In 2006 Israel imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip, which meant that food and goods would be allowed in but only enough to keep people alive, not enough that they could thrive. This was to put pressure on the population to submit. The population has refused to submit. They have tried various means, including military means, to resist. Now they are using Gandhian unarmed protest, which American liberals have called for for years. It has been very effective from a public relations standpoint, but it hasn't changed Israel's policy at all. Israel is still maintaining its demographic borders through force. The logic behind that is not security, it is demographic maintenance.
DB: So the strategy is to make it impossible to survive and so the only thing you want to do is either hide or leave.
MB: Or simply stay in your hole. In East Jerusalem, where Israel actually seeks to take over, the policy is to force people to leave. They have a law called the "Center of Life Policy," where people who are Palestinian have to continually prove that they live there. And if, for example, Palestinians spend too much time in the West Bank, they lose their residency.
There is another law to keep people from Gaza and the West Bank out of Jerusalem and out of Israel, where 20% of the population are Palestinians. That's called the Citizenship and Entry Law. It blocks people who have residency in Gaza or the West Bank from marrying people who are citizens of Israel. The point is to prevent a growth of the Palestinian population within Israel.
There are a whole set of laws aimed at demographic engineering which people don't really know about in the West, but which represent the foundation of apartheid. They are absolutely undemocratic.
DB: Some of the people who fought against apartheid in South Africa say that the situation is worse now for Palestinians. I have to think of that stage in the movement when Gandhi went to South Africa during the resistance to the pass laws. People had decided that they were going to put their bodies on the line.
MB: This has been going on for years and years in the West Bank against the separation wall. But you have to understand that across the Palestinian population there is a deep desire to engage in this kind of resistance. In the Gaza Strip people have been trying to do these protests every Friday against the wall and the siege. Now, for the first time, Hamas simply let them.
In the past, Hamas had actually been breaking up some of these protests to keep the border stable and to show that it was a good governor. This is an expression of the authentic desire of the Palestinian people to resist, to show its face for the first time. The Israeli military apparatus is deeply worried. They have actually advocated assassinating leaders of the protest.
DB: How about assassinating people who are marked clearly as journalists?
MB: We lost Yaser Murtaja, a founder of one of Gaza's most important press agencies, iMedia. These are some of the bravest journalists in the world, who get the shots that Western journalists can't get. Murtaja was widely respected outside Gaza though he had never been able to leave.
After he was shot on site by an Israeli sniper, in the stomach below his vest that was marked "press," Israel came out and labeled him a Hamas spy with absolutely zero evidence. And The Washington Post reprinted that allegation in a headline. Why would The Washington Post give any credence to that, even as just an allegation?
DB: You have written that "US policy on Israel/Palestine is almost entirely controlled by two elements in Washington, the pro-Israeli lobby and the arms industry."
Then you have the arms industry, who Trump holds up as job creators, especially in the swing states. A lot of those jobs come from US loans to Israel, which now total $4 billion a year. Those loans go straight back into Texas, Colorado, Ohio to pay for the weapons that are shipped to Israel.
MB: The pro-Israel lobby is the second most powerful lobby in Washington, after the NRA. It is responsible for funding campaigns on both sides of the aisle down to the state level. A lot of the politicians without a strong donor base can easily make a few pro-Israel statements and pledge to sign on to whatever AIPAC wants them to do, and money will start flowing in through various family foundations and donors. Kamala Harris is a perfect example. She shows up at AIPAC and makes a series of ridiculously pandering statements about how she used to raise money for Israel as a little kid.
Israel actually has a tacit agreement with the United States not to produce any major weapons platforms of its own. The US will punish Israel if they attempt to produce their own jets. Israel must buy US F-15's and F-16's. They must buy from US companies to receive US loans. So basically the arms industry and its lobbying apparatus are pushing for these multi-billion dollar loan packages to Israel along with the Israel lobby. And where do the weapons fall? They fall on apartment blocks in the Gaza Strip, and could be falling on Lebanon pretty soon.
DB: You were just in the Gaza Strip. Could you describe what daily life is like now for the people there?
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