How Palestinian resistance defeated Israel with Ali Abunimah & Jon Elmer | EI Podcast

[Music] that there is a capability in gaza to build very significant underground uh structures and assets that israel will never be able to reach the electoral identifier the electronic anti-father the electronic in the father this friedman with aso and stanley and this is the electronic intifada podcast we are gathered today to talk about what's been happening the last few days on the ground in gaza the west bank and historic palestine today we're recording on may 20th um and joined by ali abunimah our executive director and john elmer who's a researcher and my co-host at the brief podcast um john and ali thanks for being with us today thank you for having me thanks for having me back nora um ali let's begin uh with you let's let's talk about the last few days the last few nights of attacks um over 230 palestinians have been killed in hundreds of airstrikes by israel um give us your sense of what's been happening and um yeah just just your observations over the last few days yeah well as we're speaking there's a report that a ceasefire is imminent uh perhaps within a day or within hours or two days i think it can't come soon enough for people in gaza who have been under horrific bombardment for now 10 days a bombardment which has targeted specifically targeted civilians there have been massacres as we reported the electronic intifada 14 families have been essentially wiped out in gaza um the vast majority of the dead are civilians and more than 1700 people have been injured and there has been systematic israeli targeting of civilian infrastructure high-rise residential buildings private homes businesses banks clinics just you know everything that is essential to life and that is not an accident that is not so-called collateral damage it is the israeli strategy uh the so-called dahia doctrine that they developed uh or first rolled out let's say on lebanon in 2006 when they deliberately destroyed the southern suburb of beirut and the logic is that you know we're going to inflict so much pain and suffering on the population at large that no one will ever dare resist us again or at least for a very long time and that is because i mean i think cruelty has always been the kind of doctrine of zionism the iron wall is jabatinsky the spiritual uh father of the likud party and of benjamin netanyahu's ideology and of zionism generally you know you have to be cruel enough to the arabs that they understand that there's no point fighting against the zionist state but also i think it's because there are really no so-called military targets in gaza this is an asymmetrical conflict or battle we're talking about a 21st century military armed by the united states and the european union on the one hand and basically a guerrilla army a resistance movement on the other hand that doesn't have big stationary military targets that doesn't have big military bases or you know columns of tanks or warplanes so um that's why israel its only strategy to try to sear into the consciousness of palestinians that there's no point resisting is to attack uh the civilian population just as the united states did in the vietnam war uh just as uh you know all colonial regimes do you inflict suffering on on the on the population of the hope of demoralizing them and getting them to turn away from resistance now what i want to say about the ceasefire if if and when it comes is that what's significant is it will come with israel having achieved nothing except death and destruction as i always say if uh if winning a war means killing you know massacring men women and children then israel is always the winner and always the world champion but if it means changing the strategic equation if it means increasing the legitimacy of zionism if it means uh defeating palestinian resistance and and making palestinians kneel and accept that they just have to live under zionist rule then israel is always the loser and it has lost again and the final sort of opening observation i'll make is that i think the palestinian cause emerges from this horror and it is horror uh first of all having paid a terribly high price in civilian lives but one that clearly palestinians in palestine were willing to pay in the sense that any colonized people you know if you look at algeria a million and a half people died in that war to free the country from french rule because once a colonized occupied people makes a decision to free itself that decision is really irrevocable and and they are prepared to pay a high price and what we've seen here um is that we also emerge with palestinian consciousness enhanced pan-palestinian consciousness across historic palestine this is the first time in decades or perhaps ever that israel is in a sense forced to confront palestinians on three fronts at the same time palestinians in gaza resisting militarily palestinians in the west bank resisting against occupation forces and palestinians across israel within you know the 1948 boundaries of israel resisting against the racist state like never before and the israeli strategy for controlling the palestinians has always been based on the colonial tactic of divide and rule fragmentation if if israel can deal with gaza by itself it can deal with the west bank by itself it can perhaps deal with the palestinians within israel by itself but i think it's a significant change in the strategic equation if all palestinians across palestine are in revolt and in uh active resistance at the same time yeah i mean the the mayor the israeli mayor of lid um called for another it was he basically said it was a national emergency and and insisted that netanyahu bring the military forces in um to the city to quell palestinian uprising um i mean yeah has this um i mean this is really israel's worst nightmare in many ways um and it doesn't seem like the resistance uh is is being quelled well israel made a strategic miscalculation and this is against you know let's look at the regional political context less than a year ago there was really a triumphalist tone among in israel and its allies in the region in the united states that the palestinian cause was dead that the palestinian people were isolated that it was a losing struggle and that the pal and that israel had succeeded in imposing a reality on the palestinians that they could do nothing about and that's why we saw arab regimes like the united arab emirates and bahrain and morocco coming out into the open with their long-standing relationships with israel signing the so-called abraham accords and of course all that was backed more or less openly by saudi arabia and really the only question was when will saudi arabia officially join the party um you know is it going to be you know right away or you know in six months time so there was this air of triumphalism and they celebrated their marriage to israel over what they all thought was the dead body of the palestinian cause so this uh revolt this uprising this uh resistance is really a rude awakening for israel the united states and its clients in the region and it really does change the strategic equation on a number of levels and i think it it deals a severe blow to the trend of normalization it reestablishes the palestinian cause as really the central cause in the and it uh explodes the fantasy that i think many of the arab regimes but also the americans europeans and israelis had that the palestinian the palestinians can just be dealt with by so-called conflict management a little bit of economic aid and string them along with a fake peace process but they really can't upset the strategic equation which was about creating a american-backed regional alliance to confront iran and to you know destroy any states in the region that could resist you know u.s israeli hegemony and i think that that we are really dealing with a new situation i want to bring john into this uh john you lived in gaza for many years during the second intifada and um you've been researching the um you know equipment and technology of resistance factions especially in gaza um can you give us a sense of of what you've been noticing in terms of the you know the the rockets and and technology and um and the and the strategy of uh resistance factions in gaza yeah i mean as far as the rockets go there's more of them they're going further they're deadlier they're being used more tactically effectively to go around the iron domes this is something that's been developing in gaza for a long time and it goes back to i mean really it goes back to the late 80s when israel walled off the gaza strip in the first place during the so-called peace process but particularly since 2005 when the israelis pulled out of gaza and left gazans with a ghetto uh an unlivable ghetto according to the united nations but a piece of property a piece of land a base of operations and they took advantage of that and have built uh an indigenous production system for developing weaponry they've um dedicated considerable attention to taking what for 20 years before was a like a series of armed groups and bringing them all under one banner in a joint operations room not competing with each other but working together you know the 2014 war was all about israel telling us that they had been fighting terror all these years right and that was the war 2014 where they said no we're fighting an army now we've put together an army ahmadjabri who was the head of qasam at the time was assassinated just before ceasefire negotiations long-term ceasefire negotiations were taking place before the 2012 war so the idea of ceasefires is and the and the resistance and the ability for a ceasefire to hold one another one of the developments that's happened is that um hamas's politburo is in control of yahya sinwar who was a founding member of hamas and was the leader of the prisoners in jail he was released in the shalit exchange and he went to gaza in 28 2016 i guess it was and uh he ran for leadership of the polyp bureau in hamas and was elected so the leadership in hamas is in the gaza strip is a kasam based leadership it puts the primacy of the armed struggle in the movement in the top position of the politburo that's an important thing when it comes down to a ceasefire because if we're talking about a ceasefire for like a week or two and then fighting again if you're talking about a ceasefire that's gonna hold israel needs to have legitimate authority uh accepted authority on the ground for the palestinians this idea of 30 years of collaborators who have no legitimacy who you know who only answer to israel those ceasefires have no meaning but when you have a situation with a proper military leadership that's been built since the 1980s we only see it every five years or whatever when this happens but this capacity is what forces israel into these positions of well first of all it forces them into the positions of massacres because they can't deal with the resistance face to face so they massacre people like shoujayi right was they attempted to invade shijayi in 2014 they got like 100 meters got smoked stopped turned around and just laid the place to waste so that's the dynamic that uh palestinians these massacres are punitive and they're also a symbol that they can't get at what they're trying to strike the last war and the period in between we were told so much about tunnels the tunnels where they were going to come out of the tunnels and they were going to attack israeli settlements the israelis went around the entire edge of the gaza strip poking holes trying to find tunnels there's been nothing of that this time the anti-tank missiles have kept the israelis away from the border where they used to be for years and years and years we used to always see the like associated press footage right with the israelis standing beside their tanks on the border with gaza doing like praying or sitting on the cannons and you could see tanks all around islamic jihad released a video yesterday a drone video that showed that there was nobody anywhere near the borders in gaza i mean you guys covered it as well as anybody in the mart the great marches in gaza the soldiers would line up on those berms on the edge and just shoot into the into the ghetto killing people those berms are not manned right now and there's nobody around um the border of gaza and that kind of situation is forces israel's hand they don't have a way to achieve in the like whatever neo-liberal you know definitions of achieve a victory of a colonial war and hamas and islamic jihad can fire rockets for months and months and months this is not they're not in a rush obviously the carnage in gaza is terrible but the carnage doesn't make people weak need in gaza it does the exact opposite and i think you guys have seen it all around the unity and the unity that came from um you know i gaza was isolated that was israel's strategy isolate gaza when all that stuff happened at the at al-aqsa and all the ramadan shenanigans that israel was pulling off and then once they actually got violent about it people in the west bank right asked for a response a unified response from the national movement and they got it and the same with 48 it's a big deal what happened in 48 those though the seeds of those uprisings are those are strategic issues for israel they're not things that go away with a ceasefire i was i was talking about this last night on uh uh five pillars program which is a british muslim website um and uh you know i mean it is just a reality that the palestinian armed resistance in the gaza strip its capabilities have become increasingly sophisticated since over the years i mean we saw it in 2014 um you know you read max blumenthal's book the 51 day war um about the 20 2014 massacre which um to me was the definitive uh book about it about that war um and he gets into that like what exactly you were talking about there jonah that um the israelis could not invade you know whereas it you know during uh the second intifada they were able to invade at least parts of the west bank and god street um or we invade um they weren't they weren't able to get you know barely a foot into the gods strip and they just had to pull out and as you said just level entire neighborhoods vindictively flatten them to the ground so i mean i think you know it just it does show the only thing that the israeli military is really skilled at doing is killing civilians um and um yeah i mean i think there are still people in the solidarity movement who talk about the the rockets from gaza being firecrackers and i i just don't think it's true you know i mean i think um that's palestinian resistance and and and this is what we've seen in uh latest israeli aggression is that um that the they've been hesitating you know this is why they've not been able to invade we've seen reports you know there was rumors deliberately circulated by the israeli army to the press that they had already they implied they already they'd already invaded last week they'd already invaded the goddess strip whereas they they hadn't at all and it was just that was a yeah that was supposedly a ruse to try to draw hamas into uh you know this underground tunnel network uh that the israelis say exists near the borders and then to try and bomb the tunnels and collapse them on top but i just want to you know say if i can if i can say something yeah um you know i don't think it's the goal of hamas to kill israelis you know that's the the propaganda element of of israel um and the western media it is the goal of israel to kill palestinians and they do it very effectively i think it's it's israel's goal to kill as many palestinians as they can get away with in other words to make it look as if they're not trying to kill palestinians while killing them uh in order to exact this high price on palestinians but look at what palestinian resistance groups have done this time around you know last time in 2014 it was a big deal when israel was forced to shut down ben gurion airport like for a few hours or for a day it's been shut down for a week now you know it's been shut down since the beginning world airlines have cancelled their flights and it may be the fa it may be because of the pandemic that you know that's less shocking that it would have other be otherwise been because we're so used to you know international travel being shut down now in a way we weren't in 2014 but nonetheless this came at a time when you know israel was celebrating its vaccination campaign and re-emerging and reopening international travel and business and it's been shut down and that costs you know an advanced economy like israel a massive amount i you know i don't know what these are based on but i've seen reports saying you know it's costing israel a billion dollars a day that doesn't seem uh unreasonable to me when you think of an economy like israel's and the other thing i i just wanted to point to in response to to john's observations which i find always so fascinating and insightful is that i think israel's hubris and you know with this kind of triumphalist uh feeling that the palestinian cause is dead was that they could accelerate the ethnic cleansing of jerusalem and sheikh jarrah and silwan and the attacks on the al-aqsa mosque with total impunity because in the israeli mind jerusalem the palestinians in jerusalem were isolated that was 200 000 people who could do nothing against the israeli state they were cut off from the west bank they're cut off from gaza they're cut off from anyone else and so it was a major israeli strategic miscalculation to think that the resistance in gaza would not dare to respond from gaza to israel's actions in jerusalem and i i cannot emphasize enough how that also changes the equation uh israel will now have to consider that whatever it does to palestinians anywhere could result in you know six million israelis being in bomb shelters for a week at least yeah yeah john what's the significance also of um the concurrent um resumption of activities that were announced by some of the west bank military factions um factions that had been dormant for years especially as as the pa had worked in conjunction with israel to you know quash any sort of um resistance yeah i mean it's an interesting development like when we're talking ceasefires can there can hamas agree to a ceasefire while islamic jihad and the al-aqsa martyrs brigades are in gun fights in the west bank or more to the point the guns came out in the west bank in the last two days because israel started killing people with live ammunition and so those are yeah those are considerations that go into any ceasefire now and the legitimacy of the resistance is what will hold a ceasefire for palestinians you know in the way that israeli commentators can't understand why abbas couldn't just secure jerusalem right you have to have somebody who's got legitimacy on the ground in the population in question to hand out orders like a ceasefire in the middle of a war where your families are being massacred just one thing about the rockets the the rockets are not um the rockets are a product of the environment right they ghettoed they walled off these people in a ghetto that they can't get out they don't give them any kind of pass system to get in and out basically at all um making standoff weaponry was going to be obviously something that they would do it's not necessarily that it's a tactic you know that you would pick in any situation but to have it in the gaza strip just makes perfect logical sense and that's where the question of the west bank resistance comes in because we haven't seen yet resistance on this level armed struggle popular protest on this level in the west bank and since they walled off the so it's not entirely clear to me how the in the like next intifada in the west bank unfolds when people are in uh like what 16 mini ghettos mini gaza's around the west um is that fighting going to be through the pa is israel going to come into the west bank ghettos to fight there's a lot of questions that are questions that the israelis don't want to answer and that's the same thing i would say about the ground invasion ask an israeli soldier who fought in 2014 if he wants to be at the front of the line to go into gaza they have uh like a conscripted army right they're calling up reserves they're saying one of their original bluster was they're calling up reserves 9 000 people who are school teachers from monday to friday that's who they're calling up are those people gonna want to be the first to go into gaza like there are strategic things that have changed for the israeli army is the israeli army gonna go into lebanon i mean the same thing happened in lebanon in 2006 they tried a ground invasion they came up the hill and were stopped in their tracks turned around went back down and then they if you'll remember shelled and cluster bombed all those areas that they couldn't go in on the ground to so there's there's history with this there's always history with this and remember just uh was uh i think yesterday as we as we're speaking netanyahu summoned all the foreign ambassadors to an auditorium in order to justify this massacre that's going on in gaza and he he actually said you know there's two strategies with gaza one is deterrence which is what we're doing now which you know means kill men women and children and until palestinians until the natives get it into their heads that there's no point resisting and the other is conquering gaza and he's and he said that's not off the table so that was reported as you know a threat to uh launch a ground invasion and but to me that came off precisely as you said john as bluster and desperation because israel is unable to achieve uh what it it wants to achieve which is you know the defeat and submission of the the palestinians through this this bombardment and earlier when israel had threatened the ground invasion or making made uh you know motions towards a ground invasion like moving troops around gaza or or authorizing the call-up of reserves the kassam brigades actually made the statement and i think sarah al-quran islamic jihad's military wing made a similar statement saying you know come on do it i think hassam said you invading gaza is our shortest route to victory and i think it's very significant that there are no serious demands in israel even from the far right yeah of course there are the far far right people who say flattened gaza level gaza but there are really no credible calls from anyone in israel for a ground operation in gaza there would be a mutiny the army is not going in and fighting in a dense urban environment that has got a subway system of tunnels under it and i just i don't see it i mean we could always be proven wrong within an hour of making these kind of statements but i don't see i don't see a ground invasion as a possibility and i mean i think we can all hope for not having a ground invasion as it's a very costly thing but um yeah it the strategic dynamic has in the israel-palestine conflict and it's changed in the israel hezbollah conflict and there's those are factors that are real on the ground that just don't really get captured by the twitter debates or the new york times republishing israeli sources there's a dynamic around israel that israel knows and if you consider the uh extent of the disruption to israel uh you know just there have been reports in the israeli media that you know the psychological helplines like can't cope with the demand and you know there was a member of the knesset who said we have to provide emergency funding for psychological help because the israeli population is collectively having a nervous breakdown from you know what they're going through which is you know i'm i'm not going to say it's not frightening for people to be in this situation it's of course a tiny fraction of what palestinians in gaza are put through all the time not not even just now when the heavy bombing is going but um i think israelis know that what they're facing from gaza is still a fraction of what would happen in a full-scale wall full-scale uh conflict with hezbollah oh yeah oh yeah or a full-scale conflict with hamas i mean they've been developing for seven years since the last one islamic jihad and hamas and the joint operations room i mean there's all kinds of capabilities that we know they have that we haven't seen as much of we know that they have drones suicide drones capable they have autonomous submarines that we know about we have the entire frogman unit that we haven't heard anything about in part because israel's left their bases all around they've left them open they used to just sit like a massive parking lot outside of gaza used to look like a used car parking lot for tanks they would all muster there and now they're not there at all and the footage from the first day when they were doing all of the things that they normally do when a one of these flare up starts the first thing you see in israel is truck after truck flatbed truck carrying tanks down to the border well the tank didn't even get un unloaded off the truck and it got hit by a cornet the pictures of it on the back of the truck smoking and that was the last of their input of the normally dozens and dozens of tanks that they put in on the ground there's lots of little clues that israel is offering that um that they don't want the conflict and where you know the poking of the holes in the tunnels that they've been doing the nature of a tunnel is that it it has many entrances all through it that's the potency of the tunnel it's not just a straight line and so when you poke a spike on the border and you cut through a tunnel that somebody has dug with a hand trowel at great uh personal effect um those those tunnels uh you can't those tunnels can be rebuilt around the spike that goes in and interrupts it quite easily by just like just doing a little detour around it and you keep the exact s what the israelis are calling it a metro in canada we call it a subway but if you're talking about a massive system under the ground pin pricking one part of that system isn't ruining the system and maybe the border ability for them to come out and grab soldiers on the borders limited but a ground war the tunnels are under the entire ground war i just don't see it happening i i can uh confirm from my own experience when i went to gaza in 2013 the only time i've been able to go to we were able to go and visit tunnels on the rafa border now these were commercial tunnels they weren't military tunnels obviously but we still required you know these are not just open for anyone to go to and we weren't allowed to take pictures i was with other journalists and and people in gaza and it was incredible we were taken to one of the large tunnels that was like you have to imagine a very uh wide a vertical circular shaft with a platform a lift platform and at the ground level you go onto the platform and this this is a circular platform that you could park two cars on side by side and then it was like incredibly engineered there rails down the vertical shaft of the tunnel and then you know they pressed a button there was a warning horn so that you know a safety horn so that people would be away from the edges where the moving parts are and then we went down on this platform i don't know how exactly how far we went down but when you looked up like the sky was just a little hole and then there was a horizontal tunnel which would have been going straight through to egypt and that horizontal was uh just big enough to drive a car through you know it's not like a traffic tunnel size but you could drive a car through it and it had um lighting all the way and it had bracing so you know i think there was um steel steel in that particular tunnel there was like steel bracing and there was electricity running across across along it with lighting we walked a certain distance into it obviously not all the way to egypt but it was astounding if you had told me about this you know i'd heard stories about it but i thought these are sort of fanciful stories i would not have entirely believed it unless i'd seen it with my own eyes it was incredible and but that was a commercial tunnel now you have to imagine what is under the whole gaza strip and deep under the whole gaza strip in other words you know i'm not a military strategist but i can't imagine that you would put your most valuable assets uh right at the edge of the gaza strip you're gonna put that stuff uh you know deep deep under gaza and into gaza but what it told me what what it what i can infer from that is that there is a capability in gaza right and it's true and that's what they're doing and i mean they got it from hezbollah in 2006 that did that too it was not just that they had tunnels to access israeli troops it's that they had tunnels to protect their own troops that they had uh barracks underneath there so troops could never come and didn't have to come up um they have meeting rooms and um it's the capacity and the the directions and the understanding of the landscape from underneath it just turns everything that israel thought that it was doing with its like geospatial stuff just turns it on its head right they know where every building is they know where every floor is but there's this thing underneath the ground that i just it prevents i just think it prevents like when they're training can you imagine training for those tunnel operations like it's your turn like you go down check and see if where it ends like it's it's there's no good way of doing it and on the other hand the palestinians have the subway map they know where they can go to access everything at any moment when any attack comes in on the border i just think that the strategic calculus has changed too much and yeah and like what you were saying about the um about the summer holidays ali is super important because it's it's very important for israel to have this tourism industry it's very important for to for israel to have this be on um you know to not be interrupted and so what they did was they built they after the 2014 war where they couldn't have planes land they've been working on their airport at a lot to make it an international airport so that you won't interrupt the flow so then they did that and when whatever day it was last week thursday or whatever when the israelis said that they were not flying planes they were going to send them instead to alat um kasam pulled out their longest range rocket filed it filed a 250 kilometer rocket that puts a lot in range that was there you know like there didn't they didn't show at the beginning of the war like oh look at all the tools that we have you know the idea that we're hearing in the israeli media that like oh they knocked out entire uh you know cornet anti-tank missile units or that they're shutting down borders there's there's very little evidence of that it's very crude military disinformation i think and i think it is getting more more and more desperate and that that airport by the way i i've not been to to it but actually when you drive down as i did uh in was in 2019 in jordan down the dead sea road you you passed that airport because it's just on the other side of the border and it it looks like a terrible place to have an airport because on one side you know so on the west side a high mountains you know there's the there's high mountains that israel only has a narrow strip of flat land between the mountains and the jordanian border so on one side you have these high mountains and on the other side you have the jordanian border so when you're driving down the road in jordan you're you're just looking across at the israeli airport and they've built these very high walls around the airport it's very strange to that of an airport like you probably want an airport to be unobstructed but there are these very high walls around the airport to i i assume to kind of present to protect it from missile attacks or whatever so um it seems very um and i think it's named after isn't it named after the israeli astronaut who uh i have to check that but i think it's named after the israeli astronaut who died on the uh colombia the space shuttle but um yeah so it just doesn't seem very ideal to have the airport there nor really a fireball alternative uh to um you know ben gurin airport and then of course if they tried to put one in the north then you know you're you're well within the range of of lebanon so um i think i think you know i i think it's fascinating to you know we're not really used to thinking about israel as as i think for many years israel did convince people that it is invincible and invulnerable and what these conflagrations show us is is really it shows kind of the weaknesses and and the resistance in gaza have nothing but time to study israel's weaknesses yeah i think we're really seeing that with with the political response as well the media response is a sort of a new sense of desperation in the tone like as as we're filming this as we were filming this earlier uh gilad erdan the israeli ambassador to the united states and the u.n was speaking to the un general assembly and uh i i i i'm gonna have to you know see what he said exactly but i could see that he was holding up uh they were doing their usual trick of holding up the you know the placards and the illustrations in the un and he was holding up um he was trying first of all he was showing up a quote from the hamas's charter and secondly then he was showing a picture from inside what looked to me uh to be a picture from inside the al-aqsa mosque uh you know and he was trying to say essentially he was trying to say you know these were palestinian rioters and uh something along those sort of lines and to try and justify um israel's attacks on the al-aqsa mosque on worshipers during the holy month of ramadan and i've just seen like i mean this is i mean there's a point for both john and ali to uh address um like have you seen this sort of sense of desperateness from the israeli politicians and israeli propagandists where they're sort of saying like why don't you believe us you know i i saw also i saw a tweet um i think it was yesterday or the day before for one of the official israeli accounts i think it was the israeli army account um where it was putting a video um and talking about hamas and saying you know the usual sort of thing that is this terrorist organization and so forth and the uh the caption at the beginning said if you don't believe us then believe hamas when they say this so there's this real sense of like no one's listening to us you've seen that too i saw that and that struck me exactly the same way um but also another thing with that you know of course you know social media is important and you know it's it is mass media now so i don't think we can dismiss it but um it was interesting people were pointing out the contrast between the official at israel twitter account in arabic and the the one in english uh the one in arabic tweeted this just horrific thing they tweeted a verse from the quran over a picture of you know a building in gaza exploding to kind of taunt uh you know it was talking about the divine vengeance uh and it was it was really to taunt palestinians as they were killing them and to incite religious conflict and and war because i think israel thinks they benefit from this being seen as a religious war whereas the english account was tweeting like guys it's been a tough week for us but we love you thank you for all the support with lots of emojis so i can't remember who was on twitter who pointed out the contrast that there's this this you know religious fanaticism on one account and then tweeting like a hurt teenager on the other account and you just get the sense that israel is desperate is is just throwing everything out there and seeing what sticks you know um and i do sense a change that this that the the demonizing propaganda that israel relied on for so so long especially in the years right after 9 11 that you could reliably demonize muslims all you had to do is say look the name is islamic jihad what more do you need to know about them and people would immediately be on israel's side but that's not working anymore and um for you know given that ultimately you know as i point out uh south africa apartheid south africa was never militarily defeated you know it always uh retained immense uh domination over the anc or over the black population it could have massacred them at will and it did massacre them on on many occasions but it lost the legitimacy war it lost the propaganda war and once the regime loses any legitimacy then all the weapons in the world will really not help you and i really think that that is um the crisis israel is in you know as john is pointing out tanks are of no use in a situation like this you know you can have all the tanks in the world it doesn't help you in a uh battle for international and in fact it hurts you if you're seen as being this you know milit military occupier and colonizer that's just blasting the indigenous people it actually turns out to be worse so it's hard to predict uh obviously we can't we don't have a crystal ball but what we see i think in this past 10 days is really an intensification and confirmation of all of these trends we've been talking about that are not new but have been happening for years and i think now you know possibly reaching a tipping point i i do think that as a result of this bds is going to become mainstream in a way that it hasn't before um and i think that you know mainstream politicians are going to start and public figures and celebrities and so on are going to start endorsing boycott uh where they would not have dared to do so uh you know a few months ago i don't know if that's uh in your field of analysis uh john but i'd love to hear what you think about that too well i mean i think there's a lot of interesting things about the ceasefire because the 2014 ceasefire negotiations were um invalidated by israel so it'll be interesting to see with new leadership in hamas and this connection with the casamba gates in the top leadership positions how the blockade will factor into these negotiations because at this point with the west bank on fire 48 possibly rising up israel may not be the one to decide how this ceasefire goes and it was interesting i think to look to look to see towards the way that hamas deals with the blockade because when we say nothing changes from these wars a lot could change from these wars with very you know we don't have to have a whole political overthrow to have very significant improvements on life in gaza right and the blockade and i'm i'm curious to see how the 2014 failure to do that to failure to live up to that by israel will color um someone like yeah who's spent you know decades in israeli jails you know he had an interesting quote um the great marches from a couple years ago and he said they were like um when we were in imprisoned we did a hunger strike the hunger strike forced the israelis to negotiate that was the point of the hunger strike to to force a negotiation he said during the great return marches when people were walking to the lines and and and getting massacred he said this what you're seeing here is is a people calling for negotiations like uh people this is how we do it resisting with dignity with honor calling for negotiations so it is a different way that they see it and it's something that's definitely not going to be in our newspapers a lot but it i think it'll be an important factor on the ground because um you have people involved to now really have fought these struggles you know not that the previous leadership didn't of course they did but from israeli jail for your whole life you know sinhwar said that they they thought the jail was our graveyard but it was our academy now this is the guy who's coming out i i i think that the way he handles the ceasefire negotiations are going to be very very interesting and normally i would make jokes about ceasefires about how they last for two days and then we'll go another u.n meeting and we're gonna right but it's possible that that there's a new day in gaza i certainly hope so for the people that yeah no kidding um we only have and the blockade i mean that needs to be that that needs to be it's almost like it's gone on so long people forget that that is a thing that is you know on top of mind for everybody especially when we see all of these things that are being destroyed like the civilian infrastructure the civil infrastructure the libraries the hospitals the schools the blockade has to end it what has to come out of this is the is an end to the blockade i think that's a good place to leave it uh john elmer you're my colleague briefpodcast.com and ali abunimah you're our executive director at the electronic intifada um asa and stanley my co-host thank you all for being with us today on the electronic intifada podcast thank you thanks norah thank you thanks ali thanks asa thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our youtube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the youtube algorithm and it helps us to get around silicon valley censorship as much as possible it does make a difference you can also support our journalism by going to electronic interfarder.net and clicking on donate now thank you