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All right, you guys, introducing Ramsey Baroud.
He is a refugee, an exile from Gaza, an American citizen now, right, Ramsey?
You're an American citizen, aren't you?
I am, yeah.
Yeah, and he's the author of the book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and he writes at palestinechronicle.com but you know what he also writes for I Can't Really Keep Track.
Do you still write for Middle East Eye?
No, but I write for Middle East Monitor and a bunch of anti-war and many others.
Right, and, yeah, we publish almost everything, pretty much everything at antiwar.com that we can find anyway because you write for so many different places.
So Aljazeer, did I see, I think there was a tweet, wasn't there, like a week ago about you have a new TV series or something going on at Aljazeer, is that right?
There's something about...
I don't have, no, I have a new project that I started with Aljazeer called Palestine in Motion.
That's what I'm talking about, but I don't know what it is.
Yes, it's an online project that is basically the story of ordinary individuals and how their stories kind of intersect and form, you know, collective history of the Palestinian people.
Okay, and that's Palestine in Motion.
Yes.
Great, so we'll link to all that in the entry for this.
Okay, great, so, well, actually, tell us more about that before we get too much further into our subject matter today, if you would.
Absolutely.
My academic studies were mostly focused on people's history, kind of following the legacy and footsteps of Howard Zinn and many such historians.
That's what I did my PhD in, and that's what I am, most of my books really focus on people's history.
I wanted to take that to a whole new level and try to develop a digital project, a digital media project, where I interview people and I convey their story as a representation of a particular period of history and find a way to kind of overlap their personal histories so that the stories, when written together, kind of give you a full view of Palestinian history.
So we interviewed about 19 individuals, young and old, various generations and various parts of Palestine and the Middle East, and that's what we did.
You would understand more once you go to Palestine in Motion and kind of select a character and read their story, and you can stop at any point in the story and jump into someone else's story and so forth.
And the project was launched in English and Arabic as well.
This is great, man.
I'm sorry that I didn't keep track of this.
I don't know, when was it finished and published?
It was published last month, I think June 15th.
Oh, okay.
Man, I'm sorry that I had dropped the ball on this, but this is great.
I'll definitely blog it at Antiwar.com and that kind of thing.
I'm looking at it right now and it really looks like something great here.
Thank you.
All right.
So, now let's do effect and then cause, because, you know, there's plenty of...we can always talk politics forever, but I think what's most important...well, obviously what's most important is, you know, how are the people living in Gaza right now?
They are subsisting in Gaza, as they have done for many years.
And you're right, you know, everybody kind of talks about the politics behind things, but what kind of ends up being shelved or overlooked is how this is affecting the plight of ordinary people.
And that's what really matters most.
You have about two million people living in Gaza right now and they are living in this kind of state of suspended animation where they don't have freedom to travel or move anywhere.
They don't have freedom to farm their land or fish in their sea and they can't go to their universities beyond the borders of Gaza or even go to hospital in the West Bank, in Israel, in Egypt, or anywhere in the world.
So they are trapped.
They have been trapped for about 10 years.
Now you have the physical kind of confinement, which is absolutely horrible, but you also have the sense of entrapment, you know, the emotional scars, the psychological harm that results from that.
The suicide rate in Gaza is going up dramatically and people have lost any sense of hope.
They're just waiting and waiting and nothing seems to be happening, but things are getting worse.
So even cancer patients at this point are not allowed to cross to get chemotherapy in Israel or the West Bank and there's no functioning dialysis machine or chemotherapy machines or whatever in Gaza.
So that's what you have there and, you know, there is very little movement internationally that's happening to actually elevate their pain in any way.
And I've interviewed a lot of these people recently and, you know, they are kind of living on this, I don't want to call it false hope, but it really borders on false hope.
They feel like there is something going on, that the world will not be silent, something is going to happen.
I spoke to this lady who was diagnosed about a year ago with breast cancer.
She needs a permit from Israel in order for her to cross the military checkpoint and to get to the West Bank and do chemotherapy in Jerusalem.
And she has done so several times.
Of course, only she is allowed to leave.
No family member or friend is allowed to join her in her journey.
But about a month or so ago, she was denied permission and now she doesn't know what to do.
She goes to the Red Cross, she goes to, you know, various offices, she pleads, she writes letters, but they're not allowing her.
And we don't know what's going to happen, but this is the plight of hundreds of patients of cancer and other terminal illnesses who are not allowed to leave Gaza and to receive any life-saving treatment anywhere else.
Well, you know, for people who watch the news closely, we see these stories of, I guess it depends who you follow on Twitter maybe, we see these stories of people denied access to hospitals, women, children, they die.
I think I just saw one today, I'm almost positive this was, oh no, this was in England or something else.
Anyway, this is going on all the time.
It sounds so inhuman that maybe it's not quite true that there must be something that you're leaving out.
Like, well, but what if their parents 11 years ago voted for Hamas and so it's their fault that they're under siege or something like that?
Yeah, but you would hope that at one point someone is going to discover the bizarre logic in this.
I mean, you know, people voted for Donald Trump, you know.
You don't see Americans being denied medical treatment in the Middle East or in Britain or Thailand.
No American has been harmed as a result of that.
People voted for Netanyahu in Israel with one of the most extremist ultra-nationalist governments in the history of Israel.
You know, no Israeli has been personally punished or collectively or paid a price for that.
No diplomatic ties have been severed.
No siege has been imposed in Israel.
And you would say, well, Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Well, fine, but Netanyahu has unleashed civil wars so far and killed thousands of people.
At least 80% of all of his victims in recent wars were civilians.
Again, we haven't really seen anything.
We'd love to see something, but we haven't.
So this rule seems to only apply on certain people but not on others.
Yeah, and I don't mean to give too much credence to that.
I just want to give you a chance because that's the narrative out there.
And frankly, it is so horrible that it's unbelievable because most decent people and most decent Americans imagine that the government is basically decent and imagine that our allies are, especially the most democratic country in the whole Middle East, our very best friend, the Israelis, that more or less they're humane.
I mean, if there's a tortured chair called the Palestinian chair, certainly that must be something that the Palestinians, those barbarians do to each other, right?
That's not something that the Israelis invented for the use on their victims whose land that they're colonizing or anything like that.
The presumption is that the Palestinians must be the bad guys and somehow this is deserved.
And as far as I know, that's the best argument that they've got is that in the election of 2006, Hamas won.
But even then, they had a coalition government with Fatah, but then what happened?
What happened, there was this decided attempt by the U.S. government, particularly Kundalini Zarif at the time, was leading this attempt at ensuring that Hamas remains isolated.
Actually, Hamas was quite desperate to join in any coalition because they knew that if they remain at the helm and nobody else is going to share this responsibility with them, they will be an easy target.
So they reached out to everybody, and they reached out to Fatah in particular, who are the American allies and the Israeli allies in the West Bank.
And in fact, there was an agreement that was signed, called the Mecca Agreement, signed in Saudi Arabia, in particular, the strongest Arab ally of the United States.
And then Kundalini Zarif made it very clear.
They said, if you continue with this, you will not be receiving any money from the U.S. government.
So the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank had to drop the initiative and told Hamas, listen, you're on your own.
It made it a lot easier to create this brand.
Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Palestinians voted for a terrorist organization.
Therefore, they are responsible for this and that.
It would have been a lot easier for Palestinians if the so-called moderates joined them, but they were not allowed to.
So it's kind of, I think, in this situation, suits Israel perfectly, because no matter what Israel would do, you'll always use the Hamas army.
No matter.
And that's what they want to do.
I mean, I think it was Dov Weissglas, who was the top advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said at the time, listen, we don't want to starve Palestinians.
We just want to put them on a diet, okay?
And they've been on this very strict diet.
They are actually counting their calories.
If you go to Google and type counting the calories in Gaza, you'll find lots of articles about, you know, some horrible material revealed about how the Israelis count the calories of the amount of food, the food that enters into Gaza occasionally, to ensure that they are getting enough survival, you know, number of calories that would allow them to survive, but to remain malnourished.
Well, speaking of Dov Weissglas, the advisor to Ariel Sharon there, he was the one who explained, he got criticized.
Of course, Ariel Sharon was criticized.
The Likud party split between Netanyahu and Sharon over Sharon's move in 2005 to pull the Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip.
And there were many at the time who, you know, from Sharon's right who said, oh, you know, you're giving the land over to the enemy and this and that kind of thing.
But there were others who more wisely said that, wow, actually, those Israeli settlers were in effect human shields, voluntary human shields, protecting the Gazans from the worst onslaught that the Israelis have in store for them.
And now that they're out of there, now the Israelis can really clamp down on them.
And yet the spin at the time and ever since, Ramsey, right, is that, well, look, they gave independence to the Gaza Strip and how were they rewarded?
The Gazans elected Hamas and started shooting rockets at them and then gave them no choice.
So this was this most magnanimous gesture on the part of giving the entire West Bank to the Palestinians, even pulling the last of the settlers out.
And yet I have a Dov Weissglass quote right here.
It says, the significance of the disengagement plan, this is 2005, is the freezing of the peace process.
And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.
Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.
And all this with a U.S. presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde.
It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.
You've got to appreciate that kind of honesty, though.
I mean, if anyone has any doubt that that was Israel's intentions from the beginning, I mean, this is how you have it.
This is the top advisor to two Israeli prime ministers, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olman, saying this.
And then now how many...
There's been three or four full-scale attacks by the Netanyahu government, I guess the Olmert and the Netanyahu governments, right?
Since then.
Yes, yes, which really indicates that this is not because...
I lose count of how many, you know, I'm sorry.
Yes, there was the 2008-9 war, there was the 2012 war, there was the 2014 war, and there was, you know, many wars somewhere here and there.
And they were launched by a right-wing prime minister, by a centrist, which is Ehud Olmert, and by someone who's supposed to be in the left.
Believe me, it really comes to show you that Israel is united behind this doctrine that you just heard out loud by Dov Weissblatt.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right, so, well, I don't know.
We'll get back to the humanitarian thing again because I do want to focus again on the women and children, but it's all politics, politics.
How about this?
How about Avigdor Lieberman is now the defense minister.
Did I dream that?
Is that really real?
I think...
No, it's happening.
I actually saw that.
And this was the controversy over the IDF soldier executing the unconscious Palestinian on the ground who, I guess, is now being released on early release from prison.
He was convicted, I guess, of manslaughter or something.
But there was a big fight in the government because the generals, they wanted this guy prosecuted.
They need law and order inside their killing machine.
You can't have these guys just going wild and breaking the rules when it comes to this kind of thing.
You follow orders.
That kind of thing is important.
And yet all the politicians took the side of the assassin.
And so then the defense minister was the collateral damage in that and was forced to resign.
But now, so Avigdor Lieberman is a really interesting character, right, because he's a hardcore right-wing nationalist, but he's not a religious kook.
He's a secular type.
So he wants to not annex the West Bank, correct?
He wants to go ahead and let there be a Palestinian state, of course a disarmed and powerless one, etc., but a quote-unquote Palestinian state, rather than annex and continue the colonization of the West Bank.
And I don't know about his position on Gaza, but is that right?
Do I have that right?
Do you know?
Avigdor Lieberman?
Yeah, the new defense minister.
I can't imagine Avigdor Lieberman wants to see.
I mean, this is the guy who, you know, his plan has always been he wants to annex all the areas where illegal Jewish settlements are located, whether the ones that are close to the Israeli border or the ones that are in the Jordan Valley.
And he wants to annex them, and whatever happens to Palestinians after that happens.
He has no political vision for Palestinians whatsoever.
And not just that.
He has the plan of, you know, what he calls the demographic swamps.
He basically wants to expel Palestinians who live in Israel, the original, the indigenous population of that land.
He wants to expel them out of Israel to the West Bank in exchange for annexing the illegal Jewish settlers and making them part of Israel.
That's his plan.
I see.
So, and this is the actual defense minister now, and he was previously the foreign minister, and yet they were running all the foreign policy out of Netanyahu's office anyway and kind of marginalizing him.
But I don't think you really can marginalize the defense minister, can you?
Well, he needs Avigdor Lieberman a great deal, because Lieberman is the head of an important member of the coalition, Israeli Beit Jinnah party, and it has always been this kind of, like, reliable member of the coalition, because as you know, Israeli government coalitions are quite erratic and unstable by nature.
They almost never finish the full term.
But Lieberman has always been consistent on the side of Netanyahu.
But of course, I mean, Netanyahu is right-wing, but Lieberman kind of pushes him even further to the far-right wing.
As long as he's getting exactly what he wants, and as long as the settlers are happy because they are very strong supporters of both parties, then the coalition remains stable.
All right.
Now, so tell us about this, I don't know, they say he's some rich millionaire or billionaire or something who's a former Palestinian Authority guy who's now trying to work a deal between the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and between them and the Sisi government in Egypt.
And, you know, this all is in the context of the electricity crisis that's been caused by, I guess, the Israelis working in concert with the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, right?
Yes, of course.
That's Mohamed Dahlan.
Dahlan is a very, very interesting guy.
He was his close friend of Abigdoul Lieberman, and he has been friends with the Americans for a long time, and by the Americans I mean the CIA.
He was referenced several times by speeches by W. Bush at the time.
I think his statement was, I like this kid, in a conference in Sharm el-Sheikh.
How'd you like to have that in your bio?
That's right.
Now, Dahlan is notorious.
Dahlan was responsible for, I mean, imagine, a tiny little place like Gaza, 365 square kilometers.
I don't know how much in miles is that, but significantly less.
It's a very, very small region, and he needed ten security branches to crack down on dissent.
Ten.
I don't know what they were doing.
Some were responsible for, you know, politics and others, but people were not allowed to breathe without permission of Mohamed Dahlan.
He was the strongman of Gaza.
When Hamas was elected, he made it very clear that this would not stand, and, of course, he was expressing the sentiment of the Israelis and the U.S. government at the time.
So, in fact, there was a newspaper.
I think it was Sanity Fan.
I remember correctly.
But they spoke about a coup that Dahlan was actually planning, plotting against the new government in Gaza, and Hamas got hold of the news about the coup that was 2017, and they preempted the coup by overthrowing him.
So he ran away.
He ran away to the West Bank, and all of his security branches were dismantled.
In the West Bank, he did not get along with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Qatar and the Palestinian Authority.
He accused him also of trying to overthrow him.
Then he was kicked out of the West Bank and eventually landed in the United Arab Emirates, and that's where he really kind of was giving his full potential, basically.
He is accused of being involved in every conflict you can think of.
I am not kidding.
He was accused of trying to kill Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah.
He was accused of being involved in the Turkish coup.
He was involved in weapons smuggling in Libya.
He is everywhere.
I can't wait to hear about his great peace deal that he's got on offer here.
This is precisely why this is so frightening, and it tells you anything, is that the situation in Gaza is so bad, and Hamas is going so desperate, and their channels, their lifelines are shutting down so quickly, especially with the situation between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, so that they would do anything in order for them to open one last lifeline through the Egypt border.
And that's when the halal comes in bearing gifts and saying, listen, I can help you guys.
I'm all about Gaza and loving the people there, and I want to help you, but you would have to make me basically president of the political council that we need to form in Gaza.
You deal with all the internal issues.
I deal with all the diplomacy, and I will let Egypt open the border with Gaza, and that's that.
Now, why would that be the case?
Why would Israel, the U.S., and Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudis be interested in supporting the halal in this initiative?
That's really where the dangerous issue comes in.
They want Gaza to evolve as if it's an independent region.
Now, there would be no resistance, you know, because they're so desperate.
They want to keep the status quo.
They want to keep food and commerce moving between Gaza and the Egypt border.
So the entire political direction will change.
There will be a split between Gaza and the West Bank.
You will start thinking of Gazans as opposed to Palestinians in Gaza.
You won't think of Gaza as part of a larger political entity called Palestine.
And Hamas would not be interested in resisting or allowing any sort of clashes with the Israelis at the border just to keep food coming in and medicine and so forth.
That's the plan.
Well, and so the ball's in Hamas's court now, right?
And as you're saying, they may just have to do this, right?
They really don't have a choice at this point compared to the full-scale siege.
You're right.
I mean, a lot of us as, you know, political analysts are kind of scratching our heads.
Like, really?
I mean, after all of this, you're going to go back to the very guy who tried to overthrow you and worked with Israel?
I mean, this is like the worst possible formula, isn't it?
But then when you talk to the people and then you kind of start, even the people who are like, you know, upper middle class.
You know, I spoke to, for an interview I did for an article, I spoke to a lady who is a doctor and her husband is a professor at a university in Gaza, who financially, you know, is struggling, even though they've built a sweet life for themselves over the years.
But they are struggling because their salaries have been cut by over 50% by the Palestinian Authority, as you know, to squeeze Hamas even more.
Their kids are all students at a university, but they can't pay tuition anymore.
But this, again, the sense of entrapment, a doctor who hasn't attended a single medical conference for 10 years, a professor whose entire existence is going to this university that has very few books and home back and forth in a journey of 15 minutes, and that's his entire existence.
There's a sense of despair that people have.
And even though both of these individuals voted for Hamas on the account of their lack of corruption, at this point, whatever, whatever, we don't care.
And my answer was, but you are basically recreating the same scenario that started this all over again.
They said, yes, but we need to respite, we need a break, we need to breathe, you know.
So that's why I feel like it might sound astounding that Hamas is doing this, but in considering the very, very low morale and the sense of despair in Gaza, it kind of makes sense.
Yeah, all right, so now, well, yeah, I'll save that for last.
So back to the humanitarian situation, then, and about the situation that the Gazans are in.
You know, I forget who it is, but there's one commentator on Twitter who says that, oh, I guess it's Max Blumenthal, the progressive Jewish analyst and journalist, says, oh yeah, look, this is what's happening to the people of Gaza because they're guilty of being born with the wrong religion.
And just to boil it down, basically, that's why they're prisoners there.
And it's pretty much comparable to, say, like the Navajo Indian reservations out there in Arizona, if, you know, they weren't just more or less kept there, but then also constantly bombed them and shot them and tortured their kids, kidnapped them in the middle of the night and, you know, locked them away, prevented them from ever traveling anywhere, all these things like you're talking about.
Endlessly picking on them, right, instead of even letting them just have their little reservation.
You know what I mean?
But just endlessly, yeah, you know what I mean.
But anyway, so that's the situation that they're in.
But I guess I just want to let you talk about it more.
You know, I was reading the other day about how these kids are like, well, screwed, I guess we're just going to swim in raw sewage in the sea because that's all they got because they have no proper sewage treatment plant whatsoever.
That's all they can do.
The fishermen can't even fish even a couple, two or three miles like within the so-called rules without getting shot just for trying to fish in sewage water to feed their families.
I see pictures of people who are living in buildings that were bombed out three years ago and they don't have walls and they're not going to have walls.
This is really out of control here.
And so anyway, what the hell do I know about it?
You tell them.
Well, that's the thing that I think a lot of people need to be paying more attention to.
And I don't mean just the humanitarian issue here because you really can't separate the humanitarian from the political in the sense that, you know, this is not a humanitarian crisis that hit Gaza that is a result of a natural crisis.
Right.
Yeah, this isn't a hurricane that happened.
This is Bush, Obama and Trump.
As we said earlier, I mean, you know, their weight is being calculated very specifically through, you know, some sort of a scientific method of how many calories they would require, you know, to survive.
Yeah.
For those who say that what Manning did was wrong, there's the answer to whether Manning did the right or wrong thing by leaking those documents because that's out of the State Department cables there.
Yes, of course.
But here's the thing that really is so important that I think a lot of people need to understand.
And that's why we try, you know, many Palestinian historians now.
I wouldn't say many, but a good number of Palestinian historians are really trying to focus on people's history because people are just a factor in the Palestinian equation that is just really not receiving enough coverage.
Now, the thing is, actually, the war is not just against Hamas.
Because Hamas is a political organization that, you know, changes its tactics.
Now they want to ally with Mohamed Dahlan of all people in the world.
It's the people, the Palestinian people.
We haven't had a really wise leadership in a long time.
And the reason being is that our best leaders are in prison or assassinated.
So you end up having, you know, people like Mahmoud Abbas running the show.
But what keeps this conflict going in the sense of why Palestinians keep fighting?
It's because of the people.
And I'm not talking in a poetic or sentimental way.
There is this, you know, constant emphasis on resistance within the Palestinian community.
And that's what Palestinians have in common.
That's what keeps them together as one unit in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem.
The Bedouins in Danakav, the Palestinians living in Israel, Palestinians living in diaspora.
There's this constant, you know, unifying factor.
And that is the resistance.
The idea here is to really break the spirit, not of Hamas, but of the resistance.
Even of the resistance of the people.
Edward Said used to say resistance is a culture.
And it is true.
It is a culture.
And I think this starvation of Gaza, the constant bombardment of Gaza, the constant shock and awe of Gaza.
Israel could have easily said, listen, Gazans are allowed in and out.
Gazans are allowed.
But it's Hamas that we want to punish.
They could have done that.
They could have really made life extremely difficult for the Hamas leadership.
And they did not allow them money or entry or exit or any of that.
And it would have resulted in Hamas being demoralized and weakened.
But the intention was really not entirely Hamas from the beginning, but the people.
The people are paying the price, not just because they voted for Hamas, because even if Hamas left and a new organization comes in, the resistance will continue.
People will continue to fight.
These are the very people that after the 2014 war, when the mosques and the churches and everything was blown up in Gaza, people went to their houses of worship and they prayed on top of the ruins of their mosques and churches.
It's that spirit that is now weakening, I'm sad to report, at least for the time being.
And that's why the resistance of triumph in Israel, that these are the ones we are going after.
And this is why we think it's the right moment for someone like Mohamed Dahlan to walk in bearing his guilt.
Because the people are now, maybe they are exactly where we want them to be.
Maybe they are weak enough, maybe they are demoralized enough, maybe they are dispirited enough.
And that's why I keep saying that the humanitarian and the politics would have to be mixed together in this equation.
Because the people are not collateral damage, the people are not onlookers.
The people are very much involved in this fight.
And if you look back at the history of Palestinian resistance, cultural resistance, collective resistance, civil disobedience in Gaza, going back, and I wrote my last book about this specific subject, going back 70 years, you will find that the leadership in Gaza at one point was socialist, communist, secular, religious, whatever.
But the spirit of the people never changed.
So it's not about Hamas being a religious organization.
In fact, I would put the religion as the minor factor.
It's about the will of the people.
All right, so now, this current deal that's being proposed here, that you're saying that they may just have to accept, if you could put some kind of percentage on it, or a quantity of some kind, on a scale of 1 to 10, or whatever it is, to what degree would this amount to a lifting of the siege, or a big enough loophole in the siege that you could consider it, you know, a real improvement in terms of trade and the ability of Gazans to travel, and that kind of thing?
I recently wrote an article for Al Jazeera called Gaza's Game of Thrones.
And I really tried to kind of be somewhat emotionally detached while writing it, in order for me to explain what is at stake, who are the players, what do they want, you see.
And I think this is going to be measured one step at a time.
Hamas is conceding just a little bit.
They think that they might be able to place Dehlan in a decorative position, like he is there, but not really there.
We are still running the show.
Dehlan thinks, okay, I think I know what Hamas wants me to do, but we will bargain.
Every single thing is going to be bargained through the Egyptians and the Emiratis.
You want money?
You want electricity?
You want more commerce?
Well, here's a new list of demands.
And Hamas would say, no, no, no, no, but that was not the agreement at all.
They say, well, okay, take it or leave it.
So they would have to concede a little bit, and so forth.
So every party thinks that they can manipulate the situation as it progresses to their favor.
Hamas thinks that maybe we can still maintain the situation as is, with only a few concessions and get a lot in return.
Dehlan thinks the opposite.
Egypt thinks the opposite.
Israel thinks the opposite, and so forth.
As far as Hamas's understanding of this, they think that the border is going to be open permanently with Egypt.
And there will be commerce, and food will come in, medicine will come in, and that's that.
But I don't think it's going to go as smoothly as this.
I think there will be a constant bargaining over every little thing.
And Israel is watching, and Israel has a very strong influence on Sisi.
In fact, he is far more an ally of Israel than he's an ally of the Palestinians.
In fact, I think he's completely anti-Palestinian.
So the Israelis are watching, and they will know what is coming in and out.
And they are going to negotiate over every item.
And then Hamas is going to find itself in that terrible position of kind of biting their fingers, saying, oops, we should have not allowed this to happen in the first place.
But maybe we are kind of knee-down in this, and we are too involved to back down.
So I really don't think that this is going to work very well.
It's not going to be a smooth process.
And I think it is definitely the wrong move, not just politically but for Gaza in general, because it's going to shift the focus from demanding Israel to lift the siege and to allow Gaza to go back to its natural position of being part of the occupied territories, fighting for independence and freedom and liberation for international law, into something entirely different.
Sisi, Shmisi, United Arab Emirates, Saudi, like the environs of the conflict will change entirely.
It will appear as if this is an inner Arab affair, when it's not at all.
And that is, in my opinion, the greatest danger of this agreement.
Yeah.
Taking the responsibility away from those who are actually responsible, America and Israel.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, people ask me all the time, and I don't know what to answer because I've only ever read Goliath and a lot of articles over the years.
But I have really a whole shelf full of books about Palestine that I haven't ever gotten to.
So I was wondering if you could recommend some books to people who want to learn about this.
You know, maybe overall histories, but then more narrow ones, too, if you know, whatever you like.
Yes, absolutely.
I would say if you want to go a little bit back to how this whole thing started, then look into the writings of Edward Said.
Especially his book, The Question of Palestine.
If you want to also look at that period, but with more from a narrative-based perspective, look for Ga'ada Karmi's In Search for Fatima.
In Search for Fatima.
If you want to look at it from an Israeli perspective that is 100% honest and right on, look for Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
If you want to look for or read books that are more recent and put things in a more modern perspective, then Ben White.
Ben White has several good books on the subject.
I think there's a book called Introduction to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Something that is in a fiction, kind of a historical fiction type of format that is very, very readable and lovable.
Look at Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin.
And, of course, if you want to look at the situation in Gaza in particular, my last book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
Great.
All right.
So, that is Saeed, The Question of Palestine, In Search of Fatima.
Sorry, I missed the author on that one.
Correct.
Yes, Ga'ada Karmi.
Okay, and then The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé.
And I have, actually, he gave a great speech at Grant Smith's recent conference.
And I have one of his books, too, I forgot, that I haven't gotten a chance to look at yet.
And then you said Ben White, and I know him from Twitter on this story there.
I don't know much about him, but Introduction to Israel-Palestine.
And then Mornings in Jenin was by who again?
Susan Abulhawa.
Okay.
Say the last name one more time.
Susan Abulhawa.
Okay.
And then yours is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, of course, Gaza's Untold Story.
And then, so, RamseyBaroud.net is your website, and PalestineChronicle.com as well.
And now writing for Al Jazeera and Middle East Monitor, is the one you said, right?
Correct.
And we reprint as much of it as we can at Antiwar.com as well.
So, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Ramsey.
I sure do appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Keep up the good work.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ramsey Baroud.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the stuff at ScottHorton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
