Abby Martin’s “Gaza Fights for Freedom”

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Abby Martin on her documentary film and the current situation in Palestine, on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. The full film Gaza Fights for Freedom can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZSaKYmP2s

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don’t forget the donate button at the top of the webpage and subscribe buttons, signup buttons and be back in a few seconds with Abby Martin. In 2019, Abby Martin and her partner, Mike Prysner, made a film titled Gaza Fights for Freedom. Here’s the trailer from the film. Now joining us to talk about the film and her experiences in Gaza and her take on the current situation is Abby Martin. She’s a friend of the show, a longtime independent and to my mind, a very courageous journalists. She’s the host and producer of the Empire Files and Media Roots Radio. Thanks a lot for joining us again, Abby.

Abby Martin

Thanks so much for having me, Paul.

Paul Jay

So, we’ll get into the film a little bit later but start with what’s going on now and your experience there making the film. How does it change the way you look at these events?

Abby Martin

Let’s go back to 2012 during operation “Pillar of Defense,” when I worked with several Palestinians who had to check in with their families in Gaza to make sure that they were alive day to day once the power was out and Israel was committing war crimes under the cover of darkness. I think that really changes someone, at least someone who has humanity. I really take a step back and look at the entirety of corporate media and I just sit there in aw that they can continue to cover this “conflict” in the way that they do constantly providing cover for Israeli war crimes, constantly painting Palestinians not only as terrorists and completely dehumanizing them but just the passive voice. Something really simple as saying Palestinians died versus Israelis killed, making it seem like there are two equal states just fighting each other, a crisis that is over religion and you can never solve it and it’s totally complicated. It is just so cowardly, I think, for people who really understand that it’s not complicated at all. It’s very straightforward. It’s just abysmal, but, Paul, as we know, I mean, of course, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing if you didn’t understand that in order to join these networks, you need to adhere to the orthodoxy of capitalism and U.S. imperialism. So I guess it’s not surprising that this is and remains to be such a third-rail issue.

Paul Jay

Part of the story amongst many parts of this story that doesn’t get told very often in mainstream media and to some extent even alternative media is the extent to which the Israeli population has been so fascistized over the last few decades, I was there must be fifteen years ago now, and I was taken aback because I’d been there as a teenager once my sister actually went to a kibbutz and I was absolutely taken aback by the overtness of the racism against Palestinians. Just in normal conversation people would say things that even in the southern United States, if you heard whites talking to whites about blacks that way, I’m not sure they would, and the way Netanyahu’s popularity apparently is rising, the more bombs fall on the people of Gaza, it’s a big part of the story. The extent to which this gets, you know, they call “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. The term has actually become part of the parlance of the Israeli military-industrial complex, which means slaughtering people in Gaza.

Abby Martin

That is such an important part of the story, and it is completely obfuscated and purposefully omitted by corporate media because they sanitize Israeli society. You never see vox pop man on the street interviews with Israelis. It’s always painted as the right-wing extremist government represented by Netanyahu is so far out there. Then you have these extremist settlers who are going and moving on top of Arab villages and committing these crimes and they are the outliers. They do not represent mainstream Israel.

Abby Martin

Israel is progressive, right? Israel is democratic. Israel is LGBTQ-friendly. The Pinkwashing campaign that’s been deployed by Israeli authorities and the country writ large has been successful over the years, that they’ve essentially deflected all criticism and weaponized the notion of anti-Semitism, which is a very real thing and a very serious thing, and made it so that anyone who’s criticizing the state is the racist, is the bigot. That’s just a really fascinating kind of flipping reality on its head but you bring up a really important point about where Israeli society is at.

Of course, this is just anecdotal, but I think it speaks volumes about the casual nature of people who explicitly endorse things like ethnic cleansing and genocide is that when I spent a month in the occupied West Bank, I didn’t hear one Palestinian and I spoke to hundreds of Palestinians. I didn’t hear one person express outright hatred or say, expel the Jews or kill the Jews. I didn’t hear anyone say that. I just heard them say we want to live in peace. We want democracy. Fast forward to me stepping foot into West Jerusalem and Paul, I was there for three hours, but it was enough to run away and never want to go back again. I spoke to about a dozen people on the street. Did man on the streets. I did not cherry-pick these interviews. You can check them out on our Empire Files YouTube page, and every single person that I talked to endorsed ethnic cleansing. Several people said absolutely bone-chilling things like “kill all the Arabs” while laughing in the camera. Another gentleman said “carpet bomb them… we should have the right to hate Arabs”. Another person, less genocidal, just said kick them out. He was like, we shouldn’t kill them. He said, let’s just kick them out. It just went on and on like that to the point where I realized that this is such a kind of mainstream phenomenon that I think, ninety-nine percent of Israelis or American settlers there are Zionist. Obviously, if you’re anti-Zionist, you probably don’t want to live with in Israeli society and even liberal Zionism is the notion that you need an artificially supremacist state based on a majority that necessitates the ongoing ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the indigenous population. That is kind of a disturbing notion in itself.

I even talked to someone who said he was a leftist. I said, well, what do you believe as a leftist? He said, well, first of all, leftist is a slur here. You don’t want to go around saying that you’re on the left. He said, and moreover, I believe the occupation is right, he said, we need to occupy these people, but it needs to be more humane. Paul, you see this? I mean, look at the case of Elor Azaria, the soldier who was caught on camera just wantonly executing a disarmed Palestinian man on the ground. It was filmed, I think, by B’Tselem. It caused this international outrage and so Israel felt the need to do something to prosecute Elor Azaria. They slapped him on the wrist, put him on house arrest. There were so many huge uprisings against this decision by Israeli authorities to punish the soldier for executing what they say was a terrorist. That I mean, 10,000 people in Tel Aviv Square chanting death to Arabs and moreover, death to the leftists and death to the videographers.

Abby Martin

I mean, death to the videographer’s. There’s a saying within Israeli society that leftists are the AIDS and Arabs are the common cold. You can’t get rid of the common cold if you have AIDS. It’s a disturbing notion. Of course, not everyone in Israeli society believes this, but I think enough people do to really prove the point that there is no hope predominantly from within Israeli society in order to hold the government accountable. It just becomes increasingly fascistic and right-wing and the opposition party is also right-wing. I mean, look at who was running against Netanyahu in the last election. Benny Gantz, a cabinet minister who’s out there explicitly endorsing war crimes right now. I mean, he was the chief of staff during the 2014 murderous assault on Gaza and he’s saying we are going to strike harder and more painful than in 2014. Gaza residents are reporting that this is indeed what’s happening, it’s more violent of an assault and more numerous of an assault in terms of the bombing. So this is where we’re at Paul, this is why I’ve joined the BDS movement, to try to isolate Israel, because I know based on the fall of Jim Crow apartheid and South African apartheid, that this is the only thing that will really bring about democracy.

Paul Jay

Well, a little bit of another conversation, because I honestly think after talking to a lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, there are too many Palestinian activists, a little too focused on BDS. I wish they were more focused on creating a broader front within the Palestinians. Anyway, that’s a conversation I need to have with Palestinians, but for people outside Israel, I understand the focus on BDS, I mean, outside Palestine, but I just want to say that Israel and the Israeli right, which is almost the entire political elite, is the Israeli right. As you say, there is not only barely a left, you can’t really talk about a center in any real way. They need this threat. If the Israeli state wanted to weaken Hamas and maybe even marginalize Hamas, it’d don’t think it would be so complicated. Open up the gates, allow people to make a real living, unemployment, clean water, end the siege. Make Gaza a livable place and they don’t do it. It’s not like the Israelis don’t know that’s the solution. They don’t do it because they want the current situation. They want Gaza to be in desperate straits. They need the external threat. Israeli society is just rife with very sharp contradictions among various sections of the society, especially the divide between secular and religious Jews. In Israel, I think without the external threat, it’s not just I think that, many Israeli writers have commented on this. It would be a mess, more mess than it is. Whenever the political situation in Israel gets dire for the elites in power now, Netanyahu and others, they find some way to start this kind of conflict. In East Jerusalem, the ethnic cleansing they did that triggered all of this, it was a deliberate attempt to create this. I don’t know if they knew Hamas would fire rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians in Jerusalem or not, but it probably wasn’t that hard to foresee. The Israeli state and the eleven or fifteen wealthiest families of Israel that control. They have their own Israeli oligarchy, just like there is in the U.S. and other places. They need this situation to continue forever, and that’s how they imagine it. They imagine this is going to be like this forever. Not only do they not want two states, they want the conditions of Palestinians to be unlivable, and hopefully on the West Bank, people will leave, but they do want the threat of rockets coming. Otherwise, they can’t solve their own problems. Otherwise, they need to keep focusing on the other.

Abby Martin

They absolutely need the threat. They used to occupy the Gaza Strip in case people don’t understand that aspect of the history and they will never forgive Gaza, they’ll never forgive Hamas for resisting the occupation back when they were brutally under the same military occupation that still remains in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlers and checkpoints were littered throughout the Gaza Strip, and so for the last fifteen or so years, they’ve been just collectively punishing, tightening the noose year after year to essentially torture these people.

Abby Martin

We can’t forget that everything going in and out of Gaza is controlled by Israeli authorities and or hostile military entities that work in collaboration with Israeli authorities. But to your point, yeah, it is very, very important to realize that Israel needs that threat to continue, which is why they wanted Hamas to win the election back in 2006, according to a WikiLeaks cable. The Israeli intelligence chief at the time admitted this. Fatah was asking for help to ensure that they were victorious in the election, and Israel said, no, we want Hamas to win because once Hamas takes over the strip, then they can regard every single man, woman, and child living there as a hostile entity. It would be as if we were getting carpet bombed here in the U.S. because we elected Trump, and whoever was carpet bombing us just continued to say well they elected Trump, and Trump’s a genocidal maniac, so we have to do this right.

Abby Martin

It’s such a twisted logic that you really can barely wrap your mind around it, that people, two million people, half of whom are children, would be collectively punished in such a horrific way, because Hamas is the governing body. There are several instances, in terms of bombing and leveling an entire office building full of international media and claiming that Hamas was operating there. Well, what kind of things are we talking about? Hamas runs the government. Hamas runs the transportation system. Hamas runs the health care. It’s just outrageous. They could bomb anything and say it’s a Hamas target or, oh, Hamas is operating in a civilian area. It’s the most densely populated place in the world. It really is a fascinating thing to look at the way the corporate media tells the story, Paul, and you never hear what precedes the rockets. You never hear. OK, well, what came first? And no, I’m not talking about the foundation of the state of Israel and the Nakba, although that is a very important context as well. I’m talking about what you mentioned, which is the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, which makes this situation, I think, different and potentially a breakthrough moment. Not only are we seeing these historic uprisings take place all across not only Gaza but the occupied territories and across the world, but this issue of Sheikh Jarrah really lays bare what is happening, and it lays bare the reality of the situation, I think, to the rest of the world as we saw these harrowing videos of people running around armed. Because, of course, extremist settlers can be armed, where Palestinians living under this Israeli military law can’t have weapons. They can’t even protest or convene in groups or anything like that. It’s all illegal and they were literally purging these people from their homes.

I mean, imagine an immigrant neighborhood in Texas, an armed Trump supporting mob going and violently expelling people from their homes and then occupying them. Can you imagine the offense to liberal sensibilities here in this country. Can you imagine the reaction from the corporate media. The hypocrisy is just so stunning, Paul, that you can barely take it.

Paul Jay

I interviewed a young woman in a refugee camp outside of Beirut in Lebanon. This is, again, fourteen, fifteen years ago. She was telling me that when she sees the images of young Israelis, she wishes they were dead and it took me back because she was a sweet young girl and she must have been like thirteen years old or something twelve, And I said, why? She said, because I saw on television when they were bombing Gaza, this is fourteen, fifteen years ago because this bombing keeps happening every few years. She said. I saw images of young Jewish students writing their names on bombs that they were going to be dropped on the children of Gaza. That’s an acceptable image on Israeli television. Then they wonder why young people get radicalized. I go back to this point. I just saw a poll, a study just came out a few days ago. This is a poll of Israelis asking, would you support an Israeli nuclear first strike on Iran, if it came that Iran had a weapon? Not that Iran was going to use the weapon. Not that there was any evidence of an actual threat, but if they had one, would you support a nuclear first strike? And my memory, I think, was 60 or 65 percent of Israelis supported a nuclear first strike that…Oh, I forgot the full question. Would you support a nuclear strike that would kill up to two million people in Iran?

Abby Martin

Wow.

Paul Jay

I believe the number was 60 percent said yes. It’s very hard because Western media, as you said, portrays Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and all this. It’s hard for people to get what it means for a country, a people to get fascistized because it happened in Nazi Germany, and I know you’re not supposed to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, but I’m Jewish so I can get away with it. The extent of fascistization in Israel is comparable to when you had these massive crowds coming out for Hitler. Now, in my opinion, why? To a large extent, the people got fascistized in Israel because of the terrorist threat from the Palestinians, except that on the whole, the Palestinians stopped terrorist activities against the Israeli population years and years ago. Hezbollah stopped, Hamas essentially stopped because they realized it was a counterproductive tactic, but they’re still playing on all this kind of idea, and not only that, let’s also just add one other piece to this. Let’s remember that the actual creation of Hamas in the first place. The Israeli intelligence services had a hand in that because they were trying to undermine Yasser Arafat and the PLO. So Israeli intelligence, the way they make use of the despair as an instrument for the fascistization of the Israeli people, it’s to my mind, a very critical piece of understanding why you can get such popular support in Israel, that even in the United States, public opinion wouldn’t accept the stuff that Israel is doing to the Palestinians. I mean, if the Americans were doing it to the Mexicans or something, I don’t know.

Abby Martin

Well, it’s an extension of the same kind of mentality. We, being the United States, is a settler colony, right. Settler colonial state that was founded on the mass extinction and genocide of the native peoples and then, of course, on the backs of slaves, but I think we’re so far removed from that era, and, of course, the U.S. empire, violently destroying millions of lives around the world and subjugating tens of millions of people. That’s all externalized by American citizens, and there is no direct threat to us. 9/11 aside, Americans can’t really point to anything and say, I’m scared of losing my life, because of this threat directly toward me. Maybe you could argue that if you’re a black living under a reign of police terrorism, but you know what I mean. So I think that Israel being a settler colony itself, continuing to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population. For example, in East Jerusalem, there’s the demographic law that you have to maintain, 70 percent Jewish population versus 30 percent Arab population. Well, what does that actually mean? I mean, take a step back and wrap your mind around. What does that mean? It means that you have to continue to expel people, right, in order to maintain 70 percent Jews. I think that when you are indoctrinated from birth as an Israeli citizen of the threat, I mean, it’s all premised around this threat to your existence, right? As a Jewish national, as an Israeli citizen from birth segregation of Arab communities, just the dehumanization in general of how you would need to look at the people that you’re colonizing in order to be OK with violent colonization, with the brutal occupation of three million people living in the West Bank. How are you okay with that? What you have to be indoctrinated and conditioned and brainwashed to such an extreme degree that these people are no longer seen as human. We have seen that reflected in polls, Paul, back in 2014, I think 90 percent of Israeli citizens agreed with that massacre.

Abby Martin

That was five hundred children who were murdered. Two thousand two hundred Palestinians that were murdered back then. When you’re looking at something like the Great March of Return. Shooting to kill the policy that’s deployed at the artificial border fence in Gaza, 80 or so percent of people agree with that as well. Even though there were some socialist enclaves of Israeli society and there was hope for a two-state solution and there was a legitimate peace process being instigated, I would say many years ago, I think that we can all kind of look at the explicit endorsement for ethnic cleansing and colonization from Israel’s politicians from the beginning until today. I mean, this is not something new. It’s just that they need the boogeyman of Hamas. Before Hamas, it was something else. It was infiltrators. There was a Prevention of Infiltration law that was put into place in 1954, just six years after Israel’s creation that explicitly said from top-secret Israeli military orders to lay mines in the route of return for refugees and to shoot to kill anyone who was trying to return to their land. So this has always been the policy, right, but it absolutely is just surreal and I think stunning for a lot of people to really take stock at what Israeli society is and how they can support someone like Netanyahu. It’s not the same as Trump being in office. I mean, he really does represent Israeli society, and you can argue that Trump represented American society to a large degree. I mean, he unmasked what America really was, but I think Netanyahu is a more honest depiction of where people are at and we really need to accept that. Because that is the truth as much as this is sanitized from us. You’re right, though, I think it would be hard-pressed to find an American speaking that way about black people or Latino people, which makes it so scarier that these people were telling me on camera, knowing that it was toward an American audience, knowing that they were on camera and being that quick to endorse something like genocide against an entire population. What will they do behind closed doors, what will they say behind closed doors, if that’s their approach on camera? And I think that they did that because they thought Americans empathize with them. Right. Again, like, this is all kind of an extension of U.S. policy to a perverted degree. So they think that we stand with them and when you see something like Biden, good God, Paul, did you see what Biden did? I mean, there’s many things, but.

Paul Jay

Which one?

Abby Martin

This near billion dollar weapons deal that he’s approving amid this ongoing massacre. I mean, $735 million or something in weapons and then blocking the three cease-fire attempts from the international community and essentially pledging his unequivocal support for Israel. Even Netanyahu said we have all the time in the world for this operation because we have support from Biden. Israeli society looks at that and they say we can do whatever we want. I mean, America stands with us. It’s true. I mean, what American president has ever really issued aid being conditional or really issued a harsh condemnation. We saw what happened to Obama when he posed a very minor thing against Netanyahu. Netanyahu came to Congress in an unprecedented fashion and just started kind of pontificating about how they have the eternal right to self-defense no matter what that means, Paul it’s a very disturbing thing.

Paul Jay

The Democratic demand, you would think, assuming there was any real interest in democracy in the Biden administration, obviously would be one person, one vote. This two-state solution clearly is going nowhere. The West Bank and Gaza under Israeli control for decades and decades, people have a right then to vote one person, one vote. You don’t hear this ever talked about in mainstream media whatsoever. It’s a demand I personally hope that the Palestinians bring forward more clearly because that is the democratic demand and there’s 52 percent of that vote will be Palestinian. So if there was such a vote, then they’re going to have to figure out, whether it’s a federation, how this works. To have a state, first of all, based on religion is in itself racist and to not allow people to have a vote in the state that actually rules because, Mahmoud Abbas, doesn’t really rule under the bombs and arms of Israel, people should have a right to vote, and if there’s any real support for this issue of human rights and democracy, that should be the demand. Then how do you fund Israel if you don’t allow everyone to vote? It’s no different than funding South Africa and denying Africans, black Africans the right to vote.

Abby Martin

It’s the unspoken truth, right, that five million nearly I mean, two million Palestinians in Gaza, three million in the West Bank are denied basic democratic rights. What kind of democracy denies so many millions of people their rights? Of course, the vast majority of Americans don’t understand this. They don’t even understand what the occupation is. They don’t even understand what Gaza really is, how it’s this surplus warehouse for refugees, and not only that, but so-called criminals are just deported there and left to rot. If they knew these facts, Paul, of course they would agree with that. I mean apparently, we cherish the notion of democracy and free speech here in this country, which we use to be the arbiter of human rights around the world. Which is just hilarious.

Paul Jay

When we’re talking about countries that are not American allies, then.

Abby Martin

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Our friends and foes, it becomes.

Paul Jay

Well, let’s end on a maybe more positive note, in some ways, a little bit. The support in the streets right now, the protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Israeli Palestinians, and unless I have this wrong, I don’t understand why they’re called Israeli Arabs, the Palestinians living in Israel, aren’t they?

Abby Martin

Yeah, they don’t have to acknowledge Palestine.

Paul Jay

Yeah, because there’s not supposed to be such a thing, but they’re not some generic Arab that’s living in Israel. They’re Palestinians on the whole, but Chicago had a big ten-fifteen thousand people or more, and many cities I know in Canada there are ten-fifteen thousand people in Montreal, there are big ones in Toronto and Vancouver and around the world. I’m vague on my memories, on many things, but I don’t think the last time they attacked Gaza, there was as much protest around the world as there seems to be unfolding now.

Abby Martin

There are massive protests around the world in solidarity with the Palestinian movement, and I was really floored to see twenty thousand people show up in Los Angeles, which was a really positive indication of where public consciousness is spreading. As someone who’s been involved in this struggle for over a decade, I can tell you that more people than ever, of course, are waking up and realizing what side of history is the right one to stand on. I remember just anecdotally, I remember back during the Iraq war, resistance efforts being pro Palestine was too controversial to include in the calls of, you know, let’s not invade Iraq.

Abby Martin

It was just like, OK, don’t mix these issues. This is way too controversial. We don’t want to isolate people. I think now, fast forward to today, you cannot call yourself a progressive if you do not agree with what we’re talking about, Paul. I mean, if you are a liberal Zionist, I don’t think that you are really welcome in progressive spaces if you support what’s going on today. That, I think, is a testament to the strength and resilience of the movement, the fact that Israel no longer controls the narrative, the advent of social media over the last decade, people are able to film with their own smartphones. Palestinians living in Gaza are able to film the truth and post it themselves. We know that this is a very important thing. The information war is the most important thing to Israel. That’s why they have war rooms literally at Tel Aviv University where students are online trying to “correct the record”. So this isn’t working anymore and I think every time Israel goes on some sort of crazy rampage like this, more and more people exponentially wake up and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Again, the dam has broken, we are way too far gone to go back. As people are becoming educated about this and this is such a hot moment right now to spread that consciousness and information and once people educate themselves, because this is really all about critical media literacy and learning the truth that we don’t in mass media and our public education, you cannot hold those two beliefs at once. That Israel in its current form, has the right to exist yet Palestine should be free and liberated from occupation and a medieval siege, and the impossibility of a two-state solution, I think is becoming clearer by the day as settlements continue to atomize whatever was left as a Palestinian state. It’s impossible, Paul. So I think that I agree with you. I mean, I think the only solution, of course, I’ll leave this to Palestinians, but I am realizing that the only solution is one democratic state where everyone has equal rights. I think the majority of people can get behind that once they really understand the situation.

Paul Jay

And I agree with that. And just to clarify, because I know some people have filters in their ears when they hear this. When you’re saying Israel has no right to exist in its current state. You’re not saying the Israeli people have no right or the Jewish people living there have no right. It’s about a form of state that’s simply undemocratic and essentially based on religion is racist, and the issue of a democratic state is I don’t know what it’s called, how the hell we get there, I don’t know, because clearly, you know, it’s not just the Israeli elites that benefit from the current situation, but it’s a fundamental pillar of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to maintain the status quo with Israel playing the role it plays.

Abby Martin

Absolutely.

Paul Jay

Certainly, the pressure that’s being put right now on some of the progressives in Congress is good, and I think some of them are saying some things that they haven’t said before, but this progressive caucus really needs to get strong on this issue. I’m not just talking four or five people. There are one hundred people in the progressive caucus in Congress. Pressure has to be put on the whole one hundred of them to break with this submission to the right-wing lobby, the Israeli lobby, and not just Israeli lobby it needs to be said, the evangelical lobbyists, who are even stronger in many parts of the country. Right-wing evangelicalism is as pro-Israel and the aggressive nature of Israel as any Israeli lobby is. So getting in touch with progressives in Congress to really speak out is an important act.

Abby Martin

I mean, yes, and to clarify my previous point, absolutely no, I’m not talking about expelling anyone. I’m not talking about anyone being forced to leave their homes. I’m talking about everyone living there right now to be able to live in equality and peace. That’s what democracy is, right, and the equal participation in the political system. That’s why it’s so disingenuous to paint even Hamas as this cartoon villain. I mean, if you look at actually Hamas’s charter, the revised charter that exists today, it’s actually much more reasonable than the position of the Israeli government, which openly pledges to annex the rest of the West Bank. I do think that we cannot go back to sleep. I think that people become outraged every time that there’s some sort of horrific onslaught against helpless people in Gaza and they feel moved and motivated to do something in protest and, you know, donate to Palestinian charities, but we need to stay mad and we need to stay in the struggle and that means after this is over, whatever may happen in the coming weeks, please keep Palestine in your heart and get motivated to pressure your local representatives.

That means get offline and actually go to city council. Look at what Kshama Sawant is doing now, issuing very damning resolutions, trying to withhold military aid from Israel, and a lot of Seattle residents are very happy that they have a representative who just does not parse words at all. I’m planning on organizing something here so we can pressure our local politicians. That is really where the pressure needs to lie because we need to make it impossible for them to have a moment of peace when it comes to this issue, because it really does all stem from the U.S. empire. It stems from the subsidization of Israeli apartheid coming from this government. Joe Biden has already made it clear that he will not be moved. He said that Israel has not reacted disproportionately at all. This was after 30 children had died. It doesn’t matter how many kids die. Biden will not move on this issue. He will not budge unless he is forced to and that means we have to become strong and mobilized and we have to start linking the struggles of Black Lives Matter, police being trained by Israeli military forces, kids being caged at the border with Israeli military technology, the U.S. empire, the military-industrial complex, squandering all of our money to back these crimes around the world. We need to get motivated, educated, and mobilized here in the streets because that is the only thing historically that has ever moved the needle politically. It’s never going to come from the top. We have to do it from the bottom and it has to start with us educating everyone we know about the truth and getting involved.

And Paul, I recommend our film, Gaza Fights for Freedom. You showed the trailer at the beginning and people can see it for free on YouTube. YouTube, of course, is throttling it. You have to prove your I.D. I’ve never seen this be done to any YouTube video. You have to actually prove who you are. Hopefully, if you have a YouTube account already, you don’t have to do that. You can bypass that step, but please go watch it. It was filmed and produced by journalists within Gaza who risked their lives every single week during the Great March of Return to get this footage. It’s incredible cinematic footage portraying heroic Palestinian resistance, and moreover, it’s just such a clear cut documentation of flagrant war crimes violations of the Geneva Conventions, snipers targeting protected categories under the Geneva Conventions, and we hope that this will be a tool for the movement eventually, hopefully, to be presented at the International Criminal Court to finally hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity.

Check it out on our Empire files, YouTube Channel or GazaFightsforFreedom.com.

Paul Jay

Right. Thanks very much, Abby.

Abby Martin

Thanks so much, Paul.

Paul Jay

And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Check out the Empire files and don’t forget our donate button on the top of the webpage.