Max Blumenthal - Birthright and the Whitewashing of Apartheid (2015)

Max Blumenthal: I've been spending a lot of energy in Europe, particularly the UK. This is what the Israeli government-linked Reut Institute in its paper on the BDS movement calls the hub of delegitimization. should be a compliment to those of you who are involved in the BDS movement, involved in Palestine organizing. They've identified the UK, particularly London, but in general the UK, as the center of what they consider to be anti-Israel activity, which is code for pro-equality, pro-human rights activity. So I like to come out here. I get treated like a normal person. I was in Germany and I was pathologized or medicalized as soon as I went there to give a series of talks. I was banned from speaking at the main public theater. Ultimately I was, I think there was a motion introduced to ban me for life from the Bundestag, the parliament. I was attacked in all the papers. I was attacked by the grandchildren of Nazis as an anti-Semite. I mean, it's really weird being Max Blumendahl coming to Germany and a guy named Volker Beck calls you an anti-Semite in the Berliner Morgenpost. It's like, what Woody Allen movie am I talking about? That is a really... You know, and it was really, this is a figure from the left, from the Green Party, and it was Gregor Gysi from the Die Linke Party, the left party, who ultimately put the kibosh on my talks, who shut down my talks. This is, you know, someone who was a figure, who was a leader of the Socialist Party in the former East Germany. I said that the spirit of the Stasi lived on in Germany, but it's no surprise when you have these left-wing figures shutting down that advocates for the basic rights of Palestinians, it's no surprise that you would see a movement like Pegida sweep the nation when the left kind of stands aside or joins with these right-wing anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic attacks and singles out the left and singles out Palestinian citizens of Germany. It was no surprise when Ibrahim Kulani who is a German citizen of Palestinian origin living in the Gaza Strip when he was killed in a precision strike along with his entire family in the war in Gaza this summer, and the German government said nothing. And they issued no condolences to the family. It was no surprise that a racist movement targeting immigrants of color, particularly immigrants from the Middle East, would rise in Germany and gain traction among the decent middle class. And one of the things that was wielded against me in Germany was this bizarre list. I was number nine on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of anti-Israel, anti-Semites in 2013 because of chapter titles of my book, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. For example, there was a title of a chapter called The Night of Broken Glass. And I was alluded to a night when racist anti-Semitic thugs in Nazi Germany rampaged through the streets of Berlin during what is known as Kristallnacht, incited by government officials against the racially outcasted people. And the chapter was about a night in Israel May 21st, 2012, when right-wing racist thugs, incited by government officials, rampaged and rioted against non-Jewish African refugees living in Tel Aviv, smashing the storefronts of their business and attacking any black person they could find in the street. This was immediately after a huge rally, headlined by the Knesset chairperson of the interior committee, Miri Regev, who said that Africans are a cancer in the nation's body. And that is exactly the language that was used against Jews in Nazi Germany. So, for embracing the universal lessons of the Holocaust, which mean, which Say never again to anyone. I was put on this list of anti-Semites. I was number nine. I was tied with Alice Walker, the African-American author. This made my mother really proud. She likes to read the color. She liked the book The Color Purple.

Speaker 2: Roger Waters was on there.

Max Blumenthal: We've since become buddies. I was right ahead of European sports venues. That was number 10. But anyway, I wanted to do better. I'm really ambitious. I'm an American Jew, and we achieve really highly. So this year, I got to be number four for my appearance in Germany, for just coming to Germany and saying there should be equality in Israel-Palestine. I beat... someone named Glenn Miller. This is a neo-Nazi who went on a shooting spree at Jewish community centers in Kansas City. He was number nine, I was number four. So clearly I'm a bigger anti-Semite than that guy. I'm the number four anti-Semite in the world, according to this organization, which is funded by many of the people who support wing of the Israel lobby in the United States, the people who are supportive of the visit that Benjamin Netanyahu is making to the United States, and who are playing a very destabilizing role in American politics, but Netanyahu is playing a destabilizing role, not only in the Middle East, but now in Europe as well. And they use these tactics to shut down criticism. It's worked over the years. It's particularly worked in the United States. It's kept Obama, as I called Obama, the babysitter. Because whenever Netanyahu comes to Washington, Obama has to babysit him. He's met with Netanyahu more than all of the leaders of Europe combined in Washington. This is a guy who leads a country about the size of New Jersey. state of the U.S. So Obama becomes a lamed up president. He says, I have no more elections to run, so I can do whatever I want. And it's kind of pathetic that he's chosen to do so little. But he accuses Netanyahu of coming to Washington to undermine the negotiations with Iran over a nuclear program. of violating diplomatic protocol because Netanyahu's ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, who, by the way, is from his ancestral homeland of Florida. His father was the mayor of Miami Beach, helped elect George W. Bush in 2000. Ron Dermer is a longtime Republican operative who just kind of immigrated to Israel as a colonist and became a top advisor to Netanyahu. He arranged his visit around the back of Obama. So Netanyahu has actually aligned himself with the Republican Party in the United States to undercut the elected president. And for the first time, and he's been doing this over the years, for the first time we've seen the president get his back up. It's like the father of a kid who's snorting cocaine with a $50 bill that the father gave the kid, and then finally the father grounds him for a weekend. And Obama is getting the Democrats in the Senate to not attend Netanyahu's speech. It's sort of an embarrassing moment for Netanyahu, but it's an important opportunity for those of us who are organizing to put pressure on Israel, diplomatic pressure, pressure through civil society, which is really at the base of the BDS movement, for us to do more organizing and to educate people about what this really means and how it goes well beyond Netanyahu. What this reflects in the United States was borne out in a recent poll of Republicans and Democrats, their opinion on Israel-Palestine. And this poll showed that in the past year, Democratic approval, approval among rank-and-file members of the Democratic Party has dropped over 10% for Israel, and a majority of Democrats no longer favor the state of Israel over Palestine. they would like to see an even-handed approach. They don't understand Palestine, they don't relate to it, they don't know Palestinians, they're not familiar with BDS, but there's something that's upsetting them about Netanyahu and about Israel. But one thing that isn't being pointed out in this poll by the pollsters, by the pundits, by the people discussing these numbers is that these numbers started to go down last summer when Israel assaulted the Gaza Strip. This was a seminal moment, and Americans are afraid to talk about it. It's not discussed in the media. I know it's discussed more here, but it's still not properly understood how this is shaping public opinion and how it's shaping opinions about a wide range of issues. because we can't talk about it, it can shape opinions in a dangerous way. I understand in France it can shape opinions of people who hear Netanyahu coming to France and explicitly declaring himself the leader of all Jews. It can affect them in a very dangerous way and move them towards an antisemitic attitude if they don't understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism. If they don't understand that Netanyahu, someone who's elected by a minority of Jewish Israelis, is not the caliph of the Jewish world. He is not the caliph of the Jewish state in Israel and the Levant or Jaisal. What Netanyahu is doing in the United States is dangerous. What he's doing in Europe is destabilizing. And he's helping fan the flames of anti-Semitism, particularly in France, which is a scenario that benefits not only him, but it benefits Zionism. This destabilization is at the base of the logic of Zionism. Ever since the Zionist movement was conceived, but particularly when the state of Israel was born as an ethnic to clear out the West of Jews so that they will all immigrate to the state of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, repeatedly called on Jews to leave the West and move to Israel. He had a fantasy of building small communities for seven million Jews who would immigrate to Israel in the Negev desert, the Nakka. He said that he would actually dismantle Tel Aviv He said Jews are becoming too cosmopolitan there and move them into the desert to experience the land and the redemption of the land and it would also make them safe from an Egyptian missile attack. This hysteria has been present ever since the beginning. Now we hear Netanyahu warning of Iranian missile attacks. He warns of ISIS. He warns of Hezbollah. He's conjuring enemies everywhere and trying to frighten Jews wherever they go and calls on them every time there's a terror attack in Europe to leave, anti-Semites do. So Zionism and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same coin. That's something we need to understand about the destabilizing logic of Zionism. But the most immediate form of destabilization that Zionism has caused has been in historic Palestine, and that's what we're really here to talk about tonight. The Nakba is the ultimate fulfillment of the logic of Zionism because Zionism requires a majority Jewish state. Once it was decided that this state would be created in historic Palestine, the process of ethnic cleansing was inevitable because most people How do you build a majority Jewish state in historic Palestine without ethnic cleansing? It's simply impossible. You have to clear people out in order to build Kibbutzim, in order to expand it, and then you have to maintain, through demographic engineering, a clear majority, a clear Jewish majority. Netanyahu and his advisors, and this goes back to Rabin during the Oslo Accords, of people who they would like to maintain under their control who would be Jewish. They decided, Rabin decided that anything less than 70%, Netanyahu has reiterated this, would constitute a binational state and would lead to the demise of the Jewish state. So they're practicing something that is sort of anachronistic, foreign to a multicultural demographic engineering. That means that the Nakba that occurred in the months leading up to the creation of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948 and afterwards, the Nakba is a continual, ongoing process because it's necessary. Ethnic cleansing is necessary to the maintenance of a Jewish state. What happens to those who are ethnically cleansed? They're not necessarily exterminated. The state of Israel has probably killed, responsible for the deaths of around 60 to 70,000 civilians since its inception. That's a lot of people. Maybe 80,000. But over 100,000 have died in Syria. So it's definitely not exceptional. What is exceptional, exceptional is the permanent ghettoization of people who are deemed to be an ethnic outclass. Human warehousing is exceptional. The concept of surplus humanity is endemic to the logic of Zionism. Palestinians who are not Jewish are surplus humanity, and they have to be warehoused if they're not going to be killed through genocide. out what's left of Palestine. And even inside Israel, the most severe vision of this human warehouse is, of course, the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is the second most densely populated place on Earth. Its population is 1.8 million. I think close to half or a majority of the people in the Gaza Strip are under 18, which means it is a child ghetto in The unemployment rate is approaching 50%. Most of the population who lives off of donated aid from the United Nations Relief Works Agency, 80% of the population are refugees. They have refugee status, and that refugee status is passed down through generations. That means that 80% of these people have legitimate claims under UN Resolution 194 to land and property in what is now known as the State of Israel. And the only reason they're in the Gaza Strip, the only reason it's the second most densely populated place on Earth, the only reason for this misery, this ghettoization, this human warehousing is because these people are not Jewish. Because they don't possess, like me, J-positive blood. The most chilling fact for me is that I can visit the Gaza Strip by gaining journalistic credentials through the Israeli government, which I've done, and most of you who are Palestinian can. So I have privileges in the Gaza Strip that Palestinians don't have. The Gaza Strip has been under siege, under Israeli siege, since 2005, really since 2006, but it began in 2005. It was the result of the election of Hamas, the Islamist political party which was elected through democratic means in a free and fair election according to the Congressional Research Service. It was also elected in the West Bank. Its legislators were kidnapped in the West Bank in coordination with the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority. and in the Gaza Strip, the United States, the Bush administration, along with the State of Israel, which was trying to reinstall Dahilan, the Fatah kind of strong man in the Gaza Strip, attempted a coup against the elected Hamas government, sending in Fatah fighters armed by Israel. The coup failed. They were defeated resoundingly in a really catastrophic miniature civil war in the Gaza Strip. The siege began. Israel began regulating everything going into the Gaza Strip. from cardamom to size A2 paper, apparently to prevent terrorist paper airplanes from flying out. All kinds of materials that couldn't be justified on security grounds were limited. The Kogat, which is the coordinating authority of the Israeli military that controls the Gaza Strip, employed complex mathematical formulas complex mathematical formulas to calculate the amount of calories that each resident of the Gaza Strip should consume each day. According to Dov Weissblass, who was an advisor to the then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the residents of the Gaza Strip should not be allowed to starve, they should just be put on a diet. The idea was to punish the entire civilian population for electing Hamas so they would eventually submit. And they would bring in someone like Mahmoud Abbas, who controls the warehouse in Ramallah, which is known as the Five Star Occupation. And his security forces coordinate directly with Israel and subcontract for the occupation. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, population, really you could say the entire population having visited there, is committed to resistance. They're committed to resisting occupation. They're committed to resisting their dispossession. And whether they're ruled by Fatah or Hamas, they draw a red line at armed resistance. They will not demilitarize. They're committed to armed resistance. Which just, you know, my own personal opinion is as legitimate as the Algerians, the indigenous South Africans, the indigenous Native Americans, or Jews who are ghettoized in Europe, resisting their own oppression with arms. So Israel begins ramping up the kind of military assaults that it employs in the Gaza Strip. Before 2002, Israel had not... with F-16s. It did not drop 2,000-pound bombs on the Gaza Strip. But in 2006, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon and got a bloody nose in head-to-head ground confrontations with Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon, it enacted a doctrine, conceived a doctrine called the Dahiya Doctrine, a military doctrine, named after the southern Beirut neighborhood that its air force completely obliterated. And the point of the doctrine was spelled out by the then commander of the northern... the northern front of the Israeli army. His name is Gadi Eizenkat, and he was just appointed chief of staff of the Israeli military, meaning he's the top soldier in the Israeli military. Every Lebanese citizen is Hassan Nasrallah, and every resident of the Gaza Strip is Khaled Mishal. In other words, everybody's a terrorist who lives under the control of these two authorities and they will all be punished simply for living among them. There is no distinction between combatant and civilian. There's no distinction between people in Gaza and a terrorist, according to this general. The point of this doctrine is that Israel can't defeat Hamas or their armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. They can't defeat Hezbollah. What they can do though is punish a civilian population for supporting them, and that's what they've been doing ever since 2006. And so the assaults of the Gaza Strip under siege have grown more and more intense and are increasingly directed at a greater swath of the civilian population. We saw that clearly illustrated with Operation Cast Lead in 2008, 2009, and that was really prompted me, I'd been working as a journalist for over seven years, prompted me to start reporting on this issue, because I was so shocked, not only at the level of violence directed at a helpless civilian population, but I was shocked at the lack of outrage in the United States, the total support for Israel, not just for my government, but within the media, and among the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. So it kind of galvanized my commitment to this issue and to educating people about it and reporting on it in a critical way. In 2012 we saw another military escalation where Israel attacked the civilian population of the Gaza Strip and did very little damage to Hamas and its military capacity. That in an interesting way, though, because the Arab Spring was underway. Mohammed Morsi was president of Egypt. He was a figure connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood was in charge of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood had a long-standing relationship with Hamas and was capable of pushing back on the United States and Israel along with its regional allies, to first stop Israel from assassinating Hamas leaders, and then to gain a ceasefire that provided some humanitarian concessions to the Gaza Strip. That was the first time in history that it happened. And so in many ways, that escalation ended in a kind of diplomatic victory for Hamas. And people in the Gaza Strip were pretty happy about the result because they thought they had received some improvements in their daily life. For example, the fishing limit had been extended from three miles to six miles for fishermen in the Gaza Strip. And if you're fishing at three miles in the Mediterranean, you just can't catch any sardines in the summertime. I went on a fishing boat in September and saw how hard it is for these fishermen. They lose money every night. So that's what they're fighting for. They're fighting for humanitarian improvements. They're fighting for an end to the siege. In Egypt, We watched a coup take place in 2013. The military junta comes back. The military and the deep state in Egypt retrench its power and become determined not only to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, but to crush Hamas by strangling the Gaza Strip from its south. In fact, the Israeli military considered Egypt's siege to be too extreme the people of Gaza towards supporting Hamas more than Israel wanted. And that created the conditions for this current war and it made the war this summer last for far longer than any of the other assaults of the Gaza Strip. That meant more violence directed at the civilian population than ever before. A wider expanse of the civilian population experienced the violence. There really wasn't anyone in the Gaza Strip I managed to get into Gaza on August 14th with my colleague Dan Cohen, who is a journalist from the United States, who is just starting out in journalism. We got credentials, I don't know how, through the Israeli government. We just walked into the government press office and a nice older woman gave us cards. And then the next day, we were in the Gaza Strip. The war was still on. It was a five-day ceasefire. People were returning to their homes in places like Shijieh, just east of Gaza City, which had been wiped off the map. And they set up tents in front of their homes, and we walked around talking to people about what had happened. Most of the reporters had left by this time. They had gone to Kurdistan to follow the fight against ISIS. And for the first time, people were really out in the Gaza Strip for this first extended ceasefire, and we had total access to people, and we could document the stories of war crimes and serial atrocities that had been committed against them. And we started filming from the first day. Dan has continued to go back to the Gaza Strip. I stayed for two weeks, but Dan has continued to go back He's been there as late as January. And we recently met, he's from Phoenix, Arizona, so we recently met in Tucson and started editing some of our footage and getting it translated. And we intend to produce a documentary about what happened during the 51 Day War and what's happening now. Because the situation in the Gaza Strip has never been worse. The United Nations in 2012 predicted that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020. And I think that that has been realized through this last Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip prematurely. And so we want to show this situation, convey not just the atrocities and the crimes, but the emergency of the crisis in the Gaza Strip through our documentary. And I'll be publishing a book, which Verso has picked up in the UK, on the war and its aftermath, called The 51-Day War. You heard so much during the war about human shields, that Hamas was using Palestinians as human shields, and there's very little evidence to support it. but it seemed to make sense to a lot of people who believe that sort of Hamas governs without consent. In fact, the Israeli forces, when they invaded, starting on July 16th, began taking young Palestinian men, and we can turn this projector off, as human shields in village after village along the border areas. These are the areas that were destroyed Beit Hanun completely wiped off the map. Shuja'iyah on the border, on the boundary between Gaza and Israel, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of structures destroyed. Rafah, in the southernmost city in Israel, its eastern edge was completely razed, and that was the first scene you saw at the beginning. During a limited incursion on July 26th by the Israeli military, Mahmoud Abu Said, who was 19, And his family were summoned out of their house during an Iftar dinner. The Israeli soldiers, according to Abu Sa'id and several of his relatives I interviewed, asked, does anyone here speak Hebrew? His father said yes. Town after town after town, stories of men in their 50s being shot in the chest after they answer affirmatively when asked if they speak Hebrew. And my theory is that they are shot because out of fear that they can understand orders or returned testimony of what the soldiers were saying to each other while they occupied the town. His father survived, by the way. His family was sent marching towards the center of Rafah, and Abu Sayyid was taken by the soldiers. They took him back into the house that he lived in. They ransacked the house. Every house was ransacked. They sprayed paint in every house I went in that was occupied by soldiers. There would be shooting timetable. painted on the walls. In other words, Yoni has to be on sniper duty at this time and Yair at this time and so on. North, south, east, and west would be spray painted on the walls to give the soldiers an idea of where they're shooting. And in this case, there was a live teenager who they stripped, wrapped in a rug, left in a room with a muzzled dog, then took out when they were sniping at targets outside and put him by the windows and shot over his shoulders. That's the most extreme method of using a human shield possible. What they did was they killed his neighbors. They shot young men, unarmed civilians like Saleh Esraibi, who was actually trying to help another young man who they sniped to death. I met Saleh Israebi's father across the street, Suleyman Israebi, who's standing by his destroyed house, which had been bombed by an F-16. And he told me that every time I build a business, they destroy it. Every time I build a home, they bomb it. Every time I have a son, they kill him. What life is there for me? To his right was his son's car, which his son drove for a living and had been bombed with a drone missile. of so many people in the Gaza Strip who've been left with not just no family, but no future, no livelihood, nothing at the end of the tunnel. 89 families, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, were erased from the civil record in the Gaza Strip. I mean, if you think about the trees that Israel has uprooted in the West Bank, the olive trees, We're talking about over 800,000 olive trees that have been uprooted since 1967. Think of the family trees that have been uprooted in the Gaza Strip. Over 800 people among the more than 2,000 casualties in Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day war, were killed in their own homes. by precision-guided missile strikes. So we're talking about families killed in their sleep, all killed together with roofs brought down on their heads. That's why you'd see, when you look at the casualties, you just see entire families in the casualties. So this is Rafah. Then you move to Hosea, which is northeast of Rafah, just east of one of the largest cities in the Gaza Strip, Han Yunis. This is the site of the worst carnage of the war in Gaza, the worst savagery by the Israeli army, the worst barbarism. Because 7,000 people in the town were held under siege with the Israeli army embedded among their homes for 10 days with no water and no food, the Israeli military declared the town a closed military zone and refused to allow the International Red Cross in. And the Red Cross in my opinion. They will not do anything without coordinating first with the Israeli military. And in my communications with the ICRC, they refused to discuss atrocities that their paramedics had witnessed without first clearing it with the Israeli military. They even did a conference during the war with the Israeli military think tank that conceived the Dahiya doctrine that I described. This is scandalous. So the people in Hosea were left to fend for themselves with really nothing. And when I went to that town during the war, during the ceasefire, I would go from house to house and hear horror stories like I've never heard before. But going into the home of Hani Najjar was something else because you're actually witnessing the effects of a summary execution that was committed in his bathroom and in his child's room of six men. As you saw, the flesh and the hair and the blood was still on the walls. Bullets marked IMI, or Israeli Military Industries, were still on the floor when we went there. The bodies of these six men were discovered on August 2nd, after the siege of Hosea ended. The bodies were no longer there. They were... It turns out fighters, most of whom were from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who were from the town, who had attempted to resist the Israeli onslaught, who had run out of ammunition and were ambushed and fled into the house. They fought to the last man, to the last bullet. Then the Israelis sent in a dog team. They let the dogs loose on them. Then they came in and once the men were sort of immobilized. They'd basically been chewed to death by the dogs. They riddled them with bullets, exploded grenades on them. And according to Najjar, their throats were cut with the knives he used to slaughter his chickens. So whether or not these were fighters, this is a war crime. You're not, under the Geneva Conventions, allowed to execute captured fighters. And we reeled at the savagery of ISIS, at the savagery of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levan, as it executes captured fighters. But we seem to completely gloss over the Jewish State in Israel and the Levan when it does the same, and even beheads them with knives, as you've seen in this footage. The final scene, is from a live stream that was operated by Dan and my friend Jihad Saftawi, who's a 24-year-old researcher and journalist in central Gaza City. He lives in a tower called Zafar 1. It's a residential tower, and it's filled with the professional class of Gaza City, which is very beleaguered right now. The middle class' back was broken with this war. And there are four towers called Zafar. Zafar one, two, three, and four. And all around that area are engineers, doctors, many of the people affiliated with Fatah, which is the faction that controls the Palestinian Authority that Israel would like to reinstall as the authority in the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 2: They never were traditionally attacked

Max Blumenthal: in these wars. These areas were sort of considered off-limits by the Israeli military. It's the soft heart of Gaza City, and it was always the border areas that bore the brunt. It's the border areas where rockets were launched from, the border areas where the tunnels were. So for the first time, this soft heart of Gaza City was attacked. Not just by accident. You saw in that clip a tank shell hit the building next to Saftawi's. But in the final days of the war, as a ceasefire became inevitable, the Israeli military decided to bring the towers down. It staged a series of state terror attacks to bring down major residential towers filled with nothing but civilians who were mostly affiliated with Fatah, which had no military value, And Jihad Saftawi, Jihad got a call telling him to leave his home because the Israeli Air Force was going to destroy it. And he rushed out with all his belongings, rushed into the street, and then watched as the tower next to him was hit by one missile, started to wobble, 15-story tower home to 70 families, and then came crashing to the ground Zafar Ford. He said that he was so consumed with trying to make sure he got all of his documents out that he couldn't even pay attention to the fact that the building across from his was being blown apart. In the end, his building survived, but Israel proceeded to bring down Bashe Tower, the oldest tower in Gaza City, which is home to nothing but offices of media. You know, you talk about, you didn't hear anyone go, but this was an attack on the media of Gaza. One of the offices that was destroyed belonged to Saud Abu Ramadan, who was the father of Jihad's wife, Laura, who was the local stringer for Bloomberg News. And when Bloomberg News, a major wire agency, sends its people to Gaza, they work out of his office. Bloomberg News didn't report that their office had been destroyed. You heard almost nothing about this major, media complex being blown to pieces. Then Israel's military proceeded to destroy the Italian compound, home to numerous cafes and restaurants and 80 families. No military value at all. Another one of the oldest residential towers in the Gaza Strip. Blown to pieces. They bombed cafes. I mean, who bombs cafes? Well, you hear about terrorist bombing cafes all the time. We didn't hear about these cafes being bombed. It was considered completely acceptable, at least where I live. And images of it weren't conveyed, of towers being brought down. After Zafir 4 was brought down, its homeless residents put up a banner that simply read, Gaza's 9-11. And they put up, large poster boards on the last remaining wall of Zafirwan and people came and wrote messages of solidarity just as they did in the United States at the World Trade Center. To me, terror is terror and we should do away with this kind of moral exceptionalism around it and stop excusing state terror and stop excusing the terror of our allies and ourselves, which begets terror. Radicalization is spreading through the Gaza Strip now. It's completely inevitable. And the stage has been set for the next war. The rebuilding process that was supposed to take place after $8 billion of property was destroyed in the Gaza Strip has not taken place. There is no sign it will ever take place. Diplomats from across the West who have traditionally provided the residents of the Gaza Strip with food and clothing and provided Israel with bombs to kill them, gathered in Cairo in October to raise $5.3 billion for rebuilding. And they oversaw two plans. The first was called the Initiative for the Palestinian Economy, which was introduced by John Kerry, the Secretary of State of the US, and was presided over and conceived by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the morally peerless figure who's never known corruption. And this plan was, the blueprint for this plan was not presented, but I got a version of it leaked to me by a Palestinian businessman. It was floated to the Palestinian business community in the West Bank. And it was produced by McKinsey, which is an international corporate consulting firm. It was one of the most bizarre documents I've ever seen. It called for heightened tourism to the Gaza Strip. It doesn't mention the siege or the occupation once in this bizarre document, but it concluded that Gaza underperforms on key tourism metrics. That's the actual language in the document, which is the economic plan that John Kerry claimed at this donor conference would reduce unemployment in Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza, to 8%. which is the level of unemployment and recession level in the United States. So, yeah, you can really imagine hotels being built giving visitors a stunning vista of Israel's naval siege. I mean, it's just, it was ridiculous but also disturbing because we saw close to 400 factories and businesses destroyed in Operation Protective Edge, and this document calls for sweatshops to be built in the Gaza Strip. In other words, textile mills that will produce zippers and buttons for high-end fashion producers in Tel Aviv. So the Tel Aviv fashionistas will benefit from the beleaguered and shell-shocked population churning out buttons and zippers. Israel delivers the shock, and McKinsey and Tony Blair, they've got the doctrine. That's what this was, a shock doctrine document of of neoliberal disaster capitalism. We have to remember that the Gaza Strip, this is one of the most educated areas on Earth. People speak English better there than they do in the West Bank, from my experience. It has a very advanced medical core, very advanced universities, The fishing industry would be fully capable of feeding the Gaza Strip. There was previously a farming and agricultural sector that could feed the Gaza Strip, and they're just simply prevented from feeding themselves. They're prevented from being self-sustaining. The point is to eventually break them, to demilitarize them, and force them to be a literally captive market. Number two export sector for the Israeli economy is who? Occupied Palestinian territory. They have no option but to buy Israeli goods, and so this is a boon for the Israeli economy, and of course these wars on the Gaza Strip are a boon for Israel's number one industry, which is the weapons sector, because they get to test weapons on a captive, restive population and then market them to the world as field tested, which very few militaries get to do. That's why between Operation Cast Lead in 2009 and the military escalation in 2012, Israeli weapon sales increased by $1 billion because they went to international weapons fairs with their weapons, which might not have been as good as British weapons or Swedish weapons, but they were field tested. That's the language they used. So the siege is necessary for the Israeli economy, and the world is playing into it. The UN introduced a plan, which is a plan for crisis management that was drawn up with the Egyptian intelligence agencies, the Palestinian Authority, and Yoav Mordecai, who is the head of the occupation authority that governs the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from the Israeli military. And that was the plan for rebuilding the Gaza Strip, and every family would have had to have applied for building materials through the Palestinian Authority, which would then be vetted by the Israeli military, so only certain families who were deemed worthy would have their homes rebuilt, and the rebuilding process would have been monitored through heightened drone activity and new camera installations. This was all going through the UN, and Robert Seri, who is in charge of the peace process for the United Nations, So this was a non-starter. People in the Gaza Strip would not accept something that would actually permanently retrench the occupation and transform them from kind of a third-world Gulag-style prison to a first-world advanced supermax prison. Wasn't gonna happen. So out of the $5.3 billion of rebuilding money that was pledged for the Gaza Strip, $300,000 has reached the Gaza Strips instead. UNRWA, which is the UN Reliefs Works Agency, which is in charge of feeding people, the refugees in the Gaza Strip, and in charge of providing rebuilding materials, its funds have completely dried up. 46,000 government employees in the Gaza Strip have not been paid for seven months. They have no source of income. Crime is rising. Radicalization, as I said, is spreading. My friend Mohamed Elmer, who's one of the finest journalists working from the Gaza Strip, one of the best journalists in the world, kidnapped by thugs identifying themselves as ISIS. And he was beaten and tortured for several days before being released. This is something that we've never really seen before in the Gaza Strip. This is part of the destabilization process. Dan Cohen, my colleague, went to Shijia to visit the families still living in the rubble during the harshest winter, one of the harshest winters in history. And he met a child named Sami Al Qureshi, six months old, was born during the war, and had never seen light through electricity. He'd seen fire, but he'd never seen the kind of lights that Dan had affixed to his camera. He was captivated by the light on Dan's camera. This was, sorry, this was in December. The family was living in the rubble of their home and had put kind of nylon around it to try to make a tent. It was freezing. The father said he slept with seven blankets on at night. In Hosea, Dan would find people sleeping in shipping containers. In January, we learned that Sami al-Qureshi, the six-month-old child who was born during the war, had frozen to death. He was one of five children that froze to death that week. And when I talked to my friends in the Gaza Strip, most of them are trying to get out. I mean, we saw 500 refugees who were from the poorest sectors of Gazan society sneak out through tunnels, pay smugglers to try to take them to Italy and die in the sea, drowning off the island of Malta. But my friends like Jihad, he wants to go to the United States with his wife just so they can have a child there who will have US citizenship and have the rights, freedom of movement that they've been denied. And they can't get out. Despair is spreading and no one knows what's at the end of this dark tunnel. It just gets darker and darker by the day and I can guarantee you that it will cause an explosion like we haven't seen before. And that's why I think it's important that we talk about it, that we convey the sense of emergency. And the way to do it is through the kind of civil society campaign that's already being organized here through BDS. But to recognize this is an emergency situation, even if you're engaging in kind of a long-term strategy, just keep in mind what will happen when Foreign Minister of Israel Avigdor Lieberman promises that another war on Gaza is inevitable, when we know that there will be another war on the civilian population, what other place on earth can we say that about, that there will be another war? Who will die in the next war? Who will be left? And will we even be able to go back My friend Mads Gilbert, who was in al-Shifa hospital throughout the worst part of the war performing emergency operations, he kept a man alive with his own lungs when a life support machine broke because of an electricity outage. He was permanently banned by the Israeli military from ever entering Gaza again. I think Gaza should be at the center of our concerns right now. We shouldn't let it disappear in the news.

Speaker 3: I'll repeat it at the end of it. Why is it that they're not doing the opposite message of allowing Palestinians to leave Israel?

Max Blumenthal: So the question is, if Israel is encouraging European Jews to immigrate to Israel, why is it not encouraging Palestinians to leave? The answer is that it is. But in the Gaza Strip, for some reason, there is an exception. People are being... held in the Gaza Strip, I think along with, I think this is the result of coordination between Israel and the Egyptians. For someone to get out, there's only two ways out. There's the Erez crossing through Israel, and it's just impossible for people to coordinate a way that will provide them a crossing from Erez to the airport to get out of Gaza. The security restrictions, which are not really security restrictions, are so extreme. And to get a permit, you have to demonstrate so many things. Let's say you're 50, you're 55, and you were arrested during the first intifada in Gaza. A lot of people were arrested for no reason, but you could have been thrown stones. You're never going to get out of there. I mean, I know someone, Zacharias Faker, he's one of the leaders of the Fisherman's Union, and he hasn't left the Gaza Strip in 41 years. Think about that. You live on a boat, and you're kind of in a prison. He's never left this area. I went on a boat with him, and I just, you know, you go out, and it's an exhilarating feeling because you start going out of the Mediterranean, and you see the kind of concrete ghetto of Gaza fade in the background, and you start imagining that you're going to go to some other Mediterranean port, you know. I'm going to go to Piraeus. I'm going to go to Beirut. We're going to eat fish on the way. And then you realize the Israeli navy's there. They're threatening to shoot you, and you have to go back. You're in prison, no matter where you are. And then the Egyptians have kept Rafa, days since the war. So this is another reason why Gaza is going to explode. But you said you're from the Friends of Berlin. In the West Bank, Israel is able to give Palestinians easy access to go and they will be given every opportunity to leave on the condition that they don't return. The Israeli civil administration, which is this Orwellian term for the military authority that controls the West Bank, gives permits to Palestinians in the West Bank to study abroad, but they'll come with a kind of caveat. Many of you might know this better than me, that you have to stay abroad for 10 years. Basically, you spend 10 years in Europe, you start... kind of integrating into European society, and then they just say, well, you don't have residency here, you lost your, you know, you lost it, you're gone. And in East Jerusalem, it's where the exodus is being encouraged the most. Because you can hold on to your Huliyah, your Palestinian passport, but in East Jerusalem, you maintain Jerusalem residency, and to maintain that, you have to abide by Israel's center of life policy. The center of life policy requires you to prove your residence, your residency in East Jerusalem by providing tax forms, insurance forms, and that you're permanently living there. Jews who live in West Jerusalem do not have to do that. Or Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem, they don't have to do it. It really applies exclusively to Palestinians. So let's say that you are a Palestinian in East Jerusalem and you fall in love with a Palestinian in the West Bank who has a Palestinian Authority passport. And you have residency, Jerusalem residency, which gives you freedom of movement everywhere. You want to keep that. Where can you live with your spouse? Well, there's only one or two places that you can live in all of Palestine. on the eastern side of the separation wall. So it's basically in the West Bank. But it's technically part of the Jerusalem municipality. So it's in Jerusalem, but on the other side of a giant concrete wall. And it is basically a refugee camp for lovers. All the people that live there are couples between the West Bank and Jerusalem because it's the only place they can go. No one else would want to live there. Why wouldn't you want to live there? Well, they have no public services, but you pay taxes for public services. Because the Palestinian Authority is not allowed to enter with fire trucks or police. And the Jerusalem municipality, Jerusalem cops, Jerusalem fire teams can't enter because there's the wall. There are no stoplights. There's no trash pickup. You're paying for trash pickup. Every building there is considered illegal construction. which can be demolished at any time. So that's the situation that these apartheid laws have created, which are aimed at compelling Palestinians to leave. So if you meet someone at Birzeit University that you want to marry, they're going to try to push you into the West Bank, into the human warehouse and out of East Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is the priority for every Israeli government. It's where Israel sees its future, particularly Silwan. This is an area that is right next to the old city, and that's the priority for the settlers because it's next to this area where they go and worship rocks. And it's a Palestinian area, so it's a flashpoint for conflict. You know, I think when you look at Israeli apartheid or you look at Palestine, everyone is living under a system of apartheid just through different matrices of control. There are different mechanisms that are used to control each, to control Palestinians depending on where they are. And in Gaza Strip, it's the panopticon. It's the most severe incarnation of the matrix of control. But in Berlin, I mean, if you've been there, you see something different.

Speaker 2: Why do you think that Western governments are so wedded to Israel in the status quo?

Max Blumenthal: Well, that varies from Western government to Western government. I mean, I can talk about the United States, but then I can talk about Germany. Germany is a really unique case. I mean, Merkel, Angela Merkel on the right and Gregory Gysi on the left have both said that supporting Israel is part of Germany's reason of state. In other words, Germany's reason to exist. And that has to do with the cheap absolution that Germany has sought for its own crimes against Jews, its own genocidal crimes against Jews. There's this state that claims to represent all Jews, and as long as Germany sends it some reparations money and some discounted dolphin-class submarines, with launching tubes specially retrofitted for nuclear weapons, then Germany can claim to have answered for its crimes in the Holocaust. It's an easy way out. The harder way out would be to embrace the universal lessons of the Holocaust, to actually give refugees from other genocide a chance and a place in society. We can see that Germany has utterly failed in that regard with the rise of Pegida and the amount of traction that it's gotten in German society. And just the way that immigrants and refugees are treated there. The United States is a different situation. In the United States, Jews like me are living in a golden era. I think it's the best place to be Jewish in the world. And we really do not experience anti-Semitism as Jews in France do. It's just not... There. It's not acceptable. We are the new elite. We have in many ways almost supplanted Episcopalians and the WASPs as the elite of our society. And we should in many ways be proud of that. Jewish Americans are great citizens. You go to a university campus in the U.S. and you'll see building after building named after some Jewish philanthropist. We give so much of our income to philanthropy and charity. We're generally very liberal. Jews, we're very supportive of civil rights, form coalitions with oppressed minorities. But then we have Zionism. Because the more we assimilate and integrate into American society, the more we fear losing our identity. And it's the identity crisis. For many people, I like to turn a crisis into an opportunity, but other people turn an opportunity into a crisis. They need something to rally around to make them feel unique, to make them feel, in this case, Jewish. Because for a lot of secular Jews in the U.S. who don't go to synagogue on Friday nights, who find religion to be tedious, there's not much besides Israel, and the Birthright Israel trip, you know, can fill you up with this Iowana and this euphoric feeling of being part of a special, unique community. All you have to do is wave the Israeli flag and remember the Holocaust to feel these are the two central pillars of Jewish-American secular identity. Once you do away with those, you're just another white person who's really affluent. And that's scary. You're nothing. The crisis of identity deepens. So this incredibly influential group in the U.S., which is highly politicized, highly educated, extremely advanced, has been captivated by this anachronistic philosophy of Zionism, which provides it with a sense of cohesion. And it organizes around it. So some of the people who have influence in one sector of society, like Michael Bloomberg, who is the wealthiest man in America, one of the wealthiest men in America, is the mayor of New York, and leads the largest super PAC, which means the largest political action committee, which is mostly committed to gun control, which is a traditionally liberal idea in the US that most Jewish Americans support. Israel right or wrong because that's part of his identity as a Jew. So let's say you're in Congress and you go against Israel. Of course, AIPAC is going to come after you, our version of BICOM. But then there's a ricochet effect. Like, you might be for gun control, but the money from Michael Bloomberg dries up. Because, I mean, he's hysterically pro-Israel. So there's this factor. And then for most Americans, it's not that big of an issue. I mean, most Americans are dealing with immediate problems that have nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. It's a very abstract situation for them. These are people who are trying to unionize at Walmart because they have to wear diapers because they're not allowed to go on bathroom breaks. Americans are hurting. Members of Congress have nothing to gain by listening to us and doing something about it. Everything to lose, as I explained. And Arab Americans... and Muslim Americans are a potential political force. They have many of the same qualities of Jewish Americans, but they're at a place, and I don't know how it is exactly in the UK, but I sense that it's something similar, where their leadership is intimidated. Their leadership is more concerned with assimilation than actually organizing around an issue like Palestine and actually challenging power. This was a situation that Jews were in in the 1950s. In the 1950s, the major Jewish American groups, which now comprised the core of the pro-Israel lobby, were ignoring the Jews in the displaced persons camps in Europe because they were afraid of upsetting their relationships with Gentiles, just as the major Arab American and Muslim American organizations in the U.S., and I suspect there might be a similar situation here, are ignoring the people in the Gaza ghetto. for fear of upsetting the dominant powers. So, I mean, there are all these factors from country to country. I mean, you can look at Eastern Europe. They're turning towards Israel. Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are seeking out support in Eastern Europe because these countries are desperate for acceptance into NATO. It's just another way into the West. The question is, what can be done to reverse or challenge the trend. And I really think that if you look at numbers among youth, there are, youth are trending away from supporting Israel. Online media is providing an avenue for education. And the fastest growing Jewish group in the United States is, I wouldn't call it anti-Zionist, but it's a group that supports BDS to That is the fastest growing Jewish group in the US and you're seeing Muslim American and Arab American leadership being challenged around these issues in ways they never have before. So I think we're looking at a generational shift and I would, and my goal is to just, or what I would like to see is just the BDS movement working among its natural allies. And that means working among communities of color people who've experienced the same kind of oppression as Palestinians. In the U.S., we've seen the rise of the Ferguson to Palestine movement, where frontline protesters from Ferguson, who organized around the killing of Michael Brown, went on a delegation to Palestine and saw apartheid firsthand. And I saw some of them speak in a loft in New York City. And we're talking about people who are experiencing kind of occupation in their own communities, who have really no reason to offer their solidarity to anyone else, who should just be demanding solidarity. And they're wearing Palestine bracelets. I mean, they recognize it. One of the things that happened was when they started going out and protesting and facing police violence that they've never seen before, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas and percussion grenades, Some Palestinian friends of mine who go out to Berlin every Friday to Nabi Saleh, like Rajai Abu Khalil and Mariam Barghouti, started tweeting at the people in Ferguson and telling them how to deal with the tear gas, to always run at the wind, to use milk to cleanse your eyes and not water. They taught them how to make gas masks out of Hawaiian punch bottles. They started just coordinating over these basic things, because they said, and they told them, we're the lab rats for the project that's being implemented to control you, but we know it. We knew it first as Palestinians. So, as my friend Ali Arameno says, the enemy works together, why shouldn't we? That's the big issue. The question is about the kind of growth of I would say, late pro-Israel support within Islamophobic and neo-fascist movements and within a kind of cultural phenomenon that pushes the clash of civilizations, like the film American Sniper. This is a really disturbing trend. And Netanyahu is doing all he can to capitalize on it. Netanyahu has always sought to portray Israel Under the Labor Party, when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister and Bill Clinton was president of the U.S. and Tony Blair was prime minister, the special relationship was based on shared values between democracies. Now Netanyahu has reoriented it under the banner of the clash of civilizations. He's cast Israel as a kind of fortified what Herzl called a rampart of civilization against a tide of barbarism. And his message is that if you allow Israel to fall, the rest of the West will fall as well. That's why he injected himself right into the center of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. That's why he issues these calls for Jews to leave Denmark. And it's incredibly dangerous and toxic. For us, I think it's incredibly dangerous for Jews, It implicates them in crimes for which they have no responsibility, which are committed by the state of Israel, as anti-Semites would like to see happen. But what it's done is it's promoted, it's made Israel a symbol of the neo-fascist movement. They have gone... And it's not me saying this. This is a factual observation. They have gone from waving the swastika to waving the Star of David, which is the most shocking thing for me to witness in my life as a Jew. I'm talking about the EDL, who are comprised of neo-Nazis from groups that operated within football hooliganism and now have adopted the Israeli flag as their symbol when they rally outside mosques in Birmingham and elsewhere. We saw an Israeli address a Pegida rally for the first time, a common Jewish-Israeli, and he told them, these Germans assembled by the thousands, never be ashamed of yourselves or even your past. I am an Islamophobe because I'm afraid of being killed and I'm afraid of being raped. In an Israeli accent, This is really an expression of Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel and who its natural allies are. And in the U.S. we saw the largest grossing film this year, one of the largest grossing films in history, American Sniper. I was singled out by Fox News' Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Bill O'Reilly as two of the greatest antagonists to the legacy of the American sniper Chris Kyle. and I correctly called him a pathological liar. He falsely claimed to have climbed up on top of the Superdome in New Orleans and shot 20 black looters during the Hurricane Katrina looting. This is just a complete lie and just shows what a psychopath this character was and we're now exalting him as a hero. And that shows that we're at a particular cultural moment that's very dangerous I thought, after the war in Iraq, that the neoconservative ideology that got us into the war, this idea of a clash of civilizations, which justified invading a country that had never harmed a hair on the head of any American or Brit, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, I thought that this would be discredited. What we're now seeing is a rehabilitation of this extremely dangerous ideology and a cultivation of a new form of this ideology, which is the flip side of the extremist ideology represented by ISIS. This, we have to look at the, to understand how dangerous this clash of civilizations ideology is, we have to read documents by ISIS-affiliated clerics like Naji Abu Bakr, and his administration of savagery, where he lays out the goals of ISIS and how it will build an Islamic state. And in the second phase, after the initial core is organized, which happened through al-Qaeda, in the second phase, he calls for polarization around the world through acts of extreme cinematic violence. You have to... divide the world between three groups. One is the truth-tellers, who to him are the Salafist, extreme Wahhabis, ideologues, the core cadre of ISIS. Two are people in between, who will decide which side they'll be on through fear. And then those who are the evildoers, who are, you know, everyone else, who fights the They need to encourage people to fight them in order to provoke this clash, and that's why we're seeing these Hollywood-style execution videos, including one that was apparently sort of manipulated. The killing of the 21 cops in Egypt was probably created through a studio, through studio effects. I'm not saying these men weren't killed, but it was apparently a bogus video. It's being used to spread fear, but to also incite this... to inspire the rise of this ideology in order to incite a holy war. That is what Netanyahu wants. It's what ISIS wants. Both benefit from it. And the rest of us lose. And when we look at Israel-Palestine in this picture, what is Israel-Palestine about? It's not about religion. It's not a fight over Islamic lands. It is not a fight over... the Palestinians are not fighting Jews or Judaism. This is a fight about rights, denial of rights, and it's a fight about colonialism. It's a classic decolonization struggle that we're witnessing. When a holy war scenario comes into play, the kind of rhetoric that we're using is completely overwhelmed subsumed in something else, and we not only become irrelevant, we become prey for those on both sides of this holy war. That's the danger of it. That's why you have to fight, in order to fight anti-Semitism, and in order to fight Islamophobia, you have to challenge Jaisal and ISIL Because JSO is inspiring and exploiting anti-Semitism around the world, and ISO is doing the same. And you have to resist the clash of civilizations by presenting a more humane, hopeful future. And that's becoming increasingly hard to do. I've got to tell you, I've never felt When the four people were killed in the supermarket in Paris, Mignon had a hard time covering up the glee and the joy

Speaker 4: comes from the neo-fascist movement, the same movement which, of course, threatens Muslims. And surely people like Theresa May and the British government are aware of that, but yet they look into this thing by implication, trying to link anti-Semitism to Islam. I mean, that's just not being challenged.

Max Blumenthal: Right, I mean, you notice that Zionists never challenge white anti-Semites. They have no, they seem to have, or extreme Zionists seem to have very little problem with that. The problem is with Palestinians who are ruled in Gaza by an Islamist authority, which Netanyahu seeks to equate with ISIS. So the most convenient thing to do is to cultivate why we're hearing the term Islamofascism mainstreamed by Manuel Valls in France, who recently said this phrase, which five years ago in the US was only heard by the extremists of the far Islamophobic right. It does relate to the Israel-Palestine crisis, this attempt to implicate Muslims in the crimes of Nazism and to portray antisemitism as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. We need to acknowledge that one of the main vehicles in the world right now for antisemitism is in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. We need to recognize that, but it's not the same kind of antisemitism as what we've traditionally seen in Europe. In many ways, it is a crude and conspiratorial reaction to Zionism and the destabilizing role that it's played, and the role of the United States in the Middle East. And as you said, what you said I think would shock a lot of people, but it's completely true, and it's what I felt about a lot of Americans after 9-11. particularly conservatives, was that 9-11 was the happiest day in their lives. It gave them meaning. It gave them a transcendent cause that they could absorb themselves into, and it helped solve the crisis of identity that they felt. Listen to, I mean, this goes well beyond Netanyahu or supporters of Zionists, and speaks to the crisis, the cultural crisis, and poverty, the cultural poverty of Europe. What was the phrase that everyone, the slogan that everyone rallied around after the Charlie Hebdo massacre? Just be Charlie. Why do you have to be something? You have to declare yourself part of something in order to solve your crisis of identity. And this wouldn't have been possible unless you were defining yourself against the other. Because you still don't really know what you are. And Charlie Hebdo was an most of its vitriol and mockery against the most marginalized group in Europe, which is a form of sadism. So this march, this Jusri Charlie march that we saw, with all of these fraudulent authoritarian leaders at the helm of it, had nothing to do with free speech. It was about solving the crisis of identity in Europe by defining the real European as free, something that is not the other, that is not Muslim, that is not colored, that is not foreign, that does not speak with an accent. And that is dangerous, but it's also what Netanyahu not only encourages, but seeks to represent Israel as the most severe incarnation of, because what other country in the world explicitly defines who can become a citizen along ethnic and religious lines and receives support from the West as such, it's Israel. And so that becomes the value of Israel and the reason to support Israel in this Europe.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I do have a question, but I want to make a comment. Haaretz actually had a very good cartoon after the Hebdo massacre, then the cartoonists around the world were drawing cartoons. The Haaretz cartoon was the one in which they had, whatever it was, 12 journalists killed in Paris, and 14... In Gaza. So they actually picked up exactly the point that you were talking about there. I mean, this was a scandal in Israel and various ultra-right Zionists wanted to go and kill people in Haaretz for doing this cartoon. So I think that was an interesting point. Private Eye was very good, their cover said, so they understood exactly what it was about. But the question really is on a smaller level. What happened with the media in this country, or what happened with the BBC in this country was very, very interesting. They did get to the story eventually that there was massive suffering, massive civilian casualties in Gaza. They eventually were telling that story. But what they did was they set the stage with this tremendous lie about where the attack on Gaza had come from, what it was all about. So the whole situation that you, reported on about how the Israeli government had concealed the actual facts about the murder of the settler teams so that they could whip up the hysteria which would justify the war that they wanted to have and were doing everything they could to provoke it. That was never, ever acknowledged or explained or anything. So the question is this, I mean there are an increasing number of journalists around who do understand that there is a story here which is different from the one that is being put out. What options do you think we as a movement have to try to prepare journalists not to write their stories for them, but to actually get them ready for this next war, which, you know, you're right, there will be another war. What we have to focus on is the opening week of it, where the story is going to be misreported. It'll be taken straight out of the Israelis. They'll just tell them, this is what's going on, and they'll repeat it until six days later, when their journalists on the ground in Gaza will start saying, no, that's not the story, and then they'll never acknowledge that they lied to us, And they'll never say it wasn't that at all. They'll just say people are dying. And they'll tell that story. And everybody came away this summer understanding that Palestinians got absolutely clobbered in Gaza. And that's why there was this tremendous outpouring of support and people wanting to do things.

Speaker 4: But they never, ever got the story of where it came from.

Speaker 2: So do you think there's an opening there that we might be able to do something with? No, that's a really good question.

Max Blumenthal: And I wrote a long piece recently. for Electronic Intifada, which was one of the few places I knew of that would publish it, based on information on the public record, which is now accepted as completely factual. Called Netanyahu knew teens were dead as it whipped up this frenzy. The war really started here, Hebron, with the kidnapping and killing of three teens by a rogue Hamas cell, not acting on orders from Hamas. It led to the national hysteria in Israel, but the The bodies of the teens weren't recovered for two weeks, even though they were sitting on the property of one of the suspects of the crime whose family had been interrogated over and over and over. His name wasn't supplied to the Israeli public. And when the teens were finally discovered, by then... So much hysteria had been whipped up in Israeli society that within 24 hours after the death to Arabs mobs came out in Jerusalem, Mohammed Abu Khader in East Jerusalem was burned alive, which led to rioting in East Jerusalem. Rockets began to fly from splinter factions in the Gaza Strip. Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip. And by then, the war had begun. It all could have been avoided if Israel had not deployed this cynical deception. And it was, I mean, you talk about the press. In Israel, the press was put under a gag by the Israeli military. Israeli reporters were not allowed to report details on the killing of the teens, or that when every reporter who was covering this story in Israel knew that the teens had immediately been killed. Remember when Israel was raiding the West Bank this summer in June? Remember Operation Brothers Keeper? The Israeli government, the Shin Bet, and the military knew that the teens had immediately been killed in the car by their kidnappers. They even had a phone call in which they could hear them being killed. They found blood, bullets in the car, and then they initiated Operation Brothers Keepers, sending the military through West Bank cities to do what? Shatter the Palestinian unity government and arrest all of Hamas's leadership in the West Bank, which Hamas and Gaza saw as an act of war. So... There had to be an analysis of this before the war started to stop the war, and it never took place. What I think needs to happen, and what I see the pro-Israel side doing fairly effectively is media monitoring. I used to work for a group in Washington called Media Matters for America that was created to monitor right wing media, Fox News, and to call out their lies and challenge them. And the pro-Israel forces had camera I'm sure they have something in the UK that functions similarly to Camera, but Camera basically terrorizes the New York Times and gets them to correct things that were not even incorrect. They even put a banner outside the New York Times building calling the New York Times like some pro-Palestinian rag, which is ridiculous if you've ever read anything Jodi Radorn or Isabel Kirchner write. There's no reason why this can't be done on our side. What's more, there's a website called Palestinian Media Watch. And there's memory. And what these do is try to portray Palestinian society as endemically anti-Semitic, as fanatically violent by reproducing clips from Palestinian TV. I'm sure you've all seen Farfur, who is like the Palestinian bumblebee.

Speaker 2: He's like, hey kids, let's go kill the Jews or something.

Max Blumenthal: It's like some clip from a TV show that showed in Gaza, which really in no way reflects the material kids are seeing, but does show a depressing reality. Meanwhile, if you look at Israeli society and Israeli media, I mean, it's not only nonstop incitement against Palestinians that you're gonna be witnessing, you're seeing youth being militarized and indoctrinated into a culture of militarization that's incredibly dangerous. This is not known in the West. There's no reason why there can't be a website easily searchable called Israel Excitement Watch. But there needs to be these tools for journalists to access that provide them with factual material and that challenge them. I don't believe journalists will do what we want if we ask them to or approach them nicely. I believe most of these people are not very intelligent. They work hard, but they're slow-witted. and many of them only understand force. When I say force, I mean they simply have to be forced to report the facts by having it shoved in their face, and if they don't do so, they have to be shamed. But we can't do it just through letter-writing campaigns. There needs to be resources and institutions. This movement has so little money, but it has so much man and woman power compared to the pro-Israel lobby, which is an astroturf movement supported very wealthy individuals with a few very committed activists. A little money would go a long way. And so if you have any money, you should think about giving it. to support this movement and to actually build some institutions within it. I think one of the most important institutions in the United States is Students for Justice in Palestine, which has organized successful divestment drives at a majority of University of California schools and will soon bring a vote to the University of California Regents to divest from Israel, which is unprecedented and this has all happened in the last five years or less.

Speaker 3: I've seen at other universities, I've got friends who are, you know, vice president, they've seen their society being torn down. Whether it be by JSOC or by the Chancellor of the University, they've been accused of things that are obviously not right, and obviously can't go through with it. They've been removed from the University. So, what kind of advice would you give to

Max Blumenthal: When you're being shut down, and I'm speaking as an American, I don't understand, even though we speak the same language, I don't understand this place as well as you do, so forgive me if I sound naive, but when you're being shut down as a member of a dissident group, dissident left-wing group particularly, your battle is for the hearts and minds of liberals who don't support BDS, but who support the concept of free speech, which is at the heart of liberalism. And these are people who are often professors, they're part of the university community, they're part of an academic community, but they need to be appealed to, and what I've seen in the U.S. from liberals is incredibly disappointing. For example, in the case of the Irvine 11, when 11 students at University of California Irvine for two minutes interrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who had been a spokesperson for the Israeli military during Operation Cast Lead, protested him and walked out. They were prosecuted with criminal charges. for doing so. And they were convicted. Their prosecution was conducted by the district attorney of the state of California, Tony Rakakis, who was having meetings with the Israel lobby throughout. Their prosecution cost tens of millions of dollars. And the dean of the UCLA Law School, who was one of the premier liberal civil libertarian said nothing until the end when he finally decided it was wrong. Erwin Cheromensky. It's people like that that should have been pushed right away to issue statements and should have been shamed for not doing so. I can talk forever about this case. I can talk about other cases, like the case of Stephen Salaita. Stephen Salaita is a friend of mine who was hired a And I think this case will illustrate some of the progress we've been making. Stephen Salaita was a professor of Native American studies who's Palestinian. So he brings a really unique approach. And he was working at University of... He was at Virginia Tech. He was a professor on a tenure track who got hired for a tenure track program. job at the University of Illinois in a department they really wanted to work for. His wife got hired, too, and they just had a son. The war in Gaza happened. He's on his way to work, and he starts tweeting about the war in Gaza. He's very upset. He's outraged. He tweets, even if Netanyahu wore a necklace and Palestinian teeth, the United States would continue arming. continue arming Israel. Which is kind of true. I mean, it's kind of maybe an extreme thing to say, but it's true. And it's something you should be able to say if you believe in freedom of speech. In any case, donor pressure came down on the University of Illinois. He was unhired. He was left unemployed. He's unemployed. His wife is unemployed. His child doesn't have health care. He was actually literally homeless. And this was a case that shocked a lot of people... I still think that liberal pundits and civil libertarians performed pathetically, but we saw so light to be defended by one of the chief civil libertarian voices of the New York Times. There have been a generally positive response to the idea that his freedom of speech was crushed and this isn't something we should sanction as a society. But we're dealing with a parallel phenomenon, which is the corporatization of the university, which always puts pressure on the left, where these corporate presidents come in, they raise tuition because the state isn't funding the university or states aren't funding the university enough. They hire tons of administrators to make cuts and to bust student unions and different drives on campus. And the people that they'd like to dislodge are tenured professors. according to the neoliberal plan, and I think it's important to organize beyond the issue of Palestine in the long run when you're dealing with this kind of situation, and make other students understand. As I said, I don't understand the situation in the British university system, but this is what's happening in the US. The corporatization of universities is a nightmare for academics who are presenting a dissident perspective or critical perspective, particularly on the Middle East. And so to make students understand that this is happening, that this is part of it, I think broadens your base when you're organizing for Palestinian rights. There's a documentary I recently saw that spells this out.

Speaker 2: It's excellent. It's called The Ivory Tower. It shows how...

Max Blumenthal: Universities are basically being run by corporations and it's destroying the tradition of progressivism. Finally, I think that being run off campus, it's horrible, but at the same time it elevates your profile in the media. Persecution always does that. They're trying to guarantee your silence It's not going to happen. People are always, as long as this nightmare is continuing, there's always going to be students following in your footsteps, and they'll gain traction when you didn't. I just don't see this issue going away, no matter what kind of draconian and repressive measures university administrators use.