Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/11/24 Ramzy Baroud on the Roots of the West Bank Settlements and the Israeli Military-Politician Divide

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Scott interviews Ramzy Baroud about some articles he wrote recently. The first is about the birth of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. That leads to a broader discussion about the dynamic within the occupied territories. The second article examines the emerging divide between the Israeli military and Israeli politicians, which Baroud believes has roots as old as Israel itself. They finish with a quick look at the horrific humanitarian situation in Gaza. Discussed on the show: “Sharon Revisited: Netanyahu’s Ultimate Aim in Gaza and Why It Will Fail” (Antiwar.com) “The Altalena Affair: Is Israel Heading Towards a Civil War?” (Antiwar.com) Ramzy Baroud is a US-Arab journalist and is the editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: The Untold Story of Gaza and The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, and more. His new book is Our Vision For Liberation. Follow Ramzy on Twitter @RamzyBaroud and read his work at RamzyBaroud.net. 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys next up is ramsie barood he is editor of the palestine chronicle and he wrote my father was a freedom fighter and a bunch of other books including i think the latest is our very Vision for Liberation with Elon Pape there and also wrote The Last Earth and we run them all the time at anti-war.com. Welcome back to this show. Ramsey, how you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for

having me, Scott. Yeah, happy to have you here. I really appreciate your time. And I really love reading your stuff. I always learned so much from it. So let's start with here. I learned a little bit about the Alon plan and the original settlement of the Gaza Strip. I guess I know a little bit about, and in fact, I've learned a little bit more recently about the original settlement activity in the West Bank, on the West Bank, after 67. But much less about Gaza, maybe nothing. But now I'm learning about how they implemented the occupation of the Gaza Strip after the 67 war. So please do tell because, oh, I should mention the article is called Ariel Sharon

revisited Netanyahu's ultimate aim in Gaza and why it will fail. So we'll get to that part too. But so take us back to the 70s then. Right. So I'm going to take you back to actually rather 1967. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not just that, the Sinai. peninsula, the Golan Heights, part of Lebanon, the Jordan Valley, Israel has suddenly tripled in terms of size, if not even more. So for the Israeli military strategists and political strategists who were involved with the, you know, the liberal components of Zionism, the right hasn't, the right wing of Israel hasn't yet mature to become. the political force that it became in later years, starting in the late 1970s.

So they were thinking strategically. They were not thinking of the settlements as of yet in terms of population transfers. They were not thinking in terms of the agricultural use of the settlements and the territorial appropriation of Palestinian land. They were thinking in terms of how do you secure an area that is. relatively small within the larger context of the new areas that have been acquired. The man who was in charge of that is General Alone, who kind of really foresaw that in order for Israel to be secured,

they would need to create these kind of safety nets or security belts or zones all around it. They thought of annexing third of the West Bank to be, part of so-called proper Israel in a permanent way, parts of the Jordan Valley, all of these areas they wanted to use as a strategic depth. The way they looked at settlements then is like, okay, but we need people to come and live in these settlements. And that's the time where the settlers were encouraged and they kind of reached out to the religious components of Zionists and Israel. They were not very important from a political point of view. They were were not, you know, these significant political constituencies that helped anyone win or lose

elections. They were basically, really for the lack of a better word, they were just the useful idiots as far as Zionists were concerned. So they brought them in Kariat Arbafer in the Hebrew area, and then they start taking one settlement over the other, building all these new structures, and they used them. They put them in harm's way. in pursuow of some sort of a religious doctrine. For the government, it was not a religious issue.

It was a strategic military and security issue. The way they looked, and so this is really kind of the birth of settlements in the West Bank. That's the purpose itself. Later on, it was redefined, and those settlers became the most important constituency, as they are right now, in a right-led. or a far-right government in Israel, the likes of Bingvir and Smutridge and all of these guys, they are settlers.

And so their power has grown so much to the point that they are actually marginalizing the military and the liberal elites of Israel. And that's really the real conflict in Israel right now. It's this, the military that had this perfect amalgamation between military, power, strength, and security and political privilege. They are being humiliated, marginalized, and blamed for everything.

On the other hand, Gaza. Sharon was a general in the Israeli army. He was responsible for the southern branch of the army. And his job was to pacify this rebellious little Gaza. And in order for this to happen, he needed to build what he called the Sharon fingers or what became known as the Sharon fingers. Basically, five areas

that would extend all the way from Israeli territories and that would kind of cut Gaza into five different areas and you will have all these military camps in each one of these so-called fingers. And this way you isolate Gaza, you break the resistance and you are able to manage Gaza in terms of colonial, you know, kind of new colonial structures in terms of suppressing the so-called Fidei-Ian movement, which is the freedom fighters movements that was quite strong in Gaza

at that moment and so forth. So that's really the history of where these fingers or these buffer zones that Netanyahu is trying to build right now. He is actually focusing on building three fingers as opposed to five. One in the Philadelphia Corridor, which is at the Egypt-Ghasa border.

The second one is the Nitzirim area where the settlement of Nitzirim used to exist in Gaza before it was, you know, kind of pushed out of the strip in 2005, and the third finger is the entire Israeli eastern or, you know, the Gaza-Israel-Eastern borders, all the way from the Erich checkpoint, all the way across the eastern border, all the way to Karm Abu Salim border at the Rafah area. So he is kind of adopting the fingers concept, but he is slightly changing the order of how the division of Gaza is going to take place. The reason is going to fail is the nature of resistance in the, well, two reasons.

Number one, Sharon failed. Sharon in all of his greatness and awesomeness as this formidable Israeli general that is legendary in the view of the Israelis failed. He couldn't actually achieve all five fingers, and eventually he had to pack and leave. Now, Netanyahu, who doesn't have much military experience, is not going to be able to succeed where Sharon has failed. But the other and even more important reason is that Palestinians back then, there were very few in terms of the number of fighters and the number of factions and all of that. And their capabilities were extremely limited. Now you are talking about a large number of fighters, a large number of groups, and they are not fighting above ground.

are based underground in tunnels that can that would take years and years if they are all to be discovered now it will take years for them to be demolished so the chances of Netanyahu actually succeeding is really as close to zero as it gets okay so let's get back to Netanyahu in the current day in a second but if we go back to 04 and 05 and the decision of Sharon to withdraw from Gaza. I think we had talked before about this, about sort of the disingenuous nature of this. They're putting the peace process in formaldehyde and they're essentially, did we talk about the Arnon-Soffer thing? We're just, there's just too many Palestinians if we, if we disengage and withdraw, essentially we can kick, figuratively speaking, kick two million Palestinians out of

quote-unquote Israel, Palestine area. Somehow, they'll be. separate and then that way it'll be less of an apartheid state. We'll make it seem like we're really only occupying and ruling over the West Bank and no longer Gaza. So now instead of it being a bare minority ruling a bare majority or somewhere right around there, now it's back to more of an Israeli Jewish majority, something like that. But you seem to be implying that like, no, what was happening was the people of Gaza weren't putting up with it and forced them out. And so I wonder, you know, exactly what you think about all those things together. You know, there is a simple way of looking at this, you know, and kind of helping us, you know, try to

understand what has actually taken place. Let's imagine for a minute here that there was nothing going on in Gaza, because I was living in Gaza during that time in a refugee camp. I recall exactly what was going on in terms of the kind of everyday clashes and push back and and strikes and it I mean and I'm sorry to interrupt you Ramsey but just to be clear for the audience here that we're talking about in the years before 2004 when there were still Israeli Jewish settlers occupying the Gaza Strip absolutely when these guys needed to go to the beach they would have to put a military curfew on certain parts of Gaza and in order for them to go and swim on the beach,

they could not find a moment of peace as the occupiers of Gaza. And again, we are talking about the kind of resistance that really consisted mostly of rocks and slingshots. You know, we're not talking about Yassine 1.05s. We are not talking about RPGs. We're not talking about any of these things. So if Palestinians didn't do any of these things,

and it was all really fun and game, you know, casinos and beaches and hotels and all of that, there would have been no reason for Israel. to leave Gaza. So, yeah, the demographic element is important. And for Israel, this has always been a number game, especially, let's not forget that a lot of people, you know, as back as Carter's book, you know, peace, Palestine, peace, not apartheid, the whole idea that, okay, the numbers are adding up to the point that the Palestinians, some people are arguing, already overnumbered the Israeli Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the sea. So what are we talking about here?

This is not just a military occupation. This is an actual case of apartheid. So Israel wanted to kind of, okay, you know what? Let's leave Gaza. Let's put Gaza under siege. Technically, we are not, you know, Gaza is a foreign entity. They declared a few months after they left.

And a hostile foreign entity at that, we are not occupiers. Therefore, you can't play the apartheid number. Because, you know, or the apartheid game, because, as you said, two million people are complete to drive. out of this equation altogether. But, of course, the resistance of the Gazans played a major role in this.

And, you know, I think October 7 really proves that despite of all these plans, you know, putting the peace process in this constant state of just basically freeze the state, the peace process, quit talking about one state's two states, just move on with your your life entirely. Obviously, it did not pay dividends, you know, and October 7 proves that it didn't pay dividends. Gossans continued to see themselves as part of a larger hole. The siege was not enough for them to be contained or suppressed permanently, which means one out of two things. Try things that have already been tried and failed, and that's a bad, bad recipe for future conflicts and disasters, and that's sadly what Netanyahu is doing at the

moment, or accept that there can only be a peaceful just solution to the situation in Gaza, but also the rest of occupied West Bank and Israel, some degree of coexistence, some degree of democracy, some degree of fairness, so that we wouldn't have to be dealing with any of these issues anymore. All right. So now back to the current day where they're talking about doing this again, these fingers of occupation, military control, and then eventually, I guess, moved their settlers back in there. Trump's son-in-law, who is unbelievably, but very believably, why the hell not in this timeline, is Netanyahu's godson, Jared Kushner, was already talking in a speech about how, yeah, we're going to build condos

like it's, you know, South Florida. Once some seminals are out of there, we're going to have our way. and not even shy about it at all. But how are they going to colonize the place if they can't seem to defeat Hamas there? I mean, we're having this conversation. You know, humanitarian concerns aside for the moment, we're having this conversation nine months into a bitter clash between a First World Army

and a stateless militia. And all they have to do, as we all know the rules from V. all they have to do is not lose and here we are that's right and by the way we've we've spoken you know we had conversations during the war and pretty much what we have been saying from the very start is what is actually happening the the lots of Kushners and company I mean these guys are living in this delusion and they are refusing to abandon this delusion I mean I can understand if you wanted to build condos in Gaza earlier before

for all of this, but to actually still, you know, kind of subsist in that state of delusion after everything that has taken place, I mean, it will take 80 years for Gaza to remove its rubble. What condues, what tourist, you know, destinations are you talking about? And that's the problem, really, in U.S. foreign policy, is that you just, they are at, like, there are no great realizations. no one has yet, and I mean in terms of anyone within the Republican or Democratic parties, you know, the top hanshe, you know, the top guys, and nobody has said, wait a minute, we've actually have been doing this wrong. You know, something majorly wrong took place in this our political calculations of our perception of the situation in Gaza. No, they are still repeating the same old mantras and cliches, as if genocide did not take place. As if, you know, according to Lancet magazine, that's the world's most respected medical publication comes out of London, they actually, you know, came up with this horrific number that 186,000 gauzens have died as a result of the war,

not 40,000 dead, the 11,000 missing. They calculated those died from famine, disease, and so many other numbers. The number is so horrific. yet somehow US, you know, policymakers still repeat the same language that they used on October 6. I don't know. I mean, that does sound pretty high. If you compare it to a Rock War II, it was, you know, 100,000 by the fall of 04, a year and a half into the war there. And that's like almost 50% less. You mean the number from the Lancet public? education. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not, I'm not pleased by that number, but that's just

what. I understand. You're not, you're, you don't work there. I'm just, I'm just saying. Yeah. And Lansent is not particularly known for it's like pro-Palestine, anything. It just, it's a, you know, a bunch of, you know, top scientists and experts and doctors. And, and, and that's what they came up with. And, and, and look, excess death rates can be really hard to calculate, especially when a war is still going on. in this kind of thing. And the other thing is, like, from a personal point of view, many of us, you know, have lost more people that we can possibly count. And we wonder, is this really the accurate number? But even if it is the perfectly accurate number, you can't argue that an event of this magnitude, a number that is so high, a state of genocide by the language of the

ICC, the International Criminal Court, a state of extermination of the Palestinians, and we are still talking about same old U.S. foreign policy, same old illusions about, you know, settlements, what settlements? How can they possibly have a moment of peace in Gaza? How can they, if they couldn't crush a single group or a few men who manufacture their own weapons underground, over the course of nine months using every available technology. I mean, when we think that it's Israel that is fighting the war, in actuality, it's not. I'm talking to you from Italy at the moment, and I am very fully aware of the role of the Italian government in terms of the intelligence, in terms of equipment, in terms of

the modern weaponaries that have been sent to Israel, in addition to Great Britain, Germany, France, India, and others. So it's not only the Americans, although they give. the bulk of the weapons but others are also involved in helping Israel win and they can't. None of them can. So obviously

the solution cannot be through more weapons, through bunker busters, the 2,000 pound bombs, that's not going to get you anywhere except more hatred, more violence and greater degree of resistance. I know, it's so terrible.

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One, they know they need to, and two, that means you need to too. Interest rates are up, but for some reason not much for savings accounts. Park your money there and watch Uncle Joe Biden just counterfeit its value away. You can see how the Fed is afraid to raise rates to beat inflation for fear of popping the current bubbles, at least before the election. So more inflation it will continue to be. Gold is your shield against monetary and price inflation, just like it always has been.

Now, Tim Fry and the guys over at Roberts and Roberts are recommending gold over silver since the world's almost 200 governments are putting their own pressure on the price, which should help everyone else who make similar calls on their own. Of course, Roberts and Roberts can help you with platinum, palladium, and silver as well as gold. Don't let the Fed and the war party inflate all your savings away. Look up Roberts and Roberts at rrbi.co. That's rrbi.c.c.c. And, you know, I was just interviewing Kyle about this bureaucrat from, I guess, Obama years or whatever, who's back and who's saying.

And I think this is not hyperbole for budgetary purposes. I think that this is just right that he's saying that this is fueling anti-American terrorism recruitment all across the world or whatever Islamist radical groups, you know, presumably meaning ISIS-K and al-Qaeda types in Syria. and, you know, I don't know about on the Shiite side, you know, has Bala recruitment, I'm sure, is up in Lebanon. I don't know. I'm not saying that threatens America at all, but whatever is left of Al-Qaeda, well, hell, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, we've been on their side for the last 10 years. So they're probably sitting pretty and also recruiting based off of this. And I don't think those problems have gone away. And I think, you know, the reasons that America gave Al-Qaeda to target the United States,

still exist and here in space. I mean, if Grapes of Wrath in 96 motivated September 11th, then what the hell kind of payback do we have coming from this catastrophe, you know? Not to be too selfish about it because the poor Palestinians, I mean, don't get me wrong, but I'm just saying also I don't want my country to be attacked either, you know? That's right. But I think there is more to it than that. I mean, I would have accepted that argument hands down before. But this time around is different because we don't actually see any major shift in the

political discourse of al-Qaeda or ISIS of any of these groups. To the contrary, they have been marginalized largely in favor of a new type of resistance, militancy, whatever you want to call it, that is surrounding the Iran sphere in the region, namely the Ansarullah group in Yemen, Hezbollah. but also other groups that have been quite inactive in Lebanon until very recently. And we also see Shia-S Sunni alliance taking place in Lebanon and elsewhere. The formation of the new groups that happened after Gaza is kind of actually quite different from the ones that happened before. We don't see a very Sunni-oriented groups that have been largely marginalized in favor of Shia-centered kind of,

militant groups in the Middle East, in addition to some old Sunni groups that, again, have been quite inactive, coming back to the fore and forming kind of alternative alliances in the region. So I think this is going to be even an additional challenge. Right. Although Ramsey, I mean, those groups have always been sort of the bastard sons of America's Sunni sock puppet states. So where the Shiite states led by Iran are all independent from the empire, You know, if you throw in, you know, Syria, the Alawites, you know, count in Iraq now, Baghdad. And as you say, Ansarala in in Yemen and, of course, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. And so they are absolutely the ones taking the lead in defending the Palestinians now.

But then that might just be all the more reason for the bin Ladenites to try to do something crazy. For their own strategic reasons. Yeah. I mean, it's not like they're going to go and join the. Ayatollah's legions in Iraq, for example, right? They're going to do their own thing. Absolutely, but the reason I was emphasizing

that, because I do think the identity of the groups is quite important. Because what they are like, for example, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Hezbollah group in Lebanon, gave a speech a few days ago. And what he said, he said, if you want to understand the Hezbollah position

and our demands, call Hamas, literally. Say, talk to Hamas. Now, this is different type of your, you know, everyday militancy, people getting blown up in markets and schools. This is more geo-strategically driven. There's a larger vision behind it. And I think this is the kind of war that is even more difficult for the... Well, and Hezbollah has never been Al-Qaeda. You know, there are always been a very different... Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there are many state. And Nasrallah, you know, he's obviously a serious customer, but he also is like the Ayatollah himself,

all business, right? They don't seem... to really do crazy stuff. They do horrible stuff, but only when they've calculated that they need to, you know? That's right. And one question that people ask in the Middle East are those who do the crazy stuff, they haven't actually done lots of crazy stuff. They are suspiciously out of this picture altogether while someone else is kind of playing a different kind of game. So lots of questions, I guess, that would need time to be answered. They're busy targeting the Russians. for some reason you know

this goes back and forth man it does certainly and you know I wrote in my new book I'll spoil it that you know America and Britain and Saudi specialize in creating these groups

not necessarily controlling them so we can say like hey you guys should go off and fight in Ukraine or fighting Syria or wherever and they will but that doesn't mean that we can all our guys can always prevent them from hitting us too and especially when they continue to give the motive to, as we've been discussing here. So I'm paranoid about it, man. I don't think

that the terror wars are over at all. And I hope I'm wrong and later look foolish. Like, hey, remember how you thought that they were going to keep attacking us? You're stupid. I'll take it. I don't mind that. You know what I mean? If that's where we're headed. So, listen, I want to ask you about what time is it? Oh, good. So you wrote this article about the Altilena Affair, which I I knew a little bit about that. It's a very interesting story, but you're also kind of just making a metaphor here about something that you mentioned previously about new divisions in Israeli politics where, you know, I don't know if you mentioned conscription of the religious right as part of, that's another monkey wrench in the works there, but essentially this failure of the war that we've been talking about here, all of those casualties notwithstanding, means that somebody's got to pay. And if it's up to Netanyahu, it's going to not be him. So, but then where does that leave us and what does that have to do with this ship? Right. So the, you know, it goes back to what we started talking about here, about this kind of balance that was created by the Israeli military early on, you know, quite often, I mean,

early on in the life of the state after 1948, quite often we, you know, even in the Arab world, we kind of have this thing, you know, when we talk amongst ourselves, we say, well, say what you want about Israel. Maybe it's not a true democracy. Maybe it's not this and that. But at least the military does not intervene in the in the affairs of the politicians. I actually disagree. I think what happened in Israel, it's not that the military does not intervene in the in the affairs of the politicians, is that the military and the politicians historically have been the same person. Because Israel is this, I mean, even the very early, and I know you have done a lot of research on this, but the Haganah, the major, you know, kind of, you know, Zionist militia

that worked in Palestine since the 1920s until it became the IDF, more or less, after 1948. Its roots actually go back to East Europe of the late 19th century. These are, you know, So there's a very strong military component to Israel and the roots of the Israeli politics and the Israeli government. But the way that they handled it after the war is that the military men, some of them went to the IDF or the militiasis, some of them went to the IDF, and others put on suits and ties, and they went to the Knesset. But they always had this kind of interesting relationship where it's kind of a revolving door sort of thing, where the general becomes. a defense minister and the, you know, and, you know, becomes a chief of staff, and then they become a minister of agriculture and economics. And if they don't manage to, you know, score a political position, they are deputies and hits of companies and running, you know,

major investments and so that sort of thing. So the military has always been privileged by, you know, within the Israeli political system. But the idea here, is that they have to remain privileged. Otherwise, the balance is going to basically be shattered. And this, the article I wrote about this ship that I think it belonged to, it didn't belong to the Haganah, it belonged to the Menachem Begin gang, you know, the stern gang, that managed to bring weapons to Israel after the Nakba, after the destruction of the Palestinian homeland,

and after the declaration of independent Israel. And they wanted to actually take over. They wanted to be the ones with the upper hand in the Israeli, in the Israeli military and the Israeli politics. And that's where David Bingarian, who was the first prime minister of Israel, told Manachan Began, hold off. You know, this is not, you know, this is, you are exceeding your, you know, your responsibilities here.

As far as the new arrangement, the new deal that brought all, of these Israeli gangs and militias together to form the IDF, and they actually clashed, and they actually sunk the ship with all the weapons. A lot of people got killed in the process of doing so, where the military in its very early weeks turned against each other. And, you know, it could have been a lot worse if it were not for the fact that the Haganah managed to sort this out in a very bloody but very quick sort of way. This animosity that exists, back then, more or less still in existence today, because Netanyahu is an outcome of that, you know, kind of conservative Zionist movement that was inherited from Jeputinsky and his Iron Wall thinking and that sort of thing. They are all the same manifestations of these very groups that existed back then.

The military of today belongs to, you guessed it, the Haganah and David Bingeryon. The government of today belongs to, you know, these kind of once marginal but influential militias and groups that existed in Israel and Palestine before 1948. And now it's all coming back. And this is why when the Israeli president Herzog talks about the civil war, we are at the verge of civil war, brink of civil war, this is not just random, you know, warnings. They know that in the past, there was that possibility. Now, the military is not going to be happy unless they restore their status in Israeli society. It's as simple as that. And Bingarion, I mean, rather Bingvir and Smotrich and Netanyahu will do everything in their power to keep the military marginal.

The one who is going to win this conflict is going to define not only the future of Israel, but of Zionism as well. yeah all right now listen i'm sorry i'm already keeping you overtime do you have to go um we have few more minutes if you want okay yeah i just wanted to give you a chance to talk about what life is like for the people of the gaza strip right now you know we're talking about all these politics and other things but this war is just an absolute hell on earth catastrophe for these people and i sat there and watch these boys playing soccer get bombed yesterday and i can't stand it i'm I'm lucky that I have this other project, my book about Russia, that I have to devote myself to, because I can't stand to look at Israel-Palestine every day anymore.

But I want to give you a chance to get across to the listeners. What's really happening these people over there right now? Well, you know, I'm also working or just about concluded a book on Gaza. It's called The Working Title is Before the Flood, which provides context to everything that happened. on October 7. But to do so, I have been following the life of a family in Gaza since October 7 until today. And whenever I get the chance, I'm able to communicate with them. Whenever they have access to Internet, they leave me messages, I leave them questions, and that sort of thing.

And just to maybe it would be better and more relatable to put this in a way that is, you know, that any human being perhaps can relate to. This is a family that lived in the Shati refugee camp. They were all poor working-class people, mostly unemployed because of the siege. When the war started, a few days into the war, they have lost several family members, including a mother and her son. You know, they have several houses in the camp. All of them were destroyed, every single one of them. The total casualty count of that family so far is something about 40. members, including mostly children and women, but also few men.

Many of them are still missing. Every single one of them have a horroring story. One of them died from starvation. One of the children have died from starvation. Many of them are still missing. Some of them moved from the north. They were told to move to the south. It's safer.

They did. It wasn't. They were bombed. Then they moved back to the center of Gaza, back to the north. There's no homes to go back to. everything has been destroyed. So they live in refugee camps. One of them had, one of the ladies had gave birth to a child with a defective heart and down syndrome. No possibility of a surgery, no possibility of medicine, everything is shut down. They were forced for a while to beg

from Egyptian soldiers at the Rafah border in order for them to survive. The last I've heard from them is that they got scattered again after Israel invaded Drafa. They went back to the center, then they went back to the north. And now, as you know, the north of Gaza is under very heavy bombardments, what they call fire belts. I haven't heard from anyone for over a week since all of this have started. Usually when they disappear, they come back. One or two is missing in one way or the other. They are not exceptional. That is the Gaza Strip right now. I mean, this is kind of junicide that is kind of zooming down on a single family and and almost every single family in Gaza experiencing a degree of that horror.

It's just terrible. And, you know, it gets normalized, right? I guess this is like with anything, you just get desensitized to it. You know, I remember the first time I saw Grand Theft Auto, the video game and the guys tracks blood across the street after killing a guy and I remember being like oh my god like is crossing a line in a video game so bad to have it like you canop and kill a hooker and take her money that's the video game and like but now yeah of course that's like grand theft auto one there's now been like six of them and nobody cares dude now I sound like an old fuddy-duddy

even bringing that up like it's the same kind of thing well you know Israel's been bombing these people for about nine months now so I guess we're all just getting used to that or something like do you see they bombed a bunch of tents they bombed refugees in their tents imagine calling in an airstrike imagine receiving the call from

your commander to drop a bomb on a tent city of refugees on a soccer game of young boys playing soccer and then that's your job pretending that you're fighting a war oh they're all it's all

Hitler and the Nazis down there Ramsey it's incredible it's just unbelievable that this is happening um the israeli newspaper how it's as you know i mean it's still an israeli designers newspaper but kind of different than your times of israel and jerusalem posts and all of that they had an interesting report um very recently about uh testimonies of israeli soldiers talking about how quite often they just opened fire at Palestinians because they are bored so talk about the normalization of the atrocities and the genocide. And you're not even, in many, many polite companies,

you are not even allowed to use the word genocide. So a junicide is taking place, and we are kind of haggling with what are the limits of the language we are allowed to use or not to use in the media. Really, it's a degree of injustice, that the word injustice does not even begin to describe Scott. Yeah. Well, and look, it's fair that there's some confusion there

where the terms coined for the Holocaust where people are hunting down and killing every last Jew they can find millions and millions of people. And then so the term, if they're a perfect synonym, then you can't call this a genocide until it's over and everybody's dead, you know? Only then can you invoke the term. So it just has all this weird, like, political baggage attached to it where I'm so glad you point this out in your article and I try to mention it on my radio show in L.A. every week

is pretty much every week. The Wall Street Journal, the Post of the Times and the journal, but I guess especially the journal, because that's the Republican one, right? They compared it to Dresden and Hamburg. And it's not in two nights or three nights like Churchill and FDR, or was that Truman, but it's still like over the course of a few months, they completely destroyed two-thirds, three-quarters, now probably the whole damn thing of this strip. The farms, all the greenhouses, all the roads and the buildings are just neighborhoods at a time, bulldozing. all the rubble with the body still inside and just this is some real horror movie stuff going on people just don't want to believe that it could be that bad or something

like if someone said this is going on in Burma you'd be like man it's pretty crazy the way things get over there sometimes or whatever but this is America's responsibility like our government is in on this absolute barbarian level of violence being dished out on these people that's right crazy anyway I'm sorry I'm carried away this. Not really, but fittingly, but still. All right, so I'll let you go, but thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate talking to you and all your great work on this issue, which I know is so important to you. Always pleasure. Thank you very much, Scott.

All right, you guys, that's the great Ramsey Baroud. He wrote The Last Earth, and my father was a freedom fighter, and he's the editor of the Palestine. Oh, the latest is Our Vision for Liberation, Engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectual speak. He's the editor of that. he's working on a new one as he said i'm sorry ramsie would you say the name of the new one was um well the tentative title is um is before the flood before gaza to paradise i'm sorry i can't remember anything these days but thank you so much for that appreciate them um there you go before the flood and uh yeah and we run all this stuff at antiwar dot com as well so uh thank you very much again the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradio. antiwar.com, scothorton.org,

and libertarian institute.org.