Last week, Winter Storm Byron swept through the Mediterranean. While Israel battled power outages and trapped cars in the floods, in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military has destroyed or damaged more than 80% of buildings and left the vast majority of the population displaced…

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In June, the Center for Peace Communications, a pro-Israel NGO, carried an “exclusive” message, a first public statement, from the leader of an anti-Hamas militia inside Gaza. Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of the so-called Popular Forces based out of eastern Rafah, cl…

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On August 7, the Lebanese cabinet of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, under President Joseph Aoun, approved an American proposal to disarm Hezbollah, handing over its weapons to the Lebanese Army. Such a proposal has been discussed for years, but undertaking such a campaign while Israel still occupies points in southern Lebanon, reconstruction efforts in Israeli-bombarded communities are stalled, and seemingly no plan to confront Israel’s daily strikes on the country, has riled Hezbollah’s supporters and its leadership. Rhetoric from the group escalated sharply over the weekend, with its Secretary-General Naim Qassem, saying of Lebanon that if the government moves against Hezbollah and by extension the larger Shia community, “either it remains and we remain together, or farewell to everything.”

I spoke with al-Mayadeen military analyst and al-Mayadeen English producer Ali Jezzini about the risks of renewed civil strife, what American officials are dictating to the Lebanese government, how the Lebanese Army has fared in previous wars involving Israel, what came of earlier attempts to disarm Palestinian refugee camps in the country, and what Hezbollah fears will happen if they are forcibly disarmed.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Séamus: I saw more than a few expressions of shock from American friends at the idea that Hezbollah was going to be disarmed, from people who normally follow pretty closely what's happening in the region. Can you detail the current position Hezbollah is in after the ceasefire? Why is the government doing this now when it would have been unthinkable before?

Ali: There has been a plan since after the ceasefire, a gradual plan, to tighten the screw regarding Hezbollah's arms. Hezbollah preferred at the beginning with its allies to postpone the issue, [as] it needs some time to recover, it needs to solve a lot of its internal issues. There is a general public [expression here about] Hezbollah, saying that they got tricked by the government, which is true based on multiple leaks. Since the election of President [Joseph] Aoun, there have been multiple promises that the issues of the Israeli occupation [of parts of south Lebanon], the daily aggressions [by the IDF], are to be solved, even the reconstruction efforts are to be solved before we even discuss the question of arms. But all these promises have been reneged.

The current prime minister [Nawaf Salam], that actually was also the whole tricky situation because the agreement was to relegate the last prime minister [Najib Mikati] to continue his job [forming] a new government. Then within 24 hours, this [new] prime minister was chosen. The problem is that this one is disconnected from having any popular base in Lebanon. Most of the parliamentary groups have been also pressured by foreign forces, Saudi Arabia and the US, to elect this man, so his risk assessment is very different than [past] prime ministers.

It seems that the pressure did mount on the president, on the prime Minister, to finish this whole issue despite the risks that it poses, not [just] foreign risks such as the Israeli [aggression] and maybe even some aggression from Syria, since Tom Barrack, the US envoy, has already hinted at the fact that the Syrians consider Lebanon as their [beach resort] in the sense that it's a part of [Greater] Syria, and we're going to use [the] Syrians against you.

The Israelis have hinted multiple times that they're going to go back at [some] point to military action. But it indicates that [the Lebanese government] has a very, very low risk assessment of the civil strife and even the civil war that could be caused by such decisions. It would seem that either they have been promised either an Israeli intervention or an outside intervention or some foreign support. They're completely disconnected from reality and do believe that the resistance has no popular backing or it lost most of its military armaments.

S: How does Hezbollah's arsenal stack up against the Lebanese Army? Is it still more powerful than the military, even after the ceasefire and the bombardment by the IDF?

A: There are multiple issues with this because the first demand was [from] the Americans during the last period, and the Israelis behind them. [This was to] disarm the resistance from [weapons] that could pose threats against Israel, such as ballistic missiles, [other] kinds of missiles, and drones. These weapons are completely different from the ones that could be used against any force that would disarm the resistance in such circumstances, God forbid, [that] there was civil strife here. So these two issues are disconnected.

[Not to mention] the fact that around 35-40% of the Lebanese army belongs to the Shia sect in Lebanon, which is the sect of the resistance. The ongoing campaign of the president and various social media accounts, various institutions, and whole paid ads that you just can't get enough of when you're even playing YouTube now, are focusing and trying to diverge the issue from being a one against a political party, which is Hezbollah, to being against the whole Shia sect, which reinforces the social cohesion and the solidarity within. It does indicate that any action against the arms is seen by the community not as a part of what could have been a bargaining chip.

Say, the Americans and the Saudis say, "Okay, we'll do the reconstruction. You have guarantees, you have everything, just give up your arms. Nobody's going to touch you." No, no. It does look, not by Hezbollah's interpretation, but by the actions of the other party that no guarantees are here, nothing is to be offered, we can't pressure Israel, we can only condemn its actions if there was a violation [on] its part. That's Tom Barrack's words as well. You have to give up your arms without any guarantees.

So the social dynamic inside the Hezbollah society went from—there were some people who actually were shocked after the war and said we might have to discuss this as an internal matter, we might give up some concessions in exchange for roles in the political [system]. That happened after the war when there was [talk] from the president and the prime minister, and before all this [disarmament proposal] started that, okay, we will reconstruct [the south], we'll guarantee your security. But then it went downhill from there.

There was no such thing as these talks. The government stopped condemning Israeli attacks. The population here does feel that it's isolated from the government, that it doesn't consider it as part of its people, and any other voices that we previously mentioned just ceased to exist because it seemed like a whole campaign against the Shia society here, that would cause its eradication and maybe, God forbid, its erasure.

To compare the strength between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah, it's not only about arms, it's about [that] any action the government can take might lead to the dissolution of the army, or its division, because of the way the campaign is [pitting it] not against the political party but against the social component. So it's a very tense situation. They would use carrot and sticks, but instead they're using just sticks.

S: Can you go into more detail about the PR offensive you're describing? What have you been seeing in Lebanon trying to campaign for Hezbollah's disarmament in the media?

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On August 8, after more than 10 hours of deliberation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved plans to seize Gaza City and occupy it. The shape of the projected invasion continues to be doled out piecemeal to the press, but Israel’s government says, at least to Western observers, that it does not intend to annex the Strip, but to give over control of the territory to a future, non-Israeli, civil administration, but where the IDF retains “security control.”

As far-right ministers in the government now argue about whether Netanyahu is undertaking half-measures because he won’t commit to full annexation, Gaza City came under heavy bombardment last night, capped by an assassination strike against the al-Jazeera Bureau in Gaza, targeting Anas al-Sharif and 4 others whom he worked with outside the gates of al-Shifa Hospital.

I spoke with Mohammad Alsaafin, a senior producer at AJ+, about Anas al-Sharif’s killing, the treatment of Palestinian journalists by the Western media, how Netanyahu’s current plans for Gaza City are distinct from previous plans, and if a “day after” the Gaza war is even something Israel envisions.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Séamus: Anas al-Sharif was murdered shortly before we started speaking. The war on Gaza has seen the most deaths of journalists in any conflict ever, all of them directly assassinated by Israel. But this has been the most high-profile murder, I think, of them all, him being killed alongside seemingly the entire al-Jazeera bureau. What do do you see as the intention of doing this before the IDF's planned operation to seize Gaza City?

Mohammad: The easy answer is that they want to silence the most prominent journalists who have been covering events in Gaza City for the last two years, the ones who refused to evacuate and stayed behind even as much of the north of Gaza was depopulated, the ones who refused to stop reporting. And this obviously became extremely high profile because the previous al-Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza City, one of the most well-known journalists in the Arab world, Wael al-Dahdouh, left Gaza a couple of months into this genocide.

Wael's family was killed, his grandson, several of his children, his wife were killed in an Israeli airstrike in [October] 2023. [In January 2024] his son, also a producer with Al Jazeera, was targeted by an Israeli drone strike that killed him. [In December 2023] Wael was himself severely injured in an Israeli attack that killed his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa. It was after that that Wael finally decided to leave Gaza. At that point, he had already evacuated Gaza City and gone south, leaving Anas and Ismail al-Ghoul, two 20-something-year-old journalists, to pick up the slack, and over the next year, they did heroic work.

Anas' dad was also killed in [December] 2023. His 65-year-old father had gone back to the family home in Jabalia, the family had fled earlier, he'd gone back to pick up some things from the house and was killed there. I remember Anas with his family praying over their father's body and then burying him in a temporary grave because it was too dangerous to reach a cemetery at the time. And Anas went back to work on air the very next day. And that's been his M.O. [since].

When his close friend and colleague Ismail al-Ghoul was assassinated in July last year, Anas kept the flame burning. He buried Ismail, and then he went back to work. When the third member of the Al Jazeera crew, Hossam Shabat, the 23-year-old, was also assassinated in [March] of this year, it was the same thing. And the journalist who was killed alongside Anas, Mohammed Qreiqeh, he picked up the mantle after Ismail was killed. One after the other.

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In keeping with the long-standing trend of Trump taking credit for working to solve crises he himself started (such as stopping a potential war with Iran after he ordered IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani assassinated in 2020), Trump and his team are now heralding a potential “diploma…

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As Israel tears up its ceasefire with Hamas and has reignited the war against the Gaza Strip, discussions surrounding the Israeli state’s inclinations toward constant offensive war, its propaganda against the Palestinians, and what, if anything, it has learned from history, have returned to the forefront. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have insisted that Gaza must never be allowed to again become a threat to Israel, not just Hamas, and criticism of Israel’s war is now being made a de facto deportable offense far away from Israel’s borders, inside the United States. One question in particular inevitably is sparked by this constant talk of threats to the Jewish state: can Israel’s desire for “security” ever truly be satiated, and what truly threatens that security?

I spoke with Romm about his recent piece in Parapraxis Magazine, “Idée Fixe”, Zionism’s relationship with Europe and the Third Reich, how early Zionist settlers transposed the Nazi threat onto the Arabs resisting the occupation of their lands, how Israeli propaganda against Arabs mirrors the Nazis’ own against the Jewish people, what Israel wants from its occupied Arab populace, and whether the current strategies of Syria and Lebanon in dealing with the Israeli occupation of their territory are working.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Séamus: Zionism is, in the West, most associated with the Holocaust. But Theodor Herzl, its progenitor, died long before Zionism came into being, and modern Zionist settlement in Palestine started before Hitler came to power. Can you explain how the Nazi threat became the primary justification for Zionism, even when Zionism predated it? Did it significantly change how Zionism was propagated to the public in the immediate aftermath or was this association something much more recent?

Jake: [In] tracing the history of Zionism’s development, it springs initially, if you look at the writings of early Zionists, from two sources. The one that people most talk about, especially Zionists, is as a reaction against European anti-semitism, an extremely real phenomenon. The Jews faced historical persecution throughout Europe and as a reaction against this, a lot of them saw assimilation as a dead end, the idea that they would never truly be citizens. As a reaction to the [alleged] dead end of assimilation, they thought, “Well, if we just had our own state, we could avoid this kind of persecution.”

The second [source] was that this was a kind of nationalist colonialist project of the very same type that was sweeping the rest of the European continent. There was not much of a difference, say, between the idea of Serbian nationalism emerging from the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the idea of Jewish nationalism, the idea that we need to constitute ourselves as a people, and the way you do that is through constituting yourself as a national project right through becoming this kind of homogenous group that is bound together both territorially, politically, linguistically, [and] in many cases religiously as well, which always includes, no matter where, a process of de-racinatization of everyone else. Italy was unified [in the mid-1800s] and part of the construction of the “Italian” meant getting rid of all these various dialects, regional specificities, et cetera, to constitute the Italian subject.

But there’s another thing that distinguishes [Zionism] from a lot of these other nascent nationalist projects happening at the time, which is that their “homeland” in which the national project was supposed to be constituted was in Palestine. It was not where the national entity already was. That’s not to say there were no Jews in Palestine, but that there were many more Jews elsewhere around the world. It also had an inextricable colonialist element to it that certain other nationalisms simply did not have. They had to go to Palestine to realize the national project because the creation of a Jewish national subject, a homogenous Jewish subject or Hebrew subject, was inextricably tied to the land. It could only be realized in Palestine because of this blood-and-soil conception of what it meant to be Jewish.

[Zionists] combined all three of these elements in their various pitches, depending on who they were talking to. So they would say to the European powers [that] we can go establish a European civilizational bulwark against Arab or Ottoman economic independence, and we can be the guardian of European interests in the Middle East. Or they would say to Jews in America [that] this is the only way that we can protect the Jewish people, [that] assimilation is a dead end, we have faced centuries upon centuries, millenia of suffering and exile, and now we must return home to realize our national racial destiny over in our historical homeland.

The idea of anti-semitism as the animation of the Zionist project was always there, but, depending on the audience, it was either downplayed or overplayed. It wasn’t really until the Shoah that it became the dominant strain of thinking for all of these people. It becomes seen as the culmination of the historical European persecution of the Jews and it comes to stand in for this retroactive justification for Zionism, to say, “See, it was all leading to this. We always knew this was coming. If only we had Israel to begin with, none of this would have happened. Everyone could have been saved. This is why we were doing this project of colonization, we were trying to take this land to protect ourselves from just such an eventuality.”

What this ends up doing is [Israel becomes a] retroactive transubstantiation into the Zionist project as salvation from the Shoah, [and it puts] all the stuff proceeding the Shoah into that same line of historical continuity. Arab resistance to Jewish colonization of Palestine becomes seen within a line of continuity with the Nazi Holocaust. Every act of violence perpetrated against Jewish colonists in Palestine becomes seen as a kind of anachronistic continuation of the Shoah. Even when it happens before the Shoah, they were doing this because they also wanted to exterminate all the Jews, because the only reason you wouldn’t allow the Jews to have a homeland in the first place is because of extermination, because that’s the whole point of the project, to avoid extermination.

I went to a Jewish day school, kindergarten through 12th grade, this was hammered into us at every turn, [and] we [took] a long trip to Israel for five months of our senior year. Before they took us to Israel, they took us to Poland to see the concentration camps. This was obviously a very intentional move because they show you Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, et cetera, and then you land in Jerusalem, and they’re like, “See? This is what it was all for. This is what it was all about.” And that mood is recapitulated in the Yad Vashem Museum. It’s very much intentionally created, such that you walk through these long halls with rooms off to the side showing you different aspects of the Shoah, and it opens onto this courtyard overlooking expropriated Arab lands to see that now you’ve emerged in redemption. You’ve emerged and been saved by the land.”

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S: You bring up how the IDF, when fighting the Palestinians also, in this piece, about the Egyptians, how they were able to transpose that image of fighting Nazis onto these Arab armies that they were threatening Jews in the same way that the Germans were. Do you see something similar occurring with how October 7th is being utilized to justify actions abroad? Have those attacks become that new object to transpose?

J: Absolutely, because the transposition never stopped. The Zionist self-conception exists in a very uneasy and contradictory relation to the Shoah, which is to say that at once it conceives of the Zionist project as a reaction to the Shoah—as we were saying before it’s retroactively justified and they have taken up the mantle of the protector—[but] at the same time, especially in the early days of Israel’s existence, [Zionism] was also a kind of negative identity formation against survivors of the Shoah who were conceived of as weak and as cowardly, like sheep to the slaughter. [Israeli Prime Minister] Menachem Begin said something along the lines of, “[I am not a Jew] with trembling knees,” when he was referring to victims of the Shoah. They wanted to construct the new kind of Hebrew race as against this image of the weak and cowardly Jew who consents to their own murder.

You have two moments taking place in the [works of] Abba Kovner, who was a very prominent poet in early Israel as well as a leader in the IDF, in the Givati Brigade: at once you’re fighting the Arabs and conceive of them as this Nazi-like threat because they are somehow continuing the Nazi project of the extermination of the Jews, and at the same time, Kovner himself conceives of his own soldiers as akin to the Nazis in a very positive identification. Which is to say that when you have a negative identity constitution against these victims, it rebounds to a positive identification with the people who made them victims in the first place. Because if the thing you’re trying not to be is the victim, the opposite of that is the perpetrator. You start to identify with the perpetrator for their strength, for their capacity to victimize.

I think we see that very much going on now with Hamas and with Hezbollah. The slogan they’ve settled on is, ‘this is the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’, in reference to October 7th. They’re constantly talking about the 2 million Nazis who live in Gaza, or the Hamas-Nazi entity. They definitely conceive of them as a Nazi threat. They also conceive of them as weak and cowardly. You see, basically, recapitulations of Nazi propaganda of [Yahya] Sinwar as a bug living underground or a rat, as like all of the people of Gaza as dirty and backward, the same way that Eastern [European] Jews were talked about both by the Nazis and also by Western Jews, both in Israel and in Western Europe.

So you see this kind of positive identification again with the Nazis, or at least with domination and with perpetration of mass extermination. There was that article that came out in Haaretz, it was a testimony of soldiers during the First Intifada, [and] there were a few soldiers quoted as saying something along the lines of [that they] felt like Nazis and [Palestinians] looked like Jews.

This is the thing that also came up quite a lot during the Nakba. You had soldiers who survived the Shoah, many of whom then participated in the Nakba, who came to realize that precisely what they were doing was perpetrating Nazi-like violence, and some of them felt guilty about it, and some of them simply did not. Some of them recognized it as, say, a historical necessity or as a way of redeeming the image of the Jew in which the Palestinians and the Arab enemy stand in for the Nazis as the continuers of the Nazi project against Jews. Then, the violence that they were wreaking upon the Palestinians was a revenge against the Nazis by proxy, which of course, doesn’t make any sense, the Palestinians had nothing to do with the perpetration of the Holocaust, but this is how it manifested in this kind of anachronistic, historical spatial displacement.

I should also add that this kind of image of oneself as both victim and [impossibly] strong, and of your enemy as both weak and impossibly strong, is exactly the form of anti-semitism. It is exactly the form of anti-semitic propaganda, that the Jew was at once in charge of the world, a secret cabal that pulled all the strings, and also, filthy disgusting vermin, cowardly, physically dysgenic. This is precisely what we see the Israelis doing with respect to the Palestinians, that they are at once this Nazi-like entity that controls the United Nations, controls all the international institutions, controls academia, [and is] despite their manifest poverty and the crudity of their weapons, an existential threat to Israel and to the Jewish people worldwide, and also they are bugs. They are backward peasants. They are stupid, they are weak, et cetera. It is exactly the form of anti-semitism.

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On January 10, airstrikes rained down on Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Thousands upon thousands of Yemenis marched through the city’s Saba’een Square, as they had done every Friday since the war against Gaza began. Even as shockwaves shook the street and smoke clouds rose, the demonstrators did not disperse. Instead, they continued, breaking out into chants against Israel and America, filming themselves mocking the bombs, and bellowing that they didn’t care if it became a world war against them.

Yemeni demonstrators had faced military strikes on their marches before: In 2018, when President Saleh Ali as-Sammad was assassinated in a Saudi Arabian drone strike, Saudi planes dropped bombs on the march mourning his death. The response then was the same: to make their chants against America and Israel even louder.

On January 20, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, leader of the Houthi movement that has held Sana’a for the past 10 years, made an address to the nation. The ceasefire in Gaza had successfully reached the first phase of implementation, and therefore the “15-month round of confrontation” with Israel was over. Yemeni forces under the organization’s command would now return to a state of readiness and preparation, its front only to be reawakened should the “Israeli enemy return to escalation, genocidal crimes, and siege” upon the Gaza Strip.

Over the course of the past year, the Houthi movement’s blockade of the Red Sea in support of Gaza had rapidly become a maelstrom, sucking in the world’s military powers, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, and embroiling states both near and far into open war with the Middle East’s poorest nation. Conversely, just as these nations have been sucked in, outside this arena, the cost of the war, human, political, and otherwise, has begun to press deeply on Yemen’s allies.

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This is the text of a lecture delivered to faculty at The Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut on December 11, 2024. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length, and the full lecture can be listened to at the top of the page.

Good morning to everyone who is listening from the United States, and I should say good evening to all of those joining from Beirut and elsewhere in the hemisphere. I just want to first thank the Center for American Studies and Research here at the American University of Beirut for inviting me to speak about this subject, and for allowing me to return, at least by way of the information super-highway, to the university that I attended briefly in 2020 and made me fall in love with the city of Beirut in all its wonders and frustrations. I hope you have all kept safe through these difficult circumstances, and I hope that the reprieve in Dahieh and in Beirut will remain for some time yet.

When I was first asked to do this talk, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel was in full-swing. Villages in the south were being detonated and destroyed. Hezbollah was making the IDF’s advances costly, holding them at places like Khiam with great intensity, but that advance was by no means halted completely. The objectives of the war continued to grow and a ceasefire seemed to be more and more out of reach, and we were arguably approaching a horizon in which south Lebanon was to become another Gaza, insofar as it was a conflict that could not be brought to an end because what the other side was demanding could never be agreed to, something that what would amount to a full surrender.

But now, all of a sudden, there is a ceasefire. This has been achieved through the Lebanese government itself, with Hezbollah accepting its terms, achieving some level of respite from the horrors that have been wrought on this country for the next 60 or so days, or as the US envoy Amos Hochstein publicly hopes, permanently. But already that ceasefire has frayed, and there are deep fissures that have burrowed their way into its foundation.

The IDF is trying to unilaterally create a buffer zone for which refugees cannot return to, blocking out towns that it did not even occupy when the ceasefire was declared. Airstrikes are still occurring, IDF troops shoot at returnees, and it is difficult to escape the feeling that this is ceasefire is a one-sided affair, one that will not be long for this world. Across the border, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has quickly fallen, and Israel has invaded its territory as well, crawling up the border with Lebanon, outside the Golan Heights, in ways that many more people should be concerned by than they are now.

Much focus has been placed, at least here in the West, on Hezbollah’s goals throughout this war, the failure to maintain the unity of the fronts in regard to Gaza, how they have now much to rebuild inside Lebanon, and how their military structure has been weakened by waves of assassinations. But much less focus has been placed on Israel’s ambitions and how those also failed to a certain degree. Initially the goal, at least the one they expressed in public, was a wave of localized raids and the creation of some sort of “small” buffer zone, but under the new defense minister Israel Katz, it became about the complete destruction of Hezbollah itself and an outright refusal to entertain a ceasefire in Lebanon, something that was absolutely not accomplished during the course of this war. Discussed even less here in the West, and most importantly to this discussion in particular, are what America’s ambitions were and largely I think still are.

In reading the text of the ceasefire agreement, it doesn’t seem too different from the documents that came about after the war in 2006. The Lebanese Army redeploys en masse to southern Lebanon, Hezbollah pulls back weapons from the border, the ostensibly proper balance of power in a sovereign state like the Lebanese Republic is reestablished, and some degree of peace can reign between Israel and Lebanon even if there is no peace treaty, let alone some Abraham Accords-style diplomatic breakthrough. But the reality of what America wanted when the invasion started was arguably the exact opposite of this intention, the want to somehow increase the legitimacy of Lebanese state institutions and to increase Lebanese sovereignty.

The real goal of America in this war has been the overthrow of the Lebanese government and the destruction of its sovereignty, quite frankly. I know that seems like a very severe thing to accuse the American government of, especially when it has not launched an explicit regime change war here like it may have done in Iraq or in Afghanistan, and it certainly does not have the relationship, or lack thereof, that exists with the Islamic Republic of Iran today. But everything that has been communicated by the State Department since the invasion began, and what has been communicated by Israel, indicates a desire to rip out the current versions of these institutions that exist in Lebanon today and install something that removes even the shreds of sovereignty that still remained in this country.

The most obvious and clear example of this has been the push to allow Israel to have freedom of operation in southern Lebanon. One of the reasons why I assumed early on that a ceasefire would be much farther off was that the conditions that Israel sought to impose in the talks were just as untenable as they would have been in Gaza. What is a ceasefire if one side does not cease firing, and continues to have the ability to strike inside a sovereign nation? How is that not a continuation of the war? How is that not still a violation of another country’s sovereignty. Israeli officials have plainly said, with no screens, no fog over their word, that Lebanon has no sovereignty.

As long as Hezbollah operates inside Lebanon, it is not considered a sovereign state. As long as the “enemy Shia population” exists at the border, these problems Israel is having will remain, so they have to be expelled. This is another, separate nation that is imposing ethnic quotas and forcible expulsion on another country, yet the nation that is giving it all the arms in the world is insisting that this will in fact be a way of increasing Lebanon’s sovereignty.

The more insidious examples of this have been the changes in rhetoric at the State Department, things that people in Lebanon largely do not see. As soon as the invasion began, talk of a ceasefire largely dropped. They stopped advocating for it. The suggestion of it only crept back in later when Israeli losses began to mount and it became clear this would be no easy adventure, even if massive destruction was being wrought on Lebanon in the interim. With Hamas, of course the State Department wanted its overthrow but it still kept talking about a ceasefire because there were larger considerations that could be pointed to, a two-state solution, a larger Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab peace. Some other distraction that could be tabled. Hamas did not threaten the hegemony of the United States, not on its own. It could not defeat Israel militarily on its own. Hezbollah however could go toe-to-toe with Israel. It could be bloodied, it could be weakened, it could be shocked, but it had the capacity to beat Israel in a war as it had done so before again and again. Israel knew this well, as did the United States. So here was a historic opportunity to dislodge Hezbollah from the political space entirely, to create what was to be known as a post-Hezbollah Lebanon, something that was being considered even as the IDF wasn’t even near Sour, they were still fighting at Ayta ash-Sha’ab, a place you could practically throw stones at Israel from, it was so close to the border.

When the American government talks about Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon, when the American media talks about Hezbollah, the idea that becomes constructed in our minds is one where Hezbollah, this foreign entity, aligned wholly with foreign, Iranian interests, controls everything in the country. Hezbollah obviously, no question, receives massive amounts of arms, funding, and ideological inspiration from Iran, this cannot be denied in any way, shape, or form, nor would Hezbollah even really deny this. Nasrallah put up Khamenei’s portrait for a reason.

But we also know that Hezbollah is something that came out of Lebanon, that came out of the specific political considerations of this country, and that Lebanese people are its primary base of popular support, not Iranians. Yet now the rhetorical constructions from the media and from the government, accusing Hezbollah of taking the country hostage in its politics and in warfare, has become this kind of strange beast, in which a propagandistic talking point has now become an honest belief, where Hezbollah literally controls the political system, literally the entire government, and that there is no democracy in Lebanon period.

Lebanon has massive problems with its democratic system. The issues with representation, the confessional system, the bizarre specifics of just something as simple as where people run and register to vote, the fact that there hasn’t been an elected president for two years now, throughout this entire war even. But fundamentally, at the end of the day, if you are a Lebanese citizen you can vote for a representative and that representative will take his seat in the parliament.

It doesn’t matter if you are Kataeb, SSNP, [Lebanese Communist Party], if you have the votes, they will take their seat. We know that the Lebanese elect their own representatives, even if it is a needlessly complicated process. Yet, when the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller speaks about what kind of system the United States seeks for Lebanon, he says it is one where the people “can choose their own representatives.”

When that maxim of “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” is repeated and repeated ad infinitum, you lose sight of the actual reality. Lebanon has democracy. Iraq has democracy. Jordan has democracy. If the bar is that a country that denies the right to vote to millions under its control is a democracy, then Iran has much more democracy. This is a flat out counterfactual statement has become gospel within the liberal sphere.

It eventually creates these insane scenarios where Economist editorial boards are green-lighting coverage of the war in Lebanon and all the wheeling and dealing that is going on inside the government, but also the hosting of opinion pieces by Israeli politicians where they advocate not only overthrowing the current Lebanese government, but placing it under an international stewardship and creating an entirely new proxy army in the south to fight Hezbollah. It creates baffling contradictions where the US is sending top-level envoys to Beirut to talk with officials that it is openly considering circumventing the authority of.

In the early stages of this war, while they weren’t pursuing a ceasefire, the United States was instead considering pushing for an election of a president that they would favor, taking advantage of the fact that Hezbollah’s elected representatives were distracted and couldn’t mount a defense for the wishes of their voters. And even then, did they want to break the impasse to perhaps elect the president wanted by [the Lebanese Forces] and the October 17th Revolution MPs before, Jihad Azour, an IMF economist? No, they wanted Joseph Aoun, the commander-in-chief of the army.

Civilians, technocrats, those were too many barriers to deal with. Instead, they wanted to go right to the source, to install a military leader and cut out any democratic middleman. This is not an accusation that Aoun is some sort of dictator wannabe, rather it is more insidious because the United States was clearly aiming to craft him into one, to make the Lebanese Army into its own tool.

What Israel has been hoping for and is still continuing to push for, if not wholly explicitly, is if it cannot produce a new South Lebanon Army of its own, then it can manufacture a civil war that will give rise to one, or better yet, pit the unified Lebanese Army against Hezbollah and potentially recreate on a much larger scale what happened in 2008.

If you follow any of Israel’s Arabic accounts, especially Avichay Adraee’s, who is the IDF’s official Arabic spokesman, or even if you encountered promoted ads from these accounts as I received when I lived in Lebanon, you will be presented with endless provocations to undertake civilian uprisings against Hezbollah. Some might come from Netanyahu directly, others from edited videos, others from Avichay who is speaking Arabic directly into your ears. In cartoons the Israeli government makes, they make the innocent victims Christians, wearing crosses and with Maronite symbols everywhere, and the ones making their lives infinitely worse are the Shias, Hezbollahis in disguise as refugees. When these messages don’t convince anyone, they strike buildings holding the displaced, hoping to inflame sectarian tensions and make everyone fearful of even touching a Shia person, lest they be targeted from above.

The goal of this ceasefire agreement, I would argue, is to bring about that confrontation finally, between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah. Hezbollah is already going south and rebuilding its arsenal, and the Lebanese Army is supposed to be in charge of maintaining security and making sure Hezbollah does not deploy south. But there is also an acknowledgment by officials that the Lebanese Army is not ready to deploy into the area to the capacity that America would want. It is already very much there, as evidenced by the killings of these soldiers in Israeli strikes, but it does not maintain total operational control.

It may seek to disrupt Hezbollah’s activities and its offensive capabilities as stipulated in the agreement, but if you decide to enter into open conflict with a party that is represented in your elected government, you are opening up a Pandora’s box, and this is what is hoped for by Israel and what is hoped for by America: to return to a situation where they can mold the Lebanese government to its own will, and impose a system where the wishes of many voters of Lebanon’s single largest party, Shia Lebanese voters primarily, are not represented whatsoever.

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Even then, if the Lebanese Army does not end up attacking Hezbollah for Israel and starting another civil war, this is also an acceptable outcome for Israel. It gives them reason to expand its strikes on Lebanon and to target the government directly as co-combatants with Hezbollah. When Hezb responded to the plethora of ceasefire violations in a single instance some days ago, both Defense Minister Katz and Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz both said that Israel should target Lebanese civil institutions should the ceasefire break down and war returns. If there is literally any chance of a state allowing for opposition to Israel’s power, it is to be stamped out militarily, all of the powers of that theoretically opposing state removed permanently.

In Syria right now, we are seeing the expedited and expanded version of what could potentially await Lebanon. Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, the Islamist group that has now taken the reins of the Syrian state, has never fought Israel. Even as Israel invades sovereign Syrian territory, it has not even acknowledged it directly, let alone condemned it, let alone directed its forces to counter it. But “instability” is the siren call of any Israeli expansionist action, and the idea that there could even be a sliver of a chance that a new Syrian state could one day, far in the future, counter Israel directly, must be stamped out while the moment is ripe and the authorities are distracted with building something new.

In the Western media, these massive strikes on Syria’s military infrastructure have been called things like strikes on “Assad’s navy”, but these are not the Fedayeen Saddam. This military existed before Bashar, it is the institutions that belong to the state. But now that it knows no one will stop it, Israel has now destroyed 70-80% of Syria’s capabilities within only a couple days.

There is a pervasive myth that if Lebanon has a strong, sovereign military, that Israel would not dare to attack it. In truth, there is no way out of this equation Israel wants to create under the terms that it sets. If Hezbollah continues to regain its strength, it and the country must be bombarded into oblivion because its stated goal is the dismantling of the Israeli occupation. If the Lebanese Army becomes a strong army, independent of Israeli control, properly sovereign in the way that its supporters envision, it may still need to be bombarded because one day it could threaten Israel. The only option, to Israel and the United States, is to either remain weak, or to accept the Western sphere of influence. To be both at the same time is preferable.

So, we’ve talked about what has already proceeded during the Biden administration, these veneers that have been removed, but Biden and the Democrats will not be in office in January. The 60-day ceasefire trial period is set to end several days after his inauguration. Here, there is perhaps qualified hope, and I do mean qualified in that there are bizarre details to it that could only come from a return to a Donald Trump administration, details that likely would not come about in another Republican administration.

Trump’s primary locus of trust is his family, and further outward his in-laws. They are the people who he is most in contact with, who he talks to all the time, who he relies on more than anybody else. Hochstein, to put it bluntly, has been a disaster. He mediated this ceasefire agreement, yes, but his arrival has been the harbinger of numerous deadly strikes in the Beirut area, and he is compromised by his interests, namely that he is an Israeli who has served in the IDF. Contrast that with who is in Trump’s inner circle, that man being Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law. This is a nepotism hire, he has no real diplomatic experience, but he is someone who has connections with all different sides of the Lebanese political sphere, including people like Suleiman Frangieh, and he is firmly within the information bubble that Trump has placed around himself, which allows him more access than some others.

Still, that is not an unbridled case for optimism in this regard, I cannot emphasize that enough. Trump is still surrounding himself with even more ironclad supporters of Israel, people like Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Brian Hook, the most hawkish of the Iran hawks, someone who still denies the CIA overthrow Mossadegh despite the CIA admitting to it.

The thing is with Trump is that he is the most suggestible man on the planet. The last person who spoke to him, he believes almost wholeheartedly. Sometimes he stumbles into a diplomatic breakthrough, such as when Kim Jong-un spoke to him and through that, set up two unprecedented summits between North Korea and the US. Sometimes it results in completely incoherent political statements, such as when Erdogan speaks to him and he started saying the YPG were working with ISIS. If Boulos speaks to him first, he may be more conciliatory, more willing to be hands-off. If anyone else in the State Department, speaks to him first, he will advocate for much harsher measures. It’s a not especially sophisticated game but it is one that is going to have to be played because of who is sitting in the Oval Office.

Trump likes dramatic, maverick measures, no matter what they are. Most of the time they are in the direction the Republicans are facing, sometimes not. What he cares about is what looks best on TV, for his persona. He assassinated Qassem Soleimani, assassinating a military leader in a sovereign state’s army outside of wartime, but he also made the decision to end the cycle of retaliation after the IRGC hit back at an American base in Iraq with ballistic missiles, something that Kamala’s campaign was very critical of and genuinely considered to him to have been too soft on Iran for. Netanyahu considers this ceasefire to be a gift for Trump in some way, a dramatic gesture of ending America’s wars abroad that Trump will appreciate, but if Israel considers restarting this war, as I fear he is, then there is just as much chance that Trump will be gung-ho for it, wanting something bigger, more severe, more TV-ready than Biden would have perhaps enjoyed.

The fine details will be different, certainly, but this genocidal war did not start under Trump, it started under Biden. The arc of this conflict will remain the same, and people need to prepared for the fact that the light at the end of that tunnel has not yet shown itself. To see it, there might still be carving to be done.

On November 20, 2023, members of Palestine Action US attacked a facility belonging to Elbit Systems, a major Israeli arms manufacturer, located in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. Their actions temporarily shut down the building, and to make an example out of those arrested, courts in New Hampshire attempted to charge those involved with crimes that would have sent them to up to 37 years in prison. Their legal team was successfully able to negotiate their sentence down to 60 days, and Calla Walsh, one of those arrested, will begin serving her sentence this week.

I spoke with Walsh about the action they took at Merrimack, what she believes the purpose of the significant charges against them were, what she thinks will happen to organizing for Palestine under the new Trump administration, and where she believes the movement will go from here as the war against Gaza continues.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Séamus: Calla, you're about to go to jail in the next couple of days for the actions that you undertook at Elbit Systems. How are you feeling as that moment gets closer and closer?

Calla: Every day closer to jail feels like a day closer that I will be out and free. So of course, I'm not looking forward to it, but I think in our case the process was the punishment. There was almost a year of waiting in isolation [by having] no-contact orders with my co-defendants, thinking we were going to prison for 37 years. It's not good for anyone to go to jail, but I think we're seeing the results of our case as a win, considering the original charges we were facing.

Ultimately when I'm in there, I think I'm going to be keeping everything in perspective, understanding there's [millions] of Palestinians in concentration camp conditions, tens of thousands of Palestinians in prisons getting tortured and raped. What we're doing and what we did is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what Palestinians are sacrificing and what they are contributing to the resistance.

Repression is a sign that our movement is growing powerful and it's unfortunate that we'll be in jail but it's also important to show people can go through this experience and come out even stronger and the movement can build support structures around the political prisoners movement.

S: You had mentioned the original sentence that they were potentially going to issue was 37 years. How did that get taken down to 60 days?

C: We were facing five felonies originally that totaled a max of 37 years in prison. This is a common counterinsurgency tactic used by the state against protesters, to over-charge and hit them with a ton of insane felonies that are very unlikely to stick in the end but have the effect of scaring people, intimidating them into taking pleas too early or even cooperating with the state, and thankfully that didn’t happen. We stayed strong, we didn’t let it crush our spirit and our lawyers kept negotiating and I think ultimately the state realized these charges couldn’t stick. 

[In particular] there was a sabotage statute that we were charged under that no one had ever been charged with in the state of New Hampshire before and it was a statute written in the 70s specific to hindering the US or its allies’ defense capacities. It was the heaviest charge we were facing and the state realized they couldn’t even charge us with that because it was only applicable during a state of emergency, which hadn’t been declared.

I think also the longer the genocide has escalated, the more Palestinians that have been massacred with Elbit weapons, and the more resistance that there has been in the US, the student encampment movement, more direct actions, I think the state realized how untenable these charges were and how they also don’t want to make martyrs out of essentially young girls who did minor vandalism at a factory that makes machines that kill children.

S: You’re describing what you did as “minor vandalism”, can you describe in detail what happened at Elbit Systems and also why it was a target for Palestine Action US, Elbit Systems in general?

C: So it wasn’t just the one charge I mentioned, the original charges were sabotage, riot, burglary, criminal mischief, criminal trespass, and then when they dropped the sabotage charge, they added a “conspiracy to falsify physical evidence” charge. This was all related to the action at the Elbit factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire, which is about an hour north of Boston, on November 20th [2023]. There was a ton of discourse after this action publicly basically accusing us of firebombing a small Jewish local business and it’s never really been explained clearly what [actually] happened.

What happened was three of us scaled the roof and occupied the roof of the Elbit building, where there were no security cameras but we’re alleged to have caused substantial property damage to the roof of the building and defaced the Elbit sign. At the same time, a group of people blockaded the entrance to the Elbit, standing in employees’ way, preventing them from entering their work. Another crew of people came by foot to the front façade of the building and defaced it, smashed windows, and spray painted slogans. So initially the first people who were arrested were the three of us on the roof and then a fourth co-defendant [Paige Belanger], alleged to have been part of the ground siege, for lack of a better term, was arrested two months later.

Elbit is the largest Israeli weapons company. They make the vast majority of the weapons and the vehicles and the surveillance systems that are being used in Gaza right now to commit genocide. They really use Gaza as their test lab. They use Palestinians there as guinea pigs and then export these weapons to many other murderous, imperialist regimes, including the US where [many] surveillance towers innovated in Gaza are being used to murder migrants at the [US-Mexico] border.

Elbit was a really key target because of this international campaign [that] started in the UK in 2020, where they’ve already well before October 7th had successfully shut down many Elbit facilities. Initially the first Palestine Action US action was at the Elbit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was not a factory where they’re producing weapons, it was called an “Innovation Center”, so it was mostly people doing computer work. We started there and then we looked north and the Cambridge facility has [now] been permanently shut down, the first and only Elbit to be permanently shut down in the US. I’m still facing felony charges there and I won’t appear in court for those until January.

But it is notable that Cambridge, Massachusetts, a liberal haven, is still sticking felonies on us and dragging this case out for well over a year, when New Hampshire, a more Republican state, already drops all the felonies to misdemeanors for what was a far more escalated action than anything that happened in Cambridge.

S: The common refrain that I’ve heard from those who were supporting Kamala Harris is that however difficult thing may be now, protesting for Palestine under Donald Trump will be much more difficult, the punishments will be much more severe, and his election is going to be a significant blow to the abilities of the movement to organize. Even if you obviously never came close to supporting Kamala, what do you make of that assertion that things will be much worse under him than under the Democrats?

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On Sunday night, members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad paraded through the streets of Jenin. While many of the fighters wore masks, many of the PIJ dignitaries present did not feel such measures necessary. Even with faces hidden, fighters of the organization’s Jenin brigade proudly showed off machine guns, adorned themselves with headbands of their group’s emblem, and chanted loudly for the city to hear. One PIJ official stood atop steps, flanked by fighters on either side of him, grabbed one of their rifles and yelled, “We will not retreat until the last Zionist is defeated from this holy country!”

If there was any indication that the largest Israeli invasion of the West Bank in 20 years had shattered the organization, it wasn’t to be seen.

For 10 days straight beginning in late August, Jenin had been subject to a non-stop assault by the Israel Defense Forces, beginning simultaneously with other attacks on the cities of Tulkarm and Tubas, attacks which would soon spread out into nearby refugee camps, with troops being sent out of the far north to near Ramallah, the administrative center of the Palestinian Authority to harass, to threaten, and to serve as an omen.

These areas in the northern West Bank were once part of what the British during the Mandate period called the “Triangle of Terror”, a cradle of resistance to colonial rule centered around Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus. Through the Nakba, the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank, and both intifadas, these places have retained and increased their reputation as a thorn in Israel’s side, a hotbed of opposition to Israeli occupation and settlement, opposition which contributed to Ariel Sharon’s decision to disengage from the northern West Bank in the mid-2000s, just as that same phenomenon in the Gaza Strip contributed to the decision to disengage from there during that same period.

The loss of the settlements in the Strip, known as Gush Katif, has been an eternal grievance for the Israeli far-right ever since. Many soldiers involved in the current war against Gaza have been more than happy to carry that desire for vengeance back into the Strip, considering it their return to land that always belonged to them, that was stolen from them in 2005. Videos have streamed out of the area for months now of IDF soldiers proudly declaring their hopes for revenge against the Arab populace, to destroy any evidence of Arab existence in the land, and to reestablish the settlements on the pulverized ruins.

While the disengagement from the northern West Bank, deemed “northern Samaria” in official Israeli parlance, may not be as oft-referred, it is still very much a grievance, one that Israeli government ministers, those that Netanyahu relies on to stay in power, are just as eager to address.

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Tragedies seem to blend into each other in Gaza. The massacre at at-Taba’in School in Gaza City on August 10 was not the first Israeli attack on a school in Gaza that month, being part of a campaign of strikes against schools on the basis of practically non-existent evidence of Hamas military usage, ratcheting up in frequency until it reached this point: a strike on a school housing thousands of Palestinians precisely at the time of Fajr prayers, when hundreds of Muslims would be praying side-by-side, packed together in a room where casualties could be maximized.

Every crime serves as cover for the one before and after it, diverting the attention of the outside observer who can only hold so much pain in their heart for long. The massacre at at-Tabi’in blew off the headlines the murder of al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi and the threats against reporter Anas al-Sharif, and their murders were conducted under the shade brought down by strikes that crossed red lines not just in south Beirut but in Tehran as well.

While the endless train of assassinations and wholesale massacres have continued nearly non-stop since the war against Gaza began, the brazenness of Israel’s actions over the past month have arguably exceeded anything before it. It has pushed further into fronts it had refrained from treading into before during this conflict, showing off what Netanyahu has called “Israel’s long hand”, one that can hit both Yemen and now Iran itself with impunity. It is currently on what can only be seen as a warpath, seeking to firmly place itself in the driver’s seat of the war that is rapidly spreading throughout the region, and to place its primary backer, the United States, in a position where it has no hope to ever consider abandoning it, lest it let the entire Middle East unravel even further.

After searching high and low for a catalyzing event that could bring it back into some sort of moral high ground, at least one that would play more easily to Western media and its governments, Israel has finally found what it sees as a clear casus belli in the strike last month on a soccer field in Majdal Shams.

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There really was no way this wasn’t going to be a disaster, one way or another. Donald Trump and Joe Biden, two of the most unpopular major party candidates for president in American history, were also the oldest major candidates for president in American history, gearing up for a rematch on the debate stage in which 4 years had passed and both had become, as time usually concocts, even older than they were before.

Adding to the potential for turmoil was the circumventing of the long-time organizer of presidential debates, the Commission on Presidential Debates, ditching an albeit problematic but normally proportionally neutral stage for the aggressively bombastic one that had been constructed by CNN. In the moderator chairs would be not one, but two journalists beloved by American liberals for their perceived ability to speak truth to power, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The two had become more known since October 7th as some of the most visible supporters of Israel’s campaign against Gaza on television, whose level of deference to its narratives arguably crossed into fanaticism.

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Time comes for us all. People, political causes, faith in a system.

The reformist movement in Iran, expressing a desire to mold the Islamic Republic into a still-Islamic system more accepting of differing opinions, of a free press, and of women’s rights, has been for years now subject to a slow, painful death.

The reformists had achieved the presidency only once before, during the time of Mohammad Khatami, who won two terms in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hopes for a potential future of engagement with the West and a wider scope for expression within the country were dashed by a judiciary hell-bent on suppressing the words of those who supported the then-president’s vision, and state security forces more than happy to brutalize those angered by such moves.

Protests, led by students, eventually exceeded the demands of their president and sought his overthrow, considering him too weak, too ineffectual, too indebted to and supportive of those who supposedly wanted to hold the Iranian people back. Some figures of these demonstrations became so disillusioned with that failure that they began backing whoever was opposed to the Islamic Republic, no matter the source, even to the point of draping themselves in the flags of Israel and Imperial Iran.

When reformists like former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi attempted to defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, many disappointed after the failures of Khatami felt reinvigorated. After Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad of voter fraud (a charge which admittedly remains without substantial evidence), millions of Iranians turned out to the streets behind a man who was promising radical change, and who it seemed would be willing to fight to the end to catapult their wishes into the heart of power. Mousavi would eventually be placed under house arrest, a punishment that would never be lifted from his shoulders. Photos would emerge years later of Mousavi and his wife, who had, in the decade since, become elderly, the world and those hopes having long since passed them by.

The reformist movement would continue to face sidelining, but it still won parliamentary successes into the 2010s and assisted in the significant achievement of the Iran nuclear deal. The quick destruction of that deal by President Trump, the cascading downward of the moderate then-President Hassan Rouhani, and then the disqualification of most reformist candidates in elections in the 2020s, have been some factors among many leading to many Iranians, primarily young ones, exiting participation in the political system entirely.

Criticisms of the reformists by Iranians who would otherwise be their base typically rally under the following banners: They may want to do things, but they can’t. And even if they could do things, they are unwilling to change what needs to be changed.

Those still left in the movement have since been looking for a way back in. Not just back into the good graces of the system, but also the hearts and minds of those disaffected who have turned either to conservative politicians styling themselves as anti-establishment figures (like Ahmadinejad), or more critically, those who are turning to outright opposition to the state.

Now, after being beaten, bruised, and almost wrung out of existence, the reformists have received perhaps its biggest shot in almost a decade, if not longer: Masoud Pezeshkian.

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It is December 2023.

The IDF has announced the dismantling of the military infrastructure of Hamas in the Jabalia refugee camp, and in the north of the Gaza Strip as a whole. The army will withdraw from the area in the coming months, moving to focus on the invasion of the city of Khan Younis in the Strip’s south.

It is May 2024.

The IDF has fought for more than two weeks in the Jabalia refugee camp, and now appears to have largely withdrawn from the area. Despite claims that Hamas’ capabilities had been destroyed last year, the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, can only be seen as having completely reconstituted itself, if the IDF’s original assessment of total victory was ever to be believed to begin with.

In the aftermath of the battle, video emerged of the devastation to the camp of entire streets blown to smithereens, buildings hollowed out and collapsed, with a level of destruction that local journalist Imad Zakout compared to an “atomic bomb” striking the refugee camp.

There would be no assertions of dismantling any battalions, no claims of major inroads made to destroy Hamas’ capabilities once again, only the symbolic destruction of a tunnel that the bodies of Israeli hostages were supposedly found in such as Shani Louk, despite the Israeli president’s earlier claims of having already found parts of Louk’s body in October.

The raid was sold to the Israeli public initially as a mission to stop Hamas from merely making “attempts” to “reassemble”, the desolation wrought on the Jabalia camp can only be seen as one thing: punishing Palestinian society for continuing to exist after the IDF had already carved a path of ruination through it once before.

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I spoke with Electronic Intifada Associate Editor Nora Barrows-Friedman about how American liberals have descended as protests on college campuses for Gaza continue, how liberal establishment figures refuse to engage with the reality of Israel’s war against the Palestinians, w…

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The past week and a half has been nothing short of a whirlwind for many. In the past, organizing for Palestine on American campuses was far more difficult, oftentimes ignored by other students, and having little leverage to exercise over their administrations. Now, circumstances have changed.

Protests initially at Columbia University calling for divestment of the institution’s money from Israel have exploded into a nationwide movement, spurred by the university’s president calling in the New York police to forcibly dismantle the encampment that students had built on campus. As of the time of this writing, campuses from coast to coast continue to sprout up with new encampments for Palestine of their own every day, and hundreds upon hundreds of students have been arrested, as police forces continue to be sent in to stop any semblance of pro-Palestine sentiment from remaining visible at American institutions.

Unlike student movements of the near past, the rapid and almost immediately violent response from colleges, with police departments being called in with armored vehicles and police officers with guns drawn, and many times involving the violent arrest of faculty, combined with an uncommon level of message discipline and consolidation from the protesters (with encampments such as Columbia’s having their own media spokesperson), has made the movement’s momentum so far unable to be stopped, not by campus police departments, not by university administrators, not by President Biden.

While it’s not unusual for Israel to become publicly incensed over college campus issues that may seem normally outside the purview of a Western state, the degree in which the Israeli government has been angered by these protests has proven striking. Diplomats in the Israeli Foreign Ministry have compared the protesters to “criminals and terrorists”, demanding to know why they wear masks to conceal their identities. The Israeli consulate in Chicago went to the level of condemning Northwestern University for coming to an agreement with campus protesters, calling it an “appeasement agreement”, leveling language one might use for Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. Former diplomats also took to Israeli TV to express their incredulity that American students were allowed to protest Israel on campus, with Israel’s former ambassador to France remarking on i24 News, “It's incredible nobody is doing anything [about it].”

President Herzog, when made aware of the news of the campus protests in America, called for “firm and strong” action, initially calling the protesters at Columbia University anti-semitic and saying there was a “clear and present danger” to "the very lives of Jews on campus,” despite Jews making up a considerable portion of those Columbia students in the pro-Palestine encampment.

As the protests spread nationwide, Prime Minister Netanyahu went even further, making a speech in English that called the demonstrators calling for divestment from Israel “anti-semitic mobs” that attack Jewish students and Jewish faculty, and moreover that these events were “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped.”

While Israel has evidently taken note of the wide and sweeping demonstrations against them among young people in the United States, another view, away from the editorials of American newspapers and congressional offices, has been left almost entirely unaddressed in the Western media: how does the Middle East, outside Israel’s walls, see these protests? Does the coalition of states and factions that oppose Israel even acknowledge it? Most importantly, how do the Palestinians themselves see this movement?

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Aid flotillas have been sent to break the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip before, but never under such grave circumstances. After months of siege and a famine that many aid organizations have never seen the likes of before, an effort to break that siege with thousands of tons…

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Even after the attacks of October 7th, there is still a tendency, deep-set in the minds of the public, that certain paradigms, certain ways of the world, remain ironclad, unchanging. Those who grew up in a world where the Islamic Republic was the only Iran they ever knew may see certain sets of images and not even blink. A painting of Nasrallah praying in a theoretical, liberated Jerusalem. A photoshopped picture of Supreme Leader Khamenei giving a sermon in front of the Dome of the Rock. Invocations of this sort, always discussing the possibility of a conflict with Israel, perhaps striking a blow directly against the “usurping regime”, has been a constant for years.

The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, has long been engaged in a campaign of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotaging Iranian infrastructure, and infiltrating sectors of Iranian society. The Israel Defense Forces have similarly been long engaged in an open military campaign against the Iranian military in Syria, killing officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in airstrikes, a campaign that has intensified in scope and casualties since the outbreak of the assault against Gaza.

Despite years of these strikes, promises of striking back have abounded, yet rarely materialized in any substantive form. The restraint is not without obvious explanation: striking back at Israel directly, as a sovereign state, is unthinkable, as any strike would invite the full intervention of the world’s sole superpower, and perhaps an all-out war that Iran will suffer intensely at the hands of.

Nevertheless, insistence of a coming retaliation at the time and place of Iran’s choosing without action has created some dissatisfaction within the Islamic Republic’s own constituency, even leading to some analysts on Iran’s own state television voicing their frustration that Israel was not being punished:

“When they killed the Martyr [Qassem] Soleimani, we said there would be a harsh revenge. We got that revenge. Some time after that, they killed Sayyid Razi [Mousavi], and we again said there would be harsh revenge. Then they killed [Saleh] al-’Arouri, the officials of the Popular Mobilization [Forces] and the officials of Hezbollah, and again we said there would be harsh revenge, and called for patience, because where you do not think we will hit, we will. We don’t know the time of the retaliation that they don’t expect, when or where it will be. Yes, we’ve hit places, we’ve struck Ain al-Asad [Airbase], we’ve struck Erbil, but we need to ask our government whether these were enough.”

In the daylight hours of April 1, a consulate of the Islamic Republic of Iran, within the compound of the country’s embassy complex in Damascus, was struck, killing 16, including two Syrian civilians who were nearby. The primary target appeared to have been Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a Brigadier General in the IRGC’s Quds Force, a man who had held important command posts in the Iranian military since the 1990s. Zahedi did not have the place in the Iranian consciousness that Soleimani did, nor was he as high-level as he had been. But Israel had stepped over a line it most likely knew it had crossed: striking the consulate, even if it was technically in Syria, meant it had struck Iranian territory.

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The details of the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the subsequent Israeli response have been shrouded within a dark fog, heavily contributed to by Israeli and American officials and media alike, with stories of horrifying atrocities spreading quickly through newspapers and legislatures, and actual journalistic investigation conventions falling by the wayside for many.

After months of interviewing, pouring through casualty reports and video from the scene, Al Jazeera has released the results of its findings, attempting to create as objective as a scene as it can of what actually occurred on that day: what Hamas actually did, how much of the destruction was actually caused by Israeli fire, and how much of the crimes we were told about were actually fabricated.

I spoke with Richard Sanders, the director of the documentary, about the pressures of the Israel lobby, whether anything will change how the Western media treats Israeli narratives, about claims about how many Israelis were killed by IDF fire on that day, and about how independent and alternative media has been forced to do the legwork that mainstream organizations have been unwilling or unable to do.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Séamus: How soon after October 7th did this investigation begin by Al Jazeera?

Richard: The investigation began within a few weeks of October 7. It was motivated in part by skepticism about some of the atrocity stories—particularly regarding babies—that were being accepted uncritically in Western media. We felt somebody needed to do proper scrutiny.

S: The story about the beheaded babies as you allude to was debunked early on in the war, but through your investigation, what story told about October 7th was the most difficult to determine the exact veracity of?

R: Sexual violence is much more complicated than babies. With babies we can see that there are two in the list of the dead. Neither was burned or mutilated—so any story about babies that does not relate to those two, and there were a lot, is not true. That immediately flagged up for us that information from Israeli officials, IDF officers and first responders was unreliable. And if it was unreliable regarding babies, it was likely to be unreliable regarding sexual violence. It quickly became clear the bulk of the information was coming from the same sources. However—we were very aware sexual violence is extremely common in conflict and may well have occurred. In the end we reached the conclusion that, while there may have been rapes, there simply wasn't the evidence to support the claim it was widespread and systematic.

S: Those claims about systematic rape by Hamas fighters was spread around by a lot of sources, but among them was the Israeli emergency response team ZAKA. You had actually managed to secure an interview with Yossi Landau, who ran ZAKA's southern region operations and had spread a plethora of atrocity stories about October 7th. Why do you think he said yes to Al Jazeera whereas I presume others you contacted declined?

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I spoke with Josh of the Ettingermentum newsletter about the results of the Michigan Democratic primary, how voters across demographics are rejecting Biden’s handling of and complicity in the war against Gaza, and when, if ever, Biden will understand that bringing about a permanent ceasefire is within his power to stop the killing and, more critically to him, likely necessary to secure his campaign for reelection.

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