Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). The following are excerpts from an undoubtedly extraordinary interview on Gaza with former US Deputy Secretary of Defence and ex-US Ambassador Chas Freeman.
The most important points in the video interview are: Many of the dead Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 were not killed by Hamas, but by Israeli soldiers, according to Chas Freeman. He described the Gaza Strip as a “concentration camp” for Palestinians and held out the prospect of the Israelis being charged with war crimes.
Freeman emphasised that many of the victims of 7 October were killed by the Israeli army in the form of “undisciplined fire by helicopters with Hellfire missiles or by tanks with incendiary shells fired at the houses in the Israeli villages (stormed by Hamas)”. In the case of the large number of casualties among visitors to the Israeli music festival right on the Gaza border, he even says that they were “largely killed by Hellfire missiles and other undisciplined fire from Israeli forces”.
From a military point of view, this is a “disgrace” that is partly due to a “lack of discipline and training”, otherwise it would be “impossible to react properly” in an emergency. On the other hand, the so-called “Hannibal Directive” of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is also responsible for the many Israeli civilian casualties. This directive states “that the Israeli hostages should be killed together with their Hamas captors in order to prevent cumbersome and lengthy negotiations about a hostage exchange later on”, which damages Israel’s public image.
Freeman also emphasises in the interview that Hamas wanted to achieve “two goals with 7 October: firstly, to put the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda”; something he believes it has “achieved” as there is “a widespread recognition outside Israel that only Palestinian self-determination in the form of a two-state solution can provide security for Israel”. He says that “even in the US, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel, many Jews have realised that this is the case. Younger Jews in the US in particular are very disillusioned with Zionism and don’t want to be infected by the anti-Semitism that is now even on the rise because of Israel’s actions.”
Freeman continues: “I think another goal of Hamas was to destroy the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’.” Hamas has succeeded in doing so. And indeed, since the insanely cruel Israeli reaction to 7 October 2013, no one in the Arab or Islamic world dares to talk about it anymore.
To explain: the “Abraham Accords” forged by US and Israeli Zionists were intended to perfidiously consign the issue of Palestinian self-determination to the dustbin of history once and for all.
In Western official propaganda, the agreement was given the beautiful figurehead of a “peace treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates”, which was intended to completely normalise diplomatic relations between the two states and which the USA officially blessed.
On 15 September 2020, the agreement was signed in front of the White House in Washington by the far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Emirates’ Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayid Al Nahyan. The whole thing took place in the presence of US President Donald Trump, who had personally lobbied strongly in favour of the agreement.
At the same time, a peace treaty between Israel and Bahrain was signed by Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Sajani. The plan was that the “Abraham Accord”, with the USA as the guarantor power, would become a blueprint for further peace treaties between Israel and the Arab states – completely excluding the Palestinian issue.
Hanah Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), condemned the agreement and accused the UAE of having “exposed its secret deals”. Anti-Zionist Fatah accused the UAE of neglecting “its national, religious and humanitarian duties” towards the Palestinian people, while Hamas called the agreement a “treacherous stab in the back of the Palestinian people”.
The “Abraham Accord” was also seen as a betrayal of the Palestinians by large sections of the Arab masses. Against this background, according to Freeman, Hamas’ uprising on 7 October has given it enormous popularity among the Palestinians. This is because the Hamas fighters are now seen as those “who have risen up and who are prepared to accept death rather than imprisonment”.
Freeman goes on to refer to Norman Finkelstein’s “analogy of slave revolts in the USA” and in particular to the “revolt of 1831 by Nat Turner. This was a well-educated, very intelligent, enslaved African who led a slave revolt in southern Virginia whose goal was to murder every white person they encountered.” Citing Finkelstein, Freeman says, “This raises a moral question: ‘Is the violence of the slaveholder morally the same as the violence of the slave trying to end that violence?’ The same moral question arises with Israeli oppression of Palestinians versus Palestinian resistance to oppression,” says Freeman, a former top US diplomat.
All in all, former US ambassador Freeman concludes that Israel has already lost. Similar to the excessive violence with which white Americans took revenge on innocent African Americans for the slave revolts in the 19th century, the excessive violence of Israeli revenge on innocent Palestinians “will not be remembered fondly by anyone in the future”.
Freeman even goes so far as to say: “When people thought of Israel in the past, they thought of it as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust. … Now they will think of it as the home of genocide perpetrators. When they think of Israel, they think of the burning buildings and the dead babies. This is a fundamental image problem and Israel loses its protection because it can no longer accuse anyone of anti-Semitism who is critical of Israel. Because criticising people who commit genocide cannot be anti-Semitism. This criticism cannot be considered immoral. Anti-Semitism is a despicable attitude, but opposing genocide by Israel is not!”
