Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages brought back to Gaza, the Israeli military’s retaliatory airstrikes and ground offensive has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of those women and children. Some 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now homeless after Israel’s destruction of countless homes and apartment buildings, as well as most civilian infrastructure including hospitals, schools, universities, mosques and churches.
As more than 1 million Palestinians have been forced to evacuate to the southern Gaza city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his military will soon launch an offensive on this overcrowded enclave teeming with desperate, starving refugees. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that an Israeli attack on Rafah would result in a further slaughter of civilians, as he called for renewed talks to reach a ceasefire, after negotiations to reach a 40-day truce failed last week.
Egypt has threatened to effectively suspend their nation’s landmark 1979 peace treaty with Israel if Netanyahu launches his planned military assault on Rafah. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, author and international adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace. Here she talks about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the Biden administration’s ineffectual response and Egypt’s threat to tear up their 40-year peace treaty with Israel.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: This is a human catastrophe. This is a genocide that is taking place in real time in front of our eyes. We’re seeing it every day, hour by hour on our phones, on our computers, on our screens, on our televisions. We’re hearing it on the radio. We’re hearing it everywhere we go. This is not any kind of situation where anyone can say, I didn’t know.
SCOTT HARRIS: In recent days, President Biden and his administration look like they’re moving, at least rhetorically, to distance themself from what Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing and planning in this attack in Rafah that international aid agencies say would be a catastrophe. Joe Biden, in a hastily called press conference on a whole other issue, did say he felt that the Israelis response in this war has been, quote unquote, over the top.
But yet, the administration has taken no concrete action to counter or moderate the Israeli government’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza that have now killed more than 28,000 people.
At least we don’t know of what actions they’ve taken and we haven’t seen any results in Gaza itself. What do you make of the Biden administration’s finally, at least in words, seeking to distance themselves?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Well, I think it’s a reflection, Scott, of the depth and breadth of the kinds of protests that we’ve seen exploding across this country and indeed around the world. But most explicitly in terms of the impact on the Biden administration, the level of opposition in this country, the rage at the fact that U.S. tax dollars, the name of the people of the U.S. makes us all complicit in these crimes — the ultimate crime of genocide.
And people are arranging massive protests in the street. We’re seeing rabbis getting themselves arrested in the halls of Congress. Organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace that I work with that has carried out occupations of Grand Central Station in New York and the island where the Statue of Liberty is. Across the country in small towns, there’s protests going on on a daily basis.
Unions, five of the biggest unions in the countries have signed on to statements calling for a ceasefire. The word ceasefire is on the lips of everyone in this country. Eighty percent of Democrats say they want an immediate ceasefire. Sixty-seven percent of all the voters in this country say they want an immediate ceasefire.
And yet, as you say, despite some changes in language, the actions of the Biden administration make it still complicit in the Israeli genocide. And with what is being threatened in Rafah in this part of the southern tip of Gaza, where the demand of the U.S. is, “You shouldn’t carry out a military attack there unless you have a viable plan underway to protect the Palestinian population, to protect civilians.”
Well, there is no way to protect civilians. There’s nowhere for them to go. So the question is, “Is this really an effort by Israel to make good on the long-standing generations-old claim of some within the Zionist movement who say that what they have always wanted to do is get rid of the Palestinian population to make it a land without a people for the Jewish population of settlers who were the people without a land after the after the Holocaust?
Is that what this is about? This is a long-standing claim, a public claim by many in the pre-state Zionist movement. And later, as the state was created by governments of the state, by political parties. That’s what this looks like. But there is no way to protect a civilian population. Are they going to push people into the Sinai Desert and make them refugees once again in another country that does not want them and then refuse again to allow them back into Gaza where their homes have been for the last 55 years?
SCOTT HARRIS: Phyllis, We only have a couple of minutes left, but I did want to ask you this in response to Israel’s planned attack on Rafah, crowded with over a million Palestinian refugees from the other parts of Gaza where the war has gone on and destroyed much of that territory, Egypt is now threatening to effectively suspend their 1979 peace treaty with Israel. How significant is this threat from Cairo?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: It would reopen the entire sort of regional politics in a very serious way. We have to be clear, though, Egypt is completely dependent on the United States for aid money, for debt relief, for military support, for arms. You know, until the Ukraine war after Israel, Egypt was the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. It was about $1.2 billion a year, a lot of money.
And if that is going to be put in jeopardy, that would change everything. But I think we have to be clear that pressure from the United States, if it came right now — the U.S. is telling Israel, don’t do this, don’t push the population out into into Egypt — if the U.S. changed its position and began to put a lot of pressure on Egypt, I don’t think we could assume that there would not be a shift in the Egyptian position and a new a surprising willingness that we would see to do exactly what they say right now they will not do.
So the pressure has to remain from the people of Egypt on its government and for us on our government here, the pressure for a ceasefire, the pressure to stop sending the weapons to Israel that is enabling a genocide. We have to stop allowing our government to be complicit in our name in a genocide that is happening in real time in front of our eyes as we speak.
Bennis is author of the book, “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.”
For more information, visit Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project at
ips-dc.org/new-
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