On December 21, I joined the great Scott Horton, host of the Scott Horton Show and director of The Libertarian Institute, to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip. We explain the historical context necessary to explain why Hamas decided to perpetrate horrific atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7 and why Israel’s retaliatory “Operation Swords of Iron” in Gaza meets the definition of “genocide” under international law.

Here are some of the points that Scott and I covered:

• How satellite images of north Gaza show implementation on the ground of the Israeli government’s plan to make Gaza uninhabitable.
• How Israeli leaders have openly expressed their genocidal intent in Gaza.
• How Israel has always utilized Hamas as a strategic ally with the aim of blocking peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
• How Israel’s past rounds of war crimes in Gaza served only to strengthen, not weaken, Hamas.
• How Hamas’s aim with “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7 was to shatter the status quo and remind the world that the Palestinians are still there suffering under Israel’s systematic violation of their fundamental human rights for the entire 75-year existence of the Jewish supremacist state.
• How the thin veil has been removed, revealing the true face of modern political Zionism and the Jewish supremacist state of Israel.
• How Israel has always rejected the two-state solution, and now how Netanyahu is openly bragging about having always blocked peace negotiations.
• How UN agencies and international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem and Gisha, have all described Israel’s control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as an apartheid regime.
• How the US-led so-called “peace process” was the means by which Israel and the US always blocked implementation of the two-state solution premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict.
• How the only possible path to a peaceful resolution is for Israel to cease existing as a Jewish supremacist state.
• How for any movement toward peaceful coexistence must start with an end to the US government’s support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which now includes full US complicity in the crime of genocide.
• How it is up to we the American people to bring about that necessary change of making it politically infeasible for US support for Israel’s crimes to continue.
• How the neocons in power in Washington under the George W. Bush administration utilized the 9/11 terrorist attacks to push forward their pre-planned wars for regime change, including the devastating illegal war of aggression against Iraq.
• How Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians had peaceful relations in Palestine prior to the Zionist movement to reconstitute Arab Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state”; and how anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
• How the root cause of the conflict is the rejection of Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
• Why I have described what is happening in Gaza as “genocide”, how this contrasts with “ethnic cleansing” such as what happened in Palestine in 1948, and why Israel’s ongoing “Operation Swords of Iron” easily meets the definition of genocide under international law.

Here are a few of the resources specifically mentioned during the show:

• My book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• My December 12 article “Visualizing Israel’s Goal of Making Gaza Uninhabitable”
• Scott’s article with Connor Freeman “Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired”
• The Human Rights Watch report “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza”