Audio/Transcript: Ali Abunimah vs Israeli ex-FM Ben-Ami
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Audio/Transcript: Ali Abunimah vs Israeli ex-FM Ben-Ami
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Ali Abunimah - Jun 28, 2006
I debated former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami
today on Democracy Now! about the situation in Palestine.
The transcript is below and you can find links to the
audio here:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4861.shtml
Democracy Now!, 28 June 2006
Israeli forces have invaded the Gaza Strip for the first time since
withdrawing ten months ago. Israel says it launched the raid to recover a
soldier captured by Palestinian militants. The strikes came just hours after
Fatah and Hamas agreed on a document to implicitly recognize Israel within
its 1967 borders. We go to Gaza to speak with Palestinian physician Dr. Mona
El-Farra and we get comment from former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben
Ami and Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah:
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined on the telephone from Spain by Shlomo Ben-Ami.
He's the former Foreign Minister of Israel and a former member of the
Israeli Knesset. He wrote the book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The
Israeli-Arab Tragedy. We're also joined on the line by Ali Abunimah, founder
of Electronic Intifada, electronicintifada.net, speaking to us from Jordan.
Ali Abunimah, can you talk about the latest news?
ALI ABUNIMAH: Yes. Good morning, Amy. I'm here in Amman, Jordan, and
watching the situation very closely. And it reminds me of the eulogy that
Rabbi Yakov Perin gave for Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who
murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994. He said, "One million Arabs are
not worth a Jewish fingernail." And this kind of racism is clearly on
display in the Israeli reaction to the capture of its soldier in the Gaza
Strip by the Palestinian resistance. In fact, last week here in Amman, the
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said explicitly that the lives of Israeli
Jews are more important than the lives of Palestinians.
And we see that reflected also in the world reaction. Is it not astonishing
that the entire world knows the name and face of the Israeli soldier, Gilad
Shalit, while the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israel's
dungeons, not to mention 10,000 adult prisoners, thousands held without
charge and trial, abducted from their homes in the middle of the night by
Israeli occupation forces, remain nameless and faceless before a silent
world?
And I want to say that it's very deeply painful to me as a Palestinian that
while Palestinians in Gaza are demonstrating, the families of prisoners are
demonstrating to urge the resistance not to release the soldier until their
prisoners and hostages held by Israel are released, that the Palestinian
Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas rushed to condemn the legitimate
conventional military operation carried out by the resistance and rushed to
send his security forces to hunt for the captured soldier on Israel's
behalf, when never once in history has he deployed his forces to protect and
defend his own people against Israel's daily massacres. It's becoming
unavoidable to many Palestinians, if not most, that Abbas is engaged in open
collaboration with the occupation.
And a final point, that as far as Israel is concerned, it is rapidly
becoming a failed state, unable to learn any lessons from its past. It's now
repeating in Gaza and the West Bank all the mistakes of its invasion and
occupation of Lebanon. And I believe that if it doesn't drastically and
dramatically change course, it will self-destruct within a decade, perhaps
taking everyone else in the region with it. It has become an apartheid
pariah state, and its leaders are deluded in thinking that they can bludgeon
the indigenous Palestinian population, who are now the majority between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan River, into submission and servitude.
I call on brave Israelis to understand the lessons, which brave white South
Africans understood, and to engage in a voluntary process with Palestinians
of dismantling completely, starting today, the system of racist laws, walls
and settler colonies that are imprisoning both people in perpetual and
endless and escalating bloodshed. It needs to stop now.
AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah speaking to us from Amman. Let's turn to the
former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. Your response?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Response to what?
AMY GOODMAN: To what Ali Abunimah just said?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: No, no. I'm not going to respond to that. If you have any
particular question with regard to this operation, with regard to the
abduction, with regard of the political situation on the ground -- I'm not
going to go into that wider analysis about South Africa and what have you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you start with what is happening right now?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, what seems to me that is happening right now is that
Israel is trying to change the equation that was established by those who
took the soldier as hostage. Their equation was one of releasing the soldier
for prisoners in Israeli jails, and Israel seems that the present government
is not ready for that, although previous governments did negotiate and Rabin
negotiated. Even Sharon negotiated to exchange prisoners. This government
doesn't seem to be politically confident enough to negotiate, and therefore,
they want to change the equation to one that means that we will withdraw
from Gaza or we'll stop -- we'll interrupt this incursion if the soldier is
released.
Is this going to work? I'm not sure it is going to work. I am afraid that
these kind of operations tend to have a dynamic that one knows how they
start, one doesn't really know how they end. I hope it doesn't end in the
collapse of the Palestinian Authority, in the collapse of Abu Mazen, and the
rest of it, because the situation is difficult enough without this modicum
of stability and legitimacy that is given by the current president and the
prime minister is destroyed. So I really expect that things will be
controlled in some way.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that the Israeli government should release
prisoners?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Should release prisoners? Well, I think that these kind of
situations require a sort of political approach, rather than military
approach. You see, it's not that easy also to say that they should release
prisoners, because that means that every Israeli citizen is a candidate to
be taken hostage. The dilemma is not simple. I am for a political solution.
These might perhaps take the form of, say -- that the quid pro quo from the
point of view of Israel would have to be not to persist in the suffocation,
the economic suffocation, of the Gaza Strip, the boycott to the Palestinian
Authority. These kind of quid pro quos maybe we can reach through some sort
of third party mediation. I'm not sure that exchanging prisoners will work,
simply because this means exposing every Israeli citizen to being taken
hostage.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the Israeli government was wrong to reinvade Gaza?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, yes. I think it was wrong to do that, because -- if
only for the reasons that affect the stability of the government itself. You
see, the government is engaged now in this idea of disengagement from the
West Bank. If the they invade the Gaza Strip, what they are going to show to
the Israeli opinion and to public opinion, as a whole, is that
disengagement, unilateral disengagement, doesn't work. If you do not
coordinate things, either with the Palestinians or through a third party --
the Quartet, for example -- disengagement creates a frontline in a state of
war, in a permanent state of war. And therefore, you'll have to reoccupy the
territory, so what's the point in disengaging in such a manner? I think the
government is exposing the fallacies of its own policy by occupying or
reoccupying the Gaza Strip.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Gaza right now, where Dr. Mona El-Farra is.
She is a physician in northern Gaza, a health development consultant for the
Union of Health Work Committees in Gaza. What is the situation on the ground
right now, Dr. El-Farra?
DR. MONA EL-FARRA: Since the early hours of the morning, the Israeli army
did not stop their sonic bombing against the Gaza Strip. They started the
operation last night, 10:30. They targeted the infrastructure of the Gaza
Strip. Two-thirds -- the main target was the electrical power plant. And
now, two-thirds of Gaza Strip are with no electricity.
The population mood is angry, anxious, worried, scared. But despite all
this, demonstrations are going in the streets against the release of the
soldier, especially by the families of the political prisoners. This is the
opinion, feeling.
And I have a comment here to say. There's no balance of power between the
Israeli army and the militia or the resistance movement here in Gaza.
Israeli knows that very well. So what's happening in Gaza now is collective
punishment. I don't understand, why to destroy the infrastructure? Why to
deprive the population from the electricity? It is collective punishment.
This will not bring the soldier back.
What will bring the soldier back: negotiation, understanding the rights of
Palestinian people to exist. The disengagement plan, for example, and the
wall in the West Bank, all these measures Israel did to guarantee its
security, it did not, anyway, because the security of Israel is not harmed
by the resistance or largely harmed by the Palestinian resistance.
The mood is very bad in Gaza and angry. You can see twenty-- 2,000 people
last night demonstrated in the middle camps of Gaza Strip against the
release of the soldier, or the release of the soldier in swap of the
political prisoners. People feel they are humiliated and Israel and the
world wants us to kneel down. This is the mood of the people here now in
Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of collective punishment, Shlomo Ben-Ami, former
Foreign Minister of Israel, your response to that?
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: I am not favorable to collective punishment. But, you see,
one needs to see the conditions on the ground. When Israel withdraws from
the Gaza Strip and then you have every day Kassam missiles being launched
against an Israeli township, what would you do then? What is the answer to
that? I mean, either to reoccupy the land or to open political negotiations,
but that's, for example, President Abbas or even Ismael Haniyeh -- control
all the factions in Gaza, do they control Islamic jihad? Do they control the
martyrs of Al-Aqsa? So you have here a very serious problem.
We need sometimes to descend from the heights of the conceptual or even of
the moral ground to see what can be done on the ground. So the problem is
that the government has been trying all kind of ways to stop the launching
of Kassam missiles. I'm sure that Ismael Haniyeh is not interested in these
attacks. I'm sure that Mahmoud Abbas is not interested. Do they have the
capacity to stop it? They don't have it, because the political system or the
hierarchy of command, the chain of command, is invertibrate. So what is
Israel to do in such a situation?
AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah, your response?
ALI ABUNIMAH: Well, it's amazing, the rhetoric of Shlomo Ben-Ami, who knows
much better. I've heard him expose the situation more eloquently, even on
your show, Amy. He knows very well that this isn't about Gaza. This is about
Israel's relentless assault on the Palestinians throughout the Occupied
Territories, its expansion of colonies and settlements in the occupied West
Bank, and its announced annexation plan, which even he has criticized. But
he's not against the annexation of the West Bank. What he believes, he's
deluded in believing, is that Palestinians-- they can find Palestinians who
will sit and agree to the annexation of Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and all the
settlements around the Occupied Territories.
What he has to realize and what all Israelis have to realize is that the age
of colonialism has ended. He said, Shlomo Ben-Ami said, that the so-called
convergence plan, the unilateral annexation plan, is Israeli's attempt to
preempt the world recognizing that Israel is now a Jewish minority ruling
over a Palestinian majority.
He wants to talk about the Quartet and the U.S. and doing things on the
ground, because he doesn't want to talk about the big picture, that what is
driving the conflict is the radical inequality between the Jewish minority,
that rules all of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan
River, and the disenfranchised Palestinian majority, who are paying the
price for the luxury that Israel lives in, for the high incomes of Israelis,
for the settlements, for the swimming pools, for the security in Tel Aviv
and in Hertzliyah and in Jaffa and in Haifa and in Akka, that Israelis live
a normal life all around the country, except in Sderot, where they
experience the few dozen Qassams. But what pays for that normality for
Israelis is the total disenfranchisement and dispossession of the majority
population. And Israel believes that it can hide them behind walls, in
ghettos, as was done to Jews in Europe in the 1930s and '40s.
And he should be a brave Israeli. He should speak out against the
occupation. He should speak out against the apartheid laws inside Israel,
not just in the West Bank. He should condemn the law that says that an
Israeli citizen can marry anybody in the world, except a Palestinian, that
an Israeli who marry a Palestinian has to leave the country. This is a new
style of apartheid. It is even, as some have said, a new kind of Nuremberg
law. And I'm waiting for Shlomo Ben-Ami to live up to his claimed liberal
and progressive credentials and condemn these things and join the struggle
to liberate not just Palestinians, but also Israelis, from this devastating
system of oppression and apartheid, which will kill all of us --
AMY GOODMAN: Let me put that question to Shlomo Ben-Ami.
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: As I told you, Amy, I really thought we were going to talk
about the current crisis, as it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I think --
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: I, of course, do not deny things that I say about the
convergence plan. I dedicated my political life to trying to reach a
settlement, that essentially meant disengaging from Palestinian lands,
having the fully fledged Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
These are my credentials. It's not books that I've written. It is things
that I've tried to do.
Now, we have a political crisis there, and we are trying to see how we solve
it. My suggestion is, as I said before, not to invade, try to find a
different quid pro quo, and that is, stopping the suffocation of the
Palestinian economy in Gaza, improving relations with the Palestinian
Authorities, and moving to a political phase. This is my solution to the
current crisis. I don't want to go now into the wider picture. I have said
things, I have written things about it. I don't want to repeat it right now.
And frankly, I am in the middle of a business lunch. I had the idea that we
are having a very short interview.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me just ask you --
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: And now I am interrupting the whole reunion.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm very sorry. I just want to ask you one last question: the
strikes coming just hours after officials close to Mahmoud Abbas said Hamas
had agreed on a document to implicitly recognize Israel within its June '67
borders.
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Yeah. I think it is a very important document. I think that
if indeed they sign it, this will at least stem the decline into a potential
civil war between Palestinians. I think it is in Israel's interest to have a
united Palestinian polity, that is, that subscribes to a shared political
plan. I would have preferred them to simply subscribe to the Arab Peace
Initiative. I think they have departed from that legitimacy, or from that
inter-Arab legitimacy, and created their own. I don't see the logic of it. I
think that the Arab Peace Initiative has a worldwide legitimacy, and simply
subscribing to it would have meant a lot, in terms of Israeli public
opinion. As it is, I think it enhances the unity between Palestinians, but
it creates a condition that, I am afraid -- and again, I'm not speaking
theory and not generalities -- I'm afraid that the current Israeli
government will not see that as a starter.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Shlomo Ben-Ami, former
Israeli Foreign Minister, Member of Parliament, book Scars of War, Wounds of
Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. He is speaking to us from Spain. Thanks for
joining us. We will come back to this discussion after break with Ali
Abunimah, as well as Dr. El-Farra.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada;
and Dr. Mona El-Farra, physician in northern Gaza. Ali Abunimah, your
response to this document, that at least those close to Mahmoud Abbas said
that Hamas had agreed to recognizing Israel within the '67 borders.
ALI ABUNIMAH: I think if tomorrow Ismael Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal and all
the other leaders of Hamas get down on their knees and say, "We want to give
up everything to Israel and accept a state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip
and accept to cancel the rights of Palestinian refugees and to abandon our
rights to resist the occupation in any form whatsoever," it would make no
difference whatsoever, Amy, because the stumbling block, the fiction, here
is that it's the Palestinians who have rejected this. The Hamas leaders,
like the leaders of Fatah, have said many times that they're willing to talk
to Israel, they're willing to recognize Israel. The Hamas leaders have said,
"Okay, we don't want to do that in advance, because the PLO did that in
advance during the Oslo Accords and got nothing in return. So we do it on
the basis of reciprocity."
The problem, Amy, is that Israel is still completely 100% committed to
colonialism. That is why Israel is continuing to seize land in the West
Bank, to build new settler colonies every day, to pave Jewish-only roads in
the West Bank, to build the apartheid wall, to treat Gaza as a giant prison.
The reason that Israel pulled its settlers out of Gaza, as Shlomo Ben-Ami
has said before, is to create the fiction that Israel is not ruling over a
Palestinian majority, exactly as South Africa created the Bantustans to try
and fool the world into thinking that Blacks had their rights within these
so-called independent homelands and didn't need to have rights within the
South African state. The same trick will not work in Palestine, as it did
not work in South Africa.
And the world needs to recognize that. And I'm thrilled that there's a
growing civil society movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions that
does. This is what is going to put pressure on Israel to end the colonial
practices, no matter what document is signed between Hamas and Fatah. That
will make no difference if there is no active worldwide opposition and
resistance to Israel's colonialism. That is what will make a difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mona El-Farra, I wanted to give you the last word. When we
last spoke -- Shlomo Ben-Ami was talking about the shelling of Kassam, and
we last spoke, Dr. El-Farra, when you were at the hospital after the
children, the families were -- the explosions on the beach in Gaza and a
number of members of one family killed. What is the latest on that
situation?
DR. MONA EL-FARRA: Okay. First, just quickly, I totally agree with the
analysis of Mr. Abunimah, totally agree with his analysis. Israelis did not
try in the excuse of the soldier. The plan was ready to invade Gaza -- not
physically invade it. Anyway, Israel did not invade Gaza. They are
controlling us from outside.
Regarding the Kassam rockets, I would like to know how many people really
were injured by these Kassam rockets. As I told you before, the balance of
power is towards Israel. These Kassam rockets and the other rockets is just
very primitive devices. It is just a show of -- protesting against what's
happening here. But seriously, it doesn't hurt Israeli security. What was
your question?
AMY GOODMAN: The latest on the family that we last spoke to you about, that
member -- a number of members of the family, of the Galia family, who were
killed at the Gaza beach, and the conflicting reports. Human Rights Watch
and you, yourself, as a doctor in the hospital, saying that it was as a
result of Israeli shelling, and the Israeli military saying it was
Palestinian bombs.
DR. MONA EL-FARRA: Yeah, yeah, okay. This is a big joke for me, and I'm
totally, like all of us here in Gaza, totally convinced by the fact that it
was Israeli shelling. I met the doctors who received the injured. I saw the
injured myself, and the site of injuries show that it was not from mines.
Minefield injuries are different from shelling injuries. The site of the
injuries were in the upper side of the bodies. Beside, the shrapnel we
found, it was the same like what we received in the case of Jabalia two
years ago. So no matter what Israel is trying to say -- it is Palestinian
mines -- this is not acceptable for us. And you forget all this. We don't
need to add a new crime to the Israeli crimes. Even if this was from the
Palestinian side, we have a large record of Israeli assault against
Palestinians.
And just I need somebody to explain to me, why this sonic bombing? And now,
since 3:00 in the morning until now, we are under heavy sonic bombing from
the sky. This, I consider, collective punishment, and it will not secure
Israeli security. It is just they are humiliating us as Palestinians. They
want us to kneel down. And I agree with Mr. Abunimah, what Israel is doing
now sort of revives the idea of colonialism in the area.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Dr. Mona El-Farra,
physician, community activist in northern Gaza, and Ali Abunimah, who is
founder of electronicintifada.net. We thank you both for joining us.
*
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