Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: (TheGrayZone) - What the IDF did on Christmas.

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

Max Blumenthal: (TheGrayZone) - What the IDF Did on ChristmasJoin investigative journalist Max Blumenthal and me as we peel back the layers of one of the most contentious issues in modern geopolitics: the Israeli Defense Forces' alleged human rights violations against Palestinians. Max, with his sharp analytical skills, unveils the chilling realities of Gaza, including accounts of torture and claims of organ theft, that stir a profound reaction internationally. Our candid conversation probes into the heart of these accusations, the difficulties faced in reporting such incidents, and the psychological impact they have on all involved—from the Palestinian community to the Israeli soldiers caught in the cycle of violence. These narratives weave a complex tapestry of suffering and societal perceptions that are rarely brought to light.The discussion takes an even darker turn as we examine the targeting of journalists in Gaza, an issue that has captured global headlines and elicited responses from political figures such as U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken. This episode does not shy away from hard truths, dissecting the intertwining of U.S.-Israel relations and the military strategies that shape the conflict. From scrutinizing the most recent military deals to interpreting Prime Minister Netanyahu's strategic maneuvers, we lay bare the multifaceted nature of warfare and diplomacy. Closing on a note of international jurisprudence, we explore South Africa's unprecedented steps toward seeking justice at the International Court of Justice, presenting a glimmer of hope for accountability amidst the turmoil.#Gaza #HumanRights #israel #hamas #netanyahu #warcrimes #thegrayzone #MaxBlumenthal #JudgingFreedomSee 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 Friday, December 29th, 2023. Max Blumenthal joins us as we are streaming this. It's late in the day on Friday. It's a long week. It's the beginning of a holiday weekend. My dear friend Max has just finished his own great two-hour show, and I've just finished an hour and a half doing a variety of on-air work. But these are important pieces that we need to talk about, and we deeply appreciate all of you lined up to hear us.

And Max, thank you very much for all the time you've given us in 2023, and I hope we can continue to do this in 2024. And welcome here, my dear friend. You are a world-renowned investigative journalist, and your investigative work of late has centered around the horrors in Gaza and the crimes committed by the Israeli defense forces. One of the issues that you have recently raised is this, have the Palestinians who have been kidnapped by the IDF and by Israeli police, been tortured while in custody. Yeah, one of the things we've been doing at the Gray Zone, because we can't get in there into the Gaza Strip, no international reporters can, is working with reporters on the ground who are covering these horrific events and publishing their work at our channel. I'm producing it. One event we

covered was the return of something like 80 to 100 corpses to the Gaza Strip, to a cemetery in the southern city of Rafah. These were corpses of people whose bodies had been stolen by the Israeli military. Many of them had been stolen from the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, from other cemeteries, ostensibly because the Israelis were looking for their own hostages. But we have this history of Israeli organ theft, of the theft of body parts, which is well documented and admitted by, for example, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, an Israeli state pathologist at the Abu Qubir Institute in Israel. There are reports even by CNN about this. Dating back decades, Israel is an international center of the illegal organ trade. Israelis have been prosecuted in Israeli courts for this.

And the Gaza Ministry of Health and Euromed Human Rights Monitor have alleged that these corpses, when they were returned to Israel to be buried in a mass grave, because there's no room left in the cemeteries, had body parts missing. I know personally, Judge, from knowing the family of Rachel Corey, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while defending the home of a Palestinian friend of hers in the Gaza Strip in, I believe, 2003. They alleged that her, parts of her body were taken by that very figure, that notorious figure, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, when she was, her body was returned to her family. So there's a history of this that is very unsettling. And how do they do this? I mean, do they bring the body to an

Israeli morgue and an Israeli mortician opens up the body and removes the organs and then they bury the body in a mass grave? Well, that's what the Gaza Ministry of Health is alleging. What Dr. Yehuda Hiss said was that we removed corneas and took organs and other body parts without the permission of the people who had been killed or their families. This included Palestinians who had been killed by Israeli security forces, people were killed in road accidents, and even Israeli soldiers. Israel also has the largest skin bank in the world. And it uses that skin bank to graft the skin of, for example, burn wounds that Israeli soldiers are enduring in the Gaza Strip as thousands are being wounded in this sort of faltering military assault on Gaza. The Israeli skin bank is accused of stealing body parts as well.

So this is a crime against humanity that goes to the essence of Israel's assault on the personal freedom of Palestinians. That families don't even have the right to bury their own family members who were killed. And that's also part of the psychological war on Palestine that Israel has traditionally sought to prevent the burials of Palestinians, especially those who they consider to be quote-unquote terrorists. You reminded us at the outset of this program that you're not permitted in Gaza, and no international journalists are. But whatever sources you have for this, has this been exposed to the Israeli public? Is the Israeli public aware of what the military and the Netanyahu administration is doing? The Israeli public is not aware of the suffering of people in Gaza. And there was actually an exchange on an Israeli news program, a broadcast news program in Hebrew, I think it was

Channel 13, one of the major networks there, where a journalist, older journalist from a more centrist or liberal position, said that people in Israel needed to understand how much suffering was taking place in Gaza because it was a catastrophe that would impact them as well. And a younger journalist who's more in line with Netanyahu named Boker Almog was brought on to basically shout down this senior reporter and tell him that he was compromising the war effort and basically serve as a sort of organic military sensor to prevent people from knowing. People also in Israel are not aware fully of how much their own military is suffering in the Gaza Strip. I think the number of casualties is being concealed, the number of injuries, the hideous injuries, and now we're hearing about a plague of suicides among

Israeli soldiers who've come out of Gaza. In fact, some members of the Golani Brigade that were pulled out of northern Gaza were actually punished for attempting to speak to the bereaved mother of one of their company mates. Tell me about the torture. What is to be gained by torturing Palestinian civilians other than the macabre sadistic effort to punish people because of their ethnicity? Well, when the Golani Brigade went into Israel, they chanted, went into Gaza before they went in, they chanted a song. Our motto is there are no uninvolved in Gaza. There are no civilians. And that's sort of the Israeli military doctrine, is that everyone is Hamas and that everyone in Gaza is responsible. And with the failure of the Israeli military

to kill the prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Senwar, something that the Israeli defense minister promised would happen, with their failure to get any high profile Hamas leaders and drag them out in front of the Israeli public or bomb their homes. They're just simply targeting civilians, taking hundreds of often old men and even children into a soccer stadium in Gaza and putting video out there on social media of them being humiliated, left shirtless in the cold, blindfolded, taken in trucks to an internment camp in southern Israel where they're then tortured. And we covered this at The Gray Zone with a Palestinian journalist. We actually got to interview some of the older men who are just working class guys in Gaza who were dumped back in the Gaza Strip after being taken to this camp

for torture. They are presented to the Israeli public as actual Hamas militants because the Israeli military is unable to present a real military victory. Doesn't the Israeli public see right through this and don't they blame the government for torturing innocent people and lying to them about it?

Yeah, I don't think there's much sympathy there for any Palestinians within the Israeli public. What is happening, however, is there have been a series of meetings with the families of Jewish Israeli hostages who are still in Gaza. There are more than 100 of them and Netanyahu, and they're screaming at Netanyahu. They're demanding that he roll back this military operation and negotiate because they realize that the only way they're going to get their loved ones back is through an actual deal. And Netanyahu is determined to avoid that deal because a ceasefire means the end of his political career and the end of his extremely right-wing coalition. So there is mounting opposition. Netanyahu actually went into a meeting today with the

Minister of Defense, the War Cabinet, without the intelligence chiefs because he's increasingly afraid of scrutiny. We're seeing a war of the mandarins within the Israeli body politic where the intense pressure on Netanyahu is ratcheting up as he is failing to bring the hostages back. Is he actually afraid of Mossad and Shin Bet? Well, these are the so-called gatekeepers. And the former Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs, appeared in a film, for example, a documentary called The Gatekeepers, where they were attacking Netanyahu and the religious nationalist direction, the Israeli government. And they're increasingly coming out and saying, for example, former Israeli army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who helped oversee some of the first heavy aircraft assaults on the Gaza Strip in history has said that the war is lost to Hamas

and that the real victory will only come when Netanyahu is removed. You have Giora Eiland, who is a former major general, who's now a major military commentator in Israel. He has said that the Palestinian resistance in Gaza has proved resilient and cannot be simply defeated. So all these acknowledgments are taking place. Every major centrist columnist in Israel has said that there will be no military solution in Gaza and that Netanyahu is the problem. But Netanyahu is there. He has a solid base. And he himself is a prisoner to these extreme figures like Idamar Ben-Gavir, who hold just a few seats in the Israeli Knesset. But if they leave his coalition, his whole coalition

falls apart. He leaves power and he goes back to trial for all the corruption charges he faces. I guess he would also be indicted for incompetence as well, malfeasance in office. On October 7th, for sure. I mean, more men have to be thrown into the meat grinder in Gaza in order to keep Netanyahu's political career alive. I think that is starting to dawn on Israel, along with the fact that they're taking losses on the northern border. And as former Israeli minister in a Netanyahu coalition, Avigdor Lieberman pointed out today, angrily aimed at Netanyahu, 200,000 Israelis are internally displaced because they can't go back home in the South or the North

because the military campaign is not achieving its objectives. What was the torture that was visited on the Palestinian civilians? Do you know? Well, they're coming back and alleging everything from being handcuffed for days and days on end, being beaten. Euromed Human Rights Monitor and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz have documented numerous deaths. They were beaten to death. Some have now alleged that they were given hallucinogenic drugs in order to force them into confession. And we've seen the head of the Rantisi Pediatric Hospital, which had the only pediatric oncology ward in Gaza that he was Hamas in order to justify Israel's destruction of most of the medical facilities in northern Gaza. So of course that came through torture. Why else would he say it? One older man we interviewed said that they would say anything just to stop their beatings. How bad is the famine and the disease in Gaza as we speak because

of what the IDF has done? There's one Twitter account I follow of a woman who's still in northern Gaza who writes in English. Her name is Iman Basher, B-A-S-H-E-R. Everyone should follow her. She's with her children there and she said they have lost almost half their weight. She has young children. She said, I hope you all are enjoying watching my children starve to death because no aid is reaching northern Gaza. Famine is spreading in the camps in southern Gaza. So only a few aid trucks are able to enter from Egypt.

And at the final checkpoint before these trucks go in, they're checked by the Israelis at Karim Shalom, which is an Israeli checkpoint. So Israel has total control over everything that goes in Gaza. And according to one medical professional I spoke to, they're taking the anesthetic out. Over 1,000 children, according to UNICEF, in the Gaza Strip have received amputations of their limbs without anesthetic. It's not hard to find videos of that taking place on Twitter. I watched one, unfortunately, of a child reciting the Quran as they were having a limb amputated without anesthetic.

Just imagine your own child being subjected to that. It is unimaginable. The New York Times has published a piece claiming that on October 7th, there's evidence of rape and beheading. You have debunked that. You have just obliterated that. Why would the Times do it? And what was the Times' so-called information even based on? Well, this is a high-level Israeli psychological operation and a propaganda hoax that only became

coherent about two months after October 7th, when Israel decided that international support for its genocidal rampage in Gaza was faltering, and that they were particularly losing support among Joe Biden's base, which includes many feminists, progressive minded people. And so they began to accuse Hamas of mass rape without any forensic evidence. And that's the first thing the New York Times piece by Jeffrey Gettleman, who is guilty of the worst journalistic malpractice, as we just outlined at our live stream at the Gray Zone, and I did so on Twitter and will continue to do. They blame the lack of forensic evidence, the total lack of forensic evidence proving these allegations on Jewish burial ritual. So basically, if you challenge any of this or ask for evidence, you're anti-Semitic. soldier who was at the Nova Electronic Music Festival who claimed to have seen Hamas militants get out of a white van and gang rape a woman in the middle of their

lightning surprise attack on Israel. And this is a guy who has changed his story, as I've documented, no less than eight times. And when he was interviewed on October 9th, first interviewed, he made no statements about having witnessed any rape. Then you have this anonymous paramedic that the New York Times interviews who has previously gone on an Indian news channel and lied about finding a dead Israeli baby thrown in a trash can by Hamas militants and stabbed multiple times. There's no record of that. He's just a fraud. I can go on and

on, but from top to bottom, this story is an elaborate fraud based on the perception that anyone involved with Hamas is capable of sexual savagery as soon as they come upon a Jewish Israeli woman, which is interesting because if you listen to the testimonies of the young women who have come out of the Gaza strip or they were held in captivity, none of them describe any sexual abuse. In fact, one said that she was shocked at how careful her captors were to not make her feel uncomfortable in any way or violated in any way. That's not to say that, you know, everything Hamas did was, was, was, was, you know, that

they didn't kill people. They didn't kill civilians. But what Israel has to do, Israel has to go big with its propaganda to justify its big genocide. And, and, and Max, the propaganda has been a failure. Is there any country on the planet besides the United States of America whose government buys this? No. I mean, the majority of Americans are in favor of a ceasefire and consider the amount of propaganda they're subjected to by legacy media. They're still able to see through it. It's amazing how Biden's empire of lies has just

completely collapsed. This is a major contributing factor in his historic unpopularity heading into a reelection. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the site of the 1968 Richard Daley police riot, is going to be a disaster. This assault on Gaza is Vietnam for the young progressive activist between age 18 and 25, and Biden is going to pay a heavy price, as he should. Has the IDF intentionally murdered journalists in Gaza? Absolutely. We have one of the most famous journalists in Gaza, who's a revered figure. His name is Wael Dadu. He's still alive. His cameraman was deliberately targeted by Israel and killed as they tried to cover an Israeli attack on a UN school where civilians were sheltering. He was killed in a drone strike. Dadu was injured.

But previously in October, Dadu's entire family, his son, his daughter, his grandchild, his wife, they were killed in a targeted strike, a targeted strike on their home. This was a deliberate attack because Dadu is a famous Al Jazeera journalist and an Israeli military analyst. His name is Yehezekeli, Yekezeli, Yehuda Yekezeli, I believe his name is. He's a famous military analyst. He went on Channel 13 that night and declared that Dadu was killed by Israel, was targeted by Israel because they hated his reporting. It wasn't just his opinion. He was claiming confirmation based on military sources. And this has happened again and again to Palestinian

journalists in Gaza, where they've been killed not just in the field, but at home along with their entire families. And Tony Blinken goes out today and laments the loss of so many journalists around the world who are reporting conflict. That's blood on Tony Blinken's hands. He's lamenting his own crimes. And what will it take for the Israeli public to recognize the barbarity of the government? All these examples that you've given us, the lies of the government, the secrets of the government, wouldn't the Israeli public be outraged if they knew or had enough evidence to believe what you've been reporting? Well, just a quick correction that came to mind, so everyone can Google it or search for it on Twitter.

It's Zvi Yacazelli who made that statement about the Palestinian journalist. I don't believe the Israeli public will at any point have a change of heart about this genocidal rampage in Gaza. It is one of the most indoctrinated publics on the planet because of the full conscription in the military. There will be other factors brought to bear that will force them into some kind of that may force them to pull back. Unfortunately, if the United States is not one of those factors, it's going to be military force from elements like Hezbollah or economic force, which we're seeing as the de facto government of Yemen closes off one of the key economic choke points

at Bab al-Mandab in the Red Sea on Israel, it's been a very effective method of putting pressure on Israel with minimum military force. How is the Israeli economy with the 350,000 draft age men, reservists ordered for active duty and with obviously no Palestinians able to work in menial jobs. How has this affected the economy? That's a great question. You're seeing a lot of these reservists who've been in the field for two months or more who are small businessmen actually losing their small business and starting to ask for donations, crowdfunding to maintain their houses. They're going before Knesset and complaining that they're being reduced to poverty. So this is another pressure point on Netanyahu and the war cabinet. Yes, cheap Palestinian labor is no longer available, which is hurting the economy.

And the Israeli finance ministry has announced that it's basically back in COVID mode in handing out aid to Israeli citizens, tapping all their strategic financial reserves to basically pay people to stay in Israel because so many Israelis who can leave are leaving. You have the southern city of Sderot, which came under attack on October 7th. No one can move back there. So the Israeli government is having to pay for hotel rooms and welfare for everyone in a relatively sizable Israeli city, people who are already fairly poor. So this is taking an economic toll on a society which is accustomed to a more middle-class lifestyle, unlike the population of, for example, southern Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, where there is sort of an ethos of steadfastness

and resistance. Have you seen any evidence of American military advisors guiding or influencing the IDF physically present in Israel? Yeah, I was just thinking about thinking back to the early days and there was a figure named James Glynn, who is a major, I think, in the US Army. He was the person who oversaw the US assault on the Syrian city of Raqqa in order to dislodge ISIS, in which thousands of bombs were dropped, half the city was destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians were killed. He also oversaw the assault on Mosul. Obviously, this couldn't have been done without cooperation with Iran and specifically the IRGC Major General Qasem Soleimani, but the U.S. oversaw the air campaign. And, you know, it appears that Glenn kind of was trying to guide Israel as it prepared another

similar operation, but he left after a few days. And I think any control that the Pentagon might have had over what Israel does with its weapons. We've seen the Biden administration just authorize another $125 million of explosive charges today without congressional approval, without our approval to Israel, that the Pentagon doesn't really have any leverage. It's forfeited. Lloyd Austin has forfeited any leverage and lost any control over strategy. At best, what I could see the US doing is the NSA might be helping with targeting, but at this point, what is targeting? Israel just targeted a bunch of families in the Maghazi refugee camp and then came out and apologized for using the wrong weapon. It's a joke. Lloyd Austin was there last weekend.

What do you think he said to Netanyahu? We're going to keep giving you whatever you want? Yeah, what do they say? What do they say? What do they say? They're both complicit in the most monstrous war crimes in the modern era. I mean, Lloyd Austin's an empty uniform. I don't see any substance there at all.

And he's a political appointee. So he's there to represent Biden and Jake Sullivan. He was trying to put together this pathetic Operation Prosperity Guardian Coalition to protect commercial shipping from the de facto Yemeni government. And that coalition has fallen apart because countries like Spain and Italy didn't want to be part of a coalition headed by a U.S. and not an EU or NATO flag. So it's just a U.S. operation. And the U.S. has had to pull back because they don't want to lose U.S. ships to drone swarms and anti-ship attacks. So his whole mission was a failure. But Biden today leaked to the press, this is such a little op, they leaked to the press that he was furious at Netanyahu for not authorizing more money

to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. So that's what you're furious at Netanyahu about? You're not furious about thousands, 175 civilians were killed in the last 24 hours in the Gaza Strip and you're not furious about thousands of 175 civilians were killed in the last 24 hours in the Gaza Strip. And you're not furious about that. You're furious about them not propping up the Vichy regime you've established in the West Bank. How about the Biden administration? From all your sources, how do you see this ending in Gaza on the Israeli side?

Not not Biden and the Democrats. I agree with you, it's going to be a mess. But how do you see it ending? At some point, Netanyahu is going to have to stop. There's got to be some pressure on him that he can't go on like this. Or will he just go on and on and on and on because he knows when it stops, his job is over. I can tell you what I think the Israelis will do if the U.S. doesn't stop them. It doesn't mean that they will achieve this because they are not achieving their military gains as they would have expected. And they're forced to acknowledge that Hamas has been a much tougher enemy than they anticipated. But they think that they're going to be able to achieve their strategy in Gaza through a three-tiered campaign. The first was to

just depopulate northern Gaza as much as possible and turn that into a de facto buffer zone occupied by their military, where they're still getting attacked constantly and taking bodies. But they destroyed all the medical centers, all the centers of life, pushed the population to the center and the south. Now in phase two, they're attacking the center and the city of Khan Yunus, where they think Hamas leadership is occupied, is holed up. And then they're going to try to push them closer and closer to the Egyptian border. Then they want to establish a second buffer zone in the so-called Philadelphia corridor between Egypt and the Gaza city of Rafah, which will create this kind of pincher vice-like effect on the Palestinian population. And in phase three, they will fully

attack the Palestinian population, which they associate 100% with Hamas, and complete the humanitarian catastrophe by pushing them into Egypt's Sinai Desert. Right now, they're calling it voluntary migration, and they will have thinned out the population of the Gaza Strip to the point where it will no longer be a cradle of resistance to Israeli apartheid and occupation. That's the Israeli plan in three tiers. They're very open about it. And the U.S. is doing nothing to confront the reality of this plan. But luckily, someone is. The South African government just invoked the genocide convention at the International Court of Justice today. And what did that invocation mean? Did they charge Netanyahu and his colleagues with war crimes? Well, it would mean that would take place at the world court, that the world court would investigate. It's an 84-page document I haven't read. Third parties can sign on, and other

countries can and should sign on. And the world court is much more of a reflection of international opinion and multilateralism than the International Criminal Court, which is co-opted by the US. It has its most pathetic prosecutor in Karim Khan right now, who's indicted Putin for evacuating children from the war zone. Right, saving children's lives, and he's indicted for it. Yeah, he's indicted for that. But then when Karim Khan went to Israel, he just met with Jewish Israeli survivors of October 7th and hasn't done anything. The Palestinians aren't even meeting with him because he's so sold out. So actually, what this will do is force the ICC to make an assessment of genocide and genocidal intent by Israeli leadership, it forces the hand of the ICC to have this being investigated at the world court.

So there at least is some action and it will force the concept of genocide into the international media discussion. It should already be there because you have a clear plan to commit genocide, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population in Gaza and kill as many of them as they want. And you have genocidal intent expressed at the highest levels of Israeli leadership from Netanyahu referring to the Palestinian population as the biblical Amalek that was slaughtered in the book of Deuteronomy to military officials just calling for the flattening of Gaza and declaring that the grandmother, the first grader, and the baby in Gaza are just as much of an enemy as Hamas militants, as a veteran of

Israel's Unit 8200 Cybersecurity Division declared on Israeli national TV. I mean, you hear this every night. So the case seems to be clear cut to me, just a question of getting countries to force it at the world court. Max, thank you very much. It's been a long day and I appreciate your time. Your analysis is not only first rated, it's second to none. And we are deeply grateful that you share it with me and with our audience. Have a great holiday weekend.

A happy new year to you, notwithstanding what we're talking about and and all the suffering in the world but uh you're doing the work of the angels by exposing it thanks for joining us thank you judge and uh see you on another long day yes absolutely all right holiday weekend coming up uh our as we used to say at fox our cameras are dark for the weekend we'll be back with you with our full panoply of all of our first-rate guests, from Colonel McGregor to Scott Ritter to Tony Schaefer to Professor Sachs to Professor Mearsheimer to all of your favorites starting on Tuesday next week. From my heart to yours, from our team to your household, Happy New Year.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.