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.
The United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. In Tuesday's vote, 153 nations approved the resolution, 23 abstained, and only 10, including the United States and Israel, voted no. Although non-binding, the UN vote is another indication of the United States' increasing isolation as it continues to support Israel's attack that has killed over 18,000 Palestinians in just over two months. The vote came just days after the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, President Biden has issued his harshest criticism yet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During a donor event in Washington, DC, Biden criticized what he called Israel's “indiscriminate bombing” of the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian UN diplomat Nada Tarbush will soon join us. But let's first turn to a speech she gave to the United Nations in Geneva in November. It went viral.
NADA TARBUSH: Israel said something that should make you all shudder. It basically said, “I can kill every single person in Gaza.” The 2.3 million people in Gaza are either terrorists, terrorist sympathizers or human shields and therefore legitimate targets.” According to Israel, every person falls into one of these three categories – a child, a journalist, a doctor, a UN employee, a newborn in an incubator. And so, according to Israel, it can kill them and then have the audacity to come into this room and tell the world with a straight face, “We act in accordance with international law.”
The deaths of every single one of the more than 11,350 people killed last month, be they children, journalists, UN staff, the sick or the elderly, were justified, according to Israel. Think about it for a moment and let it give you pause. Anyone who advocates this distorted logic has no shred of humanity, no sense of morality and no knowledge of legality.
But guess what: your carpet-bombing explanation isn't going to convince. People are not fools. The people in this room are experienced diplomats who are well-read, knowledgeable about history, and many of them have seen your government make the same arguments during your six previous military aggressions against Gaza over the past 15 years. They have seen you resort to collective punishment before, targeting Palestinian children, journalists, medical workers and aid workers. They have seen you forcibly relocate our communities, colonize our lands, demolish our homes, and evict families from their own properties since October 7th and for the 75 years before.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian UN diplomat Nada Tarbush said this on November 17, almost a month ago. At this point, the death toll from the Israeli attack in Gaza was about 11,000. Today there are over 18,600.
Nada Tarbush joins us now in an exclusive interview from Geneva, where she serves as an advisor to the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations in Geneva.
I wonder, Nada Tarbush, if you can respond first to the UNGA, the UN General Assembly's overwhelming, albeit symbolic, call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip in response to the US veto in the UN Security Council on Friday. At the same time, it looks like this , as if President Biden were to step up his criticism of Netanyahu and the Israeli bombings and criticize indiscriminate bombings. If you can just accept that?
NADA TARBUSH: Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me, Amy.
As for the vote of the UN General Assembly, I would first like to say that this resolution was submitted to the General Assembly after the United States vetoed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Security Council last Friday. And so States resorted to the tools available in the United Nations to bring the discussion to the General Assembly, whenever the Security Council becomes deadlocked, on a question of international peace and security. So that's what happened. And not surprisingly, the majority voted for an immediate ceasefire.
The importance of this vote was not only that it shows that the support that Israel had, particularly from many Western states, for its military attack on Gaza is waning, and that even staunch supporters of Israel like Australia and Canada are now waning, we say need a ceasefire. So this shows that Israel and the United States are isolated. The General Assembly, the world parliament and the United Nations' most democratic body, has declared: “We overwhelmingly want an immediate ceasefire.”
At the same time – and here you sometimes feel that there is a parallel reality – you hear the United States voting against – you see the United States voting against this resolution, and at the same time words from the Biden administration about indiscriminate bombing of Israel . So my comment would be that in the US government we believe in actions and not words. I heard words at the United Nations that anyone would have thought were a good thing from the Americans, like “We care about the Palestinian civilians.” But that won't work as long as we see the United States Sending military aid, billions of dollars in military aid, using Americans' tax money that they could have used for other things like homelessness and health care, and sending that aid to help Israel commit genocide. Therefore, I am not convinced that the Biden administration has changed course. It still votes against a ceasefire, vetoes Security Council resolutions, sends aid and gives Israel the diplomatic and political protection it needs.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nada Tarbush, I wanted to ask you: Before October 7, both Israel and the United States believed that the Palestine issue had been forgotten by the rest of the world. I wonder how you understand how the world has come together in support of the Palestinian cause over the last two months.
NADA TARBUSH: I would say that the world has never forgotten Palestine, unless by “the world” we mean the powerful, militarized states like the United States and other European states or other states from the global north, let's say. The international community has year after year demanded a solution, an end to the occupation, an end to apartheid, an end to the settlement colonization project that we see in the West Bank. And so it is only a handful of powerful states that have sought to remove Palestine from the agenda and block any path to enforcing the rights of the Palestinian people under international law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you also talk about your own family history in relation to Palestine? Her family fled in 1948. Because in your powerful speech you also talked about what the relations between Jews and Palestinians were like before the founding of Israel.
NADA TARBUSH: Yes absolutely. My family has been a refugee since 1948. My father came from a village near Jerusalem, one of the more than 450 villages that were completely destroyed during the Nakba, the catastrophic events that led to the massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the world's refugee crisis. And my mother also comes from a city that became part of Israel after 1948.
The history of Palestine is diverse. Historically, it is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country that has hosted and welcomed all faiths and welcomed people of different ethnicities. It has always been a culturally diverse mosaic. And that's why it's not surprising to me that many people don't realize that this country can be transformed into an ethnocracy, into a state that is only for one people. And you have seen that even in the early days of Zionism there were many Jewish intellectuals, such as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud and others, who were against the idea of an exclusively Jewish state in the historic land of Palestine. They realized that this would lead to problems such as ethnic cleansing and the disregard or even violation of the rights of the indigenous population.
AMY GOODMAN: In your speech to the United Nations in Geneva, you referred to these comments in March by the far-right Israeli settler in the West Bank, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
BEZALEL SMOTRICH: [translated] There is no Palestinian. There is no Palestinian people. …Do you know who is Palestinian? I am Palestinian.
AMY GOODMAN: So this is Netanyahu's government's finance minister, Smotrich, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian,” and for people, in case you're having trouble hearing this, “I'm a Palestinian,” he said. I was wondering if you could answer.
NADA TARBUSH: Yes I can. Again, this is not a surprising narrative. It's a narrative we've heard for decades, that Israel doesn't want a Palestinian state. Golda Meir, a former Israeli prime minister, said that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. Palestinians have been dehumanized since the founding of Israel and even before, in order to justify this settler colonial project. And there was the myth of a country without a people for a people without a country. But there were people on this land, and they are the Palestinian people.
And when we hear these kinds of racist and colonialist slogans, it is consistent with what Israel has been doing all these years, which is to try to get rid of the largest possible number of Palestinian residents from Palestine, the West Bank, from Gaza, and so on trying to replace them with Israeli settlers. So they just say explicitly what they did. And I think that what we're seeing now in Gaza is the continuation of this policy of mass ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and trying to get rid of the Palestinian population in order to take over the country.
AMY GOODMAN: You also notice in –
NADA TARBUSH: And so, you know, even the Biden – please.
AMY GOODMAN: You also point out in your speech in September that during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu held up a map of what he called the new Middle East that did not include Palestine. The West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza were not in sight. Explain what he's proposing, and then President Biden is now telling this group of donors that he's criticizing Netanyahu and saying he's doing this in Gaza because he doesn't want a Palestinian – a two-state solution.
NADA TARBUSH: In fact, yes. So, again, this is not the first time that the Israelis have shown maps in which the West Bank and Gaza Strip are completely deleted and they are incorporated into Israel and call them Israel. I mean, that was done consistently. Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, as – West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem were annexed. In the West Bank there is an annexation policy with the construction of settlements, the wall and the entire settler colonial infrastructure. And a similar project is underway in Gaza. And Gaza and the West Bank have been occupied for 56 years. The dispossession of Palestinians has been going on for 75 years. It is an ongoing Nakba. It is a continuation of mass ethnic cleansing and annexation policies.
Now, the problem with formally annexing these territories is that they would have to give voting rights to the Palestinians whose land they would annex. Instead, they are trying to get rid of the Palestinians before annexing the country. But the plan was clear, and it is a plan to take over what remains of Palestine, which is very little that remains of historic Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza make up 22% of historic Palestine. This has declined dramatically with settlements. And they try to take over the little bits that are left.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Nada Tarbush, Advisor to the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations in Geneva. This is her first broadcast interview since the video of her UN address on the Israeli bombing of Gaza, which she gave in Geneva, went viral.
We'll soon speak with Texas Congressman Greg Casar as President Biden appears to be giving in to Republican demands for tough border measures in return for funding the war in Ukraine and beyond. Back in 20 seconds.