EXPOSED: Israel’s Secret War
Double Down News
553K subscribers
===
193,551 views May 17, 2024
While all eyes are on Gaza...
Peter Oborne is a columnist for Middle East Eye. His new book Fate of Abraham is available now ► https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/bo...
Join the Future of Journalism ►
/ doubledownnews
Support DDN ► https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr...
Transcript
===
Transcript
0:00
While the eyes of the world quite rightly turned towards Gaza
0:03
a quiet war overseen by extremist ministers in the Israeli government
0:09
is being waged against Palestinians on the occupied West Bank.
0:14
Israel insists that it's fighting Hamas but in the West Bank
0:19
Fatah is the leading political party and the Palestinian Authority's in charge
0:23
so what is happening in the West Bank is nothing to do with Hamas
0:29
and does make this conflict look more like one between
0:32
Israel versus Palestinians than Israel versus Hamas.
0:36
I've just got back from the West Bank having spent the best part of a month
0:40
talking to people who almost every night were being visited
0:45
by settlers who would come in and destroy their cars or beat them up
0:50
or often hit their wives their children were traumatised by this.
0:54
And the message really was get out or die.
0:56
It's Lawless kind of reminded me of Mad Max 2
0:59
if you've seen that nightmare film and the settlers are a bit like that.
1:03
Sometimes it might be villagers going out to collect their olives
1:07
and a pack of settlers might emerge with M16 machine guns
1:11
and spray bullets around the place to scare them off the land
1:14
or they use the guns to beat up some of the male villagers
1:18
and then shoot the water tanks.
1:19
Coming also with bulldozers, cars are incinerated
1:23
there have been attempts to burn down the houses,
1:26
the sheep have been scattered in some cases just shot.
1:30
They burnt the olive groves and they come into your house and they'll
1:34
smash up your house and then they will steal your money
1:38
and acts of incredible aggression.
1:40
The Israeli authorities just don't do anything about it
1:43
the International Community is mute.
1:46
When I last looked 16 of these little village encampments have been erased
1:51
the villagers have found that it's just impossible to survive.
1:55
They've had to leave their land and this is of course a crime
1:59
under international law of forceable dispossession of occupied people
2:04
from their land and their replacement by another people brought in
2:08
by the occupying power and there's no question
2:11
that these settlers are protected by the Israeli Defense Force.
2:15
There's a tendency for the police to say no nothing to do with us the police of
2:19
course are under the overall control of this electable character Mr Peng heads of
2:24
the Jewish power party settler leader very sympathetic to the settler cause hanging on
2:30
front rumor was a picture of the mass murderer Goldstein who went into the
2:35
Tomb of the Patriarchs and machine guns to death 29 Palestinians Goldstein is a
2:41
man very widely admired for that act of murderous violence and benav ADM
2:49
him and he represents a particularly dangerous tradition which really sees Palestinians as
3:03
having no rights to any land in Palestine along with his comrade in arms the head of
3:10
the religious Zionist party bezel smrd they're brought into Coalition which with what is in any
3:16
case a really right-wing political party liquid with prime minister Netanyahu in order to save
3:22
his skin politically and actually keep himself out of jail because if he's out of power he's
3:27
very likely to be convicted of corruption and go to jail and what does Netanyahu do he gives
3:35
the West Bank to these two racist settler leaders benav is made national security minister smrd is
3:43
made equivalent of Chancellor of the ex Finance Minister but he's also given this title of head
3:48
of the Civil Administration if that's an orwellian title if ever there was one in the West Bank it's
3:55
important to understand what that actually means to understand that you have to understand a little
3:59
a little bit about how the West Bank works and indeed how the system of aparte as it's regarded
4:06
by most human rights organizations actually works if you're a Palestinian living in the West Bank
4:12
you don't under Israeli law have any rights of any kind you are subject to military law now if you
4:18
are a settler living illegally under international law in the west back you have full civil rights
4:25
there's a complete difference in status the Civil Administration ation of the West Bank is in the
4:32
hands of the military it's up to Mr smrd to decide who with or not Palestinian can move around the
4:39
place safely or to Mr smotrich to decide whether he can build he or she can build a house and so
4:45
forth he controls the details of the ordinary lives of Palestinians while benav has security
4:53
control and the two people given this position are two of the ugliest nastiest bigoted racists
5:01
you can possibly imagine who do not believe Palestinians have any rights at all that was a
5:06
situation before October the 7th and of course it has got considerably worse the first thing which
5:13
VAV did after October the 7th and we start to hand out guns the number of killings of Palestinians
5:20
has escalated dramatically on this kind of Destruction around nablas I spoke to the mayor
5:26
of a village where the settlers were distributed notes saying go to Jordan await the great nakba
5:33
the nakba being of course the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel in 1948 I
5:40
heard the same stories up in Mustafa yata get out or die so it was heartbreaking being in the olive
5:46
harvest season in the West Bank and seeing that they were scared to go and collect their olives
5:51
because they couldn't they were being banned from doing so and the settlers also were coming
5:55
down and attacking schools and so the schools weren't operating so so the children couldn't
6:00
go to school the court system doesn't work in Palestine hasn't been doing since October
6:06
the 7th so that's collapsed the banking system has gone so every check is bouncing if you're
6:12
Palestinian then of course this fragrant character smartr just cut off the money from the Palestinian
6:18
Authority couldn't pay the teachers can't pay any estate employee for instance or the nurses in the
6:24
hospitals in nablas where I was weren't getting paid and actually they're having to work dou
6:29
all the time and so they're working double shifts for no money if this goes on for much longer it's
6:34
going to lead to terrible problems it already is the economy is frozen there's a paralysis
6:41
it's gone into nose dive you really got to fear what's going to happen next meanwhile there's
6:46
been a wave of arrests across the West Bank often with no charges attached many of them
6:52
of course children and they come out and the counts of of torture of beating up of brutality
7:00
as really frightening most terrible of all of course was the Revelation from the state
7:06
department whistleblow who revealed I was part of the human rights vetting process for arms going to
7:12
Israel and a charity called defense of children International Palestine uh drew our attention
7:17
at the state department to the sexual assault actually the rape of a 13-year-old boy that
7:21
occurred in an Israeli prison in the mosco beia in Jerusalem uh We examined these allegations uh
7:27
we believe they were credible we put them to isra to the government of Israel and you know
7:32
what happened the next day the IDF went into the dcip offices and removed all their computers and
7:38
declared them a terrorist entity something's gone horrendously wrong in that situation most
7:45
interesting thing in some ways of all about that testimony from the state department official is
7:51
that the United States kept that quiet we only know about it because of a whistleblower the
7:57
Americans were happy with the situation they were happy to keep it quiet they were therefore
8:03
complicit of course in this barbarous situation where the reaction of the Israeli state to Serious
8:10
evidence of alleged rape in a Israeli jail of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy is to punish and
8:16
go after the people who'd revealed that and to cover it up this has been going on by the way for
8:22
years and there's nothing happens when the foreign secretary James cleverly went to ramala where the
8:29
Palestinian Authority is based in the West Bank before October the 7th the settlers had raised a
8:35
village where about 150 people had lived called anamia quite near ramala and cleverly wanted to
8:41
go there and see what had happened particularly because there was a school which Britain had help
8:45
fund which had been destroyed in this Village and he asked to go and the Israelis said no you can't
8:50
if he'd actually cared he would have made a fuss he have said I have been banned by the Israeli
8:57
authorities from going to this Palestinian Village which has been destroyed by settlers but he was
9:04
good as gold he didn't want to offend his hosts that is a kind of complicity which you now get and
9:12
have been getting for years of Western politicians I don't wanted just to hold up The Wretched James
9:19
cleverly to be lacerating because they're all as bad that is how they conduct themselves they do
9:23
not want for some reason in the face of grotesque what a war crimes they don't want to complain
9:29
and it's very upsetting because it shames Britain it tells the world that Britain or United States
9:35
or the European Union we say that we care about human rights and we make these great statements
9:41
about atrocities committed by say Putin in Ukraine and we're very happy to do that when
9:46
it comes to say Russia but of course we won't do that when it comes to Israel and the problem here
9:53
is that you're expecting different standards of behavior from different types of people depending
9:58
on whether your ally or not and the message the rest of the world gets of course is that we are
10:04
totally cynical we don't actually have any values at all we've simply weaponized the issue of human
10:11
rights in order to attack our foes discredit our foes and to support our allies but if
10:19
Israel carries out massacres commits war crimes I think it's our duty as an ally of Israel actually
10:25
to warn them when Rishi sunak went to Tel Aviv shortly after October the 7th he said Britain
10:32
was giving our unequivocal backing to Netanyahu I.E we were handing him a blank check already
10:39
by that time Israeli leaders were coming out with genocidal statements it would have been the act of
10:46
a true friend of Israel to have issued a warning act carefully obey International humanitarian law
10:53
do not kill innocent civilians we got none of that from the British prime minister who failed in his
10:59
task as a Statesman as for James cleverly the foreign secretary he was dismal I mean he went
11:05
there and he allowed his Israel counterpart to take over answer his questions for him it was
11:10
quite pathetic Maggie Thatcher was a trueu friend of Israel but when the shatila and Sabra camps the
11:16
massacres happened there with Israeli complicity she called it pure barbarism that was the act of
11:22
a friend of Israel not Rishi sunak going to T Aviv and giving Netanyahu a blank check you can rely on
11:35
the British media either to ignore or to twist every story which really matters in this world
11:43
that's why it's important to pay attention to Double Down News and support it on patreon [Music]
===
No comments:
Post a Comment