Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-05-15 Friday

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Democracy Now! Friday, May 15, 2026

From New York, this is Democracy Now. Many years have passed in the Nakhva. And every few years, a war comes our way, yet we remain steadfast. This last war, the one on October 7th, I feel this is the biggest war in the history of Palestine. Why? Because of destruction is immeasurable. Today marks this 78th anniversary of what Palestinians call Nakhba Day. the commemoration of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes during Israel's founding in 1948. We'll speak with Palestinian writer and analyst Mohamed Chehada about Gaza today, where Israel now occupies 60% of the territory.

Most of the population has been displaced. His latest article, Gaza's disarmament trap. Then renowned Israeli-American Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov joins us in New York. His new book, Israel, What Went Wrong? I wrote this book as I was watching what was happening in Gaza, and I felt it was incumbent on me both to try to understand what is going on there and to try to understand the origins of this event going all the way back to the establishment of the state of Israel. And we'll be joined by Haaret's journalist, Gidon Levy, from Tel Aviv. All that and more coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now. Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The House of Representatives has rejected another effort to rein in President Trump's ability to wage war against Iran. On Thursday, House members failed to advance an Iran-war powers resolution on a tied vote of 212, to 212. After Democrat Jared Golden of Maine joined most Republicans in opposition.

It was the third failed attempt by House Democrats to end Trump's attacks on Iran. This comes as NBC News reports the Pentagon's considering renaming Operation Epic Fury, Operation Sledgehammer, in a bid to circumvent a 60-day limit under the War Powers Act for the president to order military strikes without Congress.

approval. On Thursday, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he dismissed reports of civilian deaths from U.S. attacks on Iran. This is Cooper being questioned by New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The subject of civilian casualties is a particular passion of mind. We pay attention to it. We follow all the procedures and have gone above and beyond to, in my case, personally warn the Iranian people of several instances. during conflict where they were being potentially used human targets. If they've been warned, how did we then bomb 22 schools?

There is no indication that we have that that has been corroborated. How many schools have we bombed? There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions. So how do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals? There's no way that we can corroborate that. No indication of that whatsoever, Senator. Foreign ministers from the BRICS group of nations have gathered in India's capital, New Delhi, with the issues of Iran and Strait of Hormuz high on the agenda.

On Thursday, Iran's foreign minister, Basarachi, addressed the summit, appealing to BRICS countries to help resist U.S. and Israeli attacks. To virtually everyone in this room, our resistance against U.S. bullying is not an unfamiliar battle. So many of us encounter a slight very important. of the same repugnant coercion. It is high time for us to jointly step up and work towards making clear that those practices belong in the dustbin of history. Today, our nations are closer to one another than ever before, and we cannot ignore

the common and dangerous challenge we all face. President Trump's departed China after a two-day state visit to Beijing, where he met with President Xi Jinping. Their meeting failed to secure a break. through in efforts to forge a USP still with Iran or to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. On the flight back from China, President Trump told reporters he has not yet decided on whether he will move forward with a new $14 billion arms package for Taiwan. During their talk, she warned Trump that differences over Taiwan could lead to conflict between

China and the United States. CIA director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on Thursday. to meet with Cuban officials as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on Cuba. Ratcliffe's trip came a day after Cuba announced its run out of diesel and fuel oil due to the U.S. blockade and sanctions. For decades, the CIA has carried out covert operations inside Cuba from orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion to repeatedly attempting to assassinate the late leader Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is reportedly taking steps to indict Castro's 94's 94.

year old brother Raul, who served as Cuban president from 2008 to 2018. In related news, more than 30 House Democrats have signed a letter urging the Trump administration not to take military action against Cuba and to lift the blockade. On Lebanon's national news agency reports an Israeli double-tap strike on a car earlier today killed two men and damaged three ambulances. It followed an overnight bombing by Israel that killed four people in a house in the town of Haruf. UNICEF reports at least 59 children in Lebanon have been killed or wounded by Israeli strikes over the past week, despite a U.S. brokered ceasefire that was supposed to have taken effect in April. The latest attacks came as Lebanese and Israeli officials in Washington began a third round of U.S. broker direct talks on Thursday,

Hezbollah is not participating. In Jerusalem, Israeli nationalists chanted death to Arabs and may your villages burn on Thursday as they joined a state-sponsored march near the Damascus Gate in the old city to mark the 59th anniversary of Israel's capture and annexation of East Jerusalem. Several journalists were harassed and assaulted as mobs of Israelis attack Palestinians in Jerusalem's Muslim court or vandalizing storefronts and throwing items at bystanders. This comes as the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, said Thursday. Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 70 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank in East Jerusalem since early 2025, amounting to around one child killed per week. Another 850 children were injured by UNICEF by Israeli attacks during that period. This is UNICEF spokesperson, James Elder.

March 2026 saw the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the last 20 years. And we're seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated. So documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten, and children pepper sprayed. Today, Palestinians around the world are commemorating what they call Nakhba Day. Nakhba means the catastrophe in Arabic. It was 78 years ago that over 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced from hundreds of towns and villages in Palestine and thousands more killed during the creation of the state of Israel. After headlines, we'll speak with Mohamed Shahada, writer and analyst from Gaza. Then we'll speak with Israeli-American Holocaust scholar, Omer Bartov, his new book, What Went Wrong, Israel?

In Ukraine, a Russian missile attack on a Kiev apartment building has killed at least 24 people. It was one of the deadliest Russian attacks on Kiev since the war began. The dead included three children. Another 47 people were injured. Meanwhile, a massive fire broke out at one of Russia's largest oil refineries following a Ukrainian drone attack. A separate drone strike targeted a Russian gas plant. The head of the U.S. Border Patrol resigned Thursday, effective immediately. Michael Banks had served as Border Patrol chiefs since January 2025, overseeing the Trump administration's violent mass-beat deportation efforts and the deployment of mass federal agents to U.S. cities. In a statement, Banks said his sudden departure would give him, quote, time to enjoy family and life, unquote.

His resignation came just weeks after. the Washington Examiner reported banks had bragged to Border Patrol colleagues about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade, prompting an investigation into the claims that ended abruptly last year while Christine Noam served as Homeland Security Secretary. A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has ordered the Trump administration to return a Colombian woman to the United States after ICE deported her to the Democratic Republic of Congo in April, a country to which she has no ties.

District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that Adriana Maria Kido Zapata had likely been sent to the DRC unlawfully since Congolese officials refused to accept her on medical grounds. She was sent to the DRC anyway. In February, a federal judge ruled that so-called third country deportation. or unlawful violations of due process. But in March, an appeals court put the ruling on hold while the Trump administration continues legal challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court's blocked a lower court ruling that would have cut off nationwide mail and telehealth access to the abortion medication Mepaphypristone. The seven to two ruling on the court's shadow docket preserves the FDA's

2023 policy that lifted a requirement to prescribe Mephypristone in person. The ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project said in a statement, quote, while it's good news that for now, patients can continue to get this safe medication by mail and at pharmacies, as they have for more than five years, we all know abortion opponents are continuing their unpopular and baseless attacks, unquote. ABC News is reporting President Trump is set to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a taxpayer-funded $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies of Trump who claim they were improperly targeted by the Biden administration. Under the plan, recipients of the money could include individuals charged in the January 6th insurrection and entities associated with, with President Trump himself.

Meanwhile, Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin is introducing a package of anti-corruption bills aimed at putting new checks on the White House. A jury in Chicago has ordered Boeing to pay nearly $50 million to the family of Samia Stumo, which had filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Boeing. Stumo was killed in 2019 aboard a Boeing. 737 Max jet in Ethiopia. The crash came months after another Boeing 737 max crashed in Indonesia. Together, the crash has killed 346 people. Samyostumo was a 24-year-old working in global health development. Her mother, Nadia Miloran, is running for Congress for a second time as an

independent in Massachusetts. Samyostumo was the grand niece of Ralph Nader. In Bolivia, indigenous groups, minors, and unions are leading nationwide protest strikes and roadblocks demanding the resignation of the Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz amid the country's worsening economic and fuel crisis. The protest began over a new law that would have undermined peasant and indigenous land rights. The law was repealed on Wednesday, but the protests are continuing. We demand the immediate resignation. of this treasonous and incapable government because they want to govern us with decrees. We won't allow that. We'll fight to the death, brothers, to remove this treasonous government.

Onward to victory. And in Oklahoma, Richard Glossop walked out of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on Thursday after nearly 30 years on death row. For a murder, he insists he did not commit. Glossop previously faced execution nine times and ate his last meal three times before last minute intervention saved his life. He was freed after a judge granted him a retrial and allowed his release on a half million dollar bond. Richard Glossop spoke briefly to reporters outside the prison that had held him since 1998. I'm just thankful for my wife and my attorneys and just happy.

She's really happy. Extremely, extremely grateful. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court rule glossop was entitled to a new trial due to errors in his original prosecution. Oklahoma's Attorney General says he's planning to retry glossop for murder but would not pursue the death penalty. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now. Democracy Now.org. Coming up, we talk about Israel and Palestine. Stay with us.

Massive will, performed by ML in our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez in Chicago. Hi, Juan. Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. Today, Palestinians in Gaza and around the world are commemorating what Palestinians refer to as Nakhba day. Nakhba means the catastrophe in Arabic. It was 78 years ago that some 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed from hundreds of towns and villages in

Palestine, thousands more killed during the creation of the state of Israel. In Gaza, Palestinians marked the grim anniversary amidst reports that Israel dramatically increased its attacks on Gaza during April. Despite a U.S. brokered ceasefire last October and the Occupied West Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund, said, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 70 Palestinian children since early last year, amounting to around one child killed per week. Another 850 children were injured by Israeli attacks during this past year. In 1948, Mustafa Al-Jazar was just five years.

years old when he had to flee his village of Yibna, now Yavna in Israel. He's now 83 and lives in a tent in Kanyunas, Gaza. In 1948, I was psychologically at ease, in my land, in my home, with my neighbors, my siblings, my parents. Our life was comfortable, comfortable, and not miserable. When we were displaced from Yibda in 1948, we entered hell. searching for water and food until the United Nations Refugee Agency set up tents and houses. For us, but even then, we had some kind of stability, not like today. Today, until this very hour, is harder, much harder than our displacement in 1948, a thousand times harder. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Thursday that Israel is now occupying 60% of the Gaza Strip.

The future of Gaza and its people rest now with the international so-called Board of Peace, which was created and is chaired by President Trump and has been recognized by the UN. The Board of Peace lead envoy for Gaza said earlier this week that the Faye's ceasefire deal was stalled over Hamas, not yet disarming, but that Hamas could still have a political role in Gaza. For more, we're joined by Mohamed Shihada, writer and analysts from Gaza, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His recent piece for 972 magazine is headlined Gaza's disarmament trap. Muhammad, thank you so much for being with us.

Can you talk about the significance of this day and then go into what you call Gaza's disarmament trap? Thank you so much, Amy, for having me back. So the significance of today is twofold. Number one, Israel made a bit a gamble, what they called the old. of Palestinians will die and the young will forget they will move on. And today marks that in Palestinian memory this day is still alive. We know our villages exactly where our homes that we were pruded from and we can locate all over on a map.

We still hold to even the keys of the homes from which we were expelled and our properties that were stolen by Israel. You see basically Israel tried since 1948 until today to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there resilient. And the second thing that it marks is continuity of the Nakhba. The Nakhba is not a single passing event. It is a process that started in 1948, deliberately designed to ethnically cleanse the maximum amount of our historic Palestine of its Palestinian population,

destroy our ability to exist as a group, and establish instead Israeli-Jewish presence on our lands, villages, and even the graves of our forefathers. every act that you saw in Gaza over the last two years, every atrocity, the mass rape, the destruction of entire cities and villages, the wiping out of everything, the systematic capturing of people as human shields and hostages, the destruction of the basic infrastructure that holds their ability for organized human existence to last in Gaza. All of it started in 1948. The difference between then and now are two things. Israel has accelerated it, ten times. as aggressively, 10 times as viciously in Gaza. The number of people they murdered is over 10 times those that were killed in 1948. And number two, Israel stopped being sort of in denial mode about it. So in 48 and the following years, Israel kept denying the NACBA, the existence of Palestinians as a group, as a nation. They kept saying that we fled out of our own homes, out of our own will. Now it's no longer denial. Now this veneer of civility has fallen off.

the mask was taken off. And now it's a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians. The word Lahashmid annihilate genocide is the one that I heard most repeated by Israeli pundits, leaders, politicians, members of parliament, ministers, and even the prime minister when he invoked Amalik, basically a biblical reference to a population that should be completely exterminated. Now the other issue here is what you described as the the disarmament trap, the headline of my article. The idea there is that for the last six months, there was this Trump deal of 20 items.

Only one item was ever fulfilled. That is the release of Israeli captives and hostages in Gaza. Nothing else. Even the reciprocal release of Palestinian captives, it was never fulfilled. There is still about 300 Palestinian children that are held in Israeli dungeons and close to 100 Palestinian women

that are held hostage, never released. Israel has been bombing Gaza every day. Food has been restricted. Israel was supposed to allow temporary shelters, homes, and new government into Gaza. They didn't allow any of this. So basically, in the midst of the Iran war, the U.S. and Israel thought that they can impose new conditions on Palestinians, on Hamas, basically asking for surrender or else the war, the military campaign, the genocide, would be resumed to full force.

So Nikolai Miladinov, the high representative of the Trump, so-called Board of Peace, went to meet with Hamas's leadership in Egypt, along with other Palestinian factions. And he proposed the following, that they need to disarm completely, unilaterally, thoroughly, unrequitedly. And after 250 days of that full disarmament of everything, down to nail clippers, down to pepper sprays, down to batons, pistols, clashing coves, after all of it is gone, 250 days later, Israel would withdraw from Gaza. It's like a pie in the sky, trust me, bro, kind of sentiment. And he told them that if you don't accept that capitulation dictate, that Israel would be absolved of all of its obligations under the Trump deal, and that they would be given a free hand to resume the military operations in Gaza. Muhammad, could you talk about the situation in Gaza right now where Israel is still occupying more than half of the territory and forcing two million people into just a sliver of land along the coast? So basically, as you mentioned, Israel has occupied and retains over 60% of Gaza that is fully depopulated.

Not a single soul is allowed there. It's way deadlier. It's marked by what is called the yellow line. And it's way deadlier than the Berlin Wall. Anyone even coming in close proximity or 300 meters away from that invisible line that is not marked on the ground is shot immediately. There was a debate in the Israeli government about shooting children that are playing near that line that would accidentally come close to the line. And an Israeli minister put a concrete example of children coming close to the line riding donkeys or horses or mules. And one Israeli minister, Itamar

Bingvir said, shoot them, shoot them, shoot to kill. And another Israeli minister, Doody M. Salem asked him a technical question in return. He said, who should we shoot first, the donkeys or the children? That is the level of atrocity with that yellow line. There's this famous Moshe Diyan, the Israeli defense minister, this famous quote from 1967. in which he said, we will tell Palestinians, we have no solution. Whoever wants to live here shall live like dogs, otherwise they should leave. In fact, after the Israeli genocide in Gaza, people in there are treated way worse than animals, way worse than dogs. There were headlines about Germany rescuing donkeys in the middle of the genocide instead of any medical evacuation of cancer patients or children, double-emptied children.

There is the Israeli protocol that allows them to shoot to kill every single living soul in Gaza. aside from animals. If it's a dog, you're only allowed to shoot it if it poses a threat to your life. If it's any other Palestinians, shoot to kill freely. That is the protocol. The other dimension is basically the entire population squeezed in less than 40%, pushed increasingly towards the sea, the ocean, without any basic necessities for human survival.

Medicine, it's heavily restricted. Tents banned. Temporary shelter is not allowed. Even the new government that's supposed to take over from Hamas remains a government in exile in Egypt. So the overall result, and this is not polemic, I mean this literally, the luckiest person that I know in Gaza, my friend Anas, I hope he's safe. His daughter is about four years old. Anas is living in a home in a destroyed, bombed out building. It's a seven-story residential building. He lives on the first floor. The apartment doesn't have any doors or windows. Most of the walls have either

fully collapsed or partially collapsed. There is a huge hole in the ceiling in the living room. room and in the floor. It's from a 2,000-pound Israeli bomb. They dropped on Gaza, on that tower in specific, and it didn't explode. The area is infested with mice, rats, scorpions, cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes. So Anna sleeps at night with one eye open to prevent rats and mice from biting and nibbling at his daughters, his only daughter's feet and hands. The disease infestation in there, the disease outbreak, is so endemic. that every single person I know in Gaza has had food poisoning, intestinal diseases, diarrhea, fever, almost 10 times within the last six months.

And Anas is considered the luckiest person that I know there, although that building might collapse at any second. It was bombed from the top, bombed from the bottom, bombed from both sides. It's riddled with holes. But at least he's living in a building that's still standing. The entire population, over 90% of them, are living on the street in plastic wrappers. It's not even a tint. It's a plastic wrapper. And Israel doesn't allow tins into Gaza,

actual tins that are capable of protecting the population from the rain or the heat, because they said the tiny amount of aluminum that goes into supporting the tint structure might be recycled by Hamas and turned into weapons of mass destruction. It's lunatic. So it is the Moshi Dian policy. Let them live as dogs or under creatures worse than dogs. Otherwise, they should leave. And, Muhammad, I wanted to ask you,

What's been the response of Hamas and the other resistance groups to this demand of a total disarmament? The response was basically twofold. Number one, they said, we cannot talk to you about phase two of the Trump plan if phase one was never fulfilled. How do we trust that Israel would fulfill phase two if they violated every single close of their obligations under the first phase? the humanitarian aid, the issue with seizing military operations, bombing, the issue with seizing more land, withdrawal. If Israel reneged on every single one of those commitments, what would stop them from reneging and violating other commitments that you put on the table? So that was number one. Number two, they said, we are willing to engage in a process of decommissioning,

decommissioning over the Northern Ireland model. In Northern Ireland, if you might recall, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. the full disarmament of the IRA and the Ulster's was not completed until a decade later. What happened to the weapons in those 10 years is basically a strict policy of mutual cessation of hostilities. All weapons were stored in warehouses, a strict policy of no use, no production,

no display of any weaponry. All of it is hidden away. And the weapons functioned as a card of leverage or an insurance card, a guarantee that the deal would be fulfilled. the bottom line of that Northern Ireland agreement was that decommissioning was not the prerequisite, the precondition to peace. It was the outcome of it. And for Hamas and every other Palestinian faction in Cairo, they said, we are willing to destroy all of this weaponry, throw it in the ocean, give it to Israel, give it to whoever. If we get a Palestinian state, if we get a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood, that answer was slammed by Israel and by the U.S.

as quote maximalist, extremist, unrealistic, lunatic. The realistic proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before. My last question to you, Muhammad, is about the Israeli government threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. After the paper published a column by Nicholas Christoph, headlined the silence that meets the rape of Palestinians.

Christoph detailed what he described as a, quote, pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children, carried out by soldiers, settlers, interrogators, and prison guards. Nicholas Christoph also wrote about reports alleging Israeli authorities have used dogs to sexually abused prisoners. Christoff interviewed Palestinian victims and cited other reports, including findings from the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the New York Times, quote, defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, unquote. The New York Times defended Christoph's reporting and said Israel's threat is, quote, part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism. I'm going to also ask the Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust, Omar Bartov, about this in our next segment.

But Muhammad Shahada, we're going to end with you on this. Thank you. Can you respond? So basically with the sexual assault on Palestinians, it goes back as far as 1948. You have admission on the record by David Bengorian, Israel's founding father, of multiple rape incidents against Palestinians. You have Benny Morris, Israel's top historian, that documented systematic rape of Palestinians in 48. And ever since, incidents have been continuous.

I remember my first case documenting it, I think, around 2015 of an Israeli rape when I was working at a human rights organization, was a woman in Jerusalem called Hadil Hashlamun. She was murdered by the IDF. They claimed that she was trying to carry out a stabbing attack, although there was no credible evidence of any knife or any weapon in the area. and they put her lifeless body in a Jeep, stripped her bottom half and took pictures of it, and circulated it on WhatsApp along with the captions. She should have chosen better shavers with an ad for Gillette, the shavers. So that was the first incident that I documented myself about over a decade ago.

With the incidents that Christoph documented in the New York Times article, they were already documented in multiple reports by the United Nations by Israel's own top human rights watchdogs like Bitsay, and physicians for human rights. They were documented by other newspapers like 972, the Guardian, Ha'Aghets, the Israeli-top newspaper. We saw it on camera, the rape incident that was documented by Israeli soldiers, and we saw what happened after, that ministers, government leaders, members of Knesset, they stormed the military base in which five soldiers were held over raping a Palestinian on camera, and they tried to break

those soldiers free. We saw then Israeli rabbi's television hosts. hosting the rapists and blessing them and praising them as heroes. We saw Israeli public opinion polls that showed over 65% of Jewish Israelis expressed support for those five rapists, instead they should not be criminally prosecuted. We show all of this evidence. It's a mountain of it.

And Christoph, as soon as he put it in the New York Times, Israel became existentially threatened because the New York Times is considered some sort of a Bible for liberals. That once it's there, it's the newspaper of record. it will be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience. So we see basically an Israeli panic attack in return, but the evidence is beyond any doubt. It was admitted by Israeli leaders, soldiers. There was even a debate at the Knesset

in which an Israeli member of parliament of the Israeli Knesset that is from Netanyahu's faction is saying that he's perfectly fine with raping Palestinians in prison. He brags about it. So in the face of this consistent evidence, denying it is absolutely foolish. The last point is about the allegation of rape by dogs. I've seen this insane Israeli talking point of denying the basic plausibility of such assault happening, which is, Amy, is virtually and literally a denial of the Holocaust because we know that Nazi commanders were using dogs to rape Jewish victims.

We know that in Chile, they were also training dogs to rape victims as well. So we see Israel that is more than willing to cast doubt on the Holocaust to whitewash its genocide in Gaza rather than admitting to their own mistake or promising even a sham investigation. It shows that they're panicking absolutely. Mohamed Shahada, I want to thank you for being with us, writer and analyst from Gaza, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. We'll link to your piece in 972 magazine headlined Gaza's disarmament trap. Coming up, the Israeli-American Holocaust scholar Omar Bartoff. He has a new book. It's called Israel. What Went Wrong? We'll also speak to Israeli journalists Gidun Levy in Tel Aviv. Stay with us.

Years of Lies by Ahmed Ali Aslan. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Mimi Goodman with Juan Gonzalez. Israel, what went wrong? That's the title of a new book by the renowned Israeli-American Holocaust scholar and historian Omer Bartoff. In late 2023, Professor Bartuff published a widely cited article in which he said, it's very likely that war crimes and crimes against humanity are happening in Gaza, but concluded then that, quote, there is no proof that genocide is taking place, unquote.

Then in 2025, he sent shockwaves through academic and legal circles by reversing his position, publishing an essay in the New York Times headlined, I'm a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it. That Israel has committed or is committing genocide in Gaza is a conclusion that's been reached by many international bodies, including the UN Human Rights Council's Independent Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Jeternal Association of Jaze, Genocide Scholars, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the leading Israeli human rights organization, Bacelam, Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, and many others. Governments have also come to this conclusion, including South Africa, which has brought a formal case against Israel in the International Court of

Justice. In his new book, Israel What Went Wrong, Professor Omar Barthoff asks, quote, how is it possible that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes, forcible displacement of civilian population and crimes against humanity? By what bitter cunning of history, he asks. Omer Bartoff is the dean's professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide.

Welcome back to Democracy Now, Professor Bartuff. Thanks so much for having me, Amy. So if you could start off by answering your title of your book, Israel, What Went Wrong? Yes, so I wrote the whole book about that, and of course it's not just one thing. It's a process. But I'm interested in the process from the beginning of Zionism. in the late 19th century, which was really a movement that tried to liberate, emancipate the vast majority of jury, about 80% of world jury, which was living in East Central Europe,

from increasing oppression, increasing violence, the rise of ethno-nationalism. And what Zionism tried to do was to, in many ways, copy what those, ethno-national movement surrounding the Jews were doing. That is to declare that the Jews too were a people with a right of self-determination and to liberate them from being a persecuted minority. Of course, the issue was that Jews could not claim any territory in Eastern Europe. And the result was that Zionism suggested that Jews go back to their ancestral homeland, historical, mythical, religious in what Jews called Eretzisselaid, the land of Israel. And once Jews started coming there, this process of liberation became also a process of settler colonialism, of encroaching

on the land of people who were already living there, that is, our Palestinians. So during the 1920s and 30s, you have these two aspects of Zionism happening at the same time. One is the Jews are persecuted and increasingly at risk for their own existence in Europe, and few and fewer countries willing to take them in. This country, the United States, close its gates of immigration already in the early 1920s. The voyage of the dam. Exactly. And in that sense, Zionism could say, well, we are providing a safe haven't. to the Jews. And hundreds of thousands of Jews actually migrated to Palestine, not all of them because there was Arnis, but because they were seeking some refuge in the 20s and 30s. But at the

same time, these very same people who are coming to Palestine are beginning to encroach on Palestinian lands. And that creates a conflict between Jews and Palestinians. It leads to the creation of a Palestinian national movement that claims also self-determination. and wants to create a Palestinian national home there. To my mind, and that's what I try to argue in the book, in 1948, that is the crucial moment. We heard before, of course, this is the 78th anniversary of the Nakbah of the expulsion of the Palestinians.

In 1948, the state of Israel is created. And that state is faced with a choice. Does it make itself into a normal state? does it fulfill its promise in its own proclamation of a state to issue a constitution that would provide equality to all its citizens, would define its borders, and would create a legal framework within which it would operate, a constitution that might have also led to some kind of restitution of coming to terms with the events of the Nakhpa, with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. But the state decides not to do it.

that. And instead, Zionism becomes a different thing. It becomes the ideology of the state. And over time, although this is, this was not predetermined and we can't say that everything had to happen, but over time, Zionism becomes increasingly militaristic, centralized, expansionist, racist, and as we've seen since October 23, genocidal. And as such, it really loses its very, I would say, it's very legitimacy as a political ideology. Professor, you grew up as a Zionist. You served in the IDF during the 1973 war. Yet you've now said that Zionism is not reformable. Would you still consider yourself a Zionist or would you describe your own position now as one of anti-Zionism?

Yeah, that's a good question. Look, as I was trying to say, I think, if you understand Zionism as the claim the Jews made already in the late 19th century, that Jews like all other people have a right of self-determination, while I myself, and I've written two books on that, I'm not a great supporter of nationalism. If you make that claim, then you have to be consistent. That is, if you support the right of self-determination for Jews, you would support it for anyone else, including, of course, for Palestinians. The one right you do not have with self-determination is to exercise it while oppressing or removing others from the land that you claim to be your own. So I would not define myself as anti-Zionists in the sense that I think that all groups, including Jews, have a right of self-determination. I do think, however, that Zionism, as it has evolved and what it has become now, is no longer supportable. I don't think that one can reform it anymore. And I think that the state of Israel, if it wants to become again a normal state,

if it wants to be a member of the international community, it must discard Zionism, it must put it on the garbage heap of history, and it must redefine itself going all the way back to 19. In other words, it has to find a way together with Palestinians of how these two groups that live there, 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians, how they can share the space and the kind of dreams, the kinds of policies that are being pursued by the Israeli government today under the mantle of this kind of fanatical, messianic, racist and Jewish supremacist, Zionism, what they try to do is to empty the land of the Palestinians. That's what happened in Gaza. It was an attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Israel denied an Akbar and then said that he was doing a second Akbar in Gaza. That failed, of course.

The Palestinians are still there, although living, as we just heard, under absolutely atrocious conditions and only a sliver of what was before the war one of the most congested areas of the world. But that failure of ethical, meant that Israel actually conducted the genocidal operation there. That has to be discarded.

No one is leaving that place, not the Palestinians, not the Jews. They have to find a way to share it rather than Israel trying to cleanse the territory, both of Gaza and, of course, as we know also, ongoing creeping ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. I wanted to bring into this conversation, in addition to Brown University Holocaust scholar, Omar Bartoff, author of the new book, Israel, What Went Wrong. I want to bring in Gidon Levy from Tel Aviv, award-winning Israeli journalist who writes for Haaretz. His recent piece is headline,

Zionism didn't go wrong. It was always built this way. If you're going to respond to Professor Bartoff and make the argument you made in your piece. Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Amy. I can't agree more with my friend Omar Bartov, Professor Bartov, except of two small remarks which I noted in my piece.

The first of them is, and we just heard Professor Bartov now, hesitating, and I understand this hesitation, it's emotionally a very painful process, but he's hesitating in defining himself as an anti-Zion. and in the same time he has so much critic, very justified critic, about Zionism. And he comes to the conclusion that Zionism must vanish. So either or, I mean, so either you are anti-Syionist because it's terrible or you are a Zionist and you can live with it. But I believe that Omobatov cannot live with it.

And he says it very clearly. And therefore, there is no room for this hesitation, even though emotionally went through the same process for an Israeli who was brought up in Omar and Mia at the same age, we were brought up in the same city. Tel Aviv, I guess our childhood was quite similar. For us to release ourselves from terrorism is extremely painful. The second remark, which in my view is more important,

is the belief of Omer that Zionism was very justified and had good reasoned the legitimacy and Israel has an legitimacy and then something went wrong while I'm claiming that from the very beginning

Zionism took a wrong direction because the Jews who came to Palestine like my parents and all, almost spirits had no other place to go and it was for them really safe haven't. It was a real, the only place they can rescue themselves. But this could have been done in a different way. You don't come to a neighborhood and turn back to the people who lived there centuries before you. And what Zionism did from the very beginning, not it went wrong, it started wrong, without the belief or the conviction that we can live together.

Zionism never really tried to live Palestinians. It was always to conquer them, to transfer them, to take their jobs, to take their lives, to take their properties in order to become the only people who lives between the river and the sea. And here we really differ because not something went wrong, Something started from your response. Yes, look, I mean, I also agree with most of what my friend Giedon says. As socialism begins precisely like the movement to which it was responding.

That is, there was a rise of ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe. Polish ethno-nationalism, Ukrainian, ethno-nationalism, Lithuanian, Latvian and, of course, German. And it emulated exactly these kinds of ideological notions. The only difference was that the Jews, being a minority in Europe, could not realize their ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe because they had no claim, no stake on the land there. Once they came to Palestine, they started doing exactly what other ethno-nationalisms were doing.

And as we know, that was a very violent process in Eastern Europe where hundreds of thousands, millions of people were removed. Ethnic cleansing was the norm. Populations were unmixed. And Zionism started doing precisely that also in Palestine. But because it moved to Palestine, it moved the Jews to Palestine, it became also a settler-colonial movement

because these Jews moved from one continent to another and we're trying to take over that land. The goal of Zionism from the very beginning was to stop the existence of Jews as a minority, to create a Jewish majority state. That was the conclusion that they reached because as a minority in Europe, they came under greater and greater threat.

So yes, of course, Zionism, like all ethno-national movements, had violence built into it from the very beginning. And at the same time, until the state was created, those people who came to Palestine in the 20s and 30s, like Gidun's parents, like my mother, we know that had they not left, they would have been murdered. Both Gidon and I would not have been born at all. Had our grandparents not decided to leave Europe and to come there, everybody who was left behind was killed. That's why I say there was a moment when the The state was created that a choice faced those who created that state, and they made the wrong

choice. They could have created a different state. It would not have been perfect, and no states are. It would not have been perfectly just, and no states are. But there it definitely made the wrong choice, and that choice determined much of what occurred afterwards. It could have been also corrected over time. The Oslo process was a moment in which people in Israel actually talked about a state of all its citizens.

But it failed. In 1995, Rabin, who was a general and was not a great peacnik, but had come to a conclusion that the occupation was no longer supported. In 1995, he was assassinated because of incitement by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his blood on his house to this day. That killed that process and accelerated what we are seeing now as an attempt to entirely empty the land of its Palestinian population. It will fail. It will not succeed because this sumut by Palestinians will continue. Palestinians will hold on to their land. But that has to, I would say that only going backward and only arguing Zionism was wrong from the beginning, what we need to do now is to think about a future,

and that future is a future for both Jews, who are also not leaving. Most of them will stay there, for both Jews and Palestinians to find a way to share that space. That is where the conversation, to my mind, has to move now. And Gideon Levy, your response,

but also you've talked about the conquest of labor that occurred in the Zionist's possession, long before the creation of the state and this whole issue of how would Israelis create or how would Jews create a state where in a territory they were still at that time a minority? Yeah, it's a very complicated question to answer, but for sure, fighting the natives is not the only option.

It could have go hand to hand. And there were times in which the way quite many Palestinians and some Jews who dreamt about such a possibility, an organization like Britschalom of Jewish intellectuals who believe that we should, from the very beginning, try to do it together, and not by force and not by pushing the Palestinians away from here. Now, the main problem of the whole thing is not 48 anymore,

because 48, as we all know, is over. The problem is that this very same attitude, this very same policy, never stopped ever since 48. And when you go today to the West Bank, you see exactly the same scenes like in the 20s, in the 30s, in the 40s, the very same scenes with the same cruel violent methods. Now, now we are not talking anymore about getting a Jewish state. Now we are not talking anymore about being a majority.

Now it's pure colonialism and racism with the pure ambition which is declared and admitted. A pure Jewish state between the river and the sea. This is Zionism today. And with this, I cannot live. I wanted to end by asking the same question I put to Muhammad. Chahada about the Israeli government threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. This is after the paper published a column by Nicholas Christoph, headlined the silence that

meets the rape of Palestinians. Christoph details, quote, the pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children, carried it by soldiers, settlers, interrogators, and prison guards. He also wrote about reports alleging dogs were used to sexual abuse. And I wanted to get both your responses very quickly on this. Professor Bartow. Well, I mean, I want to say just as Muhammad was saying, this is well known. I'm glad that the New York Times published information about that. But in Israel, it's been well known.

The Minister of National Security, Itamar Benviel, has been photographed visiting Israeli jails, humiliating on TV, humiliating Palestinian prisoners. that has become the policy of the country to abuse, to humiliate, to rape systematically. And what I find, I would say, particularly appalling is that in Israel, and that's part of what happens when a society becomes a genocidal society, generally speaking, apart from some articles in Ha'Arates and in Plus 9-7-2, no one is speaking out. Physicians Association in Israel has not spoken out. The Bar Association in Israel has not spoken out.

Academic associations have not spoken out. University presidents have not. The media is not really interested in that. That is what you see is a brutalization of Israeli society, a kind of joy at this kind of horror that is happening all over Israeli jails. And we just have 30 seconds, but Gidon Levy, that same question. Israeli society as you're in Tel Aviv is responding to this New York Times report and Israel's threat to sue the Times.

And that it is reacting to all the just acquisition against Israel by attacking the messenger. Nicola Christoph is a great journalist, I believe, to every word he writes. But he's not the only one, as Omar just mentioned. And the only way to fight it for Israel is to attack the messenger instead of looking upon ourselves, looking at the mirror, realize that in our jails there is a real barbaric catastrophe and to draw the lessons out of it. We have to leave it there. I thank you very much, Gidon Levy Award-winning Israeli journalists for Aretz speaking to us from Tel Aviv. And Omar Bartoff, Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, his new book, Israel What Went Wrong? Israeli-American scholar described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide. That does it for our show.

Happy birthday to Nicole Sjanazer. I'll be in Atlanta tonight for screening of Steel the Story, please, about Democracy Now at the Tara Theater. And then in Houston, Texas for benefit screening for KPFT. at the River Oaks Theater. Then finally to Austin, check our website at DemocracyNow.org. I'm making a good move with Juan Gonzalez.