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

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Rashid Khalidi on Biden’s “Israel-First Approach” & Growing Outrage over Gaza Across the Middle East
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18 ... transcript

President Biden is in Israel to show more support for its relentless assault on the Gaza Strip, which has reduced much of the territory to rubble, killed at least 3,300 Palestinians and displaced more than a million people. Israel also continues to maintain a complete siege, refusing to let in food, water, fuel, medicines and other necessities. Meanwhile, international outrage is growing over a massive explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital that killed hundreds of people on Tuesday. Palestinian authorities say it was an Israeli airstrike, while Israel has claimed a failed rocket launch by Gaza militants caused the blast. “Whoever was responsible, the result will be enormous, enormous anger at the United States for its support of Israel, as well as a further increase in this enormous death toll inside Gaza,” says Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University.

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.

Palestinian officials are accusing Israel of killing over 500 people in an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza City, where thousands of civilians had sought refuge. Israel is denying responsibility, claiming the explosion was caused by a failed rocket fired by the militant group Islamic Jihad. Palestinian officials have blasted Israel’s claim, pointing out Israel, the military, had already hit the hospital just days before.

As we continue to look at Israel’s war on Gaza, we’re joined by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, a renowned Palestinian American scholar. He’s the author of a number of books, including his latest, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Professor Khalidi’s new piece for The New York Times is headlined “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza.”

We’re going to go to that in just a minute, Rashid, what the U.S. should be thinking about right now. But if you can begin by responding to these developments of the last 24 hours, with the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, and the significance of this?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, it’s obviously had an enormous significance. It led to the cancellation of a summit that was planned for Amman with President Biden. The Arab participants all pulled out after this atrocity.

I think it’s also led to increased anger all over the Arab world. There are demonstrations in at least eight or nine Arab capitals as a result of this. There was already rage at American — blanket American support for Israel. And I think this has increased that.

I think that it is very hard to believe, given that Israel has threatened hospitals and schools in the past, and it’s hit hospitals and schools in the past, and that the kinds of weapons used by Islamic Jihad and Hamas have very limited warheads, that this could have been, as the Israelis claim, a misfire. As you reported, a piece of video that they put up turns out to have been dated from a period after the attack on this hospital. In any case, whoever was responsible, the result will be enormous, enormous anger at the United States for its support of Israel, as well as a further increase in this enormous death toll inside Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian legislator and medical doctor himself, said they actually had, in a very short period of time, a number of explanations of what happened. At first they didn’t say this. They said that Hamas was operating underneath the hospital. Then they said they were using Palestinians as human shields, sort of to explain what had happened. Then they came up with this. Now, I wanted to ask you — you know, we had on Sharif Abdel Kouddous, whose award-winning documentary, The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, won the George Polk Award for that, documenting what Israel said about the murder of this Palestinian American journalist. They first said she was killed by a Palestinian gunman —

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — then said evidence was inconclusive. Then, after enormous pressure and multiple investigations by many news outlets and human rights groups, they said they likely killed her, but not intentional and caught in crossfire — something that was disproven by human rights group after a forensic architecture study of the whole thing —

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — showing it was an Israeli sniper, Professor Khalidi.

RASHID KHALIDI: I mean, Israel has an enormously successful public relations machine. It took them, I think, 45 minutes to put out this specific cover story on this one, and it was immediately knocked down, as I think you already reported, when it turned out that the piece of film that they produced actually dated 40 minutes after the attack on the hospital.

AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times pointed that out, the timestamp.

RASHID KHALIDI: Precisely.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they actually retracted the video from X, from Twitter.

RASHID KHALIDI: Precisely, precisely. I mean, they have a well-oiled machine to manufacture cover stories for everything they do. They have been warning hospitals that they are targets since just after this attack, the initial attack out of Gaza on the 7th of October. They hit this hospital the other day, as you just reported. They hit a school today. If you read the Israeli press, you have senior Israeli generals and retired generals talking about places like hospitals and schools as targets, because they claim there are Hamas bunkers beneath them. So it’s hard not to accept that this was an Israeli airstrike or an Israeli bombardment.

And in any case, I think here perception is reality. Given that Israel has dropped 6,000 bombs, at least, on the Gaza Strip in the last 11 days, it’s very hard to believe that — it will be very hard at least for people in the Middle East, who know how Israel systematically lies about what it does in military operations, to believe that this was anybody else than Israel. And I think that’s the important fact to retain. People in Palestine, people in the Arab world, people in everywhere except in the American, Western European media bubble are going to chalk this up to Israel’s attack on Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about your piece, “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza.” Explain what you see unfolding now, and respond to President Biden sitting down with the prime minister, Netanyahu, today and saying the other team did it, attacking the hospital, and go on from there.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I mean, the president has bonded the United States to Israel at the hip, since very soon after this horrible escalation started. And in so doing, he has made the United States responsible, in the eyes of the world, for everything. And this is the latest example of that. He’s basically read from an Israeli teleprompter, as he seems to do routinely when anything relating to the Middle East comes up. It’s almost as if his lines are scripted in Tel Aviv at the Israeli Defense Ministry, where their disinformation headquarters are located.

And he has, I think, put the United States in a position that I am not entirely sure anybody in his administration realizes. The United States is going to be vilified not just in the Middle East as a result of its unlimited support for Israel. What we are seeing now is only the beginning. The munitions that are being sent, the aircraft carriers that have been sent to the eastern Mediterranean, the huge bill that they’re going to put before Congress for — I’ve seen a figure of $100 billion — is going to cement in people’s minds the idea that the United States and Israel are one, which means that whatever happens in Gaza, going forward, in terms of people being killed, innocent civilians being killed, in terms of population being expelled — basically, we’re talking about ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza — and, heaven forbid, people actually being forced out of Gaza into Egypt, which is still a possibility, even though the Egyptians have resisted — all of these things will be put down not just to Israel, but to the United States. And I don’t think they fully realize — or if they do, they haven’t anything about it — that this is what the president has — this is where the president has put the United States, for whatever reason. Electoral reasons, his own personal sympathy for Israel, it really doesn’t matter. We are now in a situation where the United States, in my view, has put itself in a more precarious position in the Middle East than it has any time since the 1967 War.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s happening on the northern border, on the Israel-Lebanon border, and Hezbollah and the back-and-forth rocket fire that’s going on there and what this could signify.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I mean, the most apocalyptic scenario, which I hope and pray does not come about, would be a full-scale war on the northern border between Hezbollah and Israel. That has the potential to draw many other actors in and turn into an even wider war than that, possibly, heaven forbid, involving Syria and Iran, and then, indeed, perhaps the United States. That would be a real apocalyptic scenario. I have a sense that the United States, Iran and Hezbollah and Israel are all reluctant to go too far down that path. Any one of them might do something that could provoke that kind of escalation.

But the real problem is unintended consequences of actions that are out of control. Whatever Israel or Hezbollah or Iran or the United States may want, there may be actions that will precipitate a rapid escalation. And that would — I mean, the situation is appalling as it is. It really would be infinitely worse, the devastation of Lebanon that would follow, the involvement of — communities in northern Israel would be devastated, as well. But the possibility of that growing even wider is, to me, terrifying.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about who Biden hears. I mean, on the one hand, you have Jordan canceling the summit. He was going to meet with the king, with the Egyptian President Sisi and with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, who turned around as soon as the bombing happened, and said he wouldn’t participate. Then Jordan canceled. Now the U.S. is saying they canceled it mutually. But what exactly this means? So, the only image is President Biden hugging Israeli President Herzog and the prime minister, Netanyahu, at the airport when he arrived. But even at home, State Department officials afraid to raise the issue of Palestinian deaths. HuffPo had a very interesting piece, “'On Thin Ice': Some Biden Administration Staffers Feel Stifled Discussing Horrors in Gaza.” And they talk about a call made by — made by the head — let me see if I can find this — a call with Muslim staffers where they were told to talk about their concerns. And they talked about being afraid of being fired, of being blacklisted, if they dared raise the actual concern they have about what’s happening and what the death toll could be and the position that President Biden is taking right now.

RASHID KHALIDI: We are moving into a McCarthyite era where expression of sympathy for Palestinians is equated with terrorism, and maybe met with police state tactics. Students are being visited by the FBI. I’m not in the least surprised that the government is sending the FBI to talk to student activists, is clamping down on its own employees who dare to express humanitarian sentiments. You are required now to utter a mantra in which you exclusively talk about Israeli suffering. And if you do not do that, you are branded and doxed, and so on and so forth. That’s happening in the academic — in academia, in universities. It’s happening in companies. And it’s, I am sure, happening within the federal government. I have no information about that.

But that is in line with the administration’s position, which is that this is a one-sided affair, in which on the one side is absolute evil, something which, according to administration spokesmen, is worse than ISIS, Da’ish. And with that kind of Manichaean point of view, clearly, anyone who expresses any dissent, you know, you are supporting absolute evil if you talk about anything but the unlimited suffering of Israelis. Now, the suffering of Israelis is unquestionable, but that that should be the only obsession of the president and his men and women puts the United States in a position where, maybe in the sound bubble of the United States, the so-called Western world, it’s comfortable, but with the rest of the world, that will not wash, including countries that are not particularly supportive of Palestine, countries like India, China and so forth. Those are countries that — and other parts of the world, I think — see things in the very same way. So, I don’t know that these people understand the degree to which they are harming this country by this kind of blind, one-sided, Israel-first approach.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Rashid Khalidi, if you were president, if you were President Biden, what would you do right now?

RASHID KHALIDI: What would I do right now? I would immediately call for a ceasefire. I would make sure that the hostages were released immediately. It is unconscionable that they be held. That would require a negotiation between Israel and Hamas about what the terms for that release would be. I would insist on that. It is absolutely urgent those people be gotten out. Most of those are innocent civilians, certainly the civilians amongst them, or many of them are innocent civilians.

The second thing I would do would be to say to Israel, “Look, there is this Palestine question. It’s been the problem for 75 years. If you don’t address it, the United States will not be willing to offer unlimited support.” And addressing it means talking about the Palestinian self-determination, talking about ending the occupation, talking about rolling back settlements, not limiting the unlimited expansion of settlements. I mean, there’s a whole set of things without which you will never have a resolution of this. And so I would work towards a lasting resolution of a struggle that’s been going on, as I say in the book, for more than a hundred years, instead of yet another Band-Aid, yet another attempt to stabilize the status quo, which is massively unfavorable to the Palestinians and which will only lead to more suffering for everybody concerned. That is an idealistic position perhaps, but I don’t think that anybody who has any sense of how this is likely to develop would say anything different, frankly.

AMY GOODMAN: Rashid Khalidi, we want to thank you for being with us, Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, author of a number of books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. We’ll link to your New York Times op-ed, “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza.”

Coming up, we speak with the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Back in 30 seconds.

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U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine: Gaza War Risks “Largest Instance of Ethnic Cleansing” in Mideast History
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
October 18, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18 ... transcript

Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, says the latest violence in Israel and Palestine has shocked even long-term observers of the conflict. She says Hamas atrocities cannot justify Israeli crimes in Gaza, where at least 3,300 people have been killed since Israel began pounding the territory with thousands of bombs. “What we are watching is a catastrophe of Olympian proportions,” says Albanese. “The only reasonable and necessary thing to ask for is an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, which of course must be also accompanied by the release of the civilian hostages that Hamas has taken.” She says the scale of Israel’s response cannot be considered proportional, and warns that the displacement of potentially millions of Palestinians from Gaza would constitute the “largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the history of this tormented land.”

Transcript

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

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

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. He spoke earlier today.

SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Immediately before departing for Beijing, I made two urgent humanitarian appeals: to Hamas, for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages; to Israel, to immediately allow unrestricted access of humanitarian aid to respond to the most basic needs of the people of Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom are women and children. …

They cannot justify the acts of terror against civilians committed by Hamas on October 7 that I immediately condemned. But those attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

Each of my two humanitarian appeals have a value in themselves. They are not bargaining chips. They are simply the right thing to do. And I am horrified by the hundreds of people killed at Al-Ahli Hospital this same day in Gaza by a strike that I strongly condemned earlier today. I call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire to provide sufficient time and space to help realize my two appeals and to ease the epic human suffering we are witnessing. Too many lives and the fate of the entire region hang on the balance.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.

Thank you so much for being with us. Can you respond to what’s unfolding right now and to the U.N.’s call for a humanitarian ceasefire at this point, after the deaths of some more than 1,300 Israelis and over 3,300 Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Good morning, Amy, and thank you for having me.

What we are watching is a catastrophe of Olympian proportions. It’s a humanitarian and political catastrophe. Since the very early hours of this new tragedy unfolding in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, I’ve unequivocally condemned what Hamas has done, its targeting of innocent civilians, its taking hostages, and at the same time, in the same breath, I have condemned the response that has been given by Israel under the pretense of — under the pretext of self-defense, and brutal, even unprecedented attacks in terms of intensity, against a population which has suffered, in the Gaza Strip alone, five major wars over less than 15 years. So, I’ve said, how the killing of 3,000 civilians, the bombing of hospitals, schools, crowded markets, the leveling of houses — how can it ever be justified as self-defense?

And amidst all this, I’ve said the only reasonable and necessary thing to ask for is an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, which of course must be also accompanied by the release of the civilian hostages that Hamas has taken. There is no way out without a peaceful solution. And it’s important, it’s imperative for the international community and the U.S., first and foremost, to take this opportunity to act evenhandedly and with wisdom, before we spiral further into abyss, because this is what is going to happen if the situation does not deescalate.

AMY GOODMAN: Spiraling into an abyss. Francesca Albanese, if you could respond first to what happened on October 7th, the surprise Hamas attack that ultimately killed more than 1,300 Israelis? Now we believe roughly 200 to 250, according to them, additional people are being held hostage in Gaza. And then if you can respond to the plans of Israel — repeatedly what is said is they want to de-Hamasify Gaza — and what that means?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: What has happened since the 7th of October is, as I said, unconscionable, has taken everyone, even longtime observers of the situation in Israel-occupied Palestinian territory, by surprise. There is no way that what Hamas has done cannot be condemned as war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, with no prejudice to an investigation that needs to be conducted. And there is already an investigation ongoing by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. As I said, killing civilians and taking civilian hostages cannot be ever justified. Civilian life must be preserved at all times, under all circumstances. And, you know, if we put this in context from a Palestinian perspective, the Palestinians have been under an oppressive regime, a settler colonial regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which is apartheid by default, for decades now. But so, while resisting the occupation, resisting this oppression is a legitimate goal under international law, it doesn’t give blanket license to kill or to target civilians. So, resistance has rules as much as — like the conduct of the occupied power — I mean Israel — has rules. And I cannot think of one rule of international humanitarian law that has not been violated. So, this is clear.

Now, going to Israel’s response, well, there is the opaqueness of declaring wanting Israel — Israel wants to uproot, eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip. We have to remember that the Gaza Strip has been under an unlawful blockade for 16 years. And it was already on the brink of humanitarian collapse, according to many sources, primarily the United Nations, other international organizations, even before the 7th of October. And what has happened is an intensification of this unlawfulness, because the blockade has been further tightened by declaring — by cutting off the Gaza Strip from receiving water, electricity, food, essential medicines, while it was also being bombed. I cannot imagine how this can on Earth be considered proportionate, proportional. And again, all this violence, all this brutality unleashed against 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, how can it lead, on the one hand, to the eradication of Hamas or to the, let’s say, the deescalation of the tension among the Palestinian people in Gaza?

And there is another element here, which you rightly pointed to, which is the intent to move out — I mean, to eradicate Hamas, but also to move out Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. As I myself denounce, there is a risk of ethnic cleansing here. And it wouldn’t be the first time. And there is both a declared intent, because there have been countless statements by Israeli leaders wanting to push the people of Gaza out into the Sinai, and there is also the practice. Under the fog of war, mass displacement of Palestinians has occurred — in 1947, '49, when 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, made refugees, and never allowed to return; in 1967, when 350,000 Palestinians were displaced, made refugees, many of them anew, for the second time, and never allowed to return. So, what is happening now, it's targeting millions of Palestinians. So it would be the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the history of this tormented land. And it’s not possible that it happens under the watch of the international community.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about the rejection of the U.N. Security Council draft resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza? The resolution was introduced Monday. It was introduced by Russia, won the support of Gabon, Mozambique, the United Arab Emirates and China. Six countries abstained. France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States voted against the ceasefire resolution.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Amy, it’s not a coincidence that I started this interview by saying this is a catastrophe of humanitarian and political Olympian proportion. We can see the failure of the United Nations system to ensure peace and security now, because the fact that the U.N. Security Council has so far been unable to issue a strong condemnation of what’s happening, of what has been committed by Hamas and what is being committed by Israel. This is, again, symptomatic of a decadelong political failure to resolve a situation that has been transformed into a humanitarian emergency and humanitarian catastrophe. But it remains a political — a political — situation that needs to be resolved in line with international law. And it’s upon the United Nations Security Council to do so. As I said, this is a critical time to show compassion and to show solidarity with both the Israelis and the Palestinians and act evenhandedly.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the news that Israel is set to ban Al Jazeera from reporting in the Occupied Territories, after the attorney general approved the move. According to the Israeli media, the attorney general, Gali Baharav Miara, and communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, reached an agreement Tuesday on the wording of emergency regulations to stop Al Jazeera from operating. Francesca Albanese, what does this mean? I mean, here in the United States — and you’re not always here, to say the least, but in this country, the news we are getting from the corporate media, when it comes to the broadcast and cable networks, there is almost no one reporting regularly from inside Gaza. Al Jazeera does report on the ground in Gaza. The significance of this?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I have to say, I learned this now. I hadn’t heard of it yet. And it’s extremely worrisome, because, again, we need information. We need information so that — I mean, everyone, the public opinion, and, all the more, political leaders. There have been very few independent voices reporting from Gaza, let alone after the 7th of October. But Al Jazeera has been an incredible source of information. So it’s incredible that this is happening. At the same time, what I want to point to is that both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations have done an incredible job over the years, and including these days in these tragic hours for both, to report and also put in context what’s happening. So I do hope that the decision to expel Al Jazeera will be repealed. And this will put even more onus —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but they’re on the verge, it sounds like.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: It shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen. And this is all the more — it makes all the more necessary for the international community, individual member states to prevent this from happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Francesca Albanese, we want to thank you so much for being with us, United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

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“Stop the War”: Israeli Peace Activist Whose Parents Were Killed in Hamas Attack Calls for Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18 ... transcript

We speak with Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, whose parents Bilha and Yakovi Inon were killed in the surprise attack by Hamas militants on October 7 that killed over 1,300 people in Israel. He wants the war to end. “Let’s call for peace. Let’s call for hope. Let’s call for a complete ceasefire. Let’s call for building bridges,” says Inon. “We must build the future, and this future must be based on equality, on partnership, on peace.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

We end today’s show in Israel, where we’re joined by Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, in the surprise attack by Hamas October 7th that killed over 1,300 people in Israel. Maoz is an Israeli peace activist with the movement Standing Together who’s calling for the war to end. His parents lived on a kibbutz, a farming collective, just north of the Gaza border. They were 78 and 76 years old.

Maoz, our deepest condolences on the loss of your parents.

MAOZ INON: Thank you, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your parents and what you are calling for now? Because so often we’re hearing the Israeli government use the killing, this mass killing of Israelis, over 1,300 killed — and it’s not clear, but between 200 and 250 now held hostage in Gaza — as the rationale for a ground invasion and the bombing now of Gaza.

MAOZ INON: Amy, I’m overwhelmed with what happened to me and to my family and to my community and classmates, friends in our community, Israeli communities around Gaza. Nothing prepared me for this moment that I would be here speaking with you about my tragedy. I wished I was speaking with you about the initiatives, the peace and shared society initiatives I’ve been taking part in in the last 20 years. And honestly, I’m overwhelmed with everything that’s going on.

My parents were loving people and an amazing couple, really adored and admired by their colleagues, their friends, their community, and of course by us, my five brothers and sisters and the 11 grandchildren. They didn’t want to harm anyone. They didn’t want to fight with anyone. We have close and very tight relationship — we call it even a family relationship — with the Bedouin in the Negev. I have many friends, colleagues, partners in Palestine, in Jordan, in Egypt. And what’s happening now is just devastating. It’s just devastating.

And listening to you and your guests, I was crying again. I was crying again because of the term everyone are using is “the other side team.” It’s kind of a blame game — who started it, who shoot the missile, how many victims there is from each side. And it’s just — it’s shocking. And we keep using the — everyone, including you and your guests, the same terms we are using for the last century, the century of this cycle of blood between Israelis and Palestinians. And my cry, my cry is to stop this cycle, to stop this cycle of blood, to stop this cycle of war. And I’m crying. I was interviewed the other — a few days ago with the BBC, and I said there that I’m crying not for my parents, I’m crying for those who are going to lose their life in this war. And then my cries didn’t help for too many people, hundreds of people.

And I’m crying now again with you. And I’m crying to everyone that’s watching and listening. We need you to cry with us. Don’t blame anyone. Me and my family, we seek no revenge. And we seek no revenge. We just seek peace. We seek for hope. We must change the terminology we are using to positive terminology, for reconciliation, for recognition, for partnership and for peace. I’m crying, and I’m begging you. Just will their wellness, not to blame anyone, just to stop the war and to build a different future, to break the cycle of blood, to break this game of blood and to build a new future with hope.

And hope — I’m not a scholar. I’m not a spokesman. I’m not a politician. I’m a normal people. I’m working very hard for my living. I’m raising my three beautiful children. I’m married to a beautiful, beautiful and amazing woman. And I never thought something like this might happen to someone like me. You hear it maybe in Ukraine. You hear it in Africa. You hear it in like faraway places. And this catastrophe reached me.

AMY GOODMAN: Maoz —

MAOZ INON: And it’s just — yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: There is a mass —

MAOZ INON: Sorry, I am very, very emotional, very much. Sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, my condolences to you, to your family. Today there’s a mass protest planned for Washington, D.C., led by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Two dozen rabbis will be part of a civil disobedience, apparently. They’re calling for an end to the occupation. Do you feel the same way?

MAOZ INON: I think occupation — of course, but we are in such a risk. And I think now calling for to do these things or the other, we are going back to the terminology — we are using the same terminology that brought us to this situation. Let’s call for peace. Let’s call for hope. Let’s call for a complete ceasefire. Let’s call for building bridges. Of course I’m against the occupation. But it’s irrelevant at the moment. There might — or, I’m afraid there will be many, many more victims. And what we all should be focusing now is to stop the war. Very simple message. And we must cry it. We must cry our message to everyone that has a heart and that can listen.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Maoz, there are people, Israeli families, in front of the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, whose families have been taken hostage, either mother, father, daughter, son. And they are there saying the same thing. We often see them in the media describing the horror of what happened to their loved ones, but then the media doesn’t go on to say what they’re calling for. What do you demand right now of Prime Minister Netanyahu, when you talk about ending the war?

MAOZ INON: Again, I am calling and I’m crying, not to Benjamin Netanyahu, not to the leader of the Hamas, not to President Biden. I’m crying for humanity, for the entire humanity, for the entire mankind. I’m crying to stop the war. I’m crying for immediate ceasefire. And I’m crying for hope, hope that will take us from this cycle of blood to a new and bright future. We must build hope. We must build a future. And this future must be based on equality, on partnership, on peace. And this is what I am crying for. And it’s not to blame this or the other, this person or the other. They’re irrelevant anymore. We must build a new system. And it might —

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Maoz, so much, as the show ends. And our condolences again, Israeli peace activist, speaking to us from Binyamina, Israel. I’m Amy Goodman. Thank you for joining us.

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Annexation, Ethnic Cleansing & Genocide: Mustafa Barghouti Decries Israel’s Deadly Campaign in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 19, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19 ... transcript

As the death toll in Gaza nears 3,800 from two weeks of Israeli aerial bombardment, we go to the occupied West Bank to speak with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. “With the passage of each minute, more Palestinians are killed,” says Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. Barghouti has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006 and is also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council. He discusses Biden’s visit to Israel, the “clearly Israeli” strike on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Israel’s plans to annex Gaza, and the collapsed civilian society there, where residents have no access to clean water, no hospital beds for critical medical care and no safe haven. “The game is clear: They want to ethnically cleanse, completely, the Gaza Strip.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza is nearing 3,800 as Israel continues its aerial bombardment of the besieged territory for the 13th day. Dozens of Palestinians were killed overnight as Israel bombed southern Gaza in areas that were supposed to be safe zones after Israel ordered residents of northern Gaza to vacate their homes. This is Raafat al-Nakhal speaking in Khan Younis after an Israeli airstrike.

RAAFAT AL-NAKHAL: [translated] We came from Gaza City. They told us to come to the south, so we came to the south. We found that the strikes intensified in the south. We stayed in a house. In front of us, there were strikes, and behind us, strikes. There’s no safety. There’s nowhere safe in Gaza. You have to be ready to die and to just stay in your house. …

There’s absolutely no difference between Gaza City, Rafah, Khan Younis, between the south, the north, the east or the west. They brought us to the south, and it’s been strikes every day. Every day there are martyrs in massive numbers. …

I’m over 70 years old. I’ve lived through several wars. It’s never been like this. It’s never been this brutal — no religion and no conscience. Thank God. We only have hope in God, not in any Arab or Muslim country or anywhere in the world, except for God.

AMY GOODMAN: Funerals were held earlier today in Khan Younis after an Israeli airstrike leveled a three-story building, killing 12 members of the same family. Relatives said the dead include seven children.

GRANDFATHER: [translated] What is this that has happened to them? Babies sleeping in their houses, five children and four women sleeping in their houses, no men. They were sleeping inside. The strike hit a three-level building on six babies and four women. What shall we say? Thank God. The children were all 5 or 6 years old. There was no warning, because it’s an Israeli despicable terrorist country and not an Islamic country, a terrorist American country.

UNCLE: [translated] These are seven babies. Four are buried here, and three are buried in another site. The total is 10.

GRANDFATHER: [translated] The children died, their mothers and their grandmother.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Meanwhile, in the northern Gaza Strip, an Israeli airstrike trapped children under rubble. Dramatic footage shows Palestinians trying to rescue the children.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as Israel has amassed tanks on the border of Gaza ahead of what appears to be an imminent ground invasion. Protests have been growing across the Middle East after hundreds of Palestinians died in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Palestinians say the blast was caused by an Israeli missile. Israel has denied responsibility despite attacking the same hospital just days earlier. According to the World Health Organization, 115 health facilities have been attacked so far in Gaza.

On the diplomatic front, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a humanitarian pause in Gaza. President Biden, who’s returned from Israel, is scheduled to give a primetime address tonight seeking $100 billion from Congress to help arm Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Israel now says they believe 203 hostages are being held in Gaza after being seized in the Hamas attack on October 7th that killed over 1,400 people in Israel.

We go now to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where we’re joined by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. He’s a Palestinian physician, an activist and politician, who serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. He’s been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006, is also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council.

Dr. Barghouti, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can respond to —

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — all the developments? Most recently, of course, President Biden has just left. Your assessment of his visit and the Arab summit that was canceled by Mahmoud Abbas, who’s based where you are, in Ramallah, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Jordanian king and the Egyptian president, after the attack on the hospital, and your assessment of what Israel is saying about that attack?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: You know, Amy, I don’t know where to start. The atrocities are beyond description. We are subjected now, as Palestinians, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, to horrifying war crimes, ethnic cleansing, acts of collective punishment against the population of Gaza, where civilians are dying because they don’t have water, they don’t have electricity, they don’t have food, they don’t have medicines, and an act of genocide. Every five minutes, a Palestinian is killed in Gaza. Every 15 minutes, a Palestinian child is killed in Gaza. And it goes on. My last number is 3,785. I think it’s already wrong, because with the passage of each minute, more Palestinians are killed.

What did President Biden do? Instead of coming here and telling the Israelis — and he knows very well that the United States is the only country in the world that has leverage over Israel. Instead of telling them, “Stop this atrocity. Have ceasefire, so that you can at least save the prisoners that are in Gaza, the Israeli prisoners,” he came here to be totally complicit with Israeli war crimes and to push the United States into becoming a participant in these war crimes by sending soldiers to participate in the Israeli invasion and in the crimes that are committed against the Palestinian people.

He bought every lie that Netanyahu told him, and he kept repeating them. And I don’t understand how the American intelligence structure don’t tell their president that these are lies. I am sure they know that. The first lie about decapitating children, it turned out to be a big lie. The other lie about raping women, it turned out to be a lie, and that’s what Los Angeles Times apologized about. Then this huge lie about Palestinians killing themselvesin their hospital,
this huge lie that Israel distributed and the Israeli military did, as they usually do, by telling series of lies and changing them one time after the other.

Before I come back to President Biden, let me explain. Israel committed a terrible airstrike on the Baptist Hospital, run by the Anglican Church, killing no less than 300 — killing no less than 473 Palestinian people, mainly children and women, and injuring more than 300 others. Why? For what? It was all about the Israeli ultimatum that was already, according to WHO, sent to no less than 27 hospitals, including the largest hospital in Gaza, Shifa Hospital, to evict and evacuate so that Israel can conduct its ethnic cleansing of big parts of Gaza at the moment, with a plan of ethnically cleansing all of Gaza Strip. The strike was clearly Israeli. The type of explosion is something that no Palestinian militant group has, a huge blast that took the lives of almost 500 people instantly, in less than a minute. That’s a power that no Palestinian group has. So it was a big lie.

But Israel lied four times in justifying this attack. The first Israeli reaction was that they did the airstrike on the hospital — they admitted it in the first round, and they said they did it because Hamas militants were hiding there. Then they changed the story, and they said that Hamas is taking Palestinians as human shield. Then the third story, they changed the story and said it was Hamas rocket. And then the fourth lie, which is now dominant, is that it was a jihadi rocket.

How could the United States repeat these lies and accept them without verifying them? Israel did that before with the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, when they changed their story four times. Each time, in the beginning, they said she was killed by a Palestinian, and gradually they admitted that it was their crime. Believe me, these lies should not be continued.

And the United States should immediately support an immediate ceasefire. The meeting that should have been taking place with the Jordanian king and with the Egyptian president and with Palestinian president did not take place because all these three people realized that Mr. Biden does not want to support ceasefire immediately. And they realized that he’s practically supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, something that Egypt refused and something that Jordan refused and something that all the Arab countries refused. That is the essence of what’s happening now.

And so, Israel now is changing the plan a little bit by pushing all the people from the northern part of Gaza and the middle of Gaza into the southern part. It’s already a very small area of less than 140 square miles, becoming now less than 60 square miles, with 2.3 million people. They say they pushed them down for safety, but they continue to bombard them in the south. The game is clear: They want to ethnically cleanse, completely, Gaza Strip. And they initiated acts of ethnic cleansing already in the West Bank, where 20 Palestinian communities have already been evicted by Israeli terror settlers, where more than 75 Palestinians already killed also in the West Bank. At this very moment, the Israeli army is attacking Tulkarem camp and Nur Shams camp in Tulkarem area, using drones and using also rockets against civilian population in a refugee camp. This is the situation that is getting worse and worse every day.

And the real plan, as I can see it, according to what an Israeli minister said, “We’re going to shrink Gaza’s size.” What does that mean? Annexing the northern part and the middle of Gaza? What will happen to all these hospitals? Let me read to you what World Health Organization says. The World Health Organization says that 130 attacks — 136 attacks were committed against health facilities in Gaza, during which time 491 Palestinians were killed, 16 health workers were killed, 370 people were injured, 23 Palestinian health ambulances were destroyed, and 26 facilities were completely destroyed or partially destroyed. Seventy-seven similar attacks also took place in the West Bank.

So nobody can convince us that it was Palestinians who killed Palestinians in that hospital. And nobody should give any justification for the behavior of President Biden. The only conclusion that one can come to is that he cares only about his reelection. He doesn’t care even about the lives of Israeli prisoners, neither him nor Netanyahu; otherwise, why wouldn’t they accept ceasefire? Why Netanyahu continues his airstrikes, although these airstrikes already killed 22 Israeli prisoners? They continue because they don’t care about Palestinian lives or Israeli lives.

And Mr. Biden should listen not to the lies of Netanyahu, but to the noble voice of the Jewish people, the American Jewish people who came to the American Congress to demonstrate and demand one thing: immediate ceasefire. I’m telling you, we’re calling on the whole world to immediately stand up, and instead of supporting the genocide and the collective punishment and the hysterical Israeli ethnic cleansing, to support immediate ceasefire, so we can stop the killings that are taking place, a ceasefire that could guarantee safe passage to the prisoners, but also that could guarantee humanitarian aid to Palestinians who are now dying out because of thirst, because of starvation, and, most importantly, because of lack of medicines and because of a possibility of an epidemic that could immediately start in Gaza because of the suspension of vaccinations for children and because of the destruction of sanitary infrastructure. We could see an epidemic of cholera very soon in Gaza. Is that what Mr. Biden wants? Is that what Mr. Netanyahu wants? This is atrocity that should stop. And anybody that don’t call — that doesn’t call, sorry, for a ceasefire immediately will be considered not only complicit with these war crimes, but a participant in them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Barghouti, could you respond to the decision that Biden announced of Egypt opening the Rafah border for 20 humanitarian trucks to enter into Gaza, you know, and what you think the significance of that is, if there is any, and the specific concerns you’ve raised as a doctor, the tens of thousands of pregnant women in Gaza today, what the fate of patients there are, who are in urgent need of medical care, and none is available?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, one of the most striking scenes was the images of children who died in the uterus of their mothers, because they were pregnant and they were hit. But there are 5,500 Palestinian women who are giving birth this month, and we already received terrible, terrible information about them giving birth in the streets, because there is no place to go to. The south of Gaza does not have any space anymore, besides the fact that there is no safe space for anybody. Israel has already destroyed more than 80,000 homes and houses of people, and people have no place to go to. And there is very high risk now of an increased infant mortality, perinatal mortality and maternal mortality because of the situation that Palestinians find themselves in — no sanitary facilities, no drinking water, no running water, no proper sewage system. It’s a total disaster and total, total humanitarian crisis.

You asked me about something about President Biden. Can you repeat the question, please?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yes, about the decision to let convoys, humanitarian convoys, 20, in from Egypt into Gaza.

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Imagine 2.3 million people already deprived of fuel, water, electricity, medications and food for 12 days. And you send 20 trucks for them? What does that change? It’s less than a drop in the ocean. That’s much less than what people need. It becomes only a cover of the crime that is happening. I’m not against, of course, bringing these trucks, whatever they can help, but that’s not what we need. We need an open corridor so that food, water, electricity, as well as medications can get to people. We have medical teams in Gaza. We have Palestinian medical relief teams working along the work of the Red Crescent, as well as the Ministry of Health. And they are calling us every day, telling us, “We don’t have any more medications. We don’t have even dressing to help the injured people. We don’t have proper sanitary facilities. How can we deal with patients in these conditions?” You know, patients were treated and surgical operations took place the other day on the stairs of the hospitals, because there were no beds left. And the massacre that happened in the Baptist Hospital was so shocking and practically brought the whole health structure down. And now, already, three hospitals stopped working, because they have no electricity, because they don’t have sufficient medications. It’s a humanitarian disaster that is building up.

And the only explanation is that Netanyahu wants to solve what he thinks is the demographic problem of Israel, being that the number of Palestinians today in West Bank and Gaza Strip and in Israel itself is equal to the number of Israeli Jewish people. He wants to eliminate that, first by ethnically cleansing the 2.3 million people in Gaza, pushing them out of Gaza and then annexing Gaza Strip, and then initiate a process of ethnic cleansing for Palestinians in the West Bank, first in Area C and then in the rest of the West Bank. That’s why the king of Jordan is so shocked about these plans, because he knows that he’s coming next. After they finish with Gaza, they will move to the West Bank. This is something that nobody should accept.

I never thought — I never thought, I admit — and I was wrong — I never thought that Israel could dare to conduct ethnic cleansing in the 21st century. And unfortunately, I was wrong. That’s exactly what they are doing today. And I ask the question. They say that Israel has the right to respond. OK, they responded. They responded. They already killed almost 4,000 people. How many thousands of children, how many thousands of patients, how many thousands of women and men should die before Israel decides it’s enough? Or should all the millions of Palestinians disappear from Palestine and disappear from this world so that these fascists — and I call them fascists and Nazis — that are governing Israel would be satisfied?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Barghouti, I just want to quote to you — I think this is the senior minister to whom you were referring, comments he made — Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, saying in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio on Wednesday — he said, quote, that “At the end of this war, not only will Hamas no longer be in Gaza, but the territory of Gaza will also decrease.” So, if you could talk more about that, elaborate on your point about what precisely they intend to do with Gaza, and then talk about what’s happening in the West Bank? You said it’s also the site of war crimes, of ethnic cleansing. But also the protests that are directed against the Palestinian Authority there — we had earlier in headlines that the protests across the West Bank have also taken aim at the ruling Palestinian Authority, which has launched a violent crackdown on demonstrations. A 12-year-old Palestinian girl named Razan Nasrallah was shot and killed by PA security forces Tuesday during protests in Jenin. So, if you could talk about that, the situation in the West Bank?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Yeah. I’m sorry, but you asked about something else before the West Bank?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yes. I just cited to you the person whom I thought you were mentioning earlier, the Israeli foreign minister —

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Oh, Cohen, yes, yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — talking about — yes, please.

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Yes, yes, Eli Cohen. The foreign minister of Israel means that Israel is turning now, since Egypt is not allowing the ethnic cleansing of people in Gaza to Egypt up ’til now, is turning to plan B. And plan B is to remove everybody in the northern part of Gaza and in Gaza City itself — that is about 1.1 million to 1.2 million people — move them down to the southern parts of Gaza and then annex that area, cutting down the size of Gaza from 140 square miles to maybe now less than 50 square miles or maybe 60 square miles. This is the only explanation of what he said, shrinking the size of Gaza, bringing it down. And they think — the Israeli government thinks — that if they cluster all these 2.3 million people in such a small area, then the pressure will be so huge that Egypt will be obliged to open the borders and let them out of Gaza. And in that case, Israel would have achieved its original plan of total ethnic cleansing, pushing Palestinians out of Palestine into the Sinai. Mind you, 70% of these people have already been ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. They were displaced from parts of the 520 communities that Israeli troops erased to earth back in 1948, committing 50 massacres and pushing Palestinians out of Palestine. They want to repeat the same ethnic cleansing again.

But let me tell you, this is not the last plan of Israel. Netanyahu made it very clear. Maybe I’m repeating that. He carried the map of Israel in the United Nations in front of the whole world weeks ago, in which that map, the map of Israel, included the annexation of all of the West Bank and the annexation of all the occupied Gaza Strip. This is their plan: annexation, ethnic cleansing and committing genocide against the Palestinian population.

But in response to your question about West Bank, let me tell you the situation here is very dangerous, is very grave. First of all, Israel imposed practically a process of fragmenting the West Bank into 224 small islands or ghettos, if you want, separated from each other by no less than 640 military Israeli checkpoints, many of which are closed completely — for instance, Jericho now is totally closed — and then the wall, of course, itself and the so-called bypass roads, which are segregated roads exclusive for Israelis. Many, many Palestinians cannot move now from one area to another. Our health work is becoming very, very complicated in the West Bank because we cannot move medications, we cannot move medical teams.

And the worst situation is in the so-called Area C, which represents no less than 60% of the West Bank, where settlers are continuously attacking Palestinians. The other day, Israeli terror settlers attacked the village of Qusra, in Nablus area, killed three Palestinian civilians. The army, the Israeli army, came and killed a fourth one. The next day, when the people were having the funeral of these four Palestinians killed, the settlers came back again and killed two more people, a father and a son — six people in one village in less than 24 hours. The terror of settlers is everywhere.

But in addition to that, the Israeli army is conducting a wide-range campaign of arresting Palestinians. According to my information, no less than 750 Palestinians have been arrested during the last week. And the number is growing, which means that the number of prisoners in Israeli jails is more than 6,300 now, many of whom are held under the so-called administrative detention, which means they don’t know why they are in jail, they don’t have any legal due process. Their lawyers cannot even defend them, because they don’t know what they are charged for, including 260 children who are in Israeli jails at the moment.

Add to that the fact that already more than 75 Palestinians have been killed. And the Israeli army, now thinking that everybody is busy with what’s happening in Gaza, they are now conducting military operations against Palestinian civil areas, including Tulkarem refugee camp and, before that, Jenin refugee camp. And this can go on. So it’s a very dangerous situation and a very risky situation for all Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Barghouti, we only have a minute, but what about, and why then, the Palestinian Authority violent crackdown on demonstrations, with the 12-year-old Palestinian girl, Razan Nasrallah, shot and killed in Jenin?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: That was also a crime, committed by Palestinian security forces, and it should not have happened. It is unacceptable to encounter demonstrators with gunfire. That is unacceptable. We’re not calling, of course, for chaos or internal division here among Palestinians. We have enough of what we have in front of us with fighting Israelis. But the reality is that the behavior of the security apparatus is unacceptable, including suppression of freedom of expression. People were mad. They were angry at what was happening in Gaza, about the killing of people inside that hospital. And maybe they made some — I mean, they went out of control. But responding to that by shooting Palestinians, that’s the last thing that we can accept or we should accept.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mustafa —

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: And for this —

AMY GOODMAN: — Barghouti, I want to —

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Sorry. I just wanted to say that they have to also abide by international law and stop this wrongdoing.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Barghouti is a Palestinian physician, activist, politician, serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

Coming up, we’ll hear the voices of the historic Jewish-led protest in Washington, D.C. Thousands came out, hundreds were arrested, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Back in 20 seconds.

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Ceasefire Now! Rashida Tlaib, Naomi Klein Join Thousands in Jewish-Led D.C. Protest Against Gaza War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 19, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19 ... transcript

Thousands rallied at the U.S. Capitol this week calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, in what organizers with IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace called the largest-ever protest of Jews in support of Palestine. Hundreds were also arrested during a sit-in of the Cannon House Office Building. We feature addresses by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, and author Naomi Klein.

Transcript

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: On Capitol Hill, police arrested at least 300 activists Wednesday as they held a nonviolent sit-in protest in the Cannon House Office Building to demand lawmakers press for a ceasefire in Gaza. The arrests came as thousands of people rallied on the National Mall for a demonstration organized by the groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Organizers called it the largest-ever protest of Jews in support of Palestinians. Among those who spoke was the only Palestinian American congressmember, Rashida Tlaib.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: I wish all the Palestinian people would see this. I wish they can see that not all of America want them to die, that they are not disposable. They have a right to live. They didn’t ask to be born in occupation. And so I just want to thank you on the bottom of my heart. The dehumanization has chipped at my soul, and I can’t imagine what it’s made so many other people feel. So, you all being here to speak truth — because the warmongers are out, y’all. They are ready. They want to kill and not stop. It’s pure insanity.

I still remember the cry of Maya, who was being dragged out of that festival, crying for her father. But just like poor Shaima in Gaza, who was number one in her scores — I don’t know if you know anything about Palestinian culture, but it’s a big that somebody from Gaza could score number one on her — you know, it’s like the valedictorian for the whole Palestinian people. And both of them — both of them are victims. They’re victims of the oppression, of the violence. They both deserve to live. I don’t care what their faith is or their ethnicity. Maya didn’t deserve to be targeted. Neither did Shaima deserve to die. And that’s the common humanity that we all have to remember, because they’re trying to take it away from us. And we have to make sure it doesn’t happen, not on our watch.

I’m going to be real with you all. My colleagues, many of them — I usually don’t talk smack about them. No, I’m usually considerate, because I don’t like them policing me, so I don’t police them. But as an American, not just as a member of the United States Congress, I am ashamed. I am ashamed that they’re saying, “Not yet. Maybe next week.”

CROWD: Shame!

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: “Not yet, Rashida. Maybe — maybe in a couple of days.” How many more have to die?

AMY GOODMAN: That was the only Palestinian American congressmember, Rashida Tlaib, addressing Wednesday’s historic Jewish-led protest of thousands in Washington. This is the award-winning author and writer Naomi Klein.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you all for being here. I have never seen anything like this in my history of Jewish anti-Zionist activism. It’s been decades. We used to be tiny. We are huge and growing.

We have a sacred responsibility to engage with our parents, our grandparents, our uncles, our brothers and sisters, and try to save their souls, to keep them from indulging in this quest for bloody vengeance. We are here because we will not let our fears of antisemitism be manipulated in this way, as cover for war crimes and colonial land grabs and to foreclose on the possibility of a political solution, which will only come with an end to occupation, with an end to apartheid, with true Palestinian freedom and self-determination. We will not use the fact that many of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were refugees from genocide to justify making hundreds of thousands or even millions of new Palestinian refugees.

These are not our leaders, not in the Knesset, with its so-called unity government, and not here in Congress, which reconvenes now in part in order to approve new money and new weapons to send to Israel for its genocidal attack on Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: The award-winning author and writer Naomi Klein. When we come back, the legendary Israeli journalist Amira Hass, in 20 seconds.

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will post all —

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAREQ BACONI: Good morning, Amy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

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

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: If you could explain a little?

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

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

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

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

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

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

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

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

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMIRA HASS: Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

RAJI SOURANI: Yes, yes, yes, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: — human rights lawyer —

RAJI SOURANI: I can hear you.

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

RAJI SOURANI: I do hear you very well.

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

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

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

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

RAJI SOURANI: Gaza in unprecedented crisis —

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

RAJI SOURANI: — simply, Amy, to protect —

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Raji —

RAJI SOURANI: — the reason they wanted — yes.

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

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

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

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

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