Lecture: Al Aqsa Flood or the 7th of October

Mehmet Ali Arslan: As-salamu alaykum, peace be on you everyone, and welcome to Al-Aqsa Flood or the 7th of October, a conversation on resistance with Justin Porter and John Elmer, organized by European Palestinian Youth Union in Sweden, or EPU in short. I am Mehmet Ali Arslan from EPU, and I will be your host today. Since the 7th of October, we have seen countless reports and articles in the Western mainstream media depicting the events of that day as a singularly atrocious act of terrorism. Coupled with this is the total demonization of the Palestinian resistance with the cunning use of the magic word, you guessed it right, Hamas. We believe this picture to be intentionally incomplete. and at times simply incorrect, serving to excuse or flat out justify Israel's livestreamed genocide in Gaza. We believe that the picture the Western media has painted is intentionally incomplete and at times simply incorrect, serving to excuse or flat out justify Israel's livestreamed genocide in Gaza. That's why we were compelled to dispel some of the illusions regarding the 7th of October and the Palestinian resistance with the help of our great guests. As getting the correct picture in the right framing is crucial in the fight against this genocide. So what is European Palestinian Youth Union or EPU? EPU emerged in 2018 to realize a vision of a union of Palestinian youth in Europe with the purpose of breaking the cycle regarding Palestine, a cycle of silence, violence, a temporary reaction to that violence, and then back to the beginning. Here in Sweden, EPU has become one of the main advocates for Palestine, organizing demonstrations and charity events, among other things. Our goal is to unite the Palestinian movement in Europe for young Palestinians and friends of Palestine, regardless of political or ideological affiliations, to advocate and fight for Palestinian rights, self-determination, and a sovereign, independent state of Palestine. That was briefly what EPU is. Now, let me introduce our dear guests. Justin Porter is a Toronto-based writer. He authored multiple books on the US empire and its interventions abroad. In fiction, Justin is the author of three novels, including Siege Breakers, a novel on Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza trying to free their people. As a fellow in an independent journalist syndicate called Globetrotter, he has previously reported from countries all over the world, including Palestine. Justin runs the Anti-Empire Project, where he shares his analysis on history and world affairs with his anti-imperialist gaze. Since the beginning of Al-Aqsa flood, he has been doing situation reports or sit reps in podcast format regularly, often with our other guest, John Elmer. John Elmer is a Canadian writer and photojournalist specializing in the Middle East and Canadian foreign and military policy. He is a contributing editor at Electronic Intifada. If you have seen any of their regular live streams since the 7th of October, He is the one doing the invaluable military analysis in each episode. John has lived in and reported extensively from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, based in Jenin, Bethlehem and Gaza City, covering such topics as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the disengagement and siege on the Gaza Strip, the sanctions regime and factional strife in Gaza and more. He has photographed and reported from more than a dozen countries. So a warm welcome to both of you, Justin and John. Thanks for joining us. Is there anything you'd like to add? All right, so the floor is yours, Justin.

Justin Porter: Okay, thank you. Thank you to the organizers and to all of you who are here today. You know, John and I have been talking about this for many, many hours over the past seven months, so it is inevitable that we will end up repeating ourselves a little bit, but this is a different format. We're going to go over some basics instead of telling you what's happening in the past 48 or 24 hours since our last sit rep. So it's going to be a little bit different, and it's going to be a lecture. And we'll try to talk fast because you guys are forced to watch us in one time's speed. What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about the comp. context, leading up to October 7th, of both events and of the siege as well. And then John will start on October 7th and tell you about those events and what we know about them and the way we've been researching and thinking about them. Okay, so, oh, the other, the last thing I want to say is, you know, John and I, we used to do this live in person in Canada, we used to do a little show, you know, we used to do lectures together. And so it's kind of, it's a little bit down memory lane to be doing this with you. So thank you for that opportunity as well. so october 7th we're talking about the war on gaza we're talking about israel's um genocide and the when in 2005 when the settlers um left gaza i actually had a wave of fear and and some of us did write about how we were afraid this was a prelude to genocide because we thought that the settlers being there was some kind of protection I called it at the time an accidental protection that they were removing and so once they left uh all together and and had the level of control over people's lives that they had which is a point I'm going to come right back to That level of control combined with the absence of any interaction, even as settlers, would lead to an even deepened genocidal dynamic. 2005 was around when they completed the West Bank wall or walls as well. So the period of 2005 to 2023 is a special period. period of intensifying genocidal dynamics and it has to be understood that it's it's 18 years of intensifying genocides and and i want to make that point in particular for this audience because one of the arguments that is used on this audience on people who are sympathetic to uh the Palestinian cause is that the Palestinians brought this genocide on themselves by fighting back on October 7th and the Palestinians absolutely did not bring this on themselves by fighting back on October 7th this was something that Israel uh is built it is built into the self-image of Israel it has been built into the dynamics of israel and the way israel has behaved and it is intensively built into all of these as of 2005 and with a deepening and intensifying nature since then what the siege that was imposed on gaza where there was an airport in gaza briefly it was fairly quickly destroyed by aerial bombardment by israel even before 2005 as i remember um the sea is blocked off completely and so the only way in and out is through egypt but the egyptian entry and exit in rafa is also controlled ultimately by israel this is something people need to understand and that and then there's there's a way to go in and out there was a way to go in and out through uh israel at the eras checkpoint all of every every everyone who wants to go in and out of gaza over the past several decades has got to go through an entire rigamarole with the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation decides who goes in, the Israeli occupation decides who goes out. The Israeli occupation decides what goes in, the Israeli occupation decides what comes out. If they don't want your strawberries that you've grown in Gaza to be exported, they rot on the truck they wait in line these are agriculturalists who are who are growing wonderful um things uh in the ground these are these are people of the land and they have they have had to watch what they've made be pointlessly um spoiled as the Israelis put bureaucratic rule and deliberate hurdles in the way of normal Commerce um and this is this is a there there was an organization i believe it was called gisha that published lists of what the israelis allowed and didn't allow and the lists are absolutely absurd it would be whether it's children's toys or pencils one day it would be this kind of material and another day it would be that kind of material and it's a total control exercised by a group of people that hate you This is totally abhorrent to any logic, to any sense of humanity. It's not some incidental occupation. There have been occupations all over human history. I've been to Haiti in the early 2000s. and it was occupied by almost every country in the world and i would meet taiwanese soldiers and guatemalan soldiers and they were all occupied they were all united in the occupation of haiti through the united nations but they those people didn't have an ideology that despised haitians the guatemalan soldier just signed up uh for a salary and he was in this UN mission the Israelis hate the people they're occupying they despise them they believe they are racially superior to them and they have a sense of cruelty for fun um they there's a pleasure in the cruelty that they exercise on Palestinians um and and a big part of what they the a big part of the exercise of control is necessarily psychological it's it's a form of terror because if you don't have terror if you don't have the fear of the people that you're trying to control then every second of every day you have to exert force upon them And it's better to have them be terrified of you so you don't have to do that. And so that is the whole idea that water, electricity, food, entry, exit, all of that medical care, medical equipment, the idea that all of that is under Israeli control is something that is is supposed to make people in gaza feel terrified so if you try to break that if you would dare try to break that the israelis want everyone to know they want everyone to know not just people in gaza they want everyone to know that they have a button they can press it's a genocide button and they press it and then it's the genocide happens and this is something they've always advertised it's something they've always um proudly Proudly declared. And that's why... It's unacceptable to say that Palestinians brought this upon themselves. This power that Israelis exercised and this fear that Israelis exercised over Palestinians is the very nature of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. It's built into the relationship between the settler state, the racial... uh the master race and their uh indigenous uh victims so that's the psychology of it uh in terms of the relationship the psychology that the israelis have which ilan pape and others have written about in terms of their own education system is as i mentioned a psychology and an education in racial superiority But it's not just psychology that's at work here. There's also a question of hard power. There's also a question of economy. There's also a question of military concepts. And all of these are what has changed in the world that I believe the West, the Israelis and the Western sponsors have had a hard time catching up with. so on the one hand the occupation depends on terror and it depends on fear and it depends on this promise that resistance will be devastatingly punished but on the other hand it depends on an entire military and economic and technical system so gaza in particular The control of Gaza was, as I said, there's a fence, there's a hard border, there's a buffer zone on the other side of the fence that Palestinians are not allowed to go to. This is inside their fence in Gaza. There's a naval buffer zone, so the Israelis patrol that. And then on the other side, on the Israeli side of the fence, the villages that the Palestinians, many of the Palestinians that live in Gaza came from, their families came from, they are now these kibbutzim. They're these... fortified paramilitary settlements where they're where the settlers are heavily armed and trained and um described on and after october 7th the way that they accessed their arms from their arms lockers and fought the palestinians that were resistance fighters that came from Gaza on October 7th so the Gaza so-called Gaza envelope of these fortresses outright military bases and uh militarized villages that is part of the network of control there's spy technology there's surveillance technology drones cameras equipment that's also the same case on the border with Lebanon it's also the case in the way that they control the West Bank they recruit collaborators they try to um they try to put loyalist Arab forces in place which is the situation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank it's the situation of the Jordanian monarchy, as we saw on April 14. So there's a network of allies, there's a network of spies, there's a set of technologies, there's a set of walls, there's a set of fortresses, And then there's the economy, which is dependent on selling these technologies as battle tested. As people have probably heard, Israel has turned the Palestinian population into a lab experimentation population for their weapons that they then sell to other countries as battle tested. But the economy also depends very much on constant flows of commerce from especially their neighbors, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, all of these neighbors that are trading with Israel. Israel depends on economically. It also economically depends on Palestinian labor to an extent that they are reluctant to admit and from which they're suffering today, the lack of that labor. It also depends on other sources of foreign labor, which they're trying to make up for. So all of these fundamentals, the economic, the military, the technological, All of these fundamentals are what has come into question after October 7th. And it is this battle that we're witnessing or this war that we're witnessing between Israel and the US and France and Canada and Britain and Germany and these Western countries based on this ideology that Western superiority ought to be able to be enough to terrorize and control the entire Arab region for as long as they want and extract whatever they want and terrorize whoever they want that is what is being challenged in this war and that is why the response has been so complete it's been so unhinged because the the belief in superiority and the fundamentals of of control are all being challenged and the world has changed um because over the course of these same decades the resistance in Gaza as well as some of these neighbors uh Hezbollah in Lebanon Ansar Allah in Yemen, the Iranian state, have developed military answers for many of these fundamentals. And that is what is in contention now. Um, we don't know how the war is going to go because that's what we're tracking and that's why we have the sit rep, but that's why we have the electronic Intifada live streams. But we know that this is what the war is over. The war is over whether Palestinians and whether the entire region is going to continue to be controlled forever by. people who believe they're racially superior and who despise their subjects and that the intolerability of that is what ultimately led to October 7th which I believe I will now hand over the microphone to my colleague John to take up

John Elmer: Thanks so much for having us. I appreciate all the effort you put into putting on this event. And thanks, Justin, for that introduction. I think that it's important to maybe just start with a quick timeline of the group that carried out this operation on October 7th, Hamas. And for the rest of this talk, I'll be calling them Kassam. because that's the name of their armed wing, which I would argue is now somewhat separate from the political party Hamas. The Qassam Brigades, under a project of Hamas, has essentially become a national army in Palestine. And when I cover this and have covered this over the last six months, that's something that I put a real fine point on because it's really important to follow. When I break down videos, I break down Qassam as a national army. And when I've been tracking this war, I've been tracking the Qassam Brigades differently than the rest of the groups because they operate as a national army. And The project of Hamas dates back many decades and that's another important part of this story. This October 7th operation comes out of a project, a political project that is decades long. The armed struggle in Palestine itself dates back, I mean it dates back to the beginning of the Zionist immigration to Palestine. In the 1920s in particular, and when Justin was talking about the Intifada in 2000, it's called the Second Intifada or the Al-Aqsa Intifada. But it's actually really about the fourth or even fifth Palestinian uprising since the 1920s. So it's something that's important to track. So Hamas began... their political project as a social project. They began with health, education, community centers, youth groups, and they built that base out until the 1980s when the armed struggle really began in Palestine. The modern armed struggle began in the 1980s in Palestine. It began particularly with the first Intifada in 1987. And that's when Hamas formed itself as the group Hamas, named itself Hamas. But that group didn't start that day. It came out of a decades-long political project that established a parastate, essentially, in Palestine. And that group is itself part of the story of October 7th. And the war that Israel has waged on Gaza has been told to us in the media as a war against Hamas, as if Hamas is an armed group that Israel is trying to defeat rather than what they actually are, which is effectively the state of Palestine. particularly in the Gaza Strip. And out of the first Intifada, they become an armed group. And principally at first, which is also an important story to October 7th, they began as a counterintelligence group. Their belief at the beginning of the Intifada was that the primary concern at that time in the 1980s was the way... that Israel, where their occupation was inside all of the towns and cities in Gaza. So collaborators, Israeli spies within Palestinian society were a very important part of the way that Israel managed its occupation at that time. And so in the First Intifada, the Qassam Brigades really began as a counterintelligence operation. under the leadership of Yahya Sinwar, who is now the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza, and effectively the overall leader of the group itself. We could talk about that probably in the question-answer period, but there's a distinct difference between the leadership in exile and the leadership in the Gaza Strip. So Yahya Sinwar began that group as a counterintelligence group to root out the way that the occupation had its tentacles all through Palestinian society. After the First Intifada, Israel reacts to the First Intifada by being forced to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians and to begin what we all know now as the peace process. The peace process was a way to curtail the pressure of the Intifada. And so the peace process begins in the early 1990s, well, late 1980s, but under Israeli auspices really begins in the 1990s. We know about the Oslo Peace Accords, which were not a peace accord, but were a series of steps that were to lead ultimately to a peace accord. But again, like October 7th, that narrative has been twisted so much in the Western media that it's difficult to pull that out of the pile of propaganda that has just become normalized about the Oslo peace process. And so in the 1990s, peace process fails, falls apart, and 2000, Hezbollah drives the Israelis out of South Lebanon, and people see for the first time the defeat of Israelis, the failure of their occupation. um and that really spurs on um israel's attempt to have the peace process revived in the early 2000s and the collapse of that peace process um and the seen by palestinians as a failure and seen as a a positive example of hezbollah being able to actually militarily defeat Israel led to the beginning of the Second Intifada. And the Second Intifada carries on from 2000 to roughly 2003 is when Israel begins to float this idea of withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. And the reason Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time and a longtime general in the Israeli military, a key part of the occupation, um for decades he framed it he said we had a dream but the dream could not be implemented. And the dream is to take over the Gaza Strip, take over the West Bank, and to have that become all part of Israel. And so at the time of the disengagement, as it's called, which is the Israeli withdrawal of their settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, Ariel Sharon framed that as we had a dream, but the dream could not be implemented. And one of the key reasons the dream could not be implemented was that with the second intifada, The Kassan Brigades carried out an operation, a program to make the resistance groups, to make the guerrilla group a national army and to professionalize it. to bring together cells that functioned as cells during the previous decades and bring them together as a national army. And the program was to put essentially a weapon in the hand of all the fighters. And so that began the process of the Palestinians developing their own indigenous weapons industry in the Gaza Strip. And it's that weapons industry that we see on October 7th. It's that weapons industry that we've seen for the last six months. which is more months than anyone believed that they would be able to fight consistently under a siege. And the reason that process happened is because of Kassam's professionalization of their armed forces and the development of the weapons industry. So those are crucial factors to understand how we got to this point today. The Kassam Brigades during the Second Intifada targeted the settlements inside Gaza. They targeted the settlements and made them impossible to live in. The settlements in some cases were isolated. They were cut off. The Israelis had airlifts into the settlements to drop supplies off for their soldiers because they weren't connected because of the resistance. And so that fundamental point is important to understand. There's never enough time to talk about all these things. So I'm going to skip right ahead to October 7th because with that foundation... Sorry, John, if you don't mind.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Justin ended early. So I think we can give you actually a full half hour if you want. Okay. Awesome.

John Elmer: Awesome. Okay. I'll use my prerogative. So just go ahead. Perfect. I'm sure we can get to all this stuff in the question answer too if I... But so the principle of driving the Israelis out of Gaza happens in 2005. The Israelis leave Gaza in 2005 and Palestinians have an election in 2006. In that election, Hamas wins the election. They win it in Bethlehem, you know, a Christian election. a town known for its Christians. They win it in Jerusalem, a place under occupation by the Israelis. And of course, they win it in Gaza and become the government in Gaza. Israel sets about immediately with the United States and all the same players that are against the Palestinians today to carry out a coup to overthrow the Hamas government. Hamas repels that coup drives out the collaborators that worked with the israeli project and essentially after 2000 after 2005 to 2007 hamas becomes the government in gaza and has for the first time in the palestinian struggle they have a piece of territory that is their own and And like Justin said, we were worried about that at the time because it seemed like they were just going to ghettoize and warehouse the Palestinian population inside that territory. And people didn't really at that time see the importance of the fact that the Palestinians had their own territory. It allowed the development of the weapons industry It allowed the deepening of the counterintelligence programs to root out collaborators. And really, by the 2010s, Israel has no more eyes and ears inside Gaza. They don't have any intelligence on the ground. They don't have collaborators in the way that their occupation functioned for 40 years. And it really allowed the Palestinians to, first of all, develop in a way that the Western media and intelligence agencies didn't fully appreciate until October 7th. And so those are key features of the prelude to this operation. And between 2006 and now, there's a number of military incursions into Gaza, raids, isolated wars that look like the war today, but in an isolated area. There's a number of these battles, raids that take place over that decade. So people in Gaza, they know war. The children growing up experience it every couple of years. People have had the experience of post-October 7th is known to Gaza. What happens after the genocide, it becomes a next level because Israel carries it out in total all over the Gaza Strip. targeting everybody. But it's not a categorically different type of attack than Palestinians had witnessed over those years. And the key to October 7th is that part of the armed struggle all along has been the goal of capturing Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them for the political prisoners that define the Palestinian struggle. And so wherever the Palestinian resistance has taken place since the 1980s, the goal of capturing soldiers in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners has been the principal pillar of the armed struggle. And that's what October 7th was. October 7th was a military raid, a light infantry raid, that was carried out in order to capture military bases military positions capture the soldiers bring them back to gaza and exchange those soldiers for at for what palestinians intended to be all palestinian political prisoners so that's the objective of october 7th and the reason why we're under an avalanche of lies about october 7th is because the goal has been to rob the resistance to rob the palestinian national movement of this devastating successful precisely detailed operation to capture israeli soldiers and So the operation on October 7th, there is previous incidents of this in 2006. The Palestinians use, because they develop a weapons industry and they also dig tunnels. And the tunnel operations are able to happen after the Israelis leave Gaza. The tunnel digging, the process of building the tunnel apparatus is able to happen unimpeded by Israeli forces. boots on the ground and so that tunnel apparatus which doesn't play a role in october 7th itself uh interestingly because that was what the israelis believed was going to happen was that there was going to be attack tunnels dug into israel and fighters would exit through the tunnels into israel as we saw in 2006 when a kasam brigade's operation at Kerem Shalom in the south across from Khan Yunis, captured an Israeli tank gunner Gilad Shalit. And Gilad Shalit was held for 2,000 days by the Palestinian resistance and ultimately exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, who's the leader of Hamas now in Gaza. He comes back to Gaza as a hero. And he, during the negotiations for the prisoner exchange, he was a leader inside Israeli prisons and created Qassam inside the Israeli prisons. And he didn't actually want to be in the prisoner exchange. And the prisoners demanded that he be part of the exchange. And when he left prison, he promised to the prisoners that he had been in prison with that he would get them out. And we need to understand that as the foundations of the October 7th attack. The Israelis want us to believe the attack was against children, that there was just appalling violence directed towards civilians. But the record of October 7th that we do know, and there's still a lot we don't know about October 7th, and it's important to say that, Israel's military censor has total control, literally total control over information that leaves. Israel hasn't allowed anyone to visit the southern communities and do any kind of investigations. All that stuff needs to come. But what we do know about October 7th is that it was a devastating military raid aimed at the settlements on the border and the military bases on the border in order to capture soldiers and bring them back to Gaza and exchange them. So let's just take a little bit of a look at October 7th itself. The operation begins at 6 a.m. on October 7th. At 6 a.m., fighters, about 1,000 fighters from elite units of the Kassam Brigades and Suraya al-Quds, which is Islamic Jihad, a kind of action-based sister organization, if you will, to the Kassam Brigades. Suraya al-Quds is a military group. Islamic Jihad is principally a military group. And so on October 7th, they're integrated with the Kassam Brigades in this raid. It's a special forces raid. It's elite soldiers that have been training for this operation, we know now, for years. They've been preparing the weapons industry for years. And the fighters crossed the border on that morning using Palestinian weapons, weapons that were cloned from previously successful anti-tank weapons, sniper weapons, explosive devices. But they're principally built... assembled, created inside the Gaza Strip. And their fighters used those weapons on October 7th. At 6 a.m. on October 7th, the fighters begin to muster. And the Israelis don't see the mustering of these fighters. Their intelligence is so bad in the Gaza Strip that even the morning of, while the fighters were mustering, the Israelis don't have any idea this is happening. there's video footage and all of this that i'm going to tell you is based on weeks months of research watching hours and hours watching literally thousands of videos from closed circuit tv cameras security cameras fighters helmet cams uh israeli cell phone videos um And of course, the Israelis, their technological superiority that they believed that they had is deeply integrated in camera work, drones. There's a lot of footage from October 7th. And this idea that there's some kind of video that they showed in Hollywood to journalists showing 45 minutes of secret videos that never had been seen before is a lie. We've seen the videos, the videos the Israelis are telling us about from those secret screenings. We've seen them. And we went through them meticulously. through great pains. And that's how this story has been reported all along. And if you follow the work I do on Electronic Intifada, that work is because of the media operations within the resistance movement that they believe is a critical aspect of telling this story. And so there's a lot of footage of raw video footage from October 7th And that's something that we really have never seen before in history to have that kind of level of detail. And so it's kind of a paradox. Israel's believe that they could lie because they had control of information. But the reality is there's so much video from that day that proves the opposite of what they're saying. So even as the fighters are mustering on October 7th, the Israelis don't see them coming at 626 a.m. Palestinians begin to fire homemade rockets that have been developed for two decades in the Gaza Strip at unprecedented levels. They fire 4,000 plus rockets within the first minutes of this operation, which is comparable to the number of rockets that Hezbollah fired in the entire July 2006 war and comparable to the number of rockets that Palestinians fired in the entire 52-day war in 2014. So we're talking about unprecedented levels of preparation and execution on that day. The rocket fire puts the Israelis in the bases along the border. The sirens for the rockets puts Israeli soldiers back into their bases. It puts them into bomb shelters in their bases. And so the rocket fire is cover. As those rockets are being fired, the Palestinians carry out what is called the blinding operation. They go around to each of the pillars. Israel calls it their iron wall. It's a billion dollar fence that they built, which had a focus on underground, that the wall went underground tens of meters in order to prevent the attack tunnels that had been used before. And so what the Palestinians did instead of going through the tunnels is they literally went through the wall itself. And in order to do that, they carried out an operation called the blinding plan, which went around to each of the sensors, towers, network connectivity, automatic machine guns, this entire network of Israeli surveillance and technology, military technology that is really horrifying and we could do an entire talk on that alone. Automatic machine guns that shoot kids that are too close to the border on their own land is a kind of dystopian reality that Gazans lived under. And so nobody knew better how this system worked than the Palestinians and they targeted that system immediately. They used drones to drop devices, explosive devices on each of these positions along the border And effectively, it's called the blinding operation. Effectively, it did that to the IDF. It blinded them. They lost their command and control. They lost their ability to follow what was happening. They lost their ability to communicate with each other. and in these moments we're still talking about minutes it's still 6 30 a.m on october 7th nukba units elite units from the kasam brigades carry out after the blinding plan they carry out the breaching plan which is an assault on the border wall itself using explosive devices built in gaza they use various different types of devices to blow holes in the wall And then their fighters leave on motorcycle, on paragliders. They had paragliders that took off and flew over the wall. They had fighters on motorcycles. going through the wall. They had fighters on foot who walked through the wall. They had fighters on boats, naval commandos who assaulted the beach, went out to sea and assaulted the beach. And so you have a synchronized, coordinated, precise, planned, detailed operation that takes place within minutes. The fighters are inside Israel within minutes of this operation taking place, and they're immediately ordered overrunning israeli military positions on the border they're sacking the bases at least seven military bases on outposts along the borders they're disabling israeli armored vehicles using drones dropping explosive devices on top of the tanks so they they take out the tanks they take out the bases the soldiers are already hiding from the rocket fire And before the Israelis know it, the Qassam Brigades are overrunning their bases. And if you watch video from the morning of October 7th, it's a stunning military victory. The soldiers are captured in their underwear. They're hiding under their beds. uh the palestinian fighters in units of seven to nine fighters are descending on an objective this particular base this particular outpost this is happening at 30 different places along the border each base believes that they're the only target because they've lost their command and control they've lost their communications the israelis all believe each attack is the only attack that's happening when really what's happening is 30 places along the border this is happening And if you watch the footage of that day, it's just remarkable. The preparation and skill of the Palestinian fighters overwhelming the Israelis who have built this mythology about the superiority of their military. And that is how they rule their occupation. That is how they continue to get support from the American empire is by saying that they are the sophisticated military force that is holding back. They always say that kind of like if they say it's not a genocide in Gaza, because if the Israelis wanted a genocide, they would kill everybody immediately because they're so powerful. On October 7th, within 20 minutes between 630 and 650 a.m., the Qassam Brigades dismantled the myth of the Israeli military. And it's that moment, it's that dismantling, it's the way, the nature of the way they did it with precise intelligence. Each seven to nine man unit has a particular objective. And we've seen the objective because fighters were killed and their documents were captured. We see that the fighters went to those objectives and knew where each room was. They knew where the soldiers would be. They calculated where the soldiers would come in their armored vehicles to protect those bases. And they knew how many minutes on a cue card. The fighters had a cue card that said, this vehicle takes this many minutes. The tank takes this many minutes. The Humvee takes this many minutes. And when they do arrive, you use this weapon on the tank. You use this weapon on the Humvee. You use this weapon on the various different scenarios for each fighter. Within 20 minutes, they had overpowered the Gaza division. The Southern Command Gaza division collapsed. Kassam dismantled it. And when Israel is telling us all the time that they're dismantling Hamas, that they're dismantling Kassam, that that is the point of their operation, they're saying that because they were dismantled on that day, on October 7th. Within 20 minutes, Riyam, the military base of the Gaza Command, was overrun. there's a there's a quote uh from you can see them at eras they say eras is the crossing the human crossing between gaza and israel it's a symbolic place where palestinians are humiliated usually they can't even go but if they are to get access to uh to travel they go through eras and are humiliated um the israelis are watching on video that they can see fighters taking over eras and it's this is an important thing to note the israelis never took back any of these positions palestinians took the police stations they took the settlements they took the bases the israelis never took them back The Israelis bombed from the air the bases. They destroyed Erez. They destroyed Riyam, the military base hosting the Gaza command. Palestinians took the most important military intelligence base, Unit 8200 base in the south, took the data. They knew where the computer servers were. The level of detail and precision of this attack is shocking to Israelis. The details of these are still haven't really come out, but they will in the years to come because Israel will do investigations about this and we will see details of it. We haven't seen that yet. We also haven't seen the prisoner exchange that comes from capturing these soldiers. They capture the Riyam Gaza command base, and they take the three top commanders from that base. Israel isn't telling us that, but the three top commanders, the Gaza division commander, and then there's two brigade commanders on that base are captured on that morning. and by eight by seven am all of these positions are completely in the hands of palestinians they have moved as far as 30 kilometers inside israel palestinians control in southern israel territory larger than the gaza strip itself on that morning and that territory has still not really been returned to israelis the people who lived in those communities are not back in those communities And there's now a buffer zone within Israel because of those raids. And it's important to note that they never took back those bases because there's a whole other show that we could do about Israel's response to October 7th, which involves By 8 a.m., Herzli Halevi, the chief of staff of the IDF, is issuing a command to all of the fighter jets, to the helicopters, saying that they have authority all over the sector of the invasion. To use you have the authority to fire at will is what he told his helicopter gunships and their soldiers in that area that they were to kill that they were free to kill whoever was in that area. And so in taking back. in attempting to take back the territory, Israel's army doesn't do that, doesn't take back the bases by fighting Qasem in the bases. The bases are held and Israel decides that they're going to just destroy the bases rather than fight to get them back. Some IDF... units fought for 60 straight hours. The Israelis didn't take back control of the southern area of the Gaza envelope that Justin described. They didn't take that back till Thursday. The attack was Saturday morning, October 7th, and they haven't taken back control as of Thursday. And so what we saw is a precise attack that dismantled the Israeli military. and created a sense of helplessness for the society that this institution of their army was dismantled on live camera broadcast all over the world. And so none of on that day of October 7th, None of the crimes and lies and propaganda that filled our news afterwards was reported on their day. There was no mass rapes reported on that day. That was not a story of the day. The fighters held the territory in a way that prevented that kind of action. But by 8 a.m., By 8 a.m. on October 7th, Palestinian civilians, other armed groups that aren't Qassam Special Forces, are now flooding across the border by 8 a.m., are flooding across the border. separate from the military operation. A lot of what happens after 8 a.m. that morning still needs to be learned because the people who went didn't have cameras in the same way that the Qassam Brigades did. After dismantling Israel's observation and surveillance technology, Israel doesn't have footage of what's happening anymore. after that point and so there's a lot still to learn about the rest of that day but the operation from 6 30 a.m to 8 a.m on october 7th is a devastating military raid targeting military bases and targeting uh settlement security rapid response security forces um and, and holding the settlements themselves. We have clear footage of that. Um, and we can know for sure, uh, those details. I mean, I wish we had hours just to talk about the level of intricacy of the attack. Um, the Israelis have still don't have a good idea of how it was that Kassam had the floor plan of each of these bases and was able to target these bases in, um, in the systematic way that they were and i think that a lot of the people who know the answer to that question are being held in the tunnels in gaza the military leadership and soldiers of those bases will i imagine have a lot to tell us about that day And there's a lot more to learn about that day that will come out through investigations. But Israel's hiding and lying, telling us these stories of propaganda, that children were the target, the 40 beheaded babies, the way that Biden joined the lies, saying he saw videos. of the babies that he never saw the way that anthony blink anthony blinken told the story before congress of the sadistic murder of a family that never took place the 12 year old boy who was part of that lie that blinken was telling he actually came out he the kid the 12 year old kid was appalled by the lies and he wanted to speak on israeli television to tell what happened because the day for the settlers in the the envelope was bad enough um you know if we were to look at that situation from the way israel handles it um israel would tell us war is messy right that's what they say in gaza war is messy we never want civilians to be hurt but sometimes they're in the way they'll say hamas uses human shields all of the arguments that israel says about what's happening in gaza are all true of the gaza envelope on the day of October 7th. But it's important to note that children were not the target of this operation. Babies were not the target of this operation. And we know from statistics that have come out from the Israelis, we know that there was two babies killed on that morning. One was shot through a door, tragically killed and one was shot. One was a pregnant woman who the baby was in her stomach and she was killed at a checkpoint on the road that day approaching a closed military zone, which the Israelis would call a closed military zone on that day. Both tragic situations. but not the the the systematic lies that we've been told about this and i just want to say this because um we we accepted this this uh this uh invitation that you gave us and we appreciate it um And just wanted to really bring this part of the story because the robbing of this military operation, the breaking out of the ghetto that Israelis believed that they had ghettoized the Palestinians and had pushed the issue away. That military defeat of Israel is what they're trying to take away with the lies. And it's something that I think is very important to understand for political groups, for student groups to understand. to withstand that, the propaganda and lies, because those lies are intended to obfuscate, to take away the devastating military defeat of Israel that they still haven't been able to recover from, and no genocide, no revenge, massacre of 15,000 children. Nothing would justify that, but nothing happened on October 7th That justifies that response. It's a revenge response by an army that was dismantled on that day and will be recovering as an institution within Israeli society and is now seen all over the world again. as far more fragile than they would have us believe through their Netflix TV shows and Steven Spielberg movies about their military prowess. The entire world saw that dismantled on October 7th.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: You're right on time. That was fantastic. Thank you. Wow. That was quite a lot of ground you covered both. Thank you very much. Now we're going to go to the conversation part of things. I think we'll stay on October 7th for a while, if you don't mind. You covered the initial part, the operation itself. We haven't, except that most of it was lies, what we've heard about the civilians, casualties and all that. One question is, there is obviously a high number of non-combatant casualties. We can talk about the definition of civilian or not in that question as well, or I can ask it later as well. But the question I'd ask is why the high number? Because according to Israel's numbers, and I think these are now verified, that it's close to 1,200 people that were killed, right? Oh, I have to unmute Justin again.

Justin Porter: Oh, you're on mute.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Okay, cool.

Justin Porter: Awesome.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Yeah, Marwan fixed it for us. Thank you, Marwan. So why the high number of non-combatants? Maybe we can start there.

John Elmer: Yeah, sure. Do you want to do that, Justin? Do you have the breakdown? Justin did a great breakdown of the numbers. And I think, yeah, you do it, Justin.

Justin Porter: Yeah, so I don't think 1,200 is right.

John Elmer: No, it's like 1,075 Israelis at this point and 350 at the Nova Music Festival. And the Nova Music Festival is probably a whole other show. The Nova Music Festival was a rave. It was a rave that they did. The rave itself didn't know was going to be there on October 7th. The rave was intended to be in a different spot. And on Wednesday, the operation Saturday morning, as of Wednesday afternoon, the rave didn't know that it was going to be in that spot. The Palestinians planned the operation based on the weather for the paragliders, for the The rave was on a Friday, and as of Wednesday afternoon, the rave didn't know they were going to be there. A bulk of the casualties are at that rave. So 350 of them were at that rave. The number, or what do you have, Justin, something 600 for civilians? More than half of the civilians were at the rave.

Justin Porter: So let me just do, because there's this thing, there's this thing called the Haaretz list. So Haaretz was doing this almost like a vigil, where as they got the information, they were posting the names, the ages, where they died. And they were doing that from sometime after October 7th, and they continuously updated it. And there was a point when I realized they were updating it

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Sorry, for those who don't know what Haaretz is, Haaretz is one of the biggest liberal newspapers in Israel.

Justin Porter: So they were updating it and I realized they were continuing to update it after the ground invasion. with soldiers that were getting killed in Gaza by the resistance. And I thought, oh, this is very deceptive what they're doing. Because it's probably the best resource that we have about who died and where and what. But then they started to load more into it. So I stopped at October 26th. And I cut it there and I stopped actually looking at updates because they've conflated everything. So on October 26th, the list had 902 names, 515 of them had photos, and it had characterized 556 of these as civilians, 59 as police. 273 as soldiers for 635 of them no details provided about where they happened the largest group was at the music festival as john just mentioned the proportion of adults was 498 out of 540. that have an age indicated. So the rest were, you know, there were 20 children in total, 8, 4 to 9, 12, 11 to 16. These are, again, Israeli data. So the ratio is, it's terrible, terrible that children were killed here, but nothing resembling the ratio of children that were killed in Gaza. Not even... You know, it's not even close. It's a tiny fraction, and it speaks to the fact that they were not trying to kill these children. It speaks to that fact, and it also speaks to the fact, which I suspect, that those children were in fact killed by indiscriminate Israeli fire. We can't match to the list exactly, but we know that in all the kibbutzim, we know that in the music festival, there was massive indiscriminate fire by the Israelis when they decided they didn't want anybody captured, they would rather them dead than captured, and they would rather destroy these bases and these kibbutzim rather than having them become positions that Hamas could hold. The reason... So, first of all, yes, the majority of these people were adults. I suspect a lot of them were off-duty soldiers, which means they're civilians. Fine, because we believe that definition. But they are... I I believe that most of them were killed by so-called friendly Israeli fire uh especially the civilians especially at the music festival and at the kibbutzim there were uh yeah I'll that that's I think what I can what we know what is known about uh the Israeli casualties on October 7th as of today

Mehmet Ali Arslan: i can jump in and ask a follow-up it's on my list as well of questions the music festival is pitched to us as if the palestinian resistance just went in and just butchered 350 people in place where there was no friendly fire or anything at all just they just went in and killed them because they were dancing or whatever i mean that's that's the image that We've seen here in Sweden and in general in the Western media.

Justin Porter: Sweden needs to read Israeli correspondent Ronan Bregman because he wrote a long piece, John and I broke it down in one of our sit-reps, contradicting that, basically saying that many, many, many of the... I mean, he didn't count the dead, but he described what they did. They went in their helicopters and fired ammunition

John Elmer: uh against cars fleeing cars and then they went and reloaded and they did it again so it was it wasn't even a heat of the moment exactly it was a decision to target those so so just if you take those numbers a a thousand israelis were killed that day the 1200 just became like a paragraph that the media just repeated over and over so if the number is less than 1100 350 are at the nova music festival who are 18 to 30 year olds who the next day october 8th were called up israel bragged on october 8th that they called up 350 000 military reserves who then went into gaza and filmed tick tock videos massacring people on october 7th were told they're civilians then october 8th uh they're the army of genocide going in uh and carrying out these attacks so you can't you can't brag about your uh uh, your reserve army, and then not say that there's, uh, soldiers on that day. Um, but if you have a death toll of 1,350, our soldiers police, and that's a very minimum count. Um, and then 350 at the, the festival itself under, uh, many under unclear circumstances, there's lots of footage from the festival itself of armed security guards firing. Um, there's footage of, uh, hours later. Because the key thing, I don't know if I said this, but the army never showed up. The army never showed up in these villages. They never showed up in these settlements. They never showed up to fight that day. And the first thing the captives that got let out of Gaza in the prisoner exchange said was, where was the army? That was the first thing they said to their army. Where was the army on that day?

Justin Porter: John, they were saying that on the day. So there's a story from... The Israeli media that I took, I didn't want to read it. And then I took a deep breath and I went and read it. I think it was an Israeli media, but it was like WhatsApp. Somebody got a whole WhatsApp group, one of the WhatsApp groups of Israelis in one of the kibbutzes or like some cross kibbutz WhatsApp group. And they just published the whole chat. And they're like, ah, the terrorists are outside. And then they're like, are they at your house now? No, I think they're at the next house. So they're just like, they're trying to track it through the WhatsApp group. And it was like this terrifying, it was billed as this terrifying, like live the horrors of October 7th with the Israelis in the WhatsApp group. And the Israelis in the WhatsApp group are like, almost ironically, they're like, I thought the army was invincible. Where's the army now? And they're making jokes and mocking their own army on that day because they never showed up. They showed up the next day.

John Elmer: Yeah, civilians drove from these WhatsApp groups. These WhatsApp groups are a crucial part of that day. First of all, I was following those immediately that night. Those WhatsApp groups play an important role of evidence. They play because the command and control of the IDF had been dismantled. They use these WhatsApp groups to coordinate the defense. The fight, the IDF used the helicopter pilots, talked about how they used WhatsApp groups to get the helicopter targeting in the settlements. So there's still a lot to be learned about who died where and when and how and who killed them. But if you use a number, if the Israeli number of just over a thousand and more than a third of those are at the music festival, which is all fighting age people and 350 are soldiers and police officers, you start to get a number of civilians that is in the 200s. And in a military circumstance that the Israelis would describe, they would describe people shot on the road. The Israelis would call that a closed military zone. If somebody was inside a house in Palestine sending WhatsApp messages saying where Israeli army soldiers are, the Israelis call that person a combatant and they're allowed to be targeted. It's that kind of targeting that is why you have so many and why you have these massacres at Shifa Hospital, because Israel has basically managed to justify as Hamas anyone who's in civil government, anyone who sends messages to the resistance is a combatant. If you use the Israeli definition of who is a combatant and who is not, your number starts to fall into the low category. And then when you look at the breakdown of age, you're talking about less than 20 under the age of 18 were killed. There's no record, there's no video of Qassam Special Forces soldiers going around massacring civilians. And so if the number of October 7th, if people on the media said 300 civilians were killed on that day, how different would that be than to frame it as a massacre? and say 1,200. And 1,200 is what the number they lowered it to. After October 7th, they were talking about 2,000. They were talking about beheaded babies. They were talking about all of this horror that justified the killing in Gaza. And we never break down the numbers in Gaza, but we have the opportunity to break them down in this context. And I'm not justifying the killing of civilians. I think that people, the fighters from Kassam who killed civilians should be disciplined in the same way the IDF should be disciplined. But the IDF is not disciplining. They're actually making TikTok videos and they're proud of it. And so and they call war messy. So that's how they get out of their massacres. But the Palestinians were never given that opportunity. I don't even know. if you could even write a story like that. Ronan Bergman, who's Justin referred to, who's written a few stories in Israel, he writes in Hebrew in Israel. He writes stories. He's a New York Times correspondent, and he doesn't write those stories in the New York Times. So I think that, you know, once we get... we break down these numbers, we find a very different circumstance. If people said about October 7th that less than 20 children were killed and most of them were teenagers, I just think people would think about the day differently. And that's why Israel tells us all these lies. And that's why we have to spend our time. Ali Abunima at the Electronic Intifada has spent the last six months debunking these stories and other outlets as well. And Al Jazeera did a documentary where they gave us these kind of numbers that can be broken down. And I think that that should happen. And I think that the killing of civilians by Palestinian soldiers, they should be disciplined. And I think the Palestinians believe that too.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: That was part of the... Hamas document as well right they they said explicitly exactly they said explicitly that uh the soldiers that we are ready for an international investigation and even if that means we will have to discipline our soldiers or that that they will face justice we're fine by that but of course Israel never uh never abides by it and once like something I wanted to comment on and ask as well like okay let's say let's take that number 20 children We have, as of now, almost no way of verifying who killed those 20 children, right? Like we know, we've seen, some of us at least, we've seen the burned body pictures that Israel keeps showing us saying, oh, look at what Hamas did. But I guess that's a question to John mostly. Did the resistance fighters have that kind of capability where they could just incinerate anyone?

John Elmer: I mean, they do have weapons that could. I mean, they've developed their own thermobaric warhead. But what we saw on October 7th was helicopter gunships shooting from the air.

Justin Porter: Kind of incendiary ammunition that they use. That's what it looks like.

John Elmer: Yeah. And the buildings and the settlements, like there's lots of footage in the settlements of just completely flattened houses. And Palestinians didn't have the capability to do that. And the Palestinians weren't trying to do that. That wasn't the purpose of the operation to go house to house and destroy every house. If that was part of the operation, that could have happened. It didn't happen. The reason why you have these WhatsApp groups of everybody in their shelters communicating is because they weren't the target of the operation. And there's lots of videos of Kassam fighters in the houses. I'm not trying to understate that day. I'm sure it was the worst day of the lives of many of those people in those settlements. There's no question about that. But there was a plan for that day that didn't involve capturing hundreds of civilians and destroying the entire communities. And that's not what happened in the 6 AM to 8 AM operation that we have video of. We for sure see civilians killed that day, but we also see something that's never talked about, which Justin has reported on, which is the way in which these settlements are integrated within the IDF system. the israeli army's fighting plan the rapid response units arm people in the settlements the settlers are allowed to have their own guns so they're all armed in their houses in a lot of cases and you can see on the kasam videos that there's certain instances where there's confusion in the settlements because they're being fired on from inside houses and trying to figure out which house is shooting at them and if if you use the israeli system of calling people combatant. Yeah. Anyone who fires out of a house in Palestine, in Gaza, they'll drop the entire neighborhood and say it was because there was resistance in that area. So if we want to talk about it in this way, the way that the Israelis do, then apply that to both sides of this situation. And you end up with a number in the low hundreds of civilians killed. And in Gaza, you have a number where it's difficult to prove that there's a thousand killed fighters. There's not footage of a thousand killed fighters. And we know that the number of 30 whatever they're saying now, 33,000 dead is a significant undercount because Israel's war plan has been to dismantle the hospitals, dismantles the way of reporting on this kind of thing, and then dropping people's entire houses on top of them. So people are trapped under the rubble after being forced to flee their house. So it's not always clear who's in every house. And these are just brutal crimes that we're watching that were justified by something that didn't happen on October 7th.

Justin Porter: I want to say, too, that the Hannibal...

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Sorry, can I just jump in quickly? Sure. So, John, you mentioned settlements, just so that people understand, because we hear the word kibbutzes all the time. Those are the settlements you're talking about, right, John? Those are the ones that were attacked, or at least after the first incursion. And then, if you can just quickly... Wrap that bit again. What are the kibbutzes?

John Elmer: Gaza hasn't always been a ghettoized area. The way that Israel's occupation functioned for decades was to create civilian settlements that surrounded Palestinian areas. That's what's happened all through the West Bank, and it's what happened around Gaza. So Gaza, you didn't have a wall in Gaza when the kibbutz were built. But the kibbutz are built, and they're called the Gaza envelope. It's not a secret. It's an envelope. The idea is to completely encircle the Gaza Strip. The wall comes later. The wall doesn't come around Gaza until the end of the First Intifada. But before that, the way the settlement security works effectively trapped Palestinians inside Gaza and didn't allow them to move because of the way the settlements are built. So I wouldn't call settlements all over Israel. I think that just confuses people. But the term settlement is very appropriate for the Gaza envelope because they were – purposefully built to trap the population inside and the settlements that were evacuated inside gaza were connected to those settlements in the envelope israel pulled those settlements up from inside gaza but that's the areas uh inside gaza that the settlements were built were designed to split the territory they were a military project by ariel sharone to cut up the territory of the Gaza Strip in the early 1970s with civilian infrastructure in the way, what Israel calls human shields. The goal of their military political strategy was to create human shields because settlements have legitimacy. Attacking settlements is illegitimate. And so instead of putting military bases everywhere, which is what you might do if you were playing like a board game, you would set up your military bases to encircle the area. In actual reality, the brilliance of the Zionist settler project was to create civilian installations. And we see that happening all the time. That's what the settlers right now, today, right now, this minute in the West Bank, they're taking territory in order to connect the settlements that had previously been built there. They're military installations that were attacked. And part of the plan of that day is to attack those settlements, to attack the security forces of those settlements because they're so deeply integrated with the IDF. that if Kassam's plan was just to attack the military bases, the settlement security would have been a vulnerability to them. So Israel designed it this way, and then they were attacked and defeated, and then now they reframe it as everyone's just a kibbutznik just out there farming their fields, which many of them are. Lots of people say they moved to the Gaza envelope because it's exciting. Israel subsidized them deeply to live there. And so these are military positions, and they have to be understood as military positions. It doesn't mean that everyone in them should be targeted as military positions, but it means that if they are to be caught up, that Israel would call that legitimate. They would say it's part of the messy, you know, war's messy. You can watch the Americans say that every day in their press conferences. You know, we don't want to see casualties. We want Israel to just... you know, take a little bit off. We want them to change their war plans slightly because they're killing too many civilians, which presumes that you believe that there's a certain number of civilians that are legitimate.

Justin Porter: back to you just i was just gonna say that uh william van wagonen he uh wrote a long investigation it also has the same name has lots of stuff what really happened on october 7th but uh he on the cradle right yeah i think so he was compiling a lot of mainstream and israeli media accounts and a lot of people that were killed a lot of civilians that were killed were also killed just outside of the gaza fence so like people who were trying to you know if if if there were people including Palestinian civilians who were trying to take captives And the Israelis, it would have been the Israelis who killed them from the air based on Hannibal doctrine to try to prevent them from being taken captive. And that's really the only explanation for many of these civilians. If you're in a car or in a vehicle and you're killed just outside of the Gaza fence facing Gaza, that's the Israelis that killed you. That's not the resistance that killed you.

John Elmer: and just for the audience who do not know uh hannibal directive do you want me to do it yeah go ahead yeah so because of this thing that i said about the armed struggles goal being to capture uh soldiers um and exchange them for prisoners um israel has a doctrine uh you know they say they don't have it but um that that that essentially it's worth killing your own people your own soldiers it's better to kill them than to have them be captured and taken in exchange for you know thousands of fighters who are you know there's lots of political prisoners but a lot of these prisoners are fighters these are cadre that the palestinians are trying to free from prison and so the israelis are constantly afraid of being captured And that's, I mean, I think that's a whole other talk about their psychology. But essentially, they believe it's better to kill each other than to be captured and exchanged for prisoners, which I think most of the world doesn't understand. And nobody would really want to fight in an army that actually believed that. And that's why the Israelis, they say the Hannibal Doctrine has been revoked or revoked They try to qualify it in some way because it's really a crazy way of handling an army. I know that I wouldn't want to fight in an army that believed that my life wasn't worth being captured in exchange. So they killed them. And we know that 70 cars on that day, October 7th, were hit from the air. And so who was in those cars? How many people were in those cars? Why would Palestinians be driving back to Gaza without captives? So it's a really, I mean, I think for people who are familiar with this conflict, the Hannibal Doctrine is something they're aware of. And for people who aren't familiar with the conflict, it's like a mind blowing reality of how Israelis think. which is incidentally not true. Everything we know about the prisoners who released and the way that Kassam treats prisoners, we know from Gilad Shalit, who spent 2,000 days in captivity, they don't harm their prisoners. And most of the propaganda is trying to find people who were harmed because the vast majority of people talk about... you know, being taken care of. The civilians weren't part of the operation. I don't believe that Kassam intended to capture civilians. I think a lot of the civilians were taken by other armed groups or Palestinian civilians, Gazan civilians. And then once they were brought into Gaza, Kassam took control of them. um as as a national army um they didn't say we don't we don't uh we're not gonna take these prisoners but the goal is to capture soldiers um and the prisoners the civilians could have been released on the first day if israel didn't begin its genocide instantly uh kassam would have turned over all those civilians in one day and that's what the guards told people they were offered multiple times right for many times for whatever reason

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Actually, you mentioned the other armed groups in Gaza. Maybe we can talk about that quickly. I thought it was more than just al-Qassam and al-Quds that joined the 7th of October or al-Aqsa flood. Can you talk about that?

Justin Porter: Yeah, let me say a few words about it first before turning it over to you, John, just because there is another thing for this audience in particular is that there is an attempt or a part of Israeli propaganda or pro-Israel propaganda is to say everybody that is supporting the Palestinians militarily is doing so for dastardly reasons which raises the question of why don't the other why doesn't Turkey and Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia then take up these dastardly reasons and support uh Palestinians militarily to get these supposed benefits obviously That argument falls apart, but the kind of sectarian, you know, the like people don't like Iran or Iranians don't like Arabs or Shia don't like Sunni or whatever it is, like there's all these sectarian arguments, especially in the region, right? and something similar happens for the palestinians like the palestinians are are so disunited they can't get their act together and so on and there are political divisions there's the you know the palestinian authority is primarily constituted of uh the fata uh political group which signed the oslo accord they were the leadership they were the leading uh group inside of the palestinian liberation organization but there were other groups in there but um and and then hamas controls gaza and there was a coup and there was a little a little bit of a war that they fought in oh six or oh five that that uh we we mentioned briefly in our opening or john mentioned anyway in our opening remarks but like today the situation in gaza is that fatah's armed wing the the socialist organizations the communist organizations armed wings as well as hamas as well as islamic jihad they all have a unity of um Military coordination. They're all working together as with Hezbollah and Ansar Allah and Iran and Syria. All of these groups are working together across political lines, across whether you believe in God or not, whether you are a Sunni or a Shia. All of these groups are working together. as part of the resistance project, they have overcome that through the military struggle. The political struggle lags behind this. But like, so if you're, you know, if you're someone who is, is falling for sectarian arguments as a solidarity activist in the West, It's kind of shameful because you are so far behind the actual people that are dying and fighting in Gaza against the occupation and the genocide.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Great point.

John Elmer: Thank you. Yeah, that's a very good point. And it's very true. So there's secret operation. The plan for October 7th is a secret operation. Even the elite fighters didn't know. That's the reason why they were able to keep it secret is because it was secret. And so the other armed groups didn't know about that. And that's the success of the operation is that all the other armed groups didn't know about that. But they learned about it pretty quick. We all learned about it within minutes. And those groups then mobilized. So the first wave through the border after Qassam elite forces is the rest of the armed groups. Those armed groups come across the border and they fight Qassam. They fight with settlement security. And these are the fights. In many cases, these fights went on for days and days. I think we're going to find out in the future when these are really broken down that a lot of that fighting wasn't Kassam. It was the other armed groups. The other armed groups took prisoners. Civilians took prisoners. We know that from... Israeli raid that got two of their prisoners back in Rafah a couple months ago. They were just held by families. I think if you watch the videos, you can see what the fighters looked like from the NUKBA elite units of Kassam. You can see what they looked like on October 7th when they went into battle. And when you see a lot of the civilians being taken prisoner or, you know, taken hostage. I think the civilians, it's a fair word to use for the civilians. They're not Kassam. They're clearly not Kassam. They're other armed groups. They're criminal elements. They're civilians. They're people who have been brutalized, warehoused, and This was their first opportunity to go out. It was a prison break. It was a prison break that after 8 a.m. that morning. I'm not sure that we know a lot about the way in which the armed groups fought. We know from testimonies, you could piece it together. You know, like the Nova... festival um security there's a fight at the nova music festival that lasts for hours there's fights in settlements that lasts for days and the goal of kasam was not to hold the settlements for days and actually if that was the goal i mean the thing that the israelis are going to talk all these all these israeli leaders military leaders political military leaders they're all going to be fired because when we actually analyze what happened on that day the israelis had no second line of defense if kasam's goal was to take israeli towns and cities they could have done that on that day they could have sent 10 000 fighters instead of 1 000 fighters They could have not stopped at the settlement. They could have moved to Ashdod Port. They could have moved to Damona nuclear facility. They could have moved up the roads. The Palestinians, the Qassam Brigades controlled the roads. They had full control of the roads. They could have moved along those roads. And a lot of the footage of that day is actually the fighters running out of gas in their trucks because they weren't expecting the goal. The point of the operation wasn't to take as much territory as they could, but they could have. And that's the thing that's going to be something that you'll see probably for the next decade, Israel responding to that failure.

Justin Porter: so that thing that thing you just said about how some of the captives were taken by civilians who were brutalized etc it's just there's another point that i think we have to make here which is Another argument that kind of goes around solidarity circles, which I think is a factual based on a factual error, which is like when they accept the premise that October 7th was this brutal terrorist action, which it wasn't. And then they say, but you have to understand these people were brutalized people like that's not. You don't need to apologize for something that didn't happen by explaining a context that's not the case. The military aspect of this operation and the military aspect of this war, from the point of view of the resistance, we have to talk about that factually. Not as if it's like some atrocity that has to be explained by the atrocious context. The atrocious context is there. The people are being brutalized. But the military operation of October 7th and the military resistance to the genocide does not take place according to the same ethical premises as what Israel is doing. It's not. There's no factual basis to conclude that.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: That was a great point. I mean, because we hear this from, I mean, even people like Norman Finkelstein. Yeah, that's a good example. Like, I'm not even going to people like Gideon Levy or others in Haaretz. I mean, it's been... Many disappointments. It's been hard. Yes, exactly.

Justin Porter: It's rough. It's bad out there.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: It's bad out there. We should soon open for questions from the audience.

Justin Porter: Yeah, there are some in the chat.

John Elmer: Yeah, we can answer them faster too. Sorry.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: No worries. But I mean, there were some things that I really wanted to, like, I really want to talk about the history before Hamas or rather to Hamas. I mean, you talked about it a bit, John, and Justin as well. But like, there was the PLO, right? There was Arafat. I mean, we don't have time. We don't have time for a history lesson.

Justin Porter: Let me, instead of doing a big history lesson, which we did do a little bit in the SICREPS in various lectures on individual countries. Let's just, let's put it this way. In the 60s and 70s, there was a program of national liberation along somewhat socialist lines. And the whole Arab world had this. So Nasser in Egypt and the Ba'ath Party in Syria and Iraq and Syria and Iraq were going to be a unified United Arab Republic or I think it was Egypt and I've lost it, but I think it was maybe Egypt and Syria. But there was a United Arab Republic. There was the Palestinian Liberation Organization and all of these premises, you know, the crushing defeats of 1967 and then the massive betrayal of 1973 when Egypt and Syria fought Israel. Those were the Those were the kind of defining moments where that so-called, like the Arab nationalist concept kind of broke down. And today we have the Gulf monarchies, we have the, you know, we have Jordan, we have Egypt, which after 73 and during 73 basically became part of the occupation of the Palestinians, a party to it. um now the whole the whole resistance axis has shifted and now you have a different set of countries taking up that that oh i mean i i shouldn't forget about the destruction of iraq in all of this right um iraq was Iraq is such a complicated story, but the destruction and occupation of Iraq also has everything to do with what is happening and has happened in the region. So now, after the fall of that project, you have this kind of Iran-sponsored project A totally different system with a totally different strategy that takes place. And there have been problems even in the 2010s where Hamas wasn't sure which side of this they were going to be on. And things got a little messy over the Syrian civil war, also within the solidarity movement.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: um but uh but here we are that's another that's another one that's another time that's a that's a big talk uh but okay before i go into the audience's questions uh we haven't talked about what happened after seventh of october uh militarily right i mean that's that's what you've been covering in your sit reps and in electronic and fada um like I'm just going to quickly ask a couple of questions. Why don't we see the videos of Al-Qassam, of Israel Quds in any of the Western media, including Al Jazeera English? That's a good point. They're 24-7 airing it on the Arabic one. I know that from my Arabic friends, but it's nothing on the English one. I don't get it.

Justin Porter: I have a kind of a weird answer for that because I get one of the things that I'm always arguing with people about is defeatism, right? This is why I started doing the sit reps in the first place is like, I don't want Western solidarity people to get the impression that the West is invincible and that Israel is invincible. And so presenting the facts of what is going on militarily is the best antidote to that. You just show what's actually happening. And the way you can know what's actually happening is from these videos. It's from the resistance's own media operations and their field reports. I mean, there's text, but the videos are such a powerful thing. And because... That because of that, because of that defeatism that I see, even from people who are sympathetic, I think that makes it clear why we don't see those videos, because they want to make sure that if you're unsympathetic, then you have plenty of material. And if you're sympathetic, all you see is something that'll make you feel despair. And so we, you know, despair is the thing for this audience. Despair is the thing that you have to fight. It's not that you're going to suddenly wake up and be racist like Israel is towards the Palestinians. That's not going to you guys are past that, but you are not past. Nobody is past the idea that, you know, this is so miserable and watching all this horror is not disheartening. Of course it is. That's why that's my answer. I don't know. Do you?

John Elmer: if you wanted to chime in john well i mean i i don't know but uh yeah the al jazeera point is a very very interesting one that's um that actually is a real part of al jazeera english versus al jazeera arabic and al jazeera arabic they run the videos on a florida ceiling screen and they just loop them all day all day long they repackage them they put them together in different ways They loop them in the background when they're having panel discussions like we're having right now. They just loop the videos in the background. And Al Jazeera English doesn't show them at all. English media doesn't show them at all. We've been doing this our whole lives. And we're shocked by the depths of... pathetic media coverage, appalling racism. There's things, you know, like Israel, just the depravity of Israel. I can admit that I didn't, that just the detail that they're taking in carrying out these atrocities, the targeting of the hospitals, not even lying about why they're doing it. Yeah. I'm not sure there's a good answer why. We can verify the videos, which I do. I cross-check all the videos that I put on the show. We're not just on electronic intifada. We're not just showing the videos. I'm treating them as a journalist. I'm treating them as an analyst. I'm making sure they're true. I'm cross-checking with the Israelis to make sure the event happens.

Justin Porter: and you can you can cross check them so there's no reason why the media couldn't be sure there's a question in the chat about this uh if Al Jazeera English is not showing the videos due to the fear of getting banned like RT I don't know I mean Al Jazeera I don't think they have to be afraid to do not the right thing I don't want to I don't want to say anything more than that I'm not here to

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Now we can move on.

John Elmer: We can move on. It's fine. But it's true. It's completely true in the English language media. They're absolutely, completely absent.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: um but connected to that like okay so i would i just wanted to ask where do you get your news from like with this blanket um of lies in the western mainstream media of course you're working uh for electronic and father john which has been incredible uh for us like it's been my mental lifesaver uh but like where do you get your news from

John Elmer: It's not from the news. I know at this point where the news gets their news, where they get their information from. There's a military sensor in Israel that's very tight. So it's possible to explain some of it through that. I follow the fighting groups themselves. I follow the Qassam Brigades media. I follow the Israeli Defense Forces media. I put together pieces. Sometimes it takes weeks to verify things. And I have been doing that. I basically, the area that I cover of this war doesn't ever stop. So I've been working constantly and I'm just constantly putting puzzle pieces together. The New York Times, there's almost no value to the media telling of this story because they're not on the ground. I mean, so that's another thing. I'm getting my information from Palestinians, from Palestinians in Gaza, from Palestinian resistance videos and communiques. And I think that there's no question that we've spent our whole life doing this so we can make sense of things easier than general people can. And then I've been trying to bring that, all that information to people in a way that everyone can understand. I've been trying to not be a military, you know, to get into military gear unless it's telling, unless it's part of the story that needs to be told because covering the war is I want everyone to understand it. I'm not talking to military people. I'm talking to the public. So follow the Electronic Intifada. Watch our live streams. Listen to Justin's sit reps.

Justin Porter: The thing about... The only thing I wanted to add was... I used to be an alternative media person. I used to be an alternative media activist. So I would have always said, don't bother with the mainstream media or read the mainstream media in concert with the alternative media. But in the past 10 or 15 years, the alternative media has been completely co-opted. And so it's not really... I can't really say that anymore. You still... And the mainstream media... Forget it. We've been talking. We've covered this in the sit-raps. It's amazing how there's actually zero. I don't even know if it's negative value, but it's absolute zero value. I would never pick up a Canadian newspaper to read about Palestine. Never, never, never. I would never watch a Canadian channel. It's the stupidest thing you would do. I would never recommend it for anybody.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: If I may just jump in. Most... What I can see from the media coverage here in Sweden, even like the so-called leftist outlets, which are supposed to be better about this specifically. I think they're just like the editors. They've just been consuming New York Times, Guardian. Exactly. slate vox whatever liberal outlet there is and think they know something from that that's that's my view yeah that's hopeless and i mean like people people still think like guardian is oh it's the guardian just just wanted to put it out there but sorry no absolutely

Justin Porter: So, so what I, what, where we're at now is, yeah, for me, there's telegram. Telegram is very important to me, but it's, it's a fire hose. So like you're drinking from a fire hose. So if I don't check telegram, like I'm on like resistance, the two I look at a lot is resistance news network and I'll could snooze. And those are both, you know, if you, if you're away from your phone for two hours, you're going to come back to 200, 300, 400 news pieces. And then, you know, so it's, you can't not everybody can do that i understand right that's why we have you justin yeah exactly so i'm i do that i have this thing i do it over the course of the day and i make notes and then every once in a while i do a sit rep about it and that's the only way that i can try to make it digestible for people because it's that's how i've digested it so that's basically what we do now we use social media mainstream and alternative media are largely useless. We pick a few analysts that we watch and then we try to digest the fire hose of social media that we're

John Elmer: And just a lot of wrong. There's a lot of wrong information. And so most of my job is honestly is sifting through noise, trying to find signal. And often, and I think that's one of the things that's been great about the Electronic Intifada show. is that it's, it gives us a space to do that every week. And so if I can just say, like, what media do we watch, just watch, watch us, because we're vetting this stuff. It's all we do. It's all I do.

Justin Porter: So some you want to try to quickly for the next 10 minutes, just like blitz through the questions in the chat room.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Yeah.

John Elmer: Uh, so we'll be fast answering.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Yes. So the question is we've, we've seen that the IOF infantry, uh, the occupation forces, infantry and cavalry being inept at combat and experts at shooting walls and civilian structures also standing at windows. Uh, that said is the air force any good or is it also typical Israeli Hasbara?

Justin Porter: The air force is the best of the combat arms of the Israeli military. That doesn't mean they're good. I mean, what do you mean good? They're good at what they do. They're not facing any air defense or anything like that or any other jets. You want to find out how good they are? They should go and try to bomb Iran. Then we'll know how good they are because they'll be facing a modern layered air defense system.

John Elmer: Yeah. And on that Iranian attack on the weekend, more than half of it was American fighter jets. More than half were American and Jordanian fighter jets. Oh, intercepting the Iranians. Intercepting the Iranians. So it's not even clear that the defense of Israel is happening through its air force. The first working example we've had in our lifetimes, it wasn't Israel. It was the U.S.,

Justin Porter: the israeli air force is is a a group of people who fly american uh planes and drop american munitions on a captive civilian population that's what the israeli air force that's all the israeli air force has done since i guess 1973 uh you know yeah i don't yeah

John Elmer: i just saw it pop up in the in the comments too yes electronic intifada is a news website that has correspondents in gaza that have been courageously reporting for this entire time under the most unbelievable circumstances We have a stable of writers who all cover different beats, and that's all on electronicintifada.net. And so, yeah, I wanted to make that clear. I definitely focus on the show part of it, but we have an incredible team of people that have been working tirelessly this whole time, anchored by people in Gaza. And I think it's the only place that you're going to consistently, in English language, hear from people who are actually living this in Gaza. So shout out to them and the work that they've been doing all of this time. I'm sitting in Toronto in comfort. I've been working hard, but it's nothing like what people on the ground are going through. And the journalists on the ground in Gaza are where we get all our information. So when we say we don't get any information, Al Jazeera has correspondents on the ground in Gaza. There's hundreds, if not thousands of journalists in Gaza who have done an amazing job through this entire war. They do way better work than any foreign reporter who, you know, CNN, Christiana and Amapour made a big deal about how the foreign journalists aren't getting into Gaza in some ways.

Justin Porter: um that's been um an advantage is that yeah when they go when they went in they went in with the Israeli army after the first shifa destruction and jaw solely to provide um the Israeli lies with some broadcast on TV for the boomers um

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Okay, so a quick question.

John Elmer: We'll be faster, we'll be faster.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Yeah, I'm trying as well.

Justin Porter: Six minutes, six minutes.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Yes, is Yahya Sinwar in charge of Qassam or is Mohammad Daif the main commander? I think you've already answered this, John.

John Elmer: Yeah, I mean, that could be a whole other hour long talk. Sinwar was the founder of Qassam. He is a principal pillar of Qassam. He was elected to the Politburo as a civilian, but he is a critical link between Kassam and Hamas as a political organization.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: Awesome. What are your prospects regarding the future of the Zionist entity from within? Oh, that's not looking good for them.

Justin Porter: It's not looking good for them because the Hannibal doctrine itself, I believe, is enough to erode a society's basis. The idea that the guy standing beside you is the guy that you're going to rely on is also the guy who's going to shoot you if you might get captured. And then they generalize that to the whole society in the context of October 7th, and they're not sorry about that. Their army is going, and producing... The maximum they can produce is atrocity videos. The maximum military target they could conceive of is a hospital. They are not... They're not doing very well. Ilan Pape on the Electronic Intifada livestream said, the government isn't functioning. Social cohesion is breaking. They're not going to be able to put this back.

John Elmer: And they don't trust their army anymore, and they shouldn't.

Justin Porter: Their army is a rabble. They're stealing puppies and running away from the puppy's mothers. That's a video I saw today. He's sprinting away because a dog is chasing him because he stole the puppy. That's the level of video that's coming out of there.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: OK. So thank you for the answers. Sorry. No worries. It's relevant. This question, I had something similar as well. How long do you think it will take for the resistance to run out of weapons considering they're unable to smuggle anymore in?

Justin Porter: Who said they're unable to smuggle anymore in?

Mehmet Ali Arslan: That's a good point. But I was also going to ask attrition. At some point, you talked about this before, I know, but it has turned into a war of attrition. You can explain what attrition is as well. And who has the strategic depth to withstand attrition?

Justin Porter: Yeah, I mean, that's the big question. Nobody can answer that question. But attrition, okay, so a war of destruction, a war of attrition. A war of destruction is where you're trying to destroy the entire army of the other side. You know, the Nazis tried to do it in a blitzkrieg. There's big envelopments. They capture everybody or they take the capital, etc., A war of attrition is considered to be more static. You're stuck in some static positions and you keep hitting each other and one side collapses before the other. So that's what we're into now, right? The attrition of... uh the resistance is slowly trying slowly destroying Israel's armor they're destroying Israel's armored vehicles they're destroying the infantry slowly but it's you know it's it's a slow process and at the same time Israel's committing this genocide against Palestinian civilians so who who's going to collapse first um that's the that's the nature of the war it's hard to tell I think that Israel's going to collapse first I think that that's that's my sense

John Elmer: uh from studying this but i i don't you know it's impossible to know i don't know if you want to add anything john uh no no just that they the the uh weapons development is indigenous it happens inside gaza uh israel has dropped an unprecedented number of munitions on gaza those munitions can be repurposed and will be repurposed There has been no war against the tunnel network, particularly the strategic tunnel network where fighters and weapons workshops exist. So there's no indication that Israel has been able to take out the weapons industry at all. So we don't know any more than that, though.

Justin Porter: awesome thank you uh the final question i'll have is through a comment someone said stop saying war it's a genocide obviously obviously yes go ahead it's both it's both you it's if it was just a genocide then we wouldn't like consider the effort that the resistance organizations make to produce these videos of them hitting israeli military

John Elmer: They're fighting a war. To say it's not a war takes away the entire resistance component of this, and I don't think we should do that. I think we should be strong with words. We don't need to... We can have words that have a variety of definitions, and this is absolutely a war. And if you take October 7th, obviously the war goes back before October 7th, but that was a Palestinian operation. So you can't then say it's not a war. And I don't think we should. It's a war, and there's a genocide going on during the war.

Justin Porter: Historically, genocides take place during wars almost always.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: So my tips to Mia is to follow Electronic Intifada and Justin's Anti-Empire project for Citraps to see the war part of the things. Because also, I mean, from a spectator perspective, that's the part that gives you hope and not just despair because there is resistance that is actually successful.

Justin Porter: Yes. So that's, that's a strategy and they're doing something. Yeah. It's not like they're not just trying to have revenge or, or whatever. They're, they're trying to liberate their territory from an occupation.

Mehmet Ali Arslan: I think thank you. I think we've we've gone through more or less all questions, if I'm not wrong, and where this is the point we should actually stop because it's nine o'clock. So if that's all right with everyone, I just want to say a couple of words and then. called quits for today so okay thank you very much both of you for sharing us your time and wisdom and everything else you do for justice and thank you marijuana on the background and all my comrades in epu for organizing this event we have been working around the clock for weeks now to organize and get this in front of people our audience and thank you everyone in the audience for showing up tuning in and providing great questions Make sure to follow us on our social media channels, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, soon Twitter. Like, subscribe, share, all the things to please the algorithms. And I'm going to add, follow Anti-Empire Project and Electronic Intifada. Like, after watching this, why wouldn't you? Please. And I mean, just to just to add, Justin doesn't do only sit reps about Gaza. He does a lot of great historical episodes as well. If you want to understand empire and how it works and how you should actually try to work against it and connected to that. Organize. I can't explain how liberating it is to contribute to a cause you believe in with others who feel like you do instead of like just zoom scrolling on Twitter or wherever you do it. So join us or anyone else you think are worth your time and energy. There's so much we want to do and we need more people to do all of it. You can find the application form in our profile on Instagram. and i would like to conclude by thanking all our palestinian siblings especially those in gaza for their incredible smooth which is their steadfastness they're the guiding light for a brighter future and it is our duty to follow their lead in the path to freedom once again as i started i'll finish assalamu alaikum peace be on you and have free palestine