10/14/15 – Charlotte Silver – The Scott Horton Show

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We are the masters, says Israeli mayor, as three more Palestinians are killed.
This report from yesterday by Charlotte Silver, an independent journalist in San Francisco, formerly based in the West Bank and writing for Electronic Intifada.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Charlotte?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate it.
Very important work that you're doing here.
And I'm sorry, you're reporting from there or from here at this point?
I'm in Oakland, California right now, not in Palestine.
I just like to imagine where in the world the person I'm talking to is.
Right.
And anyway, you tell a lot of very important stories in this one here, and there may be a new one since then, since the we are the masters.
But can we start with that?
The Israeli mayor of what said we are the masters in of who and in what context?
Sure.
Well, I would just like to add that four more Palestinians have been killed since I wrote, published that piece on Monday, one of whom was shot at a protest and a refugee camp in Bethlehem.
So, you know, it's every day that more violence, more deaths are mounting.
And and the majority of the deaths and injured are Palestinians and particularly Palestinian youth people, young people as young as 13 years old are being shot at protests.
But the context of that quote by a mayor of us, of a town in the north near Haifa in the north of Israel, was said in response to the residents of the town sort of pressuring him to crack down in their in their village.
Not that the village had experienced any violence, but it was sort of a call to criminalize Palestinians there.
And so he was specifically ordering his police to start monitoring construction sites, asking construction workers to show their national ID, show their permits, et cetera.
In this town, sort of a way of harassing Palestinians inside the state of Israel.
Just basically as a show of force.
Right.
I think so.
We are the masters.
All right.
Now, you know, I'm sorry, because you're right to start off with the killings and the death.
And obviously that's what's important.
But, you know, the terminology so often just gives people away.
And it really goes, I think, to explain the context in ways that, you know, just who shot who.
Sometimes, you know, if we watch CNN, you'd think that Palestine is the country next door that never stops trying to invade it.
Israel and steal it.
So.
Right.
And I think that that's a really good point, that this is a lot of what the responses Israel has had to, you know, the rash of attempted stabbing attacks that have occurred and also just protests.
Remember, 17 of the 31 Palestinians that have been killed have been Palestinians at protests.
But the majority of the response the Israeli government has had is is essentially to show to show their might, a show of force, a show of who is in control.
And this this is from the very beginning of the month when this sort of this latest surge in violence began.
Israel started implementing new measures, harsher measures of penalties and penalties and other types of of a show of force, like increased home demolitions, a form of collective punishment in which suspects of attacks are there.
The homes of suspects of attacks are destroyed, supposedly as a deterrent measure.
The Israeli police force, civilian police force in Jerusalem and the rest of Israel have been given permission to use live ammunition on protesters.
And and we're seeing reservists of border police flooding the streets of Jerusalem now.
And and now, as as as this morning, the morning of Wednesday are starting to enforce closures on Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem.
All right.
And so that's that's kind of what I'm getting at, too, with the context.
There was an article at Mondo Weiss about an NPR news report where they just don't mention the occupation at all.
And, you know, I got to say, I think it's important.
I don't know.
I'm not just talking about myself, but I'm saying in my experience as growing up in a kid in Texas, I never had much Zionist propaganda, pro-Zionist propaganda around me at all.
But I never had someone explain that when they say the West Bank and Gaza, these are lands that were conquered way back in the 1960s.
And the people there are there still Palestinians that live there, but they're under the rule of the Israelis.
They just never explain that.
They never put the map in the little square above the newscaster's shoulder and give you the 101 at all.
If you have read about the occupation, well, then lucky you.
But if you're just a regular American, as far as you know, the Palestinians already have a state.
And why won't they ever stop attacking the poor Israelis?
Because it just that's what they're left to conclude, basically, because of the lie by omission.
And so when you have a bunch of people going around saying, we are the masters, we control this checkpoint, we control.
We're going to demolish your house.
We're going to do this, that and the other thing.
That sure doesn't sound like the Palestinians invading and occupying the Israelis to me.
Right.
And, you know, remember, it's also Jerusalem that's occupied.
And this and it's Jerusalem where the majority of Palestinians sort of the heat is strongest.
This is where you're seeing Palestinians attempting to attack Israeli policemen and others.
And Israel is cracking down with the largest amount of force.
And Jerusalem is opposed.
Israel doesn't even pretend that East Jerusalem is is under consideration to be given back to Palestinians.
It was annexed immediately after it was occupied.
And it treats it like its own.
It's part of its own sovereign territory.
All right.
Now, let's see, I guess we only have a couple of minutes left before this break.
But if maybe you just want to pick any one of these stories of the recent innocent Palestinians gunned down, killed.
That is by the IDF or by settlers that you'd like to bring to people's attention.
Well, there are a number of there are a number of teenagers who have been shot at protests, shot with lethal force.
You know, the neck and the chest.
This is a shoot to kill policy.
And these are and some of them have been protesting.
Some of them have not.
There was the case of a 13 year old in Ida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem who was standing many meters away from the protests and on a on a stoop.
And he was shot dead.
But the shoot to kill policy that's being inflicted on Palestinians at protests is also being inflicted on Palestinians who are who are alleged to have attempted stabbing.
And, you know, I think that we need to look at these reports of attempted stabbings very critically.
Many of them are not ending in any kind of injury.
And yet Israel is enforcing a shoot to kill policy, which is not necessarily proportionate to the risk they pose.
And just recently, almost all the human rights organizations in Israel, B'Tselem, Yeshadin, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Amnesty International in Israel have condemned this policy that's been promulgated by ministers of the Knesset, heads of Jerusalem police force.
And they've condemned this policy as as disproportionate.
You know, even in the case of a Palestinian taking a knife shoot to kill policy is disproportionate.
So I think that the deaths that we're seeing are are not necessary.
And we have to look critically at at all of them.
Yeah, that's a very fair point.
And, you know, especially when you consider that just because the IDF said he had a knife or the police say he had a knife doesn't mean he really had a knife.
That just means that that's a thing that a cop said.
In fact, that would be an indication that it's not true.
And if we're talking about Americans here, they would be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
So that's my same standard for, you know, well-armed soldiers and police shooting guys.
And then all they have is a drop knife because no one would believe them if they had a drop gun.
But anyway, hold it right there, Charlotte.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Charlotte Silver from the Electronic Intifada.
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Welcome back.
That's funny.
Check your head.
It's all these begoodies now, huh?
I guess so.
I'm old.
All right.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Charlotte Silver from electronicintifada.net.
Electronicintifada.net.
We are the masters, says Israeli mayor, as three more Palestinians are killed, as she elaborated.
There have been, I think she said, four more since then.
And so we're talking about the knives, and that brought up to me this story.
And I don't want to talk about it again, but I want to make sure that people who hear just the interviews get a chance to hear about this story.
Could you please tell them about Ahmed Manasra, the 14-year-old boy?
Yeah.
So Ahmed Manasra and his cousin, Hassan, are alleged to have attacked a few Israelis in the large Israeli settlement block near Jerusalem, Pizgat Zev.
And his cousin, Hassan, who was, I believe, 16 years old, was shot on the spot.
And Ahmed was, I believe, rammed with a car.
And there's a very haunting video of him lying on the ground, bleeding.
His body is contorted.
His legs are obviously broken or severely injured.
They're in positions that you can't – no body would naturally make.
And he's gasping for breath.
And surrounding him are presumably residents of the settlement.
Jewish Israelis shouting at him, you know, die, and then calling him various terms and some ordering the policemen to finish him off, to put a bullet in him, to kill him.
And this video is emblematic of an attitude in, you know, not just in settlements in Jerusalem, in the rest of Israel of – and, you know, like we were saying, the residents in the town in the north calling on their mayor to crack down on Palestinians.
This is an attitude of – that's been sort of bred in Israeli society by portraying all Palestinians as terrorists.
And like you said, not putting any of their actions into a political context.
And, you know, their violence is always sort of pathologized or treated as senseless.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal that swipes away any possibility that there's a political context for Palestinian violence right now and just describes it simply as bloodlust or a blood fetish.
And these are claims that, you know, are purely racist.
There's a sort of casting of Palestinian violence as a part of their ethnicity as opposed to as a part of a political context.
Yeah.
Well, and then the next excuse would be Islamic extremism or whatever it is.
Always an excuse.
But, you know, here's the thing about this.
You watch this video, and it's just absolutely repulsive.
You mentioned the people being shot and slaughtered at the protests.
There's video of that, too.
It's just horrible.
But, you know, this picture, you think how horrible it is.
But all you have to do is just stop for one second and say, what if the shoe was on the other foot?
What if the caption here was a bunch of Palestinian Arab Muslims chanting, die, and the rest of these horrible things that they say to a 14-year-old young Jewish boy laying shot, bleeding on the ground?
Holy crap.
America would probably invade and finish the Nakba and drive them all into the Jordan River or into Egypt.
And, you know, it's important to point out that it's not just Israeli security forces like the army and the police who are killing Palestinians.
It's also Israeli citizens.
There's lots of video footage of settlers throwing stones, setting fields on fire with the protection of the Israeli army.
And also the mayor of Jerusalem is encouraging all residents to procure arms and to use their arms, carry their arms, carry their guns around and use them if they feel like an attack is coming on.
And so there's, in fact, there's the opposite.
There's a sort of encouragement of violence against Palestinians by Jews right now.
It's really something else to see.
I really wish people would watch this footage.
It seems like, you know, Mike Brown was such a change.
Black people getting shot in the street by cops on a daily basis.
White people, too, on a regular basis.
But it took the humiliation of Mike Brown's corpse, basically, to finally.
And then the insane overreaction of the police that night to the protests that came out over it to finally kind of tip the scale to get to make police brutality in this country finally an issue.
And seems like, man, if that if the American people could ever be shocked into understanding that Palestinians are human and what's happening to them is not fair and it's on our dime, it might could be this very one.
This video of this young boy laying there.
And I guess you report here he's still alive in critical condition.
Thank goodness his cousin was killed.
But, you know, even the meanest little 13 year old gets away with stabbing a bunch of people and then is shot in.
And assuming the truth of this story, I'm saying, and this happened in America and then he's laying there on the ground shot.
Now it's the duty of every adult nearby to try to stop the bleeding and save his life and protect him until the EMS gets there and let him be.
Let him go to Juvie or whatever thing.
But sit there and mock him and laugh at him and wish him dead and hope that he bleeds out.
Dying a 14 year old boy who looks younger than that to me.
I mean, man, this is just so out of control.
And it's, you know, as you say, it's the settlers and the cops, too.
And and I mean, the message there is loud and clear.
If you ask me, I wish that's the one that would finally go viral here.
Breakthrough.
Right.
Yeah, I think, you know, I think that Americans and probably the rest of the world are very inculcated and input and sort of vilifying violence.
It's perpetrated by someone who's not in a uniform.
There's something about when someone in a uniform with a helmet on and a sniper gun shoots someone at a protest.
There's something very impersonal about it.
And it's kind of this this cold violence, whereas violence perpetrated by someone, you know, a 13 year old or a 20 year old or whatever it is, taking a gun and stabbing someone.
That's that's the only kind of violence we really know how to condemn or be horrified by.
And so I think that, you know, I think that a lot of Israeli violence gets passed because it is the majority of it is perpetrated by men in uniforms.
All right.
Well, with that, I will let you go.
And thank you so much for your time, for your great journalism and your time again on the show, Charlotte.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right.
So that is Charlotte Silver.
She is at Electronic Intifada dot net.
This one is called We are the Masters.
Says Israeli mayor.
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