Category: israel

  • War is a daily fixture of American life—the US military occupies at least 750 overseas bases, and it has executed military operations in nations around the globe over the past 20 years. But most Americans have remained unaware of this, thanks to a coordinated effort by politicians, corporate media, and the military-industrial complex to make the realities of American militarism invisible to the public. As author Norman Solomon writes in his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Solomon about his book, the political crisis that decades of invisible war have generated in US domestic politics, and how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.

    Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

    Studio Production: David Hebden
    Post-Production: Adam Coley


    Transcript

    Maximillian Alvarez:  In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell famously observed, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.

    “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

    “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

    Now, Orwell never could have imagined the ways the 21st century media ecosystem would enable powers narrators to deploy the thought-corrupting and reality-skewing force of language to instigate, justify, muddle or invisibilize the horrors perpetrated in our name.

    But what he understood nearly a century ago about the relationship between power, language, and the visibility of atrocity has proven to be grimly timeless. Defending the indefensible is the proven modus operandi of the same consent manufacturing machine that propelled us into an unwinnable, illegal, and globally destabilizing war on terror over 20 years ago.

    And, “Euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness,” have been the tried and tested tools of first resort, employed by corporate media and US political and military officials looking to justify Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon, and its reckless, nihilistic campaign to embroil the Middle East in an all-out regional war.

    In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy writes, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon’s bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they’re apt to seem normal, even natural.

    “But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close at home.”

    As we commemorate the grim anniversary of Oct. 7 and reflect on a year of what has been called the most documented genocide in history, as working people around the world struggle to get by and live their lives while bombs and guns obliterate our fellow human beings in Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and beyond. When it feels for many of us, like we’ve already seen too much: too much war, too much death, too much carnage, it is important to stop and ask ourselves, how much are we still not seeing? And has the increased visibility of war over the past year changed who we are and how we act to stop it?

    To help us break this all down and to discuss his vital book, War Made Invisible, I’m honored to be joined by Norman Solomon himself.

    Brother Norman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

    Norman Solomon:  Well, thank you, Max, and you posed such a key question: What are we still not seeing? And we’re encouraged to have this sort of conceit that if we look at the mainline mainstream news and we pay attention to that, that somehow, for instance, we have a grasp, an understanding, intellectually and emotionally, what’s going on in Gaza. And that is basically preposterous, but the conceit that is encouraged compounds the deception. And the whole idea that we understand a war because we watch the news, we listen to it, we read it, is part of the propaganda system itself.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  I already have explosions of thoughts in my head just hearing that opening salvo from you, and I really can’t recommend Norman’s book enough to everyone watching. Please, go read it, it is vital in these times.

    And Norman, I want to build on that, because the paperback version of your book begins in the post-9/11 moment, a little over 20 years ago, and it concludes with an afterword on Gaza. I want those two points to frame our discussion today.

    And I was wondering if you could take us there in those immediate months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and talk us through what you were seeing and would then write about in War Made Easy. The ways that the carnage was being invisibilized, the ways the public was being manipulated, and the relationship that we had to the war that was being perpetrated in our name.

    Norman Solomon:  What’s going on now is really a continuation in various permutations of what began after 9/11. We had, essentially, a preemptive absolution for the US government because of the crime against humanity on 9/11, that whatever the United States did after that, in ostensible response, which was really just displaced rage and nationalism and militarism, that that was okay, that it was justified. And we’ve seen that echo today in terms of what the US and Israeli government are saying about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and now, increasingly, in Lebanon as well.

    So for instance, at the end of 2001, you had then Defense Secretary — And it’s uppercase D, I wouldn’t say it’s about defense — But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, every death in Afghanistan, whether it is American, whether it is Afghan civilians, every single death is the result of and the culpability of Al-Qaeda. So that was like a blank, bloody check for whatever the US was to do was justified by citing the initial crime.

    And I think this is a paradigm from that day to this. When you look at the numbers — And of course people are not numbers, but they are ways for us to understand magnitude — 3,000 deaths from the atrocity on 9/11. And then, according to the Brown University Cost of War project, the direct deaths as a result of the ensuing US so-called war on terror, 950,000 deaths, about half of them civilians. And then you go to the indirect deaths, and the Brown University study says 4.5 million deaths as a result of the US-led so-called war on terror.

    So you look at 3,000 deaths, and then you look at direct close to one million, indirect adding up to more than four million. What is that about? What kind of culture, what kind of political system will engage in collective punishment of people who are guilty of breathing while Afghan, breathing while Iraqi? Or fast-forward more than two decades, what kind of political culture in the United States will continue to arm an Israeli government that is killing people for the transgression of breathing while Palestinian?

    So this is a culture of mass murder that has emanated from or certainly got a huge boost from the response to 9/11. And here we are, what, more than two decades later, and the baseline continues to drop, so the standards continue to be degraded.

    I recently saw an excerpt from a film by the wonderful folks at the Media Education Foundation from their film The Occupation of the American Mind, it’s been recirculated now online. And they chronicle the coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, making possible the Israeli-backed right-wing massacre into the thousands of refugees at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

    And to see the footage of the US networks in 1982 and compare it to what generally we have seen in 2024 in terms of the coverage of the current Israeli slaughter going on, it is shocking because, as inadequate as the coverage was in 1982 on the US networks, it was much better, it was more candid, it was more willing to call out Israel than what we’re getting now.

    So I think a challenge as independent journalists, as progressive media institutions that The Real News Network and others are stepping onto to really step up to the challenge is to say, we don’t put up with this. We don’t accept a propaganda system that is consistent with what Martin Luther King Jr. called the madness of militarism. And Max, you referred to the consequences of the warfare state at home domestically, and it’s really what we know, what goes around comes around.

    Dr. King referred to it, and these were his words, he said it was, “A demonic, destructive suction tube,” that was taking billions of dollars worth of resources for healthcare, education, housing, elderly care, neonatal care, you name it, and it was siphoning those resources to kill people in Vietnam.

    And we’re talking now towards the end of 2024, and that dynamic is in full force, is ripping off. It is literally depriving lives of existence here at home while that funding, including most recently $20 billion with a B, dollars green-lighted by the White House, more weapons to Israel, that money, our tax dollars courtesy of US taxpayers, is paying to slaughter Palestinian people.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, man. I mean, the marquee out in front of The Real News Network building currently reads the bar from Tupac Shakur, “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” And I dream of the day when we can change the marquee and that slogan will no longer be relevant, but I feel we’re going to be waiting for a long time.

    But Vietnam feels like a great example to bring up, not only because visibility and truth telling did play a critical role in public opinion on the war, the protest movement, so on and so forth, with images of My Lai Massacre and so on and so forth. Those images are burned into people’s minds. And there was also, of course, a draft. There were more tangible connections that people had to the machinery of war that, as you said, in the 21st century, those tangible connections have been severed, invisibilized, buried underground.

    So, what was it about the 21st century US approach to war that made it so much easier to not only perpetrate but to do so at industrial scale the way that we have? What changed in the 21st century that enabled the US and other countries to make war so much easier?

    Norman Solomon:  Well, really, the disconnection has increased over time. It’s been an evolution of distancing people in the United States from the wars that are perpetrated with their tax dollars in their names. It is so much easier for elites to start wars than for people then to stop them. And, certainly, during escalation of the Vietnam War, it was considered by those in power to be, per se, fairly easy to do.

    And contrary to myth, it wasn’t the US media, the TV networks that stirred up the protests. It was the protests that changed the political climate that compelled, along with the longevity of the war and the failure to “win” that brought, kicking and screaming, reluctantly, the networks to show, actually, not very much of the carnage. But it was part of a tone that changed that ultimately had some political effect.

    There’s much ballyhoo about when Walter Cronkite in 1968 said the war was in a stalemate and could not be won. What is often forgotten is that Cronkite never made a principled objection to the war. His objection was that it wasn’t being won.

    And if you look at the paradigms of the last several decades, when there has been a war that the United States can wage routinely, I have to say, and my books have documented and many others have documented, based on falsehoods, if the wars can be “won quickly”, they remain popular.

    And so in 1991 when the first President Bush launched a war on Iraq, and that war included the notorious, so-called horrible word, horrible phrase, “turkey shoot” of retreating Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, literally gunned down in huge quantities from the air.

    Bush had tremendous popularity. He had been in the low 50, 60% approval rating right before that because of the economy. Right after this triumph of the US war, what’s called the Gulf War in 1991, Bush’s popularity rating went up to 91%. Why? Because the war just took six weeks.

    And this is embedded in US media and politics, and, unfortunately, to a large extent, in the public perception, if the war can be a triumph, it can be done early, not a lot of Americans die, then that’s considered to be a good thing. So the underlying militarism can vary in terms of how it plays out.

    I think in also another aspect of the answer to your question, in this century, the immediate aftermath of 9/11, within a couple of years, the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. First, it was a lot of cheerleading. The bombing of Afghanistan that was launched in October of 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s stunning when you look at the Gallup polls.

    90% of the US public supported the US attack on Afghanistan, 5% opposed, the other five said they weren’t sure. Well, that’s Soviet Union-style approval. That is like dictatorship, propaganda system approval levels, sky high.

    And then in 2003, the US invasion and then war on Iraq essentially… Well, at least at that stage, we had media coverage. It didn’t mean it told us much about war at all, but there were US troops who were on TV, there were photographs, there were countless stories about them. They were fighting, they were doing a lot of killing, especially from the air, and some of them were dying. And the invisibility of US wars has been escalating as the number of US troops directly involved has been drastically decreasing.

    And now more than ever, these are push button wars. The US is still engaged in dozens and dozens of different countries under the rubric of war on terror, counterinsurgency, a lot of it is secret, special ops going on.

    And so we’re in a warfare state but, to a large extent, there’s virtually no media coverage of it except from independent, progressive, anti-war oriented media outlets. And the net result is that we have a huge military budget and it goes virtually unchallenged. I mean, the official, so-called Defense Department budget is now around $900 billion with a B a year, heading very close to $1 trillion with a T. That doesn’t include nuclear weapons, some veterans benefits as a result of trying to mitigate these terrible results of these wars.

    Some of the invisibility layers include, for instance, I had to triple check this number because I was working on War Made Invisible, and I saw, oh, US soldiers who were involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when they came home to the US, how many of them had traumatic brain injury? 300,000. Can you imagine, 300,000 men and some women walking around the United States with traumatic brain injury? That’s an invisibility. All kinds of trauma.

    In War Made Invisible, I talk about the much higher rates of spousal abuse and violence from veterans, especially those who have seen combat. The moral corrosion, what’s been called moral injury, involved.

    And also, I would say in the current context — And I tried to get into this in the afterword of the paperback of War Made Invisible — The moral corrosion to live in a country that is subsidizing mass murder and genocide and not calling it that at all.

    Max, when you were quoting that powerful excerpt from George Orwell, it made me remember as well, I think it was him that said that telling the truth can be, is actually, a subversive act.

    And so our challenge now living in a warfare state based on lies, approving of and even glorifying slaughter by the US military and its allies. Now, in the Middle East most of all, of course, Israel, we have this challenge to subvert the warfare state. And we’re very much swimming upstream, but at the same time, while the mainstream is trying to cascade to tell us to be quiet, we know that, in history, we have been and are part of a tradition of Cassandras.

    We’re linked to, in the last many decades, people, organizations, and movements who said the escalation of the Vietnam War is wrong. The response to 9/11 to create the so-called war on terror was insanity. What has now been done to Afghanistan because of the US war, what was done to Iraq, we tried to warn the elites.

    And I think it’s important for us to augment our mission from we want to speak truth to power, which is, that’s okay, but power knows what they’re doing. It’s not a revelation to them, in most cases, what they’re doing. We also need to speak truth about power. So it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal, because that’s about education, agitation, organizing, and building movements.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to talk about the process of invisibilization and the role that the Obama years played in that. Because I think this, what you write so brilliantly about in your book, when I was reading it, I was thinking, this could apply to a lot of different political subjects that did not go away during the Obama era, but in many ways were just pushed under the radar. 

    So I feel like the Obama years, in terms of the political sentiments that were fomenting in this country, the underlying economic processes that were creating an even vaster gulf of inequality between the haves and have-nots, and also the reality of militarism, US-perpetrated militarism.

    To say nothing of Obama being called the deporter -in-chief, not because he was doing the more visible workplace raids and home raids of the Bush era and previous eras, but because he was using “paper deportations”, the unseen methods, which were proved to be much more efficient at expelling undocumented people from this country.

    So in so many ways, the Obama era was characterized by its ability, its deft ability to invisibilize so many of these nefarious forces.

    And I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about what that looked like on the side of the military-industrial complex. Because like I said, there was a visibility component to the war on terror. There was the shock and awe, there were boots on the ground, there were displays of military pride. Again, I remember, I was there. I was one of the guys who didn’t know shit from shit and was cheering it on at that time.

    But then we really, in a few short years, really transition to drone warfare, like you said, the warfare of button clicking, and the invisibilization of the carnage. Talk us through a little more what was happening in that first decade of the 21st century that was creating a war machine that could make itself so thoroughly invisible to a public that was back here at home, none the wiser, seemingly?

    Norman Solomon:  In foreign policy, President Obama made the so-called war on terror bipartisan. And there had been a negative energy from a lot of people who identified as Democrats, and certainly as progressives, that President George W. Bush had taken the country off the rails, that the invasion of Iraq, again, what so many anti-war progressive people had warned against, actually turned out to be a horrific disaster on virtually any level.

    And so when Obama came in in early 2009, it was an opportunity to truly turn the page. Instead, he actually sent more troops into Afghanistan. He kept the war going in Iraq, and, ideologically and culturally, really pushed to say that militarism should be not only bipartisan, but considered to be identical with patriotism and standing with your country.

    And he was part of a trend that is so sad. I’m old enough to remember when the Congressional Black Caucus was just inspiring. They had an annual alternative budget. We had Ron Dellums, we had Shirley Chisholm, we had John Conyers. These were visionaries who were in step with what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. They were drum majors for peace. They really made the connections explicit between the militarism and spending for killing overseas, and the deprivation and oppression of poor people, the rainbow, and especially people of color disproportionately in this country.

    There cropped up posters during the Obama presidency. And there’s a picture of him and Dr. King, and over Dr. King’s picture was, “I have a dream”, and over Barack Obama’s picture, “I have a drone”.

    And I document in War Made Invisible how he just talked the usual nonsense. You would talk to the troops in Afghanistan, and gratuitously, it was unnecessarily politically or anywhere else. It normalized the idea that the best thing you can do is die for your country. It became some oratory, that I mentioned, that was macabre.

    Imagine going to Bagram Air Base and telling the troops there that you may join the others who are buried in the special plot at Arlington Cemetery. You really have an opportunity to give for your country. This is a sort of a, dare I say necrophilia. It’s a worship of death in the ostensible service of your country when, actually, it’s in service of the military contractors.

    And I talk about in the book, we have gotten so propagandized that often even those of us who oppose the militarism of the US government, we call it a defense budget. We talk about defense spending, a lowercase d, and that is part of the triumph. We’re giving ground to the militarism culture. Very little of the Pentagon budget has anything to do with defense. They can capitalize D, Defense Department, that doesn’t make it real in terms of it’s about defending this country.

    And meanwhile, we have this tremendous climate emergency, and we have, as you’ve been referring to Max, this tremendous range of deprivation in our own country. It’s been said that the federal budget is a moral document, or could be, and right now we have a very immoral budget.

    And so, as we speak, we have a crossroads of this election. In foreign policy, it’s hard to see very specific differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But with domestic policy, there are huge differences because if Trump is elected and his coterie is brought in with fascistic politics, then the left, then progressives, then anti-war forces, we’ll be back on our heels. We’ll be defending the meager gains that have been achieved by progressives — Important gains, but definitely insufficient gains that have been achieved in the last 10, 20 years.

    So I think we’re facing this paradox. No matter what, we should speak truthfully, and that means not pulling our verbal punches, that means challenging those in power, whoever they might be.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  But over the past year, the visibility of carnage has been one of the most profound forces shaping people’s understanding of what’s happening right now. The social media images of Palestinian men, women, children, elderly people blown apart. Body parts, visceral carnage on people’s social media feeds.

    I wanted to ask how the visibility of Israel’s war on Palestine over the past year, how, if at all, that has changed the political dynamics that you were writing about in 2006?

    Norman Solomon:  Well, the fact that younger people, say under 40, are much more opposed to what Israel is doing than the older demographics speaks, in part, to just less years being propagandized about Israel and more willingness to just look at human rights as human rights, to be consistent about it. And of course, more orientation towards what they see in social media rather than in so-called legacy media.

    I think that, ultimately, and this sort of connects to your previous point, is that if we’re going to face a fascist or neo-fascist regime, and I think it’s fair to say that’s what a Trump regime would look like if it comes in, then the capacity to respond to the horrors that we do know about, that we have seen through video and narratives and accounts, that capacity is to hit a brick wall. That’s one of, I think, the most worrying, to put mildly, specters ahead, that fork in the road.

    Whereas if we flip it over, yes, the greater awareness — And this is a big change — The awareness of the need to support Palestinian rights and to challenge the terrible joint militarism of the US and the Israeli governments, that has begun to chip away at the foundation of automatic support of US for Israel.

    We got a long way to go. I am absolutely, fully aware that that’s true. But if you’re dealing with a wall, which is the Republican Party, then you’re going to just keep hitting the wall. If you’re dealing with a wall that has some cracks in it and there’s a possibility to utilize what we have learned about the murderous qualities of the Israeli government vis-a-vis Palestinian people, the apartheid, the exclusionary policies, the ethnic cleansing, then are we going to have some space to work in, to organize in?

    And as you know, Max, from reading War Made Invisible, I have no sparing of words for Joe Biden. I think his policies have been outrageous. I think he’s an accomplice to mass murder. There’s no question about that in terms of his role vis-a-vis Israel.

    We don’t know what’s coming up, but we do know that we have to organize and we need to and want to organize in the best possible conditions to build further momentum for the movements that are really necessary.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  In many ways, I remember looking one time when I was cleaning my kitchen, I found one of those potatoes that had been sitting there for a long time, and it had the sprouts grown out of it. And the sprouts had grown long, the potato had shriveled. And I stared at it thinking, that’s America, basically. We are an international war machine with a domestic government attached to it at this point, but it is increasingly a vestigial domestic body politic, it feels like.

    And people feel that. The people I interview, working people, red states, blue states union, non-union. People are not stupid, they know and feel and see that, as we already mentioned. People devastated by Hurricane Helene in the same week that we’re learning about more military aid being sent to Israel. So that is creating a political rage that has nowhere to go.

    And that’s where I wanted to end up with, which is where does this go if it is not channeled into a grassroots, coalitional movement, a people-led movement to bend power to our will? If people don’t have that outlet, then that rage turns sideways, it festers or it turns to nihilism.

    And therein lies the question about the efficacy of visibility here in fighting the war machine. People have seen more of Israel’s war on Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than many had… It’s been more carnage that people have seen over the past year than they have perhaps in their whole lives that has propelled so many people to protest on the streets. Largest Palestine solidarity protests in the history of our country in DC multiple times in the past year. And yet, power persists with its current program under a Democratic administration. Republican administration is not going to change that, just look at their past policies.

    So when people are both made aware by the increased visibility, their hearts are opened up to the human toll of this war because of the visibility of the carnage they’re seeing, but they are left a year later feeling like we’ve made no progress in changing the dynamics of power and influencing the people in power to stop this, then you have people who just give up. You have people who turn to figures like Trump in the hopes that he could be a big enough battering ram to shake something loose.

    So I ask you, brother Norman Solomon, I want to give you the final word here. Has the increased visibility of war brought us closer to doing something to stop this suicidal path that we are currently on? And if it hasn’t, what else needs to happen to get us there?

    Norman Solomon:  As you referred to, there’s tremendous rage, anger, and pain that a lot of people are feeling in a lot of dimensions. And that certainly applies to the Israeli war on Gaza. That pain, that rage that people feel, whether it’s their own economic situations or about US foreign policy, it can be a seedbed for all sorts of responses. It can be one for the fascistic approach and analysis such as it is from the Trump people, or it can be a genuine progressive response.

    And I often think of a saying I heard from a musician, “You might feel like you’re getting lost, but you won’t if you know the blues.” And I think that applies to having a single standard of human rights and empathy for all people and holding to principles that are not just affirming for me and my loved ones, but people I don’t even know.

    The phrase human rights, it might be sometimes abused, but I think it’s a very profound one, whether it’s access to housing and healthcare and education down the block or across the United States, or whether it’s people on other continents that we should hold to those principles. And I think that’s a pathway forward to invoke that, to talk about.

    I was very impressed by the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and he ends up talking about that the messaging about the Middle East should definitely include emphasis on equality, that we oppose apartheid, that we oppose discrimination and relegation of people to second or third or fourth class citizenship, that we believe in a single standard of equality and human rights for everybody. And that’s sort of like, you might say, a Swiss Army knife. It applies in a lot of situations, home and abroad, many different places.

    In terms of war, the visibility of war is not sufficient, but it’s necessary. And as I mentioned in the book, it’s possible for people to see on their TV screens or they’re scrolling images and video of war and horrors of war and conclude, well, that’s the way war is, or we gotta get it done quickly. Or, as Donald Trump said, we should help Israel “finish the job.”

    That’s one conclusion because it doesn’t have a grounding in human rights, and it doesn’t have a context provided as to the suppression of some people over decades and centuries, even, in many cases.

    So I would sum up a single standard of human rights, when we hold to it, when we insist on it, and we put a context — Not only insist that the suffering from war be made explicitly visible, but we put a historical context around it so that we don’t have the situation of simply empathy human rights stories, which, again, are necessary but insufficient to show the suffering, for instance, in Gaza.

    Yes, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient because we don’t want to go with victims without victimizers. They are victims, they’re human beings, just as precious as the people you’re going to see at the shopping center near where you live. That has to be made crystal clear.

    What also has to be crystal clear is that they are not victims of an act of God or a hurricane or a flood that came as an act of nature. They are victims with victimizers. And in the case of Gaza, the victimizers are at the top of the governments of Israel and the United States.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  So that is the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org, and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of the vital new book War Made Invisible. Norm, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, brother. I really, really appreciate it.

    Norman Solomon:  Hey, thanks a lot, Max.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  And to all of you watching, please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, support our work so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this, as well as all the vital on-the-ground documentary reporting that we have been publishing from Gaza, the West Bank, and around the world. Please support our work. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • War is a daily fixture of American life—the US military occupies at least 750 overseas bases, and it has executed military operations in nations around the globe over the past 20 years. But most Americans have remained unaware of this, thanks to a coordinated effort by politicians, corporate media, and the military-industrial complex to make the realities of American militarism invisible to the public. As author Norman Solomon writes in his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Solomon about his book, the political crisis that decades of invisible war have generated in US domestic politics, and how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.

    Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

    Studio Production: David Hebden
    Post-Production: Adam Coley


    Transcript

    Maximillian Alvarez:  In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell famously observed, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.

    “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

    “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

    Now, Orwell never could have imagined the ways the 21st century media ecosystem would enable powers narrators to deploy the thought-corrupting and reality-skewing force of language to instigate, justify, muddle or invisibilize the horrors perpetrated in our name.

    But what he understood nearly a century ago about the relationship between power, language, and the visibility of atrocity has proven to be grimly timeless. Defending the indefensible is the proven modus operandi of the same consent manufacturing machine that propelled us into an unwinnable, illegal, and globally destabilizing war on terror over 20 years ago.

    And, “Euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness,” have been the tried and tested tools of first resort, employed by corporate media and US political and military officials looking to justify Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon, and its reckless, nihilistic campaign to embroil the Middle East in an all-out regional war.

    In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy writes, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon’s bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they’re apt to seem normal, even natural.

    “But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close at home.”

    As we commemorate the grim anniversary of Oct. 7 and reflect on a year of what has been called the most documented genocide in history, as working people around the world struggle to get by and live their lives while bombs and guns obliterate our fellow human beings in Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and beyond. When it feels for many of us, like we’ve already seen too much: too much war, too much death, too much carnage, it is important to stop and ask ourselves, how much are we still not seeing? And has the increased visibility of war over the past year changed who we are and how we act to stop it?

    To help us break this all down and to discuss his vital book, War Made Invisible, I’m honored to be joined by Norman Solomon himself.

    Brother Norman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

    Norman Solomon:  Well, thank you, Max, and you posed such a key question: What are we still not seeing? And we’re encouraged to have this sort of conceit that if we look at the mainline mainstream news and we pay attention to that, that somehow, for instance, we have a grasp, an understanding, intellectually and emotionally, what’s going on in Gaza. And that is basically preposterous, but the conceit that is encouraged compounds the deception. And the whole idea that we understand a war because we watch the news, we listen to it, we read it, is part of the propaganda system itself.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  I already have explosions of thoughts in my head just hearing that opening salvo from you, and I really can’t recommend Norman’s book enough to everyone watching. Please, go read it, it is vital in these times.

    And Norman, I want to build on that, because the paperback version of your book begins in the post-9/11 moment, a little over 20 years ago, and it concludes with an afterword on Gaza. I want those two points to frame our discussion today.

    And I was wondering if you could take us there in those immediate months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and talk us through what you were seeing and would then write about in War Made Easy. The ways that the carnage was being invisibilized, the ways the public was being manipulated, and the relationship that we had to the war that was being perpetrated in our name.

    Norman Solomon:  What’s going on now is really a continuation in various permutations of what began after 9/11. We had, essentially, a preemptive absolution for the US government because of the crime against humanity on 9/11, that whatever the United States did after that, in ostensible response, which was really just displaced rage and nationalism and militarism, that that was okay, that it was justified. And we’ve seen that echo today in terms of what the US and Israeli government are saying about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and now, increasingly, in Lebanon as well.

    So for instance, at the end of 2001, you had then Defense Secretary — And it’s uppercase D, I wouldn’t say it’s about defense — But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, every death in Afghanistan, whether it is American, whether it is Afghan civilians, every single death is the result of and the culpability of Al-Qaeda. So that was like a blank, bloody check for whatever the US was to do was justified by citing the initial crime.

    And I think this is a paradigm from that day to this. When you look at the numbers — And of course people are not numbers, but they are ways for us to understand magnitude — 3,000 deaths from the atrocity on 9/11. And then, according to the Brown University Cost of War project, the direct deaths as a result of the ensuing US so-called war on terror, 950,000 deaths, about half of them civilians. And then you go to the indirect deaths, and the Brown University study says 4.5 million deaths as a result of the US-led so-called war on terror.

    So you look at 3,000 deaths, and then you look at direct close to one million, indirect adding up to more than four million. What is that about? What kind of culture, what kind of political system will engage in collective punishment of people who are guilty of breathing while Afghan, breathing while Iraqi? Or fast-forward more than two decades, what kind of political culture in the United States will continue to arm an Israeli government that is killing people for the transgression of breathing while Palestinian?

    So this is a culture of mass murder that has emanated from or certainly got a huge boost from the response to 9/11. And here we are, what, more than two decades later, and the baseline continues to drop, so the standards continue to be degraded.

    I recently saw an excerpt from a film by the wonderful folks at the Media Education Foundation from their film The Occupation of the American Mind, it’s been recirculated now online. And they chronicle the coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, making possible the Israeli-backed right-wing massacre into the thousands of refugees at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

    And to see the footage of the US networks in 1982 and compare it to what generally we have seen in 2024 in terms of the coverage of the current Israeli slaughter going on, it is shocking because, as inadequate as the coverage was in 1982 on the US networks, it was much better, it was more candid, it was more willing to call out Israel than what we’re getting now.

    So I think a challenge as independent journalists, as progressive media institutions that The Real News Network and others are stepping onto to really step up to the challenge is to say, we don’t put up with this. We don’t accept a propaganda system that is consistent with what Martin Luther King Jr. called the madness of militarism. And Max, you referred to the consequences of the warfare state at home domestically, and it’s really what we know, what goes around comes around.

    Dr. King referred to it, and these were his words, he said it was, “A demonic, destructive suction tube,” that was taking billions of dollars worth of resources for healthcare, education, housing, elderly care, neonatal care, you name it, and it was siphoning those resources to kill people in Vietnam.

    And we’re talking now towards the end of 2024, and that dynamic is in full force, is ripping off. It is literally depriving lives of existence here at home while that funding, including most recently $20 billion with a B, dollars green-lighted by the White House, more weapons to Israel, that money, our tax dollars courtesy of US taxpayers, is paying to slaughter Palestinian people.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, man. I mean, the marquee out in front of The Real News Network building currently reads the bar from Tupac Shakur, “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” And I dream of the day when we can change the marquee and that slogan will no longer be relevant, but I feel we’re going to be waiting for a long time.

    But Vietnam feels like a great example to bring up, not only because visibility and truth telling did play a critical role in public opinion on the war, the protest movement, so on and so forth, with images of My Lai Massacre and so on and so forth. Those images are burned into people’s minds. And there was also, of course, a draft. There were more tangible connections that people had to the machinery of war that, as you said, in the 21st century, those tangible connections have been severed, invisibilized, buried underground.

    So, what was it about the 21st century US approach to war that made it so much easier to not only perpetrate but to do so at industrial scale the way that we have? What changed in the 21st century that enabled the US and other countries to make war so much easier?

    Norman Solomon:  Well, really, the disconnection has increased over time. It’s been an evolution of distancing people in the United States from the wars that are perpetrated with their tax dollars in their names. It is so much easier for elites to start wars than for people then to stop them. And, certainly, during escalation of the Vietnam War, it was considered by those in power to be, per se, fairly easy to do.

    And contrary to myth, it wasn’t the US media, the TV networks that stirred up the protests. It was the protests that changed the political climate that compelled, along with the longevity of the war and the failure to “win” that brought, kicking and screaming, reluctantly, the networks to show, actually, not very much of the carnage. But it was part of a tone that changed that ultimately had some political effect.

    There’s much ballyhoo about when Walter Cronkite in 1968 said the war was in a stalemate and could not be won. What is often forgotten is that Cronkite never made a principled objection to the war. His objection was that it wasn’t being won.

    And if you look at the paradigms of the last several decades, when there has been a war that the United States can wage routinely, I have to say, and my books have documented and many others have documented, based on falsehoods, if the wars can be “won quickly”, they remain popular.

    And so in 1991 when the first President Bush launched a war on Iraq, and that war included the notorious, so-called horrible word, horrible phrase, “turkey shoot” of retreating Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, literally gunned down in huge quantities from the air.

    Bush had tremendous popularity. He had been in the low 50, 60% approval rating right before that because of the economy. Right after this triumph of the US war, what’s called the Gulf War in 1991, Bush’s popularity rating went up to 91%. Why? Because the war just took six weeks.

    And this is embedded in US media and politics, and, unfortunately, to a large extent, in the public perception, if the war can be a triumph, it can be done early, not a lot of Americans die, then that’s considered to be a good thing. So the underlying militarism can vary in terms of how it plays out.

    I think in also another aspect of the answer to your question, in this century, the immediate aftermath of 9/11, within a couple of years, the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. First, it was a lot of cheerleading. The bombing of Afghanistan that was launched in October of 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s stunning when you look at the Gallup polls.

    90% of the US public supported the US attack on Afghanistan, 5% opposed, the other five said they weren’t sure. Well, that’s Soviet Union-style approval. That is like dictatorship, propaganda system approval levels, sky high.

    And then in 2003, the US invasion and then war on Iraq essentially… Well, at least at that stage, we had media coverage. It didn’t mean it told us much about war at all, but there were US troops who were on TV, there were photographs, there were countless stories about them. They were fighting, they were doing a lot of killing, especially from the air, and some of them were dying. And the invisibility of US wars has been escalating as the number of US troops directly involved has been drastically decreasing.

    And now more than ever, these are push button wars. The US is still engaged in dozens and dozens of different countries under the rubric of war on terror, counterinsurgency, a lot of it is secret, special ops going on.

    And so we’re in a warfare state but, to a large extent, there’s virtually no media coverage of it except from independent, progressive, anti-war oriented media outlets. And the net result is that we have a huge military budget and it goes virtually unchallenged. I mean, the official, so-called Defense Department budget is now around $900 billion with a B a year, heading very close to $1 trillion with a T. That doesn’t include nuclear weapons, some veterans benefits as a result of trying to mitigate these terrible results of these wars.

    Some of the invisibility layers include, for instance, I had to triple check this number because I was working on War Made Invisible, and I saw, oh, US soldiers who were involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when they came home to the US, how many of them had traumatic brain injury? 300,000. Can you imagine, 300,000 men and some women walking around the United States with traumatic brain injury? That’s an invisibility. All kinds of trauma.

    In War Made Invisible, I talk about the much higher rates of spousal abuse and violence from veterans, especially those who have seen combat. The moral corrosion, what’s been called moral injury, involved.

    And also, I would say in the current context — And I tried to get into this in the afterword of the paperback of War Made Invisible — The moral corrosion to live in a country that is subsidizing mass murder and genocide and not calling it that at all.

    Max, when you were quoting that powerful excerpt from George Orwell, it made me remember as well, I think it was him that said that telling the truth can be, is actually, a subversive act.

    And so our challenge now living in a warfare state based on lies, approving of and even glorifying slaughter by the US military and its allies. Now, in the Middle East most of all, of course, Israel, we have this challenge to subvert the warfare state. And we’re very much swimming upstream, but at the same time, while the mainstream is trying to cascade to tell us to be quiet, we know that, in history, we have been and are part of a tradition of Cassandras.

    We’re linked to, in the last many decades, people, organizations, and movements who said the escalation of the Vietnam War is wrong. The response to 9/11 to create the so-called war on terror was insanity. What has now been done to Afghanistan because of the US war, what was done to Iraq, we tried to warn the elites.

    And I think it’s important for us to augment our mission from we want to speak truth to power, which is, that’s okay, but power knows what they’re doing. It’s not a revelation to them, in most cases, what they’re doing. We also need to speak truth about power. So it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal, because that’s about education, agitation, organizing, and building movements.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to talk about the process of invisibilization and the role that the Obama years played in that. Because I think this, what you write so brilliantly about in your book, when I was reading it, I was thinking, this could apply to a lot of different political subjects that did not go away during the Obama era, but in many ways were just pushed under the radar. 

    So I feel like the Obama years, in terms of the political sentiments that were fomenting in this country, the underlying economic processes that were creating an even vaster gulf of inequality between the haves and have-nots, and also the reality of militarism, US-perpetrated militarism.

    To say nothing of Obama being called the deporter -in-chief, not because he was doing the more visible workplace raids and home raids of the Bush era and previous eras, but because he was using “paper deportations”, the unseen methods, which were proved to be much more efficient at expelling undocumented people from this country.

    So in so many ways, the Obama era was characterized by its ability, its deft ability to invisibilize so many of these nefarious forces.

    And I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about what that looked like on the side of the military-industrial complex. Because like I said, there was a visibility component to the war on terror. There was the shock and awe, there were boots on the ground, there were displays of military pride. Again, I remember, I was there. I was one of the guys who didn’t know shit from shit and was cheering it on at that time.

    But then we really, in a few short years, really transition to drone warfare, like you said, the warfare of button clicking, and the invisibilization of the carnage. Talk us through a little more what was happening in that first decade of the 21st century that was creating a war machine that could make itself so thoroughly invisible to a public that was back here at home, none the wiser, seemingly?

    Norman Solomon:  In foreign policy, President Obama made the so-called war on terror bipartisan. And there had been a negative energy from a lot of people who identified as Democrats, and certainly as progressives, that President George W. Bush had taken the country off the rails, that the invasion of Iraq, again, what so many anti-war progressive people had warned against, actually turned out to be a horrific disaster on virtually any level.

    And so when Obama came in in early 2009, it was an opportunity to truly turn the page. Instead, he actually sent more troops into Afghanistan. He kept the war going in Iraq, and, ideologically and culturally, really pushed to say that militarism should be not only bipartisan, but considered to be identical with patriotism and standing with your country.

    And he was part of a trend that is so sad. I’m old enough to remember when the Congressional Black Caucus was just inspiring. They had an annual alternative budget. We had Ron Dellums, we had Shirley Chisholm, we had John Conyers. These were visionaries who were in step with what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. They were drum majors for peace. They really made the connections explicit between the militarism and spending for killing overseas, and the deprivation and oppression of poor people, the rainbow, and especially people of color disproportionately in this country.

    There cropped up posters during the Obama presidency. And there’s a picture of him and Dr. King, and over Dr. King’s picture was, “I have a dream”, and over Barack Obama’s picture, “I have a drone”.

    And I document in War Made Invisible how he just talked the usual nonsense. You would talk to the troops in Afghanistan, and gratuitously, it was unnecessarily politically or anywhere else. It normalized the idea that the best thing you can do is die for your country. It became some oratory, that I mentioned, that was macabre.

    Imagine going to Bagram Air Base and telling the troops there that you may join the others who are buried in the special plot at Arlington Cemetery. You really have an opportunity to give for your country. This is a sort of a, dare I say necrophilia. It’s a worship of death in the ostensible service of your country when, actually, it’s in service of the military contractors.

    And I talk about in the book, we have gotten so propagandized that often even those of us who oppose the militarism of the US government, we call it a defense budget. We talk about defense spending, a lowercase d, and that is part of the triumph. We’re giving ground to the militarism culture. Very little of the Pentagon budget has anything to do with defense. They can capitalize D, Defense Department, that doesn’t make it real in terms of it’s about defending this country.

    And meanwhile, we have this tremendous climate emergency, and we have, as you’ve been referring to Max, this tremendous range of deprivation in our own country. It’s been said that the federal budget is a moral document, or could be, and right now we have a very immoral budget.

    And so, as we speak, we have a crossroads of this election. In foreign policy, it’s hard to see very specific differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But with domestic policy, there are huge differences because if Trump is elected and his coterie is brought in with fascistic politics, then the left, then progressives, then anti-war forces, we’ll be back on our heels. We’ll be defending the meager gains that have been achieved by progressives — Important gains, but definitely insufficient gains that have been achieved in the last 10, 20 years.

    So I think we’re facing this paradox. No matter what, we should speak truthfully, and that means not pulling our verbal punches, that means challenging those in power, whoever they might be.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  But over the past year, the visibility of carnage has been one of the most profound forces shaping people’s understanding of what’s happening right now. The social media images of Palestinian men, women, children, elderly people blown apart. Body parts, visceral carnage on people’s social media feeds.

    I wanted to ask how the visibility of Israel’s war on Palestine over the past year, how, if at all, that has changed the political dynamics that you were writing about in 2006?

    Norman Solomon:  Well, the fact that younger people, say under 40, are much more opposed to what Israel is doing than the older demographics speaks, in part, to just less years being propagandized about Israel and more willingness to just look at human rights as human rights, to be consistent about it. And of course, more orientation towards what they see in social media rather than in so-called legacy media.

    I think that, ultimately, and this sort of connects to your previous point, is that if we’re going to face a fascist or neo-fascist regime, and I think it’s fair to say that’s what a Trump regime would look like if it comes in, then the capacity to respond to the horrors that we do know about, that we have seen through video and narratives and accounts, that capacity is to hit a brick wall. That’s one of, I think, the most worrying, to put mildly, specters ahead, that fork in the road.

    Whereas if we flip it over, yes, the greater awareness — And this is a big change — The awareness of the need to support Palestinian rights and to challenge the terrible joint militarism of the US and the Israeli governments, that has begun to chip away at the foundation of automatic support of US for Israel.

    We got a long way to go. I am absolutely, fully aware that that’s true. But if you’re dealing with a wall, which is the Republican Party, then you’re going to just keep hitting the wall. If you’re dealing with a wall that has some cracks in it and there’s a possibility to utilize what we have learned about the murderous qualities of the Israeli government vis-a-vis Palestinian people, the apartheid, the exclusionary policies, the ethnic cleansing, then are we going to have some space to work in, to organize in?

    And as you know, Max, from reading War Made Invisible, I have no sparing of words for Joe Biden. I think his policies have been outrageous. I think he’s an accomplice to mass murder. There’s no question about that in terms of his role vis-a-vis Israel.

    We don’t know what’s coming up, but we do know that we have to organize and we need to and want to organize in the best possible conditions to build further momentum for the movements that are really necessary.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  In many ways, I remember looking one time when I was cleaning my kitchen, I found one of those potatoes that had been sitting there for a long time, and it had the sprouts grown out of it. And the sprouts had grown long, the potato had shriveled. And I stared at it thinking, that’s America, basically. We are an international war machine with a domestic government attached to it at this point, but it is increasingly a vestigial domestic body politic, it feels like.

    And people feel that. The people I interview, working people, red states, blue states union, non-union. People are not stupid, they know and feel and see that, as we already mentioned. People devastated by Hurricane Helene in the same week that we’re learning about more military aid being sent to Israel. So that is creating a political rage that has nowhere to go.

    And that’s where I wanted to end up with, which is where does this go if it is not channeled into a grassroots, coalitional movement, a people-led movement to bend power to our will? If people don’t have that outlet, then that rage turns sideways, it festers or it turns to nihilism.

    And therein lies the question about the efficacy of visibility here in fighting the war machine. People have seen more of Israel’s war on Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than many had… It’s been more carnage that people have seen over the past year than they have perhaps in their whole lives that has propelled so many people to protest on the streets. Largest Palestine solidarity protests in the history of our country in DC multiple times in the past year. And yet, power persists with its current program under a Democratic administration. Republican administration is not going to change that, just look at their past policies.

    So when people are both made aware by the increased visibility, their hearts are opened up to the human toll of this war because of the visibility of the carnage they’re seeing, but they are left a year later feeling like we’ve made no progress in changing the dynamics of power and influencing the people in power to stop this, then you have people who just give up. You have people who turn to figures like Trump in the hopes that he could be a big enough battering ram to shake something loose.

    So I ask you, brother Norman Solomon, I want to give you the final word here. Has the increased visibility of war brought us closer to doing something to stop this suicidal path that we are currently on? And if it hasn’t, what else needs to happen to get us there?

    Norman Solomon:  As you referred to, there’s tremendous rage, anger, and pain that a lot of people are feeling in a lot of dimensions. And that certainly applies to the Israeli war on Gaza. That pain, that rage that people feel, whether it’s their own economic situations or about US foreign policy, it can be a seedbed for all sorts of responses. It can be one for the fascistic approach and analysis such as it is from the Trump people, or it can be a genuine progressive response.

    And I often think of a saying I heard from a musician, “You might feel like you’re getting lost, but you won’t if you know the blues.” And I think that applies to having a single standard of human rights and empathy for all people and holding to principles that are not just affirming for me and my loved ones, but people I don’t even know.

    The phrase human rights, it might be sometimes abused, but I think it’s a very profound one, whether it’s access to housing and healthcare and education down the block or across the United States, or whether it’s people on other continents that we should hold to those principles. And I think that’s a pathway forward to invoke that, to talk about.

    I was very impressed by the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and he ends up talking about that the messaging about the Middle East should definitely include emphasis on equality, that we oppose apartheid, that we oppose discrimination and relegation of people to second or third or fourth class citizenship, that we believe in a single standard of equality and human rights for everybody. And that’s sort of like, you might say, a Swiss Army knife. It applies in a lot of situations, home and abroad, many different places.

    In terms of war, the visibility of war is not sufficient, but it’s necessary. And as I mentioned in the book, it’s possible for people to see on their TV screens or they’re scrolling images and video of war and horrors of war and conclude, well, that’s the way war is, or we gotta get it done quickly. Or, as Donald Trump said, we should help Israel “finish the job.”

    That’s one conclusion because it doesn’t have a grounding in human rights, and it doesn’t have a context provided as to the suppression of some people over decades and centuries, even, in many cases.

    So I would sum up a single standard of human rights, when we hold to it, when we insist on it, and we put a context — Not only insist that the suffering from war be made explicitly visible, but we put a historical context around it so that we don’t have the situation of simply empathy human rights stories, which, again, are necessary but insufficient to show the suffering, for instance, in Gaza.

    Yes, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient because we don’t want to go with victims without victimizers. They are victims, they’re human beings, just as precious as the people you’re going to see at the shopping center near where you live. That has to be made crystal clear.

    What also has to be crystal clear is that they are not victims of an act of God or a hurricane or a flood that came as an act of nature. They are victims with victimizers. And in the case of Gaza, the victimizers are at the top of the governments of Israel and the United States.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  So that is the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org, and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of the vital new book War Made Invisible. Norm, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, brother. I really, really appreciate it.

    Norman Solomon:  Hey, thanks a lot, Max.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  And to all of you watching, please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, support our work so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this, as well as all the vital on-the-ground documentary reporting that we have been publishing from Gaza, the West Bank, and around the world. Please support our work. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • While the genocidal assault on Gaza continues, Israel has stepped up a campaign of terror in the Occupied West Bank. Fearing for his life, Waleed Samer, a linguistics student who has helped The Real News film an original documentary in the West Bank over the past year, documents the day-by-day reality of living under Israel’s occupation and tells the story of his family’s harrowing escape from their Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank city of Tulkarm. This is his story.

    Filmed by Waleed Samer
    Production, voice-over, and editing by Ross Domoney


    Transcript

    Waleed Samer: 

    Hi everyone. How are you? My name is Waleed Samer, 20 years old. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Life in Waleed’s refugee camp has become unbearable.

    Waleed Samer:

    Ok there is a lot of snipers around me. If I open my door they will kill me. Why I will try [to go outside]? I will not try. I will stay in my house. 

    They [the Israeli army] took my grandfather’s land in 1948. So maybe this is the second chance to take my land [here] in the camp. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    With only a handful of armed Palestinian fighters left, Waleed fears his camp is about to be overtaken by the army.

    Waleed Samer: 

    Are you worried about your cat?

    Waleed’s little sister: 

    Yeah.

    Waleed Samer:

    Because of the army?

    [Waleed’s little sister nods.]

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Over a period of ten days, Waleed sent us footage from his phone. The Israeli army is raiding his camp on a near daily basis. Small windows of time allow for him to go outside.

    Waleed Samer:

    It’s like a battle here. Look what they are doing. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Nur Shams refugee camp was established by Palestinians who fled their native lands in the 1948 Nakba, where Zionist militias displaced and killed thousands to create what is today known as the state of Israel.

    This is Ross Domoney reporting for The Real News. In April this year, myself and my colleague Antonis Vradis met Waleed in his camp whilst filming a documentary. He helps connect journalists like us to stories in his community so that he can fund his education. Now, months later, his ability to study or even to eat has been severely restricted as the army cuts off food and water to his camp.

    Waleed Samer:

    This is my brother. He wears a black t-shirt. He’s going to get some hummus and falafel. 

    It’s my [first] breakfast [in] two days. We must have bread to eat [with] that. But we are really hungry. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Another day, another raid. Waleed Films from his balcony.

    Waleed Samer:

    Many people in the camp now if you can listen… Many people are in a stress[ful] situation and they are just trying to get out [of] the camp but they can’t. So the situation now is very dangerous. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    A brief lull in the Israeli assault allows for a funeral. The leader of the camp’s battalion is buried. A farewell gun salute… A chance to go out again and signs that the army is still facing resistance.

    Back at home, his parents grow increasingly worried for the safety of their children and discuss the possibility of leaving Palestine. Waleed, like any other 20-year-old, would like to relax and enjoy life.

    Waleed Samer:

    I don’t have any dreams here. My future here [is not] clear. I don’t know what will happen [to] me in the next one hour maybe. No one knows what will happen [to] him. So I [imagine] I have a good future in my life: I can go out and continue my study in good universities, see the people [outside] of Palestine, [outside] of the West Bank. I can move freely. No one can attack me. No one can arrest me.

    Hello?

    Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:

    Waleed!

    Waleed Samer:

    Hi habibi how are you? 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Waleed gets a call from Antonis about a program that might be able to help him study.

    Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:

    My university here in Scotland has a scholarship that is specifically for Palestinian students. 

    Waleed Samer:

    That’s nice. 

    Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:

    Yeah. 

    Waleed Samer:

    Just imagine I finish my bachelor’s and go to Scotland university and take the masters. Oh that would be great. Every woman in life would come and marry me. The life in the last maybe three-four months has become worse here. [There is] no work or money. I don’t have the costs to pay my university, this is the hardest thing [for] me. Many things have happened. I have just started thinking I have a big future ahead of me. 

    Someone [came] into my house and was asking about my dad and [I told] him my dad is not home. He told me take these two cartons of water because the IDF at the last [raid] cut off the water. 

    Sitting in my house, opening my phone [to] see what is going on [outside] my house. I need some bread or something to eat. Maybe I was having some bread [or] something to eat yesterday but today I don’t have anything. 

    I’m just now trying to go out from my house. When I open the door, I listen if there are any planes [drones] or something like that. I swear there is a plane [drone] above my head just filming me and quickly I close my door and come back to home. I cannot do anything. Really, the situation here is really, really bad. 

    Ross Domoney [Narrator]:

    Waleed sends me a picture of a charred body. It’s the last remaining fighter from his camp. After that, his messages fall silent. Despite the hardship of life in the West Bank, he would rather stay than leave. But the occupation’s violence left him no choice. Waleed leaves his homeland like his grandfather did in 1948.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Israel’s genocide in Gaza has now surpassed a year, and is quickly spiraling into a regional war that now includes a ground front in Lebanon. As the world reels from the horrors witnessed in the past year alone, how are members of Israeli society justifying those horrors to themselves? In part two of this two-part episode commemorating the solemn anniversary of Oct. 7, Canada-based Israeli filmmaker and journalist Lia Tarachansky joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the dark psychological forces shaping Israelis’ support for the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

    Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: David Hebden


    Transcript

    Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.

    And we are once again going to look at what’s happening in the war in Gaza, where we see now, how many people have been killed? Over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. 96,000 people have been wounded or hurt. At least 10,000 are missing. In Israel, 1,200 people have been killed. At least 8,700 are injured. And it’s escalating into Lebanon, and we don’t know where this is going to take us.

    But for many of us, it’s deeply personal, and it’s also a war that we have to work to end. I’m talking today with Lia Tarachansky, who has worked here at The Real News. She’s been a colleague for a long time, an incredible journalist and filmmaker, multimedia artist, born in the Soviet Union, lived in Israel, now lives in Canada. She produced this incredible film On The Side of the Road, among others, and joins us now.

    Lia, welcome. Good to have you with us.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Thanks, Marc. Thanks for having me back.

    Marc Steiner:  It’s always good to talk to you, always. I want to start with this quote that I found on your webpage, and it was written before, but it just spoke to me so deeply about where we are now. And I just want to start there before we get into any political social analysis of where we’re going because it’s so deeply personal and upsetting, watching what’s going on.

    As I said to you before we went on the air, the kibbutzim that were attacked is where my family lives. Some are dead, some are hostages, from what I understand, people I don’t know. My best friend in the Palestinian world had his nephew shot and killed by settlers in the West Bank.

    And this is what you wrote: “My rage is sadness. My rage is fear. My rage is fire. My rage is silence. I am so much rage. I don’t know what to do with the rage. I turn it into sadness, but the sadness feels endless. Bottomless. They can’t even call. They can’t even text their loved ones to tell them they’re still alive.”

    There’s something, just for me, and I know it must be for you because you lived it, deeply troubling and emotional about this war. There’s something really different here.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Yeah. We’ve never lived through anything like this.

    Marc Steiner:  Just talk for a moment just about you. All the stuff you’ve been through, the work you’ve done, standing up and saying what has to be said, living and growing up in Israel. Can you talk just for a moment about Lia Tarachansky and where you are at this moment?

    Lia Tarachansky:  Well, I was a correspondent for The Real News for many years in Israel and Palestine. It was an experience that formed my understanding to a very deep level by being in the West Bank several times a week and then going home to Israel and back and forth over years, over many wars.

    And then I started to work on a documentary that investigated a group of Israeli and American rabbis that were trying to bring back biblical Judaism and transform the political conflict into a religious conflict.

    And it was part of an ongoing investigation, including a murder investigation I was covering for another film of seeing this rise of extreme ideas in Israel, what we nicknamed the Jewish ISIS, this group of people that are pushing towards regional war, pushing towards the return of a very kind of ancient, biblical, and very repressive understanding of Jewishness.

    And I remember thinking, wow, this is so crazy. These people are growing, but we are… There’s no way we’re going to go through what they’re advocating for.

    But the confluence of the increase in the movement from a few little groups of people who even the Israeli police, at some point, sent to jail for their extreme views and for their attacks on Palestinians, some of them killed Palestinians. They had long track records with the police. Today, they’re a third of the Israeli Parliament.

    The confluence of those ideologies becoming so mainstream that they entered the Parliament to such an extent with our prime minister’s absolute dedication to not go to jail for his corruption means that there’s a lot of very powerful people whose interest is to go deeper into war. And it’s not just on the Israeli side.

    The last year has been shocking, unbelievable. The level of mourning that we are constantly in is unparalleled in our history, with the exception of, I think, maybe for Israelis, the time before the state was created.

    As a human being, I’m speechless. The idea that after a year of almost constant bombardment and attack on Gaza, the Israeli government is now escalating into Lebanon, and escalating the very fragile stalemate with Ira is horrifying. It’s terrifying. There’s no other words for it.

    Marc Steiner:  I understand what you said completely. I am not Israeli, but I feel the same. Watching this is just emotionally overwhelming.

    And politically, the question, where do you think this goes? Where do you think this takes us? You have this very right-wing Israeli government with a huge religious fundamentalist faction in the government pushing these words you were just describing. It’s not so different, in some ways, on the Palestinian side with Hamas.

    When you grew up Jewish, Masada is one of the things you talk about, when the Jews all committed suicide and the war that killed the Jews. And it feels like we are collectively, in Israel, committing that same suicide while we’re destroying everything around us.

    Lia Tarachansky:  I don’t know what happened in Masada. I only know the story of the people who got to tell the story, but we don’t know what happened there.

    Marc Steiner:  No, not really. Right.

    Lia Tarachansky:  I can tell you Israelis don’t want to commit suicide. The vast majority of Israelis don’t want what is happening, but they perceive this as the way to survive. Oct. 7 was a shocking event for Israelis. And while you’re reading the American and European news, we’re reading the Hebrew news. And at every war, Israelis don’t have coverage of what’s going on in Gaza, and they don’t really know.

    And you can argue, well, they should know. But unfortunately, these kind of echo chambers that we are siloed in mean that we don’t listen across ethnicities, across nations, across political ideas, and certainly not across war.

    And so, as shocking as it is, the vast majority of Israelis don’t know what’s going on in Gaza, don’t understand, exactly, the impact of what is going on in Lebanon, a country that was already devastated by so many challenges, to now drag the country into this. Just like the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Lebanese, the average Israeli doesn’t want war, but there are political forces a lot stronger than us.

    And with an entire country built on military service and on very censored media coverage and a very censored education in schools, this is what you get.

    Marc Steiner:  Is it censorship? Is it the government? The military says, no, you can’t print this? Is it that the Israeli press doesn’t want to print it? I mean, why is that happening?

    Lia Tarachansky:  Well, certainly the Israeli government is very deeply involved in what is covered in the Israeli press through a network of gag orders. There’s very little that is allowed to be printed in the Israeli press about how the war is actually going on.

    The truth is that the Israeli war in Gaza has been a failure for the Israeli military, which is shocking considering how powerful the Israeli military is, how many weapons it has, and how much surveillance it has of Gaza. It’s still not succeeding because the objective that is stated to the Israeli public is an unachievable objective.

    And so there is no way to destroy Hamas. There’s no way to destroy a political party. The only thing that brutality is going to cause is more brutality. And so the war as presented to the Israeli public is very curated. The Israeli public very rarely looks at international press.

    And anyway, the international press is not really covering what’s going on in Gaza anymore. They talk about casualties and they talk about access to water and food, but they don’t have people on the ground. And Palestinian journalists, so many of them have been killed that there’s very little accurate information coming out.

    So yeah, there’s a lot of official censorship on behalf of the Israeli government, both through the military censor and through the gag orders. There’s even more self-censorship on behalf of Israeli journalists that are, at the end of the day, Israelis, and are keenly aware of the fact that their future as journalists is dependent on them not covering certain things.

    The vast majority of Israeli journalists don’t speak Arabic, don’t have contacts in Gaza. Khalil Abu Yahia who was a person who spoke quite a bit and was interviewed quite a bit was killed very shortly after Oct. 7. So many journalists have been killed that even if you had contacts, which most journalists don’t, there’s a good chance that they didn’t make it.

    So it’s a mess. There’s no other way of putting it. It’s a complete mess, and it’s a train wreck that’s being driven by drunk and self-obsessed narcissists. And we are being dragged into this train wreck with them.

    Marc Steiner:  We, being the entire world, or we being… Who’s the we?

    Lia Tarachansky:  I mean, obviously, I’m looking at my community.

    Marc Steiner:  Yes, right, right.

    Lia Tarachansky:  But it’s not just Israelis and Palestinians, and Lebanese and Iranians, it’s also now the entire region. The whole world is involved in arming and profiting from this fight. So you can say you as Americans are, I would say, even more implicated than Israelis and what’s going on. And if you were to stand up to your government, this war would end tomorrow. But when you have these kinds of periodic genocides, you lose your motivation for political action, and this is the result of it.

    Marc Steiner:  What you just said I think is really critical, which is that the American government is key to this. It’s probably the only force on the earth at this moment that can stop the war.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Yes. Well, the American government has always been lukewarm on stopping Israeli wars.

    Marc Steiner:  It’s true. Now, we’re in the midst of an election, which makes it even more difficult because people are afraid to take a position because they’re afraid to lose the election. So all that is complicating what’s happening at the moment.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Completely, yes.

    Marc Steiner:  The reason I was looking forward to talking to you is because I know all the things you’ve written, all the things that you’ve produced, this film, you have a deep sense of the place and what’s going on. And I think that what you’re saying now is that what we’re witnessing now in Gaza, in Israel, the attack in Lebanon, this could really affect the entire planet very shortly if it’s not stopped.

    Lia Tarachansky:  It is affecting the entire planet right now. But I think that when you become complacent, maybe you need a gun in your face until you actually open your eyes.

    Marc Steiner:  Yes. I mean, it’s true. People don’t feel that yet.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Oct. 7 was a wake-up call. An act of such brutality has a way of clarifying things. Gaza has been an open-air prison for many, many years. And in the minds of most Israelis, it is someplace over there where we don’t talk about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bunch of terrorists. Out of sight, out of mind.

    When Oct. 7 happened, the brutality of Oct. 7 breached those mechanisms of denial in a way that I don’t know if anything else could have. So call this our wake-up call. And when you have a system that is so brutal like the Israeli occupation, that’s what you get. This is what you get.

    Marc Steiner:  Is there any light? Is there any hope? Is there any way this ends? I mean, it seems to me that the United States has to step in on some level to make it happen. The last, but I don’t know how that… Go ahead. I’m sorry.

    Lia Tarachansky:  And Kamala Harris will not get involved. She can’t afford in her first months and years of leadership to get involved. It’s not going to happen. Not with your American current political system.

    Marc Steiner:  I mean, it just seems to me that however this ends in the next six months to a year, however long it is, that this is a critical turning point for the Middle East, for Europe, for the United States.

    Lia Tarachansky:  The only way this can end is if through, even pure lies, you can convince Israelis that they have won and that they are safe. Like any small country, especially a country that’s been through so many wars and that has a self-narrative of being a victim of history, you have to act in extremely brutal ways in order to fight overwhelming enemies. We know this from basic military strategy.

    Why does Daesh or ISIS, as you call it, why do they behead people? Because you have to appear to your enemy to be completely crazy and brutal to a point that they will not screw with you because you are actually much more powerless than you portray yourself.

    Israeli military, the Israeli policy towards Palestinians has always been to appear as brutal and insane and genocidal as you can so that everyone assumes that you’ll do whatever it takes to the end. That’s the military strategy if you are surrounded by Lebanon, and Syria, and Jordan, and Egypt, and we’ve had wars with all of them. And of course, Oct. 7 is just the latest in many, many, many decades of Palestinian resistance, or what Israelis would call attacks on civilians.

    And in that kind of environment, your only option is to appear more crazy, more brutal, more willing to kill than the next guy. If you make Israelis feel or appear as though they have somehow succeeded in achieving some sense of safety, you can end this war tomorrow. But I think that the vast majority of people are either busy in reactionist condemnation that may be justified, but doesn’t lead to much on the ground. No real change on the ground or with the program.

    So we’re seeing little bits here and there. In Canada, we did a little bit of an arms embargo, but it’s only partial, and it’s not a real arms embargo. The contemporary arms market is incredibly complex and decentralized, and so you would have to get basically the entire world on board to end it.

    Marc Steiner:  Hearing both your deep understanding of the situation politically and historically, and also the pain I hear in your voice at the same time talking about where we are. I had a conversation the other day with a Palestinian who said in our conversation, all the Israelis have to leave for this to be over.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Yeah. There’s a very messy understanding of decolonization and anti-colonialism, in a lot of the pro-Palestinian left, unfortunately. There’s a very thin understanding of Israel and Israeli society. Where are the Israelis going to go?

    Half the Israelis are descendants of refugees from the Arab world and the Muslim world. I don’t see Algerians and Egyptians and Iraqis offering the descendants of Jewish refugees their properties back. I don’t see the Moroccan government offering citizenship to Moroccan Jews. Not that they would go back at this point. A third of us, or sorry, excuse me, 20% of Israeli Jews are Soviet refugees, soviet immigrants.

    Marc Steiner:  Like your family.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Yeah. We came to Israel, we didn’t even have status because we fled the Soviet Union. We have nowhere to go back to. What, am I going to go back to the middle of another war in Ukraine?

    The vast majority of us have nowhere else to go. And when you corner someone, they fight by any means necessary. The Ashkenazi elites that have roots in the founding fathers and all that shit, they have another citizenship. They could go to Germany. They could go to Portugal. They could go elsewhere. I got very lucky. I ended up in Canada and I have options. But the vast majority of Jews in Israel don’t have those options, don’t have another home to go to.

    The history of decolonization has to do with a metropole, a European country that goes into another country, colonizes, and sends its settlers to that country to take over.

    This is a different story with Israel. I’m not saying settler colonialism is not a major part of what led to the current fight. Absolutely it is. But there’s many different things as well. There is no metropole. The people that founded the state may have had some colonial ideas, but the people who made up the bulk of the state are refugees.

    This is the reality. We are not going to solve this by living in the what-if world of 1947 of what if we abandon Zionism? What if we think about decolonization? Okay, Israel exists. This is where we are. Israel exists. Israel has existed for four generations. There is now an Israeli culture, a Hebrew language that’s spoken. There’s a way of life. It is. Deal with the reality as is.

    You want all the Israelis to go somewhere else? [Inaudible], give them a piece of whatever other place, and then we can do the intellectual and cultural and psychological war of convincing them. That’s not going to happen. So in the reality of today, what do we do to end this? This is the only question we should be thinking about.

    Marc Steiner:  So before we close out here, what you just said, just to ponder what you just said, how do we end this? It makes me think of what happened that I covered intensely in South Africa. At the end of Apartheid, everybody stayed in South Africa. Very few people left.

    Lia Tarachansky:  As they succeeded to convince the white people that the end of Apartheid will not bring about their media death, [inaudible] did in other parts of Africa. In Zimbabwe, after the revolution, there was a systemic killing of white settlers. We can sit here and debate the morality of decolonization until the cows come home but you’re not going to create change until you make people feel safe, until you make them understand. You are in the Middle East, Israelis. Be part of the Middle East.

    Marc Steiner:  It feels intractable, but I can’t believe it is intractable, that there’s got to be…

    Lia Tarachansky:  Well, people like us, Marc, don’t have the luxury of hopelessness.

    Marc Steiner:  [Laughs] it’s true. It’s true. But people like us, even inside the Jewish world, that group is growing.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Sure. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re the only ones who are going to be able to convince the Israelis that they are safe.

    Marc Steiner:  To me, it’s always deeply important to talk with you about these things because you have a deep analysis laced with serious passion about what’s going on at the moment. And I think it needs to be heard, which is one of the reasons I called you and said, would you come on today? Because I think you need to be heard.

    Lia Tarachansky:  I feel like I have nothing to say anymore. Those words that I wrote a year ago when we still thought that Vivian Silver was alive, and before I knew the Hayim Katsman was dead, and before we knew that Haya Bokchev was dead, and before Khalil Abu Yahia was dead, those words, I have nothing left to say. There’s nothing to be said. It is so big. The level of destruction and violence and brutality and cruelty is so enormous.

    The fact that tens of thousands of Israelis in the middle of a war are still protesting this corrupt government is a miracle. The fact that people still go out on the streets in Germany where it’s essentially illegal to be pro-Palestinian at this point, it’s… You’re seeing bravery in moments like these, and we need to hold each other up in these moments of uncertainty because people like us don’t have the luxury of hopelessness.

    But if you want a kernel of hope, and I’m very cautious of optimism. As a political journalist, I think optimism is a very dangerous thing to have. Optimism is an emotion. Optimism is a feeling. Optimism is an outlook on life. And it’s destructive in situations like these where we are struggling so hard to see the reality.

    Because let’s not fool ourselves, this war is going on because we are not seeing reality, because we are not tackling our denials and because we are not allowing ourselves to see. So hope, to me, is a different animal. Hope is a set of actions. You don’t hope out of optimism, you hope out of necessity.

    And there’s this incredible Ugandan scholar, world-class scholar, Mahmood Mamdani. And he’s a scholar also, amongst other things, of colonialism. He wrote a remarkable book called Neither [Settler nor Native].

    Marc Steiner:  Called what?

    Lia Tarachansky:  Neither [Settler nor Native]. And this is the latest book in many, many, many years. He was in Rwanda and he was in South Africa in 1984. And he was covering and looking at all these peace initiatives in Rwanda about reconciliation in 1984. And in 1984, it looked like South Africa was going to descend into total civil war and chaos, and it looked like Rwanda was moving towards [crosstalk].

    Marc Steiner:  Right.

    Lia Tarachansky:  And as we know, 10 years later in 1994, there was a genocidal civil war in Rwanda that had colonial roots that left so many people dead, and South Africa ended Apartheid.

    So the way things look does not often have bearing on the future. Many, many, many people have tried to predict what’s going to go on in Israel and Palestine, and then something happens and it all goes sideways. All of us were saying the escalation with Iran is going to lead to a nuclear war, nuclear winter. And then when it actually led to escalation to the point where Iran and Israel were lobbing weapons at each other, it led to nothing because there are other factors at play, and we as outsiders to those factors can only see a small fraction of the surface.

    So you don’t know what the impact of your work is, you don’t know how you are connected to other people, and you don’t know what is actually happening on the ground unless you’re fighting it on the ground.

    So considering our limited access, I think, just do what you can do that you can live with. I can’t ignore what’s going on. I feel a deep responsibility to be involved, to be informed, to sponsor refugees to Canada out of this place, to do anything that is going to make this even a tiny little fraction better. And I know that you do the same, and I hope that your audience does too.

    Marc Steiner:  Lia Tarachansky, A, let me just, again, thank you for everything you do, and I appreciate you taking the time today. I really thought this was a very important conversation, and a very difficult one. And I want to thank you for being willing to take the time and joining us here today at The Real News on The Marc Steiner Show. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

    Lia Tarachansky:  Thanks, Marc.

    Marc Steiner:  Once again, thank you to Lia Tarachansky for joining us today. And thank you to all of you for listening. And thanks to Dave Hebden for running and editing the program, our producer, Rosette Sewali, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Israel colonial settlers and Knesset members celebrated on social media the de facto deportation of two German citizens, who were imprisoned by the Israeli authorities, from the occupied Palestinian territories to Jordan on Sunday 6 October.

    Israel: now deporting peace activists

    Itamar Ben Gvir and Tzvi Sukot posted about the expulsion of German activists as an achievement for their special task force and governmental committee, which was created to deal with what they call “dangerous anarchists” in the West Bank.

    Israel’s criminal right-wing government uses the term “anarchists” to refer to all Israeli and international human rights defenders who are supporting Palestinians living under illegal occupation in the West Bank.

    According to eyewitnesses, on the morning of 2 October, the two activists were arbitrarily arrested by Israeli forces in Masafer Yatta (South Hebron Hills) as they accompanied a Palestinian farmer to his garden in the village of Tuwani.

    The Palestinian farmer they were accompanying faces daily harassment, attacks, and invasions of his private land by Israeli settlers and occupation forces, which all make it difficult for him to access his land, to cultivate it, and even to remain in his home.

    Police claimed in court that the activists had entered a settlement, confronted a soldier and disturbed him in fulfilling his duty. These claims contradict video footage of the arrest.

    The onslaught of harassment against Palestinian residents of the region of Masafer Yatta extends beyond Tuwani. Every village in the area is affected.

    Settler colonialism in action

    In the village of Zanuta in this same region, residents have been forcibly displaced multiple times despite a court ruling in their favor. Residents of Um Durit have had their livestock and property stolen and destroyed, and their land abused by settlers.

    Last July, around 200 settlers launched a coordinated attack in which they destroyed vehicles, burned fruit trees and beat up residents in Khalet Al Daba’a and Um Fagarah. In the past year, at least 19 Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank have been forcefully displaced by Israel settlers with the support of the Israeli occupation forces.

    The activists were transferred to the central unit in the occupied West Bank near the Malleh Adumim colonial settlement. The police illegally broke into the phone of one of the activists and questioned them about photos on their phones of signs and stickers condemning the genocide in Gaza and supporting Palestinian rights.

    The police alleged that this proved that they supported terror and were terrorists. They were also questioned on whether they knew about the International Solidarity movement (ISM), and were shown a presentation on the organisation with pictures of Israelis and internationals and asked if they knew them.

    The activists were taken to court and accused of three offenses: disturbing a police officer/soldier performing his responsibilities, membership in an illegal association, and “sympathising and identifying with a terror organisation”.

    According to the police, the illegal association they are members of is ISM, which they claimed has been designated as forbidden to work in Israel and the West Bank.

    Does Israel view ISM as a terror group or not?

    It is important to note that while many respectable human rights organisations have been designated as terror organisations by Israel, the ISM has not yet been designated as forbidden, nor has any international ISM activist ever been indicted and charged with a crime in Israeli courts.

    The German citizens were imprisoned in harsh conditions from Wednesday to Sunday and then given the option of leaving through the King Hussein bridge, and they are now in Jordan.

    For similar vague and unsubstantiated accusations, Palestinians are frequently arrested and tortured in the West Bank, and in Gaza the accused are murdered along with their families.

    This most recent set of arrests is part of the ongoing barrage of harassment by Israeli settlers and soldiers of Palestinians and of human rights activists in area, and comes in the wake of the murder of ISM volunteer Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in the village of Beita during a protest against settlement expansion on the village’s land.

    Featured image supplied

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • On 8 October, the New York Jets fired head coach Robert Saleh. This came only two days after he was seen sporting the flag of Lebanon attached to his team hoody:

    According to NBC Sports, security escorted him out of the building. Importantly, this didn’t happen last time the Jets fired their head coach:

    Trumps pal

    The owner of the Jets – Woody Johnson – previously served as the US ambassador the United Kingdom during the Trump administration. He is also an heir to his family business, Johnson & Johnson. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, his net worth is an estimated $8.77bn. The Senate also investigated him in 2006 over his sketchy tax arrangements:

    According to CNN, back in 2020 the State Department’s watchdog investigated Johnson after allegations that he made both racist and sexist comments to staff.

    Whilst many online are arguing that the Jets fired Saleh due to their recent results – having won just two out of five recent games, it is very uncommon for teams to fire NFL coaches mid-season. According to The Athletic, Johnson has never fired a coach mid-season before now:

    Coincidence?

    Saleh was the NFL’s first Muslim, Lebanese head coach. Last season he also wore Lebanon’s flag as part of the NFL’s heritage program. This encouraged players and coaching staff to wear flags from their countries of origin on helmets and jackets. Notably though, this weekend was the first time Saleh had worn the flag since Israel started indiscriminately bombing Lebanon. Still sounding like a coincidence?

    Back in 2011, Johnson visited Israel with former Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. During the visit, they met with Benjamin Netanyahu – Israeli prime minister and genocidal maniac. They also visited an illegal Israeli settlement. Clearly, now Israel are carpet bombing Lebanon as well as Gaza – Saleh’s Lebanese flag became a problem for him:

    Of course, Saleh isn’t the first person showing solidarity with a country Israel is ruthlessly bombing who has lost a job. Multiple corporations have fired, or withdrawn job offers to, people who’ve expressed support for Palestine whilst Israel has mounted its genocidal assault in Gaza.

    Sports professionals – as with any employees – should be able to mark their heritage, and their solidarity with countries in which Israel is committing murderous atrocities. They should be able to do so without fear of retribution.

    Had Saleh adorned the Israel flag – a country which is ethnically cleansing Palestinians and now Lebanese people –  I very much doubt he would be in the same position.

    Feature image via Mail News/Youtube 

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A new documentary from Al Jazeera takes a look at evidence of war crimes in Gaza in the form of social media posted by Israeli soldiers recording and celebrating their own attacks on Palestinians. We play excerpts from the film Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, now available online, and speak to two of the journalists involved in its production, director Richard Sanders and Gaza-based…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This story was originally published by In These Times on Oct. 7, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

    I was in Bellingham, Washington, when the attacks on Israel began a year ago on October 7. 

    I had just finished giving a talk on the future of Gaza as part of a speaking tour for the book Light in Gaza, which was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. During the talk, I stressed the need to connect Gaza, which has been under Israeli siege for 17 years, to the outside world. 

    I noted that keeping Palestinians in cages is not sustainable — it will, one day, lead to an explosion. 

    I noted that keeping Palestinians in cages is not sustainable—it will, one day, lead to an explosion.

    Although I grew up in Gaza and lived through many Israeli escalations — with some members of my family killed because of the occupation and siege — I never imagined an attack on the scale of October 7 could happen. 

    I thought something similar to the Great March of Return in 2018 would reoccur in Gaza, a protest Israel also crushed, killing hundreds of Palestinians and injuring more than 36,000 others. The Great March of Return started when Palestinian refugees gathered at the Gaza border and demanded their return by erecting tents there.

    When I read the news, I could not believe my eyes. An attack at such scale had never happened before. 

    It took me a few days to accept that an attack of this magnitude had taken place. I was deeply concerned in my heart. My first comment to my friends when I learned of the attack was that Israel would level Gaza to the ground.

    This assessment was based on my experiences in Gaza and the brutality of the Israeli war machine toward Palestinians. I was so worried about my family and friends. Knowing Gaza would never be the same again occupied my mind.

    Gaza has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, but to see an entire area of 2.3 million people destroyed, its people dehumanized and then starved to death, was something I was never prepared for.

    Boys crowd together under an umbrella as they sit by the rubble of a collapsed building in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on October 1, 2024. Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images

    In one year, Israel has destroyed some 85% of Gaza’s homes, almost all of Gaza’s hospitals and displaced some 1.9 million Palestinians. All the universities in Gaza have been deliberately destroyed by the Israeli army, and most of the schools, now converted into shelters, have either been destroyed or damaged.

    To see an entire area of 2.3 million people destroyed, its people dehumanized and then starved to death, was something I was never prepared for.

    I watched, feeling helpless, my own family be displaced. I read the names of my childhood friends, schoolmates and neighbors on the news being killed. Death became so normalized that Palestinians began to feel numb about the news of their loved ones being killed or stuck under the rubble.

    I saw a total of 30 members of my extended family killed. My friend Hassan Al-Najjar, who attended the same primary school, was also killed along with his family in an Israeli air strike. Mahmoud Shukur, the younger brother of my friend Ayman, who was killed by the Israeli army in 2014, was pulled from under the rubble of their house. His cousin was killed, his mother injured. Mahmoud himself was disabled and could not walk after being injured at a construction site in 2019.

    I watched, feeling helpless, my own family be displaced. I read the names of my childhood friends, schoolmates and neighbors on the news being killed. Death became so normalized that Palestinians began to feel numb about the news of their loved ones being killed or stuck under the rubble.

    I read the news that my neighbor Samer Abu Yousef had been killed by an Israeli shell north of Al-Nuseirat refugee camp, which is now a buffer zone after Israel built the Netzarim Corridor to divide Gaza into north and south and prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their destroyed homes in the north.

    In November, my friend Raed Qaddoura, who had a graduate degree in political science from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, was killed along with 53 members of his family. Raed’s four children were killed in the air strike, including his two-week-old twins, whose mother gave birth to them after a caesarean section without anesthesia at the Kamal Edwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

    A boy reacts as he sits by the shrouded bodies of children killed in overnight Israeli bombardment, at the Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City on October 2, 2024. Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images

    Refaat Alareer, Gaza’s well-known storyteller and teacher, wrote to me to say that he was ​“shocked” that Raed had been killed along with his family. A few weeks later, on December 6, Refaat was killed in another Israeli air strike in Gaza. His writings and poetry, especially his poem ​“If I Must Die,” became an inspiration for so many people.

    “If I Must Die” went viral, as it served his last words to the world that waited for his updates. It spoke to all people of the need to uplift Palestinian voices and to tell their stories.

    Now, I try to preserve the legacy of Refaat, my mentor and close friend. I edited a book that collects his writings titled If I Must Die: Poetry & Prose which will be released on December 6.

    To honor Refaat’s legacy too, the American Friends Service Committee where I work, and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at the Universiti Malaya in Malaysia collaborated to publish 27 stories of displaced people in Gaza.

    I feel Refaat watching us and reading these stories, feeling proud that his legacy of storytelling continues by his students.

    One of the special things about Refaat is that he continued to look after his students and their families if the students left Gaza. I was one of these students. 

    When my father fell ill, Refaat put me in touch with a doctor who diagnosed my father’s exact condition. Due to the lack of medicine in Gaza, and despite my attempts to send medicine, my father died of a stroke on May 21. He is one of thousands of Palestinian elders who lost their lives in the war. 

    An aerial view shows the destruction caused by Israeli strikes in Wadi Gaza, in the central Gaza Strip, on November 28, 2023. Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images

    I tried to evacuate my father from Gaza, but the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem told us his name was not approved for travel. My father loved Gaza, and three months before he died, told me he wanted to ​“die in Gaza.” It was hard for my father to leave Gaza, a place he lived in for 67 years and start a new life elsewhere. My father didn’t want to live as a stranger in a land foreign to him and he wanted to end his life where it started, in Gaza.

    The survivor guilt haunts Gazans wherever they go, we simply can’t forget about Gaza because we know the amount of injustice taking place there—and this feels exactly true, a year after Israel began its genocide in Gaza—trying to erase us.

    Now, a year after October 7, 2023, my thoughts are divided between my own family in Turkey, my family in Gaza, and my mother and brother who were evacuated from Gaza and now live in Turkey. 

    I have to care for my family here, take my brother and mother to their medical appointments, and make sure they feel fine and settled.

    Palestinians in Gaza have always said Gaza will not leave us even if we leave it. 

    The survivor guilt haunts Gazans wherever they go, we simply can’t forget about Gaza because we know the amount of injustice taking place there — and this feels exactly true, a year after Israel began its genocide in Gaza — trying to erase us.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • On 6 October, the Observer published an article by author Howard Jacobson. In it, he essentially smeared as antisemites anyone who dares to criticise Israel’s murder of almost 17,000 children in Gaza in the last year. Because in doing so, he suggested, we risk bringing up the horrific ‘blood libel’ myth which defamed Jewish people many centuries ago.

    Two days later, Turn Left Media shared an open letter slamming the Observer for publishing Jacobson’s piece. It insists on making a clear distinction between criticism of Israel’s horrific actions – which journalists have documented thoroughly – and the “malicious and lethal fiction” of blood libel accusations from the past. It adds:

    Jacobson effortlessly conflates the savagery of the Israeli state with Jews. This is an old anti-Semitic Zionist trick. No one is blaming Jews for what Israel is doing bar Jacobson himself. It is the State of Israel and its partners in crime, Joe Biden’s Administration, that has enabled the genocide of Gaza’s children.

    Jacobson’s wild arguments for Israel in the Observer

    The author argued in the Observer that “the myth of ‘blood libel’ persists in the media coverage of Gaza violence”. He seemed visibly tired of having his faith in the Israel apartheid state tested, lamenting that:

    night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught.

    And with no evidence, he suggests that, “for many, writing or marching against Israeli action”, this invokes “the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons”. He adds:

    Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. 

    Some such people may possibly make that connection, of course, but we have certainly never met them. So where he gets his “many” figure from is anyone’s guess.

    Maybe he hasn’t seen the many Jewish people regularly protesting against the genocide. Maybe he needs to get out more. But his imagination has conjured up the idea that people opposing Israel’s war crimes are somehow driven by antisemitism rather than anger at the murder of thousands of civilians.

    “Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation”, he says, “hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round”. And he seems to accuse journalists of “dipping into the communal pile of prejudice and superstition and letting it pepper up our reports” by sharing the horrors the colonial state has been inflicting on occupied Gaza.

    He also absurdly suggests Ukraine didn’t get enough media coverage in comparison, as if the media hadn’t just spent many, many months obsessing over Ukraine before Israel began its crimes of a much greater magnitude.

    While we don’t want to repeat his exact words, Jacobson also argued that what we’ve been seeing in Gaza will ‘confirm the conviction’ of antisemites.

    ‘He doesn’t dispute the deaths. He just grants them no importance.’

    Around a week into Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza back in October 2023, Jacobson wrote another piece in the Guardian. In it, he spoke about Gazans by saying “it’s very likely that they taught their children from the cradle to despise all Jews” – with no evidence. And on Israel, he said “we have to fight to the death for its survival”.

    His warped, ignorant views on Palestine and his fervent support for Israeli colonialism were already crystal clear back then. And they had been for years before that too. Because he consistently took part in the cynical media attempts to paint longstanding anti-racist campaigner and peace-prize-winner Jeremy Corbyn as a racist.

    As Jewdas responded to the 2024 article:

    It is true that Israel’s killed thousands of Palestinian children. Jacobson does not dispute this. He just grants it no importance.

    If you disagree with the Observer giving him a platform to offensively conflate Jewish people with the state of Israel while smearing anti-genocide campaigners as antisemites, you can sign the open letter here.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel intensified its shelling of northern Gaza and closed roads, preventing the delivery of aid, the war-torn Palestinian territory’s civil defence agency said Wednesday 9 October. News is just breaking of the IDF bombing a hospital courtyard in Jabalia, killing 16 people. Sadly, stories like this fail to make headlines, anymore – as they have become so commonplace.

    Israel: targetting refugees in Jabalia once again

    The Israel army, which said it surrounded Jabalia in northern Gaza at the weekend, issued new evacuation demands on Tuesday 8 October.

    “The shelling is intensifying, targeting civilians and their homes, causing significant fear and terror among the residents,” said Ahmad al-Kahlut, the agency’s director in north Gaza.

    The director said the Israeli army also was targeting the northern towns of Beit Lahia and Beit Hanun along with Jabalia.

    “Roads have been closed, and there has been a continuous siege for the fourth consecutive day, with no supplies entering the North Gaza Governorate,” Kahlut said.

    According to the director, “a large number” of people died in northern Gaza during the fighting.

    But he said counting the casualties had been complicated by the “difficulty of recovery and access to all areas”.

    As the Canary went to press, news emerged of another potential Israeli war crime. The Palestinian Red Crescent said its teams had transported 16 dead from the Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital in Jabalia, where displaced Gazans had sought shelter:

    Barely any hospitals operational

    The civil defence’s Kahlut said his agency had been receiving calls for help from various parts of northern Gaza, but staff had been unable to enter these areas for security reasons.

    “So far, Kamal Adwan Hospital is still operational and is dealing with the injuries that the teams can recover,” he said, referring to a hospital in Beit Lahia.

    Hisham Abu Aoun, head of the intensive care unit for the Friends of the Patient Hospital, said at least six children were evacuated to his hospital in Gaza City.

    Amal Nasr, a resident of Jabalia, said her daughter Dana and husband Rami were both injured by gunfire while fleeing the area.

    “My daughter Dana was shot in the neck, and my husband was shot in his leg by the occupation forces”, she said, adding her daughter was taken to a Gaza City hospital and was now in stable condition.

    “I was injured while we were leaving our house. I was shot in the neck and started to bleed”, Dana Nasr told AFP from the Al-Ahli Hospital. “There were many injured people in the streets of Jabalia,” she added.

    Gaza’s hospitals are struggling with limited supplies.

    The health ministry appealed Tuesday for international help, warning fuel shortages could force hospitals to close. The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said “intensified military operations” in northern Gaza forced it to halt services. This included the evacuation of seven UNRWA schools used as shelters by displaced Gazans.

    Featured image via the Canary

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By The Canary

  • Two supporters of Youth Demand have just pasted a photo of a Gazan mother and child over a Picasso masterpiece at the National Gallery. It was to demand a two-way arms embargo on Israel over its continued genocide in Gaza and assaults on, and war crimes in, other Middle Eastern countries.

    Youth Demand: taking action over Israel via Picasso

    At just before 12:00, the pair walked into room 43 at the National Gallery and plastered a photograph of a Gazan mother clutching her child over the protective glass cover of Pablo Picasso’s 1901 painting Motherhood (La Maternité), before pouring red paint on the gallery floor.

    Youth Demand is calling for a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for the new UK government to halt all new oil and gas licences granted since 2021.

    The image used over Picasso was taken by Palestinian journalist Ali Jadallah and shows a distressed and bloodied pair, coated in debris. His caption for it reads: “A mom holds [her] injured child after an Israeli attack, as Israeli airstrikes continue on twelfth day, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City”:

    Israeli bombing raids in Palestine have killed at least 41,870 people, including 16,765 children, in the last year and since the photograph was taken in 2023, Al-Shifa hospital has been completely destroyed by the IDF.

    Arms embargo NOW

    One of those taking action today with the Picasso painting was Jai Halai, 23, an NHS worker from London who said:

    I’m taking action with Youth Demand because at this point it’s been over one year of seeing my colleagues in the healthcare field decimated. Decimated by bombs, by bullets and by having to operate, with no medical equipment, on starved children.

    We need a two way arms embargo on Israel now; 87% of the British public want this and never before have they been more disillusioned with our Government and political class who do not represent us. We need a revolution in our democracy.

    Direct action is what gave us our rights and is the only way to move us towards proper justice. Civil resistance is our duty as young people: to defend those without a voice today and to defend our futures. It’s time to take to the streets; bring on the revolution.

    Also taking action today was Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 21, a Politics and International Relations student at Greenwich, London who said:

    I’m taking action because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza. I want the world to know this isn’t in the jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine. When Keir Starmer says Britain stands with Israel he’s wrong. We know very well that this is a genocide, not “self defense” and we as the people of Britain say enough is enough.

    Around 2,000 people in Lebanon of all ages have also been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the last year, on top of the death toll in Gaza and the West Bank. Missiles have also been launched at Iran on numerous occasions.

    Stop Israel

    A Youth Demand spokesperson said of the Picasso action:

    Our government is arming Israel to carry out a genocide against Palestinians and killing without restrain in Lebanon. It can’t be all carrots and no sticks: a two-way arms embargo is the least Britain can do to stop displacement, destruction and death! Young people will continue to resist genocide-as-usual, sign up at youthdemand.org.

    Featured image and video via Youth Demand

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • School children, university and college students, teachers, professors, and parents, babies, toddlers, and supporters – including Queers for Palestine solidarity group – will gather outside Elbit Systems UK to stand with the people of Palestine and Lebanon and against Israel’s ongoing genocide. It’s the latest School Strike for Palestine.

    The strike will take place from 10am-12pm on Thursday 10 October 2024 outside Elbit’s Aztec West office in Bristol.

    School Strike for Palestine

    Marking a year of Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza as well as its recent and ongoing bombardment of Lebanon, there will be speeches, songs, poems, and children’s activities. Many children and young people will return to their school or university for afternoon classes.

    School Strike for Palestine is a collective of students, campaigners, and parents, supported by Stop the War coalition. The school and university strike has been called as part of a national day of action where students and employees will walk out of their schools and workplaces in solidarity with people in Palestine and Lebanon. Other cities involved include London and Glasgow.

    This school strike will be the eighth in Bristol since last November, previously held outside Bristol City Council offices. Each walk-out has all called for a ceasefire and an end to the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank. For the first time the action is being held outside Elbit UK’s headquarters.

    Missing school and university to protest for Palestine and Lebanon at the site of an Israeli arms company is an empowering action for children and young people to get involved in when so many feel helpless, angry and fearful at what they are seeing.

    At previous school strikes young speakers have spoken of Britain’s complicity, their disillusionment with politicians, and their solidarity with Palestinian children.

    Shutting down Elbit in Bristol

    Elbit Systems UK is the British arm of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. Striking outside its national headquarters is one of the most tangible ways to voice discontent with Bristol and Britain’s role in Israel’s crimes against humanity. The company manufactures weapons marketed as ‘battle-proven’ on Palestinians.

    It produces some 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, among other weapons that have been used to kill thousands of people in Gaza this year alone, as well as in previous bombardments of the Strip.

    Elbit UK also has a weapons factory in nearby Filton, opened in July 2023 by Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotevely, accompanied by former Conservative MP for Filton and Bradley Stoke Jack Lopresti. The British government continues to award contracts to the company and grant it export licences for the selling of weapons to Israel.

    Both the company headquarters and factory are common sites of direct action and protest in Bristol. Palestine Action and other activists have long made the demand to Shut Elbit Down. Ten activists, dubbed the Filton10, were jailed for causing damage to the Filton factory in August.

    Elbit UK headquarters and factory are located near other companies that manufacture parts for weapons supplied to Israel, such as Aerospace and Rolls Royce, with both the constituency’s previous MP and the current Labour MP Claire Hazelgrove supportive of the industry. A secondary school is five minutes walk away from Elbit UK’s headquarters.

    Conservative estimates suggest 42,000 people, including over 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since 7th October 2023, the true figure is thought to be far higher and does not include the thousands trapped in the rubble.

    Israel’s genocidal assaults continue

    Before 7 October, Gaza’s two million strong population had been living under a land, sea and air blockade imposed by Israeli forces since 2007. This year Palestinians marked 76 years since the nakba (catastrophe) – the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their land to make way for the settler-colonial state of Israel.

    This year has also marked 57 years of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, since 1967. Palestinian citizens within the state of Israel (sometimes referred to as historical Palestine or 1948 Palestine) are routinely treated as second class citizens and denied many rights on the grounds of their nationality.

    On 17 and 18 September, Israel drastically escalated its conflict with Lebanese armed resistance group Hezbollah by concealing explosives in pagers meant for Hezbollah members, and on 23 September began its bombing campaign in the country.

    So far some 2,000 Lebanese people have been killed. That number is expected to rise as Israel has not agreed to a ceasefire. According to Israel’s Jerusalem Post, ‘bunker-busting bombs’ made by Elbit (MPR-500) were used by the Israeli Air Force on 27 September to bomb Hezbollah’s headquarters in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut, as well as targeting ‘nearby missile launch sites’.

    School Strike for Palestine: the demands

    The group Bristol School Strike for Palestine said in a statement that its demands were:

    To shut Elbit down. Somerset Council leased the building to Elbit until August, when it then sold it to an unknown buyer for an unknown sum of money. That Somerset Council reveal the name of the new owner and that they evict Elbit immediately.

    That Bristol, Somerset and South Gloucestershire councils end their complicity in the Gaza genocide and Lebanon invasion by ending the lease on any property hosting weapons makers, and that they make the South West a hostile place for weapons dealers and arms fairs.

    That the British government halt all arms sales to Israel.

    An immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.

    An end to targeting children in airstrikes and sniper fire in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

    An end to censoring Palestine voices and Palestine solidarity in all academic institutions.

    Featured image supplied

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • On 6 October, the BBC published new data from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL). This suggested that antisemitism reached record highs in the US. But in true BBC fashion, its headline is misleading.

    BBC antisemitism article: muddying the waters

    Towards the end of the article it stated that the figures also include anti-Zionism – which we all know is not the same as antisemitism. Similarly, data the BBC published back in August which related to antisemitism in the UK also used the same qualifier – but it completely failed to mention this then too:

    The ADL data suggests that there were more than 10,000 incidents of antisemitism in the year up to 24 September. This was more than a 200% increase compared to the previous year.

    Importantly though, over halfway through the article the BBC stated:

    Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism”, the ADL said.

    Whilst we could argue it should have led with that, the important thing is that the BBC just repeated this ADL line. At no point did it question it, or let the readers know that anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism. As we have seen in other reports this week, the BBC is afraid of stepping out of line.

    So much for ‘impartiality’.

    On a deeper dive into the ADL report, it concluded:

    ADL’s preliminary data also found that over 3,000 of all incidents took place during anti-Israel rallies, which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the most concerning antisemitic trends ADL captured since Oct. 7, 2023.

    Over the last year, we have seen countless media reports of antisemitism at pro-Palestine rallies:

    1,350 of these incidents (15% of the total) were included as a result of a methodology update that ADL implemented after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, when we saw an explosion of anti-Israel activism that incorporated expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism or attacks on Jews, Israelis or Zionists.

    When they occur during public activism (such as at protests), in confrontations between individuals or in the form of vandalism (such as graffiti), these expressions constitute an implicit attack on the great majority of American Jews who view a relationship with Israel to be an important part of their religious, cultural and/or social identities.

    Such rhetoric can be traumatizing to many American Jews and has led to their exclusion from some spaces simply because of that element of how they define and express their Jewishness.

    However, this quote from ADL clearly conflates ‘anti-Israel’ with ‘antisemitism’. Obviously, if any country starts a genocide there will be an explosion of anti-whatever country started it. In this case, it’s Israel.

    Anti-Zionism, not antisemitism

    In August of this year, the BBC published an article titled:

    Big rise in antisemitic incidents in UK – charity

    The article stated that the Community Security Trust(CST) recorded 1,978 ‘anti-Jewish hate incidents’ from January to June 2024.

    It goes without saying, we should not tolerate antisemitism in any shape or form. The important thing here though, is that the BBC article made zero mention of the CST conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Upon reading the full report, it is clear they have.

    Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same. Criticising the state of Israel or Zionism is legitimate – especially when Israel has murdered, at medical professionals’ best guesses, over 118,000 Palestinians. If we can’t criticise a genocidal regime, then what really is the point in anything?

    Earlier this year, the World Socialist Web site (WSWS) commented that:

    The CST’s “Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023” was targeted at the movement against Israel’s genocide, at Muslims and left-wing opponents, as the main source of antisemitism. This reinforces the campaign by the Conservative government, backed by the Labour opposition, to criminalise opposition to the genocidal actions of the Israeli state by equating antizionism with antisemitism.

    The Canary also previously reported on the glaringly obvious bias from the Western corporate media and right-wing politicians, branding pro-Palestine protest demonstrations as antisemitic on multiple occasions.

    What do the figures really say?

    During the reporting period, CST noted that 1,026 (52%) of the antisemitic incidents referenced or were related to Israel, Palestine and the situation in the Middle East. Of these, 836 had ‘anti-Zionist political motivation’ and the terms ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zionism’ were used in 208 incidents. In which case, this article will be included in the next figures.

    This number is an increase of 547% from the first six months of 2023 – which was before 7 October and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Who would have guessed that when you start carpet bombing an entire country, you might face a bit of criticism?

    The CST report also stated:

    In at least 210 instances, the phrase “Free Palestine” was employed, either in speech or writing. CST does not regard this in itself as an antisemitic slogan but, in each of these cases, it was targeted at Jewish people or institutions – who had not solicited discussion about the Middle East – simply for being Jewish, or comprised part of a larger tirade that did include blatantly anti-Jewish hate.

    The report did not specify which institutions or people were targeted. However, it does mention ‘members of parliament’ and ‘public figures’. The important question has to be, whether people targeted these MP’s for being Jewish or for their support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. If the latter is true, then we also know it’s true that people have also targeted plenty of non-Jewish MP’s for their unwavering support of Israel.

    Evidently, the ADL’s latest data is another instance where a pro-Israel lobby organisation is seeking to suppress Palestinian voices. The BBC’s reporting on this amounts to little more than shameless propaganda for Israel, and those in the US trying to shut down opposition to its horrific ongoing genocide.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In chilling remarks on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly threatened civilians in Lebanon with “destruction and suffering” similar to what the Israeli military has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza. In a video statement, Netanyahu urged the people of Lebanon to fight against Hezbollah, a political group formed in the 1980s to resist Israeli occupation…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel’s mass forced displacement campaign in Lebanon may soon cause major disease outbreaks, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned as Israel attacks health care centers in the country. In a press briefing on Tuesday, WHO Deputy Incident Manager for Lebanon Ian Clarke warned of the danger of the crowded conditions in displacement shelters within Lebanon, where officials report an…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden officials have reportedly admitted that ceasefire negotiations amid Israel’s war on Lebanon and genocide in Gaza have been suspended, despite public insistence by high-powered figures within the administration that they are working around the clock for a ceasefire. The Biden administration has given up on ceasefire talks after first proposing a deal for a 21-day ceasefire between…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Destructive displays of technological prowess in Lebanon serve to distract the Israeli public from the military’s failure to achieve its long-stated war aims.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Israel announced its decision to invade Lebanon on September 30—and so far, it does not seem to be going well. Israeli media has been largely silent on the state of ground operations, but Hezbollah has claimed a number of significant victories that suggest Israel has been unable to find its footing. Despite the assassination of General Secretary Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance appear to be unbowed. After all, this is an organization that was forged in the successful struggle to expel Israeli soldiers during the occupation from 1982-2000, and once again defeated Israel in 2006. 

    Hezbollah’s ability to deter Israeli advances on the ground are significant, but this has not stopped Israel’s daily bombing of Lebanon, particularly in the Dahiye suburb south of Beirut. Dahiye and Lebanon’s south are now in the spotlight of international media—which often reduce these places, the communities within them, and their histories of resistance to one-dimensional caricatures. Yet the people of these communities and Lebanon at large deserve far better, particularly now as they face the same genocidal war tactics Israel has unleashed in Gaza over the past year. Roqayah Chamseddine, an independent journalist based in Beirut and co-host of the Delete Your Account podcast, joins The Real News with updates from the ground and a portrait of the proud people of Dahiye and Lebanon’s south informed by her own roots and years of experience in these communities.

    Studio Production: David Hebden
    Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Welcome to The Real News podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor at The Real News. Today we’re speaking with Roqayah Chamseddine, an independent journalist based in Beirut. Before we begin, I’d like to extend our gratitude on behalf of The Real News team to you, our listeners and supporters.

    We are proud to be a nonprofit newsroom that tells the stories corporate media will not. And as part of that commitment, we don’t take any ad money or corporate donations ever. We depend on listeners like you to make our work possible. So please consider becoming a sustainer of The Real News today at therealnews.com/donate.

    For the past two weeks, Israel has unleashed a series of increasingly bloody attacks against the Lebanese people, heavy bombing of the South of Lebanon, the notorious pager attack which killed dozens and wounded thousands, and a series of carpet bombing strikes around the country, one of which killed the longtime leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, along with at least 500 residents of an entire apartment block in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut.

    We are speaking today on Friday, October 4th. After last night, Israel unleashed the most punishing and destructive bombing campaign in the Dahieh neighborhood yet, and now Israeli troops have invaded Lebanon as of September 30th. While much of international media is focused on the question of whether a regional war involving the United States and Iran is imminent, there is considerably less attention being given to the people of Lebanon.

    Lebanon is, in fact, a real country of real people whose roots in the land run deep. It is a nation that has seen its share of strife in recent decades, including a brutal civil war, an Israeli occupation from 1982 until 2000, and another failed Israeli Invasion in 2006. Yet for all its challenges, Lebanon is also a place of triumphs, of dreams, and its people deserve to be known to the world as more than the one dimensional caricatures that our media has to offer.

    Joining The Real News today is Roqayah Chamseddine, an independent journalist based in Beirut and the co-host of the Delete Your Account Podcast. Roqayah, welcome to The Real News and thank you for joining us.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    Thank you very much for having me today.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    I want to start by asking you to just introduce yourself a little bit further, if you could discuss your work, your history with Lebanon itself.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    So I am from Southern Lebanon. That is my family history. My family is from two villages, but originally from the village of Masjid al Salaam, which was part of occupied Palestine. The South, also known as Jabal Amil, is where all of us Southern Lebanese people originate from. Another village that my family is also from is Arabsalim. Both these villages have been hit during the last few attacks on the South.

    I am a writer and a journalist. I’ve been reporting on this region since I was very young. I’ve also attempted to get into Gaza, and that was back in 2009 as a part of the Gaza Freedom March. Did not get into Gaza, but I’m hoping that with things going the way that they’re going now, we all might be able to go to Gaza. But that’s just a bit about me.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Thank you so much for that introduction. Now, you are in Lebanon at this moment.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    Yes.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Specifically in Beirut. And I want to ask if you can describe the scenes where you are for people who are listening. What are you and those around you seeing and feeling right now?

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    So it is very tense at the moment, especially because in the last few days there have been over 15 Israeli attacks on our southern suburb. And when people say the southern suburb, they mean the Dahieh, and that is what the Dahieh is. And since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on us, these on the Dahieh have only grown exponentially. You mentioned how severe the attack was yesterday.

    It’s said to be even worse than the attack that killed Sayyed Hassan, which Israel used bunker buster bombs, which are between 2,000 to I think 4,000 tons. They’re meant to penetrate very hard targets into the ground. They create craters. I’ve been to the Dahieh since the attacks have begun. The Dahieh is my second home after South Lebanon, so I know it very well, very intimately.

    I know the people there very intimately, and it is a disaster area. And that might be me underselling how bad things are. The Dahieh is a very densely populated area filled with over 600,000 people. And these attacks are intentionally meant to maim, kill, and destroy the entire suburb. And that is exactly what we’ve seen. And so people are very tense. You can hear the attacks on the Dahieh outside from…

    Yesterday, people were saying they were hearing them up in the mountains. That’s how bad they were. So I can hear them from where I am. I’m no longer in the Dahieh at the moment, unfortunately, but it’s something that cannot escape you no matter where you go, hearing the sound of them. We also hear Israeli planes and drones oftentimes even outside the Dahieh.

    So we are being surveilled at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes, like I said, you can even see the planes, the Israeli planes. And this all began outside of South Lebanon. Because after October 8th, the attacks on our southern villages began. They didn’t start hitting Beirut until later. They didn’t start hitting the Dahieh until later.

    And that began with what we call [Arabic 00:05:48] which is the sonic booms where the planes fly very low and then fly up or break the sound barrier. And it was a form of psychological warfare, and then that grew into the attacks that we’re seeing now. So I haven’t heard any sonic booms. All that we hear now are the constant airstrikes on the Dahieh.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Thank you for providing us with that overview, and it’s very clear that there is an intentional campaign being waged to terrorize the population. It’s not simply a matter of going after these so-called military targets, and that’s very obvious from the way in which Israel is conducting this war thus far. I want us to take some time to talk about the people of these regions that you’ve mentioned and you have so much intimacy with, the South and the Dahieh.

    You’ve spent a lot of time in these places. You just named them as two of your homes. What can you tell us about the communities in these places and help us peel back from the headlines, which really just establish them as locations in a war zone, and help us fill in the details of what life is really like there.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    The Dahieh, like many suburbs throughout Lebanon, is I would say… I say a lot in Arabic, [Arabic 00:07:05] which means it’s a poor neighborhood, but there’s life. And there is a lot of poverty in the Dahieh, but the community there is very tight-knit, very close. They know each other very well. If you’re ever lost in Dahieh, you can reference one bakery and you’ll be able to find everything around you.

    People know one another like their family. They’re very, very resilient people, very humble people, helpful, grateful. And many of the people in the Dahieh come from South Lebanon and they ended up in the Dahieh because of the occupation of the South and the previous wars against the southern region. I don’t want to make the Dahieh into, oh, it’s some kind of magical place in an Orientalist sense, but the Dahieh is very…

    They like to call it, what is it, a Hezbollah stronghold. It’s militaristic language used to basically make people believe that the people there are non-human. And so whenever you attack a residential building, you’re attacking somebody that deserves to be killed.

    Now that’s putting aside the fact that we have the right to armed resistance, but the people of the Dahieh are very pro-resistance because armed resistance is the only way forward whenever you’re living under occupation and whenever you’ve seen the kind of brutality that is real, this entity has unleashed on us for decades. So in terms of the Dahieh, it’s a beautiful place filled with wonderful people who are trying to survive on a day-to-day basis.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Thank you so much. And as you mentioned, the people of the Dahieh, many of them are coming from the South of Lebanon where in previous decades, Israel has staged other invasions. The current invasion that we are seeing is, in fact, the third time that Israel has invaded Lebanon. Many of these people have experience with war and particularly with war against Israel. And I’m wondering if in that context you can talk to us a little bit about how people in these areas are now responding to this wave of attacks and this now third invasion of the country.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    So Israel has not invaded South Lebanon yet. The Lebanese resistance has saved them off so far. They’ve killed at least 17 Israeli soldiers, likely more because as you well know, the Israeli government puts a blackout on what the media is allowed to tell Israeli citizens to keep up morale. It’s a form of propaganda obviously to keep his colony’s enthusiasm for bloodletting going and making sure that they’re okay with their sons and daughters going out occupying, pillaging, and killing people.

    So Hezbollah has so far destroyed at least four Merkava tanks and killed, like I said, 17 Israeli soldiers, and their operations are continuing. Now in the South, in Baalbek and in the Dahieh so far since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on US, Israel has killed 1,974 individuals, and that includes 124 children. Over 9,000 people have been injured. Most of this is happening in the South because they’re hitting our villages and they’re hitting them very hard.

    They’re targeting houses. They’re targeting health services. They’re targeting paramedics. Israel’s been killing first aid responders in the South and firefighters. A total of 104 martyrs are among the dead, and they include emergency workers. 50 paramedics in just 14 days have been killed, many of them dying after double tap strikes, which is when you bomb an area and then you wait for the first aid responders to arrive and then you bomb the targeted area again.

    And today a group of medics and journalists ended up going to the Dahieh after this morning’s latest attack and an Israeli drone fired a missile at them and injured three. So what we’re enduring in South Lebanon and in the Dahieh is a US-Israeli War that’s being waged against us and the people of Gaza. And it’s only possible with US supplied aircrafts, US supplied munitions, and US supplied intelligence.

    And I want to make this point, the smirk of Matthew Miller, who is the US State Department spokesman, is the face of this war. So right now what the South is going through is months and nearly a year of constant psychological warfare through the sonic booms, which I’ve experienced these firsthand. Because of where some of these villages are situated so close to the mountains, Arabsalim is on the mountain, it sounds like you’re being bombed.

    That is how deep this affects you psychologically. Some people can handle it and they’ve gotten used to it. There’s a saying [Arabic 00:12:03] We’ve gotten used to it. Other people, you can tell they have been deeply psychologically disturbed by constantly feeling as though they’re going to be killed along with their family. I know that whenever the latest attacks on the South, when they were at I would say the highest level, my family who were in the South ended up going to one family’s house and staying all together because they would rather die together than die alone.

    So that is what people are dealing with. They’re killing entire families. They’re killing women and children. They’re killing our men. They’re killing people coming to our rescue. That is what Israel has been doing in Gaza and now what it is doing to the people of South Lebanon and the rest of Lebanon as well.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    I appreciate you bringing in the angle of the similarity and I don’t even know if we can call it a real strategy, but tactics that Israel is pursuing in Lebanon as what it has been doing in Gaza for the past year. Of course, we’ve seen the decimation of families, the intentional targeting of medical personnel, of press, the use of these double tap strikes to maximize the amount of casualties as much as possible.

    And we’re very evidently seeing that this is simply the way that Israel is intent on conducting wars anywhere. And as the question of regional war looms, it really raises the question of how much further will this go and how much further will it be permitted to go? In that vein, I do want to ask you pertaining to some of your earlier comments about support among the population for the resistance, help our audience understand that a little bit.

    What is the perspective that people have on the resistance? Where does it come from? And if you can just piece this together for us, I think that would really be to the benefit of our listeners.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    So in the South, South Lebanon was known as Jabal Amin. Back whenever it was Jabal Amin, there was an intimate connection with Palestine. I have relatives who told me your great-grandmother or so-and-so used to walk into Palestine. There’s a great article I’ll share with your listeners and I’ll provide you with the link where it talks about how people in South Lebanon and Jabal Amin knew cities in Palestine more than they knew Beirut.

    That’s how often they would go, and that’s how much they knew of the land of Palestine. Then French occupation and Israeli occupation helped develop the guerrilla warfare tactics that we’re now seeing employed by Hezbollah, Harakat, Aman, the two main resistance movements in Lebanon. The people of Jabal Amin also helped Palestinian resistance fighters with arms and physically as well, helping them resist Israeli occupation.

    Because they knew once they come for Palestine, they will come for us, and there is a deep brotherhood that connects us to Palestine. That is why you hear so many Lebanese people say, “No matter what you do to us, you can kill us until the very last man, woman, or child, and we will not leave Palestine. Even if we are crumbs, we will not leave Palestine because we’ve seen the devastation. We have witnessed it firsthand.”

    My own aunt, Hoda Chamseddine, was killed when she was only 15 years old sitting under our olive tree in Arabsalim drinking tea with her friends, and they dropped a bomb on the olive grove and she died in my uncle’s arms. Her friends were injured, and so we know the cruelty and barbarism of Israel firsthand. And many people from South Lebanon, you will hear them speak almost poetically as to how much they are devoted to resisting these colonizers until the very end.

    There’s a fantastic interview where a man says that the Israelis think that they are the masters of the air because they love to bomb us from the air because they’re so weak on the ground. He says, they think they’re the masters of the air, but we are the masters of the earth. Because Hezbollah, specifically because of their hybrid complex rural warfare tactics, are able to stave off this colonial entity.

    As we speak now, they’ve conducted probably more operations in the last few days than they did during the height of the July war of 2006. So the people of Lebanon, specifically the people of South Lebanon support the resistance because they know that armed resistance is the only way forward. Anyone you speak to in South Lebanon will talk to you very poetically about how devoted they are to resistance until the very last one of us, until the very last brick, until the very last person.

    We know that this is the only way armed resistance is the only way to combat a colonial entity which has… I mean, look at what’s happening in Gaza. In Gaza, they’ve killed at least 5.4% of their population, and that’s according to a report that was released today. This is the kind of cruelty that the breadth of which cannot ever be quantified. When you read that entire bloodlines, over 900 bloodlines in Gaza have been wiped out, what should the response be?

    What should the response be to the fact that Palestinian journalists like Hossam Shabat have described the death hole in Gaza being so profound that they’re running out of dirt to bury their dead. So armed resistance, that is the only answer.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    That’s a very powerful response, and I think what is really being put on the table for our listeners is that this is really a fundamental matter of survival. It’s a matter of the future in the most bare immediate terms that is really driving the support and the kinds of strategies that are undertaken by people to resist the occupation and the expansion of the occupation, which we are seeing Israel attempt at this moment.

    I think one topic that I do want to broach, given how close we are to this major event, which has been one of the biggest political developments so far in this war, is of course the assassination of Nasrallah, and US media has always painted Nasrallah as a kind of boogeyman along with Hezbollah.

    But I’m wondering if you can say more building on what we’ve already been discussing about support for the resistance, the reasons for that as to how do people in Lebanon, particularly in the South, in Dahieh, see Nasrallah as a figure and how are folks responding to his death?

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    Well, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, he was a father figure to many people because he helped liberate South Lebanon. Hezbollah began with genuinely a handful of people in South Lebanon with nothing but the mindset and the dedication to the path of resistance and has grown. There’s over 100,000 people in Hezbollah, if not more. He helped free almost the entirety of South Lebanon. Now what Israel occupies is Shebaa. We were under nearly two decades of brutal Israeli occupation.

    Then defeats Israel once again in 2006. And on top of that, look at how dedicated the Hezbollah was in joining in support of the Palestinian resistance the day after October 7th. The day after October 7th, the Hezeb committed all of their martyrs not just to the path of resistance, but every time a martyr falls from South Lebanon or from the Hezeb, because some of them don’t come from South Lebanon, they’re dedicating their lives to the path, to the liberation of Jerusalem. That is how we dedicate our martyrs.

    And every single time an operation is committed, they begin by saying, “In support of our steadfast people in Gaza and their resistance.” So the reason why Sayyed Hassan is so loved is not just for his charisma, not just because of his pluralism, not because of his outlook on Lebanon that is open to all people regardless of where they come from and who or what they worship or don’t worship, but it is because of his resilience, his steadfastness, and his ability to speak so eloquently, and also put words with deeds, combine them together.

    He was known as the true promise, because everything he promised he committed to and did. And one thing that made me emotional was the leader of Harakat Amal, Nabih Berri, said, “You broke one promise,” which is him passing away because Sayyed Hassan had promised to go pray in Al-Quds and he didn’t get to. And so that was the one promise that he broke. But the era of Hezbollah helped define the future, not just of South Lebanon, but all of Lebanon.

    Without the Lebanese resistance, we would be under US-Israeli boots. We would be submitting to the whims of the occupier now. So that is why Sayyed Hassan is so beloved, not just by Shia, not even just by Muslims. Whenever I found out that Sayyed Hassan was martyred, I was in a cafe and every single person around me was crying. Everyone. It was one of the most moving moments and heart-wrenching moments I had ever experienced in my life.

    It was a nation mourning. There are a lot of people who did not agree with the politics of Hezbollah, but they saw Sayyed Hassan as an honorable and steadfast person who would not… He faced the occupier and said, “We are a nation of people with a faith unlike any other you’ve seen before, and we refuse to submit and we will not be humiliated. You will not walk in our villages. You will not walk among the people who toil this land and act as if you own everything. We refuse.”

    And so that is why he is so beloved by people and why even now it’s very hard to say Shaheed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah or the Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah because of how his life, his appearance, shaped all of us and will continue to shape us, because the path of resistance, it is not… I mentioned this before on another podcast. Kanafani said that bodies fall, but ideas endure, and the path of resistance will endure whether or not Sayyed Hassan was martyred.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    I think the image you just painted of Nasrallah, Hezbollah, their relationship to the Lebanese people is certainly very, very different than what our audience may be accustomed to receiving. I want to focus in actually on something you said about Nasrallah’s vision for Lebanon, his pluralism.

    I think that idea in particular may really stand at odds with what people are used to hearing. I’m wondering if you can expound on that point a little bit more and introduce us to a more informed and detailed take on the actual politics of this organization.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    Right. If you read Hezbollah’s manifesto, they’re committed to Lebanon that is open to all people of all faiths. Sayyed Hassan grew up surrounded by people, Christians, Jews. The reason why I don’t like talking about this specifically is because I feel like a lot of people, they want to hear a very… How can I put this? A first world take on a figure like Sayyed Hassan.

    They want to hear that, oh yeah, he liked Christians too. But the way that the Hezeb was formatted was that they know that this country is not just for one group. The reason why our government is shaped the way that it is, like the Speaker of the House needs to be of this faith, the president has to be a Christian, the prime minister has to be a sheik, the reason why is because of French colonialism.

    Whenever the French occupied us, they’ve set it up that way. But we do not want a country that is made up to be divided this way because Lebanon is for everybody. So Sayyed Hassan was the kind of person who wanted Lebanon that would be for everyone regardless of what they believed. If they didn’t like the Hezeb, so be it. But the future of Lebanon will be made by the people, and that’s what he stood for.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Thank you for that explanation. We are coming around to the end of our time. I’m wondering if there are any messages you want to leave with our audience.

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    So one thing that people like to focus on when it comes to Hezbollah or the Palestinian resistance is how we focus on martyrdom. Because Sayyed Hassan would say that if we live, we win. And if we die, we win, because death is a shadow that follows every one of us. No one can escape the fate of death, but we know that we’ve chosen to die with dignity rather than live a moment of humiliation, because dignity is the currency that we choose to spend.

    And Israel is fighting against the people that fear humiliation more than death. And you can’t defeat people like this. So by killing Sayyed Hassan, Israel believes that they’ve decapitated the Hezeb. They’ve broken our backs, as we would say in Arabic, but what’s happened is they’ve inflamed the hearts of countless more people who are like Sayyed Hassan, who will become Sayyed Hassan, and who’ve taken up the struggle that he spent his whole life pursuing.

    So while we’re in the eye of the storm now, we don’t know what the future holds, but we’re going to hold tight to the rope of resistance. And we won’t kneel and we won’t submit because we know that just like South Lebanon, Palestine will be liberated and it will end likely in South Lebanon on our terms and in our arena where they cannot defeat us. They know this.

    They’re killing an average of 100 Lebanese people a day or 100 people in Lebanon a day. But when they’re confronted by our men on the front lines in South Lebanon, they’re unable to fight us. They say just the same way that they said in 2006, it’s like fighting ghosts. Because when you fight against the people who are so committed to their land that every time you destroy a house, the person whose home you destroyed says, “I’m going to rebuild.”

    You can’t defeat people like that. We have a faith like no one else on this earth, and we’re going to stand up like the cedars of Lebanon and not submit to anyone.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    You’ve been listening to The Real News Podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park speaking with Roqayah Chamseddine, who is based in Beirut. Roqayah, how can our audience keep up with you and your work?

    Roqayah Chamseddine:

    You can follow me @roqchams on Twitter. There’s also Delete Your Account, hosted by myself and Kumars Salehi.

    Ju-Hyun Park:

    Thank you so much again for joining us. Before we go, we’d like to thank all you listeners once again and take a moment to recognize The Real News Studio team, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara, and Alina Nehlich, who make all our work possible. This has been The Real News, and we’ll catch you next time.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In March, Reuters reported that Israel had completely destroyed 223 mosques in Gaza, and partially destroyed 289 others, including the Great Mosque of Gaza, first built in the 7th century. The Real News reports from the north of Gaza, where the faithful continue to worship amid the rubble and Israel’s ongoing slaughter.

    Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
    Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
    Video Editor: Leo Erhardt


    Transcript

    Narrator:

    On the 10th of August, 2024, 10 months and 3 days into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinians sheltering in a Al-Tabin school in the North of Gaza rose before sunrise to pray. As they prayed, an Israeli air strike targeted the school killing between 90 and 100 people according to Gaza’s civil defence agency, making the strike among the deadliest documented attacks since October 7th.

    [Background]

    “The targeting of Al-Tabin school… There is no God, but Allah! Are they breathing? Are they breathing?”

    “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

    “Say God is great, say God is great!”

    “Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best on whom we depend.”

    Narrator:

    The expression this bereaved woman repeats, is one deeply rooted in Islamic faith. It is heard and repeated in hundreds of videos and interviews that have come out of Gaza in the last 10 months.

    [Background]

    “It’s a shame! It’s a shame! Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best on whom we depend!”

    “Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best on whom we depend! Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best on whom we depend! Strengthen your Faith. Fill your hearts with Faith. I swear God will save us..”

    Narrator:

    We met with congregation leader Imam Fehmi Khalil Al Masri, who still leads prayers from amidst the ruins of the Islam Mosque in Northern Gaza, which was targeted by Israeli air strikes earlier this year in the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

    IMAM FAHMI KHALIL AL MASRI:

    Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best on whom we depend. The enemy has attacked all the mosques in the city of Khan Yunis, and beyond it all the mosques of the entire Gaza Strip. Mosques that were frequented by all people, from all corners, in order to fulfill their obedience to God.

    Narrator:

    Mahmoud Ibrahim is 72 years old, he remembers the first day of arriving in Khan Yunis in the beginning of Ramadan after being displaced.

    MAHMOUD IBRAHIM SADEH

    In Ramadan… we were bombed in Ramadan. The first day of Ramadan, the mosque was bombed above us. Even our neighbors, around us, never got the opportunity to say hi. We were here two days before the mosque got bombed. We didn’t get to see any mosques or anything. First day of Ramadan — the second day, to be specific — it was bombed. [Do you miss praying in the mosque?] I can’t! I miss it, but I can’t go to pray anymore, when you’re injured and there are planes and bombs and drones and missiles and I don’t know what. We just want to survive these days and go home. My dream is to go and see my destroyed house and die there on the rubble of my house. I want nothing in this world.

    Narrator:

    According to a Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Affairs as of January 2024, 1000 of Gaza’s 1,200 mosques have been destroyed. Included in this list, is the destruction of the Great Mosque of Gaza, one of the oldest mosques in the world, dating back to the 7th Century when Islam first arrived in the region.

    IMAM FAHMI KHALIL AL MASRI:

    Since the start of this war, what took place on the 7th of October, the day of judgment began then and has continued. We are all scattered, displaced from place to place. In place of our beloved mosque, we now have a room that doesn’t protect us, neither from the heat of summer nor the cold of winter. The war and displacement has had a huge impact on my life — it has been full of torture, suffering, and misery. But, regardless of this, we do not run or weaken. We remain steadfast. We will pray on time and give the call to prayer, and whether we are few or many we will congregate, we will pray, even if it’s out in the open.

    Narrator:

    Despite the targeting of mosques, and worshippers within them, prayers continue. After Israel’s massacre of people praying at al-Tabin school, Israel claimed that 19 of the people killed were terrorists, a claim called into question by the Palestinian chairman of the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor who says that the people killed were not involved in politics.

    MAHMOUD IBRAHIM SADEH

    We [went] to the mosque together with our friends, and my children went with me. Me and my children used to go every day, to pray and read the Quran and talk about everything. Apart from all that political stuff, we don’t get involved in that. I don’t feel right now like I’m alive. Me personally, after what’s happened to us, I feel nothing. I’ve lost hope. There’s not much life left for me. Here, my chest is broken, and here, my leg is too. Regardless of whether a bomb fell on me or not, I am not important in this world. Our whole life is just torture upon torture. Beginning with torture and ending with torture, wars — we haven’t seen anything good in our lives. We are not with this group or that group, we are not connected to anyone. We pray to Allah and that’s it.

    Narrator:

    Just like so many of Gazas homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, the great mosque of Gaza, has a long history of being destroyed – then rebuilt. Its minaret toppled in an earthquake in the 11th Century, destroyed by the crusaders in the 12th, by the mongols in the 13th and damaged by British bombs in WW1. Though it has once again been destroyed, it may yet see Gaza’s faithful gather to pray under its roof once more.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • After a year of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, and after more than 75 years of Israeli occupation, Palestinians like Ashira Prem Rachana Darwish still believe in the hope of a free Palestine. In its murderous rush to flatten Gaza and embroil the Middle East in a large-scale war, “Zionism is breathing its last breath,” Darwish says. In Part 1 of this two-part episode of The Marc Steiner Show commemorating the solemn anniversary of Oct. 7, Marc speaks with Darwish, a journalist and trauma specialist, about the ongoing genocide, the future of Palestine, and about her own experiences of torture under Israeli occupation.

    Watch Ashira in the feature documentary Where the Olive Trees Weep.

    Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
    Post-Production: Alina Nehlich


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Marc Steiner:

    Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, it’s great to have you all with us once again. And today, we’re going to have another session talking about this incredible film that has been made called Where The Olive Trees Weep. We’re talking to Ashira Darwish. She’s a centerpiece in the film, and before she got into her trauma healing work, she was recognized for her investigative journalist work for Internews, the BBC, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International.

    She was given an award as one of the most inspirational women in Palestine by the BuildPalestine organization, many other awards. She suffered trauma of imprisonment and torture for fighting for the liberation of her people in Palestine, and she works at healing trauma with other people. And we are honored to have her with us. Ashira Darwish, welcome. Good to have you on The Marc Steiner Show.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Good to be here, thank you so much.

    Marc Steiner:

    So I have to answer this question first before we even begin. So are you related to Mahmoud Darwish, the poet?

    Ashira Darwish:

    No. So Mahmoud is from Al-Birwa, which is a village in the north of Palestine. And my mother’s family, Darwish, they come from the old city of Jerusalem, Bab Hutta.

    Marc Steiner:

    Gotcha, that’s it.

    Ashira Darwish:

    So right next to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

    Marc Steiner:

    As someone else who has the last name, Darwish told me once when I asked that question, he said, “Darwish is like Smith in Palestine.”

    Ashira Darwish:

    Exactly, but my mom was friends with Mahmoud Darwish when they were together in Lebanon, so…

    Marc Steiner:

    Aha, there you go. Okay.

    Ashira Darwish:

    There’s still a connection.

    Marc Steiner:

    So one of the things that came through in this film and your conversations in the film was I think both the power of your resistance and internal strength, imbued with all the negative repression and the occupation, what’s happened to you. One of the questions is, in the midst of struggle against oppression, and in Palestine against the occupation, how one keeps their energy up, how one keeps their life up, their ability to resist?

    Ashira Darwish:

    It’s not an option or a choice, it’s a survival mechanism. In order for us to be able to survive the occupation and to survive the living under Apartheid in a situation of genocide currently, we need to keep going, and we need to find ways to survive. And I think one thing that is wonderful about the Palestinian society is that we are still a community of… We haven’t been individualized. The globalization and very much capitalist universe did not really dissect us or go into us as much as the rest of the world.

    So if you look at places, in cities in Palestine, you will see that there’s much more individualism. And this was created through the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and bringing in the money, and trying to create, to separate from the tribal kind of communal life that we normally have. If you look at the rest of Palestine, the refugee camps, and you look at the villages, you still have the tribe, you still have the community, and you still have the concept of Sumud. We withhold, we withstand, and we are resilient together in community. And I think part of what Israel does and part of what most of colonization around the world fights is this community and tribe, because if they divide us, then it’s much easier to control us. And if they divide us and turn us into consumer slaves, well, they get the money out of us and they also get to control us, and it’s much easier to annihilate us as well, if we don’t think about the other rather than thinking about ourselves.

    So part of the Sumud that is built within the Palestinian society is the caring of each other, is the taking care of the community. It is not about one person, it is about Palestine. It’s not about one person. Even if you get imprisoned, even if you lose someone from your family, there’s a bigger picture. And the bigger picture is the survival of the tribe, it’s the survival of the land, it’s the survival of Palestine, and giving it, inheriting that to the generations that come after. And that’s I think what makes us kind of stronger, what makes us still stick together, and withhold, and withstand during this genocide.

    But it’s very difficult for people who live in the cities, for people who have been sucked in by the machine of capitalism and consumerism, because then they’re still operating. I can tell you about Ramallah, where I was staying for most of the part, and it’s as if there is no genocide happening in Gaza a few kilometers away. People work, people go to schools, everything is happening. Normally, the soldiers come, invade, they take people out, and everything operates as if it’s a normal situation.

    You see the Palestinian police, and it’s far more traumatizing to be there. It’s much, much, much harder to survive if you don’t have the community and your people to hold you together. Whereas, if you look at the villages, if you look at the refugee camps, they know the suffering, and they can be together and they grieve together. Whereas, the rest of us are now already dissected, and living very individualized life, and pretending that nothing is happening, and it’s the worst thing, because it’s depressing all the normal emotions that you have to go through when you’re living under a genocide.

    Marc Steiner:

    So how do you think that affects the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the ongoing struggle of people to have a nation of their own, to fight the occupation? How does that affect that?

    Ashira Darwish:

    That’s why they created the Palestinian Authority, so that you will have a weaker fight within the cities. This is why if you look at where the fighting happens, where the Palestinian resistance is the strongest, it’s in the refugee camps. It’s not in the cities, and it’s not where the Palestinian Authority has its strongholds, because people are tied to cars, people are tied to loans in the banks. It’s either you get your paycheck from the Palestinian Authority or you get it from the Europeans, who are feeding the occupation by maintaining all these NGOs and creating this donor-dependent culture and economy.

    So it’s trying to get people more into making money and living individually then thinking about the rest of us, thinking about the rest of Palestine, thinking about what’s happening in Gaza, and rising, and paying the price for whatever happens, and resisting. So this is why they created them, so that you don’t have as much resistance. And it of course weakens the resistance. The first day that people started marching in protest against what is happening in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority went very hard also militarily. They ran over a Palestinian protestor and killed him immediately. And then, the first few minutes of the protest, they used unbelievable amounts of tear gas to try and stop people from protesting. So they’re using all their force in order to make sure that the West Bank is still under the boot of the Palestinian military and the Palestinian and the Israeli authorities.

    Marc Steiner:

    This is a bit of a digression here. This wasn’t in the film, what you’re describing now, but I think it’s an important thing, and I may probe this a little bit more, because I think it’s the contradictions inside of struggles for liberation across the globe, but it really does play out in Palestine, between the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, and Palestinian Authority’s cooperation with the government of Israel to oppress people who, as you just described, who had massive demonstrations, as you were in them, the Israelis attacked you, and you’re describing demonstrations where Palestinians were protesting, and they were attacked by the Palestinian Authority.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Yeah.

    Marc Steiner:

    So there’s this double jeopardy happening that I think most people don’t even realize is going on.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Yeah, I think the lens isn’t really put on what happens with the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority is maintained by the funding of the USAID, the Americans and the Europeans. So they don’t let their media cover what they do. They don’t cover what atrocities are done by the Palestinian Authority and what is done in terms of imprisonment, in terms of control, in terms of also coordinating, collaborating with the Israelis, so that there isn’t resistance in the West Bank, and trying to kill any movement or any resistance that is sparked in the West Bank.

    Marc Steiner:

    So going back to what we learned about you in the struggle in the film, you yourself were in the midst of the struggle. You were arrested, you were tortured, you went through a horrendous kind of imprisonment by the Israeli police. And that’s not uncommon from people I talk to in Palestine, this happens to so many.

    Ashira Darwish:

    What happened to me is nothing. What is described in the film is nothing in comparison. I was never charged, I never actually made it to the real prison. I was only held for a few days, and my first detention was a few hours, and it had this life-changing impact on me. And people don’t understand that I’m a very privileged Palestinian. I come from East Jerusalem, I have an Israeli passport. I come with all these privileges that even protect me from even further kind of torture. But the reality of it is we have 10,000 Palestinians inside Israeli prison. They get kept and tortured for months. The regulations for torturing Palestinians from 48 or Jerusalem, there’s a little bit more restriction on how they torture them versus how the Palestinians from the West Bank and Palestinians from Gaza, oh, my God.

    The stories, the horror that we are hearing right now, from sodomy to rape. Rape was always used as a weapon by the Israelis. And it’s the systematic weapon of war. and torture. and sexual harassment for the Palestinian female prisoners and the Palestinian male prisoners. This has been used by Israel historically. But the level, the amount of use right now indiscriminately, systematically, just if you raise your voice against the prison guard, you get sodomized and killed, like one of the cases that was so well documented, and the people who perpetrated it, the soldiers were defended by the Israeli society, and by the Israeli ministers, and by the Israeli government, and they didn’t have to pay the price for it. And you have Israeli journalists calling for it to become a legal policy.

    It is already a policy. They don’t need to write it down. This is what they have been doing historically. So the types of torture that we have have always been there and they’ve always been horrific, but we’ve never seen them being used at such a high level, and it’s become much more consistent. You can’t get in and not be tortured. And the torture, not only there’s the mass… The level of sodomy, and sexual harassment, and rape, and then you have the barring of food. People are starving inside the Palestinian prisons. The prisoners are coming out in horrendous trauma, nothing that we have seen before, because they’re also separated, the prisoners, and they’re not allowing them… Usually, when you get… You have the first stage of torture, and then once they finish with torturing you and they charge you, you are taken to the prison itself, which I never made it to.

    And there at least you’re welcomed by the rest of the prisoners there. We had the system of operation where you make your own food, where you have the community to take care of you. And it’s the first place where you process your torture, where you process your detention, where you process what you’ve gone through. What Israel has done is now they have separated people to the point that you’re not allowed to speak to anyone. Every prisoner is in an individual solitary confinement. You’re not allowed to have community anymore inside prison, so you get to spend all of the time being tortured on your own. And then, the prison sentence, you’re spending it on your own, and you come out after that in a horrific state of trauma.

    Marc Steiner:

    What you just described raises so many questions here. It raises a lot. I mean, I’ve seen pictures of Palestinian prisoners being released who were skin and bones.

    Ashira Darwish:

    [inaudible 00:12:28], who was in the film, Where the Olive Trees Weep, he was only detained for six months, and he came out, and he lost half of his body weight. He didn’t know how to walk, he couldn’t remember how to shave his face. He was destroyed in the detention.

    Marc Steiner:

    So as a Palestinian woman who has been in the midst of the struggle, as someone who has suffered themselves, and I think, and also as a healer and a therapist, which is what you also are, it makes me think about… Well, let me step back for a second. Many, many, many decades back, I wrote this poem called Growing Up Jewish, one of the poems I wrote. And in the poem, I have this line that says, “How the tortured become torturers themselves.”

    And when I see what’s happening inside of Israel/Palestine at the moment, and watch what happens to people who come out of concentration camps like my family did, to be able to do this in return. And then, I watch you in this film, and one of the things that you say later in the film is talking about how you have this hope in the future and believe that healing can take place. How do you see that? How does that take place? When you say that, what’s behind those words, and where do you see it going?

    Ashira Darwish:

    I think healing is possible, because, well, first, we’ve been seeing healing happening with the Jewish community by rising up against this genocide. And I think one thing where you’ve said about the torture becoming the person who tortures, the Jews never had a chance to heal. And I think the main reason why they continue the cycle is because they’ve never given a chance. The anti-Semites, the real, true anti-white Semites, the white supremacists, kicked them out of Germany, and from the concentration camps, and from Europe, and instead of repatriating them, instead of giving them back their land, and taking them back to what they’ve lost in Europe, and giving them their houses, and their lands, and everything, they shipped them to a war, they gave them guns and sent them to another war.

    They’ve occupied them with a whole other war, with not giving them a single moment to breathe, to heal, to understand who did what to them. And I think the fear of the Europeans and the Americans was that the Jews will sit, and have a moment to breathe, and realize who did what to them. Instead of that, they created immediately another enemy for the Jews, they created the Palestinians.

    Marc Steiner:

    Yes.

    Ashira Darwish:

    And they sent them there to serve their interests. If the Israelis are not serving the interests of the Americans, the Americans would not be paying a penny.

    Marc Steiner:

    Forcing refugees to create refugees.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Exactly. And they put them in that place, and they kept them in a state of fear, they kept them in a state of fight, and they never had the chance to heal. So of course, the trauma is going to continue. If you look at the Jews that are coming, that are outside, like you, that are people who… The Jewish voices for peace, the young activists that are marching now, protesting in Congress, they’ve had a chance to process, and that is the difference. They’ve had a chance to process the trauma. Many refused, many until today are connected directly with Israel, and their existence is directed towards Israel. And they never looked within at what they went through, and they refused to do any therapy or anything, and they continue to support the Zionist entity.

    But many woke up, and they’ve done the work, and being able to stand up now as a Jew and say, “Not in my name,” is their trauma therapy, because they didn’t get the chance. You didn’t get the chance to stand up and say anything when the genocide was happening to your grandparents. You didn’t have the chance to stand up for your family, but now you get the chance to vocalize it. And this, I do somatic therapy, and the chance to be able to stand and say, verbally say, “No, not in my name,” and to try and actively act in order to end this genocide, it’s as if you’re standing up for yourself, for your family, and you’re healing your intergenerational trauma. So the Jews are healing their intergenerational trauma through this genocide that the Israelis are perpetrating, through standing up for the Palestinians, and many other people who are oppressed, who are able to rise for the Palestinians. So I see that the healing happening in this cycle.

    And I know that for us as Palestinians, the only way we are going to heal, and I say the main way we heal is collective healing. We’ve gone through this trauma collectively, as collective bodies. And the collective body, for us, the collective healing is the liberation of Palestine. When Palestine is liberated, immediately there would be healing within us, because all of our sacrifices did not go in vain. All the children we have seen, all the people who have lost their families will know that every drop of blood that was spilled was to the path so that their kids and their grandkids will have a liberated Palestine, and they will have freedom, and one of them will get to experience joy and to live in their land.

    So collective healing is our way to healing, and the liberation of Palestine is the first step into the healing. And having the Jews also being in this process of fighting against Zionism and standing up against genocide means that the cycle will not continue afterwards. That we know very well, that it’s not the Jews, we know very well that it’s the Zionists, we know very well that it’s the instruments of the Americans that are operating, and we will be able to heal the wounds. We will be able to forgive at one point, when Palestine is liberated.

    Marc Steiner:

    So you have been through so much, as a woman, as someone who stands up to the oppression of Palestinians in your homeland. I have a semi-personal question, if it’s… So how did you leave? Why did you leave? What pushed you out of Palestine to here?

    Ashira Darwish:

    So the only reason I’m here is so that this film can be seen. So most of my work in Palestine, I used to do it without any noise. So the first time that it came to the public that I’m working with former child prisoners and women prisoners is through this film. So there was a danger that I would get detained for the work that I’ve been doing. And also, because they arrest anybody for speaking, singing, writing, anything that you do, you can get arrested and tortured for. So I decided to take my kids out and to come out so that people can see the film. I didn’t want to bury the film, because I was [inaudible 00:19:11]-

    Marc Steiner:

    No, right.

    Ashira Darwish:

    At some point, I was like, “If it’s either between leaving the country or the film getting buried, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life if I didn’t allow for the film to be seen.” And I also know very well that I’m leaving for the short term. I know that I will go back to Palestine, and I have a feeling that I will go back to a liberated Palestine. People might think it’s a bit crazy, but I think with everything that’s happening now, each and every movement that is happening is showing us that, actually, Palestine is going to be free very, very soon.

    Marc Steiner:

    Let me explore that a minute with you, that whole idea. Let me start this way, A, It pains me to watch what’s happening in Israel, as a Jew, as a person that has family in Israel, seeing what we have become in that place. And I also think about the years that many of us demonstrated to fight to end Apartheid in South Africa, and it happened. So I’d really like to get your perspective on how you see that developing, how you think, where the struggle goes, how what happens in South Africa, something similar, not the same, but something similar can happen in Israel-Palestine, inside the Holy Land. How do you see that happening?

    Ashira Darwish:

    We’re seeing it, it’s happening. It’s already happening. We have never seen so much people awaken to what is happening in Palestine. The veil has been removed over the Zionist entity. They can no longer pretend to be a democracy while they’re protesting for sodomy. I don’t know if you’ve watched the film, Holy Redemption?

    Marc Steiner:

    No, I’ve not seen that. No.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Oh, you should see that one. It shows you the reality of what Zionists are, the way they approach, the way they look at the Palestinians, the way they think that we are mice, and they’re ready to crush us, the way that they watch over the bombs dropping on Gaza, the dancing and rejoicing, and thinking about where they’re going to settle, and how they’re going to take over. And the Zionist dream, saying it very strongly, that this is not about just Palestine. “We wanted what God gave us in the Bible, from the Euphrates to the Nile,” having that so much… This is what the Palestinians have been saying for years, that this is not only about Palestine, they’re coming after all of us. The Zionists are coming after all of us.

    And now, with Lebanon also being targeted in such a horrific way that is… Well, it’s horrific, but at the same time, it’s exactly the expected thing from Israel, and they’re blowing up the last bullet in themselves. What I think Israel has done, and I used to tell Israelis, liberal Israelis who I used to know, I was like, “So you’re killing the chance of a two-state solution. You don’t want to live with us, it’s very clear. And the more you do it, you’re only leaving one chance, which is a one-state solution, where we will all live together. Obviously, you don’t even want us in this one-state solution. You want us completely ridden, and packed into trucks, either dead or in the sea. So how do you envision that this is going to sustain itself when you have millions of us still here? So if you’re not…”

    They’re trying to eradicate us, but the reality is they cannot eradicate all of the Palestinians. It’s not going to be very easy to kill all of us. And the reality of what is happening now is the whole world sees them. This genocide is the most documented genocide in the history of mankind. Dropping people from houses in the West Bank two days ago, bodies, using Palestinians as human shields and putting them on Jeeps, burning the kids in the West Bank and dancing over it, dropping bombs in schools, and dancing, and celebrating, the world has seen them. They basically committed suicide with this genocide in Gaza. Israel as a state committed its final stage of suicide. And now, with targeting Lebanon?

    And let me tell you, I had a dream when I was living in Tarshiha. That was in 2020, when I had my daughter. And so I am a spiritual person, I have visions, and a lot of them come true. And I had this vision of Hezbollah being in the north of Palestine, liberating Palestine till Jabal al-Tur. And I saw them all the way through, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is impossible, Ashira. This is just a dream. It’s not a vision.” And then, I would keep seeing it. And then, I went to the Jabal al-Tur, and I meditated there in the church, and I saw the same vision again. And it was very clear with also all the imageries on the wall that it’s a very important church, and a place of ascension of Jesus Christ.

    And I saw it again and I was like, “But it’s impossible. They’re so strong, how could this possibly be?” And here we are today. I can see it more clearly than ever, more clearly than ever that Israel is in its last days. Hezbollah will liberate the first until the Galilee, the Syrian army will take over the [inaudible 00:24:46] and slowly and surely, the Palestinians in the West Bank will join the Liberation Army, and Egypt as well, and this is it, and there’s no other way.

    Marc Steiner:

    There’s no other way.

    Ashira Darwish:

    There’s no other way. Having to think about the Israelis coming to a peace agreement and saying, “We know they don’t want us. We know that they don’t want to live with us.” This is the only way that Israel is going to end. And there’s no other… Again, I would love to say for any Israelis, I would love to see them. My vision, my recreation, my addition to the vision would be that all the Jews get to leave peacefully out of the airports, and out of Jordan, and to be sent back to where they came from, to their original countries in Europe, so that they can have their houses, whatever their grandparents, every inch of land that was taken away from them, they can go back to in Europe.

    And those born in Palestine who don’t have Europe, they can come out, and then they will be welcomed back into Palestine, as Jews living in Palestine under the peace which will be mandated by the Palestinians. But the Zionists as they are, Zionism is breathing its last breath. And if it doesn’t happen through that, it will happen through the protests, the mass… It’s just a matter of time for the ICJ to come out with a declaration, with a decision about the genocide. No one can deny what Israel is doing.

    Marc Steiner:

    They cannot, they cannot. When I think of where we are now, most of the family I have in Israel, but born in Israel, they weren’t born in Poland, they weren’t born in the United States-

    Ashira Darwish:

    Tell them to come out for a little bit and inshallah, they’ll come back when the land is liberated.

    Marc Steiner:

    I mean, and there’s a poster that I’ve had since 1968, and I got it in Cuba in 1968. And the poster shows a map of Palestine, and it has a crescent cross Star of David down the middle, and across it, it says, “One state, two people, three faiths.” Now, that might sound naïve. That’s kind of been my mantra since 1968, of what a world should look like and how you struggle to get to that place.

    Ashira Darwish:

    We get there with the liberation of Palestine, because this is what we want. We have no issue with Jews living in the land. The problem was never with the Jews being in Palestine, and especially [inaudible 00:27:29], if you come from a Muslim background or [inaudible 00:27:32], I think more Muslim, there’s a connection to Judaism that no one can deny. There’s a connection to language that no one can deny. We are the Semites, we are the cousins.

    Marc Steiner:

    Yeah, absolutely we are. Yeah.

    Ashira Darwish:

    The issue is with one Zionist entity that wants to wipe out the rest, doesn’t want the Christian Palestinians, doesn’t want the Muslim Palestinian, and doesn’t want even the ultra-Orthodox Jews, if you come to it. They don’t want the African-American Jews as well, they don’t want the Ethiopians. They don’t want anyone who is not white, and who is not a settler, and does not follow the exact same sect of settler mentality. So they won’t be able to sustain so much hate.

    Marc Steiner:

    So one last thing before we go, and everything you’ve just described, and your belief in how things are and should be, in your work as someone who heals and works with trauma, as a Palestinian woman who wants liberation, who’s been through her own tortures, do you have hope that actually peace can come, that there’ll be a different way, that it can actually happen?

    Ashira Darwish:

    Yes, yes. I really see it. I see that we will tell the Jews to come out, the anti-Zionists and whoever wants to come, so that the Palestinians can have a right of return, and the Jews will eventually have a right of return. So those, like for example, your family, if they want to come back and live in a liberated Palestine where everyone is treated equally, of course, and there will be peace on that land, there will be peace on that land. It’s the most beautiful place on Earth. It is the garden of Eden, and people will get to enjoy and live in Palestine, in a free, liberated land where everyone is treated equally, where everyone is treated as a human, and the hate will be eradicated. There’s no place on that land for any more hate, and it has already endured so much hate, so much anger, and it’ll not endure any more.

    Marc Steiner:

    Well, let me just say this has been a fascinating conversation for me, and to meet you as well. I think you’re the heart of this film, and I share a wish, really appreciate the time you’ve taken with us today, and look forward to showing this film around, and I hope you stay well and strong, and I hope one day we’ll actually meet. Thank you for being with us.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Thank you so much. Thank you.

    Marc Steiner:

    After recording the powerful conversation with Ashira that you just heard, I admit I found myself wrestling with some of what she said, about the future she envisions for Palestine and the people living there, both Palestinians and Israelis. And I knew that many of you, our listeners, might be wrestling with it as well. It was hard to hear, important but hard. And I personally and politically disagreed with what she said, but I wanted to listen and understand as best as I could. And I wanted to have the chance to follow up with Ashira, and ask if she could unpack further what we discussed, and to address the questions that were on my mind, and that may be on the minds of many of you listening.

    She graciously agreed, and what you’re about to hear is a short follow-up discussion we recorded a few days after our initial interview. I asked Ashira about the vision she laid out in part one of our conversation, a vision in which Israeli Jews living in historic Palestine would need to leave, at least for a time. And those who had no ancestral homelands to return to would be, as Ashira said, quote, “Welcomed back to Palestine as Jews living in Palestine, under the peace which will be mandated by the Palestinians,” end quote. How would that work? Where will the Jews go? Is there any other way for the Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace? And I posed these questions to Ashira, and here’s her response.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Yeah, it’s beautiful that, it’s beautifully said, and how and where do they go? The reality is this question wasn’t asked of my grandparent, was it?

    Marc Steiner:

    It was not.

    Ashira Darwish:

    No. When my family was kicked out of Palestine, nobody cared, did they?

    Marc Steiner:

    They did not.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Nobody cared about my grandparents. Nobody cares about my uncles, who haven’t been able to visit us since 1967. No one cares that there’s over two million Palestinian refugees currently living around the world. Egypt didn’t want them, Lebanon didn’t want them, Jordan didn’t want them, but they were forced to take them. And until today, the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon have no basic rights of working, studying inside Lebanon, or citizenship. So it’s the same, I think with left Israelis, it’s all nice and dandy if they think about giving Palestinians some rights, but not retribution, not if they recognize what happened to us in ’48, in our expulsion, then they should understand the need for us to be going back to our country and going back to our homes.

    And the fact that Israelis came as refugees, it wasn’t my problem. We didn’t make them refugees, we didn’t do the Holocaust. The Palestinians were not the ones who annihilated and killed the Israeli Jews, and we accepted Jewish refugees, and they came, and they survived, and they lived in Palestine before the Zionist entity was created, and they were living happily and peacefully with their neighbors. We married each other. There wasn’t a problem with Palestinians ever accepting refugees and giving them a home, and a house, and a warm welcome in our communities. It was a problem when the Israeli Zionists started kicking us out. And those who arrived as refugees, they didn’t arrive as refugees in 1948. They had guns in their arms. They went into each and every Palestinian village, and they killed Palestinians, and they kicked them out of their land. It wasn’t peaceful refugees coming to seek sanctuary in Palestine.

    They need to choose, was it a war of independence when they kicked us out, or was it refugees coming for safety and sanctuary? Because refugees don’t usually arrive into your land with guns. Had they been refugees, they would have been welcomed. They came with their arms and their guns, and they kicked out our families and our people from their land. They massacred people wherever they stepped foot. They massacred Palestinians in Tantura and buried them in mass graves for fun. They raped our women when they walked in as refugees. They were not refugees when they came in in ’48. Any Jews that arrived before ’48 were refugees, and they were welcomed, and they were safe.

    So to come and ask us now to think about the Jews who need to leave Palestine, because they’ve been massacring us now again, and trying to ethnically wipe us from the land since 1948, I don’t see the sanity in that. I don’t see the sanity in asking the people who have been victimized, who have been trying to survive under the worst, most fascist government on Earth to think about where the Israelis should go. Had they arrived in as refugees without guns raised, they would’ve been welcomed, and they would’ve lived with us, and more than happily, we would still want them to stay there. As people who lived as refugees around the world, we don’t want anyone to suffer the same fate. But the reality is, until today we are being slaughtered.

    Yesterday, they dropped airstrikes in Tulkarem. Children were wiped and killed in Tulkarem, in the heart of the West Bank. Why should we accept this to continue? Why should we be the ones to think and consider what is the situation of the Israelis who are trying to wipe us out completely? And we have to be the considerate ones right now, when we are collecting the remains of our infants in body bags, in rice bags, while our friends and families are starving, while our men are being, and friends and family are being tortured inside prison chambers, being sodomized? We need to think right now about how to please the Israelis when there’s a resolution, when there’s an end to our bloodshed?

    It’s very gracious of us to even think about allowing them to leave peacefully. They’ve been murdering us since 1948, until now, even with all the fighting, the Palestinians are trying to avoid civilians with our resistance, while Israel wipes us out. What are we supposed to do? And coming to say about the Arab countries accepting refugees, there’s Jews living in Iran, there’s Jews living in Jordan, there’s Jews living in Morocco, there’s Jews living in Tunis until now, and they’re safe and they’re unharmed. And I am sure that when there’s a resolution coming that the Arab countries will tell them, “As long as you stop the murder of the Palestinians, you can come and live peacefully if you don’t try to occupy our land, if you don’t try to do what’s happening in Lebanon,” if they can live peacefully with their neighbors.

    At the end of the day, we didn’t create the genocide, we didn’t create the ethnic cleansing, we didn’t create the nine million Palestinian refugees around the world. If somebody has to think about where they want to go, they should have been very gracious refugees when they arrived and not wiped us out. If they don’t want to be refugees around the world right now, then they should stop the killing and the murder of Palestinians. They should stop the genocide right now, and try and beg for justice and retribution. They haven’t stopped. And not only in Palestine, now Lebanon is bleeding. They’re bombing Yemen, and we are supposed to think about allowing them, where they’re going to go after they finish killing us, if we are lucky enough to survive this genocide, if any of us are allowed to survive after this?

    Marc Steiner:

    Yeah, I remember in ’67, ’68, I was a very young man, I think 21, 22 years old, and I volunteered to go fight in the Israeli Army, right after the war started in ’67. And then, I began meeting left-wing Israelis, and I began meeting lots of Palestinians as well. And something shifted, and what could have been a moment of liberation for Israelis and Palestinians became a moment of occupation, so-

    Ashira Darwish:

    Exactly. And Oslo was another chance where the Palestinians gave to the Israelis to tell them, “Let’s put everything behind, even the murder of all of our people, even even the massacres you’ve perpetrated in ’48 and ’67, we are willing to forgive.” Even the expulsion of millions of Palestinian refugees, we were willing to forgive, and we were willing to let go of [inaudible 00:38:13], the heartland of Palestine we were willing to give up so that we can have peace, and coexist, and live next to them as neighbors, and claim peace. We changed our curriculum, we changed the way we teach our children, and we started talking about peace, and what were we offered? Too much has been asked of us as Indigenous people who are being wiped out. I think for any left-wing Israelis right now existing, any Jews who are abroad, they’re the ones who should try to think about what happens to their people afterwards, if we are allowed to even live and survive through this genocide.

    They should think about a plan. Where will these people be located? Who is willing to accept people with so much blood on their hands to live with them as neighbors? Who’s willing to take the murderers of our children to live with them, and next to them, and bring them into their homes? If you’re willing to take somebody who’s been killing children, let me know. Those dancing as they bombed the schools and pulling the triggers, those dancing in the middle… To songs, young Jews dancing to songs, of burn their villages and kill them. If you’re willing to have them in your house, maybe that’s the solution for the diaspora and for the Jews who have been living outside, to see if they have open hearts to accept the murderers into their houses.

    Marc Steiner:

    So if we move on from this moment, is it possible for the Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians to actually find a way to live in that land together in the future? Is it too late? Is it done? Is it finished?

    Ashira Darwish:

    I think Israel is killing any chance of that. I think Israel, with the genocide in Gaza has killed any chance of that. Before that, maybe there was a chance that people were willing to pay another price for peace. But right now, we know they’re very outspoken about what they want to do with us. They have no problem saying that they want to annihilate us. They have no problem in actually actively going and wiping us out. How am I, as a Palestinian right now, experiencing the genocide of my people? Expected to think about surviving and shaking the hand of people who have been tearing my friends into bits and pieces, and tearing their children into little smithereens? How am I supposed to think about living next to somebody who’s sodomized my friends in prison for pleasure? How am I expected to live with people who are starving, my friends, my family? It’s gone beyond anything that we were ever willing to accept and forgive.

    There’s so much that has been destroyed right now in our hearts that it’s unbearable to even think about the idea of being close to them and forgiving. I know that forgiveness is the first step to trauma, and I have done my share of that, but I cannot ask the orphan children of Gaza to forgive. Do you know how many orphans we have? We have over 200,000. How are they supposed to forgive? I don’t see a reality on the ground where we can sit and coexist, until the blood is wiped out of our streets to begin with. There needs to be time for us to be able to heal, to carry our wounds. Even before we even were asked to think about forgiveness, we need this bloodshed to stop. We need them to stop murdering us, so that we can have a breath and a break, to even digest the idea of living next to them.

    As I speak to you right now, they’re still bombing, the bombs are being dropped. How are we even mentally supposed to think about coexistence? Israel is the prime evil. I don’t like to use the analogies that they use of the… What does he say, Netanyahu, in his speeches, and what do they call us? But if there’s evil in this world, it lies there. And good is always better, and good is always forgiving. And I have faith in my people that we will always accept the light and always search for the light. And always, because of our religion, because of our faith, that also forces us to forgive when times that we don’t wish to forgive, we will have to come to that point, but not now, not until the last drop of blood is wiped. Not until we count our dead and we know who’s missing, who’s dead, who’s massacred.

    There’s people who don’t… Israel isn’t even giving us the ability to know who is being killed. They just dropped 80 bodies in Gaza without any name. They’ve been decomposed. They’re just killing people and dropping them off, and we don’t have the capabilities of DNA testing. We don’t have anything. So people are being buried in mass graves, and forever, mothers, and children, and daughters will be thinking, “Is my dad alive? Is my mother alive or not?” This answer will never be given to them. Even if the bodies are under the ground in mass graves, they will never know. They will never have closure. And we have mass graves all over Gaza. Don’t ask us to forgive or coexist until we know how big our wound is, and see if we can begin to heal.

    Marc Steiner:

    Ashira, thank you for your willingness to have this conversation, and your openness, both in your mind, heart, and spirit to say what you said.

    Ashira Darwish:

    Thank you.

    Marc Steiner:

    I want to once again thank Ashira Darwish for joining us today. Her voice and commentary in the film, Where the Olive Trees Weep, was profound and deeply moving. I knew we needed to have a conversation together. And I appreciate her willingness to lay bare the reality of what she and Palestinians face in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, in Palestine, and to be so willing to share that reality, the one she lived and suffered through with all of us, and her hope for the future.

    Once again, thank you, Ashira Darwish, and thank you all for listening. And thanks to David Hebden for running this program, and our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, our producer, Rosette Sewali, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for 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 about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the British outlet Channel 4 on Monday that he believes current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, an effort that the ex-Israeli leader called “reckless.” Asked whether he thinks Netanyahu “wants to draw the United States into a confrontation with Iran,” Olmert replied, “I suspect that he does.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This story originally appeared in Prism and Truthout on Oct. 7, 2024 as part of the Movement Media Alliance’s Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD).

    A bill currently making its way through Congress could kill independent media outlets like ours. 

    HR 9495 is a bipartisan piece of legislation, ostensibly about allowing U.S. nationals wrongfully detained abroad to postpone their tax deadlines. The bill sounds relatively innocuous. But the legislation also includes the text of another bill that made it through the House earlier this spring that gives the Treasury secretary the ability to designate a nonprofit a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

    That kind of sweeping jurisdiction should terrify anyone who cares about civil liberties. It should also especially concern readers of nonprofit media, since a bill like HR 9495 can have compounding effects. Some outlets might self-censor; organizations might spend limited funds and time defending themselves from any old hateful threat that comes their way; and donations might dry up as funders worry about whether they too could face penalties. The “terror” label is already all-powerful; it can freeze assets and spark investigations. And this bill creates a whole new category—that of the “terrorist supporting organization”—one that can poison by association alone.

    HR 9495 treads on territory that’s all too familiar. It’s no secret that Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern groups are more likely to be painted as “terrorist supporters.” There are already indications that this bill targets specific organizations, such as American Muslims for Palestine, who have recently been on the receiving end of lawmaker vitriol and smears. Turning lawmakers’ hateful accusations into a legal framework to threaten nonprofits is unacceptable.

    One could make any number of critiques of this bill. It puts a truly terrifying amount of power in the hands of a political appointee, who could easily weaponize it against any enemy of their choosing. It’s likely unconstitutional. It’s also redundant–providing material support to organizations on the U.S. list of foreign terror organizations is already illegal under existing legislation. 

    When you look beyond this specific provision, it’s clear that HR 9495 is yet another piece of lawfare in the wider war to suffocate the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as any meaningful news coverage that could help sustain it. That movement has become more vocal as Israel’s current genocide reaches its one-year mark and more than 41,000 Palestinians are confirmed to have been killed by Israel in Gaza. (Some researchers estimate the death toll could end up being closer to 186,000.) This violence has been fueled by the U.S. political establishment. But rather than doing anything to cleanse their hands of the blood, members of Congress have instead tried to suppress information about the death count. 

    Prism and Truthout have reported over the past year on the fascistic repression we have seen against both speech and collective action. Some of the ways mainstream media bosses quell dissent within their newsrooms is through the repression, firing, and systematic shunning of the journalists accurately reporting on the genocide and the marginalization of Palestinian-American and Muslim journalists who are censored or hindered from doing their jobs because of their identities. In an op-ed published across multiple movement media outlets, a collective of movement journalists wrote:

    On U.S. soil, journalists and media makers are being fired or pushed out of the profession for their advocacy. Jewish journalist Emily Wilder was fired from the Associated Press (AP) in 2021 after conservative activists targeted her for pro-Palestinian social media posts written prior to her employment with the AP. In 2022, The New York Times fired Palestinian journalist Hosam Salem in Gaza, citing his personal Facebook page that he used to speak out against the occupation he lives under. Multiple journalists have also resigned or canceled contracts with The New York Times in part because of its Gaza coverage, and in late October, Artforum fired editor-in-chief David Velasco for his participation in an open letter supporting Palestinian liberation. eLife editor-in-chief Michael Eisen was fired in October for retweeting an article from the satirical paper The Onion. These acts go hand in hand with the recent cancellation of campus groups at Brandeis University and Columbia University that are critical of the Israeli occupation and siege in Gaza.

    These threats of censorship are worldwide. Online, companies like Meta systematically suppress news from and about Palestinians. In Germany, chanting “from the river to the sea” can land you in court; anyone who uses the phrase on social media can be denied citizenship. In the U.K., journalists and activists already face charges under legislation known as the Terrorism Act 2000 that human rights groups call vague and overly broad. 

    But nowhere is the threat to Palestinians—and anyone who wants to tell the truth about Israeli aggression—greater than in Palestine. Media workers make up a small fraction of the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide—at least 130 of them in Gaza since last October, but experts say they have been deliberately targeted alongside medical and aid workers. 

    This includes several Al Jazeera journalists as Israel tries to stop one of the few media organizations willing and able to broadcast the truth about Palestine, from Palestine. Baseless “terror” accusations often accompany the killing of journalists. Earlier this year when Israel assassinated Ismail Al-Ghoul–one of the last to report from Gaza’s north–the drone strike was so severe that it decapitated the Al Jazeera journalist. Afterward, an official Israeli military social media account boasted about his death. “ELIMINATED,” the post said, while also baselessly smearing Al-Ghoul as a terrorist. 

    Death is the most extreme consequence of this unfounded, wildly racist terror labeling. But it’s not the only way journalism is silenced. The Knesset justified kicking Al Jazeera out of Israel earlier this year by citing concerns over state security. Israel then expanded its reach into the occupied West Bank, raiding Al Jazeera’s offices there, too. Journalists continued to broadcast with guns trained on them, and bureau chief Walid al-Omari narrated the raid as an Israeli soldier’s hand covered the camera lens. According to al-Omari, the military order accused Al Jazeera of “incitement to and support of terrorism.”

    This terror framing and the threat of censorship that accompanies it is nothing new. Its fever pitch was mostly during the early 2000s when the mainstream press happily marched along to the beat of war drums pounded by George W. Bush’s lackeys (some of whom now maintain plum positions in the crumbling journalism industry, a tragedy of its own). 

    But the roots of this dangerous behavior go even further back. “Terrorism” made its first appearance in a federal statute back in 1969 when Congress required the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that provides aid to Palestinian refugees to deny assistance to “any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.” The “terror” framing has always been steeped in anti-Palestinian racism. Now, decades later, it has spread to become a linchpin of our world order.

    Where has this all-encompassing “terror” fiction taken us? Tens of millions of people have been displaced and around 4.5 million people have died, directly or indirectly, thanks to the post-9/11 wars. But the last year has unleashed unimaginable levels of violence.

    In Gaza, Israel has killed 2,100 infants and toddlers in its genocide. Earlier this month when Israel dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs on a residential neighborhood in Lebanon, the U.S. framed the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a “measure of justice.” In the West Bank, soldiers lay siege on entire cities and accompanied settlers on murderous rampages to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their villages. And Israel kills international observers who dare demonstrate their solidarity. Military officials and members of the U.S. political establishment justify these actions by invoking a bogeyman of “terror.”

    As our colleagues in Palestine face down arrest, repression, and the barrels of many guns, they continue to hold power to account in service of liberation for their people. We’ll maintain our solidarity with them. No threat of censorship can change that. 

    Universities in Gaza are reduced to rubble. Universities in the West Bank are subject to military raids while their scholars languish in solitary confinement. And universities in the U.S. purchase drones and rifles for police crackdowns on campus protests. 

    As those protests continue, unbowed by guns and threats of expulsion or arrest, the state tries new methods to cast aspersions on students’ righteous indignation. Security officials make specious claims tying the protests to Iran. Elected officials say protesters are in the service of Russia and China. They can never imagine or admit that the actual threat to their violent status quo isn’t some foreign plot, but the determined empathy of the people they purportedly represent. 

    When claims from the Biden administration aren’t baseless, they’re downright absurd. Israel is “escalating to de-escalate.” The mind-numbing phrase “defensive weaponry” has entered the lexicon. And when it comes to defense, Biden administration officials essentially say only one side has the right to it. 

    And then, rather than questioning these claims, or doing anything else that might hold Israeli or American power to account, most Western corporate media outlets instead run cover for the state. The institutions doing the necessary, unsettling, and bureaucratic work of keeping count of the dead become “Hamas-run ministries.” Neighborhoods become “Hezbollah strongholds.” Invasions are “ground maneuvers,” while genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation are erased from style guides. 

    A recent piece at In These Times republishing the work of June Jordan and Toni Morrison and featuring an introduction by In These Times print editor Sherell Barbee discusses the power of our voices and the need for coalition-building. As Barbee notes, “A freedom struggle is being waged, and fascism feeds on silence.” Systems of oppression are maintained by silence, the obfuscation of information, and the amplification of voices of occupation and imperialism. And as noted in an op-ed published by Prism, “The U.S. commits atrocities across the globe and calls it freedom. The rest of the Western world bows to the U.S., and together, these Western nation-states, with Israel as their creation, dictate who is worthy of humanity and who isn’t. And the U.S. media largely falls in line.” It’s up to movement journalists and Media Against Apartheid and Displacement to fight back against these injustices. 

    It is not enough during such grave horrors to simply change the conversation. Nothing will ever be enough until we see real freedom for Palestine and beyond. As our colleagues in Palestine face down arrest, repression, and the barrels of many guns, they continue to hold power to account in service of liberation for their people. We’ll maintain our solidarity with them. No threat of censorship can change that. 

    News organizations accept broad censorship guidelines from the Israeli government. Press embed with the Israeli military as they attack everywhere from Gaza to Yemen, in pitiful displays of access journalism. Debunked claims about babies beheaded on Oct. 7 are never corrected for the world to see, while real videos of decapitated Palestinian children in Gaza get little to no mention. The disingenuous Israeli claims about Hamas using “human shields” are repeated to no end, but when Israel is on the other end of a missile, reporters are quick to point out the military infrastructure located in densely populated Tel Aviv without a whiff of irony. The longstanding disregard for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim life has never been so visible, open, and normalized.

    From the earliest days of Israel’s genocide, it was clear that the media would manufacture consent for whatever would come next. Last November, the newly formed Movement Media Alliance convened and decided to build a crucial resource to push back against censorship of movements for liberation and how mainstream media manufactures consent for Israeli colonial expansion and genocide. 

    We built Media Against Apartheid and Displacement (MAAD), a website to provide readers with articles from trustworthy, accurate, and independent sources reporting on the colonization and occupation of Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. and Western backing of Israel, and the movements fighting for Palestinian liberation. As our work expanded this year so too did the number of organizations and outlets who joined MAAD, which now include Prism, Truthout, In These Times, Mondoweiss, Palestine Square, Haymarket Books, The Real News Network, The Forge, Waging Nonviolence, The Dig, The Kansas City Defender, Briarpatch magazine, Baltimore Beat, Hammer & Hope, Scalawag, Convergence Magazine, The Public Source, The Objective, The Polis Project, and Analyst News.

    Coming together as a collective of media-makers under a common mission is unprecedented, but it is a necessary endeavor. As Truthout noted, corporate media has spent many decades denying Palestinians’ humanity, both implicitly and explicitly, by deploying the mainstream myth of “objectivity” to silence Palestinian journalists

    While it seems like we’re on the precipice of some fresh, unimaginable horror each day, none of this is new–not Israel’s expansionist aggression that has lasted for more than 75 years, not the attacks on solidarity activists, and not the targeting of media outlets for performing the most basic functions of a free press. Those of us in Media Against Apartheid and Displacement have long known that our own freedom is intimately tied to the liberation of Palestine. 

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Education is a fundamental human right, yet Israel’s occupying forces have, in one year, damaged or destroyed over 90% of Gaza’s schools and all its universities.

    Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza

    This systemic and widespread destruction and the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, has led UN experts to ask Israel’s actions to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system have been intentional-an action known as ‘scholasticide’.

    There is also evidence to suggest this is part of a wider campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and erase Palestinian life from there.

    Learning has been severely disrupted for all of Gaza’s 625,000 school-aged children, and the lives and livelihoods of its almost 23,000 teachers have been hugely impacted. As of 1 October, according to the Ministry of Education Israel has killed 10,449 students and 419 educational staff in Gaza, while over 16,250 students and 2,463 teachers have been injured.

    70,000 tonnes of bombs have been dropped, turning Gaza into a vast wasteland of rubble. Massacres have become the norm, with entire families wiped off the civil registry. At least 16,500 of the over 42,500 people killed have been children, leading the UN to declare Gaza as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.

    A new report, Palestinian Education Under Attack in Gaza: Restoration, Recovery, Rights and Responsibilities in and through Education, is the first to quantify the toll Israel’s genocide in Gaza has had on children, young people and teachers, and includes many interviews with vital actors in the field.

    The Canary also spoke to students and teachers on the ground in Gaza.

    Learning loss has accumulated in Gaza

    Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and the Centre for Lebanese Studies, in collaboration with UNRWA, found that between 2019 and August 2024 school children in Gaza had already lost the equivalent of two academic years because of Covid-19 and Israel’s 2021 bombing campaign.

    As a result, ‘learning poverty’- the proportion of children unable to read a basic text by age 10- has increased by at least 20 percent.

    Professor Maha Shuayb, Director of the Centre for Lebanese Studies, told the Canary:

    We have accumulated a loss of learning. That which accumulated before the war, and another new loss that is happening now. The younger you are the more difficult it is to make it up. If this is prolonged- and we are moving into a protracted conflict, we are basically saying that a whole generation will be uneducated. It is not known when children will go back to school.

    Shuayb is worried the daily attacks on Gaza’s schools will now spread to Lebanon and prevent children there from attending school:

    That’s my worst nightmare, but that’s what happens when no one makes sure international law is protected. Schools have been systematically attacked, and huge numbers of children systematically killed or disabled, yet we seem unable to do anything. We are facing a really, really serious issue.

    If Israel’s war on Gaza continues until 2026, the report suggests students would lose five years of education, and this is without taking into account the additional effects of mass displacement, hunger, disease and trauma – which are affecting the vast majority of the population.

    Life is being decimated in Gaza. Children have witnessed horrific things, which have left them with deep scars – and they are losing so much in terms of hope, a future, and human rights. This will change the way they see the world.

    Gaza: a child’s mental health crisis in the making

    Yusuf Sayed, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, told the Canary:

    Teachers told us of the difficulties they face when trying to educate their students about democracy, human rights and international conventions in law, when all they see on a daily basis is that they are being abandoned.

    The international community has failed Gaza’s children.

    19,000 are orphaned, and many thousands have life changing injuries. Even before October 7, 98,000 children already had a disability. Their challenges have now worsened due to inaccessible shelters, lack of essential services and loss of  assistive devices, which are now entirely unavailable, as Israel has prevented their entry into the Strip.

    Before Israel’s latest military offensive, more than 500,000 children were already in need of mental health and psychosocial support in the Gaza Strip. Today, the figure is one million.

    UNRWA spokesperson Jonathan Fowler told the Canary:

    Adults and children alike have undergone tremendous shock and suffering, with physical and mental scars that are shaping their world view and threatening their faith in any future, let alone in human rights.

    The consequences of constant military operations and forced displacement are taking a heavy toll on people’s mental health, and have exacerbated a preexisting mental health crisis, which was conditioned by years of blockade and recurrent hostilities.

    UNRWA social workers report a surge in symptoms of depression, stress, anxiety, and trauma among the people they serve – one that is especially noticeable among children, who have been bearing the brunt of this brutal war.

    In Gaza, every second person is a child. So, this is a children’s mental health crisis.

    Education brings hope to Gaza’s children

    Palestine has one of the world’s highest literacy rates, and Palestinians invest a huge amount in education, as it provides their young people with the skills and knowledge needed to advocate for their rights, and contribute to their communities, and gives then hope. It also helps preserve Palestinian history, culture, and identity, and is a source of pride and identity for the population.

    Some may see education as a luxury, especially when people are dying from hunger and essential food and medical aid is blocked from entering Gaza. But the report reminds us that education offers much more than just academic achievement for these children.

    Children in Gaza have just been surviving – nothing more. There is a real need for some normalcy, a future vision and, in this respect, education is extremely important.

    School buildings which have not been destroyed have been repurposed as emergency shelters, for some of Gaza’s 1.9 million internally displaced people, but these are extremely overcrowded and lack basic resources. They too have become the targets of Israeli attacks even though, under international humanitarian law, schools are protected during conflict.

    Dr Salem Abu Musleh works for the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, and is the Gaza coordinator of the Palestine Astrophysics Programme.

    However, he and his family have been displaced several times due to the bombing, and have travelling backwards and forwards between Khan Younis and Rafah, looking for a safe place to stay.

    His son had been offered a scholarship to study in Turkey but has been unable to take up the offer, due to the border closure.

    Abu Musleh is now in Khan Younis, teaching 14 to 18 year olds, and says his classes – which take place either outside, in good weather, or in a tent that has been converted into a classroom – aim to not only increase his pupil’s knowledge, but also help with their psychological rehabilitation. He told the Canary:

    We use astrophysics to help our students express their feelings. By teaching them about the sky, the stars and the galaxies, we try and give these girls and boys hope, and show them they can do, they can learn and they can continue their lives, in spite of the war and the bad situation here in Gaza.

    Emergency education efforts threatened by restrictions imposed by Israel

    Although their rights are constantly violated, Palestinians are known for their resilience, and Israel’s attempts to erase them are constantly challenged.

    Emergency education efforts are now on the rise all over Gaza. Small-scale initiatives, similar to Abu Musleh’s, aim to keep children learning and minimize the impacts of the genocide on their mental health. And Temporary Learning Spaces now provide over 30,000 school-aged children not only with mental health support but also essential literacy and numeracy skills.

    In August, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, also began its ‘back to learning’ programme, which includes games, drama, arts, music and sports activities to try to the war’s impact on children’s mental health.

    But these emergency education efforts also face serious problems. They are not only threatened by ongoing violations, but also by the weather. Current restrictions on the entry of waterproof tents, and similar materials, mean that many are expected to face flooding and will become inaccessible due to heavy rains during winter.

    Abu Musleh said:

    Now we are looking for plastic to cover some of the places, to protect our students from rain. We face such a great problem. There are no materials here, no plastic comes here. We have found some old plastic, but it’s not enough to cover the main area, so the problem still exists.

    Although the report focuses on schools, school-aged children and young people, university students have also suffered greatly.

    Sixth year medical student, Mohammed Al Zebda attended Gaza’s Al-Azhar University:

    Israel Gaza education

    But, like many, was unable to take his final exams and graduate this year because Israel bombed his university:

    His educational journey took a drastic turn for the worst.

    No safe place in Gaza

    He told the Canary:

    As a student, my primary focus shifted to finding a safe place for me and my mother, and ensuring we had enough food, water and other necessities. It was nearly impossible to think about education while the Israeli army was bombing everywhere, and there was no safe place in Gaza.

    Al Zebda, who says he used to live in a beautiful area near to Al Shifa Hospital in Central Gaza, was displaced from his home within the first week of Israel’s bombing campaign, but initially thought they would soon be returning:

    We took only the most necessary things- passport, essential papers, laptop, phone and some clothes. I remember each of my family members carrying a bag filled with clothes and important documents, nothing more.

    Every previous war had lasted only one or two months, but we soon found this war was far more aggressive and unimaginable. My family and I were displaced four times, and this was an extremely tiring and stressful situation. During this time I wished I could die, and my family and I witnessed death multiple times.

    In August 2023, he had travelled to London to take part in a plastic surgery course, so decided he would volunteer to help the injured, and put his new skills to good use. For five months, Al Zebda helped out in a hospital emergency room and burns department. He said:

    I saw and witnessed massacres right before my eyes- children without hands, without ears, and without legs, dead people, and injuries I had never studied before. I encountered difficult cases, including children with burned-out skulls, with their brains exposed outside their skulls.

    In May, after waiting a month for his name to be called out, and paying $5000, Al Zebda eventually managed to leave Gaza for Egypt, where he is now continuing his studies and working with Children Not Numbers, to help injured children travel outside Gaza to receive treatment.

    He adds that he is very grateful to this NGO for supporting his education, and now feels safe, although he had been “forced to start from zero”.

    Immense suffering of faculty staff and students

    Dr. Mohamed Riyad Zughbur has been Dean of the Palestine Faculty of Medicine at Al Azhar University for the past five years, and is one of Al Zebda’s lecturers. His home was blasted at the start of Israel’s bombing, and he was displaced many times before reaching the safety of Egypt, where he is now living.

    This was his house before Israel’s bombing:

    And this was it after:

    Israel Gaza education

    While recounting the university’s destruction, and the many deaths of faculty students and staff, Zughbur says he feels “indescribable sadness and pain”. Two of his own relatives had attended the university, but lost their lives when they were bombed by F-16 aircraft. 10 months later their bodies were pulled out from the rubble.

    He told the Canary:

    Some students are the last in their family to be killed by Israel, and that family is then permanently removed from the civil registry. And there are students whose family members have all been killed, and they remain alive alone, struggling to survive. And there are students in the Faculty of Medicine who had limbs amputated after the bombing.

    Al-Azhar’s Faculty of Medicine, which was established in 1999, was the first medical faculty in the Gaza Strip. But last year Israeli forces bombed the building, destroying Zughbur’s dream of further developing the facility:

    He says “it is now 75% destroyed, and the infrastructure including sewage, communications and electricity, like everywhere else in Gaza, is no longer functioning”:

    After it was bombed, the Israeli army came in and destroyed laboratories and university archives, bulldozed lecture halls and looted the new laboratories.

    The university managed to restart clinical training in late April, and an e-learning platform has been available for the rest of the university since June.  Lectures are either through Zoom meetings or recorded and uploaded for students.

    However, there are still huge problems to face, with many faculty members struggling to protect their families and often not having enough food and water. Most are living in tents, so also struggle to charge their mobiles and phones, and lack internet.

    But Zughbur says despite the bombing, killing and forced displacement, those students who have stayed in Gaza are committed to their training, and are continuing their studies despite all the difficulties in their daily lives. No doubt, these students will play an important part in helping to rebuild Gaza’s health system when rebuilding starts, yet again:

    Educational resources in short supply, even before 7 October

    Dr Mohammed Albaba is the Dean of Al- Azhar University’s Faculty of Dentistry, and the only staff member from his faculty who is still in Gaza. The others have left to safer places, such as Egypt.

    Since withdrawing its forces from Gaza in 2005, Israel has carried out five bombing campaigns there, and continues its 17 year land, sea and air blockade, heavily restricting many imports and virtually all exports, further isolating the strip. As a result, there is a complete lack of educational resources- even books, pens and paper, and this problem has been exacerbated since 7 October.

    Albaba told the Canary:

    In terms of education, the blockade really affects our faculty’s improvement, and also therefore our education level in Gaza. If I want some equipment for our university, it may take months or even years to get them here, if it arrives at all.

    But the blockade doesn’t just include equipment and goods, but also people. We faced, and continue to face, a real problem in travelling. For example, if there is a dental conference abroad, this would be impossible to go to.

    There are two options for those wanting to leave Gaza: either to cross the border with Israel, which is almost impossible for Palestinians, or to cross by the Rafah Crossing, the border with Egypt. Even before Israel’s latest military attack, those crossing the Egyptian border had to pay the authorities thousands of dollars, but Albaba says this cost has now risen sharply.

    Cost of living crisis has led to a staff shortage

    He told the Canary:

    The cost of crossing the border has now tripled since the start of the war. This is a total mess, and it’s impossible to improve anything. It does not only affect education. Many patients from Gaza face death, as they cannot afford to cross the border to seek medical treatment. Considering the situation people face, its also impossible for many of them to afford to leave Gaza, if they wanted to.

    This latest Israeli aggression has changed the lives of the people of Gaza beyond recognition, and they are exhausted. In common with Zughbur, Dr. Albaba has lost his home and has not been paid any wages, but is continuing to volunteer as a Dean of the faculty because he is trying to help his students finish their education:

    The last time I was paid was two months ago. The university hasn’t paid us any salary, because it has been destroyed. People have lost their lives, their homes, their money, so there is no income. But at the same time, we are trying to educate the students.

    Most of the University’s staff have now left Gaza, and are seeking jobs abroad, but we need staff, and they need financial support to continue their lives, and continue to work with their students.

    The huge financial problems have led to a staff shortage, so Albaba is looking for volunteer staff outside of Gaza, through Academic Solidarity With Palestine, a non-profit which has proven invaluable to the many educational facilities in the region looking for volunteers at this difficult time.

    Al-Azhar used to be financed through student tuition fees, and some international support for the educational system, but this has all stopped. The university has been destroyed and the fees are not being paid.

    This is an extremely big challenge as circumstances are especially difficult, and prices extremely high, while employees still need to support their families. But it is not only staff members who are suffering from financial hardship.

    ‘Considering what other people are going through, my situation is perfect’

    Albaba told the Canary:

    Even if students have internet connections, many students don’t have the equipment. You at least need a laptop, but due to the financial problems people are facing they are now selling their laptops and their phones. They are even selling their clothes.

    Lecturers and students alike are facing severe problems, not only with lack of internet, water and electricity, but also finding safe spaces to stay. Albaba has been displaced nine times since last October:

    You keep moving because you are running from the ground invasion, from place to place, looking for somewhere safe. I have stayed with relatives, lived in a tent, rented a room for US $500 a month – which was not suitable for human beings, and now there are 10 of us, including my wife and son, staying in a store. This is my situation. It isn’t easy but considering what other people are going through, it’s perfect.

    Israel Gaza education

    Albaba considers himself lucky because he can, at the moment, cope with the financial problems he is facing, but says many other people unfortunately do not have this ability. He is, as yet, undecided about his future:

    This is my job. I want to stay in Gaza, but unfortunately after the war there will be nothing left here. It’s a very difficult situation. I can’t explain in details what we are facing, but for now I am trying to do my best to help the students, as I am still in Gaza now- although the other staff outside of Gaza are also supporting them.

    The future outcome of Gaza’s young people depends on when this war ends, and how quickly the education system is restored.

    Lack of funding for education

    Once this genocide ends, there will be significant challenges in resuming the educational process.

    A permanent ceasefire is essential as a first step to rebuilding the education system.

    The blockade also needs to be lifted, and the occupation ended.

    But, as the report states, children and young people cannot wait.

    They need access to safe educational spaces and learning activities now, to ensure their wellbeing. For this to happen there also must be increased educational funding. But funding has not been forthcoming.

    Every year, since 2003, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has launched a humanitarian appeal to support the Occupied Palestinian Territory, but education continues to be one of the least funded sectors. In this year’s US$3.42 billion flash appeal, education received only 3.5% of the appeal funding.

    The UK only gives just over 2% of the appeal funding for education, while major donors such as the US and Germany have completely neglected education in their aid packages.

    When people are focused on a dire situation with loss of life, they think of the immediate emergency context, and not about education. But the report argues that there should not be a choice between one or the other.

    There needs to be adequate funding for both.

    Israel’s destruction must be rebuilt

    For 76 years the international community has turned its back on the Palestinians, and their children. They should be given more than just the bare minimum to live, and need a secure future, with equal rights.

    Education is central to stabilising the decline in Gaza, and Sayed is still hopeful that the challenges can be met:

    Things are bad, but if and when we get a permanent ceasefire, and allow things to stabilize, there is a strong possibility that with time, commitment and reconstruction that has Palestinians at the heart of it, we might be able to make up for some of the learning loss.

    Featured image and additional images and video supplied

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • As the war on Gaza enters its second year and Israel expands its attacks on Lebanon, we continue our conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. “It was revelatory…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • On 8 October, Palestinian ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot shared a powerful video online. It imagines a scenario where, in 2040, people finally accept that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza between 2023 and 2024.

    Around the world, people mark its anniversary. And children ask their parents what they were doing during the genocide and why they didn’t act despite it happening right in front of their eyes to children like them:

    We will all be judged on Israel’s actions

    In Britain and elsewhere, many people continue to march regularly against the genocide despite media and political smears. But not enough people have taken enough action to really force Western governments to end Israel’s impunity and their own complicity in its war crimes.

    Videos like this serve as a reminder that our descendants will judge us on how we acted, or didn’t act, during the horrific extermination campaign that Israeli colonisers have inflicted on Palestinians and others.

    Upon the one-year anniversary of the start of Israel’s latest genocidal attack on Gaza, occupation forces have killed 16,756 children. As Al Jazeera reports, this is higher than in any other conflict in the last two decades. Indeed, 69% of all the victims of Israel’s crimes are women and children.

    Never again means never again for anyone

    We shouldn’t allow this genocide to become a political football for cynical actors to manipulate.

    The video above, for example, apparently comes from the Turkish government, which has consistently been the ‘world’s worst jailer of reporters’, has been found guilty of war crimes itself in recent years, and has refused to recognise its country’s own genocide of Armenians over a hundred years ago.

    As a key NATO member, Western media outlets and politicians have also granted it impunity for its crimes. However, in its criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it is right and has put its NATO allies to shame.

    We don’t all need to see eye to eye on everything to oppose genocide. It should be a human issue. Anyone with an ounce of compassion should be able to condemn the brutal murder of children and take action to stop it from happening now and in the future.

    As Holocaust survivors and their descendants wrote in 2014:

    As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.…

    We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Israeli occupation forces have extended their genocidal campaign in Gaza to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Using drone strikes, troops in armored vehicles and bulldozers, their regular raids since October 7, 2023, have escalated into extensive and deadly attacks. Between August 28 and September 6, Israel launched “Operation Summer Camps,” a major military invasion…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel invaders in southern Lebanon have begun a highly controversial standoff with Irish peacekeepers in recent days. The UN forces have said Israeli breaches on the border raise “significant concerns”. And there has been some particularly aggressive and provocative behaviour.

    On 7 October, for example, BelfastLive posted an article about “the moment Irish soldiers stared down the barrel of a deadly Israeli tank right at their door”. The “multi-million dollar” military vehicle was outside the UN peacekeeping camp UNP6-52, under the control of Irish soldiers.

    https:/twitter.com/dlLambo/status/1843189077971275955

    Israeli occupation forces had set up a “forward operating base” outside the camp as it targeted the town of Marun ar Ras in southern Lebanon. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said it was “deeply concerned” about Israel’s aggressive actions, which it called “extremely dangerous”. It has raised the issue with the apartheid state, which had previously “told Ireland to remove its peacekeepers”. UNIFIL promptly rejected this request.

    Irish peacekeepers ‘unable to fulfil their role’ right now

    RTÉ has reported that Israel’s actions have forced peacekeepers to enter “protective bunkers”. One image, which it didn’t share for security reasons, showed “at least 20 pieces of IDF military equipment, including tanks and armoured vehicles, located at a newly-created Israeli firing position immediately adjacent to the UN post”. It continued by stressing that:

    Much of the fighting since Israel moved across the blue line seven days ago has centred on the two towns adjacent to the two Irish-overseen outposts, Yaroun and Maroun El Ras.

    UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti says the force has asked Israel to “move away from the area as their presence compromises the safety of UNIFIL troops”.

    In the event of Israeli refusal to do so, the Security Council would need to take further steps. RTÉ insisted that UNIFIL – whose role is to “ensure humanitarian access to the region, as well as monitor clashes” – was currently “unable to carry out that role”.

    The Hezbollah forces resisting the invasion, however, have reportedly ordered their fighters to “preserve the lives of the soldiers of the international forces”. That means the Irish peacekeepers.

    Someone needs to stand up for civilians

    In November 2023, in the second month of Israel’s genocidal assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, the BBC published an article about the same Irish peacekeeping force in Lebanon. It spoke of “the buzz of Israeli drones” above. And Lieutenant Dylan Cadogan said:

    We have seen houses destroyed and we have seen civilians caught in crossfire that needed our help.

    It also mentioned the displacement of 60,000 people. Lieutenant Colonel Cathal Keohane, meanwhile, insisted:

    We have seen an expansion and more attacks deeper inside to Lebanon, we have seen a wider range of weapons being used

    Hezbollah acted in solidarity with Gaza after Israel began its latest war crimes there following 7 October 2023. But since the renewal of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah last year, the colonial power has been the dominant force of death and destruction in Lebanon. Statistics clearly show that Israeli attacks “far outnumber” Hezbollah’s, as do the fatalities those attacks caused.

    As RTÉ reported, Israeli strikes recently damaged a hospital between the Irish peacekeepers and Marun ar Ras. A UNIFIL spokesperson, meanwhile, estimated that 350,000 people in the peacekeeping zone had left the area since fighting began. Across the country, the displacement figure is over a million. Israeli attacks, meanwhile, have killed more than 2,083 people in Lebanon.

    Amid Israel’s ongoing regional rampage, all with impunity thanks to Western complicity, a force that stands up for peace is more necessary than ever.

    Featured image via BBC News – screengrab

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • On the year anniversary of 7 October, BBC put out a Panorama episode to mark it, talking to four families in Israel and Gaza.

    One of these was Israeli Thomas Hand, whose daughter Hamas held captive for fifty days in Gaza. However, the BBC conveniently omitted something notable about Hand. Specifically, the Zionist resident from Kibbutz Be’eri on the border, had previously given a chilling interview to Israeli state broadcaster Kan.

    And in this, he revealed how in his zeal for the destruction of Hamas, he would have been willing to sacrifice his nine-year-old daughter.

    In other words, the BBC whitewashed the part where Hand is a raging genocidal Zionist – who’d go to any length to eradicate Hamas.

    BBC Panorama omitting information on Israeli interviewee

    BBC Panorama aired on the one year anniversary of 7 October. The broadcaster’s description of the episode is already dripping in bias. It read:

    When Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, it led to a war that threatens to engulf the entire region 12 months later. Jane Corbin has been following four families, two in Israel and two in Gaza, whose lives have been changed forever by the conflict.

    Tens of thousands of Gazans are reported to have been killed and much of the territory has been reduced to rubble. With many Israeli hostages having died in captivity, dozens more still being held by Hamas and violence now spreading to Lebanon, a deal to bring peace looks as far away as ever.

    Obviously, it’s hard to know where to begin with this. For one, the BBC is both-siding the violence through false equivalence. In other words, it’s giving equal weight to Israeli and Gazan voices – when Israel has murdered over 40,000 Palestinians in its genocidal assault on the strip. The BBC should be giving Gazans still in the grip of Israel’s genocide a bigger platform all round.

    Of course, the BBC would not do this – after all, it’s still framing Israel’s genocide and annexation of Gaza as a ‘conflict’ between two sides at war. The Canary doesn’t need to tell you why this is clearly not the case.

    Again, it liberally applies passive voice to avoid pointing the finger at the perpetrator. To add insult to injury, it doesn’t even name Israel in connection to the “tens of thousands of Gazans reported to have been killed”. Nor does it acknowledge Israel as the culprits of murderous terrorism in Lebanon.

    None of this is remotely surprising from the blatantly Israel-biased BBC that masquerades as impartial, but has repeatedly shown it’s anything but. Just add it to the pile of steaming shit propaganda the broadcaster has passed off as news since Israel began its brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Not that it is anything new – it has been doing this long before 7 October – much as Israel’s apartheid occupation and violence against Palestinians extends back many decades.

    No mention of the Hannibal Directive

    While the programme does acknowledge how Israel killed its own civilians in friendly fire on 7 October, it doesn’t explain to what extent this was the case.

    Specifically, it mentioned how Israel killed 14 of its own people on the day.

    One viewer noted on X that the Panorama reaffirmed the previous reports that the IDF helicopters shot at Israeli civilians:

    However, as the Canary’s Ed Sykes detailed, Israel forces likely killed many more of the people it later reported in the death toll. Predictably, the BBC made no mention of Israel’s ‘Hannibal Directive’ either. This directs forces to murder Israeli soldiers, rather than let them be taken captive.

    Daughters death a ‘price’ Zionist father willing to pay

    So, it was amidst all this that the BBC interviewed two Gazan, and two Israeli families. Hamas took Thomas Hand’s nine-year-old daughter Emily captive and held her for 50 days. It released Emily in a hostage exchange. BBC Panorama presenter Jane Corbin said this was “the day after a ceasefire”. In reality, this was just a four-day pause in Israel’s brutal bombardment, back in November 2023.

    Hand described the moment his daughter returned:

    I can’t remember what I said. I honestly don’t know what was said. Just too overjoyed.

    However, a few months later, Hand was on Israeli state media channel Kan talking about her captivity. On this he said how he would have been prepared to sacrifice her, if it meant ending Hamas. As Electronic Intifada reported in May:

    As she watched on, her father told Israeli interviewer Tali Moreno he had been willing to sacrifice her, in order to further Israel’s genocidal war effort against the Palestinians in Gaza.

    Speaking of her short time in Palestinian captivity, he said that the Israeli military “had to do everything in its powers to destroy Hamas,” even if that meant killing his own daughter.

    “I realized that she could be bombed, could be shot by friendly fire,” he said. And yet: “That was a price that in my head, I could say: ‘Yeah okay.’ So long as we destroy Hamas.”

    The outlet explained how this is part of a broader Zionist phenomenon whereby:

    Many Israelis seem willing to sacrifice their own civilians on the altar of Zionism – and sometimes even themselves too.

    Naturally, the BBC Panorama didn’t bring up this interview with Hand. To do so would have illustrated the zeal for the Zionist occupation in Palestine. It would have shown how this has fueled Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians more broadly. Moreover, it would demonstrate how this has driven the resulting ongoing genocide it is still committing nearly a year on.

    Thinly veiled genocide-mongering

    Of course, the BBC couldn’t entirely conceal the Zionist’s thinly veiled genocide-mongering vitriol either. Hand told Corbin that:

    I keep going back to the 6th – when we were living as neighbours. But on the 7th, they ruined whatever future they had. They’ve ruined the future of what we’ve had.

    Gazans have “ruined whatever future they had” – a Freudian slip? Obviously, he doesn’t outright express his support for Israel’s genocide, but the meaning is pretty clear. He doesn’t see a future for the people of Gaza as his neighbours – in other words, it suggests he absolutely supports ethnically cleansing the strip.

    In another moment, Hand later said:

    We can’t let Hamas just rebuild again. They’ll do the same thing – they promised they will do it again and again and again – come to our communities and kill us. We can’t let that happen again.

    The BBC cut off his interview there, leaving viewers to only surmise what this could mean. We already know Hand would put up his daughter’s life if it meant destroying Hamas. His vehemence for them is apparent. Does he support the murder of over 40,000 Palestinians? That seems likely.

    In June, Hand criticised Ireland, where he is a dual citizen, for recognising the Palestinian statehood. He argued this was ‘rewarding’ Palestine after Hamas’s attacks. However, Ireland emphasised how it did so as a step towards a peaceful resolution.

    And notably, in response, Hand said that:

    We’re praying for it to happen and for all of this to end. All they (Hamas) have to do is hand over the hostages, and the war is over.

    In other words, Hand is wholly behind Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza until Hamas hands over the remaining hostages.

    BBC Panorama: thinly-veiled propaganda

    In the BBC programme, Hand also left out the part where it was IDF bombs that put his daughter’s life at risk, saying:

    They were moved from house to house, above ground, presumably one step ahead of the IDF, going South. There was about three or four houses, continually moving, under heavy fire. A bomb fell so close that they were sprayed with the window – the window shattered and covered them in glass.

    Clearly, the BBC has no qualms platforming Israeli supporters of genocide. Giving a voice to genocidal Zionists is nothing out of character for the BBC though. This was just one more instance of the public broadcaster omitting key facts that would further dent Israel’s victim narrative.

    Despite Israel’s litany of abhorrent war crimes, illegal occupation, invasions, and a literal genocide that has wiped whole Palestinian families off the map, forever, it put a Zionist citizen apologist front and centre, and left out the part where he’d sacrifice his own daughter to put an end to Hamas. For those at the back, (the BBC, evidently) Israel isn’t interested in negotiating an end to this – it won’t be content until it wipes Gaza – and Palestine – off the map.

    Feature image via BBC Panorama/ the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Palestine Action has targeted 10 British offices of Allianz, the world’s largest insurance firm and a major financial backer of Israel’s arms trade – and therefore, its ongoing genocide in Gaza and assaults on other countries in the Middle East.

    Palestine Action targeting Allianz

    Nation-wide, Allianz branches have been sprayed in a symbol of the Palestinian bloodshed by Palestine Action. This was Manchester:

    It was a similar scene in Bristol:

    And Glasgow:

    Palestine Action Allianz

    Palestine Action hit Belfast:

    Meanwhile, the Guildford HQ is currently being occupied as part of Palestine Action’s ongoing campaign against companies enabling Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems. The headquarters remains shut down as activists have occupied the front overhang and covered the premises in paint and messages such as ‘Drop Elbit’:

    The Allianz offices which have been targeted are:

    • Guildford, 57 Ladymead, GU1 1DB​​​​​​​
    • Manchester, Landmark, St Peters Square, 1 Oxford Street, M1 4PB
    • Glasgow, 58 Waterloo Street, G2 7DA
    • Lancaster, 4 Mannin Way, Lancaster Business Park, LA1 3SW
    • Belfast, Clockwise Offices, River House, BT1 2BE
    • London, 60 Gracechurch Street, EC3V 0HR
    • London, 199 Bishopsgate, EC2M 3TY
    • Birmingham, Colmore Plaza, B4 6AT
    • Bristol, 10 Victoria Street, BS1 6BN
    • Milton Keynes, Witan Gate House, Witan Gate

    Allianz: the tip of the genocide-enabling iceberg

    Allianz has previously been described as Elbit’s “principle institutional shareholder”, at-one-point owning over 2% of the company. The finance company continues to hold thousands of shares in Elbit Systems Ltd, while its subsidiary ‘Allianz Insurance Products Trust’ provides insurance services for Elbit Systems UK, including employment insurance.

    One year on from the start of the genocide in Gaza, these nationwide action serves as a reminder that, throughout the past twelve months, Western capital has continued to profit from the mass murder of Palestinians. Allianz’ profit books, its returns on its investments, have been bolstered by the hundreds of military technologies which Elbit provides in service of genocide.

    Elbit provides over 85% of Israel’s drones, including the quadcopters used to assassinate countless Palestinian men, women, and children, and has publicly advertised its weaponry as being “battle-tested” on Palestinians. Its business operations are central to Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and its technologies uphold the brutal occupation regime.

    The campaign against Elbit’s backers has seen the likes of Barclays and BNY Mellon shut down repeatedly, to raise-the-stakes of their dealings with genocide.

    Shut it down

    Palestine Action said in a statement:

    If Allianz refuses to understand that dealing with Elbit is immoral, it must be made clear that maintaining its involvement will become increasingly unprofitable.

    Palestine Action will continue until all of Elbit’s backers cut their links or shut down.

    Featured image via Neil Terry and additional images via Neil Terry and Palestine Action

    By The Canary

  • A year on from 7 October, world leaders and the corporate media are gushing over Israel. As usual, they are forgetting the years of apartheid and violence that led Hamas’s attack – along with the thousands of Palestinians they have murdered since.

    Conveniently, at the end of last year when senior officials tried to access the security footage of the wall that barricades the Gaza strip, it had suspiciously disappeared from the database. There are conflicting reports as to whether officials permanently deleted these, or just restricted them to senior government officials. Israeli’s have also provided reports of audio communications being interfered with – so they are no longer decipherable.

    As the Cradle reported in December 2023:

    During a visit by a senior female officer from the Israeli army general staff to the various division headquarters, senior officers in the reserves commented that “an invisible hand” had deleted videos from the various military surveillance cameras showing the events of that day.

    It continued:

    The videos were deleted from the military network known as “ZeeTube,” potentially to prevent their use in an in-depth investigation of how thousands of Hamas fighters managed to breach the border fence and infiltrate Israel to carry out the attack.

    We sat down with one of the generals and were going to show him a video about one of the events, and we found out that someone had deleted the videos,” said a senior reserve officer from one of the divisions, adding, “It was very embarrassing. Then suspicion arose as to why someone would do that.

    Unsurprisingly, Israeli military officials denied this. They told Israeli news site Walla, who broke the revelations, that the videos had simply been “blocked to unauthorised people”.

    Separately, the outlet noted how someone appeared to have interfered with the audio communications recordings of the day. The officials noted that some had “disappeared” or may have been “transferred to another location”, but that it meant they were “unable to hear them.”

    The senior officers suggested that: “Someone decided to transfer or delete them so that no one will hear them”. IDF officials didn’t comment on these allegations relating to the audio recordings at the time. In other words, it looks like some Netanyahu government heavyweight got rid of these deliberately.

    Mysterious, or suspicious?

    One person on X quickly reminded us that the wall is supposedly the most surveilled and high-tech border in the world – making it even more suspicious:

    Someone pointed out that Israeli officials were either lying, or they’ve never heard of cloud storage. Given the state’s claims to be at the height of tech, it’s clearly the former:

    Israel doesn’t make mistakes – until they’re convenient:

    Israel’s credibility belongs in the bin, which is no doubt where the camera footage is too:

    As one X user put it:

    However, predictably it transpired the vanished footage was entirely intentional all along. Of course, it raises the question of what Israel doesn’t want people to see or hear.

    Hannibal directive

    Last November, the Electronic Intifada exposed Israel’s use of the Hannibal directive on 7 October.

    The Hannibal Directive is a controversial Israeli military policy which allows them to use any force necessary to prevent Israeli soldiers being captured and taken hostage. This includes any action which ultimately leads to the captives deaths. Israel cancelled the official policy back in 2016. However, on 7 October at midday officials revived the directive.

    Double Down News revealed that the Israeli military were aware of Hamas’s plans, and didn’t even raise the alert level to number one – the most basic one. This means when Hamas burst through the fence at 6:30am, many of the soldiers were still in bed. Which again, is insane when Israel had prior knowledge of the plans. This means that the border footage disappearing is even more convenient as it absolves Israel:

    What is Israel hiding?

    Israel also deployed Apache helicopters, but without ground control. This meant pilots were relying on WhatsApp groups to try and decipher which vehicles heading towards the border contained Hamas, hostages, or civilians.

    Ultimately, this led to Israeli soldiers indiscriminately shooting at over 70 vehicles and in many cases killing everyone in the vehicle. The Israeli military does not deny that report. Obviously, if these vehicles were heading towards the border you would expect that the security footage picked up at least some of them. In other words, maybe it’s this Israel doesn’t want even its own IDF senior officers to see:

    At the end of the day, it all looks like another case of Israel manipulating and concealing the facts to hide how it murdered some of its own civilians on 7 October. Because, to admit to this would be to demolish the pretext it used to launch its genocide in the first place – not that anything can justify its abhorrent crusade of violence since.

    Feature image via Quds News Network/X

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.