07/29/14 – Noura Erakat – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.scotthorton.org libertyradionetwork.com All right, you may have seen this article.
It went viral around the internet over the weekend.
Anyway, we ran as the spotlight on antiwar.com.
Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked.
And this is no, you know, BuzzFeed, you know, hack job.
This is a You know, because the five, the list.
Don't be turned off by the list.
That's what I'm trying to say here.
This is really great stuff here, and I hope you've already taken a look at it.
The author is Nora Erekat, and she is a human rights attorney and activist to Abraham L. Friedman Fellow at Temple University Beasley School of Law and a contributing editor of Jadaliya, I think, something like that.
And this is at thenation.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Sure thing.
I sure appreciate you joining us today.
And so this is a very important article as I was trying to get across there, however clumsily.
I really do hope people will look at it again.
Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked, and thoroughly, I might add.
And if it's okay with you, Nora, I'd like to start with number five, because this is the one that I think is, well, it's as important as any of the others, but it's the one that is the least addressed of all of them, I think.
And you do a very good job of handling the question, the accusation, that Hamas hides all their weapons in homes full of civilians.
They use the people of the Gaza Strip as human shields, and they kind of leave this out.
It's kind of silent but included.
And so therefore, it's okay to kill the civilians, because, you know, hey, what are we supposed to do if there are civilians between us and our enemies, is kill them too, I guess.
Yeah, no, I think that you're hitting on something really critical here, which is the discourse belies the humanity of Palestinians.
What it says is that Israel has an objective, it has a military objective, and whatever stands in the way is really irrelevant.
And that, of course, only carries any water if we accept that humanity is exceptional, and only includes one people and not all people.
And so using, now the death toll has reached 1,106 Palestinians.
80% of that number are civilians.
That means 80% have not picked up arms, have not participated in any military activity, have not participated in anything that threatens Israel's security.
And 200 of those are children, right?
And rather than completely just being abominable and unacceptable under any circumstances, the discourse is one that attempts to obfuscate this either in racist rhetoric, suggesting that Hamas is hiding amongst these civilians, or that Hamas is using the dead in order to bolster its morality in the war, or that Palestinians themselves have a culture of martyrdom and seek to die.
So either we're discussing this in a racist lens to rationalize why so many Palestinians have been dead, or we're rationalizing it as a necessary evil because Israel had to attack military installations and civilians happened to be in the way.
In both instances, what's happening is that we are we are allowing Israel to get away with absolutely no accountability, that somehow the well-being of Israeli people is necessary at all costs, and even at the cost of this dehumanization.
Now, I'm saying this because I think it's really the most important point.
The other point is the fact that this is just a talking point, right?
That's what's being sold.
That's what's being bartered.
And unfortunately, you know, this has weight.
And the reason I wrote the article is because I found that mainstream news anchors weren't challenging this either as a matter of morality, that it's either racist or just illogical, or as a matter of fact, the fact that it's just not true.
Hamas, Hamas' use of what they say is human shields or Hamas shooting from densely populated civilian areas does happen, but it happens as an exceptional case, not as a systematic one.
So it cannot explain the high death toll.
And even if it could explain it, it still does not justify that high death toll.
But reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli soldiers, as well as two U.N. reports in 1996 and another U.N. report in 2009 have all demonstrated that Israel targets civilians and that Hamas did not use civilians as human shield.
Not a single news anchor has cited these reports.
Not a single news anchor has challenged an Israeli spokesperson or someone discussing these issues to say, but wait, where is the evidence?
If all of these reports, if the U.N. and Israelis and human rights organizations are all saying that this is not true, that Israel targets civilians and Hamas is not human shield, then why should we believe you?
And the only response that they're able to give is that because the Israeli army can show you pictures.
But if you look at that, we are asked to believe an Israeli military force that is meting out destruction above everybody else in the international community.
And this has not caused any kind of panic.
I mean, it should cause panic, but it's not even causing alarm or pause.
Well, what pictures have they even released?
The only pictures I've seen released by the Israelis are cartoons that just show, look, this is what a house with a Hamas and a kid and some weapons would look like if we lived in Simpsons land or something.
No, but and this is what makes it even more difficult to digest that what the Israeli army is producing wouldn't withstand judicial scrutiny.
It only withstands public scrutiny because there are enough people that want to believe it.
There are enough people that believe that Palestinian life is worth so little that this can possibly make any sense.
Well, that's what's at the heart of it.
I think what happens because of the lack of evidence, just like when they were lying us into war with Iraq, what happens is people fill in the spaces themselves with their imagination based on the premise that what I'm hearing must be true.
So then they just start imagining all Hamas fighters carrying civilians around with them or some kind of thing like that, hiding out in civilian homes just because they've heard it so much.
They just imagine it.
That fills in for the evidence.
As long as as you're saying, as long as no one's contradicting it where they can hear it contradicted, then it sounds like it's it's just perfectly true.
You cite Human Rights Watch in your article here at TheNation.com.
And I saw one of their representatives.
I believe it was their president actually on CNN today.
And he was saying, you know, that what they're doing is they're being really elastic with the definition and they're trying to pretend that just the fact that Hamas is fighting in an urban area near civilians means that somehow they're using those civilians as shields.
But that's just not true.
And when it comes to any specific use of human shields and the actual definition, that term, there's no evidence of it whatsoever.
As you point out, there there is, in fact, evidence in the past of the Israelis tying Palestinians to the hoods of their trucks, literally using them as human shields.
That's the only evidence we have of this at all in this entire conflict going back a couple of years.
But still, no, I mean, that I'm really happy to hear that there was some challenge.
But what's happened and what's happened systematically is that there is a devaluation of Palestinian life and the way that it functions in the U.S. The reason we don't even get to a discussion of no one's asking why would Hamas continue to shoot ineffective rockets that cause no military harm, right?
And there's no military advantage, because if you're thinking about belligerence and warfare, there's no military advantage to these rockets.
And yet there is severe consequences that Israel is allowed to get away with.
Why would they continue that?
Now, what Israel wants us to believe is that they would continue that because they're just irrational Jew-haters, right?
That we're supposed to believe that there are people that hate another people so much that they would do this even to the point of self-annihilation and self-sacrifice.
You can only believe that if you believe that there are people like that in the world.
And I feel that this is part of the manufacturing of Islamophobia, of manufacturing an image of Palestinians, of Arabs, who are actually Christians and Druze and other religions, right?
But manufacturing them first all as Muslims and then manufacturing all Muslims as irrational and as hellbent on death and destruction and a clash of civilizations, which is not true.
What we're missing is the context that Israel is occupying the Palestinian people and has been colonizing their land and colonizing their lives since 1948 and created a refugee population of 6.6 million and has created a situation under military occupation and apartheid where Palestinians do not have horizons of actually fulfilling their life.
They are not allowed to govern themselves, nor are they allowed basic freedoms like the freedom of mobility, the freedom of earning a livelihood, the freedom of an education, the freedom of work, the freedom of living with your family in stability.
All of that has been denied to Palestinians systematically for decades, for decades.
And the Gaza Strip, we're seeing its worst form because not only are they denied that, but the Gaza Strip has also been subject to an eight-year brutal siege that has impoverished the population to the point where 80 percent of the Palestinian population, we're talking about nearly 2 million people, 80 percent of them survive on food aid from humanitarian agencies just to survive.
Not because they can't work, not because they don't want to, but because Israel has sealed the waters so that fishermen cannot fish.
They've sealed the land borders so that Palestinians cannot travel for work.
They've sealed, they've made the agricultural land into military buffer zones so that they cannot farm their land.
They've prevented them from engaging in any kind of trade of import and export.
The World Health Organization says that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by the year 2020.
That means in six years, Israel would have made the Gaza Strip an entirely barren land.
It would have turned it into Mars, where human survival is impossible.
And so why then, under these circumstances, would a people shoot these indiscriminate rockets at this high personal cost to themselves?
Why aren't we asking that question?
Because what it looks like is they have nothing left to lose.
Does that mean that I think they should be doing it?
No.
But I'm at a loss of what they should be doing.
What should they be doing?
I've been reading quotes from regular civilians there in Gaza who are saying that they support, and this, you know, you could have written this script, it's predictable enough, that they support, they're against the ceasefire on current terms.
They would rather keep fighting and if it, and if ceasefire means going back to the status quo and the siege, something has to give here.
It's a living death.
I've seen that a few times.
I guess that's a talking point going around.
But as you describe it, it's true and it sure makes sense that this is, if it was a scam for how do you get the average schmo in Gaza to go ahead and end up supporting Hamas and violence, you do this.
That's exactly how to do it.
Make them this helpless and hopeless.
It also misses the point that Hamas is a political party with a militant wing.
And Hamas was only created in 1987.
But Israel has been occupying the Gaza Strip since 1967.
There was no Hamas for 20 years.
And even after Hamas came into power, it wasn't as powerful as Yasser Arafat and Fatah and Abu Mazen, these Palestinian leaders of Fatah.
And Israel has called them no partners for peace.
They have not been interested.
And they've always created a Palestinian boogeyman to avoid the main issue.
Once Hamas emerged as actually the best boogeyman, they've now abandoned that.
But even Palestinian president in the West Bank, who has been the most compliant Palestinian leader, and has even participated with coordinated with Israel's security to protect the settlers against Palestinians and to protect the occupation against Palestinians rather than to protect the Palestinians from occupation.
There, there is no state either.
And there are no rockets.
And so we should be asking ourselves, what is actually going on?
If the violence is the reason, is the problem, then why has not, why has peace and the security coordination and the most compliant Palestinian regime also been able to achieve nothing, according to Israel?
Why has Netanyahu said there will never be a two state solution, even though Palestinians have cooperated and bent over backwards?
And so I, the problem is with our, with our news cycle, is that rather than addressing these questions, where we're lazily relying on racist assumptions, we're lazily pointing to the spectacle, rather than dealing with the root causes.
Actually, if we're interested in a viable solution, that's what we would be doing.
All right, now, I know you're in a hurry.
But then again, you sound like you like talking about this stuff.
Can I ask you one more thing?
Or do you have to go?
You can ask me one more thing, but I do have to go.
So it'll be a quick answer.
Okay, so as quickly as you can, I was hoping you could address point number two in your article here.
Again, it's five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked at the nation.com.
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
Now, without getting entirely into the Gaza bombshell article by David Rose and the attempted coup and all that, I was hoping that because this just makes it take too long and too complicated.
But I was hoping you could somehow fill in the gap.
There's a very prominent Israeli talking point, of course, that look, we withdrew from Gaza.
And then yeah, it's under siege now.
But that's only because after we withdrew, paradise wasn't good enough for evil Hamas.
And they just started launching rockets at us for no good reason.
That was why we had to put them under the siege.
So I was wondering if you could- Palestinians have never enjoyed a day of self-rule.
They withdrew their settlers from Gaza.
They withdrew 8,000 settlers and the military that protected them from the Gaza Strip, which is- And yet there wasn't a full scale siege for a couple of years, right?
So what about that meantime, when there was the election?
This is what I'm saying.
They maintained control of the electromagnetic sphere, of the airspace, of the naval space, of the entries and the exits, of the population registry.
They maintained the ability to reinvade at any time.
Under international law, occupation does not require a military presence.
It requires a military capability and the ability to exercise effective control.
Even before the siege, Israel maintained that effective control, and Palestinians never governed themselves.
The siege was imposed in January 2006.
That is, between the time of Hamas's parliamentary victory and the siege, was not even a few months.
In that interim, Israel maintained its effective control and its occupation.
Palestinians have never governed themselves.
That is an absolute talking point, and it is meant to obfuscate this reality.
Well then, as long as we're at it, if you've got one second, go ahead and talk about the Gaza bombshell, how America, Israel, and Egypt worked to arm Fatah to overthrow and do a coup against Hamas, and that was what ended up with Hamas having monopoly rule in Gaza.
Well, as a subsidiary force to the IDF, of course, but that was what led to their monopoly as compared to Fatah, of course, and ended up getting Fatah kicked out of Gaza.
Well, I think you said it really well.
I don't think there's anything there to add.
The U.S. has certainly been involved in intervening in ways that have been detrimental to bring about the results that we don't like, and then we don't like these results, and we make these really irresponsible decisions that have high civilian costs to an entire population, and then we don't take responsibility for it, but we only make the situation worse.
Right.
Okay, well, thank you again for your time.
I really appreciate it, Nora.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate you for having me.
Okay, everybody, that is Nora Erekat.
She's at TheNation.com.
Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked.
What I was trying to say before is this isn't some flimsy listicle.
This is a really good article for you, okay?
Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked in The Nation.
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