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AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Israel. The New York Times has confirmed past reporting by +972 Magazine that on October 7th, 2023, Israel loosened military rules meant to protect noncombatants and gave soldiers, quote, “the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza,” unquote. The Times reports the order meant, quote, “the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside,” unquote.
This comes as the head of Gaza’s health agency says he’s lost contact with Kamal Adwan Hospital and at least 50 people have been killed, including five medical staff, in an Israeli airstrike on a building near the hospital in northern Gaza.
Meanwhile, in central Gaza, Palestinians attended the funeral of five journalists killed in an Israeli strike near Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. They worked for the Al-Quds Today channel and were in a van clearly marked “press.”
MOURNER: [translated] These journalists, what’s their fault? You target them just because they report the news? Just because they document your crimes? Why do you attack and target them? God is my witness, and he is the best disposer of affairs. Ayman was waiting for his first child to be born. His wife was still in labor, hadn’t delivered yet. He was hoping to see his first born, but he didn’t make it. He was martyred before he ever got to see his son.
AMY GOODMAN: Also in Gaza, health officials report the fourth infant child in 72 hours has died due to the cold temperatures.
For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist, author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, member of its editorial board. His new article is headlined “The IDF’s Own Sickening ‘Zone of Interest’ in the Heart of Gaza.” Levy’s latest book is titled The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe.
Gideon, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with the killing of the five journalists in a clearly marked van that said “press.” They were outside of Al-Awda Hospital. One of the journalists was waiting for the birth of his first child, his wife inside in labor.
GIDEON LEVY: Nothing will make Israel to admit that they were journalists. The IDF already claims that they were all terrorists presenting themselves as journalists. You never know nothing. The fact is that this mass killing is going on even now when you understand there is no purpose whatsoever except of killing more Palestinians. This war should have ended a long time ago, and Israel continues and continues, really now without any purpose except of mass killing — killing and killing and killing for the sake of killing. And this car of those five journalists is just one example of so many.
AMY GOODMAN: And the death of another child of hypothermia, dying of the cold in Gaza during this cold snap, Gideon?
GIDEON LEVY: I am much more worried, Amy, about the cold wind which blows from Israel, because those stories are hardly published here, and if they are published, they don’t touch anyone. Look what happened to us. Really, frozen babies, even this doesn’t touch anybody. Nobody talks about it. Nobody really seems to care about it. You will hear all kind of justifications, except of one, that Israel is continuing to commit crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Gideon, your last piece is about what you’re describing as a “zone of interest” in Gaza. I wanted to go to the original Oscar-winning film of Jonathan Glazer and play the trailer.
LINNA HENSEL: [played by Imogen Kogge] [translated] These flowers are so beautiful.
HEDWIG HÖSS: [played by Sandra Hüller] [translated] The azaleas there. There are also vegetables. A few herbs. Rosemary. Beetroot. This is fennel. Sunflowers. And here is kohlrabi. The children love to eat it.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: [translated] The heartfelt time we spent in the Höss house will always be among our most beautiful holiday memories. In the east lies our tomorrow. Thanks for your National Socialist hospitality.
AMY GOODMAN: So, The Zone of Interest is an Oscar-winning film about the commandant’s own home that shares the wall with Auschwitz, but the film never goes into Auschwitz. It just stays in this kind of paradise. During the Oscars ceremony earlier this year, the filmmaker Jonathan Glazer condemned the Israeli occupation after his film, Zone of Interest, won for best international film. This is what he said.
JONATHAN GLAZER: Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?
AMY GOODMAN: So, he already talked about the relevance of the concentration camps and World War II to what is happening today in Gaza. Gideon Levy, if you can share your thesis in your latest piece, “The IDF’s Own Sickening ‘Zone of Interest’ in the Heart of Gaza.”
GIDEON LEVY: Yes, and it’s very unfortunate, but you can’t help it. The IDF opened a resort place in the northern part of Gaza for the soldiers to come to have some good time, to refresh themselves from the battles, to rest a little bit. They’re offering them massages and very good meals and all kind of other benefits, just to let them rest. That’s fine with me. I mean, the soldiers deserve some rest. But I couldn’t help the comparison — not that there is extermination camps in Gaza, by all means not, but this lack of sensibility when Gaza is starving. When I talk to friends in Gaza who are fighting over a glass of water or a piece of bread, to open a resort place which offers steaks and barbecue and all kind of other delicatesses to the soldiers, I mean, how lack of sensitivity can still take us. You know, also in Tel Aviv, we continue our lives while Gaza is starving, and I feel very bad about it. But to do it in the middle of the Gaza Strip, when it’s all surrounded by death and starvation and rubbles and destruction, to open a resort place for soldiers with all kind of funs offered them, I couldn’t live with it, and I couldn’t help the comparison to The Interest Zone, to this unforgettable film. Yes, it is the same. It’s the same blindness. It’s the same moral blindness to what’s going on around you.
AMY GOODMAN: “The Israel Defense Forces has built a holiday village on the Gaza coast. Sgt. Yaron Rabinovich ate some churritos and steak … earlier this week. In an adjacent room there’s a physiotherapist who gave a soldier a pleasant massage. The village is surrounded by lawns of synthetic grass, cushions for sprawling in every corner. [A] soldier … enjoying a cappuccino, while another has a glass of XL with ice cubes.” Where exactly is this area in Gaza?
GIDEON LEVY: Well, it’s in the northern part of Gaza on the beach. As you know, Amy, Gaza is very small. And when we speak about any location in Gaza, it’s next to any catastrophe area. I guess that it’s not far away from the refugee camp which was destructed more than any other refugee camp, namely Jabaliya, which 100,000 people had to leave by force by Israel. Let’s remember also who are those 100,000 people. Those are sons and grandsons and grandsons of refugees from the former catastrophe of the Palestinian people in ’48.
So, to open this resort place, to open this fun village for soldiers on the ruins of Palestinian life or on the ruins of any kind of human reality, is really — I mean, it’s really about how it looks more than how it is, because, I repeat again, I live in Tel Aviv, which is one hour away from this location, and my life is quite normal, and I don’t feel good about it, but I continue my life. And still, to do it in the middle of the catastrophe shows how blind morally is Israel and its army.
AMY GOODMAN: And sticking with this theme of Auschwitz, the piece you wrote just before your latest, “From Auschwitz to Gaza, With a Stopover in The Hague.” A few weeks ago, Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, visited with top-level Biden administration officials in Washington, D.C. He was not worried about being arrested, even though the ICC issued an arrest warrant for him and Prime Minister Netanyahu. You write in your piece, “Benjamin Netanyahu will not travel to Poland next month for the main ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, over concern that he could be arrested on the basis of the warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.” Explain.
GIDEON LEVY: So, it’s again, Amy, the irony of history. The German chancellor, I guess, will attend this ceremony, like every year. Others will attend this ceremony. And the prime minister of Israel, the state which was established on the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust, cannot travel there because he is wanted for war crimes. Do I have to add anything more than this? I mean, again, in Israel, when we live in such denial, nobody cares much about it. But when you think about the meaning of it, the German chancellor is free to travel there, is totally free of any charges, nothing, and the Israeli prime minister, after this horrible year in which Israel killed and destructed in an unbelievably unprecedented way, is wanted and cannot get to the ceremony. I can’t think about a more symbolic way to show what long and tragic way did Israel go ever since it was established, until this moment that the head of the Israeli state, the Jewish state, so-called, which was built on the ashes of my grandparents, cannot go there because he’s wanted as a criminal of war.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Gideon, there’s another piece in Haaretz, not by you. It’s by a psychologist named Yoel Elizur. It’s headlined “’When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God’: Inside the Minds of IDF Soldiers Who Commit War Crimes.” And it talks about the psychological stress of Israeli soldiers, revealed testimonies like this: “I felt like a Nazi. It looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.” Can you comment on this and the whole issue of Israeli war crimes, and if you see this ending anytime in the future as this back-and-forth goes on around a ceasefire? We just have a minute.
GIDEON LEVY: So, in a minute, I will say that Israeli soldiers, ever since the occupation started, act like gods and feel like gods, because they can easily decide about life and death of anyone who stands in front of them. It is so in the West Bank, in the occupied West Bank. And it’s in much more horrible a scale in Gaza. They really play with the lives of people like gods.
And this will scratch their personality and their morality forever, because the easy way that they are killing — and you just mentioned The New York Times investigation about the first days of this terrible war — the easy way that they are shooting and killing anyone in Gaza, like gods who decide very easily who will live, who will not live, without any explanation. This isn’t — I mean, obviously, Gaza is the biggest, biggest victim of all this. But I also think about the society which will develop here in Israel with those soldiers coming back home, remembering what they have done for all those months in Gaza, remembering how they reacted without any moral borders. This will be a damage for a very, very long period of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Gideon Levy, we want to thank you for being with us, award-winning Israeli journalist, author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, a member of its editorial board. We’ll link to your pieces, “The IDF’s Own Sickening ‘Zone of Interest’ in the Heart of Gaza.” Levy’s latest book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe.
When we come back, President-elect Trump says he wants to make America greater, as in larger. We’ll talk with a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament and also Yale historian Greg Grandin about his attempts to get Greenland, take back the Panama Canal, and even with his new ambassador pick to Mexico, the discussions of invading Mexico — oh, and then there’s Canada. Stay with us.
