re deeply concerned,” if that’s the best they can do, when we’re providing $14.3 billion additional this year on top of $4 billion, when we’re providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations, that is not enough. And frankly, this, what is happening in Gaza, is not only happening on our watch, but we’re complicit and enabling it. Sounds harsh, but it’s the reality. And they have to deal with it. And there are going to be electoral consequences. And I wish it weren’t so. Last thing on Earth I want to see is a Republican of the type of Donald Trump or whoever comes after in the White House. But they have to earn the vote and establish that there’s a difference. They haven’t done it.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 07, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/7/pcrf
Transcript
As the U.N. secretary-general repeats his call for an immediate ceasefire, the death toll in Gaza has topped 10,000, including 4,000 children. We speak to an American doctor who just left Gaza and the founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which runs the only pediatric cancer unit in Gaza. Israel has just ordered the hospital with the unit to be fully evacuated. “They’re not getting care right now because their hospitals are under attack,” says PCRF founder Steve Sosebee, who describes medical workers trying to evacuate to Egypt or continuing to provide care while sheltering in the hospital. “We can’t heal their bodies until this conflict stops.” Dr. Barbara Zind, a pediatrician who arrived in Gaza to support the PCRF a day before the Hamas attack, describes finding shelter and rationing food and clean water. After nearly a month trapped in Gaza, she was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing and arrived back home on Monday.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel is threatening to bomb a children’s hospital in Gaza that houses the enclave’s only pediatric cancer unit. Earlier today, the Israeli military ordered the immediate evacuation of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City. Israel already shelled the hospital two days ago.
This comes as Palestinian health officials say the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including 4,000 children, since October 7th, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing up to 1,400 people while seizing about 240 hostages.
On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres repeated his call for an immediate ceasefire.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day. More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organization.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with two guests. Steve Sosebee is the president and founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization that provides medical and humanitarian aid to Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank. The fund runs the pediatric cancer unit inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. He splits his time between the occupied West Bank and Kent, Ohio, where he joins us today.
And we’re joined by Dr. Barbara Zind, pediatrician who traveled to Gaza October 6th to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. After nearly a month trapped in Gaza, she was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing and arrived back home Monday. She’s joining us from Grand Junction, Colorado.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Steve Sosebee, let’s begin with you. Can you talk about what’s happening at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City and the overall collapse of the medical system in Gaza? We saw a tweet of yours a few days ago asking, had the hospital bombed? You have a ward there, the only one for children with cancer.
STEVE SOSEBEE: Yeah. In 2019, we opened the first and only pediatric oncology department in the Gaza Strip, based on the fact that every child prior to that, every single child in Gaza with cancer, had to travel outside for care that they couldn’t get locally. And that was a problem, because that required permits from the Israeli military, which were often either delayed or not provided for these kids with cancer. So we opened. We started a campaign through grassroots fundraising and raised enough money to open a cancer department in the main pediatric hospital in Gaza City, where, since 2019 until October 7th, hundreds of children had had life-saving care, professional care, through local services and through the support of our international teams coming in. We provide chemotherapy drugs, child life services, and training for doctors and nurses in that department, in addition to any other support those kids possibly need.
Now, since October 7th, obviously, due to the conflict on the ground in Gaza, the services there have been disrupted significantly; however, the department itself is full of children, full of patients with cancer, and, in addition, their families, who are seeking refuge. Many of them have had their homes destroyed and have no other place to go. So the department itself and the hospital itself is full of refugees, full of people seeking shelter and seeking aid.
And in addition to that, the doctors who provide — the oncologists who work at that hospital had to flee Gaza City or have not been able to access the hospital on a regular basis to provide therapy and treatment for the patients. And some of the nurses themselves have had their homes destroyed and family members killed, and they continue to provide services as much as they can.
However, two days ago, there was a threat to Gaza, to the hospital itself, and it was struck yesterday. About 30 hours ago, it was struck by a rocket, and the floor above the department was destroyed, and part of the department itself was destroyed, killing some children and — not in the department itself, but in the hospital — and destroying part of the department that we had built. Now, as of today — and some of the family members have fled. But, unfortunately, there’s no — we’re trying to get them south, out of Gaza City, so possibly evacuating them out of Gaza and getting them continued care in Egypt or in Jordan. But, unfortunately, Gaza itself is encircled.
And now, as of now, there was a report this morning from the Israeli military that they are demanding the evacuation of the hospital because they consider it a combat area. And, unfortunately, a lot of the families have no place to go. They have no place to be evacuated to. And there are still literally hundreds of children and patients within that hospital and the increasing sound of bombings and shootings around the department, around the hospital, is increasingly making it difficult for anybody to leave at this time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve Sosebee, could you talk about what the lack of medical care was for the children in Gaza even before October 7th and before the beginning of this horrific round of Israeli attacks?
STEVE SOSEBEE: Yeah. So, we started our organization over 30 years ago during the First Intifada to provide medical care for children who were getting — who were being injured on the ground as a result of the uprising and the use of force against the civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and over the years evolved into an organization that brings volunteer medical teams in on a regular basis to the Gaza Strip and West Bank to provide free specialized medical care to those kids. And over the last few years, we’ve been the main organization on the ground in Gaza bringing in international teams of volunteers with — providing a variety of different kinds of specialized surgical services and medical services, including pediatric oncology, pediatric cardiac surgery, pediatric neurosurgery, general pediatric surgery, orthopedic, so on and so forth, which don’t exist or are underdeveloped within the health sector in Gaza, in an attempt to fill the significant gap of children not having access to quality specialized care and not being able to access that care that may exist in the West Bank or may exist outside of Gaza. We were developing those services locally within the Gaza Strip and treating thousands of children a year in Gaza with these very specialized services. Unfortunately, and this is how Dr. Zind got stuck in Gaza, is that we have teams rotating on a regular basis in Gaza from all over the world, and she was there at the time of the closure, along with another specialist who was developing artificial limbs for amputees, children who are amputees.
And unfortunately, there are literally thousands of kids in Gaza, in addition to those who are being injured now — and we already know that number is graphically high — that there’s thousands of kids in Gaza who have nontrauma-related injuries who need medical care, kids who are born with congenital defects, kids with heart problems, kids with cancer, kids with cystic fibrosis, kids on dialysis. These are children, in addition to those thousands of kids who have been injured over the past month, who need specialized care they can’t get in Gaza. And as a result of the hospitals now running out of fuel and not able to provide services, as a result of hospitals running out of drugs and services, as a result of specialists being killed and being injured or not able to access the treatment centers, as a result of hospitals closing, thousands of children in Gaza, in addition to those who are being injured, are going without specialized care, and many of them are even dying. And that’s actually a huge concern to us. And we hope that we’re able to get these kids out as quickly as possible to provide them care outside if they cannot get care within Gaza. But, of course, we’re asking, more importantly, for a ceasefire and enabling our medical teams, who are standing by, ready to go to Gaza and continue to provide services there — we have several surgical missions ready to go at a moment’s notice if we can access Gaza and be able to relieve the doctors there and provide those services directly to those kids.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Dr. Barbara Zind, a pediatrician who traveled to Gaza to support the relief efforts of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Dr. Zind, could you talk about your experience while you were there during this Israeli bombardment?
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Yeah. I had arrived on October — November? I can’t remember which month. October 6 for a three-day mission to see about a hundred children that the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund is sponsoring with chronic diseases. And then, the morning after I arrived, I was just walking along the beach and saw those missiles fired, and, after that, ended up joining other humanitarian aid staff and volunteers going — over the next month going to, you know, three different U.N. sites for safety, and finally one last place, and then getting there the day that the Rafah border opened with our names on a list to exit.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Barbara Zind, talk about why you got involved with Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and then what it was like, if you can take us on that journey. You were one of a number of foreigners, specialists, humanitarian relief workers inside Gaza as the bombardment began. Can you talk about where you went, whether you were able to get clean water, more importantly, everyone around you — not more importantly, but equally, everyone around you, how you took shelter? You were on TV. We saw you as a bomb went off next to you. You jumped.
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Well, yes. I mean, I was fortunate, much more fortunate than the Gazans themselves, in that we were able to — we had administration. The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund worked with other humanitarian organizations, and they could see safe places to move.
I’ve been with this organization since 2010, going over to the West Bank and Gaza almost every year, except for the years I couldn’t because of COVID. And it’s because of all the great things that they do. It’s because the children that I see — I’m not a surgeon, but I fill — they help fill in the gaps, medications, special schooling, everything that these children with chronic diseases can’t get through the Ministry of Health, and that includes just diabetics getting insulin, and so, really, life-saving medications that can’t be fully provided through the governmental services and health services that are there.
So, throughout that month, we went — we started in Gaza City and with continuous bombardment, and then everyone was supposed to go to the south. We went to another U.N. facility in the south. That one was just thousands of people coming in the gates. Usually people go to U.N. schools, but the U.N. schools were already full when they ordered the evacuation of the northern part of Gaza, and so people just went to this — it was a vocational school. So it really didn’t have facilities. And those people started building things right away. They took wooden pallets. They took bricks. They just started just building a place for their families. And these are extended families, so they are large families. Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund has a staff member who’s in the last U.N. facility that we were at, and he’s with 150 family members. He has eight children. He has 19 siblings. So, his close relatives are 150 people, and they are living in that southernmost camp.
We were fortunate in that we had clean water delivered, but for — and we had 50 people using one toilet versus 400 to 600 people per toilet. I mean, even in our group of a lot of medical workers, we had an outbreak of diarrhea. I can’t imagine what it was like outside of our camp as far as that. They had limited water. They had a certain amount of drinking water, which ran out. Our drinking water started to run out. Definitely, our water for washing and running the toilet was running out right before we left. We were fortunate to have food, but at the last few days, we ended up computing how much food we needed for 50 people. And at 800 calories a day, we had enough for two days, until we were able to have a driver go all the way to Gaza City, a dangerous drive, to bring some other foods. But I don’t know what — but we knew that the grocery stores were going to be empty. But out in the camp, they were giving one pita bread per person and, initially, a can of meat for two people. And then that went down to four people while we were there. So, the United Nations was supplying some food, but so limited for those people.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Zind —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Zind, I’m wondering — I’m wondering about the issue not just of the life-and-death travails that the Palestinian people are confronting with this bombing, but also if you could talk some about what you see in the terms of the mental health, the long-term — we’re talking about a population, a complete population, that’s been traumatized now for years, and now especially with this bombing. Your sense of what the mental health needs of these children will be for years to come?
DR. BARBARA ZIND: Well, I think a lot of times I’ve described Gaza on a good day. So, in these other missions that I’ve gone to Gaza, they’re just constantly, constantly under siege, really. I mean, food is limited a lot. I mean, fishermen can only go out so far, and that’s — they can’t go to the international water boundaries for fishing. And so, food is always limited. Medications are limited. Sixty-five percent of Gazans are on humanitarian aid all the time. So, when we talk about humanitarian aid coming in, it’s not just for this conflict. I mean, they’re always needing humanitarian aid based on limitations of food and clean water. There’s no surface water. So these children live under that stress all the time. They’re wonderful, resilient people, but I can’t imagine, you know, what it’s like to be a child and be with a family that’s moving around, has really no place to go that’s safe.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Steve Sosebee back into the conversation. This is Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who was interviewed on CNN on Sunday.
GILAD ERDAN: There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In coordination with the U.S. and the U.N., we allowed a number of trucks entering Gaza now with food and medicines to reach almost 100 trucks every day. So we don’t see the need for humanitarian pauses right now, because it will only enable Hamas to rearm and regroup.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to this, Steve Sosebee? He doesn’t see — this is the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He doesn’t see a humanitarian crisis on the ground right now. And if you can also weave in, for example, the children in your cancer ward? How are they possibly getting chemotherapy right now?
STEVE SOSEBEE: Well, that’s an interesting point of view. It’s coming from a political perspective and not a realistic one and not based on reality. The fact is, on the ground, that there is an obvious humanitarian crisis. This is described not only by people on the ground there, but by the United Nations and by other, let’s say, objective points of view.
The humanitarian crisis is obvious. There is no fuel that’s been delivered to Gaza since October 7th. And what does that mean? Well, all of the hospitals in Gaza, every single one of them depends on fuel to run generators. They’re not connected to the electrical grid, because the electrical grid’s shut down since October 11th, so that, then, even when it was operating, it only provided electricity for three or four hours a day, as we all know, prior to October 7th. So, therefore, the hospitals are running out of fuel. They’re not able to operate. They’re not able to provide ventilation for children in the intensive care unit who are severely injured, and there’s hundreds of them. They’re not able to provide electricity for babies in incubators in the neonatal units increasingly. The fuel is running out. We know that in Shifa Hospital, there’s only one generator working now. The Indonesian Hospital has run out of fuel. And other hospitals have closed. And so, I don’t know what humanitarian crisis he’s not seeing.
In addition to that, as Dr. Zind just mentioned, children and people there are on a significant calorie diet, and that’s affecting the entire population. One-point-five million people in Gaza out of 2.2 [million] are displaced. They’re living in warehouses, in tents, in other — in makeshift places, in U.N. schools. And those schools are being hit. There are no safe places in Gaza. We’ve seen the casualty toll, as you mentioned at the beginning of this program, of over 4,000 children who have been killed so far in one month. Four thousand children, that would be hundreds of thousands of American children, if that was compared to our population in the U.S. And that’s not counting the over 1,000 children who are buried under rubble, some of them alive right now, slowly dying. And that’s not a humanitarian crisis. The lack of medication, doctors are operating on children without anesthesia, without pain medication. That’s not a humanitarian crisis. There’s over 200 children who are burned from bombing of their homes, and the doctors don’t have dressings. They don’t have anesthesia. These kids are getting Tylenol, while they have third-degree burns all over their bodies. That’s not a humanitarian crisis. I don’t know what world he’s living in or what world he’s watching, but for those of us who are actually watching with open eyes and open hearts and open minds, this is a humanitarian crisis that we’ve never seen before, and it’s 2023. This is unacceptable that this is happening in this modern world. And it’s happening with modern weapons, and these modern weapons are being paid for by our American tax dollars.
Now, your question about the children in the cancer department, they are running out of drugs. They’re running out of chemotherapy. They’re running out of adequate treatment. The kids who were in remission are falling out of remission. There’s literally dozens of children in Gaza with cancer who are not getting adequate care, not because they don’t have the facility to get that care. We built that and opened it in 2019, and it’s an excellent facility. They’re not getting care, not because the doctors there aren’t qualified and the nurses aren’t qualified to treat them. They are. They’re not getting care because their hospital right now is under attack. It’s been hit by — it was bombed two days ago. The doctors don’t have access. The nurses don’t have access.
The children themselves are living in a state of absolute terror, as was mentioned earlier. If we want to talk about the mental health situation, it’s affecting the entire population in Gaza Strip, and it’s going to be a generational conflict, or a generational issue. How do you solve an entire population that’s been exposed to conflict and war — children — over 1 million children have been traumatized now, and they’re going to live the rest of their lives with this trauma, and it’s impossible to treat it. Why? Because the source of the trauma is not going away. It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder; it’s current traumatic stress. And we can’t solve it. We have a mental health program. We can’t heal these children. We can’t heal their hearts, we can’t heal their souls, and we can’t heal their bodies, until this conflict stops. And it’s not going to stop until there’s a political will on the part of everybody who believes in peace, in justice, in freedom, in equality to take a stand and put an end to this situation once and for all.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Sosebee, I want to thank you for being with us, president and founder of Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, speaking to us from Kent, Ohio, and Dr. Barbara Zind, pediatrician who traveled to Gaza October 6th to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. She was finally evacuated through the Rafah border crossing weeks later and arrived back home in Grand Junction, Colorado, this week.
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“No Ceasefire, No Votes”: Arab American Support for Biden Plummets over Gaza Ahead of 2024 Election
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 07, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/7/arab_americans
Transcript
As protests across the U.S. denounce President Biden for refusing to support a ceasefire in Gaza while arming Israel’s deadly bombardment of Palestine, polls conducted by the Arab American Institute reveal Biden’s support among Arab American voters is plummeting, dropping from 59% to 17% since the 2020 presidential election. “Something horrible is happening to these people, and this administration is turning a blind eye to it,” says James Zogby, the institute’s president. “There are going to be electoral consequences.” He argues the United States has “blown it” in the Middle East after decades of “disappointments.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
“No ceasefire, no votes” and “In November, we remember,” those were two chants we heard Saturday in Washington at the largest rally in U.S. history for Palestinian rights. Protesters denounced President Biden for refusing to support a ceasefire in Gaza while sending more arms to Israel as it continues its monthlong bombardment that’s killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including 4,000 children. Polls show Biden’s support among Arab Americans is plummeting. This is Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR — that’s the Council on American-Islamic Relations — speaking at Saturday’s rally.
NIHAD AWAD: No ceasefire, no votes. No ceasefire, no votes. No votes in Michigan. No votes in Arizona. No votes in Georgia. No votes in Nevada. No votes in Wisconsin. No votes in Pennsylvania. No votes in Ohio. No votes for you anywhere, if you do not call for a ceasefire now. … We will make our voices heard more and more. In November, we remember. In November, we remember.
AMY GOODMAN: Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR, said he was speaking in his own capacity.
We are joined now by Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, joining us now from Washington, D.C.
It’s great to have you with us. If you could talk about these figures, that I’m sure the White House is looking at carefully? In 2020, President Biden had something like 59% support of the Arab American community. Right now it’s at something like 17%. James Zogby, if you can talk about Biden’s stance right now on Israel and Gaza?
JAMES ZOGBY: Thanks, Amy. It’s been a long time since we’ve been together, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Look, yeah, the poll is one that we did to get a read on the community. I have never seen, in the 27 years we’ve been polling, my brother and I have been polling Arab Americans, we never saw a movement this dramatic over this short a period of time. The last time we polled Arab Americans was just a few months ago, and the drop since then has been even more precipitous than the drop since 2020.
This issue resonates. It’s big. It’s important. It also is part of a general national trend. Arab Americans are not immune from what the rest of the culture is feeling, and that is that President Biden just is not in control of his own presidency and how he is being portrayed to the American people and to the world. They didn’t elect a Reaganite foreign policy advocate, a neocon who was fighting for freedom there to have freedom here, that kind of rhetoric that comes from the White House. They voted for somebody that focused on a whole bunch of domestic issues to bring domestic peace and tranquility after four years of Donald Trump. And that’s not what they’ve gotten. And I think that, coupled with the Gaza situation, most certainly, is driving these negative numbers. They are deeply disappointed with the position he’s taken on this conflict, and they just are jumping ship.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jim Zogby, could you talk about some other aspects of the poll, what the support for a ceasefire was, and also whether there were gender or age or religious differences in those you polled?
JAMES ZOGBY: What was really significant was that across the board — when you get numbers that high, a flip that high or numbers in the 70% range on several questions, like support for a ceasefire, or how important is the Palestinian issue to you, or how disappointed are you with the president’s performance on this issue — all of those numbers were two-thirds or greater. When you get numbers that great, you expect, across the board, to see the crosstabs reading that way. And we did. There was virtually no difference in terms of majorities, regardless of religion, regardless of whether born here or immigrant, or gender or age. Pretty much across the board, there’s frustration and deep disappointment with this president.
And the question I keep getting asked is: Can Biden win them back? The visceral reaction to this issue is so great that in order to do that, something dramatic has to come from the White House. And I’m not sure that the president has the wherewithal to do it. Look, I’ve heard two things from people at the White House. The one is, they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump, because they don’t want — you know, they don’t want back what he was doing during his four years, and so they’ll come around in a year. I told them that — when I heard that, I said, “That’s insulting and dismissive. You have to earn that vote.” They might just as well stay home. They might vote for Cornel West. They might just not vote at all. And it’s not a given that young Arab American women, who want control over their bodies and their healthcare, that older Arab Americans, who want protection for their Medicare or an expansion of healthcare — it’s not clear that they are going to make the decision to vote at all, if they don’t have something to vote for. It worked the last time: “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy.” I’m not quite sure it will work this time.
And, you know, I’ve got an article coming out in The Nation tomorrow that makes the point that it’s not just Arab Americans who are affected this way. It’s young people. It’s progressive Jews. It’s Black, Latino, Asian voters. There’s a significant decline that this president is encountering across the board. And, you know, Gaza is playing into it. It is a sort of a canary-in-the-coal-mine issue. It’s one that sort of is speaking to a broader sense of dissatisfaction. And the White House has to get a handle on that, not just dismiss it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of broader sense of dissatisfaction, you worked with Bernie Sanders for two of his campaigns. How do you understand his insistence only on calling for a humanitarian pause and not a ceasefire?
AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, let me play a clip of Bernie Sanders, who was interviewed this weekend on CNN.
DANA BASH: I want to just clarify one thing, Senator, if I might. You support a humanitarian pause in Gaza. Some of your fellow progressives say that there should be a full-on ceasefire, which would require an agreement on both sides to halt the fighting. Do you support a ceasefire? And if not, why not?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel. And I think, what the Arab countries in the region understand, that Hamas has got to go.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders being interviewed by Dana Bash of CNN. In fact, just a few days ago, Bernie Sanders’ office was occupied by a group of progressives protesting that he wasn’t calling for a ceasefire, among other senators. Jim Zogby?
JAMES ZOGBY: Look, you know, I have no idea. I’ve called the senator, didn’t get a call back; left him a couple messages, text messages, didn’t hear back. And I’m disappointed and, frankly, confounded. I don’t understand the thinking here. One could easily take the sentence that he spoke about “You don’t have a ceasefire with a group like Hamas” that blah, blah, blah, and stick in the Netanyahu government of the most extremist rightists in the country that are today, while under the cover of Gaza, taking armed settlers to evacuate Palestinian villages and force people to leave their lands, leave their orchards and their homes. This is a crazy extremist government. And, yes, Hamas is a group that has done and does evil things, just like the Netanyahu government does evil things. The question is — that’s why you need a ceasefire. And to say we can’t have peace with them, it’s what the Palestinians say: We can’t have peace with the Netanyahu government.
But the problem is that the United States has to act like the adult in the room, and we haven’t. We’ve been the cheerleader, the coat holder, the enabler and the funder of one side, digging the hole deeper every single day. And the result is, is that we’re locked in a conflict here, on Israel’s side, that has no good end in sight. Those who think, “On this path, we’ll eliminate Hamas,” forget what happened in Beirut in '82, forget what happened in Lebanon in 2006, or what happened in Afghanistan or Iraq. You don't eliminate. What you do is you create the conditions for something more virulent afterwards. You’re not going to get rid of Hamas. I mean, the million-plus people who have been forced to leave their belongings, their memories, the neighborhoods that they lived in now reduced to rubble, and flee to the south, where there’s no infrastructure to take care of them, the families of the 10,000 who have died, 4,000 of whom children, they’re not going to say when this is over, if it’s ever over, “Oh, we love Israel. Let’s have peace.” There is going to be the seed — there are the seeds being planted today for Hamas 2.0 or something more virulent. And I don’t understand how the folks in the White House or the State Department just don’t get it, and say, “This is not going to end well.” At the end of this path, with the exception of more dead bodies, more anger and more virulent extremism, we’re going to be right back where we started. It’s a failure of the United States, not of Hamas and of Israel, but the United States. We have not shown the leadership — that we ought to be showing, given the fact that we’re funding this damn thing — to stop it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, James Zogby, you’ve been, for decades now, an expert in public opinion and polling. And it’s not just the United States or England and France where we’re seeing unprecedented demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and opposed to Israeli bombardment and the invasion, but also across the Global South. In the rest of the world, outside of the Western countries, there is virtually no support for the United States’ policies and Israel. I’m wondering if you could talk about that?
JAMES ZOGBY: Yeah. We’ve just finished a poll in 12 Arab countries. I should add, my brother does the domestic polling. We played the game of Risk, and he took one side of the board, and I got the other side of the board. I do polling in the Middle East and some polling in Europe. We’ve done some polling on Ukraine with European countries, their attitude toward it.
But in the Arab world, we’ve blown it. There wasn’t actually much of a bounce when Joe Biden got elected. The damage done by George W. Bush, the disappointment in Obama making promises in Cairo that excited people and then blaming the Arabs for not delivering on the promises he made, and then Trump and the chaos of four years. People have told me there, “We’ve been on a roller coaster with your country for the last 20 years, and, frankly, we’re dizzy right now. We don’t know what we’re getting.” They, too, hoped for calm when Joe Biden got elected. And instead of calm, they have two big wars, and they’re being forced to choose. And frankly, they can’t, because they have decided, as European countries are deciding, that they have to make their own decisions, and they have to do what’s in their interest. And their people are watching what is happening in Gaza and saying, “Hell no, we’re not going to do this anymore.” Even countries that have made peace with Israel, their public opinion has turned decidedly against Israel and decidedly against the prospect of living in harmony with that country. Damage has been done here.
And I don’t understand, in all of my conversations with people at the White House and the State Department, that they don’t just get it. I don’t know what they’re taking in the morning that makes them think, “Today is going to be a better day. Israel is going to kill more people, and Arabs are going to say, ’Let’s have peace with Israel.’” It doesn’t work that way. And I’ve been down this road now for the last 40, 50 years doing this work full time, and, frankly, it gets worse, not better. And those who think you win a victory in a war where you kill lots of civilians, their heads aren’t screwed on right. And frankly, we need new thinking on this, but the guys in the White House aren’t capable, I think, of that kind of new thinking. And it’s really — it’s deeply disturbing, because the hole we’re digging is one that’s going to take a generation to get out of.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Zogby, I wanted to ask you a few quick questions. I see you have a TV behind you, and I was looking to see if there was a crack in the screen, because I was wondering of your comments on the coverage by the mainstream media. A word you almost never hear — and I’m not talking about Fox, I’m talking about MSNBC and CNN, places where you appear — rarely do we hear the word “occupation,” and why that is so significant in understanding how to end this. We’re not just talking about Gaza; we’re talking about the West Bank. When you had the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, saying, right before October 7th, you know, “It’s peaceful there in the Middle East. We’re moving on to other issues,” yet at that time you had at least a Palestinian a day being killed in the West Bank by settlers or by the Israeli military. Now I think, since October 7th, the number is well over 150. The OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza and the West Bank. Question: How we should be talking about this issue, what you think would be the most honest? And do you think there’s a difference between Biden and Trump, not on other domestic issues, but on Israel-Palestine?
JAMES ZOGBY: Joe Biden promised us a lot. He issued not just a platform plank, that was one that they made some accommodations to us about, but they issued a separate policy statement for Arab Americans. And I remember when we wanted language that talked about the equality of human needs and rights, and they issued that statement that both Israelis and Palestinians are equally deserving of, and then there were a litany of words that followed it. Three-and-a-half years later, we’re still waiting for the delivery on the equal promise of. All that Palestinians have gotten has been a green light for Israel to run roughshod over the West Bank, take more land, build more settlements, demolish more homes, more restrictions on Palestinian rights, Jerusalem the same, and Gaza worse. It’s been a huge disappointment.
And frankly, I don’t — I recall some interesting things in the platform debate that still trouble me, because I remember back in '88 when I was negotiating with Madeleine Albright on the Dukakis-Jackson platform issue, we wanted the word “Palestinian” in the platform. And she told me, she said, “If the P-word even appears in print in the Democratic Party platform, all hell will break loose.” I told her, I said, “Don't play Chicken Little with me. The sky is not going to fall. We can do it and live with it. I mean, it’s not rocket science to say there are Palestinians in this conflict.” The party had never even mentioned the word up 'til then, and it didn't that year, either.
What troubled me in 2016 and 2020 was that we couldn’t get the word “occupation” in the platform. They wouldn’t use the word “occupation,” which was Trump language. Trump wouldn’t use “occupation,” either. In fact, they changed the human rights report from reporting on the Occupied Territories to putting it all in one thing. That was the — what do you call it? — by U.S. Ambassador Friedman. Trump’s ambassador wanted it that way. There was no occupation. The Biden administration deals with it as if it were an occupation in language, but not in practice. Not in practice. We have not put conditions or terms on Israel to deal with Palestinians as an occupied people. And so, we’ve kind of come a ways, but we haven’t come anywhere at all, from not using the P-word to not using the “occupation” word. Frankly, it’s maybe a little bit of a semantic thing.
But Palestinians are living under a brutal occupation. It’s an apartheid occupation. And they are also being victims of a genocidal attack on Gaza right now that is killing the infrastructure, killing the people, forcibly evicting over a million people from their homes in the north to move south, where there is no capacity to care for them. They’re living in tents, without water, without power, without healthcare. The hospitals in the south are not capable of dealing with all the issues. And the Israelis are treating the people in the north as if, as the general says, they’re all animals and deserve to die. If that’s not genocide, I don’t know what is.
And yet, this administration, if they can’t use the word “occupation” — and, for God’s sake, they won’t use the word “apartheid” — they can’t use the word “genocide.” Something horrible is happening to these people, and this administration is turning a blind eye to it. And I’m sorry, but when they say, “We’re deeply concerned,” if that’s the best they can do, when we’re providing $14.3 billion additional this year on top of $4 billion, when we’re providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations, that is not enough. And frankly, this, what is happening in Gaza, is not only happening on our watch, but we’re complicit and enabling it. Sounds harsh, but it’s the reality. And they have to deal with it. And there are going to be electoral consequences. And I wish it weren’t so. Last thing on Earth I want to see is a Republican of the type of Donald Trump or whoever comes after in the White House. But they have to earn the vote and establish that there’s a difference. They haven’t done it.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Fri Nov 10, 2023 3:03 am
“I Will Not Be Silenced”: Rep. Rashida Tlaib Calls for Gaza Ceasefire as House Votes to Censure Her
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 08, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/8/ ... _on_israel
Transcript
As the death toll from Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza tops 10,000 and millions around the world march in the streets for a ceasefire, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to censure the only Palestinian American in Congress. By a vote of 234 to 188, lawmakers officially rebuked Congressmember Rashida Tlaib for her criticism of Israel, including her defense of the slogan “from the river to the sea” as a Palestinian call for freedom and equality; 22 Democrats joined Republicans in the vote. “The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me,” Tlaib said in an emotional speech before the vote. “What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to censure Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, for her criticism of Israel. The vote was 234 to 188, with 22 Democrats joining Republicans to censure Tlaib. Prior to the vote, the congresswoman spoke from the House floor.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: I’m the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, Mr. Chair, and my perspective is needed here now more than ever. I will not be silent, and I will not let you distort my words. Folks forget I’m from the city of Detroit, the most beautiful, Blackest city in the country, where I learned to speak truth to power even if my voice shakes.
Trying to bully or censor me won’t work, because this movement for a ceasefire is much bigger than one person. It’s growing every single day. There are millions of people across our country who oppose Netanyahu’s extremism and are done watching our government support collective punishment and the use of white phosphorus bombs that melt flesh to the bone. They are done watching our government, Mr. Chair, supporting cutting off food, water, electricity and medical care to millions of people with nowhere to go. Like me, Mr. Chair, they don’t believe the answer to war crimes is more war crimes. The refusal of Congress and the administration to acknowledge Palestinian lives is chipping away at my soul. Over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed. Majority — majority were children.
But let me be clear: My criticism has always been of the Israeli government and Netanyahu’s actions. It is important to separate people and governments, Mr. Chair. No government is beyond criticism. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.
Do you realize what it’s like, Mr. Chair, for the people outside the chamber right now listening in agony to their own government dehumanizing them, to hear the president of the United States we helped elect dispute death tolls as we see video after video of dead children and parents under rubble? Mr. Chair, do you know what it’s like to fear rising hate crimes, to know how Islamophobia and antisemitism makes us all less safe, and worry that your own child might suffer the horrors that 6-year-old Wadea did in Illinois? I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable.
AMY GOODMAN: As Congressmember Rashida Tlaib composed herself, her sister congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, put her hand on her shoulder, the only other Muslim woman in Congress.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: We are human beings, just like anyone else. My sity, my grandmother, like all Palestinians, just wants to live her life with freedom and human dignity we all deserve. Speaking up to save lives, Mr. Chair, no matter faith, no matter ethnicity, should not be controversial in this chamber. The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. Why — what I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.
We cannot lose our shared humanity, Mr. Chair. I hear the voices of advocates in Israel, in Palestine, across America and around the world for peace. I am inspired by the courageous, the courageous survivors in Israel, who have lost loved ones, yet are calling for a ceasefire and the end to violence. I am grateful to the people in the streets for the peace movement, with countless Jewish Americans across the country standing up and lovingly saying, “Not in our name.”
We will continue to call for a ceasefire, Mr. Chair, for the immediate delivery of critical humanitarian aid to Gaza, for the release of all hostages and those arbitrarily detained, and for every American to come home. We will continue to work for a real lasting peace that upholds human rights and dignity of all people and centers a peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, and censures no one — no one — and ensures that no person, no child has to suffer or live in fear of violence.
Seventy-one percent of Michigan Democrats support a ceasefire. So you can try to censure me, but you can’t silence their voices. I urge my colleagues to join with the majority of Americans and support a ceasefire now to save as many lives as possible. President Biden must listen to and represent all of us, not just some of us. I urge the president to have the courage to call for a ceasefire and the end of killings. Thank you, and I yield.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Detroit Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American, speaking on the House floor before the House voted to censure her for her criticism of Israel.
****************************
“Stop This Madness”: Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram, 87, Condemns Israeli Assault & Calls for Peace
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 08, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/8/ ... caust_gaza
Transcript
We speak with 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram, who has been protesting outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ingram says experiencing anti-Jewish hate, losing family members to the Nazi killing machine and surviving the Allied bombing of Hamburg as a child all inspire her to speak out for peace. “What Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it,” says Ingram. She calls the vote to censure Palestinian American Congressmember Rashida Tlaib “shameful” and describes her as a “hero.” We also hear from leading Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of the potential for genocide in Israel’s assault on Gaza. “The refusal of the Israeli government to find any kind of compromise with the Palestinians … is what led and keeps leading to this ongoing and increasingly violent confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians,” says Bartov.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
As we continue to cover Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we’re joined by two guests: one, a Holocaust survivor, the other, one of the world’s leading genocide scholars. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He’s the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. He is an Israeli American scholar who’s been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza.
We’re also joined by Marione Ingram. She’s an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who’s been protesting outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, longtime activist who was an organizer with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the 1960s. She’s the author of The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust and Hands of Peace: A Holocaust Survivor’s Fight for Civil Rights in the American South.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! We’re going to begin with Marione Ingram. Before we talk about the ceasefire in Gaza, I’d like you to respond to the censuring of the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, whose speech we just played.
MARIONE INGRAM: I totally support her comments. And I think it is, on top of that, shameful that her justified defense of human lives is considered antisemitic. It is pro-human beings. I find it horrific that the politicians have the nerve to censure righteous voices for peace and for the lives of Gazans, who are being murdered. It is slaughter that is happening. And Rashida Tlaib is, in my eyes, a hero.
Netanyahu’s government, Israel’s policies for decades has been the suppression of Palestinians, land grabs, deprivation of Palestinians. It is painful for me, as someone who has experienced all of the terrors that Gazans are experiencing, and even the horrific attacks in Israel by Hamas. But Hamas’s attack on Israel does not justify the slaughter of women and children, especially children. I was a child of war. I have experienced all of these things. I have also known for a fact that what Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it. It will increase resistance to anything.
I think that Biden needs to defund all of the money that is given to Israel. I think he should not only call for a ceasefire; I think he needs to start thinking about peace. We cannot continue to make wars and then call for ceasefires, only to have wars start again after the ceasefire ends. We’ve experienced this over and over and over again. I am so tired of having to protest everything — wars, gun violence, the war against women. It is ridiculous that we are not able to think clearly.
My husband has an expression, and that is, “all about the Benjis.” I think that the happiest people in the universe must be the manufacturers of armaments, and probably are also complicit in the promotion. The fact that the United States is complicit in this murder of children is, to me, a horrific indictment of inhumanity. And I applaud Rashida Tlaib with all of my heart, with all of my being. I think she’s fantastic. I just wish that there were more voices to join her in the House.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Marione Ingram, I wanted to ask you — you grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Could you tell us and to our audience some of your experiences that shaped and determined and made you want to participate in these protests in Washington against the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza?
MARIONE INGRAM: Because I am a Jew, my mother was a Jew, my family was murdered in 1941. My Jewish family was murdered in 1941. Hamburg Jews were sent to Minsk in Belarusia. Upon arrival, they were stripped and then shot and dumped into a mass grave. My grandmother was taken by two Gestapo who came to my mother’s apartment and took her away the night before I turned 6 years old. From about the time I was 3 years old, I was aware that I was the object of hate of the German government, the German country. It was made clear by a playmate who told me that she wouldn’t play with me because I was a dirty Jew pig. I had no idea what she was talking about.
This horrific war against Jews and Germans who protested the Nazi regime progressed. It got worse. My mother had to go to the Gestapo every week. The only reason we were not taken in 1941 was because my mother had married a non-Jew. And this saved us in 1941. But in 1943, the Nazis said that all Jewish spouses were to be exterminated, as well. And in 1943, in the summer of 1943, my mother got our deportation order to Theresienstadt.
My mother tried to commit suicide, in the hopes that my father’s relatives would take in her children, in the hope that she would be able to save her three daughters. She had sent me off to one of the relatives, who was instrumental in helping us. And I had not been allowed to be outside since the Nazis came to power, and it struck me as very odd — I was seven-and-a-half — that she let me take my baby sister to my father’s cousin. And I turned around, and I found my mother with her head in the gas oven, and I pulled her out. And my mother lived and never had another such moment and was horrifically strong.
Right after that, the Allies bombed the city of Hamburg. It was called Operation Gomorrah. The Brits bombed at night. The Americans bombed during the day. It was a 10-day and 10-night uninterrupted bombing. My mother and I were not allowed in a bomb shelter. We were forced to run through flaming streets. The Allies dropped phosphorus, and I saw human beings jumping into the lake, in the canals, and coming up. They were like human candles. Their bodies were in flame. And every time they jumped into the canals and lakes, the flames would be doused, but the minute they came up for air, they would be in flames. As a seven-and-a-half-year-old, I saw more dead bodies burned to a crisp.
Two things: I’m a pacifist, and it is ironic that this horrific revenge attack on civilians — it was entirely targeted on civilians — saved my life, because there were so many burned bodies that could not be identified that I was able to go into — we were able to go into hiding. This was arranged. My father was in the underground. He had managed to arrange for us to be hidden in a sort of exurban farm outside the city of Hamburg by communist underground members. The elderly couple who hid us were not pro-Semitic, but they were virulently anti-Nazi.
And we were in hiding in a tar paper shack, when there were no people around. When there were people around, we had to go hide in an earthen dugout. And on my eighth birthday, on 19th November, 1943, in the earthen dugout, I told my mother that if I lived, I would never, ever be quiet, and that I wanted to become a peacemaker. Well, I’ve never — I’ve kept that promise. I have not been able to figure out how I can get governments to make peace, but I continue to battle on all fronts. I have battled — when I came to America as a 17-year-old, I saw that America was a racist country, and I became active in the civil rights movement. I thought —
AMY GOODMAN: Marione, in Part 2 —
MARIONE INGRAM: Yes, sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: — of our conversation, we’re going to talk about your history in the civil rights movement. But just before we go to the Israeli American genocide historian, Omer Bartov, just if you could share a message to the world about what “never again” means to you?
MARIONE INGRAM: To me, it would mean never again to repeat the horrors that we have committed throughout my lifetime, and certainly before that. Nothing has been learned from the atrocities of the mid-20th century, the continued atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been holding signs of you calling for a ceasefire.
MARIONE INGRAM: Yeah, I want more than that. I want peace. I’m disgusted at the fact that not a single nation, not a single leader has even mentioned that word, as though that is a word of — a dangerous word. There has to be a way of bringing together warring parties. When the Allies attacked Hamburg, Germany, thinking that that would weaken the military conflict, it only strengthened it. What Israel is doing in Gaza, in the West Bank, and has been doing, is only going to strengthen the attack on Israel. You cannot expect that people will be quiet after what we’ve all witnessed. I say stop, stop this madness.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in professor Omer Bartov, one of the most prominent scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies. Your sense, Professor Bartov, of what Israel is doing right now in Gaza?
OMER BARTOV: Well, good morning, and thank you for having me.
Look, what Israel is doing right now, according to its own political leaders and military commanders, is attempting to destroy Hamas, which is the hegemonic power in Gaza at the moment. And it claims to be doing it, A, as retaliation for the heinous attack on October 7th, where over a thousand civilians were butchered and 240 people were kidnapped and are still kept in Gaza. But it claims to be doing it also because it feels that without doing that, it would be permanently under threat from that organization. So, that’s its own position.
The problem with this position is not only is there massive and excessive and disproportionate killing of civilians, of Palestinian civilians, in Gaza during this operation, but also that it doesn’t have any clear political horizon. It is not clear what the day after would look like. And the reason the Israeli government does not want to talk about that is that it does not want to have any sort of compromise with the Palestinians. And that has been the policy of the Netanyahu administration, or many administrations, for decades now.
And Netanyahu actually kept Hamas quite strong and kept the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank quite weak, so that he could say that he could not find any representative of the Palestinians who would be willing to sit down and find a compromise, while at the same time he was busy — he and, of course, the settlers, who are now heavily represented in his government, could keep settling in the West Bank. So, the larger context of this is that the refusal of the Israeli government to find any kind of compromise with the Palestinians, and, frankly, the indifference of the large part, the majority of the Israeli population to the occupation, is what led and keeps leading to this ongoing and increasingly violent confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Omer Bartov, we’re going to continue with Part 2 of our conversation and post it at democracynow.org, Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, called by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. And Marione Ingram, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, about to turn 88. We thank you for sharing your experience. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 08, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/8/ ... _on_israel
Transcript
As the death toll from Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza tops 10,000 and millions around the world march in the streets for a ceasefire, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to censure the only Palestinian American in Congress. By a vote of 234 to 188, lawmakers officially rebuked Congressmember Rashida Tlaib for her criticism of Israel, including her defense of the slogan “from the river to the sea” as a Palestinian call for freedom and equality; 22 Democrats joined Republicans in the vote. “The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me,” Tlaib said in an emotional speech before the vote. “What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to censure Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, for her criticism of Israel. The vote was 234 to 188, with 22 Democrats joining Republicans to censure Tlaib. Prior to the vote, the congresswoman spoke from the House floor.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: I’m the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, Mr. Chair, and my perspective is needed here now more than ever. I will not be silent, and I will not let you distort my words. Folks forget I’m from the city of Detroit, the most beautiful, Blackest city in the country, where I learned to speak truth to power even if my voice shakes.
Trying to bully or censor me won’t work, because this movement for a ceasefire is much bigger than one person. It’s growing every single day. There are millions of people across our country who oppose Netanyahu’s extremism and are done watching our government support collective punishment and the use of white phosphorus bombs that melt flesh to the bone. They are done watching our government, Mr. Chair, supporting cutting off food, water, electricity and medical care to millions of people with nowhere to go. Like me, Mr. Chair, they don’t believe the answer to war crimes is more war crimes. The refusal of Congress and the administration to acknowledge Palestinian lives is chipping away at my soul. Over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed. Majority — majority were children.
But let me be clear: My criticism has always been of the Israeli government and Netanyahu’s actions. It is important to separate people and governments, Mr. Chair. No government is beyond criticism. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.
Do you realize what it’s like, Mr. Chair, for the people outside the chamber right now listening in agony to their own government dehumanizing them, to hear the president of the United States we helped elect dispute death tolls as we see video after video of dead children and parents under rubble? Mr. Chair, do you know what it’s like to fear rising hate crimes, to know how Islamophobia and antisemitism makes us all less safe, and worry that your own child might suffer the horrors that 6-year-old Wadea did in Illinois? I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable.
AMY GOODMAN: As Congressmember Rashida Tlaib composed herself, her sister congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, put her hand on her shoulder, the only other Muslim woman in Congress.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: We are human beings, just like anyone else. My sity, my grandmother, like all Palestinians, just wants to live her life with freedom and human dignity we all deserve. Speaking up to save lives, Mr. Chair, no matter faith, no matter ethnicity, should not be controversial in this chamber. The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. Why — what I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.
We cannot lose our shared humanity, Mr. Chair. I hear the voices of advocates in Israel, in Palestine, across America and around the world for peace. I am inspired by the courageous, the courageous survivors in Israel, who have lost loved ones, yet are calling for a ceasefire and the end to violence. I am grateful to the people in the streets for the peace movement, with countless Jewish Americans across the country standing up and lovingly saying, “Not in our name.”
We will continue to call for a ceasefire, Mr. Chair, for the immediate delivery of critical humanitarian aid to Gaza, for the release of all hostages and those arbitrarily detained, and for every American to come home. We will continue to work for a real lasting peace that upholds human rights and dignity of all people and centers a peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, and censures no one — no one — and ensures that no person, no child has to suffer or live in fear of violence.
Seventy-one percent of Michigan Democrats support a ceasefire. So you can try to censure me, but you can’t silence their voices. I urge my colleagues to join with the majority of Americans and support a ceasefire now to save as many lives as possible. President Biden must listen to and represent all of us, not just some of us. I urge the president to have the courage to call for a ceasefire and the end of killings. Thank you, and I yield.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Detroit Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American, speaking on the House floor before the House voted to censure her for her criticism of Israel.
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“Stop This Madness”: Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram, 87, Condemns Israeli Assault & Calls for Peace
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 08, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/8/ ... caust_gaza
Transcript
We speak with 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram, who has been protesting outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ingram says experiencing anti-Jewish hate, losing family members to the Nazi killing machine and surviving the Allied bombing of Hamburg as a child all inspire her to speak out for peace. “What Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it,” says Ingram. She calls the vote to censure Palestinian American Congressmember Rashida Tlaib “shameful” and describes her as a “hero.” We also hear from leading Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of the potential for genocide in Israel’s assault on Gaza. “The refusal of the Israeli government to find any kind of compromise with the Palestinians … is what led and keeps leading to this ongoing and increasingly violent confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians,” says Bartov.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
As we continue to cover Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we’re joined by two guests: one, a Holocaust survivor, the other, one of the world’s leading genocide scholars. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He’s the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. He is an Israeli American scholar who’s been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza.
We’re also joined by Marione Ingram. She’s an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who’s been protesting outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, longtime activist who was an organizer with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the 1960s. She’s the author of The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust and Hands of Peace: A Holocaust Survivor’s Fight for Civil Rights in the American South.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! We’re going to begin with Marione Ingram. Before we talk about the ceasefire in Gaza, I’d like you to respond to the censuring of the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, whose speech we just played.
MARIONE INGRAM: I totally support her comments. And I think it is, on top of that, shameful that her justified defense of human lives is considered antisemitic. It is pro-human beings. I find it horrific that the politicians have the nerve to censure righteous voices for peace and for the lives of Gazans, who are being murdered. It is slaughter that is happening. And Rashida Tlaib is, in my eyes, a hero.
Netanyahu’s government, Israel’s policies for decades has been the suppression of Palestinians, land grabs, deprivation of Palestinians. It is painful for me, as someone who has experienced all of the terrors that Gazans are experiencing, and even the horrific attacks in Israel by Hamas. But Hamas’s attack on Israel does not justify the slaughter of women and children, especially children. I was a child of war. I have experienced all of these things. I have also known for a fact that what Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it. It will increase resistance to anything.
I think that Biden needs to defund all of the money that is given to Israel. I think he should not only call for a ceasefire; I think he needs to start thinking about peace. We cannot continue to make wars and then call for ceasefires, only to have wars start again after the ceasefire ends. We’ve experienced this over and over and over again. I am so tired of having to protest everything — wars, gun violence, the war against women. It is ridiculous that we are not able to think clearly.
My husband has an expression, and that is, “all about the Benjis.” I think that the happiest people in the universe must be the manufacturers of armaments, and probably are also complicit in the promotion. The fact that the United States is complicit in this murder of children is, to me, a horrific indictment of inhumanity. And I applaud Rashida Tlaib with all of my heart, with all of my being. I think she’s fantastic. I just wish that there were more voices to join her in the House.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Marione Ingram, I wanted to ask you — you grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Could you tell us and to our audience some of your experiences that shaped and determined and made you want to participate in these protests in Washington against the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza?
MARIONE INGRAM: Because I am a Jew, my mother was a Jew, my family was murdered in 1941. My Jewish family was murdered in 1941. Hamburg Jews were sent to Minsk in Belarusia. Upon arrival, they were stripped and then shot and dumped into a mass grave. My grandmother was taken by two Gestapo who came to my mother’s apartment and took her away the night before I turned 6 years old. From about the time I was 3 years old, I was aware that I was the object of hate of the German government, the German country. It was made clear by a playmate who told me that she wouldn’t play with me because I was a dirty Jew pig. I had no idea what she was talking about.
This horrific war against Jews and Germans who protested the Nazi regime progressed. It got worse. My mother had to go to the Gestapo every week. The only reason we were not taken in 1941 was because my mother had married a non-Jew. And this saved us in 1941. But in 1943, the Nazis said that all Jewish spouses were to be exterminated, as well. And in 1943, in the summer of 1943, my mother got our deportation order to Theresienstadt.
My mother tried to commit suicide, in the hopes that my father’s relatives would take in her children, in the hope that she would be able to save her three daughters. She had sent me off to one of the relatives, who was instrumental in helping us. And I had not been allowed to be outside since the Nazis came to power, and it struck me as very odd — I was seven-and-a-half — that she let me take my baby sister to my father’s cousin. And I turned around, and I found my mother with her head in the gas oven, and I pulled her out. And my mother lived and never had another such moment and was horrifically strong.
Right after that, the Allies bombed the city of Hamburg. It was called Operation Gomorrah. The Brits bombed at night. The Americans bombed during the day. It was a 10-day and 10-night uninterrupted bombing. My mother and I were not allowed in a bomb shelter. We were forced to run through flaming streets. The Allies dropped phosphorus, and I saw human beings jumping into the lake, in the canals, and coming up. They were like human candles. Their bodies were in flame. And every time they jumped into the canals and lakes, the flames would be doused, but the minute they came up for air, they would be in flames. As a seven-and-a-half-year-old, I saw more dead bodies burned to a crisp.
Two things: I’m a pacifist, and it is ironic that this horrific revenge attack on civilians — it was entirely targeted on civilians — saved my life, because there were so many burned bodies that could not be identified that I was able to go into — we were able to go into hiding. This was arranged. My father was in the underground. He had managed to arrange for us to be hidden in a sort of exurban farm outside the city of Hamburg by communist underground members. The elderly couple who hid us were not pro-Semitic, but they were virulently anti-Nazi.
And we were in hiding in a tar paper shack, when there were no people around. When there were people around, we had to go hide in an earthen dugout. And on my eighth birthday, on 19th November, 1943, in the earthen dugout, I told my mother that if I lived, I would never, ever be quiet, and that I wanted to become a peacemaker. Well, I’ve never — I’ve kept that promise. I have not been able to figure out how I can get governments to make peace, but I continue to battle on all fronts. I have battled — when I came to America as a 17-year-old, I saw that America was a racist country, and I became active in the civil rights movement. I thought —
AMY GOODMAN: Marione, in Part 2 —
MARIONE INGRAM: Yes, sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: — of our conversation, we’re going to talk about your history in the civil rights movement. But just before we go to the Israeli American genocide historian, Omer Bartov, just if you could share a message to the world about what “never again” means to you?
MARIONE INGRAM: To me, it would mean never again to repeat the horrors that we have committed throughout my lifetime, and certainly before that. Nothing has been learned from the atrocities of the mid-20th century, the continued atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been holding signs of you calling for a ceasefire.
MARIONE INGRAM: Yeah, I want more than that. I want peace. I’m disgusted at the fact that not a single nation, not a single leader has even mentioned that word, as though that is a word of — a dangerous word. There has to be a way of bringing together warring parties. When the Allies attacked Hamburg, Germany, thinking that that would weaken the military conflict, it only strengthened it. What Israel is doing in Gaza, in the West Bank, and has been doing, is only going to strengthen the attack on Israel. You cannot expect that people will be quiet after what we’ve all witnessed. I say stop, stop this madness.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in professor Omer Bartov, one of the most prominent scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies. Your sense, Professor Bartov, of what Israel is doing right now in Gaza?
OMER BARTOV: Well, good morning, and thank you for having me.
Look, what Israel is doing right now, according to its own political leaders and military commanders, is attempting to destroy Hamas, which is the hegemonic power in Gaza at the moment. And it claims to be doing it, A, as retaliation for the heinous attack on October 7th, where over a thousand civilians were butchered and 240 people were kidnapped and are still kept in Gaza. But it claims to be doing it also because it feels that without doing that, it would be permanently under threat from that organization. So, that’s its own position.
The problem with this position is not only is there massive and excessive and disproportionate killing of civilians, of Palestinian civilians, in Gaza during this operation, but also that it doesn’t have any clear political horizon. It is not clear what the day after would look like. And the reason the Israeli government does not want to talk about that is that it does not want to have any sort of compromise with the Palestinians. And that has been the policy of the Netanyahu administration, or many administrations, for decades now.
And Netanyahu actually kept Hamas quite strong and kept the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank quite weak, so that he could say that he could not find any representative of the Palestinians who would be willing to sit down and find a compromise, while at the same time he was busy — he and, of course, the settlers, who are now heavily represented in his government, could keep settling in the West Bank. So, the larger context of this is that the refusal of the Israeli government to find any kind of compromise with the Palestinians, and, frankly, the indifference of the large part, the majority of the Israeli population to the occupation, is what led and keeps leading to this ongoing and increasingly violent confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Omer Bartov, we’re going to continue with Part 2 of our conversation and post it at democracynow.org, Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, called by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. And Marione Ingram, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, about to turn 88. We thank you for sharing your experience. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Fri Nov 10, 2023 3:05 am
“We Have Come to an End”: Palestine Red Crescent Says Gaza’s Hospitals Are Out of Solutions
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 09, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/9/ ... srael_gaza
Transcript
As tens of thousands flee northern Gaza amid an intensifying Israeli ground invasion, most operations have been halted at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City due to limited fuel supplies and Israel’s bombardment nearby. “We have completely run out of all solutions,” says Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which operates the hospital, where thousands of civilians are sheltering. Israel’s evacuation order is impossible to follow without killing patients in critical care. “Evacuating them means killing them.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel and the United States are continuing to reject calls for a ceasefire in Gaza as the death toll from Israel’s bombardment tops 10,500, including over 4,000 Palestinian children. Tens of thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza have evacuated their homes on foot as Israeli troops attempt to forcibly seize control of the area. The U.N. estimates 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza — that’s 70% of Gaza’s population. Many Palestinians fear Israel will never allow them to return to their homes.
On Wednesday, the top human rights official at the United Nations, Volker Türk, traveled to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, where he accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes.
VOLKER TÜRK: The Rafah crossing has been the symbolic lifeline for the last month for the 2.3 million in Gaza. The lifeline has been unjustly, outrageously thin. These are the gates to a living nightmare, a nightmare where people have been suffocating under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel. … On the other side of this gate is Gaza, already described as the world’s biggest open-air prison before 7 October, under a 56-year occupation and a 16-year blockade by Israel.
The atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian armed groups on the 7th of October were heinous. They were war crimes, as is the continued holding of hostages. The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians is also a war crime, as is unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: In Gaza City, Israeli airstrikes have hit areas near Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital. Meanwhile, most operations at al-Quds Hospital have been halted due to dwindling fuel supplies and daily Israeli attacks on areas around the hospital. Most roads to the hospital have been destroyed. The hospital is run by Palestine Red Crescent Society, which is part of the International Red Cross.
We go now to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where we’re joined by Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Thanks so much for being with us. If you could start off by talking about the state of the hospitals in Gaza right now? And what hospitals are you being told that you must have evacuated? And what is the response of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Nebal?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
The situation now in hospitals is dire. Almost 18 hospitals out of 35 in Gaza Strip have been — have gone out of service, either due to bombardment or because extreme shortage of — they are running out of fuel and medical supplies. The rest of the hospitals are operating under extreme difficult situations. They are having extreme shortages of medical supplies and medicine, as well as almost running out of fuel.
For example, al-Quds Hospital, yesterday we had to reduce all services and operations in al-Quds Hospital to the extent that the major and main generator in the hospital has been turned off, and now we are only using the small generator. The hospital’s surgical ward has been shut down, as well. The hospital’s oxygen generator also has been shut down, and now we are using oxygen cylinders. According to the information, we are only now for 24 hours, and we will be completely shutting down, because we will be running out of fuel. Basically, up to this moment, none of the aid has been allowed to get into al-Quds Hospital.
This is the fourth day, and al-Quds Hospital has been under intense bombardments, along of all roads that lead to al-Quds Hospital are closed. Because of the bombardment, the roads are closed. Our emergency medical services team, they are also inside the hospital, so they are unable to go out of the hospital to arrive the wounded people in the area. They can see from where they are inside the hospital that there are many wounded people very close to the hospital, but, unfortunately, they feel helpless. Because of the intense bombardment, it’s so much dangerous. So they even can’t go out to arrive those wounded people and save their lives. And the area where the hospital is located now became so much dangerous. As highlighted, all roads are closed, so nobody can get into al-Quds Hospital.
Unfortunately, none of the aid has been allowed to get into al-Quds Hospital. Two days ago, we were waiting for aid to come in through ICRC. However, the ICRC convoy was targeted by Israeli occupation forces. And unfortunately, they were unable to deliver the aid to al-Quds Hospital.
So, now the situation, not only the problem is the fuel; we are barely having food or water for our staff and our patients and for over 14,000 civilians who are currently sheltering inside the hospital. Because of the continuous bombardments, all the windows have been falled down — I mean, the glass. So they are literally open. And at nighttime, it became so much cold, even for families who are lying and sleeping on the ground. You can’t imagine the picture of children who are feeling so much cold and don’t even have a blanket to warm them up. So now we are in urgent need for everything, for blankets, for food and water. Those children, they even have a very minimum amount of food. As I mentioned, we barely have even food for the staff or for the patients. This is the third day all Gaza City and the north is out of bread, because all bakeries have already run out of fuel. So none of Gazans who are now currently in Gaza and the north are able to get any piece of bread.
There’s still in Gaza and the north almost 500,000 civilians who are still now sheltering in schools and hospitals in those area where Israel forced its people to evacuate. It’s not easy to say just “evacuate,” because intense bombardments are just taking place all over, and it’s not safe to evacuate yourself, taking into consideration that, as you highlighted, many people have to do that on foot under intense bombardment. There is no transportation. There is complete destruction of the road and infrastructure. And simply an ICRC convoy was targeted while it was on its way from the south to the north. So, how it would be safe for civilians to evacuate themselves to the south?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nebal, so if you could respond to the fact that Israel has said, either evacuate from al-Quds Hospital, or the Palestinian Red Crescent is responsible for any deaths? And then, also, you know, you’ve said that oxygen generators have now been shut off, you’re relying on oxygen cylinders, that fuel is running out. I mean, what do you — how will this go, if you don’t have access to fuel? What do you fear will happen to these patients who are dependent on oxygen, not to mention all of the other medical supplies that are dwindling, if not have entirely run out?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Yes. We have announced repeatedly that we have around 500 patients inside the hospital. Many of them are connected to life support machines. They are in the intensive care unit. We have babies in incubators. We don’t have the means to evacuate them safely. Evacuating them means killing them. Taking into consideration that already intense bombardments are taking place, so there will be no even any way to evacuate the staff, along with 14,000 civilians who are currently taking shelter because, simply, they have nowhere, no way to go to.
Hospitals, healthcare personnel, healthcare facilities should be protected under international humanitarian law. There will be no justification for Israel targeting al-Quds Hospital, although — even the WHO has announced that evacuation orders against hospitals are impossible to implement. They constitute a death penalty for patients. Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers should not put in an option to choose either to lose your life or risk your life or even turn back — turn your back to your patients and just go away. This is not acceptable.
And this situation, to be under intense bombardment, under constant fear and panic of losing your life, it’s also unacceptable. As I said, for over at least a week, now two weeks almost, intense bombardments are taking place in a very close area of the hospital, to the extent that most of the buildings in the surrounding area of the hospital has been damaged. Airstrikes are taking place even 15 meters away from the hospital. It has resulted to at least 16 people were injured during these bombardments, to the extent that a patient in the intensive care unit was also injured. This should not be acceptable.
I can’t describe the situation now inside the hospital, when I’m talking about 14,000 civilians — most of them are children and women — just sleeping on the hospital’s ground. Every single corner in the hospital, there is internally displaced people, who have no other option. This is the last choice for them. It’s just seeking shelter to a place they thought they will be in a safe place. Unfortunately, this is not the case, because Israel, it looks like it’s absolutely over and above the international humanitarian law.
Unfortunately, as a humanitarian organization, we have completely run out of all of solutions. Over three weeks now we have been calling on the international community to intervene immediately to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and including fuel. We have warned repeatedly, “We are running out of fuel.” We have already run out of fuel a week ago. So, we managed to get some fuel from some gas stations who had some left over. Unfortunately, because of the continuous blockade on Gaza, particularly, and the north, it’s now an impossible mission to find one liter of gas, one liter of fuel in Gaza and the north. We have come to an end. We have already reduced all of our operations, all of our services, in order just to manage to take care of those patients who are now inside the hospital. And although we have taken all of these measures, we are only for 24 hours. At that point, the hospital’s small generator will shut down, and then the lives of those who are connected to life support machines, they will lose their life. And we even — we even can’t imagine the situation we will be in. As a humanitarian organization, we feel helpless. We feel helpless.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Nebal, your response to Israel saying, if you don’t evacuate al-Quds Hospital, your organization, the Palestinian Red Crescent, is responsible for any deaths?
NEBAL FARSAKH: As I said, international humanitarian law is clear: Hospitals, healthcare worker, healthcare facilities, civilians should not be a target. If an attack or whatsoever happened for al-Quds Hospital, this will be a responsibility of Israel, the responsibility of the international community, who are, up to this moment, fail to stand up for humanity, fail to pressure Israel to ensure the protection of civilians, healthcare personnel and healthcare facilities. Up to this moment, four colleagues were killed during conducting their humanitarian role, trying to save other people’s life. Twenty-two other paramedics were injured. At least eight ambulances completely went out of service due to Israeli bombardment and targeted for ambulances. This also should be stopped. Under all circumstances, in all conflicts, healthcare workers, healthcare personnel, healthcare facilities and hospitals, along with civilians, they should be protected. Unfortunately, 70% of the victims, of thousands of people who were killed in Gaza, are children, women and elderly people. This war crime should be stopped.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nebal, I mean, if you could talk specifically about the situation of children, over 4,000 killed, countless others thought to be under the rubble? But apart from that, there’s a new acronym that’s been in use in Gaza hospitals: WCNSF, wounded child, no surviving family. If you could say something about that, Nebal, whether you’re witnessing that, how much you’re witnessing it in hospitals there, al-Quds included?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Unfortunately, because of the intensive bombardments that is taking place on people’s residential buildings, houses, without even any prior warning, that has resulted to wiping out whole families. And unfortunately, many children who are survivors now, they don’t even have any family member.
We have saved a 12-years-old girl. She was under the rubble for almost 30 hours. Unfortunately, she has lost all of her family. And now she is currently sheltering inside the hospital. Our psychosocial support team try as much as they can to support her, but no words can describe the traumatized situation that this 13-years-old girl, along with other children in Gaza, are living because of this intense bombardment.
Even those who didn’t lose anyone, simply being under intense bombardments day and night, and hearing strong bombardments with complete darkness because of the cut of electricity, is just so much horrifying and panic among those children who are living unprecedented situations that no child in this world, we wish, is be living.
AMY GOODMAN: Nebal Farsakh, we want to thank you for spending this time with us, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, joining us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
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“Unspeakable”: Dr. Fady Joudah Grieves 50+ Family Members Killed in Gaza & Slams U.S. Media Coverage
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 09, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/9/ ... _by_israel
Transcript
Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, including dozens of family members of award-winning Palestinian American writer, poet and physician Dr. Fady Joudah. “It is really beyond words to describe what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment,” says Joudah, who calls for the humanization of the people of Gaza and allowing more Palestinian voices into the public spotlight. “Palestinians in the West are only alive when they are dying, and that is abhorrent and unacceptable.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we’re joined in Houston, Texas, by Fady Joudah. He’s an award-winning Palestinian American writer and poet, as well as a physician. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic into English, including work by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Dozens of his family members have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. His recent piece for LitHub is titled “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.”
Fady Joudah, welcome to Democracy Now! First of all, of course, our condolences on the loss of your family members. If you could say a little bit about those family members and how you and your family here in the U.S. are keeping in touch with people who remain in Gaza?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Thank you.
We have had more than 50 or 60 people in our extended family killed by Israeli airstrikes. Some of them are in-laws of one of my cousins, and others are different families. Others were also killed by the dozens in one strike. One particular story is of a woman I knew since when I was a child in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And her brother’s grandkids were killed because Israel bombed the house next to them, and in the bombing, one of the walls — one of the walls of their house fell off on them. And they were sleeping, and it killed the three grandchildren and the parents. And only the grandfather survives. So this is also a different spectrum of what we hear about the children being the only survivors in entire families. There are also stories of elderly people who have survived 1948, the Nakba, and/or 1967, and they’re the only ones who are surviving or who have survived their families.
We try to keep in touch with some family members through social media or WhatsApp or what have you, but you know there’s no guarantee that there is regular access or regular communication. You can send a message and maybe get a response the next day. In the beginning of the war, we could get a few phone calls in. But the stuff now is just very difficult to access many people.
The situation is unspeakable and will remain unspeakable, I think, for generations and decades, has been a culmination of the Palestinian experience for a hundred years, since the British Mandate and the beginning of settler colonialism with Zionist immigration into Palestine. It is really beyond words to describe what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment, the accumulation of multigenerational trauma and memories that activates in each one of us previous memories we’ve tried overcome with hope and a flair for life and for freedom, only to find that there is always some horrific episode that reminds us that we are on this Earth in this time, liable to be massacred and lied about. It is —
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, Fady — we’re speaking to Fady Joudah, who is an award-winning Palestinian American writer and poet and physician. As you speak to us from Houston, we’ve spoken to so many Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, as well, but you are here in the United States. And the United States is so important when it comes to how Israel deals with Palestine, because of the amount of aid, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, and is now asking for much more. Can you talk about how the media here covers this issue?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Well, it’s how the media doesn’t cover it. I think that I’ve written in the piece there — and I’ve written in other pieces before — there is a collective psychosis in the mainstream language of U.S. media and administration, that is bizarre to the point of ghosting Palestinians, permitting their erasure, year after year, decade after decade.
When we say, for example, Israel has a right to defend itself, we’re also saying that Palestinian lives are not equal to any other lives that we deem superior to them. And I think that we have not repeatedly asked the question in American media and culture: Do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and to Jewish lives? There are many, Jewish people among them, who believe the answer is yes. But there are many more who haven’t even entertained the question honestly. And I think the importance of the question is to go beyond the moral lip service reflex of saying, “Of course, yes,” because to say “yes” means that you have to believe in the equal humanity of Palestinians as a political condition for freedom. When we hear about all the stuff from Blinken or Biden, it is really a language that says, “We believe that the Palestinians have rights when we decide that they have equal rights. We will put it on the back burner.” Always on the back burner.
And what I say is that we have reached a point where the murder and the destruction of Palestinian lives has reached a point of every time it reaches, it goes up higher, escalates in what is permissible about destroying Palestinian lives. We are not just talking about the numbers of the dead. We are talking about 2 million people who are living a life worse than death, and they have to overcome that and the trauma, that is unspeakable. And I do not expect the U.S. media and mainstream media or politics to even care about this. The ghosting continues.
Yesterday in The Washington Post, they published a racist cartoon, in — which they took down because there was an immediate back — I mean, lashing out at the racist cartoon. It is unimaginable to think that this — and it shouldn’t be imaginable — to think that this would be directed at Jewish lives or Israeli lives, but it is permissible to dehumanize Palestinians, until it has become part of the accepted feeling within the American psyche or consciousness on the whole. And so, everyone, I think, on the whole, except pockets here and there, is really complicit in the permissibility of the destruction of Palestinian lives, that has reached an unprecedented level in our hundred years of being massacred, displaced, dehumanized.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Fady, I want to ask you about a point that you raise in this beautiful essay that you’ve written, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.” In the essay, you cite Aimé Césaire, the renowned Martinican poet, very important anticolonial thinker, who wrote one of the canonical texts on colonialism, A Discourse on Colonialism. You cite him saying, “Neither America nor Europe seem able or willing to solve their colonial addiction, their civilizational motif. Israel is a translation of that failure, a prized Western desire. But Israel has agency in mechanizing this desire.” Could you explain, elaborate on that?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Well, I think that, for some of us who know, or don’t know, that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was a response to the Zionist movement in Europe by a Jewish people in Europe who had suffered a lot of oppression. But to overcome that oppression, they chose to side with the colonial aspect, the domineering aspect of the culture that dominated them, and export that as a mode for success and triumph into a Palestine, without much recognition of the racism involved in dehumanizing what they call the Arab population of Palestine.
And since then, it has been in the interest of the West and the U.S. to prop up Israel as an outpost, so to speak, for further domination of the Middle East for various reasons. But the problem is that this kind of propping up has really gone mad at this point. And, you know, I think we’ve reached a moment — and others have said it — where the degree of colonial viciousness that exists now in Israeli society, and is supported by the West, sends us back to 19th century barbarism, really, colonial barbarism. And then, obviously, Israel is interested in affecting this kind of behavior within the U.S. through major lobby influences and also cultural influences.
As I said, I — or let me say it this way. It would be an amazing achievement if Zionists in the U.S., and outside it, would actually say to a single Palestinian, “I am sorry.” Just once. This has not happened in a hundred years. It has happened, of course, on an individual level. I have Jewish friends and colleagues who have said it, because we are all human, and there is no monolithic collective anywhere.
But I think that one of the things we need to do is to begin to shift the language that speaks of the Palestinian and to allow for more Palestinian presence in the American consciousness, beyond death and dying. It seems to me that Palestinians in the West are only alive when they are dying, and that is abhorrent and unacceptable. And that is part of a settler colonial mentality that only humanizes its subjects when they are limp, near dying, completely helpless, obedient. Any sense of resistance or rise toward freedom or liberation is denied them through dehumanizing language and, you know, manipulative approaches and processes.
AMY GOODMAN: Fady Joudah, we want to thank you so much for spending this time with us, Palestinian American writer, poet, translator and physician, speaking to us from Houston. Dozens of his family members have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. We’ll link to your recent piece for LitHub, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 09, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/9/ ... srael_gaza
Transcript
As tens of thousands flee northern Gaza amid an intensifying Israeli ground invasion, most operations have been halted at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City due to limited fuel supplies and Israel’s bombardment nearby. “We have completely run out of all solutions,” says Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which operates the hospital, where thousands of civilians are sheltering. Israel’s evacuation order is impossible to follow without killing patients in critical care. “Evacuating them means killing them.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel and the United States are continuing to reject calls for a ceasefire in Gaza as the death toll from Israel’s bombardment tops 10,500, including over 4,000 Palestinian children. Tens of thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza have evacuated their homes on foot as Israeli troops attempt to forcibly seize control of the area. The U.N. estimates 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza — that’s 70% of Gaza’s population. Many Palestinians fear Israel will never allow them to return to their homes.
On Wednesday, the top human rights official at the United Nations, Volker Türk, traveled to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, where he accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes.
VOLKER TÜRK: The Rafah crossing has been the symbolic lifeline for the last month for the 2.3 million in Gaza. The lifeline has been unjustly, outrageously thin. These are the gates to a living nightmare, a nightmare where people have been suffocating under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel. … On the other side of this gate is Gaza, already described as the world’s biggest open-air prison before 7 October, under a 56-year occupation and a 16-year blockade by Israel.
The atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian armed groups on the 7th of October were heinous. They were war crimes, as is the continued holding of hostages. The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians is also a war crime, as is unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: In Gaza City, Israeli airstrikes have hit areas near Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital. Meanwhile, most operations at al-Quds Hospital have been halted due to dwindling fuel supplies and daily Israeli attacks on areas around the hospital. Most roads to the hospital have been destroyed. The hospital is run by Palestine Red Crescent Society, which is part of the International Red Cross.
We go now to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where we’re joined by Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Thanks so much for being with us. If you could start off by talking about the state of the hospitals in Gaza right now? And what hospitals are you being told that you must have evacuated? And what is the response of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Nebal?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
The situation now in hospitals is dire. Almost 18 hospitals out of 35 in Gaza Strip have been — have gone out of service, either due to bombardment or because extreme shortage of — they are running out of fuel and medical supplies. The rest of the hospitals are operating under extreme difficult situations. They are having extreme shortages of medical supplies and medicine, as well as almost running out of fuel.
For example, al-Quds Hospital, yesterday we had to reduce all services and operations in al-Quds Hospital to the extent that the major and main generator in the hospital has been turned off, and now we are only using the small generator. The hospital’s surgical ward has been shut down, as well. The hospital’s oxygen generator also has been shut down, and now we are using oxygen cylinders. According to the information, we are only now for 24 hours, and we will be completely shutting down, because we will be running out of fuel. Basically, up to this moment, none of the aid has been allowed to get into al-Quds Hospital.
This is the fourth day, and al-Quds Hospital has been under intense bombardments, along of all roads that lead to al-Quds Hospital are closed. Because of the bombardment, the roads are closed. Our emergency medical services team, they are also inside the hospital, so they are unable to go out of the hospital to arrive the wounded people in the area. They can see from where they are inside the hospital that there are many wounded people very close to the hospital, but, unfortunately, they feel helpless. Because of the intense bombardment, it’s so much dangerous. So they even can’t go out to arrive those wounded people and save their lives. And the area where the hospital is located now became so much dangerous. As highlighted, all roads are closed, so nobody can get into al-Quds Hospital.
Unfortunately, none of the aid has been allowed to get into al-Quds Hospital. Two days ago, we were waiting for aid to come in through ICRC. However, the ICRC convoy was targeted by Israeli occupation forces. And unfortunately, they were unable to deliver the aid to al-Quds Hospital.
So, now the situation, not only the problem is the fuel; we are barely having food or water for our staff and our patients and for over 14,000 civilians who are currently sheltering inside the hospital. Because of the continuous bombardments, all the windows have been falled down — I mean, the glass. So they are literally open. And at nighttime, it became so much cold, even for families who are lying and sleeping on the ground. You can’t imagine the picture of children who are feeling so much cold and don’t even have a blanket to warm them up. So now we are in urgent need for everything, for blankets, for food and water. Those children, they even have a very minimum amount of food. As I mentioned, we barely have even food for the staff or for the patients. This is the third day all Gaza City and the north is out of bread, because all bakeries have already run out of fuel. So none of Gazans who are now currently in Gaza and the north are able to get any piece of bread.
There’s still in Gaza and the north almost 500,000 civilians who are still now sheltering in schools and hospitals in those area where Israel forced its people to evacuate. It’s not easy to say just “evacuate,” because intense bombardments are just taking place all over, and it’s not safe to evacuate yourself, taking into consideration that, as you highlighted, many people have to do that on foot under intense bombardment. There is no transportation. There is complete destruction of the road and infrastructure. And simply an ICRC convoy was targeted while it was on its way from the south to the north. So, how it would be safe for civilians to evacuate themselves to the south?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nebal, so if you could respond to the fact that Israel has said, either evacuate from al-Quds Hospital, or the Palestinian Red Crescent is responsible for any deaths? And then, also, you know, you’ve said that oxygen generators have now been shut off, you’re relying on oxygen cylinders, that fuel is running out. I mean, what do you — how will this go, if you don’t have access to fuel? What do you fear will happen to these patients who are dependent on oxygen, not to mention all of the other medical supplies that are dwindling, if not have entirely run out?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Yes. We have announced repeatedly that we have around 500 patients inside the hospital. Many of them are connected to life support machines. They are in the intensive care unit. We have babies in incubators. We don’t have the means to evacuate them safely. Evacuating them means killing them. Taking into consideration that already intense bombardments are taking place, so there will be no even any way to evacuate the staff, along with 14,000 civilians who are currently taking shelter because, simply, they have nowhere, no way to go to.
Hospitals, healthcare personnel, healthcare facilities should be protected under international humanitarian law. There will be no justification for Israel targeting al-Quds Hospital, although — even the WHO has announced that evacuation orders against hospitals are impossible to implement. They constitute a death penalty for patients. Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers should not put in an option to choose either to lose your life or risk your life or even turn back — turn your back to your patients and just go away. This is not acceptable.
And this situation, to be under intense bombardment, under constant fear and panic of losing your life, it’s also unacceptable. As I said, for over at least a week, now two weeks almost, intense bombardments are taking place in a very close area of the hospital, to the extent that most of the buildings in the surrounding area of the hospital has been damaged. Airstrikes are taking place even 15 meters away from the hospital. It has resulted to at least 16 people were injured during these bombardments, to the extent that a patient in the intensive care unit was also injured. This should not be acceptable.
I can’t describe the situation now inside the hospital, when I’m talking about 14,000 civilians — most of them are children and women — just sleeping on the hospital’s ground. Every single corner in the hospital, there is internally displaced people, who have no other option. This is the last choice for them. It’s just seeking shelter to a place they thought they will be in a safe place. Unfortunately, this is not the case, because Israel, it looks like it’s absolutely over and above the international humanitarian law.
Unfortunately, as a humanitarian organization, we have completely run out of all of solutions. Over three weeks now we have been calling on the international community to intervene immediately to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and including fuel. We have warned repeatedly, “We are running out of fuel.” We have already run out of fuel a week ago. So, we managed to get some fuel from some gas stations who had some left over. Unfortunately, because of the continuous blockade on Gaza, particularly, and the north, it’s now an impossible mission to find one liter of gas, one liter of fuel in Gaza and the north. We have come to an end. We have already reduced all of our operations, all of our services, in order just to manage to take care of those patients who are now inside the hospital. And although we have taken all of these measures, we are only for 24 hours. At that point, the hospital’s small generator will shut down, and then the lives of those who are connected to life support machines, they will lose their life. And we even — we even can’t imagine the situation we will be in. As a humanitarian organization, we feel helpless. We feel helpless.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Nebal, your response to Israel saying, if you don’t evacuate al-Quds Hospital, your organization, the Palestinian Red Crescent, is responsible for any deaths?
NEBAL FARSAKH: As I said, international humanitarian law is clear: Hospitals, healthcare worker, healthcare facilities, civilians should not be a target. If an attack or whatsoever happened for al-Quds Hospital, this will be a responsibility of Israel, the responsibility of the international community, who are, up to this moment, fail to stand up for humanity, fail to pressure Israel to ensure the protection of civilians, healthcare personnel and healthcare facilities. Up to this moment, four colleagues were killed during conducting their humanitarian role, trying to save other people’s life. Twenty-two other paramedics were injured. At least eight ambulances completely went out of service due to Israeli bombardment and targeted for ambulances. This also should be stopped. Under all circumstances, in all conflicts, healthcare workers, healthcare personnel, healthcare facilities and hospitals, along with civilians, they should be protected. Unfortunately, 70% of the victims, of thousands of people who were killed in Gaza, are children, women and elderly people. This war crime should be stopped.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nebal, I mean, if you could talk specifically about the situation of children, over 4,000 killed, countless others thought to be under the rubble? But apart from that, there’s a new acronym that’s been in use in Gaza hospitals: WCNSF, wounded child, no surviving family. If you could say something about that, Nebal, whether you’re witnessing that, how much you’re witnessing it in hospitals there, al-Quds included?
NEBAL FARSAKH: Unfortunately, because of the intensive bombardments that is taking place on people’s residential buildings, houses, without even any prior warning, that has resulted to wiping out whole families. And unfortunately, many children who are survivors now, they don’t even have any family member.
We have saved a 12-years-old girl. She was under the rubble for almost 30 hours. Unfortunately, she has lost all of her family. And now she is currently sheltering inside the hospital. Our psychosocial support team try as much as they can to support her, but no words can describe the traumatized situation that this 13-years-old girl, along with other children in Gaza, are living because of this intense bombardment.
Even those who didn’t lose anyone, simply being under intense bombardments day and night, and hearing strong bombardments with complete darkness because of the cut of electricity, is just so much horrifying and panic among those children who are living unprecedented situations that no child in this world, we wish, is be living.
AMY GOODMAN: Nebal Farsakh, we want to thank you for spending this time with us, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, joining us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
*************************
“Unspeakable”: Dr. Fady Joudah Grieves 50+ Family Members Killed in Gaza & Slams U.S. Media Coverage
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 09, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/9/ ... _by_israel
Transcript
Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, including dozens of family members of award-winning Palestinian American writer, poet and physician Dr. Fady Joudah. “It is really beyond words to describe what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment,” says Joudah, who calls for the humanization of the people of Gaza and allowing more Palestinian voices into the public spotlight. “Palestinians in the West are only alive when they are dying, and that is abhorrent and unacceptable.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we’re joined in Houston, Texas, by Fady Joudah. He’s an award-winning Palestinian American writer and poet, as well as a physician. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic into English, including work by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Dozens of his family members have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. His recent piece for LitHub is titled “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.”
Fady Joudah, welcome to Democracy Now! First of all, of course, our condolences on the loss of your family members. If you could say a little bit about those family members and how you and your family here in the U.S. are keeping in touch with people who remain in Gaza?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Thank you.
We have had more than 50 or 60 people in our extended family killed by Israeli airstrikes. Some of them are in-laws of one of my cousins, and others are different families. Others were also killed by the dozens in one strike. One particular story is of a woman I knew since when I was a child in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And her brother’s grandkids were killed because Israel bombed the house next to them, and in the bombing, one of the walls — one of the walls of their house fell off on them. And they were sleeping, and it killed the three grandchildren and the parents. And only the grandfather survives. So this is also a different spectrum of what we hear about the children being the only survivors in entire families. There are also stories of elderly people who have survived 1948, the Nakba, and/or 1967, and they’re the only ones who are surviving or who have survived their families.
We try to keep in touch with some family members through social media or WhatsApp or what have you, but you know there’s no guarantee that there is regular access or regular communication. You can send a message and maybe get a response the next day. In the beginning of the war, we could get a few phone calls in. But the stuff now is just very difficult to access many people.
The situation is unspeakable and will remain unspeakable, I think, for generations and decades, has been a culmination of the Palestinian experience for a hundred years, since the British Mandate and the beginning of settler colonialism with Zionist immigration into Palestine. It is really beyond words to describe what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment, the accumulation of multigenerational trauma and memories that activates in each one of us previous memories we’ve tried overcome with hope and a flair for life and for freedom, only to find that there is always some horrific episode that reminds us that we are on this Earth in this time, liable to be massacred and lied about. It is —
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, Fady — we’re speaking to Fady Joudah, who is an award-winning Palestinian American writer and poet and physician. As you speak to us from Houston, we’ve spoken to so many Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, as well, but you are here in the United States. And the United States is so important when it comes to how Israel deals with Palestine, because of the amount of aid, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, and is now asking for much more. Can you talk about how the media here covers this issue?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Well, it’s how the media doesn’t cover it. I think that I’ve written in the piece there — and I’ve written in other pieces before — there is a collective psychosis in the mainstream language of U.S. media and administration, that is bizarre to the point of ghosting Palestinians, permitting their erasure, year after year, decade after decade.
When we say, for example, Israel has a right to defend itself, we’re also saying that Palestinian lives are not equal to any other lives that we deem superior to them. And I think that we have not repeatedly asked the question in American media and culture: Do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and to Jewish lives? There are many, Jewish people among them, who believe the answer is yes. But there are many more who haven’t even entertained the question honestly. And I think the importance of the question is to go beyond the moral lip service reflex of saying, “Of course, yes,” because to say “yes” means that you have to believe in the equal humanity of Palestinians as a political condition for freedom. When we hear about all the stuff from Blinken or Biden, it is really a language that says, “We believe that the Palestinians have rights when we decide that they have equal rights. We will put it on the back burner.” Always on the back burner.
And what I say is that we have reached a point where the murder and the destruction of Palestinian lives has reached a point of every time it reaches, it goes up higher, escalates in what is permissible about destroying Palestinian lives. We are not just talking about the numbers of the dead. We are talking about 2 million people who are living a life worse than death, and they have to overcome that and the trauma, that is unspeakable. And I do not expect the U.S. media and mainstream media or politics to even care about this. The ghosting continues.
Yesterday in The Washington Post, they published a racist cartoon, in — which they took down because there was an immediate back — I mean, lashing out at the racist cartoon. It is unimaginable to think that this — and it shouldn’t be imaginable — to think that this would be directed at Jewish lives or Israeli lives, but it is permissible to dehumanize Palestinians, until it has become part of the accepted feeling within the American psyche or consciousness on the whole. And so, everyone, I think, on the whole, except pockets here and there, is really complicit in the permissibility of the destruction of Palestinian lives, that has reached an unprecedented level in our hundred years of being massacred, displaced, dehumanized.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Fady, I want to ask you about a point that you raise in this beautiful essay that you’ve written, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.” In the essay, you cite Aimé Césaire, the renowned Martinican poet, very important anticolonial thinker, who wrote one of the canonical texts on colonialism, A Discourse on Colonialism. You cite him saying, “Neither America nor Europe seem able or willing to solve their colonial addiction, their civilizational motif. Israel is a translation of that failure, a prized Western desire. But Israel has agency in mechanizing this desire.” Could you explain, elaborate on that?
DR. FADY JOUDAH: Well, I think that, for some of us who know, or don’t know, that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was a response to the Zionist movement in Europe by a Jewish people in Europe who had suffered a lot of oppression. But to overcome that oppression, they chose to side with the colonial aspect, the domineering aspect of the culture that dominated them, and export that as a mode for success and triumph into a Palestine, without much recognition of the racism involved in dehumanizing what they call the Arab population of Palestine.
And since then, it has been in the interest of the West and the U.S. to prop up Israel as an outpost, so to speak, for further domination of the Middle East for various reasons. But the problem is that this kind of propping up has really gone mad at this point. And, you know, I think we’ve reached a moment — and others have said it — where the degree of colonial viciousness that exists now in Israeli society, and is supported by the West, sends us back to 19th century barbarism, really, colonial barbarism. And then, obviously, Israel is interested in affecting this kind of behavior within the U.S. through major lobby influences and also cultural influences.
As I said, I — or let me say it this way. It would be an amazing achievement if Zionists in the U.S., and outside it, would actually say to a single Palestinian, “I am sorry.” Just once. This has not happened in a hundred years. It has happened, of course, on an individual level. I have Jewish friends and colleagues who have said it, because we are all human, and there is no monolithic collective anywhere.
But I think that one of the things we need to do is to begin to shift the language that speaks of the Palestinian and to allow for more Palestinian presence in the American consciousness, beyond death and dying. It seems to me that Palestinians in the West are only alive when they are dying, and that is abhorrent and unacceptable. And that is part of a settler colonial mentality that only humanizes its subjects when they are limp, near dying, completely helpless, obedient. Any sense of resistance or rise toward freedom or liberation is denied them through dehumanizing language and, you know, manipulative approaches and processes.
AMY GOODMAN: Fady Joudah, we want to thank you so much for spending this time with us, Palestinian American writer, poet, translator and physician, speaking to us from Houston. Dozens of his family members have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. We’ll link to your recent piece for LitHub, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation.”
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
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“Clear Intention of Ethnic Cleansing”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov Warns of Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza. Bartov says the disproportionate killing of civilians by Israel, as well as dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders and suggestions of mass expulsion, are of grave concern. He recently joined hundreds of lawyers and academics in signing an open letter warning about Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza. “There is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity,” says Bartov. “If this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing … and that may become genocide.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: “If there is a hell on Earth, it’s the north of Gaza.” Those were the words of a U.N. official earlier today as Israel intensifies its aerial and ground assault. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled on foot from northern Gaza after being forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks. More than half of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged over the last month.
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced Israel has agreed to implement what the White House described as daily four-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza to give Palestinians a chance to head south. Many Palestinians fear they’ll never be allowed to return home. Some have accused the Biden administration of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Images of Palestinians fleeing on foot have been widely compared to the Nakba, or catastrophe, when some 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes upon Israel’s founding in 1948.
We begin today’s show with the Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Bartov is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
Democracy Now!'s Juan González and I spoke to professor Omer Bartov on Wednesday from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I began by asking him to talk about his own experience serving as an Israeli soldier in the northern Sinai in the 1970s and how it's impacted his view on what’s going on today.
OMER BARTOV: I was a soldier in the IDF, in the Israeli Defense Forces, between 1973 and 1976. And so, as a young soldier, the first thing that I experienced was the trauma, the huge surprise of the Arab — the Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel on October 6th, 1973. And I should say that when the Hamas attack on Israel occurred on the 7th of October, 2023, 50 years and a day later, that was quite traumatic, I think, for myself and many members of my generation. And we can talk further about why it was so traumatic.
But in the course of my service, I also served in the northern Sinai, and the command post that I belonged to was in Gaza. And so I would go quite often to Gaza, which was then — had a population of about 350,000, was poor, hopeless and congested. And since then, of course, now we have between two and two-and-a-half million people living in Gaza, which is much poorer, much more congested and whose population is much more desperate, and has been desperate for a long time, considering that it’s been under Israeli siege now for 16 years. So, for me, the lack of progress for all those years in somehow resolving this terrible humanitarian problem is very personal.
And I should add one thing. I was usually not employed as a soldier in occupation duties, but there was a time that I was. And I have very distinct recollection of that, leading my platoon through an Egyptian city at the time, with people looking at us from behind the windows, obviously not wanting us to be there, obviously afraid of us, and us walking on the street obviously feeling uncomfortable being where we are and being somewhat afraid of what might happen to us as we were marching then. That sort of sense of what being an occupation soldier means stayed with me all those years, and it’s always made me — has been one of the reasons, a sort of more personal rather than political or analytical reason, why I’ve always thought that it’s time to end this occupation, for which we called in that August 4th petition, two months before the Hamas attack on Israel.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering — we hear often now these days, especially in conflicts such as these, the terms “crime against humanity,” “war crime,” “genocide.” Most people don’t understand the distinction. And for some of us, war itself is a crime, and saying a “war crime” is almost redundant. But I’m wondering if you could give us more of a guidance or sense of the distinction between these terms.
OMER BARTOV: Yes. So, I think that’s a really important question, because people, as you say, just use these terms without really thinking what they mean. And because genocide is perceived as the worst crime, then any atrocity that happens, anything that people think deserves some sort of extreme title, they call genocide.
So, there are actually U.N. resolutions on war crimes and on genocide, and they define them clearly. Now, one can dispute those definitions, but those are the definitions under international law. The convention, the U.N. Convention on Genocide, so, 1948, defines it as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. And that’s a very important definition, because it calls for two things. It calls, first of all, for intention — you have to show that the killing is intentional, is not just part of war, part of violence, but is intentional — and, second, that the intention is to destroy that group, defined as such by the perpetrator as such. That is, it’s not the killing of individuals; it’s the killing of individuals as members of a particular group.
That’s very different from war crimes, because war crimes are violations of the laws and customs of war against both combatants and noncombatants, civilians. And crimes against humanity has to do with extermination or other mass crimes against any civilian population. You do not have to show intent, and it does not have to happen at a time of war. So, it is important to distinguish between these these three categories.
And I would add to it a third, which has a definition, although there is no resolution on it, which is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a population from a particular territory, usually because you want that territory, and you don’t want the people living on it to stay on it. Genocide is the attempt to kill a particular group, wherever it is. But there is a connection between the two, because often ethnic cleansing becomes genocide. That happened, in fact, in the Armenian genocide in World War I, and it happened, in fact, also in the Holocaust, which began as an attempt to remove Jews from particular territories, and then, when the Germans felt there was no place to move them to, they decided to murder them en masse. So, if we think about these different categories, we can distinguish between what we see on the ground and how we feel about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your sense of what is happening in terms of these categories right now in Gaza?
OMER BARTOV: So, my sense is the following. Israeli political leaders and military leaders have made very startling and frightening statements about Gaza, speaking about flattening Gaza, speaking about Hamas, but by sort of extending it also, by extension, also Gazans, in general, as human animals, speaking about moving the entire population of Gaza out of Gaza. That is a clear intention of ethnic cleansing. So, those statements show intent. And that’s a genocidal intent, which is often very difficult to prove in genocide. People who carry out genocide don’t always want to say that they’re doing it.
The second is: What are they actually doing there? And military leaders on the ground keep saying that what they’re trying to do is to hit Hamas targets, that Hamas often — and I think that’s often true — places its own headquarters, rockets and so forth under hospitals, inside mosques, playgrounds, schools and so forth. So the military claim that they’re trying to hit Hamas and not the population, but, unfortunately, the population is also getting killed. In that sense, there is clearly disproportionate killing of civilians. That is, the numbers, as you quoted earlier, are now estimated to be over 10,000. And even if we don’t believe the numbers given out by Hamas, they’re still in the many thousands. They may even be more, because many bodies are probably buried under the debris. And of those, at least 4,000 are children. And one has to remember that half of the population of Gaza is under 18 years old. So, to me, there is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity.
Whether at the moment this is genocide, my own sense is that it is not genocide at the moment, because there is still no clear indication of an attempt to destroy the entire population, which would be genocide, but that we are very close on the verge of that. And if this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing — in part, it’s already happened with the move of so many Palestinians from northern Gaza to southern Gaza — and that may become genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Omer Bartov, I was really struck by you saying it was in August that you joined other leading historians and Israeli scholars in signing this letter criticizing the, quote, “regime of apartheid.” So, that is two months before Hamas attack of October 7th. Now, often these days, after the attack that killed over 1,300 people in Israel, if you raise any kind of context, you’re accused of justifying what happened. If you, as a historian, can talk about your use of that term? I remember years ago interviewing the Nobel laureate Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. And he said, when he went to the Occupied Territories, he found it worse than apartheid in his own country of South Africa, which he survived. So, your clearly thought-out use of this term, and then a discussion about what it means to try to explain what’s happening, including using the term “occupation”?
OMER BARTOV: So, let me say, when we crafted that statement, and we worked on it quite a bit in July and finally issued it, so-called “The Elephant in the Room,” the elephant in the room that we were talking about was the occupation, and which we defined as — in the West Bank, as a regime of apartheid. Now, the reason we did it at the time was that, if you remember, there were vast protests in Israel at the time against the Netanyahu government, the Netanyahu government attempt to so-called overhaul the judicial system, which was really an attempt to undermine the rule of law in Israel to strengthen the executive and weaken the judiciary, which is the only control over the executive in Israel, with the goal of extending the occupation regime in the West Bank and, finally, of annexing that area and making life impossible for the Palestinian population there. There are over half a million Jewish settlers there and somewhere around 3 million Palestinians living there.
Now, what do we mean by “apartheid”? First of all, people tend to think of apartheid as what happened in South Africa. And the term comes from there. But there is, in fact, a U.N. resolution on apartheid that defines what apartheid is. And curiously, all the elements that are mentioned in that resolution exist also in the West Bank, the most important of which is that you have two populations in the West Bank, Jews and Palestinians. The Jews, the settlers, are extraterritorial Israeli citizens. They live under Israeli law, or some kind of figment that creates them as living under Israeli law. They can vote to the Israeli parliament. They enjoy all the rights of democracy the Jews in Israel enjoy. The Palestinians live — the Palestinians there live under a completely different set of laws, which gives them almost no rights at all. That is, they live under a military regime. They are tried before military courts, where the judges are lawyers on reserve service, Israeli lawyers on reserve service. One can detain them endlessly in prison. And so, these are two groups that live under totally different laws. They’re also separated from each other by a set of roads, roadblocks, checkposts, that make life increasingly difficult for Palestinians and make life much better for the Jewish population there. So, from that point of view, there’s clearly an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
And that has, in many ways, filtered into Israel. That is, generation after generation of young Israeli men and women are called up and go to serve as policemen in the West Bank in military uniform. Most of what they do is police the population. And that has a corrupting impact on more and more generations of Israelis, who get used to the idea that they can break into homes at 4:00 in the morning, arrest whoever they like. And so, that effect is not only that we have an apartheid regime, but we have a corruption of democracy in Israel itself, which ultimately resulted in this attempt by Netanyahu’s regime to change the very system of democracy in Israel, which was really only for Jews in the first place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering if you — you mentioned previously the acquiescence or the refusal to confront the problem in general Israeli society of the occupation? Why do you think that is, especially given the fact that Israel in its early years had a very vibrant labor, socialist and humanitarian movement among those who who created the state of Israel? What has happened?
OMER BARTOV: Well, I would say, I mean, the simple answer is that power corrupts, and that Israel has suffered for years from a kind of euphoria of power. And when I talked about the sort of link between what happened in 1973 and what happened in 2023, it is exactly that — that is, that Israel came to believe that it’s strong enough to be able to do what it likes, and it does not need to have any political compromise, which means territorial compromise. The War of 1973 could have been avoided, had Israel agreed to negotiate with Anwar Sadat at the time, the president of Egypt — which it did, eventually, after the war — and return the Sinai Peninsula and receive peace in return. But 3,000 Israeli soldiers were killed, some of whom were my classmates. And the same happened now. That is, Israel refused to talk about any territorial compromise and believed that Hamas can lob a few rockets here and there, but, by and large, it’s not a problem for it, and therefore, there’s no need to think of any territorial compromise.
And this, you know, became the sense in the large sectors of the Israeli public. People could live in Tel Aviv, have a good time, have a good life. And 20 miles to their east, there was an apartheid regime, but it really had very little to do with them. And the curious thing was — and this is what we were trying to point out in August — was that the people who were protesting, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, quite remarkably, went out to the streets every Saturday to protest against the erosion of democracy in Israel, refused to talk about the occupation. And when I was there protesting against that, we were marginalized. We were pushed to the side. And people said, “Well, occupation, that’s a kind of — that’s a difficult term. You know, not everybody agrees on that. Let’s not talk about it now. It will divert attention,” whereas, in fact, it was the core of the very attempt to change the rules of the game in Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll return to our interview with Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Back in 20 seconds.
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“From the River to the Sea”: Omer Bartov on Contested Slogan & Why Two-State Solution Is Not Viable
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov says the two-state solution is dead after decades of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, making the creation of an independent Palestinian state all but impossible. He says a one-state solution — a single democratic state for all Jewish Israelis and Palestinians — is also unlikely to work given the competing national visions of the two communities. “The only solution is a confederation,” says Bartov, describing a scenario in which two states would be closely intertwined and interdependent. He also discusses the phrase “from the river to the sea,” used by both Israelis and Palestinians to refer to the land.
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.
We return to Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on genocide. He spoke to us on Wednesday, one day after the House voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, for her criticism of Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bartov, you are a professor at Brown University in Providence. You’re in Cambridge right now. And I wanted to ask you about the dissent on college campuses and how they’re being dealt with. In Cambridge, at Harvard, you know about the students who were protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. A truck carries around their faces, and above their faces, it says, “antisemite.” And on television, you’ll see pieces on antisemitism, which is very real in the world, for example, the burning of the Austrian cemetery in Vienna and many other situations. But they will be blended together — this is on the mainstream networks — with images of people protesting, holding a Palestinian flag. Can you talk about what’s happening on college campuses and people fearing that their concern for justice is being translated as antisemitism and cause for them to be blacklisted?
OMER BARTOV: So, look, this is a very complex issue, I agree. I think part of it is, frankly, ignorance about the reality on the ground in Israel-Palestine. And that has to do, obviously, not with your show, but with much of how the mainstream media in the United States is presenting things. But also, young people, students can find other sources of information to better know what is happening on the ground. So, generally, I think there’s a little bit of an issue of information.
Antisemitism is real, as you say, and has been growing, and is a not just lamentable, but frightening phenomenon. And obviously, I have no sympathy with it. But there is, and there has been for a long time, a tendency to label any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the policies of any particular government, let alone criticism of Israel as a state as such, as antisemitism. And that is a policy of the right wing in Israel, and that’s a policy of the right wing in this country, and it has nothing to do with the truth. One can be a Zionist or a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, and not be antisemitic. One can be, again, Zionist, but against particular Israeli policies. I very strongly support the existence of the state of Israel, and I’m highly critical of its policies, and some people would call me a self-hating Jew. But that is nonsense. That has to do with criticism of policies that not only function as oppression of Palestinians over a very long period of time, 56 years of occupation of Palestinians, a refusal by the Israeli government to ever talk about what happened in 1948, so this kind of shutting up the entire conversation, and at the same time a belief that Jews, like other nations, have a right of self-determination. So we have to separate the two.
I think that at the moment, in the demonstrations, there is a sort of heightening of passions, and in part it is because of the policies of the Israeli government. I do feel that when people march in support of Palestinian lives — and I’m very much in favor of that — one does also have to remember what happened on October 7. On October 7th, over a thousand Jewish civilians, Israeli Jewish civilians — there were actually some Arabs there, too, some Bedouin, who live there, too — were butchered in the most heinous manner. And this was live-streamed. This has been deeply wounding to Israeli society. Almost every person in Israel knows people who were killed there or kidnapped, including myself. Members of my own family were either killed or are now in Gaza. And one has to recall that there are 240 people now held as hostages. And so, I think that when when protests the policies of Israel, for the sake of — and this has to do also with what Representative Tlaib said, which I completely agreed with. I thought it was a very moving speech. But I think it’s important to also stress that other side.
There has been a dehumanization of both sides. Occupation dehumanizes people. It dehumanizes the occupier, and it dehumanizes the occupied. And the way to deal with this is to talk about the political future: How do we move forward? A ceasefire would be wonderful, and I’m very much in support of it, but it won’t put an end to the violence. The end to the violence will come only as a result of a peaceful resolution of this 100-year-old conflict which has caused so much blood. That is, I think, what we should try to push the American administration to do, to change its policies, to put pressure on the Israeli government to finally relent and to begin again negotiations with the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you about the term “from the river to the sea,” which the Israeli government takes, and those who charge others with antisemitism say, it means the annihilation of the Jewish population of Israel. I’m looking at the Likud party platform of March 1977, “The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel),” which is the land of Israel. And it says, “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” That’s between the sea and the Jordan River, between the river and the sea. Can you talk about that term?
OMER BARTOV: Yes. You know, the originators of the Likud party, the Revisionist part of Zionism, under the great leader Jabotinsky, had a song that they used to sing. And the song was, “The Jordan has two banks / this one belongs to us, and the other one, too.” That is, they were not only talking actually about so-called historical Palestine, which is Mandatory Palestine of the interwar period; they were actually talking also about parts of the Jordan, of what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, as belonging to the future Jewish state.
So, when we talk about “from the Jordan to the sea,” we are talking about the territory that is now controlled by Israel. In that territory, there are now 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians — 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, 3 million Palestinians who are in the West Bank, and two to two-and-a-half million Palestinians — most of the population of Gaza are refugees in Gaza. So it’s 7 million versus 7 million.
To talk about a Palestinian state or a Jewish state between the Jordan and the sea, the question, of course, arises: So, what happened to the — what will happen to the other half? That is really the question. If one talks about a Palestinian state that refuses to recognize the Jewish right of self-determination — that is, of the right of Jews to have a state of their own — the question is: What will happen to the Jews there? Would they go back to Europe, as some people say, whatever that actually means? And if you have a state the way the Israeli right, the Likud party, and now the much more radical, really Jewish supremacist elements in Netanyahu’s government, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, these people who sort of trace their roots back to Rabbi Kahane, who are really Nazis — if you think — if you ask yourself, “What do they mean?” they want to create a Jewish state that does not have Palestinians in it, nor Arabs in it. And the policy has been consistently to make life as unbearable for the Palestinians there, so that either they will finally move out, which they have no intention of doing, or to use an emergency situation, such as exists right now, under the cover of which they could be ethnically cleansed. And that’s a major worry now among Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, who are worried about a second Nakba, a second expulsion of Palestinians after 1948, something that has been mentioned by a number of Israeli politicians, and, of course, a major worry in the West Bank and in Gaza.
So, what we need to think of is not the term “from the Jordan to the sea,” which is the territory that Israel now controls, but how does that territory get to be shared by these two groups in ways that do not include oppression, lack of any rights, lack of equality, and certainly does not include violence and expulsion.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Omer Bartov, the issue of a two-state solution or a one-state solution, if you could take that on in a nutshell?
OMER BARTOV: Yeah. So, you know, I used to be a strong supporter of the two-state solution. And I gradually realized that this was a sort of fig leaf of the Israeli left, while the country kept settling the West Bank and making it impossible to create an independent Palestinian state there. And we kept saying, “Well, but at the end, there will be a two-state solution.” So, the traditional two-state solution, to my mind, is no longer viable. ’
So what is viable? And I think — and I belong to a group of people who have been talking about it for quite a while — that the only solution is a confederation, which would mean that there would be two states. There would be a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. They both would have full sovereignty. And they would be along more or less the borders of 1967, the Green Line, so-called, but they will make a distinction between residency and citizenship, so that people, say, Jews who live in a Palestinian state, could remain Israeli citizens, who have rights of residency in a Palestinian state, but have to then adhere to all the laws, rules and regulations of that Palestinian state. And Palestinians who live, say, in Nablus and would like to live in Haifa, like a French man from Paris who would like to live in Berlin, could move to Haifa, and they could have rights of residency, but they’d have to conform to all the rules and regulations of the Israeli state, but they would vote for — to a Palestinian parliament. And Jerusalem would be the joint capital of both. And above that, there would be institutions that will take care of the mutual affairs of these two states, which are very tightly woven together now by the infrastructure, electricity, water and so forth. It’s really impossible to cut them apart. That is — right now, of course, sounds like a pipe dream. But I think that in the long run, that is probably the only viable solution.
And I’ll add one last thing to that, which is very important both to Jews and Palestinians, which is that both states would have the right of return. The Jews could say, as they say now, that Jews who want to become Israeli citizens, wherever they live, can come. And Palestinians in the Palestinian state could say all Palestinian refugees who would like to come back to Palestine could come and become Palestinian citizens, and, under certain rules, could also move to the Israeli part of so-called Mandatory Palestine as residents.
AMY GOODMAN: And why not simply a one-state solution?
OMER BARTOV: I think a one-state solution is something that neither one side nor the other wants, because the Palestinians, quite rightly, want the right of self-determination, want to have their own state, as do the Jews. And both sides are afraid that the other side would be more powerful. Obviously, right now, under current conditions, the state of Israel is much more powerful militarily, economically than the Palestinian part of the land. And so, in that sense, a one-state solution would actually perpetuate Jewish supremacy in the whole country.
AMY GOODMAN: Omer Bartov is professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar is one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza.
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Palestinian Groups Ask ICC to Arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu for War Crimes & Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about a new effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza, where Israel’s monthlong air and ground assault has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. On Wednesday, three Palestinian rights groups filed a lawsuit with the international body, urging it to investigate Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid. The petition also calls for arrest warrants to be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. International inaction against Israeli aggression is part of “a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades,” as well as the “absolute double standard” applied to war crimes committed against people of the Global South, says Erakat, who was part of a team of academics and activists who came together to support the ICC lawsuit. “This is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.”
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.
Three Palestinian human rights groups have filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court calling on the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders for genocide, incitement to genocide, and the crime of apartheid. The three groups — Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — told the court that Israel’s suffocating siege of Gaza and the indiscriminate attacks on densely populated civilian areas amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The lawsuit also seeks the arrest of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant. This comes as the death toll in Gaza is nearing 11,000, according to Palestinian health officials.
We’re joined now by Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erekat, associate professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, part of the Palestinian team of academics, intellectuals and activists who helped bring the ICC lawsuit. She’s joining us from Philadelphia.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noura. If you can explain what this lawsuit is all about?
NOURA ERAKAT: Absolutely. This lawsuit comes as a collective effort on behalf of the three organizations you mentioned — Al-Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — who are on the ground and documenting the ongoing atrocities. It’s one of a myriad of efforts that have been filed before the International Criminal Court. For example, very recently, Reporters Without Borders have also submitted a petition calling on the ICC to investigate the now killing of 34 journalists, several of them while they were working during this onslaught.
The one thing that we want to highlight as the ad hoc team is that this is not merely a lawsuit against Israeli individuals as stipulated by the petition, which it very much is, but it is also holding on trial the International Criminal Court, the international criminal law, international legal institutions as a whole, which have demonstrated an absolute double standard when it comes to the Global South. We’ve seen this in the tenure of the ICC, which, since its establishment, has opened over two dozen cases, all of them on the African continent. All those who have been indicted, with the exception of Slobodan Milošević, have been Arab and African individuals, heads of state, officials.
And so, here we are pushing the ICC to either hold Israel to account in what is an ongoing genocide, where the leaders of it have told us very much that they have the specific intent to destroy a Palestinian people, in whole or in part, and demonstrated the specific underlying acts in order to effectuate it, or demonstrate for us that this is actually a moment where the ICC demonstrates that it’s not effectuate, that it’s not effective, that it is actually part of punishing a Global South and letting Western countries move forward with impunity.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke to Raji Sourani, the world-renowned human rights attorney in Gaza, in Gaza City, in a heartbreaking plea from Raji, who remained in northern Gaza, after his house was bombed. He particularly held Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the ICC — called him out, saying when Russia attacked the children of Ukraine, the ICC immediately opened war crimes investigations, and then raised the issue of where is he on Israel and Palestine. If you can address this and also talk about an ICC case that has already been opened, an official investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank back in 2021, in West Bank, in Gaza and East Jerusalem?
NOURA ERAKAT: Raji is absolutely right. Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the ICC, opened the investigation within a week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, immediately, without question. In this case, it took the prosecutor, Karim Khan, three weeks to travel to Rafah in order to investigate what was in the first week an evident example of genocidal intent, mass killings, the destruction of those conditions of life that would reduce the ability of Palestinians to survive.
In this situation, what we see is not merely a repetition of history, but a continuation of colonial legacies, and one that led to the failure of the League of Nations, frankly, in the aftermath of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, where a fascist Italy, led by Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. And in that moment, Ethiopia, which was a member state of the League of Nations — and rather than hold Italy to account, which was dropping indiscriminate chemical weapons on the Ethiopian people, instead, the Red Cross decried the Ethiopians as being too savage to follow the laws of war. Media were running headlines that Ethiopians were hiding and sheltering in hospital, using them as human shields. And world powers failed to impose sufficient sanctions on Italy in this moment. And this demonstrated the limits of these international institutions and led to the failure of the League of Nations.
In a similar — we are in a similar moment right now. These international institutions need to act. And instead we’re seeing a stalemate, and we’re seeing international leaders, like led by the United States, as well as the U.K., as well as France, who are basically providing a green light to Israel to commit genocide, to commit these atrocities.
This is not out of nowhere. Everything started before October 7th. And Israel — this is a moment where Israel has not been held to account. It is a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades. International organizations have said that Israel is practicing the crime against humanity of apartheid. There was a near consensus between 2020 and 2021. And yet, rather than impose sanctions in that moment, rather than mobilize international mechanisms and institutions in order to dismantle apartheid, we saw the United States celebrate and normalize Israeli apartheid, and we saw them continuing to normalize relations with other Arab regimes. It was this fundamental failure that has led us to this moment and an ongoing crisis of a lack of accountability, of an imposition of two types of law — one for the Global North, one for the Global South. This is a hypocrisy on the part of Western governments and demonstrates that there is no such thing as Western universalism, but instead continues to be two sets of laws on two sets of people.
And what’s wonderful, the only thing that provides us hope, is that a mass, mass movement of individuals, peoples, communities have risen up against their governments also to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Western democracy. Even in the United States, consider that 66% of Americans have demanded a ceasefire. Eighty percent (80%) of registered Democrats have demanded a ceasefire. And yet, only 19 out of 535 members of Congress have endorsed it. Consider that that same Congress censured the only Palestinian American representative in government, at the very moment that she represents the majority. So this is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does the tens of thousands of Palestinians being forced south right now — we just have 20 seconds — fit into your charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity?
NOURA ERAKAT: What we’re seeing is an ongoing Nakba of the Palestinians, who are with their hands up and on their feet with white handkerchiefs in order not to be killed. This is an ethnic cleansing of the north of Gaza. It’s a continuation of the Nakba to take Palestinian land without Palestinian people. It is a crime against humanity and fits in a larger framework of genocidal warfare.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, associate professor at Rutgers University, we thank you so much. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza. Bartov says the disproportionate killing of civilians by Israel, as well as dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders and suggestions of mass expulsion, are of grave concern. He recently joined hundreds of lawyers and academics in signing an open letter warning about Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza. “There is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity,” says Bartov. “If this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing … and that may become genocide.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: “If there is a hell on Earth, it’s the north of Gaza.” Those were the words of a U.N. official earlier today as Israel intensifies its aerial and ground assault. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled on foot from northern Gaza after being forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks. More than half of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged over the last month.
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced Israel has agreed to implement what the White House described as daily four-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza to give Palestinians a chance to head south. Many Palestinians fear they’ll never be allowed to return home. Some have accused the Biden administration of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Images of Palestinians fleeing on foot have been widely compared to the Nakba, or catastrophe, when some 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes upon Israel’s founding in 1948.
We begin today’s show with the Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Bartov is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
Democracy Now!'s Juan González and I spoke to professor Omer Bartov on Wednesday from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I began by asking him to talk about his own experience serving as an Israeli soldier in the northern Sinai in the 1970s and how it's impacted his view on what’s going on today.
OMER BARTOV: I was a soldier in the IDF, in the Israeli Defense Forces, between 1973 and 1976. And so, as a young soldier, the first thing that I experienced was the trauma, the huge surprise of the Arab — the Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel on October 6th, 1973. And I should say that when the Hamas attack on Israel occurred on the 7th of October, 2023, 50 years and a day later, that was quite traumatic, I think, for myself and many members of my generation. And we can talk further about why it was so traumatic.
But in the course of my service, I also served in the northern Sinai, and the command post that I belonged to was in Gaza. And so I would go quite often to Gaza, which was then — had a population of about 350,000, was poor, hopeless and congested. And since then, of course, now we have between two and two-and-a-half million people living in Gaza, which is much poorer, much more congested and whose population is much more desperate, and has been desperate for a long time, considering that it’s been under Israeli siege now for 16 years. So, for me, the lack of progress for all those years in somehow resolving this terrible humanitarian problem is very personal.
And I should add one thing. I was usually not employed as a soldier in occupation duties, but there was a time that I was. And I have very distinct recollection of that, leading my platoon through an Egyptian city at the time, with people looking at us from behind the windows, obviously not wanting us to be there, obviously afraid of us, and us walking on the street obviously feeling uncomfortable being where we are and being somewhat afraid of what might happen to us as we were marching then. That sort of sense of what being an occupation soldier means stayed with me all those years, and it’s always made me — has been one of the reasons, a sort of more personal rather than political or analytical reason, why I’ve always thought that it’s time to end this occupation, for which we called in that August 4th petition, two months before the Hamas attack on Israel.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering — we hear often now these days, especially in conflicts such as these, the terms “crime against humanity,” “war crime,” “genocide.” Most people don’t understand the distinction. And for some of us, war itself is a crime, and saying a “war crime” is almost redundant. But I’m wondering if you could give us more of a guidance or sense of the distinction between these terms.
OMER BARTOV: Yes. So, I think that’s a really important question, because people, as you say, just use these terms without really thinking what they mean. And because genocide is perceived as the worst crime, then any atrocity that happens, anything that people think deserves some sort of extreme title, they call genocide.
So, there are actually U.N. resolutions on war crimes and on genocide, and they define them clearly. Now, one can dispute those definitions, but those are the definitions under international law. The convention, the U.N. Convention on Genocide, so, 1948, defines it as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. And that’s a very important definition, because it calls for two things. It calls, first of all, for intention — you have to show that the killing is intentional, is not just part of war, part of violence, but is intentional — and, second, that the intention is to destroy that group, defined as such by the perpetrator as such. That is, it’s not the killing of individuals; it’s the killing of individuals as members of a particular group.
That’s very different from war crimes, because war crimes are violations of the laws and customs of war against both combatants and noncombatants, civilians. And crimes against humanity has to do with extermination or other mass crimes against any civilian population. You do not have to show intent, and it does not have to happen at a time of war. So, it is important to distinguish between these these three categories.
And I would add to it a third, which has a definition, although there is no resolution on it, which is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a population from a particular territory, usually because you want that territory, and you don’t want the people living on it to stay on it. Genocide is the attempt to kill a particular group, wherever it is. But there is a connection between the two, because often ethnic cleansing becomes genocide. That happened, in fact, in the Armenian genocide in World War I, and it happened, in fact, also in the Holocaust, which began as an attempt to remove Jews from particular territories, and then, when the Germans felt there was no place to move them to, they decided to murder them en masse. So, if we think about these different categories, we can distinguish between what we see on the ground and how we feel about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your sense of what is happening in terms of these categories right now in Gaza?
OMER BARTOV: So, my sense is the following. Israeli political leaders and military leaders have made very startling and frightening statements about Gaza, speaking about flattening Gaza, speaking about Hamas, but by sort of extending it also, by extension, also Gazans, in general, as human animals, speaking about moving the entire population of Gaza out of Gaza. That is a clear intention of ethnic cleansing. So, those statements show intent. And that’s a genocidal intent, which is often very difficult to prove in genocide. People who carry out genocide don’t always want to say that they’re doing it.
The second is: What are they actually doing there? And military leaders on the ground keep saying that what they’re trying to do is to hit Hamas targets, that Hamas often — and I think that’s often true — places its own headquarters, rockets and so forth under hospitals, inside mosques, playgrounds, schools and so forth. So the military claim that they’re trying to hit Hamas and not the population, but, unfortunately, the population is also getting killed. In that sense, there is clearly disproportionate killing of civilians. That is, the numbers, as you quoted earlier, are now estimated to be over 10,000. And even if we don’t believe the numbers given out by Hamas, they’re still in the many thousands. They may even be more, because many bodies are probably buried under the debris. And of those, at least 4,000 are children. And one has to remember that half of the population of Gaza is under 18 years old. So, to me, there is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity.
Whether at the moment this is genocide, my own sense is that it is not genocide at the moment, because there is still no clear indication of an attempt to destroy the entire population, which would be genocide, but that we are very close on the verge of that. And if this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing — in part, it’s already happened with the move of so many Palestinians from northern Gaza to southern Gaza — and that may become genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Omer Bartov, I was really struck by you saying it was in August that you joined other leading historians and Israeli scholars in signing this letter criticizing the, quote, “regime of apartheid.” So, that is two months before Hamas attack of October 7th. Now, often these days, after the attack that killed over 1,300 people in Israel, if you raise any kind of context, you’re accused of justifying what happened. If you, as a historian, can talk about your use of that term? I remember years ago interviewing the Nobel laureate Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. And he said, when he went to the Occupied Territories, he found it worse than apartheid in his own country of South Africa, which he survived. So, your clearly thought-out use of this term, and then a discussion about what it means to try to explain what’s happening, including using the term “occupation”?
OMER BARTOV: So, let me say, when we crafted that statement, and we worked on it quite a bit in July and finally issued it, so-called “The Elephant in the Room,” the elephant in the room that we were talking about was the occupation, and which we defined as — in the West Bank, as a regime of apartheid. Now, the reason we did it at the time was that, if you remember, there were vast protests in Israel at the time against the Netanyahu government, the Netanyahu government attempt to so-called overhaul the judicial system, which was really an attempt to undermine the rule of law in Israel to strengthen the executive and weaken the judiciary, which is the only control over the executive in Israel, with the goal of extending the occupation regime in the West Bank and, finally, of annexing that area and making life impossible for the Palestinian population there. There are over half a million Jewish settlers there and somewhere around 3 million Palestinians living there.
Now, what do we mean by “apartheid”? First of all, people tend to think of apartheid as what happened in South Africa. And the term comes from there. But there is, in fact, a U.N. resolution on apartheid that defines what apartheid is. And curiously, all the elements that are mentioned in that resolution exist also in the West Bank, the most important of which is that you have two populations in the West Bank, Jews and Palestinians. The Jews, the settlers, are extraterritorial Israeli citizens. They live under Israeli law, or some kind of figment that creates them as living under Israeli law. They can vote to the Israeli parliament. They enjoy all the rights of democracy the Jews in Israel enjoy. The Palestinians live — the Palestinians there live under a completely different set of laws, which gives them almost no rights at all. That is, they live under a military regime. They are tried before military courts, where the judges are lawyers on reserve service, Israeli lawyers on reserve service. One can detain them endlessly in prison. And so, these are two groups that live under totally different laws. They’re also separated from each other by a set of roads, roadblocks, checkposts, that make life increasingly difficult for Palestinians and make life much better for the Jewish population there. So, from that point of view, there’s clearly an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
And that has, in many ways, filtered into Israel. That is, generation after generation of young Israeli men and women are called up and go to serve as policemen in the West Bank in military uniform. Most of what they do is police the population. And that has a corrupting impact on more and more generations of Israelis, who get used to the idea that they can break into homes at 4:00 in the morning, arrest whoever they like. And so, that effect is not only that we have an apartheid regime, but we have a corruption of democracy in Israel itself, which ultimately resulted in this attempt by Netanyahu’s regime to change the very system of democracy in Israel, which was really only for Jews in the first place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering if you — you mentioned previously the acquiescence or the refusal to confront the problem in general Israeli society of the occupation? Why do you think that is, especially given the fact that Israel in its early years had a very vibrant labor, socialist and humanitarian movement among those who who created the state of Israel? What has happened?
OMER BARTOV: Well, I would say, I mean, the simple answer is that power corrupts, and that Israel has suffered for years from a kind of euphoria of power. And when I talked about the sort of link between what happened in 1973 and what happened in 2023, it is exactly that — that is, that Israel came to believe that it’s strong enough to be able to do what it likes, and it does not need to have any political compromise, which means territorial compromise. The War of 1973 could have been avoided, had Israel agreed to negotiate with Anwar Sadat at the time, the president of Egypt — which it did, eventually, after the war — and return the Sinai Peninsula and receive peace in return. But 3,000 Israeli soldiers were killed, some of whom were my classmates. And the same happened now. That is, Israel refused to talk about any territorial compromise and believed that Hamas can lob a few rockets here and there, but, by and large, it’s not a problem for it, and therefore, there’s no need to think of any territorial compromise.
And this, you know, became the sense in the large sectors of the Israeli public. People could live in Tel Aviv, have a good time, have a good life. And 20 miles to their east, there was an apartheid regime, but it really had very little to do with them. And the curious thing was — and this is what we were trying to point out in August — was that the people who were protesting, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, quite remarkably, went out to the streets every Saturday to protest against the erosion of democracy in Israel, refused to talk about the occupation. And when I was there protesting against that, we were marginalized. We were pushed to the side. And people said, “Well, occupation, that’s a kind of — that’s a difficult term. You know, not everybody agrees on that. Let’s not talk about it now. It will divert attention,” whereas, in fact, it was the core of the very attempt to change the rules of the game in Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll return to our interview with Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Back in 20 seconds.
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“From the River to the Sea”: Omer Bartov on Contested Slogan & Why Two-State Solution Is Not Viable
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov says the two-state solution is dead after decades of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, making the creation of an independent Palestinian state all but impossible. He says a one-state solution — a single democratic state for all Jewish Israelis and Palestinians — is also unlikely to work given the competing national visions of the two communities. “The only solution is a confederation,” says Bartov, describing a scenario in which two states would be closely intertwined and interdependent. He also discusses the phrase “from the river to the sea,” used by both Israelis and Palestinians to refer to the land.
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.
We return to Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on genocide. He spoke to us on Wednesday, one day after the House voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, for her criticism of Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bartov, you are a professor at Brown University in Providence. You’re in Cambridge right now. And I wanted to ask you about the dissent on college campuses and how they’re being dealt with. In Cambridge, at Harvard, you know about the students who were protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. A truck carries around their faces, and above their faces, it says, “antisemite.” And on television, you’ll see pieces on antisemitism, which is very real in the world, for example, the burning of the Austrian cemetery in Vienna and many other situations. But they will be blended together — this is on the mainstream networks — with images of people protesting, holding a Palestinian flag. Can you talk about what’s happening on college campuses and people fearing that their concern for justice is being translated as antisemitism and cause for them to be blacklisted?
OMER BARTOV: So, look, this is a very complex issue, I agree. I think part of it is, frankly, ignorance about the reality on the ground in Israel-Palestine. And that has to do, obviously, not with your show, but with much of how the mainstream media in the United States is presenting things. But also, young people, students can find other sources of information to better know what is happening on the ground. So, generally, I think there’s a little bit of an issue of information.
Antisemitism is real, as you say, and has been growing, and is a not just lamentable, but frightening phenomenon. And obviously, I have no sympathy with it. But there is, and there has been for a long time, a tendency to label any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the policies of any particular government, let alone criticism of Israel as a state as such, as antisemitism. And that is a policy of the right wing in Israel, and that’s a policy of the right wing in this country, and it has nothing to do with the truth. One can be a Zionist or a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, and not be antisemitic. One can be, again, Zionist, but against particular Israeli policies. I very strongly support the existence of the state of Israel, and I’m highly critical of its policies, and some people would call me a self-hating Jew. But that is nonsense. That has to do with criticism of policies that not only function as oppression of Palestinians over a very long period of time, 56 years of occupation of Palestinians, a refusal by the Israeli government to ever talk about what happened in 1948, so this kind of shutting up the entire conversation, and at the same time a belief that Jews, like other nations, have a right of self-determination. So we have to separate the two.
I think that at the moment, in the demonstrations, there is a sort of heightening of passions, and in part it is because of the policies of the Israeli government. I do feel that when people march in support of Palestinian lives — and I’m very much in favor of that — one does also have to remember what happened on October 7. On October 7th, over a thousand Jewish civilians, Israeli Jewish civilians — there were actually some Arabs there, too, some Bedouin, who live there, too — were butchered in the most heinous manner. And this was live-streamed. This has been deeply wounding to Israeli society. Almost every person in Israel knows people who were killed there or kidnapped, including myself. Members of my own family were either killed or are now in Gaza. And one has to recall that there are 240 people now held as hostages. And so, I think that when when protests the policies of Israel, for the sake of — and this has to do also with what Representative Tlaib said, which I completely agreed with. I thought it was a very moving speech. But I think it’s important to also stress that other side.
There has been a dehumanization of both sides. Occupation dehumanizes people. It dehumanizes the occupier, and it dehumanizes the occupied. And the way to deal with this is to talk about the political future: How do we move forward? A ceasefire would be wonderful, and I’m very much in support of it, but it won’t put an end to the violence. The end to the violence will come only as a result of a peaceful resolution of this 100-year-old conflict which has caused so much blood. That is, I think, what we should try to push the American administration to do, to change its policies, to put pressure on the Israeli government to finally relent and to begin again negotiations with the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you about the term “from the river to the sea,” which the Israeli government takes, and those who charge others with antisemitism say, it means the annihilation of the Jewish population of Israel. I’m looking at the Likud party platform of March 1977, “The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel),” which is the land of Israel. And it says, “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” That’s between the sea and the Jordan River, between the river and the sea. Can you talk about that term?
OMER BARTOV: Yes. You know, the originators of the Likud party, the Revisionist part of Zionism, under the great leader Jabotinsky, had a song that they used to sing. And the song was, “The Jordan has two banks / this one belongs to us, and the other one, too.” That is, they were not only talking actually about so-called historical Palestine, which is Mandatory Palestine of the interwar period; they were actually talking also about parts of the Jordan, of what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, as belonging to the future Jewish state.
So, when we talk about “from the Jordan to the sea,” we are talking about the territory that is now controlled by Israel. In that territory, there are now 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians — 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, 3 million Palestinians who are in the West Bank, and two to two-and-a-half million Palestinians — most of the population of Gaza are refugees in Gaza. So it’s 7 million versus 7 million.
To talk about a Palestinian state or a Jewish state between the Jordan and the sea, the question, of course, arises: So, what happened to the — what will happen to the other half? That is really the question. If one talks about a Palestinian state that refuses to recognize the Jewish right of self-determination — that is, of the right of Jews to have a state of their own — the question is: What will happen to the Jews there? Would they go back to Europe, as some people say, whatever that actually means? And if you have a state the way the Israeli right, the Likud party, and now the much more radical, really Jewish supremacist elements in Netanyahu’s government, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, these people who sort of trace their roots back to Rabbi Kahane, who are really Nazis — if you think — if you ask yourself, “What do they mean?” they want to create a Jewish state that does not have Palestinians in it, nor Arabs in it. And the policy has been consistently to make life as unbearable for the Palestinians there, so that either they will finally move out, which they have no intention of doing, or to use an emergency situation, such as exists right now, under the cover of which they could be ethnically cleansed. And that’s a major worry now among Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, who are worried about a second Nakba, a second expulsion of Palestinians after 1948, something that has been mentioned by a number of Israeli politicians, and, of course, a major worry in the West Bank and in Gaza.
So, what we need to think of is not the term “from the Jordan to the sea,” which is the territory that Israel now controls, but how does that territory get to be shared by these two groups in ways that do not include oppression, lack of any rights, lack of equality, and certainly does not include violence and expulsion.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Omer Bartov, the issue of a two-state solution or a one-state solution, if you could take that on in a nutshell?
OMER BARTOV: Yeah. So, you know, I used to be a strong supporter of the two-state solution. And I gradually realized that this was a sort of fig leaf of the Israeli left, while the country kept settling the West Bank and making it impossible to create an independent Palestinian state there. And we kept saying, “Well, but at the end, there will be a two-state solution.” So, the traditional two-state solution, to my mind, is no longer viable. ’
So what is viable? And I think — and I belong to a group of people who have been talking about it for quite a while — that the only solution is a confederation, which would mean that there would be two states. There would be a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. They both would have full sovereignty. And they would be along more or less the borders of 1967, the Green Line, so-called, but they will make a distinction between residency and citizenship, so that people, say, Jews who live in a Palestinian state, could remain Israeli citizens, who have rights of residency in a Palestinian state, but have to then adhere to all the laws, rules and regulations of that Palestinian state. And Palestinians who live, say, in Nablus and would like to live in Haifa, like a French man from Paris who would like to live in Berlin, could move to Haifa, and they could have rights of residency, but they’d have to conform to all the rules and regulations of the Israeli state, but they would vote for — to a Palestinian parliament. And Jerusalem would be the joint capital of both. And above that, there would be institutions that will take care of the mutual affairs of these two states, which are very tightly woven together now by the infrastructure, electricity, water and so forth. It’s really impossible to cut them apart. That is — right now, of course, sounds like a pipe dream. But I think that in the long run, that is probably the only viable solution.
And I’ll add one last thing to that, which is very important both to Jews and Palestinians, which is that both states would have the right of return. The Jews could say, as they say now, that Jews who want to become Israeli citizens, wherever they live, can come. And Palestinians in the Palestinian state could say all Palestinian refugees who would like to come back to Palestine could come and become Palestinian citizens, and, under certain rules, could also move to the Israeli part of so-called Mandatory Palestine as residents.
AMY GOODMAN: And why not simply a one-state solution?
OMER BARTOV: I think a one-state solution is something that neither one side nor the other wants, because the Palestinians, quite rightly, want the right of self-determination, want to have their own state, as do the Jews. And both sides are afraid that the other side would be more powerful. Obviously, right now, under current conditions, the state of Israel is much more powerful militarily, economically than the Palestinian part of the land. And so, in that sense, a one-state solution would actually perpetuate Jewish supremacy in the whole country.
AMY GOODMAN: Omer Bartov is professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar is one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza.
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Palestinian Groups Ask ICC to Arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu for War Crimes & Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about a new effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza, where Israel’s monthlong air and ground assault has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. On Wednesday, three Palestinian rights groups filed a lawsuit with the international body, urging it to investigate Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid. The petition also calls for arrest warrants to be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. International inaction against Israeli aggression is part of “a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades,” as well as the “absolute double standard” applied to war crimes committed against people of the Global South, says Erakat, who was part of a team of academics and activists who came together to support the ICC lawsuit. “This is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.”
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.
Three Palestinian human rights groups have filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court calling on the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders for genocide, incitement to genocide, and the crime of apartheid. The three groups — Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — told the court that Israel’s suffocating siege of Gaza and the indiscriminate attacks on densely populated civilian areas amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The lawsuit also seeks the arrest of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant. This comes as the death toll in Gaza is nearing 11,000, according to Palestinian health officials.
We’re joined now by Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erekat, associate professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, part of the Palestinian team of academics, intellectuals and activists who helped bring the ICC lawsuit. She’s joining us from Philadelphia.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noura. If you can explain what this lawsuit is all about?
NOURA ERAKAT: Absolutely. This lawsuit comes as a collective effort on behalf of the three organizations you mentioned — Al-Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — who are on the ground and documenting the ongoing atrocities. It’s one of a myriad of efforts that have been filed before the International Criminal Court. For example, very recently, Reporters Without Borders have also submitted a petition calling on the ICC to investigate the now killing of 34 journalists, several of them while they were working during this onslaught.
The one thing that we want to highlight as the ad hoc team is that this is not merely a lawsuit against Israeli individuals as stipulated by the petition, which it very much is, but it is also holding on trial the International Criminal Court, the international criminal law, international legal institutions as a whole, which have demonstrated an absolute double standard when it comes to the Global South. We’ve seen this in the tenure of the ICC, which, since its establishment, has opened over two dozen cases, all of them on the African continent. All those who have been indicted, with the exception of Slobodan Milošević, have been Arab and African individuals, heads of state, officials.
And so, here we are pushing the ICC to either hold Israel to account in what is an ongoing genocide, where the leaders of it have told us very much that they have the specific intent to destroy a Palestinian people, in whole or in part, and demonstrated the specific underlying acts in order to effectuate it, or demonstrate for us that this is actually a moment where the ICC demonstrates that it’s not effectuate, that it’s not effective, that it is actually part of punishing a Global South and letting Western countries move forward with impunity.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke to Raji Sourani, the world-renowned human rights attorney in Gaza, in Gaza City, in a heartbreaking plea from Raji, who remained in northern Gaza, after his house was bombed. He particularly held Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the ICC — called him out, saying when Russia attacked the children of Ukraine, the ICC immediately opened war crimes investigations, and then raised the issue of where is he on Israel and Palestine. If you can address this and also talk about an ICC case that has already been opened, an official investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank back in 2021, in West Bank, in Gaza and East Jerusalem?
NOURA ERAKAT: Raji is absolutely right. Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the ICC, opened the investigation within a week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, immediately, without question. In this case, it took the prosecutor, Karim Khan, three weeks to travel to Rafah in order to investigate what was in the first week an evident example of genocidal intent, mass killings, the destruction of those conditions of life that would reduce the ability of Palestinians to survive.
In this situation, what we see is not merely a repetition of history, but a continuation of colonial legacies, and one that led to the failure of the League of Nations, frankly, in the aftermath of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, where a fascist Italy, led by Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. And in that moment, Ethiopia, which was a member state of the League of Nations — and rather than hold Italy to account, which was dropping indiscriminate chemical weapons on the Ethiopian people, instead, the Red Cross decried the Ethiopians as being too savage to follow the laws of war. Media were running headlines that Ethiopians were hiding and sheltering in hospital, using them as human shields. And world powers failed to impose sufficient sanctions on Italy in this moment. And this demonstrated the limits of these international institutions and led to the failure of the League of Nations.
In a similar — we are in a similar moment right now. These international institutions need to act. And instead we’re seeing a stalemate, and we’re seeing international leaders, like led by the United States, as well as the U.K., as well as France, who are basically providing a green light to Israel to commit genocide, to commit these atrocities.
This is not out of nowhere. Everything started before October 7th. And Israel — this is a moment where Israel has not been held to account. It is a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades. International organizations have said that Israel is practicing the crime against humanity of apartheid. There was a near consensus between 2020 and 2021. And yet, rather than impose sanctions in that moment, rather than mobilize international mechanisms and institutions in order to dismantle apartheid, we saw the United States celebrate and normalize Israeli apartheid, and we saw them continuing to normalize relations with other Arab regimes. It was this fundamental failure that has led us to this moment and an ongoing crisis of a lack of accountability, of an imposition of two types of law — one for the Global North, one for the Global South. This is a hypocrisy on the part of Western governments and demonstrates that there is no such thing as Western universalism, but instead continues to be two sets of laws on two sets of people.
And what’s wonderful, the only thing that provides us hope, is that a mass, mass movement of individuals, peoples, communities have risen up against their governments also to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Western democracy. Even in the United States, consider that 66% of Americans have demanded a ceasefire. Eighty percent (80%) of registered Democrats have demanded a ceasefire. And yet, only 19 out of 535 members of Congress have endorsed it. Consider that that same Congress censured the only Palestinian American representative in government, at the very moment that she represents the majority. So this is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does the tens of thousands of Palestinians being forced south right now — we just have 20 seconds — fit into your charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity?
NOURA ERAKAT: What we’re seeing is an ongoing Nakba of the Palestinians, who are with their hands up and on their feet with white handkerchiefs in order not to be killed. This is an ethnic cleansing of the north of Gaza. It’s a continuation of the Nakba to take Palestinian land without Palestinian people. It is a crime against humanity and fits in a larger framework of genocidal warfare.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, associate professor at Rutgers University, we thank you so much. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
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Re: U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim
by admin » Wed Nov 22, 2023 1:11 am
Gaza Hospitals Fail Under Israeli Bombardment; Doctors Without Borders Describes Horrific Conditions
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/13 ... transcript
Transcript
Gaza’s two largest hospitals are under a complete siege by Israeli forces and no longer functioning. Palestinian health officials have also accused Israel of using snipers to shoot at people inside Al-Shifa Hospital, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. Israel has claimed Hamas runs a command center below the hospital, though this has been denied by hospital staff and Israel has not publicly released any evidence behind the claim. Dr. Fadel Naim of Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital says surgeons are forced to operate in hospital corridors with limited anesthetic supplies. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t help many of these patients. Many of them died because we couldn’t do anything for them.” We also hear from Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician with Doctors Without Borders who has worked in Gaza and the West Bank. She is a co-founder of the social media account Gaza Medic Voices. “Anyone who tries to leave the hospital is targeted,” says Haj-Hassan. “We have descended into a very dark era for humanity.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Gaza’s two largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and al-Quds, have stopped functioning as Gaza’s health system collapses under relentless Israeli bombardment and blockades. On Saturday, Al-Shifa Hospital ran out of fuel, forcing doctors to remove dozens of premature babies from incubators. Six premies have already died. Doctors are struggling to keep more than 30 other babies alive.
Palestinian health officials have accused Israel of using snipers to shoot at people inside the hospital complex, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. Israel has claimed Hamas runs a command center below the hospital. Hamas and medical officials at the hospital have denied the claim.
On Sunday, Dr. Mohammed Obeid, a surgeon with Doctors Without Borders, described the dire situation inside the hospital.
DR. MOHAMMED OBEID: The situation now is very bad. And we don’t have connection. There is no internet. Sometimes we have some [cellphone reception]. We’re on the fourth floor. And also, there’s a sniper who attacked four patients from — inside the hospital. One of them has a gunshot directly in his neck, and he has a quadriplegia. And the other one, he had a gunshot in the abdomen. And some of the people which actually go outside the hospital, they want to go to the south. They bomb them also. They bombed the families from Al-Shifa Hospital today in the morning. There is no electricity, actually. There is no water. There is no food. So our team is exhausted.
We have two neonate patients die, actually, because the incubator, it’s not working because there is no electricity. Also, we have the adult patient in the ICU; he died because the ventilator is shut down because there is no electricity. We can see, actually, the smoking — the smoke around the hospital. They hit everything around the hospital, and they hit the hospital many times.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Mohammed Obeid, a surgeon with MSF, Doctors Without Borders, inside the Al-Shifa Hospital. On Sunday, Democracy Now! reached another doctor in Gaza City, Dr. Fadel Naim.
DR. FADEL NAIM: We are at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital, the Baptist Hospital, the only functioning hospital in Gaza City. All the injured people and other people, like people with high blood tension or diabetes mellitus or diarrhea or asthenia or children with dehydration, cancer patients, patients with kidney failure who need dialysis, pregnant women and other cases, are coming to our hospital because they have no other possibility to go to other hospitals. The other hospitals are surrounded by the Israeli tankers, like the biggest hospital in Gaza, Shifa Hospital, and al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital. Some of the [inaudible] hospitals are closed because of the shortage in fuel and equipment. Since yesterday, we received more than 300 or 400 injured people and tens of other people who had other health problems. We had to do some surgical interventions in the corridors and on the courtyard because of the shortage of anesthesia drugs.
Our biggest problem is the shortage in manpower. Because we are a small hospital, we are not prepared to receive such like — like these numbers of patients at one time. Many volunteers came to help us, but we need specialized doctors in different specialties, in general surgery, in neurosurgery, chest surgery, vascular surgery and gynecology and pediatric pediatricians. Unfortunately, we couldn’t help many of these patients. Some of them died because we couldn’t do anything for them.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Fadel Naim, speaking Sunday from Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City.
To talk more about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we’re joined by Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan. She’s a pediatric intensive care physician who works with the humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, or Doctors Without Borders. She’s in regular contact with health professionals in Gaza and previously worked as a medical trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. She’s the co-founder of the social media account Gaza Medic Voices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza. On Saturday, she took part in a vigil outside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office in London. She broke down while reading an urgent message from the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Dr. Nidal Hadrous.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: [reading] We, as medical staff, want to leave, but we cannot. We might not survive until the morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Haj-Hassan breaks down as she tries to read a statement from the doctor in Gaza. She sits down. She covers her eyes. Her colleagues, also in blue hospital gear, put their arms on her.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: [reading] We might not survive 'til the morning. We don't want to be killed here just only because we remained committed to our patients and our medical profession. I am calling for help urgently. Please do whatever you can through your governments or the international — the ICRC, the Red Cross, to arrange a safe corridor for the medical staff. Please treat this as top urgent. This is the director of the major trauma hospital in Gaza.
I’m going to leave you with one more message: To bomb a hospital means to terrify sleeping patients, to break windows over their heads, to make the walls tip onto their bodies, to rip out ventilators and burn oxygen tanks, to ruin equipment that can help human millions of times.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric intensive care physician who works with the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders, reading an urgent message from the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Dr. Nidal Hadrous.
Dr. Haj-Hassan, thank you so much for joining us. You must be, to say the least, beyond exhausted. You were reading that statement in London. I last saw you in Jordan, and now you’re in Toronto, Canada. Can you talk about the latest? That was Saturday. This is now two days later.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah. Just to be clear, you know, this was a vigil with multiple healthcare providers present who have been working in the Gaza Strip for over a decade. And we’re all in tears. I mean, every day we feel like we’ve reached the worst. And I’m going to quote one of my colleagues in Gaza, a young female surgeon, who said, “Every day we think that we’ve reached the worst thing that could ever happen, and it’s impossible that the world will be silent to it, and it will definitely get better, and we’ve finally reached the end. And then the next day proves that there’s something even worse.” And I share that sentiment. We have descended into a very dark era for humanity.
Let me just paint a picture for you of the conditions, as far as I know them, right now at Al-Shifa Hospital. I’ve receiving updates up until about an hour and a half ago. It’s very difficult to receive updates. As you know, communication has been cut off, so they’re intermittent. There’s certain individuals who have intermittent connection.
Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest trauma hospital in Gaza. It is under complete siege. It has been come under direct attack by Israeli forces for over a week now. The medical staff, including Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, staff, are physically in the hospital at the moment. There are patients there in critical condition, hundreds of patients. And there are thousands of internally displaced individuals who are still inside that hospital, completely under siege, surrounded by Israeli tanks. They have no access to food. They’re surviving on minimal dates and biscuits that are left in the hospital. They have no access to water. They describe being very thirsty. And, as you know, they have no access to electricity, after the fuel supply was cut off, the electricity supply was cut off, and, more recently, the solar panels were bombed. They describe over a hundred bodies lying on the ground decomposing, dead bodies that they cannot bury. This is after having to dig mass graves in the garden of the hospital. The morgues cannot be cooled to preserve the bodies. As you know, there’s no electricity. So they’re decomposing.
The intensive care unit was targeted twice in the last 24 hours. There are 28 patients there. Two of them have passed away over the course of the evening. These are the adult patients. They have no access to oxygen. Dialysis patients, who require electricity to run the dialysis machines because they have kidney failure, do not have access to those dialysis machines. I can describe to you in detail what death will look like for these patients. Toxins will develop in their bloodstream. They will become overloaded with fluid, because they cannot pee it out. They cannot pee the toxins out, either. They will feel very unwell. They will probably get very confused. They’ll have difficulty breathing. And eventually they’ll die. This is a slow, horrible, painful death — preventable painful death, like all the deaths in Gaza.
Anyone who moves inside the hospital is getting directly killed. Two nurses were killed by snipers in the last 24 hours. Anyone who tries to leave the hospital is targeted. You mentioned the 38 premature newborns — three of whom who’ve died — are currently outside of their incubators, at risk of hypothermia, without access to oxygen. And I’m not sure how they’re going to provide them with all the things they need, including food.
This is an entire hospital that’s completely cut off, and we’ve had very little to no news from the other hospitals in the north of Gaza. Last we heard, they’re completely surrounded, like Al-Shifa Hospital. And, you know, we’re in a situation where there has been a systematic attempt to destroy civilian Palestinian livelihood and existence in all of Gaza, not just the north. Thirty percent of the killed have been in the south of Gaza, which is supposed to be the safe zone. Humanitarian corridors, or so-called humanitarian corridors, are called the corridor of death by Gazans, because they get directly targeted as they’re trying to flee on these corridors.
You know, Doctors Without Borders — and I mentioned we’re really struggling to contact a lot of the staff. One of my colleagues who I know at Al-Shifa said, “We are sure we are alone now. No one hears us. We are alone.” MSF was established — one of the main principles of MSF’s establishment by journalists and doctors decades ago was to provide testimony — this concept of témoignage, which means bearing witness — to provide testimony, to bear witness on these sorts of atrocities, that we don’t — that are not exposed, and to relieve the suffering of those who experience them. And we’re in a situation where we can’t do either of those things. One of our MSF staff who is staying in Gaza City, but not physically in the hospital at the moment, said there are dead people on the streets. I’m going to read his quote: “There are dead people on the streets. We see people being shot at. We can see injured people. We can hear them crying for help. But we cannot do anything. It is too dangerous to go outside.” Ambulances cannot reach the wounded.
You mentioned Dr. Hammam Alloh earlier, who was on your program a couple days ago describing how he had refused to leave the hospital and desert his patients. I knew Dr. Hammam. He was a beacon of light. He’s a gift to the world of medicine and his patients. He was a brilliant nephrologist, was one of the most highly trained doctors in Gaza. He was transforming the care of patients with chronic renal disease, the same patients that I told you are now subject to a slow and horrifying death. He spent a decade learning how to serve his people. He also has a very young family. He was killed in his wife’s home along with his father —
AMY GOODMAN: His father, his father-in-law and his brother-in-law.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: — [inaudible] wife, his young children, and the rest are under the rubble at the moment. And they’ve been calling out to the Red Cross to try and help evacuate, and the Red Cross cannot reach them, for all the reasons that I mentioned. You know, I can’t believe that I’m having to say this, but healthcare providers, healthcare facilities, civilians have to be protected. You know, he mentioned in his interview to you that —
AMY GOODMAN: We’re having a little trouble with Dr. Haj-Hassan’s Skype. We’re going to play that interview. Dr. Haj-Hassan, can you hear me? Well —
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: I can.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re breaking up a bit.
**************************************
“Beacon of Light”: Fellow Doctors Recall Dr. Hammam Alloh, Gaza Doctor Killed by Israeli Airstrike
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/13 ... transcript
Transcript
We speak with two physicians who knew Dr. Hammam Alloh, a Palestinian nephrologist at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who was killed Saturday in an Israeli airstrike. They recall him as a “committed physician, wonderful father” and “beacon of light.” He had refused to heed Israeli directives to evacuate in order to continue providing care to his patients. “He spent a decade learning how to serve his people,” says Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders. “He wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine, without occupation,” says Dr. Ben Thomson, a fellow nephrologist who worked with Dr. Alloh.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in another doctor into this conversation, as you talk about the doctor whose interview we are going to play in just a minute, Dr. Ben Thomson was also a friend and a colleague of Dr. Hammam Alloh. He’s a nephrologist in Toronto, where you are now, too.
Dr. Ben Thomson, can you also tell us about Dr. Hammam Alloh? We’re going to play the full interview in just a moment that we did with him just two weeks ago.
DR. BEN THOMSON: Thank you, Ms. Goodman.
I mean, Dr. Hammam Alloh, as my colleague from Médecins Sans Frontières said, was a incredible human being, a committed physician, wonderful father. When I was at his home in September in Gaza City, I was joking with him, because I said, “You’re such an optimist.” You know, he was absolutely convinced — he insisted that if the world knew what was happening in Gaza, that it would intervene and that it would end the suffering for people in Gaza.
Like so many doctors in Gaza over the last month, faced with horrible circumstances, he remained committed to his patients. He cared for them, despite everything that he faced. The very first interview he did, as he was speaking truth to the world about the horrors that he was experiencing in Gaza, his own home was bombed. Windows, the front door of his house blew off. He went to check on his children. He went to check on his father that lived with him. He put them in a room, and then he came back and finished the interview. And the very next day, he went to work. This was his level of commitment.
I am convinced that if he was here sitting and he was here talking to you, he would have been very clear what he wanted. You know, he was an optimist, yes, and he had good days and bad days over the last month. When we spoke every day, he would talk about how he was committed to developing education programs for today’s doctors and the doctors of tomorrow in Gaza. But he also had very difficult days, faced with the very difficult circumstances that he faced every day, seeing his colleagues being killed, working in hospitals with no water, no food, no electricity, knowing that his patients who required dialysis treatment three times a week to survive, knowing that they’d be dead within a week without electricity, all thousand of them throughout Gaza would be dead. Knowing that, he still went to work. And those good days where he talked to me about education, he also had bad days. And on those bad days, he would tell me — he was speaking of the horrors that he was seeing. He was experiencing war crimes. He was witnessing them. He would tell me he was experiencing a genocide of his own people. It was horrible.
You know, I think at this point politicians are embarrassing themselves by their inaction. He would have been very clear. He would have wanted — there’s things that he would have wanted that I can talk to you about. But, you know, I think we need to remember Dr. Hammam, like many physicians in Gaza, was incredibly committed to his patients —
AMY GOODMAN: How did he die, Dr. Thomson?
DR. BEN THOMSON: — a wonderful father, and he died too early.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he die?
DR. BEN THOMSON: He was hit in an airstrike. He was at his wife’s home. He was with his father, with his father-in-law and his brother-in-law. His wife and two children, who are 4 and 5 years old, were at his own home, so they survived. But while he was at his wife’s home, an Israeli airstrike on his home killed all of them in the home.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Dr. Thomson, if you can tell me about your own situation in Toronto? I mean, to say the least, that’s very different from Gaza. But you were suspended for a month after you and the hospital were threatened over your comments that you tweeted on X. Can you talk about this?
DR. BEN THOMSON: I think, like many people around the world, I have experienced bullying, harassment and other negative consequences to speaking out for Palestine. In my situation, I had death threats. I was suspended from the hospital. I had a difficult month. But the reality is, my worst day over the last month is nothing compared to — you know, the best day of anyone in the last month in Gaza is still worse than my worst day.
And the reality is, people like Dr. Hammam would want us to think about, you know: What do we need right now? Yes, I suffered death threats, but the reality is, Dr. Hammam was killed, and a couple hundred other healthcare professionals in Gaza have been killed. And it behooves us right now to think: What do we have to do?
We must have an immediate ceasefire. We must have rapid and unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. And, you know, speaking with Dr. Hammam at his house in September, he talked about the fact he wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine without occupation. We spoke of this often. And I think it behooves us now, as an international community — yes, many of us have been threatened. The reality is much, much worse for our colleagues in Gaza. The reality is we absolutely need to have a ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and there must be a durable, peaceful, just solution for a free Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan back into the conversation — we’re having a little trouble with your Skype — and ask you to respond to what Israel is saying, that they are attacking the hospital because Hamas has used it as — underneath it, at least, or all around it — it is not exactly clear — as command and control.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: You know, I get asked this question all the time. I got asked this question in 2014. The same accusations were made in 2008, 2009, 2014, 2021. These aren’t new accusations. It’s also not new that those accusations have not been substantiated.
I have worked in these hospitals. I can tell you what they are, with certainty. They are healthcare facilities caring for patients with limited resources as a consequence of a 16-year siege and with healthcare professionals who are the most dedicated doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists that I have met in my entire life. And Dr. Hammam Alloh is the perfect example of that, as are Dr. Maisara and every single doctor who has been killed, and nurse and paramedic and microbiologist. I mean, over 200 healthcare providers have been killed to date, and they have been screaming for international protection. So I can tell you that they are functioning health facilities caring for patients.
And regardless of whether accusations of military activity around those hospitals are substantiated, it is an international — it would be considered a war crime to target them if they are functioning as a healthcare facility, and they are. That, I am confident of. I am also confident that I have never personally seen any evidence of military activity in and around these hospitals. And that is the most that I can say to this.
And I want to — I think that the important thing to remember is, we keep getting sucked into these arguments where we’re justifying these preposterous justifications for the violation of international law. And instead of constantly trying to defend something that’s completely — to defend against something that’s completely preposterous, I think we need to refocus on what is clear. What is clear is over 11,000 Gazans have been killed to date. Almost 200 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed. Healthcare facilities are directly targeted, with intent. Ambulances are directly targeted, with intent. The entire infrastructure of a civilian population, everything that is needed, that is indispensable to their survival, from food to water to medical facilities to their shelter — everything has been targeted, intentionally targeted and destroyed. That is what we should be focusing on. There are also, you know, almost 5,000 children who have been killed, that we know of, but we don’t have statistics from the last 48 hours because they have completely destroyed the ability to even expose these atrocities.
And, you know, the last message that Dr. Hammam Alloh had sent, just a few hours before he was killed, to one of my colleagues, he said, “Your shouting means a lot to us. Please keep it up.” And I hope what Dr. Ben Thomson, what myself, what every humanitarian doctor or provider or human out there who is screaming about these atrocities, we paint this horrific picture, and I hope it inspires your viewers, the politicians everywhere to get up and respond to this avalanche of suffering with an avalanche of solidarity and action, because this is not a world that I want to live in. This is not a world that my colleagues want to live in. And this is not a world that we want to raise the next generation of children in. We have museums all around the world that remind us that this is not what we want for humanity. And this is our opportunity to assert that.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Haj-Hassan, there is a new acronym that was coined in Gaza over the last few weeks: WCNSF — “wounded child, no surviving family.” Can you explain?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah. I mean, over 1,000 families have been killed. They’ve had at least two members of their families killed in the last month. Many families are completely wiped out, because these are — I don’t know much about weapons, but I can tell you they are very violent weapons that wipe out entire multistory residential buildings where families are sheltering, in seconds. And you have had so many families wiped off of the civil registry. Sometimes a child survives. And not infrequently, one person in the family survives. And so, it was happening so frequently that they had to coin a term for it, and sometimes even writing it on the bodies of the patients. Sometimes they even just write the word “unknown,” because it’s a child with no surviving family to even identify the child.
And, you know, it’s not just WCNSF. That is the acronym that has been coined by the Gazan medics. But there’s also WMNSF, “wounded mother, no surviving family”; WFNSF, “wounded father, no surviving family.” These aren’t acronyms that are used, but they are realities on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Doctor —
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: One of the last messages — so, I just want [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, I’m going to cut you off, but only so that we can hear this last interview that we did, the last interview with Hammam Alloh. I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric intensive care physician with Doctors Without Borders. And I want to thank Dr. Ben Thomson, a friend and colleague of Dr. Hammam Alloh, who, again, was killed this weekend in an airstrike. The nephrologist in Toronto, Dr. Ben Thomson, traveled to Gaza twice a year since 2013. His charity is called Keys of Health. We’re going to break and then come back to hear Dr. Hammam Alloh’s last words. Stay with us.
***********************
“We’re Being Exterminated”: Hear One of Dr. Hammam Alloh’s Last Interviews from Gaza Before His Death
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
Transcript
We feature one of the final interviews with Palestinian doctor Hammam Alloh, who died Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his wife’s home, killing him, his father, brother-in-law and father-in-law. On October 31, Democracy Now! spoke to Dr. Alloh about conditions at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, and his decision to continue working, as he called on people in the United States and the rest of the world to take action against Israel’s indiscriminate assault. When asked about why he refused to leave his patients, Dr. Alloh responded, “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
Nearly 200 medical workers have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7th. Over the weekend, Democracy Now! learned that Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his family home, killing him, his father, his brother-in-law and his father-in-law. Dr. Alloh was a kidney specialist, a nephrologist, who worked at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza. He was 36 years old. He leaves behind his wife and two children, a 4- and a 5-year-old. Dr. Hammam Alloh spoke to Democracy Now! October 31 in one of his last interviews.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, you’ve said, “Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day.” If you can talk about that in the hospital, which, as you said, is not just a hospital for sick people? Thousands are taking refuge at Al-Shifa and al-Quds and the other hospitals. And also, we’re talking to you as you just left Al-Shifa. How do you comfort your family? What’s happening to your family as you’re at the hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I tell them at least we still have a house with a door to close. But many thousand refugees, people like us, who used to live in dignity have no longer houses and no doors to close to protect them as they are surrounded by wastewater, by garbage. They don’t have a liquid, continuous supply of clean water to drink. Many of them have a lot of missing members of their families. They don’t know if they are alive or not. I tell them at least we still have a house to live in, but they don’t have. And surprisingly, my 4- and 5-year-old kids, they accept this as a comfort, as a better situation compared to those refugees living — they are living actually in hospitals, but it’s not like they are living inside the hospital departments. Many of them do not have enough space to go into hospital hallways, so they are living around the buildings and in the garden. So, yeah, surprisingly, my very young kids accept this.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli military has dropped thousands of pamphlets warning people where you are, in northern Gaza, to leave. Why don’t you go with your family south?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: And if I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare. So we can’t just leave.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Health Organization talked about this issue of telling doctors to leave their patients, choosing your own lives over your patients. Can you talk about that choice, since so many patients can’t leave — for example, babies in incubators?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients? I’m asking you, Ma’am. Do you think this is the reason I went to med school, to think only about my life? This is not the reason why I became a doctor.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what’s happening to the hospitals? Just in our headlines today, we talked about, and in the last few days, the attack on the Indonesia Hospital. The Turkish Hospital is the only cancer hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of these places, both as a sanctuary, thousands of people taking refuge, and for patients?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah. Indonesian Hospital is providing healthcare for over 400,000 citizens in the Gaza Strip. And this part of the Gaza Strip is being split from the rest of the Gaza Strip. If this hospital stops providing care, so we are exposing many thousand Palestinian souls to the dangers of disease and death.
Turkish Hospital, with its very modest capabilities even before war, was the only hospital providing care and medications for cancer patients from around the Gaza Strip. It was airstruck yesterday. I don’t know how many patients and healthcare professionals were wounded. And many patients are dying now because they are not safe with their families to go to receive care and to continue their chemotherapy.
Ministry of Health has declared two hours ago also that the electricity would be cut off from Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital, representing 40% of the healthcare power in the Gaza Strip and providing services for many machine-dependent patients, like the ventilated patients and the hemodialysis patients. So, if electricity is cut out from this hospital, so we are directly deciding those patients are going to necessarily die. Ventilated patients will die in minutes. Dialysis patients will die in hours to days after stopping their hemodialysis. Many patients are now being treated with the modest supplies we have. Many diabetic patients are now being admitted to hospital because of their insulin is not being kept in the refrigerator, so it’s not working. We are out — we ran out of many medications, like antifungal medications. We have a patient who died earlier this week with mucormycosis. This is an invasive, ugly type of fungal infection that killed her because we had no amphotericin to offer her. So, my very simple answer to your question is that death is coming to so many people in the Gaza Strip, in hours to days, if this continues the same way it’s going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Alloh, the Middle East Eye reports on a baby who died, says, “His death certificate has been issued before his birth certificate.” A 1-day-old baby has been killed by Israeli bombing in Gaza. Israel, the military, the government, says that Al-Shifa, your hospital, is Hamas —
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — the site of Hamas command and control. Can you respond to that, Dr. Alloh?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I’ve been working this hospital for over two years, and I never saw this. So, I’m no lawyer, I’m no attorney, but this is how I am simply replying. I never saw this for over two years. If this is true, I would see at least a clue.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the shipments of aid coming in. Normally, in normal times — if there’s ever a normal time in Gaza — over 400 trucks a day. We’re talking about a trickle of trucks now, maybe a dozen, maybe eight in a day. Have you ever seen this aid arriving at the hospital? And can you talk about what you need right now?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Well, that number you just mentioned that was allowed into Gaza Strip is actually — is actually what you were referring to. It is nothing compared to what we need, nothing compared to the shortage in supplies, machines and medications we are in need for. The only thing, came just as I was leaving the hospital today, was a carton of IV fluid bottles. This is the only thing I saw. And I don’t really know if this came through the aid trucks in the few couple of days, or that was from the stores of the Ministry of Health. In addition, I happened to ask about in the hospital administration, and what they mentioned that was all about the gloves and gauze. And this is not what we are actually only in need for. This is what maybe the least we care for, the least we are in need for. So this is, again, nothing compared to what we are in need for in terms of supplies and medications.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Hammam Alloh, your message at this point to the United States, where we’re based, and to the world?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Actually, the message hasn’t changed since the beginning of this war. First, we need this war to end, because we are real humans. We are no animals. We have the right to live freely.
Second, if you were, and your citizens, to live under these circumstances, what would you do for them? This is what we exactly would like you to do for us as a superpower country, as the United States, because we are really as human as your U.S. citizens are.
We were expecting more — earlier, I mean, solutions for that humanitarian and healthcare catastrophes and the crises, but what we are seeing, mainly through trucks allowed into Gaza, is nothing compared to us. So, we are being exterminated. We are being massly eradicated. And you pretend to care for humanitarian and human rights, which is not what we are living now. To prove us wrong, please do something. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, speaking to us from Gaza City, where he works at the largest hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital. Please be safe.
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I hope I will be. Let’s hope, both together, I will be. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh was speaking from Gaza on Democracy Now! on October 31st in one of his last interviews. He was killed Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his wife’s home, killing him, his father, his father-in-law and his brother-in-law. Dr. Alloh was a kidney specialist who worked at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza City. He was 36 years old. He leaves behind a wife and two children, a 4- and a 5-year-old. Nearly 200 medical workers have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7th.
And that does it for our show. To see all our interviews with doctors, with residents, with Israeli historians and scholars and peace activists, with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists and academics, human rights lawyers, go to democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/13 ... transcript
Transcript
Gaza’s two largest hospitals are under a complete siege by Israeli forces and no longer functioning. Palestinian health officials have also accused Israel of using snipers to shoot at people inside Al-Shifa Hospital, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. Israel has claimed Hamas runs a command center below the hospital, though this has been denied by hospital staff and Israel has not publicly released any evidence behind the claim. Dr. Fadel Naim of Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital says surgeons are forced to operate in hospital corridors with limited anesthetic supplies. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t help many of these patients. Many of them died because we couldn’t do anything for them.” We also hear from Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician with Doctors Without Borders who has worked in Gaza and the West Bank. She is a co-founder of the social media account Gaza Medic Voices. “Anyone who tries to leave the hospital is targeted,” says Haj-Hassan. “We have descended into a very dark era for humanity.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Gaza’s two largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and al-Quds, have stopped functioning as Gaza’s health system collapses under relentless Israeli bombardment and blockades. On Saturday, Al-Shifa Hospital ran out of fuel, forcing doctors to remove dozens of premature babies from incubators. Six premies have already died. Doctors are struggling to keep more than 30 other babies alive.
Palestinian health officials have accused Israel of using snipers to shoot at people inside the hospital complex, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. Israel has claimed Hamas runs a command center below the hospital. Hamas and medical officials at the hospital have denied the claim.
On Sunday, Dr. Mohammed Obeid, a surgeon with Doctors Without Borders, described the dire situation inside the hospital.
DR. MOHAMMED OBEID: The situation now is very bad. And we don’t have connection. There is no internet. Sometimes we have some [cellphone reception]. We’re on the fourth floor. And also, there’s a sniper who attacked four patients from — inside the hospital. One of them has a gunshot directly in his neck, and he has a quadriplegia. And the other one, he had a gunshot in the abdomen. And some of the people which actually go outside the hospital, they want to go to the south. They bomb them also. They bombed the families from Al-Shifa Hospital today in the morning. There is no electricity, actually. There is no water. There is no food. So our team is exhausted.
We have two neonate patients die, actually, because the incubator, it’s not working because there is no electricity. Also, we have the adult patient in the ICU; he died because the ventilator is shut down because there is no electricity. We can see, actually, the smoking — the smoke around the hospital. They hit everything around the hospital, and they hit the hospital many times.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Mohammed Obeid, a surgeon with MSF, Doctors Without Borders, inside the Al-Shifa Hospital. On Sunday, Democracy Now! reached another doctor in Gaza City, Dr. Fadel Naim.
DR. FADEL NAIM: We are at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital, the Baptist Hospital, the only functioning hospital in Gaza City. All the injured people and other people, like people with high blood tension or diabetes mellitus or diarrhea or asthenia or children with dehydration, cancer patients, patients with kidney failure who need dialysis, pregnant women and other cases, are coming to our hospital because they have no other possibility to go to other hospitals. The other hospitals are surrounded by the Israeli tankers, like the biggest hospital in Gaza, Shifa Hospital, and al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital. Some of the [inaudible] hospitals are closed because of the shortage in fuel and equipment. Since yesterday, we received more than 300 or 400 injured people and tens of other people who had other health problems. We had to do some surgical interventions in the corridors and on the courtyard because of the shortage of anesthesia drugs.
Our biggest problem is the shortage in manpower. Because we are a small hospital, we are not prepared to receive such like — like these numbers of patients at one time. Many volunteers came to help us, but we need specialized doctors in different specialties, in general surgery, in neurosurgery, chest surgery, vascular surgery and gynecology and pediatric pediatricians. Unfortunately, we couldn’t help many of these patients. Some of them died because we couldn’t do anything for them.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Fadel Naim, speaking Sunday from Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City.
To talk more about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we’re joined by Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan. She’s a pediatric intensive care physician who works with the humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, or Doctors Without Borders. She’s in regular contact with health professionals in Gaza and previously worked as a medical trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. She’s the co-founder of the social media account Gaza Medic Voices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza. On Saturday, she took part in a vigil outside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office in London. She broke down while reading an urgent message from the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Dr. Nidal Hadrous.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: [reading] We, as medical staff, want to leave, but we cannot. We might not survive until the morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Haj-Hassan breaks down as she tries to read a statement from the doctor in Gaza. She sits down. She covers her eyes. Her colleagues, also in blue hospital gear, put their arms on her.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: [reading] We might not survive 'til the morning. We don't want to be killed here just only because we remained committed to our patients and our medical profession. I am calling for help urgently. Please do whatever you can through your governments or the international — the ICRC, the Red Cross, to arrange a safe corridor for the medical staff. Please treat this as top urgent. This is the director of the major trauma hospital in Gaza.
I’m going to leave you with one more message: To bomb a hospital means to terrify sleeping patients, to break windows over their heads, to make the walls tip onto their bodies, to rip out ventilators and burn oxygen tanks, to ruin equipment that can help human millions of times.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric intensive care physician who works with the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders, reading an urgent message from the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Dr. Nidal Hadrous.
Dr. Haj-Hassan, thank you so much for joining us. You must be, to say the least, beyond exhausted. You were reading that statement in London. I last saw you in Jordan, and now you’re in Toronto, Canada. Can you talk about the latest? That was Saturday. This is now two days later.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah. Just to be clear, you know, this was a vigil with multiple healthcare providers present who have been working in the Gaza Strip for over a decade. And we’re all in tears. I mean, every day we feel like we’ve reached the worst. And I’m going to quote one of my colleagues in Gaza, a young female surgeon, who said, “Every day we think that we’ve reached the worst thing that could ever happen, and it’s impossible that the world will be silent to it, and it will definitely get better, and we’ve finally reached the end. And then the next day proves that there’s something even worse.” And I share that sentiment. We have descended into a very dark era for humanity.
Let me just paint a picture for you of the conditions, as far as I know them, right now at Al-Shifa Hospital. I’ve receiving updates up until about an hour and a half ago. It’s very difficult to receive updates. As you know, communication has been cut off, so they’re intermittent. There’s certain individuals who have intermittent connection.
Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest trauma hospital in Gaza. It is under complete siege. It has been come under direct attack by Israeli forces for over a week now. The medical staff, including Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, staff, are physically in the hospital at the moment. There are patients there in critical condition, hundreds of patients. And there are thousands of internally displaced individuals who are still inside that hospital, completely under siege, surrounded by Israeli tanks. They have no access to food. They’re surviving on minimal dates and biscuits that are left in the hospital. They have no access to water. They describe being very thirsty. And, as you know, they have no access to electricity, after the fuel supply was cut off, the electricity supply was cut off, and, more recently, the solar panels were bombed. They describe over a hundred bodies lying on the ground decomposing, dead bodies that they cannot bury. This is after having to dig mass graves in the garden of the hospital. The morgues cannot be cooled to preserve the bodies. As you know, there’s no electricity. So they’re decomposing.
The intensive care unit was targeted twice in the last 24 hours. There are 28 patients there. Two of them have passed away over the course of the evening. These are the adult patients. They have no access to oxygen. Dialysis patients, who require electricity to run the dialysis machines because they have kidney failure, do not have access to those dialysis machines. I can describe to you in detail what death will look like for these patients. Toxins will develop in their bloodstream. They will become overloaded with fluid, because they cannot pee it out. They cannot pee the toxins out, either. They will feel very unwell. They will probably get very confused. They’ll have difficulty breathing. And eventually they’ll die. This is a slow, horrible, painful death — preventable painful death, like all the deaths in Gaza.
Anyone who moves inside the hospital is getting directly killed. Two nurses were killed by snipers in the last 24 hours. Anyone who tries to leave the hospital is targeted. You mentioned the 38 premature newborns — three of whom who’ve died — are currently outside of their incubators, at risk of hypothermia, without access to oxygen. And I’m not sure how they’re going to provide them with all the things they need, including food.
This is an entire hospital that’s completely cut off, and we’ve had very little to no news from the other hospitals in the north of Gaza. Last we heard, they’re completely surrounded, like Al-Shifa Hospital. And, you know, we’re in a situation where there has been a systematic attempt to destroy civilian Palestinian livelihood and existence in all of Gaza, not just the north. Thirty percent of the killed have been in the south of Gaza, which is supposed to be the safe zone. Humanitarian corridors, or so-called humanitarian corridors, are called the corridor of death by Gazans, because they get directly targeted as they’re trying to flee on these corridors.
You know, Doctors Without Borders — and I mentioned we’re really struggling to contact a lot of the staff. One of my colleagues who I know at Al-Shifa said, “We are sure we are alone now. No one hears us. We are alone.” MSF was established — one of the main principles of MSF’s establishment by journalists and doctors decades ago was to provide testimony — this concept of témoignage, which means bearing witness — to provide testimony, to bear witness on these sorts of atrocities, that we don’t — that are not exposed, and to relieve the suffering of those who experience them. And we’re in a situation where we can’t do either of those things. One of our MSF staff who is staying in Gaza City, but not physically in the hospital at the moment, said there are dead people on the streets. I’m going to read his quote: “There are dead people on the streets. We see people being shot at. We can see injured people. We can hear them crying for help. But we cannot do anything. It is too dangerous to go outside.” Ambulances cannot reach the wounded.
You mentioned Dr. Hammam Alloh earlier, who was on your program a couple days ago describing how he had refused to leave the hospital and desert his patients. I knew Dr. Hammam. He was a beacon of light. He’s a gift to the world of medicine and his patients. He was a brilliant nephrologist, was one of the most highly trained doctors in Gaza. He was transforming the care of patients with chronic renal disease, the same patients that I told you are now subject to a slow and horrifying death. He spent a decade learning how to serve his people. He also has a very young family. He was killed in his wife’s home along with his father —
AMY GOODMAN: His father, his father-in-law and his brother-in-law.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: — [inaudible] wife, his young children, and the rest are under the rubble at the moment. And they’ve been calling out to the Red Cross to try and help evacuate, and the Red Cross cannot reach them, for all the reasons that I mentioned. You know, I can’t believe that I’m having to say this, but healthcare providers, healthcare facilities, civilians have to be protected. You know, he mentioned in his interview to you that —
AMY GOODMAN: We’re having a little trouble with Dr. Haj-Hassan’s Skype. We’re going to play that interview. Dr. Haj-Hassan, can you hear me? Well —
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: I can.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re breaking up a bit.
**************************************
“Beacon of Light”: Fellow Doctors Recall Dr. Hammam Alloh, Gaza Doctor Killed by Israeli Airstrike
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/13 ... transcript
Transcript
We speak with two physicians who knew Dr. Hammam Alloh, a Palestinian nephrologist at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who was killed Saturday in an Israeli airstrike. They recall him as a “committed physician, wonderful father” and “beacon of light.” He had refused to heed Israeli directives to evacuate in order to continue providing care to his patients. “He spent a decade learning how to serve his people,” says Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders. “He wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine, without occupation,” says Dr. Ben Thomson, a fellow nephrologist who worked with Dr. Alloh.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in another doctor into this conversation, as you talk about the doctor whose interview we are going to play in just a minute, Dr. Ben Thomson was also a friend and a colleague of Dr. Hammam Alloh. He’s a nephrologist in Toronto, where you are now, too.
Dr. Ben Thomson, can you also tell us about Dr. Hammam Alloh? We’re going to play the full interview in just a moment that we did with him just two weeks ago.
DR. BEN THOMSON: Thank you, Ms. Goodman.
I mean, Dr. Hammam Alloh, as my colleague from Médecins Sans Frontières said, was a incredible human being, a committed physician, wonderful father. When I was at his home in September in Gaza City, I was joking with him, because I said, “You’re such an optimist.” You know, he was absolutely convinced — he insisted that if the world knew what was happening in Gaza, that it would intervene and that it would end the suffering for people in Gaza.
Like so many doctors in Gaza over the last month, faced with horrible circumstances, he remained committed to his patients. He cared for them, despite everything that he faced. The very first interview he did, as he was speaking truth to the world about the horrors that he was experiencing in Gaza, his own home was bombed. Windows, the front door of his house blew off. He went to check on his children. He went to check on his father that lived with him. He put them in a room, and then he came back and finished the interview. And the very next day, he went to work. This was his level of commitment.
I am convinced that if he was here sitting and he was here talking to you, he would have been very clear what he wanted. You know, he was an optimist, yes, and he had good days and bad days over the last month. When we spoke every day, he would talk about how he was committed to developing education programs for today’s doctors and the doctors of tomorrow in Gaza. But he also had very difficult days, faced with the very difficult circumstances that he faced every day, seeing his colleagues being killed, working in hospitals with no water, no food, no electricity, knowing that his patients who required dialysis treatment three times a week to survive, knowing that they’d be dead within a week without electricity, all thousand of them throughout Gaza would be dead. Knowing that, he still went to work. And those good days where he talked to me about education, he also had bad days. And on those bad days, he would tell me — he was speaking of the horrors that he was seeing. He was experiencing war crimes. He was witnessing them. He would tell me he was experiencing a genocide of his own people. It was horrible.
You know, I think at this point politicians are embarrassing themselves by their inaction. He would have been very clear. He would have wanted — there’s things that he would have wanted that I can talk to you about. But, you know, I think we need to remember Dr. Hammam, like many physicians in Gaza, was incredibly committed to his patients —
AMY GOODMAN: How did he die, Dr. Thomson?
DR. BEN THOMSON: — a wonderful father, and he died too early.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he die?
DR. BEN THOMSON: He was hit in an airstrike. He was at his wife’s home. He was with his father, with his father-in-law and his brother-in-law. His wife and two children, who are 4 and 5 years old, were at his own home, so they survived. But while he was at his wife’s home, an Israeli airstrike on his home killed all of them in the home.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Dr. Thomson, if you can tell me about your own situation in Toronto? I mean, to say the least, that’s very different from Gaza. But you were suspended for a month after you and the hospital were threatened over your comments that you tweeted on X. Can you talk about this?
DR. BEN THOMSON: I think, like many people around the world, I have experienced bullying, harassment and other negative consequences to speaking out for Palestine. In my situation, I had death threats. I was suspended from the hospital. I had a difficult month. But the reality is, my worst day over the last month is nothing compared to — you know, the best day of anyone in the last month in Gaza is still worse than my worst day.
And the reality is, people like Dr. Hammam would want us to think about, you know: What do we need right now? Yes, I suffered death threats, but the reality is, Dr. Hammam was killed, and a couple hundred other healthcare professionals in Gaza have been killed. And it behooves us right now to think: What do we have to do?
We must have an immediate ceasefire. We must have rapid and unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. And, you know, speaking with Dr. Hammam at his house in September, he talked about the fact he wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine without occupation. We spoke of this often. And I think it behooves us now, as an international community — yes, many of us have been threatened. The reality is much, much worse for our colleagues in Gaza. The reality is we absolutely need to have a ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and there must be a durable, peaceful, just solution for a free Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan back into the conversation — we’re having a little trouble with your Skype — and ask you to respond to what Israel is saying, that they are attacking the hospital because Hamas has used it as — underneath it, at least, or all around it — it is not exactly clear — as command and control.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: You know, I get asked this question all the time. I got asked this question in 2014. The same accusations were made in 2008, 2009, 2014, 2021. These aren’t new accusations. It’s also not new that those accusations have not been substantiated.
I have worked in these hospitals. I can tell you what they are, with certainty. They are healthcare facilities caring for patients with limited resources as a consequence of a 16-year siege and with healthcare professionals who are the most dedicated doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists that I have met in my entire life. And Dr. Hammam Alloh is the perfect example of that, as are Dr. Maisara and every single doctor who has been killed, and nurse and paramedic and microbiologist. I mean, over 200 healthcare providers have been killed to date, and they have been screaming for international protection. So I can tell you that they are functioning health facilities caring for patients.
And regardless of whether accusations of military activity around those hospitals are substantiated, it is an international — it would be considered a war crime to target them if they are functioning as a healthcare facility, and they are. That, I am confident of. I am also confident that I have never personally seen any evidence of military activity in and around these hospitals. And that is the most that I can say to this.
And I want to — I think that the important thing to remember is, we keep getting sucked into these arguments where we’re justifying these preposterous justifications for the violation of international law. And instead of constantly trying to defend something that’s completely — to defend against something that’s completely preposterous, I think we need to refocus on what is clear. What is clear is over 11,000 Gazans have been killed to date. Almost 200 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed. Healthcare facilities are directly targeted, with intent. Ambulances are directly targeted, with intent. The entire infrastructure of a civilian population, everything that is needed, that is indispensable to their survival, from food to water to medical facilities to their shelter — everything has been targeted, intentionally targeted and destroyed. That is what we should be focusing on. There are also, you know, almost 5,000 children who have been killed, that we know of, but we don’t have statistics from the last 48 hours because they have completely destroyed the ability to even expose these atrocities.
And, you know, the last message that Dr. Hammam Alloh had sent, just a few hours before he was killed, to one of my colleagues, he said, “Your shouting means a lot to us. Please keep it up.” And I hope what Dr. Ben Thomson, what myself, what every humanitarian doctor or provider or human out there who is screaming about these atrocities, we paint this horrific picture, and I hope it inspires your viewers, the politicians everywhere to get up and respond to this avalanche of suffering with an avalanche of solidarity and action, because this is not a world that I want to live in. This is not a world that my colleagues want to live in. And this is not a world that we want to raise the next generation of children in. We have museums all around the world that remind us that this is not what we want for humanity. And this is our opportunity to assert that.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Haj-Hassan, there is a new acronym that was coined in Gaza over the last few weeks: WCNSF — “wounded child, no surviving family.” Can you explain?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah. I mean, over 1,000 families have been killed. They’ve had at least two members of their families killed in the last month. Many families are completely wiped out, because these are — I don’t know much about weapons, but I can tell you they are very violent weapons that wipe out entire multistory residential buildings where families are sheltering, in seconds. And you have had so many families wiped off of the civil registry. Sometimes a child survives. And not infrequently, one person in the family survives. And so, it was happening so frequently that they had to coin a term for it, and sometimes even writing it on the bodies of the patients. Sometimes they even just write the word “unknown,” because it’s a child with no surviving family to even identify the child.
And, you know, it’s not just WCNSF. That is the acronym that has been coined by the Gazan medics. But there’s also WMNSF, “wounded mother, no surviving family”; WFNSF, “wounded father, no surviving family.” These aren’t acronyms that are used, but they are realities on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Doctor —
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: One of the last messages — so, I just want [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, I’m going to cut you off, but only so that we can hear this last interview that we did, the last interview with Hammam Alloh. I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric intensive care physician with Doctors Without Borders. And I want to thank Dr. Ben Thomson, a friend and colleague of Dr. Hammam Alloh, who, again, was killed this weekend in an airstrike. The nephrologist in Toronto, Dr. Ben Thomson, traveled to Gaza twice a year since 2013. His charity is called Keys of Health. We’re going to break and then come back to hear Dr. Hammam Alloh’s last words. Stay with us.
***********************
“We’re Being Exterminated”: Hear One of Dr. Hammam Alloh’s Last Interviews from Gaza Before His Death
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 13, 2023
Transcript
We feature one of the final interviews with Palestinian doctor Hammam Alloh, who died Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his wife’s home, killing him, his father, brother-in-law and father-in-law. On October 31, Democracy Now! spoke to Dr. Alloh about conditions at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, and his decision to continue working, as he called on people in the United States and the rest of the world to take action against Israel’s indiscriminate assault. When asked about why he refused to leave his patients, Dr. Alloh responded, “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
Nearly 200 medical workers have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7th. Over the weekend, Democracy Now! learned that Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his family home, killing him, his father, his brother-in-law and his father-in-law. Dr. Alloh was a kidney specialist, a nephrologist, who worked at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza. He was 36 years old. He leaves behind his wife and two children, a 4- and a 5-year-old. Dr. Hammam Alloh spoke to Democracy Now! October 31 in one of his last interviews.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, you’ve said, “Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day.” If you can talk about that in the hospital, which, as you said, is not just a hospital for sick people? Thousands are taking refuge at Al-Shifa and al-Quds and the other hospitals. And also, we’re talking to you as you just left Al-Shifa. How do you comfort your family? What’s happening to your family as you’re at the hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I tell them at least we still have a house with a door to close. But many thousand refugees, people like us, who used to live in dignity have no longer houses and no doors to close to protect them as they are surrounded by wastewater, by garbage. They don’t have a liquid, continuous supply of clean water to drink. Many of them have a lot of missing members of their families. They don’t know if they are alive or not. I tell them at least we still have a house to live in, but they don’t have. And surprisingly, my 4- and 5-year-old kids, they accept this as a comfort, as a better situation compared to those refugees living — they are living actually in hospitals, but it’s not like they are living inside the hospital departments. Many of them do not have enough space to go into hospital hallways, so they are living around the buildings and in the garden. So, yeah, surprisingly, my very young kids accept this.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli military has dropped thousands of pamphlets warning people where you are, in northern Gaza, to leave. Why don’t you go with your family south?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: And if I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare. So we can’t just leave.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Health Organization talked about this issue of telling doctors to leave their patients, choosing your own lives over your patients. Can you talk about that choice, since so many patients can’t leave — for example, babies in incubators?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients? I’m asking you, Ma’am. Do you think this is the reason I went to med school, to think only about my life? This is not the reason why I became a doctor.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what’s happening to the hospitals? Just in our headlines today, we talked about, and in the last few days, the attack on the Indonesia Hospital. The Turkish Hospital is the only cancer hospital?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of these places, both as a sanctuary, thousands of people taking refuge, and for patients?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah. Indonesian Hospital is providing healthcare for over 400,000 citizens in the Gaza Strip. And this part of the Gaza Strip is being split from the rest of the Gaza Strip. If this hospital stops providing care, so we are exposing many thousand Palestinian souls to the dangers of disease and death.
Turkish Hospital, with its very modest capabilities even before war, was the only hospital providing care and medications for cancer patients from around the Gaza Strip. It was airstruck yesterday. I don’t know how many patients and healthcare professionals were wounded. And many patients are dying now because they are not safe with their families to go to receive care and to continue their chemotherapy.
Ministry of Health has declared two hours ago also that the electricity would be cut off from Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital, representing 40% of the healthcare power in the Gaza Strip and providing services for many machine-dependent patients, like the ventilated patients and the hemodialysis patients. So, if electricity is cut out from this hospital, so we are directly deciding those patients are going to necessarily die. Ventilated patients will die in minutes. Dialysis patients will die in hours to days after stopping their hemodialysis. Many patients are now being treated with the modest supplies we have. Many diabetic patients are now being admitted to hospital because of their insulin is not being kept in the refrigerator, so it’s not working. We are out — we ran out of many medications, like antifungal medications. We have a patient who died earlier this week with mucormycosis. This is an invasive, ugly type of fungal infection that killed her because we had no amphotericin to offer her. So, my very simple answer to your question is that death is coming to so many people in the Gaza Strip, in hours to days, if this continues the same way it’s going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Alloh, the Middle East Eye reports on a baby who died, says, “His death certificate has been issued before his birth certificate.” A 1-day-old baby has been killed by Israeli bombing in Gaza. Israel, the military, the government, says that Al-Shifa, your hospital, is Hamas —
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — the site of Hamas command and control. Can you respond to that, Dr. Alloh?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I’ve been working this hospital for over two years, and I never saw this. So, I’m no lawyer, I’m no attorney, but this is how I am simply replying. I never saw this for over two years. If this is true, I would see at least a clue.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the shipments of aid coming in. Normally, in normal times — if there’s ever a normal time in Gaza — over 400 trucks a day. We’re talking about a trickle of trucks now, maybe a dozen, maybe eight in a day. Have you ever seen this aid arriving at the hospital? And can you talk about what you need right now?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Well, that number you just mentioned that was allowed into Gaza Strip is actually — is actually what you were referring to. It is nothing compared to what we need, nothing compared to the shortage in supplies, machines and medications we are in need for. The only thing, came just as I was leaving the hospital today, was a carton of IV fluid bottles. This is the only thing I saw. And I don’t really know if this came through the aid trucks in the few couple of days, or that was from the stores of the Ministry of Health. In addition, I happened to ask about in the hospital administration, and what they mentioned that was all about the gloves and gauze. And this is not what we are actually only in need for. This is what maybe the least we care for, the least we are in need for. So this is, again, nothing compared to what we are in need for in terms of supplies and medications.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Hammam Alloh, your message at this point to the United States, where we’re based, and to the world?
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: Actually, the message hasn’t changed since the beginning of this war. First, we need this war to end, because we are real humans. We are no animals. We have the right to live freely.
Second, if you were, and your citizens, to live under these circumstances, what would you do for them? This is what we exactly would like you to do for us as a superpower country, as the United States, because we are really as human as your U.S. citizens are.
We were expecting more — earlier, I mean, solutions for that humanitarian and healthcare catastrophes and the crises, but what we are seeing, mainly through trucks allowed into Gaza, is nothing compared to us. So, we are being exterminated. We are being massly eradicated. And you pretend to care for humanitarian and human rights, which is not what we are living now. To prove us wrong, please do something. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh, speaking to us from Gaza City, where he works at the largest hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital. Please be safe.
DR. HAMMAM ALLOH: I hope I will be. Let’s hope, both together, I will be. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hammam Alloh was speaking from Gaza on Democracy Now! on October 31st in one of his last interviews. He was killed Saturday when an Israeli artillery shell struck his wife’s home, killing him, his father, his father-in-law and his brother-in-law. Dr. Alloh was a kidney specialist who worked at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza City. He was 36 years old. He leaves behind a wife and two children, a 4- and a 5-year-old. Nearly 200 medical workers have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7th.
And that does it for our show. To see all our interviews with doctors, with residents, with Israeli historians and scholars and peace activists, with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists and academics, human rights lawyers, go to democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
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