Intent to destroy all or part of a group is required to meet the criteria of genocide, and Israeli officials have made their intentions towards the people of Gaza explicitly clear, says Phyllis Bennis. In this discussion of her new book, Understanding Palestine & Israel, she explains how other recognized genocides have been defined, the influence of the Holocaust and its aftermath on Zionism and Jewish identity, and why the ceasefire movement indicates a change in the movement for Palestinian rights.
Transcript
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. Iâm Marc Steiner. Itâs 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 weâre 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. Sheâs 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. Itâs good to see you. Good to have you back with us again.
Phyllis Bennis:
Great to be with you, mark. Itâs good to be back with the real news
Marc Steiner:
And maybe one day weâll 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, Iâm interested in how you did this book just very quickly because itâs so huge and thorough and obviously well-written. But I mean, it covers so much territory, it the history of whatâs 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 Cheaterâs version is, itâs 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 canât keep doing this partly because itâs 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 wasnât going to be to just do a bunch of new questions. So this book is really quite different. Thereâs 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 wouldâve 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 didnât 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, thatâs 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 didnât really have any of the political background, didnât 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 didnât 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? Whatâs the context of that? So thatâs what this book is for. Itâs 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 whatâs 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 wasnât 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 thatâs the starting point when weâre 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:
Didnât, didnât either.
Phyllis Bennis:
Turns out that there were, and they immediately said, within days within, it was just over a week. Weâre not sure yet. Thereâs 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 thatâs the context. Now, why was it so difficult and why is it important? Itâs 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 donât 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 itâs kind of designed for confusion. Itâs designed for only the most elite lawyers to really know what theyâre talking about. This one is really pretty straightforward. It basically says thereâs 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 donât actually have to kill anybody if you create the conditions that a group of people somewhere canât exist anymore because youâve destroyed their housing, youâve poisoned their water, youâve 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 thatâs 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 itâs important to understand that there is this very specific criteria for what makes something genocide, and it doesnât 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, itâs always been very hard to prove the case of genocide. Usually itâs not hard to prove the actions. The harder part is to prove the intention. How do you prove whatâs in somebodyâs 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 weâre 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 whatâs 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 canât kill them. Theyâre sleeping. This is a village of old people and women and children, and we promised them protection. We canât 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 thatâs what made it genocide. So the point of using the point of fighting for people to recognize it is not just because itâs a horrifying thing and you want people to be horrified. People are horrified enough seeing what it looks like, but itâs 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 wasnât visible like this. We werenât seeing it on our televisions. There was no social media, there were no computers in peopleâs 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 didnât want to call it a genocide was not because it wasnât 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, youâve got to do something
Marc Steiner:
Thinking about the way you put this book together. Itâs 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 itâs 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. Youâre 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 itâs 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 wasnât 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 didnât want to go to some desert country and spend time digging up the land. That wasnât the first choice. But the US didnât 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 donât like Jews, but theyâre also probably all communists.
Marc Steiner:
Exactly
Phyllis Bennis:
Right. So the combination meant that they couldnât 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 itâs not surprising that people went there, and itâs 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 donât belong here. Youâre 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. Youâre not really Russian, youâre not really something else. Youâre really Jews. You donât 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? Weâve 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 itâs 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 itâs 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 werenât 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 wasnât part of the origin of the state that made that possible. The origin of the state, and this is the other part thatâs important that most people donât 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 didnât quite sit right. Being a good Jewish girl, I went to my fatherâs library and read Herzl, and he had Herzlâs diary, and I read Herzlâs 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. Iâm interested in this little piece of Arabia. You are concerned about Englishmen, Iâm 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 wonât 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, thatâs 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 wasnât 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 youâve 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 wouldâve sat with Palestinians live in the United States, now theyâre not in Israel anymore. So Iâm curious where you think this moment takes us.
Phyllis Bennis:
Yeah, itâs a really important question mark and a good one. I think that what weâre 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, Iâve 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. Iâll 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 itâs also true that it is way better than it ever has been before. People were like, no, thatâs not true. That canât 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 itâs, itâs also important because when you look at it online, you go straight to News International, middle East, Israel,
Right to it, and you donât see everything else that you might not read the article, but you at least see the headlines whatâs 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. Itâs 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 childrenâs 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 wouldâve 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 wasnât 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 wasnât in the opinion section. Here it is. And I passed it around for people to look at because people couldnât see it because the press is still really bad. It uses different kind of language. Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Palestinians die, passive voice. Theyâre not killed by anybody, they just die. So thereâs a lot of huge problems here, but we have to look at what has changed. And I think that is extraordinary. What we havenât, to come back to your question, what we havenât done yet, and weâre starting to, but we havenât done enough, is to change the political discourse to actually change the policy.
And here what weâre 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. Thatâs not enough to pass. But weâve never had anything close to that number of people signing on to cutting aid to Israel military aid. The other thing thatâs important is recognizing the now massive divide between the electeds, particularly in the Democratic party. Itâs 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%, weâve never been close to that. 77% of Democrats say no more aid to Israel. Thatâs 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 isnât going to buy them the votes they need to stay in office. So thatâs where we are right now. The other side of it, thatâs the good news, is that weâve 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 donât 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 weâve 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 theyâll 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 donât have enough time for Palestinians to survive that time. It will take for that to happen.
Marc Steiner:
Youâve written so much in this book and youâve said so much today. The question I would have before we maybe have to break, and thereâs so much more to say thatâs in your book we havenât even gotten to yet, that politically youâve 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 Iâm 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 Trumpâs 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 whatâs happening in Israel Palestine now and the utter destruction and slaughter taking place in Gaza, what do you think this takes us?
Phyllis Bennis:
Thereâs only one thing that Iâm sure of in a period of profound uncertainty. The one thing that Iâm 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 canât 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 Floydâs 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 thereâs choices. The Youth wing of Jewish Voice for peace. For instance, the organization Iâm very proud to work with has, I think itâs 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 thatâs 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 donât know. Some have fled. Too many have died. Too many are still buried under the rubble. We donât even know how many. We donât 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 weâre 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 wasnât 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 havenât 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 Iâve 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 donât know about you, but Iâve 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 canât 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 canât 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 canât do our job of getting you reelected if you hold onto this policy. Iâve never seen anything like that.
Marc Steiner:
No, right. Itâs 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 didnât 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 didnât 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 thereâs lots of reasons why you didnât 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 didnât 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 wasnât. 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 didnât 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 donât 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 youâve been saying in the time weâve had the other day, it earths a little bit more and weâll have to come back and do some more and maybe even talk more about the book. The book. Itâs 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 didnât, 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 Emmaâs, so you can find in any bookstores in Baltimore. Theyâre here or wherever youâre 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 thereâs much more to talk about, much more to do, and thank you for all your work as well.
Phyllis Bennis:
Thank you, mark. Itâs been a pleasure.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Phyllis Bennis for joining us today, and weâll 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 Iâll 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, Iâm Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
