Despite Gaza Ceasefire, Israel Accelerates Its Annexation of the West Bank - Rami Khouri Pt. 1/2


Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri outlines the Israeli far-right’s longstanding opposition to Palestinian self-determination and, as he says, the very right of Palestinians to exist. Khouri discusses how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, together with President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have shredded international law at every opportunity in their genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. Yet despite Trump’s success in pressuring Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire deal, the agreement itself is on thin ice: Israel’s resumption of strikes in Gaza could lead to an unraveling of phase two negotiations, precluding the possibility of a permanent ceasefire and ultimately of any effective Palestinian governance and statehood.  


Talia Baroncelli
Hi, you’re watching theAnalysis.news, and I’m Talia Baroncelli. Today, I’ll be joined by Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. We’ll be discussing the Gaza ceasefire deal.

If you’ve been enjoying our content, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and make a donation if you can by hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Most importantly, get onto our mailing list to get all of our content sent straight to your inbox. You can also like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Make sure you hit the bell to get all of our notifications and listen to us on podcast streaming services such as Spotify or Apple. All right, let’s get into it with Rami Khouri.

Joining me now is Rami Khouri. He’s a Palestinian-American journalist who’s been covering issues in the Middle East for over 55 years. He is also an Al Jazeera op-ed columnist and a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut. Rami, it’s great to have you today. Thanks for joining us.

Rami Khouri
I’m happy to be with you.

Talia Baroncelli
Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire deal, and phase one is currently being implemented. This is the same agreement that was proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden all the way back on May 31 of last year. We’ve seen numerous Israeli commentators who are either anti or pro-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say that Netanyahu was the primary obstacle to the deal, that he was the one who was stalling, and that he didn’t want a formal ceasefire deal to come about. What do you make of President Trump’s Mid East envoy, Steve Witkoff going to Israel and essentially pressuring Netanyahu to push the deal over the finish line?

Rami Khouri
Yeah, there are a lot of factors that are at play here, but I would say the main ones are that it’s not just Netanyahu who didn’t really want a cease fire. It’s the Zionist movement, the Zionist extremists, who, for the last 100 years, have been trying to throw the Palestinians out of Palestine or just get them to stay there as housemaids and servants under Jewish domination. Zionism has had this streak of military conquest, particularly against Palestinians, spreading also now to Syria, Lebanon, and other places. Netanyahu was the main driving force for continuing the war because it helped protect his political incumbency, but Zionism is the real problem because Zionism has never been defined, just a stage for the Jewish people.

The criminal colonial British supported this, made it happen, and then passed the torch of colonial criminality to the United States after World War II, which has supported Israel and Zionism in doing whatever they want to do in the Middle East. We’ve seen it now in the last year and a half, Israel running wild across the whole region with its very sophisticated military capabilities, which are almost entirely dependent on the U.S., and attacking any country that it wants to attack, assassinating anybody they want to assassinate.

Netanyahu wanted to keep this going, hoping it would push the Palestinians out of Gaza eventually. It never happened because one of the things that Zionism has never learned is that Indigenous people who are threatened and subjugated by foreign colonial occupiers will fight back to the last man and woman. The Israelis did this in Masada, and they did it in other places historically in Europe and other places when they were subjugated. They fought back. They didn’t surrender, lie down, and play dead. The Palestinians are doing the same thing. They will resist as much as they can.

When the conflict started in the early part of the last century, there were about a million people in Palestine. By 1948, when the Strait of Israel was created, there was one and a half million Palestinians. That’s all there was. Today, there are about 14 million Palestinians, and every single one of them is committed to achieving their rights, which means a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. Not destroying Israel as Zionist propaganda has it, but a Palestinian state with its full sovereign rights, peacefully living with Israel and expecting Israel to do the same– living peacefully with Palestinians. Zionism and the state of Israel, and it seems the United States, do not want to have a Palestinian state come into being. This was really one of the main reasons why this went on.

The reason that, finally, the Israelis accepted the ceasefire, I believe, was partly the arm twisting by Trump but also the fact they realized that they had nothing more to gain with more military action. They weren’t going to destroy Hamas. They were not going to evict the Palestinians from Gaza. They were not going to get the Palestinians to surrender. Therefore, all they were doing was digging themselves further into a big hole in front of global public opinion and the global legal system. When the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and other courts around the world took positions criticizing what Israel was doing as a plausible genocide, what the Israelis did was they tried to shred international law like they shredded babies in their sleep with their advanced weaponry. Just destroy international law. The American government and its colonial criminality went along with this.

So, this is the real problem, too. I think the bigger picture we need to keep in mind, this is not just a Gaza or Hamas, Israel, or Netanyahu and Hamas conflict. This is the last anticolonial struggle in the entire world. That’s why the entire world, essentially the Global South and much of the Global North, has supported Palestinian rights for peaceful coexistence and criticized Israel. That’s why the Israelis are going crazy because they can’t handle being checked or being contained either by Arab resistance or by international pressures. They expect to be able to do anything they want, which is what they’ve been able to do over the last 70, 80, 100 years because of massive Western support. This is all changing now, and this is the situation we’re in.

The ceasefire, hopefully, will allow everybody to rethink this and move to the next phase, where we might stop the current fighting and war and then move towards a permanent negotiation for a permanent resolution of the conflict. That’s a big sticker item, but it can be done. We’ll just leave that for the next round, but right now, it’s to consolidate the ceasefire, come to terms with what happened, and hold people accountable on both sides.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, we will get to the specifics of the three stages of the ceasefire deal, but first, I wanted to ask you, and you’ve already alluded to this, what you think of the Blinken and Biden administration and how they’ve essentially aided and abetted a genocide using U.S. taxpayer funds and U.S. weapons. Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, recently said that Hamas is now able to actually replenish its ranks. Based on what he’s saying, it does sound like all of the destruction and the genocide was really for nothing. What do you think of that?

Rami Khouri
I think the American administration, personified by Blinken, Biden, and Kamala Harris, is, at the same time, heartless and incompetent. It’s an incredible combination to have when you’re running the most powerful military machine and government in the world– to be heartless and incompetent. They were simply doing whatever the Israeli government wanted them to do, and their pro-Zionist, pro-Israeli donors in the United States. It was a disgraceful performance. It really was the pit of American modern politics. American politics had degraded into the mud. We saw it so clearly in the Gaza situation.

They tried to cover it up with all kinds of fancy public relations, and none of it worked. The majority of American people wanted a ceasefire. The small majority wanted to have constraints on American arms sales to Israel. Most young American Jews were for a ceasefire and were critical of what the Israeli and American governments were doing. The trend in public opinion in the United States and across most of the Western world, with only a few exceptions, was against what Israel was doing because it was a criminal, savage assault. Inhuman, indecent, indiscriminate, and endless savagery. Attacking sleeping mothers and children in their tents and setting them on fire or shredding them with these new weapons that send out blades and shred people like a meat grinder. They did this over and over and over again.

The United States provided the weapons, the money, and the diplomatic protection. It was one of the most disgraceful experiences of power exercised by any sovereign big power in the world. It was completely in line with the colonial and imperial legacy. This is an important point that I think people will start to realize when they fully analyze what’s going on. The major human rights institutions of the world have studied this and said this is genocidal. This is Apartheid, what Israel is doing. There’s massive support and proof for that position among Jewish, Israeli, American, and independent respected legal minds.

The Israelis ignore all of this because they’re saying, “We are above the law. We do whatever we want.” This is the epitome of Apartheid and a racist attitude. Therefore, what we’ve seen from the Americans and some European countries, especially Great Britain and Germany, has been disgraceful. The nationals of these countries should be ashamed of what their government is doing, but they can’t do anything about it because the Western capitalist pseudo-democratic systems allow this to happen. They were there from the beginning when the British said in 1917 that they would support the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine, which was 93% Arab, including my family in Nazareth. It started with the British criminal duplicity, and it continues.

What happened, as terrible as it was, was not unusual or unprecedented. The British and the French, from the late 1800s until today, have been killing Arabs in big numbers all over the region, either directly or indirectly. Then, other people got into the process. Other powers got involved, i.e., the Russians, the Iranians, and the Turks. Even some Arab countries, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and some other Arab countries got involved in battles around the Middle East, where big numbers of people like Sudan, where large numbers of people were being killed or displaced.

So, this problem is really one of two combined problems. One is the legacy of Western imperial colonial savagery and barbarism, really, and now genocide. Combined with that is the fact that in the Arab countries that were essentially born in their current form after World War I, sovereignty has not taken hold. We don’t have really very many– we don’t have any sovereign Arab countries that can make their own sovereign decisions. Any Arab country that makes a big decision on arms sales, water supplies, industrial policy, and trade issues, big issues like that, they need the approval of some other power.

It used to be in the old days, just the French and then the British were the big colonial powers. But today, various Arab countries, when they make these decisions, they’ve got to get the approval of the U.S., of Britain, maybe France, maybe Russia, maybe Turkey, maybe Iran, maybe Saudi Arabia. There are many Arab countries that are involved in what I call the desovereignization of the contemporary Arab world. These are independent but not sovereign states. They’re not administered and run for the well-being of their own people. That’s why you have, according to credible statistics, something around 65%, two-thirds of Arab people, are not able to meet their monthly essential needs, i.e., medicine, food, shelter, heat, water, and education. Two-thirds of the Arabs are poor. The Arabs have become a nation of paupers. The Arab nation as a whole, the Arab people, are a pauperized, helpless people with no political power, no ability to hold accountable their own leaders, no ability to contribute to policymaking, and no ability to resist the foreign hegemonic predatory, savage assaults against them. And that’s why when Hamas and the Palestinians stood up to Israel, it generated such immense international support all over the world because people like to see somebody in the south stand up to the colonial north. Israel and the U.S. together represented the colonial north in this episode.

Talia Baroncelli
I do want to ask you about this concept of desovereignty or desovereignizing. You’re applying it to the Arab world, but couldn’t you extend that analysis to most countries in the world, given that there are such huge divides between working people and the capitalist elite, which ultimately benefits from most global economic interactions and deals? Are you saying that this is something specific to the region, or can we expand the analysis to the global level?

Rami Khouri
I honestly couldn’t say. I’m not a scholar of global sovereignty. I am a scholar of Arab desovereignization, and I live it, I see it, I’ve experienced it. That’s why you have this massive outmigration of the most talented, smartest, brightest, most entrepreneurial, inventive, and creative young Arab men and women for the last 50 years. They’ve been leaving this region and going to Europe, Australia, and North America because they can’t live here as full human beings.

It might be true for many countries around the world that are dependent on powerful other big countries that support them. Maybe it’s the nature of global capitalism. I’m not a scholar of these things. But for the Arab region, this is very clear.

Part of the problem is the capitalist runaway system. But again, I’m not a scholar of that, so I couldn’t talk about that with any credibility. But you see clearly that the powers, and there is some evidence in the record, if you read Noam Chomsky’s books and others, where there’s a lot of record quotations and documentation of Western powers, the U.S., Great Britain, and others who said outright, “We need to go into this country because we need to control their oil. We need to benefit from their energy.”

The idea that smaller countries, independent countries in the South, have sovereign rights and the ability to control their own resources and make their own decisions that’s not fully accepted by major Western powers. We see this exercised more openly and more viciously than ever before in the continuing Israeli genocide because the Israelis are now… now there’s a ceasefire in Gaza, which hopefully will hold, but now the Israelis have open season in the West Bank. They’re burning villages and attacking people. We’ll see what happens if anybody steps in or not.

Talia Baroncelli
Right. What you’re speaking about is essentially what the Biden administration and what Secretary Blinken constantly refer to as the so-called rules-based order, which is essentially a weaponization of the actual liberal international order, which was formed after World War II, and using that as a discursive tool to implement all sorts of imperialist exploitation on people in the Global South and other parts of the world.

As you mentioned, people in the U.S., many voters actually, were really opposed to the war in Gaza, to the genocide in Gaza. There was actually a YouGov poll conducted by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which showed that the onslaught and bombardment of Gaza was a huge issue for voters who decided to actually sit out the election and not vote. I think it was 29% of people who were polled said that that was one of the main reasons why they decided not to vote.

Based on those facts and that there is general disapproval of these wars, do you think Trump is actually picking up on the sentiment, or has he put pressure on Netanyahu to push forward a ceasefire deal for his own personal reasons or just not have additional conflict in the Middle East? Or is this also part of his normalization that he’s trying to bring about between Saudi Arabia and Israel to ensure that the Abraham Accords are fully implemented?

Rami Khouri
It’s probably a combination of all those things. Before I come back to your question. What Blinken calls a rules-based order, it’s not rules-based. Take out the L. It’s a ruse. It’s a trick. It’s a deception. When these rules were made after World War II, they were supposed to protect the world from human rights abuses and gross genocidal atrocities as the Nazis did. That was the purpose. But it was only applied to weaker miscreants, tyrants, and criminals in the Global South, in Africa, mostly, and one or two in former Yugoslavia.

When people challenged the Western hegemonic powers, they were subjected to this rules-based order. But the rules are not really rules. It’s a ruse. It’s a trick. This is how the Western world, the imperial world, has always acted. Talking nicely but acting viciously.

Trump’s motivation is really one of the great new puzzles of our region and the world. Anywhere that you look in the world, Ukraine, China, wherever, Russia, people are speculating all the time. I don’t want to add to the speculation. I prefer to keep my journalistic tradition as one of reporting facts as far as I can define them or identify them.

What we do know is that he has appointed a lot of people in Middle East posts that are almost totally committed to the Zionist project, though he has appointed a few people in the Defense Department, some Undersecretary and Assistant Secretaries of State who are against American military action in the Middle East, against supporting Israeli wars against Iran, and things like that. He’s made some appointments that are a little bit contradictory, and he may not realize that. We have no idea how these appointments are made and who makes them. We just have to wait and see.

What we do know is that Trump is an egomaniac. He wants the world to thank him for saving the world. He believes that he is a savior, now including divinely ordained interventions to save his life. He wants to make history. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he might actually realize that the trajectory the U.S. is on now and has been for many decades is terribly destructive. If you look at the spread of American bases, I don’t know how many now. There are like 40 military bases all over the region and others just over the horizon.

Talia Baroncelli
I think there are 800 across the globe or something like that.

Rami Khouri
Yeah, but it’s incredible. The consequence of this is that what had been a limited conflict in Palestine in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s under the British between the Zionist colonizers and the Indigenous Palestinians, then slowly spread, and then after ’48, Israel was created, and then you had Arab countries fighting against Israel. Israel beat most of them because of the massive support it had from the West and its own motivation. Therefore, the conflict grew to Arab-Israeli, and then the Iranians got involved. If you look at the last year and a half, you had Israel, the U.S., and Great Britain at one point fighting six or seven different people militarily, including Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Unbelievable. Leave apart for the moment the massive public opinion position across the entire Arab region, which is heavily critical of Israel and the United States but also committed to peaceful coexistence with an Israeli state that accepts a Palestinian state and accepts to negotiate a peaceful permanent agreement, which Hamas has proposed many times, by the way. At least 10 times, Hamas leaders have publicly and privately in letters to the U.S. President, to the Israeli Prime Minister, to others, and public statements there. Even Hamas, they repeated it yesterday. A Hamas official said, “We are open to discussions with the United States, as Iran is.”

The real problem here with Trump is that, first of all, we don’t know what he wants. He’s not an ideological person. He’s a theatrical person. He likes applause. He likes drama. He likes to be the center of attention, and he likes the accolades. We should call this bluff and say, “Look, great savior of the world, we’re with you, and here’s how you save the world. You should get seven Nobel Prizes, not just one. You do that by reigning in Zionism, pushing the Israelis and the Palestinians to a negotiated resolution, as happened now with the ceasefire. Get the other great powers involved to help cement a permanent peace.” If you resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict would be resolved; then, the Iranian-Israel conflict would disappear because Israel would no longer threaten Iran. This normalization with the Saudis and everybody else would be perfectly reasonable. Everybody should normalize with everybody else across the region, with Turkey, and with Iran. Imagine if you had the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Jordanians and the Syrians, Iranians, and Saudis all working together. This place would be the greatest global economic engine for the next 50 years with the energy and resources and the human power that’s there.

The main constraint to this in the last 100 years has been the combination of predatory militaristic Zionism that’s unchecked and Western colonial imperial support for that militarism, leading to a situation of Arab countries that are run as dictatorships in most cases and declining living conditions across most of the region, except for the small wealthy oil states, and therefore, building up greater tensions and tensions and tensions. The consequence of this has been what we’ve seen, which is resistance. When people are oppressed, they resist. Some of them flee, some of them emigrate, and you can’t blame them. But resistance is the human response to subjugation. The people who most valiantly, perhaps invisibly portrayed this throughout history were the Jewish people, in many cases, in antiquity and in modern times.

If Trump realizes this, that this legacy has only and will continue to only create more conflict, more tension, and a much more powerful will to resist, he might then say, “Look, how do we stop this?” We have to stop this by solving the core problems. The fact that in the last 20 years, you saw the rise of this axis of resistance, which has been weakened now by the Israeli-American attacks, but the Hezbollah, Hamas, and [inaudible 00:27:58], the Iranians and others in Iraq and Syria. These people emerged because of the natural instinct to resist oppression, subjugation, and predatory colonial interventions in our regions. Therefore, we need to keep reminding the Western leaders that there is a way to live peacefully in this region amongst ourselves, with Israelis, with Iranians, with Turks, with Arabs. Everybody can live peacefully. They have in the past and in many, many cases. This is something that the Western powers have never really learned or absorbed. Maybe they’re incapable of accepting that. But I don’t think so. I think if you look at the white South Africans, how they came to terms with the colonial Apartheid that they had implemented, and they realized it was not sustainable. To their credit, F. W. de Klerk and his pals said, “Look, this is going to just kill us and kill a lot of Black South Africans.”

Talia Baroncelli
Sorry, if I can interrupt. I think it’s also worth noting that there have been numerous attempts by Palestinians to resist peacefully. There was the Great March of Return. Oftentimes, that’s not centered in a lot of these discussions, and it’s ignored. There are discussions around whether violence is justified or not. That’s a whole other discussion. We can also debate whether violence against civilians is ever justified. I personally don’t believe so, but I’m not in a position to judge people. I just wanted to underline that there have been all sorts of acts of peaceful forms of resistance. In those moments, the Israelis were actually shooting at these peaceful protesters, especially in the case of the Great March of Return, for example.

Rami Khouri
Right. The Israelis, the Zionists, I should be careful because not all Israelis are cruel, savage killers. I know I have Israeli friends and some great people, and I know that. Not all Americans are colonial butchers, either.

Talia Baroncelli
That was part one of my conversation with Rami Khouri. In part two, we’ll be speaking a bit more about the prospects for peace and equality in the region. Thanks for watching.


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Rami G Khouri is a Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle

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