Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal (TheGrayZone) : Indiscriminate Israeli Fire

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

#Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostagesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 6th, 2023. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you, my dear friend, for taking time to come back to the show. And it's great to see you as well. Does the Israeli government have a policy of knowingly killing its own people in emergency situations in order to prevent them from being taken as hostages? It's called the Hannibal Directive or the Hannibal Procedure. And this procedure was a secret military proposal or, sorry, military policy that first emerged after the Jabril Agreement, an agreement that Israel engaged in for the release of Ahmed Jabril, who was then the head of the Palestinian Liberation Front

General Committee. And he was exchanged for something like, he had taken something like six Israeli soldiers hostage, and they were exchanged for something like 1600 Palestinians. Then we saw the Gilad Shalit swap. This was an Israeli soldier taken when he was patrolling Gaza or enforcing the siege of Gaza in 2006 in his tank. He was exchanged five years later in 2011 for 1,200 Palestinian prisoners. So it's very politically painful for Israel to engage in a swap for one of its captured soldiers or citizens.

The first time the Hannibal procedure was revealed, the secret procedure was actually when I was in the Gaza Strip in 2014, when a soldier named Colonel Hadar Golden was captured, sorry, Lieutenant Hadar Golden was captured by Palestinian militants in the southern city of Rafah. This was August 1st. It's known as Black Friday in Gaza. Over 100 Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel brought massive firepower down on this city in order to kill not just the captors of Hadar Golden, but Hadar Golden himself to prevent another one of these prisoner swaps. So this became kind of a miniature scandal in Israel. Did they kill this lieutenant? Yes, they did. And his body parts, I believe, are still in Gaza. They haven't negotiated yet to

giving him a proper Jewish religious burial. So then on October 7th, you had, when the whole October 7th attacks were inspired by the concept of a massive prisoner swap that could clear out the Palestinian prisoners, people in Palestine see them as captives. There are children there, there are people who haven't been charged under what's called administrative detention. So they went and captured as many Israelis as they could, including just like anyone they could grab, an old person, a young person, as well as Israeli soldiers, including officers. This is a disaster for Israel, over 200 people. officer said that a mass Hannibal was enacted in which cars heading back into Gaza were attacked, knowing that they contained Israeli hostages. And yesterday, before Israel's war cabinet of Netanyahu and the security chiefs, several former abductees who were in the Gaza Strip testified that Israeli Apache helicopters were firing at

the cars they were in as they were heading back into the Gaza Strip. That's on top of the Israeli police investigation showing that the helicopters killed many Israelis and the testimony we have of Israeli tanks shelling homes in the Kibbutzim, the small kibbutz communities, where they knew Israelis were being held captive by Hamas militants. So many Israelis were killed by Israeli forces on October 7th. Does the Israeli public know of this procedure and who would authorize it? Does it have to be Benjamin Netanyahu or is this a military decision? I mean, this decision was made in the field on October 7th.

There may have been officers. I know that one of the key commanders of the Gaza division, which had been substantially wiped out, made the call to bomb the Israeli military base at the Erez crossing, which is the key nexus of the siege of Gaza, which is the key, the key nexus of the siege of Gaza, which had been overrun by militants. And you have the whole civil administration known as Kogat there. These are the bureaucrats who run the siege of Gaza. I've

been through there many times because you have to pass through there to, to get in and out of Gaza. And it looks like a, like a big kind of airport hangar with security lines. And there are also military personnel in there. So undoubtedly when an airstrike was called in on this base, Israeli military personnel were killed by the Israeli airstrike. But in the field, you had the Apache helicopter pilots had no contact with any commander. They were just kind of flying blind and told to keep emptying out the tank of ammunition and coming back to base to reload just because of the chaos on the ground. And they said that they had no,

I mean, in testimony in Israeli media, they said they had no way of distinguishing between civilian and militant. And it's the same in the Gaza Strip, by the way. We've had returned or freed captives from the Gaza Strip. And their family members say that the captives there aren't just in tunnels, they're in the street being pulled in donkey carts. And the Israeli military has no way of distinguishing them from Hamas fighters or Palestinians. And so they are now pleading with the Israeli military to stop the bombing.

They said that the bombing was the worst trauma they ever encountered and that they feared more than anything being killed by the Israeli military and having their deaths blamed on Hamas. These are direct quotes from testimony yesterday in Israel's war cabinet as reported by Israeli media. Do we know or will we ever know how many Israeli soldiers and how many Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF on October 7th? I assume it will be covered up. It's being covered up by the military sensor. And so we have these rare instances like in Kibbutz Beri where we learned that 13 Israelis were killed by a tank shell in which after the Israeli special forces team was told that all these Israelis were inside this house, they made the decision to shell them and to shoot them with small arms in order to kill some 40 Hamas militants who were holed up there as well. We only know that because one person survived the shelling and she told another person who had somehow come out of that house and survived as well. And that second person, her name is Yasmin Porat, went to Israeli media and told that story, but so many people are dead. You see all of this evidence of families, and this is so tragic and upsetting, that in some of these kibbutzim,

many families were found in homes that were reduced to rubble. Their bodies were badly burned and you would see the father covering his child and wife. What does that tell us? It tells us that there was a major explosion and the father, the head of the home tried to protect his family and the house came down on them. Those are the scenes that we see in the Gaza strip now as the Israeli military is bombing family homes in Gaza. That's how families are found there. So we can deduce from that. And I can name some of these families that were found in this matter. One of the young children

killed by an Israeli tank has been used by the Israeli government as a poster girl for Hamas killing, even though the Israeli government knew all along that she was incinerated by the tank. It took them weeks to identify her body because of the conflagration caused by the tank. Do I have this right? Yes. Her name is Lael Hitzroni, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, all of them have gone on Twitter, tweeted out her image and said she was, who was her caretaker, were in the home with her. Just a tragedy wrapped in a crime, wrapped in a cover-up, wrapped in a series of lies that are just so upsetting when you have to unpack it.

How does the Israeli public react when something like this is exposed. So they were told for weeks that this beautiful young girl, she appears to be about 11 or 12, was viciously slaughtered by Hamas when, in fact, she was incinerated by the IDF. The IDF knew about this, lied about it, the government lied about it, and then eventually the truth came out. How does the public react? I don't think much of the public is getting this news right now. There's a new poll showing that only 1.6% of the Israeli public believes that the Israeli military has used too much firepower in the Gaza Strip. You do see protests that are getting larger and larger outside Benjamin Netanyahu's residence and at the military command headquarters in North Tel Aviv of the family members and their supporters demanding

that the captives come back. And this is as close as you can get to a pro-peace protest in Israel. They believe that as long as the mass bombing continues and there are no more truces or ceasefires, that their relatives will not come out alive. And they're blaming Netanyahu for the whole catastrophe of October 7th. But then you have another segment of the Israeli public, which is strongly represented in Netanyahu's coalition, where Netanyahu is sort of the moderate centrist, Someone who's been a man of the kind of considered an extremist when he was younger is now a moderate centrist. And you have this whole wing of the Israeli public that could care less about the captives

and just simply wants to eliminate what they see as this existential threat, promising them a second Holocaust through mass extermination. And Netanyahu has even appointed his former U.S. ambassador, Ron Dermer, who's one of his closest political fixers, is now like a strategic advisor. He's appointed him to devise a plan to, quote, thin out the population of Gaza, according to Israel Hayom, which is a pro-Netanyahu newspaper. Did Netanyahu and his government ignore warnings of the likelihood of this attack, either the warnings that came from Egypt or the warnings that came from the all-female tank group, or what the New York Times times says is israeli intel uh that warned of this almost precisely even to the point of where they would hamas would break through in the fence and the

barriers a year earlier i want to be careful with this because a lot of this reporting is coming from sources that want netanyahu out, that are trying to make him take the fall for a failure that was extended well beyond him and his little political network and reach deep into the military intelligence apparatus. And so you look at the New York Times reports and who's leading them. It's a guy named Ronan Bergman. He's an Israeli reporter. And he wrote a book called Rise Up and Kill, which is a history of Israel's assassination policy. You look at who blurbed that book. It's a lot of the, many of the security chiefs, the former Mossad and Shin Bet

chiefs who are leading the campaign against Netanyahu and they're his sources. So I think what actually happened was that the Palestinian counterintelligence and Hamas's political leadership led by Yahya Senwar, who spent much of his life, maybe most of his life, in an Israeli prison, tricked the Israelis and tricked Netanyahu into believing that they had no plans to attack, that they just wanted an economic peace. And they managed to pull off a major intelligence coup, conceiving the largest military operation against Israel since 1973, without using any advanced technology that Israel could have surveilled, and carrying it out in very disciplined fashion. And I think Israel's intelligence

services, we hear so much about how brilliant they are. They're kind of a paper tiger, as is Israel's military. We see right now Israel's military is able to destroy many civilian homes. They're winning the war on Palestinian babies and Palestinian women. But the Al-Qassam Brigades, which is the armed wing of Hamas, is still in the field. It's still fighting. It's still ambushing Israeli fighters. It's still appearing out of tunnels and killing them. And so far, Israel's military campaign has not achieved any real objectives. Does Benjamin Netanyahu bear culpability for the, not the creation, but the support and expansion of Hamas as a resistance to the PLO in the West Bank? Well, every Israeli leader has had a policy of fragmenting Arab unity on a geopolitical scale. So making alliances with countries like Ethiopia or Turkey and small

minority groups like the Christian Falange in Lebanon to create fragmentation or within the Palestinian public playing Fatah and Hamas off one another. But what Netanyahu was trying to do with Gaza is to simply prevent the inevitable, which was the explosion of the volcano that we saw on October 7th, through an economic peace, the kind of thing he achieved in parts of the West Bank, like the city of Ramallah. He'll give out thousands of work permits to impoverished workers in Gaza so they can go work in the West Bank. He thinks that he can sort of pay them off and simultaneously every year or two, they'll do what they call a mowing of the lawn operation where they'll kill a number of Hamas operatives and terrorize the public for a

few days or as much as 51 days. And then they'll call it quit, allow Hamas to stay there in a weakened state. And now the volcano has exploded. Netanyahu's whole policy of mowing the lawn and economic peace has been discredited, and they're moving towards the final solution of what they started started in 1948. It's just terrifying to, I mean, I admire you immensely, but it's terrifying to hear that phrase, final solution. But I guess in Netanyahu's mind, it is. You may know this fellow, Alon Pincus, the former Israeli consul general in New York. I myself have met him. Here's what he had to say about Netanyahu's complicity in the expansion of Hamas. The reason they ignored this was stems or is derived from a policy that he dictated, and that was that Hamas is deterred, that Hamas does not pose a major military threat, that Hamas intends to keep the status quo, and that strengthening Hamas via funneling funds and endorsements from several Gulf states

is a recipe that he endorses and promotes in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. Agree or disagree? I mean, I know what, I understand this narrative and where it's coming from. Hamas was built up to undermine Fatah and the more secular Palestinian factions in the 1980s. It was allowed to operate freely in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation authorities then. Netanyahu has allowed Qatar to transfer money to Gaza. But the reality is that first of all, Hamas has a mass popular base in the 2006 legislative elections. It actually won in the West Bank, not Gaza, the West Bank that the Palestinian Authority controls. And that the general trend in this region has been to more religious or Islamist politics.

It's very popular there. So I don't know what Netanyahu could have done to put this in the box forever. He was just trying to manage the occupation as best as he could. And it's not possible when what was really happening in the Gaza Strip was people were deprived. They were living under siege since 2006. And you have Hamas and all these other factions fighting for this tiny cake that was still dwindling. There were huge protests in the Gaza Strip actually against Hamas in the Southern Gaza Strip, especially, but all across the Gaza Strip in July. And it was then that the Israeli security chiefs warned the situation there is getting so desperate because what people were

protesting was the economic situation. It's getting so desperate that the volcano could explode. So I don't know what Netanyahu was supposed to do, except what they seem to be suggesting is what he's doing now with his opponents, which is conducting a genocidal assault to carry out regime change by eliminating Hamas's popular base in their bedrooms at night. Here's a clip from Alistair Crook. You may know or know of him. He's a regular on this show, highly regarded international, former British diplomat and intellectual. This is going to take you back to your comments earlier about the vitality of Hamas fighters in the streets against the idea.

And at the same time, we've seen increase of attacks by Hamas on the Israelis. 60 Israelis have died in an ambush. I'm not sure that it's exactly 60, but it's certainly roundabout 60. It's reported in the Israeli press that it's 60 that have died in an ambush. Is that a significant number, Alistair? 60 Israeli soldiers killed in an ambush? In one incident, yes. 60 is quite big for one incident. They put bombs all around, and then the Israelis walked into it, and then they finished them off with automatic rifle fire.

But there have been others. The Israelis have been killed in tunnels. They've laid traps, taken them into tunnels, and then collapsed the tunnels on them. And in the north, there's been heavy fighting. Does the Israeli public know this? Well, the Israeli public is very sensitive to deaths of soldiers. The first movement, sort of putative anti-war movement in Israel known as the

Four Mothers began during the first Lebanon war because the death toll was getting too high. That's why Israel's the pioneer in drone technology because they would prefer to fight from a distance and very small, tight-knit society. You can't lose lots of soldiers. I know the exact incident that Alistair's referring to. I don't know if 60 soldiers died there. They were attacked in their tents by fighters who emerged from tunnels, and the tunnels just happened to be right under their tents. But I didn't see the actual attack. I haven't seen any Israeli military reports or corroboration. The 60 was claimed by al-Qassam. But they're losing soldiers day after day. And that really does raise questions about how long this can go on before it becomes too politically painful, along with the fact that the captives, many captives, are still there. And it also speaks to the fact that Israel is not achieving the military objective of eliminating Hamas and

its military wing. They are eliminating thousands and thousands of civilians according to their doctrine. This is their military doctrine of terrorizing civilians so that the political leadership gives up. But the political leadership in Gaza has already crossed the line and they're not going to give up. Does the Israeli cabinet believe that there are any innocent Palestinians? We can listen to the words of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, who said there are no civilians in Gaza. There is no distinction between military and civilians. We can listen to the words of Netanyahu when he referred to the Palestinian population as Amalek, who were the biblical transgressors from the book of Deuteronomy who attacked the Hebrews as they fled Egypt and were exterminated by God. And so he's basically calling for extermination.

We can spend the rest of today quoting Israeli leaders on their intent to exterminate the Palestinian population. But the Israeli military doctrine is based on this idea of the terrorist's next door neighbor being dangerous. And that according to the doctrine, it's acceptable to kill the neighbor of the terrorists. And in Gaza, where you have, let's say a Hamas activist who is identified by Israeli intelligence through their cell phone, they're living in a house that probably has five levels that could be three families and 60 people. And they're dropping a 500-pound bomb, or as we saw in the Jabalia refugee camp where

300 were killed in order to get one Hamas mid-level commander, 2,000 pound bombs. That's what Israel's deliberately doing and it's openly saying it's doing it and the Biden administration is saying, oh, we've asked them nicely to kill less. You're right. That is what they're doing.

You mentioned intent. Here is a haggard looking, exhausted Secretary Blinken trying to explain the difference between intent and results. You've talked about what you made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the War Cabinet, but what concrete and specific assurances have you gotten from them, if any? Based on what you heard from them today, are you confident Israel will follow the international laws of war in southern Gaza when it resumes its military operations? Thank you.

SECRETARY BLINKEN. Thanks, Mara. So as I said, we made clear the imperative that before any operations go forward in southern Gaza, that there be a clear plan in place that puts a premium on protecting civilians as well as sustaining and building on the humanitarian assistance that's getting into Gaza. And the Israeli Government agreed with that approach. Israel understands the imperative of protecting civilians, the imperative humanitarian assistance, and will continue to work to ensure that that carries forward in practice. And again, as I said to the Prime Minister, to the War Cabinet, intent is obviously where

you start, and it's vitally important. And I'm very confident in the intent, but results, of course, are fundamentally what matters. If the Israelis understand the imperative of protecting civilians, as the Secretary of State just said, then this is a play on words, because as you just pointed out, Max, the Israelis don't believe there are any civilians in Gaza. What leverage is he using? That's the question. None. None. As you pointed out, I ran the clip over and over again. It was a dynamite statement you made the last time you were on. They have extraordinary leverage that they could exercise, as you say, with a phone call, and it would be effective while this podcast is still streaming, and they have done nothing. Yeah, I'm looking at news today of something like 10 or 20

U.S. transport aircrafts filled with armaments and vehicles arriving in Israel. So they're not using any leverage. They're wasting leverage. They're letting the tail wag the dog. They're abandoning the role of the superpower in reining in its mad dogs. All they have to do is say, no more planes. Let's have a ceasefire. The Secretary General of the UN for the first time in his tenure has enacted

a provision that allows him to put forward a ceasefire proposal before the Security Council. There's just an emerging consensus that a ceasefire needs to take place or the conflict will expand. The destabilization will become unbearable. And I believe genocide is, the genocide of our time is taking place. Blinken doesn't want to exercise leverage because Tony Blinken is himself a sort of progeny of the Israel lobby. He doesn't have the gall. He doesn't have the kishkes to stand up to Netanyahu. You just look at him. He looks like an abused husband coming back

from having his wife throw the dishes at him. He does look terrible. Can the UN bring about a solution to this, an end to this slaughter? No. The UN has proven itself to be feckless and toothless in the face of this slaughter, and the US is a permanent veto in favor of Israel and the Security Council. There is seemingly no international institution that's been willing to act. And you have the head of the ICC, the International Criminal Court, Kareem Khan. This is the guy who issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for evacuating ethnically Russian children from the Eastern Donbass

region to the Russian Federation to get them out of the war zone, accusing him of mass child abduction. And he's in Israel now seeking warrants against Palestinians. He actually wants to indict. He's asking Israelis for evidence to indict Palestinians so that you have the most co-opted, owned US and NATO controlled ICC chief. So I don't know who,

though the Palestinians are just saying the world has completely failed us. And that's why they're turning to the gun. That's why they believe that their only protectors are their fighters or Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. That's why that is happening. I mean, just go back to Arafat's famous speech. The first time the Palestinians ever appeared at the UN, he brought an olive branch in one hand and a Kalashnikov rifle in the other. And he said, you can take the olive branch or the gun, please accept the olive branch. And the world has taken the olive branch. And when I say the world, I mean the US and its vassals. And it's taken that olive branch, buried it underground and fertilize the ground with the blood of thousands and thousands of Palestinian children.

Max, thank you very much. You're, you're a tiger when it comes to unearthing the facts and presenting them in, in a humanistic and compelling and deeply moving way. I hope you'll come back again with us next week. Thank you so much. I look forward to next time.

Thank you. All the best. Same to you. Enough said. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. MUSIC I'm