Pruebas 2

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

Brad Lander (NYC Comptroller):  These buildings have ceased to be courthouses. They are not places where judges are having hearings that are a meaningful part of the rule of law. These buildings are essentially abduction traps.

[TEXT]  On May 29, 2025, journalists gained access to film in the hallways of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the Ted Weiss Federal Building in lower Manhattan.

Both buildings contain multiple immigration courts open to the public

Dan Goldman (US Representative D-NY):  They are now literally arresting people who are coming to court, who are following the law, who are doing things the right way. These are the exact opposite of convicted criminals and worst of the worst that Donald Trump said he was going to deport. These are people doing it the right way.

[TEXT]  Hundreds have been detained, deported, and disappeared to other cities or other countries.

Dan Goldman (US Representative D-NY):  This is gestapo-like behavior, where plainclothes officers wearing masks are terrorizing immigrants who are doing the right thing by going to court, following up on their immigration proceedings, and trying to come into this country lawfully, which is through asylum.

Speaker 1:  You have the right to remain silent.

[Repeats in Spanish].

Speaker 2:  [Speaking Spanish] No, please… My dad…

Speaker 3:  [Shouting] Where’s my son? Where’s my son?

Speaker 4:  You guys ask people to do it the legal way, they do it, and this is how you treat them.

Speaker 5:  What’s your fucking family say about you? You fucking Nazi.

[Inaudible].

Speaker 6:  Yo, get the fuck off me! I’m American!

Masked Border Patrol Officer:  I can put my hands up, too [obscures camera].

Camera Operator 1:  Yeah, you can.

[TEXT]  Early on, agents did not wear tactical gear.

Few agents would identify themselves.

Camera Operator 2:  Can you guys identify yourself, please?

Plainclothes Officer 1:  I’m with the FBI.

Camera Operator 2:  And your name is?

Plainclothes Officer 1:  I decline to answer that, but we just have to do what we have to do and then we’ll be out of the way.

Speaker 7:  The judge has trampled on his rights.

Plainclothes Officer 2:  I apologize. But you have to talk to somebody at 26 Federal Plaza. We’re just following orders, ma’am.

Speaker 7:  There’s no one who…

Camera Operator 2:  Just following orders? Are you with the FBI as well?

Speaker 7:  Can I get your name?

Masked Plainclothes Officer 1:  I don’t have to answer that.

Speaker 7:  Can I get your supervisor and what department you’re from?

Speaker 8:  We need to close the door. Excuse me.

[TEXT]  Activists and court observers were also allowed in these public spaces.

They would later be restricted from being in the hallways.

No cameras are allowed inside the waiting rooms or courtrooms.

Speaker 9:  Excuse me. Excuse me.

Speaker 5:  [Inaudible] fucking ashamed. Jesus fucking Christ.

Speaker 4:  Shame on you. Shame, shame, shame.

Speaker 5:  Fuck you, fucking Nazi.

Speaker 4:  Shame.

Speaker 5:  You are a Nazi.

Speaker 4:  Shame on you. This is disgusting. Shame. [Camera shutters clicking].

Speaker 5:  Move me out of the way. I’m an American citizen.

Plainclothes Officer 2:  You are impeding arrest.

Speaker 5:  Move me.

Plainclothes Officer 2:  You are impeding arrest.

Speaker 5:  Move me. Move me.

Speaker 4:  Shame, shame, shame.

Speaker 5:  Fucking fascists.

Do you tell your mom you’re a Nazi? Did you dream about this when you were fucking growing up? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Speaker 4:  Who are you? Who are you? I don’t know who you are.

Speaker 5:  What’s your fucking family say about you? You fucking Nazi. Fucking SS, that’s who you are.

Speaker 4:  I don’t know who you are. Why are you [inaudible].

Speaker 5:  Fucking Nazi. Take your mask off you fucking coward. Take it off. Take it off.

Speaker 10:  [Inaudible]

Speaker 11:  Fucking abominations of people.

Speaker 5:  Fuck you. Nazi! Fuck you!

[Slams fists on door].

[TEXT]  Being undocumented in America is not a criminal offence.

It is a civil violation — Just like a speeding ticket.

The courts are the sanctioned process to determine asylum eligibility.

Agents often ignore a judge’s ruling and make arrests anyway.

Brad Lander (NYC Comptroller):  The judge just granted every one of the people that’s about to leave this courtroom a continuance until Nov. 4, 2026. She advised every one of them of their right to have their cases heard in person, to be able to tell their stories. She asked them if they feared persecution, that they are entitled to have lawyers. She told them that they would have a list of the lawyers that might be provided free or low cost, although I’m told it hasn’t been updated since 2023, even though the city and the state are providing a lot of resources for lawyers.

So anyone that [inaudible] God, including these families, they are violating the Convention Against Torture, and they are certainly violating Judge Adams’ very well-described rights.

Speaker 12:  There’s a baby. There’s a baby, guys [crosstalk].

Officer 1:  Make a hole —

Speaker 13:  Not in the courtroom. Not in the courtroom. Not in the courtroom.

Masked Officer:  No pictures in the courtroom.

Speaker 12:  Guys —

Masked Officer:  No pictures of the courtroom.

Speaker 12:  Just hold him on the side, right here.

No photograph inside the courtroom.

Masked Officer:  Make a hole! Make a hole!

Hey, just take them, just take them, just take them. We’ll come find you.

[Crosstalk].

Speaker 12:  It doesn’t matter their identity, it doesn’t matter who they are, you don’t even know —

Camera Operator 3:  I got your back, I got your back.

Speaker 14:  Sir, what country are you from?

Speaker 1:  You don’t have to show documents. You have the right to remain silent [Spanish].

Masked Officer:  Make a hole! Make a hole now! Make a hole now!

Speaker 15:  Here we go.

Out of the door.

Masked Officer:  Make a hole now! Out of the damn way!

[TEXT]  “…70.3% held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction … Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”

– Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Sept. 2, 2025.

Speaker 16:  Why is he being detained?

Speaker 17:  What is the reason for his detainment?

Is the reason for detaining him, has he done anything? Has he broken any laws?

Speaker 16:  He has another court date. He has another court date. He’s been released by the judge.

Speaker 17:  His court date is set for next May. Why is he being detained?

[TEXT]  Detained immigrants are taken to the 10th floor and sometimes held for weeks.

Despite legal precedent, politicians have been denied entry into those rooms.

In August 2025, a leaked video exposed serious issues in the 10th floor holding cells, including overcrowding, poor sanitation, lack of medical care, [and] limited legal access.

Speaker 18:  …I’m sure you’re following federal orders.

Speaker 19:  Who’s out there?

Speaker 20:  Don’t open the door.

Speaker 21:  I got you. Who’s out there?

Speaker 19:  Press.

Speaker 21:  OK.

Julia Salazar (New York State Senator):  And elected officials.

Speaker 22:  Why won’t you open the door?

Speaker 23:  State elected officials and city elected officials.

Speaker 24:  Please do open the door.

Julia Salazar (New York State Senator):  We’re just asking to observe.

Emily Gallagher (New York State Representative):  It’s our right as elected officials to observe the conditions our constituents are in.

Jessica González-Rojas (New York State Rep.):  We’re happy to wait as long as you need us to wait.

Robert Carroll (New York State Representative):  Court proceedings can’t be fair if they’re done in the dark.

Emily Gallagher (New York State Representative):  Yeah. A federal judge ruled yesterday that no one should be detained up here and that we should be able to enter.

Gustavo Rivera (New York State Senator):  And since we know the folks are here, we just want to observe their conditions. That’s all.

[TEXT]  After an hour-long standoff, Homeland Security arrested the 11 elected lawmakers.

Crowd:  We want justice for our people!

Officer 2:  Back up! If you impede, you will be placed under arrest!

Crowd:  We want justice for our neighbors!

Officer 3:  On that side, please. On that side.

Crowd:  One! Two! A little bit louder! Three!

Officer 2:  Make a hole! If you impede, you will be placed under arrest!

Speaker 25:  Five!

Photojournalist:  Violence…

[Camera shutters clicking].

Masked Officer:  Move, move, move!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 2:  Keep walking, guys. Come on, keep going. Keep walking. Keep walking. Come on.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 3:  Move out of the way!

Speaker 26:  [Speaking Spanish].

Benjamin Remy, Esq.:  That was an asylum-seeker from Venezuela. He was given his final hearing, and unfortunately, he was grabbed as soon as he left the room, so there will be no due process for this man. He’ll be shipped out somewhere across the country to a detention facility and he’ll have to start essentially from scratch.

Camera operator 4:  Stand back. It’s a pregnant woman.

Speaker 27:  Thank you.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 4:  Clear a path, please.

More space, more space, more space.

[To the press] Get out of the fucking way! You do that one more fucking time, I’ll fucking arrest you.

Allison Cutler, Esq.:  And I said that to them. I was like, she is pregnant and you’re detaining her. She’s in her final trimester, obviously, she’s incredibly pregnant, and you’re detaining her anyway. You can cause a miscarriage doing that.

The pregnant women really get me.

Speaker 28:  Oh, honey.

Allison Cutler, Esq.:  Because we had a client whose wife suffered a miscarriage after she witnessed him being detained.

Speaker 29:  I remember that, yeah.

Allison Cutler, Esq.:  And so you could literally cause a miscarriage at this point.

Speaker 30:  Do you know the nationality?

Allison Cutler, Esq.:  [Shakes head “no”].

I told them she’s pregnant. She’s obviously extremely pregnant. I told the client to tell him what medication she…

[TEXT]  The White House has directed that people can be deported to countries they’re not from.

Speaker 31:  [Spanish] Please, please, no.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 5:  Out the way!

[Speaking Spanish].

Speaker 31:  [Crying].

[TEXT]  Naturalization ceremonies are held in the same building.

“Overall, immigration courthouse arrests have been nearly 14 times as common in New York City than the country as a whole. They made up 7% of all ICE arrests in the city since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 through June, compared to 0.5% nationally over the same period of time.”

– “NYC Is the Nation’s Capital of Immigration Courthouse Arrests, New Data Analysis Shows” by Haidee Chu and Gwynne Hogan THE CITY, Aug. 11, 2025.

Protests outside the buildings while court is in session have become common.

Protesters:  No ICE! No KKK, no fascist USA!

No ICE! No KKK, no fascist USA!

No ICE! No KKK, no fascist USA!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 4:  We’re ICE, OK? You’re being detained.

Officer 4:  Back up, back up, back up. Back up!

Officer 3:  Everyone, get back!

Speaker 32:  But you don’t have beds here?

Speaker 33:  We do not have beds here.

Protesters:  [Singing “Amazing Grace”] I once was lost…

[Chanting].

Officer 5:  You will be placed under arrest and charged with disorderly conduct.

Chant Leader:  How do you spell “kidnappers?”

Protesters:  I-C-E!

Jumaane Williams (New York City Public Advocate):  It’s possible that the 4-year-old daughter would be taken and the mom would be left.

Officer 5:  Please make a hole.

Speaker 34:  Watch the water fountain, guys, behind you.

Speaker 35:  Help, help —

Protesters:  [Yelling].

Masked Plainclothes Officer 6:  I’ll explain everything to you in a minute.

Detained Man:  [Spanish] Thank you very much.

Speaker 36:  Don’t try to push my hand. This is as far as you go.

[TEXT]  On Sept. 9, 2025, the Supreme Court lifted a ruling preventing ICE from targeting people without probable cause in Los Angeles.

Critics say the ruling allows “blatant racial profiling.”

Profiling has been observed in the NYC court hallways since May 29, 2025.

Speaker 38:  Get the fuck off me! I know my rights! You guys are harassing me!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 7:  Get back, get back, get back.

Speaker 6:  You’re harassing me! Stop harassing me! I’m American, motherfuckers! Get the fuck off me!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 7:  I understand. Go ahead, bro.

Speaker 6:  Stop touching me! Don’t touch me, nigga! I know my rights! Yo, get the fuck off me! I’m American!

This is a fucking public building!

[Crosstalk]

Fuck you!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 7:  Go that way! Get out of here! Get out of here!

Speaker 6:  Don’t touch me! Stop touching me!

[Crosstalk]

A public building!

[Crosstalk]

Excuse me, I got to get my stuff. Excuse me. Excuse me. Good boy.

Where’s my stuff at? Y’all threw it on the floor, huh?

Masked Plainclothes Officer 7:  Well, you — [Crosstalk].

Speaker 6:  …Move out of people’s way, huh? Y’all want to harass everybody in the fucking world. Y’all got nothing else better to do?

You touching me, sir.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  You’re touching me.

Speaker 6:  You’re touching my butt.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  You’re touching me. [Crosstalk].

Touching your butt? You should be so lucky.

Speaker 6:  Oh?

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  You should be so lucky.

Speaker 6:  I got five kids, homie, I don’t need it.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  Sure seems like it. You should be at home taking care of your kids.

Speaker 6:  And I do take care of my kids. What do you do for a living, harass people?

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  Yeah.

Speaker 6:  All right, that’s what I thought.

I dislike you for what the fuck you do, and I bet you $100 million your dumbass family’s not even from here! We all come from somewhere, you stupid motherfucker.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  Being racist.

Speaker 6:  Yeah, I’m not racist. You’re the racist one for touching me! Your men harassed me! Your men harassed me! Your men harassed me! That dumbass agent nigga that’s not even American harassed me. And his stupid ass! Your fucking ancestors came here, fucking shit!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 8:  [Inaudible].

Speaker 6:  Yeah, yeah, get mad, big boy! You can’t touch me, nigga, I’m American!

Masked Plainclothes Officer 9:  Where’s security? Are we able to get him out of here?

Speaker 6:  Security, no. I’m not done, sir.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 9:  Are we able to get him out of here?

Speaker 6:  I’m not done, sir. Excuse me, I got to go do paperwork.

Masked Painclothes Officer 10:  You’re done, you’re done.

Speaker 6:  Sir, I got to go talk to the lady.

Masked Painclothes Officer 10:  Not right now.

Speaker 6:  This is a public building.

Just do better. I pray for you. I hope to God he helps you and blesses you, and your life, and your family, and forgives you for your job, forgives you for everything that you did wrong [camera shutters clicking]. I pray to God he forgives you, I really do, and I forgive you. I forgive you for doing this to me today in front of all these people and cameras. I forgive you, and I pray for you. I pray for you, bro.

[TEXT]  Masked agents stormed a courtroom when a scared asylum seeker ran back into court.

A judge had just granted him a continuance for 2027.

The agents arrested him anyway.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 11:  Make a hole, make a hole, make a hole. Make a hole.

Masked Plainclothes Officer 4:  Get out the way! Get out the way!

Speaker 39:  Uh-oh.

Speaker 40:  [Crying].

[Handcuffs closing].

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in the World News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this as we open our program today. Somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 people have been buried under the rubble and Gaza and killed the majority of women and children. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed. Over 1.2 million people face starvation and seemingly nothing is being done to end this massacre. Many of the most profound voices and leaders of the fight against the war in Gaza are members of the Jewish community who say not in our name. And today we’re joined by Phyllis Benni. She directs the Institute for Policy Studies New internationalism project that focuses on Middle East, particularly Palestinian rights, US militarism and un issues. She’s also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Most recently spent six years on the Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, and her most recent book is Understanding Palestine in Israel. Phyllis, welcome back. It’s good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.

Phyllis Bennis:

Great to be with you, mark. It’s good to be back with the real news

Marc Steiner:

And maybe one day we’ll have a conversation of some good news

Phyllis Bennis:

In SHA as they say. If

Marc Steiner:

So, the book you just wrote, I mean, I’m interested in how you did this book just very quickly because it’s so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of what’s happened between Palestine, Israel to where we are now and why, and the analysis it runs all through it.

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, thanks for that. The Cheater’s version is, it’s based on an earlier book, but it is a very different new book. I did a series of small primers on different Middle East issues, one of which was on Israel Palestine.

And that one went through seven new updates over the years. It was done as FAQs, so it was in a sense like a website disguised as a book we might say. And every time the print edition ran out, it was four or 5,000 copies each time before printing a new one, we would add a bunch of new questions. So it got to be very messy and very disorganized and whatever. And this time around, this could have been the eighth version of that, but I sort of said, we can’t keep doing this partly because it’s a mess and hard to follow, hard to read, but also because this is a different moment.

The reality of genocide made things different. We had to do something different. There was an entirely new constituency who needed some version of this, and I knew it wasn’t going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. There’s a lot more narrative sections to it, a longer introduction forward by a Palestinian analyst, much longer analysis of the current situation. But it included a lot of the questions from the earlier one as well, rewritten, updated, but still there. So it was partly designed for what we might call the ceasefire movement,

Speaker 3:

This

Phyllis Bennis:

Extraordinary rise of people who showed up, not because the existing Palestinian rights movement was completely responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people for the first time. I mean, that would’ve been great. We were responsible for some of it,

But the rest of it was a very spontaneous reaction of people, a human reaction to what they were seeing on their phones day after day, on their screens, on their computers, on their televisions, in the radio, in the newspapers. And people were saying, this is not okay, whatever I used to think, or maybe I didn’t ever really think about Israel Palestine before, but now this is not okay. And as people came to see that it was not only not okay that children were being burned alive in their tents in front of the world, but that we were writing the checks for it, that we were sending the bombs, that we were sending the planes, more and more people said, that’s not okay. We need a ceasefire. We need a permanent ceasefire right now. And that movement was kind of extraordinary because it was based on a lot of people who didn’t really have any of the political background, didn’t know the history, but were responding as human beings and also the students, the incredible students who had organized these encampments on campuses across the country and were doing teach-ins within the encampments. They were doing Passover seders because there were so many Jewish kids within those encampments, but they also didn’t really have a chance to learn a lot of the history either. So the book is also for them, when you say settler colonialism, what does that really mean? What’s the context of that? So that’s what this book is for. It’s for all those different people.

Marc Steiner:

A couple of things you said I want to explore a bit, and one is this argument over the word genocide and why you say that what’s happening at this moment by the Israelis towards the Palestinians is genocide?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, let me say one note in advance, comparing this to what it took to normalize the issue of using the word apartheid to describe Israeli actions

Against the Palestinians. The debate over that, which was not a debate for either South Africans or Palestinians for many, many people understood that well, but for the rest of the world, and particularly the western world and most especially for the United States, that was a very contentious notion. And the debate over that question began back around thousand 2001 and a very long time ago, and it wasn’t really until 20 years had gone by that we were able to normalize that with the production of these massive reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and BET sem and Ash Dean and all these other organizations around the world, parts of the United Nations started saying that what Israel is doing is in violation of the international covenant for the punishment and prevention of the crime of apartheid. So that’s the starting point when we’re talking about genocide. It took less than 20 days to normalize it, partly because the association, 800 Scholars of Genocide and the Holocaust who even knew that there was an organization of Holocaust scholars, I

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t, didn’t either.

Phyllis Bennis:

Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. We’re not sure yet. There’s not enough evidence yet, but we think this is genocide. And just a couple of months ago, they issued their final report saying, there is no question. This is genocide. So that’s the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? It’s difficult, I think because people think that the word genocide refers only to the Holocaust and that it has to look like massive levels of industrial sized killing

Of people. What people don’t usually know is that the Genocide Convention that was passed back in 1948 and signed by almost every member of the United Nations, almost every country is a party to it. It was a very specific outline of what genocide meant. So it was easier to understand actually than a lot of other parts of international law where it’s kind of designed for confusion. It’s designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what they’re talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says there’s two things that have to happen for some act of violence to be considered genocide. Number one, there has to be an intention, a specific intention to destroy all or part of a group. As a group. You don’t actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere can’t exist anymore because you’ve destroyed their housing, you’ve poisoned their water, you’ve denied them access to electricity, all those things, and people are forced to either leave or they get killed or something else.

That could be genocide, that could be the intent to commit genocide if that’s your intention. So intention is the first thing that your goal is to destroy a group as a group. Then the second point is there has to be at least one of five identified acts of violence that you commit against that group so it can killing members of the group. It can include causing serious physical or mental injury to the group. It can include creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to survive. It can include making it impossible for children to be born in the group, and it can include transferring children from the group to some other group

If you commit any one of those things and have the intention to destroy the group that makes it genocide. So it’s important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the Holocaust. Thankfully, that has not happened again with that kind of wholesale slaughter all at one time. But what we are seeing in Gaza is at least four of those five actions and the words of Israeli officials themselves has made clear their intention. Mark. Historically, it’s always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually it’s not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove what’s in somebody’s mind? Well, this time, that was really easy. What the South African team put forward when they brought up their case before the International Court of Justice was based entirely on what Israeli officials had said publicly in Knesset meetings to the meeting.

And we’re talking about the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, a host of Knesset members, poets, musicians, leading intellectuals, all of them using language that said, there are no innocent people in Gaza. We are going to kill them all. They are like rats that need to be killed. This kind of language. When I first started hearing these remarks early on in the period right after the attacks of October 7th, it sounded too familiar because it sounded like the language from the Indian wars in this country back in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties. There was one in particular in what’s known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right.

Phyllis Bennis:

You know about this. The commander who happened to be a Methodist minister, interestingly enough, ordered his troops to attack a sleeping village on the shores of Sand Creek, and his name was John Chivington. And some of the soldiers who were sent out as scouts came back and said, we can’t kill them. They’re sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We can’t just kill them. And his answer was, knits, make lice kill them all, including the children.

This was the language we were hearing from the Israeli Knesset, and that’s what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because it’s a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but it’s to make clear that there needs to be accountability. The Genocide Convention requires things of not only the perpetrator who it requires to stop it, but it requires those who have signed the genocide Convention like the United States, like most of the world, to do whatever they can to stop it. So for example, you and I are old enough to remember back in 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda was going

Marc Steiner:

On. Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

It wasn’t visible like this. We weren’t seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in people’s homes, but people did know about it. Everybody at the UN knew about it. The Clinton administration,

Marc Steiner:

They all knew I covered it long distance exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

As well. But the reason they didn’t want to call it a genocide was not because it wasn’t horrifying enough, it was because if they did, they would be obligated to do something about it and they were not prepared to do it. That was the thing that made it different, plus the fact that now people all around the world were seeing it and demanding of their own governments, you’ve got to do something

Marc Steiner:

Thinking about the way you put this book together. It’s very thorough, no stone left unturned, deep analysis all the way through historical analysis. And one of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading it was how does this happen? How do the oppressed become the oppressor? I mean, every time I turned a page, you wrote something that popped in my head again, and it’s something that I really have been wrestling with a lot. And your book maybe take a deeper dive into it. What are your thoughts?

Phyllis Bennis:

Well, this is a complicated question. You’re talking about Israel and Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right,

Phyllis Bennis:

As the oppressed

Marc Steiner:

And Jews

Phyllis Bennis:

And Jews, and some of that is true, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Zionism, the call for creating a Jewish dominated state in what was then an Arab land of Palestine had been a minority position in the Jewish community worldwide from its origins in the 1890s, right up through World War ii. And it took the Holocaust and its aftermath to make Zionism a majority position.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Phyllis Bennis:

And it wasn’t even the Holocaust alone. It was the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jews who had either escaped the Holocaust or had survived the Holocaust somehow, who were indeed a people without a land, they were not going to a land without a people. They were going to a populated land that had an indigenous population that had been there for centuries where they wanted to go mostly was not there. They mostly wanted to come to the United States because they had family there, but they wanted to go for many, it was to go to the UK where they might also have family. These were also mainly by this time, they were mainly city dwellers. They were urban people, they were educated. They were not farmers, they were not peasants like my grandfather who came from Russia way before the Holocaust. They were not that. They didn’t want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasn’t the first choice. But the US didn’t let them in because of the combination of antisemitism and anti-communist. There was this assumption that all of these Jews are not only bad people, we don’t like Jews, but they’re also probably all communists.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Right. So the combination meant that they couldn’t mostly get into the United States. So Israel, as it was in the form, in its formative years, became the only real place that they could find a home. So it’s not surprising that people went there, and it’s not surprising that for Jews who already were in other places around the world, took on the campaigning for it and said, yes, this is what we need to survive in this new world. The opposition to Zionism in the past had really been rooted in this understanding. For example, in Russia, during the time of the pogroms, the time when my grandfather did come, what you had were Russian nationals attacking Jewish villages, Jewish towns,

And it was incredibly violent, destroying the towns, burning down Jewish shops, killing Jewish men, raping Jewish women. It was a horrific set of years of these kinds of attacks. And the first call of these people was, get out, get out. You don’t belong here. You’re not really Russian, get out. And for many Jews who survived the Groms, what happened later was that Zionist organizers would come and say, you should come with us. You’re not really Russian, you’re not really something else. You’re really Jews. You don’t belong here. You should come with us to this new country. They were saying the same thing as these antisemitic mists, and the answer for many of them was, why should we have to leave here? We’ve lived here for centuries. Our graves are here, our families are here. We speak this language. So it was a very difficult challenge to encourage people to take it up in Israel, including today, the majority of Israelis are not descended from survivors of the Holocaust.

So I think it’s always a dicey proposition to sort of position Israelis as historic victims. Some Jews certainly are historic victims, and some of them ended up in Israel, but it’s not a where you had an entire population that ended up there, all of whom were faced with this. The Mizrahi Jews, for instance, did not go through the Holocaust at all in the way that European Jews did. They weren’t driven there until much, much later when there were antisemitic attacks and some of their countries, some of them were made up, but most of them it did happen, and they ended up leaving and going to this new

Marc Steiner:

Jewish,

Phyllis Bennis:

But it wasn’t part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part that’s important that most people don’t have a chance to learn, is that the people who created the idea of Zionism, the founder of modern Zionism for Theodore Herzl, who famously wrote this book, the Jewish State,

Speaker 3:

Which

Phyllis Bennis:

Outlined this idea to begin with, but he also wrote diaries and published diaries. When I was a kid, when I was growing up, Jewish kid, very heavy duty Zionist, I was going to be what we used to call a professional Jew. I worked for the Jewish Centers Association, all that stuff, and I was going to do that as my career. But then when I went off to college, I sort of put all that aside, got involved in Vietnam and other things, and at some point when something came back and sort of slapped me upside the face and said, you got to look at this Middle East stuff again.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, right. I thought,

Phyllis Bennis:

I think maybe I was wrong about this Israel stuff. Something just didn’t quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my father’s library and read Herzl, and he had Herzl’s diary, and I read Herzl’s diary and I read the news that Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British colonialist for whom Zimbabwe used to be named Rhodesia

Marc Steiner:

Exactly

Phyllis Bennis:

Writes to Cecil Rhodes, and he says, you might wonder why am I asking you for support? He was trying to get Cecil Rhodes to endorse this project of a Jewish state in Palestine to get the king to endorse this and make it a project of the British Empire. And he says, you may wonder why am I coming to you? You are interested in Africa. I’m interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, I’m concerned about Jews. So why am I asking you?

And then he answers his own question and he says, because our projects are both something colonial. And I read that and said, oh, well, I won’t say on radio what I said, but you can imagine. I said, oh dear, I was way wrong about this. And it was sort of, okay, well that makes sense. I had been studying colonialism, studying imperialism, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s what that was. And the rest was mostly propaganda after a very real crisis of the Holocaust. No question. But seeing that as the solution was a very, very propaganda driven response

Marc Steiner:

When we were younger, we all kind of were enamored by that. In 67, I actually tried to join the Israeli army in the midst of my anti-war work because of the war in 67.

Phyllis Bennis:

That was the moment that everything changed in the us. I was a

Marc Steiner:

Kid,

Phyllis Bennis:

Got a few years on me. I was one of the kids running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl at the giant fundraiser Hollywood held for beleaguered Israel in the 67 war. But that was the moment aside from us kids with our bucket of cash and checks that we were running up and down collecting. That was the moment in the six day war that the Pentagon looked at Israel differently and said, we can do business with these people. These guys are good. There was a lot of propaganda that wasn’t true about that war, that little beleaguered. Israel was invaded by six Arab armies. Not true, but there were at least two Arab armies that were really fighting against Israel. Israel bested them very quickly and very well. They had a very well-trained army. It was small, but they had all the best weapons in the world, provided mainly by France and Czechoslovakia, both sides of the Cold War.

And the Pentagon looked at this and said, wow, these guys are good. We could maybe do something here. And that began the collaboration between the Pentagon and the Israeli military that continues to this day as the bedrock of that so-called special relationship. So that was really one of the consequences, perhaps along with the Israeli occupation of so much Arab land of all of the rest of Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula. But it was also the creation of this special relationship with the US that came out of the six day War. So it was a very momentous moment.

Marc Steiner:

I wonder how all that you’ve written in this book and looking at the history and why we are where we are, and we found ourselves in this moment where just before we went into studio tape, Donald Trump made some pretty horrendous statements about Israel and Palestinians and what could come next given the real politic of our country at the moment where the right wing is in power and the right wing is in power in Israel, as I often say, most of the Israelis who would’ve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now they’re not in Israel anymore. So I’m curious where you think this moment takes us.

Phyllis Bennis:

Yeah, it’s a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what we’re seeing right now is the extraordinary confluence of two very contradictory realities. On the one hand, those of us who have worked on Palestinian rights for many, many years, for more decades than I like to think have always, yeah, I’ve always focused on changing the discourse, changing the narrative in this country based on the idea that when you get people to understand things differently, that creates a new popular understanding, a new public discourse, a new kind of narrative that begins to influence the media coverage. And over time, the media coverage is transformed and eventually you get to the hardest part, which is the political discourse, enough of a shift to actually change the policy. So that was our theory of change, if you will, for all these many years. What we have seen in these last two years has been an extraordinary explosive transformation of the public discourse and an absolutely enormous change in the media discourse.

As bad as the mainstream media still is, and it is still terrible in a whole host of ways. It is night and day beyond what it ever was in the past. I’ll take a little diversion for a moment. I was speaking not too long ago at a series of events in Albany and Syracuse, that area, and at one of the events, there was a question about the media. Why is the media so bad? Why is the media so terrible? What can we do about it? Should we boycott all the mass media? And I said, look, it is terrible. And it’s also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, that’s not true. That can’t be true. And I pulled out a couple of examples. I still get the print editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, partly because they have comics, but also so do I. But it’s, it’s also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,

Right to it, and you don’t see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines what’s being talked about, which I find very important. So I started clipping again like I used to before the internet. And I had among other things, the day about, I guess it was about three or four weeks ago that the number of people killed by Israeli assault in Gaza, that was known, that was made up just of the people where we know their name, their birthdate and their ID number had hit 60,000. It’s now of course over 67,000, but the day it hit 60,000 big front page article in the New York Times, the jump piece was a, I dunno, page five or six, whatever it was. And the article finished on the jump and below it was a graph showing the ages how many children of each age group, from zero to one, one to two, two to three, three to four, all the way up to 18, the numbers in graph form. Then the other two columns began in tiny little two or three point type. You could barely read in Arabic and in Transliterate English, the name and age of all the children

That had been killed column after column. And at the bottom of that first page, it went to the next page. That was the entire of column after column after column of children’s names. And at the bottom of the last column of that second page, it said, these names represent 18% of the children who have been killed

To run. The rest of them would’ve taken five more pages. It was stunning. It was a stunning piece of journalism. And somebody from the audience called out, but that was an ad somebody took in the paper, sorry, this wasn’t the times, this was the post. This was in the Washington Post. And I said, no, this was a front page article, a news article. It wasn’t in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldn’t see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. They’re not killed by anybody, they just die. So there’s a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we haven’t, to come back to your question, what we haven’t done yet, and we’re starting to, but we haven’t done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.

And here what we’re seeing, I mean we did have 50 members of the house now have signed on to the block, the bomb bill, that would stop several of the key components that Israel is using militarily to assault Gaza. It would stop them from being sent. That’s not enough to pass. But we’ve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing that’s important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. It’s true among Republicans, but not nearly as dramatically. The continuing support for aid to Israel, shipping off the arms to Israel, all of that, and the position of the base of the Democratic party of whom 77%, we’ve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. That’s unprecedented. And I think at some point, political operatives are going to have to start recognizing that gap that they will not stay in power.

Whatever money they get from APAC is not going to be enough to buy votes. When 77% of people are saying one thing and their leadership and their existing members are saying the opposite, that money isn’t going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So that’s where we are right now. The other side of it, that’s the good news, is that we’ve seen this incredible shift in the discourse at every level. The problem is all of those shifts mean we are in the middle of a medium to long-term shift and we don’t have a medium term to survive. Because the other part of it is that for these almost two years, the situation in Gaza has gotten so horrific that we’ve were on the verge of losing an entire generation of children to a lack of education, lack of sufficient food, lack of ability to grow into a normal adulthood because they’ll be stunted. 20% of the people, of the children of Gaza were being stunted in 2018, according to the United States, way before this genocide started, they were already in the then 12th year of a boycott of a blockade. So this is the challenge that we face. The shifts that are underway will work to change the policy, but we don’t have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve written so much in this book and you’ve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and there’s so much more to say that’s in your book we haven’t even gotten to yet, that politically you’ve been at this game of analysis and writing for a long time, looking at our politics here, looking at the Middle East and more. So I’m really interested to hear what your analysis is about where you think this takes us in this country and beyond. We see at this moment Trump’s rhetoric about Israel and Palestine, which is just horrendous, and that the force of the right taking hold in this country more than it has in our lifetime ever. And given what’s happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?

Phyllis Bennis:

There’s only one thing that I’m sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that I’m certain of is that building a movement for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, which is what we are now facing, has to be central to the movement against fascism and authoritarianism. That we can’t any longer separate them. Those movements have to be linked and in a very powerful way. That was similar to what happened in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd sparked what became a global, but was especially a US movement, unprecedented a movement against police violence and for black freedom

And for a generation of young people who came of age at that moment, some of them in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the similar, the Rise of Black Matter at that time. But then particularly in 2020 with George Floyd’s killing, we had young people coming of age saying, my identity now is wrapped up with being part of a movement for justice. The movement for social justice is what defines me. This was particularly not more powerfully, but particularly evident just because it was such a giant leap away from the past among young Jews who in the past had grown up saying that identification with Israel is my identity as a Jew, when you and I were growing up, that was sort of all there was there. If you identified as Jewish, which most Jews did, you identified with Israel. That was kind of the deal.

And now there’s choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization I’m very proud to work with has, I think it’s about 70 or 80 campus chapters. The encampments had thousands of Jewish students as part of the encampments, identifying their own life, their own Jewish identity, their identity as people of this country, their identities as people, as human beings was wrapped up with Palestinian rights as the moral issue of their time. In the same way that in 2020, the question of racial justice became the moral issue of their time. People speak of the justice generation, which started around 2020 and is now central to this notion of the young people who have made the issue of Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights crucial to their identity in the context of social justice. So that’s what we are facing right now, the challenges.

Can we bring those change identities, those changing understandings to a political reality, to change the policy, most especially to change the policy of providing the weapons that enable this genocide? Can we do that in time to survive, to see the survival of at least most of the maybe 2 million people that are still surviving In Gaza, Gaza had a population of 2.3 million. About a hundred thousand have fled to other countries. The other 200,000, we don’t know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We don’t even know how many. We don’t know how many. What gives me a little bit of hope, mark, in this really hopeless

Speaker 3:

Time

Phyllis Bennis:

Is that we saw already in this ceasefire movement that I described earlier, this somewhat spontaneous, somewhat organized movement of people that came into being within the first weeks of this genocide, came out into the streets and huge numbers, 400,000 on one day in Washington dc, tens of thousands in cities across the country, and continuing on and on demanding an immediate ceasefire. And it did two things that in some ways the Palestinian rights movement itself had never really done very effectively. Number one was to stay on message, a kind of message discipline, which was cease fire. Now, that was the call. But the other thing which seems somewhat contradictory to that was that that movement managed to redefine what ceasefire meant. So immediate ceasefire quickly became immediate and permanent ceasefire is what we’re demanding. And then it was an immediate and permanent ceasefire that has to include three things.

Number one, the obvious thing, stop killing people with your bombs and your tanks and your planes and your bullets. Stop killing people. Number two, allow in unlimited amounts of food and water and medicine and all the things that had been denied, allow unah to work. Allow the trucks to come in, stop keeping out what it takes to survive. That was number two, and that had to be part of the ceasefire. And number three, perhaps the most important for those of us in this country, stop sending the weapons. So those three parts became the definition of the ceasefire we are calling for. It wasn’t just a pause long enough to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners and then go back to war. It had to include these things. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that kind of a ceasefire yet. But that has been the demand. And when you have that breadth of people supporting it, people all across the country seeing for the first time, and I’ve been involved as you have been in lots of different movements from Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, central America, the Iraq war, anti-war movement, Afghanistan, all these

Speaker 3:

Movements.

Phyllis Bennis:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the kind of breadth of politically motivated resignations of people who worked for the federal government that we saw this time around.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely right.

Phyllis Bennis:

Everyone from the thousand plus people at U-S-A-I-D 500 or more at the State Department, not who resigned, but who came out in protest, I think five or six resigned, and others resigned from the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You had the White House interns, right? The most ambitious kids in the country who came out and said, we are not the leaders of today, but we strive to be the leaders of tomorrow and we can’t do it. Mr. President, this was addressed to the guy who became known as genocide. Joe addressed to President Biden. This was not even about Trump to say, we can’t do it when you hold this policy, the staff of the Biden, a presidential campaign in 2024, before he stepped down, they wrote a public letter saying, we can’t do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. I’ve never seen anything like that.

Marc Steiner:

No, right. It’s unprecedented

Phyllis Bennis:

Policy. The poll that was taken in April of this year, April of 2025, when people were actually trying to find out why didn’t Kamala Harris win what was really going on there? And what they did was to poll a very specific group of voters, voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Biden in 2024. Meaning they either voted for Trump or they voted for members of Congress but didn’t vote for President, or they voted for an alternative. A third party voted for the Greens or somebody else, or they voted for Mickey Bounce or they voted for Gaza. And the question was, we know there’s lots of reasons why you didn’t vote for the Democrat, for the heir of Biden, but you did vote for him the time before. What was the most important reason you didn’t this time? I assumed it would be the economy.

The economy was second. The first was Gaza. I was shocked. I was sure it had to be wrong, but it wasn’t. It was right. 29% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said the reason was they refused to stop sending the weapons to Gaza, that they refused to whatever part it was the people who didn’t like what happened at the DNC when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker even to have a presence for a moment on the stage. All of that led to them losing the election. Whether that was the only reason for the election, I don’t know, but we do know it was the largest single reason that people abandoned the presidential tier of the Democratic Party ticket.

Marc Steiner:

So everything you’ve been saying in the time we’ve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and we’ll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. It’s a wonderful book.

Phyllis Bennis:

People, if you can see the book, the second printing, which is going to have an index, which the first one didn’t, is going to be out in a couple of weeks. People can get the second printing. The first printing is gone, but the book will be available and it can be ordered now.

Marc Steiner:

It is an important book to read and to wrestle with. And I bought my copyright here in Baltimore. Read Emma’s, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. They’re here or wherever you’re listening to us from in San Diego, Vancouver, wherever you are. And I want to thank you so much, Phyllis, for joining us again today, and I look forward to continue this conversation. And there’s much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.

Phyllis Bennis:

Thank you, mark. It’s been a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to her work. Thanks to David Hebdon for running our program today, and Steven Frank for editing the program as well as Producer Rut Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you liked us to cover. Just write to me ats@theo.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Phyllis Pennis for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.