Palestinian Perspective

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, Rami Khouri, Palestinian-American journalist and columnist with 50 years experience in the Middle East and a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. Among his recent articles, one in July on Al Jazeera called, Believe It or Not, Justice Will Prevail in Palestine. Rami, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rami Khouri: Thank you, Brian. I'm happy to be back and I'm glad to say that you're still dealing with these tough issues in a fair and reasonable way.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for saying so. First, as we began early on with Dan Goldman on the suffering among Israelis right now, how would you describe what civilians in Gaza are experiencing at this time?

Rami Khouri: Well, they're experiencing a total living hell. You can just turn on any social media and any-- The mainstream American TV don't cover it that well. MSNBC is a little bit better, but go to Jazeera English on the web and you can see much better coverage. It's just an extraordinary situation of 2.2 million Palestinians totally enclosed. They can't go anywhere. They're helpless. They don't have any real self-defense mechanism or shelters. The Israelis have the strongest army in the region. I think seventh strongest in the world.

They're unleashing massive attacks and destruction of homes and schools and hospitals. It happened before. It's just hard even to describe the intensity of the attack and the suffering. The intensity of the suffering is commensurate with the inability of this kind of action and this kind of tit-for-tat between Hamas and Israel to achieve anything other than to perpetuate this suffering, which has now been frightened seriously on the Israeli side for the first time with the Israeli suffering.

I think it's 800 or 900. I don't know what the exact figure is. This is extraordinarily important and also sad for the Israelis to have so many people killed. It does show the inevitability that this cycle will only expand. The thing the Israelis should appreciate is that the technical capabilities of Hamas and some of its allies will also keep increasing, which has happened steadily over the last few years.

The real question is what can be done? What should be done to break this cycle and find a way that the Israelis can live in a secure, accepted, peaceful state, which is majority Jewish as it is now with open borders and trade and tourism, et cetera, sharing water and living in a normal state in a normal region. The Palestinians can do the same thing, live in their own state, have a fair resolution of their refugeehood.

That can be negotiated according to international law with the Israelis. The Palestinians also must be able to have exactly the same rights. That has been a challenge that neither side has really been able to raise in the international arena's standards of priority issues. Therefore, we see what we see today, increased suffering of mostly civilians in Israel and in Palestine.

Brian Lehrer: Why, in your view, did Hamas launch this weekend's attacks at this time? Are there even policy goals? You probably heard the end of our conversation with Congressman Dan Goldman, who was saying that Hamas just continues to reject Israel's right to exist or exist as a Jewish state, not in the balanced two-state way that you were just laying out. I heard someone else on MSNBC refer to Hamas as nihilists in its philosophy. Are there even policy goals for this attack or how would you characterize it?

Rami Khouri: I couldn't tell you precisely because I'm not privy to what the Hamas people are thinking, but I can certainly tell you by closely analyzing Hamas's movement and events and positions over the last 30 years or since it came into being in the early '80s. I've met Hamas people and I've even been in meetings with some Hamas people and seminars and conferences and things like that. Same with Hezbollah. I've been 50 years in the region as a journalist and analyst, so I've met a lot of people on all sides.

It's very clear. It's clear beyond the doubt, certainly to most Palestinians, that the Hamas position is one that asserts resistance to Israeli policies, occupation, oppression, subjugation, et cetera, et cetera, and colonial expansion, which is still going on in the West Bank. Resistance is what they do. It's their name, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya. Hamas is short for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which is the Islamic resistance movement. The key word in their name is "resistance."

They will resist what has happened to the Palestinian people and to them in Gaza and they will keep pushing back in any way they can. I don't think they expect their actions, even though they've been able to inflict much greater pain on many more Israelis and fear among a huge segment of the Israeli population and closing the airport in Tel Aviv, et cetera. They don't expect that to resolve the conflict and bring them their state. What they do expect, and they've said this consistently as has Hamas and other people in the region who will follow a similar strategy, is that we will not acquiesce in our own invisibility, in our own subjugation, in our own irrelevance.

We will not allow ourselves to be taken out of history simply because the Israelis have 200 nuclear weapons and full American support and et cetera, et cetera. We will not roll over and die because there's 13 million Palestinians now. We have rights. They're recognized internationally in the UN and other places. We want to achieve those rights. The last point I'd make here. There isn't time to get into these things in a half-hour chat, but the Hamas people repeatedly agreed with Yasser Arafat when he was alive.

When Arafat was negotiating with the Israelis after Oslo and trying to come up with a peaceful resolution of the conflict, Hamas didn't agree with what he was doing, but they agreed to accept any result that comes out of the negotiations if it's a two-state solution, whatever it is, that is accepted by the majority of Palestinian people. Hamas says things, does things, whispers things, prints op-eds. You can't judge these groups just through one metric, which is, "Oh, they killed all these civilians at a music festival."

Brian Lehrer: How much do you think Hamas has the support of the civilian population in Gaza and perhaps the West Bank, no matter what one thinks of the Israeli response? Just as I said to Congressman Goldman that no matter what one thinks of the occupation or Hamas that the occupation was likely to produce this kind of result over time as it continued and as what's perceived as what you described as colonial expansion continues in the occupied territory, especially in the West Bank.

Just as we asked that question on that side, no matter what one thinks of the Israeli response, something like this was to be expected, this kind of Israeli response, or tell me if you disagree, but do ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, knowing that this would be the kind of response to this kind of terrorism by Hamas, do Palestinians in Gaza generally think this trade-off of a thousand lives for a thousand lives, or whatever the actual numbers are, are in their interest and Hamas is doing what they wanted to do?

Rami Khouri: That's a very complex but important question, which is hard to answer in a minute and a half, but I'll give you what I can. The equation is not a thousand lives for a thousand lives because the equation is perpetual suffering by both people in many dimensions. The fear of people living around Tel Aviv now because of the ability of Hamas to send out much more powerful and accurate rockets, that fear has to be calculated in closing the airport, the drop in the economy, all these issues on the Israeli side.

On the Palestinian side, you have to calculate this massive destruction of infrastructure and people. 70% of kids under the age of 10 have mental health, fear issues. They're urinating in their sleep every night. The human degradation on both sides as well as the physical loss of life and physical destruction of infrastructure, these are all factors that have to be calculated. What I would say is, certainly, a majority of Palestinians are pleased to see the Israeli facade of invincibility and imperial power and its ability to impose anything it wants on the Palestinians forever, however degrading, to see that broken.

What Hamas did is historically very important in shattering so many Israeli myths, strategies, strategic military doctrines. They shatter American and European policies that say we just have to keep the situation calm and advocate for two-state solution, which is never going to happen right now. All of these things have been shattered. The Palestinian Authority with Abu Mazen, who's a sad, old man, who very few people respect. What Hamas has done has shaken up every dimension of the Palestinian-Israeli, the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I would add, and we don't have time to get into this, maybe one day, you and I will have coffee as we've done before. What they've done is also reaffirmed the reality, which, virtually, I would say 90% of Arabs believe and most people around the south of the world, is that this is the continuation of a colonial struggle that started in the late 19th century. Again, we don't have time to get into it, but these are the factors that cause people in the Arab region to be happy when Israel suffers. Not because we want to kill Jews or kill Israelis or reject Israel.

We've offered Israel a zillion times coexistence, full coexistence, full recognition, open borders, full trade, and the Islamic world has joined the Arab world as well. We've offered this many times formally and the Israelis and the Americans have ignored it completely. The bigger picture here is that people will react emotionally to short-term events. That's positive on some things and negative on others. Deeper down in the minds of people, the Israelis and the Palestinians is the bigger issue.

The bigger issue for Israel is we want to be able to live in peace in a Jewish state, in the region that we consider part of our ancestral homeland. By the way, we've given that acknowledgment to the Israelis. We would accept that. The Arabs, the Palestinians, want to live in a situation where the colonial penetration and occupation and subjugation of the region that started in the 19th century by the British and the French and now is perpetuated by the Americans mostly, we want to bring that to an end. We want equal rights for everybody.

If there's one single goal that I think we should work for in the media, in academia, in whatever is to get the Palestinians and the Israelis, the governments and all other concerned people, the American government, the French, whatever, to simply come out and say the following, "We believe that the people of Israel, the Jewish people of Israel, and all other Israeli citizens and the Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and all the Palestinians, and there are a few Jewish Palestinians here and there, that they have absolutely equal rights under law and under God and under the doctrines of history, constitutionalism, pluralism, democracy, and equal rights."

The simple fact of acknowledging that the Israelis and the Palestinians deserve equal treatment in history and on their land has never been acknowledged as a result. Therefore, we perpetuate what we see. The Israelis now have 300,000 soldiers. They're going to send some of them into Gaza. They occupied Gaza for many years. What more can they possibly do? They can destroy physically all of Gaza. All that would do is what it has done in the last 30, 40 years.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in and throw a follow-up, a pushback question at you as framed really by our previous guest, Congressman Goldman, because he was saying, "Look, Israel ended its occupation of Gaza some years ago. Hamas, as the governing body in Gaza, has dedicated itself to continuing to attack Israel nonetheless rather than just try to build a successful domestic government in Gaza in the interest of its people." How would you respond to that?

Rami Khouri: I would respond to that by saying it is very articulate and sophisticated and convincing Israeli talking points that go well in New York and Brooklyn where my family and my grandchildren live and where I go often. I have huge respect for everything that goes on in Brooklyn. These are talking points that are very powerful and effective, but they're not accurate.

The Israelis physically ended their physical, direct occupation of Gaza, but they kept the siege on it from the land, from the sea, and from the air. They would repeatedly bomb it. We've seen what they've done since they left. Now, they will claim they did that because they were attacked. We get back into the cycle of violence. The cycle of violence isn't just military violence.

For the Israelis to hold a dancing party a few hundred meters or whatever away from the human tragedy and horror of life in Gaza under perpetual subjugation is another kind of violence. It's cultural violence. It's political violence. It's attitudinal violence. We need to break this. There are people in Israel and in Palestine, brave people, friends of mine, even some cousins of mine who are involved in these efforts to get Israelis and Palestinians jointly to find a breakthrough and they haven't succeeded.

The main reason I would say. Well, there's many, but the main reason is that massive American and much European support for anything that Israel wants to do in the name of self-defense removes the likelihood that Israel will change its policies, which guarantees that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and if they're destroyed, the next people to replace them, will keep working to resist. If you don't understand what resistance means, then you'll never understand the dynamics that we see on the ground today.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Rami Khouri, Palestinian-American journalist and columnist with 50 years experience in the Middle East and a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. There's one thread of pro-Israel calls that are coming in and texts that I want to get you to respond to here, Rami. For example, a text says, "If the Palestinians had been peaceful when Israel pulled out, by now, they would've had freedom of travel." I think further to a similar point, we're going to take a call from Joe in Manhattan. Joe, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Joe: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. A great deal of what Rami is saying is just massive nonsense. In 1929, 25% [unintelligible 00:17:06] in the so-called occupied West Bank at that time on the British mandate in 1929--

Brian Lehrer: Joe, I'm going to apologize, but we have such a bad line that I don't think anybody can understand your words. I'm going to make the point to you, Rami, as I understand how Joe made it to the screener, which is Israelis occupy territory because they wouldn't survive. I think he was going to say because there are enough rejectionists within any two-state solution that we could imagine that they would be under constant attack.

Rami Khouri: Well, again, this gets us into history. History is absolutely critical for this. We really need to understand the trajectory of the last 100 years. It's not just when Israel pulled out of Gaza or when '67 happened or 1948 happened. It really goes back to the early 1900s when the Zionist movement wanted to create a state for the Jews and Palestine, which is totally understandable in the view of how the Jewish people were subjected to pogroms and discrimination and death and awful stuff in Europe, mostly White Christian Europeans and Russians, and North Americans in the US as well. That history is very important.

One point I would make to answer this, because we don't have time again, is that the Palestinians and the Arabs initially had no problem with higher Jewish migration coming into Palestine in 1910 and 1920 and 1930. By the late '30s, when it became obvious that they were trying to set up a system that would lead to a Jewish state, that they would take the land that was then 93% Palestinian and 7% Jewish approximately in that period and, say, from 1910 to 1930.

As Jewish immigration increased, the Palestinians realized that this wasn't just Jews who were escaping persecution, wanting to live peacefully. This was a movement to try to create a Jewish state and push out the Palestinians. There's tremendous amount of historical research by Israelis, Arabs, everybody else now that documents a lot of this stuff. This conflict was doomed to be a conflict starting in the-- Really, it was 1929 when the first clashes started.

If there's one major culprit in this, it's the British, British colonial criminals. They have to be held accountable one day, but that's another story. As pro-Israelis say, "Oh yes, the Haj Amin al-Husseini went and saw Hitler." You can pick out people. You can pick out incidents. You can pick out dates. We can do the same thing with the Israelis. It's sad when 300 people die.

It's terrible, unacceptable when 300 people die in a dance rave. It's also totally unacceptable when you have over 1,000 Palestinians detained in Israel with no charges. No charges, no trial, nothing. The Israelis grab them, put them in jail, and keep them there, and things like-- I can pick out an issue on the Israeli action side. They can pick out an issue on the Palestinian--

Brian Lehrer: Are you saying though, as a matter of history and going back to the 1947 partition, the 1948 declaration of the state of Israel by the United Nations, are you saying that in your opinion, there is no way that there could have been a Jewish state, meaning a guaranteed Jewish political majority, a place where as maybe an act of historical reparations, if we want to use that word, after 2,000 years of discrimination culminating with the Holocaust, that there's no way that there could have been a Jewish state in the way that we generally think of it now alongside any just state for Arab and other Palestinians?

Rami Khouri: That could have happened under certain circumstances, but it didn't happen because of the way things went and the British role to arm and help the Zionist militias and the Zionist groups that started to take ethnic cleansing and scare people to drive Palestinians out here and there. This is all, again, documented by people on all sides. It's not just talking point from one side. It could have happened. The Palestinians accepted an increase in Jewish immigration.

The Palestinians were saying there should be one state in Palestine for all its people. There was always a Jewish minority in Palestine, in Safed, in Jerusalem, and in Haifa. There was always an Indigenous Jewish minority that had lived there for years and years. There were about 6%, 7% of the population 100 years ago. That increased with the migration, of course, from Europe. It didn't happen for various reasons, which, again, we don't have time to get into here. We were not against coexistence with a growing number of Jews in either a federated or a confederal or a single unified state.

The reason that the Arabs were pushed back against the increasing Jewish militarization that drove Palestinians out and wanted to create a state is that because we felt it was incredibly unfair that a land that was 93% Palestinian-owned and lived in would suddenly be turned over to make 100% Jewish state. Why don't we do that in Florida or do it in Nevada? You wouldn't do it. Of course, nobody would do it because it's totally unfair to take somebody's country and give it to another people no matter how badly that people needed a place to live safely.

The fact that they came to Palestine was instructive because it was one of the few places where the Zionists knew that the Arabs would live peacefully with them because they always did. When the Zionists wanted to create a state that was Jewish majority and the British helped them, that's when the resistance started and that's when clashes started and from there to where we are today,

Brian Lehrer: Almost at the end of our hour, first with Congressman Dan Goldman from Manhattan and Brooklyn, and now with Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri. Rami, how does this end without becoming a wider war? I said I wanted to ask you about Iran's place in this. It's been reported that Iran was either behind the attack, provided the wherewithal for the attack that Hamas would not have had on its own technically, or at very least green-lighted the attack because it wanted to stop the Saudi normalization of Israel, which seemed to be around the corner, which would further isolate Iran. How do you see the Iranian role in Saturday's attack and how do you see this war widening or the prevention of this war from widening?

Rami Khouri: A couple of quick points. Most of the specific things you mentioned are things we read in the mainstream American media. If you rely on the mainstream American media, you're completely nuts if you want the mainstream American media to be your main source of knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian problem. With a few exceptions, you included bringing people in from both sides to give their views. We end up debating back and forth but not resolving it.

The Iranian role, the United States, I've lived now in the US for the last three years. I'm coming and going to the Middle East regularly. The United States media and political establishment is totally obsessed with Iran. They're hysterical. I've been to Iran only once and I've known many Iranians. Iran has many things that we should criticize, but to fault it for all of this stuff going on in Gaza and with Hamas and others and Hezbollah, I think, is wrong.

What is clear is Iran has worked closely with these groups, with Hezbollah, with Hamas, with the Houthis, with Islamic Jihad to raise their capabilities. They see themselves as part of a strategic alliance as the US sees itself now sending the Ford carrier group to Israel, to support Israel. You help Israel. Iran helps these groups. Other people help different groups. Everybody has allies and supporters. The Iranians, I think, I don't have facts, but clearly, they provided a lot of technical aid, which allowed Hamas and Hezbollah before it to significantly raise their capabilities and warfare intelligence, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: I will point out that it was just on Friday and how quickly this has fallen out of the conversation. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an Iranian women's and human rights activist, Narges Mohammadi, for resistance to internal oppression by Iran and what that state is seen to stand for. I don't know if that's related to the international situation or completely separate from it in your opinion, but I'm just noting it.

Rami Khouri: It is noteworthy. She deserves that award. There's a lot of brave human rights activists in Iran. Some of whom we know, but that's a separate issue. The issue of Iran with its allies around the Arab region is something that's developed since the Islamic Republic started in '79. They've succeeded very well in creating a regional network of close allies whose capabilities have increased to the point where Hezbollah has forced the Israelis into a deterrent ceasefire on the Lebanese-Israeli border, where the Houthis in Yemen forced the Saudis and the Emiratis before them to stop the war in Yemen and negotiated ceasefire.

Now, Hamas has taken a similar step, hadn't reached quite the level of Hezbollah, but has sent a powerful, historic, unprecedented signal to the Israelis that, "You keep treating us like you're treating us in Gaza and you're going to get more and more of this. The next rockets are going to reach Tel Aviv, and then the next ones are going to go everywhere in Israel and hit the airport and the military zone."

This is a terrible, terrible cycle that we have to break. I believe it can be broken, but not by the current leaders, and certainly not by the current international supporters of Israel who basically keep telling Israel, "Do what you want. We'll support you. Here's some more guns and ammunition and money. You have the right to defend yourself." The Palestinians ask the same question, "Do we have the right to defend ourselves?" By the way, international law is very clear that people under occupation of subjugation struggling for independence have the right to self-defense by any means possible. That's in the Geneva Convention, UN resolutions, UN Charter, and international humanitarian law.

Brian Lehrer: This was going to be your last answer. When you say "by any means possible," that's not to defend what happened on Saturday, right? UN Secretary-General Guterres made that statement the other day, correct?

Rami Khouri: Yes, I think we have to say that what happened with the dance rave is clearly something that is unacceptable to most people around the world-

Brian Lehrer: -and all the other civilian attacks.

Rami Khouri: Yes. It gets tricky because when you go and attack a civilian living in a settlement and land that was occupied and that civilian is a reservist in the army and has the guns at home, there's no black-and-white answer to these questions. In the same way, the Palestinians would say, "Well, what about the 12,000 children?" 12,000 children have been detained by Israel since 2000 and questioned and some imprisoned, some let out, and they break into homes in the middle of the night.

Anything we say that is unacceptable on the Israeli side, we can say there's parallel, unacceptable actions on the Palestinian or the Syrian or whatever side you want. This is a war, so what I'm saying is that we have to accept that we are in a condition of war that has historic antecedents and clear reasons. We see the consequences. We've got to break that historical cycle and find a way to return to the effort that has been going on for 50, 60 years unsuccessfully, to negotiate equal rights for both sides in a peaceful and permanent manner. I'm convinced from my research and other things that the majority of Israelis, the majority of Palestinians want that.

Brian Lehrer: Well, with a little bit of hope at the end of that answer. Thank you very much, Rami Khouri. I guess we're not going to solve the Middle East on the show today. Rami Khouri, Palestinian-American journalist and columnist with 50 years experience in the Middle East and a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. We heard earlier from Congressman Dan Goldman from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Rami, thank you as always.

Rami Khouri: You bet, Brian. Take care. I hope to see you soon.

 

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