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This week’s episode of Scheer Intelligence welcomes someone with extraordinary courage and experience not only in Palestine but the Middle East as a whole. Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Kuwait-born, Canada-based Palestinian doctor, who also serves as the medical director at Gila, a global humanitarian healthcare organization, provides an indispensable account of what he knows is Palestine.
Despite his various missions providing medical care and assistance to those who need it most in often helpless regions in the Middle East, Loubani was still on the receiving end of brutal punishment and treatment for simply being Palestinian. Israelis, Loubani said, do not fundamentally understand Palestinians are people.
“They don’t fundamentally understand that Palestinians’ No. 1 interest is their own freedom, safety, dignity. They think, in the typical colonizer way, that all the actions of Palestinians revolve around them, around wanting to do something to them rather than revolving around Palestinians and what Palestinians want for themselves,” Loubani noted.
Loubani describes a moment where he was severely beaten by an Egyptian policeman for stating he is Palestinian rather than Canadian and Loubani thinks, “That’s a microcosm of what I experienced as a Palestinian, because everybody tells me the same thing: Tell me you’re not a Palestinian and I’ll let you be and I’ll leave you alone. But say you’re a Palestinian, I will beat the f*** out of you.”
Even through nonviolence, as with the Great March of Return in 2018, where thousands of unarmed Palestinians demonstrated near the border of Gaza and Israel, Loubani experienced the same treatment. “I was shot in 2018 through both legs by an Israeli sniper and that happened while I was in full medical garb at one of these protests with nobody armed. One of my colleagues was killed shortly after I was shot.”
The message Palestinians receive on a daily basis and have received for almost all their history is one of denying their existence and agency, Loubani expressed. Host Robert Scheer agreed and points to the Jewish experience as being ironically identical. “Every Jewish person who heard what you said should cry. They should see themselves. Why they don’t is the greatest betrayal of the whole Jewish tradition,” Scheer, who is Jewish, said.
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to say the intelligence comes from my guest and in this case, not just intelligence, obviously. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian doctor by birth, and we’ll discuss whether one is allowed to be a Palestinian by birth who left the region, was actually born… Well, tell me, where were you born?
Tarek Loubani I was born in Kuwait.
Scheer Yeah. So you were already sort of a refugee?
Loubani Yeah, absolutely. The only document that testified to my existence was a little card issued to say this person exists. The end.
Scheer And this is true of the fate of many Palestinians who unfortunately don’t have the same right of return that I would have when I grew up in the Bronx in a Jewish neighborhood. I was always told once the state of Israel was created that I had a right to return because my Jewish mother guaranteed that even though she was from Lithuania and actually a refugee from the Russian Revolution and before that, the czar’s police. Nonetheless, Israel was described and I’ll get into your credentials and your medical training and so forth. But I want to remind people the basic defense, certainly when I was a young person in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, the justification was, first of all, very compelling that the most horrible tragedy had been visited upon the Jewish people in Europe, not in the Middle East, in Europe, by one of the most advanced societies, admired widely in America, Germany, and that was the largest group of immigrants in America at that time, very prominent people admired Germany.
And the slogan, when heard was, Israel represented a land without people, for a people without land. Now, that was a lie because—and Tarek’s family would be a very good example—these people have been living continuously in that area. They considered, this is an inconvenient truth on a grand level, they considered themselves Palestinians, the rest of the Arab world, which had been divided up by colonialism into nations and so forth, nonetheless regarded the Palestinians as basically a stateless people. So why don’t we take it back before you became a doctor, before you became a Canadian citizen, to this identity of a Palestinian that is continuously denied and used as a justification for imprisoning those Palestinians who still are in the area, you know, and they’re not even called prisoners. They’re supposed to go somewhere else, some other country wants you. We’ll get to that in a little bit, but give your own personal story here.
Loubani Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting you should say that, because one of my first experiences in Canada when I moved here, we ended up obviously being enrolled in school. Education is important for everybody, but particularly important to Palestinians. And ever since I could remember my father would always tell me, you know, look at all of this. It can go at any moment. The only thing they can’t take from you is your education. So in our family, there was very much an intergenerational trauma, since my grandparents on both sides had lost everything in 1948. And my parents who started their lives, both of them in literal tents and then migrated to shacks with zinc topped roofs called zincos, and then eventually had some more built structures as they grew. They were constantly reminded that they had everything and lost it all and that anything can be taken away from them.
So when we got to Canada, I was enrolled in school almost immediately, I think within a couple of days of arriving. And when I got to my class, the teacher asks me, Well, where are you from? And so I said, Well, I’m Palestinian. She said, No, you’re not. There’s no such thing as a Palestinian because there’s no such thing as a Palestine. I was in grade five at the time, there’s no discussion about that. I’m like, Oh, okay. It’s not that I changed who I was because she didn’t believe that I existed, it just was the first time that anyone had told me that I didn’t exist, you know, that I could remember. And that was not a one off, that was the start of my life in Canada. And until today, until today, routinely, I’m told, to go back home or to leave here or why are you here? Or things of this variety by people who simultaneously tell me that I’m not really a Palestinian, that there isn’t really a Palestine, and they can somehow hold these two totally contradictory views simultaneously, like only true hypocrites can.
Scheer But the irony, the deep, deep irony here is that you were subjected to exactly the condition of most Jews in the world prior to Israel. You know, where would you go back to? I mean, my mother left Russia after the revolution because she belonged to a group called the Jewish Socialist Bund that was trying to build some kind of Jewish homeland, you know, in what became Soviet Russia. And her movement was denounced by Lenin and so she fled with her sister and they got a steerage passage to the United States and the Jewish people that I grew up with because I was born in 1936 and went through the war in my mother’s family, all of whom were killed, that didn’t get out of Lithuania, this was a tragedy that European civilization visited upon the Jewish people, not Muslim religion, not the Middle Eastern civilization, not anything to do with Palestinians. You know, and the fact of the matter is, the world, you know, had looked the other way. Jewish refugees had been turned away from New York by FDR.
I heard very little about the deaths of Jews for much of the war. There was a kind of inconvenient aspect to it, why bring it up? We’re trying to rally a nation that still had strong anti-Semitism in this country. I’m broadcasting here now from Los Angeles, our major social organizations where the political decisions were made at the Jonathan Club, they excluded Jews as well as Black and brown people and actually women from membership. So the idea is this is horrible. Yes, in modern history, no greater tragedy in such a short period of time has visited upon any people than the Holocaust, but we didn’t examine the Holocaust. There came suddenly a quick fix, quick fix. Oh, go to Israel. Not how do you change Europe? How do you change Germany? How do you change France, where anti-semitism was quite…? How do you change Eastern Europe? No. And now the irony is that people are banned from protesting for Palestinians in Germany, which caused the Holocaust and which was never really held in any basic way accountable.
So I just want to bring that up, but ask you the question that people listening might say: Why is it important to you to to have Palestinians recognized and why wouldn’t the best thing be, they can’t become citizens of Israel because there’s no right of return. That was another thing that confused me in the Bronx. I had the right to go live in Israel because of my Jewish mother, once Israel was formed. But the Palestinians around the world who were again wandering, stateless, subject to harassment even in the Arab world, didn’t have that right to return. But the quick answer I would get out on the street right now is, Hey, why don’t they just go live in Yemen or go live someplace else, go live in the Sinai, in the desert? Right? Why is it important that there be a Palestinian identity and nation that’s recognized?
Loubani The way I look at this is that Palestinians have rights, one of them being the right to return to their homeland from which they were forcefully dispossessed. What they decide to do with that right, is their business. And so it’s obviously the case that if tomorrow Israel were to open the doors, apologized for what it had done and say anybody who wants to come back can, you know, like would I go back to Palestine tomorrow? I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. But the reality is, to go there, I’d have to abandon quite the life that I’m built in Canada. Friends, families, relationships. So it’s not about necessarily the practicality of it. It’s about the justice of it. That my grandmother was displaced from her farms, from her olive groves. My grandfather was robbed of his land. And fundamentally, the first thing that has to happen is an acknowledgment that these people existed. And as we’ve seen in Canada and the United States, people are quick to acknowledge when those people almost don’t exist or when they truly have so little power that that an acknowledgment is tokenistic.
And I heard it said and it really resonated with me that what Israel wants to do is flatten, to pulverize Gaza and then hold land acknowledgments over the ashes of the Palestinians. And that sounds about right for the usual approaches of colonialists, especially European-based colonialists. So it’s important because it’s our right and then what we decide to do with that right, once achieved, is our business. If Palestinians decide they want to stay in wherever they are, fine. And if they decide they want to go home, fine. I will say, though, that even though I’ve never seen my parent’s village, it’s Sassa, my father’s village, Sassa. My mother’s village, I once saw out of a prison car. I was in a prison car driving from a court in Jerusalem to a prison called Maasiyahu in Ramallah. And the guard pointed out a village and said, that’s your mother’s village. One of the police officers said, that’s your mother’s village. So that’s the only time I’ve ever seen it. You know, even though I’ve never seen my father’s village, I still feel like I’m from there. I am from there. And that’s something that can’t be easily disrupted simply because I haven’t been able to go back. It’s not that I was from there and I left. It’s that I was robbed of my place.
I was robbed of my village. I was robbed of my choices, of my future, of my dignity. To make choices and to have a future. And those are the things that people like me are fighting for. And you can imagine, I fight for it from a place of deep privilege. The vast majority of Palestinians fight for it out of refugee camps, from deep poverty. And so for them, there is a material difference. They do want a better life and they know that that better life happens from true justice. For me, the honest truth is that I my standard of living would probably go down if I moved to an Israel that was free, an Israel that was just and humane and honest. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of the Palestinian diaspora.
Scheer And let’s not exaggerate your privilege, because you, out of concern for your fellow human beings who happened to be Palestinians, have gone back. You’re not an armchair advocate here. Tell me about that. Because that’s one of the arguments that you’ll hear from Israelis. They’ll say, wait a minute, you’re not there. You don’t know the risks. You don’t know the dangers. That’s what they have been saying to American Jews and Jews elsewhere in the diaspora. Oh, we know we have to make decisions, that’s what Netanyahu says, but in fact, is you are not some armchair observer. Your commitment to your fellow human beings who are also people of the same background has taken you to Gaza. So please sketch that out, because as a medical doctor, yes, you have privileges, you have a better income and so forth in Canada.
But your moral code, your strongest feelings have brought you back. You’ve been imprisoned there. You also were imprisoned in Egypt, we’ll get to that. This whole idea, that somehow the David/Goliath thing, the Palestinians are somehow Goliath because they have the whole Arab world against them. That’s utter nonsense. Palestinian people have been abandoned by every other Arab nation at one major point or another. We will get into that. The Palestinian people never attacked Israel. They never had an army, they didn’t have an air force in this whole period when they were occupied and they’ve been held as prisoners for seven decades. But give you a personal story here, because this is not a story of privilege. You risk your life continuously. You sacrifice your basic freedom. Let’s not be modest about it.
Loubani Well, Bob, I agree with you. I’m a person who is built for being in the field. I’m built for the front lines, both psychologically and luckily physically. However, I don’t think that you should dismiss my privilege so readily. The fact is that I hold a Canadian passport. I have a very generous income from the Canadian state for being a doctor. I speak English, kind of like you. Most people struggle…
Scheer Far better, far better.
Loubani Most people struggle to hear my accent, even though English is not my mother tongue. It’s my second language. And so those things are points of deep privilege. If not for those things, I mean it’s not like other people don’t want to do the work that I’m doing. They just don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do it. So, yes, I’ve been there. What I have done, what I think I have done, which may be, you know, you’re trying to recognize me for, is I’ve used that privilege to the maximum possible capacity to try to give back to a community that I feel is being unjustly treated and unjustly sort of victimized. And that’s true. My connection with Palestine is, first, as a humanitarian and as a human being, which is why when I first started working, it was in Latin American communities. You know, I’ve worked in other countries, I’ve worked in northern Canada with indigenous people. So to me, the first connection is on a human level with people who are suffering. I didn’t go into medicine because I was Palestinian. I went into medicine because I was human and I didn’t go in to help Palestinians. I went to help people. And so it is truly a natural connection. And I’m deeply proud of being a Palestinian. I’ve never denied it, even when it hurt me. And in literal sense, you know, I had a confrontation with an Egyptian policeman when I was arrested in Egypt in which he basically said to me, Are you Canadian or Palestinian? And when I said Palestinian, he beat the f*** out of me. And he hit me so hard that, you know, I’m not sure exactly if it happened then or in the second beating, my ribs broke, my kidneys were damaged such that I was peeing blood for two weeks. And after he was done the first round, he picked me up by the hair, you know, while I was obviously crying and and sort of moaning in pain and said, now, I didn’t hear you. Are you Canadian or are you Palestinian?
And I said to him, I’m the one who’s ears are ringing, but you’re the one who can’t hear. I’m still a Palestinian. Okay. Maybe I wouldn’t be so mouthy if I were to do it again. But, you know, he beat the s*** out of me again. Now, I would take all of those beatings because at least it’s a physical manifestation of that person’s denial of my existence. And funny enough, those beatings are less painful and shorter in duration than the exact same thing that’s happening. That’s a microcosm of what I experienced as a Palestinian, because everybody tells me the same thing. Tell me you’re not a Palestinian and I’ll let you be and I’ll leave you alone. But say you’re a Palestinian, I will beat the f*** out of you. And that’s the message, not just that I receive in… I received it that day in a literal sense, but I receive it every day in a metaphorical sense, but that every Palestinian receives and that’s the message of the Palestinians today are receiving, you know, the ones in Gaza, the ones who are dying, as you and I speak, the ones who are suffering every moment, not just from the bombs. You know, in a sense, the ones who are getting killed are the lucky ones because everybody else has to cry for them, has to bury them, has to starve day on day, has to drink dirty water and those things, those things could stop in a heartbeat. If Palestinians would just stop being Palestinians. And they know that. And yet somehow they find the bravery and the dignity and the ability to say: no, I’m still Palestinian, even if you can’t hear me.
Scheer Well what you’re just saying is the song, the story of most Jews in the world who encountered anti-Semitism. There are different Semitic people, but in fact is the Jewish experience was one. And you could pass, stop being Jewish. Change your name, change your religion, convert, get different features. What have you. This is certainly available to people for some reason, it wasn’t available to everyone, of course but those who could get more education or could get some money or so forth, you could pass. Hollywood. Hollywood offered careers to Jews as long as they changed their name, as long as they changed their features and so forth. So every Jewish person listening. You know, older people, we get emotional. Every Jewish person who heard what you said should cry. They should see themselves. Why they don’t is the greatest betrayal of the whole Jewish tradition. Gabor Maté, he was in my class with you. He said there are two traditions: one biblical, Hebraic, one of the diaspora. The diaspora we acknowledge was progressive.
A large number, disproportionate number of Jews were involved in the American civil rights movement, are involved actually in defending Palestinian rights. There is Jewish Voices for Peace and any Jewish person who heard what you said should tear up. They don’t. They don’t because they’ve bought into the David/Goliath lie. And I want to get to that right away. I happened to be in Egypt at the end of the Six Day War. I was the editor of Ramparts magazine. I went there and then I went to Israel. I was in Gaza. I was in the West Bank. The big lie is that Israel gained control of these territories because something the Palestinians did. It’s a big lie. I interviewed Israeli Palestinians who had volunteered blood, who gave their blood. They couldn’t be in the military. They were citizens. They actually thought it would get better for their compatriots on the other side. Why? Because Gaza had been controlled by the Egyptians and they weren’t always kind, as you have learned personally. And Jordan controlled the West Bank. And we know there’s a large number of Palestinians, like Jews, out there everywhere, they were in Jordan and they got treated very badly.
And yet Israel made peace with Egypt and the U.S. Government now arms Egypt and the U.S. Government, we should talk about when you got arrested ten years ago in Egypt with a famous filmmaker, John Greyson, you were making a film and you were on your way to Gaza. The U.S. decided they like one government. They get along with the military junta that runs Egypt now. Israel gets along just fine, they’re making separate peace with the Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia eventually and so forth. So the question is the Palestinians who are should be seen as the Jews in this situation are seen as somehow the rich Saudis or the militarized Egyptians, it’s the big lie. It’s absolutely outrageous. And, you know, we can talk about that a little bit.
Loubani Well, Bob, I think I want to try to reframe the way that you presented it. You know, I wondered very much why I feel such a deep affinity with Jews in general, not just historic Jews, you know, of World War II, but Jews pretty much throughout their entire history and until today. And I think the frame that people try to put us in is Palestinian versus Jew. Which is, of course, Palestinian is a national identity and Jews a religious identity. 30% of Palestinians are Christian. If this was truly a Muslim versus Jewish thing, then why is Bethlehem occupied? Why are there shaheed posters, martyr posters of people with crosses? Why? Some of the most prominent people in the Palestine Liberation Movement were never Muslims. We’re not even talking about used to be at one point they were born Christian, I think, for example, of Edward Said, although there were many even on the military side too. So the frame that I finally have been able to understand this with is truly one of a colonized and a colonizer.
And in that particular context or somebody who robs or extracts and somebody who is being robbed or extracted. And in that context, what happened in Europe makes a little bit more sense in terms of how it compares and where the affinities lie. So long as the Jewish people in Europe were on the receiving end of that abuse, that affinity was very, very clear. Now them crossing over people, I mean, obviously it wasn’t all Jews, but people crossing over in that sense, it simply was a move from being a people who were colonized after a fashion to I think using the term colonized for Jews is probably a much bigger decision than I can make. But then in Israel, it became the role of the colonizer. The identity of the colonizer is immaterial. They are the colonizer. And because they’re a colonizer, they’re now in the league and allied with other colonizers. And that’s why Israel allies with the white people who would have happily killed the colonized Jews in South Africa. That’s why they ally with the Americans who happily turned around ships of Jews rather than saving them. That’s why they ally with Egypt, which looks like it should be, you know, on a on a racial level, let’s say, or on a cultural level, an ally of Arabs. The reason why Egypt and Israel are in alliance is because they’re both in the same axis of colonization. They’re in the same orbit of that racist outlook upon people. And the best sign of that, if you wanted a small study of it, is that when South Africa was quote “liberated,” a lot of the colonizers shifted from being white to being black. You know, there’s still a lot of abuse of South African poor and South African Blacks.
It just so happens that the farm managers, as it were, as it’s been described, are now Black rather than white. I think once you draw out the the conflict and I hear you talking a lot about how Jews should be ashamed, I think that’s because you’re saying Jews should recognize the history of being in that subjugated or colonized spot and relate to the fact that your grandfather, your grandmother, your grandparent was was being dominated and subjugated and genocided, and therefore you should have kinship with somebody else. And that is true. That is why so many Jews support the Palestinian cause. But that’s in tension with, at the same time, a deep indoctrination that they are actually the colonizer, that there is a national myth. South Africa had a national myth. Egypt has a national myth, you know, the pharaohs and so on. Everybody, the Americans obviously have a national myth. And so their national myth right now is in competition with what their religion is telling them about what justice looks like.
Scheer So, you know, we’ve gotten very personal in this discussion. It’s quite different than what we did in our class. But I’m going to take advantage of it because it is personal. We were talking before the tape and you were talking about family members being killed. You were talking about people you know, patients, you worked on and we have to bring this back to medicine. And what they’re going through, they’re being bombed right now as we speak. They’re being killed right as we speak. And I do want to explore the Jewish connection and also I want to connect the Western Christian connection, because the other part of my family’s story is that my father was an immigrant from Germany who came during the First World War. He was 14 years old or something. When he arrived at Ellis Island. Still German, still had family, occasionally wrote letters to each other, sent money and so forth. And my uncle, when I finally got back, I went to Lithuania. I mean, after the war, 1961, I believe the first trip I made, I was a college graduate and I went to Lithuania to try to find my mother’s family. They were all dead, gone, disappeared, killed, which we knew were already in our family and the ones that were in America.
And then I went to find my father’s family. And it was the great educational experience in my life. They were very nice people. My aunt was already working at the American Air Force. They had been working at the American Air Force Base. They had my uncle had been wounded at Stalingrad fighting the Russians. Very good guy. These were farming people, not highly educated in south west Germany. And I spent, I went back many times, I brought my children, I tried to understand why did my father’s family want to exterminate and succeed in killing so many millions of people? And in the postwar Germany, yes, they study it in the school. Yes, they had thought about it, but that was over now. We really never examined where this came from. Was it a failure of capitalism? My uncle would sometimes say, you know, those people in the stock market, that’s the only time Jewish ever came up, was in relation to the economy. But they didn’t know any there. And when I would talk to, you know, intelligent people, I’ve actually, over the years talk to Hannah Arendt, I talked to Herbert Marcuse, I talked to quite a few people trying to grasp this. And it hit me the other day when Germany was arresting people or preventing them from demonstrating in support of the Palestinians. Germany! I thought, how in the world could they defend, they had committed this great the greatest atrocity.
It is that atrocity which is used to colonize, oppress the Palestinian people, kill them, drop these huge bombs on them this morning. Bombs the U.S. says you should never use against the city. Killing, they have to kill. There has to be a genocide. It has to be a war crime to use those weapons in such a congested area. And they’re doing it and they’re doing it with the support of the German government. They’re doing it with the support of the French government. The Eastern Europeans, where anti-Semitism was… You know, after all, it wasn’t only Germans who killed my relatives in Lithuania. And so the idea that there is no shame in Germany now. The German people or the German Americans that I grew up amongst also, that somehow this is all visited upon what? The rubric of the Muslim somewhere or the Palestinian, is one of the grotesque characterizations, tragedies of human history and why people accept it. It’s just a simple thing. I ask people, why is it that the Palestinians have no vote over their rulers? All this stuff about freedom, the free world, democracy? You accept the situation? I visited Gaza at the time in the Six-Day War, and I was told by Moshe Dayan, by Allon, by top Israelis, you come back in ten years and you’re going to see these people are going to have a lot more rights. They’re going to have rights. And if they don’t, then we won’t be Israel. We won’t be the Jewish state. It turned out to be a big lie, whether they believed it or not at the time. It’s a big lie. None of these Palestinians that we are bombing have any say in what happens to them.
Loubani Moshe Dayan is interesting because he truly was a person who, within the rubric of racist colonization or colonizer thought, was trying to make Palestinian life better as he understood it, very much in the same way that you might add a little bit of extra straw to the home of an animal that you have in a zoo. And so I’ve always had deep compassion for people like him and the people who have been the worst to Palestinians because they start from a place of deep racism that they can almost not escape. And for example, why have I been in jail multiple times from Israel? Israel has jailed me at least 3 or 4 times. They deported me more times than I can count at this point. They’ve denied me entry to Gaza so many more times than even that. Literally, it’s in the dozens of times. So why? Why does Israel do that? I’m a doctor, after all. But here’s like the mental exercise that helps me understand the Israeli army. Okay. So we can all agree that Eichmann is bad, right? You and me, Bob, we agree. Eichmann is bad. We agree Hitler’s bad. Let’s go with Hitler just to make it a little more profound. What about Hitler’s doctor? Was he bad? If you could kill him, would you have killed him? Because Hitler’s doctor facilitates Hitler, makes Hitler possible, in a sense, gives him comfort. And to Israelis, many Israelis, every Palestinian is a little Hitler running around. And I am Hitler’s doctor to them.
So when they look at me with such hatred, when they talk to me like I’m a criminal, that’s the basis on which they’re doing it. They don’t fundamentally understand that Palestinians are people. They don’t fundamentally understand that Palestinians’ number one interest is their own freedom, safety, dignity. They think, in the typical colonizer way, that all the actions of Palestinians revolve around them, around wanting to do something to them rather than revolving around Palestinians. And what Palestinians want for themselves. So I have deep compassion for them. But I will stop them. I will stop them and I will never stop until they are stopped. Because what they do, regardless of why they do it and regardless of my compassion for them, is monstrous. What Israel does is war crimes is violations of international law, is dehumanization, is apartheid. What Israel does has to be stopped. And whatever mechanism it is that we have to sort of pick for that, in most of our cases, it’s things like BDS. In my specific case, it’s things like treating Palestinians, it’s things like building a medical system. You know, those are the things we have to do. But we can do all those things while simultaneously embracing and understanding the perspective of Israelis.
Scheer Time for a break. We’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re back with Scheer Intelligence and our guest. You have been defined out of existence in the American media, political class. I mean, I watched the debate, our governor…
Loubani But I haven’t been waiting for the Americans to tell me who I am. Like, yeah, I get that.
Scheer No, no, but I want to be clear about this because I have respect for the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, think basically a good person, I actually knew his father. And yet I watched him in a debate with DeSantis, the governor of Florida. And the one thing they both agreed on is the Palestinians have no rights. Whether they really believe that or not, they just stated it clearly they want jumped over each other in the most grotesque political dance to say no, I am more for Israel bombing and doing what it’s doing than you are! So this great democracy, we don’t have any serious discussion. At least there was a time when Jimmy Carter and others where you had to negotiate, you had to recognize. People like Colin Powell understood that he was involved. Everybody forgets that we had a chance for some kind of peace here with Rabin, when he was the leader of Israel. And nobody ever brings up why did that peace process stop? It stopped over technically, in the sense, not techincally, but dramatically, over an assassination. Well, who killed Rabin? Was it some Muslim fanatic? No, it was a Jewish fanatic. It was from within Jewish society the peace process was stopped. And many of the people around Netanyahu now actually admire the assassin. The widow of Rabin has said that he was killed by this madness inside Israel. So the rewriting of history, this is the part that really gets me going here. We talk a lot about what is fake news and real news and so forth. We have been sold a narrative and by the way, I think it’s unfair to the Jewish religion, yes, as Gabriel Maté said, there are two strands, there’s secular diaspora experience and to one degree or another, you identify with the religion or a sense of a wandering tribe or what have you.
But there are also different views about the religion. And certainly the creation of Israel in the biblical terms was not supposed to come from human beings organizing, it was supposed to come from divine source and the return of the Messiah. We don’t have to get into all that. But really, you’re talking about a people, everybody says, well, why don’t the Palestinians act better or do this or control that? It’s always the responsibility, Hamas does this or you do that. Well, that’s that’s an argument you can make about the people in South Africa who rebelled against white control. You know Mandela or anybody, what they did, you can argue about the Jews. After all, in the creation of Israel, they killed, they blew up hotels, they killed [inaudible] and what have you. They killed British colonizers and so forth. So movements of liberation are desperate. They’re often act in ways that are contrary to their purpose. They often have manifestations. And for God’s sake, the Palestinian people have never been allowed to organize as a culture, and certainly not during the occupation.
They never been allowed out, they were divided. And let’s just get to that because the fact of the matter is the PLO, which is now supposed to be the good representation, betrayed the Palestinian people, but also Israel at a key point under Netanyahu, preferred Hamas, they preferred Hamas, and they preferred to division, divide and conquer. And also we’re going to run out of time, but I think it’s an important kind of a reckoning about history. I want you to take me through all of your arrests. I want people to know what a Canadian doctor who’s risking his life and career and well-being and, you know, his relation to his family goes through to try to bring medical care to people living under Israeli occupation. So can you just take us through all of your arrests? They’re not insignificant. They’re our responsibility, our government, with its arms, with its money and our politicians support your being arrested. They do. We do.
Loubani Yeah. I mean, I’ll take you through four of them. There have been a lot, unfortunately. But I think these four the most emblematic of the arrests that I’ve been through. The first one, first time I was ever in jail was in Israel and I was arrested and taken to Ariel jail, where I saw a lot of the people who are under administrative detention. And I remember I decided I was going to grow my facial hair out. At the time, obviously, I was much younger, I could barely grow facial hair. And one of the other prisoners asked me, one of the detainees, he asked me, What are you doing? How come you didn’t shave today? I very proudly was like, Oh yeah, I’m going to grow this thing out, you know, until I’m released, like it was a playoff beard. And he looked at me and he said, Yeah, I decided to do the same thing. He grabs the beard, you know, down here. Five years ago, he had been in administrative detention for five years at that point in conditions that were unbelievable. In fact, do you speak Hebrew, Bob?
Scheer No. I speak Yiddish a bit. But go ahead.
Loubani There’s a phrase that I don’t think I’ll ever forget till the day I die. [Inaudible] Excuse me, soldier. [Inaudible]. Do you mind turning off the light to room four? Because in jail, lights are on 24 hours and the Palestinians were never allowed to turn off their lights. But because we were, quote, foreigners and myself, there were people from Scandinavia and then American and then me, we were allowed to ask for them to turn the lights off. And depending on the guard on duty, they might say yes.
Scheer What was the reason you were in jail? What was the charge?
Loubani The charge was being in a closed military zone. But of course, that was nonsense. There was never a closed military zone or anything like that. The real reason was that we were documenting human rights abuses at a time when we thought that sunlight would disinfect the occupation. We thought that the occupation, if people understood it, they wouldn’t support it. You know, obviously, with the way that Biden is behaving now, I can tell how naive 22 year old me was. I was so crazy to think that the Americans would back off this project. But it was also because I thought that there was a separation between the colonial project of Israel and the colonial project of the States. I didn’t see how closely correlated they were. So that was the first arrest. My second arrest was in Iraq, and it was at the hands of a group called called [inaudible]. So they had arrested me because there had been some spies who spoke with a Palestinian accent who they had caught in a hospital a few weeks before I arrived in the town of Fallujah. So when I tried to go working, it was in a context of they just saw people speaking like I spoke. They had digital cameras like I had and laptops like I had. And here I was basically trying to, like, replace them. So I was arrested. They put me through like a formal trial process.
Scheer This was in Iraq?
Loubani This is in Iraq. It was gruesome. It was terrible process. I was treated well. You know, that’s why I never really had too many doubts.
Scheer You had gone as a medical person?
Loubani Yeah, I did. And within their contacts, they were just not open to people coming in from outside, especially with Palestinian accents, because many of the Israeli agents who would come through and many of the interrogators spoke with Palestinian accents, they told me.
Scheer So now you were being confused by the Iraqis. This is interesting, because of the David/Goliath image is supposed to be tiny Israel and massive Arab population. But as I indicated, when I was in Egypt, I was disabused of that and my first hours there, that the Palestinians were being treated throughout the Arab world as the Jews had been treated, dare I say, in Europe.
Loubani Yeah, I would say in this particular case, you know, one has to be cautious because the Americans had no reserve of Arabic speaking intelligence. And so they tapped Israeli intelligence to help them. And so the interrogations were being done by actual Israeli operatives who spoke Arabic in Iraq.
Scheer In Iraq?
Loubani Yeah and we all knew that at the time. This isn’t new, it’s not like information that I’m revealing to you for the first time 20 years later. It was it was pretty widely known at the time that Israelis were operating in Iraq to help give depth, initially, in the first couple of years.
Scheer You may say it’s widely known, but I don’t think a reader of The New York Times would know this. There might have been a story, but I don’t recall reading that the interrogations being done in Iraq were done by Israelis on contract or something?
Loubani Initially and that came back to me multiple times because I speak Arabic with a Palestinian accent. People were very terrified when I would talk and especially people who had been to jail. I could almost tell who had been to jail just by the way they reacted when they heard my accent. I was in Iraq two summers, and so it was the second summer that people really had that visceral reaction, the first summer when I was in Fallujah. It was also relative news to me.
Scheer I mean, you are an amazing human being. You took your medical skills to Iraq to heal people.
Loubani Where else was I going to go? I mean, it was the place that needed it. And at that point, I was banned from going to Palestine.
Scheer But most people who support wars or causes or what have you do it as an abstraction. You know, some get drafted, some actually are in the military and so forth. But most people, it’s kind of like a video game or something. And I didn’t know this about you, the extent of your involvement, and it wasn’t only with Palestinian patients, it was patients, as you said earlier, around the world. But I didn’t know you’d go to a war zone and Fallujah.
Loubani Yeah, I mean Fallujah was the place that I wanted to be. I tried initially to work in Baghdad, but the fact that it’s known that Palestinians are almost all Sunni, coupled with the fact that I spoke with a Palestinian accent, it was very hard to operate in Shia hospitals. I went there, patients couldn’t trust me. The staff couldn’t trust me. So I thought, okay, well, if I go to a Sunni hospital, it might be easier, that was my rationale. And as soon as I arrived, they were just so deeply suspicious in the context of having caught these two spies two weeks before I had arrived. So there was a duality, right. On the one hand, these people are fighting for their own lives, they’re struggling. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me, this was not too far off of the Nick Berg situation. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me. But in the end, they didn’t kill me. They ran me through a bit of a trial, which operated as well as it could have in times of war with people who didn’t have very much education. And in the end, I thought they were going to kill me, but they released me.
So I don’t know what to say about that. But that was very formative for me in a lot of ways because I could see how this was going to turn into ISIS if people weren’t allowed to have some of their basic rights, like all of the primordial ingredients were there. You know, none of these people were religious before the war. And then all of a sudden they found that the only thing that could help them defend their city was to join this particular religious group. They were learning, they were experiencing tremendous savagery from the Americans. And within 2 or 3 years, Islamic State started to coalesce. And some of the horrible things that happened, the Civil War, etc., really blew that in the direction of of radical extremism. You know, an extreme response to an extreme situation. As far as I know, almost everybody who captured me is dead. But I don’t, I mean, I don’t really know. They were quite security conscious. That was number two. Number three…
Scheer Before we leave number two, there’s a reference point to what’s happened with Hamas. Because when I was in Gaza and the West Bank right after the Six-Day War, most of the people I talked to and admittedly, they could speak English. But they had been there under the Egyptians or the Jordanians, they were not a particularly, did not appear to be, particularly given to the religion. And one of the arguments was over the years that they increasingly found some support, some consistency with more religious groups. And I think that in part I mean, Hamas is now just being treated as nothing but mad, raging fundamentalist Muslims. We don’t talk about other fundamentalists, be they Christian or Jewish, whatever, in the same way. But nonetheless I got from your talk in our class that you feel Hamas developed a certain credibility connected with its religion, no?
Loubani The reality, Bob, is that all of these organizations catch steam because of two big reasons. One is moment of crisis, so extreme problems, and the other one is path of opportunity, some way out. The way that Hamas operates and the reason why Hamas has such credibility, Hamas developed its credibility in stages. The first stage was when people were poor, they gave them food, they gave them medical care. You know, half of Hamas’s leadership got their start on social works projects. So when you really look at who they are and what they do, regardless of where they are now, that’s where they were.
The reason why they were voted in is because the Palestinian Authority was so deeply corrupt. And regardless of what you want to say about Hamas’s political ideology or Islamism or so on, Hamas isn’t corrupt. You know, wasn’t corrupt then I’m guessing that it has some corruption now, but the corruption level now is akin to Canada. You know, like I guess your audience might not be that familiar with Canadian politics, but our premier, like our state governor right now, is a deeply corrupt man, but he’s corrupt in the Canadian way. He has dinners with people that give him money, he makes deals and that is probably the level of corruption that Hamas is at. They’re at quote, normal levels of corruption for most…
Scheer Now, it’s not just corruption. The conventional wisdom now, that’s how the media gets away with saying this is a war between Israel and Hamas. It’s not a war between Israel and the Palestinians. They define Hamas as this, as the president has, totally out of control for religious fanatics beyond any reason, without any history, without any legitimacy whatsoever. And therefore, anybody who voted for them or is in the area that they control is accountable. And what they are, the current stories that you’re reading now is they are primarily rapists of Jewish women and killers of children and babies. And so if you divide the people that way, which is, after all, what we did with the Iraqis is what we do with the Syrians, certainly what we do with the Iranian people, we define them as, you know, monsters. Tell us more about this, because you have an insight. You’ve worked in Gaza. You’ve worked in the those hospitals that were destroyed now because we said they were nothing but the placentas for Hamas terrorism. Give us this reality and I think it’s well worth the time we’re spending on this.
Loubani Let’s first to root it in the American method of approach. So America looks at North Korea, for example, and instead of recognizing a state that makes rational decisions to come to reasonable outcomes, they think to themselves, well these guys are crazy, this guy is nuts, you know, etc. And as such, they have led the state of North Korea to make perfectly rational, normal conclusions all the way into a nuclear bomb. Do you really think that a state run by a madman has somehow just magically developed out of nowhere an incredible military capacity that includes nuclear bombs that could end life? I mean, it’s crazy making to think that the North Koreans are not rational state actors. We know their goals. We know what they want. We know how to give it to them. We know how to get what we want. We just, North America but specifically the US, just refuses. Iran is very similar. Iran has very obvious ambitions with very obvious goals and a clear pattern of thought that Obama was able to exploit in a sense to get a deal.
The deal did exactly what the Americans wanted: to de-proliferate the area. And at the same time, the Iranians got what they wanted, state legitimacy and move in certain ways, etc. Basically, rational conversation led to a rational place. And that deal, of course, once it was dismantled. Guess what happened? Iran would be crazy not to be working on a nuclear bomb right now. They’re almost certainly doing it. They almost certainly are headed in that direction because they know that that’s more or less the only thing that kept North Korea safe. And, of course, people look at Iraq. Now, you take those two historic examples and then move on to the third one, right, and to Palestine. So Hamas, when, Hamas, of course, is not the military wing that’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.
But I want to just say Hamas to encompass both the military and political wing. When Hamas was making decisions, and that’s really through the prime minister, who has significant legitimacy in Gaza, they were making decisions based on their understanding of Israel and Israel’s reactions to their actions. And so they thought if we have prisoners, we can liberate our prisoners. Now, you can say, why didn’t they try to do this nonviolently? Okay. Good question. What if I were to tell you, Bob, you’re going to have to play dumb for a moment here so that I can expound this? What if I were to tell you that all the Palestinians showed up, hands up and did sit ins every Friday for two years? Is that nonviolent enough for you? But what was the Israeli reaction? The Israeli reaction when that happened…
Scheer Wait a minute, this is a true story?
Loubani Great March of Return, baby.
Scheer So when, what? Tell us.
Loubani Started on March 31st, 2018 went all the way until 2020. Palestinians had massive sit ins every Friday. And it’s not the Palestinians don’t have guns. Palestinians have lots of guns. But they made decisions to not bring the guns.
Scheer This is in Gaza?
Loubani Yeah, it was in Gaza and they marched into nowhere.
Scheer This is common knowledge to people that are listening to this or reading it, you know. But I did not know this. Maybe I haven’t been attentive enough.
Loubani Okay. Let me tell you, in that case, about the Great March of Return. It was initiated by poets. Poets who wrote beautiful poetry about freedom, artists who drew beautiful pictures about freedom. And actors, theater sort of people who put on like massive carnivals in the border areas. There is a wall, it’s called the iron wall, and however, it’s not just the wall. You’re actually not allowed within 200m of that wall. And so they went to sit in the no go zones. They went and arranged festivals. There was popcorn, there was cotton candy in the areas that were a little bit further away. But in the areas right up to the wall, that’s where people went. That’s where people were. That’s where, you know, they all, to a man, to a woman, to a child had no weapons. And the Israelis responded on the very first day with, I think ten kills, a thousand injuries, I forget the exact number of deaths, but it was somewhere in that order. And over the span of two years, there were 20,000 people who were injured, 6,000 live fire gunshot wounds. And there were about, I forget the exact number, but I believe it was around 200 people killed while nonviolently marching every week. And so when we talk about the pretext for October 7th, we talk about a deep, abiding commitment to nonviolence through the Great March of Return. And what did the Palestinians get?
A little bit better access to the Rafah crossing, okay. No money. Doctors, for example, have not received a salary in Gaza since 2013 when the coup happened in Egypt. No money, no real food, no opportunity to go anywhere. And, of course, you’re subject at any moment to an Israeli bombardment, if they so please. And, oh, by the way, the war in 2021. So I think and I don’t know if you know this Bob, but I was shot in 2018 through both legs by an Israeli sniper. And that happened while I was in full medical garb at one of these protests with nobody armed. One of my colleagues was killed. Shortly after I was shot and unfortunately, I couldn’t be there to help in his rescue. Who knows, but I may have been able to prevent his death based on my medical knowledge. But he was shot and killed. 19 of us in the medical corps that day were shot, 19 of us. And so, you know, the Palestinians gave an honest, fair shot to peaceful, nonviolent, direct action type resistance. And that’s situated Hamas in a place where they were making what seems to me a pretty rational thought. Okay, let’s go. Let’s hit hard military targets. Let’s bring back prisoners and then let’s do X, Y or Z. Now were any…
Scheer Okay, let me stop you right now, because for what you’re saying, I don’t even know if I can get this on radio, there is such a limit on what we’re allowed to consider, now on this subject. The idea that one could offer any rational explanation. Think about North Korea that you can probably do, probably can do it even about Iran. But the way the narrative is so tightly controlled. The very act of our having a discussion. I hope I’m wrong about what could possibly have justified, compelled, whatever the right word is, explain would be considered as impermissible thought, I suspect, in most respectable venues of media, academia and so forth. Now, I’m not going to stop you, but I just want to say the climate is such that you can’t actually have an intelligent discussion about where people are coming from. And the irony in terms of what you’re asking for, Henry Kissinger just died and a lot of people I know say good riddance and he was a great mass murderer and so forth. But the fact is, at least the realistic school of American foreign policy actually said, no, we can talk to red China even under Mao, or we can talk to other people. We can negotiate, which is what you are talking about. You’re saying we actually could have dealt with Hamas the way we dealt with Mao, right?
Loubani I mean…
Scheer And you and I are both risking our professional careers in both Canada and the United States by actually daring to have this discussion.
Loubani It’s interesting. I suspect you’re right, however, having said that, like, how can we disable Hamas if we don’t understand what they’re doing and why? Like for me, as well personally, the Palestine that I envision, the free Palestine, doesn’t necessarily contain Hamas in a leadership role, right? Like Hamas is a resistance movement. Hamas probably doesn’t even think of Hamas in a post liberation role. So I think what some people think is that by introducing rational capacity to people, that you are justifying their crimes, right? So there were like violations of human rights law, there were war crimes on October 7th. Those things need accountability. But why am I not allowed to simultaneously hold the view that war crimes on the Palestinian side demand accountability and war crimes on the Israeli side demand accountability? To pull it back to another example where we’re all a little bit more emotionally disconnected. Were the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the German army, were they irrational actors? No, not at all. In fact, there are super systematic. You know, were the Allies irrational actors? No, not at all. And had they had the Allies assumed that everybody in Germany is crazy and nobody’s behaving rationally and you can’t do anything, then it would have probably been a very different war. They would have approached it differently, they would have discussed it differently, and they may not have been as successful. If you want, from my perspective…
Scheer Oh, let me stop you there. Since I brought up my German relatives before. The fact of the matter is, Nuremberg aside where at least we wrestled with the banality of evil and their systematic accounting, even counting the fillings of people’s teeth that they killed. The Germans were exhibit A of scientific precision and rationality, and we recruited them for our side of the Cold War. Remember, Germany was divided and the Russians did the same thing. Suddenly these people who had engaged in an absolutely monstrous, unprecedented horror, a genocide. Suddenly, hey, wait a minute, they’re, now we got rid of that guy, Hitler, basically they’re all rational. Their institutions, their academy, their universities, their businesses, BMW and Mercedes. Everybody, come on, the game is over. The deadliest game in human history, suddenly it’s over. That’s what shocked me about going to Germany even 60 years later or something. And the same people, some of them came over and worked on our missile program and so forth. So we’re circling back to, and I want to hear your other two examples, but we’re really basically going back to the dehumanization of the enemy, the thing that Orwell talked about. And once you can dehumanize, once you can control the narrative, Gabor Maté made that a big point, the key to totalitarianism is controlling the narrative, then you can do anything. And what you’re challenging here and then and lots of luck we’ll have getting this word out is, wait a minute, there’s a different narrative and you’re insisting on it.
Loubani Look, I’m helping in that sense, you can say. Like, I’m happy to help the people who want to destroy Hamas. You want to destroy Hamas, fine. Give Palestinians their rights, give them their dignity, give them what they’re asking for in terms of their independence. That totally defangs and destroys Hamas. You want to strengthen Hamas, then create a lot of people with deep suffering and hurt. Hamas’s popularity on October 6th was probably close to the lowest. They ebb and flow like every governing body. But functionally, they weren’t getting results for people. You know, people were suffering and people blamed the sitting government when they’re suffering. And it’s not necessarily that people saw an alternative. It’s not that people were like, Oh, Hamas sucks, let’s go with the PA, who we know is ultra corrupt. But Hamas wasn’t popular. Right now, Qassem, specifically, is probably the only thing standing between the Palestinians and their complete annihilation. And as such, it’s just very, very hard to see how Palestinians on the ground aren’t turning to Hamas and Qassem. And after this is over, whether we like it or not, they’re going to look at Hamas, they’re going to look at them and say, you saved us, you’re the ones who prevented them from killing us and that’s a very normal nationalist response to war.
People always side with the people who bring the resistance. Think of Charles de Gaulle and his popularity. Think of Nelson Mandela and his popularity. You know, all of these people who led resistances end up being very popular because you did something while everybody else sat there. And right now, right now specifically, every orphan, every person who’s been injured, every person who has family who has died is a potential recruit in that sense. And I don’t mean a recruit to like savage terrorism of the variety that the Israelis talk about. There was a fake story and a bunch of lies about Palestinians literally hanging babies on clothes drying lines. I mean, obviously, that’s that’s a lie. I’m not talking about that. But they’re going to be interested in resistance and they’re not going to be easily assuaged. They’ve lost family. They’ve lost homes. They’ve lost a lifetime, you know, and that can, if Israel is stupid and there’s every reason to believe that it is and if the international community supports them and there’s every reason to believe that they will, that can result in an even more potent resistance that does something that’s even more extravagant than what we saw on October 7th.
Scheer All right. We’re going to run out of time so take us through your other two examples, a doctor trying to treat patients and we went through Iraq, but I assume the other two are in Gaza. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the hospitals that have been destroyed and that they were nothing but command centers of Hamas and what is the reality?
Loubani Okay. So the third arrest is Egypt. It’s been well-trodden by most people. And so I, I won’t talk about it too much since we’re a bit short on time.
Scheer Well you should actually, because until I read this ten year old Guardian article here, I’ll hold it up there for people watching video. “Egypt releases two Canadians held without charge,” and you were with the very famous film director, John Greyson, and you were there to record. And there again is another example, the Egyptian voters had gone for somebody who identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and so forth. Again, I’ve been following that ever since the Six-Day War, different currents in Israel and different layers of corruption and the appeal of a group like the Muslim Brotherhood, because at least to claim some, you know, ethics that were consistent with serving the people, if only in food and well, not only food and medical, but Morsi, I believe. Where did he go to college? Wasn’t it in the United States or something? He had that background. [Editor’s Note: Mohamed Morsi received a PhD in materials science from the University of Southern California.]
Loubani I’m not sure. Yeah, I’m not sure.
Scheer Okay. But anyway, you were arrested. Is that the arrest you were going to tell us about?
Loubani Yeah. So basically there was a protest of pro-democracy people, most of them weren’t Brotherhood.
Scheer This is in Egypt, just to remind, people. Yeah.
Loubani It was in a place called Ramsis Square. And the police immediately opened fire. And so I was there, I have no interest in Egyptian politics, I never really had. But I figured because it was two days after another massacre that maybe there would be some shooting or something. What I didn’t figure is that they would shoot very nearly a thousand people, 135 of whom were killed. And so after the first couple of people were shot, we retreated. The medical people like me, who are medical, retreated into this mosque that was at the square and set up a makeshift hospital where we literally treated hundreds of people over almost eight hours. And finally the police set the mosque on fire and me and John were able to escape. But during our escape, while trying to get back home, not knowing the city at all, we were caught by police. That was a long one. It involved a lot of terrible sort of torture, including the event I told you about earlier, where he asked me if I was a Canadian or Palestinian. And it was awful. We were on our way to Gaza, the cover story, of course, was that John was making a film about about my medical work. But like, if you know me at all, you know that I would never really do that. I’m not interested in films about me. The real story is that we were there to explore and flesh out the gay rights movement in Gaza and start working with it.
Scheer Let me understand that, you were going to make a movie about gay rights?
Loubani No, the movie had nothing to do with it. John is gay and I care about rights. So, you know, it was a pretty good match and we were very interested in… One of the things like, for me, you know, I’m not I’m not just interested in people being healthy in a physical sense. Obviously, that’s why you become a doctor. But I’m also interested in society being healthy. And part of that is all of the different pieces of human rights, you know, the right of somebody to be alive, the right of somebody to eat, to drink, the right of somebody to move freely, but also the rights of people to have whatever sexuality they have. I was going to say they choose, but I’m not sure that any gay people would say they’re choosing to be gay. So whatever sexuality they have and I had sort of started to feel at that point that we were getting close to a post liberation moment. And I started to panic because, oh my God, like if liberation comes tomorrow, we’re not ready for it. As a society, as a Palestinian society, what are we going to do about civil rights? What are we going to do about all these things? We’re in this war footing, in this war posture. And really, when you look at South Africa, South Africa didn’t lose the anti-apartheid struggle.
They lost the post-apartheid peace. And I felt like Palestine would be the same. I didn’t feel like anybody was focusing on building institutions, on building rights. A lot of my medical work very similarly has to do with fighting patents, essentially attacking capitalism, because as soon as occupation ends, these post-capitalist motherf****s are going to show up or rather post occupation motherf*****s are going to show up. You know, they’re going to show up. They’re going to appear. They’re going to start trying to sell things. They’re going to start trying to take away rights. In South Africa, the Constitution post-apartheid, was the most progressive ever. It guaranteed the right to water and electricity, for example. And then the country privatized those things. And in Palestine, having being free doesn’t mean being free of Jews. That has nothing to do with it or being free of Israelis. That has nothing to do with it. It means being free to actually live your life, to actually do what you want to do. And so you don’t want, I didn’t want to replace one occupation, literal military occupation with another, an economic occupation, which is what we’ll see in so many countries.
Scheer Or a religious occupation that would take away peoples rights, right?
Loubani Yeah. But that that one is going to be… It’s not in the nature of Palestinians to be religious extremists. So Palestinians, you know, like even Hamas is on the moderate end.
Scheer Okay, sorry to interrupt because this is such a great, if only for me, it’s a great tutorial because I have the conceit that I know something about the area. Now, I clearly don’t have the language skill. I clearly don’t have the history. I clearly don’t have the knowledge. And this is the trap of journalism. You know, I saw things, I see things. But I have to question. And I did have this sense. But I couldn’t document it, this is not my area of expertise. I didn’t have the sense when I was in Gaza, it was always when the West Bank and then when I was in Egypt, I couldn’t quite figure out how people related to the religion. I had a stereotype in my own mind. But then again, people have this stereotype of say, the Jewish religion. And yet most Jews I knew in New York didn’t fit that stereotype, you know, even the ones who were observant. And then and I really had the sense that this religion, which Israel kept saying was the key thing, they won’t accept us because we’re Jewish and we have to have a say in all that. I didn’t find it prominent. And this hearing, you know. It is giving me an insight. So could you just. Let’s just take a minute or two to explore that. When you say the Palestinian culture is somewhat different.
Loubani Yeah. Palestinians have always lived in very mixed sort of relationships and mixed societies where there’s always been Christians, there’s always been Muslims, there’s always been Jews. There’s always been, not necessarily that I want to create a new category, but like Armenians. And so it’s a huge melting pot. Especially cities like Jerusalem or cities like what is now Tel Aviv, Jaffa, for example. These are places where there were lots of activity. Jaffa is still, what, like 20, 30% Christian right now? Bethlehem obviously has a preponderance of Christians to Jerusalem full of Christians. When you have these mixed societies, it’s very similar to kind of what we heard about the sort of Spanish golden age. It really forces you down because you can no longer easily abstract. You can no longer easily sort of turn Jews into some caricature or turn Christians into some caricature. When I see people in Canada who characterize Muslims, it’s largely because they don’t know Muslims. And so that creates a kind of Christian extremism here. And I see that extremism correlated to the increase in homogeneity and the lack of diversity. And so it’s the same, very similar in Palestine. You have lots of ideas flowing and you have lots of people flowing around. Hundreds of years of people coming and going all the way through, changing religions, marrying each other, you know, like having babies with each other even when they’re not married. These things naturally moderate you and the society is naturally moderate. You go there, you see some people, in [inaudible], one of which is like the more extreme form of of Islamic cover.
The majority are wearing hijab, which is not considered at all extreme. In the cities like Ramallah or Bethlehem. People aren’t even wearing hijab, they wear whatever they want to wear. So Hamas then comes into that particular environment. This is both the pool and draws out of and the sea it has to live in. And so for it to become more extreme is counterproductive to its own goals and also is not intuitive to its own base. It’s a grassroots movement, so it has to pull its water, its sustenance out of the the population. This by no means, like I think people hear that. They say, oh, Hamas’s is not extreme, etc., this by no means says that they’re not capable of things, horrendous things, war crimes or whatever. Obviously firing missiles on civilian communities is, to put it mildly, wrong. So it doesn’t remove their capability. But what it does is it sort of helps contextualize who it is who were dealing with. What is Hamas. Because if you think Hamas is ISIS, you’re going to deal with them very differently from if you think Hamas is Hamas and that they’re different from that. There is, by the way, ISIS in Gaza. And actually something that very few people know because it wasn’t widely reported. ISIS has bombed markets in Gaza. They’ve actually done things like that. They’ve kidnaped journalists in Gaza. You know, ISIS has operated there. And ISIS can operate because of a deep, deep desperation, because of a deep dysfunction of the society.
And largely when when Hamas came in by organizing that society, they removed some of the theaters into some of these more extreme groups. I think if we’re really interested in defanging Hamas, if we’re really interested in getting rid of Hamas, though, it comes back down to those original points that that I gave you. You know, Hamas is a resistance movement. That’s why they’re there. That’s their reason. That and that will be the end of them when there’s when there is no resistance, they might win an election here and there, the same way the ANC has. But they’ll be fundamentally forced to change. Nobody’s going to accept lots of the behaviors that are currently going on, executing collaborators in the streets or, you know, things like that when there’s an overall prevailing peace or when people are comfortable. And part of that, as I think we see, is that, through the 80s, these groups didn’t have as much. We had started talking a little bit about the open Bridges policy and the open Bridges policy didn’t give Palestinians freedom. It didn’t answer their national aspirations, but it put food in their in their homes. It put money in their pockets.
Scheer This is going back to Dayan.
Loubani To Moshe Dayan in the 80s. Yeah. And so because of that, you know, it went down and it was really only during the intifada when the Israelis started to ratchet up the suffering that Palestinians started to turn back. And then, of course, that sort of violent, I mean, I don’t know if you want to call the first intifada truly violent, but that strain that led to the intifada dissipated and disappeared because of the Oslo Accords. Right. A negotiated peace. And what brought us to the second intifada? It was constant ratcheting up, again, of Palestinian suffering was constant denial of the tenants of the deal and removal of their land. Palestinians could easily see the settlements that were building over them. I was there as soon as I got my Canadian citizenship, it was the first time I could go to Palestine. My family went immediately. And when we went there, even as a 14 year old, I could see what was happening. I could tell there was a problem. And when I was 14, I didn’t know anything about anything. We used to have to go and steal water for the home of our family in the refugee camp, and I would go with them to be an extra set of hands and we would steal it out of pipes that were leaking from Israeli settlements. And I remember thinking, well, I can see my I can see their pools from here. I can see their pools. Why are we putting water like dirty water almost into buckets to carry home? So it’s the same now. You know, the tension is ratcheted up, the suffering is ratcheted up. And so the Palestinian response is also ratcheted up. We want to take that away. Well, take the suffering away, just like everywhere else.
Scheer Well, you know, I know we didn’t get through the other two arrests.
Loubani I can tell you the the fourth one very quickly, it’s easy and it’s ridiculous.
Scheer You know, go ahead and then we’ll try to wrap this up. At least keep it to 90 minutes.
Loubani I was arrested two weeks ago in Canada. And the allegation, not yet proven in court, I want to say, is that I sprayed ketchup on a member of Parliament’s office during a protest because he refuses to call for a ceasefire. This member of Parliament like went on interviews, has been deeply wounded and apparently cried during an interview because he felt so unsafe and threatened by this ketchup. And this actually to me and I spent time in jail for this. I spent time in jail because when the police came to arrest me, they came with three squad cars. They didn’t find me because joke’s on them, I was somewhere else getting arrested. But beside the point, you know, they. They didn’t find me. And so I went to the office, they ended up arresting me there. And they told me that I could have my freedom if I promised neither to protest him nor to say anything about him publicly. And when I said no, they said, well, then you’re going to be in jail for a long time. And as it so happened, the judge the next day didn’t agree with them in bail court and I was let go. But, that’s kind of where we’re at, where people are demanding human rights and asking for ceasefires and asking for killing to stop. Are considered to be making the people who advocate war and want genocide to feel unsafe.
Scheer Okay. I want to thank you for taking this time. I hope we can get this on the air, that we can get people to listen to it. And would like to check in with you again. You don’t have any plan to go to Gaza anytime soon. They won’t let you anywhere.
Loubani The moment, I can go in, I will.
Scheer Okay.
Loubani Yeah. And I want to go in, but I’ll need a pass to get in. The Egyptians aren’t keen. I tried to go through Egypt, and that didn’t work. And the Israelis are definitely…
Scheer Just don’t bring your ketchup spray with you or they’ll have a legitimate reason to stop you. Okay. I want to thank the folks at KCRW for hosting these shows, Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho. And I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, Max Jones, who takes care of the video. And I particularly want to challenge the J.K.W Foundation. I do that every week, but I feel particularly strong because Jean Stein, it’s a foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a great writer who wrote Edie and other books, but she also was an ally of Edward Said, and came from a very prominent film industry, Jewish family, and not nonetheless, in the tradition of Jews committed to human rights. Jean Stein was really a very important advocate for raising these issues of Palestinian human rights along with everyone else. So I want to end on that note. I want to thank you for doing this, and let’s hope that things might take a turn that saves human lives. On that note, thank you.
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