Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees

Yuval Abraham

January 5, 2024

In early December, images circulated worldwide showing dozens of Palestinian men in the city of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, who were stripped to their underwear, kneeling or sitting hunched over, then blindfolded and put into the back of Israeli military trucks like cattle. The vast majority of these detainees were civilians with no affiliation to Hamas, Israeli security officials later confirmed, and the men were taken away by the army without notifying their families of the detainees’ whereabouts. Some of them never returned.

 

+972 Magazine and Local Call spoke with four Palestinian civilians who appeared in these photos, or were arrested near the scene and taken to Israeli military detention centers, where they were held for several days or even weeks before being released back to Gaza. Their testimonies — along with 49 video testimonies published by various Arabic media outlets of Palestinians arrested in similar circumstances in recent weeks in the northern districts of Zeitoun, Jabalia, and Shuja’iya — indicate systematic abuse and torture by Israeli soldiers against all of the detainees, civilians and combatants alike.

According to these testimonies, Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep, food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the day. Some testified to having been beaten all over their bodies and having cigarettes extinguished on their necks or backs. Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these conditions.

The Palestinians we spoke with said that on the morning of Dec. 7, when the Beit Lahiya photos were taken, Israeli soldiers entered the neighborhood and ordered all civilians to leave their homes. “They were shouting: ‘All civilians must come down and surrender,’” Ayman Lubad, a legal researcher at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, who was detained that day along with his younger brother, told +972 and Local Call.

According to testimonies, the soldiers ordered all the men to undress, gathered them in one place, and took the photos that were later disseminated on social media (senior Israeli officials have since chided the soldiers for sharing the images). Women and children, meanwhile, were ordered to go to Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Four different witnesses separately told +972 and Local Call that while sitting handcuffed in the street, soldiers entered homes in the neighborhood and set them on fire; +972 and Local Call have obtained photos of one of the burned houses. The soldiers told the detainees they had been arrested because “they didn’t evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip.”

An unknown number of Palestinian civilians remain in the northern part of the Strip despite Israeli expulsion orders since the early stages of the war, which led to hundreds of thousands fleeing southward. Those we spoke to listed several reasons why they did not leave: fear of being bombed by the Israeli army on the journey south or while sheltering there; fear that Hamas operatives would shoot them; mobility difficulties or disabilities among family members; and the uncertainty of life in the camps for displaced persons in the south. Lubad’s wife, for example, had just given birth, and they feared the dangers of leaving their home with a newborn.

In a video filmed at the scene in Beit Lahiya, an Israeli soldier holding a megaphone stands in front of the detained residents — who are sitting in rows, naked and on their knees, with their hands behind their heads — and declares: “The Israeli army has arrived. We destroyed Gaza [City] and Jabalia on your heads. We occupied Jabalia. We are occupying all of Gaza. Is that what you want? Do you want Hamas with you?” The Palestinians shout back that they are civilians.

“Our house burned down in front of my eyes,” Maher, a student at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University, who appears in a photograph of detainees in Beit Lahiya, told +972 and Local Call (he asked to use a pseudonym for fear that the Israeli army would retaliate against his family members, who are still being held in a military detention center). Eyewitnesses said the fire spread uncontrollably, the street filled with smoke, and soldiers had to move the bound Palestinians a few dozen meters away from the flames.

“I told the soldier, ‘My house burned down, why are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘Forget about this house,'” recalled Nidal, another Palestinian who also appears in a photograph from Beit Lahiya, and asked to use a pseudonym for the same reasons.

‘He asked me where it hurt, then hit me hard’

More than 660 Palestinians from Gaza are currently known to be detained in Israeli prisons — most of them in Ketziot Prison in the Naqab/Negev desert. An additional number, which the army refuses to reveal but could be as high as several thousand, are being held at the Sde Teyman military base near Be’er Sheva, where much of the abuse of detainees is alleged to be taking place.

According to the testimonies, the Palestinian detainees from Beit Lahiya were loaded onto trucks and taken to a beach. They were left bound there for hours, and another photograph of them was taken and circulated on social media. Lubad recounted how one of the female Israeli soldiers asked several detainees to dance and then filmed them.

The detainees, still in their underwear, were then taken to another beach inside Israel, near the Zikim army base, where, according to their testimonies, soldiers interrogated them and severely beat them. According to media reports, members of IDF Unit 504, a military intelligence corps, carried out these initial interrogations.

Maher recounted his experience to +972 and Local Call: “A soldier asked me, ‘What’s your name?’ and started punching me in the stomach and kicking me. He said, ‘You’ve been in Hamas for two years, tell me how they recruited you.’ I told him I was a student. Two soldiers opened my legs and punched me there and punched me in the face. I started coughing and realized that I wasn’t breathing. I told them, ‘I’m a civilian, I’m a civilian.’

“I remember reaching my hand down my body and feeling something heavy,” Maher continued. “I didn’t realize it was my leg. I stopped feeling my body. I told the soldier that it hurt, and he stopped and asked where; I told him in the stomach, and then he hit me hard in the stomach. They told me to get up. I couldn’t feel my legs and couldn’t walk. Every time I fell, they beat me again. My mouth and nose were bleeding, and I fainted.”

The soldiers interrogated some of the detainees this same way, photographed them, checked their ID cards, and then divided them into two groups. Most, including Maher and Lubad’s younger brother, were sent back to Gaza and reached their homes that same night. Lubad himself was part of a second group of about 100 detained in Beit Lahiya that day who were transferred to a military detention facility inside Israel.

While there, the detainees regularly heard “planes taking off and landing,” so it is likely that they were held at the Sde Teyman base beside Be’er Sheva, which includes an airfield; this, according to the Israeli army, is where detainees from Gaza are held for processing — that is, deciding whether they should be classified as civilians or “unlawful combatants.”

According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, the military detention facilities are intended only for questioning and initial screening of detainees, before they are transferred to the Israel Prison Service or until their release. The testimonies from Palestinians who were held inside the facility, however, paint an entirely different picture.

‘We were tortured all day’

Inside the military base, the Palestinians were held in clusters of around 100. According to the testimonies, they were handcuffed and blindfolded the whole time, and permitted to rest only between midnight and 5 a.m.

One of the detainees in each cluster, whom the soldiers chose because he knew Hebrew and was given the title “Shawish” (a slang term for a servant or subordinate), was the only one without a blindfold. The former detainees explained that the soldiers guarding them had green laser flashlights that they used to mark anyone who moved, changed position because of pain, or made a sound. The Shawish brought these detainees to soldiers standing on the other side of the barbed wire fence surrounding the facility, where they were punished.

According to testimonies, the most common punishment was being tied to a fence and having to raise their arms for several hours. Whoever lowered them was taken away by the soldiers and beaten.

“We were tortured all day,” Nidal told +972 and Local Call. “We knelt, head down. Those who didn’t succeed were tied to the fence, [for] two or three hours, until the soldier decided to let him off. I was tied up for half an hour. My whole body was covered in sweat; my hands became numb.

“You can’t move,” Lubad recalled of the rules. “If you move, the soldier points a laser at you and tells the Shawish, ‘Get him out, raise his hands.’ If you put your hands down, the Shawish takes you outside, and the soldiers beat you. I was tied to the fence twice. And I kept my hands up because there were people around me who were really getting hurt. One person came back with a broken leg. You hear the beating and screaming on the other side of the fence. You are afraid to look or peek through the blindfold. If they see you looking, it’s a punishment. They will take you out or tie you to the fence too.”

Another young man released from detention told the media after returning to Gaza that “people were tortured all the time. We heard screaming. They [soldiers] said to us, ‘Why did you stay in Gaza, why didn’t you go to the south?’ And I told them, ‘Why should we go to the south? Our homes still stand, and we are not connected to Hamas.’ They told us, ‘Go down to the south — you celebrated [the Hamas-led attack] on October 7.’”

In one case, Lubad said, a detainee who refused to kneel and lowered his hands instead of keeping them raised was taken behind the barbed wire fence with his hands cuffed. The detainees heard beatings, then heard the detainee cursing a soldier, and then a gunshot. They don’t know if the detainee was actually shot, or whether he is alive or dead; in any case, he did not return for the rest of the time that those we spoke to were held there.

In interviews with Arabic media outlets, former detainees testified that other inmates held at the facility died next to them. “People died inside. One had heart disease. They threw him out, they didn’t want to take care of him,” one person told Al Jazeera.

Several detainees who were with Lubad also told him about such a death. They said that prior to his arrival, an elderly man from Al-Shati refugee camp, who was ill, died at the facility as a result of the conditions of detention. The detainees decided to go on a hunger strike to protest his death, and returned their rationed pieces of cheese and bread to the soldiers. The detainees told Lubad that at night, soldiers came in and severely beat them while handcuffed, and then threw teargas canisters at them. The detainees stopped striking.

The Israeli army confirmed to +972 and Local Call that detainees from Gaza died at the facility. “There are known cases of deaths of detainees held in the detention facility,” the IDF Spokesperson said. “In accordance with the procedures, an examination is conducted for every death of a detainee, including an examination regarding the circumstances of death. The bodies of the detainees are being held in accordance with military orders.”

In video testimonies, Palestinians who were released back to Gaza describe cases in which soldiers put out cigarettes on detainees’ bodies and even gave them electric shocks. “I was detained for 18 days,” a young man told Al Jazeera. “[The soldier] sees you falling asleep, takes a lighter, and burns your back. They put out cigarettes on my back a few times. One of the guys [who was blindfolded] said to [the soldier], ‘I want to drink water,’ and the soldier told him to open his mouth and then spat in it.”

Another detainee said he was tortured for five or six days. “‘You want to go to the bathroom? Forbidden,’” he recounted being told. “[The soldier] beats you. And I’m not Hamas, what am I to blame for? But he keeps telling you: ‘You are Hamas, everyone who remains in Gaza [City] is Hamas. If you weren’t Hamas, you would have gone to the south. We told you to go south.’”

Shadi al-Adawiya, another detainee who was released, told TRT in a videotaped testimony: “They put cigarettes out on our necks, hands, and backs. They kick you in the hands and head. And there are electric shocks.”

“You can’t ask for anything,” another released detainee told Al Jazeera after arriving at a hospital in Rafah. “If you say, ‘I want a drink,’ they beat you all over your body. There is no difference between old and young. I am 62 years old. They hit me in the ribs, and I’ve had trouble breathing ever since.”

‘I tried to take the blindfold off, and a soldier kneed me in the forehead’

The Palestinians that Israel detains in Gaza, whether militants or civilians, are being held under the 2002 “Unlawful Combatants Law.” This Israeli law allows the state to hold enemy fighters without granting them prisoner of war status, and to detain them for extended periods of time without standard legal proceedings. Israel can prevent detainees from meeting with a lawyer and postpone judicial review for up to 75 days — or, if a judge approves it, up to six months.

After the outbreak of the current war in October, this law was amended: according to the version approved by the Knesset on Dec. 18, Israel can also hold such detainees for up to 45 days without issuing a detention order — a provision that has concerning ramifications.

“They don’t exist for 45 days,” Tal Steiner, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, told +972 and Local Call. “Their families are not notified. During this time, people can die and no one will know about it. [You have to] go prove it happened at all. A lot of people can just disappear.”

The Israeli human rights NGO HaMoked received calls from people in Gaza regarding 254 Palestinians who were detained by the Israeli army and whose relatives have no idea where they are. HaMoked petitioned Israel’s High Court in late December, demanding that the military publish information about the Gaza residents it holds.

A source in the Israel Prison Service told +972 and Local Call that most of the detainees taken from Gaza are being held by the military and have not been transferred to prisons. It is likely that the Israeli army is trying to obtain intelligence information from civilians while using the Unlawful Combatants Law to imprison them.

The detainees who spoke to +972 and Local Call said that they were held in the military facility alongside people they knew to be members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. According to the testimonies, Israeli soldiers do not differentiate between the civilians and the members of those groups and treat everyone the same way. Some of those arrested in the same group in Beit Lahiya almost a month ago have not yet been released.

Nidal described how, on top of the violence the detainees experienced, the detention conditions were extremely harsh. “The toilet is a thin opening between two pieces of wood,” he said. “They put us in there tied with our hands and blindfolded. We would come in, and pee on our clothes. And that’s where we drank water, too.”

The civilians who were released from the Israeli military base told +972 and Local Call that a few days later, they were taken from one facility to the next for interrogation. Most said they were beaten during interrogations. They were asked whether they knew Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives, what they thought about what happened on October 7, which of their family members was a Hamas operative, who entered Israel on October 7, and why they did not evacuate south as they were “asked.”

Lubad was taken to Jerusalem for interrogation three days later. “The interrogator punched me in the face, and in the end they took me outside and blindfolded me,” he said. “I tried to take the blindfold off, because it hurt, and a soldier kneed me in the forehead, so I left it.

“Half an hour later, they brought another detainee, a university professor,” Lubad continued. “Apparently, he didn’t cooperate with them during the interrogation. They beat him really brutally next to me. They told him, ‘You’re defending Hamas, you’re not answering questions. Get down on your knees, raise your hands.’ I felt two people coming toward me. I thought it was my turn to be beaten and cramped my body to prepare. Someone whispered in my ear: ‘Say dog.’ I said I didn’t understand. He said to me, ‘Say, the day will come for every dog,’” implying death or punishment.

Lubad was then released back to the detention cell. According to him, conditions in Jerusalem were better than in the facility in the south. For the first time, he was not handcuffed or blindfolded. “I was in so much pain and so tired that I fell asleep, and that was it,” he said.

‘We were treated like chickens or sheep’

On Dec. 14, a week after he was taken from his home in Beit Lahiya, leaving behind his wife and three children, Lubad was put on a bus back to the Kerem Shalom Crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. He counted 14 buses, containing an estimated 500 detainees. He and another witness told +972 and Local Call that soldiers told them to run and said that “whoever looks back, we’ll shoot him.”

From Kerem Shalom, the detainees walked to Rafah — a city that has turned into a giant refugee camp in recent weeks, housing hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. The released detainees wore gray pajamas, and some showed Palestinian journalists injuries to their wrists, backs, and shoulders, ostensibly as a result of the violence they suffered in detention. They wore numbered bracelets which they had been given when they arrived at the detention center.

The detainees told the journalists that they didn’t know where to go in Rafah or where their families were. Many of them were barefoot. “I was blindfolded for 17 days,” one of them said. “We were treated like chickens or sheep,” said another.

One of the detainees who arrived in Rafah told +972 and Local Call that since he was released two weeks ago, he has lived in a nylon tent. “Just today I bought shoes,” he said. “In Rafah, no matter where you look, you see tents. Since my release, it’s been very hard for me mentally. A million people are crowded here in a city of 200,000 [prior to the war].”

When Lubad arrived in Rafah, he immediately called his wife. He was glad to hear that she and his children were alive. “In prison I kept thinking about them, about my wife who is in a difficult situation, alone with our newborn baby,” he explained.

But on the phone, he felt that his family wasn’t telling him something. Eventually, Lubad discovered that an hour after his younger brother had returned from his detention at Zikim Beach, he was killed by an Israeli shell that hit a neighbor’s house.

Recalling the last time he saw his brother, Lubad said: “I saw how we were sitting there in boxers, and it was terribly cold, and I whispered to him, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, you’ll be back safely.’”

During his detention, Lubad’s wife told their children that he had traveled abroad; Lubad isn’t sure they believed it. His 3-year-old son saw him stripped of his clothes on the street that day. “My son really wanted to go to the zoo, but there is no zoo [left] in Gaza. So I told him that on my trip I saw a fox in Jerusalem — and indeed, when I was interrogated, in the mornings, some foxes passed by. I promised him that after it was all over, I would take him to see them too.”

In response to the claims made in this article that Israeli soldiers burned the homes of detained Palestinians in Beit Lahiya, the IDF Spokesperson commented that the allegations “will be examined,” adding that “documents belonging to Hamas were found in the apartments in the building, as well as a large quantity of weapons,” and that shots were fired at Israeli forces from the building.

The IDF Spokesperson said that Palestinians in Gaza were being detained “for involvement in terrorist activity,” and that “detainees who were found not to have been involved in terrorist activity and whose continued detention is not justified are returned to the Gaza Strip at the first opportunity.”

Regarding allegations of ill-treatment and torture, the IDF Spokesperson said that “any allegations of improper conduct in the detention facility are thoroughly investigated. The detainees are handcuffed according to their risk level and health condition, according to a daily assessment. Once a day, the military detention facility holds a doctor’s lineup to check the medical condition of the detainees requiring it.”

The detainees who spoke to +972 and Local Call, however, said that they were examined by a doctor only upon their arrival at the facility, and they did not receive any subsequent medical treatment despite their repeated requests.

 

Israel cannot be a colonial power and a democracy

Chris Hedges

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé reframes ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ as a colonizing force that is inherently undemocratic due to its necessary subjugation of Palestinians.

Israel’s status as a bona fide democracy is often taken to be a self-evident truth, but a more critical look at the history and reality of Zionism calls this into question. After all, how can a democracy exist in a country constitutionally defined as an ethnostate that can only exist through the suppression and gradual elimination of its Others? Israeli historian Ilan Pappé joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on Israel as an inherently colonial, and therefore anti-democratic, project.

Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-directs the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Prior to coming to the UK, Pappé was a historian and politician in Israel. He is the author of several books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Transcript

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

Chris Hedges:

The scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who Isaiah Berlin called the conscience of Israel, warned that, “If Israel did not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” warned Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank in East Jerusalem was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war and constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” he wrote.

He foresaw that, “The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews, the administrators, inspectors, officials and police, mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret police state. With all that implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab quiz links on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israeli Defense Force, which has been until now, a people’s army would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation to generate and its commanders who will have become military governors, will resemble their colleagues in other nations.” He warned that the rise of virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn concentration camps for the occupied, and that in his words, “Israel would not deserve to exist and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli fanatics, heirs of the fascistic movement led by the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. These Jewish extremists who today make up the ruling coalition government are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are being killed or wounded a day. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God as is the slaughter of the Palestinians who are compared to the biblical Amalekites massacred by the Israelites. Enemies, usually Muslims, slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magic circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.

Joining me to discuss what the occupation of Palestine has done to Israeli society and what the results of the current murderous campaign in Gaza and the West Bank portends for Israel in the future is Ilan Pappe, Professor of History of the University of Exeter in Great Britain, who has described what Israel does to the Palestinians as incremental genocide. He has written numerous books including The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which his French publisher has ceased publishing despite a surge in sales since the October 7th attacks, part of the concerted campaign by Zionists and their supporters to discredit and censor narratives that are critical of Israel.

I’d like to begin with a look at post Israel, the Zionist project that begins in the 1920s, and see whether the project itself, even before the creation of the state of Israel had built within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Ilan Pappe:

Yes, I do think it did. And you are right in pointing to the 1920s because of course the Zionist movement existed before, but I think it’s in the mid-1920s when it started to purchase land and evict the people who were living on that land. And that happened around 1926. It became a settler colonial project and not just a project for salvaging Jews from anti-Semitism or a national cultural redefinition of Judaism as nationalism instead of as religion.

The moment that happened, it was very clear that it’s going to impose itself by force on an indigenous native population. And it was not just the classical settler colonial imposition of settlers from abroad imposing themselves on a native population, it also was kind of creating this idea that they can produce or establish a European state in the midst of the Arab world, very much like the white supremacists in South Africa. And there’s two facts, that you are trying to implement a project of displacement and replacement of an indigenous population and that you are trying to create a cultural political entity that would alienate the area it belongs to and the area would alienate you were sold, I think had been sold in the 1920s. And we can see the effect of this to our days, no doubt.

Chris Hedges:

And yet there was always a tension within the Zionist project. I, you may have known him too, I knew Abba Eban, Teddy Kollek. When I was in Israel, they outlawed Meir Kahane’s Kach Party. The people around Netanyahu now are of course the heirs to the Kach Party, later assassinated, this very right wing rabbi. And I want you to talk about that tension because it was there. I mean, Teddy Kollek when he was mayor of Jerusalem, when I was there, he was building sewer systems for… it was a different approach to colonization, or perhaps I have that wrong?

Ilan Pappe:

It was a different approach, but it remained colonization. If I’m a bit more abrupt about it, I would say that there was definitely an ideological stream within Zionism that believed that you could be a progressive colonizer or an enlightened colonizer. And yet from the colonized people’s point of view, even if you provided some benefits in economic terms, in infrastructural terms, the colonization was still there. And the colonization was translated not only in terms of whether you provide sewages for Jerusalem or not, but by the fact that Teddy Kollek as the mayor of Jerusalem oversaw the ethnic cleansing of quite a large number of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in order to make space for building new Jewish neighborhoods, which should rightly be called Jewish colonies or settlements.

So in the end of the day, the Zionist vision, even in its most liberal version, meant that the Palestinians at best, at best could be tolerated as individuals in limited spaces within Palestine. That would be determined according to the Israeli notions of national security. And at worst, they’re an obstacle that has to be removed. And as the time went by, most of the Israeli Jews said, “Why just be content with limiting their presence? Why not get rid of them altogether?”

Chris Hedges:

And yet these figures represented a secular strain of Zionism. And I want you to talk a little bit about Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who you knew, who I quoted it in the introduction, and he talks about this religious strain within Zionism where the land itself becomes sacred as particularly dangerous, I think he even uses the word fascistic. There is that split. And of course those of us, Abba Eban spoke better English than I did, Oxford educated, urbane. And so talk a little bit about that tension between secular and religious Zionism. And of course ultra orthodox religious Zionism has essentially proved triumphant.

Ilan Pappe:

Yes, I call this tension, which you rightly point to, the struggle between the state of Israel in the state of Judea. The state of Judea grows up among the national religious groups and becomes particularly potent after ’67 and it’s kind of headquarters, it’s habitat if you want, the settlements in the West Bank, and before that, even in the Gaza Strip. And they become a force to reckon with and they combine exactly what Leibowitz was talking about, and he saw it in the making. I mean I say it in hindsight, to his credit, he saw it and kind of predicted it happening, but now we have the benefit of time to see that he was absolutely right.

So that state of Judea, what you can call the settler state, is a combination of a messianic kind of Zionism combined with fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism, a wish to create a theocracy in which also secular Jews are the enemy, not just the Palestinians. And they become stronger. They used to be on the margins and we used to think that they are not really relevant, but now they are a central power in Israel. And against them stands the state of Israel. That is the kind of pre ’67 Israel that wanted to be a liberal democracy, a pluralist, secular, but is losing it in the struggle against the state of Judea.

But what is so interesting and frustrating about this struggle, it does not concern the Palestinians at all. As you probably know, and we forgot it because of the dramatic events that occurred after 7th of October, but until the 7th of October, we witnessed in Israel a kind of a mini civil war between those two states that I’m talking about, the state of Israel in the state of Judea when hundreds of thousand of secular Israelis demonstrated daily trying to defend the kind of Israel they want. But when Palestinian citizens of Israel ask them, “Can we join you? And can we also include a rejection of the occupation as part of our struggle for a better Israel?” They were chucked out of this movement of protest because it was not against the occupation, it’s not against the semi apartheid or full apartheid of Israel, depends where it is. It is what kind of an apartheid Israel should we have? A liberal democratic one for the Jews or a theocratic one for the Jews?

But unfortunately it does not evolve around the main issue, the most important issue that we started our conversation with, that can you impose yourself militarily and violently on millions of people against their will?

Chris Hedges:

I want to talk about 1948, this is the war of independence. All settler colonial projects are implanted by violence as was the one in the United States. The difference is that I think by 1600, over a 100-year period, 56 million indigenous inhabitants in North, Central and South America were obliterated through either diseases or violence so that by 1600 you only had about 10% of the original indigenous population was there. That wholesale extermination essentially allows a settler colonial project to survive because there’s physically no opposition. That’s not true in Israel. You have about 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation, 9 million living in the diaspora. This from the establishment of the state of Israel is a huge problem for Israeli leaders. How are they going to cope? The demographic time bomb is real in terms of Arabs having larger families. You have huge flight, a kind of brain drain from Israel. I think there’s a million Israelis living in the United States. But let’s look at 1948, how they deal with a problem. And then we’ll go to 1967 when Israel occupies what is the remaining part of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza.

Ilan Pappe:

Yes, as you rightly say, settler colonial projects have always these two dimension, geography and demography, or if you want space and population, you want the space without the population. And the more space you take, the more unwanted population you have. So the Zionist leadership exploited the end of the mandate, the circumstances that developed in the region and in the world three years after the Holocaust to implement a massive ethnic cleansing that left half of the Palestinian refugees and expelled half of the Palestinian population, destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, more than 500, and demolished most of the Palestinian towns.

So within the borders that were kind of established after 1948, that is Israel today without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel was unable to fully complete the ethnic cleansing, but it had a relatively small Palestinian minority that did not endanger the demographic majority of the Jews. So you could even have a demographic state because you always knew that democracy and demography would go hand in hand. Although because of the paranoia of Ben-Gurion until 1966, although the Palestinians in Israel had the right to vote and to be elected, they were under a very harsh military rule as it is.

Now, it’s not surprising that David Ben-Gurion, the big architect of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, was trying to pressure the government of Israel. He was out of effective politics already in 1963, but he was trying after June ’67 to convince the Israeli government to get out of the West Bank, almost saying to them, “I was able to get rid of about 1 million Palestinians, and now you are incorporating even a larger number of Palestinian under your rule.” The kind of leadership that followed him, some of them were young generals during the ’48 war and some other politicians like Levy Eshkol and you mentioned also Abba Eban and Teddy Kollek, they decided there is no need for massive ethnic cleansing in order to keep the demography in such a way that it doesn’t endanger the Jewish democracy.

So what did they do? They decided to keep millions of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without the right to take part in the Israeli political system. When some people said to them, “Okay, that’s fine, but can you in return give the Palestinian the right to determine their future in a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?” They didn’t accept that either. So they really believed that they could somehow contain the Palestinian national ambition and resistance within that idea of a West Bank and a Gaza Strip that is our enclave controlled by Israel, maybe with some autonomy for the Palestinian inside, and convince the world that this is the best solution and even call it a kind of a two-state solution. Of course, it had nothing to do with a two-state solution.

So historically speaking, it’s the same problem all the time, as you rightly say, Chris, it’s having the territory without the people, but because of circumstances and things that changed, ’48 is not ’67 and ’67 is not 2023, and because of that, the methods of maintaining this balance between territory and population changes. But the vision is the same one, and the purpose is the same one, and the failures are the same one. The massive expulsion didn’t work. The idea of keeping people without citizenship rights is not working, and even putting them under siege as we have seen on the 7th of October is not working. And whatever the Israelis have in mind for Gaza, I can assure you, without knowing how it would unfold, it’s going to be a huge failure, which unfortunately will have an incredible human cost, mainly for the Palestinians.

Chris Hedges:

Leibowitz really takes the 1967 war, which sees Israel seize the remaining land by Palestinians as the dividing point. He defines himself as a Zionist. He seems to argue that the pre 1967 borders known as the Green Line could work. But ’67 for him and the refusal on the part of the Israeli leadership to give up the occupation, or after ’67, moved back to the pre ’67 borders, really, he argues quite passionately is in many ways the death now of Israeli democracy, civil society. Can you explain that?

Ilan Pappe:

Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say that I think that as we started our conversation, the seeds for this end or implosion from within had been sold much earlier in the 1920s. But let’s go along with this thesis, although I think it was doomed to fail from the very beginning. But there’s no doubt that the occupation of 1967 accelerated these processes by which you had a legal system, a political system, and the culture system that justified a daily violation of the human rights and the civil rights of the Palestinians, at least inside Israel. In the pre ’67 Israel, there was an attempt all the time to improve the situation of the Palestinian citizens in Israel. And as we said, they had the right to vote, they had the right to be elected, and finally they even were allowed to create their own national parties and so on.

But at the same time, the direction in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was going towards a different kind of a future, a long and never ending building of two mega prisons, one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip maintained by at least hundreds of thousands of Israeli had to be daily involved in maintaining this mega prison of policing millions of people. And the idea, and I think that’s where Leibowitz, which was different from Kollek and Abba, even for instance, Leibowitz warned them that their sense that they might separate, there will be this democratic liberal pluralist Israel within the pre ’67 borders, and there will be something less admirable, less fortunate, but hopefully manageable beyond the Green Line, beyond the borders of Israel. And he warned rightly so that you will not be able to contain it, that it would spill over into Israel, and you will not have, in the end of the day, two entities, namely a liberal democratic Israel next to an occupied Palestine.

No, in the end of the day, you will have one apartheid system that may have varieties in the way it controls the lives of Palestinians, but in essence, as indeed Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International eventually understood recently, would have to be ruled through segregation, discrimination, and oppression. And it doesn’t matter whether we talk about Tel Aviv and Haifa or we talk about Nablus and Gaza, it became one organic country where the people who are Palestinians are subjected to a variety of legal regimes and military regimes that violate the basic civil and human rights.

Chris Hedges:

And I just want to say that Israeli Arabs, even though pre ’67 there were moves to incorporate them in the side, nevertheless did not serve in the army or the intelligence units. That’s correct, right?

Ilan Pappe:

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. So Leibowitz, it’s not just that the occupation for him is not sustainable, but it’s what it does, how it deforms Israeli society. And I wonder if you could speak to what happened. I’m especially interested in why you believe these Zionist fanatics and bigots and crypto-fascists, these people surrounding Netanyahu, why they became ascendant?

Ilan Pappe:

Well, I think that there are two crises here at work. One crisis is what you can call the Zionist left, this attempt to, if you want, to square the circle to somehow say to yourself, I can be both an occupier and a socialist or a liberal. This failed to work on so many levels. First of all, the Palestinians were not impressed by that. They understood, as I once put it, that when a Zionist has a boot on your face, it doesn’t matter whether he holds the Book of Marks or the Bible, what matters is the boot. And I think that’s one reason the Zionist left was not working. Secondly, there was a sense among the Israeli Jewish electorate that this is a deception actually. And there was something in it, they said, “You actually think like us, but you would’ve liked it to be nicer. You would’ve liked the world not to be fully aware of it. You don’t want to lose international legitimacy. It’s not because you have different moral approach, but you have a more functional approach to it.” And that did not convince the Jewish electorate.

So one crisis was this, what I call the failure to square the circle and take universal values and say that they can coexist with the values of colonialism and oppression. The second and no less important is the failure or the collapse of the idea that you can redefine Judaism as nationalism. There was an attempt to create a Jewish culture, a Jewish identity, which is secular, and it didn’t work. There are some successes. There is a Hebrew culture, no doubt. I myself dream in Hebrew. Hebrew is my mother tongue so I’m fully aware of the success of Zionism to create a Hebrew culture. But the Hebrew culture is not a substitute for Judaism. It creates a culture around language, but doesn’t have the power that a religious affiliation has.

And what happened was that while the religious Jews had a clear idea what Judaism is, Israeli Jews never knew what does it mean to be an Israeli Jew? As you probably know, in our idea, on our identity cards, our nationality is not Israeli. No, Israeli has an nationality identity that is an Israeli. In my idea, it’s written that my nationality is Jewish. And in the idea of my neighbor who is a Palestinian Israeli, it says that his nationality is Muslim, not Palestinian or Christian, which I mean, they try to impose this idea that they can play with religious identities and even impose it on Christians and Muslims. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. And I think anywhere you look at the world and attempt to create a state identity that is equivalent to a religious identity in the modern world is not working. It is not working.

And this crisis has led to the return to Judaism as a religion by many Israeli Jews, including the Arab Jews who were anyway more traditional. And then they asked themselves similar things that are happening in political Islam. Can we translate the Jewish scriptures into political documents of our day? Can we impose the imperatives of the religion on the public domain, on the state policy, both the domestic one and the foreign one? And for secular Israelis, this is something they cannot coexist with. But they don’t really have a very good answer. So what does it mean to be a Jew if it’s not to be a religious Jew? What is a secular Jew? What is a secular Muslim for that matter? Or secular Christian? And that’s a crisis that maybe also exists in other places, but there’s no, this pressure cooker that Israel is where these questions become vital and existential.

Chris Hedges:

When Thucydides talked about the expansion of the Athenian Empire, he wrote that, “The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself.” To what extent is the tyranny that Israel has imposed on occupied Palestinians now being imposed on itself?

Ilan Pappe:

Well, we had clear indications, especially… I mean, they were there before, but I think the 7th of October was a pretext for these tyranny to be directed towards freethinking Israeli citizens who are also Jewish by definition. We have a clear case of a history teacher in Petah Tikva who all he did, he shared with his students, pupils rather, some alternative views to the ones they hear in the Israeli media. And he was arrested for few days before he was released. Any attempt by Palestinian citizens of Israel or anti-Zionist Israeli citizens to express doubts or even say that you have to understand the context of the 7th of October is regarded by the police as incitement to terrorism. So inevitable, as any historian would know, this can never be contained towards one group of people, and eventually you use these powers against your own people, and it depends who is the one who uses the power.

There’s some very important critical sociologists in Israel, which I am not one of them, but they followed the way that the upper echelons of the Israeli Security Service, the upper echelons of the army, are now populated by what I call the state of Judea, namely settlers, national religious settlers are now occupying very important position. You have, of course, the ultimate example, and this is the terrorist from the Judea state, Ben-Gvir, as the Minister of Internal Security. So even at the top, you have someone who doesn’t hesitate to use the same means against free thinking Israelis, regardless of who they are, Jews or Arabs, as he wants to use them against the Palestinians. But he may be a bit of a joke even in the eyes of his own subordinates, but there are more serious people below him who supposedly are part of the civil service and are not politically elected, but they come from this ideological hotbed that sees people like myself, if you want, as dangerous as any Palestinian, and that is something that is now spreading in Israel.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about October 7th, both the micro impact and as a historian, the macro impact?

Ilan Pappe:

Well, the micro impact is a bizarre, really and I’m trying to get my head around it, although I can begin to understand this. Let’s start with the Israeli Jewish society. There is this almost possible mixture of total disbelief in the ability of the Jewish state to defend you or even provide you with the most fundamental services. So it’s a total breakdown in the confidence of the state to provide for you, not only defend you because the military failed, but the way the state was not there after the 7th of October. I don’t know how much people are aware of it, but the state did not function for about two months in terms of providing social, economical… it was all done by the civil society. The government did not function at all in terms of helping people who were evicted from the north or the south.

So on the one hand, there is this breakdown in believing in the state. On the other hand, there is a total support for the genocidal policies in Gaza. It’s a contradiction, but one can understand where it comes from, and that’s one of the micro kind of impact you have, that you will have an even more intransigent, inflexible, theocratic, fanatic Israeli Jew society in the post 7 October Israel.

As for the Palestinians, I think some big questions would be asked also by the Palestinian national movement because it’s a big responsibility to stage an operation when you probably know beforehand what the Israeli reaction would be. It always reminds me of the two… I had a webinar with some people from Lebanon and we talked about it, and I think there are similarities. People say to me, “But Hamas was kind of building on the legacy of 2000 when Hezbollah bravely succeeded in pushing the Israeli army outside of Lebanon.” So there is an example of an Arab paramilitary group being a match to the might of the Israeli Army. But I said, “Yes, but there’s another legacy, that’s a legacy of 2006 when Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said, ‘Had I known that Israeli reaction to the abduction of three soldiers would be the destruction of Beirut, I would not have ordered that operation.'”

So he did talk with responsibility of when you strategize, you have responsibility also for your own people. It would be interesting to see in the micro level, first of all how the Palestinians are reacting to the Israeli retaliation, beyond of course their ability. And I think they were able to galvanize public opinion to show that however one condemns or doesn’t condemn the service of October, it does not weaken the basic growing solidarity with the Palestinians.

Now let’s talk about the macro. The macro is that Israel is not going to defeat the Hamas that easily, and is going to be stuck there. And in order even to maintain some sort of success, victory, they would have to stay there for years in direct occupation. And this could easily escalate into an uprising in the West Bank and attack from the north by Hezbollah, and who knows, even undercurrents in the Arab world that would change the Arab tolerance of Israel that we have seen so far. This can escalate to regional war. On the one hand, that’s the bleak scenario.

The more positive scenario in the macro one is that the civil society that is now very much pro-Palestinian and even supports boycott and divestments from Israel, may succeed in convincing some governments in the Global North, and definitely in the Global South, to move beyond actions of civil society into sanctions and pressure on Israel, and maybe have a total new perception about the need to pressure Israel to give up its supremacist policies, its oppression, and so on.

It’s too early to judge which of the two processes will unfold. They may even unfold in conjunction, namely, the more violent the region would become, the more willing maybe the international community would be willing to change its basic perceptions of what is the essence of the problem and what is the way out of it.

Chris Hedges:

But isn’t the key Washington? I mean Israel, along with the US, is already on this issue, they’re pariah states, as we saw with the vote in the UN. As long as there’s unconditional support from Washington, Israel can resist any kind of pressure, can’t they?

Ilan Pappe:

Well, that’s a very big question because I think that the Global South also has power. I taught in a Chinese university recently in September, and it was very clear that China, for instance, is still reluctant to be involved in the question of Palestine because as you know, Chinese foreign policy, contrary to the way it’s portrayed in America, is interested in economic gains more than anything else. And rightly so, Palestine is not an economic bonanza these days. So I don’t think they’re likely to be involved too much in it.

But I do think that there are other powers on the international map that could challenge the American hegemony on the question of Palestine, that’s one point. And secondly, yes, America is still a key, but something is happening in the American civil society. Israelis and pro-Israelis in America like to call it the rise of new anti-Semitism, which is a very superficial analysis of the fact that the younger generation of Americans, A, is much more knowledgeable than the previous generation what goes on in Palestine. B, is far more committed, some people would say naively, but they are more committed to moral dimension of foreign and security policies. And that includes large chunks of the young American Jewish community. So I’m not sure that also this determinist view of an American policy is the right approach, either. I do think there’s a chance of a different American policy as well.

But I do think Chris, probably the best way to do it is by saying there are two coalitions now when it comes to Palestine. One I call global Israel. Global Israel is still governments in the Global South, multinational corporation, military industries, security industries, communities of Christian Zionists and Jews who more or less continue to provide Israel immunity for almost everything it does, almost automatically, kind of a faith. And against that is global Palestine. And global Palestine is made of civil societies. Some governments in the Global South who are not only Palestinians, but they really believe that the struggle for justice in Palestine connects very well with their own struggles against injustice in their own societies. And this is the younger generation of the world.

And I think that this is a battle that goes beyond a Palestine, connects ecological issues, poverty issues, rights of minorities issues with Palestine, and therefore I don’t think the balance of power is just America versus the rest of the world. I think there are much more complex two global coalitions, which are relevant not only to Palestine, but I see the relevance mainly in the case of Palestine because I’m interested in it. But I’m sure they can be also exposed in other places of contention and where conflicts are still raging.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s close by looking at Gaza. First I want to talk about intent. The UN says that half of Gazans now face starvation. I was in Sarajevo during the war, that was 300 to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, about two dozen wounded a day. This is just by comparison, I don’t want to minimize what happened in Sarajevo, I still have nightmares about it. But that’s nothing compared to what’s happening in Gaza in terms of the level of bombing. What is the intent? Is the intent to create a humanitarian crisis of such extremity that the international community is forced to intervene and become a partner in ethnic cleansing? Well what? You know the mindset of the people around Netanyahu better than I do.

Ilan Pappe:

Well, first of all, I think that there was really here an inertia of revenge to begin with, rather than a very careful planning. And not everything should be attributed to clear and systematic planning. As the days went by, it was clear to at least one group within the policymakers who thought that the war gives a pretext to get rid of Gaza, a more systematic planning. So the end result, as far as they’re concerned, is the depopulation of the Gaza Strip from as many Palestinians as possible either to Egypt or to other parts of the world, because Gaza, if it’s not sustainable now, it wouldn’t even be less sustainable in the future. I think there is one component among the Israeli policy makers who believe that they have the power to do it.

There is a more, I don’t know, even call them more moderate, I’ll call them more pragmatic people like Benjamin Gantz, Gadi Eizenkot, also depends. I mean, they joined the government in the last moment from the opposition. I don’t know how influential they will be for the day after. But if they’re still influential on the day after, they would like to see… They have a certain end game in mind, which is to annex part of the Gaza Strip directly to Israel, which what will remain is a very small piece of land with a huge number of people living in it and hoping that someone else would run the domestic affairs of Gaza, whether it’s the PA or a multinational force.

However, they don’t think that it’s even possible to discuss the day after scenarios before they fulfill what they promised to the Israeli public, which is something they cannot fulfill. And that’s one of the reasons for the carnage that we are seeing, that they could have this victory photo, kind of triumphant photo that shows that the Hamas is nowhere to be seen in Gaza, or at least nowhere to be seen as a military force. I don’t think they can achieve it, but they still believe that they can.

And until that happens, they continue relentlessly doing it by the way, [by that, even endangering more the lives of the still 130 and so Israeli hostages still held by the Hamas in the Gaza Strip]. They claim that the two objectives of what they call the land maneuver is to destroy the Hamas as a military power and to salvage the hostages. It’s very clear from the way they’re acting, they have given up on the hostages, but they still believe they have the power to get this picture that they want, either a dead Sinwar or an expelled Sinwar, the scenario of Lebanon 1982 Arafat leaving to Tunis with the rest of the Palestinian leadership. These are the scenarios they have, and all the means seems to be justified in their eyes to achieve that.

Chris Hedges:

And you are arguing they won’t. So what happens when they don’t achieve that?

Ilan Pappe:

That’s what I meant before that what happens is that they are going to be stuck there for much longer than they think, involved in a gorilla warfare which is much longer than they think, endangering every day an escalation that could bring other factors as other actors into that conflict with dire consequences also for Israel itself. Can you imagine, Chris, what would’ve happened if in the 7th of October Hezbollah would’ve coordinated with the Hamas a similar attack on the north? Remember, the main military problem for Israel was that most of its army was in the West Bank helping to defend the settlers and helping them with their ethnic cleansing. So there was not enough soldiers in the North and not enough soldiers on the Gaza border to prevent a operation like the one the Hamas conducted. Imagine what would happen if the Hezbollah would’ve joined in, how Israel would’ve got out of that. And somehow this lesson is not being learned by the Israeli policymakers.

So I think that they are going to take Israel into a very dire future, even for the Israelis themselves, in terms of casualties, in terms of international isolation, in terms of economic crisis. And relying all the time on the American Congress, it’s not the best and most solid pillar in the world to build a future for a younger generation and tell them that they live in the best place the Jews could be in the world right now. They’re sort of digging their own hole here because they don’t want to see what the problem is and what price they have to pay if they really want to build a different future.

Chris Hedges:

Great. That was Ilon Pappe, professor of history at the University of Exeter in Great Britain, author of the Biggest Prison on Earth: The History of the Occupied Territories and the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

 

All This For A Myth: We Have Lost Everything Beautiful

Abby Zimet

Behold, in Gaza, there is no new year, just old afflictions - life in tents without water or blankets, point-blank death for grandmothers and children, half the population starving, the broken and displaced "living out our nightmares before we even dream them" as Western leaders avow their genocidal fantasies. For Jews, writes Abe Louise Young, the times call for confronting "the killing myth" that is Israel, "an anathema to faith, an equation with an error: A country built on top of another country (that) is not the way home."

On Thursday, Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the U.K., said the quiet rabid part out loud when she argued Israel must destroy all of Gaza because "every school, every mosque, every second house" sits on a tunnel - even though most tunnels in Gaza were built decades ago by Israel - thus offering up on British national radio what critics agree is now an alarmingly common, clear "call for genocide." Her candor was grimly praised by U.K. journalist Robert Carter for exposing "how evil Israel's colonialist project is and what (its) true ambitions are - the total genocide and land theft of all Palestine." And so it goes. The Israeli assault on Gaza, as well as the West Bank, lurches bloodily on, with harrowing stories of mass executions of families, bodies left in the street for days under Israeli gunfire, prisoners forced to strip, adults going hungry to feed their kids, the forced departure of residents from their longtime "home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world." "This year has been very bad," says a mother of five forced to flee to multiple schools. "When my daughters look at pictures from the past they start to cry. We have lost everything beautiful."

And under the brutal, random tenets of an Israeli military that views as "terrorists" anyone who doesn't comply with the latest evacuation order, families are still forced to keep fleeing, from home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood. In Gaza City last month, that pitiless policy brought multiple deaths. In one neighborhood, Moemen Raed al-Khaldi lay wounded and still for three days amidst the bodies of his dead relatives after soldiers suddenly stormed their house; they told the family to leave in Hebrew, which none of them understood, and in the ensuing confusion they shot dead his grandfather, grandmother, uncle, a pregnant woman and several others staying there. Nearby, his six year-old cousin also survived after soldiers shot his parents in front of him. In al-Rimal neighbourhood, soldiers ordered 24 residents of a building to evacuate; retired UN worker Kamel Mohammed Nofal was explaining that his four adult children, there with their spouses and nine children, were deaf and blind when soldiers shot him dead. At least 11 others were killed in al-Rimal, including an 8-year-old girl; the UN is investigating it as a(nother) war crime.

For those who survive, 90% have been displaced as Israel calls for evacuations from more and more areas, most recently around Khan Younis, where over 620,000 people once lived. Perhaps half of them have now fled to coastal Al-Mawasi, an empty, narrow strip of sand stretching south toward Rafah. Al-Mawasi was home to about 6,000, mostly Bedouin farmers and fishermen; today, hundreds of thousands of refugees live packed into makeshift tents. They stand in long lines for water, roam the streets looking for food or firewood - uprooting trees, collecting paper, taking down now-useless electrical poles - and despair that their children go to bed hungry and wake up cold. "We left the house crying for the (warmth) we left behind," laments Muhammad Sadiq, who'd never fled Khan Younis in past wars, "and we went (to) a barren land with only sand." Said 40-year-old mother Reem Al-Atrash, "People carry their tents, bedding, clothes and sorrows, and walk toward the unknown, weighed down by all their fears. Here we are just passers-by, living out our nightmares before we even dream them."

Meanwhile, "Gaza is starving." In what aid workers call "the impossible reality of Gaza," at least half the population is said to suffer from severe hunger - young children face the greatest risk - and all of it is classified in "a state of crisis," with the highest share ever recorded of people facing "catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity." Workers say many adults already go hungry so their kids can eat, but in the coming weeks at least 10,000 children under five could suffer "severe wasting," the most life-threatening form of malnutrition: "The threat of dying from hunger is real." Atrocities have also spread to the West Bank, where over 300 Palestinians, including 80 children, have been killed in attacks by soldiers and settlers, and the IDF have detained hundreds more "suspected of terrorist activities." For Palestinians already long besieged and terrorized, says Nowar Nabil Diab, "Our memories are being erased." He mourns his home, his sky, his morning with "a cup of tea and a feta sandwich" while listening to Lebanese singer Fairouz;, now, he fears looking out a window. "Life is dwindling," he says. "Fear is a loyal friend. It will never leave us."

Still, amidst "the most savage war conducted in the 21st century against a civilian population," one in which its perpetrator refuses to even consider ending a brutal occupation almost universally condemned, White House spokesperson John Kirby says there is no U.S. plan to look into Israeli abuses and "we have not seen anything that would convince us we need to take a different approach (trying) to help Israel defend itself." Shame, shame. They forget: "Never again" means "never again." Recalling a Haitian resistance akin to that of Palestinians, some cite the Creole, “Tout moun se moun” - Every person is a person. For Jews today, writes Abe Louise Young, it is time to "look in the mirror." "I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people," Young writes. Today, "I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot." Instead, we must "tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor. This telling must be done."

Here's the entire piece. With thanks to Vox Populi:

New Seeds For Old Stories

by Abe Louise Young.

"When I was a child, everything I heard & read about Israel was aspirational. We saved our quarters in cardboard boxes emblazoned, "Plant Trees In Israel!" People said, "Next year in Jerusalem!" to mean goodbye, to celebrate New Year's Eve. We sang of Yisrael in plaintive prayers that seemed older than petrified wood. Being connected to something ancient made me feel more real (and when you are a little girl, many things conspire to make you feel unreal.)

Now, I understand that this Israel I learned of is a myth. Yisrael is a timeless spiritual space–the holy core, the center of everything. But Israel was built like a physics equation spliced into a river, a laboratory sent into a bloodstream. An equation with an error. A country built on top of another country, another culture it tried to bury, thinking the world too busy or guilty-feeling to care about the human beings living there; naming the Holocaust’s collective loss reason enough—good reason—to move in, to push out, with carte blanche.

An example: Today, I learn that the editor of the Jerusalem desk for the New York Times lives in a house built above a house stolen from a Palestinian editor and BBC Arabic Service journalist named Hasan Karmi. Hasan was forced under threat of death to leave his home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world. The Karmi family became refugees from Palestine in 1948 so a Jew fleeing Nazi Europe could move into their house (free of charge), could call it his own address and refuge: Israel.

Did he use their plates? Their artwork? Did he keep or destroy Hasan's library? Where are their family papers and embroideries? Their birds and their dog, Rex? The children's clothes and toys? The president of Hebrew University inscribed his name on the facade. When the New York Times bought the new home built on top of it, the Karmi family had been erased.

I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot. The words that rise up are unfair, unjust, unholy.

I spoke to my father yesterday. He said, "There were very few Arabs in Israel when it was founded. Just a few, and they left willingly." I said, "Dad, you've been lied to. Have you heard of the Nakba?" "What is that?" he asked, "propaganda?" I order an oral history collection about the expulsion of 750,000 Arab people from Palestine to be sent to his doorstep, a Hanukkah present. He sends me Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. A miracle for whom?

Israel today denies that the people of Palestine exist as people. They are called dogs, human animals. How else to pretend that you did not steal their beds, their roofs, their gardens, doves, foods and dances, make them flee barefoot, execute them in lines against a wall? How else to pretend you do not confine them in prisons and a concentration camp, fly drones overhead that shoot bullets at anything that moves?

But people are not easy to erase. They write poems, keep archives, have children to tell stories to. They wear iron keys to the stone homes their great-grandparents built around their necks, even as they starve in plastic tents in the rain.

They share videos on Instagram of white phosphorus, made in Arkansas, burning through the legs of infants. They share videos of singing together while bombs drop, of baking bread on a metal plate held over burning paper as Israel starves them. They share videos of people they love dying, of mothers mourning, of babies and bodies pulled from rubble; they write new endings, they cry on camera. We hear the voices of Motaz, Plestia, Bisan around the globe; we read poems by Mosab, Rafaat, Naomi out loud.

What can we do? What can we do? How do we turn the hands of history, interrupt the seige? Around the world we call and plead with politicians to stop sending money and bombs to Israel, we hang ceasefire signs from buildings and overpasses, boycott, mass in millions to march, we watch our glowing phone screens and retch as we see Israeli snipers execute Palestinian children, soldiers press buttons to bomb mosques, bakeries, hospitals and universities. We cry out as we see the apartment buildings fall with families inside them, rage as we see Israeli soldiers laugh and dance with the lace underwear from dead women's dresser drawers.

All this for a myth. For stolen land. All this for a myth. For stolen land. To make a place for Holocaust survivors and atone for European crimes, to help Western presidents control the Middle East, and again, again, for white people’s “safety” at the expense of brown people’s lives.

Again.I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith

Israel, this is not the way home. Israel, we must look in the mirror. Yes: descendants of a holocaust immediately created another holocaust: oh painful, terrible truth. Oh repetition compulsion. Oh catastrophe. Truth tribunal, please commence; help us into a true story.

Those who continue to slaughter must be restrained by all nations of the world working together. The sacred, battered place must become one where people of any faith and race can live in freedom, without violence or apartheid, with equal rights to enjoy bread, love, children, the sea and the sunset, stories and buying tomatoes.

Each stolen home, each stolen acre of Palestine must be returned and every prisoner freed.

To tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor, will take many generations. This telling must be done. Each name of a soul taken must be spoken, engraved and gilded, embroidered with tatreez; each life must be grieved.

I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith. I want the money Jewish children save to go to the people of Palestine for five hundred years. I want all the years of the U.S. payments, $318 billion to Israel, to pour into Palestinian hands as reparations. We must return what was stolen, heal what was harmed, apologize for every life ended. Let the next trees planted be peace groves, be olives and oranges watered by indigenous hands; protected by safe, loving, hands, tree-tending hands.

Let us learn from them how to live again on holy land."

 

Bombing Gaza – Disturbing Comparisons with Vietnam

 

Mel Gurtov

Indiscriminate Bombing

Investigations into Israel’s use of 2000-pound bombs in its Gaza campaign have determined that you have to go back to Vietnam to compare the brutality and mindlessness of what Israel is doing. These bombs, many supplied by the US, are being dropped in densely populated areas.

Both the New York Times and CNN have provided videos of the craters those bombs create on the ground. It is little wonder that the civilian death toll in Gaza is over 20,000 now.

As CNN reports, the bombs being dropped by Israel “are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq,” during that war:

“Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy munitions such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll. The population of Gaza is packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth, so the use of such heavy munitions has a profound effect.”

The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) response? “In stark contrast to Hamas’ intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.” But intelligence experts consulted by CNN say they haven’t seen such intense bombing since the Vietnam War.

The Washington Post also investigated the Israeli air strikes, using (it reports) “satellite imagery, airstrike data and U.N. damage assessments,” as well as interviews of people on the ground and “experts in munitions and aerial warfare.” The Post’s report says:

“The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.”

Israel’s Plan

The IDF seems to be doing very little to protect civilian populations from the bombing. In southern Gaza, the IDF’s instructions to civilians on where to move to safety have either been murky, insufficient, or at worst wrong.

As a result, civilians are being bombed and shot in areas they were instructed to be. (Thomas White, the director of UN Relief Works Agency affairs in Gaza, tweeted Saturday on this forced displacement: “The Israeli Army just orders people to move into areas where there are ongoing airstrikes. No place is safe, nowhere to go.”)

Providing no safe place for fleeing Palestinians may be part of a larger strategy: the “voluntary removal” of the Gaza population as far south toward Egypt as possible. That objective would fulfill a longstanding ambition of the Israeli far right.

This so-called “ethnic transfer” amounts to ethnic cleansing. The only obstacle to the strategy is that neither Egypt nor any other nearby country is willing to accept two million Gaza refugees.

A Vietnam War Comparison

The Israeli government should not be surprised to find, as I reported based on recent polling, that the Gaza population’s support of Hamas is actually growing as IDF operations expand. Confirmation comes from US intelligence which, as reported by CNN December 22, believes the Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank see Hamas as a defender of their cause based not just on its October 7 attack but also its success in freeing prisoners in exchange for hostages.

My own research during the Vietnam War lends plausibility to that intelligence finding. Villagers invariably blamed the US when it bombed or napalmed in order to flush out Vietcong (VC) soldiers. At the RAND Corporation where I worked, I read numerous interviews of villagers and captured VC soldiers to assess (as the research project was called) the “motivation and morale” of enemy forces.

It was clear that the more villages were destroyed, killing innocent people and driving away others, the greater the support of the VC and the stronger the resentment of the US and the South Vietnamese government it supported. In turn, those US actions enabled recruitment by the VC, just as Israeli bombing will enable recruitment by Hamas.

There is a case to be made that Israel is violating international law by indiscriminately bombing civilian populations, forcibly moving them, and using outsize weapons that increase casualties. (Yes, Hamas’ terrorist assault of Oct. 7 and its treatment of hostages also violate international law.)

There is also a case to be made that the Biden administration’s message to Israel to limit civilian casualties is absurd on its face, not to mention contradicting its continued arming of Israel with weapons that increase casualties. There are no heroes here, only leaders blinded by aggressive ambitions and refusing to recognize the human interest, which in short involves putting an end to the violence and investing in peace.

Fulfilling those aims starts with a cease-fire; massive food, energy, and housing assistance to Gaza’s people; and movement toward a two-state, mutual security solution.