Interview: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

On November 17, I discussed the Israel-Palestine conflict for the Nate the Mutualist podcast (formerly Nate the Voluntaryist). It was a lengthy discussion, and we covered a lot of ground in considerable detail. We talked about the influence of Christian Zionism on the conflict, the creation of the “Jewish state” in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the consequences of the 1967 “Six Day War”, how the US-led so-called “peace process” served to block implementation of the two-state solution, how Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza was a direct consequence of Israeli policies, why Hamas called its 10/7 attacks in Israel “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”, and how Israel has responded to those atrocities by committing war crimes with genocidal intent in Gaza.

Fair warning, if you watch this interview, you are going to see me lose my composure. At several points while trying to describe the genocide in Gaza, I broke down and became emotional, struggling to get the words out to explain the horrific nature of Israel’s deliberate brutalization of the civilian population and many people’s unconscionable support for this massacre. In this state of distress, I expressed my inability to comprehend people’s inhumanity in supporting Israel’s actions and the nature of media reporting whereby we continue to hear the absurd claim that Israel does everything possible to avoid harm to civilians despite Israeli officials having been open and explicit about their genocidal intent. Once we stopped recording, I apologized to Nate for losing composure, and Nate kindly offered to edit that part out, but I told him not to because people need to know what’s happening.

As an additional note, at about that same point in the playback of the Odysee video, which was nearly an hour and a half in, I ran into a technical error while watching, with a message saying that playback was aborted due to a corruption or browser compatibility problem. I ended up having to download it and then skipping ahead a couple minutes to continue watching. (The download option is in the menu to the right of the “Share” button on the video’s page on Odysee.)

Topics we discussed include:

• How most of what people think they know about the conflict just isn’t true because Western media report on it through the lens of Western governments that have always been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
• What evangelical Christian Zionists believe about Israel, including their desire to bring about Armageddon, and their massive influence on US policy.
• How some of the most prominent outspoken critics of Israeli government policies are Jews.
• How the accusation of “anti-Semitism” for legitimately criticizing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians is the height of intellectual and moral cowardice.
• How the Palestinians weren’t responsible for the Holocaust but were made to pay the cost for Europeans’ crimes against Jews.
• How Palestine was a refuge for Jews relative to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, until the Zionist movement came along and ruined the friendly relations Arabs and Jews had by getting the British government to enforce a belligerent occupation to deny the Palestinians their right to self-determination while aiming to dispossess the Arabs of their land and ultimately to expel them.
• How Jews owned only about 7% of the land by the end of the Mandate while the majority Arabs owned more land in every district of Palestine, yet the UN General Assembly proposed the partition plan calling for 55% of Palestine to be reconstituted into a Jewish state.
• How the partition plan violated the UN Charter, with the committee responsible for coming up with the plan having explicitly acknowledged that the principle of self-determination was not applied to Palestine in order to accommodate the Zionist colonization project.
• How UN General Assembly Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, by which time over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes
• How the demographically “Jewish state” of Israel came into being through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine, with well over 400 Arab villages literally being wiped off the map.
• What the “Balfour Declaration” was and how it set Great Britain on the policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
• How the British promised to support the Arabs in their aim to free themselves from Ottoman rule and gain their independence.
• How to this day Israel has no legally defined borders despite this being one of the requirements of statehood under international law.
• How much of the religious Jewish community in Europe (as well as the indigenous Jewish community in Palestine) were actually opposed to Zionism, and why.
• How Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a large concentration camp mostly populated by refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing.
• How the US-led so-called “peace process” is the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution.
• How the whole “peace process” was premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law to the conflict.
• The important distinction between “a two-state solution” as proposed by Israel and the US under the “peace process” and the two-state solution grounded in international law.
• How the Palestinian Authority (PA) was created under the Oslo Accords to serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime.
• How the Palestinians’ recognition of the function of the PA and its corruption was a central reason why Hamas won democratic elections when it participated in the political process in 2005 and 2006.
• How the US and Israel responded by colluding with Fatah, the party of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas-led government.
• How Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza was a direct consequence of Israeli policies.
• Why Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt that started the June 1967 war was not “preemptive”.
• How one of the biggest problems is that so many people refuse to simply start their analysis from the premise that Jews and Arabs have equal rights, and that when one party violates the rights of another, it is wrong.
• How Israel openly announced its intent to commit genocide in Gaza in response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on 10/7 and has since been acting to execute that intent within the limits of political feasibility given the whole world watching.
• How Israel before its 2008-2009 “Operation Cast Lead” announced its intention to implement the IDF’s “Dahiya Doctrine”, which was an explicit policy of using deliberately disproportionate force to brutalize the civilian population; in other words, how Israel openly announced its intention to commit war crimes in Gaza.
• How Israel’s military operations in Gaza have been characterized by this deliberate use of disproportionate force, and how it has escalated that policy from the aim of punishing civilians to the aim of destroying Gazans as a people.
• How the US government is supporting the genocide in Gaza, including by blocking a ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council, thus preventing the delivery of urgently required humanitarian aid to the dying population of Gaza.
• The influence of my Christian upbringing on my perception of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
• How Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” published in 2002 and recently viral on TikTok explained that the US government’s support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian was one of the central grievances of his Al Qaeda terrorist organization that was responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.
• How in 2002 and 2003 before the US’s illegal invasion, I was able to see through the lies from the government and media that Iraq had stockpiles of and active programs to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
• How I have come to accept the label “independent journalist” although viewing myself as more of an open-source information analyst, and how I have managed to remain total independence since I first started doing this work.
• Why Hamas called its 10/7 attacks in Israel “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”, and how it is related to Christian Zionism and the plan by Jewish extremists to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque to rebuild a Jewish temple at the site where one had existed in ancient times.
• Why I think the 10/7 attacks were an act of utter desperation on the part of Hamas, the aim being to shatter the status quo and completely change the course of history.
• How the Netanyahu government in Israel had been using Hamas as a strategic ally to keep the Palestinian leadership divided and prevent any kind of negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
• How the whole purpose of Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement plan”, which was the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005, was to shift resources from Gaza to solidify its illegal occupation and settlement regime in the West Bank and to ensure an end to efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement.
• How Israel has been maintaining an illegal blockade of Gaza for 17 years for the explicit purpose of collectively punishing the civilian population.
• How the claim is constantly seen in the media that Israel does its utmost to protect civilians from harm despite open and explicit declarations by Israeli officials of their intent to brutalize the civilian population of Gaza and to utterly destroy them as a people.
• How Israel uses the term “human shields” as a euphemism to mean any Palestinian civilians killed by virtue of their being in Gaza, which bears no relationship to the term’s meaning under international law.
• Why I am no longer religious.
• The importance of critical thinking and being willing to question your own beliefs.
• The lesson I learned from my experience trying to warn family and friends back in 2002 and early 2003 that the US government was lying about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction (WMD) wage an illegal war of aggression for the purpose of regime change.
• The sage advice I received at that time from William Blum, author of Killing Hope and Rogue State, after asking him how to get through to people who seem uninterested in the facts.
• Why it is moral cowardice for Americans to remain silent in the face of an ongoing genocide that is being supported by the government that claims to represent us.

Here are some additional resources mentioned during our discussion:

• My 2016 debate with Rafi Farber about whether the means by which Israel was established in 1948 was legitimate
• My debate last month with Alan Futerman about whether Israel is justified in committing war crimes in Gaza in response to Hamas’s 10/7 atrocities in Israel
• My book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict