I will be brief as I know that you're all coming out tonight on a school night in these frigid temperatures, but I wanted to welcome you all. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Greetings of peace and blessings to you all. Thank you for joining us on this night and a warm, warm welcome to all of our guests. We pray that this is a beneficial night for everyone. I just wanted to, before I introduce Chris, I wanted to personally thank him. for accepting our invitation and agreeing to address our community, not only tonight, but also this upcoming Tuesday, January 23rd at six o'clock. He'll be joining human rights attorney and Rutgers University professor Noura Arakat in a panel discussion entitled The Crime of Genocide. So I know it's a lot to come out again, but we'd love to see you all. And we're trying to take advantage of Chris being here just short time. So now it's time for me to embarrass Chris a little but I'm sure I'm sure it's okay. I reached out to Chris actually about two weeks ago after I realized that he was in town and within minutes he responded so graciously offering to do just about anything we needed for Palestine. It was incredibly touching. Initially I had discussed with Chris that he would do a panel tonight and then shortly after Chris responded, but if at one point you want to do a talk, I would do one entitled, The Death of Israel. Of course, you can only imagine my face as an American Muslim and all my post 9-11 trauma reading this message. The title is provocative yet deeply profound. Chris, how about like the death of a settler colonial state? I offered a few alternatives, but Chris stood his ground. That's venation, Chris? Maybe that's a little better? Too weak, Omaima, too weak. I realized then that there are times in our lives where we must realize the gravity and significance of the moment. Here was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author pleading with me to retain a title of a talk in which he wanted to expose the truth of what is clearly happening in Gaza. Yet fear, my fear, conquered the moment. And had we not went through with honoring this very basic request, then we would have allowed the very thing that this regime is desperately trying to accomplish. The silencing of truth. Last Friday, I was watching Al Jazeera. and after the U.S. and the U.K. and a few other puppets cowardly dropped 60 bombs on the fearless people of Yemen in retaliation for their courageous acts of resistance and seizing Israeli-linked commercial ships in their own Bab al-Mandab streets. An estimated 5 million courageous Yemenis took to the streets after Jummah, our Friday prayers. and chanted, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. The poem goes on to describe the people's defiance in the face of tyranny, calling for their courage under their men's oppression. As I watched this footage, as I'm sure many of you saw last Friday, it shook me to my core. This is precisely what Chris was trying to tell me. I don't care, Omaima. I don't care if this may be seen as politically incorrect or that it may make some uncomfortable or maybe seem too threatening in any way. Chris, as you all know by seeing the numbers in our crowd tonight, which I'm sure have exceeded 400 since I counted the chairs last night, I am sure you all know that Chris has always been a man whose morality and humanity prevailed the moment. And I must say, I am so very grateful, Chris, for that valuable lesson that you showed me that night. You see, resistance comes in various forms. It can be through our endless rallies, our persistent boycotts, our defiant social media platforms. But perhaps the most powerful, as I am sure we will all witness tonight, it can be in the form of our words. I will now introduce Chris. For many of you that I'm sure are Chris Hedges fans, I probably don't need to say much, but Chris Hedges is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years covering the Middle East, including Gaza and the occupied West Bank. He had previously spent five years covering the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Hedges served as the Balkan Bureau Chief for the New York Times during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. He left the New York Times after the editors at the paper demanded he cease his public denunciations of the invasion of Iraq. He is the author of 14 books, which I'm sure many of you have, including several New York Times bestsellers. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He also taught in the college degree program offered by our very own Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system for a decade. Without further ado, it is my extreme honor to welcome Chris Hedges. Thank you very much. I know there are people in this room who have family and friends in Gaza, as I do. The last contact I've been able to have with people I know in Gaza is three or four weeks ago. I don't know if they're alive or dead. All of us who spent significant time in Gaza, I think every waking moment is colored by this almost unfathomable slaughter. And whatever I feel is a pale reflection, I know of what many of you in this room are enduring. But I want you to know that There are many of us that are doing everything humanly possible to fight back. Israel's Lebensraum master plan for Gaza borrowed from the Nazis' depopulation of Jewish ghettos is clear. Destroy infrastructure, Medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water, block shipments of food and fuel, impose telecommunications blackouts, unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day, let starvation and epidemics of infectious diseases along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes turned Gaza into a mortuary. Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged 60% of the housing. The safe areas to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in the south have been relentlessly bombed with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80% of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the UN. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving. and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. The some 50,000 pregnant women lack health care and adequate nutrition. Infants are dying in droves. Israeli political and military officials at the South African jurists documented at the International Court of Justice make no secret of their genocidal intent, nor of their vision of what comes next. In September before the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of what he called the New Middle East at a UN General Assembly meeting. Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem had all been incorporated into a greater Israel. Palestine had ceased to exist. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure, or starvation, or being driven from their homeland. Their will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation for those who want to live will be the only option. Israel is lobbying countries in Latin America and Africa to accept Palestinian refugees. Israeli leaders are calling this deportation, quote, voluntary migration. Voluntary migration is not a new concept in the annals of genocide. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who voluntarily registered for deportation. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be deported. Marek Edelman, the only surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising writes in his book, The Ghetto Fights, the number of people anxious to obtain three kilos of bread was such that the transports now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people could not accommodate them all. And Edelman, by the way, repeatedly condemned the Zionist state of Israel, calling it unviable and supported Palestinian resistance including armed resistance. The Nazis ship their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it. The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil, our evil, we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters. Perhaps the saddest irony is that a people once in need of protection from genocide now committed. The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica. The over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge. The thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The genocide carried out during the Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. on his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children. Most people have no imagination, he wrote. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth. Primo Levi, who survived the death camps, railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the State of Israel, a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be re-read as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, Negation of Reality. He wonders if we who have returned have been able to understand and make others understand our experience. We all inhabit a morally gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death, often for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust and the Israelis are no exception. One month into the genocide, according to a poll in Time Magazine, 57% of Israelis believed Israel was not using enough force in Gaza. These Israelis saw the same images you and I see, the children with amputated limbs, the chalky, lifeless bodies lifted out from under the rubble The long trenches filled with corpses wrapped in white shrouds. The screams of the wounded in the hospital corridors. Only 2% of Israelis said Israel was using too much force. The South African lawyers at The Hague who compared Israel's crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians. They sang as they danced, there are no uninvolved civilians, as evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli war machine and political system. Racism, an attribute of all colonial settler societies, whether the British colonists in India and Kenya or the French in Algeria, pervades Israeli society. Palestinians are seen as vermin to be controlled or exterminated. It is very hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. What is the point? of studying the Holocaust if you do not understand its fundamental lesson. When you have the capacity to stop genocide, and you do not, you are culpable. It is hard not to be cynical about the humanitarian interventionists, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power, who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the responsibility to protect, but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the humanitarian interventions they championed, Bosnia, Darfur, Libya, came close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. The moral universe has now been turned upside down. Those of us who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to defend themselves. Vetoing cease fires and providing 2,000 pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet in densely packed refugee camps is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps obliterating families are routine acts of war. Carrying out genocide in Gaza is a way to de-radicalize Palestinians. Attacking Houthi bases in Yemen will de-escalate a regional conflict and remember it is not only Israel which has abandoned its citizens held hostage in Gaza. There are hundreds of Palestinians who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents trapped in Gaza and the Biden administration is making no discernible effort as demanded by U.S. law to secure their safety. None of this makes sense as protesters around the world realize. If the genocide in Gaza is not halted, it will presage a new world order. A world where the old rules, more honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It will be a world where nations with vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced military systems carry out, in public view, massive killing projects. The industrialized nations weaken fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the global south and anyone who might think of revolt. We will kill you without restraint and no one will stop us. One day you will all be Palestinians. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful, an increasing in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressure on behavior and sets moral norms. Christopher Browning writes in Ordinary Men about a German reserve police battalion in World War II that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. In such a world I fear Modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ordinary men to become their willing executioners. Evil is protean, it mutates, it finds new forms and expressions, it changes its face, but it's not its essence. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah Witnesses, Freemason, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities, and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism, and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel's second largest arms supplier following the U.S. The supposed campaign in the U.S. and Germany against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is the latest subterfuge to champion white power. It is why Germany and the U.S., which have effectively criminalized support for Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremacists, including philo-Semites such as John Hagee or Marjorie Taylor Greene fervently back Israel. The Israeli historian Ilan Pape writes that Germany's unequivocal support for Israel is a form of blackmail. The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the UN solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine, Pape writes. What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined. Dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à-vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and more importantly it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation. I knew Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, along with Sheikh Yassin. Al-Rantisi's family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He was a soft-spoken, articulate, and highly educated pediatrician who had graduated first in his class at Egypt's Alexandria University. As a nine-year-old boy, he had witnessed in Hanayounis the executions of 275 Palestinian men and boys, including his uncle, when Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip in 1956, the subject of Joe Sacco's magisterial book, Footnotes in Gaza. Scores of Palestinians were also executed by Israeli soldiers in the neighboring town of Rafah, where today hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee now that Hana Yunis is under attack. I still remember the wailing and the tears of my father over his brother, Rantisi told me. I couldn't sleep for many months after that. It left a wound in my heart that can never heal. I'm telling you a story and I'm almost crying. This sort of action can never be forgotten. They planted hatred in our hearts. He knew he could never trust the Israelis. He knew that the goal of the Zionist state was the occupation of all of historic Palestine and Israel would go on to seize Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 along with Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. And he knew the eternal subjugation or extermination of the Palestinian people was the goal of the Zionist movement. Al-Rantisi and Yersin were assassinated in 2004 by Israel. Al-Rantisi's widow, Jamila Abdullah Taha al-Shanti, had a doctorate in English and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza. The couple had six children, one of whom was killed along with his father. The family's home, where I visited them, was bombed and destroyed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Jamila was killed by Israel on October 19th of this year. Israel's genocide is rearing a new generation of enraged, traumatized, and dispossessed Palestinians who have lost family members, friends, homes, communities, and any hope of living ordinary lives. And they too will seek retribution. Their small acts of terrorism will counter Israel's state terror. They will hate as they have been hated. And this lust for vengeance is universal. After World War II, a clandestine unit of Jews who served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army hunted down former Nazis and assassinated them. To understand is not to condone, but we must understand if this cycle of violence is to be stopped. I and the public know what all school children learn, W.H. Auden wrote, those to whom evil is done do evil in return. The Palestinian attacks of October 7th which left Some 1,200 Israelis dead feeds this lust within Israel, just as Israel's 17-year siege and obliteration of Gaza feeds this lust among Palestinians. There is little discussion in the Israeli media of the slaughter in Gaza or the suffering of Palestinians, some 2 million of whom have been driven from their homes, but a constant repetition of the stories of Israeli suffering death and heroism. Only our victims matter. The shooting dead of the three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic but a glimpse of Israel's rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are kill anything that moves. Israel may appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank. It may achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence may exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews with any Palestinians who remain stripped of their basic rights may be realized. At that point, it will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel's huge black hole of historical amnesia. And those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted. But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza, and Israel is talking about months of warfare, 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 will lie in ash heaps. Israel's social capital will be spent. Liberal Zionism, always an oxymoron, since Israelis never intended to give equal rights to Palestinians, has already been replaced by religious Zionism. Religious Zionism gives divine sanction to an ugly, repressive, hate-filled, apartheid regime, deeply alienating younger generations of Americans, including Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come to power, will distance itself from Israel and religious Zionism the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Israel's support will come from 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. Despotisms can exist long after their past due date but they are terminal. You don't have to be a biblical scholar to see that Israel's lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp. Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility, and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. This mystique offers, much of it once embodied in liberal Zionism, hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides a national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel's decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy It will become harder and harder to recruit indigenous collaborators such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority reviled by most Palestinians to do the bidding of the colonizers. All Israel has left is escalating violence including the widespread use of torture which accelerates the decline. The wholesale violence works in the short term as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria The dirty war waged by Argentina's military dictatorship and during Britain's conflict in Kenya and Northern Ireland. But in the long term, it is suicidal. Israel may wipe out the current Hamas leadership, but the past and current assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere. Israel was already at war with itself before October 7th. Israelis were protesting to prevent Netanyahu's abolition of judicial independence. The religious bigots and Zionist fanatics currently in power had mounted a determined attack on secularism Israel's unity since the attack is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protesters from decrying the government's abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian quote-unquote human animals, when eradicated or subdued will be replaced by disloyal Palestinians with Israeli citizenship already targeted by a series of discriminatory laws along with Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society. The Israeli scholar, Yeshiahu Leibowitz, who Isaiah Berlin called the conscience of Israel, warned that, quote, if Israel did not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. Religious nationalism is to religion what national socialism was to socialism, warned Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war and constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution, he wrote. He foresaw that the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials and police, mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret police state, with all that implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation to generate and its commanders will become military governors, will resemble their colleagues in other nations. He saw the rise of virulent racism that would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn, in his words, concentration camps for the occupied and as he wrote, Israel would not deserve to exist and it would not be worthwhile to preserve it. Jews, he understood, can also become Pharaoh. The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli fanatics, heirs of the fascistic movement led by the extremist Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, who was barred from running for office and whose Koch party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who are compared to the biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelis. Enemies, usually Muslims, slated for extinction are sub-human. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magic circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged. The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel's genocide. It tries to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it funnels The billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel including 14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the 3.8 billion in annual aid to quote-unquote finish the job. It is a full partner in Israel's genocidal project. There is no way to deny the courage of the armed Palestinian resistance whether you accept their ideology or not. as they face down one of the most advanced military machines on the planet with little more than small arms. But there are also other forms of resistance that to me are as important. Writers, poets, journalists and photographers, many of whom have been targeted and killed by Israel, affirm the belief that one day, a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see, the words and images will provoke empathy The Chris Hedges Report What this genocide is like, how those caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of the children, the wails of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through filth, sickness, humiliation and fear. This is why writers, photographers, and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war, including the Israelis. They stand as witnesses to evil, an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers, along with over 83 journalists and media workers in Gaza, and 3 in Lebanon since October 7th. I experienced futility and outrage when I covered wars for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I wondered if I had done enough or if it was even worth the risk. But you go on because to do nothing is to be complicit. You report because you care. You make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes. And this brings me to the Palestinian novelist and playwright Atif Abu Saif. He and his 15-year-old son Yasser, who live in the occupied West Bank, were visiting family in Gaza where he was born when Israel began its scorched earth campaign. Atif is no stranger to the violence of the Israeli occupiers. He was two months old during the 1973 war and writes, I've been living through wars ever since. Just as life is a pause between two deaths, Palestine as a place and as an idea is a timeout in the middle of many wars. During Operation Kass led the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, if Atif sheltered in the corridor of his Gaza Family home for 22 nights with his wife, Hannah, and two children, while Israel bombed and shelled. His book, The Drone Eats With Me, Diaries from a City Under Fire, is an account of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that killed 1,523 Palestinian civilians, including 519 children. Memories of war can be strangely positive because to have them at all means you must have survived, he notes sardonically. He did what writers do, including the professor and poet Rifat al-Arir, who was killed along with Rifat's brother, sister, and her four children in an airstrike on his sister's apartment in Gaza on December 7th. Atif, once again finding himself living amid the explosions and carnage from Israeli shells and bombs, doggedly publishes his observations and reflections. His accounts are often difficult to transmit because of Israel's blockage of internet and phone service. On the first day of the Israeli bombardment, a friend, a young poet and musician, Omar Abu Shaweesh is killed, apparently an Israeli Naval bombardment, though later reports would say he was killed in an airstrike as he was walking to work. Atif wonders about the Israeli soldiers watching him and his family with their infrared lenses and satellite photography. Can they count the loaves of bread in my basket or the number of falafel balls on my plate, he wonders. He watches the crowds of dazed and confused families, their homes in rubble, carrying mattresses, bags of clothes, food and drink. He stands mutely before the supermarket, the Bureau de Change, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the sweet shop, the toy shop, all burned. Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids' toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles, and shattered perfume bottles, he writes. The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town, scorched by a dragon. I went to the press house where journalists were frantically downloading images and writing reports for their agencies. I was sitting with Bilal, the press house manager, when an explosion shook the building. Windows shattered and the ceiling collapsed onto us in chunks. We ran toward the central hall. One of the journalists was bleeding, having been hit by flying glass. After 20 minutes, we ventured out to inspect the damage. I noticed that Ramadan decorations were still hanging in the street. The city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris. Atif, who has been the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Culture since 2019, writes, in the early days of the Israeli shelling, Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke. I often think about the time I was shot as a kid during the first intifada and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think. He leaves his teenage son with family members. The Palestinian logic is that in wartime we should all sleep in different places. So that if part of the family is killed, another part lives, he writes. The UN schools are getting more crowded with displaced families. The hope is that the UN flag will save them, though in previous wars this hasn't been the case. On Tuesday, October 17th, he writes, I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just to be done with it, I think. It's the 11th day of the conflict but all the days have merged into one. The same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear. In the morning, my phone rang. It was Rula, a relative in the West Bank, telling me she had heard there'd been an airstrike at Talat Hawa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City, where my cousin Hatem lives. Hatem is married to Huda, my wife's only sister. He lives in a four-story building that houses his mother and brothers and their families. I called around, but no one's phone was working. I walked to Al Shifa Hospital to read the names. Lists of the dead are pinned up daily outside a makeshift morgue. I could barely approach the building. Thousands of Gazans had made the hospital their home, its gardens, its hallways, Every empty space or spare corner had a family in it. I gave up and headed toward Hatem's. 30 minutes later, I was on his street. Rula had been right. Huda and Hatem's building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved. The only known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU. Wisdom had gone straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand. What about the others, I asked someone. We can't find them, came the reply. Amid the rubble, we shouted, Hello! Can anyone hear us? We called out the names of those still missing, hoping some might still be alive. By the end of the day, we managed to find five bodies, including that of a three-month-old. We went to the cemetery to bury them. In the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital. She was barely awake. After half an hour, she asked me, Uncle, I'm dreaming, right? I said, We are all in a dream. My dream is terrifying. Why? All our dreams are terrifying. After ten minutes of silence, she said, Don't lie to me, Uncle. In my dream, I don't have legs. It's true, isn't it? I have no legs. But you said it's a dream. I don't like this dream, Uncle. I had to leave. For a long ten minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies, second world war films and end of the world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand. Who could have the courage to tell Hannah, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister, had been killed, that her family had been killed. I phoned my colleague, Manar, and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. Lie to her, I told Manar. Say the building was attacked by F-16s, but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help. Leaflets in Arabic dropped by Israeli helicopters float down from the sky. They announced that anyone who remains north of the Wadi Waterway will be considered a partner to terrorism, meaning, Atif writes, the Israelis can shoot on sight. The electricity is cut, food, fuel, and water run out. The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his niece, Wissam, wracked with pain in Al-Shifa Hospital, who asks him for a lethal injection. She says Allah will forgive her. But he will not forgive me, Wissam. I'm going to ask him to, on your behalf, she says. After airstrikes, he joins the rescue teams under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn't see in the sky. A line from T.S. A heap of broken images runs through his head. The injured and the dead are transported on three-wheeled bicycles or dragged along in carts by animals. We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket. You find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat, he writes. In the past week, many Gazans have started writing their names on their hands and legs in pen or permanent marker so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre, but it makes perfect sense. We want to be remembered. We want our stories to be told. We seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our graves. The smell of unretrieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air. The more time passes, the stronger the smell. The scenes around him become surreal. On November 19, day 44 of the assault, he writes, A man rides a horse toward me with the body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it's his son, perhaps. It looks like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and barely able to move. He is back from no battle. He is no knight. His eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him, but then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one. He barely looks up. He is too consumed with his own loss. Most people are using the camp's old cemetery. It's the safest. And although it is technically long since full, they have started digging shallower graves and burying the dead on top of the old, keeping families together, of course. On November 21st, after constant tank shelling, he decides to flee the Jabalia neighborhood in the north of Gaza for the south with his son and mother-in-law, who is in a wheelchair. They must pass through Israeli checkpoints, where soldiers randomly select men and boys from the line for detention. Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road, he writes, rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned out car as if asking for something, for me specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car, limbs and precarious body parts just thrown away and left to fester. He tells his son Yasser, don't look, just keep walking son. In early December his family home is destroyed in an airstrike. The house a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material. In each of my novels, whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the camp, I conjured ours. I'd move the furniture around a bit, change the name of the alley, but who was I kidding? It was always our house. All the houses in Jabalia are small. They're built randomly, haphazardly, and they're not made to last. These houses replace the tents that Palestinians, like my grandmother Aisha, lived in. After the displacements of 1948, those who built them always thought they'd soon be returning to the beautiful, spacious homes they'd left behind in the towns and villages of historic Palestine. That return never happened, despite our many rituals of hope, like safeguarding the key to the old family home. The future keeps betraying us, but the past is ours. Though I've lived in many cities around the world and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home, he goes on. Friends and colleagues always asked, why don't you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in, why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same. Because in Gaza, in an alleyway, in the Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalia, There stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. If on doomsday, God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn't hesitate in saying home. Now, there is no home. Atif, as I write, is trapped in southern Gaza with his son. His niece was transferred to a hospital in Egypt and Atif continues to write. We are called as believers, Muslims, Christians, and Jews to stand with the oppressed. We are called to defy malignant power. Atif, Rifat, and those like them who speak to us at the risk of death remind us of this injunction. They speak so we will not be silent They speak, so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world, the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby, and demand that this genocide cease. The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt What's by its own admission is Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including dumb bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end, while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the UN. It insists it upholds the rule of law, while it subverts the legal mechanism at the International Court of Justice that can halt the genocide. Cynicism pervades every word. Biden, Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk, the four horsemen of the apocalypse who support this genocide utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue, this might be the case, but it cannot be the case with genocide. Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide, even if it means we are forced to endure the dreaded return of Trump. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with the Palestinians. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable if we do not. We join the long list of those who for expediency or because of indifference have sold out the Palestinians and sold out all of the oppressed. I read from the Hadith collection of Imam al-Bukhari. He writes, The Prophet, peace be upon him, once said to us, help your brother The oppressor and the oppressed. We asked, O messenger of God, we understand how we can help one oppressed, but how should we help one who is oppressing by stopping him from oppressing others, he replied. Evil has not changed down the millenniums, but neither has goodness. And once again, this is questions from the audience, and we'll try to get through as many of them as possible. First question, and I didn't put this at the top, it sort of just came there. What can we learn from the Bosnian War in terms of the changing political action and public sentiment to end the genocide in Gaza? Well, we can learn, first of all, indifference, because that Genocide lasted three years before there was a reaction. And the only reason there was a reaction is not because there was any kind of moral calculation by the Clinton administration, but because with the overrunning of the safe areas in Srebrenica and Jepa and the massacre, which I mentioned in my talk at Srebrenica, the UN peacekeeping force disintegrated, proved ineffective There were Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica. They were unable to protect those who were in this supposed safe area. And the Clinton administration had made a promise with the UN that should the peacekeeping forces be overrun, they would intervene. So Clinton's hand was forced. He did not want US troops on the ground and so he launched a palming campaign. And I think the lesson is The deep cynicism, I think all of us who reported overseas, whether it was in El Salvador, Gaza, or Bosnia, or anyone else, the deep cynicism by the United States, by Washington, and by Europe, and we are watching this cynicism express itself during the genocide in Gaza, where on the one hand, they speak, of course, in minimizing civilian casualties, but on the other hand, Making sure the supply train, the military supply chain to Israel is not only continued but even ramped up. Remember, especially with things like tank shells, if we have the capacity to stop this now, because so much of the munitions that Israel is using, which they're running out of, come directly from the U.S. I mean, I've been in Gaza when it was bombed by Israeli jets and picked up pieces of metal that say, made in Dayton, Ohio. I also just want to draw, if you're talking about Bosnia, I was in Sarajevo during the war. We were hit with three to four hundred shells a day. I was three to four dead a day, maybe four to five dead a day, and about two dozen wounded a day. And I don't want to minimize what took place in Sarajevo. Thirty years later, I still have nightmares about it. But that's nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza, where you have hundreds of dead a day. And so I think for those of us who have been under siege, it's driven home to us the intensity, the kind of carpet bombing that Israel is carrying out. Remember, Gaza is a tiny place. It's 20 miles long and five miles wide. So yeah, those would be the lessons. Thank you. What steps must be taken for the a quote-unquote new Oslo Accord and regional perspective for economic development, the foundation for lasting peace? And I guess if you can speak about a little bit elements if you can about the old Oslo Accord for those of us who may not be up to speed on that. So I covered Oslo and I knew Yitzhak Rabin. I knew Yasser Arafat quite well, I even knew Abu Jihad. Oslo was never going to work. Rabin, to his credit, understood that the occupation was poisoning his country. And that's why I quoted from this great Israeli scholar, Yeshiahu Leibowitz, who saw it all coming. But his solution was to withdraw Israeli forces and create a colonial police force. i.e. the PA, which Abbas does, I mean, but he has no credibility left, even in the West Bank. The interesting thing about Arafat is that Arafat drew a line. He just wasn't going to be a complete puppet for the Israelis, which is why I think most of us who covered Arafat believe he was poisoned by the Israelis, and there's very strong evidence behind that. So Oslo was an attempt for Israel to find a solution, because remember, Israel would still control the borders, that was never going to grant the Palestinians a state. At this point, Israel, especially with the occupation of the West Bank, it controls 60% of the West Bank, has made the two state solution impossible. Israel did it. And now the only solution is from the river to the sea, a secular Palestinian, maybe it has another name, state where Palestinians, Jews, everyone has equal rights. That is the only route left. Thank you. Next question. Do you think the groundswell of people coming together in protest, powered by social media, makes any difference as compared to other and earlier genocides? It always makes a difference. It may not end the genocide, but it calls out the hypocrisy of the ruling class, and it scares them. And I, anecdotally, I was very involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, and at the same time a faction of my family unfortunately works on Wall Street, my cousins, and they were terrified of Occupy. I know this from them. They were getting hourly updates. Now Occupy was one of the most benign, peaceful, you know, Quakers in sandals kind of movement, but they would get, they're marching down Bond Street, you know, they have a big puppet of a squid. And they wouldn't even go out to the restaurants, they brought, you know, paper bag lunches to eat in their offices. So, the fact is, this is a whole other discussion on the destruction of American democracy, which I've written extensively on, but in many ways, The ruling oligarchic corporate class that has seized political power, and of course the media, we can get into the media, is illegitimate. And it knows it. And so when people go out in the street, it scares them. And in the end, politics is a game of fear. That's what it is. And I did cover the revolutions in Eastern Europe. I was in the Magic Lantern Theater every night with Václav Havel in Prague, a playwright. And these despotisms, and I think this is what's happened in Israel, devour themselves. So you can't underestimate how important it is to get out and to protest. But I would also say it's important, terribly important for the Palestinians who feel often forgotten and erased. And so in the end, and I didn't go to journalism school, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and I come out of a religious tradition and I look at that kind of resistance as a moral imperative. That it's not whether we're going to win, that's the wrong question. The wrong, the right question is that it's where we have to be and where so many, especially young, I mean you go to the protests in DC and it's really encouraging because they're young, they're smart, they're articulate and that is where we have to be. I'm not going to guarantee that we're going to win, but I don't fight fascists because I'm going to win, I fight fascists because they're fascists. And an amen to that. Another question. I understand the absolute importance of stopping oppression, both to the oppressed and the oppressors alike. But how is this possible when we have such a minimal role in society? The protests have been enormous in changing public opinion of genocide, but they have not yet to change the opinions of politicians in charge of the decision making. What is our role in stopping the oppressors as bystanders in America? Well, I think there has to be a line at which, and I am as terrified of a Trump presidency as probably many in this room, but there has to be a line that we draw that you can't cross. And I think the problem is, especially with the Democratic Party, we have never put that line in place. And so what we've watched since the Clinton administration is the Democratic Party transform itself into the Republican Party. and the Republican Party goes so far to the right that it became insane. But the Democratic Party in Europe would be a right-wing party. I was Ralph Nader's speechwriter, and let me just put a plug for Ralph, the most important Arab-American political leader of our time. who speaks fluent Arabic. I was in a restaurant with him and I speak Arabic. I'm trying to resurrect it because, you know, I hope you've all read Joe Sacco's great works, Palestine, and his masterpiece, Footnotes in Gaza. Footnotes in Gaza came because he and I went and spent 10 days in Ha... Actually, I was so frustrated by the New York Times coverage of Gaza that I used my vacation time to go to Gaza and and spend 10 days in Hani Yunus and write this magazine piece for Harper's called a Gaza Diary, in which at one point they still had the Jewish settlements. We heard over the loudspeakers when the kids were coming out of school, and then we heard all sorts of words, I'm not going to repeat, but they were baiting these 10, 11 year old kids to throw rocks. And then when they threw rocks, they shut them, some cases killed them. So By the way, after publishing that piece, the New York Times informed me that I would never report from the Middle East again. But in that, in those interviews on Hanayounis, we interviewed older residents who told us about the massacres of 56. And Harper's cut it out. And Joe was so upset that he spent the next six years shuttling back and forth to Hanayounis, interviewing every eyewitness and survivor that he could find, and did his book. footnotes in Gaza, which I have to admit, even though I knew the story, when I read it, at the end, I was just weeping. And, you know, Joe and I, you know, we've been working in Gaza for years. And he called me up and he said, and we're old men now, you know, he said, you know, we got to go back. Our next book is Gaza. And I said, OK. I've already spoken to Simon & Schuster, my publisher. They will take it. We don't know what it's going to look like because we don't know how far the Israelis are going to go. But there are two forms of therapy that I have for Gaza. One is attending the protests. And the other, I found, because I left the Middle East a long time ago, my Arabic is really deteriorated. But I'm taking classes three days a week. And you know what my other therapy is, is studying my Arabic. Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A Q&A would actually act in order to carry out the sentencing or would geopolitical factors lead to a lack of legitimate action from the international community? So the ICJ is a UN body and whatever finding or whatever ruling it makes even on a temporary injunction saying you know there's enough evidence that Israel should it has to be approved by the Security Council and the US will veto it. So it's moot. On the other hand, if the, and let's just by the way, honor South Africa. They have stood with the Palestinians, you know, for decades. And, um, but if the court, and you can be sure there will be heavy pressure from the US, one, not to issue, in essence, a temporary injunction saying there's enough evidence. They won't rule at first in two to three weeks on whether there's genocide. They'll just say there's enough evidence to bring the case, therefore it should stop. We know there will be heavy, heavy pressure. Because under international law, if there is a ruling that Israel is committing genocide, the United States is guilty, which it is guilty, of accomplice to genocide. And Israel desperately wants to stop this because its whole justification for its colonial settler project is rooted in the genocide carried out against the Jews. And if they become or are found guilty of genocide, as they should be, then that kind of moral veneer, that ability of the Israel lobby to essentially be immune from any kind of criticism, all of that collapses. It has deep existential, there are deep existential issues for Israel. Again, it's important because I think, and especially if you read the brief, the 83-page brief, it's an educational, you know, it's almost impossible to deny what's happening. The same way, and I speak at a lot of colleges with Students for Justice in Palestine, I don't know any, and I'm a strong supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement, of course. I don't know universities have embraced BDS But the result of the movement is that it's educated an entire generation of young kids about Palestine. And that's why Israel spends so much energy and time trying to defeat it. So even though the ultimate goal we have, which is of course halting the genocide, may not be achieved by standing up and fighting against what I would call radical evil. There are all sorts of victories that chip away at the foundations of power. And in the end, you know, that is where we have to be. There was a great Jewish rabbi, Abraham Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King. And he was criticized by other rabbis for marching on the Sabbath. And Abraham Heschel told the rabbis, I pray with my feet. That's what we have to do.