Democracy Now
We get an update on ongoing
ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel from former Israeli peace
negotiator Daniel Levy. The latest proposal, mediated by U.S. Middle East envoy
Steve Witkoff, “walks back the commitment for a permanent ceasefire, Israeli
withdrawal and allowing in of humanitarian aid.” It’s a bad deal for the
Palestinians that will allow Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza,
says Levy. Meanwhile, families of Israeli hostages are protesting Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s delays in securing a deal as he works toward
“permanent war” and the eventual annexation of Gaza. “None of this would be
possible if so much of the Israeli media and society was not mobilized in
support of this, and none of that would be possible if Israel wasn’t treated
with impunity.” Levy also responds to the latest massacre of Palestinians at an
aid site operated by the U.S.-Israeli aid initiative, the Gaza Humanitarian
Foundation.
Transcript
This is a rush
transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with Gaza
ceasefire talks, which are underway after Israeli military tanks opened fire
Sunday and killed at least 30 Palestinians near Rafah in southern Gaza as they
were waiting for aid. More than 170 others were wounded. Israel has denied
responsibility. The aid site is operated by the U.S.-Israel-backed Gaza
Humanitarian Foundation. This is a witness named Ibrahim Abu Saud, who
described the attack to Al Jazeera.
IBRAHIM ABU SAUD: [translated] They said there
was aid, and we were supposed to enter at 5:30. We were advancing toward the
Al-Alam roundabout near the sea, and there was a lot of gunfire. The
quadcopters came and said there was no aid today. At 6:00, the tanks were firing,
but no one was doing anything to the Israelis.
AMY GOODMAN: Soon we’ll go to Gaza to talk
more about the attack with a doctor who treated survivors and with a local NGO
coordinator, but first we get an update on how negotiations are continuing over
a possible ceasefire.
Over the weekend, Hamas submitted
its response to a proposal by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Hamas is
offering to release 10 living hostages and 18 bodies in return for Israel’s
release of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is also seeking a complete end to
Israel’s war on Gaza and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, but Witkoff
has called Hamas’s response “totally unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, in the United States,
authorities in Boulder, Colorado, have arrested a man accused of using a
makeshift flamethrower and another incendiary device to attack a crowd of
people taking part in a weekly walk honoring Israeli hostages in Gaza. Eight
people were injured with burns, at least one in critical condition. The FBI
said the attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism.
For more, we’re joined in London
by Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a former Israeli
peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.
Daniel, welcome back to Democracy
Now! First, if you can talk about where the ceasefire proposal stands right
now?
DANIEL LEVY: Good to be back, Amy, although
the circumstances continue and worsen in terms of how dire they are.
That ceasefire diplomacy, first
of all, let’s be very clear, this doesn’t have to be a partial release of the
Israelis being held. That’s a modality that the Israeli side has pushed for,
instead of being willing to bring a total, definitive end to this, all the
Israelis living and dead out, a full cessation, full withdrawal, etc. It’s
important to remember that the agreement reached at the very beginning of
Trump’s term, if people cast their minds back, Israelis being held were
released. There were six weeks of a largely respected — not entirely on the
Israeli side — ceasefire. That arrangement was that one would segue from a
first phase into subsequent phases of releases towards a permanent ceasefire.
Israel broke that ceasefire. It not only broke that ceasefire, but it launched
probably the most barbaric of its assaults over the ensuing weeks, if one
measures that in terms of the degree of the blockade and starvation regime
imposed on Gaza. Talks resumed.
Where are we? The U.S. did
something which should have been obvious all along, and further shame on the
Biden administration that it didn’t do this. It spoke directly through envoys
to Hamas. Adam Boehler, the hostage envoy, and subsequently someone called
Bishara Bahbah, has been in direct talks with the Hamas leadership conducting
these talks. They apparently reached an arrangement. That arrangement was
apparently then rewritten at Israel’s assistance, put American stars and
stripes on it and repackaged as an American proposal put forward by Witkoff.
That seems to be Witkoff playing the regular game of America putting forward
Israeli positions. That’s, if you like, channeling his inner Biden or Blinken.
That proposal — let’s be very clear: That proposal walks back the commitment
for a permanent ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal and allowing in of humanitarian
aid.
Now, given that the Israeli prime
minister is basically telling us the following, that his government is telling
us the following: “We can have a pause, we can get some of the Israelis back,
and then we will resume our” — I’ll use the word — ’genocide.'” They don't
quite say it, but they say everything that constitutes a genocide, that they
will continue the ethnic cleansing, the squeezing of Palestinians into smaller
areas in Gaza, the plans for resettlement, the killing, the destruction. By the
way, they’re also pursuing similar goals in the West Bank. So, Netanyahu is
saying, “You give us back some, and then your people can rest. Our soldiers can
rest. Our troops can rest for 60-odd days. And then we’ll double down and make
it even worse.” That is not a deal anyone should accept. The ball is now back
in Witkoff and Netanyahu’s court. From what we’ve seen so far, one shouldn’t be
hopeful. But that’s where we stand, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to what happened
on Saturday in the streets of Tel Aviv, Israeli protesters demanding an
immediate ceasefire and release of remaining hostages. This is Yotam Cohen,
brother of hostage Nimrod Cohen.
YOTAM COHEN: We are facing moral bankruptcy.
Netanyahu is abandoning our loved ones in captivity and crushing the Israeli
ethos upon which we were raised, for which, for his own political motives, we
are left with no other option but to turn to the United States special envoy to
the Middle East. Please, Mr. Witkoff, if the hostage deal outline is accepted,
place a comprehensive deal on the table immediately, one that will end the war
and ensure the return of all remaining hostages. Don’t let Netanyahu torpedo
this deal and resume the fighting, the fighting that will cause the living
hostages their lives.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the brother of hostage
Nimrod Cohen. Also at the protest Saturday in Tel Aviv was protester Amram
Zahavi.
AMRAM ZAHAVI: And usually I want to apologize
to the world to be a Jew and Israeli in a country that behaves like the
Germany, the Nazis at 1940. I say that Israel is now a complete copy of what
happened in Germany and the atrocity and the genocide that Israel is doing in
Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israeli protester Amram
Zahavi. If you can respond, one, to the family member of a hostage and to these
Israeli protesters in the streets? And does that put pressure on Netanyahu?
DANIEL LEVY: I wish I could tell you that it
puts the requisite level of pressure on Netanyahu. So, what we have, Amy, is a
situation where many of the families of the Israelis still being held, and of
those who have been released already, and their supporters have taken to the
streets because they have clarity on this, that the person preventing this deal
— not as Witkoff tells us, Hamas, just like Blinken and Biden told us, but it’s
Netanyahu who’s preventing a deal, because he wants a permanent war. You now
have a former Israeli prime minister acknowledging what the International
Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, so much of the world has
acknowledged for so many months, which is that Israel is committing war crimes.
This is what former Prime Minister Olmert has said. You have 1,500-plus Israeli
academics who have written to the heads of the universities, saying they must
distance themselves from the war crimes that Israel is committing.
In the meantime, much of the
Israeli official political opposition is against Netanyahu for a variety of
reasons but is not calling out the crimes that are being committed, is not
opposing his war. And Netanyahu sees his best political path as continuing the
war, and he also sees that this is the fulfillment of the ideological vision of
trying to permanently remove the Palestinians. Israel set up a directorate.
I’ll give you the name of it. It’s the Directorate for the Voluntary Emigration
of Gaza Residents, headed by a colonel, Yaakov Blitstein, inside the Defense
Ministry. Now, there’s nothing voluntary about trying to get rid of people when
you’re starving and kettling them into ever smaller areas.
None of this would be possible if
so much of the Israeli media and society was not mobilized in support of this,
and none of that would be possible, Amy, if Israel wasn’t treated with impunity
externally. Of course, the U.S. leads that, but beyond it, we’re now hearing
words. We’re now hearing much more relevant rhetoric from Israel’s Western
allies, but we’re not seeing the commensurate actions. We’re not seeing
Europeans, Canadians, others imposing an arms embargo, seizing Israeli foreign
assets. We’re not seeing Israel isolated from international sport. As long as
there is impunity, these crimes will continue.
There are people who say, Amy,
that you have this tension between America first and Israel first inside Trump
world, that the kind of cultural war of Palestine-Israel fought domestically —
so, what’s being done with universities, with funding, with foreign students —
by the way, we, of course, see the extremely courageous and very on-point
messages in some of the commencement speeches. But that domestic deployment of
Israel-Palestine is a little different from the geopolitical management, where
the Trump administration have not gone along with Israel’s position on Iran, on
the continuing to strike the Houthis — they did, and then they stopped — on
Syria sanctions. They visited — he visited the Gulf, but not Israel. So, there
is — there is some cracks there. There are some divisions. Unfortunately, what
you don’t have is any acknowledgment of Palestinian humanity from this
administration, but it is an administration talking to Hamas that conceivably
could still put forward a ceasefire plan, but that will depend on much more
pressure. That’s not where they are today, and that’s not the zeitgeist that
we’re seeing.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, because we’re
going to a doctor in Gaza, and you could imagine these hospitals are incredibly
busy, I wanted to get your comment on Israel’s denial that it was involved in
the killing of at least 30 Palestinians who went to get aid, who were told by
quadcopters that they can go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to get aid,
and then were gunned down. Israel is saying it wasn’t them, the Israeli
military, who did that. And also what happened in Boulder, this man, shirtless,
with some kind of flamethrower, burning eight Americans who were standing in
vigil for Israeli hostages?
DANIEL LEVY: So, let me touch on that first.
Of course, any attack on people exerting their right to protest, to rally
anywhere, certainly including in the U.S., including in Boulder, Colorado,
that’s a criminal act. That person should have the full force of the law
brought against them. There’s no question in terms of condemning what was done
there. I don’t see how anyone could condemn that but think it’s OK that in
another part of the world a country shoots people who are desperately trying to
get some aid and starves and besieges a population of 2 million-plus civilians.
So, that’s the Boulder situation.
Look, in terms of the Israeli
denials, we understand that approximately 75 Palestinians have been killed in
the under a week that this new authority has been functioning. I call it
genocide profiteering, a private company distributing aid. Israel has denied.
We’ve been here before, right, Amy? It’s not our first rodeo. Israel
immediately issues its denial, comes up with some spurious counterclaim, hopes
the news cycle moves on. In the end, we find out that the denials were worth
precisely nothing. One has to acknowledge that the media has been banned from
there. If Israel wanted to get its story out, let the media in. And if the
media took itself seriously, then it would point that out — the mainstream
media, I’m not talking about Democracy Now!, of course. There are citizen
journalists who you can always turn to. There are people on the ground. You’re
about to do that. So, there’s no credibility to that, to that claim.
But if I may, one point on this
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, so-called, there is a mechanism to get aid to the
people in Gaza. It’s tried and tested. It’s through the U.N. and other aid
delivery systems that work according to humanitarian principles. Israel’s claim
that Hamas has been siphoning off that aid, and that’s how it stays in power,
has been repeated. It’s spurious. It has not been proven. What Israel is doing
here by creating these zones, by making announcements on quadcopters, by
sending people across great distances in Gaza, and then shooting those people,
it is a layer of cruelty that tears at the very humanity of all of us, yet
another layer of cruelty. And even if the Palestinians aren’t what keeps you
awake at night, we should be clear that what Israel is establishing here in
terms of undermining the fundamentals of global principles of humanitarian
assistance should matter to everyone, just as the way Israel has used AI —
Lavender, they called it — robotics in such appalling ways in their strikes in
Gaza, and just as genocidal actions and narratives have been normalized. We
have to bring an end to it. You’re about to hear the horrors of what is going
on on the ground. Everyone must redouble their efforts to end this. Stop
genocide, end apartheid, sanctions now.
AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, I want to thank you
for being with us, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former Israeli
peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.
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