The new Chutzpah
By Judy Haiven’s Newsletter (Posted Aug 19, 2024)
Originally published: Judy Haiven’s Newsletter on August 7, 2024 (more by Judy Haiven’s Newsletter)
Many of you know that the Yiddish word chutzpah means extreme self-confidence or audacity. It is defined here: a young man murders his parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. The new definition of chutzpah is Israel—the Jewish state—killing 186,000 people in ten months, denying it, then getting Jews around the world to also deny it.
The longer Israel’s war on Gaza goes on, the more frenzied and desperate pro-Israel Jews in Canada become. A few months ago pro-Israel Jews pleaded for the release of the hostages, and tried to pressure Netanyahu to release the Jewish hostages. But the powerful in Israel, led by Netanyahu, turned a deaf ear and refused to even consider some kind of hostage/prisoner exchange beyond a very limited one in November 2023. Now we seldom hear a word about the hostages. In fact the pro-Israel community is so slavish toward Israel that whatever those in power in Israel say—well Canadian Jews are merely Israel’s echo chamber. The pro-Israel Jews just go along with it. No matter how ridiculous, dangerous, or dishonest.
Why Do Some Jews Go Along With Genocide?
But why? I don’t recall one other war, or one other public issue that we Canadians are forbidden from talking about, prevented from taking action against, labelled as terrorists, or Hamas lovers because we demand a ceasefire. We demand Israel stop it’s heinous genocide against millions of mainly women and children in Gaza and the West Bank.
But if we dare speak against Israel, or in favour of Palestinians, we can be fired, harassed, doxxed, denied jobs, not allowed to graduate, and more. In this column, I’ll look at the many aspects of the “cancel culture” used by those in the pro-Israel establishment and their friends such as evangelical Christians.
You will have to bear with me. This is a detailed account of pro-Israel individuals and institutions such as B’nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center that have taken on the duties of stopping any discussion about or sympathy toward Palestinians.
First I want to mention these facts:
The pro-Israel Jewish community in Canada denies that Israel has wantonly killed at least 40,000 Palestinians—overwhelmingly women and children—in cold blood since October 7. The Lancet claims the figure could more likely be 186,000—which includes all the people who died in the collapsed buildings, and those who have died of injuries, disease and starvation which Gazans have had to endure for many months.
The pro-Israel Jewish community also denies that in the Gaza strip, Israel has destroyed more than 412,000 buildings, mostly homes, 80% of schools, virtually all 18 hospitals (only 3 are partially open), all 12 Gaza universities, 241 mosques, and many churches.
Another thing the pro-Israel Jews deny is that Israel has deliberately slowed or stopped food and water deliveries to Gaza, causing mass starvation. Without food and water shipments, Israel has forced all Gazans to drink polluted water and many to eat grass and leaves. Now in Gaza, there is evidence of Polio. The UN reported in June an increase in Hepatitis A, dysentery and gastroenteritis. Many people are also noting the spread of a highly contagious skin disease in Gaza.
I don’t think one Canadian Jew has lost a business, a profession, a career, a home, a job, an opportunity because of antisemitism
Canada’s pro-Israel Jews (in denying or ignoring all of the above) have found a way to try to get a very different message across and to keep debate away from Gaza. Their message is that Jews in Canada are facing horrifying cases of antisemitism. An antisemitism so vile and pernicious that not one Jew we know of has lost his or her job. No Jew has lost their place in medical school or any professional school, their livelihood, their housing, their supply of water or food, their opportunity to pray and live in any community in Canada. No Canadian Jew has lost their ability to practice law, dentistry, engineering, science, medicine or any other profession. Not one Jew in Canada has been wounded, maimed or killed because they are a Jew.
The pro-Israel Jews stoke the lie that they are the ones under fire, and refuse to reference or even think about the genocide of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—savagely killed by Israel— the state that claims to speak for all Jews worldwide.
Patrick Chappattee: International Justice Pursues Netanyahu (May, 2024).
This world is topsy-turvy.
Students who oppose Israel’s genocide have their tents ripped down, get arrested and find their student status in jeopardy because the establishment Jews complain to the universities that they don’t want the tents or any reminder of Palestinians’ lives on campuses.
Some students who support Palestinians human rights are told that they cannot graduate, are barred from interning or articling jobs if they dare to wear a keffiyah, or sign a letter for a ceasefire
Let’s look at some of the areas in which those who support Palestine or dare to question or oppose Israel have felt the full weight of pro-Israel forces cancelling them, and trying to destroy them. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a list of what the pro-Israel groups have done to stop free speech, and to punish anyone who supports the Palestinians.
Medicine
There are at least 10 doctors in the Toronto area who have been suspended or lost their jobs, or faced possible discipline because they used social media to condemn Israeli genocide.
The “whisper campaign” includes targeting medical students and profs who signed open letters for a ceasefire, or posted against genocide social media. In the last couple of years Dr Ritika Goel is one of 3,000 healthcare professionals, a professor at the Temerty School of Medicine at the University of Toronto who had signed an open letter to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza—where Israel had killed Palestinian doctors and bombed clinics. She was labelled as pro-Palestinian, and “antisemitic” but sympathetic to terrorism and more—though she is a medical professor at the University of Toronto’s Temerty School of Medicine. She had friends willing to help her fight, so she was able to retain her position.
Dr Yipeng Ge was tossed from his medical residency program by a pro-Israel doctor who didn’t like Ge’s posts in support of Palestine. Ge was then taunted and humiliated because of his stance when he was the student representative on the board of the Canadian Medical Association. He was suspended from that role as well. Ge, who has a medical degree from the University of Ottawa, had gone to Harvard for training. He has also done medical/humanitarian work in Gaza.
Dr Gem Newman the Univ. of Manitoba’s medical school valedictorian called out medical professionals and associations for “deafening silence” on the humanitarian crisis there. College of medicine dean Dr. Peter Nickerson, called Newman’s remarks “divisive and inflammatory,” Businessman Ernest Rady, who donated $30-million in memory of his late father an early U of M medical graduate who was Jewish. Rady was furious and called the Newman speech “hate speech… and lies.” He demanded that the film of commencement—notably Newman’s speech—not be posted on social media.
Arij Al Khafagi was suspended from the Univ. of Manitoba nursing program because she dared to criticize Israel in her social media posts—“condemning the Israeli government and the military for the atrocious acts that they were committing.” Al Khafagi was the president of the U of Manitoba’s Nursing Students’ Association. Her suspension lasted 3 months—until an investigation decided she was “not antisemitic.” She was then reinstated, and noted, “I don’t have an agenda of hate or bias or anything. I share the perspective of unity and humanity.”
By Banksy (UK)
Dr Ben Thomson, a nephrologist at the Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital north of Toronto, was disciplined by his hospital for posting pro-Palestinian social media. He dared to say that there is no evidence of Hamas decapitating babies. He was suspended from practice for months, and he had to move house because of threats he received including this: “This message is for Dr. Ben Thomson. Remove your post regarding Israel. It is disgusting, you are a disgusting human being, you do not know what you’re saying, and if you do not remove it, I advise you and the rest of your staff to stay out of your office.” He is now suing the hospital and some of the doctors.
Law
Law firms in the Toronto have announced they won’t give jobs to articling students mostly from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and York University who signed a letter in support of Palestinians. More than 74 law students signed an open letter for a ceasefire. A retired chief justice from Nova Scotia exonerated these students of antisemitism, but don’t hold your breath waiting for those law firms to reverse their decision.
Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General required TMU law students applying for jobs to sign a form saying they did not sign an open letter in support of Palestine in October.
Culture
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was forced to revise wording of exhibit on Palestinans’ dispossession for a show in Oct. 2023, “Being and Belonging”
Hunger in Gaza, this Feb. 2024 cartoon is by Anne Derenne (aka Adene). Derenne is French and lives in Spain.
The ROM stopped its art show Death, Life’s Greatest Mystery which profiled Palestinian artists who portrayed the culture around Muslim death and burial; it was only allowed to go ahead, when the ROM also featured Jewish burials.
Indigenous art curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario Wanda Nanibush left her job of nine years after supporting Palestnians’ rights after Oct. 7. It’s not clear if she was fired, but she definitely was harassed because of her pro-Palestinian politics.
A number of artists and curators accused the Art Canada Institute (ACI) of trying to suppress Lands Within, a photography exhibit that amplified the voices of a group of Arab and Muslim artists. The online art platform, which is part of the University of Toronto, demanded that some of the photos be subject to a last minute “sensitivity review” to ensure they would not offend. Many artists withdrew from the show and it was cancelled in Nov. 2023. Artists also withdrew from projects with the ACI, because the ACI’s executive director Sara Angel supported a letter that targeted former Art Gallery of Ontario curator Wanda Nanibush (see below).
Two women who were marshals at a pro-Palestine rally were assaulted, one knocked to the ground, by a man more than twice their age in St John’s NF. In 43 weeks of marches in support of Palestine, this has been the only violent act.
Education
Students who participated in the McGill encampment were called “antisemites” by the university administration threatened with not being allowed back to classes, or not graduating.
The pro-Israel lobby, despite no physical evidence, says students are scared by the pro-Palestinian encampments at at least a dozen universities across Canada. All but one encampment have now been shut down.
A school board in the London, Ontario area has banned t-shirts that read “Free Palestine,” though “Free Ukraine” is acceptable.
A student in a high school in (near Toronto) was addressed by a guidance counsellor in a “harmful and discriminatory anti-Palestinian racist language.” The teacher was sent home for “likening a student to a terrorist for wearing a Keffiyeh.”
The Toronto District School Board has persecuted Javier Dávila because, as part of his job of sending information to the teachers, he sent materials that supported the Palestinian cause. He was suspended by the Toronto Board. This is his third complaint before a tribunal at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
In what is being billed as an “example of anti-Palestinian racism in Windsor, a video circulated on social media shows a young woman denied entry to a St. Clair College facility for wearing a keffiyeh.In a video posted to social media in May, a security can be heard telling the person recording she is not allowed inside the St. Clair College Centre for the Arts in Windsor, Ontario—ostensibly for wearing a keffiyeh, which he refers to as a “scarf” in the video. “I know what it means. You’re not allowed in here,” the guard was heard saying.
Seven students who stayed at the encampment to pressure the University of Waterloo to cut all financial and academic connections to Israel were sued by the university for $1.5 million, for property damage, trespass and intimidation. One of the encampment leaders calls this bullying and intimidation by the administration. The university would only drop the lawsuit if the students abandoned and shut down the encampment. So that is what they had to do.
13 pro-Israel faculty members are taking Simon Fraser University Faculty Union to court for passing motions that support Palestine and a ceasefire.
An Ottawa student was suspended for posting a Palestinian flag on their online profile.
City police removed a student at Humber College in Toronto for putting up stickers which said Boycott Israeli apartheid.
By Banksy (UK)
McGill University and the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) revoked the McGill name from the student group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR). Prompted by McGill’s Vice-provost, it seems the students’ society, fearful of other sanctions, agreed to to this.
In October, student groups at McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, and York University held rallies and published statements showing their support for the people of Palestine and calling for an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response, each university administration condemned the statements and threatened to decertify the student unions. On Oct. 13, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather demanded York University decertify its three student associations to maintain a “safe space for Jewish and ‘pro-Israel’ students on campus.”
Employment
Four waitresses from a Moxies in Toronto were fired for applauding a pro-Palestine rally as it went by the restaurant. They were fired because B’nai Brith decided to contact the restaurant management and complain about “antisemitism.”
Dozens of Jewish doctors used a “black list” to deny residency places to students who may have supported Palestinians
Birju Dattani was denied the job as the CEO of the Canadian Human Rights Commission when B’nai Brith, Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal backed up by the federal Conservative party revealed that Dattani sat on a panel with pro-Palestine speakers—when he was a grad student in the UK.
The CBC has disciplined and stopped reporters and producers from exposing what Israel is really doing in Gaza.
Cartoon by Emanuele Del Rosso (Italian, dated Oct. 2023).
Zahraa Al-Akrass, an on-air reporter, was fired from Global TV because she posted pro-Palestinian comments on social media
Yara Jamal was a video editor at CTV in Halifax. She was fired because she (a Canadian born in Palestine) “sympathized” with the Palestinian cause.
Wanda Nanibush, Indigenous curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, criticized Israel’s genocide. After nine years she left the Gallery, but many think she was let go because of her outspoken support for Palestinians.
Politicians
In Victoria BC, city councillor Susan Kim was able to keep her job by a thread after Victoria City Council lambasted her for signing an open letter that called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and “liking” a tweet in support of Palestinians. An investigator found that she did not draw the line between being a councillor and a private citizen. So far punishment is pending.
Sarah Jama (Ontario NDP-MPP) was forced out of the NDP caucus because of her stand on Israel. She was accused by the caucus colleagues of being antisemitic, and pro-Palestinian.
Marat Stiles, leader of the Ontario NDP, was forced to grovel an apology to the Jewish establishment for daring to tweet that at a recent craft fair she attended, she liked “beautiful Palestinian embroidery.” She was pressured by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre to remove her post.
In April 2024, the speaker of the Ontario legislature banned anyone from wearing a keffiyeh in the legislative chamber.
The Speaker at the Ontario legislature also ordered MPP Sarah Jama to leave, as she was wearing a Keffiyah. When she did not go, he barred her from voting that day.
https://mronline.org/2024/08/19/the-new-chutzpah/
(Another blow to the illusion that Canada is a nicer version of the USA.)
*****
Media Claim "Hamas Rejects ..." Deal That's Not Offered
Axios claims that Hamas rejects a ceasefire deal with Israel:
Hamas rejects new U.S. proposal for Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal
The opener:
Hamas on Sunday rejected an updated U.S. proposal for a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, blaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for moving the goalposts and the U.S. for indulging him.
Seven paragraphs later we learn:
Zoom in: More specifically, Hamas objects to the fact that the proposal doesn't include a permanent ceasefire or comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
There is no ceasefire deal.
How then could Hamas reject a ceasefire deal?
There is only a potential agreement on a pause in the fighting to hand over to Israel the hostages it wants to retrieve.
Which is nothing anyone in the situation in Gaza could agree to.
Posted by b on August 19, 2024 at 6:17 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/08/h ... l#comments
(Such cheap electioneering is a Biden trademark.)
*****
Why the Israelis Are Incapable of Implementing a Ceasefire
August 17, 2024
Why the Israelis are incapable of implementing a ceasefire. Photo: Batoul Chamas/Al Mayadeen English.
By Robert Inlakesh – Aug 16, 2024
Despite empty ceasefire talks, the failure of the US and “Israel” reveals a grim reality; the Zionist dream is crumbling into perpetual war and economic collapse.
A lot of value has again been placed upon useless ceasefire negotiations supposedly aimed at ending the war in Gaza, despite Hamas having rejected involvement in the hamster wheel process that the US is telling the world represents a serious diplomatic effort. In reality, a regional conflict has already been opened, the pre-October 7 world will never return and the future of the Zionist Entity is to remain in a state of perpetual war.
Let’s be clear, if the US government wanted a ceasefire, it would have already happened or will be announced suddenly. The framework is already there for it, a deal could be implemented and every Israeli held in Gaza would eventually be exchanged for a large sum of Palestinian detainees. We need not go back far to demonstrate that such a ceasefire and prisoner exchange is possible, a smaller truce and prisoner swap occurred in November of last year which proved that Hamas would implement such an agreement. Yet, neither the US nor their Israeli allies seek a meaningful ceasefire and only play with this notion for political purposes.
Eventually there will need to be a ceasefire in Gaza, likely following a large escalation across the West Asia region, but even in the event that this takes place sooner rather than later, the war will continue elsewhere.
The level of genocidal extremism that is present at every level of Israeli society is not ignorable. We are no longer talking about the intelligent politicians, dog whistles and sanitized rhetoric of the past, this is raw and brazen ethno-supremacy. Itamar Ben Gvir is the Israeli Police Minister and Bezalel Smotrich is the entity’s finance minister, they aren’t some kind of fringe elements of the settler movement in the West Bank, they directly control the regime’s policy.
There are no notable Israeli political forces that oppose the war in Gaza and no notable anti-war demonstrations at all from Jewish Israelis, even the 98-Palestinians living in the occupied territories are often too intimidated to dare hold demonstrations, despite their heartache at what is happening in Gaza. The demonstrations that frequently take place against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are motivated out of concern for the Israeli captives held in Gaza and the soldiers dying at the hands of the resistance, there is no concern for Palestinian civilians.
Western liberals have presented the argument that Israelis are fed up with Netanyahu and that he would be pushed out of power suddenly if there was an election, in order to suggest that somehow there is a voice of reason opposed to the current leadership. This is based upon outdated polls, the latest of which now suggest that the Israeli Premier currently remains the most popular politician and that despite projections that he couldn’t secure a coalition, he would still outperform his opposition. Yet this is irrelevant, as the issue that many Israelis have with Benjamin Netanyahu is not that he is waging a genocidal war that is slaughtering tens of thousands of children. We know this because all the polls suggest that the overwhelming majority of the Zionist public believe that enough or not enough force is being used in the Gaza Strip, while the number of those who believe that too much force has been used remains in the low single digits (percentage wise).
Why point this out? Because the Zionist dream has been broken on every level. We are now well past the idea of an Israeli “deterrence capacity”, let alone expansionism, it has become apparent to anyone with eyes that the Zionist regime has no way of dealing with the threats posed from Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and Iraq, besides opening up a wider regional war. The Zionist regime’s military has failed in the Gaza Strip to defeat the Palestinian resistance and is now left with no way out other than a wider regional war or ceasefire.
If we look at the state of the Israeli economy, tourism is dead, 46,000 businesses have declared bankruptcy, imports and exports have plummeted, investors are withdrawing, multi-billion dollar projects are falling through, the Port of Eilat has gone bust, the value of the Shekel has fallen and the list goes on. In the north of occupied Palestine, industry is dead, settlements have been evacuated and were/are pummeled with missiles, drones and rockets, while over 100,000 displaced have nowhere to turn.
The Israeli military is exhausted and has scattered its soldiers across the fronts in Gaza, the West Bank and northern occupied Palestine, while they deal with a lack of tanks and armored personnel carriers in the event that war in the north opens up. Their ill-trained, ill-disciplined and overworked soldiers are clearly incapable of fighting the likes of Hezbollah.
All of this is obvious and this weakness has brought out the very worst in Israelis that had already adopted an apartheid ideology. Deep down, they all would like to return to the delusional racist bubble world in which they lived prior to October 7, but it isn’t possible. The world will never forget what has been done and the survivors will never abandon their struggle for self-determination.
The idea that their racist settler colony can exist in prosperity at the expense of the entire region is under threat, an existential threat, and with this, so too is American hegemony. This is why neither Washington nor Tel Aviv will back down from their position of pursuing “victory”. For Benjamin Netanyahu personally, he is surrounded by a coalition of extremist nut jobs that he helped nurture into power, a project that began in 2005. Behind him also is an Israeli public that wants their captives returned and may apply some pressure in that regard, but also wants to see Gaza wiped off of the map for good. So there is no incentive for him to end the war in Gaza from the US or domestically, since the resistance forces across the region are the only ones that can apply real pressure.
If you want a good indication of how the Israeli society thinks, following the declaration by International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, that he was calling for an arrest warrant against the Israeli premier, Netanyahu’s support surged in the polls at the time. Or, look at the fact that it was completely acceptable for the issue of gang-raping a defenseless Palestinian prisoner, who died from his wounds and was held without a charge, to be debated in the Israeli Knesset, with a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party passionately defending the gang-rapists. One of the gang-rapists was even invited on Israeli television to advocate for the actions committed by him and follow soldiers, despite there being a video that showed the horrifying incident. There were even protests that broke out in favor of 10 soldiers accused of involvement in the case of gang-rape, who Ben-Gvir called heroes, and an Israeli legal representative organisation for four of the accused argued that the gang-rape occurred in self defense.
Whether we look at the Israeli political elite, military, police, intelligence, society or media, we see genocidal mania. This is because their narcissistic supremacist ideology is collapsing before their very eyes, they are beginning to realize that maintaining apartheid is no longer viable.
The opportunity for the Israelis to implement the only solution that would have enabled them to continue their existence has passed. If the Zionist regime was actually serious about the Oslo Accords and simply accepted international law as the consensus for a so-called two-state solution, they could have perhaps proceeded and actually maintained their regime. However, allowing the Palestinian people to gain access to basic human rights in only 22% of historic Palestine was not possible for them under their racist expansionist ideology.
We are now reaching the final phase of this settler colonial project and the Israelis have come to the realization that maintaining their ethno-supremacist regime of absolute privilege will mean exterminating and ethnically cleansing everyone in their way. They are so immersed in their own collective form of narcissism, in which they view themselves as both the victim and hero of the story, that stopping now is impossible. This is also why Israeli society is split down the middle on the question of what kind of ethno-supremacist regime they seek: whether that will be a secular or religious regime going forward.
Therefore, with full US backing they are slowly committing national suicide. This may be a process that is somewhat delayed if a ceasefire is reached in Gaza that prevents the immediate end of the regime by military means, but the war will continue in other ways. The West Bank will likely end up becoming their punching bag until they can again escalate elsewhere and the only promise that can be made to their own people is a future of perpetual war.
https://orinocotribune.com/why-the-isra ... ceasefire/
******
The Chris Hedges Report: Israel’s Mask Is Slipping
August 19, 2024
“No going back to Oct. 6” — David Hearst, editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, lays out the essential context of the conflict in Gaza and what to anticipate going forward.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
The latest chapter of Israel’s occupation of Palestine has raged on for nearly the last year, marking a significant shift in the decades-long clash that has already initiated the demystification of the mythology behind Israel.
Truth continues to be the first casualty of war in this particular struggle, as it has been massacred, through the killings of journalists in Gaza and the censorship of dissidents, throughout the conflict along with the Palestinians themselves.
Unfortunately for Israel, however, the state’s lies and brutality this time are too severe to escape the eyes of the global stage, and even its own people.
As David Hearst, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Eye, states in this interview:
“There are huge tensions in Israel about how the war was prosecuted, particularly the central tension is the obvious fact that Israel has been killing its own hostages through military action, obviously. And the narrative from Israel that Israel is pushing Hamas to release hostages is nonsense.
It is the exact opposite. The main killer of the hostages has been the bombing campaign. So there is a huge protest about getting the hostages home. And getting the hostages home means ending the war, basically.”
Hearst joins host Chris Hedges on the second episode of The Chris Hedges Report to offer a clear and direct explanation of the complexities surrounding the conflict, providing essential context on what to anticipate moving forward.
“What we’ve got to get really clear about is that our idea of left and right, or our idea of moderates and extremists, does not translate to Israeli realities. And when it comes to killing as many Palestinians as they can, everyone is up for it,” Hearst tells Hedges.
The brazen violence that journalists like Hearst and others have reported on is pulling Israel’s mask of nobility down, and revealing its true face as the “ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been.”
Hearst claims that “there is a blood lust going through Israel.” He proves this point through stories of the brutality, demonstrating how for Israel “there’s absolutely no attempt to distinguish between someone carrying a gun or a rocket launcher and someone carrying a bottle of water.” In other words, all Palestinians are automatically “terrorists” — guilty of crimes punishable by death — to the Israelis.
This indiscriminate tactic of killing has exposed Israel for what it truly is. The live streamed suffering of the Palestinians, and the violence of the Israelis, is too great for the apartheid regime to hide once the genocide is over. Israel will become synonymous with its victims, just as the violent regimes of the past have.
Credits
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Max Jones and Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its “democracy” — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism.
Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare that will continue at least until the end of this year — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation —which it successfully sold to its Western audiences — will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews.
Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians; Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews; and Serbs are with the Bosniaks.
Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.
Joining me to discuss the future of Israel and the decades long effort by Zionists to dispossess Palestinians from their land is David Hearst, editor in chief of Middle East Eye, an independent website based in London covering the Middle East in English and French.
David Hearst on The Chris Hedges Report. (Screengrab)
David Hearst: Well, you’re dead right, I don’t think there’s any going back to October the sixth, and it stripped away an awful lot of the fig leaves that at least liberal Zionists, certainly in Britain, were operating under for far too long and getting away with it.
I’d like to push back a little bit on that comment that Israel has been hijacked by extremists, because historically, I don’t see it that way. I see Zionism as a two-speed venture.
You can have the salami-slice tactics of the so-called moderate center ground, which is basically one settlement at a time. Nothing too much. An awful lot of left and right. All these ghastly settlers are here, whatever. The sort of language that Jonathan Freedland, my former colleague, used to talk about again and again, and it was used very cleverly to stop BDS, to stop sanctions against Israel.
The argument being that if you sanction the good guys, the right wing will take over. This idea of left and right in Zionism — I think Gaza stripped all that away.
And I see Zionism as a two speed operation. It either goes in salami slices, it either goes bit-by-bit, quite cleverly, one street at a time, or it goes like Ben-Gvir in fifth gear, like a tank. And you literally say, this is “Eretz Israel.” This is the “Land of Israel,” the biblical Land of Israel, we’re God’s chosen people and we’re going to shoot everyone that’s around. And the vengeance that we seek on or wreak on Gaza is biblical vengeance. So I’m not sure Israel has been hijacked by extremists.
I think the Zionist colonial project was extremist in the first place. And the more you go back, there is no such thing as a proper Israel, a clean Israel. There is always one massacre lurking in the shadows. There is Tantura, there is a whole bunch of massacres. There’s the poisoning of the wells.
Expulsion of Tantura civilians following the Tantura massacre in May 1948. (Benno Rothenberg /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
There’s… you know the history better than I do so I see Zionism as a two- speed operation, and now it’s in fifth gear, and it is going for broke. And the idea that Israel isn’t Israel for all its citizens, has long been thrown up, thrown out the window.
Excuse me. It’s an Israel for Jews only. And the width of discussion about Gaza is much narrower than we in the West like to imagine. So I’d just like to recall a recent event, which is the motion of the Knesset. The Knesset passed a bill basically saying that they are outlawing a creation of a Palestinian state, and they had two objections to a Palestinian state. The first one was that if we create a Palestinian state, Hamas will take it over. It will become Gaza in the middle of us, and we can’t tolerate that. Okay, all right. You, given what happened on October the seventh, you could make a case for that just.
However, what the real intent of the motion was, it says, we cannot have a Palestinian state inside the Land of Israel, absolutely where we were 3,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, etc. And that is the Zionist project. So that has to be a real warning light.
So everyone who keeps on mouthing in the West, I mean every single party in the West — the Labour Party in Britain, the French, the Germans, the U.N., the U.S. — all talk about a two state solution.
Well, who on the Israeli side is going to take away now, 700,000, more than 700,000 settlers? Who on the Israeli side is actually going to see… even if you are a … dinosaur that recognizes Israel who is there on the other side now to talk to?
And I think we’ve really got to challenge the idea of a two state solution by simply going to the West Bank, or inviting everyone to go to the West Bank, looking at all those twinkling lights on the hills and saying, Who’s going to shift that lot? Who’s going to shift the roads? Who’s going to shift the 17,18 industrial estates in the West Bank? Try driving between Jerusalem and South Hebron Hills, and just see how many roadblocks you have to go through. Just do that straight…
Chris Hedges: I was just in Ramallah. I just went to Ramallah about 10 days ago. And you know to go from Ramallah to Nablus, which should take 90 minutes, takes seven hours. You’re exactly right. I want to clarify, because you’re right about Zionism when I talk about extremism, and let’s not forget that the Nakba and in 1967 these were liberal Zionists who oversaw the worst atrocities against Palestinians.
But the difference, I think, and I lived in Israel for a while, is that the liberal Zionists, and it was all a veneer, I mean, it didn’t make any difference for the Palestinians, but they fought against the religious Zionists. Meir Kahane, for instance, in the 1990s his Kach Party was outlawed, and then the government, Ben Gvir and these figures, are essentially heirs to Kahane, in some ways, they’re more honest than the liberal Zionist. So you are exactly right, that the Zionist project and all you have to do is read the private letters of Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, the leader, in essence, the leader of the pre-1948 Zionist Movement. Read his letters. He’s quite frank.
Ben Gurion speaking at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the building of the Histadrut, which would become Israel’s national trade union, in Jerusalem, 1924. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
He sounds like Jabotinsky, the right wing, I think Mussolini, at one point called him a good fascist, the heir to the Herut Party, which Bibi Netanyahu, his father was one of the founders of that came out of the Stern gang and these terrorist groups, Menachem Begin and others that killed both British officials and Palestinians.
So yes, you’re exactly right, that Zionism, the engine of Zionism itself, has never altered. But the face of Zionism, I think these religious Zionists, the liberal Zionists, and certainly when I lived in Israel, the liberal Zionists in the nature of Kach, the Kach Party and Kahane. They banish these people. And now we have seen a triumph of these settler religious fanatics over liberal Zionism. I guess that was the point I was trying to make.
David Hearst: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And there was a lot of pushback in those days of the Jewish underground. And in fact, there was a plot by the Jewish underground, by all the same people we’re talking about now, to blow up Al Aqsa, and that was diffused by security forces. The difference now, of course, is that security forces are completely overtaken with settlers.
Chris Hedges: And the military. It used to be that if you were a settler, you could not rise within the security forces or the military.
David Hearst: Yeah, absolutely. And now, of course, you’ve got [Bezalel] Smotrich, you’ve got Ben-Gvir, actually, with official positions in terms of both the finance and also the border police. So they are not just part of the government, but they are a very active part of that government.
I think the point I was trying to make with the Knesset vote was that Benny Gantz voted for it along with, you know, most of the parties.
So the idea of there being extremists and moderates when it comes to the Palestinians, when it comes to judicial reform, okay, there’s a real battle going on for control between the religious Zionists and Ashkenazi Zionists, if you want to call them, or, you know, people who style themselves in the center ground, but on Palestine, on shoot to kill or shoot everyone, it’s not even shoot to kill, it’s shooting everyone in Gaza, there is no distinction at all.
Benny Gantz, I believe, in one of his election videos, boasted about how many Palestinians he’d killed when he was in charge. There’s very little pushback. There was a letter sent to all the congressional leaders, I think it was about 48 hours ago, from an oppressive array of ex-IDF, ex-Mossad, [inaudible], like quite a quite a few big names, basically saying that Netanyahu was a criminal and shouldn’t address Congress, but they didn’t mention the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice.
Gantz, then chief of general staff of the IDF and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meeting in 2013. (Prime Minister of Israel, Flickr)
They didn’t mention genocide or war crimes. What they were talking about was the submarine affair. They were talking about bribery and corruption, and they were still saying that Iran is an existential enemy and that Netanyahu poses an existential threat to Israel because he’s just mucking things up. They’re not saying that the whole project is wrong and will lead just to a regional war. They’re not backing away from that. They’re not backing away from trying to do the impossible and eradicate, uproot Hamas from Gaza.
So what we’ve got to get really clear about is that our idea of left and right, or our idea of moderates and extremists, does not translate to Israeli realities. And when it comes to killing as many Palestinians as they can, everyone is up for it. There is a blood lust going through Israel. I use the word biblical vengeance, but it is sickening what they think they can get away with and what still has got to come out.
One of the most horrifying stories came out of the Israeli army, I refuse to call it, by the way, the Israeli Defense Forces, because I don’t use the word IDF, I say Israeli army. One of those horrifying tales of Israel came out in an extremely good website, 972, I’m sure you know, and it was the testimony of six, I think, soldiers, all anonymous, who had been reservists in Gaza. And let me just read you some of the things that they said about how it is that so many civilians have died in Gaza. It’s somewhere up at the moment, near 40,000 but there’s probably another 10,000 under the rubble. If you read The Lancet in Britain, there could be three times as many dead, what they call indirect deaths.
So that’s the scale of it. And you ask yourself, how, why? How’s it happened? Has it all been in-fighting? Is it crossfire? What is it? Absolutely not.
According to soldier B, any Palestinian in Gaza can inadvertently find themselves a target: “it’s forbidden to walk around, and everyone who’s outside is suspicious. If we see someone in a window looking at us, he’s a suspect. You shoot.”
Soldier A said that in the operations room, destroying buildings often felt like a computer game. Anyone caught in one of Israel’s kill zones could be targeted by or who is targeted by a bored soldier could be counted as a terrorist. So there’s absolutely no attempt to distinguish between someone carrying a gun or a rocket launcher and someone carrying a bottle of water. And there’s another soldier who said that the policy, there was a policy of torching Palestinian homes after they had been taken over as temporary locations for soldiers. So they said the principle was, if you move on, you have to burn down the house.
And according to soldier B, his company burned hundreds of houses.
Soldier A said, “I can count on one hand the number of cases in which we were told not to shoot, even with sensitive things like schools, approval feels like a formality. No one will shed a tear if we flatten a house when there is no need or we shoot someone we didn’t have to.”
Soldier S said that the Caterpillar bulldozers cleared the areas of corpses, buried them under the rubble, flips them aside so the convoys don’t see them. See the images of people in advanced stages of decay, they don’t come out. This is how the Russians behaved in Ukraine, and just none of it is getting through.
Now, if peace does break out, and unfortunately, I don’t think it will, because I think that’s locked up, we can talk about this in Netanyahu’s very, very sick brain. But if there is a ceasefire, these stories will multiply, and we will get the full horror of war crimes.
So the whole Western push to protect Israel, particularly the American push, [President Joe] Biden’s push to protect Israel against war crimes, will crumble under a mountain of evidence that is going to come out about actually what happened.
What were the deaths? What happened, for instance, in the second time Israel stormed Al Shifa hospital?
According to my information, they got 800 people out. Most of them were government workers shot them dead and then bulldozed the bodies and crushed the bodies and pulverized them. That is, like, you know, these sort of scenes are scenes reminiscent of Srebrenica. So it’s only just coming. I think our support for Israel is just about to tumble under the weight of this truly horrifying evidence, which, you know, it feels like we’ve been writing solidly now for nine months, but is underreported.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, I covered Srebrenica. I was there in Bosnia for Srebrenica. Let’s talk about what’s happening in Gaza. I’m really interested in your take. It doesn’t seem to me that Israel really has any clear idea of where it’s going at all. There was an early effort, obviously, to drive the Palestinians into the Sinai. [U.S. Secretary of State Anony] Blinken went around and tried to get Iraq and Jordan to accept a certain number of, quota of Palestinians. This was roundly rejected.
I was just in Egypt, and the Egyptian journalists were telling me that the military has been unequivocal to the Sisi government, that no Palestinian will come over, be pushed out of Rafah into the Sinai. So how do you read where Israel thinks it’s going and then how do you see where everything is going?
David Hearst: Well, you’re absolutely right. I think it was the Egyptian army, not Sisi, but the Egyptian army that stopped that one. They said, absolutely not. This is an existential threat for the Egyptian state if you had a Palestinian enclave in the Sinai.
And I think Egypt is very, very sore about Rafah being bulldozed. Because, one, it was a source of income, quite a big source of income. But two, as you know, it was their Palestinian card. It was their foreign policy. Now, Egypt has been made irrelevant as an actor in Libya. It’s been made completely irrelevant in Sudan, a country it once ruled, and that’s been made irrelevant in Gaza and Palestine. And that’s a big, big deal for certainly the Mukhabarat and the GIS and the general security.
Israeli tanks on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing on May 7. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
So Israel’s tactic in Gaza was really quite simple. It was to seal all the land borders and create a port and push the Palestinians into the sea. And there were ministers who voiced exactly this. There’s a lot of oral evidence for the South African genocide case, and there’s a lot of evidence, oral statements, about pushing the Palestinians into the sea or thinning out the Palestinian population. In fact, Ron Dermer, who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s point man, was asked in December by Netanyahu to develop a plan to thin out the Palestinian population.
So ethnic cleansing and another enactment was absolutely the aim, and still probably is the aim of the Israeli government.
In terms of the various options they are trying to do, they’re absolutely at sea. They tried two main plans. Firstly, they phoned up all of the 32 tribal chiefs in Gaza, and only one agreed to work with them.
Then came a statement from the tribal chief saying, we are not going to work for the Israelis.
Now, there was a period about a month in after October the seventh, where Hamas were really quite concerned that they would lose the population, and that was a bad period for them. However, they should have had absolutely no concerns for that, because Israel went out of its way to make this a war against all Palestinians living in Gaza, whether they were Hamas, whether they were Fatah, whether [inaudible], whoever they were, this was a war of extermination. And the message got through very, very quickly.
So the level of public support for the resistance shot up and has maintained. There are reports of people saying “a plague on both your houses, we can’t bear this anymore”. And I’m not surprised by that, because every single Gazan family has been hit by this war. They’ve been moved not once or twice, but nine, 10 times. They have had all their money taken off them in Israeli roadblocks. This has happened to our journalists. They’ve been shot, they have been tortured, they have been raped. There’s a story of about 100 cases of rape that Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization, has monitored, which Hamas has not registered for reasons of social conservative and shame, family shame. But the Israelis have used rape, exactly like the Russians have done, as an instrument of war, torture, [inaudible], arrest. They’ve stolen.
So this is absolutely a war against the whole people. And of course, the support for Hamas shot up and is still incredibly high.
So from Israel’s point of view, they cannot distinguish between Hamas and the normal population, which is why they claim that the Hamas losses are so high.
So the first attempt was to establish local governors, through direct appeals to the tribal chiefs that failed.
The second attempt was an attempt to infiltrate between [inaudible] mukhabarat who were placed there by Majed Faraj, Majed Faraj’s people, and they came there under the guise of being a protection to Egyptian aid convoys, and they were rumbled because they were armed. They drew their guns when the aid trucks were rushed by people and they were all captured. They tried to establish their headquarters in the headquarters of the Egyptian Red Crescent in Rafah, and they were all arrested. So that was the second attempt. Hamas dealt with that very quickly.
Now the situation is that I think Hamas are confident they have — they don’t say they’re over the worst, but, militarily, they are confident that — say they’ve gone through so much they’re not going to go back. Every time they’re asked by their more nervous colleagues in Doha or Beirut, can you keep on fighting? The answer is, yeah, no problem. Several months more, we can keep on doing it.
How can they keep on fighting?
Firstly, the tunnel network is much, much bigger than the Israelis thought, and much more advanced and much more sophisticated. It can run cars through it, for instance. They recently found a tunnel that was three levels deep, going under the Rafah border, another one running from north to south. So they’ve got literally thousands of kilometers of tunnels, and that is the main strategic weapon. It’s still intact. Hamas says about 20 to 30 percent of it has been rendered out of order, but they keep on digging. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is they’ve got a limitless supply of high quality explosive from the unexploded ordnance of Israeli missiles and bombs. They say they’ve got about 3,000 tons, which they recycle in their factories underground. So they’ve got communication north and south. They’ve got a limitless supply of explosives, and they’ve got also a limitless supply of manpower. Because as you can imagine what Palestinians would do when you’ve seen your families blown up, or you’ve seen the Israelis set the dogs on a guy with Down Syndrome and just left to bleed to death, that goes on in front of your eyes all the time. You can imagine what anyone, any brother or sister watching that would do.
Israeli forces in Rafah in May. (Israeli Defence Forces Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
And the third thing that they’ve demonstrated, more than anything else, is they’re not going to leave. They’d rather die in Gaza than go. This is a new generation of fighters. They’ve gone through, they were born after Oslo. They’ve gone through all the nonsense about, you know, tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrow, you’ll see a Palestinian state. They’ve gone through the humiliation. They’ve gone through, you know, 16, 17 years of siege. They know that Israel is counting the number of calories and controlling the number of calories they consume, even in peace, and they say, what the hell we’ve had enough. This is the breakout generation.
So I view October the seventh, horrendous as it was, as a prison breakout, basically. And a lot of Palestinians support this. Really do. If you’re in the West Bank, where horrendous things have been happening, we can talk about that. But there’s a whole bunch of things have been happening under the cover of war. Basically, the settlers are trying to push the Palestinians into area A from area C, which is the part that is controlled by Israel, in fact, Israel controls everything.
2017 map of the control status of the West Bank as per the Oslo Accords. Area A in green, Area B in red and Area C in pink. (SoWhAt249, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
And what the West Bankers say is, if it works in Gaza, we’ll be next. So you’ve got this absolutely, you know, if anyone is facing an existential war, we use the word existential a little bit too much about the Jews and being Jewish myself, I’m fed up with it. I think the people facing a real existential crisis are the Palestinians, and they’re standing up to it, and they’re behaving like real warriors.
Chris Hedges: Where do you see… I have a hard time figuring out how this is going to end. I mean, it’s clear what Israel’s intent is. It wants to depopulate Gaza and make Gaza uninhabitable, but I don’t see it. And it can keep going as long as the United States keeps funneling weapons. I think I read, 68 percent of munitions that Israel uses now come from the United States, and I don’t see that ending. So how do you see this, you know, playing out?
David Hearst: Well, Israel’s got a very big problem, and that is, it’s going back and back and back in the same areas to destroy Khan Younis again, for the second, third time. It’ll destroy Rafah again. It’ll go back to Gaza City again. It will not be able to pacify Gaza. So this will be, even if it is low level, it will carry on.
They’ve got a real problem trying to work out who’s going to run the place and how it’s going to get run. There are rival projects at the moment. I don’t think any of them will take off. Basically, there’s a sort of U.S. sponsored plan with the UAE and possibly also with Dahlan, Mohammed Dahlan, who is mentioned as a possible figure that could be acceptable to Hamas, that also has the whole backstory to it, which we could talk about. But even if you take, for instance, UAE, there’s a recent suggestion that the Emiratis would put ground troops in, there are conditions that the Emiratis would set for saying that they would put their troops on the ground.
(Much more at link.)
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/19/t ... -slipping/
جيش الدفاع الاسرائيلي سوف يعمل بقوة ضد المنظمات الارهابية في تلك المنطقة.
