Watch the full episode HERE
This is a System Update special revisiting our coverage of Israel's atrocities in Gaza, featuring interviews with Norman Finkelstein and Rashid Khalidi.
Israel-Gaza War
When I look back on the 9/11 attack and the various wars that followed under the umbrella of the War on Terror, I think the one thing I recall most is the amount of unity that the United States had and that Americans had in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the intensity of the emotions that attack provoked. As I talked about before, I lived and worked in Manhattan when 9/11 happened. I remember like it was yesterday, the sensation of watching those two buildings in southern Manhattan crumble to the ground on top of 3000 American citizens. The Pentagon was attacked for weeks in New York. You could smell the burning of the rubble of the bodies, of the chemicals. Everywhere you went, there were desperate signs filling every street corner, every streetlamp on every street corner, from desperate families, hoping against hope that their missing loved ones were somehow with amnesia or unconscious or in a hospital instead of the horrible truth, which was that they were almost all dead under the rubble in the World Trade Center. And the emotions that everyone I knew felt, that I felt as well, were extremely out of rage, shock and trauma – and a desire for vengeance. And so, what ended up happening was that the government successfully exploited those very real human emotions. We all watched videos that were heavily provocative and inflammatory to our emotions. Videos of people jumping out of the World Trade Center as the only hope that they had for escaping a fire that was consuming them, of 9/11 calls to families as people had their lives extinguished when those buildings fell on top of them.
Of course, this generated enormous amounts of disgust and rage and a desire for vengeance against the people responsible. Most people felt that and most people felt that for a long time. That's why the government was able to convince Americans to essentially acquiesce to anything and everything that was done in the name of punishing or destroying the people who were responsible for that horrific attack. That took the form of multiple wars, of the initiation of a worldwide torture regime – that didn't just involve waterboarding, but all sorts of other techniques that had long by the United States been punished as torture, of kidnaping programs, of kidnaping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria and other countries that were allied with the United States to be tortured – of due-process-free prisons around the world, including at Bagram and Guantanamo, where people were in prison with no charges. There are still people, of course, in Guantanamo, who have never been charged with any crime, never convicted of any crime and they have sat there for 20 years. There was the hideous, disastrous invasion of Iraq – regime change wars all over the world – and the transformation of our own domestic politics, of the introduction of things like the Patriot Act and mass NSA spying and all kinds of authoritarian projects that seeped into and contaminated Americans’ form of government, all justified in the name of fighting against and destroying the people who launched this horrific attack.
I think the lesson that most Americans have learned from 9/11 is that a lot of what was done ended up being excessive, abusive, morally shameful, or at the very least just counterproductive. We ended up occupying Afghanistan for 20 years and spent trillions of dollars on this War on Terror, only for, at the end of the 20 years, the Taliban to just waltz back into power as though nothing had happened. Tens of thousands of people, American troops died, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in those countries that we were at war with, died as well for very little benefit, for very little progress that was ultimately made. The lesson ought to have been that no matter how horrific that attack was, no matter how righteous and justified the anger was, what was crucial at the time was to have the ability to use reason rather than emotion to make assessments about the best course of action, and most importantly, to create the space to actually debate what the best course of action was.
I think more than any other policy, what most bothered me at the time and what ultimately propelled me into journalism was the fact that the climate that had been created in the wake of 9/11 was so repressive. Anybody who was at all well known, at all questioning of government policy done in the name of fighting terrorists, was immediately accused of being an apologist for terrorism or supporting terrorism or being on the side of the terrorists, an incredibly toxic and healthy environment that destroyed the ability to engage in reason and to ask, even if you're horrified by these attacks, even if you find them completely lacking in anything human and you're enraged by them, even if that's true, you still have to question what was the best course of action, as well as whether or not we played any role in creating the climate that caused so many people to want to come to harm the United States. Obviously, 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack in the United States. There was an attack on the World Trade Center just a few years earlier that succeeded a little bit, nowhere near 9/11, obviously; there had been attacks all over the Muslim world against U.S. forces in Lebanon and in Somalia and all kinds of other places. There was an incredible amount of hatred for the United States that ultimately culminated in the 9/11 attack and it took years to be able to create the space to say “Are we doing anything in terms of interfering in that part of the world, in terms of occupying people's lands, in terms of our policies in that region to interfere in and control their lives or using violence against them that have caused the anti-Americanism to exist?” None of this debate was permissible, and I think the lesson of 9/11 – if you look at polling in the United States – most people have learned is that a lot of what was done that most of us supported right in the aftermath of 9/11 because of our anger and rage and our blinding indignation and desire for vengeance, turned out to be, at best, quite misguided. And that it's extremely important, especially when it comes time to war, when emotions are at their highest to create space for permissible debate, for permissible questioning.
It is an oddity that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened and it was time for the United States to get involved in that war, even though there was an attempt made to crush debate or dissent, to call everybody who questioned it a “Russian agent,” just like anyone questioning the War on Terror was called as “on the side of terrorists”, there was still an ability to have that debate. I, in fact, did a lot of programs on the show in the days, weeks, and months after the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. involvement in that war where I questioned it, where I opposed it, right, where I denounced it and, of course, I got accused of a lot of different things. Being accused of things is something you can do, but there was at least some space to question it, even though there wasn't much. I think there was even more space when it came to the War on Terror. There are a lot of people who are opposed to the Iraq war. There were people after the first few weeks who even opposed the Patriot Act. And yet, somehow, when it's not our wars, but when it's Israel, it seems as though there's even less space to question. In fact, people spent the weekend on the lookout for anybody who was even slightly off note in order to accuse them of being on the side of Hamas or justifying these horrific massacres that fighters for Hamas engaged in deliberately aimed at civilians.
I think the first thing to note is that in reality, there was virtually nobody defending massacres of civilians against Israeli citizens. There wasn't that. There was nobody. You can always find people advocating any position but, certainly, nobody in power, not just in the U.S. or in the West, defended, justified, or mitigated the atrocities committed by some of those people who invaded Israel, not who attacked police stations or military bases, as some of them did – which are generally considered legitimate targets – but who did things like go to a rave where a large number of young people in their twenties were having an all-night party and then just shot them, massacred them? We don't know how many.
There are lots of claims in wars that get circulated for which there is no evidence. Things like mass rapes get alleged. Well, we haven't really seen evidence of that, but there were clearly horrific atrocities committed and everyone that I heard at least pretty much is opposed to that, finds that morally repugnant, because even if you think there are legitimate grievances that the Palestinians have, you have to draw the line at basic humanitarianism. You can never sanction the deliberate targeting of civilians. I think there's even an important distinction to be drawn between facts of violence that are likely to cause the death of civilians and you do it anyway – everybody at war does those.
Remember, the United States did “shock and awe” in Baghdad, you could watch enormous bombs exploding throughout the city and the explicit purpose was to terrorize the population into submission, to use “shock and awe” to force them to surrender, to believe that it was helpless, and obviously, the United States government knew a large number of civilians were going to die in those bombs. And they did. Obviously, the war in Ukraine entails that and every war entails that. When Hamas shoots rockets into Israel, they hope that they're going to hit a police station or a military base, but there's a high likelihood they're going to hit civilian targets and they do it anyway. When Israel goes and drops massive bombs in one of the most densely populated places on Earth, which is Gaza, of course, there's a knowledge that they're going to kill large numbers of civilians in Gaza every time they've done it, and yet they still do it as well. There's still a difference between what you could call collateral damage and going to a place where you immediately see there are only civilians – like a dance festival or rave – and gunning people down.
There has to still be a moral line that is drawn where nobody can justifiably cross the way a lot of the militants that entered Israel did it. I don't think anybody can possibly in good conscience justify that – and the reality is almost nobody did. In fact, I think the only person I saw who did was somebody who was at a protest in New York City, a pro-Palestinian protest sponsored by the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. It was a single speaker. No one knows the person's name. Even people at this protest objected to it and said that they disassociated themselves from that. There were a lot of people expressing support for the Palestinian side without justifying what Hamas did and the fact that we had to watch this person search for him and hold him up shows how difficult it was to find people who actually supported the worst actions that Hamas took. But there's a deliberate attempt to suggest that, unless you're 100% on board with everything that Israel does – suggesting that everything they do is justified, everything the Palestinians do is unjustified; the Israelis are the upstanding, morally superior humans, and the Palestinians are animals who don't have human value – unless you're willing to say essentially that, you get accused of being supportive of acts that you're actually actively denouncing.
Here's the one person that I think people could find, and again, the fact that people at the point of this person who nobody knows was no power, who's not elected official, who has no standing in media, shows how marginalized this view was.
(Video. DSA Pro-Palestinian Demonstration. October 8, 2023)
Protester: When the Palestinians break through the fence, they put the. [crowd cheering...] But as you might have seen, there was some sort of Rave or desert Party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders, and […] at least several dozen hipsters. But I'm sure they're doing very fine, despite what the New York Post said. [...]
No, obviously they're not doing fine. We all saw the videos of people's corpses lying on the ground because they were shot by the people who invaded Israel. And maybe you had two or three people or four people screaming their approval in this crowd but this was a repulsive position that everybody I know, including people who have long been critics of Israel or support of the Palestinian cause, repudiated.
And so the idea that if you at all question the Israeli government or if you question the Biden administration's support for it, somehow means that you're a proponent of the worst acts of Hamas is just as intellectually dishonest, just as manipulative, just as designed to suppress dissent as those who claim that opponents of the Iraq war were pro-Saddam Hussein or that people who questioned the War on Terror were on the side of al al-Qaida, or that people who oppose U.S. support for Ukraine are pro-Putin. It's all part of the same tactic you should not fall for and you should not tolerate if you are even a minimally intellectually honest person.
I, again, understand that the reality is that all those videos that people were subjected to over the weekend, all those claims about atrocities committed against Israelis, obviously have produced a great amount of anger and a great amount of sickness, not just in Israel, but in foreign countries as well, for people who feel an affinity toward Israel – and in the United States, there are a lot of people who feel an affinity for Israel. They're not just American Jews who do, but evangelical Christians, who wield a lot of political power as well, and who feel an affinity toward Israel for religious or cultural reasons, but there's also the foreign policy establishment, neocons, and military who see – and always have – Israel as an important military ally of the United States. So, the energy and the emotion surrounding this topic, I'm aware, are very high and there are not a lot of people who want to hear any questioning right now. And I think it's very important to be careful, but not be willing to refrain from asking questions or making the points that I think ought to be raised.
One of the things I did when I was thinking about coming on tonight and talking about this war – and how to do it – was I went back and watched the video that I did immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where pretty much the same thing happened. We spent the first day or the first two days bombarded with images of Russian violence against Ukrainians, of Ukrainian civilians crying, of mourning, of grieving, of weeping, the kind of thing that we almost never see when America is involved in wars. We almost never see interviews with the victims of our bombs or our drones but we do get shown that when it comes time for a war the U.S. government wants to instigate support for it. And so, people were just drowning in videos and obviously, if you're a decent person and you look at videos of Ukrainian women crying over the death of their children, you're going to be emotionally moved by that but it can't mean that you're not allowed to question or even oppose your country's involvement in that war, because then you get accused of supporting Russian violence or being indifferent to the suffering of people because there are wars all the time in every part of the world. And obviously, there has to be space for you to say I don't think my government should get involved in this war, or I think this war is more complicated than the morality play we're being presented with.
So, I went back and watched what I tried to communicate the day after the Russian invasion, knowing that the same kind of propaganda, the same kind of emotional intensity would immediately arrive as it is with us now when it comes to what is a war between Israel and Gaza. I just want to show you a little bit of what I tried to communicate because I think it's so incredibly relevant to what we have to do now and how we have to think about this war that not only involves Israel and Gaza but also the United States and a lot of other countries. So let me just show you a couple of excerpts from February 24, 2022. It was the night of or the day after the Russian invasion.
(Video. System Update. February 24, 2022)
Glenn Greenwald: It's always an extraordinarily horrific episode to watch a new war break out any time. That's just always true. And precisely for that reason, we react very emotionally to the outbreak of a new war, as we should, given that, it generally means that large numbers of human beings, innocent civilians, are going to have their lives extinguished. Bombs are falling, destroying cities, destroying ancient structures, disrupting lives, and causing thousands or hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of displaced human beings. Whoever we assign blame to for that war, we naturally are going to have a huge amount of intense emotion toward that country of rage and anger and a desire for vengeance. And conversely, we're going to have an enormous amount of sympathy and a desire to help and protect and defend whoever we regard as the victim. It's for any normal, healthy, well-adjusted human being a time of extremely high emotions. And I think we need to be aware of that for two reasons. The first of which is that any time we're in a state of high emotions, by definition, necessarily, our capacity to reason diminishes. If we're reacting to something with intense emotions, our ability to use rationality, to react to the situation, to analyze it, is crowded out by the intensity of those emotions, even when those emotions are valid particularly when those emotions are valid, as the emotions that are pervasive now, watching what's happening between Russia and Ukraine undoubtedly are. It doesn't matter whether the emotions are valid or not. The mere existence of intense emotions means that we lose our capacity, at least for the moment, to evaluate events and what our response should be and how we should think about them with reason, with rationality.
[…] It's just that we ought to be aware of what the reaction is when our brains are flooded with high emotions when our emotions are part of a collective reaction, therefore, even more intense, given that we're social and political animals and we're tribal and we feed on one another's emotions. And so, the more we all feel intense emotions, collectively, the emotions intensify.
It's important to realize what that means for our reasoning ability, which is our ability or our willingness even to think about things rationally. And the reason, as opposed to these emotions, diminished, we're in a diminished state of reason when we react to things emotionally. And that's why whenever events like this happen, you can go through every single event that you might want to compare a new war to. Look at 9/11, for example: in the days after 9/11, we were all in lockstep about various ideas, emotions and reactions that a month later, two months later, a year later, 20 years later, many of us who embraced those emotions of the time have come to reevaluate and regard as misguided.
There's no question that a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, we're going to be thinking about these events differently than we're able to think about them right now. And I just think it's important to realize […]
I think you're seeing an enormous amount of that. Obviously, you've seen it in Israel, but you're seeing it in the U.S. too. I cannot tell you how many people I've seen – conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats – where there's really very little difference or dissent, even though a lot of people try to claim there is. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of mainstream American politics and the vast majority of the people in both parties have as much unity in support of Israel as they did at this moment in support of Ukraine when Russia invaded.
There are places around the world that see things much differently. There are thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the Arab world out on the street expressing solidarity for Palestinians. And if you are subjected to that media and that discourse, you would think a lot differently. But the reality is there is a unity of thought and emotion, which sometimes is justified, but it also creates the danger that because we're tribal animals, because we're social and political animals, and especially now with social media, that where we feed on the same collective notions and nobody wants to be cast aside, no one wants to be excluded – societal scorn is a big punishment for social animals – there is a danger that we can get swept away in these emotions. I'm so angry with the Palestinians, with these Hamas monsters, that we are just ready to turn Gaza into a parking lot without regard to the implications of that of the wider world that would spark the humanitarian disaster that would generate. I think it's important to try and step back and use your reason and not just your emotion because we have so many examples where using that emotion led us wildly astray.
Interview with Norman Finkelstein on the Future of Israel’s War in Gaza
Originally streamed on April 17, 2024
G. Greenwald: Let's begin. I want to spend a lot of our time on the Israeli war in Gaza. But before we get to that, there's a recent issue that involves the Iranian retaliation against the Israelis for the April 1 bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. How do you see the Iranian response to that? And what do you think is the likelihood that we're on the verge of a major escalation in the war in the Middle East?
Norman Finkelstein: Well, nobody likes to sound like a “Cassandra,” the prophetess of doom in Greek mythology. However, one also has a responsibility that if there is a significant danger lurking—in this case one hesitates to say it—but a terminal danger lurking, then there is a responsibility to sound the alarm. And I do believe that we are facing one of those moments where Israel is hurtling towards the precipice and is determined, one way or another, to drag the rest of humanity with it.
The only point of departure, in my opinion, that's rational is to start with the theorem, not the thesis. The theorem is Israel is a monolithic state. And I don't say that in a glib way. I don't say it in an emotive way. I think one can say it in, for want of a better word, in a scientific way. The state is certifiably crazy. There are two poles for the entire Israeli spectrum. It's a very small spectrum at this point. At one pole, you can call it the poll of “crackpot realists”—that was a term coined by the sociologist Seawright Mills in his book “The Causes of World War Three.” By “crackpot realist,” he meant those folks who saw war as the only answer to every question, even as they acknowledged or were aware that the war wouldn't solve any problems. It's just their first and their last reflex. They were crackpots, but they were also of completely sound mind. So, in my opinion, a typical exemplar or an exemplar of a crackpot realist would be someone like Professor Danny Morris, Israel's chief historian. He's urbane. He's engaging. He's sophisticated. He's secular. And he's also a crackpot. Again, I don't say that glibly. He advocates attack—he has been for the past 15 years—he's been advocating the attack on Iran. He said that if the West, meaning the United States, doesn't join in, Israel will have to nuke Iran. He says that the population will have deserved the fate of being incinerated, the tens of millions of them, because they elected the government. Now, Morris must know such an attack will trigger a reaction, if not from Iran, then from Hezbollah, which will be terminal for Israel. And yet, without the least bit being fazed by that prospect, he advocates a nuclear attack on Iran.
At the other end of this very narrow spectrum are those who advocate what's called the Samson Option. And you can find an interesting analysis of the Samson Option in Professor Noam Chomsky's book “Fateful Triangle.” The Samson Option is very simple—I should also point out the notion that Professor Chomsky pointed to was then elaborated on, about, I guess 5 or 10 years later, I can't remember now, by Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter in a book called “The Samson Option”. Basically, it's very simple: either pretend to be mad, pretend to be crazy, so as to terrify your enemies and your allies—that if they don't do Israel's bidding, Israel is going to bring down the temple on everybody's head. And there are those who are not simply pretending to be crazy, but advocating the Samson Option. They are crazy. They are lunatics. And I do believe there is a significant portion of Israel's political spectrum that is either pretending to be crazy or actually is crazy. As you know, there is a very tiny step from pretending to be crazy to then coming to actually believe the phantoms you have conjured and become crazy. And you saw an illustration of that—and that's just an illustration—you saw it yesterday in the Security Council. If you listened to Gilad Erdan's speech, it was certifiably lunatic. It was lunatic. He starts by saying The Ayatollah is Hitler; the Islamic State is the Third Reich; it's hell-bent on conquering the whole world. Iran is hell-bent on conquering the whole world. He then says Iran is within weeks of acquiring a nuclear weapon and the world has to stop it. And the upshot, or bottom line, is, if the world, to use his terminology, “acts like Chamberlain,” then Israel will have to act like Churchill.
If you listened to his rhetorical delivery, it was as if he were saying “Who dares to doubt me in this chamber?”—meaning the Security Council. If you listened! He even, at one point, held up an image on his iPad of Israel intercepting a drone over Al-Aqsa Mosque, allegedly intercepting a drone above Al-Aqsa Mosque, and then he said that Israel is the true protector of Islamic holy sites and the Islamic Republic of Iran is the defiler of these holy sites. This is not even the subject of Monty Python. It's not a subject matter of Monty Python. This is lunacy run amok. And if even half of Israeli society and only half of the Israeli political elite think this—in my opinion, it's much more than half—the place is crazy. You know, it's not too long ago, that Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, said that the whole idea of the “Final Solution” came not from Hitler, but from the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem. I recently debated Benny Morris and he was emphatic that the Mufti of Jerusalem played an important role in the Final Solution. This is just sheer craziness.
G. Greenwald: It's an apologia for Hitler and for Nazis to say, “Oh, they didn't really want to kill the Jews until the Palestinians persuaded them to do so.”
Norman Finkelstein: Well, of course, it's an apologia but for me, the real problem is, they really believe it. I do. I think we're at that point where, as I said, this notion of the Samson Option has two aspects: pretend that you're crazy to get others to do your bidding for fear that you're going to do something lunatic and then, those who are beyond pretending and are prepared in the name of their holy cause, where their backs might be up against the wall—or they think their backs are up against the wall—that they're going to bring down the whole temple, meaning all the goyim are going to go with us. It's a very scary prospect.
I don't believe that Iran has many options. Some people will say—and it's perfectly rational—that Iran for the sake of humanity should not take the bait. However, I do not believe that Iran has that option. And I will explain to you why. Looking at the historical examples, Israel is determined to go to war. It will keep escalating the provocations, escalating the provocations until it becomes untenable for a government to react with passivity. In 1954, the Israeli leadership, in particular David Ben-Gurion, the then Prime Minister, and Moshe Dayan had decided that they were going to topple the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. As many historians have reported, they escalated the provocations, escalated the provocations, until finally, when Nasser kept resisting what he knew was Israel's intention to launch a war, Israel joined in with France and the UK to invade Egypt. In 1982. Well, I should say in 1981 there was a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO. It was signed in July 1981. But Israel was determined to knock out the PLO, which was based then in southern Lebanon. And even though the PLO kept resisting the provocations, Israel kept bombing South Lebanon, bombing South Lebanon even though there was a ceasefire, escalating, escalating until it became untenable for the PLO not to react. It should be borne in mind that the reason Israel attacked the PLO was because it was too moderate, namely, to push for the two-state settlement, and Israel was afraid that pressures would be brought to bear on it to resolve the conflict for once and for all. But that would force an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, which it wasn't prepared to do.
G. Greenwald: I just want to make a couple of observations about some of the things you said. We did a show last month in which we documented how many U.S. adversaries over the past 25 years have been declared to be the new Hitler, not by random think tankers, but by media outlets and the government of the highest level. And it's essentially every American adversary. Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a new Hitler, obviously. Putin is the new Hitler. Gaddafi was the new Hitler. Assad was the new Hitler. Ho Chi Minh was the new Hitler. Hamas is the new Hitler. In fact, worse than Hitler, we're being told. The one comparison you cannot make is Israel comparing it to the Nazis. But the other point I wanted to make about Benny Morris and this crucial point that you brought up with tone, that I think is so important. I remember 15 years ago when I started realizing this, I wrote an article about how if you use intemperate language or you speak passionately, even if it's completely valid about an injustice, you're immediately deemed a fringe radical, somebody who is almost in the realm of insanity but if you are able to speak in a kind of urbane, sophisticated way, as you said, for Benny Morris and use the language of diplomacy like Bill Kristol, you'll automatically be deemed somebody worthy of mainstream centrism, even though the ideas they're presenting are bloodthirsty and deranged and insane.
But let me just ask you about what is going on with Iran at this point. Because when Israel bombed the Iranian embassy on April 1 in Damascus, obviously, as you said, there was no way Iran could not react. There's no country in the world that wouldn't retaliate if planes flew over their embassy and deliberately bombed and killed senior military officials. Imagine what the U.S. and the Israelis would do if that happened. I had to […]
Norman Finkelstein: Hold on to that for one-half second. The problem is that if they didn't react, we know from past experience exactly what Israel would do. It would keep escalating the provocations up to and including assassinating the Iranian head of state, formally denying it, but with a wink, as “Of course, we did it.” There is no way to stop them. Once they have resolved that a war is necessary and a war is inevitable, once they have resolved, there is no way on God's earth to stop them. That's what the historical record shows. You can hold that, hold back, hold back, as Nasser did until February 1955; hold back, as the PLO did from July 1981 till June 1982; as Hamas did after a ceasefire was agreed upon between Israel and Hamas in June 2008. But Israel will provoke and provoke and provoke because it's resolved on that war. So I do not believe the option of not reacting actually exists. And that, to me, is a very difficult problem.
As of now, we're facing a moment when Israel has to resolve—not has to resolve, it wants to resolve—three problems. Problem number one, it wants to execute its “final solution” to the Gaza problem. The Gaza problem. Gaza has been a pinprick on Israel's side, believe it or not, since 1949. As one senior official said, in 2015, “We can't keep having these wars of attrition in Gaza. The next conflict has to be the last conflict.” So we have the Gaza “problem.” Then there is the Hezbollah problem. Hezbollah has gone one step too far. It's caused 100,000 Israelis to have to relocate from the northern border. And it has targeted, albeit on military sites only, it's targeted Israeli territory. And number three, the Big Megillah. When I quoted Penny Morris, I quoted him from 2008. Israel keeps repeating and repeating and repeating and Professor Morris has written one op-ed, a second op-ed, a third op-ed, and a fourth op-ed in the U.S. main newspapers saying, we have got to attack Iran. And I do believe because Benjamin Netanyahu knows the American media very well—he's really a virtuoso on it—and he spies an opportunity now. For example, as you can see, Gaza has vanished from the headlines, now everything is about Iran. He spies an opportunity now to carry out or to win what you might call the trifecta: Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran. Another opportunity like this might not come along soon, and they can achieve in their minds—remember, we're talking about lunatics, certifiable lunatics—in their minds, they can achieve, there are three overarching strategic objectives in one […]
G. Greenwald: Let me ask you about that. So, as you said, you know, Benny Morris is warning about how Iran is weeks away from a nuclear capability. They've been warning of this. Yeah, they've been warning of this for, you know, almost 15 years. Netanyahu went and presented that primitive little chart at the UN, quite notoriously. When we had John Mearsheimer on our show last week and asked him about the attack on the embassy, he said it's clear that the Israelis want not only a war with Iran but to drag the United States into the war. That has been their goal for a long time. President Biden— I haven't given him much credit lately over the past six months, but at least, in this case, he and other Western leaders seem determined not to have this broad conflagration in the Middle East. They are telling Israel, look, the Iranian attack did almost no damage. There's no reason to go crazy and insane as you're suggesting that they want to. How much at this point do you think the Israeli government cares about Western perception and Western opinion?
Norman Finkelstein: No, that's an excellent question, and I think it's an unanswerable question. Historically, since 1957, Israel has been hesitant about any undertaking, any major military action without the green light or, as in 1967, what's been called the amber or the yellow light from the White House. The reason being, famously, in 1957, after Israel had conquered significant Egyptian territory, it was ordered by President Eisenhower at the time to withdraw. So when 1967 came and 1956 was basically the dress rehearsal, in retrospect, for the 1967 war. The Israelis sent many people to Washington, officially and unofficially, to make sure that LBJ, the president at the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, wouldn't do what Eisenhower did, namely after Israel, and it knew it would easily conquer the territory of neighboring states, Jordan, Syri, and Egypt, they wanted it to be affirmed that the U.S. under LBJ wouldn't force a withdrawal. So in general, I think it's fair to say that Israel is cognizant of and hesitant to act in the absence of a U.S. at any rate, if not the green light, a yellow light. Where I would somewhat disagree with you, not fully, but somewhat, is when Netanyahu posted or held up that Looney Tunes picture at the U.N. and claimed Iran is near the breakout point, the usual Israeli spiel. There wasn't a war going on. This was Iran trying to, I think, to use the Samson Option idiom, they were pretending to be crazy so as to make everybody terrified at the prospect of defying this crazy state. But now things are significantly different. We are after October 7, there is a huge, insatiable bloodlust in Israel. There is the fear in Israel that what it calls its deterrence capability, meaning the Arab world's fear of Israel, was significantly diminished after October 7, Israel appears to be, I'm not saying it would appear to be, much weaker than had hitherto been imagined. And three, it looked like and looks like an opportunity might be available to them. Every crisis, as the cliche goes, is also an opportunity. So, on October 7, Hezbollah attacked the military sites with that suicide point on Israeli territory. Now, the Iran “attack,” of course, was utterly innocuous. Much more innocuous, incidentally, than Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks in 1991, which did a little damage but did some damage.
G. Greenwald: It was innocuous by design. Clearly, the Iranians could have done a lot more had they wanted to.
Norman Finkelstein: It was. And of course, it was innocuous by design, as one commentator pointed out, they mostly used slow-motion drones, which they knew it's like a videogame, shooting them down from the sky. And, you know, Hezbollah has I can't say I know, but the reports are it has 150,000 missiles, of which quite a few we’re told, again, I can’t verify, quite a few are very sophisticated, which means for all the talk about Israel's air defense system, let's remember, Israel is a very tiny place, 150,000 missiles if they're launched, it's curtains for Israel. So, of course, it was purely symbolic. But I would have to add, that I imagine the Iranian leadership together with Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. They thought very hard about how to react to what happened on April 1. That's what they came up with. I have to assume they had a very sophisticated analysis before they undertook that action. Nasrallah knows Israeli society, I think, better than most Israelis because his mind is not corrupted by the delusions and hallucinations of this crazy state. So I have to assume that they thought this was the most prudent move to make. But my own sense, and I don't want to in any way give the impression of being omniscient or infallible, but my own senses, if Israel has resolved as it did in 1954, 1982, and 2008, if it has resolved that Iran has to be neutered, I would say no amount of restraint will stop them.
Interview with Rashid Khalidi on Israel-Gaza
Originally streamed on November 30, 2023
G. Greenwald: Thinking about that, the Israeli mid-term or long-term plan, meaning what happens when this bombing campaign finally comes to an end, when the ground invasion either turns into some sort of partial occupation, reoccupation of Gaza or some international force or whatever, if you look at the scope of the destruction in northern Gaza – there have been reports that 60% of all buildings, if not destroyed, are architecturally compromised, not safe to inhabit; the sewage system, the electrical system, the hospital system are completely destroyed – I mean, to some extent, northern Gaza has been rendered in a large degree uninhabitable in terms of just any kind of modern society: how would these internally displaced Gazans who are now in southern Gaza and dispersed throughout the country really in any reasonable or meaningful way, get back to any kind of meaningful or normal life in northern Gaza, even if the Israelis were to permit that?
Rashid Khalidi: Well, I think rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable was actually a declared war. The minister of defense got various Israeli generals to say that. And when you cut off electricity and you cut off water, you are, in effect, making the place uninhabitable. When you destroy or render unusable most of the hospitals in northern Gaza or when you destroy schools, when you destroy a variety of other infrastructure, you are rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable.
The claim is that this was intended to destroy Hamas infrastructure, but my guess is that there was, as they said, a desire to render that part of Gaza at least, uninhabitable. Now you can see that there's a doctrine here. It's a doctrine that was first adopted in 2006 or at least first enunciated after the 2006 war on Lebanon. And it was the so-called Dahya doctrine, Dahya had been the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were flattened by Israeli bombing in 2006. And the man who is now a member of the war cabinet, a former chief of staff by the name of Gadi Eisenkot, that actually annunciated this, he said, “We will not, you know, except proportionality. We will act unproportionately and we will flatten villages. We will do what we did to the Dahya. In other words, we will destroy it in order to destroy it in a punitive fashion. And I think that is what Israel is doing now. What does that mean for the day after? Well, I think it's connected in the first instance to what they were hoping, which is to get people out of Gaza and decrease the Palestinian population within the borders of mandatory Palestine. In other words, to launch another stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. If that proves impossible, the next best thing is to squeeze them into a smaller area, maybe push them into southern Gaza. But I don't think that any of these things are necessarily beyond rendering Gaza uninhabitable, which the minister of defense said. I don't think any of these things are entirely clear. And I think, as you suggested, there are multiple factions in this government. The military has its own views. The prime minister, who basically wants to continue the war and not lose this government which keeps him in power – failing, he would go to trial presumably – then, other factions within the government, the Likud Party, the extreme right-wing parties, which want to see cleansing as soon as possible and as much of Palestine as possible and so forth. So, it's to me, frankly, and I'm reading the Israeli press carefully, it's not clear that they have a clear idea or a unified idea of what they want to do with the Gazans. Once this military campaign is over, whenever it's over.
G. Greenwald: On this stated goal of destroying Hamas, I don't think we ever got clarity about exactly what that means although the Israelis made clear from the beginning, from Netanyahu on down, they said we don't mean we're going to erode the power of Hamas. We don't mean we're going to undermine it. We don't mean we're going to weaken Hamas. We mean we're going to destroy it, eradicate it, remove it from existing in Gaza. Obviously, with a war like this, facts are hard to come by. So, let's just take the Israeli numbers, the numbers given by the Israeli military. According to the Israeli military, they have thus far killed 1500 to 2000 Hamas militants. So, let's take the maximum number of 2000. And according to the Israelis as well. There are 30,000 Hamas fighters. So, they've killed 1/15 of all the Hamas fighters that existed at the start of the war. Presumably, there are going to be more anti-Israel radicals and people who hate Israel after the destruction that they've witnessed and after the number of deaths. But let's just keep that number in place: 30,000 Hamas militants. That would mean in order to kill all Hamas militants is the minimum necessary, I would assume, to achieve this goal of destroying Hamas, they would have to kill 15 times more Hamas militants than they have thus far. And at the current rate of civilian death, that would mean that they would basically end up killing 200,000 250,000 Gazans in total. Do you think there is any war in which the world just stands by and watches something like that take place?
Rashid Khalidi: No, absolutely not. The United States wouldn't tolerate it because the Biden administration couldn't tolerate it, because public opinion is already against this war. A majority of Americans are in favor of a cease-fire. They want it to stop. They do not accept the Biden administration and the Israeli government's insistence on continuing the war until, quote-unquote, “Hamas is destroyed,” whatever that means. I mean, whether it means killing 20,000 more Hamas militants and God knows how many thousand more civilians, tens of thousands more civilians, and destroying even more of the infrastructure of Gaza, 60% has already been rendered uninhabitable and unusable. God knows how much more there is to destroy. But I do not think that the world's public opinion, Arab public opinion, but for that matter, American public opinion, will put up with that. I think there'll be a rebellion within the Democratic Party. I think the president would be guaranteed to lose the 2024 election. And I think that he would be obliged to stop this long before we got to those apocalyptic numbers. So, I don't think that there is any possibility of our reaching anything like those numbers, even if those numbers are realistic. I mean, let's assume that they're highly exaggerated, which I think is the case. I don't think there's any chance of killing 10,000 or 20,000 Hamas militants, no matter how many civilians Israel kills, no matter how many tunnels – you read the Israeli military correspondents saying they've done very limited damage to the tunnel system. Well, they've dropped how many thousand tons of bombs a day, a week in Gaza, and they still have only minimally damaged the tunnel system. They've killed 2000, by their estimate, 30,000 militants. It just does not seem to me within the world of possibility that this could go on to that extent. How it stops, however, I don't know.
G. Greenwald: You're somebody who's followed this conflict for most of your career as a scholar, as an academic, as a historian, you've referred to on a couple of occasions this public opinion that has turned against the Democratic Party, against Joe Biden for his support of what's taking place in Israel. I do think there's an interesting dynamic that it is the case that for a lot of years now, maybe going back to 2014, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has pretty much been on the back burner of American politics. You have all these young people who have started to pay attention to politics for the first time. A lot of people have paid attention to politics for the first time only because of Trump. This is the first real look they're getting at Israel and the Democratic Party's relationship with it. And you have these mass protests all over the world, hundreds of thousands of people in major western cities like you have to go back to the Iraq war to find protest on this level. As somebody who has followed this conflict and has been in the middle of it in so many ways for so long now, is this a kind of radical or fundamental change in terms of public opinion and the amount of opposition to what the Israelis are doing and how the U.S is supporting them?
Rashid Khalidi: I mean, there has been a trend in this direction. But I think you put your finger on it. I think that this is a moment when a newly awakened generation with new access to information is for the first time really looking very carefully at things that are happening in Israel and Palestine. And they clearly do not like what they see. There's an NBC poll that came out the other day of voters from 18 to 34: 70% of voters in that age group disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of this war. That's an astonishing percentage. I mean, a majority of Americans want a cease-fire, but that 70% of young voters that goes, Republicans and independents, I mean, that's a remarkable number. And it's part of a trend that I think has really been accentuated by this war. But that's been going on for a very long time in the polling over many years, showing a drift away from sympathy for Israel and towards greater sympathy for the Palestinians and this war has crystallized that, I think.
G. Greenwald: Yeah. So, for those of us who have followed this debate and this conflict for a long time, there are all the arguments that everybody can rehearse in their sleep. You show people the death tolls in Gaza and people say, “Oh, Hamas uses them as human shields,” “Hamas operates from hospitals” – all the arguments everybody knows and knows the responses to. And I do want to ask you about a couple of perspectives that are, I think, the most potent ones that Israelis and pro-Israel supporters in the United States and the West offer and I want to begin by asking you this, in almost every war there are two questions broadly speaking, I think, that need to be asked: Is there a moral or legal justification for the war, for the force being used? And then, Is it a wise use of force, even if it's morally justifiable, will it produce benefits on the whole as opposed to detriment? After the October 7 massacre that did kill hundreds of civilians, whatever that number is, do you think Israel had a legal and moral right to use force in Gaza against the group and the people who perpetrated that attack?
Rashid Khalidi: You know, the problem with that question is it's framing. Gaza has been under siege for 16 years. Israel had assumed that it could live a peaceful, quiet life whilst putting its bootheel on the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And sooner or later, that had to explode. Now it exploded in a particularly ugly fashion with these massacres. It resulted in the highest death toll among Israeli civilians in the entire history of Israel's wars since 1948. So, there was going to be a reaction necessarily, and inevitably. But if you step back one minute, I think it's very clear that if you occupy and if you imprison and blockade and besiege a population, sooner or later that population is going to react violently and negatively. Israelis talk about this as if it's irrational. It's not irrational at all. The nature of the violence that was carried out on that day is, of course, horrific. But when you do this to people and you pretend that “out of sight is out of mind” and you can live a normal life in suburban communities with other people in a cage within a couple of miles of you, you are storing up problems that sooner or later are going to erupt. So, did Israel have a right to occupy? In the first instance. Did Israel have a right to kick those people out in 1948? In the second instance, I mean, you can go on and on and on. The people in Gaza are 80% refugees from the areas that Hamas invaded on October 7. So, it really depends on where you start and where your perspective is on this.
If you assume that everything was peaceful and this is France and Germany or this is a country A and country B, where country A simply decides to launch a murderous assault on the civilians of country B, then, of course, country B has the right to a counterattack. But this is not country A and country B, this is an occupier and an occupied population. And this is a settler colonial project where the people living in settlements around the Gaza Strip are living on lands that used to belong to people who now have been living, or their ancestors, their parents and grandparents, have been living as refugees in the Gaza Strip since 1948.
And you have to factor that in. Does an occupying power have the right to attack an occupied population? You should be asking, I think, those kinds of questions as well as the question “What should Israel have done?” Israel shouldn't have been in occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the first place. There should have been a Palestinian state. There should have been any number of things, the absence of which has led to this horrific situation that we're in, where at least 800 Israeli civilians have been killed, and at least 450 or more Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed. And apparently over 15,000 Palestinians, both civilians and militants, have been killed. And we're not at the end of it. I mean, assuming that this cease-fire breaks down over the next several days, we're going to see many, many, much higher casualty tolls. And I think at the end of this, you'd have to ask that question, what was achieved? What was the point of this? Have they stirred up more enmity for Israel? Have they improved Israel's position? Are Israelis more secure as a result of killing 15,000 Palestinians, including a huge number of children, women and other non-combatants? I don't think the answer is yes. I don't think you achieve security in that fashion. I'm not just saying that from an Israeli perspective. I would say that from a Palestinian perspective as well. Now, sooner or later, there has to be a political resolution of this. I don't think we're nearer to a political resolution as a result of this. Not only do I think that because of whatever happened on the 7th of October, but because of the 15 times greater toll that has so far been inflicted by Israel since October 7 – and that toll will only, unfortunately, probably increase.
G. Greenwald: I'm always amazed at the ability of Western media outlets and governments to just define history however they want. They did the same thing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They just pretended that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the West began in February of 2022, as opposed to having extended many years back, without which you can't possibly understand what happened in February of 2022. And of course, the attempt to pretend that there was no conflict until October 7 and it all started when Hamas invaded Israel. But your answer essentially says that the way for Israel, best thing for Israel, to do from its own perspective, from the perspective of morality and legality, is to resolve the underlying conflict so that there's no more motive for Palestinians to attack Israel. The standard argument which I am interested in hearing your view on, is that Hamas has made very clear they don't want a two-state solution. The reason Netanyahu propped up Hamas was precisely because he thought they would work symbiotically to prevent a two-state solution, so that wouldn't resolve the hostility of Hamas, say Israel defenders. And then I want to ask you: is a two-state solution possible given the extent of this settlement project in the West Bank?
Rashid Khalidi: I mean, my short answer to the second part of your question is no, unless you deal with occupation and colonization, you should not even utter the words two-state solution, a two-state solution which Israel continues to settle, or in which 750,000 Israeli citizens maintain their residents and their colonization of Palestinian lands, is not a two-state solution. It's a one-state solution with a one-state, one Bantustan solution. A situation in which Israel continues its occupation is not a two-state solution, and every Israeli generous offer has included Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley, which means it's not a state. I mean, imagine if a foreign country controlled the border with Mexico and the border with Canada, would the United States be a sovereign state? Of course, not.
The first part of your question: I think that you have to look at this in terms of how you end this conflict. Do you end it in a fashion that maintains a structural inequality where one group has rights and security at the expense of the rights and security of the other, where one group proclaims – as the Israeli nation’s state law proclaims – that only the Jewish people have the right of sovereignty in the land of Israel, or do you have a solution, whether it's a one state or a two-state solution in which both peoples and every individual have equal rights? How do you do that? I don't know. I don't think that a two-state solution is possible in present circumstances because nobody's talking about the elephants in the room. Nobody's talking about ending Israeli security control. Nobody's talking about ending the settlement. And if you don't do that, even if the Palestinians accept the measly 22% of historic Palestine, which comprises the West Bank, occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, even if they accept that unjust partition of Palestine, you have to get some 50,000 Israelis out of there, or figure out how they continue to live.
G. Greenwald: Heavily armed Israelis, heavily armed Israeli settlers, backed by all major components of the IDF […]
Rashid Khalidi: Precisely. I think those are all obstacles in the way of a two-state solution. There are obstacles in the way of a one-state solution as well.
Norman Finkelstein on Gaza
Originally streamed on September 23, 2024
G. Greenwald: I think one of the reasons why the war in Gaza got so much attention for the time that it did was in part because of just the sheer brutality of what the Israelis were doing, but also because I think a lot of people who have sort of paid attention to politics only recently, young people, people who only started to get involved with Trump, really had no idea of the extent to which the United States enabled that, paid for it and sort of fueled and never place limits on what the Israelis are permitted to do to the Palestinians. I remember asking you on my show sort of where you put this war in Gaza in the kind of pantheon of horrific war crimes and other types of destruction, and everybody saying it's basically at the top. Yet, that was months ago and this war really hasn't slowed down. I mean, every day, every week, we hear of some new school being bombed or some family being wiped out and of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza just being utterly destroyed. How do you think from a historical perspective, this Israeli destruction of civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza will be understood?
Norman Finkelstein: Well, as the historians like to say, there's continuity and there is change with what preceded it. I think if one uses the negative force that Israel has invoked, if you use their metaphors, what you can say is up until October 7, Israel periodically launched these high-tech killing sprees that they call operations, and the main purpose of these killing sprees – as they said it, not me – their metaphor was to “mow the lawn” in Gaza. That basically meant – well, it had several different features to it – but it didn't mean total annihilation. Come October 7, there was a new goal set by Israel, namely, this time we're not going to mow the lawn in Gaza, we're going to extirpate, pull out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza. That took basically three forms – and I should point out, these are overlapping forms, they're not entirely discrete. The first form was an attempted mass, ethnic cleansing of Gaza, namely forcing all the people to the south and then hopefully the gates of Rafah would be open and they would flood into the Sinai desert. That didn't happen because the president of Egypt said no and it seems that the U.S. deferred to President Sisi’s decision. The ethnic cleansing didn't occur in toto. But I think it's not widely known. In large regards, it has succeeded. The estimates are somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Gazans are no longer in Gaza. They, by hook or by crook were in Egypt. It seems Egypt doesn't allow more than 60,000 Gazans to stay at any one given time. So, you could say – we will take the low estimate – 300,000 have been expelled. They will certainly never return. They are finding a way to get past Egypt, Egypt is a transit point to some other corner of the world. So, if you take the low estimate, that would mean one-seventh of Gaza's population has been successfully and one might add surreptitiously expelled if you take the higher estimate of 500,000. That would be about one-quarter of the population. So even though the kind of ethnic cleansing that was conceived in the early days has not succeeded, it must be said that, in part, it has succeeded. The second possibility, leaving aside the ethnic cleansing, was to make Gaza unlivable. And that goal has succeeded. There's a lot of nonsense, in my opinion, and I have to emphasize “in my opinion” because they don't make any claims of fallibility. There's a lot of nonsense being said about what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza. Number one, as you know, every headline has to have as its subhead “The Israel-Hamas War.” There has not been any meaningful substantive Israel-Hamas war. There has been an Israel-Gaza war and the aim of the Israel-Gaza war is to make Gaza unlivable and uninhabitable. I'm using the language of the Israelis is not my embroidery or embellishment, that's what they say. As the former head of the National Security Council, Giora Islan, and he's not the only one, he's one of the defense ministry Galant's advisers, he has said we're going to leave the people of Gaza with two choices: one, to stay and starve, or two, to leave. That goal, which, in my opinion, was the main goal, that goal has been achieved. I don't like to be a bearer of bad news, on the other hand, if we're speaking to adults, we should treat them respectfully as adults: Gaza is no more, Gaza is gone. The estimates are – if you take the whole of Gaza – half of the infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. That means, for somebody who doesn't quite grasp that, let's say in New York City, where I happen to reside, and you’re walking down 6th Avenue, just imagine every second building has gone. Or just imagine, walking down 6th Avenue, one side of the street is there, the other side of the street is no longer there.
There are no universities left in Gaza. There are no schools, colleges, universities, or hospitals. There are barely any hospitals left in Gaza at this point. And so, you might say, well, what about rebuilding? There can't be any rebuilding of Gaza. That's just not true. First of all, the estimates are, by now, there are about 45 million tons of rubble in Gaza. It's estimated it will take 10 to 15 years to just remove the rubble. The rubble is mixed with a lot of unexploded ordnance, toxic substances and also a lot of bodies and even if you managed to remove the rubble, there's no question in my mind what's going to happen: Israel is going to say we're not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead, it said Hamas would use the cement to build tunnels, we're not going to let cement in and nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that. They say Hamas built 430 miles of 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider completely nonsense, complete nonsense. All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel, if they had built 450 miles of tunnels, that would be more – Glenn, I know you lived for a while in New York City – that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York subway system. The New York subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza, 26 miles long and 35 miles wide? No, but that's the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it. So, between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won't let cement in, there is no Gaza anymore.
