Representing Gaza and Future Hopes

What does colour sound like? Join the National Gallery for a new series of their podcast Stories in Colour, hear from curators, scientists, historians and artists who uncover hidden mysteries across the spectrum. Travel back to a time when a blue pigment found in the mines of Afghanistan cost more than gold, and fast forward to the present day to hear about the rivals hunting for the blackest shade of black. With vivid storytelling and unexpected discoveries. Listen to Stories in Color from the National Gallery wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the LRB Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Schatz. The subject of this week's episode is the situation in Gaza, where a so called ceasefire has been in effect since the tenth of october two thousand twenty five. Gaza isn't on the front page much these days. It's been eclipsed by the Iran war and Israel's war on Lebanon. But to speak of a return to quote unquote normal life in Gaza would be a delusion. Since the signing of the ceasefire, nine hundred four Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and more than two thousand seven hundred wounded. In the last twenty four hours, five more Palestinians have been killed, including a six month old child I think it's a very of the strip, on the other side of the yellow line, that it calls the new border with Gaza, Palestinians struggle to survive. Meanwhile they're trying to recover from a genocide that has not so much ended as entered a new phase. My guests on this episode are two analysts, both originally from Gaza, Mohammed Shahada , a journalist and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations based in Copenhagen And Jah ad Abu Salim, the executive director of the Gaza Genocide Center in Washington DC, a project to document the destruction to preserve evidence and resist the erasure of the record. Mohammed and jihad, thank you for joining me on the LRB podcast. Thanks for having us. Good to be back. Thanks for having us. I'd like to start by asking both of you about the people of Gaza who are so often forgotten. Can you give us a sense of what life is like there for ordinary people, how it's changed, how it has failed to change since the ceasefire. So basically life in Gaza for as far as I remember is a permanent state of non life, as put by Israel's then defense minister Vigor Lieberman in twenty eighteen. He said we would keep the bodies of everybody in Gaza drowned, their heads above the water, and nothing more. You're not allowed to live and you're not allowed to die. Just the state of of not even bare existence, its non existence since the Israeli siege and the enclave started. Even before, if you look at the Oslo Accords, the peace process nineteen ninety five, there was a headline in nineteen ninety five in the New York Times that described the Oslo Accords on the ground. And the headline was Palestinians learn freedom has its lim its. And the most resonant phrase used by interviewees from Gaza was open -air prison repeatedly to describe the situation in there. Now the difference after the genocide is basically Gaza has been reduced to a combination. If you're familiar with Hollywood, it's a combination of the movies Mad Max, Fallout, Squid Game, Minority Report. It is basically a wasteland, a howling wilderness, a refugee camp in ruins that is under the most dystopian sci-fi horror show kind of surveillance equipment. So over the heads of everyone in Gaza there's a killer drone 247 that never leaves. The emitting noise zzzz it never stops. It's been a constant feature of our lives for the last two decades. Now there is added to it this so called quadcopter drone. It's smaller drones that can infiltrate neighborhoods. They would go through tents, refugee camps, they would sometimes enter your window late at night and shine a bright flashlight on you, and each one of those drones is either equipped with a gun or with an explosive device, so as soon as people see it, they understand it's there to hunt to kill. The biggest struggle at the moment is basic shelter. Almost everyone I know is on the street. Every single member of my family, every friend that I have, every colleague, every neighbor had their homes either bombed, burned to the ground, buildows detonated from the inside, or heavily damaged to the point that it cannot house any human habitation. The luckiest of my friends is Anas. Anas lives in a bombed out building on the first floor. The building was bombed from the very top, so the last two floors are gone. The staircase connecting the multiple floors in that condominium is cut in half. The bottom floor was bombed repeatedly, so it's also burned completely. In the apartment where Ennis lives, it doesn't have any windows, doesn't have any doors, there's no door to even enter the apartment. There's a giant hole in the living room from an unexploded two thousand pound bomb that Israel dropped on that tower, it went right through it, and it landed on the ground floor, so he literally lives above that unexploded bomb. His daily occupation during the day is finding water or food. It has become one of the most insane struggles. Or just a place to relieve yourself. A restroom is also becoming a dream. Israel is literally banning toilets from entering Gaza up until this moment , so you have to improvise. And the nightly time struggle is Anna sleeping with one eye with one eye open to protect his only daughter from mice, rats, scorpions, snakes , cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies, etc. that have had this sort of unprecedented nesting ground in either infinite piles of garbage that Israel does not allow to be collected or disposed of, or in destroyed sewage systems, or in the rubble of homes where those rodents and insects have been feasting on the decomposing bodies of thousands of Palestinians under the rubble. So that's the basic life there. The worst part of all of this is that people see the world turning its back on them and moving on to the next big topic. That Gaza sees to be a topic in mainstream media, in government statements, in parliamentary debates, anywhere. It's only remembered by people like you and I, people on the street, everyday people. And even there, you see enormous fatigue and despair. And what that signals to the average person in Gaza is this life that you're living at the moment, this hill on earth, is not temporary. It is the new normal. People are willing to endure unspeakable tribulations as long as there is an end in sight. But when you tell them this is your life permanently, you're stuck in this, it becomes an aggravated nightmare. Uh jih ad, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, I mean uh it's important to to name what Muhammad just described, right? This is not a humanitarian crisis. But what we're looking at is a political project to destroy a place, to destroy a people. I've said this in the beginning of the genocide and and I repeat it now. What Israel has been doing in Gaza is a targeted dismantlement of the foundations of society. At the end of the day, all of this, as Muhammad described, is leading somewhere and it's leading towards the destruction of what is left of Gaza and what Israel is trying to do by imposing these impossible measures on Palestinians there is to continue the the project of its genocide through slow death, even after it failed to do that under the extreme c circumstances of you know, its large scale and and diddly genocide that we've witnessed over the past three years. Um I I wanted to ask you, more than twenty years ago, the left wing Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimberling, himself a survivor of a genocide, published a book called Politicide about Ariel Sharone and Sharone's project to destroy the Palestinian people not so much physically but as a national project. Now, what we're seeing in in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank as well is a project not of politicide, but as you said, of genocide, of extermination, of the elimination of a people. And I'm wondering, do you see what has happened as an extension and radicalization of the project of politicide that Kimmerling describ ed, or as in some ways, an even more radical rupture? I think when uh a group of people are denied its rights, its sovereignty, its ability to govern itself , to make decisions about its past, present and future, to build in institu tions. I think ultimately we all understand what that means for Palestinians, I mean it's been more than a century of this, more than a century of uh denial of rights, and even even any attempt by Palestinians to build institutions that would help them organize their lives, you know, and maintain their political, cultural, social , and economic lives. Every decade or so Palestinians deal with these disruptions, uh, these organized destructi ve attempts on the part of Israel to contain, to destroy, to limit these attempts at Palestinian collective existence. I think this chapter that we're witnessing we can talk about the genocide in the past tense is the ultimate conclusion of a century of that, you know, when when for a century an entire people are denied their ability to exist even if discursively, even if through you know these scattered measures here and there. Ultimately, all of these things, their logical conclusion is an escalation of that into the genocide that we have been witnessing today. So what started before nineteen forty eight, what began to unfold in 1948 and what we're witnessing now is all part of the same process. Regardless of scale and regardless of how incremental or or intense it is, it's leading somewhere. And and Israel In fact, it's become more explicit. I mean what what used to be a subtext is now the text, what used to be unspoken is now spoken. There's kind of brazenness to it. There is a very interesting thing about Ariel Sharon in specific, Baruch Kimmerling's grand villain in the book. Sharon goes back in his history with Gaza to nineteen fifty-three. He was the founder and commander of the unit one hundred and one that was tasked explicitly with carrying out what was called reprisal attacks. It was a series of terror attacks against Gaza to suppress any kind of resistance , number one, and number two, to prevent any p refugees in Gaza from trying to return to their homes inside Israel. And the idea was simple. You go into a refugee camp late at night, blow up homes, kill dozens of people and then leave again and re rinse and repeat that handle of terrorism to drive people out. Israel at the same time had the plan of resettling twelve thousand people from Gaza in Sinai and, the US offered funding of what would be the equivalent today of three hundred and fifty million dollars. People in Gaza revolted in nineteen fifty-five and the plan died out. Sharon continued. He was part of the attack on Gaza in 56, in which Israel deliberately first thing they did was to obliterate as much as possible of the refugee camps and to destroy Gaza's infrastructure, particularly the railroads that connected Gaza with Egypt. His journey with Gaza continued for decades after, even when he was Prime Minister and went ahead with what was called the disengagement plan, unir unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. And he said explicitly, his advisor Duf Wisglass even said it more bluntly in Haaritz. He said we're leaving Gaza in order to freeze the peace process and prevent Palestinian statehood. Because once we leave Gaza, nobody's gonna bother it pressuring us anymore about the West Bank. We get a free hand there, and basically the burden of proof, as Ariel Sharon put it, would be on Palestinians in Gaza. If you manage to turn Gaza into a Singapore, despite blockade, despite military assaults, despite bombing, then you are worthy of a state. If you cannot, then Gaza would be the cautionary tale for why the occupation should not end in the West Bank. The other logic was simple. Israel in Gaza had a few thousand settlers. It made it more difficult for Israel to carpet bomb the enclave and to besiege it because they still had their people inside. It's the same way as throughout the genocide, Israel had few hostages left by the end of the genocide between January 25 to October, and they were still carpet bombing Gaza but reluctant to bomb the areas where they thought or had intelligence that the hostages would be. So it's the same logic that Ariel Sharon advocated for taking the settlers out of Gaza to make it much easier to starve those people in there to death and bomb it ten times as aggressively. What followed is what everybody knows, a series of operation called mowing the loan. Each one of those operations was supposed to, as the United Nations report written by Richard Goldstone put it, each campaign was designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize the civilian population with the assumption that if we do it, people would start leaving. And to be frank, Adam, it was it was working. Between the start of the blockade two thousand and seven until twenty twenty three, about a quarter million people had left Gaza because Israel was making sure with each one of those high tech killing sprees to reduce major parts of Gaza back to the stone age as their own defense minister put it. The difference now with the whole genocide is Net anyahu understood this was a too excruciatingly painfully slow of a process. Not the entire population was leaving, and no matter how many people leave, the population recovers. In twenty nineteen there was a statement by a senior Israeli official in Ukraine saying that Israel is willing to pay for flights that would take anyone from Gaza to a third country if any third countries were to accept them. But no countries accepted. So that's why you move to plan B. Genocide, just speed up the dynamics of what After the nineteen sixty-seven war to depopulate Gaza and to move Gazans to uh to other countries. I mean, these you find in the current situation so many echoes of past policies, past uh initiatives. But to get back to the question of the state of life or as you put it, Muhammad, non-life in Gaza today, what efforts, if any, are being made to repair the damage and rebuild Gaza , or is everything being kind of held up because of the ongoing political conflicts between this Trump Board of Peace and Hamas in in Gaza . Is anything being done to improve daily life in Gaza? From the Israeli and international side, nothing whatsoever. Israel was supposed to fulfill a number of obligations as part of the first phase of the Trump deal. This included allowing the repair. They don't the Israelis don't have to do it. They just need to allow Palestinians to repair infrastructure, water, electricity, sewage , the reconstruction of Gaza was deferred to phase two of the deal, but reconstruct hospitals, bakeries, so basic necessities for organized human life, clear rubble out of main roads, allow the repair of the gaz a power plant, electricity lines, etc. Now it's been six months since that deal was signed. Israel never allowed any of this to happen. None whatsoever. Zero. Even when Israel allowed some billdozers to ent er Gaza, it allowed them to specifically enter to look for the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, not to remove rubble, not to rescue over ten thousand Palestinians that were stuck under the rubble. The billdozers came with an explicit mission, an explicit mandate, dig out the Israeli hostages and leave. You're not there to r help early recovery with the population. With people in Gaza themselves, they've displayed sort of phenomenal resilience at trying to reconstitute their lives in any way possible. So Annas, for example, as I said, is living in a bombed out building. Although he knows the building might collapse at any second, he's trying to build his life back. He's trying to put the pieces back together. Uh even with people on the street, the struggles that they go through every day to just recharge a phone, to be able to write an article, or to connect with uh colleagues outside of Gaza or to do just basic work functions is phenomenal. And the most phenomenal of all of those is the determination amongst Gazans to rush to education as the first instinct as soon as the ceasefire it, ceasefi re name only, but as soon as it was signed, people in Gaza immediately rushed to figure out okay, how can we do high school exams? How can we go back to schools? How can we do remote learning? How can we reconstitute, rebuild libraries and collect books from the rubble of buildings and turn it into what is now called the Phoenix Library in Gaza. By the way, I think it's worth noting to our listeners, some of whom may not know this, that that Gaza has one of the most liter ate populations in the entire world. Literacy rates are are nearly a hundred percent. Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. And it comes from two places. The first place is that you need to be an extraordin ary human being in order to survive. So there is always the urge to try to learn more, to do more, to accumulate more certificates, more qualifications, more skills, in the hope of just qualifying as a basic human being to either find a job in Gaza after Israel destroyed and shattered the economy or to find a scholarship abroad or to get customers uh from abroad that you can work with remotely in Gaza. I had a number of friends who were brilliant computer engineers that cultivated a web of customers outside. And the other reason for this persistence in terms of pursuing education is to be able to narrate our struggle , to be able to connect with the world outside, to be able to not just be passive victims. And basically, this Palestinian huge belief in global public opinion is something that people have inv ested their their entire lives. You see with journalists in Gaza, each one of them would get a phone call telling them just stop covering or you're a dead man walking. That was the Israeli intelligence officers calling Annas Al Sh arif on his phone and telling him this Anas Uskut, shut up, just stop covering, stop reporting, turn your camera off. And they kept reporting until the moment that they were murdered, every single one of them, in the desperate hope that maybe it would awaken the sleeping conscience of the world. So that explains this sort of heavy investment. Jihad. Muhammad described the situation on the humanitarian level, and I think it's important to capture what is happening on the political one. We have this thing called the Board of Peace, which is supposed to be the framework through which the improvements you asked about are supposed to happen and take place . Trump established it. It was recognized by the UN Security Council as a consortium of actors that would oversee the continu ation of the ceasefi re and ultimately the rebuilding process. At its inaugural meeting in February, ten board member states pledged a total of seventeen billion doll ars for reconstruction, which when we look at it against you on estimates of seventy billion plus. It's a sm it's a small fraction. It's a small fraction of the damage. Uh and speaking of smaller fractions, here's what the situation uh is right now. In May twenty twenty six, as we're talking, just around one percent of the seventeen billion dollar amount has actually been honored. And the board itself, whatever that thing is, has warned in a report to the Security Council that the gap between the commitment and the disburs ement must be closed with urgency, adding that the funds committed uh but not yet dispersed represent the difference between a framework that exists on paper and one that delivers on the ground. So basically the body that was set up to rebuild Gaza is publicly admitting that almost none of the money that was promised has arrived. And of course, you know, leading aid organizations have said that the Board of Peace is failing, precisely because Israel is still, as Mohammed said, Israel is still obstructing the the vast majority of uh of aid into the Gaza Strip. You know, save the children's leadership stated that children in Gaza are still not in school, they're malnourished, they're not being treated for their wounds. As Muhammad said, the electricity grid and water infrastructure is 90% still unusable. So 90% of the electricity grid and the water infrastructure in Gaz are still unusable. So here what we're seeing is a structural problem that also goes beyond this funding gap. Reconstruction is is tightly linked to compliance with security conditions. So, you know, we're talking about large scale build rebuilding of houses, infrastructure and utilities. The main and central condition that keeps being put forward is is the d demilitarization and disarmament of Hamas and and the other political factions. And Hamas of of course has not agreed to those terms. You know, the the reconstruction in a sense is is being held hostage to a political negotiation that has no resolution in sight anytime soon. And yeah, so people are still living in tents, they're enduring uh the most difficult circumstances . What's your map of podcast from Occuli Mundi won gold at the twenty twenty five British Podcast Awards. Ocul imundi is Latin for eyes of the world and What's Your Map features a fascinating range of guests talking about the stories and ideas behind maps that they love. Guests this series include the Norwegian explorer Cecilia Skug, who's climbed the world's seven tallest mountains, and Ross Perlin, co director of the Endangered Language Alliance. Every episode is filled with history, culture and conversation. What's your map is hosted by the historian Jerry Broughton, whose books include a history of the world in twelve maps and four points of the compass, and you can zoom into the maps on Oculi Mundi's website, OcultyHyphenmundi.com Subscribe now to What's Your Map available on Apple, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. Jad, I want to get back to the issue of Hamas and demilitarization and so on in a moment. But first, um I want to ask you both about the Committee of Palestinian Technocrats who were working with the Board of Peace. My sense is that these are not just quislings. These are people who are who are legitimate who feel that there 's no other choice but to participate. Can you talk about who these people are? Are they mostly people from Gaza or the West Bank or what is their expertise? What kind of politics do they bring to this project? And also to what extent are they equal members of this project or are they just window dressing? I've been engaging with some members of that committee. It's called InCAG, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. With an eternal term for life. So basically the NKEG, it's supposed to include 15 commissioners. All of them are from Gaza, from a technocratic background. Some of them have affiliation to Fatah or to Muhammad Dahal an, the advisor to the president of the Emirates, Muhammad bin Zayed. Some of them are coming from civil society or academia, etc. It's a mixed bag. The names were proposed by different Palestinian factions and then given to the Trump administration that gave it to Israel to basically approve or disapprove of every single name and then a long process of back and forth and names were added last minute and name were names were taken out. You settled with those fifteen people. That was created on the fourteenth of january twenty twenty six. So now it's been over a hundred and twenty days, uh, the US had a plan for the first hundred days of INCAG, staffing, resourcing, funding, operational activities, raising popularity and legitimacy. Um I got a copy of that plan back when it was uh disseminated to European diplomats and I looked on the hundredth day to see how much of it was fulfilled. Zero point zero percent, nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Each member of IncAG is basically a political activist in exile in Egypt. None of them have ever been allowed to Gaza by Israel, not one member of it. Zero. They don't have any staff. They were never told by the Trump administration who their staff would be, where their offices in Gaza would be , where would they sleep the night if they go into Gaza? They were never updated on this. They're not allowed to talk to the Palestinian Authority or Hamas , the people that they're supposed to take government from. They have a babysitter that is basically a high representative of the Board of Peace to Gaza that oversees in CAG. So they need to take permission for every trip, every travel, every meeting, every media appearance. So they're basically under severe restraints. Four of them offered their resignations to the border peace and then were asked to stay on anyways, and were instructed to just wait. The entry of the border of that in CAG government to Gaza is just a matter of one decision, just Israel letting them in. Hamas already created committees that are supposed to transfer powers to INCAG. INCAG has been publicly endorsed by every single Palestinian political faction. The only dilemma is that now you have the Border Peace and not even the Border Peace, it's Trump and Netanyahu. There's no Border Peace. They are demanding that Hamas hands over every single weapon that it has before any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and then the Board of Peace would allow NCAG to come in after Hamas accepts that principle. And NCAG would be the dirty cups, the ones collecting the weapons, going home to home, door to door, strip searching people to make sure they're not hiding a taser or a nail clipper or um pepper spray because that is considered the weapon from Israel's perspective. They're supposed to hand over everything. So essentially INCAG would become Israel's gendarme, not unlike the PA and the West Bank. Is that how it's understood? and represent Palestinians in international fora. That is supposed to just run services in Gaza. They're not supposed to actually lead. They're not supposed to govern. And the best part in this is that Israel actually looks to INCAG as a pilot project. They wanted to work in Gaza to do it in the West Bank, collapse the Palestinian Authority and replace them with a bunch of technocrats with no political mandate, no representation, no elections that answer to Trump, the lifetime chairman of the Board of Peace. There is a friend to Ali Shat. Dr. Ali Shat is the chair of NCAG and a longtime friends of friend of his told me that they are now under the impression in INCAG that they have been a distraction all along, that they were just created to give Israel more time with the genocide in Gaza because they're not given any actual authority what soever. So even this form of depoliticized governance, that is to render governance as as a as a function, as a managerial function, run by an apparatus that would work on creating stable conditions rather than challenge Israel or the international community or hold them accountable. Even that is not granted under the current circumstances. Because I think so long as Israel can get away with the destruction of Gaza and and prolonging its genocide as a process, I think they're not going to to defer even to this scenario So I mean I agree with Muhammad, this is I mean this is a performance of administration. These people are stuck in in Cairo, they're not allowed to enter Gaza. All of this speaks to the to the worldview and and and type of thinking that exists on the part of entities like this Board of Peace that wants to depart from the political into the the into business like arrangement. Business like arrangements and the reduction of the people of Gaza to a quote unquote humanitarian issue, when in fact this is a political question, a question of national rights and sovereignty. Now there is an economic dimension to the Board of Peace. It is a top-down economic model of a kind of resort where Gazans would become a kind of proletari an service population, if I'm not mistaken. Can you talk about what this vision is? The map that Jared Kushner displayed at the Dav os at the Economic Forum it shows Gaza being divided into eight cages. Each cage is isolated from the cage next to it by a giant buffer zone that is just inhabited by trees. There's no people that would be living there. And each one of those cages is connected in its backyard to an industrial zone or a data center or an artificial intelligence hub or a Tesla factory. And Gaza's beach would be completely out of reach for the population there because it would be turned into resorts and high rise towers for high net worth individuals. It's turned into the Riviera . So people in Gaza would be, as Israel's own Channel Twelve put it, they would be rend ered cheap labor for American billionaires in a country or in an enclave with no regul ations and no tax system. So it would be a tax free open buffet to exploit the local labor as slaves for those billionaires. The headline in Channel 12 was saying that Jared Kushner, Larry Ellison, and Peter Thiel of Planeteer were trying to turn Gaza into this tax free haven with no regulations and cheap labor. But that is the ideal scenario. That is if we take them for their word and presume that they will implement it the way they say, the Borough Peace is never intended to be anything serious. I was just trying to write a couple of pages on the structure of it, the mandate, the charter, and I was reading and the whole time that I was reading it sounded like something from Saturday night live. Trump is declared supreme leader for life, he designates his successor, he decides where money is spent, he vetoes any decision raised by the board, he dictates who sits on the board, he can fire and hire whoever he wants, he alone can change the charter of the board. When he's about to die, he can designate Ivanka or Jared to take over the board. It's a family-owned business enterprise. And the actual bodies of the board, take, for instance, the Gaza Executive Board. So it includes a number of government representatives, Turkey's Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, people from Qatar, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia. And it also has experts like Sigrid Kogg, the former deputy prime minister of the Netherlands and a senior official at the United Nations. Now, I have a friend that reached out to some of those people in the executive board and he asked a simple question: Can I talk to discuss and gain your insights into the executive board? And the answer was this: I have no insights. We never met. I never receive any updates. My only source of information is media. Just like you. I read what is written in Haar its and elsewhere. I have never been consulted. I don't even know who sits on that executive board. When they were asked about this board of peace plan that is asking Hamas for to disarm capitulate. They said, I never heard of that plan and I'm very pessimistic about it. It is the own the personal initiative of those guys that are running the show. In the background there is a bunch of businessmen . It's basically entropy and wars of misery. It's genocide profiteers. You have an Israeli businessman called Iran Tankman that used to be in the intelligence service, was part of what is called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. the most notoriously bloody, insane, violent organization that was ever created under the guise of humanitarianism, and Liran Tankman sat at the Border Peace Meeting pitching a brilliant idea . We're gonna replace the economic, the banking system, the financial system in Gaza with bitcoins and cryptocurrency digital wallets. Guess who has a cryptocurrency digital wallet business . That is Trump's children and Steve Whitcoff's children. It's just like a family business enterprise. There is this group in Florida that is called Alligator Elcatraz. The official name of the group is Gotham. They've been basically They were offered quote the most profitable contract in their history profit margins three hundred percent one point seven billion dollars to go and work in Gaza from a high-ranking official in the Trump White House with no bidding process and no vitting and no nothing, no proposal, nothing. You just get it, you give me a cut, you give that guy a cut, and then you get the project. So that's why no country is pledging any money to the Borough Peace. Because number one, they're not doing any reconstruction. Like at the UN Security Council, they're saying the lack of financial contributions in accordance with the commitments is hampering and impeding the reconstruction in Gaza. Who are you fooling? There is no reconstruction and the Borough Peace is preventing reconstruction. So they're not doing any reconstruction and even if you give them the money to do it, it'll end up in their pockets. Uh Mohammed in a recent article you write that the Hamas negotiators have been eyeing the Northern Ireland peace process uh as a model because a full disarmament there was framed as an outcome of peace, not as a prerequisite. And you know, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in nineteen ninety eight, but disarmament took place nearly a decade later. Israel, however, has successfully moved the global posts by interpreting the ambiguous language I'm quoting you of the Trump plan to demand Hamas' immediate and unconditional disarmament. And the Board of Peace's high representative, Nikolai Mladinov has gone along with this hard line interpretation. So are these negotiations just another trap? Absolutely. So with the High Representative Miladinov, he made a statement that I found profound and I fully agree with. He said you cannot have, and I'm paraphrasing here, you cannot have an independent Palestinian government that can run this territory if you have an armed group that is operating outside of the preview of that government. How do you expect a government to operate and be independent and sovereign, etc., if the Israeli army can enter and leave Gaza at will, or if they can continue to fly those killer drones on top of the heads of everyone in Gaza? When the Board of Peace was putting together this Gaza committee, I asked a couple of senior Palestinian officials and and public figures if they were interested in joining. And their answer was very simple: Do you think I'm a lunatic to go there and get bombed by Israel and then Israel says it was a mistaken identity and the incident is what is swept under the carpet and nobody's gonna bother to look into it. That's the Board of Peace. That's in CAG. You have a government in the air operating under the boots of the Israeli army that would never leave Gaza. So for the proposal to work, you need to have those two components. Disarmament is coupled with ending the occupation. That's how you had it in Northern Ireland and that's how what Hamas itself said that we are more than happy to lay down our arms if Israel's occupation is over, if we get a state on the nineteen sixty seven borders, which is twenty two percent of mandate Palestine. That is seen as maximalist, insane, rejection ist. So the proposal that Miladinov put to Hamas is simple. All of the security agencies and local staff of the Hamas government in Gaza would not be replaced. They would be merged into the INCAG government after is really an American vetting. And people who don't pass the vetting would receive compensation, severance packages, early retirement, or would be given non-military roles. That is brilliant. That I fully agree with . That is much needed. It's something that we've been calling for for a long time, this sort of don't follow debathification like the US did in Iraq and it turned out to be a disaster. Then the second component is the disarmament issue, where it doesn't talk about decommissioning. Decommissioning means you put the weapons in warehouses, you strictly apply a rule of mutual cessation of hostilities, you no use, no display, no production of weapons. Anyone that violates these uh stipulations would be arrested or engaged by the security forces on the ground. That is what Hamas agreed to. That is what Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom support. But that's exactly what Israel doesn't want. What Israel wants is a humiliating defeat. Like if you look at it from a purely security perspective, why does Israel need Hamas to lay down their arms? Maybe you would say give them benefit of the doubt because Israel doesn't want another October 7th, or they don't want Hamas rockets to attack them, etc. But Hamas agreed to put all of those away. The rockets, the tunnels, all of it would be gone. It's the Kleshenkovs that they are talking about. The rifles that are needed for an insurgency if the IDF decides to come back to Gaza. Milanov is posing this simple issue. Hand over all of those Kleshenkovs within ninety days before any Israeli withdrawal happens, and you need to destroy all your tunnels within ninety days before any Israeli withd rawal happens and destroy all of your production sites, all of your rockets, everything, except for what he calls personal weapons, which at that stage means like a stick, a pocket knife, a Swiss Army knife. If you're taking away the Kleschenkoffs, RPGs, like what's left? So you need to give away all of those things in 90 days to NCAC. And then you have an international mission going into Gaza door to door, home to home, verifying that it's 100% defens eless and weaponless. And once they till the Israelis , this is our finding, Israel would begin withdrawing from the areas where it's a hundred percent verified to be defenseless and weaponless. In an ideal scenario, ah okay fine the Israelis would leave, Hamas would give up its arms, you have a new government to have reconstruction, but Israel would retain eighteen percent of Gaza as a buffer zone permanently, indefinitely until such a time that quote Gaza does not constitute a future scenario of the resurgence of a threat. What does that mean? It means what Nebniao has been saying as a talking point for decades. Palestinians need to become Canadian or they need to become Swiss or Swedes in order for us to end the occupation. It it's garbage. It doesn't mean anything. Or or or to renounce any connection to Palestinians in the West Bank and to a project of national sovereignty Precisely. But that's the ideal scenario. That's if everything works according to plan. The realistic scenario, if you look at handside, Israel never fulfilled any of its obligations under the first phase of the Trump deal. And Hamas's only leverage at the moment is the weapons, is those few Kleshenkovs. If they give it up and have no leverage, what are the chances that Israel that never fulfilled the first half would say, Ah, okay, now we feel you? The idea that even if Hamas agrees to the Milanov proposal, do you think Netanyahu would allow reconstruction in Gaza when he's running for elections? It would be a disaster. And in addition to that, Israel fought a three-year inten se genocidal war in Gaza, destroyed uh most of the Gaza Strip, and declared many times that it has defeated or dismantled or uh dismembered uh Hamas 's brigades and factions. And they failed. And and the and the and and now Israel wants to use uh blackmail and the continued slow destruction of life conditions for Palestinian civilians in Gaza to achieve what it claimed. I mean, Israeli leaders generals have claimed repeatedly throughout the most intense days of the genocide that they have succeeded in dismantling and disintegrating Hamas's brigades and factions. So if all these cities, all these neighborhoods, all the all those high rises, all those uh you know uh cities like Rafa , big parts of Han unis, Bethanun does not exist anymore on the map, Betlehe does not exist anymore on the map, all of this happened and they were claiming that they were they were making all of all of this progress on the ground vis-a-vis defeating Hamas militarily. So what's going on here? So what was the point of all of that destruction if the the issue here is a a political one? So the Board of Peace, I think we can safely say is an instrument of war by other means, dominated by Israel and Trump . And now I want to ask you, though, about Hamas and perceptions of Hamas inside Gaza. I mean, before October 7, Hamas was struggling to maintain support among people in Gaza. It was resented for its heavy -handed leadership. It was at risk of being superseded by other resistance groups like Islamic Jihad, since Hamas appeared to be focused on internal politics rather than fighting Israel. Now, it was often said at the time that if elections were held throughout the occupied territories, Hamas would win in the West Bank but lose in Gaza. How is Hamas seen today? And what sort of group is the Gaza leadership given that so many of its cadres were killed during the war? In twenty twenty one when there were supposed to be Palestinian elections and then the Israeli head of the Shenbit kept visiting our president and instructing him to cancel them and Israel started kidnapping candidates. It was cancelled eventually. But back then I interviewed Hamas leader and he said that their own internal polling was showing consistently that they would at most get about 25% of the vote, and Fatah would get just as much, that neither of them was climbing anywhere close to a majority. With the younger Palestinian generation, in Gaza in specific, you have this h unger for change. We tried Hamas, we tried Fatah, we just want something different. Gaza's overwhelmingly young. It's I think the most youthful population on earth. The overwhelming majority of the population never voted a single time in their lives because the last vote was in two thousand and six. And there is this resentment towards Hamas, Fatah, Israel, the US, Europe, because the entire world had forsaken Gaza. And it's resentment towards governments, of course , not people. So basically after the genocide, there's been this inter interesting two-way street. So at some point I remember interviewing this young woman, Asala Mundar Kullab. Her father was murdered by Hamas in two thousand and seven. He was a senior Palestinian Authority security official. They killed him in an ugly way. They raided the funeral house after, they raided their home, they took his belongings. And Asala back then was only seven years old and she remembers it vividly. She remembers that she stood in the middle of the house and she started yelling at them murderers, murderers, murderers, and she couldn't stop. Now after the genocide started, at some point she wrote it on social media despite the immense danger to her life she said I am Asala Mundir Kullab the daughter of that colonel that Hamas murdered in 2007 I forgive them and I choose to channel all my anger, my resentment, my despair, my frustration towards Israel. Because the genocide was making it clear that Israel's enemy in Gaza is everyone, not just Hamas . If it was a war was sort of like surgical precision against Hamas targets here and there could have been a different scenario. But Israel was going neighborhood by neighborhood, rounding people up, starving people, putting them on death marshes, executing people, burying them in mass graves. Atrocities are impossible to recount in in even a whole day of podcasting. But basically Asala said, I forgive them, I choose to support them, and she was ic vividly and strongly and publicly supportive of uh the armed resistance in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Yemen ever since. That is one trend. It's hard to quantify. But I've seen some other examples like this. There is a journalist that Hamas detained and tortured in 2016. His case was reported by amnesty and he came out and and left Gaza even and as soon as the genocide started he's been consistently supportive of the armed resistance and when I talked to him he said I draw a distinction between Hamas as a government, Hamas as a political group, which I absolutely detest up until now, and the armed resistance. In Gaza, if Hamas ceases to exist, Israel would take over Gaza and kick everybody out. That was his understanding. At the same time , when I talk to people there, but they can't help but feel resentment towards Hamas on October seventh. It's natural. You lost everything you had. You're living on the street, painfully waiting for any answer, none is coming. Hamas released all the hostages trusting that Trump would stick to his words. He scammed them twice in January and on October 2025. So there is this deep resentment about Hamas' negotiation style, their management of the war, their lack of preparation for what comes after the war for October 7th itself. October 7th it's a bit more nuanced. So I once interviewed a senior Hamas member in Doha and I asked him how do you remember that day? He started off by saying, well, October sixth was not any better. Israel was still killing Palestinians on October sixth, the days right before. They were still bombing Gaza two days before. twenty twenty three and twenty twenty two were the single two bloodiest years in West Bank history for Palestinian children since records began. Gaza was dying out, normalization, all of those parameters. So he said October sixth was not any better. And then he said October seventh put us back on the map. It reminded the world of our struggle. And then he sighed deeply with a visible look of pain, and he said, You know what? If I can take it all back, if I can go back in time and prevent all of this from happening, I would do it without thinking. I'll do it without a second thought. There are some Hamas leaders that behind closed doors would describe this as a disaster. So Ahmed Yusuf, who made the same remarks that it was disastrous, that it was catastrophic, the decision was taken by three militant leaders without consulting any of the political winged leadership abroad, that it was kept secret from everybody else, that those three leaders lacked political maturity. According to Ahmad Yusuf, Khalid Meshal Des Prevents this nuance from coming to the public domain, although Yusuf spoke about it publicly, but what prevents others from coming forward is simple. They were told if you speak up about this, you're not gonna win any western sympathy. Hamas is burned. No matter what you do , you walk on your arms and seru feed, you do whatever you want. You're not you're never gonna gain any Western sympathy, and you're not gonna gain any Arab support from official governments in the West or in the Middle East, and you're gonna lose your popularity and your own base would resent you. So you stand to lose way more than you stand to achieve. So again it's like activism and politics is about what works, not what feels good. And even for some of those leaders if they feel that it might feel good to admit those mistakes, they're afraid of the political consequences that it wouldn't work, it wouldn't improve anything. Because there is no off ramp that is being offered to any of them. Ahad, what do you think about that? As Muhammad said, it's really hard to know what exactly the calculation was from the point of view of uh those who made the decision to uh launch the October seventh. But for Palestinians in G aza today who are dealing with the circumstances that we have described in the beginning of this show, you know, I talk to people too and I for someone living in a in a tent or you know, struggling to survive. You know, the the these these conversations about political reality and what happened and what should happen are difficult to have, but nonetheless, Palestinians in Gaza have always been engaged politically and they have their their differences. They have it's it's not a monolith. There are Palestinians in Gaza who still support Hamas. There are Palestinians in Gaza who oppose it, there are Palestinians in Gaza who, despite everything, you know, still see what what happened on October seventh as justified. There are Palestinians in Gaza, as Muhammad mentioned. They don't love that they have to had to pay this heavy price. All of this we will make you know better sense of it moving forward as we as hopefully you know we we learn from Palestinians in Gaza more and hear from them. But I think the common denominator between now and then is is the co is is a continuation of a model that has always sought to render Gaza rightless to keep it in this limbo of refugeehood, of statelessness , of development. And it created the conditions for despair, it created the conditions for wanting to uh you know break free. And uh and no matter what Palestinians in Gaza have done throughout the years, all of their attempts, be it violent or nonvi-olent, be it uh, you know, through the vehicle of Hamas or any other Palestinian political uh structure. All of these attempts have have been met by denial, have been met by marginalization, have been met by a continuous state of forgetfulness. Mentioned the question of memory and forgetting. This would be a good time for us to talk about the creation of the Gaza Genocide Center. Um, this organization in DC that you're helping to launch uh that will record and preserve evidence of the genocide. Now, the conditions under which this work is being done are very different from those of other recent genocides, Bosnia, Cambodia , Rwanda, because the party that perpetrated the crimes has faced no punishment and is in fact more powerful than ever. And the victims are still living in hell, under constant threat of being attacked or driven from their land . So can you talk about the work that you're doing, the challenges that you face and the overall mission of the organization? I think the the the starting point for any group organization or any any person who wants to document the genocide is not to treat it as a past event. Th the genocide continues, albeit on a in a scale, you know, we're not seeing 100 people get killed every day, but still dozens are being murder murdered on a on a weekly basis. And like you said, the the party that is perpetrating that genocide is not only getting away with murder, but it's also it has been trying to expand this approach uh regionally to bomb everyone anytime, anywhere. We've seen what has been done in Gaza being being replicated in Lebanon and Iran. Now the normalization of the targeting of medics and healthcare work ers. Just, you know, it's it's a passing headline in a place like Lebanon. Israel at any moment would bomb, an ambulance, or you know, the same thing happened in Iran. So the Gaza Genocide Center is an initiative that was started by a group of Palestinians and allies who come from the worlds of tech, advocacy, and academia with the goal of building a comprehensive database of the genocide incident by incident. To preserve the evidence, we don't take for granted that everything that has been posted on social media, all this evidence, the you know, digital evidence and that has accumulated throughout the past three years, there are no guarantees that this will exist on the internet forever. We all know that there are efforts to rewrite history as Mike Pompeyo said uh a few months ago that you know when when the history when the history of this is written, you know, it has to center Israelis as the victims. So, you know, you have statements like that. So what we are hoping to build, we are working on building a a database of the genocide t uh tracking every incident, um knowing what happened, when, where, who was affected, uh and and and making sense of of the scale, but by breaking it down to its its single building block. So we're also uh going to collect testimonies on the ground from survivors. We are going to uh build a virtual memorial that will give the uh relatives, friends, neighbors, loved ones of the thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered, the opportunity to honor the memory of their loved ones, but also to be able to hopefully capture the true scale of the death toll, assuming there are We have the the official death toll, right? But uh not all deaths were the result of kin of kinetic conditions, that is airstrikes, bombardment and so on. There have been thousands of deaths that have been the result of custodial conditions that is, you know, Palestinians killed under torture in Israel's detention camps, or those who who lost their lives due to structural conditions. You know, we know hundreds of people, maybe more than that, who were who died because they couldn't get the medical care they need, they couldn't get the evacuation they need in time, they couldn't you know secure the medication they need. They died from you know d lack of hygiene, diseases and and so on and so forth. So we are going to work to capture some of that. It's an immense effort. And you know, there is a growing space of organiz ations like Air Wars, Institute of Palestine Studies, and others that have been working on capturing uh aspects of the genocide. But it's it's it's it's an ongoing process and uh and it's going to take years to capture uh what what we have witnessed over the past few years. Thank you, Jihad. My my last question is for both of you. And uh it's not actually my question. It's a question posed by a novelist in Gaza who works on arts projects with children. Uh her name is Safa al-Nabahin, and I I I had mentioned to her that I was going to be talking to the two of you, and I asked her what question she would have for you. She said, how do they see their role in representing Gaza from the outside compared to the raw voices writing directly from the tents? How can the diaspora amplify our voices without accidentally overshadowing them . Everyone talks about rebuilding homes and hospitals, but what about Gaza's intellectual soul? With our bookshops, theaters, and universities gone, how do they envision the rebuilding of our cultural infrastructure? As writers in the di aspora, how can they practically support grassroots cultural and psychological initiatives inside Gaza, such as arts programs for children that are trying to heal the next generation ? How can Palestinian writers abroad help shift the global gaze so that the world sees us as literary creators and artists rather than just political subjects or victims. Uh Mohammed, do you want to start? I fully agree with Safas questions there. Uh there's this important element. Uh two things to unpack. Number one, the role of diaspora Palestinians has always been what is called Isnad support. It is Palestinians on the ground that dictate the agenda. They know best what works. Our role is to crowdfunding, change people's minds, organize, educate, raise awareness, talk to politicians, try to exert pressure as much as possible uh wherever possible in in Congress, European foreign ministries, parliaments. That is our role. It is a supportive role. They are in the lead. They are at the forefront of the struggle. The other thing that I think was very powerful is the idea of um how can Palestinians or pro Palestinians approach speak for us without overshadowing our voices? Or in other words, how can we speak for people on the ground without romanticizing them too much or heroizing them too much, without describing them as perpetual victims or as made out of iron and cast out of steel, that they're indestructibly resilient. They're neither, they're people in between . And this sort of obsessive creation of Gaza as some sort of an imaginary sick twisted reality TV show is one of the most destructive things that pro Palestinians outside and Palestinians abroad can do. And I've seen it in many instances where, for example, a Palestinian went to the US and an old woman came to him and she said, Shame on you, shame on you. Why did you leave Gaza? Why didn't you die there? Why didn't you stay and get martyred there? That's insane. That's practically insane. That was literally the question she posed to a Gazan journalist that came out in the middle of the genocide. I've seen a lot of these sort of shaming of Gazans because they don't confirm to an imaginary stereotype of what a Gazan should be. He should be or she should be the most sacrifical human being on the face of the earth, perpetual victim whose life is in tatter s and at the same time should be so robustly resilient that it inspires and at the same time evokes pity. That is insane. It it's destructive. The other thing is that Palestinians and pro-Palestinians for so long relied in our strategy on basically showcasing our naked scars and trauma to the world in the hope of evoking two sentiments, shock and anger. We want the world to be shocked at the horrors, the atrocities that Israel has been visiting on us for decades, close to a century, or we want them to be so angry and agitated to get mobilized to do something. The problem is that anger burns quickly and shock our human minds have this function, hedonic adaptation, it's called that guarantees you would be desensitized by the repetitive exposure to the same shocking or traumatic event . So if you see a picture of a dead child, it'll shock you to the core. The thousand times that you see a picture of a dead child, you might not feel much about it. The reason why those unsustainable sentiments became uh incidentally sustainable during the genocide is that Israel kept finding new ways to shock us. Every time I thought I got used to the worst that Israel can do, they would find a new way. I one day I was like, okay, I've seen the worst. How worse can they do? And then they burned a Palestinian teenager on his hospital bed in a hospital and he was engulfed in flames and the whole world saw it. How worse can they do? And then they shot three hundred and fifty bullets on a six year old child trapped inside a vehicle with her entire family that were shot before her. So they kept finding new innovative ways to shock us. So that's what kept the momentum. But the momentum is built on a temporary delusion. The idea that this momentum would be sustainable is a delusion because I've been I've lived through 10 Israeli military operations and three wars in Gaza, two grand invasions, each one of them ended the same way. A ceasefire, as soon as it's signed, Israel violates it at for perpetuity, but the world pretends everything is over. The world moves on and Gaza is forgotten. So why would this one be any different? There was the sort of belief that okay, we got the three victories. The victory of the ICJ declaring a plausible genocide, ICJ saying the occupation is illegal and there is apartheid, and the victory of the UN adding Israel to the list of systematic child murderers and abusers. And the fourth one is the arrest warrants by the International Criminal Courts against Netanyahu and UF Galant. All of those are unprecedented victories, but they're also delusional momentum. Namibia got a similar ruling from the ICJ, I think in 1979. It took about close to two decades after for apartheid to collapse. In Myanmar, they got a genocide plausible genocide ruling from the ICJ. Nobody remembers Myanmar today. The Rohing ya's they're still living in refugee camps in Bangladesh in terrible conditions. Without education, healthcare, without any basic necessities, nobody remembers them. As soon as there is a pretend ceasefire, people move on. So those victories are temporary. And I think the element that is lacking from our movement is to move from sort of being reactive to proactive. There was a time when the Palestinian struggle would inspire people . Instead of being sort of passive victims, we were active actors. Now some people would make the argument, okay, there is active actors, that is the armed resistance in Gaza. Armed resistance has its limits. You need action to complement it. In South Africa they had armed resistance, nonviolent resistance, BDS, global diplomacy, polling, pressure campaigns, global solidarity groups, etc. People speaking for the cause, people publicizing it. The problem is that our authority, the Palestinian authority, as soon as the genocide began to unfold, I've been told by multiple sources they instructed their diplomats and top leaders to not talk about Gaza role in global media They didn't want to agitate or provoke the Israelis. So the people that are supposed to represent us are basically the leadership of the Bantus stand and at the same time they're supposed to be the only legitimate representative of our liberation movement. It is catastrophic. It was a time when Yasser Arafat would visit India and he would have a million people on the street immediately. If Abbas visits any Arab capital, they would have to keep it a secret, because people would throw rotten tomatoes and eggs on him. Uh just he made designated his son Yasser, a businessman with no political qualifications, as his basically heir, as as the new leader of Fatah, a member of the top leadership decision making board of of the Palestinian body politics. The Israelis have have have effectively separated the West Bank and Gaza in the eyes of much of the world. And we're talking about a situation which the destruction of Gaza has taken place against the backdrop of the fragmentation of the Palestinian National Project and the collapse of its leadership into inefficacy and competence and collaboration. Jihad, what uh I'm wondering if you could reflect on S Safar's question. I think Safah's question is is important today for Palestinians on the outside, like Palestinians inside Gaza or in the West Bank or in forty eight or in the you know Arab Diaspora. It's not a question of representation. Nobody is a spokesperson for the Palestinian people unless they are, you know, designated that role uh through a democratic democratically elected institution. There are different people doing different things and trying to and trying their best to push for this change that we hope to see. That is our freedom and liberation and an end to this nightmare. In this context, we can see our roles from a structural point of view. That is, you know, we can empower each other, we can support each other, we can amplify each other, we can ensure that the less represented, the more marginalized, those who are in the tents, on the ground, who are struggling, can have their voices be heard by the outside world. And I think this is one of the things that Palestinians in the diaspora have a responsibility to do by by building institutions, by building initiatives that tell the stories and create these vehicles for ensuring that the memory is preserved and the stories are told and that there is a small room somewhere for us as a collective to think about the future. And of course this is you know a general and an abstract statement, but when we translate it into concrete efforts, it can mean many things. Um there are some of us who work on the humanitarian front, there are some of us who work on the cultural front, some of us who work on the documentation front, others work on the advocacy front . And yes, I I mean I agree with Muhammad, there are Palestinians and diaspora have a lot of flaws, but at the end of the day, let's not forget what they're up against. You know, we no struggle in history has seen these levels of scrutiny and uh racer and lawfare. Um be people are actually punished in their livelihood and in their safety. So it's it's a difficult moment that we're in, but it's like those moments in history when followed by these massive catalysts that cause change and um collapse in the existing order and open doors for new possibilities. We don't know for sure or for certain what will come out of this moment, but I think you know we have to honor our responsibility nonetheless towards ourselves and towards our people and towards the world that we live in, because a at the end of the day, what's happening in Gaza and in Palestine is universal in its nature and and has universal consequences that transcend Palestine and the Palestinian people. And it and is a symptom of shifts in the global political order. Yeah. And whatever precedents are established there, they they are established elsewhere. So I think you know uh,, this is what makes this issue universal uh at its core. How many actors globally are involved in it, but also how consequential it is for the whole world. Uh jih ad and Mohammed, I want to thank you for joining me on the LRB podcast. It's been a real education. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you.