In the early hours of Wednesday morning, drones attacked a fleet of small boats bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla, as it’s known, is the latest group attempting to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to deliver food and medical supplies.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks to Tommy Marcus, who goes by Quentin Quarantino on Instagram, about the convoy enduring attacks on international waters as volunteers remain resolved to continue their mission to deliver aid to Gaza.

“It’s pretty jarring. I’m not going to lie. I’d love to put on this really tough, confident face and say I’m totally fearless. But I’m just a normal guy, and I’d expect and hope to live past 30,” says Tommy Marcus, who is among the roughly 500 volunteers in the convoy from 45 different countries. He adds, “There is truly no way to deter us, I suppose, unless they kill us. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”

Diana Buttu, the former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization and an analyst on issues related to Palestine and Israel, says Israel’s blockade of all entrances to the Gaza Strip is illegal and that “Israel’s attacks on these flotillas are similarly illegal.” Uhl spoke to the Palestinian human rights lawyer about Israel escalating strikes on Gaza as the U.N. met this week and more Western countries recognize the Palestinian state — a gesture she calls hollow.

“This is an American Israeli genocide,” says Buttu. Donald Trump “could have easily ended this, but he’s choosing not to.”

“Everyone joined this mission because they’re so horrified by the genocide unfolding in Gaza and also the inaction of all of our governments around the world,” says Marcus.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.  

Transcript

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl. For this episode, I really wanted to talk to my friend Tommy Marcus, who is on a boat headed to Gaza. The boat, along with about 50 others, are part of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The coordinated fleet of small boats are trying to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to deliver food and medical supplies. 

But as we were texting, drones attacked the convoy. He said there were explosions. 

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the group reported on social media, “Over the past few hours, more than 15 drones have hovered above the Alma boat at low altitudes, appearing roughly every 10 minutes.” 

Under the hue of a red light, steering committee member Yasemin Acr took to her Instagram.   

Yasemin Acr: We are currently on the Alma. And we have sighted 15-16 drones — big drones — right above our vessel. And we were alone. And now we are joining the fleet again. And we have been informed that one of the sailing boats has been attacked by a drone.  

JU: Moments later, she was back with another update. 

YA: We just heard another attack. Right now. We know of five vessels that have been attacked by a bomb. You can clearly hear it. And again, another bomb was released. We do not know which vessel it is at this very moment. Raise the alarm. We are in international water, carrying only humanitarian aid. We have no weapons. We pose no threat to anyone. It is Israel who is killing thousands of people. It is Israel starving a whole population.

JU: The fleet, which includes about 500 volunteers, was attacked as it was leaving Greece. Organizers say there were no serious injuries or fatalities, but at least 10 vessels were damaged.

Almost two years into Israel’s war on Gaza, more than 65,000 people have been killed, nearly 30 percent of them children. In August, famine conditions were confirmed, where more than half a million people are trapped. And as of late September, 440 people have died of starvation. 

Tommy took to social media too. 

Tommy Marcus: This flotilla has journalists, it has activists, it has politicians, it has all peaceful people on board who are now coming to terms with their mortality. [Voice cracks.] And the truth is, no matter how hard they threaten us, we will not stop.

JU: Despite the attacks, Tommy joins me now. Tommy is a content creator under the pseudonym Quentin Quarantino on Instagram, where he has raised over $30 million for various humanitarian causes over the last several years. 

Now, just a note, we’re speaking on Wednesday, September 24. 

Tommy, thank you so much for joining me.

Where are you now, and how are you holding up? 

TM: Jordan, it’s a pleasure to be on. Thanks so much for inviting me. We’re currently southeast of Crete and north of Libya, I think something like that. Somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea on the way to Gaza.

JU: So you’re just surrounded by water? 

TM: Yes.

JU: It is a, I am sure, scary and tumultuous journey. There are moments of fear. Last night, as you and I were talking, your boat and the other boats were subject to attacks. Could you tell us what happened and how you and your crewmates get through those moments? 

TM: Sure. I mean, I think it’s important to note that while we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, we were seeing the rhetoric that the government of Israel was starting to use about our flotilla, including and up to calling us terrorists — and insinuating, and also specifically saying, that we are somehow violent over the past 48 hours. 

So leading into last night, I wouldn’t say we were expecting all of a sudden explosions to go off, but we have been diligently training every day for potential lethal force used on us and how to handle that situation, how to stay calm, and how to make sure everyone on board stays safe.

And we’re lucky that we were doing that because last night, I believe the number was 13 total explosions. One sailboat was damaged to the point that it can no longer sail, and sadly has to leave the flotilla. It’s a genuine miracle that there weren’t severe injuries. That’s the best way to describe it.

There were many opportunities for people to be hurt, and the strikes were not intended to not harm people, I would say. 

JU: Right. Now I want to zero in on that terrorist label they are assigning to this flotilla. Now, what is on this boat? What is the mission here? I think the contrast between their label and your mission really highlights this sinister branding exercise by the Israeli government.

TM: Yeah. So, first aboard this boat are members of European Parliament, other politicians like the former mayor of Barcelona, members of the press, prominent activists, and notably no one who’s ever been involved in any sort of violence. 

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And what we’re carrying on this ship? Notably, no weapons, nothing that could incur any sort of violence or harm onto any person. What we’re carrying on this ship is food, baby formula, and medicine for the people of Gaza who are being forcibly starved by Israel. So when you think about those three types of items and then look at the rhetoric that’s being used to describe what this flotilla is, I guess it was a little funnier yesterday before they started bombing us, but, you know, it’s laughable that they are continuing to put out on social media that we are a terror boat — that we are the “Hamas Flotilla,” I think is their favorite term right now. So it’s really crazy. Even though I knew that we were going to be subject to crazy lies and hasbara, seeing it in person, seeing it being played out is shocking to say the least.

JU: Now, this isn’t the first time the flotilla has been subject to attacks. Earlier this month, a couple boats in the flotilla were attacked with incendiary devices. Now what happened and what was their response then? How did they try to spin it? 

TM: So the boat that I’m sitting on currently, Familia, was the first boat that was hit by an incendiary object dropped by a drone.

There were multiple eyewitnesses. The device that was dropped has been forensically analyzed by groups such as Bellingcat. So, within 20 minutes of that first attack, there were news headlines from the Times of Israel and outlets like that — like the state-run-type propaganda machine — saying that it was from a lit cigarette.

We luckily had enough surveillance footage that you could then see, a few hours later once we went through the footage, you could see a fireball being dropped. In addition to the humanitarians who watched the drone hover over them and then drop it on them. So then the lie turned into “We shot a flare at ourselves,” I believe, is what they started to go with.

JU: Now, all of the freedom flotilla efforts have previously been intercepted. Volunteers have been detained, and in 2010 Israeli commandos raided one in international waters and killed 10 activists. Now, how are you and the crew thinking through and preparing for these risks?

TM: Well, every member of this flotilla went through a three day nonviolence training and also assigned a code of conduct that involves the promise that our actions will be completely nonviolent.

So, you know, we’re prepared in that sense. And we also studied that 2010 attack. Of course it was a horrific thing. I don’t want to think that that’s going to happen, but of course it’s something that we have to think about, being intercepted. We are preparing very diligently to adequately convey the lack of threat that is this group of roughly 30 people on my boat, and I can say the same for the other boats that comprise this flotilla. So everyone is preparing daily and being briefed daily by people on land as well: on how to best convey the fact that there is no violence unless they hurt us.

And just to clarify that statement, the only violence that could possibly happen is the IDF hurting us. We have no means of harm and no intention of violence, and no matter what, there will be no violence. You know, if we were intercepted and they punched me in the face, I would just sit there.

JU: You posted a video on Instagram yesterday, and you mentioned how the escalating threats and smear campaign from Israel has led to you and others to think through your own mortality. I can’t imagine that’s something that has probably come up in your life before. Maybe it has, but in this moment, what has that process been like for you as you see what you’re doing as noble — I think many of our listeners, if not all of our listeners would agree — is a noble effort. But still, you’re thinking through something that is heavy that is dark, what has that been like? 

TM: It’s pretty jarring. I’m not going to lie. I’d love to put on this really tough, confident face and say I’m totally fearless. But I’m just a normal guy, and I’d expect and hope to live past 30.

I just turned 30 a few days ago. And when these tweets started coming out with the violence — insinuations of us being violent and us being a threat — like being familiar enough with the way that Israel prepares the people who listen to them for unnecessary violence and killing, it became very obvious very quickly that OK, wow, it’s, you know, I did know what I was signing up for. I did know that I was taking a big risk. But you know, yesterday, it kind of came into full view. We were all sitting with our lifejackets all night with our boat rumbling from loud explosions. And as an influencer who talks a lot about politics, I’ve been subject to plenty of death threats over my career, right? But that’s from individuals and almost always unsubstantiated. So the difference here is that, as a United States citizen, also someone who’s half Jewish, coming to terms with the fact that the government of Israel is essentially issuing lightly put death threats toward me and other Americans on board, the Europeans, everyone on board — it’s a lot to take in.

I have to give credit to the people that I’m on board with. Because of course I’m taking a risk — but the risk that I’m taking, in my opinion, is less than some of the other people on board.

We have multiple Palestinians on board. One that comes to mind is Rima Hassan, the European Parliament member in France, who was born in Syria and raised in a refugee camp. She was on the last mission and spent five days in Israeli prison. Another person that comes to mind is Kieran Andrieu. He is a journalist for Novara Media. He’s a Palestinian British citizen. But most of his family lives in the West Bank, and the sacrifice that he is making not only supersedes the risk of his own physical well-being just because of his skin and his heritage. But also, he made the decision weeks ago that it was worth it to join this flotilla while knowing that, in all likelihood, he will never be able to visit his family in the West Bank again in his life.

So for me as someone, you know, I’m not married, I don’t have children. A lot of people here have children. I just looked up, and I’m looking at an Al Jazeera journalist I know who has young children. There’s different levels of risk and, of course, we’re all in the same level of danger when a bomb drops. But ultimately, I get a little uneasy when people are telling me how brave I am, when I’m looking around at these other people who are, in my opinion, like the bravest people in the world.

And they’re handling it with such grace. I think if I was sitting alone on this boat last night, I would’ve had a complete panic attack, meltdown. But there was this moment about an hour or two into the bombs when it became clear it wasn’t letting up anytime soon. And there was this moment where I was sitting in the kitchen area. And Rima Hasan, the Palestinian Parliament member, started cooking pasta for she and I.

And I just found that to be one of the most badass things that I’ve ever witnessed in my life because I was terrified, but I was also very hungry to be honest, and she just was continuing — these bombs were getting closer to us — and just kept making pasta. It was really delicious and it reminded me, you know, I’ve made a lot of Palestinian friends over the past few years, and there’s a certain amount of courage that, unfortunately, Palestinians are kind of required to have instilled in them. And that’s just like the tiniest example, but it’s something that I genuinely think I’ll never forget: that moment of Rima cooking the pasta. 

JU: Could you talk about the commitment that is shared across all of these boats and across every single crew member? Despite these attacks, you are still continuing your mission to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Could you talk a little bit more about that shared sense of commitment? 

TM: I can tell you very honestly, there was not a peep out of any of the 30 people on board last night as we were listening to bombs closing in on us about, like, OK, maybe we should not do this there. All that we could think is, “Let’s get through this so we can get to Gaza.”

There is truly no way to deter us, I suppose, unless they kill us. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Everyone joined this mission because they’re so horrified by the genocide unfolding in Gaza and also the inaction of all of our governments around the world. That it’s depressing that we all have to be here, but we all feel that if not us, then who? And I think that’s a shared feeling among every single member of the entire flotilla.

I don’t necessarily want to be on this boat. I don’t love sharing — we’re down to one working bathroom. No showers. But that all just kind of goes to the wayside when you think about the suffering that’s happening. As we’re speaking, I’m sure a Palestinian child is being targeted by an Israeli quadcopter. So, you know, it all becomes like the moments of fear, and the moments of, like, holy shit, I’m really like on the Mediterranean Sea being targeted by a genocidal, scary empire regime. Those moments are very fleeting because we all have just never felt such a calling to do something than this. And we all know how righteous this mission is and how important it is.

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And of course, we don’t have enough aid to feed all of Gaza. We don’t have enough aid to feed half of Gaza. But the goal is that if this is a success and we open this humanitarian corridor, then we set a precedent where cargo ships could start delivering the food that Israel will not give to the Palestinians in Gaza.

And to that note, as I’m sure you’ve seen, they’ve been telling us, “Well, if you really want to feed the Palestinians, meet us at this stock point in Israel, we’ll take the aid and give it to them,” which is for anyone who’s been paying any attention, that’s absurd in many ways. 

The food that is given, I think over close to 3,000, I believe, aid-seekers just in line for food that Israel has distributed to Palestinians — civilian aid-seekers — have been murdered since October 2023. So even if they were being completely serious, “OK, we’ll take this aid and hand it all over,” that would probably also include a couple IDF sniper shots to innocent people who are just trying to feed their family.

So there’s no reality in which we would accept those demands and hand over aid to Israel because we know what they’re doing and the whole world at this point knows what Israel is doing. The gig is up. 

JU: Now to wrap, let’s talk about why you joined as an American Jew, you had a certain perspective and it’s been interesting to watch you question your own views or beliefs or understandings or assumptions over the past several months. Could you talk about what that process has been like and why you are sitting on this boat now? 

TM: Yeah, so with my page, Quentin Quarantino, I’ve spent nearly six years raising money to help people, whether it be in Afghanistan or Hawaii or Texas, after a school shooting, like all around the world, Ukraine.

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My goal ever since the first time I did a fundraiser and it went viral overnight, and I realized the power that I could have financially affecting righteous causes and quite frankly saving lives, it’s been my mission to help people. So I was raised in a very Zionist centric community. I was raised thinking that Israel was a necessity.

I knew that occasionally bad things happened in that region, but I was told by people I thought were smart and kind, that it was just kind of something because of the Holocaust that just had to happen. 

As someone who like really takes the news and storytelling aspect of my page and amplifying voices that need amplification amongst my audience, I slowly started to realize, as I watch the genocide day by day, that quite frankly, I think it is the largest moral crisis of my lifetime. I needed to do something. And worst of all, I realized that the way that I talked about it for a long — too long — I was referring to it as like a horrible war. I wasn’t supporting Israel, but I was kind of following what Bernie Sanders would say and like not going an inch further than that and being really scared because people would accuse me of antisemitism. Even two years ago when I was posting the type of content that now I look at and I’m like, man, that is like, if anything, hurtful and dangerous rhetoric.

And so as I started to unlearn and talk to more Palestinians — and like I do in many situations where I’m trying to help in a situation where I am transparently not an expert and not claiming to be an expert — I reached out for help. I think the most important thing that I learned was that what’s happening right now is not because of October 7, and it’s not because Benjamin Netanyahu is an evil man. He is an evil man, but he’s a symptom, not a cause. This has been unfolding since 1948, and that was something that was very hard to come to terms with and something that I don’t think I really wanted to know. I think I intentionally kind of ignored those aspects because it was always told to me that if there was no Israel, all Jews in the world would die.

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And, you know, talking about my hometown that has a really decent percentage of Israelis who live there and loves Israel, knowing that there’s a lot of places like that, and especially living in New York City for 10 years and having mostly Jewish friends — like, it’s this crazy myth that the Jewish people need to occupy a land that was already taken and, you know, creating an apartheid system and essentially torture people in order to be safe. It’s a lie. 

And once I realized this, that’s when I was like, OK, I need to use my fundraising power. I need to raise as much money as I can. I need to do the normal activism that I’ve been used to doing in other situations for years now. And so I started to open my mouth, and I think most importantly, imperative for me when I started doing this kind of announced many times like I was really wrong and what the things that I was saying — for example, I was reposted by the government of Israel on October 8, 2023 — were genuinely harmful. 

So I hope, I don’t know if it’ll happen, but my hope is that other activists, especially in the kind of moderate Democrat world, who don’t open their mouth about the genocide get encouraged to do similar things.

JU: Well, Tommy, wishing you the absolute best, wishing you safety and security as you continue your mission and wanted to thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. 

TM: Thanks so much, Jordan.

JU: That was Tommy Marcus who is on the Global Sumud Flotilla, heading to Gaza with humanitarian aid. After we spoke, he started drone watch duty for the night. 

After a quick break, we hear from Diana Buttu, the former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, an analyst on issues related to Palestine and Israel, and a policy adviser to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.

Break

JU: The attack on the latest convoy attempting to bring humanitarian aid, comes as Israel has escalated strikes on Gaza with the goal of emptying the city of civilians. 

A growing number of Western countries have come out in support of a Palestinian state in recent days as the U.N. meets this week. 

Joining me now to discuss the latest is Diana Buttu. She is the former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, an analyst on issues related to Palestine and Israel, and a policy advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She was also recently a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. 

Diana, welcome to the Intercept Briefing. 

Diana Buttu: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

JU: Now we just heard from someone who is on the Global Sumud Flotilla. He told us about the drones circling overhead and their fleet being attacked. How does this reflect the ongoing challenges of delivering humanitarian aid? And could you tell us about the legality of Israel’s blockade?

DB: So, Israel’s blockade is illegal. It’s illegal under international law, but you don’t need to be an international lawyer to know that withholding baby formula, water, food, et cetera, is immoral, unjust, and illegal. I mean, you don’t need to be a legal scholar to know that, but that said, it is illegal.

And so Israel’s attacks on these flotillas are similarly illegal. What Israel has done and this is really important, is that it’s set up a system in which everything has to be checked by Israel — by the Israeli army. So there’s no way that anything can get into Gaza unless it is checked by the Israeli army.

And this has been going on now for decades, not just since 2023, but for decades. And this is why there have been chronic shortages within the Gaza Strip of everything from food supplies to medical supplies and so on. Now, since 2023, since October of 2023, what Israel has done is they took a policy, they decided, and they were very open about it, in saying that they weren’t going to let in any food, any fuel, any water, any electricity, nothing. Those were the exact words of the then-Minister of Defense, who, by the way, is now wanted for war crimes for starvation. And indeed, they have not allowed any of these supplies to come in en masse. What they are allowing in is just a trickle of supplies, but certainly not enough to be able to meet the needs of the entire Gaza Strip.

And the other thing that they’re doing is they’re only allowing enough to get into certain parts of the Gaza Strip. So they’re tying what aid is coming in to the areas that they want to be ethnically cleansed. So if they want an area to be ethnically cleansed, such as in the north, they’re not allowing any aid to come in there.

This is why these flotillas are trying to break that siege and trying to get aid in so that there isn’t the Israeli thumb on all of the goods that are coming in. And to be clear, Israel has blocked everything even before October of 2023.

I mean, they’ll put arbitrary rules on things that cannot come in. At one point in time, they had blocked coriander from coming in, and at other points in time, they had a specific caloric intake of what they deemed enough calories for humans. And so this is why the flotilla has been trying to break this blockade because the global community, the international community, the international diplomatic community as we know it has failed.

JU: Now the U.N. is meeting this week. But before we get to that, could you update us on Israel’s latest military escalation in Gaza? 

DB: So what Israel has been doing is they have been nonstop bombing Gaza, with on average about 100 Palestinians being killed a day. In addition to killing 100 Palestinians a day, they’re also dropping leaflets now in places like Gaza City because their aim is to ethnically cleanse the entire north — northern part of the Gaza Strip — and that includes Gaza City. And so the Israeli army has been going around and demolishing — blowing up actually — high-rise buildings. And one night last week, because they blew up so many structures, they made 6,000 people who already had been homeless, they made 6,000 people homeless again. These were 6,000 people who had been sheltering in U.N. compounds, U.N. schools, et cetera.

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So the Israelis are now systematically going around building by building in Gaza City and blowing up pretty much anything that they can, and they’ve made it clear that they’re going to continue to do this all throughout the north, that they’re going to continue to occupy the northern part of the Gaza strip and push people down to the south.

The fear is, of course, that in pushing people down to the south, that this is going to be a continuation of their ethnic cleansing policy. And to be clear, again, to be perfectly clear, when they tell people to move south, it’s not as though the south is safe either, because these are also areas that the Israelis are bombing.

So, as it stands now, more than 80 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip is confined to less than 18 percent of the land of the Gaza Strip. Before October 2023, it was already the most densely populated place on Earth, and now it’s just that much more. 

JU: Now turning to the U.N., President Donald Trump spoke on Tuesday where he claimed that he is “deeply engaged in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza,” but that “Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace.”

What do you make of Trump’s remarks and the administration’s role in the conflict, especially considering Israel has repeatedly killed negotiators? 

DB: So, you know, it’s exactly the opposite of what he said. One of the things that I found fascinating, he, in that same speech, he mentioned that he has stopped seven wars.

JU: OK. 

DB: You know, I’m not so sure about that [laughs]. But there’s one more that he actually can stop, and that’s this. And the one that he can actually stop being this, is by simply stopping the flow of weapons to Israel, and by demanding that Israel stop its bombing campaign. It’s as simple as that.

But instead what he has done is, he’s now twice in a span of three months bombed the very people who are involved in the negotiations. He did it the first time in Iran, and the second time he bombed Qatar. The very people who’ve been serving as mediators, who’ve allowed the Israelis to come and come to Doha and have been sitting as mediators, as negotiators, as helping them.

And he goes ahead, and he allows the Israelis to bomb them. And so this is the one war that he has the ability to actually stop, and instead he has been the leader that has let it go on and on and on. And, you know, there’s a debate that goes on in Israel, and it’s gone on in Israel for a very, very, very long time about who is in charge.

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Is it that the United States is in charge, or is it that Israel’s in charge? This is an internal Israeli debate of who’s the boss, who’s stronger, et cetera. What’s become very clear, at least amongst Israelis and the thinking that Israelis have is that Israel is in charge. I’m not so sure. I still think that America is in charge, and because it’s America that’s in charge, you know, this is an American-Israeli genocide. He could have easily ended this, but he’s choosing not to because America has put its hand in the hand of Israel and believes in genocide and continues to push for this genocide. 

JU: This week, France became the latest country to formally recognize a Palestinian state after the U.K., Canada, and Australia did over the weekend.

The U.S. is the only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to not recognize the Palestinian state. 

DB: Yeah. 

JU: How significant though, are these recognitions? 

DB: You know, these are hollow. These are ringing hollow. I mean, they’re recognizing Palestine at the same time that Palestine and Palestinians are being erased. And there’s something so troubling about all of this. I can get into the significance of recognition, but I don’t think that’s as important as is the idea that these powers have failed Palestinians. 

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The ways in which they have failed Palestinians is just countless. There’s just so many ways they have in their toolbox the ability to end genocide and instead of ending genocide, they’re throwing this crumb our way of saying, “Oh, well, we recognize you” at a time when the Israelis are literally erasing us from the map. So instead of all of the fanfare that they think they should be getting for recognition, they should be looking at themselves very hard in the mirror and holding their heads in shame for the fact that they’ve let a genocide continue for two years.

You know, genocide is the highest crime that there is, and again, you don’t need to be an international lawyer to know this, you don’t need to sign up to the Genocide Convention. It demands that everybody do everything to stop genocide, and their response to stopping genocide is to stand before the U.N. and say that they recognize Palestine, it just rings so hollow. It rings so hollow, and it just shows how for decades, instead of these countries listening to Palestinians and recognizing the threat that Israel poses to us and to our lives. Instead, they coddled Israel, and that’s the part that is so deeply troubling to me. 

JU: Could you explain a little bit more what these countries specifically could do? Like what could Mark Carney do? What could Keir Starmer do? We know the U.S. could withhold weapons and aid. As hollow as these gestures are, what more should they be doing? 

DB: So there’s a few things. The first is that Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner. It’s not the United States, it’s Europe. So one of the things that they could be doing is to be cutting their trade ties with Israel.

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A second thing that they could be doing is to be imposing sanctions on them. A third thing that they could be doing is to be making sure that Israel isn’t represented in any sporting events, in Eurovision, in any of the things where it’s appearing normal. A fourth thing that can be done — and these are all things, by the way, that were done in the case of South Africa — is that they could withdraw the credentials of the Israeli representative to the United Nations.

So these are things that can and should be done, but they’re not going to do that. Oh, and you know, and then there’s of course the number one thing is an arms embargo. When you think about the weapons that Israel’s getting, for example, the F-35 — one of the things with the F-35 is that different parts of it come from different countries. And just by imposing an arms embargo, it makes sure that Israel can’t get some of the most brutal weaponry. 

And so all of this can be done, but it’s not going to be done because the point has always been to give Israel a little bit of a carrot and to kind of, you know, here’s a cookie. If you’re good, we’ll give you another cookie. With this theory that if they just do more for Israel, if they give more to Israel, then somehow Israel is going to listen to the world. Israel has never listened to the world. Israel doesn’t care. Israel doesn’t care about the international community, doesn’t care about any of this stuff. 

So instead, these countries are going to say how much they appreciate us and how they recognize us. And they’ll change their address and they’ll change their logo, and they’ll change their letterhead. But beyond that they’re not going to do anything. And again, we’re going to see that they’re going to hold their heads in shame, years from now.

JU: Now on Tuesday, an inquiry from the U.N. said, “The Israeli government has demonstrated a clear and consistent intent to establish permanent control over the Gaza Strip while ensuring a Jewish majority in the occupied West Bank and inside Israel.” That is a very grim assessment. You were a negotiator during the Second Intifada; do you now believe that a two-state solution or peace are possible anymore? What are your hopes for the future of Palestine and the Palestinian people? 

DB: You know, I didn’t think a two-state solution was possible even back then. I want to back up a little bit. People talk about the death of the two-state solution as though there was like some date and there was a date. And that date was 1967. And the reason that that date is 1967 was because that was when the first Israeli settlement went up. And when that first Israeli settlement went up, and there was never a challenging of this ideology of superiority, and challenging the ideology that Israel can take land — then that becomes the death of the two-state solution. And so that death happened long, long, long ago. 

Now, there were attempts to mask that over the years. There was a push. We heard so many world leaders try to push Palestinians to say, “You have to recognize Israel, and there has to be a two-state solution.” And so they pushed Palestinians. And Palestinians recognized Israel, the Palestinian leadership, and they signed Oslo.

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And you know what’s fascinating is that we’ve yet to hear an Israeli leader who talks about the two-state solution, or the Palestinian state. In fact, it’s the opposite. Each and every Israeli leader has made it clear that they will never give back all of the territory that they occupied in 1967, including Yitzhak Rabin. His last speech before the Knesset, before he was assassinated, he made very clear that they’re never going to give up all of the land and that they’re always going to have that permanent control. And so, you know, that ship sailed long, long, long ago. 

For me as a Palestinian being involved in those talks and those negotiations, they call it negotiations in the sense of like peace negotiation. There was no peace that was being discussed. It was mostly about what life is going to be like in the future. And it was abundantly clear from the very first meeting that I ever had until the very last meeting that I ever attended, that it was always going to be about levels of control.

And what Israel was always seeking was a surrender agreement with Palestinian acceptance to that surrender agreement. And by surrender agreement, I’m not just talking about like, “Oh, we give up,” but this idea that they will forever rule over our lives and we have to accept it and we have to be grateful for it, and no matter what they do, we can’t complain about it. So like more and more and more and more.

And so when I look to the future, it’s grim. It’s very, very, very grim because that ideology has never been challenged. And today when I look around, I listen to my neighbors here in Haifa, and I see and read what is written, and I watch the news, it’s a horror show. It’s horrifying because again, instead of that ideology being challenged — this ideology that they can commit genocide — they feel very emboldened. They feel very, very, very emboldened. 

JU: I want to thank you so much for your work, for your advocacy, for your insight, and thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. 

DB: My pleasure. It’s been my pleasure. 

JU: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

We want to hear from you. 

Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell all of your friends about us, and better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us.

Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl. 

Thanks for listening.

The post What It’s Like on the Gaza-Bound Flotilla Attacked by Drones appeared first on The Intercept.

European Union foreign ministers rebuffed a call to end arms sales to Israel last month, despite mounting evidence of war crimes — and, potentially, genocide — presented to them in an internal assessment obtained by The Intercept.

The contents of the previously unknown 35-page assessment could sway future war crimes trials of EU politicians for complicity in Israel’s assault against Gaza, according to lawyers, experts, and political leaders. 

The appraisal was written by the EU’s special representative for human rights Olof Skoog and sent to EU ministers ahead of a council meeting on November 18, as part of a proposal by the head of the EU’s foreign policy to suspend political dialogue with Israel. The proposal was rejected by the council of foreign ministers from EU member states.

Skoog’s analysis laid out evidence from United Nations sources of war crimes by Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah since October 7, 2023, when around 1,200 people were killed during a Hamas-led attack that prompted Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip. The U.N. estimates some 45,000 people have died in Gaza since, with more than half estimated to be women and children.

“History will judge them harshly. And perhaps so will the ICC.”

Though the assessment did not spare Hamas and Hezbollah, much of its strongest language was reserved for the Israel Defense Forces.

“War has rules,” the paper says. “Given the high level of civilian casualties and human suffering, allegations focus mainly on how duty bearers, including the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), have seemingly failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians and civilian objects against the effects of the attacks, in violation of the fundamental principles of IHL” — international humanitarian law.

Skoog cites an increased use of “dehumanizing language” by Israeli political and military leaders, which may “contribute to evidence of intent” to commit genocide.

“Incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence — such as that made in statements by Israeli officials — constitutes a serious violation of international human rights Law and may amount to the international crime of incitement to genocide,” the paper says.

The implications for senior officials from arms-exporting countries to Israel — such as Germany, Italy and France — were not lost on Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and secretary-general of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.

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If the International Criminal Court finds Israeli officials guilty of war crimes, Varoufakis told the Intercept, the very distribution of the report to EU ministers carries significance because the Europeans will not be able plead ignorance.

“They cannot plausibly deny that they were privy to the facts given the contents of the EU’s special representative’s report that they had a duty to take under consideration,” Varoufakis said. “The world now knows that they knew they were in breach of international law because they were explicitly told so by the EU’s own special representative on human rights. History will judge them harshly. And perhaps so will the ICC.”

Blocked Diplomatic Action

The paper arose from a February request by Spain and Ireland to evaluate whether Israel’s war in Gaza violated human rights articles in the EU–Israel Association Agreement, which, among other things, enabled some 46.8 billion euros of trade in 2022. 

If the European Commission had identified a breach, it would have brought a suspension of the agreement onto the agenda. The Commission’s pro-Israel President Ursula von der Leyen, however, declined to act.

Consequently, Skoog was commissioned by the EU’s foreign service, the European External Action Service, to investigate. He produced an initial assessment in July. The Intercept obtained a version of the assessment that was updated in November.

The document, which has not been previously reported, was discussed internally as part of the EU’s foreign service propsal to suspend “political dialogue” with Israel, the only aspect of the relationship the union’s foreign service has power over; Skoog’s paper effectively backed the plan to freeze it. The proposal, however, was rejected by the EU ministers, along with a de facto recommendation to ban arms exports to Israel.

The report found that because the death toll in Gaza corresponds to the demographic breakdown of the territory’s civilian population, the pattern of killing indicated “indiscriminate attacks” that could constitute war crimes.

“When committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population,” the assessment added, “they may also implicate crimes against humanity.”

Skoog called on EU countries to “deny an export licence” — for arms — “if there is a clear risk that the military technology or equipment to be exported might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

“Lawyers across Europe are watching this closely and likely to initiate domestic and international accountability mechanisms.”

In the wake of the assessment, some EU politicians will be at risk of complicity if Israel is found to have committed war crimes, said Tayab Ali, a partner in the U.K. law firm Bindmans, which recently took the British government to court over its arms exports to Israel.

“Lawyers across Europe are watching this closely and likely to initiate domestic and international accountability mechanisms. Economic interests are not a defence to complicity in war crimes,” Ali told The Intercept. “It is astounding that, following the contents of this report, countries like France and Germany might even remotely consider raising issues of immunity to protect wanted war criminals like Netahyahu and Gallant” — referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser and negotiator for the Palestinian Authority suggested that the rejection of the EU’s own analysis by its member states was political.

“Legally, we know where the dominoes should be falling,” Buttu said. “It was a question of whether the politics would match with the law, and unfortunately, they did not.”

“Criminal Collusion”

Skoog’s paper pulls no punches in its treatment of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, describing hostage-taking, for instance, as “a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.”

Rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah were “inherently indiscriminate … and may constitute a war crime,” it says.

The probe also calls out the use of tunnels in civilian areas as being tantamount to using human shields, which is also a war crime. The Israeli military, however, had not offered “substantial evidence” to back up this allegation, which, even if proven, would not justify indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks on civilian areas. 

“Even when their own services presented them with the facts, they refused to act.”

The paper rebuts a major Israeli defense against war crimes allegations over the targeting of hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Skoog’s assessment argues that the “intentional targeting of hospitals … may amount to war crimes,” regardless of any Hamas activity there.

Skoog’s assessment says international law allows Israel “the right and indeed the duty to protect its population,” but that this can only be exercised in response to an armed attack or imminent attack and must be proportional. Because it is an occupying power, the assessment says, Israel also had an obligation to ensure safety and the health of those living under occupation.

Agnès Bertrand-Sanz, an Oxfam humanitarian expert, said the assessment “reinforces the case that EU governments have been acting in complicity with Israel’s crimes in Gaza.”

“Even when their own services presented them with the facts, they refused to act,” she said. “Those that continued exporting arms to Israel in defiance of the report’s clear advice, are involved in a blatant case of criminal collusion.”

The post EU Officials Will Claim Ignorance of Israel’s War Crimes. This Leaked Document Shows What They Knew. appeared first on The Intercept.

As the official death toll in Gaza passes 31,000 people, including more than 13,000 children, the Israeli state is continuing its mass-killing operations in the besieged strip. The U.N. secretary-general is warning that famine is spreading in Gaza, and Tel Aviv remains defiantly committed to its distinctly offensive war of collective punishment.

While the Biden administration is growing more vocal in its public calls for a pause in Israeli military actions, it has also made clear it has imposed no “red lines” over military action. The Netanyahu government maintains it will escalate its attacks in Rafah, even as the White House is calling for Israeli officials to consider a smaller-scale operation to target Hamas fighters and leadership.

This week on Intercepted, Palestinian human rights lawyer Diana Buttu discusses the disconnect between the rhetoric of Western leaders and the predictable results of their sustained military backing of Israel. Buttu also analyzes the political debates within Palestine and the role of Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, and the thousands of arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7. She also discusses the significance of Palestinian resistance leader Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving multiple life terms in an Israeli prison but whose freedom Hamas says it is committed to winning in a future exchange of captives. Barghouti, who is often characterized as Palestine’s Nelson Mandela, was reportedly beaten in prison this week.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is warning that famine in the north of Gaza is imminent and he has called on the international community to immediately facilitate the delivery of aid to the besieged Palestinians. Now this comes as a major new U.N. report has issued a dire assessment of the humanitarian situation in the strip predicting that within months more than a million people could face the most severe level of hunger and the report predicted “alarmingly high acute malnutrition rates among children under 5, significant excess mortality and an imminent risk of starvation.”

Now, while the Biden administration has, in recent weeks, become more vocal in public in demanding Israel facilitate the delivery of aid, President Biden has refused to use any of the substantial leverage that the U.S. wields over Tel Aviv to back up his public rhetoric. In fact, the White House continues to operate a pipeline of weapons resupplying Israel’s forces as they continue the mass killing operations in Gaza.

This week, in the early morning hours of Monday, Israeli forces once again laid siege to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, surrounding the complex with tanks and engaging in heavy fire. The Israeli forces then raided the hospital and claimed to have taken some 80 people prisoner. Palestinian sources say the number is more than 150 people were snatched during the operations. The IDF claimed that it was conducting what it called a “high precision” operation alongside Shin Bet intelligence operatives, but Gaza health officials are saying that anyone who tried to move in the hospital was targeted by sniper bullets and quadcopter attacks. An estimated 30,000 people have taken shelter in the hospital complex and the surrounding area because they believed it to be a protected area.

Now, Israel justified this raid by saying its forces came under fire from inside the hospital. And Israeli media claimed the IDF had what they called “concrete evidence” that Hamas commanders had relocated there from the northern Gaza Strip and they were using it as a command center to manage their attacks against occupation forces. Al Jazeera reports that an estimated 20 people were killed during this raid. At least one Israeli soldier also died. The overarching official death toll from the past five-plus months in Gaza has now gone over 31,000 people, including 13,000 children. And for all the talk of it being the Hamas-run Health Ministry’s numbers, those numbers are probably very conservative. There are more than 8,000 people who are missing and many of those are believed to have been trapped or died under the rubble of their former homes or buildings in their community that were brought down by Israeli attacks.

Now over the five-plus months, Israel has made a series of unverified claims to justify its attacks against hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. Remember in November it attacked Al-Shifa alleging that the hospital was a major Hamas facility and that it was on top of an underground command and control lair — sort of a Hamas Pentagon. Now those claims were co-signed by the Biden administration, actually more than co-signed. The Biden administration didn’t just say, oh we agree with Israel’s assessment. The White House said we have our own intelligence that indicates that Hamas is using that hospital as a command and control node. Well, when the IDF actually then went in and took control of the hospital and they brought journalists there, they failed to produce any credible evidence to back up these major sweeping claims that they had made about the hospital. Then they moved on to the next raid at the next hospital. 

As a result of these Israeli attacks, Gaza doesn’t have a single fully-functioning hospital anymore. Last week, a BBC News investigation documented how medical workers at Nasser Hospital were detained and tortured by Israeli forces following a February 15 raid at that hospital. And among the abuses that medical staff who were detained said that they endured were being stripped naked, being blindfolded and beaten. Muzzled dogs being used to menace the prisoners. Some staff reported being doused with cold water and held for hours in stress positions. As with the Al-Shifa raid that went down this week, the IDF claimed that that raid last month at Nasser hospital was “precise and focused.” And there they said they took 200 people captive. They characterized them as “terrorists” or “suspects of terrorist activity,” including some who were posing as medical teams. This is part of Israel’s constant narrative that basically that everyone in Gaza is Hamas, even the U.N. and doctors, et cetera.  

In Brussels on Monday, the E.U.’s top foreign policy official Josep Borrell said that there’s no longer a question of Gaza being on the brink of famine. He said it is “in a state of famine.” He said that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. The Israelis of course pushed back against that. 

And now with this  possible large-scale ground invasion looming over the city of Rafah on the Egypt border, the White House is now making it clear that actually they don’t have any red lines for Israel, despite the fact that Biden had seemed to indicate that a full scale invasion of Rafah was a red line. The White House saying now no, no, Israel will make its own decisions. Instead the White House is inviting an Israeli team to come and discuss a way to do a lighter version of a targeted operation in Rafah. 

To discuss all of these developments as well as the fate of Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian resistance figure who is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison. There have been reports this week that he has been beaten in prison. Some have said that he is akin to the Nelson Mandela of the Palestinian liberation cause. We go to Haifa and we’re joined by the human rights lawyer and political analyst Diana Buttu. 

Diana, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Diana Buttu: Thank you very much. Jeremy. It’s nice to be with you.

JS: I want to begin by some of the most recent developments that we’ve seen. The World Food Program is now saying that there will be all-out starvation setting in in Gaza between now and May. Some people say, in parts of Gaza, that’s already the reality.

On Monday, the top E.U. foreign policy official Josep Borrell accused Israel of deliberately imposing a policy of starvation on Gaza. And then we had yet another raid on Al-Shifa hospital by Israeli forces, where dozens of people were detained.

Talk about these latest events, and what you think this says about where things are headed as Ramadan continues.

DB: This is genocide, and we’ve known this from the first day that Israel was intending to carry out genocide. It’s important to keep in mind that, from day one, the Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said that there would be no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel. And, alongside that, they also mean, no medicine. And that what they were dealing with is “human animals.” These were his words.

And so, it’s not at all surprising that now, as we’re approaching nearly six months in, that we’ve seen starvation deaths in the north, where most of the people who are dying are the most vulnerable: children and, in some cases, the elderly, who are also suffering from diseases.

So, it’s not at all surprising that we are seeing this, and it’s not at all surprising that we see the world’s inaction when it comes to everything from Israel’s attack on hospitals, to the attack on schools, to the attack on cultural centers, to every form of Palestinian life. Because, what the message is that Israel is sending to Palestinians is, if you want to have a normal life, it’s going to be outside of Gaza. If you want to get food? Outside of Gaza. If you want to get medical treatment? Outside of Gaza. You want to go to school? Outside of Gaza. Do you want to have any cultural preservation? Outside of Gaza. And this is what Israel has said that they are doing, and this is what they’re doing. This is what they’re doing.

The sad part is, is that Israel’s made it so clear, and yet nobody’s doing anything to stop Israel; quite the opposite. They’re providing excuse after excuse for Israel to continue this genocide.

JS: You know, the Biden administration for these past five-and-a-half months of sustained scorched earth attacks by the Israelis has continued the flow of weapons to Israel, has continued the political support for Israel, has prevented other nations of the world from demanding an immediate ceasefire using the veto power at the United Nations. And, in the past couple of months, we’ve seen this shift in some of the overt public rhetoric; you know, stories of Biden growing impatient with his great, great friend, Bibi Netanyahu. And then you add Kamala Harris, the American Vice President starting to use the word “ceasefire.”

And now, Joe Biden, as he stood with the leader of Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day saying, oh, we share common ground with Ireland, we need to get a ceasefire implemented as soon as possible. But the U.S. is very, very clear. There is no actual red line regarding Rafah. No one should read too deeply into the fact that the president actually said there was. No, the U.S. remains committed to providing Israel with weapons that Washington characterizes as being used in self-defense.

The Democrats appear now to put the full blame on Netanyahu, asserting that Biden has done whatever he could to rein him in. You have Chuck Schumer, a very open, public Zionist, a passionate supporter of Israel through all of its most horrifying policies. He’s now saying, oh, the Israelis need to choose a new leader, Netanyahu has to go. 

How are you reading this refinement of the narrative coming out of the centers of power in Washington, D.C.?

DB: This is the kind of stuff that they talk about in the belt, but it’s not the stuff that actually changes policy for Palestinians.

But, more importantly, it’s important to note that this isn’t just Netanyahu. We’ve seen for the past five-and-a-half months, video after video of soldier after soldier, carrying out war crimes and proudly doing so. Those soldiers are not Netanyahu. Those soldiers are part of the Israeli society. And, inside Israeli society today, you see an appetite. You see that there is nobody willing to stop this genocide.

To the contrary; they make fun of Palestinians for the fact that there is no water, they’ve made fun of Palestinians for not having food, they’ve made fun of Palestinians for not having medicine. Most recently, they made fun of Palestinians who were killed as these food baskets were being dropped from the sky, and they were poking fun at Palestinians.

So, this isn’t just one individual. This is Israel, this is Israeli society. And the reason that it is like this is because, for all of these years, for 75 years, nobody has reigned in Israeli leaders. It’s been to the contrary. We get these little hints that they’re not happy.

But what the U.S. is effectively saying now is that it has no leverage over Israel. That’s the message that they’re saying to Palestinians. We have no leverage over Netanyahu. And, as much as people are saying that this is some row or some showdown, the person who’s going to come out on top is going to be Benjamin Netanyahu, because he knows that Israel can do whatever it wants, and he knows that Biden is not going to do a thing to stop him.

JS: That is true, of course. At the same time, the White House pretends that it has no leverage over Netanyahu but, actually, there were media reports over the weekend, including from ABC News, that indicate that the Israelis are telling the White House that they’re short on tank munitions, even with one senior Israeli official saying, oh, this could mean that we don’t end up winning the war. And they’re accusing Washington of slow-walking some of the recent weapons shipments.

The U.S. was quick to come forward and say, we haven’t done that yet. But anyone who knows history knows that Joe Biden, even just recent history under Biden: In 2021, Biden was able to bring the intense siege against Gaza to a very swift halt with a phone call to Netanyahu. He basically said, you have no more runway, this is done. And, within 48 hours, Netanyahu was in talks with the Egyptian regime, and the thing was brought to a close. So, it’s a ridiculous notion to imply that that the U.S. has no leverage.

The question becomes, why Biden won’t use any of that leverage. And there’s one school of thought that Biden has been the most tenacious defender of Israel when it’s at its most violent throughout the course of his half-century in politics. But then, there’s another part of this, which is that Israel has a tremendous amount of influence in U.S. politics. AIPAC inside of the United States pours money into the campaign coffers of politicians, or into efforts to try to defeat politicians that it believes are not sufficiently quote-unquote “pro-Israel enough.”

So, I want to ask you, because you’re a lawyer, because you’ve worked on these human rights issues, and because you follow the politics: what is behind the U.S. policy? What is driving this right now?

DB: It’s hard to say. I agree with you. I do think that Biden has leverage, but the message that he’s sending is that he doesn’t have leverage. And so, the question becomes, as you put it, why isn’t he using that leverage?

I think, in part, is that he has taken the position that every other American leader has taken, which is to kick this issue, kick this issue, kick it down the can to the next presidency. And he has never really wanted to confront Israel, to deal with Israel, because, at this point in time, this isn’t just the question of a phone call. It’s going to be a question of a phone call followed by some action. For Netanyahu, this is an end-of-career move.

We know that the minute that Israel’s attack on Gaza is over, the minute after that, Netanyahu is going to be out of office. Why? The Israeli public does not like him. Whether you’re on the left wing — or what’s left of the left wing — or you’re on the right wing, all of them are blaming Netanyahu. And the only reasons that he’s prolonging this is, first, because he can, and second, because he knows that, by ending this, it’ll be the end of his political career.

If you’re on the right, you are blaming Netanyahu for not hitting Palestinians enough over the course of his term in office. And if you’re on the so-called left, you’re blaming Netanyahu for not keeping Israelis quote-unquote “safe” while an occupation rages on.

So, when it comes to Biden, I think that he’s just wanted to take this position of kicking it down to the next presidency, to the next term, to the next term. And, unfortunately, to pick up the phone and to force Netanyahu to stop means more than just picking up the phone. It actually means some concrete action, and I just don’t think he’s willing to go there.

JS: I want to ask you about the political dynamics in Gaza prior to October 7th, and what, maybe, we can expect going forward. There are some reports in the Israeli media that, in this current round of negotiations between David Barnea — the head of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency — and other mediators that Hamas is going to put forward Yahya Sinwar as the direct negotiator.

Now, these are not confirmed reports, but it wouldn’t be necessarily surprising; Sinwar was a couple of decades in Israeli prisons, he speaks fluent Hebrew. But it does seem that there is a lot more discussion right now about who may govern a future Gaza, if there are, in fact, Palestinians left in Gaza after the Israelis are done with this campaign, this massive attack on the civilian life and institutions in Gaza.

But my sense is that Hamas did not have extreme popularity in Gaza prior to this, but even among many factions that are critical of Hamas or anti-Hamas, that there does seem to be a broad consensus that Hamas needs to be part of any future discussions on the existence of Gaza and how it how it would govern.

Walk us through your understanding of what things were like politically in Gaza prior to October 7, and how the tapestry of organizations across occupied Palestine view Hamas going forward.

DB: Let me preface this by talking about what it means to “rule over Gaza,” or to “rule over the West Bank,” and I’m using that term in air quotes. And the reason I’m using air quotes is because there’s no such thing as ruling over it.

What I mean by this is that the West Bank is not a sovereign state, neither is the Gaza Strip. Everything is linked to Israel. And there isn’t a separate currency, there isn’t a separate economic system. I used to joke around and say that the Palestinian Authority Minister of Transportation has probably as much authority over the transportation system as a child does over the little train that they have. And that’s it.

It’s a system in which this is a government that is the subcontractor to Israel. In some cases in the West Bank, it’s the security subcontractor to Israel. But, in the case of the Gaza Strip, it’s not necessarily the security subcontractor, but a subcontractor nonetheless. And it’s because Gaza is not an independent state, because the West Bank is not an independent state, because Palestine is not free. And so, because these entities are not free, they operate effectively with their hands tied behind their backs, and they can’t really do much.

So, if you look at a normal government or places around the world, what is it that citizens want from a government? They want to have some sort of economic policy, some healthcare policy, some education policy. They want to have some policies when it comes to retirement. And, of course, people want to be free. None of this can be delivered by any shape of the Palestinian authority in the West Bank, or by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, because of the control that is exerted by Israel. And because of not only the control that’s exerted by Israel, but by the conditions that are placed on Palestinians, and by these authorities, by the international community.

And so, as a result, if you look at public opinion polling in the West Bank on October the 6th, Fatah was — which is the ruling party in the West Bank — Fatah was at a low. Not only was Fatah at a low, but the president himself, we had somewhere in the — I think it’s 80 percent of Palestinians said that he should resign. This isn’t: please don’t run in the next election. It is: resign, we’re not happy with you.

The same idea was present in Gaza. Not with the same numbers but, again, a lot of discontent. And you have to ask, why, and it’s because they don’t have the ability to properly lead, to properly function, to properly govern, because it’s not a state.

So, that was the state of affairs in the Gaza Strip. Hamas was not entirely popular on October the 6th for the reasons I mentioned. And, in the West Bank, Fatah was not popular on October the 6th, for the reasons I mentioned.

Today, I can’t really speak to Gaza, because I’m not there, but I can speak to the West Bank. Today, support for Hamas has risen a lot. Why? Because people see that the only political movement that’s standing between them — between us as Palestinians — and Israel’s extermination of us, is Hamas. That there is a political body that is resisting, and that isn’t just going to lay down and allow Israel to walk all over us.

The question becomes, what does it mean for the future? And here’s where it becomes very important for Palestinians to be able to decide their own future. I’ve heard time and again from Israeli leader after Israeli leader, from international leader after international leader, saying that there’s no future for Hamas in Gaza. I’m sorry, it’s not for them to decide. This is entirely for Palestinians to decide. And it may be that Hamas decides that they don’t want to be in the political side of things any longer. I don’t know. But whatever decision is taken has to be a Palestinian one, And this idea of pandering to what the West wants, that has got to come to an end.

You know, Jeremy, I want to share just an anecdote with you, if I may, of something that happened in 2005 when I was part of the team that was involved in the Israeli disengagement.

So, in 2005, Israel pulled out of the settlements from the Gaza Strip, and it pulled out all of the settlers as well, but it didn’t end the occupation. So, it took down the settlements for sure, and the settlers left, but it didn’t end its control over the Gaza Strip. And, at that time in 2005, there was a lot of fanfare, and Israel was rewarded quite handsomely for doing this withdrawal, this disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

At the time, the members of the international community kept asking the Palestinian team — I was part of it — what is needed to make the Gaza Strip viable? And, actually President Bush had even asked this question. And the answer was simple: allow Palestinians to live freely. An airport, a seaport, a connection to the West Bank, a connection to the world. To be able to control our own economy and our own future.

Now, at the time, the Israelis said, no, no, we can’t do that, because they’re obsessed with control. They’re obsessed with this idea of constantly controlling Palestinian lives. And so, in the process of discussing things, the Israelis insisted that, for goods to be able to get in and out of the Gaza Strip, that they needed to be scanned.

And I’ll never forget the conversation that I had with somebody from the Israeli side who indicated to me the following. He said, yes, goods need to be scanned going in, and goods that are coming out need to be scanned. And the level of scanner that we require is so high that it actually doesn’t exist.

You hear this, and you should, like, scoff, or say, this is absolutely absurd. And yet when we told this to the heads of international organizations, to heads of state, their response was, oh, but you need to work with Israel, you need to appease Israel.

And I’m telling you this anecdote because those days of appeasing Israel have got to come to an end. And had they actually listened to Palestinians back in 2005, I don’t think we’d be in this place today.

JS: I wanted to ask you also about Marwan Barghouti. We recently were interviewing Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, and asked him a bit about his potential future aspirations. But also, he was describing the importance of Marwan Barghouti to the broader Palestinian liberation cause.

And, of course, for people that aren’t familiar: Marwan Barghouti has spent two decades in prison in Israel. He’s sentenced to multiple life sentences, in a broader kind of mainstream sense. He’s been compared on some levels to a Nelson Mandela-type figure for Palestinians. But I think there’s a broad consensus that he would be one of the figures that could successfully preside over a free and independent Palestine.

And Hamas has said that — now, Barghouti is not a member of Hamas — but Hamas has said that they are prioritizing his liberation in negotiations with the Israeli government.

Talk a bit about Marwan Barghouti, your knowledge of his background, his importance, and whether you think that that is an apt comparison, to say that he is a Mandela-like figure in the context of contemporary Palestinian resistance politics.

DB: He is very much a Nelson Mandela-like figure, but there’s a big difference between the two. And the big difference is that the ANC at every opportunity was making sure to put forward Nelson Mandela’s name. In our case, we have a Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has spent the past 19 years in office never really uttering his name, or pushing for Marwan’s freedom. And the reason that he doesn’t do that is because he sees him as a rival.

So, who is Marwan Barghouti? Marwan Barghouti was a leader of the second Palestinian uprising, the Intifada. He’s a member of Fatah. He’s a member of Fatah in the grassroots sense. He’s an activist who has worked in a number of different communities. But not only did he work in a number of different communities, he was also imprisoned by Israel a number of times, [he] speaks Hebrew. And, at the start of Oslo, like many others, he very much believed in this idea that there could be a two-state settlement, that there could be a Palestinian state.

And he actually went to the Knesset, spoke before the Knesset, and talked to them about this idea of having a Palestinian state, but he also recognizes that the issue of negotiations is only going to get Palestinians so far. And, very early on during the Second Intifada, he came out and said, this process of negotiations is a sham, we’ve gotten nothing out of it except increased settlements. And he very much believed in and continues to believe in garnering power, and garnering political support, and in trying to create an opposition to the Israeli occupation.

And this is primarily why he’s been thrown in prison. The Israelis didn’t like the fact that he was involved with the Fatah organizations that were involved during the Second Intifada and, instead, arrested him and threw him in jail. And he’s now serving, I don’t even know how many life sentences that he’s serving, without ever the possibility of ever being released.

Can he be a uniting figure? Yes. What’s so fascinating is that people still talk about him, even though he’s been in prison now since 2002, it’s 22 years. In April, it will be 22 years that he’s been in prison. And yet, as I mentioned, we’ve had a Palestinian leadership that hasn’t even uttered his name over the course of the past 19 years.

So, yes, he does have that ability to be a leader, to unite people. But, ultimately, it remains up to Palestinians to decide. I think the bigger issue is that we must be pushing for his release, as we must be pushing for the release of all Palestinian political prisoners. Because there is no way for us to build, to move forward, without having these individuals in our midst.

JS: I want to ask you about the situation — you referenced other prisoners — the situation in the West Bank. It often doesn’t get as much attention as the horrifying realities occurring in Gaza, but there has been an intense Israeli campaign that has multiple prongs.

On the one hand you have Israeli state-backed and -armed settlers that are going in and seizing, snatching Palestinian’s homes by force. And some Palestinians have been killed in those operations, and many of them many have been displaced. But you also have had the official Israeli forces going in and rounding up thousands of people that they’re taking into custody as political prisoners, and some of them are being disappeared into the military justice system, others are being held in administrative limbo, where they are denied the most basic fundamental rights of prisoners around the world.

And there are minors, there are children that are continuing to be snatched by Israel, and held in conditions where they are denied access to their families, where they are certainly initially denied any access to lawyers, and then they’re being prosecuted and held in a military court system.

But describe — because you work on these cases as well, Diana — describe what people may not be familiar with of the intensity of the situation right now in the West Bank, what Palestinians are facing right now.

DB: Right now, actually, even before, I think you’d be hard pressed to find one Palestinian family that didn’t have either a family member or a friend who has been inside an Israeli prison. If you look at the statistics, I believe the number is something like 20 percent of all Palestinians have been incarcerated; all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, let me be clear. Which means probably 40 percent of all Palestinian men have been thrown into an Israeli prison.

What’s happened since October the 7th has been even worse. There’s a few things that have happened. The first is that, in addition to the usual violence of abducting people in the middle of the night, the campaign has been now increasing against children. And we’ve seen more and more children being abducted in the middle of the night since October the 7th, thrown into prison. And many of them thrown into prison, again, without charge or without trial.

What’s important to note when it comes to children is, because the rules differ when it comes to Palestinian children versus Israeli children, the system is designed to extract a confession, or to extract a guilty plea from you. Because if you plead guilty to a charge, then you end up going to prison for less time than you do if you actually simply await trial.

That’s the way the system has been rigged, is that they’ve dragged it out in such a way that children can be thrown in prison without charge, without trial. Eventually, if they do get charged with something, that they are held in prison pending trial for quite a long period of time. And, if you’re the parent of one of these children and you’re faced with a plea, then you’re more likely going to urge your child to accept a plea, even though they haven’t done anything, just in order to be able to secure their release.

But, since October the 7th, not only has that increased, but the conditions inside the prisons have become that much worse. Of all of the children who were released during the first ceasefire back in November, each and every one of them — and I interviewed a large number of them — had indicated that they were beaten.

Some of them were tortured. All of them were denied adequate food. They were put, in some cases, ten young boys in one room, one cell. They were given enough food for three, and they were only given food once or twice a day. They were only allowed to take a bath once or twice a week. And, in addition to being thrown into the cells with so many people, overcrowding, they were often beaten for everything from asking for water, asking to be able to take a shower, asking for food, asking to be able to see a lawyer, asking to be able to see their family. These are children that we’re talking about. 

The same is true when it has come to women who are being held in Israeli prisons as well. Many of the women who have been released have talked about the violence — and often sexual violence — that has been meted out against them. Many of them talked about torture. And, again, the same system of not giving them access to food, no access to water, no access to their lawyers, no access to families.

Currently, there are approximately 9,077 Palestinians who are being held in Israeli prisons, including some 700 children. And it’s about-two thirds, around 6,200, who have not been charged with a crime in that system of administrative detention. And there’s really no way to challenge the system, because the Israelis are in the throes of giving the state carte blanche.

This is why we don’t even see proper reporting about the conditions under which people are being held. We don’t see that the judges are demanding that children have access to legal representation, that they have access to their families. Everything has been swept under the rug.

But it’s not just that. In some cases, the detentions are sometimes two and three and four days where we don’t even know where the individual is held. And I’ve met with some political prisoners who have told me that they had everything from dogs attacking them and mauling them, to being forced to crawl around on all fours and call the prison guard their master, to denounce Hamas, to denounce any Palestinian leadership. I’ve heard from prisoners where they’ve said that they were held and forced to stand around for days without any clothing on, with their hands shackled high up in the air.

And, again, any complaints, even— One of them said that whenever he complained about how tight the shackles were on his hands and on his legs, that he was then beaten as well. It’s very violent, it’s very violent. And the Red Cross has been denied access to these prisons, so we really don’t know what is happening in these prisons at this point in time.

JS: I want to ask you about another line that, obviously, Netanyahu and people from his side of the spectrum in Israel promote this notion, that there should be one state, the state of Israel, and that Arabs and Palestinians who live in Israel and have accepted Israeli citizenship and society, that they’re able to live really fruitful and productive and peaceful lives.

I’m speaking to you right now, you’re in Haifa. I’m wondering your analysis of that portrayal, that if Palestinians would just accept coexistence under the Israeli state, that life would actually be fine, and tranquil, and give them the best chance at living a fruitful, positive existence.

DB: The problem, of course, is that that’s not the reality. So, 20 percent of Israel’s population is Palestinian. And that 20 percent are those who did not flee in 1948, and their descendants. So, in 1948, about 150,000 Palestinians remained in Palestine, and that number is now close to 2 million.

The problem, of course, is that we still live in the aftermath of the nakba. And there has never been either a reckoning of the nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine — nor has there been an attempt to do anything other than to erect a system of Jewish supremacy and Jewish superiority. So, what Israel is effectively saying is, if you accept your status as a defeated, second-class, inferior citizen, who is not entitled to the same rights as everybody else, even though you’re in your homeland, then you’ll be OK. But the problem is that they’re never really willing to challenge this idea of Jewish supremacy.

And so, what does it look like? First is that there are laws that are on the books that either directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian who hold Israeli citizenship. There’s about 60 of them; there’s more if you take into account some of the other regulations. And these laws affect practically every aspect of your life.

So, for example, there is a law that says that communities that are of a certain size have the ability to determine whether somebody who wants to move into that community, whether they’re considered suitable for the community. Now that should be sending alarm bells ringing for people, but in the Israeli system, not only is it normal, but it’s been upheld as being legit by the Israeli Supreme Court.

If you try to raise anything in relation to the nakba — and, you know, the nakba wasn’t that long ago, 75 years ago — it’s immediately shot down. If you try to demand equal rights, and there have been attempts to push forward bills in the Knesset to demand that Israel be a state of its citizens, that has also been struck down. So, there’s nothing in this system that ever allows you to be a full equal. It’s always going to be a system that’s based on Jewish supremacy, Jewish superiority, and never one of equality, and this became much more apparent in the aftermath of October the 7th.

I’m going to give you a couple of examples. So, one was, there was a Palestinian singer who, on October the 7th, posted in Arabic on Facebook, “wala ghaliba illa Allah,” “there is no victor but god,” and she used a little Palestinian flag emoji. She was thrown in prison for that post. And then, after being released from prison, for every day since she’s been released from prison, since the end of October until the current day, there’s been a campaign of demanding her expulsion from her city, a campaign to demand that her husband — who’s a doctor and the deputy director of a hospital — that he’d be expelled from his job.

Now, I want you to contrast that with the most popular song that exists now inside Israel. It’s a song that openly calls for genocide, which has had 20 million views on YouTube alone. The top five songs in the country are songs that call for genocide. We openly hear Israeli leaders talking about genocide. We see people, ordinary people, post about this day in and day out, and yet nothing happens to them.

JS: Picking up on that question, then, what do you see as a viable and just resolution to the entire situation? I mean, obviously, it seems that Joe Biden and European officials are now trying to talk up [a] two-state solution. There are others who say there should be a one-state solution, and that state is Palestine. And then, of course, the Israeli government position — certainly under Netanyahu, but probably under other governments as well — is that there isn’t going to be a Palestinian state, and the world’s just going to have to accept that.

But given your decades working on this issue as a lawyer, as a spokesperson for the PLO, as an activist, an advocate, what in your personal view is the most just resolution that could come about, after the nakba, after these 75 years of constant attacks against Palestinian people, after the events of October 7th and the subsequent genocidal war by Israel? What does a just future look like?

DB: First, I think it’s important for us to focus on ending the genocide first. It’s hard to talk about the aftermath without understanding what it is that we’re going through right now. And I don’t want any future or idea to be only thought of based on what we’re presently going through. That’s what happened with Oslo in the first place.

But I want to step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of where things are. I want to contrast and compare a few things.

So, if you look at apartheid South Africa, and the end of apartheid South Africa, that was a very important moment in history. But, because apartheid ended in South Africa in the way that it ended without ever really addressing the root causes of it, we see that, today, that South Africa is still one of these places where there’s such an unjust distribution of resources.

And, looking at Palestine, I think that we have to start thinking in terms of decolonization. Now, it’s, a big word, whatever. But the idea is that I don’t think we should be basing our vision of the future based on the current reality.

Just 75 years ago, Israel destroyed, depopulated more than 500 villages. Those descendants are still alive, those people are still alive. Much of that land has not been used. It’s possible for us to really be thinking of a future that is much more visionary, much more inclusive, and not one that is confined to this idea of, is it going to be two-state, is it going to be one state?

Right now, I think much of this talk of solutions is a way of trying to absolve the world of stopping this genocide. Like, let’s just talk about a two-state solution, because then we don’t have to really focus on holding Israel accountable for committing genocide. And I think that we have to think much bigger and much broader than that.

And when I think about bigger and broader than that, I do think that we have to recognize that the nakba happened not very long ago, that there has to be a process of decolonizing the place. That Palestinians must be given their rights, that Palestinians do have the right to return, and that anybody who wants to see this place prosper should be demanding that Palestinians be able to return. This is your capital, this is where your investment is.

And, instead, I think that there isn’t really a future any longer for Zionism. And I think that the Israelis have to soon come to this realization. They’ve been given the message that they can build a state on the ruins of another country, that they can continue to, as the British had done, beat the natives over the head, and hope that they will somehow beat them into submission.

I think they have to now recognize that that’s just not going to be a formula for future prosperity. And instead we have to think about going to a place where Palestinians are given their proper rights, no longer as secondary or as second-class citizens, or under this carpet of Jewish supremacy.

JS: On that note, though, I wanted to ask you about public opinion in Israel about the war in Gaza. The most recent public opinion polls that were taken were in late January, and found that a large majority of the Jewish public thinks that the IDF is using adequate or too little force in Gaza. And an absolute majority of the Jewish public in Israel — 88 percent — believes that the scope of casualties suffered among Palestinians in Gaza are justified.

DB: Yes.

JS: A lot of my Palestinian friends say, how do you coexist with a population that holds those opinions? And, I mean, Israel [often says] well, we have a right to exist, we have a right to self-defense. And then you have the White House sort of now saying, well, this is a Netanyahu/extremist thing. But I think the reality is that you have a very solid majority of the Jewish Israeli public that believes this is perfectly acceptable to do to the people of Gaza.

DB: Absolutely. That’s the part that’s so terrifying, is that when we talk about genocide, this isn’t just one statement coming from one individual, it’s not just one soldier that’s in Gaza. This is an entire system that is taking their orders from the top down.

We’ve heard the president say that there are no innocents in Gaza, we’ve heard the prime minister refer to this as the children of light versus the children of darkness. We’ve heard the minister of defense. I mean, it just goes down and down and down.

If you turn on the TV on any given day, you’ll hear one Israeli commentator after another saying things like, we need to get rid of them, there should have been a hundred thousand dead at this point in time. And you can see, as you drive throughout the country, signs that read, “finish them,” signs that read, “together we will succeed.”

And when I probe people and ask them, what does that mean? What does “together” mean? What does “succeed” mean? They have no way of defining it, except to say that the more destroyed that Gaza is, the better it is. Because they’ve been, again, fed this line, that if you just beat Palestinians more, and beat them more, and beat them more, and beat them even more, that somehow they will submit, that somehow they will become subservient and obedient. And they haven’t quite figured that out yet.

This is why I say that, when going through this idea of de-Zionizing this place, they have to be made aware that what Israel’s doing is not normal, that this is not the actions of a normal state. Just in the same way that you see now the aftermath in countries around the world that carried out genocides, that they have an education process. That education process has never happened in Israel.  The only education process that they have been fed is that Palestinians are deserving of more and more and more violence meted out by the Israelis. And that is something that really must be addressed.

JS: Diana, thank you so much for taking time with us during Ramadan to have this conversation. I really appreciate it.

DB: My pleasure.

JS: That was Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights attorney and political analyst.

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review was done by Sean Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and check out our other podcast hosted by my colleague, Ryan Grim, it’s called Deconstructed. Also, leave us a rating and a review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other people to find us as well.

If you want to give us feedback, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us until next time. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post “We Have to Start Thinking in Terms of Decolonization” appeared first on The Intercept.

On multiple occasions, Biden administration officials have said that Gaza, which was ruled by the PA before Hamas took over in 2007, should be reconnected to the West Bank “under a revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority.” In a memo circulated to foreign diplomats this month, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh criticized the U.S. plan, arguing that “much of the current talk about the need to revitalise the Authority … is really just a cover for the failure of international community [to commit] Israel to a political solution.” Earlier, he was even more blunt: Shtayyeh said in November that PA officials would not be going to Gaza “on an Israeli military tank.”

Shtayyeh’s comment was rare recognition by a senior PA official of the authority’s overwhelming lack of support among Palestinians, who largely view their leadership as an illegitimate and increasingly authoritarian “subcontractor” for Israel’s occupation. In particular, the U.S.-backed Palestinian security forces’ role in the repression of Palestinian resistance and the PA’s security coordination with Israel — under a U.S.-managed arrangement — have long been a key factor in Palestinians’ anger at their representatives. Their disillusionment has only been exacerbated in recent years as PA forces have carried out a series of violent crackdowns, detaining, and often abusing, not only those perceived to pose a threat to Israel’s security but also critics of the PA itself, including hundreds of peaceful demonstrators.

Human rights advocates caution that American support for PA forces has enabled their growing culture of impunity. “When they do anything, they know the Americans are behind them and can protect them,” said Shawan Jabareen, director of Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, which has documented torture and other abuses by Palestinian security forces.

The PA’s role in preserving Israel’s interests in the West Bank is precisely why the prospect of their return to Gaza has engendered much skepticism among Palestinians, who fear the arrangement would only outsource Israel’s repression, rather than offer them a legitimate representative to advocate for their interests.

“People know the PA is not going to liberate the place,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former negotiator with the Palestine Liberation Organization, noting that confidence in the authority has deteriorated even further since Israel launched its war on Gaza. “But they do expect representation.”

“Post October 7, the PA was nowhere to be found. They haven’t been representing,” she added. “So when people talk about this revitalized PA, we have no idea what they’re talking about. What does it mean to revitalize it? The only thing that I can think that it means is more money going to the security forces, more money going to suppress.”

Liberation vs. Stability

The Palestinian security forces were established as part of the Oslo negotiations in the mid-1990s in lieu of a military for what was to be a Palestinian sovereign state. A combination of police, intelligence, and civil defense bodies funded and trained by the U.S. and European countries, PA forces carry out a range of law enforcement functions, many in coordination with their Israeli counterparts.

That coordination, which Palestinian leaders have repeatedly threatened to end during escalations in Israeli violence, is most controversial when Palestinian forces are deployed to target groups and individuals that Israel accuses of “terrorism.” 

“The security coordination is one of the chief obstacles to achieving Palestinian liberation,” Fadi Quran, a Palestinian activist and political analyst who has repeatedly been arrested by Palestinian security forces for participating in protests critical of the PA, told The Intercept in an interview last year. “This is a very sophisticated system of domination and control that was designed within Palestinian society. It’s a very systematic process of seeking to get Palestinians to help control their people.” 

The tension between the Palestinian public’s political aspirations and Palestinian forces’ role in undermining them was on display at a security forces base in the West Bank city of Jericho last year. During a two-day visit before the war started, The Intercept spoke with several recruits and mid-level officials at the base on condition of anonymity, as the visit was not authorized by senior leadership.

Young recruits in training spoke fervently of their commitment to the Palestinian national cause and dismissed questions about the PA’s contributions to maintaining the occupation. At the base, they practiced drills while chanting nationalist songs and slogans. On their barracks, hand-painted murals celebrated PA President Mahmoud Abbas and late PLO leader Yasser Arafat but also paid tribute to armed resistance and the Lions’ Den, a West Bank-based militant group that emerged in recent years and quickly became a primary target of the Israeli military. The rhetoric at the base echoed a time, during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s, when members of the Palestinian security forces joined militant groups in the fighting against the Israeli military.

In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the last major Palestinian uprising against Israel, the U.S. and European countries sought to regain control by investing heavily in economic and security stability in the occupied territories, seeking to depoliticize Palestinian forces, and indefinitely postponing a final resolution to the conflict.

“We work for stabilization,” Giuliano Politi, a member of the Italian Carabinieri, a paramilitary force, who instructed PA recruits at the Jericho base on protection for official figures, basic shooting, and public order. “Everything is aimed at that.”

“The liberation struggle is translated to them as this kind of maintaining peace and order of their own people.”

An overwhelming majority of the security forces’ leadership are affiliated with Fatah, the political party that’s ruled the West Bank since the Oslo Accords. Many are former fighters and political prisoners, giving them an aura of legitimacy with younger generations. But as an institution, the PA forces have traded a commitment to liberating the territories from occupation to maintaining order.

“To be fair to the younger recruits, they do when they enter believe that this is what their goal is,” said Quran, the activist. “People come in with this assumption that they’re going to be part of the liberation struggle, but then the liberation struggle is translated to them as this kind of maintaining peace and order of their own people.”

That’s in part due to pressure from the foreign governments funding the PA — particularly the U.S., which has heavily invested in the Palestinian security sector. The authority is also often at the mercy of Israel, which has long viewed the PA as a greater political threat than Hamas. The PA is the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people and serving as livelihood to some 942,000, including in Gaza. But to pay their salaries, the PA is at the mercy of foreign donors and Israel, which controls the flow of funds to the PA and frequently withholds them to exert pressure on the authority.

“They’re actually a crucial part to the continuing occupation,” said Quran. “Because without 150,000 young Palestinians being mobilized against their own people, for the sake of Israel’s security, if you had those 150,000 people mobilized for other activities that focus on Palestinian liberation, you’d have a much different ballgame, a much different type of struggle on the ground.”

“Security for Israel”

Some leaders of the PA security forces acknowledge the contradiction of their role maintaining order in the West Bank but insist the alternative would be catastrophic. “[Israel] will destroy our infrastructure again, destroy our institutions again, destroy our forces again — they can do that easily,” a senior member of the PA forces told The Intercept. “They will destroy everything we have built in the last 30 years.”

The official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with journalists, added that Palestinian forces were “standing on the edge of a sword.”

The Israelis “always try their best to provoke us to react violently so they can justify their crimes.”

“We are under huge pressure by the Israelis; they always try their best to provoke us to react violently so they can justify their crimes,” he said. “They are trying all the time to prove that we are a failure and cannot keep law and order and cannot keep the security of the place we’re supposed to be responsible for, to justify their daily incursions and killings of our people.”

In practice, that has meant PA forces standing down in the face of growing settler violence, and as the Israeli military has increasingly invaded parts of the West Bank that are nominally under the security control of the PA. It’s also led to the emergence of new militant groups seeking to fill the void left by PA forces. “If no protection is provided to you from a third party, from your own government, or from the occupying power,” said Jabareen, of Al Haq, “you will try to look for your own ways to protect yourself.”

The PA security forces’ repression of dissent has further cost them legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian public. In October, as anger mounted at Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinian security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades at protesters in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Such crackdowns have grown more frequent in recent years, and reached a peak in the aftermath of Palestinian security forces’ 2021 killing of Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic of Palestinian leadership.

“Nizar wanted freedom for the Palestinian people, and in his view, the Palestinian people had lost that freedom for two reasons: Mahmoud Abbas and the PA and Israel,” Nizar’s brother Ghassan Banat told The Intercept at his office in Hebron, which he had turned into a shrine filled with photos and quotes from his late brother. “He said we must free ourselves of the PA, and then we must work together to free ourselves from Israel. And so the PA killed him.” 

“The PA security forces are not there for the security of Palestinians,” Banat said. “They are security for Israel.”

The post For Palestinians, U.S. Talk of a “Revitalized” PA in Gaza Is Code for Outsourced Oppression appeared first on The Intercept.

Israeli officials said the raids were targeting members of a new militant group that has emerged in recent months; the siege followed the killing of an Israeli soldier near the city in October. While Israel partially lifted the road closures earlier this month, the 21-day lockdown signaled a remarkable escalation of Israeli force in a part of the West Bank that is — at least nominally — under the control of the Palestinian Authority. But the incursions and blockade of Nablus were only the latest in a growing series of Israeli acts of aggression in the West Bank that have put Palestinians on edge even before an Israeli election returned right-wing former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power this month. While the territory, home to nearly 3 million people, has been under military occupation since 1967, and violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers is relatively commonplace, the last few months have reminded residents of past surges in Israeli violence that were met with widespread Palestinian resistance, including during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s.

Outside the West Bank, however, few people took notice. With some exceptions — like the May killing by Israeli forces of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the city of Jenin, which U.S. officials are now investigating after months of inaction — developments in the occupied territory are largely ignored by foreign governments and media. Attacks against Palestinians there have become ordinary occurrences and are rarely large-scale enough to prompt news coverage or statements of rebuke.

“You don’t see the West Bank in the news like you see Gaza, because Gaza is bombed, you have these devastating images, videos, stories — it gets in the news, but even then, it dissipates,” Yara Asi, a Palestinian American researcher who was working in Nablus through the recent siege, told The Intercept. “I think that obscures a situation that has been getting significantly worse in the West Bank.”

“This is firmly within Area A, as designated by the Oslo Accords,” she added, referring to a breakdown of the occupied territories in different areas of control, with Area A being the one theoretically under the civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority. “So when you hear that Israeli jeeps have raided the city, or that they have closed the city, this just belies the whole artifice that Oslo ever was, which is that there’s any place of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank.”

“It’s the low-grade death by 1,000 cuts that they have perfected.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and political analyst, echoed that sentiment. “This isn’t Gaza, where Israel does one big operation and kills 2,000 people in a short period of time,” she told The Intercept. “It’s the low-grade death by 1,000 cuts that they have perfected. And because they perfected it, you don’t see the big picture any longer. You don’t see international condemnation, you don’t see any restraints being placed on Israel.”

Top: Tires burn on a road in Bethlehem following the funeral of 7-year-old Rayan Suleiman on Sept. 30, 2022. Left/Middle: Rayan Suleiman’s mother holds his body in the occupied West Bank, on Sept. 30, 2022. Right/Bottom: Relatives mourn the death of Palestinian teenager Mahdi Hashash, who died of shrapnel wounds from an Israeli raid, during his funeral in the refugee camp of Balata near the West Bank city of Nablus on Nov. 9, 2022. Photos: Getty Images

Deadliest Year

Even as the killings are distributed over weeks and months, rather than concentrated as in the rapid bombing campaigns Israel has launched on Gaza with increasing frequency, military and settler violence in the West Bank is on the rise. The United Nations last month warned of an “explosive situation” as 2022 is on track to become the “deadliest year” in the West Bank since 2006, with at least 105 Palestinians, including 26 children, killed there: a 57 percent increase over last year. The youngest, 7-year-old Rayan Suleiman, died of an apparent cardiac arrest after being chased by Israeli soldiers near the city of Bethlehem.

Ten Israeli civilians, three foreigners, and four Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinians from the West Bank in that time frame, according to the U.N. But deaths are only one way to measure the worsening situation in the West Bank, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians also face restricted mobility, land expropriation, and economic hardships created by the occupation. Movement restrictions by way of Israeli checkpoints and road closures, in particular, have been tightening, while attacks by settlers, often operating with the military’s protection, have become more frequent. The olive harvesting season, when Palestinian farmers leave their villages to work in the groves, has become one of the most dangerous for them.

Still, the almost routine reality of the violence Palestinians face has made it hard for observers to grasp at the big picture — and take note of a perceptible shift that is further fueling anxiety and resentment.

“Only when you step back, you see just how alarming it is, how devastating this whole thing is,” said Buttu, stressing that violence is a built-in feature to the occupation. “I’m torn between saying this is an escalation and saying this is part of what we’ve lived through for 55 years. … The whole world is shocked by Ukraine. But that shock doesn’t apply here, because it’s been 55 years.”

Non-Factional Resistance

Both the recent siege of Nablus and a stream of military incursions over the last months in other cities in the West Bank have largely been aimed at suppressing a new crop of armed Palestinian groups that have emerged in response to both the protracted occupation and growing frustration with the Palestinian Authority.

The groups — including Nablus’s “Lion’s Den” and Jenin’s “Hornet’s Nest” — represent a continuation of a long tradition of Palestinian militant resistance but also a remarkable departure from earlier iterations of it. Made up mostly of young men who were not around during, or are too young to remember, the Second Intifada, these groups conceive of themselves as local defense units, targeting Israeli forces from within the occupied territory. Crucially, they also propose an alternative to long-entrenched factionalism that has dominated Palestinian politics and armed resistance in the past.

“One of the most important things about this moment is that you see these groups coming together in places like Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and elsewhere, under a common umbrella, willing to engage in armed resistance and directly confront the Israeli occupation, but doing so under this sort of shared banner,” Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political analyst, told The Intercept.

Supporters of the groups run the gamut from traditionally “Marxist, leftist parties in Palestinian politics, all the way across the spectrum through nationalists and political Islamists,” Munayyer added. “Palestinian politics for years has been characterized by this really damaging divide between the largest factions — Hamas and Fatah — that have demobilized Palestinian politics in the West Bank and Gaza. What’s different here is not the fact that there is an engagement in armed resistance, of course that’s always been present, but that it’s being done under this non-factional banner.”

In fact, Palestinians’ growing frustration is directed not only at Israel’s occupation but also at the Palestinian Authority,  which has exercised control over the West Bank since the Oslo Accords and which many have come to see as an extension of the occupation itself.

The existence of the Palestinian Authority has offered an internationally recognized, bureaucratic framework that has allowed the flow of foreign funds to the occupied territories and the maintenance of a semblance of order. But a deeply controversial security cooperation with Israel has made Palestinian security forces the first line of repression against Palestinian resistance. The PA has grown increasingly authoritarian over the years: No elections have been held since 2006, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved Parliament in 2018. Since then, Palestinian forces escalated a crackdown on Palestinian activists and civil society, sending the PA’s legitimacy tumbling. Some 80 percent of Palestinians said last year that they wanted Abbas to resign. That figure was only slightly lower in a poll taken this year.

“He knows that he has no legitimacy, and he knows that he’s gotten to the point where the only legitimacy he has is through the donors and through Israel,” said Buttu. “He knows that if he doesn’t have the international community, and he doesn’t have Israel, he has nobody, he is finished.”

“Simmering Intifada”

Uncertainty in the West Bank has been thrown into further turmoil by the results of Israel’s fifth election in four years earlier this month, which returned Netanyahu to power and is set to give Israel its most right-wing government ever.

Some Palestinians note that what happens in Israeli politics doesn’t change the reality of the occupation. They point to Israeli violence over the last year as an effort by the former government to prove that it was as tough as the right-wing opposition. If anything, they add, Netanyahu’s extremism exposes the reality of Israel’s plans for continued expansion in the West Bank.

“There are probably some on the Israeli side that would like to try to manage the status quo for as long as they possibly can, but the status quo is not unchanging as it relates to Palestinians. For us, the status quo means a constant growth of settlements, constant deepening of apartheid, continued ethnic cleansing,” said Munayyer. “And I think there are some Israelis that really represent a forceful and growing contingent among the Israeli pubic who want to see that recalibrated in a very accelerated way. They want greater attacks against Palestinians, to more forcefully expel Palestinians from larger swaths of their land, and really to take the kind of provocative actions that are not simply going to instigate small skirmishes or fights but that are intended on creating a much bigger conflagration.”

It’s too soon to predict whether the shift will last and how effective a new generation of Palestinian resistance groups can be. Israel’s crackdown in recent months has led to the killing or arrest of much of the groups’ leadership, though support for them appears to be growing, also in response to that crackdown. The dynamic is not new: While some form of armed resistance has remained a constant throughout the occupation, there have been surges in Palestinians’ efforts to directly confront Israeli forces, and they have been promptly met with Israeli repression. “Every so many years you see a willingness to reengage with a broader armed resistance, which I think is shaped in part by a distance from the severe repression that Israel brings on Palestinians every time these uprisings begin to form,” said Munayyer.

Whether mounting Israeli violence across the West Bank over the last several months will plunge the territory back into the large-scale fighting of the past remains in question — but it’s a question Palestinians and others are increasingly voicing, with some referring to it as a “simmering intifada.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say, ‘The next intifada has started’ — but I think what we’re seeing reflects the overwhelming frustration of Palestinians,” Munayyer added. “They want something to change, even if that something might come at the significant cost of a brutal Israeli crackdown. Sometimes when you just desperately want change, you hope that what you’re seeing is the sign of change. It’s hard to predict where this is going to go, but I think it comes from that desire to fundamentally change a paradigm that millions of Palestinians feel stuck in.”

The post Israeli Raids in the West Bank Push Palestinians to Brink Again appeared first on The Intercept.

“The future lies in the Palestinians being cordoned off into these tiny little ghettos.”

In the 13 months since Biden took office, over 1,300 Palestinians, a majority of whom are children, have been displaced by the demolitions tallied by the U.N., which counts each permanent closure or destruction of a residential or commercial property or key piece of infrastructure. At a similar point in President Donald Trump’s tenure, under former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli officials had carried out the demolition of 379 structures that displaced nearly 600 Palestinians — less than half the toll overseen by Biden and Bennett so far.

According to Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian lawyer and scholar at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Bennett is ramping up these demolitions as a display of strength in hopes of stamping out any remaining hope that Palestinians might one day achieve self-determination. “Bennett’s making it clear that this is where the future [of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship] lies,” she told The Intercept. “The future lies in the Palestinians being cordoned off into these tiny little ghettos. And all the land surrounding these ghettos will slowly be taken — be stolen — for Israeli settlements.”

Experts say the accelerating pace of Israel’s demolitions is a direct result of Biden’s refusal to pressure Bennett over Palestinian rights. The United States has considerable leverage over Israel, they point out, and Biden could wield it to end Israel’s aggressive expansionism — potentially within the course of a single conversation.

“I don’t think it takes more than for him to pick up the phone and actually threaten [Bennett],” Buttu said. But the well-being of Palestinians has clearly been “put on the back burner” in favor of Biden’s desire to secure a new Iran nuclear deal and to project the sense that tensions in the region have calmed since the violence of last summer, when Israeli attacks killed nearly 200 Palestinian civilians. Buttu and other Palestinian rights activists say Biden’s reluctance to push Bennett undermines his purported support for a two-state solution and amounts to tacit acceptance of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the 2021 calendar year, Israeli-enforced demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures surged to 907 — the second-highest level on record, surpassed only by the 1,094 demolitions that were carried out under President Barack Obama in 2016 while Americans were distracted by an acrimonious presidential election. Over 145 demolitions have already occurred in 2022, putting Biden and Bennett on track for another record. And experts say these figures are likely an undercount, given that some events take time to be reported or are never reported at all.

The increase joins the resurgence of brazen assassinations in marking a rapid escalation in Israeli expansionism and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and they both add texture to the ongoing backlash to decisions by leading international human rights organizations to explicitly label Israel’s ongoing subjugation of Palestinians as apartheid. While proponents of Palestinian rights have been using the term to describe Israeli oppression for decades, its adoption last year by two influential international organizations — Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — has renewed attention on the atrocities committed by the regime.

Israeli authorities often use discriminatory local permitting rules to justify the demolitions of Palestinian structures. Among other inequities, these rules foreclose thousands of buildings erected by Palestinians who were unable to acquire a permit from ever securing proper licensing, with few exceptions. Meanwhile, Israeli structures regularly receive retroactive permits. The disparate application of permit laws has long been a key tool of the Israeli government in the enforcement of its multi-tiered system of political rights, as Amnesty International’s recent report recounts at length.

While the Biden administration made public calls for the demolitions to cease in the last year, activists say the president’s refusal to apply meaningful pressure to the Israeli regime undermines his public opposition to its actions. During the 2020 presidential primary, Biden distanced himself from competitors like Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., by pointedly refusing to support conditioning military aid to Israel as a means to apply pressure on Palestinian rights.

Beth Miller, senior government affairs manager for Jewish Voice for Peace Action, said that Biden’s decision to forsake the use of this potential source of leverage amounts to de facto acceptance of ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. In a statement provided to The Intercept, IfNotNow national spokesperson Morriah Kaplan echoed that sentiment, saying “it is time for Biden to do what five Presidents from both parties have done — leverage US aid and weapons sales to pressure the Israeli government.” Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. each threatened to modify or withhold economic or military aid to Israel at some point during their tenure.

The administration’s inaction puts it increasingly at odds with the Democratic base, as well as Americans as a whole. Polling from May 2021 by Data for Progress shows a clear majority of Americans and an overwhelming majority of Democrats support policies that would stop Israel’s use of U.S. aid to fund the seizure and destruction of Palestinian properties and to continue their annexation of Palestinian territory. Americans’ growing reluctance to pay for Israeli apartheid likely explains why pro-Israel groups like Democratic Majority for Israel and American Israel Public Affairs Committee have ramped up their involvement in electoral politics, especially in Democratic primaries. (Neither organization responded to a request from The Intercept to comment on this story.)

Buttu, who spoke with The Intercept from Palestine, is not shocked by Biden’s refusal to push Bennett to halt demolitions and settlement expansion. But she expressed a feeling of ongoing disbelief at the refusal of most Democratic politicians, including some progressives, to stand up for the Palestinian people.

“When it comes to demolitions, this is the part that I have never understood,” she told The Intercept. “I have worked with many of these families who have lived with the fear of demolition over their head. This is their life. These are their homes. This inflicts real trauma on kids. The fact that Israel’s never confronted about this policy is really sick. Instead, we have candidates that come forward and just behave as though this is normal.”

The post Israel Surpasses 1,000 Demolitions in the Occupied West Bank Since Joe Biden Took Office appeared first on The Intercept.

The latest round of escalations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen an unusual surge in intercommunal violence between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Videos captured groups of Palestinians in mixed Israeli cities protesting and even rioting on a scale unseen since the Second Intifada in 2000.

Israeli leaders began to fear the worst: “There is no greater threat now than these riots,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Taking the cue, right-wing Jewish Israelis, many of whom came into the Israeli cities from radical West Bank settlements, formed bands that roamed the streets looking for Palestinians.

Both sides were accused of mob violence: burning businesses and vehicles, carrying out home invasions, assaults, and even murder. Social media videos surfaced appearing to show lynch mobs. Only one side, though, boasted the support of the state: Journalists and amateur videographers showed right-wing Jewish Israelis as they engaged in various forms of rampage.

Now, with the dust beginning to settle on the worst of the violence, the very discrimination that gave rise to Palestinian discontent is again becoming apparent. Over the past several days, Israel launched a campaign of mass arrests against Palestinians in mixed cities who were accused, often without specific evidence, of rioting. No such sweeps were made to arrest Jewish Israelis accused of mob violence.

“You can see that the police campaign is political when it comes to combating crime. They’re trying to scare us from doing protests.”

“If we talk about the current campaign that they” — the police — “launched, they have arrested dozens of people, and all of them are Palestinian protesters and political activists,” said Amir Toumie, a graduate student who is a member of the Haifa Youth Movement, a Palestinian activist group. “Hardly any of them are Jewish citizens. You can see that the police campaign is political when it comes to combating crime. They’re trying to scare us from doing protests.”

Some 1,600 Palestinians have been arrested since the campaign began, according to Sami Abou Shehadeh, member of the Israeli Parliament for the Palestinian and leftist bloc, the Joint List. A police spokesperson claimed that “the majority of incidents that took place were carried out by Arab Israelis who took to the streets and attacked Jewish civilians and police officers.” Abou Shehadeh refuted the claim, saying that Palestinians were detained even while standing on the streets on the sidelines — a testament affirmed by Toumie.

“Police were standing right next to the settlers while they were on the streets of Haifa chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ and attacking everybody and every property that they saw,” Toumie said. “So we understood that the police were not going to be protecting us.”

The youth movements from Haifa and people from various Palestinian neighborhoods formed local protection committees. “The police did not take it well,” Toumie added. “They started coming into the neighborhoods and arresting people even for standing in the street and not doing anything.”

The reactions of authorities during — and now, in the aftermath of — the violence show why Palestinian citizens of Israel were fed up and protested in the first place: Though places like Haifa, the largest mixed city in Israel, where 15 percent of the city’s population is Palestinian, are often hailed for coexistence, Palestinian residents face frequent discrimination and daily indignities.

Relations between Palestinians and Jews in Israel have always been strained, at best, but when the violence spread like wildfire — rival mobs attacked people, damaged businesses, and set cars ablaze — it showed just how tenuous those relations were. In Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv, a Jewish Israeli mob vandalized Palestinian-owned businesses, including a popular ice cream parlor, before turning on a Palestinian man who was trying to flee in his car.

In Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, a Palestinian man was stabbed. In Yafa, Palestinians beat a 19-year-old Jewish soldier, fracturing his skull. Yigal Yehoshua, a 56-year-old man, was hit in the head with a brick as protests swept through the country; he succumbed to his wounds at a Tel Aviv hospital. His death came following the killing of Mousa Hassouna, a 33-year-old Palestinian from Lod who was shot dead during riots while three others were wounded. The suspects in his killing, Jewish Israelis who said they had acted in self-defense, were taken into custody and then released.

Various events fueled the latest rounds of unrest, recriminations, and violence. The crisis was kindled by Israeli authorities installing barriers at Damascus Gate, an entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City that had become a popular area for Palestinians to meet and mingle. Protests then spread when Israeli police attacked worshippers inside Al Aqsa Mosque, throwing stun grenades and gas bombs. Looming evictions of families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah also fanned the flames of violence.

The underlying issue, however, has always been the same: Palestinians are simply not treated equally to their Jewish compatriots.

The mob violence meted out by Jews and Palestinians against one another in Israel’s mixed cities was shocking to some. Yet the strife is taking place against a backdrop of inequity, deep social marginalization, and active efforts by groups aligned with the state to rid these cities of their Palestinian citizenry.

“We are in a terrifying space,” said Diana Buttu, a lawyer from Haifa and a mother of a 7-year-old boy. “We’ve seen certain houses being marked by mobs by day, only to be attacked by night. This is terrifying because they are aided by the police directly, or indirectly when they turn a blind eye.”

Palestinians make up about 21 percent of Israel’s population and, in theory, have equal social and political rights. In reality, they are treated as second-class citizens, facing rampant discrimination at the municipal and governmental level as well as widespread legal and social barriers. Despite living in a country with a quality of life on par with Western Europe, the reality for Palestinians in Israel is fraught with indignities and marginalization at the hands of their fellow Jewish citizens.

Anti-Arab hate speech is largely normalized in Israel’s mainstream press and political parties, with a “Jewish supremacist” party called Jewish Power, joining the most recent governing coalition. “Israel’s rightwing parties have campaigned for far greater Jewish dominance in Israel,” Israeli American pollster and political strategist Dahlia Scheindlin recently wrote in The Guardian. “The nationalist right wing has led and legitimized rage against Arabs, left wingers, migrants and the media,” said Scheindlin, chronicling the context that Palestinian citizens of Israel endure at the hands of the state.

Palestinians inside Israel, sometimes called Israeli Arabs or Arab Israelis in an effort to separate them from their Palestinian identity, are formally marginalized by the state in a range of often codified discriminatory policies. The most notorious of these is the Jewish Nation-State Law passed in 2018, which made Hebrew the country’s national language — downgrading Arabic from its official designation as a second language — and defined the establishment of Jewish communities as being in the national interest.

Palestinian citizens are often confined to small neighborhoods within cities or villages in specific areas of the country. These locales are usually constrained in civil planning and expansion due to nearby Jewish settlements, many of which were established after the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee en masse.

“The reason that these mobs are happening is because they didn’t finish us off in 1948 and they’re seeing this as their chance. This has all been done with the state’s approval,” Buttu said. “This is the culmination of years of anti-Palestinian hatred, of years of politicians making statements about Palestinians.”

“The reason that these mobs are happening is because they didn’t finish us off in 1948 and they’re seeing this as their chance. This has all been done with the state’s approval.”

Buttu said the rise of the Kahanist movement, a fascist political outlook that helped propel a broader religious Zionism, has only made things worse for Palestinians. The ideologues of the movement — which, despite the banning of explicit Kahanist political groups, has gained a foothold in Israeli power politics — frequently make explicit calls for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

It’s against this backdrop of discrimination that anger erupted. In mixed cities like Lod, an eerie calm is usually predominant, but Palestinian neighborhoods are rife with violence and drugs, a situation Israeli police often turn a blind eye to, in line with other forms of state neglect, in areas ranging from garbage collection to law enforcement.

When intra-Arab crime erupts, the police barely take interest, said Toumie, the graduate student and activist. “We have been asking for the police to intervene for years and start collecting the illegal weapons in the Palestinian villages and towns and to organize law and order campaigns to rid them of criminals and organized crime,” Toumie said. But action was not forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Haifa is often hailed as an oasis of coexistence, but Abou Shehadeh, the member of Israeli Parliament, said this is a myth that bolsters Israel’s narrative of inclusivity or liberalism in response to international condemnation of its policies. While both Jews and Palestinians share public resources, the city itself is racially segregated and divided, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of systematic discrimination.

“Jewish-Palestinian relations were never great. Just because people didn’t regularly shoot at each other doesn’t mean they were fine,” Abou Shehadeh said. “It doesn’t mean there was equality. Even in apartheid, there was co-existence, but there is a racist dimension that does not allow for equality. Inside the mixed cities you see the most images of apartheid.”

Abou Shehadeh said there is a current movement to ask for international protection for Palestinians inside Israel. “The police are against you. The media is against you,” he said. “We have lost any basic feeling of security. We have started to think of an international dimension — to ask for international protection as a minority. We are asking for an investigative team to look into attacks on both sides of the Green Line.”

The post Jewish and Palestinian Mobs Dueled in Israeli Towns — but the Crackdown Came for One Side appeared first on The Intercept.

With President-elect Joe Biden trudging onto the field, it’s likely the U.S. foreign policy establishment will seek a return to the Obama-era modus operandi: an emphasis on two states and maintaining the illusion of being an honest broker, even if in practice Israel is favored. There could be a few wrinkles, owing to Obama administration veterans’ frustrations about Israel’s actions around two failed Palestinian peace pushes, as well as the Iran nuclear deal. But Biden has historically been and will likely continue to be a traditional, Washington pro-Israel stalwart.

“Trump made clear once and for all that the U.S. is entirely pro-Israel. He removed the mask of the honest broker.”

It’s also possible that none of it will matter. The playing field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be radically different than what Obama veterans left behind in 2017 — not least thanks to Trump leaving an open goal for the Israelis. The end result seems clear: yet another hefty nail in the coffin of the two-state solution, a result of radically altered facts on the ground green-lit by Trump — and unlikely to be reversed by Biden or any other U.S. president.

Over the past four years, Trump and his deputy-cum-son-in-law Jared Kushner helped Israel realize an incredible set of diplomatic and strategic gains at virtually no cost in concessions to the Palestinians. On a raft of policy areas, Trump suddenly dropped objections long held by bipartisan U.S. presidential administrations over decades. Establishing a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, annexing the disputed Golan Heights, ramping up illegal settlements, strangling humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, demolishing record numbers of West Bank homes, threatening to brand human rights organizations critical of Israel as anti-Semitic, and even scoring public recognition for Israel from several Arab states — these are just a few of the mind-blowing changes that took place under Trump. More remarkable still, these gifts were all handed to Israel by the author of “The Art of the Deal” without negotiating anything in return.

In what appears to be a final gratuitous gift to the Netanyahu government, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly plans to visit the annexed Golan Heights and a settlement in the occupied West Bank next week. These moves, unprecedented for a sitting secretary of state, would further legitimate Israeli claims to these territories while emphasizing how little the U.S. is interested in Palestinian statehood or other basic interests. For some Palestinians and their advocates, the Trump approach reflected an unspoken reality suddenly blasted out over loudspeakers.

“Trump made clear once and for all that the U.S. is entirely pro-Israel. He removed the mask of the honest broker and made clear that the role of the U.S. in any negotiation is to act as Israel’s lawyer,” said Diana Buttu, a political analyst based in Ramallah and former legal adviser to the Palestinian team during the Oslo peace process. “His legacy has been to check off everything on Israel’s wish list.”

The Kushner Legacy

By most accounts, Kushner played a key role in driving his father’s Israel policy. Jokes abounded when the real estate developer was handed the portfolio for Middle East peace. But his tenure may indeed have been consequential for taking the Israelis and Palestinians further away from any deal.

The signs of Kushner’s openly one-sided approach were visible soon after Trump took office. Early in his term, an amusing anecdote emerged about Kushner’s long personal history with the right-wing Netanyahu. In the late 1990s, Kushner’s family hosted Netanyahu overnight at their New Jersey home during one of his trips to the United States — a night during which the teenaged Jared was made to vacate his room for Netanyahu and move himself into the basement.

This personal experience of displacement at the hands of an Israel government official did not seem to have given Kushner much empathy for the Palestinians once in power. During his role as Trump’s envoy, Kushner marshaled the full weight of U.S. diplomatic power to try and bury the Palestinian national movement. While bragging about his own in-depth reading on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Kushner has publicly cast aspersions on the presumed right of Palestinian self-governance and done his utmost to stifle their ambitions.

It’d be too easy to say that this effort has been unsuccessful. With the facts on the ground under the Trump administration radically reshaped in Israel’s favor — through actions like the embassy move and annexation of the Golan Heights — far less has been left on the table to even negotiate about. Even the veto that the Palestinians once held over Arab states normalizing relations with Israel has been annulled, with numerous nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan, already establishing public ties with Israel. These moves have effectively destroyed what remained of the old Arab League consensus on this subject, which said that ties with Israel should be predicated on the creation of a Palestinian state. With such a state now effectively out of the picture and the Arab League moving on regardless, the Palestinians have been left alone to an uncertain fate.

Biden Unlikely to Reverse

The odds that a Biden administration will go equally hard in the opposite direction to bring the Palestinians back to negotiating parity with Israel seems unlikely to most analysts. The new balance of power that Kushner, Netanyahu, and a few other well-placed individuals have established is unlikely to be radically changing anytime soon.

“There are certain bells that the Trump administration has rung on this issue that Biden will not, and cannot, unring. Things such as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, annexing the Golan Heights, supporting normalization — the Biden administration will accept these as the new normal,” said Yousef Munayyer, non-resident Senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “The U.S. is in an economic recession and dealing with a pandemic virus. Meanwhile, on the international stage, there are a host of other pressing issues created by the Trump administration that are crying out for attention. Those things are going to be at the top of the agenda for the Biden administration.”

“There are certain bells that the Trump administration has rung on this issue that Biden will not, and cannot, unring.”

Under the Trump administration, U.S. relations and economic support for the Palestinian Authority were choked off, as part of a hardball campaign aimed at compelling their surrender to Israeli terms. While Biden is unlikely to put pressure on Israel to make concessions, he will likely seek a return to the status quo ante with Palestinian leaders that previously existed under the Obama administration.

The Palestinian leadership, meanwhile, has its own problems: weak, divided, and rudderless, led by a septuagenarian ruling class that was caught almost entirely flat-footed by the Trump administration’s merciless campaign to destroy Palestinian nationalism. A return to the Obama-era status quo, with Biden doing some halfhearted goaltending against the most blatant Israeli abuses, will not save them. But it could give them the breathing space to begin to rethink their approach to a conflict that has left them at the mercy of shifting American political winds.

“There has been a serious internal legitimacy crisis that the Palestinian Authority leadership has faced for more than a decade,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of the book, “Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump.” “Biden is not going to institute earth-shattering changes on the ground, but by resuming aid funding, reestablishing political relations, and ceasing the constant assault that we’ve seen under the Trump administration, he might at least give Palestinians the breathing space they need to put their own house in order.”

The post Trump Destroyed Any Hope of Israeli-Palestinian Peace — and Biden Can’t Rebuild It appeared first on The Intercept.

But this strategy may backfire, including against a Netanyahu government that has enthusiastically supported Trump’s get-tough approach. Even former Israeli military officials have begun raising the alarm that the Trump administration’s punitive actions against the Palestinians, rather than bringing peace, are leading the region toward a new era of conflict. In an article this week in Ha’aretz, former Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson Peter Lerner criticized the administration’s attempts to “blackmail” the Palestinians, stating that such a strategy would lead to a power vacuum in the West Bank, warning that “hardballing the Palestinian into submission is likely to blow up on Israel’s doorstep.” Lerner’s warning echoes previous reports from Israeli military officials that funding cuts are likely to lead to a humanitarian crisis and further unrest in the occupied territories.

The Trump administration’s unapologetically anti-Palestinian posture, famously symbolized this May by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley walking out of a U.N. Security Council meeting to avoid even hearing a speech by the Palestinian envoy, is in many ways something new in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. While the United States has never been seen as a neutral arbiter on the conflict — famously characterized as “Israel’s lawyer” even by U.S. officials who have taken part in negotiations — the Trump administration’s actions have risen to a new level of overt hostility to Palestinian claims. Going back to the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman, successive U.S. presidents have shown a willingness to downplay the right of self-determination for the Arab people living in Palestine, while supporting Israeli expansion.

But experts say that even weighed against this shabby historical standard, the Trump administration’s approach is unique for its single-minded focus on satisfying short-term Israeli goals and political constituencies in the U.S., even at the cost of U.S. interests.

“Past U.S. administrations were also slanted toward the Israelis, but what’s different today is that the usual mitigating factors in decision-making, such as American national security interests and the desire to at least appear even-handed, no longer seem to be present,” says Khaled Elgindy, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute. “Instead we have domestic politics and ideology in their purest form dictating U.S. policy on this issue.” 

A number of high-ranking U.S. officials have strong ideological ties to the Israeli right, including U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, who has been personally involved in the funding of West Bank settlements and whose appointment was even opposed by hundreds of U.S. rabbis in a public petition. Under Friedman, Kushner, and Trump adviser Jason Greenblatt, the administration has charged ahead with provocative actions like cutting critical aid for organizations working in Gaza and the West Bank, despite warnings even from pro-Israel organizations that these actions are setting the stage for unrest.

“Even Israeli military officials have weighed in against cutting aid to UNRWA, because they know that there are security implications on the ground to such a decision,” says Elgindy. “But this doesn’t seem to be a factor in the Trump administration’s thinking.”

Despite helping champion this effort to make life worse for the Palestinian people, Kushner has also, somewhat incongruously, held himself out to them as a peacemaker. In an interview published in Arabic with a Palestinian newspaper in June, Kushner claimed that “the prospects for peace are very much alive.” He also claimed that Palestinian leaders were refusing to negotiate with him due to the fear that “we will release our peace plan and the Palestinian people will actually like it because it will lead to new opportunities for them to have a much better life.”

In recent months, White House officials have suggested that they have plans to boost economic activity in the occupied territories as a means of helping woo ordinary Palestinians and hopefully reconciling them to the continued denial of their political rights and the loss of key interests like a capital in East Jerusalem and the return of refugees. This idea of an “economic peace” has long been promoted by Israeli officials as a way of sidestepping thornier political questions. Israel’s warming relationships with the Gulf Arab monarchies have also boosted the prospects for such an approach being tried, with states like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia reported as potentially bankrolling investments in the occupied territories.

But experts with experience in past negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians say that, despite the hopes of Kushner and the Gulf Arab leaders, such a plan is unlikely to bear fruit.

“The idea behind an ‘economic peace’ is that if you keep people economically satisfied, they won’t demand their political rights,” says Diana Buttu, a political analyst based in Ramallah and former legal adviser to the Palestinian side during the Oslo peace process. “Such an idea is not going to work because this conflict is fundamentally about politics and human rights, not economics.” 

Buttu adds that the Trump administration’s approach of favoring Israel while bullying the Palestinians into submission may achieve the short-term goal of pleasing the president’s supporters among Christian evangelicals and donors like Sheldon Adelson, but it is unlikely to win Palestinians cooperation with any peace plan. Such an approach may indeed backfire on the Israeli government in the long-term. Faced with a hostile U.S. administration, intransigent Israeli leadership and feckless local government in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians may end up bypassing their own ineffectual leaders and fighting to achieve their rights directly. Grassroots movements like the Great Return March in Gaza, and protests in villages like Nabi Saleh, have suggested that the weakening of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, along with the likely death of the two-state solution, may already be giving rise to new citizen-led movements engaged in direct action against the occupation.

“Palestinians have weathered a lot, but what they are feeling now is that their leadership is incapable of defending them from the Trumps of the world,” Buttu says. If such a dynamic accelerates, it could create a serious dilemma for the Israeli government. “If you looked at South Africa during in 1984, during what seemed like the worst of apartheid, no one would’ve thought that within 10 years that the country would have a black president and that it would be Mandela of all people.”

Butto added, “Things can change just like that.”

Top photo: Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner speaks onstage during the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018, in Jerusalem, Israel.

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