For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Kathy Kelly.
She's the founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and is a three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She's recently returned from Palestine.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you, Scott.
It's very good to have you here, and I guess you did just get back from Gaza two or three days ago, right?
That's right.
I came in two nights ago feeling a bit unsettled, not sure whether it was a good idea to leave or would it have been better to stay.
But quite honestly, it was very difficult from within Gaza, where there's limited access to electricity or to phones or to Internet.
It seemed like it was important to try to communicate about what had happened to people that we'd stayed with inside of Gaza, so we decided to return.
And how long had you been there this last trip?
Well, I left the United States on the 7th of January, and we were in Egypt trying to cross over, which was not so easy to do, but we entered Gaza on the 16th and were there for six days.
And I'm sorry, it's completely escaped my mind when the last day of the fighting was before the ceasefires.
Well, the ceasefire was declared on the 18th.
On the 18th, yeah.
So you, I guess, thankfully mostly saw only the aftermath and not the entire nearly month's worth of warfare there.
Well, you know, when I thought about what it could have been like for the family with whom I stayed to have undergone 22 days of bombardment, and the first night that I was there we counted and once every 11 minutes a bomb would come, a sickening thud, an ear-splitting blast.
And the morning after the ceasefire had been declared, the mother in that family was so relieved and certainly people were, I suppose, grateful that they had survived, but the grief and the indignation and the outrage over what had been done to those who had survived, but with their houses completely damaged, not to mention the many, many people who were bereaved because their loved ones had been killed, including children.
And what are the latest casualty figures, do you know?
I believe it's close to 1,300 for those killed, 5,000 wounded.
This will likely become a higher casualty rate.
The potential of the doctors to heal people is so compromised, and that's of course in part because of the state of siege that Gaza had been subjected to.
Before these horrendous assaults, there was already a state of siege that had compromised the health care delivery system.
Well, you know, a big part of the story of the recent assault on Gaza in the American media was that the Israelis were going to extraordinary lengths to fight only Hamas and protect civilian lives.
As Senator Charles Schumer said at a rally in New York, what other country would send text messages to the cell phones of the people they're bombing, warning them to get out of the house before they blow it up?
Do you have a comment about that?
Well, I would like Senator Schumer to hook up with the newly appointed Middle East envoy, Mr. George Mitchell, and determine that as soon as possible after Mr. Mitchell arrives in Tel Aviv, a trip would be made to Gaza so that they could go and see the aftermath of the bombing.
You know, people were told, evacuate, but where were they going to go?
And what place was supposed to be safe?
I was in an area one block beyond the area between the border and what's called C Street, where everybody had been told to evacuate, and on either side of where we stayed, bombs had hit homes.
The Al-Quds Hospital was hit.
I think many people know that the United Nations Relief and Works Administration had a school to which people had run for shelter, and that also was hit.
Ambulance drivers were hit as they carried patients that were critically wounded, and it seems to me that the number of crimes against humanity is staggering.
When you go into a town, for instance, I was in the north of Gaza, a town called Beit Vahia, and house after house completely turned to rubble, unlivable, unrepairable, and there was one family whose mother I had met in the Shifa Hospital, and she had suffered from white phosphorus chemical burning.
The doctors were almost certain of that because of the unusual nature of these burns.
But what so afflicted her was the story of what had happened when the Israeli Air Force hit her house with three bombs.
The family, an extended family, were huddled into one room, and we went and we found the house later that afternoon in this small town of Beit Vahia, and the room that she described was completely charred and blackened, and we encountered her son, and he told about how other of her children had been running out of the house with planes, shooting out of their bodies, and he showed us the tattered remnants of his father's clothing.
The father had been burned to death.
He then talked about how they had loaded survivors onto a cart, managed to get to a truck, and the truck was going downhill, wanting to race to get them to some kind of assistance, and then soldiers came, Israeli soldiers came, told the truck to stop.
The driver couldn't put the brake on fast enough for them, and so they shot into the truck.
They killed more members of her surviving family.
Now, these are crimes against humanity.
Mr. Mitchell, Senator Schumer, the law in Gaza, talking to the survivors, surveying the scene.
They go to the village of Tufa, and they stand there and look as far as they can in any direction.
All they will see are houses that are destroyed, and after every house was dynamited, then the bulldozers came along and ripped up all of the orange groves, all the livelihood, all the potential for subsistence.
These are facts on the ground that were created in order to attack and assault an indigenous population, I believe, with the intent to remove them.
So you just don't buy the argument at all that these are collateral damage casualties, that the real goal was just to protect Israeli towns from Hamas rockets and so forth?
No, I don't think the goal was to protect Hamas towns.
I'm sorry, to protect Israeli towns from Hamas rockets, because, you know, I was in the Jenin camp in 2002 and saw the same thing in a system of war that's been systematic and it's been governed by an ideology that says that one group of people are substandard.
I think that the Israeli governance and the military have decided that Palestinians do not have the same rights to human life and livelihood that Israelis have, and we've seen this again and again and again.
I think we also have to look at President Jimmy Carter's very thoughtful article that appeared in the first weeks of January in the Washington Post.
I believe it was January 7th, entitled, A War That Didn't Have to Happen.
And he said that he and his wife, Rosalyn, had gone to the Israeli village of Sderot and they felt very, very sad for the anxiety, the burdensome life when people don't know when a Hamas rocket might be fired into their town.
I guess 20 people have been killed because of those Hamas rockets over years.
But the breaking of the ceasefire that had been declared on June 19th, 2008, happened in 2008 in November, November 5th, and the people inside of Gaza who had been digging a tunnel, I mean, it was their land, if they want to dig a tunnel, they have a right to do that, they were attacked by Israel, six people were killed.
The ceasefire was also broken, and as much as the agreement to that ceasefire, the conditions clearly stated that there would be a resumption of the flow of previously restricted goods into Gaza, that never happened, and that the border crossing would be opened so that there would be a free flow of humanitarian goods going into Gaza, and that never happened.
So, who broke the ceasefire?
I think that the manipulation of the Western media to hear only one side, and then because of the intimidation of people, if they were to speak up, they'd be labeled anti-Semitic, you then have 22 days of inhuman, reckless, ruthless assault against a civilian population, using conventional weaponry against a civilian population, and the world ignores it.
World leaders ignored it.
One doctor was shaking with rage when he said to me, this is worse than an earthquake.
After an earthquake, people send relief, people try to help, but in this case, it's likely that NATO and the Americans are going to help Israel further tighten the thumbscrews of this state of siege.
Well, there's many things to address there.
First of all, I don't think it's really, it certainly shouldn't be in dispute, as you say, who broke the ceasefire in terms of the blockade, which was never let up in violation of it, and then, of course, the rocket strikes of November 4th or November 5th, I guess, Palestine time, as you said.
But I guess my question is, because it's clear that the narrative that they've spelled out is of self-defense against Hamas rockets is just not tenable, but if the strategy is to just get rid of them, killing 1,300 of them at a time wouldn't work, why wouldn't they tear down the fence and try to push them into Egypt?
Is that something that's coming, or what do they expect to happen to the people of the Gaza Strip if they mean really to take it?
Well, I think that is a very good question.
There's almost no possibility that the government of Egypt is going to accept refugees pouring across that border, and as you say, people can't be pushed into the sea.
Where are they going to go?
Does the Israeli government have its eyes on Jordan as a possible place into which they would push refugees?
But I think that right now, Hamas is not prepared, it doesn't seem to me, to buckle.
The massacre certainly couldn't be spun into looking like a victory.
I didn't hear anybody in a cab or amongst students or walking along roadsides say, look at this victory, I saw people pretty stunned and staggered by the extent of the devastation.
But nevertheless, I certainly don't think we can expect to hear people in Gaza saying, okay, that's it, we're ready to give up our right to have a home, our right to become a sovereign entity.
Well, and do they blame Hamas for getting them bombed?
You know, I don't think I have adequate experience or language skills to know the answer to that question.
I know that some have said to us that they were more frightened by the fighting between Qatar and Hamas that happened after the elections than they were even of the bombing.
There's a big prison called the Saraya Prison, and that prison was directly hit during this most recent bombing.
I've been a prisoner before myself in U.S. prisons, and I don't feel a particular empathy for people who are trapped inside of prisons, and I wanted to ask more questions to try to find out, you know, was there any effort to evacuate the prisoners?
And the people that I was with were very, very frightened that I would even mention that prison.
So I think that we should allow for the reality that Hamas' governance is a source of anxiety and fear for any people who are not part of Hamas.
Nevertheless, it is the elected government.
Right.
And, well, you know, the announced strategy was basically the same.
At least it depends because it, you know, depends which article you read about which, you know, Israeli minister talking, but they basically made the parallel to Lebanon, I think, and said that they were applying that same strategy that by bombing the people of Gaza, they would make them blame Hamas, and even if they couldn't, you know, with their violence, completely destroy Hamas, that they would destroy the credibility of Hamas among the people of Gaza because people would blame them for getting them into that situation, that kind of thing.
You know, I was in Lebanon in 2006, and I clearly remember after the ceasefire had been declared, Hassan Nasrallah gave a talk, and I was with a group of, I guess you'd say Lebanese urban professionals.
They were landscapers and translators and social workers and doctors and lawyers, and they were quite a secular group.
I really don't think they would have wanted to change their lifestyle so that they would become adherents of the practice of Islam that Hassan Nasrallah might have recommended to them.
I mean, he's the head of Hezbollah there.
Right, yeah, thank you.
I watched them watch his talk.
His face was, you know, filling the entire wall.
They had projected it in this kind of modern cafe, projected the talk to fill an entire wall.
And after the talk was over, people, mostly in their 20s, as I say, a very secular group, well-educated, looked at one another, raised their eyes, and began to nod and to applaud.
It wasn't roaring applause, but it was more or less, it seemed to me, indicative of a group of people who said, well, here's somebody who is defending our potential to survive these kinds of assaults.
And these young people had also determined to go down south of the Litani River in Lebanon and to try to bring relief, even while the bombing was going on.
So that was a sign of solidarity that was very, very strong.
Now, what will happen for the future with regard to Gaza, I just want to mention that, and maybe your listeners know this, but al-Kazira nonstop broadcast the suffering and the affliction that had been wreaked upon civilians inside of Gaza.
So I think Israel is going to have to face the fact that all around the world, people are indignant over the criminal and the ruthless and the reckless nature of these attacks that were made against civilians.
I mean, 50% of people living in the Gaza Strip are children.
And from three different doctors, I heard testimony that the majority of the patients they treated were grandmothers and grandfathers and women and children.
Well, and this is a very important thing for the future, I think, too, that the Western media, certainly the American media, was kept out.
And I guess there was a little bit of footage I saw on CNN International, which in fact I saw them showing live phosphorus bombs being dropped over Gaza, exploding over Gaza, I guess I should say.
But for the most part, NBC, CBS, ABC showed virtually no footage of Gaza.
And yet, as you say, pretty much the rest of the world has seen it.
And that kind of leads to a real imbalance as far as, you know, decision-making and, you know, figuring out ways to solve these problems when people are dealing with entirely different sets of facts.
Well, that's why I think it's so important that the newly appointed envoy, George Mitchell, go to Gaza and bring as much media with him as he possibly can.
Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, went in for a day.
John King from the United Nations has been a humanitarian coordinator, and he's been speaking up on all of the international channels.
Again, the U.S. people are at a handicap.
And also I think it's important that U.S. people should know that so much of the weaponry that's been used, not to mention the free-will gift of the jet fuel, the aviation jet fuel, for these F-16s has come from the United States, that the United States taxpayers have paid for the means of killing, murdering, maiming, destroying women, children, grandparents.
Another thing that the rest of the world can see with their own eyes.
Well, and so let me ask you about this, because I know you've been involved in, you know, anti-war activism.
I don't know, you know, your whole history or whatever, but have you ever heard of a situation where you have basically at least, you know, some kind of one-sided war, but there is no ability for regular civilians to flee, where there's no possibility of becoming a refugee, and the regular civilian population are basically stuck among the people being bombed?
Well, I suppose you could look back to the situation of the genocide against the people who populated the United States before the United States exterminated so many of the native population.
Certainly, but nothing in recent memory?
You know, say, World War II or something?
I was in Iraq in 1991, and there was only one road that should have been kept open as a conduit from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad as a way for refugees to get out and as a way for humanitarian relief to get in, and that road was being bombarded mercilessly by the Americans.
And I was part of a peace team, and we ourselves began to try to see if we could ride along that road and that maybe the presence of Americans would safeguard that road.
And I remember seeing charred and smoking ambulances that had been bombed, passenger buses that had been bombed, little tiny cars that were turned over.
The station chief for CBS was bombed in his little Toyota.
He survived it, but that road was bombed clearly in violation of the Geneva Accords.
So the United States is capable of this as well.
And of course, the United States had subjected Iraq to a 13-year state of siege, and I think that it's almost as though the Israeli government and the United States government and their militaries compare notes and say, you know, well, this seems to work pretty well if you want to have a goal of overtaking other people's land and resources.
Yeah, well, and I guess it's a question of who's copying who when we talk about using white phosphorus, which the Americans certainly used in Fallujah.
And now I guess from what I understand, the international law, I don't know if it's specifically the Geneva Convention or which, that regulates the use of this weapon says you can use it on soldiers in a battlefield but not among civilians.
And it's right there technically a violation of international law for Israel to use white phosphorus weapons, at least within any kind of built-up city area where civilians are likely to be.
Do you know from the time that you did spend there in Gaza whether there was any credibility to the argument, which I've heard made on BBC Radio 4 News, Morning News, for example, an Israeli spokesman saying that, well, there are battlefield spaces out there in Gaza where they use these weapons, but they did not use them on civilians?
Well, the people at the Shifa Hospital I think very wisely took a biopsy of a patient that they suspected had been attacked by white phosphorus.
And that biopsy has already been returned after it was sent outside to a laboratory in Egypt and there were elements of white phosphorus.
And this was a civilian patient.
Two other patients were sent from the Shifa Hospital with such severe burns that the doctors suspected were caused by white phosphorus to a hospital in Egypt.
And they died there.
Autopsies were done on both of those corpses.
And they found that the cause of death was that the white phosphorus, which penetrates very deep into the body toward the bone and the muscle tissue, had gone into the circulatory systems of these patients who didn't survive.
And then it's poisonous and the liver couldn't process the white phosphorus and both patients died of cardiac arrest.
And these doctors are certainly ready to testify about this.
And I think that Israel knows that the evidence is there and that's why they have issued orders assuring all of their soldiers that they will protect their soldiers if there are any prosecutions, any proceedings brought under international law saying that they committed war crimes.
Again, if the United States turns away, if it ignores what the rest of the world can see, I think that this doesn't ultimately enhance security for anybody in Israel or the United States.
We were in the burn unit of the Shifa Hospital.
It's a burn center actually right next to the main hospital.
And a doctor there, as he was talking to us about their certainty that white phosphorus had been used, took a phone call from a very simple farmer.
I was so impressed that he took this call and he listened carefully.
And the farmer was explaining that they had been trying to salvage oranges that were part of a crop that had been destroyed by the bulldozers.
And they could see that the oranges were covered with a substance that was very sticky and it made their hands itchy when they handled the oranges.
And the oranges had a foul smell.
And was there any way that they might be able to salvage these oranges?
And, of course, the doctor said he didn't know how to advise them.
He said, really, we don't know what was used against us.
And the implication was that that was residue from white phosphorus or from nobody knows what?
Probably the latter would be the safer, more prudent thing to say.
But the doctor ended up saying that he, in the past, had tried to believe that there could be a compatibility between Israelis and Palestinians.
And he said he wants to believe this.
And he says that now he has to call what he is seeing a true genocide.
And I know we can't just fling that word around, but I feel like it's proper to quote some of the most skillful healers, doctors in Gaza, who were joined by doctors from other parts all around the world, who have arrived at that conclusion.
I'm talking about some of the relief teams that came in.
Well, and the thing is, I mean, with 1,300 casualties in this one group of attacks, this one assault, that doesn't seem to amount to genocide.
But I guess it's certainly debatable, at least within the larger context, because, well, it just can't be true that the people pinned in this tiny little strip are the aggressors and the Israelis the defenders.
Well, I think it's helpful to read John Pilger's article that appeared on antiwar.com.
He wants to call attention to the systematic nature of the war that's been going on now for 60 years and an ideology that fuels that war.
I think that you can't isolate the assaults on Gaza as a discrete factor unattached to what preceded these attacks.
So, you know, if there would be any way forward, I think there has to at least be a breaking of the silence, because if you don't tell the truth by breaking this terrible silence that the nations of the world have been complicit in and have agreed to, then I think that the frustration gets exacerbated, so much so that people will not have any faith whatsoever in the United Nations and international law or in any kind of arbitration that might be accomplished by other governments.
Well, and, you know, I keep thinking back about what you said about al-Jazeera and the excellent coverage that they provided for the people of the Muslim world, and I can't help but think of the story, at least, that Mohammed Atta was motivated to attack the United States by what he saw Israel doing to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese.
And, of course, Osama bin Laden's original declaration of war came just a month or two after the first Kwana massacre there in Lebanon, and half the thing was about it or something.
And it seems like maybe if there's any way to drive home to the American people the importance of approaching this issue with a little bit of fairness, it's that this issue is what got 3,000 Americans killed on September 11th.
Well, you know, one of the doctors said to me, he's a Christian, Dr. Attala, he said, if I prick you with a pin, don't cut my head off.
And even if I keep pricking you with that pin, the thing to do is to ask me, why am I doing that?
And that, to me, is the question that the Bush administration refused to ask throughout the aftermath of September 11th.
What would motivate people to throw their lives away, to take these tremendous risks?
What would their grievance be?
And I think if you really ask that question, it gets to be a kind of simple discussion.
People don't like to live under occupation.
They don't like to watch their children die or suffer from malnourishment, chronic malnourishment.
They don't want to see their precious and irreplaceable resources gobbled up by other people and not be able to bring any of the benefit of their work and their resource back into their own homes and lives.
And it's certainly not so different from what motivated those who revolted against the British Empire to form a separate entity and to say that they no longer wanted to live under British occupation.
But that's the kind of education that we need a charismatic leadership in the United States to accomplish.
And I think that there are certainly great hopes.
I'm certainly very, very sure that President Obama understands the history of this conflict and he understands the grievances of the Palestinians full well.
We know this because when he was in Chicago, he went to gatherings where some of the most radical spokespeople, Ali Abunimah, the founder of Electronic Intifada, would have been on a first-name basis prior to Senator Obama's movement toward the presidency.
Well, yeah, I guess so.
Then the question is, politically, will he be able to admit that he understands or will he have to pretend that they hate us because we're free and march on with the war on terrorism?
Well, I myself think that there could be some considerable encouragement in his decision to appoint as an envoy to the Middle East someone who is outside of the grouping that has so long dominated discussion of U.S. policy with regard to Israel.
Again, if George Mitchell would decide to step outside of the comfortable confines of Tel Aviv and go over to Gaza, I really think that we should all press for that, imagine that, and demand that.
That could be a step, at least, in another direction.
All right, everybody, that's Kathy Kelly from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
They only give that to war criminals, so don't feel bad if they haven't given it to you yet.
Snowballs would be flying in hell before that would happen.
But we do have a website that people could visit if they wanted more information.
I certainly recommend Electronic Intifada as well, and our website, www.vcnv.org, and certainly antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
