Loading ...TRANSCRIPT: An Interview with Max Blumenthal on the One Year Anniversary of Israel's Attack on Gaza
GREENWALD: This is Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept, and my guest today is Max Blumenthal, who, among other things, is the author of a brand new book entitled The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Hey Max, thanks so much for taking the time to chat.
BLUMENTHAL: Great to be on with you, Glenn.
GREENWALD: Yeah, you too. So, the reason I wanted to talk to you isn’t just because you have this very powerful, but, to be perfectly honest, very kind of harrowing and depressing account of the Israeli attack on Gaza. It’s also because it is the one-year anniversary of that war.
And I wanted to begin by asking you this: My perception of the Israeli attack on Gaza, what the Israeli military calls “Operation Protective Edge,” is that the way that it was perceived and talked about and reported around the world was fundamentally different than prior Israeli attacks on Gaza, to the point where I think it actually changed perceptions of both Israel and Gaza in fairly fundamental ways.
And I wanted to begin by asking whether or not you agree with that, and whether you do or you don’t talk about how you think this latest war affected public opinion around the world about Israel, the occupation, and its relationship to Gazans.
BLUMENTHAL: I think that’s right, and there are two major factors in why that took place, and why we saw a real shift.
I think Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 promoted a real shift in opinion within the political left in the U.S. But during that war, we saw the Israeli government, the government press office which hands out credentials to journalists, bar all journalists from entering the Gaza Strip. And so journalists weren’t able, except for the Palestinian journalists who were living in the Gaza Strip, to actually witness the violence up close. And this is disproportionate violence targeting civilians in a way we had never seen before in the Gaza Strip.
This time, during Operation Protective Edge, unlike Cast Lead, we saw the Israeli government issue unprecedented amounts of credentials to journalists, including myself. And when the war began, as journalists were clustered around the Al Deira hotel in Gaza’s sea port, the Israeli navy, which has maintained this siege for six or seven years, about three kilometers out at sea, began lobbing a series of artillery shells at four boys who were affiliated with the main fishing family who are huge in the fishing industry in Gaza City, the Bakr boys. They were playing hide-and-go-seek on the beach in front of journalists who were hanging out at this hotel where most of the journalists stay whenever there’s a war, and their bodies were torn to shreds.
A friend of mine, Lazar Simeonov, was one of the journalists who rushed out of his apartment and caught these harrowing images on film of these really slender, small boys, with their bodies shredded apart, being carried to ambulances. And the intimacy of the violence shook these journalists who had always kind of reported on this as a conflict, and not as a disproportionate assault, or settler-colonial conquest. And I think they really saw what people on the Gaza Strip had been going through, and how the violence was affecting families, women, and children.
And this is the other factor: This war that Israel waged on the Gaza Strip this time was waged with unlimited violence. I mean, the full malevolent capacity of the Israeli military was brought down on the Gaza Strip. The AP found that over 850 people were killed at home, mostly at night, in their beds. And that nearly 90 percent of them were civilians. People being killed with 2,000-pound fragmentation bombs falling on apartment blocks containing over 30 or 40 people. Most of them were from single-family units. So, 89 families were wiped out of the civil registry during Operation Protective Edge.
And so journalists would come upon these scenes of entire families shredded to pieces the day after the attack. I spoke to one journalist when I was waiting for my credentials in Ramallah. He had just come out of Gaza. He had covered Iraq, he had covered Syria, and he said he had never seen anything like the carnage in the Gaza Strip when he arrived at the al-Batsh house. It’s a family called al-Batsh. The head of the household was the police chief in Gaza City. The Israeli military concluded he was a military target, targeted his family. I think 20 members of this family were killed, and this journalist said that he found fingers on the ground, arms dangling from trees, freshly charred flesh in the rubble.
So the journalist corps, the international media corps, was radicalized to a substantial degree by this attack. And Glenn, you did a really important job exposing NBC’s removal of Ayman Mohyeldin who was one of those journalists on the scene for the massacre of the Bakr boys and the killing of Salem Shammaly, this 19-year-old guy who was looking for his family in the rubble of Shuja’iyya and was executed on-camera by an Israeli sniper. Ayman was mysteriously removed – he was basically big-footed by Richard Engel.
So I think this was an important moment for online and independent media in pressuring the mainstream media to report more accurately on how disproportionate the Israeli violence on Gaza was. That this was, in fact, a massacre that took place over the course of 51 days.
GREENWALD: I mean, you cite a lot of evidence that actually comes from the IDF’s own estimate about the massive firepower they brought down on Gazans.
They fired tens of thousands of tank shells, artillery shells, mortars, missiles, bombs, I mean, massive firepower by any estimate. And I want to talk in a little bit about just the general steps that the Israelis took, if any, to avoid civilian casualties, because, of course, defenders of the Israeli government will say, “Look, in every conflict, civilians die, and it’s unfortunate, you know, the Israelis take more steps to protect civilians than other armies, including Hamas,” and I want to talk about those guidelines and those principles in a minute.
But the thing that struck me most about your book, and I think some people might be surprised by this, is it’s really free of any polemics. There’s no inflammatory tone. It seems to me that because you were on the ground in Gaza and you spent so much time talking to people who lived there, who were victims of the attack, that you felt like you wanted to get out of the way and let those stories speak for themselves. And you react as a reader in a much more visceral way than if you read a U.N. study or an AP report saying 900 women and children have been killed.
To really hear the stories in a straightforward, very factual way, really affects you as the reader. And I think that’s what makes your book more worth reading than anything else. But I wanted to ask you, personally, can you describe a little bit the odyssey of hearing and seeing the human suffering that was left by this Israeli attack?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, as you know, Glenn, I wrote a book, Goliath, about the Israel/Palestine crisis, tracing it back to its roots in 1947-1948, the Nakba, and bringing it to the present, outlining the sort of psychological character of Jewish-Israeli society and tracing the rise of the right wing government, so I’ve been covering this for a while. I mean, that book took me five years to write.
I had been unable to get into the Gaza Strip while working on that book. No matter how hard I tried. I waited for a month in Egypt to get in. And this war presented me with the first opportunity to get into the Gaza Strip. And for all I knew about the Israel-Palestine crisis, I was not prepared to come in to such intimate contact with so much human destruction. And to really come to grips with the fact that the Gaza Strip is an open-air prison, and it’s not hyperbolic to say so. We’re not just saying this for rhetorical effect.
In order to enter Gaza, you pass through the Erez terminal with your government press office credential, which means you’re one of very few people who can get in or get out. And you wander down a long corridor, which is a cage, and then you arrive at a metal door at a concrete wall. The metal door opens, it shuts behind you, and you’re inside what is effectively a walled-off ghetto.
You look down this endless wall, to your right, and you see a remote-controlled machine gun perched on the wall. That’s the spot and strike system, which is operated by an all-female unit of Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert, tens of kilometers away, by remote. And what they do is, they watch the buffer zone — this 300-[meter] area that Palestinians are forbidden from entering inside the Gaza Strip. And anyone who enters who they determine to be a “terrorist,” they eliminate with the push of a joystick button from a remote-controlled machine gun. It’s just that dystopian.
Then after you arrive at the passport control area in the Gaza Strip, which has been blown up by the Israeli military, you see tank treads that have torn up the road. And beyond that is Beit Hanoun. Beit Hanoun has been completely wiped off the face of the earth. Almost every building has been destroyed. And it’s not until you reach Gaza City in the soft heart of the Gaza Strip that you see actual urban areas that are still intact and functional.
When I arrived it was August 13th or 14th and it was the beginning of the first extended cease-fire, when families were returning from these squalid U.N. schools where they had been sheltering. This segment of Gazan society which consists of about 100,000 homeless people that are now referred to in Gaza as the “rubble people.” They decided it was better to just set up tents in front of the ruins of their homes in all of the border regions of Gaza, than to be in these shelters, because Israel kept attacking the shelters while they slept in the courtyards of these schools. Dozens of people were being killed in U.N. shelters.
So I got to interview people. I got unfettered access to people as they were just hanging around in the ruins of their homes. I got to hear the stories of their flight from Israeli assaults as artillery shells and missiles were raining down on their neighborhoods. I got to hear them describe to me the killings of their family members. This was what took place over the course of five days of this extended cease-fire.
What shook me the most was how well I was treated in the rubble. How after interviewing families who would tell me about witnessing their neighbors being destroyed by a missile, that they would beseech me to have lunch with them. I didn’t even know where the lunch would come from. They would chase me down after denouncing my government and insisting that the Obama administration was no better than Netanyahu, and hand me sweets, and tell me that they see a clear difference between the American people and the American government. I mean, that kind of treatment showed me how impeccable the character of these people was, even as they were facing their own immiseration and ruin.
That was kind of deceptive, because I started to adjust, in a weird way, to being in the rubble with these people. Then the bombing started again, and then I had to deal with the terror of night after night of bombings, and naval shelling throughout the day, and drones swooping closely overhead, searching for targets. And I became shell-shocked. So I couldn’t have even imagined going through 51 days of that, especially as a child under the age of seven.
We have to recognize that the Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. The majority of the people in the Gaza strip are under age 18, and a substantial percentage of those under 18 are under the age of seven, which means they have known nothing in their lives but these three atrocious wars, which have left almost 20 percent of the entire area of the Gaza Strip in ruins.
What’s on those children’s mind? What kind of lives can they have? Can they ever be normal as they go through life without therapy, without relief, without recourse and without justice, with continuous traumatic stress disorder? I can’t even imagine that as I sit here in Los Angeles, talking to you, what they’re going through.
Source: firstlook.org