Nowhere Left to Go in Gaza as Israel’s Ground Assault on Rafah Looms

On Friday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans for a ground invasion of Rafah, where at least 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering; the vast majority are refugees who have fled their homes. Israel’s most recent bombardments on Rafah have killed at least 14 people in a set of strikes on Thursday and upward of 100 on Monday. This week on Intercepted, guest host Sharif Abdel Kouddous — a contributing writer for The Intercept — and Tareq Baconi discuss Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, the history of Palestine, and prospects for the future. Baconi is the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group on Israel/Palestine, and author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous:  I’m Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a contributing writer for The Intercept, hosting Intercepted this week.

All eyes are on Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza. It is now being bombed daily, and fears are growing that Israel will soon launch a ground invasion.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began over four months ago, they have steadily pushed Palestinians further and further south, towards the Egyptian border. Amid one of the most punishing bombing campaigns in modern history, Israeli troops first entered the northern section of Gaza and encircled Gaza City. 

After a week-long truce in November, troops moved further south, taking Khan Yunis and other areas. Now, over half of Gaza’s population, some 1.4 million people are crammed into Rafah with nowhere left to go.

Israel’s military campaign has so far killed over 28,000 people, with many thousands still missing and presumed dead under the rubble. More than 12,300 of the dead are children. Over 80 percent of the population has been displaced and are facing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The U.N. estimates that a quarter of the population is suffering catastrophic famine. Gaza now has the highest percentage of people facing acute food insecurity ever recorded, and the scale of the destruction has rendered most of the territory uninhabitable. 

Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to continue the assault and launch a full-scale attack on Rafah, insisting on what he calls “a total victory over Hamas.”

Benjamin Netanyahu: At the start of the war, I outlined three goals: destroy Hamas, free the hostages, and ensure that Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel any time in the future. Achieving these goals will ensure Israel’s security and pave the way for additional historic peace agreements with our Arab neighbors.

But peace and security require total victory over Hamas; we cannot accept anything else. Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t have total victory? 

SAK: Negotiations around a ceasefire continue, yet the prospects so far appear dim. Egypt fears an attack would force a mass displacement of Palestinians fleeing the violence into its territory. Egypt has fortified the border with concrete walls and barbed wire, and has deployed some 40 tanks and armored personnel carriers to the area.

On Monday, President Biden discouraged Netanyahu against a ground invasion of Rafah.

Joe Biden: The major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan — a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there.

Many people there have been displaced, displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north, and now they’re packed into Rafah. Exposed and vulnerable, they need to be protected.

SAK: No such warnings have been issued before, and yet U.S. official policy hasn’t changed. Unequivocal and all-out military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel remains, and the killing and destruction continues on a scale that the International Court of Justice has deemed “plausibly genocidal.” On Tuesday, South Africa urged the International Court of Justice to use its power to stop Israel’s military offensive in Rafah.

To take an in-depth look at where things currently stand, and to examine the history of Palestine and the prospects for the future, we are joined today by Tareq Baconi. He’s the president of the board of Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, and is a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group on Israel/Palestine. Tareq is author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.” 

Tareq, welcome to Intercepted.

Tareq Baconi: Thank you for having me. 

SAK: I want to start with the latest. Over the weekend, Rafah was heavily bombed ahead of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said is a planned ground invasion. Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, it’s where over half of the entire population of Gaza has been forcibly displaced to. Before October 7th there were less than 300,000 people there, now there’s an additional 1.4 million Palestinians, including some 600,000 children. [They] are packed into the space, there’s massive tent encampments that are pushing right up to the border with Egypt. There’s literally nowhere left to go.

Can you talk about what’s happening now, and the implications of an Israeli ground invasion into Rafah?

TB: Well, it’s really important to understand this within the context of population transfers, and what Palestinians have called “the endless Nakba,” which is the Israeli effort to try to depopulate Palestine, and make sure that it can maintain as an apartheid regime, a Jewish majority, “from the river to the sea.”

So, this is the broad context which we need to understand what’s happening in Rafah now. And this is something that became quite stark following October 7th,nwhen there were plans that were issued by various politicians within the Israeli government as well as internationally around the possibility of removing the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip to make space for Israeli attacks against Hamas, and Israeli military plans. And so, this is what we’re seeing today, is the reemergence of these initial plans that we began to see in the first few weeks after October 7th.

As you say, if there is a ground invasion in Rafah, the possibility of a population transfer happening under the fog of war is quite high. So, we’re back in this place, where we can imagine now hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip, which would make the possibility of a population transfer almost double what happened in the Nakba in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee.

And so, in the situation around Rafah, there’s obviously been heightened tensions. Egypt, specifically, is quite worried about what would happen if those Palestinians are forced to flee into Egypt, into the Sinai Peninsula. And international leaders and the American administration have warned Israel that, if it takes that step, if it moves into in the direction of a ground invasion, that it would not be supported. That it would be something that the politicians here have warned Israel against.

But, of course, that’s something that should be taken at face value, in the sense that the Biden administration is obviously complicit in the Israeli operations and the ongoing genocide. And so, any effort now to try to suggest that they’re trying to pull Israel back is really something that should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Israelis themselves have talked about their desire to relocate the Palestinians in Rafah to other areas in the Gaza Strip. But, obviously, these plans are all impractical. They’re not plans that can actually either mitigate the high level of death that will happen if there’s a ground invasion, or the possibility that Palestinians will just flee in panic, as people do during the times of war.

I think it’s really important to emphasize when we’re talking about Rafah specifically, as you said, there are about 1.3 million people displaced from their homes inside Gaza to Rafah, but those are themselves people who had been displaced from homes in what is now Israel. So we’re talking about 75 years of ongoing displacement. And, again, the possibility of one more displacement, out of historic Palestine.

SAK: I want to ask you about the role of Egypt in a moment but, when we talk about Gaza, it’s often spoken about as this separate territory that’s kind of on the periphery of the land of historic Palestine. That it’s this other place that is somehow different in the Zionist project.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of Gaza as a political geography in Palestine, and its history in relation to Israeli settler colonialism?

TB: I mean, when we talk about the Gaza Strip today, we’re really talking about a colonial construct. Because, before ‘48, and before the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza as a city — Gaza City, which was, before October 7th, one of the biggest cities in the Gaza Strip, but which has now effectively been depopulated — was really an extension of other cities in historic Palestine: Haifa, Acre, Ramla, Khalid, Hebron.

And so, the idea that this enclave that is now understood to be the Gaza Strip is something that was separate from the land of historic Palestine was just, it’s ahistorical — that’s factually untrue. What became the Gaza Strip really happened through the process of the establishment of the state of Israel and Israeli settler colonialism, in the sense that it’s in the establishment of the state. The majority off the inhabitants of Palestine were ethnically cleansed and vast, vast numbers of those ended up in what became the Gaza Strip. So, when we talk about the Gaza Strip today with its 2.4 million inhabitants, about two-thirds of those, 60 to 65 percent of those are refugees from homes that are now in Israel.

Now, one of the misconceptions that people often have when thinking about the Gaza Strip is that the Gaza Strip came under blockade because of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and then the movement’s capture of the Gaza Strip in 2007. But, in reality, the Gaza Strip has been deemed a problematic strip of land for successive Israeli governments since 1948.

So, we’ve had 12 wars waged by Israel against the Gaza Strip since 1948, and we’ve had a whole host of measures: targeted assassinations — economic blockades, building out collaborationist networks — inside Gaza to try to pacify the Gaza Strip, to try to make sure that this desire of the refugees in Gaza to return to their homes is sort of killed. And so, when Hamas emerges as a power that then takes over the Gaza Strip, it becomes the perfect fig leaf for Israel to justify the blockade.

So, we hear the Gaza Strip’s under blockade because of Hamas, it’s a security positioning, when, in reality, the Gaza Strip has effectively been severed from the rest of historic Palestine for demographic reasons, to maintain Israel as a Jewish majority state or the illusion of Israel as a Jewish majority state.

SAK: So, let’s take a step back.

We’re now four months into this brutal assault, a genocidal attack on Gaza. The level of destruction that Israel has wrought on civilian life in Gaza is proportionally among the worst in the world, or in modern history. Nearly all aspects of civilian life — homes, schools, hospitals, bakeries, farmland, water, sewage infrastructure — have effectively been destroyed. Even if this were to stop today, there’s not much left to go back to. Gaza has effectively been made unfit for human habitation, and it’s this hellscape where the bones of the dead are inseparable from the rubble. 

What does this mean for the future of this territory? What does it mean for the future of Palestine, that this level of destruction has been brought to this area?

TB: I mean, it shows us in very extreme ways the logical conclusion of Zionism. It shows in very extreme ways how the Zionist project thinks of Palestinian inhabitants and Palestinian life. Which, by the way, is not exceptional to Zionism as a settler colonial ideology. All settler colonies perpetrate genocide in order to create new realities on the ground, and the Zionist project is obviously no exception to that.

But what we see in the Gaza Strip today is a logical manifestation of that. That there can be no Palestinian life under Israeli apartheid. And, as you say, if the ceasefire started tomorrow and the genocidal violence ended, there is no way that these Palestinians are able to go back to any kind of normal life.

If we think about the history of just the past 14 or 15 years, the blockade since 2007, the U.N. had said that Gaza would become uninhabitable by 2020. This is a situation in which, before the current escalation, the Gaza Strip was already placed on life support, that there would be a drip feeding of food or humanitarian assistance or fuel in an effort to maintain Gaza just above the brink of collapse, but never allowed to grow, or to sustain the population there.

And the population, I should say — the vast majority of the population, I believe, about 80 percent — is below the age of 18. So, we are talking about a population that’s growing that was placed in an open-air prison indefinitely. 

So, this is fundamentally why this was always going to break, and why it broke the way it did on October 7th, but with the breaking of that balance —the trying to sustain Gaza on the brink of collapse, but not quite — when that broke, for any Israeli political party, but for the regime, for Israeli apartheid, the next logical solution is elimination. And this is what we’re seeing today. We’re seeing genocidal violence.

Now, the genocide is obviously the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, but that’s only part of the picture. The actual picture is the making of Palestinian life in that place impossible.

And so, now, let’s say there’s a ceasefire tomorrow. The number of deaths that will happen through starvation, through impoverishment, through disease, through all the ways in which human life is vulnerable to the elements; that’s part and parcel of the Israeli approach to killing only a portion of the Palestinians who would have been killed by the end of this, would have been killed by military violence. Many of the Palestinians would have been killed in secondary ways, right?

And so, life just becomes impossible. And for those who cannot live there, then they move out, quote-unquote, “under their own volition.” So, the idea of transfer then happens without Israel taking effective responsibility for it. 

So, this is why it’s really important. When we’re thinking about genocide, it’s not just in the numbers of those killed, but it’s in the erasure of Palestinian-ness, and Palestinian life in that space.

SAK: Well, let’s talk about efforts for a ceasefire.

There are negotiations underway. Most recently, Hamas responded to a U.S.-backed Israeli deal with a three-stage ceasefire proposal that would involve Israel withdrawing troops from Gaza, stopping its aerial campaign, the exchange of prisoners, and so on. Netanyahu responded by calling this proposal “delusional,” insisted on what he called “a total victory over Hamas,” saying that was the only solution to end the war.

You’ve closely followed Hamas in your book, “Hamas Contained,” which provides some of the best research and analysis on Hamas, I encourage everyone to read it. Can you just give us a thumbnail sketch of who is making decisions within the movement?

You have the leadership within Gaza; people like Yahya Sinwar, you have the head of the military wing, Mohammed Deif. You have the leadership in exile, people like Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal.

Can you just tell us, what is the connection between those within and those without, who these people are, and Netanyahu’s supposed goal of trying to destroy Hamas?

TB: So, historically, Hamas had always adopted what it called a shura approach. It’s a consultative approach in which the different constituencies within the movement are consulted on any major strategic decision. And the different constituencies —meaning the leadership inside/outside, the leadership in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians from Hamas, from the movement in Israeli prisons — and the shura approach was always a time-consuming process, obviously, because of security considerations and because of where all of these constituencies were.

But the movement itself was always and continues to be very democratic, in the sense that, even if there are differences in opinions within the movement, once a decision is made on the level of strategy, that binds the different elements of the movement. And you do see often — and we have seen since October 7th — “rogue elements” is too strong a [phrase], but people within Hamas saying certain things or putting forward certain narratives that seem to break from where the movement is at. But, by and large, the movement and the officials within the movement tend to fall in line once a certain decision is taken.

Now, since October 7th, for all the reasons that we can understand, that approach has been a bit more difficult to manage. A, because of the need for urgent decisions to be made, and B, because the majority of Hamas’s leadership in the Gaza Strip is now underground and literally out of reach. So, that has made some of the sort of the early weeks after October 7th appear as if there are divisions between the internal and the external.

I should say here that I have no direct access or contact with the movement since October 7th, and so, this is based on my own sort of historical analysis of the movement. But I imagine now that the leadership inside — so, as you say, Sinwar and Mohammed Deif — are taking, in some ways, a leadership position, and this whole operation is, in some ways, an operation driven by the leadership on the inside. So, in the Gaza Strip.

But I do think that the outside leaders — so, specifically the ones in Doha — are obviously the ones who are interfacing with the negotiators, and putting forward the, as you said, the counterproposal, the three-phase counterproposal. I would look at that document as a consensus document. So, I would look at that proposal as a proposal that the leadership, both inside and outside, would fall behind if it is adopted.

But, back to your point about the Netanyahu position. So, Netanyahu has from the onset declared that the only objective from the operation in the Gaza Strip is the decimation of Hamas. And, from day one, most analysts — including myself — said that that was an impossible goal. There’s no way that Hamas as a movement can be decimated. Even if it’s organizationally weakened, the ideology of the movement — which are political demands that many Palestinians espouse — extend far beyond the movement.

So, even if Hamas is really weakened, that political demand would continue to exist, and would take the other forms. So, the idea that decimation is the objective is really cover for genocidal violence in Palestine. That’s how it should be understood.

Now, that position has received support from international, mostly Western players, specifically the U.S. administration. Since the ICJ decision, we’ve seen the U.S. really try to shift, to try to say that there needs to be less targeting of civilians, more care in protecting civilian life. And, with this proposal specifically, Secretary of State Blinken came out and said, well, there’s room here, there are some spaces here to negotiate.

Again, this should be seen in the context of an American administration that’s increasingly nervous about how evident it is that it’s complicit in genocide, right? Now it’s created a position where, after arming and supporting Israeli genocide for months, it’s coming to a position where it really can’t control or manage what the Israeli establishment is doing.

So, Netanyahu’s maximalist position is obviously an impossible position. But, outside of that, it means that there’s just going to be a continuation of the violence, and the rejection of any kind of ceasefire at the moment. 

SAK: Well, there has been revived talk of a two-state solution. In the weeks and months leading up to October 7th, the U.S. have been trying to broker a deal to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia.

Those talks were shelved after the Israeli assault began, but they’ve since resumed, and Saudi Arabia is insisting that Israel end the war, and then put Palestinians, quote, “on a path towards statehood.” The Biden administration says it’s now actively pursuing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state after the war in Gaza.

Can you talk about this revived push for a so-called two-state solution, and what it actually means in the current political context we’re in?

TB: I mean, the return to talks around the two-state solution is really like watching a three-decade train wreck and fast forwarded to now. It’s trying to take all the failures of the past three decades in terms of creating a Palestinian state, and suddenly suggesting that now that’s a possibility that Palestinians should jump on.

I mean, we need to go back once again to the context. If we’re talking about Israeli apartheid and we’re talking about Israel as an apartheid state, any kind of partitioning of Palestine is a legitimation of apartheid. That’s just a form of demographic engineering, that’s a legitimation of expulsion of Palestinians, that’s a creation of, effectively, a Bantustan, which is what’s been created now in the West Bank under an illegitimate Palestinian authority. That’s a central pillar of Israeli apartheid today.

So, when we’re thinking about the two-state solution, that’s really what we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about, how do we make Israeli apartheid tolerable, and how do we make it sustainable?

And you can see it in the way that it’s being discussed, because, let’s play the game that the two-state solution is something that’s viable. The idea here would be to create two sovereign states, Palestine being a sovereign state that’s territorially contiguous, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Now, just that being on the table, within minutes, you already see the reservations begin to be articulated. So, now that state cannot quite be a state with full sovereignty, it has to be a demilitarized state. And then it becomes a state that can’t really control its borders because, obviously, then, if it’s open to the Arab world and there’s an influx of people coming into Palestine, Israel would voice security risks. So, immediately, we’re going from the idea of statehood to the idea of this entity whose borders and military and security is controlled by Israel, that’s allowed to call itself a state.

So, it’s really a repackaging of where we’ve been the past three decades and calling it again a two-state solution. It’s very clear that there will never be a Palestinian state on ’67, or at least in the way that’s imagined when the international community talks about the two-state solution. And, frankly, the clearest stakeholders that make that assertion are the Israeli politicians, are Netanyahu and his ilk, who come out and say, there will never be a Palestinian state.

So, this is being openly disclosed, and yet everyone is asked to pretend that the Israelis don’t really mean what they’re saying, and they will be forced into a situation of statehood, when the Israeli political elite is now driven by a settler movement that has close to a million people in the West Bank. And, when Gaza has been made uninhabitable, the idea that either of those things could then somehow produce a Palestinian state is really an effort to try to live in illusions, to live in a reality that that just doesn’t exist in Palestine today.

So, instead of statehood, I think what policymakers should be focusing on are two things: one is, how do you bring accountability against an apartheid regime? And there’s obviously measures that are happening in the international community now and, specifically, with South Africa’s case at the ICJ. And two, how do you allow the Palestinians to have a representative leadership, and a legitimate leadership, that can decide where they want to go after they’ve experienced genocide?

So, rather than trying to resuscitate a defunct Palestinian authority, the question should really be about how to support real Palestinian legitimacy.

SAK: Let’s turn to the role of Egypt in all of this, which is involved in the negotiations around the ceasefire.

Egypt is the only country to share a border crossing with Gaza that’s not controlled by Israel. Since this assault began, it has refused to open the border to allow for a mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into northern Sinai which, as you said, is a longstanding colonial fantasy.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has spoken in the rhetoric of the Palestinian cause and invoked Palestinian rights, saying he won’t allow for this displacement of Palestinians from historic Palestine into Egypt. But I think we have to remember this rhetoric rings hollow. Egypt has been complicit in the siege of Gaza for the past decade and a half, helping to enforce the blockade, destroying tunnels that provided a lifeline, coordinating very closely with Israel on security, and heavily restricting the movement of people and goods across the Rafah crossing. And, since October 7th, they’ve continued to allow Israel to dictate the terms of what crosses this border between Egypt and Gaza.

Now, with this impending ground invasion of Rafah, they’re warning that any move that would force a mass displacement of Palestinians would jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Netanyahu has also said that Israel must control the Philadelphi Corridor, the 14-kilometer stretch of land which runs along the Egypt/Gaza border.

What is your assessment of Egypt’s role in all of this, and what would you like to see happen?

TB: Well, what one would hope would have happened by now is that Egypt would allow for humanitarian aid to go into the Gaza Strip. The fact, as you say, that this is a sovereign border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, means that Egypt had always, since October 7th, had the ability to provide humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

The fact that it hasn’t makes it complicit in the suffering that’s happening in the Gaza Strip, and shows that, actually, any kind of movement across that border is really controlled by Israel, and it decides how to maintain that kind of blockade on Gaza.

But, specifically in terms of Egyptian worries around Rafah, and around population transfers, so, there’s two things here to think about. The first is that Egypt — and especially the Sisi regime — obviously has always been worried about the Muslim Brotherhood, and worried about any kind of domestic opposition, specifically Islamist opposition to its rule. And the influx of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Palestinians, many of whom had been living under Hamas’s governance for years, and Hamas — obviously, probably — fighters and officials, and the influx of those into Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, presents a security concern in this narrow lens. In the lens of thinking about, specifically, what the Sisi regime perceives as an Islamist threat in Egypt. So, that’s one consideration for the political establishment.

And the other, of course, is just the instability that that kind of Palestinian refugee crisis would mean for a country, the majority of whose population supports Palestine, and supports the Palestinian right to self-determination. So, this is a huge failure, it would be perceived as a huge failure for the Egyptians, that they allowed for this to happen, and that this is happening on their territory. That they then become the host of a refugee population at a time when we understand historically that Israel will prevent the return of any Palestinian refugees. So, if we look at Syria, if we look at Lebanon, and we look at Jordan, we can see what this population means years and decades from now.

So, really, this is an existential issue for Egypt. However, having said that, there’s very little faith that the Sisi regime will work in any way that’s ethical, or that’s beneficial to the Palestinian struggle, in solidarity or in support or in any other way. And it will be driven by realpolitik. It will be driven by security considerations — the ones we talked about — but also economic considerations; as in, how big a paycheck will they be able to get for allowing this to happen.

Now, the position they’ve taken is very clear, that they will annul or rescind the Camp David Treaty of ‘78/‘79 if this goes through. However, one of the things that I think a lot about is, what becomes permissible under the fog of war?

So, these states — even the U.S. administration — can say they’re against this. Egypt can say they’re against a population transfer, Israel can say they’re not really looking for a population transfer, they’re looking to move civilians out to al-Mawasi or other areas inside the Gaza Strip. But, under the fog of war, in violence, we all know what happens.

And so, that gives a plausible deniability to all these actors. You know, they can then say they were against this population transfer, but now it’s a fait accompli and they have to deal with the reality that’s been created.

So, I’m not sure whether I would take the Egyptian government at face value, and say that they would rescind the peace treaty. I think that economic concentrations would probably play a big role in what the final outcome of this looks like.

SAK: Since Hamas was elected and then took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, we’ve seen successive Israeli assaults in 2008 and ‘09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and others. And they’ve always ended with some sort of negotiation, and a revert to some kind of status quo, with some changes, what you have deemed a violent equilibrium.

That doesn’t seem to be a possibility this time, to go back to what was before, because of the level of destruction and so forth. So, what could the future hold? Are we in a war of attrition for a long time? That status quo seems to have been broken.

TB: Absolutely. I think the status quo is broken, not only because of what we just talked about, which is that the Gaza Strip is now uninhabitable, and I cannot quite conceive of the level of reconstruction that would be needed to maintain any kind of quality of life that’s fit for human life in the Gaza Strip; what that would entail, and the shift in politics and policy that would enable that to happen.

But the reason that a return to that status quo is quite difficult to imagine now is also because of what’s happening inside Israel, and inside the Israeli polity. I think October 7th shattered the illusion that there can be any kind of security for Israelis as long as apartheid persists. I think it’s very clear that the idea that the Palestinians can be indefinitely managed and pacified is no longer possible, and I think that the Israeli establishment understands that very well.

That’s why it’s not a return to business as usual. It’s rather a genocide. Because that business as usual, that status quo, I think has been irreversibly shattered.

Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that we’re going to be living in interminable violence? I think that’s certainly a possibility. It is very much a possibility that, given this awakening that’s happening within Israel, that Palestinians can’t be placed behind walls and forgotten, there is the possibility of finishing what started in ‘48. And we see that in spectacular violence in the Gaza Strip.

But I think where it’s clear is, perhaps, in the West Bank, and with Palestinian citizens of Israel, where there is violence, intimidation, imprisonment, population transfers. [Did you know], since October 7th, 17 villages in the West Bank have been depopulated? So, the colonization on crack is evident throughout historic Palestine. So, certainly, this interminable violence is a possibility.

And then there’s another possibility, which is that the international community wakes up and recognizes that the only way there can be real security and justice in Palestine is if the Palestinian demands for liberation are actually engaged with, rather than placated. So, if there’s a real engagement with what the sources of violence and injustice are, and if there’s a real attempt to bring accountability and to try to dismantle apartheid, I think that’s the only way that we’re going to get a sustainable resolution.

But I have very little faith that this will happen, at least in the near- to medium-term future, because of two things. One, I do think that the Israeli society now does not quite understand what’s happened since October 7th, in the sense that there’s such censorship, and media blackout, and control of the messaging. I think that the Israeli society has been allowed, through Western impunity, to move in a direction that’s fascist and right wing. It’s very difficult for them to really grapple with an alternative that isn’t genocidal. So, I think post-October 7, there’s no change that’s coming, I don’t think, from within Israel.

But the second reason for that is because the international community remains committed to policies that have failed. It’s quite shocking to think of the level of violence that’s happened since October 7th, and the only policy recommendations that the international policy actors can come [up] with is a return to what was before October 7th. It just shows the poverty and the failure of the international community to really understand the place, and what’s happening.

SAK: Well, let me ask you about the U.S. response in particular.

President Biden on Sunday warned Prime Minister Netanyahu that a ground offensive in Rafah should not proceed without a plan to protect the hundreds of thousands of civilians there. In remarks a few days before that, where he had a gaffe — where he called Abdel Fattah El-Sisi the president of Mexico — but he said Israel’s response in Gaza was “over the top.” Which is a meager expression, but perhaps the harshest criticism to date that Biden has given Israel over its brutal assault, but there hasn’t been any change in policy that we’ve seen so far, and the Biden administration has fully vocally supported this military campaign.

They’ve increased military aid and funding, they’ve even bypassed Congress to send munitions to Israel. They’ve vetoed calls for a ceasefire at the U.N. Security Council.

Are you surprised by the Biden administration’s response to this, or is it just business as usual from the U.S.? 

TB: It’s not necessarily business as usual. There are two things that might explain this shift in tone, but I have to make clear from the beginning that I don’t believe this shift in tone represents a shift in policy. I think that the Biden administration is still actively complicit in genocide, there’s just no two ways about it. Diplomatically, militarily, financially, it’s enabling Israel to do what it’s doing.

But there’s two reasons for this shift in tone. The first is that the Biden administration, I think, is becoming increasingly aware of how evident its complicity is, and what kind of exposure this might mean for the administration.

So, I’m thinking specifically of the ICJ trial, but not only. The case brought against the Biden administration in federal court in the U.S. by the Center for Constitutional Rights in California is making a case that the Biden administration is complicit in genocide, and the judge was unable to proceed with the case, but made it quite clear that, from the legal standpoint, they believe that there is a plausible case for the U.S. being complicit in genocide.

So, now we have an American administration, a Democratic American administration actively facing charges of genocide at a time when its base very clearly is not aligned with where the Democratic Party is at. And there’s a level of disruption that’s happening on a grassroots [level] here that’s considerable.

So, I think there’s that element, that there’s a clear, maybe four-month delayed sense of shame that they’re openly dehumanizing Palestinians, calling into question the numbers of Palestinians killed, showing no empathy for the fact that there’s a genocide happening, actively being complicit in the genocide. I think, now, the tone shift is trying to weigh that out a bit.

But the second and I believe maybe more important reason is the election. They’re worried about losing Michigan, and the reality is that this is something that is a very clear possibility. Obviously, because Michigan has a very strong Arab demographic base, and they are appalled by what the Biden administration is doing. And there are all these efforts now to try to present it as if the Biden administration or even the Democratic Party really cares about Palestinians or Arab issues, or had not taken the despicable route it’s taken since October 7th.

So, both of these are, I think, just politics. They’re really just trying to put a cleaner face or a more civil veneer on the fact that they are genocidal.

SAK: And what about the media’s coverage of what’s happening in Gaza in this country? We’ve seen a lot of criticism of newspapers like The New York Times, but other outlets as well.

You’ve been following and thinking about and writing about Palestine for many years now. There’s always been some sort of bias in the media in the United States that many people criticize these larger outlets of bias towards Israel in the language they use in their coverage. What have you seen this time?

TB: I mean, part of the reason that I think there’s been such a shift, at least on the grassroot [level] here is because many people have access to media that isn’t the mainstream media. I really think that this is probably the first genocide to be livestreamed on social media, and on our iPhones. And so, people have access to information that isn’t The New York Times and other [comparable media] — The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC — because the level of complicity and silencing that happens in the mainstream media, specifically on Palestine, is quite unbelievable.

And we saw that from day one. From Muslim anchors being removed from their platforms to the numbers of op-eds that were being penned by Palestinians as versus non-Palestinians, to the fact that many of the points that Israeli propaganda/Hasbara makes are regurgitated completely uncritically by the mainstream media, but also by the mainstream— I mean, obviously, President Biden himself fell into those Islamophobic and Orientalist tropes at the beginning.

So, the structural silencing of Palestinians is very difficult to witness, actually, specifically in American media. And I think social media has been a very important corrective. It’s a very important corrective to the kind of racism and bias that mainstream media has here.

SAK: I just want to turn quickly again to the West Bank, which you mentioned. Because of the focus on Gaza, a lot of what’s happening in the West Bank hasn’t received as much coverage, but the level of colonial violence and dispossession has accelerated dramatically over the past few months. Three hundred eighty — or at least 380 — Palestinians have been killed in attacks by armed settlers, as well as soldiers. Nearly 7,000 have been arrested and are held without charge in so-called administrative detention. Of course, this was happening before October 7th, but now it’s on a different scale.

And you have these raids, also, into places like Jenin, with Israeli soldiers going undercover dressed as doctors to assassinate a wounded patient in a hospital. What’s your assessment of what’s taking place in the West Bank as well, and in ‘48? 

TB: I think there’s a real expansion and strengthening of the settler violence against Palestinians for a number of reasons; dispossession being first and foremost, but also intimidation, terrorizing, inflicting real violence. I think there’s a real ideological commitment by the settler entity — or the settlers writ large — to really wreak havoc throughout the West Bank, and we’ve seen that before October 7th and, obviously, it’s on a more significant scale after October 7th.

And one of the things that’s been interesting to watch in this space is the Biden administration, for example, put out an executive order a few days ago, naming four settlers and sanctioning them. So, freezing their assets and saying that they’re sanctioning these settlers for acts of terror, and for the violence that they’ve meted out against Palestinians in the West Bank. And some have seen this as an important precedent, that this is a way to begin engaging with the sanctioning of the settler movement, which it might be.

But part of the issue with that approach, with focusing on settler violence in these sort of individual cases, is that it forgets or omits the structural reality of settler violence, which is that the leaders of the settler movement, the leaders of the people who are committing colonial violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, are sitting in the highest echelons of the Israeli government. So, the idea that you can sanction four individuals, or numerous individuals, while dealing with the Israeli government in full diplomatic, military, legal, financial support is attempting to separate ‘67 from Israel. As if the apparatus of military rule and colonization that’s happening in the West Bank — the settlement building, the violence — as if that’s separate from the Israeli government, and that’s an illusion.

There’s no separation. It’s a singular regime that’s committing different forms of violence against Palestinians in different locations. What’s happening in the West Bank is not the result of acts of individuals or groups. This is state-sanctioned policy that’s being driven from the top in the Israeli establishment onwards.

More than that, it’s not a right-wing ideology, which is something that you often hear in liberal circles, that if we resolve the Netanyahu issue, then we’re going to have a more civilized Israeli regime that can be dealt with diplomatically. And the truth is that the settlement enterprises, fundamentally, a labor enterprise, and there’s no consensus within Israel that actually limits the kind of settlement, outgrowth, or colonization of the West Bank. It’s misunderstanding how this regime has operated since ‘48, and continues to do so today.

So, I think what’s happening in the West Bank shows, actually, the continuation of efforts to colonize and expand the Israeli state.

SAK: And, final question: it’s hard to talk about hope in these dark times right now, with what’s happening in Gaza, with what’s happening in the West Bank, with everything that’s happening across Palestine. But, as you mentioned, the status quo was shattered, and we’re in some new paradigm. Is there anything that gives you a glimmer of hope?

TB: I think there are a lot of things that give me hope. I mean, it’s very, as you say, it’s really hard to talk about hope when the violence is so extreme. 

But the reality is that the status quo, or the paradigm that we existed in before October 7th, was a paradigm in which no one was talking about Palestine, and Palestinians were dying constantly. And now, we’re living in a paradigm where we’re actually talking about the root causes of suffering in Palestine, which is colonization, genocidal violence, attempts at ethnic cleansing. These are the problems that Palestinians have been facing since before ‘48.

Now, we’re having this conversation on an American platform, talking about ethnic cleansing and genocide. We’re talking about Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology. We’re talking about what Palestinians have been saying and facing for decades. So, that rupture is really important, and that rupture is the beginning of a real shift in terms of how we understand justice in Palestine.

You know, I’ve been living in New York since October 7th. I don’t normally live in the city, and the kind of organizing work that’s been happening has been mind-blowing. And to see that support for Palestine is across color lines, is multigenerational, but mostly driven by the younger generation, gives me a great degree of hope. Because, while, let’s say the Democratic Party here is still aligned with a ‘70s outlook on Zionism, the base of the Democratic Party is progressive, and they understand what this means. The realignment that will have to happen in the American political establishment is one that is moving in the direction of justice for Palestine.

And these changes, these paradigmatic ruptures are very unsettling, and they are destabilizing, and they will take time. But I think the general trajectory we’re moving in is one that’s very hopeful.

Now, that’s not to say that justice is inevitable, because I do think that Palestinians are facing an adversary that is very powerful and extreme in the tactics and the violence that they use. But I do think that, more than before October 7th, Palestinians have a level of understanding, of international solidarity, and mobilization, that they didn’t see before. And I think that’s really important.

SAK: Well, Tareq Baconi, thank you very much for joining us.

TB: Thanks for having me.

SAK: That was Tareq Baconi, the author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Sharif Abdel Kouddous.