Kall: then the Anti-Defamation League is coming back hard against it
Hedges: yeah, I wouldn't feel comfortable using that word. I think it's better to speak in terms of legality. You know, if you look at Richard Faulk the UN special reporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories - a former Princeton law professor - he denounced, and this was before the invasion and bombing of Gaza - he denounced what was happening to the Palestinians in Gaza - a crime against humanity - he noted that under international law, collective punishment of a people such as the Palestinians in Gaza is a violation of international humanitarian laws laid down in article 33 of the fourth Geneva Convention, and he even went on to ask the international criminal Court to investigate what's happening in Gaza and to determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders, while responsible for the siege, should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international law. I think that is the kind of language we should speak - I don't think it’s helpful to use terms – number one, I don't think it's true that this is a holocaust, but I don't think that it's helpful to get off into that very emotional and amorphous debate. The debate is what does international law say, that is happening in Gaza, and I think it's very clear that what it says is that Israel is in violation of international law.
Kall: okay. I wanted to talk to you about Nizar Rayan - how do you see the name?
Hedges: Rayan - yep?
Kall: Nizar Rayan was killed in a bomb attack along with his four wives and 11 children. This is a guy who you wrote about - we just reprinted the article, it was originally on - what was the site? Truth dig - we just republish it on op-ed news.com - with your permission. Thank you. This guy blows my mind, this is a guy who sent his son to become a suicide bomber and what you write about in this article is how his other children wanted to be suicide bombers - even his two and four-year-olds. Before I read your article, I was thinking and speaking to some people about how can it ever be any kind of peacemaking with somebody with that kind of mentality. How could he ever compromise, which is what it takes to make peace. And yet, what you write in your article makes it so clear how radicalized these people are, how desperate they are - they have nothing, they have no hope. How does this - what are the steps? Could he ever have been capable of negotiating peace?
Hedges: no, but the point is to take away popular support for figures like Rayan and make sure popular support empowers other figures
Kall: how does that get done?
Hedges: Well, hope - you use the word hope. That's key - when you have no hope, the only way left to affirm yourself is through death - which is essentially the only route open to young males, and often now females in Gaza. People who have no work, no jobs, they’re trapped - they can't leave, they have no travel documents, they're sleeping ten to a floor.
The only sort of way that they see their life being celebrated is to become a Shahid, become a martyr in the day that they become a Shahid, Hamas will put posters with their pictures up on the walls in their refugee camps or in their neighborhoods. And these are poster size photographs and they’re always the same - it's usually a young man holding a weapon in front of a gold topped al aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. They're all studio photos they were all taken before their death.
The gun was a prop - the mosque was just a backdrop. The only thing that was real in those photos was the yearning for these young people to fight against Israel and for a Palestinian state - and to die. And for that moment, at least until the pictures are pasted over or fade away or peel away, those slain youths have, in their minds eye, a purpose for their very brief life and their heroism recognized. And I think that the way to blunt that is to offer these people over ways to affirm themselves.
As long as Israel continues with its current policy, people like Nizar Rayan are going to be empowered. And you know, I think, I tried to write the piece, in such a way that it was clear that I find most all of the tactics of Hamas, morally repugnant - yet at the same time, I want people to understand, or I tried when I wrote it to help people understand what it is that went into creating a Rayan.
Now to understand is not to excuse and I don't excuse. But unless we have that capacity for empathy, unless we have the capacity to understand how somebody comes to a point where they are willing to sacrifice their own life and as you said the life of their children, we're not going to be able to blunt this movement.
If you look at and I did in the article right about the history of the family - is his grandfather, his great-uncle were killed in the 1948 war that led to the establishment of Israel. They lost their home - his grandmother died shortly after. Rhyon’s father was an orphan, he was passed around among family members and this was of course and 1948 when 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in a very deliberate policy by Jewish militias.
Rhyon himself spent 12 years in an Israeli jail. His brother blew himself up as a suicide bomber on an Israeli bus in 1988. One of his other brothers was shot in a street protest by Israeli soldiers five years before that. And another brother was expelled to Lebanon, and you know, it's like family abuse. So when you batter the grandfather, the father, you end up with a Hamas figure - with someone like Rhyon
Kall: well let's talk about Hamas. Is there any hope that peace can be made with Hamas?
Hedges: well, I first went to the middle east, Yasir Arafat was sort of the terrorist du jour. Everybody said you could never talk to the PLO. They're just terrorist killers, and let's not sugarcoat the PLO – they’re engaged in many despicable and disgusting acts but not only against Israeli civilians, but against Americans as well.
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