Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies' Phyllis Bennis about Israel's war on Palestinians for the July 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.” That recent statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders can be explored almost word by word. With zero cynicism at all, I wonder, who is “we,” exactly? What repercussions or responses accrue to a "humanitarian crisis" that differ from, for example, war crimes? And then, if "losing sight" is wrong, what has maintaining sight delivered?
Reports from just recent days are in of Israeli forces killing more than a hundred people in a southern Gaza designated safe zone, attacking schools where people were sheltered.
The Lancetreminds us that the roughly 40,000 people who have been reported killed in Gaza since last October should not be the number we hold in our heads, given not just the difficulty of data collection, but that armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. People dying from infectious disease and a lack of clean water are no less dead.
A numerical accounting of the toll of the current Israeli war on Palestinians may take years, but why should we wait? The effort to end it is now. So how and where does that happen? What needs to happen to get there?
We're joined now by Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of numerous books, including the constantly updated Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
while it's necessary, condemning attacks on civilians isn't enough. If we are serious about ending this spiraling violence, we need to look at root causes, and that means, hard as it may be for some to acknowledge it, we must look at the context.
Well, it's now July 2024. We're at where we're at. Is there anything that you would add or change from that call to understanding, from last year?
PB: I think the only thing I would change is that we are now looking at almost 10 months of genocide. When I wrote that, back in October, it had just started, and we had no idea we would be still at work, still having been unable to gain even a ceasefire. Even a ceasefire remains out of reach.
What has changed is the language of the White House, the language of some in Congress. We hear President Biden now saying, “We need a ceasefire. We want a ceasefire.” But he keeps on transferring weapons, including the 500-pound bombs, these massive bombs that were temporarily paused a few weeks ago, along with the giant 2,000-pound bombs, one of which alone can wipe out an entire city block, destroy every building on the block, and kill every person in those buildings.
For the moment, those bombs are still being “temporarily paused,” maybe because in a recent Reuters report, we learned that the US had, since October, already transferred at least 14,000 of those MK-84 bombs, those 2,000-pound giant weapons of mass destruction, and the smaller, less dangerous 500-pound bombs, that maybe could only destroy half a block at one time, and maybe only half the people that were living in those houses. So, OK, that should be right, right?
The hypocrisy of it. Saying, “I want a ceasefire,” President Biden says, while he continues to transfer the weapons. And then he goes on to say, while he continues to enable this genocide by providing the weapons–which is all that Israel wants from him, they don't care whether he says he wants a ceasefire or not; they want him to send the weapons, and he is sending the weapons. And then he says, “I'm the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.” What kind of hypocrisy are we hearing here?
JJ: Right. Well, Ramzy Baroud just wrote recently about the importance of separating humanitarian efforts from political and military objectives, essentially using the survival of people as a bargaining chip. I feel that media—not media alone—but they've fuzzed up this understanding that when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled, that we're supposed to think about civilians being harmed, and they should be protected whenever.
But just to say, the international bodies that even just witness and record this carnage are themselves undermined.
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: And the idea is: It's just every country against every other country–which, side note, would be demoralizing enough, even if it weren't such an obvious lie, given that we know that commerce is global; we accept meta-national rules when it comes to corporate behavior. But here the international bodies that would say this is wrong, where are they?
PB: Well, you're absolutely right. The international community, as it likes to be called—meaning the United Nations, the international courts, all of those institutions—have failed. In the main, they haven't failed primarily for lack of trying. They certainly have not tried hard enough. But they have tried.
The problem is they have been undermined every step of the way by their most powerful member, which happens to be the government of the United States. We should not forget what Dr. King taught us, that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government. He said that in 1967 at Riverside Church. I will say it again, today, so many years later. That has not changed.
We do see, in the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, the extraordinary impact of South Africa's initiative to challenge Israel directly, state to state, to say that Israel is violating the international convention against genocide. And after several weeks, on an expedited basis, the court came out and said, yes, this is plausibly genocide. And while it will take some time, usually months or years to make a complete and final determination, we are hereby ordering a set of things, that they ordered Israel to do, to make sure that the potential for genocide—or the actual genocide, they were leaving themselves that little wiggle room—but to make sure that that stopped, and they gave explicit orders, which Israel, again, simply ignored.
And what's different this time, Janine, what you said is so important about other countries, as well as the international institutions, standing by and watching: One of the things that's different here is that the international covenant against genocide, unlike most parts of international law that are very complicated, very hard to understand and really only apply very narrowly, the Genocide Convention specifically holds accountable every country that is a signatory, a party, to that convention. That includes the United States, ironically enough, includes Israel. But it says that every country who has signed on to that treaty has the obligation to make sure that it doesn't get violated.
That was the basis for South Africa charging Israel with violating the covenant. But it also goes to every other country, including our own. So the Biden administration, aside from its active enabling of the genocide, is doubly responsible here, because it has an explicit, affirmative obligation to do everything in its power to stop the possibility of these attacks turning into genocide, or to stop them if they are indeed already genocide.
And the US answer to that requirement is to keep sending the weapons: 14,000 of these giant 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 of the smaller 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, a thousand bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs, and more and more and more.
JJ: In this context—and whatever we say is the latest news might not be the latest when folks hear it—but what I'm reading now says that the International Court of Justice, the top court of the UN, is going to issue in two days, on July 19, an opinion, a non-binding opinion, on the legality of Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, which is clearly the context here, given our understanding that conflict didn't start on October 7. Given what we've just said, what can we possibly imagine will come from that opinion from the ICJ?
PB: What we are going to hear, I anticipate, will be a full recognition of the main violations that Israel is committing in carrying out this 55-year occupation of Palestinian land, the West Bank, Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem.
That will not lead, I'm afraid, to a change on the ground. Israel has made clear it has no respect for the International Court of Justice. It has no intention of abiding by decisions of the International Court of Justice.
What we are going to hear is a globally legitimated, important, very important, judgment, which will be important for us in civil society to hold up as a tool in our own mobilization in our own countries. Those of us in the United States will have a new piece of evidence of the illegality of US arms to Israel, because of the illegality of the occupation that those arms are designed to maintain. That's what makes it important. It's going to be a tool for us.
Phyllis Bennis: ""In any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation."
International law, like domestic law, frankly, is almost never self-enforcing. You can pass a law that says whatever you want, that murder is illegal, that's good to say. That doesn't stop somebody from killing someone, but it does allow accountability.
And this will allow accountability. Other countries, not the United States I'm afraid, but other countries that have a greater commitment to international law than this country does, will be able to use that judgment to, for example, use the concept of universal jurisdiction to say that those crimes, if indeed they are identified by the International Court of Justice as I anticipate, that those crimes are so serious that they can be adjudicated in any court in any country.
And that means that in any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation. And there can be papers issued that will hold them accountable, and mean that if they land in Paris or in Brussels or in Pretoria, or in countries anywhere in the world who take this up, that they could face arrest for these violations.
This is not the International Criminal Court, but the concept of universal jurisdiction means that any court can take up a case like this for these kinds of crimes. So I think it's going to be a very important judgment, even though we can know ahead of time that Israel will certainly not abide by whatever it demands.
JJ: And I do want to say that I have seen media pay maybe more respectful attention to international bodies than in the past. It used to be that the UN was just kind of a joke, and they were just people who were trying to interfere with the US. And I feel, it's impressionistic, but I feel like that is maybe shifting, for just the reasons you say.
PB: I think that's absolutely right, and I think the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has played a huge role in that. I think people all around the world, including here in the United States, the most cynical, were cheering, and crying, tearing up, watching this dream team, extraordinary rainbow combination of people of the South African legal team argue their case passionately, but with great focus on the law. This was about the law. They were not using designer videos, or whatever, to emphasize the horror of what the genocide looks like on the ground. They were sticking to the law.
And it was a powerful description, and I think people all around the world were looking at that and saying, wow, here's South Africa, a country of the Global South, that is suddenly taking the initiative in this institution that for so long was assumed to belong to the wealthy, colonial countries of the world, and now suddenly it's being democratized. These institutions themselves are being democratized through this process. That's enormously important.
JJ: Obviously, I think media are important. Sometimes, though, they seem like almost the last consideration. But I do know that in something like this, where you cannot avoid, unless you're trying to avoid them, images of grief-stricken Palestinians holding their loved ones in their arms…
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: Media have to do a job to get you to deny the feeling that you have when you see those images.
hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons and miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas, even a child's bedroom, blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants.
And they conclude, “Israeli officials say that Hamas' tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.” I don't know how else you read that, except to tell you, that feeling you have of your heart breaking, you should ignore that, because whoever Israel kills deserved it.
PB: Yep. No, I think that's absolutely right. That was not an accidental story. The timing was not accidental. The focus on that story was not accidental.
And I think that it also was very carefully written. It was written beautifully. It was a very powerfully written story. It was also written in a way that completely, carefully ignored, what does international law actually say? So Israel can say all it wants, “Well, we had no choice.” Israel had every choice in the world, and the choices it made violated a host of components of, if we just look at the Geneva Conventions, that say, among other things, you have to distinguish between civilian and combatants in who you target.
As we saw in this attack last week, there was an attack on, supposedly, one of the military leaders of Hamas, Mohamed Deif—that attack killed more than 90 Palestinian civilians, wounded more than 300. It doesn't matter whether or not it's true that Israel thought that Muhammad Deif was there. It is illegal to deliberately, knowingly, kill 90 civilians and injure 300 more because you think a military leader might be present. They don't even allege that he was fighting at the time. That is completely illegal.
It's illegal to attack hospitals. The fact that there may have been a command center in a tunnel below does not make it legal to destroy a hospital. It does not make it legal to destroy the headquarters of UNRWA, the only humanitarian organization with the capacity to actually get desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
None of these Israeli claims about “well, we have no choice”—the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and it has been fenced off, walled off, and surrounded by soldiers. It's the definition of a siege.
I think that many people believe, there's this claim, that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when the settlers and the soldiers were pulled out. That's not true, because the definition of occupation in international law is not the presence of settler colonies, physically, or the presence of soldiers on the territory. It's about control. And by building the wall, and having that wall surrounded by soldiers, Israel remains occupying the Gaza Strip. So you have an entire generation of people who have grown up in the Gaza Strip, because it has been besieged now for 17 years, who have never been outside that tiny strip of land, have been physically walled off like a siege of ancient times, and that was the condition in which this war is being fought.
Hamas has violated international law in a number of ways, in terms of its attacks using missiles that cannot be targeted against military targets. But the notion that there somehow is this choice of Hamas fighters to fight in the open, as if there is massive open space inside the Gaza Strip, this most crowded strip of territory in the world, it boggles the imagination. To anybody who's ever seen Gaza, this notion that this is somehow a legitimate excuse, that, “Oh, well, it's too crowded. We had no choice but to destroy all the infrastructure, all the buildings, the water treatment, the hospitals, all the universities, every museum, 70% of the schools.” This is a constant violation of international law, in which our own government and our tax money and our Congress and our president are directly and deeply implicated.
JJ: I thank you for that, and this would be the point where I would ask about hope and ways forward and what we could do, and I'll ask that now, too.
Crowd in Freedom Plaza for the March on Washington for Gaza (1/13/24). Photo by Elvert Barnes.
PB: Yeah. I think we can never give up hope. What has been extraordinary in this 10 months has been to see the rising of an incredible, powerful, broad movement of human solidarity with the Palestinian population of Gaza. People who never really gave much thought to the Israel/Palestine question, to Palestinian lives, to Israeli occupation, suddenly—and, certainly, part of it is because of the media, social media and mainstream media, have had no choice, as you said earlier, Janine, but to portray the horror of this genocide. And people have responded as human beings, which is an amazing thing. It doesn't happen all the time.
So we have to have hope in that. We have to know that we have managed to rebuild the definition of ceasefire, so that when we call for a ceasefire, and I've got to say the message discipline of this broad and largely unaccountable movement has been pretty extraordinary. Everybody is sticking to the demand: We need a ceasefire now. At the same time, we have managed to transform the understanding of, what does a ceasefire mean? It's not just, stop firing for a few minutes while you exchange some hostages and then go back to war. It means a permanent stop to the firing. It means access, real access, to massive amounts of immediate humanitarian aid. And it means stop sending weapons.
So when we demand a ceasefire of the Biden administration, we're demanding all those things. Unfortunately, when President Biden says, “We need a ceasefire,” he's only talking about part of one of those three things. And he's undermining the others by continuing to send the weapons. So that's what we have to focus on. The hope is, we have more people supporting the rights of Palestinians to life, among other things; it's huge, and the responsibility that comes with that hope is to keep up the demand for an immediate ceasefire, with all that that requires.
JJ: We've been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
