Landmark Rape Case of Gisèle Pelicot, by Amy Goodman

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Landmark Rape Case of Gisèle Pelicot: As Ex-Husband & 50 Men Are Sentenced, Will French Laws Change?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 23, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/23 ... transcript

In France, sentences have been handed down in the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 51 other men convicted of rape against Pelicot’s ex-wife, Gisèle. Dominique Pelicot had repeatedly and systematically drugged and facilitated the rape of Gisèle Pelicot, approaching other men online to visit their home and assault her over a period of 10 years. Pelicot waived anonymity and fought for a public trial in the historic case, a decision that shaped the public discourse on sexual violence and the prevalence of chemical submission and drug-assisted sexual assault. “We were all here to wait for Gisèle, but also we were all here for one another,” says Diane de Vignemont, a French journalist who reported on the Pelicot trial and found a “sisterhood” that formed among women attendees to the trial, many of whom shared their own experiences with sexual assault.

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.

“Merci Gisèle.” That was the nationwide response in France to Gisèle Pelicot, the 72-year-old French woman whose landmark rape case galvanized France. On Friday, her husband and about 50 other men were declared guilty and sentenced for repeatedly raping her for more than a decade after he drugged her unconscious. A panel of judges sentenced Dominique Pelicot to the maximum 20 years in prison.

The shocking case made headlines around the world. The three-and-a-half-month trial gripped France, with supporters regularly gathering around the Avignon Palais de Justice courthouse to support Gisèle Pelicot, who famously waived anonymity to give a voice to survivors and change the public discourse on sexual violence. She told the court during the trial, quote, “It’s not for us to feel shame — it’s for them,” she said. She also insisted videos of her rapes, that her husband had taken when she was fast asleep, drugged into sleep, that these videotapes be shown in the court as part of the trial. Gisèle Pelicot spoke after the sentencing on Friday.

GISÈLE PELICOT: [translated] I’m thinking about the victims who aren’t recognized and whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know we share the same struggle. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have supported me throughout this ordeal. Your testimonies devastated me, and I was able to pull the strength from them to come back every day to face these long days of the trial.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, some women’s rights activists supporting Gisèle Pelicot said they were disappointed with the verdict. This is Muriel Trichet from the French feminist collective Nous Toutes, Us All.

MURIEL TRICHET: [translated] For crimes, you can get a life sentence without parole for 22 years. And with rape, no. And yet rape destroys lives. We spend our lives trying to get over it. There are secondary victims who have not even been taken into account. And so, the minimum needed was to hit very hard with this justice. … Really very, very, very disappointed. Very disappointed. And once again, well, our thoughts go especially to Gisèle, to Gisèle who we will never thank enough. And on top of that, this verdict is a spit in the face. I have no other words.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Diane de Vignemont, a French journalist who covered the trial in Avignon. Her November piece for New Lines Magazine is headlined “Gisèle Pelicot: Finding Sisterhood at France’s Mass Rape Trial.” She’s based in Paris, but she just flew into New York.

It’s great to have you in studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Diane. Explain the significance of this trial and the bravery of this 72-year-old woman, who did something that most women in France — I mean, most do not bring — do not bring cases against their rapist. But what happens when they go to trial even?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Hi. Thanks for having me.

So, yes, the case is definitely exceptional, not only in the acts themself, you know, the raping of a woman over 10 years by so many men, but also by the fact that Gisèle decided to make it public. She waived her right to anonymity, which most women in their rape case choose not to do, especially when the video evidence is so graphic.

AMY GOODMAN: And just for people who didn’t follow this case, how can it be, 50 men? In fact, it was something like 70, right? What happened over this decade? And how was Dominique Pelicot, her husband, found out?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Of course. So, yes, it’s 50 — 70 men, so 20 of whom were not identified because the videos don’t show their face. But Pelicot began drugging her, that we know of, 10 years ago with sleeping pills. And he recruited men on a website called Coco, where people do go for libertinage, like a swingers’ website. And he created a chatroom called “against her will,” ”à son insu” — “without her knowledge.” And there, he recruited men to come in and have sex with his wife. Some of them, he did warn that she was taking sleeping pills. Most of them, he said, too, that she was consenting through the sleeping pills; this was a game that they liked to take part in as a couple.

AMY GOODMAN: That she was faking it?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes, that she was —

AMY GOODMAN: That she was faking she was sleeping?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: No, that she was taking the sleeping pills herself because this is something that she liked and enjoyed. And you can see him on the videos egging the men on by telling them that she likes it, she enjoys it, she wants more.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, you hear in the video this horrific drone of her snoring to see how deeply drugged she was.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Really, really intense snoring, to the point that one of the accused said that he had tinnitus and he couldn’t — he had bad hearing, which is why he didn’t hear her snore, and that was his defense. But you can very, very much hear her snoring. And he recruited them online, and there was a whole process that they had to go through so that she wouldn’t know in the morning that she had been raped. So, they had to not smoke, not wear cologne, cut their nails short, take their clothes off in the hallway, warm their hands before touching her, so that, one, she wouldn’t wake up, and, two, she wouldn’t know the next morning that she had been raped.

AMY GOODMAN: So, she finds out about this because her husband is caught at a grocery store — what, it’s called upskirting? — trying to take pictures with his cellphone up women’s skirts.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: And the police come to the house and take his hard drive, and that’s where they find thousands of videos and photographs of something completely different —

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — his wife being raped.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: He’s caught upskirting. They convince — the vigil who caught him upskirting has to really convince one of the women to go to the police with it. She does not want to, but he pushes her to. And because he’s arrested, they get to go through his phone. And because he’s in police custody, they also get to go to his home, and that’s where they find the hard drive where he had a folder titled “abuse,” where he had methodically catalogued every single videos, over 10 years, videos with the name of the rapist, videos with the name of the act. And she —

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have his children, her children, their children — what, two boys and a girl — and then, they have grandchildren — saying, “Something’s wrong with mom. She is forgetting everything. She is” — and the husband, who’s the rapist and recruiting everyone else to rape her, takes her to the doctor because she’s losing her memory. But this is from being heavily drugged.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly. She wakes up one morning, looks at herself in the morning, and she’s got a haircut that she doesn’t remember getting. She goes to her hairdressers to apologize, and they say, “Yeah, you seemed very odd, like you were out of it.” And so, she, for 10 years, was consulting doctor after doctor after doctor to find out what was wrong with her. She thought she had early-onset Alzheimer’s. But no doctor could figure out what was wrong with her. Her husband kept taking her and kept, you know, making quips about, you know, “What are you doing that you’re so tired? What are you doing at night?” And so, yeah, that’s maybe one of the things that will be beneficial after this case, is that doctors will know to watch out for the symptoms of chemical submission.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about that moment when she decides, “I am not going to be anonymous. I’m going to flip the script. I am not ashamed. I didn’t do this. I was the victim,” when she took off her sunglasses, allowed the videos to be made public?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: So, yeah, from the testimonies of her daughter and of reporters who first followed the case when it came out in 2021, at first, she was very, very scared of the publicity. Her name, in the article in 2021, is not given. And she spends about two years in hiding. And then, little by little, as her lawyers tell her that she has to watch the videos ahead of time, she has to prepare herself for what’s going to be shown on trial, she starts watching the video with her lawyers. And that’s when she gets progressively angrier and decides not only that she’s going to make it public, but that she’s also going to fight the court to make it public, because they were very, very opposed to it originally. So, it’s not just her deciding, but it’s her fighting for it. For a few weeks, the court took back the publicity of the trial. For a few weeks, it was closed.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the scene in Avignon outside the courthouse, the women there and all over who started to rally around her.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah. So, you have to get there very, very early. So, the court opens at 8:00, but you have to be there at 7:00 at the latest to line up by the courthouse. And there’s a side room where the public can go, but there’s only 60 seats in the courthouse. And the day I went, 30 of them was reserved for journalists, because increasingly journalists were coming in from all over the world. There were, I think, 175 that day.

And so, the women are lining up. And I found it really extraordinary in line, sort of a sorority that immediately appeared. Women that I had met two minutes ago were telling me about why they were here, telling me about their rapes, telling me their experience with chemical submission, being drugged one night, waking up in a strange bed. And sort of circles were forming within the line of people talking to one another and supporting one another. And really, we were all here to wait for Gisèle, but we were also all here for one another. It was quite surprising. I thought it was going to be only bleak, but there was this really surprising sorority.

AMY GOODMAN: And you write about how you found sisterhood. Explain.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah. So, yeah, I was very distraught going there, distraught while watching the rape videos. I had originally intended to go later on, so that they wouldn’t be showing the videos, but they ran late, and I ended up watching, sitting through them. But the woman next to me was as distraught as I was, and she grabbed my hand as we watched the videos. And that was quite extraordinary. She didn’t let go until the videos stopped playing. And then, everyone, all of the women attending — it’s a small town, and there’s only a small break for lunch, so we all go to try and eat something, despite what we’ve seen, at the same restaurants, the same boulangeries in Avignon. And we really — we stuck together all day. And that was quite extraordinary.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the issue of consent? And talk about French law and how people are trying to change it now. And also men’s responses to this, because, let’s be clear, that website Coco, where the husband recruited all of these rapists — which, by the way, were her neighbors, people she would pass in the street. She had no idea. But Coco was shut down, wasn’t it, by an LGBTQ group, because they saw that gay men were being ambushed, recruited to ambush gay men on that site? It wasn’t shut down by her case.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: No, it very much wasn’t. And even though her case came out in 2021, it was only later that it was shut down.

But yeah, on the issue of consent, it’s quite tricky. We don’t have consent explicitly written into French law. What qualifies a rape and what has qualified a rape since the late ’80s is a sexual act performed via either constraint, menace or surprise. And so, obviously, questions of consent come in to illustrate and sort of try and understand more of that, but it has to be proven that the act was committed by constrained violence or menace or surprise.

And consent not being written in is very important, because in French criminal law — and that includes rape law — the main issue is intent. And so, to prove that you’ve not committed a theft or a homicide, you can try to prove that you didn’t intend to commit a theft or a homicide. And it’s the same for rape. If you can argue that you didn’t intend to commit a rape, you might get a lower sentence. And so, a lot of these men tried very hard to exploit that flaw. One of them was quoted saying, you know, “I didn’t know what consent was before this case. But thank you, Madame Pelicot. You’ve taught me about consent. And once the court frees me, I will create a seminar where I teach other men about consent.” And so, a lot of them were able to say also that they thought that she’d given consent because her husband said that she had.

And so, it’s very, very tricky. Feminists, feminist activists are very, very divided on the issue of whether adding consent to the law would be better or not. They say — some of them say that it might put too much weight on the victim to prove that she was not consenting, rather than on the perpetrator to say that he didn’t ask for her consent, that it might actually not be that helpful to women to add consent to the law, because you might get situations like this man who was saying that, you know, he didn’t know about consent, and so he obviously — it’s not his fault that he raped her. He did not intend to rape her. It was an accidental rape. That’s a sentence that was uttered in court: “accidental rape.”

AMY GOODMAN: And it may be that Pelicot is a murderer, as well, is that right?

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: That his DNA has been matched to a cold case in Paris from something like 10 years ago.

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Very much, and a rape case in Paris, as well, which is why some people are very iffy with the case being described as a Mazan rape trial, because even on Gisèle herself, not all the rapes were committed in Mazan. He had her raped in a car by the sidewalk. He had her raped in a car — in a bedroom in their daughter’s beach house. It’s not all about that one town of Mazon.

AMY GOODMAN: And there were even pictures of her daughter found, who said, “I don’t know this underwear I’m in.”

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: “My father raped me, and he insists he didn’t.”

DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes. So, the kids of Gisèle say that the one who’s really been forgotten and left out of this trial is the daughter, because, yes, there’s pictures of her naked, in her father’s hard drive, wearing underwear that she doesn’t recognize. And she is convinced, and she’s arguing, and she’s founded an association to support people like her, who — she says she’s been raped. She says she’s been chemically subdued. But unlike Gisèle, there’s not a single video, and so you can’t prove anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Diane de Vignemont, we thank you so much for being with us, French journalist who covered the Pelicot trial in Avignon, France. We’ll link to her piece in New Lines Magazine headlined “Gisèle Pelicot: Finding Sisterhood at France’s Mass Rape Trial.”

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 24, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/24/headlines

Israel Attacks Two Hospitals in Northern Gaza
Dec 24, 2024
Health officials in Gaza say Israel has attacked the Al-Awda and the Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern Gaza, while forcing wounded and sick patients to leave the Indonesian Hospital, in the latest assaults on Gaza’s devastated health system. Israeli artillery shelled the third floor of the Al-Awda Hospital, while Israel detonated remote-controlled explosives just outside the Kamal Adwan, which is barely functioning after repeated Israeli attacks. This is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan, speaking on Al Jazeera.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: “Just now one of the explosives planted by the Israeli army detonated. It caused a shock wave that shattered the hospital doors and windows on the west side. It also injured some of the patients and the very few medical staff left at the hospital. Roughly 20 people were hurt. A second, stronger explosion followed. It caused massive damage to the hospital’s west wing, and more patients were injured. The entire west wing’s doors and windows were all smashed, and the false ceiling collapsed.”

At the United Nations, officials decried Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s health system.

Stéphanie Tremblay: “The director-general of the World Health Organization said that the reports of bombardment near Kamal Adwan Hospital and orders to evacuate the hospital are deeply worrisome, adding that the hospital has been in the middle of fighting for too long and the lives of patients are at risk. OCHA reiterates that civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, must be protected.”

In other news from Gaza, an Israeli drone strike on Sunday targeted an aid convoy in Deir al-Balah, killing four security guards. This comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that there has been “some progress” in talks over a ceasefire and hostage deal.

Israel Detains 100 in West Bank; Palestinian Authority Clashes with Palestinian Fighters in Jenin
Dec 24, 2024
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have reportedly abducted about 100 Palestinians in raids over the past day. This comes as Palestinian Authority forces are clashing again with Palestinian militants in the Jenin refugee camp. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports Palestinian police have been firing rocket-propelled grenades at armed Palestinian fighters in Jenin, where Palestinian police killed a 17-year-old on Monday.

Israel Confirms It Assassinated Haniyeh as It Threatens to Kill Houthi Leaders Next
Dec 24, 2024
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has publicly confirmed for the first time that Israel was behind the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July. Katz made the comment as he threatened to target the heads of the Houthi movement in Yemen,

Israel Katz: “We will damage its strategic infrastructure, and we will behead its leaders. Just as we did to Haniyeh, Sinwar and Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza and Lebanon, we will do it in Hodeidah and Sana’a. Whoever will raise his hand to Israel, his hand will be severed. The IDF’s long arm will harm him and will settle the score.”

In recent days the United States and Israel have both bombed targets in Yemen, while Houthi forces fired a rocket at Tel Aviv that injured 16 people.

Taxpayers Against Genocide Sue Two California Democrats for Funding Israeli Military
Dec 24, 2024
In Northern California, more than 500 residents have joined a class-action lawsuit in an effort to block future U.S. military aid to Israel over Gaza. The lawsuit targets Democratic Congressmembers Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson. The lawsuit was filed by the group Taxpayers Against Genocide. Seth Donnelly is the group’s lead organizer.

Seth Donnelly: “We want to go to where the source is. It controls our tax dollars. And that’s Congress. They have power of the purse. And our two reps in the House voted — and that’s Mike Thompson for some of the counties, and the other one is Jared Huffman for the other counties. They both voted on April 20th to send $26 billion more in military aid to Israel. And by that point, the evidence of genocide was overwhelming.”

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Kurds Under Threat in Syria as Turkey Launches Attacks and Kills Journalists After Assad Regime Falls
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 24, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/24/syria_kurds

As foreign powers look to shape Syria’s political landscape after the toppling of the Assad regime, the country’s Kurdish population is in the spotlight. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to threaten the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey regards as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years. Turkey’s foreign minister recently traveled to Damascus to meet with Syria’s new de facto ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the Islamist group HTS. “Turkey is a major threat to Kurds and to democratic experiments that Kurds have been implementing in the region starting in 2014,” says Ozlem Goner, steering committee member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava, who details the persecution of Kurds, the targeting of journalists, and which powerful countries are looking to control the region. “Turkey, Israel and the U.S. collectively are trying to carve out this land, and Kurds are under threat.”

Transcript

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

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

We end today’s show with Syria and what the fall of the Assad regime means for Syria’s 2 million Kurdish people, who make up about 10% of the country. Since the Islamist armed group HTS toppled the Assad regime, Turkey, Israel and the United States are vying for greater control in post-Assad Syria, and the balance of power seems to be shifting against Kurdish groups.

Turkey’s foreign minister traveled to Damascus Sunday to meet with Syria’s new de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of HTS. According to press accounts, they discussed the need for Syria to draft a new constitution, Israel’s attacks on Syria, and the future of the Kurds.

Meanwhile, a U.S. delegation met with al-Sharaa on Friday, and the Biden administration is moving to lift a $10 million bounty on him over his links to al-Qaeda. The Pentagon has also acknowledged there are now about 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, more than double the previously announced figure of 900.

On Monday, the Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan said Syrian Kurdish armed groups had no place in Syria’s future, adding that Turkey would continue targeted operations against it. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years. The Syrian Kurdish YPG is the military wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, a key U.S. ally in fighting the Islamic State. But the return of President-elect Trump has called into question how long Washington’s support will continue.

For more, we’re joined here in New York by Ozlem Goner. She is associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, CUNY. She’s also a steering committee member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava and is from the Bakur region of broader Kurdistan.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor.

OZLEM GONER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your concerns right now. What exactly is happening to the Kurdish population of Syria?

OZLEM GONER: Thank you so much for having me.

So, this is a big threat for the Kurdish populations in Syria, and this is also a big threat for this democratic confederalist, women’s liberationary and pluralist experience that Kurds initiated in the region of north and east Syria more broadly, because Turkey, as you’ve shown in the clip, and also as President Erdoğan, for example, just this past week said that we can’t confine the great Turkish nation to its 700-something thousand kilometers. So, Turkey is very explicitly saying that they’re involved. Turkey has said very explicitly that they’ve been supporting HTS for 11 years and that they have a stake in Syria and have explicitly been intervening in the region, pushing for its interests, trying to further its already-occupied — for example, Turkey has been occupying Afrin region of north and east Syria, that was under the Kurdish self-government for now since 2018. So, Turkey is a big threat to the democracy and against Kurds especially at this moment.

And we’ve seen in Syria, you know, both Israel and Turkey are making their progress, trying to control further territory, trying to exert further power and control in the region, and all through the U.S. You know, U.S. has been — Turkey is a NATO country. We have to know this, because sometimes this is represented as if there’s, like, Turkey versus the U.S., whereas, actually, Turkey is one of the major allies of the United States in the region. Turkey is the second-largest NATO army. And Turkey has been not only massacring, torturing, imprisoning Kurds under the Turkish territories, under the Turkish nation-state, but has been killing journalists in Kurdistan, has been killing journalists in Syria, in Iraq. So Turkey is really playing at becoming a major force in this region and taking Kurds out of the picture here.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk specifically about the journalists. Press freedom groups have condemned the killing of two Kurdish journalists, Nazim Dastan and Cihan Bilgin, by a Turkish drone as they were reporting on attacks on the Tishrin Dam on the outskirts of Kobani in northern Syria.

OZLEM GONER: Right, right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of this area and who those journalists were.

OZLEM GONER: Right. So, those journalists — this is very, very important. This is crucial that Turkey targeted — target-killed these two journalist in north and east Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: A man and a woman.

OZLEM GONER: A man and a woman, yes. So, Nazim Dastan has been showing Turkey’s involvement with ISIS in 2014, when Kobani, this town that’s now under the threat of yet another Turkish invasion, and the SNA, the Turkish militias, Turkish mercenaries, paid by Turkey, are at the border and have started also a ground invasion. Turkey is using airstrikes and drones to also kill, do these targeted killings. Nazim Dastan was the journalist in 2014 who showed the Turkish-ISIS alliance and how, the ways, the different ways that Turkey was supporting ISIS in the region. And he was actually imprisoned in Turkey prior to his killing in north and east Syria.

And Cihan Bilgin has also been doing very important work, showing, for example, the lives of Kurdish people who were displaced from Afrin by Turkey’s ethnic cleansing in 2018. So, she has been in the region reporting the lives of these displaced people and also the ongoing Turkish attacks, because we need to understand something that’s very important, is that Turkey, from 2014, by supporting ISIS into the killing of 14,000 Kurdish people at the hands of ISIS, backed by Turkey, was very important.

Since then, in 2018, Turkey occupied Afrin, a region in north and east Syria that was under the Kurdish self-rule, and ethnically cleansed thousands of people, sold Kurdish women to slavery. And there are many, many human rights reports that show this at this moment. So, 2018. 2019, Turkey again came to the U.N. meeting and, in front of all the U.N., the world leaders, showed a detailed map as to how Turkey plans to colonize and occupy the north and east Syria. So, it’s trying to attack Kurds in 2023 right before Israel’s genocide started in Gaza. Turkey destroyed 40 to 50% of infrastructure in north and east Syria. And these, you know, they hardly make it to the media, but these are the realities that Turkey is a major threat to Kurds and to democratic experiment that Kurds have been implementing in the region starting in 2014.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about how this will all play out with the presidential transition here.

OZLEM GONER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. is backing one Syrian Kurdish group that Turkey is opposed to, but at the same time, Turkey and the U.S. are allies, right?

OZLEM GONER: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Both in NATO.

OZLEM GONER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And also, how worried are Kurds in Syria about President Trump returning to power? In 2019, he greenlit a Turkish invasion into northern Syria.

OZLEM GONER: Right, right. I mean, as you know, these are fascist governors, governments, that are basically in coordination since the Cold War. Turkey has been one of major allies of the United States in the region, starting with the Cold War, I mean, using military training, sales of war equipment. The planes, the F-16s, that kill Kurds in north and east Syria are sold by the U.S., and not only are sold by the U.S., but the U.S. actually gives a lot of military funding, humanitarian funding, that are used in the purchase of these, this weaponry.

So, behind, you know, if you scratch the surface a little bit, the only purpose of those U.S. troops in the region were to prevent the further growth of ISIS, because even prior to the U.S. entering the region, it was the Kurdish forces who have been, because of their own movement’s success of 40 years of practicing of self-governing, self-defense, women’s self-defense forces — so, these were all in place before the U.S. entered the region. But the current presence of the U.S. troops is to prevent Turkey from entering, annihilating, crushing, killing Kurds in tens of thousands. What we’re seeing in Gaza today can happen in Rojava if we don’t enter. And it happened previously to Kurdish populations in my hometown of Dêrsim, 1930s, in Iraq. So, the Kurdish populations at the hands of these governments, who are in cooperation with the U.S., who use U.S. funding, U.S. military equipment, and then somehow appearing on the surface as if there is some contradiction here between the U.S. and Turkey. At the moment, as you said in the beginning, Turkey, Israel and the U.S. collectively are trying to carve out this land, and Kurds are under threat.

And also, I have to say one important thing is, even during Assad regime, Turkey was preventing the Kurds from sitting at the negotiating table to determine the future of a democratic Syria. And Turkey is doing that right now, while HTS have been giving some messages that Kurds could be included in this process. That is, after that, the Turkish foreign minister made several visits, signaled that, “Hey, we have been supporting HTS for the last 11 years.” And so, Turkey is trying very hard to prevent Kurds from sitting at the negotiating table. And that’s a very big loss for the region in general.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we’ll continue to cover this. Ozlem Goner, we want to thank you so much for being with us, associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and also at the CUNY Graduate Center here in Manhattan.

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 26, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/26/headlines

Israeli Strikes on Gaza Kill Dozens, Including Five Journalists; Three Babies Freeze to Death
Dec 26, 2024

Palestinian health officials say Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed 38 people and injured 137 others in the past 24 hours. Among the dead are five journalists with the Al-Quds Today channel who were killed in an Israeli strike on their broadcasting van near the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Video of their assassination shows a van clearly marked with the word “press” engulfed in flames. The slain journalists are Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Ali, Mohammed al-Ladah, Faisal Abu al-Qumsan and Ayman al-Jadi, who had gone to the Al-Awda Hospital with his wife, who was in labor with their first child. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports Israeli attacks since October 2023 have killed more than 190 journalists and media workers across Gaza.

Meanwhile, Palestinian doctors say three babies have died of hypothermia in recent days as temperatures in Gaza’s tent encampments plummeted amid Israel’s stifling blockade of food, water and aid. Displaced Christians in Gaza marked a somber Christmas holiday amid the devastation of Israel’s assault. This is 67-year-old Najlaa Tarzy, whose family once again spent Christmas sheltering inside Gaza’s only Catholic church.

Najlaa Tarzy: “Each year on this date, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, spread joy to children, pray at night and celebrate Jesus’s coming and birth. Last year was very harsh on us, and this year is harsh with the atmosphere of war, martyrs and the life we’re living. We can’t handle it. We don’t know how to describe it. It’s extremely difficult. It is misery.”

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed at least eight Palestinians Wednesday as troops backed by armed drones attacked the Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. Among those killed were two Palestinian women and an 18-year-old.

Turkey’s Erdoğan Threatens to “Bury” Syrian Kurds Unless They Lay Down Arms
Dec 26, 2024

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has threatened to “bury” Kurdish fighters in Syria unless they lay down their arms. Erdoğan made the threat during remarks to the Turkish parliament on Wednesday, insisting the Kurdish YPG militia must disband.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: “As I said after the Cabinet meeting, business as usual is no longer possible. The separatist murderers will either bid farewell to their weapons or be buried in Syrian soil alongside their weapons.”

On Monday, thousands of women rallied in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli demanding Syria’s new leaders respect women’s rights. They also condemned Turkish-backed attacks on Kurdish groups. Many of the protesters waved the green, yellow and red flags of the Women’s Protection Units, an affiliate of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia that Turkey considers a terrorist organization.

Hemrin Ali: “Today, all women in the Jazira region, including Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, are uniting their voices, saying yes to supporting the Women’s Protection Units, YPJ, yes to preserving the rights and gains of the women’s revolution in northern and eastern Syria. Today, we are safeguarding all the achievements of northern and eastern Syria by demanding freedom and rights for all women, without discrimination.”

Later in the broadcast, we’ll go to Damascus for an update from Syrian journalist and BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab.

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

Meet State Dept. Official Michael Casey, Who Resigned over Gaza After U.S. Ignored Israeli Abuses
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 26, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/26 ... transcript

After a 15-year career in the Foreign Service, Michael Casey resigned from the State Department in July over U.S. policy on Gaza and is now speaking out publicly for the first time. He was deputy political counselor at the United States Office for Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem for four years before he left. Casey says he resigned after “getting no action from Washington” for his recommendations on humanitarian actions for Palestinians and toward a workable two-state solution. “We don’t believe Palestinian sources of information,” Casey says about U.S. policymakers. “We will accept the Israeli narrative over all others, even if we know it’s not correct.” He also discusses what to expect for Gaza under the incoming Trump administration.

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where medics say an Israeli strike killed five journalists who worked for Al-Quds TV in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza. They were reportedly sleeping in a van clearly marked with the word “press.”

Meanwhile, three Palestinian babies have died of hypothermia at the al-Mawasi refugee camp in southern Gaza as temperatures plummet and Israel’s deadly blockade on food, water and key winter supplies continues. The father of 3-week-old victim Sila, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, told Al Jazeera his family had been sleeping on cold sand in a tent exposed to bitter winds. Al-Mawasi is designated a safe zone, but Israel has repeatedly attacked it over the last 14 months as its forces continue to pound Gaza.

This comes as Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank raided Nablus to escort a group of settlers to Joseph’s Tomb, which has been a flashpoint between Palestinians and Israeli settlers.

AMY GOODMAN: A group of Palestinian Americans trapped in Gaza has sued the Biden administration, saying it abandoned them and their families in a war zone despite rescuing, quote, “similarly situated Americans of different national origins,” unquote.

For more, we’re joined by Michael Casey. He resigned from the State Department in July over U.S. policy on Gaza after a 15-year career in the Foreign Service. He served nine years before that in the U.S. Army. He was deputy political counselor at the United States Office for Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem for four years before resigning. He’s joining us now from Michigan.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mike Casey. So, you resigned in July. You’re making the reasons for your resignation public now. Explain what happened and why you’ve decided to leave your career.

MICHAEL CASEY: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

I’ve been trying to get the story out, honestly, since I left. I’ve talked to sort of multiple journalists who, you know, for various reasons, weren’t able to publish the story until recently. So, I’ve been trying to get the story out since that time.

And really, why I left was that after I covered Gaza almost every day for three years and just writing every day about what was happening there, even before October 7th, the humanitarian catastrophe that was there beforehand, and just getting no action from Washington on any of those issues. And we also, my office, wrote about Palestinian politics, settlements, human rights issues, prisoner abuses, different things like this, every day writing about them. And then, October 7th, everything was just amplified, you know, a hundred times worse than it was before. And just writing all this information, having it disregarded, taking no actions and no policies on it, and acting constantly in direct contravention of our own interests was eventually too much for me, and I decided I had done everything I could to help, there was nothing more I could do on the inside, and it was time for me to leave.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mike, you’ve said, in fact, that once you were posted in Jerusalem, everything you learned as a diplomat, you had to forget. If you could elaborate on what you mean by that?

MICHAEL CASEY: Sure. It’s just — and that’s the way it feels. You know, basic things as a diplomat, to be skeptical of your interlocutors. You know, when the government of the country you’re assigned to tells you something, you have to fact-check it a little bit. But with the Israeli government, we don’t do that. We just repeat what they tell us. We don’t even report on that information.

And, you know, having basic concerns for issues like human rights, that was a bedrock of our foreign policy in other places, and in Israel, we just completely disregard it. I mean, one issue I always highlight was administrative detention, which is where people are locked up without charges. You know, when I was in other countries, like Malaysia, there was maybe one person in admin detention, and the secretary of state would raise her case all the time, whereas in Israel, we were approaching 2,000 Palestinians were being held in admin detention, including minors, including American citizens, and we never said a word about it. And so, just these issues that you would normally push forward everywhere else, in this country we just pretend like it’s not a problem.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, in your reading, Mike — you worked at the State Department; before that, you were also in the military — what, in your view, explains this? Why do you think the U.S. is consistently blind to the suffering of Palestinians?

MICHAEL CASEY: It’s hard to get a concrete answer on that as to why that is, just seeing it happen every day and what we do with that and just the absolute disregard of reality that we have. And it’s good to see organizations like DAWN who are launching a lawsuit — it’s sad that it had to come to this point, but launching a lawsuit against the State Department for violating its own policies, you know, violating its own human rights reports, as they mentioned when they made the announcement, because my office wrote these reports and documented the human rights abuses there. It was the longest report in the world. It took the longest to finish. And then we come out and say things like “There are no human rights issues in Israel.” It just — it doesn’t make any sense. And as to why that is, I don’t know. Our policy is just completely backwards. We start from the point of we need to sell weapons to Israel, and then we backtrack and make the facts the way we need it to be in order to make that happen, which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip from the Fault Lines documentary called Starving Gaza in Al Jazeera English that features Stacy Gilbert, who we also interviewed, the former senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. She resigned after over 20 years in service after disagreements with a State Department report that she worked on concluding Israel was not obstructing U.S. humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

HIND HASSAN: In April, Stacy Gilbert was asked for her input on a Biden administration report on whether Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza.

STACY GILBERT: I was shocked to see that it said, in very clear terms, it is our determination that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance.

HIND HASSAN: You had advised that that wasn’t the case. Is that correct?

STACY GILBERT: Yes. The subject matter experts were removed, and the report was moved up to a higher level. We were told, “You will see the report when it is released publicly.”

HIND HASSAN: And then the report comes out and just doesn’t include what you had to say?

STACY GILBERT: I wasn’t sure I read that correctly. I read it again, and I sent an email then that I would resign as a result of that.

HIND HASSAN: Do you remember what you wrote in your resignation email?

STACY GILBERT: I said that report will haunt us.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Stacy Gilbert, a State Department official, in the Al Jazeera documentary Starving Gaza. You can also go to Democracy Now! to see our extended interview with Stacy. So, Mike Casey, that was in the spring. You were there in Jerusalem. You were still working. Talk about the changing of the conclusions of this report, which Stacy Gilbert said is a report that will haunt us.

MICHAEL CASEY: And she’s absolutely correct, because it’s absurd to reach that conclusion based on all of the evidence that’s out there. I mean, it’s the absolute consensus of the international organizations, human rights organizations that are actually in Gaza and documenting this information, and the decision comes in complete contrast to that. And there is no one out there who is saying the situation is not — that Israel is allowing aid in. No one is saying that except for the Israeli government. So, when we reach these conclusions, we’re either using information provided by the Israelis or we’re simply making it up, because no credible organization is saying that they are not blocking humanitarian aid.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh. She was killed by an Israeli sniper outside the Jenin refugee camp, one of the most well-known Al Jazeera reporters. She was killed May 11th, 2022. After she was killed, there was a funeral for Shireen. Can you describe, Mike Casey — you were in Jerusalem at the time. Is that right? Can you describe what happened at the funeral? She is, by the way, an American journalist, a Palestinian American journalist.

MICHAEL CASEY: Yes, I was there at the time, and it was one of the worst days in the office when she was killed and then when the funeral happened, because it was just such a — so emblematic of our policies there and our policy failures, that an American is going to be killed, we’re going to call for an investigation, we’re not going to be serious about it. Whatever they come out with, we’re going to accept, even if we know the facts are otherwise. And then it reaches the point where her funeral is attacked. The police are beating pallbearers. Her coffin falls on the ground.

And we don’t say anything about it, just at this level of brutality that’s happening, and we don’t say anything. And so, people in the office were just devastated emotionally, because many of them knew her personally, and then knowing that they’re working for the United States government, who has the most leverage and the most ability to make some changes and make some impact, and know that we’re not going to say anything about it. I mean, it was really crushing for morality in the office.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have senators, like Maryland Senator Van Hollen, who have called for the release of the report on Shireen Abu Akleh. That actually hasn’t happened. And if you can compare what took place there and what you felt should have been said by the United States and how the U.S. deals in other countries?

MICHAEL CASEY: Yeah, it’s interesting, when I was listening to the headlines at the beginning of your broadcast, just to hear the update on Gaza and the update on Ukraine and seeing, you know, two incidents, and we’re going to have very different responses to them, because we simply pick and choose our statements that we’re going to make depending on the situation. So, yeah, it’s just that we’re going to put red lines out there, we’re going to call for investigations, we’re going to do things like that in Israel, but we’re not serious about it, and we’re not concerned with the result that comes out from them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to some of the early work that you did shortly after October 7th, 2023. Just three weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, nearly 7,000 Palestinians had already been killed. But on October 25th of 2023, President Biden cast doubt on Gaza’s official death toll. This is a clip of Biden.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mike, if you could explain? What was your response when you heard Biden’s remarks?

MICHAEL CASEY: So, we fought within the system to clarify why we believe those numbers were the most accurate numbers we could find. You know, we wrote about — we had an official response, that we would talk about how the Ministry of Health in Gaza is the most connected to its parent ministry in Ramallah. Many of the employees there are from the PA. Analyses of past conflicts have never shown a significant difference between the reports. So we had an official way of dealing with it.

But, in general, it was — it sort of personally affected me because I was writing those numbers every day in our reports at the time. And when the president of the United States comes out and says, “I don’t believe your numbers,” that’s a little bit hard to deal with. But, in general, it was a common trend even before October 7th that we don’t believe Palestinian sources of information. We don’t believe what they say, whether it’s Palestinian government, whether it’s Palestinian contacts that we talk to. It’s just disregarded. And even the United Nations and others, we disregard sometimes. We will accept the Israeli narrative over all others, even if we know it’s not correct.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, can you explain, Mike — we just heard earlier from Stacy Gilbert — how many of your college, do you believe, whether they resigned or not — how many of your colleagues in the State Department agree with you and others in criticizing U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine, and in particular now —

MICHAEL CASEY: It’s a very strong sentiment —

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — in the wake of the war, the assault on Gaza?

MICHAEL CASEY: It’s a very strong sentiment within the department. I’ve had many people reach out to me saying they support what I did, they’re glad I’m speaking out, essentially giving them a voice to their concerns that they have, and a lot of people who have told me they would be right behind me if it weren’t for their own personal circumstances that they can’t resign, which I fully respect in that. So, it’s definitely a common sentiment, especially at the lower levels within the department. It was always surprising. Everyone that I talked to, everyone I interacted with, it seemed like everyone felt the same. Yet, somehow, like Stacy mentioned, when the information goes up to a higher level, the decision that comes back down is completely the opposite of what everyone has put forward.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re talking about Tony Blinken, you’re talking about the secretary of state, when you say when it goes up to a higher level, or the people around him. How much contact did you have, or was there any discussion that you had or others you know had, with him? For example, Gilbert’s saying they changed the results of their report, when saying everyone knew Israel was stopping humanitarian aid from getting in, and yet that was changed.

MICHAEL CASEY: That’s never been fully clear. Where does that decision happen in the department once it goes above maybe the assistant secretary level? Where are those changes made? Who makes those final decisions? That, I don’t know. I don’t have full clarity on that.

I did have interactions with Secretary Blinken when he would come to visit. You know, I arranged some of his meetings. I sat in some of his meetings as a notetaker when he met with President Abbas and others. And out of all the decision-makers at the top, the secretary of state was one of the most disappointing ones, because he seemed to be an individual who’s very smart, understood the conflict, had a level of empathy. You know, when we got our local staff out of Gaza, he called each of them to check in on them. So, he seemed to have a level of empathy and understanding of the situation, yet he’s backing these decisions at the higher level. So, out of all the people at the top that are involved in this, he was one of the most disappointing to me personally.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mike, could you talk about what — within the State Department, what the response has been to these protests? After you resigned, you and three others got an award for constructive dissent from the American Foreign Service Association for a cable you wrote about Gaza. Could you explain what was in that cable? What is a dissent cable?

MICHAEL CASEY: So, a dissent cable is a special channel where you can write a report saying “I disagree” with whatever policy we’re working on. You can’t put that sort of information in standard reporting, but you can put it in the dissent channel, which stays very protected. It goes up to the higher levels of the State Department. They do read and they do respond to it and address those issues.

When we won the award, we actually had to look back at our dissent cables, because we wrote more than one, to figure out which one they were talking about in particular. A lot of the details, I don’t want to get into, for sort of reasons of classification. The overall question was that we need to do more to evacuate people from Gaza. You know, we evacuated American citizens out of Gaza, but then we just stopped. And we were not evacuating people who we had worked with over the years, people that had been contacts of ours, people we’d sent on exchange programs, people we had invested in, people who were the future of Gaza, that really need to be helped and protected, not just for humanitarian reasons, but really for what’s going to happen in Gaza in the future. And so, we basically wrote a dissent cable about that, which obviously didn’t change the policies there, particularly after Rafah was shut down.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Mike Casey, can you talk about the last straw for you? You were in Jerusalem, one of the top State Department officials there, when the National Security Council said they should just back what Israelis want for post-conflict Gaza. Explain what you understand that is and why you left.

MICHAEL CASEY: So, that was one area, as things were moving forward in Gaza, that I stayed a little bit longer, thinking this is one area where maybe we can make a positive impact, is really laying out what needs to happen in the future in Gaza. And we laid out a plan that involved the humanitarian aspects of it, security aspects of it, governance aspects of it, what needs to happen in terms of connecting Gaza with the rest of Palestine, you know, inserting a credible Palestinian government at the governor, ministerial and local level, and integrating it, creating a second state, two-state solution — everything like that that would fit within our goals and what’s best for Gaza. And the response was, “Well, the Israelis have a different plan, and we’re just going to go with that.” And the current plan is —

AMY GOODMAN: And that plan is?

MICHAEL CASEY: — the idea of — the current plan, as I understand it, was having local families — they use the term “clans” — to run things in Gaza. And we wrote reports about why that’s not feasible, it’s not going to work, and that the reason the Israelis support that plan is because it will lead to chaos and conflict in Gaza, which is their goal in what is happening there. It’s not our goal. It shouldn’t be. And it’s not a feasible plan. And I’ve talked to contacts of mine in Cairo who’ve said, even just a couple weeks ago, people from Washington were still reaching out to them and asking about this plan. So, it seems we’re still pursuing it, even though we know it’s not feasible and it’s not right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mike, finally, as we end, if you could talk about what your concerns are about the incoming Trump administration with respect to U.S. policy on Palestine? He said earlier this month that if the Israeli hostages are not returned by Inauguration Day — that is, January 20th — quote, “all hell is going to break out.”

MICHAEL CASEY: And unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about an incoming administration. I fear they’re going to basically pick up where they left off in terms of where the Israeli government was planning to formally announce or annex settlements in the West Bank and other destructive policies which are not only terrible for Palestinians, but also very difficult to reverse in a future administration. And so, I fear they’re going to pick up where they left off. I feel Israel is going to be given even more of a blank check than they have under the Biden administration, and that there will be steps taken, like annexation of certain areas, that the Trump administration doesn’t understand the impact of those, because they don’t analyze them very carefully and simply just accept whatever Israel wants them to do, even more so than the Biden administration.

But if I were to give them advice, I would tell them to really focus on having a policy on Palestine, not just viewing it through the lens of Israel and what Israel wants, but what’s good for Palestinians, what’s best for our own interests there. If we want a two-state solution, we need to create a second state. We can’t just put “Palestine” in quotes in reports and pretend like it doesn’t exist. We need to create a political and economic, social, cultural entity that is Palestine, recognize the country, stop denying its existence at the United Nations and others, and really push forward policies such as a national election and different things like that, that are important for the Palestinian people, regardless of what the impact is on Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Casey, we want to thank you for being with us. Mike resigned from the State Department in July after a 15-year career in the Foreign Service. He was deputy political counselor at the United States Office for Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem for four years before resigning in July over U.S. policy on Gaza.

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

Back in Syria After Exile, BBC Reporter Lina Sinjab on “Joy” & Calls for Prosecution, Reconciliation
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 26, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/26 ... transcript

"Assad's police threatened to bury me and my reporting. Now I'm back, and free"
We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013. She relays the “sense of freedom and joy” now present on the streets of Damascus, where ordinary Syrians, for the first time in generations, “feel that they are liberated and they are proud of where they are today.” Current estimates put the number of forced disappearances under the Assad government at 300,000 likely tortured in prisons and buried in mass graves. We discuss Syria’s new transitional government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and whether it can fulfill its promises of inclusion and accountability for all Syrians. “There’s no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable, for the sake of reconciliation in the country,” says Sinjab.

Transcript

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the latest developments in Syria in the wake of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime earlier the month. On Wednesday, the first widespread demonstrations took place in cities across Syria after a widely shared video showed an attack on an Alawite shrine in the north. Syria’s new rulers said the video was old and had been shared to, quote, “stir up strife.” Al-Assad belonged to the Alawite sect.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as thousands of women rallied Monday in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli demanding Syria’s new leaders respect women’s rights. They also condemned Turkish-backed attacks on Kurdish groups. Many of the protesters waved the green, yellow and red flags of Women’s Protection Units, an affiliate of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia that Turkey considers a terrorist organization.

HEMRIN ALI: [translated] Today, all women in the Jazira region, including Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, are uniting their voices, saying yes to supporting the Women’s Protection Units, YPJ, yes to preserving the rights and gains of the women’s revolution in northern and eastern Syria. Today, we are safeguarding all the achievements of northern and eastern Syria by demanding freedom and rights for all women, without discrimination.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go now to Damascus, where we’re joined by Lina Sinjab, a Syrian journalist and BBC Middle East correspondent. She was the BBC Syria correspondent until 2013, when she was forced to flee Syria after threats from the Assad regime. She’s been reporting from Beirut for over a decade and returned to Syria earlier this month as the Assad regime was collapsing.

Lina, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you start off by just describing the scene in Damascus this week and also talk about what happened around Christmas?

LINA SINJAB: Well, I have to say that it’s been over two weeks since the toppling of Assad regime, and there’s still a sense of freedom and joy among many Syrians, whether here in the capital or elsewhere in the country. It’s a heavy burden that has been, you know, over the shoulders of Syrians for nearly five decades, and the last decade was the worst, as they faced detention, bombing and, you know, torture inside prison, disappearances. So, I think, you know, many Syrians are still in the overwhelmed feeling of freedom, feeling that they belong to the country, that they have a say in the country, and that they are able to contribute to the future of Syria.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Lina, if you could talk about your own experience as a Syrian? You returned after so many years away. And you said, when you crossed over — you were in Lebanon, and you came into Syria — you said upon your return, quote, “This is the first time ever in my life as a journalist that I am fearless.” So, could you elaborate on that?

LINA SINJAB: Well, I’ve been reporting on Syria for a long time. You know, I joined the BBC in the mid-2000s and continued reporting up until the time that I had to flee the country in 2013. And there was always the pressure of what to say, who to talk to, what permission you take, who’s the minder who’s going to accompany you whenever you’re reporting. You know, you always have these two minds: You want to maintain your integrity and impartiality as a journalist, tell the truth, but also try to find a way so that you’re not falling into the hands of the regime’s repression. And I’ve had many cases where I’ve been called in, I’ve been summoned, I’ve been grounded because of reports that I’ve done.

But when the uprising began, I just, like, felt there is no way of hiding the truth. I had to report on the peaceful protesters, on their peaceful demands. I had to report on the opening fire on protesters, on the detention, on the killing. And, you know, I was stopped several times by regime forces and different security forces, sometimes picked up from a park near my home, sometimes from the border, sometimes from a demonstration in the suburbs of Damascus. But I ended up in the last year, like, confined to my house. I wasn’t able to go out or report, you know, on the ground. I had to be constantly on the phone talking to people that I’ve trusted, I know for sure that they’re telling me the truth, and broadcast from my home. I was under country arrest. I wasn’t able to travel outside Syria. But I had, you know, tried my best so that I leave the country without violating any rules, because I didn’t want to provoke my right to come back.

However, you know, the threats continued even when I was outside. Several times, I was, like, put on the arrest list by different security police. And, you know, even if you are outside the country, you are always thinking of the ones you left behind, of family members, of friends who might get in trouble. People continue talking anonymously even when they are outside Syria, because they’re afraid about their freedom, their families, their safety.

So, that all is gone now. I feel for the first time we are in Syria, we don’t have worries about where to go, who to talk to. Actually, even if you walk on the streets, people come up to you, because they want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories. And one thing that is really incredible to see from my own eyes in my own country is, over the past years when I managed to bribe my way in and come here, I felt that this country has become dark and with heavy shoulder, that people have grown old with sadness and with poverty. Now there are big smiles on their faces. Their shoulders are upright. Their heads are up. They feel that, you know, they’re liberated and they’re proud of where they are today. And that’s a big difference.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Lina, I mean, in addition to this, you know, what you described, how Syrians are feeling this celebratory mood, there’s also a great deal of mourning for the hundreds of thousands who were disappeared or killed during Assad’s regime. So, if you could say a little bit about that, what you’ve learned about the missing, how many there are, and what’s been revealed of these mass graves, the prisons, the prison network, the vast prison network that Assad ran?

LINA SINJAB: You know, the detention haven’t started during Assad the son, but actually Assad the father. And there were many reports about former prisons, whether Palmyra or even Sednaya, in the old days of the father, where, you know, people were even killed using acid to melt their bodies. When the uprising began in 2011, protesters would pray for their families, to pray for them that they will get a bullet and get killed rather than get detained, because they know what detention means. And thousands of people disappeared over the years. You know, recently, the Syrian human rights organizations were talking about over 120,000 missing in Syrian prison, forcibly disappeared, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that over 60,000 were tortured to death inside prison. That’s all before prison cells were open to the public and some prisoners were released. At that point, a Syrian human rights organization came to the conclusion that yet another 80,000 or more have been tortured to death.

And then we came to the discovery of the mass graves, and many organizations who’ve been documenting and studying from satellite images the situation of the mass graves. They’re estimating that nearly 300,000 have been tortured to death. So, you know, the number of people who disappeared or tortured to death is really high in numbers. And that leaves many families, who were wanting answers and finding their beloved ones, in pain. And what they’re calling for now is justice. They want the criminals and those who have blood on their hands, who are those who participated in the killing and torture, to be prosecuted, so that they have a closure and they will be able to, you know, say a respectful payoff for their beloved ones.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Lina, if you could say — you know, there was the, in addition to the Alawite — the protests against the attack on the Alawite shrine, there were also reports of protests after a video went viral on social media of a Christmas tree that was burned. So, if you could respond to that? What’s known about that? And the fact that there’s speculation that there were foreigners who were responsible for setting that tree on fire? And who are the foreign fighters now in Syria? And where?

LINA SINJAB: Well, there are reports of some foreign fighters who joined the rebels who toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And, in fact, the HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who is in charge now — it’s the leading force now — they rushed to the scene when the Christmas tree was set on fire, tried to put it down and reassure the families and the Christians who wanted to celebrate that it will be repaired immediately and perpetrators will be arrested. And, in fact, they did come back and say that they’ve arrested them and that they are foreign fighters. And this is a big issue and big challenge, because, you know, nobody wants to see foreign fighters here in Syria.

However, what happened with the Alawite community is a different story. When rebels advanced in Aleppo in November, it seems that there was also an attack on the Alawite shrine. But there were reconciliations soon after. Suddenly, the videos were released again yesterday, and religious figures from the Alawite community urged people to protest, while at the same time there was an ambush against HTS security, who were trying to arrest former members of Assad’s regime who refused to give up their arms. And actually, they shot at HTS and killed 14 members of them. So, that happened as the protests also were taking place.

But the protests, it seems that, you know, calling for these protests, it had a different agenda behind it, because the Alawite community are worried about prosecution. Most of the Alawite community are supportive of President Assad, or former President Assad, and they had contributed or been part of the crackdown, the brutal crackdown, on the Syrians’ arrests, torture in prison and killing. So, they will be prosecuted. And that’s why they are, you know, out and about, trying to put pressure so there will be a general amnesty on the Alawite community.

This is something that is impossible to happen, because the families of those who died in prison, the families of those who were bombed and tortured to death or disappeared, they need justice. They need answers about what happened to their family members. And there is no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without, you know, a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable for the sake of reconciliation in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the other protest this week. On Monday, thousands of women gathered to protest to demand that HTS, the new Islamist rulers, respect women’s rights. They also condemned attacks on Kurdish-led regions in the north of Syria. But talk about women and what they want, as HTS talks about an inclusive government.

LINA SINJAB: Yes, I think they have made their agenda clear, that they want an inclusive government, that they will protect the rights of minorities and the rights of women. And I have to say — you know, I’m here in the center of Damascus — life is just like normal. I mean, I don’t need to worry about wearing hijab. Or even like people — it was Christmas. They were celebrating in parties. They were drinking alcohol. And some HTS members, they were even seen in some of the parties celebrating with other people, while many of them were also protecting, you know, Christian neighborhoods, so that people, Christians, feel safe to have the Christmas Mass and celebrate Christmas, as well.

So, I think, you know, that’s something that is unnegotiable about women’s rights, about minorities’ rights. There are debates about — you know, there’s this transitional government because it’s all one-colored government, mainly from the Islamists, mainly men, who are in charge. So, that’s also raising some concerns. But civil society is really active. Many initiatives are out, talking about involvement in the framing the future of Syria, in writing the constitution, about participation of all the Syrian society into that. And actually, just two days ago, the leadership announced that almost all of the rebel factions dismantled will join the Syrian Army. And that’s something also very good, because that means that there won’t be any internal fighting for power, but they are all under one ministry and one army.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Lina, finally, as we end, if you could also say, you know, what your concerns are about the different foreign forms of intervention into Syria, from the presence of Iran-backed groups, Turkey, and, of course, these systematic Israeli military airstrikes on Syria?

LINA SINJAB: I think Syria have suffered for more than a decade of different regional powers, you know, deciding for on behalf of Syrians and, you know, having sovereignty over Syrian territories. Mainly, we’re talking about Iran, Hezbollah and the Russians, as well. You know, in the north, we’ve seen also Turkey supporting some Syrian-backed — Syrian forces, as well. And Israel has violated almost every right of sovereignty and, especially after the toppling of Assad, almost destroyed all the defense forces inside Syria. So, all of these are violations.

And really, as a Syrian, I feel that this is a golden opportunity for Syrians to work together to build the country together without any interference from foreign forces. But I have to say, the most feared one among people here is Iran and its affiliated militia, whether in Iraq or in Lebanon, from Hezbollah or the Shia militias in Iraq. They’re worried about them interfering in the society, causing disruption and causing instability, especially that many of the Alawites and the Shia in Syria have always been affiliated to foreign powers, like in Iran, and they are worried that this is going to continue.

AMY GOODMAN: Lina Sinjab, we thank you so much for being with us, Syrian journalist, BBC Middle East correspondent, speaking to us from Damascus, now back in the capital of Syria. She was the BBC Syria correspondent ’til 2013, when she was forced to flee Syria after threats from the Assad regime.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 27, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/27/headlines

Israel Forces Evacuation of Northern Gaza Hospital After Attack That Killed 50
Dec 27, 2024

In northern Gaza, the director of the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital says five medical workers were among 50 people killed in Israeli strikes near the hospital. Israeli forces have since stormed the hospital and forced out 350 people at gunpoint, including about 75 remaining patients. Parts of the hospital were seen in flames. Kamal Adwan was one of the only medical facilities still operating in northern Gaza. The five medical workers killed were pediatrician Dr. Ahmed Samour, laboratory specialist Israa Abu Zaida, paramedics Abdul Majeed Abu Al-Aish and Maher Al-Ajrami, and maintenance specialist Fares Al-Hudali.

Elsewhere, a fourth Palestinian infant has reportedly died due to an extreme cold snap in Gaza. And overnight, dozens of people were killed or left missing under the rubble of their homes after Israel bombed residential buildings in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. Civil defense workers said the strikes killed civilians in their own homes.

Mahmoud Basla: “Fifteen martyrs have arrived at the Al-Ahli Hospital, and there are more than 40 civilians still remaining underneath the rubble, according to the family. There was also the targeting of the Isleem family, and five people were martyred, as well as the targeting of the Harrara family and the martyrdom of an entire family. It was truly a bloody night for civilians. And the question continues as to why these homes are being bombed.”

Watchdog Finds 75,000 in Gaza at Risk of Famine, Buries Report After U.S. Ambassador to Israel Objects
Dec 27, 2024

A top famine watchdog organization says it withdrew a new report this week warning up to 75,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza are at risk of famine and are unable to evacuate. The report by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network appeared on the organization’s website but was removed after U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew criticized the report’s findings, calling its figures “outdated and inaccurate” — though he did not provide evidence. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network is funded by USAID, the U.S. government agency overseeing foreign aid.

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by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 27, 2024

Gideon Levy on Israel’s “Moral Blindness”: Gaza Babies Freeze; Strikes Kill Medical Workers, Reporters
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In northern Gaza, the director of the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital says five medical workers were among 50 people killed in Israeli strikes near the hospital. Israeli forces then stormed the hospital and forced hundreds, including patients, into the streets. This all comes as The New York Times has confirmed past reporting by +972 Magazine that on October 7, 2023, Israel loosened military rules meant to protect noncombatants in Gaza. Award-winning Israeli journalist Gideon Levy decries the moral decay of Israel, which has gone so far as to open a luxurious rest area for soldiers in northern Gaza: “It’s the same moral blindness to what’s going on around you.” Levy also discusses his latest piece, headlined “The IDF’s Own Sickening 'Zone of Interest' in the Heart of Gaza.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Israel. The New York Times has confirmed past reporting by +972 Magazine that on October 7th, 2023, Israel loosened military rules meant to protect noncombatants and gave soldiers, quote, “the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza,” unquote. The Times reports the order meant, quote, “the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside,” unquote.

This comes as the head of Gaza’s health agency says he’s lost contact with Kamal Adwan Hospital and at least 50 people have been killed, including five medical staff, in an Israeli airstrike on a building near the hospital in northern Gaza.

Meanwhile, in central Gaza, Palestinians attended the funeral of five journalists killed in an Israeli strike near Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. They worked for the Al-Quds Today channel and were in a van clearly marked “press.”

MOURNER: [translated] These journalists, what’s their fault? You target them just because they report the news? Just because they document your crimes? Why do you attack and target them? God is my witness, and he is the best disposer of affairs. Ayman was waiting for his first child to be born. His wife was still in labor, hadn’t delivered yet. He was hoping to see his first born, but he didn’t make it. He was martyred before he ever got to see his son.

AMY GOODMAN: Also in Gaza, health officials report the fourth infant child in 72 hours has died due to the cold temperatures.

For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist, author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, member of its editorial board. His new article is headlined “The IDF’s Own Sickening 'Zone of Interest' in the Heart of Gaza.” Levy’s latest book is titled The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe.

Gideon, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with the killing of the five journalists in a clearly marked van that said “press.” They were outside of Al-Awda Hospital. One of the journalists was waiting for the birth of his first child, his wife inside in labor.

GIDEON LEVY: Nothing will make Israel to admit that they were journalists. The IDF already claims that they were all terrorists presenting themselves as journalists. You never know nothing. The fact is that this mass killing is going on even now when you understand there is no purpose whatsoever except of killing more Palestinians. This war should have ended a long time ago, and Israel continues and continues, really now without any purpose except of mass killing — killing and killing and killing for the sake of killing. And this car of those five journalists is just one example of so many.

AMY GOODMAN: And the death of another child of hypothermia, dying of the cold in Gaza during this cold snap, Gideon?

GIDEON LEVY: I am much more worried, Amy, about the cold wind which blows from Israel, because those stories are hardly published here, and if they are published, they don’t touch anyone. Look what happened to us. Really, frozen babies, even this doesn’t touch anybody. Nobody talks about it. Nobody really seems to care about it. You will hear all kind of justifications, except of one, that Israel is continuing to commit crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Gideon, your last piece is about what you’re describing as a “zone of interest” in Gaza. I wanted to go to the original Oscar-winning film of Jonathan Glazer and play the trailer.

LINNA HENSEL: [played by Imogen Kogge] [translated] These flowers are so beautiful.

HEDWIG HÖSS: [played by Sandra Hüller] [translated] The azaleas there. There are also vegetables. A few herbs. Rosemary. Beetroot. This is fennel. Sunflowers. And here is kohlrabi. The children love to eat it.

UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: [translated] The heartfelt time we spent in the Höss house will always be among our most beautiful holiday memories. In the east lies our tomorrow. Thanks for your National Socialist hospitality.

AMY GOODMAN: So, The Zone of Interest is an Oscar-winning film about the commandant’s own home that shares the wall with Auschwitz, but the film never goes into Auschwitz. It just stays in this kind of paradise. During the Oscars ceremony earlier this year, the filmmaker Jonathan Glazer condemned the Israeli occupation after his film, Zone of Interest, won for best international film. This is what he said.

JONATHAN GLAZER: Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?

AMY GOODMAN: So, he already talked about the relevance of the concentration camps and World War II to what is happening today in Gaza. Gideon Levy, if you can share your thesis in your latest piece, “The IDF’s Own Sickening 'Zone of Interest' in the Heart of Gaza.”

GIDEON LEVY: Yes, and it’s very unfortunate, but you can’t help it. The IDF opened a resort place in the northern part of Gaza for the soldiers to come to have some good time, to refresh themselves from the battles, to rest a little bit. They’re offering them massages and very good meals and all kind of other benefits, just to let them rest. That’s fine with me. I mean, the soldiers deserve some rest. But I couldn’t help the comparison — not that there is extermination camps in Gaza, by all means not, but this lack of sensibility when Gaza is starving. When I talk to friends in Gaza who are fighting over a glass of water or a piece of bread, to open a resort place which offers steaks and barbecue and all kind of other delicatesses to the soldiers, I mean, how lack of sensitivity can still take us. You know, also in Tel Aviv, we continue our lives while Gaza is starving, and I feel very bad about it. But to do it in the middle of the Gaza Strip, when it’s all surrounded by death and starvation and rubbles and destruction, to open a resort place for soldiers with all kind of funs offered them, I couldn’t live with it, and I couldn’t help the comparison to The Interest Zone, to this unforgettable film. Yes, it is the same. It’s the same blindness. It’s the same moral blindness to what’s going on around you.

AMY GOODMAN: “The Israel Defense Forces has built a holiday village on the Gaza coast. Sgt. Yaron Rabinovich ate some churritos and steak … earlier this week. In an adjacent room there’s a physiotherapist who gave a soldier a pleasant massage. The village is surrounded by lawns of synthetic grass, cushions for sprawling in every corner. [A] soldier … enjoying a cappuccino, while another has a glass of XL with ice cubes.” Where exactly is this area in Gaza?

GIDEON LEVY: Well, it’s in the northern part of Gaza on the beach. As you know, Amy, Gaza is very small. And when we speak about any location in Gaza, it’s next to any catastrophe area. I guess that it’s not far away from the refugee camp which was destructed more than any other refugee camp, namely Jabaliya, which 100,000 people had to leave by force by Israel. Let’s remember also who are those 100,000 people. Those are sons and grandsons and grandsons of refugees from the former catastrophe of the Palestinian people in ’48.

So, to open this resort place, to open this fun village for soldiers on the ruins of Palestinian life or on the ruins of any kind of human reality, is really — I mean, it’s really about how it looks more than how it is, because, I repeat again, I live in Tel Aviv, which is one hour away from this location, and my life is quite normal, and I don’t feel good about it, but I continue my life. And still, to do it in the middle of the catastrophe shows how blind morally is Israel and its army.

AMY GOODMAN: And sticking with this theme of Auschwitz, the piece you wrote just before your latest, “From Auschwitz to Gaza, With a Stopover in The Hague.” A few weeks ago, Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, visited with top-level Biden administration officials in Washington, D.C. He was not worried about being arrested, even though the ICC issued an arrest warrant for him and Prime Minister Netanyahu. You write in your piece, “Benjamin Netanyahu will not travel to Poland next month for the main ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, over concern that he could be arrested on the basis of the warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.” Explain.

GIDEON LEVY: So, it’s again, Amy, the irony of history. The German chancellor, I guess, will attend this ceremony, like every year. Others will attend this ceremony. And the prime minister of Israel, the state which was established on the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust, cannot travel there because he is wanted for war crimes. Do I have to add anything more than this? I mean, again, in Israel, when we live in such denial, nobody cares much about it. But when you think about the meaning of it, the German chancellor is free to travel there, is totally free of any charges, nothing, and the Israeli prime minister, after this horrible year in which Israel killed and destructed in an unbelievably unprecedented way, is wanted and cannot get to the ceremony. I can’t think about a more symbolic way to show what long and tragic way did Israel go ever since it was established, until this moment that the head of the Israeli state, the Jewish state, so-called, which was built on the ashes of my grandparents, cannot go there because he’s wanted as a criminal of war.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Gideon, there’s another piece in Haaretz, not by you. It’s by a psychologist named Yoel Elizur. It’s headlined “'When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God': Inside the Minds of IDF Soldiers Who Commit War Crimes.” And it talks about the psychological stress of Israeli soldiers, revealed testimonies like this: “I felt like a Nazi. It looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.” Can you comment on this and the whole issue of Israeli war crimes, and if you see this ending anytime in the future as this back-and-forth goes on around a ceasefire? We just have a minute.

GIDEON LEVY: So, in a minute, I will say that Israeli soldiers, ever since the occupation started, act like gods and feel like gods, because they can easily decide about life and death of anyone who stands in front of them. It is so in the West Bank, in the occupied West Bank. And it’s in much more horrible a scale in Gaza. They really play with the lives of people like gods.

And this will scratch their personality and their morality forever, because the easy way that they are killing — and you just mentioned The New York Times investigation about the first days of this terrible war — the easy way that they are shooting and killing anyone in Gaza, like gods who decide very easily who will live, who will not live, without any explanation. This isn’t — I mean, obviously, Gaza is the biggest, biggest victim of all this. But I also think about the society which will develop here in Israel with those soldiers coming back home, remembering what they have done for all those months in Gaza, remembering how they reacted without any moral borders. This will be a damage for a very, very long period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Gideon Levy, we want to thank you for being with us, award-winning Israeli journalist, author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, a member of its editorial board. We’ll link to your pieces, “The IDF’s Own Sickening 'Zone of Interest' in the Heart of Gaza.” Levy’s latest book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 30, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/30/headlines

Sixth Palestinian Child Dies of Hypothermia in Gaza as Israel Continues Unrelenting Attacks
Dec 30, 2024

In Gaza, a 1-month-old baby named Ali al-Batran has died from hypothermia in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The baby’s death from bitter cold temperatures faced by Palestinians displaced by more than a year of Israeli attacks came just one day after the infant’s twin brother, Jumaa al-Batran, also succumbed to hypothermia. They were the fifth and sixth Palestinian babies to die of exposure this week, as Israeli forces continue their withering assault.

At least 27 Palestinians were killed and 149 wounded in the latest 24-hour reporting period, bringing the official death toll from Israel’s nearly 16-month assault to more than 45,500, though that’s likely a vast undercount.

On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others. The nearby Ahli Hospital was also damaged from artillery fire.

Meanwhile, CNN reports Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, is being held at Sde Teiman, an infamous Israeli military base in the Negev Desert that doubles as a prison where Palestinians have been tortured. On Friday, Dr. Safiya was arrested as Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital, setting the facility on fire and forcing staff and patients outside at gunpoint. This is Faris al-Afaneh, a patient who survived the ordeal.

Faris al-Afaneh: “At around 4 a.m., the army came into Kamal Adwan Hospital and asked all the medical staff, the patients and all the people accompanying them to go out into the courtyard. And then they sorted everyone, the medical teams in one group, the patients in another. Then they got ambulances to get us and sent us through the main gates. … We were taken for interrogation at around 3 p.m. They stripped us naked and left us there until sunset, with no one to aid us. We were left in the dust. And then one soldier would come around every once in a while and would curse at us and spit on us. It was very ugly.”

Family Blames Palestinian Security Forces for Killing of West Bank Journalist Shatha al-Sabbagh
Dec 30, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, 22-year-old Palestinian journalist Shatha al-Sabbagh was fatally shot in the head late Saturday near her home in Jenin. Her family said she was walking with her mother in a well-lit neighborhood and carrying young children when she was shot by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces. There was reportedly no fighting nearby at the time of her death. The Palestinian Authority denied the claim and instead blamed Israeli forces for the killing. Sabbagh had been active in documenting the Palestinian Authority’s crackdown on armed groups fighting the Israeli occupation.

Syria’s De Facto Leader Says It Could Take Four Years to Organize Elections
Dec 30, 2024

The leader of the armed groups who toppled longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad says it could take as long as four years for Syria to hold elections. Ahmed al-Sharaa made the comments in an interview with the Saudi Al Arabiya network, saying it will take time to organize a new census, and up to three years to draft a new constitution. Al-Sharaa also said his paramilitary group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham would soon be dissolved.

Elsewhere, civil defense groups say 11 people were killed — most of them civilians — after an Israeli airstrike triggered a massive blast at a weapons depot near the Syrian capital Damascus. This follows dozens of Israeli airstrikes on Syria’s military infrastructure in recent weeks.

Israelis Hold Nationwide Rallies to Demand Gaza Ceasefire Deal and Netanyahu Resignation
Dec 30, 2024

Thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and other cities on Saturday night, demanding a ceasefire deal to release the remaining hostages held in Gaza and calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down. Families accused Netanyahu of sabotaging a hostage release deal so that he could remain in power. The protests came a day before Netanyahu underwent successful surgery to have his prostate removed. Critics noted Netanyahu received anesthesia during his surgery — something that’s frequently inaccessible to Palestinians. An International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity cites, among other things, Israel’s blockade of anesthetics and anesthesia machines from entering Gaza.

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“A Genocidal Project”: Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah on Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Health System
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 30, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/30 ... transcript

Gaza’s Health Ministry has confirmed that close to 46,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s ongoing assault, but Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimates the true number is closer to 300,000. “This is literally and mathematically a genocidal project,” says Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza for over a month treating patients at both Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals. Israel continues to attack what remains of the besieged territory’s medical infrastructure. On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others. On Friday, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital, and set the facility on fire. Many staff and patients were reportedly forced to go outside and strip in winter weather. The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was arrested, and his whereabouts remain unknown. “It’s been obvious from the beginning that Israel has been wiping out a whole generation of health professionals in Gaza as a way of increasing the genocidal death toll but also of permanently making Gaza uninhabitable,” says Abu-Sittah. “On the 7th of October, the Israelis crossed that genocidal Rubicon that settler-colonial projects cross.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where a sixth baby has died from severe cold as the death toll tops 45,500 and Israel’s assault on medical infrastructure continues in the besieged territory. On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others.

On Friday, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital. The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was arrested, and his whereabouts remain unknown. Many staff and patients were reportedly forced to go outside and strip in winter weather. This is nurse Waleed al-Boudi describing Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s arrest.

WALEED AL-BOUDI: [translated] Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was arrested from Al-Fakhoura School after he had stayed with us and refused to leave. Even though they told him to and that he was free to go, he told them that he won’t leave his medical staff. He took all of us and wanted to get us out at night. But they yelled at him and arrested him, a man of great humanity. We appeal to the entire world, all of the world, all the human rights organizations to stand by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the great man, the man who planted, within us and within our hearts, patience so we can persevere in our steadfast north. I swear we wouldn’t have left, but by force. We cried blood on the doors of Kamal Adwan Hospital when we were forced out by the occupation army.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A person who was with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya shared testimony that, quote, “The Israeli forces whipped Dr. Hussam using an electrical wire found in the street after forcing him and others from the medical staff to remove their clothes,” unquote.

This is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in one of his final interviews before being detained, produced by Sotouries.

DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] I always say the situation requires one to stand by our people’s side and not run away from it. Gaza is our homeland, our mother, our beloved and everything to us. Gaza deserves all of this steadfastness and deserves all of the sacrifices. It is not just about Gaza, but we deserve to be a people that deserves freedom just like every other people on Earth. I think the occupation wants us to get out and for us to ask them to get us out, so they can publicly say that the healthcare system is the one asking to leave and that it wasn’t them who asked us to, but we are aware of that. But we will not leave, God willing, from this place, as I said, for as long as there are humanitarian services to be provided to our people in the northern Gaza Strip.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in one of his last interviews before Israeli forces arrested him Friday in a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital along with at least 240 others in a raid which left the hospital nonoperational.

Israel’s military alleged that Hamas militants were using Kamal Adwan Hospital. The World Health Organization is calling on Israel to end its attacks on Gaza hospitals. Earlier today, the World Health Organization’s chief, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, said, quote, “People in Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid. Ceasefire!” Last week, World Health Organization spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris was asked on Channel 4 News whether there is any evidence of the Israeli claim that the hospital is a Hamas stronghold.

DR. MARGARET HARRIS: So, whenever we send a mission, we go and we look at the health situation. Now, I’ve not had at any point our healthcare teams come back and say that they’ve got any concerns beyond the healthcare, but I should say that what we do is look at what the health situation is and what needs to be done. But all we’ve ever seen going on in that hospital is healthcare.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, for more, we go to Cairo, Egypt.

AMY GOODMAN: Nermeen, thanks so much. I am here with a man who knew Dr. Abu Safiya well and is in constant contact with people on the ground in Gaza, particularly the medical professionals. Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah is with us here, British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon. He worked last year in Gaza for almost — for over a month with MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières — that’s Doctors Without Borders — in two hospitals. He worked at Al-Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza, as well as Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital.

Welcome to Democracy Now! You’ve been in touch with family of Dr. Abu Safiya. If you can talk about where he is right now, believed to have been arrested by the Israeli military, and then the crisis just right now on the ground with the closing of Kamal Adwan and more?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, unfortunately, the family is afraid that he has been moved to the infamous Sde Teiman torture camp, an internment camp where, before him, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh was tortured, and tortured to death, Dr. Iyad Rantisi was tortured to death, where there is documented evidence of not just Israeli guards taking part in torture, but even Israeli doctors taking part in the torture of Palestinians. And so, that is the fear that not just the family has, but all of us have.

And what we’ve seen in this process, in this destruction, systematic destruction of the health system, with the total destruction of all of the hospitals in the north, so not just Kamal Adwan, before that, the Indonesian Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital, and, immediately after, the targeting of al-Wafa Hospital and then the targeting again of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, which was the first hospital the Israelis targeted on the 17th of October. The targeting of al-Wafa Hospital was intended to kill medical students from Gaza’s Islamic University who were sitting in exam in that hospital. And luckily for them, the Israelis got the wrong floor. And then the targeting of Al-Ahli Hospital, which is now the last hospital functioning in that whole arbitrarily created northern part of Gaza, is a sign that the Israelis will now move towards the Ahli Hospital for destruction.

I just want to highlight there is research that is about to be published that shows that the chances of being killed as a nurse or a doctor in Gaza during this genocidal war is three-and-a-half times that of the general population. So it’s been obvious from the beginning that Israel has been wiping out a whole generation of health professionals in Gaza as a way of increasing the genocidal death toll but also of permanently making Gaza uninhabitable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, you, of course, as we mentioned, as Amy mentioned in the introduction, you have worked in two Gaza hospitals. You’ve just talked a little bit about what’s recently — the recent Israeli attacks on medical infrastructure in Gaza, but if you could explain, just to give a sense of what’s happened overall since October 7th, 2023, if you could say the scale of the destruction of medical infrastructure, as well as the systematic attacks on medical personnel, as you said, this new research that’s coming out that shows that they’re three to four times more likely to be killed than the general population? So, if you could just say, begin from October 2023 to now?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, what happened on October the 12th is that the Israeli army started to call by phone medical directors of all of the hospitals, telling them that unless they evacuated the hospitals, the blood of the patients would be on their hands. And I remember that day I was with Dr. Ahmed Muhanna from Al-Awda Hospital, who’s still been arrested now for over a year, an anesthetist and a medical director, and he received a phone call from the Israeli army to tell him to evacuate Al-Awda Hospital.

Of course, we realized at that point that the destruction of the health system was going to be a prerequisite for the kind of ethnic cleansing that the Israelis wanted in Gaza. I was in Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on the day of the 17th of October, when the Israelis bombed that hospital, killing over 480 patients. And then we had the whole narrative about Shifa Hospital, the siege of Shifa Hospital, the destruction of three pediatric hospitals in the north, and then the first attack on Shifa Hospital. And then, after that, 36 hospitals in Gaza have now been reduced to the three partially working hospitals in the south and only a remnant of Al-Ahli Hospital in the north. We have had over a thousand health workers — doctors, nurses, health professionals — killed, over 400 imprisoned, and then the destruction of the health infrastructure, the destruction of water and sewage, the use of water as a tool of collective punishment in order to create the public health catastrophe that exists in Gaza in terms of infectious diseases, and the intentional famine.

And so, at the moment, we have in Gaza what the doctors are referring to as the triad of death: hypothermia because of the winter, wounding because of the injuries, and malnutrition. And with the three, what happens is that people die of — at higher temperatures, people die of lesser injuries, because the coexistence of these three conditions means that the body is depleted of any physiological reserve. And so, that’s why we’re watching over seven kids in the last week die of hypothermia, an adult nurse die of hypothermia, not because the temperatures are subzero — the temperatures are just hovering above zero — but because they’re so malnourished and they’re injured and a lot of them have infectious diseases, and so they’re dying at the same time. Israel has created a genocidal machine that takes Palestinian lives beyond the injury, beyond the bombs, beyond the shrapnel. And so people are dying of infectious diseases. People are dying because of the health system has collapsed, and so their chronic diseases become medical emergencies. And people are dying from the famine and the malnutrition.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, in light of that, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, if you could comment on the fact that so many people now, an increasing number of people, are questioning this death toll of 45,500, over that number who have been killed in Gaza since or who have died in Gaza since October 2023? People are saying that is a vast undercount. From what you’re saying, that seems almost certain. If you could comment as a medical professional? You know, what do you think might be a more accurate figure?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, 45,000 are people whose bodies were taken to a Ministry of Health hospital, and they were taken by people who witnessed or who recognized them, and a death certificate was issued. This 45,000 excludes the tens of thousands who are still under the rubble, more so in the north, where the emergency services were targeted by the Israelis and so are now completely unable to function. And so, we see pictures of dogs eating bodies of those killed in the streets. And so, not only people under the rubble, people who have been killed and not reported, or their bodies have not been retrieved. When you drop 2,000-pound bombs, there’s very little of the human body that is left. And so there are people who literally pulverized by these bombs.

Then you have those whose chronic illnesses, once untreated, became deadly, so the kidney dialysis patients, the heart disease patients, the diabetics, who were no longer able to get treatment. It doesn’t take into account the women who are dying from maternal care, from obstetric injuries during delivery, because they’re delivering in makeshift hospitals, they’re delivering in the tents, and they’re malnourished when they give birth, and so them and their babies have a higher rate of maternal mortality, of infant mortality. And then you have those who are dying of infectious diseases, of the thousands who have hepatitis at the moment, of the polio, and those who are dying not immediately from their injuries but from the wounds that do not have access to healthcare to stop the infection setting in, and then, eventually, the infection becoming sepsis and killing them.

The number is closer to 300,000. This is around 10 to 12% of Gaza’s population. France, at the end of the Second World War, 4% of its population were killed. This is literally and mathematically a genocidal project. This is not a political term. This is a literal and mathematical term, where you want to eliminate the population and to ensure that whoever is left is incapable of becoming part of a society, because they’re tending to their wounds or they’ve been so severely debilitated by the injuries and the neglected injuries.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Abu-Sittah, you have asked, “How can a live-streamed genocide continue unhindered?” What is your response to that question right now?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Right now with the arrest of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, where is the British Medical Association? Where is the American Medical Association? Where are the royal colleges? Where are the French Medical Association? Western medical institutions, their moral bankruptcy has become so astounding during this genocide. For them to become part of a genocidal enablement apparatus, for their silence and, in a lot of times, their collusion to silence those who speak out against the genocide, for me, as a health professional, you’re shocked at how completely empty of any moral value these medical associations have become, when they have become complicit in a televised genocide which targets doctors.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I’m speaking to you here in Cairo. In May, Germany did not allow you in to speak. You are a British Palestinian doctor. Since you were in Gaza last year, you’ve been speaking out about what’s happening. Explain exactly what happened. I mean, Human Rights Watch and other groups were demanding that this ban be lifted. They banned you from where?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, I was invited to speak at a conference in Germany. I was stopped at Berlin Airport and was told that I’m banned from going into Germany for a month, and I was deported at the end of that day back to the U.K. A few months later, I had an invitation from the French Senate. When I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I discovered that the Germans, a few days after they deported me, had put in a ban for the whole of the Schengen — and Schengen is the EU plus Norway, plus Sweden, plus Switzerland — using an administrative law so that they wouldn’t have to put it in front of the judge. We then were able to challenge that and have it overturned.

But at the same time, pro-Israel groups, like UK Lawyers for Israel, submitted multiple complaints against me with the General Medical Council to have my medical license removed, submitted complaints against me with the Charity Commission in the U.K. to have me banned for life from ever holding office in a U.K. registered charity.

This is what — this is why this genocide has continued unhindered and unchallenged for over 14 months. There are apparatus of genocide enablement that exists in the West, either through collusion or by actively targeting. Over 60 doctors in the U.K. have had complaints against them with the General Medical Council to have their medical licenses removed as a result of their support of the Palestinians during the genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Abu-Sittah, Jimmy Carter died yesterday at the age of 100. He wrote the book in the 2000s, which is quite amazing, but after he was president, Palestine: Peace [Not] Apartheid. I’m going to rejoin Nermeen for the end of the show, an interview I did with him on that issue. But your thoughts on President Carter?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: The logic of the relationship between the Zionist colonialist movement and the Palestinian Indigenous population has always been that of elimination. At a certain point — and that’s unfortunately now behind us since the 7th of October — apartheid separation was the chosen method of elimination of the Palestinians. On the 7th of October, the Israelis crossed that genocidal Rubicon that settler-colonial projects cross. And once the genocidal Rubicon is crossed, the elimination of the Indigenous population by the settler-colonial project then purely becomes genocidal. Israel, even at the end of this genocidal war in Gaza, will not be able to deal with the Palestinians in a nongenocidal way. Once the settler-colonial project becomes genocidal, it cannot undo itself. We’ve seen that in North America with the killing of the children in Canada. We’ve seen that in Australia. We’ve seen that everywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: And Carter, again, as we just have 30 seconds, writing the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Well, Carter had a historic opportunity to change the course of this struggle, had he insisted that part of the Camp David Accords was the creation of a Palestinian state. And no amount of recantation will ever change that missed opportunity. He could have forced on the Israeli government, and the first right-wing Israeli government at that point, under Begin — he could have forced the creation of a Palestinian state, but he failed to do that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And finally, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, we just have 30 seconds. You just said that a genocidal settler-colonial project cannot undo itself. How do you see this ending, then?

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: You see, the world has a choice, because surplus populations like the Palestinians, like refugees crossing the Mediterranean, like the poor people in the favelas and in the inner-city slums, these will either be dealt with through a genocidal project, as Israel has dealt with the Palestinians in Gaza — and this kind of response or this kind of template will become part of the military doctrine that is taught to armies across the world in dealing with these surplus populations.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, thank you so much for joining us, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza as a volunteer with Doctors without Borders treating patients at both Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Amy will rejoin us for our last segment talking about her interview with former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100.

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“Total Moral, Ethical Failure”: Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov on Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 30, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/30 ... transcript

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s onslaught in Gaza has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians and injured more than 108,000. At the same time, Gaza officials continue to accuse Israel of deliberately blocking aid deliveries. Human rights organizations are condemning Israel for attacking Palestinian lifesaving infrastructure, including Gaza’s water supply and medical system. All of this has led to the world’s leading specialist on the subject of genocide to declare Israel is carrying out a combination of “genocidal actions, ethnic cleansing and annexation of the Gaza Strip.” Omer Bartov, an Israeli American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, describes why he believes Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza right now. “There was actually a systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable, as well as to destroy all institutions that make it possible for a group to sustain itself, not only physically but also culturally,” says Bartov, who warns impunity for Israel would endanger the entire edifice of international law. “This is a total moral, ethical failure by the very countries that claim to be the main protectors of civil rights, democracy, human rights around the world.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh.

As 2024 winds down, new details from Gaza’s Health Ministry confirm more than 108,000 Palestinians have been injured in Israel’s onslaught since October 7th, 2023, and more than 45,500 killed — though the true toll is thought to be far higher. Meanwhile, Gaza’s officials continue to accuse Israel of deliberately blocking aid deliveries, and UNRWA has warned of a, quote, “approaching famine” in Gaza where residents face severe food insecurity.

This comes as thousands of Israelis protested against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government Saturday, demanding an end to the war in Gaza and a ceasefire that would bring home the hostages still held by Hamas.

Our next guest says Israel is carrying out a combination of, quote, “genocidal actions, ethnic cleansing and annexation of the Gaza Strip.” Omer Bartov is professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He’s an Israeli American scholar who’s been described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He was recently in Israel and just returned earlier this month.

Professor Bartov, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could begin by explaining why you think now a genocide is occurring in Gaza?

OMER BARTOV: Yeah. Thank you for having me again. I just want to start by saying that I was listening to the interview with Dr. Abu-Sittah, and I’d just like to express my appreciation for all the work that he’s been doing and everything that he was saying in the previous segment.

I started, as you may know, already in November 2023, I published an op-ed in The New York Times where I wrote that I thought the IDF was carrying out what appeared to be war crimes and crimes against humanity, but I was not yet convinced that we had enough evidence that this was genocidal action. And my view changed really around May of 2024 with the decision of the IDF, despite opposition from the United States, to invade Rafah, the last area of the Gaza Strip that had not been taken over. There were about a million Palestinians there who had already been displaced several times, and the IDF displaced them one more time to the beach area, the Mawasi area, without any proper infrastructure at all, into tent cities along the beach, and then proceeded to demolish much of Rafah.

And it was at that point that I started looking back at the entire operation, starting with statements made at the very beginning, in October 7th, 8th, 9th, by Israeli leaders, political and military leaders with executive authority, who were saying that they wanted to flatten Gaza, destroy it, that there were no people who were uninvolved, and so forth. And it appeared at that point that there was actually a systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable, as well as to destroy all institutions that make it possible for a group to sustain itself, not only physically but also culturally, its identity, its collective memory, which meant a systematic destruction of universities, of schools, of mosques, of museums and, of course, of housing and infrastructure. So, what you could see by then was that there was what we would call an urbicide, an attempt to destroy the urban centers, physically destroy them, a scholasticide — that is, killing of the members of the educational institutions, of schools, professors at universities, and so forth — so that the population, having been displaced many times and, as you heard before, vast numbers of them being killed, wounded and debilitated, would never be able to reconstitute itself as a group in that area. That’s the general drift of it.

Now, as of early October this year — that is, a year after the war began — the IDF started an operation in the northern part of Gaza, north of the so-called Netzarim Corridor, which is now not really a corridor — it’s like a box about five miles wide and five miles long — emptying that area north of that corridor entirely of its population. And this was a plan that was being sold by a retired Israeli general, Giora Eiland, on Israeli TV for months before. And the idea is to force the entire population out through military action and through starvation, through depriving the population of food and water. And much of the population has indeed been removed. This last attack on the hospital you were discussing earlier is one additional phase in this attempt to make this entire area empty of its population.

This has been called by the former Israeli chief of staff and minister of defense, who is himself a political hawk, on the Israeli media an operation of ethnic cleansing. But ethnic cleansing means that you move people from a place where you don’t want them, a particular ethnic group, to another place where they can be at least secure of those attacks. But, of course, in Gaza, when you move people from one place to another, to so-called safe zones, they are not safe there, and they do come increasingly and constantly again under attack. So, that’s what makes this so-called ethnic cleansing actually a part of a genocidal operation.

As for annexation, what we hear a lot now on the Israeli media is that as this northern third of Gaza is being flattened and emptied of its population, there are in fact settler groups waiting in the wings just across the fence to move in and to start settling that area, with an eye to occupying it entirely. And I don’t see — if they do that, once the army lets them in, I don’t see any mechanism in Israel itself or, frankly, internationally that would remove them from there. So, that would be the beginning of a creeping annexation and resettlement of Gaza as it is being emptied of its Palestinian population.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Bartov, I want to ask about the enablers of this, as you say, genocide. In a Guardian piece last week headlined “A consensus is emerging: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Where is the action?” columnist Nesrine Malik condemns Western complicity in what’s occurring in Gaza, writing, quote, “The danger now is that Palestinians die twice, once in physical reality and second in a moral one where the powerful diminish the very standards that shape the world as we know it. By refusing even to accept the designations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, let alone act upon them, Israel’s allies force an adaptation on to the world after which it simply becomes accepted that rights are not bestowed by humanity, but by the parties who decide who is human.” So, that’s Nesrine Malik writing in The Guardian. Professor Bartov, could you respond to that? And in particular, a genocide, as you say, is occurring in Gaza. The genocide would not be possible without the complicity and direct involvement of Western powers, in particular the United States. So, in that sense, is the U.S. also, by association, guilty of committing genocide?

OMER BARTOV: Yes, look, I mean, I would begin by saying that, first and foremost, the population that is most responsible for what Israel is doing right now is the population of Israel and that there is a deep complicity of the Israeli population, including not only the government but opposition parties in Israel which are supporting the operation in Gaza. So, we can talk about that.

But, of course, Israel cannot and would not be able to continue its actions in Gaza without complete support, especially from the United States, also from European countries, Germany foremost, but also in many ways France and the U.K. The U.S. administration, under Biden, could have ended this war as early as November or December 2023, because Israel cannot conduct such operations on such a scale without constant assistance from the United States, first of all, by the vast amount of munitions that are going to Israel on a daily basis, tank and artillery shells, interceptor rockets. All of this is coming on a vast scale from the United States to the tune now of about $20 billion being paid by the American taxpayer. Had an American administration said to Netanyahu in December 2023, “You have to wrap this up, or you’re on your own,” he would have had to stop, because it would have simply been impossible. But instead, this was not done.

And the result of that is, obviously, first of all, the massive destruction of Gaza. Second, it means that the entire edifice of international law that was put into place in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust in order to prevent genocide ever happening again, through the Nuremberg tribunal, through the Genocide Convention of 1948, the Geneva Accords of 1949 and so forth, and now the Rome Statute more recently — all this apparatus has been shown as meaningless if a country like Israel, supported by its Western allies, can act with impunity. And the result of this is that all other rogue states in the world could now say, “Well, if Israel can get away with it, why should we not?” And so, in that sense, this is a total moral, ethical failure by the very countries that claim to be the main protectors of the civil rights, democracy, human rights around the world. And apart from the regional catastrophe that is happening right now, this has much larger ramifications for what we will see in the future.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Bartov, so you just mentioned, of course, you were in Israel just earlier this month. You spoke to a large number of people there. What is their — what is your sense of how Gaza is being perceived? You know, is there criticism now, much wider and broader criticism, of Israel’s actions in Gaza than there was, say, earlier this year, in the summer, when you were there, or last year?

OMER BARTOV: So, yeah, I was in Israel in June 2024. And at the time, when I spoke with people and even mentioned what was going on in Gaza — and most of the people I speak with are mainstream liberal, left-leaning — there was huge reluctance to even speak about it. People were completely caught up with the sense of trauma and pain following the October 7th Hamas attack, which killed about 900 civilians, as well as several hundred soldiers.

When I was visiting Israel this time, just earlier this month, I had a sense that more people were aware of what was happening in Gaza — not because of Israeli TV, which is still entirely blocking out, voluntarily, any real reports from Gaza. All these reports are filtered through what the army — the information given them by the army. But there have been newspaper reports. There have been a lot of social media reports. So, more people, I think, are aware now of what is happening there.

But how are they responding to that? My sense is that there’s a growing sense of resignation, of despair, of hopelessness in those circles, that one would hope would be the main opposition to the policies of an extreme right-wing government.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Bartov, I’m so sorry that we’re out of time. We’re going to have to end it there. Professor Bartov, Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He’s an Israeli American scholar who has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. We’ll be back in a minute.