Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights‘ Ahmad Abuznaid about the Rafah invasion for the May 10, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Beltway reporters have access to things others can’t see, but can they see things that aren’t there? That question was brought to mind by a May 8 piece by New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker, in which he interpreted Biden’s evident decision to “pause” delivery of certain types of bombs to Israel as “meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits.”
Israel’s plans to storm the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Baker explains, “have been a source of intense friction with the Biden administration for months.” That friction was evidently expressed in the unfettered delivery of weapons during those months, and the publicly expressed support for the catastrophic violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Palestinians, destroyed their homes and infrastructure, and denied their access to humanitarian aid.
Others, more focused on actions than vibes, saw this step as “overdue but necessary,” if it is part of some serious effort to condition any US support for Israel on ending the bloodshed.
Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ahmad Abuznaid.
Ahmad Abuznaid: Thank you, Janine. Thanks for having me.
JJ: An invasion of Rafah, we were told, would be an uncrossable “red line” for Biden, but luckily enough, a New York Times headline says, “Attack Not Seen as Full Invasion”—“seen as” being the kind of slippery language media use to suggest something they’d rather not say: that only some people’s definitions matter. What do we know about what’s happening in Rafah right now? Is it surprising, and why would we accept that it doesn’t amount to invasion?
AA: Well, we shouldn’t accept that assessment. Israelis have been saying they’re going to invade Rafah, no matter what. They said they would continue with their “mission,” no matter what. Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a speech and said, despite any pressures or response from outside forces or international forums, Israel will continue.
So I think what’s really the question here is whether President Biden issued his red line in actual red or in pencil. We’re going to find out, because technicalities as to how they view the invasion of Rafah aside, not only has it already occurred, but they’ve clearly made the statement again that they’re going to continue. So I think, really, the ball is in President Biden’s court. Will he continue to be bullied around and told what to do by Netanyahu, or will he act like he’s the president of the US, and call for an end?
JJ: Is the pause, as it’s been called—some people have been saying he stopped giving weapons; that’s not it. It’s been called a pause or a delay in the delivery of certain types of bombs. Is that meaningful? How meaningful is that?
AA: No, that’s not meaningful. And I’ll tell you why. Because in the last few months, there has been shipment after shipment after shipment to Israel. And so to now say that you would pause, or have paused, certain munitions is a little too little, too late. Israel may not, in fact, need what you paused in order to, again, conduct its invasion of Rafah.
So are you going to end the genocide, President Biden? That’s the central question. People aren’t asking for a pause right now. They’re asking for an end to the genocide, and an end to military weaponry to Israel. So it’s clear President Biden is still not reading the room.
JJ: Yeah, yeah. In general, it feels as though the options or the hopes are so tamped down. Ceasefire seems like the ultimate thing that we can call for, but ceasefire doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t put Gazans back in their destroyed homes. I mean, obviously, cease fire, but where would that fit in with what else needs to happen?
AA: Yeah, I mean, the ceasefire is the most immediate demand, and that’s why if President Biden had made this threat via weapons months ago, there literally may have been thousands of lives saved. And so the ceasefire is still the first and most urgent demand, because we’re trying to save lives.
The people of Rafah are not only facing, again, the incredibly brutal and violent genocidal assaults, they’re also facing forced starvation. There was this huge conversation around aid trucks beginning to increase, and now here we are again with aid trucks essentially coming to a halt. So the genocide is real, and that’s the first and most important demand in this moment.
Ahmad Abuznaid: “We need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again.”
But beyond that, after what the US taxpayer, after what the West, after what elected officials have witnessed, how can they continue to go back to the status quo of supporting the state of Israel, even if there’s a ceasefire? I would argue that it’s clear to most Americans at this point that the Israeli government cannot be trusted with our weapons. They’ve taken it so far at this point, with their genocidal conduct, there’s actually no turning back.
And so ceasefire fits in, again, prominently, because we need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again, and to make sure this can never happen again, that means that the state of Israel must not receive any more US arms, period. The US should no longer protect Israel at the International Criminal Court, period. The US should no longer protect the state of Israel at the International Court of Justice, period.
These are all ways that Israel deserves to be isolated in this moment. And, in fact, many countries are already taking that necessary step. We’ve seen Colombia, for instance, cease any relations with the state of Israel, and that’s what’s required of the world right now, especially of the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be one of those leaders of the “free world,” and supportive of people’s self-determination and calls for freedom and justice. If the US is truly that, this is the moment to show it.
And so we’re way beyond the ceasefire. We need a ceasefire immediately, but we need to see some divestment from the Israeli apartheid state, divestment from the genocidal state, and sanctions on the genocidal apartheid state.
JJ: There’s a feeling that the masks are off. Legislators in this country aren’t saying, as they supply Israel with money and bombs and political shielding and international bodies, they aren’t saying, “We hope for peace, but it’s hard. And Israel is our friend.” They’re now saying, “If you don’t full-throatedly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing project, you’re a terrorist supporter, which by the way means you’re a terrorist, and we will see that you are treated accordingly.”
That sentiment has always been there, of course, but it’s still shocking what people are now OK saying out loud–and doing, like HR6408, legislation to define pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist-supporting, and strip their tax exempt status. How are groups like US Campaign for Palestinian Rights responding to these very overt and meaningful legislative threats?
AA: Look, they’ve attempted to stifle BDS and criminalize boycotting of Israel. They’ve attempted to make people pay via loss of state-awarded contracts, and agreements, right? You would sign this pledge. We’ve seen, of course, lawsuits and lawfare utilized, such as the lawsuit that was levied against the US Campaign. And you know what? We fought that and we won.
And so this is actually another overreach, another violation of our constitutional rights, another mode of repression against Palestinian organizing and activism. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t going to stop us. If they think that a piece of legislation like this is going to cause us to cease our advocacy, our activities, our organizing, our shutting it down for Palestine, then they’ve miscalculated. So what we’ll see is that this will be utilized by the state to attempt to repress and suppress the movement, just like the anti-BDS laws, just like these lawfare expeditions.
But it won’t stop. They won’t silence us, they won’t stop us, and if, at the end of the day, we have to suffer through losing tax-exempt status, I think the organizations that right now are doing anything they can to stop a genocide, I think they’ll gladly sacrifice tax-exempt status. But I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights, and our constitutional rights to organize in this country.
JJ: It seems like something has fundamentally changed in terms of the US public, and of course we’re seeing it with college students, but it’s been there before. It feels like flailing on the part of the administration, and on the part of people who want an uncritical support for anything that Israel does, and want support for genocide. The students are just driving them mad. And yet there they are, still doing it. Does this feel like a shift to you? I know you’re not a psychic, but does it seem like something is changing?
AA: Oh, it’s absolutely changing. Millions of people have taken action in the last few months, and that’s been calls, letters, petitions, direct action, civil disobedience, marches, protests, rallies, birddogging, you name it. And now we see encampment, and the students, just like they rose up against the war in Vietnam, just like they rose up for the civil rights movement, just like they rose up against the war in Iraq, the students will continue to be just a huge, huge part of this movement.
And right now, they’re speaking clearly to this country, not only about Palestine, and our need to get a ceasefire and to divest. Their demands are super clear. They’re super prepared. They’re super disciplined and intentional. I’m so proud of them. But not only are they making these demands clear for us in relation to Palestine, they’re also giving us, in plain sight, a contradiction for us to understand and grapple with domestically.
Do we want continued militarization of police, not only in our communities, but on our college campuses? This is what we’re witnessing: riot gear, dispersal techniques used on our students at Ivy League institutions, at non–Ivy League institutions. Literally, the weight of policing being levied against students from the ages of 17 to 20.
And it’s not only a concern that we’re seeing this, obviously, under a supposed Democratic, progressive president; we can see that this is something we should be concerned about, not only now, but in the future here for this country, as we see this intense militarization of our college campuses.
JJ: Let me just say, to me, on some level, the media’s focus on “leverage,” that focus on “Joe is kind of irked at Bibi. Uh oh”—it feels condescending to me, this Great Man theory of history that’s going on. It’s a personal conversation between Joe Biden and Netanyahu. It seems to make a mockery of international law and of human rights, frankly. And I just wonder, what other lenses could media be using? What other things could media be focusing on, that would take it away from “there’s a personal fight between these two guys, and somehow millions of people are affected by it.”
AA: Yeah, I think what media can do is continue to center the horrific nature of this Israeli assault, this genocidal assault on Gaza, the statistics, the data, the stories, the devastation that we’re seeing in Rafah right now. I think centering those voices and that experience, and then thinking about, again, our role, is where the focus needs to be.
The conversations between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are for them to have. What we’re asking for is action. And we’re not going to be satisfied with these leaks of displeasure or of tension or of fracturing friendships. This isn’t about friendships. This is about stopping a genocide. And unfortunately, right now, not only are we not stopping it, we’re arming it and supporting it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid. He’s executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Thank you so much, Ahmad Abuznaid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AA: Thank you, Janine.
The Hamas charter explicitly calls for killing all Jews, but the terror group’s campus supporters, who often harass Jews, accuse Israel of genocide. They call President Biden “Genocide Joe.” No one uses hate speech more often than those who constantly accuse others of using hate speech. Do those accusing the Jews of genocide do so to justify killing them? Will traditional Christians and Muslims find themselves worshiping underground? How far will the current political illiberal position’s and projection extend?
Which campus supporters the support Hamas are you referring to? By far, the majority of protesters I saw interviewed where protesting genocide and made no reference to supporting Hamas. But if you are referring to FOX reporting, they are identified as “anti Israel”.
Seriously ? There was an invasion by Hamas, right ? You understand the concept of a proxy, right ? You haven’t heard protesters chant ‘long live palestine’ and “from the river to the sea, palestine will be free” during all these campus protests which were on all media and social media platforms, right?
So what? Long live Palestine from the river to the sea doesn’t mean “Kill Jews” ya morons.
And what, you have a problem with the First Amendment?
What a bizarre notion of being Jewish have these Zionists, who spew the blood libel that to deplore genocide is to deplore Jews. Zionism is no more Jewish than Nazism is Christian, despite the claims of their proponents.
No, it doesn’t. The Hamas charter only said something similar to that when the Israeli government was openly financially and logistically supporting Hamas. They changed it in about 2017. Doesn’t that kinda say something?
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” – Benjamin Netanyahu (2019)
“In the visible dimension Hamas is an enemy, in the hidden dimension it is an ally.”
– IDF Major General Gershon Hacohen (2019)
“Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet.”
– Charles Freeman, US diplomat and ambassador (2006)
Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO,” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies. ()
Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official. ()
Funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran. ()
“The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the pace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” said a U.S. government official. “Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with,” he said. ()
Former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson told UPI: “The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it.”
In June 2007, during the Battle of Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, the US Ambassador to Israel quoted Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief, Amos Yadlin, in a memo later published by Wikileaks:
“Although not necessarily reflecting a GOI [government of Israel] consensus view, Yadlin said Israel would be “happy” if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
Source: Wikileaks (published in 2014)
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Avner Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. ()
“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.” ()
A leader of Birzeit’s Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says “they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO.”
Source: How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas (WSJ, 2009)
In an August 2014 interview on Israeli television channel i24News, former Israeli Ambassador to Germany and the EU, Avi Primor, emphasized that Hamas had been created by Israel:
“It was the Israeli government, it was us who created Hamas, in order to create a counterweight to [Yasser Arafat’s] Fatah at the time. And we thought it would be a religious organization that would quarrel with Fatah, we couldn’t foresee what would become of it, but it’s our creation, these are the facts.”
Sources: i24News (2014) and CanalBlog (2015)
In a May 2019 interview with Israeli news website Ynet, retired Israeli Major General Gershon Hacohen, a conservative associate of Benjamin Netanyahu, made the following statement:
“The truth must be told, Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the two-state option, and that is why he made Hamas his closest partner. In the visible dimension Hamas is an enemy, in the hidden dimension it is an ally.”
In August 2021, former Israeli politician Haim Ramon, referring to Hacohen’s statement, added that the Bennet government “adopted the concept of separating the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and strengthen Hamas.”
Sources: Haaretz (2023) and Walla News (2021)
In October 2023, Israeli newspaper Haaretz discussed a March 2019 Likud party meeting during which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained his strategy of allowing Qatar to keep funding Hamas in Gaza in order to isolate Gaza from the West Bank:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” () “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
In February 2020, former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman revealed how Prime Minister Netanyahu secretely asked Qatar to keep funding Hamas:
Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and the top officer of the Israel Defense Forces in charge of Gaza, Herzi Halevi, visited Qatar earlier this month on the instructions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to plead with its leaders to continue their periodical payments to Hamas, Yisrael Beytenu party chief Avigdor Liberman claimed Saturday night.
“Both Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas and planned to cut ties with them. Suddenly Netanyahu appears as the defender of Hamas, as though it was an environmental organization. This is a policy of submission to terror,” he said, adding that Israel was paying Hamas “protection money” to maintain the calm. ()
With Israel’s approval, Qatar since 2018 has periodically provided millions of dollars in cash to Hamas to pay for fuel for the Strip’s power plant, allow the group to pay its civil servants and provide aid to tens of thousands of impoverished families.
Sources: Another Concept Implodes (Haaretz 2023) and Times of Israel (2020)
BS quoting, outright misstatements, cherry picking words and overall false narratives. One might even think this clown he has all these people on his mobile speed dial. Tom_Collins is a racist anti-Semite doing what racist’s anti-Semites do best. The world today that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas, Very sad.
He said, she said yada, yada, yada … This is the end game result when you actually believe your own bullshit and made up stories. You are an idiot and have another Tom Collins you dope.
Israel has been persecuting Palestinians and ethnically cleansing them since 1948. Its military and economy are funded by the US and many of its allies.
Israeli Settlers say the land is promised to them by God.
Palestinians have lived on their land for centuries and Israel expels them and now it is committing genocide in Gaza and it could spread to the West Bank and possibly other places.
People protesting Israel’s policies are not antisemitic, they are anti genocide and ethnic cleansing. There are Jews as well as non Jews protesting Israel’s policies.