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International Community Call For Cease Fire As Civilians Targeted And Generations Under Siege In Israel, Gaza
On October 7, Hamas fired 2,000 missiles from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and sent hundreds of fighters into Israel, killing hundreds of Israeli civilians. Israel retaliated with overwhelming force – bombing Gazan civilians, homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and civilian buildings. As we record this interview on October 11, Israel is reportedly planning to mount a ground offensive in Gaza with 360,000 Israeli reserve troops poised to invade.
As of today, at least 1,200 Israelis and 950 Palestinians have been killed and tens of hundreds have been wounded on both sides.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas but Israel’s actions reveal that Israel is mounting war on the Palestinian people as a whole – especially in Gaza.
Targeting civilians constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention, regardless of who commits them. And if we’re serious about stopping all war crimes, it’s crucial that we under the context. Hamas’s offensive was launched in the context of decades of the Israeli apartheid regime and settler colonialism.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who serves as the International Adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace, and is a member of the national board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer,” published in 2018. Phyllis wrote a new article in The Hill titled As Israel and Gaza Erupt, The US Must Commit To Ending The Violence – All The Violence.
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Investigating The Assassination Of Palestinian American Journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh
The Zionist colonial settler state of Israel is not the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust much less the moral legatee of the ancient prophets of the Jewish people. Never has this been more evident than with the exposure of the Israeli army’s assassination of the beloved Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh. Assassination is a political murder.
Shireen had covered the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank for Al Jazeera for 25 years. The day she was killed she was reporting on the Israeli military invasion of Jenin, an Arab town on the West Bank occupied by the Israeli army for 55 years. She was wearing a helmet and a protective vest marked “PRESS.”
It is the practice of the Israeli army to shoot journalists and otherwise suppress the truth of their war crimes including the illegal theft of Palestinian lands. Israel’s brutal occupation has been going on since it illegally seized the West Bank as a prize of the 1967 war between Israel and three of its neighbors. Since then the Israeli military has ruled the native Arabs. Shireen is the 86th journalist to be killed while covering Israel’s illegal occupation since 1967.
The murder of Shireen was not adequately exposed by the U.S. press. The United States supports Israel politically, ideologically, economically, and morally. The U.S. gives the state of Israel more than $3.8 billion a year in weapons. Shireen was killed by a high-velocity armor-piercing 5.56 mm bullet fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semi automatic rifle – a weapon made in the U.S.
Israel has refused to conduct an investigation of Shireen’s assassination, because it “would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] and in Israeli society in general,” according to the Israeli government. Although complaints have been filed in the International Criminal Court against Israel, the court does not appear to have the political will to thoroughly investigate those charges.
There is an apocryphal story of three rabbis dispatched from a Zionist congress in Vienna many years ago to report back on the situation in Palestine. They reported back that the bride is beautiful but she’s married to another man.
The claim of the Zionist is that Israel was built on a land without a people for a people without a land. This is Israeli propaganda. This propaganda is less and less swallowed by the new generations in the United States and Europe as they witness Israel taking over more and more of historic Palestine and attempting to prevent the truth of what they are doing from coming out.
Guest – Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. He was educated at Yale and Oxford universities and is the author of many books on the Middle East. He is also the author of Under Siege: PLO Decision Making During the 1982 War, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East and recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Michael Smith and Marjorie Cohn
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