Press TV
has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, editor of Veterans Today
from Madison, about Israeli onslaught on Palestinians in the besieged
Gaza Strip.
What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: UN-run schools have been hit five times.
Each time Israel has come out of giving their version of what is called
an excuse to common being rocket fire came from the vicinity of the
school. Is there any doubt that Israel targeted these schools?
Barrett: No there is no doubt at all. It has been a
very clear pattern in these Israeli attacks not just the bombings …
white phosphorous droppings, shelling and so on in Gaza, but also in
sniper murders of innocent children, over 600 of which were documented
by British Medical Journal in 2004 that the Israelis do intentionally
target civilians and they intentionally target children.
The preposterous excuse that this is somehow collateral damage
because Palestinian fighters were hiding in these schools number one it
is simply not true. All the sources on the ground tell us it is not
true. Number two, the fact is that Israelis are upset that the
Palestinian resistance fighters are in Gaza in an overcrowded
concentration camp with two million people in a tiny area, and they
blame the resistance fighters for fighting in a crowded area. They are
the ones who have penned up the Palestinian people in this concentration
camp.
There is no place in Gaza where you could possibly fight from where
there would not be people crowded around you. But in fact it is not the
Palestinian resistance. It is the Israelis who use human shields as a
matter of policy. They capture Palestinian kids, women, civilians, and
use them as human shields as they are invading Gaza.
So the Israelis are lying through their teeth about all of this, but
fortunately the world is now waking up and becoming aware of the way the
Israelis are intentionally genociding the civilian population of Gaza.
United Nations seems to know it. Ban Ki-moon is coming right out and
pointing out the obvious, that these are intentional war crimes,
intentional attacks on civilians; mass murders of innocent men, women
and children; For what purpose? I suppose to aggravate and inflame the
tensions in the region.
The Israelis have decided that they cannot survive unless there is
perpetual and ever-escalating war and so they are creating the very
resistance that they deplore by massacring the civilians of the people
they are victimizing, and they know there will be a reaction. They know
that Israelis and even Jews will be hated all over the world for this
for a very long time. They know that people in the Middle East will hate
the Zionists and attack them, and they welcome this because they want
to be perpetually at war. That is the strategy for endlessly expanding
and trying to create a greater Israel.
Press TV: Do you think Israel has committed a war crime?
Barrett: I think we should prosecute both sets of
war crimes - the 99% of blatantly illegal killings and maimings of
civilians by the Israelis, and the one percent of people being badly
hurt or killed by the Palestinians.
I think all of these war crimes should be taken to The Hague, should
be hashed out in international court, there should be prosecutions.
But in my opinion the Hamas people who are firing these rockets will
have a successful defense. Their defense is that under international law
occupied people have the right to resist occupation militarily, and the
question of whether a given military act is legitimate or not turns on
proportionality and what forms of resistance are possible since the
Palestinians have the right - and many would say the duty - to
militarily resist the genocide that is being inflicted on them.
It is not just an occupation. It is a genocide. And the question
becomes what form of military resistance, which means killing people -
that is what military action is - is legitimate and what is not.
The Palestinians are merely firing these little 4th of July bottle
rockets. They do not even have any warheads. They are killing very very
few Israelis. Now if they were for instance putting nuclear warheads on
their rockets and they obliterated Tel Aviv completely and killed all
of the war criminal settlers who live in Tal Aviv, that would be
disproportionate and I think they should be convicted of a war crime if
they did that. But instead they are simply firing these virtually
harmless rockets with no warheads.
If anything I think that they are guilty of being far far too weak,
peaceful, conciliatory - call it what you want - if I were Palestinian, I
would believe that I had the right under the international law to put
warheads on those rockets and to kill the same number of people that
they were killing - in fact more, because it is the Israelis who are the
aggressors.
They invaded and occupied Palestine. They launched the genocide of
the Palestinian people. The Palestinians have the right and the duty to
resist. They have the right to kill more Israelis than the Israelis are
killing Palestinians. Far more, the Israelis have the duty to stop
fighting and to leave occupied Palestine under international law. That
is their duty.
Every right-minded person in the whole world calls for the
destruction of the genocidal Zionist entity in the same way that they
called for the destruction of the apartheid state of South Africa.
Everyone of decent conscience needs to admit that the state of
Israel-Palestine, at the very least, needs to have an equal protection
clause in which everyone gets exactly the same legal status regardless
of religion or ethnicity, and all of the Palestinian refugees and their
descendents have the right to return home, have their lands be returned
to them and be given compensation as UN resolution 192 says.
…the entire Palestinian population is resisting occupation and
resisting genocide. It is not just people in uniform who are called
Hamas fighters. The entire population is fighting against genocide.
…Hamas is simply the leading edge of the Palestinian resistance which
enjoys the support of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. The
children want to participate in the resistance. In most cases all they
can do is throw stones at tanks and then be murdered by the snipers.
But if indeed children died digging those tunnels (in Gaza), I would
argue that they died as martyrs doing a very heroic thing just as the
similar Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto would have done in that
situation. If they did not, that was wrong. They should have resisted.
The Jews who did not resist the Nazi genocide – and yes it was a
genocide regardless of whether the numbers and the gas chambers or what
we are told there – but yes there was a genocide. There was horrible
racism. There was atrocious persecution of Jews in Germany and the Jews
resisted and the ones who resisted are the heroes. The ones who did not
resist are not the heroes.
Press TV: Are the Gaza tunnels still the goal of this Israeli operation?
Barrett: No this is not about tunnels. Tunnels is
the talking point that the Zionist propagandists in Tel Aviv issue to
all of their stooges and the Zionist power configuration here in the
West, where the Zionist lobby has ceased power.
I do not know precisely how many and what parts of which tunnels
Israelis have damaged or destroyed and which they have not. But that is
not the purpose of this operation and they have practically admitted
that it is not. Direct calls for genocide are being published in Israeli
newspapers.
Members of the Israeli parliament are saying that we must murder the
mothers who give birth to the little snakes - namely the Palestinian
children. Snipers are boasting on social media about massacring
Palestinian children and Israel supports this essentially. They will not
prosecute any of it because the people there support it.
So this is really about genocide. It is about making life so
miserable for the nearly two million Palestinians locked up in that
concentration camp called Gaza that they will have to leave; either that
or they will be massacred, just like they did in Deir Yassin in 1948.
This is part of a genocide. It is a Nazi-style genocide against the
whole people and it needs to end.
Labels: debate, gaza, genocide, hamas, Israel, jeffrey alderman, Press TV, rockets, u.n. school, war crimes, Zionism