The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a “system of domination,” says author Nathan Thrall on this week’s Intercepted. In order to constrict “Palestinians into tighter and tighter space” over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.

In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.”

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

As the Israeli military campaign in Gaza grinds forward — with a possible war in Lebanon on the horizon — it has been difficult to think of what the region will look like the day after these conflicts subside. Prior to the war, Israel maintained a blockade over Gaza, as well as a suffocating system of control over the West Bank, where millions of Palestinians live under direct military occupation.

Today, the West Bank is a cauldron, with regular violence from the Israeli military, and armed settlers aimed at suppressing any hint of an uprising from Palestinians, and confiscating land legally entitled to them for a future state. Israel’s control over the territory for now remains intact, but it is unclear what form it will take in the future.

Today, author Nathan Thrall joins me to discuss the situation in the West Bank and beyond. His latest book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” tells the story of one Palestinian family living under Israeli occupation, and the broader systems of domination that they encounter in their everyday life.

Nathan, welcome to Intercepted.

Nathan Thrall: Thanks for having me.

MH: Nathan, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” was published on October 3rd last year, just before the Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of the current war in Gaza. Obviously, you’re a very highly regarded analyst and expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Can you talk about how the timing of the book release influenced its reception, and [the] pressure on your ability to talk about the book?

NT: Yeah. So, I think that there’s been a mixed picture. On the one hand, a lot of the gatekeepers who originally were going to host me at various venues, as soon as October 7 happened, canceled those events. So, that was quite a negative development.

In the U.K., there was a really insane atmosphere, where they were shutting down anything that had “Palestinian” in the title. There was a traditional music concert at a church in London of traditional Palestinian music that was shut down. The biggest event of my tour was that I was going to do with the title character Abed Salama, that was shut down by the U.K. police. And we had radio ads pulled for the book in the U.S., radio ads pulled from national radio. So, it was definitely a hostile reaction as soon as October 7 happened.

At the same time, of course, there’s more interest in Israel-Palestine as a result of October 7. And I would hope that there are a lot of young people who are coming to the book, and maybe compensating some for this older generation that just doesn’t want to hear anything about Palestinian life under occupation.

MH: Nathan, I’m reading the book right now, and I encourage our listeners to pick it up as well. It’s, really, a fantastic book.

And, in the book, you use a very ingenious kind of framing: you use the story of a tragedy of one particular Palestinian family to talk about a broader system of domination, as you call it, that Israel operates in the West Bank. Can you talk about what that means, the system of domination, how it actually plays out in controlling or influencing the lives of Palestinians living under Israeli military control?

NT: Well, thank you for those kind words. The real aim of the book was to put the reader in the shoes of Palestinians living under occupation, and to understand the system of domination in a visceral way, in an emotional way. Not to just take it in an abstract way, in an analytical way.

So, the only way that I felt that you could really do that was to have real three-dimensional characters who you identify with, and who you watch navigating this very complex bureaucratic system. And it has so many different layers to it, but the basic element is that you have a process of Jewish expansion taking over Palestinian territory, and constricting Palestinians into tighter and tighter space. In order to maintain that system of domination, you need to use a great deal of force, in order to deter Palestinians from resisting.

So, there is an elaborate permit system, there are elaborate restrictions on movement, there are walls and fences that enclose Palestinian communities, there is a segregated road system. And there is a system of punishment and arrest of Palestinians who raise their heads up in any way, including kids who are just taken in in the middle of the night. Their parents are helpless, powerless to protect them, and these kids will be held in jail. Their parents will sometimes spend a week just trying to find which detention facility the kid is being held in.

What I wanted to do is, rather than just describe that — as I’m doing now, in a general way — [is] to give very specific stories, so that people understood what it really meant for a human being to live through that. And, by understanding what it is for a human being to live through it, you wind up learning how the system actually works, in a deeper way than you would reading an NGO report on apartheid, or an NGO report on the permit system, or the checkpoints, or land confiscation.

And so, just to give you one anecdote: at one point in Abed Salama’s life, something that I describe in the book is how he chooses a marriage partner based on the color of her ID, because he’s at risk of losing his job in Jerusalem, and the only way he can keep it is if he buries someone with the right color ID. And many of his colleagues at the same firm that he was working in were trying to do the same thing. And this is how deeply the system of domination reaches into Palestinian lives, down to choosing who you might marry.

MH: It’s interesting because, when you’re in the West Bank, you feel this very visceral sort of omnipresent Israeli military control, the constriction of people’s lives. And Israel itself has multiple legal regimes, it seems, if you look at the whole territory from the river to the sea, so to speak. There’s obviously 1947 Israel. There’s Gaza, now, which is currently in conflict. And then there’s the West Bank. And a lot of the ways of thinking about the subject seem to view the situation in the West Bank — or maybe even in Gaza — as temporary, or contingent on certain political factors.

But when you look at it holistically, it gives a very interesting picture of the character of the Israeli government, viewed in total. Do you see the West Bank as separate from Israel today, given the length of time it’s been controlled, and the ongoing settlement project? Or is it exceptional, in a way?

And the reason I ask is because it kind of gets at the question of Israel being democratic or not in the moment. How compelling do you think the argument is today that the West Bank system of domination, as you put it, is something which is not intrinsically part of the character of the Israeli government?

NT: It’s something that I’ve written about, actually. I wrote a piece for the London Review of Books a couple of years ago called “The Separate Regime’s Delusion,” and that piece was about what I call a delusion, which is this notion that Israel’s control of the West Bank and the settlements constitutes a separate regime from Israel itself.

The fact of the matter is, you have one in ten Israeli Jews living in the occupied territories. The settlements themselves are suburban; they are connected by highways to workplaces inside Israel and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Going to and from the settlements is seamless, it is just like going to any suburb in Israel.

And, when you enter these settlements, you feel that you are inside Israel. You see Israeli street signs. You see the Israeli health clinics, Israeli schools, Israeli police stations, Israeli fire stations, Israeli malls; all of that, you see inside the settlements. And you do not have the sense that you are abroad; when Israeli citizens who live in the settlements vote, they vote inside the settlements, they’re not filing absentee ballots.

Every single ministry in the Israeli government is allocating resources to the West Bank. There is not a separate budget for the West Bank, it’s not as though the army is doing everything in the West Bank. No, the Ministry of Transportation is paving this settler infrastructure, the roads in the West Bank. The Israeli high court of justice is ruling on Israeli practices inside the West Bank. The Israeli ministerial committee for settlement is deciding on policy in the West Bank. So, it’s legislative, judicial, executive, all the branches of the Israeli government are deeply entrenched in the West Bank, and you cannot separate that, and say that there’s some separate administration.

In addition, you can look at it in the reverse direction as well, and look at the practices of Israel toward, for example, the Palestinian citizens of the Naqab, of the Negev Desert. These are Palestinian citizens of Israel — they have full citizenship — but they are subjected to the exact same practices as Palestinian Bedouin pastoralists inside Area C of the West Bank. They are forced off of their land, they’re subjected to repeated home demolitions, and their lands are taken over for the expansion of Jewish communities.

So, what I see when I look at Israel-Palestine is a single sovereign — Israel — ruling over 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians. Now, within that system, the Palestinians have variegated rights, and are subjected to different rules depending on where they live.

First of all, it should be said that the majority of those 7 million Palestinians are living without basic civil rights. The worst off are Palestinian refugees who aren’t even counted in those 7 million. Those are Palestinian refugees who are not allowed back into Israel or the occupied territories.

And the next level are Palestinians in Gaza, who are under a siege, who are under a siege before this war, who could barely leave Gaza, who had to ask for special permission just to go and travel to the West Bank to study in a West Bank university, to go and receive medical care in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.

And the next level are Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank, and they are the ones who need to go to the Israeli authorities in order to get permission to just build a new shed outside their house, a new floor on top of their home, any kind of structure. And almost all of those requests are denied, and then Israel comes and demolishes anything that these people do wind up building.

The next level are Palestinians who live in Area B and Area A of the West Bank. These are the places that are under some limited Palestinian Authority autonomy. It’s very limited, in the sense that Israel is the ultimate sovereign. Israel comes in, and makes arrests, and enters with its forces in Area B and Area A every day.

Just to give some perspective on how much territory we’re talking about here, Area A, and B, and Gaza, the three places where you have some Palestinian autonomy, all together they make up about 10 percent of the territory under Israel’s control. That’s all it is, and it’s disconnected. Area A and B are 165 little islands surrounded by a sea of Israeli control.

And then, the next level are Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem, including the parts of the West Bank that Israel annexed in 1967 and unilaterally declared to be part of East Jerusalem, going from the edge of Ramallah in the north to the tip of Bethlehem in the south. And they do not have the right to vote in national elections, but they do have the right to vote in local elections, and they have much more freedom of movement than Palestinians in the West Bank.

And then, the next level are Palestinian citizens of Israel who, as I say, they themselves live in very different circumstances depending on where they are. If they’re a Palestinian Bedouin living in an unrecognized village in the Negev, then they’re living very much like a Palestinian in Area C of the West Bank, and their citizenship doesn’t really get them very much protection. But if you’re a Palestinian citizen living in Haifa, it’s a very different story. You still don’t have all the rights that a Jew does. You don’t have the same rights to immigration and land, but it is the most rights that you can have as a Palestinian within the system.

Now, the fact that there are different regulations applied to different groups of Palestinians doesn’t negate the notion that this is a single regime. This is Israel controlling Palestinian lives in different ways. It doesn’t mean that there’s a separate regime in each of these different locations.

And, similarly, in apartheid South Africa, you had a whole host of different rules applying to Black South Africans, colored South Africans, depending on where they lived, if they were in Bantustans, if they were in townships. You even had this tricameral parliament in the 1980s under apartheid South Africa.

So, the notion that, somehow, there’s a democratic Israel within its pre-1967 borders, and then there’s this temporary occupation that’s outside of Israel and separate from Israel, is simply false. And it’s an illusion that the world needs to put forward in order to think of Israel as a democracy. Because the only way that you could actually call this place a democracy is if you put up this mental barrier and say, OK, there’s Israel within the green line and everything beyond it is no longer Israel, and it’s not actually controlled by the same government.

But it is controlled by the same government.

MH: Nathan, for many years now, the Oslo Accords have been sort of the basis for thinking of how this situation could be ameliorated politically. And not just [for] the Israelis, or the Palestinian Authority, or the U.S., but even the Arab League continues to make reference to a two-state solution and the terms of that accord as a basis for their political vision of how this conflict could be transcended or moved forward from. But, from what you’re describing, the Israeli control has become so pervasive in these territories, and it’s become such a seamless part of Israel today, that It sounds to me that it’s very difficult for such a state to come into existence.

What’s your perception about the continued reference to a two-state solution on the 1967 borders and the Oslo Accords? Which, to me, seems like a very elegant potential solution, but now seems almost farcical, in the sense [of what] they’re actually implementing it on the ground. I’m curious of your own take about that.

NT: So, I think that there are a few different things to unpack when we’re talking about a two-state solution. One question is a moral question, which is: is that actually a fair settlement?

So, if you have 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living under Israeli control — and let’s just leave aside the millions of Palestinian refugees, who are not even able to enter Israel in the occupied territories — is it a fair distribution to say that half the population — and the Palestinians are a little bit more than half now — are going to get 22 percent of the land? And it’s going to be discontiguous, and then they’re not even going to have full sovereignty in this area.

Because what we’re really talking about when we talk about a two-state solution is what Netanyahu has called a “state minus,” what Yitzhak Rabin called “less than a state.” And so, is that fair? That’s one question, a moral question, to give half the population 22 percent of the land that’s not actually contiguous, while the other half gets a contiguous 78 percent.

Another question is, is it realistic? That question, I think the answer is, clearly, no, it’s not realistic. Not because it’s physically impossible to evacuate settlers from the West Bank. It’s unrealistic because there is no incentive for Israel to do it. Israel has many strong disincentives to do it.

And so, if you look at what two-states would entail for Israel — and I’m not talking about the Israeli right, I’m not talking about people who have an ideological commitment not to give up an inch of the land of Israel, who are significant political force — I’m talking about mainstream Israelis, even secular mainstream centrist Israelis. You’re talking about something that is extremely costly, that will potentially involve major political conflict inside Israel, perhaps bloodshed. You’re talking about something that is perceived as a security risk by Israel to give up this territory.

The way that they look at it is they’re not going to get, really, anything of significance in return. This occupation has lasted for over half a century. There is no sign that it’s going to end anytime soon. There’s very little pressure on Israel to end it. And so, why would they just give this away, when there are all these costs associated with doing so?

And then the other possibility that people talk about is Israel giving full citizenship and equality to all the residents under its control, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. And that is something that Israel will never do, in a million years.

And so, for me, the real issue is not so much, is it too late for two states, Has the settlement project expanded to such a degree that it’s too costly to withdraw the settlements? It’s more a question of, is there any actual incentive to force Israel to move from what is the most comfortable option for it now — which is to continue the status quo, to expand the settlements, to constrict Palestinians into tighter and tighter spaces — and the answer to that is, no.

We may be now seeing the very first steps of inching towards some kind of accountability for Israel, but we are decades away from the kind of pressure that would be required to make it in Israel’s self-interest to take what it perceives to be a very costly step of giving up this 22 percent.

MH: Nathan, even before the October 7 attacks, it seemed like the window for political negotiation had narrowed quite considerably, and even the prospect of a negotiated solution seemed almost moribund between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Since October 7, obviously there’s been the terrible attacks on that day itself, but all the very devastating war in Gaza, which has seemingly inflamed people’s sentiments quite considerably. And, politically, I would say, from observing, it seems to have radicalized Israeli politics to some degree as well, too.

You’re based in Jerusalem. Can you talk a bit about the effect of the attacks and subsequent war on Israeli society, and how you see it perhaps influencing the possibility of any sort of negotiation or compromise in the future?

NT: I think it’s had a profound effect. I think Israelis, for the most part, have been pushed to the right. I think that in many ways what you had previously in Israel prior to October 7 was this kind of division between the left and the right — the Zionist left and the Zionist right — about, what is the conflict really about? And the Zionist left basically had the perception that the conflict is really about our occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, this is what the world’s really upset about. This is what needs to end, that’s what’s being demanded of us in international institutions and by our allies. And so, once we end that occupation, we will have resolved the conflict.

And the Israeli right had said, no. The PLO was founded before 1967. They are not interested in simply ending the occupation that began in 1967, they are standing in opposition to the takeover of their entire homeland against the will of the native majority. And the Zionist left is delusional in thinking that you can resolve this conflict just by resolving the issues of 1967 and the occupation that began that year.

My view is that the Israeli right is much closer to the truth on this. It’s true that the PLO, the National Liberation Movement of the Palestinians has accepted the international resolutions that have demanded that Israel and the occupation give Palestinians a state on 22 percent of the land, and they have made this giant concession to say that, actually, we will be satisfied with just 22 percent. We’re giving up 78 percent of our land.

But that is a very controversial position among Palestinians, and the PLO has had to kind of play a game of saying that we’re not actually giving up the right of return when we say that we’re accepting a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the land, when everybody knows, in fact, they are, in effect, giving up the right of return. They have published leaks from the various negotiations that they’ve had with Israel, where they’ve said very clearly, we won’t change Israeli demography, and Abbas has even made public statements about not returning himself to Safed, where he and his family come from.

So, my own view is that the Israeli right was much closer to actually an accurate analysis of what this conflict is really about. And I think that October 7 was a rude awakening for many, many Israelis on the center and the left, in the sense of realizing that maybe the right was right. It’s not just about the occupation, that the communities that surround Gaza are perceived to be settlements.

Now, they might not have the same status as newly built settlements in the West Bank in the minds of many Palestinians, but they are built on Palestinian land. These are communities built on the lands of Beit Lahia in Northern Gaza, some of them. And some of the Palestinians who were rushing across the border on October 7 were filming themselves and saying ecstatically that, I am returning home. I’ve made it across the border and I’m returning home.

So, I think that realization for many Israelis has pushed them to the right and toward a view that there is no choice but to control the Palestinians indefinitely and never to give them a state, because they’ll just use that state as a launch pad to future attacks. And I think it’s a really deep change that’s happened for a lot of Israelis.

MH: You wrote a book before your current book called “The Only Language They Understand,” which was based on your work for the International Crisis Group on diplomacy in Israel-Palestine. And it had a very compelling thesis, I thought, which was that the parties to the conflict have only really responded and made concessions in the face of pressure, or when they felt that they had to do so and their options were constricted, including the Israeli side.

Given the situation you’ve sketched out, where positions have hardened so much, is there still a window where outside pressure, whether from the U.S. or international institutions, could be effective in pushing the Israeli side, which has more power — or maybe the Palestinian side and the Palestinian Authority — to a zone of mutually acceptable agreement, if there is one that still exists after October 7?

NT: So, I do believe that the historical record clearly shows, as I argue in that book, that all of the concessions that have been made, every single Israeli territorial withdrawal that has come about, has come about through pressure. Either violence, or diplomatic pressure, or serious threats, credible threats. I think that that is the only thing that is going to get Israel to reassess its current view, which is that the least costly thing is to continue the status quo indefinitely, to control Palestinian lives indefinitely, to prevent Palestinian statehood and self-determination and, certainly, equality and full rights as citizens.

I think that we are now seeing the world, as I mentioned earlier, beginning to take some measures that have some teeth. The ICC announcing that they’re likely to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant is a very significant step. And It’s going to be, I think, a years-long process, but it’s something that Israel greatly, greatly feared.

And I think that if we can get to more actions, like we’re seeing the first steps from the Biden administration of sanctioning violent settlers. Canada just put sanctions on the main organization that is constructing the settlements called Amana in the West Bank. Steps like those are the kinds of things that would make Israel reconsider its current path, and make it rational for Israel to say, actually, the least costly thing for us to do is to give Palestinians a state on 22 percent of the land.

And I think that’s possible, but I think that the rate at which we’re going there is very, very slow. And, in the meantime, we could see many, many worse developments, including expulsion.

MH: In addition to the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians themselves or the regime of control that Israel administers over the Palestinians in the West Bank, there’s a broader regional context as well, too, which I’m sure people in Israel are thinking about. Which is that, it’s very possible there could be a war with Lebanon and Hezbollah in the near-term future.

The north of Israel has been evacuated, and so has the south of Lebanon, as a result of the preparations for such a conflict, putatively. And, at the same time, Israel has a conflict with Iran, and Israel has very tense, increasingly tense relations with the Arab League, and so forth.

As you mentioned, it’s a pretty small country, and there’s only 7 million Jewish Israelis in a relatively small strip of territory. How does this broader context, you think, shape the possible actions that Israel may take in the future? Because it’s a very heavily armed state, does not have integration with its neighbors, and whatever brief moment that this integration seemed to be happening in the last few years, it seems to come to an end now. Does this kind of siege mentality influence how you think what may happen?

And I bring it up because Israel has very robust doctrines for deploying military force if it feels it’s under great threat. And I think it’s a concern [for] many of us in the region and beyond that this could lead to a much broader war, if people do not communicate in a way which gives an offramp.

NT: I don’t believe that the process of integration, as you put it, has come to a halt, actually. I mean, the fact that we are nearly nine months into this mass slaughter in Gaza, and the U.A.E. and the other states that normalized with Israel over the past several years have not even hinted that that normalization, that their relations with Israel will be called into question or downgraded. The fact that all of the reporting about the discussions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia about normalization with Israel indicate that the Saudis still are interested in normalizing with Israel under the right circumstances.

I think that the betrayal by the Arab states of the Palestinians is one of the most shocking developments for Palestinians I know over the last several years, and especially the last several months that this normalization has continued. And so, I am not ready to say that the process of Israel integrating and normalizing with other states in the region is now finished because of this Gaza war.

But you’re right that there is a very large risk of a regional war, and the talk in Israel now is almost as though it’s guaranteed to happen. Israel has been saying for many months that they are going to move Hezbollah from southern Lebanon up to the Litani River one way or another. Either Hezbollah is going to do it through agreement, through a diplomatic agreement, or Israel is going to move them forcefully, and they have not backed down from that claim. And, if that happens, then we’re likely to see a war that is on a much greater scale than what we’ve seen so far.

MH: Yeah, it’s deeply concerning because, obviously, Hezbollah’s capacities are much greater than Hamas. And there was a devastating war in Lebanon in 2006, and a very sordid history between the two countries. It’s something that a lot of people are afraid of, including the potential involvement of the U.S. and Iran as well, too.

I wanted to pivot, though, a bit, Nathan, to your own background. I think you have a very fascinating story, actually. You worked at ICG for many years, and you wrote a previous book I mentioned earlier about your work there. And then you have the most recent book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which has been very well received, including with the Pulitzer Prize recognition recently as well, too.

How did you get into Israel-Palestine? What was your backstory that actually brought you to the region and led you to develop this background and expertise in the subject?

NT: When I really first came and started reporting here was in 2006. I had just finished graduate school, finished a master’s degree, and Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, brought into Gaza, and the 2006 war with Lebanon broke out. And I hopped on a plane, came to Israel/Palestine, started to study both Hebrew and Arabic, and kind of went to an English language newspaper and asked, can I start reporting?

I had very naive ideas about — You know, I had the notion that I’d be sent to the front and start filing dispatches at the Lebanese border. In fact, they were not interested in allowing me to do that. They gave me a much less interesting story to cover, to see if I could write.

And I lived here for a year, from 2006 to 2007, and was trying to make my way as a journalist then. I decided that I was better off moving back to New York after a year here, and worked in New York partly as an editor, I was an editor at the New York Review of Books. And, while I was working as an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books, I convinced the editor Bob Silvers to allow me to do a reported piece in the West Bank.

And I came and I did a reported piece on what was then called “Fayyadism,” which was a phrase I think Tom Friedman coined. He was a big champion of the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and he and many others were hailing Fayyad as like a new Ben Gurion. He was going to build a Palestinian state from the ground up.

All of these negotiations were a waste of time. The way to do it was to cooperate very closely with Israel, to have Palestinian security forces that could do Israel’s work for it extremely well. Israel would then have the requisite level of trust to withdraw from the West Bank and a Palestinian state would be created.

And I came and reported on all of that at a time when there was bipartisan enthusiasm for this project. There were very few people who were critical of it. And I wrote a pretty critical piece about it, saying that this is just making Israel’s occupation easier, and it is thereby prolonging Israel’s occupation, it will only help this occupation survive much longer.

And, as a result of that piece, two people who write frequently for the New York Review of Books on Israel-Palestine — Hussein Agha and Rob Malley — really liked the piece. And Rob Malley was the Middle East director for the International Crisis Group, and he invited me to try my hand at basically doing the same kind of thing. He said, “Just do the same kind of writing, just with more footnotes. Where would you like to go?” And I told him I wanted to go to Gaza.

So, within a few weeks of that piece being published, I was in Gaza, rented an apartment in Gaza City right by the pier, and started to write my first report for Crisis Group. They liked what I wrote, and I moved with my family to Jerusalem a few months later.

MH: Nathan, my last question. I think myself and many of us are trying to get a prognosis of where this is all heading. Obviously, this is a conflict which has gone on for many decades now, an occupation which is very deeply entrenched, an escalating regional — even global — crisis, which has its crux right in Israel-Palestine.

Given your breadth of experience and years in the region, if you could say where you think this could be headed, with the appropriate caveats. I’m just curious, because it seems that we’re at the moment where the previous paradigm of a negotiated solution no longer has a clear path forward, but there’s also not a clear idea of what comes as an alternative to that.

If you could give your perception of what you think could happen, what would it be?

NT: So I think, broadly speaking, there are a few possibilities.

One is for Israel to agree to give Palestinians full rights and citizenship. A second is for Israel to agree to give the Palestinians a state with sovereignty on 22 percent of the land in the West Bank and Gaza. A third is to continue this system of domination that has been described as apartheid by the leading human rights organizations in the world; HRW, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International by the U.N. Special Rapporteur, by leading Palestinian human rights organizations like Al-Haq, by leading Israeli civil society and human rights organizations, and even by former Israeli ministers and the leading legal authority in Israel, the former attorney general of Israel. All of them have described this as a system of apartheid, and continuing that system of apartheid would be the third option. And the fourth option is to see some kind of mass expulsion.

And, of those, the only two that I see as realistic in the foreseeable future are mass expulsion or continuation of apartheid. It’s possible to make the first or the second option something more realistic, but that would require a real change in circumstances. It would require a revolution in the way that the international community deals with Israel, and I don’t see that happening.

So, for me, it’s really these two bleak scenarios. And, of those two, the one that is the most likely is just to continue the system of apartheid, while there will be growing pressure on Israel. But when there’s not a war, Israel’s not going to be on the front pages of the newspapers. There aren’t going to be mass demonstrations about Israel-Palestine in cities across the world or on college campuses across the world. And Israel has been dealing with this threat of becoming a pariah for decades.

I mean, if you go back and read the way that people were reacting to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, you will see that Israel is quite used to this, and ready to live with the world wagging its finger at it, but without, really, any serious consequences.

MH: Nathan Thrall, thanks for joining us today.

NT: Thanks for having me.

MH: That was Nathan Thrall, author of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” available in paperback this August. He’s also the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.”

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 by David Bralow, Shawn Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman, and our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

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Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” follows the war’s impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in the besieged Strip.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film’s correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, and these statistics — the official statistics out of Gaza — are almost certainly a dramatic undercount of the dead.

In a report released this week, the British aid organization Save the Children estimated that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. Many of them are feared dead, trapped under rubble, or killed in other conditions. Or, there are fears that they’ve been snatched by Israeli forces and are being held in detention.

These statistics can become overwhelming. But it’s very important that we remember that, behind each of these numbers, when we read the death tolls, is a human being. It was a family, a parent, a child, a sibling that are being shattered, destroyed on a constant basis.

On the program today, we’re going to hear from two journalists who have produced one of the most vital pieces of journalism of the past nine months. It’s a film that tells the story of how this war has impacted the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.

The documentary premiered last Friday on Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine Fault Lines. It’s called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”

Joining me now is the film’s correspondent, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, an award-winning independent journalist who works frequently for Fault Lines. Sharif, welcome back to Intercepted.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

JS: And we’re also joined by the executive producer of Fault Lines, the journalist Laila Al-Arian, a winner of both Emmys and the George Polk Award. Laila, welcome to Intercepted.

Laila Al-Arian: Thank you for having me.

JS: Laila, I want to begin with you and, first, just say that this what you’ve produced here is one of the most powerful, vital, and important pieces of journalism that has been done over these past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza. And one of the aspects of this film that makes it so powerful is the incredible work of the journalists that you worked with on the ground in Gaza.

So, Laila, just to begin, talk about the process of how you came up with the concept for the film, and the team that you assembled to do this investigation.

LA: Sure. Thank you so much for your kind words, Jeremy.

So, the war on Gaza began, as we all know, in October of last year. And my show Fault Lines — which is a documentary and current affairs show on Al Jazeera English — had already commissioned all of the episodes for the fall season, so I felt really helpless just sitting back and watching as all the events were happening in Gaza, not actually being able to cover it until the new year, when our new season was beginning. So, I was following it, it was the only story that mattered, and yet our hands were tied as far as actually covering it.

So, my colleague Kavitha Chekuru and I — she’s the director of the film, as well as the writer and producer —our show focuses on the U.S., so there has to have a strong U.S. connection to every story, and it was very clear what the U.S. connection was. The U.S. is Israel’s most important, biggest ally, a supplier of weapons, military assistance and, of course, funds. And, of course, the Biden administration’s support for the war was so clear from the very beginning and persisted.

But, of course, we couldn’t go to Gaza, because Gaza is closed basically to the entire world, except for select doctors, aid workers, U.N. personnel. But no journalist working for an international media outlet has been allowed in, save for people who are going in as part of official Israeli military embeds.

So, given that our team couldn’t travel to Gaza, our team — which includes Sharif Abdel Kouddous, of course, as a correspondent — ended up working with a production company called MediaTown, based in Gaza. MediaTown has been producing films about Gaza for many, many years. They’re very experienced, very talented journalists, and we basically told them that we wanted to focus on specific cases of families who’ve been directly impacted by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. And, unfortunately, it wasn’t very difficult to find cases, given that you’d be hard pressed to find a single family out of Gaza’s 2.3 million people that hasn’t been affected by this horrific war.

So, they helped us identify some families. Also, when the case of Hind Rajab happened, the six-year-old girl who the entire world was shocked about her case — she was trapped in her car and pleading to be saved as an Israeli military tank surrounded her car — when that case happened, we also asked them to interview her mother and help us cover that case.

But these journalists worked under the most extraordinary circumstances, the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They were in the north — well, we have two crews, one in the north, one in the south — they were in the north, they were dealing with everything else that the people of Gaza are dealing with, which is repeated displacement, bombardment, aerial attacks, artillery attacks. They themselves had lost loved ones.

The production manager on the project, Hussein Jaber, on December 5, his daughter was shot by an Israeli ground troop. He was badly injured; in fact, he had to get surgery during the production. It felt like every time we were reaching out to a reporter, or a witness, or anybody on this project, they were all dealing with just unimaginable situations. We had another journalist who had most of his family killed in an airstrike. Another journalist who filmed, actually, a U.S.-made shell at the site of Hind Rajab’s killing.

By the time I messaged with him, it had been just days after his wife and son were killed, his young son. It’s just unfathomable. And he told me, I’m so sorry it took me some time — and when you say “some time,” it was, like, a couple of hours — to get back to you, because he was covering the flour massacre. So, not only was this man freshly grieving the killing of his wife and child, he was covering the flour massacre. My mind can’t comprehend the horror and the loss and the grief that these people are going through. Not to mention just the sheer will and struggle it takes just to survive.

You’re dealing, also, with a crew holding cameras, working very long hours, who are hungry, because there are starvation conditions in the north.

JS: There are so many moments in the film, too, where — just as a human being, or if you have children, as a parent — you’re listening to the human reality that’s being described by other human beings. And sometimes, a few times, I had to sort of pause when I was watching it to absorb what was being said.

You tell the story of the Al-Ghaf family from the north of Gaza, who then relocate to Khan Yunis, and they’re constantly on the move. But the father is telling a story about how his son is hungry, and is asking him to go get him biscuits and a date, and he goes to the market. And while he’s there, the place where the family was seeking refuge from the Israeli attacks is bombed and he returns.

SAK [from film]: His wife, Mariham was one of at least 11 people killed in the attack, along with Firas.

JS: You see the footage where he’s placing the little package of the snack that he had gotten for his son in the hand of his dead body. And he is saying that he lost his mind in that moment. He was having an out of body experience, and he went to get his son a snack, and he came back, and his son didn’t have a mouth anymore. And there are so many moments in this film where, on just a visceral human level, you can’t imagine it, you can’t fathom it.

Another scene where someone who survived a horrifying mass execution, it is saying, I don’t think any human being could ever forget this. The power of some of the testimony that’s provided is just, it’s at the same time sickening, but also such a powerful expose on the human experience that has been forced on the people of Gaza.

And Sharif, I was hoping we could walk through sort of an overview of the three main stories that are told here. And, for people who haven’t seen it yet, I would encourage everyone to watch it. It tells the story of three separate families, and their experience over the past nine months of loss and survival and struggle.

But let’s begin, Sharif, with the Salem family. Talk a little bit about their story, and what you discovered as you investigated what happened to them.

SAK: The Salem family, we mostly speak with the mother, Hiba Salem, and her son and other children. Their story is both horrific and common in Gaza, which says a lot. Their neighborhood in Gaza city was bombed early on in the war, and so much of this, of what we cover, is families trying to find safety, and unable to do so.

And so, they were forced to flee their home in search of safety, and they went to stay with relatives in a building that was not far from their home. And, on the morning of December 11, a massive airstrike hits their building, killing over a hundred people, nearly all of them members of their family or their extended family.

We worked with the nonprofit group Airwars, who investigated the strike for us, and documented and listed to as close of a degree as possible all the names of the people who were killed in that strike. They estimate about 50 children were killed in that attack alone.

SAK [from film]: Do you know how many children were killed in the attack?

Emilly Tripp, Airwars: So, we estimated 50, at least.

SAK: And how common was this type of attack that you investigated on December 11th?

ET: I would say this is one of so many.

SAK: This family’s case was also featured recently in an AP investigation that was published last week, that found at least 60 Palestinian families have lost 25 or more family members in Israel’s bombardment. And they actually found that the Salem family in continued attacks ended up losing an astonishing 270 members by spring in different attacks, their extended family.

So, this is a pattern of wiping out families across generations. And, actually, this pattern is a key part of the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

But what is almost unfathomable is that, after surviving this December 11 airstrike that killed over a hundred members of their extended family, Hiba and her children move to another building, and witness yet another massacre, this time at the hands of Israeli ground troops.

This is now mid-December, Israeli ground troops have encircled the north, and the family ends up trapped inside this building with other family members. Israeli tanks and troops are outside, they’re shelling and shooting the area and the building for days. There’s no one firing back.

Then, in the afternoon of December 19, Israeli troops enter the building and storm several apartments. The survivors say they separated the men from the women. They began beating severely the men and boys. They strip-searched the women, verbally abusing them and also beating them. Then, according to multiple survivors, they stripped the men down to their underwear, made them lie face down on the floor, and summarily executed them. At least 11 men were executed. The soldiers then left the building and continued attacking with what eyewitnesses describe as shelling or shooting from a quadcopter. Hiba Salem’s four-year-old daughter Nada was hit in the eye and also killed.

This is the kind of horror that we’re seeing in just one family in Gaza. And, again, this incident is also specifically cited in South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice.

JS: Of the three cases here, in each case, you can see the lengths that you guys and your team went to, to try to nail down and document each of the facts. But, in this case of the Salem family and this mass execution that they endured while seeking shelter in this building, again, having to move from place to place, you not only got WhatsApp messages where you’re seeing the reports that people are sending out to their loved ones and others, pleading for help, describing what happened, and voice memos, etc., but also video that was then filmed in the aftermath of these mass executions and the assault on this building, where one of the main eyewitnesses featured in your film can be spotted wounded, sitting on the ground in one of the shots of the video.

He’s there with dead bodies of people. He just happened to survive, and he’s describing what happened. But you actually see that he, in fact, was there in the room where the mass executions took place.

SAK: Yeah. The next day, after the soldiers withdrew from the area, people were able to enter the apartments, and civilians, neighbors took videos. We have two videos from inside, we show one of them. They’re both horrific to see. You see the corpses of several undressed men on the ground, the blood and bullet holes in the walls. And then, yes, you catch a glimpse of Yahya.

We also have another step of corroboration, which was the Al Jazeera coverage when the family was taken to the hospital for treatment. And you see Yahya himself saying the same thing as he told us in his testimony, how they came in and executed people. You see Hiba, wounded badly, with her children who are all wounded, talking about how they executed her husband. And this is the importance of having a network like Al Jazeera. A lot of the stories that we worked on and the cases that we filmed with, we have footage of the events themselves, because we have this big network on the ground that’s working day and night covering this.

And just a final note on Yahya, when we’re talking about him, myself, Laila, and others were the primary translators of a lot of the interviews we did, and I translated Yahya. And there’s a moment that is part of his testimony that’s in the film, where he finishes, like you said, he said, this was the worst day in my life, I’ll never be able to forget this. But then he kind of puts his hand up to block the camera, he can’t say anymore. He then puts his hand on his stomach as if he’s having physical pain. He doubles over, puts his hands on his knees. And, for me, when I was translating that, I was just floored. Because you can see that recounting this horrific experience of watching his family just be executed in front of him was physically causing him to just double over and almost collapse.

JS: Laila, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned Hind Rajab earlier and, of course, this case did receive a lot of attention from journalists that are actually paying attention, because it was so horrifying, and it took place over a protracted period of time. But maybe you could just take a step back and tell people that story of what happened to Hind Rajab. Her mother and her family are central characters in one of the three stories that you tell, but maybe just explain the context of what happened to this six-year-old girl.

LA: Sure. Well, Hind’s family, like most of the families in Gaza, had to flee because Israel was bombarding all over the Gaza Strip. They’re from the north, so they fled to the south. And Hind’s mom, Wissam Hamada, she gave us the most extensive interview that she’s given any journalist. She was very open, very vulnerable.

And she told us that, as she was living in the south, her mother told her, please write your name on your hands or your arms, so that if you’re killed in an airstrike, people will be able to identify you. And this is something that we’ve heard throughout the last nine months, of parents also writing their children’s names on their hands and legs, so that if, in case of an airstrike, they’ll be able to know where their children are and identify them.

And Wissam said, I don’t want that. I’d rather go back to the north, back to my home, so that if I’m killed, people will know who I am. They’ll know my face, they’ll know that I’m Wissam Hamada. So, she took this fateful decision to go back to the north, where she thought, of course, there’s no safe place in Gaza, but she thought she could find some semblance of safety for herself, for six-year-old Hind, and for four-year-old Eyad.

And, when she got to the north, it was terrifying, just as it is everywhere. And, on the night of January 28th, there were these fire belt bombings, just absolutely horrific bombardments all around them. The next day, they wanted to find somewhere else to be safe to shelter, and it was raining really, really hard. So, Wissam’s uncle Bashar told her, hey, why don’t I take your kids in my car, so that they don’t get wet? And, you know, it was cold, it was January.

So, she puts Hind and Eyad both in the car, and then Eyad just jumps out, he wanted to stay with his mom. And the uncle starts to drive, and the car comes under fire, and they hear people saying “ambulance.” And they thought they were OK because the car continued to move, and it ended up in a gas station. And the next thing you knew, Wissam was calling her family over and over again.

The next thing you know, Bashar’s 15-year-old daughter Layan picks up, and she says, we’ve been shot, everyone is dead, except for me and Hind. And then they called the Red Crescent over and over again, they try to get help.

JS: Just one point of clarification, Laila. They’re calling the Red Crescent not in Gaza, but they are calling the Red Crescent in the West Bank, to try to figure out how to respond in Gaza, because there’s a total siege, total war zone. So, they’re actually having to call an entirely different part of Palestine that is not on the ground in Gaza.

LA: That’s right. Partly because I think that the communications are so difficult in Gaza. That was one of the other challenges we had throughout, was just, literally, the phone lines, there’s no internet, or it’s very difficult to get internet.

So, in fact, at one point, a relative in Germany, a relative of Wissam Hamada had to get involved and ask for help, literally in Germany and Egypt, all over the world, because the communications are so bad in Gaza.

So, the Red Crescent then gets involved for hours trying to get help. They eventually realized that Layan also died from her injuries, and that Hind is very badly injured, and Hind is begging for help. Saying, please come get me, please come get me.

Hind Rajab [translated]: Hurry!

Omar Al-Qam: Hide. Hide. Where are you exactly, in the car?

HR: Huh?

OQ: Are you in the car?

HR: Yes.

OQ: Hide under the seats. So you can’t be seen at all.

HR: OK.

LA: They eventually get permission from the Israelis, they’re able to coordinate with the Israelis for an ambulance to be dispatched from Gaza to go get Hind. They even give them a map with an approved route to go get her. And we actually show that map for the first time, to show [that] this is real, this is not something we’re just saying.

And the ambulance goes, and you hear it, you hear a sound. And then it just stops, the communication. So, the ambulance was fired upon, and those two rescue workers were killed, and Hind died of her injuries as well.

JS: In the film, you speak to those Palestinian Red Crescent officials that were doing — I mean, it’s like many Americans have seen in the movies, it’s the equivalent of a 911 operator. And you have Palestinian Red Crescent officials talking to Hind, and we hear their interactions with her. And then they bring on a child specialist who also is trying to find a way to also deal with the severe mental trauma that this six-year-old is under, and it’s the lifeline. The only chance they might have to save her life is to keep her spirits up, her talking to them.

Nisreen Qawas: Can you imagine with me that a six-year-old is afraid, is hungry, is thirsty, smells blood around her all the time. Dark is coming on soon, and only the phone is her hope. My voice, Rana’s voice, Omar’s voice, my colleagues, was her only hope.

JS: It’s devastating.

Sharif, talk about, then, the forensic investigation that was done in this film, to determine how the vehicle was shot, how these ambulance workers that went to try to rescue this little girl as she was bleeding out. At one point, she’s describing to the rescue workers — and they have her mother patched in, too, so the mother can talk to her — while Hind herself, who had been shot and is bleeding, says in her six-year-old voice that there’s blood in her mouth, but she doesn’t want to wipe it, because she’s concerned that it’ll upset her mother, because she would be wiping it on her sleeve. And the mother says to her, it’s OK, it’s OK, just wipe your mouth. And that basically is the last time they hear Hind alive.

Sharif, describe how you then did a forensic examination of what exactly happened when that ambulance came to try to rescue her

SAK: Yeah. And just, quickly, on the Hind call, people have to realize this was a three-hour recording. They spoke to her for three hours, and we translated large segments of it. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

There’s a moment where one of the Red Crescent workers — We heard from Omar, the person who first called Layan and initially spoke to Hind, we spoke to Nisreen in the documentary, but the person who spoke to her the most, actually, was called Nisreen.* And she is so traumatized by that call that she refused to do an interview. She couldn’t talk about it without it being too difficult for her.

And there’s a moment where she is trying to provide some solace to this girl who is surrounded by her dead relatives, who’s injured, who’s somehow calm, in a way. And they read, she recites to her the opening verses of the Quran, and she does a line by line with her, and it’s really — I cannot even talk about it without tearing up.

But, to investigate what happened exactly, since we don’t have the testimony of any survivors, because everyone was killed, what we do have is the recording of the phone call between Layan and the Red Crescent, where you hear the gunshots that killed Layan. And we have footage and photos of the aftermath, when civil defense workers were finally able to get to the area, took photos and video of the car, and of the ambulance that was targeted as well.

So, we worked with Forensic Architecture and Earshot, which does audio analysis.

Nicholas Masterson: We can also see the amassing of Israeli tanks in the area, which are positioned at strategic locations, such as the intersections of roads, so they have lines of sight along the main avenues and streets in the area.

SAK: Crucial to the analysis is the short call between Omar and Layan. We hear a total of 64 gunshots fired in just six seconds.

SAK: So, what Earshot found on that call, which was a key portion of audio, is that you can hear 64 gunshots. You hear Layan screaming, and these 64 gunshots that are all similar in characteristics, they’re similar in loudness. And what they found was that the gunshots were about 74 milliseconds apart, which meant that the rounds being fired were up to 900 rounds per minute, which is far in excess of what an assault rifle like an AK-47 can fire, and is more consistent with Israeli army weaponry, such as the machine gun that’s mounted on a Merkava tank. They were also able to analyze the difference between the muzzle blast and the bullet reaching the phone, and thereby analyze or deduce how far the gun was from the phone. So, the shortest distance they found would have been 13 meters away, and the furthest distance would have been 20 meters, 23 meters away from the phone.

And then, what Forensic Architecture did then— Well, first, Forensic Architecture also mapped the car, and mapped all the bullet holes in the car. They found 335 bullet holes in the body of the car, which is really quite astonishing. That doesn’t mean there was 335 bullets, because one bullet can make multiple holes, but it was shot up an incredible amount of times. They focused on one volley of shots, and they could basically tell the direction of where the bullets are coming from.

Then, using this distance that was analyzed from the audio analysis, between 13 and 23 meters, they kind of did a statistical analysis of where the tank was most likely positioned, and you see that in the documentary. And you have to understand, a Merkava tank is one of the largest tanks in the world, and when you see this visual reconstruction of this massive tank not far away from this tiny Kia vehicle, it’s quite shocking.

And, also, it shows how the Israeli soldiers could have seen exactly who was in the car. This is not a far distance. These tanks also have visual equipment for them to be able to see a couple of kilometers away. This, to the naked eye, would have been visible. So, this, I think, analysis was very important.

We also did an analysis of, as Laila mentioned, the ambulance workers waited for three hours before getting approval from the Israeli authorities to go to the area. They provided them with a map and an approved route, which we show in the documentary, which the Red Crescent shared with us. The two ambulance workers go there, and you hear them on the call with Hind. And, on the call with them, you hear them, you hear a blast, and they’re hit. It’s very hard to tell from that blast and do an audio analysis.

But then, what we did afterwards with Forensic Architecture, they basically were able to see where the entry and exit hole of the artillery shell that hit the ambulance was, and it essentially looks like it was a direct hit. You can tell from which direction it was coming from, and it was coming from the direction of the Israeli tanks, which were past the car. And it seems to have been a direct hit that pushed the ambulance back.

And let me just end by saying, we do this level of corroboration, and verification, and journalistic sourcing and analysis to get as close to the truth as possible. Not only in this case, we do it to the execution case, and in everything we cover. The level of detail that’s needed before anything is kind of accepted by the powers that be — for something to be investigated, for something to be condemned — compared to the other way around, where just the merest accusation of something— If you look at how the Israeli military claimed that there was this Hamas command center under Shifa [Hospital], and provided this ridiculous animation. And then, all of these journalistic outlets report on it, don’t report on it critically enough. They go on embeds and give that side of the story a lot of credit. There’s just such a difference in the standard that needs to be met, that is infuriating, actually.

I was sort of angry that we had to go through and do this whole Forensic Architecture analysis and all this. Everyone knows that Israeli soldiers killed this family in cold blood. I don’t think there’s any question about this. That we have to go and prove it with such detail. There’s a part of it that’s actually, I mean— I think it’s important analysis, but there’s a part of it that’s maddening, in a way.

JS: Yeah. I mean, and from the beginning, you have Joe Biden multiple times saying that he saw photos of Hamas fighters beheading babies. Even after the White House clarified that he hadn’t seen any such photos, he continued to promote it.

And then, here you have a case where, even before you did this investigation, there was by far enough evidence available to the public that it was very clear what happened to Hind Rajab and to that ambulance but, as you say, you all went the extra mile to make it indestructible proof that this had, in fact, occurred.

And, on that issue, Laila, what kind of response did the Biden administration offer when you questioned them — or have they offered when others have questioned them — about these cases?

LA: They usually say that Israel is conducting an investigation and will follow up. I mean, they, to my knowledge, haven’t ever offered to conduct their own investigation.

Even with the killing of a U.S. citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh, it took months and months of advocacy, of the family traveling to the United States, for the U.S. to finally say they would have the FBI do their own investigation. And this is a U.S. Citizen.

We know that the U.S. investigates other crimes not involving its own citizens in other countries. But, of course, they unequivocally support Israel, no matter what Israel says or no matter what it does. And even in the case of Hind, which was so shocking and really indefensible, there’s no evidence whatsoever that there were any fighters in the area. I mean, there’s just really no excuse for killing this family in cold blood. They haven’t had a satisfactory answer.

And, in the case of this documentary, we reached out to the State Department, to the White House, for four months, trying to push for an interview, for a sit-down interview. I mean, we’re the premier current affairs show for Al Jazeera English in the United States, and they repeatedly declined. Sharif went to the White House, he went to the State Department, didn’t get called on.

So, it’s really a shame that, on an issue that overwhelmingly interests our audience, the State Department and the White House, while giving other news organizations interviews, chose not to engage with us.

JS: And Laila, while you were filming this documentary, Israel raided the facilities of Al Jazeera in occupied East Jerusalem, banned Al Jazeera from operating in Israel, and also confiscated the equipment of Al Jazeera.

So, when you were pursuing answers from the Israeli government on these specific cases — and specifically on Hind Rajab — did they speak to you? Did they offer any response? How did they approach it, given that they had raided, shut down, and banned Al Jazeera?

LA: They did not respond to either [our] interview request or a list of questions that our producer and director Kavitha Chekuru sent them. So, clearly, they have no interest in engaging.

And we should also remind your audience that, a couple of months into Israel’s bombardment in Gaza, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken was pressuring Qatar to ask Al Jazeera to tone down its coverage. So, while the U.S. talks about the importance of a free press in other countries, they’re trying to put pressure on Al Jazeera in terms of its coverage of Gaza, which is, obviously, very contradictory to their statements elsewhere.

JS: Sharif, the third story — or the one that we haven’t discussed yet of these three stories — is the Al-Ghaf family from the north of Gaza, and they took shelter or refuge in Khan Yunis. The man that is featured in your film, his wife and his son were both killed. When we meet him in your film, he’s with his two daughters in a tent the size of a closet, basically.

Talk about that family and that experience.

SAK: Again, this is unfortunately a very typical story in Gaza, whereby Palestinian civilians are forced or ordered by Israel to go mostly to the south, to so-called safe zones, only to be bombed there anyway. And that’s what happened.

So, tragically, with this family, they flee their home in the North to Khan Yunis relatively early in the Israeli onslaught. Abdullah, his wife Mariham, and four children, two girls and two boys, like so many families, they’re struggling to find food, they’re managing to survive.

On December 28, their youngest son, two-year-old for Firas asks his father for these biscuits with dates that he really liked. So, Abdullah goes to the market to try and find some for him, and that’s when the Israeli military attacks the building where they’re staying. Abdullah’s wife Mariham is killed, and so is his two-year-old son Firas. And that video that you mentioned of Abdullah coming back and putting the biscuit in that shrouded body of his dead two-year-old son, actually went viral at the time, in the way that these videos, that this genocide has been live-streamed, we’ve seen kinds of these videos.

And this one at the time kind of did have this ripple effect, because it’s such a heart wrenching and shocking and moving moment of this father, putting this biscuit in the hand of his son who’s been killed. What most people don’t know is that not only was Abdullah’s son killed, his cousin’s three-year-old son Farid was also killed that day. But, also, Abdullah’s other son eight-year-old Muhammad was badly injured.

And, of course, hospitals at the time are barely functioning because of the Israeli assault — I mean, we could do 20 documentaries just on the attack on the healthcare system in Gaza alone — but they’re barely functioning because of the assault and because of the blockade. Muhammad cannot get the medical attention that he needs. He’s suffering in pain for 25 days without proper medicine, without proper painkillers.

Finally, they get permission for him to be evacuated to Egypt to get medical care, and it’s too late. And you have this moment, Abdullah saying this tearful goodbye to his eight-year-old son, who’s asking his father to come with him. And he’s saying, I can’t come with you, but I’ll try and join you.

Muhammad Al-Ghaf [translated]: I want you to come with me.

Abdullah Al-Ghaf: What?

MG: I want you to come with me.

AG: I’m going to let you go and when I can, I’m going to come too.

MG: OK, don’t cry.

AG: OK, my love. [Kisses.]

SAK: He’s transferred to Egypt and he dies the next day of his injuries.

And, you know, Abdullah ends up then moving with his two surviving children, his two daughters, Wedad and Nagham, to a tent in Rafah. And we don’t know a hundred percent for sure, but I very much doubt they’re still in Rafah, because Israel invaded the Rafah, crossing the so-called Biden administration’s red line, and forcing a million people who had fled to Rafah to flee again. So, by some accounts, they’re back in Khan Yunis.

As we know, we spoke with Airwars and other organizations have documented this as well, that areas in the South that were designated as humanitarian zones have been repeatedly bombed and shelled and attacked by the Israeli military again and again and again. And so, it’s abundantly clear that there’s nowhere safe in Gaza, and life can be snuffed out at any moment.

JS: Laila, I wanted to ask you about one of the people that is featured in the film, Dr. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International. And, of course, one would expect an interview with a human rights organization, it would be a standard part of doing a film of this nature.

But, as someone who follows Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, their reports on Palestine very carefully, I found it striking that Dr. Callamard seemed to state that they believe that Israel was intentionally killing civilians. And, by my reading of it, I don’t know that Amnesty has gone that far before to describe that level of intentionality. Am I right about that?

LA: Yeah. She said, at best, they’re not taking the precautions they’re supposed to take. And, at worst, they’re intending to kill Palestinian men, women, and children. And I think that’s just based on the sheer numbers of people they’ve killed, and the sheer amount of destruction they’ve caused, which is unprecedented. I mean, Israel, by some counts, has bombed more heavily than Germany at the end of World War II. So, in many ways, the bombardment of Gaza, the killing of civilians in such a small place, and the proportions of the population is unprecedented.

And I think if you look at the way they’re conducting this war, in terms of carpet bombing, bombing residents where they know they’re civilians, the execution that Sharif talked about earlier. We couldn’t really get into this in the film but, at the same time that the Salem family experienced this execution of their father and husband, Ayman Salem, there were reports of two other executions in that area of Gaza City during that same period in December. So, it’s really chilling. I honestly think we only know a small fraction of the crimes that have taken place in Gaza.

When you look at what happened to Hind Rajab, Forensic Architecture concluded that the soldiers who fired could likely see the family. So, if soldiers are firing into a car while receiving no crossfire of a family that’s unarmed, that’s just trying to survive, what does that tell you about the way that they’re conducting this war?

And what we’ve heard over and over again from testimony from Gaza is that these soldiers are going into Gaza saying, you all cheered October 7, and basically that there’s no innocent person in Gaza. And, from the very beginning, when their own political leadership says we’re fighting human animals and we must act accordingly, when their military leadership says things like that, calls them “Amalek,” doesn’t differentiate between the people in Gaza, it means everybody is fair game. And that’s been made clear. There seems to be— Not seems to be, there is a wanton disregard for human life in Gaza. I truly think there’s abundant evidence of that.

And, again, I don’t know that we know even the half of it. There’s a reason that they’re obscuring, that they’re not allowing foreign media in. And the journalists of Gaza are doing an incredible job exposing the crimes every single day, but they’re simply not being picked up by Western media, and that’s its own conversation, why that’s the case.

SAK: Well, just to add to Laila’s point, the reason we know Hind’s name and that she’s become an icon is because her voice was captured in this phone call, and it was broadcast and put online. And so, we know her name.

And what Nisreen, one of the Red Crescent workers says in an interview to us says, what makes it more difficult to me, is it only Hind? Are there a thousand Hind stories? Are there 10,000 Hind stories that don’t have a name and a story that didn’t make it to TV? Even though the journalists in Gaza are doing this incredible job of shouldering all the labor of covering this brutal, brutal onslaught, there’s a lot we don’t know.

As many as 150 journalists have been killed, and that is also having a direct effect on what we know and what we understand is happening on the ground there. If we just take, for example, the destruction of Shifa Hospital in April, the largest hospital, what was once the largest hospital in Palestine — it accounted for 30 percent of all medical care in Gaza — it was basically burned to the ground. And then the Israeli forces withdraw, and there’s mass graves found outside with hundreds of bodies. Arbitrary executions, doctors arrested, medical staff tortured. We’re not getting the coverage of what’s happening there.

Firstly, because it’s not being picked up properly by Western media outlets. But, also, the problem is that Israel’s attack on journalists in Gaza, the very people who can expose and report on these atrocities, is having a direct effect. The Committee to Protect Journalists is still trying to verify the killing of four journalists at Shifa. And the reason it’s taking so long to verify the information by CPJ is because journalists are being killed, so there’s no one to report on it.

They said in a statement last month, “The decimation and displacement of Gaza’s media community, which was estimated to number at least 1,000 before the war, means that there are fewer and fewer local journalists left to provide details about the fate of their colleagues.” So you have this horrific cycle. More journalists being killed, less information coming out, and it continues going round and round.

JS: Yeah, Sharif. And, also, it has been unfortunately not shocking, but there’s been an unconscionable silence on the part of so many of our colleagues in the face of record numbers of our colleagues being killed. And not just journalists being killed, but also members of their family being killed as well. And I am so angered when I look at the journalists who will, every day or every week, tweet demanding the freedom of Evan Gershkovich, who’s being held in the prison in Moscow.

I’ve been clear, I think Evan Gershkovich should be freed. I’ve defended Fox News journalists when the Justice Department has gone after them in whistleblower cases. I believe that all journalists have an obligation to stand up and defend freedom of the press, and the institution of journalism in a society that proclaims itself a democratic society. But it’s shameful, it is utterly shameful how our colleagues overwhelmingly have reacted to the killing spree that Israel has gone on against journalists and journalism in Gaza.

And the final question I wanted to ask you, Laila, is: you and I have been in touch over these past nine months on a regular basis, and also as you and Sharif and your team were working on this film. And, in the midst of producing this film, your family learned that more than 200 of your mother’s family members in her extended family have been killed in Gaza over these past nine months.

And I wanted to ask you what that has been like for you, as a journalist, as a Palestinian, all of these dynamics. The silence of your colleagues, the personal toll that it’s taken on your family as well.

LA: I mean, honestly, I think for a lot of Palestinians, the last nine months has felt like a never-ending nightmare. Where this is the most documented genocide in history. Every single day, we wake up to a stream of one horrific video after another. Of horrific stories that, if it were happening anywhere else, it would be front page news, would merit a breaking news alert to our phones. And yet, it’s silence a lot of the time from legacy media institutions.

There’s really no words to capture the agony, the helplessness, the grief that we’ve been feeling. These 200 members of our extended family are people that, for the most part, I wasn’t even able to meet because of the siege on Gaza. Gaza has been an open-air prison for the last 17 years that has also been cut off from the rest of the world. So, actually, getting into Gaza has been very, very difficult for people, even well before October 7th. So, the function of that is that you have family that you’ve never even had a chance to meet.

But as much as I grieve my family, I also grieve people like Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was an amazing poet, professor, sort of public intellectual figure who was, I believe, targeted by the Israeli military and killed along with his sister and her children and, I believe, one of his brothers.

There are so many people that we grieve without even having met. All of the children that we see dismembered, losing their limbs, beheaded. We’ve seen the most horrifically unforgettable images in the last nine months. And it’s been really painful to see the silence, as you mentioned, of my industry.

I went to a few different events in the fall after a record number of journalists had been killed. Seventy-five percent of journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in Gaza. It is a staggering number. And yet, at these events that honored courage in journalism, that honored journalists who are pushing boundaries, there was nothing said on Gaza. I was shocked.

And it’s unforgivable, and it’s shameful. And I think it’s improving a little bit, but I believe my industry has failed in so many ways the last nine months, and this lack of solidarity is something that we definitely won’t forget.

JS: Well, Laila and Sharif, I want to thank you and the whole team that you assembled to do this incredibly powerful film. I hope every single person watches it. But we all, I think, wonder how can we take action, what can we do about this? And I think what you’ve produced offers people at least some small step that they can take. And that is to share this film with every single person that you know, especially people that have decided they don’t want to pay attention, or they think it’s too complicated. Just ask them for a commitment of one hour and 20 minutes of their time to understand what has happened over these past nine months, and what their own government, what the U.S. government is bankrolling, endorsing, providing political support for.

But, one journalist to another, deep gratitude to you, Laila Al-Arian.

LA: Thank you so much, Jeremy.

JS: And thank you very much, Sharif, for all of your great work, and what an important and powerful film you all have produced.

SAK: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” is a new Al Jazeera English documentary that premiered on the program Fault Lines. We were speaking to correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Fault Lines executive producer Laila Al-Arian. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review was done by David Bralow, Shawn Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. And do leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other people to find us as well.

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

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

*Sharif meant to say Nisreen

The post The Night That Won’t End in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The escalating military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel now threatens to expand the conflict in Gaza into a full-blown regional war. For the past eight months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded missile attacks, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians from northern Israel and southern Lebanon. The two sides have fought devastating wars in the past, but a cold peace has reigned for nearly 17 years. That peace is now in jeopardy, as Hezbollah has mobilized in sympathy with Hamas following Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. To discuss the situation this week on Intercepted is Sam Heller, a fellow with the Century Foundation and expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Heller spoke with host Murtaza Hussain on the prospects of the conflict escalating, as well as the potential impact on the Lebanese, Israelis, and the broader Middle East.

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The Israeli military and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah are currently in a state of low-level conflict that began with Israel’s invasion of Gaza last October. This conflict has claimed hundreds of lives, mostly in Lebanon, while forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli and Lebanese civilians from their homes, with no prospect of return. As devastating as the war in Gaza has been, an Israeli war with Hezbollah would be magnitudes worse.

Hezbollah, which was originally created out of local resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, is believed to have up to 200,000 missiles ready to be fired at Israel in the case of a full blown war. Israel, meanwhile, has threatened to destroy Lebanese cities as part of a military strategy known as the Dahiya Doctrine. That doctrine emphasizes inflicting mass damage to civilian infrastructure in a conflict.

A war between Israel and Hezbollah would truly be a catastrophic event for Israel, Lebanon, and the entire Middle East. Though no side truly seems to want such a war, there are strong signs today that it is becoming more likely nonetheless.

Joining me now to discuss the implications of such a conflict is Sam Heller, a researcher and analyst looking at Lebanon, Syria, and the wider neighborhood. He’s a fellow with Century International, the Century Foundation’s Center for International Research and Policy. He joins us from Beirut.

Sam, welcome to Intercepted.

Sam Heller: Hey, thanks for having me.

MH: To start, can you tell us a bit about the political situation in Lebanon at the moment, vis-à-vis Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel? Obviously, tensions have increased in the last eight months since the war in Gaza began, but hostilities between the two stem back much further.

In 2006, there was a very devastating war that took place between Israel and Hezbollah, which resulted in significant destruction and loss of life in Lebanon. Since then, there’s been a détente, which has existed between the two sides going on 17 years or so. But, at the moment, that seems to be breaking up. Israeli officials have threatened widespread retaliation in Lebanon, even in Beirut and other major city centers.

In your estimation, how do people assess the risk of such a war taking place? And what would the implications be for the Lebanese people if it did happen, especially if the skirmishes expand beyond South Lebanon to where they’re mostly confined today?

SH: I mean, obviously, the calm that had mostly prevailed in the country’s south or along — I guess they call it the Blue Line, right? It’s the de facto border that divides Lebanon and Israel.

So, the calm that had held there since 2006 broke down on October 8, the day after October 7. That’s when Hezbollah fired on Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory. The Israelis retaliated, and then it kind of turned into this ongoing tit for tat exchange of fire that has continued, and then sort of mutated, transformed with time, right? As both sides have expanded the scope of their targeting, adapted their tactics. Maybe some of the weapons that they’ve introduced.

I don’t think things have entirely gotten out of control yet. A thing that seemed to characterize the balance on the Blue Line prior to October 8 was that you had both Hezbollah and Israel — even when things would flare up, when there would be, maybe, a provocation or an exchange of fire — it seemed pretty clear that both sides were thinking, I think, pretty deliberately about how to effectively signal to the other. To maintain a sort of reciprocity, and keep up a stable deterrent balance.

Now things are a lot more kinetic and violent, but it looks like both sides are still thinking in terms of how to respond, how to position themselves such that they maintain deterrence opposite their enemy here. I don’t think that either side has really opened things up. I think that’s the concern but, fortunately, we’re not there yet. Whether that’s going to happen, I don’t know, right? I mean, I don’t think anyone does, except for maybe the Israelis.

So, I was here in October — here in Beirut, that is — and then I was out of the country in November/December, and I got back in January. The first thing that I wanted to know when I got back was, I wanted to ask people, hey, how concerned are you, how concerned should I be about the risk of a more open and total conflict? And I got different answers.

I think that what I heard from Western diplomats and some Lebanese who had visibility into some of the processes of mediation that were ongoing to deescalate on the Blue Line, I think they said that they were very concerned. And that they treated the Israelis’ threats to intervene more fully as credible and serious.

But I think that there was a real sort of cognitive dissonance when I would talk with other people here in Lebanon who, I think, were just much less concerned. Either because they were preoccupied with other issues, who would just sort of put what was going on in the South out of mind. Even for people who were more interested in this and thinking about it more, people who basically thought that the Israelis, A, would not undertake a larger intervention because it’s a bad idea, because it doesn’t make sense. Second, that they wouldn’t do it because the Americans wouldn’t allow it.

I also think that it would be a bad idea for the Israelis to do this. I think that it would be, if they attempted to invade, to stage some larger intervention in Lebanon, I think it would likely be a bloody, destructive mess. More for the Lebanese but, for both sides, realistically, right? But then, also one that would be inconclusive, that I don’t think would accomplish what the Israelis seem to be looking for. But I also don’t trust them to make good choices, having seen how they’ve conducted themselves basically since October 7 and in Gaza. I don’t think we should necessarily assume that they’re going to approach this in a totally coolheaded, rational way.

MH: You’ve written a lot about Hezbollah in the context of the Syrian conflict and, of course, the group has changed and evolved a lot since 2006, the last time that there was a war in South Lebanon. There are some estimates that Hezbollah has between 120,000 to 200,000 missiles which could be deployed against Israel in the context of such a war.

If there were a conflict to take place, and if Israel, say, invaded South Lebanon to establish a buffer zone with the goal of seriously degrading or defeating Hezbollah, what do you think the retaliatory consequences could be, from Hezbollah’s perspective? Or what capacity do they have, which have maybe exceeded those they had in the past as a non-state militant group?

SH: I think it’s hard to know precisely what they would do because, I think, Hezbollah is deliberately sort of cagey about its real capabilities and what it could bring to bear. When the group does pin a more specific number to, for example, the number of trained Hezbollah fighters or the number of missiles in its arsenal, it’s hard to know what is real and what is, maybe, braggadocio, a bluff.

But I think that the Israeli voices that seem to be advocating a ground invasion, potentially in occupation of Lebanon, potentially 10 kilometers north of the Blue Line, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. It seems responsive to what seemed to be the preeminent Israeli concerns following October 7. Prior to that, the Israelis seemed most concerned about Hezbollah’s precision missile arsenal, and then the ways that that could threaten Israeli population centers and critical infrastructure.

But, after October 7, it seems like the Israelis — and then this seems to have been additionally conveyed via mediators in some of these talks around de-escalation — the Israelis seem much more concerned with this more proximate threat posed by Hezbollah on the border, right? They don’t want Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces present deployed along the border, they don’t want Hezbollah to be able to amass forces there for a potential October 7-style infiltration attempt. Particularly, I think, after the ensuing exchanges of fire that have followed October 7, I think we’ve seen that Hezbollah’s, their anti-tank guided missiles have seemed particularly effective. So, I think the Israelis also want Hezbollah’s forces beyond the roughly 10-kilometer range of these anti-tank missiles.

I mean, it seems to me if the Israelis push 10 kilometers north — First, that’s not going to be a walk in the park, right? I think that will meet fierce resistance. Second, they’ll have moved the center of gravity of this conflict a little ways north, kind of slightly out of range of some of these northern Israeli communities, from which 60,000 people have been evacuated since October. But it’s still going to be this hot frontline where Israeli forces are going to be targeted with regularity. It’s going to be subject to infiltration attempts by Hezbollah, potentially other armed factions in Lebanon, either Lebanese or Palestinian.

And then, I don’t think that [Hezbollah] have unveiled the totality of their arsenal. I think that some of their longer-range missiles, it seems like maybe they’re holding them in reserve. But then, even with some of the weapons that they have employed so far, they’ve demonstrated a range that is beyond 10 kilometers; for example, these groups of drones. They’ll still be able to reach beyond that buffer, and then to hold these northern Israeli communities at risk.

So, it does not compute for me. I mean, this idea that the Israelis could somehow intervene in this way, and then get what they’re looking for.

MH: Sam, one thing which is very interesting is, presently, the war in Gaza is in its eighth month, and it’s inflicted tremendous damage on Gaza, and certainly millions of people have been displaced, or hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, tens of thousands have been killed. And, certainly, ordinary life in Gaza is no longer possible.

As catastrophic as that war has been, it seems the assessment of many observers would be that a war between Israel and Hezbollah would be far, far more destabilizing for people in Lebanon, people in Israel, throughout the country, potentially, and as well as the region writ large.

What is your sense of the possible escalatory risks in this conflict? If it were to stumble into a very wide-ranging war between these two parties, what’s the worst case scenario that could happen, and how likely do you assess that?

SH: It seems for sure that it would be devastating for both Lebanon and Israel. I mean, Lebanon more than Israel, realistically, given the disparity in relative power here. But I think it would also do real damage to Israel. The ways in which that could expand and metastasize regionally, it’s hard to know.

It’s plausible that it could draw in the Americans more directly, even as I don’t think the Biden administration wants to see an open war between Israel and Hezbollah, and I think that they are making a good faith attempt to avert it. But if it happened, it’s possible that the Americans would intervene more fully and directly in support of Israel.

We could also see stepped-up involvement by Iran, and by other members of the Iran-led Resistance Axis regionally. I think it’s maybe hard to know in all instances how much reserve capacity they have, or how much further they can escalate. I mean, obviously, a lot of them are already involved, but I think that the escalatory potential is real and substantial. And then, obviously, the human toll would be terrible.

MH: This nascent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah started In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. Describe to us the relation between these two conflicts.

Obviously, Israel, in some sense, is disaggregating them, and views this conflict with Hezbollah as, in some sense, independent. But Hezbollah seems to be acting out of sympathy or — if not in coordination with Hamas — to aid or to move forces away from Gaza, to force them to defend the northern border.

What would the impact of a ceasefire have? Would it be salient, and would it actually help perhaps avert a war, which we’re describing at the moment?

SH: Hezbollah and Iran are both members of this Iran-led Resistance Axis. Over the past several years they’ve promoted this idea of the unity of arenas or battlefields, and the possibility of this type of collective response in the event that any Axis member comes under attack. So, this conflict has been a real kind of road test of that.

Hezbollah and Hamas, they don’t seem like they are entirely simpatico. Apparently, from the early years of the Syrian conflict, they were sort of mutually estranged after Hamas sided with the Syrian opposition militants against the government of Bashar al-Assad, alongside which Hezbollah had intervened. Likewise Iran, and various other Iran-linked groups. But that’s a relationship that they were subsequently able to mend. So, they are allies, even if they aren’t totally of one mind.

So, it was Hezbollah that initiated this now months-long conflict along the Blue Line. They justified it at the time as an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people, the resistance in Gaza. But then, also, as a step towards liberating what remains of Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory. I think that rationale has subsequently evolved somewhat as this conflict has become more protracted.

Now, I think that Hezbollah justifies its involvement first as what they call a “support front,” as a means of relieving pressure on Gaza, preoccupying the Israelis, obliging them to commit some substantial portion of their forces on Israel’s northern front with Lebanon. But then, also, I think Hezbollah will say that what they’re doing now, they’ll describe it as a preemptive defense of Lebanon. That, realistically, the only deterrent to fuller Israeli intervention in Lebanon is Hezbollah and its capabilities. And so, Hezbollah — by intervening as it has, and then keeping up this exchange of fire — that by now keeping up with this months-long lower grade war, that they are actually deterring the Israelis from carrying out something larger.

But I think that they will also say that they’ve been suspicious of U.S. and other Western attempts to mediate some de-escalation along the Blue Line, because they’ve said that these are efforts to divide the fronts, to disaggregate between this conflict in Gaza and in Lebanon, which they reject. They refuse to stand down and to engage on the terms of any sort of agreement that might de-escalate conflict along the Blue Line until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. And then, critically, not a unilaterally-announced de-escalation or ceasefire declared from the Israeli side, but one that is agreed with Palestinian factions.

Obviously, that has not, so far, been forthcoming. But I think that Hezbollah will point to the ceasefire in November — [during] which Hezbollah also halted its attacks — as evidence that a Gaza ceasefire would similarly unlock calm on the Blue Line with the Israelis. I mean, it seems like they may be operating according to slightly different calculus.

It seems like, from the start — per, at least, some American and Israeli reporting that we’ve seen — there was discussion in the Israeli government of intervening preemptively against Hezbollah, on the grounds that this war with Hezbollah was the war that Israel had prepared for, and that Hezbollah was the more serious threat to Israel’s security. Why they didn’t do that, I guess, it depends on the account.

I mean, in some articles — I guess, U.S. sources — will say that the Americans dissuaded them. But even as the Israelis ultimately decided against that, part of the logic of the war that they have waged in Gaza has seemed to have been as a sort of deterrent exercise aimed at Hezbollah, and then other regional enemies. That’s why you get Israeli officials pointing to — very explicitly, right? — pointing to Gaza, and then saying that “we will reproduce this in Beirut. We will do this in Lebanon.”

I think that October 7 seems like it was a real, maybe fatal blow to Israel’s security paradigm, this idea that the Israelis could unilaterally impose security on their regional surroundings through sheer force. Everything that they’ve done in Gaza since then, what they’ve done in Lebanon, what they may do in Lebanon, I don’t know if there’s a way for them to reconstitute that deterrence. But It looks like that’s maybe some of what they’ve got in mind, in addition to kind of realizing some of these more specific and tangible concerns related to Hezbollah’s proximity to the border, and then reassuring residents of northern Israel in a way that would permit them to return.

But if you can have a ceasefire in Gaza — which unfortunately does not seem imminent currently — it seems like that is a prerequisite for a deal on the Blue Line.

MH: Sam, it’s a very curious situation, too, because obviously Hezbollah is the most powerful military force in Lebanon — more so than the Lebanese military — but it’s not technically democratically accountable to the Lebanese people, and it’s very polarizing and divisive among some factions of Lebanese society, and maybe particularly so after the Syrian war.

How do other parties in Lebanon perceive the situation? Because, obviously, if there was a war — which Hezbollah seems to be trying to avoid for the most part — the consequences would still impact Lebanese to some degree, without distinction of their political sympathies or other backgrounds. How do Hezbollah fit in politically in Lebanon’s domestic political landscape?

SH: I think that there is maybe a broader anxiety across Lebanon’s different political constituencies and factions that this conflict in the south may turn into a fuller, more devastating war. But, short of that, I think that the really pointed and direct criticisms of Hezbollah’s involvement and its now ongoing engagement with the Israelis have mostly been limited to just elements of the Christian right?

Most of the country seems sort of tacitly understanding of this. And I think that after, I guess, depending on how you count it, several Israeli invasions, extended Israeli occupation of the country, Israel’s regular attempts to scare, to intimidate Lebanese, threats to return the country to the Stone Age. Israel is, I think, generally viewed here among not all, but I think most Lebanese as the preeminent threat. To Lebanon, Hezbollah, which is, yes, controversial, for, I think, good reasons, including some of what it’s done abroad, some of what it does at home. Nonetheless, Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanon that’s able to stand up and to plausibly deter the Israelis.

I think also it’s tough to get a fuller sense of this but, at least anecdotally, I’ve heard some people say — again, not among kind of elements of more right wing Christian parties, but among some Lebanese Sunnis, for example, who had been alienated from Hezbollah as a result of Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, in support of the government of the Assad regime — that there’s been some real appreciation for and support of Hezbollah since October. As they’ve seen Hezbollah, and then alongside it some other factions, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad has carried out a few actions, the Lebanese chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood has reactivated its armed wing.

But principally it is Hezbollah that has been carrying this front, and then waging now this extended and costly fight in support of Gaza.

MH: Sam, my last question, given the implications of this conflict, if it were to take place — a very broad-ranging conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, both regionally and, for the people of the two countries, as well as the broader world — what should U.S. and foreign diplomats be doing to try to bring this conflict to an end? What would be most efficacious in steering off this potential disaster? And what can they do in the short term to try to bring the two sides back from the brink?

SH: You need a Gaza ceasefire.

There may have been some optimism earlier on in the war, that the U.S. in particular might be able to mediate some agreement to achieve de-escalation or calm on the Blue Line. But it seems like they hit a wall, right? Because I think that it became apparent that, really, all that the Americans and other Interested outsiders could do was sort of precook a deal. Hezbollah isn’t willing to engage on the substance currently of any agreement.

But then, you can talk with some Lebanese figures who are proximate to Hezbollah, who I think can plausibly represent its outlook and interests. And then, you can sort of pre-negotiate an agreement that is likely acceptable to Hezbollah. You can have that sort of fleshed out and in place. But then, you can’t consummate it until you have the Gaza ceasefire.

Maybe the Americans thought that they’d have one by now, right? That that was more achievable. It seems like they’ve made some announcements to that effect prematurely. But, because of the way that all these things interlock and fit together, and then because of the so-far unavailability of that just really crucial piece, there is just no immediate prospect for turning this off.

And then, periodically before that, you get these Israeli threats to substantially escalate. And then, like, how credible that is, whether this is the time that it will materialize. Who knows?

MH: Sam, thanks so much for joining us on Intercepted.

SH: Thanks for having me on.

MH: That was Sam Heller, a researcher and analyst looking at Lebanon, Syria, and the wider neighborhood, and a fellow with Century International. 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 by David Bralow, Sean Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post War Clouds Over Lebanon as Hezbollah and Israel Clash appeared first on The Intercept.

An Israeli military operation in Gaza this week aimed at rescuing four hostages from Hamas killed over 270 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. The Nuseirat refugee camp, where the attacks occurred, became a scene of horror as the injured sought care from Gaza’s few remaining hospitals. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator, witnessed the aftermath. She joins host Murtaza Hussain on Intercepted to discuss what she saw following the Israel Defense Forces attack alleged to involve grave war crimes, and the ongoing impact of the war on Gaza’s civilian population.

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The last few days have seen a tremendous escalation in violence in the Gaza Strip, with hundreds of Palestinians reportedly killed and wounded in the course of an Israeli military operation aimed at rescuing four hostages being held by Hamas. Authorities in the Strip announced that 274 people were killed in Israeli strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp, along with over 400 wounded. Among the dead in those attacks included 64 children, according to local health authorities.

Very few hospitals continue to operate in the Gaza Strip amid a brutal Israeli military campaign that has now stretched into its eighth month. The staggering increase in civilian dead and wounded in the attacks this week has stretched the remaining healthcare infrastructure in the territory to the brink, and there’s little prospect of an end to the carnage in sight.

Joining me now to discuss the situation, as well as what she herself has witnessed in recent days, is Karin Huster, a medical coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, currently working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza. Due to the conditions in Gaza, the connection and audio quality are not optimal, but we’re very grateful to have her joining us today.

Karin, welcome to Intercepted.

Karin Huster: Thank you for having me.

MH: Karin, just before we were about to begin recording, you had to suddenly leave and transport from a different location to another for security concerns. Can you tell us a bit about what’s going on on the ground in Gaza, where you are presently?

KH: We are in the town of Deir al Balah, which is in the center of Gaza, and it has been receiving some pretty intense attacks from the Israeli forces for the past, I would say, 10 days. At the same time as the town of Rafah, which is south of it, also has been under attack.

There are activities every day. And so, sometimes we have to adjust times that we leave the office to go home. It’s just the way of life in Gaza.

MH: Karin, you’ve been working in the Strip on a medical mission for Doctors Without Borders. Can you tell us a bit about the context of the mission that brought you there, how long you’ve been there, and what the overarching support role is for the medical system in Gaza?

KH: Yeah. I am in charge of medical activities for Doctors Without Borders. We’ve been in Gaza for many, many, many years, and we were doing quite high-level reconstructive plastic surgery for victims of war before October 7. And then, when October 7 happened we, of course, had to pivot activities and focus 100 percent on supporting the health system to respond to the needs [of] wounded patients, the collapse of the healthcare system. So, strengthening the primary healthcare system, looking at malnutrition, supporting vaccination. We are one of the actors trying to make sure that the health system doesn’t completely collapse.

We have activities in Rafah, and we were there at first because, as you all know, the internally displaced people had moved to the south. Everybody had moved from the north to the south at the orders of the Israeli forces. And so, this was obviously the most critical place for us to be.

We started primary health care activities. We did maternities, maternity support, antenatal care, postnatal care, deliveries. We are doing trauma care — so, support to hospitals — but [also] doing surgeries and plastic surgeries, orthopedic surgeries.

And then, as the war started to come closer to Rafah and then into Rafah, we moved our activities so that we put them where the people now are, with Deir al Balah. We were already in Deir al Balah at Al-Aqsa Hospital, where we had some surgery activities related to victims of war wounds, and we had escort to the emergency department of Al-Aqsa hospital. And what we did when the people were displaced north towards Deir al Balah, we started this primary health care programming again, because people didn’t have access to care. So, that’s where we’re at.

Something else we did in Rafah before we left was, we had a trauma stabilization point, which was right behind the front lines when Israel was attacking. We were fearing that Israel was going to invade Rafah; this was on the news for many weeks. So, we had prepared a trauma stabilization point which would stabilize patients that were received from the front lines. And then referred to field hospitals or other hospitals within Gaza.

So, we did that for two weeks. And then, when it became too dangerous, we closed that. And now we’re exclusively in Deir al Balah, but also looking at the north to see if there are some activities we can start there.

MH: Karin, the past week has seen a huge uptick in Israeli military operations, particularly one operation aimed at rescuing a number of hostages held by Hamas. Can you describe the aftermath of this attack, which took place in or around Deir al Balah, and reportedly resulted in tremendous civilian casualties, including at the hospital that you were working at?

KH: Yeah. So, it wasn’t one attack. As a matter of fact, it started with an attack in Deir al Balah itself, not far away from our office. And that attack was the first event that happened that day. It was a huge explosion, and it generated a lot of victims; wounded and dead. And all of those casualties were brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital.

Maybe half an hour after this initial attack in Nuseirat, which is a little bit north of Deir al Balah. Nuseirat was attacked by the Israeli forces — a very intense attack, as we now are learning — and that also resulted in a tremendous caseload of patients and many fatalities that were initially brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital, which is right next to Nuseirat. But it’s a very small hospital with not a lot of capacity.

And so, everybody was brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital. Al-Aqsa Hospital is the only Ministry of Health hospital that is still standing in the middle area. And, as a matter of fact, in the south, period, there are no more hospitals in Rafah, aside from two NGO field hospitals. And so, all victims are brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital, pretty much de facto. There is no incident command center, and the communications, as you know, are very poor, so everybody is brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital, regardless of Al-Aqsa Hospital’s capacity.

To start with, on June 8 — that infamous day — was already extremely poor. The past week had seen two huge mass casualty events. With that, an overpopulation of patients and internally displaced patients in the hospital. So, the hospital normally has a bed capacity of 250. Before June 8, [it] had 600 patients in that hospital, plus several hundred internally displaced people who believed that it is safer to be on the ground sleeping in a hospital than being in a plastic tent. I think they’re right.

That’s sort of the situation to set you up. These events happen. The hospital is completely overloaded. It felt like a 747 had crashed, and all the victims, the wounded, and the fatalities were brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital. Completely unable to manage, obviously, such a caseload, when we arrived, pretty much the entire floor of the emergency department, which is relatively big, was full of patients on the grounds. No mattresses for them. Critical patients, patients who were expectant — so on their way to dying. Kids, moms, young women, adults, elderly people. Everything.

They attacked in the middle of the day, people were going to the market. There was no warning to those attacks. So, obviously, the impact was massive. The scene was really difficult. It’s very difficult for us to see three-year-olds, to see young adolescents being there with enormous wounds that will affect them for the rest of their lives if they survive. It’s really difficult to see scenes like that. So, a very, very intense situation. It was super-hot inside. It smells, you know? The smell of warm blood that just impregnates you, because so many people are bleeding.

And so, we just spent our time. We went there, two nurses and one physician, and then we had our wound care clinic staff that we also moved to the emergency department. And, basically, you work in the chaos, you know? There is no time for fancy anything. You have survival kits, you cut people’s clothes so that you can reach the wounds. You pack wounds, you stop the bleeding. You try as best as you can to stabilize patients, so that they can wait for when there is a time for them to go to the operating room, or for them being transferred to another facility, if that is an option.

MH: And Karin, as you mentioned, there are very few medical facilities still operating in Gaza in general, but also in the region you’re operating in. Also, Gaza is also subject to an effective blockade, with the result in decrease in access to medical materials, and so forth.

How is this strangling of the health care system impacting the ability to deal with these very catastrophic and large numbers of wounded and dead coming into hospitals?

KH: Well, I mean, the math just doesn’t work, right? You have less and less structures and more and more patients, more and more victims. So, I’m not a math expert, but when you reduce the bed capacity but you increase the wounded, you increase your attacks, your strikes on the civilians, you won’t have enough space for people to have a bed. You won’t have enough healthcare workers to attend to all of these victims. You won’t have enough operating rooms to operate in. You don’t even have enough fuel to go and get the patients with your ambulances, and you won’t have enough supplies or medical equipment to take care of everyone. That’s absolutely a nightmare.

For us, it’s been since May 7th that the Rafah crossing between Rafah and Egypt has been closed. There have been very, very few things, very, very few trucks that have been able to come across. Certainly, for Doctors Without Borders, we’ve had no medical equipment, no medicines that have been able to enter. So it’s a situation that, if the status quo remains, it would worsen everything, and it will definitely worsen the outcome for the poor patients who have been able to survive these massacres.

MH: Karin, you’re obviously attending to a population which is undergoing incredible trauma, and it’s been about eight months now this military defensive has gone on, and all the human and social impacts of it on the people of Gaza.

What have you observed, in terms of how people are coping or not coping with these attacks? It seems almost unthinkable, but you’re seeing it firsthand, the impact on this population. How is this affecting Gazan society? How is it transforming people in ways people may not be expecting?

KH: It’s shocking to me every time I look at some — I don’t speak Arabic. So, really, my way of speaking is through my eyes and looking at people. And every time when somebody comes with me in the emergency department with their child who is very severely wounded, or they are calling me to show me their grandmother, begging me to do something about it. And they just raise their hands in helplessness.

Part of them is just empty. They’re just in automatic survival mode. They have no choice, right? If they live, they live. But they really ask all the time: What kind of life is that? Some of my colleagues have told me that I’d rather be dead than going through this day in and day out with no hope that this is going to be finished.

But, really, for me, still— For example, the healthcare workers, I find that they are incredibly resilient. I think if this were to happen in the United States, we would absolutely not have the capacity and the resilience, the wherewithal to withstand such a repeated assault on our population. We’re just not used to that. Gazans are used to this. It’s been happening for decades and decades, and I think it helps them cope, in a way, with this, right?

But their eyes are tired, they’re empty. It’s difficult. They show me their kid, and what is it that we can do? Yet they are not angry. They’ve never been angry toward me or towards my other colleagues. It’s just helplessness.

I think they know that they were not counted before, that they were not thought of as Palestinians. But they do know now that the world is watching. It’s not doing enough, but the world is watching. And they are very thankful about this, and It brings them hope. Many people have told me that.

MH: Karin, during the time you’ve been in Gaza, are there particular cases emblematic of the human impact of the war that have stuck in your mind? Either patients at the hospital or scenes you’ve witnessed in the territory. Are there particular stories or individuals that you think people should know about?

KH: Yeah. The most recent one happened on June 8th, when we responded to this Nuseirat incident.

When we entered the emergency department, it was complete chaos. We all figured out how to dance in this chaos, and I started to know my area and all the, I don’t know, maybe 80, a hundred patients that were lying there. Two struck me pretty hard, even though I’m usually pretty good at blocking it, especially in the heat of the moment.

But one was this little kid. She was three to four years old, I don’t know. And she was lying in the fetal position on the ground. Nothing, no mattress, no nothing. She was alone. Usually, in Palestine, everybody, if you can, you always have somebody that accompanies you. And, if you’re young like this, it will always be your parents.

But she was alone, and behind her was an elderly woman, completely confused. And people were bleeding everywhere. This was an intolerable scene for us, let alone for a little kid. And my eyes were just focused on this kid who was in this fetal position. Cold, completely wet from her blood. She had a big head wound.

And so, I asked, left and right. I said, is this your kid? You know, with gestures. And, “no.” My first reaction was, I’m just going to carry her. I can’t leave her on the ground like this, this baby. I have children. And so, I asked the person next door, can you at least check in on her?

And I would do my rounds, and then come back, and see this kid. Then, eventually we took all her clothes off, and wrapped her in a survival blanket, still completely on the floor, and gave her some pain medicine. She fell asleep. And, eventually, her uncle came.

I couldn’t even imagine what was going on in her little brain. The woman who was right behind her was actually the aunt of one of our pharmacists, whose house in Nuseirat was the victim of all the shooting that happened, and the missiles. And our pharmacist lost two family members; one who was three years old and another adult cousin.

And this aunt was severely wounded, completely confused. It was clear that maybe she had dementia on top of it, but she was absolutely confused. She would be falling on the ground. Normally, if you were in the United States, somebody like this is given, first of all, all the medicines to calm them down, but is given, also, all the right care immediately, and the attention from one nurse because that patient is so confused.

But there, she was just left to her own devices. And it really pained me to see that this is what was the result of these strikes, these repeated strikes that have been happening on Gaza. It’s these stories that just hurt you.

Back in January, I was in Gaza in January/February. And, on our way, our driver said, “You know, Karin, they killed a fisherman this morning.” So, the Navy is out there, and they bomb if fishermen are beyond a particular distance from the beach. And so, he was just killed, you know? He was fishing. Just fishing.

And then, the last one, that’s not really a story about anybody; it’s maybe the story about everybody. But when I was there in January, we were there while they were destroying Khan Yunis. It was intense every night of the five weeks that I was there. And every time I heard the plane go around, I would know when the bomb would drop, because you get used to the patterns and the time that you wait. During the days when that happened, you’d see the smoke. But every night I would hear the bomb and then [explosion sound]. And I would think, that’s it. That’s one family that’s gone.

That haunts me all the time. This big explosion, for me, is the soul of one Palestinian family going to heaven. Being blown to smithereens and going to heaven. It’s not one person’s story, but it’s, for me, the people of Gaza’s story. And that hasn’t left me.

A little bit less now, but definitely in January/February, every time I heard this noise, it was poof, one family, gone. Poof. One family, gone.

MH: Karin, thank you so much for sharing that.

A number of Doctors Without Borders’ family members have been killed or wounded in the war since it began. Can you talk a bit about the risks that the medical workers and their families have faced since the start of the conflict?

KH: Well, our staff are — and I will talk about my Palestinian colleagues, not the international medical staff — but Palestinian colleagues not only are healthcare workers, but they’re also Palestinians. So they live with the same dangers [as] the other Gazans. They also live in areas that are unsafe. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

So, they can also be the victims of strikes. And then, at the same time, they have to care for others, they have to care for their Palestinian co-patriots, they have to care for the wounded in the hospital. So, they have this double duty and this double weight on them, which is really, really difficult.

Some of them have left to Egypt, but many are choosing to stay. And, for many, it is, in any case, a super-painful choice to make. Sometimes they do it because they have very young children and they want to save them, you know? Exactly what we would do if we had the opportunity to leave.

But some stay. One of my colleagues, Dr. Sohaib, he’s staying here, and he sent his wife and his young daughter to Egypt. He had to pay about $10,000 for the two of them, and he’s chosen to stay with us, and to work to help the Palestinian people.

MH: You’ve worked with Doctors Without Borders missions before in other countries, including wartime situations, such as in Iraq during the war against ISIS. What can you say is different about the situation in Gaza?

KH: I think, first of all, we have a population that’s prisoner, right? We have a population that’s stuck in an enclave with no choice to get out. It’s a population that’s been abused through decades of Israeli, either occupation or Israeli oversight and control. And now it’s been the victim of relentless attacks by a military that’s one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world, with no moral compass whatsoever.

And so, it’s a military that has no hesitation to kill, to have huge collateral damage, to strike one particular target that they might have. And so, that I think is very unique, to have a country that calls itself a democracy but that behaves in a way that has completely lost any sense of humanity. It’s unique to me. I’ve never seen something like that.

MH: Karin, given that the Israeli military is carrying out these attacks in one hand with grave disregard for civilian casualties at best, at the same time, it’s controlling the access to this population, which is cut off from most international press. Its access to medical aid and food aid is very restricted.

How are these two dual pressures making this humanitarian situation worse? And I could ask how, if you had access to a free flow of medical supplies, how would that change the situation? And how is the current situation exacerbating the amount of death and chaos taking place in Gaza at the moment?

KH: Well, I think there is no question that, if we were able to scale up — which is something that we’ve been asking for eight months, besides asking for a ceasefire and a permanent ceasefire — but also, if we were able to open the Rafah crossing, Kerem Shalom, or any other crossing to let the aid go in, to let food go in, to let humanitarians go in, humanitarian aid, so that we could scale up to the needs, it would most certainly help patients to have better outcomes. It would help them survive things that people may not have survived. It would be able to save limbs that maybe today are amputated.

We can’t send anybody. There is a list right now of patients that the U.N. has, and it’s a list of 25,000 patients that should be referred outside of Gaza for further tertiary care. That’s not just victims of trauma; it’s also oncology patients, right? So, cancer, a variety of conditions. It could be congenital diseases, kids with malformations that could be completely resolved with surgery, if we had access to surgery here.

And so all, all of these folks, 25,000 of them are waiting, hopelessly waiting, because there is not one border that is open for them to cross, to get that so-desperately-needed care.

MH: Karin, tens of thousands of people are reported to have been killed since the start of the war, and the true figure may not be known given the number of people buried under rubble in airstrikes and so forth since it began last October. Of course, many, many of those are believed to be innocent civilians, including men and women.

But, particularly in Gaza, given the young age of the population generally, it seems that a disproportionate number are also children. Can you talk a bit about the impact specifically on children that you’ve seen as a medical worker in Gaza, of the war, and of these IDF attacks?

KH: Right now, when I look at kids, I look at kids who have nothing to do. There is no school, obviously. There is not even a system, because humanitarian aid is so scarce, we can’t scale up. You don’t have the usual actors in the Gaza Strip that are able to provide some activities or some education to all the children of Gaza, or at least even to some. It’s very, very restricted.

So, you have kids who are just doing absolutely nothing, who are losing, right now, eight months of schoolwork. This is huge. I mean, there are students who were going to be doctors, who were going to be lawyers. It’s an economy, it’s a society that’s going to be wounded and maimed for the long term. These things will have repercussions for decades. The future is just bleak for them.

On top of it, I think you are going to see — and this is just an observation — but when I see the number of children with amputations, we are going to have to deal with the biggest cohort of amputated children in the world. And we don’t even have access to prosthetics, we don’t even have access to good follow-up for these children as they grow. To change the prosthetic, to do some limb adaptation, all the things that come with having an amputation. That’s fancy magical thinking. We hardly can save lives, so forget about doing what we need to do for kids with amputations.

It’s really sad, when you think about that.

MH: Karin, you’re there on the ground right now and dealing with the full force of the implications of this military campaign and the impact on the civilian population. In the United States, there’s still debates and the discussion of pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Is there a message you’d like to send from Gaza at the moment to the rest of the world about what should happen and what needs to happen there going forward, for the sake of the humanitarian situation?

KH: People in the United States, people around the world have to stop thinking of Palestinians as this — I don’t know what people think about Palestinians — but they have to believe, they have to think of Palestinians as being just like them. They are people who love to go to the beach during the weekend, to hang with their families, to do a barbecue, to go and smoke shisha together. Women [like] to get together and talk, they like to do sports. Just like us, there is no difference. They should have access to that same freedom.

Macklemore, I think, had a line in his song that said, “what if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?” And that’s what we need to do.

Macklemore [Singing “Hind’s Hall”]: What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids? If the West was pretending that you didn’t exist, you’d want the world to stand up, and the students finally did. Let’s get it.

KH: We need to think about, what if this was us? What if this were us in Gaza? These were my kids, that was my son who was amputated, my daughter who died. Maybe then, when we internalize things a little bit more, would we really pick up the phone, call our congresspeople, call our representatives, and put relentless pressure on them and on our government, and on governments around the world. To not just keep talking, but to actually do something.

I am heartened by the number of people here. There’s a small cohort of people in Gaza that are taking the risk to come here, and to tell the people of Gaza that we are thinking about them, that they are worth being saved, that they are worth fighting for. And I know there is the same happening in many places around the world. I’ve seen the young people really stand up for Palestinians, but I want to see the older people like me, the forties, the fifties, the sixties. I want them to stop being silent.

People are being silent, and they seem to be ashamed of voicing their disagreement of these inhuman strikes, repeated inhuman strikes on the people of Gaza. Like, what is wrong with people, that you don’t feel comfortable to criticize a government that has been completely ignoring the international humanitarian laws for eight months, now? Since when is this wrong, to tell somebody that what they’re doing is unacceptable and that they need to stop?

And, for the United States, it has the power to stop them. So, what is it doing? What is it waiting for?

MH: Karin Huster, thank you for joining us on Intercepted.

KH: You’re very welcome. Thank you for giving me the time to come to your show.

MH: That was Karin Huster, a medical coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, currently working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza.

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 by David Bralow, Shawn Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. And special thanks to Ali Gharib.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Medical Aid Worker Describes the Bloody Aftermath of Israel’s Hostage Rescue appeared first on The Intercept.

After eight months of brutal fighting with no end in sight, the war in Gaza is at risk of metastasizing into a regional conflict. Recent tensions between Egypt and Israel — normally security partners who have cooperated in the blockade of Gaza — have thrown into stark relief the growing risks of a spillover from the war.

This week on Intercepted, security expert H. A. Hellyer discusses with co-host Murtaza Hussain the growing hostilities between the two countries, which have resulted in Egypt joining the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, threats to annul the Camp David peace accords, and even a fatal shooting incident between Egyptian and Israel troops.

The war in Gaza is at risk of exploding into a far greater war that could cause the destruction of the tenuous security architecture that has held the region together for decades.

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

In recent weeks, tensions have risen between Israel and Egypt. Though these countries are key security partners who’ve cooperated for years in the blockade on Gaza, they are now facing a potential breaking point in their relationship.

Israel and Egypt have been bound together for decades by the Camp David peace agreements, signed under former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. That agreement has kept the peace for years despite opposition from much of the Egyptian public, but it is now being pushed to the brink by the Israeli assault on Gaza and, in particular, Israel’s attacks on the southern city of Rafah.

In recent weeks, Egypt has threatened to suspend the Camp David peace accords, publicly criticized Israeli actions in Gaza, and even join the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel. A shootout in late May between Egyptian and Israeli soldiers killed one Egyptian soldier. These events have threatened to erode this relationship further into open conflict.

Joining me now to discuss the history of Egypt/Israel relations and the growing tensions today is Dr. H. A. Hellyer. Dr. Hellyer is a scholar in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and a senior associate fellow in security studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies — or RUSI — in London.

Dr. Hellyer, welcome to Intercepted.

Dr. H.A. Hellyer: Thank you so much. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

MH: So, Dr. Hellyer, Egypt has been a critical part of the conflict in Gaza since the beginning as a mediator between Israel and Hamas. It’s also a longstanding security partner of Israel, and helped to administer the blockade of Gaza prior to this current conflict.

Can you give us an overview of Israel and Egypt’s ties since the start of this war, and what tensions have emerged as it’s continued into its eighth month?

HAH: If we’re talking about this particular, how should we say, phase, of the conflict? Because I think there’s a tendency to look at what’s going on right now in Gaza as having started on October 7. And, of course, that’s not the case. It’s very clear that this has a much longer history going back decades, right? I mean, what is going on right now is indistinguishable, or very difficult to separate out, from what’s happening in the West Bank at the moment, as well, and what’s happened in Gaza before October 7.

But if we limited to October 7 onwards, then I think what you saw post-October 7 were a few things from Cairo’s perspective. The first was that they had maintained a certain level of coordination with Hamas as the de facto governing authority of Gaza. You had very clear coordination and engagement there. At the same time, you had coordination and engagement with the Israelis. And, of course, Cairo was the first Arab capital to sign a peace treaty with the Israelis more than 40 years ago, and that’s been a consistent factor in that regard.

But also, Cairo is engaged with pretty much every Palestinian faction on the ground as well. The Palestinian Authority, Fatah and so on. So, Cairo has really been, I would say, a linchpin of any type of negotiations that have taken place; not simply over the past nine months, but going back many, many years.

And I think that Cairo was, of course, as the rest of us, taken by surprise, in terms of what happened on October 7. There were reports indicating that they suspected something was going to happen on the 7th of October and apparently alerted the Israelis, according to some reports, but I’ve never seen more details than that. And, also, nothing to suggest that they knew about the scale of it. Simply that they saw chatter going on and wondered what was going to happen, but nothing more than that. And, of course, the Israelis got much more than that, and chose to ignore it, as we know now from all the reports.

But once that took place, I think Cairo was very clear in condemning any attack on civilians. But then, when the reprisals and the retaliations by the Israelis began in October on Gaza, I think Cairo was extremely concerned. Very vocal, very public about its opposition to the retaliation. And then, the retaliation, of course, developing into a much wider, large-scale bombardment on Gaza that caused a huge displacement of Palestinians within Gaza.

You have Palestinians in Gaza now who have been displaced 5, 6, 7 times in the past nine months. So, there was that concern, of course. And they were very public about it. I think that this has been very clear in international fora, in the media, it’s been quite clear that there’s been, at least on the rhetorical level, an incredible amount of work that has gone in from the Egyptian side for many reasons. One of which is the concern that the Israelis are trying to push Palestinians out of Gaza and into the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, something that Egypt rejects completely.

I remember when this first came up back in, I think it was October time. There are a lot of people sort of belittling the suspicion that this is what the Israelis wanted to do. Having said that, a few months later, it no longer seems or no longer seemed quite so far-fetched, because there were all of these leaks from the Israeli cabinet about, this is actually something that they were discussing, but certainly that was a big concern of Cairo’s.

So, there’s a lot of factors that go [into this].

MH: Dr. Hellyer, can you explain the Egyptian military’s relationship with Hamas historically? Obviously, it participated in the blockade of Gaza, but it also has various forms of coordination with Hamas, as a result of the fact that it’s the governing power in Gaza for so many years.

How does it view Hamas in the context of this conflict, and as a political actor, generally?

HAH: That’s an excellent question. Because Hamas was, of course, founded as a Brotherhood-linked movement back in the 1980s. And, of course, the Egyptian state is nothing if not very, very clear about its opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, at least in the country; I say “at least in the country” because you’ve seen over the last decade that Hamas and the Egyptian state have had a very interesting relationship.

Some parts of the Egyptian state are very, very unwilling to countenance, I think, any type of engagement beyond outright opposition, but these parts of the state I don’t think are in ascendancy at all. And I think what you have instead is a very pragmatic view by the Egyptian state to engage with Hamas, and we’ve seen that very widely over quite some years now, where Cairo has hosted Palestinian reconciliation talks, hosted very senior Hamas leadership for meetings and conferences, and so on.

And it’s not uncommon to hear people very close to circles of power in Cairo say things like, “Hamas has to be part of the solution.” Which isn’t typically what you would expect, but there’s a few things here.

One, officially — officially — Hamas disconnected itself from the Muslim Brotherhood, I think, in 2016 or something. I’d have to go back and check the actual date. But it officially made that statement, and I think that that was a clear signal to the Egyptians that, look, we’re a national movement in Palestine, and when you engage with us, it’s on that basis. We’re not an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood movement that you are so opposed to. And, certainly, I think the Egyptians took it as such.

The other thing is that Egypt, in terms of foreign policy, is actually incredibly pragmatic, and you’ve seen that time and again over the past decade. Generally speaking, they’re actually really pragmatic in terms of foreign policy. And I think that, if you look at the situation on the ground, what was, really, Egypt going to do except engage with Hamas? I mean, Hamas were governing, at least partially — and I say “partially” because, of course, Gaza was and remains under Israeli occupation, and even in the heyday of quote-unquote “Hamas governance,” it was still under occupation, so they never really governed it in a full sense — they were in control of huge parts of the quote-unquote “governing apparatus” in Gaza. So, what exactly was Egypt going to do?

And I think they were very pragmatic in that regard. I’ve never seen anybody express any regrets about that from the Egyptian side.

MH: And Dr. Hellyer, this brings me back to recent events as well. Obviously, the Israeli military has been threatening — and, in some sense, carrying out — a military operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah. There were reports in late May that an Egyptian soldier was killed in exchange of fire between Egyptian soldiers and the Israeli military in the course of that operation. Of course, that’s a very sensitive and incendiary potential situation to take place between these two countries.

Can you talk about why Rafah is so critical to Egypt? And also the implications of that incident, and how it was received in Egypt itself?

HAH: First, In terms of that particular clash; if you allow me, I’ll explain that, and then go on to Rafah itself.

The Israeli press reported last week — I can’t remember which outlet did so — but the Israeli press reported last week that the way in which that clash unfolded was that Israeli soldiers were trying to get closer and closer to the border with Egypt at the crossing. And they were doing so purposefully, to see how much they could get away with, before there would be a response from the Egyptians. So, an intentional provocation in order to test the waters, as it were. An Egyptian soldier responded — this is what was in the Israeli press — and the Israelis shot him.

That’s apparently what happened, again, according to the Israeli press. I think [it was] very reckless, but I think their entire operation there has been incredibly reckless. What we saw in terms of public opinion thereafter was a huge amount of anger and grief. Grief, of course, about the Egyptian soldier. I saw that on Egyptian social media a lot from, again, official/unofficial sources.

You know, I don’t think that there’s any doubt that in Egypt the official sentiment that’s being expressed, which is very critical of Israel, and the popular sentiment around the Palestinians are not particularly far off at all from each other. I think that it’s pretty much identical. It might be that public opinion is even more inflamed, but I think that when you see expressions of anger from the Egyptian side in official channels, they are reflecting a huge popular feeling more generally.

When it comes to Rafah, there’s a number of things here. First, Rafah has the closest city to the border with Egypt. So, as I said earlier, the fear that the Israelis are trying to push Palestinians out of Gaza and displace them — i.e., ethnically cleanse them — to Sinai is a fear and concern that the Egyptians have held for a very, very long time, that the Israelis are seeking to — I mean, I’m speaking from the Egyptian perspective here — they’re seeking to extinguish the Palestinian cause by removing Palestinians to Sinai, and that’s the solution for Gaza. They’ve long held the suspicion about the quote-unquote “Sinai solution.”

When hostilities broke out in October, there were reports — and I think that now everybody knows this — that the Israelis had considered this to be a possible option of quote-unquote “temporarily displacing” Palestinians to Sinai, so that they could go into Gaza and do much more. It was very interesting to see that even some European states — and I think the United States up until, I don’t know, maybe end of October, sometime in November — were at least considering whether or not this would be an option. Cairo made it extremely clear that this was a no-starter, that this would not be allowed, that they would not permit this sort of a strategy, even if it was touted as temporary. And that was that. I mean, to be fair, once Cairo made their wishes very clearly known, I think any western state that had thought that this might be something to pursue gave up on it.

Now, your listeners might wonder why Cairo was so adamant in this regard, because it was being touted as temporary, not permanent. Again, from Cairo’s perspective, and I think that this is borne out by history, the suspicion is that this wouldn’t be temporary, that it would be permanent, and that it would serve as a precursor to ethnically cleansing Gaza, and Cairo didn’t want to be complicit in that ethnic cleansing exercise. And, when I say history bears this out, I do not know of any situation in modern history where Palestinians were forced to leave any part of Palestine and were allowed to return. I think that that’s just history from 1948-onwards. So, the Egyptians were not unreasonable in that regard, I don’t think.

When it comes to Rafah, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The peace treaty has its articles, it also has its annexes. There’s an annex that specifies what type of troops, weaponry, arms, artillery, and so on, are allowed to be in different parts of Egypt’s territory and Gaza. Particularly when we’re talking about the Sinai because, of course, the peace treaty was signed following the occupation of Sinai by the Israelis in the 1967 war.

The Sinai, as well as Gaza — a part of Gaza, at least — is split up into four zones: A, B, C, D. Sinai is basically A, B, C, it’s divided into those three zones. And then Zone D. Zone D is what’s called the Philadelphi Corridor. And the Philadelphi Corridor runs along the border of Gaza and Egypt. It’s a very thin corridor; I think it’s 100, or a couple of hundred meters, in terms of width, it’s not breadth. But it goes from the whole line of the border. And it’s very, very clear in the annex that Israel and Egypt cannot have much in there. It’s got to be very, very light in terms of any type of artillery, and so on.

And, of course, Israel, when it took the Philadelphi corridor, and when it came to Rafah, it had huge tanks with the full range of stuff that you’d expect the IDF to have, but they moved it into the Philadelphi corridor. So, this was actually a clear violation of the peace treaty, and Egypt had said many times before this would be unacceptable, but the Israelis went ahead and did it anyway. And they are now in control, completely, of the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza side, not on the Egyptian side.

This has caused huge issues in Cairo, the Egyptians are furious. And, as a result of this escalation, vis a vis the treaty, Cairo took other measures — they were not military or anything like that — but they announced, for example, that they were going to join the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel. They refuse to recognize Israel’s takeover of the crossing in Rafah between Egypt and Gaza. So, they’re not allowing anything to go in and out of there through Egypt, because they said, no, we do not recognize Israel’s right to operate anything on the border crossing. So, instead, now things are going through another crossing, Kerem Shalom further south.

Although there have been discussions recently about restoring some sort of international presence at the Rafah border crossing in order to allow it to be reopened, which would not recognize Israel’s right to be there, but would return some sort of quote-unquote “neutral party” that wasn’t Hamas or the Palestinians. And the Egyptians apparently have expressed their preference for the EU, because there was an existing EU operation there some years ago. So, it’s just reactivating that border regime. For some very bizarre reason, the Israelis have expressed a preference for the U.N. I say “bizarre” because the Israelis have said all sorts of very peculiar things about the U.N. over the past nine months, so it strikes me as intriguing that they prefer this. I’m not sure why.

MH: Dr. Hellyer, I want to ask you a bit about this peace treaty you refer to between Egypt and Israel. Of course, it’s the Camp David Treaty, which was negotiated many decades ago by then-Egyptian-president Anwar Sadat. And, in many ways, it’s the cornerstone of the relationship, and a broader U.S.-backed regional order in the Middle East.

Now, since the October 7 attacks, many people, observers, have been concerned about the meltdown, so to speak, of that order, in a very chaotic and potentially violent manner. And, as the war has gone on, the Egyptian government has threatened to suspend the Camp David Treaty, without entirely specifying what that would mean in practice, but suggesting that the peace treaty between itself and Israel may not be enforced any longer.

This conflict, the violence of it, even on the scale of the Israel-Palestine conflict to date, is perhaps the most violent it’s ever been, or at least in many, many decades since the emergence in the 1940s of the war, or the split between Israelis and Palestinians. And so, it really does seem to threaten everything that one would take for granted about the Middle East and how it’s presently constructed politically.

What is your assessment of the potential of the Camp David Treaty between Egypt and Israel to be suspended? And what will be the consequences of that? And then, finally, it’s kind of a threefold question: how does the Egyptian public currently view this agreement as the war is developing?

HAH: I mean, that’s a big threefold question. So, let me take the last one first, because that’s, I think, the easiest one to deal with first.

When it comes to the Egyptian public, I’m trying to remember when the last time there was a public opinion poll in Egypt that looked at the peace treaty, and I think it must have been a very, very long time ago. I would presume that the treaty has really taken massive hits in terms of public support for it over the last nine months. I’d be very surprised if that had not been the case.

But, of course, the treaty does not hold and does not get suspended as the result of public opinion, as much as it’s a decision of the country’s leadership. And I think the country’s leadership has been very clear, and this has been consistently the case, and constantly the case, at least in my lifetime, where there hasn’t ever been a serious suggestion under any government that the peace treaty was going to be canceled. Even during the revolutionary period between 2011 and 2013, I don’t think that that was ever posited as a serious policy option. I think that’s always been the case since it was signed in the late seventies. And, of course, when it comes to the state’s leadership, I think they recognize that this is, indeed, as you put it, part of the bedrock of the regional security architecture which currently exists.

Now, the carnage, the incredible humanitarian catastrophe. The war in Gaza that we see and have seen over the past nine months, as horrific as it is, I don’t think has actually changed that particular equation, in terms of how at least regional governments consider the current regional security architecture. You could argue that they’re thinking really badly, or that they are not considering this strategically, but that’s another question.

I don’t think that there’s any serious — how should we say — proposition where people are thinking, you know what? Let’s just change the regional security architecture and get something new. On the contrary, I feel that everybody, at least in government, across the region is trying to do completely the opposite. They’re trying to call the United States, for example, to come in and intervene more heavily; intervene not so much in terms of a military invasion or something, but intervene, for example, with the Israelis. That they are calling on other regional powers not to inflame the situation or escalate.

So, you saw that, for example, when it came to the Iranians. And, I think, across the board. You know, even a country like Iran, they didn’t jump on the bandwagon of escalation at all. On the contrary, I feel that every major power in the region has been trying to avoid escalation, with the exception, I must say, of the Israelis, if I’m perfectly frank. I find the Israelis have actually been very reckless in quite a few different policy options over the past nine months.

The Iranians were reckless in In terms of how they retaliated following the attack on their consulate in Damascus. I do think that was a reckless thing for them to do, but they didn’t do more than that. And the way in which we’ve seen other countries over the past nine months, it’s constantly been this exhortation of, deescalate, deescalate, deescalate, and also not to change the regional security architecture. They’re trying to use the existing regional security architecture to try to bring things to a more settled outcome.

MH: Dr. Hellyer, I want to pivot a bit and ask you about a few articles you’ve written in the last few months, specifically about the subject of how this war is impacting global perceptions of the United States, and what you can call the rules-based order, or international law, and the institutions that support it.

Obviously, Israel is facing intense scrutiny from the ICC, the ICJ, over the actions of its senior officials, and also allegations of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza over the past eight months. And the U.S. has been very obstinate in its defenses of Israel, and seeming hostility to the enforcement of the same norms that it calls for enforcing in cases like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Can you talk a bit about the damage, from your perspective, that these actions by the U.S. are doing to these international institutions? And, also, the perception in the Global South, so to speak, or non-Western countries of the U.S. patronage of Israel in the situation where it’s accused of very, very serious crimes.

HAH: That’s a really important question, and one, frankly, I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past nine months. Because, of course, it’s important that we recognize the human cost of what’s going on in Gaza to those who matter the most in that regard, which are the people of Gaza. And there’ve been tens of thousands of civilians killed, and many hundreds of thousands lives irrevocably damaged. So, I think that that’s very important to center our attention on.

But when we think about this beyond Gaza, and even beyond the region, there are lots of consequences here. And it’s been very, very troubling to me to consider what sort of repercussions we’re going to see, and have seen already, when it comes to the impact on the rules-based order.

Now, I want to be clear here. When I say “the rules-based order,” I’m not talking about some sort of tool of the United States or, for that matter, any other country to try to govern the world, or something like that, and I know that some people do. From my perspective, the rules-based order is a way to govern the world’s conflicts by referencing and prioritizing international law. That the rules in that regard are international law.

And, of course, the manifestation of that rules-based order is pretty patchy. And when I say “patchy,” I’m being polite, you know? In some places, it seems to hold, and in other places it doesn’t. And, of course, that’s all about enforcement. Because the rules-based order does not work unless people put muscle behind it and enforce it, in the same way that any law that is put into effect does not get the teeth that it needs unless, indeed, there’s an enforcement mechanism that people take seriously. And, when it comes to international law, that’s not always the case.

I remember I was actually in the Arab world when Russia invaded Ukraine a few years ago now. And I was very supportive of Ukraine, and continue to be, in terms of repelling Russia’s invasion of their territory. For me, it was very clear cut. This is an invasion of a sovereign country by another country without any justification whatsoever, and it’s important that the world say as such. Otherwise, a very clear bedrock of, again, the rules-based order — which is about national sovereignty from invasion — is completely expunged. Even though I have no particular affinity to Ukraine, it’s not something that I studied particularly much, at least until the invasion. But the principle alone just struck me as something that was very important.

I remember having discussions in the Arab world at the time, and I completely understood why many people in the region didn’t see it like that. And, frankly, I found it quite surprising that we expected them to. As I said, I found the case very morally compelling, ethically compelling and very principled. I didn’t think that there was any confusion about that from my perspective. But when you talk about sovereignty and invasion and occupation, and you’re an Arab, I’m sure what they hear, they hear Iraq and they hear Palestine. They hear, wait a minute. The West invaded Iraq, and occupied, and that was OK, apparently. And Israel, which is backed by the West — this is the rhetoric and the narrative that plays out.

And it’s not a narrative that doesn’t have basis. The reality is that, indeed, Iraq was invaded, and Iraq did have an occupation. And Palestine was invaded, and key Western countries have backed Israel in the continuation of that occupation, even while they are very clear that this is illegal. I mean, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal by international law, but it’s also recognized as such by pretty much everybody in the international community, including the United States. But, at the same time, support for Israel at the U.N., arms and so on, continues rather unabated.

So, the consistency here, I felt, was something that we just had to appreciate and understand and accept that, actually, the West as a complete cohesive block— Because we’re talking several dozen countries that come under the rubric of the West. We’re not talking about all of them being on quite the same page. You had many countries that opposed the Iraq War, for example, within the West. And you had countries that have had a rather troubled relationship, let’s say, with the Israelis, because of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. But those are nuances that people like you or me might be able to appreciate as Westerners, they’re not necessarily nuances that people in the Arab world would necessarily know about or appreciate. They see the big power politics at play here, what the big countries are doing on this and that and, in that regard, there’s a lot that hasn’t been consistent.

But still, I felt that there was a way to talk about this in a consistent manner. I had very interesting conversations with people on Ukraine, and I know that many other colleagues did as well. Once you get, however, to last year and Israel’s war in Gaza, it becomes impossible, almost, to have discussions around the rules-based order; not only the wider Arab world, but across the world, outside of the West. If you’re talking South America, Latin America, Africa, most of Asia. And, indeed, by the way, in much of the West as well, at least in terms of public opinion, there’s a lot of angst, very legitimately held, about the idea that, wait a minute, you’re telling us that you support a rules-based order, but here is your ally — i.e., the Israelis — completely ignoring the rules-based order, and you’re not even admitting that the rules-based order here, international law, is being broken. And I think that that was a fundamental break in credibility.

In other examples that I’ve mentioned — like when it came to the Iraq war, for example, there was a case that international law was being followed when it came to the Iraq invasion, the Iraq war. I say there was a case, OK? I’m not saying that this was correct, I’m just saying that you could have argued that it was at least disputable, right? At least for a time. Maybe not a very long time, but you could have tried to make that case.

You can’t do anything like that when it comes to this. When it comes to this, you have the International Court of Justice investigating — or rather hearing — a case on genocide. You have the International Criminal Court prosecutor seeking arrest warrants for war crimes, and aiming it, yes, at Hamas leaders, but also at Israel’s leaders, particularly the prime minister and the defense minister. So, the idea that there’s any doubt about this is rather strange.

But when you go to, particularly, Washington D.C. — this unfortunately is the biggest loss of credibility of all — Washington refuses to acknowledge that there is basis to this feeling of inconsistency. On the contrary, they’ve attacked the ICC tremendously. They’ve said that the charges at the ICJ are baseless. They insist, and continue to insist, that there has not been any infringement of international law in Gaza by the Israelis, quite astoundingly.

I mean, listening to spokespeople for the State Department and the Security Council, it’s incredible to see this sort of, how should we say, bizarre dance. Where the facts are so clear to everybody asking, but there’s some sort of parallel universe at work here. To the point where you’ve had people resign from the State Department and go public — this happened recently, again — go public with how, internally in the Biden administration, they’re purposefully ignoring their own experts on how quite a lot of things are happening in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis. So, that sort of denial of these things even taking place, I think it has a huge impact on how people view the United States and its commitment to international law and the rules-based order. And that has a repercussion.

The repercussion is very serious. If the strongest advocate of the rules-based order refuses to recognize that, actually, it’s not upholding the rules-based order, then the incentive or the trust that the rest of the world will have in upholding that rules-based order really falls. And I think that we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Where, if people even mentioned the phrase, people just sort of snigger and say, are you kidding? I mean, what rules-based order? How is it a rules-based order when you, as the United States, are unwilling to uphold it? Not against a powerful opponent like Russia or China or something like that, but against your own ally. Against your own ally, you know? And I think this is what really gets a lot of people very riled up, that the United States has tremendous leverage over Israel, and Israel is an ally, right? So, it isn’t actually that hard, materially speaking, to make a difference in terms of policy here, but the United States has refused to do that.

There’s a lot of stuff out there about how D.C. is putting pressure on the Israelis, and Biden’s not happy with Netanyahu, and so on. A lot of that is perfectly true, but when we talk about pressure, we have to recognize [that] the United States overwhelmingly supports Israel when it comes to diplomatic cover at the United Nations Security Council, and with the provision of military assistance. That’s leverage right there, but it’s never been touched. So, how does that look to everybody else in the world? It looks like the United States will uphold the rules-based order and international law when it serves their interests, or when it serves their allies interests, but will not do so when it doesn’t.

MH: At present, there are efforts to end the war in Gaza, in mediation that Egypt and Qatar and the United States are taking part in, potentially to bring about a temporary and then permanent ceasefire. And it seems to me that the impetus behind these efforts are becoming more and more urgent, in the sense of preventing a broader regional war, which has been the fear of everyone since October 7 began.

Currently, there’s an escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and there could be a broader conflict also involving Iran or other parties as well. And, of course, the tensions between Egypt and Israel, and also Jordan and Israel, figure a part of that as well, too.

What do you fear may happen if this war continues on without a diplomatic solution in the months or even more than a year ahead, that could be forecasted to continue forward. Could this become a regional war? And what would the implications be for the people in the region and the broader world if that happened?

HAH: So, since October 7, and since the war in Gaza began in October, something that, not just myself, but I think many security analysts and people who watch the region— And I want to make this clear to your listeners as well, I am a scholar in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in D.C., but I’m also a senior associate fellow in international security studies at the oldest think-tank in the world, which is very, very concerned about defense and security issues, the Royal United Services Institute in London.

I’ll tell you that, as somebody in that wider security arena, the concern that this could spill over and really escalate has been a really big one. Not just for myself, but [for] many, many people that I know. Because the reality is that, when you have escalations like this take place, there’s no such thing as controlling where it goes.

I think people live in this mythical world where they think that if you’re good at it, you can escalate carefully and delicately and precisely. You know, you can turn it up just a little bit, you can go from 24 degrees to 25 degrees or something. This is not a remote control on an air conditioner; you can’t control everything. The law of unintended consequences is very real.

And I’ll be very honest with you, I expected much more of a regional conflict than what we’ve seen thus far over the past nine months. And I think that’s a testament, frankly, to the region, and to leaders in the region wanting really hard to avoid such a scenario. Because, really, all the factors are there.

You have this attempt to escalate, and the Israelis, as I said, have been very reckless in this regard. You could have easily seen much more of a really wide regional war with very little. I mean, this is a tinderbox. So, again, I really think it’s a testament to the region that it hasn’t gone that way yet.

But I say “yet,” because lots of things can happen. And we see the escalation recently on the border with Lebanon between the Israelis and the Lebanese. Of course, there’s still stuff to be concerned about with regard to the Houthis in the Red Sea, but I’m particularly concerned about Lebanon. And I think that if conflict does break out there, not in the tit-for-tat sort of way that we’ve seen over the last few months, but much more serious, it’s going to be very bad for the people of Lebanon, but also for Israelis. Hezbollah is not Hamas. Hezbollah has a lot more to work with in terms of weaponry and people, and I think the Israelis know that. But, as I said, they’ve been very reckless on multiple occasions over the past nine months.

And what we’ve seen since October is that they’ve engaged in this war on Gaza without having a very clear strategic imperative at work that is achievable. And lots of conflicting, I think, sort of aims involved within. So, they could very easily make a really, really bad decision when it comes to Lebanon. Even if, from the outside, it seems totally counterproductive, because they’ve done this quite a few times over the past nine months. So, that is concerning.

And I think that that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that international political leaders, particularly the United States, they’re the ones that have the most leverage here by far. But also, more broadly speaking, really put their offices to good use, and push for de-escalation, and really encourage — and I mean that in the nicest possible way — really encourage the Israelis to not drag the region onto a track that would be deeply, deeply damaging for the entire region, including themselves.

MH: Dr. Hellyer, thank you so much for joining us on Intercepted.

HAH: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

MH: That was Dr. H. A. Hellyer, a scholar in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a senior associate fellow in security studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense.

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 by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Rafah Clash Exposes Roots of Egypt and Israel Tension appeared first on The Intercept.

The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focusing on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah. But the cold reality is that Israel has already bombed and occupied large swaths of Rafah. 

The regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not only from Rafah, but also from areas of northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians — many of whom are wounded, starving, dehydrated, and traumatized — on a desperate hunt for a place to pitch a makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.

Despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Biden is fed up with his great friend Netanyahu, the U.S. has made clear it continues to arm and support the Israeli regime.

This week on Intercepted, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, speaks with Jeremy Scahill. Since the launch of the so-called war on terror in 2001, the 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol for answers, and traveling to countries the U.S. has labeled as enemies. Benjamin discusses her personal path to activism and the siege on Gaza, and offers a guide on how ordinary people can disrupt business as usual in the chambers of power in Washington, D.C.

Transcript

This transcript is generated from audio recordings and may not be in its final form.

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focused on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah.

But the cold reality is that Israel has already been bombing and has occupied parts of Rafah. They brought tanks in and knocked down the I-Heart-Gaza sign at the Rafah border crossing. This was essentially a stunt by the Biden administration to say, well, we’re going to pause the shipment of certain kinds of weapons. And then, the next day, you have John Kirby, the national security council spokesperson, coming out and saying, well, ho-ho-ho, people are making a big deal about this. Let me be clear: most of the weapons are still flowing to Israel.

The Israeli regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Not only from Rafah, but also from areas of Northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians, many of whom are wounded or starving, dehydrated, all of whom are traumatized, on yet another desperate hunt for a place to pitch their makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.

Now, despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Joe Biden is fed up with his great friend Benjamin Netanyahu, the reality is that the U.S. continues to make clear that it stands behind Israel, that it continues to arm it and support it. Well, today on the show, we’re going to spend the hour with one of the most dedicated peace activists in the United States, Medea Benjamin, the cofounder of Code Pink.

Since the launch of the so-called War On Terror in 2001, The now 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol, trying to question them on issues like the war in Gaza. Medea has traveled to countries around the world that the United States has labeled enemies. And, in addition to her work with Code Pink, Medea is also the cofounder of the human rights group Global Exchange as well as the Peace in Ukraine Coalition, Unfreeze Afghanistan, and other antiwar and international solidarity organizations.

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

Medea Benjamin: Great to be on with you, Jeremy.

JS: Let’s begin by talking about the latest developments out of Gaza and, specifically, Rafah. What we’ve seen over the past several days [is] Israel really re-intensify its military operations; not just in Rafah, but also in other parts of Gaza. We have a situation now where there is, once again, this forced internal expulsion happening, where Gazans in the north are being told that they need to move to the south, Palestinians in the south of Gaza are being told they need to move north. There are hundreds of thousands of people that yet again are having to move with their families, with children, with sick people. It’s like this sick kind of game show that the Israeli state is subjecting the Palestinians to, making them forced contestants in this murderous game show.

I just want to hear your analysis of what we’re witnessing right now, and also the moves on the part of the Biden administration to project this notion that somehow, behind the scenes, they’re trying to implement some form of restraint against the Netanyahu government.

MB: Well, as your listeners know, this scene is just unbelievable. I have friends in Gaza who are sending me notes saying, “We wish it was over already. The martyrs are the lucky ones. They have died and we are living in hell.”

I talk to a lot of women. We recently had Mother’s Day and, looking at our own children, our own grandchildren, and thinking every moment about what the mothers are going through in Gaza. Not only is it heartbreaking, but we feel so impotent to stop it, with all the work that people are doing all over the world, from the U.N. to the streets. Trying to say, no, this must end, this must end, and yet we see it still go on.

Which brings me to the issue that you brought up about Biden, acting like he is doing something by putting a halt on these weapons. And yet, we have sent tens and tens of thousands of these bombs and missiles, and been a partner in this genocide for seven months now. So, to say we’re putting a pause on these weapons, and then to see the outcry from Republicans, from even more hawkish Democrats than Biden, from Biden’s donors, from Republicans wanting to really take advantage of this, as if they think it’s some popular position among the American people to say, no, you can’t put a halt on weapons.

In fact, bringing into Congress this week a new piece of legislation, I think t’s called The Israel Security Assistance Support Act, which says that the president could not halt these weapons. So, it’s a mind-spinning kind of moment to be living in, to be seeing every day the suffering, and now the lack of water and food, and people leaving on donkey carts and not knowing where to go. And yet feeling what more can we do to make this stop? And not knowing what more we can do.

JS: People who are following developments closely, especially on social media, are certainly familiar with the direct action that you’ve been undertaking on Capitol Hill over these past seven months, as well as your friends and colleagues from Code Pink and other activist groups. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about your strategy there.

When Tony Blinken is in front of Congress — or, recently, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary — you often will see, if you watch the hearings, bloodied hands come up behind them, people disrupting and getting up and speaking, advocating for the Palestinians of Gaza. Explain a little bit about the strategy that you all are employing on Capitol Hill throughout these seven months.

MB: What you don’t see is behind the scenes that we are going into offices every single day and having discussions with staff members, and trying to move them a tiny bit. Whether it’s getting them to sign onto a letter calling for conditioning of aid, while we want to see a total end to aid, or whether it’s trying to stop a bill that is going to enshrine a definition of antisemitism that could make it illegal to talk about the crimes that Israel is committing.

So, we are having those discussions all of the time, and working with the more progressive offices to try to come up with some kind of strategy. Alternative letters, alternative bills, use of the War Powers Act, whatever we can find in the very, very limited toolbox that is our Congress.

In the meantime, when we are walking down those halls and we see a guy with a button on that indicates — and usually it’s a guy, there are women, too — that indicate that they are a member of Congress — I must admit, I do not know 435 members of Congress, but you can identify them by the buttons. And we start running after them with our cameras on to ask them questions.

If they’re friendly congresspeople that we know, we ask them, what other vehicles can you introduce that could then work on? And if they are unfriendly members of Congress, we ask them questions to try to get them on record, oftentimes to show just how heartless, soulless, callous, disgusting these people are, because we think it’s important for the general public to know that, as well as people around the world to watch these.

And then, in the hearings we don’t want there to be a hearing in which a witness is going to speak about the correctness of the U.S. position of supporting Israel without there being an outcry in the public. Sometimes we can’t even get into these hearings, and the Armed Services Committee — these are public hearings, you know, and it’s supposed to be first come, first served — they keep us out of these hearings beforehand. So we can’t always get inside, although we try to send other people who dress up to look like they are professionals, and send them in instead of people like us, clad in pink or in keffiyehs.

So, strategy-wise, I would say our strategy is really to try to get members of Congress to sign on to ceasefire pieces of legislation, to vote against sending more weapons to Israel. But what you see more publicly is this naming and shaming of some of the worst members of Congress.

JS: Give us an example of a hearing where you’ve stood up and denounced whether it’s the defense secretary or the secretary of state. Walk us through what happened. So you have to wait in line outside the hearing room, I would imagine, in the cases where they haven’t already preemptively blocked you from entering this public hearing.

Walk us through the first exchange you have with security or the police as you’re filing into the room, all the way up to the point where you decide to stand up and speak out in the middle of a hearing.

MB: Well, first let me go even further back than that, Jeremy, because I am amazed that so many Americans — I would say, probably the majority of Americans — don’t know that you can just walk into the buildings of Congress. And, not only that, you can walk into most of the offices of congresspeople; you don’t have to have an appointment, the doors are open for the most part. There are exceptions. And some, ironically, some of these exceptions are the most progressive members of Congress, like Bernie Sanders, who keeps his door locked. 

But, for the most part, you can just walk into offices, and that is so important for people to know. You can come to Washington, D.C., anytime, Monday to Friday, walk into the building, and walk into your congressperson’s office. And I say this also, Jeremy, because we walk in and we say, we want to speak to somebody who deals with foreign policy, and they say, well, here’s their card, you should write to them and ask to schedule a meeting.

Well, we do, time and time again. We write to them hundreds of times and ask for a meeting and, about 95 percent of the time, we never hear an answer. And it’s not just because we’re Code Pink; I ask people who are listening, try it out. Write to your member of Congress, call them, ask how you get in touch with the scheduler to try to schedule a meeting, and you will probably not get a response. And so, we just walk into their offices.

Now you asked about walking into the hearings. They are called “public hearings” because the public is allowed into them. That’s something I didn’t know until about 20 years ago, when I started to go to these public hearings to protest the Iraq War. You stand on line. Again, first come, first served. The door opens about 15 minutes before the hearing starts. And, because they want to keep us away from the C-SPAN cameras, they usually put “reserved” on all of the most prominent seats, so that you have to sit in the corners, on the sides, not right behind the witnesses.

But sometimes we get lucky, and they forget to put those on the seats, and we get to have a good place. And we sit behind. Usually what happens is there is an opening statement from the majority and minority chair, and then the witness has an opening statement. We usually listen to most of the opening statement, just in case there is a great surprise and they say something good. And then, right before the end of that opening statement, which is about five minutes long, if we are going to interrupt, we stand up and we speak out, and say something like, why did you not even mention the word Gaza? Why did you not even talk about how you are complicit, you are a partner with Israel in sending these weapons? The blood is on your hands. What are you going to do to stop this genocide? The whole world is watching. The American people don’t want us to be doing this, that kind of thing, as the police come in and they start to drag us out.

If you’ve done two of these interruptions in two years, you only have to pay a fine of about $50. And you’re taken to the police station, you are processed, but you are let go in a couple of hours. If you do this more than a couple of times, as in my case, the penalties start getting more difficult, and what we really try to avoid is a stay away order, in which you’re not allowed to go back to Congress for a certain amount of time.

But for people who haven’t done this, we say, come on down, come to Washington, speak out at one of these hearings, get arrested, and wear it as a badge of honor, because you have to, many times in life, go to jail for justice.

JS: On April 30, you had a run in with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that then resulted in you being arrested in the halls of Congress, and friends of yours captured on video what happened to you. And people can go on Code Pink’s feed on X — or Twitter, or whatever we’re calling it these days — or Medea’s own feed and see this, but a female Capitol police officer then really aggressively patted you down. I think, for a lot of people, this was really stunning to watch it.

Now, of course, this happens to people across the United States all the time. You can talk to any African American in the United States that’s had an interaction with the police, and they’re being searched like they’re Pablo Escobar, or worse. But what I witnessed on this video is just an extremely aggressive patting-down of your body.

Walk us through what happened there.

MB: Well, I got up and spoke out, and let’s put this in the context that we are peacemakers trying to stop a genocide. We certainly don’t have any kind of weapon. I’ve never carried a weapon in my life but, if I did, you have to go through metal security just to get into the building, so there’s nothing on you. The same as whatever purses or packages you’re bringing in, they go through a metal detector. 

It’s just an exercise in humiliation, where they just pat down every part of your body openly in the public space, right in the hall, including your private parts. Pull out your bra, as if you’re going to have a pencil or something stuck in your bra. [They] do this several times in that hallway, and your hands are zip-tied behind your back.

Then [they] take you in a paddy wagon, take you to the police headquarters, where you are patted down all over again, at least one more time if not two more times. So, it is ridiculous. The other thing is, I’m 71 years old, I’ve been doing this now for a long time. They know me in Congress, they know that I am totally peaceful. They know they don’t have to do this and, especially, so aggressively.

So, yes, I think it did stun a lot of people. But, as you say, not only does this happen to members of particularly minority communities in the United States, but all the time they were doing that. I was just thinking of what people go through in Gaza, and to not get upset about a pat-down while people are being slaughtered and starved.

JS: I want to back up and ask you a bit about your political trajectory and the activism that you’ve done over all of these years. I’ve known you for a long time. I met you when I was 19 years old.

My dad had been on the 2nd Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, when Fidel Castro invited young people from around the world to come and participate in the harvest of 10 million tons. And he had been living at the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day at the time, in 1971. And he wrote an article for the Catholic Worker newspaper that Dorothy Day put on the front page, and it was called “Up from Nonviolence,” and it was about pacifists coming to terms with the fact that a violent revolution had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictatorship. And there was great debate in the Catholic worker movement — which was an anarchist pacifist movement — about supporting a revolution that used armed struggle.

So, my father wrote an article out of that experience defending the Cuban revolution, and Dorothy Day put it on the front page of the Catholic Worker newspaper and then defended it, in her own “On Pilgrimage” column.

And so, when you’re a kid, you tend to not really pay much attention to your parents’ stories. You think they’re boring or, because they’re your parents, they’re not interesting to you. But it was really the first time in my personal life that I understood something really cool about my dad. And he had recommended to me, I want to go to Cuba with you; he hadn’t been back to Cuba since then.

And so, we found an organization called Global Exchange that was running trips to Cuba to challenge the U.S. blockade, and it was the Freedom to Travel campaign. And so, we wrote to Global Exchange, and you were the one that was in charge of the delegation that we ended up going on in 1994. And, for me, it was a life-changing experience because, on that trip, where I got to know you, we also spent a lot of time with Philip Agee, the late and great whistleblower who was a CIA operative that had actually participated in the operation to capture and ultimately kill Che Guevara. And we also met Assata Shakur, the Black Panther who has been living in exile in Cuba for many, many decades, and a whole slew of other really interesting people.

So, when I first met you, you were very focused on Cuba, on the blockade, on the U.S. economic war against Cuba. So, I know your story begins before that but, first, maybe just pause to talk a bit about your work on Cuba and that era of your life.

MB: Well, it is very much related, actually, to my work around Gaza because I was working as a nutritionist in Africa and seeing starving children all around me. I worked in rehydration centers and had babies dying in my arm. And I thought, this cannot be. I know there’s enough food in the world to feed all these children. Why is this happening?

And so, I started looking for other models of society that took care of children. And I met Cuban doctors in Africa, and they said to me, “We don’t have any malnourished children in Cuba.” And I said, oh, I don’t believe that. I haven’t seen a country — even in my own country, the rich United States, there are children that go hungry. And they said, “Go to Cuba and see for yourself.”

And so, that was the first reason I went to Cuba. And I traveled all around Cuba going into what I consider the poorest parts of the country, and all the children were so well taken care of. And that’s because, after the revolution, they put this incredible emphasis on making sure all the children had good health care and good nutrition. This is something that just astounded me.

And so, I wanted people to see that there was another model of society that could be different. And I didn’t totally think that Cuba was a model, because I did criticize the restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but I was just so amazed at a society that didn’t have malnourished kids. And a poor society, you know? A poor Caribbean island.

And so, in a sense, that’s what keeps me going around the Gaza issue, and issues I’ve dealt with for decades since then is, can’t we develop models of society where there is no child that goes hungry? Where there is no child that is suffering? And, of course, the interplay with that and war is that I grew up during the Vietnam era, and I knew that war is just a blight on civilization that we should, as we develop as a society, as a global society, be able to do away with war.

So, I think those two things have been threads throughout my life, of trying to think of ways that we can move towards a global society where we don’t kill each other, and where we actually take care of each other.

JS: And, am I correct, as a teenager, you lived on a kibbutz?

MB: I did. My parents were very pro-Israel, and they sent me when I was 16 to go live on a kibbutz. And it was such a contradictory experience. Because, on the one hand, I loved the socialist nature of the kibbutz.

At that time, it was Ein Gedi, it was on the Dead Sea, it was one of the more socialist kibbutz, and they had a work ethic that I thought was terrific. Where everybody got up together in the morning, ate breakfast together, and then went out in the fields to work, did hard labor, and then enjoyed our time together. And, in fact, it was such a radical experience that, at that time, all the children did not grow up in their individual homes; they grew up in a collective house. So, I thought that experience was quite marvelous.

On the other hand, it was so jarring to me the attitude they had towards the neighboring Arabs. In fact, they told me not to go out and talk to the Arab communities, which I immediately went and did, and found a warm and welcoming greeting in the Arab communities. But I started to question the racism that existed in the general Israeli society, just like I was growing up [with] in Long Island, New York, in a high school where there were race riots.

So, that kind of thing got me thinking and questioning what was Israel all about, if people were so dismissive and worse towards their Arab neighbors.

JS: You were primarily focused on Cuba when you were at Global Exchange. And then, 9/11 happens, and the Bush administration — and correct me if I get any of this timeline wrong — but the Bush administration gets its effective blank check from the U.S. Congress, and begins ratcheting up for, initially, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and then very quickly starting to put the focus on invading Iraq.

When was Code Pink started, and what was the initial mission or focus?

MB: Well, just to say that Global Exchange was not just focused on Cuba. We were really a global organization, we were taking people to places all over Africa, all over Latin America. We were working on issues throughout Latin America, and really had a very broad perspective on how do we stop U.S. policy, particularly in places that were trying to do something different, create a new model.

Yes. After 9/11, I personally switched to focusing on Afghanistan and the Middle East, and [was] trying not to give up some of the other issues — For example, Cuba, I’m going in two more weeks. I’ve been going every couple of months taking powdered milk to the pediatric hospitals there, because the economic situation is so bad. But yes, I have felt compelled to focus on the area of the world where the U.S. was creating so much havoc.

And, as you know, the illegal invasion of Iraq took many of us to Iraq and then throughout the region, to just see how much the U.S. was in bed with the most repressive dictatorships in the region, and how our presence — including bases, U.S. troops — were propping up these very repressive regimes, and how, then, the U.S. lied to the American public to get us into the war in Iraq. We also opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, which many people didn’t at the time.

So, yes, my focus changed very much, and I moved out of working on the more general issues of Global Exchange, and we started Code Pink as an organization that was just going to be a temporary thing. We were going to organize against the invasion of Iraq, be successful as good citizens who tell their government what they can and can’t do, and then move back into the other work we were doing. But, obviously, that never happened.

JS: I want to ask you a couple of questions about other actions that you’ve been involved with, and initiatives. There was quite a bit of hope that there was going to be a flotilla that would launch from Turkey that would try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza from the sea and bring in humanitarian aid.

Now, of course, the last time there was a flotilla of this nature back in 2010, the Israelis raided the ship, and killed a number of the activists and humanitarians that were on board. And, in fact, Joe Biden was the vice president at the time, and was dispatched by the administration to defend the Israeli deadly operation on the ship that had tried to break the Israeli siege at that time. And Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC and was defending it — I believe maybe it was even Meet The Press — and defended the Israeli military attack on this nonviolent activist convoy to Gaza.

But you were recently in Turkey with others, and you were trying to organize this flotilla that would break the blockade. What happened to that?

MB: Well, I do want to say I wasn’t one of the organizers, I was a participant. And there is a wonderful group that has been working on this for years. The first flotillas were actually successful in getting small boats into Gaza but, after that, the Israelis have been stopping them, and boarding the ships on international waters, illegally boarding the ships, kidnapping the people on board. And, for the most part, taking them into Israeli jails and then deporting them. The worst was, as you mentioned, 2010, on the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, in which the Israelis murdered 10 people.

We felt like this was an incredibly important moment to try to send another flotilla, so we met in Istanbul. And it was a beautiful gathering of people from about 40 different countries, there were hundreds and hundreds of us wanting to get onto these ships. The Turkish community had raised millions of dollars, mostly from small donations all around the country, bought an enormous cargo ship and a very big passenger ship that could hold up to about a thousand people. And we were ready to set sail, and if we had to confront the Israeli military, then so be it. But we felt that this was an important way to not only get humanitarian aid into Gaza, but also to break the siege.

The unfortunate consequence is that the Turkish government, under tremendous pressure from the United States and, of course, Israel, did not let us out of the port. And the ship was flying under the flag of the small African nation Guinea-Bissau and, under pressure from those same countries, Guinea-Bissau pulled its flag.

So, we returned from Turkey, but that’s not the end of this. There are still efforts to get a new flag from a country that won’t be intimidated, and also to go to a different country where we will be allowed to leave from the port. But this just shows you the power of the United States to reach out to countries, even like Turkey, where the president has shown his support for the Palestinians time and time again, and tried to have an independent policy from the United States. But, even in that case, the United States and Israel were successful in blocking us.

JS: What do you think is motivating Joe Biden right now? I mean, I’ve done a lot of writing on this, and none of us are actually in Joe Biden’s head, but there is a many-decades-long history that we can assess involving Joe Biden. And, of course, you’re familiar with it.

But the guy comes to the Senate in 1973, meets early on in his tenure as a Senator with Golda Meir. And he spends the next several decades bringing up that meeting, and regularly calls himself a committed Zionist. He has defended Israel when it’s at its most violent, its most extreme through the decades. He’s, by his own personal accounts, been a great, great friend of Netanyahu for more than 40 years now. Even though there are questions about Biden’s mental acumen, it does seem that he has a lifelong commitment to a very extreme Israeli agenda. And, specifically, has bolstered Netanyahu, even at times when Barack Obama was at odds with Netanyahu, it seems like Biden has served as Israel’s man in Washington in many, many ways.

I mean, there’s the issue of illegal settlements that Biden occasionally has carved out to say, oh, I have a different position here. And he’s very fond of telling stories about how he stood up to Bibi. But on the issues that really matter, on a military level, the scorched-earth campaigns against the Palestinians, Biden has been a stalwart defender of Israel for many, many decades.

But, now that you’re immersed in the world of Washington, and you’re on Capitol Hill, and you’re talking to lawmakers and chasing down policymakers, what is your assessment of where this is coming from, from this White House?

MB: Well, I think you have written and spoken a lot on Biden’s connections over the years to Israel, and he’s traveled to Israel many times. And there are different ways to travel to Israel; one is to see what the Israelis want you to see, and that’s what Biden does, and the other is to go off and go to places like Hebron and, of course, go to Gaza. Which the people in Gaza have been asking presidents to do over and over again, and none of them have dared to go to Gaza.

So, Biden sees what the Israelis want him to see. As you say, this has been ingrained in him for decades. I don’t say he does this because of the money, I think it’s a lot more than the money. But I do want to say that, being in the halls of Congress, you see this tremendous impact that the pro-Israel lobby has on our government. And that, even at this moment, when Biden had called for a, “pause” in sending the weapons, the backlash is so intense. And it’s almost like they’re tripping over themselves to see who can be the most pro-Israel hawk. And is it because they want to please their masters in AIPAC? Christian Zionists, who are very close to groups like CUFI [Christians United for Israel], the backlash is intense.

So, I think that Biden has boxed himself into a corner of his own decades-long support for Israel, his, “rock-solid” support for Israel. And then, these people that are surrounding him — he put them in there, Anthony Blinken and others who are part of this extreme pro-Israel mindset — and then a Congress that really is so corrupt that you can see people who are in there only because they were put in there by AIPAC. And the fear of AIPAC, I think, is even more important than the money that AIPAC puts in, because people are so afraid of being targeted by AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups that that keeps them silent at best. But mostly keeps them jumping on this bandwagon of the extremists of pro-Israel.

You see when Chuck Schumer — who, like Biden, is a lifelong supporter of Israel and, of course, Jewish as well — when he criticized Netanyahu, there was a tremendous backlash against him, when he said that Netanyahu was one of the obstacles for peace. He has since backtracked on that, and joined with extremist Republican leader in the House Mike Johnson to invite Bibi Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. And this will probably happen in the coming weeks. 

And it’s just astounding. I mean, I hope it happens because I think it would be a chance to get many, many, many, many thousands of people to flood Washington, D.C. and try to shut it down. But this is part of the bubble of Washington that is such a disconnect.

I mean, Jeremy, I think you and I have seen so many times in our lifetimes — although I still think of you as a 19-year-old — how our government doesn’t represent us. But, at this point, the disconnect is just so enormous that one thing is what the public opinion polls show, what the people on the campuses are saying. What the uncommitted voters in key swing states are saying. What is happening every time a politician goes home into their communities and gets interrupted by angry constituents saying, stop supporting Israel, and what they are doing in the White House and in the Congress.

So, I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this morass, but I do see it coming to a head right now, in that the people in office are so disconnected to reality, to global opinion, and to public opinion in the United States.

JS: Now, I wanted to ask you a bit about Bernie Sanders, but it’s not just Sanders. This is kind of the emerging Democratic Party line on Israel, is to really make sure that the political focus is on Netanyahu, and a portrayal of this as everything we’re seeing here is a result of Netanyahu. But if you look at actual public opinion polling in Israel, there is widespread support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, there are indications that a solid majority of Israelis are perfectly fine with the reported documented level of deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. And I think that there is a bit of a dishonest game that’s being played by the Democrats, even those that are starting to increasingly speak out.

If you listen to Bernie Sanders — I’ll just use him as an example — right after October 7, Sanders’ position on Israel’s military actions in Gaza was deeply troubling, and a lot of people were calling him out on that. Since then, Sanders has gotten increasingly better in his positions, particularly about military assistance to Israel. But if you listen, 90 percent of the time, what Sanders is saying is, not a nickel more for this extremist right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Occasionally he’ll say “Israel” but, generally speaking, he wants to identify the problem as being Netanyahu.

And that is also part of what’s behind all these leaks from the White House, about how Biden is becoming frustrated with his great friend Netanyahu. Biden threatened this, Biden said, we’re going to withhold that. Then they actually pause — and it really was more or less a symbolic action — they pause some weapons shipments. And then, the next day, John Kirby, The NSC [National Security Council] spokesman at the White House, comes out and says, oh, but the vast majority of the weapons are still going to Israel. You know, Lloyd Austin said similar things.

And I don’t mean to just single out Sanders, but he’s probably the most prominent one delivering this line. And you see it with the leaks coming from the White House about Biden being frustrated with Netanyahu, you see it with the symbolic pause of the weapons shipment. The framing of it is that Netanyahu is the problem. 

And, at the end of the day, it seems like what they want to do is put all of this on the bad ship Netanyahu and sink it. Like, the problem was Netanyahu here. The problem wasn’t the Israeli state, the problem wasn’t Israel’s actions, the problem was this extremist right-wing political figure.

MB: Well, yes. We see a lot of that, and it is a way to hide what is the Israeli state. Not only Netanyahu’s cabinet and who he brought into the cabinet, but the whole Israeli state. That this is an apartheid state, that this is a state that’s built on separate roads, separate checkpoints, separate villages, separate everything.

Also, I think we have to do a better job of not only talking about the horrors of Gaza, but talking about the horrors of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the horrors of the prisons. The horrors of the way children are treated in military courts in Israel. Talking more about the administrative detention, and how many thousands of Arabs are in Israeli jails.

I mean, all of this, in terms of speaking about what the Israeli state is built on, how it maintains itself. And that, yes, Netanyahu is the most prominent figure, but he is in charge of a country that is built on such incredible inequities that it’s the whole state that is the problem.

But you’re going to have a hard time getting that talked about in the U.S. Congress. I mean, Bernie Sanders, it took him months and months to even use the word genocide, and he does not like to use that word. He does want to talk about conditioning aid, but he doesn’t want to talk about stopping aid, halting aid. I think out of the 435 members of Congress on the House side and the hundred on the Senate side, there’s really two that we can count on to talk about what Israel is really like, and that is Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush. They’re the ones that are under tremendous attack, because they tell the truth about what the Israeli state really is.

I mean, we have to look towards Bernie Sanders in the Senate, because we have so few other people. You have Chris Van Hollen who went to the Rafah border and saw the hundreds and hundreds of trucks that couldn’t get in, and came back very angry about that. But then he went in ahead and voted for a package that included $17 billion in weapons for Israel. And we have so many examples of that in the Senate.

So, yes, they like to blame Netanyahu. And yet, when Netanyahu comes, how many of them — if indeed he comes to address the Joint Senate — how many of them will protest when he is there? How many of them will speak out against an incredible war criminal coming to address Congress in the midst of a genocide?

JS: We only have a couple of minutes left, Medea, but I want to ask you about the November election coming up. And, of course, I think you and I are both very well aware that whether Trump wins or whether Biden wins, this is going to be the war state. And I think you can make an argument that Trump may have been worse than Biden in the face of this Gaza war, but not necessarily.

I mean, I think it’s hard to imagine anything short of— Maybe Trump would have started doing U.S. drone strikes, maybe there would have been a different kind of political rhetoric coming from the White House, but I’m not sure anyone can convince me that Trump would have necessarily been worse than Biden.

I think we’re looking at atrocity here. You’re talking about minor gradations of difference on this. The style might have been different, maybe we would have seen more resistance from some Democrats if it was Trump implementing this but, on this issue, I don’t think you’re going to effectively be able to convince anyone that pays attention that, somehow, Palestinians should be hoping that Biden wins another term, or anyone that cares about Palestinians that Biden wins another term.

But I do want to ask you about how you see the argument that is often made, which is, OK, yes. We know that Joe Biden is a horrible warmonger. We get all of that. He’s atrocious on this, this, this, this, this. But it would be worse domestically under Trump, and it would be much worse for the world at large.

Because you’re immersed in this discussion, how do you respond to people who say, I’m afraid of what these people are going to do to a woman’s right to choose. I’m afraid of what they’re going to do with deportations and immigrant raids, etc. What is your answer to people who say, well, if we don’t vote for Joe Biden, or we vote third party — this is as old as dirt that we have this conversation in American politics — but specifically about this election. What is your response to people who say, if we don’t vote for Biden, we get Trump?

MB: My response is that we are screwed either way. That we do not have the choices that the American people deserve, and people should rise up against the whole system. I hope we shut down the democratic convention in Chicago. I hope we shut down the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I hope that these students who we’re seeing on their encampments, that this is not just an issue about Palestine, this is an issue about the U.S. system that is so outrageous, and that it has to be changed.

And if we have two choices — although I will be voting for Jill Stein, and I also really support Cornel West — but if this system gives us these two choices, then people have to really look at the system. Vote whatever way you want to vote, but look at how we can really use this moment to work with people whose eyes have been opened by the support for the genocide in Gaza to say, how are we going to really, really change the system? How are we going to make such a change in this country that we will never have those kinds of choices again?

And that’s why I’m in the halls of Congress every day. After this conversation, I’m getting on my bike and running over to Congress. And I do want to say that anybody who is listening to this [who] can get themselves to D.C., you can join us any day, 10 o’clock in the Rayburn cafeteria. Come. We should be flooding the Hall of Congress. We can’t walk into the White House, but we can walk into Congress, and we should be shutting that down every day.

The system doesn’t work. The people need to rise up. Let’s rise up any way that we can think of it, to say, we need another system. The two choices of Biden and Trump; neither of them work.

JS: Medea Benjamin, thanks so much for all of your work and your activism, and for being with us here on Intercepted.

MB: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: That was Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the antiwar organization Code Pink. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn, our wonderful producer, made this show possible. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Fireman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you want to read the work of the journalists of The Intercept, the people who are the true heart and soul of this organization, you can go to theintercept.com. Now, more than ever, it is vital to protect independent journalism, because there are a lot of nefarious actors who are trying to crush it. I stand in solidarity with our colleagues from Al Jazeera, whose offices in Israel were raided, and the network has been banned in Israel.

The Intercept newsroom is powered by a unionized workforce, and I’m honored to work with every single one of these talented journalists.

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

The post Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin on Disrupting the U.S. War Machine appeared first on The Intercept.

THE Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, reached a deal with students to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.” It is one of the few schools to reach deals with students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza as demonstrations spread to more than 154 campuses nationwide.

This week on Intercepted, we bring you a special episode from inside the student movement for Gaza. Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the campus protests and students’ demands for schools to cut off financial ties with Israel and weapons makers. Thakker is joined by Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism graduate student at Columbia University. Gillian takes us inside the protest encampment at Columbia, which inspired similar demonstrations nationwide before it was violently dismantled by police.

Transcript

This transcript is generated from audio recordings and may not be in its final form.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Prem Thakker: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, bringing you a special episode straight from the campus protests sweeping the nation. 

ABC: Across the nation and around the clock …

NBC: Clashes and arrests from the streets of New York, to the University of Minnesota, to Cal Poly Humboldt …

ABC: From California, to Michigan, and along the East Coast …

Over the last few weeks, several universities responded to pro-Palestine and anti-war campus protests by unleashing local police forces on students. At Columbia University in New York administrators suspended student protesters and authorized a police raid on campus. Last week, after negotiations broke down between protest leaders and the university, NYPD officers outfitted in riot gear arrested students en masse.

ABC7: New York City police burst into a building and encampment at Columbia University occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters. Police have arrested about 300 people at Columbia and City College of New York.

Over at the University of California Los Angeles, police stood by as a pro-Israel mob attacked a pro-Palestine encampment. 

ABC7: More fireworks exploding in the middle of the tents, more fireworks being thrown over the barricade into the middle of the tents, more smoke coming from the tents …

The next night, though, police stepped in, by shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the pro-Palestine students who had just been assaulted the day before. 

NBC LA: 3 a.m., hundreds of officers using flashbangs and firing non-lethal projectiles … Face off with the protesters before moving in tearing down the pro-Palestinian encampment.

The militarized response to peaceful campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were replicated at other schools. At the University of Texas in Austin, crowds reaching into the thousands have been met with tear gas and stun grenades. 

CBS Austin: Armed state troopers were on campus at the University of Texas at Austin during a protest there, and dramatic video shows the moment a news photographer covering the event was tackled to the ground by police.

ABC7: Students received an email saying, if they didn’t evacuate the protest area, they would be subject to arrest.

Unknown speaker: After they couldn’t push us back further, I saw the mace. One of the cops just started raising it at our faces.

PT: At Ohio State and Indiana University Bloomington, officers with snipers monitored protests from rooftops. At Columbia, an officer accidentally fired his gun inside a campus building where students were, during the police raid.

At Washington University in St. Louis, officers beat and slammed a professor from another university who was filming them. They then dragged his limp body across campus. He was hospitalized with several broken ribs and a broken hand.

KSDK News: This video shows police tackle a 65-year-old professor as officers dragged other demonstrators toward a police van.

PT: The flashpoint comes amid demonstrations at over 154 university campuses nationwide. On Thursday, President Joe Biden characterized the protests as violent.  

President Joe Biden: Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest.

PT: The so-called “violent protests” the media and politicians decry more often than not only turn out that way because of the actions of police or pro-Israel agitators. Student protesters are painted as easily manipulated violent agitators, rather than sincere organizers pressuring their schools to end their economic ties with Israel and calling for an end to the war on Gaza; a war that’s killed at least 34,000 people — more than 13,000 of those children — and has wounded and displaced many more. 

Meanwhile, as members of Congress pressure schools to crack down on protestors, they are also discussing with university trustees how to crack down even further with agencies like the FBI. Here’s Representative Josh Gottheimer in a recent call hosted by centrist political group No Labels:

Josh Gottheimer: Based on my conversations with the FBI there’s activity I can’t get into— Given my committee responsibilities, I can’t get into more specifics. But I can just say that I think people are well aware this is an issue, but it should be— So, I can’t speak to the local FBI field offices, but it’s got to be all hands on deck, and I’m glad that the committees are going to be taking action. A lot of work’s been done here, there are a lot of layers. It’s not just— You know, this is a lot of years of involvement and action that we have to investigate here. 

PT: Even as schools try to shut down protests, this movement isn’t going away. To better understand the movement and students’ demands, we head to Columbia University, which has unleashed  some of the most violent responses to protesters.  

Joining me now to discuss what happened at Columbia is Gillian Goodman, a freelance journalist and grad student at the university’s journalism school. She’s been reporting on the encampment since it began. 

Welcome to Intercepted, Gillian. 

Gillian Goodman: Hey, thanks, Prem. It’s great to be here.

PT: To start, could you tell me how events unfolded last week, beginning with Monday evening, when the response to students escalated?

GG: So, Monday the 29, a 2 p.m. deadline was given for dispersal of the encampment, which essentially signaled that negotiations had failed between administration and a group of organizers of the encampment. When that 2 p.m. dispersal deadline hit, I was within the encampment, and they read the email aloud on the megaphone.

Student Protester: Earlier today, President Shafik sent out an email announcing the end of negotiations, and declared explicitly that the university will not divest from Israel.

GG: There was very little sense that anyone was willing to disperse within the encampment, I think there was a pretty clear unanimous sense. And so, what they did was basically go through the risks affiliated with not dispersing, so that all community members who decided that they were going to basically refuse the administration’s decision to disperse would know the risks that they were incurring, which included suspensions and, ultimately, expulsions, potentially, as well as Ineligibility to graduate for anybody who is going to be graduating in the next few weeks.

Student Protester: They’re coming around with all of these disciplinary notices. They’re saying that they want us to leave, that we’re a threat, that we’re a danger. Do we feel like we’re a danger here?

Crowd: No!

Student Protester: And what do we say to Columbia?

Crowd: Shame!

Student Protester: However, we want to make sure that the decision that we make about whether we stay here and continue to take up the space that is rightfully ours is one that everyone knows all of the risks of, and is and consents to as a group, right? This is the most important thing. We want to make sure that everyone is on the same page and has the same information.

GG: So, after this, I think there was a sense on campus that something had to happen, because negotiations had failed, they were refusing to disperse. There was a couple of hours of kind of eerie calm where there wasn’t much to do in the bright middle of the day. They held a press conference where they expressed extreme frustration in the administration. And then, the rest of the day from 2 p.m. kind of unfolded like a normal day in the encampment. They had teach-ins, they had speakers come in, they had people creating art. And then, night fell, and we all, I think, were waiting to see what the response would be.

A call to arms kind of came out across the encampment anonymous telegram channel around 11 p.m. that was far more cryptic than anything that normally came through. Usually, missives from the encampment had a very specific ask. They said, we’re going to rally at this time for this thing at this place. This was different. It basically said, all supporters come to the encampment to defend us. And that was it.

So, I was speaking with some sources inside. There had been a lot of these sort of false starts, where you come, you rush to campus at midnight, you think there’s going to be this big action — either from the administration or from the encampment — and then, sort of all quiet. I spoke to some sources who were organizers inside, and they said, this you’re going to have to see for yourself.

So, I got myself to campus, and they started what was a pretty typical rally that then moved into a picket. But they had organized into groups that I hadn’t seen before, sort of teams that seemed to each have different jobs. At around midnight, a second encampment was set up on a far lawn, on Lewisohn Lawn, but it turns out that this was actually a decoy encampment. While this decoy encampment was being erected, a separate group of organizers were occupying Hamilton Hall, which is one of the main administrative buildings on campus.

I was not at the decoy encampment; I was at the occupation of Hamilton Hall.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: So, the students have entered Hamilton Hall just at about 12:30 at night. A second encampment was set up, but that seemed to be mainly a diversion from the larger action of taking Hamilton Hall, which is the main administrative building on campus. The doors have been barricaded with chairs from the inside, and the outdoor tables, metal tables, from the outside.

There was a student who tried to stop the protesters’ actions. So far, he has not been able to do anything, but is standing at the front of the doors discussing with a bunch of the protesters.

GG: And it moved very, very quickly. They essentially started their entry into the building just after midnight and, by 12:30, the building was completely secured with a really robust human chain around it, and the beginnings of a barricade on the inside and outside, that they continued erecting the rest of the night.

PT: OK, thank you for taking us through that.

And I think it’d be helpful, because this was such a flashpoint moment at Columbia, to back up a little bit to come to some of the roots of how this first began. Could you take us through how the protest movement first started beginning on Columbia’s campus?

GG: So, there had been, for many months, disagreements building on campus over the administration’s handling not only of the ongoing war in Gaza, but how those protests were happening on campus. There was a sense that, while antisemitism is a very real and viable threat, the way that instances of hate speech in that direction were being handled was very different to how the instances of hate speech and Islamophobia were being handled.

There were many incidents, including physical altercations, in which pro-Palestinian protesters were sprayed with noxious chemicals, where they were doxxed, where their information was released, and the administration organizers felt had consistently ignored those instances. Whereas a really robust antisemitism task force was set up, there were many meetings, there were many emails.

So, I think that sense that issues of free speech and issues of repression were not being handled equally across all protesting groups.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Were you around when they were setting up the initial camp early in the hours of Wednesday morning?

Ry Spada: I was part of it, yeah.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Can you talk to me about the decision to take that step? Because I think it really represented the next step in Columbia’s movement. What did that feel like? What were the fears and excitements around taking that next step?

Ry Spada: I mean, I think there was — as there is kind of with all sort of radical actions — I think there was a sort of baited joy. We were all really excited to have this moment to express the anger that we’ve been feeling with this institution. Personally, as a Jewish anti-Zionist student, I’m just deeply disappointed in the ways, obviously, that Colombia is weaponizing antisemitism, and Jewish trauma, and the Holocaust, to legitimize their complicity in what is a genocide.

There was a sense of, sort of, this needs to happen, like you said. We had been having protests here, and they had been cracking down really hard on them. They’d been pushing forward a really biased messaging. They had not even said the word “Palestinian” until, you know, maybe two weeks ago. It just felt like something needed to happen.

GG: This all came to a head the 17 of April, Wednesday, the 17, where, at 4 a.m., a group of organizers erected this encampment on a central lawn at Columbia, and then, at noon, held a rally to introduce that encampment to the world, and to the rest of Columbia’s student body and administration, and to air their demands. Which were, primarily, divestment from all Israeli profits and holdings, disclosure of all of those financial connections. And then, later, amnesty for any students who were disciplined in those actions, as well as an academic boycott of any academic relations between Israel and Columbia, including the Tel Aviv Center.

So, I think that encampment came as a surprise to a lot of people, even though there had been many, many actions, it just was the first escalation. And, even though it was not the first encampment that had happened — I mean, Vanderbilt had had a similar encampment since the end of March — but it was one of the most high-profile. And, even from that very first day, that first Wednesday, it was pretty robust. There was a significant amount of tents, there were a significant amount of people. And so, it didn’t start very cautiously. It started quite decisively.

PT: The timing of the construction of the encampment is also important to the story, because it occurred on the same morning that the House Republican-led Committee on Education and Workforce was bringing Columbia administrators to testify on questions of antisemitism.

Rep. Virginia Foxx: Since October 7th, this committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses — particularly the most expensive, so-called “elite” campuses — have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.

PT: Antisemitism is, of course, a very important issue, a scourge of society. But, nevertheless, members of Congress seldom care about Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism to the same extent.

So, I wonder, on the earlier days of the encampment, if you could speak a bit more to how students were feeling, what they were talking about. You mentioned their broader goals, and I’m also curious about how they expressed their hopes, their visions, particularly given the fact that looming over them was this high-drama affair in D.C. that seemingly didn’t care at all to engage with their concerns.

GG: What I think is really interesting to note is that the encampment began being set up at 4 a.m. that day, so it wasn’t in response to anything specific in President Shafik’s testimony, right? Which I think some people had thought that it might have been. They hadn’t even heard what she was going to say yet. But I think it was this idea that Congress was so deeply invested in what has become, I think, a kind of euphemism or scapegoat idea, without engaging in any of the other side of things.

Rep. Kathy Manning: Professor Shafik, I understand that all Columbia students go through an orientation that includes anti-discrimination training. Does that training include comprehensive education about antisemitism, including the central role Israel plays in Judaism?

Minouche Shafik: Thank you for that question. In the past, that was not the case, and that is something we are actively working on.

KM: But is that taking place right now?

MS: We have trained our student affairs staff across Columbia.

GG: And so, I think it wasn’t anything specific that she said, even though, later, many people — including many faculty — took issue with how she handled the task force. But I think it was a wider sense that this circus around this is made to really dismantle academic freedom, it’s made to dismantle pro-Palestinian speech, and it was made to discredit the movement regardless of how President Shafik responded.

So, the second day of the encampment’s existence, on the 18, it was dismantled by public safety. And that’s when the arrests, the initial round of arrests occurred.

Student Protester: And, as the police entered the lawn, we sat down and linked arms, and we chanted, and sang hymns and the songs of revolution. And we made certain that they understood that we in no way respected or were intimidated by their authority.

GG: People were fairly undeterred by this in a really huge way, because it was incredibly historic that the NYPD had come onto campus. I think it was deeply traumatic for a lot of people — both within the encampment, and students who had no relation to the encampment — to see this happen. But it was largely peaceful, no one resisted arrest. I think organizers had expected to be arrested in some ways, and that was part of their escalation.

So, as the encampment regrouped and reformed, there were new tents springing up on east Butler Lawn right next to the original encampment within two hours of the arrests. Really quick mobilization. They hung a banner — “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — very shortly afterwards, and people began having a sit-in. Very quickly, speakers arrived. Cornel West was there also within maybe 45 minutes of this new sit-in, and tents began springing up towards the end of that day.

So, the first days of the encampment really felt like a new sense of world building. It reminded me of things that I had seen back in Occupy City Hall. This idea of, we can form this kind of mutual-aid-based almost utopian society in which we have true academic freedom. We have true freedom of speech that felt in contrast to how organizers were feeling Columbia was treating them, and that we can have radical thought and action in a way that we create. And I think that kind of heady world-building characterized a lot of the early first days of the encampment, even as it was beset by challenges pretty much every day.

PT: Could you speak maybe a bit more to the atmosphere in the encampment throughout your time with them and with the students? I’m wondering broadly how the students are using the space to organize. But, also, the emotional feelings, the communal aspect you’re talking about.

What was it like inside the encampment?

GG: Inside the encampment, I think, maybe I can best describe it to you by walking you through it visually.

In the very first days, there was no access into the lawn, so anyone wishing to enter would have to hop a fence. And so, there would be someone from the encampment stationed at all of the fences, both to speak with members of the community who didn’t wish to enter, who maybe had an issue with the encampment, they would engage in conversation. But, if you were coming into the encampment, there was someone who would grab you by the hand, who would help you over the fence, step you down onto a chair and into the environment.

Later, a gate was opened up, so there was easier entry, and there were community guidelines erected at the front of the gate, especially in the latter days of the encampment after the first sort of three or four. So, if you were new to the encampment, someone would take you in, they would read you through a list of 10 community guidelines about respecting the space, about understanding what you’re saying when you’re entering in terms of a free and viable Palestine within our lifetime, a staunch rebuke of antisemitism. And, included in those community guidelines were really, really clear missives about everyone is welcome, in terms of every faith, every background is coming to the space to learn, and coming to the space to show support and solidarity for Gaza and the people of Palestine.

So, after you were read your community guidelines, you would enter through the rest of camp and, towards the latter days, they erected what they called a cornucopia, which was sort of the supply center of the camp. And that would have hot food throughout the day, snacks and cold food early in the morning and late in the night. Blankets, tents, art supplies, bug spray, sunscreen, things that had been brought in by supporters from the outside, community members. I saw kids as young as 10 bringing supplies in.

Child: Well, it’s actually pretty cool, because you can see everything and what’s going on. And it’s a good experience to see what people are fighting for.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: And what do you think people are fighting for?

Child: Like, everybody to be free, and no genocide.

GG: And folks as old as 70s and 80s dropping off everything from coffee to more tents. Once you pass the cornucopia, the central part of the encampment was a large expanse of tents; at its height, it was easily over a hundred tents I counted. Each sort of festooned with signs that would have different things from “bold, beautiful, arrested” to “dykes for the death of the empire” or “Jews for Palestine.” And so, you could sort of get a sense of people’s specific bent within the camp from some of these handcrafted signs.

And then, the focal point of the encampment began as and always was this open central area where they would hold teach-ins, and speakers would come, and they would have morning assembly every day at 10 a.m., and then nighttime assembly at 10 p.m. And the speakers that cycled through were everyone from higher-profile politicians — Ilhan Omar came at a certain point.

Fox 5: Congresswoman, what message are you sending today with your visit to the encampment?

Rep. Ilhan Omar: I just wanted to see and make sure that we were hearing from the young people, that it is peaceful, that they want the issue to be focused on the demands that they are making.

GG: Her daughter is a Barnard student who was one of the very first people suspended for their involvement in the encampment. To folks who were ex-Columbia students who witnessed the 1968 protests on campus, would come and speak to that. There were families; I did a piece about children inside the encampment. I think the youngest that I spoke to what had brought their 14-month-old daughter, and she was eating avocados off a pink plastic tray. So, a real family sense, a sense of collective joy, a sense of collective learning, a sense of longing for collective liberation.

And that’s why to me, it always felt like utopian world-building. It was really an attempt to have an extremely democratic society in which all decisions — I watched them vote on proposals, it took an extremely long time, because anyone who wished to speak could speak, and every proposal was considered — in ways that I don’t know are always sustainable. But, like I said, with similar things like Occupy Wall Street, this sense of, a new world is possible and we’re going to build it, is really what I felt from inside the camp.

And I will say that I was there every day since the beginning of the encampment. I was not there every hour — many, many things happened outside my purview that I didn’t see — but everything I did see for a significant amount of time was incredibly peaceful, was incredibly welcoming.

I sat at seders for Passover.

[Sound from seder.]

GG: I sat at an interfaith sermon. I sat at many, many teach-ins. And there are moments of tension, always; you know, you disagree if you’re building a world together, not everyone wants the same exact world. But there was never moments of violence that I witnessed.

PT: I’m glad you bring all that up, because it reminds me of the array of media depictions we’ve seen on the protesters broadly, but specifically on the Colombian encampment. Those have ranged from calling it, I believe, a socialist or communist Coachella. To, of course, calling it a deadly pit of violence and antisemitism. And the popular line in The Post is now “outside agitators.” But seemingly those all were off the mark, and not just in the way they were describing it, but also just because they were confused in how they were trying to attack these students; they couldn’t pick one thing.

And one thing about that is sort of the procedure that you lay out, the discipline that these organizers had, that was quite impressive, both in terms of how they were organizing this encampment and the protest, but also their messaging discipline. How they spoke to the media, who was speaking to the media, who was representing the protesters.

So, I’m wondering if you could speak to that element of it.

GG: Pretty early on there was a lot of media attention directed at the encampment. And so, I think they realized quite quickly that that was going to be a central need for them. And, as they have said sort of since the beginning, all eyes on Gaza. If you want to speak to us, we want to ensure that the thing that we are protesting is front and center, more so than us, which I think became more of an issue in the later days.

They designated, essentially, media spokespeople very early. And those media spokespeople, if you came in and you said you were a journalist, those are who you would be directed to. And, especially if you were an outside journalist — I think student journalists within Columbia had a different relationship to the encampment — but especially outside media, you would be politely invited in, you would be identified as media. You would then often be held in a media area near the cornucopia, off to the left of the entrance of the encampment. And then, eventually — sometimes it took a while — a media-trained member of the encampment would come to speak to you.

And I saw them have media trainings. I wasn’t able to sit in on any of them but, basically, everybody who spoke had gotten this kind of media training that I think allowed them to express what they were hoping to express, which was organization, peacefulness, and a really strong, cohesive message of their demands.

And I’ll just say one, one more point that I do think is important to mention about these media spokespeople is, they’re not infallible. One of their primary media spokespeople in the beginning of the encampment, a recording [was unearthed] on social media of them defending statements that they had made, and that were quite violent, that were saying to kill all Zionists. And that person was then barred from Columbia’s campus and, since, has apologized for those statements, and I think has expressed a deep amount of disappointment that those statements would take away from the movement. But I do think it’s important to say that these people are— They’re not perfect people. And I think that sometimes everyone who’s saying the messaging isn’t going to have a 100 percent perfect track record. And so, that instance did happen.

PT: Thank you for noting that. And that reminds me that, of course, throughout this campus, throughout all these campuses, we’re dealing with students, not necessarily professional negotiators and so on. One thing that has been kind of deployed by administrators to respond heavily to these protests is these ideas of student safety, student comfort, the fact that it’s finals season, so these protests are a distraction.

But, of course, as we’ve seen at many of these protests — oftentimes, of course, not always — but oftentimes these protests are ones like Columbia’s encampment, where they’re doing teach-ins, where they might indeed get loud because they’re chanting or drumming. But much of it is dancing, chanting, learning from each other. And it really only gets more unsafe or more uncomfortable or more disruptive for people studying after the police responses.

So, I’m wondering if you could speak to, I know you mentioned speaking somewhat to people who might not have been involved in the protests. What was your impression of the temperature and atmosphere of campus throughout your time there? When were students most uncomfortable, when were students most distracted, and when were students most unsafe?

GG: I think it’s really interesting to what you’re saying about this idea that they are both young students who don’t know what they’re doing and high-level dangerous agitators. And it felt almost as if they were young enough to be dismissed by administration, but old enough to be punished as adults. They were old enough to have significant NYPD brought in for those first arrests, and then a really extreme militarization of the NYPD come in for the second round of arrests.

I would say the first round of arrests were definitely a flashpoint on campus. And I think, for those outside the encampment, to see fellow students — whether or not they agreed or disagreed with them — being brought out in zip ties was incredibly affecting and, from that moment on, campus was different. How people felt about the administration was different from that moment on, and I do think how people felt about the encampment was different from that moment on.

Some people, it really deepened their resolve, and felt that national eyes are upon us and international eyes are upon us. And, later, Gaza’s eyes are upon us. It primarily, I think, because people were shocked to see this police involvement, which hadn’t happened for decades on Columbia’s campus and, because it is a private institution, needs to be OK’d by the administration. So, the idea that the administration would not only willingly, but sort of seek out this kind of response really changed things for people in both directions.

I spoke with counter protesters, young counter protesters, like a woman, Shoshana Ofstein, who was going to be an incoming Barnard student next year; she’s now negotiating whether or not she’s going to arrive at Columbia. But she felt, as a Jewish person, that the NYPD hadn’t done enough.

Shoshana Aufzien: Hi, I’m Shoshana Aufzein. I’m currently living in Jerusalem. I’m back home — my family lives in the Upper West Side — and I’m an incoming Barnard student.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Can you tell me what brought you out here today?

Shoshana Aufzien: I think the events that have been happening on campus are absolutely appalling. I don’t think anybody condoning terrorism should be allowed to be on a college campus. And I, frankly, feel safer living in a warzone right now than I do on Columbia’s quad.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: How do you feel about the arrests that happened in the NYPD’s presence on campus?

Shoshana Aufzien: I mean, I don’t think they’re doing enough, frankly.

GG: She was looking for more police involvement on campus. So, there was a really wide range of opinions on that. I don’t think everybody sat up and said, this is unacceptable, get these police off our campus. Some people really felt, I feel extremely unsafe, and I am looking to discipline those people that are making me feel unsafe.

PT: And so, you talk about this high-grade stewing pot of emotion and reaction to what students, but also people across the country, are seeing. And we’ve talked a bit about the moments leading up to, and the exact moment of, students coming to take over Hamilton Hall on Columbia’s campus.

But could we talk a bit more about that night upon their entrance into Hamilton Hall, and then what ensued after? Both on campus but, of course, as well, throughout the city?

GG: So, a second encampment was erected that was sort of to act as a decoy to the main action of entering and occupying Hamilton Hall, an administrative building.

That moment, I think, especially of students breaking the glass of the doors to place a lock around them, felt very much like a no-turning-back moment. And I think a lot of what led to that was a feeling that they had exhausted every other option.

They had been engaging in school sanctioned protests for months, they had been engaging in sit-ins, in die-ins. There had been petitions, there had been emails, there had been the withdrawal of donations. I think a lot of organizers felt, especially after the escalation with the NYPD and their demands, they felt that their negotiations still had gone nowhere. The concessions that the university made, also, just to note, when negotiations failed.

So, there were a round of concessions on the table from the administration when those negotiations failed. The administration had offered scholarships for folks in Gaza and the West Bank, they had offered to convene a committee on academic freedom, they had offered to convene a committee to consider proposals of divestment. But I think organizers felt — and they said, in fact, in a press briefing, when that 2 p.m. dispersal deadline was brought down — they said that these felt like bribes. The scholarship felt as if the administration was throwing money at a problem, and the committees on academic freedom and the proposal of considering divestment felt empty to the organizers.

So, I think faculty were — a lot of them, really — on the side of the organizers, but also felt deeply that they maybe need to make concessions and disperse for safety. But, regardless of all of this, the organizers felt that escalation was their only hope, and they were really looking to the protests of 1968 explicitly, in which protesters occupied the same building, Hamilton Hall, to protest the Vietnam War and Columbia’s expansion into Harlem. That incident resulted in even larger scale arrests with greater violence.

And so, I think that the organizers understood that the historical precedent for what they’re doing was not without risk. And I think that moment when they took the hall and renamed it Hinds Hall, that moment, they understood, placed them in a historical precedent that was unsafe for them, and was violent.

And so, I think, watching them with their arms linked, singing protest songs, but in a much more somber tone than I had ever heard them sing before as 300 riot police entered campus, and all press was pushed out.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: So, police in riot gear, probably two to three hundred, have entered the campus. They’re coming in towards the protestors who are at Hamilton Hall right now. They’re surrounding the lawn with the second encampment in front of the protestors.

GG: There was almost no press, and almost no witness to the arrests.

Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: The students are still singing in front of Hamilton Hall.

GG: We all attempted to remain inside. A lot of people really put their bodies on the line, and sort of refused to move for a bit, but the police were incredibly effective in removing not only press, but also legal observers and medics. And so, the only information we have about what happened during the actual arrests — and of course, almost nobody saw what happened inside the building during the arrests — but that the only evidence we have from that is some footage that we’re slowly gathering from different sources, and trying to paint a picture of what happened.

PT: It’s striking when you talk about how quick the police response was to these students. And you have to wonder if it might just be too late to put things back to where they were before. Because even in those handful of hours that we saw images of students singing these very affecting songs, and as we see those students unfurl the banner that read Hinds Hall, in honor of the six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, you have to wonder if it’s too late, just because alongside this you’re seeing more and more campuses either expressing overtures. Or, in fact, promising divestment votes in the fall, as we see on Brown University’s campuses. There’s other campuses that are opening negotiations with protesters.

It just strikes me because, in the ’80s, students in Hamilton Hall were able to secure a divestment vote from apartheid South Africa. And now, here, despite Columbia students being met with police right away, and now they’re kind of reeling, their tents have been swept. On one hand, many protesters might feel very dejected but, on the other hand, they have young children in Gaza saying, thank you. And those images are being seen by people across the world. You have college campuses all over the place that are now facing similar encampment protests spurred, in part, by Columbia’s acts, and a lot of these campuses are now opening negotiations.

So, I’m wondering if you have any sense at Columbia while, despite the tents being gone, students being arrested, where does the divestment movement stand at Columbia amid all of this context?

GG: The only people able to enter Columbia’s campus are people residing in residential buildings directly within campus. If you are a Columbia student with a functioning Columbia ID who is not in one of those dorms, you cannot even walk through the gate. So, it’s incredibly difficult to have momentum and solidarity in a movement when a huge swath of campus can’t set foot on campus and cannot be together.

This is the moment I think that online organizing takes up some of the mantle of that, and there’s a lot of communication in Signal and Telegram channels, and also solidarity with other institutions, right? Like, the arrests at City College were massive and more violent than what happened at Columbia. And I think there is a huge solidarity emerging between Columbia and City College.

Of course, NYU has had an encampment, the New School has had a large encampment. And I think that kind of solidarity is forming because there is no access to an easier campus solidarity that could, I think, bolster the divestment movement.

PT: Well, as we are seeing across the country, there are definitely lots and lots of organizing happening still between pro-Palestinian students, pro-Israel students and demonstrators, and the police. And there seems to be no sign of slowing down.

But thank you, Gillian, for joining us. This was incredibly informative, and I think there’s been a lot of outsider media parachuting in to these encampments, especially from folks who maybe have been paying as much attention to these students and their concerns as you have been so intimately doing so. So, thank you for sharing that perspective with us.

GG: Absolutely. I’m really happy to be able to bring it to you all, and bring those voices in. So, thank you for having me, Prem.

PT: Absolutely. 

That’s Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism grad student at Columbia.

Now, let’s dig deeper into the larger divestment movement. What exactly are these students so committed to, beyond calling for an end to Israel’s violence in Gaza and Palestine more broadly?

They have focused demands on university complicity. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student-led coalition, has identified five demands for the school, which include financial divestment, academic boycott, stopping displacement of the surrounding community and policing on campus, and releasing a statement calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. 

We’ll focus on number one: financial divestment. Specifically, students are calling for Columbia to divest all of its finances — including its endowment — from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine. They further want to ensure accountability by increasing transparency around financial investments.

Divestment emerged as a popular tactic in opposition to apartheid South Africa decades ago. In the early 2000s, college students around the country began pressuring their universities to divest from Israel. Several divestment referendums have taken place at Columbia’s campus in recent years; in 2018, at Barnard, about 64 percent of participating students voted in favor of divestment from companies that, quote, “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” In 2020, 61 percent of Columbia College undergraduates voted in favor of a similar resolution.

Fast forward to now. A whopping 90 percent of participants at Barnard voted in favor of divestment and, at Columbia College, about 76 percent. The pre-existing campus appetite for divestment from Israel was inflamed after October 7. While Hamas’s attack shocked the world, Israel’s brutal retaliatory collective punishment shocked people even further.

Students at Columbia were no different. They sprung into action, hosting vigils, rallies, and forums. Several other schools joined quickly after Columbia’s encampment, including Yale, MIT, and the University of North Carolina. These protests have largely consisted of nothing more than students in tents, or chants and drums. Nevertheless, administrators have been quick to meet such protests with a heavy police presence, but knocking down one only seemed to prompt five more elsewhere.

While many schools responded to students’ demands for divestment with violence, there were some notable exceptions. Evergreen State College, for example, struck a deal with students to begin work towards divesting from, “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

Evergreen State is the alma mater of American nonviolence activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by Israeli bulldozers in 2003 as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes. In 1977, Hampshire College, a small private university, became the first to divest from apartheid South Africa. In the years following, colleges nationwide tipped like dominoes.

As the American student movement for Palestine peaks, it’s an open question as to whether Evergreen State could be the moment’s first domino.

That does it for this episode of Intercepted

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn and senior editor Maryam Saleh produced this episode. Gillian Goodman contributed reporting and audio to this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. And I’m Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept. 

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us, too.

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Thank you so much for joining us.

The post “A New Sense of World-Building”: Inside the Student Movement for Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, the famed American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler was thrust into the center of a controversy after remarks Butler made about the October 7 attacks in Israel. A longtime critic of Zionism and Israel’s war against the Palestinians, Butler had condemned the attacks in the immediate aftermath. But at a March roundtable in France, Butler offered a historical context for the Hamas-led operations and stated that the attacks constituted armed resistance. The blowback was swift, and Butler was criticized in media outlets across Europe and in Israel. This week on Intercepted, Butler discusses the controversy and their position on Hamas, Israel, and crackdowns on student protests.

Butler is currently a Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School. They are the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Well, Maz, there’s a lot to talk about this week. In a few minutes, we’re going to be talking with the great Judith Butler. But before we get to that interview, I want to ask you your sense of where things are right now with the Netanyahu government appearing to be ready for a full-scale invasion of Rafah.

Of course, Rafah has been attacked repeatedly, but this presumably would be a much more intense, full-scale ground operation, even as there’s reports that the Biden administration is trying to push for some form of a deal where Hamas would release 33 of the Israelis that they’re holding in return for some, as of now, undefined pause in the Israeli attacks.

But your thoughts on this moment, the political situation, and the threats coming out of Tel Aviv.

MH: Well, it’s been a very eventful few days. We had the reports suggesting that a peace deal could be imminent, in fact, that would end the conflict for a predetermined period of time. But on Tuesday, Netanyahu indicated that whether there is a deal for hostages or not, the war will continue and the attack on Rafah will continue.

And he said explicitly that we’re going to enter Rafah “with or without a deal.” So what it indicates to me, and most observers, I would say too, is that this war was not really about the hostages. It’s not currently about the hostages either, because Netanyahu’s had many opportunities to free the hostages in a peace agreement for a ceasefire or a permanent peace agreement.

And reportedly, even from the first days of the war, it came out recently that Hamas apparently had offered full release of hostages in exchange for the IDF not coming into Gaza on the ground. So it seems that Netanyahu is very, very committed to continuing the war as long as possible; the hostages are not a priority.

It seems like his statement on Tuesday was specifically geared to sabotage the current ongoing negotiations, which by all accounts, we’re almost reaching success. So it seems very, very obvious that Netanyahu is invested in continuing the war. And it could not just be for political reasons, in terms of Israel’s position, but his own political future inside Israel, because the second the war ends, he’s going to be in serious political and legal trouble with Israelis and continuing [the war] longer prevents that.

JS: There’s also this strange micro-mystery that’s been playing out. Some days ago, there were reports that started emerging in the Israeli press, indicating that Netanyahu and some of his senior officials in his government were very concerned that the International Criminal Court was going to be handing down indictments, including indictments of Netanyahu himself and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister.

And the initial reporting in the Israeli media was citing sources in The Hague, but it seems pretty clear from other reporting that has now taken place in Israel and elsewhere, that this was kind of rumor intelligence and that it was being floated to the Israeli press. For what reason would Netanyahu and his government want to float the notion that the International Criminal Court was potentially going to be issuing indictments?

It could be that that is true — that there is a contemplation at play at the Hague where the prosecutor, Karim Khan, is actually considering or has sealed indictments of Netanyahu or others. Though it would be a really swift course of action, if you look at the history of how the ICC proceeds, but it does seem as though there’s a political agenda at play that isn’t exactly clear right now.

Netanyahu reportedly also spoke directly to Joe Biden saying that he wants the United States to block any effort by the International Criminal Court to issue indictments against Netanyahu or other officials. But it’s something to sort of keep an eye on and flag. And just one thing I want to mention for people — we’ve talked about this on the show before, whether it’s true or not, the reports about potential International Criminal Court indictments of the Israelis — it’s important to remember this, that there is a law on the books in the United States that’s been in place since 2002, and it was a bipartisan bill that was signed into law by George Bush. And it’s known in the human rights community as the Hague Invasion Act.

And basically what it says is that if any American personnel — military elected officials, appointed officials — are ever indicted or brought to The Hague on war crimes charges or as part of a war crimes investigation, that the president of the United States can use military force to liberate them from the Netherlands.

But also buried within the language that the framers of that law employed was that it’s not just American officials that could be liberated, but also those working for governments of a NATO member country or major non-NATO allies — and among them is the state of Israel.

So, I just want to put that out there for people. Imagine if China or Russia had a law on the books that said if any of their personnel were ever taken to The Hague, that China or Russia could invade the Netherlands. But the final thing I want to say on this is that just the mere rumors that there may be an attempt by the International Criminal Court to indict the Israelis has caused a panic in Washington, particularly among Republican lawmakers and Speaker Mike Johnson, where they are now drafting legislation to directly retaliate against the International Criminal Court if they indict any Israeli officials on war crimes charges. The White House, Maz, is saying for now, we don’t support an investigation. The position is the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel. And then Speaker Mike Johnson saying that if the Biden administration doesn’t stop this, if it is in fact even true, that it would create a precedent that would allow American diplomats, political leaders, and American military personnel to be indicted on war crimes charges at The Hague as well.

MH: Well, the whole thing is making such a spectacle out of the supposed rules-based liberal order, because these are institutions that the United States has patronized or supported in various ways in the past and used, specifically, endorsed their use against their own enemies. Vladimir Putin is indicted by the ICC. He has a warrant for him.

No one claimed they didn’t have jurisdiction over that. So, to so brazenly view it as valid in one circumstance and ignore it and even attack the institution in others, I think this is not going to be sustainable in the long term, because the whole world sees this hypocrisy, sees the lack of substance behind these very lofty words and institutions.

So I think that if they attack the ICC in various ways, attack its personnel, threaten even to attack it physically, if it puts warrants for Israelis, I think it only further along the process of a decay and dissolution of these very, very flawed ideas, institutions that the U.S. built at the end of the Cold War.

JS: Yeah. And just a final note on this: I still think that there are political reasons why Netanyahu’s government wanted to push this story, whether it’s true or not. And let’s also remember that there have been credible reports that Israel has spied on lawyers working for the state of Palestine in proceedings at the International Criminal Court. These have been going on for many years, so it’s possible that the Israelis heard something and they wanted to front-run it and make a big racket about it. It’s also possible that it’s part of a broader distraction operation or an attempt to get the United States to come out on record and attack the International Criminal Court — knowing that Israel is committing war crime after war crime.

Well, we’re going to speak to somebody who also has been really outspoken about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, as well as the events of October 7, and also the events taking place on American college campuses and universities, [and] around the world increasingly. I’m referring to Judith Butler, the U.S. philosopher, currently a distinguished professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School.

Judith Butler is the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

Professor Judith Butler joins us now from Paris. Thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Judith Butler: I’m glad to be here.

JS: Judith, I want to start by asking you about the protests, the encampments that we’re seeing pop up, not just across the United States at universities and colleges, but now increasingly we’re seeing this happening at universities internationally.

And at some of the campuses, particularly in the United States, there’s been a violent crackdown — not only targeting students, but also targeting professors at universities like Emory and others. And I’m curious to get your analysis of the situation as we understand it right now on these campuses, the way that the university administrations have responded, and the role of law enforcement agencies in coming onto the campuses to arrest students and faculty.

JB: Well, certainly I have been following the student encampments and protests, and the way that some university presidents have called in police to break apart the encampments, but also physically to confront and hurt students and faculty protesting and to suppress, in general, their rights of assembly and their rights of free speech. I would say as well their academic freedom — although those three are not the same. 

I think we all saw the footage from Emory University, and the calm and principled head of the philosophy department [Noëlle McAfee] who had the perspicacity to persist and to communicate about her situation. I have to say that I have seen police incursions on campuses for many years.

It is important to see that some university presidents are not calling in the police. So we need to remember that some of them do still hold to principles of freedom of expression and are not enacting violence against students. That said, it is a quite phenomenal movement. 

I’m in France right now, where the students at Sciences Po have been erecting an encampment. I saw an astonishing number of police surrounding the Sorbonne the other morning. Paddy wagons waiting for student protesters and other protesters are seen every weekend in the streets of Paris. Whenever there is a demonstration, there are huge numbers of police who bear their automatics in public as ways of intimidating people and keeping them from expressing their solidarity with Palestine, and of course, their principled opposition to a continuing genocidal attack on Gaza, now focusing, as we know, on and near the Rafah gate.

I think that there are spurious and completely objectionable grounds that universities have given for unleashing police on students. One of them has to do with security. One has to ask security for whom or for what — certainly not security for protesters. They’re not interested in protesters being secure, secure enough, to exercise their rights of expression, their rights of protest. It seems like that would be good if we wanted to guarantee rights of protest on campus, since that would be a defense of freedom of expression and what we call “extramural speech” in the academy. 

But also it becomes clear that the security at issue is twofold. One: security for the campus, its own property — security of the entrance, allowing students to come and leave as they wish, imagining that those protests, those encampments, are somehow keeping people from moving on and off campus. 

But also, as we know, there is a security concern raised by some Jewish students — and here, it’s really important to say some Jewish students, because not all Jewish students agree — those Jewish students who claim that they are unsafe on campus or feel that they need security, telling us that certain utterances make them feel unsafe.

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Pro-Israel Advocates Are Weaponizing “Safety” on College Campuses

Now, utterances that truly jeopardize another person’s safety are those that threaten them with harm. And what we’re seeing in some of the justifications that are used by college and university presidents to bring police onto campus is an equivocation between utterances that may be objectionable and hurtful or disturbing, and utterances that are threats, literally threats to the physical safety of a student.

So I think that the blurring of that distinction has quite frankly become nefarious because any student who says “I feel unsafe by what I hear another student say” is saying that “My security and safety is more important than that person’s freedom of expression.” And if we countenance that, if we give too much leeway to that claim that a student feels unsafe because, say, an anti-Zionist — or a statement in support of Palestine, or a statement opposing genocide makes that Jewish student feel unsafe, we are saying that that student is perceiving a personal threat or is threatened by the discourse itself — even when the discourse is expressive rather than portending physical harm. 

Now, if somebody does say, listen, if somebody uses a deeply antisemitic slur, any kind of antisemitic slur, or addresses a Jewish student in an antisemitic way, and then says, “And because you’re Jewish,” or “Because I feel the following way about Jews, I’m also going to do physical damage to you. I’m going to harm you.” — that is not acceptable speech. That is not protected speech. There’s nothing about that speech that is protected. 

But if calling for an end of genocide against Palestine is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then we see that the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student. It’s as if they are being threatened with harm when, in fact, the opposition to the genocide in Gaza is quite explicitly an opposition to doing harm and killing numerous people who are huddled in Rafah looking for safety.

So I call it nefarious because it’s so clear that Palestinians — who are under bombardment and will now, or have undergone, unfathomable loss, who are living through a spree of killing and genocide that stretches the human imagination and appalls anybody whose heart is open to the reality before them — that they are the ones in need of safety. And the international community has failed to provide that safety. They are in need of safety from harm, like real physical harm. They need to be safe from killing, from being killed. They need to be protected against being killed. They need to protect their families, what’s left of their families.

So for an utterance that opposes the genocide in Gaza to suddenly make a Jewish student feel unsafe — because that Jewish student identifies with Zionism or with the state of Israel — is a grotesque claim in the sense that that student is safe. 

That student is having to hear something that might be deeply disturbing and sometimes antisemitic — and I think we must all agree that antisemitic speech, narrowly, clearly, lucidly defined, is radically objectionable under all circumstances. But we can talk about that as well, since what counts as antisemitic has so expanded beyond the limits of its established definitions that, unfortunately, the call for justice in Palestine is registered by some as nothing more than antisemitism.

MH: Judith, I wanted to get your perspective also on what these protests are indicative of — in the sense that, obviously, you’ve seen previous generations of protests by students and others about Palestine before, but it seems the scale and scope today is quite unlike what we’ve seen in the past. What do you think that this reflects in terms of public opinion and particularly generational change of how younger people view this subject, as opposed to how it appears to older generations? 

JB: I think that it’s obviously not everyone in the younger generation. So we have to be careful in our generational generalizations. And, you know, we see people like Ros Petchesky in New York, a Jewish Voice for Peace advocate, getting arrested, I think, several times now. She’s older than I am, I believe. So there’s a cross-generational solidarity, as well as a specific form of mobilization that is now focusing on college campuses. 

But let’s remember that the mobilization on college campuses was preceded by a number of very public actions jointly waged by Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, disrupting bridges in New York or the federal building in Oakland, the ports of Oakland, the Statue of Liberty, we could go on and on. Some very high-profile protests. And of course, Biden himself has discovered that there are — that there’s no event he can go to right now without major protest outside. Now, a lot of times that is young people. I guess I want to point out that a lot depends on whether you’re able-bodied, like able-bodied young people are able to encamp and protest in ways that other folks maybe can’t.

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Amid Gaza War, College Campuses Become Free Speech “Testing Ground”

But the current mobilization on college campuses is being watched nationwide and globally. So a number of Palestinians have commented to me from different parts of the world that it is enormously heartening, that it lifts them to see this great solidarity and this great clarity. Very often when it comes to Israel–Palestine, we hear people say, “Well, it’s so complex.” I think for many of the young people, it’s not that complex. This is a genocidal violence being enacted against the Palestinian people in Gaza. And it is obvious and it is clear, and they have the footage and they circulate the footage and they know it.

They’re also reading: They’re getting the history of Zionism. They’re getting the history of occupation. They’re getting the history of Gaza. They’re learning online and in seminars and in their own colleges. And the mobilization is born of an unequivocal conviction — not just that the bombardments and killings, the loss now of over 34,000 Palestinian lives is horrific. Not just that, but the history of Zionism, the history of occupation, the structure of apartheid within the state of Israel, the fact that Palestinians remain stateless or living within administrative authorities that do not have full state powers and do not represent full political self-determination. And that even now, Palestinians who live within the state of Israel, within its current boundaries, they also are suffering harassment, violence, and second-class citizenship in many different ways. 

I think that there is a broad educational effort happening here. And I like the fact that education is being mixed with activism because activism should be informed. And sometimes we see ill-informed instances, like somebody yelling, “Jews go back to Poland.” No, that’s not acceptable. 

What does the liberation of Palestine mean? What does it look like? Well, in my view, it means that Palestinians and Jews and other inhabitants of that land will find a way to live together. Either next to each other or with one another, under conditions of radical equality, where occupation is dismantled and all the colonial structures associated with occupation is dismantled.

It doesn’t mean pushing Jews off the land. It does mean, in my mind and in many people’s minds, the taking down of settlements and the redistribution of that land to Palestinians who lived there. And it does mean, in my mind and in the mind of many others, a just way of thinking about the right of return for Palestinians who have suffered forcible exile and who wish to return to the lands or at least to the region, or to have compensation or acknowledgment for what they have suffered. 

I wish I saw more on campus. Like, what’s behind the slogan? Like, yes, I want to free Palestine from colonization, from bombardment violence, from settlements, from military and police detention. I want to see freedom from all of those things. But then we also have to ask: Freedom to do what? What will freedom look like? How will it be organized? How will people live together in a free Palestine, or in a free Palestine–Israel, whatever it may be called, or in two states who will have to have a negotiated agreement or a federated model? 

A lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time, so I think I would like to see more seminars in the street, seminars on college campuses that try to take apart the slogans — distinguish the hateful slogans, the ignorant ones, the antisemitic ones from those that are actually helping to realize justice and freedom and equality in that land.

So if we were to have another public seminar on these campuses where everybody is assembled, it should surely be on academic freedom as well. Academic freedom means that educators have a right to teach what they want, to build their own curriculum, to express their ideas without the interference of state and without the interference of donors.

But I think that’s also collapsing right now as donors, we see at Columbia University, are making threats to withdraw funds, that also happened at Harvard and elsewhere. Also state powers, governments pressuring universities to suppress the rights of speech and assembly that their students have. These are forms of interference in university and college environments that ought properly to be protected from that interference. That is what academic freedom is.

JS: Judith, I wanted to ask you about the events of the last few months and how they’ve impacted you and your public profile. On March 3, you made remarks at a gathering in France. And for people that have really followed the history of Hamas as an organization, of the armed struggle of the Palestinian people, of the actions of the Israeli state over the decades — the remarks that you made were, in my assessment, a quite factual rendering of the events, and embedded within them was historical context. You used a phrase, though, that was then cherry-picked, and much ado was made about it in the international press, and certainly in the Israeli press, but also in Le Monde, in American newspapers, and other papers in Europe, et cetera.

You described the attacks of October 7 as “an act of armed resistance.” And again, I emphasize, if people listen to the full context of your remarks, it was quite clear, I think, to intellectually honest people, what you were saying. But then you had just this avalanche of attacks against you publicly. And, from what I understand, also privately, you received hostile communications or hateful communications from people.

But I wanted you to walk us through how you experienced that. What was the point that you were making that then became the subject of controversy? Because I think it’s important to hear it in your own words.

JB: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. I should preface my answer with this comment. Because the violence is so acute and people are taking up sides in very emotionally invested ways, they’re not hearing very well. They don’t always have the time or patience to read or listen to a complex point. And I am somebody who does speak in complex sentences, and I make a claim, and then I qualify it, and then I contextualize it. There’s several steps. And as a teacher, I have the time to do that. As a public figure, I’m learning, one doesn’t always have the time to do that. 

The question that was posed to me in Pantin was, first of all, whether Hamas was a terrorist organization, and then whether I thought as well that it was possible to distinguish the actions of Hamas from an antisemitic attack. 

I made clear in that context that I, as a Jewish person, quite frankly, was anguished on October 7, and I wrote about that, and a lot of my friends on the left were very angry with me for writing about that. I was supposed to keep that to myself. We can see that the grief over Jewish lives lost is very often humanized and memorialized in ways that Palestinian deaths are not.

And we have only to look at the U.S. press and Le Monde as well to see that enormous inequality. 

But I did feel that way. And I wrote against Hamas, in fact, hoping that it would disappear as a movement on October 7. And then as I thought about it, and I saw the genocidal actions of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people of Gaza, and I think we have to say Palestinian people, because it’s not just those who voted for Hamas, or those who are actively part of Hamas. They [Israel] weren’t like asking people, “How did you vote?” or “How do you feel about Hamas?” before they killed them. They did not do that. And indeed, children, older people, as we know, aid workers — I mean, the killing has been monstrous and largely indiscriminate.

And I did think that it was then more important to come out against genocide and to call it that. I did some work, some reading, as I think we probably all did, to figure out, well, how is genocide defined, and who are the jurists who agree. And now, as we know, there are several hundred, if not thousands, who do agree that what is happening is genocide, and the International Court of Justice has also said, plausibly, yes, it is. Wish they would say something stronger. 

By the time I got to Pantin, and people asked me about Hamas — I still don’t like Hamas. I don’t endorse Hamas. I have never applauded or rejoiced in the military tactics of Hamas. I have written extensively on nonviolence, and I often presume people know that I am actually committed to nonviolent means of overthrowing unjust regimes. This is what I teach, and it’s what I believe, and it is what I also have written about at length. 

So I wasn’t romanticizing Hamas, but I was saying they come from somewhere. Hamas emerged as a significant political organization in the wake of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords turned out to be an enormous betrayal of the Palestinian people. The transfer of political authority that was going to take place, that was promised, never took place. And in fact, it was undercut: More land was taken, fewer rights were given, and it was considered by most Palestinians to be a massive betrayal.

Hamas emerged then, as we know, within Palestinian politics. There are several political parties. There’s Fatah, there’s the Palestinian Liberation Organization, there’s the Palestinian Administration and its complex relationship to that, and also the Palestinian National Unity Party, which is extremely interesting to me. I’m probably following that more closely than anything else. 

In short, I thought it was important not to just see the atrocities committed by Hamas — and they were atrocities — on October 7 as random acts of violence. They were horrific. I’ve condemned them many times, and I continue to condemn them. But they come from somewhere.

Can we take the time to understand what drives people to that? Where does that come from? What conditions are they living under? What conditions are they objecting to? Can we discuss those who object to those conditions through military means and those who object to those conditions through other means available to them? Just as a matter of understanding. 

But in certain contexts, to try to understand something like this means that you endorse it. Or if you fail immediately to call it “terrorist,” that means you think it is acceptable. Well, no, there are various unacceptable crimes against humanity, many of which are inflicted by states. We don’t call all crimes against humanity “terrorist” crimes. 

I was trying to contextualize. I was trying to understand why people would be moved to take up arms and be part of a combat struggle. Now, the problem in France is, if you say “resistance movement,” you’re saying résistance. And if you say résistance, you are recalling the liberation from the Nazis, you are recalling the triumphant win of the resistance movement against fascism in France. 

So résistance is always an idealization. Résistance is always what you want. You want to be part of it. You want to be in the wake of it. You want to tell that story. You want to applaud it. So to say something is résistance is to applaud it. And I was foolish because I know enough French and French culture to know that you can’t use the word résistance without invoking that particular legacy.

So, people immediately thought that meant, if I call this violent resistance — and then even say, “And I object to its tactics,” which I did say — by using the word résistance, I am applauding, I am endorsing. 

I never was. I never will. I never have. But I am interested in why people pick up arms, and I’m interested in when they lay them down. So why can’t we be thinking about the Irish Republican Army, or why can’t we be thinking about other places where there’s been violent conflict — where different groups have agreed to lay their arms down when a legitimate political negotiation seems plausible? I’m interested in that, because I am interested in nonviolent modes of resolution. But we have to understand why people take up arms.

And I suppose also, I want to distinguish between being against occupation or against the Israeli siege of Gaza, and antisemitism. Now, yes, some Hamas members said hideous antisemitic remarks. And, of course, we must object to every and all antisemitic remarks. And those were hideous, clear, and explicit. There’s no equivocation. 

But to say that their struggle for justice, freedom, or equality is, at core, just antisemitism, or mainly antisemitism, is to assume that they would be happier if they were colonized by some other group of people. They’re only objecting to being colonized by the Jews because they’re the Jews.Well, no, that’s not right. 

They’re objecting to colonization. And if and when antisemitism gets confused with an anti-colonial rhetoric or an anti-occupation rhetoric, then we need to disentangle it. We need to do that on college campuses, we need to do it with our Palestinian allies if that ever happens — in my experience, it happens very, very rarely. 

In any case, I guess I was taken to endorse Hamas, which I do not do, that I refused to call it “terrorist,” but I feel like once you call it “terrorist” and you just put it in that box, then it’s random violence that justifies any and all efforts to wipe it out.

If Hamas is only terrorist and not a military group that is trying to achieve some kind of political aim that other people are also trying to achieve through nonmilitary means, if it’s only terrorist, then the alibi for genocide is right there. Because if all of these people are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers who are living in Gaza, then the entire population is painted as terrorist, at which point, there’s only one thing that the Israelis and many of its U.S. supporters think is possible: which is the obliteration of those people. 

So I think we have to think critically about how and when we call people terrorists. There’s a jurist here who’s defending people’s free speech on Palestine, and she’s called a terrorist sympathizer, and she’s now under scrutiny by a legal investigation. So before we bandy about this term “terrorist” — and I’m sure there are legitimate uses of it, and we can even describe some actions of Hamas as terroristic, terrorizing, terroristic — we can certainly also talk about whether Israel is an example of state terrorism. When do we talk about that?

I think it’s not the case that terrorism only belongs to nonstate actors. We also have states that act through terrorization and terroristic tactics and who would comply with such a definition. But yes, for many people, at least in the media, it seemed that I had either contradicted myself, that I had criticized Hamas and now I was elevating it and even identifying with it — but that’s not the case. I continue to deplore their tactics. 

I am interested in why they took up arms after Oslo. I wonder what it would take to get them to put down arms. What am I for? I’m for significant, substantial political negotiations that would produce a nonviolent future for Palestine. But, I don’t know if anybody can really hear that, because at this point, the smallest word reduces the person.

Like, “Oh, you said that word,” or “You failed to say that word, so this is who you are, and this is where you belong, and you’re on that side.” “You’re pro-Hamas.” Or even in my early one, “You’re pro-Israel.” It’s like, no. No. People are jumping, and they see words and they grab them, and they try to capture people and reduce them without listening, reading, contextualizing. I hope, really, that we get slower, more careful educational efforts happening on campuses and elsewhere, so that our reporting and our speaking can be as precise and thoughtful as possible.

MH: Judith, one thing you alluded to — and we’ve discussed on the show in the past as well too — is the difficulty of discussing the subject not just among peers, but also due to state pressure. In the United States certainly we’re seeing now with the campus protests, but also in Europe, perhaps even more strenuously.

You’re based in Paris, and you’ve had some incidents in the last few months where events you’re speaking at or taking part in came under some sort of pressure or participation had to be withdrawn. And things like this are happening across Europe and quite extensively. Can you talk a bit about the climate there for discussing Israel–Palestine and the challenge in raising these perspectives that you’re discussing with us today?

JB: I mean, I think what’s going on in Germany is quite distinct, and people here in France I know keep asking themselves, “Are we becoming Germany?” And I don’t know whether France is becoming Germany. I think there is in fact an internal debate about that. The police were brought in to confront the students at Sciences Po, and many people who may have very different views on Palestine and Israel objected to the suppression of the freedom of protest and the freedom of speech at Sciences Po. But it’s true that, I mean, obviously in places like Germany, anybody who’s invited there will first be investigated by their hosts to see whether they support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which I have since 2009. I wouldn’t go to Germany because I know what the attacks would be like against me.

I’m glad [Yanis] Varoufakis did. I think that was brave and important and drew attention to it. I’m glad Masha Gessen survived that trial. I’m glad that Nancy Fraser is speaking out strongly against her cancellation. It was, and remains, a complete scandal that someone as smart and important as she is, is denied the freedom to speak because she signed a perfectly legitimate philosophers’ letter objecting to the genocidal attacks on Gaza.

So I’ve been rescheduled. One of that was canceled in a convoluted way, but then I’ve been twice rescheduled. So we will see whether that rescheduling is fulfilled. I think it probably will be, but it is not comfortable to speak freely in public about matters such as these

JS: Just to follow up on that: I’ve been in touch with lawyers in Germany who are representing ordinary citizens, not prominent academics, not famous people, but ordinary residents of Germany.

Some of them are Arabs, Palestinians, others are Jewish residents of Germany, who have been charged under antisemitic speech laws because they’ve used terms at demonstrations to describe what the Israeli state is currently doing to Gaza that were historically applied to the actions of the Third Reich.

And there was a rather senior woman who is an Israeli living in Germany who was twice arrested within I believe a week period, a one-week period, for simply holding a sign. But many of the most vicious attacks against people on these grounds in Germany are aimed at Arab residents, unfamous Arab residents of Germany, some of whom are even being threatened with deportation.

And what I wanted to zero in on is, I’m constantly having arguments with people in Germany and elsewhere in Europe about these kinds of laws. As you see the rise of the AfD in Germany, the far right-wing party, the re-rise of the the far right, — and we’re seeing this in other European countries as well, and you’re certainly experiencing that in France. If right now Germans, ordinary Germans, don’t recognize that the weaponization of these laws against residents or citizens of Germany — because the German state has this “reason of state” that “we must defend Israel at all costs,” that’s the mentality here, and it in and of itself conflates Israel as a state with Judaism as a whole. 

But if you justify criminalizing this speech, right now, that is aimed at protesting against Israel’s actions in Gaza. And then if you have a far-right party take over, it’s so easy for that party to say, “Well, hey, that’s the standard. You’ve set the standard. We’re allowed to criminalize speech that we don’t like.” I think that’s extremely dangerous. You know, I can levy a million criticisms toward the United States, but at least we have a fundamental basis to argue about these issues from, and it’s the First Amendment. In Germany, and it’s leading the way, and in other European countries, they also have speech laws heading in this direction, or they’re contemplating them — these are extraordinarily dangerous laws. Extraordinarily dangerous.

JB: I am following that, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that people who are famous should not be canceled or criminalized, but maybe other people can be. No, no, no. I’m quite aware — in fact, when I used to go to Germany, I visited many Israelis in exile who live in Berlin and who were working closely with Palestinians and were anti-Zionists, quite frankly, who thought that they would be able to live in Germany more easily than they could in Israel because of the cultural activities.

But those people, including, as you say, Jewish people of conscience, the Jüdische Stimme people, the Jewish voices people — they are being arrested, and we’re seeing German police arresting Jewish people in the name of defending against antisemitism. And of course, we’re also seeing German politicians and their apologists deciding whether or not a Jewish person’s critique of Zionism or critique of the Israeli state or the Israeli policy in Gaza amounts to antisemitism.

So Germans are brokering whether or not Jews are antisemitic or not, which I find appalling. And there’s no shame in that. You’re right about the raison d’état the reason of state in Germany, the unconditional support for the Jewish state of Israel. But, you know, they claim that the Jewish state of Israel is a democracy, and yet, if it were, which I don’t think it is, it would also accommodate free speech or robust criticism of the state’s actions. But it does not do that.

We’ve seeing that now in the sporadic persecution of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, professor at Hebrew University, who was arrested in her bed just the other morning. Released now, but possibly facing new arrests as we speak. But in Germany as well, the suppression of criticism, of public criticism, is also an attack on democracy. So as they cancel and annul and criminalize all kinds of young people, including, as you say, Palestinians, people from Turkey, North Africa, Syria, you don’t have full citizenship or full residency or complete papers or are particularly vulnerable — we see a crackdown on the stateless or the precarious that suggests that police powers are legitimately being used to suppress open public criticism. What we associate with flourishing democracies.

So you’re right. The AFD, which according to the latest reports is gaining greater and greater support among German people, including German youth, is able to flourish in an environment in which state powers and police powers are being unleashed against people who are trying to express basic democratic rights: the rights to speak, to criticize, to assemble, to protest, to give names to what we see, to give the true name for what we see, to say the word “genocide.”

We could have a longer conversation about the spurious argument that is sometimes used against protesters, namely that the Jews are those who suffered genocide, therefore they cannot be enacting a genocide, and it is obscene to say that they are, and they use that word “obscene.” There is nothing that keeps a people who have suffered massively in life from afflicting massive suffering on others, even though the sufferings are different. There is nothing in the history of the world that precludes that.

There are no pure angels in the situation, but there is obviously an effort to control language and to suppress analogies and to keep the exceptional character of the Nazi genocide in place so that we cannot use the word “genocide” to name what very clearly complies with the legal definition of genocide. So I just think it is going to be a massive struggle in Germany to open up the critique of Israel, to accept the nonconsensus on Israel. 

I want to say one last thing about it, and here’s a kind of bad argument: If you say you’re an anti-Zionist in Israel, in Germany, and sometimes here in France as well, people think it means that you believe that Israel has no right to exist. They actually think that’s all it means. When you say you’re an anti-Zionist, they hear you saying, “I want the destruction of the state of Israel.” Now, you could be an anti-Zionist like I am, clearly, and wish for a state formation in which Palestinians and Jews live together and inhabit that earth together equally and without violence, supported by constitutional protections, by economic equality, the end to colonial structures, the end to occupation.

That’s not the death of the state of Israel, but it might involve a transformation of that state. And it’s that last point, like, what if we imagined a transformation of that state, so that it was a state that represented all the inhabitants there, regardless of religion, regardless of race, national origin?

We would just sound like old-style liberals, right? We would be like boring old-style liberals. Constitutional democracy. If you called for that, for a one-state solution, would you be calling for the end of the Jewish people or the death of the Jewish people or the destruction of the state? You would be calling for a transformation of the state that would be in the service of all the inhabitants, because living on conditions of equality, living equally free, living under justice is the end to a violent struggle for freedom, because freedom is there.

It’s the end of the violent struggle against the Palestinians because they are your neighbors and your equal citizens. I mean, it’s a vision of cohabitation. It’s not a violent act. So, you know, the state of Israel was founded one way; it could have been founded another way. There were bi-nationalists who wanted the state of Israel not to be founded on the basis of Jewish sovereignty. They lost that. And there have always been Jewish Israeli critics of the Jewish sovereignty principle who wanted Israel to be a democracy worthy of the name. Those are positive values, and at least they should be debated. And they could be debated in Germany because a lot of the people who held to this view were German Jews or German-speaking Czech Jews like Hans Kohn.

I mean, it’s just nonsense. Anyway, this is the nonsense that we’re left with in this world right now.

JS: Well, Judith Butler, you leave us with a lot to contemplate, and I know you have to go right now, but we’re so grateful for you, for taking the time to be with us here on Intercepted. Thank you so much.

JB: OK. Thank you very much.

MH: Judith Butler’s latest book is out now and called “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

JS: 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 by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Fireman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

JS: Thank you so much for joining us, I’m Jeremy Scahill. 

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Judith Butler Will Not Co-Sign Israel’s Alibi for Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

In the face of growing international pressure, the Biden administration has continued to double down on a policy of blanket support for Israel, even as it presses ahead with a possible military offensive against the town of Rafah that many observers have warned could trigger the largest humanitarian crisis of the war so far. This week on Intercepted, co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict with Thanassis Cambanis, director of the foreign policy think tank Century International. Cambanis explains how Biden’s policy toward Israel is pushing the entire Middle East to the brink of a regional war that could inflict far greater suffering than we have seen to date, in an area which U.S. policymakers claim to be trying to exit.

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Maz, as always, these days, there’s a lot to talk about. Just a couple of thoughts, though, on what we’ve been witnessing at university campuses across the United States.

Of course, there’s this massive demonstration that has broken out in encampment at Columbia University, and you’ve had a pretty heavy-handed response, from not only Columbia’s administration, but the attempt on the part of the university to use the New York Police Department to crack down on the students who are gathering to protest against Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians of Gaza.

And I’m not going to say his name, but there’s one assistant professor at Columbia University who identifies himself as a rabidly pro-Israel Zionist, who has, for months, been trying to make himself the story at Columbia University. You know, throwing tantrums, trying to provoke students into some action against him.

The reality is that if you look at narratives throughout history — particularly the history of the United States — when protesters are engaged in direct action or are protesting, the universities of the day, their administrations, the major media outlets, they all poo-poo the protesters. You can go back and look at articles that were written about Dr. Martin Luther King, not just his work on the civil rights movement, but also his work on the antiwar movement and in opposing the war in Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, when he died, his popularity was at its lowest. He was being targeted by major media outlets, by both political parties. You had liberal activists who were being carted out under radio and television to denounce him as being too radical. And we’re seeing that kind of narrative right now. So, what I would say to the students is: history is on your side.

But I wanted to make a different point, and it refers back to this assistant professor who’s trying to make everything all about him. The reality is that, with the focus on the demonstrations on the college campuses, it’s important to remember that the students themselves keep saying, don’t make us the issue, the issue is the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza, and Israel’s unjust war against the Palestinians. But, clearly, the rabid supporters of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza want to distract from the facts that anyone with eyes to see is witnessing in Gaza. They’re trying to make it that, somehow, you have Hamas and Hezbollah taking over American universities.

And they don’t like to talk about the inconvenient fact that many Jewish students at these universities are some of the main organizers, or are providing many of the actual students that are in these encampments. They want to make it seem as though these protesters are somehow in the pay or under the influence of Hamas or Hezbollah.

In a way, also, this situation that Israel created by bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria, knowing that the Iranians would be in a position where they’d have to respond, this was an attempt — in part, I’m not saying this was exclusively what the Israeli strike in Damascus against the Iranian consulate was about, but in part — it clearly is an effort to shift the attention away from the horrors that are playing out in Gaza. And when we are focused, then, on this fake debate about antisemitism on college campuses — I’m not saying that there’s not antisemitism that exists — but the notion that there’s this epidemic of antisemitism on campus, rather than, there is a mass popular uprising on campuses against Israel’s scorched-earth war against the Palestinians, what we’re not talking about then is the fact that there are mass graves being discovered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where at least 300 bodies have been retrieved in recent days.

We’re not talking about the fact that the Israelis appear to be moving forward with a ground invasion of Rafah. There is satellite imagery indicating that, in recent days, tents have been erected in Khan Yunis to the north of Rafah, which has already been utterly devastated. We’re not talking about the fact that the Biden administration is setting itself up now to greenlight even more weaponry to go to the Israelis.

A word of caution, just to people from studying history: this is an effort to shift the narrative, because the narrative is going very, very bad for this war that the Biden administration has bought into fully, and is promoting politically, and is facilitating with nonstop shipments of weapons.

MH: That’s really well said. And oftentimes you see in cases like this, when it’s impossible to win the debate on the merits, you see suppression, changing the subject, censorship.

And I will point out that gentleman you mentioned at the Columbia University — and not just him, but also the head of the ADL and, recently, certain members of the Senate — have called on the National Guard also to be called in to target these students. And you look at the history of the United States and the Vietnam War, what that implied and the consequences of that, it’s a very, very dire situation that’s developing in the U.S.

And you said it perfectly: at the time, the most indefensible things are being discovered in Gaza. We’re having a very concocted and very calculated debate to reframe things, to create a crisis in the United States that does not exist. To change the subject, and also to send a message that this subject will be censored by force, potentially in the very near future. It could be with the destruction of people’s personal lives, physical violence targeting these students.

It’s a very, very grave situation, and it’s something that we’ve seen play out again in the past in the United States, and we did not like it when it happened in the past before. And to see the same playbook deployed again, unironically, to these students is very, very ugly. It’s something we should speak out very forcefully about, before what could happen, does happen.

JS: Yeah, just one final point on that, let’s rewind back in time, to when we were told that all these conservatives were really standing up for free speech and against cancel culture. And some of those individuals, including some of the most prominent ones, are really at the forefront now of a totally dishonest narrative to smear, collectively, so many of these students, including students who are Jewish students protesting, saying that, “what Israel is doing is not being done in my name.”

MH: Yeah, it’s sick. It’s very, very revealing cynicism and hypocrisy, which is being played out every single day at the moment.

JS: Well, Maz, we’ll continue to pay close attention to what’s happening at Columbia University and other campuses across the country. And always remember to keep it in the context, as the students said, of why they’re actually there, and why they’re gathering.

And that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today, the situation not just in Gaza, but the broader geopolitical context, and the role of the United States.

MH: To discuss this with us today, we have Thanassis Cambanis. He’s the director of the foreign policy thinktank Century International, an author and journalist, and his work focuses on U.S. foreign policy, Arab politics, and social movements in the Middle East. He’s currently working on a new book about the impact of the Iraq war on the international system.

Thanassis Cambanis, welcome to Intercepted.

Thanassis Cambanis: Great to be with you, Maz.

MH: So, Thanassis, there have recently been reports in the press that the Israeli government is preparing for an assault on Rafah. And, obviously, this has been a phase of the war that’s long been feared to generate perhaps the greatest and most acute humanitarian crisis when it finally commences. The Biden administration has been under pressure from the international community and sectors of the press and civil society to ensure that either this operation does not happen, or happens in a way that minimizes humanitarian impact on Palestinian civilians. But it seems very difficult for that to be accomplished.

Can you talk about why this attack is so consequential, potentially, and what the implications could be for Palestinians in Gaza?

TC: The focus on the Rafah assault is, in some ways, an indication of the failure to do anything to regulate or modulate the Israeli assault on Gaza overall. So, in a way, I don’t want to minimize how awful a ground invasion of Rafah will be, but let’s not forget, as you know well, there’s already famine underway in the Gaza Strip, right? There’s already more than a million people displaced from the North to the South. There are routine attacks on food deliveries and so on. So, we’re already talking about a sort of cataclysm of almost unimaginable degree for civilians in Gaza.

Now, as bad as it is, a land invasion of Rafah, among other things— One, it attacks the last remaining quasi-safe zone; and, again, I don’t want to exaggerate. It is not a safe place to be, Rafah has been bombed throughout the campaign, even during periods when it is not specifically the focus of the Israeli assault.

Secondly, it’s the border, right? It’s the border with Egypt. And so, if and when there’s an invasion of Rafah, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of literal pressure on the civilians who are sheltering there to flee into Egypt. And this is, for the United States in particular, a “red line.” And I say this with scare quotes, because we all know that red lines are declared in order to be introduced.

But this is something that the international community — largely Egypt, the U. S., and others — have said cannot happen. Civilians cannot be forcibly displaced across the border into Egypt. That is somehow too much even for an international community that’s been willing to countenance a series of war crimes and extreme actions by Israel. That is why the Biden administration has, on at least this matter, been somewhat robust in discouraging Israel from moving forward.

But all that is in a context in which I think the U.S. and others have misunderstood what Israel is doing. Or, rather, have willfully chosen not to read the very clear signs that Israel has given of what its campaign in Gaza is all about, which is a pretty well-planned and well thought out military operation to make Gaza unlivable. And, ultimately — at least in the words of many members of the Israeli leadership — with the intention of reducing the population of the Gaza Strip, whether it’s through death and disease, or through displacement, or voluntary or forced expulsion from Gaza to Egypt.

That’s the thing that Israeli officials have said, right? This isn’t a conspiracy theory or some kind of reading of the tea leaves. This is stated intentions of people who are helping make Israeli policy. And that’s why I’m afraid we’re somewhat missing the point when we focus on these efforts to delay or restrain the operation, because the Israeli government — or at least key stakeholders in it — have said this is what they want and plan to do. And I’m afraid and also expecting there will be an Israeli land operation in Rafah, and the question will be, how maximalist will that military operation be? Will people ultimately be pushed over the border? Will they swarm the border and flee over it, because otherwise they face certain deaths?

And, if and when that happens, how much will that escalate this conflict and the regionalization of the conflict into yet another unfathomable phase.

JS: I’m wondering, also, why we even pay lip service to the notion that the Biden administration is sincere in any of this stuff on Rafah?

If you want to take them at their word, what have we seen for the past several months? We saw the building of this narrative, oh, Biden is growing impatient with Netanyahu. Oh, he’s getting really upset with Netanyahu. You know, there’s a lot of leaking about how Biden is dissatisfied, Biden is upset, Biden is losing patience. And then you had Biden, according to his advisors, he misspoke when he said it was a red line. Then they started to say, no, there are no red lines regarding Rafah. 

Then they come back, and now there’s a little bit more of a nuance. Well, they wanted the Israelis to come to Washington and discuss what the terms of such an operation in Rafah would look like. And now we’re at this position where the U.S. seems to be projecting this notion that they’ve reached or brokered some sort of an understanding with the Israelis of what ground operations will look like in Rafah.

At the same time, we’ve seen for seven months the United States continue to rush emergency shipments of replenishment for the Israeli arsenal, offer them political support when they’re acting at their most extreme, giving preemptive cover to lay siege to hospitals when the Biden administration not only cosigned the narrative about this Hamas Pentagon being under al-Shifa hospital, but then said we have U.S. intelligence to indicate this.

And now we arrive at this moment where the Israelis bombed the embassy in Damascus, they killed a number of [Iranian] military and civilian officials. Even though the Israelis portrayed it as an attempted apocalypse raining down on Israel, I think, by all reasonable standards, what the Iranians did was calculated. It was telegraphed in advance, it was not using their most sophisticated weaponry. It was a very calculated, the Iranians believed, proportionate response, even though they didn’t kill large numbers of Israelis; I believe there was one death that occurred, as a result of shrapnel, of a child.

But the point I’m getting at here is that it seems as though the Biden administration is interested in domestic political consumption and projecting a certain image globally while, at the same time, providing the Israelis — certainly in the form of the aid pack, the military package that’s going through Congress right now — with everything they need to continue this scorched-earth campaign. And Israel does what it wants and, maybe later, Biden grows more frustrated.

So, I’m wondering if you can unpack all of this. There’s a lot there but, basically, it boils down to, why should we believe anything the Biden administration is saying? Because seven months indicate that the actions mean more than any words or leaks about frustration.

And, on the second level, how this politicking from Biden relates to the response we saw from the Iranians to the Israelis blowing up, attacking what, actually, under law, is sovereign Iranian territory, albeit in Syria.

TC: Jeremy, I think you’re exactly right in focusing on actions, not words. And when I try to analyze and understand the administration’s policy, I almost entirely ignore the rhetoric, right?

When Biden uses profanity on the phone with Netanyahu and has that leak to the press, that is spin, that’s an attempt to manage the domestic politics around this war, it is not an indication of what our policy is. So, you raised a lot of really important interrelated issues, and I want to talk quickly about Israel first, and then the regional picture second.

So, on Israel, the U.S. has three pressure points: that’s weapons supplies, the U.S. veto at the U.N., and the third is humanitarian aid. So, when we want to look at what U.S. Policy towards Israel is, I think we look at almost exclusively at those three things, actions on those three things. Not on statements, even semi-important things like discussions with visiting Israeli officials about what a Rafah invasion plan could look like. Those aren’t unimportant, but those are not the central pillars of the policy.

On the central pillars of the policy, the U.S. has been consistent, and consistently, I think, wrong and destructive. So, on weapons, not only as you mentioned, has the U.S. been express-shipping the weapons necessary to engage in this really escalatory and destabilizing — not to mention on a human level, deadly and awful — military campaign, it has also ignored existing U.S. laws, the Leahy Laws that would, if properly enforced, require the U.S. to stop these shipments, make a finding about whether they’re being used in the commission of war crimes. And, in fact, then it would have to find that these weapons are being used in the commission of war crimes, and suspend delivery. This would not require, by the way, any new rules or laws or any kind of special treatment of Israel. It would just involve observing and enforcing existing law.

So, instead, this administration— as, I think, most past administrations have done since, I think, George H.W. Bush was the last president to enforce any U.S. rules restricting Israeli conduct, and that was on financing for settlements, not on weapons shipments. So, here we are, not only ignoring existing law about the use of the weapons in war crimes, but also doing kind of shady, mob-style accounting, where the weapons shipments are being cut up into smaller parcels in order to be below notification thresholds. And these are really rinky-dink ways of subverting U.S. values and U.S. laws in order to keep arming Israel. So, weapons could do a lot, [but are] doing nothing.

Second, on a role at the U.N., there was one moment a couple of weeks ago where the U.S. allowed a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. Security Council, and then proceeded to immediately undermine that by saying it wasn’t a binding resolution. And, in fact, not only undermine that resolution, but undermine a whole body of U.N. law that used the same kind of language historically that we all understand to be enforceable international law. And now, the U.S. position seems to be, with certain weasel words, things security council resolutions don’t count.

And the third one is aid, where on this, it’s almost embarrassing to have the U.S. as this global superpower and sole guarantor of Israel, not insisting on the free flow of food and medicine into Gaza, which it could have been doing from day one, right? Gaza is not in some remote, hard to reach place. It is surrounded almost entirely by Israeli territory. There’s a container port nearby, there are highways running in and out of Gaza. It is not hard to get as many hundreds or thousands of truckloads of anything you want into Gaza any day of the week, even during this war. It is purely an Israeli choice to prevent that, and it is purely an American choice to pretend that this is something that they have to negotiate and plead for with Israel.

I find it astonishing and embarrassing, even in private, to be in conversations with senior American government officials who talk as if it’s a big deal to get the number of truckloads up from single digits to dozens. You know, it’s a joke, except it’s not a joke, because people are dying by the thousands as a result of this.

So, in all the ways that America could be modulating the Israeli campaign— So, this isn’t even about stopping the war. This is just about making it less murderous, less deadly, less likely to escalate. The U.S. hasn’t done any of those things.

So, the policy is, essentially, genuinely, the bear hug, right? It is: enable Israel to do whatever Israel sees best, and defer making American judgments about what’s in America’s interest in the Gaza war, and in the regional war.

So, secondly, the regional war. This is the part where the U.S. is most guilty of incompetence and policy malpractice from day one. And, on this score, I think the U.S. was genuine in saying it did not want to have a regional war inside Palestine. It seems like maybe senior government officials in the U.S. don’t really value Palestinian lives, I think that’s unfortunately clear.

When it comes to the region, the U.S. does value regional calm, right? There are all kinds of security and economic interests, political interests at stake. The U.S. does not want a regional war. And yet, from the beginning, the things that it could have done, first by restraining Israel, and second, by restraining itself, it has not done.

So, we’ve ended up with the U.S. in a direct war with the Houthis over Red Sea shipping. So, this is international shipping, it is a shared global international interest. Why is the U.S. trying to police this in a one-on-one, essentially? OK, there are a couple of allies helping, but it is basically one of these coalition of the willing led by the U.S., so the U.S. is in a shooting war with the Houthis.

Let’s imagine what would happen if the U.S. were approaching this as a sane global power, one among many. It would have invited the Chinese to enforce whatever the Chinese were willing to enforce, and no more. Because, again, this is a shared global interest, not some kind of parochial U.S. interest.

So, we dive into this period of really reckless escalation. So, the U.S. being attacked by Axis of Resistance factions in Syria and in Iraq. There’s a war going on between Israel and Lebanon, which we don’t focus on too much because it’s much less deadly — although still very significant and deadly — than the one going on in Gaza.

And so, after months and months of this, Israel has understood that the moral hazard provided by the blanket U.S. protection no matter what Israel does, that lesson has been absorbed. Israel comes to understand it can do whatever it wants, and the U.S. will help it clean up afterwards.

So, when the strike happened on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, this is something that anyone could tell you was very high-risk, a very high-risk escalation in a situation where there’s already been so much back and forth that any Iran expert would tell you Iran has been pushed to the limits of how much it’s able to restrain itself without responding to establish some kind of deterrence. And so, Israel does this.

According to press reports, there was a last-minute notification to the U.S. In my read, this is a U.S. malpractice, right? So, even if these press reports are true — which I suspect that there was more notification than that for a strike like this — but even if the notification was half an hour, the U.S. should have said, don’t do it. And, if you do it, we will publicly disavow it and not have your back. You cannot do this in a situation, again, in which the U.S. is trying to avoid direct war with Iran, and is already in direct war with the Axis of Resistance factions in multiple countries.

This is a crazy amount of instability, right? We’re in a regional war that involves Iran, Israel, the U.S., Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon. And some of the best trained and most experienced infantry fighting and militias and militaries in recent history. So, this is highly unstable, very dangerous, a threat to wellbeing and human life around the region.

Even if you don’t care about that, let’s say a U.S. policymaker who just does not care about Arab and Muslim lives around the Middle East, you do care about economic stability, strategic stability, and not having the U.S. drawn into a very complicated multi-front regional war in the Middle East while it’s trying to manage this actually important war in Ukraine. On the management of the regional war, this administration has really done a poor job, a surprisingly poor job. Even on things I disagree with them. I think they tend to operate with some amount of intent and competence and, on this, I can’t see any read in which they are being competent or intentional.

MH: Thanassis, this issue of regionalization is something that me and Jeremy have talked about in the past, too. It’s a very acute fear of many people observing the situation.

It seems like on October 6 there was a very fragile status quo that maybe was optimal for Israel and even the United States, managing the conflict with the Palestinians and keeping the rest of the situations under lid, so to speak. But now that status quo is effectively shattered.

And it’s not just the Axis of Resistance countries — or Iran, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and so forth — but even Egypt and Jordan, their stability is very threatened by the situation. I think Egypt has said that if there are refugee inflows into Sinai from Rafah, they could suspend the Camp David Accords. They didn’t specify what that means specifically, but the Camp David Accords, of course, are the accords which keep the peace between Egypt and Israel. And Jordan’s stability is also threatened by what’s happening in the West Bank.

It seems that the Arab countries, the Gulf Arab countries and the Sunni Arab countries, they’re also very endangered by the situation. And it seems that whatever status quo existed before, it also worked for them well enough, but it’s very difficult to recreate that now that this war in Gaza has happened. And I know from talking to people in the region — I’m sure you have as well, too — this profound anger about what’s happening in Gaza. Not just at Israel and the United States, but also what local governments perceive to be involved.

And, you know, I talk to people in Lebanon pretty often and, notably, when I talk to them on the phone now, I can hear Israeli drones. It’s a very common aspect of our conversations now, which were very mundane in the past. It’s very palpable the extent to which the war is spreading.

How bad do you think the situation could get? And what offramps potentially exist that the U.S. could incentivize Israel [with], even at this late stage?

TC: From the beginning, we’ve said — and we’ve written this and published this at Century International, and this is almost banal — the main and only solution here is to stop the war in Gaza, right?

Some of these escalations are self-serving opportune [actions], like, I’d say, the Iraqi resistance factions are opportunistically using this conflict to pursue some aims of their own. But, on the whole, the instability is a response to Israeli extreme violence in Gaza. So, stop the war in Gaza, you solve the regional problem. Don’t stop the war in Gaza, you actually can’t resolve the regional problem.

In terms of fixing it, the U.S. has sometimes done a decent job trying to sort of do cleanup work. I mean, after the strike on the Iranian consulate, the U.S. really pulled out all stops to mediate with Iran, to convince Iran to have a muted response, which Iran had its own incentives to do as well, and then to pressure Israel to respond to the response in a way that would end the escalation.

So, that’s the kind of thing that can be done, but it is trying to manage a forest fire. You can’t do it, actually. So, you can do your best, and get lucky sometimes and prevent these things from spreading but, ultimately it’s going to spread, because it is an unstable equilibrium involving really core matters of interest and identity.

How bad could it get? I shudder. I shudder. I don’t even want to speculate about it, because I had been until recently mostly worried about an open war between Israel and Lebanon, and what that would look like, in the amount of death and destruction of civilian life. Mostly in Lebanon, but I would expect Israel would suffer more effective targeting of its territory than it has yet. But now, I’m worried about a war directly involving Iran, because Israel is acting as a maximalist spoiler.

So, we’re used to analyzing — or, at least, I’m used to analyzing and hearing people analyze — these conflicts in the Middle East where you’re worried about, essentially, the mismatch between a state that fights some kind of nonstate actor that has asymmetric power, and also sort of has nothing to lose, right?

So, usually, we’re talking about the risks that come with trying to do battle with an ISIS, or another nonstate actor that, in the end is willing to do maximalist extreme destabilizing scorched-earth techniques in order to achieve its interest, and it even wins when it loses, right?

Now, we’re suddenly in this twilight period where the actor that’s behaving this way is Israel. Not a small nonstate actor with nothing to lose, but a state, a nuclear-armed state with an incredibly modern, powerful military, with incredibly long-range strike power. And this state is willing to risk everything, including its relationship with the United States, without which, I don’t understand how Israel imagines it would function or operate and retain its military edge without the unqualified backing of the United States.

But it’s willing to gamble that and, so far, it has won on its own terms, and it is willing to provoke direct war with Iran and essentially set the whole region on fire. In order— I don’t even know what it expects to accomplish by this, because all these measures, as I see it, make Israel less safe. And, again, just trying to look at things from Israel’s perspective, I don’t understand how they see this buying them any kind of security in the region in which they are trying to exist and coexist. 

I’m very alarmed by the evidence which points to highly risk-taking behavior by Israel. It seems like a really deep interest in starting a war with Iran, a war that it hopes will bring in the United States and the Gulf powers. And this is where — to go to the question of what can be done — this is where the Gulf and the U.S. need to really put the brakes down, remove the creation of a moral hazard, and say, we will not join a war with Iran.

And this is really a sort of Saudi and U.S. decision. They have the power to really put the damper on this, but they have not. And this I find inexplicable and really risky, given what Israel’s been doing.

JS: I wanted to shift to talk a bit about the issue of Palestinian statehood.

The Biden administration, in the midst of the horrors of the past seven months, some weeks ago started to really make much more public this push for a two-state solution, and then that caused a flurry of articles, and then reiteration by European powers and other global powers. And then at the United Nations recently, of course, the United States vetoed the moves to recognize the Palestinian state, and the U.S. had its own sort of discombobulated answer for why it did that; I don’t really want to make the focus of this.

Tareq Baconi, the great scholar on Hamas, had a piece recently in The New York Times — he’s written a series of pieces, actually, for The New York Times and other publications that are worth reading in the context of the post-October 7 reality — but in this piece, the headline was quite provocative, it was an April 1 piece called “The Two-State Solution is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy.” And, in this piece, Tareq Baconi writes, “Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their consent in 1947. And, fundamentally,” Tarek Baconi writes, “the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has, in and of itself, normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid.” Tareq Baconi also notes, “The vacuity of the two-state solution mantra is most obvious in how often policy makers speak of recognizing a Palestinian state without discussing an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.”

You guys have also published some pieces on this as well. I’m just curious for your thoughts about this entire discourse, but specifically what Tareq Baconi is arguing here.

TC: We’ve just published a series of pieces on what a shared future for Israelis and Palestinians look like, and the whole framework of that series of pieces was borrowed from Tareq. So, actually, I tried to get him to write for us, but he helped me shape these ideas, so I’m borrowing his thinking, which I find persuasive, for talking about what, one, a more honest look at what the present actually is, and two, an honest appraisal of what the future looks like.

So, the idea here is to stop with the wishful thinking and sort of delusional talking about two states. I mean, the first time I went as a reporter to Israel/Palestine and actually drove around the West Bank and went to Gaza, just obvious, reasonable questions; like, how would this work? How would Gaza and the West Bank be put together in a state without a capital in Jerusalem, and without territorial contiguity? 

And the folks who were on the two-state con would say, don’t worry, everyone understands how this is going to work at the end of the day. It’s just a matter of getting political buy-in. And that wasn’t true. There actually isn’t a way that this works. And that was in 2005, long before the completion of the barrier wall around the West Bank, and various other land grabs and changes that have really made it an impossible reality.

So, now, we look at what there is. What there is, is a form of partition, and a form of at least two classes of people — or three classes of people, citizens and non-citizens — that live under Israeli control. So, it’s not a question of, how do we get to a two-state solution, it’s a question of, what is actually possible in this setup?

If I follow the framework that Tareq has laid out, and just sort of apply common sense and a read of history to the present and the potential future, I see that we have one set of options, which are an extension of the status quo. Where, essentially, Israel maintains full control over the lives of everyone who lives between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And, because of its desire to have a Jewish state as defined by its current governing majority, that means it will be some form of apartheid state where Palestinians — and maybe others, [as] I see an extension of the status quo means that the many Jewish Israelis who object to the status quo have suffered rights-stripping as well — it’s clear to me that we have a sort of emerging authoritarian approach to dissent.

So, I could see an extension of the current partition, in which Palestinians have no rights, and in which Jewish Israelis who dissent have fewer rights than Jewish Israelis who support this order. So, that’s one set of options.

The other is just what we know from the way the world works. If you want to have equal rights, Palestinians get equal rights, and that leads to some form of shared sovereignty. It could be one state, it could be a confederation, along the lines of Belgium. There are other solutions that people have worked out. In none of these outcomes do Jewish Israelis get to preserve dominance over everyone who lives in that territory. And that is something that, at this stage, Israel and Israelis are not willing to consider.

And so, what I find really helpful about Tareq’s way of framing this is, if you want to support this, OK, just be clear that what you’re supporting is a religious ethnocracy, in which people who are of the wrong religion or race or ethnicity simply don’t have rights. They have conditional partial rights extended to them, and often taken away violently by a ruling, a religious ethnocracy. And if that’s what one wants to support, one should have to call it by its name, and acknowledge the really disturbing implications of that.

And this is sort of the problem with the Tom Friedman discourse. You know, how can Israel be Jewish, democratic, and whatever else he says? And it’s like, well, it can’t be all those things, right? You can’t have an identity-based state in which people of one identity get all the rights, and also have equal rights for everybody. It’s either, everyone has equal rights or everyone doesn’t.

MH: One very, very revealing thing in the last few months has been looking at the reaction from the international community to the current conflict; not just Western countries, but also the Global South countries, so to speak. China and Russia and so forth, South Africa. Ireland you could put in the Global South, perhaps.

Their response to the conflict and the perception of it, at least in public, is very, very different from that of the United States. And if you look at the U.N. voting patterns, the U.S. is very isolated alongside Israel in defending certain Israeli policies, standing against international consensus on how this conflict should be resolved according to national law. And, basically, the U.S. is a very indispensable ally and patron for Israel, without which it could not continue to operate the way it is. And it seems, for that reason, the U.S. is a very huge enabler of the continuation of this terrible conflict, and now it’s exacerbation, perhaps, to a broader regional conflict.

I’m curious on your perspective on how the situation can be ameliorated somehow. Because, obviously, there are huge, very — I would say a very — big global majority of countries and individuals who are against the status quo and like to mediate it in a different way. But, somehow, they’re not able to influence the conflict in the way that they should be able to, to bring it to a conclusion. Because of this U.S. role, and kind of the U.S. monopoly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Can you talk a bit about the way this could potentially be internationalized in the future in a way that could be more constructive diplomatically? Because I think there is a potential there, now that U.S. power is in relative decline globally. How could that be accomplished, and can’t be accomplished?

TC: I mean, the big caveat here is, it only takes one major power that’s willing to stake itself on a bad regime to prop up that regime. And we saw that in Syria where, really, with not that much resources, Russia was able to tip the balance in favor of Assad.

So, if the U.S. is willing to keep staking itself on Israel, even in a period of multipolarity that comes with its relative decline, it could do that. So, I just want to start with that because I think the evidence of how these kinds of conflicts work militates in favor of humility about the slim potential for better outcomes.

That said, you referred to the sort of feeling in the Global South, and I’d put it differently. I think there’s a large and growing consensus of people and some governments who are no longer willing to accept what they see as a completely unjust situation in Palestine and Israel. So, some governments have followed their people; South Africa, Ireland, you mentioned some others on that list. The United States is a place where I think a decisive majority of people under 40, maybe even under 50, do not in any way support the U.S. policy towards Israel. And this is across the board, right? This is Arabs, and Muslims, and African Americans, and Jewish Americans, and all kinds of other demographics, right? It’s not some kind of parochial interest.

So, that will ultimately change the policy. When it becomes bad politics to support Israel, the government and policy will belatedly catch up. It will be too late for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who have died as a result of this bad policy, but that’s how the U.S. policy is going to change.

In terms of internationalizing, I think that helps set the stage for a better disposition in the end, but that’s not going to actually happen until the U.S. shifts and becomes unwilling to be Israel’s protector of first and last resort. When that does happen, there’s going to be, I think, an interesting kind of struggle. Because there are other regional and international powers at play in the Middle East who are just as bad for the Middle East as the United States has been; among [them] leading, I think of Russia and China. These are not good powers. It can be useful when they help create a balance so no one can dominate the region, but these are not powers that are going to help.

And, frankly, the E.U., which could have been a sort of a force for rule of law and some kind of equality agenda in Palestine and Israel, has not taken that role. Some member states of the E.U. have, but the E.U. as a whole has been more like the United States than like Europe on this issue, unfortunately.

So, I hope when the moment comes that America finally releases its sort of lockjaw fixation on supporting extremist Israeli policies that international players and countries that actually are interested in equality, equal rights, rule of law, and justice — countries like South Africa and Ireland, and not countries like the U.S., Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia. These aren’t going to be guarantors of some great outcome for Palestinians, either. So, I’m wary of investing too much hope in what internationalization can bring, but I view it as inevitable and desirable, because the U.S. ownership of this issue has been terrible.

And, by the way, not only has it been terrible for Palestinians and for all the civilians who have suffered in Palestine, it’s also been terrible for Israel, because it’s helped turn Israel into a fully Praetorian militarized state that has gotten used to — maybe addicted to — a security cycle of wars and an accelerating timeframe as a way of defining its entire national agenda. So, this is for those Americans who support the idea of a Jewish state or a Jewish homeland in Israel, U.S. policy has enabled Israeli policies that have been terrible for Jewish Israelis.

So, a diminishing of American hegemony over the Israel Palestine conflict will be beneficial to all.

JS: Just to push back on one thing, though. I certainly understand your point with regard to Russian military operations in the context of Syria. China, on the other hand, if I — maybe you can clarify what you meant by this — but China is not running around dropping bombs all over the Middle East. I think you’re referring more to China’s approach to basic liberty, freedom, etc., democratic values.

But, just to be clear, China did not launch the war against Iraq, and is not bombing Syria.

TC: To be clear, I was talking about the future. Not counting on China in the future to be a benevolent force for good in the region. Absolutely, China has not been a toxic problem in the Middle East the way the United States absolutely has, and the way Russia has.

JS: The point you’re making there, I think, really makes clear, in many ways, this has been a mask-off moment around the world.

If you just look at it on an Israeli domestic policy level, there’s a tendency now to try — and this is certainly almost official U.S. policy — to kind of put all of the bad stuff onto the bad ship Netanyahu. And, like, let’s sink that ship. You know, what we really need is Benny Gantz in power.

But if you read Israeli public opinion polling, it’s really horrifying the level of outright support there is for the known level of civilian death in Gaza right now, for the policies of the Israeli state. The U.S. is obsessed right now — particularly Democrats are obsessed — with blaming Netanyahu, as though the problem is this man. I mean, that really is what they’re projecting.

And I think, to go back to what Maz is saying about Ireland, Spain, other countries that have become vocal about this issue in an unprecedented manner. Yes, it’s coming from within their populations but, also, on a governmental level, there’s a split in the E.U. right now. And I think many European nations are really disgusted with the posture that Germany in particular has taken on this war.

Germany is currently engaged in a campaign of state repression against people who are speaking in defense of Palestinians. They recently raided a gathering in Berlin — the Palestine Congress — while Salman Abu Sitta, a survivor of the Nakba, was speaking, the Berlin police came in, they broke up the gathering. There have been thousands of people issued citations for so-called antisemitic speech and, when you start looking through the actual charges, no reasonable intelligent person would believe that the things people are being cited for are actually antisemitic. The posture of some European governments is really a confrontation of a multi-decade U.S. posture on Israel.

Domestically, in the United States, there’s the uprisings at campuses that all of us are following very closely. But, also, you’re starting to see a fracture within the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s slow moving, but it is happening, and the status quo doesn’t seem like it’s going to sustain. It seems like there’s a new day for discourse and discussion around what the Israeli state is, what its actions are, and what the U.S. role in those actions has been.

But what I wanted to ask you, because you’re in discussion at times with some of these people, what on earth does the Biden administration think it is doing right now? You have Biden, he repeatedly says, oh, I’m a Zionist, he talks about Golda Meir. You have John Kirby, Jake Sullivan, and Antony Blinken, it’s like pulling teeth to get them to express any sentiment that recognizes Palestinian lives. And, when they do do it, it feels so staged, like they are seeing not only the same image as we are, but they’re seeing more than that.

And what they have projected, the message they have projected, is that there is no crime too grave that the Israelis could commit that we will cut them off. And I think reasonable people can conclude, this is proceeding pretty much how they’ve wanted it to proceed. Because leaking stories to Politico or Barak Ravid a million times a week about how upset Biden is becoming with Netanyahu — that’s not a policy.

I’m sorry. I think I’ve reached the conclusion months ago, this is going how Biden & co. wanted to go, or they would have done something, actually, to stop it.

TC: I think your beginning observation helps answer your question about what the Biden administration is thinking.

So, although it’s convenient for some Americans to pretend this is a Netanyahu problem, what Israel is doing is the product of Israeli consensus. This is an Israeli political culture that long ago stopped considering Palestinians human beings, and stopped treating them as such. A state that is not interested in a two-state solution or even in coexistence, but is interested in dominion by a really extreme, identitarian set of politics over another population.

So, that is the consensus. If Netanyahu disappeared politically tomorrow, the Israeli policy would be much the same, and we’d be still forced to reckon with a lot of extremism in Israeli policy. That’s the Israel that the U.S. is supporting, right? It is, as I said before, a religious ethnocracy that views the Palestinians as a problem to be managed, not as a group of human beings under their sovereign control.

And so, when we ask what on earth is the Biden administration thinking, it’s pretty clear that the president knows this file well, and has come to a series of unsettling and wrong conclusions. He has bought into this narrative that is essentially a hate narrative about Palestinians being “human animals,” to quote one member of the Israeli cabinet. The sort of nostrum that, by the way, the U.S. has pursued in other venues like Iraq, which is the, in scare quotes, again, “these people only understand force,” right? That’s the approach. Not the approach of people living under the control of a state. 

So, what is the U.S. doing? I think the president is actually steering this policy. So, this is not Obama’s Syria policy in which advisors were making arguments and things were being experimented with. This president knows what he’s doing. What he’s doing is incorrect, in my view. It’s wrong. It’s wrong-headed, and nearsighted, and destructive to U.S. interests, as well as the interests of Israelis and Palestinians. But it is being done with knowledge, with intent, and with familiarity. Deep familiarity.

Now, one piece of the answer is that Biden’s out of step. He’s thinking of Israel as Israel was during the Yom Kippur War. Surrounded by hostile states, hanging by a thread, in need of American help in order to preserve its experiment. Well, this isn’t 1973.

JS: He may actually believe Golda Meir is still the prime minister.

TC: Well, let’s talk about racism. I think racism is a big part of this as well, right? 

How is it that our administration is not horrified by the loss of life, by the loss of civilian lives? I’m distressed by the loss of any civilian life, starting with the Israelis who were killed by Hamas on October 7. The murder of civilians is unacceptable, intolerable. It’s wrong. Why are we not shocked and disgusted? 

Well, unfortunately, reluctantly, I’ve come to the conclusion — and this is from the policies, and also from the ways in which senior administration officials talk about it, even in private — they do not see Palestinian lives as of equal value. That’s an awful realization, and it’s a really hard and horrible thing to try and walk back from. That is one of the only ways I can understand the continuation of these horrific policies.

MH: Thanassis, I want to ask you one last question, looking forward at what could happen in the months and years to come.

Obviously, Israel is a state which is very similar to South Africa and Rhodesia in the past, in the sense that, it was a state which was very much at war with the broader region around it, and its values and policies had put it at odds with millions of people. It’s a numerical minority against a larger majority in the region.

In Israel’s perspective, it seems that whatever conciliatory or pragmatic political leadership may have existed in the past or contested for power has now been marginalized, is becoming more and more marginalized. You see a more radical stream of Israeli politics emerging as a dominant stream. And I totally agree with Jeremy and you that Benny Gantz and people like this are by no means any less radical than Netanyahu, and there are even more radical forces who seem to be waiting in the wings as well.

At the same time, it is a country with nuclear weapons, has a very powerful air force, intelligence apparatus, and it perceives efforts to put pressure on it, or to concede equal rights to Palestinians, or even create a Palestinian state as an existential threat, against which it may choose to fight to the death. And it also feels that it has a superpower backing it, at least for now, in order to do that.

From your perspective, given that the U.S. is so important in this situation, it’s actually fostering a situation where these very potentially apocalyptic scenarios come to pass, what can the United States do today beyond putting an end to the Gaza war to restrain a country which could lead it into not just a regional war, but even a broader war than that. And even if Americans don’t care about Palestinians, or care about Arabs, people in the region, why is it in America’s interest now to stop the trajectory of Israel, which seems to be leading it towards a place which is very, very dark?

TC: Well, from a very sort of crass and Machiavellian perspective, it’s not in America’s interest to be implicated in endless unending regional wars in the Middle East.

Of course, you could take that central proposition and say, maybe it’s OK for the Middle East to be a terrible place for people who live there as long as the U.S. isn’t directly involved. Maybe that’s one scenario where the U.S. just finds a way to disengage from the region, but actually really disengage, meaning disengaging from Israel as well.

But if the U.S. is going to stay engaged as it is right now by treaty, by not only its military protection of Israel, but of Gulf states and its partnership with Egypt, and its interest in the oil markets, if it’s going to be involved, then it needs and wants a Middle East that is not a resource suck, as it has been for decades now. And electively so, right? Since the invasion of Iraq through this war in Gaza, all of the major conflagrations of the Middle East have been entirely elective, extreme overreactions in the case of, after October 7 or a sort of crazy own goal in the case of the U.S.’ illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

So, what is the way out? The way out is for the U.S. to start treating Israel as a normal ally. Which means help the ally when the interests overlap, when it’s in America’s interest, detach or discourage the ally from destabilizing a region in which the U.S. has a plethora of other core national interests. And, if that happens, Israel is not going to disappear. Jewish Israelis are not going to be annihilated. Israel will be a powerful military state, one of the most militarily capable states in its region.

It is, we’ve seen through these wars, of and part of the region, right? Israel is not some kind of Switzerland grafted onto the Middle East. It is absolutely a Middle Eastern country, it is part and parcel of its neighborhood, and it will learn to coexist in equilibrium with its neighbors only when the U.S. withdraws this blanket infinite backing, which essentially has created decades of moral hazard, which has enabled this kind of expansionism.

One last note is on the question of eliminationism, right? There’s a lot of eliminationism in the discourse around this conflict by the people involved. So, we have some Palestinian groups and some Israeli groups that openly wax philosophical about an outcome in which the other group ceases to exist in their territory. And ultimately, all the eliminationists have to be pushed out of political power, because there are plenty of Israelis and plenty of Palestinians who do look for a shared future. They might not like each other, and they might wish things were different, but they are absolutely talking the political discourse of coexistence, not of eliminationism. 

That’s what we need in the future. An Israeli government that is not eliminationist, a Palestinian leadership that, like Fatah and the P.A., is not eliminationist. The considerable inroads have been made towards that, more on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side right now — 30 years ago, maybe it was the other way around — but that’s where it’s going to have to end up.

It’s either that, or it’s perpetual apartheid and cycles of war, like the ones we’ve seen for the last 20 years.

MH: Thanassis Cambanis, thanks for joining us on Intercepted.

TC: Really great to talk to you. Maz, Jeremy, thanks for having me on.

MH: That’s Thanassis Cambanis, the director of Century International.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

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

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

JS: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Biden’s Indifference to Palestinian Lives Is Sending the Middle East Into the Abyss appeared first on The Intercept.

The war in Gaza has been among the deadliest for civilians, including children, of any war in the 21st century. After spending five weeks volunteering and administering at a field hospital in Rafah, Mohammad Subeh, an American doctor, describes what he saw to Intercepted co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. Subeh spent weeks treating wounded Palestinian children, many of them orphaned by Israeli attacks. He also described treating those who survived the aftermath of “mass casualty incidents” in which dozens of civilians were killed or wounded; many of these attacks appeared deliberately targeted at civilians, Subeh says, rather than “indiscriminate.” As the Strip reels from the consequences of a breakdown of public health infrastructure following the destruction of most Gazan hospitals, Subeh says that ordinary civilians are paying a gruesome price for Israel’s military assault.

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Maz, I want to start off the show. We’re going to be talking with a doctor who has just come back from Gaza. We’re going to talk about his experiences in a field hospital in Rafah near Khan Yunis in the north of Rafah, as Israel still threatens a full-scale invasion of Rafah.

But first, Maz, you’ve been doing some reporting and writing about the recent events between Israel and Iran, where the Iranian government launched a counterstrike on Israel in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Talk about these events, and your analysis of where things stand right now.

MH: Since the start of the war in Gaza six or so months ago, there’s always been a fear that the war will expand beyond the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to include the broader region as well and, most prominently, Iran, and now we’re seeing the first steps towards that. Israel, as you mentioned, they blew up the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, which is a very serious escalation because, from legal purposes, consulate buildings count as a sovereign territory of a state.

So, Iran felt compelled to respond to this attack by similarly attacking Israeli territory; in this case, actually, firing ballistic missiles at Israel, and drones. It seems like the escalation or the response by Iran was calculated not to cause damage. They telegraphed their intentions several days in advance, both publicly and privately. And yet, it still represents the first time any state has fired missiles at Israel since Saddam Hussein did it in the early ’90s. So, I think that the Israelis have now said that they’re planning to respond. The scope and scale of that is not clear.

But, either way, I believe that this war, the shadow war between Iran and Israel — which has really been the subtext of a lot of the current conflict as well, too — is now becoming less of a shadow war and more of an overt conflict, in which I do believe that the Israelis will try to involve the U.S. as much as possible.

JS: It’s also interesting, Maz, that you have what is referred to as this Axis of Resistance against Israel — which involves Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic resistance in Iraq and, of course, the Houthi militias Ansar Allah in Yemen, implementing their blockade — and now, with Iran directly firing missiles, even though it was, as you say, it does appear to have been somewhat of a coordinated strike calculated to have a measured response that would be justifiable in turn.

But what is clear is that, in the case of Yemen, in the case of Hezbollah, in the case of Iran, these countries are asserting that they are no longer going to maintain the status quo, where Israel is allowed to act unilaterally, and a nation state like Iran — or a nation state like Yemen — that they’re just going to stand aside and say, oh, yeah, this, this is fine, it’s just the way things work in a so-called rules-based order governed by the United States. It seems like that era is over.

MH: Yeah, I think that’s correct. And, effectively, Iran has created this network of militias and groups — which are not its proxies, but you could say it patronizes — throughout the region, and effectively encircling Israel in many ways by these groups, such that they don’t have the latitude to operate in the region as they did before. And Israel, ultimately, is a small country — I think Iran is about maybe ten times the size in terms of population — and it can’t defy the will of the entire region, absent a blank check, that it receives from the United States in this case.

So, I think Israel is very much drawing down its accounts at the moment. There’s a bank run on U.S. geopolitical security happening in the region and in context of global events. And it needs to have the confrontation, from its perspective, now, with Hezbollah and Iran and these groups, because the U.S. may not be able to support it in the same way in 10 to 15 years.

So, I think from the Israeli perspective, because they do see the shift in the region, their motivation or their incentive, really, is to have a confrontation now, today, when it’s very likely that they could draw upon U.S. carrier groups in the Mediterranean to help them with Hezbollah, or other U.S. assets to help them strike Iran.

So, I think that the risk of a war, which people have feared for many, many years, a regional war, is very, very high today, and probably the highest it’s ever been.

JS: Maz, before we move to speaking with a doctor who has just returned from Gaza, I wanted to draw people’s attention to a story that our colleague Ryan Grim and myself did this week at The Intercept. The headline of it was leaked: New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid the Words Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Occupied Territory. And this was an internal style guide memo that we obtained from within the New York Times newsroom, and it was drafted in the middle of November of last year, and has been updated periodically since then. But, essentially, what it is, is the rule book for reporters that are reporting on Gaza. 

It tells journalists to severely restrict the use of the term “genocide” to “only discussion of the legal parameters of genocide.” Similar instructions were given about ethnic cleansing. It also says to steer clear of the phrase “occupied territory,” even though international law, the United Nations have determined that all of these areas of Palestine are considered occupied territory. It also directs reporters not to use the word “Palestine” unless they’re talking about the efforts at the United Nations to establish a Palestinian state. And it also tells journalists not to use the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza that are being attacked by the Israelis.

And they’re saying, well, while these are technically refugee camps that were settled as a result of Palestinians being expelled from their homes decades ago, they’re not really refugee camps, they’re more like neighborhoods now. So, we shouldn’t refer to them as refugee camps, unless it’s to explain why other voices are referring to them as refugee camps.

And this memo, and the leaking of this memo, comes as the New York Times told staff this week that they had wrapped up an internal investigation into who might have been leaking information to The Intercept. And, of course, we’ve published a number of stories about the controversy that has happened within the New York Times newsroom over the Gaza war. There’s been a rebellion of sorts, or severe disagreements between staffers at the Times about the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, about the rules for language that can be used when reporting about Gaza, but also problems with the marquee New York Times story called Screams Without Words that is now considered by many to be the kind of gold standard in proving Israel’s narrative that Hamas engaged in a systematic campaign of rape and other sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. All of that can be found at theintercept.com, the latest story from Ryan Grim and myself.

And, with that, I want to bring on our guest now, who is Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He has just returned last month from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza. During his five-week mission, the field hospital saw a dramatic increase in cases; they were seeing up to a thousand patients per day, and performing an average of 40 major surgeries daily.

Dr. Subeh currently practices emergency medicine at El Camino Health and Good Samaritan Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. He joins us now from Washington, D.C.

Dr. Subeh, thank you so much for being with us.

Mohammad Subeh: Thank you for having me.

JS: Let’s begin. I know that your family, that you are a descendant of Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes, and you’re an emergency room doctor in California. You’ve just returned from a medical mission to Rafah. Give us a little bit of your family background and your professional background.

MS: My grandparents lived in a city called al-Lydd in now-occupied Palestine and were forcibly displaced in 1948. They took refuge in a small country of Kuwait, and that’s where I was born. I spent the first six years of my life in Kuwait.

Then, the Persian Gulf War in 1990 happened, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that was my first exposure to war. And we tried to ride out the war there for about a couple months, but it got to the point where my father was going to be killed, and so, we had to flee within 24 hours.

And so, we sought refuge in Los Angeles, and that’s where I spent the rest of childhood, my adolescent years, up through high school. I trained at the University of Chicago after completing undergrad and grad school up at Stanford, and now practice emergency medicine in the Bay Area.

JS: And how did you make the decision to travel to Gaza in the midst of this war and siege that Israel has laid on the Palestinians of Gaza?

MS: Ever since I became an emergency physician, even prior to that, my goal was to not only practice medicine locally, where it may be convenient for us physicians to practice medicine, but also globally, [in] communities that really need the help. So, annually I go on medical missions.

So, I take my older son with me to El Salvador, and we go there for almost two weeks every year. And last year when we returned, he and I and my wife were talking about the possibility of going to Gaza. And I have family in Gaza. So, speaking with family in Gaza, you kind of already know the difficult circumstances that they face with respect to healthcare, even prior to October. Under siege, it’s very difficult to get adequate healthcare, and especially if you require tertiary care, specialty care. The steps you have to take to exit Gaza to access specialty care are extremely difficult.

And so, we were kind of brainstorming ways we could help, whether it be bringing specialists in, or different types of healthcare initiatives that would move the needle for folks on the ground. So, when October happened, it was kind of, for me, it was no longer decision paralysis in terms of, let’s brainstorm, but rather, we need to get on the ground, and I need to do whatever I can to help the people. Because, from the first week, you already started seeing the targeting of the healthcare infrastructure, the difficulty that people were facing with trying to get adequate care, even for their chronic conditions. And I would hear a lot of the stories from family members, when telecommunications would be on and we’d connect with them.

So, for me, it was a no-brainer to go and help on the ground and. I think one of the biggest hurdles, mentally speaking, for a lot of physicians going there is, we don’t want to be a burden on a system that’s already very strained. And then, two, you want to feel like you’re moving the needle. You’re having an impact on people’s lives, and on the health care in general in Gaza.

And so, that’s probably the biggest hurdle to have to overcome for a lot of folks.

MH: Mohammad, can you tell us a bit about the context of the field hospital you set up in Gaza? What was it created to address? And how did you actually experience seeing the influx of patients from the war? How did it match your expectations of what you’d seen previously in your career?

MS: In terms of deciding which NGO to join on the ground in Gaza, for me, one of the biggest things was finding a group that already had some experience working in Gaza, and the length of the mission.

So, a lot of the missions are a couple of weeks, but I wanted to be there a lot longer. And so, the group I went with, it was a five-week mission, with a potential to extend even further. Our goal was to set up this field hospital in Rafah, the Northern border of Rafah with Khan Yunis.

And, for folks who are not familiar with field hospitals, these are tents, essentially, that are set up in which patients are seen and treated. Many times, they’re bare-bones, but sometimes you’re able to get equipment in, and supplies and medications, to be able to provide a little more advanced services.

One of the decisions, in terms of making a decision to proceed with a field hospital, is working within the remaining hospitals at the time. So, as many folks may know, I think there are probably only 11 of 36 hospitals in Gaza right now. There’s been a complete obliteration of the healthcare infrastructure.

And so, a field hospital gives you the ability to go in and really start from scratch, determine where the greatest needs are, and really direct your resources to those greatest needs on the ground. [It] also gives you the ability to break things down and move if you need to. If there’s going to be, say, for example, a ground incursion and a siege of that particular hospital, impeding the ability for patients to reach us at the field hospital. So, in fact, a couple of weeks ago, we did have to move the hospital to a different location in Rafah, in order to serve a larger population as well.

The expectation going in definitely did not meet the reality that I saw. You watch videos, you hear from folks who have gone to Gaza about what the circumstances are like but, as a physician not only having worked in the United States, but also abroad with limited resources, the reality of the limitations of resources to be able to do your job is very painful when you realize, hey, I’m here. There’s equipment and medications just outside the border a few miles away on aid trucks that are not allowed in, and I have a patient who’s dying in front of me. If I only had these pieces of equipment or this medication, I can save this person’s life, but I don’t have access to it. And so, this person will die.

Or, you know, this person’s just had a major surgery, and I can’t control their pain postoperatively, because the pain medicines are outside the border and not allowed in. So, it’s very manmade, as opposed to— You think about limitations that are really out of your hands. Like, no one can really move the needle on those limitations. That’s an easier pill to swallow, but it becomes increasingly frustrating as a physician trying to help save people’s lives and limbs when you go there, you realize the level of atrocity, the amount of children affected, just the demographic of your patient population that’s coming in, and the constant trauma that you see. I mean, it’s never-ending.

I trained on the south side of Chicago and the west side of Chicago. I have never seen this level of trauma on [this] mass scale.

JS: Can you describe some of the patients that you saw, and the types of injuries that you were witnessing and treating?

MS: A lot of these traumatic injuries come in two different forms: one, in terms of blast injuries and shrapnel injuries from missile strikes, and another from gunshot wounds.

The majority of these traumatic injuries are inflicted upon the patients that come to me by drones. So, these are drones that are manned remotely by military personnel, they’re outfitted with high definition cameras. There are fixed-wing drones with precision missiles that can target people with high accuracy and high precision. And then you have quadcopters, which are these smaller drones outfitted with machine guns, and can target populations via their high-definition cameras as well.

A large majority of the traumatic injuries that I saw were in pediatric patients, patients under the age of 17 or 18; actually, even more so, under the age of 12. Even this morning, as I was just thinking about my time in Gaza, I was thinking about this young boy who was about ten years old, who was walking down the street with his sister — who’s probably four or five years old — and a missile struck right next to them, blew out his brains from the left side of his skull.

He came in to me kind of taking his last breaths, agonal breathing. And it was this dystopian image in my mind, because his sister was right next to him, screaming. Shrapnel sheared her right buttock off her body. And it was like this horror movie that I was living in real life, and I continue to remember that.

That sticks with me because it was so representative of the trauma inflicted upon this population, especially the pediatric population. Whereby, not only are they experiencing the physical trauma of a missile hitting next to them, shrapnel shearing parts of their bodies off, a gunshot wound to their chest or their face or their abdomen, but also that psychological trauma that they’re carrying.

You know, seeing her brother taking his last breaths next to her. The constant drones above your head, not knowing when the next strike will be. Day in and day out, every breath that you take, you are experiencing this psychological trauma.

That’s a big part of, actually, what you don’t expect going into Gaza, managing that. Like, how do you treat that? We’re taught to treat the physical aspects of the traumatic injuries and the pain, and experience, already, difficulty with adequately treating those conditions. But that psychological trauma that’s inflicted en masse on the children of Palestine is something like, really, I would say it’s probably the hardest part of the job on the ground there.

The drones outfitted with machine guns; that’s something I’ve never seen, I’ve never encountered. And you’d think the first case that comes in, or the second case, OK, maybe these are one-offs. But you constantly hear from patients as you’re trying to get their history of— What happened to you? You know, drones were above my head, and then I got shot. Ten people picking up firewood to bring heating towards their tent, to warm up their families and to cook, and then a machine gun just opens fire on them.

An eight-year-old girl, Rima, playing outside her tent, shot by a drone. A young boy, Mu’min, who was sleeping in his tent, is 13 years old, and gets shot in his arm and chest. The more you hear about these stories and how they sustain these injuries, the more you see that we’re not dealing with indiscriminate bombings or indiscriminate attacks. These are very deliberate.

I want to share just another story. You know, I took care of many children whose parents were killed in front of their eyes. One child, his name is Faisal. So, Faisal and his brother Adam were in their home, came out to the hallway in their home, and found their pregnant mother and father in the hallway. And the Israeli soldiers shot them, shot the parents in front of their eyes, and then proceeded to shoot Faisal in the abdomen, shearing his intestines and his urinary bladder.

I mentioned this story, one, because it’s unfathomable that this would happen in this day and age, but also because I think it’s important for folks to see this extra layer of pain and suffering inflicted on the surviving family members. It was not uncommon for me to take care of pediatric patients who came in having witnessed their families being killed in front of their eyes, and then having been attacked themselves as well. Either shooting a limb, making sure that they lose that limb, or shooting them in the abdomen. The lucky ones are the ones that really survived to come and be able to be stabilized in our units.

This is, like, multiple layers of atrocities that are inflicted on this population that I myself never witnessed. And I know folks, colleagues who are working with me at the field hospital who had just returned from Ukraine and other conflict areas had never witnessed in their entire careers, many of whom have been working in the humanitarian space for decades.

But, yeah. It’s definitely not something you expect to see ever as a physician, nor should we really see this, especially in 2024. 

MH: You mentioned you worked in different field hospitals before, you worked in Chicago as well, too. In many of those cases, presumably, you wouldn’t see huge influxes of wounded people and dead and dying people that you see in some of these attacks in Gaza.

How do you cope as a doctor, or as someone working in a field hospital in situations where you have maybe dozens of people coming in? How do you triage those cases? And what did you see and experience in incidents where there were mass casualties in Israeli attacks in Gaza?

MS: As physicians in the U.S., at least, we’re trained to be ready for any mass casualty incident that may occur, God forbid; so, for example, a mass shooting. Many physicians never experience going through a mass casualty incident, and being required to triage patients and deciding who gets the limited resources and who doesn’t.

Yet, in Gaza, it was constant, it’s constant mass casualty incidents (MCI). It’s bread and butter. Like, a missile strike? You’re getting ready.

You hear missile strikes constantly, by the way. I mean, the closest missile strike to our field hospital, which is supposed to be in a Deconflicted zone — meaning there should really be no military operations within 700 meters of our site — was a couple blocks away. Shrapnel would enter our facility.

And so, mass casualty incidents, for folks who are not familiar with it, is basically a scenario whereby healthcare personnel have to be ready to see patients in the dozens — sometimes we saw up to 70 patients during these MCIs — and determine their injuries, the severity of their injuries, and whether or not we could potentially save their lives or save their limbs.

So, you’re color-coded. Essentially, patients would come in, usually not by ambulance first, because ambulances would be targeted as well. But sometimes, with these donkey carts carrying loads of bodies, or these motorized scooters carrying a trolley behind them. And you really have to just go through and color code them.

So, either you’re color-coded as black, dead, in which case we would send those folks to a corner on our sandy plot of land to be placed in body bags. Black-expectant, meaning you’re really— You’re on the verge of death, and there’s really not much, you’re taking your last breaths.

There’s red, critically ill, you really want to invest the limited resources into these folks because there’s high potential to save them, and they’re really at high potential for a quick decompensation. And then yellow; these are potentially going to turn into critical patients soon if we don’t stabilize them. And then, green; someone, say, shot in the arm or leg, a broken ankle, things of that sort, but can walk or move, the mobility is there. And so, you really target your resources to those folks in the red group first.

It’s extremely difficult. I mean, not only as a physician, [but] as a human being, just having to make those decisions. Because, in many ways, there is objectivity that goes into it, but there’s also some subjectivity, especially in the chaos that’s happening around you. And families sometimes come in and say, please do something for my child, and you know that child is gone. It’s definitely mentally taxing, especially when it’s happening in such high volume and in such frequency, constantly.

I think, for me, the saving grace was the fellow doctors and nurses and staff that I was working alongside. I mean, these folks have been working tirelessly for six months on end, taking care of super-sick patients with very limited resources, and they’re doing this with smiles on their faces. I mean, they’re— I would always hear them saying Alhamdulillah, thank you, Allah, for whatever you give us, and just be accepting of what they have control over and accepting of what they don’t have control over. And that gave me a perspective, and allowed me to actually have the endurance to go through a five-week medical mission, and be able to really focus on what I was sent there to do, as opposed to the things that I don’t have control over.

You imagine folks that have went through one MCI in the United States, and the amount of trauma that, as healthcare personnel, you kind of endure having to go through that MCI here, and just multiply that by a thousand. And that’s every day in Gaza right now.

JS: The Israeli government in its six months of sustained attacks on Gaza has systematically attacked hospitals and medical facilities, killed scores of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, laid siege to hospitals like— Al Shifa is the most prominent, but it’s certainly not the only one. Abducting medical staff. There’s credible information that doctors and hospital administrators have been tortured in an effort to get them to confess some connection between the hospital and secret Hamas facilities or Hamas members.

I’m wondering of your thoughts. You were there as people from World Food Kitchen were targeted and killed, you’re describing working with doctors that have been there for six months. You know that many of your fellow doctors who are Palestinians in Gaza, and nurses who are Palestinians in Gaza, have been killed or subjected to abuse.

Talk about your perspective on the overarching reality of what has been done to medical workers and medical facilities in Gaza.

MS: It’s probably one of the most important things to talk about. Healthcare facilities should be off limits in general, and we kind of know that, right? I mean, these are lifelines for civilian populations to be able to get the care they need in the most difficult times, right?

And there’s been a deliberate — like you mentioned — it’s a deliberate attack on the health care infrastructure. Whether it be entering, besieging hospitals, and entering and killing health care personnel. I mean, we’ve heard several stories, not one-off stories, of these soldiers going in and shooting doctors, shooting nurses, essentially taking away the ability for folks to get the care they need, not only by limiting supplies coming in by, but by the personnel who would be able to deliver the care that you need. And then you have the attacks on the ambulances, the transportation that would get you to where you need to be to save your life in the case that you become critically ill.

And so, you can see this constant deliberate attack. I was there when Nasser Hospital was besieged and all the healthcare personnel were kicked out or killed. Actually, we received all the patients that were brought out in boluses every night out of Nasser Hospital after three weeks of being besieged. Many of these patients were dialysis patients, children with traumatic injuries requiring orthopedic specialists, people in the ICUs there with infected wounds, chest tubes that were pouring out pus.

The levels, the layers of trauma and pain inflicted upon the population transcend those afflicting just the individual. They are system-wide, whether it be the education system or the healthcare system, or basic utilities, water, electricity, basic things that folks need to live, even with a baseline standard of livelihood.

We brought on board several personnel that worked at Shifa, worked at Nasser, they would relate to me the stories of the atrocious acts that were inflicted upon them with the besieging. The snipers waiting outside to shoot them as soon as they walk out.

And we’ve heard, even, the stories of — even now — doctors and nurses will change out of their scrubs prior to leaving the remaining hospitals, because they don’t want to be targets. Because wearing scrubs or a white coat is essentially a target on your back to be killed or abducted.

You think back five months ago, with the Baptist hospital, the bombing on the Baptist hospital, and this whole debate back and forth. Like, this moral army would never do this, right? Would never. And it’s just these rogue rockets. And then you go to Gaza and you witness the complete destruction. Nobody’s talking about the 20-plus hospitals that have been shut down, that have been destroyed completely, right? Because it doesn’t fall in line with a narrative of a moral army trying to defend itself, right?

Nonetheless, your hat remains on as an emergency physician when you go in and you’re trying to help people. Again, it’s like, what do I have control over? Obviously, I understand that, at any moment, I could be one of those folks that’s abducted or targeted with one of these drones. They can see me, right? With the cameras that are constantly above my head, and I could be a target. But you kind of put that on the wayside, and you try to do what you’re there to do, and to take care of the patients there.

I think it’s, for me, just kind of on a side note, it’s saddening to see that it took a missile strike — actually, three or four missile strikes — on a convoy of international humanitarian aid workers for the world to really be bothered or kind of shaken up. And it just shows us that, one, there’s a level of supremacy that we have internally, which is problematic, and is probably the root problem of all of this, right? When a human being thinks that they’re more superior to another human being, and that they’re more worthy of living than another human being, or worthy of having certain resources than another human being. That opens up a Pandora’s box of allowing oneself to commit atrocious acts. You proceed to dehumanize the other human being to the point where you’ll allow yourself to do anything to them.

I think it’s really sad for me when I saw the amount of headlines and coverage on the targeting of these humanitarian aid workers, when you had almost 200 other aid workers killed in the span of the past six months. And you had 30-plus thousand Palestinians who were killed deliberately over the past six months. And that’s not accounting for the additional probably 10,000-plus that are under the rubble, and the tens of thousands who died as a result of no access to appropriate medical care for other things, like strokes and heart attacks, right? Things that people will die from if they don’t get adequate care.

It just highlighted for me the double standard that we’re seeing. And it’s sad for me as an emergency physician because, for us, anyone and everyone that walks into the ER, we take care of them. It doesn’t matter the language you speak, the color of your skin, your socioeconomic status, how much money you make. It doesn’t matter. I’ll have, many times, in the Valley, in the ER that I work at, you’ll have a billionaire in a room next to a person who doesn’t have much, who’s just trying to make ends meet for the next day, and it doesn’t matter, because they’re both human lives that are worth saving.

You see the complete opposite of that when you’re in Gaza, and this pain is inflicted upon this population, and only certain people’s lives are highlighted in the media, and those are the lives that maybe move the needle in decision-making and policymaking. So, yeah, I feel like it’s such a sad time for humanity right now.

MH: And, Mohammad, I want to ask you a final question to wrap up.

You are an American doctor, but you’re also of Palestinian extraction and, obviously, your family has roots in the region, and so forth. And you went there to Gaza, and you witnessed this, not just as a medical professional, but someone who also is Palestinian, and shares a background and language with many of the people involved in this.

How do you interpret these events in some sense of how we’re contributing to it as Americans, given your own unique vantage point on the conflict?

MS: As a Palestinian born in Kuwait— So, first off, I was never a citizen of Kuwait, because there are rules against that. So, I would travel with a document that says I was stateless. And, in many ways, this was liberating.

Before I became a U.S. citizen in 2005, the 15-year-long trek of becoming a U.S. citizen— So, anyone who tells you, by the way, that it’s easy for someone to just come into the U.S., and get a job, and take over other people’s jobs, it’s baloney. I think it was liberating for me in some respects, being labeled stateless, because it didn’t impede my ability to see our shared humanity.

Sometimes we put up these labels and these borders in ways that separate us and divide us as human beings, as opposed to really bringing us together and appreciating and celebrating our shared humanity and our differences. I think the past six months have been pivotal for Palestinians in general, and what’s happening in Palestine, and what has been happening in Palestine for almost eight decades.

And it’s pivotal because change happens when human beings across the world are awake, aware, critically thinking, using our intellect that is a God-given tool for us to process the world around us and to make decisions. And I would say, up until now, with respect to Palestine, the global population has been herded towards certain narratives that serve only a small group of people, right? And allow those people in power to control, in many ways, various aspects, whether it be economic, or land, or whatnot.

And so, I think this is the first time I’ve seen in mass-scale people waking up, having conversations— Initially, it was very difficult to have these conversations. I would say in October, even into November, because there’s a lot of retaliation. I myself was threatened several times by people within emergency medicine, physicians higher up in emergency medicine, threatening that I would never be able to get a job in the U.S. again, because I’m speaking out against the destruction of healthcare in Palestine, and the targeting of civilians, and sharing people’s stories.

This is also the first time all of this video coverage has come out on people’s cell phones out of Gaza and Palestine, and people are seeing it in real time. And so, there’s not this kind of same spewed narrative that every major network shares on their primetime news that people just take at face value as truth.

And so, I think it’s breaking down a lot of the frameworks that have been put up to divide people, and paint Palestinians amongst other peoples as the other, as less than human; and so, deserving of pain inflicted upon them collectively. And I hope that people just wake up to the beauty of our shared humanity, and how we can overcome, whether it be the atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinians today or any other population decades from now.

How we can overcome that and, one, prevent it from ever happening and, if it were to happen, how we can stop it from progressing to the point where what we’re seeing today in Palestine, where it’s become a genocide.

JS: Dr. Mohammad Subeh, thank you very much for being with us on Intercepted.

MS: Thank you for having me.

MH: That’s Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He returned on March 15, 2024 from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza.

JS: Before we go, I want to share with you that Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby Award under the category of Best News and Politics Podcast. Thanks to all of our listeners, our guests, our workers, and everyone that makes this show happen every week. Special shout out to our wonderful producer, Laura Flynn.

There is still time to vote for us, and you can help us win that category by casting your vote. We’ll share the link in the show notes on the page wherever you get your podcasts.

MH: 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 by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

JS: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post U.S. Doctor Returning From Gaza Describes Unforgettable Carnage appeared first on The Intercept.

The conflict in Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The conflict in Israel/Palestine has triggered an outpouring of public grief, anger, and protest in the United States over the U.S. government’s role in the war. Student activists in particular have led demonstrations denouncing what they view as U.S. complicity in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza, including possible facilitation of the crime of genocide. This protest movement is now facing a wave of censorship and repression, with university campuses emerging as the new ground zero in a battle over free speech and American foreign policy.

I’m now joined by Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Aziz is the author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” host of the “Race and Rights” podcast, and the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights.

The Center just published a new report on antisemitism and Islamophobia in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Sahar Aziz, welcome to Intercepted.

Sahar Aziz: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

MH: Sahar, I want to ask you a bit about the environment for academic freedom in the United States after the October 7 attacks. We’re about six months away from those attacks now. Obviously, there’s been a groundswell of protests in the United States, as well as a backlash to those protests we’ve seen in institutions, and even from politicians.

I’m curious about your own perception. What have you seen, being someone on campus? And what are you looking at, in terms of people trying to push back against this historic upsurge of pro-Palestinian speech in the United States?

SA: To say that university campuses are ground zero for testing our free speech and academic freedom principles would not be an overstatement. What we’re witnessing right now is similar to what we witnessed during the Black Lives Matter social movement, during the anti-Vietnam War social movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights Movement.

So, we are living through a period in American history where the young people, the university students, are seeking systematic changes about a particular issue — in this case, U.S. foreign policy on Palestine and Israel — and they’re doing it through a very American tradition of sit-ins, and protests, and conferences, and teach-ins at universities. So, in many ways what we’re witnessing isn’t new, if you look at American history.

What is new, though, as you stated, is the subject matter. This is arguably the first time that we’ve seen such a large number of students at numerous universities, especially in the east and west coast — and then with some universities within what we call middle America — where students who are Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and their allies, who are Jewish Americans and other identity groups, are realizing that the narrative on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, that the U.S. foreign policy on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, and that the media is portraying Palestinians as barbaric and savages and terrorists and antisemites.

And all of this is happening while these college students are watching live, in real time, the mass bombing, mass starvation, targeted assassinations of Palestinian civilians and journalists and doctors in Gaza, so they can see for themselves this disconnect between what’s happening on the ground in Gaza — thanks to citizen journalism from Palestinians who are risking their lives, and being killed by the Israeli military, being targeted as a result of their journalism — and then what university presidents and U.S. elected officials are saying, and the positions that they’re taking, which send a very clear message, which is that: Palestinian lives do not matter, and only Israeli lives matter.

MH: It’s interesting, you mentioned that university campuses have been the ground zero of this sort of upsurge. And, oftentimes, in most cases, you’d see university officials — particularly even the more conservative officials — would encourage free speech, qua free speech as a value on campuses. And, obviously, in the last few years, there’s been an upsurge of progressive activism, and there’s been this sort of free speech movement, so to speak, led mostly by conservatives, but ostensibly in everyone’s interest.

But now, it seems like they’re shifting from welcoming speech to more of a mode of censorship and suppression. And I find it a little ironic — I’m curious about your own take, as someone looking at it from the inside a bit more — because there seems to be quite a disconnect, actually, between wanting to welcome speech, which is to describe as uncomfortable or controversial and so forth, but then responding in a manner which is so hostile to speech which they don’t like, which is on behalf of Palestinian rights, or critical of the Israeli government, or U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

I’m curious how people in academia have navigated that, and students and professors as well, too. How do we deal with administrations and authorities, which sort of seem to give conflicting messages in this regard?

SA: Well, the attempts to censor speech, and academic programming, and political activism on college campuses is bipartisan, and it is supported by both the liberals and the conservatives, but through different means.

So, the conservatives — or what I’ll say, those who are on the political right — are much more overt and aggressive and hostile in their attempts to censor, where they are sending clear messages through letters, or through press releases, or public statements, stating that these students should be criminalized, that they should be kicked out of universities, suspended, and they are not in any way hiding their objective to censor.

The liberals are not using the same tactics, but it is the same objective. And, oftentimes, they will use pretext to claim that the request for the event wasn’t early enough, the security situation requires that this event cannot happen, or all sorts of what we call pretexts and excuses. And, also, they have been accommodating the conservatives’ clear witch hunt against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in particular, and faculty as well, who are seeking to add to the debate, to the conversation, to the discussion about a very hot topic, a contemporary issue in which the United States is directly involved by providing billions of dollars to the Israeli military, and by providing political support to the Israeli government at the same time that what many of these students and faculty believe is a genocidal campaign by Israel in Gaza, and what South Africa is alleging is genocide before the International Court of Justice.

And although whether or not it is genocide is a legal question that will be determined on the merits over the next few months or years, there is certainly sufficient evidence to believe that there are numerous war crimes that have been committed by Israel — as well as Hamas, on October 7th — and the question is, why don’t the elected officials, the university administrators, the politicians, and members of the media and other members of the elite, why don’t they want students doing exactly what they went to the university to do? Which is to learn about different ideas and different perspectives, and to hear from different types of experts. And instead of encouraging students and faculty to hold their own events, and let students shop with their feet, so to speak. In other words, if you want to attend the event, you go choose to. If you want to attend the protest, you choose to.  But instead of doing that, they are reverting to just shutting everything down.

And that then leads us to wonder why. Why don’t you want there to be a conversation? Why don’t you want the Palestinian perspective and the Palestinian experience to be included in the marketplace of ideas, in the debate, and in the discussion? And that is causing many of the students to be suspicious of the motivations of those people seeking to censor.

And, oftentimes, the stated motivation is to combat antisemitism. The problem with that stated motivation or objective is that, when you look at the evidence that is being cited as the basis for wanting to shut events down, or shut down protests or speech, or infringe on academic freedom, it is not cases where an individual Jewish student is being targeted, directly harassed, intimidated, verbally abused, or physically abused. That situation is antisemitism, and there have always been processes in place in universities for students to be protected against that, whether they’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian, any other identity group that’s protected by the law.

But that’s not what we’re seeing, right? For the most part, the majority of the complaints are based on students claiming that other students’ chants and protests make them feel unsafe, make them feel uncomfortable, they find [them] offensive. And if that’s going to be the criteria, then we’re not going to be able to talk about very much at all on university campuses, and then we can’t have open and public inquiry about controversial issues.

Now, the right is claiming, “well, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you” to the left, because they have an axe to grind against the political left, saying, your cancel culture, your woke culture, all of the work you do that is antidiscrimination, antiharassment, Title VI, Title IX. Those are all part of the problem, and you essentially made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.

Of course, the flaw in that argument is that the political left, when they are seeking to decrease harassment, intimidation, discrimination on college campuses, that is when it is directed at students, right? And it is when people come and provide what we call very low value speech — or, more specifically, misinformation and disinformation — that is effectively peddling racial tropes.

That is not what we’re seeing on college campuses today. What we’re seeing in college campuses today are demands for a ceasefire, are demands for divestment from Israel, are demands for the U.S. government to either condition military aid to Israel based on adherence to human rights norms, or stop it altogether.

Many of these types of objectives in this political activism on college campuses today, we’ve seen it vis a vis Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other countries where there is a dissent in the United States against U.S. foreign policy on a particular issue. And no one responds to that political activism by saying, oh, well, you’re Islamophobic, or you’re anti-Latino, or you’re anti-Black, or you’re anti-Christian. They may respond and say, we don’t agree with you, we think you’re misinformed, we think your facts are not accurate, we think this is false, so you’re having a debate on the merits. That’s fair game in an academic setting and, in fact, it should be welcome.

But that’s not what we’re seeing right now at university campuses. What we’re seeing is the weaponization of antisemitism, which I think is to the detriment of Jewish communities, because if you define antisemitism incorrectly to mean political dissent or criticism of a nation state — in this case Israel — then you dilute its meaning, and you weaken the enforcement of real antisemitism. And I would make the same argument if someone was alleging that criticizing Iran was Islamophobic, or criticizing Saudi Arabia was Islamophobic, or criticizing a sub-Saharan country was anti-Black.

There is no exception for Israel. In fact, to treat Israel like any other nation is demonstrating that you’re not antisemitic in many ways, that it is like any other nation. And, right now, what’s happening in Gaza is so unprecedented, and so devastating, that it absolutely warrants the amount of attention that it’s been getting in the United States.

MH: I do wonder if there’s a counterproductive aspect of these censorship attempts because, as you mentioned, there’s this effort to suppress any discussion of this subject in a critical manner by young people, who tend to be the most curious and energetic about political issues. And, at the same time, U.S. politicians talk about Israel-Palestine all the time; it’s one of the most high profile foreign policy issues in the United States, so the difference, the gap between these two things is quite considerable.

And if you look at authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, for instance, people would publish samizdat about certain subjects which were verboten by the government. It increased the interest and appeal, and made more of a salient ideological ground of conflict because, you know, what are you trying to hide? That’s kind of the implication behind censorship.

And you alluded, Sahar, to this issue of the weaponization of charges of bigotry — in this case, antisemitism — to suppress dissent. And, obviously, any form of racism, including antisemitism, is condemnable in any form. But there is this usage of it — and I think it’s been noted for many, many years — to specifically make verboten criticism of the policies of a particular nation state — in this case, Israel — and the U.S. relationship with that country.

One thing that it does remind me of a little bit is, in the years after 9/11— So, a lot of the students who were protesting — not all, but many of them — either have heritage, are Palestinian, or are from the Middle East, or of their Muslim background — I wouldn’t necessarily even say majority, but a significant number of them are of those backgrounds — and their identities, in some way, are weaponized against them, because they are treated as though their criticisms are somehow suspect, or there’s something sinister behind it.

And you published this report through your center at Rutgers University recently, talking about how Islamophobia has been used as a tool in conjunction with accusations of antisemitism against many of these students. And it did remind me of post-9/11 when anyone who was Muslim making these critiques was somehow deemed suspect.

Tell us a bit about that report, and some of your findings in that regard.

SA: So, the report is called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse.” And, as you noted, it was published by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, and myself and Mitchell Plitnick are the coauthors of the report.

We had been working on this report for nearly two years — it predated October 7, 2023 — because each time that a Palestinian or an Arab or a Muslim was involved in the Palestine-Israel debate— And, oftentimes, those three identities would get homogenized into “presumptively Muslim,” which, we know the majority of Arabs in America are actually Christian, and we know that the Middle East is full of various faiths, including Jewish, Christian, and other faiths. But everyone would be homogenized into this Muslim identity that had been racialized as presumptively violent, hateful, despotic, and antisemitic. And these racial stereotypes were then used to silence, discredit, censor those speakers, even when those speakers were experts. And that would be the equivalent of peddling an anti-Black racist trope in order to exclude African Americans from engaging in the discussion about racism in America, or peddling antisemitic racial tropes to exclude Jews from engaging in the discussion about religious freedom in America, right?

So, this topic, the Palestine-Israel topic, is extremely important for these diverse communities, because many of them are of Palestinian ancestry, or they have friends who are Palestinian, or their origins are in the Middle East. And so, there is this cultural connection, and this personal connection. And the fact that they happen to have that identity suddenly then places them outside the purview of free speech rights, or political activism rights, because they are accused of having hateful motivations towards Jews, rather than simply being critical of the status quo politically, and militarily, and socioeconomically, which is effectively what you do when you have a debate or a discussion that is based on facts, and an analysis of the current situation and the historical situation.

So, effectively what we did is we unpacked that stereotype to show that to presume that a Muslim or an Arab or a Palestinian is antisemitic without any evidence other than simply that they are criticizing Israeli government practices, or Israeli military practices, or Israeli policy, or U.S. foreign policy, that if that’s all you have, that’s the only evidence you have, or that you’re critical of Zionism as a political ideology, well, then you’re really peddling a racial trope that’s Islamophobic.

And, again, the ultimate objective is to ensure that one does not contribute towards bigotry towards one group — which, in this case, would be Muslims — in the name or claiming to do it to protect bigotry or to stop bigotry against another group: Jews. Because that is effectively not the objective; the objective is to ensure that there is a monopoly over the narrative about Palestine-Israel in America that is unconditionally and staunchly pro-Israeli. My position is, that’s very un-American. I mean, that’s fascist, and that’s propaganda. And I would say that if the conversation were limited to any one perspective on what was acceptable.

So, ultimately, that report is an attempt to educate people about that racial trope so that they’re more careful, they’re more thoughtful, and they actually look to the facts when a Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian is accused of antisemitism. To determine, did this person in fact engage in antisemitism, or is this person simply communicating political beliefs through which the accuser disagrees with, and the accuser wants to discredit and silence in bad faith?

And I’ll just add that this stereotype of being presumptively antisemitic is an extension of these post-9/11 stereotypes, which resulted in significant material, liberty, and economic and dignitary harms to Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians across America after 9/11, which is effectively the subject of my book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.”

So, this is an extension of that. To make people cognizant that, when you assume that Muslims are violent and hateful people without any evidence, when that’s just a racial stereotype, then it makes it very easy for bad faith actors to then extend that to, oh, they also hate Jews.

And, again, that doesn’t mean antisemitism doesn’t exist among Muslim communities, but Islamophobia also exists among Jewish communities and Christian communities, but that doesn’t mean that every Jew is Islamophobic, and it doesn’t mean every Christian is Islamophobic, just like it doesn’t mean that every Muslim is antisemitic. So, providing that individual responsibility, looking for the facts to determine whether or not someone is in fact hateful towards a particular group, is extremely important, because otherwise you are defaming, you are slandering, you are libeling, and you are smearing individuals.

And if that same type of behavior were conducted against a white person, a white Christian person, or a white Jewish person, everybody would understand that that is unacceptable. And that, in fact, the person that should be discredited is the bad faith accuser, not the victim of these racist tropes that are being peddled at them or deployed against them.

MH: You made the very good point about these measures being taken place ostensibly on behalf of protecting the safety of minorities, but we’ve seen in the last few months very severe and very violent attacks on Palestinians in the United States, symbols of Palestinian identity. There was a murder of a young boy in Chicago a few months ago, there was a shooting attack on several young Palestinian students, one of whom was left paralyzed as a result of that. And there seems to be a grave disjuncture between the level of concern being expressed for emotional harms, as opposed to real harms which are taking place right now.

And, to the point about campuses as well, too, there was a chemical attack on some Palestinian students at Columbia University recently, which the administration of that school and the press has taken quite minimal interest in, compared to how grave it is in reality.

I was curious about one thing particularly, Sahar, that I saw in the news a few months ago in Florida: efforts to ban Palestinian student groups from campus entirely. And it seems that Florida may be a testing ground for further measures that may be rolled out in the rest of the country.

Is there a legal basis, really, for banning this type of speech entirely by law? I know that the administrations were putting great administrative pressure and political pressure on these groups and these young people, but can they actually make Palestinian activism verboten legally on campuses in the United States in the future?

SA: Well, without knowing the specifics of the case, generally what universities do if they shut down or suspend student groups is they do not state that it is because of their viewpoint, and it is not because of their exercise of their constitutional rights. Usually they will find what we call pretext; you violated this policy by not reserving the room appropriately, or by inviting outside speakers or outside attendees when you were not allowed to. There are all sorts of policies that universities have on a range of topics and, if the administrators want to harass students and give them a hard time, they can find these so-called “facially neutral” policies and say, well, it has nothing to do with, with your viewpoint, it has to do with you violating this viewpoint-neutral policy.

And then the question becomes, well, is the enforcement viewpoint-neutral? And if there are other clubs or university student groups that have also violated those policies, are they being treated in the same manner? And that’s why you’re seeing more litigation that is being brought by Palestinian groups and Muslim student groups, represented often by Palestine Legal, which has started to represent these student groups who clearly— Well, there’s reason to believe that they are being targeted, based on their viewpoint and based on their identity, but oftentimes that then gets resolved in court.

But what the university administrators will claim is that, no, it’s not related to their identity or their viewpoint.

But, again, I think that when you’re looking at places like Florida, or Texas, or other what we call “anti-DEI states,” this is just the beginning of a much broader agenda, which is to quash and eliminate any type of agency, or mobilization, or programming, or curriculum that centers the experiences and the voices and the knowledge production of minority communities, whether they’re Black communities, Native American communities, Indigenous communities, Muslim or Arab communities. And it’s easy, and it’s politically expedient, to punch down at Palestinian student groups, because anti-Palestinian racism is so bipartisan, and Islamophobia is so mainstream and normalized, that they can get away with it.

But it sets a dangerous precedent, because what they really want is they don’t want Black history to be taught in any schools that is not simply glorifying a white-dominant narrative, and that in any way provides the African American diversity of experiences. And we can then apply that to American history vis a vis Native/Indigenous populations, American history vis a vis immigrant populations, and so on and so forth.

So, this is where I hope that people across the country who may not have any particular connection to Palestine or to the Palestine-Israel issue, but if they care about ensuring that our universities, and our schools, and our government, and our media represents the rich diversity of perspectives and lived experiences in the United States, that they really need to pay attention and push back against this censorship.

Because what we saw after 9/11 was, they came for us first as the Muslims, and they justified expanding government authority — especially executive authority — and they justified heightened judicial deference by telling the population, don’t worry, we’re not going to take away your civil liberties, we’re going to take away their civil liberty; these Muslims, these outsiders, these threats. And, over time, that expanded, and then surveillance and the dilution of civil liberties became more normalized.

So, even if someone doesn’t care much about the Palestine-Israel issue per se, they absolutely should care about their free speech rights, their academic freedom rights, and the ability for our country to function in a way that does not perpetuate white Judeo-Christian dominance. Because, by 2050, this country, there will be no majority race, and there will be no majority sectarian religion, right? There will be such a diversity even among Christians, and then with Islam, and Hinduism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, we need to have a country that educates our students in a way that allows them to understand the reality of America.

MH: You make a really good point, too, because, obviously, these anxieties about the student activism in Palestine ties into much broader anxieties that were also visible during the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago. And it’d been an ongoing sort of theme on campuses, particularly in the last decade; [even] beyond that, I would say.

And one thing I want to also make a point to listeners, too, is that oftentimes developments in universities are treated as somehow separate from society, or somehow less serious than main federal politics, and what have you and so forth. But, really, the reason that there’s so much scrutiny from, say, in this case, a group seeking to suppress criticism of Israel is they know that, on campuses, you’re seeing the future elite of the country are there, and having their worldviews formed. They’re being groomed and developed and getting their skills together to take on these very important roles in society, so they’d like to shape the debate at that level, such that the downstream effects as they see it will later manifest in their favor. So, it’s very, very important what happens on these campuses as well.

And one thing, Sahar, which I saw in the news and found very alarming and I think people should know it as well, too is that former President Trump — and, maybe, future President Trump, depending on the election — he had said recently in response to questions about these protests on campuses that he would take the step of revoking the visas of students who are foreign students who take part in what he called pro-Hamas rallies. And, really, in practice, this seems to be any rally which is for the support of a Palestinian rights, and so forth.

And this proposal, as extreme as it is, seems to tie into a broader theme of hostility to immigration, or immigrants and minorities, and so forth. And it’s actually wedding support for Israel into a much more extreme set of far-right policies, you could say, aimed at changing the composition of the United States.

I was curious of your perspective of how the evolution of support for Israel as a component of U.S. domestic politics has been playing out, and how this realignment — this support for Israel towards the far right — is manifesting itself on the ground.

SA: Israel is a very unusual subject matter when looking through the domestic politics lens, because it’s so bipartisan in the unconditional support for its policies and practices, even though its policies and practices are hawkish, militaristic— It’s a permanent occupation, it’s now been called an apartheid state by many human rights organizations, and it is now being charged with genocide by South Africa. 

And the fact that you have such strong unconditional support for it by both Democrats and Republicans makes it stand out, as opposed to other issues, like abortion, voting rights, diversity, equity, inclusion, social welfare programs. And what I believe we’re witnessing is the conservatives, the political right, taking advantage, and exploiting the support for Israel that is in the Democratic Party. And, for various reasons which we don’t have enough time to go into, in terms of why there’s so much political domestic support for Israel, especially among elected officials— And a lot of it absolutely has to do with the influence of special interest groups in our political system overall, not just on the issue of Israel, whether it’s gun rights, or abortion, or other what we call hot topics.

But they are leveraging that to quash the university activity, and to oppose DEI with the objective, the long term objective to — as I stated before — to regress our education system back to an era when it was European origin, or people of European ancestry, they were centered in how we educated people, that it was Judeo-Christian tradition that centers how we educate people. And so, if you are not from the Global North, and if you are not of Judeo-Christian tradition, then you are a permanent outsider. You will not see yourself in the books that are assigned, in the type of knowledge production, in the professors, in anything, right? You will be an outsider. And that, then, perpetuates that system.

And so, what we’ve seen, I would say, since 9/11 by this generation, by this post-9/11 generation is a rebuke of that white Judeo-Christian-dominant system. The #MeToo movement, which was a gender rights movement, the LGBTQ movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, now the Palestine human rights movement. All of these are part of a pattern, or a manifestation of the change in the demographics of this country, because these are the college students who are now in there from 18 to 25, and they are realizing that the America that they were born into simply is not acknowledging their lived experiences. And they’re demanding change. And that’s why you have to understand the Palestinian social movement as an extension of that.

What’s paradoxical is that, if it was anything but Palestine-Israel, the Democrats would be supporting the movement, just like they did the Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement, and the LGBTQ movement. But, because Israel is unconditionally supported by both the political right and left, you’re seeing liberals engage in illiberal ways, in illiberal practices. And they are creating a dangerous precedent, they are doing the dirty work — and I call it dirty work because it’s so un-American — of the conservatives of the political right who are, in fact, seeking more censorship, less free speech, less academic freedom for those on the political left.

For themselves, of course, they want as much free speech as possible, as much academic freedom as possible. And, when DEI includes ideological diversity, suddenly the political right is on board, because they use that as code for, “hire more white male conservatives.”

And so it’s all about, if it serves us, we want it. If it doesn’t serve us, we don’t want it. Rather than looking at DEI as an objective, the objective is for there to be more representation in workplaces, in universities, in professors, as students, in the media, that represents America. And that is going to change based on the state, based on the region of the country, but just acknowledging that no group of people should be in a country where they feel that they’re completely invisible, if not outright oppressed.

So, the message I think that I have for the liberals is: be careful how you respond to the censorship on Palestine, because it will expand. It will expand to the various issues that you care about, like abortion rights, and voting rights, and anti-gerrymandering, and gun rights. Pick the issue that you care about. Once you make it normal for there not to be any type of open debate and discussion by experts— And I will highlight “by experts.” I don’t think that speech by pundits and people who rant is very helpful speech, whatever the position is.

But remember [that] in universities we have a peer review process. We have a process where, if you go and start stating things that are false, there are peers who will call you out for it. And that is a form of quality control that doesn’t exist on social media, or doesn’t exist in other media outlets. And that’s why universities are so well suited to have contentious debates and discussions, and let the university administrators, and the faculty, and the students figure out ways to do it in a robust, healthy way that is not harassing to individual students, that is not racist towards individual students, but in a way that allows students to have access or exposure to different ideas by experts. But what we’re seeing now is attempts to completely stop that.

And so, then the question is: well, where can students go learn? If it’s social media, that is bad news for education. You can’t learn much from 240 characters, or from a three-minute TikTok video, or from a five- or ten-minute YouTube video. Universities are there so that you can take the time and learn things in depth through a class, through programming, through conferences, through conversations, through mentoring. And so, this political intervention by these House Un-American Activities Committees, and these Senate Un-American Activities Committees, is bad for our universities. It’s bad for the quality of higher education in the United States.

And I think it just goes without saying that Congress has no business interfering with universities, and they need to stay out of universities’ businesses, and let them be managed and run by professionals.

MH: Sahar, it’s interesting, it seems like every generation of young people in the United States has a cause which they’re very galvanized by. We saw in the last century the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the struggle against apartheid. It strikes me very much that the pro-Palestine movement is that cause for a younger generation of young student activists.

I was reading a book recently by Rashid Khalidi, “The Hundred Years War in Palestine;” we had him on the podcast a few months back as well, too. There was a very interesting anecdote of his own time as a student in New York and, at that time, many decades ago, the Palestinian cause was much less— The framing of it was much different in the United States, if the Palestinian perspective was discussed at all.

And he said he recalled going to a protest of Golda Meir giving a speech in New York. And, at his protest, there were about four people [there] protesting against her appearance. And there were hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of students who were going to watch her speech in support of it. And now, it seems like the whole dichotomy is flipped, and that change, which is so manifest on a popular level, is not manifest yet at an institutional level at all.

I’m curious, just to conclude, your own perspective of how important or defined perspective has become for young people that you see as a professor or engaging in activism. What has the Palestinian cause come to symbolize for them, and how it may develop in the U.S. in the future?

SA: I think the Palestinian issue, or the experience that they are witnessing right now, the events they’re witnessing, is waking up a generation to the contradictions between what they learn in school, that the United States is a beacon of freedom, it is a place where one can speak freely and express dissenting views without fearing persecution, without fearing being arrested, or being expelled from school, or being surveilled, or being threatened with physical harm. Because they’re also taught in schools that those types of repressive measures happen abroad in autocracies, and now they are witnessing these types of practices here in the United States, and these practices are being demanded by Congress and imposed on university administrators.

So, they’re realizing that their country has a democracy crisis and a constitutional crisis, where the very people elected to uphold the constitution are now abusing their authority to violate the constitution, but only for certain students. So, they’re also realizing how racism works, and how — as I discuss in my book “The Racial Muslim” when focusing on religious freedom in particular — that these constitutional rights have historically always been constrained by the racial identity of the person seeking to exercise those rights.

And so, if you are white and Judeo-Christian, you have the fullest extent and the full liberty to exercise those rights, and you’re much, much less likely to have those rights violated, either by private actors or by the government. But the more subordinated, or racialized, or stereotyped, or hated your minority group is, the less likely you can exercise those rights without repression. And, again, one need only look at the history of African Americans in America to know that reality.

And so, they’re seeing that American racism, and American democratic deficits are not a thing of the past, and that they’re realizing that their generation has numerous challenges that they now must face, because they are the future leaders. I will tell you that many of us in the academy are using this moment to educate our students, to make them realize that you have a responsibility to be an agent that defends American fundamental values, and those values are being tested.

Right now, you’re living through it and, rather than cowering in fear, or rather than being so pessimistic that you check out of the system, you have an obligation to lean in, and to demand and expect that your university leaders, your elected officials, and any other members of the elite that have decision-making powers, that you demand that they uphold the constitution, and that they uphold American fundamental values of free speech, academic freedom, racial equality. And the fact that you are one of the case studies is— It can either be a privilege or a burden, but it is their reality.

So, yes, we are in another social movement. We are seeing a major transition in how the Palestine-Israel issue is being addressed, discussed, and examined, at least among college students. And the biggest fear of the individuals and groups who do not want that change, who want to continue that monopoly over the narrative on Israel that it is always the victim, and that Palestinians are always the terrorists, which is a false narrative, that they are going to do everything they can to repress that competition of ideas in the marketplace of ideas.

And so, the question we have to ask ourselves is, are we going to sit by and be quiet and be complicit, or are we going to stand up and defend the values, but also be willing to defend those values, when the speaker is someone you disagree with? My position is, universities need to be places for robust discussion and robust debate, and utilize the peer review process, where if someone states something that is false or that is misinformation, there will be others in the room that can challenge that, or that can provide alternative programming that challenges that.

But censorship is absolutely not the American way, and if we make it the American way, then we are going down the path of autocracy.

MH: Sahar Aziz, thank you so much for joining us today.

SA: Thank you.

MH: That’s Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers Law School, and author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.”

Before we go, I wanted to share with you that Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby Award under the category of “Best News and Politics Podcast.” Thank you to all our listeners, guests, and everyone that makes this show happen every week. You can help us win the category by casting a vote, and we’ll share the link in the show notes.

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 by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Amid Gaza War, College Campuses Become Free Speech “Testing Ground” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,” Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The United States and Iran’s long-running shadow war continues to play out against the backdrop of the conflict in the Gaza Strip. While the U.S. is Israel’s primary security and political backer, Iran has placed itself at the center of a range of militant groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militias that are fighting the U.S. and Israel in various countries across the region. Iran is the primary patron of these groups, but its central role in the current conflict, as well as the history between the U.S. and Iran that led us here, is not widely understood.

To discuss this, I’m joined now by Arash Azizi. A writer and historian who recently wrote the book, “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.” He’s also the author of the book “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions.”

Arash, welcome to Intercepted.

Arash Azizi: Thank you so much for having me Murtaza. It’s great to be here.

MH: Arash, presently, the war in Gaza is entering, I think, its sixth month at the moment, and the role of Iran in the conflict is not very well understood, especially by American audiences. Can you talk a bit about what role Iran is playing in this war, and what role it played in the lead up to the October 7th attacks, in terms of its place in the region, vis a vis Israel and various other actors?

AA: The Islamic Republic is the only important state funder of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups that conducted October 7th; particularly Hamas, which led the October 7th attacks. As the most important and, as I said, really, the sole significant state funder of these groups, both financially and militarily, Tehran has played an important role.

But, in the months since, it’s now very clear — and, in fact, the American intelligence community seems to also have come to this conclusion — that Iran wasn’t aware of these attacks beforehand, that it didn’t really plan for them. It basically looks to have been caught by surprise. All indications seem to point out to the fact that Hamas’s military leadership on this trip — for operational reasons — was allowed to sort of take these autonomous actions. That, in some ways, they had broader support from the Islamic Republic and what it calls the Axis of Resistance, this coalition of groups that it supports in the region, but that it acted on its own on that day.

Now, what we’ve seen in the last few months is that, of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran tries to bank on this global outpouring of emotions against Israel following its attacks on Gaza. That it, of course, tries to show support and galvanize support by supporting Hamas and Yemeni Houthis, who are attacking ships passing through the Red Sea. But, at the same time, the Islamic Republic is very worried about getting into a direct confrontation with Israel and the U.S., so it has actually tried hard to avoid that. And its relationship to the Axis of Resistance is interesting, because it doesn’t come across often and in certain sort of analyses out there. But, really, what you have is the fact that Iran is trying to push them back, and hold them back, and make sure that they don’t get it into a conflict that it doesn’t want to.

And, at the same time, I think, in Iran, for many people — and many ordinary people but, also, even people in the establishment — they’re very worried about this consequence of Iran having tied itself to this group of unruly militias in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Palestine, not to mention those beyond, which can then get Iran into a conflict that it can ill afford. That Iranians don’t want a war, and they don’t want a direct confrontation with Israel and the United States. So, this has really led them to question the whole policy of Iran in supporting them.

And [the question] also becomes clear: what is the response of the Arab world to this war? What is its response? Its response is actually united, basically, across the board; which is to say that they want a two-state solution. They want Israel to end its onslaught on Gaza, to plan for the day after, and to end the occupation, and allow for the creation of the Palestinian state, which is what the Arab states have wanted since 2002.

And if you listen to diplomats, sort of leading establishment figures in Iran who are not currently in power, but they were in power until recently, they’re basically pointing out to the fact that “Iran can’t be more Arab than the Arabs,” is a way that [they] sometimes put it. That if there’s a consensus in the Arab world, that that’s what it means. Iran can’t be the one who wants to continue its line that, no, Israel should be destroyed, Israelis should learn swimming, and all these different things that the leaders of the Islamic Republic have said.

So, I think there’s a reckoning there as well, that the regional mood and the demands of the Arab countries in the region, Iran can’t adopt a position that opposes them.

MH: So, as you alluded to, Iran supports this very, very broad network of groups. It’s actually kind of staggering how many groups are currently being funded or armed by Iran in various different countries. Obviously, there’s Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, the Houthis in Yemen, groups in Syria, Iraqi militias, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah, [which is] a separate organization, also supported by Iran. And, whether at Iran’s direction or not — and it may not be, as you said, as the U.S. intelligence community and others have concluded — they are the only ones actually shooting at Israel, you could say. They’re shooting at Israel, directly or indirectly, in various ways. And that may trigger a broader conflict, despite the wishes of Iran, despite the patronage of these groups.

I’m kind of curious, can you tell us and our listeners, why is Iran supporting all these groups? Because it seems like it’s a significant outlay of resources. It seems very organizationally difficult. Just from a purely administrative strategic aspects, it’s very impressive that they managed to cultivate so many different groups in different countries, who are very loyal to it in many ways. How did they do this and why are they doing this?

AA: The Islamic Republic was founded as a revolutionary state out of the grand revolution of 1979. Revolutions are not made because you want trains to run on time or you want things to be efficient; revolutions are made because you want to change the world. 

MH: “You didn’t have a revolution for the price of melons.” I think that Khomeini said that.

AA: [Laughs.] Exactly. That’s an excellent quote. That sort of exactly explains things, right?

So, the1979 revolution was really made to change the world. When you really think about it, revolutions like that make a nation become an incubator of a grand ideological project. That was the case in the Russian revolution of 1917, that was the case in many other revolutions, [like the] Chinese revolution of 1949. So, Iran, really, as a nation state, became an incubator for this grand ideological project of, let’s call it Khomeinism, right?

And what really [is] Khomeinism? It hasn’t always been clear throughout its history, but one thing you can say, actually, that there’s been an ideological failure on many fronts, that Iran has not been able to offer a different society — has not been able to offer a different Islamic society — that anyone would actually like to follow. It’s not clear that Islamic universities, Islamic water management, all of these terms that they use, right? Islamic banking. Is it actually a significantly different sort of desirable society that you can follow?

But one thing that it has continued and has offered is a resolute anti-Israeli position, which all these different groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Houthis in Yemen, a variety of Iraqi Shia groups — they all follow. In the last few decades, Iran has been able to prop them up as this Axis of Resistance that fights the United States and fights Israel. And, of course, the tragic reality is, I don’t believe that the founders of the Islamic revolution of ’79 were Shia sectarians, right? They were Shia, sometimes they were sectarian, but I don’t think this was very fundamental to their identity. I think because they had higher aspirations, right?

Shias are only 15 percent of the Muslim world, so to rule over the Shias— Ayatollah Khomeini didn’t want to rule over the Shias, he wanted to rule over the world, really, and certainly the world Muslim community, right? And that’s usually how it’s discussed in the rhetorics of the regime.

But the reality is, in the last 20 years, there was a process of sectarianization in the region, particularly after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. And [it was] on both sides, obviously; it wasn’t just Iran that was sectarianizing things. The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq after 2006, then the rise of different groups, ultimately the rise of ISIS, right?

So this meant that these groups— This doesn’t include Hamas, obviously, which, not coincidentally, in this period, actually, Hamas left the Axis of Resistance, if you will, because it was too much of a Sunni group to be part of a Shia-led axis in this particular period. It only rejoined once the sectarian wave had receded. But the reality is, these groups were able to grow in Iraq, in Lebanon, certainly, and even in Yemen, because of this period of sectarianization, where Shia versus Sunni became an important recruiting ground. And everybody knows, in politics, you’re able to recruit people on basic tribal identitarian purposes. And this was basically how it’s done.

So, it’s harder to convince an Iraqi that they should join some sort of a Khomeini’s Islamist revolutionary project. I obviously sort of see it negatively, but it should also be understood like any other form of tribalism. You know, the reason young Iraqi Shias would go join a Shia militia was that they saw that there was a rise of these really genocidal Sunni Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, which were attacking the Shias throughout. So, they had a reason to join them, to defend their communities, right?

So, this was one dynamic, and the other dynamic was opposition to Israel. That, OK, the whole Khomeini’s political social project has failed, but there remains an opposition to Israel. And these people would join Iran and its axis, because it could offer opposition to Israel for them. And, for the Islamic Republic, this meant a raison d’etre for the regime, this meant an ideological legitimacy. And this ideological legitimacy mattered inside the country as well, because, what is the Islamic Republic? What’s the justification for it? The justification for a number of supporters it would become, “we are leading this Axis, we are fighting Israel.”

And it’s interesting. They know that this is not ultimately a very successful winning card in Iran, a country in which, for better or worse, the Palestinian cause is not a household cause anymore, if it ever was. It’s not like people care about it, particularly, compared to other countries in the world.

So, they tried different versions of this. For example, they would say, oh, the Axis of Resistance is actually an economic axis that helps the Iranian economy. There was a nationalist version of this effectively that, both for proponents and opponents of this, they would say, oh, this is really just the Persian empire, this is sort of the Iranian empire going across. So, they actually try using this kind of language at different times to justify the support.

But, as I said, I think, in recent times, especially in recent months, there’s come a reckoning that this doesn’t seem to serve Iranian national interest well at all, while it actually really endangers the country in many ways, because it creates too many enemies for it, and it puts it in risk of war, a war that it does not want, and it cannot afford.

MH: So, very briefly, right now, in this conflict, Israel is surrounded, in a way, at least geographically, by these Iranian-backed groups, and I think the most important and powerful of them is Hezbollah in Lebanon. And there’s been many, warnings, increasingly urgent warnings, I would say, that the coming months could see an expansion of the war in Gaza to Lebanon, which would be very disastrous. And I think that it’d be disastrous for the Lebanese people, but also for Israelis, in the sense that Israel has threatened — and also, in the past, carried out — very devastating attacks against civilians in Lebanon indiscriminately. And Hezbollah has tens or hundreds of thousands, potentially, of rockets, which it would deploy in a conflict against Israel, which would be very devastating to Israel’s infrastructure and population as well, too.

You mentioned that Iran is not eager to have this war right now, or it’s actually trying to hold the groups that patronize this back from having this war at the moment. Can you talk a bit about what the short-term and long-term vision is? Because I know that maybe in the short term they don’t want to have war with— You know, I’ve read for — and I’m sure you’re well aware — that they also do have a strategy of putting pressure on Israel and, potentially, in the views of many of the groups destroying Israel, by some strategy of asymmetric warfare. And I think that Khamenei has written about this, the supreme leader of Iran.

Can you talk a bit about, just briefly, what the Iranian or the Iranian government’s plan to degrade or destroy Israel is on paper, and how these groups fit into that?

AA: So, short term and long term. I think short term they are trying to manage the situation, and Khamenei sort of prides himself of having what he calls a strategic patience. That you don’t get into immediate fight because that will just destroy our forces, but we’ll grow, we’ll grow, we’ll grow, and patiently we’ll just grow our forces. And they have done that, right? Why is Hezbollah able to be such a powerful force today, after all?

There was one war in 2006 with Israel. Now, imagine how many years since Israel has left Lebanon; it’s 24 years. So, if you wanted to get into a fight every couple of years — as, in fact, Israel and Hamas did much more often, due to Israeli attacks on Gaza — if they wanted to do that, Hezbollah would have been a degraded force. Today, Hezbollah is much, much, much more stronger than it was 10, 15 years ago. It was able to grow, precisely because it doesn’t engage in a conflict.

The problem with patience is that it leads to other people’s impatience, right? So, a lot of ground forces of these groups, including ideologues and others, are very openly criticizing Khamenei, basically. Saying, this is the time, you know? People of Gaza are being killed. Why are we not going to go and fight Israel directly? So, Khamenei has been trying to calm them down and have this strategic patience. 

Now, what are the long-term goals? I think if you ask the leadership, Khamenei and them, their idea is that they’ve built up an important Islamic Republic that has been able to survive. It has survived all the enmities of different Western countries and Israel. It’s now almost half a century long. When you think about it, it’s already in the annals of Iranian dynasties, it’s becoming its own dynasty that’s been able to survive, as I said, almost half a century, and that it continues to hold on to these ideals. Khamenei has chosen not to compromise on these ideals anymore, at the cost of making life much more difficult for himself. He has made a calculation that if I give in a little to these Islamist liberal Democrats, nothing would be left of this project.

In regards to the region in Israel, I think they think ultimately they’ll be able to kick Americans out, that they’ll be able to Islamicize the region more, and lead to more Islamist regimes down the road. And I think, like many other opponents of Israel, they believe that one day they’ll be able to unite and fight, and destroy Israel somehow. Force Israeli Jews to flee, or to surrender, or to become subjugated. And this vision doesn’t make sense in any sort of a short-term sense because, of course, Israel is a nuclear power, of course Israel is very powerful militarily, has support across the world. Everyone knows that. So, I think in their revolutionary dreams, if you will, this is something that’s a very long-term plan. That maybe in 100 years, it could happen, if you just keep it going. 

The issue, though, is that, thankfully, tons of people, including in the Iranian establishment, don’t want to wed their country into some sort of an eschatological dream, that one day these grand changes will happen, and all that. And are much more pragmatic, and are happy to accept the realities of the region, and have Iran be a part of the region.

So, my argument, actually, is that, I think, in the Iranian establishment, people are much more boring, if you will. Iranian nationalists are people who want a strong Iran. They want to fight with other countries in the region sometimes over who has influence where, but they’re not interested in this revolutionary Islamist dream. 

If you read this output of thinktanks, they’ll tell you that these people are Mahdist, believers in this millenarian Shia ideology, that they’ll do anything because the Imam of the time will come back, and the new Messiah will come back, and this is a key to Shia ideology. I don’t buy that. I think the leadership, I think much of the establishment of the Islamic Republic doesn’t really think that. They don’t really believe in this stuff, even though they say it now, or most of them don’t, anyway. And they know it doesn’t have any social base in Iran.

That’s why my prognosis is that, after the death of Khamenei, who is already turning 85 next month, things will change in Iran. So, you’re going to come to see different policies.

MH: Yeah. As you mentioned, and for the listeners, Ayatollah Khamenei is a supreme leader of Iran. So, he is, effectively, on paper, that’s a position with some limited powers but, in reality, it’s a very, very, almost a king-like role in the country. His views are very, very important.

Now, when he passes away, as you said, a new supreme leader will come to power, but there are other factions of the government who do not favor the same policies that Iran has undertaken, both in the region and domestically. You wrote an article in The New York Times recently that “change is coming to Iran, just not the change we hoped for.” And you talk about these members, or people at high levels in the Iranian establishment, including the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who have very different views about how Iran should comport itself in the region, and also vis a vis, potentially, domestic policy.

When Khamenei does die, what do you think may change internally in Iran? And how may Iran’s strategy vis a vis the United States or Israel also change with someone else in power who may be more beholden to these factions of the IRGC and other parts of the establishment, who you could say are more pragmatic?

AA: My prognosis is that whoever the next supreme leader is doesn’t really matter, and the real power will be with the IRGC and these other factions of power, which will vie for power with each other, right? They’ll fight, and they’ll enter a period of rivalry with each other over power. So, that’s my prognosis.

Of course, like any other, it could be wrong. It could be that a superior we don’t know emerges and wants to be the Khamenei. It could be, as some are saying, that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, is going to be anointed the next supreme leader, and he will have some power, although I personally don’t think that’s possible, frankly.

Imagine you yourself are someone in the IRGC. You fought the good fight for all these years, you’re in these positions. Are you going to cede all power to someone’s son, who nobody knew who he was until recently? It’s true that Mojtaba has apparently tried to build some links and connections to them, but I don’t think it will be enough to hold power in Iran. I don’t think someone like, let’s say, Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Parliament, currently, is going to just sit on the sidelines and allow Khamenei’s son to rule the country.

Now, what will be the changes? What I believe, the direction of changes are going to be in the direction of pragmatism, both domestically and regionally. Now, of course, what the hell does pragmatism really mean? It’s open to debate, right? But the idea is that they wouldn’t be so much wedded to the revolutionary goals of ’79, and that Khamenei, as a genuine revolutionary clearly does, right? Khamenei is a genuine revolutionary. He truly wants to continue this path that he’s been on all his life. I think they won’t have that.

So, that means, probably, in order to solve the Iranian economic problems a little bit, and also, by some social peace, they’ll be more moderate in domestic policies. And they’ll understand that they need to sort of end the standoff that Iran has with the world, for the sanctions to end, for Iran to be a bit more integrated in the global system, it’s actually possible, I think, that they’ll follow a series of rapprochement with regional and international powers.

Now, different factions in the IRGC in recent years have had different ideas. Some people believe that they really take pride of a place in Axis of Resistance as their most prized project. They’ve seen that it has worked in the sense that it’s a topic of conversations around the world, and that it’s a cause of concern for the United States, so they’ll think about how they can continue that project into the post-Khamenei era.

And some, actually, have developed significant links now with Russia and China, which changes the whole idea of global integration. You know, maybe there isn’t one globe, so we should be obsessed about these Western sanctions finishing against us, and we can try to improve the relationship with Russia and China, actually, and become a more direct component of that sort of anti-Western coalition.

But I think, ultimately, it’s much more likely that they’re trying to seek a regional rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, even come to some sort of rapprochement with United States. They’ll decrease the support for different militias, because they would see that as a way of getting peace with Saudi Arabia. They’ll stop wanting to be on the frontline of fighting to destroy Israel. So, I think it’s possible that we’ll see changes in those directions.

The reason I said “it’s not a change we hoped for,” [is] I think these are overall positive developments. I think, basically, it’s a question of Iran stopping to be a revolution and becoming more of a country. But it’s also not the democratization that people like myself have fought for all of our lives, and we’ll continue to do that fight, right? For democratization, for gender justice, for social justice, for environmental justice, and all the other causes.

But the immediate change you will see in Iran after the death of Khamenei is unlikely to be that a bunch of liberal Democrats can somehow come to power, because we’re not organized, but it is possible for these other, as I said, IRGC folks to come to power and, in order to just make their own life easier, give up on the revolution that nobody really believes in anymore, and replace it with a more familiar sort of military authoritarianism.

I think of examples like Algeria or Pakistan as the models that they’ll think about. And it’s not just me saying that. I guess Algeria, I haven’t heard that example made before, but many people point to Pakistan in Iran as a potential model. They don’t say it in a good way, as in, they’d like it to be what some of them are thinking, that’s sort of where it’s headed. In a country in which military has a very important role in running things, but also the country is not wedded to a very particular revolutionary project.

MH: One thing that was striking to me recently is: I talk to friends in Iran pretty often and, in contrast to the Iranian government, which is very, very eager to be at the frontline of these conflicts with Israel and the United States, I detect a lot of fatigue or even disinterest in these regional conflicts. Which is very different from other people I know in other countries in the region, whose country, whose governments are actually not that deeply involved.

Iran’s government is the most involved, but I get the sense that the people are the least zealous, and the most tired, I would say, of the situation. Iran obviously had elections recently — I think it was at the Parliamentary level — and there was not this huge upswell of enthusiasm to take part in these elections.

You’ve written books about the subject, talked about it quite a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how Iranians are interpreting changes in the region, and also changes, potentially, in their own country, after suffering many, many years of sanctions and some dashed hopes with different political regimes in the past decade?

AA: Fatigue is a very good way of putting it. They’re just not interested, frankly. Iran is going through its worst time in decades. I actually always like to compare — it’s a very historian thing to do, to compare the current conditions to [other eras] — I usually like to compare it to the 1910s, and recently I saw that someone in Iran who I respect a lot, this journalist, also did the same, so now I have more confidence to say it.

And the 1910s, why do we say that? Because it was a time when Iran suffered a terrible famine in which 20 percent of the population died, or something like that. It was the first world war, Iran was invaded by all of the countries. No one really knew where the next breakthrough [was] going to come from. And, of course, it was the 1921 coup that really changed Iranian history then, and led to a new dynasty and everything.

So, the reason we make this comparison is, as I said, it’s because things in Iran are terrible. The crisis of competence of the government is really staggering. Tons of people are leaving the country, the brain drain has led to just a drain-drain, if you will. Everyone, tons of people are leaving. I don’t want to exaggerate it — it’s not on the level of Venezuela or something like that yet — but tons of people are living in the country.

Those who remain have very little hope in their careers. If you think about it, if you are an Iranian professor in a university 20 years ago or 15 years ago, maybe you made $2,000 a month. Now you make $300 a month. I mean, can you imagine if this happened to any of us? That you’ve dedicated your life, your career, and now you’re much worse off than you were at the beginning, you have problems affording basic things.

So, before anything else, when conditions are like this, Iranians who are already kind of self-centered to begin with, they’re obviously much more thinking about their own country and its travails. They don’t much care about the region, even though it involves us, right? So, they’re worried about the potential of war.

And, of course, the other thing that is sort of ironic, it’s that, of course, Iran’s direct involvement in being a battlefront is, in being on the first battlefront against Israel, in confronting the United States, is what has led, from the perspective of Iranian people, is what has led to their economic degradation, to all the sort of economic crises that they face.

I saw an Egyptian intellectual that I respected a lot recently wrote something that people write all the time, that I cannot believe that the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement of 1979 is still there. And people of Palestine are suffering… and then we still have this peace treaty. Which begs the question, is there a demand that the peace treaty should be torn apart and Egypt go to war with Israel? If that happens, then the Egyptian people will have to pay a very, very serious cost, right?

So, my point is that, I don’t know, then, whether they actually want that, whether they want that war and the price that will come with it. And I don’t know what would be their views if they had to pay such a cost, I don’t know what would be their views on the issue ten years after that, you understand my point? The Iranians are the ones who have had to pay this price. It’s very different when you don’t have to pay the price, and you can make all sorts of loud pronouncements about things, right?

But Iranians have had to pay the price for the government’s adventurist regional policies. And, really, the heaviest price, I want to emphasize what I just said about the economic situation. Now, the national minimum wage in Iran, which just got announced very recently, as the Iranian new year was last week, it’s like $180 per month. It’s 600-and-something dollars in Turkey, right? When would Iranians have dreamed that our national minimum wage would be one third of Turkey’s? This is a staggering reality.

So, the price has been incredibly high in Iran and, thus, there’s very little support for these regional policies. As I said, people care about Iran, and they want foreign and regional policies that would serve Iranians and their interests. It’s not that they’re not interested in the world or region at all, but it’s that they believe that these policies are in support of ideas that they don’t support, Iranians are not particularly crazy about.

These ideas are not popular in Iran; as you mentioned, in the parliamentary elections, a minority of people voted. They’re spending all their national wealth on projects that they don’t support. So, obviously they’re not going to be happy about that.

MH: Arash, you mentioned that, obviously, these economic problems, many of which are stemming from U.S. sanctions on Iran. Iran on paper should be a very wealthy country, because of its oil resources, and educated population, and so forth, but it’s not, it’s in this very dire state, as you said.

But it’s interesting, because the Iranian government, even under Khamenei, did try to seek rapprochement with the United States several times over the past two decades. During the era after the invasion of Afghanistan they cooperated with the U.S. very closely, and there was a very conciliatory Iranian president in power at that time, Khatami. And then, again, during the period of Rouhani, the previous president of Iran, the Iranian government sought a nuclear deal with the United States in exchange for economic integration, and removal of sanctions, and the introduction of Western companies to invest and buy from inside Iran.

But these efforts were actually rebuffed from the other side. They were rebuffed from the American side, or undermined in various ways. So, I’m kind of curious, would the Iranians actually try to do that again? Or would they be wary of the fact that perhaps American — and, I would say, behind that, Israeli — hostility is so implacable that we’d be fools to try to do this again? And then, our only hope out of this economic morass is to try to integrate with a new Global South type of world, with China and Russia and so forth.

How do you interpret that history in terms of what’s possible in the future? And, also, what opportunities have been missed for people in the region, and Iranians particularly?

AA: When we look at the history of Iranian-U.S. relations since 1979, it really is a history of missed opportunities, almost like a tragicomical history of things almost getting there, but not. I always think in my mind about the coincidence of when you have one U.S. president with one Iranian president, or a sort of political condition, and it just never quite works.

When you think about it, for example, Bill Clinton is in power in ’92, Khatami comes to power in ’97. They only have a few years that Khatami and Clinton are both there, and they really try to make things happen, even in those short few years. But, of course, Khatami has limited power, there are tons of other things, Bill Clinton has other concerns.

It’s never actually been one long night of hostility, interestingly enough. Every U.S. president has worked with the Islamic Republic in one way or the other at some point. Reagan, of course, had Iran-Contra, helped Iran get arms during the Iran-Iraq war with Israel, right? With Israeli arms with the Star of David on them going to the Islamic Republic as it fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

We mentioned Clinton under George W. Bush, who put Iran in the Axis of Resistance. Iran worked super closely with the U.S. against Taliban after 2003 and, later on, in Iraq, effectively. United States and Iran effectively ran the country as quasi-colonial powers, frankly, for a period, because the United States realized that the only way you could run Iraq, or sort of maintain influence in Iraq, was with some sort of an effective rapprochement with Iran. So, it has been like that.

But I’ll say a couple of things very quickly. First of all, the Islamic Republic, the revolutionary ethos of this regime has always been anti-American, especially since the end of the Cold War. In the first decade of the Islamic Republic [when] the Cold War was going on — the Soviet Union was still there — Iran, its official line was against both Moscow and Washington, and it had to sort of balance that out, although it actually did end up working quite closely with Moscow on certain questions, as scholars like Timothy Nunan have shown how this worked in relation to Afghanistan, and Syria, and other countries.

But, ever since then, its anti-Americanism has been very central to it, there’s a “death to America” rally every year that the regime organizes. And Khamenei, the Supreme leader, he really sees that as central to his work, so it will be very different when that is taken away, as we talked about previously.

I think, in the future, when I say rapprochement, we’re just talking about establishment of diplomatic relations, like Algeria has with the United States, like almost all countries in the world have them, right? It won’t necessarily be a hitching of the wagon for Iran to become a pro-Western country, in a way, what does that even mean anymore? Not to get too Huntingtonian here but, outside the core Western civilization, what does it mean to be pro-Western? I mean, Turkey is a member of NATO, but I don’t think any of us would really describe it as pro-Western anymore. It sort of stands out for its own interest.

Same as India. India, it’s a democratic country, it’s a liberal democratic country. It’s still largely traditionally considered to be sort of friendly to the West in the last couple of decades, at least — of course, it has its own proud history of nonalignment, and you can say during the Cold War, it sometimes was closer to Moscow, actually, than the West — but it has its own interests.

So, I think the way I think most Iranians — including myself, by the way — when you think about the future of Iran in this multipolar world that is emerging, is that Iran does not need to be against the U.S.. It also doesn’t need to be part of some sort of a U.S. Western-led coalition, necessarily. And I think, according to what kind of changes you see in Iran, this will be hotly debated. I think many Iranians on a popular level are more pro-Western, frankly, than anything else, they’re not pro-Russian or pro-Chinese. How that would make itself felt in policy is something that remains to be seen. I see this sort of the future of the world like that.

You mentioned Iran being a wealthy country and all that; one of the tragedies is, Iran is actually very well suited to become an important power in this multipolar world, of a power of its own kind. And it’s the kind of regional policies that have stopped us from being that. So, Saudi Arabia next door is a member of the G20, Turkey is able to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine. What is Iran doing? Like, this buffoonish policy in Russia and Ukraine of supporting Russia and its invasion of Ukraine goes against everything that Iranian diplomacy has stood for.

And also, I should say that Iran has a very proud history of an independent statehood. We are one of the only countries in the world who were never colonized. Iran was a founding member of the League of Nations, it was a founding member of the United Nations. It sat on the Council of the League of Nations in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s through the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. Iran was one of the countries invited to be part of an international sort of conciliation. And not quite peacekeeping, but international efforts to end these conflicts, you know?

So, this is the history of our country, and I think a lot of Iranians wanted to go back to playing such a role, as opposed to becoming a supporter of terror groups, and militias, and a sort of boogeyman of the international order. And it’s a very different boogeyman than, let’s say, Russia and China or North Korea.

Obviously, we don’t want to be North Korea, that has its own state, but Russia and China, when the question of their confrontation with the West comes with these two grand powers, and that’s the way it’s discussed. Whereas Iran has the potential to become a very important middle regional power, and that opportunity is squandered by it being effectively a vector for these kind of policies.

And I should say that, if you look at China, for example, I guess one of the questions that is often asked is, can Iran become part of an anti-Western bloc with China and Russia? But if you look at China, China doesn’t actually prioritize some sort of anti-Western revolutionary ideas. It really doesn’t. Which is why, in the region, China has much more closer economic ties with a variety of Arab countries — Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and others, who are close allies of the U.S. — and even with Israel, than it does with Iran. So, it’s not like China says, oh, Iranian brothers are a great anti-Western force, so we’re going to support them against Israel or anything like that.

They’re not doing that. They’re following their own economic interests, and the idea is that Iran should do the same. I think that’s the idea that will come to really rule Iran after Khamenei, and I think that’s the idea that makes sense to the Iranian people.

I think if you ask average people on the street— Frankly, it works on most people in the world, right? If you ask people, what do you want your government to do in the world affairs, they probably say they want to follow some concept of national interest, before having interest in what ideological grouping in the world they should join in, or what kind of contribution they can do to the world order.

MH: Arash, my last question, obviously, in 2022, there were these huge protests over the killing of a woman named Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Iran, on allegations that she’d worn a quote-unquote “improper hijab.” This obviously triggered a huge outpouring of anger among Iranians and a sort of social rebellion, which I think has been playing out in the country, even to this day.

I have friends in Iran — in Tehran, at least, in the capital, which may be more liberal — who have told me that in many places, restaurants, establishments, that people are not dressing according to the guidelines of the government. They’re rejecting many of the very strict social/ideological rules that characterize the government at present. And even in more conservative cities like Mashhad, I’ve also heard of similar things happening.

Just to conclude, what is the future of this movement in Iran, the social movement, which is rebelling against the regime? I think it’s mainly made up of younger people. How may it continue manifesting, especially as the government transforms and changes following the death of Khamenei, which we can expect in the years to come?

AA: Social rebellion is an excellent way of putting it. And I think, right now, you have a sort of astounding scene of millions of women — tens of millions by some counts — just daily breaking the mandatory hijab rule, and just coming out on the streets without wearing a headscarf. I sometimes FaceTime with friends or family in Tehran. I’m shocked. The other day I asked my friend, I said, “Are you in Turkey? I just called you.” Like, I thought they were not in Iran, but it was Iran, but tons of women were not wearing the hijab.

And, by the way, they’re not doing that because the government is lax. Government is not lax at all. Government is still putting people in jail, closing down cafes, fining people. A government official recently suggested that they’re going to have a smart system of fines in which cameras get you, and if the cameras detect you without a hijab, they’ll automatically take money out of your bank account. These are all tactics of intimidation.

And, despite that they’re doing it, I also, Murtaza, if I’m speaking honestly, I actually think we are really seeing a social resurgence on many issues. I think, for example, there is a new feminist consciousness, if you will, in Iran, that is not just about the regime; it’s about patriarchal structures in society, and even patriarchal beliefs that might exist amongst groups opposed to the regime. And I think we’ve had that in the last few decades but, in this new generation, we have its resurgence again.

I think the movement of 2022, and the beautiful “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan that it sort of adopted from neighboring countries and made its own opened up questions amongst Iranians — especially young Iranians, as you mentioned — as to, OK, well, we hate the regime, we want it gone, but what kind of country do we want? What does it mean to be Iranian? What kind of life do we want to have? What does it mean to be left and right, and what’s the meaning of democracy? And I think these questions were really posed in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and they had been left out or became subjects of fatigue, as you also mentioned earlier, but I think this movement gave new energy to them in many ways.

And, even though Iran right now, people are already sick and tired of the Islamic Republic, I think the conversations that came out of that movement are going to continue for a very long time. So, I think, really, when it comes to this movement, we need to have a longer view of Iranian history.

Often, many scholars — including myself, but also many of my ustads, or professors, as we say — they compare it, let’s say people like Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet or Ali Mirsepassi, they’ve compared this movement to the constitutional revolution of 1905, 1906, the first grand Iranian movement for rule of law, for liberty, for human dignity, and this very long process of Iranian struggles for a better world. We start understanding that this is how this movement should be viewed, and how it made some political demarcations, and also gave new political ideas to people. 

So, while my short-term prediction for Iran, as I said, is that it’s very likely that we’ll get some sort of a change in rulers. I think just because we changed the crown with the turban once in 1979, and once we changed the turban for a military beret, this doesn’t mean that the struggles will stop, or will finish. I think struggles for social justice and change and democracy in Iran will continue.

MH: Arash Azizi, thanks for joining us today.

AA: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Murtaza.

MH: That’s Arash Azizi, he’s a writer and historian specializing in Iran. You can check out Arash’s new book, “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.” He also wrote “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions.”

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 by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And 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 what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and check out our other podcast, Deconstructed.

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

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Iran and U.S. Wage a Shadow War Behind Gaza Conflict 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.

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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.

After six months of a sustained U.S.-backed Israeli war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza, President Joe Biden says he now has a “red line.” Asked about Israel’s threatened full-scale invasion of Rafah, Biden said, “You can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas],” Biden told MSNBC. “There are other ways to deal with Hamas.”

The White House has taken no action to halt the transfer of arms and other support to Israel’s war and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly said that he, not Biden, will decide whether to occupy Gaza. As the Ramadan holiday begins, the humanitarian reality of the people in Gaza has descended into horror. Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign is intensifying the already indescribable suffering wrought by constant bombing and ground operations. The decimation of the health infrastructure and the attacks against hospitals have resulted in the collapse of basic health services.

This week on Intercepted, Yara Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health,” joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a discussion on the health impacts of the war, the dehumanizing narratives Israel has deployed to justify its mass-killing operations, and the U.S. plans for building a port off the Gaza coast. Asi is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. 

JS: Maz, there’s, as always, a lot to talk about today regarding the situation in Gaza. Some of the latest news that we’re hearing out of the Biden administration, after months of leaking stories to the press, and messaging that Biden is losing patience with Netanyahu, and that the administration is concerned about the mounting death toll and suffering of Palestinians, the latest news now is that Biden is talking about something along the lines of a red line, if Netanyahu decides to do a full-scale invasion of Rafah. And I’m just wondering your thoughts, Maz, on those developments.

MH: I’m very skeptical of the Biden administration’s very lately-professed reservations about the Israeli operation. So many people have died by this point — which is obviously a tragedy, and it’s taken as a given — but Biden made a very notable comment when he made this red line comment, saying that 30,000 more Palestinians can’t die, which is such a bizarre framing to discuss what could happen going forward.

I take his recent comments about Israel and Netanyahu and expressing some sort of reservation more as being sort of an effort to portray himself as an opponent of his own policies, or an opponent of his own enabling of the Israeli government to carry out this operation. Obviously, the operation is very divisive inside the United States, including in the Democratic Party. Biden has to think about an election year. He’d love to be passed this conflict, many, many months before the election comes, but he can’t seem to let go of Israel in this situation. And even when he’s saying there’s going to be a red line, he’s not backing down on funding the Iron Dome and other defensive capabilities Israel has, which are very, very important to enable its offensive capabilities, because it needs to be able to deter people who would retaliate against it for invading Gaza.

So, when he says red lines, he doesn’t get into specifics. I really don’t take this as a very sincere or genuine sort of opposition or restraint on Israel. I think it’s more an attempt to restrain people in the United States by making them think that somehow he is not endorsing the very policies that he’s implementing.

JS: Let’s remember, too, that Joe Biden and Netanyahu, by Biden’s own account, have been very good friends for some 40 years. So, this isn’t like Biden was a young politician who ascended to the presidency and is just dealing with Netanyahu for the first time. In fact, when Biden was vice president under Obama, he often ran what amounted to defense for Netanyahu, because of the reported hostility between Obama and Netanyahu.

But the other layer of this, Maz, somehow this line reminds me a bit of how the Democrats explained away their votes in favor of the invasion of Iraq, and their promotion of the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Both Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, and Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war in Iraq, asserted that the Bush administration had misled them, given them inaccurate information, and that, actually, it’s their fault that they voted— it was Bush’s fault that they voted for the war in Iraq.

And, in a similar way, the emerging line from the Democrats is that this was all Netanyahu’s fault, and that this isn’t actually about the Israeli state’s actions. This isn’t actually about the entire intellectual, cultural, political, military apparatus in Israel supporting this. It’s actually about this one bad actor, Netanyahu.

It’s not just about the U.S. election, but it’s also about the power of narratives. And I think that what we’re seeing now is what the Biden team sees as their offramp, which is to load all of the badness of this onto Netanyahu, and try to separate Netanyahu from the broader Israeli state, which is completely morally, ethically, and intellectually dishonest.

MH: It’s funny, we think about Biden’s own personal perspective; whenever he’s asked about Israel, he brings up how he knew Golda Meir personally, which shows how different his worldview is from average younger people, younger generations in the United States or elsewhere. I’m surprised he didn’t say he knew Herzl personally, or the Maccabees personally. But he’s basically signaling, he’s coming from a very, very older perspective of Israel. He doesn’t see the Palestinians even as a factor in decision-making. You can see, at a very human level, he disregards their own suffering, while feeling very intense sympathy for Israeli suffering.

I think that it’s not going to work, the strategy of offloading everything on Netanyahu, because even the political opposition in Israel opposes the two-state solution, opposes many of the things that the U.S. says it would like to happen. They brought Benny Gantz into the U.S. recently to talk to him. He echoed many of the same views as Netanyahu. And there are people in the Israeli political establishment who speak differently, but they don’t have the majority popular support to implement those policies that the U.S. says it would like to see going forward.

So, I don’t think the strategy of using Netanyahu as a sacrificial lamb, so to speak, is going to work. And I think that the Biden administration is simply trying to kick the can down the road, and hope people forget about this period, but I think they’re going to be mistaken about that. I think this is going to be a very decisive and definitive moment in history. People will not forget what stance the Biden administration took, irrespective of its attempts now to, as I said, portray itself as an opponent to what it’s doing.

JS: Yeah. And, of course, Ramadan, Maz, has just gotten underway, and it comes at an incredibly dire moment for the Palestinians of Gaza. And today we’re going to be focusing on the health consequences of Israel’s U.S.-backed scorched-earth campaign — what very clearly is an intended starvation campaign. And it’s not just that Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of starvation; there is starvation, and there already are deaths that have been attributed, straight up, to starvation.

And we’re joined now by Dr. Yara Asi. She is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management. She’s also the co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. And she has a new book out called “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health.”

Dr. Yara Asi, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Dr. Yara Asi: Thank you for having me.

JS: Let’s begin with the big-picture situation of what the U.S. is currently doing. On the one hand, the Biden administration is not retreating from its full support in arming Israel, providing political defense for the scorched-earth war against the Palestinians of Gaza. And, on the other hand, you see President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris increasingly trying to talk about the suffering of Palestinians, and Biden has put a lot of political weight on the notion that the U.S. is now directly trying to get so-called aid to the Palestinians of Gaza, initially in the form of airdrops of food and other supplies. And now, this construction of a port off the coast of Gaza that Biden himself said will be “protected,” quote-unquote, by Israeli forces.

Your reaction to this U.S. policy of simultaneously giving American weaponry to Israel and now saying, oh, we’re going to facilitate the direct delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians of Gaza.

YA: So, there is a long scholarship and critique of humanitarianism across contexts, but it is kind of hard to imagine a more potent example of the failures of humanitarianism than what we’ve seen in Gaza, really, since the beginning, but especially four or five months in at this point.

The president, the vice president, we’re really starting to see a shift in their language, simply because I think, at this point, the level, the scope of suffering is completely unavoidable. They can no longer pretend that this is just targeting Hamas, that this is just affecting Hamas, that this is just affecting people who didn’t flee the north.

Israel has made quite clear that they plan on invading the parts of Gaza Strip in Rafah, where people had fled to, people who cannot leave. When they announced this airdrop plan — and I am deeply ingrained in the humanitarian discussion — there was not a humanitarian agency or actor in the world who thought this was a good idea.

The reality is, Gaza has multiple land entry points aside from Rafah, which is what we’re all continuing to talk about. But many across the strip — the Gaza strip — aside from the Mediterranean, is essentially completely enveloped by Israel, with that little tiny bit of Egypt in the south. And so, if humanitarianism, if getting aid in — especially in the North, where it’s most needed — was a concern, the U.S. could push these land openings. The U.S. could force Israel to stop blocking aid, the U.S. could force Israel to do something about these Israeli citizens who are sitting at the Rafah border proudly, bringing their families to block aid trucks.

Airdrops are seen as kind of a— Not even a last resort. Something that, really, in 2024, should not be done, should not be needed. There are videos that showed the pallets dropping into the sea. So now you have this visual of these starving, traumatized, displaced people, including children, running into the Mediterranean Sea.

And then, of course, there was this story, just in early March, about some of these airdrops falling on people in Gaza. People who had survived this so far — including children — who have had airdrops fall on them, and have killed them. Then this was followed up with this announcement of this port. 

It’s interesting that the administration does not bring up why Gaza does not already have a seaport. Gaza is a city on the Mediterranean, in a very traditionally-trafficked route by traders, historically. Gaza had a seaport, Gaza has always wanted a sustainable seaport. Israel has prevented them from building that. Why does Gaza not have an airport? Israel bombed the airport that they built several decades ago and has prevented building of a new one.

So, now, trying to come in and patch these significant gaps of need with what are really, essentially, very performative efforts that, if you really consider the humanitarian need, you would recognize immediately. This port idea is going to take weeks if not months to build. We have people starving today, dying today. It’s going to require U.S. military involvement. And then, as you noted, this idea that, still, even though this is a port built to circumvent Israel blocking aid from coming in the land borders, Israel is still going to be able to inspect and control, and quote-unquote “secure” this port. It’s really farcical.

I think many Western actors who have seen that the stance that they took in October and maintained is no longer sustainable, and they’re trying to scramble at this point to look like they genuinely care about Palestinian life here, but I can’t see that that’s the reality, when we know that there is so much more that can and should be done; number one, starting with a permanent ceasefire. But even just looking at getting aid in, there are much better and more effective ways to do that that already exist, and pressure can and should be applied on Israel to facilitate that, and the fact that it’s not shows that this is not truly a concern for Palestinian life.

MH: Yara, the context which you’re describing, too, is a deliberate strategy by the Israeli government to use starvation, and deprivation of food and other necessities of life, as a weapon of war, which is a very medieval sort of tactic of siege, which the U.S. claims to eschew in the 21st century, yet, we’re seeing it happen in real time.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about — and I’m sure that, as an expert in public health, you have as well, too — are the implications of deprivation of food and water and medicine to a civilian population for a long period of time, including short and long term health implications of that. I’m curious what you’ve been thinking watching this, and the implications it’s having for the Palestinian population that we’re aware of, and what may be happening that we’re not aware of, but is likely, given the circumstances.

YA: Yeah, this is a great question. So, I think it’s really important to start with the pre-October 7th context of the Gaza Strip, which was already a site of blockade, occupation, and significant deprivation, which manifested in multiple outcomes: high poverty, high food insecurity, high rate of waterborne illness, death in children.

So, Gaza was already in a substandard state, what political economist Sara Roy has referred to as de-development. It’s not just under development — they don’t have enough resources, they don’t have enough food — it’s artificially de-developed by the conditions of occupation and blockade.

And so, when you layer that with the multiple forms of attack on life we’ve seen in the past five months, from the siege starting on day one, we started to hear reports of hunger and thirst and medicine deprivation almost immediately. We have reports now of at least two dozen, perhaps, people who have starved to death. Undoubtedly, that number is much higher, just underreported, because many people are displaced, the situation is so fragile.

Right now, we are to the point in the Gaza Strip where a permanent ceasefire, this second, would not stop the majority of suffering for most people. Most people have no homes to go back to, and most hospitals and health facilities, if not destroyed, are heavily damaged. I think the World Health Organization has recently said, less than ten hospitals in the Gaza Strip remain functional and in some capacity. Most of them have been reduced to offering trauma care.

So, let’s say you’re a cancer patient. Let’s say you require dialysis, or even just an asthma inhaler. You’re not getting any of that, none of those people are getting care. The only cancer hospital in the Gaza Strip that could offer chemotherapy services shut down in early November because of lack of fuel. So, if you have cancer — and we see the pleas from people on Twitter, my grandmother, my mother, I need to get out of Gaza to get my chemotherapy — you are getting no treatment whatsoever. Let alone if you have cardiovascular disease, any other number of health ailments.

Even prior to October 7th, many of these conditions required an application for a medical permit issued by Israel to leave the Gaza Strip, to either enter Israel to receive the care that you needed, or even to go to the West Bank or East Jerusalem, which are also Palestinian territories. You’re required [to obtain] an Israeli permit for this.

Israel had consistently delayed and denied permits before. Now, the World Health Organization has said this entire system has been shut down. People are not able to leave for medical reasons consistently, whether it’s because of trauma, or because they have a high-risk pregnancy or, again, insert any other health ailment here. The consequences long-term are immeasurable, especially because, as we have this conversation, this is ongoing.

Just looking at starvation, especially in children, this can cause stunted growth that can never be recovered, even if these children survive this, and are able to get back to normal caloric intake and nutritional needs. Much of the aid that’s distributed in terms of food aid is not nutritionally sound. It’s a lot of flour and rice, it’s not a lot of protein, fresh fruits and vegetables. The scale and scope of this starvation has astounded even scholars of mass starvation and famine.

And so, while we can kind of extrapolate from past settings of siege and starvation as a weapon of war, which has unfortunately been a consistent feature of our humanity, we don’t know what this will look like for all these people in the Gaza Strip, half of whom are children, most of whom have nowhere to return to, and will probably remain in some displaced state for weeks, months, years. We don’t know.

These shelters that they’re in or these tent cities that they’re living in, very underserved, as you can imagine. Very crowded, very prone to spread of infectious disease, low access to clean water, clean food. Sometimes it’s hundreds of people sharing one bathroom. So, these conditions are just absolutely horrific, completely inhumane.

And so, I think what we’re seeing now, as horrific as it is, will pale in comparison to when we’re finally able to look back at this comprehensively, retrospectively. The tales that will come out, I think, will haunt us for a very long time.

JS: Let us not forget that Israel has systematically attacked hospitals, health clinics, has killed many scores of health workers. They’ve abducted some doctors and tortured them to try to get them to confess that their hospital was in fact housing or masking what amounted to a Hamas Pentagon underground. And so many of the charges that Israel has leveled against Gaza’s hospitals have then later been proven false or wild exaggerations.

Of course, many people are familiar with al-Shifa Hospital, but this was replicated to the point where of the three dozen or so actual hospitals that existed in Gaza, almost none of them are fully functional right now, and there’s only a few of them that are able to do any sort of servicing of a large population. 

We’ve had doctors that have been on the ground in Gaza, including American doctors and Canadian doctors, who have described some of the scenes that they’ve witnessed, including a doctor who, some weeks ago, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles times describing how he saw a number of small children that he asserted appeared to have been killed by single bullets fired by a sniper weapon.

And you have a lot of people who are suffering from gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, having been under the rubble, who are being treated without any sort of anesthesia or pain management or painkillers. Not to mention what happens after, if there is a successful surgical procedure.

But I wanted to ask you, also, in this context, about the specific cases of how this war, and Israel siege, and the destruction of the medical infrastructure, is impacting pregnant women. I read a testimony over the weekend from a Gaza resident who said that when the food started to run out, they started using animal feed to make bread. And I also have read not just reports from aid organizations and medical organizations about how this is impacting new mothers who are trying to breastfeed, but also testimony from women who say, I essentially have to make a choice between drinking salt water or poisoned water — dirty water.

There’s a shortage of formula. Women are not able to breastfeed because of the health consequences to their bodies. And then you have the issue of inadequate menstruation products and other things. But this has particularly affected women and, in an extremely acute way, pregnant women, or new mothers and their children.

YA: Yeah, absolutely. And, ironically, we’re having this conversation just a few days after International Women’s Day. And so, the silence on the suffering of Gaza’s women and girls by much of the West has been particularly appalling. 

In an ideal circumstance, a pregnant woman has multiple prenatal visits. She has a skilled medical professional at the birth, she has a clean, private space to give birth, and she has opportunities for postnatal care, for having help with breastfeeding, women need special diets. None of that is possible. We’re hearing from pregnant women giving birth in shelters surrounded by hundreds of people, no physician around, there have been physicians who have been giving c-sections with no anesthesia.

In some ways, this is seen by some as not just an attack on Gaza today, but an attack on Gaza’s future. Gaza is a very young population. Tens of thousands of women were pregnant before this; there was an estimated 180 women giving birth per day at a certain point. Infant mortality has increased, rate of miscarriage and stillbirth has increased. Not just because of the physical stress, trauma, lack of food on the women, but also the shock.

We’ve seen some women who were able to successfully give birth, potentially to a premature baby, but because of the sound of bombings, the baby is unable to even latch to nurse. So, even if the woman is trying, we’re seeing babies that have starved and will starve. All babies that are being born that have been born in this are not receiving vaccinations. It’s really horrific.

This is not due to lack of technology or lack of advancement — Gaza has health professionals that are willing and able — this is purposeful human made policy to ensure that everyone from the most vulnerable pregnant women, infants, and everyone else, is suffering just as much for inexplicable reasons. And this is a place where we should be at least seeing some urgency. Going back to the earlier question, if we’re really concerned here about humanitarianism and helping people survive, this is a no-brainer, supporting pregnant women and their newborn babies and children. And yet, we are seeing them having to experience the same conditions, seeing them having to flee for their lives on foot.

There was the story very early on in this about the premature babies at al-Shifa and other hospitals who were left behind by medical staff with assurances that they would be evacuated and, instead, they were abandoned in the hospital. And when workers returned, they frankly found their decomposing bodies. This was months ago, and this did not spark any sense of urgency or need of intervention.

So, coupled with the health needs of this specific population, the lack of response shows, I think, the depravity of this situation, and the willingness of much of the world to really let Israel do whatever it wants to whoever it wants in the Gaza Strip.

MH: Yara, at the start of the war, there were a series of many greatly disturbing statements made by current/former Israeli government and military officials about what they expected to have happen in Gaza and what they hoped to engineer there. And, very notably, there were some statements specifically saying that the Israeli government should pursue a strategy aimed at spreading disease epidemics in Gaza.

There’s one statement in particular I was thinking of at the start of the war, former Major General Giora Eiland said, “The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring us closer to victory.”  And this statement was actually endorsed by Bezalel Smotrich, who’s currently one part of the Israeli government at a very senior level.

Can you speak a bit about what Israel has done since the war started that would likely generate these disease epidemics, and how that ties into a strategy that they have identified of, “thinning out the population,” potentially, by means short of direct use of violence, and bombs, and shooting, and so forth.

YA: Again, just to set some context, it’s important to note that placing quote-unquote “pressure” on the population has been Israel’s strategy since the beginning of the blockade in 2007. Ensuring deprivation, ensuring a dependency, ensuring that people cannot attain their full physical and mental health and capacity in education, or in work, or in any other sector.

This has been the policy, this whole idea of mowing the grass that we heard in past wars, or calculating the calories. And that’s why I think these statements were such potent evidence in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Because here we have Israeli government ministers — including the national minister, the foreign minister — basically saying, yes, that is the strategy. Make this population suffer. ensure their surrender and, for some of them, ensure that they can never return to this land, so that we can have it and build our settlements on the beach.

And this is why in the genocide case, this destruction of the health system played such a potent role, because the argument was, yes, the bombings, and the snipers, and the tanks, pose one form of threat to life, and threat to forced displacement, etc., but we cannot assume that these secondary consequences — starvation, I think, being most prevalent right now, but also the spread of infectious disease — is not part and parcel of Israel’s approach to induce surrender, to force displacement, to weaken the population, just as much as the other aspects of it.

Alex de Waal, who is a very well known mass starvation and famine expert said in an interview several weeks ago: you can bomb a population by accident, you cannot starve a population by accident. And I would take that further and say, you cannot induce this level of infectious disease spread by accident.

This is epidemiology 101. You have a weakened, malnourished population, sheltered in overcrowded conditions, lack of access to the most basic of medical supplies, health needs, masks, antiseptics, cleaning supplies, little access to bathrooms. Obviously, there’s no trash disposal, so people are just kind of disposing of trash in big piles in the middle of camps, sometimes close to where water is being stored. The likelihood of contamination is, of course, very high. None of this is new information. We have studied this exact phenomenon over and over again.

So, when you force a population into those conditions— Again, reminding your audience that people in Gaza cannot leave right now without paying actors in Egypt at the Egyptian border thousands and, increasingly, tens of thousands of dollars to do so. They are not choosing to stay in these conditions, most of them. Many of them wish to leave. And, while some have stayed in the North because they cannot flee, because they choose not to flee, whatever their reasons may be, forcing people into this tiny little space in the southern part of the Gaza Strip in these conditions, of course we’re going to see an increase in infectious disease. This was predictable on October 7th itself.

Basically, nothing is being done about the infectious disease angle, and the World Health Organization, with the data that it’s been able to collect, surprise, surprise, is seeing significantly increased rates of diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, skin diseases, respiratory infections, flu, COVID. It’s winter time, or it was just winter time when these diseases spread. Diseases that are especially dangerous for young children, like diarrhea. Again, children that are unvaccinated, we saw outbreaks of polio in Syria in very rural, unvaccinated communities. We’re very fearful that we’ll start to see even those kinds of outbreaks among the population in Gaza.

So yes, I mean, this is a recipe for disease outbreaks. We saw some actual soldiers, Israeli soldiers who had been deployed in Gaza, having to be sent back because they themselves had some sort of gastrointestinal infection or something. So, just imagine what it is like in these conditions.

There was a period when everyone I knew from Gaza was reporting coughing and feeling flu-like symptoms, with no ability to be diagnosed, no ability to get any medication, no ability to even rest and hydrate, which is kind of the basic thing you’re supposed to do in these circumstances. It is causing unnecessary 100 percent preventable death and disability. And this is very well known by Israel because it was already partially the case before October 7th. And, again, this is the fifth major round of military campaign in the Gaza Strip, and so, this is no surprise.

And so, I think it does us no service to act surprised that this happens. It’s, really, these bad faith efforts, I think, by many Western leaders, who are suddenly now expressing shock at what health and humanitarians were warning about five months ago, is really just hard to stomach.

JS: Yara, I wanted to ask you about some of the dehumanization narratives that Israel has employed as it seeks to justify the unjustifiable scorched-earth attack against the people of Gaza.

We’ve done a lot of reporting on this at The Intercept. Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has a new film out this week looking at Israel’s targeted campaign of misinformation and disinformation. Just to remind people that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, you had a very swiftly assembled propaganda operation put into place, and various actors from Israeli society were deployed in this effort, primarily people from the private so-called rescue operations that are ultra-orthodox, like Zaka. They offered testimonies to the world about what they claimed to have witnessed as they operated in the kibbutzim and other areas where Hamas and other groups launched their attacks on the morning of October 7th. They promoted the completely false assertion that there were beheaded babies, at times saying there were 40 beheaded babies.

Eli Beer, who is the head of another Orthodox rescue organization claimed that Hamas had placed an infant in an oven, and baked the infant, and that they personally witnessed and took out this child later. This didn’t happen. They claimed that they saw a pregnant woman who had a fetus cut out of her body, and the fetus was stabbed, and then the mother was killed.

No pregnant women have been documented to have died on October 7th, the Israeli government is not validating that a pregnant woman was killed on October 7th. There was a pregnant woman who was an Arab that was shot as she was en route to the hospital. Doctors were unable to save her baby, but she lived. These stories then became part of the official narrative.

And then you had Joe Biden, on multiple occasions, repeating the beheaded baby story, but also claiming he had seen confirmed images of Hamas operatives beheading the babies. The White House had to walk that back, and Biden continued to say it, nonetheless. Anthony Blinken testified before the Senate, told a very gruesome story about Hamas militants coming in and chopping body parts off of a family, and then sitting down at the table and eating their breakfast. This also has been thoroughly debunked.

And, in November, you had this intense campaign being run by the Israeli government with the direct participation of health officials in Israel to allege that Hamas had come in with a premeditated plan to commit and weaponize sexual violence, and to do so in a widespread manner, targeting Jewish women and children on October 7th.

And you had the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights Israel put a report out in November, claiming that there was ample evidence to suggest that there had been widespread rape and sexual violence. And then the Netanyahu government, with assistance from the White House, starts promoting this notion that feminist organizations had been silent in the face of this overwhelming evidence, that there had been widespread sexual violence deployed on October 7th.

You then had The New York Times at the end of December publishing its piece, “Screams Without Words,” that claimed to be providing new details that there was a weaponization of sexual violence from Hamas. And, in recent weeks, a number of independent news outlets, users on social media, have pointed out information about the authors of that New York Times piece, including a filmmaker who had no reporting or investigative reporting experience, someone who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces in an intelligence unit, who was essentially put in as the lead researcher investigating these claims.

And then, all of this culminates with the Israeli government denying access to an independent U.N. investigative body who wanted to go to Israel to investigate these allegations. Israel implied that its members were antisemitic and anti-Israel. And so, then, instead, they got Pramila Patten, who is an envoy of the Secretary General who has no actual investigative mandate, to come in. And then she, some days ago, released a 24-page report, and that report has been promoted in the media as the United Nations has uncovered evidence that there was widespread sexual violence in Israel committed by Hamas and other groups. But, if you actually read the report, which I did, the word evidence is mentioned a handful of times, but exclusively it is mentioned to explain that they weren’t dealing in evidence, they were dealing in information. And that, in fact, they were relying almost entirely on information provided to this U.N. group by the Israeli government itself.

Within this report, the U.N. looked at some of the cases that have received widespread attention and said that they didn’t find grounds to be able to declare that these were valid assertions. And no one is denying that there should be, there should be a very thorough investigation. And I know, as a former war reporter, a lot of sexual violence takes place in war, I wouldn’t be shocked if it did. But these are serious charges, particularly if you’re saying it was a premeditated program.

But my read of it — and I’m following this very closely — is that the overwhelming majority of the so-called evidence that is being presented is coming from nonscientific experts, people with no forensic or relevant medical credentials, people who are not legally qualified to determine rape. And, most importantly, people who have repeatedly promoted assertions about atrocities that later were proven to be false.

Your thoughts on this whole tapestry of this campaign, that is a very deliberate one, that Israel has now found a way to get the United Nations to launder — or at least allow it to be vague enough — that media outlets and lazy individuals online can now declare, a-ha! The U.N. has come in and said it, everyone who questioned this is a rape denier.

YA: There is a lot there, so let me try to start at this core question of dehumanization of Palestinians and what purpose does that serve, right? 

So, if you’re Israel, and your claim is, “we don’t kill all of them, we only kill terrorists, it just so happens that almost all of them are terrorists,” then you can justify a lot, and you can get the world on your side for a very long time.

Again, looking prior to October 7th, this has been the playbook. Palestinians are inherently dangerous, whether they’re a child or an elderly person. They are all deserving of this collective punishment, this over-securitization, [the] West Bank checkpoints, this blockade of a full civilian territory. All of these inhumane practices that agencies like the U.N. have been tracking, and arguing about, and, increasingly, the conversation has come to this question of, well, what is the purpose of this for Israel? And, for many, the answer is: they want Palestinians off the land, and they want the land.

Now, we have seen this take many different forms over the past century. And I think this kind of goes to this question of who is worthy of speaking and being believed, and who is questioned, and who is not trusted to narrate their own lived experience.

You mentioned Joe Biden earlier and, very early on, one of the first indications aside from the full-throated support that he was going to go fully along with this was when he questioned the Palestinian death toll, because it had been captured by the Palestinian ministry of health. And, of course, they can’t be trusted, right?

However, all of these various Israeli actors, good faith is the assumption, right? You start with good faith, and then maybe after a while of investigation, we can say, well, there are questions. Oh, we can walk back statements. They even walked back or tried to quell the death toll thing. But once something is said and it’s out there, especially by the president, the secretary of state, somebody like this, you can’t put that back in a box. So, this recent U.N. statement, the caveats were, just to put it mildly, were so remarkable, that it was really shocking that it was released in this form. 

Now, I completely agree with you. Let’s do a full investigation of all parties, right? Justice must be served. But for this U.N. report, with only kind of hearsay evidence, to suddenly be the foundational report for what happened on October 7th at the same time that dozens, if not hundreds, of U.N. reports tracking Israeli apartheid, referencing Israeli settler colonial aspirations, tracking Israel’s stealing of Palestinian water, it’s rationing Palestinian electricity; I mean, I could spend the rest of this time just referencing violations that the U.N. and other actors have documented.

JS: Sexual assault against Palestinian women, including prisoners.

YA: Yes, sexual assault against Palestinian women and prisoners. And, in one case of a child, this was a case that was referred to Defense for Children International Palestine. They documented the testimony of this child. And none of that bore anything, any fruit. If you brought it up to any official, it was, you know, we don’t want to presuppose anything that will come in the way of a two-state solution. And we really think unilateral moves and overtly criticizing Israel is not helpful.

We’re constantly hearing that that’s not helpful, but the reports that indict, that accuse, that confirm this narrative that Palestinians are dangerous, and that is why it’s OK to do these things to them. Even the children, because they’re children now, but they’re going to grow up to be adult Palestinians, and they’re dangerous. So, you know, do the math.

It’s so disheartening now. As a Palestinian, this kind of dehumanization, it’s baked into your existence, to your experience. But to see it be leveraged in this way, in what the ICJ has called, at this point, a plausible genocide, which has required South Africa to just last week go back to the ICJ and say, those provisional measures you asked Israel to do, they’re not doing any of them. In fact, they’re doing less than you ask them to do, things are exponentially worse. We require immediate intervention. I don’t even remember that really being significantly covered in Western media, while this, again, this U.N. report that you referenced was kind of seen as, we closed the book on this is what happened.

So, to me, this is about narrative, and who can be trusted, and who is taken in good faith. Why is it always that what Israel does is credible and in good faith? And yes, they make mistakes, but they are a democracy and they’re worth defending. And yet, any accusation against Palestinians is seen as, well, yes, that’s what they do, that’s how they act. Of course, that child that was killed in the street had a knife. Of course, this prisoner who was killed in his jail cell was killed for purposeful reasons. Of course, this Palestinian American journalist who was reporting from a refugee camp was killed in the crossfire. Initially, if we remember, by Palestinian militants. That was the story. Weeks later, that story unraveled, and then the IDF was like, well, actually, it was us, but we didn’t mean to.

JS: You’re referring to Shireen Abu Akleh, who is a dual Palestinian and U.S. citizen, and the Biden administration has actively tried to thwart an FBI investigation to determine who killed her. And Al Jazeera and others have documented quite clearly that it was almost certainly an Israeli sniper that killed her.

YA: That’s right, yes. But the initial story and what ran for a long time was that she was caught in the crossfire between Palestinian militants. Which, from the get-go, made no sense.

So, every time there is a situation where Israel is accused of wrongdoing, they are permitted to investigate themselves, and they are permitted to find themselves not guilty of anything. They have, consistently, for decades, disallowed international investigators, U.N. investigators, from entering the Gaza Strip, from entering the West Bank to conduct independent investigations.

I could sit here and just list countless times when there was an incident, Israel’s initial narrative was one way, and then a new— Even sometimes a New York Times investigation, or a Washington Post investigation, or CNN forensic investigations have shown that Israel’s narrative was incorrect. But, by then, the narrative is out there. So, even when the investigation comes later, it’s never as loud, it’s never as loudly received. This was, I think, just the most kind of potent and largest example of this.

And, again, with the caveat that full investigations on what happened on October 7th need to be made of all parties. But to use these accusations to justify what appears to be the attempt of mass extermination of a civilian population, with no pushback, no questioning, even if you ask for evidence or ask questions, you are called antisemitic, you are called a Hamas supporter, any of these things. It’s something we don’t see in any other context in the world.

MH: Yara, just briefly to your point about selective attention and outrage: On February 19th — I know me and you have discussed this in the past — but on February 19th, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights issued a press release which was very, very notable for its claims that there’d been significant sexual assaults against Palestinian women in detention, including two reported rapes of Palestinian women, threats of rapes, other humiliation in the form degradation, and reported uploading of photos of Palestinian women in degrading circumstances by the Israeli military online. I’ve seen very little to no follow-up from powerful institutions with the ability to press the U.N. on these accusations, attention, or interest, and so forth. The stark contrast could not be more glaring, and it really highlights your point about this selectivity and moral selectivity when we look through the subject.

I wanted to ask you one last question, just to conclude. Obviously, you write as a public health expert, and as an expert on the impact of conflict on civilian populations. But, as you mentioned, you’re also a Palestinian American. And, obviously, you’re invested in the subject. Your tax dollars, like mine and Jeremy’s, also contribute to what’s happening in Gaza today.

I was curious of your own view of the Biden administration, especially heading into election year as a Palestinian American, and how its conduct, its rhetoric, and its policies on the subject have impacted your view of this administration, and the Democratic Party and what it stands for, in this context.

YA: For someone who was elected as this “empathizer-in-chief,” quote-unquote, the many ways in which this administration has demonstrated how cheap Palestinian life is, is really something I’m still processing.

As a Palestinian growing up in the U.S. you recognize very quickly that the U.S. is and probably always will be on Israel’s side, right? We have never had this kind of benefit of having Western power in our corner. We’ve always had grassroots power, we’ve always had support of other liberation movements and other oppressed peoples; they have always got it.

But, in terms of the U.S. government — which, let’s remember, Israel is the number one recipient of U.S. foreign aid, by far — you kind of find, at least I did, kind of find a way to make peace with that. In that, yes, Israel is a bad actor in many ways, and the U.S. is supporting this. And I will use my perch here to speak out against this, and I will find ways to push policy, push legislation, etc.

I think this past half-year has shaken many of us. We can literally post pictures of our starving babies, of their decomposing bodies. I mean, the number of horrific stories that have come out of this, just individual stories.  Set aside the aggregate numbers, which are terrible.

Just yesterday I read about this deaf man in Gaza who had been told by Israeli soldiers to do something. He’s deaf, he didn’t hear them, he was besieged in his home. They shot him and killed him. I was just, like, what were his last moments like? Fear. This was an elderly man. He was perhaps even displaced in ’48, who knows? He has lived this lifetime of dispossession and trauma. And to have nothing. Nothing for that, you know? Nothing.

When Palestinian suffering is discussed, the suffering is unbearable. It’s very abstract. It’s just suffering, broadly speaking, you know? And then, I remember when the hundred-day statement was released by the White House, and it completely focused just on the plight of the hostages, the Israeli hostages. Did not mention how many Palestinians had been killed, it did not mention the thousands of Palestinians illegally detained by Israel. It did not mention the settler pogroms that have occurred in the West Bank, that the West Bank right now is essentially closed. We’re not even talking about the West Bank, because what’s happening in Gaza is so bad.

And what does Biden do about the West Bank? He puts some sanctions on a few individual settlers. Let alone the fact that they are being cheered on very loudly by the national security minister of the country himself.

In 2021, when Biden was president and Israel started bombing Gaza, reporting indicated that it ended because Biden had kind of told Netanyahu that we’re out of runway here, this has to stop. And it did. So that leads me to think, if this is still happening, this is with the implicit and explicit approval and support of the United States, and we are bending over backwards to justify this.

When you see the State Department’s spokespeople, or the White House press secretary, or John Kirby, or any of these people speaking, the verbal gymnastics that they go through to avoid overtly empathizing with Palestinians, or acknowledging their suffering, or overtly criticizing Israel and saying, yes, this was wrong. It’s always, we’re talking to our Israeli partners, and we’ll get back to you on that, or we’re conducting investigations. It’s never just, we saw this video, it was wrong.

We’ve seen videos of Israeli soldiers looting Palestinian homes, you know? Posing with children’s toys and women’s lingerie. There was one of a man — an Israeli soldier in his full garb — pretending to take a nap in a child’s playpen. Disgusting, vile behavior. We’re all seeing this on social media. And if I’m seeing it, I’m pretty sure the United States government is able to see it. I think that’s how it works.

The fact that none of this is worthy of comment, none of this is worthy of attention. None of this is worthy of saying, drop everything, this has to stop. Even if you support Israel, even if, as Biden himself has said, is a Zionist. At what point do you say this has to stop?

I think many Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and our allies, because I think one thing the Biden administration has done wrong is to pretend that this is just an issue that matters to Palestinians or Muslims. That they’re doing just outreach to Palestinian Americans or Muslim groups, or whatever. And I have heard from many people who have no skin in this game, who are absolutely disgusted and appalled that they live in a country where there is a famine happening, imposed by a U.S. ally that receives billions of dollars in military aid, unprecedented diplomatic cover at the U.N. Security Council and any other number of international bodies. And the best that we’re told is, we don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

I don’t think that people are accepting this narrative anymore. And I think it’s causing many people to question, not just Joe Biden and his administration, because you can go back into his history. He has been a long-term supporter of Israel, and has seemed to demonstrate some pretty apparent anti-Arab racism.

But if this country cannot intervene, and the Democratic Party is just a smattering of voices just calling for a ceasefire — we’re not having serious conversations about stopping military aid — I’m feeling very disillusioned in general. Very disappointed with even the so-called progressives in this country, very few of whom, I think, have spoken very loudly about this. I think these are positions that will age very, very poorly, and I think that the Biden administration ignores these pleas for intervention at their own peril. 

And we saw this with the huge uncommitted vote in many states over the past couple of weeks. We’ve heard indications that they are assuming that, by election time, especially if Trump is on the ballot, people will forget. I have seen and heard things I will never forget, can never forget. And it has really— I will never see the United States, the West, any of it, in the same way again. And I know I’m not the only one.

JS: Yara, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for all of your work. We encourage people also to pick up your book and read it. It couldn’t be unfortunately more relevant than this moment. Thank you very much for being with us here on Intercepted.

YA: Thank you so much for having me.

MH: That’s Dr. Yara Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health.” And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

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

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and Deconstructed. Also leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

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

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Israel’s Use of Mass Starvation as a Weapon of War appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. State Department this week congratulated Pakistan’s new prime minister on assuming power, following elections that were marred by widespread allegations of rigging, voter suppression, and violence targeting supporters of imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan. On a special crossover episode of Intercepted and Deconstructed, hosts Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim discuss the aftermath of Pakistan’s February 8 election, as well as growing calls inside the U.S. to hold Pakistan’s military-backed regime accountable for its ongoing suppression of democracy. Hussain and Grim also discuss U.S. interests in the region, and the historical ties between the Pakistani military and its supporters in Washington.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

This week, the United States announced its recognition of a new government in Pakistan, led by a coalition of parties opposed to former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The recognition comes on the heels of a brazenly fraudulent election this February that saw massive voter suppression, rigging, and outright violence targeted at Khan supporters.

Despite that crackdown, and despite Khan’s ongoing imprisonment on politically motivated corruption charges, his party still garnered more votes than any other party. The result of this election has further bled away legitimacy from the military-run Pakistani regime and its civilian clients who are now relying on Washington to give them the legitimacy that they seem to lack domestically.

Joining to discuss today is my colleague Ryan Grim, host of Deconstructed, who’s also reported on Pakistan with me over the past year. Ryan, welcome to the show. 

Ryan Grim: Thanks for having me here.

MH: So, Ryan, you’ve been a staple at State Department briefings in D.C. talking about Pakistan, both before the election and since then. Can you give us a little glimpse of what the U.S. official response has been to this election, which has struck many people around the world and Pakistan beyond as maybe one of the most rigged and the most unfair and unfree elections Pakistan’s had, certainly in recent history?

RG: Not just Pakistan, it’s probably — at least over the last, say, 30 years or so — the most obviously rigged election in a country where you expect some basic level of democracy.

Now, obviously, Pakistan has had a flawed and challenging time. The democracy movement there has serious adversaries internally in Pakistan. What I mean by the fact that you might expect it to be democratic is, say, to compare it to something like Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad. Like, when Saddam Hussein wins, like, 98 percent or 100 percent to zero, nobody says, “I’m so shocked. Because, you know, Saddam Hussein has such strong democratic bona fides that I can’t believe he would undermine democracy like that.”

But in a country where you have contested elections, and you have an election commission that is supposed to be taken seriously, there probably hasn’t been — that I can think of, I’m curious for your take — an election that was so flagrantly and almost comically rigged. I don’t want to say that it’s funny, because this is a country of more than 200 million people, [and] we’re watching their democracy get flushed down the drain, but the way they’re doing it is just, wow.

I’ll give you one example that I just saw circulating today. On one of the forms that the election commission just uploaded, on the original form, the PTI candidate, or the independent candidate — he’s independent because he wasn’t allowed to run as PTI — got 584 votes in this one precinct. When they uploaded the form, you can see that somebody took a pen and drew a circle around the five, and turned the five into a zero, kind of with a little slash through it, which then leaves you with the number “084.” But then, when you look at it, you’re like, that looks like a kid just turned a five into a zero. And they did that kind of all across the country.

Can you think of a comparison in another country that is expected to have reasonably transparent elections that flipped it this flagrantly?

MH: No. It’s a really, really good point you’re making. It’s because Pakistan has had very, very serious challenges with military rule, and dictatorship, and threats to democracy for pretty much its entire history. But it’s always had nascent democratic institutions, it’s never been a one-man state run by Bashar Assad or Saddam Hussein, something like that.

So, people have expectation that they can say a lot of things that they want to say. And then, if they vote, maybe there will be some manipulation, but it’ll still be an election which is somehow worth voting in, you could say. Not like a 95 percent or 99 percent for one guy type of situation. But I think it’s because Pakistan is a very— First of all, it inherited democratic institutions at the outset, it had the setup ready for democracy, and people tend to take that seriously.

But also, it’s a very big country. It’s 250 million people by some estimates, definitely well over 200 million. It’s very hard to control that number of people in a way you would a smaller dictatorship of 20 million people, the way they say Syria was at some point.

So, it’s a very unruly society in a way, in a good way, in the sense that it had a very boisterous press, a very boisterous civil society. And I think this is the first time that I certainly have ever seen — and I’m talking to people there pretty regularly who I’ve known for years — seen the level of suppression and fear, and that type of fear, that type of military-controlled fear of a whole society that’s never existed before.

And this election was really fascinating, because I think that they did so much before the vote to suppress the PTI, including, as you alluded to, banning the party from actually contesting, and forcing the candidates to contest as independents, putting Imran Khan in jail, trying to humiliate him in various different ways and ruin his reputation. Despite all that rigging and all that preelection sort of manipulation, which was far in excess of what we’ve [ever] seen in Pakistan ever, the PTI still did really well.

PTI affiliate candidates actually trounced the opposition, and I think this is significant of something which has been kind of building up in Pakistan for a long time. It’s that, if you follow the politics of the country, the military is always the hand behind the throne, you could say, but in the front, on the throne, there seems to be this rotating set of families, like the Bhutto family or the Sharif family. And it’s almost become monarchical in a way, that these few groups of families think that the country belongs to them, and they extract huge financial benefits from the situation and, meanwhile, the military keeps its own prerogatives, the military controls so much of the economy. And this situation, which has become so intolerable, is reaching the point where it could only really be enforced by a dictatorship now.

And so, you’re seeing Pakistan, which — as you said very well — it’s had some reasonable democratic institutions despite all the suppression, [but] it’s moving towards more of a situation where you’re going to have to govern it like Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad did their countries. And I think that it would be very, very dangerous and very, very violent, because how can you control that many people using that much violence without kind of cracking society up? So I think that that’s coming.

And, to your point, I can’t think of a single country that has had elections which were rigged in such a strange and bizarre way, with the expectation that it should have been real elections. Because I saw the videos and some of the footage that you mentioned. I also saw videos of people running up to polling stations and dumping all the votes in the back of a truck — almost comical, cartoonish levels of manipulation.

And it also struck me that the Pakistani military has been caught kind of flatfooted by the digital age, which is really unacceptable in 2024, because I think that this type of rigging, if everyone has a cell phone camera in Pakistan now, or most people do, or more than people do [than ever], you’re getting caught if you do that, and you’ll get caught by that type of brazen sort of behavior. And, also, our reporting has kind of caught them flatfooted, too because, as much as they’ve tried to stop Pakistan’s traditional media, they cannot silence the entire planet and the entire planet’s media, which is the situation they’re facing at the moment. So, that’s really interesting.

And I wanted to ask you, as you kind of mentioned it a little bit, too, but you’re at the State Department on a regular basis, and Pakistan comes up quite a bit, and you’re bringing it up, and other people are bringing it up. What is the role of the U.S. in the situation, and why is the U.S. opinion of what’s going on in Pakistan so important to the situation itself, but also to elites in Pakistan, evidently?

RG: I feel like some of it is almost psychological, that there’s some kind of postcolonial relationship that the Pakistani elite — the Pakistani military in particular — has with the United States, where there’s a real hunger for approval. Because the amount of money flowing from the U.S. to Pakistan is not comparable, say, to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or some of our other nations where you might expect to get that kind of reaction. So, some of it just feels almost like a part of the postcolonial culture.

On the other hand, Pakistan is, to a significant degree, an aid state that is running an extraction-based economy, which means that it constantly needs fresh infusions of global capital. China is a major investor as well. The IMF plays a huge role in their politics. The IMF played a big role in the last government, the ouster of Imran Khan and the upcoming reassessment of the next tranche of the IMF loan is going to play a huge role in Pakistani politics. And hanging over that is the specter of the United States, because we can pull a lot of strings over at the IMF.

Leading up to the election, the response that you would get from the State Department was effectively a green light for rampant electoral fraud and rigging. And it doesn’t sound like it, you have to be able to parse the language that you’re hearing, but that’s what diplomats are very good at.

So, what you would often hear from the State Department whenever I or other reporters there would confront them with the most recent allegation of massive rigging. Things like not letting candidates file for office, or a candidate comes to file to run for office and they abduct him at the office. Or he files for office, goes home, and his home is raided, and he’s thrown in prison. We’re not talking like tiki tac electoral violations here, we’re talking about major suppression or, like, literally banning the party from running, things like that.

You would hear from the podium: we encourage Pakistan, like all countries, to hold free and fair elections, and we look forward to those elections being free and fair. You know, just very generic statements. And you might say, OK, well, that’s wonderful. You know, the United States standing up for free and fair elections. Good for them.

Anytime a country that was in a more adversarial posture, vis a vis the United States, had any type of irregularities going on, you could see what the United States is capable of, and that’s anywhere from sanctions to much harsher language. Belarus had an election recently. Practically before the polls were closed, State Department was out with a statement that says, we condemn the sham elections in Belarus.

Iran, when it cut the internet during some protests, the State Department put out a livid statement talking about the way that it was suppressing, it was suppressing people’s freedom of assembly and ability to communicate with each other. When Pakistan shut down the internet during its own election, you get a very muted statement.

Then, in response to the obvious shenanigans that were going on in Pakistan, you’d start to get words from the State Department like, they’re concerned about the irregularities. But you compare that to what you were hearing from a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill, they were saying there should be no recognition of a future government that comes out of this sham process without an independent election investigation.

The State Department never went that far, and my understanding is that that was read by the Pakistani government as essentially a green light. That, OK, the United States is expressing some embarrassment, basically, about how ridiculously the Pakistani establishment has rigged this election, but they’re not going to stand in our way from forming an anti-Imran Khan coalition, even though it was quite clear on election day that Imran Khan’s coalition, his party, won an overwhelming majority of the votes.

MH: You know, it’s fascinating that there has been such a brazen — as you kind of described it — steal, and the U.S. has kind of been a handmaiden to that. Very quiet before the election, and certainly quiet and accepting of the outcome since then.

It’s very interesting, the statement — I think you pointed out on Twitter or X — the statement that the U.S. put out about Shehbaz Sharif, the new Prime Minister, accepting powers, that we congratulated him on assuming power. They didn’t actually say, per se, that it congratulated him on winning the election.

RG: Yeah, I have it here. You want to hear it?

MH: Yeah.

RG: So, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad posts— And all of everything in diplomacy matters. Like, does it come from Blinken? Does it come from Biden? Does it come from somebody lower in the State Department? Does it come from the Ambassador’s personal Twitter account? Does it come from a different account? Everything is parsed.

And so, this one comes from the Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, so it’s kind of the lowest level of a Twitter account that you could choose to send out a message. They say “DB,” which is the U.S. Ambassador of Pakistan, that’s all, he signs it at the end, DB. He says, “I extended my congratulations to Shehbaz Sharif today on his assumption of office as Prime Minister of Pakistan. I look forward to working closely with the government and people of Pakistan on our mutual interests.”

To me, you can read two things from that. One is that they really felt the pressure from the Pakistani diaspora here in the United States, and from the global outcry, not to full-throatedly [sic] endorse this brazen theft. But, also, that there was really nothing that the diaspora or any other entity could do that was going to stand in the way of the U.S. moving forward and recognizing this coalition, which is the one that it wanted to take power, but they did it in the weakest way possible: I congratulate him on his assumption of office.

And Matt Miller over at the State Department described it as “a selection,” which is kind of funny, because you often hear radicals in the street chanting, “Selection, not election! Selection, not election!” And then you’ve got the State Department spokesperson referring to the election as a selection, yet still recognizing it. So, it has the power.

Now, what power it has in this fractured country remains to be seen. It might be a little bit of a poison chalice that they’ve taken to their lips here.

MH: It’s so funny, because I’m sure that most Americans are not even aware that this happened, or that the U.S. government has played this role in Pakistan. But I’m talking to people in Pakistan these days, and they’re very upset. They’re very upset of, obviously, the double standards and hypocrisy. And also, despite all the missteps of the U.S., people still sort of look to it as the only kind of power outside which can validate or give their approval to a democratic outcome, and it’s so clear that there was not any democratic outcome or democratic process in Pakistan at all.

And yet, for the U.S. to weigh in, and to give this sort of thumbs up to it — however weak and however sort of caveated it was — it was very alienating to people. It’s kind of a consistent theme of foreign policy, in my view, that, Pakistanis are noticing very much that the U.S. took this position, but Americans are not aware of it, because they have other things going on and they’re not focused on X/Y/Z issue in South Asia.

But those negative sentiments in Pakistan are going to exist now towards the U.S., because of the actions of some State Department officials who deemed it in their interest to recognize an election that they knew was not real.

I was kind of curious, from your perspective: Obviously, Pakistan was very important to the U.S. during the Cold War, during the war on terror, and the U.S. war in Afghanistan, it played a role that the U.S. needed to rely upon. But now, today, I don’t really see a lot of strategic utility of Pakistan to the U.S. And the military in Pakistan has always looked to find ways to make itself relevant to the U.S., and it’s really struggling. It has a story we did a few months ago about the arms sales to Ukraine, but it’s kind of more peripheral activity.

I’m kind of curious, from your perspective, in your view, why do you think the State Department may have felt the need to weigh in and give this sort of reward to something that I think they knew was not a real election? Was there a strategic benefit, or was it more like an inertia, that they just don’t care about Pakistan enough, so they’ll recognize whoever’s in power there? Or is there more like a settling scores with Imran Khan situation that may be an undercurrent of it?

RG: I mean, I think you can never underestimate the power of score-settling and inertia combined. I think that might end up having a significant amount of explanatory power. But, beyond that, it is a really interesting question, because the U.S. is going to take heat. It’s expending its most valuable capital, which is its ability to talk about freedom and democracy, by championing this election. Like, it’s really embarrassing for the U.S. to allow this to happen, because now, anytime they talk about the sham election in Belarus, or the sham election in Iran, or the sham election in Bolivia, or Venezuela, or wherever they want to go next, and complain about democracy not being respected by X/Y/Z adversary, they can easily point back and say, look at this clown show that you supported and operated in Pakistan. Like, don’t tell us that you care about democracy.

So, they’re willing to take a really powerful hit to stand behind this absurdity, which then raises your very good question of why. Like, there must be some compelling U.S. interest that they see on the other side of this debacle that makes it worth taking this hit. And what is that?

We have, like you said, the inertia and the score-settling against Khan. But, to me, it indicates that there is more going on when it comes to U.S. jockeying vis a vis India and China than we even understand. That’s my guess, is that there must be some play that the U.S. sees here in Pakistan that relates both to its interest in kind of buttressing India, and raising India up as a bulwark against China, and also some concern that China and Pakistan — which have deep historical ties and financial ties together — that if they get too close together, that somehow that undermines whatever strategic interests the U.S. has in that region.

It’s hard for me to get my head around exactly what it is that they think they’re doing. They may not know entirely what it is. But that’s my guess, that it has something to do with their interest in basically cozying up to this rising power of India, and guiding it in a way that allows it to be some type of a tool that it can wield against China in its endless competition, in this newish, coldish war with China.

What’s your guess? Because there has to be some compelling interest on the other side of this that would justify or make it worth it for the U.S. to torch so much of its Democratic credibility.

MH: I think a consistent theme throughout Pakistani history or Pakistani-U.S. relations is that the U.S. government seems to prefer dealing with the Pakistani military, and I think you see it in other countries too. They historically prefer dealing with the Turkish military. It’s a lot easier to have a single point of contact, as opposed to dealing with a big society which is messy, has different opinions, and different factions. It’s just a lot more convenient.

And, from a military-to-military perspective, the Pakistani military is a relatively functional institution. It has a capacity to produce ordinances and do things that are useful to the U.S. There is a strategic benefit that they can draw upon.

Pakistan is a very poor country, but it has the sixth-largest military in the world. Something that very, very high-ranking, in terms of disproportionate spending on military matters, which is not great for Pakistanis, and it’s resulted in a very, you could say, underfed society, in terms of institutions, and economic growth, and so forth.

But the military is very, very powerful, the intelligence services are very powerful. They’re currently undergoing a very extensive military modernization at the moment, so the money that’s not being invested in sanitation, healthcare, and basic education, things like that, it’s really going into making the military such that it can stay on par with its regional rivals, and see itself as needing to stay on par with the top level of military modernization in the world.

So, from a U.S. perspective, I can see why they like dealing with the Pakistani military, because it’s just very convenient for them. And they don’t want to have to deal with Pakistani society, because Pakistani society will produce someone like Imran Khan, who was put in a very famous cipher — as we wrote about — aggressively neutral about things that the U.S. cares about a lot, like the Ukraine war, which most Pakistanis just don’t want to be involved in, because they don’t see it has anything to do with them.

So, when you have a situation where you can have a country where you have to deal with occasional pushback and occasional resistance to U.S. prerogatives, or you can have a very dependent, very strategically overgrown sort of institution that represents the whole country that is willing to do what you say, and willing to take a more of a junior role, and defer to U.S. prerogatives, I think that the U.S. will choose that.

And I think it’s sort of a problem with many postcolonial countries because, in a lot of colonies — and especially in the British- and French-colonized world — the military was the most built up institution, because that’s what they needed to rule. And then, when the colonizers left, the military was still there, and all these other parliaments and so forth were much, much more nascent and underdeveloped in comparison. So, that’s why you had military domination.

And then, military domination of local politics ended up being an extension of neocolonial control, because, well, we have these close military relationships; a lot of Pakistani military officers traditionally got trained in Britain or the U.S., so they developed these very deep, lasting relations, they developed a culture which was familiar to many U.S. elites, and they kept that relationship going.

And then, if you look at some countries which broke the mold. And it was very critical of things happening in Turkey but the one accomplishment of the Turkish government is breaking the control of the military over society. It’s civilian-controlled now. Pakistan has never reached that level.

And I think that, from an American perspective, while for Pakistan it’s not great, for them it’s kind of good, because if you want to buy arms from Ukraine, Imran Khan won’t do it, the military will, and it is doing that.

RG: I think it points to this interesting phenomenon in U.S. diplomacy, which is laziness or arrogance. Last week on Deconstructed, we talked with the author of a new book on Lumumba and postcolonial Congo. In that situation, you had some interesting overlaps, in the sense that Lumumba, you could describe him as aggressively neutral, just the same way that the State Department described Imran Khan.

With a little bit of diplomatic elbow grease, the United States easily could have worked with Lumumba. Lumumba had an American and a Western orientation that was kind of fundamental to him. We even talked about how he tried to sell all of the Congo’s minerals to an American con artist for, like, $2 billion. He really was not the Soviet sleeper cell that the U.S. pretended he was.

On the one hand, you can say, well, the United States is naïve. They’re paranoid and they just saw communists everywhere, and they hear Imran Khan give an angry speech, and their paranoia makes them think that Imran Khan is a stooge of Putin, or a stooge of China, just like Lumumba was a stooge of the Soviets.

But, to your broader point, they’d rather have somebody that is a slam dunk than somebody who has some neutrality to him that would force them to actually negotiate, country to country, in order to create positive relations between those two countries. It’s much simpler from a diplomatic perspective to just say, you know what? Not so sure about Lumumba. He might be oriented towards us, he might be oriented toward the Soviets, or he might actually just be a Congolese nationalist. Let’s just get somebody in who we don’t even have to wonder about. 

And I think the Pakistani military is somebody that the U.S. just doesn’t have to worry about. It’s just easier to deal with from their perspective.

MH: Yeah, I totally agree.

In the U.S., despite the State Department’s recognition of the Pakistani government, there has been some buildup of pressure over this subject. I think a lot of it driven by the Pakistani diaspora, which is concentrated in certain areas, and sometimes is quite economically or politically influential locally, so you see some members of Congress sort of bringing up pressure on the U.S. government to question more of what happened during the election, and also the circumstances of the entire removal of Imran Khan, what happened after, and potential U.S. involvement.

Can you talk a bit about what you’re seeing and hearing? I know we had a story recently about this, too, talking about a recent letter from Congress about the subject. What are we seeing in terms of internal domestic political division in the U.S., which may, at some point, bring pressure to bear on the Pakistani government to come clean about what’s going on there at the moment?

RG: Right. And the Pakistani diaspora has been incredibly successful. Heavily concentrated in the medical field and, particularly within that, heavily concentrated in the world of physicians and doctors. Well-educated, well-organized block here. But not huge.

I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, I don’t know if you know what it is, but less than 2 million, maybe even less than a million Pakistanis in the country but, like you said, concentrated in areas like Houston, Northern Virginia, Washington State.

And so, for instance, Abigail Spanberger, CIA analyst-turned-member of Congress who is now running for governor of Virginia has been outspoken in support of Pakistani democracy, and that’s, I think, particularly because of local pressure, local organized pressure from people that she would like to see support her as she moves up the ranks in Virginia.

Greg Casar, a Squad-adjacent or Squad member who represents Austin and San Antonio has been quite outspoken as well. There’s a significant Pakistani population in Texas. Casar was one of the leaders of this letter that circulated that said that the State Department ought not to recognize any Pakistani coalition government until there’s been an independent investigation.

That only wound up with fewer than three dozen members of Congress signing it. That is at once a significant number that can’t be ignored, while also being far fewer than you would need on letters like that for the State Department to be genuinely intimidated by it.

MH: You know, Ryan, for the past year, me and you have been very much in the weeds about Pakistan, more than we ever probably expected to be, based on what’s going on there at the moment.

But it’s interesting; for our listeners who come into it more freshly, last year, me and Ryan reported on a secret document leaked from somewhere in the Pakistani military intelligence complex showing the way that the U.S. had put pressure on its Pakistani counterparts to remove then-Prime Minister Imran Khan from power. It was known as “the cipher,” and Imran Khan himself, before he went to jail, had been talking about it quite regularly.

And, subsequent to that, we did some stories about post-Imran Khan U.S.-Pakistan relations, in terms of the way that the military had switched from Khan’s status of neutrality in the war in Ukraine to becoming an active supplier of arms brokered by the U.S. to the Ukrainian military. And also, some other irregularities, and some other problems with the current charges that Khan is facing, which could have very serious consequences for him at the moment, some serious problems in terms of how those charges are actually substantiated and so forth.

We’ve had these stories, and I think that they’re indicative of very severe divisions inside Pakistan, and great unhappiness with what’s going on in there at the moment from all sectors of society. Not just the general public, but also institutionally and so forth as well. Because, obviously, Pakistan under its current leadership is trying to replicate itself in some sense as a dictatorship, because the once very vocal Pakistani press has been more or less silenced. That’s why this reporting is now being done by people like me and you in the U.S. who have more latitude, and we’re kind of free from that sort of suppression.

But also, the whole pretense of democracy is going out the window, in the sense that we have this parody of democracy instead, far more so a parody than it was maybe any time in history. And it’s interesting because it’s very scary, in a way, because, if you put so much pressure on society on all fronts, it can really kind of blow. And now we’re seeing Pakistan evolve in that direction.

I’m curious, what do you think it’s indicative of, in terms of, if the U.S. continues cosigning it, how it may blow back on America based on past experiences in other countries? But also what the threats and dangers are of Pakistan heading to a situation where it could become very unstable. It’s a nuclear armed country of well over 200 million people.

If you were telling U.S. policymakers why it’s not a good idea to keep cosigning this, what would you indicate to them as some of the major dangers?

RG: I might say, I really hope you know what you’re doing here, because you’re playing an extraordinarily dangerous game with people’s hopes and dreams here.

If you go back to Imran Khan’s removal back in early 2022, that’s followed by extraordinary levels of repression against his movement. Effectively, the complete and total disbandment of his party, the jailing of most of the leaders of the party and. And, in a typical scenario, an autocrat or powerful authorities may expect that that had solved the problem. Levels of repression that extreme in other historical contexts and other countries have been able to effectively smother whatever movement there was that that it represented. That it failed so spectacularly is something that I think the United States needs to take into consideration.

We described the levels of election rigging that went into this before February 8th. The authorities clearly believed that they had done enough to basically destroy the support for Imran Khan and the PTI. Otherwise, they would not have allowed the election commission and the precincts to begin reporting results on election day, and they wouldn’t have allowed the broadcasters to broadcast those results to the entire country. And we know that because, once it was clear that it had been a landslide victory for Imran Khan’s supporters, they barred the election commission from continuing to report numbers, and they barred the broadcasters from continuing to speak, and they shut the internet down.

But, because they had left open that window on election day, the entire country watched the returns come in, and watched Imran Khan’s party picking up a majority of seats in the government. They then had to steal it from out from under that very clear victory that had been presented.

So, the fact that they put that many obstacles in front of people. There are stories of 40 percent of the population is illiterate, and they took away the symbol of the party. And then, on election day, moved people’s polling locations all over the place and shut down mobile service, so people couldn’t text each other, people couldn’t do what they normally did on election day, which is text a particular number and find out where they’re supposed to vote.

We heard stories of how a family in one household would have multiple different precincts that they’d be supposed to vote in, depending on who in that family was voting, and they would be miles and miles and miles apart, sometimes tens of miles apart, extreme long distances. That people were willing to walk over all of that glass to go to vote in an election that most of them believed would actually be stolen from them— That’s the thing. They weren’t naïve, they didn’t go out thinking that it was going to be a free and fair election. They went out assuming it was going to be robbed, yet they went out anyway.

So, now that they are suppressing that mandate and instead putting in this other government raises the question for the United States. OK, now what? How sure are you that this isn’t going to blow? How much do you think you can take this steam and keep it in the kettle? At some point, this thing is going to blow. 

Elections are the way that people let out their steam. And, by getting some directional representation. Like you said, they don’t expect that they’re going to be completely clean and fair elections, but you might expect that, if it’s an absolute landslide victory, that at least they’re allowed some level of something close to representing that. If they’re not, what is left for people to express their democratic impulses, other than violence? Other than the complete disintegration of the institutions that are stitching the country together.

So, to me, they’re really playing with fire here, which goes back to the question of why? To what end? What is on the other side of this for you that makes it worth this extraordinary nuclear-fueled gamble?

MH: It’s very easy to succumb to cynicism and, obviously, the U.S. government seems to become very cynical about the subject.

But you’re right. Pakistanis did so much to vote in this election. It’s kind of touching, actually, the way that people went so out of the way to register what they felt was their vote about their future, and their kid’s future, and so forth, and despite the knowledge that they knew no one was going to respect it, they just wanted to make sure that people heard. And to turn away from that and to reject it so forthrightly, it’s very disillusioning. It’s something that I think I’ve noticed, you’ve noticed, and we all have.

One thing I wanted to ask you: This whole reporting on Pakistan, for me — and I’m curious about your perspective — is very eye-opening in many ways, because I think we saw a lot, not just about Pakistan, but about the U.S. in the situation, and the U.S. media as well, too. Because The Intercept reported on the cipher document and many other classified documents, and we reported on the Pakistani election. I think we’re one of the few outlets which bothered to report on this. It’s one of the most important— the fifth biggest country in the world by population had a fraudulent election, had the deposal of a very popular prime minister with U.S. involvement.

I think other outlets either could not report on it for technical reasons — in the sense that it’s very difficult to do some of the reporting we did for security and other purposes — but also, it seems like they were just adverse to doing it. And there’s a reason why the reporting came to The Intercept, because we were capable, but also we had an interest.

And it made me think that, if people in Pakistan can’t rely on their own media now — because for very obvious reasons, the military is crushing the media there and made it very dangerous; reporters have been killed, they’ve been abducted, it’s a situation like that there — but in the U.S., where we are free, and we are very involved in the situation, there’s been incuriosity, complicity, I would say, also, with what’s going on. You’re going up there to the State Department every week, and yelling at the State Department, Vedant and Mark Miller, and so forth.

Where are the rest of the people? Where is the rest of the U.S. press? They know very, very well that their own government is involved in cosigning this very unjust situation, but they’re absent.

I’m curious about your own perspective, but this is very strange to me, in a way. How is it that The Intercept has become maybe the last bastion of free speech for Pakistanis, and even for American involvement, of knowing what’s going on with their country in this other country?

RG: Maybe if some of these media outlets recognize that there is a really active diaspora that is hungry for this coverage, that could help in the future to get them a little bit more interested in doing some of this coverage. There’s the obvious old saw that U.S. readers generally are not given much to read about when it comes to American foreign affairs, either because they’ve been trained not to care about it, or they just don’t care about it either way. I think editors look at Pakistan as just not remotely interesting.

I was actually talking to a top editor at one of the major papers who edits and helps guide coverage in this area. What she explained to me was, look, for a couple of years, it was Ukraine, now it’s Israel, Palestine, it’s Gaza. And, if it doesn’t fit directly into that, then there really isn’t any appetite among editors at the top papers to cover it. There are all sorts of interesting intersections between the story of Pakistan and Ukraine. We covered the entire affair, the entire deposal, coming from Pakistan’s unwillingness to be 100 percent supportive of the Ukraine war effort, and trying to stay neutral, and then, later, secretly making weapons for Ukraine. But, as she said, that’s kind of complicated, that’s not a quick daily piece we can do.

And when it comes to Gaza, one of the most popular if not the most popular Muslim elected officials in the world is Imran Khan, and to not have his voice at this moment, I think, changes the way that, at minimum, the Muslim world is able to respond to what’s going on. It’s hard to say what the effect would be of having him in office, in power, at this moment; I’d be curious for your take on that.

But those are not close enough tie-ins from the perspective of these major media outlets for it to warrant any attention.

MH: Yeah. It’s disappointing, because then we don’t cover these subjects, the media doesn’t cover these subjects. And then, when something happens later on, they’re very surprised, but with the context where no one really has the information that led to it.

Yeah. To your point, I do think if Imran Khan was free at the moment and was able to speak, he’d be very voluble at what’s going on. because he was never one to censor himself or to hold back about his opinions about affairs well beyond Pakistan’s border, which I guess was what annoyed the U.S. State Department and U.S. officials so much about him, and led to the predicament he’s in now.

RG: And annoyed some of the Arab states as well. They would rather prefer to not think about, for instance, Kashmir, or not to think about the Palestinian question. Palestinians were getting in the way of the Abraham Accords, and Imran Khan would embarrass them in front of their own populations by refusing to just go along with these two, in some ways, interestingly-related impulses from the West. To say, look, OK, we’re not going to solve these problems, let’s ignore them, pre-October-7th. Let’s just pretend they’re not happening. And Imran Khan was unwilling to do that.

MH: Ryan, thanks again for joining us in this crossover episode. It’s like The Flintstones meets The Simpsons. Those cartoons when you’re a kid, I love those episodes. So, it’s like that one again.

RG: Which one is which?

MH: I think you’re Flintstones. I think you’re Flintstones, and I’m Homer.

RG: Sounds good. That sounds perfect.

MH: That was The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief and host of Deconstructed. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. And 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 what the size, makes a real difference.

And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted. And definitely do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well. And do check out Deconstructed as well.

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

Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post U.S. Endorses Pakistan’s Sham Election appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli government is on the brink of a long-feared military offensive against the town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinian civilians have taken shelter from the Israeli campaign in Gaza. An attack on Rafah could trigger the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the war so far, including a potential ethnic cleansing of Gaza as Palestinians are pushed into Egypt. This week on Intercepted, hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the current state of the war as well as the ongoing Palestinian campaign for political unity with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a physician and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. Barghouti speaks about the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the role of the U.S. in facilitating the war, and his own political future and that of the Palestinian national movement in the wake of this crisis.

[Intercepted theme music]

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Well, Murtaza, today we have a lot of news to discuss, and we’re really honored to have a very special guest, so we’re not going to do much by way of introduction. Just to say, the context is that President Joe Biden, while eating an ice cream cone on Monday evening, indicated that he believes there may be a temporary ceasefire — is what he’s calling it — a temporary pause in Israel’s military attacks against Gaza, though Hamas is indicating that they don’t see a clear path yet for that. We’ll see what happens. Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten a full siege, an invasion of Rafah. The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate inside of Gaza.

And we go, now, to Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. He is the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. That’s a Palestinian political party. Dr. Barghouti is also a physician, and we thank him so much for joining us here on Intercepted.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti: Glad to be with you. Thank you.

JS: Dr. Barghouti, let’s start with just your initial reaction to the rumblings that we’re hearing about the potential for a deal. Joe Biden — who is facing a reelection campaign, and has a lot of heat being put on him for his full-blown support for Israel — is indicating that there may be some agreement that Israel would pause its military attacks against Gaza during the holy month of Ramadan. Hamas says that they have a different understanding of what’s going on.

What is your sense of what we’re seeing right now?

MB: What we see is a shameful position from the side of the United States of America, which is providing full support to Israel to continue these massacres in Gaza. And why temporary ceasefire? Why not full and complete ceasefire? Why not permanent ceasefire? How many more thousands of children should die before the United States of America changes its position and votes in the Security Council of the United Nations in favor of a permanent ceasefire? United States is the only country that is obstructing, and continues to obstruct that particular resolution for a complete and permanent ceasefire.

So far, 37,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza. 70 percent of them are children and women, more than 11,000 children. And more than 70,000 have been injured, many of whom will die because Israel is preventing any medical care to them, and any proper hospital care.

So that’s about 4.5 percent of the population of Gaza that have been killed or injured by Israeli bombardment, and that is a huge number. Had it happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 12 million people injured or killed in four months of time. That is unacceptable.

And, on top of that, Israel now is killing Palestinians [by] combining three processes: the bombardment with airstrikes, with artillery, with gunshots; the hunger, putting people in a situation of severe deprivation from food, water, electricity, everything. And the people are starving; 700,000 people are now starving in the north of Gaza, and Gaza City as well.

And, in addition to that, they’ve created horrible conditions on the ground, killing people with diseases. Again, there is more than 710,000 people who are sick with severe infections, with outbreaks of infections, with respiratory infections. Many of them are not getting any treatment. And that summarizes the whole situation.

So, for God’s sake, for how long Mr. Biden and his government will continue to support the continuation of this terrible war? And what he spoke about, about an agreement on Monday, was not supported, neither by Israel nor Hamas nor anybody else, because Israel is trying to impose its own conditions.

And, in my opinion, Netanyahu is using the threats of attacking Rafah, which would cause the worst kind of massacre, to sabotage and undermine the negotiations that are happening about a temporary ceasefire. And then he will use the failure of these negotiations as an excuse to attack Rafah, and try to conduct what he dreamed about and what he was dreaming about all this war, which is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians out of Gaza.

MH: Dr. Barghouti, you mentioned Rafah. There are currently more than a million Palestinians from across Gaza sheltered there at the moment in very, very dire conditions and, as you said, living under the threat of an imminent potential Israeli military operation.

Can you talk a bit about the conditions there and what we’re seeing at the moment? And we mentioned that it could result in Netanyahu achieving his dream of ethnic cleansing. How do you think he may like to achieve that? Or, where is his dream of sending these million-plus Palestinians in the near future? 

MB: Well, let me say that I am a volunteer with a very important Palestinian medical organization called Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and we have 30 medical teams now working in Gaza under most difficult conditions. They work in the north, in the middle, in the center, as well as in the south, including in Rafah, where we have many medical teams working there.

The situation is awful. We have almost 1.3 million people clustered in less than 55 square kilometers. That’s like 30,000 people per square kilometer. Or, maybe you could say 36,000 per square mile. And if Israel starts bombarding there in Rafah, this will be the largest massacre ever.

From the very beginning of this war, Netanyahu declared his position, which is to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza. He wanted to cleanse Gaza completely from Palestinians and then annex it to Israel. His military spokesperson, Richard Hecht, in the very first two days of this attack said that every Palestinian in Gaza must evict and go to Sinai, evict their home and go to Sinai.

That has been the plan, always. Only because Palestinians are steadfast and determined to stay there and not become refugees again, as they were in 1948. And, because up till now, also, Egypt is taking a firm stand, the Israelis have not been able to push people out of Gaza. But, if they start bombarding Rafah, that risk is going to be there, of course.

People are stuck in the streets; some with tents, some without tents. The lucky people are staying in shelters of UNRWA, which frequently are bombarded. And, even in these shelters, the conditions are horrifying. Every room — which is no more than 16 square meters — will have something like 60 to 80 people in it. Every 600 people have one latrine. There is a shower for every 2,400 people.

That gives you an idea about the situation, but many are in tents in the streets. There are 50,000 pregnant women there who cannot give birth in safe spaces. There are 64,000 breastfeeding women who don’t have food, don’t have enough nutrients, don’t have vitamins. It’s a disaster at every level you can think about. And yet, yes, they can be bombarded by Israel at any moment.

The Israeli bombardment is totally indiscriminate. They don’t care about the fact that these people are civilians, and about the fact that, of the 104,000 Palestinians killed or injured, 70 percent are women and children.

By the way, I am a physician and medical doctor, and I never thought in my life that, in the 21st century, my colleagues would call me and say they had to amputate a leg of a person without anesthesia, or they had to operate on a child without anesthetics, because Israel is preventing anesthetics from reaching people. My heart was broken listening to patients with cancer. 10,000 of them are in Gaza, and they tell me they have no treatment whatsoever. And they are dying, literally. 

There are many sad stories. I mean, like the story of Hind. Recently, I gave a lecture in Florence, and I said, what’s the difference between Anne Frank, the famous Jewish person who was killed by Nazis in Germany, and she was in Holland? What’s the difference between Nazi occupiers killing Anna Frank and the story of Hind Rajab, who was a Palestinian child, six years old, stuck in an ambulance with six of her family members killed by Israeli tanks, screaming for help, calling ambulances?

The ambulance people responded to her, and tried to calm her. And, for hours, she was begging for them to come. And then they sent an ambulance, and they coordinated with the Israeli army that there will be an ambulance coming there. What happened? Hind was shot and killed, and the ambulance was completely destroyed. The driver was killed. The first aid provider was killed.

What’s the difference between Anna Frank and Hind Rajab? They are the same: two children persecuted and killed by fascists. It doesn’t matter whether the fascist is German, or Israeli, or of any religion or any country, the behavior is the same behavior. A behavior that is fascist, that kills children, and has no respect to human life.

JS: Dr. Barghouti, even though the siege of Gaza is as intense as ever, the death toll continues to rise, the suffering — as you’ve been eloquently laying out — is so acute among the surviving population, and now facing the threat of even more intense military action, there is this big focus in international media about what people call a day-after scenario. And there’s a lot of discussion about what a future would look like for all the Palestinian people that are currently divided by Israel; the Palestinians who live in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem in Gaza.

As a political figure and leader, I wanted to ask you if you are in touch with any European governments, or the U.S. Government. Has anyone reached out to you from Washington or from the capitals of European nations to discuss your perspective on what should happen going forward for the Palestinian people in their quest for a fully recognized independent state.

MB: We are in good touch with the many leaders in the region, and Arab leaders as well as European leaders, many of them come and visit us. Most recently, I had meetings with the prime minister of Holland, the foreign minister of Holland, the deputy prime minister of Luxembourg, and many others. And we are in touch with most European countries.

Yesterday we had a very good meeting with the king of Jordan. And, before that, I had a meeting with the prime minister of Kuwait, and the emir of Qatar, etc. Except the Americans, they never contact us. And all these delegations that come, I don’t know whom they meet, but they don’t even try to listen to us.

But let me tell you something. People talk about the day after, because they don’t want to speak about the day-to-day, about what’s happening today. And this whole monologue about the day after started very early in this attack.

In the very first two weeks of this horrible war— Now, it’s more than four months, and still the day we are in is still going on, and the killing is still going on. No way can you speak about anything constructive before stopping this war, before having a true, complete, and permanent ceasefire. What they talk about, who should govern Gaza, who should— Netanyahu is very clear.

Netanyahu does not want any Palestinian ruling of Gaza. He wants to reoccupy it completely. He wants to bring in or create a bunch of collaborators to work for him as subservient to his occupation, so that he will not have any responsibility for the civil needs of the occupied people, as international law indicates. And that’s what he used to say. No, it shouldn’t be Fatah-istan or Hamas-istan. And I responded to him by saying, but it will not be Netanyahu-stan, either.

So, the question here is as follows: who should govern Palestinians? Palestinians, of course. And I don’t understand why the United States of America, which advocates democracy everywhere, and represents itself as the biggest advocate of democracy and democratic elections, except when it comes to Palestine. Then, our government should be imposed on us, which has to be agreed with the United States of America and with Israel.

As Biden said, he wants a Palestinian government that is acceptable to Israel. Would he have said, also, that an Israeli government should be acceptable to Palestinians? No, God forbid, of course not. So, instead of all this talk about who should be there, and who should govern what, they should accept our right of self-determination, and our right to choose our own leaders in our own way. And that is through democratic free elections, like you do in the United States, or like they do in Britain, or any other country.

We are entitled to democracy and entitled to choose our leaders as we want. And, of course, the way to achieve that day of elections goes through the formation of an immediate unified Palestinian national leadership, and an establishment of an interim national unity government, or national-consensus government, accepted by everybody, so that it can function and work. And I call it “interim” because it has to prepare for democratic elections, eventually.

We want our right to choose our leaders, a right that we have been deprived from since 2006. And all this war that you see today could have been easily avoided, had we had elections in 2021. All the polls then showed that no single party in Palestine would get a majority, neither Fatah nor Hamas. And we would have had a pluralistic democratic system, and one government for both West Bank and Gaza. And maybe breaking the siege on Gaza, and maybe avoiding this war.

But, as long as the United States keeps talking about imposing on us who should rule us, this will not work. We need democracy, we need our democratic right to choose our leaders. And we need to end this terrible Israeli occupation, which has been the longest in modern history; 57 years of occupation is enough, and 75 years of displacement, of no less than 70 percent of the people of Palestine, is enough.

Apartheid, which Israel is conducting, and the system of racial discrimination will not provide solutions. Only a system where we are all equal — we and the Israelis — have equal rights, only then can [we] really have true peace and justice.

JS: One quick follow-up on that then. You, in the past, have had considerable public support for your candidacy, or for the possibility that you could potentially be head of state of an independent and unified Palestine.

I wanted to ask you about that, and if you would consider — if the situation does change to a point — where you see a path to having free and fair elections, if you would try to stand to become the head of state of Palestine. And, second to that, a lot of discussion in recent days about Marwan Barghouti, the resistance leader who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. There’s talk that maybe he could be released in an exchange of captives between Hamas and the Israeli government. 

And there are comparisons at times to the plight of Nelson Mandela, and Marwan Barghouti has shifted some of his rhetoric as he’s been in prison, and still remains a very influential figure.

So, a tale of two Barghoutis. Let’s start with you, though. Would you consider running for the presidency of a future in independent and unified Palestine?

MB: If I am needed, I am ready to do so. I already did it in 2005. I ran against Abbas, I came second in these elections. If we have elections tomorrow, I think the result will be completely different. And I feel the support of the people, which I appreciate so much.

But it’s not about me. It’s about what system we will have, and whether there will be true, free, and democratic elections. I spent all my life trying to serve our people in every possible way I could. Whatever is required from me, I will do.

Regarding Marwan: Marwan is a friend, and a colleague, and a relative. And Marwan is a freedom fighter, he’s not a terrorist. And he is a political leader, one of the many political leaders who are imprisoned in Israel. I think he should be released, I hope he will be released in exchange of prisoners. He can play an important role in improving the situation of Fatah, because he’s Fatah. And he can be a very good bridge between us, and Fatah, and other parties like Hamas, to have a national unity structure.

We’ll see what happens. The most important thing is that they get freed now. And then we will agree about who should run, and who has the best chances, and who has the best program.

But, at the end of the day, I want to see democratic free elections, and I accept the results, whatever they are. But we cannot be ruled by a group of people who are mobilizing the authority, and who have killed our Palestinian parliament, legislative council, destroyed the democratic system with the absence of separation of powers. That has to end. And the only way to end it is to have a free democratic system. 

And, by the way, I always said that democracy is a precondition for peace. For so many years, Israelis wanted leaders that they can control, or leaders that are weak, or leaders that are divided, so they can be easily manipulated. I say: that did not bring peace. Only Palestinian leaders who are elected by their own people and trusted by their own people can negotiate a fair deal between us and the Israelis. Not a deal like Oslo, which was imposed on us, using all the weaknesses of the Palestinian side.

MH: Dr. Barghouti, at the moment, Israel is facing a degree of international pressure and isolation that it hasn’t faced in many, many years, if ever. Currently, there’s a genocide case at the International Court of Justice based on Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza. And, also, a tremendous outpouring of criticism and ostracism from countries in the global South, and even countries like Russia and China, which are at odds with the United States. It seems like the only country, really, that’s still in Israel’s corner uncritically, or the most strenuous country is the United States.

I’m curious, from your perspective, if the U.S. was not in the equation, how might the situation be different? We see these vetoes at the U.N., and the U.S. is Israel’s major military supplier, and so forth. The fact that there is not peace and there’s not a pathway to peace, what role has the U.S. played in that, and how is the U.S. currently obstructing even a humanitarian solution in the short term for Palestinians in Gaza?

MB: United States is playing a very dangerous game — and, by the way, contradicted to the feeling, in my opinion, of the majority of the American public. Because we’ve also seen not only shifts in many European countries, but in the United States in particular, and especially among the younger generation, including young Jewish people, who frequently demonstrate and say not in my name.

And I believe that Biden is about to lose elections, mainly or partially because of his position in this war, supporting the aggression on Palestinian people. Not only by talks, not only by repeating the lies of Netanyahu, but also by sending American troops. There are 2000 troops participating with Israel, and American advisers, etc.

United States made itself an obstacle to peace in this case, and the 154 countries in the United Nations voted for permanent ceasefire. In the United Nations Security Council, 13 countries voted for that. One country abstained — which is Britain — and the United States obstructed by using the veto. And that is a very destructive approach by the United States government.

They are allowing this genocide to continue. It’s not just genocide; it’s three war crimes at the same time, happening in parallel. The war crime of genocide, the war crime of collective punishment, and the war crime of ethnic cleansing. And this is sending the world a very dangerous message. The message is, “We and the world don’t live anymore by international law. We live by the law, by the rules of the jungle.”

That is very dangerous, if you consider what could be the consequences of such a situation, or what other powerful countries will conclude from that. It would mean that any powerful country in Asia or Southeast Asia could invade another country, because it will be justified. The amount of hypocrisy and double standard when it comes to comparing the American and European position in Ukraine with that in Palestine is very obvious.

It’s an unbelievable kind of double standard. Everybody is in pilgrimage to Zelensky and Ukraine, because they say he has an occupied area, that Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine. They imposed on Russia more than 11,000 sanctions in less than two months. The prosecutor of the criminal court was in Ukraine in the second month, and did an investigation and everything. In our case, they have pilgrimage to Netanyahu, to the occupier, and the United States is supplying him with the largest air bridge ever in the region, with tens of thousands of explosives.

You know, Israel threw on Gaza no less than 69,000 tons of explosives. That is about 30 kilograms of dynamite for each man, woman, and child in Gaza. This is larger than the total power of both nuclear bombs thrown on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the Second World War. That is unacceptable.

Yet, the United States continues to support Israel, the occupier, the country that conducts ethnic cleansing, and conducts the worst kind of racist nationalistic policy. And, more than that, that advocates Jewish supremacy against Palestinians.

In my opinion, the United States is hurting its reputation. Mr. Biden has hurt his own reputation personally but, also, he hurt the reputation of the presidency of the United States by this behavior. And what we need is an immediate change. And the change should be immediate support of permanent ceasefire, immediate pressure on Israel to take out its forces from Gaza, and to allow the supplies to reach people. Allow milk, allow clean water, allow food, allow vitamins, allow medications, allow surgical equipment, and anesthetics. This is what we need.

If the United States wants, it can do that. The question is whether it has the will to do it or not.

JS: Dr. Barghouti, I want to ask you about Hamas, and the portrayal. In most of the major Western media outlets, Hamas is painted as a monolith. It’s painted entirely through the lens of the al-Qassam brigades, the military operations, the attacks against Israel on October 7th. But, of course, Hamas is much more than just al-Qassam; it’s also a political movement that engages in civil society that stood for democratic elections in 2006. And I think that it does a real disservice to the publics of the United States and Europe to oversimplify and generalize when talking about various Palestinian political factions.

But, having said that, you also had a decision that was made by leaders within Hamas to conduct what they called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th. And I’m wondering what insight you can offer into whether the leaders of Hamas fully understood the wrath that would come down upon the people of Gaza in the aftermath. And if you, personally, as a Palestinian political leader, think that those attacks were unwise, or if they shattered a paradigm that is the only chance Palestine has to move forward in the face of Israeli apartheid, aggression, and scorched-earth bombings.

MB: Look, I want to tell you something that people, probably, your audience doesn’t know. Hamas originated from the Muslim Brother Movement. Till 1987 — we were occupied already for 20 years by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, and we already had almost 40 years of ethnic cleansing — till 1987, Muslim Brothers did not participate in the struggle against Israeli occupation. They were 100 percent occupied with social services and religious activities.

It was the pressure of occupation that changed the mentality of the young members in Muslim Brothers, and watching, also, all other national forces struggling against occupation. And that’s how they changed, and created Hamas in 1987, ‘88.

If Hamas disappears tomorrow, and you continue to have the injustice, and the oppression, and the persecution, and the killing, there will be another force. Maybe, I don’t know what it will be called. The cause is the occupation, the cause is the oppression, the cause is apartheid. Hamas is a result, not the cause.

And the history did not start on the 7th of October. Of course, you know my positions, I’m a person who advocates nonviolence all my life. I believe in it, I know it’s effective. I even managed to convince Hamas with nonviolence, and they committed to it from 2014 after the war to 2019.

What did they get? In the peaceful marches they were organizing — and we did too — was more killing and more shooting. One of my best colleagues, my young colleagues, Rouzan al-Najjar, was 21 years old, who was treating injured people during demonstrations, and a sniper shot her in the heart and killed her. I was shot twice by an Israeli sniper while trying to treat an injured person in 1996. I still carry 35 shrapnels in my back.

So, even when they used peaceful resistance and nonviolent resistance, we were always encountered with severe violence, and nobody cared. I didn’t see The New York Times write about that, or The Washington Post reporting these peaceful demonstrations that Palestinians did.

So, history did not start on the 7th of October. Before 7th of October, in particular, Israel was doing the following things: expanding settlements in the West Bank at an unprecedented level, attacking Palestinians in Jerusalem in a vicious way, destroying and trying to prevent Palestinians from having free prayer in Al-Aqsa Mosque, and trying to change the nature of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Judaizing Al-Aqsa Mosque, and attacking Christian priests in Jerusalem, spitting on them, by Israeli soldiers and settlers, preventing Muslims and Christians, Palestinian Muslims and Christians from free prayer in Jerusalem.

And, on top of that, Netanyahu was appearing everywhere, saying he will normalize relations with Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. And, this way, he will end the Palestinian issue. He will liquidate it completely.

And proudly he stood in the General Assembly of the United Nations, carrying the map of the “new Middle East,” as he described it, two weeks before the 7th of October. The map included all the Arab countries that he normalized or was going to normalize with in green. And then, in the heart of that new Middle East, Israel in blue, annexing all of the West Bank, annexing all of the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Syrian Heights as well. This was the message that Netanyahu was sending. And more than that, now, information is leaking that he was also planning a huge, massive attack on many of Hamas’ leaders to assassinate them.

This was the situation before the 7th of October. But, more than that, you have to go deeper and see, what did we have. The United Nations, when it recognized Israel in 1948 or ‘49, it conditioned its recognition with the implementation of two U.N. General Assembly resolutions: 181, which said that Palestine would be divided in two countries, Israel with 54 percent, Palestine with 44 percent. And the 194 resolution, which said that all Palestinians evicted from their homelands — which were 70 percent of the Palestinian people — would be allowed to go back home. These were the two conditions. Was any of that implemented? Of course, none.

Even when Palestinian leadership made a huge compromise accepting the Oslo agreement with the promise of a Palestinian little, mini-state, in less than 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine, which is less than half of what we should have had according to the U.N. resolution that gave Israel its legitimacy, even that was rejected by Netanyahu, who built his whole career on killing that peace opportunity, and aggravating the Israeli public against the Israeli leader who signed the agreement — Yitzhak Rabin — until he was assassinated.

This is history. These are the things that led to the 7th of October. And still, I say we shouldn’t get stuck in that day. We should move forward, and we should ask the question, how can we have peace for both Palestinians and Israelis? How can we have justice for both Palestinians and Israelis? How can we save lives of Palestinians and Israelis? Only through one way, which is ending occupation, ending apartheid, ending this system of the racial discrimination, and stop the killing of the people.

MH: Dr. Barghouti, you mentioned that the Israeli government — and I think the U.S. has supported this — has had this idea of going around the Palestinian issue, and going to regional countries, the Gulf Arab countries and others, and making deals to normalize relations with Israel. And then, thereby, treating the Palestinian issue as something of the past, or liquidated, as Mr. Netanyahu had alluded to.

Can you talk a bit about why this is proven to be an unrealistic idea, or why this idea is seemingly not possible to achieve successfully? Because I know, traveling the region, speaking to people, there’s tremendous anger on a popular level about what’s happening in Palestine. And I think that leaders cannot be totally insensible to that, even if they’re not democratic.

I was curious on your take on the Abraham Accords idea, and what the future is of that sort of approach, of trying to ignore Palestine and simply dealing with Riyadh or the Emirates.

MB: Abraham Accords were anti-peace efforts, because they promised that, once the Abraham Accords happened, it would get us closer to peace. Did they? Or, we had the 7th of October.

Of course, the problem: Israel was not in war with Bahrain, Israel was not in war with the Emirates. There is no dispute between these two countries and Israel, except for one thing: that their people support the Palestinian rights. But when you make peace with the Emirates and Bahrain at the expense of the Palestinian people, you are trying to avoid the issue, the main problem.

It’s like a student who goes to give an exam, and then he gets a difficult question — which, in this case, would be peace between Israel and Palestinians — and, instead of solving the question he got in the exam, he creates another question, an easy question, and answers it. Of course, he can do that, but eventually he will get zero in the exam, and he will not pass.

That’s exactly what Israel and the United States tried to do. To deviate the attention from the Palestinian issue, and normalize or make peace with these countries that had no problem with Israel in the first place.

So, if Mexico and the United States have a problem with borders, you don’t solve it by creating a solution between United States and Canada. That’s exactly what they did with these Abraham Accords.

JS: I wanted to ask you about the situation in the West Bank right now, and also with the Palestinian Authority. Of course, Monday, you had the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority resign. That government is in crisis, Mahmoud Abbas is deeply, deeply unpopular. I mean, there were ideas floated that, somehow, Abbas is going to ride in on Israeli or American tanks into Gaza. I mean, he’s already deeply, deeply unpopular in the West Bank.

And what we’ve seen happening over these past four months is thousands upon thousands of Palestinians being arrested or worse, disappeared or killed, in the West Bank. It seems like Netanyahu is using the situation in Gaza to now really intensify the attacks against the West Bank to expand the illegal settlements, and using these semi-governmental forces as settlers that the government is arming and empowering to go and take Palestinian land, to kill Palestinian people.

What is going to happen in the West Bank? What are you hearing from your friends, your family, your colleagues, about how people see the coming months and the struggle for their freedom, their dignity, their rights? Given that Abbas is there, deeply unpopular, Netanyahu waging an intensification of the war, and Gaza very much unresolved. What is going to happen in the West Bank, Dr. Barghouti?

MB: First of all, let me tell you why Netanyahu wants to continue this war forever. Because this man knows that once the war stops, he will be accused of the failure on the 7th of October, the huge failure of the Israeli army, intelligence, and political leadership. He will also be judged for mismanagement of this war against Palestinians. And he will be tried, because he’s accused of four cases of corruption. He’s indicted with four cases of corruption, which will probably take him to jail.

So, this man wants to continue this war forever. Or, as long as he can, so that he can maneuver and escape going to prison. That’s why he’s a very dangerous element now. In the West Bank, the Israeli army killed more than 400 people since the 7th of October, about 80 of them are children. They intensify their activity in settlements. They have already evicted 30 communities in the West Bank from their homes, conducting ethnic cleansing, and they conducted more than 8,000 new arrests against the people there.

And, practically, the Israeli army reoccupied all of the West Bank. The Palestinian authority is done. I mean, it’s an authority without authority. It’s over. The Israeli army is everywhere, including Ramallah.

And so, Netanyahu is practically repeating what he dreamt about, which is reoccupation of the West Bank, destroying any perspective of peace, reoccupation of Gaza as well. And it continues.

And the crimes continue to happen in the West Bank. Besides the Israeli army, we have 750,000 armed settlers who are behaving as terrorists, conducting terror attacks, burning houses, burning cars, shooting people. And the worst thing is that even the prisoners in Israeli jails are badly tortured. And, up till now, we lost ten of them under the Israeli torture in Israeli prisons. So, it’s a very bad situation, also, in the West Bank.

The way out of this, in response to what you spoke about the Palestinian Authority, is very simple. We want immediate formation of national unity leadership, where everybody would be together, where we can discuss together the plans for the future, how to stop Netanyahu from conducting the ethnic cleansing. And what we need is an interim national unity government that is acceptable to all parties, whether they participate or not. But interim, because eventually it has to plan for free democratic elections.

JS: That was Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, and a physician.

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is our lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely do leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

JS: Just one personal note: at The Intercept, we recently suffered a round of layoffs. Our Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge was removed, 15 of our colleagues lost their jobs. A deeply, deeply unjust situation. And I just wanted to say, for people that listen to this show, that among the people laid off was our very, very valued colleague, José Olivares. We want to thank José so much for his incredible dedication to this program, his skills as a producer and journalist, and just for being an all-around wonderful human being.

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

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

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

Correction: March 7, 2024, 6:35 p.m. ET: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly stated there have been more Israeli military casualties in the current conflict than the 1967 war. More than 700 Israeli soldiers were killed in the Six-Day War, whereas at least 219 have been killed since the October 2023 invasion of Gaza.

The post Dr. Mustafa Barghouti on the Struggle for Palestine’s Future Amid Gaza Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans for a ground invasion of Rafah, where at least 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering; the vast majority are refugees who have fled their homes. Israel’s most recent bombardments on Rafah have killed at least 14 people in a set of strikes on Thursday and upward of 100 on Monday. This week on Intercepted, guest host Sharif Abdel Kouddous — a contributing writer for The Intercept — and Tareq Baconi discuss Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, the history of Palestine, and prospects for the future. Baconi is the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group on Israel/Palestine, and author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous:  I’m Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a contributing writer for The Intercept, hosting Intercepted this week.

All eyes are on Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza. It is now being bombed daily, and fears are growing that Israel will soon launch a ground invasion.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began over four months ago, they have steadily pushed Palestinians further and further south, towards the Egyptian border. Amid one of the most punishing bombing campaigns in modern history, Israeli troops first entered the northern section of Gaza and encircled Gaza City. 

After a week-long truce in November, troops moved further south, taking Khan Yunis and other areas. Now, over half of Gaza’s population, some 1.4 million people are crammed into Rafah with nowhere left to go.

Israel’s military campaign has so far killed over 28,000 people, with many thousands still missing and presumed dead under the rubble. More than 12,300 of the dead are children. Over 80 percent of the population has been displaced and are facing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The U.N. estimates that a quarter of the population is suffering catastrophic famine. Gaza now has the highest percentage of people facing acute food insecurity ever recorded, and the scale of the destruction has rendered most of the territory uninhabitable. 

Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to continue the assault and launch a full-scale attack on Rafah, insisting on what he calls “a total victory over Hamas.”

Benjamin Netanyahu: At the start of the war, I outlined three goals: destroy Hamas, free the hostages, and ensure that Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel any time in the future. Achieving these goals will ensure Israel’s security and pave the way for additional historic peace agreements with our Arab neighbors.

But peace and security require total victory over Hamas; we cannot accept anything else. Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t have total victory? 

SAK: Negotiations around a ceasefire continue, yet the prospects so far appear dim. Egypt fears an attack would force a mass displacement of Palestinians fleeing the violence into its territory. Egypt has fortified the border with concrete walls and barbed wire, and has deployed some 40 tanks and armored personnel carriers to the area.

On Monday, President Biden discouraged Netanyahu against a ground invasion of Rafah.

Joe Biden: The major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan — a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there.

Many people there have been displaced, displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north, and now they’re packed into Rafah. Exposed and vulnerable, they need to be protected.

SAK: No such warnings have been issued before, and yet U.S. official policy hasn’t changed. Unequivocal and all-out military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel remains, and the killing and destruction continues on a scale that the International Court of Justice has deemed “plausibly genocidal.” On Tuesday, South Africa urged the International Court of Justice to use its power to stop Israel’s military offensive in Rafah.

To take an in-depth look at where things currently stand, and to examine the history of Palestine and the prospects for the future, we are joined today by Tareq Baconi. He’s the president of the board of Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, and is a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group on Israel/Palestine. Tareq is author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.” 

Tareq, welcome to Intercepted.

Tareq Baconi: Thank you for having me. 

SAK: I want to start with the latest. Over the weekend, Rafah was heavily bombed ahead of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said is a planned ground invasion. Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, it’s where over half of the entire population of Gaza has been forcibly displaced to. Before October 7th there were less than 300,000 people there, now there’s an additional 1.4 million Palestinians, including some 600,000 children. [They] are packed into the space, there’s massive tent encampments that are pushing right up to the border with Egypt. There’s literally nowhere left to go.

Can you talk about what’s happening now, and the implications of an Israeli ground invasion into Rafah?

TB: Well, it’s really important to understand this within the context of population transfers, and what Palestinians have called “the endless Nakba,” which is the Israeli effort to try to depopulate Palestine, and make sure that it can maintain as an apartheid regime, a Jewish majority, “from the river to the sea.”

So, this is the broad context which we need to understand what’s happening in Rafah now. And this is something that became quite stark following October 7th,nwhen there were plans that were issued by various politicians within the Israeli government as well as internationally around the possibility of removing the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip to make space for Israeli attacks against Hamas, and Israeli military plans. And so, this is what we’re seeing today, is the reemergence of these initial plans that we began to see in the first few weeks after October 7th.

As you say, if there is a ground invasion in Rafah, the possibility of a population transfer happening under the fog of war is quite high. So, we’re back in this place, where we can imagine now hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip, which would make the possibility of a population transfer almost double what happened in the Nakba in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee.

And so, in the situation around Rafah, there’s obviously been heightened tensions. Egypt, specifically, is quite worried about what would happen if those Palestinians are forced to flee into Egypt, into the Sinai Peninsula. And international leaders and the American administration have warned Israel that, if it takes that step, if it moves into in the direction of a ground invasion, that it would not be supported. That it would be something that the politicians here have warned Israel against.

But, of course, that’s something that should be taken at face value, in the sense that the Biden administration is obviously complicit in the Israeli operations and the ongoing genocide. And so, any effort now to try to suggest that they’re trying to pull Israel back is really something that should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Israelis themselves have talked about their desire to relocate the Palestinians in Rafah to other areas in the Gaza Strip. But, obviously, these plans are all impractical. They’re not plans that can actually either mitigate the high level of death that will happen if there’s a ground invasion, or the possibility that Palestinians will just flee in panic, as people do during the times of war.

I think it’s really important to emphasize when we’re talking about Rafah specifically, as you said, there are about 1.3 million people displaced from their homes inside Gaza to Rafah, but those are themselves people who had been displaced from homes in what is now Israel. So we’re talking about 75 years of ongoing displacement. And, again, the possibility of one more displacement, out of historic Palestine.

SAK: I want to ask you about the role of Egypt in a moment but, when we talk about Gaza, it’s often spoken about as this separate territory that’s kind of on the periphery of the land of historic Palestine. That it’s this other place that is somehow different in the Zionist project.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of Gaza as a political geography in Palestine, and its history in relation to Israeli settler colonialism?

TB: I mean, when we talk about the Gaza Strip today, we’re really talking about a colonial construct. Because, before ‘48, and before the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza as a city — Gaza City, which was, before October 7th, one of the biggest cities in the Gaza Strip, but which has now effectively been depopulated — was really an extension of other cities in historic Palestine: Haifa, Acre, Ramla, Khalid, Hebron.

And so, the idea that this enclave that is now understood to be the Gaza Strip is something that was separate from the land of historic Palestine was just, it’s ahistorical — that’s factually untrue. What became the Gaza Strip really happened through the process of the establishment of the state of Israel and Israeli settler colonialism, in the sense that it’s in the establishment of the state. The majority off the inhabitants of Palestine were ethnically cleansed and vast, vast numbers of those ended up in what became the Gaza Strip. So, when we talk about the Gaza Strip today with its 2.4 million inhabitants, about two-thirds of those, 60 to 65 percent of those are refugees from homes that are now in Israel.

Now, one of the misconceptions that people often have when thinking about the Gaza Strip is that the Gaza Strip came under blockade because of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and then the movement’s capture of the Gaza Strip in 2007. But, in reality, the Gaza Strip has been deemed a problematic strip of land for successive Israeli governments since 1948.

So, we’ve had 12 wars waged by Israel against the Gaza Strip since 1948, and we’ve had a whole host of measures: targeted assassinations — economic blockades, building out collaborationist networks — inside Gaza to try to pacify the Gaza Strip, to try to make sure that this desire of the refugees in Gaza to return to their homes is sort of killed. And so, when Hamas emerges as a power that then takes over the Gaza Strip, it becomes the perfect fig leaf for Israel to justify the blockade.

So, we hear the Gaza Strip’s under blockade because of Hamas, it’s a security positioning, when, in reality, the Gaza Strip has effectively been severed from the rest of historic Palestine for demographic reasons, to maintain Israel as a Jewish majority state or the illusion of Israel as a Jewish majority state.

SAK: So, let’s take a step back.

We’re now four months into this brutal assault, a genocidal attack on Gaza. The level of destruction that Israel has wrought on civilian life in Gaza is proportionally among the worst in the world, or in modern history. Nearly all aspects of civilian life — homes, schools, hospitals, bakeries, farmland, water, sewage infrastructure — have effectively been destroyed. Even if this were to stop today, there’s not much left to go back to. Gaza has effectively been made unfit for human habitation, and it’s this hellscape where the bones of the dead are inseparable from the rubble. 

What does this mean for the future of this territory? What does it mean for the future of Palestine, that this level of destruction has been brought to this area?

TB: I mean, it shows us in very extreme ways the logical conclusion of Zionism. It shows in very extreme ways how the Zionist project thinks of Palestinian inhabitants and Palestinian life. Which, by the way, is not exceptional to Zionism as a settler colonial ideology. All settler colonies perpetrate genocide in order to create new realities on the ground, and the Zionist project is obviously no exception to that.

But what we see in the Gaza Strip today is a logical manifestation of that. That there can be no Palestinian life under Israeli apartheid. And, as you say, if the ceasefire started tomorrow and the genocidal violence ended, there is no way that these Palestinians are able to go back to any kind of normal life.

If we think about the history of just the past 14 or 15 years, the blockade since 2007, the U.N. had said that Gaza would become uninhabitable by 2020. This is a situation in which, before the current escalation, the Gaza Strip was already placed on life support, that there would be a drip feeding of food or humanitarian assistance or fuel in an effort to maintain Gaza just above the brink of collapse, but never allowed to grow, or to sustain the population there.

And the population, I should say — the vast majority of the population, I believe, about 80 percent — is below the age of 18. So, we are talking about a population that’s growing that was placed in an open-air prison indefinitely. 

So, this is fundamentally why this was always going to break, and why it broke the way it did on October 7th, but with the breaking of that balance —the trying to sustain Gaza on the brink of collapse, but not quite — when that broke, for any Israeli political party, but for the regime, for Israeli apartheid, the next logical solution is elimination. And this is what we’re seeing today. We’re seeing genocidal violence.

Now, the genocide is obviously the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, but that’s only part of the picture. The actual picture is the making of Palestinian life in that place impossible.

And so, now, let’s say there’s a ceasefire tomorrow. The number of deaths that will happen through starvation, through impoverishment, through disease, through all the ways in which human life is vulnerable to the elements; that’s part and parcel of the Israeli approach to killing only a portion of the Palestinians who would have been killed by the end of this, would have been killed by military violence. Many of the Palestinians would have been killed in secondary ways, right?

And so, life just becomes impossible. And for those who cannot live there, then they move out, quote-unquote, “under their own volition.” So, the idea of transfer then happens without Israel taking effective responsibility for it. 

So, this is why it’s really important. When we’re thinking about genocide, it’s not just in the numbers of those killed, but it’s in the erasure of Palestinian-ness, and Palestinian life in that space.

SAK: Well, let’s talk about efforts for a ceasefire.

There are negotiations underway. Most recently, Hamas responded to a U.S.-backed Israeli deal with a three-stage ceasefire proposal that would involve Israel withdrawing troops from Gaza, stopping its aerial campaign, the exchange of prisoners, and so on. Netanyahu responded by calling this proposal “delusional,” insisted on what he called “a total victory over Hamas,” saying that was the only solution to end the war.

You’ve closely followed Hamas in your book, “Hamas Contained,” which provides some of the best research and analysis on Hamas, I encourage everyone to read it. Can you just give us a thumbnail sketch of who is making decisions within the movement?

You have the leadership within Gaza; people like Yahya Sinwar, you have the head of the military wing, Mohammed Deif. You have the leadership in exile, people like Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal.

Can you just tell us, what is the connection between those within and those without, who these people are, and Netanyahu’s supposed goal of trying to destroy Hamas?

TB: So, historically, Hamas had always adopted what it called a shura approach. It’s a consultative approach in which the different constituencies within the movement are consulted on any major strategic decision. And the different constituencies —meaning the leadership inside/outside, the leadership in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians from Hamas, from the movement in Israeli prisons — and the shura approach was always a time-consuming process, obviously, because of security considerations and because of where all of these constituencies were.

But the movement itself was always and continues to be very democratic, in the sense that, even if there are differences in opinions within the movement, once a decision is made on the level of strategy, that binds the different elements of the movement. And you do see often — and we have seen since October 7th — “rogue elements” is too strong a [phrase], but people within Hamas saying certain things or putting forward certain narratives that seem to break from where the movement is at. But, by and large, the movement and the officials within the movement tend to fall in line once a certain decision is taken.

Now, since October 7th, for all the reasons that we can understand, that approach has been a bit more difficult to manage. A, because of the need for urgent decisions to be made, and B, because the majority of Hamas’s leadership in the Gaza Strip is now underground and literally out of reach. So, that has made some of the sort of the early weeks after October 7th appear as if there are divisions between the internal and the external.

I should say here that I have no direct access or contact with the movement since October 7th, and so, this is based on my own sort of historical analysis of the movement. But I imagine now that the leadership inside — so, as you say, Sinwar and Mohammed Deif — are taking, in some ways, a leadership position, and this whole operation is, in some ways, an operation driven by the leadership on the inside. So, in the Gaza Strip.

But I do think that the outside leaders — so, specifically the ones in Doha — are obviously the ones who are interfacing with the negotiators, and putting forward the, as you said, the counterproposal, the three-phase counterproposal. I would look at that document as a consensus document. So, I would look at that proposal as a proposal that the leadership, both inside and outside, would fall behind if it is adopted.

But, back to your point about the Netanyahu position. So, Netanyahu has from the onset declared that the only objective from the operation in the Gaza Strip is the decimation of Hamas. And, from day one, most analysts — including myself — said that that was an impossible goal. There’s no way that Hamas as a movement can be decimated. Even if it’s organizationally weakened, the ideology of the movement — which are political demands that many Palestinians espouse — extend far beyond the movement.

So, even if Hamas is really weakened, that political demand would continue to exist, and would take the other forms. So, the idea that decimation is the objective is really cover for genocidal violence in Palestine. That’s how it should be understood.

Now, that position has received support from international, mostly Western players, specifically the U.S. administration. Since the ICJ decision, we’ve seen the U.S. really try to shift, to try to say that there needs to be less targeting of civilians, more care in protecting civilian life. And, with this proposal specifically, Secretary of State Blinken came out and said, well, there’s room here, there are some spaces here to negotiate.

Again, this should be seen in the context of an American administration that’s increasingly nervous about how evident it is that it’s complicit in genocide, right? Now it’s created a position where, after arming and supporting Israeli genocide for months, it’s coming to a position where it really can’t control or manage what the Israeli establishment is doing.

So, Netanyahu’s maximalist position is obviously an impossible position. But, outside of that, it means that there’s just going to be a continuation of the violence, and the rejection of any kind of ceasefire at the moment. 

SAK: Well, there has been revived talk of a two-state solution. In the weeks and months leading up to October 7th, the U.S. have been trying to broker a deal to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia.

Those talks were shelved after the Israeli assault began, but they’ve since resumed, and Saudi Arabia is insisting that Israel end the war, and then put Palestinians, quote, “on a path towards statehood.” The Biden administration says it’s now actively pursuing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state after the war in Gaza.

Can you talk about this revived push for a so-called two-state solution, and what it actually means in the current political context we’re in?

TB: I mean, the return to talks around the two-state solution is really like watching a three-decade train wreck and fast forwarded to now. It’s trying to take all the failures of the past three decades in terms of creating a Palestinian state, and suddenly suggesting that now that’s a possibility that Palestinians should jump on.

I mean, we need to go back once again to the context. If we’re talking about Israeli apartheid and we’re talking about Israel as an apartheid state, any kind of partitioning of Palestine is a legitimation of apartheid. That’s just a form of demographic engineering, that’s a legitimation of expulsion of Palestinians, that’s a creation of, effectively, a Bantustan, which is what’s been created now in the West Bank under an illegitimate Palestinian authority. That’s a central pillar of Israeli apartheid today.

So, when we’re thinking about the two-state solution, that’s really what we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about, how do we make Israeli apartheid tolerable, and how do we make it sustainable?

And you can see it in the way that it’s being discussed, because, let’s play the game that the two-state solution is something that’s viable. The idea here would be to create two sovereign states, Palestine being a sovereign state that’s territorially contiguous, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Now, just that being on the table, within minutes, you already see the reservations begin to be articulated. So, now that state cannot quite be a state with full sovereignty, it has to be a demilitarized state. And then it becomes a state that can’t really control its borders because, obviously, then, if it’s open to the Arab world and there’s an influx of people coming into Palestine, Israel would voice security risks. So, immediately, we’re going from the idea of statehood to the idea of this entity whose borders and military and security is controlled by Israel, that’s allowed to call itself a state.

So, it’s really a repackaging of where we’ve been the past three decades and calling it again a two-state solution. It’s very clear that there will never be a Palestinian state on ’67, or at least in the way that’s imagined when the international community talks about the two-state solution. And, frankly, the clearest stakeholders that make that assertion are the Israeli politicians, are Netanyahu and his ilk, who come out and say, there will never be a Palestinian state.

So, this is being openly disclosed, and yet everyone is asked to pretend that the Israelis don’t really mean what they’re saying, and they will be forced into a situation of statehood, when the Israeli political elite is now driven by a settler movement that has close to a million people in the West Bank. And, when Gaza has been made uninhabitable, the idea that either of those things could then somehow produce a Palestinian state is really an effort to try to live in illusions, to live in a reality that that just doesn’t exist in Palestine today.

So, instead of statehood, I think what policymakers should be focusing on are two things: one is, how do you bring accountability against an apartheid regime? And there’s obviously measures that are happening in the international community now and, specifically, with South Africa’s case at the ICJ. And two, how do you allow the Palestinians to have a representative leadership, and a legitimate leadership, that can decide where they want to go after they’ve experienced genocide?

So, rather than trying to resuscitate a defunct Palestinian authority, the question should really be about how to support real Palestinian legitimacy.

SAK: Let’s turn to the role of Egypt in all of this, which is involved in the negotiations around the ceasefire.

Egypt is the only country to share a border crossing with Gaza that’s not controlled by Israel. Since this assault began, it has refused to open the border to allow for a mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into northern Sinai which, as you said, is a longstanding colonial fantasy.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has spoken in the rhetoric of the Palestinian cause and invoked Palestinian rights, saying he won’t allow for this displacement of Palestinians from historic Palestine into Egypt. But I think we have to remember this rhetoric rings hollow. Egypt has been complicit in the siege of Gaza for the past decade and a half, helping to enforce the blockade, destroying tunnels that provided a lifeline, coordinating very closely with Israel on security, and heavily restricting the movement of people and goods across the Rafah crossing. And, since October 7th, they’ve continued to allow Israel to dictate the terms of what crosses this border between Egypt and Gaza.

Now, with this impending ground invasion of Rafah, they’re warning that any move that would force a mass displacement of Palestinians would jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Netanyahu has also said that Israel must control the Philadelphi Corridor, the 14-kilometer stretch of land which runs along the Egypt/Gaza border.

What is your assessment of Egypt’s role in all of this, and what would you like to see happen?

TB: Well, what one would hope would have happened by now is that Egypt would allow for humanitarian aid to go into the Gaza Strip. The fact, as you say, that this is a sovereign border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, means that Egypt had always, since October 7th, had the ability to provide humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

The fact that it hasn’t makes it complicit in the suffering that’s happening in the Gaza Strip, and shows that, actually, any kind of movement across that border is really controlled by Israel, and it decides how to maintain that kind of blockade on Gaza.

But, specifically in terms of Egyptian worries around Rafah, and around population transfers, so, there’s two things here to think about. The first is that Egypt — and especially the Sisi regime — obviously has always been worried about the Muslim Brotherhood, and worried about any kind of domestic opposition, specifically Islamist opposition to its rule. And the influx of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Palestinians, many of whom had been living under Hamas’s governance for years, and Hamas — obviously, probably — fighters and officials, and the influx of those into Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, presents a security concern in this narrow lens. In the lens of thinking about, specifically, what the Sisi regime perceives as an Islamist threat in Egypt. So, that’s one consideration for the political establishment.

And the other, of course, is just the instability that that kind of Palestinian refugee crisis would mean for a country, the majority of whose population supports Palestine, and supports the Palestinian right to self-determination. So, this is a huge failure, it would be perceived as a huge failure for the Egyptians, that they allowed for this to happen, and that this is happening on their territory. That they then become the host of a refugee population at a time when we understand historically that Israel will prevent the return of any Palestinian refugees. So, if we look at Syria, if we look at Lebanon, and we look at Jordan, we can see what this population means years and decades from now.

So, really, this is an existential issue for Egypt. However, having said that, there’s very little faith that the Sisi regime will work in any way that’s ethical, or that’s beneficial to the Palestinian struggle, in solidarity or in support or in any other way. And it will be driven by realpolitik. It will be driven by security considerations — the ones we talked about — but also economic considerations; as in, how big a paycheck will they be able to get for allowing this to happen.

Now, the position they’ve taken is very clear, that they will annul or rescind the Camp David Treaty of ‘78/‘79 if this goes through. However, one of the things that I think a lot about is, what becomes permissible under the fog of war?

So, these states — even the U.S. administration — can say they’re against this. Egypt can say they’re against a population transfer, Israel can say they’re not really looking for a population transfer, they’re looking to move civilians out to al-Mawasi or other areas inside the Gaza Strip. But, under the fog of war, in violence, we all know what happens.

And so, that gives a plausible deniability to all these actors. You know, they can then say they were against this population transfer, but now it’s a fait accompli and they have to deal with the reality that’s been created.

So, I’m not sure whether I would take the Egyptian government at face value, and say that they would rescind the peace treaty. I think that economic concentrations would probably play a big role in what the final outcome of this looks like.

SAK: Since Hamas was elected and then took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, we’ve seen successive Israeli assaults in 2008 and ‘09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and others. And they’ve always ended with some sort of negotiation, and a revert to some kind of status quo, with some changes, what you have deemed a violent equilibrium.

That doesn’t seem to be a possibility this time, to go back to what was before, because of the level of destruction and so forth. So, what could the future hold? Are we in a war of attrition for a long time? That status quo seems to have been broken.

TB: Absolutely. I think the status quo is broken, not only because of what we just talked about, which is that the Gaza Strip is now uninhabitable, and I cannot quite conceive of the level of reconstruction that would be needed to maintain any kind of quality of life that’s fit for human life in the Gaza Strip; what that would entail, and the shift in politics and policy that would enable that to happen.

But the reason that a return to that status quo is quite difficult to imagine now is also because of what’s happening inside Israel, and inside the Israeli polity. I think October 7th shattered the illusion that there can be any kind of security for Israelis as long as apartheid persists. I think it’s very clear that the idea that the Palestinians can be indefinitely managed and pacified is no longer possible, and I think that the Israeli establishment understands that very well.

That’s why it’s not a return to business as usual. It’s rather a genocide. Because that business as usual, that status quo, I think has been irreversibly shattered.

Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that we’re going to be living in interminable violence? I think that’s certainly a possibility. It is very much a possibility that, given this awakening that’s happening within Israel, that Palestinians can’t be placed behind walls and forgotten, there is the possibility of finishing what started in ‘48. And we see that in spectacular violence in the Gaza Strip.

But I think where it’s clear is, perhaps, in the West Bank, and with Palestinian citizens of Israel, where there is violence, intimidation, imprisonment, population transfers. [Did you know], since October 7th, 17 villages in the West Bank have been depopulated? So, the colonization on crack is evident throughout historic Palestine. So, certainly, this interminable violence is a possibility.

And then there’s another possibility, which is that the international community wakes up and recognizes that the only way there can be real security and justice in Palestine is if the Palestinian demands for liberation are actually engaged with, rather than placated. So, if there’s a real engagement with what the sources of violence and injustice are, and if there’s a real attempt to bring accountability and to try to dismantle apartheid, I think that’s the only way that we’re going to get a sustainable resolution.

But I have very little faith that this will happen, at least in the near- to medium-term future, because of two things. One, I do think that the Israeli society now does not quite understand what’s happened since October 7th, in the sense that there’s such censorship, and media blackout, and control of the messaging. I think that the Israeli society has been allowed, through Western impunity, to move in a direction that’s fascist and right wing. It’s very difficult for them to really grapple with an alternative that isn’t genocidal. So, I think post-October 7, there’s no change that’s coming, I don’t think, from within Israel.

But the second reason for that is because the international community remains committed to policies that have failed. It’s quite shocking to think of the level of violence that’s happened since October 7th, and the only policy recommendations that the international policy actors can come [up] with is a return to what was before October 7th. It just shows the poverty and the failure of the international community to really understand the place, and what’s happening.

SAK: Well, let me ask you about the U.S. response in particular.

President Biden on Sunday warned Prime Minister Netanyahu that a ground offensive in Rafah should not proceed without a plan to protect the hundreds of thousands of civilians there. In remarks a few days before that, where he had a gaffe — where he called Abdel Fattah El-Sisi the president of Mexico — but he said Israel’s response in Gaza was “over the top.” Which is a meager expression, but perhaps the harshest criticism to date that Biden has given Israel over its brutal assault, but there hasn’t been any change in policy that we’ve seen so far, and the Biden administration has fully vocally supported this military campaign.

They’ve increased military aid and funding, they’ve even bypassed Congress to send munitions to Israel. They’ve vetoed calls for a ceasefire at the U.N. Security Council.

Are you surprised by the Biden administration’s response to this, or is it just business as usual from the U.S.? 

TB: It’s not necessarily business as usual. There are two things that might explain this shift in tone, but I have to make clear from the beginning that I don’t believe this shift in tone represents a shift in policy. I think that the Biden administration is still actively complicit in genocide, there’s just no two ways about it. Diplomatically, militarily, financially, it’s enabling Israel to do what it’s doing.

But there’s two reasons for this shift in tone. The first is that the Biden administration, I think, is becoming increasingly aware of how evident its complicity is, and what kind of exposure this might mean for the administration.

So, I’m thinking specifically of the ICJ trial, but not only. The case brought against the Biden administration in federal court in the U.S. by the Center for Constitutional Rights in California is making a case that the Biden administration is complicit in genocide, and the judge was unable to proceed with the case, but made it quite clear that, from the legal standpoint, they believe that there is a plausible case for the U.S. being complicit in genocide.

So, now we have an American administration, a Democratic American administration actively facing charges of genocide at a time when its base very clearly is not aligned with where the Democratic Party is at. And there’s a level of disruption that’s happening on a grassroots [level] here that’s considerable.

So, I think there’s that element, that there’s a clear, maybe four-month delayed sense of shame that they’re openly dehumanizing Palestinians, calling into question the numbers of Palestinians killed, showing no empathy for the fact that there’s a genocide happening, actively being complicit in the genocide. I think, now, the tone shift is trying to weigh that out a bit.

But the second and I believe maybe more important reason is the election. They’re worried about losing Michigan, and the reality is that this is something that is a very clear possibility. Obviously, because Michigan has a very strong Arab demographic base, and they are appalled by what the Biden administration is doing. And there are all these efforts now to try to present it as if the Biden administration or even the Democratic Party really cares about Palestinians or Arab issues, or had not taken the despicable route it’s taken since October 7th.

So, both of these are, I think, just politics. They’re really just trying to put a cleaner face or a more civil veneer on the fact that they are genocidal.

SAK: And what about the media’s coverage of what’s happening in Gaza in this country? We’ve seen a lot of criticism of newspapers like The New York Times, but other outlets as well.

You’ve been following and thinking about and writing about Palestine for many years now. There’s always been some sort of bias in the media in the United States that many people criticize these larger outlets of bias towards Israel in the language they use in their coverage. What have you seen this time?

TB: I mean, part of the reason that I think there’s been such a shift, at least on the grassroot [level] here is because many people have access to media that isn’t the mainstream media. I really think that this is probably the first genocide to be livestreamed on social media, and on our iPhones. And so, people have access to information that isn’t The New York Times and other [comparable media] — The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC — because the level of complicity and silencing that happens in the mainstream media, specifically on Palestine, is quite unbelievable.

And we saw that from day one. From Muslim anchors being removed from their platforms to the numbers of op-eds that were being penned by Palestinians as versus non-Palestinians, to the fact that many of the points that Israeli propaganda/Hasbara makes are regurgitated completely uncritically by the mainstream media, but also by the mainstream— I mean, obviously, President Biden himself fell into those Islamophobic and Orientalist tropes at the beginning.

So, the structural silencing of Palestinians is very difficult to witness, actually, specifically in American media. And I think social media has been a very important corrective. It’s a very important corrective to the kind of racism and bias that mainstream media has here.

SAK: I just want to turn quickly again to the West Bank, which you mentioned. Because of the focus on Gaza, a lot of what’s happening in the West Bank hasn’t received as much coverage, but the level of colonial violence and dispossession has accelerated dramatically over the past few months. Three hundred eighty — or at least 380 — Palestinians have been killed in attacks by armed settlers, as well as soldiers. Nearly 7,000 have been arrested and are held without charge in so-called administrative detention. Of course, this was happening before October 7th, but now it’s on a different scale.

And you have these raids, also, into places like Jenin, with Israeli soldiers going undercover dressed as doctors to assassinate a wounded patient in a hospital. What’s your assessment of what’s taking place in the West Bank as well, and in ‘48? 

TB: I think there’s a real expansion and strengthening of the settler violence against Palestinians for a number of reasons; dispossession being first and foremost, but also intimidation, terrorizing, inflicting real violence. I think there’s a real ideological commitment by the settler entity — or the settlers writ large — to really wreak havoc throughout the West Bank, and we’ve seen that before October 7th and, obviously, it’s on a more significant scale after October 7th.

And one of the things that’s been interesting to watch in this space is the Biden administration, for example, put out an executive order a few days ago, naming four settlers and sanctioning them. So, freezing their assets and saying that they’re sanctioning these settlers for acts of terror, and for the violence that they’ve meted out against Palestinians in the West Bank. And some have seen this as an important precedent, that this is a way to begin engaging with the sanctioning of the settler movement, which it might be.

But part of the issue with that approach, with focusing on settler violence in these sort of individual cases, is that it forgets or omits the structural reality of settler violence, which is that the leaders of the settler movement, the leaders of the people who are committing colonial violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, are sitting in the highest echelons of the Israeli government. So, the idea that you can sanction four individuals, or numerous individuals, while dealing with the Israeli government in full diplomatic, military, legal, financial support is attempting to separate ‘67 from Israel. As if the apparatus of military rule and colonization that’s happening in the West Bank — the settlement building, the violence — as if that’s separate from the Israeli government, and that’s an illusion.

There’s no separation. It’s a singular regime that’s committing different forms of violence against Palestinians in different locations. What’s happening in the West Bank is not the result of acts of individuals or groups. This is state-sanctioned policy that’s being driven from the top in the Israeli establishment onwards.

More than that, it’s not a right-wing ideology, which is something that you often hear in liberal circles, that if we resolve the Netanyahu issue, then we’re going to have a more civilized Israeli regime that can be dealt with diplomatically. And the truth is that the settlement enterprises, fundamentally, a labor enterprise, and there’s no consensus within Israel that actually limits the kind of settlement, outgrowth, or colonization of the West Bank. It’s misunderstanding how this regime has operated since ‘48, and continues to do so today.

So, I think what’s happening in the West Bank shows, actually, the continuation of efforts to colonize and expand the Israeli state.

SAK: And, final question: it’s hard to talk about hope in these dark times right now, with what’s happening in Gaza, with what’s happening in the West Bank, with everything that’s happening across Palestine. But, as you mentioned, the status quo was shattered, and we’re in some new paradigm. Is there anything that gives you a glimmer of hope?

TB: I think there are a lot of things that give me hope. I mean, it’s very, as you say, it’s really hard to talk about hope when the violence is so extreme. 

But the reality is that the status quo, or the paradigm that we existed in before October 7th, was a paradigm in which no one was talking about Palestine, and Palestinians were dying constantly. And now, we’re living in a paradigm where we’re actually talking about the root causes of suffering in Palestine, which is colonization, genocidal violence, attempts at ethnic cleansing. These are the problems that Palestinians have been facing since before ‘48.

Now, we’re having this conversation on an American platform, talking about ethnic cleansing and genocide. We’re talking about Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology. We’re talking about what Palestinians have been saying and facing for decades. So, that rupture is really important, and that rupture is the beginning of a real shift in terms of how we understand justice in Palestine.

You know, I’ve been living in New York since October 7th. I don’t normally live in the city, and the kind of organizing work that’s been happening has been mind-blowing. And to see that support for Palestine is across color lines, is multigenerational, but mostly driven by the younger generation, gives me a great degree of hope. Because, while, let’s say the Democratic Party here is still aligned with a ‘70s outlook on Zionism, the base of the Democratic Party is progressive, and they understand what this means. The realignment that will have to happen in the American political establishment is one that is moving in the direction of justice for Palestine.

And these changes, these paradigmatic ruptures are very unsettling, and they are destabilizing, and they will take time. But I think the general trajectory we’re moving in is one that’s very hopeful.

Now, that’s not to say that justice is inevitable, because I do think that Palestinians are facing an adversary that is very powerful and extreme in the tactics and the violence that they use. But I do think that, more than before October 7th, Palestinians have a level of understanding, of international solidarity, and mobilization, that they didn’t see before. And I think that’s really important.

SAK: Well, Tareq Baconi, thank you very much for joining us.

TB: Thanks for having me.

SAK: That was Tareq Baconi, the author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And 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 what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted. And definitely do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcast. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

The post Nowhere Left to Go in Gaza as Israel’s Ground Assault on Rafah Looms appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza is entering its fifth month. As the brutal siege and bombing continues, the United Nations and other international organizations are warning of famine and the outbreak of diseases. Powerful nations around the world, led by the U.S., are not just supplying weapons and political support for Israel, but also have now joined in the campaign to further restrict vital humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Biden administration has led the charge to suspend funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the most important aid organization operating in Gaza. Israel has waged a smear campaign against UNRWA, baselessly characterizing the whole organization as a front group for Hamas. What began as an accusation that a few UNRWA employees may have participated in the October 7 attacks has now become a sweeping attack against the organization’s very existence.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill is joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, a political educator and director of the Decolonial Centre in London. Elnaiem discusses the ways pro-colonial narratives provide support to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, despite people around the world watching a “livestreamed genocide.” He also breaks down the major imperial powers’ role in the conflict, connecting the historical thread of colonialism to the current war.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The U.S.-backed Israeli war against Gaza is now entering its fifth month. It would be impossible to overstate the horrifying destruction that has been unleashed on the people of Gaza. More than 27,000 have been killed. The vast majority — 70 percent of them — are women and children. More than 66,000 others are injured. And these statistics are likely a dramatic undercount; thousands of people remain missing, many of them are lying dead under the rubble of what was once their homes.

More than 80% of Gaza’s Palestinians are now internally displaced, and are being corralled under threat of bombing into an ever-shrinking killing cage, as the Israelis begin to lay siege to Rafah, along the Egyptian border.

Hani Mahmoud, Reporter, Al Jazeera English: Overnight — when, in fact, it started in the early hours of last night — in the evening hours, with the heavy artillery shelling of the eastern part of Rafah City, and finishing at about midnight, with massive airstrikes on both different locations, in eastern Rafah and in the central part of Rafah city. Very crowded and densely populated, two areas. The one in eastern Rafah, a residential home full of displaced Palestinians…

JS: Two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals have now been rendered entirely inoperable. Famine is spreading, clean water is scarce. Doctors are performing limb amputations on children with no anesthesia. Some patients are dying from the shock of the excruciating pain. Women are having C-sections with no anesthetics.

Israel has enforced a wartime blockade on the entry of aid. That’s resulted in only a tiny fraction of what the U.N. and other organizations say would be necessary to even begin to address the horrifying reality. 

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO: First, to Gaza, where WHO continues to face extreme challenges in supporting the health system and health workers. As of today, over 100,000 Gazans are either dead, injured, or missing and presumed dead. WHO has faced great difficulty, even to reach hospitals in southern Gaza.

Heavy fighting has been reported in the hospitals in Khan Yunis, severely impaired access to health facilities for patients, health workers, and supplies.

JS: The World Food Program has for weeks been warning that Gaza is facing catastrophic hunger and starvation. People in Gaza have on average just one-and-a-half liters of water per day; that’s to drink, to wash with, to cook with. Chronic diarrhea is rampant among children; there has been a 2,000 percent increase since Israel launched its invasion and bombing in October. Milk and formula are now scarce, newborns are having to eat solid foods long before their bodies are ready for it, causing other health issues. There is an average of one toilet per 480 people in shelters in Gaza.

Steve Inskeep, Host, NPR: As they respond to the October 7th attack by Hamas, the Israeli forces have destroyed many Palestinian schools and universities. The places flattened include Israa University in Gaza City.

Reporter, France 24 English: With no shelter and limited supplies, these displaced Gazans have been living on the streets in Khan Younis. Some have seen their homes demolished by Israeli airstrikes, and fear that nowhere in the enclave is safe.

Anchorperson, Al Jazeera English: Well, we begin in Gaza, where Israeli forces are showing no signs of slowing their attacks. The main building of Nasr Hospital in Khan Yunis is amongst the latest targets. Troops are surrounding the facility and intense bombing has been taking place around it overnight. Gaza’s health ministry says no one has been able to enter or exit the hospital, which was already struggling to treat the wounded.

JS: Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s universities and schools, its healthcare centers, its archives and libraries. It is engaging in controlled demolitions of entire neighborhoods, blowing up apartment complexes, destroying farms and other agricultural areas. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed or significantly damaged. There are reports of mass executions of prisoners and the widespread torture of other Palestinians. And, at every turn, Netanyahu and his henchmen have made clear they intend to continue their campaign indefinitely, even as their military forces face a quagmire in their military battle against the Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian fighters.

And Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, he’s back in the Middle East, and continues to reiterate that the U.S. opposes a permanent ceasefire.

U.S. House: On this vote, the yeas are 226, the nays are 196. The bill is passed.

Reporter, Reuters: The U.S. House passed a bill to provide almost $15 billion in aid to Israel on Thursday.

JS: The U.S. continues to rush weapons and ammunition to Israel to continue this slaughter. And, at the same time, the Biden administration has led the charge to cut funding to UNRWA, perhaps the most important international organization operating on the ground in Gaza. The U.S. and other nations have accepted, without any actual concrete evidence, Israel’s accusation that a tiny number of UNRWA staff participated in the October 7th attacks.

This is an organization with 30,000 employees, more than 12,000 of them inside Gaza itself, and the U.S. has admitted it has not even bothered to check the facts on its own, and yet, has now allowed the Israeli government’s propaganda to replace any sort of independent U.S. policy.

The U.S. is outsourcing even the minimal semblance of independence to an extreme Israeli agenda against the most important aid organization in Gaza. That’s the fact.

Catherine Byaruhanga, BBC News: The U.N.’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Gaza said it was vital for UNRWA to be able to continue with its work.

Sigrid Kaag, Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, U.N.: There’s no substitution for the humanitarian role that is played in Gaza. We need to all ramp up, given the totality of needs, and the scale, and the complexity of the crises. There is no substitution.

JS: And all of this comes as Biden is pushing for an additional $14 billion of new cash to Tel Aviv for Israel’s war against the people of Gaza.

This is all happening as the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel can proceed. The court explicitly ordered Israel to allow with immediate effect the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The main U.N. humanitarian organization OCHA says that, in January, Israel blocked 66 percent of its planned missions to deliver aid to Gaza. Israel has intensified its attacks against UNRWA and the U.N. were a clear attempt to distract from the ICJ ruling. It also happens at a time when a federal judge in California has ruled that the Biden administration is plausibly supporting genocidal actions by continuing to arm and back Israel.

The U.S. is not some outside observer. It is complicit in all of this. It’s an active partner in the carnage, the bombings, the attacks against defenseless civilians. And it’s leading the international charge to defund the most important aid organization operating in Gaza. And yet, we are told that Biden — who apparently spends his mornings watching Morning Joe on MSNBC — is losing patience with Netanyahu.

This apparently is the Democrats emerging strategy for 2024: blame the war all on Bibi’s extremism, and gaslight everyone by claiming that Joe Biden was somehow a voice of moderation. Well, in the real world, Biden almost cannot give a speech anywhere now without it being disrupted by protesters confronting him for his support of the scorched-earth war.

And the White House says it doesn’t want a wider war in the Middle East, and yet its expanding its bombing campaigns in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, and says it will continue indefinitely.

Keir Simmons, NBC News: The bodies of Iraqis killed in this weekend’s airstrikes were buried today. With speeches from pro-Iranian leaders calling for America to be clean from the country.

Iraq’s prime minister visited the wounded in the hospital. The strikes, aiming to punish Iran and Iranian-backed groups for the attack that killed three U.S. soldiers. But the Pentagon admitted today, there are no reports of Iranians killed or injured.

JS: None of this is going to be neatly wrapped up in time for the 2024 election, and the White House knows it, because they are fueling it. They are hoping that Trump’s insanity is going to somehow save Biden, that people will let him off the hook for supporting and facilitating this genocidal war because they are terrified of Trump.

But the indications — at least right now — is that this is far from a guarantee. Biden’s ratings are in the toilet, and he has made clear he doesn’t care about the concerns of so many voters in the U.S. who are appalled at what he is doing right now to the people of Gaza. This isn’t just Israel’s war; it’s a joint US-Israeli war, and no amount of spin is going to wipe the blood off the hands of the U.S. officials who waged it.

But it’s not just the U.S. that has steadfastly backed the scorched-earth war; it’s virtually the entire Western establishment, with a few notable exceptions. Canada, they’re all-in. Britain, all-in. France, all-in. Germany, enthusiastically all-in. It is this coalition of the killing, and what motivates these nations to support Israel’s war of annihilation, that we are going to focus on on today’s program.

Our guest is Mohammed Elnaiem, a political educator, and Director of the Decolonial Centre in London. He is an advocate of anti-colonial politics and works with his colleagues to amplify anti-colonial work and activism.

Mohammed, thanks so much for being with us. Welcome to Intercepted. 

Mohammed Elnaiem: Thank you. 

JS: Mohammed, I want to begin with narrative. The narrative that has been deployed by… Not just by Israel, but by the United States, and the European countries that are supporting Israel’s war against Gaza. First of all, just start off by giving your broad reflections on the story of this war. How it began, how it’s been waged, what that has looked like from the United States and European capitals.

ME: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, first of all.

One of the things that has been horrific for a lot of us to see is the ways in which a certain kind of narrative, a European exceptionalist narrative — and I say “Europe and its offshoots,” in the sense that the United States is an offshoot of it, it’s part of the same global political culture — of almost needing to be entirely uncritical of Israel, and the way in which Israel is waging what’s effectively — and, even by the ICJ, potentially — a genocidal war against the people of Gaza.

For the longest time, when you’re looking at the media in general and other topics, Noam Chomsky’s idea that the role of the media is just to manufacture consent for everybody to fall in line with the foreign policy of the United States and Europe seems to be a bit over-simplistic. But then, all of a sudden, you’re watching the media, and this is a livestreamed genocide. The evidence is irrefutable, it’s publicly available. And the way in which the media kind of tiptoes around it, both-sides it, makes it seem as if it’s not important that a genocide is taking place, or sometimes just by omission, just pretends that this isn’t happening… I mean, you start to really buy into the idea that Chomsky had, which is that the role of the media is to manufacture consent.

And I think, one of the things is that this is a ripe moment for the far-right to recruit, because this is also a moment where it becomes very easy to buy into conspiracy theories which are antisemitic, that the reason why we’re seeing this is because there must be a conspiracy, Israel’s controlling the media, etc.

And so, for me, it’s like, I’m obviously someone of colonized descent — my dad was born during the time when Britain had still colonized Sudan — and I’m watching the media, and I’m watching, for example, the right-wing media. And they’re just sitting down there discussing — Julia Hartley Brewer had a guest on, just casually discussing if ethnic cleansing is a potential solution to the Gaza question. Or when you watch a person who maybe has had tens of their family members killed in Israeli airstrikes, and they’re asked to condemn Hamas.

The lack of shame, the lack of empathy. You have to try to understand, where is this coming from? And if you reject the conspiratorial antisemitic account, then you’re probably going to come to the conclusion that there’s something, culturally. What’s the cultural reason for how, in the name of anti-antisemitism, which generally means in the name of being against genocide, people are being actively complicit in genocide.

And so, for me, a part of the way in which I’m seeing the narrative is, where is that coming from? And I think, for me, the diagnosis to that problem is quite simply that all of these people in the cultural industry, the curators, the journalists, there’s no malign intent, there’s no need to engage in some kind of double standard. There’s a cultural problem here which is making them complicit in genocide, and that’s kind of what I’ve been interested in when it comes to the narratives.

JS: A lot of times people focus on the fact that the United States, because it’s the greatest bankroller of Israel in general, and the biggest sponsor of Israel specifically in this war of annihilation in Gaza, and, to a lesser extent, of course, the British government, which also is a very steadfast supporter of Israel, including when it’s at its most violent. But what we’re seeing is other European nations becoming very, very outspoken. Not just in their defense of Israel, but their specific defense of Israel’s tactics in Gaza.

I’m speaking specifically of the German government, certainly its spending on weapons. We’ve seen that on full display in the NATO/Ukraine-Russia conflict, but also, now, Germany is talking about actually exporting offensive weaponry to Israel.

And, in fact, you received, Mohamed, a lot of attention for a series of posts that you made on social media. When the German government chose to announce its support for Israel as it faced its genocide allegations at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa, Germany announced that it was supporting Israel in its case at the ICJ on the very day that, in Namibia, people were marking the 100th anniversary of the German genocide in Namibia.

I’d like for you to tell that story and offer your reflections on it, but also, to speak specifically to how you see Germany … Which, of course, murdered 6 million Jews in World War II — and not just Jews, [but] also communists, Roma people, Slavic people, gay people, etc. — but the country that waged this genocidal war in World War II is now taking the side of the Israeli state, which was created in the aftermath of that genocide in Europe, at the expense of the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now forcefully defending what many in the world believe is an ongoing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

ME: The honest truth is that when we’re hearing what’s happening to Palestinian and a lot of brown activists of diaspora descent who are fighting for Palestine in Germany, let’s just talk about that. And, more broadly, the decisions that Germany’s made on the international stage.

And you’re hearing stories of police officers coming in and destroying candlelight vigils for Shireen Abu Akleh, or police officers engaging in coordinated campaigns in seven different states, going into offices and making sure people don’t have the wrong literature and that they’re not Hamas supporters.

When you’re seeing these stories of peaceful protests happening in the area of New Köln in Berlin, and then the police just coming in and rampaging. I mean, these are moments and kinds of images which should make Germany ashamed, but also should give them pause, as to not reenact the historic crime which they committed upon the Jewish people and many others, which was the Holocaust.

And then, on the international stage, to see Germany supporting Israel unconditionally, even as Israel is potentially waging a genocide. And, on the day of the anniversary of the Nama and Herero genocide, these are all moments where you’d think … This is, again, it’s one of those moments where, don’t they get it? And, for me, the question is, why don’t they get it?

And so, the series of tweets that I wrote was an attempt to try to understand that question. And my conclusion is, is that a lot of people will claim that drawing any comparison of the Holocaust with another event is a form of relativizing the Holocaust. Whereas, for me, I think that one of the biggest problems for Europe, actually, and it’s part of why they don’t get it, in Europe and its offshoots, is actually exceptionalizing the Holocaust. In the sense that, of course, in many ways, the Holocaust was exceptionally brutal, a unique event, and one of the most horrific events to have ever happened; it’s a stain on the history of humanity. But, at the same time, the logic which went into the Holocaust preceded the Holocaust, and it succeeded the Holocaust.

What I mean by this is, in the 1940s, Aimé Césaire, who was from Martinique, wrote this book called “Discourse on Colonialism.” And he made the claim that, actually, the thing that upset Europe the most about the Holocaust wasn’t the techniques, he said it was the fact that those techniques were reserved solely for the people in the colonies, for African slaves, for what he called the Indian coolies, and that they were now coming to the soil of Europe. And he called it a boomerang effect.

And, a century prior to that, Amy Ashwood Garvey, who was an incredible thinker, and an anticolonialist who was a mentor to some of the first leaders of African independent countries … When fascist Italy had invaded Ethiopia, went to Trafalgar Square, and stood on the stage and said, the only thing in between you and fascism is us, the anticolonialists. And the reason was quite simple, that, for example, just to take the case of the Holocaust and how it connects directly to the Nama and Herero genocide, a lot of the key ideas of Nazi ideology were formulated in response to the conquest of what’s present-day Namibia.

And even the concept of a Lebensraum — and I may be pronouncing that wrong, and I’m sorry if I am — but the idea that there needs to be fertile land for the ills of industrialization, for Germany, the Volk, to be revitalized, which was an idea that made its way into “Mein Kampf,” was an idea that was developed by Ratzel in response to the Nama and Herero genocide, and in encouragement of it. But, more importantly, the Nama and Herero genocide was the first genocide that Germany committed in the 20th century. And it committed that genocide, obviously it developed a whole repertoire of ideas and techniques and ways of corralling people, concentrating them in certain places, killing them, depriving them of the their rights, and then eventually exterminating them. And, obviously, that went into German statecraft and informed the Holocaust.

But it’s much deeper than that, because we’re not just talking about the Nama and Herero genocide. We’re talking about the techniques that the British used in Kenya, in the Mau Mau emergency, and also in the Boer War. We’re talking about what the Italians did in Libya, we’re talking about what the Italians did in Ethiopia. And, just to show you the difference between the case of the Nama and Herero genocide … Germany only recognized and apologized for it a few years ago, and the amount of money that they sent as reparations — or so-called reparations — was a pittance, compared to the amount of money that the German state gave on the founding of Israel in the claims conference. And we’re talking about something like what, three billion dollars?

Most German kids don’t know about the Nama and Herero genocide. But so, then why is there this exceptionalizing narrative? Scholars have described many reasons for why, but I think one of the most important things is a form of self-identity, right? That, to be a person of a civilized country in Europe and Europe’s offshoots, whether we’re talking about the United States, etc., is to understand that, post-1945, this was an era where fascism was an aberration. It had nothing to do with, we are actually heirs of the Enlightenment. And we promised to say “never again,” and part of saying never again means unconditionally supporting Israel, because Israel is the incarnation of Jewish self-determination. I mean, this is the rationale, right?

But, for me, it’s the main problem, and the reason why maybe Europe and its offshoots are doomed to constantly be complicit in genocide — and here we’re talking about a difference of magnitude only — is because of the exceptionalizing narrative. It claims to seek penance for Jewish people, but it’s actually about trying to absolve oneself, in order to continue a system which claims to be predicated on ideals of the Enlightenment — like humanism and freedom and liberty — but which actually, by necessity, has to desecrate all of those values. And the only way in which you can continue with a system like that is to tell yourself a nice, soothing story that you are post-Holocaust, that you’ve learned from that, and that proof of that is unconditional support for Israel.

And I think this is damaging, because what it means is that we’re going to have to continue to see genocide as a permanent fixture of society, and we’ve got to push back against that. And so, that, for me, is one of the most horrifying aspects of the narrative which Europe tries to tell itself, and so-called “Global North” countries.

JS: I want to just read from the post from the Namibian president — who, by the way, just passed away this past weekend — but, on the day that the German government announced, on the 13th of January, 2024, that it was going to be supporting Israel at the International Court of Justice, the president of Namibia posted on social media, “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention Against Genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

Various international organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have chillingly concluded that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, and the President of Namibia said that he was “appealing to the German government to reconsider its untimely decision to intervene as a third-party in defense and support of the genocidal acts of Israel before the International Court of Justice.”

Now, that’s the Namibian president, but the overarching narrative that Israel promoted about South Africa taking it to the International Court of Justice on charges that it was violating the Genocide Convention, was that South Africa itself is the problem. That South Africa is a corrupt government, that South Africa has no moral standing to bring such charges against Israel, and that, in fact, it’s a complete atrocity that South Africa would dare to use the term genocide against the Israeli state, which was established in the aftermath of the genocide of World War II.

A lot of what happened was this attempt to say, don’t look at the 84-page filing, nine pages of which consisted of statements from Israeli officials clearly making statements that could be interpreted as genocidal intent. Instead, look at South Africa’s problem.

What the Israelis also rejected was a notion that there was any historical significance to South Africa, a nation that suffered under an apartheid system that was backed by Western countries led by the United States for decades, that that had no relevance whatsoever to the proceedings in court.

ME: I mean, you just hit the nail on the head. One of the things about the narrative which I’m talking about right now is the fact that Netanyahu himself has said that this is a struggle between light and darkness, right? This is a struggle between civilization and animals. At the Decolonial Center we hold that, actually, the main ideas which made colonialism possible and justified continued until the present, and I think that this is a perfect example of that.

First of all, I am extremely critical of the current government of South Africa, right? The current government of South Africa has a lot to answer to its people. But the way to delegitimize that is actually also tapping into a part of the psyche which sees these countries as S-hole countries, like what Trump said. That these are corrupt, backwater countries. You can’t trust them, and what do they know about genocide?

So that’s one where it’s basically a reiteration of, OK, if they’re so uncivilized, how can you expect them to say anything? And if you look on social media, especially Israeli social media, and far-right Israeli social media, you’ll see a lot more overt expressions of what I’m trying to explain.

But it’s also this kind of moment, with Namibia challenging Germany, and it’s kind of like we’re seeing this rise, again, of a kind of spirit that’s always been latent since the era of decolonization, but I would say even much earlier than that. Which is basically to say, you claim to stand with these concepts of international law, and international human rights, and rules-based order, etc. Why aren’t you?

And the first challenge to this, or the first challenge to, for example, the principles of the French Revolution, came from Haiti. C.L.R. James, who wrote this book on “The Black Jacobins,” on the Haitian Revolution, said that, when the challenge came from Haiti, people in the National Assembly would shove the rights of man deep into their pockets. You know, they don’t want to make this appeal.

And this is kind of what’s at stake here, when South Africa comes up, and Namibia comes up, and all of these countries, regardless of whether or not whether it will actually prevent a genocide. The fact that it’s happening is, I think, something that caught the Western world and Israel off guard. But it’s also, again, part of that same tradition, third-world anticolonial tradition of saying, “We believe in these concepts which you claim to profess more than you believe in these concepts, and we’re here to rescue them from you.”

And I think that that’s why the default position to try to push back against that has to be that these people are uncivilized, these people are corrupt, these people can’t be trusted. And I think that that’s really what’s at stake with these challenges.

JS: I want to ask you about the United Nations. Of course, the secretary general of the U.N. has been quite forceful in denouncing the record number of killings of U.N. personnel. And, of course, many United Nations officials have been very bluntly outspoken about the nature of the war that Israel is waging.

But, when it comes to what can the United Nations actually do, it’s become more clear during these past four months, than I think ever in history, that the United States governs over a system where it alone decides who the bad guys are in the world, where it alone will decide whether bombs are dropped or cease to be falling. And you have this dance that plays out where nations of the world make their arguments, oftentimes based on legal precedent and the precedent of international law in the United Nations, as to why Israel must cease its operations against Gaza.

And, on the other side, you have the United States treating it as basically just a discussion society that the U.S. is forced to sit through. And then, at the end of the day, whoever happens to be sitting in the chair of the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. vetoes what the vast majority of nations and people of the world have made clear that they believe is a just course.

I want you to talk, though, about the role of the United Nations in everything that we’re witnessing, and the message that is sent when, at the end of the day, the Secretary General of the U.N. can basically be begging for an end to this war, and yet the United States says, no, no, no, it doesn’t work that way. It works this way. We say when things end, we say when the burning fire is put out.

ME: Actually, this is really interesting, Jeremy, because when I first learned about the Hague Act, that was actually from you, during the times when you wrote Drone Wars, and it just blew my mind that there was a law which said that if the United States is ever taken to the ICC that it could invade The Hague, and the diplomatic spat that happened afterwards.

I think what’s more worrying is, for the longest time we’ve already known, and I think it’s clear to everybody now, that international law is a tool that’s wielded by the powerful, [the] former colonizing countries, and also the new empires of the world. But I think what’s more terrifying is that now we almost feel like we also have to be on the defensive [to] the U.N.

Because after decolonization happened, there was a moment of hope that the U.N. General Assembly could be this place, one person, one vote. And you have, all of a sudden, for the first time in the world it’s not just a few countries — Spain, France, Britain, and the United States, etc. — who are deciding the agenda on the world stage, but it’s the entire world. And there were even hopes, when there was a proposal by Algeria in the early 1970s for a new international economic order, for the U.N. General Assembly to kind of be a legislative body of a world republic, for example.

Of course, that didn’t happen, and the Security Council system happened instead, and that was a way in which the hegemony of the United States came into full gear. And then, of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has been virtually unchallenged when it comes to these kinds of things.

And so, right now, the best way to look at the U.N. is to see it as both an extension of Western power … For example, we’re talking about debt, global debt. The ability to forgive global debt would be so easy if the United States said [something], but it doesn’t. When it comes to all sorts of things related to, for example, dealing with the biggest threat to the entire species right now — which is the life-supporting systems of our planet, which is climate change, and facilitation of loss and damages, and all of that stuff — obviously, the U.N. is an obstacle.

At the same time, the U.N.’s humanitarian organizations are the last lifeline for people in Gaza, for example, right now: UNRWA. And what we’re actually seeing, which is even regardless of the fact that the United States and Western countries profess and claim to be standing for the rules-based order, we’re seeing that the biggest assault against that rules-based order is being waged by the West.

It’s no small thing right now, the pulling out of funding of UNRWA. It’s no small thing that the heads of states of Western powers … And it’s even divided the West. I haven’t seen something like this in a long time, where you have, for example, Norway and Ireland and Spain saying that it’s a bad idea, what are we doing? Like, it’s to that level.

And so, all of a sudden, for the first time, I’m even finding myself in a position where, on the one side, the U.N. legitimates and, like you said, it becomes a discussion room for all these countries. On the other side, I feel that the only groups of people — and this is one of the things that it’s been a surprising turn — the only people who are defending the idea that there should be international norms and rules, and that you shouldn’t be openly attacking the only thing that represents that aspiration, seems to be the Global South, you know?

And, whereas the biggest group to kind of attack the U.N. as biased… Israel is openly, openly hostile towards the United Nations, but the way in which people have fallen in line after this investigation on the… And not even an investigation; after the claims of the Israeli government on the UNRWA staff being involved in Hamas attack. And that’s been really, really horrifying to watch.

JS: And you also had Israel first saying that 12 UNRWA staffers were involved in some capacity directly in the attacks of October 7th. And then you had Israel giving its so-called dossier to a number of news organizations, and the first news organization to do a significant report about this was the Wall Street Journal, and they sort of elevated it even higher, and said that a full 10 percent of the local staff — UNRWA is a 30,000-employee organization, 12,000 or so of its employees are Gaza-based — and so, the Wall Street Journal does this big story where they say, ah, it’s not just 12 bad apples it’s that 10 percent of the organization is in some way linked to Hamas. Which, in and of itself, is a risible thing to say, because Hamas is the governing authority in Gaza, and simply saying that someone is linked to Hamas without defining it means absolutely nothing.

But also, you had Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, saying publicly that the United States had not even done its own investigation into the veracity of the claims before very publicly vowing to suspend its funding to UNRWA, which then created a domino effect, and you had, then, other powerful wealthy nations say, we’re going to do the same thing.

But then, you had the Financial Times, and Sky News, and some other media outlets, also review this dossier — and these are not exactly leftist publications — but they said that what Israel is alleging is not substantiated, even in the documents that Israel is providing. And now, you have a walk back where they appear to be saying, “Oh, well, four members of UNRWA were involved in some capacity in the events of October 7th.”

So, this is just the latest episode in Israel’s campaign to bombard the marketplace of ideas with propaganda, with lies, with disinformation, misinformation. And, time and time again, we have seen the United States in particular not just repeat Israel’s allegations, but often say, we actually have other intelligence to indicate that this is true. They did that with al-Shifa hospital, for example.

But, on this issue, I also wanted to transfer to asking you about the way that armed resistance is talked about, partially in this conflict, but in general, when you’re talking about people who are facing down against oppression from either powerful nations or allies of powerful nations, as in the case of Israel. Now, we can talk specifically about the events of October 7th, and I think that we should separate the attacks that Hamas launched against military facilities.

I mean, Hamas has its own narrative, and it published its multipage defense of its actions. And it stated that its intent was to go after military targets, and they have their own definition of who’s a civilian and who’s not, that we don’t need to get into. It’s clear that there were war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th. I don’t think anyone reasonable could deny that. You don’t kidnap children, you don’t kidnap elderly people, you don’t shoot unarmed people who are trying to surrender. This isn’t a political thing I’m saying, it’s a legal thing. These are war crimes.

At the same time, the overarching narrative about Palestinians in general — and we’ve seen it in a very acute way here — is that they are not allowed to have any form of resistance that Israel does not permit. And even when they’ve demonstrated nonviolently, they’ve been gunned down. But this notion that is being drilled into the public mind, that the mere notion that Palestinians would take up arms against what the United Nations continues to maintain is an occupation — not just in the West Bank, but in Gaza as well — is rooted in a very long history of criminalizing all forms of unsanctioned defense of populations that are the victims of colonialism; or, in this case, violent settler colonialism and an apartheid state.

ME: Yeah, that’s entirely correct, and that’s actually something that a lot of third-world countries in the 20th century tried to push for, to be recognized in international law. And, actually, the right to armed resistance against colonial occupation is a right that is actually protected under international law; many people don’t know that.

But I think one of the things that makes this so much more complicated is that we now live also in an era of the war on terror. And one of the key ideas is that, because of the fact that so many countries went through these phases of national liberation — which may be some of the last key national liberation movements in the early 1990s, but generally the majority of it being the 70s and the 60s, whether we’re talking about Algeria, talking about Mozambique, etc. — a lot of attempts to try to resist colonial occupations, which continue to exist today, are easily branded as terrorism.

And one of the reasons for that is because there’s a template, which the United States has set, which equates resistance with terrorism, and which then plays into the geopolitical interests of that country. There’s all sorts of discourses and ideas, in the media, in movies, on TV, television shows, which makes it very difficult today for any group to be legible as being a group that’s legitimately fighting for its national liberation.

One of the things that the United States is very known for is that it is a country which sees its own war of independence as a canonical event in its history in order to have existed. And there was a really interesting conversation that Huey Newton had, I think, with William Buckley, where the first thing [is], Huey Newton catches William Buckley off guard, and he says, you know, would have you joined the revolutionary war? And William Buckley didn’t know how to respond, and he waffled a bit.

And that’s the thing. It’s like, if you’re going to condemn a country’s ability to come out of a war, or an armed resistance, or an armed struggle, then the United States must condemn itself. And it does, it does, and it regularly does, because it’s kind of like, we got here first, and closed the door behind us.

And that’s kind of how Palestinian… But the thing is, is that we saw through the Oslo Accords. There was an attempt to go through the peaceful route, and the Oslo Accords ended up just providing a rubber stamp to the Palestinian Authority working with the Israelis as kind of like a proxy force for the occupation.

We saw just last year, when there [were] the peaceful marches and people were just getting sniped, one after the other. They tried the peaceful march approach, they tried the international law approach, they tried through the ICC. And then, of course, they’ve also tried, and there’s been a history of trying armed resistance.

But I think this kind of ties in again with the UNRWA defunding. In this sense, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they try because, at the end of the day, Israel civil society, very unfortunate for me to say, basically, the narrative is that Palestinian people, especially the people in Gaza, are, to use the language that has been popularized as of late, the civil wing of Hamas, actually, they are Hamas. They hide Hamas in their doors, in their homes. They sympathize with Hamas secretly. They’re raising their kids to become Hamas. And so, it’s fair game.

Yeah, it’s fair game to deprive them of their rights, to deprive them of humanitarian assistance. Because, as far as the people who wrote that dossier are concerned, this is a formality for them. It doesn’t matter. There’s no need to prove UNRWA is Hamas; UNRWA is Hamas for the fact that it employs Palestinian people.

Obviously, this attack against UNRWA has …. We saw it. We saw it in the Trump administration. It’s not new, you know? What’s worse is that, effectively, because of what we talked about, about the flaws of the U.N. system, the way that the ICJ report was written — and this was the argument that South Africa made — it was written in such a way where the only way in which you could bring in humanitarian assistance to the people, which was one of the demands of the court, is for a ceasefire.

How Israel responded to that, the response was quite simply that, we will outsource the potential genocide which we’re engaging in Gaza to our allies. And the allies, they joined in. And so, what ends up happening now is that those war crimes are being outsourced using the same discourses, which prevent Palestinians from even resisting. Which is basically that they deserve it. They deserve to not have aid, they’re complicit in the attack. And if you do it, it’s more like, they did it, not us. That’s their crime, not mine.

I think that that’s really what is at the heart of all of this.

JS: How has the war against Gaza been received in other countries that have been subjected to violent colonialism or apartheid? Maybe you can walk through a couple of notable examples.

ME: I think the best example, obviously, is South Africa, because I think South Africa, Namibia [much] of the entire world was just colonized, basically. Again, it’s this opportunity to confront the West with the hypocrisy, but also, it really is about seeing the higher ideals that are actually a positive contribution of the West, for example, to the world. The ideals of human rights, the ideals of human liberty, and to confront that head on with a system which desecrates that. And Israel is a perfect opportunity for this.

I was watching COP28, and I saw all of the heads of states, and a huge amount of them condemned what was going on in Gaza in the first international meeting after the attack. And so, you saw [that] it was very clear. And you saw Gustavo Petro in Colombia, who has been very outspoken, and has even suggested that South Africa be given the Nobel Peace Prize. But you also saw Chile, which has a huge population of the Palestinian diaspora, the biggest outside of the Middle East. You saw Honduras. In general, it became a rallying cry for a host of other issues, because a lot of these countries were also fighting for loss and damages on climate reparations.

Basically, what Israel has done to Gaza has had reverberations, basically, on the multilateral level of a division that’s happened since maybe the Bandung Conference, which is basically that you have a lot of these formerly colonized countries, third-world countries, saying that they’re not interested in being pawns of a cold war, and that they’re nonaligned, and that what they want is a complete redrawing of the architecture of the global economy, and the global systems of international law. And that’s why it has been an event which has brought people back together, and reignited that spirit, and I think that that’s why it’s not just about what’s going on in Gaza.

Gustavo Petro made the connection. For example, he said that Gaza is kind of like the future, and that in a world where the vast majority of the world’s population is becoming redundant, and we are not prepared to tackle the risk of climate-induced disaster, there will be more Gazas. And that Europe will respond — this is what he said — to these waves of migration, etc., with the same doctrine of extermination which it is imposing on Gaza.

And so, in many ways, it’s not just about the legacies of colonialism and existing colonialism, but it’s about trying to create the new order, a new international order where everybody is seen as equal, and trying to use this as an opportunity to not just defend Gaza, but to defend the idea that every state and every person is equal, and that there are no hierarchies of who deserves justice and who doesn’t. And to push back against the idea that the only people who should face justice are those who are geopolitically convenient to the United States.

JS: Just to clarify for people that might not be familiar with that history, when you mentioned the Bandung Conference of 1955, it was one of the most important early meetings of what would become known as the Non-aligned Movement. Yugoslavia was part of it, India was part of it, Egypt was part of it, Kwame Nkrumah and other revolutionary leaders were part of it. And the notion was that most of the world’s people in what is now referred to as the Global South should not cast their lot with either the United States or the Soviet Union in an exclusive manner. Instead, they should develop a third way of functioning in international relations where you didn’t become either a puppet for or a slave to either of these dominant spheres of influence that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.

But, speaking of colonialism, I wanted to ask you about Britain and its position on Palestine, and how the British government has proceeded over these past four months. Because it’s not just the governing right-wing conservative government in Britain, but also the leader of the so-called Opposition Labour in Britain, and his full-throttled support for Israel.

Talk a bit about how this war has played out on a domestic level in the U.K..

ME: So, on the one side in the U.K., it’s been a moment of radicalization for a lot of youth; and I say that in a positive sense of the word, radicalization in the sense that people are now understanding that there’s a root cause problem in the way that the world order is structured, and they’re ready to fight for what’s right, and to fight for legitimate humanist ideals. On the other side, there’s been a huge disenfranchisement, especially of Muslim communities.

There was just a poll that was released yesterday, which showed a dramatic drop in support for the Labour Party since Keir Starmer publicly said that he thought that cutting off water, food, and electricity to the people of Gaza is Israel’s right. And the Labour Party tries to resolve its bad rep now with progressives and with a lot of Muslims by claiming that it supports a Palestinian state, but this is obviously a ruse. Because the illegal settlements continue to expand, the siege is never lifted on Gaza, but we support the idea of a Palestinian state. But then, when the Palestinian authority tries to lobby for one in the international sphere, they’ll support [vetoing] it, or they’ll abstain. Things like that. People are not buying it, right?

But there was one story which I found really horrific. There was a man who had lost lots of his family members in Gaza. He’d met Angela Rayner, who’s a key figure in the Labour Party opposition, and he protested against her. And then, I think there was an interview with Sky News or something with Angela Rayner, and they asked, how do you feel? You know, did it remind you of the time when … There was another politician called Joe Cox who was killed by a far-right person? Did it remind you of that? And she made herself out to be as if she’s the victim of, again, the same tropes, you know: this brute Palestinian man.

And I think one of the things that I’ve also been really surprised with, and it’s one of those things, again, it’s part of the same episode, principle, dynamics. There’s been this interesting thing about the criminalization of the Palestinian flag; it’s something that’s happening in Germany as well. And in the U.K. we have this non-binding definition by the IHRA of antisemitism, which says that attacking the state of Israel is a form of antisemitism, etc. And one of the things, also, is denying the right for Israel to exist.

But, for Palestinians, denying the right, the existence of a Palestinian people, is something which is socially acceptable and even encouraged. One of the things that’s really interesting is that people say that waving a Palestinian flag is a provocation against Jews. And I think that that’s very telling, in the sense that the existence of a flag, [which] symbolizes a peoplehood, it symbolizes the existence of a nation, the existence of a people, and to say that waving their flag is a provocation means that the existence of those very people is seen as a provocation.

And that should show you, more generally, that the existence of the Palestinian people is seen as an inconvenience, and that’s why it’s become morally and socially acceptable to speak of them, to speak of ethnic cleansing as a solution to the Gaza question, you know? I mean, that’s kind of how they see it, that this is perfectly acceptable.

And so, there’s this huge distance, and I think this is something you could probably relate to in the United States, between the commentariat, between the press, and the people who are on their social media, on Twitter, etc., and they’re seeing this potential genocide being livestreamed on their phones. It’s a livestreamed genocide.

And the Labour Party is just completely out of touch. I am someone who has been committed to the Labour Party. I’m not going to vote for the Labour Party in the next general election, and I think there are many people who feel the same. Because, if this is not a red line, then what is?

I think that this is a turning point for a lot of people, in the sense that the status quo in Palestine is being rejected and renounced. And if, in just a year, with all of the normalization agreements that were happening between Israel and the countries around it … I mean, the fact that we passed the threshold where people said that Gaza would be an unlivable place by 2020, it almost felt hopeless.

But I think one of the bright things about this, regardless of the awful position of the Labour Party, one of the really great things that’s come out of this is the fact that people are now demanding an end to that status quo. And I’m seeing that at least among young people here in Britain, and I think that also kind of contributes to why someone like Nikki Haley is saying that every 15 minutes someone spends on TikTok, they become antisemitic, or something silly like that.

JS: As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about the movement for decolonization.

Now, of course, part of your work is dealing with resurrecting stories from history and making them current, but also addressing current manifestations of colonialism. Talk for a moment, as we wrap up, about your work on decolonization.

ME: Yeah. I’m part of a project called Decolonial Centre, which is a project of the Pluto Educational Trust here in the U.K. We started this project, and we have a team that’s across the world, with some members in Brazil and Sudan.

In general, the main idea is that colonialism never came to an end, and that coloniality or the legacies of colonialism continue to inform present-day politics. There are some countries which are still under colonial occupation; Palestine being one, but there’s a lot of other places, like Western Sahara, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, etc. There’s many, [as] colonialism still exists.

And so, what we need to do is, we’re a political education outfit which tries to inform people about not just about colonialism — I think there’s been great work already that’s been done lately on colonialism — but, more importantly, on traditions of anticolonialism, and traditions of decolonization. And what we’re trying to do, ultimately, is to inspire people to coalesce.

We don’t claim to lead any decolonial movement, but we know that there are already movements working on decolonization in various ways. And what we want to do is we want to produce a space for them, as a forum for debate, for discussion, and to reignite that same spirit of Bandung, which you talked about, Jeremy.

Let’s see where it goes. Right now we’re going to launch our newscast soon, we’ve got a mini encyclopedia where people can learn about colonialism, and we’ve also got those videos which you’re talking about.

So, we’ll see where it goes, but I just want to take this opportunity to really thank The Intercept for being one of the few places and spaces to tell the truth. And there are consequences for telling the truth, there are lots of consequences, but that’s the duty that a journalist makes. And so, I just wanted to thank The Intercept for constantly telling the truth.

JS: Well, thank you as well, Mohamed Elnaiem. We really appreciate you being with us here on Intercepted. We’ll make sure to put links up to your organization and your work. Thanks so much for being with us on the show.

ME: Thank you.

JS: That was Mohamed Elnaiem, the Director of the Decolonial Centre.

You can find them at decolonialcentre.org. That’s “centre,” spelled the British way: C-E-N-T-R-E, decolonialcentre.org.

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow 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 what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and do leave us a rating or a review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other people to find us as well.

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

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

The post Joe Biden Leads a Western “Coalition of the Killing” in Backing Israel’s Gaza War appeared first on The Intercept.

The killing of three U.S. soldiers at a remote military outpost in Jordan, claimed by Iraqi militia groups to be retaliation for U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, has set the stage for a response by the Biden administration that has blamed Iran for helping support the attack. After years of attempting to pivot away from the region, the Biden administration now looks set to deepen its military involvement in the Middle East as it fights the Houthis in Yemen and squares off in an escalating proxy war with Iran.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the trajectory of the U.S. long war in the Middle East with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a longtime writer and commenter on the region. Cole discusses the basis of the ongoing U.S.–Israel security relationship, the perspective of anti-Israel militant groups in the region, and the prospects of the expansion of the war despite the Biden administration’s stated desire to keep it contained.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Maz, there is a lot to discuss this week. We had the initial ruling that came down from the International Court of Justice in the Hague that overwhelmingly ruled in favor of South Africa in its case against Israel for what it alleges is genocide in Gaza, and the Israeli government responded to that… Well, first of all, by declaring victory and — aided by the United States — projected the impression of what took place at the Hague as the judges, telling Israel that it could continue waging its war, and that it just needs to be careful when, in reality, that is not at all what happened.

But, perhaps more important than the spin campaign that Israel and the United States have been engaged in coming out of the Hague ruling is that Israel launched a full-on attack against one of the primary humanitarian initiatives that exists or remains in Gaza, and that is the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East. Now, this organization has been in the sniper scope of Israel for quite a long time, and the Israelis view this as an entity that is going to ultimately aid the establishment of, not just a Palestinian state, but the right of return of Palestinians who were forcibly expelled from their homes.

And the Israelis provided the United States with information that they said they obtained from signals intelligence, and intercepted cell phone communications, as well as the testimony of people that Israel has taken prisoner and interrogated. And they say that they documented at least a dozen employees of this very important U.N. agency that were involved in some way or another with the October 7th attacks. And, again, I emphasize that some of this intel the Israelis say came from the interrogation of people that it snatched during its ground operations in Gaza.

But then, the propaganda campaign and this initiative by Israel intensified this week, when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece with a headline that was “Intelligence Reveals Details of U. N. Agency Staff’s links to October 7th Attack.” And the Wall Street Journal, based on Israeli information, said that 10 percent of the Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have what they described as “links to militants.” And, if you read the article, they’re not explaining what they even mean by links.

In some cases they’re talking about people whose family members are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and they’re banking on this notion that people won’t understand that Hamas is not just the Qassam brigades; Hamas is a governing authority within Gaza. And so, to merely say, these people have connections to Hamas, is hardly the smoking gun that it’s being portrayed as.

But I think it’s also relevant, Maz, to point out that the lead writer of this Wall Street Journal piece is a journalist by the name of Carrie Keller-Lynn, and Carrie Keller-Lynn was a journalist for Israeli media outlets… Okay, that’s fine, but she also was in the IDF, and a person that she says was her best friend, she credits her with singlehandedly creating the IDF’s social media strategy.

This is the lead journalist who wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal which — I’ll just say it bluntly — it read to me like an Israeli government press release filled with unsubstantiated allegations that was passed off, then, as an article in one of the most important newspapers in the United States. And then this went like wildfire, and people used this to try to put more pressure on more governments to cut their funding.

And the United States government and other governments already have said that they’re going to pull their funding from this U.N. agency that is one of the most important humanitarian organizations helping refugees in Palestinian Gaza, educating children, providing health care, providing foodstuffs, and, is one of the frontline responders right now to the dire humanitarian crisis that has been caused by the Israeli siege, invasion, and occupation of Gaza. This is a very, very dire situation.

And the final point I’ll make on this, Maz, is that, in the instructions, the orders, the provisional measures that were issued by the panel of judges at the Hague, one of the main directives to Israel was to immediately allow unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza, and warned other countries that they should not participate in any prevention of aid to the Palestinian people. It’s clear that by defunding this U.N. agency that the United States and other countries that participate in this are ultimately violating in, I would say, a flagrant manner, the orders of the world’s highest court, which were explicit in the instruction to allow humanitarian aid, not cut it off, in Gaza.

Murtaza Hussain: You know, one of the most incredible quotes I heard about this this week from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he said that we have not had the chance to investigate these allegations ourselves yet, but we believe they are highly, highly credible. So, effectively, they’re banking on Israel’s determination of what happened here.

As you said, Israel had a target on UNRWA for many, many years, has gathered information from interrogations where we know they perform torture and other abuses against prisoners. But, also, Israel has a history of making false allegations against Palestinian non-government organizations.

A few years ago, there were a number of organizations in the West Bank accused of terrorism under Yair Lapid’s government, who’s considered to be a more dovish government, relatively. And this was rebutted very thoroughly by European organizations and governments, but it took some time later on to rebut these charges against Palestinian NGOs, the purpose of which was to destroy Palestinian civil society with terrorism accusations.

Now that this conflict is going on, the role of UNRWA is more vital than ever on a day-to-day basis of keeping people alive, and these allegations, to be accepted without investigation or without verification, to take the Israel government’s word for it, it’s really an unbelievable attack on Palestinians at a moment where they’re desperately trying to survive, literally, an Israeli military offensive in Gaza. It’s pretty shocking.

And I’ve been, as you mentioned, these reports, in the news and so forth, the sort of failures of the media and the cynicism we’ve seen from some segments of the media, it really reminds me of the period of the war in Tehran when it began, in 2003 and thereafter, when there was so much effort made on generating consensus for policies of brutality against civilians that we saw the penetration of media by government intelligence agencies to such a degree that we said that we … We look back on it with remorse, for most people.

But now it’s being replayed again in this circumstance. It’s very depressing, and it kind of shows that these institutions have not learned as much as they claim to have from that period.

JS: Well, it also comes as Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, went on national television in the United States this past weekend and basically accused some activists who have been calling for a ceasefire and demanding an end to the war against Gaza, implied that they may be on the payroll of Russia, and said explicitly that they’re doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

You know, I also have to say, with all the discussion, the Democrats are hyper-focused on the demonstrations that became violent at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and you have members of Congress that were deeply involved with those demonstrations that the Democrats have alleged are tantamount to treason against the United States. What the U.S. is doing right now to the UNRWA in Gaza, you could apply that, then, and say, well, the whole U.S. Congress needs to be defunded.

If some members of Congress were involved with this, and it is insurrection, and it is treason, then wouldn’t the consistent principle that should be applied here, that the entire U.S. Congress becomes defunded? I mean, this is how insane this is: we have officials in the United States government that were involved with torture programs, that were involved with kidnapping people, that were involved with CIA black sites, who, not only are their entities and agencies not defunded, not only are their public careers not ended, but they often are promoted.

I mean, for god’s sake, Henry Kissinger just died, the man was involved with mass murder after mass murder, and he was embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike until the day that they put him in the ground. So, this all is clearly an attempt by Israel and its sponsors — the United States, Germany, other countries — to try to distract from Israel’s war crimes, and Israel clearly is trying to use this as part of its starvation campaign against the people of Gaza.

MH: Yeah, absolutely. You make a really good point, that if we’re defunding institutions, or shutting them down, or criminalizing them based on the actions of some number of their members, the Israeli military has committed many more crimes, incredibly, in the last three, four months, and maintains consistent U.S. political, diplomatic, and economic support despite that.

So, this whole concept of using some allegations of some members of an organization to criminalize them or make them verboten entirely, it’s applied so inconsistently, it’s almost laughable. The politicization of the accusations is so brazen. And the fact that it’s coming now, when there’s so much distraction and there’s so much chaos in the region, and so much suffering from the people who benefit from UNRWA, it’s really quite cynical. And the people who are going to suffer in Gaza, it’s going to be very, very stark, and very, very grotesque what we see coming as a result of this, unless the decision’s walked back which, so far, the government seems to show no indication of doing.

JS: Yeah. And I would point people to our colleague, Ryan Grim, who did a really good write up on all of this week; it’s in his newsletter, and it’s also at theintercept.com.

Well, Maz, there’s not just the news that’s coming out of Gaza, there’s also this broadening series of lower-intensity conflicts that are intensifying throughout the Middle East, where you have the United States conducting a number of military operations against what is loosely being called the Axis of Resistance, or Alliance of Resistance. You had three American service members that were killed in a kamikaze drone strike inside of Jordan. You have the blockade in the Red Sea still going strong, and the United States regularly striking Yemen. You had Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, making some pretty explicit promises about attacks that would be conducted against Israel if Israel doesn’t back away from its own military operations inside of Lebanon.

And, to discuss all of this, we invited this week the renowned Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan. He is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. And, since the early days of the so-called War on Terror after 9/11, he’s written a blog on his website, it’s called, Informed Comment.

You can find his writings at juancole.com, and we are very honored to have Professor Cole with us now. Juan, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Juan Cole: Thanks for having me.

JS: So, let’s begin with the very big picture. You’ve been writing a lot of articles recently that not only deal with Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, the war against Gaza, and various aspects of the Israeli policy and the U.S. role, but, also, you’ve been writing about the blockade that Ansar Allah has implemented in the Red Sea, you’ve been writing about the dynamics of the prospects for a wider war, United States actions in Iraq, the rise of a sort of coalition that is vowing to confront U.S. Hegemony in the region, and to potentially directly fight Israel.

Let’s start from the very broad perspective of your analysis of why the Biden administration is doing what it’s doing right now in the broader Middle East.

JC: The Biden administration is deeply committed to the security of Israel in large part, I think, because the foreign policy establishment in Washington sees Israel as America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East. I think they saw what happened on October 7th not as a terrorist attack, but as an attempt to push Israel out of the region, and the fragility of Israel in the region is often not appreciated by casual observers, but a third of Israelis say they want to leave and, if they actually did, then Israel would become much weaker demographically.

About a million Israelis are out of the country at any one time. A lot of times people will go off in their 30s and make a career. They always used to come back after a few years, but the statistics from the Israeli Census Bureau suggest that, in the past year or so, returnees are fewer, than had been usually the case.

So, I think that the Biden administration believes that in order to keep Israel flourishing and as an asset to U.S. security in the region, it really has bought into the line of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas must be destroyed, that it crossed a red line, and went from being a an annoyance to being an actual existential threat to Israel.

So, that’s my reading of the mood in Washington.

JS: One follow-up to that, specific to President Biden’s approach to support for Israel in the Aftermath of October 7th, and stretching all the way now to almost four months.

The administration has spent a lot of effort trying to plant stories in the media. And, in fact, it also occurs overtly/openly/publicly where administration officials express their concerns about Netanyahu’s declarations about this being an open-ended war, that Biden is losing patience with Netanyahu, that the administration is concerned about the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinians and the mounting death toll. And yet, we still have no-restriction military aid flowing to Israel and, crucially, political and diplomatic support, including preemptively dismissing the validity of South Africa’s charges at the International Court of Justice.

I’m wondering [about] your sense of why Biden seems so committed to continuing to offer that level of support, even as his administration tries to plant these stories saying that the patience is wearing thin.

JC: Well, Biden, like any politician, has multiple constituencies, and there is a progressive caucus in the Democratic Party. You’ve probably got 40 or so representatives in the House of Representatives that want a ceasefire, and are upset at Biden’s wholehearted embrace of Netanyahu’s ongoing war. And so, Biden knows that there’s a significant split in the Democratic Party.

Opinion polling suggests that half of Democrats want a ceasefire, or maybe as much as 70 percent, it depends on the poll. Youth, anybody under 30 hates this war and doesn’t believe that it’s necessary. And the youth vote really has been the difference between having a Republican president and a Democratic president for the past decade and a half, since 2008.

So, I think Biden’s team puts out these signals that he’s unsatisfied with Netanyahu, and he may be. There’s some reason to think he’s frustrated, but he does also want to support the war effort to the hilt, as you say. I mean, the Israeli officials have admitted that they ran out of ammunition a long time ago. It’s only the U.S. resupply on a virtually real-time basis, a daily basis, that allows the war to go on.

So, if Biden actually wanted to stop the war, he could. I think he doesn’t want to stop it, because he believes that the war could actually destroy Hamas. This is, in my view, an unlikely outcome, but if that was your premise, that what the Israelis are doing will reshape the region, will destroy a major actor like Hamas, then you could understand why somebody might back this war a hundred percent.

But then, he has to deal with this wing of the Democratic party, which seems to be growing, which is deeply dissatisfied with this knee-jerk support for anything that Netanyahu does.

MH: Juan, you mentioned that it’s commonly perceived and described in U.S. politics that Israel is an asset to U.S. strategic interests in the region, but it’s very interesting … At the moment, it seems like, given the widespread regional anger about the war in Gaza and its consequences, the U.S. is having to intervene very extensively in the conflict, not just to resupply Israel with munitions, and give the targeting information, and defend it diplomatically at international fora but, also, the U.S. is now directly fighting the Houthis in Yemen on behalf of Israel, who have said themselves they’re acting in response to the war in Gaza.

This past weekend, several U.S. service members were killed in the drone strike in Jordan carried out by Iraqi militias, who also said they were acting in response to U.S. support in the war in Gaza. And, finally, the U.S. actually has aircraft carriers and troops in the eastern Mediterranean specifically to deter Hezbollah, which may intervene more forcefully in the conflict without that deterrence from the U.S. provided there.

So, it seems like the U.S. is doing a tremendous amount to help Israel at the moment but, to the argument that Israel is beneficial to the U.S., it doesn’t seem very clear what the U.S. is getting out of this. It seems a very lopsided exchange, in a way.

Can you speak a bit about what you think continues to hold and drive this relationship on these terms, given the fact that the strategic utility is not clearly obvious at the moment?

JC: Well, I think the strategic utility goes beyond a moment. And, again, I’m trying to understand the mindset in the foreign policy establishment in Washington, I’m not trying to allocute as to the truth. But they perceive Israel to be a long-term strategic asset in the Middle East of some importance.

For one thing, the Israelis have very good intelligence in the region. Trump, when he was president, met with Sergey Lavrov and some other Russian officials, and actually let it slip that the Israelis had placed someone high in the ISIL councils, and that they were getting direct intelligence from ISIL planning through this Israeli agent. Apparently, the CIA was not able to do this, but the Israelis were.

And, since ISIL during the Obama period was the major foreign policy threat and dictated a lot of Obama policy in the Middle East — the response to it and the attempt to destroy it — having the Israelis penetrate it like that was gold. And I think behind the scenes and in ways that we don’t hear about, there are lots of those kinds of things that the Israelis do for the United States.

And so, I perceive the Biden administration to feel that it can hold the status quo with regard to what the Americans call the Axis of Resistance — I prefer the Alliance of Resistance, because we always use “Axis” for pejorative purposes — but the Iranians have over time established allies in Lebanon, and Iraq, and Yemen, as you say, although these are very loose alliances. It’s not a command-and-control kind of situation; the Houthis don’t take orders from Tehran. But they are aligned on the basis of a common perception of Israel and the United States, as a threat to their interests.

And the Biden administration came into office hoping. to do a deal with the Alliance of Resistance, to bring them in from the cold. And I think there was a genuine hope that that could be done for various reasons, and it may have to do with Biden’s acquiescence in the views of some of the hawks around him.

That didn’t go forward, in a big way. And, in fact, local regional actors became tired of waiting for Biden to make this move. And so, the Saudis reached out to the Iranians themselves, through China, and the Biden administration has been trying to work to extend — or had been trying to work to extend — the ceasefire between the Saudis and the Houthis in Yemen, and that struggle may start back up. We don’t know. But the U.S. has now taken the Saudi role of bombing Sana’a, I think, to very little effect.

So, I think what the Biden administration is trying to do is to hold the status quo against the Alliance of Resistance through surgical interventions. Bombing a base of one of these Shiite militias here and there, time to time, while they believe the Israelis are rolling up Hamas. And I think they must understand that this can’t go on for a very long time, or the status quo simply will not hold. But that’s what they’re trying to do in the meantime.

And so, even though the Iraqi militias have killed American troops at a base in Jordan near Syria, the response of Biden on Sunday was remarkably restrained. He said, we’ll reply at a time and a place of our choosing. That’s usually the way you would reply to a stray mortar hitting a base and not doing — killing three American soldiers, that’s not something that you would put off the response to a time and a place of your choosing; you would want to go to war over it. And it’s very clear that the Biden administration does not want to go to war over it, and that they’re attempting to find a way to muddle through this crisis.

JS: You also had two U.S. Navy SEALs that, according to the official reporting on it, went missing as part of the U.S military presence deployed in an effort to stop the Yemeni blockade of the Red Sea. And now, they’ve officially been declared dead by the United States. So, in addition to those two, now you have the three confirmed deaths of American service members in Jordan from this drone strike.

But I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned about Iran, and your characterization of the Alliance of Resistance as you’re putting it, and how the Houthis, Ansar Allah, is much more autonomous than is often portrayed in the broader media, and by American and other politicians. And we hear this phrase nonstop: Iranian backed, Iranian-controlled groups. And that’s not just applied to the Houthis; it’s also applied to Hezbollah and, at times, to Hamas as well.

I wanted to ask you, given your knowledge of the region and politics, how you see Iran’s perspective on all of this? You know, the Israelis have, under Netanyahu in particular, for many years, quite transparently tried to pull the United States into a much more overt military conflict with Iran. And it seems like Netanyahu in part believes that this would be his best, if not last, shot at doing that.

We hear a lot about what the U.S. and Israeli perspective is on Iran’s motivations, but I’m wondering if you could share thoughts on what you’re reading, what you’re hearing about how the Iranian government and its power structure view this current moment.

JC: Well, I think the war against Gaza and the very high civilian death toll puts the Iranians in an enormously difficult position, because they’ve talked a very good game about opposing Israel and standing up for the Palestinians, and they’ve made a lot of political capital at least among the publics in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. And even, I would say, among some leftist movements, by taking this hardline stand for the Palestinians against Israel. And they haven’t done anything. They’ve sat by passively as the Israelis have killed … The numbers keep changing every day, but well over 20,000 people.

That’s a problem for the Iranians. They don’t want to respond, they don’t want to get involved. And it’s at least reported that they told Hezbollah in southern Lebanon not to get involved in any significant way, that they’re trying to restrain their allies. It’s not the image that you have of Iran in Washington, but if you look at the situation on the ground, that seems to be the case.

So, I think the Allies themselves are impatient. And so, my guess is that the Houthis decided to start hitting container ship traffic in the Red Sea all on their own, and I’m not sure that the Iranians even want this. They depend on covert oil shipments, basically, to various countries, including, especially, China. But there are a lot of differently-flagged ships that probably are carrying Iranian goods, and they wouldn’t want the insurance and the cost of carriage to go way up.

So, the Houthis are a land-based group. They don’t depend on sea commerce, and it doesn’t hurt them. So, I suspect this is coming from Sana’a. But it does benefit the Iranians in the sense that, if everybody attributes it to them — and I’ve seen in the newspaper Iranian officials sometimes being pleasantly surprised that major events are attributed to them, when they hadn’t known that they were going to happen, and so forth — to the extent that it’s attributed to them, then it makes it look like the Alliance of Resistance really is doing something for the Palestinians, and it’s not doing very much. But it’s doing something, and that helps Iran’s popularity among the Middle Eastern publics.

So, I think Iran is probably satisfied with the situation as it is now, in the sense that it’s getting a reputational boost without having to take very much in the way of risk. And, were the hawks in the United States like Senator Tom Cotton to prevail, and were Iran actually to be struck by the United States in response to some of these activities of Iran’s allies, that would change the equation.

But the Biden administration clearly, in my view, does not want to go in that direction. And so, I think the Iranians are frustrated about the war, but they don’t want to take the kind of risks that would allow them to intervene directly, and they don’t want even their allies to do very much.

And Hezbollah has sent some rockets into northern Israel. The Israelis complain bitterly that northern Israel up near the Lebanon border is essentially depopulated, people have had to leave those hamlets. But the main military installation that Hezbollah struck was abandoned. It was an Israeli base, but there was nobody there.

So, these are symbolic strikes, for the most part, and I think the tragedy that struck American servicemen on Sunday was that what might have been meant as a symbolic strike actually fell on residential territory, and so, actually killed people, and wounded a large number.

MH: Juan, you mentioned that the Houthis are taking these strikes in the Red Sea, and they’re generating a tremendous amount of attention to themselves negatively, obviously, from the U.S., and the U.K., and so forth, in various ways. But also, in the region where they were not very popular before, they’ve become relatively popular in recent weeks and months.

You see the Houthi spokespeople going on television, becoming fixtures in social media and on regular media in the region because of a sense that they’re standing up for the Palestinians, but also, by extension, a perception that they’re standing up to the U.S. And there seems to be a very pronounced view in the region that this is not just an Israeli war, but it’s a U.S. war, specifically, and we saw that in the statements of some of these Iraqi militia groups that claimed responsibility for the attack on the base in Jordan as well, too.

They view the U.S. very intimately involved in the war, a direct participant in the war in Gaza, even. Whereas, in the U.S., it’s often depicted as more of an arms-length relationship, and people are sometimes surprised to see a retaliation against the U.S. directly for actions which are taken by Israel.

Can you speak a bit about this sort of disconnect, and how the U.S.-Israel relationship is viewed by people in the region as very hand-in-hand?

JC: Oh, well, people in the region don’t make a distinction. When the United States invaded Iraq, U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq were often referred to by the Iraqis as Israelis, and the notorious incident in Fallujah where four contractors were attacked and strung up was carried out by people in Fallujah who called themselves “Iraqi Hamas.” And part of the reason that they attacked those U.S. contractors was because the Israelis were at the time conducting an assassination campaign against Hamas leaders.

And so, the American public has never viewed these events synoptically, has not been able to see them in the same frame. But, in the Middle East, the United States and Israel are basically seen as one thing.

And so, when you hear in the United States that the Israelis have killed so many thousands of people, the American public might say, well, is that really necessary? Maybe the Israelis shouldn’t be doing that. But, in the Middle East, the comment would be, why are the Americans doing this?

And people are furious in the Middle East — I mean, their blood is boiling all through the region — against the United States. This is not a completely new phenomenon, of course, and we’ve seen moments in the past when there has been a lot of anger towards the U.S., in part because of its unqualified support for Israeli impunity. But it is quite remarkable, the amount of anger.

And so, it puts American allies in the region in a difficult position, because the Saudi government, the government of the United Arab Emirates, the Jordanian government, they all hate Hamas, and nothing would please them better than for Netanyahu to succeed in destroying it. And so, none of those governments has done more than criticize the war and, de facto, they agree with the war aim. But their publics are not on the same page.

And so, the Saudis and the Jordanians, who have a real population … You know, the United Arab Emirates is a postage-stamp country, with a million citizens and eight million guest workers. It’s in a different demographic situation. The Saudis and the Jordanians, the governments really have to negotiate with their publics, and their publics are furious.

So, you see people in Saudi Arabia, for instance, their government has demanded a ceasefire, even though the U.S. is opposed, and they have criticized the conduct of the war. And they’ve said openly that you can forget about this Abraham Accords business until the Palestinians are treated properly. That’s for Saudi public consumption. I mean, they’re trying to reassure their own public that they are not villains in the piece.

So, not only [do] people in the region see the United States as more or less behind this war as a hundred-percent backer of it and the reason for which it can go on, but the publics and the governments are deeply split. And so, that’s why something like The Alliance of Resistance, by sending out some drones, and sort of committing some pinpricks against Western security, gives them a great deal of cachet. And, in a place like Iraq, it could be consequential.

They have elections. The militias are all also civil political parties. And they have, last I knew, some 60 seats in Parliament. The current Prime Minister Al Sudani is beholden to the Shiite militias and their civil bloc in Parliament. So, there’s likely a fair storm coming in relations between the United States and Iraq over all this.

And, of course, what the Shiite militias want is not only to punish the U.S. for its involvement in Gaza, but also to push the remaining U.S. troops out of the region. So, with their 2,500 troops in Iraq mainly doing training and logistics for the Iraqi army and its continued mop-up operations against ISIL, there’s some 900 U.S. troops in Syria liaising with the YPG, the Kurdish leftist militia. And, again, to make sure that ISIL doesn’t come back, to give some support to the Syrian Kurds, and also, maybe to block Iranian and Shiite militia activity in southeast Syria.

So, the Shiite militias in Iraq are trying to push the Americans out, and may be hoping that the U.S. response to something like the attack on the base in Jordan will provoke such a large rift between Baghdad and Washington that the troops will have to leave.

JS: I wanted to ask you, Juan, about the notion of endgame here. This is something that’s a conversation that’s being pushed in Washington, and in European and Arab capitals, particularly of countries that are dealing directly on negotiations or diplomatically with Israel. And there’s some indication from U.S. officials that they’re nearing some form of another deal to release some of the captives that are being held in Gaza, as well as Palestinians who are being held in Israeli jails and military prisons.

But I’m wondering about what Netanyahu might be seeing as the endgame, what the American government might be seeing as the end game. What you’ve read — I know you don’t have inside sources, necessarily, on any of this stuff — but I’m bringing it up in the context of what, even in the Israeli media now, is being described as an emerging quagmire in Gaza for the Israeli military on a tactical level.

There’s been much made about the tunnels of Hamas; only a small fraction of them have even been penetrated by the Israelis. Israel is a relatively small country, and the death toll of Israeli soldiers is climbing. The families of Israelis who are being held hostage are becoming completely emphatic in their impatience and demands for some sort of a deal to be made. But even among seasoned defense correspondents in the Israeli media, you get a sense that they understand that this is not actually going well on a tactical level for the Israeli military, and I’m wondering what you see as Netanyahu’s endgame here.

Does he believe he’s going to be able to sort of redraw the map of Gaza? Is the plan to actually annihilate the Palestinians as a population in Gaza? Would Biden permit such a sort of endgame from Netanyahu’s perspective?

I’m throwing a lot at you here, but we hear a lot of conflicting messages from different parties involved, but it does seem like Netanyahu recognizes this may be his last shot at implementing lifelong agendas that he’s embraced.

JC: The thing with Netanyahu is that he’s an opportunist and doesn’t actually seem to have many principles. There are some things that he’s stood by for many years. Of course, opposition to a Palestinian state, and torpedoing any sign of a peace process has been characteristic of his position, but those are negatives.

As for a positive vision, I’ve never seen him adumbrate one, and I think my reading — and, as you say, it’s only from reading the newspapers — but there was a great diplomatic historian who once said, I think correctly, that there are no secrets if you know where to look. And I think we can know quite a lot about what policy is being proposed and made.

The Netanyahu cabinet is deeply divided over its vision of the future of Gaza. So, Netanyahu brought these fascists in to make his government, and the Jewish power bloc and the religious Zionism bloc, they would very much like to ethnically cleanse Gaza and, indeed, to bring back Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land in Gaza.

And it’s not so much that the Biden administration wouldn’t permit that — I think Washington will roll over whatever the Israelis do and accept it — but the Egyptians won’t accept it. I mean, where would the people in Gaza go? Likely, it would be into the Sinai. Well, the Egyptian government has spent all the time since 2013 engaged in a counterrevolution against the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam in Egypt. And the officer corps in Egypt, the raison d’etre is, A, to run the country, B, to make sure there’s no populist or Muslim fundamentalist opposition.

So, the idea that the Egyptians would allow two million Palestinians — many of them members of the Hamas civilian political party — into Sinai, which is already a mess, security-wise, is just completely implausible. And, in 2018, there was an incident in which some Palestinians tried to flee to Egypt through the Rafah crossing in Gaza, and the Egyptian military shot down a few of them, so the Egyptians have made it very clear exactly what would happen if anyone tried that.

And it’s one of the reasons that the Palestinians, a million of them, are gathered there in Rafah as we speak, having been pushed down there by the Israelis in tents and in terrible living conditions, is that there’s no place for them to go. They can’t get out. And so, the idea of ethnically cleansing them is, I think, not on the table.  They’ve talked about getting other countries to take them. Again, what stable government would want to take in very large numbers of traumatized Palestinians from Gaza?

And for me, as a historian, it’s striking that the Nazi leadership once talked about how they had taken citizenship away from their Jews. And they said, people keep criticizing us for how we have treated the Jews, but now that they’re without citizenship, now that they’re kind of a geopolitical flotsam, who will take them? How are you better than we are? They knew — the United States, Britain, even Brazil — nobody would take them. And that’s why they ended up being dumped on the poor Palestinians in a colonial transfer.

But it’s the same thing now, the Palestinians are stateless. They have no state, they have no citizenship, they have no rights. Hannah Arendt said that citizenship is the right to have rights. And so, nobody is going to take them. So, this is just … The ethnic cleansing scenario seems unlikely in the extreme. It’s not that it’s impossible.

Then Yoav Galant, the defense minister of Israel, wants to permanently make northern Gaza uninhabitable, and to have it be a buffer zone, kind of like the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. And it appears that some of the Mass destruction of the physical infrastructure of northern Gaza — and the destruction of buildings and entire apartment blocks, and so forth — was not part of any war aim against Hamas. It was looking forward to the endgame in which northern Gaza… There would visibly be no place there for anybody to live, no facilities that allow them to live there.

And Gallant’s vision of it seems to be different from Netanyahu’s. The two have difficulty sharing a podium when they have a press conference about the Gaza war. It is quite remarkable that the prime minister can’t be on the same platform as the defense minister, because they don’t see eye to eye about how the war is going or what the endgame would be.

So, Netanyahu seems to just agree with the last person that he talked to on his cabinet. If he’s meeting with them and a fascist figure like Ben Gvir says, well, we must find a way to have them leave, Netanyahu says, yes, we’re working on it. But is he, or how serious is that?

So, I think the evidences from his public statements to the extent that he’s been consistent and he hasn’t is that he might like to turn Gaza into the West Bank and have it be occupied by Israeli security forces. Biden wanted to bring in the PLO and the Palestine Authority from the West Bank and have them run Gaza, even though the people in Gaza wouldn’t find that acceptable, and Netanyahu said, absolutely not. Because, of course, that’s a step towards a two-state solution, which Netanyahu opposes, and a step towards a Palestinian state, which will happen over his dead body.

So, he doesn’t want the PLO to take over. There have been suggestions that a multinational force go in. That was done in Beirut after the 1982 war, which didn’t go well. And, of course, the Marines got blown up as a result. I wouldn’t advise that multinational task force approach. But Netanyahu seems to think the same tactics that have worked for the Israeli army as an occupation army in the West Bank could now be applied to postwar Gaza, and the Israelis could find a new set of Gaza leadership that would acquiesce in this military occupation.

But again, I don’t think that we should think about Netanyahu as a man with a policy. You have to think about him as a man who’s hanging off a cliff by his fingertips. And if he can just keep the pinky from slipping, he’s won that day. His government is deeply unpopular, 17 percent of Israelis think it should remain in power. It could fall at any moment. In fact, if he did agree with Biden to make a pause, Ben Gvir and others on the far right could pull out, and it could go to new elections. He could go to jail.

The evidence from opinion polling are that, were elections held today, the Likud party, the right-wing party and its far-right allies, would all be crushed in the polls, and that Benny Gantz, a centrist liberal Zionist would come to power. And Netanyahu is actually being tried as we speak, and he’s tried to find ways to put off a verdict, but his trials could finally come to fruition were his government to fall.

And so, he could just be a few steps away from going to jail, so he’s hanging on for dear life and I think one of the reasons this war keeps going on is not so much that it’s plausible that it will end up destroying Hamas — which is a set of clans, and you can’t destroy a set of clans — but that, as long as it goes on, his government remains in power and he remains out of jail. So, he just has to keep the fingers from slipping off the cliff.

MH: Juan, we just experienced in the U.S. a very long generational military involvement in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and various other parts of the region, which ended quite unhappily, for the most part, and there’s still tens of thousands of U.S. troops based in the region.

But it seems like there’s been a political shift in the U.S. that the call for greater military involvement in the Middle East is seen as a very unpopular position. I can’t even really think of many politicians on either side of the spectrum in the upcoming election who call for greater military involvement for its own sake; maybe Nikki Haley is a major exception.

But the Trump movement was very much, you could say, an isolationist movement, even though he governed a bit differently in practice. And, certainly on the left, there are these tendencies very strongly now as well, too, much of it drawing on the failures and the dissatisfactions of the Iraq war, and so forth.

And yet, despite this growing public tendency, not only are there still many, many U.S. troops in the region, but the U.S. is still very openly and publicly involved in facilitating this war in Gaza, which is breeding more anti-Americanism and anger in the region against any U.S. presence at all.

Can you talk a bit about how public opinion may or may not constrain U.S. policymakers in the future, if they were to try to expand the war in the region on Israel’s behalf to fight Hezbollah or Iran or other parties?

JC: Oh, I don’t think that the Biden administration wants to get involved in a wider war, and I think they’ve been taking more or less symbolic actions in response to provocations, just bombing. Of course, bombing guerrilla groups is useless. You could do that from here to eternity and never have any effect, unless you put troops on the ground or find somebody to fight for you. So, no, I don’t think the Biden administration wants that, and I think they’ll do anything they can to avoid it.

One thing that has to be remembered is that the United States is already at war with Russia in Ukraine. And, although U.S. troops are not committed, a very great deal of money and materiel are committed. We don’t have infinite bombs in the United States, we don’t have infinite ammunition, and things were already chancy for resupplying the Ukrainians before the Israeli war on Gaza, and the Biden administration has been trying to resupply Israel without detracting from the Ukraine war effort.

It had prepositioned a lot of weaponry and ammunition in Israel for possible use in the region. And here, again, Israel is a warehouse for the U.S. military, it’s a strategic asset, because they can do that there. I’m not sure any other country in the region would allow the U.S. to preposition large amounts of weaponry for use in the region in their country.

But that now has been diverted twice by the Biden administration to the Israelis. The reason they have to do that is they can’t send things out from California or Seattle. They don’t have it.

I think the mood of the U.S. public is not in favor of a more robust engagement militarily with the Middle East. It’s not even, practically speaking, plausible, given the geopolitical situation. For the U.S. to get involved in the Middle East at this point in a big way would be a tremendous boost for the Russian war effort, and nobody in Europe or Washington wants to see that.

With regard to your feelings of isolationism, I think you’re right. Trump had an opportunity to strike Iran, and John Bolton, his national security advisor, had spent 20 years trying to get into a position where he could bomb Iran. And he finally was there, and the Iranians shot down an unmanned drone over the Persian Gulf, a U.S. drone, and Bolton had managed to convince Trump that he had to respond. And so, Trump was going to hit an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps base.

But then, it was announced early on a Thursday that they were going to do this, and then, late in the afternoon, Trump is said to have turned around and asked one of his aides, well, how many people would die from this strike? And they said, well, about 130. And Trump said, well, you know, they didn’t kill any Americans when they shot down our drone, that wouldn’t really be proportionate.

And so, he pulled out of the strike at the last moment, and it’s one of the reasons that Bolton turned against Trump and campaigns against him, and so forth, is … Trump did not do very many reasonable things, but this was one of them. And I think he thinks that his base, kind of disgruntled factory workers and white people in the countryside who feel that they’re being taken advantage of by foreigners and Washington don’t want to spend more treasure and blood on the Middle East. Which, after all, it’s hard to see in what way they benefited from Afghanistan or Iraq.

And so, in other circumstances, I think the killing of U.S. troops in Jordan on Sunday would have been a real crisis for the Biden administration, because the Republicans would have forced them to strike back at Iran — as some of the more extreme Republicans are calling for — but Trump is not going to run with that. It’s very unlikely that he’ll be calling for war with Iran, that’s not what he thinks his base wants to hear. And so, the Biden administration has a little bit of a cushion to respond in more, as I said, symbolic ways.

So, I think that this is a terrible crisis, it’s a horrible thing, if you follow the news closely, to live with it every day. But, so far, we’re not in 2002. This is not the Bush administration planning to have a big set of wars in the region.

JS: Also, when Donald Trump is the voice of restraint, that’s a stark reality about the clique that John Bolton represents, and there is certainly an enormous amount of opportunism going on with people that served in the Trump administration.

And let’s remember, too, that Trump did sign off on the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. It’s not that Trump was, uh, was some kind of a dove. I mean, Trump was quite militaristic. He ratcheted up the drone strikes that had widely expanded under Obama, he did a ground raid in Yemen, was bombing Somalia at record pace, was striking in Syria and elsewhere. But Biden, who’s much more of an empire politician, you can follow a much longer arc of Biden’s career…

But, speaking of arcs, I wanted to ask you about German policy. And I’m glad you also brought up Ukraine, because Germany has been the major voice in the European Union, in terms of more powerful countries pushing that war. And Germany actually started to increase the amount of GDP that it’s willing to spend on defense, exporting of weaponry, which was unusual for Germany.

And, mind you, this is not the CDU in power anymore under Angela Merkel — this is supposedly the liberals that are in power now, under Olaf Scholz, and the Green Party, in fact, occupies the position of foreign ministry in the German government — but Germany has been a major proponent of Israel’s war in Gaza, it has sent a record level of assistance to Israel. But, at the beginning, it was overwhelmingly in the form of what Germany categorized as defensive materiel — armored vehicles, body armor for troops — and now there are reports in the German media that Germany is considering a variety of requests from Israel to actually start sending munitions to Israel as well.

Germany signed on to be, effectively, a defense council in support of Israel’s defense at the International Court of Justice, where they’re being accused by South Africa of committing genocide and genocidal acts in Gaza. And many Palestinians have a perception that Germany’s involvement in what they believe clearly is a genocide or an attempted genocide in Gaza is linked to the fact that Germany committed genocide against the Jews in World War II.

And you had Germany announcing that it was going to sign on to support Israel at the International Court of Justice on the very day that, in Namibia, Namibians were marking the German genocide that began a century earlier, and issued a scathing attack against the German government, linking those two events together: the genocide in Namibia with Germany signing on to defend Israel against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.

And just one last point on this: it’s not just that Germany is full-on supporting Israel politically, diplomatically — now, it seems, militarily — in a very aggressive way, it’s also that, domestically, in Germany, there are speech laws now that are supposedly aimed at halting or cracking down on antisemitic speech that have been weaponized now to criminalize — although it’s in misdemeanor form —criminalize several specific acts of speech that are perceived to be anti-Israel.

You’ve written recently about some of the historical connections to Germany’s full support right now of the Israelis, and I’d like to hear your analysis of this transformation of Germany’s posture in the world, which really ratcheted up during Ukraine, but is in full force now with the Israeli war against Gaza.

JC: This generation of Germans are still traumatized by World War II, and the Nazi era, and the Holocaust, and I think they decided that the way you work out your national guilt about the Holocaust is knee-jerk support for Israel. And remember that there are ways in which there are limits to liberalism in Germany that come out of the Nazi experience, because the one flaw in liberal philosophy is a belief in everybody being able to have a voice. Giving Hitler and his gangs voices didn’t work out very well for the Weimar Republic.

And so, there are laws in Germany and Austria that limit speech of a Nazi sort, so it bleeds over, then, into the Palestine issue, because to what extent is supporting Palestine, hate speech against Israel? And these become very difficult political negotiations.

I think the Germans have just decided that the Palestinians are a source of disturbance, they produce terrorism, their claims against Israel are outrageous, and that they’ve kind of put them in that limbo of speech that they put the far right in, as upsetting the apple cart of liberal society. That the only way to have liberal society in Germany is in fact to be illiberal with regard to certain kinds of speech and actions.

So, it’s an enormous psychological and emotional wound that the Germans are dealing with, and I think they’ve come down on the wrong side of how you deal with this. I mean, yes, they should never forget what their ancestors did because, remember, there are hardly anybody left alive from the era where the Holocaust occurred. But they should never forget what their ancestors did, and they should be determined to maintain the kind of liberal freedoms that would forestall any return of the far right.

And, of course, the return of the far right is, all of a sudden, in Germany, an actual prospect; the AFD seems to be growing in strength. And there’s genuine conversations, as you know, at the higher heights of the German government about whether to bite the bullet and put the AFD under the anti-Nazi laws, and sort of ban the party, ban that kind of speech, because it does skate very close to what’s illegal in Germany. So, if these things are seriously being considered against 20 percent of the German population, imagine how expendable the Palestinians and their cause is in this regard.

I think the only way forward for Germany, ultimately, is to have a different view of the significance of the Holocaust. Not as something that they did to Jews, for which their unstinting support for everything that the Israelis do is the only penance, but to see it as a global event against an ethnic group. And, of course, the Germans also committed a Holocaust against Poles, and the siege of Leningrad was intended to be a Holocaust against Slavs, and they were going to move people out of Russia and Ukraine and replace them with Germans.

So, if you saw these events as of universal significance, and then you were determined that they never happen again, then they have to never happen again to Namibians and Palestinians, as well as never happening again to Jews. And that’s a universalism of an earlier period of German liberalism, I think something maybe that Immanuel Kant might have sympathized with, that this generation of Germans has lost, and they need to recover it.

MH: Juan, it’s been so good to get your perspective on all this, and having you weigh in — as someone who’s written about the region for so many years, and seen so many changes — it’s been very invaluable.

I wanted to ask you, just to conclude … You know, this October 7th attack and the subsequent war between Israel and Gaza over the past few months really does seem like a very big inflection point in the Middle East, and the history of the U.S. role in the Middle East. And where it may go, it’s impossible to say.

But, as someone who has seen different iterations of U.S. policy in the region, and different configurations of politics in the region, I’m curious what you foresee as a possible day after. How may the region look, how may the U.S. posture towards the region look, and what could be the future between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but also the Israelis in the broader region? Are we moving towards an era of greater conflict? Is there a possibility for these events to spur a diplomatic solution out of urgency?

I’m kind of curious what you see, generally, with the caveat that we don’t know. But what do you foresee is possible with the way the world will look when this conflict finally ends?

JC: I fear that things will just go on the way they have been going on. I don’t foresee a big change. Of course, one seldom does. But I don’t see the vision in the Biden administration that would allow them to play a positive role in reshaping the region.

Ironically enough, I think Bill Clinton was the last one who had that kind of vision, the last president who did, and even he didn’t follow through on it in a thoroughgoing way, and kind of put his thumb on the scale for the Israelis. But, I think, for all of its flaws, the Oslo process was the last time that this struggle, this conflict, had a realistic chance of being resolved and going to a situation where it could just be managed.

There are only three possibilities for the future of the Palestinians. Either they are ethnically cleansed, as the Israeli far right wants, or they continue to be ruled under a kind of apartheid, as all the major human rights organizations have decided to characterize the situation. Or there is an evolving situation towards some sort of one-state solution. I don’t think a two-state solution is any longer plausible. Where would you put it? I mean, the West Bank looks like Swiss cheese if you take the Israeli squatter settlements into account, and half of Gaza has been destroyed, so that’s not a state. So, does Israel-Palestine end up a Lebanon, for instance?

But those are the only three possibilities. And, of the three, given the geopolitical realities and the military realities, it seems to me that another hundred years of apartheid is actually the more likely of the three scenarios. And there isn’t any counterbalancing factor that would forestall that development.

The Egyptians are the only major military power in the region, and they’ve taken themselves out of the fray. Syria is a basket case, it never really did much for the Palestinians anyway. And Iran talks a good game, but it’s distant, and it seems, actually, just to play a kind of symbolic politics with the issue.

And then the Americans are feckless and, for their own reasons — because of the way they see Israel as an element in their own security — are not going to force the Israelis to do anything. I used to think that the Israelis themselves would finally come to their senses and decide that trying to keep the Palestinians as chattel in the long run was not good for them, or for the Palestinians, or for anybody.

But I’ve despaired of that. I mean, the Israeli public opinion has moved to the far right, and 80 percent of Israelis are fine with what’s going on with Gaza after the admittedly horrific and soul wrenching attack of October 7th that the Hamas terrorists undertook. So, this is not something that’s going to happen voluntarily, a solution to this problem. It would have to be forced by somebody, and there’s nobody to force it. So it will just go on like this.

And it’s very bad for the region. You take a country like Lebanon, which could be very prosperous, but who’s going to invest in Lebanon if it’s sitting on the edge of an active volcano? And it’s got Hezbollah-armed militants running around the south. So, then, billions of dollars are lost in opportunity costs for the entire Eastern Mediterranean because of this ongoing situation, and it affects the whole region.

And the bright idea that Jared Kushner had, that you could do an end run around the Palestinians, and just have the Israelis recognized by wealthy and or desperate states in the region, I mean, that whole theory, I think, was refuted by October 7th. Unless you deal with the Palestine problem, you’re just not going to have peace.

But then, I think the other conclusion we may draw is, we’re not going to have peace.

JS: Well, that is the opposite of an uplifting note to end on. I hope you’re wrong, but I unfortunately think that a lot of what you just said there does constitute some of the more likely scenarios to see, not just in the coming months, but in the years ahead.

Juan Cole, thank you so much for all of your work. Not just on these subjects, but also over the years. A real honor to have you on the program.

JC: Thank you so much. And likewise.

MH: That was Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan. You can read his writings at juancole.com.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review was done by David Bralow, Sean Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely do leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

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

Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Biden Stands at the Precipice of a Greater War in the Middle East and His Political Future appeared first on The Intercept.

With his airstrikes this month ordered in response to attacks on Red Sea shipping, Joe Biden has become the fourth consecutive U.S. president to bomb Yemen. The strikes targeted against the Houthi militant group are aimed at preventing further attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea. Biden himself has said that the strikes carried out so far have been ineffective but that they would continue on nonetheless.

This week on Intercepted, Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor of language and literacy at Michigan State University and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute focused on Yemen, joins us to discuss the history of U.S. involvement in the country since the war on terror and the potential impact of this new intervention on Yemeni society. With co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain, Al-Adeimi discusses the U.S. role in facilitating a disastrous Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen over the past decade, the emergence of the Houthis, and the political threats of the present conflict as Yemenis attempt to negotiate a peace agreement aimed at putting an end to a devastating conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands in the country.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Maz, there’s a lot to discuss this week. We have the United States government now very clearly agitating toward a wider war in the Middle East, even though the rhetoric from the White House is that that is not what the Biden administration wants.

The U. S. expanding its airstrikes against Yemen, the U.S. still continuing its military operations in Iraq. And, despite all of Netanyahu’s recent statements about how there will never be a Palestinian state as long as he’s in power, and then, very provocatively coming out and saying that, from the West of Jordan, Israel is going to remain in total control.

And I went back and I was looking, Maz, and this has been Netanyahu’s posture throughout his entire political career. But also, for all of the focus that we’ve heard about Hamas’s charter and calls for the destruction of Israel — by the way, parenthetically, Hamas amended its charter, and now says that it recognizes 1967 borders as a future Palestinian state — but what’s interesting is, if you go back and you read the Likud party charter of 1977, in that document, it says, quote, “between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

So, right now, we have, on the one hand, Netanyahu coming out and saying the Hague isn’t going to stop him, we’re going to continue going, this could go on for many, many months, if not years, Israel is going to be in control of everything West of the Jordan. And you have the Biden administration continuing to try to play this game where they project one image in the media, which is that they’re running out of patience, and then, on the other hand, continuing to support Netanyahu’s war of annihilation, Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.

And Khan Yunis in the South of Gaza has now been the epicenter of the most intense Israeli attacks of late, where they’re killing upwards of 180 to 200 Palestinians every day, and laying siege to sites that the Israeli government has told Palestinians to flee to, to stay safe. They’re continuing to attack the few remaining hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza at the same time we see the war expanding with these airstrikes in Yemen, that could very, very quickly spread further into a much hotter conflict involving United States forces, and others within the “axis of resistance,” as it’s called.

MH: You know, it’s interesting. It seems like the U.S. — against its will and the exhaustion of the American public — is very, very much involved in a serious military conflict in the Middle East again. These strikes in Yemen, the U.S. has tried to downplay them and say that, well, they’re limited, we’re not in a war. It’s attempted to deter the Houthis and so forth, but it’s already expanding; they’re bombing Saada very heavily. And there’s no exit strategy of where this ends or how this ends, it could spiral and snowball quite a bit.

And it seems like the driver of this is effectively cosigning a very radical government in Israel which has very maximalist goals. It’s no longer interested — if it ever was — in meaningful compromise with its neighbors, or accepting a peace deal, which does exist on the table, which allows it to move on from this conflict. And the U.S. is effectively invested in bankrolling this, and underwriting it for as long as it takes.

And you mentioned the Likud charter; the Likud charter is effectively a very important document for American foreign policy now, because American foreign policy is invested in ensuring that the tenants of this ideology, in which Netanyahu himself is a major proponent now, are a U.S. foreign policy priority. And as much as politicians want to talk about pivoting to Asia, focusing on Europe, or what have you, they’re stuck in the same doom cycle of defending to the hilt maximalist Israeli ideological and political and military interests and demands.

So, it’s very irrational, I would say. The fact that the U.S. is now looking down the barrel of another major war in the Middle East; it’s already involved in another major war in the Middle East. It goes against every American interest, and yet we’re still stuck here. And I think it really bears reflection: how are we getting wrapped up into another war in Yemen? How are we still mired in the Middle East? It’s very bloody, irresolvable on the current term’s conflicts. And I think Netanyahu and Israel are very, very much at the core of that.

JS: You and I have talked for a couple of months at least, now, about how the actual Israeli ground war against Hamas actually is not going well for Israel or for the United States. And now, this is becoming a very mainstream story. In The New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, in Haaretz, you now start to see a recognition that the stated goals of this campaign — to, quote, “eliminate Hamas, and to free the Israeli hostages” — there’s a recognition now among elite media outlets — and among journalists who have very good sources in the Israeli Military and the Israeli government — that they’re flailing. That this is rapidly becoming a quagmire, just on a military level.

You had an incident that took place on Monday, where 21 Israeli soldiers died as they were trying to rig two buildings in Gaza with mines so that they could do a controlled demolition. You know, under international humanitarian law, an occupying force or an invading force is not allowed to destroy buildings or seize properties unless there’s a very clear military necessity to do it. And, for months, we’ve watched Israeli soldiers posting videos on TikTok of them gleefully hitting the detonate button to blow up civilian residential neighborhoods, to blow up universities, to have these Israeli soldiers doing this.

And then, to die, when what Israel says is that Hamas launched an RPG at a tank that was, quote-unquote, “protecting the soldiers who were going to rig the explosives in this building.” And that this somehow then also hit one of the bombs they were trying to plant in the building, and it caused the buildings to collapse on top of the 21 soldiers This is the single biggest casualty event for the Israeli military of the past three and a half months of siege in Gaza.

To me, it really is sort of a symbol of how the whole military campaign against Hamas — you know, this is not a war against Hamas, it’s a war against Gaza — but the military campaign against Hamas also seems to be kind of collapsing on itself in some ways.

MH: You know, there was an incredible statistic which was reported yesterday, which is that it’s estimated that Hamas’s tunnels inside Gaza could run as much as 450 miles. So it’s only 25-mile strips, it’s a very, very small amount of territory fortified so deeply under the ground. And I don’t think there’s any precedent for a military actually encountering something like that or how to deal with it; it may be the first.

So, any of the goals, traditionally, that they set out for how this campaign was going to go have really stalled, or they have kind of confronted the reality that you can’t eliminate Hamas militarily, that’s a very difficult goal in itself. But, at the same time, trying to rescue the hostages which are in their control, where you don’t know where they are … These two goals don’t match at all.

I think this entire military offensive began very much in a panic and a rage after October 7th. There was not much foresight, not much planning. One thing we learned was that the Israeli military had never made contingency plans for how to do regime change in Gaza if they needed to, something that they discovered after October 7th.

So, now they’ve entered this conflict with no clear exit strategy, no plan on how they want to bring it to fruition. And the Israeli government, while it’s taking these very heavy losses, they’re now publicly fighting about how they’re going to proceed with this, and the divisions between the war cabinet are opening up quite broadly.

I think that it’s still quite early, but it’s looking very, very bad for Israel’s military campaign. It’s looking like a repeat, perhaps, of it’s campaign in Lebanon in 2006, where they withdrew without achieving their goals. I think that may be the case now, despite their very, very disproportionate amount of force that they have, that they’ve used. Ultimately, they’ve set a trap for themselves by setting maximalist goals, which may be, by themselves, impossible to achieve.

JS: Yeah. And it seems clear that Netanyahu is intent on saving his political career by planting a flag on a huge pile of Palestinian corpses in Gaza. And the question is, whether or not he’s even on a tactical level going to be able to do that, despite the fact that they’ve documented more than 25,000 Palestinians [killed by now], it seems like, even by just wantonly mass killing civilians, they may not even be able to conquer Gaza.

Well, Maz, today we’re going to turn our focus sharply onto this other front that has opened up in what is becoming a broader war in the Middle East, and that is: the U.S. attacks against Yemen, and the blockade that Ansar Allah, the Houthis, have been operating now for weeks, initially targeting Israeli ships, or ships that were affiliated in some way with Israel. Now they’re saying that they’re also going to target ships from the United States, and Britain, and other countries that participate in these attacks against Ansar Allah’s forces off the coast of Yemen. 

To do so, we’re joined by Shireen Al-Adeimi. She is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University. Also a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, where she focuses on Yemen.

Shireen, welcome to Intercepted. Thanks for being with us.

Shireen Al-Adeimi: Thanks for having me.

JS: So, I want to begin with this comment that’s gotten a lot of attention that Joe Biden made recently, when he was asked whether the strikes against Yemen, against the Houthis, were working. And Biden said the following: “Well, when you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

First, off the bat, your response to Joe Biden’s statement.

SA: I mean, in a way, it’s a very clear admission of what the U.S. policy has been toward Yemen over the last decade, let’s say, or more. The response has always been: bomb them, and let’s see if that works. And we know it hasn’t worked in the past, we know it’s not working now. We’re going to continue doing it anyway.

And so, I wasn’t surprised by it, and I realize that the administration knows what they’re doing, and that they understand that past behavior is the best predictor of future outcomes. And yet, they continue along this policy.

Just to hear that admission, I think it’s a little bit jarring, because it has not worked, it’s not working now. They know that the Houthis have gotten stronger. They know this will mobilize even more people toward their cause, and yet the policy remains in place, that they’ll just continue doing it anyway because, apparently, that’s the American way, is what it signals.

MH: Shireen, before we get more into present events: you’re an expert on Yemen. Can you tell us a bit about the political circumstances in which the current crisis emerged? Obviously, there’s been a civil war in Yemen for a number of years. And, more recently, there’s been some peace talks, which seem to have made some progress towards an end.

Tell us what was happening in Yemen before this crisis in the Red Sea began.

SA: I wouldn’t characterize it as a civil war, because it was, essentially, before it could even brew to a full-fledged civil war, there was a Saudi-led intervention in 2015.

And so, we could take it back to 2011 during the Arab spring, when Yemenis were seeking an end to dictatorship. The promise of democracy which, you know, we have the structure for that in Yemen, in contrast to the countries that are surrounding Yemen, which are all monarchies, and sultanates, and emirates, and whatnot.

But it began with people’s protests, which were coopted by various political groups. The president resigned in 2011, and we had an interim president in place, so that’s the internationally-recognized government that we hear about, President Hadi. And, meanwhile, the Houthis have had their issues with the Yemeni government since the early 2000s. They weren’t the only group who were dissatisfied, of course, so they joined the movement, initially what were peaceful movements. 

So, late 2014, the Houthis, in the middle of this national dialogue that was meant to bring people together, the various parties, come toward a coalition government. They essentially took over the capital and forced the president to house arrest. And they said that their motivation was, still, to work toward a political solution, and we’ve heard from the previous U.N. envoy that that was still on the table.

So, in March of 2015, the various factions were still willing to sign an agreement, and that’s when Saudi Arabia began bombing, formed a coalition, said that this was going to take a few weeks, they were going to just curtail the Houthis. They didn’t want the Houthis in power; understandably, given the political differences between Ansar Allah, the Houthis, the Saudi government, and the U.S. government.

And so, that led to, essentially, the next eight years of war, where it wasn’t Operation Decisive Storm. They weren’t able to just bombard the Houthis, and have them give up their arms, and retreat to the northern part of Yemen. And, instead, the Houthis mobilized most of the nation, essentially, to defend the country against the Saudi-led coalition.

This persisted until 2022, when Houthi attacks began to have an impact on Saudi Arabia in the U.A.E., which was not previously the case. This was mostly an asymmetrical war, with Yemeni civilians being killed and being starved because of the blockade and the bombing, and Saudi, U.A.E. citizens, and American citizens not really feeling the brunt of this war at all.

But, in early 2022, there were some Houthi missiles and drones that landed in the oil fields in Saudi Arabia in the U.A.E., which prompted all of these parties to come and to have serious dialogue toward peace. And so, there was a ceasefire in place, and President Hadi — who was the internationally recognized president — he was set aside by the Saudis, and replaced with a council of eight men, four of whom were/are backed by the U.A.E., four of them backed by the Saudis. And they’ve spent the last year and a half fighting one another in southern Yemen, which is controlled by the coalition. Meanwhile, the Houthis are now recognized, essentially, as the de facto government in Yemen; they rule the part of Yemen where about 70 to 80 percent of the population resides.

They were close to an agreement with Saudi Arabia. We were hearing whispers that they were about to sign an agreement this month, in January, with the Saudis, signaling the end of the war. Who knows what that transition would have looked like post-war, but at least it would have given Yemenis this hope that foreign intervention was going to end, and the parties within Yemen could forge a path forward that worked for Yemenis.

Then the attacks on Gaza happened, and you know the Houthi response to that, which I think has derailed those talks and could further delay any notions of peace in the in the near future, at least

JS: Picking up on that, Shireen, I think it’s really interesting the way that the United States — and this is not a new phenomenon — but the way that the United States tries to link any entity that it wants to portray as ultra-nefarious as being ultimately controlled by another major power. The Russian-backed this, the Iranian-backed this, the Chinese-backed this. And, in the case of the Houthis or Ansar Allah, you can go back and look at a much deeper history, the tapestry of information that we were able to see from the WikiLeaks cables. How U.S. officials, over the years, the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh — the former longtime ruler of Yemen — constantly was trying to get the United States to allow him to use counterterrorism weapons and funding to fight his domestic battles against the Houthi militia at the time, and the U.S. was consistently saying no. And, also, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that, for a long time, the United States rejected the notion that the Houthi movement was a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran.

And part of what has happened with the Saudi bombings that you mentioned, with the U.S. policy under Barack Obama [of] beginning regular strikes on the country, and then, the battles for power that took place in Yemen, is that some of what the far right in the United States — or the Republicans — wanted to portray as this is just a wholly owned Iranian subsidiary, started to become more true. In the sense that when the Houthis achieved some form of political power in Yemen, then they were able to broker more peer-to-peer relationships with Iran. But the notion that this is an entirely Iranian subsidiary, I think, remains quite ludicrous. But, nonetheless, that is how it’s portrayed.

I mean, first of all, we should also say “the U.S.-backed Israeli government” when we’re talking about the war in Gaza, because there’s far more evidence that the United States is giving the crucial weapons to Israel to carry out this campaign than there is a long term plan with Ansar Allah in Yemen.

But what I wanted to ask you about is how the way when media outlets, and the U.S. government, and Western governments, talk about this as the Iran-backed Houthi movement, it strips Yemenis of their agency on the issue of Gaza, and it betrays an ignorance of Yemen’s history with sending fighters to Afghanistan, for instance, to fight the Soviets. I remember being in Iraq and Baghdad right before “shock and awe” began, and a bunch of Yemenis came pouring in, because they said they wanted to fight against a U.S. invasion.

I want to get your analysis of how much of this is about Ansar Allah, and the Houthis making this decision to implement this blockade in defense of Gaza, and how much of it has actual support among other sectors of Yemeni society, including people that may be opponents of Ansar Allah, or believe that the Houthis represent an illegitimate takeover of the government of Yemen.

SA: Yeah. I agree with everything that you’ve said, and I think we’ve become conditioned to hear Iran as the enemy. And so, “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” is just a euphemism for “enemy.” So, it’s just an easy way for people to just understand, these are the bad guys, and we’re the good guys.

And it’s not just a characterization that’s happened now, of course, in the context of Gaza, but over the last nine years, since the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed war in Yemen began, they were always characterized as Iran-backed Houthis. They were all of these claims about Iranians sending weapons to Houthis during the middle of the blockade, aerial blockade, naval blockade, land blockade. And yet, Iran’s relationship with the Houthis has always been exaggerated and, like you said, it takes away the agency. And we know that this was orchestrated by the previous president Saleh, all of this is out there for people to learn about, and yet this notion continues.

Now, I do think that the solidarity between Yemenis and Palestinians runs deep. In 1947, when Yemen had just joined the United Nations, they were among five member countries who were who walked out when the vote to partition Palestine occurred; this was a monarchy that was controlling North Yemen. During the time that Yemen was controlled by the Communists in South Yemen, there was a blockade in Bab al-Mandab in support of the war between Egypt and Israel.

During the time of Ali Abdullah Saleh — the Republic of Yemen, the long term dictatorship — he was very open with all members of the Palestinian leadership, and Palestinians were allowed to come and work in Yemen, have the rights that all Yemenis had. They weren’t living in refugee camps or anything like that. And their leadership was welcomed in Yemen, even when they were kicked out of Lebanon during the civil war.

And so, no matter the leadership in Yemen, this is one of the few issues where there’s a perfect alignment between what the people of Yemen want and what the leadership has done to support the Palestinians in the Palestinian cause, both morally and materially, over the last several decades. And so, this is not an inauthentic relationship between the Yemenis…

And now, of course, some people will say that the Houthis are trying to co-opt this and strengthen themselves. The Houthis have a lot to lose here by blockading the Red Sea in support of Gaza. Like I said, the peace deal is on the table. Yemenis want nothing more than to just move on with their lives, to pick up the pieces.

And the damage has been immense to the Yemeni population. The latest numbers — and these are vastly underreported — but at least 377,000 people have been killed in Yemen. A child was dying at the rate of one every 75 seconds, a child under the age of five, for the past several years, and this is because of the blockade.

And so, the Houthis don’t want to rule over a country where people are starving, and there’s no trade, and there’s a blockade, and we have to seek permission from the Saudis to leave our country or to enter our country. The one airport in Saada just finally reopened, which the U.S. just bombed in those first airstrikes.

And so, they have a lot to lose. And, yes, they may be regional clout [right now] for their stance with Gaza and Palestine, but it comes at the expense of a peace deal for Yemen, which we’ve long sought for, which everybody in Yemen has long sought for. But I think that even their enemies within Yemen, just people — whether they’re in higher positions or just the average person — this cause seems to have united us together.

The war with Saudi Arabia really fractured Yemeni society in many ways. We have a lot of Southern Yemenis where I’m from who supported the coalition, and a lot of Northern Yemenis who didn’t. The cause for Palestine, I think, though, unites Yemenis, and they see it as a way to confront the blockade in Gaza, and to lend support for the Palestinians in the middle of this genocidal war against them. And if the Houthis happen to be the one doing it, so be it.

I mean, this is the same reason a lot of people flocked to the Houthis during the last several years, because they were seen as the only group who stayed in Yemen and were defending Yemen against foreign enemies, a coalition of 16, 17 countries. Whereas the other members of the leadership in Yemen, were and are still in hotels in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., and directing, being told what to do. Step down, do this, do that, take this money, do that.

And so, they’re not seen as legitimate rulers in Yemen, whereas the Houthis are seen as being bold, whether it’s defending Yemen against Saudi Arabia, or now, lending support to Palestine through this blockade.

MH: Shireen, to your point, there were big rallies in major Yemeni cities in support of the Palestinians, and in defiance of the U.S. and U.K. airstrikes which took place after the Houthi attack. So, it clearly does evince exactly what you’re talking about, this unity of many, many different factions of Yemeni society over this one issue, of which the Houthis have become the standard bearer.

Obviously, we’re talking about the Houthis right now, and you know more about their origins, and where they came from, and what their characteristics are. Tell us, briefly, how did the Houthi movement emerge, and what are their beliefs and ideology, and how does that fit their place in Yemen?

SA: So, the family of al-Houthi began as preachers, turned politicians, and they came from a province called Saada in the very north of Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia.

Now, Yemen, under a dictatorship, anybody who posed any threat to Ali Abdullah Saleh was met with violence. I know this as having lived in the south during 1994 in Aden, where the southern leaders declared secession from the North, because it wasn’t working anymore, there were all of these misalignments of expectations, and Ali Abdullah Saleh responded with a war, with bombardment, asymmetrical bombardment, until the Southerners felt like they were forced back into unity with the North, which is why you see a lot of resentment between historic North and historic South Yemen.

The Houthis, in that context, were preaching against corruption, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s corruption, his very close relationship with the Saudis in the U.S. which, Jeremy, you mentioned earlier, with Yemenis going to Afghanistan and Iraq. I think it’s safe to say that we’re allergic to imperialism. Like, this is not something that Yemenis will accept at all. It’s in our national anthem that we won’t accept a ruler over our lands, it’s a very… And we’ve been colonized. We’re people who have been colonized by the Ottomans, by the British, and have fought very, very long and hard to end foreign interference in Yemen.

And so, the Houthis were not representing a cause that was unique to them. This was something that was shared by the majority of the Yemeni population, but most people can’t really say much under dictatorship without having to worry for their personal safety. And so, they began preaching against that, but they also were preaching very specifically about Saudi religious influence in Yemen.

In the 90s, there was a lot of exporting of Salafi Wahhabi Islam from Saudi Arabia. And, in a country like Yemen, where 40 percent of the population is Zaydi Muslim — which is a branch of Shia Islam — and about 60 percent are Shafi Sunni, they felt like this was just a complete threat to the theological foundations of this country.

Yemen is a deeply conservative religious society, but they’re also proud. We’re proud of our history and the ability of these various factions to live harmoniously over a couple thousand years; like a thousand years or so, 1,500 years. And so, for Salafi Islam or Wahhabism to infiltrate into Yemeni society, and to have that on-the-ground impact, was something that the Houthis were rejecting, given their theological background. But they’re also not a minority, like I said. And so, they’re from the sect where 40 percent of Yemenis practice that sect of Islam.

The very president who fought against them in six different wars — Saleh, between 2004 and 2010 — also shares their theological background. He’s a secular Muslim, but he is also from a Zaydi family.

And so, those were the causes that brought them to parliament, initially. And then, once Saleh saw that this was going to be a threat to his rule, responded with war. Enlisted the Saudis, tried to enlist the Americans, like you mentioned earlier, Jeremy, and was not successful, because the Americans understood that they were not Iran-allied, and so it was not their business to deal with it.

But the Saudis failed to do anything about the Houthis, and they’ve continued to strengthen themselves as fighters, but the fighting came as a response to the way that the government responded to them. They had some sympathy among the Yemeni population during this time, but it wasn’t until 2011 when they joined the protest movements that they also became a legitimate or a viable sect, a group who were asking to be represented in a future Yemen, in a future coalition government, that more people started paying attention to them.

JS: I wanted to ask you about the Axis of Resistance. We recently had on a scholar on Hezbollah, and she was talking about how the Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic resistance in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, as well as the Iranian Government — that they have essentially their own command center, also, where they’re analyzing global developments, particularly in light of the events of October 7th, and then the Israeli war of annihilation that’s been going on now for more than 100 days.

And you hear, from time to time, Yemeni officials… And Houthi leaders have become very popular on many Arabic language news channels as political analysts, as commentators, and their status is rising, certainly in the world as Gaza becomes destroyed. And you have silence from so many Arab nations and Muslim nations around the world, that the Yemeni commentators are emerging as very sharp critics of the Anglo support for Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.

But when Yemeni leaders say that this is sort of their opening salvo in a war of defense against Gaza, and that they also can escalate, and you have the prospect of a full blown hot war against Lebanon, for instance, by the Israelis… You have the United States now resuming bombing in multiple countries, you have Iran also staging its own attacks in the context of the broader simmering war.

How do you see this playing out, specifically with regard to Yemen? What else could Yemen be doing right now that they’re not already doing in the Red Sea? When Yemeni officials imply that they could do more, what is your read on [it]?

Are they bluffing? Are they giving a geopolitical analysis that says that, if this turns into a broader ground war in the region, that Yemenis would go and fight it? I mean, you get what I’m saying? Like, how much of this is bluster or bravado, and how much of it is, we’re serious about what we’re saying?

SA: I mean, they are serious about what they’re saying, but their capabilities are limited. So, they don’t have a Navy, they don’t have an Air Force. And yet, they were underestimated in the past. They were essentially able to defeat the Saudis in the U.A.E., let’s be honest. If the Saudis were not able to take an inch of land that they already had — in July of 2015, between 2015, between 2015 and 2022 — and were desperate to get out of this war, then that constitutes a defeat, despite their backing by the United States, despite the U.A.E. being a partner in that war.

Now, of course, southern lands have been essentially taken over by the coalition, and our islands, for example, are occupied by the U.A.E. But, in terms of holding on to the North, and the stronghold where most of the population resides, they’ve won, despite only really having ground soldiers, and some drones, and some missiles here and there.

And so, this blockade that we’re seeing in the Red Sea, you know, they’re using drones and missiles and fishing boats. They don’t really have a Navy, like I said. They could escalate those.

And I think one interesting. development was, not just attacks in the Red Sea, but going all the way down to the Gulf of Aden, and staging attacks from there. Those are not areas that the Houthis control. And yet, they were still able to attack some ships from that. So not just the Red Sea; it’s also just that entire area. So, I think they could escalate those.

Fighting on the ground is their strongest suit. This is why the Saudis never had a ground invasion. The U.A.E. was policing this, basically, but they knew better than to have a ground invasion. And they were using Yemeni forces, mercenaries. They were using Blackwater forces, Sudanese forces, they were using all of those people, except the Saudis and the U.A.E. soldiers to wage these battles on the ground, and even they were defeated. Because Northern Yemen, these are highlands. Think of Afghanistan; you’re not going to be able to win on the ground over there.

So, I think defending their own country, they’ve been very, very successful at that. They have not had any ambitions to take over, or to go outside of their borders, except to win these short battles with the Saudis at the border, because that was the only place they could face them on the ground. But it’s interesting to me, because there’s Saudi Arabia between Yemen and Palestine. And so, it’s hard to imagine that they could do anything more to escalate, but I think their escalation is in the Red Sea, and in the Gulf of Aden. And they’ve said that they’re targeting Israel-bound ships. And, since the U.S. and U.K. started bombing, now they’re targeting U.S. and U.K. ships as well. Maybe that’ll escalate to other countries, depending on what happens.

But I think some of it is bravado. Some of it is that they are dedicated to this ideologically more than technically. They’ve been underestimated in the past, and I think we should be taking everything that they’re saying seriously.

MH: Shireen, you mentioned that they survived this very long and very brutal air campaign by the U.A.E. and Saudi, which was backed by the U.S. with various technical and logistical support. It’s interesting because, now, the response to them is to hit them with more airstrikes by the U.S. and U.K. directly now. Are there lessons that they’ve learned during that time of how to survive an airstrike? Because it seems that there’s some adaptation that took place here.

I remember several years ago, we had a story about the bombing of Saada City in the north, where you mentioned that many leaders come from. The city was very much destroyed, including the historical heritage. And it was assumed that the group was going to be wiped out very soon as a result of facing this air power. Because, as you said, they don’t have air defenses, really, they don’t have an air force of their own.

How have they learned to adapt? Is it like a Darwinian sort of adaptation, that they’ve become stronger, or learned how to evade and hide their forces from air power? Is that likely to make this campaign today unsuccessful?

SA: I mean, wars are never won through aerial bombardment. We know those lessons from Afghanistan, for example, or from Vietnam. And so, I think, with the Houthis, they’re not just a small group. Maybe the family of Al-Houthi is what inspired this movement, but when you see those millions of people on the streets coming out in support of the movement of Ansar Allah, these are ordinary Yemeni men who are willing and have been willing to sacrifice for the defense of their country.

And when we thought that the movement was going to be wiped out in Saada — like you said, they really carpet bombed it, essentially, they were carpet bombing Saada in the beginning parts of the war — and yet the leaders have been safe. Many of them have not — we have had a previous Houthi president who was assassinated by the Saudis a few years ago — but they just continue to survive, because they know that this is not something that is unpopular. It’s not an unpopular movement, it’s not just isolated to northern Yemen and Saada in that one province. They’re all over the country.

I mean, even Ali Abdullah Saleh, the previous president who joined them initially from 2015 up until late 2017, he joined them in the war against the Saudi-led aggression, which was just phenomenal to think about, that they had forged this partnership after years and years and years of fighting one another, but it was a very convenient political partnership. And the second he turned against them and tried to join the U.A.E. again, he was killed within 72 hours. 

And people were saying that there’s no way; like, Saleh had maneuvered every imaginable thing against him. He was known as the one who danced on the heads of snakes. He was a very shrewd politician, he was a survivalist in that area. And yet, in his stronghold, in Sana, he was killed within just… not even 72 — 48 hours of him turning against the Houthis.

And so, I think their power has been entrenched, and part of it is survival. Part of it is, they’ve always worked with very limited technology, and they know how to make that go a long way. But I think, on the ground, they have won hearts and minds, and many more people are willing to fight for their homeland than I think the Americans understand. They don’t understand our history with colonialism, they don’t understand our history with oppression, and how hard Yemenis had to fight, for their rights to not just live free of oppression and colonialism — whether it was the Ottoman empire in the North or the British empire in the South — but also to not live under a monarchy. That was a hard-won fight in Yemen, and then the fight against dictatorship, which happened during 2011.

So, I think there’s a lot of investments by Yemenis to just be left alone, to chart their own course, to determine self-determination, and to live in a sovereign place that does not have to bow down to the will of Saudi Arabia, or to the U.A.E., or to the United States, or even to Iran. You’ll see a lot of people speaking out very strongly against Iranian influence in Yemen, because they don’t want to bow down to anybody. They want to be able to control their own affairs. 

MH: I want to ask you very quickly: obviously, Biden has reinvigorated U.S. military involvement in Yemen, by bombing Yemen in recent weeks. The Saudis and the Emiratis, because of their very, very painful and failed experience in attacking Yemen, they’re desperate to get out of the country now. And you mentioned that they’re concerned about these strikes by the Houthis against their own cities, and so forth, that took place in 2022.

Are these strikes going to derail the Saudi regime’s ambition to extricate themselves from Yemen and have a peace deal? Because it seems like, as opposed to welcoming them, they seem to be quite nervous about the strikes, or seem to be not supporting them. What’s their concern as you see it, in terms of maybe failing to end the war in Yemen from their perspective, and go back to a stable situation?

SA: I think, more so than the airstrikes, the designation of the Ansar Allah as terrorists is more likely to derail the talks, because the Saudis are not going to want to be seen as just, “signing a peace deal with terrorists,” quote-unquote. And so, I think they’re nervous about that.

And, of course, they don’t want to also be … You know, the Saudis and the U.S.’s relationships are very intertwined, their interests are intertwined. And so, they want the U.S. to just play along here. Let us sign this deal, let us get out of this completely, and then you do what you want. They’re not concerned about Yemeni citizens — they never have [been], of course — they’re just concerned about their own security at the border.

There have been continued skirmishes at the border, by the way, with Saudi Arabia. And so, they just want to wrap this up, and get it over with, and work toward their vision 2030, or whatever it is that Mohammed bin Salman is interested in doing.

The Emiratis, I think, have longer-term ambition in Yemen, which is why this deal is with the Saudis and not the Emiratis. So, the Saudi went into this just thinking they’re going to bomb their way to it, and they couldn’t, and they’ve lost. The U.A.E., I think, is a separate contender here, a separate entity to deal with, because they are interested in the theft of resources, essentially, in Southern Yemen. And so, that’s a whole other battle that Yemenis themselves are hopefully going to unite in fighting against, and not be fractured again.

But I think the Saudis are asking for de-escalation. They don’t want to derail the talks, they just want to get out of this. But I think, more importantly, the designation, if it sticks, to designate the Houthis as terrorists won’t look very good for Saudis, because they’re not going to want to seem like they’re talking to terrorists.

JS: One other note on that: when the United States designates Ansar Allah or the Houthis as a terrorist organization while, at the almost the exact same moment of the designation, you have the overwhelming majority members of the United States Senate, a massive bipartisan majority voting to effectively kill a measure brought by Senator Bernie Sanders that simply sought to ensure that the Biden administration’s state department is complying with American law regarding the military support for units or entities, foreign military units or entities that may be committing human rights abuses, it just strikes me that this is our response to the blockade of a port that the individuals doing the blockade seem to have kept their word on which kinds of ships they…

Israel and Yemen are at war. Yemen did declare war, Yemen is a party to this, and is implementing this blockade which, the massive result of it has been to disrupt shipping, but they were exclusively targeting ships that had a connection to Israel. Now, as you mentioned, the front has expanded, because of the U.S. and Britain and other countries now deploying their war vessels into the region.

But this designation of the Houthis as terrorists is really on the nose when you juxtapose it with the fact that, not only is the United States completely arming and politically bankrolling the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, but actively refusing to check if even U.S. law is being broken by supporting units that all of us are watching on television, committing human rights abuses and mass murder in Gaza.

SA: Yeah. The political cover that they’ve provided to their allies — whether they’re the Saudis, the Emiratis, or the Israelis — it’s just been incredible. Like, la-la-la-la-la, we don’t want to hear about it. Let’s just continue supporting them because they have a right to self-defense, or whatever it is that our government tells itself. But they don’t even want to know, like you said.

And even bombing Yemen, on the day that South Africa brought its case to the ICJ, I think, also sends a signal. Let’s just distract from this case and bomb Yemen, and just call them Houthi targets, and not pretend that bombing a sovereign country is totally fine, and bombing airports is totally okay.

And so, I think this is all just a distraction. Our government is totally intertwined with Israeli’s government and interests and, unfortunately, the people we’ve elected are taking a lot of money from AIPAC and other sources, and they’re not interested in at least even understanding what the goals or what the will of the American population is, let alone fulfilling it. They just have their own interests.

And so, yeah. This has just been extremely… It’s interesting, in a way, because they’ve laid out… They’ve been much more transparent about this. Wars have a way of just laying bare what people’s motivations and interests really are, and I think they’ve done a really good job at doing that.

JS: From the beginning of this intense phase of Israel doing a scorched-earth attack against Gaza, killing more than — and I still assert these are conservative numbers — more than 25,000 Palestinians, more than 10,000 children. I emphasize that I think they are conservative numbers, because people need to understand, when news outlets or commentators dismiss death figures or injury figures given by the Health Ministry in Gaza — they say, oh, it’s the Hamas-run health ministry — but if you actually know anything about the standards that are used there by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, anyone who’s counted as dead or injured has to have come through either the hospital system or the mortuary system. And they’re not just, like, randomly throwing out estimates. And if you actually pay close attention to it, there are other international NGOs that put the body count of Palestinians several thousand dead higher than even the so-called Hamas-run Health Ministry.

But, even taking those conservative statistics — the 25,000 dead — you contrast that, then, with the rhetoric and statements of American officials, most prominently Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And, on the one hand, the United States is giving no-condition military aid to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Blinken on a number of occasions has gone around the back of congressional review processes to push through extra tank ammunition to the Israelis to be used in their attacks on the people of Gaza. And you have, then, Blinken running around the world trying to force a tear to come out of his eye when he talks about the suffering of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children. He even — and I thought this was so disgusting — started to talk specifically about Wael Dahdouh’s family, the Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera Arabic, while at the same time doing nothing to address the fact that Israel is systematically murdering journalists and their families.

And you have Biden, and Blinken, and others saying, we seek no wider regional war, that the United States is doing everything possible to stop it while, at the same time, engaging in military strikes in multiple countries, and opening up what is a very significant front in bombing Yemen in such an overt way, and pledging to continue it in perpetuity.

And what I wanted to ask you, Shireen, is: what kind of fire is this administration playing with in the region? This is an election year that Biden is going into. A lot of presidents think that wars are going to help them to win their elections, but it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be able to tie this up in some kind of a neat, convenient bow in time for what appears to be a race between Biden and Trump. 

So, lay out how you see this playing out in the coming months, with the kind of box that has been opened now by the U.S. actions in the Middle East. 

SA: We know from polls, and from demonstrations, and everything going on around here that most people in this country — most Democrats for sure — are calling for a ceasefire. And, instead of working toward a ceasefire, instead of making the support for Israel conditional or pulling it all together, we’re seeing this administration doing everything they can to support Israel. While, at the same time, claiming that, “Oh, I have no leverage, and Israelis will never listen, and we want to curtail civilian deaths.” Meanwhile, they’re vetoing any mentions of ceasefire in the U.N. Security Council, and so on.

And so, I think this president is much more interested in supporting Israel and propping up a genocide, essentially, through his support for Israel than winning, winning against Trump. And his own party is telling him, people within his own party are telling him that we’re not going to vote for you if you continue supporting Israel, and he is doing that regardless. So, I think it’s interesting.

There is mention that he might be coming to Michigan at the end of this month. Michigan has the largest Arab American population in the United States. They did this just before the last elections, too;  I was part of a group where President Biden sent his senior foreign advisor to come speak to a group of us here, Arab Americans in Michigan. Yemeni, specifically Yemenis in Michigan, because the idea was, like: Well, yes, we were part of the coalition that started this war on your country, but we promise we’re going to end it, we promise we’re going to end the war in Yemen.

And I remember sitting in that meeting and hearing his security advisor talk about the regrets of having joined the Saudi-led coalition, and how they felt like it was just to appease the Saudis, because the Americans had just signed the Iran deal without the Saudis being part of that, and the Saudis were upset. And so, when they said, please join the coalition, we said, yes, of course.

I mean, this is all a farce; the United States was more than happy to lend support for the Saudis, and many think of this as a U.S. war in Yemen, anyway. But, you know, “we guarantee we’re going to end this war.” And the moment, of course, Biden took power, he reframed this war as defensive rather than offensive.

And so, the reality is that this is who Biden is. Biden voted for the Iraq war. Biden expanded the war in Afghanistan through drone warfare. Biden/Obama launched the war in Yemen. He has never seen a conflict that he didn’t turn into a war. He has never met a war that he doesn’t like. And so what makes us think that he’s going to all of a sudden change? He’s not going to change. He is committed to violence and war as a foreign policy tool. And so, I think it’ll come at his own peril, right?

So, people here are fed up. They’re not going to vote … Many of them are saying here in Michigan that he’s lost their vote. They’re not going to forget, even if he calls for a ceasefire now. Like you said, at the very least, we have 25,000 people in Gaza who are killed, and the suffering is just not going to be forgiven, right? Or forgotten.

And so, I think it should be interesting what happens later this year.

JS: One follow-up on that. I know we’re going to hit the season where the sort of major league vote-shaming starts happening, where you have all these democratic operatives telling everybody that, oh, if they don’t vote for ol’ Joe Biden, that they’re going to be responsible for Donald Trump winning again.

I mean, it’s such an intellectually and morally bankrupt argument to begin with, but setting it in the context of this specific mass slaughter that Biden is fueling in Gaza, I’ve been saying to people: first of all, most Democrats didn’t want Joe Biden to run, which is the first point here. But, secondly, I want to hear from anybody who runs around telling people that they have to vote for Joe Biden or they’ll be personally responsible for Donald Trump being elected, I want to see every piece of evidence they can produce to show that they spent every waking hour trying to stop Biden from fueling this genocidal war in Gaza. I want to know that they were knocking on doors, that they were calling their representatives, that they were talking to the DNC, that they were trying to stop the DNC from running, ramming Biden down the country’s throat again as the Democratic nominee. I want to see all their receipts. Because, on a moral level, I don’t think you have any business vote-shaming anybody, particularly Palestinian Americans whose family members have been killed by American bombs in Gaza. So, now is the time to produce those receipts, or else you need to go and sit in a corner and be quiet, telling people how they need to vote. Because if you can’t show those receipts, you have no credibility. You’re just a cog in a party machine.

But what I wanted to ask you specifically, Shireen, is what you’re hearing from people in the broader community in Michigan, because it is an important place, as you noted. Do you think people are likely to just not vote? I can’t fathom that they would vote, that a lot of Muslim Americans in particular… I mean, Arab Americans aren’t necessarily Muslim, that’s a mistake Biden made the other day, when he said Donald Trump wanted to ban Arabs from coming into the United States. He was talking about Muslims. And the United States has a substantial population of Arab Christians, including Palestinian Christians.

But are you hearing from people — this isn’t a scientific question, it’s more of just kind of, you know, what are you hearing — that they won’t vote, or that they’re only going to vote the down-ballot races, but they won’t vote for Biden? Or that they will vote for Trump, or that they want to vote third party? What kinds of things are you hearing from people?

SA: Yeah. So my sense is that people are likely not to vote, because nobody wants Trump, either, he was a disaster for Muslim Americans as well. And so, my sense is that they’re just going to sit it out. And, at the end of the day, these people cannot be shamed into voting for somebody who is an active supporter of genocide.

I didn’t vote for Biden in the previous elections, because how could I allow my moral conscience to vote for somebody who had destroyed my country, right? Not just my country, [but] others [too]. But he was in the Obama/Biden administration. Were it not for them, the Saudi war in Yemen would have never started.

And it wasn’t just selling weapons to the Saudis, as we see now with selling weapons to Israel, right? Or donating them or whatever. It was logistics, it was training. It was choosing targets for them. It was spare parts, maintenance, midair refueling, for god’s sakes, right?

And so, in every way, the Obama/Biden administration were responsible for this war in Yemen. I could not vote for a man who caused that much death and destruction, and I knew that I couldn’t trust him to just say, well, we’re going to end it. He didn’t. I was very happy with my decision, because he just continued the policy, same as usual.

And so, I think, for those of us sitting it out, not voting, it is not up to us. We did not put somebody in power who is committing genocide, supporting genocide, and has many war crimes behind his belt, right? And so, this is up to the party, this is who they nominated. And if that person is going to ignore the majority of Democrats saying that we want a ceasefire, and is going to continue supporting the Israelis anyway, then those are the consequences of his own actions and no one else.

Not voting for Biden means not voting for Biden. It doesn’t mean voting for Trump. It doesn’t mean enabling anybody else, it just means that we have taken a moral stance in not voting for somebody who has caused so much suffering and death and destruction in places where… And these are not just abstract figures to us.

When I talk about the war in Yemen, we talk about 377,000 people who are killed. Some of them are my own family, extended family members. I can’t go back to Yemen and expect to see things the way they are, right? There’s been so much displacement, there’s been so much destruction, and this is going to cause a generational impact on my country, just like it will cause a generational impact in Gaza and in Palestine.

And so, it’s Biden’s problem that he chose to support genocide, and he should face the consequences. And I think, no matter what happens with the vote-shaming, well, too bad. He shouldn’t have committed these war crimes, or supported war crimes in these other countries. If you really want us to vote, we’re happy to vote for people who are not going to be war criminals.

JS: Shireen, thank you very much for being with us on Intercepted. 

SA: Thanks for having me.

MH: That was Shireen Al-Adeimi, Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, where she focuses on Yemen.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Sean Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. 

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

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

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