This is a rush transcript. The copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez.
Authorities in Gaza say Israel’s massive bombardment has killed another 700 Palestinians in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll in the past 18 days to about 5,800 Palestinians. More than half of Gaza’s population has been displaced.
Israel continues to reject increasing international calls for a ceasefire or humanitarian pause. The World Health Organization is calling for more aid to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, where 12 hospitals and 32 health centers have had to close. The Ministry of Health in Gaza issued a statement today announcing: “We declare the total collapse of the health system and hospitals in the Gaza Strip.” The announcement came hours after the Indonesian hospital in the northern Gaza Strip went dark overnight due to the Fuel had run out. However, power has since been restored.
On Monday, Hamas released two Israeli women who had been held hostage. Nurit Yitzhak Cooper, 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, were arrested on October 7 in the Hamas attack that killed about 1,400 people in Israel. As the two women were released, Yocheved Lifshitz shook hands with one of her captors and could be heard saying “Shalom,” which means “peace” in Hebrew. Israel believes there are around 220 other hostages in the Gaza Strip, including the husbands of both women.
As Israel continues to threaten to launch a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, tensions are escalating on the border between Israel and Lebanon, where Israeli troops and Hezbollah exchange fire daily. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to devastate Lebanon if a new front emerges in the fighting.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] I can’t tell you now whether Hezbollah decides to fully enter the war. If Hezbollah decides to enter the war, it will long for the Second Lebanon War. They will make the biggest mistake of their lives and we will hit them with unimaginable force. It will have devastating consequences for them and the state of Lebanon.
AMY GOODMAN: In Washington, DC, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller warned Hezbollah not to escalate its attacks on Israel.
MATTHEW MILLER: That’s why we continue to make our messages very clear to everyone in the region who is hostile to Israel: if they are considering attacks, they should reconsider. And that’s why the president ordered the deployment of two aircraft carrier strike groups in the eastern Mediterranean.
AMY GOODMAN: We are currently joined by Rami Khouri, a Palestinian-American journalist and columnist with 50 years of experience in the Middle East. He is a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut and a former editor-in-chief of The Daily Star in Lebanon. He comes to us from Boston.
Rami, thank you very much for being with us. First, could you talk about what is happening on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon as tensions and violence escalate?
RAMI KHOURI: What is happening is something that has happened many times over the last 30 years, but this time it is a little different. Hezbollah has become a very powerful force with enormous capabilities in technology, missiles, intelligence, secrecy, etc. – in all aspects of warfare. Due to the mobilization of troops that fought in Syria to defend the Syrian regime, they are also a much larger force today than they were in the 2006 war. They have a lot of experience, a lot of technology and, more importantly, they are equipped with a regional, as they call it, resistance axis, namely Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, i.e. the Houthis in Yemen and smaller groups in Syria and Iraq. There is a constellation of forces of varying capabilities that call themselves the Axis of Resistance. And the northern front between Israel and Lebanon is now far more dangerous to Israel than before because of this regional capability in the event of war breaking out.
And Hezbollah’s strategy has also evolved. If it comes to that, it will not fight Israel alone. I would like to emphasize that I firmly believe that neither Israel nor Hezbollah want to start a war. You’ve done it before. They have both suffered great disruption and destruction. And they know that an all-out war now would be much more destructive and, above all, the civilian population and the national infrastructure would suffer. And Hezbollah has planned this into its strategy to hit key strategic, industrial, transportation and energy hubs that it can reach with its missiles. They have precision missiles. They are very good at secretly infiltrating Israel. You did it. I think they sent a drone over the Dimona nuclear facility a few years ago. So the tensions on the northern border with Israel and the southern border with Lebanon serve to send the message between Israel and Hezbollah that they are ready to fight if necessary, but they would rather not, so do They are maneuvers.
There is also an element of testing here. Hezbollah is very good at this. They are very serious strategic people, whatever you may think of them. So you don’t just buy new weapons and try to use them. They test things out. You see how Israel reacts. They make a little attack here, a little attack there. They’re sending some troops across the border. They send a drone. They make some rockets. And they see how Israel reacts. Israel has evacuated villages within five kilometers along its northern border, so this is already a major disruption. And that’s part of Hezbollah’s strategy. They want to continue to test, test, challenge and mock Israel. And they want to disrupt Israel’s basic social and economic functioning.
And the main goal in the long term is to destroy Israel’s excessive sense of power and dominance. And you know, Netanyahu is the best example of that. And Netanyahu is something of a Saturday morning cartoon character in the United States. He’s a tough guy, and he’s strong, and when challenged, he’ll beat anyone. And he said just yesterday that if there was war in Lebanon, they would destroy Lebanon, and they are already destroying Gaza. And Hezbollah’s strategy is to use its regional connections along with its own capabilities, along with strategic ambiguity, to not allow Israel, the US or anyone to know what it’s really going to do, to somehow undermine Israel’s trust to destabilize. but also to meet society’s sense of security. What happened in Gaza when Hamas attacked on October 7 was an incredible blow to the Israeli people’s confidence in the performance of its armed forces, which were quickly overrun, some of them dropping their weapons and fleeing.
So the northern border has all kinds of dimensions. The simplistic, cartoonish diplomacy and analysis expressed in most mainstream American media and government is that, as you know, there is a risk of war between Hezbollah and Israel on the northern border. It is far more complex and nuanced. But there is a serious threat to Israel that it may have to fight against five different people at the same time if there is a regional war, which I still think is unlikely, but it could happen. And that is one of the most important new factors, and it explains a little bit why Hamas has achieved what it has achieved: the coordination between these different groups of resistance fighters in the Arab world and in Iran. They coordinate very closely in terms of training, equipment, strategy, communication, you name it. So it’s a completely new situation in the north. And I think the United States and Israel are making the mistake of analyzing the situation based on the events of 2006.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rami Khouri, I wanted to ask you: Regarding Israel’s strategy: If Israel actually wants to prevent a regional war, why, for example? For example, how do you assess the repeated bombings at airports in Syria and what impact that could have? be anxious to spread the war?
RAMI KHOURI: Israel has been doing this for many years, bombing Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. And these are probably largely bombing units that are close to Iran or are involved in transporting equipment or people from Iran to these various outposts where the country has allies throughout the Arab world. That’s the assumption most people have. And these attacks are aimed at destroying this connection between Iran and its allies in Syria and other Arab countries.
However, it doesn’t work very well. You know, the Israelis are pretty sophisticated, but they’re also pretty simplistic and stupid when it comes to not learning the lessons of their own repeated strategy that doesn’t work. You know, they now say they want to wipe out Hamas and eliminate the threat, and they say if Hezbollah gets involved, they’ll wipe out Lebanon. They said that four or five times. They occupied Gaza. They occupied southern Lebanon. I was in Lebanon. I lived there for 20 years and was there during the 2006 war. So they did these things. They have caused great suffering in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. And where are the two strongest forces now that are challenging Israel in ways it has never been challenged before? They are in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Why? Because Israel, in its “tough” Joe Palooka cartoon approach to diplomacy, warfare and relations across the region, simply relies on its ability to defeat anyone and destroy countries. And you see it today in Gaza. It is incredible what they do by physically destroying the basic infrastructure and human needs of a society. But it doesn’t work. They don’t realize that a year or two later this just leads to greater resistance, with greater secrecy, higher levels of technology, more coordination and a greater sense of defiance.
And I should add here that, you know, Hezbollah and Hamas – Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which means the Islamic Resistance Movement. “Resistance” is Hamas’ key word. Hezbollah informally calls itself the resistance, the Muqawama. And resistance is a key – perhaps the key – driver of what these groups and others in the region are doing. And the Israelis don’t seem to understand this because they are the ones being resisted. And with resistance there is defiance. When the U.S. deployed the advanced naval task force a few weeks ago and warned Iran and its allies not to take action, the next day there were three or four small attacks on American targets or U.S.-allied targets in Iraq and Iraq Yemen and elsewhere. So defiance and resistance are two dynamics that are very important for people who oppose both Israel and the United States and others. And this needs to be taken much more seriously by anyone trying to analyze the region, and certainly by anyone trying to act politically, militarily or diplomatically, including the Israelis, the Americans, the Europeans and others.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And all the attention in recent days has been on what the Biden administration and the US are doing to support Israel, but there seems to be increasing disagreement in Europe about what is happening. We are seeing the European Union and various states within Europe calling for a humanitarian pause, essentially a short ceasefire – very different from the United States. I wonder what you think about that.
RAMI KHOURI: Well, I think Europeans are waking up to the fact that they are human beings and need to react like human beings, not like killing machines, which is what they have done recently by following the example of the US and Israel. The suffering caused in Gaza is incredible. And the deliberate, cruel intensification of the – it’s not just the pressure, it’s the outright oppression of Gaza, to try to starve it or starve it to death or stop the hospitals from operating because they don’t have electricity. This is a level of barbarism and cruelty that has probably not been seen since the Middle Ages. And the Europeans joined the Americans in the beginning and said, “Oh, Israel can defend itself.” And that’s one of the factors that social psychiatrists and political psychiatrists really need to analyze: why do Europe, the US, Canada and others have this draconian Israel’s measure to kill on an industrial scale so vehemently and unreservedly supported? never seen this region before? They killed 400 people two days ago, and yesterday they killed 700 people. And the world just sits and analyzes what is going to happen, there, here, or there. So there is a kind of lack of humanity. There is a lack of people who can analyze what is going on with their minds and hearts.
And I’ll tell you what the reason is. According to my analysis, it is quite simple. I’ve been reporting, analyzing and traveling in the Middle East for 55 years now, and I’m constantly coming and going to the United States. I’m here now. I think that has become very clear since May 2021, two years ago, when we had the uprising in Jerusalem and there were the fighting in Gaza and the anti-Israel protests across Palestine. It has become clear that this is now seen by Arabs and almost everyone in the global south as the last anti-colonial struggle. Israel is the last remnant of the racist colonialism of white settlers in Europe in the 19th century. They came, they expelled the Palestinians, who made up 93% of the population of Palestine, and they established an Israeli state. They were successful. But they only succeeded because they had enormous support from the white supremacist colonial British, and now they have it from the Americans. So, the colonial nature of this process – and it’s still going on. They are still in the West Bank. Bands of settlers are moving around and burning down Palestinian villages. They have displaced 500 people from their villages in the last month or two. And they are still engaging in settler colonial expansion and displacing indigenous peoples. This is now the driving force for the resistance against Israel and against the USA and the Europeans who have joined them. This is the world’s last anti-colonial struggle. And that’s why there are huge demonstrations all over the world when something like this happens.
You know, there are essentially four global forces that have significant political support around the world, and that is climate change; #MeToo, gender equality; Black Lives Matter, i.e. anti-racism; and Palestine. And Palestine is a global problem, and Americans and Israelis and most Europeans and now mostly Canadians are too blind to see that reality. So you think we can send more military forces and be tough on TV and it will work. But it doesn’t work. So it really is time for a reassessment. And of course the Americans learned that in Vietnam. They learned it in Afghanistan. They learned it in Iraq. But they haven’t learned. And the Israelis have not learned from their experiences either.
Therefore, resistance and defiance continue to drive people in Arab countries and elsewhere to resist what the Israelis are doing. And we’re not saying get rid of all Israelis or kill them. We say: Let us have a negotiated peace in which there is an Israeli state that is predominantly Jewish, as it is now, and a Palestinian state in which the refuge and exile of Palestinians is governed by international law, and we have our sovereign state have, and we live in peace. We made this offer. The Arabs have repeatedly made this offer to Israel, but it has no interest in it, because Zionism is a strategy, an ideology that seeks to create a Jewish state in a country that is 93% Arab. And it succeeded. And it doesn’t want peace with the Palestinians. They want all of the Palestinian land, exclusively for the Jewish people.
You know, the world supported the creation of an Israeli state, and after the Holocaust that was understandable. And not just the Holocaust, it was a century or more of white European and North American racism and anti-Semitism against Jews. Jews were horribly mistreated by white supremacists in Europe and North America. And they came to the Middle East because they knew they had always lived there. They were accepted in society as an integrated part of society. And the early settlers who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries up until about 1920, the Jews who came were very accepted in the region. There was no problem – they had always lived there – until around 1930 it became clear that they wanted to establish a state. They wanted to take over and drive out the Palestinian Arabs and create a Jewish state. And this coincided with the rise of the Nazis in Europe, which significantly increased the exodus of Jews from Europe. And of course the United States and Britain refused to take them in, refused to let the Jews in.
There are therefore several dimensions of historical responsibility. But the final point is that we are now at a stage where the world – we and the world increasingly – clearly sees this as an anti-colonial struggle aimed at a just peace, equal rights for an Israeli and a Palestinian state, etc .targets other Arab countries whose territories were devastated, annexed or occupied by Israel. The Israelis have no interest in that. The Americans have no interest in that at all. So this is a real dilemma. What the world needs to study more than just Hezbollah’s motivations is the nature of white supremacist colonialism in North America and Europe, because it still continues.