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And boy, they've got an illegal immigration problem in Gaza.
They're dying to get out.
Mel Freikberg is a reporter for Interpress Service, and her latest is, oh, that's ipsnews.net.
And they've got a lot of great journalists there.
I recommend you bookmark that entire site.
And her latest there is Gazans Dying to Enter Israel.
Welcome back to the show, Mel.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me.
Well, you're very welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And it's a sad story.
I'll try to stay out of your way as much as I can and let you tell it.
But basically, to start us off here, Gaza is under blockade.
And their economy is in shambles.
And so your story is basically, I think, about people who are economic refugees who are so desperate to get into Israel that they're risking their lives just, oh, and into Israel to make a buck, that they're risking their lives to do so.
Yes.
There's been, because the economic situation is so bad in Gaza, it's something like 55% of youngsters are unemployed and over 85% of Gazans are aid dependent.
So the situation there is very severe.
So what has been happening is that some young men have been trying to jump over the security fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel to get into Israel to try and find work.
And as they've approached the border fence, they've been shot.
Some of them have been killed and others have been injured.
Still other young Gazans have tried to get into Egypt, which is also in conjunction with Israel implementing the blockade to a large degree on Gaza.
And these young men have been trying to get into Egypt, because it's very hard for Gazans to get into Egypt as well, through the tunnels, the underground smuggling tunnels.
And some of them have died there as well.
Others are trying to earn money by working in the smuggling tunnels, but the tunnels regularly get blown up by the Egyptians or by the Israelis, or collapse on their own.
So they're dying there as well.
So it's a very desperate situation.
And then you have the farmers who are trying to access their land, because Israel has created a 300 meter buffer zone along the Gaza border.
And I mean, Gaza is very, very small.
There's over one and a half million people in an area 27 kilometers long, sorry, 47 kilometers long by 6 to 12 kilometers wide at different stages.
And this 300 meter buffer zone, it's illegal for the farmers to go near their land, and a lot of their most fertile agricultural land is there.
And when they try to approach the land or try to farm their land, they're getting shot at by the Israelis as well.
So quite a few Gazan farmers have been killed and injured there as well.
After the last war in Gaza in November, I was there in Gaza, there was an agreement, part of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Gaza, was that the buffer zone would be reduced to 100 meters so that the Gazan farmers could have access to 200 meters of their farmland in the buffer zone.
But I was speaking to a human rights organization there, and they're saying that it's being this, that the access to their land is being very, they're not getting access to the land all the time.
Sometimes when they approach the buffer zone, they're getting shot, other times when they approach the buffer zone, they're able to farm, so it's a very unpredictable situation.
So yes, it's very tough economically for Gazans at the moment, and it's, when I was speaking to somebody at the UN, they were saying that, you know, as I say, over 85% of Gazans are now aid dependent, and although a bit more international aid is coming into Gaza and there are more NGOs working there, it's, they're just, you know, they're having all their dignity taken away from them because they're not able to earn a living, and they're just relying on the international community more and more to survive.
All right, first of all, a small point, but just one that I want to make sure that I understood you right.
Were you saying just now that the policy of shooting people who get too close to the fence is inconsistently applied, and so what happens is they end up, the Gazans end up deciding, oh, hey, listen, we've been able to go out there for the last couple of weeks without getting shot, but then all of a sudden they just start shooting them again, and that inconsistency ends up getting more people killed, is that right?
According to my understanding, yes, having spoken to human rights organizations there and seeing the statistics at the UN, it is inconsistently applied, and I don't even think they're lucky enough to be able to get to their land every, you know, for a few weeks running and then somebody's shot, if they're actually even come, there are cases where they even come near the Baffazan and they're being shot.
I mean, another problem is that the Gazan fishermen, they are only allowed to go six nautical miles out to sea because of the Israeli blockade.
Under the Oslo Accord in 93, they were allowed to go 20 nautical miles out to sea.
Because there's been, you know, some skirmishes between the Israeli forces and some fighters in Gaza, the Israelis reduced the area to three nautical miles a couple of months ago, but even within those three nautical miles, fishermen were being shot, their boats were being destroyed, they were being arrested, even while they were well within the three nautical mile zone.
And most of the sardine shoals are further off than three nautical miles.
So what is happening is that the fishing sources are being depleted within the three mile zone, and so they're struggling to provide enough fish even for Gaza.
And this has also put a lot of fishermen out of business, and they've had to look for work elsewhere.
Yeah, all right, now, so here's the thing of it too, and you may have much, you must have much more detailed information about this than me, but isn't this really the point?
I mean, hasn't it come out that keeping the Gazans, the population, civilian population of Gaza hungry, quote unquote, and on a diet, quote unquote, is what the blockade is all about?
They don't even really pretend that it's about keeping weapons out of the hands of Hamas.
Hell, anybody who reads Vanity Fair knows that the Israelis and the Americans are the ones who gave all the guns to Hamas in 2006 anyway.
Well, an Israeli human rights organization called ISHA actually questioned the Israeli government's claim that the blockade on Gaza was purely for security reasons, which is what they regularly claim to the media.
And they eventually got an answer out of them that the Israeli government basically said they didn't have to do business with a territory that was hostile with Israel.
And yes, they did actually go into and formulate some kind of diet where they decided how many calories Gazans could have.
And that was only the way, ISHA was only able to get that information out of the Israeli authorities by, you know, by going to court and, you know, sort of getting legal action because it wasn't available to local journalists.
That's just absolutely amazing.
You know, in American media, it's all portrayed like the massive Arab juggernaut of which something called Palestine is just a small part is, you know, unendingly threatening poor little Israel and it's the best they can do to keep them at bay.
And they don't ever explain that.
No, really, they have this giant prison called the Gaza Strip where they count calories to keep people hungry but not starving to death.
Yeah.
It's also one of the other problems with Gaza, which goes beyond, because I don't think there's people actually starving in Gaza at this point.
Right, I mean, that's what they say, right?
They count the calories, make sure they're...
I think that's actually the quote from either Dov Weissglass, Ehud Olmert's aide, or it was from the WikiLeaks, was hungry but not starving.
But I mean, one of the more serious problems is that part of the blockade is they're not letting in certain equipment for the storage systems and the water and sanitation and health systems, so that 90% of the, there's 90 million liters of untreated or partially treated sewage being pumped out into the ocean every day because the sewage works are not working properly.
These international aid organizations battle to bring into Gaza the various bits of equipment that they need to repair Gaza's destroyed infrastructure and sewage works, and they have to wait six months to a year to get the various parts in because it takes a lot of coordinating with the Israelis to get this equipment in.
So in the meantime, Gazans do not have enough healthy drinking water, and a lot of this water, the aquifer in Gaza, 90% of it, according to the World Health Organization, is undrinkable, they cannot drink this.
And a lot of this sewage is seeping back into the aquifer and underground, so there's a lot of waterborne diseases being carried out as well.
So that's one of the problems that's bigger than perhaps Gazans not getting all the food they'd like.
Well, and is it not correct that in Gaza, minors are the majority, right?
Yes, I think it's something like, I don't remember the exact statistic, but the vast majority of people in Gaza, 60% or something, are youngsters.
It's unreal.
I mean, just think, if this was any other state in any other situation, they were not the satellite of the American empire, but maybe a Chinese satellite or a Russian satellite state that was doing this to its occupied territory, what the cries of holy hell and terror would be in Washington, D.C., right?
We would be launching a preventive war immediately.
Yeah.
Sorry, I'm just editorializing on your facts here.
They're just driving me crazy, though, to think that.
And this just goes on for year after year after year.
Gaza's been occupied.
Well, the siege has gone on since when?
2010 or 9?
No, it got really strict in 2007, in June, when Hamas overthrew, when there was a coup by Hamas against the joint government between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
It got stricter then, but actually, restrictions started years before that, when there was a lot of suicide bombings happening in Israel as well.
They've been sort of getting really strict on Gaza, but the real restrictions came into place in June 2007, when Hamas took over.
Right.
And then, first of all, I'm sorry, before I switch to the West Bank and your piece about the buses and all that there, I wanted to ask you as a question from the chat room and something you brought up, of course, was the Egyptian role in the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
They control the southern border of Gaza there.
And now, since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in 2011, in fact, your colleague Adam Morrow is sort of my resident expert on Egypt on this show, and he's talked about some progress in getting in the lessening of restrictions in some travel, but I guess in trade is the real sticking point.
Is that correct?
One of the problems is that the crossing from Egypt into Gaza, the Rafah crossing, it's not really built to facilitate the import and export of goods.
The Kerim-Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza is actually designed for the import and export of goods.
So that's one of the problems.
So even if the Egyptians did allow the free import and export of goods to and from Gaza, the terminal would have to be significantly changed to allow all the goods to come in and out, because if you've actually crossed it quite a few times and it does not facilitate, as I say, the import and export of goods.
But it's also a bit more complicated than that, because the Egyptians, to a certain degree, are under pressure from the Israelis, because the population registry control is issued by the Israelis, and the Israelis, with the help of the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, decides who can get a passport and who can't, and also will be on the list of who can enter and who can leave Gaza.
So it's not just a case of Hamas or the Egyptians, just Hamas just controlling who can leave Gaza, only the people who are given permission by the Palestinian Authority by being able to get passports and then being on the population registry as being able to travel through.
It's a little bit complicated.
But the Egyptian government has, I think, been a bit better under the present government than the previous government, but they're still not opening things completely, and it is still very difficult for young Palestinian men to be able to get into Egypt, because also the Egyptians, there's a bit of a friction between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, because some people in Egypt believe that Hamas is maybe siding with some of the Salafists who have been attacking Egyptian security forces.
So that is another element to the situation.
All right.
And then on the West Bank, there's been a little bit of news about this, actually, which is notable, right, for these kind of topics to really break into the discussion among the political class in the United States at all.
But there's been a little bit of attention paid to this.
I sure hope that people will take a look at your piece at Interpress Service about it, Free Ticket to Apartheid.
And this is about the bus system in the West Bank and the controversy surrounding what smack, I mean, I'm from Texas, so this is what I learned when I was a boy, what used to be so horrible about Texas that we finally got right at federal gunpoint, actually, was this kind of separate and unequal treatment on basically racial and religious grounds.
Yeah, a lot of the Palestinians who go to Israel, travel to Israel, were catching settler buses to go from West Bank towns to travel into Israel.
But the settlers didn't actually want the Palestinians to travel on the same bus as them.
And the Palestinian laborers who were getting on the Israeli settler buses were subject to quite a lot of harassment and unpleasant treatment.
And the settlers were also saying that they believe the Palestinian laborers were a security threat, even though quite a lot of those laborers were actually coming into Israel and they had security clearance to work in Israel, as well as some of them actually working on the Israeli settlements themselves.
So I don't understand how there could be too much of a security threat.
But anyway, they petitioned the Israeli Defense Forces to stop Palestinians from traveling on the same buses as them.
So what the Israeli authorities then did was introduced separate buses for the Palestinian laborers so that they wouldn't inconvenience the settlers by traveling on the same buses as them.
Yeah, another problem with immigration.
I can't help, again, I'm from Texas.
I can't help but think of the parallel to Mexico.
Only if Mexico was tiny and crammed full to the brim with children and was under military occupation and they had no other chance to make any money but to come to the United States, which is almost true.
That last part here.
But I try to frame it in a way where people could maybe put themselves in the shoes of the Palestinians or even the Israelis to understand the situation there.
If America was occupying Mexico and building white only colonies all over Mexico and then but hiring Mexicans still to do all their labor for them and making them ride on their own Jim Crow buses and this kind of thing.
Again, it's just you compare it to the United States.
These are the things that we define ourselves now as being great for having overcome them, the terrible legacies of the past.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah.
It's very, very strange to think of American unlimited support for this kind of policy.
But again, they don't ever even explain that.
Well, you know, the West Bank, that means the West Bank of the Jordan River, see?
And that's where Palestinian lives.
And it's been under occupation since 1967.
And this, that and the other thing.
They don't ever even tell you.
Not on TV, certainly.
And I guess maybe if you read the New York Times all the time, you would eventually glean that.
Right.
But they don't ever explain the situation at all.
So I'm not saying if the American people really understood that they would be good on it, but at least give them a fair chance.
You know what I mean?
Let them read Mel Freykberg at IPS so they can at least know the truth of the situation.
Yeah, it's I don't think Americans are well informed on the situation.
The vast majority.
Well, now, so what about the civil disobedience movement?
There's something that I also don't know nearly enough about.
I know that there is one.
And I know that it's a shame that we don't get any real coverage of it here in the U.S.
You're not talking about the BDS movement?
Oh, not so much international boycott, but just the civil disobedience and the peaceful protests on the West Bank.
There's that movie, Five Cameras.
I've seen that.
It was a pretty impressive thing.
Right.
Well, there's a lot of demonstrations taking place on a Friday, organized demonstrations, and a lot of them are mostly peaceful.
You do get the young guy throwing stones, but then it's always an argument of who starts first.
Often when I've actually gone and covered some of the demonstrations, there are people marching very peacefully, women and children and men.
And as they come down the road, the Israeli soldiers will come up in their jeeps and will start shooting rubber-coated bullets and tear gas canisters directly at them and spray them with skunk spray.
And then the young guys will start hurling stones at them.
And then it becomes a thing of the young guys, the Shabab, you know, hurling stones at the soldiers, shooting them.
So that's happening on a regular basis.
And it's actually growing, the number of villages that are now taking part in the regular Friday demonstration.
Yeah, I saw where some protesters had set up a kind of makeshift campground on Palestinian land, I believe, protesting a new...
Well, yeah, of course.
It was like in East Jerusalem and it was their last...
I guess the way it was portrayed was it was the rest of the West Bank's last direct access to East Jerusalem, was the new settlement was going to cut them off where they'll have to go through Israeli territory and, you know, settler territory in order to get to East Jerusalem at all anymore.
And they had apparently like a large U.S. hippie-style sit-in.
You know, everybody join hands and sing songs and build a little tent and try to stay as long as we can kind of thing.
And they were just carted off by soldiers.
And I guess the work on that new settlement continues, right?
They've actually had a few where they tried to set up these, and that was totally peaceful, where they tried to set up these tent cities.
And, yes, they were roughed up and forcibly removed by the soldiers and charged with whatever and had to pay whatever fines they were given.
That has been happening as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And do I have it right about that new settlement cutting off the West Bank from the rest of East Jerusalem at that point?
In the E1 area.
In the E1 area, if the settlement building goes ahead there, yes, it will cut it all.
All right.
Well, any peace talks coming up that you put much stake in?
Well, Kerry was in my neighborhood yesterday, and John Kerry was in my neighborhood yesterday, and William Hague from the British government was in Ramallah yesterday as well.
And one doesn't hear too many details other than Kerry saying that both sides have to get ready first and make hard decisions.
And he mentioned a couple of things about the Israelis, you know, continuing to build settlements, because now what the Israelis are doing is they are also legalizing the outposts.
Now, the outposts are much smaller than the settlements, and they are illegal even by the Israeli, even according to the Israeli government.
And often these little outposts, they don't have any electricity or infrastructure.
And generally, the Israeli government and the courts rule that they are illegal and they have to be demolished.
But now the Israeli government is now actually legalizing the outposts as well.
Other than Kerry walking around the neighborhood and going for some photo opportunities and making a few soundbites and that, which is generally what the politicians do.
They just say the right things, and they make a few, you know, sentences expressing concern and what have you.
And the Israelis know they're going to do that and accept that they have to do that.
But nothing actually changes, so I don't know.
Yeah, that was going to be my question, right, was about the conventional wisdom in Israel, the way they take it is that John Kerry doesn't mean it, Barack Obama doesn't mean it.
And don't worry, of course, they have to say a couple of things for the cameras, but we can continue on.
And for public audience, like, you know, we condemn this and the settlements are not helpful.
And we really wish you wouldn't keep, you know, taking Palestinian land and this is really wrong.
And, you know, and Israel knows that they have to say that and they're going to say that and just continues on its merry way, knowing full well that there will never be any real force behind those words.
Well, now, it's been a few years since Ehud Barak, the defense minister and former labor leader, used the phrase apartheid and broke the apartheid barrier by saying, geez, you know, and this is the reality of the situation, right, is they're very close to being a minority ruled state.
And that's really what they mean by apartheid, not just the tyranny that they inflict upon the Palestinians, but soon the majority of people, the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
And yet they seem to just continue on down the same path of either losing, you know, they say Israel is a democratic and Jewish state, but they're at the point where they have to choose one or the other.
And they they're still not choosing.
Right.
They still demand both.
But in in contrary to the facts as they exist in the world, correct?
Well, yeah.
And another interesting development is that there's been the new Israeli government is actually divided on whether they agree to the two state solution.
Always they've stated that they agree to the two state solution.
But now some members of the Knesset actually came out a couple of days ago and argued with Tzipi Livni, who's in charge of negotiations, peace negotiations, and said to her, the two state solution is not the position of the government.
And we don't believe this is in the government's best interest.
So the government is now actually divided as to whether they agree to a two state solution or not.
I don't believe that a lot of them ever did agree to a two state solution and they were just like paying lip service to it.
But now they're actually saying that they're actually contradicting her and saying this is not necessarily the position of the Israeli government.
So that's still what they what they definitely plan to do.
I don't know.
Mel, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Everybody.
That's the great Mel Freichberg.
She's a reporter for Inter Press Service.
That's IPS news dot net.
Check out her latest pieces.
Free ticket to Apartheid and Gazans dying to enter Israel.
That one's running in the top headlines at Antiwar dot com today.
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Over at AIPAC, the leaders of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., they're constantly proclaiming unrivaled influence on Capitol Hill.
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The NRA and AARP's efforts make them look like puppy dogs in comparison to the campaigns of intimidation regularly run by the neoconservatives and Israel firsters against their political enemies.
But the Israel lobby does not remain unopposed.
At the Council for the National Interest, they put America first, insisting on an end to the empire's unjustified support for Israel's aggression against its neighbors and those whose land it occupies, and pushing back against the lobby's determined campaign in favor of U.S. attacks against Israel's enemies.
CNI also does groundbreaking work on the trouble with evangelical Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in drumming up support for this costly and counterproductive policy.
Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
Just go to Councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
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Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
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But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
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