JD Vance / Martha Raddatz Conflict Reveals Elite Detachment; New Studies Document U.S. Funding Of Israel & Real Gaza Death Toll
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Out of Touch Media (5:34)
Interview with William Hartung & Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (31:51)
Outro (1:09:33)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight... All of this has caused a Versailles
-like climate Where our modern-day aristocrats are increasingly lounging in the luxury behind guarded walls and inside elaborate palaces, while the masses struggle and suffer and seed outside the gates, angrier and angrier those whose indifference toward their lives could not be any clearer.
This explains why populations throughout the democratic world continue to vote in ways that are maddening and confounding.
To many media and political elites for Brexit, for Bolsonaro, for Trump, Marine Le Pen, and even the AfD in Germany, it's because they live completely different lives.
These media elites do than those who they are judging and thus have utterly different priorities and preferences from the vast majority of people.
All of this was vividly illustrated by a somewhat contentious exchange when Trump's vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance appeared on an ABC News program with longtime host Martha Raddatz.
The two exchange aggressively different views on the harms and dangers of unfettered immigration as well as D.C.'s prioritization of foreign wars over its own citizens' need with regard to agencies like FEMA. These exchanges highlighted this breach that is central to American and Western political trends, and so we want to examine this exchange and the broader points that it illustrates.
Then, there were two new studies associated with Brown University that were released this week.
One of them detailed how much money the US, over the last year and then for prior decades before that, has actually given to and expended for the State of Israel and its various wars.
Although the official amount is extremely high in the billions and billions of dollars, the actual cost as the study demonstrates is much higher.
Another related study documented the actual number of Palestinian lives lost in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7th.
Both of these studies shed significant light on the U.S.'s growing direct military involvement in that region in service of Israel.
And we are thus happy to speak with two of the authors of this study, William D. Hartung, who is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on the arms industry and U.S. military spending.
And Sophia Stamatopoulos-Robbins, an award-winning anthropologist and filmmaker with extensive fieldwork in Israel, Palestine, and Greece, who holds a PhD from Columbia University.
We're very looking forward to those interviews.
The studies that they helped author were truly very eye-opening.
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All right.
So over the weekend, there was an extremely telling exchange, or actually series of exchanges, where JD Vance, who I think is increasingly finding his confidence and his ability to articulate his views in a very effective way, went onto the ABC News show on Sunday morning that is hosted by the longtime ABC News correspondent and host, Martha Raddatz.
And the two of them had a couple of quite contentious exchanges that I think really illustrate not just the huge gap in the worldview between the type of populist right-wing factions that JD Vance represents and the corporate media outlets who overtly despise them, but also between corporate media employees who are generally very wealthy, who live in very protected and isolated neighborhoods, who don't experience any of the harms that ordinary
people are saying that they fear, and therefore scorn those harms and insist that they're illusory, because in their lives, these problems are illusory, because they live behind guarded walls and in gigantic mansions and are taken everywhere by driven limousines.
And so their lives are completely detached from the lives of ordinary American citizens, and therefore they end up genuinely confused and maddened and confounded why it is that so many Americans believe things and want things and vote certain ways that they find so incomprehensible.
And this widening...
and this widening breach between Just in the United States, but also throughout the Western democracy between our media corporations and the elites who work in them and the views and ideas and desires of ordinary people is growing constantly.
It's already incredibly vast.
And that actually is quite dangerous when you have elites who govern the country and who shape public opinion, increasingly living lives completely isolated from and detached from.
The vast majority of ordinary citizens whom they claim they can speak for and understand and in whose interest they can make decisions.
So let's watch this very telling exchange between J.D. Vance, the Republican president's nominee and senator from Ohio on the one hand and Martha Raddatz, the ABC News anchor, on the other regarding concerns about elite immigrants turning violent and even becoming We're good to go.
Only, Martha, do you hear yourself?
Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border.
Americans are so fed up with what's going on and they have every right to be.
And I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging That apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs.
I worry so much more about that problem than anything else here.
We've got to get American communities in a safe space again.
And unfortunately, when you let people in by the millions Most of whom are unvetted.
Most of whom you don't know who they really are.
You're going to have problems like this.
Kamala Harris, 94 executive orders that undid Donald Trump's successful border policies.
We knew this stuff would happen.
They dragged about opening the border.
And now we have the consequences and we're living with it.
We can do so much better.
But frankly, we're not going to do better, Martha, unless Donald Trump calls this stuff out.
I'm glad that he did. So, it is actually quite extraordinary that a person could be sitting in this anchor seat and essentially accuse Donald Trump and J.D. Vance of lying, which is, as you're going to see, what they do essentially every day.
That's what these networks and these outlets are for, to prove that they are dogged reporters who correct lies.
Only lies, though, that come from Trump and his movement.
Almost never lies that come from Kamala Harris, as we saw in both debates.
When the fact checkers, quote unquote, directed their fact checks only to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and never once to Tim Walsh or Kamala Harris, despite how many times they also lied.
It's really, it's embedded now in media culture that this is what they're there to do.
And so to try and Debunk the concerns that they raised when they went to Aurora, Colorado and that they've been raising in other speeches as a result of videos being circulated and stories being told in Aurora about armed Venezuelan gangs who have come into the country illegally taking over apartment buildings.
Through force, through waiving very potent weaponry and forcing residents to leave or taking over their apartments, her response was, what are you talking about?
It's only happening in a handful of apartment complexes in Aurora.
It's not like it's every apartment complex, so it's really no big deal.
And that's why J.D. Vance said, do you hear yourself?
You are so dismissive of what is happening in these communities because in your community, none of that is happening.
And that really is at the heart of everything.
The vast majority of people in the United States who tell everybody that it's racist or it's evil to be concerned with the impacts of illegal immigration and the massive flow across the border that's uncontrolled and unvetted, the vast majority of them who Hector everybody else and denounce it as malintentioned or racist,
even though a huge number of non-white Americans, including increasingly the black and Latino working class, are raising this issue as well.
But the vast majority of people who insist on this are people who live in neighborhoods where none of that's happening.
It's just like if you live in a neighborhood that is extremely wealthy and it's guarded by private security, then it's very easy for you to dismiss concerns over crime because you're not ever experiencing crime.
You have private security guards on your street.
You're living behind fences.
And the same is true of immigration.
Whether you're for or against immigration, whether you think it's good or bad, whether you are kind of in the middle, I think, as most people are, which is the idea that immigration adds to the country, which it always has.
We're a country of immigrants, but you can't have an unvetted flow over the border.
Whichever your view is, there's no question that assimilating people who are newly arrived in the United States, who come from a different culture, with different customs, with different religions...
It takes effort to assimilate, and the more people who arrive there, the more difficult that assimilation is.
Even if you end up concluding that on balance, it's wonderful.
It still is an effort.
It's still an impact on the community that drains resources, that creates all kinds of tension and conflict, and it always has.
So there's no point in denying it.
But if you are not subject to that, if you never see it, Then it's very easy to just treat it as an abstraction.
Just like all the concerns of ordinary people, you can just treat as abstractions because your life has become protected and insulated from all of those concerns of ordinary people.
And that's exactly what has happened in the media.
Now just to illustrate the point, to give you a sense for why Martha Raddatz doesn't care about immigration, even though polls show that most of the country does, Here is an article from Realtor.com in May of 2017.
This is seven years ago.
Realtor.com is devoted to very high-end, high-profile real estate purchases when people who are well-known buy multi-million dollar homes.
And there was Martha Raddatz in it, and the title was, There's No Debate.
ABC anchor Martha Raddatz buys a stunning Arlington home.
Quote, Martha Raddatz, ABC's globetrotting correspondent, and her husband, NPR newsman, Tom Shelton.
Of course she's married to someone who works at NPR. And Tom Shelton in particular, who I'm not going to delve into, but I've written about he's one of the worst NPR people.
Just think how aberrational their lives are.
Anyway, they paid, again, this was seven years ago, $2.125 million for a vintage home on a coveted block in Arlington, Virginia.
The four-bedroom, four-bath home sits on a beautiful half-acre lot that is about 15 minutes minus rush hour traffic from downtown Washington, D.C. The house was built in 1900.
When wealthy Washingtonians kept weekend getaways in Arlington, the previous owners, who bought the house in 2006 for $1.16 million, renovated the home and nearly doubled its size to 5,400 square feet, says listing agent Anne DeBennett of Washington Fine Properties.
Now, if that description isn't enough for you to invoke the...
Imagery about what Martha Raddatz's life is like.
You are in luck because here from the Observer in May of 2017 is a picture of her home.
And there you can see it's really quite beautiful.
It's a very manicured lawn.
It has some lovely marble steps and a pathway leading up to this house.
Look at the landscaping.
It is quite beautiful. It's in a very coveted part of Arlington, Virginia because of how much security there is, how low crime they have.
And so if you live in this house and on this street and in this neighborhood, of course you don't care about immigration because illegal immigrants don't come into your town.
There's no impact on where you live.
Nobody's competing with the resources that are yours.
Nobody's taking your job.
They're not replacing NPR reporters or Martha Raddatz with people who can work for much lower wages because they're in the country illegally.
So all of this conversation, just imagine from her perspective what a complete just abstraction it is, what an opportunity is to posture as a good, caring person because she's not the one who has to deal with the effects in her community.
And this is true generally.
It really used to be the case that, and I don't want to glorify the past of American journalism, but one of the big changes, there are two big changes in American journalism.
One is that there used to be a very healthy, vibrant local media.
And generally, local media was composed of people who were considering themselves working class.
These journalists were working class.
They worked on a working class wage.
They came from the communities on which they're reporting.
They lived in the communities on which they were reporting.
You can just go back and look at any of the iconic local journalists.
We've talked about some of them before.
We've shown some of them before.
They look exactly like the people and live exactly like the people on whom they're reporting, on whose neighborhoods they're reporting.
Because that was the local media.
The local media has pretty much disappeared for a whole variety of reasons, and increasingly things are consolidated in the national media.
And then at the same time, the national media has become almost entirely corporatized.
Almost none of this is in the hands anymore of a small family that has passed down the newspapers for generations.
And even those families who do still exist, like the Salzburgers and the New York Times, have gotten extremely rich.
They get venture capital and hedge fund investments.
So it's a gigantic corporation, even if it's owned by a quote-unquote family.
Most of them are just part of massive media conglomerates.
And so the people who are the talent, who work very high up in these media outlets, the people you see on TV, they all make many millions of dollars and they all live like Martha Raddatz or better.
And this has really created a massive breach Between these people who are based almost entirely in two big cities on the East Coast, which is New York and Washington, who all went to Ivy League schools, who all make a very high income,
in the top 1% at least, and who live in houses like the ones we just showed you, from Martha Raddatz, it's precisely why They have no ability to understand the life of ordinary citizens or the views of ordinary citizens or what their angers are and what their grievances are.
They can look down upon them.
They can scorn them.
They can scoff at them.
Here is where the vice president lives, Kamala Harris.
It's her rarely seen residence on one observatory circle.
You can see inside and learn the history behind one of America's most elusive properties, the vice president's residence, soon to be home to Vice President Kamala Harris.
This was in People magazine in January of 2021.
They got an exclusive look at where Kamala Harris lives.
That's the official residency of the vice presidency.
It has some very walled off security and isolation.
Here's a little bit of the inside with the very Victorian decor that also populates the White House.
And this is how J.D. Vance lives too.
J.D. Vance became very wealthy despite the fact that he grew up working class as a result of the book he wrote that was a huge bestseller.
And the fact that he made a lot of money in Silicon Valley.
We showed you his homes before that time when there was a claim that the dossier that was published about him somehow doxed him when his houses are very well documented and easily discoverable.
But there's a big difference, which is you can live this isolated, aberrational life of wealth and security and protection that sets you apart from almost everyone else and realize that and not assume so arrogantly and self-centeredly that you have the ability to look down on these people and judge them and condemn them for the things that they think because you realize how wide that gap is between yourself and them.
Or you can just ignore that gap, pretend it doesn't exist, and just think the reason why so many ordinary Americans think differently than you do is because they're dumb and aggrieved and misled and drowning in disinformation and you're smart and have your eyes wide open.
And that's, I think, exactly what you see in this clash and that you're seeing all throughout the democratic world where people are voting for parties and factions and candidates that are deeply and universally hated By the political and media elite.
I mean, you see a lot of the Republican Party, the establishment wing of the Republican Party, the Cheneys and the Bushes, and a lot of others as well, being extremely hostile to Donald Trump and feeling much more comfortable in the Democratic Party.
And obviously Trump has lived like this too.
He's lived on the... Top floor of penthouses in New York, including Trump Tower.
He lives in that gigantic, sprawling mansion in Mar-a-Lago.
But again, you can either understand that difference, be cognizant of it, try and listen to what people are saying so that you can understand their perspective, even though your life is not like theirs, or you can just assume that you're above them, and that's the reason why you think that.
And in that exchange, I think that's what we're seeing.
Here's one more exchange that I think illustrates this same dynamic.
And as I said, this dynamic is, I think, shaping almost all of Western politics in the democratic world in a way that I think is probably the biggest factor more than any other.
I wanna go back to what former President Trump said.
He said they're going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.
There is no truth to that.
And on staging, Pentagon officials say that active duty troops were staged and ready to go before being called upon and were instantly out the door.
So, President Trump, former President Trump is saying things that aren't true about that money being withheld from Republican areas.
Well, Martha, I think you're actually confusing staging of resources from the rapid response of the U.S. military.
I mean, look, in FEMA's defense, there are things after this hurricane that FEMA simply could not do.
You actually need military command and control.
You need military resources deployed to the area.
And I think all the president has said is, frankly, what some of Kamala Harris's surrogates have said Which is that if these areas were a little bit more democratic, maybe Kamala Harris would have focused on them more.
That acknowledgement is not to attack, frankly, the good folks of FEMA. It's to suggest that Americans are feeling left behind by their government, which they are, Martha.
If you talk to folks on the ground, I've had friends that have been in Boone, North Carolina, helping with the cleanup.
It is an extraordinary sense of betrayal and being left behind.
People are worried that their government doesn't care about them.
I'm much more worried about the incompetence of Kamala Harris' administration that led to that more than I am the fact that Donald Trump allegedly said something.
I'm just going to say that local officials and FEMA officials say that is just flat wrong.
But I want to...
They're always acting as though they're the arbiters of truth, at least when it comes to interviewing these people.
But the point he was making is a point that you rarely hear, which is, you can think whatever you want about Donald Trump.
His flaws are very obvious.
His character flaws, his flaws as a president, all of those flaws are very visible and evident and obvious.
And other than his most fanatical supporters, even his more moderate supporters, I mean more moderate in their commitment to him, recognize it and are very open-eyed about it.
But the reason they nonetheless vote for him, despite those pretty serious character flaws, is because they have a seething anger toward the Martha Raditzes of the world, toward the Kamala Harris's of the world, toward the people who rule in Washington.
And Trump, whether genuinely or not, is very effective at channeling that anger, at empathizing with it, at validating it, And it should be validated because it is valid.
It is true that the priority system of Washington and the people who run it in politics and media are completely detached from the ordinary people in the country.
And I believe that one of the main reasons Trump won in 2016 was embodied by his convention speech when he stood up and said, I'm accepting the Republican nomination on behalf of the forgotten people.
Which is how most people see themselves in the United States vis-a-vis the federal government and the media outlets that they despise.
They just believe that the government and the media elites do not care at all about their lives.
And if you look at the priorities of the federal government, it's extremely difficult to conclude otherwise.
And that was the point that J.D. Vance was trying to make to Martha Raddatz that simply can't comprehend it.
She's so interested in nitpicking what Trump said and saying this isn't true and this isn't true.
But the reality is that people in South Carolina, North Carolina, in Tennessee, in Kentucky, did suffer a great deal, and do suffer a great deal, just like people in Central Florida and Northern Florida, far more than they should, given that the United States is the wealthiest country on the planet, because the resources are just not directed toward them.
They are not the priority.
Newsweek on October 4th tried to make the point this way, quote, how FEMA's disaster funding compares to Ukraine aid.
And it was essentially saying that you can see what the priorities are of the United States and the governing class in Washington by comparing how many resources, how much energy, how much focus, how much devotion is given to Ukraine versus how much is given to the lives of ordinary people and to their communities and neighborhoods that don't live in houses like Martha Raditz's.
Since the war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2022, the U.S. has provided Ukraine with almost $60 billion for weapons and security, according to the Associated Press.
However, the US Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, claims that US aid to Ukraine is even higher.
Quote, Congress responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine with funding of about $176 billion for US agencies to provide arms to Ukraine, aid civilians, and impose sanctions, and more, the website said.
President Joe Biden recently announced an additional $2.4 billion assistance package for Ukraine on September 26.
In comparison, in 2022, Congress appropriated $18.8 billion in annual funding for FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund, which is the primary funding for domestic disaster relief programs, and has appropriated already roughly $20 billion each year thereafter.
Additional appropriations measured in the billions of dollars were made in 2023 and 2024.
Most recently, Congress approved a continuing resolution that provided FEMA with an additional $20 billion in disaster relief funds to be used through December 20.
So the gap between what we've spent on Ukraine and Ukrainians and the lives of Ukrainians over the last two years and what we're willing to spend on our own citizens and their communities, and especially when they're in the greatest crises like suffering from hurricanes or tornadoes or natural disasters, is massive.
And And so when you see all of this money in D.C. and all of these politicians in D.C. constantly talking about sending all their money to Ukraine or how we need billions and billions of more to finance the war in Israel to make sure that the people of Israel Who have higher standards of living than millions and millions of people in the United States can have what they want,
courtesy of the American worker who was forced to subsidize and fund them with their taxes, which isn't spent on improving their neighborhoods or providing them with greater support, but instead is just sent to Raytheon and Boeing and every other country imaginable in order to fuel wars.
And you see in that exactly what the priorities of the D.C. class is.
And this rage that you see in every poll, people hate the DC ruling class.
They hate the corporate media.
They hate it. And so those politicians that can successfully channel that are the people who are going to be more popular.
And it will leave those people who think the status quo is great.
I mean, if you lived in Martha Raditz's house and had her job, or you were her husband and had your job at NPR, of course you'd think establishment institutions are great because they're rewarding you.
They're creating a society that works very well for you.
So you just can't understand, why would anybody hate us?
Why would anybody hate these institutions?
They're so trustworthy.
They've done so much. Good.
Look at where we live. Look at the opportunities they've given us.
And it's almost natural to see the world through your own interests, to see it through your own prism.
And that's why, as a journalist, you should work, and especially as a politician, you should work even more We're good to go.
It's because your life is completely different.
You live behind isolated walls of protection and none of these problems ever end up getting anywhere near you.
And I think those two exchanges really vividly illustrate what has become, I think, the number one political dynamic shaping politics throughout the West and the democratic world.
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Last week on October 7th, in fact, two illuminating new studies on the U.S.'s role in the widening Middle East wars were published by Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
The first of the two detailed the genuine cost.
Of the American expenditures directed to and for Israel, both in the past year since October 7th, but also going back to 1959 when the U.S. started sending aid to the Jewish state.
The second paper explores the real death toll in Gaza since October 7th, including the widespread indirect deaths of Palestinians, ranging from severe malnourishment to sweeping plagues to people undiscovered under the rubble.
These vivid and alarming accounts capture some of the less visible aspects of the current conflict, yet some of the most important ones, and so we're happy to welcome two of the study's authors.
The first is William Hartung, who is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and is an expert on the arms industry and US military spending, focusing on the defense budget and security assistance.
He previously directed the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy and co-directed the center's Sustainable Defense Task Force.
He's the author of Profits of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex and he joins us to discuss the report he just co-authored for Brown's Watson Institute titled United States Spending on Israel's Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region.
Sophia Stamatopoulos-Robbins is an award-winning anthropologist and filmmaker with extensive fieldwork in Israel and Palestine, as well as Greece.
She is the author of The Waste Siege, The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, a book that has won multiple major awards for its in-depth analysis of waste management in conflict zones.
She holds a PhD from Columbia.
Her recent report that she published with the Browns-Watson Institute is titled The Human Toll, Indirect Deaths from the War in Gaza and in the West Bank, and we are happy to speak with her as well.
Good evening to both of you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Congratulations on these important studies and I'm looking forward to talking to both of you about them. Yes, thanks for having us. Sure.
Thanks for having us. Sure, happy to have you. So let me start with you, Mr.
Hartung, because I do think there's a lot of confusion, and I would suggest it's deliberate confusion, about just how much the United States supports Israel. I think it's obviously well known that we regard, or our government does, Israel is an important ally. We give it aid, but in the last year, I think the amount of aid Would surprise a lot of people if you look at the actual data and take into account all the real costs.
So can you talk a little bit about what your study was intended to analyze beyond just the obvious transfer of money directly from Washington to Tel Aviv?
Yeah, I mean, even that part is complicated because there's so many channels, so much attempt to hide the details.
But, you know, the various aid channels that basically put weapons in the hands of the IDF were about 17.9 billion.
But then our colleague Linda Bilmes looked at The surge of aircraft carriers, the missile war with the Houthis, increased combat pay, which added another 4 billion plus to get to 22.76 billion.
We're pretty sure that's a conservative estimate because they've been so...
Non-transparent about what they're sending, when they're sending it.
They actually, Washington Post found, put a bunch of the deals under the threshold for reporting to Congress.
So Congress didn't know about a lot of these things when they were happening.
Whereas Ukraine, every time they send something, there's a long list of what it is, what it costs, what weapon it was, you know, they tell you when it's delivered.
So it's a very different approach taken.
But, you know, the State Department spokesperson tried to argue we were lumping together apples and oranges, which is only the case if you think the Houthis just decided to attack shipping, when in fact it was a response to the war in Gaza.
And we didn't really get to the escalating costs of the war in Lebanon.
So this is the beginning. I mean, even just the sending of this missile battery with 100 personnel to Israel is the beginning of a further escalation of U.S. involvement.
Yeah, and I just want to follow up on that for a minute because your study looked at the last year, but also a lot of time before that.
But in terms of the last year, it was really focused on the aid we gave specifically in the name of the Israeli war in Gaza.
But it seems... Likely.
Actually, not even likely. It's already happening.
The war is already expanding, and therefore U.S. involvement in the war is expanding.
Hopefully it stays confined, but there's a good chance that it won't.
That escalation will continue.
What kind of cost do you think the United States might be looking at if the war continues to escalate in an uncontrolled way, rapid escalation, and the U.S. fulfills its promise to deploy as many assets as possible to defend Israel?
Well, one thing that came to my mind was the war in Iraq, where the Bush administration, one official said it would cost $50 billion, and it cost a trillion.
So you can't predict how wars are going to go.
And the Biden administration's approach seems to be...
Israel attacks. There's a counterattack.
They go in heavier behind Israel.
So they're sort of letting Netanyahu set the pace.
And once you've got troops in Israel, once you're fighting in Lebanon, once he's pushing the United States to perhaps bomb Iran, there's no limit to how costly this might be.
And it's really kind of a national emergency to try to pull back the U.S. enabling of this war.
Let me ask Dr.
Stamatopoulos-Robbins about the study that you helped to author, which is examining the real death hole in Gaza.
The numbers that we have been getting typically come from The Gaza Health Ministry, or as the Western media always calls it, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Those numbers in the past have been very reliable, and those basically count the number of people who are killed through bombing or through shelling or through some other violence from war who end up in the hospital, dying, and then going to the morgue.
And those numbers have been something like 35,000 people, 38,000 people, maybe as recently as 40,000.
Why is it necessary to do a study to determine the number of deaths beyond that?
What does that not include? Yeah, thank you.
I think one of the most striking things about writing this report was just how much larger the number is of people who die from what is called indirect death than the number we hear about from what you're describing, which is described in the report as death from traumatic injuries resulting from direct violence.
So people who work on war use ratios of roughly one direct death to four indirect deaths as the most conservative ratio for understanding the number in total that we'll find of deaths once the dust has settled, so to speak, and we're able to count properly.
But there are people who estimate that as many as 25 deaths, indirect deaths, can result from one direct death.
So this report compiled already published data from this past year from international organizations and Israeli and Palestinian organizations that collect Information about different kinds of destruction to kind of map out the pathways, what they call the causal pathways to indirect deaths.
So, for example, economic collapse and food insecurity, the destruction of infrastructures and the medical system and Environmental contamination.
When you put all of that destruction together, which is what the report did, you find a huge number of people that have probably already died and that will certainly continue to die even if the bombs stop dropping tomorrow.
I think it's often kind of elusive to understand the level of destruction that has been imposed on Gaza over the last year.
I remember very early in the days after October 7th, people who were called radicals or extremists who didn't represent the Israeli population, including people inside the United States who were attending pro-Israel protests, were saying things like, Our goal is to flatten Gaza, to remove it from the map and then rebuild it as part of greater Israel.
And I remember a lot of people thought that that was quite fantastical, if not because Israel and the Israeli government wouldn't want to do it, but the international community would never permit something like that.
And yet, if you look at a lot of the data in your report, in terms of the amount of civilian infrastructure that has been Irreparably damaged, the amount of social functioning that has been extinguished, doesn't seem to me like we're all that far away from what those people were calling for at the beginning.
Can you talk about some of the data that you presented in this report to illustrate the scope and magnitude of what has been done to civilian society in Gaza?
Yes, absolutely. So we have an estimated 90% of Gaza's population.
That's over 1.9 million people who have been displaced.
We have 96% of Gaza's population facing acute levels of food insecurity.
I'll add to that that 9 out of 10 children do not have the food they need to eat.
And that a letter from 99 doctors to the Biden administration that was published just this month on October 2nd had an appendix revealing that 62,000 people, at least 62,000 people, have already died of starvation.
The massive destruction of road infrastructures already as of January, which means people can't access healthcare or any kind of support system, humanitarian aid, as well as...
I just want to make sure I'm giving you the numbers.
At least three quarters of housing stock that's already been destroyed, which means that people are living in temporary shelters that, as we saw today in the news, are also targets of airstrikes and other forms of violence that leave people exposed to the elements as well as infection and disease.
I think one of the numbers that really strikes me when I look back over this report is that of 52,000 women who were pregnant as of January, most of those women have given birth outside of medical facilities, often in tents or in shelters or even on the street.
And due to the lack of medical supplies and access to healthcare facilities, many of those women are also having cesarean sections, for example, if they do get that kind of operation support without anesthesia and without disinfectants or sanitary equipment, just to give you kind of a picture of what it looks like.
Yes, I mean, it's an absolutely repulsive and grim picture, no matter what angle you look at it from.
Mr. Harding, I mean, one of the reasons why I found these reports so illuminating when treated as one, or at least as associated together, is because there's all this destruction going on in Gaza, as was just well articulated.
But then also, the whole world knows that the US is paying for it.
Now, one of the arguments that I know a lot of supporters of USA to Israel will make is that the number is a little bit deceiving because a lot of that, not all of it, but a majority of the aid that we give to Israel is required to be spent purchasing weapons from the American arms industry, from Boeing or General Dynamics or Raytheon.
etc. Is that true and are there benefits to the American people from that?
Well, I think, you know, I'm really glad that we're discussing Sophia's paper in detail, because to me, that's the foundation.
I mean, more than 100,000 dead in a territory of $1.9 billion is just shocking.
So even if there were some significant benefits to the U.S. economy, to me, that would be the equivalent of blood money.
But in fact, it's much more limited than the The administration would have you believe.
Certainly the companies do fine.
About a quarter of the aid Israel can use to build up its own weapons industry.
The rest of it just kind of passes through Israel, goes back to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Palantir, which helps make the surveillance things to pick targets, and had the gall to actually hold their board meeting in Israel after the war started as an explicit political endorsement of the war.
But, you know, in terms of jobs, Spending on weapons is the least effective way to create jobs, but it's been politically engineered so those jobs are in the districts of members with the most power over the budget.
And even relatively liberal members often don't want to be perceived as voting against jobs in their district.
But interestingly, two of the unions that are most involved The UAW and the machinists have initiatives underway to see if they can reduce the need for their members to build weapons to make a living, which happens periodically, but is quite extraordinary.
And UAW also has come out early for a ceasefire.
And so it used to be you could sort of draw a wedge between labor and peace and social justice movements.
It's much less the case with respect to Gaza.
The paper that you looked at wasn't just about the money we've given to Israel to wreak the kind of destruction Sophia was describing and that her paper so disturbingly documents, but also the kind of history of US aid to Israel.
This didn't just come out of nowhere.
The US has been given massive amounts of aid to Israel over several decades now.
Can you talk about what the trends are in terms of how much we have been giving them over the last, say, four or five decades and how much we're now giving them?
Yeah, our colleague Stephen Selmer did a really great job.
Among other things, he adjusted it for inflation, which is not that easy to do.
But he found, if you adjust for inflation, since 1959, $250 billion of U.S. military aid to Israel Which not only enabled their military, but to my mind, probably paid for the bulk of their own arms industry.
And of course, they sell light weapons, they sell drones, they become a significant weapons exporter, in addition to how they use the weapons in repressing the Palestinians.
So, you know, in the early decade, it was relatively low.
It picked up after the 1967 war and then substantially Essentially, the Camp David agreements were sealed with an arms deal.
Egypt and Israel were allotted at least a certain amount each year.
Israel's number was about 3 billion.
No, it's more like 3.8, counting things like missile defense.
And there's a 10-year agreement, which is in the midst of 38 billion.
And that's been far exceeded with these emergency aid plans in the last year.
They give them used weaponry at a discount or free.
There's commercial deals that are not well reported for things like, you know, firearms.
And Israel's Air Force that's doing the bombing is entirely made up of U.S. weapons.
So in some ways, you know, it's like, oh, we must investigate whether U.S. arms are involved.
There's nothing to investigate.
Their whole Air Force is from the United States.
Reuters found that they had virtually You know, used up their entire stock of major bombs, and the USA replaced that.
So this work could not be waged on this scale without that support.
So when administration officials say they're leaning on Israel to be more restrained or They talk about, you know, supporting a rules-based international order.
It's laughable and just, I don't know how these folks are ever going to have any credibility ever again.
But most importantly, I think is the point Sophia is making.
We have to stop the killing.
And that means stopping the flow of military.
And there's some members of Congress I'm trying to do this, but they're a relatively small core.
Senator Sanders is trying to block a new arms sale.
There's others, but given the scale of the suffering and the responsibility that we face, it's a pretty minimal showing.
People should be rising up in anger and trying to stop all this.
It's certainly happening with the student movement and elsewhere, but not in our Congress.
Yeah, it's a tiny, tiny group, and I question a little bit how much of that is a genuine attempt to actually stop those sales versus kind of a campaign tactic to signal to people who care most about this issue that there's space for them in the Democratic Party, even as the current administration funds all of this unconditionally.
Sophie, let me ask you, one of the things that I have found just interesting Beyond words over the last year is that it's not just that there's massive destruction of the civilian infrastructure and all the people who had relied on it, whose lives and families depended on it, but the thing that is so striking is that basically all of the hospitals and the healthcare system has been deliberately targeted and destroyed by By Israel.
So not only is the civilian population constantly under siege with weapons and bullets and shells, but there's nowhere for them to go increasingly to even get treated.
And even those hospitals that were standing from the very beginning didn't have basic supplies.
Western doctors would go there and were shocked at, as you said, the lack of anesthesia or the lack of Just antibiotics are the most basic things you need to administer real health care.
Even bandages have been deliberately kept out.
How would you characterize the targeting and destruction of the hospital and health care system in Gaza and the effect that it has had on these death numbers?
Yeah, I mean, it's really beyond words at this point.
I think some of the...
Shocking details for me were in the weeds, like you said, kind of the lack of things like antibiotics or the inability of hospitals to provide nutrition when they are faced with severe malnutrition patients who come in.
You know, things that seem extremely basic.
Another shocking thing for me in the details was that as the medical workers have been killed, we have over 880 medical workers who have been killed, and many thousands have been displaced.
You also have a lot of people whose training in medicine has been interrupted.
So you have people exercising parts of medicine that they are not trained to be in.
Underfed, underslept.
So we're not even only talking about the kind of physical infrastructures or supplies that are lacking, but also the kind of overall systems ability to operate in any way that would be near normal is completely gone.
I don't know if I mentioned that the Only four of Gaza's 36 hospitals were not damaged or destroyed as of a few months ago.
The statistics are in the report.
So it means that even the lucky people who are making it to hospitals, which again means that you're lucky in Gaza, are also being met with inadequate facilities, inadequate care, no hospital beds being available.
And then as you mentioned, hospitals have been Actively targeted.
So hospitals are bombed, hospitals are surrounded by Israeli soldiers and tanks and fired upon.
So we don't have anything like a normal kind of place for people to seek medical attention.
And I will add As we're thinking about things like infectious diseases, and you may have seen that the first polio case was identified in August in Gaza, and it's very possible that there are more cases, but it's been very hard to track those.
Today or yesterday, one of the hospitals and shelters that were I think it was today, just in the morning, was a place where the second dose of a polio vaccine as part of the broader campaign that there was a lot of media attention on was supposed to take place, but that site was targeted.
So you can just see how even the kind of humanitarian, high-profile efforts to support the medical system are being targeted and interrupted.
You've studied The Israel-Gaza conflict prior to October 7th and prior to everything that's happened.
You've studied other conflicts as well.
Where in the scope of, let's say, humanitarian disaster and deliberate destruction of life and civilian life, would you rank what is being done in Gaza over the last year by Israel to, say, prior attacks on Gaza by Israel or other conflicts in your lifetime or this century?
How should people think about the perspective about how to look at what's happening there?
Is that a me question? Yes.
Sorry. It is.
Well, I have focused primarily on Palestine in my research.
So what I can say is that there have been many cycles of Israeli airstrikes and other forms of violence in Gaza over the last 17, 18 years.
Those have resulted in high death numbers.
That's what we thought at the time anyway.
So sometimes some numbers in the range of 1400 or maybe up to 2000.
And here I'm talking about direct deaths from traumatic injuries with extensive destruction Of apartment buildings, for example, with whole apartment buildings being leveled.
And at that time, each time we thought it was the most devastating kind of destruction we were seeing in Palestine and that we could imagine.
And I will say, I did my research in the West Bank and Gaza was always, during the whole time that I've been doing research, which is since 2007, kind of an extreme case we were watching.
When we started to see the violence unfolding after October 7th, 2023, my colleagues and I and my interlocutors in Palestine and I were all floored.
We have not seen anything like this.
I don't know how to quantify to say something in A range, but just returning to the Lancet numbers, which were the conservative estimate of one direct death to four indirect deaths, giving us the 186,000 number as of June of this year, we're talking about a number that we couldn't even imagine.
And maybe what I should do is also go back to Palestinian history to say that in In 1948, when there was the Nakba, or catastrophe, that led to 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinians being expelled from their homes and lands, that became the largest number and the kind of monumental moment in Palestinian history that people referred to as the Great Catastrophe.
If you take the 1.9 million people who have already been displaced in Gaza, you're seeing the Great Increase and kind of shocking development that we're having today.
Yeah, when you're talking about 186 deaths, direct and indirect, you're basically getting to 10% of the entire population of Gaza extinguished in the course of a year.
And when you think of it that way, as well as the other ways you can think about it, the scope of it kind of becomes remarkable.
Let me just ask you one last question before I turn to Bill for just a couple other questions as well.
One of the things I think about often is, you know, you said we need to stop the bombing of Gaza, which seems very obvious.
But I just wonder, I think about a lot, like, what is the future of Gaza?
There's basically no Gaza anymore.
There's some people in Gaza who are in refugee tents and camps.
But as far as any kind of active society or civilian life, it basically has been destroyed.
You have disease running rampant, as you say.
And all of that's only going to get worse.
This is constantly proliferating and spreading.
And then there's just the mental health aspect which no one ever thinks about when you're watching people blowing up because it seems like a luxury.
But to live under these conditions for a year, I don't understand how anybody goes back to any kind of normalcy ever.
Do you envision how any kind of society in Gaza could be plausibly rebuilt in a way that matches what it had prior to these attacks?
That's quite a question, Glenn.
I'm sorry, I think about it a lot, so maybe you can give me some optimism about it or not.
I mean, I think about it too.
You know, I'll start with a pessimistic statistic that we, or, you know, piece of information that came out of the report, which was that children were telling Doctors Without Borders workers that they wanted to die in the course of the last year.
And we do not have suicide numbers or, of course, the numbers of people who are having suicidal ideation, but the desire to stop living has been documented already in Gaza.
So what you're describing as the kind of psychological effects is obviously present.
The strangely optimistic, although scary, kind of other piece of information to think about is that, you know, Northern Gaza has been separated off from Central and Southern Gaza for a while now, for several months.
The people of Northern Gaza, and we don't know a total number, it could be 200,000, it could be 400,000 people who are living there, are under threat and under evacuation orders.
Many of those people who have been under threat and under evacuation orders for months now, And I do think that we can detect in that refusal not only an inability, which is certainly going to be the case for the disabled, the elderly, people who have lack resources, but also that people are obviously attached to their lives in Gaza, whether or not those buildings are standing.
So, you know, wherever the people in Gaza end up living, they are going to need support and I think it's quite clear from the kind of messages that are being sent out from Gaza itself that people want to rebuild and are trying in small ways to rebuild their lives as best they can.
They know very well that they have rebuilt before, just not on this scale.
Yeah. I want to turn to Bill and just ask a couple last questions.
And just by the way, we'll provide the links to each paper, which I really encourage you to take a look at and read.
It's actually very user friendly.
It's not wrapped up in a lot of academic jargon.
There's a lot of data there that just very stark.
And I really encourage you to take a look at both.
This may be beyond the scope of what you're studying, like these kind of Obvious cost, but also more indirect cost to the United States from the position on Israel.
But one of the things that many military officials and diplomats had pointed out over the years, it's now taboo, you don't hear much of this now, but you certainly will hear from it if you talk to policymakers in Washington, is the understanding that...
The whole world knows probably, the United States is probably the population that thinks about this least, but the whole world knows that this is not an Israeli war in Gaza.
This is a U.S.-Israeli war in Gaza because all the weapons that fall both in Beirut now and West Bank and in Gaza are American weapons.
America pays for it.
It protects Israel at the U.N. and that we have a lot of interest throughout the Middle East and throughout the world that are severely undermined Because of the anger and animosity caused by the world seeing what it is that we're doing with Israel and Gaza.
Are you able to talk at all about the cost of the United States from that kind of failure in world standing or the damage to our other relationships and interests in that region and around the world?
Well, I feel like to some degree, the United States has been fortunate.
It's a funny way to put it.
But there's been many examples of breaking international law, of causing suffering.
And to some degree, the U.S. has...
We've restored its position, not in a moral way, but because of economic power.
People feel like they have to deal with the U.S. It may be different this time because of the scale of the destruction.
Most of the world understands what's going on here, and yet our diplomats are trying to essentially pretend That they're not enabling all this.
So even in the narrow sense of, you know, the Israeli government says, well, you know, we're going to eradicate Hamas.
Well, yes, what Hamas did was horrific, but the disproportionate effects, a hundred many times as people dying in Gaza has died on October 7th.
And the notion that Gaza is going to disappear, even if they eliminate every last person, which they're not going to do, how much resentment do they think there's going to be I think it's...
It's hard to calculate, but I think it is different in kind, and it's going to change the whole kind of ability of the United States to have positive influence or to redeem, you know, what it's supported here.
Sophia's findings have to be broadcast far and wide because it's so much worse than a lot of people might have realized.
And of course, you know, the dying will continue even after the bombing stops because of all the trends that she's pointing out.
So, you know, I think we have to stop the killing, stop the dying.
And I think The Palestinian people, their culture, their national identity, their place in the world, of course, has to be preserved.
It's a challenging thing.
I will say that the student movement, which has taken much more pushback than when I was a student activist, deserves credit for not backing down and trying to elevate this issue in the public eye.
It's unfathomable and unconscionable what's going on.
And we just have to redouble our efforts to stop and reverse it.
Absolutely. We've had student protesters, protest leaders on the show many times talk about what really is their willingness to sacrifice potential future career opportunities in the name of this obviously polarizing cause in the United States.
Let me just ask you one last question because I do think your point about the destruction of Gaza, as illustrated by Sophia's paper, is the key point.
At the same time, I think it's vital in terms of Incentivizing Americans to care more that they understand how much their government, their own government is behind this.
This is not a conflict on the other side of the world that doesn't involve them.
It's American resources, American military equipment, American service members, American money that is all behind this war as well as our standing in the world.
One of the things that I find so amazing is that if you go back to The 1980s and early 1990s under the Reagan and Bush administrations, there was very much this sense that, look, we're financing your wars.
You couldn't fight these wars without us.
We're financing your military.
And as a result, there are lines that we're going to draw that you can't cross when it comes to How you're undermining our interests.
The Bush 41 administration, for example, tried very hard to condition loan guarantees on the cessation of the expansion of settlements in the West Bank on the grounds that we need a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement for our own interests.
There seems now to be Almost no sense at all about any kind of imposition of limitations on Israel, even when they seemingly deliberately humiliate the U.S. government as they did, for example, when Joe Biden said, my red line is you can't invade Rafa.
And Netanyahu said, I don't care about your red line.
We're absolutely going to do what we think we need to.
And then he went and did exactly what the red line that Biden proclaimed said you couldn't do, and there were zero consequences.
What... And maybe this is also beyond the ken of your expertise, sir, but you're looking at this dynamic.
Why is it that there's been, even as compared to the Reagan and Bush years, this obvious erosion in the willingness of the United States to stand up to Israel in any way, even when it comes to our own interests when it's in conflict with theirs?
Well, I mean, it is extraordinary.
They're not using the only leverage they have, and then they're pretending they're helpless.
And I can't fully explain it in a rational sense.
I mean, politically, I think they overstate.
I think the staunch support for Israel is much less than it used to be, especially among the younger generation.
There's some billionaires throwing money around, but I don't think that counteracts it.
So I think even if it's a narrow political calculation, I think they're operating off an old playbook.
So it's almost like just an ideological hangover that's detached from reality.
I really can't.
I can't fathom it. I really can't.
Maybe somebody else has a better way of understanding that.
But nobody's benefiting from this war.
And of course, Palestinians are benefiting least.
But I feel like it's the 100th centennial of The birth of James Baldwin.
One of the things he pointed out about structural racism is that, yes, the primary victims are the people that are being repressed, but it also deforms and dehumanizes the oppressor.
And so in that sense, there's no way to justify this.
There's no benefits to be had.
And I think anybody who thinks otherwise is out of touch with reality.
Yeah, I mean, even just on the level of the crudest political self-interest, I mean, clearly the Kamala Harris campaign is endangered by anger over the administration's support for this issue and the refusal even to extend symbolic gestures to these voters who may not vote for them out of anger over their policy has been just remarkable.
It's almost like they find the interest of Israel's wars to be even greater than their ability to win a national election that's going to take place in 27 days.
It's such a bizarre dynamic.
Well, thank you so much for the work you both done.
We're going to do everything we can to promote both these studies, and I really appreciate each of your time to come on and talk to us about it.
Yeah, no, it was great to be able to talk about it in this detail.
Absolutely. Thank you guys very much.
Have a good evening. Take care.
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