The War on Iran Is About Palestine

Journalist, author, academic and editor of the news site The Palestine Chronicle, Ramzy Baroud discusses the connections between the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran, Israel's war in Lebanon and Israeli actions in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

Transcript

This Understanding Israel Palestine. I’m Margot Patterson, the producer of this week’s episode. We’ll be talking about what’s at the heart of the US-Israeli .war on Iran but first news.:

Humanitarian organizations are struggling for funds needed to mount a response to the wars in the Middle East.The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, estimates 3.2 million people inside Iran and 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced since the US and Israel attacked Iran Feb. 28. Te agency said operations across the region are dramatically underfunded, particularly in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. UNHCR was forced to cut 30 percent of its staff last year due to funding cuts stemming from the closure of the US agency for International Development. 

The Associated Press reports that least 10 Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank were injured Sunday night, March 22 as Israeli settler rampaged  through villages near Nablus. in the Occupied West Bank, setting cars and homes ablaze. The arson and assaults came a day after attacks were reported  on at least 6 other communities overnight. At least 5 Palestinians  were wounded in the overnight assaults which took place during the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. With attention focused on the Iran war, settler attacks in the West Bank have intensified and the Israeli government has pressed ahead with new settlements. The United Nations reported that as of March 15, 25 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers this year.. Nearly 700 Palestinians in 9 communities have been displaced by settler attacks so far in 2026.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has walked back criticism of Israel as an apartheid state made in early March in the podcast God Saves America. In a March 24 interview in Politico, Newsom said he was only referencing comments made by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. The governor said he opposes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu but  reveres Israel and is proud to support it.

The Israeli newspaperHaaretz reports an Israeli judge ruled that a Palestinian minor likely starved to death after he collapsed March 22nd in Israeli military detention.Israel never charged 17-year-old Walid Ahmad with any crime. His American cellmate said he and other boys detained in Meggide Prison begged guards for a doctor to see Ahmad but guards refused. An Israeli surgeon reviewing the autopsy report said Ahmad showed sighs of prolonged starvation alongside colitis and scabies.

My guest today is Palestinian journalist, historian, academic and author Dr. Ramzy Baroud. He's been an editor at Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye and is the chief editor of the news site, the Palestine Chronicle, which he founded in 1999. He holds a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. He is the author of eight books, several of them family memoirs, which relate Palestinian history through the experiences of individuals. His most recent book published just a month ago is Before The Flood, a Gaza Family Memoir across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine.

Ramzy Baroud, welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine. 

Thank you for having me. My pleasure. 

The Palestine Chronicle came across my radar screen rather recently. I'm wondering if you would share just a little about the Palestine Chronicle for people who may not be familiar with it, what it seeks to do and how you came to establish it.

Absolutely. And thank you for starting with this question because I think the role of the media right now, not just the media as a monolith but rather the identity of use behind the media and the ownership of the media, is particularly important. The Palestine Chronicles started in September, 1999. It was an individual effort at the time. Over the years, it evolved to become one of the largest independent media organizations in Palestine, anywhere in the world. Now with three different websites, part of a larger network. We have English, we have Italian and French and we have a very large audience that keeps growing all the time.

The reason behind this is that it's really turned out that only independent media can possibly have the chance to communicate Palestine to the rest of the world in a way that not only makes sense, but is honest and does not involve corporate interest. No matter how much we appeal to mainstream corporate media to tell the truth on Palestine, in fact, to tell the truth on any conflict in any war in the Middle East or in the global south, our efforts are usually futile. They fall in deaf ears simply because by definition, corporate media is there to serve the interest of corporations. Those of us working within the independent media sphere don't have that kind of corporate interest.

Therefore, the chances of us doing it more honest job in reporting the truth is a lot higher. But with the Palestine Chronicle in particular, there is something that is worthy of note and that is we position our reporting within the stories of ordinary Palestinians.

We imagine ourself telling the story from not only a Palestinian point of view in terms of politics and ideology, but the viewpoint of people living the genocide of Gaza, the apartheid of the West Bank, people who are struggling, fighting and dying for their cause.

And even within the independent media sphere, you're not gonna find that kind of take on journalism. We call what we do community journalism where a group of people, many of us are volunteers who have sustained this operation for many years with the ultimate hope of changing the conversation on Palestine and centering that conversation within the grasp of ordinary people in Palestine and beyond Palestine.

My second question is about your story. Your parents were refugees displaced from their homes by the 1948 war that led to the establishment of Israel. You grew up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and are now a US citizen. When, why and how did you come to live in this country? 

So I'm a Palestinian refugees one of seven, eight, 9 million Palestinian refugees scattered all over the world. Mostly in Palestine itself. Occupied Palestine, but also in many parts of the Middle East and the world. My story is unique to me, of course, but typical in many ways. It all starts with the nakba or the catastrophe, the original destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 that led to the exodus of Palestinians from their original historic homeland.

That's Palestine. After that exodus, as all of Palestine was essentially destroyed and occupied by newcomers, settlers from Europe and elsewhere paving the way for the state of Israel to be established. All the wars that happened since then, or the conflicts or the uprisings, all the story you hear and you read about in books and in the media is ultimately the outcome of that original starting point, the eradication and the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinian people in 1948.

My family comes from a small village called Beit Daras. That village was destroyed along with over 500 Palestinian villages in the Palestinian landscape that was destroyed by Israel. We ended up being in Gaza. We lived in a refugee camp in Gaza called Nusseirat. Most of that refugee camp has been destroyed along with 92% of all of Gaza during the Israeli genocide. I've lost over 110 members of my family during the genocide, but that number is not unique to me. Some Palestinians in Gaza lost even a higher number than this.

And how did you happen to come to live in this country?

It happened in the early 1990s. I was a student at the University of Birzeit  in the West Bank. It was during the first Palestinian Intifada starting in 1987, the first uprising. At the time there were travel restrictions between the West Bank and Gaza. Now it's no longer restrictions. It's complete closure. Palestinian students from Gaza and the West Bank were particularly the ones who paid the highest price for the cutoff between the West Bank and Gaza. And I was one of them. We were all active in politics, particularly against the Oslo charade and the attempt at co-opting the Palestinian leadership to completely let go of the rightful demands of the Palestinian people.

 I was in my early twenties. We were just kids, by the standards of my age today, when we were all rounded up by the Israeli military. Some of us were imprisoned in the West Bank and others were deported into Gaza. It was then that I realized that there was absolutely no way that I could finish my education in Palestine.

Eventually I managed to come to the States. When I came to the States, it realized the huge gap in understanding what is happening in Palestine by, ordinary Americans, not as a result of ill intentions really, but as a result of the complete hegemony that Israel and the Israeli narrative has on every mainstream outlet in the US with their media, cinema, academia and so forth and a new type of struggle started ever since of trying to educate the American public and eventually the global public on the reality of the situation in Palestine. But that identity that was shaped in the refugee camps on Gaza was, essentially the same identity that I still hold onto.

You mentioned the hegemony of the Israeli narrative in this country. Right now we're hearing little about what's going on in the Gaza Strip in the West Bank. But conditions in both places are dire, though not as ferociously as before the ceasefire in October. Palestinians in Gaza continue to be killed by Israeli airstrikes. 673 Palestinians have died since the ceasefire, and four more yesterday . In the West Bank, attacks on Palestinians by settlers and soldiers are escalating. An article published yesterday, March 18th, in The New York Times described a sexual assault on a shepherd in the West Bank with settlers binding and beating him, his wife and three daughters, his brother, father, and uncle, and an American human rights activist who was with them. The family's 400 sheep were stolen by the settlers. Do you view Israel's increasing attacks in the West Bank as facilitated by Israel's wars in Iran and Lebanon? How coordinated is all of this? Could you talk about the connections between these wars and Israel's conduct in Gaza and the West Bank?

That's a brilliant question really, because Israel always views all of its action as coordinated actions. Its measures in Lebanon, its attacks on Lebanese civilians and villages and infrastructure, is part and parcel of what's happening in Gaza. The Israelis themselves constantly speak about fighting at seven war fronts, which is ironic because in some of these supposed war fronts, for example, Syria, nobody is actually fighting back. They just keep attacking Syrian villages and towns and infrastructure and killing people and occupying more and more land and expanding without a single bullet ever fired back at them. Yet in their own thinking and dialectics, they still see this as a war front. Of course, the West Bank and Gaza are war fronts that have been open since the very start of the conflict and now there are attempts at using the space created for them, where the media is looking somewhere entirely different, to further facilitate their military plans in the West Bank. 

In the West Bank what Israel wants, ultimately they want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, at least from large swaths of the West Bank, particularly in an area called area C, which is the majority of the West Bank land, and push the population elsewhere. They always create these new plans to expand settlements, expand the apartheid wall, built on Palestinian lands, push people in various parts of the area in Bethlehem, Al-Khalil, Hebron, and other places, further west and so on. This has been happening for a very long time. It was accelerated during the genocide in Gaza, but it's now happening in the open with nobody talking about it because of the aggression against Iran.

And of course, the same situation in Gaza still unfolds. For example, the closure. Today they declared that they are going to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. I doubt that this is gonna happen. At least they made the statement that they could, might open it under certain conditions, but it was closed for nearly 20 days. This means that you have tens of thousands of wounded Palestinians who are in a place that has no shelters, let alone a truly functional medical system, who have not been able to leave Gaza to Egypt and other hospitals for treatment. So yes, Israel sees its war against the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen and everywhere else to be part of one comprehensive and cohesive military plan, because Israel has decided that this is an existential war. That existential war in Israel's mind requires carrying out genocides against innocent Palestinians in Gaza and ethnically cleansing Palestinians in various parts of the West Bank.

So you think that the war on Iran is essentially about Palestine and against Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian independence? 

Absolutely. In fact, I find it slightly unnerving and surprising when I hear people say enough with Iran. Now let's talk about what's happening in Palestine, not realizing that what is happening in Iran, the outcome of this war in Iran and in Lebanon and against the Palestinian,s will determine the geopolitical landscape that is going to determine in many ways the future of the Palestinians, including the outcome of the genocide in Gaza.

Let's not forget all of this is a result of what has been taking place in Gaza. If the international community took a courageous stance and told the U.S. enough is enough, if the Arabs actually used their economic largesse, their energy leverage in particular, and told the US that we will no longer support you or do business with you as long as you continue to facilitate the genocide of the Palestinians, I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu would have been emboldened enough to expand his wars and try to get the Arabs and other countries involved in his dirty wars, whether against Iran or against Lebanon. But the whole region is now paying the price of their cowardice, of their oneffectiveness and of their appeasement of Israel and the United States.

The outcome of this war on Iran could either embolden Israel to go ahead and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, or have to rethink its entire strategic program and find itsel,f perhaps, being pushed to, revisit this aggressive policy of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Can Palestinian resistance continue if Iran is defeated? 

The short answer yes,.I know exactly why you asked that question, and I appreciate that question, and I will elaborate on that. But in essence, resistance in Palestine will continue regardless. The resistance in Palestine started even before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It started in the 1920s, and it culminated in the major strike, one of the most historic civil disobedience acts ever recorded in the 20th century.

So early on in that general strike against British colonialism and the Zionist movement in 1936 and all the way to the Nakba and continued in numerous other forms until today, including cultural resistance, which in many ways is very connected and joint with armed resistance and other forms of resistance.

However, in recent years, Iran, as part of the access of resistance involving Hezbollah in Lebanon, involving Yemen and Ansarullah,, involving other groups, has created a larger platform for support for Palestinian resistance. Instead of Palestinians resisting alone, they are coordinating their resistance with larger strategies of other movements in the Middle East. That gave them leverage; it gave them strategic depth, which they have never had since the start of their resistance against Zionism and against the Israeli state.

Losing the access of resistance will have dire impact on Palestinian resistance and the nature of that resistance. Would it end it altogether? Absolutely not. Historically, we have learned that Palestinians will always resist. Now, Israel knows this. This is why their ultimate aims always end with “Let’s ethnically clean the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.” They've been talking about it openly, repeatedly. It is just part of the everyday political discourse of Israel now. And the Americans jumped on the opportunity. Jared Kushner and others, and even before the Trump administration, during the Biden administration, secretary Anthony Blinken spoke about the need to push the Palestinians into Egypt just temporarily, and he went to Egypt bargaining with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, with the hope that someone will take the Palestinians.

Even if occupied, even if living under apartheid, with the Palestinians in their land, they will continue to resist. So the shortest way to finalize the Israeli Zionist project is to push the Palestinians out altogether. Without Palestinians, there is no resistance. This is the Israeli calculation, because they know of the direct link between the people and the resistance. This is not about Hamas and Fatah. It's not about armed struggle . It's about the people.

Just a few days after Israel and United States attacked Iran, you wrote a column discussing the relationship between Palestinian resistance groups and Iran. You wrote that from the outset the Islamic Revolution saw the Palestinian cause as central to its regional vision, framing Israel as a colonial project, and Palestine as a symbol of global anti imperial struggle. 

That alignment gradually weakened, you went on to say, as the PLO pursued diplomatic engagement with Israel and United States, especially after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Iran opposed, viewing them as making, concessions to Israel without guaranteeing Palestinian rights. After that, Iran shifted its support to resistance groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Could you talk about Iran's relationship with those two groups, and especially with Hamas, which has recently endorsed Iran's right to retaliate against attack but asked it not to attack Gulf countries. 

Another good question because the mainstream media tries to present this issue as this, very basic idea that Iran supports Palestinian terrorism or terrorism across the region. But of course, it's not the case, and the issue is far more nuanced, even within the Palestinian discourse. The Islamic Jihad is the second largest Palestinian resistance groups in Palestine at the moment, with Fatah kind of being removed out of that equation, following the Oslo Accords, in 1993. That leaves the Islamic Jihad and leaves Hamas.

The Islamic Jihad is not a movement that was created in an entirely different political space and then later on try to find alliances in Iran. No, it was shaped around Iran, the Iranian revolution, and the Iranian political discourse that emerged after the revolution and the toppling of the Shah’s regime.

Hamas is far more complex. It is a Palestinian movement that was created in Gaza and initially was shaped by priorities similar to those of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Hamas was in a way a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine. That began changing over time, where Hamas began acquiring a greater degree of independence and began developing an independent foreign policy attitude and a national agenda that seemed gradually separate from the Muslim Brotherhood.

 I put it this way: if you listen to Hamas' statements and follow their political discourse in Palestine itself, it's a purely Palestinian movement that is really more nationalist than religious. But if you listen and read Hamas statements and follow their political discourse in the Middle East and outside, meaning in the diaspora, you are going to find that they are somewhat still rotating within that Muslim Brotherhood space. After the events in Egypt, particularly the overthrow of the Muhammed Morsi government by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the crushing of the various Muslim Brotherhood movements in Egypt and elsewhere, it seemed that Hamas reached a realization that they needed to decouple as much as possible from the Muslim Brotherhood and lead their own independent political agenda.

But of course, it's not so easy. This is really one of the biggest challenges that Hamas has had from the very start. On the one hand, they want to be seen as and they are a resistance movement against Israeli occupation and Zionism and Palestine itself. But on the other, they want to be part of some sort of a political agenda within the region because they do believe, like many Palestinians, that all of these issues are linked, that Palestine will not be liberated if Zionism remains empowered and powerful and expanding in the Middle East, that there has to be some sort of a regional solution or a regional fight. But because the region itself has been going through incredible changes, especially since the Arab Spring, starting in 2011, navigating that space for a small movement that has basically nothing in terms of a budget and very little political leverage over anyone, it has been quite difficult.

Syria was a devastating example of this reality where Hamas tried to stay away from the situation in Syria. Both sides were pushing Hamas to take a stance. Hamas took a stance. But the stance that they took backfired because it created a major conflict within the axis of resistance. It separated Hamas from Hezbollah, from Iran and from the Syrian government at the time. And if it were not for Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad, that played a very important role in bringing Hamas back to the fold, that schism would've stayed on for much longer. The genocide in Gaza brought the axis of resistance back together and reconciled all the differences. It's no longer about cliches and slogans and fiery speeches, we are talking about a shared fight to the very end by all of these groups.

But then the war on Iran started, forcing Iran to, carry out its threats of attacking U.S. military bases and economic assets, even in Gulf states, and I think that must have put some pressure on Hamas because Hamas in diaspora is based in countries like Qatar, for example, and Turkey that are, developing a certain political attitude that we want the war to stop, but we strongly condemn Iran for targeting our countries as well. So most likely that was an outcome of that pressure.

The mainstream media have talked a lot about the bad blood between Iran and the United States going back to the revolution in 1979 that held Americans hostages and brought the Islamic Republic to power,. How much of that history explains the U.S. decision to go to war with Iran? How much of it do you think has to do with Israel and the Israel lobby in this country, which has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for decades?

I definitely think that this is something related to Israel and the Israeli lobby. That doesn't mean that we should underestimate the relationship between the events of 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the direct assault on American dominance in the Middle East. The U.S. was the main supporter of the Shah, and they used the Shah and Iran at the time as a platform to expand on their hegemony in that region.  In fact, the equivalent of the FBI of Iran at the time was called the Savak. It was shaped around the Shabak, which is the Israeli internal intelligence agency. There were so many similarities. It was the same model created in Israel that was created in Iran. Since the toppling of the Shah, Israel misses its partners. They dominated the Middle East, and the American Empire lost a very powerful partner in that region. 

But things have changed so fundamentally since then; the world has shifted in so many different ways. And Iran actually, has been desperate in trying to be included in world affairs. Iran does not want to be marginal, does not want to be this isolated regime doing its own thing within its own borders. The Iranians have sent numerous messages to the Americans that we are ready to work together, but not based on a client regime status, but based on mutual respect. It's something that does not work very well for the Americans. Even before the start of this war, various news agencies reported that Iran has been offering American companies to come and to be part of the energy sector in Iran based on competitive prices and certain advantages to the Americans. So if this is really just about the oil, they were offering you their oil at a cheaper price than they were giving, their regular customers.

It's not about oil. It's a about strategic control. But that strategic control is now being fully defined by Israel and Israel alone. We saw Joe Kent the director of the US National Counter-Terrorism. Center, just quit, and made it very blunt in his resignation letter.. This is a guy who served 11 times in various American wars. This is a guy whose wife was actually killed by ISIS in Syria. This is not a lefty, is not a radical, socialist. He is part of the system and the military component of that system. And in his resignation letter, he says, I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. This is not our war. It's Israeli war.

This is definitely Israeli war, and it could potentially be the war that will teach  the American military and the American government that there are limits to military power and to fire power. There are certain limits, and those limits might now be discovered in the Strait of Hormuz as we speak.

How do you explain Western silence in the face of the US and Israel's illegal attacks on Iran? Not only silence, most Western governments actually condemned Iran, the victim of the attack. Could you talk about your understanding of the this silence, not only of Western governments, but Western media, most politicians and civil society groups as well? 

Yeah, absolutely. And especially civil society groups. International law is not relevant. I'm sorry to state that so bluntly. But this is a system that was created after World War II to preserve the privileges and the rights and the interests, economic, political, and military of those that prevailed as a result of the war. But for a while, there was some semblance of potential fairness because the balances of power that existed at the time seemed to open some space for smaller, weaker global south nations to create new alliances with the Soviet Union, with China, with other countries in the global south, particularly in South America.

But that doesn't exist anymore. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in the global order, the supremacy of the United States leading to the first Iraq war in 1990 and ’91, all the way to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. International law, though it may sound good on paper, is of no relevance to people in the global south because they could not negotiate any.. They have no allies, they have no supporters. They have no alternative political spheres in, in which they could orbit. And sadly, the Gaza genocide was the most extreme and tragic example of all of this. We have seen people burned alive. Live television. We've seen it with our own eyes. We have seen mass extermination.. We have seen people being massacred in mass in, hospitals like the Shifa Hospital or the Baptist Hospital in Gaza being put on mass graves. No accountability whatsoever. So that was the death of international law. It sounds good on paper. A lot of things sound good on paper,

Now in the case of Iran, again, we are still operating within that same international system. The genocide is still happening. Nothing fundamental has changed. Iran has greater allies, more leverage, economic control over Hormuz, geostrategic, but still not enough to allow others to be involved directly in their war. The international system is completely absent. Europe is staying out because they know Trump is being led by Netanyahu, who, is implementing the same doctrine of what they call constructive chaos. It's a doctrine that they have used repeatedly in the past. Europe doesn't want to be part of this mess, but If the war goes in favor of the US and Israel, and that is very unlikely, you are gonna start seeing more and more European interest in intervention, but only to be part of whatever geopolitical outcome that is going to favor them financially and economically in the future.

Is it that Western countries are just so weak that they don't want to buck the United States, or is there hostility against Iran?

I don't think it's hostility against Iran. In this kind of political and military conflicts, feelings and emotions really don't have much weight. They are going to do whatever it takes to serve their interests. And we know that they have done so before. In 2015 when the nuclear treaty was signed between the U.S. , European countries, the UN and Iran, they were very happy to do business with Iran. And they did. Money was being exchanged. Iranian oil and gas was flowing to Europe. Everything was great. And when Trump came and canceled that agreement in his first term in office, Europe was not happy about it at all. And they urged Trump to please reconsider, please rethink. We already have a good thing going here. Why are you ruining everything? But Trump got his way. And Europe lined up in total agreement with the United States, but why? He is the one who violated the the agreement, not Iran. So this shows you that the issue here is not really about general feelings of hostility. The problem is Europe itself.

The other thing is that majority of Europeans are against the war. And in the case of Spain, massive number of Spaniards are against the war. So British people are against, the Americans are against the war. So if this is really hostility against tIran, why are they European and Americans and Westerners in general saying no to the war?

When we were kids in universities studying political science, we were told that there is a term called client regimes. These are regimes like Bahrain and Jordan and these other Arab countries, other countries in the global south. And these are small countries that cannot defend themselves and they have to confine some bigger ally who would protect them with the promise that, they will have the ability to conduct their own business without interruptions. They can violate human rights as well, but that's okay. They don't have to rule through democratic means. That's okay. They don't have to respect international law, and that's fine because the U.S. doesn't care about any of these things as long as they do business according to American political dictates and economic interest.

We have also been told that Europe is a different category. Europe is not client regimes. Europe are partners. European countries are partners of the U.S. Maybe not the strong partner, maybe the junior partner, but still a partner. The last few years have proven that theory was wrong. I think it's always been wrong. It just hasn't been tested. Trump is the one who tested it.

Now someone would say, but wait a minute. In this particular case, they're not, meaning in the case of the war on Iran, and I think just because there is a global position that is against the war, even the Arabs themselves don't want to be involved, even though Iran is retaliating against their own interest or American military bases in their own countries. Very few countries want to be involved in this and that kind of emboldens even client regimes to say I totally support you. I don't think Iran should have nuclear anything. In fact, I support your regime change. I just don't want to be part of it. 

Last question for you. If you were going to boil it down to one thing , what would you like Americans to know about the situation that you think they don't?

I want Americans to understand that this whole idea that there is a civilizational fight here, there's  something that is structurally cultural at work between Palestinians Arabs, Muslims against them as people. It's completely false. It's a false narrative that was shaped by government propaganda, was shaped by Hollywood, by various mainstream understanding. In actuality, this is a fight for dignity. It's a fight for survival. It's a fight for our history, for our culture, for our identity, for the right not to be dominated.

I think that should be added to the human rights charter of the United Nations. The right not to be dominated, not to be subservient to anybody. The right not to be attacked and violated at any given point. Once these issues are secured, and I think more and more Americans are beginning to realize that this is really, is essentially about these issues, then I think we can always find rooms to overlap and to understand one another and to communicate with one another without necessarily having anyone drop bombs on any anyone else's home village or country. I hope more and more Americans are beginning to realize this. I think the Gaza genocide was a hugely eye-opening for many Americans, but I also hope that realization extends to what's happening in Iran.

It's not about women's rights because they have already killed hundreds of little girls in a school in Iran. It's not about human rights in general because you do not kill people in order for you to free them. And it's not about Israel's right to exist. Israel does exist. It's the existence of Israel's neighbors, including the Palestinians, that is at stake at the moment.

Ramzy Baroud, thank you so much for talking to us today. 

It's my pleasure. Thank you. 

That was Ramzy Baroud, journalist, author, academic and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. This is Understanding Israel Palestine.