Democracy Now ! / September 3, 2024
Guest : Yonatan Zeigen – Israeli peace activist whose mother, Vivian Silver, was killed on October 7, 2023, during the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eri
Gideon Levy – Israeli journalist and author, columnist for Haaretz and a member of its editorial board
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested this weekend to demand a ceasefire following the deaths of six more hostages in Gaza, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to reject the terms of a deal that would remove Israeli troops from southern Gaza. This comes after nearly 11 months of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in the territory, according to local health authorities. “Our politicians won’t listen to anything, because they’re driven out of self-interest,” says Israeli peace activist Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother Vivian Silver was killed in the October 7 Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eri. Despite the feeling of solidarity on the streets, Zeigen says there is a sense of “hopelessness” in the mass protests in Israel. We also speak with Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, who says the outrage in Israel is still mostly confined to critics of Netanyahu and has not yet penetrated his base of support, and that the United States has a major role in the continued violence and Netanyahu’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire. “If President Biden would have really liked to put an end to this war, he could have done it within days by stopping or at least conditioning … the supply of arms and ammunition to Israel. He didn’t do it,” Levy notes.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli army’s discovery of six dead Israeli hostages in tunnels in Rafah, in southern Gaza, has spurred some of the largest protests Israel has seen since October 7. Israel says the hostages were killed by Hamas; Hamas says they were killed by Israeli airstrikes, not far from where a seventh hostage was found alive last week.
On Sunday and Monday, grief and anger spilled onto the streets as hundreds of thousands of Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and other cities, along with hostage families, demanded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accept a ceasefire deal with Hamas to secure the release of all remaining hostages. This is demonstrator Michal Caspi, whose nephew Alon Ohel was taken hostage October 7th.
MICHAL CASPI: So many people came. I met people that never came before. They came for the first time. I think after what happened yesterday morning, when we hear about the six bodies that came back, I think everybody feel like they have to do something. And I think it’s one of the reasons that so many people came out from home and came to say their words, that they want all the abducted to come back home.
AMY GOODMAN: A rare general strike was called by Histadrut. It was held across Israel on Monday.
Meanwhile, thousands of mourners gathered at the funeral of the Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose body was among those retrieved from southern Gaza. Hersh’s father Jon Polin said he hoped his son’s death would not be in vain and instead lead to the release of the remaining 101 hostages still held captive in Gaza.
JON POLIN: Hersh, we failed you. We all failed you. You would not have failed you. You would have pushed harder for justice. You would have worked to understand the other, to bridge differences. You would have challenged more people to challenge their own thinking. And what you would be pushing for now is to ensure that your death, the deaths of all the soldiers and so many innocent civilians are not lashav, not in vain.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite the protests calling for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back Monday, rejecting the terms of a deal that would remove Israeli troops from southern Gaza. Netanyahu begged for forgiveness for not bringing the six hostages home alive.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] I told the families, and I say it again this evening: I ask for your forgiveness for not succeeding in bringing them back alive. We were close, but we didn’t succeed. And I also say this evening, Israel will not accept this massacre. Hamas will pay a very high price for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Even Netanyahu’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is disagreeing with Netanyahu saying he will not agree to a ceasefire unless Israeli soldiers can stay in the Philadelphi Corridor.
For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by two guests. Gideon Levy is an award-winning Israeli author and journalist, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, member of its editorial board. And Yonatan Zeigen is an Israeli peace activist, trained mediator and social worker, son of the renowned Canadian Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7th during the Hamas attack on her kibbutz, Kibbutz Be’eri, where she lived. He has said his mother had a plan for peace for Israel and the Palestinians before she was killed.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Yonatan, let’s begin with you in Tel Aviv. Can you describe the scene of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis, a number of them family members of hostages still in Gaza, demanding that Netanyahu agree to a ceasefire deal?
YONATAN ZEIGEN: Well, being on the streets with so many people and with that energy is very powerful, on the one hand. On the other, it’s filled with despair, because you know that our politicians won’t listen to anything, because they’re driven out of self-interest. So, in that sense, you feel — you feel the energy, you feel the solidarity, but also the hopelessness.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yonatan, do you believe these latest deaths of the six hostages were preventable. If so, why? And do you see that the latest protests are some sort of a turning point in Israel?
YONATAN ZEIGEN: All of the deaths were preventable. October 7th was preventable, as well. If we would have pursued peace years ago, if we would seek partners, Palestinian partners, instead of strengthening fundamentalists, if we would have not strengthened our own fundamentalists and put them in government, then October 7th wouldn’t have happened to begin with.
And since then, if we wouldn’t have gone into this atrocious war, and if we would — sought diplomacy and the help of the international community and go to the PA and Saudi Arabia and the United States and asked, this is — “We’re willing to do 1, 2, 3 in order to create a new reality here, and we ask for Hamas to be driven out,” then we would have gotten that. And all of the deaths would have been prevented, and the hostages would have been brought home.
Is it a turning point?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring —
YONATAN ZEIGEN: Yeah?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No, go ahead. Go ahead.
YONATAN ZEIGEN: I started to say: Is it a turning point? One should hope. But, you know, people relate — you know, they anchor themselves in personal stories. And we woke up on Sunday to a very harsh and heartbreaking story of the six hostages being killed. Will it fuel a relentless protest that will be strong enough to bring a government down or to make it change their policy? I’m not sure.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Gideon Levy, I’d like to pose that question to you. Do you think that these protests are a turning point? They’re certainly the largest since the October 7th attack.
GIDEON LEVY: I can’t agree more with Yonatan. I’ll be just more harsh, as usual. I doubt it very much. It cannot be a turning point as long as it is only this kind of protest. First of all, most of the protest, if not all of it, has nothing to do with the political base of Benjamin Netanyahu. And therefore, he did ignore it until now, and he can continue to ignore it as long as it doesn’t penetrate to his own base. And his own base, I must say, is still very solid, and the protest did not penetrate there.
And secondly, we have to remember that this kind of protest cannot last for long, because it’s a very partial protest. It’s only a protest about the hostages. And the hostages is a huge subject. It’s a huge tragedy. It’s a huge catastrophe. People lost everything. People lost their lives, innocent people, wonderful people, like Vivian and many, many others. But this protest ignores totally the Palestinian victims. And as long as it ignores totally — but really, totally — the 40,000 people, then killing of six gets different proportions and cannot fuel a protest for a long time.
AMY GOODMAN: Gideon Levy, can you explain what the Philadelphi Corridor is? And talk about the fact that Israel didn’t have it before, what Netanyahu is — why he’s resisting removing soldiers from there, even disagreeing — I mean, they’re both being investigated for war crimes, both he and Yoav Gallant, his defense minister — right? — at The Hague. But Gallant is even saying that this is not necessary. And how — is this — the same question that Juan asked Yonatan — a real turning point, this level of mass protest, with the strikes called on top of it?
GIDEON LEVY: So, first, about the Philadelphi Corridor, we will not bother your viewers too much, Amy, because nobody heard about the Philadelphi Corridor as such a huge, painful subject until one, two weeks ago. I’ll tell you more than this. I’m almost convinced that if the issue of the Philadelphi Corridor will be solved, Netanyahu will find a new thing to sabotage any kind of settlement. This man does not believe — and I give him the credit that it is ideological and maybe not only personal, but he doesn’t believe in any diplomacy with the Palestinians. He never did. He never did believe in any kind of settlement with the Palestinians, only living on his sword, only living on our military power. This was his ideology, and it continues now.
He will not end this war now, even if the Philadelphi Corridor — for your viewers, it’s a piece of land which is on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu claims, rightly so, that many arms were smuggled through the tunnels in the Philadelphi Corridor. But I would like to remind the prime minister that the big attack on Israel did not come from the Philadelphi Corridor. It came from the most protected border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the most invested border, the most sophisticated border. So it’s really ridiculous. It’s looking for excuses why to say no to stop the war.
And as about your question about turning point, it depends on the coming days. I mean, if the coming days will gain momentum, it might become a turning point. But I have my doubts, because, as I said before, the protests in Israel, until now, is limited to a very specific part of the population. It makes a lot of impression from the outside to see those hundreds of thousands of people gathering in Tel Aviv, but they are not the face of Israel, for sure not the majority of Israelis.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to one of the protesters in Tel Aviv this weekend, Itai Sela, a retired Israeli army veteran with two sons in the Israeli army.
ITAI SELA: The government of Israel is a threat to the world peace. It’s a dictatorship, run by one-man show. And Israel has 200 nuclear armaments. And the way Netanyahu is a world chaos agent, like Donald Trump, he’s a threat to the world peace. … He doesn’t care about the hostages.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Yonatan Zeigen, you were in the streets of Tel Aviv, as well. You and your brother have lost your beloved mother, beloved by so many, not only in Israel, but around the world, as a longtime peace activist. Vivian Silver died on October 7th when Hamas raided her kibbutz. You talk about a plan she had before she was killed. Do you agree with Gideon that the hundreds of thousands of Israelis are only focused on the hostages, calling for a ceasefire, or that there is some recognition of the horror that is taking place in Gaza, as well now as the West Bank?
YONATAN ZEIGEN: There is some, but it’s not enough. When I come to the streets, I stand with the bloc against the occupation or the people who want to end the war. But we are very, very few there, because there is no link in Israeli society between what was before October 7th and what — and the war since and what is happening in the West Bank. They don’t make the link between that and between our situation, our dire situation here, with the hostages and in general, the dire straits of our country. And it’s sad, because we have to make that link. It’s a blind spot of ours.
But a root of our problems is the lack of diplomacy for so long, the continuation of the expansion project of the settler movement, the occupation, a ruthless use of force in the siege of Gaza. This is the root of our problem. Our security issues and October 7th were symptoms of that. And as long as we don’t treat that problem together, — you know, we need a signal from the international community, as well, in order for us to understand that this is a problem needs solving. But as long as we don’t do that, then we are doomed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask Gideon Levy: Do you think at this point that the only thing that can stop Netanyahu is a decision by the Biden administration to cut off arms to Israel?
GIDEON LEVY: Yes, but I don’t see this decision being made. We are dealing with science fiction, I’m afraid. The Biden administration played a very weird role in this war. On one hand, their heart was in the right place. I’m sure President Biden cared a lot about the suffer of Gaza, about the humanitarian situation. He was shocked, as many others in the world, from what Israel is doing there. But in the same time, he supplied all the weapons and ammunitions to commit all those crimes.
So, I really don’t know. If you want someone to stop a war, do you supply him with more arms and more ammunition? I don’t know this kind of logic. If President Biden would have really liked to put an end to this war, he could have done it within days by stopping or at least conditioning — conditioning — the supply of arms and ammunition to Israel. He didn’t do it. He was far of doing it. And therefore, all the other requests, the condemnations, remarks are totally hollow.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s put that in our last question to Yonatan Zeigen: The significance of the U.S. in leading to a ceasefire, and what President Biden has done, what he should do at this point?
YONATAN ZEIGEN: I think the United States and the international community, in general, plays a crucial role. They were actively enabling our status quo here before, and they are actively enabling the war now. And it’s rooted in the web of interests that was spun for years. And I think the administration has to create a new web of interests that does not rely on weapons and military, but on economy and tourism and trade routes. And I expected the Biden administration and the international community to establish a new international alliance that has authority to give us incentives, and to inflict sanctions if we continue on the wrong path, and to join hands with players on the ground, civil society in Israel and Palestine, to create a new roadmap and to incentivize political actors on both sides to understand that we need to tell a new story in the Middle East, one of peace and not of war.
AMY GOODMAN: Yonatan Zeigen, Israeli peace activist, a social worker, mediator, son of the renowned Canadian Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7th in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, where she lived. And Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist and Haaretz columnist, member of the Haaretz editorial board — both speaking to us from Tel Aviv.
