Thursday, July 25, 2024

Phyllis Bennis: “We Can Never Give Up Hope”


I’ve long respected and appreciated the informed perspective of Phyllis Bennis – author, scholar, and director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Indeed, she’s one of my “go-to” people for information and insights on both U.S. foreign policy and its implications both here and abroad and issues pertaining to the Middle East.

This past Monday, Bennis was interviewed by Janine Jackson of FAIR’s CounterSpin program on Israel's war on Palestinians. Following are excerpts.

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We are now looking at almost 10 months of genocide . .. [with] a ceasefire remain[ing] out of reach. . . . We hear President Biden now saying, “We need a ceasefire. We want a ceasefire.” But he keeps on transferring weapons [to Israel], including the 500-pound bombs. . . . [H]e is sending the weapons. And then he says, “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.” What kind of hypocrisy are we hearing here?

. . . The international community, as it likes to be called – meaning the United Nations, the international courts, all of those institutions – have failed. In the main, they haven’t failed primarily for lack of trying. They certainly have not tried hard enough. But they have tried.

The problem is they have been undermined every step of the way by their most powerful member, which happens to be the government of the United States. We should not forget what Dr. King taught us, that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government. He said that in 1967 at Riverside Church. I will say it again, today, so many years later. That has not changed.

We do see, in the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, the extraordinary impact of South Africa’s initiative to challenge Israel directly, state to state, to say that Israel is violating the international convention against genocide. And after several weeks, on an expedited basis, the court came out and said, yes, this is plausibly genocide. And while it will take some time, usually months or years to make a complete and final determination, we are hereby ordering a set of things, that they ordered Israel to do, to make sure that the potential for genocide – or the actual genocide, they were leaving themselves that little wiggle room – but to make sure that that stopped, and they gave explicit orders, which Israel, again, simply ignored.

And what’s different this time . . . is that the international covenant against genocide, unlike most parts of international law that are very complicated, very hard to understand and really only apply very narrowly, the Genocide Convention specifically holds accountable every country that is a signatory, a party, to that convention. That includes the United States, ironically enough, includes Israel. But it says that every country who has signed on to that treaty has the obligation to make sure that it doesn’t get violated.

That was the basis for South Africa charging Israel with violating the covenant. But it also goes to every other country, including our own. So the Biden administration, aside from its active enabling of the genocide, is doubly responsible here, because it has an explicit, affirmative obligation to do everything in its power to stop the possibility of these attacks turning into genocide, or to stop them if they are indeed already genocide.

And the U.S. answer to that requirement is to keep sending the weapons: 14,000 of these giant 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 of the smaller 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, a thousand bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs, and more and more and more.

. . . [Recently] there was an [Israeli] attack on, supposedly, one of the military leaders of Hamas, Mohamed Deif – that attack killed more than 90 Palestinian civilians, wounded more than 300. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true that Israel thought that Muhammad Deif was there. It is illegal to deliberately, knowingly, kill 90 civilians and injure 300 more because you think a military leader might be present. They don’t even allege that he was fighting at the time. That is completely illegal.

It’s illegal to attack hospitals. The fact that there may have been a command center in a tunnel below does not make it legal to destroy a hospital. It does not make it legal to destroy the headquarters of UNRWA, the only humanitarian organization with the capacity to actually get desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

None of these Israeli claims about “well, we have no choice” – the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and it has been fenced off, walled off, and surrounded by soldiers. It’s the definition of a siege.

I think that many people believe, there’s this claim, that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when the settlers and the soldiers were pulled out. That’s not true, because the definition of occupation in international law is not the presence of settler colonies, physically, or the presence of soldiers on the territory. It’s about control. And by building the wall, and having that wall surrounded by soldiers, Israel remains occupying the Gaza Strip. So you have an entire generation of people who have grown up in the Gaza Strip, because it has been besieged now for 17 years, who have never been outside that tiny strip of land, have been physically walled off like a siege of ancient times, and that was the condition in which this war is being fought.

Hamas has violated international law in a number of ways, in terms of its attacks using missiles that cannot be targeted against military targets. But the notion that there somehow is this choice of Hamas fighters to fight in the open, as if there is massive open space inside the Gaza Strip, this most crowded strip of territory in the world, it boggles the imagination. To anybody who’s ever seen Gaza, this notion that this is somehow a legitimate excuse, that, “Oh, well, it’s too crowded. We had no choice but to destroy all the infrastructure, all the buildings, the water treatment, the hospitals, all the universities, every museum, 70% of the schools.” This is a constant violation of international law, in which our own government and our tax money and our Congress and our president are directly and deeply implicated.

. . . [W]e can never give up hope. What has been extraordinary in this 10 months has been to see the rising of an incredible, powerful, broad movement of human solidarity with the Palestinian population of Gaza. People who never really gave much thought to the Israel/Palestine question, to Palestinian lives, to Israeli occupation, suddenly – and, certainly, part of it is because of the media, social media and mainstream media, have had no choice, as you said earlier, Janine, but to portray the horror of this genocide. And people have responded as human beings, which is an amazing thing. It doesn’t happen all the time.

So we have to have hope in that. We have to know that we have managed to rebuild the definition of ceasefire, so that when we call for a ceasefire, and I’ve got to say the message discipline of this broad and largely unaccountable movement has been pretty extraordinary. Everybody is sticking to the demand: We need a ceasefire now. At the same time, we have managed to transform the understanding of, what does a ceasefire mean? It’s not just, stop firing for a few minutes while you exchange some hostages and then go back to war. It means a permanent stop to the firing. It means access, real access, to massive amounts of immediate humanitarian aid. And it means stop sending weapons.

So when we demand a ceasefire of the Biden administration, we’re demanding all those things. Unfortunately, when President Biden says, “We need a ceasefire,” he’s only talking about part of one of those three things. And he’s undermining the others by continuing to send the weapons. So that’s what we have to focus on. The hope is, we have more people supporting the rights of Palestinians to life, among other things; it’s huge, and the responsibility that comes with that hope is to keep up the demand for an immediate ceasefire, with all that that requires.

Phyllis Bennis
CounterSpin
July 23, 2024




NEXT:
A Day of Shame at the U.S. Capitol


Related Off-site Links:
In Fiery Speech to Congress, Netanyahu Vows “Total Victory” in Gaza and Denounces U.S. Protesters – Ellen Knickmeyer, Farnoush Amiri and Ashraf Khalil (AP News, July 24, 2024).
“Not in Our Name”: Hundreds Arrested at Jewish-Led Protest Ahead of Netanyahu Speech – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, July 24, 2024).
Biden’s Middle East Policy Is Horrific. Trump’s Would Be Even Worse – Bob Dreyfuss (Common Dreams, June 17, 2024).
“Massacre”: Analyst Slams Israeli Military Raid That Frees 4 Hostages, Kills 270+ PalestiniansDemocracy Now! (June 10, 2024).
“War Is Not the Answer”: Meet the Israeli Peace Activist Whose Parents Were Killed on October 7Democracy Now! (June 10, 2024).
Israel Used U.S.-Made Bombs in Deadly Attack on UNRWA School – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, June 6, 2024).
“Apocalyptic”: 40 Killed in Israeli Airstrike on U.N. School Sheltering Displaced Palestinians in GazaDemocracy Now! (June 6, 2024).
Children Among Dozens Killed in “Appalling” Israeli Attack on UNRWA School – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, June 6, 2024).
There Is No Moral Argument That Justifies the Sale of Weapons to Israel – Mary Lawlor (The Guardian, March 21, 2024).
Draft U.N, Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, March 25, 2024).
“Genocidal Actions” Persist in Gaza as Israel Blocks Aid and U.S. Weapons Flow – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, April 12, 2024).
Journalist Abby Martin Explains Why She Considers Israel’s Actions in Gaza to Constitute GenocideMiddle East Eye (April 3, 2024).
“A War Machine Out of Control”: Israel Keeps Attacking Aid Workers as Gaza Faces FamineDemocracy Now! (April 3, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Nina Turner: Quote of the Day – July 24, 2024
Something to Think About – June 28, 2024
Kyle Kulinski: Quote of the Day – May 23, 2024
Judith Butler on the Ongoing Student Protests Against the Gaza Genocide
Naomi Klein’s Powerful Words on Israel’s and the West’s Ongoing Gaza Genocide
Outrage and Despair
“This Is a Genocidal Project”
“A Genocide Has Been Normalized”
Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
More Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
Josh Paul: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
Phyllis Bennis: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
Michael Fakhri: Quote of the Day – February 27, 2024
Sabrina Salvati: Quote of the Day – January 2, 2024
Christmas 2023 – Reflections, Activism, Art, and Celebrations
Jehad Abusalim: Quote of the Day – December 8, 2023
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Quote of the Day – November 2, 2023
In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
Prayer of the Week – October 16, 2023
Something to Think About – October 12, 2023
Eric Levitz: Quote of the Day – October 11, 2023
Phyllis Bennis: “If We Are Serious About Ending This Spiraling Violence, We Need to Look at Root Causes”
“Nothing About Today is ‘Unprovoked’”
“The Mistreatment and Discrimination Against Palestinians Is Not Unprecedented. It’s Baked Into the Foundation of the Political System in Israel”
Progressive Perspectives on the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian “Nightmare” (2021)
Something to Think About – July 29, 2018
Noura Erakat: Quote of the Day – May 15, 2018
For Some Jews, Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians is Yet Another Jewish Tragedy
Remembering the Six-Day War and Its Ongoing Aftermath
David Norris: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2014

Image: A dove flies over the debris of houses destroyed by Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip – October 11, 2023. (Photo: Reuters)


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