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

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DemocracyNow! Headlines
November 21, 2023

WHO Says Israeli Attacks Have Taken All of Northern Gaza’s Hospitals Out of Service
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/21/headlines

The Palestinian Health Ministry says all hospitals in northern Gaza are now out of service amid repeated assaults by Israeli forces on medical centers. The World Health Organization said it was working to evacuate remaining patients from Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in the besieged Palestinian territory, along with the Indonesian and Al-Ahli hospitals. Hundreds of patients — many of them injured in Israeli strikes — remain trapped in medical centers which have effectively ceased functioning. A WHO official in Geneva said Israel’s assault is “robbing the entire population of the north of the means to seek healthcare.”

U.N. Chief Condemns Israel’s “Unparalleled and Unprecedented” Attacks on Civilians
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

There’s been no letup in Israel’s bombing campaign. In one of the latest attacks, at least 20 Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces bombed the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Palestinian officials say more than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes — over 5,000 of them children. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres marked World Children’s Day, the U.N.’s annual day of action for children, with a call to stop the carnage.

Secretary-General António Guterres: “What is clear is that we have had in a few weeks thousands of children killed. So this is what matters. We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I am secretary-general.”

Israeli Attacks Kill Palestinian Journalists in Gaza and Media Workers in Lebanon
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

The chairman of the Gaza Press House has been killed by Israel’s military. Belal Jadallah was heading to the south of the Gaza Strip when he was killed by an Israeli tank shell in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Belal Jadallah was known as the “Godfather” of Palestinian journalism. He helped train generations of reporters and welcomed foreign correspondents to the Gaza Strip.

In northern Gaza, 27-year-old digital content and podcast presenter Ayat Khaddura has reportedly been killed along with her family in an Israeli airstrike. This is one of her last video reports.

Ayat Khaddura: “We’re separated, of course. I and a few others remain at home, while the rest have evacuated, and we don’t know where they went. The situation is very scary. The situation is very terrifying. What is happening is very difficult. May God have mercy on us.”

In southern Lebanon, two journalists with the Beirut-based TV channel Al Mayadeen have been killed in an Israeli airstrike. The network says camera operator Rabih Al-Me’mari and correspondent Farah Omar were deliberately targeted by an Israeli warplane after reporting on the latest Israeli bombardment of south Lebanon. A third civilian traveling with them was also killed in the attack.

At least 50 journalists and media workers, most of them Palestinian, have been killed in the region since October 7. We’ll have more on this story after headlines.

Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Abducted by Israeli Troops at Gaza Checkpoint
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

The Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha has been released, following his abduction by Israeli soldiers while trying to leave the Gaza Strip with his family. Abu Toha had been heading to the southern Rafah border crossing when he was seized by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. His family had not heard from him until Tuesday. Mosab Abu Toha is an author, columnist, teacher and founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. Click here to see our recent interview with him, and we’ll have more on his abduction later in the broadcast.

Families of Israeli Hostages Blast Bill to Impose Death Sentence on Hamas Members
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

In Jerusalem, far-right members of Israeli’s parliament on Monday got into a shouting match with family members of hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. Lawmakers were debating a bill to impose the death penalty on “terrorists.” The bill was advanced by Israel’s ultranationalist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was once convicted by an Israeli court of racist incitement against Palestinians and supporting a terrorist group. Family members condemned the death penalty bill, saying it endangered efforts to win the release of their abducted relatives. This is Udi Goren, whose cousin is being held captive in Gaza.

Udi Goren: “This is incredibly disappointing, because I feel that at this point, when we know that taking down Hamas, we keep hearing from them, is going to take months or years, and it’s going to take a long time; on the other hand, the other objective is time-sensitive. People are dying. We know that for sure.”
One hostage family member yelled at Ben-Gvir in the Knesset session, “You care more about killing Arabs than saving Jewish lives.”

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports Qatar-brokered talks for a deal that would see Hamas release some of its hostages in exchange for a three- to five-day pause in fighting are at a “critical and final stage.” Hamas officials said they were “close to reaching a truce agreement.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley Calls for Gaza Ceasefire: “Too Many Civilians and Children Have Died”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

The White House has pushed back after the Center for Constitutional Rights sued President Biden, accusing him of failing to prevent genocide in the Gaza Strip. On Monday, White House spokesperson John Kirby called the allegations “pretty inappropriate” and said only Hamas has genocidal intentions, not Israel’s government.

John Kirby: “Yes, there are too many civilian casualties in Gaza. Yes, the numbers are too high. Yes, too many families are grieving. And, yes, we continue to urge the Israelis to be as careful and cautious as possible. That’s not going to stop, from the president right on down. But Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat.”

Those remarks from the White House came as Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon became just the second senator to demand a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, joining Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin. Merkley wrote, “By waging a war that generates a shocking level of civilian carnage rather than a targeted campaign against Hamas, Israel is burning through its reserves of international support. Too many civilians and too many children have died, and we must value each and every child equally whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.”

Protesters Rally at Seattle Space Needle to Demand Gaza Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023

In Seattle, hundreds of people blocked the main entrance of the Space Needle observation tower Sunday in a Jewish-led peaceful act of civil disobedience calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Protesters flew a 40-foot-tall banner that read “Ceasefire Now!” in the air buoyed by large balloons. They’re demanding Washington Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, join growing congressional calls for a ceasefire. The action was organized by the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

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A Grim Milestone: Journalist Death Toll Tops 53 as Israel Kills More Reporters in Gaza and Lebanon
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/21 ... transcript

Transcript

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least 50 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Forty-five of the slain journalists have been Palestinian. Others have been arrested or injured. According to CPJ, this has been the deadliest period for journalists covering conflict since the media group began tracking deaths over 30 years ago. Meanwhile, journalists in Israel and the West Bank have been confronted with cyberattacks, physical assault and other forms of censorship for allegedly “harming national morale and harming national security” while reporting on Israel. It’s a “news blackout,” says CPJ’s program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Sherif Mansour, under which the Israeli government is blocking “essential media coverage” and withholding “lifesaving information” from Gaza in order to win its Western propaganda war.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s been another devastating 24 hours in Gaza and southern Lebanon for journalists covering the 46-day Israeli bombardment. The Beirut-based TV channel Al Mayadeen has just announced two of its journalists were killed today in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon. The network says correspondent Farah Omar and camera operator Rabih Al-Me’mari were deliberately targeted by an Israeli warplane after reporting on Israel’s latest bombardment of south Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in northern Gaza, Ayat Khaddura, a 27-year-old digital content and podcast presenter, has been reportedly killed along with her family in an Israeli airstrike. This is Ayat, one of her last video reports.

AYAT KHADDURA: [translated] This may be the last video for me. Today, the occupation dropped phosphorus bombs on the Beit Lahia project area and scary sound bombs and threw evacuation notices in the area. And, of course, almost the entire area has evacuated. Everyone started running madly in the streets. No one knows neither where they’re going to or coming from. We’re separated, of course. I and a few others remain at home, while the rest have evacuated, and we don’t know where they went. The situation is very scary. The situation is very terrifying. What is happening is very difficult. May God have mercy on us.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, the head of the Gaza Press House was also killed by the Israeli military. Belal Jadallah was heading to southern Gaza when he was killed by an Israeli tank shell in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Belal was known as the “Godfather” of Palestinian journalism. He helped train generations of reporters and welcomed foreign correspondents and sponsored them when covering the Gaza Strip.

The Committee to Protect Journalists Monday announced a grim milestone had been reached with at least 50 journalists and media workers killed since October 7th. Forty-five of the journalists have been Palestinian. There have been three Israeli journalists killed, and there have been at least three Lebanese journalists killed. CPJ reports 11 journalists have been injured, three are reported missing, and 18 have been arrested. According to CPJ, the past month and a half has been the deadliest period of journalists covering the conflict since the media group began tracking these deaths over 30 years ago.

We go now to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Sherif Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sherif, welcome back to Democracy Now!, under horrific circumstances. The U.N. secretary-general says that the number of civilian deaths is “unparalleled and unprecedented.” Of course, journalists are civilians. As I woke up this morning, I got one text after another, first the young woman and her cameraman in southern Lebanon killed about an hour after she posted a video report. She’s standing in a field in southern Lebanon, and she’s talking about the Israeli military killing civilians. She and her cameraman are then hit and killed. And then, as I’m learning their names, another text comes in. This young reporter in northern Gaza is killed, even as she says in her report, “I fear I will die.” Can you talk about this latest news and then a man you have come to know, who worked with you on a CPJ report, the head of the Gaza journalists’ association, also killed in an airstrike?

SHERIF MANSOUR: Thank you, Amy, for having me.

I remember being on your show a little bit more of a month ago and saying, for journalists in the region, this is a deadly time. And it was the deadliest week back then. It became the deadliest month and now the deadliest six weeks on our record. I was not exaggerating. I was not speculating.

The killing of Belal Jadallah, who helped us document this deadly pattern of journalists being killed by Israeli fire over 21 years — just in May, we made a profile of 20 journalists. The majority, 18, were Palestinians. And he, Jadallah, his center have helped identify them, their families, get us their pictures. And on Sunday, he became a victim of this same deadly pattern when he was killed in his car. Jadallah has also provided crucial safety equipment for journalists in order to do their job safely. And he opened the Press House for journalists to use the electricity and internet when there was no other place.

This deadly pattern has existed before. It’s getting more deadly per day. We are investigating the three more killing today, adding to 50 as of yesterday. We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s unprecedented. And for journalists in Gaza specifically, the exponential risk is possibly the most dangerous we have seen. Journalists were killed in the very early stages at the two entry and exit points from Gaza — in the south, the Rafah crossing; in the north, the Erez crossing. And since then, they were killed everywhere in between. They were killed in the south in Rafah City, in Khan Younis, where they were told it’s going to be safe. They were killed in the middle in the Gaza Strip. And they were killed in the north in Gaza City. They have no safe haven. They have no exit.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sherif, could you talk, as well, about the arrests of journalists in Gaza and the Occupied Territories? And also, your organization has criticized, as well, Israel for its censorship within Israel of the press in Israel. Could you talk about that, as well?

SHERIF MANSOUR: Well, we have documented separately from the casualties list, which includes journalists going missing, injured, the escalation of arrests. As of yesterday, 18 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank were arrested. Many of them were put in administrative detention, in military prosecutions. In addition, dozens of cases of censorship, direct censorship, cyberattacks, physical assaults, obstruction from coverage within the West Bank and within Israel.

In Israel, an emergency legislation has now given the government for the first time the unprecedented power of shutting down international media organization, including acting on Al Mayadeen — which two journalists were killed today in Lebanon — banning them in Israel, and allowing the government also to jail even Israeli journalists for up to a year under suspicious and these accusations of harming national morale and harming national security.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Also, here in the United States, we are getting much coverage on the commercial media of the war, of the Israeli war in Gaza, but it’s all of U.S. journalists that are basically based in Israel, and there are no U.S. journalists that I’ve seen that are actually in Gaza. And those who do go in only go in with the Israeli army and under the condition that Israel must review all of their videotape beforehand and approve it before it can go out. I’m wondering your sense of how the American people — what kind of story they’re getting as a result of these conditions?

SHERIF MANSOUR: Well, these conditions put local Palestinian photojournalists and freelancers at the most risk. They are the ones on the frontlines. We have not — we have seen a dwindling number of international media and international journalists within Gaza over the years because of the risks involved. And right now the Palestinian journalists are bearing the brunt of this risk and this heavy toll.

Of course, these casualties, the censorship is also coupled with communication blackouts for, to date, since the start of the war, that makes this more often news blackout, not just communication blackout. And, of course, that denies journalists a voice. It also denies people in the region and worldwide of essential media coverage, lifesaving information for 2 million Palestinians who are struggling to find food, clean water and shelter right now, but millions and hundreds of millions all over the world who are following this heartbreaking conflict and try to understand it, including in the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as Juan said, Sherif, you have — the Israeli military says they cannot guarantee the lives of journalists that go into Gaza. In early November — I’m just thinking back to a few weeks ago — the Palestine News Agency reported that their journalist Mohammad Abu Hattab was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza Strip along with 11 members of his family, including his wife, son and brother. His colleague, journalist Salman Al-Bashir, burst into tears during a live broadcast upon learning of Abu Hattab’s killing. As he spoke, Al-Bashir tore off his helmet and protective vest, labeled “press,” and threw them to the ground. And then there was a split screen, as he ripped off his gear, saying, “Why do we bother wearing this if we’re going to be killed anyway?” They showed the anchor back in the Palestine news studio as she wept as Al-Bashir tore off his helmet and protective vest. Your response to this situation and this whole issue of embedded journalism is the only way the U.S. media can get those reports inside Gaza, where their news reports are reviewed, and the Gazan journalists on the ground being killed one after another, dozens of Palestinian journalists killed?

SHERIF MANSOUR: Well, the Israeli army cannot escape or evade their responsibility under international law not to use unwarranted lethal force against journalists and against media facilities. It would constitute a possible war crime to do so. We have raised directly with Israeli officials the need for them to reform the rules of engagement, to respect press insignia and to ensure there are safeguards, checks when civilians and journalists are around. We have called for Israeli allies, including the U.S. government, European allies, to raise directly these issues, and publicly, with their Israeli counterparts. And we have called for the U.N. Security Council to include safety of journalists on the agenda in any diplomatic discussion.

Of course, the Israeli government are obliged under international law to protect journalists as civilians, but it’s also journalists’ vital role in time of war providing accurate, timely, independent information that gives them these protections under international law. And we want to make sure that the Israeli army, as well, do not continue to push false narratives and smear campaigns to try and justify the killing of those journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Sherif Mansour, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, speaking to us from Philadelphia.

Coming up, the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha has been detained at an Israeli checkpoint in Gaza, his whereabouts now unknown. Back in 20 seconds.

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Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Freed After Being Abducted in Gaza & Beaten by Israeli Forces in Jail
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/21 ... transcript

Transcript

Israeli troops detained and reportedly beat the acclaimed Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha after he was stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint Sunday while heading toward the Rafah border crossing with his family in Gaza. His whereabouts had been unknown until today, when news emerged that he had been released. According to the Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu, Abu Toha was taken to an Israeli prison in the Naqab, where he was interrogated and beaten along with more than 200 other Palestinians who remain in detention. We play excerpts from Abu Toha’s recent appearance on Democracy Now! and speak to Buttu, who says, “Mosab’s story is like that of so many Palestinians in Gaza.”

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

Calls all growing across the globe for Israel to immediately release the acclaimed Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha, who was detained at an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza this weekend while heading toward the Rafah border crossing with his family. His whereabouts are unknown.

His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Progressive and other publications. He founded the Edward Said Library in Gaza. His first book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The poetry collection was published by City Lights Books.

In a recent essay in The New Yorker magazine, Abu Toha wrote, “I sit in my temporary house in the Jabalia camp, waiting for a ceasefire. I feel like I am in a cage. I’m being killed every day with my people. The only two things I can do are panic and breathe. There is no hope here,” he wrote.

Mosab Abu Toha appeared on Democracy Now! a few weeks ago.

MOSAB ABU TOHA: I mean, where do we immigrate? We have been — we were born on this land. My parents were born on this land. My grandparents were born on this land. My great-grandparents were born here. But if you ask anyone in Israel, most of them would tell you that their grandparents were born somewhere else. And even I only have a Palestinian passport, which is really not very helpful when I leave Gaza — if I could leave Gaza. … So, where do we go? And Netanyahu, on the second day of the escalation, asked the Palestinians in Gaza to leave. He said, “Leave now.” But where do we leave, and why should we leave? We have nowhere else to go.

AMY GOODMAN: Those the words of the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha on Democracy Now! in October. His whereabouts are now unknown, after he was taken by Israeli forces at a checkpoint in Gaza.

We’re joined now by Diana Buttu. She is a Palestinian lawyer, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, broke the news of Mosab Abu Toha’s kidnapping. She joins us now from Haifa.

Diana, can you talk about what you understand has happened to him?

DIANA BUTTU: Mosab’s story is like that of so many Palestinians in Gaza. He was seeking refuge in the Jabaliya refugee camp. His own home was bombed and shattered to pieces. While he was in Jabaliya refugee camp, the Israelis perpetrated a massacre in Jabaliya, which was 70 meters away from where he was. He twice escaped death.

And his son is an American-born citizen. They, along with the rest of the family, finally got clearance to be able to leave Rafah to go elsewhere. And as they were fleeing from the heavily bombed north of — northern part of the Gaza Strip, they were forced to go through a checkpoint, what was supposed to be a safe passage, on Salah al-Din Road, which is the road that leads from the north to the south. At that checkpoint, at that military area, he, along with hundreds of other people, were forced to raise their hands. He was forced to put his son down on the ground, his young son, 3 years old, raise his hands in the air. And he and hundreds of others, men and women — this has been confirmed by his wife — were then abducted. They weren’t arrested; they were abducted, kidnapped by the Israeli army, with everybody else told to continue on.

His family is not in Rafah. They are still trying to get to the south. It is near impossible to get to the south. And his family still has not heard from him. They have no idea of his whereabouts. We’ve checked everywhere with the ICRC, with representatives of Congress, with the State Department, and nobody has been able to provide us with even the simplest of answers in terms of where he is, why he’s been abducted, what conditions he’s being held under, and when it is that he will be released. And this is why so many are pushing and demanding not only for Mosab’s release, but for the release of the hundreds of Palestinians that Israel has abducted over the course of the past seven weeks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering — you’ve commented in the past on the extent to which Israel has been disseminating false information about the war. Could you elaborate on what’s been the effects of that?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, the effect has been that we now see that commercial media are looking and examining the tiny little minutia of disinformation that Israel is putting out, but they seem to ignore the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that Israel is bombing a 2.2 million-populated refugee camp. Half of them are children.

And we just keep hearing one piece of disinformation after another. We’ve heard them talk about the legality of bombing hospitals, when anybody who has any sense of morality or notion of what’s legal, what’s right, knows that you can’t bomb a hospital. And yet, rather than questioning that, we’ve seen instead that commercial media have been going down the path of simply accepting these truths.

We see this also when it’s come to Mosab, that there’s somehow an allegation that he has done something wrong, rather than people recognizing that this has been a pattern that Israel has been carrying out now for quite some time, for the past seven weeks. It’s been going into Gaza. It’s been abducting people, and without anybody knowing where their whereabouts are. We’ve seen this happen with Palestinian workers who happened — who had permits to be inside Israel, who were then not only abducted, but beaten, with their torture broadcast and put up on TikTok and on Instagram, and, of course, nobody even questioning the legality, the morality of doing any of those sorts of things.

So, the problem has been that they’ve gone down the path of somehow accepting the disinformation rather than questioning it and rather than questioning this big picture of the legality of Israel bombing a large refugee camp. The only reason that they’re refugees is because Israel made them into refugees in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain more about how you’re trying to get information and attention to Mosab’s case right now? I mean, word is that Israel and Hamas are close to a hostage release agreement. Does this fit into that? Why is it so difficult to deal with Israel and Palestine right now? How are you able to communicate with both?

DIANA BUTTU: In terms of communication, communication is near impossible. And it’s near impossible because the Israelis, a little over two weeks ago, imposed a blackout on telecommunications inside the Gaza Strip. And not only was there a blackout imposed, but it’s also been impossible for roaming to be working. So, of the times that I’m able to reach friends, very dear friends, who are in the Gaza Strip, it usually takes about the entire day to reach one or two friends. Communication is near impossible.

And so, in terms of getting the story of Mosab out, it’s been really just trying to connect with his family, particularly his wife, getting information, and then trying to spread it as wide as possible to friends who — people who know him, who have worked with him, his publisher, the people who have published him in the past, not just his book publisher but others, and trying to get that information going, so that people recognize that it isn’t just the story of Mosab, but it’s the story of thousands of other Palestinians, as well, and, indeed, millions of Palestinians who are now trapped inside the Gaza Strip. It has become near impossible, Amy, to reach people in Gaza, and it’s become near impossible for them to even be able to reach the most basic things, like to contact an ambulance once there is an Israeli bomb, to be able to contact people to remove the rubble, to be able to get to the hospital. All of this has been done under the cover of darkness, and the fact — and yet, at the same time, we’re watching this live. And the fact that nobody is doing anything about it speaks volumes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to Mosab Abu Toha speaking on Democracy Now! just a few weeks ago.

MOSAB ABU TOHA: Last night, my son, who is 3 years old, was sleeping, and there was bad bombing in the area. And he woke up, and he said, “Who did that?” And he said, “Let it stop.” I mean, that was the first time he was asking me to do that, as if I was responsible for the bombing. So, I have nothing to do as a father. I have nothing to do as a neighbor or as a son. We are helpless here. We have been helpless all our lives, while the United States, unfortunately, is always stepping in to support Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: The words of the Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha, speaking on Democracy Now! a few weeks ago. To see the whole interview, go to democracynow.org. I also want to thank Diana Buttu, Palestinian lawyer, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, speaking to us from Haifa.

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Becca Balint, First Jewish Congressmember to Back Ceasefire, Expresses Support for Rashida Tlaib
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 21, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/21 ... transcript

Transcript

Dozens of members of Congress are now calling for a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities in Israel and occupied Palestine. We speak to Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of Vermont, the first Jewish member of Congress to join these calls. “The horrific violence has to stop. Hostages must be released. We have to end the suffering in Gaza. Palestinians and Israelis both deserve safety and security. And now more than ever, I believe that we need a true, negotiated ceasefire to get to a two-state solution,” Balint says of her position. We also discuss her friendship with fellow Democratic congressmember and the only Palestinian American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib.

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

We turn now to the growing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza coming from lawmakers in Washington. On Monday, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon became the second senator to demand a ceasefire, joining Dick Durbin of Illinois. According to one count, 42 members of Congress have now called for a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities in Israel and occupied Palestine.

We’re joined now by Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of Vermont. Last week she became the first Jewish member of Congress to call for a ceasefire.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Congressmember Balint. Thanks so much for joining us. Talk about why you’ve made this decision. You’re senator from Vermont. Bernie Sanders is not there yet, but you are. Talk about why.

REP. BECCA BALINT: So, I want to be really clear, Amy, with folks who are listening and watching, that I wrote the op-ed to express to Vermonters — it was really geared towards my constituents, and I should have anticipated that it might get national attention, but I actually didn’t. So, I wrote it for Vermonters, and what I wanted to do was really give voice to all the things that I had been feeling and thinking and wrestling with since the beginning of October, and wanted to articulate clearly for Vermonters what I thought needed to happen, so, you know, wanted to just lay it out there: The horrific violence has to stop. Hostages must be released. We have to end the suffering in Gaza. Palestinians and Israelis both deserve safety and security. And now more than ever, I believe that we need a true, negotiated ceasefire to get to a two-state solution.

And as you mentioned, both my senators here in Vermont have not yet made the call. But I know, in my conversations with them, that we actually want the same things. Where we differ is just in the strategy that is needed to get us there. But we all want to find a way to stop the violence, to stop the bombing. We don’t want to continue to see innocent civilians, including so many children and babies, die. And I just felt that it was really important for me to articulate clearly for Vermonters all of the complexity I was holding. And I honestly — when we released the op-ed, I was very focused on how my constituents would feel about what I said, and I didn’t anticipate that I was the first Jewish member of Congress to call specifically for a negotiated ceasefire, because I know we’ve been saying a lot of the same things for weeks. So, what I do know is there are no exact words right now that will sum up the totality of what we are all thinking and feeling about this situation, but I do know that we have complete agreement on an immediate cessation of hostilities, pausing the violence, ending the suffering, and trying to get to a negotiated ceasefire that will hold.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Representative, you’ve said that you and Representative Rashida Tlaib have been brought together by your people’s suffering and are now friends. Could you talk about the vitriol directed toward her as the only —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — Palestinian congresswoman?

REP. BECCA BALINT: Yes. I really appreciate the question. It’s disgusting. The Islamophobia right now is completely and totally out of control. And I was disgusted by the fact that colleagues are trying to go after the one Palestinian American member of Congress.

And as I said, you know, Rashida and I became friends early on in my tenure. We were brought together, I think, by — we both have big hearts. And she’s known a little bit like a mama bear in the caucus. She is very loving and gentle towards, you know, specifically new members, like making sure we have what we needed. I was really drawn to her because we are, as I said, two people that have people within our family that have endured suffering over a very long time. We are both parents to teenagers, and we share the struggles of that.

And actually, I don’t think it’s betraying a trust to say, you know, she sent me a message last week saying what she hopes is that in the future she and I will be able to walk together in a true democratic Palestine and in Israel, both of us together as friends, as people who understand the horrific suffering that is going on right now.

And I have really tried to use my platform, and will continue to do so, to stand up against the Islamophobia, and also the antisemitism. And we’ve discussed this, as well, that you can be critical of Israel, and you should be critical of Israel and Netanyahu and the policies — and I’ve never shied away from that — and I also am very uncomfortable in this moment by some of the outrageous antisemitism hurled at Jewish members of Congress, specifically progressive Jewish members of Congress who are trying to do the right thing in figuring out the correct strategy going forward. But, you know, Rashida will always be what I call one of my heart people.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on the day after Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House of Representatives, we brought on Marione Ingram, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, protesting outside the White House, calling for a ceasefire, and she condemned the censure —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: — of your colleague, [Representative] Tlaib.

I want to thank you very much, Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of Vermont. She is the first openly LGBTQ member to represent Vermont in Congress, the first congresswoman to represent Vermont, and now the first Jewish member of Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We’ll link to her op-ed in the VTDigger headlined “Cease-fire needed to stop bloodshed in Israel-Hamas conflict.”

Coming up, we go to Argentina, where the far-right political outsider Javier Milei has been elected president. He’s called “the Trump of Argentina.” The first to congratulate him was President Trump and the former Brazilian President Bolsonaro. Back in 20 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “En el país de la libertad,” “In a Country of Liberty,” by the Argentine León Gieco, who signed a letter protesting Milei’s erasure of the horrors of Argentina’s 1976 to 1983 right-wing dictatorship that killed over 30,000 Argentinians.

[admin]

DemocracyNow! Headlines
November 22, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2023/11/22

Israel Continues Deadly Attacks as 4-Day Truce Announced, Gaza Death Toll Tops 14,100
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day pause in fighting and to exchange 50 hostages held in Gaza for 150 Palestinian women and children in Israeli prisons. The short-term truce will also allow for the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The deal was mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the U.S. The temporary truce will start Thursday at 10 a.m. local time. The death toll in Gaza has topped 14,100 people after nearly seven weeks of nonstop Israeli attacks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it does not mean Israel will end its war on Gaza, as it continued its deadly attacks on the besieged territory, including in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. This man lost 15 members of his family, including children, in an Israeli airstrike earlier today in a residential area of Khan Younis.

Kamal Kalouseh: “This ceasefire deal won’t bring safety from Israelis. They may betray it. They may not continue with it. If there is no real ceasefire deal that ends this, it is not worthy.”

Reporter: “Aren’t you optimistic?”

Kamal Kalouseh: “No, no, I am not optimistic, but I am apprehensive that the attacks will be fiercer than before the ceasefire.”

We’ll have more on the truce deal after headlines. Separately, an Israeli drone strike killed at least five Palestinians in the Tulkarm camp in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian officials say Israeli forces also raided the emergency department of the Thabet Thabet Hospital in Tulkarm.

***

Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital Under Siege; WHO Mourns Employee Killed with Family in Israeli Strike
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

Israel’s assault on Gaza’s health system continues. At least 100 Palestinians were killed overnight and this morning in attacks around hospitals and refugee camps. Israeli forces have encircled the Indonesian Hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip and have ordered staff to evacuate. There are still hundreds of patients inside, including 50 in critical condition. The head of the Indonesian Hospital, Sarbini Abdul Murad, wrote an open letter to President Biden urging him to listen to his conscience and respect international norms. Murad writes, “You have destroyed the international rules of the game, insulted the authority of the UN, torn apart the sense of justice, and hurt human values, and tarnished the face of human civilization.” Israeli shelling has killed at least 12 people in the Indonesian Hospital.

The World Health Organization says it is struggling to evacuate hospitals in the north.

Christian Lindmeier: “Over 30% of the deaths and injuries are in the south of Gaza, in the so-called safe area. Over 30% of the deaths are in the south of Gaza. Then came the bombing and the attacks of the hospitals, and now no more hospital is functioning in the north. Colleagues from MSF have been reporting that they were attacked, too, one of the last resorts there. So, taking away healthcare of people is taking away the last resort, is taking away the last piece of humanity. And that’s what’s happening right now.”

The WHO announced one of the agency’s staff members was killed when Israel bombed her parents’ house in southern Gaza. Dima Alhaj was among more than 50 people killed in the strike, including her 6-month-old baby, her husband and two brothers.

***

Three Doctors, Including Members of MSF, Killed in Strike on Al-Awda Hospital
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

Doctors Without Borders said two of its doctors were killed in an Israeli strike on the Al-Awda Hospital. Doctors Mahmoud Abu Nujaila and Ahmad Al Sahar were killed alongside their colleague Dr. Ziad Al-Tatari. Doctors Without Borders said it has repeatedly told Israel it is a functioning hospital, and shared its GPS coordinates with Israeli authorities one day before the deadly attack. There are still some 200 patients at Al-Awda.

***

Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha and Family Released After Abduction by IDF
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

The Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha has been released, following his abduction by Israeli soldiers while trying to leave the Gaza Strip with his family. Abu Toha had been heading to the southern Rafah border crossing when he was seized by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. He is said to be receiving medical treatment after being beaten by Israeli soldiers.

***

BRICS Leaders Call for “Durable Truce”; South African Lawmakers Vote to Suspend Ties with Israel
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

Leaders at a virtual summit of BRICS nations called Tuesday for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” in Gaza and the release of all captive civilians. The original BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — were joined by the coalition’s newest members — Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran — at Tuesday’s high-level meeting. In contrast to the U.S. and many European nations, the majority of BRICS countries, including China and Russia, have called for a ceasefire. The summit’s host, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, forcefully condemned Israel’s assault on Gaza.

President Cyril Ramaphosa: “The collective punishment of Palestinian civilians through the unlawful use of force by Israel is a war crime. The deliberate denial of medicine, fuel, food and water to the residents of Gaza is tantamount to genocide.”

South Africa’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to suspend diplomatic ties with Israel and close its embassy in Pretoria until a ceasefire is reached. Such actions, however, will ultimately be up to President Ramaphosa.

***

Ro Khanna Joins Congressional Call for Gaza Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

California Congressmember Ro Khanna has become the 43rd Democratic lawmaker to call for a ceasefire. Activists and Khanna’s constituents have been pressuring the powerful lawmaker to sign onto a House ceasefire resolution, including occupying his office last month.

In related news, the Detroit City Council on Tuesday became the largest U.S. city to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire. Polls show some two-thirds of Americans support a ceasefire.

***

Activists Protest at Missouri Boeing Plant; UTA Drops Susan Sarandon for Calling for Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023

In Missouri, protesters rallied at the gates of a Boeing manufacturing plant near St. Louis Tuesday, demanding an end to the use of U.S.-made weapons in the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Protesters say the factory produces Joint Direct Attack Munitions and GBU-39 small-diameter bombs supplied to Israel’s Air Force.

In Hollywood, the United Talent Agency has stopped representing Oscar winner Susan Sarandon after she spoke at a rally in New York City last week, where she called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Sarandon has been active at antiwar protests to demand the protection of Palestinian lives.

Susan Sarandon: “You don’t have to be Palestinian to stand with the Palestinian people. You do not have to be Palestinian to understand that the slaughter of almost 5,000 children is unacceptable and a war crime.”

****************

Israel & Hamas Agree to 4-Day Truce & Hostage Release as Netanyahu Threatens War on Gaza Will Go On
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/22/hostages

Transcript

Under the terms of a new hostage deal, Hamas will release 50 hostages who were captured in its October 7 attack in exchange for Israel releasing 150 Palestinian women and teenagers held in Israeli prison and agreeing to a four-day pause in fighting to exchange captives and bring urgently needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. The four-day pause could be extended if Hamas continues to release hostages, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Israel would continue its 47-day bombardment of Gaza that has killed 14,000 Palestinians. “This is a rare glimmer of hope,” says former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, who explains how this deal will shape Israeli politics and Netanyahu’s prospects moving forward. “The morning after this, he faces the music.”

AMY GOODMAN: Israel is continuing to attack Gaza ahead of the start of a four-day pause in fighting. Al Jazeera reports at least a hundred Palestinians were killed overnight in Gaza. The death toll from Israel’s 47-day bombardment has now topped 14,000.

As part of the truce deal, Hamas has agreed to initially release 50 hostages in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons. The four-day pause could be extended if Hamas agrees to keep releasing 10 hostages a day. Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza are believed to be holding about 240 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel.

According to the Palestinian group Addameer, Israel is now holding about 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners. That’s up from 5,000 before October 7th. More than 2,000 of the jailed Palestinians are being held indefinitely without charge. Palestinian news outlets have reported six Palestinians who were being detained without charge have died in recent weeks.

In Gaza, some residents welcomed the news of the four-day pause to the Israeli bombing.

ABU JIHAD ABU SHAMIEH: [translated] We hope this ceasefire will be good. We have been waiting for this ceasefire. We have been hoping for it. We pray for peace for all people so we can be done with all these challenges we are facing. We have been fleeing from one place to another. We hope the ceasefire will be good and that we will see positive solutions from this. We pray for ceasefire. We pray for people to live in peace so they can go back to their jobs and houses to have stability.

AMY GOODMAN: In Israel, families of the hostages called on the Israeli government to secure the release of everyone seized on October 7th. This is Nir Shani, whose 16-year-old son Amit is being held hostage in Gaza.

NIR SHANI: Any person will be released is good, is important. Eventually, we need them all. But if it had to be slice by slice, so be it. … We need to establish this release. The best thing is that everybody will be released at the same time, but, as I said, some can stay in that situation for a bit longer, and some will not be able to hold on, so we have to start doing the deals and get them back to us.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Daniel Levy, the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He served as an Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. His piece for The New York Times earlier this month was headlined “The Road Back from Hell.”

We’re going to get to that in a moment, Daniel. Thanks so much for joining us again. But we want to start off with this deal that has been reached. We know a good deal about the horrific story of the hostages who are being held, that Hamas is holding or other groups in Gaza, about 240 of them. We know less about the Palestinian prisoners, the women and children. It’s going to be three to one. They will release 150 Palestinian prisoners for 50 hostage. Can you tell us about these people who are in prison? We don’t know specifically, though the Israeli government is releasing their names. But who is held in Palestinian jails? Who are these women and children?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, I think, Amy, that, first of all, let’s acknowledge this is a rare glimmer of hope. It will be very good to see those Israelis who will be coming home. It will be so important to have those four or five days without bombardment, without civilian losses in Gaza. It would be horrendous if we then return to where we have been in these past 40-plus terrible days. And [inaudible] to see those women and children coming out. I can’t speak to the names. We don’t know the names.

You mentioned the Palestinian organization Addameer. I suggest people look up that organization, which advocates on behalf of Palestinian prisoners. By the way, last government in Israel, the government of Bennett, Lapid, Gantz, super-extremists, as we’ve come to know the Netanyahu government, that organization was one of six Palestinian NGOs that was deemed criminal, terrorist by the Israeli [inaudible].

Israel has different ways of trying and convicting, or not convicting, Palestinians that it then holds in its prisons. The issue of child detention is something that Defense of the Child International has particularly drawn attention to, the number of children who end up in Israeli prisons, who go through military trials. Israel uses military courts. Women are part of the resistance, part of the struggle. Some Palestinians who [inaudible] are part of that struggle. Others are there on spurious accusations. And then Israel has a system of administrative detention, where it will hold people without trial. It will say — the security establishment will say to the courts, “This is too sensitive,” about [inaudible] information. And people can be held indefinitely under administrative detention. So, that’s the ways in which they are held.

As we’ve heard, more than 2,000 have been arrested — I think maybe two-and-a-half thousand — in the West Bank since the start, since October 7. So, we’re going to get some of those out now, the women and children. And I imagine if there are going to be further prisoner releases — if there are going to be further releases from Gaza, you will have exchanges of prisoners, of those Palestinians being held in [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel, we’re going to break and come back to you. We’re going to try to call you on the phone to get a better sound from your system. Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator with the Palestinians at Taba under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and at Oslo B under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll be linking with him in a moment.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “We Rise” by Batya Levine, sung at many of the Jewish resistance protests calling for a ceasefire now. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator with the Palestinians. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes. Daniel, I wanted to ask you about the — just announced in the last few hours, this temporary — this truce. In an interview with The Guardian recently, you said, quote, “My sense is that the Israelis are always trying to get another day, and another day, and another day of operations before agreeing to a deal.” Because we’ve heard now of this potential truce now for two weeks, and each day we kept hearing that it was imminent, that it was imminent. But what has Israel been able to do during that time, while it finally reached and officially declared?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, Juan, unfortunately, the answer to that question is an awful lot of additional damage, civilian loss, children being killed. We’ve seen the devastation in hospitals in Gaza.

Now, I think the Israeli government was probably each day hoping it would buy the lottery ticket and capture one of the Hamas leaders, kill one of the Hamas leaders. The names Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are the ones that spring to mind.

And — and I think this is crucial — why have they held out so long? I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu and the leadership understood that once you go into this new phase, where you’ve agreed an initial prisoner release, a few things happen. Some new dynamics come into play. On the Israeli side, internally, in the public debate inside Israel, people see that you can get people out through a negotiated deal. And I think Netanyahu is worried that that will increase the pressure on him to do further deals, to make these arrangements whereby you end the military assault. And he hasn’t wanted that because they haven’t achieved their military objectives, which are unachievable, by the way, and because he knows that the morning after this, he faces the music, and he is likely to be toast politically.

But, you know, other things will happen as a consequence of this. For instance, we may see more Western media using this lull to show us more of the devastation inside Gaza. In fact, there’s a report in Politico which says some in the administration are worried what these images may do to public opinion even more. So there’s real concern, I think, on the Israeli side that this sets in motion a dynamic which could end a war which they want to continue.

And I would say that the families have done so much of the heavy lifting inside Israel in changing the public debate and getting us to this point. I don’t think so much should be placed on their shoulders.

I think now — belatedly, because it should have happened long ago — is the time for the U.S. administration and others to step up and to desist from their opposition to a ceasefire, because it would be so cruel if after this we see a return of the kinds of assaults and bombings and losses on the Palestinian side in Gaza. And, unfortunately, in their statements that they put out recognizing this initial deal, neither President Biden nor Secretary Blinken did that, and they still actually fail to talk about Palestinian lives with empathy and to accord those lives humanity and dignity, which is such a sad thing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you just said that you thought that the goals of Netanyahu are unachievable. Why is that?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, he has talked and talked about the elimination of Hamas. That is not a militarily achievable objective, in my mind. Hamas is a movement that has withstood this pressure, so I think there will still be — it may be somewhat residual, but a Hamas fighting capacity. But Hamas is a political movement. Hamas is an idea. I don’t want to lionize that, but I think we have to recognize that when people are met with a system of structural violence, they resist. That resistance may be in the form of Hamas. That resistance may be in the form of other armed groups. By the way, that resistance may be in the form of calling for boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel. That resistance may be in the form of pursuing legal claims in international courts and elsewhere. If you close all of those avenues, then you’re much more likely to get the kind of outburst of violence and even the scenes which were horrific on October 7th. But Hamas will still be there the morning after. And groups like Hamas will still be there as long as the occupation and the system of denial of Palestinian rights is in place. There’s no military solution.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we reported yesterday on Mosab Abu Toha, well-known writer and poet — right? — who was taken for four days. Apparently, he was taken with about 200 people. Now, there was such an outcry in the United States, The New Yorker magazine, The Atlantic demanding his release. No one knew what had happened to him, the U.S. — sorry, the Israeli forces taking him at a checkpoint, that he was released. But when you have examples like that, I mean, the other 199, or however many were taken, did they then become part of the Palestinian political prisoners who then Israel can use to release in exchange for Hamas prisoners, not to mention how many hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested on the West Bank in the last few weeks? They haven’t been tried, have they?

DANIEL LEVY: Some have, and some haven’t, Amy. You’ve got some being held under what’s called administrative detention, which is basically detention without trial. I mean, my takeaway from that, amongst other things, Amy, is — let’s whisper it — pressure works. OK? So, if pressure can be built to get one person out, can it be built to get more out? Can it be built to end what’s going on in Gaza?

Now, you asked about the future prisoner releases. And that is why I think we need to understand that the overwhelming likelihood, as terrible as this is, is that at the end of this round of the agreement reached, Netanyahu has committed himself to resuming the military assault. By the way, in the statement he released, the first thing he talked about was not we’re getting our people home, it was his commitment: “I am going to continue this war.” That’s the first sentence. That’s the intention. And that’s why there needs to be maximum pressure exerted to build on this, because also let’s just think about the dynamics and the geography in play here. The Palestinian population has been displaced from the north of Gaza to the south. Israel now says that it intends to move from north to south. You have more people in a smaller area. Can anyone in good conscience make the claim that, going forward, there will be a reduction in Palestinian civilian casualties, in dead children? So, if the administration continues to refuse to call for a ceasefire, it is complicit.

Now, those future agreements, which I think are still the offramp to getting a ceasefire, will involve further prisoner releases. And so, the answer to your question, Amy, is that just as we have seen women and children being released now, hopefully in the coming days, from being held in Israel and being released from Israeli prisons, in the future there will be further deals, and Hamas is not going to drive a soft bargain. Hamas has this leverage by holding these Israelis. It intends to use that leverage. When it comes to the soldiers it is holding, I imagine the release that they demand from Israeli prisons will be very significant indeed.

And there’s a proper debate inside Israel. And thankfully, you have courageous families who are getting up in the parliament, shouting at the right-wing ministers, standing outside the Ministry of Defense, standing outside the Prime Minister’s Office, meeting with the leaders, saying, “Save lives. Don’t end more lives. Prioritize” — and this is going to be the debate, whether they prioritize the release of the Israelis, and therefore, that means we’re going to a ceasefire, and we’re going to see Palestinians released, or they prioritize prosecuting their war.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the Netanyahu government and — the public opinion polls are showing that Netanyahu’s popularity is at an all-time low even in the midst of this war, far, far less, for instance, to the popularity of President Biden here in the United States. Is it your sense that regardless of what happens, that Netanyahu’s — with this war, that Netanyahu’s political career is coming to an end?

DANIEL LEVY: From your lips, Juan. It’s a risky thing to speculate on, because he’s such a political survivor. But I do think, this time around, the path to staying on in power for Netanyahu is almost, almost unimaginable. He is so unpopular. I think even some of the reservists who are fighting in Gaza are chomping at the bit to finish, so that they can demonstrate outside his office to get him out.

And here is the question that will follow in the coming days: Does even this pause begin to reignite politics inside Israel? Do we have to wait ’til the end of the war in order for Netanyahu to be replaced? There are open splits now, increasingly visible, inside the government. One of the most hard-right, openly racist and worst factions voted against the deal. Another intended to vote against the deal but pulled back at the last minute. We are likely to see some of the next five days, a lot of it will be filled with life-affirming images inside the Israeli media of Israelis coming home, but some of it will be now talk of what next. The opposition leader has called for Netanyahu to be replaced.

So I think we’re in a zone where that begins to come into view. But, to be honest, the most important thing is to get the ceasefire, and the politics can come when it comes. If we need to get rid of Netanyahu to get the ceasefire, then, of course, that order switches.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we thank you for being with us, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator with Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll link to your recent New York Times op-ed, “The Road Back from Hell.”

Coming up, we speak with an Israeli history teacher who was jailed for four days and held in solitary confinement after criticizing the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. Back in 20 seconds.

***

Meet the Israeli History Teacher Arrested & Jailed for Facebook Posts Opposing Killing of Palestinians
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/22/meir_baruchin

Transcript

On November 9, Israeli police arrested Jerusalem history and civics teacher Meir Baruchin after he posted a message on Facebook about his opposition to the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. Police seized his phone and two laptops before interrogating him on suspicion of committing an act of treason and intending to disrupt public order. After being in jail for four days, Baruchin was freed but lost his job as a teacher and is still facing charges. “These days Israeli citizens who are showing the slightest sentiment for the people of Gaza, opposing killing of innocent civilians, they are being politically persecuted, they go through public shaming, they lose their jobs, they are being put in jail,” says Baruchin, who says if he had been Palestinian, he would have faced more violence.

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

We turn now to look at how the Israeli government is cracking down on Israeli citizens who criticize their government’s bombardment of Gaza. We’re joined now by Meir Baruchin, a history and civics teacher from Jerusalem who was recently jailed for four days in solitary confinement after he posted a message on Facebook about his opposition to the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, especially women and children.

On November 9th, Israeli police ransacked his house and arrested him. They also seized his phone and two laptops. Police interrogated him on suspicion of committing an act of treason and intending to disrupt public order. He was then jailed for four days and labeled a high-risk detainee. Baruchin has since been freed, but he has lost his job as a teacher and is still facing charges. Despite this, Meir Baruchin has refused to stay silent and is joining us now from Jerusalem.

Meir, welcome to Democracy Now! It was hard for us to get in touch with you over the last few days because your electronic devices, like your phone, were taken. Can you talk about exactly what happened to you? What did you post? And then, how did the Israeli police come to ransack your house?

MEIR BARUCHIN: First of all, thanks for having me.

When I got to the first interrogation, the interrogators presented 14 posts, most of them before October 7th. There were posts from four years ago, from two years ago. Only one or two posts were after October 7th.

What I’m trying to do in my Facebook posts is this. For most Israelis, Palestinians are really vague images. They have no names, no faces, no family, no hope, no plans. And I’m trying to give them names and faces, introduce them to Israelis, so more Israelis would be able to see Palestinians as human beings. So, that’s what I do in my Facebook. The police didn’t like it, so they arrested me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when you were arrested, what was the substance of the interrogation against you during that time? And how were you treated?

MEIR BARUCHIN: On November 9th, I got a call from the police to come over for interrogation on sedition. I called my lawyer, and he said that in order to interrogate an Israeli citizen for sedition, they need an approval from the general attorney. The police did ask for approval but was rejected, so they decided to interrogate me for intention to commit an act of treason and disrupt public order.

The minute I walked into the police station, they shackled my hands and legs, and they showed me a warrant to search my house. Five detectives took me to my house and ransacked the place. Then I was taken back to the police station for the first interrogation, that lasted four hours. After that, I was taken to the jailhouse. Like you said, I was categorized high-risk detainee, separated from everyone. I wasn’t allowed to bring anything with me, a book or something. I spent there four days. In order not to go crazy, I exercised every hour and a half, two hours.

On Sunday evening, November 12th, they took me for a second interrogation. And their technique was — it wasn’t really asking questions. It was more of a rhetoric. When you install the answer inside the question, you don’t really let the other person choose his own answer. For example, they said something like, “As someone who justifies and legitimizes the rapes by Hamas people on October 7th, don’t you think that…” — you know, that was their technique. Also in my second interrogation, at a certain moment they said that my Facebook posts are just like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now, I’m history teacher, so I asked them, “Did you ever read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” There was no comment.

I was taken back to the jailhouse. And on November 13th, I was released by the judge, and still they kept me in the jailhouse for another three-and-a-half hours.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what has been the response of fellow teachers in Israel and of the press to your arrest and detention?

MEIR BARUCHIN: Most of mainstream media embrace the statement of the police spokesman who accused me as justifying and legitimizing the rapes committed by Hamas people on October 7th.

As for my colleague teachers, hundreds of them are telling me, “Meir, I am fully behind you, but I have children to support,” “Meir, I’m with you, but I’m paying a mortgage,” “Meir, I’m with you, but my daughter is getting married,” “Meir, I’m with you, but we just started to redecorate the house.” They are afraid to speak up. They are afraid to lose their jobs. They see very clearly that these days Israeli citizens who are showing some — the slightest sentiment for the people of Gaza, opposing killing of innocent civilians, they are being politically persecuted, they go through public shaming, they lose their jobs, they are being put in jail. So they are afraid.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, published an editorial headlined “Arresting Arabs and Left-wingers: How Israel Intends to Crack Down on Domestic Dissent Over Gaza War.” In it, Haaretz wrote about your case, saying, quote, “Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence — silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy. Baruchin paid a personal price.” So, Meir, if you can talk about the fact that you were fired from your job? You have four children, right? And also, how unusual is your arrest and being put in solitary confinement, both for Israeli Jews and for Palestinians?

MEIR BARUCHIN: Well, first, I must admit that the fact that I’m Jewish played a key role in my arrest. Had I been Palestinian, it was completely different. There would have been much more violence from the police officers and also in the jailhouse by the wardens.

I think it’s a clear message for not only to the teachers, but to all Israeli citizens. One of the newspaper men from Yedioth Ahronoth, Ben-Dror Yemini, he called me a “soldier in the service of terrorist propaganda,” in those specific words. Other newspaper — other journalists also embraced the police statement without getting my response or without even trying to challenge the police statement.

AMY GOODMAN: They took your phone and also your computer?

MEIR BARUCHIN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten it back?

MEIR BARUCHIN: They took my phone. They took two laptops. No, no, not yet. My lawyer is working on it. But the case is still not closed. I’m still facing charges. Also, the Ministry of Education suspended my license, so I cannot go back and teach anywhere in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you tell your kids? We just have 30 seconds, Meir.

MEIR BARUCHIN: My kids are proud of me, and that’s the most important thing.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us. Meir Baruchin is an Israeli history and civics high school teacher who was jailed for four days, held in solitary confinement, after criticizing the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. His case is still open. He could still go to trial. He’s speaking to us from Jerusalem.

***

Gaza in Ruins: Satellite Imagery Researchers Say Israel has Destroyed or Damaged 56,000 Buildings
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 22, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/22/radar

Transcript

Democracy Now! speaks with two researchers who lead the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group, a network of scientists using remote sensing to analyze and map the damage and destruction in the Gaza Strip since Israel’s attacks began on October 7. Radar technology shows that Israel’s bombing campaign has left about half of all buildings in northern Gaza damaged or destroyed since October 7, with at least 56,000 buildings in Gaza damaged overall. Doctoral researcher Corey Scher explains how researchers use open data to bring consistent, transparent assessments of the rapidly expanding damage in Gaza. “We’ve all been surprised at the speed of this,” says Jamon Van Den Hoek, lead of the Conflict Ecology lab.

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

We end today’s show looking at how Israel’s 47-day bombardment has left Gaza in ruins. Satellite images show the Israeli attacks have left about half of all buildings in northern Gaza damaged or destroyed since October 7th. Overall, researchers say at least 56,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged.

We’re joined now by two researchers who lead the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group, a network of satellite image scientists using remote sensing to analyze and map the damage and destruction in the Gaza Strip. Corey Scher is a doctoral researcher at CUNY, the CUNY Graduate Center here in New York, and Jamon Van Den Hoek is an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University, the lead of the Conflict Ecology group.

Jamon, let’s begin with you. Explain what you found in these charts, these images that you have of Gaza, where it stands today, where it stood a month ago.

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: Yeah. Thank you, Amy, for the invitation to speak with you today.

We’ve been charting damage using satellite radar technology since the start of the war across the entire Gaza Strip every five to six days. So we update our damage maps, we share them with journalists and humanitarian actors every five or six days, and we track what we identify as likely damage across the Gaza Strip.

What we’ve seen is a really steady and fast expansion of damage across especially northern Gaza. As you mentioned, North Gaza governorate and Gaza governorate, just last week, leading up to Saturday, we’re approaching 50% of buildings seeing likely damage. Now, there’s still much less damage in southern Gaza. Rafah, for example, is maybe somewhere between 5 and 8%. But as your earlier guests were saying, we’re expecting that to increase as the war continues.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And have you ever seen this scale of damage and destruction at such a rapid pace in any conflict in other parts of the world?

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: It’s difficult to say. We haven’t yet used the same approach to measure, say, the rate of damage across Ukrainian cities or Syrian cities or Yemeni cities. But I think we’ve all been surprised at the speed of this. And part of that is just how compact Gaza is. If you look at the rate of progress of damage on our maps, it’s just filling up the map of Gaza, especially in the north. And that’s been consistently surprising to us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Corey Scher into the conversation. Corey, how does open access to these satellite images help understand and compare the impact of conflicts?

COREY SCHER: Thanks, Juan, for the question.

Open data helps us to maintain a consistent delivery of damage assessments. Whereas it’s been a big issue for journalists and humanitarian organizations acquiring very high-resolution satellite data from private companies, we don’t face those issues, because our work focuses on leveraging science and open data to make sure that we can provide a consistency and quality of this type of assessment across the duration of, for example, what’s going on in Gaza. Open data is a cornerstone of the work that we do, because it helps us bring transparency to this in a way that can’t be interrupted.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about how rare your work is, which may surprise some people, not reliant on commercial imagery. Semafor recently reported earlier this month that key providers of satellite photographs to news organizations and other researchers had begun to restrict imagery of Gaza after a New York Times report on Israeli tank positions based on the images. Can you talk about this? In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, commercial satellite companies provided some of the most compelling images and insights into how the conflict was developing on the ground. And, of course, this has changed after Israel’s attacks and invasion of Gaza, Corey.

COREY SCHER: Thanks, Amy. Well, I can’t really comment on the politics or the policy of a specific company. All I can say is that leveraging open data, that we use, can guarantee that regardless of what’s happening in the private sector, open Earth Observation has the potential to at least give some type of insight into the impacts of conflict happening on the ground. So, I think that’s all we can really say.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk a little bit more about what the difference is between commercial images and the ones that you use?

COREY SCHER: Yeah. Thanks, Juan. So, what we’re doing is a scientific analysis of satellite radar data. So, I want you to imagine a camera flash, that you’re one of the — take a picture of something at nighttime. The camera flash leaves the camera, goes through space, bounces off the surfaces. Say you want to take a photo of me. So, the camera flash goes off my face and then illuminates my face, goes back to the sensor, and then you have recorded an image.

So, now we’re going 700 kilometers in altitude. There’s satellite radar. Similar to a camera flash, a burst of microwaves, radar waves, go down to the Earth. They illuminate a region, and then the echoes of these waves scatter back to the sensor, and we can make an image — the sensors make an image, regardless of day or night or cloud cover conditions. So this adds to the level of consistency where we can image a region. Every revisit of the satellite overpass, usually we have a good acquisition.

AMY GOODMAN: Ja—

COREY SCHER: Um —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

COREY SCHER: Yeah, thank you. Well, what we’re doing is listening for very small changes in these echoes. So, if you imagine walking into a room where there’s no furniture, you listen to the sound of your voice echoing throughout the room, remember that echo, go back later after installing a carpet or a bookshelf, and you can hear a slight change. Scientifically, our algorithms are looking for very small variations in the radar echoes that bounce off the Earth’s surface and go back to the satellite to map indicators of damage. So this is very much different than a picture, right? We’re not looking at pictures. We’re running satellite radar data through scientific algorithms we’ve spent years developing, ultimately to resolve these signals of damage.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamon Van Den Hoek, if you can explain how open access to these satellite images helps you understand and compare conflicts, like what you see in Gaza? And how are your images different from commercial imagery, and how you get it, and comparing Gaza, for example, to Mariupol in Ukraine?

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: Sure. As Corey was saying, we’re sensitive to different kinds of things than one could see if you looked at basically a bird’s-eye view of Gaza. We are sensitive to lateral damage, so damage to the walls, to the sides of buildings, structures, that you can’t see if you just look top down. That’s a key difference just between optical overhead imagery and side-looking radar imagery. That’s a bit technical, but that’s an important difference when we have ground invasion. Not everything is aerial bombardment. Not everything has a roof being destroyed.

The other aspect that Corey was touching on, as well, is — and you mentioned with the Semafor article — are those restrictions, where commercial providers, over many years of developing relationships with humanitarian actors — there’s become a dependency on using commercial imagery in the humanitarian space, as well as in journalism, to monitor conflict effects on communities, landscapes, farms, forests. That’s developed a kind of relationship with these commercial providers such that that’s basically the literacy, is using those kind of very high-resolution images, the kind you might see at, say, a Google-based map or an Apple-based map in Apple Maps, very clear, high detail. You can make out features. However, those images are usually very small-scale. They’re narrow strips of land. They’re acquired in a sort of ad hoc and sometimes inconsistent manner. If there’s cloud cover, you can’t see through the clouds. Working over a country as large as Ukraine, for example, it’s incredibly difficult to get, wall to wall, the entirety of Ukraine covered with commercial imagery in that way, not just because of the size of Ukraine, but because of all the atmospheric and weather effects that happen that obscure your view.

Radar doesn’t have those kind of limitations. And working with civilian spacecrafts — we’re working with the European space agency Copernicus Programme’s Sentinel-1 satellite, which is an amazing satellite that’s been in operations for about eight years now — we don’t have those restrictions. So, we can, in a sense, just as easily detect conditions, damage, whether it’s cloudy, whether it’s day or night. It doesn’t matter to us. We don’t need visible light do this.

And we can also, because we have open access to it, and everyone does — you and Juan can go right now to Sentinel help and download your own satellite images and do this. Anyone has access to this. So there’s a tremendous opportunity for democratization and transparency of the methods. We aren’t hiding behind any sort of commercial barrier or some bespoke algorithm where the inner workings are unclear. We’re trying to be incredibly transparent and be very direct with the limitations of what this approach offers, and sharing this with actors, journalists, humanitarian organizations, who can do other things with it than we can. We can map likely damage. We can make estimates of damaged structures. We cannot do all these other amazing things that so many people are working on on the ground, as well as through sort of remote journalism practices. So, it’s become a really much — very much a team effort, where, yes, we’re doing this analysis in an open way, but then what we generate, we share, and then it goes — it’s gone off, and people have made amazing products that have really told a kind of a narrative that we’ve never been able to imagine, really.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Van Den Hoek, have you been warned about what you’re doing? Have you been warned? I don’t hear you. Sorry. Go ahead.

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: There’s nothing — no, we have not been warned. There’s nothing illegal about what we’re doing. We’re accessing open imagery. There’s no — we have not been communicated with anybody about anything of this nature.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jamon, I’d like to ask you — you worked on a report with Amnesty International looking at the 2014 Israeli attacks on Gaza, and you also analyzed satellite imagery back then. How has the science evolved over the years?

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: It’s like night and day. Back then, we were working with also open data, but a combination of commercial imagery. This system that we’re working with now didn’t exist at that time, this radar technology that we’re using today.

Working with Amnesty International — it was also led by Forensic Architecture — we were able to combine different kinds of satellite images to monitor very specific features. So, we were able to see, say, individual trees destroyed by tanks or trucks in Rafah. But it was very localized, and it was also — Protective Edge was such a short conflict, really, very, very brief. And so, there, we just looked at kind of before and after.

That kind of before-after approach doesn’t work with a conflict that’s now — a war that’s now gone on 47 days. We’re not interested in the after. We want to know the process. We want to know the pattern of change as it’s manifest on the ground. Those concerns weren’t really there for such a short conflict, but we also didn’t really have the means to do it. And now —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 10 seconds.

JAMON VAN DEN HOEK: Thank you. Every five days, we can update this, and we just have a much better sense of grasping the dynamics of this war than, really, any other conflict that we’ve looked at.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamon Van Den Hoek, we want to thank you so much for being with us, and Corey Scher, part of the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group, a network of satellite image scientists using remote sensing to analyze and map the damage and destruction in the Gaza Strip.

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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 23, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/23/dissenters

Transcript

Hear from Craig Mokhiber, a longtime international human rights lawyer, who previously served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on why he left his post while decrying U.N. inaction over what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Mokhiber’s letter of resignation went viral last month. He spoke to Democracy Now! shortly after.

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

In this holiday special, we spend the rest of the hour with the dissenters: two top officials, Craig Mokhiber at the United Nations and Josh Paul at the State Department. They both recently resigned from their jobs to protest the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

We begin with Craig Mokhiber, 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. He recently resigned his post and accused the United Nations of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza.

In a letter addressed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, Craig Mokhiber wrote, quote, “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,” Mokhiber said.

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.

I spoke to Craig Mokhiber on November 1st, a day after he stopped working at the United Nations. I asked him to talk about why he resigned.

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: I say no more money for war! We’ve got to have a ceasefire. Wait a minute. Got a [inaudible]. No more money for war! No more money for war! No more money for killing 8,300 people in Gaza. 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.

AMY GOODMAN: International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned from his post as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

When we come back, we speak with another dissenter, Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department to protest the Biden administration’s push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst its siege on Gaza.

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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 23, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/23/dissenters_2

Transcript

We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official, about his decision to resign from his position in protest of U.S. arms sales to Israel amid its recent bombardment of Gaza. Paul tells Democracy Now!, “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.”

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

We end this special with Josh Paul. In October, he resigned from the State Department to protest the Biden administration’s push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst its siege on Gaza, calling it “shortsighted,” “destructive” and “contradictory.” Paul had served as 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 nations.

In his resignation letter, he 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,” he wrote.

I asked Josh Paul to talk about why he resigned from the State Department.

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 in October in protest of a push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst the attack on Gaza. Visit democracynow.org to see all of our coverage on Gaza and Israel.

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“The Mandates of Conscience”: Michelle Alexander on Israel, Gaza, MLK & Speaking Out in a Time of War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 24, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/24 ... _alexander

Transcript

“But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.” That was the name of a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature here in New York, where leading writers and academics came together to speak out against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Speakers included Yasmin El-Rifae of PalFest and the civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a special broadcast: “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.” That was the name of a November 1st event here in New York where leading writers and academics came together to speak out against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The event was held at the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. But it almost didn’t happen. Four other venues refused to host the gathering.

Over the next hour, we’ll hear the words of the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. He was in conversation with the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His books include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Their discussion was moderated by Michelle Alexander, the renowned civil rights attorney and author. We begin with Yasmin El-Rifae, author, writer and producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature.

YASMIN EL-RIFAE: Since 2008, PalFest has been bringing writers and artists from around the world to Palestine for a weeklong festival, staging free public events in multiple cities across Palestine. Some of you have been our guests, participants and advisers.

As we come together in this beautiful sanctuary tonight, churches, mosques, hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza are being bombed by Israel. Our PalFest colleagues, friends and partners in the West Bank are living in terror for their safety and the safety of their families. The young writers in Gaza who organized a night of poetry in the besieged strip ahead of the opening of PalFest in Ramallah last May have stopped replying to their messages. Mohammed al-Qudwa, who contributed a poem to that evening last May, is still occasionally replying to messages and posting on Instagram. With no food, water and power in Gaza and amidst constant bombardment, he writes that when his phone lights up, the internet feels like a miracle. Some of the writers and activists in the West Bank whose homes PalFest visited just last May and in years prior are having their photographs and addresses circulated on chat groups among armed Israeli settlers calling for their murder. Some of the publishers and editors who have worked with these writers and artists and activists are in this room today.

In response to this disaster, we are holding this event as an urgent intervention by writers, scholars and poets who have worked at the unavoidable intersection of art and politics, who have thought deeply about land, segregation, colonization, history and liberation. We thank the Union Theological Seminary for taking us in at a time when events in this city are being canceled and censored. This is the fifth space we approached to host us this evening. The difficulty is not because of availability.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Yasmin El-Rifae of the Palestine Festival of Literature speaking at an event at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. It was titled “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.” This is civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander, renowned author of the book _The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” About five years ago, Alexander wrote a widely read op-ed piece for The New York Times headlined “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine.”

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The fact that so many people are here tonight, so many, from all different religions, races, genders, is itself a testament of hope. I know that so many of us are carrying a great deal of grief, fear, anger, internal conflict and despair into this room. I hope that we can breathe together, now that we have arrived, exhale, open our hearts to one another and listen deeply to each other. We are here. We are many. We are not alone.

On behalf of Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, I want to welcome you to James Chapel. Serene could not join us tonight because she has a commitment in Washington, D.C., but she wishes she could be here, and she extends a very warm welcome to all of you.

It’s no secret that many people are closing their doors to these kinds of vital conversations right now, fearful of what others might say, think or do in response. And so I am enormously grateful that Serene said yes when I asked her if the Palestine Literary Festival could come to Union and use this sacred space. She said yes, knowing that her decision might invite criticism or rebuke. But she also knew that James Chapel has been a site of many, many difficult, courageous conversations, dialogues that are essential to our collective liberation and the creation of beloved community.

In fact, it was in this very space that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was originally scheduled to deliver his 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War. The event was ultimately relocated to Riverside Church across the street due to the overwhelming number of people who wanted to hear what he had to say and our space limitations here.

At Riverside, Dr. King stepped to the podium and said, quote, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

Dr. King acknowledged how difficult it can be for people to speak out against their own government, especially in times of war, and that the temptations of conformity may lead us toward a paralyzed apathy. He did not deny that the issues present in Vietnam were complex with long histories. And he recognized that there were ambiguities and that North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front were not paragons of virtue. But he said that he was morally obligated to speak for the suffering and helpless and outcast children of Vietnam. He said, quote, “This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls 'enemy,' for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers,” end-quote.

He condemned the Vietnam War in unsparing terms. He decried the moral bankruptcy of a nation that does not hesitate to invest in bombs and warfare around the world but can never seem to find the dollars to eradicate poverty at home. He called for a radical revolution of values. He said, quote, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” end-quote.

Dr. King was condemned by virtually every major media outlet in America for taking this stand. And even within the civil rights community, many imagined that he was a traitor to the cause. And yet we now know — deep within us we know — that he was right. He is right. He is right today as he was back then about the corrupting forces of capitalism, militarism and racism and how they lead inexorably toward war.

And he was right that our conscience must leave us no other choice: We must speak. When the oppressed, the poor, the weak are under attack, when their homes are stolen or demolished, when they are forced to migrate and to live in unspeakable conditions, in open-air prisons, concentration camps, perpetually as refugees under occupation, we must speak. We must speak when Jewish children are brutally killed in the name of liberation, when antisemitism and Islamophobia slip in through the back door of supposedly progressive spaces. When Palestinian children in refugee camps are bombed and killed, when schools and hospitals and entire neighborhoods are laid waste, we must speak. When international law is treated like a naive suggestion, we must speak. Yes, it may be difficult. Yes, we will make mistakes. We are human. And yes, we may be afraid. But we must speak. Countless lives and the liberation of all of us depend on us breaking our silences.

And what’s required in these times, as I see it, is not only activism and politics, but also deeply personal spiritual work. As Grace Lee Boggs once said, quote, “These are the times to grow our souls.”

All of us have a conscience that whispers to us, sometimes in the dark. The mandates of conscience that arise within each of us arise not out of loyalty to abstract principles or doctrines, but from a place of deep knowing, a deep knowing that we owe something to each other as human beings, that we belong to each other, and that our freedom and liberation depends on one another. If I do not stand and speak up when the bombs are raining down on you, then who will speak up for me, for my loved ones, when the tables are turned? As James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis more than 50 years ago when she sat in a prison cell “For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

AMY GOODMAN: Civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander, speaking at a November 1st event at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature. Coming up, Michelle Alexander moderates a discussion by the renowned author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Stay with us.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rashid Khalidi on Israeli Occupation, Apartheid & the 100-Year War on Palestine
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 24, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/24 ... id_khalidi

Transcript

In this special broadcast, we air excerpts from a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. The event featured a discussion between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Coates won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. His books include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Their conversation was moderated by civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. In this special broadcast, we’re airing excerpts of a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. It featured a discussion between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Coates won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. His other books, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Beautiful Struggle and the novel The Water Dancer. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His books include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Their conversation was moderated by the civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander, who asked about personal connections to Palestine. This is professor Rashid Khalidi.

RASHID KHALIDI: I’m honored to be here, and I’m extremely pleased that it was possible to put this together. This is the second Palestine Festival of Literature event that has been canceled and canceled again, and the heroic organizers managed to pull it together. They did the same thing in London, where I was supposed to speak last Friday. And it was canceled and canceled again in London. They sent the anti-terrorism police to the Royal Geographic Society and told them they could not hold the event, but they held it anyway.

My connection to Palestine is obviously a personal one. My family is from there. I have family there now. My niece’s family is actually in Gaza. They live in Nu’man, which is a neighborhood of Gaza right near the sea, or not far from the sea. They fled from their home under bombardment to the southern part of Gaza. They were being bombarded there. And so they went back to the shelter of their home. And then, just two days — just yesterday, because they were warned that the neighborhood would be bombed, they moved to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which is, like all hospitals in Gaza, threatened by the Israeli military with being bombed. So that’s part of my connection. And I have family in other places there.

I was there last in March, and it was obvious that the situation was on the point of exploding. One has to be there to see exactly how awful occupation and dispossession and decades of living as people have had to live, whether in refugee camps or in other parts of occupied Palestine, whether they’re Palestinian citizens living as fifth-class citizens in Israel, whether they’re in the Gaza Strip, whether they’re in the West Bank, whether they’re in Jerusalem. I should say that my wish is that every single one of you has a chance to go there. People who have been there have found it a transformative experience. You actually cannot believe what settler colonialism is like, you cannot believe that in the 21st century this is being done to an entire people, unless you see it. You can read about it, you can understand it theoretically, but you have to see it. And I urge those of you who have the opportunity to please try and go there.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I want to pick up on wherever she left off. I went with PalFest. Yasmin, Omar and all the organizers of PalFest hosted me. And I was there for five days in the Occupied Territories, in Jerusalem, and then I stayed another five days after that.

And I had this degree of anxiety about going, because I knew I was going to see something, something I couldn’t quite name. And I knew, because of my upbringing, because of my mother, because of my father, because of my wife, because my son, because of my community, that after I saw the thing, I would have to come back and talk about it, that there was no option in which I did not talk about it.

And I thought I was going to another country, but, in fact, what amazed me was I actually felt that I was in the same country, but I was in a different time. I was in the time of my parents and my grandparents.

I can think back to all of the articles I’ve read, all the things I’ve seen said about how complicated and how complex the situation is and the occupation is. It’s complex, it’s complicated. And it’s made to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a Ph.D., to really understand what’s happening. But I understood the first day.

We went to East Jerusalem to try to visit in the way that Muslims visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque. And I can remember being there, and there were four IDF guards, biggest guns I’d ever seen in my life. And they checked our IDs, and they gave us our IDs back. And then they did nothing. They just made us wait. And we waited. And we waited. And we waited. There was no list. There was no protocol. There was no anything. They were just making us wait because they could. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I was like, “I know what this is. I know exactly what this is.”

The second day, we went to Hebron. And I can remember walking down streets with a Palestinian guide. And we would get to certain streets, and he would say, “I can’t walk down this street with you. You can walk. I cannot, because I’m Palestinian.” And I thought, “I know what that is.”

As we drove through the Occupied Territories and I would look out and I would see roads that Palestinians could use and roads that only Israeli Jews could use, I said, “I know what this is.” As I saw different colored license plates for different classes of people, I said, “I know what this is.” As I saw communities that I can only describe as segregated, I said, “This is Chicago. It’s Baltimore. It’s Philadelphia.”

And I don’t mean to center the whole world on America. We have a tendency to do that. But my lens is my lens. This is all I have. And what I felt was a tremendous weight. I felt the obvious thing that I think all of us feel, that our tax dollars are effectively subsidizing apartheid, are subsidizing a segregationist order, a Jim Crow regime. But I also felt that, as an African American who was reared on the fight against Jim Crow, against white supremacy, against apartheid, I felt tremendous shame. How could I not know? How could I not know that the only democracy in the Middle East, as it bills itself, is segregated? How did I know that?

And what I came to, Michelle, was that Israel is a democracy, the only democracy in the Middle East, in the exact same way that America is the oldest democracy in the world. So, the relationship was quite clear. It was quite clear. It was palpable. It was felt. And the responsibility was clear after that.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yeah. So, let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about the history. Both of you have written a lot about the importance of understanding history in order to engage meaningfully with our present. Both of you have talked about history as ongoing processes rather than as complete, finished and in the past. And you’ve written that there was no isolated event, the Nakba that began and ended in 1948, but rather a hundred years’ war on Palestine. And so I’m wondering if you could share with us what you think people need to know, need to understand about the history of Palestine in order to act in meaningful and courageous ways now. And also, what do they need to know about the history of Palestinian resistance, since it is so often portrayed in the media in such an ahistorical fashion, as though Palestinian resistance is driven by hate rather than by a natural, unquenchable yearning to be free? And so, share with us what we need to know, in your view.

RASHID KHALIDI: Thanks, Michelle. What we need to know, all of us, is more about the history. What we need to know is, I think, summed up in the title of the book that you just mentioned. This is part of a hundred years’ war on Palestine. It’s not a war in Palestine. It’s a war to implant a settler colonial presence at the expense of an Indigenous people, which is being pushed out slowly but surely. And when we say the Nakba, the disaster, we start by talking about what happened in 1948, but that’s part of a much longer process.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Can you explain what happened in 1948?

RASHID KHALIDI: I will. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, starting months before the state of Israel was created, including 70,000 people in Jaffa, 70,000 in Haifa — two of the largest Arab cities in Palestine — 30,000 people in Jerusalem, all of this before Israel was even created. And then, once Israel was created, once the war between Israel and the Arab states started, hundreds of thousands of more were driven out.

That was not a result of war. That was part of a settler colonial process which dictates that you must eliminate, reduce, push out the Indigenous population in order to replace it with settlers. That is what Israel is. Israel is a national fact, but it is also a settler colonial fact. It is a fact very similar to the facts that were created in Ireland by settlers sent over by England to push the Indigenous population to the west of Ireland, settlers brought to this country to push the Indigenous population west and out of the land that white colonists wanted to settle. It’s different, but it’s exactly — it’s different in its specifics, but it’s exactly the same process.

And the war is not one between equals. It is a war between a Indigenous population and a externally supported powerful movement rooted always in Western Europe and the United States. This is the metropole for that project. This is where that project gets its money, its guns, its vetoes in the Security Council. Without that, we wouldn’t be where we are, without the Balfour Declaration, without the British, without the British and the French, without the United States.

And I think it’s really, really important to understand all of these facts, that it is a — this has been a process which is driven by a demographic imperative, to create a Jewish majority in a country which until 1948 had an overwhelming Arab majority, to create a Jewish state, which was the objective of Zionism. In an overwhelmingly Arab land, you had to reduce the Arab population. And in order to do that, you had ultimately to use force. That’s what the Nakba starts with: force. Hundreds of thousands more are pushed out after the 1967 War. And in the interim, there’s constant pressure on Palestinians to leave. Permits are revoked, residencies are revoked, you’re not allowed to enter, you’re not allowed to retain this citizenship or to live here — all of it designed to squeeze the population either out of the country or into smaller and smaller spaces. You can call them Area A, Area B, Area C. You can call them Bantustans. You can call them Native American reservations. It’s the same thing. It’s the same process. It’s the same logic. It’s the same racism.

And I guess the last thing I’d say about the history is that in this unequal struggle, which involves unremitting violence, one of the first leaders of the Zionist movement, a man named Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of every government since Yitzhak Shamir’s government, he said — he said it: We need an iron wall, we need force, or we cannot do this. Every Native population resists its dispossession. That’s not me. That’s Jabotinsky. And he said it again and again and again. And that is what has produced Palestinian resistance, unremitting violence. You cannot have dispossession, you cannot have people’s homes and property taken away, without the use of violence. You cannot force 750,000 people from their homes without violence. And that is what the Palestinians have suffered in this war.

And they have resisted. Sometimes they’ve been successful. Sometimes they’ve been unsuccessful. Sometimes that resistance was political or nonviolent. Quite frequently it was violent. Violence inevitably breeds violence. And every time the Palestinians have tried to resist nonviolently, the response was almost even — almost more ferocious than violent resistance. Why? Because if Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions or action before the International Criminal Court or the Great March of Return in Gaza a couple of years ago, when Israeli snipers shot down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unarmed demonstrators — if those things can succeed, then Israel is naked, in a way that it’s not when the resistance is violent. So, when you ask, “Why do you have violent resistance?” you have violent resistance both because in order to impose this settler colonial reality on this people, unremitting, unceasing violence has been applied to them, and because, finally, people can only take so much. People can only take so much.

And so, I think that in order to understand this and in order to advocate effectively for this cause, it’s really necessary for us to understand all of these things, to understand the legal aspects, the kind of things that Noura Erakat has written about, to understand details about the politics, the kinds of things that many other people have written about, and to understand the history. This has been portrayed by a movement that is political, that is national — I’m talking about Zionism — that is economic, that is military, but is also a public relations project. It has sold a picture — what you were talking about, Ta-Nehisi — which people have swallowed with their mother’s milk. And it is necessary to deconstruct that, and the only way to do that is to know better than they do the reality of what has been happening in Palestine for more than a hundred years.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: But, Ta-Nehisi, can you — well, you can respond to that. But also, I’m especially interested in your thoughts about the history of Black solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and kind of the extent to which you think it’s vital for Black people to be in solidarity with Palestine and the struggle to free Palestine today.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah. Well, I’ll say a couple things. I think it’s really important to acknowledge something. And that is that, you know, I’m a relative latecomer to this. It’s not something that I had a real knowledge of. I had an intuition for it. I had an awareness of the tradition. But it really was not until I went there that I had a tactile feeling for it.

One of the things I will probably be making amends for until the day they put me in the ground, if I’m honest, is in one of my most celebrated works of journalism, when I had to demonstrate tangibly how a reparations program could be done. I looked to Israel. And, you know, like, I think about that. And one of my golden rules about writing is that, you know, you only write after you’ve reported, you only write after. And I wrote without going. I wrote without going. And so, while there is this long tradition of solidarity, for me, personally, there’s a thing of making amends. And it is terribly, ferociously important to me. I think about that.

And I think about how gracious people were when I was over there. I think about how they took me into their homes. I think about how they fed me. And I think about how their only request was: When you go back, don’t lose your voice. That was all they asked. That was all they asked. And so, for me, I am obviously aware of the tradition. But this is like personal. You know what I mean? Like, I have some debts to pay, you know? And I think, like, it’s really, really important to me that I be clear about that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll return to this conversation between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi in a minute. They were speaking at a November 1st event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at Union Theological Seminary here in New York, the discussion moderated by the civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander. Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue to look at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, we return to a recent conversation between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. They spoke at a November 1st event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at Union Theological Seminary here in New York, the discussion moderated by the civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: I feel like I came late to my awareness, as well. I had heard things, including one time from a friend, a good friend, who is not prone to hyperbole, who went to Palestine, returned and said, “You know, I was active in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and had been to South Africa many times.” He says, “But what I saw in Israel and Palestine was worse than what I had seen there.” And I remember filing that fact away somewhere, what he said, but imagined that the work that I was doing at home was what was most deserving of my attention.

And it wasn’t until the Ferguson uprisings, when I began to hear that activists on the street who were facing tear gas and tanks, they were getting advice from Palestinians halfway across the globe, tweeting to them about how to deal with militaristic occupation and attacks. And following the experience that those activists had in Ferguson, many of them went to Palestine and came back with stories and deep knowledge of the history. And as I began to learn more, I also came to learn that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was staunchly in support of the Palestinian cause, that Muhammad Ali had identified himself as strongly in support of the Palestinian cause, that there was a long tradition of, you know, Black activists standing in solidarity with Palestinians.

And I have to give a shoutout to my sister’s new book. She’s a historian. She just published a book called Fear of a Black Republic. It’s about Haiti and the rise and the birth of Black internationalism in the United States. But it is that long history of Black people understanding that their struggle for liberation crosses boundaries, and that solidarity is necessary across those boundaries, I think, is calling to us now. And the fact that Palestinians were supporting folks in the street of Ferguson, and who also, I have heard, were showing their support for people in Flint, Michigan, giving advice about how to survive when your water is shut off, and so it’s encouraging to me to hear about that kind of international solidarity in this time.

But let’s turn to some political realities in the United States right now. The United States’ support, as we all know, for Israel has been absolutely unwavering for decades, even among supposedly progressive politicians and elected officials. Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick have written an excellent book called Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. And I’d love to hear from both of you a little bit about these political realities in the United States right now. We are witnessing in real time exactly how unshakable support is for Israel, as the Biden administration refuses to draw any lines in the sand or place any limitations at all on the billions of dollars of aid that we send to Israel every year, even as it commits horrific war crimes broadcast around the globe. Why is our government not only tolerating this, but sending billions more dollars to Israel?

And before you answer, I want to note that I think a clue can be found in a speech that a young U.S. senator named Joe Biden delivered on the Senate floor in June 1986. It’s available on YouTube. He said defiantly, quote, “If we look at the Middle East, I think it’s about time we stop apologizing for our support for Israel. There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel,” end-quote. So, what was Biden saying exactly? What do we need to understand about U.S. support for Israel?

RASHID KHALIDI: Hot potato, eh?

I think we need to understand a bunch of things. We need to understand that there’s a strategic thing there, serves American imperial interests, has always done. That’s why the British started this project. They did not do it for the brown eyes of the Jewish people. They did it because it was in the strategic interests of the British Empire. And that’s one reason the United States does it. We do not give $3.8 billion a year, plus the $10 billion that Biden has asked for additionally this year, for anything to do with sentiment. It has to do with strategy. It has to do with oil, has to do with interests, imperial interests.

It has to do with a couple other things. It does have to do with the evangelical right. That’s one of the things that moved Britain to support the Balfour Declaration, to support a Jewish national home in an almost entirely Arab country. And it’s one of the things that moves American politicians, the votes, the money, the concentrated political power of the evangelical right.

It has to do with money. Our politicians are whores. They’re bought and sold. That needs to be said. And the bigger — the bigger the donor, the more services they get. And that’s part of the — that’s part of it.

And if we ask, “Why is it that our media is so complicit?” well, it’s partly because our media is a echo chamber for the people in power in Washington. I read The New York Times some mornings, and I say ”The New York Pravda Times.” And I read The Washington Post, I read ”The Washington Izvestia Post.” They are like the Soviet press during the Cold War. They are — whether it’s the Ukraine war or whether it’s this war, they echo power.

But they also echo money. Who owns The Washington Post? Jeff Bezos. Who owns MSNBC, NBCUniversal — well, MSNBC, NBCUniversal? Who owns those institutions, those institutions of the press? The same people who own the politicians. The same people who own our universities. Who runs our universities? Who runs our universities? Not the presidents and the deans and the department chairmans — chairmen and women. It’s the board of trustees. What is the board of trustees? It’s the same people who finance the politicians, same people who own the media.

So, if we see a compliant media with a government that is supportive of Israel, because of votes, because of the evangelical right, because of imperial strategic objectives, it’s very simple. When we see university administrations kowtowing to one narrative on Palestine, as they have done right across the country, it’s for the same reason that our media does it and the same reason that our government does it. It’s money. It’s power. It’s very, very, very simple. I can give you a more sophisticated explanation, but I think that that really sums it up, frankly.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t have a better answer than that.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because I reflect on the fact that —

RASHID KHALIDI: Can I say something? I hope I did not insult sex workers. I did not mean to do that. I did not mean to do that. I’m very sorry.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Appreciated.

RASHID KHALIDI: They’re far above politicians. Sorry, I had to say that.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, I think we should probably spend a minute talking about censorship, fear and censorship. I know that both of you have significant experience with censorship, having your work censored. I do, too. And we have seen in recent years the censorship of books labeled critical race theory — that’s turned out to be a very broad category — books about LGBTQ people and issues. Kind of the scope of censorship keeps broadening. But we are seeing now kind of new forms, or very old forms being born again, of censorship in this kind of war context. And I do worry about the possibility of us entering into another McCarthyite era. The challenges of finding a site just for this conversation, I think, speak to the real risk of that.

And I wonder if both of you — and I’ll start with you — could say a little bit about where you think we are right now in terms of censorship. And as was mentioned earlier, people have real fears, fears that are grounded, you know, in reality, the possibility of losing jobs, of retaliation, and even being attacked violently or killed as a result of expressing their views. Where are we now in terms of censorship? What do you fear? And how do you think people ought to respond in this moment in time?

TA-NEHISI COATES: You know, oddly enough, I think we’re in a great place. And I don’t say that blithely. I say that, as you mentioned, having some very, very direct experience with my own work being banned in schools and libraries, and then, this week, helping where I could, and, ultimately, you know, as you, Michelle, but trying to, you know, figure out where we could hold this event, seeing, you know, Yasmin and go through all of the hoops. So, what I’ve gleaned from that is, when people start resorting to instruments as blunt and direct as book bans or not allowing discussions, they’re threatened. It’s the weapon of a weak and a decaying order.

You know, I have to say a little something. I’ll never forget. I came back, right? I come back from Palestine. This is like, you know, late May, and I’m going crazy. Like, I’m going to sleep, and I’m dreaming about Palestine. And I’m waking up, and I got that glassy-eyed look in my face. And my wife is worried about me, and everybody’s worried about me. And I emailed a friend, and I said, “Do you have a contact with Rashid Khalidi at all?” And he said, “Yeah, I do.” And he connected us. And I wrote a message: “You don’t know me from Adam, but I got to talk to somebody about what I saw.” And he said, “It’s OK.” He said, “Look, I’m having a dinner this weekend. Why don’t you and your wife come?” And I came, and we sat in community, and it was the thing that I needed. And among the many things Rashid said that night, he said, “I have been fighting this fight for a long time, and I’ve never seen our side this strong. I’ve never seen the students in university so galvanized. I’ve never…”

And you can confuse the ferociousness of the pushback with strength. You know what I mean? But the fact of the matter is, in African American history, for instance, here in our struggle, the struggle is the most violent when people are the most threatened. The original and the oldest and the most lethal form of domestic terrorism was pioneered after the Civil War, and what it was was in response to the fact that suddenly you had multiple states throughout this country with Black majorities. You had a majority-Black Legislature in South Carolina. The pushback had to be ferocious. It had to be violent. It needed to be, because of the sheer strength of the threat. That’s generally been our history.

And so, now in this moment, when I look out and I see, you know, not just my work banned, but I see the work of my colleagues banned, I see, as you mentioned, LGBTQ authors banned, when I situate myself within the history of Black writing, and I understand the fact that there was never any safe moment for Black writing in this country’s history, when I understand that — when Frederick Douglass publishes his Narrative, and he goes and he talks about it, he has a price on his head. He can be dragged back into slavery at any moment. When I’ve seen that Ida B. Wells was driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, for reporting on the lynching and the murder of her friends, and she continued to report on it nonetheless, when I understand that Elijah Lovejoy was shot to death and his press was shoved into the river, you have to be realistic about this moment.

What happened to you, man? You had to find another location for your talk tonight. That was it, actually quite simple compared to the long history of things. My wife was kind enough to send me an article about this district where they had banned Between the World and Me, right? And there had been — and this is a deep red district, and there had been this whole fight about it. And they went and they interviewed the librarian. And the librarian said, “This is the most checked-out book we’ve ever had.” That’s not because of me. That’s because of the ban. You understand what I’m saying?

And so, like, the very fact that you guys are here, the very unfortunate fact that some of you who are watching this couldn’t get in — you know what I mean? — the fact that we had to struggle to find a venue for this event, doesn’t say anything about the strength of this movement here. It doesn’t say anything about our strength. Says a lot about the threat and what people feel and the weakness. So, I don’t know. I, like — anybody that knows me knows that I am not one known for my optimism. But I feel it in this moment. I really do.

RASHID KHALIDI: I mean, I don’t have much to say after that. But I am completely convinced that Ta-Nehisi is right.

The first thing is, this idea that the international community supports what Israel is doing acts as if the United States, Western Europe and a few white settler colonies in Japan are the international community. They aren’t. They’re a pimple on the backside of humanity. The international community is India and China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Congo, Nigeria, Brazil — I could go on. Those are the people who voted in the United Nations for a ceasefire, 120 countries. There were 14 — there were 14 that voted against: six island nations, the United States, Israel and a bunch of hangers-on. That’s not the world. The world is actually with us, indeed in this country. The press? No. The politicians? No. The universities? Certainly no. And by that, I mean the administrations.

But look at the campus that I teach on. Five years ago, Columbia students voted overwhelmingly in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of companies that support the occupation. Overwhelmingly. Same thing happened at Brown. Same thing happened at Barnard. Same thing happened at Michigan. Same thing happened at almost every university where the thing was put to a vote. The students are with us. By a vote, we know that.

I was on the television the other day, for my sins. It’s a terrible thing to go on television, I promise you. Don’t do it if you don’t have to. And I mentioned that young people are with us. And, God bless her, the interviewer said to me, “Yeah, there’s a poll here that says, on Biden’s handling of the Gaza situation, in the age group from 18 to 35, he has 10% support.” Ten percent. I could give you — I could give you — I could give you more polls. They are terrified of us. That’s why. That’s why we’re getting censorship.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: We’ve got to close now. And, you know, I think as we sit here in the center of the most powerful empire in the world, we need to think about what our responsibility is, as King said in his speech, to those who have been defined as our enemy, and consider not just, like, what we must say, but what we must do. And I’m wondering if you have thoughts that you want to share.

RASHID KHALIDI: I do. Thank you. One of the things that I argue in this book, that you mentioned, is this is not a war on the Palestinians waged by the Zionist movement or Israel alone. It’s a war waged on the Palestinian people by Israel and the United States. Those are our weapons. Those are American F-35s, American F-15s, American F-16s, American 175-millimeter guns, American 155-millimeter guns. They fire shells of a hundred pounds each. I could tell you their kill radius. I could tell you how large the diameter of a 2,000-pound bomb dropped from an American plane is. That’s us, our tax dollars, our votes.

We must oppose, with action, with words, not just weapons that we send to Israel to kill people with being used in that way — and, incidentally, in violation of U.S. law. U.S. law mandates that weapons can only be used for defensive purposes. Why do you think they keep saying in every one of their statements that Israel has a right to defend itself? Because, otherwise, they would be in violation of U.S. law in sending those weapons to Israel. If killing children in Jabaliya camp is a defensive purpose, then it’s legal. And if it’s not, they’re in violation of the law. We must oppose that.

And we must oppose the possibility of the United States being complicit in ethnic cleansing. We must oppose it as strongly as we can. Otherwise, we are the ethnic cleansers, and we are the killers. We may not be the ones pulling the trigger. We may not be the people forcing people out into Egypt or into Jordan, but we are responsible. Our government has just said that it’s willing to fund that. Now, maybe they’ll pull back on it, but they’ll only pull back on it if we make them stop. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi in conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates at a November 1st event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at Union Theological Seminary here in New York. The discussion was moderated by the civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander.

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Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal Highlights Plight of Palestinian Prisoners, Many of Them Children
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 27, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/27 ... transcript

Transcript

With a four-day truce between Israel and Hamas set to expire after Monday, we look at who has been released and the growing pressure to extend the pause in fighting that has given Gaza residents small respite from Israel’s relentless bombardment and allowed humanitarian aid to reach people inside the territory. The pause began Friday to allow for the release of Israelis and foreign nationals kept hostage by militants in Gaza in exchange for the freedom of some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, many of whom are minors and women. “We are talking about over 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli prisons right now. More than 2,500 are being held under administrative detention … without a charge and without a trial,” says Tala Nasir, a lawyer with Addameer, a group that advocates for Palestinian prisoners. We also speak with Israeli journalist Orly Noy, who says the sheer number of Palestinian prisoners shows “how central the tool of incarceration is in the Israeli project” of occupying and oppressing Palestinians. “The same system that allows every Jewish settler, citizen or soldier or policeman to walk away after killing Palestinians under the most outrageous circumstances is the same system that treats a 12-year-old who threw stones as a dangerous terrorist,” says Noy.

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

The four-day truce in Gaza has entered its final day, but negotiations are underway to extend it. So far, Hamas has released a total of 58 hostages who had been held captive for the seven weeks. Thirty-nine of the freed hostages have been Israeli citizens. Hamas also released 17 Thai workers, a Filipino worker and an Israeli Russian. Since the truce began, Israel has released 117 Palestinian prisoners, mostly women and children, including many who had been held without charge.

One of the first hostages released was the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Yaffa Adar. She was captured from her home in the kibbutz Nir Oz. Her granddaughter, Adva Adar, spoke Sunday.

ADVA ADAR: I can say that she’s deaf, and I can say that she said that she was thinking about the family a lot and that it helped her survive that she could hear the voices of the great-grandchildren calling her and that it gives her a lot of power, and that she’s now trying to realize what’s happening here and about a lot of friends and neighbors that are either dead or kidnapped from the kibbutz and about Tamir, her oldest grandson, that is also a hostage, and that she has no house to return.

AMY GOODMAN: In the occupied West Bank, crowds gathered to celebrate the release of Palestinians held in prison. This is Nasrallah Alawar, one of the Palestinian teenagers released.

NASRALLAH ALAWAR: [translated] Prison guards made us starve. They used to bring us two patches of bread for each cell, which is not enough. There were also children, 11 and 12 years old, with us, and there wasn’t enough food for them. God only knows how bad the situation was.

AMY GOODMAN: Health officials in Gaza now say the death toll from Israel’s bombardment has reached nearly 15,000. The New York Times is reporting the rate of civilians killed in Gaza by Israel has been far higher than in recent wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The New York Times reports more than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza in the last seven weeks than have been confirmed killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its attack nearly two years, though the exact death tolls in both conflicts are unknown.

Earlier today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops in Gaza and told them, “Israel will continue until the end. Nothing will stop us.”

We’re joined now by two guests. We go to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Orly Noy, Israeli political activist and editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call. She’s also the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her new piece for +972 Magazine is “What Israelis won’t be asking about the Palestinians released for hostages.” Tala Nasir is also with us, a lawyer with the Palestinian prisoner and human rights organization Addameer.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Orly Noy. If you can talk about this temporary truce, that could end today or possibly will continue, Israel says, for each day that Hamas releases at least 10 hostages, what this four-day respite has meant, who has been released, Orly?

ORLY NOY: Thank you, Amy, so much for having me.

As soon as the exchange of prisoners deal was agreed upon, Israel came up with a list of 300 Palestinian prisoners, almost all of them minors, with a few women included, that would be the pool to be released throughout the ceasefire. When you look thoroughly at the names and the charges, as you said, first off, many of them were never charged with anything. I mean, the numbers are incredible. The latest data from the beginning of November talk about more than 6,800 Palestinians, political prisoners, what Israel refers to as “security” prisoners, more than 2,000 of them through administrative detention. It means that not only they have never been convicted with anything, they’ve never been charged with anything, so never had the opportunity to defend themselves.

You look at minor Palestinian teenagers who have been arrested for throwing stones at police jeeps or army jeeps. One of the names in that list is in prison just simply for calling, with a group of his friends, “Allahu Akbar” — yes, “God is great.” Another Palestinian woman has been sitting in jail for allegedly intending to carry out an attack, not even doing anything in practice. Others have been charged with attempts to carry out stabbing attacks, or did — even did so, but mildly injured policemen and women. So you see that the charges are incredibly minor, but what this list really gives, allows is the sense of how central the tool of incarceration is in the Israeli project of the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the Israeli hostages, and others. Thai, a Filipino hostage, a Russian Israeli hostage was released.

ORLY NOY: So, of course, I mean, these past three days with the release of the hostages have been really a sort of national celebration, after — in what are maybe the darkest days that Israelis can remember. I mean, there was a very anxious anticipation for their return, especially the children, whom the Israeli entire society became to know by name each of the children that have been held as hostages. So there’s been a lot of anxiety in anticipation for their return.

They’ve been greeted with a national embrace. And they, of course, went immediately to receive medical treatment, those who needed, but a medical checkup for all of them. And they have — I mean, but this is just the beginning of their journey back to life, because many of them don’t know what happened since they went to captivity. Many of them lost immediate family members, and they are just now learning about it. So it’s a very bittersweet moment for them and for the Israeli society as a whole.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, from the beginning, it was said that Americans or Israeli Americans would be released. It was only yesterday that the little 4-year-old, Abigail Edan, was released. Both her parents were murdered. She ran, as a 3-year-old — it’s astounding; she turned 4 in captivity — to her neighbor’s house, and there Abigail was captured along with the mom and her three kids — I think her oldest daughter and the husband were murdered — and then they were all taken into captivity. She is the first American to be released, and some are speculating that Hamas is holding off on Americans so that Biden will put pressure on Netanyahu to continue the ceasefire.

ORLY NOY: Yeah, we are being told so. And it actually makes some sense, because, I mean, it is almost ironic that while Israel is incarcerating Palestinian children for throwing stones, at the same time, the only lesson that it teaches the Palestinians is that the only way to actually release Palestinian prisoners is through such heinous crimes, such as the one that Hamas carried out on October 7th. I mean, really, the amount of Palestinian children, women, minors and others in the prisons, without any due process, without the ability to really honestly protect themselves from, is such that right now it seems that their only hope is through such actions — again, horrible, violent, heinous actions taken by the Hamas — but Israel just doesn’t show any other way for Palestinians to be able to resist the occupation, which they have the right to, without spending the rest of their lives in the Israeli prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: Tala Nasir, I want to ask you about what’s happening on the streets right now. I want to go back to what Ben-Gvir, the far-right Cabinet minister, said. On Thursday, the Israeli minister of national security, Ben-Gvir, instructed police to use an iron fist against attempts to celebrate prisoner releases, and said, quote, “My instructions are clear: There are to be no expressions of joy. Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism; victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” So, if you can talk about what this means? In the West Bank, we’ve seen thousand people coming out to celebrate the young men now, boys when they were arrested — some have come of age while they were in prison. But in East Jerusalem, we are not seeing that. Is it because people are terrified of being arrested for terrorism? I mean, this from Ben-Gvir, a man who himself was convicted in Israeli court 15 years ago of aiding terrorism and inciting hatred of Palestinians?

TALA NASIR: Yes. First of all, good morning. Thank you for having me.

I’m going to talk about several violations after, or in the past three days, within this exchange deal, starting with the West Bank. So, the Israeli forces deliberately assaulted the released prisoners and their families during the prisoner release operations. They first delayed the release of prisoners until late at night. They released the child prisoners wearing clothes that are too big for their size, and some of them were barefoot. Additionally, the clothes did not provide adequate protection from the cold weather at these days. Forces also used gas bombs, the rubber bullets, live ammunition in front of Ofer Prison, where families were gathered to meet with their children and loved ones.

On the other hand and concerning the released prisoners from Jerusalem, the Israeli forces raided the homes of the prisoners before their release in the occupied Jerusalem. They prevented them from any signs of celebration upon, of course, reuniting with their loved ones, sons and daughters. The families of the released prisoners were summoned to Al-Moscobiyeh center, where they were subjected to harsh and arbitrary conditions that prohibited them from gatherings, banned them from marches and fireworks, prevented them from chanting slogans, in addition to confiscating the sweets that were inside the houses.

Also, there were assaults on journalists who were present at the homes of the released prisoners, and that was by physically assaulting them and expelling them out of the houses, prohibiting them from media coverage. That’s what happened, or these are the main violations happened in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem in the past three days of the prisoner exchange.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about particular cases of young people who are imprisoned, Tala Nasir? You’re speaking to us from Ramallah. If you can talk to us, for example, about the case of — let’s see — of the young man who was — Ahmad Manasra. Tell us when he was arrested. What happened to him when he was 13 years old?

TALA NASIR: Yes, OK. So, regarding Ahmad Manasra, so he was arrested when he was 12 years old, and he was — on attempt of stabbing an Israeli settler. He was interrogated in a very hard conditions inside Israeli prison. He went under torture and ill treatment. He is now facing psychological illness and issues. Of course, he’s not on the list of the prisoners supposed to be released within this exchange deal, because he is over 18, while he was under 18, he was 12 years old, when he was arrested. We hopefully think his name will be on the next list of the supposed to be released from Israeli prisons, but until now nothing is accurate about the many prisoners.

Talking about the prisoners who were released or the names who were on the list, one of them serves the highest sentence of all child prisoners. His name is Mohammed Abu Qtaish. He is serving a 15-year sentence, which is the highest sentence among all the children. We’re talking about a woman prisoner who was released before two days. Her name is Shorouq Dwayyat. She is sentenced to 16 years old, and it’s the highest sentence among the women prisoners. We’re talking about injured and ill female prisoners who were released. One of them is Israa Jaabis, who suffers severe burns all over her body. We’re talking about Fatima Shaheen. She is a woman prisoner who was released. She lost the ability to walk. She is paralyzed for being shot by the occupation forces. We are also talking about releasing four administrative detainees from women prisoners, in addition to nine child administrative detainees. These are being held under administrative detention without a charge, without a trial and indefinitely.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about how many Palestinians are imprisoned right now. What? Over 7,000, 2,000 of them from the West Bank since October 7th?

TALA NASIR: Not exactly. We are talking about over 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli prisons right now. More than 2,500 of them are being held under administrative detention. And talking about after the 7th of October, the number of 80% of the Palestinians detained after the 7th of October are being now held under administrative detention without a charge, without a trial. And after the 7th of October until this day, we’re talking about 3,260 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons until this day. So, in less than two months, it’s more than 3,000 Palestinians, including 120 female prisoners, including 41 journalists.

And let me shed light on something. From Friday until this day, we are talking about more than 112 Palestinians that were detained in the past three days only, from the beginning of the truce. So it’s actually equal to the number of released prisoners within the exchange deal. So these mass arrest campaigns are still taking place in all the cities, villages, refugee camps in the Palestinian territories. And most of them are being held under administrative detention.

Something important to note also: Six Palestinian prisoners died or were killed inside Israeli prisons in less than a month. These six, four of them were arrested after the 7th of October, and two of them were arrested before. Until now, we don’t know the circumstances of their death, because we still don’t have the accurate information, but the testimonies of prisoners and released prisoners affirm that they were brutally beaten inside the prisons. So, several violations have been taking place inside Israeli prisons after the 7th of October, and that’s what we have documented throughout these two months.

AMY GOODMAN: Near Ofer prison in the West Bank, Hanan Al-Barghouti spoke after she was part of the first group of 39 Palestinian detainees to be released. She said, since October 7th, her family was not allowed to contact her, after Israeli prison authorities launched a brutal crackdown on Palestinian prisoners. She says she was in September and placed in jail without charge or trial for an additional period of four months, subject to indefinite extensions under Israel’s administrative detention policy. Four of her sons are also under arrest.

TALA NASIR: Yes, true.

AMY GOODMAN: This is her.

HANAN AL-BARGHOUTI: [translated] The female prisoners await relief. The female prisoners are in agony. The female prisoners are very upset. They impose on us many humiliating things and all the things that hurt us. But we remain with our heads held high and steadfast and tolerant despite their sadism. God willing, we will free all the female prisoners and empty the jails.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Hanan Al-Barghouti, who was arrested in September and just released as part of the prisoner exchange. I actually want to put this question to Orly Noy. How are Palestinian prisoners perceived? I mean, the way you describe them — we talk about the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th. You describe them as hostages of the Israeli state, with so many of them not even charged.

ORLY NOY: Yeah. I mean, here, I should mention a word about the collaboration of the Israeli media with the general state attempt to portray each and every Palestinian behind bars as a terrorist. I mean, this is the one and only term that the Israeli media is referring by to the Palestinian prisoners, and it doesn’t matter what they did. And if it’s a 12-year-old child who threw stones or a grown-up man who did something more severe, they are all seen as terrorists. And the double standard, particularly in that area, is really mind-blowing, because the same system that allows every Jewish settler, citizen or soldier or policeman to walk away after killing Palestinians under the most outrageous circumstances is the same system that treats a 12-year-old who threw stones as a dangerous terrorist, and all of a sudden, you know, stones can kill and whatnot, so they are all seen as terrorists.

And one of the most difficult tasks for a human rights organization is actually to advocate for the conditions of the Palestinian prisoners, who — as was mentioned before, which were harshened dramatically since October 7th. And we’ve been talking to some people, and we’ve been hearing heartbreaking, shaking testimonies about the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in the prisons these days, and far away from the public eye and further — even further away from public interest.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where do you see this going, Orly Noy? Do you see Israel — Hamas has already agreed to this — extending this truce for every day that they release 10 hostages? And what about the pressure on Netanyahu, where you had thousands of Israelis marching to his offices, demanding hostages be number one over a military strike on Gaza?

ORLY NOY: I think that the question would become crucial after the release of all the civilians, because we should keep in mind that Hamas is also holding in captivity Israeli soldiers. And without a doubt, the price that they will demand for their release is going to be much, much higher than what we’ve seen so far.

At the same time, and again going back to the role of the Israeli media, the media is pushing very hard to renew the war after those exchanges. And Netanyahu actually has a very big incentive to carry on the war, because of those demands that you mentioned, because he knows that the day after the war, the Israeli public is going to hold him accountable for that catastrophe.

At the same time, nobody knows what Israel’s endgame is and what is Israel’s plan for the day after the war regarding Gaza. So, all of that, with the given situation in Gaza, where — when people, the residents of the already most densely populated place on Earth, are now squeezed in a smaller area, facing hunger, without clear water to drink, without proper medications, what will be the nature of the next phase of war, should there be one? Under those circumstances, I really do not dare to even imagine that scenario.

AMY GOODMAN: Just have 30 seconds left, but I want to ask Tala about your knowledge of the number of arrests of people, of Palestinians in Gaza. In recent days, Israel arrested the Awni Khattab, the head of Khan Younis Medical Center, and Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the head of the Al-Shifa Hospital. We also, of course, know about Mosab Abu Toha, who is known around the world, the Palestinian poet and writer. He was taken with about 200 others in prison, but because of tremendous pressure and outcry, especially from the United States news organizations, he was released, but the others weren’t.

TALA NASIR: Yes. So, unfortunately, we have no information about Palestinians who have been imprisoned from Gaza, to this day. We tried to contact, of course, the Israeli Prison Service. All the Israeli human rights organizations are trying also to find out the whereabouts and the situation of Palestinians detained from Gaza. But until now, we don’t even know the numbers of these Palestinians, and, of course, we do not know the circumstances of their arrests.

We are also talking about, until this day, there are approximately 700 missing Palestinians, who are likely detained in the occupation prisons, but we don’t know the accurate information about their conditions. These are from the workers who have been working inside Israel before the 7th of October. Some of them were released at the Karm Abu Salem crossing. But there are approximately 700 that are now still missing, and we don’t have any information about them. So we are trying and working to know the conditions they are being detained and what are their condition and what are they going through right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Tala Nasir, I want to thank you so much for being with us, lawyer with the Palestinian prisoner and human rights organization Addameer, speaking to us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and Orly Noy, Israeli political activist, editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call and chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. We’ll link to your new piece for +972 Magazine, “What Israelis won’t be asking about the Palestinians released for hostages.”

Coming up, we speak to a former Palestinian prisoner and a former Israeli military commando, who together helped found Combatants for Peace. Back in 20 seconds.

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“There Is an Alternative”: Meet the Israeli & Palestinian “Combatants for Peace” Urging Nonviolence
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 27, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/27 ... transcript

Transcript

With Israel and Palestine experiencing the worst violence in decades, we speak with two co-founders of Combatants for Peace, a group composed of people from both sides of the conflict who have committed to nonviolence and peaceful coexistence. Avner Wishnitzer is a former member of Sayeret Matkal, one of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite commando units, and Sulaiman Khatib spent more than 10 years in prison after being arrested as a teenager for an attack on Israeli soldiers. The two recently co-authored a piece for The New York Review of Books on modeling a nonviolent path toward peace. “We are offering a different direction that’s based on partnership and common interest and common values,” says Khatib. Wishnitzer adds that only a political solution can bring lasting peace. “When people are fed with the idea that there is no choice but violence, they respond with violence to each other,” he says.

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

As we continue to cover the truce in Gaza and prisoner-hostage releases, we’re joined by two of the founders of the group Combatants for Peace. Avner Wishnitzer is a member of one of the Israeli military’s elite commando units. He’s joining us from Jerusalem. And in Ramallah, we’re joined by Sulaiman Khatib, who spent more than 10 years in prison after an altercation with two Israeli soldiers. They recently co-wrote an article for The New York Review of Books headlined “Combatants for Peace.”

Sulaiman, let’s begin with you. As you see Palestinians released from prison in exchange for the Israeli hostages and those of other nationalities who have been released, can you talk about your thoughts as a former man imprisoned yourself?

SULAIMAN KHATIB: Firstly, thank you, Amy, for having us, myself and my partner and brother, Avner in Jerusalem.

And as I heard your interview with the colleagues, speakers before us, that explain in details about the prisoners and the hostages exchange, as ex-prisoner, I definitely feel a lot of empathy to the prisoners, especially when talking about kids, actually, women and kids. That makes me feel optimistic. And that shows also, unfortunately, where the dehumanization and the multi standards — double standards that exist in this place.

And definitely as an ex-prisoner personally and Combatants for Peace, in our organization, that includes Palestinians and Israelis, that we live with a more multiple, complex narrative, we would like, really, both the Israeli government and the Hamas in Gaza to release the prisoners, the civilians that were taken hostages in Gaza and the Palestinian prisoners that we are talking about thousands of them, and some of them without charge even, in jail. All these prisoners and hostages have families, have rights. And as we see, unfortunately, their rights by international law were not granted, as myself experienced that. I’ve been in jail when I was actually 14, under a military court. So I know the meaning of separating from your family and being without rights, basically. I know the meaning of that.

AMY GOODMAN: And what inspired you now to commit your life to peace as a co-founder of Combatants for Peace?

SULAIMAN KHATIB: So, as a ex-political prisoner, and I participated — I am a very active person since my childhood, very committed to the liberation and freedom of our people. I participated in different hunger strikes, food hunger strikes in jail, and that was my first introduction and transformation to nonviolence and the power of nonviolence.

Through my experience and learning about the history of the conflict and learning — I also know Hebrew very well, and I’m coming from an Indigenous Palestinian family that has been living around here, outside of Jerusalem, almost more than 500 years. I have been opening my heart and my soul and my mind to find partners on the Israeli side that reach the same conclusion, which is basically as simple as no military solution for this conflict.

And it’s beyond that, because, for us, nonviolence is ideology. We advocate for nonviolence. And we advocate for liberation that’s collectively connected, both Palestinians — despite, of course, the power dynamic and the occupation, which we challenge, and we talk about it clearly. I believe that, as I said, our freedom and our needs for freedom and for dignity and for human rights, both Palestinians and Israeli, is legitimate.

The strategies that has been taking place not just lately, since October 7, but, of course, like over decades of occupation and apartheid system and the violence and the ideology of violence, whether it’s coming from settler violence or it’s coming from religious violence from Hamas side, we are opposing this clearly and publicly. We are offering a different direction that’s based on partnership and common interests and common values, based actually on an old story that we, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, we could live in coexistence next to each other, and our identities can really be safe and practiced in the land where we belong. And it doesn’t have to be either/or. We’ve been — myself, Avner and other friends — we’ve been in the place where is it about us or them, eliminate them, and the army force options. We don’t believe in this anymore.

And definitely, after I was released from jail, I committed my life to bridge the gap among our people with other activists. And the road is long. I know this is a long journey. It’s not necessarily even for our generation.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Avner Wishnitzer into the conversation. You are a former member of one of the IDF’s elite commando units. What inspired you to help found Combatants for Peace?

AVNER WISHNITZER: Hi, and thanks for having us.

For me, it was the gap between the way I was raised to believe that Israel is a safe haven for the Jews and that it’s essentially liberal democracy, and the reality of the occupation, which I learned to really know up close only after my service. I was at that time in my early twenties and still a reserve soldier in that same unit. And what I saw in the early 2000s around the South Hebron Hills and around Nablus and different places around the West Bank really brought me face to face with the systematic oppression, of which I was only vaguely aware. And it exposed, it created a dissonance: the declared values of Israel as a democracy and its backyard, in which none of these values are valid. And I felt that I can no longer talk the talk and act as if this backyard did not exist. And I refused to serve in the Occupied Territories in late 2004. And then, thinking that it’s not enough to just refuse and absolve yourself from this systematic violence, it is crucial also to struggle against it actively, because you can only refuse once.

And at that point, it was early 2005. We were approached by a group of Palestinians who were curious about this refusenik phenomenon, and then we started meeting. And these meetings later led to the formation of Combatants for Peace. And we have been saying for almost two decades what we are still saying now, and we insist even more, as Sulai said, there is no military solution. It’s a fantasy, but a very dangerous fantasy.

And we see now the horror and the fear and the hatred in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza. What happened on the 7th of October, the atrocities are unprecedented, and then Israeli attack on Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank, again, unprecedented. The levels of violence keep rising, and the circle of violence just goes on, because we are unable to undo the driving forces of this conflict — first and foremost, the occupation. It’s not the only reason, but we believe it’s the most important reason for perpetuating this conflict. And this is why we’ve been struggling against it for so long. We believe there is —

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think —

AVNER WISHNITZER: There is an alternative, and this is what we are trying to push forward.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s what I want to ask you about: What is the alternative at this point? You have this truce that could end today, unless Hamas releases 10 prisoners a day, but Israel has said only up to 10 days and that they are going to wipe out Hamas in Gaza. What is the alternative, Avner?

AVNER WISHNITZER: So, the alternative is not in this microtactic level. I mean, sure, we are for the release of all hostages. We are for the release of prisoners. You talked about the prisoners a lot during this program. We are talking about something far more fundamental, a sea change, which means the renewal of talks that would lead to a political — a just political solution, that is agreed on both sides and not imposed unilaterally, and to support that political process, that is so crucial, because right now there is no alternative. It’s just brute force. And when people are fed with the idea —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds left, but then we’re going to continue the conversation.

AVNER WISHNITZER: OK, just one point. When people are fed with the idea that there is no choice but violence, there is only violence, to each other. We need to open an alternative, a political process to end the violence.

[admin]

“Atmosphere of Hate”: AFSC Leader & Palestinian Vermonter on Shooting of 3 College Students
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 28, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/28 ... transcript

We get an update on the three university students of Palestinian descent who were shot Saturday in Burlington, Vermont. Two were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic at the time of the attack. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmad are now recovering, though Hisham Awartani, who was shot in the spine, has reportedly lost feeling in the lower part of his body. The FBI is reportedly investigating whether the shooting was a hate crime. “This atmosphere of hate” starts “from the federal level,” declares Wafic Faour of the organization Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, who joins us to discuss the recent history of Vermont’s suppression of pro-Palestinian sentiment. “If you talk about Palestinian rights, you’re going to be called 'terrorist,'” says Faour, yet although “the attacker is a white supremacist, … we don’t call it as is.” We also speak to Joyce Ajlouny, former director of the Ramallah Friends School in the occupied West Bank, where the three victims were students together. She reads poems they wrote in sixth grade and notes that over the course of the decadeslong occupation, “Palestinians of all faiths … have not been offered the humanity and dignity that they deserve.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Burlington, Vermont, where three Palestinian college students were shot on Saturday as they were walking to dinner at the home of one of the students’ grandmothers, who lives near the University of Vermont. Two of the men were wearing keffiyehs, and they were speaking Arabic at the time of the attack. The young men have been identified as Hisham Awartani, a Brown University student; Kinnan Abdalhamid, of Haverford College; and Tahseen Ahmad, a student at Trinity College. They were all 20 years old — they’re all 20 years old and graduates of the Ramallah Friends School in the occupied West Bank. Two of the students remain hospitalized. Hisham Awartani, who was shot in the spine, has reportedly lost feeling in the lower part of his body and may never walk again.

Authorities have charged a 48-year-old white man named Jason Eaton with three counts of second-degree attempted murder. He’s being held without bail. He pleaded not guilty on Monday. He reportedly shot the students from his porch as they walked by. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the FBI is investigating whether the shooting is a hate crime.

The shooting comes just weeks after a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death near Chicago by his landlord.

Tamara Tamimi, the mother of one of the students, Kinnan Abdalhamid, told ABC News, quote, “To us, it’s decades of dehumanizing policy and rhetoric from U.S. leaders towards Palestinians and Arabs, including from the Biden administration, which has caused our children to be in the situation that they’re in,” unquote.

On Monday, relatives of the men shot in Vermont joined local authorities at a news conference at Burlington City Hall. This is Rich Price, the uncle of the Brown student, Hisham Awartani.

RICH PRICE: We speak only on behalf of the family because the family can’t be here. I want to say that these three young men are incredible. And that’s not just a proud uncle speaking, but it’s true. They are — they have their lives in front of them. …

I moved here 15 years ago, and I never imagined that this sort of thing could happen. And my sister lives in the occupied West Bank, and people often ask me, “Aren’t you worried about your sister? Aren’t you worried about your nephews and your niece?” And the reality is, as difficult as their life is, they are surrounded by incredible sense of community. And “tragic irony” is not even the right phrase, but to have them come stay with me for Thanksgiving and have something like this happen speaks to the level of civic vitriol, speaks to the level of hatred that exists in some corners of this country. It speaks to a sickness of gun violence that exists in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Rich Price, the uncle of Hisham Awartani, one of the three college students of Palestinian descent who were shot Saturday in Burlington, Vermont. And this is Kinnan Abdalhamid’s uncle, Radi Tamimi.

RADI TAMIMI: Kinnan grew up in the West Bank, and we always thought that that could be more of a risk in terms of his safety, and sending him here would be, you know, the right decision. And we feel somehow betrayed in that decision here. And, you know, we’re just trying to come to terms with everything.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by two guests. In Burlington, Vermont, Wafic Faour is with us. He’s a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, has lived in Vermont for years. He’s a member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine. And in Bethesda, Maryland, Joyce Ajlouny is the former director of the Ramallah Friends School, the school where all three of the students shot in Vermont graduated from. She’s now the general secretary of the international Quaker social justice organization American Friends Service Committee. She herself is Palestinian American.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Wafic, you’re in Burlington. Let’s begin with you. Where were you on Saturday when you got the news that three young Palestinian students, all 20 years old, best friends, visiting one of their grandmothers for Thanksgiving, were shot?

WAFIC FAOUR: I was at my house in Richmond. Thank you, Amy, for inviting us. I was at my house. We were organizing many activities and rallies because of what is happening on Palestine and this genocide war against our people over there. Definitely, I was shocked. And our community here are terrified and angry.

But, Amy, we should talk about what brought this atmosphere of hate. And this is a hate crime, and we should call it as is. From the federal level, the actions of Biden administration’s and Secretary of State Blinken and the defense secretary, they’re supporting Israel unconditionally and talking about the Palestinian victims and questioning the numbers of the Palestinian Health Ministry. This is on the federal level. And here in Vermont, for the past two years we have living under siege, too, from attacks from institutions here. When we brought resolution to talk about Palestinian rights, human rights and the protection of the Palestinian people, we found attacks from administrations in UVM, University of Vermont in Middlebury, and, unfortunately, from many faith-based institutions. And they called us antisemitic. And this atmosphere will bring to the American public that if you talk about Palestinian rights, you’re going to be called “terrorist.” If you wear a keffiyeh like this, you’re going to be called “terrorist.” And this is what brought this crime. And it is hate crime. Unfortunately, our leaders here in Vermont didn’t call it as is. And we should call it as is and use the right words.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Wafic, specifically at the press conference that was held on Monday by law enforcement, what do you believe should have been said but was not?

WAFIC FAOUR: Well, I mean, when state attorney Sarah George mentioned it’s a hateful event, but it is not hate crime. I mean, if it happened to another community, it would have been called hate crime immediately. And now they are questioning of the mental capacity of the attacker, when it is — believe me, we feel here if the name of the attacker is an Arab name or a Muslim name, he will be called “terrorist” immediately by the media, and the media will have a field of describing that person. Now the attacker is a white supremacist, and because of the atmosphere and racism against the Muslims, the Arabs and the Palestinians here, in this state and all across United States, we don’t call it as is.

At the same time, the mayor of Burlington, who opposed and he promised to reject and to veto any resolution in our progressive city that calls for Palestinian human rights and our rights as a Palestinian American citizen and our solidarity groups to call — to use our First Amendment and to call for the right of BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanction. And that happened a year and a half ago. You cannot have a double standard that attack us because we are activists for the rights of the Palestinians, at the same time when something like this, you just bring sorrow and mourning and defend yourself and where you stand. You have to stand with people justice regardless, and you have to be the mayor of all the citizens.

And I call for the Burlington councilmembers to bring a stronger resolution, and mainly for ceasefire now. You know, the Palestinians are dying. And we are working to stop this genocide over there. And we have — our local leaders, they have responsibility to support our solidarity group and the people in Vermont and Burlington.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — the mother of one of the injured young men, Hisham Awartani, his mother, Elizabeth Price, has been trying to leave Ramallah and travel to the U.S. to see her son. Is there any news about whether she’ll be able to come?

WAFIC FAOUR: I don’t know. I heard that she’s coming. I saw a statement about that. I don’t know if she’s on her way already. I know a sister, and her husband, of another victim is here. I am in contact with the stepfather of another victim, and he told me his health is improving now.

But we have to take this crime as example of what we feel and what we are experiencing here. We stand by those victims. But at the same time, I have to talk to you about the fear and the anger of our community here in Vermont, the Palestinian and the Arab Muslim community in particular, and our solidarity groups and young students who getting attacked by UVM administrations and a year and a half ago from Middlebury administration, too.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get to that, but I want to bring in Joyce Ajlouny into the conversation, former director of the Ramallah Friends School, the school where all three boys went to school in Ramallah. She’s now the general secretary of American Friends Service Committee, joining us from Virginia [sic]. Can you talk about where they went to school? These were three best friends, now 20 years old. I think you’re muted.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Terribly sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Perfect.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Yes, Amy. Thank you for having me.

As you were speaking to Wafic, I received a message from Ali Awartani and Elizabeth Price. They’re saying they’re on their way to America — just to answer your question about if they are planning to come. They are en route, traveling to be with Hisham.

AMY GOODMAN: And I should correct that you’re in Bethesda, Maryland. Sorry, I said Virginia.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: I am.

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: No worries. That’s close enough.

Yes, the Ramallah Friends School was established in 1869 by Quaker missionaries. It’s a phenomenal place. I’m a graduate of the school myself. My grandmother, who was a Palestinian Quaker, graduated from there in the 1920s. So, this is a proud place for many of us. And not that it’s educationally and academically superior than IP education, kindergarten through 12th grade, but it’s also the Quaker values and the foundations of peace and nonviolence and teaching tolerance and service and integrity, conflict resolution, emphasizing dialogue and inquiry. That is what the school is about. And the track record is phenomenal when we look at our graduates and what they are up to. I think graduates say that they are who they are because of the Ramallah Friends School. So it is a phenomenal place that has transformed the lives of many throughout generations. So I know that Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen are proud alums.

And, you know, I think that they’re getting together as most of us are, Palestinian Americans here. I also want to share that three of them are Palestinian Americans. And so, sometimes that’s dropped from the news, that two of them are actually American citizens. And so, they are gathered. They gather together to provide solace for each other and just vent sometimes, and it’s therapy to come together. And unfortunately, they have witnessed this horrific, horrific crime in the midst of them coming together to comfort each other. And I think that is what has happened, unfortunately, this time.

AMY GOODMAN: You posted on Facebook their poems, Tahseen’s poem, as well as Hisham. I’m wondering if you could read them for us? How old were they? Like in sixth grade?

JOYCE AJLOUNY: They were in sixth grade. I had the privilege of being the head of school when they were in middle school. And so, the librarian, actually, dug those up. And I will read Hisham’s poem, sixth grade Hisham, who now goes to Brown — by the way, brilliant students, all of them, accomplished, top-notch, value-driven.

I wanted to say, maybe, Amy, before I read his poem, that’s how selfless our students are. You know, Hisham wrote to his professor at Brown — and I want to quote him — he said, “It’s important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. The serious crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in a much wider conflict.” And then Hisham goes on to say to his professor that “This is why, when you say your wishes and light your candles today, you should mind — your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather a proud member of a people being oppressed.” And so, these are his words since the shooting.

When he was in sixth grade in 2015, he wrote — that’s Hisham Awartani:

“Hope dwells in my heart
It shines like a light in darkness
[This] light cannot be smothered
It cannot be drowned out by tears and the screams of the wounded
It only grows in strength
This light can outshine hate
This light can outshine injustice
It outshines segregation and apartheid
As of Greek legend, Pandora opened a box
And when she did that, all the evil escaped
But luckily, Pandora closed the jar before hope could escape
And as long as hope stayed in that jar
Hope would never escape
So I ask you one thing, learn from that story
Learn to never give up hope
Learn to let hope give power
In the darkest of times
And let the light shine.”

AMY GOODMAN: Wow! Hisham in sixth grade.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And how about Tahseen?

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Tahseen, there are two poems. I want to read one, which depicts where our students are coming from, that they are coming from living under a brutal occupation apartheid system that agonizes them, that traumatizes them day in and day out, children, sixth-graders. So, Tahseen writes:

“My ears are pounding
Children dying
Mothers crying
Authorities lying
My ears are pounding
My ears are pounding
Missiles destroying
Bombs exploding
Bullets killing
My ears are pounding
Press careless
Dreams traceless
Lands ownerless
My ears are pounding
Kids without mothers
Beds without covers
Palestine without others
My ears are pounding
My ears are pounding
There is one sound I heard
Not from a breeze or a bird
The sound of darkness
My ears are pounding
My ears are pounding
I’d rather be deaf.”

So, that says a lot. That says a lot about where we are at today in the story of the Palestinian struggle, which is often depicted as that this all started on October 7th. And so, this is 2015. And they are — when you read this poem, you feel like you’re reading it about today, about our people in Gaza and what they are going through, and yet this was eight years ago. So, the struggle continues.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And —

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Yeah. Go ahead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Joyce, I wanted to ask you if you could comment on the tragic irony that the families of the victims have said in various interviews that they thought that the U.S. would be a safer place for their children than the West Bank, and then to have this terrible tragedy occur here.

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Yes, of course. I mean, I think that is the absolute truth. You know, I know that a large number of Palestinian students from the Ramallah Friends School attend U.S. colleges. And they’re actually very sought after. And when they come here, the parents know that they are keeping them away from being subjected to violence from not just the Israeli military but the Israeli settlers. I have a 31-year-old son there now, and I worry about his safety. The settlers have been emboldened, and there’s violence there every day. And you wonder. You know, you send them here, and then they — this keffiyeh has now become a symbol, instead of our struggle, instead of a symbol of our tradition, our traditional dress and our struggle, this is now being painted and tainted as a symbol of violence. And so, I have another son in Washington, D.C. He doesn’t leave home without his keffiyeh. I worry about him, too. So, that is where we’re at right now.

And I can’t but agree with Wafic about the dehumanization that has been taking place. And this is not new. You know, Palestinians are — you know, even in our grief, we are depicted as Palestinians “dying” — right? — while Israelis are being “killed” and “massacred.” So language really matters. And I think that is what we have seen time and time again. You know, 47 children died on the West Bank between January and August of this year, way before this war started. And I wonder, like, who cried for them. Who mourned them? Where was the U.S. mainstream media talking about them? And so, it’s not just the language. It’s also the framing — right? — that this is the worst attack since the Holocaust, painting Palestinians as Jew haters, as that this is a religious struggle rather than a people seeking freedom, seeking liberation from a settler colonial system, and remembering, you know, that Palestinians of all faiths are in the same struggle, as well, and they have not been offered the humanity and the dignity that they deserve. And so, I think this is all — this is manifest due to the continued dehumanization, not only by the media but by our government, you know, as Wafic said, that they continue to turn a blind eye. They’re not calling for a ceasefire. They continue to embolden the Israeli atrocities by sending more aid, doubling their aid, and supporting the genocide of our people. And so, that is truly the reason why this is happening.

I just wanted to also take the opportunity, you know, we’re doing the — there’s this exchange of hostages. And when they talk about that, they talk about Israelis released the children — the Israelis released are “children,” while the Palestinians who are released are “teenagers,” so children versus teenagers. You know, in my book, they’re all hostages. The fact that the media is not talking about the 3,000 Palestinians who have been kidnapped, basically, since October 10th and put in Israeli jails, and they’re calling them — they’re not prisoners. To them, they are bargaining chips — right? — that they will use in exchange. But, to us, they are hostages, just like the hostages that are held in Gaza. And so, that is the narrative that is being talked about day in and day out. And people who have sentiments that are anti-Arab, anti-Muslim are emboldened by all of that and take action, like Jason Eaton, who felt emboldened because no is portraying Palestinians as human beings that deserve the dignity and the respect that everyone else should be — that everyone else is granted.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Eaton, of course, is the alleged shooter —

JOYCE AJLOUNY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — of the three Palestinian young men. I want to thank you, Joyce Ajlouny, the former director of the Ramallah Friends School, where they all went to school in the occupied West Bank, all three students shot in Burlington, Vermont, on Friday. Joyce is also now the general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee. And I want to thank Wafic Faour, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, speaking to us from Burlington.

And this final note: Speaking about the Vermont representatives, you have Becca Balint, who is the first Jewish congressmember to call for a ceasefire. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has not called for a ceasefire but has called for conditions on U.S. aid to Israel. He said, quote, “While Israel has the right to go after Hamas, Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government does not have the right to wage almost total warfare against the Palestinian people.”

Coming up, we speak to prize-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill about Israel’s propaganda war over Al-Shifa Hospital and what’s underneath it. Who built what’s under Shifa Hospital? Back in 20 seconds.

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Jeremy Scahill: Israel’s “Lethal Lie” About Al-Shifa Hospital as Hamas Base Was Co-Signed by Biden
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 28, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/28 ... transcript

The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill deconstructs Israel's narrative around Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, including unsubstantiated allegations Hamas uses tunnels under the hospital as its command center — tunnels that Israel itself built. “We were told that this was like a Hamas Pentagon,” says Scahill, who describes how the Israeli military’s own evidence disproves its allegations that the hospital was dangerous enough to justify its siege and bombardment. The World Health Organization says Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, “is no longer functioning.” The Israeli disinformation campaign against it was a “lethal lie,” says Scahill. We also discuss the status of Palestinian prisoners who are now candidates for release in Israel and Hamas’s ongoing hostage exchange.

Transcript

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

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

Israel is continuing to detain the head of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza. Last week, the Israeli military detained Muhammad Abu Salmiya as he was evacuating patients south from Gaza City.

Israel raided Al-Shifa, claiming Hamas ran a command and control center under the hospital, but Israel has yet to provide any hard evidence to back that up. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He admitted Israel built the bunkers decades ago underneath Al-Shifa.

EHUD BARAK: It’s already known for many years that they have in the bunkers, that originally was built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa, were used as a command post of the Hamas in a kind of a junction of several — several tunnels, part of this system. I don’t know to say to what extent it is a major. It’s probably not the only kind of command post. Several others are under other hospitals or in other sensitive places. But it’s for sure had been used by Hamas even during this conflict.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Well, when you say it was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak?

EHUD BARAK: No, no. Someday, you know, decades ago, we were wanting the place, so we held them. It was decades, many decades, ago, probably five, four decades ago, that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more — more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

We’re joined now by Jeremy Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. One of his most recent pieces for The Intercept is headlined “Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda.” Jeremy is joining us from Germany.

Jeremy, can you talk about what he just said?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Well, first of all, Amy, the Al-Shifa Hospital, originally, going back to the years of the British Mandate in the 1940s, it was a British military barracks, and then it was converted into a hospital, under both the Israeli and the Egyptian occupations of that area. And then, in the 1980s, the Israelis began to do extensive construction on it. In fact, I was looking at the Israeli Architecture Archives that were set up, and you can go back and look at [inaudible] from that era, and two Tel Aviv architects oversaw the expansion of the Al-Shifa Hospital. And by 1983, they had finished the construction of underground facilities at the hospital.

Now, we should also say, it’s not uncommon for hospitals the world over to have underground facilities for a variety of reasons. But when you’re in an active war zone, it’s very common. In fact, Israel has many underground facilities at its hospitals throughout Israel and has been using them since October 7th, certainly. They’re considered more secure places to hold vulnerable patients.

And so, what we know about Israel’s construction is that they at least built an underground operating room. They built a network of tunnels. And, in fact, during some of the construction, the son of one of the Israeli architects who designed the underground facility said that when Israel was building these in the 1980s, they hired people from Hamas as security to guard the construction project to ensure that it wouldn’t get attacked.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeremy, could you talk also about the thousands of prisoners that Israel has been holding, many of them without any trial for extended years, and yet the Netanyahu government refers to all of them as “terrorists”?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. I mean, Juan, I went through — and this connects also to the narrative around Al-Shifa. But just to directly answer your question, Israel released a list of 300 names that it said were fair game for a hostage-prisoner handover because of the truce with Hamas. And I went through all 15 pages of those names. I read each of the individual dates of birth, the dates of arrest, what the nature of the charges were — if there were any charges. Some of them don’t even list any actual charges against them. And what I discovered is that of the 300 names, 233 of these prisoners — most of them are teenage boys, some are — there’s a teenage girl who’s 15 years old — the 233 of 300 have not been convicted of anything. They haven’t been sentenced for anything. And Israel is the only country in the so-called developed world that tries children in military courts.

And so, you know, the Israeli narrative is that these are all hardened terrorists, because Palestinians are not allowed to have any context. Palestinians are not treated as full human beings. So, when a child — maybe his brother was killed by the Israeli forces, maybe his mother was killed by the Israeli forces — throws a rock at a soldier, their houses are often then raided at night. They’re snatched. They’re taken to interrogation without the presence of a parent or a lawyer. And then they’re pressured into pleading guilty under threat of spending years in a military judicial process.

Now, I say this relates to Al-Shifa because the colonial narrative always — and you can look at the British with the IRA, you can look at the position against Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress — is that those who are victims of the occupation have no rights to legitimate struggle. And so, the prisoners that Israel are holding, overwhelmingly, are people that are accused of committing political acts of violence. And that context also bleeds into Israel’s narrative about Al-Shifa: Al-Shifa is not really a hospital.

Al-Shifa — look, I don’t know if you guys have the video, but if you do, you should play it. Israel puts out a video to justify the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital, the most important hospital in Gaza, where you had dozens of children that needed incubators. Israel had knocked out the power supply. You had the most vulnerable patients there. They put out a video, the Israeli Defense Forces, that is this high-tech three-dimensional rendering, they said, of an underground, what I just call a Hamas Pentagon, and they imply that this is where — this is the central facility where Hamas is planning its terror operations.

When Israel finally then lays full siege to it, with the backing of the Biden administration and Biden himself — they co-signed all of that. They said that hostages had been held under the hospital. They said that it was used as a command and control center. When Israel finally starts to access the hospital, they take embedded journalists on these propaganda tours. And what they found was essentially nothing of any major significance. They go in, and they say, “Oh, look, we found these rifles behind an MRI machine,” which is ridiculous for anyone who knows the technology of an MRI machine and the magnetism of it. They’re all conveniently placed, neatly arranged. There’s one Hamas vest with a Hamas logo on it. So that gets ridiculed, and skepticism is expressed even by corporate media outlets that historically print Israel’s propaganda as just established fact.

So, then they finally gain access to a tunnel in the area. They go down there, and they say, “Oh, this tunnel is X number of meters long, and there’s a blast-proof door that has a hole so that the Hamas terrorists can fire at us. So we need to take some time before we blow it open. And then on the other side is going to be this command and control center.” So, finally, then, last week, they blow the thing open. They go in there. And what do they find? They find three rooms, basically. One looks like a kind of very old-school, 1980s-style exam room from a hospital. There’s a sink somewhere in there. There’s two toilets. And then you have this utter clown from the IDF who has been made a fool of himself by doing these tours. It’s like Geraldo Rivera looking for Al Capone’s vault. He’s running around, saying, “Aha! There’s electricity in here. This is a Hamas command center. Aha! They had an air conditioner in here.” You know, the pipes are rusty. Many of the electrical wires aren’t even connected.

Now, I don’t know for a fact that Hamas guys weren’t under there. It wouldn’t shock me if at some point Hamas did have people under there. But we were told this was like a Hamas Pentagon and that it was so dangerous that it justified laying siege to a hospital filled with the most vulnerable people. This is akin to sort of the George H.W. Bush administration lies about the Iraqis pulling babies from incubators. It’s an utter lie that was co-signed and promoted by President Joe Biden and his administration, and they should be made to answer for this, because it wasn’t just Al-Shifa. They did it at the Indonesia Hospital. They did it at other hospitals. Of course Hamas has networks of tunnels underneath Gaza, 150 to 300 kilometers, by some estimates. Israel is waging a targeted assassination campaign against them, and they live in a confined area waging a guerrilla war. That’s not news. But Israel tried to rebrand something that anyone who’s followed this already knows, and tried to make it seem like it’s a smoking gun. And, in fact, it was a lethal lie.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we want to thank you for being with us, senior reporter, correspondent at The Intercept. We’ll link to your pieces on Al-Shifa and Palestinian prisoners at democracynow.org.

[admin]

“Horror Show”: Doctors Without Borders Demands Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza, Medical Aid for Wounded
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 30, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/30 ... transcript

We get an update from Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and violence hospitals are facing in the occupied West Bank. Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian children Wednesday during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp, and medical workers say they were blocked from reaching the camp to treat the wounded. “Under humanitarian law, anyone should be able to reach a hospital,” says Benoît, who is demanding a “proper ceasefire” in the region to allow medical aid to reach people devastated by Israel’s war. She says the prospect of Israel resuming its bombardment of Gaza, including in the south where people were ordered to move, would be “a horror show.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel has agreed to extend its truce with Hamas for a seventh day to facilitate the exchange of captives. The extension was announced just minutes before it was set to expire on Thursday morning, prolonging a reprieve for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents after 47 days of relentless attacks by Israel spawned a massive humanitarian crisis. On Wednesday, Hamas released 16 hostages. In exchange, Israel released another 30 Palestinian women and child prisoners.

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, two Palestinian children were shot dead by Israeli forces during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp on Wednesday. Fifteen-year-old Basil Suleiman Abu al-Wafa died in a hospital after he was shot in the chest. And 8-year-old Adam al-Ghoul was shot in the head as he ran from Israeli forces, in a killing captured on video. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said Israeli soldiers blocked medics from reaching the camp to treat the wounded.

In Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza, Doctors Without Borders surgeon Dr. Hafez Abukhussa described how his hospital is overwhelmed.

DR. HAFEZ ABUKHUSSA: The patients that we see, the majority of patients, they are female and children. But what hurts me a lot, when I see a child, an innocent child, injured, and he need a major surgery. He lost his limb. And he’s the last child. He’s the only remnant of his family. And when he woke up from anesthesia, he asked to see his family. So, this is really a heartbreaking situation.

The difficulties that we face here is the lack of supplies, the lack of instruments. In the hospital on normal days here, there’s 300 patients. Now it’s more than 1,000 patients. The patients, they are homeless, because many of them are refugees within Gaza, and the other people, they have — their houses were destroyed. They don’t have the access to potable water, or there’s a lack of food, a lack of [electricity]. And some of them just get out from their houses with the clothes that they are wearing. We know that we are in danger, in danger anytime, but we will keep doing the same.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about what is happening right now in Gaza? I mean, as we are broadcasting, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken is meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, and he just met with Netanyahu. There is a ceasefire, not clear it was going to be extended even one more day. Minutes before the end of that ceasefire, it was announced it would continue. What have you learned about the devastation?

AVRIL BENOÎT: Well, thanks for having me.

From the medical humanitarian perspective of what we have seen from the beginning, after the appalling attack on October 7th, has been a collective punishment of the people in Gaza. And that’s why you’ve seen such a disproportionate number of civilians killed. The devastation on the hospitals is near complete. There are a few hospitals in the north that are really not much more than shelters right now, with still medical personnel trying to stay with patients, but they have no more equipment, they have no electricity, they have no water. They’re holed up.

And it’s a very high-risk evacuation route. We know from our own experience of our team that was stuck there with their families, after having made the decision for the medical doctors to stay with some of the patients in the hospitals, that they came — they were subjected to crossfire. A couple of the members of the evacuation group, the family members were killed in that. Our vehicles were destroyed, the ones that we were intending to use to be able to evacuate these staff and families after they retreated from what seemed to be imminent risk of death, that proved to be fatal in the end.

And so, what we’re seeing is this surge of patients in the south. As you just heard, hospitals, from the beginning, have been completely overwhelmed, but now they’ve got patients who really require much more complex medical care. They require, really, referral — ideally, medical evacuation in a safe way to a third country, for example, where they can receive the level of care that will save their lives and prevent further damage.

Just to mention another thing, because of the lack of antibiotics, medicine, wound dressing equipment, we have a very high risk of high numbers of people dying of infections. And that is something that should never happen under international humanitarian law, the norms of war. People should have access to medical care in a conflict like this. And that is just not being guaranteed in terms of the way this war is being conducted.

AMY GOODMAN: Can I ask you if you’ve heard about this report of al-Nasr pediatric hospital in northern Gaza and the premature babies, five of them, discovered, the remains of the babies? The reports were that they were left to die after Israeli forces blocked access to the intensive care unit.

AVRIL BENOÎT: I don’t have the details on that, I’m sorry. What we do know is that it was a harrowing decision for the medical staff when ordered to evacuate, knowing that sometimes you’re only given a couple of hours, which is completely unacceptable. Even in the context of this pause, this truce — which we certainly hope will continue and become an actual ceasefire — it’s very complicated to transfer a patient that is in a vulnerable state, in a machine that no longer has any electricity — as you probably know, the lack of fuel has meant it’s near impossible to run ambulances — and because of the violence, all these checkpoints, where it seems that people are waiting for hours and hours. You can imagine you’ve got people who are transferred from an intensive care unit stuffed into an ambulance because it’s one of the only ones running, and then at the checkpoint they’re stopped for up to seven hours. And then there’s violence, and they feel they have to retreat. It’s a very harrowing, high-risk kind of thing to organize.

And that’s one of the reasons that we’re calling for this killing to stop, for there to be a proper ceasefire, and, furthermore, for there to be medical evacuations, so that people can receive the care they need in a safe way, with, of course, the right to return if they so wish, and then also for there to be unconditional humanitarian aid that is allowed to enter, because we know people are in places where the aid cannot reach, and they cannot reach the hospitals. They don’t feel it’s safe. And so they are at risk of dying and suffering lifelong consequences if they don’t receive the medical care right away.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Avril, could you speak about the — during this pause, how much medical equipment, supplies, medicine, as you were speaking about earlier, the acute shortage, which many people have mentioned — how much medication is coming in, medication and equipment is coming in, during this pause, into Gaza?

AVRIL BENOÎT: The specifics are unclear, to be perfectly honest. We see that every day there are a certain number of trucks. They move at a snail’s pace. What we would really like to see, of course, is for that to be faster and of greater volume. Before this conflict, before October 7th, there were 500 trucks that would cross daily into Gaza, and that was during a blockade, so not enough. The hospitals were already at a deficit of the equipment that they needed, of the replenishing supplies. All the stocks were always threadbare. And so, then compounded with the fact that we have an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 wounded people, not to mention those that are now coming in with fevers, gastrointestinal situations, acute watery diarrhea — maybe it’s cholera; we don’t know, because we don’t have the testing facilities and labs available to check — what we’re seeing with this truce is that there is no way to be able to support the hospitals that continue to stand. Of course, many of them have been damaged in the fighting. They have been attacked systematically. The World Health Organization has been tracking this.

And for us, this is such an obvious violation of international humanitarian law, to attack hospitals, to attack medical staff, to kill them while they’re at the bedside of patients — and our own colleagues have been killed — and to just go after these facilities as if there’s some excuse that is legitimate, when it’s not, and there’s no evidence that’s been offered to really prove that they should be targets, really nothing — nothing — to substantiate that at all. They are protected spaces.

And so, the truce has allowed perhaps some stocks to go in for us to facilitate to do some movements, to check on some hospitals and clinics to see what their stocks are like. But what you really needed was to pre-position everything, to have it already in place at the starting blocks, in a warehouse, ready to be distributed to the places that need it most, that still have medical staff. And that wasn’t done because of the total siege over the last many weeks.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Avril, I’m not sure — I’m sure you’ve heard that the World Health Organization earlier this week warned that more people in Gaza could die from disease than have already died from the bombing. If you could talk a little bit about that?

AVRIL BENOÎT: Yes. Well, certainly, I mentioned infections earlier. When you have children coming in who have more than 50% of their bodies burned from explosions, they are, in the best-case scenario, in the fully equipped hospital with all the means to control the infection, really it’s a life-or-death situation. So, now we have so many of these children that we cannot treat properly. We don’t even have the proper gauze in the stocks to be able to do it.

The other thing that the World Health Organization was pointing out, which is entirely plausible, is this whole question of dehydration. So, young children, infants are coming in severely dehydrated. And where is the water? Since the siege began, this is one of the things that this collective punishment has honed in on to say, “We’re not going to give you access to water or food or medicines” — all the things that are needed just to stay alive. So, that’s a huge problem right now.

Then you just think of the people with chronic illnesses. And this is always a concern for us. Somebody who’s on heart medication, or they have diabetes, they have any number of chronic illnesses — think of all the cancer patients — where are they supposed to go to replenish? The hospital system that is barely functioning at all in the south, for example, their focus is on the severely wounded that are coming in, trying to keep people alive, patch them up, do the amputations really quickly, not in the proper way even to allow for prosthetic devices after. They’re just trying to do the most triage very urgently. And the ones who need safe place to give birth, the ones who need their heart medication, the children who are severely dehydrated, and there’s nowhere really to look after them in a hospital like that, these are the ones that are likely to be the other casualties of this war, not only the ones who are killed by the direct violence that is seemingly affecting civilians so much more than anyone else.

AMY GOODMAN: Avril Benoît, if you can talk about Netanyahu’s threat to — in resuming the bombardment? You’ve got Blinken, who reportedly is urging more surgical strikes. But they’re talking about bombarding the south. This is where they forced — what is it? — a million Gazans, Palestinians, to go from the north. So, talk about what this would mean if this temporary ceasefire ends.

AVRIL BENOÎT: It’s a horror show for us. Just think about it. A third of the injured people already were injured in the south, which was the place that everyone was told to go. That was the place. You were supposed to leave the north, go to the south. And then they got killed there.

So, for us, this is the worst, because what we have is, on the one side, the talk of “We would like humanitarian law to be respected. We would like civilians to be considered. Limit the collateral damage of civilians,” and yet, what we have seen time and again is there are no consequences evident for not doing that. And so, we have, with the looming end of this truce — and, it seems, not enough political will to really have a ceasefire — what we would regard as a kind of talking one thing but no consequences. So we can tell the Israeli forces, the Netanyahu government, “Please try to limit the killing of civilians, start doing that,” but we’re not really seeing any consequences if they don’t.

And we do know that the United States is providing billions in aid, its military aid. And so, you know, it seems that that aid could well be used, with no consequences, to violate international norms, the Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law. And for us, that’s just unacceptable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And finally, Avril Benoît, MSF International President Christos Christou posted this update on Tuesday, that while he was visiting the MSF team at the Khalil Suleiman Hospital in Jenin, the Israeli army conducted an incursion on the refugee camp.

AVRIL BENOÎT: Yes. And one of the most difficult things about that is that —

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to play a clip. We’re going to play a clip —

AVRIL BENOÎT: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: — of Christou right now.

AVRIL BENOÎT: Sounds good.

CHRISTOS CHRISTOU: It’s been already two-and-a-half hours that we are trapped in our hospital here in Jenin, while the Israeli forces are operating in another incursion in Jenin camp. There is no way for any of the injured patients to reach the hospital, and there’s no way for us to reach these people. There’s nothing worse for a doctor to know that there are people there needing our care, and they cannot get it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Avril Benoît, if you could comment on that and also the fact that two children were killed in Jenin just today?

AVRIL BENOÎT: Yes. Well, as Dr. Christou, our international president, said, if people cannot access a facility in the West Bank, already you can see the grave concern that we have. Under humanitarian law, anyone should be able to reach a hospital. And to have a hospital surrounded, blocked, so that no one can actually bring their injured children, bring their wounded to that hospital, for us, is a complete outrage. It’s been happening systematically in Gaza. And for us to now see it elsewhere is something that we, as the international community, should never accept.

And that is one of the reasons that we are speaking so loudly and in a united voice with the humanitarian aid agencies for a ceasefire, a proper ceasefire, to stop the killing, stop the siege, and allow aid to come in unconditionally and for the people to be helped, saved, and to be able to resume their lives in some shape or form.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Avril Benoît, for joining us. This ceasefire, we will see, goes day by day, those children in Jenin killed yesterday. Avril Benoît is executive director of Doctors Without Borders.

Coming up, we’ll be speaking with the acclaimed Gazan human rights attorney Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. He’s going to be joining us from Cairo, after his house was bombed in northern Gaza. We will find out about his journey south. Then we’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin about the death of Henry Kissinger. Stay with us.

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“This Is Genocide”: Attorney Raji Sourani on Israeli War Crimes & Fleeing Gaza After Home Was Bombed
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November30, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/30 ... transcript

After his home in Gaza was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in October, Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani joins us from Cairo. He says Israel is enacting a “new Nakba” in its war on Gaza, and the expulsion of all Palestinians from their homeland is the clear end goal of the Israeli state. “They want us out, out of Palestine, out of Gaza, out of the West Bank,” says Sourani. “This is genocide, this is ethnic cleansing, and these are first-class war crimes.”

Transcript

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue our coverage of Gaza, we’re joined by Raji Sourani, the award-winning human rights lawyer and director of the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. He’s a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. We last spoke with Raji Sourani after Israel bombed his home in Gaza City. He joins us today from Cairo, Egypt.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Raji Sourani. If you could begin by talking about how you managed to leave Gaza and how you got to Cairo?

RAJI SOURANI: Well, it was very hard and very heartbreaking for me, I mean, to leave Gaza, I mean, the place I lived all my life, one-way ticket in it. And that was very hard and very tough. But really, I mean, after I was targeted for the second time, after we talked, I was advised very strongly, I mean, not to be at that place and to leave the northern of Gaza. And I left with my family, who didn’t want to leave me alone. I mean, so we left together to the south for a few days, and thanks for the help of great friends, I mean, who managed to get me there, because in two previous attempts it was mission impossible, when tens of people died either on the beach road or at Salah al-Din Street in front of our eyes, when the Israelis shot and bombed, I mean, people who were advised to leave to the safe haven in the south. But that wasn’t, I mean, the case. So I managed to leave to the south, finally, on my third attempt. And from there, I managed to move to Egypt.

There was, I mean, quite a lot of friends who wanted, in a way, the voice, I mean, of Gaza, the voice of the voiceless, about the horrendous genocide taking place at [inaudible] to be reported to the outside world. And there is quite a lot of things to do with the ICC, which greatly disappointing us, and there’s quite a lot of work to do with the ICJ. And there is quite a lot of work to talk, speak to power in European countries about this new Nakba, which is in process, and Israel creating it, and to stop their complicity, their absolute political, legal, military support for belligerent criminal occupation, who’s doing suicide — genocide at the daylight, who’s doing ethnic cleansing, war crimes, broadcasted there live at the real time. But it seems deep in their mind and hearts, the colonial, racist Western governments don’t want to see, don’t want to know, and they are insisting, I mean, in supporting blindly the Israeli belligerent occupation in the crimes they are doing in Gaza and the Occupied Territories at large.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji, if you could look straight into the camera lens as we speak to you now in Cairo? Thank God you’re OK. When we were speaking to you the day after your house was bombed, you described your son moving you and your beloved wife from one room, saying, “Let’s going into the hallway,” and then the place was destroyed. If you could say in more detail what it was like to make your way north to south, what you saw along the way? We also had reports that those who wanted to return to their homes north — so much of the bombing, it may surprise people, is happening actually in the south, where people are directed to go, before this ceasefire. Is it true that people were shot trying to go home in the north? The Israeli military had said, “Don’t do this.”

RAJI SOURANI: Well, we have to understand the context, the context of what the Israelis really want. In simple words, Prime Minister Netanyahu, the criminal Netanyahu, said in simple words, “Gazans should leave Gaza.” He said, “Gaza should be deserted.” And the Minister of Defense Gallant, in a clear, simple way, he said, “For Gazans, there will be no food, no electricity, no fuel.”

And so, what does that mean? I mean, if you say Gazans should leave Gaza, to go where to? It’s obvious and clear. If you are starving and cutting electricity, food, medicine, you are bombing shelters, hospitals, ambulances, if you are killing hundreds of entire families, I mean, being erased, if you are bombing bakeries, if you are bombing water infrastructure and desalination plants, if you are, you know, bluffing, I mean, the entire streets in the Gaza, if you are not allowing people even to reach hospital, if you bomb the civil defense system and the people who are working on it, what do you want from that? If you make no safe haven in entire Gaza, what’s the purpose of that?

They want to push the north to the south. This is the first stage. And they pushed many as a million people, I mean, to the south — Gaza already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. And they push them while Gaza suffers 17 years of blockade, suffocated the life socioeconomically, passed through five wars against them, and in the eye of the storm the civilian and civilian targets. And now you are doing all that. You are killing almost 30,000 people, because many, many, Amy, still, I mean, under the rubbles, many still under their destroyed houses, and civil defense unable to recover. You are talking about thousands of people. You are talking about thousands of people in the streets in some areas nobody can get to.

The rationale, the behavior of the Israeli guidelines, the outcome of this pushing people to the south, and then from the south toward Sinai, that’s a new Nakba. As simple as that. They want us out, out of Palestine, out of Gaza, out of the West Bank. This is, I mean, the ultimate goal, Amy, for the Israeli government. And this coalition of Netanyahu and the right wing, the basis of their governmental agreement, the coalition agreement to do that, this was said at day one of this war, of this genocide war. And I think yet the Israelis so determined, so willing, and they want to do that. They want to do that.

They finished, I mean, the first stage, and now they want to go to the second stage. And after they finish up with Gaza, it won’t be a new brand of apartheid in East Jerusalem and West Bank. They will do the same, I mean, there. So, what was lack of their plan in 1948 in the Nakba, they want to implement it completely now, so Eretz Yisrael would be clean, and they will have the purity of the Jewish state. And by that, they will accomplish, I mean, their mission. This is simple, clear for any who want to see beyond the details. This is really what Israel want to do.

And that’s why we call it, from the second day, this is genocide, this is ethnic cleansing, and these are first-class war crimes. It’s against A, B, C of international law, international humanitarian law. And it’s against Geneva Convention. It’s against Rome Statute. And we see, from the wall to wall, support by many European countries, doing that willingly and giving full legal, political and military support for the state of Israel, plus U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji, as you talk about international law, can you make that comparison between what happened in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, immediately the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opening an investigation, especially against children — I think there were something — against what happened to the children. Five hundred children have died in Ukraine over almost two years, up to a thousand dead or maimed. And you compare it to the few weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, 5,000 to 6000 children alone dead, over 15,000 people dead. What do you want Karim Khan to do? And finally — and we just have a few minutes — right now Blinken just met with Mahmoud Abbas. He just met with Herzog on his, like, fourth trip to the Middle East, the U.S. pushing hard to give more weapons aid to Israel. Your response to that? What do you want Biden to say to Netanyahu? And how much power does he have?

RAJI SOURANI: I don’t think yet there is decision by U.S. to stop what is going on. They can simply stop all these crimes. We are bombed with F-35, F-16s, the American tanks, the American artillery, the American ammunition. We are killed with that, with some small amount of European arms. Now, if U.S. want to stop that, they can do that. And they can do that simply. But they are supporting, Amy, really, what Israel is doing. And if we are talking about the next stage that — attends. Hello?

AMY GOODMAN: We can hear you fine. Just if you can just look up into the camera. We see you. Ah, we may have just lost Raji Sourani. Raji Sourani is the world-renowned, award-winning human rights attorney, won the RFK, Robert F. Kennedy Award, won the Right Livelihood Award, has lived in Gaza for decades, speaking to us from Cairo, Egypt. He just got out of Gaza. His home was bombed, with this wife and his son and him it.

[admin]

Headlines for DemocracyNow!
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

Dozens of Palestinians Killed in Renewed Israeli Attacks as Weeklong Gaza Truce Expires
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed after Israel resumed its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, ending a weeklong pause to facilitate the exchange of captives. Hamas responded by firing a salvo of rockets toward southern Israel. The U.N. says the resumption of violence puts thousands of innocent lives at risk. Since October 7, the Israeli bombardment has killed over 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,100 children. Israel has expanded its military campaign to target southern areas of Gaza, where Israeli planes have been dropping leaflets warning people to evacuate areas around Khan Younis, warning the city was now a “dangerous battle zone.” Israel previously expelled hundreds of thousands of people from the northern Gaza Strip to the south. Just hours before the truce was set to expire, residents of Khan Younis searched through the rubble of their former homes for any personal items they could salvage.

Dalal Masoud: “The end of the calm today feels like our execution. They are telling us that today is the last day of the ceasefire, and we have 24 hours before we return to a life of sheltering in schools in squalor, with the hardship of life without water, electricity or proper shelter. We want a complete truce, not being told every day there is a truce, only to have it breached.”

Freed Palestinian Prisoners Say They Faced Torture and Rape in Israeli Jails
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza came after Israel and Hamas completed a seventh exchange of captives. On Thursday, eight Israelis held by Hamas were released, while 30 Palestinians were freed from Israeli jails. Israel’s government says it believes Hamas still holds 137 hostages kidnapped during the October 7 attacks. Newly freed Palestinians report suffering torture and sexual assault. This is Baraah Abo Ramouz, a Palestinian journalist who spoke after his release from an Israeli jail Thursday.

Baraah Abo Ramouz: “The situation in the prisons is devastating. The prisoners are abused. They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.”

Earlier this week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for an investigation into reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7.

NYT: Israel Had Hamas Battle Plan More Than a Year Ago But Failed to Prevent Oct. 7 Attacks
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

Israeli government officials knew Hamas was planning a large-scale attack on Israel more than a year ago, but failed to respond to specific warnings about the plot after dismissing it as “aspirational.” That’s according to an explosive report in The New York Times, which says Israeli officials intercepted a 40-page battle plan by Hamas detailing how its attack would play out — a blueprint Hamas closely followed on October 7.

Meanwhile, another explosive new report by +972 Magazine details how Israel is using artificial intelligence to draw up targets in Gaza, and how Israel has loosened its constraints on attacks likely to kill civilians. One former intelligence officer described the plan as a “mass assassination factory.” After headlines, we’ll go to Jerusalem to speak with Israeli investigative reporter Yuval Abraham, who broke the story.

Arizona Police Arrest Protesters and Journalist Covering Blockade of Raytheon Building
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

In Arizona, 26 people were arrested Thursday as protesters peacefully blockaded a Raytheon manufacturing hub in Tucson, demanding an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel. One protester said, “We are outraged that more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed, while companies like Raytheon continue to fill their coffers with blood money.” Among those arrested was journalist Alisa Reznick of public radio station KJZZ. She was arrested by Pima County Sheriff’s deputies even as she carried recording equipment and repeatedly identified herself as press.

MSNBC Cancels “The Mehdi Hasan Show,” Sparking Uproar
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
December 01, 2023

MSNBC is facing a torrent of backlash after announcing it’s canceling “The Mehdi Hasan Show.” The British-born journalist is known for holding powerful figures to account and is one of the most powerful Muslim voices on American television.

Following the news, Congressmember Ilhan Omar said, “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is cancelling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices.” Journalist Ryan Grim said, “Mehdi’s style of confrontational interviews, in which he doesn’t let public figures get away with lies or half true talking points, turned him into a celebrated journalist in the UK. His show’s cancellation is such a pathetic indictment of the U.S. media.”

Mehdi Hasan’s show has been welcomed as one of the few on a mainstream network to question Israel’s narrative over its attacks on Gaza. Last month, Hasan interviewed Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Mehdi Hasan: “I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So” —

Mark Regev: “Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.”

Mehdi Hasan: “And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also” —

Mark Regev: “They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.”

Mehdi Hasan: “But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?”

Mark Regev: “No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.”

Mehdi Hasan: “Oh wow.”

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“Mass Assassination Factory”: Israel Using AI to Generate Targets in Gaza, Increasing Civilian Toll
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
December 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/1/ ... transcript

We look at a new report that reveals how Israel is using artificial intelligence to draw up targets in its military assault of Gaza. The report’s author, journalist Yuval Abraham, has found that the IDF’s increasing use of AI is partly a response to previous operations in Gaza when Israel quickly ran out of military targets, causing it to loosen its constraints on attacks that could kill civilians. In other words, the “civilian devastation that is happening right now in Gaza” is the result of a “war policy that has a very loose interpretation of what a military target is.” This targeting of private homes and residences to kill alleged combatants means that “when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision it was worth it.” It has turned the Israeli military into a “mass assassination factory,” with a “total disregard for Palestinian civil life,” continues Abraham, who also notes that, as an Israeli journalist, his reporting is still subject to military censors. We also discuss another recent report revealing that Israel may have received intelligence about Hamas’s planned attack more than a year in advance of October 7, but ignored it.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: [size=15\20]Israel has resumed airstrikes on Gaza after a weeklong truce ended. The strikes have reportedly killed at least 70 Palestinians. Israel is dropping leaflets ordering Palestinians in Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, to head further south toward Rafah.[/size] Since the October 7th Hamas attack, the Israeli bombardment has killed over 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,100 children. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has described the resumption of attacks as “very troubling.”

RAVINA SHAMDASANI: The resumption of hostilities in Gaza is catastrophic. We urge all parties and states with influence over them to redouble efforts immediately to ensure a ceasefire on humanitarian and human rights grounds. Recent comments by Israeli political and military leaders indicating that they are planning to expand and intensify the military offensive are very troubling.

AMY GOODMAN: Talks are reportedly continuing for a new truce and the release of more captives. Israel says it believes Hamas still holds 137 hostages kidnapped during the October 7th attacks.

We turn now to look at a stunning new exposé on how Israel is using artificial intelligence to draw up targets and how Israel has loosened its constraints on attacks that could kill civilians. One former intelligence officer says Israel has developed a, quote, “mass assassination factory.”

In one case, sources said the Israeli military approved an assassination strike on a single Hamas commander despite knowing the strike could kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Another source told +972 Magazine, quote, “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. … Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every [home],” unquote.

+972 also reports the Israeli military knowingly attacked civilian targets, including apartment complexes, universities and banks, in an effort to exert, quote, “civil pressure” on Hamas.

We’re joined in Jerusalem by the Israeli investigative reporter Yuval Abraham. His latest report for +972 Magazine and Local Call is headlined “'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.”

Yuval, thanks for joining us again from Jerusalem. If you can talk about who your sources are and what exactly they’re using — the Israeli military is using AI for? Explain this idea of a “mass assassination factory.”

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Sure, yeah. So, I’ll start by saying, Amy, that, you know, there are some things that I can say and other things that I cannot say. You know, we, as Israeli journalists, are subjected to the military censors, so everything that I have published had to be vetted by the military. And also my knowledge is partial.

So, I’ve spoken to seven Israeli intelligence officers, some of them current, some of them former intelligence officers. All of them took part in wars against Gaza, in bombing campaigns, whether right now or in 2021, 2022 and 2014. And the use of artificial intelligence is an increasing trend that the army is adopting to mark targets in Gaza.

And I think a good year to look at to understand its beginning with relation to Gaza is 2019, when the Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi introduced this new division in the military called the Targets Division. And its idea was to bring together hundreds of soldiers and basically start to develop these AI algorithms and automated software to accelerate the target creation for strikes with life-and-death consequences in Gaza. And, you know, a source that actually took part in this division center said that they were being judged not by the quality of the targets that they were producing, but by the quantity, that the idea here was that if you want to create a certain shock effect, if you are fighting against a guerrilla group, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and/or Hamas in Gaza — this is the source saying — then — so, the source said that this shock effect is the way Israel views its war tactic against these organizations, and [size=1w0]part of that is trying to accelerate the creation of targets.[/size]

Now, in 2014, which was the previous biggest Israeli assault on Gaza, according to sources that I’ve spoken with, the Israeli military ran out of targets after roughly three weeks. And that operation lasted for 50 days. And sources have described a sense that in previous operations, that the military just runs out of targets to bomb, and alongside that there is some political pressure or some need to continue the war, to create a victory image for the Israeli public, to work, you know, to apply more pressure. And I think this increasing use of artificial intelligence, this acceleration of target creation, in part, is a response to that problem, to running out of targets.

And what we know now from sources is that target production using these programs — one of them is called “The Gospel,” and according to sources, it does facilitate this mass assassination factory that I can get into in a moment. But the rate of creating the targets is now faster than the rate that Israel is able to bomb the targets. And in this Targets Division, according to the army’s sources, already 12,000 targets were created during this war in this Targets Division, using these artificial intelligence tools, which is too much — two times as many targets as were bombed in the entirety of the 2014 war, which lasted for 51 days.

AMY GOODMAN: Yuval Abraham is a journalist based in Jerusalem who writes for +972 Magazine and Local Call. He’s just written a piece called “'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.” We’ll be back in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Students at the Ramallah Friends School in the occupied West Bank singing a solidarity song for the children of Gaza with their teachers Safia Awad and Issa Jildeh. In just a moment, we’ll be speaking with Elizabeth Price, the mother of one of the three Palestinian college students in the United States who was shot in Burlington, Vermont, Saturday night. But right now we’re continuing with Yuval Abraham, journalist based in Jerusalem, who writes for +972 Magazine. His most recent piece”:https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/, “'A mass assassination factory.'” Yuval, explain what a power target is.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Sure, yes. So, power targets is a concept that was developed, according to intelligence sources in the military, first in 2014. And the military defines power targets as residential high-rise buildings. So they have eight floors, 12 floors, 14 floors. And the official military’s claim is that in each of these buildings there is military target that merits, that legitimizes bombing down the entire building. However, according to three sources in Israeli intelligence that I’ve spoken with who have deep knowledge of this tactic, who have been involved with bombing power targets, they say that the idea of power targets is to purposely attack buildings that have all of these civilian apartments in them in order to put pressure on Palestinian civilian society in Gaza, which is then translated to pressure on Hamas, civilian pressure on Hamas. I’ve heard this term several times in my conversations with intelligence sources.

Now, in 2021, Amy, the Israeli military bombed the Al-Jalaa building in Gaza, which — you know, it caused an international uproar because this was a building that hosted the AP, AFP and Al Jazeera media outlets. It was one out of nine high-rises that were bombed in 2021. I have managed to confirm from sources within Israeli intelligence that this was, in fact, a power target. One source said that there was this idea that if we bomb the high-rises, it causes the civilians to feel like Hamas is not sovereign, like they have lost control. One source said that he felt this was a form of a terror tactic.

Now, very importantly, the sources that I’ve spoken with have dealt with these power targets before 2023, before the current Israeli assault in Gaza. So I know less about the specifics of power targets that are currently bombed; however, we do know from official army statements that Israel, during the first five days, so up until October 11th and October 12th, has bombed 1,329 power targets. The military says that half of the targets that were bombed were identified as power targets in the military.

Now, during these five days, we know, of course, that hundreds of children have been killed. We have managed to find indications of these buildings that were bombed without an evacuation protocol. And this is a very important point, because, according to sources that I’ve spoken with, in the past the internal protocol in the military was that you can only bomb power targets, which are high-rise buildings or governmental buildings inside neighborhoods, after you’ve evacuated all the families from the building. This was a principle that was in place in 2021, where they bombed nine high-rises, nine power targets. And no civilian Palestinians were killed, because they did put in place an evacuation protocol. They call, you know, the guard in the building. It’s quite horrific. You know, there is little missiles. But at the end of the day, the goal was to put pressure on civilians by destroying their apartments, from what I’ve heard from sources, and not by killing them.

Now, I don’t know — again, I haven’t spoken to sources that have bombed power targets in this operation, but there are clear indications that I am finding in Gaza — for example, the Al-Mohandessin Tower, which was bombed, on top of all the families inside of it, or Babel Tower or Al-Taj Tower — that they were bombed while the families were inside. And I think — I am assuming, since these are high-rises, and since the military has said that it bombed over a thousand power targets, that these were power targets. So this is a shift. I mean, the evidence suggests there is a shift here of not only striking targets that are primarily intended to cause civilian shock or to put civilian pressure on Hamas — again, according to intelligence sources — but, apparently, in some of the cases, the evidence suggests that such targets have also led to the killing of families.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking Thursday at a news conference in Tel Aviv.

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: Israel has the most sophisticated — one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women and children. And it has an obligation to do so. … The way Israel defends itself matters. It’s imperative that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Yuval Abraham, if you can respond to what Blinken is saying? You know, at the beginning, after the October 7th attack, President Biden said that the support for Israel was unconditional, they could do anything they wanted. Now, clearly, with massive pushback in the United States with protests of people all over the country and around the world, you have both Biden and Blinken stepping back and saying you have to protect civilians. One of your sources suggested that the scale of this attack, with an unprecedented number of civilian casualties in Gaza, has to do in part with the Israeli military’s wish to redeem itself after the catastrophic failures of October 7th. And now you have this big New York Times exposé that Israel clearly knew a year ago the blueprint for this attack. And there are other reports, in Haaretz and other places, that say — I think they were called — the women surveillance soldiers along the Gaza border, I think they’re called spotters, were repeatedly telling their supervisors in the last weeks, in the last months, “We see this escalation here. It looks like Hamas is about to attack.” And they would be told they’d be brought up on insubordination charges if they kept pushing this issue. Yuval?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yes, Amy. It’s very important for me to respond to Blinken’s statements. And I have three things that I really want to say, and I really want people to listen to them.

The first is that the very real war crimes that Hamas has committed, you know, killing people — some of them I knew — massacring people, do not justify Israeli war crimes in Gaza that are being committed. That’s number one.

Number two, this idea that the military is doing whatever it can to keep civilians in Gaza safe or that it is using its technology to not harm civilians in Gaza is false. It’s not true. And I know this not only from looking at the catastrophic killing of so many civilians in Gaza, but also by speaking to intelligence sources who have told me that now all of the previous restrictions, that were already permissive, into harming civilians have been dramatically loosened. For example, one source spoke about how you get sort of this approximation of where a target is, and it’s not pinpointed. And yet soldiers will still strike it, knowingly killing families and civilians, to save time, to save time in getting a more accurate pinpointing of the target. It’s very important that people understand that — and this according to five sources that I’ve spoken with in Israeli intelligence — in all of the target files that Israel is bombing right now, the amount of civilians that are likely to be killed is written down. So, again, it’s not a mistake. As you’ve quoted in the beginning of the piece, in the beginning of the narration, Amy, when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision that this killing was worth it to hit another target. And there are internal regulations that the army has created that regulate this. And so it’s very clear to me that after October 7th there is a total disregard for Palestinian civilian life, even when hitting targets that are either not distinctly military in nature.

The third and final thing — and this goes back to the idea of a mass assassination factory — is that there is a systematic policy, according to sources, of targeting private residential homes of Hamas or jihadi operatives when they are in these private homes, when they are in these buildings or private residences. And just so you understand, I mean, what this means is that the military is knowingly dropping a bomb, that weighs a ton, or often more, on a residential building in order to assassinate one person, knowingly killing that person’s family and neighbors in the process, when, according to sources, in the vast majority of cases, these buildings are not places where there is military activity that is being conducted. It is an assassination against somebody who is in Hamas or Jihad’s military brigades, but they are not in a military place. One source who was particularly critical of this policy said that he thought it was like if Israel would bomb — sorry, if a Palestinian militant group would bomb the homes of Israelis, not when they are wearing their army uniform, but when they are going back home in the weekend, and essentially assassinating them through the bodies of their families or their neighbors, and then saying that they use those families as human shields.

Now, I think that we’ve talked about these power targets, and we’ve talked about these assassination targets, and, of course, there are many different types of targets that could be considered, under international law, more legitimate — for example, militant cells, for example, ammo warehouses, for example, you know, rocket launcher pits. And I think that to look at the civilian devastation that is happening right now in Gaza, you have to understand that it’s a consequence of a particular Israeli war policy. It is a war policy that has a very loose interpretation of what a military target is, also attacking people in civilian spaces. It is a war policy that centers on deterrents and hitting these power targets that are intended to place civilian pressure on Hamas. And it is a war policy that is increasingly being helped by the use of big data, automation software and AI. And again, I don’t know everything; I’ve only spoken to several sources. But my evidence suggests that many, many of the civilians who are being killed in Gaza are being killed as a result of these policies, that I do not think are justifiable policies. International law experts would call them war crimes. And that’s why I don’t think that what Blinken is saying is true, honestly.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to talk more about war crimes later in the program. Yuval Abraham, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli Jewish journalist based in Jerusalem, who writes for +972 Magazine and Local Call. We’ll link to your new piece, “'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.”

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Resumed Bombing of Gaza Will Be Crushing to Palestinian Students Shot in Vermont, Says Victim’s Mother
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
December 01, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/1/ ... transcript

We speak with the mother of Hisham Awartani, one of the three 20-year-old Palestinian college students who were shot last weekend in Burlington, Vermont, in a suspected hate crime. Elizabeth Price traveled from her home in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to see her son, who is still hospitalized in Burlington. He was shot in the spine and, while in stable condition, now faces an immediate loss of mobility. Price shares how her son’s “resilience” and “brotherhood” with his childhood best friends who are the other survivors of the shooting, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, have been an integral part of his recovery. She also emphasizes that had Awartani been shot in Palestine, “he would have been dead in prison or thrown somewhere in a medical facility without the support to recover from this.” We also discuss life under occupation in the West Bank, U.S. displays of solidarity with Palestinians, and the media narrative surrounding the shooter’s motives. Of the three young men’s commitment to highlighting the larger picture of Israeli oppression of Palestine, Price says that “the fact that the Israelis have started bombarding again in the Gaza Strip is something that will crush them more than their injuries.”

Transcript

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

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

We turn now to Vermont, where family members of three Palestinian college students shot in Burlington Saturday night are arriving to care for their sons, who they say were targeted simply for being Palestinian. In a minute, we’ll speak with the mother of Hisham Awartani. He was shot in the spine when he took a walk with his friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad after they visited relatives while staying in Hisham’s grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving break. All three have been friends since the first grade at the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. Two of them were wearing keffiyehs, the symbol of Palestinian pride, when they were shot. Their alleged attacker, Jason Eaton, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder. Authorities have not yet added a hate crime enhancement to his charges.

The Associated Press reports Eaton had a history of domestic disputes that led police to confiscate his shotgun a decade ago. NBC News reported Tuesday that another ex-girlfriend told police in 2019 Eaton had continued calling and texting her and driving by her house after she had made it clear she didn’t want to communicate with him, and she had considered filing a restraining order. So often mass shooters have abused women in their past.

At a vigil Monday on the campus of Brown University, where Hisham Awartani is a student, professor Beshara Doumani, the Mahmoud Darwish professor of Palestinian studies, read a statement from Hisham.

BESHARA DOUMANI: “I would like to start out by saying that I greatly appreciate all the love and prayers being sent my way. Who knew that all I had to do to become famous was to get shot? … And as much as I appreciate the love [from] every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict. Had I been shot in the West Bank where I grew up, the medical services which saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli Army.”

VIGILERS: Shame!

BESHARA DOUMANI: “The soldier who would’ve shot me would go home and never be convicted.”

VIGILERS: Shame!

BESHARA DOUMANI: “I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine. This is why when you send your wishes and light your candles for me today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed.”

AMY GOODMAN: That statement from Hisham Awartani was read at a vigil Monday night at Brown University’s campus, where he’s a student.

Hisham’s mother, Elizabeth Price, joins us now from Burlington after traveling from her home in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to be with her son in the hospital.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Elizabeth. I’m so sorry you’re here under these circumstances. Can you talk about how Hisham is doing and his friends, the two other Palestinian students shot on Saturday night?

ELIZABETH PRICE: Hisham makes me so proud. I mean, he was lying in his bed, paralyzed from the chest down, in great pain from broken bones, and in shock and traumatized, and he typed out that statement to be read out to a vigil. And I was so impressed with his ability to focus on others during that, in this time of his life being devastated.

He is in stable condition. He is going to be transferred to a rehabilitation center so that he can live to learn — learn to live with his injuries, and then also, hopefully and definitely, return on a path towards full mobility, we hope. His other friends are also stable. One has been discharged from the hospital but is severely traumatized. You know, he spent 45 minutes thinking that his friends had been shot dead. And then, a third, the third child, or the third young man — because they are children to me since they grew up in my house — is stable and working towards discharge.

But they are all traumatized, and they are all feeling grateful to be alive and feeling the bitterness of the fact that they are receiving such attention and such support and such incredible medical services from the Burlington community in the Burlington medical facility while at the same time people are dying under the bombs of the Israeli bombardment. I mean, the fact that the Israelis have started bombarding again the Gaza Strip is something that will crush them more than their injuries have crushed them.

My son said that when he went through the list of those who had died under the Israeli bombardment a few weeks ago, he found that there were 30 that had his name, Hisham. And he has said in another statement to a Brown newspaper — he says to remember, like he said in the vigil, “I am the Hisham you know.” And I think that he just really wants people to be thinking about the Palestinians who are dying by the tens of thousands right now, and not to be focusing on him. And I think this is something that he and his — this is a sentiment that is shared by his friends, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you can tell us — although he wants to talk about himself as, as he said, a member of an oppressed community; think of all of the people who don’t get help when they’re shot right now in Gaza and the West Bank. But if you could tell us about Hisham? He’s Palestinian, Irish American? Is that right?

ELIZABETH PRICE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty years old, a junior at Brown?

ELIZABETH PRICE: Yes, yes. So, Hisham was born in America and is a devoted Giants fan. He grew up in Palestine. He’s an Irish citizen because I was born in Ireland, and he’s Palestinian because his father is Palestinian. And he’s a — you know, grew up in Palestine. He is a born mathematician. He has mathematics in his family. He once said to me that just numbers make him happy. And he is the type of person who — he’s a polymath. He’s a polyglot. You know, he speaks Arabic and English —

AMY GOODMAN: What languages does he speak?

ELIZABETH PRICE: Arabic and English fluently. He’s studying — he’s very good at Persian right now, because he’s been taking Persian. He took cuneiform in college, so he, you know, can write in an extinct language. He has studied Hebrew and German and French in high school, and he is currently studying Spanish and Italian at Brown.

And he is doing a BSc in pure mathematics at college. He went in as a math student. And then, when he took a course in archaeology, he was just hit by a bug for archaeology — bitten by the bug of archaeology. Now he’s doing a BSc in math and a BA in archaeology. Not really quite sure how those two things go together, but Hisham has the ability to just suck in information, create this incredible database of knowledge that he can make, quite rapidly, connections with, and then come out with a conclusion that he shares with people. I mean, he’s a computer, in his brain. And yet, at the same time, he’s very soulful and very philosophical.

And I think in the last few days — I mean, this hasn’t even been a week since this happened to him. In the last few days, I have really understood how Hisham has the ability to have his soul and his heart encompass his people and for him to be able to contextualize the suffering that he’s had within what is something that he sees as a valid and — the dignity of his people. So, I think that is giving him great comfort. There is an Arabic word, sumud, which means resilience. It’s about the concept of existence being resistance, staying on your land no matter what. And Hisham, for me, signifies and symbolizes that concept. He is like an olive tree, that he can get cut down, but he will regrow. And that is where he gets the strength to be thinking about other people and about his people even while he lies in a bed unable to move.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I think we can also see where he gets his spirit: from you, Elizabeth. And his —

ELIZABETH PRICE: I’m lucky to be his mother. I am blessed to be his mother. I am so privileged to have gotten to know him in my life.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about them growing up in the Ramallah Friends School? We spoke with the head of the school, who’s now head of the whole American Friends Service Committee in the United States, Joyce Ajlouny. Talk about his experience growing up in Ramallah, where you live, and going to this Quaker school.

ELIZABETH PRICE: Well, I mean, life in Ramallah and life in Palestine is a beautiful thing. Obviously, we live under military occupation, and so, you know, people are killed every day, and often they are children. And children are arrested, and people are arrested. And often the school goes on strike because — in solidarity with the news of someone being killed by the Israeli army. So, it’s a life where you know when the school goes on strike, that someone has lost their life. And the walls of the streets around the school are filled with pictures of people who have been killed, in memory of them.

But Ramallah, and Palestine, is a place of family and community. It’s a place where everyone knows each other, and we feel safe. My daughter, who is 17, can walk home late at night in safety, because everyone respects the other and sees the other as a member of a larger society or community or family. And so you’re never alone, and you’re always — everyone acts to take care of each other.

So, these boys grew up together. They did Model United Nations. They talked, and they did math club, and they did chess club. And they would come to my house on a Saturday afternoon, like giraffes, you know, as they grew up over the years, and they would duck under my threshold and sprawl over on my couches, and I would make them food. And then they would cram themselves into Hisham’s tiny room, and they would just talk about philosophy and politics and language and then just talk about — you know, just joke with each other.

And then, when they were receiving their college results for those who had applied to American colleges, you get the results at like 3:00 in the morning in Palestine, so they would stay up together, and they would be on the phone to each other, and they would be there for each other. So, as the one person up opened their email, and if it was good news, they would celebrate; it was bad news, they would commiserate. And so, that helped them survive so much. And the three boys who you mentioned, Hisham and his two friends, are like brothers. And I think that that has been so important for them.

After they were shot, they were kept in the same ICU room for a number of days by the hospital, because the hospital recognized that the proximity meant that they could be with each other and give each other strength. Kinnan, who has been released, was the least hurt, but was deeply, deeply traumatized by the experience that he went through when he thought that his friends had been killed. And so, by keeping him, even though he could be released, with the boys, the hospital was able to give them that comfort of being with each other and having that camaraderie and that brotherhood sustain them in the time where they were just trying to come to grips with the hatred that had been shown to them, the devastation of their lives and the crippling of my son.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a report from NBC. At one event at Brown, 20 students were arrested by university police and charged with trespassing after they refused to leave a sit-in outside Brown President Christina Paxson’s office. A friend of Hisham’s, Daniel Newgarden, said that Hisham had attended a Shabbat dinner with some of the Jewish students who had been arrested during the sit-in, and that they got together each Friday afterward. And they talked about the alliance between Jews and Palestinians, who they saw increasingly anxious after October 7th, Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH PRICE: Yes. Hisham did notify Brown that he felt unsafe on campus. I hadn’t realized that. Hisham often wouldn’t tell me things. He was so busy with his life, doing five course and 20 hours of work. But he did feel anxious. He was active.

And I have to tell you that when we heard about that sit-in by the Jewish students, we were moved. There has been such an incredible outpouring of support by Jewish activists in America. The concept of the Grand Central Station sit-in was something that reverberated around Palestine and really lifted our hearts. And then, when Hisham sent me a picture of him at Shabbat dinner with these young people, I just felt like he was in the right community.

I mean, when this type of thing happens, when Palestinians are so traumatized and so abused by the international community and the ignoring of their rights, my children learned over this last seven weeks what it is to be on the wrong side of justice. And I think for definitely my daughter and definitely Hisham, it opened their eyes up to what it is to be a part of an oppressed community, and the opportunity for solidarity across that.

Jewish people have been targeted for centuries by antisemitism. The other minorities in America, the Native Americans have been in solidarity with the Palestinians. Black Americans, so many different minorities have reached out and been in — stood in solidarity with the Palestinians. And I think that that’s the life that I want my children to experience, to live in a community where they know and fight for the — against the injustice that others suffer, and that they know that the others are standing with them in the injustice — against the injustice that the Palestinians suffer. So, that Shabbat dinner gave me great joy when I heard about it.

AMY GOODMAN: People can go to Democracy Now! and see — we were there at the Grand Central protest, hundreds of Jews arrested as they shut down Grand Central Station on a Sabbath night, on a Friday night. If you can say what the doctors are saying right now, Elizabeth? Hisham has a bullet lodged in his spine. He also — his thumb — what else is —

ELIZABETH PRICE: So, Hisham, from what I understand, he must have had his hand up when he was shot, and so the bullet went through his thumb into his clavicle. And then I think it may have ricocheted against his scapula. It broke a — I think it touched a rib, and then it went into the T2 of his spine. So, from what I understand, that trajectory and that passage meant that the bones slowed down the bullet, which is very lucky, because I think the bullet would have severed his spine. So, currently the bullet has lodged there, and there’s concussive impact, which has meant that Hisham has lost the sensation of pain and temperature, but he can feel pressure from his mid-torso downward. So Hisham has to go through a long process of physical therapy to be able to regain the control of his muscles down there.

In the short term, I believe that he will be able to learn how to live with that. He’ll be given the — he’ll be taught how to live with his disability. And our long-term plan is to support him to be able to regain motion, functional motion in all of his body. But my son has an incredible mind and an incredible soul. And he is already — the doctors say that it’s hard sometimes to get people to engage with their new situation, and Hisham has been asking questions and inquiring and just taking control of it all with his curiosity and taking information so he can process it. So, he’s tired, and it’s a long — the next step is — the next phase is going to be a very long process, but he’s very determined, and he’s brilliant and curious. And I think — I know that he’ll be a success in no matter what he does.

AMY GOODMAN: He was shot in Vermont. There’s a three-member Vermont congressional delegation. You’ve got Becca Balint, the first Jewish American congressmember to call for a ceasefire. Peter Welch just joined her, the Vermont senator. And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders,, while he has not called for a ceasefire, he has called for aid to Israel to be conditioned on what’s happening in the West Bank and what’s happening in Gaza. Your final thoughts on what you’re calling for now, Elizabeth, as your son lies in the ICU?

ELIZABETH PRICE: Thank you. I think one of the things that I really want to emphasize is that there should be — it would be irresponsible for there to be any discussion of the mental health status of the perpetrator. There are millions of people suffering with mental health issues, and it is disrespectful to them to imply that mental health is something that leads to gun violence. There are millions of people in America with mental health who do not pick up a gun and shoot. And it is irresponsible to victimize the shooter in this case. So, any discussion of what his mental state was or his emotional state was is irresponsible. It’s also a double standard. It is often applied to white perpetrators of shooting crimes, but not to those who are nonwhite or of different backgrounds, and particularly of minority backgrounds. And so I consider that to be unacceptable. And recent statements by the media that have highlighted that have — they broke me last night. And I find that incredibly offensive, that people would victimize the shooter.

I would also say that it is time to call for ceasefire. The fact that the bombs started falling on Gaza again today crushed me. I celebrated Becca Balint’s stance, and I applaud and I’m so grateful for Peter Welch’s statement of an unconditional ceasefire. The Palestinian people in Gaza have been brutalized by not just the bombardment, by the fact that they haven’t had — they didn’t have food, water or fuel for weeks. They just sat there and died. And I just — I was in deep depression and mourning for seven weeks, even before this happened to my son.

And my son would be, I think, redeemed in his suffering if he knew that, in any way, in any small way, attention brought to the Palestinian people through his plight helped to make the decision makers in the American government recognize that Palestinians are humans and Palestinians deserve to live, and if one more Palestinian child dies or is injured in the way that my son was injured, it is a travesty that this world should not have to live with. My son is receiving attention and the best medical care in America. If he was in Gaza or if he was in the West Bank, he would have been dead in prison or just thrown somewhere in a medical facility without the support he would need to be able to recover from this. So I am incredibly privileged, and as is my son, that he has been hurt here amongst this community who have supported us and provided us with the medical care, where he is seen as a valid human being. And I think, in my son’s name, I call for all the decision makers and policymakers in the American government to recognize the Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank and in Jerusalem are also human and deserve the dignity and the support that my son is being provided with. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth Price, we thank you so much for being with us, mother of Hisham.

ELIZABETH PRICE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Please give him all of our regards, one of the three Palestinian students shot by a white man while visiting their family in Burlington, Vermont, this past weekend, Elizabeth Price joining us from Burlington after traveling from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank — so did his father — to be at Hisham’s side.

[admin]

Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago: A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.
by Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman
Reporting from Tel Aviv
Published Nov. 30, 2023
Updated Dec. 2, 2023

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Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

THE MOSSAD'S FALSE FLAG AL QAEDA CELL

Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip said on Friday, December 6, 2002 that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to "work in the Gaza Strip under the name of Al-Qaeda." Al-Jazeera TV reported that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, who were trying to set up an operation there in the name of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. The Palestinian Authority spokesman said the members of the group had confessed that they were recruited and organized by the Israeli intelligence, Mossad. Sharon had personally claimed on December 4, 2002 that he had proof of Al-Qaeda operations in Gaza, and used the allegations to justify brutal Israeli Defense Forces attacks in the Gaza Strip the next day -- which was the start of the Islamic holiday, Eid, celebrating the end of Ramadan. Ten civilians were killed in the IDF assaults. Reuters published an extensive featured story on the affair by Diala Saadeh on December 7, 2002, under the headline "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza Al Qaeda Presence." The article quoted President Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, "It is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo explained: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza." (Haaretz, Reuters and Al Jazeera, December 7, 2002) Sharon is of course a past master of false-flag tactics like these, having been implicated in the direction of the Abu Nidal organization and also in the setting up of Hamas.

On Sunday, December 8, 2002, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority Planning and International Cooperation Minister, held a press conference with Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the PA 's Preventive Security Apparatus in the Gaza Strip, to release documents and provide further information about the Israeli intelligence creation of a self-styled Al Qaeda cell. Shaath called on the diplomats to "convey to their countries that they assume the responsibility of exerting pressure on the Israeli government to stop the Israeli aggression," and announced that the PA had handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli Intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda. The goal of the operation was to create a new pretext for aggression against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Shbak said that the PA had found eight cases of fake Al Qaeda recruiting over the previous nine months. Three Palestinians were arrested, while another 11 Palestinians were released, "because they came and informed us of this Israeli plot." The PA Security Service had traced mobile phone calls and e-mails, purportedly from Germany and Lebanon, back to Israel; these were messages asking Palestinians to join Al Qaeda. One e-mail even bore the forged signature of Osama bin Laden. "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," Shbak said. The recruits were paired with collaborators in Gaza, and received money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not work." The money was provided by collaborators, or transferred from bank accounts in Israel and Jerusalem. (Palestine Ministry of Public Information, Islam Online, December 9, 2002)...

Palestine -- After Israeli had occupied the west bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza strip and the Sinai peninsula in June, 1967, the Israelis found themselves ruling over some two million Palestinians. Under the United Nations system it is illegal to annex territory acquired through armed conflict without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, which in this case was not forthcoming. Rather, the UNSC passed resolution 242, calling on Israel to withdraw to the internationally recognized borders as they had been before June 1967. (In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush spokesmen accused Iraq of having violated some 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions; they conveniently forgot that Israel was the all-time champion in that department, since Israel is currently in violation of some 30 UNSC resolutions regarded the territories it has occupied since 1967. But the US never proposed war to enforce compliance with those resolutions.) The Israeli occupation of conquered Palestine was oppressive and humiliating, and a national resistance soon emerged in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Its leader was Yassir Arafat, a secular nationalist more or less in the Nasser mold. Since the PLO had few weapons, and since the Israeli army was a dominant presence, the PLO began doing what the Jews had done between 1945 and 1948 against the British occupation of the same territory: they launched guerilla warfare, which the occupiers quickly labeled terrorism. The official Israeli line was that there was no Palestinian people, but this was soon disproved. From the beginning, the Israeli Mossad was active in conducting provocations which it sought to attribute to the PLO and its peripheries: attacks on airliners and on the 1972 Olympic games in Munich are therefore of uncertain paternity. The more horrendous the atrocity, the greater the backlash of world public opinion against the PLO. There is no doubt that the Mossad controlled a part of the central committee of the organization known as Abu Nidal, after the nom de guerre of its leader, Sabri al Banna. In 1987-88, just as the first Palestinian intifada uprising was getting under way, there emerged in the occupied territories the organization known as Hamas. Hamas combined a strong commitment to neighborhood social services with the rejection of negotiations with Israel and the demand for a military solution which was sure to be labeled terrorism. Interestingly enough, one of the leading sponsors of Hamas was Ariel Sharon, a former general who was then a cabinet minister. These facts are widely recognized; US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurzer, an observant Jew, stated late in 2001 that Hamas had emerged "with the tacit support of Israel" because in the late 1980s "Israel perceived it would be better to have people turning toward religion, rather than toward a nationalistic cause." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 21, 2001) In an acrimonious Israeli cabinet debate around the same time, Israeli extremist Knesset member Silva Shalom stated:

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

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

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

With incredible arrogance, the Bush administration has pronounced Arafat as unfit to be a negotiating partner. In effect, they are choosing Hamas -- or worse, an act of incalculable folly for Israel and for the United States as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- “Divide and Rule”: How Israel Helped Start Hamas to Weaken Palestinian Hopes for Statehood, by Amy Goodman

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

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

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

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

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

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

-- Middle East Expert Lara Friedman: If Netanyahu Cared About Hostages, Why Did He Launch Ground Invasion?, by Amy Goodman

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a years-long cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

[Michael Moore] As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if maybe he should have shown up to work more often? Should he have held at least one meeting since taking office to discuss the threat of terrorism with his head of counterterrorism? Or maybe Mr. Bush wondered why he had cut terrorism funding from the FBI. Or perhaps he just should have read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6th, 2001, which said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes. But maybe he wasn't worried about the terrorist threat, because the title of the report was too vague.

[Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor] I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

-- Fahrenheit 9/11, written, directed and produced by Michael Moore

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.


Vehicles caught fire in Ashkelon, Israel, as rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.Credit...Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

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

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

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

Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.

Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000.

Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000.

-- For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces. The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from, by Tal Schneider, Times of Israel, 8 October 2023

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent.

"We did not have…threat information that was in any way specific enough to suggest something was coming in the United States." -- Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor [responding to Gorelick]

"Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." -- George Bush, Jr.

-- The 9/11 Commission Report, by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

"This is our 9/11.” -- Michael Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the United States

"In a way, this is our 9/11" -- IDF International Spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, 10/8/23

Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

But on that September day we were unprepared. We did not grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over time. As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and -- above all -- a failure of imagination.

-- The 9/11 Commission Report, by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”


The breached security fence in the village of Kfar Azza, Israel, three days after it was attacked by Hamas.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Adam Goldman

[admin]

The Women Soldiers Who Warned of a Pending Hamas Attack – and Were Ignored: Over the past year, the Israel Defense Forces’ spotters situated on the Gaza border, all women, warned that something unusual was happening. Those who survived the October 7 massacre are convinced that if it had been men sounding the alarm, things would look different today
by Yaniv Kubovich
Haaretz
Nov 20, 2023
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... 1581146536

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Three days after the October 7 massacre in southern Israel, Mai – a spotter who serves in the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division and survived the murderous Hamas assault on her army base near the border – received a phone call at home.

On the line was someone from the army’s human resources division. “If you don’t return to your post,” she was cautioned, “that’s absenteeism during wartime and would mean up to 10 years in prison.” Identical messages were also delivered to colleagues from the army base who, like her on Black Saturday, had been locked in an operations room “armed” only with their cellphones as Hamas terrorists ran amok.

“We tried to explain that we can’t go back,” Mai recounts. “We lost our comrades. We spent hours hiding, among dead bodies, in that operations room.”



According to Mai (a pseudonym, like the names of everyone interviewed for this story), some of the young women who survived the attack are currently being treated in mental health institutions, while others are still too afraid to seek treatment.

“Up till now, the commanders haven’t visited us; nobody from the army has come to speak with us and ask how we’re feeling. They’re simply ignoring our existence.” Perhaps a clarification should be added to that last statement: They are seemingly ignoring their existence as human beings, not as part of the military.

(The spotters’ job, known as “tatzpitanit” in Hebrew, involves staring at a screen for hours on end, studying surveillance cameras for untoward activities. Nowadays, only women soldiers perform the task.)


IDF spotters working at the IDF base in Nahal Oz.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

The spotters decided to stay home and nothing else happened until last week – when they all received identical letters informing them that if they failed to return to their posts by this Wednesday, there would be severe repercussions.

“They told me: ‘You need to come back, your position is ready,’” says another spotter, Shir. “Nobody cares how I am or if I’m fit to do this – the main thing [for them] is for me to return to my nine-hour shift watching screens all day.”

Shir has decided that she will report back to the base – but not because of the threats and intimidation.

“It’s important to make clear that we’re returning only for the sake of our friends who were murdered or kidnapped,” she says, “and not for everyone who abandoned us there.”

Somehow, Shir and her colleagues are not surprised by the attitude they have encountered; just perhaps a little unnerved by its intensity. During their years of military service, they say they’ve grown accustomed to the fact that they “don’t count.” Nor was any notice given to the repeated warnings they raised before Hamas’ infiltration on Black Saturday. Warnings that, it seems to them, were going in one IDF earpiece and out the other.

These included reports about Hamas’ preparations near the border fence, its drone activity in recent months, its efforts to knock out cameras, the extensive use of vans and motorcycles, and even rehearsals for the shelling of tanks.


An IDF spotter working at the Nahal Oz military base, near the Gaza border, earlier this month.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

The spotters believe Hamas was actually being rather negligent: it didn’t try to hide anything and its actions were out in the open. But throughout this period, they say senior officers in the IDF’s Gaza Division and Southern Command refused to listen to their warnings. They believe this stemmed partly from arrogance but also from male chauvinism.

The spotters are exclusively “young women and young women commanders,” explains one of them. “There’s no doubt that if men had been sitting at those screens, things would look different.”

‘Tell everyone we love them’

In some ways, the hours leading up to the morning of October 7 were quite ordinary. Noga, a spotter stationed at the IDF’s intelligence unit at Kissufim, close to the Gaza border, spotted an unfamiliar, suspicious-looking man standing in front of one of the barrier gates erected along the Gaza Strip border.

Her report reached Lt. Col. Meir Ohayon, commander of the 51st Battalion in the Golani Brigade, who at 3 A.M. made his way to the location and, after sighting the man, fired tear gas at him. The suspect turned back and went to a Hamas observation post about 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) from the fence, which is the distance at which Palestinians are allowed to stay. The spotter observed several other people at the same position, and it seemed to her that a briefing was being held there.


An armed Israeli observation post hit by Hamas on the morning of October 7.Credit: Hatem Ali/AP

All of the above seemed unusual and disturbing to her, so she shared her feelings with the other spotters as well as the on-duty commander. However, at the end of a discussion that lasted about a minute in the operations room and in consultation with the division, it was decided to return to normal.

“I’m sorry I had to wake you at this hour,” the spotter apologized to Ohayon, “but I still think there’s something strange here.”

Ohayon was unperturbed and replied that it’s always best to be vigilant in order to avoid surprises. A few hours later, it became clear that this “vigilance” did not prevent the surprise.

This was merely the final piece in the puzzle, though. In retrospect, after she fully understood the scope of the disaster, and after she had lost dozens of friends who were either killed or kidnapped by Hamas, the sheer scale of the disconnect became clear to the spotter.

While she had been trying to understand who the suspicious figure was and what he was up to, the IDF and Shin Bet security service had already held discussions following a warning about a terrorist infiltration. It was serious enough for the senior officials to decide (on the Friday evening) to increase the presence of special forces in the south, sending a specialist team trained to deal with terror squads.

Another team from the Shin Bet operational unit and a force from the commando unit were also placed on alert. An elite IDF team from Sayeret Matkal was also dispatched to the area. However, no one in the Southern Command or its Gaza Division bothered to inform the dozens of young women serving as spotters at the Kissufim and Nahal Oz army bases of that. This did not even change at 4 A.M., when it was decided to put the Gaza border communities themselves on alert for fear of possible infiltration.


Ori Megidish (center) with family after she was found by IDF ground troops in Gaza. Megidish, an army spotter, was taken hostage on Oct 7.Credit: Shin Bet Spokesperson's Office

“If we had known about this warning, this whole disaster would have looked different,” Yaara tells Haaretz. “Nobody told us there was such a high level of alert.”

According to Yaara, three hours, or even two hours, would have given the young spotters time to prepare. “But nobody thought to tell us. The IDF left us like sitting ducks on a range. The fighters at least had weapons and died as heroes. The spotters who had been abandoned by the army were simply slaughtered, without any opportunity to defend themselves.”

At around 6:30 A.M., Noga still found time to report about the “infiltration” protocol for communities and military bases, all while hearing the gunfire and shouting of the terrorists outside the command center where she was stationed.

In the spotters’ WhatsApp group, friends from Nahal Oz were already reporting that terrorists were everywhere, that people had been killed and kidnapped, and that there was nowhere to run. At 7:17 A.M., the last message was received in the group, signed by spotters from Nahal Oz: “Tell everyone that we love them and thanks for everything.”

Disdainful attitude

The spotters’ harsh words for their superiors is not a new development. In fact, Haaretz published an investigative report last year focusing on the disdainful attitude toward them from their commanders. At the time, your correspondent spoke with spotters from bases across Israel, including those in the Gaza Division.

One of the issues they raised was that their voice was simply not being heard and that their professional opinion was not being given due weight. It seems that any commission of inquiry studying the events of October 7 will have to start with the testimonies of those surviving spotters.



They can pinpoint seemingly pivotal incidents going back months. For instance, Talia, who has served as a spotter in the Gaza Division for about 18 months and is therefore considered something of a veteran, recounts: “A month before the war, I was sitting in the command center in Kissufim and at around 7 A.M. dozens of cars and vans arrived in the area I’m responsible for, near one of Hamas’ observation towers. After a few minutes, a luxury car stopped next to them – the type of car very few people in Gaza have, so definitely Hamas.”

“I didn’t recognize all of them, but it was clear to me that these men were from Nukhba [Hamas’ special forces], because some of them had ski masks over their faces so as not to be identified. They left there for a briefing that lasted a long time, 30 to 40 minutes, with binoculars, pointing to the Israeli side.”

Talia says she wanted to try to identify the men and see what was in their vehicles – so she pointed the cameras to one of the senior people there and zoomed in.

“He gestured to me, wagging his finger – ‘nu, nu, nu,’” she recounts, admitting her shock because the camera was located on a high pole at a great distance from where the group was standing, but he knew exactly where it was.

At that stage, she called in her commander. I told her they can see me, that he’s talking to me through the camera,” she recalls. “She also saw this and didn’t know how to react to it.”

After the Gazans left, Talia says she received a report from a more northerly lookout post that the same group had returned and was stopping in different spots along the length of the Gaza Strip.

For Talia and the other spotters on duty that day, this looked like a briefing prior to an operation against Israel – and they acted accordingly.


The entrance to Kibbutz Nahal Oz.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz

“We flagged the event, we reported that it was unusual and that they could see us,” she recalls. “We reported that it was a briefing by senior [Hamas] officials who we could not recognize. But until today, it’s not clear what [the IDF] did with that information.”

She says her commanders also tried to pass this information up the chain of command. However, as relatively low-ranking officers, these women “are just as helpless as we are before the senior commanders – and certainly before the division and regional command,” Talia says. “Nobody really pays any attention to us. As far as they’re concerned, it’s ‘sit at your screens’ and that’s it. They’d say: ‘You’re our eyes, not the head that needs to make decisions about the information.”

When the Hamas attack began on October 7, and after messages had come in from the Nahal Oz base, Talia sent a message to that same commander, asking if she remembered the earlier event. “She replied that she had no doubt it was the briefing for the attack,” she relates. “At the same time, we’re seeing videos of our friends being taken off to Gaza, helpless.”

Every stone, every vehicle

Two to three months. That’s how long it takes for a new spotter to know her sector “better than anyone else in the IDF,” Talia says. “In my sector, I know every stone, every vehicle, shepherd, Hamas training camp, laborers, birdwatchers, trails and outposts.” In her words, a veteran spotter does not need “8200 in order to tell immediately whether her sector is operating unusually,” a reference to the fabled intelligence unit.

It is hard work, often Sisyphean. A spotter’s shift lasts for nine hours, during which she sits in front of a screen attempting to monitor anything that seems at all unusual, even a slight deviation from the norm. Any such event must immediately be logged in an operational report, which is sent to the base commanders, and from there to the intelligence desks of the relevant divisions and command centers.



What happens in practice with the information they have just relayed? The spotters are finding it hard to answer that question.

This was also the case when Hamas drones started flying regularly in their sector.

“In the past couple of months, they began to put up drones every day, sometimes twice a day, that came really close to the border,” says another spotter, Ilana. “Up to 300 meters from the fence – sometimes less than that. A month and a half before the war, we saw that in one of Hamas’ training camps, they had built an exact replica of an armed observation post, just like the ones we have. They started to train there with drones, to hit the observation post.”

Ilana recounts how they passed this information on according to protocol, but even went beyond that: “We yelled at our commanders that they have to take us more seriously, that something bad is happening here. We understood that the behavior in the field was very strange, that they were basically training for an attack against us. Until now, nobody has come and told us what was done with this information.”

And then on Black Saturday, when they saw the drones blowing up their observation posts one after the other, the spotters knew where this was headed. “We knew from the moment the attack began: this was exactly what was happening in the last month and a half of their training,” Ilana says.

There were other preliminary signs too, spotters says. More reports that they wrote, and sent, but whose whereabouts are unknown.

“They never told me what happened with the information we were passing on,” says another spotter, Adi. “We were constantly being told that there might be a terrorist infiltration, that it could happen.” Of course, the IDF needs to be prepared for such an incident, but apparently there was no concrete threat – no matter how many concrete events the spotters reported.

“In the last year, they started to remove pieces of iron from the fence,” says Adi, citing an example of what was written in another report that might be buried in some drawer somewhere. And there’s more.

“In my sector, they built a precise model of a Merkava IV tank and trained on it all the time,” says another spotter from the Gaza Division. “They trained on how to hit a tank with an RPG, where exactly to hit it and then, in front of our eyes, they trained on how to capture the tank crew.”

She says the spotters tried warning that these training exercises were actually increasing in intensity, “that there were more people taking part, and that they were being done with additional Hamas units coming in from other areas.”

They also noticed that vans and motorcycles were frequently being used in the training. And when protests started taking place by the border [in the months prior to the attack], they observed that “there are Hamas operatives who are constantly examining the places where we are less effective with the cameras. They really planned everything down to the smallest detail. Anyone who says today that it was unavoidable or that it was impossible to know – that’s a lie.”

In her words, ”They abandoned our friends to die because nobody wanted to listen to us. It’s beneath their dignity to listen to a sergeant – who for two years has been staring at the same screen and knows every stone, every grain of sand – tell them something contrary to what the senior intelligence officers are telling them. Who am I, some little woman, before a man with the rank of major or lieutenant colonel, for whom everybody stands at attention when he enters the room?”

A few minutes after 1WTC was hit the following message came over the public address system in 2WTC. I was in the 44th floor sky lobby of 2WTC at the time. “A plane had just crashed into 1WTC but the integrity of 2WTC was OK.” Notice how you are not instructed to leave and not instructed to stay. The message was repeated again. Seconds after the message was repeated flight 175 crashed into 2WTC.... I would like to make it clear here on what exactly came over the public address system at 9:02 AM. I made a conscious effort to memorize it. “A plane had just crashed into 1WTC and that the integrity of 2WTC was OK.” This message was repeated once more. Seconds after the second announcement flight 175 crashed into 2WTC. -- Jim Kazalis, 9/11 survivor and volunteer guide in NYC

Obviously, people started leaving WTC1 after the first strike at 8:46. People also began leaving WTC2. As I recall from reading about it, Building Security through the public address system advised those in WTC2 who were evacuating to return to their desks. -- Brian Good

I was in the second tower that got hit. When you refer to “they” you have to clarify who that is. When the first building was hit, the Morgan Stanley security went screaming through the floor telling everyone to evacuate. When I was in the stairwell, the announcements said that the building was safe -- stay where you are go back. -- Ken Robulak, Former Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley (company) (2001–2004)

I was in Manhattan that day. On my walk home to Brooklyn I met a man who was on the 20th floor of the south tower when the plane struck. He said the firefighters were telling everyone to stay put and not to leave the building. He chose to ignore them and lived as a result. -- Greg Murphy, Studied Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Art and Art History (Graduated 2017)

-- Why didn't they evacuate the World Trade Center in September 11 after the first crash?, by quora.com

‘They studied us in depth’

Forty fighters from the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, some Bedouin trackers and three women combat soldiers from the artillery corps who were on standby: this was the entire force at Nahal Oz on the morning of Saturday October 7 facing hundreds of terrorists – a significant proportion of the 3,000 or so who infiltrated with vans, cars and motorcycles from the sea, land and air. The soldiers had no chance.

“They knew much more about us than we thought,” says another spotter, Liat. “Today I know, and my friends are also sure of it, that they studied us in depth. Not just where we were sitting and observing from. They did an insane job.”


Palestinians from the Gaza Strip entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza on October 7.Credit: Hassan Eslaiah/AP

A spotter who was on duty at one of the lookout posts that day says: “There were so many warning signals along the way. Hamas didn’t do this under the radar. It’s just that nobody thought to accept the opinion of some spotters when intelligence personnel were thinking completely differently.”

In April, Smadar sat at the lookout post in Kissufim and noticed something new at one of Hamas’ training camps. “They had built a precise model of the border area,“ she says. “They trained there on how to break through the fence. Contrary to what the IDF thought, their training was for infiltration on the ground, not from tunnels. As time passed, their training became more intensive.”

About a month and a half before the attack, that training apparently shifted up a gear.

“We started to see them getting 300 meters from the fence, and their trainers stood with stopwatches and measured how much time it took them to run to the fence, to reach it, and to return to their positions. We knew there was something [happening],” says Liat. According to her, even though disturbances were also taking place near the fence, “the forces we sent did practically nothing – even the warning shots stopped. Combat soldiers would arrive, fire tear gas and leave.”

Those reports, it seems, piled up in the rubbish heap of the tragedy.

A month before the war, there was an apparent change of approach among some spotters: A senior officer from the Gaza Division came to the operations room on one of the bases along the Gaza border in order to talk about the sector, so one of the spotters decided to tell him exactly what was on her mind.

“I told him there was going to be a war and we’re simply not ready,” she says, recalling the conversation. “That what’s happening with Hamas along the border fence is not normal. That they’re mocking the IDF, that our hands are tied and we’re not even [firing] warning shots.”

The response of the senior officer was to ask for her name, to regard her with admonishing eyes and to “put her in her place” for having the temerity to address him directly rather than going through the proper channels.

“He said to me, ‘I’ve been in the sector since 2010. I was a commander here, an intelligence officer, I know Gaza inside-out, and I’m telling you that everything’s fine. You’re here only six months and I’ve been here 12 years. I know the sector like the back of my hand.”

Someone who has known the sector for less time – but still in depth – is Einat, a spotter from Nahal Oz. That Saturday, she was at home (“in the safe room with the family”), but recognized immediately what was about to happen.

“As soon as I understood that there was such a large infiltration, I told [my family]: ‘There’s a Hamas raid, they’ll kidnap soldiers and charge into the residential communities.’ I even told them there was no way they weren’t coming with paragliders. They looked at me like I was crazy. I started shouting that we knew there would be something and no one would listen to us.”

Then the messages from friends at the base began to arrive, plus the photos and videos from Palestinians on Telegram. “We were seeing how they were murdering our friends and how they were being taken to Gaza,” she recalls. “I cannot describe the frustration, the sense of abandonment by the senior commanders. We issued warnings, we told our commanders, but we’re considered the bottom of the division’s food chain.”

In response to this article, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stated: “The IDF and its commanders are following all the male and female soldiers who were present during the events of October 7 closely. The male and female soldiers are accompanied by medical professionals from the mental health system. This is in addition to the continuous contact with their commanders, who are a support system and attentive ear. The return to their posts will be gradual and sensitive, supervised and according to the condition of each person. There is no intention of disciplinary measures against anyone. If there were any conversations that might suggest otherwise, they are contrary to the guidelines and will be dealt with accordingly.”