Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Mel Freitberg.
She's a journalist for IPSnews.net, working out of the Gaza Strip, of course, with a great many things published by Interpress Service.
You can find her writing at antiwar.com, in this case, antiwar.com/freitberg.
And I'm going to lead you right to it.
The latest is called War Clouds Back Over Gaza.
Oh, and I think you corrected me, didn't you?
That's Freitberg.
My apologies.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So, War Clouds Back Over Gaza.
I guess maybe we can go back two or three weeks to, and you can explain, hopefully, what started, what caused, or what happened in the last couple of weeks of violence.
I suppose there's some sort of temporary-ish ceasefire now, and then maybe we can get into the threat of further conflict after that.
Yeah, it has been fairly quiet.
You know, periodically there are flare-ups of violence between the resistance groups in Gaza and the Israelis, but nothing serious.
And then three weeks ago, after it had been fairly quiet, Israel went and assassinated three major Hamas commanders.
And at the time their reasoning was that they had received concrete warnings of Hamas and other resistance groups trying to kidnap Israelis in the Sinai, as well as kidnapping Israeli soldiers.
Now, this is something that they bring up every year at this time during the Jewish Passover.
They warn Israelis not to travel to Sinai.
And they also, you know, and they say this every year, but nothing actually happens.
And, of course, they have been saying for a while that Hamas wanted to kidnap some more, capture some more Israeli soldiers.
So this is nothing new.
And the fact that they went and suddenly killed these three commanders for this sort of vague, this vague reasoning made me suspicious.
And then, of course, shortly thereafter they knew that the Hamas and the other resistance groups would react to this.
And then that is when a lot of rockets were shot towards Israel.
And then, of course, the Israelis used this as an excuse to go into Gaza and to kill a lot more people and to, you know, to carry out a lot more attacks.
So the Israelis were definitely instigating something.
But, of course, a lot of the time what happens is that the Western media only hears about the rockets being shot at Israel, not at what happened prior to that, because the resistance groups did say that they would take revenge for the killing of those three commanders at an appropriate time.
So that is, you know, what made me suspicious straightaway that something more was on the way.
Well, you know, it's unfortunate, but I do watch a little bit of cable TV news here in the States.
And the way it works is we don't hear anything about any of this until a Hamas rocket hits a school bus.
And then all we hear is the terrorists attacked an Israeli school bus, and the Israeli government has been forced to retaliate.
Yeah, well, that's the way the whole narrative is framed to a large degree, especially the U.S., because the American media seems to be pretty bad about giving their coverage of the situation here.
I mean, you do get sort of biased coverage with the U.K. and other countries as well, but you also get media outlets in the U.K. and that also give more of the Palestinian perspective.
But it's the same with Operation Cast Lead, when, you know, everybody says that the Hamas had started by shooting rockets at Israel, when actually Israel had, again, gone in and killed six Hamas guys, saying that they were going to try and, again, they had dug a tunnel that they were going to try and kidnap Israeli soldiers.
And that tunnel that they actually bombed was nowhere near the border of Gaza with Israel.
So even Israeli reasoning wasn't very logical, because they wouldn't have been able to capture any Israeli soldiers through that tunnel.
So, yes, the Israelis do basically control the narrative of when the next war will be, when the violence flares up, and also, to a large degree, the Western media's coverage of the situation.
Yeah, well, it's true, and we certainly never see footage on TV.
Maybe, you know, once every few years, 60 Minutes might do a special or something like that, but for the most part, we never ever get to see what Gaza or the West Bank even look like at all on TV.
Another thing that also I don't think is covered at all in the American media is that there is a buffer zone.
The Israelis have created a buffer zone between southern Israel and Gaza, and this goes from 300 meters to up to 1.5 kilometers, and anybody who comes into that zone is shot at.
Now, this is where some of the most fertile land is in Gaza.
And a lot of us, you know, Gaza's very tiny, and it's got 1.5 million people.
So the farmers, they are desperate to farm their land and to, you know, get their produce or graze their animals, and they go into this zone, and they are shot.
And since Operation Cross, there's something like 22 Palestinian civilians have been shot dead and then 100 and something injured because they've gone into the zone purely to do farming.
And that's not taking into consideration the Gaza fishermen who've been shot and killed as well.
Now, this happens on an almost daily basis, and none of that is covered as well.
But that is also a sort of violence against the, you know, the Palestinians and the Gazans.
And, you know, on that basis alone, you know, if that was happening anywhere else in the world, people would be allowed to retaliate, not to mention the quicksand siege that's imposed on Gaza as well.
Well, first of all, of course, all of those civilians killed, if they're referred to in the American press at all, they're identified by Israeli sources as being militants, which I guess means they're carrying a rifle, so it's okay to kill them.
I don't know.
And then there's never any follow-up when it turns out that's really not true.
But, you know, what I wonder is there was a statement by one of Ehud Olmert's aides.
I forget his name, but he was one of a very top guy in Olmert's government who said that the program for Gaza was not to starve them, but to put them on a diet.
And then in the WikiLeaks, there was another statement very similar to that, that said not starve them, but keep them hungry.
And this is, of course, a reference to the siege, which is sold at least to the American people, and I presume the people of Israel, as an effort to keep Hamas from importing nuclear bombs from Osama bin Laden or something like that, when in fact they really kind of admit in certain circumstances that it's a war against the nutrition of the civilian population of the strip there.
And I wonder whether the Israeli people really know this.
Has that been really publicized in, say, left-leaning papers in Israel, for example?
It has in Haaretz, which is one of the slightly better Israeli newspapers, slightly left-leaning, still has a Zionist ideology, but slightly left-leaning.
And in fact, an Israeli human rights group called Gisha actually forced the Israeli defense forces or the people who were in charge of putting the Gazans on the strict diet, was the words they actually used, to come up with the documentation as to why they were putting what was behind the enforcement of the strict diet on Gaza.
And they didn't want to come up with the documentation or the reasoning behind it, so eventually Gisha took them to court and basically outlined what foods they were not allowing in.
But also they were forced to admit that it was political, the siege on Gaza, and that they said words to the effect that Israel didn't have to do any business or have any economic relations with any political entity that didn't suit its own interests or that it's considered a threat.
So that's not the exact wording they used, but basically admitting that the siege on Gaza was political and an economic punitive measure.
And some of the NGO groups I've worked with have tried to pin the ideas down to exactly what foods would have been allowed in and what foods are banned.
Now, after the flotilla to Gaza last year, the Free Gaza flotilla that was raided by Israeli commanders where nine people were shot dead due to international pressure, the limitations of stuff imported into Gaza were slightly eased, but still not very much so.
Because when these NGOs were trying to get a list of what foods were allowed in, because on a weekly basis the foods that were banned kept getting changed, and this was a way of making it difficult for the NGOs to try and work out exactly what was banned and what wasn't.
But to give you an example, things like toilet paper, toothpaste, cigarettes, fruit juice, jam, those were banned from entering Gaza.
Seedlings, school books, this kind of thing, which had nothing to do with Israel's security at all.
So that is just more of an illustration that it was purely a punitive measure.
Well, the people who organized the flotilla said that every time that they had tried to donate humanitarian aid to Gaza the official way, by way of the Israeli government, that they would just sit on it and never deliver the aid.
Well, yes.
That's quite a clever way of making the Gazans suffer without the international community being able to pin down that Israel's being purely punitive and vindictive as far as the siege on Gaza goes.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'm just saying they're fairly clever at doing that.
Without saying blatantly, we're going to make them suffer, or we're going to hit civilians, or whatever they say, no, we'll allow the stuff in and we don't like it when civilians are killed.
But their talk and their behavior are two different things.
All right, well, so Benjamin Netanyahu is in a weird position here, a bad position.
Back in the days of Ehud Olmert, Condoleezza Rice came up with this plan, because George Bush had said that Israel does not have to negotiate with a government, Yasser Arafat's government, that is not democratically elected.
There's no legitimacy there whatsoever, so we have to have democratic elections.
So they had democratic elections, and Hamas won.
And then they were, I believe, going to have to form a coalition government with the PLA, even in Gaza, where the PLA kept control in the West Bank anyway.
But then they had the whole Dayton Plan that backfired, where they put a bunch of arms into the hands of Hamas and created a reaction, and the PLA ended up losing out in Gaza altogether.
So now Israel's dealing with a situation where the Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas, and they are terrorists, right-wing, radical, fundamentalist crazies, and just like they don't have to deal with people who aren't democratically elected, they don't have to deal with terrorists, according to the United States.
And really, what are they to do with Hamas?
What are they to do to guarantee a government in Gaza that doesn't want to push all the Jews into the sea?
Well, I mean, there's been a division between the Hamas political wing and the military wing, and the Hamas political wing has several members have actually said that they would be prepared to accept the existence of Israel as a de facto fact on the ground for the next 40 years or whatever, if the Israelis would also stop their regression against Gaza and lift the siege on Gaza and respect the rights of the Palestinians, too.
So there is a pragmatic side to Hamas, which is the political wing.
And these members in Hamas, because I've actually interviewed some of the Hamas leadership, and they have also stated this to several European government members who've interviewed them as well about the situation, but Israel has always failed to take them up on this offer, where there would be like a ceasefire for, I don't know, 40 years or whatever, and then take the situation from there.
But that doesn't suit the Israeli authorities either.
And don't forget that before they made peace with the Palestinian Authority, they said the same thing about the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is where the Palestinian Authority came from.
They also said the PLO was a terrorist organization, and they wouldn't negotiate with them either.
But eventually they did negotiate with them.
So they're not interested in a negotiated settlement, and they see Hamas as a great threat.
And that is why they've worked so hard to help the division between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, because they are truly frightened of a united Palestinian front.
And I actually think that Benjamin Netanyahu does very well when Israel is under what the Israelis call threat, and there's a military threat in that.
And he can launch strikes, or he can, you know, attack Palestinians.
He's then the golden boy in the eyes of the Israeli electorate.
And also it takes the pressure off him internationally, because the Israeli government is basically becoming the black sheep of the international community and is regarded as an apartheid state by a growing number of people.
So that also probably had something to do with the strike on Gaza.
But there is a way of reaching some kind of negotiation with certainly the more pragmatic elements in Hamas, even if it's not an ideal situation.
Well, now, so what do you make of the move by some Palestinians, and I guess internationally, to just go ahead and declare Palestine a state?
I think it's fairly smart move.
It's not something that's been, you know, done sort of without thinking.
Kaye, Foreign Minister Salam Fayyad has actually been working on it for the last couple of years, and he actually said in September last year that by September this year, 2011, the Palestinians would be ready for statehood.
And certainly members of the EU have said that the monetary financing, IMF or whatever, said that the Palestinian Authority is ready for statehood come September this year, because they have been building state institutions.
I don't think the Palestinians have any other choice, because they've tried to negotiate with the Israelis.
And Netanyahu has continued with the settlement building, even when he refused to renew the so-called construction freeze that was for 10 months.
But I must say that even in those 10 months, there was still a lot of settlement building continuing.
Well, but what about Mahmoud Abbas?
I thought he was just Netanyahu's sock puppet anyway.
When you say what about him, what do you mean specifically?
Well, I mean, if Gaza is in the hands of Hamas and the West Bank is in the hands of the PLA, nominally anyway, then the West Bank is really, if my understanding is probably overly simplified, but it seems like Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the PLA, is much less independent from Tel Aviv than Yasser Arafat was.
Certainly he's an entirely different creature than whoever's running Hamas over there on the Gaza Strip.
And I just wonder whether this is part of his plan, is to go ahead and defy Netanyahu and declare independence?
I think they're going to do that.
I think they're definitely going to take it to the UN Security Council in September.
And, yes, he is a puppet to a certain degree.
But, I mean, when even being a puppet to that degree is not working, and the Israelis are still basically failing to give the Palestinian Authority even some concrete accomplishment on the ground, what has the Palestinian Authority got to show?
Or, you know, being a sock puppet or agreeing with the Israelis or negotiating as much as they can and reaching out to the Israelis.
And the Israelis are still giving them nothing in return.
They're continuing the settlement building.
They're continuing the expropriation of Palestinian land.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Mel.
We have to leave it there.
Mel Frickberg, everybody, from IPSNews.net.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
