Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is the Palestinian writer and analyst Mohamed Shahada.
In our conversation, we talked about the humanitarian situation in Gaza after 15 months of war and genocide. We also talked about the military capabilities of Hamas and why Israel was unable to inflict a total defeat on the group. We also talked about how the Trump administration will relate to Israel. And finally, Mohamed shared his thoughts on the effects of the international solidarity movement during the genocide.
Our conversation was recorded before the ceasefire negotiations accelerated, but plenty of the discussion remains relevant to the current situation. Today's episode is brought to you by PTO supporters on Patreon and by The Syllabus, a non-profit knowledge discovery service doing artisanal automation. How does that work? Well, they use technology to monitor thousands of sources and each week human curators, that is actual people, handpick the best of what's been published on the internet.
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And now to today's interview. Mohammed Shahada is a Gazan writer and analyst. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Al Jazeera and the London Review of Books, amongst other venues.
So, Mohamed, in a moment we'll come to the political situation in Gaza and onto what Israel is doing in the territory in terms of its creation of infrastructure and security architecture that appears to be aimed at the imposition of long-term occupation of at least parts of the Gaza Strip and the possible creation of new Israeli settlements. But first, before we get into that, could you say something on the humanitarian situation at this point in time
And the effective demolition of the Garz and economy and the built environment and so on.
Well, the demolition of Gaza's economy has been happening since at least 2006. That's the very least estimate. Back then, there were a lot of experts that were saying that Israel's blockade on Gaza is decimating its economy and dismantling or collapsing its ability to exist as an organized human society. You had Israeli defense ministers, one after the other, coming on record and saying that
our policy in Gaza is to drown everyone but keep their heads above the water. That was a verbatim quote from Israel's defense minister, Avigdor Libeman, in 2018. You then had another defense minister, Benny Gantz, who is now hailed as an opposition leader. He said in 2022 that in Gaza, we will not allow, quote, we will not allow any real development, any real economic development. So that's been a very deliberate strategy. That's
The very core premise of Israel's blockade is to collapse Gaza in terms of economy, social life, social cohesion, so that you have an average Gazan reaching the age of 37 without ever having had a job, without being able to put food on the table, to start a family, to move out of their parents' homes, or to basically get any life. Like a lot of people that I have, friends and family that I have in Gaza would constantly tell me before October 7th, I'm
I'm afraid I'm going to die before I ever experience living. The idea, the thought of suicide crossed the minds of literally everyone I know in Gaza. And that's all before October 7th. What you had since then is Israel going in to finish the job. That's something that Israeli generals have been consistently saying on record. They've been saying that previous wars were attritional. It's what Israel referred to as mowing the lawn. But
But they said we're fed up with this, we don't want it anymore, we want the next war to be the last, we should finish off the Gaza question. That's what's happening now in terms of multiple processes.
The first one is systematic destruction of everything, literally everything. If you look, for example, at northern Gaza, it just came out recently in Israel's main liberal newspaper, that an Israeli settler, also a military brigadier general, who's called Yehuda Vak,
He went into Gaza, he's in charge of the Nisrim corridor, he brought his three siblings in Gaza, civilians, settlers from the West Bank, brought them in to form a small company whose main task is to bring extremist settlers and soldiers to destroy every single building in the way, leave nothing standing. So the first process is mass destruction of everything. You have another process of mass starvation that I've never seen before.
Now what you have is Israel allowing way, way less than the very bare minimum that is necessary to just keep people alive. There's also a process of mass psychological torture. Everyone that I know in Gaza has just become shells, ghosts, shells of their former selves. They're not the same people that I knew from before anymore. The psychological agony is so severe that...
The idea of death is now on the minds of kids as young as six or seven year old that they are constantly telling their parents, "Okay, when I die, I will write scribble my name on my arm so you recognize my body." There's another process of deliberately creating conditions for the spread of diseases. If you look at Mawasi, Israel's safe humanitarian zone in Gaza, it's basically an empty desert
filled with tints and piles and piles of garbage because there's nowhere else to put it and lots of puddles of sewage, untreated sewage, urine and feces floating rivers between the tints. This is a situation in which you cramp at least half a million people in Mawasi, leave them in that situation. They are destined to doom. Everyone I know has picked up all different kinds of diseases. There's also the other dimension of mass killing.
It's not just killing Hamas targets with disproportionate violence where there's a huge amount of civilian casualties. No, it's deliberately going after civilians. One way of Israel doing that is what it's called, Where's Daddy? It's an artificial intelligence program that is designed to
track and surveil a Hamas target or any target that Israel decides to eliminate and wait until they get home in a densely populated area and then bomb them with their entire families and neighbors together so you have one airstrike that kills a hundred people. This is not disproportionate violence. This is Israel using a targeted individual as an excuse to wipe out a hundred people, not the other way around. Other processes, there's mass incarceration.
Every neighborhood Israel goes to is declared as an extermination zone. Every living soul there, an Israeli soldier, is free to shoot whoever they want if they find any moving target, any living soul, any breathing thing. But at the same time, they're also free to round up everybody there, all the civilian population.
and take whoever they want back to Israel to what Israel's own top human rights organization, B'Tselem, has described as torture camps, most prominent of which is Deit Ayman in the Negev Desert, where Israel would put thousands and thousands of people in literal cages.
Overcrowded cages where they sleep on the floor every night in the extreme cold of the desert subject to constant torture blindfolded Handcuffed cuffs on the legs as well. They are seated in in this permanent seating position 24/7 during the day they're deprived of sleeping they get beaten up if they try to sleep they get beaten up if they try to talk to each other and a lot of them have open untreated wounds that are just rotting
So put all of this together, you just basically have a genocide. There's no other way to describe it. As well as the attacks on civilians that you describe and this creation of just absolutely atrocious conditions for the population, you've written about the way that the suffering of ordinary Gazans has also been compounded by Israel's targeting of Hamas's governance structures, the local police force, and by preventing any role for the Palestinian Authority. Can you talk about that a little bit and the consequences of that?
Basically, Israel as soon as it decides to launch this war in Gaza, they come up with two main goals: Defeat of Hamas as a militant group, defeat of Hamas as a government authority in Gaza. Hamas is in Gaza three things: it's a political party, a government and an armed group, a militia. They are also a charity group, they run a number of NGOs and charities in Gaza.
As soon as Israel decided on that goal, they simultaneously decided on a clear red line that Gaza should not be run by the Palestinian Authority or by UNRRA, the United Nations agency that is in charge of Palestinian refugees, and also that Gaza should not be run by the IDF. So that means one thing. There's no one to run Gaza. Israel's plan for Gaza is not to have a plan. It is to have permanent chaos.
Israel began as soon as the war started to systematically target officials from the Gaza government, from Hamas's government. One thing that is important, being in Gaza's government does not make you a Hamas member and does not make you a legitimate target. Legitimate targets are combatants. But in the civil government in Gaza, civil servants, most of them are not affiliated with Hamas.
And all of them have been vetted by Israel itself. In 2019, Israel began to allow...
suitcases filled with cash to come into Gaza from Qatar through Israeli territory. Israel back then, they made one clear condition that anybody who receives a salary from the Qatari money needs to submit their names, ID cards, all of their information and their biometric data. Netanyahu at the time said it very openly. We know where the aid is going. We know every individual that the aid is going to.
and Israel vetted the list of names from the civil servants in Gaza and they approved virtually every single one of them. The only people that were blacklisted were 300 individuals.
But nonetheless, Israel decides on October 7th to start targeting systematically civil servants in Gaza. And it's not just the security sector where Israel can make a claim that policemen can assist Hamas because they are armed, which is largely false. But basically, they started targeting people from the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance. Every single government agency became a legitimate target to Israel.
But the most devastating was the systematic targeting of policemen, of basically dismantling law and order in Gaza, coupled with Israel incentivizing, encouraging, and providing active or passive protection to criminals in Gaza to take over.
Literally. Like last week there was an article in Haaretz in which they said that Israel's plan for Gaza is twofold. People in the north are going to be ethnically cleansed and then some of them will be allowed back to live in concentration camps in what Israel called gated communities in which you live in a tent in a camp that is closed, walled off by the IDF and later on to be run by foreign mercenaries.
In the south, Israel's plan is, according to Haaretz itself, Israel's plan is to empower two families, quote, whose main source of income is criminal. What is even more insane is that some of those families are affiliated with groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, and Israel wants to put them in charge.
One of the reasons is to create this complete collapse in Gaza of law and order, to have Gazans fighting and killing each other. Another dimension has to do with Israel's deliberate strategy of using food as a weapon of war, something that the EU's chief foreign relations commissioner, Joseph Borrell, concluded when he was in office. He said Israel is weaponizing food as a weapon of war in Gaza.
The way they do it is that Israel bans food from going into Gaza, gets under pressure from the US to let aid in. What they do after is that Israel's military and police would snitch to Israeli settlers and say a humanitarian convoy is moving on this road at this hour. Go and sabotage it. Then the US imposed sanctions on those settlers, on the group that was behind this. Then Israel resorted to another strategy to never allow the aid to go into Gaza as much as possible. The
The way Israel does that is with an unannounced, unofficial long list of banned items. When a truck reaches the borders with Gaza,
Israeli soldiers would inspect the truck and then if they find a nail clipper, it would say the whole truck needs to be sent back because a nail clipper is a banned item. The list of items that have been banned was reported by CNN very early on in the genocide. It included crutches. It included seeded fruits like dates or apricots or whatever fruit had a large seed inside. It included anesthesia.
If a truck manages to go in, then the second trick is to tell the truck driver, empty all of the truck load on the ground. There needs to be another truck from Gaza itself that comes and picks up the truck load. You're not allowed to go in with your truck.
That's why you see hundreds and hundreds of truckloads at Israel's Airis crossing or Kerem Shalom in the south, where Israel would take pictures of them and try to shame the UN and say, look, we have a lot of aid that is piling up and you're not picking up any of it. They are not picking it up because there's not enough trucks in Gaza to begin with. Then once the truck gets to pick up the truckload, Israel allows it and then it goes into Gaza.
In Rafah, the area under Israel's control, Israel declared it an extermination zone or a death zone, a killing zone. It means no human being is allowed to go inside, no Palestinian, specifically policemen. The only people that are allowed there are criminal gangs. And as soon as a truck goes in, they would go and hijack the truck, take over. In some incidents, the looting was happening 100 meters from Israeli tanks and soldiers. Then there is the other layer that there are no roads anymore.
If they find a road, Israel would bomb them on the way or would fire them on the way. That's why you had Cindy McCain, who's now running the World Food Program, the widow of one of the most pro-Israeli senators in U.S. history, John McCain. She came out a few days ago and she condemned Israel very strongly. She said this is insane. It's lunatic that every time a U.N. convoy is going into Gaza, the IDF would fire at it.
Let's turn for a moment then to Israel's apparent objectives. So some of this you've already described. So we've seen Israel's creation of these quote unquote security corridors, the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, the so-called General's Plan and this project of fragmenting Gaza into isolated non-contiguous enclaves or as you describe concentration camps is perhaps an accurate word. What
What exactly are the Israelis trying to achieve with this in terms of their project of settlement? Do you think we will indeed see the establishment of Israeli settlements, at least in the north of Gaza? This, of course, would be for the first time since the dismantling of 21 settlements during the 2005 so-called disengagement process.
To start with, Israel's use of the term buffer zone or a security corridor is just the pretext to wipe everything out completely in their area. So if you take a look, for example, at the Nisrim corridor, the one that cuts Gaza in two halves,
It was early on it was one kilometer wide Israel kept expanding it up until it reached the width of four kilometers and now they're expanding it even more in that corridor There's not a single building that is standing everything is wiped out because Israel considered it from a military perspective The justification is that this is an area where the IDF is permanently stationed. They have bases military bases They are air-conditioned. They have barbecue parties. They have soccer fields where they play football
So any building in that area can be a potential danger against the soldiers' lives. Therefore, there should not be any standing building. So in Nitzarim, Israel wiped out whole cities in the eastern buffer zone that Israel has about one kilometer deep into Gaza. Israel wiped out areas like Khuzaa, a whole village in Khanounis. They wiped out half of Shijaiya, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Gaza City.
But now we see this gone on extreme with Israel rendering all of northern Gaza, rendering all of them as a security corridor, one ginormous security corridor, which means they have to leave no building standing there, not a single living soul. That's why you saw systematic ethnic cleansing. There was about 150,000 people there in October, last October, three months ago. Now there's about 10,000 to 12,000 people lived in it. Israel is basically...
either killing everyone on the way or forcing them out. Not a single soul is allowed there, not a single building allowed there as well. What this means, in the north of Gaza in particular, is that it is facilitating and paving the way for rebuilding settlements. There were three settlements that were in that area up until 2005. There was Nesanit, there was Eris, there was Sinai. So those were the three in the very north of Gaza. And Israel is very much building the way to rebuild them again.
There is also the possibility, like if Israel re-establishes those settlements and they wiped out all of Jabalia, Beit Hanun and Beit Lahia, they create a ginormous buffer zone that protects these settlements. So settlers can be there to satisfy Netanyahu's, the most far-right, most openly fascist coalition in Israel's history. So a way to satisfy these constituents is to allow them to rebuild a few settlements in the very north of Gaza.
Also in the Nisarim corridor as well, four kilometers wide, that's an enormous area, four kilometers by 12 kilometers long. So you had a lot of Israeli extremists, extremist settlers like Daniela Weiss, one of the most prominent extremist settlers in the West Bank, going to inspect the Nisarim corridor with the idea in mind of rebuilding settlements there. So it is very much alive. It
But Israel's idea is to build more of these corridors. There is a planned corridor called the Kisufim corridor. They built half of it. It's between Deir el-Balach and Khan Yunis. There is another corridor called Sofa corridor between Rafah and Khan Yunis that is planned to be built. Israel started to build it early on in June last year, and then they stopped. They're planning to rebuild it again.
If they build these corridors, what you have is Gaza being about half of its area being completely swollen into these corridors. Already, Israel had now swallowed a third of Gaza's area in these buffer zones and corridors. So half of it will be gone into these corridors. And the rest is five disconnected, discontiguous, isolated, overly crowded concentration camps. That's about it. And
And when it comes to the establishment of settlements themselves, in what way do you think that will happen? Would you imagine that we might see something akin to the kind of plausible deniability that Israel has when it comes to the creation of new outposts in the West Bank, say, where you'll have settlers apparently independently establishing new outposts that are then subsequently given security protection by the IDF and their existence is gradually normalised as they expand?
as opposed to the Israeli government very overtly coming out and saying, yes, we're going to create colonies in Gaza, which you would imagine would cause a greater degree of international outrage and perhaps make life a little more difficult for Israel's sponsors. Yeah, exactly. That is something that Israeli experts themselves have been telling me, is that Netanyahu
is unlikely to officially announce a new Israeli settlement in Gaza. But what he will do instead is turn a blind eye, allow settlers to go in, build an outpost that is unofficial, informal, and then regularize it. What you have in the West Bank is a similar process. Israel gave a commitment to the Americans a few years ago, back when the Kerry initiative, John Kerry, when he was mediating back then, Israel was saying we will build settlements or new settlement housings
within the settlement blocks, within already established settlements. We will not build new settlements. We will not build something from scratch. They instead manipulated this with one loophole. Send settlers to build an outpost. Just put a couple of tents, put a few sort of prefabricated homes there,
and wait there. A few months later, the IDF would condone it, turn a blind eye to it, and the government would use any violent incident in the West Bank as a pretext to regularize and make legal these outposts. And then it becomes an official settlement, then the government will officially go in there and build housings and turn it into a whole city.
So it is very similar the way it would happen in Gaza. Israeli settlers already have said a few months ago that they have 700 families, settler families, who've already signed up to go and settle Gaza.
One thing that is important and extremely dangerous about this, even before October 7th, this was an Israeli fantasy or even an item on the agenda to resettle the Gaza Strip, although it was inconceivable at the time. But for example, you had Israel's finance minister, who is also the de facto ruler of the West Bank, Bitzlel Smotrich, on the night of forming Israel's government in December 2022,
He goes to a museum that is called the Gush Katif Museum in Israel. It is to commemorate one of the largest Israeli settlements in Gaza, Gush Katif. He goes to that museum on the night of forming the government with his family.
And he writes in the sort of introduction notebook that you have there for visitors to write a few notes in, he writes the evacuation of Ghosh Qatif was one of the most unforgivable crimes in Israel's history. And at the end he says, we will remember and we will return. Then you had an Israeli Knesset member called Limor Son Har Melech.
who came out in the Knesset and said we will return to Gaza. And you had Daniel Avai saying we would return to Gaza. And you had Israel's own minister of the settlements, she's called Orit Struk. She came out in March 2023. She came out and said, look, we are coming back to Gaza. We will rebuild settlements in Gaza. So it was very openly on the agenda before October 7th even happened.
If we turn for a moment to Hamas and the military situation at this stage. So in spite of the death of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwa, and the toll taken on the Hamas leadership more broadly and the attrition of the Qassam brigades, Hamas retains the ability to fight on a guerrilla war footing, launching hit and run attacks and even continuing to fire a small number of rockets into Israel.
What is your sense of Hamas's military capabilities at this point in time and the extent to which they can replenish their losses, both fighters and arms, given the intense pressure that they're under from the IDF and the destruction of supply routes? So as you pointed out, Alex, the...
got a lot of heavy hits from Israel throughout the war. That is undeniable. Their rocket stockpile has been heavily depleted. I wouldn't even call it rockets. It's largely projectiles, homemade projectiles. They don't have an explosive warhead attached to them most of the time. They only have fuel to carry them to a certain area, and that's it, and they're indiscriminate. It's improvised projectiles, very primitive. But basically, Israel depleted the majority of these
But nonetheless, there's also another issue. Israel managed to deal heavy strikes to Hamas's leadership and to their tunnel system early on in the war, in specific when Israel was just indiscriminately bombing Gaza. If you bomb Gaza indiscriminately, you are bound to inevitably hit a tunnel or two. There was also damage to the leadership, the top leadership. A lot of them were assassinated throughout the war, but not all of them. There's still a lot that are still alive and active.
There's also been a hit to Hamas's manpower to some extent. Hamas would put their own figure of losses in the Kassam Brigades and Hamas as a movement, like anyone affiliated with Hamas, at about 6,500 to 7,000. That's like the maximum estimate. That, as I said, it includes militants as well as non-combatants who are affiliated with Hamas as a political organization.
But on the other side, the most recent intelligence estimate was saying that 65% of Hamas's tunnel are still there and operational. And about 60 to 65% of its manpower is still there. That is Western intelligence.
The picture on the ground you have there is that Hamas managed to recruit about 7,000 people from what is known as the ISNAID force. Those are Hamas members that have rudimentary military training from before the war, and it's easy to integrate them, test them with ambushes, explosive devices, planting them, etc.,
training on light weaponry, carry out these sort of guerrilla warfare. They don't need any sort of meticulous training. At the same time, according to Israeli estimates, like in the Jerusalem Post, it was published a few days ago, they said Hamas managed to recruit 13,000 new members into Hamas. There's the other issue. Hamas managed to restore a lot of the tunnels because when Israel bombs a tunnel, they don't destroy the tunnel completely. They destroy a segment of it.
And they are like the biggest source of Hamas's weaponry has always been Israel itself. That's the ironic nature of it. It's all of Israel's unexploded ordnance in Gaza that Hamas recycles.
and since the start of this genocide about 10 to 15 percent of Israel's bombs they don't explode they're faulty, unexploded ordnance so that means at least over 15,000 tons that Hamas can reuse and recycle and make into either projectiles or explosive devices to ambush Israeli troops the other thing is that Hamas became largely autonomous on a sill level, on a micro level
which means each Hamas cell in each neighborhood is operating independently of the cell in the neighborhood next to it, which means that they have more freedom of action to do these ambushes and guerrilla warfare. They don't need a chain of command. So if a top leader is killed, it's independent of it. They don't need it. It's irrelevant. The other thing is that you have at least five to seven of Hamas's military council. That's the top entity in the Qassam Brigades.
Five of those five to seven of the top leaders that are still alive, presumably because Israel did not announce that they managed to assassinate them. One of them is Sinwar's brother, Muhammad Sinwar, who is, according to Israel itself, he's more hardline, more trained and more of a mastermind than his late brother Yahya.
There's another one, Abu Sa'ib al-Haddad in northern Gaza, the head of the Gaza Brigade or the Qassam Brigades, was now running the entirety of northern Gaza according to Israel itself again. So in a way, like the way you would draw a conclusion about this, I would say Hamas lost the ability to threaten Israel itself, to threaten Israel's civilian population,
but they maintain a solid ability, substantial ability, to undermine and threaten Israel's presence inside Gaza. As long as the IDF is still in Gaza, there's going to be an insurgency. They can maintain it for many years to come.
And just on the tunnel network, presumably the IDF could move in force into the tunnels themselves and clear them that way. And if they were to do so, given their advantages in numbers of soldiers and material, that they could do that. But do you think that reflects their unwillingness to accept the kind of casualties that that would require? And that for all its ability to destroy and kill, the Israeli army is perhaps not characterized by the bravery that they like to credit themselves with?
Basically, Israel is a very mediocre fighting force. They're very good at video games, as other experts have been pointing out. They adore killing from a distance, but they don't dare to engage in a battle face-to-face.
You see that with Israeli soldiers, like the Israel's military doctrine is literally to protect soldiers' lives first, before the civilian population of the targeted area. Under international law, your army should put the civilian lives before a soldier's life.
which means you're not allowed to preemptively kill a civilian and say, ah, there is a risk to my soldier's lives if that civilian remained alive, that's why I killed him, or that's why I destroyed the civilian infrastructure. The IDF is spinning it the other way around. Israel's military doctrine is to say, Israeli civilians, number one, Israeli combatants, number two,
Enemy civilians number three, enemy combatants number four. So soldiers' lives come before the lives of any person in Gaza itself. So the army should minimize the risk to soldiers' lives, which means Israel's combat style in Gaza when they go with a grand invasion is every neighborhood they are about to invade, they need to flatten it before.
So they engage in very heavy bombardment of the whole area, aerial bombardment, but that is expensive and costly. They start shilling it, artillery fire, non-stop. If you look, for example, at Shij'aya or Beit Hanun, areas that are adjacent to Israel, they would station a huge amount of artilleries there and shill the area indiscriminately for days and days and days to make sure there's not a living soul that can survive there, and then they would advance inside it.
So there is a huge risk averseness, which is one of the reasons they don't dare to inspect a neighborhood meticulously and see whether there's a tunnel here or there. On the other hand, there's an issue that Hamas's tunnels are no risk to Israeli civilians on the other side of the border. There were Hamas tunnels that were crossing the border into Israel itself. Israel says that it managed to destroy the majority of these tunnels.
by Israel's own admission, before the war itself, when they built the barrier underground. They built a barrier that goes, I think, about 20 meters underground. It cost about $1 to $2 billion. It had sensors on it, electronic devices that can detect any vibration in the area to alert Israel to an attempt to build a tunnel. So they said they destroyed the majority of Hamas's tunnels there.
But after October 7th, they even more meticulously inspected the area to destroy any tunnels there. You saw it, for example, at the Philadelphia corridor between Gaza and Egypt. Israel went there with a claim that Hamas still maintains a huge amount of tunnels in their area, smuggling tunnels. That's how they get all their weapons. We need to go in and destroy these tunnels.
They've been now in Philadelphia for over eight months, since May until now January. They did not find a single, they did not find one single tunnel that is operational, that crossed from Rafah into Egypt. They found a few inoperational sealed and destroyed tunnels that the Egyptians destroyed in 2013.
So basically the remaining tunnels in Gaza itself, if there's a tunnel that connects let's say neighborhood A and neighborhood B in Khan Younis, it is of no risk to Israel itself. It's largely defensive in Gaza. It is to repel an IDF invasion if the Israeli forces advance on the ground. But it is not crossing into Israeli territory. So the significance of it to Israel is marginal.
That's another reason why they don't risk soldiers' lives to try to find every tunnel. The other thing is that, the third and most important one, is that Hamas' tunnel system is largely exaggerated. A lot of it is just fiction. Israel is heavily invested into saying that Gaza has a tunnel system that's way bigger than the tunnel system in London.
or the metro system in New York, insane. How do you build that in Gaza within less than 10 years when you have Israel banning all construction material from going in? In Gaza, Israel makes this claim to say that basically under every single building in Gaza there is a prospective tunnel, therefore it is legitimate for us to bomb everything. For Hamas, they also have a vested interest to exaggerate the size of their tunnel system because it makes sense to sound as a formidable fighting force.
But in reality, I would say the actual size of Hamas's tunnel system is much smaller than what is in the media.
So as we speak, we're just a short time away from Donald Trump's inauguration as US president. There are conflicting views on how the new administration might approach the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many believe Trump will back the continuing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the creation of the settlements that we've talked about, and that the US might even support formal annexation of the West Bank, which the nomination of Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador to Israel would seem to indicate.
Other analysts have pointed to Trump's famed love of a good deal and his sort of preening narcissism that might mean he doesn't want to be seen as responsible for a major escalation of violence in the region. And he did, of course, you know, however seriously we take this, he did portray himself almost as the peace candidate in contrast to Joe Biden, who was, in spite of the Afghanistan withdrawal, someone who oversaw a major expansion of US military commitments in Ukraine and obviously the Middle East as well.
What's your guess as to the approach that Trump will take?
Many things. To unpack it, it's a very good question. So to start, I would say Trump was the most hostile president to Palestinians in recent memory until Biden. Biden immediately broke that record with the genocide in Gaza. But even before, the years 2022, 2023 were the deadliest in the West Bank since records began.
And Biden did nothing about it. 2023, Israel institutes the largest land theft in Palestinian-Israeli history since the Oslo peace process. Biden does absolutely nothing. There's a ginormous acceleration and escalation in settlement buildings. Then October 7th happens, and you have a full green light from the Biden administration for Israel to do whatever they wanted.
So in Biden's last years, I had a little bit of hope that he is now free of electoral pressure. You have the idea. He's not running again. So I had hoped that he would have a change of heart. And then I asked veteran American diplomats and I asked senior Arab diplomats if there's going to be any change of heart. What should we expect from him in the lame duck period? And the answer is unanimously don't expect anything.
a Saudi diplomat, the way she put it to me, she said, well, we tried, we tried, we tried, we asked, we proposed all those policies and ideas. But Biden is an ideologue. His support for Israel is a lot of political consideration as well, but it's largely ideological. And she said that Biden considers any change of policy on Gaza, any pressure on Israel in the remainder of his term to be, quote, attained on his legacy.
He wants to be remembered as the most pro-Israeli president ever. So I don't think Trump can outdo this. On the other side, Trump is not ideological. He's impulsive. There's a lot of fair criticism against him, but he's not ideological. He's a businessman, first and last.
has been very pro-israeli for many years, but this time around he's not up for re-election. So that frees him from electoral pressure or from different lobbying groups that will try to pressure his administration. So that can be something positive. There's another thing, according to American diplomats, according to Arab diplomats that I spoke to, is that Trump genuinely wants a Nobel Peace Prize. He thinks that he deserves it and he wants it. He's hoping to achieve it with Israeli-Saudi normalization.
So he's dead serious about that thing. On the other side, what matters the most with Trump is the people he's surrounded by. I'll give you an example. In 2017,
Trump goes to the West Bank. He visits Mahmoud Abbas, our Palestinian president. Unfortunately, he's been our president for now almost two decades. So they meet up in Beit Lahem and they get along very well. Recently, I spoke to someone from Trump's administration, a senior official. He said Trump really, really likes Mahmoud Abbas. I said, good for him. Most Palestinians don't. In that meeting,
Abbas presents a lot of maps to Trump and he presents the Palestinian official position. He says we are willing to accept 22% of historic Palestine and we are willing to accept the majority of Israeli settlements to stay in place with land swaps.
He presents a very, very moderate, extremely moderate version of a peace proposal. Trump was very impressed. He said to Mahmoud Abbas, they told me you're an extremist. They told me you're a lunatic. I find you extremely moderate. And he agrees with everything that's presented. He tells Mahmoud Abbas, OK, we have a deal. Abbas looks to the other people around him and says, guys, we just solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He gets very excited.
As soon as Trump leaves the room, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, chief advisor also on this topic, he goes back to the room and goes to Saeb Arakat, our chief Palestinian negotiator at the time,
and tell Saeb al-Qaad, "Remember what Trump just told you, forget everything he said, none of it matters, none of it counts. You deal with me, you talk to me." And then leaves. That's it. So whatever Trump is gonna be persuaded to do, the people around him will try to manipulate as much as possible. Netanyahu is a master manipulator himself. And we are likely to see a very catastrophic foreign policy in the US in that regard. The things that Israel would expect from Trump that
that were a bit difficult to get under Biden would be West Bank annexation, a major West Bank annexation. It's not because Biden opposed it. He was okay with annexation de facto. He was just opposed to making it an official announcement. But they expect to make it official under Trump. It's not for sure that he would get along with it, but he might. Last time around, they came very close. Then the Abraham Accords happened and they cut the road short on annexation. There's the other thing.
giving back Israel a huge amount of 2,000 pound bombs. If you drop a 2,000 pound bomb, you will kill in one airstrike 500 people, 1,000 people. That bomb, it creates a fireball in the area upon immediate impact that reaches the temperature of 3,500 Fahrenheit degrees, evaporates bodies in the area. The body is no more, there's no corpse left.
It kills people in the vicinity of 350 meters around the bombed area. And Israel was dropping it on Gaza like candy. But in May last year, Biden delayed one shipment of these bombs. Trump is likely to resume it immediately. There's the other issue of starvation.
just starving Gaza completely, cutting off all aid. That is not something that is far-fetched that Trump's team will play along with. But otherwise, I don't see any way in which Trump can outdo what Biden already did, allowing a whole genocide to unfold.
Just on Trump's desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he might have some competition from a very unexpected quarter. I don't know if you saw this, but Michael Gove, former British Conservative cabinet minister and now the editor of The Spectator, had an article recently, I believe in the Jewish Chronicle, calling for the IDF to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. So, yeah. Yeah, a lot of those guys are slime bowls that they give slime bowls bad name. There is the Yiddish term for a schmuck, and I
I find it immensely satisfying. There's the Australian equivalent, Ding Dong. Those guys are just Ding Dong schmucks.
Turning to Europe for a moment. So there's a significant divergence between European states when it comes to Israel's actions in Gaza. We've, of course, seen very vehement support for Israel from Germany, Israel's second largest military supplier after the United States. Britain has also largely backed Israel, although there has been this partial suspension of some arms exports.
France has banned exports more broadly and has been somewhat more critical. Italy has also blocked exports, perhaps surprisingly, given that the country is run by Georgia Maloney at the moment. And then, of course, there is Spain and Ireland, who have been much more critical and who have joined South Africa's case against Israel at the ICJ. Supposing Trump were to align very closely with Netanyahu and the greater Israel crowd and to support annexation and so on, would
Would you anticipate that we might possibly see a greater divergence between European states and the United States on the question of Palestine, since presumably European leaders will feel more comfortable visibly disagreeing with a politician of the populist right, like Donald Trump, as compared with Joe Biden, who is unfortunately perceived as being within the bounds of acceptability in spite of his position
total backing for Israel's actions and the appalling record that he has on the situation? Well, basically, say with Europe, the last time around when Trump was in office, they were very vocally opposing a lot of his policies on Israel-Palestine to pick up a fight with him on issues that
that are different from this. There was European-American disagreement on NATO, on issues of, for instance, countries like France. France wanted Europe to become more militarily independent from the US. Germany was opposed. This was a huge division inside Europe itself. So you saw the European Union being very vocally critical of Trump at that point. This time around, there are a lot of signs, unfortunately, that Europe is rehabilitating Trump's image.
They're trying to engage with him positively. Look at Emmanuel Macron immediately went to meet up with Trump and congratulate him upon his electoral victory in November last year.
There is a lot of European leaders that want to try to be on Trump's good side this time around. Even our own president, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is trying this time to be on Trump's good side. The last time around, he boycotted the Americans completely. He cut all relations between the Palestinian Authority and the US, including intelligence sharing apparatuses. That was something that's very important to Americans.
The PA was collecting intelligence not just in the Palestinian territories but around the Middle East as well, sharing it with the US. He cut all of that completely. This time around he's not trying to do the same thing. He's trying to start on a positive note with Trump and you see the same in Europe. So there is a risk that the issue will be swept under the carpet. There's another issue is that you have a genocide unfolding in Gaza with the entirety of the European Union watching it very closely.
They're not ignorant about it.
I was recently in a meeting with a top European leader. He took out his tablet, he circled it around the room, and it had meticulous satellite imagery that the EU has been collecting in Gaza, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, and it shows nothing is left there anymore. And that official himself, he said, off the record, that what Israel is doing is wipe out Gaza completely so there's not any possibility for organized human life on the day after so people would have to leave.
as soon as the genocide ends, if it ends anytime soon, there will be a heavier, more concerted effort to do a magic trick of disappearing Gaza as a topic, to push it into extreme irrelevancy, and then Israel will ban cement and reconstruction material from going in. So this time around, if Israel stops the war, like that's the base case scenario, Israel ends the genocide, trades it with Trump in return for West Bank annexation,
and then prevents reconstruction material from going into Gaza, locks Gaza up completely, give people their choice, leave or stay there and starve to death, live in a flimsy tent for the rest of your life. I don't think Europe is going to pick up a fight on this, unfortunately. That European official himself, he told me in July, he said...
80% of European governments, 80%, are okay with Israel doing whatever it wants in Gaza. The only thing they ask Israel repeatedly is, and he did this verbatim, he said, they go to Israel and say, please, please, please kill fewer people.
Keep killing, just kill a little bit less. 100 people per day is okay. Just don't go up to 1,000 per day. Early on in the war, it was over 1,000 per day. So the only thing they beg for is the spectacle. How bad does it look in the media? And they only ask, okay, kill fewer people, keep killing. You have a green light to continue the war as much as you want. 20%, that means Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Belgium. That's about it. Everybody else is on board. I don't think they will bat an eye this time around. Another thing.
You had a lot of European policy proposals by Joseph Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief at the time, until the 1st of December. He made a lot of concrete proposals. He said, suspend Israel's association agreement with the EU. Europe is Israel's largest trading partner. A third of Israel's imports come from Europe. He said, impose sanctions. Impose sanctions on Israeli ministers, army divisions, the IDF units, extremist settlers.
Kaya Kalas, as soon as she takes over Borel's job, first thing she says, let's invite Israel to an association council. Completely obliterates it. And she says, we will try to talk sense to them. Maybe we can convince them to increase aid to Gaza. No more sticks anymore, just carrots. It's insane.
Let's turn briefly just to Israel for a moment. So before October 7th, Israel was, of course, riven with internal tensions and divisions. And we saw the very large scale protests against the government's judicial reforms. Since then, Netanyahu's polling ratings have very substantially recovered in recent months and the conflict has
with Hamas and Hezbollah seems to have helped to smooth over some of those divisions within Israel, at least to an extent. Would you expect them to re-emerge, especially if we were to see a formal ceasefire in Gaza and perhaps a bit of an accounting of the economic impact of the war on Israel?
Well, basically, every time there was a milestone in Gaza of Netanyahu, for example, assassinating Ismail Haniyeh or Senwar or Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader in Lebanon, every time you had one of these ginormous historic events from an Israeli perspective, his poll numbers went up a little bit and then it went down again.
His coalition is very close to a majority. I think the highest poll number that I've seen, a serious poll, is basically about 59 seats out of 120. If they get two more seats, they can cross the threshold and maintain a majority. They're very close, but they're not there yet. They could not form a complete majority in the Knesset if elections are held today.
After October 7th, you saw Netanyahu's polling numbers dropping completely down. I think there was about 10% of Israel that were not blaming him for October 7th. But it kept rising again slowly and steadily until he managed to rehabilitate it. He did not manage to rehabilitate it enough, but it's still quite close. There is still a lot of issues that are impacting his popularity. One of them is the issue of the recruitment of the Haredim, ultra-Orthodox in Israel.
There's another issue of the economy being in shambles. There's another issue with the reservists being fed up of this indefinite military service. A lot of them lost jobs or lost marriages, families collapsed, etc. Indefinite deployment, it's very painful to a lot of them.
But at the same time, there is the possibility for this to continue indefinitely, at least for the next five years. That's what Israeli experts have been telling us nonstop. I am regularly in touch with a lot of decent serious experts there. And they say the way it would go is Israel maintaining this five-finger policy, cutting Gaza with the corridors.
then that would allow the IDF to have a very marginal number of troops to maintain these corridors. And then the troops there would keep going in and out of specific neighborhoods in Gaza over the next five years until they collapse everything down completely. What you saw in Jabalia is going to happen to Gaza City. There is Balah and Yunus, Rafah, Mawasi itself.
So I wouldn't put too much hope on Israeli society coming around and then pressuring Netanyahu to stop the war. The majority of Israelis think that Israel is either using sufficient force in Gaza or not enough force.
The majority, from what I see, are completely delighted with what is happening in Gaza. You even have people that are going on these Saturday protests against Netanyahu to demand a deal and a hostage release. Some of them on record have been going on TV to Israeli media and saying, if the hostages are out, you can do whatever you want to Gaza. One of them is the father of an Israeli soldier, Larry El-Bagh.
that was captured in Nahal Ouz. Her father went on TV and he said you can wipe out Gaza after the hostages are out. Everyone there, there's no innocent people in Gaza. So the voices that would pressure Netanyahu to end the war are either completely marginal or becoming substantially weakened. There's something in Israel that is called the poison machine. Netanyahu created it and his base. The poison machine, it goes like this.
If an Israeli general in the IDF criticizes Netanyahu or Netanyahu's policies, there would be a swarm of attacks, character assassination on him in Israeli media, on social media, non-stop attacks. He would get protesters outside his home playing drums day and night to just annoy the hell out of him.
There would be a great deal of intimidation. There was even an Israeli hostage that came out of Gaza and she received a huge deal of death threats from Netanyahu's poison machine because she said something like that she was treated well or something of the sort. She still criticized Hamas a lot, but because she did not go completely the full mile on genocide Gaza, wipe it out altogether, she was receiving death threats.
So the only way that Israel can come around is, as a senior Arab, Miryir, recently put it in October, he said the only way this can end is Israel being dragged, kicking and screaming into a ceasefire. And the only way you can drag Israel is the weapons supply.
So the international Palestine solidarity movement has mobilized at unprecedented scale in response to Israel's actions, although we have seen perhaps a reduction in activity in recent months. It's perhaps most striking in the United States, where the movement has, of course, been historically relatively weak.
The mobilization of public feeling has clearly fed into the judicial processes at the International Criminal Court and the ICJ. We've seen huge protests, the development of direct action and attempts to blockade weapons factories that are supplying the Israeli armed forces, some sporadic acts of solidarity from trade unionists trying to prevent shipments to Israel.
But clearly all of these efforts have fallen well short of forcing Israel to end the genocide or even to get states like the US, Britain and Germany
to substantially change their position. What is your general assessment of the movement at the moment? And do you think there are any clear tactical and strategic opportunities that have yet to be fully exploited? Basically, I'll say that there's an unfortunate tendency of despair to downplay the impact of these demonstrations and pressure.
At the moment, things seem very bleak and dark. But early on in the genocide, for example, in October, when the Ahli hospital in Gaza was bombed, most likely by Israel. On that day, you had a lot of protests and demonstrations breaking out in Jordan, in the West Bank, in Egypt, around the Middle East.
European and American diplomats in these countries were telling their capitals that our lives are under threat. We fear our embassies will be attacked, our diplomatic missions. You saw warnings from European governments and I think the US as well telling tourists don't go to the Middle East at the moment. Emotions are very high up. Things might go wrong. I don't believe in violence and I don't advocate for it. But the pressure in that moment
forced all those European governments and the US to pressure Israel not to go with a full invasion. If you remember the time Israel wanted to go with a full invasion immediately in Gaza, then later on around the end of October when the invasion started, they termed it a maneuver, a limited maneuver. They were not saying full invasion. They stopped using the language. It was just like a semantics wordplay. It was very ridiculous. They went with an invasion anyways.
but it was watered down. Israel's conduct and ambition was watered down by the tangible pressure that was exerted on Europeans and Americans on their diplomatic missions. On the other side, when you had campus demonstrations that were happening, or even before that, when you had the regular demonstrations in the streets of London or in the US or in Denmark or in Germany, France, whatever, in all of these countries,
It shifted dramatically US foreign policy and all the countries that are tailing it on the ceasefire. If you remember the first five months of the genocide, no one was allowed to use the word ceasefire. It was completely banned. It was very painful and ridiculously, extremely moronic.
to see someone like Justin Trudeau trying to say ceasefire but he knows that he's not allowed to so he's in pain, contouring himself and twisting into a pretzel to try to say an alternative word instead of ceasefire and there's no other alternative word and then he manages to articulate a pose and you saw it with Joseph Borrell with European leaders saying yeah we would like a pose in Gaza, a humanitarian pose
That was explicit orders from the White House. No ceasefire. All the demonstrations, the pressure that was being exerted on the streets, it shifted things around. By February, the US was convinced that there is a need for a ceasefire that ends the war. By March, April, there was a solid ceasefire proposal. The other issue, when you had the campus protests happening, it was one of the most profound tools of pressure against different governments.
And that's why they are fighting it very heavily tooth and nail with a concerted campaign of intimidation, smear, defamation on a government level, on lobbying groups levels, on even individual businesses level, all these law firms saying that we are taking names and we're not going to hire any of those Harvard graduates, whatever.
There's an unprecedented campaign of intimidation, suppression, humiliation and smear against those students in their 20s, teenagers or people in their early 20s to kill that movement in the butt because it had a lot of profound impact. Back then, if you remember, that's when Biden announced his red line.
to sort of absorb the heat from these campus protests. That's when he said that if Israel goes into Rafah, I'm gonna suspend all arms sales to Israel. Israel is not gonna get any American weapons. Israel went into Rafah anyways and he didn't suspend shit, but
He made that threat because of the pressure of those campus movements. Another thing, when Biden went and announced at the end of May, 31st of May, when he made the grand ceasefire proposal, primetime television, and he was trying to speak to the Israeli public over Netanyahu's head to create pressure on Netanyahu to end the war. One of the reasons for this was basically the pressure that was happening in the street.
When Biden suspended the shipment of those 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, one of the main reasons was this pressure on the streets, nothing else. It was not the ICJ. The ICJ told Israel, suspend your operation in Rafah immediately, leave Rafah. They didn't. The U.S. didn't bear an eye on it. Another thing, early on in the genocide, you saw Israel preventing all food, water, electricity, medicine, fuel from going into Gaza immediately.
and later on it took weeks and weeks and weeks until Israel was convinced to allow Egypt, it was not even Israel itself letting the aid in, it was Israel allowing Egypt to allow aid into Gaza. Like there's this usual Israeli talking point of saying, "Ah, people complain about our blockade on Gaza, what about the Egyptian blockade?" It's not an Egyptian blockade, it's an Israeli imposed blockade from Egypt's side of the border.
Israel told Egypt if you allow any aid trucks to go into Gaza, we will bomb it as simple as that. So it took weeks and weeks until all of those European governments and the Americans felt the intense heat and pressure in the streets in the Arab world as well as in their capitals to force Israel to allow aid in. It was not ideal, not far from enough, but it worked. And I would say these forms of pressure, it worked. But as long as the pressure is disruptive,
A demonstration in an empty street that the media is not going to cover, that nobody's going to look at, a demonstration in a clear street in London, it's insufficient. There is a need for disruption of one way or the other. That's why the campus protests were having a profound impact. It was disruptive. And early on, that's why the demonstrations, when it felt that it can have a disruptive impact, all those European and American leaders were cowering in and pressuring Ilstreet. So there is hope there.
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