During the more than seven months of Israel’s war in Gaza, in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages, Israel’s airstrikes and ground offensive has now killed more than 35,000 Palestinians. In March, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that more children have been killed in Gaza in recent months than in four years of conflict worldwide.
The U.S. student anti-war movement which spread to hundreds of campuses across the country, has emerged as the moral conscience of our nation, expressing outrage at U.S. complicity in the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians – and basic human empathy for the tens of thousands of lives lost. In recent months these students, who by and large have carried out peaceful protests, have been vilified by politicians and the media, falsely and dangerously claiming that their criticism of Israel is antisemitic and supportive of terrorism. Police raids on student pro-Palestinian encampments have often been gratuitously violent, and has resulted in the arrests of more than 3,000 nationwide.
Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid triggering widespread famine among Gaza’s 2.3 million residents has been compounded by the Israeli military’s ongoing ground offensive in the southern city of Rafah, where nearly 1 million refugees have once again been forced to evacuate. Amid the continuing carnage, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for war crimes. Between the Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with author and Roots Action.org co-founder Norman Solomon, who talks about his recent article, “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young In the Thrall of a Dominant Death Culture,” focusing on the U.S. student movement opposing Israel’s war in Gaza.
NORMAN SOLOMON: A phrase that you used really comes to the core of the uprising that occurred on many college campuses in the U.S. In recent weeks. You refer to basic human empathy, and it’s not primarily or even secondarily, an ideological motivation that has stirred so many tens and tens of thousands of students this spring to actively protest and several thousand of them really under the baton — at least figuratively, sometimes literally, of the police — a few thousand being arrested. It’s about human beings connecting to each other even if they’ve never met, which is the essence of solidarity. And really at the core of a lot of religions in terms of a ideology or theology of love, of compassion, of caring. Unfortunately, there’s so much energy that is in the other direction from leaders in Congress, unfortunately as well from the White House, mass media, with some exceptions. The overwhelming majority I think of what we’re getting is jargon, is what Orwell referred to as sticking together with a kind of a glue, these strips of rhetorical phrases, which have virtually nothing to do with the humanity of other people. And here we are after more than seven months of this carnage subsidized by the U.S. government and there is a distinct failure of the U.S. power structure to move against that slaughter. In fact, the power structure continues to enable it.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Norman, our listeners are aware that the International Criminal Court has now issued arrest warrants for war crimes against Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister and the chief of the military in Israel, as well as the leaders of Hamas for their attack on October 7. The response of the Biden administration has been fairly predictable. They condemn it and they say specifically that to include the leaders of Hamas and the Israeli government leaders in this same set of warrants is false equivalency. I wondered if you would address the kind of double standards that are very apparent as well as hypocrisy in the U.S. stance on human rights, not just right now with Gaza, but certainly for many years.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The International Criminal Court is for the first time really stepping beyond the kind of global political constraints that have focused its prosecutions on Africa — sometimes well deserved. But when superpowers or European countries engage in crimes against humanity, they should not be exempt. And in this case, Israel should not be exempt, nor of course should Hamas. And so while we are hearing from the White House, as you note this outcry of supposed double standards on the part of the court, in fact, the court is now moving to eliminate double standards. What we need is a single standard of human rights, the same standard that condemns war crimes no matter who is doing them and who is subsidizing them. And in this case, what Hamas did was horrific on Oct. 7, 2023 and for more than seven months now with the active assistance of the United States, Israel has been engaged in massive war crimes.
So this gets back in a way to the uprising, the almost entirely nonviolent uprising of students on U.S. campuses recognizing not only the immoral criminality of what Israel is doing to human beings in Gaza, but also the complicity of the U.S. government in not only standing aside and ignoring what’s going on, but actually shipping billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunitions to literally make this slaughter possible.
And so I think in an acute way, we are at a cusp of history, a way in which — as was the case during the Vietnam War — we have a sort of a cleavage, a separation, a gap between officials who insist on not only turning a blind eye, but actually participating in mass murder. And people at the grassroots were saying absolutely never again for anyone.
For more information, visit Roots Action at rootsaction.org and Norman Solomon’s website at www.normansolomon.com.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Norman Solomon (26:16). More articles and opinion pieces are found in the Related Links section of this page.
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