This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show looking at Israel’s intensifying attacks on Lebanon, where officials said Sunday Israeli strikes across Lebanon during the weekend killed at least 50 people. Israel is facing international condemnation after repeatedly attacking U.N. peacekeeping forces in southern Israel. At least five members of UNIFIL — that’s the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon — have been injured in recent days. U.N. has also accused Israel of forcibly entering and destroying a part of the UNIFIL base near the Israeli border and rejected calls by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to remove the peacekeeping forces from the region. On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Guterres warned attacks against peacekeepers, quote, “may constitute a war crime.”
For more, we go to Boston, where we’re joined by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at American University of Beirut.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rami. In these last six minutes that we have, if you can talk about the significance of the attack on the U.N. base, the injuring of the two U.N. Indonesian peacekeepers? The UNIFIL is made up of peacekeepers from a number of different countries, including Indonesia and Italy and other places. Essentially, is this attack on the United Nations?
RAMI KHOURI: Yes, that’s true. It’s essentially an attack on the U.N. It’s an attack against the modern system of the rule of law that the victorious powers in World War II set up after 1945, the U.N., development agencies, humanitarian law codes, all kinds of things that were supposed to make the world safe from another genocide as happened in Nazi Germany.
And the message of Israel is “This is nonsense. None of this makes sense to us. We’re not going to respect any of this stuff. People can make up any laws. They can make up any courts. They can do whatever they want around the world. The people of Israel” — and there’s a difference between the people of Israel and the Jewish people, because not all Jewish people in the world agree with this. But the people of Israel seem to accept fully the policy of the Israeli government now to kill and burn alive and torture people in Palestine, and now in Lebanon, in any way they want to achieve what the Israeli government says is its security.
But this is a flawed policy, because what we’ve seen around the region for years is that this kind of savagery only brings about greater responses and greater determination to fight it, now to the point where the state of Iran — not just a militia somewhere, but the government of Iran — is involved in the battle, and the U.S. is sending more troops and anti-aircraft defense systems to Israel and expanding its bases around the region.
So, the message of Israel is “We don’t care about anything except Israel, and we will destroy the whole region if we need to.” And this is something that is possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but a regional conflagration with the U.S. and Iran now facing off against each other, and Iran and Israel firing missiles back and forth at each other, and Hezbollah and Iran both showing that they have the technology to evade Israel’s air defense systems and hit precise targets — and they’re still only hitting military targets; they haven’t gone after civilians as the Israelis have. This is the bigger picture that we have to look at in the region.
And the Israelis don’t seem to understand that the Palestinian people and Lebanese people and Iranians and everybody else in the region are human beings just like the Israelis and Jewish people are human beings. And they should go back to Masada, the great fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, where in 73 A.D. the Jewish forces there preferred to die by suicide rather than to be killed or taken slaves by the Romans who had laid siege to them. And now the situation is reversed, that the Israelis are the Romans. They’re laying siege to parts of Gaza. They’re destroying parts of Lebanon. They’re threatening Iran. And the people are not going to surrender. They will die. And many of them are dying. People, doctors, as you just heard, saying, “We’re not going to evacuate our hospitals. We’ll die with our patients.” This is a human reaction. It’s not a Palestinian or an Arab or an Islamic or — it’s a human reaction that the Jewish people showed the world in their history and in their biblical texts, which are widely adopted, that this is how human beings survive. They survive by defending their dignity and their physical life.
And this is where we are now in this battle. And the U.N. is one of the targets. UNRWA is something that Israel has been trying to shatter for years. They don’t allow Guterres to come into Israel anymore. This is a terrible trajectory. And people will fight back against it.
AMY GOODMAN: Rami, in this last minute we have, you now have, in light of all of this, still the U.S. is sending 100 troops — this is completely new — and this anti-missile THAAD system, and this in the midst of this, to say the least, extremely significant election, which is neck and neck between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Harris very close in these battleground states that have large Arab American, Lebanese American, Muslim American communities, like Michigan. What is the effect of this?
RAMI KHOURI: We’ve seen the effect already, that not only Arab and Muslim Americans, but a coalition that they have created with Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, progressive Jews, church groups, labor unions, academics — a big coalition has emerged, focused on the refusal, as Americans, to be a part of a genocidal war by Israel against Palestinians. Americans don’t want this to be their legacy. They don’t want this to be their policy.
And they’re saying, “Well, we’ll vote for somebody else. We don’t care who’s president,” because there’s not much difference between Kamala Harris and Biden and Trump and anybody else. They’ve been killing Palestinians and Arabs since the Zionist movement started a hundred years ago, which aimed to get the Palestinians out of Palestine and replace them with a Jewish state, which has happened. They have a Jewish state. They want to keep expanding, it seems. And this is not going to work. This is a recipe for catastrophe.
So, the Americans sending more arms is what America does in its foreign policy, as its primary means of —
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds, Rami.
RAMI KHOURI: Yeah. So, American militarism and Israeli barbarism are only going to create a catastrophe for everybody. And now that Gaza may influence the American election —
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Rami Khouri, journalist. Thanks for joining us.
