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en.wikipedia.orgThe Chris Hedges Report continues to be produced through Hedges's Substack. Activism and direct involvement with politics. In the 2008 United States presidential campaign, Hedges was a speech writer for candidate Ralph Nader. [61] Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.
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Chris Hedges - Substack
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The Chris Hedges Report: On the Precipice of Darkness
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About — Chris Hedges
www.chrislhedges.comChris Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born on September 18, 1956 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He grew up in Schoharie, a rural farm town in upstate New York. He was a scholarship student at The Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, a pre-prep boarding school, and at the boarding school Loomis-Chaffee in Windsor, Connecticut.
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The Chris Hedges Report: On Emptying Gaza – Consortium News
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THE WEAPONS ISRAEL TESTS ON PALESTINIANS WILL BE USED AGAINST ALL OF US [Listen here]
As Antony Loewenstein explains, Palestine has been a testing ground for repressive technologies exported around the world, from spy software to killer drones.
by Chris Hedges, The Real News Network December 8, 2023
Whether it's drone technology or the infamous Pegasus spy software, Israel has long developed and refined repressive technologies used by governments around the world by testing them on Palestinians. Antony Loewenstein, journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a deep dive into the disturbing links between Israeli Apartheid, the arms industry, and global repression of civilian populations.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Cole, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley, Kayla Rivara Opening Sequence by: Cameron Granadino
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges: The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel's drones, surveillance technology including spyware, facial recognition software and biometric gathering infrastructure, along with smart fences, experimental bombs, and AI-controlled machine guns are all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results. These weapons and technologies are then certified as "battle-tested" and sold around the world.
Israel is the tenth largest arms dealer on the planet and sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America. Israeli weapons sales totaled $12.5 billion last year. Its close relationship with these military internal security surveillance, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement agencies explains the fulsome support Israel's allies give to its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
When Colombian president, Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the October 7 attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a terrorist attack and said, "Terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine," Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Columbia. This global cabal dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales.
These technologies are cementing into place a supernational, corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved in ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine. It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the US. Joining me to discuss this use of Palestinians as human Guinea pigs for the Israeli weapons and technology industry is Antony Loewenstein (b. 1974), author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.
So your book, which is a great read, lays out the rise of this arms industry, which originally was a state industry and then privatized. One of the points you made at the end of the book, which is very fascinating, is how much of the apparatus to keep the Palestinians under control is essentially now handed over to private firms. I want to quote Elliott Abrams (b. 1948), who I've interviewed, "The role of Israel is to serve as a model, an example in military might, in innovation, in encouraging child birth." This is one of the themes of your book that much of Israel's support and power derives from its connection to this global arms network. So let's lay out some of the innovations that Israel has pioneered. We can begin with Pegasus and drones. They're at the forefront of some of the most advanced technologies and weapon systems that are used to control subject populations.
Antony Loewenstein: In some ways, the genesis of the book was partly due to some of the reporting around Pegasus a few years ago. Listeners or viewers will be aware that Pegasus is a spyware tool that is made by NSO Group, which is an Israeli company and it was started to be used about 15 or so years ago by a range of countries. And in fact, the country that it was first mostly used in was Mexico as various governments there were desperate to fight a failed drug war, and of course it only made the violence worse. But what's interesting back then and also now is Mexico remains, Chris, to this day, the world's biggest and most obsessive user of Pegasus. Obsessed.
Whether it's the right-wing government or nominally left-wing government, Pegasus is now in dozens of countries; I don't even know how many, I think about 70, 80 or 90. In some ways, the reason I partly wrote the book was to say that the media was obsessed with Pegasus. Pegasus is an important investigation; It's a tool that is put on phones of activists and human rights workers in countless countries. And it breaches human rights. Obviously, that's terrible.
But the problem was that it was too often framed as this rogue Israeli company doing terrible things. As I show in the book, as you know, it's not that; It's essentially an arm of the state as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are arms of the US government. Now, Lockheed Martin is a private company. It has a board, sure, and it makes profits or not. But essentially it's an arm of the state. Right? It's used by the government in various foreign policy agendas or goals.
Pegasus is exactly the same. I started looking at that issue about saying that now probably, Israel is number one or two in the world for spyware and Pegasus and NSO Group in some ways are a smokescreen. Because there are so many other companies that are doing exactly the same thing. So if NSO Group goes bust tomorrow --And it's in a bit of financial trouble at the moment -- It's not going to make any difference. There are so many other companies doing exactly the same thing using that whole allure of being able to spy on pretty much anybody, which is why to this day no country wants to regulate this, nno country. They're all obsessed with it. That's been the fundamental problem at the moment.
Chris Hedges: Explain how Pegasus works. And we should note that it was used also on Jamal Khashoggi's fiance, Jamal, who I knew being the Saudi journalist who was dismembered in the Saudi embassy and a consulate in Turkey. But explain how it works.
Antony Loewenstein: Pegasus is a silent tool. It can be installed on your iPhone or Android. It doesn't matter what phone you have. Years ago, a lot of us used to get random text messages. You'd click on the link, you'd forget about it, and you'd move on. That was the way it used to work. So country X or intelligence agency Y would have this tool, let's say, in India, in some other country. They would then send a message to this phone of an activist or human rights worker or a lawyer, that person would click on a link, their phone would be infected, and they wouldn't know.
There's no way to know yourself without it being forensically checked. These days it doesn't even require a text message. All it requires is someone knowing your number. That's it. And it can access all your information. It can even access your phone and microphone when the phone is off. So it can be used as a weapon against you. As I show in the book, I interviewed huge amounts of people in Mexico and India and elsewhere. These are people often lawyers who are challenging the state.
In Mexico, I interviewed a woman whose husband was murdered by, almost certainly, Narcos. Then after his death, her phone was being surveilled by the Mexican state. It's never entirely clear even to this day why in her case it was surveilled. But it shows that there is this utter obsession with various intelligence services to get access to all this personal information. It's important to note that one thing that really was clear in researching this particular tool is that Pegasus and tools like this have become -- And it was said to be in The New York Times a few years ago, and I questioned some of this in the book but two journalists wrote --The most powerful weapon in the world since the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Now, I would question that because nuclear bombs clearly can cause carnage, to put it mildly. Pegasus doesn't directly kill anybody per se, but what it does is it means that privacy is close to dead. At the moment there is this massive proliferation of these tools. Israel of course -- This is the key point -- Uses Pegasus and other tools as a key foreign policy agenda. I show in the book Netanyahu and Mossad, over the last decade, would go to countries where Israel had no close relations: Rwanda and India when Narendra Modi (b. 1950) comes in. And others; Saudi, UAE. They hold Pegasus up as a diplomatic carrot saying, we will sell you this amazing tool which you can surveil your own citizens, whatever you want. But in return we would like you to vote in a certain way in the UN or buy certain weapons. That's how it works. I show a timeline when Netanyahu goes to Hungary to visit Viktor Orbán (b. 1960) or Modi in India, and 6-12 months later, Pegasus is in use. This is not accidental. This is a key part of Israeli foreign policy now.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the drone program. They pioneered drones. As I remember from the book, India is maybe their largest drone customer. These drones are used against migrants fleeing towards Europe, particularly Greece as well as the US-Mexico border.
Antony Loewenstein: I have some interesting declassified documents from the '80s where Israel was using drones in its war in Lebanon. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, it was before the digital era, but Israel was using drones. In this amazing document that I have in the book from the CIA they're shocked and amazed how incredible -- That's their words -- These drones are, how effective they are, and they wonder -- Back in the '80s -- How Israel will be a global pioneer of drones. Fast forward to the last decade or so, and as I show in the book, I have spent a lot of time in Gaza as a reporter in the last 15 or so years that there is a proliferation of testing of drones, particularly around Gaza.
I'm putting aside what's happened since October 7, although it's happening since then too. But in the last 15 years huge amounts of drones are being tested above Gaza, some armed, some not, used in the various Israeli invasions, incursions, or whatever you want to call it in Gaza. Those drones are then called "battle-tested" and then they're sold to huge amounts of nations around the world. The part that shocked me the most was the use by the EU. The EU is buying Israeli drones. They're unarmed, yes. And viewers will be aware that in the last 10 or so years, there's been a huge influx of migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East, after 2015 when the Europeans said they didn't want to repeat that huge influx of people coming. Of course, if you're Ukrainian and white, they'll welcome you in. And I have no problem with Ukrainians being welcomed in. But clearly if you're Black or Brown it's not going to be the same.
EU created this fortress, Europe and Israeli drones are part of that. Frontex, which is the European border force, uses Israeli drones 24/7 in the Mediterranean, circling the Mediterranean, sending back real-time images to Frontex, which is based in Warsaw, in Poland of what's happening. The EU has made a clear decision to let people drown; That is obvious. They barely issue rescue boats and they criminalize people who are trying to rescue migrants. Israeli drones are a key part of that infrastructure and eye in the skyand Israeli drones have appeared in India and various other countries. In the last years, Israel remains one of the key drone makers of the world, and increasingly, so is Turkey. Turkey makes a cheaper version of what Israel has been developing and therefore Turkish drones are now also appearing in many nations around the world in many conflicts.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about who Israel sells to. It's easier to tick off the list of who they don't sell to. I covered the conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Israel was supplying weapons, including napalm, to the Salvadorans and the Guatemalans. They were one of the most fervent supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa, they worked with Augusto Pinochet's Chile, and the Rwandan genocide was perpetrated with Israeli weapons. They will provide military equipment to the most heinous regimes, including the latest ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. You mentioned three countries: Iran, North Korea, and I don't know who the other one was.
Antony Loewenstein: I think I say Syria.
Chris Hedges: Maybe Syria
Antony Loewenstein: As far as we're aware.
Chris Hedges: Right. As far as we're aware.
Antony Loewenstein: As far as we're aware. It's interesting to note though, before 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, Israel and Iran were incredibly close. The fact that Iran was run by a dictator was no impediment to selling weapons. They were worried that the rise of the Islamic Revolution would impede their sales, which clearly it did. On the one hand, I shouldn't have been that surprised. It's important to note America remains the world's biggest arms dealer. 45% of the world's arms comes from America, so they are leaders by far. Israel is tenth. One of the things that shouldn't have shocked me but did was Myanmar, in the last years, has been committing a genocide against its Rohingya population -- Many of them have been killed, many have been kicked out into Bangladesh -- Even after the UN found that Myanmar was committing genocide, Israel was still selling surveillance and weapons to the Myanmar regime.
As you say, it's hard to list. There's so many of them. It's also worth saying that India -- And India is a big focus of the book because India is now the world's biggest country population wise, the world's biggest self-described democracy. Although I would very much question that. A key ally of the US and certainly my country, Australia and most western nations, because it's not China -- India is building a Hindu fundamental estate under Modi, a proudly chauvinist nation where particularly Muslims are discriminated against openly. There's pogroms against Muslims. Now, India and Israel didn't have a great relationship before Modi came in. There was a relationship in decades past. Modi comes in 2014 as Prime Minister and there's a love affair between Netanyahu and Modi. There's this image that some viewers may have seen of the two of them stepping onto the beach, getting their feet wet, talking about how much they love each other, who knows, no audio was recorded.
But this relationship is central to why I wrote the book. There is a growing global ethno-nationalist surge, India being the most obvious example, of nations that proudly discriminate against non-majority populations. In India it's against Hindus, against Muslims. In Israel, it's Jews against anyone who's not Jewish. And I say this as someone who's Jewish myself, that the whole alliance between Israel and India reminds me very much of Israel and South Africa: Nations that proudly discriminate against non so-called acceptable populations and are therefore inspiring others. Israel has become the inspiration to so many countries and far-right and rightists around the world, putting aside liberal Zionists for a minute, who over the years have had a love for Israel. I'm talking about India, Hungary, various other nations, not selling weapons but selling the idea of getting away with it.
That's something I talk about a lot in the book, that the idea that Israel is able to get away with it, each being occupation, endless colonization, brutalizing Palestinians, selling weapons to God knows who and God knows where, goes to the heart of why Israel is, to me, a danger. Not only to Palestinians, which is bad enough, but a model. Finally, Chris, I say in the book that you often go to far-right rallies -- And I go there for work, to be clear. For work purposes -- In the US, Australia, and elsewhere, the Israeli flag is a constant presence. It's not unusual and these are not groups that traditionally like Jews. They don't. I quote in the book Richard Spencer (b. 1978), that hideous alt-right leader in America who said a few years ago, I'm a white Zionist. He doesn't like Jewish people but he loves the idea of creating, for him and many like him, a Christian ethno-nationalist state.
You've written a lot of incredibly important work on Christian theocracy in the US and its potential growth and rise in domination. Israel is a touchpoint, as you would well know, for many of these groups. Not all, but many. And it's not because lobbyist groups like Jews; Many of them do not. But they like what Israel is doing to Palestinians to unbelievably dominate and control them. And they're proudly Jewish chauvinists. They're Jewish supremacists. That's what they want to create for Christians in America or Hindus in India. That to me is the danger.
Chris Hedges: This is from your book according to Netanyahu, Jewish writer Peter Baynard explained, "The future belong not to liberalism as Obama defined it, tolerance, equal rights and the rule of law, but to authoritarian capitalism, governments that combined aggressive and often racist nationalism with economic and technological might. The future, Netanyahu implied would produce leaders who resembled not Obama but him." I think it fits in with what you said and unfortunately I fear, I don't know what you think that he's right.
Antony Loewenstein: I fear that too because it's worth saying that Obama wasn't exactly a big believer in-
Chris Hedges: No, he wasn't.
Antony Loewenstein: … democracy and human rights either. But putting that issue aside, no, I fear that that is correct. And Netanyahu, I suspect as a leader possibly hasn't got a long life left as leader of Israel. It's obviously unclear because so many Israelis, even many who supported him are understandably incredibly angry with him after what happened on October 7th. So he may not last long as a leader himself, but I think his general analysis, I fear is correct, absolutely, that there is this sense of country after country, after country becoming enamored, not just with technological repression either from Israel or the US or others, but this idea somehow that you can maintain that domination forever.
Now, obviously, October 7th, as I touch on in the book or imply, although the book came out before October 7th, is arguably a delusion that if you believe as a nation that you can repress people through tech forever, it's a lie that will not work. And from Gaza is a key example of that. Even though Gaza was the key laboratory of Israel, they spent billions and billions in building walls and drones and surveillance. Hamas was able to breach that remarkably relatively easily. I mean, it's obviously took years of planning to do so, but I fear the lesson will not be learned.
And Gideon Levy (b. 1953), who's a good friend of mine, the amazing Israeli journalist in Israel has said that he fears that even now the lessons are not being learned by Israel and other leaders. What he means by that is that the lesson that Israel is taking from October 7 and frankly the US took from 9/11 was the wrong one. It was that we need to invade and bomb and dominate even more, which I think is born out of insecurity, not strength, but nonetheless, that's I fear the lesson that Israel is taking, not so much that we need to maybe talk to Palestinians or negotiate with Palestinians. Those Israelis, some are saying that, but it's a tiny minority.
Chris Hedges: And yet in your book you talk about Sri Lanka. You can explain what happened. They destroyed the Tamil Tigers and the Israelis were full partners in that project. And that fascinated me because I wondered if that wasn't the playbook for Gaza.
Antony Loewenstein: Looking just exactly a bit of background, 2009 was the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. It'd been going for decades between the majority Sinhalese population and the Tamil Tigers who were I guess resistance movement for more Tamil rights and a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka for years. Actually Israel had been supporting the Sri Lankan government in selling planes, fighter jets and other forms of technology weapons. 2009 happens and as some viewers remember, the Sri Lankan government was able to target the Tamils in a smaller, and smaller, and smaller part of the northern part of Sri Lanka.
Probably 40,000 Tamils were killed. We really don't know the exact number. There's never been any real accountability for that. I do look at what's happening in Gaza and I have thought of quite a lot actually about Sri Lanka since October 7 because in some ways the Israeli plan, and I don't think there's one united plan, there is to some degree a discussion, although within think very narrow bounds within the Israeli political and military establishment.
But I think the plan seems to be Northern Gaza is obliterated. It's apocalyptic. I think if Israel, I think it's probably very lucky there will be a resumption of some kind of fighting in Gaza. I don't know when, but soon. If the plan is to decimate the southern part of Gaza, and I have, as I'm sure you do, Chris, Palestinian friends in Gaza who are sheltering in refugee camps in their own country now in southern part of Gaza really struggling. Their homes have been destroyed. They have no connection to Hamas.
I mean, these are civilians living in Gaza. If essentially Gaza's infrastructure is completely obliterated that leaves only really a handful of options. Permanent tent cities in Gaza, or which of course as some viewers will be well aware, the dream of many on the Israeli political elite. And also let's be clear, many in the Israeli public based on public opinion polls kicking the Palestinians out. Egypt, Jordan Lebanon.
Though so far, Egypt, despite being a dictatorship, has not acquiesced to that. They have not opened the borders enough to allow really that many Palestinians into the Sinai that could change. I mean, the Egyptian economy is on its knees. Will they accept lots of money and bribes? I very much hope not, but we don't know. But I do fear the plan, as you say in Gaza, is not dissimilar to what Sri Lanka did in the northern part of that country. And the outcome in Sri Lanka finally has been that the war is kind of over, but Tamils are still regarded as second class citizens in their own country.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the Alpha Gun Girls. It's a little sidelight, but something just disgusting, I didn't know existed until you wrote it, until I read it.
Antony Loewenstein: Yes. Well, there is a side industry, I guess you could call it, of Israeli women, Jewish women who are… Often they've been in the military. They have fetishized or sexualized the Israeli military. So you have these groups of women who are scantily clad, often holding guns, often posing in photo shoots as if they're kind of in war in Gaza or somewhere else as an idea and a way to show two things. One, the IDF is female friendly. You can be a incredibly sexy woman and still be in the IDF and kill Palestinians. That's the implication. And secondly, that Israeli women are cool.
I mean, that's the message they're trying to send. I don't know if it's particularly effective, but that's the message they're trying to send. And for years, I've been following this story that there's been a real push by the IDF Israeli army to show how gender friendly they are, how in fact gay friendly they are, how trans friendly they are, by how vegan friendly they are.
I mean, we sort of laugh in a way by saying this, but I have a big section in the book talking about this is such a key part of Israeli messaging. So-called Hasbara. But I'm not entirely convinced it's massively successful. I mean, people can argue that either way, but a lot of Israel's social media in the last 10 or so years has focused on this issue. We give vegan meals to soldiers who want it. We are trans friendly, we are women friendly, we are gay friendly. You can wave the rainbow flag.
In fact, some viewers will see about two weeks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, there was this Israeli soldier in Gaza. The background was apocalyptic. Holding the rainbow flag, and this image kind of went viral. I did a story about. Essentially saying, and the message was very clear, you see, we want to liberate Palestinians in Gaza who are gay to just be themselves.
Now, the mocking that this got justifiably was clear as if people were saying, "Right, so you've decimated Gaza and it's apocalyptic." But gee, you can be a gay Palestinian and some may have freedom in Gaza. I mean the cognitive dissonance to actually believe that. And that ties into these girls. You're talking about this finally that these women over the last years are traveling around Israel and the world promoting an image of Israel as liberal, but also militaristic. Pro-feminist, but also gun friendly. And that's why a lot of pro-gun groups in the US and mostly men, let's be honest, are into these kinds of sexualization of Israeli gun-wielding women.
Chris Hedges: We should note that one of the uses of Pegasus or the spyware was to entrap gay Palestinian men as you write in the book and essentially turn them into informants.
Antony Loewenstein: Indeed. There's a big part of 8200, which is the equivalent of the US's NSA. Which in its whole [inaudible 00:28:02] is to monitor Palestinians 24/7 across the occupied territory. So one thing they do is to try to find, so-called weak spots. A man who's married to a woman who might be gay, a man who might be having an affair with a woman. In other words, someone who is, "doing" something unconventional. I use that term loosely.
When they get that information, they will then try to turn that person into a spy. We don't really know how many Palestinians are collaborators. There's not really an… Some are. It's a tiny minority, but some are. In Gaza too, by the way. And often in fact, as I say in the book, because there's been a siege on Gaza for close to 20 years, enforced by Israel and Egypt to get out of Gaza sometimes.
I've spoken to Palestinians who have been offered this but refused it to get out of Gaza. On the Israeli side, they've been told, "You can leave to go to study overseas or go to hospital in Israel or elsewhere. You have to spy for us for Israel." And that's how they blackmail people because they gather information from this 24/7 global surveillance network. And it's interesting just finally that when October 7 shows that not just the Israeli intelligence failed, it was an arrogance and a hubris, but also the American intelligence failed. It's interesting to note, since speaking to various sources I have, and there's been some decent reporting in the last six weeks that the US, apparently after 9/11 basically, although is spying on Israel a lot, I talk in the book that there's apparently about 3 to 400 NSA employees in the US whose everyday job is to spy on Israel. That's their job.
So they're an ally, but also America doesn't entirely trust them. And I'm sure that works both ways, but America was not particularly "helping" Israel to detect so-called terrorist threats. And one thing, I just wanted to add this finally if I could, that I'm the co-editor and co-founder of a group called Declassified Australia, which is a news-gathering organization. We did a story a few weeks ago that showed that Pine Gap, which is a key US intelligence gathering center in the center of my country, Australia, which is used as a key intelligence gathering venue to use the US used in Iraq and Afghanistan to target so-called terrorists, but kill huge amounts of civilians is being used by the US since October 7 to give intelligence to Israel in its so-called targeting of Hamas.
Now, the reason that's relevant apart from the fact that you have a massive US intelligence base in the center of Australia, which is being expanded in the frankly crazy US expansion in my part of the world, apparently target China and Australia, sadly is a key ally in that madness to have a US and Australian spy base in the center of Australia being used to funnel information to Israel. How they're using that information, of course, is not entirely clear.
It makes legal culpability very clear on the US side and the Australian side as it was when the US was targeting, so-called terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria or elsewhere. I say so-called because huge amounts of civilians were killed. That global US intelligence infrastructure is being used as is the F-35A. F-35A is a weapon that the Israel is using over Gaza. The global supply chain involves many countries. And I'll declassify Australia. We also had a story showing that a key part of when the door is being opened at the bottom of the F-35 to drop weapons on Gaza, that part is made here in Melbourne, Australia.So you have a global supply chain of companies that are directly complicit in what Israel is doing, which seems like at the ICC is listening, "Hello, there's a lot to be done."
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about privatization. You talk about the neoliberalism that transformed Israel which was a socialist state, major state owned enterprises were sold off, privatized, especially in the 1990s. Israel has very high income inequality. Poverty rate 23% in Israel, 36% for the Arab population. And you write, "Many Palestinians are unaware at how the occupation has been privatized because it makes no difference if a state officer or private individual harasses or humiliates them." You go on to write, "Many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their schools, workplaces, or Israel, if they are fortunate enough to get one of the few work permits handed out by the Jewish state, use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move." But these are private companies. So explain that what's happened to how essentially private for-profit firms are managing the occupation?
Antony Loewenstein: It's worth saying obviously that Israel was a self-described socialist country, but socialist country for Jews. I mean, that's obvious to say that.
Chris Hedges: Well, yes. That's right.
Antony Loewenstein: And clearly, I mean as some older viewers will be aware, it's amazing to think now that so much of the global left was enamored with Israel for the first really 20 years of its existence. Anyway, that was a bit of blindness that we can talk about some other time. But anyway, look, Netanyahu was a key factor in this, that yes, Israel had a quasi-socialist background. In the last 20 or so years, there's been a shift, not just neoliberal policies within Israel itself, but also outsourcing the occupation. And in some ways it goes along with the massive expansion of settlements.
You now have roughly three quarters of a million Jewish settlers living in occupied territory, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And a lot of the guards or security officers that are working on both settler checkpoints but also Israeli checkpoints are run by private companies. I lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020 and been visiting there for close to 20 years. So I spent a lot of time looking into these kinds of issues. And it's worth saying that, as I say in the book, yes, it's been outsourced and the accountability was zero. Even if an Israeli soldier commits an abuse, let alone if a private interest does.
It's important also to say that, yes, a lot of these companies are Israeli, but many of them in fact that are doing this, are also foreign and international. And that's relevant because some viewers will remember the last years the UN had tried for years to release this list of global companies and Israeli companies that were directly complicit in the occupation, and therefore they should be boycotted essentially. And they released a list a number of years ago. It caused a big scandal in some circles. About 20 or so of those companies then removed themselves from being involved in managing the occupation, so to speak.
But there are still, I think around 100 companies, Israeli and foreign that are directly involved day-to-day in so-called managing the occupation. That to me is not just illegal and immoral, but also right for a kind of boycott campaign, which I suspect will increase in the coming years after what we've seen the last six weeks.
Chris Hedges: Can you talk about AnyVision? I think it's changed its name to Oosto and then Unit 8200.
Antony Loewenstein: So AnyVision which you said has changed its name, is a facial recognition company, an Israeli company that was testing this at Israeli checkpoints. So what that means is that when Palestinians want to, say, move around the West Bank, if they want to potentially go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they have to have their details checked, their irises often checked now, and they were gathering all this information.
We don't exactly know where that information was going, but clearly it was going into Israel, a massive database that they were using to gather personal data on pretty much every single Palestinian, the occupied territories. Those tools are then marketed globally. They have appeared in huge amounts of infrastructure from airports to other places around the world. And when those companies promote it, whether AnyVision uses the term, battle tested, I'm not sure, but they are saying it's been tested in Palestine successfully. So-called successfully.
And that does tie into Unit 8200, which is, as I said, Israel's NSA. It is the body that is gathering intelligence on Israeli and on Palestinians. And increasingly I should say, there is a lot of evidence that increasingly the occupation is coming home, that a lot of Israeli Jews who for years believe that this was just happening to Palestinians down the road, are increasingly being surveilled themselves. And I'm not just talking about since October 7, although particularly since then, that there is a move within Israel increasingly at criminalizing dissent entirely, whether it's by Arabs or Jews.
But Unit 8200 has become this kind of quite infamous funnel of people who work in the military for years developing all these tools and methods to surveil Palestinians, which they then take to the private sector to develop various forms of repression which they can then sell around the world. And by maintaining those close ties, that's how it goes to my point earlier on, the NSO Group was essentially an arm of the state. Many of these companies, these surveillance companies, repressive tools, biometric companies operating in the occupied territories or in Gaza are then used by Israel as a key selling point to make new friends, so to speak.It's a transactional friendship, transactional relationship. And it's why as I really think, I think there's more and more that the Israeli armed industry really is an insurance policy. It's an insurance policy because, yes, there are some countries that oppose what Israel's doing. Not many, not enough, but even the countries that publicly do oppose what Israeli is doing, many of them are still buying Israeli repressive technology. I mean, Mexico is one example amongst many.
So often I think words matter. Sure, what a government or prime minister or president says, it's not irrelevant. Yeah, sure. But what matters more is what you are doing, what you are buying, what you are deploying yourself in your own country. So when you have 130, 140 nations in the world that have bought some form in the last decades of Israeli defense technology, drones, missiles, spyware, whatever it may be, that's what matters. I think Israel believes probably with justification, those nations, at least for now, are unlikely to turn on Israel while they're so reliant on those tools of repression.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about Blue Wolf or the Wolf Pack database.
Antony Loewenstein: So this is basically a system that has been developed in the last five or so years that every Israeli soldier operating in the occupied territories has. The aim is to get personal information and data on every single Palestinian man, woman, and child. It's entered into a massive database. And that is then used to potentially discriminate against those people. What does that mean practically? Person X wants to go from the West Bank to Israel to work to get medical care. A Palestinian does not know what information has been collected on them. There's obviously no consent.
As I say in the book, there's testimony given by soldiers usually anonymously, Israeli soldiers, where it's almost like a game. How many Palestinian personal details can we get on our mission tonight when we're serving in the occupied territories? And it goes without saying, but there is no transparency in this process. Zero. So Palestinians living in Hebron or Nablus or somewhere else, don't really know what information is being gathered, but we do know that it's impacting their freedom of movement from place to place within the West Bank and also potentially further afield into Israel or overseas.
Chris Hedges: Israel innovates all sorts of forms of crowd control. You write Sea of Tears, a drone that dropped tear gas canisters over a broad area, skunk water, the skunk water drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time. They were used on Great March of Return, which was a nonviolent, largely nonviolent protest movement in Gaza where they went up to the border. Many of them, of course, were shot. But talk about some of the forms of crowd control that have been pioneered by Israel, but that we have seen in places like Ferguson.
Antony Loewenstein: Yeah. Well, this is something I talk about in the book, right, Chris, that there is a sense that, again, Israel is using the West Bank, particularly East Jerusalem and Gaza as a testing ground. So some of those examples then explain what they basically are. So the Great March of Return, as you said, was Palestinians trying to march for their freedom and for the right to return essentially to Israel to where ancestors used to live. And the Sea of Tears was a drone that was dropping essentially a tear gas on people. Didn't kill them, but it certainly caused huge damage. And literally while the March of Return was happening and while that drone, the Sea of Tears was being used, I document this in the book, other countries were wanting to buy it because it was being tested, so to speak, in real time.
The connection between the US and Israel is key here. And I say this pretty much soon after 9/11, there was a massive attempt by both the American Israeli… Firstly the pro-Israel lobby in the US, the Anti-Defamation League particularly, but other groups as well to have sort of information sharing. So huge amounts of police forces went between Israel and the US and vice versa training, so to speak, in tools of so-called people management. They're examples of police officers that have these quotes in the book going to Israel after 9/11, being inspired by what Israel is doing to Palestinians.
I mean, let's be clear, as I say in the book, American police don't need Israeli training to be repressive against Blacks and minorities. Obviously I'm not arguing that. But what I am saying is that they're getting new tools of repression to the point where just quite recently you had major Israeli border security individuals on the US-Mexico border. Looking at how the US, "maintains" its border. And it's worth saying, you mentioned this before, I didn't fully give an answer to that, that on the US-Mexico border, there is a key part of that infrastructure, which was started by Obama, deepened by Trump, and continued by Biden now of Israeli surveillance. There's massive Albert surveillance towers all across the US-Mexico border.
And Elbit is Israel's biggest defense company. And the reason the US initially was interested in this kind of technology was because it had been tested and tried in Palestine. "It works". So you have all these massive surveillance towers, which the aim is to both surveil potential migrants crossing the border, but also importantly Native Americans who live on their ancestral territory. And I have quotes in the book of saying they can't live securely in their own territory because of these surveillance towers.
So again, it's worth saying that there is this ideological alignment between many in the US who view Israel as almost on the frontline, I hate to use the term, the Wild West of crowd control, crowd management, crushing any kind of resistance to overwhelming force. And they take those examples back to the US and vice versa. It's like a feedback loop. It goes both ways. So as you say in Ferguson, I touch on this in the book, that there was a lot of evidence that some, we don't know exactly, that particularly police in Ferguson had directly gone to Israel. That's not necessarily the case. But some of the training that police forces in the US had used, including in Ferguson, had partly come from Israel.
Chris Hedges: Talk about Frontex and how this Israeli technology is used to break into encrypted messaging apps, especially on refugee mobile phones.
Antony Loewenstein: Yeah, Frontex is the EU's border, so-called security force. And there was a real trauma inside Frontex, not that I feel sorry for them, but trauma after the 2015 refugee surge, mostly from Syria and elsewhere. Let's not let that happen again. So now you have a situation where huge amounts of migrants are still trying to come from mostly Africa and the Middle East, escaping walls or conflicts or climate crisis disasters and their phones, which are their smartphones, which essentially are a vital way of knowing how to get there. People have maps on their phone, personal details, photos, are often taken from people at EU border crossings.
Information is taken off them. We don't know exactly what information is taken off, but presumably my sense and for my reporting is that probably contacts in European nations and attempt to try to break up what they would call people smuggling networks, what I would say is humanitarian paths to a better life. And Israeli technology is part of that. I think it's important to say that, as I said before, those Israeli drones that are part of that infrastructure as well, but also the EU, which is Israel's biggest trading partner.
It's worth saying that. So when you have all these European nations in the last years expressing now and then concern about the occupation, concern about settlements, just this week, just this week, one of the heads of the EU said, and I'm paraphrasing, in time of war, it's just outrageous that Israel would spend huge amounts of money on building more settlements because the Israel has released its latest budget and there's huge amounts of money for settlements. I responded on Twitter and what are you going to do about it? Because history suggests nothing. They'll do nothing about it.
I mean, apart from the fact that I'm a German citizen and an Australian citizen, obviously in Germany, this issue is toxic, that Germany is using its own historical calamity, disgusting actions during the Holocaust, including much of my family were killed in the Holocaust. Using that to support Israel's historical absolution to somehow say that to be madly pro-Israel is to atone for our own sins during the 12 years of Nazi Germany. And that has a practical impact because Israel is not just selling lots of weapons to Germany.
Germans are also selling huge amounts of technology to Israel. Since October 7, there's been a tenfold increase in weapons that Germany is selling to Israel, to assist in its horrific war in Gaza. This is what it practically means. So EU support for Israel, and I have a quote in the book, there was a… Gideon Levy, the journalist I mentioned before from Haaretz went to a meeting with Netanyahu a number of years ago and he looks at a map, Netanyahu, and says, "The whole world's basically in support of Israel." There's a few nations in Europe, I think he pointed to Belgium that kind of give us a bit of trouble, but overall we're fine.
Meaning that, yes, occasionally the Belgium authorities express concern about settlements, which Israel doesn't really care about, but ultimately the EU has made a decision that they will not challenge Israel, even though EU infrastructure, Chris, is being destroyed in the West Bank constantly. And I wonder how and when that will change because it hasn't changed yet.
Chris Hedges: I want to close your last chapter. You quoted an Israeli human rights lawyer "Because of surveillance tech, a country can avoid massacring protestors now. Today, we're able to identify and stop surveillance of the next Nelson Mandela before he even knows he's Nelson Mandela." What you describe in the book is the formation of a really frightening, dystopian, Orwellian world that extends far beyond Israeli borders. But that, of course Israel is integral to creating.
Antony Loewenstein: I certainly don't suggest that Israel is not able to commit massacres. And obviously, we've seen that since October 7. I guess what that quote, that was from Eitay Mack who is a really great Israeli human rights lawyer. He spent a lot of time trying to uncover the Israeli arms industry. So in a lot of his work is in my book. Essentially what he's saying, and the book also shows this, is that the technology of surveillance is so sophisticated now that nations… And I have quotes from people in Togo, for example, and various other nations across the globe that are run by, often US-backed or Israeli-backed dictatorships that back in the so-called bad old days, obviously there are repressive regimes that were able to surveil people through various forms.
Of course, that's existed forever. But the difference now is that we are so, frankly, overly reliant on phones and the internet that all this technology is monitored 24/7. It doesn't mean every information is always captured. I mean, the US issue after 9/11 was they were getting so much information, they couldn't process it. Israel has a similar problem as we saw on October 7, but as you say, Israel to me is becoming and really has been for years, one of the global inspirations for repressive tech. Long before 9/11 and long after 9/11.
And the danger of that is, is clear, is that it becomes a model for repression. As I said, Israel shows countries how to do it. You can also repress your people if you buy this technology, this spyware, this drone, whatever it may be. Now, yes, the technology is not perfect that of course don't say that, but that's what I'm saying. But it can create a global, almost architecture of control that is close to unbeatable and the impact of that at a time where democracy is frankly in decline.I mean, you could argue that even so-called self-described democracies aren't democracies anyway, but nations that claim to be democratic are increasingly moving, I would say, more and more to an Israeli style model. I'm not just talking about an occupation, particularly. I'm talking about language. I was also talking about surveillance. As I say in the book, the whole US rhetoric after 9/11, the so-called war on terror, that was the Israeli playbook. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was remarkably inspired by what Israel had been doing in Lebanon in the '80s and onwards. Hugely similar.
Similar rhetoric about, so-called terrorism, collateral murder, or they call it collateral damage, but I would call collateral murder. Something that a mutual friend Julian Assange (b. 1971), a fellow Australian, a great huge hero of mine, I've known Julian since 2006, right at the beginning of WikiLeaks, that what people like him and many others have been saying for years, this is the threat, the idea of a complete architecture of global surveillance, which is close to unbeatable. Israel is a global leader in that.
I think alerting people to that is the first step. The next step is obviously how to challenge that. I think a lot of the global response to October 7, both the attack by Hamas, but also the insane, overwhelming, brutal war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza, I think is bringing out a civil society action that I have not seen on this issue certainly in my lifetime. I have Palestinian-Israeli friends, and I'm talking about mostly globally, not so much in Palestine, Israel itself. And that to me is a sign of hope, including fellow Jews and many Palestinians. And that to me is the only sort of sliver of hope in what is a really, really dark time.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
This article first appeared on The Real News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Music of Palestine pt. II (2023) aarsbog posted a photo:
Kamera: Nikon FM
Film: Fuji G 200
Kjemi: C41 photo store developed
- My good friend Saadi told me.. in the evening you should listen to Asmahan… [to be continued]
Asmahan: أسمهان- Ahwa (I Love) (ca. 1935)
The war on Palestine has gone on for over 100 years [Listen here]
by Chris Hedges, The Real News Network December 1, 2023
All too often, the question of Palestine is framed as an eternal conflict arising from ancient ethnic or religious hatreds, with questions regarding the origins of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of land claims reduced to matters of scriptural interpretation. Such views entirely omit the actual history of Palestine and the Zionist movement. The colonization of Palestine, a process still playing out before our eyes to this day, has definite historical origins at the turn of the 20th century, when Zionism was born and the encroachment of Palestinian land began. Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundreds' Year War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a look into this essential history, and how it can help us frame Israel's present war on Gaza.
Rashid Khalidi (b. 1948) is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the author of several books.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Hedges: The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which has reached a terrifying crescendo with the assault on Gaza, is the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the US. This century-long assault by Israel has one objective: to force an indigenous people from their land. The historian Rashid Khalidi breaks what he calls The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine into six periods; The first is the British support for Jewish Zionists during the British occupation of Palestine from 1917-1939. The second declaration of war is the 1947-1948 Nakba or catastrophe that saw Zionist militias ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine, and carry out a series of massacres. The third is the 1967 war when Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and expelled roughly another 250,000 Palestinians. The fourth declaration of war on Palestine was Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, followed by the departure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters to Tunisia and other parts of the Arab world, and the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The fourth war against the Palestinians began with the First Intifada, or uprising in 1987, continued with the Second Intifada, and is taking place with the Israeli assault on Gaza.
The backdrop to this century of war by Israel and the Palestinians is the failure of Arab leaders to offer meaningful support to the Palestinian people. In fact, these leaders often colluded with Israel to weaken the Palestinian resistance movement. Joining me to discuss Israel's settler colonial project, how it is being played out in Gaza, and its consequences is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialization and Resistance, 1917-2017. First, I have to say that for anyone who wants to put what's happening in Gaza in context, I can't think of a better book. You make the argument correctly, of course, that we see variations in scale, savagery, and tactics, but not in intent. Let's begin with on the eve of the Balfour Declaration, only 6% of the residents of historic Palestine are Jewish. If you can lay out the importance of the backing of superpowers, first Britain and then the US, in pushing through this Zionist project.
Rashid Khalidi: Thanks for having me, Chris. I chose to start this narrative with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 because the framing of the conflict as one between Zionism and the Palestinians or between Israel and the Palestinians is basically false. Of course, there is a national conflict there, and that's central to it but without the external support that Zionism received from the British, none of what we have seen in the past century and more would've happened as it did. British and later American and other external support was absolutely essential to the success of the Zionist project from the very beginning. So I start this tale of what I call the Hundred Years' War with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which gives the support of the power of the greatest empire of its day to the Zionist project. Calling for, in the words of the Balfour Declaration, "the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine." Now the Balfour Declaration and the mandate that follows it never mentioned the Palestinians and that's essential. Removing the Palestinians, eliding the Palestinians, is and has always been part of, not only the Zionist project but of the project of the great powers that supported it.
Chris Hedges: You're right. The British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain's strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Explain.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. There are many motivations for the British issuing the Balfour Declaration and some of them that have been induced are “philosemitism” or Christian Zionism: The belief in the 19th century among Protestant evangelicals in Britain that the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land was a Christian duty. These are minor, in my view, minor elements in the motivation for the British. The essential motivation for the British was imperial and strategic; Britain wanted to create a buffer to defend the eastern frontier of Egypt under British control, they wanted to do this 10-11 years before the Balfour Declaration. They also wanted to control the Mediterranean terminus of the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf; thinking at that time of a railway and later on creating in that space that runs from Haifa through what is now Jordan to Iraq, creating a road system, creating an oil pipeline, and creating a series of air bases.
So the British had these objectives in mind: Protecting Egypt's defenses from the east by controlling Palestine and controlling the Mediterranean terminus of this shortest land route between these two bodies of water, which was essential obviously to their connection to their Indian empire. That's what motivated Britain and strategic motivations were also what led them to change their policy at the end of the 1930s.
Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the rise of nationalism? In historic Palestine, they had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 20 centuries from the 7th century until 1948. And you deal with that issue –
Rashid Khalidi: From the 16th century.
Chris Hedges: – 16th century. Sorry, sorry. 16th century, yes. Can you talk about that and how it affected Palestinian identity?
Rashid Khalidi: Well, nationalism was developing all over the Ottoman Empire, not only among Arabs, among Turks, among Armenians, and among Greeks. It was also developing among Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which is where Zionism comes in. It is in Palestine a settler colonial project but it is also a national movement among persecuted Eastern European Jews.
In the case of Palestine, you had a local patriotism that over time developed into Palestinian nationalism as part of a broader movement towards nationalist identifications all over the colonized world and all over much of Europe. You have similar things happening in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe: The rise of national consciousness and demands for national independence and self-determination in the period before World War I, during, and after World War I. And that's what happens in Palestine, as in other parts of the Arab world.
Chris Hedges: So there's a clear understanding. It's one of the nice layered textures of your book is that your family was involved at very high levels with this Zionist project, where we also see how they're saying one thing to the Palestinian leadership and quite another amongst themselves. But I want to talk about opposition. Because initially, the opposition is nonviolent and democratic, they form congresses, they have leaders, and it goes nowhere.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, the opposition actually began before World War I. The opposition is parliamentary. The opposition is in the press. There's a little bit of resistance by peasants to their dispossession in different parts of Palestine where Zionist colonies are established. But essentially the opposition before and after World War I is, as you say, in the form of demonstrations or speeches, or after World War I, congresses and delegations to London where the British government is obviously, and petitions to the high commissioner in Palestine. All of this, as you say, goes absolutely nowhere.
There were violent outbreaks in 1920 and 1921, and again in 1929 but the thrust of the Palestinian National Movement up until 1936 was essentially demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, petitions, congresses, newspaper articles, and so forth. And it achieves absolutely nothing. The British are unyielding in their support for the Zionist project. Meanwhile, Jewish immigration is growing because of persecution in Europe, the Nazis come to power in Germany in 1933, and immigration shoots up. The Jewish population as a proportion of the whole goes from 17% in 1930-1931 to 31% by the end of the 1930s, as a result of people fleeing the Nazis and not being allowed to go anywhere else; The US has shut its doors to immigration. Britain has shut its doors to immigration.
So this persecuted population coming out of Eastern Europe literally has nowhere to go. People who could and would certainly have been saved from the Holocaust are basically shut out of most Western democracies. And that's part of the tragedy; These people are forced, in a sense, to go to Palestine, whether they want to or not, because it's the only country where immigration is unlimited thanks to the British mandate, which says that there should be unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine. So this changes the demographics of Palestine in a period of six or seven years.
Chris Hedges: And you point out that they come both with educational levels and resources that most indigenous members of historic Palestine do not have.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. Through something called The Transfer Agreement, the Zionist movement negotiates with the Nazis. People are allowed to bring some of their capital and some of their property with them. And that leads to an influx, not only of the German-Jewish population which is highly educated and skilled and motivated, but also of a lot of capital. And so the economic balance in Palestine shifts. Even though the Jewish population is under 35%, it controls more than half of the economy by 1935.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about the duplicity of the Zionist leadership. Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), you write for example, told several prominent Arabs at a dinner in Jerusalem in March 1918, "To beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power." You write the Zionist movement leaders understood that "Under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs because that would cause the Jews to lose the world's sympathy." This duplicity, of course, continues to this day, as all of us who covered Gaza and the West Bank, would file our reports, and then watch the Israelis reflexively lie. But talk about this duplicity and its importance.
Rashid Khalidi: Yeah. It goes right back to an incident that I detailed at the very beginning of the book. An ancestor of mine who had been a member of the first Ottoman Parliament, who had been mayor of Jerusalem, lived in Europe, taught in Vienna, and knew German; he knew about Zionism. We know that from his papers and from the books and Viennese newspapers that he received that are kept in the family library to this day. He knew about Zionism. He knew everything about Zionism. So he wrote to Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in 1899, two years after the first Zionist Congress, with full knowledge that the objective was a Jewish state in Palestine. And he tells him that we respect the Jews, they're our cousins, we understand your suffering, and there's nothing more noble than the idea of the Jewish people having a state, but not here; There's already a people here.
The interesting thing is not only this letter from this ancestor of mine, a man named Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi (1842-1906), but Herzl's response which is completely disingenuous, and completely ignores all the points that Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi is making. And then says in response to a question that Yusuf Dia had not even asked, we have no intention of driving the population away. If you look at Herzl's diaries, he's talking about "spiriting" the population discreetly across the borders. We're talking in the 1890s. This is clear in Herzl's mind. You have to get rid of the Arabs to have a Jewish state in a majority Arab country, there's no other way to do it. And that in fact, is always the driving motive of Zionism.
So what Weizmann is saying is profoundly deceptive in the quote that you read, which is from 1918 or 1919, because it was always understood that the objective was a majority Jewish state in what was, at that point, a majority Arab country. And that deceptiveness has been, as you say, a constant ever since. The idea of ethnic cleansing, which is something that was inherent in Zionism and which was practiced again and again in 1948, and 1967, is being practiced today in Gaza. Pushing people into the south of the Gaza Strip was always inherent in Zionism because there's no other way to, as I've said, create a majority Jewish state in a majority Arab country.
Chris Hedges: You quote the Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling (1939-2007), this term "politicide" of the Palestinian people. Explain that.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, it was essential to argue that the only people with legitimate rights in this country were the Jewish people. This is now part of the Israeli Constitution, as of a law that was passed in 2018, only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in the land of Israel. That's part of the platform of the Likud party from 1977, that's part of the program of the current Israeli government, but it's always been inherent in the Zionist project. If there were two people there, then why would the minority have a right to the entire country or to most of it? And this approach was essentially adopted by the British and is incorporated, not only into the Balfour Declaration but into the Mandate for Palestine that the League of Nations gave Britain, which is the charter for ruling Palestine under the League of Nations from 1922 when the Mandate was adopted until the British finally left in 1948. The idea is that there are no Palestinian people. The Palestinians are never mentioned in the Balfour Declaration, except as the non-Jewish population of Palestine. They're never described as a national entity. They're never described as having political rights. The only rights that are to be allowed to the overwhelming Palestinian majority are civil and religious rights.
This approach, which is a British imperial approach as well as a Zionist approach, continues pretty much up to the present day. Israel becomes a state and is entitled to national self-determination and the rights that a nation-state enjoys. The Palestinians, if they are even to demand these things, do it on sufferance, and are only allowed basically a simulacrum, a pale shadow of these things. You look at all the proposals made to the Palestinians, they're never for full sovereignty; They're for some form of autonomy under Israeli sovereignty. That approach has been central not only to Zionism and the diplomacy of the state of Israel after 1948, but to the approach of the great powers, certainly of the US and before Britain.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the 1936-1939 >Arab revolt. I didn't understand until I read your book how bloody it was. The British, if I remember correctly, sent in 100,000 troops. They armed Jewish militias. But this came, of course, after decades of essentially nonviolent tactics that had failed.
Rashid Khalidi: The spark for this is a growing militancy among young Palestinians, among middle-class Palestinians, among Palestinians who see the extraordinary rise in Jewish immigration. In 1935, 60,000 plus new immigrants arrived in Palestine, which was larger than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917. And there are articles in the paper saying, at this rate, we're going to become strangers in our own country. So in response to the ineffectual leadership of the Palestinian elites that dominated the national movement, and in response to this complete unwillingness of the British to respond to Palestinian demands, a general strike broke out in 1936, which is a grassroots effort. The leadership had nothing to do with it. The traditional elite leaders are taken by surprise. The general strike went on for six months, it's ended with the intervention of the Arab governments which were afraid that this would lead to instability and were trying to do the bidding of their British masters, so the king of Egypt, the king of Iraq and so forth, intervene.
The general strike ends and the British send out a Commission of Inquiry which decides to partition Palestine and give a chunk of it over to a Jewish state from which are to be transferred – The term is "transferred" i.e., expelled – The Arab population. Even in that tiny part of Palestine, there wasn't a Jewish majority. And the rest of which is to be given to Britain's client, King Abdullah (1882-1951). The Palestinians reject this. They want self-determination for themselves as the overwhelming majority of the country in the entirety of their country. And what the British are offering them is an insult. So what starts as a general strike and unrest in the countryside turns into a general armed revolt. The British lost control of parts of much of the countryside and they briefly lost control of several cities. They were unable to bring in reinforcements in 1938 because of crises in Europe, the need to tie down British troops in Europe, and because they were afraid to send Indian troops because they were not sure of their loyalty. Because so many Indians are exercised about British repression in Palestine.
So the revolt expanded and by 1938, the British were in a desperate situation. They begin to arm and train auxiliaries from the Zionist militias whom they train in savage, British counterinsurgency tactics: Shooting prisoners, blowing up houses over people's heads, the large detention camps, and so forth, all of which are the modus operandi of the Israeli army going forward. The people who became the first generals in the Israeli army; Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), Yigal Allon (1918-1980), and Yitzhak Sadeh (1890-1952), were trained by these British counterinsurgency experts in the late 1930s to help the British put down this revolt. Finally, after the crisis in Europe is temporarily over with the Munich Agreement, the British have reserves that are freed and they flood Palestine with troops and the RAF, and they bomb and destroy their way to crushing the Palestinian revolt. In the course of this, something like 14 to 17% of the adult male Palestinian population are either killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.
So the revolt is crushed, the Palestinians are broken, and thousands of weapons are confiscated. Dozens and dozens of people are summarily executed, many more are shot in the course of operations after being taken prisoner, and the Palestinians really suffer enormously. Their leadership is exiled going into the 1940s in fact, from the effects of the repression by the British of this revolt.
Chris Hedges: I want to go into the Nakba. The relationship between the British and the Zionists changed on the eve of World War II because of course, the British needed Arab support. Although the British formed a Jewish battalion or division, I can't remember.
Rashid Khalidi: Brigade. Jewish brigade.
Chris Hedges: Brigade. Jewish Brigade. 1948, you have Zionist terrorist groups, Irgun, and Stern Gang, attacking the British. They blew up the HQ of the British at the King David Hotel. So 1948, the Nakba. Then I want to end of course, by talking about what's happening today, but let's talk a little bit about the Nakba, or the catastrophe.
Rashid Khalidi: The British do, as you say, shift their position, and they drastically reduced their commitments to the Zionists in 1939. On the eve of World War II, they realized they were going to have to fight that war in the Middle East and they needed the support of the local populations which had come to hate them for the repression of the Palestinians. This goes far beyond Palestine and the Arab world, it goes to the rest of the Muslim world, and in fact, to much of India. So you have the secretary of state for India writing to the cabinet saying, this has become an Indian problem. We cannot continue this support for the Zionists. This is going to hurt us here. They already in 1937 decided they couldn't send troops from India to put down the Palestinian revolt because they weren't sure of their loyalty. So Britain does a pivot away from the Zionist movement, reduces its commitments to the Zionists, and makes a bunch of promises, which of course, they never keep to the Palestinians.
After World War II, the situation entirely changed. First of all, the Zionist movement is now fighting the British, as you say. And secondly, the Zionists have pivoted themselves. Having been, in their view, betrayed by the British, their previous patron, which had allied with them only for strategic reasons and which turned away from them for other strategic reasons, the Zionists very shrewdly are able to develop relations with Washington and Moscow. These became their patrons for the period immediately after World War II. When the British finally decided they couldn't hang on to Palestine, they left India at the same time – This is 1947 – They decided they were going to abandon Palestine and they tossed it into the lap of the United Nations, which created a Commission that has a majority and a minority report. The majority report gives most of Palestine to the Zionists, who at that time, were under 35% of the population. The Jewish population was about 33%-34%, the Arab population is an overwhelming majority, and yet the Palestinians are given over 42% of Palestine. The Zionists are given 55%. And then there's supposed to be an internationalized corpus separatum in the middle.The Palestinians say, this is our country, we are the majority, under the covenant of the League of Nations and under the charter of the United Nations, we're supposed to get self-determination. So they rejected the Partition Plan which would've given most of their country, most of which they owned – Zionist land ownership was only about 6% at this time – To a putative Jewish state with a small Arab state in the 43% of Palestine remaining. As soon as the UN Partition Resolution was adopted at the end of November 1947, war broke out in Palestine. The superior military forces that the Zionists developed with British help during the Arab Revolt through the folks who had been part of the Jewish brigade coming back and joining into what became later on the Israeli army, slowly but surely, inexorably started to take over parts of Palestine. By April and May, this has become a rout. The largest Arab cities, the largest cities with Arab populations, Haifa and Jaffa are ethnically cleansed. The populations are driven out. Other cities are taken. The western suburbs of Jerusalem which are the Arab parts of the western suburbs of Jerusalem are overrun in April and May of 1948.
So by the time the British left on May 15, 1948, 300,000 Palestinians had already been made refugees, 70,000 from Jaffa, 70,000 from Haifa, about 30,000 from the western neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and tens and tens of thousands in villages up and down the country. At that point, the Arab armies intervened. Flooded by refugees, the Arab countries were initially very reluctant to intervene. They're forced to do so both by public opinion and by the rivalry between different Arab governments. And you have what then becomes the so-called Arab-Israeli War, i.e., the war between Israel and the Arab states, in which Israel defeats the Arab states over a period of time. Another 400,000 people are driven from their homes in ethnic cleansing operations in the south and the north of Palestine.
Chris Hedges: "The Zionist movement," you write, "applied a highly developed understanding of global politics." Later on in the book, you were an advisor to, I believe in Oslo with the PLO, and you –
Rashid Khalidi: No. In Madrid and Washington.
Chris Hedges: – In Madrid and Washington.
Rashid Khalidi: I never had anything to do with Oslo.
Chris Hedges: But this is a problem even today, that the inability on the part of the dominant Palestinian leadership to understand the systems, especially the US and Europe.
Rashid Khalidi: Absolutely. It was a failing of the Palestine leadership in the '20s, '30s, and the '40s. There were a few people who had some understanding but basically, they were not very clear on some of the global elements of power that often determined outcomes in Palestine. That was also true to a very large extent of the PLO leadership that developed starting in the '50s and '60s, took over the Palestinian National Movement in the mid-'60s, and was dominant until the end of the Oslo period at the end of the 1990s. And a remnant of it is still there in Ramallah.
To my way of thinking, these people's understanding, especially of the US and Western Europe, is sorely lacking. Unlike the leaders of the Zionist movement, most of whom originated in the West, or spent a great deal of time in the West. People like Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), who was a British subject. He was an immigrant to Britain but he understood British politics and British society. Golda Meir (1898-1978), she understood American society. She was born in Eastern Europe but she came to the US as a young woman. She spoke perfect English. I once heard her speak. She was very convincing, very authoritative, and very charismatic, but understood the society she was dealing with.
And that was generally true of people like Herzl. Herzl was a Viennese. He understood European society. He understood European power politics because he was a European. And that gave the Zionist movement an enormous advantage. When you have people like Abba Eban (1915-2002), who trained in Oxford, born speaking English, you have an enormous advantage. This is an advantage that certainly the Palestinians did not have in the '20s, '30s, and '40s, and I would argue did not have during the whole period where the PLO dominated the Palestinian National Movement because even though there were people like Edward Said (1935-2003) or myself who knew western societies, we were not decision-makers. At best, they occasionally listened to our advice, but unfortunately quite rarely.
Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the rise of, I don't know any other word for it, Jewish fascism. Jabotinsky. Mussolini at one point praised Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) as a good fascist. It's always been there. One of the first stories I covered was about Meir Kahane (1932-1990) in Israel, this fascistic rabbi, but Israel banned his party in 1994, the Kach party. And now that virulent strain, overtly racist, it's all come out, especially in the Netanyahu government. Talk about that strain within Zionism and its political triumph.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, there are two elements: One is the anti-democratic element and one is the racist element. The anti-democratic element was not prevalent, except insofar as it had to do with Arabs. In other words, there was a high degree of tolerance for democratic diversity in Israel, insofar as the Jewish population was concerned. The Arab population from 1948 onwards for 18 years was under military government. And so you had a democratic regime for Jews and a military government for Arabs. Now they could vote but they had to check in with the general security services, the Shabak, in order to travel from one town to another, or in order to get certain jobs. So you had a police state, I wouldn't call it fascist, a police state regime for Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel for the first 18 years of its existence, and a vibrant democracy for Jews.
Now, the strain of anti-democratic thinking of Jewish supremacy and of a willingness to cut corners as far as democracy is concerned, or to completely abandon democracy, as you said, develops with Rabbi Meir Kahane, who's assassinated at one point. But his thinking lives on in, as you said, the Kach party, and later on in the two right-wing parties that are central to the current government coalition. [note: Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionist Party ]
These are essentially anti-democratic parties, as well as Jewish supremacists. And that links to a broader set of issues – Which don't have anything to do with fascism specifically – Which has to do with a racist colonial attitude towards the Palestinians. The Palestinians are lesser people, the Palestinians don't have the same rights or shouldn't have the same rights as Jews, and the Palestinians either don't exist or if they exist, they have to accept a subordinate position.
Israel bills itself as a state that is both Jewish and democratic. And as one Palestinian who lives in Israel said, it's democratic for the Jews, but it's a Jewish state for the Arabs. It's a state from which they are excluded, in other words, in terms of certain rights that pertain only to Jewish citizens of the state, various rights that have to do with access to land, various rights that have to do with access to certain jobs, and so on and so forth. There are about 18 or 20 laws that systematically discriminate against Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel inside Israel. And that's not to speak of the millions of people over whom Israel rules without any recourse, except military courts which have a 99% rate of conviction. There is no law. There is military law. They have no voice in anything, any important decisions about their lives. We're talking about the population of the Gaza Strip. We're talking about the population of the West Bank.
So Israel is a state that rules over a territory from the river to the sea with privileges and rights for all Jewish citizens, and a diminishing scale of rights, some for Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel, fewer rights for Palestinians who live in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the '67 war, and no rights for the several million Palestinians who live in the territories that have been occupied now for 56 years; The longest military occupation in modern history.
Chris Hedges: You talk a lot about the repression on the part of Israel towards Palestinian resistance movements. The First Intifada, which I covered, was largely nonviolent. The Second Intifada was not nonviolent. You're very critical of the tactics used in the Second Intifada. You get the March of Return up to the fence on the border of Gaza where Israeli snipers are shooting medics, journalists, and children. But you make a point that in some ways the repression is harsher against nonviolent movements. Why?
Rashid Khalidi: Because it's convenient to picture the Palestinians as terrorists and because nonviolence has the danger of winning the sympathy of Western countries. When you can put the Palestinians into a terrorist box instead of saying this is resistance to occupation, or this is resistance to settler colonialism, which is what it is, of course, and can picture them as terrorists – Which is something that really became most successful under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (1928-2014) in the period immediately after 9/11, when he hooked Israel up with the American global war on terror – If you can do that, you can deny that they should be a party to anything, well, they're terrorists. You can't talk to them. Obviously, this was a tactic adopted by Netanyahu who subtly and surreptitiously was supporting Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, as a means both of separating the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, as a means of sustaining and deepening the divisions in Palestinian politics between Ramallah and Gaza, between the Palestinian Authority and between the Hamas government in Gaza, and as a means of avoiding any negotiations. Well, they're split, and this lot are terrorists. We can't talk to them. Therefore no negotiations. Therefore, we continue annexation, we continue colonization, we continue dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank, which is the objective of this, and most Israeli governments since 1967 in different forms over time. So the terrorism label, which again has been trotted out starting on October 7 with the Hamas attack out of the Gaza Strip, is extraordinarily useful for hoodwinking Western elites, which are largely accepting of an Israeli analysis, which elides completely occupation, which elides completely the oppression that's a necessary daily part of the occupation. The violence that is a necessary daily part of occupation, and completely, completely eliminates from view the fact that this is a settler-colonial process to take over as much of Palestine as possible and to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces if they cannot be pushed out of Palestine entirely.
Chris Hedges: Two points: One, Hamas was elected in a fair election in 2006. Israel imposed this siege or blockade. And secondly, the PA, the Palestinian Authority, as you point out in your book, really functions as little more than a colonial police force. Let's talk about the current Israeli government. Many of the figures within this government have long called for, the euphemistic term "transfer" but massive ethnic cleansing. Of course, the Biden administration has given the Netanyahu government not only a green light but supporting it with what, $13 billion in supplemental military aid. We already give Israel $3 billion a year.
Rashid Khalidi: $3.8 billion.
Chris Hedges: $3.8 billion. So let's talk about this government. Are we essentially seeing an even more draconian version of the Nakba? But as you said, these figures were spawned by Kahane and this movement. And they have long advocated for removing, not just the Palestinians under occupation, but even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
Rashid Khalidi: Right. These trends in Israeli society include not just Jewish supremacy on the right, but a desire since the beginning to carry out demographic transformations of the country. That was essential. You can't create a Jewish state in a majority Arab country without bringing in a larger Jewish population and decreasing the Arab population. It's the logic of a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab country, up until 1948. And what you see today under this government that came into office early this year, elected in December of last year, and came into power after coalition negotiations early in 2023, has been an accelerated drive for the colonization of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, and since this war began on October 7, a desire to as much as possible push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. This was seen as an opportunity. The atrocities that were perpetrated at the beginning of this attack by the attackers or by the people who came in behind the attackers gave the Israeli right an opportunity to carry out another phase of ethnic cleansing.
Now, we don't only know this from their statements, we know this from the fact that American diplomacy played, in my view, a disgraceful role in trying to convince both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments to take in populations that Israel would displace, would kick out of the Gaza Strip, and possibly also the West Bank. We know this not only from the angry rejections by the Egyptian government, the Jordanian government, the Saudi government, and every other Arab government of these ideas, and from the retractions by the Biden administration as soon as they saw that angry reaction; We know that from the same funding request that the Office of Management and Budget put before Congress on October 20 for $14 billion for Israel. Buried in that on page 40 is a request for support for migration, including people leaving the Gaza Strip.
There are various clauses that show that the US government was party to an Israeli plan to expel populations from the Gaza Strip. As everybody in the Arab world knows, and everybody in the world should know, when Israel expels Palestinians from Palestine, they never are allowed to return. The Egyptian and the Jordanian governments understood this perfectly and they were not going to go along with this. They treated Antony Blinken (b. 1962) with the contempt that he deserved when he tried to peddle this idea to them and the United States eventually retreated from that and the President has repeatedly said now since then, oh, we will not accept the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
The US government was privy to, party to, and complicit in, an Israeli plan to do that in the first week or so of this war, as is evidenced by the budget request put before Congress on October 20. You can go to page 40 of it, and have a look. It's unequivocal. The US was asking for money for operations outside of Gaza and anybody kicked out of Palestine ever by Israeli ethnic cleansing is not allowed to return. This is not, in other words, a temporary measure, nor was it meant by Israel to be a temporary measure. You can read what the Israeli Intelligence Ministry said. You can read what various Israeli ministers have said. The intention was to ethnically cleanse as much as possible of the Gazan population. Since then, those ambitions have been reduced because the Arab governments wouldn't go along and the US pulled back. And now what seems to be intended is to squeeze the population of the Gaza Strip into a smaller and smaller part of that very tiny 20-mile-long area.
Chris Hedges: Well, that creates a humanitarian crisis; Gaza already is one of the most populated spots on the planet, a very high unemployment rate, especially among the young, over 50%, half the population, is under the age of 18. It's clear that not much is left in Northern Gaza but they bomb the south as well. Khan Yunis, one of the cities in the south, half of the city has been declared a free-fire zone. They've killed far more UN workers than they've killed Hamas militants, as far as I can tell. Is the idea to create such an appalling humanitarian crisis that enough pressure can be put on the Sisi government in Egypt because these Palestinians in Gaza will be pushed out into the Egyptian Sinai? Where do you see it going? Certainly, the true believers, these fanatical Zionists and bigots in the Netanyahu government, this has long been their dream. They have called for this for decades.
Rashid Khalidi: Right. Well, they're also engaging in small-scale ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank where about 15 or 16 small communities have been forced to leave. 2,000 or 3,000 people have now been driven from their homes in the area south and east of Hebron and in the Jordan River Valley by armed Zionist settlers backed by Israeli troops in a wave of ethnic cleansing. These people argue it's necessary and correct and the realization of one of their dreams, which is to make the West Bank as free as possible for Palestinians. Even if they can't drive them into Jordan because the Jordanians have now moved troops to the border to prevent that and have very clearly said we will under no circumstances allow you to do this. Pushing them into smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank stealing their land and taking over more and more of the West Bank serves the same purpose.
As far as Gaza is concerned, it's not clear where this is going to go. We're in the middle, at the time that we record this, of a truce, a very short-term four-day-truce. Even if it's extended the intention of the Israeli military and the Israeli government is to continue the war into the southern part of Gaza. How they intend to do that without more phenomenally high casualty tolls among the civilian population is hard to imagine. They've already killed probably as many as 20,000 people. The Gazan authorities say 14,800 have been killed but there are apparently many, many hundreds, perhaps thousands buried under the rubble of their homes, UN schools, and other buildings destroyed in this mad attack on the population of Gaza.
The claim that the objective is to kill Hamas militants is belied by the fact that dozens and dozens of United Nations schools have been hit. Well, they had tunnels underneath. That's not an excuse for destroying a school full of refugees, which is what's happened again and again and again and again. Or there was one Hamas militant on the ground floor, so we destroyed a 12-story building and killed everybody inside. Again under any reading of international humanitarian law, this is absolutely outrageous. It's completely accepted by the US and Western governments, so they are, to my way of thinking, complicit in a litany of war crimes. But it is the policy of Israel clearly to inflict as much suffering as possible on the Gazan population, presumably to make them pay for the defeat that Hamas inflicted on the Israeli army and for the suffering of Israeli civilians thereafter. And also presumably to push them into, ideally from an Israeli perspective, leaving the Gaza Strip and going to Egypt. And if that's not possible, squeezing them into a smaller and smaller area of the Gaza Strip.
I don't know what will be the outcome of this. People will try and return to the northern part of Gaza. Some have already tried to do so. There is apparently a large population there. There are relief supplies going into the north to save the population that remains there. And Gaza City is the largest built-up urban area in the Gaza Strip. That's where the largest group of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip used to live. Where they're going to go and where they're going to live is just impossible to foresee at this stage.
Chris Hedges: I want to close by asking why, both within the Republican party and the Democratic party, there is such blind support for the Netanyahu government. Where does it come from? I don't know that it's in our strategic interest to alienate the Muslim world at this level. It'll take us years to regain any trust throughout the Arab world and the Muslim world. But what is its engine? Why is it happening?
Rashid Khalidi: That's a very hard question to answer and it has multiple answers. First of all, there is a difference between the party leadership in the Democratic party and the base, and there's a difference between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans are much, much more supportive of Israel. This partly may be due to Christian Zionism, to the zeal with which some evangelicals look upon the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. It may have to do with the appreciation for muscular, colonial, racist aggressiveness that Israel displays on the part of some Republicans. At the top, however, of both parties, it has to do with the fact that people of a certain generation were led to believe things that Israel wanted them to believe. In a time in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, we're talking about a gerontocracy, look at the leadership in the Senate, look at the president, these are people whose views were formed in the '60s and '70s when the only narrative available was an Israeli narrative. So they believe everything the Israelis tell them, whatever fairytales they're led to believe, they swallow hook, line, and sinker.
The difference is a generational difference and the differences between the bases of the two political parties. The Democratic party has a very broad and disparate base. And most elements of that base are much more skeptical of Israeli claims and are much more critical of Israel than is the Democratic party leadership. So the president, the people around him, the leadership in the House and the Senate are solidly pro-Israel in the Democratic party as in the Republican party. The difference lies in the base. If you look at the components, unions, the postal workers have come out for a ceasefire in opposition to the position of the Biden administration. Pastors of Black churches put a full-page ad in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago demanding a ceasefire. Black intellectuals, Native American intellectuals, and Hispanic intellectuals are all much more critical of Israel, especially the younger ones than are their elders, or are Republicans, as a general rule. This is not only true of young Black students, young Latino students, or young Arab or Muslim students, it's also true of many young Jewish students. You look at college campuses and Jewish Voice for Peace is a central component of the drives for divestment of these universities' assets from companies that support the Israeli occupation and Palestinian rights generally.
So there's a generational divide, even among Republicans, by the way, but especially among Democrats, which shows that even though there's a high degree, in my view, of brainwashing among the older generation – People who believe that the movie Exodus is an accurate portrayal of reality, which is to say a lot of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, they don't know better, to be frank – Whereas younger people have much better access to information than their elders. They do not trust or pay any attention to the mainstream corporate media which is full of lies as far as they're concerned. And as far as I'm concerned. The picture that is given by the American mainstream media is far, far less diverse than the picture given by the Israeli media. I read The New York Times in the morning and I read Haaretz, or The Times of Israel, or Ynet, Yedioth's English language service, Yedioth Ahronoth. There's more disparity and more critical thinking in the Israeli press than in The Washington Post and The New York Times, or on CNN or on MSNBC. Young people know that, and they have access through social media and other forms to information that their elders by and large don't even know exists.
Chris Hedges: Well, it's money too. AIPAC announced that they're going to spend $100 million to defeat Rashida Tlaib (b. 1976) and a few others who have called for a ceasefire. They're major donors. And we've seen these billionaire hedge fund donors at Harvard and Columbia and UPenn use the power of the money. The response on the part of the presidents of Harvard and UPenn is they've groveled before these... Of course, they don't run the universities, the board of trustees runs the universities. But it's also the weight of that money and the fact that we live in a political system of legalized bribery.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. I would say that this is true right across all of the centers of power in our society. The politicians are bought and paid for. They can only exist with donations that finance their political campaigns, from the president on down to city council members. That's true of corporations, that's true of universities, that's true of the art world; They're dependent on donors. And it has played itself out in universities in a quite terrible way. The concerns of Jewish students and their understandable worry about antisemitism have been conflated with their concerns about Palestinian advocacy. And universities have been extremely solicitous of that. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students, who include Jewish students, minority students, and Arab students, have been treated in a relatively cavalier fashion.
And if you look around the country, you had a Palestinian child murdered in the Chicago suburbs because he was Palestinian or Muslim. You've had three Palestinian students attacked in Vermont a couple of days ago because they were wearing keffiyehs. You've had a man shot outside a mosque in Rhode Island and you've had a Jewish man knocked to the ground and killed in a demonstration in Los Angeles. So you've had four or five incidents of violence, three or four of which are against either Palestinians or people supporting the Palestine cause or Muslims. And yet the solicitude of the university, which is understandable and legitimate for the concerns of some Jewish students, does not extend to other students, including Jewish students who feel put upon by the fact that not only does the government blindly support Israel, not only does the media blindly support Israel, not only is there a general atmosphere in corporations, we won't hire this person if they signed a petition in support of Palestine, but the university administrations are hostile to them. And so they feel unprotected, students who are supportive of Palestine, which in many campuses are the majority of students.
At Columbia, at Brown, and at many other universities, resolutions in support of divestment from companies that support the Israeli occupation passed with overwhelming majorities. That's a democratic indication of where a lot of student sentiment was when those votes took place, sometimes several years ago. But if you look at many campuses, the support for Palestinian rights is at least as great, if not greater, than support for Israel today, even after the shock of the attacks of October 7, when there was enormous sympathy in American society generally for Israelis because of the huge number of Israeli civilian casualties, as many as 800, perhaps more, Israeli civilians were killed at the beginning. So there was enormous sympathy but that has not lasted in view of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. People say 800 civilians, 15,000 civilians. Well, they're all civilians. Children are children. Unless you have a racist view which is that some children are more valued than other children or some civilians are more valued than other civilians.
Chris Hedges: Well, at Columbia, where you teach, didn't they outlaw Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace? They outlawed those groups, right?
Rashid Khalidi: Yes. They banned them both. They withdrew their right to have events and university support. That's correct. For the first semester.
Chris Hedges: To close, isn’t this because they can't win? I'm talking about the Zionists. They can't really win the argument.
Rashid Khalidi: There's an argument that antisemitism is the refuge of scoundrels and unfortunately that is what's happening now. There is real virulent antisemitism in American society, most of it on the right and there's some antisemitism certainly in some of the fringes of support for Palestinian rights. But in fact, given that they actually can't win the argument, how do you justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify no rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories? What can you say to justify the ongoing incessant colonization, appropriation, and dispossession going on in the West Bank? There's nothing you can say. There are no arguments that justify that unless you say Jewish supremacy and absolute right, and God gave this land to us. You say things like that that are not acceptable to most college students.
So you shut down the debate by saying, well, they're antisemites, and their slogans are genocidal, which is actually what a university administrator at Columbia said, that the slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is genocidal. It's part of the laws of the state of Israel. It's the platform of the Likud party, that from the sea to the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. That was the platform of the Likud party in 1977. So a bunch of students are hollering "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." And the Israeli government actually is instantiating in law, in its constitution, that from the river to the sea, the only sovereignty will be Jewish sovereignty. On the one hand, on the other hand. And this lot are persecuted for their beliefs. ----------------
Al-Fakhoura School (2023) aarsbog posted a photo:
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- Saturday 18 November 2023: Yesterday Israel bombed the Al-Falah School in Gaza City, killing 20+; and today, as all the Al-Shifa Hospital patients and medical personnell are forcefully expelled at gunpoint to flee south by foot, and Israel´s ground operations has expanded to Southern Gaza; today an Israeli military strike hits the UN-run Al-Fakhoura school in Jabalia refugee camp in Northern Gaza, killing more than two hundred women and children
The Chris Hedges Report: What really happened in Israel on Oct. 7? (Published 17 November 2023)
Did Israel’s military kill its own civilians on Oct. 7?
by Chris Hedges, The Real News Network November 17, 2023
For all the sensationalism surrounding the events of Oct. 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza fence and seized territory in the Gaza Envelope as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there is still much that we do not know. The official Israeli death toll from the attack is estimated at 1,200 civilians, revised from an initial estimate of 1,400. Among this figure are several hundred civilians, which Israel says were killed by Hamas militants. Other testimony from survivors of Oct. 7 suggests an alternative explanation—that in its fervor to defeat Hamas, Israeli commanders may have willingly targeted and sacrificed Israeli soldiers and civilians in the crossfire.
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone joins The Chris Hedges Report for an in-depth look.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Chris Hedges: There's growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters but the Israeli captives with them. Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be'eri, told the Israeli press, that he set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. Escapa told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, that his desperation began to set in. "The commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses and their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages." The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were, "Compelled to request an aerial strike against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza in order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control."
That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers. Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on August 1, 2014, captured an Israeli soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area where he was being held. Goldin was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.
Joining me to discuss the reports of Israel shelling its own citizens with tanks and missiles is Max Blumenthal, who investigated this for The Grayzone. So you did a wonderful job piecing together these reports that are coming out of Israel. Why don't you lay out what Israeli commanders faced after roughly 10 hours, several hours after this incursion, and then perhaps give me some details about what you found out?
Max Blumenthal: Well, thanks, Chris. I'm still trying to piece together what happened on October 7. One reason that I'm left investigating even after this report that I thought was comprehensive was that in the face of so much death and destruction caused by Israel's military in Gaza – Which is basically tantamount to genocide. You have systematic killing in Gaza – Everyone I know there has ... Luckily I don't know anyone who's been killed, but everyone I know there has lost neighbors or relatives. They've all lost their homes. So the Israeli military and the Prime Minister's office, Netanyahu's office, are recycling October 7 atrocities and they're also introducing new deceptions in order to try to keep the media's lens focused on October 7 now that it is starting to hone in on the horror of Gaza. We have all these new stories about babies baked in ovens, we've heard stories about babies cut out of mothers' wombs by so-called Hamas terrorists, rape, gang rape, women after being taken, gang raped in the streets in Gaza City. All of these lies were spun out. The 40 beheaded babies was repeated by Biden, who claimed he'd seen photographs. All of these lies were repeated and put forward in order to give Israel the latitude to carry out this genocidal assault that we're now witnessing. And we can see Biden was so stunned by the propaganda that was being pushed on him by Netanyahu's office and the pro-Israel media that he immediately caved. Tony Blinken in his recent Senate testimony also repeated some of these lies. So I'm still trying to unpack it because it's these lies that went beyond the actual killings and atrocities that were committed by gunmen from the Gaza Strip on October 7 that have made it possible for Israel to target and exterminate hundreds of entire families in the Gaza Strip as well as hospitals and medical centers. So I started my investigation when testimony started to filter out in Israeli media which contravened the official story of October 7. The official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is that Hamas "terrorists" stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire families in their homes, and then burned them all, somehow, melted cars and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried out this gigantic mass shooting. It does appear clear that many Israeli non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen but that's where the official story stops. What I was able to determine from these testimonies, as well as basic and visual analysis of the photos that the Israeli Foreign Minister and Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's office were putting forward, was that Israel used disproportionate force on its own citizens in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political concessions from the state of Israel, which had been besieging the Gaza Strip for 15 years. So you read one of those testimonies, and I guess we can go into some detail about them and how I came to my conclusions.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, let's go in because, in your article, which people can read on The Grayzone, you print pictures. I'll let you go from there. The photographic evidence seems to contradict the statements that have come out of Jerusalem.
Max Blumenthal: It's important to understand that the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released; The Israeli soldier who was taken in 2006, who was operating a tank outside Gaza, was taken in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. So this entire Al Aqsa Flood operation is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. So gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers and to military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza. Much of the Gaza division, which has also been responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped out. The Erez Crossing... I don't know if you've been through there, Chris.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, many times. Many times, yes.
Max Blumenthal: Okay. Yeah, because you've been to Gaza, I've been through there three times. It is the nexus, the nerve center of the siege of Gaza. It's not only where you cross through if you want to enter Gaza and return to, or if you're a resident of Gaza you'll have to pass through there to get medical treatment outside. It's the home of the civil administration, the bureaucracy of the panopticon-style occupation of Gaza. So that was immediately overrun by gunmen as a military target, and with all these soldiers inside, the head of the Gaza division actually went into an underground bunker. He recounted this story to Haaretz and made the tough decision to bomb Erez Crossing and they sent Hellfire missiles onto the Erez Crossing from Apache helicopters. And this was basically the beginning of the Iron Swords Operation that Netanyahu declared several days later, which is essentially the carpet bombing of Gaza.
But Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault began around 6:00AM at daybreak, and by 10:30AM, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force's commando teams, and the well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point, there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were not even at full strength until 12:00PM. So you have action at Erez Crossing, and then you have Kibbutz Be'eri, which is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in the crossfire, Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there were standoffs in their homes. And by the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people's homes with tanks.
According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival – Which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz Be'eri and Kibbutz Re'im, which also have military bases essentially embedded within them – It was held on the road between these two kibbutzim and came under attack. Many captives were taken. This woman, Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be'eri, went into a home with her partner, and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered.
She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in. So if you look at the pictures of Kibbutz Be'eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I've seen, or you may have seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli artillery. There's no way that Hamas gunmen could have done that much structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they were equipped with; Kalashnikovs and some RPGs.
I24, an Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored propaganda network, actually went to this kibbutz on a guided tour and said they saw tank tracks everywhere. It's obvious what happened there and it was stated clearly by the security coordinator of Kibbutz Be'eri, who you quoted at the top of this interview. He was on a hotline with the Israeli Military Command and they decided to shell houses on top of their occupants, including Israeli civilians. Now, why were they doing this? As you mentioned, there's the Hannibal Directive, this once-secret directive that was introduced after Israel entered into a major prisoner swap with I believe the PFLP-GC, which operates out of Syria in exchange for Ahmed Jibril and hundreds of other prisoners in order to get back some Israeli soldiers who had been taken in the Lebanese Civil War.
Chris Hedges: It was only three. I don't think it was a very –
Max Blumenthal: Yeah, it was three.
Chris Hedges: – Yeah.
Max Blumenthal: So this is a politically painful prisoner swap, and the Israeli public was furious, and the right-wing politicians were furious. So they introduced this directive named after the Carthaginian general Hannibal – Who took his own life, he took poison rather than being taken captive by the enemy – And it authorizes Israeli commanders to kill their own soldiers if they're taken captive by the enemy in order to prevent such a prisoner swap from taking place. And it was used again, this is when it got exposed in 2014 – August 1, 2014, what's known as Black Friday in Southern Gaza – And I was actually there in the aftermath of this massacre. A lieutenant named Hadar Goldin was taken by Hamas fighters. He was in the field when Israel broke a ceasefire and started attacking around the southern city of Rafa. The Israeli Military Command authorized airstrikes, artillery strikes, and tank fire to bring the full wrath of the Israeli military onto this area in order to make sure that this soldier did not get taken alive.
Over 100 people in Rafa were killed in this massacre. The morgues were filling up. It was hideous. I actually visited a hospital called Kuwaiti Hospital, which is now under attack again, and because the mortuaries were so full of bodies on this day, they actually had to bring in ice cream coolers to store the bodies of babies. The doctor who interviewed me, who I interviewed about that, his entire family was killed about a week and a half ago, after he refused Israeli orders to evacuate Kuwaiti Hospital. But back to the Hannibal directive. We have to question whether it was put into play on October 7. Because we not only have the Erez Crossing where many soldiers were killed – And if you look at the aftermath, the roof was clearly brought down. There's serious structural damage to the roof of Erez Crossing – You have Kibbutz Be'eri where there was tank shelling, and then you have these Apache helicopter pilots in the air who were stating in their testimonies in Hebrew to Israeli media that they had no intelligence, no way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground.
And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then go shoot as many cars and people as they could on the ground. Pure chaos. These testimonies have been totally ignored, by the way, by Western media. Were they encouraged to kill captives or shoot cars that they thought contained captives? We don't know. What we do know is there were orders from the top to kill Israeli civilians if Hamas gunmen were around them in order to get the gunmen. And it's like the same military doctrine that's being employed in Gaza: Any civilian is a target if they are the "terrorist's next-door neighbor." Israel actually calls it the Neighbor Policy. They don't know any other doctrine. They don't have any other means of targeting and they weren't prepared, obviously, for this military onslaught. So they went to their core doctrine of bombing everything in sight.
That brings us to the third scenario. We talked about Erez Crossing and Kibbutz Be'eri, then you have the chaos of the Nova Electronic Music Festival. And it's there that it appears clear that after a lot of these Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commando teams had left – This is an element that's left out in a lot of Western media – Many people from Gaza started streaming in, including lower level characters from the armed factions who may have had weapons but weren't part of the operation or weren't trained, onlookers, people who wanted to see what Israel looked like, to see the land that their families had been kicked off. There were some heinous killings, and you could see actual captives being taken by guys on motorcycles who didn't even have weapons. They were grabbing people.
A lot of this happened around the Nova Music Festival. There was a lot of shooting between festival security guards and various gunmen, and a lot of people were killed, but many people were fleeing the festival by car. There is a video of some Hamas gunmen stopping cars and shooting people. But then you have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of Hellfire missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the squadrons. They put out a video afterward of themselves shooting cars, hitting cars with Hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire.
We don't know who those people were, but if you look, a lot of the cars were heading back to Gaza. So they were very likely cars of people from Gaza who may have been taking captives and so many captives or would-be captives were killed. Was one of them Shani Louk? This woman whom the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been making such a big deal of who was a festival partygoer, who was attractive, and was a German citizen. There's some video of her being taken. They say they found a skull fragment from her.
Was she in a car that was hit by a Hellfire missile? Unclear. But it's very clear that many of these cars were hit by Apache helicopters and the helicopter pilots said they had no idea who was in them. They were shooting people on the other side of Gaza after they entered, by the afternoon of October 7. It's very clear to me that many people were killed. Many Israelis were killed by Israeli forces, along with many active duty, uniformed Israeli soldiers who were actively engaged in the siege of Gaza were combatants.
Chris Hedges: I want to buttress that I went into Kuwait after the first Gulf War and drove up the Highway of Death, which was miles and miles of Iraqi military vehicles, all of which had been hit by Apache helicopters. And when I saw one of the pictures, one of the images of a car with two completely blackened corpses, that is what I saw in vehicle after vehicle after vehicle going into Kuwait. Some of these images which were disseminated by the IDF have been removed. And maybe you can explain why you think they were no longer made available to the public.
Max Blumenthal: Well, when I first went to Gaza in 2014, in the midst of Israel's 51-day-long assault on Gaza, I came across a car that was on the roadside that had been roasted by a Hellfire missile along with its driver. The driver's body had been removed but it was undoubtedly charred and you could actually see his sandal melted into the gas pedal. He had been hit by a Hellfire missile. I embedded the picture in my article to compare it to the vehicles that the Israeli Foreign Ministry was pointing to as evidence of Hamas savagery, and it's identical. By the way, he was a taxi driver, a poor young guy named Fadi Alowa, who had taken a wounded Hamas fighter to the hospital without even knowing that he had been a fighter. And so they killed him.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has a website called hamas-massacre.com. And the UN Ambassador – This unhinged character named Gilad Erdan, who used to be in charge of Israel's meddling operations to attack college students who were organizing to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, or forming Palestine solidarity student groups – Gilad Erdan whipped out this QR code at his UN address, about two weeks ago, and the QR code was supposed to lead to a Google Drive folder that contained all these images of charred cars, melted bodies, and all sorts of other atrocities that Hamas had committed. But all the pictures eventually disappeared. My initial read was that they concluded that a lot of these pictures were either fake, or they could have even depicted Hamas fighters who had come in and been hit by Hellfire missiles. But then Gilad Erdan in embarrassment later said that there was a technical error, and he tried to repost the images.
And that makes sense because they have no shame. They lie relentlessly, shamelessly and so it didn't seem like they actually deleted them out of shame. They deleted them because of a major technical error, which is also ironic because Israel's supposed to be the technically savvy startup nation that's teaching the world through innovation and creativity how we can enter the AI future, but they can't even maintain a simple Google Drive.
And that shows the boneheadedness of this entire operation. But it's worked. It's been very successful in convincing Brussels and Washington that Hamas was ISIS. That is Israel's message: Hamas is ISIS, they're irrational, they aim to simply kill Jews, they don't have any political demands, and the only response to them is the response that the US waged on ISIS – After supporting ISIS, by the way, in Syria – Which was to destroy much of Raha, ISIS's base of operation, as well as Mosul in Iraq. The man who actually oversaw those operations, James Glynn, the marine officer, was sent to Israel to consult the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of October 7 on how they should respond. Now, the Pentagon's pulling back and saying, whoa, this is a little bit crazy for us even. We don't even know what you're targeting, or where your targeting is coming from. But they gave him the green light because they fell for the propaganda shock and awe campaign of these photos.
And recently actually at a fundraiser for the Republican Jewish Coalition – Which is funded substantially by the Adelson family of the late laconic oligarch, Sheldon Adelson, but also many other wealthy Republican, pro-Israel Jews in Las Vegas at Adelson's Hotel – A character named Eli Beer appears on stage, who is a volunteer rescuer and a religious nationalist orthodox Jew from New York, who is living in Israel and had arrived as a first responder in October 7 through a group called United Hatzalah. And this is obviously like a fundraising speech. And he declares that a baby had been burned in an oven, had been baked in an oven by Hamas "terrorists."
I'm looking at his comments right now. I have them in front of me. He actually had not seen any baby in an oven. It was someone named Eli Moskowitz, who is from his first responder United Hatzalah team. And Eli Moskowitz had not seen any baby baked in an oven. He said that he found a small bag with contents of body parts that had been apparently pressed against a heating element. These body parts were displayed by Netanyahu filtered out on Twitter and sent to influencers by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in the PM's office after Netanyahu was embarrassed by the retraction of the story about 40 beheaded babies. So if we go back to October 8, CNN and Biden begin telling this phony story about 40 beheaded babies, they are both forced to retract, Netanyahu puts out an image of some burned body parts, says it's a baby, and then flash forward to this fundraiser in Las Vegas where these first responders are saying that there was a baby baked in an oven based on body parts they had in a bag which were pressed against a heating element.
Now, put two and two together. What heating element could have created that much heat to char a body part, which didn't even belong to a baby, but was put forward by Netanyahu to save face? It was likely a Hellfire missile and body parts that had been blown to bits by a Hellfire missile, which were likely an Israeli citizen but could have been someone from Gaza, are being put forward as an Israeli baby. But if you look at the confirmed death count, only one Israeli baby was killed. It's horrible and tragic. It was a 10-month-old baby named Millie Cohen, who was accidentally shot by Hamas gunmen in an exchange of fire.
And more reporting will come out about this, but you can look at the confirmed death toll at Haaretz. There's no other baby. There's no baby burned in an oven, no one's even saying that. So what we're looking at is the most horrific, lurid propaganda, which is bogus, all derive from apparent friendly fire and is being spun in order to justify the actual beheading of babies with missiles in the Gaza Strip and the systematic extermination of an entire society. A senior Israeli security source told Yedioth Ahronoth, the top Israeli tabloid, that 20,000 people had been killed in Gaza. I personally think that could be an overcount, and they're trying to boast to the Israeli public about how many people they've killed to satisfy the bloodlust of the public after October 7.
But if that's true, that's like 1% of the entire population, which definitely qualifies as genocide. So this propaganda has been used to justify the realization of the lie. Many Israelis who are involved in this military operation or who are seen torturing people in the West Bank, workers in the West Bank on camera, are reenacting the lurid propaganda that they believe to be true about October 7, and it could lead to a regional war. Because the genocidal fury has overwhelmed Israeli society, the propaganda, the shock and awe campaign, has prevented Brussels and Washington from being able to put any check on it.
Chris Hedges: What do you think this means for the hostages that are in Gaza?
Max Blumenthal: That's a great question, and one of the hostages answered it. I don't know her name. She appears to be from one of the kibbutzim that had the most captives taken, it's called Nir Oz, and that's where two of the elderly captives were released came from. It's a kibbutz that has many people, more from the left of the Israeli political spectrum, who would be critics of Netanyahu, come from. So he may not be – Netanyahu, his government, and the Israeli population – very favorably disposed to them. But one of these hostages, an older woman, appeared on camera from wherever she was being held inside Gaza and excoriated Netanyahu, and said, you have no desire to get us. What are you doing? Have a ceasefire, negotiate for our release, and get us out of here. You've already killed 50 of us. And that is correct. At least 50 captives have already been killed in these blitzkrieg-like Israeli bombings where they're using 2,000-pound bombs and Mark 82 bunker-buster bombs.
So I don't think they'll make it out alive. It would be a miracle if they made it out alive. Everyone wants them to make it out alive, whether they're on the anti-Zionist side, or ... Well, I shouldn't say everyone wants to make it out alive. It appears that those who want them to make it out are those who are protesting Netanyahu outside his office and outside the military headquarters who tend to be leftists or anti-Zionists in Israel. And those who could care less about them getting out are Netanyahu's supporters the military supporters and the military commanders themselves. Because what about this operation suggests that they're actually trying to rescue hostages? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the political dynamics that have been put in play by assaulting everyone in the Gaza Strip, are sending the message that no negotiations are possible whatsoever.
Netanyahu could fall at any day as this operation goes on if certain things take place. For example, if the soldiers that the Israeli military has sent into the few unpopulated areas in Northern Gaza where they've set up these defacto bases of Merkava tanks, if they actually get out of their tanks and wade into the rubble or try to actually take out tunnels themselves, they're going to lose many, many lives, and Netanyahu will likely fall, but he would also fall if he negotiated for the release of these captives. Why? Because of the propaganda that he put into play, the propaganda was so extreme and so lurid, and they went so far beyond an already horrific reality on October 7 that the Israeli public was whipped into such a fervor that they would not stand for any negotiation with Hamas. So the only objective that can be put forward, which has been reinforced by Tony Blinken, is regime change in Gaza. And regime change in Gaza means months and months of grinding, genocidal war in which no captive could possibly survive.
Chris Hedges: Isn't it straightforward? They took the captives because they wanted a prisoner exchange. Netanyahu could empty the Israeli prisons of four or five, six, I don't know, 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, and they would get there. The hostages would go home, wouldn't they?
Max Blumenthal: Yeah. This isn't about Hamas per se. Hamas does have the political mandate to carry out an armed struggle. That's why it was elected in 2006, including by people who are not necessarily Islamists outside of its base. They actually won cities across the West Bank. It wasn't that they won Gaza, they won all of Palestine that was able to vote. So their mandate is to do armed struggle to resist where the Fatah and the Palestinian authority basically gave up, and they're going to continue doing that. But Palestinian armed struggle has always been driven by political demands that were essentially rational and were related to ending ethnic cleansing and ending the military occupation of Palestinians. The leadership of Hamas put forward clear political demands at the beginning of the Al Aqsa Flood as they did in 2014 during Operation Cast Lead. They relate to preventing the incursions of fanatical religious nationalists to the Al Aqsa Compound, the third holiest site in Islam, they relate to ending the siege of Gaza so that they can actually determine they can enjoy some sovereignty. They can actually fish in their own seas. They can have an economy, they can visit Jerusalem.
Emptying the Israeli prisons, where something like 1,500 Palestinians are now held without charges, 700 Palestinian children pass in and out of these prisons every year. There are currently at least 150, now there are probably 200 Palestinian children being held in these jails. They're hostages. They've been kidnapped. I've gone to their trials in the Israeli children's courts and they were kidnapped in their own beds. Ahed Tamimi was kidnapped. I've known her since she was a child and her village, Nabi Salih has been waging this unarmed struggle against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Her dad was kidnapped, Basam, who's really the leader of that struggle and is an international hero.
And so it relates to the whole occupation. And the only way that they could trigger some negotiation, they believe, was by taking captives, because all diplomatic channels had been cut off. The entire West had declared Hamas a terrorist organization that could not be negotiated with. So the only way to spur negotiations is through violence. And that's what they did. And what they've done is forced the essential dynamics of Zionism into an accelerated mode. Because Zionism, as a settler colonial movement based on an anachronistic ideology, Herrenvolk ideology from the turn of the century Europe, has demonstrated its unwillingness to accommodate the native population as it seeks to consolidate its settler-colonial presence. And so it must move towards genocide as all other settler-colonial movements have done. And so that's where we're at right now, is the phase of whether Israel will be able to finish the job that it began in 1948 or not.
And any negotiations that could have taken place with a rational authority are off limits. This is also an obvious failure of American and Western leadership to recognize not only what they're dealing with in the Gaza Strip, which is yet another Palestinian faction that is using violence to spur political momentum because all diplomatic means had been cut off for them, but also what they're dealing with in Israel. Where they're dealing with a fundamentally genocidal political movement and a genocidal society. This Israeli society is primed for genocide. You can look at the viral videos. The videos that are going viral in Israeli social media are parents actually enlisting their own children as props to mock Palestinian children who are dying, dressing them up in hijab to mock Palestinian girls who are dying, who are being starved, who are thirsty because the water has been cut off.
There's a new trend started by an Israeli journalist from Channel 13 in Israel of mocking Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank who are detained for eight hours and forced to listen to a children's song endlessly to torment them, and they dance around mocking the video of the prisoners. The singer of that children's song was brought to perform in an Israeli military base. You can look at the footage of all the pop singers appearing at military bases or in the so-called Gaza Envelope, where reservists are preparing to go into Gaza, and it's straightforward genocidal anthems about re-conquering Gaza, driving out its inhabitants, and reestablishing Israeli settlements that are even bigger than the former settlement of Gush Katif. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence has even introduced a think tank's paper, which calls for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the forced transfer of its residents to Egypt. They put it forward as an official blueprint for the aftermath of this operation that they call Iron Swords.
So that's what the US has green-lit here. And by trying to spur some basic political momentum and relaxation of the siege – Hamas might've just agreed to a relaxation of the siege to be able to deliver something for their constituents – By trying to do that with violence when all diplomatic channels have been cut off, what they've done is forced this conflict into its final phase. I don't think Israel will stop before it believes that it has finished the job that it began in 1948.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Max Blumenthal from The Grayzone. You can read his article, "October 7 Testimonies Reveal Israel's Military Shelling Israeli Citizens With Tanks and Missiles" at The Grayzone. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
This article first appeared on The Real News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Zeitoun (2023) aarsbog posted a photo:
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An interesting conversation between the legendary on-the-ground war correspondent Chris Hedges (b. 1956) and talk show / podcast host Marc Steiner on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the current Israel-Hamas War:
Chris Hedges: Israel´s Endgame in Palestine is Genocide (Published 7 November 2023)
TRANSCRIPT; taken from The Marc Steiner Show:
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us.
As you’re all too well aware, Real News has been covering the Gaza War with real intensity and real focus. The work I’ve been doing here on Not in Our Name, to Max Alvarez’s stunning interviews, especially the recent one with Issa Amro in Gaza, the coverage of so many here at The Real News. And in this segment of The Marc Steiner Show, we’ll look where this war is going in Gaza. Not only where it might take Palestinians and Israelis, but the entire world. My guest is Chris Hedges, a journalist here at The Real News who lived in and covered Gaza, was Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, covered the wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, and here at The Real News has The Chris Hedges Report.
Well, Chris, thanks. I appreciate you taking the time. I know you’ve –
Chris Hedges: Sure.
Marc Steiner: …Got 10 different interviews and you’re on your way out, so it’s good to have you here.
Let me just start with one of the obvious questions people are asking. What is the end game here for Israel, do you think? What do you think we’re marching towards?
Chris Hedges: Well, most of the people in the Netanyahu government, including Netanyahu himself, have been quite clear for, often decades, what the end game is, and that’s the destruction of the state or even the idea of Palestine. And that will be accomplished through acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. And I fully expect things to get worse in Gaza. I mean, they’re bombing the hospitals now. There’s not enough food or water. Israel is impervious to requests from Washington because of the Israel lobby.
They have, traditionally, Israel, because of the power of the Israel lobby, it doesn’t really matter what any administration wants. They humiliated Biden when he was vice president and called for a moratorium on settlements, and then the day he was in Jerusalem announced an expansion of settlements. They bypassed the White House to go speak, by Netanyahu, to go speak before Congress to denounce the Iran deal. They know that, in essence, the Biden administration can’t touch the military aid, and has no ability to really pressure the government to halt this massive bombing campaign.
And I want to put that bombing campaign in perspective. I was in Sarajevo during the war. We were being hit with 300 to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day, and I don’t want to minimize that. I, almost 30 years later, still have nightmares because of it. But that’s nothing compared to what’s happening in Gaza. The first two weeks, they damaged or destroyed 45% of the housing stock. They’ve dropped, I think, it was just in the first two weeks, 20,000 tons of bombs. This is Stalingrad level. As bad as Sarajevo was, it doesn’t come close.
Thousands of Palestinians are trapped under the rubble. And they have surrounded the northern part – They will do it piecemeal. They learned that from the Americans in Fallujah. You don’t, essentially, attack on a wide front. You break up your urban areas into sectors that you then dominate. So, they’ve cut off Gaza City from the south, which is Gaza’s largest city, about 700,000 people.
Marc Steiner: And they’re about to go in.
Chris Hedges: Well, they’ll go in. The problem with urban warfare, which I’ve been in, is that all of your heavy machinery doesn’t really give you much of an advantage. So, I think that it’s saturation bombing. They will keep the northern part of Gaza cordoned off, surrounded, but I expect them to bomb their way to victory, or what they’re going to continue or call victory.
Marc Steiner: Call victory, right.
Chris Hedges: They don’t really want to start crawling through the rubble fighting Hamas fighters. The tunnels are an issue. We don’t know how big, but they’re big. But they need generators in order to pump down air into the tunnels. I think most of the hostages are probably in the tunnels. This is also a very cynical decision on the part of the Netanyahu government. I don’t think many of those hostages are going to come back. I think they know that and they don’t care.
So, they’ve cut off food, in essence, they’ve cut off water. The trucks that have come over through Rafah are, it’s negligible. It’s a very cynical public relations ploy, but it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the tremendous suffering.
So, I expect that they will push what remains of the Gaza population over the border into the Sinai, into Egypt, and they will never come back. And there have been reports in the Egyptian press that the Americans have approached the Sisi government. The Egyptian economy is in a mess at over $160 billion in debt. And they will offer financial incentives, and probably, if that doesn’t work, they’ll use threats to do Israel’s bidding. And in essence, Gaza as we know it – And I spent seven years covering Gaza, my office was right in the center of Gaza City – Just won’t exist.
Marc Steiner: So, two questions here that popped in my head as you were speaking. I was talking to some people yesterday about Uganda and Entebbe in the airport, and rescuing the hostages that took place. Talk a bit about, from your experience covering wars and what’s happening right now in Gaza, why couldn’t Israel have done that? Why couldn’t Israel simply have gone in, found out where the hostages are, and rescued as many as possible? What do you think? Was that possible or was that impossible?
Chris Hedges: No, because first of all, the hostages are dispersed over a wide area. And second of all, they’re underground. You knew they were on the plane in Entebbe, they were in an enclosed space. This is completely different.
Marc Steiner: So, I’m thinking about the American end in this, and I know it’s not going to happen, but it seems like the only way conceivably to stop Israel from doing what it’s doing at this moment would be the threat of a cutoff of aid. And when you see inside the Jewish world in America, in the United States, I see it all the time, is a growing body of Jews saying, no, not in our name. We don’t agree, And whether it’s marches or articles or organizations being developed. So, that seems to me the only way to stop the madness from [inaudible].
Chris Hedges: Well, that would be the only way. Even that might not work because Israel needs that aid to essentially replenish stockpiles. But they have a pretty robust arsenal.
Well, those are the Jews that don’t count. J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace don’t count. For me, they count quite a bit. But I’m talking about in terms of the power structure and its money. It’s AIPAC and these Sheldon Adelson type retrograde Jewish billionaires. By the way, they funded Netanyahu. I covered that campaign. Netanyahu was their baby. They created him and they bankrolled him against Rabin.
So, yes, I think ultimately that’s why I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, that it is about severing aid and imposing sanctions on Israel. That’s the only weapon we have. We’re very far from achieving that. Even most of the liberal groups don’t support BDS. And the Israel lobby is just so well-funded and so powerful, and they represent a political strain of a very right-wing political strain within the American population that it does not, I would guess, represent the political leanings of probably most American Jews.
Marc Steiner: When I see what’s going on in Gaza, in Israel right now, in Palestine, I know that Israel is not attempting, they’re going to seize a huge portion of Gaza. They’re going to call it a buffer, they’re going to do whatever, they may put settlers in, they may not, but they’re going to seize a huge portion of Gaza, pushing Palestinians out. But this seems to me, having been through, covered this my entire life almost, when I want to say young Zionist to a place where I became against that, but this seems really different. This moment seems really different in terms of what could happen post-war and how it could affect…
Chris Hedges: Well, it’s not different. It’s just different in scale. The Nakba, or the catastrophe, were, right, 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes, pushed into places like Gaza and refugee camps. The 50 massacres that the Haganah or the Jewish militias carried out. So, that’s been part of the Zionist project since the founding of the state of Israel. And in the ’67 war, they pushed out another 350,000 people. So, it’s a difference in scale, it’s not a difference in intent.
I think the difference is that we have… This government is the most extremist that Israel has ever had. Many of these people are heirs to Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, this rabidly racist right-wing Brooklyn Rabbi who founded the Kach party, which was outlawed in ’94 by Israel and declared a terrorist group by Israel and the United States, which it was, kind of. There’s always been a strain of fascism within, going back to Jabotinsky, that pioneer of Zionism. Benito Mussolini called him –
Marc Steiner: The Herut party.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, Herut. They called him, I think Mussolini, and Netanyahu’s father worked for Jabotinsky, called him a good fascist or something like that. So, it’s always been there, but now it’s predominant. And for them, it’s the final solution, or their version of the final solution. And they won’t stop.
And once they finish with Gaza, they will turn on the West Bank. And they want to create, these are their own words, a religiously pure state, which means the forced exile, ethnic cleansing, whatever you want to call it, of millions of Palestinians, including Christians. There’s a significant Christian population among the Palestinians. They think they’re going to finish with this problem once and for all.
Marc Steiner: Clearly, the opposite’s going to happen. If Israel’s game was to end Hamas and end that organization, this will do the exact opposite. This particular war is going to have more recruits, more people who are going to be up against the wall and –
Chris Hedges: Right.
Marc Steiner: …And have no choice.
Chris Hedges: But they may all be pushed out of the country. Look at the Armenian Genocide. The world has a short memory. For me, what’s happening now is very akin to the Armenian Genocide. It was very public. Everybody knew what the Turks were doing, but nobody did anything. And that’s kind of where we are now.
It’s worse in the sense that the United States is actively backing and supporting the genocide with intelligence, with military support, vetoing the calls for the ceasefire at the UN, etc. You will certainly create blowback, probably in the form of terrorism. But once these people are pushed out of their land and permanently thrust into the diaspora, which I think is the plan…
Marc Steiner: You think that’s Israel’s plan?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. The people around Netanyahu, they’ve long been calling for this. Yeah.
Marc Steiner: I mean, this is… You lived there for quite some time. Israel, even Gaza, covered it all. I’m curious what you think, what happened inside of Israel? There’s always been something twisted. I mean, from the time of Buber and [foreign language] screaming for a binational state in 1948, to the forces in ’68 trying to create something different with Palestinians. But something fundamental has shifted inside of Israel, inside of the Israeli body politic.
I know there are close to 1 million Israelis, might be most of them on the left, out of Israel now. They’re in Germany, they’re in Vietnam, they’re here, they’re across the globe. But something really has shifted here. To me, it feels like an openly fascistic state is being created.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, it is openly fascistic. The, either difference is, there was a kind of… And I knew Teddy Kollek and Abba Eban and all these figures. Very urbane, charming, well-educated. It was keep them happy on the farm, kind of. And I was there in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They were building new sewer systems in East Jerusalem, this kind of stuff. So, it was an attempt to domesticate the Palestinians without employing this savage violence that we see in Gaza, and to a lesser extent, of course, the settlers were being armed and rampaging through the West Bank, through Palestinian towns, killing indiscriminately. Over 130 Palestinian civilians have been murdered since Oct. 7. But the goal was always the same.
And Ilan Pappé, a great Israeli historian and others, I think, have pointed this out. The goal was always the control of Palestine. They were never going to give it back. And it was, how do we control an occupied population? And it just that, let’s call it liberal Zionism, didn’t work. The fascinating thing about Rabin, who I also knew, is that he recognized that the occupation was killing his country. Didn’t really care too much about the Palestinians, but he realized that it was distorting Israel to such an extent, militarizing it, feeding it that undercurrent of racism, which is now rampant within Israeli society.
That the structures that were the secret police, collaborators, all this stuff that any occupying force needs was very corrosive to Israeli democracy. Rabin got that. And of course, he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. When Netanyahu – And I covered Netanyahu’s rallies – When Netanyahu was running against Rabin, he was allowing his supporters to burn an effigy of Rabin in a Nazi uniform. They would chant, “Death to Rabin.” At one point, Netanyahu walked in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. And Leah, Rabin’s widow, correctly blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for the murder of her husband.
And after that, there was, I hope… There was some hope under Rabin. Rabin had a very close relationship with King Hussein, who I also knew very well. They were very close, actually. And Netanyahu and the Netanyahu government is just a whole other animal. Netanyahu became prime minister in ’96, and pretty much, with a few interruptions, dominated Israel. And Netanyahu has always mentored extremists, Avigdor Lieberman and all these. They were all Netanyahu proteges. So, I don’t have a lot of hope. I’ll do everything I can. I’m about to –
Marc Steiner: I can hear that.
Chris Hedges: …Well, it’s not my job to sell hope [Steiner laughs]. That’s not journalism, by the way.
Marc Steiner: No, it’s not.
Chris Hedges: It’s my job to assess the situation as clearly as I can.
Marc Steiner: So, having covered it so intensely, having been in other war zones, I’ve been wrestling with what could come out of this. What could be, not Israel’s end game. Israel’s end game is to push the Palestinians out, take over the land. What could actually…
Chris Hedges: Well, Israel will become a fascistic state ruled by the ultra orthodox, kind of Jewish version of Iran.
Marc Steiner: Which we use as a digression, which we, growing up as Zionists between Israel and Baltimore, would mock as frummies, as people who were on the fringe, who were somewhere else. They were these… And not close to power, that’s completely shifting.
Chris Hedges: That used to be true, but not anymore.
Marc Steiner: Yes. Right, right.
Chris Hedges: So, yeah, I mean, that’s what… Israel’s already moved pretty far in that direction. Netanyahu’s dismantling of the judiciary is, of course, a huge step in that. But people who speak out against the Netanyahu assault against democracy or the slaughter in Gaza are attacked as traitors and silenced. And I mean, there’s been a huge campaign preceding Oct. 7 against Israeli human rights workers at B’Tselem.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Chris Hedges: And that will now accelerate. There’ll be no room for dissent.
Marc Steiner: I feel that, and watch it coming. I spent part of the last 50 years being called many times by certain folks inside my community as a Judenrat, just saying no to the occupation and what’s going on. That tendency is now in control. And then, with the Palestinians, every time I talk to Palestinian friends now about the family, what’s going on, I have family who lived in Kissufim and [foreign language], and some of them may be hostages. We don’t know. I don’t know. I have friends in Palestine whose kids have been killed. People have been killed in this. And so, it’s sometimes, though I’m covering it, it gets really hard because it gets really deeply personal to watch this go on.
And what’s happening in the Palestinian world, I think people don’t really grasp the intensity, the madness, the murder that’s taking place among Palestinians now. Except when I heard the piece that Max Alvarez, editor-in-chief here did with Issa in Gaza, it was heart rendering. I don’t think people really get how deep this is.
Chris Hedges: Well, Israel’s cut off all the internet and cell phone service because when you carry out genocide, you block the ability of the victims to reach the outside world. That’s standard.
Marc Steiner: Talk about that for a minute. Just explore what people listening to us, why you call it genocide? That’s a huge term to use.
Chris Hedges: Well, sure, because it’s about the wholesale destruction of people, and all of the mechanisms by which you can destroy a people: The denial of food, the denial of water, the denial of safety, the ability to flee – Fleeing to the south? They’re bombing the south. They’re bombing the supposedly corridors that they set up to go to the south. It’s indiscriminate, dropping 2,000 pound bombs on Jabalia, on refugee camps. Jabalia, I’ve been in, spent a lot of time in Jabalia. So, Gaza is one of the most densely packed spots on the planet, but Jabalia is the most densely packed spot in Gaza, and I think they bombed it three times. Nobody knows the number of dead because –
Marc Steiner: They’re under the rubble.
Chris Hedges: …Thousands are under the rubble. So, that indiscriminate, they’re bombing hospitals. I mean, they say, well, they’re terrorist command centers, or Hamas command centers. They’re bombing hospitals, they’ve cut off the fuel. The babies in incubators are dying. That’s genocide.
Marc Steiner: We talked about what the end game would be. And you’ve covered this so long and so intensely. I may have lived it intensely on some levels, but you’ve covered it intensely. You’ve been in the middle of it. How do you see it playing out over the next few years? What do you see happening between the US and Israel? It’s also affecting the West. It’s affecting here. It could affect this election coming up between…
Chris Hedges: Well, the wild card is whether it ignites a regional conflagration. So, that would begin in Lebanon with Hezbollah, but it wouldn’t begin unless Iran green-lighted it. I don’t think that Iran or Hezbollah wants to ignite a regional conflagration, but that’s the wild card. Things can just go wrong. I’ve covered enough war that once you open that Pandora’s box and let all those evil spirits out, they control you. It doesn’t control… You don’t control it. So yeah, things could go wrong that way.
The arms manufacturers are thrilled. They’re making money in Ukraine, they’re making money with Israel, because remember, most of this money is going straight to Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and that’s who’s making the money.
The Palestinians have always been friendless, powerless. And the Arab states are very duplicitous about their commitment, which is largely rhetorical, and they’re quite happy to sell the Palestinian’s outing. There’s a lot of animus towards… For instance, Egypt hates Hamas because Hamas was born out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they, CC with US and Israeli backing, seized power to essentially prevent a Muslim Brotherhood government from running Egypt.
So, the Palestinians really don’t have many friends. Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah, Syria to a certain extent, but not… Am I, if I had to make an educated guess, I think Israel’s going to get away with it.
Marc Steiner: Get away with it?
Chris Hedges: Get away with this massive campaign of…
Marc Steiner: Before we close because we’re about to close, what do you mean by get away with it? What are they going to get away with, do you think?
Chris Hedges: Pushing most of the Palestinians out of Gaza and turning most of Gaza into a moonscape, which is what they’ve already done with the north.
Marc Steiner: They’ve already done.
Chris Hedges: I know that’s what they want to do. That is without question. The question is whether they can be stopped, but I don’t see the forces that are going to stop them.
Marc Steiner: I think it’s a danger for the entire planet that we’re watching unfold at this moment inside of Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East.
Chris Hedges: Well, it’s just so… I don’t sleep. I mean, it’s just so, the horror of it. And I mean, how many children are dead? 3,000, 4,000 kids? I mean…
Marc Steiner: At least.
Chris Hedges: It’s just, everybody hooked up to a dialysis machine or in an ICU or in an incubator, they’re all dying. Everybody’s going to die. They’re running out of food, they don’t have clean water. And the intensity of the bombing campaign is unlike anything we’ve seen in the 21st century. I really don’t know how far back you’d have to go. Maybe Grozny. I didn’t cover Grozny, but friends of mine did, who had covered Sarajevo, and they said Grozny was much, much worse.
Marc Steiner: I think people don’t understand the depth of the attacks taking place.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, I would say,
Marc Steiner: Mainstream media is not really giving the people here [crosstalk].
Chris Hedges: Well, they’re not in Gaza. So, you have a few stringer, Palestinian stringers, and then you’ve seen Israel target like Al Jazeera correspondent and others. So, just as they did with Shireen Abu Akleh, who was assassinated on the West Bank by an Israeli sniper. So, yeah, I think people don’t get the intensity of it, and…
Marc Steiner: Well, that’s why I’m glad for your reporting. You’ve always done this, your whole career. I followed you when you were at The New York Times, before we ever met, years back, and all the work, and you bring that to light. They could use that again, bringing that to light. I’m serious. They could use that again. I’m glad you’re here at Real News to do that. And Chris, I know you have a very tight schedule today. Chris, I just thank you so much for taking this time.
Chris Hedges: Yeah. Thanks, Marc.
Marc Steiner: And I look forward to talking again.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, thanks.
Marc Steiner: And thank you all for joining us today, and I want to especially thank Chris Hedges for joining us here in studio in between his interviews and on his way to the airport. So, please keep following his work here on The Real News, The Chris Hedges Report.
And special thanks to Cameron Grandino and Adam Coley for giving the show on the air, Dave Hebden for editing, and the tireless Kayla Rivara, making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
Please let me know what you thought of what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, your ideas. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I will get right back to you. And we’ll be continuing our coverage of what’s happening in Palestine, Israel, so stay tuned for all that coming up. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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