Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/2/24 Connor Freeman on What Comes Next for Gaza

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Connor Freeman joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the latest developments from Gaza. They talk about the apparently imminent invasion of Rafah, the concerning state of internal Israeli politics, the scale of suffering, Biden’s makeshift pier and more. Discussed on the show: “Israel’s Smotrich Calls for ‘Total Annihilation’ of Rafah, Other Cities in Gaza” (Antiwar.com) “In Gaza, Authorities Lose Count of the Dead” (Wall Street Journal) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, May 2nd, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of Anti-War.com, an editor of the book, Hatter than the song. time to abolish nuclear weapons you can find my full interview archive more than 6,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scott horton.org and at youtube.com slash scott horton show and all your favorite podcatchers and things like that and our guest on the show today is our assistant editor

at the institute and antiwar dot com connor freeman welcome back to the show connor how you doing i'm doing very well scott thanks for having me back on very happy to have you here on the show And we have a lot to talk about here in terms of the war in Gaza, first of all, with the politics here in the United States. Well, first of all, the negotiations. Secretary of State Blinken, he said things like this before, but he seems to be pushing for some kind of a ceasefire deal. What would that look like? How long of a ceasefire? How many hostages to be released?

How likely is any of that to happen, do you think? Well, so my understanding is that the offer that has been put together by the Egyptians with the assistance of the Israelis, although the Israelis, I don't believe have agreed to it yet. They've reduced their demand from 40 hostages being released by Hamas to about 33, in exchange for, I believe, thousands of Palestinian prisoners. But this would, as Netanyahu has made clear, this would not negate an invasion of Rafa. And he has already made clear to Anthony Blinken and as well as to representatives of families of the hostages that they will go ahead and invade Rafa, a city where well over a million Palestinians who've already been internally displaced within the strip and the indiscriminate bombing campaign from the northern and central parts of Gaza. They would like to go in there and eliminate what they say are four Hamas battalions that are still embedded in Rafa. So there's the idea of a permanent ceasefire, which is what Hamas has been demanding for months as well as a lifting of the siege and for displaced Palestinians to be able to return to their homes in the northern parts of Gaza or whatever remains of them, more than two-thirds of all the homes in Gaza have already been destroyed. But the, the, what, you know, Hamas's demands are not going to be agreed to on the part of Netanyahu.

And basically what he's offering is what they call an openness to. discuss a temporary calm, like a sustainable calm, but definitely not a ceasefire. And Anthony Blinken, of course, is working on behalf of the Israelis more than anything, even though he's supposed to be America's top diplomat. And he was just in Riyadh, I believe at a World Economic Forum conference where he said that the offer that Israel is put on the table, which is, you know, again, not meeting hardly any of Hamas's demands. He calls it an extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous offer after Israel has already killed at least 34,000 or 35,000 Palestinians at this point that we know of, including roughly 24,500 women and children.

It's anti-war radio on KPFK, 90.7 Pacifica in L.A. talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com. And now, so one thing about this whole story is that Netanyahu's coalition, is the most right-wing religious slash nationalist coalition that he's had this whole time in almost decades of power here, if you add them all up. So I don't know how many years it is. It is going on 20 years if you add them all up, I think. So what role are they playing in Netanyahu's decision-making here? Oh, sure. Well, actually, Benny Gantz has threatened to topple the Israeli government if there is a ceasefire. He wants a hostage deal without an end to the war. And Bezalel Smotrich from the religious Zionism party who has a special position in the

defense ministry that makes him essentially the governor of the West Bank, who has overseen a huge expansion in illegal settlements in the West Bank. He has said that, no, we want nothing less than total annihilation of Rafa, which could mean, I mean, if you're going to totally a annihilate Rafa right now, where these people are living in makeshift tents with very little food and very little medicine. They're doing relatively better, certainly than the people who are still stuck in northern Gaza, where, you know, basically everything has been bombed out, every kind of infrastructure that would sustain life. And the least aid is getting into the north. We've had top U.S. officials say that famine is already taking place in the north. But what, you know,

Bezlo Smotrich was saying, again, referencing the Hebrew Bible, saying that we need to go in there and totally annihilate Amalek, which is a reference to a nation that the Israelites were commanded to destroy. And what that means is they want it. He wants to see every man, woman, child, and infant slaughtered with no quarter. And what we are actually seeing, there was a report in the Middle East eye this week. And he says, actually, I should make clear, Smote Ridge is threatening again to topple the government as well, because he's saying, if Netanyahu does not invade Rafa, and there is any kind of a ceasefire, this government is not fit to exist.

What he's saying is we need to go into Rafa, kill all the Palestinians. Of course, he's a big proponent of ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip and then resettling it, as is it, Mar-Bangivir, the national security minister. And he says after that, we need to go into Lebanon and wipe out Hezbollah. And so Netanyahu is in very hot water right now. Of course, he's facing his corruption trial. And his approval polling, his approval numbers and polls

has gone up since the recent tensions with Iran. But still, he's, I think, dragging behind his opposition. I think he only has a 34% approval rating right now, which is better than it was in October, but still very low. And he needs to stay in power and maintain this permanent state of emergency, which is why we've seen the escalations with Iran

when he took the brazen step to bomb the Iranian consulate in Damascus and kill General Muhammad Reza Zahadi and his deputy as well some other top of Quds Force generals. I mean, that nearly started a war with Iran if it wasn't for Iran's restraint and their response about two weeks later. But Netanyahu, in order to stay in power, has to move forward with this ethnic cleansing campaign. And what he's talking about is we need to have other countries absorb the Palestinians. We've seen these remarks made from so many different Israeli officials from the intelligence minister to the former UN ambassador, Danny Danone, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal about how they want Western countries to absorb the Palestinians.

And, of course, this idea that Blinken in the White House talk about where they say, well, we agree that Hamas needs to be eliminated in Rafah, but we need to see a plan for how you're going to safely evacuate Palestinians. The Red Crescent just said that there is absolutely no way that that plan can work. There is no, because of the nature of the bombing across the entire strip, which has been escalating over the last couple of weeks, that there is just no place for the Palestinians to go. So when they talk about invading Rafa, they're probably going to attempt to push as many of them as they can into Egypt and hope that they can kill as many as possible and push them out of Gaza. but there is no, we know from humanitarian officials and people on the ground that there's at this point no options for evacuating the civilians. And there is a report that came out in Middle East Side this week, which is all about how they're going to, they've set up a very complex series of checkpoints where basically

they will let some women and children or perhaps most women and children leave Rafa, but they're going to detain virtually any male Palestinians and put them in detention. And, you know, even if they're unarmed and civilians and there's no indication that they're affiliated with Hamas at all. And we're going to see them because we've seen so many reports out of Israeli media from 972 MAG and Harats. The Palestinians that have been taken to these detention centers in Israel are being tortured in barbaric ways. Even UN officials, we know, or UN workers, people working for UNRWA, we know have been waterboarded and raped and tortured in all kinds of ways, but they were just trying to seek false confessions from them regarding Hamas's involvement with the UN Palestinian aid agency. But that kind of treatment, people being tied up next down on debarbed wire fences and having their hands tied and stripped into their underwear and not allowed to go to the bathroom so they have to defecate on themselves and being forced to drink out of toilets. I mean, this is how the Israeli military operates once they get people into these detention centers.

And at this point, it looks like they're going to, I mean, they have hundreds of armored vehicles stationed in the Negev Desert in the south near the border with Gaza. I believe it's 700 trucks and about 700 armored vehicles and about 100 more up in the north. They're very clearly preparing for this offensive into Rafa. And, but, you know, the Americans have made clear that they're not going to use any of the leverage that they have with the Israelis to stop them from doing this. We constantly hear from John Kirby and Anthony Blinken that they haven't presented a plan to safely evacuate civilians. And yet before Iran responded to that bombing of the consulate, we had apparently, according to CNN, the Israelis were about to drop leaflets into Rafa telling the people there here, here we come, basically. And that attack has been postponed in the meantime because they had to figure out how to

respond to the Iranians for their retaliation against the bombing of the consulate. But it's very clear that there is no pressure from the White House. And we will likely oversee the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. They've already taken about 16% of the strip for a buffer zone near the border with Israel, and they're building the Netrazine corridor, they're bisecting the gazaing the gazaing. Gaza strip with this roadway that will allow them to prevent the movement, the free movement of Palestinians from the south to the north and allow them to maintain what will be an indefinite, essentially an

indefinite occupation of the strip where we're going to have a permanent Israeli military presence there. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some, at least, into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium.

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talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com here. It's really important, as you mentioned briefly there, that Benny Gantz, who is not one of these religious nuts, he's a former general and who is in competition with Netanyahu for political power there, but as part of the war cabinet, that he is threatening to resign over a deal to end the war, never even mind the religious cooks like Bengavir and Smotrich. That is extremely worrying. And then it must be said, and you know, you kind of referenced this,

that this accusation that the Palestinians are Amalek. I mean, imagine being a Palestinian and being accused of being Amalek. Like, what did I do to ever deserve this? Well, somebody quite prima facie, obviously, falsely is accusing you of being its ancient enemy from 3,000 years ago. And that the Supreme Being says they have the right to even kill you and your children because their religion says so. that's their excuse when even if you accept that god told the ancient hebrews to kill amalek that was still a select group of individual people or even if you count it a whole tribe of people who they killed back then three thousand years ago so whoever said that that means that

they can kill whoever they want now because whoever they want is amalek now from now on it's completely crazy it's the most deranged excuse for killing somebody anybody ever came up with and people are in the west we're supposed to accept that the palestinians are amalek that's why you're at war with them it's completely nuts but anyway so my question is how many people have they killed so far again uh roughly or 35 000 but there's a a report in the Wall Street Journal out this week, all about how the health system has collapsed to such a degree that these numbers that we've been seeing where it's been hovering around 33, 34, 35,000 for weeks. It's because they can no longer count the dead effectively

at all. In fact, they're relying on media reports in some cases and testimony from family members, but we even saw a source in the report with the Wall Street Journal explaining someone from the Palestinian civil defense who is not, he says, I've lost five members of my family, but they have not been documented because even though the health ministry has issued a form for people to report deaths, he goes, I don't have an internet connection. And it's because so much of the infrastructure has been wiped out. So they have to get at least two sources to confirm a death. I believe they need a certificate from a hospital or a morgan also for a family member to sign off on the that this is, this is my brother or this is my sister and they've been, you know, or my father

or my mother and they've been killed. But, of course, just because of the nature of the war, this is becoming much more difficult. Especially when they're wiping out entire families at a time. Absolutely. And in the case of, you know, we just saw, I mean, this is part of the whole politics of the international criminal court investigation. You know, there's a report out in Reuters this week about how they're interviewing staff from the Nassar Hospital in Khan Yunus. That's the main hospital in the south. And then also

the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the main hospital in the northern part of the strip, where they found multiple mass graves with hundreds of bodies. And some of them are, you know, still in their hospital scrubs. You know, we're talking about patients, displaced people, nurses, doctors. A lot of these bodies, at least the reports are saying, are indicating that these people have been tortured. There's evidence of field executions. Several of them appear to have been buried alive, you know, some of them are apparently missing organs. So, and this is what the ICC is investigating, you know, the Reuters report about it is, is pretty fairly tight-lipped and kind of vague because they're trying to protect the identities and the nature, the identities of

the victims and the hospital staff, the ones who weren't killed, but we're, you know, hundreds of people, they put laid siege in March to the Al Shifa Hospital for about two weeks. And there were just piles and piles of bodies that were discovered after the Israelis ended their siege there. But they are discovering these mass graves now. And, you know, I just saw a report from a, there was a report from the European humanitarian monitor where they were, the European Mediterranean humanitarian monitor, where they were saying that they've discovered about 140 of these unmarked graves. And in some cases, they're mass graves. But this is, this is the nature of Israel's war on Gaza. So I mean, you know, the estimates from various experts who were, you know,

experts on the nature of the famine are saying that, you know, the starvation is going to kill far more people because there's, you know, Gaza before this war started was supposed to be getting 500 trucks of humanitarian aid delivered every day. And on top of that, they were still getting some commercial goods coming into the strip before the war started. And at one point, it was getting so low that they were only getting 20 or 30 trucks delivered. a day, mostly through the Rafa crossing. The Israelis have made all kinds of promises that they're going to open up the Erez crossing in the port of Ashdad, but they've dragged their feet on all of that.

And we know that from even Samantha Power, the head of the USA-AID, has said that famine is already taking place in the northern parts of the strip. And, you know, more than one point, it's well over a million Palestinians. I believe it's 1.1 million Palestinians are on the absolute. brink of starvation. They're facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity, according to the top watchdog on famine, the integrated food security phase classification. And so, I mean, and virtually everybody in the Gaza Strip is struggling to find food. And so the prediction, the estimates are that by August, if everything stays the same under, you know, being underwritten and supported

unconditionally by this White House, we're going to see 100,000 people dead in Gaza. come August and if they do invade Raffa they estimate that number will go up by the tens of thousands yeah well I don't know about that and it seems like the numbers of officially killed in violence have been growing much slower recently compared to before but then again on the other hand I can't imagine they have a very sophisticated plumbing system down there in Rafa where almost the entire population of the strip has been forced to go to this one tiny town on the border and then now they're about to bomb the hell out of that and without good sewage that means people are dying of dysentery and cholera and of course

everybody's already going hungry and all these things so this is you know like um bush senior and bill clinton's iraq war one and a half uh sanctions regime and no fly zone regime against the uh which was a bombing campaign against iraq kind of in a microcosm here And so it wouldn't surprise me at all, really, if through excess deaths, especially from sickness and malnutrition and famine, that, you know, people have to outright necessarily just starve to death. But they can be extremely hungry. I'm malnourished and then get the flu and die of that or whatever you have, you know, whatever other cause gets them that they would have otherwise been fine. So, yeah. Sure.

And we've already seen reports of that from earlier in the war where there was reported that there were hundreds of thousands of cases of respiratory infections and people having diarrhea. And of course, part of the war is- Meaning toddlers and babies, right, meaning little kids of the victims of that, yeah. And the Israelis have been bombing orchards, greenhouses, and all arable land. It's a war of famine. And so they've been, you know, and they're not allowing, you know, water and food in. This is part of the operational. on October 9th where defense minister Yoav Galan announced these people are human animals and we will treat them accordingly. We're cutting off the food, the fuel, the water, the electricity. And people should know when you talk about bombing all

of the crops and the greenhouses and all of that, that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, say whatever you want about them, they are, we're all stuck with them as the three most important newspapers in this country. And they all have done in-depth reports on

exactly that, where they all outright compare it to Dresden in World War II when we're not talking about the Third Reich, we're talking about the Warsaw Ghetto and who's the Reich now, you know, is what we're talking about here. And it's just absolute devastation where the Wall Street Journal has to tell you with a straight face. Yeah, this is, it looks, you know, somewhat like Tokyo in 1945. Yes, absolutely. Robert Pape and scores of other experts

Going back to even December and November, we were seeing reports about that with just the scale of destruction, where you've seen hundreds of thousands of buildings that have just been bombed out, especially in the north of Gaza. And really, the only safe place in the strip right now are relatively safe, which is, you know, over the weekend, the Israelis killed 22 people, including 18 children in their bombing raids on Rafa. But that's, you know, that's how bad the campaign, that's how indiscriminate the bombing has been. These are the safest places where you're out in your tents and you're sleeping there and yet bombs are still raining down on you, killing children. And so, I mean, yes, it's one of the, it's indisputably one of the worst civilian punishment campaigns in modern history where they've destroyed a percentage of infrastructure that rivals Hamburg and Cologne and all these other German cities that were bombed. during the Second World War. All right, it's Anti-War Radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com.

Connor, what's the latest on Joe Biden's peer? Or is it Netanyahu's peer? Oh, so right now, there's a report in Politico from a European official and American official that suggests the construction of it will be completed by Friday, and aid deliveries will be able to start by Saturday. The estimates are that only about 90 to, I believe,

120 trucks will be able to get into the strip once this pier is construct per day, once it's up and running and in operation. And then this is actually a very contentious issue right now because Lloyd Austin during a House Armed Services Committee was questioned by Representative Matt Gates from Florida about whether or not, because earlier in the state where the staging area is for this, it came under mortar attack earlier this week from some Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza, and nobody was hurt and some minor damage was reported. But the U.S. troops, you know, the makeshift here is only miles off of the coast of Gaza,

and they'll be well in range of, you know, to be targeted from these Palestinian resistance forces. And so Matt Gates said, in a situation like that, would they be able to hit Americans? And Austin said, yes. And he said, will they, and what will they shoot back? Will they be able to defend themselves and shoot back into Ghaz. And he said, yes, they absolutely will. And so Matt Gates is saying, well, if we're going to be getting into a shooting war with the Palestinians, then we better hold a vote on it. We better have this, you know, Congress holds the war powers. This should be a declared war. And I mean, the, I mean, the peer itself. Yeah, or not. Yeah, exactly. But the peer itself is, you know, they're going, it's not going to actually mitigate the

suffering in the Palestinian. The only reason the Biden administration is even doing this, and it's going to cost, it's going to involve more than a thousand U.S. troops. It's going to cause, it's going to cost double what they originally projected. It's reportedly it'll be, the price tag is $320 million. I just imagine three weeks from now. The story is some Marines got blown up by an RPG over there in Gaza. Now what? Yeah. And what's every Republican other than Gates going to say then, you know? Yeah, absolutely. They're going to be. call for, you know, the final solution in Gaza and with U.S. troops and the IDF working side by side. And so basically that they're going to take the aid from, it's going to be delivered to

Cyprus and then it'll go through an Israeli inspection in Cyprus. And then it's taken to this makeshift pier where U.S. Army boats then take it to this causeway that has been built on the Gaza coast. And it'll be delivered from the U.S. Army boats and taken up by trucks that are run by the UN and then they have to go through a second set of inspections which are always onerous and the Israelis look for any excuse to deny shipments of aid to come into Gaza and then it's going to come into the strip but again in very small numbers it won't really make a dent in the starvation campaign and the famine and so in the meantime we have U.S. troops in the line of fire and this is just all because the Biden administration refuses

is to lean on Netanyahu to not only call a ceasefire so that they can negotiate the hostages being released and end this horrible humanitarian crisis in this genocidal war. But, you know, they won't even open the land crossings necessary to allow aid in so that they could, you know, they wouldn't have to do this if Biden was willing to use the, willing to use his leverage with the Israelis. And so in the meantime, we're putting U.S. troops in the line of fire. And the American, again, we just got, you know, we're just in this massive $95 billion foreign military aid bill, we're spending $26 million, mostly going to military aid for the Israelis.

And some of it is to, you know, respond to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the broader region. But we've, you know, been, again, the U.S. taxpayers have just paid in the last few months, $20 billion for the Israeli war machine in Gaza. And now we're being charged $320 million. to really just do a token effort to get aid into the strip while the Israelis continue bombing civilians by the thousands and starving the Ghazans to death. And while we're doing this just to support the Israelis,

or basically to just put a band-aid on the humanitarian crisis, it turns out, according to the Jerusalem Post, this idea of the U.S. setting up this pier was actually Netanyahu's idea. He suggested it to the president of Cyprus back in October, and there's also a report in Kahn news that says last month, Netanyahu told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs Committee that this could actually be used to facilitate the removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. So we may end up seeing

not only the U.S. dragged into a direct war with the Palestinians, but also taking part directly in the ethnic cleansing as well. All right, you guys, that is Connor Freeman. He's assistant editor at the Institute and at anti-war.com. Thanks very much. Thank you, Scott. All right, y'all. I am Scott Horton, and this is anti-war radio, and I have a website with all my archive, 6,000 interviews going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.