On the occasion of the “Gaza Last Day” initiative on May 9, we interviewed journalist Rula Jebreal for Kritica, about her book now in bookstores, “Genocide. What Remains of Us in the Neo-Imperial Age.“ The following is the transcript of the interview, which aired – in Italian – on our YouTube channel (for the interview in Italian, click here).
“Genocide. What Remains of Us in the Neo-Imperial Era” has been in bookstores since May 6th and is already doing a lot of talking. It has received important reviews, but also the appreciation of many ordinary people who are reading, giving and discussing it. I had the privilege to be in charge of curating your text, we worked together for a few months, intense and important. On Gaza Awareness Day, for which the name “The Last Day of Gaza” was chosen, let’s come back to the contents of the book, first of all starting with the fact that actually these are not the last days of Gaza, because “the last day of Gaza” has been going on for decades. In the book you tell of this continuing present of persecution suffered by the Palestinian people, this ongoing Nakba, a continuing catastrophe that is now going through a phase of unprecedented barbarism.
Thank you Federica, I’m so grateful for all that we have done together. You’re right, this book was born obviously with everything that is happening in Gaza, with this genocide, but this genocide has very far and very long roots. It has been years and years, in my opinion, that it was brewing. The Israeli ruling class, and especially this government of fascists in Israel, decided to exploit the October 7 event to carry out a political agenda that has been theirs forever, certainly for at least 58 years, since [after the Six-Day War in 1967, ed.] they militarily occupied a major piece of Palestine. The project of the Israeli right has always been this, but now it enjoys broad support from the majority of Israeli society: they want all of Palestine without the Palestinians. A true ethnic replacement, in which every episode is to be used and exploited to drive them out of their land and carry out genocide. In 1948, when the Israeli state was established, this was done simultaneously with the forced expulsion, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of the native and indigenous inhabitants of the land of the Palestinian territory. 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, they tried to alter even the microclimate by importing trees from the West that are not suitable for the local climate, which is why today we see fires in the Israeli territory that do not blaze in neighboring countries; they burned or uprooted olive trees and planted pine trees and other species unsuitable for the climate. But the incredible thing is that this project of settlement, annexation, expulsion and expropriation is something that Israeli leaders have been talking about forever; Netanyahu’s father, a historian, who lived in the United States, has always been linked to these ideas, to the ideas of a radical Israeli right wing that has always believed that Palestinians should be expelled en masse away from Palestine, using violence and terrorism by settlers, who are illegal yet accompanied and protected by the army, and now blatantly financed by this government. Even Israel’s intelligence services call them terrorists. This ethnic cleansing project has been on the march forever. No one in the West speaks clearly about the fact that in 2023, before October 7, 244 Palestinians were killed in Palestine, two pogroms were committed in two different Palestinian villages, Benaya and Hawara, and that the Israeli Minister of Finance celebrated these pogroms against Palestinians and burned villages.
Moreover, Israel has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity everywhere in Palestine for years, including in the occupied West Bank and including East Jerusalem, where I grew up. Inside East Jerusalem there is a torture center, it is called al-Mascobiyya. Inside, according to the testimony of Josh Paul, who was head of the U.S. State Department, there were reported cases of rape of children as young as 13 years old. This was the general climate, which the world had decided to ignore, until it erupted on October 7. After October 7, the West woke up, with the idea of “we must defend ourselves against terrorists!”, erasing all the previous history, the history of oppressed, repressed and tortured Palestinians, raped, massacred for years. As if it all started with October 7. And when UN Secretary Ántonio Guterres said, “Look no, it didn’t all start on October 7,” and called for understanding the historical context, he was accused of anti-Semitism.
Why is it important to talk about this? Because today is not the last day for Gaza, with all due respect to those who chose the title of that initiative. There is still time to save lives, to save the 40,000 orphaned children in Gaza, to save the two million people who are being starved and bombed every day, to save our fellow journalists who are still alive, to save the families, but also to save the West, the reputation and credibility of the democratic West, and above all to save international humanitarian law.
In the book you recount that just in 2023, with a delegation of personalities and experts, you had tried to sound the alarm about the possibility of genocide. You had gone all the way to Brussels to try to warn that a new Nakba was being prepared, precisely. Moreover, declared, the Netanyahu government’s intentions were quite black and white. You didn’t get a hearing, though.
In May 2023, that is, a few months before October 7, with a delegation of politicians, diplomats, international lawyers, we decided to make a trip to Brussels because we no longer had confidence in the Biden administration. Also because we remembered Shireen abu Akleh, our Palestinian colleague who had been killed in May 2022; an American citizen, killed by an Israeli sniper with a U.S.-made bullet, a U.S.-made rifle, and there was no trial.
For me and my colleagues the mainspring, however, was that we had been some time earlier in Washington, to talk to the administration and the Office of Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and others responsible for the Palestinian issue, and I remember as if it were yesterday that their response was, “The Middle East is calm.” So Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, answered us. I had the impression that he was living in an alternative world. Just shortly before, a United Nations report had come out indicating that of all the places at risk for potential genocide, Palestine and Israel were among the top.
That’s why we decided to leave it with the United States and go with this delegation. With Daniel Seidemann, who is an Israeli lawyer and diplomat, with a former U.S. ambassador for Israel and many others. And we were shocked because we met a lot of people, including even the Vice-Premier of the Europarliament Pina Picierno, who literally told us that they were busy at that moment on the Abraham Agreements, which, of the two, should have raised fears of an acceleration of violence, since they normalized relations between Israel and some Arab regimes bypassing the Palestinian issue completely; trade agreements, economic agreements, military agreements, but they had nothing to do with Palestinian rights or ending colonization. And then I remember this sentence, which I included in the book, “If you want, we can arrange a meeting with the Israeli embassy.” And I admit there I was shocked; senior European officials delegating to Israel the problem of the ongoing dangers to the Palestinian people. They didn’t want to know half of it, they just tore it up. And they were the same people who had invited me to speak to the Europarliament about Ukraine, and I had accepted, because I believe in it, because I believe that international law should be applied impartially and that war crimes should be judged beyond the ethnicity or religion of the perpetrators, as well as the victims. But then, when I tried to get those same people to think about Palestine, the response more or less was that they didn’t care. They totally abdicated their political role, a catastrophic failure. But on the other hand, they responded the same thing after October 7: they delegated entirely to Israel the right to defend itself.
The European foreign minister went just recently to Israel and to the Israeli foreign minister she said “we are partners, we are allies, we are collaborators.” Shocking. It was just a few days after we discovered the mass grave where 14 Palestinian paramedics had been executed and thrown into, killed with blows to the head in their ambulances buried in mass graves, built with bulldozers, digging a pit and throwing them in. And we discovered this crime thanks to the cell phone of a boy who filmed it all, asking his mother for forgiveness before he died, telling her “forgive me mom, this is my mission, I wanted to save lives.”
I don’t understand how our representatives in Europe, in the West, can’t lift a finger to save lives, I can’t understand how they don’t reflect on the fact that if you want to defeat Trumpism in Europe, the only way is international legality. It’s not arming more, it’s not buying weapons from the United States, it’s arming for justice, for international legality. We need a Nuremberg for Palestine. Not only to save Palestinians and Israelis from this total madness going on, but to save democracy. Otherwise we will end up with a Europe full of Trump-like people. Because what is Trumpism, what is Trump fascism, in practice? In practice it is proclaiming that there are no laws: there is no international law, I guarantee your security because I am more armed, because I have nuclear weapons. That is, we go back to the situation before the First World War. We lose the guarantee that conflicts can be resolved not through the law of the strongest, the law of the jungle, but through a legal system, an architecture of laws, treaties and conventions that protect those who are armed and those who are not. We are going backwards.
In the book you also tell how much and how people in the capacity of doctors, health personnel, but also in the capacity of journalists, or jurists, have been and are working every day to save people in Gaza and in Palestine, to make sure that the truth of the facts emerges against the propaganda, and also to precisely, continue to give a viable path to international law. And there are many important interviews in the book, the one with Al Jazeera journalist Wael al Dadouh, the one with jurist Omer Shatz and others. What emerges from this picture? And in what ways are the earth’s powerful, who would have the power to stop a slaughter, completely missing the mark?
They would, above all, have a legal obligation to stop it, not just power, to be exercised only if one feels like it. There have been orders from the International Criminal Court, from the International Court of Justice, arrest orders for Netanyahu, for Galant (as well as for Hamas leader Sinwar), and all the Western leaders have, more or less, declared that they would not abide by it. So what are they saying, that the law does not apply to Netanyahu? That it doesn’t apply to Putin, it doesn’t apply to Duerte in the Philippines? Then it doesn’t apply to anybody. And by declaring that, they are destroying their credibility before the world. For so long the West prided itself on being that system that followed a world legal order, or at least tried to follow it. Right now the global South is looking at the West not only as hypocritical, but also as complicit in crimes against humanity. They are saying to the West: you have always been colonialist, imperialist, hypocritical, false, because the right does not apply to people who look like us. When Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, says “Palestine will be our future,” he is completely right, and we see it already. We see now these missiles fired from India toward Pakistan. Do you know what the Indian military is saying? It is saying, “We want to implement the Israeli doctrine.” The law of the jungle, again. Two nuclear-armed countries, Pakistan and India. We are moving toward the end of humanity and civilization. And you know who else is using Israeli terminology, “human shields,” “collateral damage,” “right to security”? The armed groups operating in Somalia that are exterminating more Somalis. Gaza is becoming a global doctrine, thanks to the complicity of the West. The International Court of Justice said as early as February last year that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. February 2024. It is now May 2025 and no country has done anything. They had an obligation to sanction Israel, to trigger an economic boycott, but they also had an obligation to trigger the most important thing, when a risk of genocide is announced, which is the responsibility to protect civilians. No Western country did anything; on the contrary, they continued to arm Israel. Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States are complicit in colonial genocide, and in response to that, let me be clear, I expect a wave of terrorism. A real wave of violence against the West. We should not be surprised if that happens. Because if Israel’s response is to destroy international legality, that paves the way for terrorism to establish itself. The terrorists will say: if the laws don’t apply to Israel, they don’t apply to anyone. And no one is prosecuted, why do we have to respect that legality? A terrifying message is being sent, and I fear a new world order is being created, in the sign of Trump and Netanyahu, and in that order no one is safe. Those who think they are protected just because they live in the West are wrong, because the future Palestinians are all of us.
These are concepts that you make very clear in the book. One of the hardest chapters to read, but also the most important and enlightening, is about the war against journalists, against those who go in search of facts and try to inform. So many rules are being skipped in this regard as well. I think of the fact that Gaza is inaccessible to independent journalists, there is no way to go in and document what is happening. And that has also meant loading on the shoulders of so many Palestinian journalists a huge task, which many have paid with their lives. You yourself tell, you also did it in a documentary that you presented just yesterday on CNN, that even this did not start with the post-October 7, that there were earlier episodes, such as the already mentioned assassination of Shireen Abu Akleeh. What do you focus on in this documentary and why does it have to do with the ongoing genocide in Gaza?
Exactly three years ago – on May 11, 2022 – Shireen Abu Akleeh, our American-Palestinian colleague, had gone to Jenin (in the West Bank) to cover the news. At the time, she was dressed in a journalist’s helmet and wearing a jacket that said “Press”: Press. She was with a group of friends who are her colleagues from Al Jazeera, because she worked for Al Jazeera, and she was the face of Al Jazeera in Palestine. Everybody knew her. The sniper who killed her looking through the telescope knew perfectly well who she was. He knew perfectly well that he was killing the voice from Palestine, the ambassador, somehow, before the Middle Eastern world, of events from Palestine. She was killed with a blow to the head, and Israel immediately began to tell lies. The Israeli prime minister, who at the time was Naftali Bennet — someone who in the past has boasted that he has killed many Arabs and that there is nothing wrong with killing many Arabs — immediately made a video saying that it was Hamas militants who killed her. Our colleagues from CNN, from the Washington Post, but also our Israeli colleagues, they went, they investigated, they saw, they went to Jenin, they interviewed everybody, they showed where the Israelis were, where the Palestinians were, and they found that there were no militants. There weren’t. So already the first lie was debunked. Then Israel changed the narrative by saying, “Ah, they didn’t realize it was a journalist, they didn’t see it was a journalist, there was a person with a camera and they mistook it for something else,” second lie, blatant. How does a sniper make such a mistake? That too is immediately refuted by our colleagues. And again they said many more. President Biden, who immediately called for justice for her, when he realized she was killed by the Israelis began to cover up and hide the truth. Israel was asked to interview the soldier accused of the murder. Israel refused. Biden went to Israel shortly after the incident and asked reporters not to ask him questions about the incident. He did not meet with the family of Shireen, an American citizen, and did nothing to get justice for Shirin. In my opinion, this has given the Israelis the idea that they can really commit any crime with total impunity. What is happening in Gaza is the fruit of many years of total impunity. Israel has violated 40 U.N. resolutions, the only country in the world. It has violated all the orders of the International Criminal Court and the Court of Justice. And it continues to do so. Israel continues to trample on international law every day and yet they are rewarded by the West. For destroying the world legal order. So many Westerners make a political calculation, they think “that stuff there stays in the Middle East.” They think that Palestinians, people like me, are a subspecies that can be sacrificed. When I talked to Gideon Levy, an extraordinary Israeli journalist, he said, if 20,000 stray dogs were killed in Gaza, the Israelis would be angry. But 20,000 children, those can be future terrorists and so it’s okay to kill them. That tells you everything about the dramatic moment we are in. The Palestinians are completely dehumanized in the eyes of the Israelis and even Western governments. Sacrificed while at the same sacrificing democracy, as Joe Biden did in America. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris lost the election not because of Trump but because of the catastrophic policy on Gaza. When Harris said “I will not change my policy on Israel,” that was the day he lost the election. He lost progressives, African Americans, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans and especially young people who were disgusted with Biden’s criminal mercenary policy.
Yes, there is a disconnect going on in society, between the ordinary people who in the majority anyway certainly do not wish for genocide, certainly do not wish for the extermination of the Palestinian people, and on the other side the politicians, who then make the decisions and do not, as you say, comply with international obligations, the duties of democracy. The pillars that make up democratic society are collapsing in Palestine one after another. This is also clearly explained in the book, I think of what the dismantling of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, you tell it by also interviewing the secretary, Philippe Lazzarini. This is the agency that has been in charge of ensuring for decades that Palestinians and Palestinian society under occupation has dignity, in all its forms. Or the fact that the more than 200, some 230 colleagues of ours who were murdered, were literally executed, were not collateral victims of the bombings but were targeted and shot. Wael al Dadouh says it, “they punish us through our children,” in his case almost his entire family was exterminated. So I ask you, from the perspective of those who live in this part of the world, do you think the reaction is taking any form? Is there a need in your opinion to react to this situation? Because events like even the Taverna Santa Chiara in Naples for example, in the last few days here in Italy, tell us that people are fed up with being so helpless, not saying anything, not taking sides. What can we do?
People, especially world public opinion, are enraged, let it be clear. People are enraged because they see this colonial genocide, they hear the propaganda from the other side, they see the actions of indifference, of complicity of Western governments, and they are disgusted. In the United States that’s why they were unwilling to vote for a Kamala Harris who they knew very well was better than Trump. But the complicity of genocide in the Biden administration, as American writer Ta Nehisi Coates told me, is “a red line.” He said “if genocide is not a red line, if you are not willing to expose genocide and save lives, then you are willing to sacrifice anyone.” This is a moment of great clarity in world opinion. And this wave is coming everywhere in the world and it reminds me of the Iraq war. During the Iraq war, world opinion was ignored. They went in front and destroyed the Middle East, literally, and with it they destroyed a part of America and a part of the West, causing a wave of emigration and a wave of terrorism, and totally undermining the stability of the Middle East. That war was wanted by Netanyahu, who today in fact continues to insist, says we need another war with Iran. And right now, at this very moment, while he is exterminating Palestinians in Gaza, he is bombing Syria and he is also bombing Lebanon on a regular basis, despite the cease-fire and UN resolutions. We are dealing with a rogue state, a terrorist state, which continues to think that the West must support it as if everything is owed. And the attitude of so many Israeli citizens who go abroad like that lady in Naples who said, “Ah, but Israel is a wonderful country, you have to come,” I don’t know if it was provocative or not, well it’s normal the response reaction of, “Do you realize?” But they don’t realize. They don’t see the Palestinians. They use to kill us the same language that was used in Rwanda. Human animals, subspecies, worms. This is the language they use. I will not forget phrases of ministers, a minister like Eliyahu who said “We must throw an atomic bomb in Gaza,” or Dichter, Minister of Agriculture, who kept saying “We are activating the second nakba.” Or others who celebrated after October 7, saying “This is our opportunity to finish the job.” The work is extermination. They also declared, an Israeli general did in December in an article, that they must use hunger as a weapon of war. This is the same person who wrote a plan to that effect, and we are not talking about a new plan. He wrote it in 2003. In 2003 he was the adviser for Ariel Sharon for Gaza, who had said, “I will close Gaza and throw away the key.” His adviser had proposed to him a plan to even adjust the calorie bill of the Palestinians, not starving them completely, but giving them 750 calories a day, that is, slightly below starvation level. The same person wrote in 2023, in December, an article advocating the use of starvation to complete the extermination in Gaza, in which he says “We must ignore world opinion and carry out this extermination not only with bombs but mainly through the use of starvation and disease.” In fact, it is no coincidence that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, all talk about the use of hunger as a weapon of war as confirmation that genocidal acts are taking place. People see at home these children starving and being bombed every day, 75 percent of the people in Gaza are kids under 25, who grew up in a world that was an open-air prison, with a calorie bill of 750 calories a day. Many of them when Hamas came to power were not even born. To punish them for Hamas crimes is to collectively criminalize all Palestinians. “There are no civilians in Gaza” is something that is also said by the Israeli Labor leader, Herzog, at the head of what we might call the left, although for me it has become blasphemy to say that there is a left in Israel. It has not existed for years now. When Herzog says “there are no innocent civilians,” he is saying that a whole nation is guilty of Hamas crimes. In my opinion that is also a direct incitement to genocide.
From Israel comes a paradigm on the social level as well. A society based on hatred, on racism, on fear, on a sense of threat. And I think that somehow the world societies, in the global south, but also in the West, are sensing that that could be the way of life waiting for everybody, to plunge into this violence and these totally uncontrolled forms of hatred.
People sense that the current political ruling class is willing to sacrifice them as well. In my opinion, the public much smarter and much further ahead. They know very well that we have a European ruling class, consisting of Ursula von der Leyen and many others, who are willing to sacrifice all of us, for a design of the world that in my opinion is really vicious, without rules and without laws. When they voted in the Europarliament against the proposed discussion of a terrorist attack on European soil-that against the Freedom Flottilla attacked in international waters near Malta, ed. against a European humanitarian ship-they sent a chilling signal to all of us. We in the West are also expendable. If that attack had killed European citizens, I am sure they would not have reacted. They would have uttered some empty condemnation, but Israel would have gotten away with it, as it is getting away with everything.
Journalist and founder of Kritica.it. You can read her articles and essays in MicroMega, Gli Stati Generali, and Africa ExPress. She has won several awards, including the Luchetta – Italian Press Award in 2022.
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