Introduction and UNRWA’s Role

My guest today is Chris Gunness, who is the former chief spokesperson for UNRWA and who for many years has been an outspoken advocate for the voiceless Palestinian people. I first spoke with Chris a few weeks after October 7th, where we discussed some of the underlying causes of this conflict. Today, Chris joins me for his reflections on the past six months, with a particular focus on the seemingly coordinated campaign against UNRWA by Israel and its allies. We will also explore the price other humanitarian organizations are paying. amidst the ongoing devastation of Gaza. Chris, welcome back to The Voices of War.

I’m as very nice to well very nice to be back. I’d hardly call it nice in the circumstances, but it’s good to talk to you as ever.

 

 

Absolutely, absolutely horrible circumstances and just for some context for our audience today is the 8th of April and I think it’s Just before lunchtime London time and I know our time is short Chris. So let’s start straight in Firstly, we keep hearing about unra Of late over the last month or so and all the allegations about it working closely with Hamas Can you first give us a little bit of our background? About the organization in other words, what is its mandate? How does it do its job? Why was it created in the first place? Before we then dive into the ongoing, I guess, controversy that’s kind of been flamed and fueled by Israel.

It’s a good place to start, Miles, because I think people need to understand quite how huge UNRWA is. Don’t think of UNRWA as an aid organization. Think of it as a quasi -government, delivering quasi -governmental services, so education for over half a million children in over 700 schools across the Middle East, Syria, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon. 7 million patient visits in primary health clinics in all of those places. Food distributions in Gaza alone to 1 .2 million people. So UNRWA is huge and just to give you a bit of history, in response to the 1948 Middle East War, 750 ,000 Palestinians were either forced from their homes or fled from their homes. Those in the north went into Lebanon, those in the northeast went to into Syria those in the east went to Jordan and others went to West Bank and Gaza and to start with UNRWA provided humanitarian services So what do refugees need they need food they need water they need shelter they need some medicine but as it became clear that the nation that the young state of Israel was not going to honor its pledge which was going to be the pledge that allowed it into the United Nations under resolution 194 Israel had to allow the right of return Israel made it clear that would be no right of return. So as the years began to stack up, UNRWA turned from a humanitarian emergency relief organization into a human development organization. So it set up an education department, it set up a health department, and it set up a social services department. And essentially those are the core services of UNRWA today. Most of its budget goes on education, but also health and relief services. But as the Middle East is so unstable, UNRWA finds itself in the middle of war like it has done in Gaza since the 7th of October. So UNRWA sort of doesn’t quite have to drop everything, but suddenly it’s got, as in Gaza, one and a half plus million people who are in 154 of its facilities in Gaza, either in or near. So it’s having to provide food and water and housing and sanitation services for, as I say, 1 .5 million people. Often,

In schools, for example, UNRWA schools are created for 1 ,000 students and suddenly, you know, these have got sort of 15 ,000 people in them. So whereas there are toilet facilities for 1 ,000 children, suddenly there’s the necessary for showers and toilets and, you know, all the sanitation services. So UNRWA is really overwhelmed completely. The Commissioner General of UNRWA, which is the Chief Executive, Filippe Vazirini, has said that UNRWA is pretty much broken. And so not only has it got this huge demand for its services, is suddenly in Gaza, but also elsewhere in the West Bank as well it works, as I say in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But it’s also now got this financial and this political attack on it and I know that’s something you want to talk about.

Yeah, I really want to get to that. I just want to confirm firstly that, so if I understood you correctly, UNRWA was set up as a temporary organization, as a temporary body to basically service the consequences of the, as the Palestinians have come to call it the Nakba. And because there was no return, ultimately the doors were closed on that debate, that the refugees from the Nakba can return. It then became a pseudo permanent.

Yes, correct.

Yeah.

institution and ultimately the only institution really that is sanctioned by the world to give out aid to the Palestinian refugees all the way back from 1948.

That’s a very excellent summary of where UNRWA is and why it’s where it is. So, I mean, to be clear, there are now 5 .9… million registered refugees with UNRWA and people often say well why are the grandchildren of people from the Nakba registered with UNRWA? The reason is like all refugee populations when refugees and refugee camps have children if they can’t go home their children are registered by UNHCR which is the other there are two refugee agencies in the UN there’s UNHCR which deals with all the other refugees apart from Palestinians and UNRWA so with UNHCR refugees say take a family from Afghanistan in a UNHCR administered camp in Pakistan. If those Afghans have children in that camp, their children are also registered for services because they need food and they need water like all the other refugees. And that’s exactly the same with the Palestinians. So for example, in Gaza, two -thirds of the population of Gaza are refugees from 1948 or their descendants. But as I say, their descendants are refugees themselves. And that’s how it continues to work. And it will provide services to refugees who are

registered when they need it. Obviously there’s a needs -based approach and as I say today there are 5 .9 million registered refugees.

Right, and I guess they stay refugees until they’re resettled in some place. Yeah.

Exactly. So refugees classically have three choices. They have what’s called local integration. So if the government, if they are where they are and the local authorities say, you know, they can stay here then and the refugees want to say free will, freedom of choice, obviously a very important principle in refugee convention. So refugees can choose to stay where they are.

If they’re allowed, yeah.

If they can persuade a third country to give them a visa, they might go to Canada or to a European country, then they have the choice to go and be in that other country that gives them a visa. Or they have the right of return. They can go back to their homes and live in peace with their erstwhile neighbours. And actually, UNHCR, interestingly, their preferred remedy, as it’s called, is the right of return because of their long experience of resettling refugees, they have found that the most stable and peaceful and durable outcome, is where refugees go back home and learn to live with their neighbours, people who were their enemies. And although it’s often said that UNRWA pushes the right of return, that’s not true. UNRWA believes that the refugees simply have a choice, and it’s up to the refugees, they can make one of three choices. But less than until the parties agree… Then there’s going to be a continuation of the refugee problem. And that’s what I was saying. Israel accuses UNRWA of perpetuating the refugee problem. But actually what perpetuates the refugee problem is the refusal of the parties to deal with the refugee issue. So when at the time of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid 90s, you had sort of debate about so -called final issues, final status issues like Jerusalem, like refugees, like water, like borders, like a whole host of things, the refugee problem was sort of shunted away into the distance because it seemed to be too difficult. But it was that shunting into the distance of the refugee problem that perpetuates the refugee crisis and perpetuates UNRWA because UNRWA is mandated by the General Assembly to administer services to refugees until there is a durable solution. And it’s that lack of a durable solution and it’s the failure of the parties to find a durable solution that perpetuates both the refugee crisis and UNRWA.

It’s really, I mean, as a former refugee from Bosnia and having lived as a refugee for three and a half years in Germany with a very uncertain future, we’re talking here millions of people who have an uncertain future and a question of their existence unresolved. And what I mean by existence, I mean, you’re not seen, you’re effectively stateless, you do not belong. And firstly, more often than not, refugees, if you are lucky to emmigrate to another country, as my parents were lucky. There’s also a lot of luck involved in that. Also what background your parents had, you know, whether you might be, you know, we came to Australia as skilled migrants, you know, my dad’s an engineer, my mom’s a physics professor, highly educated. So, you know, by sheer luck, those were desired, you know, employments in Australia. And therefore we received a permanent residence and subsequently citizenship. But that is again, just sheer luck. There were.

Yep.

hundreds of Bosnians who didn’t get lucky to come to Australia and you know had to take up one of the other options ie. go back to a destroyed home our house in Sarajevo and another holiday home were completely destroyed. We didn’t have a house to go to. So, this is the reality of a refugee

Do you ever think about going home there, Maz? I mean, you, although you’ve accepted Australian citizenship, you also would have the right of return. Do you ever feel that you want to go back and make a life for yourself in Bosnia?

Mandate, Reach, and Services of UNRWA

That’s a really interesting question. I did actually go back and I spent three and a half years in Bosnia with my partner, who incidentally she’s Turkish born, but draws roots from Bosnia and Sarajevo via her extended family or via her grandparents on both sides. We actually went there and started a not-for-profit for three years, a fitness center. The whole idea behind it was to build bridges between divided communities, et cetera. And we had a very international…

Interesting.

Representation of the club with nine flags inside the gym by the end of it and all the Bosnian ethnic minorities represented We had coaches from different, you know nationalities. It was a hugely successful grassroot What turned out to be a grassroot kind of peacemaking project? But for me, it was a critically important aspect of closing a loop for my own healing, I guess from that kind of early childhood separation and being torn out of my homeland. And that’s what that Palestinians don’t don’t get. Yeah. Sorry gone

Yeah, but you see that’s, yeah, but that’s one difference between… Exactly, I mean that’s one of the big differences between Bosnian refugees and I also worked in Bosnia and Palestinians and I guess the answer is sort of politics and history. I mean you say luck, I mean you from obviously from a family of skills you said your dad was an engineer I believe and you know mum also had a profession. So, but the Palestinians by the way are among the most educated people in the Middle East, they do not lack skills, the Palestinians. Believe me, but Israel believes that the right of return is going to destroy Israel.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

which of course is not true, but for that reason it refuses to allow the Palestinian. So if you’re a Palestinian and you can see your grandfather’s house, your house, and it’s across a wall, you’re not even allowed to talk about the right of return. Whereas if you’re a Jew and you live in California and you’re not practicing and you don’t really care about Israel, you have the right with government subsidies to go and live in a beautiful apartment on stolen Palestinian land. That’s how asymmetric this whole debate is. So the Palestinians are routinely denied their rights of all sorts, including the right to life, but also the right of return. And by the way, there are many different ways of exercising the right of return. Some Palestinians might just want reparations. They might say, OK, I don’t want my house. my land back but just give me the money for it. So it isn’t the case that every Palestinian would want to go back to Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv or wherever. I mean let’s not forget that Tel Aviv you know this has a reputation for being a lovely liberal city but it too was founded on Palestinian villages like so many cities in Israel.

Right. And why does Israel fear? I mean, does it fear it because Israel is a democratic nation? And does it fear the return of the refugees because it would then really skew the balance of power potentially?

Yes, I mean, there’s that. There’s the fact that Israel is nominally a democratic country and there are Arab countries and there’s Arab representation in the Knesset. So if Arabs went back in their millions and formed democratic parties, arguably they could win elections and that’s terrifying apparently for some Israelis. I don’t know why that should be, frankly, because Israel will remain a democracy. And also, let’s be clear, there are some Israelis who would like the Palestinians to go home. you know, they’re a very shrinking number of Israeli sort of people on the left. who would like nothing more than to have Palestinians back in peace and live side by side with the Palestinians. That’s the dream of many Israeli lefties, though, as I say, that constituency within Israel is shrinking. But I think there’s a mythology that’s peddled about the Palestinians, that they are, you know, that they hate Jews, they want to kill the Jews. I mean, let’s be clear, it was European Christians who did the Holocaust, right? It was not any Palestinians, it was not any Arabs.

And so, you know, this idea that Palestinians just want to wipe out Israel and do another Holocaust, it’s, you know, there’s a sort of Holocaust industry, as it’s called, including by sort of Jewish intellectuals as well. And there’s a man called Avraham Burg, who wrote a book called ‘The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes’. And he traced what he calls the Holocaust industry from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the 60s to the present day. And this idea, that mainly right-wing governments peddle in Israel is you know you better vote for a strong security-minded, militaristic right-wing party that will stop the Holocaust happening again because all the Arabs want to do is wipe us all out. So it plays into a very right-wing political industry if you like and it’s very distorting and it’s very untrue. You talk to most Palestinians they don’t want to do a Holocaust you know they’re having a genocide done against them they know exactly what that’s like is. and they want to avoid it at all costs.

To what end is this happening, Chris? I mean, what is the ultimate goal of Israel as you see it?

I think it would like a sort of pure Jewish state and you speak to Jewish public intellectuals like Gidon Levy and he says that Jewish supremacy is very much part of the Zionist dream. I mean there are many sorts of Zionism. There’s a kind of left-wing form of Zionism which I find slightly problematic, the idea that there’s a left-wing. way of colonializing, colonizing and taking over someone’s land. I find that just a bit sort of intellectually inconsistent. There is no such thing as left-wing colonialism, you know, your land, you know, taking away land from indigenous people. But nonetheless, there are others who believe that, you know, Zionism means that the land of Israel from the river to the sea belongs to the Jews and it’s becoming an increasingly popular political creed as Israel drifts further and further to the right and I think that there are you know perhaps 90 plus percent of Israel today would say that Israel belongs to the Jews exclusively and they don’t want any Palestinians there and I think Netanyahu realizes this and I think he realizes that it would be politically popular if he were to do an offensive against Rafah in the south of Gaza where there are about 1 .5 million people.

And I think Netanyahu believes that he might blast a hole in the wall with Egypt and drive millions of people into the Egyptian Sinai. I think the Egyptians have said no, and I think the Americans support that. But then the question is, if ethnic cleansing isn’t on the cards, what are the other options that Netanyahu is considering? I think one of those is just de -developing Gaza and making it a place where netanyahu will want to live and therefore people would leave which is perhaps the least bad of all options and then the very worst option would be a genocide. Just kill them. And that certainly has been going on and the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, certainly believes that there is a plausible case of genocide for Israel to answer and that’s a very very frightening prospect.

Absolutely. And what do you make of the fact that there was the, you know, US judge presiding at the ICJ that voted in favor, voted in favor of all six conditions for Israel?

What do you mean by that? The US challenge to divide the ICJ? Judge Donoghue, yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, to be fair, I think the ICJ is populated by some very eminent jurisprudential experts and legal scholars. And this idea that they’ll all vote according to their politics, I don’t think that’s true at all. And Judge Donohoe, by the way, has left because it’s a UN body and so the justices on the court rotate. So she’s now gone. There’s now a Lebanese person in charge, Lebanese judge. And of course, Israelis said, well, as Lebanese, you’ll never vote for Israel. I don’t think that’s true, just as Judge Donohoe didn’t vote for Israel. I think you have to assume that they are legal experts. And they issue published legal opinions, which have to make sense. And they’re held up to scrutiny by some of the greatest jurisprudential brains on the planet. So they’re not going to come out with judgments and opinions which are legally inferior or inconsistent. So, yeah, I mean, I think the court is reputable. And actually, just today, we have a case of Nicaragua taking the Germans to the ICJ for complicity in genocide. And interestingly, it’s not just because of their defense support, military support for Israel. The Nicaraguans in their submission have also cited the defunding by Germany of UNRWA. Germany after the Americans who give 350 million, the Germans are the next largest donor. They give 200 million euros. And what the Nicaraguans are arguing is that in the provisional measures which were made public on the 26th of January, the court said that any restriction on international aid would be a violation of the genocide convention. And what the Nicaraguans are arguing is that cutting off aid to UNRWA is a restriction of international aid, therefore it’s a violation of the Convention. So that debate is going to be very interesting.

Right of Return and UN Complicity

The irony can’t be lost on us that it’s Germany. I mean, it’s just…

Absolutely. The country that did the Holocaust is now enabling and complicit with the genocide, arguably. Go figure. I mean, it’s shocking. And even more so in the case of Israel. I mean, yes, the simple answer is Holocaust guilt. I think, yeah, I mean, we used to go when I was in UNRWA.

Why? Do you have any? Yeah. Sorry.

Guilt.

we’d go to Berlin because they were such big funders and we’d meet. There’s basically two big think tanks in Germany. There’s one aligned to the Christian Democrats, the right wing one, and there’s one attached to the social Democrats, the left wing one. And we used to go and have meetings with the social democratic one who were big sports of honor. And the head of it said, when I was the defense minister, Netanyahu would come and lecture me for three hours about the Holocaust and then demand two nuclear submarines. And, you know, and generally Israel got them. So, you know, I mean, there is a lot of Holocaust.

Yeah, how do you say no?

guilt and that’s why you know the cabinets meet in each other’s countries every six months a whole Israeli cabinet flies to Berlin and has a meeting with the German cabinet and vice versa every six months. So, Holocaust guilt is a huge huge dynamic in German support for Israel but I think younger Germans are increasingly angry that they’ve got so many social problems at home Germany’s been so generous with refugees they’ve got all sorts of economic and social issues and I think a lot of people are saying in Germany why are we giving all this money to Israel, which has a, until 7th of October, it had a perfectly successful economy. And why is Germany giving them all this money? So I think that dynamic is changing, but to answer your question, I think it’s Holocaust guilt. But also to get the other point you’re making about, isn’t it massively ironic that the Germans are doing this to UNRWA and supporting Israel? Isn’t, and enabling genocide, isn’t it even more ironic that the nation, the people against whom the Holocaust was committed, are themselves carrying out a plausible genocide. I mean, I just don’t understand how the last six months, over 20 ,000 women and children could be killed in what some Israeli intellectuals or Jewish intellectuals like Norman Finkelstein describe as a concentration camp. I mean, he actually describes Gaza. David Cameron, now foreign secretary, but at the time he was the prime minister of the UK, described Gaza as the world’s largest open air prison.

Norman Finkelstein has described Gaza as a concentration camp. I mean, how extraordinary that people, you know, who so many of whom were exterminated in concentration camps have set up what the Jewish intellectual calls a concentration camp and is committing what the ICJ calls a plausible genocide. I mean, it’s the irony is staggering.

And I mean, you have somebody like Finkelstein who’s I think is both his parents, they were both in concentration camps in the Holocaust. And I mean, he’s a historian of the region and an avid advocate for Palestine and Palestinians. I find that, I mean, there are so many threads there. I mean, at some point, do we take Israel for its word? Because it feels to me like we’re kind of closing our eyes and saying, no, no, like,

In the Holocaust, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Surely that can’t be what it is because if we just think back to, I think it was June last year when Netanyahu was at the UN General Assembly and he presented a map of the Middle East, a revised map of the Middle East as part of the Abraham Accords and all the business developments that were occurring. The map quite clearly showed Israel as the entire region, as you said, from the river to the sea. Are we just not seeing the forest for the trees because we are so sensitive to or so fearful of being called antisemitic?

Yeah.

or anti-Jewish. Right.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. I mean, when the Palestinians say from the river to the sea, they’re told that they’re trying to wipe out Israel, they’re antisemites, they’re Nazis, they’re doing a Holocaust. And when Netanyahu goes to the UN and holds up the map, which quite clearly shows from the river to the sea, it’s Israel’s innate right to have all of that land. Yeah.

And he’s applauded. He’s applauded as a peacemaker.

Yeah, so, yeah, I don’t think he’s in favor of a one-state solution, or maybe he is, but I mean many Palestinians who’ve been called out for using the phrase from the river to the sea will say, well, it’s a one-state solution. I’m not saying that Jews shouldn’t be there either. I’m saying one-state solution. So, and there’s a big debate about from the river to the sea. But yes, I think the answer is that there’s a huge amount of…

course.

of exploitation of antisemitism. It’s the classic trope that if you criticize Israel then you’re an antisemite. But I think that you know since the 7th of October that has changed massively. I think that the naked face of Zionism has been shown for what it is and I think a lot of people who were sympathetic to Israel and a lot of people who were frightened of being accused of antisemitism are now turning around and saying no,

Humanitarian Operations in Crisis

We need to call this out for what it is. It’s a genocide. And, you know, if you look at some of the writings of people like Herzl, they talk about wiping off the indigenous community, wiping out the indigenous community. So it shouldn’t be any surprise to anybody that the modern…

incarnation of Zionism is genocidal. Well, it’s in the DNA of Zionism. I’m not saying that all Zionists are intent on committing genocide. I’m saying that there is in the founding literature of the Zionist movement a clear injunction to genocide. Just read Herzl, it’s all there.

Yeah, yeah.

And of course, when the whole world allows you to do it, it becomes a lot more, it becomes easy to become desensitized to the carnage you’re causing when the world lets you. I mean, this is not, it’s incredible. Sorry, go on. Yeah.

And that yes, I’m no I think you’re right. I think yeah, I mean of course primarily the US giving $3 .8 billion of military aid a year. Germany also, 350 million euros plus, I think it was just this year, so from 2023 to 2024, the last year. And the UK, of course, as ever on the coattails of America in the so -called special relationship is always there, giving logistical support from the bases in Cyprus. But I think there’s now a huge pressure. The conservative friends of Israel, are now being exposed by none other than a big Tory grandee, a man called Alan Duncan, gave a very famous interview a few days ago in which he called out, you know, he named and shamed those politicians who were in the pocket of the Israel lobby, the so -called Conservative Friends of Israel. There’s also the Labour Friends of Israel, by the way. So, you know, Israel’s been very clever in befriending, I guess is the word they use in their title, Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel, politicians in parliament. And, you know, it’s interesting watching them all speak out about Israel’s right to self-defence and actually even the right to self-defence, you know, under international law, the occupier does not have the right to self-defence. If you occupy someone else’s country, they have the right to attack you. and you don’t have the right, you know, under international law and force from the convention, the occupying power must protect the occupied population and supply services. That’s what their international law says about occupying powers. They’re not allowed to attack them and they’re certainly not allowed to commit genocide against them. But if you dare stand up and say Israel doesn’t have the right self-defense, then you’re the biggest Nazi on the planet. But it is the case. And in fact, the ICJ in a famous ruling in 2004 on the wall,

the wall that they built between Gaza and the West Bank, sorry, between Israel and the West Bank, Israel proper and the West Bank. And the ICJ issued an advisor opinion and made it very clear that Israel can’t claim self-defense because it occupies that land. So, you know, it’s a very interesting, it’s a very interesting debate that’s going on. Everyone’s ignored that. And I haven’t stood up and said Israel hasn’t got the right self-defense, but to be very clear, the ICJ has said that. And if anyone doubts it, they need to read, they need to read.

– Yeah.

read the ICJ opinion on the wall from 2004.

It’s really interesting you saying that people need to read. And it feels to me like that’s one of the things we’re absolutely not doing. I .E. we’re not reading history. We’re not looking at this. And I put out a monologue earlier today kind of making this point. You know, we’re not looking at the entire history of this conflict or the tensions that are there. But now, because of October 7th, we have a tendency to use October 7th as the moral yardstick.

beginning of it all. Yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting what you say. I mean, people talked about the 7th of October as if it was the start of the conflict. Well, since 2007, Israel has imposed on Gaza the toughest trade embargo probably in the history of trade relations. Pretty much nothing came out of Gaza, even though, you know, it was it’s an industrial base. Frankly, when I first went to Gaza, there were orange groves and olive groves in the north. That’s been completely

That’s it, right? And…

completely bulldozed by Israeli armored tanks and bulldozers. All the food production facilities that used to be up in Jabalia and up in the north of Gaza, that’s where they completely destroyed the food factories. There’s a lot of industry that could have been exported, but Israel has not allowed that. So the blockade that’s taken place since 2007, that’s conveniently airbrushed out of history. And then of course there’s the occupation since 1967. No one is allowed to talk about the fact that Gaza is occupied. And then there’s the Nakba, there’s 1948, there’s the dispossession. And so there’s been this complete dehistoricizing. And for the Israelis, they’ve pushed the narrative of it all began with the brutal Hamas massacre on the 7th of October. But for many people born in Gaza since 2007, All they’ve known is these sporadic attacks and total blockade. And now what they’ve seen is, you know, all the universities of Gaza have been completely destroyed. Hundreds of academic staff have been killed. Many, many schools, cultural centers, food production factories, the industrial base, you know, unemployment in Gaza is now well over 80 % and rising. And that’s why people are saying, you know, what Netanyahu is trying to do is de-develop Gaza and make it uninhabitable. So the very worst they’ll have to deal with is people just desperate to leave because he’s made Gaza a place where nobody wants to live. Just one thing I remember on this question of desensitization, you were saying the world is sort of desensitized to all this. So are the people of Israel. And one of the really interesting things about this is that Israeli TV simply doesn’t show pictures of the personalized suffering of people in Gaza. There’s endless depictions of

you know, babies who were killed in the Kabutzim or women who were raped, you know, and the 40 babies being beheaded or whatever it was, that turns out to be complete nonsense.

The child in the oven, complete nonsense. And the mass rape, clearly there was sexual violence, but the idea that mass rape was used as a weapon of war by Hamas, I think that’s pretty much also been exploded as a myth. But Israelis have served up a media diet of the atrocities of Hamas. but nothing of IDF soldiers laughing as they blow up whole apartment blocks or the president writing names on a huge munition that was fired into civilian area of Gaza. None of the pictures of Palestinian men and women being humiliated and televised or put on social media in violation of Geneva Conventions, et cetera, et cetera. None of that is, is, is put out there on the media. And I’ve got liberal friends in Israel who sort of text me saying, you’ve gotta know Chris that nobody here gives a damn about civilians, about people in Gaza. And I write back and say, well, congratulations, that’s the triumph of fascism. That one of the things you have to do if you’re going to commit a genocide against a people is desensitize your own population and make sure that they don’t think of them as human beings. And that’s precisely what’s happened in Israel. The vast majority of people in Israel do not consider the Palestinians

UNRWA’s Political Targeting

Yeah.

to be human beings because once you consider them to be human beings then they have inalienable rights and you have to respect their dignity and their destiny as individual human beings with inalienable rights and that whole narrative and that whole discourse has now been airbrushed out of the public discourse within Israel.

I mean, again, the irony is just incredible. I mean, it’s a topic that I’ve discussed quite a lot on this podcast in various different contexts, i .e. this desensitization and this kind of neutering of our morality. But it seems to me, over the top of that is overlay this absolutely asymmetrical control of information. So not only is Israel asymmetric, there’s a giant asymmetry in the military power between

Yeah.

Palestinians and Israelis, but also there’s a giant asymmetry in the information war globally, locally, globally, regionally. Yeah.

inflammation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and we’ve not talked about UNRWA. That information war was used with extraordinarily, extraordinary effectiveness and impact the day after the ICJ issued its… Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, exactly. So, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I was going to come back to that because that’s interesting. It was a day after. I mean, we have to double click on that because I mean, that’s it. That’s I mean.

So the court issued its provisional measures on the 26th of January, and then within 24 hours, on the 27th, the New York Times had splashed over its front page these what turns out increasingly likely to be false allegations against 12 UNRWA staffers who the Israelis said to taking part in the 12th of October, sorry, the 7th of October attacks and in fact. turned out that that is not true. Israel has presented no evidence either to the internal UN inquiry by the Office of Internal Oversight or it would seem to the external review and by the former French Foreign Minister Colonna. So, but nonetheless it has been slammed into the…

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, sorry. Sorry, sorry. I just have to put it. What do you mean it’s presented no evidence?

So there are allegations, so the Israelis in the third week of January called the Commissioner General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, to a meeting in Tel Aviv where he met a relatively junior member of the International Organizations Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that official presented a list of names and allegations but no actual evidence. So there weren’t photographs, video, you know, stuff which you would assume that in these days of social media, somebody making an accusation like that would have corroborating evidence. Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. But no, that wasn’t forthcoming. And actually, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, has said that the US has not been able to drum up any independent confirmation of the Israeli claims. And indeed, the Office of Internal Oversight of the UN has issued a sort of interim version of its report.

recordings etc. Yeah.

into these allegations. And on the strength of that, the European Union has refunded UNRWA to the tune of 82 million. And other donors have also come back. The Canadians, for example, have come back as have… And Australia, exactly. I think Penny Wong was completely unconvinced and realized that Israel had produced no evidence whatsoever. And indeed, none of the evidence has been given to UNRWA, none of it’s been handed over to UNRWA, either by the Israelis or the Americans.

Australia as well. Yeah, no

Americans or any of the major donors. And that suggests to me that none of the major donors holding out. Yeah. But I mean, they don’t have any evidence. If they had evidence that UNRWA staffers had been involved in the attacks on the 7th of October, believe me, they would have handed it over to UNRWA. But they haven’t done that. Guess why? They don’t have it. It doesn’t exist. I think I from the start called it the dodgy dossier and said if there was an intelligence dossier in Israel’s possession, which showed that UNRWA workers were

Of course, Germany and US are still not. Yeah, they’re still.

part of the Hamas attack on the 7th of October, it would have been given to every journalist on the planet, only the New York Times, which has people from the IDF working, you know, on sort of, you know, and it’s news from, only the New York Times was prepared to splash this stuff and was very much part of the whole kind of right-wing Zionist, fascistic attack on UNRWA. But nobody else would touch it. Fox News, sorry, Sky News were offered it. They didn’t touch it. The Financial Times offered it. You know, most people didn’t touch it. only the New York Times. Guess why? I mean, New York Times is run by Zionists and people who are very pro -Israel.

And isn’t the Times of Israel effectively a training ground for New York Times journalists? That’s effectively an exchange program. Right.

Yes, and the Jerusalem Post. And the Jerusalem Post. I mean, you know, they all go through the Jerusalem Post and end up in the New York Times or CNN or whatever. Yeah, I know there’s a…

Media Influence and Public Narrative

I mean, how do we live in a world like this? And we know this. I mean, look, I’m not well-versed in this region. I mean, I have perhaps a more nuanced understanding of it than some percentage of the population because of this podcasts, because I’m genuinely interested. But these are not even secrets. I mean, this is now, you know, Bassem Youssef, I think, put it really well. I mean, this is so absurd that it’s laughable now that this is all done, you know, our face in front of us. It is so obvious. You don’t even have to be highly educated to scratch below the surface of these superficial narratives, but we live and breathe by them.

Yeah, I agree. No, I agree. I mean, I have to say, I think the New York Times is a great newspaper on everything but Israel -Palestine. I know it does great reports. In fact, they did a piece the other day on US arms sales and supplies to Israel. And I thought it’s behind the paywall. So I certainly am not going to pay the New York Times any of my money. But I got sent that article. And it was a very good article. But generally, I mean, often the New York Times correspondent, I mean, when I was there, the correspondent had a son who was actually fighting in the IDF while he was reporting on the conflict in Gaza. I mean, how anyone thinks that it’s sensible to send a man to come

cover that conflict when his own son is in the IDF. I mean, go figure. So yeah, it’s, but I mean, I think that is a testament to the fact that right-wing Israelis and right-wing Zionists have conquered the narrative. They’ve won the war of words. They’ve won the battle of information. And that’s because they’ve got huge resources. You know, and I say to Palestinians, if we’re going to say strike back, you know, get a lobby in Washington, you know, play them at their own game. But the Palestinians are hopelessly divided.

That’s crazy. That’s crazy.

and the Palestinian diaspora, which is, you know, just can’t agree on anything usually. I think they can all agree to what’s happening now in Gaza as a genocide, but they’re classically very, very divided. And look at the PA, look at the Palestinian government. You know, it’s all the former resigned on mass recently. But I mean, and there’s now talk about, you know, the PA has been reconstituted, but it’s very much in a sort of Israeli American creation. Most Palestinians are completely rejected. But again, that just shows how powerful and asymmetric the conflict is.

I mean, it’s just to me so undemocratic and counter intuitive.

I mean, I spoke about this very point with Professor Rashid Khalidi some time ago, just before October 7th actually. And he made it very clear that since the inception of Israel and Nakba onwards, this asymmetry has been there and perhaps growing. And it’s really hard to see how given this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I saw it as a lived experience. The information aspect of it, I saw it. The huge might. I mean, I always remember when I would give an interview to CNN, we’d go to Washington with my boss, who was a bit of a coward, to be honest, I won’t name him, and we’d get to the State Department. And we were sitting on one side of the table, the American State Department and the other. And I would sort of see, they would say, no, Mr. Gunness, on the third of whatever month at this time. you gave an interview to CNN and you said this and they’d have this transcript and at the top of the head of the paper I could see the menorah which is the branding of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and clearly they just typed out the interview, sort of you know emailed it over faxed it over to the State Department and they just sort of you know did the bidding and that that used to happen all the time there was no I mean on other occasions things I said were sent by text to American congressional leaders on the Appropriations Committee who would then get in touch touch with my boss and say why is Chris Gunness saying this? And of course when something is coming from the head of the Appropriations Committee in DC, of course your boss jumps on the phone and says why are you saying that? So I don’t believe in Elders of Zion conspiracy theories, but as I say, lived experience, I have seen how these guys operate. And a Jerusalem Post journalist or Times of Israel journalist could easily send a text to somebody on the Appropriations Committee and say, just look what Chris Gunness has just said with their their own spin. So there is a huge, huge asymmetry in the information war. And, you know, UNRWA sadly does not have the resources to take these people on, which is why, you know, UNRWA has really not been very successful in putting out its own narrative, which is that, you know, the dossier was dodgy, and the allegations were false. In fact, the Commissioner General of UNRWA,

After that meeting I referred to earlier sacked the 12 workers. He just sort of, you know bought him to the narrative of guilt and Yeah, knee-jerk reaction his justification was that it was to protect the interests of the agency which UNRWA frameworks allow him to do and he didn’t wait for due process and and he’s gonna have a problem with his hands. I suspect if it turns out

Yeah, knee jerked, yeah.

that there is no evidence against these 12 people, two of them, three of them are either dead or missing incidentally, but the remaining nine, they well have quite a substantial case against UNRWA because their livelihoods and their reputation certainly have been ruined as a result of this lack of due process.

Right. And just to be clear, as a result of this lack of this same due process, a lot of the funding for UNRWA was pulled, again, as a knee-jerk reaction, again, as we mentioned before, probably due to the Holocaust guilt or fear of being called antisemitic in some capacity by a host of donating states, barring a few exceptions, of course, who didn’t, who still maintained the funding. What…

Yes, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, you know, God bless them. Yeah, exactly. But most of them just they were 16. Oh, yes. So Norway, the Norwegian Foreign Minister made some very powerful. Yes, indeed. Made some very powerful statements in support of UNRWA, but there were very few. And I think the fact that the Commissioner General sacked the people on the spot, I think really, you know, I think it really freaked out a load of quite a few of those donors. I don’t think that helped the donor decision at all.

Right. Okay. I think Norway might’ve been in there as well. If I, is that right? Yeah.

World Central Kitchen Attack

And what was then the impact on the ground? I mean, because as we established right at the start, yeah, yeah, yeah, so going.

Oh, huge. I mean, enormous. I mean, first of all, there was a sort of political impact in the sense that it delegitimized UNRWA. Everyone thought, well, if UNRWA’s taking part in Hamas attacks, then how can this be a humanitarian agency? So there was that huge sort of political PR fallout from this. There was also the financial fallout, because obviously 16 donors left with $450 million dollars. So there’s a massive UNRWA’s budget at any one time, it’s about between 1 .2 and 1 .5 billion. So it was a third of UNWRST budget was just vanished overnight virtually in about 72 hours. Yeah, exactly. While a genocide arguably was raging against. Yeah, exactly.

And in underwater, I mean, when Anra needs it the most as it’s ever. Yeah. Yeah.

And of course, instantly, you know, that meant that services were threatened. And as I said at the beginning, it doesn’t just work in Gaza. It also works in the West Bank, in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. And so the operations were threatened there as well. And of course, UNRWA now has enough money to stagger on til June, but you have to plan. You can’t run a humanitarian operation with a budget of 1 .5 billion if you don’t know if you can pay your salaries next month. You know, how can you sign a contract with a teacher, you know, more than more than half of UNRWA’s budget goes to teacher salaries basically because more than half of UNRWA’s main work is educating half a million children around the Middle East. Well, you can’t sign contracts with people legally unless you have the money in the bank to pay them. So it meant a whole load of logistical problems. But I think more than anything, there’s the reputational problem that Israel… told the mother of all lies, which is that there were UNRWA workers in this attack. Not true. And that is now slammed into the narrative and somehow will forever be part of UNRWA’s history. And it’s just not true.

Yeah. Well, it’s the classic. I mean, if you have to defend yourself, you already lost. Right. I mean, Israel’s playing this game very smartly. Get the information out there. Let the other party defend itself because you’ve already lost. Right. That’s the, you know, you’re chasing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But nobody turns around and says, you know, Mark Ragev is a liar and he puts out known lies about things. I mean, I remember during 2000… and 14 war, not just Mark Regev, but others, others spoke to people of both military and civilian. You know, when UNRWA schools were attacked, which they were in 2014, journalists would phone me up and say, well, Mark Regev just told me that the schools had militants in them. And after the 2014 war, we had a board of inquiry. And lo and behold, all of that was shown to be complete and utter nonsense. But in the fog of war and the heat of battle, UNRWA couldn’t send investigators to see what was going on there. there. So, you know, Israel was able, Regev and co were able to say these things, which were entirely baseless and get away with it. And here we are, you know, he’s the chief spokesman and there are other Israeli spokespeople saying outrageous things. And in part, by the way, of the whole genocidal thing, you know, this whole label that Mr. Regev was saying, you know, Hamas ISIS, you know, as if the whole, I mean, Hamas is a broad political movement with a very vicious military

win and clearly they committed wholesale violations of international humanitarian law which I and everybody else has condemned on multiple occasions and they are condemnable acts but a lot of misinformation went out about that like the 40 beheaded babies etc which were put out in order to desensitize and terrify populations and as you say it worked you know it worked very well but people don’t turn around and say we’re not put Mark Ragev on there because of his history of truthful and not truth. Israel always gets away with it. They just carry on putting this stuff out there. Nobody ever seems to question it.

And it was parroted by Biden and Blinken. I mean, I mean, you can’t get, you know, more.

Yeah, absolutely. And a journalist then reports what the President of the United States and the Secretary of State of the US has said. And why shouldn’t journalists report that stuff? Because that’s what they do, you report what politicians say. But has anyone ever really turned around and said, reported in Australia that what Biden said was complete lies? Probably not.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, and certainly wouldn’t have captured the headlines. It’s certainly that, you know, if someone has.

Yes, that’s right. A story, you know, four weeks later, someone accused the politician of telling a lie. That’s hardly whole front page stuff, is it?

Exactly. I listened to your very interesting interview with Mohen Rabbani, great interview by the way, and I’ll put a link to it on here as well. I think he’s a phenomenal brain himself, so listening to you two together was great. I’m hoping to actually have him on the show in May as well. But you spoke about some leaked Israeli documents that outline steps to ultimately dismantle UNRWA, which…

Oh, thank you. No, thank you. Yes, he is.

Oh great, yeah, yeah, he’s excellent.

Yes.

Be really interesting to hear because I’m a former intelligence officer. Part of this kind of behind the curtain stuff was my daily bread and butter, so to speak. So really keen to hear in the Australian Army. So I was only a child in Bosnia, so I left at 10. But I spent 15 years in the Australian Army and all of that effectively in intelligence.

in Bosnia. Oh wow.

Okay.

Legal Accountability and Investigations

Wow, so, I mean, this was leaked and it was an official sort of Israeli, it came from one of the ministries. Now, it was in January or December, but it was a three -point plan and the plan began with… a smear campaign, which is very much part of the disinformation campaign. So, you know, UNRWA workers were involved in this attack on the 7th of October. UNRWA in its textbooks preaches antisemitism, UNRWA staff are doing all these terribly antisemitic things, they glorify violence, they preach the right to return, etc, etc, etc. So there was the smear campaign. And then phase two of this strategy was the defunding, which we saw. So, 16 donors defunded as a result of the smear campaign. And then there’s the dismantling, there’s the destroy. So Israel at the moment is refusing to allow UNRWA convoys to the north of Gaza, for example. UNRWA workers in the West Bank are having visas restricted as they are international staff trying to go to Rafah they go sort of through Egypt and Israel is refusing to give them visas. So there’s a whole sort of bureaucratic restriction, there’s restrictions that Israel is talking about.

Yeah.

about of banks, so UNRWA in order to procure equipment and materials that they hand out, food and other things in the West Bank have to use Israeli banks and there’s talk in Israel about refusing to let UNRWA use Israeli banks and then finally there’s the whole property rights, so UNRWA for example… in occupied East Jerusalem has got a huge headquarters, which is not just part of the headquarters of UNRWA regionally, but also part of, it’s the West Bank head office of the West Bank, the headquarters of the West Bank in Jerusalem. And there’s increasing talk about Israel taking away the lease of that. So, you know, now into this sort of dismantle UNRWA phase. And so, yeah, I mean, yes.

That’s about a thousand cuts, right? Yeah.

Yes, exactly. And cuts both politically, practically, operationally as it were, but also financially. I think UNRWA is really coming back from that. It’s moved back from the abyss. Most of the donors have come back. They’re the two largest. Germany, Holocaust guilt, America blind support for Israel and complicity and genocide is probably, you know, the American Congress has passed legislation saying that America cannot refund UNRWA.

least until March next year. And Germany, I think Germany will come back because the Europeans have come back and that’s the EU is the mothership as it were, though Germany might not see it like that. So I think the Germans will and I think that in the next few weeks we’re going to see the publication of these two reports, one the internal and the external report into these all these neutrality issues around UNRWA. I think at that point it’s going to be very difficult for the Germans and other donors not to come back. as I say, apart from the US who are now congressional, they’re just relatively bound not to refund UNRWA until at least next March.

Chris, I’m conscious of our time. So to kind of bring it to our close, a couple of other questions because obviously UNRWA is not the only organization that’s being stifled in Gaza and West Bank and other refugee camps, et cetera. There are a whole host of other humanitarian organizations that are being strangled, so to say, if not physically killed. Like we’ve obviously seen the unfortunate killing of

world food, but it’s worth central kitchens.

the work, which of course created a giant uproar internationally in Australia, of course, as well. Because one of the people killed was an Australian humanitarian worker. But of course, there were three Brits, I think an American Canadian, a Palestinian, and I think a Polish, that were killed. What do you make of that entire occurrence? How it happened? And of course, then the subsequent…

in Australia and yeah yeah so of course yeah

Yes.

Yes.

Wolf. Yeah.

sorry, alleged, not alleged, but the so -called investigation by Israel in the reprimanding of two officers, a junior, well, junior, a major, and of course a colonel and maybe I think they were sacked and a general was reprimanded along those lines.

Yes, I mean first of all what happened on the day is that the World Central Kitchen had notified the Israeli army first of all the route they were using the precise GPS coordinates of every millimeter of that road was notified to the Israelis even before they started to use it and they would have coordinated is the word they used with the Israeli army of the number of vehicles the fact that vehicles had those very bright logos on the roof of the World Central Kitchen.

kitchen, they would have given the precise names of all the staff that were there, they would have given the precise vehicle numbers, what was in the vehicles, all of that would have been notified to the Israeli army. Nonetheless, the Israeli army shot with the drone the first vehicle, they then phoned up the Israeli army and said, you just hit and killed, hit a vehicle and killed some of our workers. They then evacuated those who could into the second vehicle. The Israeli then hit that vehicle and they then evacuated those who were living and wounded and whatever to the third vehicle and the Israelis then hit that vehicle. So how this cannot be described as deliberate targeting I don’t know and just this morning actually I was reading it’s a very interesting report you should read it after the so-called great march of return in 2018 -2019 the UN did a report a very good friend of mine was on the commission doing information on it and you know nearly 200 people were killed. killed unarmed demonstrators. Children were shot in the head like meters away by Israeli snipers. Children were shot at the back and then killed, shot at and killed while they were lying on the ground. Disabled people were shot at. Women, children taken south. This was a nonviolent march, yeah. And these people were deliberately targeted. There was…

This was a peaceful march. This was a nonviolent march.

the instruction clearly went out to shoot people in the legs. So there are about 4 ,000 of the 6 ,000 people who were shot were shot in the legs and many children were permanently disabled because they lost both legs or a leg. So the idea that the Israeli army is an army that doesn’t deliberately target people. particularly unarmed protesters is just not true. And what we now know of the Lavender system, this AI system that’s now coming to light, it gave the IDF, the Israeli army, the ability to track so -called militants into their homes. And then those homes were bombed and they had this really sick name for that part of the platform called the ‘Daddy’ function, which meant that when the, ‘Where’s Daddy’ exactly?

Geopolitical Stakes and Policy Futures

Yeah, where’s daddy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So they’d go into their homes and then, you know, a 2000 pound bomb would be dropped and the entire family would be killed. So the idea that this army somehow doesn’t deliberately target innocent people, I just don’t understand where that mythology is coming from. As for the actual sackings, to be clear, this is the result of an internal IDF due process operation, right? It is not the full independent inquiry, which Netanyahu told Mr. Biden, Mr. Netanyahu told Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, would happen. So, you know, what the world is waiting for and the right-wing British press are definitely not gonna take their eye off this particular ball. They want to see an independent investigation. And I can tell you there has never been an independent investigation apart from the famous Goldstone report in 2009. into the war in 2007 -2008 and when that came out the Israelis went on their bullying, bully -boy tactics and went out of their way to make sure that nobody would take any action and indeed the PA were at the time the head of Shin Bet went to Ramallah and said to President Mahmoud Abbas if you don’t stop this report going any further in the UN system we will turn the West Bank into Gaza. you know, the end of the Goldstone report was killed off. But there has never been any criminal accountability. The one big difference this time around is the International Criminal Court. So the ICJ, International Court of Justice, we talked about earlier, is there to adjudicate disputes between states. The ICC can bring criminal investigations and criminal arrests against individuals like they did with Milosevic and Karadzic and Mladic and all of these war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. So they are investigating abuses and crimes that have taken place in Palestine.

Yeah.

–

and just as they’ve done for Putin in relation to crimes committed in Ukraine. So they could issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, for your Avgalant, the defense minister, for Yitzhak Herzog, he travels, you know, he could be arrested. He was the person who said that you couldn’t distinguish between the terrorists in Gaza and ordinary civilians. In other words, everyone in Gaza is fair game, shoot who you like, they’re all terrorists. So, you know, these people travel and they could be arrested. So I don’t, I think things are different.

compared with 2014 and I think people are seeing the effective functioning of these international mechanisms and urge them to live up to the name of their founding fathers and I urge them to actually take action to enforce accountability.

And just to go back to the killing of the World Central Kitchen staff, the allegation was that some Hamas fighters had joined the convoy. Is that right?

Right. I mean, there’s some reports about people dressed in black, but that even if there were, you have to, it has to be proportionate. You have to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants and you have to use weaponry, which is proportionate. So international law does not allow you just to blow up aid vehicles. It’s not this idea that just because there was, they’re suspected that there may have been.

That’s still illegal.

a Hamas person. What evidence was there that there was a Hamas person and how was that referred? Yes, proportionality and distinction. Yeah, so it wouldn’t allow as well just to blow up aid vehicles because they thought a Hamas militant…

And even if there was, even if there was, you are still not by IHL. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

was there just as you know with the shift this argument applies to so many other attacks that have taken place you can’t just use indiscriminate munitions just because you think there’s a Hamas person there there has to be this concept of military advantage and you have to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants and that clearly was not done in this case even if there were Hamas militants in one of the vehicles.

Well, I mean, everybody’s a human shield in Gaza. So, you know, that that explains that explains all of it away, especially as we were saying, ‘Where’s Daddy’. You know, and I will try and do a separate episode on that specific program, because I just when I was reading about it, my mind was blown. I just I just cannot believe that this is something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yes, there is a journalist actually at 9, yeah, +972, which is one of the websites and news sources in Israel. You must dig out one of the people who came out with stuff about Lavender, a filmmaker and the documentarian was on British News Channel 4. And it’s really worth listening to that interview because he came out with a lot of stuff about the Where’s Daddy and also about the Lavender AI platform program. We’ll call it what you will. Very interesting.

And I find it interesting that undoubtedly, you know in next year or if already not now That will be marketed to you know, the likes of the US military the Australian military British military Here’s a here’s a fully functioning program, you know, that’s you know sold by Elbit or someone right? Yeah, exactly. Last question Chris and conscious of our time. But what do you think will be the enduring impact of what we watching unfolding Gaza on geopolitics if not history?

Yeah. Yeah.

Final Reflections and Paths Forward

help you get militants. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, let me tell you, I mean, the options are a genocide, an ethnic cleansing or both. And that genocide and that ethnic cleansing has been televised and live screened on an almost daily basis. So I think one of the lasting impacts will be that the rule book. that governs genocide and ethnic cleansing, that’s been thrown away. So the next time a Putin or a Kim Jong-Un or some crackpot dictator decides to start sending missiles into places that they don’t like or invade those places or commit genocide against those places, it’s going to be laughed at when America and Australia and so -called democratic and civilized world turns around and starts preaching about international law. So I think, I mean, I think, the rule book was pretty much ripped up after Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and all of that, so Syria. But I think that what was left of the rule book has now been truly ripped up. So I think that’s one of the lasting legacies. That isn’t to say, I think, that the International Criminal Court could issue arrest warrants. And I think there can be cases of individual criminal responsibility. I mean, when it became clear that Milosevic was politically dispensable,

You’re right, yeah.

and Serbia wanted to join the EU but said you know hand over your war criminals first then you know it was shown they were politically dispensable I think Netanyahu is about to become politically dispensable just today there’s an opinion poll in Israel which shows that he has about half the support that Benny Gantz has so Netanyahu may be about to become politically dispensable. I think that on the Palestinian side, I think that there will be a lasting legatee of bitterness and anger. And I think that is going to reverberate for decades to come. And I hate to think what the consequences of that will be, but there will be a day of reckoning. I think that even though Netanyahu is claiming to have destroyed or on the road to destroying Hamas, I think that for every Hamas fighter that’s been killed, 50 plus will be standing in his place and I think that Hamas will be strengthened. Hamas operates in the West Bank, it operates in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and across the Middle East, so make no mistake, Hamas has been strengthened by this. I think Israel is now on the road to a very fascistic Jewish majority, Jewish supremacy, a state built on the notion of Jewish supremacy, which I think is a terrifying prospect. And I think that regional stability has is now really very, very fragile for decades to come. And I think the Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the fact that the Houthis are now attacking international shipping and the casus belli is very much what’s going on in Gaza. So I think, you know, in every, and I think American, in America as well as an honest broker, I think has been pretty much damaged irreparably. So I think, you know, in all,

Yeah.

respects its negative, negative, negative, negative. The one thing I would say, and this is my… I pray that it’s right, though in my heart of hearts I know it probably isn’t. And that is this thought that on the 7th of October, the mythology that has surrounded Israel’s relations with the Palestinians evaporated. So the idea that Israel could manage the Palestinian question by imposing an apartheid system, by arresting and torturing their children, by killing them in open warfare, by blockading them in Gaza, by by, as I say, imposing an apartheid system, that that would somehow bring security to Israel. That mythology has simply vanished. It is no longer the case. On the Palestinian side, the idea that attacking Israel, that these vicious attacks are somehow going to be productive in any way, perhaps that as an idea has also vanished. And perhaps, and this is, as I say, wishful thinking, the idea is dawning and will it continue to dawn that Israel will only get security if it gives the Palestinians a just and durable solution to some kind of state, goodness knows what that state would look like. And on the Palestinian side, there’s perhaps a dawning realization that they can only avoid what’s happened and they can only have a sustainable future if they respect Israel’s right to exist and that they live side by side in peace as neighbors.

Thank you.

And I say that’s the dream, that what happened on the 7th of October is that that reality arguably came into sharp focus. Those dynamics could be realised, I mean realised mentally, whether they can be realised actually politically, I don’t know. But that’s the best case scenario. My fear is the first scenario that I apply, which is negative in all respects.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. On that somber note, Chris, it’s been fascinating. Thank you for the work you’re doing. You’re one of the most eloquent voices on this issue, I think. And I dare say, there’s many Palestinian voices out there cheering you on. And many of us, dare I say, rational and critically thinking people are also cheering you on. So thank you so much for your time. Once again, I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

It’s a pleasure.

It’s a pleasure, Maz. Thank you very much for your engagement. Your very intelligent and informed engagement. I’m very grateful. So best wishes to you and all your listeners. Thanks again.

Thank you.