More Turf Wars in Jerusalem

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Latuff. This is not going to stop.

More Turf Wars in Jerusalem
by
Ellis Dea

Now nine Jews have been killed in Jerusalem, clearly more than during the entire Gaza slaughter. The last one (if you want to make it 10) was an Ethiopian who was first shot by a Jewish soldier and then kicked, spat upon, and beaten to death (at least report, at least, he is dead, but then it is difficult to believe any "official" reports). Of course, he was suspect from the start because he was, in Yiddish terms, a "Schwartzer," and Schwartzers are, of course, suspect and less than human. After all, they are black in color and not "real" Jews. They are Schwartzer Jews.

We hear complaints that Israel does not have any responsible representative Palestinian to talk about this with. Well, that's right. BECAUSE THEY PUT THEM ALL IN PRISON! C'mon, really, do they think nobody knows what is going on there? Ever hear4 of a guy named Barghouti? Probably not if you stick to corporate media.

Well, John Kerry snapped into action right away and bravely said that Israel had the right to self-defense. What the hell, or how the hell, does that fit here? Perhaps he means that the Jews should build more walls and lock more Palestinians in a smaller area while the Israeli builders knock down more buildings and put up condominiums to sell to other Israelis. I don't know. Maybe we should give them another 3 billion dollars a year? Yeah, that would help.

There is not much new about all of this, actually, as it has been going on daily. The only new thing about it is that Israelis, mainly soldiers if seems, are also being killed. See, the Palestinian men, mainly, have learned how to stick the blade in, twist it, and then twist back and pull it out. That is how the last one got hold of an M16 rifle (guess where those are made) and then opened fire on another bunch of Israelis.

All that is clear is that this sort of thing is going to continue until the Jews forget their sense of entitlement as the "chosen people," and start treating all humans as humans, not as "animals" to be herded and slaughtered.

Here is some more in-depth discussion:

TOPICS

• Israel & Palestine

GUESTS

JAMIL DAKWAR

human rights lawyer. He's a Palestinian citizen of Israel who previously worked as senior attorney at Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel.

NATHAN THRALL

senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, covering Gaza, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. His new article for The New York Times is headlined "Mismanaging the Conflict in Jerusalem."

This is viewer supported news

DONATE

The death toll from violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories has increased with new Palestinian stabbing attacks and an intensified Israeli crackdown. On Sunday, an attacker identified as a 21-year-old Arab citizen of Israel knifed an Israeli soldier to death and then opened fire at a bus station in Beersheba, wounding 10 people. The attacker was killed. In an apparent case of racial profiling, a mob of soldiers and bystanders then shot and beat an Eritrean man to death, mistakenly thinking he was a second assailant. After sealing off East Jerusalem neighborhoods last week, Israel is widening its crackdown on Arab residents and continuing military operations across the West Bank and Gaza. The United Nations says last week was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel in 10 years, raising concerns "of excessive use of force, and violations of the right to life and security of the person." We are joined by two guests: Jamil Dakwar, a Palestinian human rights lawyer with Israeli citizenship, and Nathan Thrall, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group whose new article for The New York Times is "Mismanaging the Conflict in Jerusalem."

---

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The death toll from violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories has increased with new Palestinian stabbing attacks and an intensified Israeli crackdown. On Sunday, an assailant identified as a 21-year-old Arab citizen of Israel knifed an Israeli soldier, then opened fire at a bus station in Beersheba with the soldier's rifle, wounding 10 people. The soldier and the attacker died. In an apparent case of racial profiling, a mob of soldiers and bystanders then shot and beat another man to death, mistakenly thinking he was a second assailant. Video footage shows the crowd kicking and assaulting the victim, 29-year-old Haftom Zarhum, as he lies on the ground. Zarhum later died in the hospital. He had been seeking asylum in Israel from his native Eritrea. The incident comes after Israeli forces shot dead five Palestinians accused of stabbing attacks, including three in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

After sealing of East Jerusalem neighborhoods last week, Israel is widening its crackdown on Arab residents. A new bill before Parliament would give forces stop-and-frisk powers to search anyone in the streets without cause. In addition to severe restrictions on movement, Israel is also erecting a wall in East Jerusalem that would separate Palestinian neighborhoods from a nearby Israeli settlement. Israeli forces meanwhile continue military attacks across the West Bank and Gaza, raiding villages and firing on Palestinian demonstrations. Over the weekend, a group of some 200 Israeli settlers reportedly attacked two Palestinian villages in the West Bank with firebombs.

The surge in Palestinian knife attacks and protests is partially fueled by concerns over Israeli control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and visits there by far-right Israelis. On Sunday, Israel rejected a French proposal to deploy international observers at the flashpoint holy site. Speaking today in Madrid, Secretary of State John Kerry backed Israel's rejection of a foreign presence at the Temple Mount, but said he would meet with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the coming days.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Israel has every right in the world to protect its citizens, as it has been, from random acts of violence. But in my conversations with the prime minister, as well as with King Abdullah and the foreign minister of Jordan, they have expressed a desire to try to see this process be able to find a way of making certain that everybody is clear about what is happening with respect to the Temple Mount.

AMY GOODMAN: The overall death toll stands at 44 Palestinians and eight Israelis this month. The U.N. says last week was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel in 10 years, raising concerns, quote, "of excessive use of force, and violations of the right to life and security of the person."

Joining us now are two guests. Here in New York, Jamil Dakwar is with us. He's a human rights lawyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who previously worked as senior attorney at Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel. And in Jerusalem, Nathan Thrall is with us, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group covering Gaza, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. His new article for The New York Times is headlined "Mismanaging the Conflict in Jerusalem."

Nathan, let's start with you in Jerusalem. What is happening there, and why do you believe that the situation is so out of control at this point?

NATHAN THRALL: So what's happening now in Jerusalem is checkpoints are going up all over the east. At the exits to Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem, you have big concrete cubes going up and very, very long lines for Palestinians to exit their neighborhoods. And there is a sense among Palestinians in East Jerusalem that they are being punished for these so-called lone wolf stabbing attacks that have taken place so far. The other morning, residents of one neighborhood, where basically the traffic police, the parking—people who give parking tickets never go, came and left 500-shekel tickets on everybody's car. And there are a series of small steps like this that are leading a lot of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to feel that they're being collectively punished for what's going on now.

I live right at one of the seam neighborhoods between the east and the west, and it's filled with border police who are basically stopping a high proportion of the Palestinian men who are walking from one side of the city to the other. Many of them work in the west side of the city. You had mentioned a moment ago that there is a consideration of allowing the police to do stop-and-frisk without cause. You know, that's news to the residents of Palestinian East Jerusalem, who are stopped and frisked without cause all the time and are being stopped and frisked without cause today. So the situation in Jerusalem is extremely tense. People are eyeing one another suspiciously. A Palestinian woman in West Jerusalem was walking around today and was telling me how people were staring at her, surprised that she was walking around there.

So, the attacks don't seem to have any kind of organized leadership behind them, which makes them much more difficult for anybody to stop. And one of the big problems here is we don't have an organized political leadership in Jerusalem, a Palestinian political leadership in Jerusalem, which means that there's no one for the Israelis to talk to in order to try and calm the situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go right now to what happened on Sunday. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected Palestinian concerns over the Temple Mount.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The reason the status quo has been violated is not because we changed it. We didn't change anything. The orders of prayer, the visiting rights have not changed for the last 15 years. The only thing that's changed are Islamist hoodlums, paid by the Islamist movement in Israel and by Hamas, who are entering the mosque and trying to put explosives there, and, from there, emerge and attack Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, and Christian visitors. That's the only change in the status quo. Israel will protect the holy site, will guard the status quo. Israel is not a problem on the Temple Mount, Israel is the solution.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. We're also joined by Jamil Dakwar, human rights lawyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who previously worked as a senior attorney at Adalah, a leading Israeli human rights group. Your response to what Netanyahu just said?

JAMIL DAKWAR: Well, I think that what is really striking here is that the Israeli government, every time there is any kind of a rise in tension and crisis and use of violence, it turns into militaristic approach towards dealing with the Palestinians. It's using that same old policies of a crackdown, on collective punishment, on seeing the Palestinians with no really value of their life and their basic human rights. The response, and particularly on the issue of status quo, you know, Israel is the only country that is allowed to change the status quo in Jerusalem, and it's been changing that for years, for decades. And yet, if a country or political party is suggesting a change of the status quo towards more peaceful resolution, towards more protection of civilians, then that is always rejected. So I think there is, clearly, a going back to giving now the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu a pretext to go—what he really would prefer to do is to continue his policies of aggression against Palestinians.

Certainly, this is going to be more and more difficult, because in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, the reason that there is no leadership is because Israeli policies were cracking down on institutions. The Orient House was closed by the Israeli government. The Palestinians who were elected by their own people were not allowed to engage in political activities. Many of them were imprisoned. So that, in and of itself, clearly shows that the Israeli government wants to see only its own interest, meaning the Jewish Israeli interest in Jerusalem, and that continue to perpetuate the situation both in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank as a military occupation, which is now nearing 50 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what has caused this latest escalation of violence, from your perspective. Where did you grow up, by the way?

JAMIL DAKWAR: I grew up in Haifa. I went to school at Tel Aviv University. I remember when I went to law school at Tel Aviv University, there were very, very difficult times. There were times when there were suicide attacks going on inside Israel. Those happened in response to the settler going to Hebron mosque and killing prayer—Palestinians who were praying in the mosque. That kind of blew up the whole situation. And it was clear that without cracking down on the settler violence, without ending Israel's settler activity in the West Bank, there is no way that the Palestinians will sit back and allow the Israeli government to continue to control their life in every way.

So I think the escalation that we're seeing now has been mounting, has been building, because of what's happened in the last several years. There is no hope for any real, normal life. This is the new normal for the Palestinians, which is military occupation continues unabated, the Israeli government continues to send settlers to the West Bank. There's a crackdown rounding up children, Palestinian children, in night raids, documented by Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations. These kinds of things will make Palestinians despair or make the Palestinians, some of them, to resort to violence and do what they are doing. And I think that is what is really concerning.

AMY GOODMAN: Are these knife attacks new?

JAMIL DAKWAR: These knife attacks are new, although in the—we've seen in the—this is not the first time that there were these kinds of wave of knife attacks. And it happened during the Shamir—appeared in the '80s. They were very much similar, in a situation where the Palestinians were really giving up on their hope to have a normal life. I think that there's now also—there's the impact on their lack of ability to be able to express themselves.

You mentioned the Arab Palestinian citizen who stabbed the soldier. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian citizens are peaceful. They've been peaceful in their activities for their entire career, and yet the Israeli government is cracking down on their leadership, is cracking down—there are home demolitions inside Israel, displacement of Arab Bedouin communities. That is making people see that despite the fact that you are making an effort to be a citizen, a law-abiding citizen, the Israeli government is saying, "No, you are not welcomed here. You are an enemy. You are not going to be enjoying the same basic rights as others in the country."

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, a Palestinian reportedly opened fire at a central bus station in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, killing a soldier and wounding 11 other people. He had taken the gun of the soldier. Afterward, the Israeli police spokesperson, Micky Rosenfeld, addressed reporters.

MICKY ROSENFELD: As a result of the attack where the terrorist had a pistol and opened fire, we have six people that were injured, four of them being police officers injured inside the central bus station. One man was severely taken to hospital and received medical treatment. Unfortunately, confirmed that he passed away a few minutes ago. Heightened security is continuing in the area, and our police units are still in and around the central bus station.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli eyewitness to the shooting, Sima Koseshvili, called for greater security.

SIMA KOSESHVILI: [translated] Do I need to live in a world where I am afraid to leave home to go to my college studies, to work or to go shopping? Everything is frightening, and I want the police to take more action and increase their security presence.

AMY GOODMAN: Nathan Thrall in Jerusalem, can you talk about what happened there in Beersheba? First you had the killing of both the Palestinian gunman and the Israeli soldier, many other people also injured, and then the Eritrean man being beaten to death in a case of apparently mistaken identity.

NATHAN THRALL: Yes. Frankly, I know about as much as what—as much as you do about what happened there. I wasn't there, and I've seen the reports and watched some of the videos. And I've seen that the government has, you know, acknowledged that a tragic mistake was made. But beyond that, I don't know the details of the incident.

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this?

JAMIL DAKWAR: The significance is that, look, what's happening is that now anyone appears to be an Arab Palestinian. And that starts with the racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, that is a daily experience of Palestinians. But also Israeli Jews who are Arab Jews, who come—[Sephardic] Jews, who appear to some Israelis or to the Israeli security forces as suspicious Arab Palestinians, some of them are even being attacked. I think this is going out of control, because the Israeli government and the politicians are spreading those statements, making those statements that are very dangerous statements, encouraging citizens to take arms and shoot people, shoot to kill. And there are now human rights reports investigating the shoot-to-kill orders. This amounts to extrajudicial killing. There need to be clear investigations of these instances. You have people who did not pose any imminent threat to additional people; even if they committed crimes, they still should not be executed right on the spot. And that, I think, will bring the situation to a much worse, because people are mistrusting anyone who is a Palestinian, who is an Arab, who appears to be Palestinian, and that's why the Eritrean refugee got in that situation. And the lynching—there's situations where a soldier is standing by, security forces standing by and not protecting those civilians. That, in and of itself, is a huge, dangerous escalation that I think even worse than the act of lonely or individual taking some knives and stabbing people, because that frustrates entire—puts entire communities at risk, when law enforcement carries those attacks and crackdowns and opens fire with no respect to human life.

We see a situation that really requires more attention and more action, not just—you know, condemnation of acts of violence is the easy part of this. What is really needed to be done is what needs to be done about the situation, the situation of the occupation, the situation on East Jerusalem. And what we're not hearing, what are the solutions, including administration officials. Every time Secretary Kerry tries to say something right, whether it's the recent comment that he made, where he said, "Well, we've seen building of settlements, an expansion, etc. That is now—and now we're seeing violence." So he's making the right connection, a very logic, commonsense connection, and yet he had to retract those statements, even though he's really saying what everybody knows, what everybody knows in the Obama administration, what everybody knows here in the United States, that settlements are illegal, and yet they are now getting full support from this Israeli government, and is now building on turning this conflict into a religious war. And I think that is really the critical point where I think we need to be very, very concerned about. People who know the situation know that if you are going to speak to the youth about religious wars and agitate them, they will take things like this, they will take knives and stab people. And without leadership, without any hope, without a future, this will become the norm. And unfortunately, that would be a very dangerous route to go to.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there a role for the ICC here, the International Criminal Court?

JAMIL DAKWAR: Well, the ICC, as you know, there's a preliminary investigation of the situation in Israel and Palestine, particularly the situation of Palestine after Palestine joined the ICC. There were calls to ask the prosecutor to look at the alleged crimes committed in the recent month. I believe it will be a little bit difficult for the prosecutor to jump at this issue. There's a significant development that happened just last week with the ICC prosecutor asking to open full investigation in Georgia. That will be an important—has important implications on the situation in Palestine, because this will be—if this full investigation will move forward, will be the first nonstate party full investigation that is taking place in the ICC, which could, again, delay, on one hand, the Palestinian situation, but, on the other hand, would also set important precedent for that. I think, most importantly, there should be a clear deterrence to the Israeli government from clear statements made, that the Israeli government cannot continue these actions with no consequences. There is no accountability. We know from reports like B'Tselem, Yesh Din, Al-Haq and other organizations that investigations within the Israeli military are discredited, they're not credible, they're not serious, and therefore, at some point, there will be action by legal mechanisms, including the ICC, to look into the crimes that are committed in the occupied Palestinian territory.

AMY GOODMAN: On Saturday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his counterpart in Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, visited Israeli stabbing victims recovering in the hospital. On Sunday, Mayor de Blasio visited the Western Wall and toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum. He signed the guest book at the museum, "Never again," then made a statement.

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: We're here at a painful moment. We're here at a moment where people are afraid, where people are struggling, because of the violence in their midst every single day lately, more and more terrorist attacks on absolutely innocent civilians, something unconscionable and unacceptable, according to all our values, and something that must end.

AMY GOODMAN: Nathan Thrall, I wanted to get your comment—also the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Marine General Joseph Dunford, in addition to de Blasio, are in Israel—to what you believe needs to be done and what de Blasio said.

NATHAN THRALL: So, what we're seeing is the beginning of the United States compensating Israel for the Iran nuclear deal, and they're discussing now increasing the $3 billion in aid that Israel receives each year. And regarding de Blasio's statement, of course attacks on civilians are horrible, and all of this death is horrible. In terms of looking at the root causes, I see very little being done to address that.

What we're seeing right now among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and particularly in Jerusalem, is a real sense that the idea of a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem is escaping them. Jerusalemites have felt for many years that they are losing Jerusalem. They feel that they're losing control over Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well. And so, they're—the other guest had mentioned that the institutions of the Palestinian political leadership used to exist in Jerusalem. The PLO had something called the Orient House, which was its headquarters in Jerusalem, that had been—that has been shut down and is shut down. And, you know, Jerusalem has been separated by an enormous wall from the rest of the West Bank. And when Palestinians come and visit from Gaza, for example—those few who are allowed exit permits and do get to come to Jerusalem—they're in shock at what they see. And seeing it with their own eyes and going around the West Bank, they come to the conclusion that the possibility of separating Israel from an independent Palestinian state passed a long time ago.

And nobody is offering any kind of solutions or answers to Palestinians, including their own leadership. And I think that's a big part of why you see Palestinians actually acting right now outside of the political factions that dominate Palestinian politics. Palestinians feel like those factions are not offering any solutions and that they are taking matters into their own hands. So, the center of some of the fighting against Israel has occurred specifically among those groups who are not under Palestinian Authority control. The Jerusalem—Jerusalemites, of course, are not at all under Palestinian Authority control. The Palestinian Authority is forbidden from acting in any form in Jerusalem—and in other domains, as well. Villages in the West Bank who are fighting against the wall cutting through and taking part of their land also find—many of them are outside of the Palestinian Authority's control and therefore are able, actually, to fight Israel. The same thing with hunger-striking prisoners and with Gazans now, who are approaching the border fence every day and throwing rocks, and getting shot and killed in the process.

So, I think that Palestinians, in general, feel that they are approaching the end of an era, and that era is the era that was inaugurated with President Mahmoud Abbas's election in January 2005. This came just after Yasser Arafat had died and at the end of a very bloody and painful intifada, one that was bloody and painful for both sides. And what Abbas represented for Palestinians was a chance to try a totally different strategy, one that was not based on armed conflict, one that would basically give Israel exactly what it most wanted, which is security, and to cooperate with Israel, fully in security, to hunt down militants in the West Bank and to prevent attacks against Israelis, against settlers. And Abbas—if you ask the Israeli security establishment, they will say that Abbas has delivered that in spades. And what the security officials say is, you know, "We view our job as to provide the calm that allows the political leadership to reach out and to make a deal, or at least to improve the situation." Even if you don't have a final peace agreement, there are a thousand things that Israel can do to make life better for Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem and Gaza. And a lot of the anger—sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I just—we have to wrap up, but I wanted to bring Jamil Dakwar back in. Go ahead with "a lot of the anger," and then I'm going to go back to Jamil.

NATHAN THRALL: Sure. OK, sure. I just wanted to say that a lot of the anger is a sense that that strategy, that was inaugurated with Abbas's election in January 2005, has been given 11 years now to play itself out, and it hasn't achieved anything. And it hasn't really eased life or restrictions on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem. And so, what Palestinians are doing now is, in a very nonstrategic and emotional way, rebelling against that, without a clear vision of where they're headed.

TOPICS

• Israel & Palestine

GUESTS

JAMIL DAKWAR

human rights lawyer. He's a Palestinian citizen of Israel who previously worked as senior attorney at Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel.

This is viewer supported news

DONATE

The Israeli government has rejected a French call for international observers at the Temple Mount, the holy site that has been a flashpoint for the current unrest in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The United States is backing Israel's stance ahead of a meeting with top leaders from both sides in the coming days. After President Obama restored ties to Cuba and brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, some are hoping for a similar change on Israel-Palestine during his last 15 months in office. Will it happen? We are joined by Palestinian human rights lawyer Jamil Dakwar.

---

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamil Dakwar, as we wrap up, your final comment? Also, we have seen President Obama go out on a limb on a number of issues—on Cuba, went against what was the prevailing wisdom, but certainly represented actually a majority opinion in this country on Cuba, and is changing relations with Cuba; on the Iran deal, pushed very hard to get this Iran deal. Do you see him possibly doing something like this on Israel-Palestine?

JAMIL DAKWAR: Sadly, I think it will probably be hard to see him pushing that in the last year in his administration, given the Iran deal, given everything, the political capital, has spent on all these other foreign policy issues. I think it would be very sad for this administration that they didn't really get it right on the priority and the action, because U.S. ultimately has the power over financial support to Israel, diplomatic, political support. They know what needs to be done. And sadly, every time, you know, Palestinians resort to nonviolent practice—and that's the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have been doing that, as was mentioned, whether in Nabi Saleh, in all the different places in the West Bank, in trying to oppose the wall, trying to oppose other crackdowns, and all of a sudden now, individual attacks and violent attacks, that are very, very unfortunate, now turn to be the one to be representing all the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. And that's, I think, the sad reality where we live.

I think that's why I think there's a need for the Palestinian unity, for Palestinian leadership to realize the need to be a lesson learned from the 22-year failed experience of Oslo, what it meant for the Palestinians, and to have more legitimacy within the Palestinians to give them the confidence that the Palestinian leadership is indeed speaking on behalf of Palestinians, so that they can also garner the support internationally, even if the United States will not be on their side in the near future.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Jamil Dakwar, human rights lawyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who previously worked as a senior attorney at Adalah, an Israeli human rights group; also Nathan Thrall, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, speaking to us from Jerusalem.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/19/after_historic_shifts_on_cuba_iran?utm_source=Democracy+Now!&utm_campaign=c919930d31-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-c919930d31-191108309

Ever Wonder What is Jewish? "A Slaughter of Innocents"

THE ABSURD TIMES

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2014

"A Slaughter of Innocents": Henry Siegman, a Venerable Jewish Voice for Peace, on Gaza

Today, a special with Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation’s "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Henry Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. Three years later, the Nazis came to power. After fleeing Nazi troops in Belgium, his family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He later became head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Over the years, Siegman has become a vocal critic of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories and has urged Israel to engage with Hamas. He has called the Palestinian struggle for a state "the mirror image of the Zionist movement" that led to the founding of Israel in 1948. In July, wrote an op-ed for Politico headlined, "Israel Provoked This War." Democracy Now! hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh sat down with him on July 29 — in the midst of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a special with Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation’s "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Henry Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. Three years later, the Nazis came to power. After fleeing Nazi troops in Belgium, his family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Henry Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He later became head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Over the years, Henry Siegman has become a vocal critic of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories and has urged Israel to engage with Hamas. He has called the Palestinian struggle for a state, quote, "the mirror image of the Zionist movement" that led to the founding of Israel in 1948. In July, he wrote a piece for Politicoheadlined "Israel Provoked This War."

Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I sat down with him on July 29th in the midst of Israel's offensive in Gaza. I started by asking Henry Siegman if he could characterize the situation in Gaza at the moment.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, it’s disastrous. It’s disastrous, both in political terms, which is to say the situation cannot conceivably, certainly in the short run, lead to any positive results, to an improvement in the lives of either Israelis or Palestinians, and of course it’s disastrous in humanitarian terms, the kind of slaughter that’s taking place there. When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the slaughter of—repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we’re watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis—and should be a profound crisis—in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success. It leads one virtually to a whole rethinking of this historical phenomenon.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do you believe—Mr. Siegman, what do you believe the objectives of Israel are in this present assault on Gaza?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, they have several objectives, although I’m not sure that each of them is specifically responsible for the carnage we’re seeing now. It has what seems on the surface a justifiable objective of ending these attacks, the rockets that come from Gaza and are aimed—it’s hard to say they’re aimed at civilians, because they never seem to land anywhere that causes serious damage, but they could and would have, if not for luck. So, on the face of it, Israel has a right to do what it’s doing now, and, of course, it’s been affirmed by even president of the United States, repeatedly, that no country would agree to live with that kind of a threat repeatedly hanging over it.

But what he doesn’t add, and what perverts this principle, undermines the principle, is that no country and no people would live the way Gazans have been made to live. And consequently, this moral equation which puts Israel on top as the victim that has to act to prevent its situation from continuing that way, and the Palestinians in Gaza, or Hamas, the organization responsible for Gaza, who are the attackers, our media rarely ever points out that these are people who have a right to live a decent, normal life, too. And they, too, must think, "What can we do to put an end to this?"

And this is why in the Politico article that you mentioned, I pointed out the question of the morality of Israel’s action depends, in the first instance, on the question: Couldn’t Israel be doing something in preventing this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human lives? Couldn’t they have done something that didn’t require that cost? And the answer is: Sure, that they could have ended the occupation, with results—whatever the risks are, they certainly aren’t greater than the price being paid now for Israel’s effort to continue and sustain permanently their relationship to the Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say that Israel could end the violence by ending the occupation, Israel says it does not occupy Gaza, that it left years ago. I wanted to play a clip for you from MSNBC. It was last week, and the host, Joy Reid, was interviewing the Israeli spokesperson, Mark Regev.

MARK REGEV: Listen, if you’ll allow me to, I want to take issue with one important word you said. You said Israel is the occupying authority. You’re forgetting Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. We took down all the settlements, and the settlers who didn’t want to leave, we forced them to leave. We pulled back to the 1967 international frontier. There is no Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. We haven’t been there for some eight years.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, can you respond?

HENRY SIEGMAN: OK, yeah. That is of course utter nonsense, and for several reasons. First of all, Gaza is controlled completely, like the West Bank, because it is totally surrounded by Israel. Israel could not be imposing the kind of chokehold it has on Gaza if it were not surrounding, if its military were not surrounding Gaza, and not just on the territory, but also on the air, on the sea. No one there can make a move without coming into contact with the Israeli IDF, you know, outside this imprisoned area where Gazans live. So, there’s no one I have encountered, who is involved with international law, who’s ever suggested to me that in international law Gaza is not considered occupied. So that’s sheer nonsense.

But there’s another point triggered by your question to me, and this is the propaganda machine, and these official spokespeople will always tell you, "Take a look at what kind of people these are. Here we turned over Gaza to them. And you’d think they would invest their energies in building up the area, making it a model government and model economy. Instead, they’re working on rockets." The implication here is that they, in effect, offered Palestinians a mini state, and they didn’t take advantage of it, so the issue isn’t really Palestinian statehood. That is the purpose of this kind of critique.

And I have always asked myself, and this has a great deal to do with my own changing views about the policies of governments, not about the Jewish state qua Jewish state, but of the policies pursued by Israeli governments and supported—you know, they say Israel is a model democracy in the Middle East, so you must assume—the public has to assume some responsibility for what the government does, because they put governments in place. So, the question I ask myself: What if the situation were reversed? You know, there is a Talmudic saying inPirkei Avot, The Ethics of the Fathers: "Al tadin et chavercha ad shetagiah lemekomo," "Don’t judge your neighbor until you can imagine yourself in his place." So, my first question when I deal with any issue related to the Israeli-Palestinian issue: What if we were in their place?

What if the situation were reversed, and the Jewish population were locked into, were told, "Here, you have less than 2 percent of Palestine, so now behave. No more resistance. And let us deal with the rest"? Is there any Jew who would have said this is a reasonable proposition, that we cease our resistance, we cease our effort to establish a Jewish state, at least on one-half of Palestine, which is authorized by the U.N.? Nobody would agree to that. They would say this is absurd. So the expectations that Palestinians—and I’m speaking now about the resistance as a concept; I’m not talking about rockets, whether they were justified or not. They’re not. I think that sending rockets that are going to kill civilians is a crime. But for Palestinians to try, in any way they can, to end this state of affair—and to expect of them to end their struggle and just focus on less than 2 percent to build a country is absurd. That is part of—that’s propaganda, but it’s not a discussion of either politics or morality.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the things that’s repeated most often is, the problem with the Palestinian unity government is, of course, that Hamas is now part of it, and Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and also by the United States. I’d just like to read you a short quote from an article that you wrote in 2009 in the London Review of Books. You said, "Hamas is no more a 'terror organisation' ... than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons." Could you elaborate on that and what you see as the parallels between the two?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I’m glad I said that. In fact, I repeated it in a letter to The New York Times the other day, a week or two ago. The fact is that Israel had, pre-state—in its pre-state stage, several terrorist groups that did exactly what Hamas does today. I don’t mean they sent rockets, but they killed innocent people. And they did that in an even more targeted way than these rockets do. Benny Morris published a book that is considered the Bible on that particular period, the war of—

AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli historian.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli historian, Benny Morris.

HENRY SIEGMAN: The Israeli historian, right, then in the bookRighteous Victims, in which he said—I recall, when I read it, I was shocked—in which he—particularly in his most recently updated book, which was based on some new information that the Israel’s Defense—the IDF finally had to open up and publish, that Israeli generals received direct instructions from Ben-Gurion during the War of Independence to kill civilians, or line them up against the wall and shoot them, in order to help to encourage the exodus, that in fact resulted, of 700,000 Palestinians, who were driven out of their—left their homes, and their towns and villages were destroyed. This was terror, even within not just the terrorist groups, the pre-state terrorists, but this is within the military, the Israeli military, that fought the War of Independence. And in this recent book, that has received so much public attention by Ari—you know, My Promised Land.

AMY GOODMAN: Shavit.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Ari Shavit. He describes several such incidents, too. And incidentally, one of the people who—according to Benny Morris, one of the people who received these orders—and they were oral orders, but he, in his book, describes why he believes that these orders were given, were given to none other than Rabin, who was not a general then, but he—and that he executed these orders.

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Meaning?

AMY GOODMAN: What did it mean that he executed these orders, Rabin?

HENRY SIEGMAN: That he executed civilians. And the rationale given for this when Shavit, some years ago, had an interview with Benny Morris and said to him, "My God, you are saying that there was deliberate ethnic cleansing here?" And Morris said, "Yes, there was." And he says, "And you justify it?" And he said, "Yes, because otherwise there would not have been a state." And Shavit did not follow up. And that was one of my turning points myself, when I saw that. He would not follow up and say, "Well, if that is a justification, the struggle for statehood, why can’t Palestinians do that? What’s wrong with Hamas? Why are they demonized if they do what we did?"

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the Israeli prime minister earlier this month, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowing to punish those responsible for the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teen who was burned alive following the murders of three Israeli teens. But in doing so, Netanyahu drew a distinction between Israel and its neighbors in how it deals with, quote, "murderers."

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I know that in our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers. And that’s the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don’t. We condemn them, and we put them on trial, and we’ll put them in prison.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking about the difference. Henry Siegman, can you respond?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, the only difference I can think of is that in Israel they made the heads of the two major pre-state terrorist groups prime ministers. So this distinction he’s drawing is simply false; it’s not true. The heads of the two terrorist groups, which incidentally, again, going back to Benny Morris, in his book, Righteous Victims, he writes, in this pre-state account, that the targeting of civilians was started by the Jewish terrorist groups, and the Arab—and the Arab groups followed.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Irgun and the Stern Gang.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, yes. And as you know, both the head of the Irgun and both the head of the Stern Gang—I’m talking about Begin and Shamir—became prime ministers of the state of Israel. And contrary to Netanyahu, public highways and streets are named after them.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress. We’ll continue our conversation with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our conversation with Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former head of the American Jewish Congress.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I’d like to turn, Henry Siegman, to Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, who was speaking to Charlie Rose ofPBS. He said Hamas was willing to coexist with Jews but said it would not live, quote, "with a state of occupiers."

KHALED MESHAAL: [translated] I am ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians, and with the Arabs and non-Arabs, and with those who agree with my ideas and also disagree with them; however, I do not coexist with the occupiers, with the settlers and those who put a siege on us.

CHARLIE ROSE: It’s one thing to say you want to coexist with the Jews. It’s another thing you want to coexist with the state of Israel. Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel? Do you want to represent—do you want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?

KHALED MESHAAL: [translated] No. I said I do not want to live with a state of occupiers.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, speaking to Charlie Rose. Henry Siegman, could you respond to that, and specifically the claim made by Israelis repeatedly that they can’t negotiate with a political organization that refuses the state of Israel’s right to exist in its present form?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes. It so happens that in both international custom and international law, political parties, like Hamas, are not required or even ever asked to recognize states, whether they recognize a state or not. The question is whether the government of which they are a part and that makes policy and executes policy, whether that government is prepared to recognize other states. And this is true in the case of Israel, as well, the government of Israel, any government. I, incidentally, discussed this with Meshaal, not once, but several times, face to face, and asked him whether he would be part of a government that recognizes the state of Israel, and he says—and he said, "Yes, provided"—they had a proviso—he said, "provided that the Palestinian public approves that policy." And he repeated to me the fact that—he said, "You’re absolutely right." He says, "People ask us will we recognize the state of Israel, and will we affirm that it’s legitimately a Jewish state." He said, "No, we won’t do that. But we have never said that we will not serve in a government that has public support for that position, that we will not serve in such a government."

But a more important point to be made here—and this is why these distinctions are so dishonest—the state of Israel does not recognize a Palestinian state, which is to say there are parties in Netanyahu’s government—very important parties, not marginal parties—including his own, the Likud, that to this day has an official platform that does not recognize the right of Palestinians to have a state anywhere in Palestine. And, of course, you have Naftali Bennett’s party, the HaBayit HaYehudi, which says this openly, that there will never be a state, a Palestinian state, anywhere in Palestine. Why hasn’t our government or anyone said, "Like Hamas, if you have parties like that in your government, you are not a peace partner, and you are a terrorist group, if in fact you use violence to implement your policy, as Hamas does"? So the hypocrisy in the discussion that is taking place publicly is just mind-boggling.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, you’re the head, the former head, of one of the leading Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Congress.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Two of them, also of the Synagogue Council of America.

AMY GOODMAN: So, these are major establishment Jewish organizations. You said you went to see Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas, not once, but several times to meet with him. The U.S. government calls Hamas a terrorist organization. They will not communicate with them. They communicate with them through other parties, through other countries, to talk to them. Talk about your decision to meet with Khaled Meshaal, where you met with him, and the significance of your conversations.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, first of all, it should be noted that the U.S. has no such policy of not meeting with terrorist organizations. It has a policy of not meeting with Hamas. That’s quite different. We’re very happy to meet with the Taliban and to negotiate with them. And they cut off hands and heads of people, and they kill girls who go to school. And that didn’t prevent the United States from having negotiations with the Taliban, so that’s nonsense that we don’t talk to terrorist organizations. We talk to enemies if we want to cease the slaughter, and we’re happy to do so and to try to reach an agreement that puts an end to it. And why Hamas should be the exception, again, I find dishonest. And the only reason that we do that is in response to the pressures from AIPAC and, of course, Israel’s position.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Henry Siegman, as you are far more familiar than most, the argument made by Israel and supporters of Israel is that what might be construed as a disproportionate response by Israel to Hamas has to do with the historical experience of the persecution of the Jews and, of course, the Holocaust. So how do you respond to those kinds of claims?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I don’t accept that at all, because the lesson from the persecutions would seem to me—and certainly if you follow Jewish tradition, the lesson of those persecutions, we have always said, until the state of Israel came into being, is that you do not treat people in that kind of an inhumane and cruel way. And the hope always was that Israel would be a model democracy, but not just a democracy, but a state that would practice Jewish values, in terms of its humanitarian approach to these issues, its pursuit of justice and so on.

I have always felt that, for me, the Holocaust experience, which was important to me, since I lived two years under Nazi occupation, most of it running from place to place and in hiding—I always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is not that there is evil, that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. That was not the great lesson of the Holocaust. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent, cultured people, people we would otherwise consider good people, can allow such evil to prevail, that the German public—these were not monsters, but it was OK with them that the Nazi machine did what it did. Now I draw no comparisons between the Nazi machine and Israeli policy. And what I resent most deeply is when people say, "How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?" The point isn’t, you know, what exactly they did, but the point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it. That is the most important lesson of the Holocaust, not the Hitlers and not the SS, but the public that allowed this to happen. And my deep disappointment is that the Israeli public, precisely because Israel is a democracy and cannot say, "We’re not responsible what our leaders do," that the public puts these people back into office again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned your experience as a Holocaust survivor. Could you just go into it a little more deeply? You were born in 1930 in Germany. And talk about the rise of the Nazis and how your family escaped.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I don’t consider myself a Holocaust survivor, in the sense that I was not in a concentration camp. But I lived under Nazi occupation. I was born in 1930, but the Nazis came to power in—I think in 1933. And shortly thereafter, we lived in Germany at the time. My parents lived in Germany, in Frankfurt. And they left. My father decided to give up a very successful business and to move to Belgium then, and on the assumption that Belgium was safe, that we would be escaping the Nazis. But in 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium, and they invaded France. That was in early 1940, I believe. And so, it’s a long story, but for the next—from that point on until February 1942, when we arrived, finally arrived in the United States.

And how my father pulled that off is a miracle; to this day, I don’t fully understand, because there were six children that he had to bring with him, and my mother, of course. We ran from place to place. First we were at Dunkirk, where the classic evacuation, memorable evacuation took place, and the French and the British soldiers withdrew to across the channel. We happened to find ourselves there at the time. And then we were sent back by the—when the Nazi troops finally caught up with us in Dunkirk, they sent us back to Antwerp. And then my father had connections with the police chief, because of his business interests in Antwerp before the Nazis came. He was tipped off the morning that we were supposed to be—the Gestapo was supposed to come to our house to take all of us away. And so we just picked up, and we managed to get to Paris. And from Paris, we crossed—we were smuggled across the border into occupied Vichy France, and we were there for about a year, again without proper papers and in hiding. Then we tried to cross into Spain. And we did, but when we arrived at the Spanish border, they finally closed the border and sent us back into France.

So, then we managed to get a boat to take us from Marseille to North Africa, where we were interned briefly in a camp in North Africa. And then the—what I believe was the last ship, a Portuguese, a neutral ship, taking refugees to the United States stopped in North Africa. We boarded that ship. And we were on the high seas for two months, because the Nazi subs were already busy sinking the ships that they encountered. So we had to go all the way around to avoid various Nazi submarine-infested areas.

So after two months on the high seas, we arrived in New York, where we were sent to Ellis Island, which was full of Bundists, who had been German Bundists, who were arrested and were being sent back to Germany. But as we walked into Ellis Island into that hallway, something I will never forget, "We’re in America at last!" And those Bundists were greeting each other in the hallway, "Heil Hitler!" So the "Heil Hitlers" that we were trying to escape in Europe was the first thing we encountered as we landed on Ellis Island.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did you end up becoming head of one of the country’s—or, as you said, country’s two major Jewish organizations? And what was your position on Zionism after World War II?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, my father was one of the leaders of European Zionism. He was the head of the Mizrachi in the religious Zionist movement, not just in Belgium, but in Western Europe. And the leaders, the heads, the founders of the Mizrachi—mayor of Berlin himself, Gold, many others—were guests in our house in Antwerp. And they used to take me on their knees and teach me Hebrew songs from Israel. So, I had—I was raised on mother’s milk, and I was an ardent—as a kid even, an ardent Zionist. I recall on the ship coming over, we were coming to America, and I was writing poetry and songs—I was 10 years old, 11 years old—about the blue sky of Palestine. In those days we referred to it as Palestina, Palestine.

And so, into adulthood, not until well after the ’67 War, when I came across—and I got to know Rabin and others, and I came across a discussion in which I was told by Israelis, by the Israeli people who I was talking to, government, senior government people, that they had an initiative from Sadat about peace and withdrawal and so on. And Rabin said, "But clearly, the Israeli public is not prepared for that now." And that hit me like a hammer. I always had this notion drilled into me that if only the Arabs were to reach out and be willing to live in peace with Israel, that would be the time of the Messiah. And the Messiah came, and the Israeli leadership said, "No, public opinion is not ready for that." And I wrote a piece then in Moment magazine—if you recall, it was published by Leonard Fein—and he made it a cover story, and the title was, "For the Sake of Zion, I Will Not Remain Silent." And that triggered my re-examination of things I had been told and what was going on on the ground.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Prior to that, your sense had always been that if the Arabs reached out, there would be two states: Palestine and Israel.

HENRY SIEGMAN: I had no doubt about that. I mean, that was, you know, just a given, that we are sharing. The resolution said, you know, two states. The resolution, which Israel—the partition resolution, which Israel invoked in its Declaration of Independence, planted, rooted its legitimacy in that—it cited the Palestinian—the partition plan. But when someone these days says, "But there’s a partition plan that said that the rest of it, that was not assigned to Israel, is the legitimate patrimony of the Palestinian people," the answer given is, "Ah, yeah, but they voted they would not accept it, and the partition plan was never officially adopted." Well, why are you quoting it then in your Declaration of Independence, if you consider it to be null and void and not—anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: And the response of—or the slogan, the idea that was put forward so much in the founding of the state of Israel: Palestine is a land without people for a people without land?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, that was the common understanding and referred to repeatedly in Ari Shavit’s book and others, that the Zionist movement, at its very birth, was founded on an untruth, on a myth, that Palestine was a country without a people. And as he says, obviously—and he recognizes in his book that it was a lie. And therefore, from the very beginning, Zionism didn’t confront this profound moral dilemma that lay at its very heart. How do you deal with that reality? And as a consequence of that, one of the ways in which they dealt with it was to see to the expulsion of 700,000 people from their cities, from their towns and villages, and the destruction of all of them, which, to his credit, Ari Shavit writes about very painfully and honestly.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress. We’ll continue our conversation with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former head of the American Jewish Congress. Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I sat down with him on July 29th. I asked Henry Siegman about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that Israel is just responding to the thousands of rockets that Hamas and other groups are firing from Gaza.

HENRY SIEGMAN: My response is that they wouldn’t be firing those rockets if you weren’t out—if you didn’t have an occupation in place. And one of the reasons you say you do not have an occupation in place is because you really don’t have a united partner, Palestinian partner, to make peace with, and when Palestinians seek to establish that kind of a government, which they just recently did, bringing Hamas into the governmental structure, Palestinian governmental structure, that is headed by Abbas, you seek to destroy that. You won’t recognize it. And this is why I say there are several reasons for the Israeli action. A primary one is to prevent this new government from actually succeeding. It’s an attempt to break up the new unity government set up by the Palestinians.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Why would they do that? Why would they want to do that?

HENRY SIEGMAN: They want to do that, for the first time—for years, I have been suggesting and arguing that they want to do that because they are intent on preventing the development of a Palestinian state. To put it bluntly, they want all of it. They want all of Palestine.

Now, this is something that Netanyahu said openly and without any reservations when he was not in government. He wrote about it, published a book about it, his opposition to a Palestinian state, that Israel couldn’t allow that. The difference between the time that he—and he, incidentally, opposed not just Palestinian statehood. He opposed peace agreements with Egypt. He opposed peace agreements with Jordan. Any positive step towards a stabilization and a more peaceful region, Netanyahu has been on record as opposing.

And when he came into office as prime minister, he understood that it is not a smart thing to say that Israel’s policy is to maintain the occupation permanently. So, the only difference between his positions in the past and the position now is that he pretends that he really would like to see a two-state solution, which, as you know, is the affirmation he made in his so-called Bar-Ilan speech several years ago. And some naive people said, "Ah, you know, redemption is at hand," when, to his own people, he winked and made clear, and as I just read recently—I didn’t know that—that it’s on record that his father said, "Of course he didn’t mean it. He will attach conditions that will make it impossible." But that was his tactic. His tactic was to say, "We are all in favor of it, but if only we had a Palestinian partner."

Now, in fact, they’ve had a Palestinian partner that’s been willing and able—they set up institutions that the World Bank has said are more effective than most states that are members of the U.N. today. And that, of course, made no difference, and continued to say we do not have a partner, because you have nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza who are not represented. So the unity government became a threat to that tactic of pretending to be in support of a Palestinian state.

AMY GOODMAN: In a response to the piece that you wrote forPolitico that was headlined "Israel Provoked This War," the Anti-Defamation League writes, quote, "Hamas has a charter which they live up to every day calling for Israel’s destruction. Hamas has used the last two years of relative quiet to build up an arsenal of rockets whose sole purpose is to attack Israel. Hamas has built a huge network of tunnels leading into Israel with the purpose of murdering large numbers of Israelis and seizing hostages." Henry Siegman, can you respond?

HENRY SIEGMAN: What I would point out to my former friend Abe Foxman of the ADL is that, too, is Israel’s charter, or at least the policy of this government and of many previous governments, which is to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. And they have built up their army and their armaments to implement that policy. And the difference between Hamas and the state of Israel is that the state of Israel is actually doing it. They’re actually implementing it, and they’re actually preventing a Palestinian state, which doesn’t exist. And millions of Palestinians live in this subservient position without rights and without security, without hope and without a future. That’s not the state of—the state of Israel is a very successful state, and happily Jews live there with a thriving economy and with an army whose main purpose is preventing that Palestinian state from coming into being. That’s their mandate.

But sadly and shockingly, they can stand by, even though international law says if you’re occupying people from outside of your country, you have a responsibility to protect them. I mean, the responsibility to protect is the people you are occupying. The soldiers who are there, ostensibly to implement that mandate, will watch settler violence when it occurs when they attack Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and they won’t do a thing to prevent it. They won’t intervene to protect the people they are supposed to protect, and they will tell you, "That’s not our job. Our job is to protect the Jews."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: On the question of the support, the successive U.S. administrations supporting Israel, I’d like to again quote from something you said in a 2002 New York Times interview with Chris Hedges. You said, "The support for Israel," in the United States, "fills a spiritual vacuum. If you do not support the government of Israel then your Jewishness, not your political judgment, is in question." So could you explain what you mean by that and what the implications of that have been, in terms of U.S. governments supporting Israeli government policy?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, what I meant by that, and that was an interview quite a while ago—

NERMEEN SHAIKH: 2002, yes.

HENRY SIEGMAN: I see, OK, which is not all that long ago, for me anyway. I meant by that something quite simple, that for many American Jews—and, I suspect, for most American Jews—Israel has become the content of their Jewish religious identification. It has very little other content. I rarely have been at a Shabbat service where a rabbi gives a sermon where Israel isn’t a subject of the sermon. And typically, they are—the sermons are not in the spirit of an Isaiah, you know, who says, "My god, is this what God wants from you? Your hands are bloody; they’re filled with blood. But he doesn’t want your fast. He doesn’t want—he despises the sacrifices and your prayers. What he wants is to feed, to feed the hungry, to pursue justice and so on." But that’s not what you hear from rabbis in the synagogues in this country. So, what I meant by that is that there’s much more to Judaism and to the meaning that you give to your Jewish identity than support for the likes of Netanyahu.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Henry Siegman, what do you think the Obama administration has done since his first administration? And what do you think he ought to be doing differently, on the question of Israel-Palestine and, in particular, his response to this most recent military assault on Gaza?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Look, I have written about this for years now. It’s not all that complicated. It is quite clear that, left to its own devices, if Israel—if the United States says to the Palestinians, "Hey, you guys have got to talk not to us; you’ve got to talk to the Palestinians—to the Israelis, and you have to come to an understanding that’s how peace is made, but we can’t interfere. You know, we cannot tell Israel what to do"—left to their own devices, there will never be a Palestinian state. And the question is—I have very serious doubts that we have not gone beyond the point where a Palestinian state is possible. The purpose of the settlement movement was to make it impossible. And I believe they have succeeded: That project has achieved its goal.

AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish settlements.

HENRY SIEGMAN: The Jewish settlers have achieved the irreversibility of the settlement movement, in terms of the vast infrastructure that has been put in place. So, even if there were a leftist government, so-called leftist government, that came to power, it would not be able to do it, because of the upheaval that would be necessary to create such a state.

There is only one thing—as far as I’m concerned, there are only two things that could happen that could still, perhaps, produce a Palestinian state. The first one is for the—because the United States remains absolutely essential in terms of Israel’s security, to its continued success and survival. If at some point the United States were to say, "You have now reached a point—we have been your biggest supporters. We have been with you through thick and thin. And we have based—we have treated you"—you know, a lot of people say, criticizing the U.S. and the international community, that we have double standards, that we expect things of Israel that we don’t expect of the rest of the world. We do have double standards, but it works the other way around: We grant Israel privileges and tolerate behavior that we would not in other allies. We may say there’s nothing we can do to change that, but we don’t give them billions of dollars. And we don’t go to the U.N., at the Security Council, to veto when the international—efforts by the United Nations to prevent that bad behavior. So we have double standards, but it works the other way. But if the United States were to say to Israel, "It’s our common values that underlie this very special relationship we have with you and these privileges that we have extended to you, but this can’t go on. We can’t do that when those values are being undermined. The values—what you are doing today contradicts American values. We are a democratic country, and we cannot be seen as aiding and abetting this oppression and permanent disenfranchisement of an entire people. So, you’re on your own." The issue is not America sending planes and missiles to bomb Tel Aviv as punishment; the issue is America removing itself from being a collaborator in the policies and a facilitator, making it easy and providing the tools for Israel to do that. So, if at some point the United States were to say what is said in Hebrew, ad kan, you know, "So far, but no further. We can’t—this is not what we can do. You want to do it? You’re on your own," that would change—that could still change the situation, because the one thing Israelis do not want to do is have the country live in a world where America is not there to have their back.

And the other possibility, which I have also written about, is for Palestinians to say, "OK, you won. You didn’t want us to have a state. We see that you’ve won. You have all of it." So our struggle is no longer to push the border to—to maintain a '67 border, where nobody is going to come to their help, because borderlines—international opinion doesn't mobilize around those issues. But this is a struggle against what looks and smells like apartheid—we want citizenship, we want full rights in all of Palestine—and make that the struggle. If Palestinians were to undertake that kind of a struggle in a credible way, where the Israeli public would see that they really mean it and they are going to fight for that in a nonviolent way, not by sending rockets, for citizenship, I am convinced—and I’ve seen no polls that contradict that belief—that they would say to their government, "Wait a minute, that is unacceptable, in fact, for us, and we cannot allow that. We don’t want a majority Arab population here." I’ve talked to Palestinian leadership and urged them to move in that direction. There is now a growing movement among younger Palestinians in that direction. And that, I hope, may yet happen. Now, it has to be a serious movement. It can’t just be a trick to get another state, but only if it is serious, where they are ready to accept citizenship and fight for it in a single state of all of Palestine, is it possible for the Israeli public to say, "This we cannot want, too, and we have to have a government that will accept the two states."

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, I wanted to ask you about media coverage of the conflict right now in Gaza. In a comment to close theCBS show Face the Nation on Sunday, the host, Bob Schieffer, suggested Hamas forces Israel to kill Palestinian children.

BOB SCHIEFFER: In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that is embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause—a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children," she said, "but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

AMY GOODMAN: That was the host, the journalist Bob Schieffer, onFace the Nation. You knew Prime Minister Golda Meir.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, I did. I wasn’t a friend of hers, but I knew her, and I heard her when she made that statement. And I thought then, and think now, that it is an embarrassingly hypocritical statement. This statement was made by a woman who also said "Palestinians? There are no Palestinians! I am a Palestinian." If you don’t want to kill Palestinians, if that’s what pains you so much, you don’t have to kill them. You can give them their rights, and you can end the occupation. And to put the blame for the occupation and for the killing of innocents that we are seeing in Gaza now on the Palestinians—why? Because they want a state of their own? They want what Jews wanted and achieved? I find that, to put it mildly, less than admirable. There is something deeply hypocritical about that original statement and about repeating it on the air over here as a great moral insight.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, recently wrote a piece for Politico headlined "Israel Provoked This War: It’s Up to President Obama to Stop It." You can go to our website at democracynow.org if you’d like to get a copy of the full DVD interview with Henry Siegman.

---

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.