John Pilger - Palestine is Still the Issue (2002)

Speaker 1: There is only one way of ending this. It's ending occupation, because occupation has become the cancer that is eating the lives of both peoples.

Rami Elhanan: What the occupation did for us It reduced us into animals in a way that sometimes I'm ashamed to say that I'm an Israeli.

Ishai Rosensweig: This is, you know, a huge bluff of, you know, of the Israeli establishment, that every, you know, criticism of its policy is anti-Semitism.

John Pilger: Sometimes I feel pity for the Palestinians.

Speaker 5: It's very pity for the Israeli mothers, because they are thinking that their soldiers or their sons are victorious soldiers. But they should come and see what their soldiers are doing here.

John Pilger: 25 years ago, I made a film called Palestine Is Still the Issue. It was about a nation of people, the Palestinians, forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel, an occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United States. So in 25 years, if we're to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, They've risen up against Israel's huge military machine, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives As if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle to be free. Free Palestine! Last April, troops and tanks of the Israeli army attacked Ramallah and other towns in occupied Palestine. This was reported as an incursion to stop terrorism. In fact, it was also an attack on civilian life, on schools, offices, clinics, theatres, radio stations. This systematic vandalism is typical of one of the longest military occupations in modern times. We are not terrorists. Even the Culture Ministry was destroyed. The director, Liana Badri, a distinguished novelist and filmmaker, showed me the devastation shortly after it had happened.

Speaker 5: This is the administration room. We had a lot of files here. You can see that everything were broken. It was the best place in the ministry.

John Pilger: I mean, what you did here was promote projects for Palestinian culture. Basically, filmmaking, projects for children.

Speaker 5: Exhibitions, book exhibitions, painters' exhibitions, festivals, dance, folklore. We had a lot of projects. Now we don't have anything to begin. We don't have computers, equipment, furniture. And we have this feeling of humiliation.

John Pilger: The smell is awful, isn't it?

Speaker 7: Look at this.

Moishe Dan: The smell is awful, yes.

John Pilger: Bag of shit, and there's shit smeared all over the photocopier.

Speaker 5: 2, 2—

John Pilger: So they just ate and defecated in the same place.

Speaker 5: Yes, and putting them on the photocopy, putting the shit everywhere, even on the walls. And you can see that we have toilet, 2 toilets in every floor, but they didn't use the toilet. All the time they were making it on the floor or anywhere.

John Pilger: Can we have a look in this room in here? Good grief.

Moishe Dan: Look at this.

John Pilger: These are children's drawings, aren't they?

Speaker 5: Yes. This is the room specialized for children's work, children's Paintings and children's culture, and to encourage them to paint, to let them express themselves, to make competition— writing competitions. But you can see how they destroyed everything. They don't respect anything. They just want to come and destroy. And this is the systematic terrorism of the Israeli state.

John Pilger: For the Palestinians, this cultural vandalism means a deliberate intention to destroy them as a nation. The heart of the conflict here is a struggle for land, for the hills and valleys of Palestine, for precious water and fertile soil. During the early 20th century, the great majority of the population of Palestine were Palestinian Arabs. In 1948, Israel was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust. For the Palestinians, this meant the loss of 78% of their country. Today, they are seeking only the remaining 22% of their homeland. For 35 years, that homeland has been dominated by Israel. In 1987, the Palestinians rose up in what they call Intifada. History will surely call it a war of national liberation. They fought mainly with slingshots against tanks and planes, and they were put down with this kind of brutality— Israeli soldiers deliberately breaking the bones of prisoners. Some of the soldiers later insisted they were carrying out official Israeli policy. 2 years ago, the Palestinians rose up a second time. This was hardly surprising. During curfews, people live under a form of house arrest. Without notice, they can be locked inside their homes. Their ordinary lives are a maze of controls, roadblocks, checkpoints. This is how I remembered apartheid South Africa. The hidden effect is the same: humiliation and anger and death. I'm a Muslim. This Palestinian woman knows how devastating the impact of checkpoints can be. Last October, she was about to give birth to her second child, and she and her husband set out for the nearby hospital. They were stopped at an Israeli roadblock, where they pleaded to be let through.

Speaker 5: منهم تلمى ولا تلمى دفشوا دفشوا مين؟ دفشوا جود فأضعت غربة في البرودة الثاني ورموا عليه الهوية فعضتنا رجعنا عضتنا رجعنا على سبيل انه يعني مزاجهم يبقى رايب فمرضوش من ننزلها ماشي مرضوش ساعتها خلفت كانت حماتي معاي فهي قطعت حبل السرة في شفرة ووقع الولد يعني ضل يوقع الولد فعوض لفم جاكيتها ولفنها عن طريق الكريمزان اتصل في سيارة من كرايبة شوفير عوضنا قدرنا لما وصلنا المستشفى الفرنسي هو اللي هو الولد متوفي.

John Pilger: Stories like Fatima's seldom make headlines, and yet many similar cases have been documented.

Speaker 5: ليش بيسوف فينا هيد مش عارفين إحنا يعني؟ ش بين بالنسبة لي أنا يعني أنا شو بينه بينهم مع كل الشعب الفلسطيني عندما يعني تأخذين شركة المكان بيحور يحور عربي.

John Pilger: Palestinians try to lead a normal life, but life is never normal during Israeli military operations. Curfews stop everything. Ambulances are denied access to the sick and wounded. Children are stopped from going to school. The Israelis claim this is necessary for their security. If that's true, it's clearly not working. And the security of Palestinians is almost never mentioned.

Speaker 9: You feel all your life that you are humiliated. You don't control yourself. You don't control The air you are breathing. You don't. I don't want— I don't want to talk about planning for anything. This is something that we don't even dream about, plan to next hour or next day what we will do. This is something we don't even dream about, because our destiny is not in our hands. It's in the hands of the others who decide how we will live, how we will get married. To get married— to come and live with my husband in this country, I had to take the permission of the Israelis.

Ishai Rosensweig: Right.

Speaker 9: It's not enough that they took our land and they are not allowing us to have our own state, but also they are controlling every detail in our life.

John Pilger: Some Israelis have spoken out. More than 500 soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories. We are, they've said, like the Chinese student who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. We are the conscience of our country. Ishai Rosensweig is one of them.

Ishai Rosensweig: I really think the real story of the occupation is there, in the checkpoints. I cannot forget this kind of picture, you know, 5 in the morning, quarter to 5 in the morning, hundreds of— a line of hundreds of people waiting, you know, to pass in the checkpoint. And you're standing there, and you see their eyes, the humiliation, the frustration, the hatred. Then you are the occupation. You have all the power. They have no power. You can at every second take their ID, and then they are, you know, they have nothing, because without Without identification, you can, you know, every soldier can arrest them. You are the man that stand there, keep them without rights, without freedom.

John Pilger: The world often sees the issue of Palestine through the tragedy and horror Of suicide bombings, an expression of despair by powerless people against an oppressor armed with modern weapons. The first female suicide bomber struck in January 2002. Her name was Wafa Idris, the only daughter of a family of refugees who were driven out of their home near Tel Aviv. She was twenty-eight, an ambulance volunteer.

Speaker 10: وبعدين علاقة صداقة كانت موجودة يعني بينه وبينها. واللي صار اللي حصل يعني إنه قامت في عملية يعني كانت مفاجأة إلنا.

John Pilger: What makes an ambulance volunteer a carer become a suicide bomber?

Speaker 10: طبعاً كانت تيجي على البيت تحكينا إنه اليوم في واحد استشهد. طبعا نزل مخه على الارض مصارينه كانوا طلعات اجره كانت طلعة من محلها طبعا هاي نوع اثر عليها بعض الحالات حتى اللي بيكون يعني بعض الفتيات بتكون لحوامل بدها تولاد طبعا تولد على الحاجز يموت الطفل تبعها على الحاجز صوبت ثلاث مرات فرصاص المطاط يعني هذا بقى انا بتوقع انه هذا يكون الدافع قوي إنها تنطقم لأبناء شعبها.

Speaker 7: The suicide bombs are presented to the Israeli public as an insane act by an insane people with with whom there is no chance for peace. Instead of putting a wider analysis, which would say there is a way out of the suicide bombs, while everybody condemns. And rightly so. There is a way out of it, and the way out of it is to provide the circumstances in which these young people would find avenues of hope instead of avenues of despair. There is, I would say, an orchestrated campaign to silence that kind of analysis inside Israel.

John Pilger: Suicide attacks against civilians are clearly crimes. And they are used by extremists. But the extremists rely on the brutality of the occupation and the despair of their young volunteers. Some extraordinary Israelis are brave enough to recognise this. Rami Elhanan is one Israeli father who knows about suicide bombing. On September 4th, 1997, his daughter Shmarda was killed by one. She was 14 years old.

Rami Elhanan: She was a child of peace. She was full of life, very laughing girl, very good student, dancing, everything that little girls do. It was the first day of school. She was going down the Ben Yehuda Street, which is some kind of a mall, to buy some books for the new year with 2 girlfriends of hers. One of them, Sivan Zager, died with her, and the other, Daniela Biermann, was very, very severely wounded.

John Pilger: Rami is a graphic designer and a former soldier. His father survived Auschwitz. His grandparents, 6 aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. How do you distinguish the feelings of anger that any father would have felt at losing your daughter in such circumstances?

Rami Elhanan: I'm not crazy. I don't forget. I don't forgive. Someone who murders little girls, anyone who murders little girls, is a criminal and should be punished. But if you think from the head and not from the guts, and you look what made people do what they do, people that don't have hope, people who are desperate enough to commit suicide, you have to ask yourself, Have you contributed in any way for this despair, for this craziness? It hasn't come out of the blue. The boy that his mother was humiliated in the morning at the checkpoint will commit suicide in the evening. The suicide bomber was a victim, the same as my girl was. Of that, I'm sure. You have to understand where these suicide bombers come from. Understanding is part of the way to solving the problem.

John Pilger: Few people have been betrayed so often as the Palestinians. Before the Second World War, the British ran Palestine as a mandate. They had promised the Palestinians an independent state. But they also promised Palestine to the Jewish movement known as Zionism. In 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, the Arab world revolted as Palestinians were expelled from their homes or forced to flee in a blitz of fear and terror. 3/4 of a million people became refugees. Israel's military hero, General Moshe Dayan, later admitted, Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population. While Palestinians were denied the right to return to their homes, anybody who could prove they were Jewish had the right to settle in Israel. In 1967, Palestinians once again fled their homes during the Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the remaining 22% of Palestine, describing this as an act of self-defense. To the Palestinians, it seems that Israel's colonizing never stops. We are not colonized. This looks like a medieval fortress. The Israelis call it a Jewish settlement. In fact, it's part of a network of armed colonies that, by one estimate, effectively control 42% of the occupied West Bank. Many of them dominate and intimidate Palestinian communities. They are illegal under international law and have been condemned by the United Nations.

Speaker 9: When I came to West Bank and saw all these settlements, Israeli settlements, on the tops of the hills, you know, surrounding all the cities, so you feel that they are over you, they are superior.

Speaker 7: Mm.

Speaker 9: And you are the ant, the insect, down, you know? And you know this is your land. It's nobody else's land. This is our land. But still, they are the ones who are on the tops. And they have all the weapons, and they control also everything in the West Bank.

John Pilger: This is Moishe Dan. He's taking me to a Jewish settlement in the south of the country, in Palestinian Gaza.

Moishe Dan: Shalom.

Speaker 1: Shalom.

Moishe Dan: אני מדריך שלם.

John Pilger: I see here this is all electrified fence along here, isn't it?

Ishai Rosensweig: Electrified.

John Pilger: I mean, this is almost a constant state of war, isn't it, really? I mean, if you have to put up something like electrified barbed wire. It is today.

Speaker 7: It is today.

Moishe Dan: The barbed wire is new because of the situation where Jews are driving home on the road, and some guy who is supposed to be a Palestinian policeman The Israelis bring with them a version of apartheid.

John Pilger: We pass this road being built for the sole use of Jewish settlers and soldiers. Until it's opened, these Palestinians must wait hours for the few settlers to drive by. Doesn't that strike you as remarkable, that there is a A road for only one ethnic group of people, a Jews-only road?

Moishe Dan: It wasn't always like that.

John Pilger: But it is now.

Moishe Dan: It is now. The reason, because many— about a year and a half ago, a school bus was blown up, an Israeli school bus, as it was traveling from Kfar Darum by So we decided that the best thing to do would be to create some kind of separation.

John Pilger: There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the majority of people deeply resent the presence of this settlement.

Moishe Dan: Look, I don't know what the actual people, Arabs who live here, feel and think. I don't think. On a political level, they, I'm sure, would prefer not to be under Israeli rule. But in terms of raising their families and supporting their families, this is, I think, one of the best solutions for them.

John Pilger: For 35 years, the United Nations has voted on this best solution. Almost unanimously, it has called on Israel to respect international law and get out of occupied Palestine. Inside the settlers' fortress is a surreal middle-class suburb dropped into one of the most overcrowded and poorest corners of the world. One of the strategic aims here is the control of water, which is precious in the Middle East. While Palestinians often don't have enough running water, sometimes none at all in the heat of summer, the settlers seldom run out.

Speaker 10: I'm going to get some water.

John Pilger: And the symbol of the occupation is this wall. The thing that is striking about this settlement is that it's, it's like a fortress. I mean, this is like a Berlin Wall.

Speaker 11: Like the Berlin Wall, very bad. We don't feel comfortable. We lived here I'm here for 15 years without these walls, fences, and everything. We lived very normal. This last year changed all the rules in the area. Everything was changed.

John Pilger: The justification for taking somebody else's land is biblical, that God gave them Palestine, and God, not the history of others, is their witness.

Speaker 11: I'm here because it's obvious that's my place. It's not something that's in my hands that we can, you know, we can give it back, not me and not any politician or anybody, or parliament or whatever, because it's a movement. It's something comes 3,000 years ago, when Moses brought us here, and we have in our mind And we have the dream of building a temple in Jerusalem. It's something a lot bigger than religion.

John Pilger: Where will it end, though, if there's no compromise? Doesn't that mean conflict?

Speaker 5: Where?

Speaker 11: Life is full with conflicts. I don't know what to say. I know— Maybe I'm saying something too strong. It's 1-0 game. We will fight. The conflict is here. We will fight. It's 1-0 game. Not to kill each other, but it's us or them.

John Pilger: On the other side of the wall, This is the reality of Palestine. At yet another checkpoint, people are waiting and waiting.

Dr. Alfarar: Let me just take you on a journey from Gaza to Khan Younis. This normal journey usually takes 20 minutes to reach from Gaza Town to Khan Younis. But after this checkpoint, this journey sometimes takes people from 4 to 9 hours. People, as you see here, waiting to go from Gaza to Khan Yunis to guarantee the security of the passage of 2 or 3 settlers.

Speaker 11: Yeah.

Dr. Alfarar: So it is the security state that's taking place.

John Pilger: So 2 or 3 settlers will drive along here. In the meantime, all this traffic has to bank up.

Dr. Alfarar: Exactly.

John Pilger: How long will these people be here, do you think, just at a guess?

Dr. Alfarar: These people, they will stay till tomorrow morning, because the road is closed now. It will not be reopened until tomorrow morning.

John Pilger: Dr. Alfarar's family used to own land near this crossing. The Israelis confiscated it and demolished her home, and this is typical of what happens almost every day in occupied Palestine.

Dr. Alfarar: They demolished my house and another 26 houses the same night. I call it terrorism. Here, I call it terrorism.

John Pilger: How long had your family lived here?

Dr. Alfarar: Maybe back to 900 years, we were in the same place. I feel angry. I feel devastated. I feel abandoned by the world. Let me be frank with you. I feel that nobody is taking care of us.

John Pilger: Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! This is Gaza, just a few miles down the road from the affluence of the Israeli settlement. The contrast is extraordinary. Almost a million Palestinians are trapped behind electrified barbed wire and roadblocks, always waiting for invasion. Their defenses are pathetic mounds of sand. Fear has a permanent presence.

Speaker 10: Hello, Hala.

Speaker 5: Hello, Hala.

Speaker 9: Waiting for the invasion is worse than the invasion itself, because you're waiting, you don't know when, where and how they will hit or come in. The first time they bombed in Gaza, I was still in another flat, and we had children, many children in the building.

Speaker 7: No!

Speaker 9: And, oh, I heard all the children And their mothers screaming and crying.

John Pilger: The half-built buildings of Gaza are a testament to the hopes raised, then dashed, by the talk of an independent Palestine. Without Israeli permission, most people can't leave and they can't return. They can't get the jobs. Their produce Most can't get to market. Most struggle to live on about a pound a day, a poverty compounded by an Israeli policy called closure.

Speaker 1: You see, for Israel to sustain this unsustainable occupation, it is transforming every city and every Palestinian town and village into a prison, basically, surrounded by tanks, surrounded by walls, surrounded by fences. And it's not like they're building a border between us and Israel. It's building borders inside West Bank and Gaza, between our cities and towns, for the sake of their settlements. They are obliging us to be occupied people and not citizens.

John Pilger: The United States, Mr. Prime Minister, has been proud of its association Rest assured that the security of Israel is a principal objective of this administration.

Speaker 11: I want everybody to know, should I be the president, Israel's going to be our friend. I'm going to stand by Israel.

John Pilger: Israel's occupation of Palestine would not be possible without the backing of America. In the oil-rich Middle East, Israel is America's deputy sheriff, receiving billions of dollars along with the latest weapons— F-16 aircraft, bombs, missiles, Apache helicopters. Today, Israel is the 4th largest military power in the world, and it has nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1: We saw an Apache helicopter. I saw a helicopter circling in the sky above our heads, then shooting a missile. The rockets fell just 200 meters from our house. All our windows were shattered. I had a child in front of me, my daughter, who was 11 years old, shivering from fear, worried, frightened to death. And I could do nothing to protect her.

Speaker 13: I was 11 years old.

Speaker 1: And you don't know whether in the second minute you or your daughter will be dead. That feeling of impotence is indescribable, and I will never forget it.

John Pilger: This is bomb damage in Gaza. Although America is Israel's main arms supplier, it's not widely recognized that Britain also fuels the conflict here Even though it condemns Israel for its illegal occupation. During the first 14 months of the Palestinian uprising, the Blair government approved 230 export licenses for weapons and military equipment to Israel. The categories these covered included large-caliber weapons, ammunition, bombs, and vital parts for military aircraft that almost certainly included American-supplied combat helicopters. You may have seen these Apache gunships on the news firing missiles at densely populated areas. Tony Blair has said, and I quote him, we are doing everything we can to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

Speaker 9: As much as they humiliate us and And kill us and destroy our land, destroy everything we do— our schools, our organizations, infrastructure, everything they like to destroy. But this gives us more power to continue and resist.

John Pilger: In the news we get, only the Palestinians are described as terrorists And yet the Israelis have a long history of terrorism, both before and since the founding of the Jewish state. At least 3 Israeli prime ministers have been involved in campaigns of terror. The tragic scene is like a serious incident during the Blitz. The hotel housed the British Army headquarters and the Palestine government offices, and casualties were very heavy. The commander of the terrorist group that blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 Was Menachem Begin. 91 people were killed. Menachem Begin was Israeli Prime Minister in the '70s and '80s. He once described a massacre as a splendid act of conquest. Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister until 1992. He had been a leader of a Jewish group called the Stern Gang, which carried out a string of assassinations. When those Israelis, who are now famous names, committed acts of terrorism just before the birth of Israel, you could have said to them, nothing justifies what you've done, ripping apart all those lives. And they would say it did justify it. Well, what's the difference?

Speaker 13: I think we have now, as an international community, come to a new understanding. I think after September 11th, the world got a wake-up call, because terrorism today is no longer the mad bomber, the anarchist who throws in an explosive device into a crowd to make a point. Terrorism is going to move from the present situation to non-conventional terrorism, to nuclear terrorism. And before we reach that point, We have to remove this scourge from the earth. And therefore, whether you're talking about the struggle here between Israelis and Palestinians, the struggle in Northern Ireland, the struggle in Sri Lanka, or any of the places where terrorism has been used, we must make a global commitment of all free democracies to eliminate this threat from the world, period.

John Pilger: Does that include state terrorism?

Speaker 13: No country has the right to deliberately target civilians, as no organization has a right to deliberately target civilians.

John Pilger: That's what Israelis have been doing for years. The present Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been involved in terror. In 1983, he was found indirectly but personally responsible For a civilian massacre by Lebanese militia in 2 Palestinian refugee camps. At least 800 innocent people were murdered in cold blood, most of them Palestinians. What about Israeli terrorism now?

Speaker 13: The language of terrorism, you have to be very careful with. Terrorism means Israel is deliberately targeting civilians in a kind of warfare. That's what the terrorism against Israeli schools, coffee shops, malls has been all about. Israel specifically targets, to the best of its ability, Palestinian terrorist organizations.

John Pilger: All right. When a sniper shoots an old lady with a cane trying to get into a hospital for her chemotherapy treatment in front of a lot of the world's press, for one, and frankly we'd be here all day with other examples, isn't that terrorism?

Speaker 13: I don't know the case you're speaking about, but I can be convinced of one thing. An Israeli who takes aim, even an Israeli sniper, is taking aim at those engaged in terrorism. Unfortunately, in every kind of warfare, there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. Terrorism means putting the crosshairs of the sniper's rifle on a civilian deliberately.

John Pilger: Well, that's— that's what I just described.

Speaker 13: No, I can tell you that did not happen.

John Pilger: It did happen. And, and I think that's where some people have problem with the argument that terrorism exists on, on one side. Your definition is absolutely correct about civilians, and those suicide bombers are terrorists.

Speaker 13: If you mix terrorism and counterterrorism, if you create some kind of moral obfuscation You will bring about not just a problem for Israel, but you will bring about a problem for the entire Western alliance, because we are all facing this threat.

John Pilger: It's hard to see the difference between what the Israelis call counterterrorism and terrorism. Whatever the target, both involve the killing of innocent people. This is what happened when Prime Minister Sharon sent tanks into Bethlehem We had, a day before, a private hospital director who was going from the hospital in Al-Qadr to Bethlehem to get supplies for his hospital. His plate number was known to the soldier. His name was known to the soldier. And they knew that he is the director of a hospital.

Speaker 10: And they knew that he is the director of a hospital.

John Pilger: But he was shot by a high-velocity bullet. In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, recognized Israel's right to exist and Israeli sovereignty over 78% of Palestine. It was an historic compromise. And in the early '90s, a breakthrough for peace seemed possible. It was in this room in a Jerusalem hotel that the first direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials took place in 1991. These led to further meetings and an agreement in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, that set up an autonomous mini-state in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. For Yasser Arafat and his people, it was seen as a beginning, but the reality was different. What the majority of Palestinians got was a classic colonial fix. Arafat and his elite got the trappings and privileges of power, while the mass of the people got what one Israeli journalist called The autonomy of a prisoner-of-war camp. In July 2000, the 2 sides met in America to reach a final agreement. But among the issues they discussed was a profound disagreement about just how much land was on offer. Israel's prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, claimed he'd offered the Palestinians almost all the occupied territories back. And said that Arafat had rejected this. In reality, the Israelis were expanding more and more illegal settlements on Palestinian land, even during the negotiations. Add to that the special access roads with their checkpoints, and the Palestinians say that all that was left was a group of colonies with their borders patrolled by military bases.

Speaker 7: It's very important to understand that from a Palestinian point of view, they were asked to sign, in the end of the day, a document which did not relate even to one of the central issues for which they had been struggling for more than 100 years. They are left eventually with an offer of 10% of what used to be Palestine. The Israelis who dictated this offer in the summer of 2000 are not even talking about a proper state. We're talking in that area of a stateless state, I would call it, a Bantustan, with no genuine sovereignty, with no independent foreign economic or political policies, with no proper capital, and at the mercy of the Israeli security services and the Israeli policy.

John Pilger: Not only that, but there is now documented evidence that the Palestinians had made an extraordinary offer to the Israelis Conceding even more of their land, but this was not news at the time. If there is no justice for the Palestinians, there will be a reckoning in the young generation.

Speaker 10: السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته. أنا. اسمي خالد دحلان. اليوم رح نلتقي مع بعض أنا وياكم علشان نعمل اللي هو اللقاء أحاول الرسم الحر.

John Pilger: Doctor Dhalan runs a project for children in Gaza. He asked these boys to draw anything that was on their minds. Most of these children are traumatized by the fear and violence of the occupation.

Speaker 10: The majority of our children exposed directly to the attack or to the bombardment by the Israeli army is traumatized. There is many, many symptoms. Children became anxious and depressed and make, for example, sleep disorder. As nightmares or sleepwalking or something like that. Many, many children, they cannot concentrate well to study.

John Pilger: Nearly every drawing is of violence. Nearly every family in Gaza has lost someone, either to an Israeli jail or to violence. Dr.

Speaker 10: Dilan's goal is to help the children keep the last thing that belongs to them, There is a conflict between the Israeli soldiers with the tanks and the Palestinian kids who threw stones, and they cry, La ilaha illallah, there is no God except Allah.

John Pilger: What children in other parts of the world would draw as It's a murderous fantasy they draw here as real life.

Speaker 10: Yes, war and violence. This is a good thing to protect the children from the mental disease.

Speaker 9: I don't want my child, that I've been working on having for 15 years, to come and when he's 10 years old, he goes to a settlement and he wants to kill his brothers. And the only The only way, the only way to stop all this suffering, now I will say it on both sides too, is to have a Palestinian state according to UN resolutions.

John Pilger: When will Israel agree to negotiate with the Palestinians, not for what they call a few bantustans on the West Bank, But for a state that is as peaceful, as secure, above all, as independent as Israel itself.

Speaker 13: Do you want Israel to concede the terms of that negotiation upfront on television? Or is it better to agree to the general principle and then sit with the Palestinians in a face-to-face negotiation once they stop violence?

John Pilger: What about this, the general principle then of a state as independent, as independent as Israel?

Speaker 13: We do not need a string of adjectives to agree to. You agree to the principle?

John Pilger: Well, that's a fair principle, isn't it? What's a state worth if it isn't independent?

Speaker 13: What we're speaking about is our willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians their self-government, and we are willing to create A Palestinian self-governing entity. Some call it a Palestinian state, which will address the real needs of the Palestinians.

John Pilger: What right have you to create somebody else's homeland?

Speaker 13: Well, we are being asked to negotiate that. We are willing to be part of that. We're willing to make a contribution to that. We are not going to upfront go into details about its geographic configuration.

Speaker 7: I support sanctions, selective sanctions on Israel, because I tell my friends here and my colleagues, I would rather have you pay an economic price than pay the price I think you will pay in terms of human lives. There is no alternative. The stronger party in the conflict, Israel, has to understand that there is a price for going on with the policies it carries.

John Pilger: What do you say to those fellow Israelis who will inevitably come up with the view that in the end we're going to be pushed into the sea? This expression, we'll be pushed in.

Rami Elhanan: Don't be wrong by this mosquito. We are the most We are the most powerful power in the Middle East. We have one of the greatest and more powerful armies in the world. In this last operation, there were 4 divisions, armored divisions, against some 500, 2,000 armed people. It's a laugh. Who will push us into the sea?

John Pilger: Until recently, Israel has enjoyed almost an immunity from criticism among Western politicians. This has been largely due to a fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, a fear manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign lobbies.

Speaker 7: I think the Holocaust memory does not allow any moral criticism of anything that Israel does. Europeans in particular, and the outside world in general, are not allowed to voice criticism on Israel, unless, again, what Israel is doing is akin to what the Germans had done to the Jews. And if you do criticize Israel, you are immediately charged with anti-Semitism.

Ishai Rosensweig: This is, you know, a huge bluff of, you know, of the Israeli establishment. That every, you know, criticism of its policy is anti-Semitism. And criticizing your government, your country's policy, is today, I think, the only patriotic thing one can do.

John Pilger: The Israeli government denies it, but Palestinians fear that there are plans to take all of Palestine, trapping or expelling them indefinitely.

Speaker 9: We are not against the Jews. That's why I have Jewish friends. We are against politically the governments of Israel and the army of Israel who denies our rights. And I hope, I hope to have peace here with the with the Israelis, but with dignity. This is very important for us. With dignity, it means with our full rights. The Palestinians will never be. They will never disappear. We are not the Red Indians. We will not be canceled from history just like this.

John Pilger: No. Thank you.