Worse Than Hell: Dr. Mads Gilbert Decries Israeli Military Raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 15, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/15 ... transcript
Transcript
The Israel military raid on Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering, is an “unprecedented attack on civilian society” in the “darkest time in modern history,” that is being justified in the West by “a deep-rooted and frightening racism,” says Dr. Mads Gilbert, who worked at Al-Shifa. “You don’t do these things to people you consider equal.” Dr. Gilbert is a Norwegian physician who just spent weeks in Cairo trying to enter Gaza to help his colleagues and has worked extensively in Palestine since 1981. “The civilian population of Gaza [have] done nothing wrong other than being born Palestinians in Gaza,” he says. “Israeli impunity has reached a new level, and we are all sinking into that abyss of disregard for human life.”
AMY GOODMAN: We begin the show in Gaza, where Israel is conducting a military raid on Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge or medical treatment. The Palestinian Authority has decried the raid as a violation of international law. There are reports Israeli troops have ordered all young men on the hospital grounds to surrender. Many Palestinian men are already being interrogated, some while being held naked and blindfolded. Israel has accused Hamas of placing a command center below Al-Shifa, but Hamas and hospital officials have denied the claim. Israeli tanks are now inside the hospital complex.
This is Dr. Ahmed al-Mokhallati, a plastic surgeon at Al-Shifa.
DR. AHMED AL-MOKHALLATI: And understand we can’t look through the windows or doors. We don’t know what’s happening. We have tanks moving within the hospital. We can hear continuous shooting, and right now. But again, it’s totally risky, the situation.
REPORTER: So, what are these sounds, Doctor? I’m hearing sounds.
DR. AHMED AL-MOKHALLATI: It’s continuous shooting from the tanks. We don’t know what to do. We are within the building. Israel within the building. They are in. We can’t go between the hospital buildings at all for food. So, we are with each other, with the patients, with the civilians within the hospital. And it’s totally risky, the situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Doctors in Al-Shifa are struggling to keep patients alive, including dozens of premature babies, amidst a lack of fuel and the ongoing Israeli military raid.
AL-SHIFA DOCTOR: [translated] I am standing here at the ICU at Al-Shifa medical complex. The department is suffering after the shutdown of electricity due to the lack of fuel. The Health Ministry warned about the lack of the fuel. This department today at dawn was struck directly by the Israeli occupation forces. Here also, the ICU and these children, who were on life machines and artificial respiration, were taken into the corridors of the ICU department. These people here were denied life support devices. They face the loss of their lives because there are no support machines or artificial respiration devices. Around 29 patients are facing this tragedy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Dr. Mads Gilbert, Norwegian physician who’s worked in Al-Shifa for years, just spent weeks in Cairo getting — trying his best to get into Gaza. He’s a professor at University Hospital of North Norway and the Arctic University of Norway who’s worked with Palestinians since 1981, was in Gaza there during the major Israeli bombardments of 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2014. Dr. Gilbert, where are you right now?
DR. MADS GILBERT: Right now I arrived this early morning in Johannesburg in South Africa. I will be on an invited speaking tour here on Gaza and Palestine, but with —
AMY GOODMAN: We just — we just have a few minutes, but I know that you’ve been speaking to people within Gaza, in Al-Shifa. Can you talk about the scene that we just described? What do you understand is happening there?
DR. MADS GILBERT: If I should choose today between hell and Al-Shifa, I would choose hell. I got a report yesterday from the minister of health that 20 out of the 23 ICU patients had died. Seventeen other patients died because of lack of supplies, oxygen and water. And three, if not five, of the 38 premature newborns have died because of this slow suffocation that the Israeli occupation army is exposing all the hospitals to by cutting electricity, oxygen and medical supplies. And it’s — you know, it’s beyond description. I’m out of words to describe this systematic, man-made slaughtering of patients in civilian hospitals.
And when I heard the crowd in the United States shout, you know, “No ceasefire,” I think that’s the only place on Earth where people are supporting Israel. And the other streets of the world are supporting a ceasefire, a human solution, a lift of the siege and a support for the people of Gaza. So this is a deeply divided world, and the lies are flying around like never before in any war.
And I think we need to keep our heads and our hearts calm now and understand that what we are seeing is an unprecedented attack on a civilian society, occupied by one of the most brutal and ruthless armies in the world, exercising a systematic attack on civilian healthcare, completely against international law and the standards that we want to apply, and being back-patted all the time by the U.S. president.
I mean, we’re in the darkest time in modern history now. So far, if you look at the U.N. numbers, the U.N. numbers that are coming out every day in their fact sheets, 40,000 Palestinians have been killed or are missing under the rubble or have been injured for four weeks. Forty thousand. Six thousand of the killed and missing are children. When did that become defense of a country? When did it become decent to drag neonates out of their incubators and kill children? You know, the only explanation for this is a deep-rooted and very frightening racism, because you don’t do these things to people you consider your equal. I’m extremely disturbed. I’m extremely upset. And I blame the European leaders and your president for this bloody bloodshed of people who are being completely defenseless.
And I talked to a colleague in Mustashfa Al-Aqsa in the south yesterday. He told me they were seeing influx of patients coming, walking from the north, having followed the Israeli command to leave the north, and they were being shot in the legs. And they were treating gunshots in the legs from people trying to escape the north. Forty percent —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Gilbert —
DR. MADS GILBERT: — of the [inaudible].
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Gilbert, I wanted to ask you what — the Israeli government continues to insist that Hamas is using the hospitals in Gaza as command centers and as underground headquarters storing weapons and even hostages. What is your response to these claims?
DR. MADS GILBERT: Twofold. Why are you in the media conveying these false claims continuously and taking the attention away from what is the real problem — namely, the continuous bombing and killing of people in Gaza? There is absolutely no proof, so far, that I know of, neither from U.S. intelligence nor from the Israeli intelligence, and we’ve heard these accusations for 16 years. Show us the proof. Show us the evidence. And don’t forget that the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Convention, is telling the fighting parties to make both distinction and precaution. If it’s a mixed military and civilian target, the civilian precaution takes priority over the military again. And they have been bombing not only Shifa and al-Quds, but lots of hospitals, with even bothering to claim that there is any military activity in that hospital. They bombed the Turkish. They bombed Al-Rantisi Pediatric Hospital. And we’ve all seen these ridiculous videos where they say, “Oh, here are Pampers in a pediatric hospital. It’s got to be the terrorists.” So I think this is a big sham, and I’m a bit worried that you in the media so easily are conveying these unsubstantiated accusations. And regardless, they don’t have the right to bomb hospitals. That’s very clear.
And now it’s not only Al-Shifa. Now the al-Quds Hospital is being evacuated with all the patients and all the staff. And it is really a convoy of shame to the Western world and to the United States to see these hospitals, the last resorts in a dramatic assault on the civilian population in Gaza, who have done nothing wrong other than being born Palestinians in Gaza. And this convoy of misery is the result of a lenient attitude to the Israeli violations of international law through many, many years. The Israeli impunity has reached a new level, and we are all sinking into that abyss of the disregard for human life and humanity, as we are seeing this going on without anybody trying to stop the Israeli army.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mads Gilbert, we thank you for being with us, Norwegian physician who’s spent decades working in Gaza, attempted to get in to go back to Al-Shifa but wasn’t able to, now speaking to us from Johannesburg, South Africa.
Coming up, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.
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Peter Beinart: Israel Will Only Be Secure & Safe If Palestinians Are Given Freedom
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 15, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/15 ... transcript
Transcript
Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, discusses proposals for a prisoner swap with Hamas, the ongoing cycle of Palestinian oppression and resistance, censorship of pro-Palestine advocacy in the United States, what he calls a “generational struggle” among American Jews over Zionism, and more on Israel’s current assault of Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
In Israel, family members of some of the 240 hostages being held by Hamas have begun a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Benjamin Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, where they plan to arrive Saturday. The family members are accusing the prime minister of not doing enough to free their loved ones.
On Monday, Hamas offered to release up to 70 women and children hostages in exchange for a five-day ceasefire and the release of 275 Palestinian women and children prisoners being held in Israeli jails. Israel has ignored the offer so far and has rejected all calls for a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., for a March for Israel, where speakers and rallygoers repeatedly voiced opposition to a ceasefire.
To talk more about the overall situation, we’re joined by Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, the City University of New York. He also writes a newsletter on Substack called The Beinart Notebook.
Peter, welcome back to Democracy Now! I want to start with President Biden saying there’s about to be a hostage release. And if you can talk about what this deal you see — you can’t possibly know exactly what we’re talking about here, but the issue of a trade for these hostages for prisoners, and who these prisoners are that Hamas is demanding be released?
PETER BEINART: I don’t know the details, but I pray that this will happen. Many of the hostage families have been calling for this. I can’t even imagine the agony of these families not knowing where their relatives are and if they’re alive or dead. In our own family, we have all the names of the hostages on our refrigerator door so we see them every day. But there are Palestinians who have been in prison, often for a long time, sometimes in administrative detention, without any due process. And it seems to me that allowing women and children, Palestinian women and children who have been held under those conditions, as part of a negotiated deal would be a humane gesture on both sides.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about some of the leaders who are imprisoned by Israel right now, like, for example, Marwan Barghouti?
PETER BEINART: Right. So, I think one of the problems in Palestinian politics is that there’s a whole generation of leaders, really, who are in jail, most famously, Marwan Barghouti, the nationalist leader. He’s not an Islamist like Hamas. Polling consistently shows he’s the most popular Palestinian leader.
And I think Israel needs to think about what its political strategy is here. You can’t defeat Hamas militarily, because even if you depose it in Gaza, you will be laying the seeds for the next group of people who will be fighting Israel. We know that Hamas recruits from the families of people that Israel has killed. You need, it seems to me, to support Palestinian leaders who offer a vision of ethical resistance, not what we saw on October 7th, but ethical resistance, and a path to Palestinian freedom, that also means safety for Israeli Jews.
Marwan Barghouti, although he was involved in armed attacks during the Second Intifada, has spoken from jail about the path of Nelson Mandela, about reconciliation, about justice not vengeance. If Israel wanted legitimate Palestinian leaders that it could work with to build a horizon for Palestinian freedom, because only Palestinian freedom in the long run will ensure Israeli Jewish safety, then it could let him out and create the beginnings of a more legitimate Palestinian leadership, rather than Mahmoud Abbas, who’s viewed as a corrupt, authoritarian subcontractor of Israel at this point.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Peter, I’m wondering your response to the way that many pro-Palestinian voices are being silenced in the United States. Last week, for instance, Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace as official student groups through the end of the term. And your sense of what — the impact of these kinds of policies and the pressures from a lot of university donors on their universities to silence these voices?
PETER BEINART: I think when historians look back at the periods of repression of free speech in the United States from World War I to the Red Scare of the McCarthy era to the post-9/11 era, tragically, we are writing another chapter now. And it’s being done in part because of the cowardice of university administrators and others, people who were sworn to defend the principles of free speech and academic freedom, because of pressure, as you say, very, very often from donors.
You don’t have to agree with everything that Students for Justice in Palestine says. I myself don’t. But they have the right to make their voices heard. Yes, do some of the things they say — are some of the things upsetting to some Jewish students? Yes. Some of the things that the pro-Israel groups on campus say are upsetting to some of the Palestinian students.
The point of a university is that people are able to express their views. And for goodness’ sakes, one of the things we’ve been hearing from people on the right for years and years in their opposition to cancel culture is that universities are supposed to make you uncomfortable. Physical safety is one thing. Intellectual discomfort is another. It is not the job of university presidents to protect students from hearing things that, because they were raised in pro-Israel families, they find deeply upsetting. The point is to allow people to have these conversations. And it’s really deeply, deeply disturbing to me that in these places that are supposed to be bastions of free speech and academic freedom, we’re seeing this kind of crumbling.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I’m wondering also — there was a report in The New York Times today, which inexplicably, in my view, should have been on the front page but was buried in the back, about an attack on the Al-Shifa Hospital on Friday that initially the Israeli Defense Forces claimed was, again, errant missiles of Hamas, but The New York Times has been able to document that — from some of the fragments of the missiles, that they were actually anti-tank artillery from the — Israeli anti-tank artillery. And this really raises deep questions about the credibility of prior statements of Israel about some of these attacks. Wondering your response.
PETER BEINART: I mean, look, I’m not a military expert. I would just say this: Israel is saying that Hamas is embedding itself in civilian areas and using Palestinian civilians as, quote-unquote, “human shields.” There may be cases in which that is true, but we know that this is the way guerrilla armies fight, right? The Viet Cong, when they were fighting the United States in Vietnam, didn’t just walk out into the fields and say, “Here we are.” They embedded themselves in villages. This is the nature of fighting against a guerrilla movement, against an insurgency. It doesn’t give you carte blanche to then basically go and kill vast numbers of civilians.
The underlying lesson is you can’t defeat an insurgency unless you address the core political grievances. This is the fundamental flaw behind Israel’s strategy. And Israel, it’s so tragic to see this, because it’s been happening again and again for decades. Israel went into southern Lebanon in the early 1980s to depose the PLO, and they kicked the PLO out of Lebanon. And what happened? They ended up in an occupation that led to Hezbollah. Israel is not laying the foundations here for anything that will lead to mutual coexistence and mutual freedom between the two societies. The civilians it kills are laying the groundwork for more and more destruction and death on both sides, because Israeli leaders are not willing to face the fundamental fact, and American leaders are not forcing them to, that the issue, even deeper than Hamas, as horrible as Hamas is, the issue is the lack of Palestinian freedom.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Beinart, you just wrote a piece in The New York Times, “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive,” where you talk about the ANC. If you can talk about apartheid, Palestine, the ANC and the day after, as they say?
PETER BEINART: The point I tried to make is that the African National Congress, although it did use armed resistance against apartheid, it tried hard to not go after civilians. And one of the reasons it was able to maintain this ethical line, which tragically Hamas brutally crossed on October 7, was that it saw its strategy of ethical resistance was working. It saw that it was resonating around the world. By the late ’80s, an anti-apartheid movement had grown that had led to sanctions, that had led to divestment. And this created a kind of virtuous cycle that made it easier for the ANC to resist in an ethical way.
The point I wanted to make in the piece is, if we find what Hamas did on October 7th despicable, as I did, it is incumbent on us to support Palestinians who are fighting for their freedom in an ethical way. And when you shut that down, as the United States has done again and again — you shut down Palestinian efforts at the U.N., you shut down Palestinians’ efforts at the International Criminal Court, you criminalize Boycott, Divestment and Sanction, even though these are nonviolent efforts in the language of human rights and international law — you are actually empowering forces like Hamas that will resist in these immoral ways. We have to create paths for Palestinians to fight for freedom ethically, and we have done the opposite.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering also — you tweeted on Monday, quote, “American Jewish institutions have assembled alibis for the horror Israel is inflicting on Gaza. They’re not just intellectually flimsy. They aim to squelch our noblest emotions: solidarity with suffering people + outrage at the state that is killing them.” Could you talk about the enormous battle that is occurring within the American Jewish community, where groups like Jewish Voices for Peace are being arrested by the hundreds in cities across the country, yet many of the major Jewish institutions continue to line up behind Israel?
PETER BEINART: Yeah. You know, it says in the Talmud that the imperative of human dignity is so great that it overrides all rabbinic commands. And it’s really — it’s tragic to me to see that the institutional leaders of our Jewish community have forgotten that in this moment when it needs to be remembered most. And instead what you have is a series of alibis that just don’t make any sense. For instance, the idea that people in Gaza deserve this because they voted for Hamas in 2006. Well, most of the — only 25% of the people in Gaza were even alive during that election. And if we set the precedent that you can be killed because you vote for the wrong political party, I think that’s going to have very, very bad consequences for many people all around the world.
There is a generational struggle, above all, that’s happening among American Jews. The bulk of the people who are leading these protests, these Jewish people who are protesting in the name of a ceasefire, are young. And what gives me hope is there are people on both sides, Hamas and the Israeli government, who basically see this struggle as a zero-sum struggle of tribe versus tribe, and that logic is going to lead to greater and greater destruction and misery; what I think we’re seeing among young American Jews is a different claim. It’s that this is not a struggle of Jews against Palestinians; it’s a struggle of Jews and Palestinians and people of conscience from all around the world around a series of basic principles. The principle is that there has to be safety and freedom and decent lives for Palestinians, if there is ever going to be safety and decency and dignity for Israeli Jews, as well, that these two people are bound together in a garment of destiny, as Martin Luther King said. And I actually think that it’s this multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic movement that, in this incredibly dark time, is the one thing, I think, that we can cling to as something as a source of hope.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter, we have less than a minute, but what is your assessment of what President Biden is doing and should be doing?
PETER BEINART: President Biden keeps saying that he would like Benjamin Netanyahu to do something else, and Benjamin Netanyahu keeps doing what he’s doing, because there is no stick attached to what President Biden is saying. Right? There are no consequences. Now Netanyahu is saying that Israel is going to reoccupy Gaza. Biden knows that this is a nightmare for Israel and a nightmare for the United States. It will be a quagmire, an insurgency for as long as the eye can see. America has to use its considerable leverage to get the Israeli government to do something to show Palestinians that it has — that there is a way for them to fight for their freedom, that Israel and the world will offer them; otherwise, we are going to have round after round after round of this hideous killing on both sides.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Beinart, we want to thank you for being with us, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, professor at CUNY Journalism School. We’ll link to your recent New York Times op-ed headlined “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.”
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Rabbis for Ceasefire: Jewish Leaders Organize to Halt Israel’s Bombardment of Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 15, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/15 ... transcript
We speak to Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer with Rabbis for Ceasefire and the founding co-chair of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rabbinical Council, about Tuesday’s “March for Israel” in Washington, D.C., that was covered widely by the mainstream media and platformed antisemitic Christian Zionists. Wise sees a deep connection between Jewish religious principles and anti-Zionist activism and says accusations that anti-Zionists are antisemitic are a cynical strategy used to “shield Israel from accountability.” She says Israel cannot be uniquely exempt from political and humanitarian critique. “Israel is not a Jewish person. Israel is a state. God forbid we should not be able to cry out when states are committing horrific genocidal violence in the name of Jewish people.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
This week has been dubbed the Jews for a Ceasefire Week of Action by groups including IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. In Chicago, hundreds of Jews and allies blocked the entrance to the Israeli Consulate Monday.
PROTESTER: Ceasefire means ending the genocide, the invasion, the siege. It means hostage release now. It means no more escalation to further war, violence and death. And it means creating a space for a true diplomatic solution that addresses the root causes of occupation and apartheid.
AMY GOODMAN: Around the country, Jews calling for a ceasefire also held sit-ins in the offices of congressmembers. In Washington, D.C., Monday, dozens of rabbis with Rabbis for Ceasefire were joined by spiritual leaders and hundreds of others for a morning prayer and reading of the Torah in front of the U.S. Capitol to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
RABBI: [reading Torah] Sound the great shofar for all people’s freedom.
AMY GOODMAN: After the special Shacharit service, rabbis and supporters marched to congressional offices, where they met with elected officials. This is Congressmember Cori Bush.
REP. CORI BUSH: We are rabbis. We are pastors. We are congressmembers. We are surviving family members. We are human beings. And we are bound by our faith to demand a ceasefire now, to demand an end to the violence now, to demand that love and peace and justice and humanity reigns and is at the center of all of our work now — not tomorrow, not next week, not in a month, not in a year. Now. Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Rabbi Alissa Wise, organizer with Rabbis for Ceasefire, former co-executive director of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, where she was also the founding co-chair of JVP’s Rabbinical Council.
So, we’re seeing all of this opposition around the country. Can you describe what happened in Washington? We just saw Cori Bush. I think AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, a number of other congressmembers were there for your prayer service. Talk about the support you’re getting.
RABBI ALISSA WISE: We’re getting tremendous support from the signers of the Ceasefire Now Resolution. And on Monday, when we brought our message to D.C., we were buoyed by the embrace of these members of Congress, but actually the embrace went both ways. It was clear that our presence there in D.C. was a balm for their souls. They are being run through the mud for their voice of humanity and their voice of justice. And likewise, we need support, too. We are Rabbis for Ceasefire. We are, as rabbis, responsible to serve the Jewish people’s spiritual, cultural, communal health. And as part of that, our obligation as rabbis is to ensure that Jewish people are part of the most profound and sacred obligation in Jewish tradition, which is saving lives. And that is the root of our call for ceasefire.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rabbi, I’m wondering if you could talk about your experience and work within the Palestinian solidarity movement. And how do you counter claims that critique of Israeli policies and of the occupation is inherently antisemitic?
RABBI ALISSA WISE: You know, there has been an effort over the past number of years to conflate critique of Israel with antisemitism. This is a deliberate strategy by those who seek to shield Israel from accountability. The truth is, Judaism is a beautiful, evolving religious civilization that has been part of the world for thousands of years. Zionism and the Jewish state has a far shorter history. Zionism is just over 125 years old, and the state just 75 years. There is nothing inherent in critiquing the Israeli state as antisemitic. The thing that we have to remember is that states must be held accountable when they violate human rights. And the cynical strategy by legacy Jewish institutions to shield Israel from accountability, through claims that Israel is a Jew or Israel is the Jew of the world — Israel is not a Jewish person. Israel is a state. God forbid we should not be able to cry out when states are committing horrific genocidal violence in the name of Jewish people.
When American Jews around the world, rabbis and our congregants alike, are saying, “Not in our name,” they are enacting their obligation as Jewish people to protect life, to say every life is sacred and to make no distinction between Israeli life and Palestinian life. As Representative Rashida Tlaib said, the cries of Israeli and Palestinian children don’t sound different to her. They don’t sound different to us. When you seek to stop critique of a nation-state that is committing such horrific genocidal violence with claims of antisemitism, you are lending credence to that violence.
You know, yesterday in D.C. at the pro-Israel rally, I was horrified to see that the most powerful antisemite in our country was given a headline spot. Shame on them! Shame on them for allowing Pastor John Hagee, who believes that Israel needs to be supported by Christian Zionists in order to hasten the second coming of the Messiah, at which point Jews must either convert en masse or burn. There is nothing more antisemitic than that. And shame on them for putting Jewish lives at risk, for playing Russian roulette with Jewish safety to protect Israel and to shield them from accountability for this horrific violence. When the crowd started shouting “No ceasefire,” I was humiliated. I was horrified. I was brought up in a tradition that teaches life is sacred. I prayed on Monday with my fellow rabbis in front of the Capitol that we are guided by an ahava rabbah, an unending love. And that unending love is not finite. It extends to all people. And it must. I think about my children, my Jewish children that I’m raising, and the peril that these Jewish organizations are putting them in when they cynically seek to conflate critique of Israel and antisemitism and create a stage for those who joyfully claim that Jews must convert or be burned at the coming of a second Messiah, and that is their reason why they support Israel. Shame on them.
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March for Israel Speaker Pastor Hagee Once Said God “Sent Hitler to Help Jews Reach the Promised Land”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 15, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/15 ... transcript
Transcript
Speakers at Tuesday’s “March for Israel” on the National Mall included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Christian fundamentalist House Speaker Mike Johnson and radical Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, who once said God “sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.” Sarah Posner, a reporter focused on the American Christian right, discusses Hagee and Johnson’s backgrounds and explains how Hagee and other extremist evangelical Christians and Jewish Zionists use each other to advance their own movements. Rabbis for Ceasefire’s Alissa Wise notes the “influence of Christian Zionism on U.S. foreign policy is way understated” and should be vigorously countered by white American Christians, just as white American Jews have mobilized a high-profile opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: We were going to bring in a second guest to join you, Rabbi Alissa Wise, and to talk more about the Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, who once said God had, quote, “sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.” This is part of what he said at Tuesday’s march in Washington.
JOHN HAGEE: Israel is the shining city on the hill. Israel said — God says of Israel, “Israel is my first-born son.”
CROWD: Yeah!
JOHN HAGEE: Jerusalem is the city of God. Jerusalem is the shoreline of eternity. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, today and forever.
AMY GOODMAN: Other high-profile speakers at Tuesday’s protest included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the new House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has ties to the Christian Zionist movement.
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: As Prime Minister Netanyahu says so well, this is a fight between good and evil, between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re, in addition to Rabbi Alissa Wise, joined by Sarah Posner, who has long covered Christian Zionists and is the author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. She’s an MSNBC columnist, her recent piece titled “The dispiriting truth about why many evangelical Christians support Israel.”
If you can talk about that, Sarah, and also specifically talk about John Hagee addressing these tens of thousands of people, and then the House speaker?
SARAH POSNER: So, Hagee has long walked this line between seeming like he — or, pretending to a Jewish audience like he’s really only interested in policy and what’s happening in the present. He walks this line, but then, when he goes into a church to preach about his theology, what he says is really quite different. He didn’t say on Tuesday that he expects, according to biblical prophecy, that one day Jesus will return and fight a very bloody battle, which, as the rabbi said, will result in Jews either converting or dying — and Muslims, too, by the way. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say that he believes that at the end of that, Jesus will rule the world from his throne on the Temple Mount. He didn’t say that everything is playing out according to biblical prophecy. And so he has basically hoodwinked many Jews into believing that he actually supports Israel, but what he really supports is his claim that Bible — Israel is just a pawn, really, in this Bible prophecy, which at the end of which — at the end of which Jesus will rule the world as basically a theocrat.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sarah Posner, you’ve noted that, quote, “At the heart of Christian Zionism is not a love for Israel but rather Christian nationalism.” But what does Israel and its staunchest defenders get from this alliance?
SARAH POSNER: Well, what Israelis and American Jews who embrace Hagee’s support get is a huge movement, much larger than the number of Jewish Americans, that has the ear of the Republican Party, that is enmeshed in the Republican Party. And so, it’s much more than CUFI has juice — CUFI is Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel — has juice on Capitol Hill or in the White House, when a Republican is in the White House. It is more than that. It is so common among evangelicals, even if they’re not members of CUFI, to share these ideas about Israel and Bible prophecy and the return of Jesus. And so, what they do is they bring this huge constituency to Republicans, many of whom, like Speaker Johnson, believe all of this themselves.
And so they have morphed together this idea of supporting Israel with being a good American Christian. They believe that God has commanded America as a country, not just them as Americans, to, quote-unquote, “support Israel.” But in their minds, supporting Israel involves supporting the occupation, supporting the Israeli military, no matter what it does. It doesn’t mean supporting Israel from the standpoint that some day, perhaps, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. That’s not part of the equation.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play another clip. In 2008, John McCain rejected Pastor John Hagee’s endorsements, after the pastor said God sent Hitler to help Jews get to Israel. This is a clip of Hagee’s sermon.
JOHN HAGEE: Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah Posner?
SARAH POSNER: So, this is part of Hagee’s overriding theology, that all of history can be sandwiched into his view of what the Bible prophecy is about: the return of Jesus. So, basically, what he’s saying is — what he’s saying there, and what he’s essentially saying in other much more recent statements than that, is that God has punished or disciplined the Jews throughout history as part of his plan to get them to return to Israel, which is a precondition of Jesus’s return. So he’s not trying to make it happen on a faster timetable. He will say that it’s all going to happen on God’s timing. But what he’s saying is any world event that’s occurring now or has occurred in the past is part of what has been prophesied in the Bible, and God is directing traffic here. And one of God’s intentions is to get Jews to return to Israel, because that is a precondition of Jesus’s return. He says that — he claims this is all laid out in the Bible, and this is just Bible prophecy playing out.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Rabbi Alissa Wise back into the conversation. Your response to this whole issue of the extreme Christian right in the United States lining up in support of Israel for its own religious purposes?
RABBI ALISSA WISE: Yeah. As Sarah mentioned, you know, CUFI boasts more members — 10 million, they claim, which surpasses the total number of Jews in the United States. So one thing that’s really critical is that white Christians need to be mobilizing just as American Jews are. American Jews are getting arrested by the hundreds, as you mentioned. Christians who oppose this vision that Christianity — that Hagee is proliferating need to, likewise, be stepping out. The influence of Christian Zionism on U.S. foreign policy is way understated. The Jewish pro-Israel lobby is dwarfed in comparison to what the Christian Zionist lobby is doing to promote U.S. foreign policy.
But I think the most important piece here is that all of this is making Jews less safe in the world. Israel’s actions in Gaza, but also not just now but for generations — when Palestinians are not free, Jews are less safe in the world. And that is the crux of the matter. There is no way for Jewish safety to be found when others are being oppressed. That’s just the simple truth of it. And organizations that seek to distract from those of us that are trying to realize freedom, democracy, equal rights — it’s simple. It’s equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis. Those people claim that we are antisemitic, when, in fact, their actions at aiding and abetting genocidal violence in Gaza now, but apartheid and occupation for generations, that is what is making Jews less safe in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to put this question to Sarah Posner, author of Unholy. You have written about Mike Johnson, the new House speaker’s Christian nationalist track record. Can you talk about his views and when you first encountered him in 2007 working on a story about the Alliance Defense Fund’s ambitions to gut the separation of church and state? Explain what that all this.
SARAH POSNER: So, the organization is now called Alliance Defending Freedom. It’s a major Christian right legal organization that sees itself as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU. It is behind many Supreme Court cases, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade; Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving the anti-gay baker. And Johnson was working for them at the time that I interviewed him.
And he laid out for me the organization’s ambition to eviscerate the separation of church and state at the Supreme Court and to create a legal framework in which conservative Christians could object to things like LGBTQ rights in the name of religious freedom. Everything he said to me back in 2007, ADF has pretty much done and accomplished or is well on its way to accomplishing — undermining church-state separation, elevating the religious freedom of conservative Christians who oppose LGBTQ and reproductive rights. And that is the framework and the ideology that he brings to Congress.
He also believes that God created civil government and that the government should be run from what Christian nationalists would call a biblical worldview. So, his entire ideology and framework and way of looking at the world and way of looking at government, in particular, is very classic, to the T of the Christian right, of Christian nationalists, whatever you want to call it, believing that their biblical worldview is what should dictate law and policy in the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering: Is this phenomena of the Christian Zionism largely centered in the United States, or have you seen similar movements in other advanced industrial countries, especially in Europe, as well?
SARAH POSNER: Sure. It’s worldwide. There are organizations that bring together Christian Zionists from different countries, that, in particular, bring together Christian Zionist legislators from different countries. So it’s definitely a worldwide movement. But Hagee is probably the world’s foremost and most well-known Christian Zionist, in part because of his decadeslong preaching on the question, but also because of his founding of CUFI in 2006.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah Posner, we want to thank you for being with us, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. And thank you to Rabbi Alissa Wise of Rabbis for Ceasefire and former co-executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace.