The Chris Hedges Report: Israel’s Mask Is Slipping

“No going back to Oct. 6” — David Hearst, editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, lays out the essential context of the conflict in Gaza and what to anticipate going forward.

By Chris Hedges 
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The latest chapter of Israel’s occupation of Palestine has raged on for nearly the last year, marking a significant shift in the decades-long clash that has already initiated the demystification of the mythology behind Israel.

Truth continues to be the first casualty of war in this particular struggle, as it has been massacred, through the killings of journalists in Gaza and the censorship of dissidents, throughout the conflict along with the Palestinians themselves.

Unfortunately for Israel, however, the state’s lies and brutality this time are too severe to escape the eyes of the global stage, and even its own people. 

As David Hearst, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Eye, states in this interview: 

“There are huge tensions in Israel about how the war was prosecuted, particularly the central tension is the obvious fact that Israel has been killing its own hostages through military action, obviously. And the narrative from Israel that Israel is pushing Hamas to release hostages is nonsense.

It is the exact opposite. The main killer of the hostages has been the bombing campaign. So there is a huge protest about getting the hostages home. And getting the hostages home means ending the war, basically.”

Hearst joins host Chris Hedges on the second episode of The Chris Hedges Report to offer a clear and direct explanation of the complexities surrounding the conflict, providing essential context on what to anticipate moving forward.

“What we’ve got to get really clear about is that our idea of left and right, or our idea of moderates and extremists, does not translate to Israeli realities. And when it comes to killing as many Palestinians as they can, everyone is up for it,” Hearst tells Hedges.

The brazen violence that journalists like Hearst and others have reported on is pulling Israel’s mask of nobility down, and revealing its true face as the “ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been.” 

Hearst claims that “there is a blood lust going through Israel.” He proves this point through stories of the brutality, demonstrating how for Israel “there’s absolutely no attempt to distinguish between someone carrying a gun or a rocket launcher and someone carrying a bottle of water.” In other words, all Palestinians are automatically “terrorists” — guilty of crimes punishable by death — to the Israelis. 

This indiscriminate tactic of killing has exposed Israel for what it truly is. The live streamed suffering of the Palestinians, and the violence of the Israelis, is too great for the apartheid regime to hide once the genocide is over. Israel will become synonymous with its victims, just as the violent regimes of the past have.

Credits 

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones 

Intro: Max Jones and Diego Ramos 

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges 

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its “democracy” — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism.

Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare that will continue at least until the end of this year — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation —which it successfully sold to its Western audiences — will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews.

Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy. 

Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians; Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews; and Serbs are with the Bosniaks.

Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.

Joining me to discuss the future of Israel and the decades long effort by Zionists to dispossess Palestinians from their land is David Hearst, editor in chief of Middle East Eye, an independent website based in London covering the Middle East in English and French.

David Hearst: Well, you’re dead right, I don’t think there’s any going back to October the sixth, and it stripped away an awful lot of the fig leaves that at least liberal Zionists, certainly in Britain, were operating under for far too long and getting away with it.

I’d like to push back a little bit on that comment that Israel has been hijacked by extremists, because historically, I don’t see it that way. I see Zionism as a two-speed venture.

You can have the salami-slice tactics of the so-called moderate center ground, which is basically one settlement at a time. Nothing too much. An awful lot of left and right. All these ghastly settlers are here, whatever. The sort of language that Jonathan Freedland, my former colleague, used to talk about again and again, and it was used very cleverly to stop BDS, to stop sanctions against Israel.

The argument being that if you sanction the good guys, the right wing will take over. This idea of left and right in Zionism — I think Gaza stripped all that away.

And I see Zionism as a two speed operation. It either goes in salami slices, it either goes bit-by-bit, quite cleverly, one street at a time, or it goes like Ben-Gvir in fifth gear, like a tank. And you literally say, this is “Eretz Israel.” This is the “Land of Israel,” the biblical Land of Israel, we’re God’s chosen people and we’re going to shoot everyone that’s around. And the vengeance that we seek on or wreak on Gaza is biblical vengeance. So I’m not sure Israel has been hijacked by extremists. 

I think the Zionist colonial project was extremist in the first place. And the more you go back, there is no such thing as a proper Israel, a clean Israel. There is always one massacre lurking in the shadows. There is Tantura, there is a whole bunch of massacres. There’s the poisoning of the wells.

There’s… you know the history better than I do so I see Zionism as a two- speed operation, and now it’s in fifth gear, and it is going for broke. And the idea that Israel isn’t Israel for all its citizens, has long been thrown up, thrown out the window.

Excuse me. It’s an Israel for Jews only. And the width of discussion about Gaza is much narrower than we in the West like to imagine. So I’d just like to recall a recent event, which is the motion of the Knesset. The Knesset passed a bill basically saying that they are outlawing a creation of a Palestinian state, and they had two objections to a Palestinian state. The first one was that if we create a Palestinian state, Hamas will take it over. It will become Gaza in the middle of us, and we can’t tolerate that. Okay, all right. You, given what happened on October the seventh, you could make a case for that just. 

However, what the real intent of the motion was, it says, we cannot have a Palestinian state inside the Land of Israel, absolutely where we were 3,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, etc. And that is the Zionist project. So that has to be a real warning light.

So everyone who keeps on mouthing in the West, I mean every single party in the West — the Labour Party in Britain, the French, the Germans, the U.N., the U.S. — all talk about a two state solution.

Well, who on the Israeli side is going to take away now, 700,000, more than 700,000 settlers? Who on the Israeli side is actually going to see… even if you are a … dinosaur that recognizes Israel who is there on the other side now to talk to?

And I think we’ve really got to challenge the idea of a two state solution by simply going to the West Bank, or inviting everyone to go to the West Bank, looking at all those twinkling lights on the hills and saying, Who’s going to shift that lot? Who’s going to shift the roads? Who’s going to shift the 17,18 industrial estates in the West Bank? Try driving between Jerusalem and South Hebron Hills, and just see how many roadblocks you have to go through. Just do that straight…

Chris Hedges: I was just in Ramallah. I just went to Ramallah about 10 days ago. And you know to go from Ramallah to Nablus, which should take 90 minutes, takes seven hours. You’re exactly right. I want to clarify, because you’re right about Zionism when I talk about extremism, and let’s not forget that the Nakba and in 1967 these were liberal Zionists who oversaw the worst atrocities against Palestinians. 

But the difference, I think, and I lived in Israel for a while, is that the liberal Zionists, and it was all a veneer, I mean, it didn’t make any difference for the Palestinians, but they fought against the religious Zionists. Meir Kahane, for instance, in the 1990s his Kach Party was outlawed, and then the government, Ben Gvir and these figures, are essentially heirs to Kahane, in some ways, they’re more honest than the liberal Zionist. So you are exactly right, that the Zionist project and all you have to do is read the private letters of Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, the leader, in essence, the leader of the pre-1948 Zionist Movement. Read his letters. He’s quite frank. 

He sounds like Jabotinsky, the right wing, I think Mussolini, at one point called him a good fascist, the heir to the Herut Party, which Bibi Netanyahu, his father was one of the founders of that came out of the Stern gang and these terrorist groups, Menachem Begin and others that killed both British officials and Palestinians.

So yes, you’re exactly right, that Zionism, the engine of Zionism itself, has never altered. But the face of Zionism, I think these religious Zionists, the liberal Zionists, and certainly when I lived in Israel, the liberal Zionists in the nature of Kach, the Kach Party and Kahane. They banish these people. And now we have seen a triumph of these settler religious fanatics over liberal Zionism. I guess that was the point I was trying to make.

David Hearst: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And there was a lot of pushback in those days of the Jewish underground. And in fact, there was a plot by the Jewish underground, by all the same people we’re talking about now, to blow up Al Aqsa, and that was diffused by security forces. The difference now, of course, is that security forces are completely overtaken with settlers.

Chris Hedges: And the military. It used to be that if you were a settler, you could not rise within the security forces or the military.

David Hearst: Yeah, absolutely. And now, of course, you’ve got [Bezalel] Smotrich, you’ve got Ben-Gvir, actually, with official positions in terms of both the finance and also the border police. So they are not just part of the government, but they are a very active part of that government.

I think the point I was trying to make with the Knesset vote was that Benny Gantz voted for it along with, you know, most of the parties.

So the idea of there being extremists and moderates when it comes to the Palestinians, when it comes to judicial reform, okay, there’s a real battle going on for control between the religious Zionists and Ashkenazi Zionists, if you want to call them, or, you know, people who style themselves in the center ground, but on Palestine, on shoot to kill or shoot everyone, it’s not even shoot to kill, it’s shooting everyone in Gaza, there is no distinction at all.

Benny Gantz, I believe, in one of his election videos, boasted about how many Palestinians he’d killed when he was in charge. There’s very little pushback. There was a letter sent to all the congressional leaders, I think it was about 48 hours ago, from an oppressive array of ex-IDF, ex-Mossad, [inaudible], like quite a quite a few big names, basically saying that Netanyahu was a criminal and shouldn’t address Congress, but they didn’t mention the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice. 

They didn’t mention genocide or war crimes. What they were talking about was the submarine affair. They were talking about bribery and corruption, and they were still saying that Iran is an existential enemy and that Netanyahu poses an existential threat to Israel because he’s just mucking things up. They’re not saying that the whole project is wrong and will lead just to a regional war. They’re not backing away from that. They’re not backing away from trying to do the impossible and eradicate, uproot Hamas from Gaza.

So what we’ve got to get really clear about is that our idea of left and right, or our idea of moderates and extremists, does not translate to Israeli realities. And when it comes to killing as many Palestinians as they can, everyone is up for it. There is a blood lust going through Israel. I use the word biblical vengeance, but it is sickening what they think they can get away with and what still has got to come out.

One of the most horrifying stories came out of the Israeli army, I refuse to call it, by the way, the Israeli Defense Forces, because I don’t use the word IDF, I say Israeli army. One of those horrifying tales of Israel came out in an extremely good website, 972, I’m sure you know, and it was the testimony of six, I think, soldiers, all anonymous, who had been reservists in Gaza. And let me just read you some of the things that they said about how it is that so many civilians have died in Gaza. It’s somewhere up at the moment, near 40,000 but there’s probably another 10,000 under the rubble. If you read The Lancet in Britain, there could be three times as many dead, what they call indirect deaths. 

So that’s the scale of it. And you ask yourself, how, why? How’s it happened? Has it all been in-fighting? Is it crossfire? What is it? Absolutely not.

According to soldier B, any Palestinian in Gaza can inadvertently find themselves a target: “it’s forbidden to walk around, and everyone who’s outside is suspicious. If we see someone in a window looking at us, he’s a suspect. You shoot.”

Soldier A said that in the operations room, destroying buildings often felt like a computer game. Anyone caught in one of Israel’s kill zones could be targeted by or who is targeted by a bored soldier could be counted as a terrorist. So there’s absolutely no attempt to distinguish between someone carrying a gun or a rocket launcher and someone carrying a bottle of water. And there’s another soldier who said that the policy, there was a policy of torching Palestinian homes after they had been taken over as temporary locations for soldiers. So they said the principle was, if you move on, you have to burn down the house.

And according to soldier B, his company burned hundreds of houses.

Soldier A said, “I can count on one hand the number of cases in which we were told not to shoot, even with sensitive things like schools, approval feels like a formality. No one will shed a tear if we flatten a house when there is no need or we shoot someone we didn’t have to.” 

Soldier S said that the Caterpillar bulldozers cleared the areas of corpses, buried them under the rubble, flips them aside so the convoys don’t see them. See the images of people in advanced stages of decay, they don’t come out. This is how the Russians behaved in Ukraine, and just none of it is getting through.

Now, if peace does break out, and unfortunately, I don’t think it will, because I think that’s locked up, we can talk about this in Netanyahu’s very, very sick brain. But if there is a ceasefire, these stories will multiply, and we will get the full horror of war crimes.

So the whole Western push to protect Israel, particularly the American push, [President Joe] Biden’s push to protect Israel against war crimes, will crumble under a mountain of evidence that is going to come out about actually what happened.

What were the deaths? What happened, for instance, in the second time Israel stormed Al Shifa hospital?

According to my information, they got 800 people out. Most of them were government workers shot them dead and then bulldozed the bodies and crushed the bodies and pulverized them. That is, like, you know, these sort of scenes are scenes reminiscent of Srebrenica. So it’s only just coming. I think our support for Israel is just about to tumble under the weight of this truly horrifying evidence, which, you know, it feels like we’ve been writing solidly now for nine months, but is underreported.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I covered Srebrenica. I was there in Bosnia for Srebrenica. Let’s talk about what’s happening in Gaza. I’m really interested in your take. It doesn’t seem to me that Israel really has any clear idea of where it’s going at all. There was an early effort, obviously, to drive the Palestinians into the Sinai. [U.S. Secretary of State Anony] Blinken went around and tried to get Iraq and Jordan to accept a certain number of, quota of Palestinians. This was roundly rejected.

I was just in Egypt, and the Egyptian journalists were telling me that the military has been unequivocal to the Sisi government, that no Palestinian will come over, be pushed out of Rafah into the Sinai. So how do you read where Israel thinks it’s going and then how do you see where everything is going?

David Hearst: Well, you’re absolutely right. I think it was the Egyptian army, not Sisi, but the Egyptian army that stopped that one. They said, absolutely not. This is an existential threat for the Egyptian state if you had a Palestinian enclave in the Sinai.

And I think Egypt is very, very sore about Rafah being bulldozed. Because, one, it was a source of income, quite a big source of income. But two, as you know, it was their Palestinian card. It was their foreign policy. Now, Egypt has been made irrelevant as an actor in Libya. It’s been made completely irrelevant in Sudan, a country it once ruled, and that’s been made irrelevant in Gaza and Palestine. And that’s a big, big deal for certainly the Mukhabarat and the GIS and the general security.

So Israel’s tactic in Gaza was really quite simple. It was to seal all the land borders and create a port and push the Palestinians into the sea. And there were ministers who voiced exactly this. There’s a lot of oral evidence for the South African genocide case, and there’s a lot of evidence, oral statements, about pushing the Palestinians into the sea or thinning out the Palestinian population. In fact, Ron Dermer, who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s point man, was asked in December by Netanyahu to develop a plan to thin out the Palestinian population. 

So ethnic cleansing and another enactment was absolutely the aim, and still probably is the aim of the Israeli government.

In terms of the various options they are trying to do, they’re absolutely at sea. They tried two main plans. Firstly, they phoned up all of the 32 tribal chiefs in Gaza, and only one agreed to work with them.

Then came a statement from the tribal chief saying, we are not going to work for the Israelis.

Now, there was a period about a month in after October the seventh, where Hamas were really quite concerned that they would lose the population, and that was a bad period for them. However, they should have had absolutely no concerns for that, because Israel went out of its way to make this a war against all Palestinians living in Gaza, whether they were Hamas, whether they were Fatah, whether [inaudible], whoever they were, this was a war of extermination. And the message got through very, very quickly.

So the level of public support for the resistance shot up and has maintained. There are reports of people saying “a plague on both your houses, we can’t bear this anymore”. And I’m not surprised by that, because every single Gazan family has been hit by this war. They’ve been moved not once or twice, but nine, 10 times. They have had all their money taken off them in Israeli roadblocks. This has happened to our journalists. They’ve been shot, they have been tortured, they have been raped. There’s a story of about 100 cases of rape that Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization, has monitored, which Hamas has not registered for reasons of social conservative and shame, family shame. But the Israelis have used rape, exactly like the Russians have done, as an instrument of war, torture, [inaudible], arrest. They’ve stolen. 

So this is absolutely a war against the whole people. And of course, the support for Hamas shot up and is still incredibly high.

So from Israel’s point of view, they cannot distinguish between Hamas and the normal population, which is why they claim that the Hamas losses are so high.

So the first attempt was to establish local governors, through direct appeals to the tribal chiefs that failed.

The second attempt was an attempt to infiltrate between [inaudible] mukhabarat who were placed there by Majed Faraj, Majed Faraj’s people, and they came there under the guise of being a protection to Egyptian aid convoys, and they were rumbled because they were armed. They drew their guns when the aid trucks were rushed by people and they were all captured. They tried to establish their headquarters in the headquarters of the Egyptian Red Crescent in Rafah, and they were all arrested. So that was the second attempt. Hamas dealt with that very quickly.

Now the situation is that I think Hamas are confident they have — they don’t say they’re over the worst, but, militarily, they are confident that — say they’ve gone through so much they’re not going to go back. Every time they’re asked by their more nervous colleagues in Doha or Beirut, can you keep on fighting? The answer is, yeah, no problem. Several months more, we can keep on doing it.

How can they keep on fighting? 

Firstly, the tunnel network is much, much bigger than the Israelis thought, and much more advanced and much more sophisticated. It can run cars through it, for instance. They recently found a tunnel that was three levels deep, going under the Rafah border, another one running from north to south. So they’ve got literally thousands of kilometers of tunnels, and that is the main strategic weapon. It’s still intact. Hamas says about 20 to 30 percent of it has been rendered out of order, but they keep on digging. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is they’ve got a limitless supply of high quality explosive from the unexploded ordnance of Israeli missiles and bombs. They say they’ve got about 3,000 tons, which they recycle in their factories underground. So they’ve got communication north and south. They’ve got a limitless supply of explosives, and they’ve got also a limitless supply of manpower. Because as you can imagine what Palestinians would do when you’ve seen your families blown up, or you’ve seen the Israelis set the dogs on a guy with Down Syndrome and just left to bleed to death, that goes on in front of your eyes all the time. You can imagine what anyone, any brother or sister watching that would do.

And the third thing that they’ve demonstrated, more than anything else, is they’re not going to leave. They’d rather die in Gaza than go. This is a new generation of fighters. They’ve gone through, they were born after Oslo. They’ve gone through all the nonsense about, you know, tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrow, you’ll see a Palestinian state. They’ve gone through the humiliation. They’ve gone through, you know, 16, 17 years of siege. They know that Israel is counting the number of calories and controlling the number of calories they consume, even in peace, and they say, what the hell we’ve had enough. This is the breakout generation. 

So I view October the seventh, horrendous as it was, as a prison breakout, basically. And a lot of Palestinians support this. Really do. If you’re in the West Bank, where horrendous things have been happening, we can talk about that. But there’s a whole bunch of things have been happening under the cover of war. Basically, the settlers are trying to push the Palestinians into area A from area C, which is the part that is controlled by Israel, in fact, Israel controls everything.

And what the West Bankers say is, if it works in Gaza, we’ll be next. So you’ve got this absolutely, you know, if anyone is facing an existential war, we use the word existential a little bit too much about the Jews and being Jewish myself, I’m fed up with it. I think the people facing a real existential crisis are the Palestinians, and they’re standing up to it, and they’re behaving like real warriors.

Chris Hedges: Where do you see… I have a hard time figuring out how this is going to end. I mean, it’s clear what Israel’s intent is. It wants to depopulate Gaza and make Gaza uninhabitable, but I don’t see it. And it can keep going as long as the United States keeps funneling weapons. I think I read, 68 percent of munitions that Israel uses now come from the United States, and I don’t see that ending. So how do you see this, you know, playing out? 

David Hearst: Well, Israel’s got a very big problem, and that is, it’s going back and back and back in the same areas to destroy Khan Younis again, for the second, third time. It’ll destroy Rafah again. It’ll go back to Gaza City again. It will not be able to pacify Gaza. So this will be, even if it is low level, it will carry on.

They’ve got a real problem trying to work out who’s going to run the place and how it’s going to get run. There are rival projects at the moment. I don’t think any of them will take off. Basically, there’s a sort of U.S. sponsored plan with the UAE and possibly also with Dahlan, Mohammed Dahlan, who is mentioned as a possible figure that could be acceptable to Hamas, that also has the whole backstory to it, which we could talk about. But even if you take, for instance, UAE, there’s a recent suggestion that the Emiratis would put ground troops in, there are conditions that the Emiratis would set for saying that they would put their troops on the ground. 

One of them, for instance, Abdul-Khalek Abdullah, who’s a political scientist very close to the UAE, said that Abu Dhabi would have several conditions for participating in such an initiative. I’m just reading out. These include an official invitation of the PA, substantial reforms within the PA appointment of an independent prime minister.

Abdullah also emphasized that the Emiratis want assurances the PA would assume control over Gaza and want Israel to commit to a two state solution. Well, all of that is just like light years away from where we are right now. So even the Emiratis, who were probably closest to the Israeli position, have got a mountain of objections. Then take Dahlan, Dahlan has refused the idea of… Dahlan and Hamas talk to each other all the time and there is a relationship…

Chris Hedges: You should explain who he is, for people who don’t know him. 

David Hearst: So Muhammad Dahlan is one of the Fatah strongmen. In 2006, 2007 he was tasked with — he comes from Gaza, he has family in Gaza — he was tasked, basically with making a preemptive coup. Hamas chucked his 7,000 fighters out. It was very bloody, and from then on, the siege started. Dahlan then later fell out with Mohammed Abbas, the Palestinian president, and he’s now in exile in Abu Dhabi.

Dahlan is the basic bag carrier for Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the Emirates, and he’s basically the man who does all the dirty operations for the Emiratis. He funneled arms to Libya. He created arms factories in Serbia. He liaised with the RSF in Sudan just before the coup. He’s the go-to guy.

Now on Palestine, he is the deadly enemy of Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas has used this. He’s wanted on corruption charges. He’s been convicted in absentia.

Dahlan says all of these are political charges, but the main rivalry in Fatah is between Dahlan, who continues to pour money into his various camps. Balata camp is loyal to him, for instance, and he’s also poured money into Gaza. Now, when Yahya Sinwar comes out of jail, Sinwar and Dahlan go back a long way. They were both born in Khan Younis. They both went to the same school. They went to the same university. They were in prison together, partly, and a relationship developed between the two. 

Now, when Sinwar came out, he was full of praise for Dahlan, accepted money for weddings, and there were deals being done. And this caused ructions within other elements of Hamas, particularly in Doha, particularly the political guys, and also in Beirut as well. And they stopped this. They said, no, Dahlan is not waltzing back into Gaza, we remember what happened in 2007.

But there was still this relationship, I asked my sources, what was the story behind Sinwar and Dahlan? Didn’t they realize I said to them that a leopard never changes his spots? That he could be working for the Israelis, Americans, God knows who. And they laughed, and they said that during one episode, I think before the First Intifada, or maybe even during it, they were both at university, Sinwar and Dahlan, and a [inaudible] was killed by some of Dahlan’s gunman and Sinwar beat him up to within a fraction of his life, basically, and left him almost like… He didn’t kill him, but he sent a message. So I was told, Sinwar loathes Dahlan, but you never know. They both could have matured, and they both realized that they need each other. Dahlan, since October the seventh, firstly, praised the action. He did not condemn it. He then said, this was the Palestinians’ right. He’s kept very, very close, closely involved with the whole situation. He has rejected the idea of going into Gaza without the express invitation of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Hamas, meanwhile, have said that they are prepared to be flexible about who governs Gaza, by which they mean someone that they are consulted about, who may not necessarily come from their ranks. 

So immediately in my brain, I thought, oh, was this a reference to Dahlan? So there are things going on there. I think the difficulty of composing a Gaza government post-war are multiple.

Firstly, every single problem that you and I have covered for the last 20 years has not been solved like PA, the reconciliation, Abbas’ hatred for Dahlan, Abbas’ refusal to be a partner to Hamas, who he absolutely loathes. Israel dividing and ruling the siege the whole Western post-Oslo concept that the only people you can negotiate with are the people who recognize Israel’s right to exist.

All of that comes together and it’s concentrated on one small area, and you realize that all the problems still exist. So I don’t think, and if this is going to materialize, it could be that Hamas does sign, I think Hamas has accepted the ceasefire, and Israel hasn’t, and that basic ceasefire is on the lines of Biden’s speech, he made it far too late in the war, but he did actually make it, to give him his credit. And the U.N. resolution, and that was very clear. Both were very, very clear. It was very much like the first ceasefire deal that was signed with William Burns, the C.I.A. chief in Cairo and then in Doha. And the people who rejected, of course, was Netanyahu. So then Biden made this and that, the specific parameters of that was that at the end of the first stage there would be negotiations and the ceasefire would be permanent, and the negotiations would continue, but it would not allow Israel to go back to war, and that has been the sticking point all along. 

Now Biden changed policy on that but too late in his speech in which he said, this was an Israeli offer, of course, it wasn’t an Israeli offer. It was Burns coming out again, it was the C.I.A.

And Hamas signed up to it, and Turkey would also have been a guarantor under those circumstances. It is Netanyahu who cannot sign that deal because, not because Gantz has left his war cabinet, but because Ben-Gvir could walk out of the coalition, and then what you’ve got in Israel is Ben-Gvir, a future prime minister, seizing the mantle of the right wing coalition between Likud and the religious Zionists, and that is the part, that’s the seat at the moment that Netanyahu occupies, and he’s terrified that Ben-Gvir could outflank him on that.

So I just don’t see Netanyahu, except I could be completely wrong. Tomorrow it could happen, in which case Hamas would say, fine, alright, we’ve come out of the war, we won.

So the principal problem of what happens next in Gaza is the accretion of all of these problems that we’ve been talking about, the fact that Israel hasn’t eradicated Hamas. And if Israel hasn’t eradicated Hamas, Hamas is still there as the de facto government, and if you try and impose something on them, it won’t work. So the next government has to have the resistance groups’ blessing, not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and the resistance. And that would be a very, very different government to the one that would be, I mean, if that happens, I think Abbas has got to worry about keeping charge of Ramallah as well, because the same thing could happen there. 

So all of these things require so much movement that I think my gut instinct is the war will go on. It will become a military occupation. I think the West Bank will become a military occupation as well. And the PA will be there purely as the eyes and the ears of the Shabak, of Shin Bet and you will have, I think at the moment the last count was something like 650 roadblocks in the West Bank. Everyone shut up in their own villages, and you’ll have Israel fighting a soft war, if you like, on five fronts, though we haven’t talked about Lebanon, but that will be the next major offensive.

At the moment, I think Israel, the Israeli army is too exhausted, it doesn’t have enough tanks to invade Lebanon, and Hezbollah has been doing an extremely good job of knocking out military targets that Israel needs to establish its eyes and ears in northern Lebanon. So I think Israel faces a future of open conflict on five fronts.

Chris Hedges: Do you think Israel is intent upon making an incursion into Lebanon? I mean, that’s a big question.

David Hearst: Well, the motor for that is internally displaced people from the border. I mean, if you’re a Palestinian, and if you are journalists like us, you laugh at the notion that Israel can’t stand internally displaced people. What has it done to the Palestinians? But it has, I think there’s something like 60,000 still living in hotels after 10 months. And there is pressure to start that. There’s also continual back and forth. They can’t stop trying to eliminate Hezbollah commanders and so it’s got its own momentum.

There are other indications that an invasion of Lebanon is a matter of when, rather than if. I understand that it’s actually not a story I’ve actually yet written, but I understand that the Qatari diplomat has flown to Beirut to talk to Hezbollah and offer Qatar’s services as a mediator, should war break out, and that’s been accepted. So that’s one indication of sort of long term planning for the war, and the other indications are the direct talks that the U.S. officials have had with Iranian officials in Oman about setting the parameters of Iran’s pushback if and when Israel invades Lebanon.

So I think it’s stalled for the moment because of technical means, tanks, basically hardening the Israeli airfields in the north of Israel, trying to work out how to cope with drones that seem to fly under the Iron Dome and other missiles as well that fly surface to surface, trying to counter the the latest Hezbollah missile.

But at the moment they say exactly the same thing applies to those northern communities apply to southern Israel and we’re going to have to deal with the threat. I think, however, we’re in a new era where they can’t just simply pick off militias and targets one after the other. You remember the phrase, Chris, that they used, you know, grass cutting exercises. 

Chris Hedges: Mowing the lawn. 

David Hearst: Mowing the lawn, those sort of deeply odious, you know, suburban sort of understatement. I think that era is gone. I think several things have changed about this new era, I don’t think they can dictate now who’s going to be the next leader of the Palestinian Authority. Certainly, they can put a new quisling in. They could put Majed Faraj in, or they could put in Hussein al-Sheikh, but they’ve got no legitimacy on the ground. If Abbas goes, those two go. It’s very, very interesting talking to Hani al-Masri, the veteran commentator who once used to be close to Abbas, on basically how weak Fatah is at the moment, and how many people are looking in different directions.

And so I think that era is over. And I think certainly mowing the lawn is over, because the guys whose cuttings you are, whatever the horrible metaphor goes, the grass you are cutting is fighting back. And it’s fighting back with missiles that are asymmetric and that can do you real damage. And if you look at the West Bank, there have been two incidents now where Israeli troops have walked into Iraq style bombs. So roadside bombs, they’ve blown up a tank, blown up heavily armored vehicles and killed people inside them, one soldier in particular, or they walked into buildings and then they got blown up. The level of resistance in the West Bank is increasing, technically, all the time and Israel, to avoid using soldiers, it’s using F-16 aircraft.

And that reminds me, and I think I’m sure it must remind you, of the Second Intifada, where they were bombing targets with aircraft, the camps with aircraft, and they’re doing the same now with drones. So this isn’t a question of pouring troops on the ground. It’s battlefields conditions, where they reduce Nur Shams camp, for instance, to, or areas of it, to rubble, or Jenin, where I was in fairly recently. So the war in the West Bank is growing as well. And when you were in Jordan, you must have noticed how angry people were in Jordan and the East Bankers as well, not just the Palestinians.

Chris Hedges: Yes, and they and they threw [inaudible], the investigative journalist, in prison for her coverage of Jordan’s collaboration in shooting down the Iranian missiles that were headed for Israel, for a year, along with her exposure of the companies to break the Yemeni blockade or transporting goods from the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Jordan to sustain the Israeli economy.

David Hearst: There was another very small story in Jordan that I think happened while you were there, and that was an ex-soldier from Amman which, as you know, is in the south of the country. And according to Jordanian law, soldiers, after 20 years of service can apply for a housing loan from the army. It’s a lot of money, and the family uses this to build houses, and it’s a bit of a perk.

He died, and on his death, the family were told by the lawyer that he donated all the money from that loan to Gaza. And that’s quite an interesting sort of vignette about what people feel about Palestinians. I don’t know whether he’s Palestinian or not, but he certainly didn’t come from a Palestinian town in Jordan, and the level of anger is enormous. So when we’re talking about a new era, yes, you could have Donald Trump and his great friend, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, signing a piece of paper for lots of money, I assume, to both the Trump families and to him normalizing relations with Israel, but it would mean so much less, and I actually don’t think he would do it. I think he’s too shrewd for that now, because Saudi Arabia owns the Arab Peace Initiative. It was signed in Riyadh, it’s very proud of it, and it still thinks it’s the basis for peace. 

So, the whole idea, as you know, of the Abraham Accords, was to leapfrog the Palestinian veto. So I don’t think we can go back to those days. And I think Blinken and Biden’s foreign policy is in shreds, literally in shreds. And it basically has to be rebuilt from the bottom up. We have to have Western governments that say the Palestinians should be able to support their own leadership and to vote their own leader in, right? And we shouldn’t have a veto on that. And then they come and talk to us, and they say, right, let’s talk about a solution, but to say, to fight against all national unity governments, to say the next Palestinians should be someone that we’ve chosen to keep the whole entity weak, all of this is a total disaster for the West. I’m not talking about for Israel, for the West. A two state, a Palestinian state is never, ever going to be accepted.

And then they should ask themselves this question, which Israeli leader is actually going to evict hundreds of, now, hundreds of thousands, of settlers? Where is it going to happen? And if you cannot answer that question, you then say, “Why are you talking about a two state solution?”

You’ve got to ask yourself those questions. And no one is asking that. They’re all just saying, oh, well, it’ll all be decided by negotiating. Where did you see Trump’s map for a Palestinian state? It was some sort of a rubbish dump in East Jerusalem, and it was an enclave in the… Did you see that map? It was amazing. That’s peace, is it? I mean, so it’s not going to happen. Is Western policy actually going to do the seat change that we’re both thinking about and knowing about and doing it? I don’t know, but it’s collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions at the moment.

Chris Hedges: And this brings me to the cost of Israel. I mean, Ilan Pappé is talking about the imminent demise of the Zionist state. There are clear signs of stress. First of all, economically, Israel is suffering terribly from this prolonged conflict. It has now revoked the prohibition on conscripting religious youth who were exempt, orthodox youth into the army. It is expanded the amount of time by which soldiers must serve, and there are reports of thousands of very severe Israeli casualties, and the distances are very small, so somebody with a very serious wound can be airlifted quickly out of Gaza and kept alive, but is probably invalided for the rest of their life. So let’s just close by talking about, you know, when Pappé, certainly somebody who knows more than I do, I mean, he’s talking about the disintegration of the Zionist state.

David Hearst: A lot of people do. I think there’s a lot to what Ilan Pappé says. He always was an anti-Zionist so the number of people who, or Israelis who, who think like him, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, basically.

There is an overwhelming consensus for carrying on this war in Israel amongst all sections of the Israeli public. But there are huge tensions in Israel about how the war was prosecuted, particularly the central tension is the obvious fact that Israel has been killing its own hostages through military action, obviously.

And the narrative from Israel that Israel is pushing Hamas to release hostages is nonsense. It is the exact opposite. The main killer of the hostages has been the bombing campaign. So there is a huge protest about getting the hostages home. And getting the hostages home means ending the war, basically. That’s one set of tensions.

The other set of tensions, I think you mentioned, is the number of severe injuries, we don’t actually know. I think there’s a figure of 4,200, 4,300 but I think it’s many more. It’s more like 10,000 and that has had a big effect, particularly amongst reservists, who are also, you know, students, small businessmen, who are very, very much, the engine of the Israeli citizen military state. 

It was the reservists who could keep the economy going. There’s another factor that we haven’t mentioned is that the number of Israelis who are now taking European or foreign passports and are shifting their money abroad, particularly to Cyprus, Portugal, France, Greece, Britain, that’s another indication of the fact that the Ashkenazi Jew, the European Jew, the second, third generation of of the Holocaust generation don’t have as much faith as they did that they’ll be able to live in Israel.

Again, as a journalist, you want to know how many people, how many passports, you don’t want to keep on this sort of anecdotal plane. You actually want figures and facts, and of course, we’re not getting them. So that is anecdotal rather than… but it is certainly a factor of the number of people actually leaving Israel, Israeli Jews, I’m talking about.

Chris Hedges: I’ve heard the numbers as high as 400,000-500,000 I don’t know if you’ve heard…

David Hearst: Those figures have been bandied up, but there’s been nothing officially admitted yet. So, that’s another indication, I think Israel, I mean, how do wars end? Wars end through mutual exhaustion. Wars end through both sides realizing they cannot gain their objectives through military means alone.

I think Israel is a long, long, long way away from that. I think it’s on that journey, but it is many years away from realizing that they can’t solve the Palestinian problem through arms alone.

As soon as they come to that conclusion, we’re into a different world where they sit down honestly and say, how can we share this land together? And I don’t care whether it’s a one state or two state or no state, but it has to have that “how can we live together” type approach, which did happen in Ireland. I was a correspondent in Ireland in 1985 during the Anglo-Irish agreement. And at that time, you could not have got a Republican that said, I will participate in Stormont, which he would have called the partitionist assembly. It would have been unbelievable to have Ian Paisley and the head of the IRA sit down together and laugh, they became known as the chuckle brothers. Inconceivable that. But that was only a decade away or 15 years away from the Easter Accords, the Good Friday Accords, when exactly that happened, but if you read it, but if the dynamics of Ireland are a mirror of what might happen in a conflict as bitter as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it would be settlers sitting down with Hamas. It would not be the moderates of each side talking to each other who’d already put down their guns. Because the real talking wasn’t done between the SDLP and the OUP, the official unionists and the SDLP, the Catholics. It was done between Sinn Fein and the DUP, and it was done between the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries, and they were the force for peace. It was the paramilitaries on both sides which were the force of peace. 

So I think we’re a long, long way away from this. And I think Israel still feels it can basically wipe Palestine off the map. And if it has Ben-Gvir as a prime minister, he will absolutely do that.

But what’s changing, I think, and this is a big, big difference, is that Israel has lost world opinion. It really has lost the Jewish youth, American youth, and I think it’s also lost its grip over the political support. And I think it’s very, very interesting how, in a transition between Biden and Harris, it was said again and again, Biden had to support Israel instinctively on October 7, because he’s a generation that remembers the Holocaust, but it’s almost like he was generationally Zionist, and Harris doesn’t have that. I think that’s being a bit too optimistic.

I think Harris will be still in the grip of all of those arguments produced by the pro-Israeli lobby, which is like, I mean, a complete grip on the thinking of certainly the Republicans, but also Washington in general. But they must have realized that, you know Biden’s strategy of the classic bear hug. You know, the closer that you hug Israel, the more you impede it to do its worst, then eventually it goes. That’s gone as well. That era has gone. That was typical Tony Blair rubbish, that the closer you stay to Israel, the more you restrain it.

We’re now talking about no longer wars that last 45 days or 50 days. We’re talking about permanent war. And that theory doesn’t work anymore, and someone’s got to feed those bombs. And so the pressure we concede already we could. We can see it in Michigan, that Michigan’s refusal to vote for Biden was an element. I’m not saying a key element, it was one element in Biden thinking that he couldn’t win the next election as Michigan’s one of the key states. Similar, very interesting, similar things are happening to the Labour Party as well. There was a Muslim boycott of Starmer and he lost five…

Chris Hedges: He got less votes than Jeremy Corbyn.

David Hearst: He did. 300,000 less than Corbyn did in 2019, the disastrous election then, when you had Labour fighting Labour, but 3 million votes less than 2017 which was the height of Corbyn’s [inaudible] and so you know some very, very interesting Labour… Labour now say, oh, they’re intimidated, and so they’re investigating electoral intimidation. This is absolute rubbish. No one was intimidated.

People voted against them because of their record on Gaza, quite rightly. And you had high flyers like Wes Streeting as a health secretary who got in by only 500 votes. That was in Ilford North. And now, lo and behold, you have David Lammy saying, yes, we’re restoring money to UNRWA. And they’re going to restrict, we reported this today as an exclusive, but there are rumors or reports that he’s going to restrict arms sales to U.K., not cut them off, but restrict, restrict U.K. arms sales to Israel. That’s a big change, and that they are withdrawing their objection to the International Court of Justice, the genocide case, and that objection is one that America is going ahead with, which is to challenge the ICJ’s jurisdiction over Palestine based on the fact that there was a treaty that called on the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Accords, which said that the Palestinian Authority couldn’t arrest Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, and that’s the basis for saying that the ICJ doesn’t have the right to send arrest warrants for Netanyahu and for the defense minister Yoav Gallant and also the Hamas leader as well.

So they’re withdrawing that objection. All of those are small steps, but it’s a response not to their conscience, because they were absolutely for the Gaza campaign for so many of the last 10 months. It’s due to electoral pressure. So I think in the long run, Israel has done itself immense damage by basically trying to extinguish the Palestinian problem militarily, once and for all, which is undoubtedly what the IDF has been trying to do.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thanks. That was David Hearst, editor in chief of the Middle East Eye. I want to thank the production team, Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones]. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

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