IDF to Eliminate Palestinians from Northern Gaza – Richard Silverstein part 1/2

Talia Baroncelli
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Richard Silverstein to speak about Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, as well as its invasion of Lebanon.

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Joining me now is American writer and analyst Richard Silverstein. He runs the website Tikun Olam, which focuses on the Israeli security state. He’s also published in other publications such as the New Arab and the Middle East Eye. It’s great to have you here today, Richard. Thanks for joining.

Richard Silverstein
Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli
So we both have been watching the coverage on the one year of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and on the Palestinians. I wonder what your assessment has been so far of the U.S. media coverage on October 7.

Richard Silverstein
Well, I’ve been disappointed in the coverage because it veers into weaponizing mourning, weaponizing Israeli suffering on behalf of the political interests of Israel in demeaning the Palestinians and justifying the genocide happening in Gaza. There’s a continual echo of the 1,200 Israelis who were killed on 10/7, which obviously is a trauma for Israel. But they’re trying to use it in order to increase support for what Israel is doing without acknowledging the pain and the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, which isn’t a day-long trauma like 10/7 was for Israelis, but is a year-long trauma. Every day, 50 or 100 Palestinians are murdered in Gaza. There’s no one outside the Gazans themselves who are mourning them, except maybe in the Arab world.

You have media, CNN, you have all the different media platforms around the world trotting out Israelis who have suffered, the parents of hostages, the parents of Israelis who were killed. It’s a litany of Israeli suffering. It blots out the suffering of Palestinians, which is many, many, many times greater than the Israelis. If you look at the number of Gazans killed, 42,000 only of the known dead, compared to the 1,200, that’s 35 times more Palestinians killed in the past year than the Israelis killed in 10/7. I think it’s really important to put that in perspective, and it’s a message that isn’t being heard.

Talia Baroncelli
What you’re saying is similar to something that author and political scientist Naomi Klein has been writing about. She recently wrote a piece in the Guardian in which she said that Israel has essentially been weaponizing the trauma of October 7 to legitimize the continuation of this war on Gaza. What do you see as the end game right now? As you’ve mentioned, there are over 40,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza. There have been many people killed as well in the West Bank. Benjamin Netanyahu has constantly been stalling all the various bridging proposals and other ceasefire proposals. He says that he wants to get the hostages back, but everything that he’s been doing, according to numerous reports, is that he’s actually not really interested in getting the hostages back because he doesn’t want to have a ceasefire in Gaza. What’s your assessment now of the end game or the military operations that are in Gaza right now?

Richard Silverstein
I’m afraid it doesn’t look good. I don’t see any way or any possible outcome where Israel or Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire, and that’s for a number of reasons. He’s basically a narcissist and a megalomaniac. The only thing he wants is to preserve his own power because he knows that as soon as the war ends, the Israelis, who basically hate him because he hasn’t gotten the hostages home, will defeat him at the polls. There will be an election in 2025, if not before then. He will lose that election. He figures if he continues the war long enough, that perhaps Israelis will see him as their savior. Also, he is afraid of the corruption trials going on against him, which have been held in abeyance as long as the war has been going on. As soon as the war ends, he faces those, he faces the voters, and he knows that the prognosis is not good for him. So that’s one reason why he’s been sabotaging the ceasefires.

The other reason is basically he has a vision of genocide, which many people in the media and Holocaust scholars, genocide scholars have acknowledged what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide. This genocide, the Israeli genocide, is basically to eliminate the Palestinians in Gaza by any means necessary. Those means might be combat. Those means might be forced expulsion, the ethnic cleansing, like we had in the Nakba. It could mean ending humanitarian aid completely, which basically has happened, making life unlivable for those in Gaza so that they could either be expelled to Egypt or expelled to Saudi Arabia, all of these proposed by Israelis as plans. It’s basically to have an endless war in Gaza, and they’re going to be doing the same thing against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that process has only just begun. I don’t see any good outcome, unfortunately.

We’ll talk about the U.S. role here. The U.S. has been facilitating Israeli genocide in spite of the feel-good rhetoric coming out of the Biden administration. They’re essentially going along with him and facilitating it with all of the missiles and bombs that they’re supplying, which are used to kill and assassinate figures like Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif in Gaza, and [Hassan] Nasrallah in Lebanon. Those are all U.S. munitions being used.

Talia Baroncelli
We’ll get to the U.S. response at some point, but I do want to focus on what Israel has been doing right now because if you look at their operations in the Gaza Strip, numerous officials have been saying that they’re trying to expand the so-called safe zone in the south of the Gaza Strip. The reason they’re doing that is because they want to “evacuate people from the north of the Gaza Strip.” That can be interpreted as a code word for eliminate. They want to ethnically cleanse and eliminate people from the north to the south. What is their game plan there? Why are they doing this?

Richard Silverstein
Well, there’s been a plan proposed by an ad hoc group of Israeli generals and security officials who are lobbying for this plan, which has basically two major components. The first one is to eliminate everything in Northern Gaza. They’ve already destroyed basically almost all of the buildings and residences in Northern Gaza. Earlier in the conflict, they expelled everyone from Gaza, and they fled south. Then, of course, you talked about safe zones, but they’re not really safe because Israel will declare an area to be a humanitarian zone, and then it will bomb the zone. So that sends them fleeing in every direction.

What they’re proposing is the permanent expulsion of everyone and everything from Northern Gaza, eliminating all the houses, raising the whole area where hundreds of thousands of Gazans used to live, and turning it into what they call a military zone. There would be nothing left in Gaza except Israeli troops, according to this plan. What Giora Eiland, who’s the leader of this group, an Israeli general, says is that the Gazan citizens would be given the opportunity to leave Northern Israel. Of course, he’s proposing this as a voluntary removal by the Palestinians themselves and not being forced out by Israeli military, Israeli troops going in and forcing them out. Because he views this as a voluntary removal, he contends that the north would be vacant so that Israel could then occupy it.

The second component is that he proposes ending all humanitarian aid in Northern Gaza. We, at one time earlier in the year, had several hundred trucks a day entering Gaza. Kamala Harris and Biden have been boasting, and Anthony Blinken Secretary of State, boasting about how they pressured Netanyahu to allow more trucks to come in, and more did come in. We’re talking 100 trucks a day when normally it would be 500 trucks a day. Gaza is under siege, so these trucks were the only materials coming into Gaza. Now the number I just looked up is 64 trucks a day entered Gaza in the month of September.

I have gotten an Israeli security source who has told me that Israel has now formally become state policy to implement the island proposal, the island plan. The IDF has expelled everyone from Northern Gaza. They’re not saying that they’re implementing this plan, but that’s what they’re doing, and that’s what the security source told me. I would predict that in October or November, there will be no humanitarian trucks entering Gaza. Because he’s saying that there would be no Gazans left in the north, he can then stop any activity, any humanitarian aid from entering Northern Gaza. This would be a permanent expulsion of all Palestinians. Keep in mind that U.S. policy has always been calling for the return of Palestinians to Northern Gaza.

I would ask the State Department, and I’m sending a query to them today, saying, do they have any comment about the island plan and Israel implementing it? My guess is that they either won’t respond to me or they will say, in the past, we’ve said that we want the Palestinians to return. They will not comment on the island plan because Israel hasn’t publicly said that it is. However, I should note that right-wing extremist politicians and members of the Knesset and ministers have applauded what Israel is doing and are saying that they’re implementing the island plan. You haven’t had Netanyahu say it. You haven’t had the Chief of Staff say it, but that’s what they’re doing.

It’s very similar, by the way, to the Nakba because in 1948, [David] Ben-Gurion was very careful not to say that Israel was expelling Palestinians. Not to say that 750,000 Palestinians who were driven out from Israel during the 1948 war were being expelled according to an official plan. He didn’t want anything written down, although we know from various sources that there was an official plan. They’re following the same playbook now and hoping that the world will either look askance or not notice that that is what they’re doing.

Talia Baroncelli
[Itamar] Ben-Gvir, who’s the Minister of National Security of Israel, constantly says that he wants to occupy and settle or resettle Gaza and that extreme settlers from Israel would then go to the Gaza Strip to live there. It does seem like the creation of what’s called the Netzarim Corridor, which divides the north and the south of the Gaza Strip, is really a way to achieve that.

Just listening to what Matt Miller from the State Department has been saying, there were similar questions posed to him as to why Israel is still involved in the north and is trying to increase its strikes on Hamas. Or that’s what they’re alleging. They’re saying that they’re increasing their strikes on Hamas in the north, even though in the past, they said that they’ve actually driven out Hamas from the north. There’s some contradictory messaging there. The response that Matt Miller gave on behalf of the U.S. is that they would not support Israel resettling in that area.

Something that Blinken has said in the past is that they would never support the changing of any of those geographical boundaries of Gaza. They want the territory to stay the same. In terms of what they’ve been doing by providing Israel with at least $17 billion USD this past year. If you look at other operations included, it’s probably $22 billion since October 7. They’re just enabling any genocidal policy that Israel has been pursuing. Based on all that, how do you then evaluate U.S. support for Israel?

Richard Silverstein
Well, what you just said about the U.S. views towards Israel in Gaza, it’s important to note that those views were stated months ago and that they haven’t been restated. Unless maybe Matt Miller did mention that in his press conference, those are basically irrelevant statements because the U.S. has done nothing to get Israel to honor what the U.S. is saying its policy is. It has not exerted any pressure on Netanyahu to allow Gaza residents to return or to allow humanitarian aid into the north. If you say something as a politician but don’t do anything to implement it, it doesn’t matter what you’ve said because it’s meaningless. Basically, U.S. policy towards Israel is meaningless as far as what they’re saying they believe, what they say they want, or what policy they say they want. It hasn’t been willing to exert pressure. It hasn’t been willing to follow Bernie Sanders approach, which was to call for a halt of U.S. military aid to Israel. As long as they’re not willing to exert pressure, real pressure, that Israel will feel and that will hurt Israel, then you might as well have no policy at all. I don’t think that the U.S. is going to restate its views about what they said months ago, about what they would like to see the Israelis do. Even if they do restate it, as I said, it really has no meaning.

I wanted to go back to another thing you raised, which was what will happen if Israel does turn the north into a military zone. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, even said that Gaza could be turned into luxury condos along the ocean, along the Mediterranean, for Jews, of course, for Israelis, and that this would be a way to rebuild Gaza, restore Gaza, but of course, for Jews and for Israelis only, since there would be no Palestinians living there. Trump himself said that. He said Gaza could be beautiful again if they would only develop their coastline, which is basically turning Gaza into a real estate proposition instead of a political and military situation, which is what it actually is.

I was thinking, as you were talking just now, about what Israel would do after it turned it into a military zone. It would start putting settlements in there, which is roughly what Kushner and Trump were talking about. They’d ship settlers into Gaza and turn it into a permanent Israeli, either an exit, like they’re talking about in the West Bank, or they would just have the North be part of Israel, informally part of Israel. That’s why I think the world is not willing to face these things and not willing to listen to analysts and journalists like me predicting what will happen based on what we know has happened in the history of this conflict. Everybody is listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden saying feel-good rhetoric that has no bearing on what actually will happen. Not only what will happen but what is happening now in the genocide, staring at us right before our eyes.

Talia Baroncelli
It is really hard to watch because there are so many contradictory signals. I think what that ultimately means, at least on the part of the U.S., is that they actually want what Netanyahu and his government, his right-wing Likud government, is implementing and executing, not only in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank; we’ll actually get to the rest of the region as well, Lebanon and vis-a-vis Iran.

It’s just incredible to watch, though, because it seems like there’s this massive façade of trying to communicate that, oh, we’re doing everything that we can. There are numerous liberal articles, i.e., Politico and other outlets, saying President Biden is so upset with Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s communicated how upset he is and enraged he is. Bibi won’t listen to him, and he’s tried his best. The U.S. could just use its leverage by withholding weapons transfers. It just seems like political theater. Is that how you interpret it, or do you think that there actually is a certain segment of maybe the U.S. State Department or Blinken who are trying to bring about a ceasefire? What do you think?

Richard Silverstein
Well, just by the fact that seven different State Department officials and humanitarian aid officials in the State Department have resigned in the past year because their resignation calls out Blinken, calls out administration policy, saying that it is a façade, the word you mentioned, saying that there is nothing humanitarian about the policy despite the rhetoric. I think that tells you what’s going on with the people inside the State Department and what the progressive voices within it really believe about what the policy is.

If you read the statement that Harris put out and Biden put out after Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated, basically, they applauded the assassination. They ignored the fact that when you murder the leader of a major, one of the most important political and military figures in Lebanon, when you assassinate him, when you try to destroy this powerful political entity in Lebanon, you’re really sowing chaos in the whole society, all of Lebanon. You’re not just attacking Hezbollah, you’re attacking the whole country. How is that a legitimate or reasonable U.S. policy? It’s basically saying that the U.S. supports terrorism in order to eliminate its enemies in the region. Not using the word terrorism, of course, but that’s what it is. We’re supplying them with all of the weapons, all of the bunker buster bombs that are being used to assassinate people like Nasrallah and his subordinates. Israel has murdered many of the Hezbollah senior commanders, and they’ve been doing it with U.S. weapons.

You can’t have this two-pronged strategy, which is, on the one hand, to say you support a ceasefire, you support not escalating the conflict, but on the other hand, you give Israel billions, tens of billions of dollars in weapons, which they then use to sow further chaos and pursue the genocide. It’s an insane dichotomy that they’ve created, and the world isn’t calling it out. You have a few countries like Spain and, I believe, Italy, which have stopped sending weapons to Israel. The amount of weapons they send is really minuscule compared to what the U.S. does.

I should add that the majority of Americans oppose the administration’s policy. They want to see a stopping of military aid to Israel until the end of the war. They want to see a ceasefire. They want the U.S. to pressure Israel, seriously pressure Israel for a ceasefire. They want the hostages to return because a ceasefire would make that happen. Biden and Harris are deliberately and intentionally opposed to the majority of American opinion. You would think that the Democrats would be sensitive to this because Harris is teetering on the edge of losing the election. She may yet win the election. You would think a politician running for president who’s in a very, very tight race would listen to the voice of the American people. The fact that they’re defying it indicates that they’re more concerned with billionaire pro-Israel donors who donate huge amounts, hundreds of millions of dollars to their campaigns. The billionaires are the ones who are driving U.S. policy rather than the people, which to people like me and you and others is shameful. We are powerless to get them to do anything else. That’s really deeply frustrating and tragic for people like me, journalists like us, and analysts like us. The seven U.S. officials who resigned have had no impact on policy. It changed nothing.

Talia Baroncelli
One of the U.S. State Department officials who resigned was Alexander Smith. He had been working for USAID for four years. USAID is an arm of the U.S. State Department. USAID wrote a 17-page report indicating that Israel was actually preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza. This eternal report was submitted to Blinken, to Secretary of State. Yet he still went before Congress and testified before Congress that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid from getting into the Gaza Strip. This is in violation of U.S. laws, which stipulate that arms transfers can only be given to a foreign country if that country actually allows for humanitarian aid to be delivered to different areas.

This also relates to additional reports of wrongdoing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. There was a report in the outlet Drop Site News, which is run by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim. This article was written by Yaniv Cogan, and it says that according to an Israeli cabinet member, Blinken actually approved a policy for Israel to bomb aid trucks. I highly recommend that people read this report. We’ll get into the details. Essentially, this means that Blinken is covering for Israel’s war crimes.

The response that Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, has given to really important questions; if you see her 60 Minutes interview, for example, where she was asked about how she could potentially prevent an all-out war in the Middle East and what her stance is vis-a-vis Israel, it’s been very neocon-like and pretty pathetic if you listen to it. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Harris’s Israel policy and her stance on Iran.

Richard Silverstein
I wanted to point out that U.S. law; this is going back to Blinken. U.S. law says that the U.S. cannot provide any aid to any country that is violating international human rights standards. Two different agencies within the State Department; one of them was USAID, which is what you’ve referred to, and the other, I don’t remember the name of it, but they both produced reports.

Talia Baroncelli
It is the refugee one.

Richard Silverstein
Yeah, the refugee agency. Both produced reports saying that Israel is not respecting human rights standards. They sent those reports to Blinken, who was the one who was ultimately responsible for making the determination. He ignored those reports, and he testified before Congress, as you say. Media within the past month, including Drop Site and I think The Intercept, have basically pointed out that Blinken lied. Now you have some NGOs that are calling for his resignation for lying. I’m not aware, I haven’t read that Drop Site article you referred to, but I’m not surprised that the U.S. would tacitly, not publicly, say as long as the Israelis believe that there is involvement of terror, in the distribution of humanitarian aid, that Israel can do whatever it wants to intervene and stop that from happening. Of course, the U.S. always leaves it to the IDF and always leaves it to Israel to define the terms under which it will operate. Then, the U.S., after the fact, goes along with it and tries to square it with U.S. policy, even if it makes no sense whatsoever.

Going to what Harris said on 60 Minutes, it was just happy talk, as I mentioned earlier in our interview. She said that we’re doing everything in our power, that we’ve pressured the Israelis to increase humanitarian aid, and we succeeded in that, which, of course, unfortunately, [Bill] Whitaker, the 60 Minutes interviewer, didn’t say, well, why are 64 aid trucks only going into Gaza in September if you’ve had such success of persuading Israel? If the U.S. persuaded Israel to increase the aid truck, it happened six or eight months ago. It didn’t happen last month or even the month or two prior to that. There’s just no consistency for Harris or for the Biden policy. That’s deadly for the Palestinians.

I personally think, politically, it’s a bad calculation on Harris’s part. She has a large Arab-American community in Michigan, which is one of the battleground states. Harris is desperately trying to get the American Muslims on board. There was just a statement from 25 Imams from around the country supporting Harris, but that’s not going to work in terms of the overall Arab-American population in the United States, especially in a very, very tight election. There’s less than one percentage point separating these two candidates. In the seven battleground states, Michigan is one of them, there are enough voters in all of those other six states that it could be the margin of difference for her. It’s a completely baffling political calculation that they’re making. For the reasons probably that I mentioned earlier, it seems almost like Harris would prefer to maintain the support of these billionaires and lose the election rather than win the election and defy the billionaire pro-Israel donors. It makes no sense to me in terms of the way I am used to politics working. That’s the problem with Israel. It really turns everything topsy-turvy, not just in the region but in its relationships with many Western nations that have relationships with Israel.

Talia Baroncelli
If you listen to what she said in the 60 Minutes interview, it’s basically John Bolton’s wet dream. John Bolton wrote in the New York Times that he wanted to start a war with Iran. In that interview, she said that Iran is the greatest adversary of the United States. She could have said Russia or China, but she decided to say Iran, a country that doesn’t even have nuclear weapons. Do you think she’s really so scared of upsetting her large donors that she’d perhaps rather lose the election and risk alienating Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, as well as the younger generation of voters who really want to see a ceasefire in Gaza and probably won’t even vote for her at this point?

Richard Silverstein
She is petrified, and that’s why she’s tacking rightward because she believes that she has to be tough. She has to be a security op. She has to say that we’re stopping immigration on the border. We have to be tougher than the Republicans on this so that it won’t expose her right flank for the Republicans to attack her. The problem is, if you tack to the right politically, you’re going to lose people in the Democratic Party who vote Democratic in every election. They’re going to be hesitant before voting for you because you’re clearly disrespecting their point of view. That’s why when the unaffiliated group tried to get a two-minute speaking slot at the Democratic Convention, they were turned down, even though the woman who was going to give the two-minute talk– I read the talk. She recited it on a PBS show. It was a beautiful speech, very moving, but non-judgmental, non-condemning of Israel.

Talia Baroncelli
Is this the Democratic politician from Florida you’re referring to?

Richard Silverstein
No, she is a Democratic operative official in Georgia. I don’t remember her name, but it was a beautiful statement. They gave it to Harris’s people. Harris still refused to give her a seat because they were frightened of not just the donors I was talking about but also of the Jewish vote, which has been reliably Democratic. They believe, falsely, that the Jewish population in America is a monolith, that it’s routinely supportive of Israel, and that it is as right-wing as the right-wing government in Israel. They believe they’ll be accused of anti-Semitism if they take a principled stand and pressure Israel. That’s not true. That’s not what will happen.

There’s a younger generation, which you mentioned among the Jews and among the general population, which is much more progressive, much more on the left than the older generation, the older generation of Jews, which grew up with Zionism. Younger Jews don’t buy those things like the Jews used to.

A principled position would rally a great deal of support. Personally, I don’t believe that Democrats can win by abandoning the left side of their party. I believe that they will lose if they do that. You have someone like Biden, who at least you could excuse some of his positions because he’s been proudly a Zionist since 1980 when he first came to the Senate. He’s completely caught up in the past, but Harris is not that. She’s been much more recent to the political arena, so she shouldn’t be as beholden as Biden was. She’s shown no independence on this issue, and it could cost her the election.

Talia Baroncelli
You’ve just been watching part one of my discussion with Richard Silverstein. In part two, we’ll discuss the U.S.’s reckless support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and how this might escalate into a nuclear conflict with Iran. See you next time.