Clarity Press
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle, as well as a nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. He is the author of several books and co-editor, with Ilan Pappé, of Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, published in 2022. We spoke for my radio program Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio on March 26. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: A lead story in The Palestine Chronicle covers a powerful report from the United Nations saying that three of the key aspects that identify a genocide have been committed by Israel in Gaza. What is your response to that report?
Ramzy Baroud: This report was anticipated in terms of its relevance to the situation in Gaza. Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur [on the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967], has been quite clear in her previous language. It’s not the first time she has used this language. This time, however, she puts it all within the needed legal framework that provides clear evidence to clarify that Israel is indeed committing acts of genocide, according to international law.
One of them is about the targeting of people who are identified as an ethnic group or a group of any distinct similarities. Israel has indeed done so by killing more than 35,000 Palestinians.
The second allegation is the act of causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. It goes without saying that when you carry out an act of genocide of this nature, you have already done physical and mental harm to members of a group.
The third alleged violation is the act of deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction in whole or in part. Israel is in fact carrying out this kind of wholesale destruction of Palestinian society, humans, animals, buildings, anything in their way. The Israelis themselves are speaking openly about it. They haven’t really been shying away from attaching that kind of language that goes with the type of destruction that is happening in Gaza. It starts with the likes of Yoav Gallant, the defense minister of the Israeli regime, who from the beginning [of the latest war] declared that there would be no food, no fuel, no medicine, no water—nothing would be allowed to enter Gaza. And he really has remained committed to that pledge.
Q: Let’s talk about the cagey role that the United States is playing in the genocide. On the one hand, there’s no holding back on the dozens of weapons shipments. On the other hand, some U.S. officials are saying they’re upset about the way in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prosecuting his genocide.
Baroud: Without the Biden Administration, there would have been no genocide on the current scale. Israel would have run out of weapons a long time ago. The United States and Germany are providing Israel with 99 percent of all of its weapons that are being used in Gaza.
At the same time, they are disagreeing over this. The United States likes to have a plan. Yeah, fine, go and invade Iraq, that’s not the issue. But pretend that you have some sort of a political plan after the destruction of Iraq. Do whatever you want in Afghanistan, that’s fine, as long as you come up with some sort of a political discourse that would show that you are capable of managing the so-called peace once you manage the war.
Netanyahu doesn’t want to hear of it. He has no plans to finish this war anytime soon. It’s a war of revenge, and it’s a war that is keeping him in his position. As long as the war is being fought, his coalition of like-minded, far-right extremists are more or less happy.
Q: How do you read what’s going to happen in the United States, in terms of the upcoming elections? Clearly, this issue could cost Biden the election. How do you read the Palestinian community and the Arab American community?
Baroud: In traditional American politics, the establishment political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, seem to be really trying to outdo each other. Who loves Israel more? Biden has won because Biden has access to the weapons. He has access to the arsenal. He has access to the massive funds that are saving the Israeli economy.
It’s already becoming part of the domestic American agenda. When Biden delivered his State of the Union address, his convoy was blocked by thousands of people who basically occupied Washington D.C., preventing him from reaching the Congress. I think that was a big moment where we are beginning to see Palestine as part of the American political agenda.
We need to continue with this. We need to stop dilly-dallying with language. Some politicians, when asked whether what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide, are hesitating. One of them, Bernie Sanders, has said [in February] this makes him queasy, to hear the word “genocide.” [In May, Sanders would speak out more strongly, calling Gaza an “illegal and immoral war.”] We can’t live in this kind of environment anymore. We have to be very strong, very firm, very united, and we have to put Palestine on the ballot [in November].
Q: While many eyes are watching Gaza and many are concerned about what’s going on there, there’s a lot happening in the West Bank. Can you talk about what’s happening in the West Bank, as well as with the resistance?
Baroud: The West Bank is actually undergoing an intifada. It’s undergoing an actual uprising, and there is a very open kind of war going on where you have far-right Israeli extremists carrying out numerous rampages throughout the West Bank.
Because the situation in Gaza is so extreme, we are kind of being distracted from what’s happening in the West Bank. What’s happening in the West Bank is equally fundamental in terms of the outcome, because the land mass of Gaza is quite limited. We’re looking at 181 square miles. But the territorial ambitions of Israel, the annexation plans of Israel, the settlements of Israel, all are happening in the West Bank.
Regardless of what’s going to take place in Gaza, I think there will be an explosion in the West Bank, because all of this pressure, all of this anger, all this rage among Palestinians over what is befalling Gaza, and what is befalling them, we are seeing it translate into armed resistance.
The ethnic cleansing has already begun. There are parts of the West Bank that have already been evacuated. Thousands of Palestinians have been pushed out of certain areas in the northern West Bank, in the Jerusalem area, and so forth. This is already happening. It’s already underway. But again, we just don’t talk about it because it doesn’t compare to the horrendous genocide that is taking place in Gaza.