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All right, you guys, introducing Greg Shupak.
He is writing here at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
That's fair.org.
He teaches media studies at the University of Goulf Humber in Toronto.
Probably said that wrong.
And he's got a book, The Wrong Story, Palestine, Israel and the Media.
And that's what we're going to be talking about here.
But I want to mention it's at ORBooks.com.
And I know they publish a couple of Patrick Coburn's books in the past.
So good guys there.
ORBooks.com, The Wrong Story, Palestine, Israel and the Media.
And this article at FAIR is called Slapping an Israeli Soldier.
More newsworthy than shooting a Palestinian child in the face.
Pretty subtle headline there.
Straight to the point for us.
Welcome to show, Greg.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show here today.
So, I'm probably saying this wrong too.
Ahed Tamimi.
Is that how you say it?
Yeah, more or less.
Ahed Tamimi.
Ahed Tamimi.
Okay.
Ahed.
I don't, I don't really pronounce these things right.
I'm from Texas.
Go ahead.
Tell us all about her, please.
Okay.
Well, so she's a 16 year old Palestinian.
And in December, her cousin was shot in the face using a rubber coated bullet by Israeli forces occupying the West Bank.
He was, was seriously injured.
He required hours of surgery, I believe six hours of surgery, and he had to be placed in a medically induced coma.
That was at a protest over the Trump administration's decision to move the recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The, the subsequent, there was a subsequent protest over what Israeli forces did to Mohammed Tamimi, which is Ahed Tamimi's cousin.
And by the way, I should mention that Mohammed Tamimi is 14 years old.
So it was at this protest for, over his shooting that Ahed was, was, was, was captured on video slapping a member of the Israeli occupation forces.
This video went viral because frankly, it's a potent symbol of resistance to military occupation.
And it's worth noting for further background that Ahed and her family had already received international attention for photographs of, of Ahed resisting Israeli presence in her, her village, which is Nabi Saleh.
So now as a result of this video, Israel arrested Ahed by raiding her family home at 3 a.m., confiscating the family's phones, computers, and laptops in the process.
Her cousin, another cousin of hers, Nur, a 16 year old, was, no, excuse me, she's not 16 years old.
She's, I believe 20.
She's, was also arrested, but she's out on bail.
Meanwhile, Ahed is, is in jail in an Israeli awaiting sentencing and trial by, or trial and sentencing, I should say, via a military court.
Ahed's mother, Nariman, was also arrested and she remains in custody as well.
So there are a lot of issues at play here, but one of them that's been overlooked in media is the fact that, A, Palestinians detained and tried by Israeli military courts do not get anything resembling a fair trial.
They are convicted at a rate of 99%, which sort of tells you all you need to know.
And another crucial issue that media have overlooked is that Ahed is at a really serious risk of being subject to severe harm in Israeli jail.
So Israel has a well-documented record by, according to organizations like UNICEF, for, for violating the, the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention Against Torture.
So, yeah, that's a little bit of an overview of the issue.
I can say more as we go forward.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So, yeah, I guess, first of all, I just want to thank you again for doing this.
I've been meaning to cover this issue and I just hadn't really got to, to it.
And this is a good way to cover it too, because not only do you have, you know, a good, a great background here on the real story, you also have such great criticism as it is a fairness and accuracy in reporting of the Post and the Times treatment of this story, the American media's treatment of this story.
And I want to add this because, yeah, I don't know, it's a technicality.
It shouldn't even really count at all because, of course, this young lady, 16 year old girl, has every right to resist the military occupation of her property, full stop.
And yet, in fact, in the moment, in the narrowest view, the soldier hit her in the face first, right then and there.
And I'm not sure if that made it into, into this article, but I read that in a different article on FAIR a week or so ago where they went and showed how this part gets left out of the story is that, in fact, and I don't know if it was, you know, immediately she hit her right back or it was a minute later or whatever, but makes little difference anyway.
She had the right to hit at that point.
It's still self-defense anyway.
But it seems important, you know, that and I guess.
So let me ask you about the Israeli reaction to this, because I think what happened was in the way I read it was instead of the Israeli kind of public opinion and media opinion consensus being that, see how brave our soldiers are, that they'll sit there and take it because they're not going to let themselves be provoked by a 16 year old girl that instead they went, oh, my God, our soldiers got completely bodied by this 16 year old girl.
We've got to do something.
Get her, get her.
And that was when they came and then they did a midnight ray at three a.m.
Three a.m.
Ray.
They come and get these children out of their beds like boogeymen in the middle of the night, like in the like the NKVD and the Soviet Union.
And it's just insane.
And is that really right?
Like that was what really provoked because they let it slide at first and then they came back to get revenge because the public opinion was, you know, they were so in fear of the masculinity of these brave heroes in the IDF.
Yeah, it was, as you say, it was a few days later, I think Friday was when, excuse me, Monday was it was a Monday when Ahed had slapped the soldier, which, as you correctly point out, she has the right to do under international law.
In fact, under international law, Palestinians have the right to resist Israeli occupation up to and including armed struggle.
So certainly a slap from a 16 year old is is really a pretty mild form of resistance.
Yes.
As you say, the a lot of.
Well, I never even mind international law just for a second here.
Sorry to butt in.
But if George Washington had the right to shoot redcoats, then she has the right to resist the IDF.
So regardless of whether the UN charter had ever been ratified by anybody or not, she has the right to resist violent aggression because that's natural law.
Yeah, I mean, I agree that that it's not only a matter of international law, it's a matter of sort of, yeah, what do you want to call it?
Natural, just basic human rights, sensible.
Yeah.
The rights that come before the natural rights that precede government civil rights.
Sure.
Any kind of elementary moral principle would allow for it.
Yeah.
But, you know, as you say, yeah, the Israeli public opinion, I mean, was was divided on the soldiers reaction.
But certainly there was a very large contingent that said she, you know, that her and her and even her family should pay the price.
There was Michael Oren saying in media that maybe they're, quote, not even a real family.
There was another commentator making rather menacing threats about how they should get ahead in the middle of the night when cameras are not rolling.
Naftali Bennett.
Well, wait, wait.
On that last point, that was after she was already arrested.
He was talking about men should go into her prison cell in the middle of the night.
Oh, yes, that's true.
The implication was clear.
He was saying that she should be raped as punishment.
Yes, it's widely understood that way.
And I think that's a fair assessment.
No, yeah, you're right that that that was sort of after the fact and not something that led to the arrest.
But, yeah, the the video circulated on the Monday of her slapping the soldier.
And it was only much later that a day later that she was arrested following the fact that this video had been seen the world over.
And as you correctly say, a lot of Israelis were saying, well, our soldiers can't be shown to be weak and emasculated and pushed around and so on and so forth.
So, yeah, it was a very kind of, I guess, depressing look into the Israeli psyche.
I'm embarrassed for them.
I'm seriously embarrassed for them when that could obviously and much more easily be spun as look at our brave, heroic soldiers who what are they going to do?
Hit back against a little girl.
Go ahead and have your temper tantrum, little girl, if that was how they wanted to spin it.
Not that that would be the truth or anything, but I'm just saying, sure, you know what I mean?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
For them to then throw a temper tantrum instead and go and again with the 3 a.m.raid, they they literally steal children out of their beds in the middle of the night.
You know, I actually made that claim on some show and some guy went crazy about what a damn lie that was, even though really happens all the time, including in this case.
All you got to do is type in IDF child bed night and you'll get 10 million results, man.
And it's all Israeli Jewish left wing peace organizations that document it all.
Yeah, no, it's widely documented by Israeli sources, Palestinian sources, international sources.
No, you're totally right.
It's not as if her case is particularly unique.
Unfortunately, it just happens that she's got a little sort of captured a little bit of the global imagination in the way that unfortunately other Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding in captivity do not get.
Yeah, man, this is crazy.
All right.
So now rewind a little bit to this initial protest.
Why are the Palestinians in this village so upset with their wonderful lot in life?
Why aren't why don't they feel lucky to be occupied by Israel?
They're making a desert bloom after all.
Yeah, well, I mean, I obviously can tell you read sarcastic, which is the desert bloom thing is a funny canard giving the given the long track record of uprooting Palestinian all of grove.
So literally deforesting the desert, if you will.
But yeah, I mean, it's a 50 year military occupation of the West Bank that we're now looking at.
It's we're coming up on how many years would this be?
80 years of the the existence of the state of Israel, meaning 80 years of the colonization.
Well, actually, I mean, the colonization of Palestine dates back to at least the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
So over 100 years, but 80 years of Israel refusing to let Palestinians return to their homes after having expelled them during the 1947-1948 Nakba.
So, yeah, 80 years of that form of dispossession, at least 100 years of colonization, 50 years of military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, East Jerusalem in particular.
Yeah, all of all of that has obviously led to occasionally Palestinian expressions of discontent, as we previously discussed, is very much their right.
And it's worth particularly noting that some of the coverage I looked at talks about how Nabi Saleh, which is where the Tamimis live, is is in kind of active, ongoing conflict with an Israeli settlement, Talamish.
It's like all West Bank settlements, illegal under international law.
And so the one thing that I find particularly notable is that some of this coverage I looked at, like, for example, CBS and New York Times, they had covered or made mention of the conflicts between Nabi Saleh and Talamish without noting that Talamish is an illegal settlement.
They would just call it like something like an Israeli settlement or a Jewish settlement or something like that, which kind of obscures the status of that settlement.
It makes unclear to readers who may not be experts in the subject that this is that this settlement has no right to exist.
So it's it kind of this type of coverage sort of frames the issue as being a conflict, quote unquote, even the word conflict, right, is very sort of neutral sounding between two parties with with equal rights to be doing what they're doing with equally valid claims to the territory.
But in reality, this Talamish settlement has has no right at all to be there.
And the Palestinians of Nabi Saleh are opposed to having their land stolen and getting attacked by settlers.
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If you read the book and yeah, you know, invite me to give a speech to your group.
Can you talk a little bit more about the status of the water there?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's that's part.
That's definitely a big part of the of the issue between the settlement and Na'vi Saleh.
Yeah, it's it's part of the larger picture of of water and the role that it plays in in Palestine, Israel.
And that's I mean, the kind of shorter version, a shortest version, most concise version is that in essence, Israel takes Palestinian water from the West Bank and then sells it back to Palestinians at an inflated price.
And this is part of what's going on with Halamish.
So and this is what they were protesting when the 14 year old boy, the cousin, was shot in the face in the first place.
Yes, exactly.
That as as as well as some reports have noted that it may have also had something to do with the declaration.
Those I may be I may be conflating because I'm just thinking that they hold this protest over the water.
And you're right.
Reports have mentioned both.
So absolutely.
OK, it's I mean, you know, protests can deal with more than one thing at a time or maybe one report was more correct than another.
But the point is that you're absolutely right, that the water is an ongoing, immediate issue for the people of Nabi Saleh.
And in fact, it's an ongoing issue for people throughout Palestine.
It's sort of well known that, you know, in in Israel beyond the the Green Line or in the illegal settlements, Israelis have, you know, lavish pools and all the water they can drink, whereas Palestinians are often very, very short on water, you know, particularly in Gaza.
But that's another story.
All right.
So now in the media's telling of this, well, this wild girl, you know, from one of those barbarian Eastern tribes, something like that, like in Lord of the Rings, you know, the type she just came and attacked this poor, helpless IDF soldier and, you know, resulting in her just punishment is basically the framing of the whole thing.
And then but now to get back to, you know, and therefore it's the lie by omission, right, about who's on whose property, who's a military occupation, invading and occupying whose land and who has the right to resist and use violence and who doesn't and all of these things that we've been talking about.
But then so then now when it comes to her punishment, you mentioned before she's being held without bail and will face a military tribunal.
And how the way you you talk about this in the fair article is the the frame here is about the American media's treatment of this is normalizing military tribunals and talking about this as though everybody knows it's just as legit, quote unquote, as the juvenile court system in your town.
When that's not what we're talking about here at all.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I guess we could mention as an aside that the juvenile court system in a lot of towns in America or Canada and other sort of Western countries isn't is pretty flawed and problematic in its own right, too.
But yeah, having having said that, yeah, normalizing these military courts is a major problem in the coverage that I look at.
So, I mean, according to the to ACRI, the the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank live under a military court system that doesn't grant them the right to due process.
There is, you know, flagrantly discriminatory policies where Israel's illegal settlers in the West Bank cannot be tried as adults until they're 18, whereas in the military courts, the age of majority for Palestinians is 16.
So Palestinian youth are tried as adults when they're 16.
Illegal Israeli settlers are tried as adults when they're 18.
So, I mean, that's a pretty clear example of the apartheid system of, to use the term that many of us use when describing Israeli policies.
Another important international group, Defense for Children International Palestine, which is a group that has consultative status with the U.N., has noted that judges in these military tribunals will, well, first of all, the judges themselves are either active duty or reserve officers in the Israeli military.
So that means they're sort of in a ludicrously conflicted position.
They're going to be heavily biased towards the institution of which they are a member.
But these so-called judges rarely exclude evidence that is obtained by torture.
Torture is widespread, Israeli torture of Palestinians.
So confessions obtained under torture are not excluded.
We have children who are forced to sign confessions drafted in Hebrew that they do not even understand.
We have Palestinian prisoners, including children, denied the right to lawyers for extended periods.
We have children denied the right to visit with their parents.
So, you know, in this military court system, it's even more unfair than a lot of run-of-the-mill court systems around the world are.
Well, and then the American media's treatment of this is just, yeah, she's got a court date coming up.
That's basically it, right?
So they just imply that it's all just fine, never mind anything you just said.
Yeah, as though, well, she'll, you know, the truth will be uncovered, justice will be served in these courts and so on.
I mean, again, that's kind of a ridiculous paradigm to apply to courts in America or other Western countries anyway.
But it should be pretty transparent that it's a real travesty to talk about, you know, persecuting a 16-year-old member of a colonized population as though they're receiving some kind of measure of justice.
Yeah.
All right, Greg, we'll never even mind the torture of fighting aged males because everybody knows that they don't have any human rights whatsoever, certainly not Palestinians in Israeli jails.
But tell me what you really know about the torture of minors by the Israelis.
Well, you know, as I think I started to mention earlier, there's an extensive body of evidence on this.
UNICEF has, for example, released a report in, I think it was, yeah, 2013, which found that Israel subjects Palestinian youth to practices that amount to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment that violates the Convention against torture, as well as the Convention of the Rights of the Child, such as aggressively awakening them in the middle of the night with armed soldiers, forcibly bringing them to interrogation centers, blindfolding them, depriving them of sleep, threatening them with death or violence, threatening them with solitary confinement, actually keeping them in solitary confinement, threatening them with sexual assault against themselves or against a family member.
So, you know, this is very, very serious stuff, right?
This is the type of torture that, for example, has gone on at Guantanamo Bay or other American military sites.
And it's the Palestinians who are the barbarians, everybody.
Remember that.
You'll never forget that because, after all, most of them don't speak English.
But whenever you see Israelis on TV, they're white and they speak English.
So that's all you need to know.
Yeah, no, it does.
It's certainly the unjust treatment of Palestinians in the media fits into the larger paradigm of the sort of clash of civilizations narrative that we've had since at least 9-11.
Well, that's why they hate this little girl so much, because she has blonde hair and blue eyes.
And they're terrified that Americans are going to see her and go, well, wait a minute, that looks like my daughter's best friend from junior high.
Yeah, there may be something to that.
I mean, I think that that, yeah, I think that that's probably that's probably true, that it's harder.
It might be harder in some ways to other to Mimi and to present her as, you know, part of the Arab or Muslim menace that supposedly threatens to bring Sharia to Western civilization or whatever other types of lies the ruling class is spreading.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm of the opinion just because I've got to have some hope for the humanity of my fellow Americans here that if the American people really understood that really even the reality at all, the existence at all, never mind the details, but even the existence of the occupation of the West Bank, that this is already conquered territory.
There is no Palestinian state.
That's why they're always talking about one day they're going to make one.
And yet the same time, they always frame it, especially on the right in right wing media and pro-Israel media.
It's always a question of these terrorists trying to extort land out of the Israelis as though all the land already belongs to Israel.
And these Palestinians, I'm not sure where they supposedly exist in midair or on the other side of the Jordan River somewhere or something.
But they're the ones who are the invaders trying to use terrorism to force the poor little Israelis to give up what little land they have.
And that's just a damn lie.
And I think that whenever regular Americans figure out that, wow, what an upside down narrative compared to who's really zooming who over there, then I think that they'll naturally be on the side of the underdog because it's just not right.
And when we hear about 16 year olds being tortured and being denied the most basic rights, being forced to sign confessions in a foreign language and this kind of thing, and we learn that this is all happening on the dimes on the on the money taken out of our paychecks that we get every couple Fridays, that this is where my withholding is going is to pay the Israelis to do this to people.
I think that the American people will be on the right side of this.
And that's why they have to lie to us all damn day long like this, whether by omission or by outright just framing the story, turning it upside down and making it try to seem somehow like a 16 year old girl is an aggressor against an occupying army the way that they do.
But I think that their time is running out because this kind of narrative, it just doesn't make sense, does it?
Even when you read The New York Times and the CBS News framing of it, it's still the story of a little girl versus a soldier.
Right.
And what's going to happen to her now?
And I guess that's sorry, I'm just ranting and raving here.
But is she facing life in prison now for this or what are they going to do to her?
Well, she's certainly facing years in prison.
It's unclear what exactly will what exactly will happen.
And hopefully with sustained international pressure for her and other Palestinian prisoners, adults and children, that some measure of, well, justice or restitution can be won or at least the harm can be reduced.
But, yeah, I mean, I fully I mean, I definitely agree that if the American population isn't misled so the way that it's so systematically is through news media, then I don't I don't think anything more than maybe a very small portion of the of the society is going to support underwriting this type of of oppression that's inflicted on Palestinians.
Or for that matter, I think that without the illusion spread through mainstream media, most of the population would be resolutely opposed to the entire project of American imperialism, which support for Israel is one part of.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right, listen, so you're the author of this great book here, The Wrong Story, Palestine, Israel and the Media.
This is obviously along the same things we've been talking about this whole half hour here.
But go ahead and tell us more about this book here.
It's at ORBooks.com.
Yeah.
So thanks for mentioning it.
The the book basically is structured around looking at three what I would call overarching narratives about Palestine, Israel.
And I set out to demonstrate why each of them are false.
So the first narrative, the first version of the story of Palestine, Israel that one hears in media is that both sides are at fault and both sides have, you know, suffered to comparable degrees.
So I explain why this is a very misleading way to look at it.
I mean, both sides do not, you know, did not mutually ethnically cleanse one another to Israel, ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Both sides do not militarily occupy one another.
As we've been discussing today, both sides are not, you know, detaining thousands of political prisoners.
Only Israel is doing that to Palestinians.
So that's one chapter.
Another looks at the claim that the problem, the claim that the problem is, you know, extremists and that moderates need to be empowered.
The issue with this framing is, or at least one of the issues with that framing of the issue, is that it implies that the the problem comes down to, you know, cultural phenomenon like religion in particular, and that Palestinians are, you know, Muslim fundamentalists.
Never mind that 20 percent of Palestinians are Christians, but they're Islamic radicals who are, you know, born and bred anti-Semites.
And that's why Israel cannot accommodate any kind of solution with them and has to deal with them violently.
Another dimension of this extremists and moderates narrative says, well, the Palestinian Authority, the PA, they're the they're the good guys and it's necessary to empower them.
But in reality, what that means is that a proxy for U.S. and Israeli management of Palestinian lives needs to be empowered because that's what the PA has largely functioned as.
A third narrative I look at, the final one, is that is that Israel, when it uses force, particularly in large scale military engagements like the 2014 attack on Gaza, which is called Operation Protective Edge.
Yeah, there's this narrative that says, well, Israel has the right to defend itself.
And so I spend this chapter demonstrating why that's a faulty way of looking at it.
Because, I mean, for one thing, as I as I demonstrate these upticks in violence, such as the one in 2014 or Operation Cast Lead in 2008, 2009, or Operation Pillar of Cloud, Pillar of Defense in 2012, these in each case and earlier ones, too, Israel has ample opportunities for ceasefire agreements and it opts for massacres instead.
I also argue that, you know, in a colonial situation like the one we have here, it's by definition impossible for the colonized population to initiate violence.
They are the ones whose very condition depends upon them being subject to violence, as Paulo Freire says.
So the the point here is that Israel can't be defending itself because every aspect of the Palestine-Israel situation revolves around Israel using violent force to subjugate Palestinians.
So you can't say, you know, Israel's taking some defensive action against a rocket fire from Gaza when, for example, Gaza is subject to a military siege.
So a very destructive, devastating humanitarian crisis inducing siege that's enforced through violence, right, through land, sea and air.
So, I mean, to say that when you have people under siege and they fight back, that you are defending yourself by violently crushing their resistance, that's highly, a highly distorted way of looking at it.
So the entirety of Palestine-Israel depends upon Israel or is characterized by Israel violently ruling Palestinians.
Without that, there is no, there is no occupation.
There is no keeping, you know, efforts to maintain a demographic superiority for Jewish Israelis.
Without these aspects of the conflict that are violently produced, then maybe you could talk about people defending themselves.
But when you're maintaining this completely unequal situation through violence, you can't say you're defending yourself when once in a while there's some smaller scale use of violence in response.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Israeli decision to help nurture the rise of Hamas as a right wing religious alternative to the commie PLO in the first place was a brilliant stroke of public relations there.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, because the Hamas guys, they parade around in their green Cobra commander masks and all this stuff and fit the part for Israeli PR.
And and in fact, you know, I don't know how I guess this wasn't really deliberate, but or I don't know whether it was or not.
But, you know, in in 06, Connelly's Arise and Ehud Olmert held those elections where in the lead up to the elections in Gaza, and this is after the, you know, the so-called unilateral withdrawal from Gaza by Israel, which was an attempt to disrupt the the negotiation for a Palestinian state in the first place, as they said.
But in the aftermath of that, they held this election, but they withheld all the tax revenue from the PLO so they couldn't buy up all their patronage votes and whatever.
And so Hamas ended up winning the election hands down in Gaza.
But then even still, they formed a coalition government with Fatah there.
And it wasn't until then Israel, Egypt and the U.S. tried to do that coup against Hamas that David Rose wrote about in the Gaza bombshell that only then did Hamas kick the PLO all the way out and take the rest of control over the Gaza Strip, where, again, as you kind of frame it, they're really just the Israeli trustees running the concentration camp there.
They're not really a government in any real sense.
But but, you know, all of that part of the story always gets left out.
And it's just like, oh, my God, Hamas terrorists, Gaza terror and Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.
You love Hamas or whatever this kind of thing.
And and it's a it's a great bunch of talking points, I guess.
But in the reality of the situation, it seems pretty unfair for them to always truncate the antecedents, as Bob Higgs says, and leave out, you know, why it is that there even is a Hamas and why it is that Hamas rules the Gaza Strip in the first place to the degree that they do in within the Israeli siege.
Yeah, I mean, there's a much more complicated history of Hamas than the mainstream narratives would suggest.
So certainly, as you point out, it was, in fact, something that Israel saw as a useful, I guess, opportunity to create a religious or to exacerbate the religious dimension or seeming religious dimension of the the Palestinian question.
So, yeah, that that's absolutely true that Israel helped usher in the creation of Hamas.
And I mean, another key context is that because the Fatah-led PLO was the the dominant faction or has been the dominant faction in the Palestinian Authority, it's become clear to Palestinians that in the post-Oslo years, since the PA has been created, that, you know, that that the the PA and the the Fatah and PLO, which are its major constituents, can't really be counted on, Fatah in particular, can't really be counted on to mount any kind of self-defense or resistance to Israel.
And in fact, they've enforced Israeli-U.S. prerogatives.
So they've policed and suppressed resistance carried out by their fellow Palestinians.
They've collaborated with Israel in arresting and imprisoning Palestinians.
So one context for Hamas is that of the major movements in Palestine, the other force, the kind of left nationalist force, was bought up through the Oslo process.
And, you know, that's not entirely of their making, of the Fatah or the PLO's making.
It's also part of connected to larger world events, like the fact that Oslo occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So really, this is the era of the dawning of total American global supremacy.
And so they felt kind of internationally isolated.
And I think that beyond that, you know, and it's a longer history than we probably have to cover in its entirety.
The point is that there's a lot of vacuums that Hamas was able to fill.
So just to give one more example, in the period following or during the Oslo process, when the PA essentially oversaw the neoliberalization of the Palestinian economy, there was, you know, not there was not very much left for community organizations.
So Hamas was able to help, you know, win support by, you know, fulfilling community social services.
And, you know, in that respect, it was able to become kind of a part of the fabric of Palestinian society, at least in Gaza now.
So, you know, if we're going to talk about the future of Palestine, it's foolhardy to just, you know, say, well, Hamas has to be left out of the picture because they've used violence at some time.
Well, if violence excludes a party from the picture, then the entirety of Israel, of the Israeli state would be would have been excluded a long time ago.
So Hamas is, in that respect, something that is at this point a meaningful force in Palestinian society and has to be part of any kind of solution.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I won't keep you any longer, but I really appreciate your time on the show and your great coverage of this story here.
It's again about Ahed Tamimi.
Did I say it right that time?
And the article at FAIR.org, it's slapping an Israeli soldier more newsworthy than shooting a Palestinian child in the face.
It's a great rundown on the story and of the cynical American media's dissembling on the issue as well.
Gregory Shupak, thank you very much, sir.
Thanks a lot.
All right, you guys.
And you know me.
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