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Nov. 1, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:23:43
Voices For Gaza: Speaking Out Against Israel's Atrocities

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When I look back on the 9-11 attack and the various wars that followed under the umbrella of the war on terror, I think the one thing I recall most
I think the one thing I recall most is the amount of unity that the United States had and that Americans had in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and the intensity of the emotions that attack provoked.
As I've talked about before, I lived in Manhattan, I worked in Manhattan, but I've been in When 9-11 happened, I remember like it was yesterday, the sensations of watching those two buildings in southern Manhattan crumble to the ground on top of 3,000 American citizens.
The Pentagon was attacked.
For weeks in New York, you could smell the burning Of the rubble, of the bodies, of the chemicals.
Everywhere you went, on every corner, there were desperate signs filling every street corner, every street lamp on every street corner from desperate families, hoping against hope that their missing loved ones were somehow with amnesia or unconscious or in a hospital instead of the horrible truth, which is that they were almost all dead.
In fact, all dead, those missing, were under the rubble in the World Trade Center and the Emotions that everyone I knew felt, that I felt as well, was extreme amounts of rage and shock and trauma and a desire for vengeance.
And so what ended up happening was that the government successfully exploited those emotions, those very real human emotions.
We all watch videos that were heavily provocative and inflammatory of our emotions.
Videos of people jumping out of the World Trade Center as the only hope that they had for escaping a fire that was consuming them of 9-11 calls or calls to families as people.
Have their lives extinguished when those buildings fell on top of them and of course has generated enormous amounts of disgust and rage and desire for vengeance against the people responsible.
And most people felt that and most people felt it for a long time and that's why the government was able to convince Americans to essentially acquiesce to anything and everything that was done in the name of punishing or destroying the people who were responsible for that horrific attack.
That took the form of multiple wars, the initiation of a worldwide torture regime that didn't just involve waterboarding but all sorts of other techniques that had longed by the United States been punished as torture, of kidnapping programs, of kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria and other countries that were allied with the United States to be tortured.
Of due process-free prisons around the world, including at Bagram and Guantanamo, where people were in prison with no charges.
There are still people, of course, in Guantanamo who have never been charged with any crime, never convicted of any crime, and they have sat there for 20 years.
There was the hideous, disastrous invasion of Iraq, regime change wars all over the world, and then the transformation of our own domestic politics, of the introduction of things like the Patriot Act and mass NSA spying.
And all kinds of authoritarian project that seeped into and contaminated America's form of government, all justified in the name of fighting against and destroying the people who launched this horrific attack.
And I think the lesson that most Americans have learned from 9-11 is that a lot of what was done ended up being excessive or abusive or morally shameful or at the very least just counterproductive.
We ended up occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, spent trillions of dollars on this war on terror.
Only at the end of the 20 years for the Taliban to just waltz back into power as though nothing had happened.
Tens of thousands of people, American troops, died.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and those countries that we were at war with died as well for very little benefit, for very little progress that was ultimately made.
And the lesson ought to have been that no matter how horrific that attack was, no matter how righteous and justified the anger was, that what was crucial at the time was to have the ability to use reason rather than emotion to make assessments about the best course of action.
And most importantly, to create the space to actually debate What the best course of action was.
I think more than any other policy, what most bothered me at the time and what ultimately propelled me into journalism was the fact that the climate that had been created in the wake of 9-11 was so repressive.
That anybody who was at all off-note, who was at all questioning of government policy done in the name of fighting terrorists was immediately accused of being an apologist for terrorism or supporting terrorism or being on the side of the terrorist.
Incredibly toxic and a healthy environment that destroyed the ability to engage in reason and to ask, okay, even if you're horrified by these attacks, even if you find them We're completely lacking in anything human and you're enraged by them.
Even if that's true, you still have to question what was the best course of action as well as whether or not we played any role in creating the climate that caused so many people to want to come do harm to the United States.
Obviously 9-11 was not the first terrorist attack against the United States.
There was an attack on the World Trade Center just a few years earlier that succeeded a little bit, nowhere near 9-11, obviously.
There had been attacks all over the Muslim world against U.S. forces in Lebanon and in Somalia and in all kinds of other places.
There was an incredible amount of hatred for the United States that ultimately culminated in the 9-11 attack, and it took years to be able to create the space to say, Are we doing anything in terms of interfering in that part of the world, in terms of occupying people's lands, in terms of our policies in that region to interfere in and control their lives or using violence against them that have caused anti-Americanism to exist?
None of this debate was permissible.
And I think a lesson of 9-11...
That if you look at polling in the United States, most people have learned is that a lot of what was done that most of us supported, right, in the aftermath of 9-11 because of our anger and rage and our blinding indignation and desire for vengeance turned out to be, at best, quite misguided.
And that it's extremely important, especially when it comes time to war, when emotions are at their highest, to create space for permissible debate, for permissible questioning.
Now, It is an oddity that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, And it was time for the United States to get involved in that war, even though there was an attempt made to suppress debate, to crush debate, or dissent, to call everybody who questioned it a Russian agent, just like anyone questioning the war on terror was called a, on the side of terrorists.
There was still an ability to have that debate.
I, in fact, did a lot of programs on this show in the days and weeks and months after the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. involvement in that war, where I questioned it, where I opposed it, where I denounced it.
And of course, I got accused of a lot of different things, but being accused of things is something you can live with.
There was at least some space to question it, even though there wasn't much.
I think there was even more space when it came to the war on terror.
There were a lot of people who were opposed to the Iraq War.
There were people after the first few weeks who even opposed the Patriot Act.
And yet, somehow, when it's not our wars, but when it's Israel, it seems as though there's even less space to question.
In fact, people spent the weekend on a lookout for anybody who is even slightly off note in order to accuse them of being on the side of Hamas or justifying these horrific massacres that fighters for Hamas engaged in deliberately aimed at civilians.
And I think the first thing to note is that, in reality, there was virtually nobody defending massacres of civilians against Israeli citizens.
It wasn't that there was nobody.
You can always find people advocating any position.
But certainly nobody in power, not just the United States or in the West, defended or justified or mitigated the atrocities committed by some of those people who invaded Israel, not who attacked police stations or military bases as some of them did, which are generally not who attacked police stations or military bases as some of them did, which are generally considered legitimate targets, but who did things like go to a rave where a large number of young people in their 20s were having an all-night party and
We don't know how many.
There are lots of claims in wars that get circulated for which there's no evidence.
Things like mass rapes get alleged.
We haven't really seen evidence of that, but there were clearly horrific atrocities committed.
And everyone that I heard, at least, pretty much is opposed to that, finds that morally repugnant because even if you think there are legitimate grievances that the Palestinians have, You have to draw the line at basic humanitarianism.
You can never sanction the deliberate targeting of civilians.
I think there's even important distinction to be drawn between acts of violence that are likely to cause the death of civilians, and you do it anyway, and Everybody at war does those.
Remember the United States did shock and awe in Baghdad.
You could watch Baghdad and see enormous bombs exploding all throughout the city.
And the explicit purpose was to terrorize the population into submission, to use shock and awe, to force them to surrender, to believe that it was helpless.
And obviously the United States government knew a large number of civilians were going to die in those bombs, and they did.
And obviously the war in Ukraine entails that.
Every war entails that.
When Hamas shoots rockets into Israel, they hope that they're going to hit a police station or a military base, but there's a high likelihood they're going to hit civilian targets and they do it anyway.
When Israel goes in, drops massive bombs, In one of the most densely populated places on earth, which is Gaza, of course there's a knowledge that they're going to kill large numbers of civilians in Gaza.
They have every time they've done it, and yet they still do it as well.
There's still a difference between what you could call collateral damage and going to a place where you immediately see there are only civilians, like a dance festival or a rave, and gunning people down.
There has to still be a moral line that is drawn where nobody can justifiably cross that the way a lot of the militants that entered Israel did.
And I don't think anybody can possibly, in good conscience, justify that.
And the reality is almost nobody did.
In fact, I think the only person I saw who did...
Was somebody who was at a protest in New York City, a pro-Palestinian protest, sponsored by the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America.
It was a single speaker.
No one knows the person's name.
Even people at this protest objected to it, said that they disassociate themselves from that.
There were a lot of people expressing support for the Palestinian side without justifying what Hamas did.
And the fact that we had to watch this person and search for them and hold them up It shows how difficult it was to find people who actually supported the worst elements of Hamas, the worst actions that Hamas took.
But there's a deliberate attempt to suggest that unless you're 100% on board with everything that Israel does, suggesting that everything they do is justified, everything the Palestinians do is unjustified, the Israelis are the upstanding, morally superior humans, and the Palestinians are animals who don't have human value, unless you're willing to say essentially that, you get accused of being supportive of acts that you're actually actively denouncing.
So here, here's the one person that I think people could find.
And again, the fact that people had to point to this person, who nobody knows, who has no power, who's not an elected official, who has no standing in media, shows how marginalized this view was.
When the Palestinians broke through the fence, they put the F-35 in place.
And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a But I'm sure they're doing very fine despite what the New York Post says.
Obviously, they're not doing fine.
We all saw the videos of people's corpses laying on the ground because they were shot by the people who invaded Israel.
And maybe you had two or three people or four people screaming their approval in this crowd.
But this was a repulsive position that everybody I know, including people who have long been critics of Israel or supportive of the Palestinian cause, repudiated.
And so the idea that if you at all question the Israeli government or if you question the Biden administration's support for it, it somehow means that you're a proponent of the worst acts of Hamas is just as intellectually dishonest, just as manipulative, just as designed to suppress dissent.
As those who claim that opponents of the Iraq war were pro-Saddam Hussein, ISIS.
Or that people who question the war on terror were on the side of al-Qaeda.
Or that people who oppose U.S. support for Ukraine are pro-Putin.
It's all part of the same tactic.
That you should not fall for and you should not tolerate if you're even a minimally intellectually honest person.
Now, I again understand that the reality is that all those videos that people were subjected to over the weekend, all those claims about atrocities committed against Israelis, obviously have produced a great amount of anger and a great amount of sickness, not just in Israel, but in foreign countries as well, for people who feel an affinity toward Israel.
And in the United States, there are a lot of people who feel an affinity for Israel.
There are not just American Jews who do, but evangelical Christians who wield a lot of political power as well and who feel an affinity toward Israel for religious reasons or cultural reasons.
But there's also the foreign policy establishment and neocons and militarists who see Israel as an important And always have as an important military ally of the United States.
And so the energy and the emotions surrounding this topic, I'm aware, are very high.
And there's not a lot of people who want to hear any questioning right now.
And I think it's very important to be careful but not be willing to refrain from asking the questions or making the points that I think ought to be raised.
And one of the things I did when I was thinking about coming on tonight and talking about this war and how to do it was I went back and watched the video that I did immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine where pretty much the same thing happened.
We spent the first day or the first two days bombarded with images of Russian violence against Ukrainians, of Ukrainian civilians crying, of mourning, of grieving, of weeping.
The kind of thing that we almost never see when America is involved in wars.
We almost never see interviews with the victims of our bombs or our drones when it's innocent people, but we do get shown that when it comes time for a war that the U.S. government wants to instigate support for.
And so people were just drowning in videos.
And obviously if you're a decent person and you look at videos of Ukrainian women crying over the death of their children, or you're a decent person, you're going to be emotionally moved by that.
But it can't mean that that means that you're not allowed to question or even oppose your country's involvement in that war because then you get accused of supporting Russian violence or being indifferent to the suffering of people because there's wars all the time in every part of the world.
And obviously there have to be space for you to say, I don't think my government should get involved in this war or I think this war is more complicated than the morality play we're being presented with.
And so I went back and I watched what I tried to communicate in the day after the Russian invasion, knowing that the same kind of propaganda, the same kind of emotional intensity would immediately arrive as is with us now when it comes to What is now a war between Israel and Gaza?
I just want to show you a little bit of what I tried to communicate because I think it's so incredibly relevant to what we have to do now and how we have to think about this war that not only is involving Israel and Gaza, but also the United States and a lot of other countries.
So let me just show you a couple excerpts from this is February 24th, 2022.
So it was the night of or the day after the Russian invasion.
So it's always an extraordinarily horrific episode to watch a new war break out anytime.
That's just always true.
And precisely for that reason, we react very emotionally to the outbreak of a new war, as we should.
Given that it generally means that large numbers of human beings, innocent civilians, are going to have their lives extinguished.
Bombs are falling, destroying cities, destroying ancient structures, disrupting lives, causing thousands or hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of displaced Human beings, whoever we assign blame to for that war, we naturally are going to have a huge amount of intense emotion toward that country of rage and anger and a desire for vengeance.
Conversely, we're going to have an enormous amount of sympathy and a desire to help and protect and defend whoever we regard as the victim.
It's for any normal, healthy, well-adjusted human being A time of extremely high emotions.
And I think we need to be aware of that for two reasons.
The first of which is that anytime we're in a state of high emotions, by definition, necessarily, our capacity to reason diminishes.
If we're reacting to something with intense emotions, our ability to use rationality to react to the situation, to analyze it, is crowded out by the intensity of those emotions.
Even when those emotions are valid, in fact, particularly when those emotions are valid, as the emotions that are pervasive now watching what's happening between Russia and Ukraine undoubtedly are, It doesn't matter whether the emotions are valid or not.
The mere existence of intense emotions means that we lose our capacity, at least for the moment, to evaluate events and what our response should be and how we should think about them with reason, with rationality.
Now, it's just that we ought to be aware of what the reaction is when our brains are flooded with high emotions, when our emotions are part of a collective reaction and therefore even more intense given that we're social and political animals and we're tribal and We feed on one another's emotions.
And so the more we all feel intense emotions, collectively the emotions intensify, it's important to realize what that means for our reasoning ability, which is our ability or our willingness even to think about things rationally and to reason as opposed to these emotions.
We're in a diminished state of reason when we react to things emotionally.
And that's why whenever events like this happen, you can go through every single event that you might want to compare a new war to.
Look at 9-11, for example.
In the days after 9-11, we were all in lockstep about various ideas and Emotions and reactions that a month later, two months later, a year later, 20 years later, many of us who embraced those emotions at the time have come to reevaluate and regard as misguided.
There's no question that a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, We're going to be thinking about these events differently than we're able to think about them right now.
And I just think it's important to realize.
So, I think you're seeing an enormous amount of that.
Obviously, you're seeing it in Israel, but you're seeing it in the United States, too.
I cannot tell you how many people I've seen, conservatives and liberals and Republicans and Democrats, Where there's really very little difference or dissent, even though a lot of people try and claim there is.
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of mainstream American politics and the vast majority of the people in both parties have as much unity and support of Israel as they did in this moment in support of Ukraine when Russia invaded.
There are places around the world that see things much differently.
There are thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the Arab world Out on the street expressing solidarity for Palestinians.
And if you were subjected to that media and that discourse, you would think a lot differently.
But the reality is there is a unity of thought and emotion, which sometimes is justified.
But it also creates the danger that because we're tribal animals, because we're social and political animals, and especially now with social media, that we feed on the same collective notions.
And nobody wants to be cast aside.
No one wants to be excluded.
Societal scorn is a big punishment for social animals.
There is a danger that we can get swept away in these emotions.
I'm so angry with the Palestinians, with these Hamas monsters, that I'm just ready to turn Gaza into a parking lot without regard to the implications of that, of the wider war that would spark, of the humanitarian disaster that would generate...
And I think it's important to try and step back and use your reason and not just your emotion.
Because we have so many examples where using that emotion led us wildly astray.
Norman, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
I'm fine, thank you.
So, let's begin with the...
I want to obviously spend a lot of our time on the Israeli war in Gaza.
But before we get to that, there's obviously a recent issue which involves the Iranian retaliation against the Israelis for the April 1st bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
How do you see the Iranian response to that and what do you think is the likelihood that we're on the verge of a major escalation in the war in the Middle East?
Well, nobody likes to sound like a Cassandra, the prophetess of doom in Greek mythology.
However, one also has a responsibility That if there is a significant danger lurking, in this case, one hesitates to say it, but a terminal danger lurking, then there is a responsibility to sound the alarm.
And I do believe that we are facing one of those moments where Israel is hurling towards the precipice and is determined one way or another to drag the rest of humanity with it.
The only point of departure in my opinion that's rational is to start with the theorem, not the thesis, the theorem that Israel is a lunatic state.
And I don't say that in a glib way.
I don't say it in a emotive way.
I think one can say it in, for want of a better word, in a scientific way.
The state is certifiably crazy.
There are two polls For the entire Israeli spectrum.
It's a very small spectrum at this point.
At one poll, you can call it the poll of crackpot realists.
That was a term coined by the sociologist Seawright Mills in his book, The Causes of World War III. And by crackpot realist he meant those folks who saw war as the only answer to every question,
even as they acknowledged or were aware that the war wouldn't solve any problems.
It's just their first and their last reflex.
They were crackpots, but they were also of completely sound mind.
So a typical, in my opinion, a typical exemplar or an exemplar of a crackpot realist would be someone like Professor Benny Morris, Israel's chief historian.
He's urbane.
He's engaging.
He's sophisticated.
He's secular.
And he's also a crackpot.
Again, I don't say that glibly.
He advocates attack.
He has been for the past 15 years.
He's been advocating an attack on Iran.
He said that if the West, meaning the United States doesn't join in Israel will have to nuke Iran and he says that the population will have deserved the fate of being incinerated the tens of millions of them because they elected the government now Morris must know
that such an attack will trigger a reaction if not from Iran then from Hezbollah which will be terminal for Israel and yet without in the least bit being fazed by that prospect he advocates A nuclear attack on Iran.
At the other end of this very narrow spectrum are those who advocate what's called the Samson option.
And you can find an interesting analysis of the Samson option in Professor Noam Chomsky's book, Fateful Triangle.
And the Samson option is very simple.
I should also point out the notion that Professor Chomsky pointed to was then elaborated on about, I guess, five or ten years later, I can't remember now, by Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter in a book called The Samson Option.
and the Samson option basically is very simple either pretend to be mad to pretend to be crazy so as to terrify your enemies and your allies that if they don't do Israel's bidding Israel is going to bring down the temple On everybody's head.
And there are those who are not simply pretending to be crazy by advocating the Samson option.
They are crazy.
They're lunatics.
And I do believe there is a significant portion of Israel's political spectrum That is either pretending to be crazy or actually is crazy.
And as you know, there's a very tiny step from pretending to be crazy to then coming to actually believe the phantoms you've conjured and becoming crazy.
And you saw an illustration of that, and it's just an illustration.
You saw it yesterday in the Security Council.
If you listened to Gilad Erdan's speech, it was certifiably lunatic.
It was lunatic.
He starts by saying, the Ayatollah is Hitler, the Islamic State is The Third Reich is hellbent on conquering the whole world.
Iran is hellbent on conquering the whole world.
He then says Iran is within weeks of acquiring an atomic nuclear weapon, and the world has to stop it and the upshot or bottom line is if the world to use his terminology acts like Chamberlain then
Israel will have to act like Churchill now if you listened to his rhetorical delivery It was as if he were saying, who dares to doubt me?
In this chamber, meaning the Security Council.
If you listen, he even at one point held up an image on his iPad of Israel intercepting a drone over Al-Aqsa mosque allegedly intercepting a drone above Al-Aqsa mosque and then he said that
Israel is the true protector of Islamic holy sites and the Islamic Republic of Iran is the defiler of these holy sites this is it's not even the subject of Monty Python it's not the subject matter of Monty Python this
is lunacy run amok and if even Of Israeli society.
And only half of the Israeli political elite thinks this.
And in my opinion, it's much more than half.
The place is crazy.
You know, it's not too long ago that Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, He said that the whole idea of the final solution came not from Hitler but from the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.
I recently debated Benny Morris and he was emphatic that the Mufti of Jerusalem played an important role in the final solution.
This is just It's sheer craziness.
It's apologia for Hitler and for Nazis to say, oh, they didn't really want to kill the Jews until the Palestinians persuaded them to do so.
Well, of course, it's an apologia.
But for me, the real question is, or the real problem is, I think they really believe it.
I do.
I think we're at that point where, as I said, this notion of the Samson option, it has two aspects.
Pretend that you're crazy in order to get others to do your bidding for fear that you're going to do something lunatic.
and then those who are beyond pretending and are prepared in the name of their holy cause where their backs might be up against the wall or they think their backs are up against the wall that they're going to bring down the whole temple meaning all the goyim Are going to go with us.
It's a very scary prospect now.
And I don't believe that Iran has many options.
Now, some people will say, and it's perfectly rational, some people will say Iran, for the sake of humanity, should not take the bait but I do not believe that Iran has that option and I will explain to you why looking at the historical examples
once Israel is determined to go to war It will keep escalating the provocations escalating the provocations until it becomes untenable for a government to react with passivity in 1954 The
Israeli leadership, in particular David Ben-Gurion, the then Prime Minister, and Moshe Dayan, had decided that they were going to topple the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
And as many historians have reported, They escalated the provocations, escalated the provocations, until finally, when Nasser kept resisting what he knew was Israel's intention to launch a war, Israel joined in with France and the UK to invade Egypt.
In 1982, Or I should say in 1981.
There was a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO. It was signed in July 1981.
But Israel was determined to knock out the PLO, which was based then in southern Lebanon.
And even though the PLO kept resisting The provocations, Israel kept bombing South Lebanon, bombing South Lebanon, even though there was a ceasefire.
Escalating, escalating until it became untenable for the PLO not to react.
It should be borne in mind that the reason Israel attacked the PLO was because it was too moderate.
Namely, it supported a two-state settlement, and Israel was afraid that pressures would be brought to bear on it to resolve the conflict for once and for all, but that would force an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
Which he wasn't prepared to do.
So let me just interject, Norman, if I could just interject, just because I want to just focus a little bit on where we are with Iran and the U.S. a little bit more.
Before I do, I just want to make a couple of observations about some of the things you said.
We did a show last month in which we documented how many US adversaries over the past 25 years have been declared to be the new Hitler.
Not by random think tankers, but by media outlets and governments at the highest level.
And it's essentially...
Every American adversary.
Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler.
Ahmad al-Bajinadad was the new Hitler, obviously.
Putin is the new Hitler.
Gaddafi was the new Hitler.
Assad was the new Hitler.
Ho Chi Minh was the new Hitler.
Hamas is the new Hitler.
In fact, worse than Hitler, we're being told.
The one comparison you cannot make is Israel and comparing it to the Nazis.
But the other point I wanted to make about Benny Morris and this crucial point that you brought up with tone that I think is so important.
I remember 15 years ago when I started realizing this, I wrote an article about how if you use intemperate language or you speak passionately, even if it's completely valid about an injustice, you're immediately deemed a fringe radical, somebody who is almost you're immediately deemed a fringe radical, somebody who is almost in the realm of insanity,
But if you are able to speak in a kind of urban, sophisticated way, as you said, for Benny Morrison, use the language of diplomacy, like Bill Kristol, You'll automatically be deemed somebody worthy of mainstream centrism even though the ideas they're presenting are bloodthirsty and deranged and insane.
But let me just ask you about what is going on with Iran at this point because when Israel Bombed the Iranian embassy on April 1st in Damascus.
Obviously, as you said, there was no way Iran could not react.
There's no country in the world that wouldn't retaliate if planes flew over their embassy and was deliberately bombed and killed senior military officials.
Imagine what the U.S. and the Israelis would do if that happened.
I had John...
Hold on.
I had...
The problem is, you know, because I discussed this with people who I respect a lot, the problem is if they didn't react, we know from past experience exactly what Israel would do.
It would keep escalating the provocations up to and including assassinating The Iranian head of state formally denying it, but with a wink-wink as, of course, we did it.
There is no way to stop them.
Once they have resolved that a war is necessary and a war is inevitable, Once they have resolved that, there is no way on God's earth to stop them.
That's what the historical record shows.
You can hold back, hold back, hold back, as Nasser did until February 1955.
Hold back, as the PLO did.
In July from July 1981 till June 1982 as Hamas did after a ceasefire was agreed upon between Israel and Hamas in June 2008 in June 2008 but Israel will provoke and
provoke and provoke because it's resolved on that war so I do not believe the option of not reacting actually exists and that to me is a very difficult problem as of now we're facing a moment where Israel Has to resolve,
or wants to resolve, not has to resolve, it wants to resolve three problems.
Problem number one, it wants to execute its quote-unquote final solution to the Gaza problem.
The Gaza problem, the Gaza has been a pin-trick on Israel's side, Really, believe it or not, since 1949.
And as one senior official said in 2015, he said, quote, we can't keep having these wars of attrition in Gaza.
The next conflict has to be the last conflict.
So we have the Gaza quote-unquote problem.
Then there is the Hezbollah problem.
Hezbollah has gone one step too far.
It's caused 100,000 Israelis to have to relocate from the northern border, and it has targeted, albeit on military sites only, It's targeted Israeli territory.
And number three, the Big Megillah.
When I quoted Penny Morris, I quoted him from 2008.
Israel keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.
And Professor Morris has written one op-ed, A second op-ed, a third op-ed, a fourth op-ed in the U.S. main newspapers saying we've got to attack Iran.
And I do believe, because Benjamin Netanyahu, he knows the American media very well.
About that, he's really a virtuoso.
And he espies An opportunity now.
For example, as you can see, Gaza has vanished from the headlines.
Now everything is about Iran.
He espies an opportunity now to carry out what you might or to win what you might call the trifecta.
Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran.
Another opportunity like this might not come along soon.
and it can achieve in their minds remember we're talking about lunatics certifiable lunatics in their minds they can achieve their three overarching strategic objectives Let me ask you about that.
So, as you said, you know, Benny Morris' warning about how Iran is weeks away from a nuclear capability.
They've been warning of this.
Yeah, they've been warning of this for, you know, almost 15 years.
Netanyahu went and presented that primitive little chart at the UN quite notoriously.
When we had John Mearsheimer on our show, Professor Mearsheimer, last week and asked him about the attack on the embassy, he said it's clear that the Israelis want not only a war with Iran, but to drag the United States into the war.
That has been their goal for a long time.
President Biden, I haven't given him much credit lately over the past six months, but at least in this case, he and other Western leaders seem determined not to have this broad conflagration in the Middle East.
They are telling Israel, look, the Iranian attack did almost no damage.
There's no reason to go crazy and insane, as you're suggesting that they want to.
How much at this point do you think...
The Israeli government cares about Western perception and Western opinion?
Look, that's an excellent question and I think it's an unanswerable question.
Historically, Israel has been, since 1957, Israel has been hesitant about undertaking any major military action Without the green light or as in 1967 what's been called the amber or the yellow light from the White House.
The reason being, famously in 1957 after Israel had conquered significant Egyptian territory It was ordered by President Eisenhower at the time to withdraw.
So when 1967 came and 67, 56 was basically the dress rehearsal in retrospect for the 67 war.
The Israelis sent many people to Washington Officially and unofficially to make sure that LBJ, the president at the time, Lyndon Brains Johnson,
wouldn't do what Eisenhower did, namely after Israel, and it knew it would easily conquer the territory of neighboring states, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.
They wanted it to be affirmed That the US, under LBJ, wouldn't force a withdrawal.
So in general, I think it's fair to say that Israel is cognizant of and hesitant to act in the absence of a US at any rate,
if not a green light, a yellow light, where I would somewhat I disagree with you, not fully, but somewhat, is when Netanyahu posted or held up that Looney Tunes picture at the UN and claimed Iran is near the breakout point, the usual Israeli spiel.
There wasn't a war going on.
This was Iran trying to, I think, To use the Samson option idiom, they were pretending to be crazy so as to make everybody terrified at the prospect of defying this crazy state.
But now things are significantly different.
We are after October 7th.
There is a huge insatiable bloodlust in Israel.
There is the fear in Israel that what it calls its deterrence capability meaning the Arab world's fear of Israel was significantly diminished after October 7th,
Israel appeared to be, I'm not saying it is, but appeared to be much weaker than had hitherto been imagined.
And three, it looked like and looks like an opportunity might be available to them.
Every crisis, as the cliché goes, is also an opportunity.
So October 7th, the Hezbollah attacks, only on military sites, that's a side point, on Israeli territory.
Now the Iran quote-unquote attack, of course it was utterly innocuous.
Much more innocuous, incidentally, than Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks in 1991, which did a little damage, but it did some damage.
It was innocuous by design.
Clearly the Iranians could have done a lot more had they wanted to.
Of course it was innocuous by design.
As one commentator pointed out, they mostly used slow-motion drones, which they knew it's like a video game.
shooting them down from the sky and you know Hezbollah has I can't say I know but the reports are it has a hundred fifty thousand missiles of which quite a few were told again I can't verify quite a few are very sophisticated which means for all the talk about Israel's air defense system let's remember Israel is a very tiny place.
150,000 missiles if they're launched.
It's curtains for Israel.
So, of course, it was purely symbolic.
But I would have to add, I imagine the Iranian leadership together with Syed Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, they thought very hard about how to react to what happened on April 1st.
That's what they came up with.
I have to assume they have a very sophisticated analysis before they undertook that action.
Nasrallah, I suspect Yisraelah knows Israeli society I think better than most Israelis because his mind is not corrupted by the delusions and hallucinations of this crazy state.
So I have to assume that they thought this was the most prudent move to make But my own sense, and I don't want to in any way give an impression of being omniscient or infallible,
but my own sense is, if Israel has resolved, as it did in 1954, 1982, and in 2008, if it has resolved that Iran has to be neutered.
I would say no amount of restraint will stop them.
Thinking about that, the Is really mid-term or long-term plan, meaning what happens when this bombing campaign finally comes to an end, when the ground invasion either turns into some sort of partial occupation, reoccupation of Gaza or some international force or whatever.
If you look at the scope of the destruction in northern Gaza, there have been reports that 60% of all buildings, if not destroyed, are architecturally compromised, not safe to inhabit.
The sewage system, the electrical system, the hospital system are completely destroyed.
I mean, to some extent, northern Gaza has been rendered in a large degree uninhabitable in terms of just any kind of modern society.
How would these internally displaced Gazans who are now in southern Gaza and dispersed throughout the country really in any reasonable or meaningful way get back to any kind of meaningful or normal life in northern Gaza, even if the Israelis were to permit that?
Well, I think rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable was actually a declared war aim.
The Minister of Defense, Galant, various Israeli generals said that.
And when you cut off electricity and you cut off water, you are in effect making the place uninhabitable.
When you destroy or render unusable most of the hospitals in northern Gaza, when you destroy schools, when you destroy a variety of other infrastructure, You are rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable.
Now, the claim is that this was intended to destroy Hamas infrastructure.
But my guess is that there was, as they said, a desire to render that part, at least of Gaza, uninhabitable.
Now, you can see that there's a doctrine here.
It's a doctrine that was first adopted in 2006, or at least first enunciated after the 2006 war on Lebanon.
And it was the so-called Dahya doctrine, Dahya being the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were flattened by Israeli bombing in 2006.
And the man who is now a member of the War Cabinet, a former chief of staff by the name of Gadi Eisenkatt, actually enunciated this.
He said, we will not accept proportionality.
We will act Unproportionately.
And we will flatten villages.
We will do what we did to the Dahiya.
In other words, we will destroy, in order to destroy, in a punitive fashion.
And I think that is what Israel is doing.
Now, what that means for the day after?
Well, I think it's connected in the first instance to what they were hoping, which is to get people out of Gaza.
Decrease the Palestinian population within the borders of mandatory Palestine.
In other words, Launch another stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
If that proves impossible, the next best thing is to squeeze them into a smaller area, maybe push them into southern Gaza.
But I don't think that any of these things are necessarily, beyond rendering Gaza uninhabitable, which the Minister of Defense said.
I don't think any of these things are entirely clear.
And I think, as you suggested, there are multiple factions in this government.
The military has its own views.
The Prime Minister, who basically wants to continue the war and not lose this government, which keeps him in power, failing which he would go to trial, presumably.
And then other factions within the government, the Likud party, the extreme right-wing parties, which want to see ethnic cleansing as soon as possible and as much of Palestine as possible, and so forth.
So it's, to me, frankly, and I'm reading the Israeli press carefully, it's not clear that they have a clear idea or a unified idea of what they want to do with the Gazans once this military campaign is over, whenever it's over.
On this stated goal of destroying Hamas, I don't think we ever got clarity about exactly what that means.
Although the Israelis made clear from the beginning, Netanyahu on down, they said, we don't mean we're going to erode the power of Hamas.
We don't mean we're going to undermine it.
We don't mean we're going to weaken Hamas.
We mean we're going to destroy it, eradicate it, remove it from existing in Gaza.
Obviously, with a war like this, facts are hard to come by.
So let's just take the Israeli numbers, the numbers given by the Israeli military.
According to the Israeli military, they have thus far killed 1,500 to 2,000 Hamas militants.
So let's take the maximum number, 2,000.
And according to the Israelis as well, there are 30,000 Hamas fighters.
So they've killed one-fifteenth of all the Hamas fighters that existed at the start of the war.
Presumably there's going to be more anti-Israel Radicals and people who hate Israel after this destruction that they've witnessed, after the amount of death.
But let's just keep that number in place.
30,000 Hamas militants.
That would mean in order to kill all Hamas militants, just the minimum necessary I would assume to achieve this goal of destroying Hamas, They would have to kill 15 times more Hamas militants than they have thus far and at the current rate of civilian death, that would mean that they would basically end up killing 200,000, 250,000 Gazans in total.
Do you think there is any world in which the world just stands by and watches something like that take place?
No, absolutely not.
The United States wouldn't tolerate it because the Biden administration couldn't tolerate it because public opinion is already against this war.
Majority of Americans are in favor of a ceasefire.
They want it to stop.
They do not accept the Biden administration and the Israeli governments.
I mean, whether it means killing 20,000-odd more Hamas militants and God knows how many thousands more civilians, tens of thousands more civilians, and destroying even more of the infrastructure of Gaza.
If 60 percent has already been rendered uninhabitable and unusable, God knows how much more there is to destroy.
But I do not think that I don't think that there is any possibility.
Of our reaching anything like those numbers, even if those numbers are realistic.
I mean, let's assume that they're highly exaggerated, which I think is the case.
I don't think there's any chance of killing 10 or 20,000 Hamas militants, no matter how many civilians Israel kills.
And no matter how many tunnels.
You read the Israeli military correspondence, and they're saying they've done very limited damage to the tunnel system.
Well, they've dropped how many thousand tons of bombs a day, a week, on Gaza, and they still have only minimally damaged the tunnel system?
They've killed 2,000 of, by their estimate, 30,000 militants?
It just does not seem to me within the world of possibility that this could go on to that extent.
How it stops, however, I don't know.
You're somebody who's followed this conflict for most of your career as a scholar, as an academic, as a historian.
You've referred to on a couple of occasions this public opinion that has turned against the Democratic Party, against Joe Biden for his support of what's taking place in Israel.
I do think there's an interesting dynamic that it is the case that for a lot of years now, maybe going back to 2014, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has pretty much been on the back burner of American politics.
You have all these young people who have started to pay attention to politics for the first time.
A lot of people have paid attention to politics for the first time only because of Trump.
This is the first real look they're getting at Israel and the Democratic Party's relationship to it.
And you have these mass protests all over the world, hundreds of thousands of people in major Western cities.
You have to go back to the Iraq War to find protest on this level.
As somebody who has followed this conflict, has been in the middle of it in so many ways for so long now, is this a kind of radical or fundamental change in terms of public opinion and the amount of opposition to what the Israelis are doing and the way in which the U.S. is supporting them?
I mean, there has been a trend in this direction, but I think you put your finger on it.
I think that this is a moment when a newly awakened generation with new access to information is, for the first time, really looking very carefully at things that are happening in Israel and Palestine.
And they clearly do not like what they see.
There's an NBC poll that came out the other day of voters from 18 to 34.
70% of voters in that age group disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of this war.
That's an astonishing percentage.
I mean, a majority of Americans want a ceasefire, but 70% of young voters, that includes Republicans and independents.
I mean, that's a remarkable number.
And it's part of a trend that I think has really been accentuated by this war.
But that's been going on for actually a very long time.
The polling over many years shows a drift away from sympathy for Israel and towards Greater sympathy for the Palestinians.
And this war has crystallized that, I think.
Yeah, so for those of us who have followed this debate, this conflict for a long time, there's all the arguments that everybody can rehearse in their sleep.
You show people the death poles in Gaza and people say, oh, Hamas uses them as human shields.
Hamas operates from hospitals.
They operate from mosques.
All the arguments that everybody knows and knows the responses to.
I do want to ask you about a couple of perspectives that are, I think, the Most potent ones that Israelis and pro-Israel supporters in the United States and the West offer.
And I want to begin by asking you this.
In almost every war, there's two questions, broadly speaking, I think, that need to be asked.
One is, is there a moral or legal justification for the war, for the force being used?
And then, is it a wise use of force, even if it's morally justifiable?
Will it produce benefits on the whole as opposed to detriments?
After the October 7th massacre that did kill hundreds of civilians, whatever that number is, 500, 800, 900, whatever that amount is, do you think Israel had a legal and moral right to use force in Gaza against the group and the people who perpetrated that attack?
You know, the problem with that question is its framing.
Gaza had been under siege for 16 years.
Israel had assumed that it could live a peaceful, quiet life while putting its boot heel on the Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
And sooner or later that had to explode.
Now it exploded in a particularly ugly fashion with these massacres.
It resulted in the highest Death toll among Israeli civilians in the entire history of Israel's wars since 1948.
So there was going to be a reaction, necessarily and inevitably.
But if you step back one minute, I think it's very clear that if you occupy and if you imprison and blockade and besiege a population, sooner or later that population is going to react.
Violently and negatively.
Israelis talk about this as if it's irrational.
It's not irrational at all.
The nature of the violence is, of course, horrific that was carried out on that day.
But when you do this to people and you pretend that out of sight is out of mind and you can live a normal life in suburban communities with other people in a cage within a couple of miles of you, you are storing up problems that sooner or later are going to erupt.
So did Israel have a right to occupy in the first instance?
Did Israel have a right to kick those people out in 1948 in the second instance?
I mean, you can go on and on and on.
The people in Gaza are 80% refugees from the areas that Hamas invaded on the 7th of October.
So it really depends on where you start and where your perspective is on this.
If you assume that everything was peaceful, and this is France and Germany, Or this is Country A and Country B, where Country A simply decides to launch a murderous assault on the civilians of Country B, then of course Country B has the right to counterattack.
But this is not Country A and Country B. This is an occupier and an occupied population.
And this is a settler colonial project where the people Living in settlements around the Gaza Strip are living on lands that used to belong to people who have now been living, or their ancestors, their parents and grandparents, have been living as refugees in the Gaza Strip since 1948.
And you have to factor that in.
Does an occupying power have the right to attack an occupied population?
You should be asking, I think, those kinds of questions as well as the question, what should Israel have done?
Well, Israel shouldn't have been an occupation of the West Bank in the Gaza Strip in the first place.
There should have been a Palestinian state.
There should have been any number of things, should have been, the absence of which have led to this horrific situation that we're in, where at least 800 Israeli civilians have been killed, at least 450 or more Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed.
Apparently, over 15,000 Palestinians, both civilians and militants, have been killed.
And we're not at the end of it.
I mean, assuming that this ceasefire breaks down over the next several days, we're going to see many, many, much higher casualties.
And I think at the end of this, you'd have to ask that question.
What was achieved?
What was the point of this?
Have they stored up more enmity for Israel?
Have they improved Israel's position?
Are Israelis more secure as a result of killing 15,000 Palestinians, including a huge number of children and women and other non-combatants?
I don't think the answer is yes.
I don't think you achieve security in that fashion.
And I'm not just saying that from an Israeli perspective.
I would say that from a Palestinian perspective as well.
Sooner or later, there has to be a political resolution of this.
I don't think we're nearer to a political resolution as a result of this, not only, I think, because of whatever happened on the 7th of October, but because of the 15 times greater toll that has so far been inflicted by Israel since the 7th of October, and that toll will only, unfortunately, probably increase.
I'm always amazed at the ability for Western media outlets and governments to just define history however they want.
Russian invasion of Ukraine.
They just pretended that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the West began on February of 2022, as opposed to having extended many years back, without which you can't possibly understand what happened in February of 2022.
And of course, the attempt to pretend that there was no conflict until October 7th, and it all started when Hamas invaded Israel.
But your answer essentially The standard argument, which I am interested in hearing your view on, is that Hamas has made very clear they don't want a two-state solution.
The reason Netanyahu propped up Hamas was precisely because he thought they would work symbiotically to prevent a two-state solution, so that wouldn't resolve The hostility of Hamas, say Israel defenders.
And then more interestingly, I think I want to ask you, is a two-state solution possible given the extent of the settlement project in the West Bank?
I mean, my short answer to the second part of your question is no.
Unless you deal with occupation and colonization, you should not even utter the words two-state solution.
A two-state solution in which Israel continues to settle or in which 750,000 Israeli citizens maintain their residence and their colonization of Palestinian lands is not a two-state solution.
It's a one-state solution with a one-state, one-bantustan solution.
A situation in which Israel continues its occupation is not a two-state solution.
And every Israeli offer, generous offer, has included Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley, which means it's not a state.
I mean, imagine if a foreign country controlled the border with Mexico and the border with Canada.
Would we be a sovereign state?
The United States?
Of course not.
The first part of your question.
I think that you have to Look at this in terms of how you end this conflict.
Do you end it in a fashion which maintains a structural inequality, where one group has rights and security at the expense of the rights and security of the other?
Where one group proclaims, as the Israeli nation state law proclaims, that only the Jewish people have the right of sovereignty in the land of Israel.
Or do you have a solution, whether it's a one state or a two state solution, in which both peoples and every individual have equal rights?
How you do that, I don't know.
I don't think that a two-state solution is possible in present circumstances because nobody's talking about the elephants in the room.
Nobody's talking about ending Israeli security control.
Nobody's talking about ending settlement.
And if you don't do that, even if the Palestinians accept the measly 22% of historic Palestine, which comprise the West Bank, occupied Arab East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Even if they accept that unjust partition of Palestine, you have to get 750,000 Israelis out of there or figure out how they continue to live.
Heavily armed Israeli settlers backed by major components of the IDF, if not most.
Precisely.
I think one of the reasons why the war in Gaza got so much attention for the time that it did Was in part because of just the sheer brutality of what the Israelis were doing, but also because I think a lot of people who have sort of paid attention to politics only recently, young people, people who only started to get involved with Trump, Really had no idea the extent to which the United States enabled and paid for and sort of fueled and never placed limits on what the Israelis are permitted to do to the Palestinians.
And I remember asking you on my show, sort of where do you put this war in Gaza in the kind of pantheon of horrific war crimes and other types of destruction?
And I remember you saying it's basically at the top, and yet that was months ago.
And this war really hasn't slowed down.
I mean, every day, every week, we hear of some new school being killed, of some family being wiped out, of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza just being utterly destroyed.
How do you think, from a historical perspective, this Israeli destruction of civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza will be understood?
Well, there is, as historians like to say, There's continuity and there's change with what preceded it.
I think if one uses the metaphors that Israel has invoked, if you use their metaphors, what you can say is up until October 7th, Israel periodically launched these high-tech killing sprees, what they call operations.
And the main purpose of these killing sprees, as they said it, not me, their metaphor was to mow the lawn in Gaza.
And that basically meant, well, it had several different features to it, but it didn't mean the total annihilation.
Come October 7th, there was a new goal set by Israel.
Namely, this time we're not going to mow the lawn in Gaza.
We're going to extirpate, pull out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza.
And that took basically three forms.
Originally, and I should point out, these are overlapping forms.
They're not discrete, entirely discrete.
The first form was an attempted mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza, namely forcing all the people to the south and then hopefully the gates of Rafa would be opened and they would flood into the Sinai Desert.
That didn't happen because the president of Egypt said no and it seems that the U.S. deferred To President Sisi's decision and the ethnic cleansing didn't in total occur.
But I think it's not widely known.
It has in large regards, has succeeded.
The estimates are somewhere between 300 and 500,000 Gazans are no longer in Gaza.
uh by hook or by crook they were in egypt it seems egypt doesn't allow more than 60 000 gazans to stay at any one given time so you could say 300 will take the low estimate 300 000 have been expelled they will certainly never return And they are finding a way to get past Egypt.
That is, Egypt is a transit point to some other corner of the world.
So if you take the low estimate, that would mean one-seventh of Gaza's population has been successfully, and one might add, surreptitiously, If you take the higher estimate of 500,000, that would be about one quarter of the population.
So even though the kind of ethnic cleansing that was conceived in the early days has not succeeded, it must be said that in part it has succeeded.
The second possibility, leaving aside the ethnic cleansing, the second possibility was to make Gaza unlivable.
And that goal has succeeded.
There's a lot of nonsense, in my opinion, and I have to emphasize in my opinion because I don't make any claims to infallibility.
There's a lot of nonsense being said about what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza.
Number one, as you know, every headline has to have as its subhead the Israel-Hamas war.
There has not been any meaningful substantive Israel-Hamas war.
There has been an Israel-Gaza war.
The aim of the Israel-Gaza war is to make Gaza unlivable, uninhabitable.
I'm using the language of the Israelis.
This is not my embroidery or embellishment.
That's what they say.
As the former head of the National Security Council, Geira Eiland, and he's not the only one.
He's one of the Defense Ministry's advisors, Defense Minister Galant's advisors.
He has said we're going to leave the people of Gaza with two choices.
One, to stay and starve, or two, to leave.
And that goal, which in my opinion was the main goal, that goal has been achieved.
I don't like to be a bearer of bad news.
On the other hand, if we're speaking to adults, we should treat them respectfully as adults.
Gaza is no more.
Gaza is gone.
The estimates are, if you take the whole of Gaza, one half of the infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed.
That means, for somebody who doesn't quite grasp that, if you're, say, on a major thoroughfare, let's say in New York City, where I happen to reside, and you're walking down 6th Avenue, just imagine every second building is gone.
Or just imagine you're walking down 6th Avenue.
One side of the street is there.
The other side of the street is no longer there.
That's Gaza.
There are no universities left in Gaza.
There are no schools or colleges, universities, hospitals.
There are barely any hospitals left in Gaza at this point.
And so you might say, well, what about rebuilding?
There can't be any rebuilding of Gaza.
That's just not true.
First of all, the estimates are by now there are about 45 million tons of rubble in Gaza.
It's estimated it'll take 10 to 15 years to just remove the rubble.
The rubble is mixed with a lot of unexploded ordnance, toxic substances, and also a lot of dead bodies.
And even if you manage to remove the rubble, there's no question in my mind what's going to happen.
Israel's going to say we're not letting cement into Gaza.
It already did that after Kass led.
It said Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels.
We're not going to let cement in.
And nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that.
Hamas, they say, built 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider completely nonsense.
All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel.
If they had built 450 miles of tunnels, that would be more, since Glenn, I know you lived for a while in New York City, that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York subway system.
New York subway system has 430 miles of tunnels.
Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza, 26 miles long and 5 miles wide?
No.
But that's the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it.
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