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Professor Ramzy Baroud discusses a people’s history of Palestine in his new book, that chronicles the powerful resistance to Zionism and its manifestations in the current national liberation movement.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian historian and author, in his new book, “Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine,” traces the long arc of Palestinian resistance to the Zionist settler-colonial state leading to its current form in Hamas. It is resistance, defined by Palestinians themselves, as Dr. Baroud explains, that is the “sole leverage” of the Palestinian people in their struggle for existence, which began before the Nakba of 1948.
In this episode, Chris Hedges speaks with Professor Baroud about his deep personal connection to this struggle. Dr. Baroud’s family lived in the village of Beit Daras before being forcibly displaced to Gaza during the Nakba. In the current war, more than a hundred of his family members have been murdered by the Israeli Occupying Forces, including his sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, who was a physician and community leader. His losses go beyond that. Professor Baroud explains that due to the decades of confinement in Gaza, “everyone who dies in Gaza is somehow family, friend, neighbor, relative, connection of some kind.”
Dr. Baroud describes the “slow-motion genocide” of Palestinians through the blockade of Gaza and regular attacks, cruelly referred to by Zionists as ‘mowing the lawn’, which led to the Palestinian uprising on October 7, 2023. The world watched as the Israeli state waged a full-blown genocide that destroyed 92% of Gaza. Now, Palestinians are being squeezed into an even smaller area without the infrastructure they relied on previously. He describes the situation as more dire than before as “[Gazans] are being asked to engineer a miracle of survival while the world is looking on somewhere else.”
Hedges and Baroud discuss what the future holds for Palestine. Baroud is hopeful that Palestine will prevail given the steadfastness and ingenuity of Palestinians in their fight for survival. In his book, a type of people’s history that challenges the mainstream Zionist narrative, Baroud explains that even though there are divisions in Palestinian society – as there are in all societies and national liberation movements – there is an underlying unity he refers to as the “secret code of Gaza.” Palestinians also have a long history of “scholar-warriors” who have led successive liberation movements and have fostered connections with other liberation movements around the world. The Zionist state can only exist through military force, and Palestinians have demonstrated their powerful abilities to resist. Dr. Baroud admits proudly, “I don’t want to say [we are] super humans in Gaza, but our story speaks for itself.”
Chris Hedges
Executive Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Margaret Flowers
Transcript:
Margaret Flowers
Crew:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Ramzy Baroud in his haunting memoir, “Before the Flood”, the chronicle of three generations of his family in Palestine, personalizes the struggle by Palestinians to endure British and then Israeli occupation. He details the intimacy of village life for the Al Badrasawis family in Beit Daras and later after the Nakba in 1948, the refugee camps in Gaza. His portrait weaves together ancestral history with the colonial forces that for a century have immiserated and oppressed the Palestinian people. Set against the unrelenting violence of settler colonialism, apartheid, and finally genocide, is the steadfast resistance of Palestinians who cling with ferocity to their land, their culture, and their faith.
Ramzy is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, which he has led since 1999. He holds a PhD in Palestine studies from the University of Exeter and is the author of eight books, including “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada”, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, “The Last Earth”, and “These Chains Will Be Broken”. He is also the co-editor with Ilan Pappé of “Our Vision for Liberation” and the forthcoming volume “Gaza Rising”, which examines Palestinian resistance and political transformation in Gaza, where he is from.
Ramzy, I want to begin with the dedication of your book: “To my sister, Dr. Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud. I write your name in full because that is how it appeared on the white bag that held your remains soon after the bomb was dropped.” I want to begin with that because this is a wound, at this point, I think almost no one in Gaza has escaped.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. I know that you ask difficult questions, but I didn’t realize that you were going to start with the most difficult question. You know, when the people who perish in the genocide, even if you don’t know them, even if they’re not close to you, as a Gazan, we are one large family. And I don’t mean that in a sentimental way, because we are essentially the descendants of the 200,000 Palestinian refugees that made their way to Gaza after the Nakba, and they multiplied within an area that actually shrunk. So, physically Gaza is a lot smaller than it was in 1948, but the population of Gaza has increased by over 10, 11 fold. And yet somehow, we created this space in which we are one family. I doubt that there is a single person anywhere in Gaza in which another family on the other side of Gaza cannot find some sort of a familial connection through mother, through father, through anything. It’s just you can’t create that separation after this much time. So, everyone who dies in Gaza is somehow family, friend, neighbor, relative, connection of some kind. But when the genocide grew in its intensity, it got closer and closer.
So, within the very first few days, you had three Baroud families that were killed in Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the center, in Khan Younis in the south, and in Jabalia in the north. And then, for whatever reason, we started counting. I don’t know why I was counting the dead. So, the number went 33, 55. We reached 110. And then I stopped counting because I didn’t know why I was counting my family that were killed, and then immediate cousins with their wives or husbands and children, aunts and uncles. But for some reason, you just never think that it’s going to hit that hard, so close to the point that it’s your own sister.
And there’s something about my sister that I think it’s important to denote here. She wasn’t just a doctor. And every doctor is very special in Gaza, especially in Gaza. But she was an intellectual. She was a community leader. She empowered so many women in the southern Gaza that they created this powerful clique basically of medical workers. She fought for their rights. She established unions. She seemed in a sense kind of like larger than life. And no matter what happened, somehow you feel like she is safe and you don’t know why. Maybe because she survived many massacres before. Maybe because she was the one who was responsible for dealing with the wounded of the various and previous wars. She told me, at one point she said, “You know, you bring so many children to this life as a doctor and to be the one who pronounced them dead within your own lifetime, it is something so difficult to bear, but that’s the life we live in.”
And just to wake up one morning and to see your sister on the news, there was complete shock and disbelief, but she’s the only Soma. Soma is not a common name in Gaza. She was one of the very few Somas. And how many Doctor Somas? So, I saw it on the Wafa News Agency. I saw the body in a white bag with the full name on it with “D-R” there. And I was like, no, I reported on it as if it’s not my sister. I knew she was my sister, but I wanted to hide it until my daughter came and told me, of course, devastated and crying,” I think Auntie Soma died.” And that’s when I realized, yeah, indeed, Auntie Soma has died and that was supposed to be the end of it, and it shouldn’t.
Chris Hedges: And Israel has targeted, not just journalists and of course many academics, but in particular, doctors and health workers.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: It has and there’s a reason for that. Israel wanted to ethnic cleanse the Palestinians from the very, very beginning. This is not something that Smotrich was talking about separately as if he is operating outside the system or Ben Gvir. This was the Israeli plan. This wasn’t just about killing. Yes, it was. It wasn’t just about revenge, and it was. It was about something much bigger. They thought the Nakba will end here. That chapter, they started in 1948, was supposed to be over now. Push the Palestinians out of Gaza and, by extension, the West Bank that really, for various reasons that we can discuss now or later, did not put up so much resistance would have been an easy target. You push the Palestinians out of the West Bank, you have ethnic cleansing there, annexation, Area C is gone and so forth and so on.
So how do you do that? You target the places that bring people together. You go after universities, schools, shelters and hospitals. This civilian infrastructure, which is, of course, the most obvious war crime ever, it wasn’t just because Israel was committing war crimes. Israel had a strategy – destroy the hospitals, kill the doctors. People have no reason to be in those places. This is why they carried out that first massacre in the Baptist hospital, Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, followed by Shifa, Nasser and all the rest.
When people went from the north to the south, the Khan Yunis hospitals became a place that brought people together and Israel wanted to take over Khan Yunis. So, they systematically started assassinating the doctors of the Khan Yunis, of the Nasser hospital, not only within the vicinity of the hospital, but in their own homes, in the streets and so forth. My sister was targeted by a drone that kept chasing after the taxi that was carrying her with a few other civilians, and they kept going after them until they blew up the car and that was it. So, yes, it was about killing doctors and medical workers. Thousands of doctors, medical workers, civil defense, firefighters and so forth were killed to ensure that people leave the areas that brought them together and go somewhere else further south.
Chris Hedges: Before we speak about your book, let’s just speak a little bit about what is happening now in Gaza. Israel has seized what, almost 60 % of the Gaza Strip? And, we should be clear, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. It is blocking humanitarian aid in violation of the ceasefire, and in particular, materials that would allow Palestinians to construct any kind of dwellings or permanent shelters. It has, of course, destroyed medical facilities. People are drinking water that is unclean, not treated, living next to fetid pools of raw sewage. It’s a slow-motion genocide, which sadly the world has kind of shifted its focus from the horror of the full-blown genocide and is allowing Israel to essentially continue the process that it began on October 7th.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. And the irony in all of this is that this is what really led to October 7th in the first place. There was a slow-motion genocide in Gaza to begin with. 90 to 97 % of Gaza’s water was undrinkable, according to the United Nations. People were dying from easily curable diseases in Gaza. Cancer patients had no access to medicine. People who needed dialysis machines were dying. Once you are at a stage that kidney patients need dialysis machines, you know that your chance of death is a lot higher than your chance of living.
So, Gaza was suffering to begin with. And the Israelis were very clear about this in terms of food, in terms of medicine. The argument that was made, we all remember that infamous Weissglas, the former advisor of Ariel Sharon, when he argued that “We don’t want to kill Palestinians, we just want to put them on a diet.” You know, that’s just a code word for, “We want them at the brink of starvation.” And Israel, in terms of military action, every few years they would go to Gaza to so-called ‘mow the lawn’, meaning to kill a few thousand, wound a few tens of thousands, and just remind Gazans who is the boss and kind of continue this perpetual sense of besiegement, as a result of which the vast majority of the people of Gaza, mostly youth, never stepped a foot outside that tiny little space of about 140 plus square miles.
So, the situation was already dire before the genocide. We can only use our imagination to think about what it was during the genocide, when 92 % of everything that was standing in Gaza was destroyed, with the entire infrastructure of Gaza decimated, and now, with no infrastructure for people to even pretend or try to survive. That is gone. So, now we are back to the slow-motion genocide you speak of, Chris, but the issue is this is different than the one that existed prior to the genocide because at least prior to the genocide, they had somewhat functioning hospitals, somewhat functioning clinics, somewhat functioning schools. There was somewhat of civilian lives that operated somehow because they are amazing people. They are my people. I am from Gaza. We are very, very resourceful in managing under the most dire of circumstances.
But now, they are being asked to engineer a miracle of survival while the world is looking on somewhere else, which is creating the exact same cycle that is going to lead to the same anger, the same rage that led to October 7th in the first place. So, everyone is going to pay the price for this, but sadly, if that is to happen again, everyone is going to point the finger at Gaza and say, “It’s Gaza’s problem or Gaza’s fault. They initiated all of this,” as if there’s absolutely no historical context to any of this.
Chris Hedges: From the beginning of the genocide, Israel, through leaks in the Israeli press, but often public statements, was very clear that the Palestinians in Gaza were to be driven from Gaza. That must remain the goal. Do you see Israel achieving that goal? I mean, that’s certainly what they want.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: I don’t think they will achieve that goal because there’s something that I call the ‘secret code of Gaza’. There is a social code we have in Gaza that you can’t understand via academic research or theory or rational, logical thinking. You have to be embedded in that population, and you have to experience living in Gaza and be one of them in order for you to understand what that code is. I come from a village called Beit Daras, as you saw in the book. And the people of that village are usually associated with having large heads. We say that we have large heads, that we physically have large heads. It turned out that was just a way to say the people of that village are particularly stubborn and we are very stubborn people. But we are also located in a place in which Palestinian refugees from Gaza all are villagers. They are peasants, we call them. We come from the countryside in southern Palestine. We are people that value community, value honor, value bravery, value resilience, value karama, dignity, hurriya, freedom. These are the codes and the little concepts according to which we operate. They are not something you can translate to news soundbites to explain why we do what we do.
And there is a decision that has been made in Gaza, a collective decision, that is uncommunicated, but it’s there that we would rather die to the last of us than leave Gaza. In fact, we have that saying in Arabic, we say, “Hataa akhar qatrat dam,” until the last drop of blood. So, we will fight until the last drop of blood. And now here’s the thing, that is supposed to be a metaphor, but it’s not. For us in Gaza, it’s an actual thing.
We stand our ground and we die in large numbers, but we’ll never abandon our homeland. If Israel could not achieve that over the course of two years of genocide, plus, and ongoing, and ongoing, and they still haven’t. When people applied to leave Gaza for medical purposes, the vast majority of them are just wounded people who needed to go and get urgent medical attention. You did not see a million Palestinian applying to go and leave Gaza. They will not leave. In fact, a lot of them came back to Gaza during that brief transition where some people were allowed to cross the Rafah border. So, as long as the Palestinian people have made that decision to withstand, under any circumstance and they prove that tangibly and practically, I don’t think Israel will possibly succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about your book. I think you do a couple of things in the book that I think are really important. It’s beautifully written, by the way, too. And that is that so often those of us on the outside of Gaza hear the stories of the elites, those people who were educated in the West. We don’t hear the stories of most Palestinians, which come from the kind of villages that your family comes from, that’s number one. And number two, I think what you do really well in the book is talk about the continuum of resistance beginning with, of course, the Zionist militias, and the British, that attack the town in Palestine where you come from and integrating that all the way to the present, including the resistance of Hamas.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. So, I do people’s history. I do micro history. It’s a way of challenging not just the Zionist narrative and the mainstream narrative, which is kind of the traditional academic narrative much closer to the Zionist narrative than it is to the Palestinian narrative. But I dare say that I’m also challenging some in the Palestinian narrative itself that’s the common one, that we are familiar with. And I’m not challenging them because I think that they have made a mistake in their historical narration of Palestine, but because we were pushed into this position, because we were so dehumanized, so neglected, so marginalized in the story, that intuitively we started trying to prove that as a people we existed prior to Zionism, that we are not anti-Semitic. Not only that, we are so humanized. We had a culture before Israel. We had theaters and we had opera houses in Haifa and Yaffa. And we had a thriving civil society. This defensiveness in which the Palestinian has traditionally told his story in Western academia. But the fact is, vast majority of us are actually peasants. We’re falaahun. And we are very proud and we are rooted in our society. And many of us did not, that generation, has never been to an opera house or never been to a cinema and did not necessarily go to libraries. And many of them were illiterate. You see, like my family in Beit Daras was perceived to be middle-class because we had a donkey. Most people didn’t have donkeys.
So, during the Nakba, the privileged ones, of course the rich were the first to leave using trucks because they could afford trucks, but the majority left on foot. And some left on donkeys and we were one of the privileged ones where my uncles and aunties were kind of taking turns on the donkey, kind of circulating around the countryside in Palestine for days until we ended up in Gaza. So, the reason I am saying this is sometimes I feel that when we tell the story, we try to accommodate the so-called target audience so much to the point that we invest so much in humanizing. I don’t think we need to humanize as Palestinians because we are not only, I don’t want to say super humans in Gaza, but our story speaks for itself.
No, my dad, my grandfather did not have the biggest library in Jerusalem. And we did not have a villa. We lived in a mud brick house and we farmed the lands and we lived as an extension for numerous generations of Palestinians who were very close to the land. That story is not told often. It’s always told in the margins, or as footnotes. But the thing is, we are the vast majority of the Palestinian people. We are the refugees. We are the ones who live in refugee camps. And here’s the trick. We are the ones who have fueled the resistance of Palestine from the very beginning in 1948. We resisted during the war of 1948, but when we were pushed out into Gaza, we immediately formed what we call Fedayeen, the freedom fighting groups. These were peasants, had no ideological background. Their sole focus was to find a way back to their homes in Palestine. Some of them just wanted to go and claim some of the harvest that they collected but they did not bring with them in the rush of war and Zionist massacres. The Fedayeen eventually became ideological groups, became the Palestine Liberation Army, became the Socialists, the PFLP, became the Communists, became Fatah, and eventually became Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and the current ideological resistance formations in Gaza. All of this is very, very important context. So, we don’t think about Hamas in isolation. Hamas is the same people, the same demographic made up of all of these groups since the very start of the modern Palestinian struggle.
Chris Hedges: One of the themes of your book, from the beginning, is the divisions within Palestinian society. Those who, for economic or other reasons, decide to collaborate or tolerate with the occupiers, first the British, but then later the Israelis, right up, of course, to the present day with the Palestine Authority. I covered the first Intifada, and I remember the tension in Gaza between the shopkeeping, the bourgeois class, and the shabab on the streets. And that is also something that has been unchanged in this long resistance struggle, and I wondered if you could address that.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: Absolutely. And I don’t think it will change because I think we made a mistake. Many of us made a mistake, at least in what we consider the unit of analysis to Palestinian unity. And many of us also played in the hands of Netanyahu. Remember, it was Netanyahu and others who were saying, you want us to go back to the peace process, Palestinians are not united. How do we speak to people who speak in so many voices?
Of course, it’s underhanded and devious because, in actuality, no national liberation movement has ever been truly and fully united. At the end of the day, we always had classes, even before the British came to Palestine, we had classes that existed and coexisted during the Ottoman era. Then there was new formulation under the British, then under the Zionists. You will always have that. You are going to always have those, and usually the downtrodden and the poor and the working class are the people who are going to carry arms and fight until the very end. But you always have this group of people who negotiate.
I am in the process of reading this excellent book by Amilcar Cabral, from one of the great African national liberation leaders fighting against the Portuguese back in the day. And he was assassinated himself in 1973, I believe. And he talks about the formation of Guinea during the fight against Portuguese colonialism and it’s just incredible. I mean, if you just remove the word Guinea and replace it with Gaza and remove Portugal and replace it with Israel, you’re going to find the exact same thing. You’re going to have those who are fighting and those who are negotiating, the petit bourgeoisie. That’s going to always be the case and will never change.
And they change heads. One day they are working with the Ottomans, then with the English, then with the Israelis. Now they are the Palestinian Authority for today. They’re trying to benefit. They have VIP cards. It allows them to travel, to do business with Israel. Some of them are actually contractors with Israel to build settlements and the apartheid wall. This doesn’t say that Palestinians are particularly bad or they are doing it different. This just says that the course of history is almost predictable and consistent. What really matters is that you have majority of Palestinians who support resistance, who are proving and demonstrating that support in their everyday life. And when I say resistance, I’m not just talking about Kalashnikovs and firing and firepower. I am talking about the idea of resistance that we cannot submit. We cannot surrender, that we will always find a way to subsist, to exist, but to also to fight back. They are the majority. They are the majority of Gaza and the West Bank, but they are, especially people in the West Bank, they are quote “between the Israeli military settlers on the one hand and the negotiating bourgeoisie of the Palestinian Authority on the other” who do not want to lose their privileges. And this is the reality of Palestine. No, we are not divided people. This is just the nature of national liberation struggles.
Chris Hedges: There are two things. One, of course, under international law, the Palestinians have a right to resist, including the use of force. And secondly, when I was in Gaza and I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, they made it very clear to me that this was not primarily an Islamic resistance group. This was a national liberation movement. And I think you also make that clear in your book.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: It’s the National Liberation Movement. Hamas has always been a national liberation movement. Ideology in national liberation struggles in Palestine, it is something that kind of serves as a platform for articulating and pronouncing a political discourse, having a sense of ideological orientation, but it really doesn’t change the fact that it’s a national liberation movement. And you kind of see this. In fact, if you look at the early, early statements made by Hamas, in fact, their very first statement, where they make a reference to the Arabs to come to the rescue. They shame the Egyptian army for actually protecting Israel in a sort of protecting the Palestinians. And they make references that seemed like, yeah, they were Palestinians, but they were locating themselves within a larger Arab, political context the same way that Fatah has done, the same way that other movements have done in Palestinian history. Then there is the Islamic world, the Islamic Ummah. It’s not marginal, it’s important, but it was not the main center or the core of Palestinian political awareness.
But even that kind of changed in recent years, especially during the genocide. I have read every statement made by Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for Hamas who was killed by Israel in the later phases of the war. And you could see how he was actually relocating Palestine very slowly in his discourse. At times, you feel like the Arab and Muslim factor was becoming marginal and he was speaking to the ahrar alealam, the free people of the world. And just because, according to their political dialectics as we could see during the genocide, solidarity was not really pouring in coming from the Arab and Muslim world. A lot was happening in South Africa, in Namibia, in Spain, in Nicaragua and so forth. So, you start feeling at times that the discourse of Abu Ubaida, his language and his target audience began shifting.
So, you see all of these shifts happening throughout the years from the very beginning until now and yet you realize that there is one common factor that never ever changed. That we are Palestinians and that our political identifiers are the Nakba, the resistance, muqawama, hurriya, freedom, the same political identifiers of all other Palestinian groups. So no, absolutely this is not part of some grand Islamic revival project. This is very much a Palestinian national project.
Chris Hedges: In your book, you write about two powerful political forces, one the Arab nationalist movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood. Can you talk about those forces and their importance for the Palestinians?
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: And I think this is very much linked to this is that somehow we, generation after generation, kind of linked our hopes and connected our own existing sense of agency to other movements, leaders, individuals that were somehow kind of rational in their behavior towards the Palestinian cause. Gamal Abdel Nasser seemed to be the most rational choice for Palestine liberation. He earned a lot of credibility during the 1948 struggle, the Nakba, the war. He was one of the last people to leave Palestine during the war as he was besieged, along with other Egyptian officers, with Palestinians fighting together in the town of Fallujah in southern Palestine. The scene of the siege being broken and Gamal Abdel Nasser and the officers kind of marching through Gaza all the way to Sinai is a scene that is repeated in several of my books because it was very iconic. You had basically all the refugees, hundreds of thousands, going to the streets to greet them and to show them gratitude as they were leaving. And I felt like something was cemented at that particular point in the relationship between Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Palestinian people to the point that I don’t think there was a single Palestinian household that actually did not have a poster of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
And you could have been a secularist, a socialist, an Islamist, it made no difference. Gamal Abdel Nasser was a character that nobody disagreed with. He was there and he was always present in our lives until 1967 happened, what we call the Naksa or the setback. And this was an era in which new voices and new ideas began challenging that narrative that existed between 1948 and until 1967. And in fact, until very recently, you have that older generation of Palestinians that wouldn’t even allow a conversation about the credibility of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Or did he have Palestine’s interest in mind or not. They don’t even want to talk about it. But for the newer generation of historians, they started examining the discourses and the politics and realized that maybe there is another way in which we can frame what happened up to that point.
Then the Muslim Brotherhood was rising. Now the Muslim Brotherhood are connected to Palestine from the very start. I don’t accept the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood, with all of the mistakes that they may have or haven’t committed, I don’t accept that the idea that they are an imposition on the Palestinian discourse. They actually fought in Palestine during the Nakba War. And I speak about this in my book. And they left behind this ideology, this political revolutionary ideology that kept them and the rest of the Palestinian nation kind of somehow connected until Gaza happened.
When the Gazans were allowed to leave to Egypt and get education from Egypt, they had this direct channel to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of the early leaders of Hamas studied in Egypt, particularly Ain Shams University, Zagazig University, Helwan even, and of course University of Cairo. And they met, coordinated, discussed, but they built kind of a common discourse. that made Palestine feel, or Hamas, or the early Islamic movement at the time, Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, we call it, they made it appear as if it’s an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, but with Palestinian priorities. And that evolved. That evolved throughout the years until today, where you feel like, in a way, yes, that connection is still there, but it feels as if it’s an entirely different political movement.
Chris Hedges: Well, Rantisi studied in Egypt, he was at Alexandria University, and I believe was very close to the Muslim Brotherhood before the founding of Hamas. You write about Sheikh Yassin and you write about Yahya Sinwar and you write about your amazing relative. I’ll let you talk about all three. I mean this guy is in his 40s and he’s finally martyred, of course. But just talk about those three figures in terms of resistance.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: So these figures are very important to understand them at a micro level and, by extension, understand the larger Palestinian experience. Sheik Ahmad Yassin is the byproduct of a revolutionary generation that existed, in Gaza in particular, since 1948.
Chris Hedges: Let me just stop you to explain for people who don’t know, he was an Islamic scholar. He was finally at end of his life, wasn’t he a quadriplegic? But a brilliant scholar, just to insert that background.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: He was a brilliant scholar and that’s kind of this common character that I try to trace throughout Palestinian history. In fact, I ended up discussing what they call a longue duree or long history that goes back hundreds of years in Palestinian history. There’s this scholar-warrior sort of thing. Izzeddin al-Qassam was the quintessential scholar-warrior in Palestinian history. And he is the one who kind of launched armed resistance in Palestine, more or less, leading to the 1936 uprising and revolution in Palestine that unified the peasants of Palestine, along with the intelligentsia and the urban communities in one continuous uprising and revolution that lasted between 1936 and 1939.
And then later, I kind of look at Ahmad Yassin as an extension of that. He was the scholar-warrior. But what makes his character particularly interesting is that his disability over time reached a point that he was literally reading using his tongue. And with time, they developed a special device for him in which he would put in his mouth and he would move between the pages. So, he was in a constant state of learning. And one element in the scholarship of Ahmad Yassin that I think was interesting, it was this concept of resurrection, that of the resurrection of Palestinian collective intellect. And I think Muhammad Shehada, who was also from Beit Daras, from my village, was one of the kind of those who were communicating that message to young people, that we don’t need to lead ourselves to outside ideologies anymore, that Palestinian liberation has to happen from Palestine itself. And for that to happen, we need to resurrect ourselves as a nation intellectually before anything else.
And in fact, Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic grouping or movement, they’ve been around for a very long time, but they became particularly active after 1967, throughout the seventies, throughout the eighties, all the way until the launch of Hamas in December, I believe it was December 1987. There was like a 20-year process of studying cleansing, resurrecting, these are the terminologies that they have used. Yehia Asanwar was one of the disciples of Yassin and that generation. And his focus was, in the beginning, on kind of cleansing Palestinian society from the collaborators. Because you can imagine after 1967, Israel now has direct relationship with Gaza. They were not outsiders anymore. You had the Israeli military administration in every part of Gaza. You cannot leave, you cannot come back to Gaza without having to go through an Israeli.
Everything was controlled by the Israeli. They called it the civilian administration. It wasn’t civilian at all, it was military. And you had to speak to the Shin Bet about every little thing. I had to go to Egypt to study at one point. I needed to meet with the Shin Bet, that’s the Israeli internal secret service. And then they start negotiating with you. I had an uncle of mine who was with the PLO many years ago and I needed to explain, where is he? I need information. And I was a child, I was a kid. So many people became collaborators, sometimes out of need. And as a result, they became active participants in the Israeli occupation.
And Yahya Sanwar had this group called Majd, Glory, that was dedicated to catching and eliminating these collaborators. Because again, that was their philosophy. You cleanse your own society before you deal with the enemy. And dealing with the enemy started in 1987. And by the way, Chris, I think this is really important that a lot of kind of new scholarship made this horrific mistake of misinterpreting this relationship between Hamas and the Israeli occupation to the point of saying so conveniently without understanding any of that history or context by saying well, you know at the end of the day Israel established Hamas. And I don’t know if you’ve seen people like that, some are very well-respected scholars making that argument. No, Israel did not establish Hamas. Maybe in the minds of Israel at one point they wanted to give some space for the Islamic movements to prosper, to create some sort of the conflict between them and the other PLO faction, but creating Hamas as if that was a deliberate Israeli intelligence operation is completely erroneous and 1987 proved that to be the case. And if that was not enough, what happened during the genocide, kind of really in my mind should end that conversation altogether.
Chris Hedges: And let’s talk about your relative. What is his name? Ehub? Is that right?
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: Ahab is my relative. No, the thing about Ahab is that – it’s funny because I remember him the last time I saw him before I left Gaza, he was a child. He was like maybe nine or something like that. But somehow he was pushed to be a man at a very young age. Why? Because he was very close to another character, another brother, a friend of mine named Wael. Wael was exactly, almost exactly my age, two days separated from my birthday. During the what we called later on, we called it Black Sunday, it happened during the first Intifada, when an Israeli soldier guns down a number of Palestinian workers in Rishon Le Zion in southern Israel, leading to the eruption of protest all across Palestine. My cousin, Wael, was killed during that day of protest. He was shot in the throat, standing outside his house. That was a defining moment for the entire Badrasawi family. Badrasawi family is just that branch of my family, the Baroud family.
Prior to that, they were all cheap laborers in Israel. They were workers. They were people of great honor. There were the descendants of the same people, refugees, fellaheen, freedom fighters. But they seemed to be focused on just trying to subsist, to survive. Then Wael was gone. He was killed. And then Ahab, this child, watching, and I describe in the book this very specific scene in which he almost went mute, just looking at the body of his brother at the Shifa hospital as he was being prepared for burial. And then Ahab went from this cute little child that we will be teasing and playing with into this kind of like, it’s time for me to stand up to be a man. And then Ahab started going to the mosque where Ahmad Yassin was giving lectures. And then Ahab started reading the Quran and Ahab tried to find his salvation in spirituality. But I still remember him as this child with his jeans, they were so poor, he didn’t have a belt to keep his pants together, so he would use a rope. And I just remember that very final scene and I left and I went back to Gaza in 2012 after another Israeli attempt at ‘mowing the grass’ of Gaza, and I meet Ahab. And Ahab was the head of the Northern Command of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, military arm of Hamas. And I could not understand that transformation. He was still as kind, he was still as sweet, he was still as polite and gentle, but he was in that position.
Now later on, he aged, per their standards, and he went back to school. He did his master’s degree in Islamic Sharia. He wanted to do his PhD. He was teaching. He had a Halaqa, which is the religious group in which he teaches other scholars. And he kind of moved on with his life until the genocide happened. And the early days of the genocide, you remember that, Chris, when they attacked the Shati refugee camp. And everybody understood that if this fight for Shati is an easy fight, it’s over for Gaza because that’s where the real warriors of Gaza, kind of in the Northern area of Gaza, are there. And my understanding, and I actually just very recently spoke with his wife at length about this, she said, “The young people of the resistance were scared because the fight is usually happening at the border.” They’re very close to Israel, but it’s rarely enters into the Shati refugee camps. So, they did not know what to do. So, Ahad had to make the decision of going back to the fighting himself and he needed to do something, something so extreme before he dies that he would change the dynamics of the Shati battle. And he did, and I speak about that at length in the book.
Chris Hedges: Well, explain. He walks out into the open and fires on an Israeli tank.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. That immediately went in the news. Of course, I reported on it in the news as a journalist, not knowing that was actually Ahab who did it. Only later on I discovered that. And after that, he actually blew himself up in kind of ending it all right there, followed by his son, Abdulrahman, followed by his son, Muhammad, and so forth and so on. So, after that, it seems that there was an Israeli decision, knowing that he is the one who has done that, to completely obliterate the family. There are many members of that branch of the family. In fact, most of my family that were killed during the war comes from that particular branch because they were taken out along with their wives, husbands and children and so on.
Chris Hedges: So, what’s the next chapter? Where are we going? Of course, and we’ve not spoken about it, but there’s horrific violence perpetrated by armed groups of settlers. They’ve been given automatic weapons. I think Smotrich gave them 10,000 weapons. They’ve become murderous gangs, inflicting terror. I think they just uprooted 3,000 trees or something. They’ve seized large sections of the West Bank itself. When I was in Ramallah, a summer ago, you just couldn’t even move between villages. In fact, the day that I was there, the Israelis had come in and burned down all the money exchange shops so people couldn’t get foreign currency or money transfers. Where are we headed?
Dr. Ramzy Baroud: I know it might sound a bit odd to be positive during these times considering the kind of losses and grief that we experience and continue to experience. But in my mind, I believe that Israel is acting out of total desperation as opposed to confidence with a strategy. Israel started with a strategy, Plan D, Plan Dalet, this maximalist settler colonial plan that was not only meant to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of historic Palestine, but to the very end of the Palestinian nation and where Israel exists in total permanency. What happened in the last few years disrupted that plan, disrupted it in a way that no Arab army could have possibly have done so.
I’m not promoting armed resistance. I’m a historian. I try to explain why people make the choices they do and what are the historical timelines and context of why they resist. But if you think about it, Chris, I was thinking about the campaign that we have been doing for years to boycott Caterpillar bulldozers, for example, in the US and globally. But to think about how many bulldozers have been blown up by the resistance in Gaza and in South Lebanon. These are kids in Gaza. It’s not military There is nothing military about it. They create their own little devices underground and they have done more damage to Caterpillar than any other movement to hold Caterpillar accountable.
How many Merkava tanks have they destroyed? The Israeli army just made a very upsetting discovery that it can no longer achieve political and strategic ends using military power. They neutralized Israel’s military. This is why they are killing civilians, because we are talking about the civilians because they want us to ignore what has happened to their military. So, the answer is this, the Palestinian people have one leverage and one leverage only. If they let go of that leverage, then there is absolutely no hope for us as Palestinians. And that leverage is resistance. How do you define resistance? The Palestinians themselves define resistance. Not me, not anyone else. They will tell us what resistance is, and they will have to define it in the way that they find suitable. So, any Palestinian faction, group, authority that behaves outside of that scope, they are conceding to Israel.
As far as the Israelis are concerned, they realize that the current war that they are leading, not only against Palestine, but in Lebanon, in Iran, and throughout, could be the most defining war. And I think Netanyahu, for once, is actually telling the truth. This is as important as their so-called war of independence. They lose, and by losing, I mean they are not able to achieve the political outcomes and strategic outcomes, then they have to make a choice, either to leave or to reach political compromises with the Palestinians that satisfy the Palestinian people. If they win, well, I don’t want to think about that possibility and I don’t see it happening because again, if your military power has been neutralized and Israel is a settler colonial society that can only survive through military power and through physical expansion, then I don’t know what other alternative they still have.
Chris Hedges: Thank you, Ramzy. And I want to thank Diego, Max, and Noel who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
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