“Noam Chomsky Is a Soft Revolution” by
Foy Vance.
This is Democracy Now!
I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation
with the world-renowned dissident, linguist
and professor Noam Chomsky.
Let’s turn to the situation in Gaza.
Israel’s Internal Security Minister Gilad
Erdan said Thursday Israel could launch another
wide-scale military operation against the
Gaza Strip.
This comes after Israel’s violent crackdown
on peaceful protests in Gaza from March to
May, when Israeli forces killed over 136 Palestinians,
injured over 14,000 Palestinians.
I want to turn to the Canadian doctor, the
Palestinian-Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani,
who was shot by Israeli forces in both legs
while he was helping treat Palestinians injured
by Israeli forces during the nonviolent Great
March of Return.
It was May 14th, a Monday.
I asked Dr. Loubani—this is right after
he was shot—if he felt he was targeted.
I don’t know the answer to that.
I don’t know what orders they received or
what was in their heads, so I can’t tell
you if we were deliberately targeted.
What I can tell you is the things that I do
know.
In the six weeks of the March, there were
no paramedic casualties.
And in one day, 19 paramedics—18 wounded
plus one killed—and myself were all injured,
so—or were all shot with live ammunition.
We were all—Musa was actually in a rescue
at the time, but everybody else I’ve talked
to was like me.
We were away during a lull, without smoke,
without any chaos at all, and we were targeted—and
we were, rather, hit by live ammunition, most
of us in the lower limbs.
So, it’s very, very hard to believe that
the Israelis who shot me and the Israelis
who shot my other colleagues—just from our
medical crew, four of us were shot, including
Musa Abuhassanin, who passed away—It’s
very hard to believe that they didn’t know
who we were, they didn’t know what we were
doing, and that they were aiming at anything
else.
So, later that same day, May 14th, the man
that Tarek was just talking about, Dr. Loubani
was talking about, paramedic Musa Abuhassanin,
was shot and killed by Israeli forces.
He was shot in the chest.
Dr. Loubani tweeted a photo captioned, “A
haunting photo, Friday, May 11.
Left: Mohammed Migdad, shot in the right ankle.
Hassan Abusaada.
Tarek Loubani, shot in left leg and right
knee.
Moumin Silmi.
Youssef Almamlouk.
Musa Abuhassanin, shot in the thorax and killed.
Volunteer unknown.
Photographer: shot and wounded.”
And he showed this photograph that he had,
that he thought he was just going to have
for a scrapbook, and then realized these were
some of the last days of their lives.
What’s going on in Gaza right now, from
your perspective, Noam?
We can add to that list the young Palestinian
woman, a medic, who was murdered by a sniper,
far from the so-called border, when she was
tending to a wounded patient.
Yes, it’s hideously ugly.
But there’s a background, as always.
The crucial background is that Israeli—this
Israeli stranglehold on Gaza, which has reduced
the life to bare survival, has reached the
point where the United Nations, other analysts
predict that by the year 2020, Gaza will literally
be uninhabitable.
That’s two million people, half of them
children, being caged in a prison, carefully
controlled, savage restrictions on food, on
anything that comes to them, to the extent
that the fishermen are kept close to shore
so they can’t fish, the sewage plants have
been destroyed, the power plants have been
attacked.
The official program—official—was to keep
Gaza on what was called a diet, barely enough
to survive.
Doesn’t look good if they all starve to
death.
Notice that this is occupied territory, as
recognized by—even by the United States,
everyone but Israel.
So, here’s a population kept in a prison,
in an occupied territory, fed a diet to keep
them at bare survival, constantly used as
a punching bag for what’s called—what
calls itself the most moral army in the world,
now reaching a point where within a couple
years it will be uninhabitable, yes, and in
addition to that you have sadistic acts like
highly trained snipers killing a young Palestinian
woman medic when she’s tending a patient,
and what the doctor just described.
What do we do with it?
We actually react to that.
The United States has reacted.
It has reacted by very sharply cutting its
funding to the one organization, UNRWA, U.N.
organization, that keeps the population barely
alive.
That’s our response, along with, of course,
overwhelming support for Israel, providing
with the arms, diplomatic support and so on.
One of the most extraordinary scandals, if
that’s the right word, in the modern world.
Can we do something about it?
Sure, of course we can.
Gaza should be a thriving Mediterranean paradise.
It has a wonderful location, has agricultural
resources, could be marvelous beaches, fishing,
sea resources, even has natural gas offshore,
which it’s not being allowed to use.
So there’s plenty that can be done.
But we’ve—the U.S. has preferred, under
repeated administrations, but much worse now,
to, as usual, support the murderers.
Noam, Israel is threatening another strike
on Gaza like what they called Operation Protective
Edge in 2014 when they killed well over 2,000
people—about, oh, around a quarter of that
number children.
Yes, they are threatening.
If you look over the record—there’s no
time to talk about it now—there’s a marvelous
book that just came out, incidentally.
Norman Finkelstein’s book Gaza, which is
about Gaza’s martyrdom, is a definitive
study of this.
But what’s happened since 2005 is pretty
straightforward.
I mean, the previous history is ugly enough.
But in 2005, Ariel Sharon, other Israeli hawks,
recognized that it didn’t make any sense
to keep a couple of thousand Jewish settlers
illegally settling in Gaza, using up most
of its resources and devoting a large part
of the Israeli army to protecting them.
That was totally senseless.
So they decided to move them from their illegal,
subsidized settlements in Gaza to illegal,
subsidized settlements in areas that Israel
wanted to keep, in the West Bank, in the Golan
Heights.
It was framed as a traumatic event, but that
was a play for world opinion.
It was basically a joke.
They could have done it quite easily.
And they pulled out, and that was called a
withdrawal.
But they remained under total Israeli occupation,
just that the army wasn’t inside Gaza; it
was controlling it from the outside.
There was an agreement reached in November
2005 between the Palestinians and Israel on
a ceasefire, no violence, opening Gaza’s
seaport, rebuilding the airport that Israel
had destroyed, opening the border so that
there could be free flow between Israel and
Egypt and so on.
That agreement lasted a couple of weeks, in—that
was November.
In January, the Palestinians committed a major
crime: They ran a free election, recognized
to be free and fair, only one in the Arab
world.
But it came out the wrong way.
The wrong people won: Hamas.
Israel, at once, escalated violence, tightened
the siege, increased the repression against
Gaza, imposed the diet.
The U.S. reacted by standard operating procedure:
started to organize a military coup.
Hamas preempted the military coup, which was
an even greater crime.
Violence, the U.S.-Israeli violence, increased.
The savagery of the siege increased, and so
on.
Then it goes on like that.
Repeatedly, there’s an episode of what Israel
calls mowing the lawn.
Smash them up.
They’re defenseless, of course.
Then there’s an agreement reached, which
Hamas accepts and lives up to.
Israel violates it constantly.
Finally, an Israeli escalation of the violation
leads to some Hamas response, which Israel
uses as a pretext for the next episode of
mowing the lawn.
I’ve reviewed this.
Norman Finkelstein reviews it in his book.
Others have.
That’s been the history since 2005.
So, yes, there might be another one.
But now we’re reaching a point where it’s
almost terminal.
Repeat, it’s expected that the Gaza Strip,
having been devastated so savagely over the
years, will literally become uninhabitable.
Now, there are ways to deal with this.
It’s not a—doesn’t take a brilliant
scientist to figure it out.
It’s quite obvious.
And Noam, the solution that you say that is
straightforward and simple?
Very straightforward.
Live up to the terms of the November 2005
agreement.
Allow Gaza to reconstruct.
Open the entry points to Israel and Egypt.
Rebuild the seaport that was smashed.
Rebuild the airport that Israel destroyed.
Allow them to reconstruct the power plants.
Let them become a flourishing Mediterranean
site.
And, of course, permit—remember that the
famous Oslo Agreements required, explicitly,
that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank be a
unified territory and that its territorial
integrity must be maintained.
Israel and the United States reacted at once
by separating them.
OK?
That’s not a law of nature, either.
Palestinian national rights can be achieved,
if the U.S., Israel are willing to accept
that.
Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political
dissident, author and linguist, now a laureate
professor in the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Chomsky taught for 50 years at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Visit Democracynow.org to watch our first
full hour with Noam Chomsky, discussing immigration,
U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and more.
In the coming week, you’ll hear Noam Chomsky
on North Korea, Yemen, Iran and more.
And that does it for our broadcast.
I’m Amy Goodman.
Our website, Democracynow.org.
Thanks for joining us.
