Why the Speaker Calls Israel’s Actions in Gaza Genocide

Well, let me simply say that

everyone on this show who you have interviewed

in Palestine has used the word genocide,

and I think we need to take this word quite seriously

because it does describe the situation in which a population is targeted,

not just the military part but the civilian part,

and bombarded,

dislocated forcibly,

and plans are being made for relocation or the absolute razing of Gaza itself.

So as you know, there are legal groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights

that has published a 40-page study

on why it is correct to call what is happening to Palestinians now genocide,

and other groups are studying international law and showing that genocide is not,

it doesn't always look like the Nazi regime,

but it can be the systematic undercutting of the livelihood,

the health, the well-being, and the capacity to persist.

This is exactly what is happening.

Why it is that the U.S. media, for the most part,

and the U.S. government has decided to be complicit with genocidal crimes is a major question.

It is an alarming fact, and Hanan Ashrawi is right to say that

it's not just that they're giving ideological support or spin doctors to say that Israeli genocidal violence is justified.

They are actually giving weapons and support and counsel in order to effect this genocidal set of policies.

So as far as I'm concerned, the Palestinians have been labeled as ungrievable.

That is to say, they're not a group of people whose

lives are being considered as worthy of value, of persisting, of flourishing in this world.

If they are lost, it is not considered to be a true loss,

because they are not just less than human—surely that—but not just less than human,

but a threat to what the idea of the human is,

that is being defended by Zionist politics shared by Israel and the U.S. and many Western powers.

So I think once we see these caricatures taking hold in public discourse,

all Palestinians are Hamas,

or Hamas is terrorist rather than, say, an armed resistance struggle,

or Israeli violence is morally justified, and Palestinian violence is barbaric,

well, why wouldn't it be—why wouldn't it be right to describe the bombardment of people in

their homes and in their hospitals and in their schools, or as they are fleeing, according to Israeli directives?

Why isn't that barbaric?

I mean, what we are seeing is not just the killing of

Palestinian civilian lives as a a casualty of war, a kind of byproduct,

these civilians are targeted. So the targeting of civilians who belong to a particular group,

ethnic, racially defined, that is a genocidal practice.

That is what we are seeing.

And we should all be standing up and objecting and calling for an end to genocide.

It's true. I signed several petitions, one of which calls for an immediate ceasefire.

That's the minimum.

But the fact is, is that the violence that we're seeing belongs to a longstanding violence,

75-year-old violence that has been characterized by systematic dislocation,

killing,

imprisonment,

detention,

stolen land,

damaged lives.

We actually need a much fuller political solution to the situation.

Until Palestine is free and people in Palestine are able to live as

citizens or political actors in a world that they helped to craft, they become self-governing, they belong to a democracy,

we will continue to see violence.

We will continue to see this structural violence producing this kind of resistance.

So I hope we don't, in the end, put a Band-Aid.