Mazin Qumsiyeh returns to RevolutionZ to further explore the causes, the toll, the consequences, and the lessons of Israel's barbaric assault on Palestinians, including genocidal acts intended, broadcast live, celebrated, and made possible by U.S., UK, and Gerrman support though particularly by the complicit U.S. including the vile role of AIPAC -- but also to marvel at Palestinian resistance and the unprecedentedly fast and passionate U.S. public and particularly youthful pro-Palestinian activism.
Mazin Qumsiyeh returns to RevolutionZ to further explore the causes, the toll, the consequences, and the lessons of Israel's barbaric assault on Palestinians, including genocidal acts intended, broadcast live, celebrated, and made possible by U.S., UK, and Gerrman support though particularly by the complicit U.S. including the vile role of AIPAC -- but also to marvel at Palestinian resistance and the unprecedentedly fast and passionate U.S. public and particularly youthful pro-Palestinian activism.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This will be our 266th consecutive episode and this time our guest is Maison Komsaya, who was with us as well eight weeks ago. Maison previously served at US universities, including Tennessee, duke and Yale. He is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University. He has published over 180 scientific papers, over 30 book chapters, hundreds of articles and several books, including sharing the land of Canaan and popular resistance in Palestine. On topics ranging from cultural heritage to human rights, to biodiversity conservation to cancer.
Speaker 1:Maison gets around. He always saw a number of projects, ranging from formulating the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan to empowerment projects with farmers, women and children that he benefited, that benefited tens of thousands. He is Laureate of the Paul K Fierroben Foundation Award and the Takrem Award, among others, and he has been providing a wide circle of people and organizations remarkable coverage of the events in Gaza. So it is a pleasure and also an honor to welcome you back, maison, to Revolution Z.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me, michael.
Speaker 1:Perhaps we should start with, I guess, a kind of overview, summary statement of how you see things now in Gaza. But I have to say I think the Revolution Z audience likely knows what is going on the basics. Even here in the US, you have to make an effort to be oblivious to not know, and such people are not listening to Revolution Z. So perhaps after that summary, we will be able to move on to my asking about issues for which there is less clarity why is it happening? And, still more so, things that have surprised you, things that have been unexpected, things being done about it which, in its passion and scope, has been to me surprising, albeit not yet enough, and what to do about it. So OK, maison, if you can just give us a summary overview of basically the last two months since I had you on last time, as to what's been happening.
Speaker 2:Well, since we spoke, basically the number of civilians killed by Israel has tripled since that time. It's still in the range of between 200 to 500 civilians being killed daily in Gaza. Total number of civilians killed so far is about 25000. Most of them are children. Nearly half of them are children. And then there was there's another 63000 who are injured and another 8000 under the rubble. So in total we have about 105000 casualties of this genocide in Gaza, and these people represent about 3.2 percent of the population of Gaza. So that's equivalent to killing 11.3 million Americans. I repeat, it's equivalent to killing 11.3 million Americans.
Speaker 2:Most of Gaza has been devastated. The Gaza Strip is a small strip of land with 2.3 million people and 70 percent of the buildings have been destroyed. And Israel continues to destroy and basically Bobbi Trapp and bomb buildings. They want to make Gaza uninhabitable. And even today I received from one Zionist message that says we're also destroying the soil and so that it will never be inhabited again. So this is what's happening on the ground in Gaza, but of course, not all the pictures in Gaza.
Speaker 2:There's skirmishes on the northern parts of Palestine and the Lebanese border, with Hezbollah and Israel trading shots. There is the US and British attacks on Yemen to protect Israel, basically because Yemen says that it's international obligations when there is genocide to intervene. So they are stopping Israeli ships coming through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. So the US and Britain basically declared war on Yemen and is bombing Yemen over 140 so far on various targets in Yemen. And then there's some skirmishes in Iraq and Syria where American bases, illegal bases in those countries, military bases have come under fire from some resistance forces. This is, in brief, what's happening on the political and social fronts here and we can talk more about this.
Speaker 2:In Gaza, I may add, one thing I've been working on is the destruction of the educational system. All the universities have been targeted destruction. Now 650,000 students have been without going to school for three and a half months School students, university students, etc. It's devastating the educational system. There's an attack on the healthcare system. Most of the 36 hospitals in Gaza have been rendered out of service, so there's no medical services for the injured and many of them are dying from festering wounds etc. There are some conditions. They have to amputate legs without anesthesia and arms Over 1100 children so far have had their limbs amputated without anesthesia because of the lack of medical facilities and using primitive things like kitchen knives and things like that.
Speaker 1:I think it's hard to comprehend at some level. And yet people have heard what's going on and people have access to information about what's going on. But what's surprising? What are some things that even took you by surprise, If nothing did. I'll tell you what took me by surprise.
Speaker 2:What is most surprising to me is that here we are, 110 days after the Israeli onslaught, and the Israeli army cannot. It's the fifth strongest army in the world, supported by the first strongest army in the world, that's the United States with direct munitions and so forth, and they cannot so-called win over the guerrilla forces in Gaza. To me, this surprised me. I mean, there's only a few thousand Islamic resistance fighters in Gaza and the Israeli army is losing badly to them in direct confrontations. Israel actually withdrew some brigades from Gaza and the resistance fighters are showing images of targeting Israeli soldiers and tanks regularly. And Israel doesn't seem to be good at street warfare or fighting guerrilla force. All they seem to be good at is bombing civilians from the air, which I think is a good tactic to force a surrender. They use the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the example of carpet bombing of Dresden, that it's okay to bomb civilians, to force a surrender on the enemies, so to speak. But those were country to country fighting here were not a country. You know were not. There's no Israel and Palestine fighting each other as countries. There is Israel on top of Palestine, a colonizing power, sort of like Native Americans and European colonizers fighting each other. You cannot consider those to be equivalent in any sense of the word, like Germany, nazi Germany and allies or something, or Japan and the US. So it's a very different equation.
Speaker 2:What surprised me again is the resilience of the Palestinian people in Gaza and while starvation is now spreading and people are dying of hunger and thirst and lack of medical care, as I mentioned earlier, because Israel is blockading like a medieval siege of cities, that used to happen to starve them and force them to surrender. But they seem to be miscalculating and just yesterday I think was 24 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza as they were booby trapping, booby setting mines inside two buildings to blow them up. Because Israel wants to clear out Palestinian civilian buildings for one kilometer, almost a mile, deep into Gaza, clear all the residences, all the buildings in that strip of land and create what Israel calls a buffer zone. But of course this is against international law that you would destroy people's houses to create an illegal buffer zone deep into an area that you militarily occupy. The Geneva Conventions are clear about these things. So one aspect is this.
Speaker 2:The second aspect is that I think is kind of surprising is that, while the majority of the world public opinion is, with the Palestinian human rights and against Israeli genocide in Gaza, western governments continue plugging along as if nothing is happening. And not only plugging along and moving along, they are funding and supporting and arming Israel to commit more genocide. And that's why, since the last time we talked, there has been a case brought against Israel and the International Court of Justice by South Africa, now supported by over 50 countries, to try and bring Israel to bear responsibility. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what will happen in that court case, but it's a quote unquote advisory opinion to the United Nations and when the United Nations received the advisory opinion from International Court of Justice, the United Nations body that is in charge of enforcement is the UN Security Council and at the UN Security Council, as you and your audience knows, the US has a veto power and has top previous resolutions that try to hold Israel to account or even call for a simple ceasefire.
Speaker 1:I want to ask you about some things that confuse me and probably confuse some people in the audience. It's from a different angle, obviously, where here you are there, and that may give you a better angle to understand these things that I, at least, don't understand. One of them is you know, we've seen vile behavior by nations, like what Israel is doing, although the scale is pretty amazing this time. But I think what we haven't seen is the leadership of a country, even the media of a country, not so much rationalizing what they're doing but virtually admitting to it and celebrating it. That was the thing that struck me most when the South Africans brought their case To get a case against genocide. You don't. It's insufficient. I'm not sure why, but it is insufficient to show the massacres, the, the actual effects and behavior and what it's doing to people. You have to also show that it's what was desired.
Speaker 1:You have to show that the leadership of the country, in this case Israel, is doing what it is setting out to do and intended to do, and that's very often and almost impossible to show, because of course, the leaders don't say well, we're doing this to destroy these people, we're doing this to route these people from the area that they're in, we're, etc. Etc. But the Israelis do say it. The Israelis literally say you know, it's not, it's not a narrow sector of the population of Gaza that we're fighting with, it's the whole population of Gaza. It's not, you know, military targets that we're targeting. It's the whole damn country that we're targeting. It's everything as you described, and you don't have to for genocide. You have to not only show that they're targeting everything, but that they want to target everything and that it's their policy. And the Israelis admit to it. I have to admit I'm surprised by that.
Speaker 2:This is very unusual in history of genocide. I mean, let's be clear human history is a pathetic history of genocide after genocide after genocide. Just in the past few hundred years, we have had over 300 genocides, an average of one genocide per three years, including genocide of, you know, the French and Algeria, or the Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia, or in Iraq, or in Yemen, or in Syria, or in Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide, or the genocide of Jews and Gypsies, etc. In Second World War. We have had a very bloody history as a species, but you are absolutely right that it is shocking. Most of the perpetrators of previous genocides were not proud of it. They, they tried to hide it, you know, they tried to be careful with their language. But this one is very unusual in that the every leading Zionist has basically proudly proclaimed what they are doing. You know, the president of the state of Israel says there are no civilians in Gaza. Everybody is game, game is target. The prime minister himself and Netanyahu invoked a Malik, which is a Bible story that says that God told the ancient Hebrews to go ahead and kill every man, woman, child, even beast. Cut every tree. Don't leave anything behind. He said this to his soldiers, who then proceeded to do this and repeat the story of a Malik. So you know, when you have the minister of defense who says we have to cut water, electric, we will cut water, electricity, food, fuel, everything to these people, because we're not dealing with humans, we're dealing with human animals. Again, very unusual. Even at the times of the Nazis, I've never heard such language being spoken by Nazi propagandists or Nazi leaders. So so this is very, very unusual.
Speaker 2:But I might add two more other peculiar features of this genocide. One is that it's being broadcast live. Previous genocides did not have that. They happen and people may got the story about it my life massacre, you know it was a brave American reporter who broke it out, things like that. But it was unusual for things to get out, so to speak, to information. But in this case everybody has iPhones and cameras and phones and they are recording and they are broadcasting on the internet live. They.
Speaker 2:Even there are cases where Gaza civilians were broadcasting their own murder, basically by Israelis. I mean I could show you hundreds of videotapes like this. So so this is a very unusual feature. Again, didn't happen in previous genocides. They. The third kind of unusual thing about this genocide is the genocide carried out, for example, by the Japanese and Nanking, or by the Germans and the concentration camps were carried out by that country without the direct support from other countries. This one is very unusual in that there are a bunch of countries, their governments, are not only egging it on and saying go for it, they are actually supplying the weapons and the resources to do it, like the United States sending 2,000 ton bombs to Israel. I mean, the only reason you would. 2,000 pound, I'm sorry, bombs that that flattens whole neighborhoods, you know whole block, flattens it down. That cannot be for fighting a resistance force.
Speaker 2:That is for genocide and they know it when they supply white phosphorus, when they supply the F-35s, when they supply all the tools of the genocide needed by those, by those committing it, by more than one country the United States, a UK, germany, germany is egging them on and giving them weapons. Some other countries in Europe. This is also very unusual in world history to have several foreign governments being full partners in the crime of genocide.
Speaker 1:Yeah, during the Vietnam War in the United States you couldn't get these kinds of statements and you obviously didn't have, and the United States didn't need that kind of external aid. But there was one quote that came out and it was Kissinger anything that flies on, everything that moves For me that has been so basically bomb everything, destroy everything. That was a clear statement, but it wasn't out in the press and it wasn't. You know, kissinger didn't give up and give a press conference about it. It just sort of found its way into visibility.
Speaker 1:There's another thing I want to come back to, why everybody is doing what they're doing. But first, another thing that I at least find surprising and it's sad that I find it surprising or that anybody would, but I do which is the speed with which, and the passion with which a degree of support for Palestine has emerged in the US and I'm not up on every place else, but in the US, as much as it should be the whole population and isn't so the sadness of it, young people have exhibited support for passionate support, for militant support for Palestine at a pace, you know, with a speed that is much, much greater, faster than emerged for Vietnam and Indochina. I mean, people don't realize that, I think, but it's quite true, and you also see acts that we weren't able to pull off then being pulled off now. Blockading a bridge is one thing, blockading five bridges at a time, simultaneously, is another thing.
Speaker 1:Cities voting in favor of a ceasefire is actually quite remarkable, and it brings up one of the questions that you raised. If a city council can do that, if a student body can do that, what's the impediment that prevents Biden, or the incentive that prevents Biden, from going with the public stance? Or, at a smaller scale, that's the impediment that prevents all but a very few university administrations from following their student bodies. What is it that causes at the level and this is what you raised at the level of governments or of powerful authorities, what is it that causes them to align with Israel against Palestine?
Speaker 1:And it's just a self-evidently disgusting massacre for which they don't seem to have a lot of benefits. That is, those leaders. What is Biden? What is the United States getting out of this? It almost seems to be counterproductive for the United States, and yet we go on and support it.
Speaker 2:You raised a very, very important question and indeed this support of genocide is not to the best interest even of American imperial interests in the Middle East.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem to be.
Speaker 2:They're losing friends left and right. They're losing allies. Even Arab dictatorships that are basically puppets of the United States are starting to distance themselves. Saudi Arabia is now having talks with Iran, mediated by China and so on. So why is there? Well, let me put it this way when we worked against apartheid in South Africa, which was engaged in massacres and so forth, there was not a very strong pro-apartheid Africana lobby in Washington DC or in Western governments that was very powerful. We do have such a lobby. It's called the Zionist lobby, apec and people around APEC. Apec is a coalition of hundreds of organizations that support the Zion, so there is a lobby. That's an important point.
Speaker 2:The second point to make what does this lobby do? There's two things it does. One is bribe and second is blackmail. The BBs I call them Bribe and blackmail Bribe. It's understandable. If you look at voting in Congress, even for simple ceasefire, you see that the highest recipient of lobby money are usually the most outspoken supporters of Israel. It's about money. But the second is the blackmail, and this is something people don't appreciate very much.
Speaker 2:When the Zionist blackmailed the Swiss banks, basically claiming that Swiss banks had hoarded money and the Swiss banks wanted to just simply repay any money that was held by Jews or anybody else. If they wanted, come get it, show us the documents, we'll get it. And of course, switzerland was neutral in the Second World War, so of course they had bank accounts for Germans, for Japanese, for Americans, for everybody. It was a big banking industry in Switzerland. Zionist blackmailed this banking industry, got billions out of it, did not give any money to the Holocaust survivors, and some Holocaust survivors, like Norman Finkelstein, were very, very upset about these situations, since his parents are both Holocaust survivors. They got nothing, while the Zionists got the money from Germany and others. But anyway, what is blackmail? Blackmail is done via ability to destroy people in the media.
Speaker 2:If you remember, when Bernie Sanders was running for the last election, he was ahead of Joe Biden by miles in all the primaries and everything else. Joe Biden would not have been elected. There's no way that he could have been elected if it were not for this Zionist lobbyist that didn't like Bernie Sanders, even though Bernie Sanders is Jewish. They just didn't like him because he spoke for some aspects of Palestinian human rights, even though he himself now didn't call for a ceasefire, and we are upset with who did this. Many of us supported him, but anyways, they wanted Joe Biden because he's had them as Zionists. Now why is he a Zionist?
Speaker 2:I don't think it just has to do with money. I think it has to do with also blackmail and check out. People need to check out the stories of Jeffrey Epstein and Gisella whatever Maxwell is girlfriend and what he was doing was, with his girlfriend, bringing young girls and others, sometimes teenagers, to powerful politicians. And he is you know, in my humble opinion and the evidence is overwhelming on some aspects of this that he was working for the Mossad, was working for the Israelis and was videotaping a lot of these things and using them Israelis, using them to blackmail these politicians. Like Donald Trump with his philandering, like Joe Biden with his philandering and with young children. He likes children. This is what they use against politicians and against business people. They use blackmail and blackmail works cheaper than direct funding. So they achieved this.
Speaker 2:Jeffrey Epstein supposedly quote unquote committed suicide in jail. I don't buy it. I think he was killed so that they don't. He doesn't spill the beans on his paymasters, basically. But things are coming out now and I think there will be more coming out soon on these aspects and this is part of the reason why our political system in the US is and I say that because I'm also a US citizen our political system is not fair. Then allow third parties is rigged so that they think the public thinks there's democracy, that we have to choose the lesser of two evils, either Trump or Biden in this case.
Speaker 1:Well, what can I say? I certainly agree with you about the US political system being biased as an understatement, but I'm not sure I buy what you're saying about Blackmail and Epstein and the rest of that. But regardless, there is something to explain. That is to say, and maybe we don't agree, maybe in time your explanation will rise and I can't offer a really good, strong explanation as an alternative. I find I can't. There are cracks appearing, significant cracks.
Speaker 1:There was an article in the Times I don't know whether you saw it and I wish I had brought it so I'd have it at my disposal here, but I didn't About a week ago, 10 days ago a very, very strong article. It was strong enough so that it could have been written by somebody really good and maybe it was you know and that found its way in. And I was surprised by that too, just like I'm surprised by this happy about, but surprised by the speed at which young people have recognized what's going on and that they have something to say about it and to contribute to trying to stop it. And, of course, the South African case is overwhelming, not just in presenting okay, this was done here, this was done there, this was done here this carnage. It's blood dripping all over. Not just that, but in showing that it was the aim, that it is policy, I mean, there's one observation I might make about some of these things.
Speaker 2:You know, when September 11 happened, you know how the US went. There was a group of neo-conservatives, rumsfeld and the group around him, who pushed for going after Iraq because Netanyahu had, you know, the project of New American Century and securing the realm and all this stuff. They had put the statement that we have to topple seven countries in seven years or something. Iraq has to be number one. Why? Because Saddam Hussein is against Israel. So they concocted this thing about weapons of mass destruction, all this stuff, so that they can topple Saddam Hussein. And actually there was a compromise. They weren't going to go to Afghanistan, it was just a compromise let's delay Iraq for a few months, go into Afghanistan, then we go to Iraq and then we can go to the rest of them Syria, yemen, libya which I did, by the way and Iran. They never got to Iran because there was a lot of resistance. But anyway, when they came up with these plans and they went and did literally genocide in, you know they remember Shakh and O and Iraq and all this stuff and they were leakage. I mean, that's why you know people who leaked Wiki leaks, leaks the documents and the videos showing American targeting of civilians, et cetera.
Speaker 2:But you see, in the after October 7th and I really paid attention to what the US was saying and one of the things the US administration said to Israel in private and even leaked a little bit in public here's what they said we just hope you don't do the mistakes we did after September 11th. It's a kind of coded message. What is the mistake we did after September 11th? It wasn't a mistake, it was deliberate. You know destruction of countries that we did after September 11th People have nothing to do with it. You know Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, you know, was an enemy of Saddam Hussein. He was hunting them in Iraq. So why do you go after Iraq? It was intentional to go after these countries and destroy their people and create division and Shia and Sunni and all the stuff that the US did.
Speaker 2:But anyway, my point about it is obviously, if this was a kind advice from a friend a friend in the sense of a partner in crime between the US and Israel, the US advising Israel just be careful, you know how you go about doing this If this was a friendly advice, certainly Israel will listen to this advice and in my opinion, this was suicidal for Israel not just genocidal but suicidal, and I don't say this slightly. I think this may be the end of Zionism and the end of Israel. This genocide we can talk more about that if you want. But my point about this is that Israel not only did not listen, they went overboard, even more than what the Americans did in Iraq. To my knowledge, the Americans never bombed hospitals in Iraq, never bombed universities in Iraq, never besieged Baghdad and caused starvation of people in Iraq. This is very, very unusual for the Israelis to go this far, and they argue. Even some of the people I dialogue with Zionists they argue well, you have to excuse us.
Speaker 2:October 7 made us go crazy. We were just doing this nutty thing. No, I mean, I think governments are not excused. People may be excused for overreacting individuals, but governments are not excused for committing genocide as an overreaction. They're not supposed to be emotional, disturbed people that just go lash out. And in any case, lashing out for perceived wrongdoing is not an acceptable excuse at the International Court of Justice or when you are trying genocides.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a case can be made, I think, that the foremost organizer of anti-Semitism in the world is the Israeli government, on a scale that is unprecedented. I think that's arguably true. I mean, it shouldn't be in some sense? I don't think that the response to what the Israeli government is doing should yield an attitude toward all Jewish people. On the other hand, it's very understandable why it does and how it does, and that's another ugly side to this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if I may add to this, the problem also that faces many decent Jews around the world is that this government, the Israeli government, was created supposedly representing Jews and keeps advertising itself as representing Jews, and that any Jew who is outside of this tribe is self-fating, or if he or she does not support Israel, lock and barrel, as I say, then they are outside the tribe.
Speaker 2:We represent Judaism. This is number one. Number two is they use the symbols of Judaism and all their activities. When they bomb refugee camps from F-35s, they are painted with the Star of David or they have menores on them and things like that. That's number two. Number three is when they blanket anybody who opposes Israel as either self-hating Jew or anti-Semite, or they start dredging up the Holocaust and this is a Holocaust for us and all of this stuff, this, actually these three points is what increases anti-Semitism. And so I think you are right, and many decent Jews who wrote about these subjects, like Elan Papi and Norman Finkelstein and others, said Zionism in Israel is the largest perpetrators of anti-Semitism in the world today, and I think that's correct. We have to, and that's why, when you mentioned they, for example, closing five bridges, who closed the five bridges? It was not by Jews. Jewish voice for peace.
Speaker 2:So there are Jews, decent Jews, who are working for human rights. And what the Zionists say about them? They are traitors traitors to whom. You know, traitors to Judaism. That's what they say. The. Zionists say this yeah, so it.
Speaker 1:About the.
Speaker 2:Turekarta. They say that these are traitors to Judaism. These are the most orthodox Jews out there, you know.
Speaker 1:So, in a sense, I'm Jewish and they're saying to me look, you're either pro-Zionism and pro-Jewish, or you're critical of Zionism in Israel, in which case you're an anti-Semite. So now I have a choice. Right, I have a choice. I can either be against genocide, be against gargantuan crimes against humanity, or I can be pro-Jewish. That's what they're saying, and when you say that to people and you give them that as a choice, a lot of people are gonna say, well, all right, you know, I guess, if you define things that way, I have to choose being against Zionism, even at the expense of being considered or even sort of feeling myself, because you pile it on me over and over again, to be critical of Judaism and Jews. It's a remarkable kind of an arrangement.
Speaker 2:I don't know what to call it. It's a very dangerous thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but I still am surprised. I mean, I'm an old guy and I was around for the 60s and I was around for all that stuff, and I'm telling you that the speed with which support for Palestinians on campuses and among young people has arisen in the United States and the passion with which people express it and feel it is quite remarkable. It really is quite remarkable, and so that's a good sign.
Speaker 2:That's a good aspect also, because that's a positive side. The positive side is that Jews, christian Muslims, bahá'id, druze, atheists, people of various backgrounds, people of various ethnicities, people from various nationalities and countries are coming together and saying this is ridiculous and this should not be allowed in the first quarter with 21st century, to have such genocide and such mass slaughter of people in front of the world. So they mobilize. And why? Young people in particular? Young people, are more able to get information through the social media, whereas older generation, less tech savvy like me, watch on the news, tv et cetera, but the TV and the news is as you see and see and then, and Fox News and things like that, they don't show you and unless you can understand Arabic and watch and just hear or may I be in to see live footage you're not going to get that live footage. So the young people have access to live footage because they have Instagram, telegram, facebook, tiktoks, ex previously Twitter. They have this information available to them, so you cannot hide it from them.
Speaker 1:And I think that's why there's mobilization. That's part of it, but I don't think it's all of it. I mean it's young instead of older, because young is different than older. Young is less jaded, has compromised fewer times, if at all, can be shocked, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are various factors, but still the scale of it is quite remarkable, I think, and promising the part of it that gets me and this was true back for Vietnam too, the Vietnamese incredible resistance you could attribute to that, rightfully having their sacrifice produced in some sense, the 60s. Their sacrifice produced a remarkable outpouring which then spread into all sorts of dimensions, and now the Palestinians are doing that. The Palestine's sacrifice, it's horror, is hopefully awakening, prodding, guilting, whatever you wanna call it, a swath of humanity into being human, and it's just a shame that people have to suffer so much to have such a positive effect.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, I mean I think we are at the turning point for humanity, for several reasons I think, after the horrors of the Second World War, not just the Nazis again, like the Japanese in China, et cetera, and the Philippines and so forth.
Speaker 1:And America all over the place.
Speaker 2:And also the American using of nuclear bombs, et cetera. The world started to say how are we going to prevent such wars in the future? So they set up international bodies in the UN and so forth. The problem is it was a compromise and it was rigged a little bit because, as I said, the five great powers, the five great powers, basically you can cut. I presume this.
Speaker 1:That's all right.
Speaker 2:So give me a minute here.
Speaker 1:Take your time.
Speaker 2:So the five great powers left for themselves the winners of the Second World War, including the US, china, france, england. They set for themselves that they are kind of guardians and have a veto power on the other countries. So, even if 190 countries want one thing and the US wants another thing, the US wins because it has this veto power. So there's no democracy, if you want, in this sense, and this is one of the problems that faced us in the current affair and why we got to this stage. In my humble opinion and that's why, also, between 1945 and today we are in 2024, we have had in those 70, some years or 80 years, we have had a lot of massacres, a lot of genocides, a lot of wars, and that this international body were not able to deal with them. Now, why do I say that this one might be a game changer and force a change in the international order?
Speaker 2:Part of it is that there's a 1900s see, when early 1900s and up to 1950, the US represented like 40% of the world economy. It was dominant over the other countries. Now the US has started to decline, and started to decline, in my opinion, right after the Vietnam War and the withdrawal from Vietnam, and then this was followed by withdrawals from other countries like Lebanon, afghanistan, et cetera. Even though the US still retains a huge military power, 1,100 bases in something like 140 countries, their economy is now less than 24% of the world economy, and China, which in 1980 was two or 3% of the world economy, is now 18% of the world economy. So there's a shift in power, you know, and there's a unilateral world that's now dissolving into a multilateral world. Such transitions in world history are always associated with a lot of pain, and sometimes this pain can be very catastrophic, like what's happening in the Middle East and Western Asia today. I'm sure there will be a regional war, followed perhaps by another world war, because transitions in power are not always smooth.
Speaker 2:It's still there's still a possibility of a smoother transition if the US. There is enough in the US public that pressures this government to allow a smoother transition. But somehow I think that's not in the cards and I think the US probably will continue down the path of supporting genocide and more destruction in our region, in the world.
Speaker 1:The South African case is, I think, a cutting-edge moment, I guess you could call it. If the court and the UN do impose the short-term policies that the case demands and generates a ceasefire and so on, that's one thing and obviously positive, incredibly positive. But if it doesn't, if it it's not the whole case, because the whole case could take years, but the short-run demands of the case, if those are ignored or ridiculed, as you know, not warranted, that may be the end of international law. You know, it's a situation where the law itself, international law itself, is what's really on trial in that case, or at least it's on trial along with Israel, and that's worrisome on the one side. But also it yields the hope that it will be vastly strengthened by a sensible choice on the other side.
Speaker 2:No, I think you are precise in your diagnosis. We have two roads to take. I hope that the positive road of international law actually plays out and that it is not down to might makes right, because if it goes down, might makes right, by the way, also the US and and also is raised with loose, because you know countries around like Iran and Syria and Lebanon, other countries are going to see that all this talk about UN and international law is a waste of time and let's go ahead and develop our nuclear weapons, let's go ahead and do what they do and proceed down that line. And I think that's the danger of this second road, that I hope will not happen. But I, as a scientist, I say I give it 50, 50 chance.
Speaker 1:Oh, we'll see.
Speaker 1:There are two other questions I want to ask and I don't know. You know I'm asking you because I'm talking to you. I mean I can't pick you out as a, as a I'm not sure there is a person who specifically should be asked these questions. But the first question is about the Israeli population, the. The extent of it certainly isn't universal. I mean, there is resistance inside Israel, there is opposition, there is heartfelt concern, but the extent of the support for what's going on, that also in some ways surprises me, because it's just so.
Speaker 1:When you hear that I don't know 150, however many doctors responded to the attacks on the, on the the first, you know the big hospital where we're supposed to be a Hamas center underneath it, and literally wrote an open letter saying bomb it, bomb the hospital, bomb it with everybody in it, bomb it and kill them all. And that was 150 doctors, something like that. And when you see videos of children dancing to lyrics that say kill them all, it's very disturbing, to say the least. And you know, look, I know that there's propaganda, I know that there is images over and over again, but I also know that right now in Israel there are images that are pretty honest, that are saying this is what we're doing celebrate, and it seems like there should be more dissent it's very, very hard to do dissent within a colonial mindset.
Speaker 2:I'm sure in the European colonizers who went to North America and destroyed so many nations, including with genocides etc, I'm sure there were dissenters among them, a small minority who said let's be nice to those people, but the logic of colonization is so overwhelming. How are you going to have a United States of America if you did not commit the genocide? And so they had to educate the children about the savages of the natives, how they are barbarians, how they scalp men, woman and children. They had to give all that propaganda to their people. And I'm just describing things again as scientists, amateur anthropologists, not as a wishful thinking or what I desire. But again, it doesn't mean that there aren't any people like that and that they're not important there. They are important. Actually, when I was arrested, you know, detained by the Israeli army many times after times I was arrested or detained there were Israeli Jews who were with me, who were standing up for bulldozers and Israeli military trying to protect the tree or a house from being demolished. So this is important. It's important also in, in essence, to challenge the mythology that we talked about earlier that Israel represents all Jews, that Israel is a democracy that Israel is. You know that anybody who's against Israel is is anti-Jewish, you know. This is why it's important. I think you know, even symbolically it's important, but on every level it's important because there are people with the conscience and it, for many Palestinians and for many people also here, it's important not to fall into the Zionist trap.
Speaker 2:The Zionists want this to be a religious war. They want this to be a civil, as Netanyahu said. It's a clash of civilization that we have to win. This for Europe, for, for modern democracies, it's a clash of civil. Sorry, it's not a clash of civilization, but if you try to keep it like this and try to push it like that, sorry, but your civilization will be the one that goes extinct, not the other one, you know, but it's.
Speaker 2:It's crazy, you know, and and I think the presence of people, of decent people, from all religions, as I said, especially Jews, who speak out, pulls the rug from under this theory about the clash of civilization and, and it doesn't allow, and we do have extremists, of course, among Palestinians, among Muslims, among Christians, among whoever it pulls the rug from those extremists, because there are extremist Muslims who also can say well, it's, you know if they say it's a clash of civilization yes, it's Islam versus Judaism well, it's becomes harder for them when they see you know decent Jews, you know occupying Congress or Grand Central Station, working for Palestinian human rights, for ceasefire, etc. It pulls the rug from under all extremist ideologies, whether they are Jewish or Muslim or Christian or whatever all right.
Speaker 1:Well, we're almost exactly at an hour. If you have something else that you want to say to the audience, we could certainly do that. Is there anything that we've missed and that you want to bring up our address very briefly.
Speaker 2:As George Bush once said, after September 11, go shopping. You know he's evil and what he has done to Iraq. We need to do the opposite. We need to not shop. We need to boycott the vestments sanctions, just like we did with South Africa. The people need to act because governments are not acting. So I encourage everybody in the audience to look up bbsmovementnet, the website of the boycott campaign, and if you want to reach out to me, you can reach out to me at our website. Info at PalestineNatureorg PalestineNatureOneWorldorg.
Speaker 1:Thank you yeah, let me just add, I think the revolution Z audience, like I said at the outset, is probably, you know, all on the right side, all on the left side, all on Palestine side on this issue.
Speaker 1:But I suspect that lots and lots of them deal with other people, family members, people they go to school with, people they work with, who are not, who are still ignorant of the degree of what's going on and still just sort of knowing it's there but paying no real attention and not infuriated by it, not aroused by it.
Speaker 1:And I should tell you that if you look up Maison site, if you look up your site listeners, you will find lots of information there and you might be sort of prone to skip over it because you're broadly aware, but the information that he, you, maison, presents is very, very useful in getting the truth to people who are basically ignoring it or even hiding from it or sort of vaguely hearing it but not having it get into them and influence their choices. So I would second the you know, the advice to take a look at that site and take a look at some of the details and then convey them to people who don't yet understand what's going on email me at info at Palestine natureorg and we'll put you on the mailing list.
Speaker 2:You get the weekly message with action items to do so love to stay in touch also thank you, that's given.
Speaker 1:Give him the email one more time and then we'll sign off it's info at Palestine natureorg. Palestine. What was the rate after?
Speaker 2:Palestine nature.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's Eure. Okay. Okay, I hope people will visit and thank you very much for being on again. Maison, I know you're under a lot of pressure and you're dealing with you're dealing with very hard times, so I really appreciate it. Thank you very much and that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.