It’s been 17 days since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood triggered Israel’s punishing bombardment of Gaza. Thousands are now dead in Gaza and Israel without a clear end in sight to the bloodshed. As the world looks on in horror, we must not forget the decades of history that have brought us here. Israel has held Gaza under siege for the past 17 years, sealing off 2 million people in an open-air prison. At the same time, Israel’s democratic institutions have eroded and mutated into a theocratic fascism. Israeli filmmaker Lia Tarachansky joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss this history and her recent article reflecting on the war.
Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Before I introduce my guests I’ll say this is another conversation about what’s happening in Israel-Palestine, another piece of the Not in Our Name series, and one that’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to cover without breaking down in tears myself when I watch what happened from the moment that Hamas crossed the border, to Israel’s insane response, to the thousands killed. Watching this go on, there’s something very different about this moment than anything else I’ve covered or been a part of when it comes to Israel-Palestine over my 50-plus years of being active in this world.
So I’m having serious conversations with many people. The woman I’m talking to today is someone who I’ve known through our work here at The Real News, though she no longer works at Real News, and she’s one of the first people I turn to on many levels, but on this particular topic, this issue of life, Lia Tarachansky. She’s a journalist and a filmmaker, an artist, a multimedia artist born in the Soviet Union, but she’s an Israeli. She now lives in Canada.
She’s an incredible filmmaker, and we’ve done programs about her work in films, On the Side of the Road, Ethnocracy: Israel’s African Refugees, and her experimental film, Ocean. She’s won Best Women in Film and Shorts awards. She’s this amazing human being, an activist, an artist, and a former coworker here at The Real News who’s had her wits about her and is not at Real News anymore. Welcome, Lia. Good to have you with us.
Lia Tarachansky: Thank you, Marc. I hope somebody does that for you at the beginning of your show.
Marc Steiner: Thank you. I don’t even know where to begin sometimes. I read the piece that you wrote that was extremely powerful and moving, 11 Days Have Passed is what you called it. And I almost don’t know where to begin anymore. This moment seems so different. Whether it was my first experience in the ’67 War and every war that happened since, and all the killings of Palestinians and the murders of Israelis and all that’s gone on in these 50-plus years, something profoundly seems to have shifted. And maybe I should be getting more emotional because I’m getting older, I’m not sure, but something seems different.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. This moment is, to me, distinctly different. A couple of things are going on at the same time: Israel has been moving in a particular direction. My films and the work of many, many, many journalists, most of them Israeli and Palestinian, have been illustrating how the dissolution of democratic institutions by the Netanyahu government starting in 2009 with the introduction of a whole slate of anti-democratic laws that eroded every aspect of what we would normally call democracy inside of Israel for Jews.
There’s the structural issue of Israel being a theocracy and not a democracy, but for Jewish people, the democratic institutions for Jewish people have been on a very slow and very extreme path of destruction. We’ve seen the rise of theocracy in Israel and the suppression of secular forces in favor of a very fundamentalist understanding of temple-time Jewishness, which is a Jewishness most Jews don’t want to return to.
At the same time, there has been a normalization and permanence to the colonial occupation of Palestine, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, and it became very normal to control millions of people and it became a thing that we took for granted. For the last 15 years, a lot of us have been saying, if this particular thing goes on, it’s going to lead to that. If the dehumanization of African refugees is going to go on, it’s going to lead to this, it’s going to lead to this, it’s going to lead to this. If you keep 2 million Palestinians in Gaza under brutality for decades, it’s going to lead to an explosion.
The moment we’re living in right now is that all of those forces have intersected. The anti-Netanyahu demonstrations this year, which have been the biggest protest movement in Israel’s history, illustrate how much frustration there is that average Israelis were willing to take pretty big risks in order to protest their complete destruction of Israeli democracy and the uber-centralization of the Israeli economy in the hands of a dozen families.
So the steady movement of all of these things, each of them would have been catastrophic, and all of them meeting together has been catastrophic. This moment feels very different because, in the Second Intifada, Israelis were being killed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other movements. I’m the generation that grew up with buses exploding civilians getting targeted by Hamas and hundreds of Israelis getting murdered in terrorist attacks that have touched every person that I know, including myself. So the particular nature of the attack that happened on October 7 is not new for us. Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks every year for the past decades.
But something is different about this one because in Israel we have normalized the siege on Gaza so much that it became a part of the reality. It was not on the news, it was not discussed. If you go to I’lam, which is a wonderful media literacy institution, and it’s an institution that studies the media in Israel-Palestine, I’lam, you’ll find that Palestinians in general were discussed in the Israeli discourse in the news and the public sphere almost not at all.
So the fact that what happened on October 7 and the bursting of the dam that led to people breaking through what we’d assumed were impenetrable barriers, feels different. Because in the Second Intifada, we still didn’t have the same apartheid segregation that we have now. That was pretty solid. You still could go in and out of Gaza pretty easily, you could go in and out of every part of the West Bank pretty easily. And today we live in a world where we sealed off 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and assumed that they would deal with whatever.
The dam has burst, and they have reminded us that they’re alive and well and that we need to deal with the mess that we made. The way that happened in the form of the atrocities that were perpetrated against civilians also was so horrific that people who wrote off the Israel-Palestine conflict into the back pages of failed experiments in human history could not ignore it anymore.
The Israeli army’s response has been so brutal and so horrific and has surpassed the worst nightmares we’ve ever had of them carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip and preparing for a massive land invasion with hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The response is so horrific. The level of the violence, the different historical things that have led to this, and the fact that what happens in Israel-Palestine in this modern interconnected world we live in doesn’t stay in Israel-Palestine, I have no doubt that what happened is more connected to the US-Russia Cold War than it does to Israel or Palestine.
The ramifications of what’s happening to Jewish and Muslim communities around the world are evidence of how these localized conflicts cannot be maintained and contained anymore because we live in a completely interconnected world. And the war on misinformation has been a frontline in a way that we haven’t seen in the past. All of these things have converged in a way that is horrifying.
I would also like to add that something interesting is also happening in the sense that the humanization of the Israeli victims has also allowed us to come up with a third way of looking at this. In the protest movements and solidarity movements, as well as in the larger public, in the largest society, we have gotten so comfortable with sides, with this idea of, well, I was in this, I was cheering for this team, and now I’m cheering for that team, and I can only speak to this team. Okay, now I can only speak to that team.
That idea has shattered and we need to come up with something better. We need to come up with something that holds space for the fact that an oppressor can also be a victim, for the fact that a victim can also be an oppressor; and for the fact that if we are going to find a way out of this hell hole, it’s going to be through holding space and building something that has humanity and compassion for people. We haven’t been in that place before to this extent.
Marc Steiner: You’ve said a lot.
Lia Tarachansky: Sorry.
Marc Steiner: No, no. Nothing to be sorry for. That’s what these moments are for, especially at this time. We’ve seen this where, as you put it, 3000 Palestinians have been killed, at least 1400 Israelis, and maybe 200 people kidnapped. I read a report this morning that it could be close to 900 children killed in Gaza, some reports said 600. I’m not sure what the real number is. I’m not sure anybody knows what the real number is.
Lia Tarachansky: You can’t know what the real number is because the majority of the killed are stuck under rubble.
Marc Steiner: And some may be alive under that rubble, an unimaginable horror. It has been happening across the globe, but given the rightward shift in Israel – And even in terms of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, I would consider Hamas a rightward shift, no matter what they think they are otherwise – And that so many Israelis who were on the left, so many Israelis who want to bring peace between Palestinians and Israelis to fruition, are gone.
Lia Tarachansky: They’re not gone. They’re shocked. They’re shocked because within hours of the attack taking place, people that they’ve been protesting alongside, and have dedicated their lives fighting for, have said that it’s justified and celebrated it. When we fight for decolonization, we fight for principles. And in a moment where something horrific happened to us, a lot of the left rolled over like it doesn’t matter, like those are not people, like the fact that we live in an oppressive country means that we deserve to die. That was a very brutal awakening and is a huge failure of the left, and we’re going to have to do some big soul-searching about what it is that we’re fighting for.
Marc Steiner: Even from what I’ve read and people I’ve talked to, many of the Israelis who were killed on October 7 were on the left.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that people who are not on the left deserve to die.
Marc Steiner: No, of course not. Of course not.
Lia Tarachansky: A lot of people who were kidnapped and killed are people who debted their lives to peace and justice. The loss of their life and the fact that they are currently in this precarious situation as hostages is a tragedy the same as any other person. Like I said, the left is going to have to do a lot of soul-searching because if the way that you can fight for Palestinians is by dehumanizing other people, it means that you’re not fighting for your principles; You’re fighting for a new flag. And I’m not interested in taking on another nationalism after denouncing one.
Marc Steiner: I understand completely. I agree. What I’d like to talk a little bit about is where you see it going. When you see that these massive protests took place in Israel – It wasn’t about Palestinians, but it was against Netanyahu, for the most part – When you see the rightward shift across both entities, Palestinian and Israeli, and when you see this moment – Which we both said at the very beginning of the conversation feels very different, in part because of the death of the Israelis, but also because the thousands of Palestinians being killed at this moment as we’re speaking together. I don’t even know how to say this sometimes – How do you see this playing out? How do you see what can come out of this? Is there light that can come out of this extremely dark moment?
Lia Tarachansky: Israel-Palestine is a place where what it means to be human is extremely intense, it’s a place that is quite sacred to a lot of people, and it’s a place where even the most unspiritual of us feel something very powerful. It’s a place that has seen the worst of humanity and it has seen the most beautiful things in humanity. If you are able to go out into the streets and yell, Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies, after your children have been kidnapped, then that is light. If you can remember that we are trying to build something different, decolonization is not flipping the table and making a new oppressor, decolonization is creating a new space, then you can create light.
This has been a moment of some difficult tests for a lot of people. If we use this moment to assert our humanity, to assert that we will hold space, and keep in our hearts and center the people who are the most directly impacted by this, then we can create light. I don’t think that it’s a thing that happens from the sky; it’s something that we create. I’ve seen a lot of Jewish people rise up, show up, and stand in solidarity, and I’ve seen a lot of Palestinians reach out, stand, and assert their humanity and Israelis, and condemn the atrocities that Hamas perpetrated. I’ve seen the best of humanity in these last 13 days, those are the voices and that’s the work that we need to highlight. What impact will it have on global politics? I don’t think anybody can seriously look you in the eye and tell you the answer to that.
Marc Steiner: It seemed like you were saying that Israelis came out saying, we don’t need to have this war with Arabs?
Lia Tarachansky: Absolutely.
Marc Steiner: Tell me about that. Something we’ve missed. Clearly, our press is not covering that.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. There’s been anti-war protests all over the country. Netanyahu is being dragged over the coals right now by the Israeli press. The business as usual is not going on in Israel, and a lot of people are against the way that this has been playing out. Unfortunately, as I said, when you spend 15 years destroying democratic institutions, you criminalize public protests and you criminalize free speech. And we’ve seen in the last few days, waves of arrests of anybody that has the courage to say no to this war, especially targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel. One person was arrested for saying God is bigger than all of this mess. And they were arrested for that. We’ve seen a few incidences like that in the past but for that to be a wave of silencing, a wave of arrests, is shocking.
An Israeli woman who held a sign that said Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies was arrested and the sign was taken from her. The peace movement in Israel and Palestine is alive and well like ever before, and it’s a lot louder and a lot more prominent than almost anywhere else. The fact that your press is not covering it has a lot to do with the fact that the US is trying to make this about the US, in the way that Russia has tried to make this about Russia. Biden’s arrival in Israel and the speech that he gave is a revolting manifestation of that.
Marc Steiner: Revolting, you said?
Lia Tarachansky: Yes.
Marc Steiner: Yep. Yep. His coming to Israel was more about his votes in America, what he thinks is about his votes in America.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah, everybody’s using it for their votes. People are paying attention now for their own selfish reasons. I get it. Russia is manipulating Hamas, Iran, and Lebanon for its own selfish reasons. I get it. I get that that’s how politics work. But we are used to being used in the global chess game of politics. That has been the truth for us for the majority of our existence as a state and for Palestinians, for the majority of their existence under various empires. That’s not new but the volume of it happening as practiced on Ukraine and as now perpetrated on Israel and Palestine is revolting.
Marc Steiner: Clearly, the Israeli government, part of its end game here is taking over a good portion of the Gaza Strip and pushing people out of it.
Lia Tarachansky: No, Israel doesn’t have an end game.
Marc Steiner: What do you mean?
Lia Tarachansky: The Israeli government doesn’t have an end game.
Marc Steiner: You’re saying they don’t have a strategy for how they want to pursue this war?
Lia Tarachansky: The Israeli army has had multiple strategies that have been put in place over decades. The Israeli government doesn’t have an end game for this. This is going to be a war on multiple fronts, involving several nations and several international powers. Israel does not have an end game for this. The Israeli government has been reactionary for the majority of its existence, at least in the last 15 years. And Netanyahu, at an all-time low, facing four criminal investigations and a mass movement that has been calling for him to step down, is fighting for his life to stay in the political sphere. There is no end game. This idea that there is an end game is one of the products of the conspiracy theory left.
Marc Steiner: Interesting. When Israel does this almost genocidal act of telling Palestinians to leave and move, go further to the East, is one of the reasons I said it seemed as if Israel wants to come in to create themselves, to create –
Lia Tarachansky: The South.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. The South. Right.
Lia Tarachansky: There is nothing like Israel. There is the country of Israel that has many different powers that are struggling to manifest their interests at the same time as any other country. The government of Israel, whose emergency cabinet is responsible for the overall strategy here, is working with the military elite who have their own strategies and each one of them has their own interests. I don’t believe that the moving people to the south has to do with annexing land, it has to do with the desire to, as Israeli pundits said, bomb Gaza into the Stone Age. The point here is to have a very strong response, a show of force that would be brutal beyond imagination and total beyond imagination because what Hamas did is show to the world that Israel’s so-called superior military, superior arms, arsenal, and superior defense systems, are fallible.
Israel’s economy has been dependent on Israel’s war machine selling arms to the world and illustrating that it has achieved some military supremacy. And while that’s all true, Hamas has blown a giant hole in the middle of all of that. The only thing pushing the Israeli military right now is a desire to have a decisive show of force that would illustrate to all of Israel’s enemies that if you come at us, we will kill the last of you and your children. And it’s a brutal, genocidal approach to global politics, but it’s also not working. The Palestinian resistance has not subsided as a result of the brutality of Israel’s bombardment. Hezbollah has not subsided its rocket attacks on Northern Israel.
Russia and all of the other players in this game have continued the cyber attacks and all the various less visible forms of their solidarity, of their support for the people fighting Israeli soldiers right now. And this has only made everything worse and has only ramped everything up to 11. So no, I don’t think there’s an end game. This is a reactionary war. We know very well what the Israeli government’s interests are in general and we know very well what the surrounding nations’ interests are, and everyone is fighting for their interests at the expense of the Gaza people and the Israelis.
Marc Steiner: Two quick things here: As you were speaking, I was thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and doing some writing about it. I went back to read the story of Masada where all the Israelis were wiped out. And it feels in some ways that what people have attempted to do to Jews for a thousand years or more, Israel is doing it to ourselves. Setting that up. I think about the stories that I grew up with from the pogroms with my bubby and grandfather and what happened, the horrendous things that had happened to them as they fled Poland. I think about all my cousins who sat in my living room with numbers on their arms, growing up as a kid and knowing what that meant. But this moment somehow, we are sowing the seeds for our own destruction that other people have attempted to do –
Lia Tarachansky: I don’t know. This big picture shit… Forgive my language –
Marc Steiner: – You can say whatever you’d like, Lia [laughs].
Lia Tarachansky: – Yeah. It’s true that when the early Zionist movement came to Palestine and perpetrated the Nakba, they were importing the actions of their oppressors, and they used what they knew. The fact that at that time in the forties, many different populations were being displaced in mass – In Poland, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine – Was part of the way that the business of war was being done. The mass dispossession of Jews out of Arab countries is another example of it, and the context is important. The oppressed came to Palestine and brought the oppression with them, and the oppressed Palestinians are bringing the oppression they have learned from the Israeli army of indiscriminately killing everybody in sight, to Israel. This inheritance of rape and oppression and murder can only lead to all of our destruction.
It is our job to remember that underneath the game that Russia’s playing, and underneath the game that America is playing, and underneath all of the layers of complexity, there are people that live here, that live in Israel, and that live in Palestine. And no matter what they believe, no matter what they’ve been brought up in their educational system to believe, they don’t deserve what is going on right now, that we all deserve better than this.
We live in an interconnected world. The war in Ukraine has illustrated that very clearly. If you don’t care about people, if you only care about your economy – Already, the war in Gaza is having an impact on the movement of gas. Chevron shut down its gas fields in Israel – This is going to come to you whether you care about it or not. There have been people murdered because they are Palestinian, Muslim, or Jewish around the world as retaliation for what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, and that violence is going to come closer and closer to you. All of us are implicated in this and all of us have a responsibility to keep and to hold space for the humanity that we want to take forward into this 21st century, which so far, has been very disappointing.
Marc Steiner: Lia, as we close, I really do appreciate you taking the time to do all this today. When we were writing back and forth you introduced me to your friend, Samah Sabawi, and she read this poem that her father wrote, Abdul Karim Sabawi. I want to close with that, her poem, and introduce her. Talk to me and all of our listeners here about her and what they’re about to hear.
Lia Tarachansky: Sure. Samah Sabawi is a remarkable person. I met her when we were both invited to do a presentation in Israel and Palestine to government employees in Canada. I remember in 2009 we were sitting on a train and talking about how can this horror continue when Israel attacked Gaza. And 15 years later, it’s astonishing that we are still asking ourselves, how can this go on? But Samah Sabawi was born in 1967, and even though her family was displaced out of Gaza, her father decided to call her Samah, which your Arabic listeners would know, means forgiveness. Her father, Abdul Karim, and she are both poets.
They’re beautiful poets who speak in a way that rips through your heart. Besides being brilliant in a number of different ways, Samah is also a world-premiering and award-winning playwright, and her plays, if they haven’t played in your city, will soon. She lives in Australia right now, and she’s raising beautiful families of her children and is probably skipping a lot of nights of sleep, worrying about her relatives and her husband’s relatives in Gaza.
Marc Steiner: We’re about to hear her voice, her poem written by her father, Abdul Karim Sabawi, read by Samah Sabawi. Lia Tarachansky, I always love talking with you. I’m sorry every time we talk it has to be with such pain that swirls around us, but it is, and I’m glad you’re there to help tell the story. And I’m glad you are always ready to talk together with me. So thank you very much and hope we see each other soon.
Lia Tarachansky: Thanks, Marc.
[ Audio of Samah Sabawi plays]
In 1967, my father Abdul Karim Sabawi’s home city, Gaza, fell under Israeli occupation. He, like many other Palestinians, was uprooted and forced into exile for the rest of his life. He wrote this poem on that painful first morning when he woke up in Jordan to realize he may never be allowed to return. The poem was translated from Arabic into English by me, yours truly, and it’s a poem that he never actually published in Arabic because he says it’s one that is too painful for him to relive and to remember. I found the poem written in one of his old transcript files, and I brought it with me since, and I translated it into English. The poem is called Erasure.
“When you were parched,
We quenched your thirst with our blood.
Now
We carry your burden,
Disgraced.
We cry in shame
When asked,
“Where do you come from?”
Dishonored, we die
If only the stray bullets
From the occupier’s guns
Were merciful
That they pierced through our legs.
If only they tore through our knees.
If only we sunk into your sand,
Deep to our necks.
If only we got stuck
And became the salt of your earth,
The nutrients in your fertile soil.
If only we didn’t leave.
The gates of our hearts
Are wide open to misery.
Don’t ask us where this wind is blowing.
Don’t ask about a house,
Or windows,
Or trees.
The bulldozers were here.
The bulldozers were here,
And the houses in our village,
Fell like a row of decayed teeth.
They haven’t colonized Mars yet,
And the moon is barren.
Uninhabitable.
So carry your children,
Your memories,
And follow me.
We can live in the books of history.
They’ll write about us,
“The wicked Bedouins
Landed in Baghdad.
They landed in Yafa,
They landed in Grenada,
Then they moved on.
They packed their belongings
And rode on their camels.
They didn’t leave their print on the red clay
And all their artifacts
Were faded
With the passing of the years.”
Does anyone in the world care?
Does anyone care?
What is it worth
To be an Arab,
Or a Native American,
Or a dinosaur?
[Audio of Samah Sabawi ends]
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