(upbeat music) - Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor and chief of Current Affairs magazine. I am joined today by Dr. Faros Sidwa. He is a trauma and general surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital. He's also the lead organizer of the Gaza Healthcare Letters, available at gazahealthcareletters.org from healthcare professionals who have worked in Gaza. And he was the author of recent New York Times op ed, 65 doctors, nurses and paramedics, what we saw in Gaza. Dr. Sidwa worked in Gaza himself earlier this year and has written a number of accounts explaining what he saw there. Dr. Sidwa, thank you for joining us on Current Affairs today. - Thanks for having me. - I want to just read a little bit from your latest Gaza letter, which was co-signed by 99 American physicians and nurses. And you say in that, we are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension, crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting. This is addressed to the Biden-Harris administration. Please meet with us to discuss what we saw and why we feel American policy in the Middle East must change immediately. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we've returned. Dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons. They're inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams. Our conscience will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that's deliberately killing these children en masse. You asked the Biden administration in that letter to meet with you. I want to first ask, have you received any response from the Biden-Harris administration? - No, I actually get all sorts of people forwarding me the automated emails that they get when they email the Biden administration, asking them to meet with us. And then they forwarded the automated email to me and they say, oh, I can't believe it's just an automated email. And I say, well, that's more than I've gotten. Actually, they literally, I have not received so much as an acknowledgement of the letter from either Biden or Harris or anybody associated with them. - Let's, I want to break down. This is not the first letter either that you have said to the Biden-Harris administration. You've been working since you came back from Gaza to draw attention to what you call in here, crimes beyond comprehension. Perhaps you could tell us a little more about those crimes beyond comprehension that you and these dozens and dozens of other healthcare workers have witnessed in Gaza. - Sure, me and a good number of other people who signed that letter have worked in other combat zones, in other war zones, in other humanitarian disaster zones. So like myself, I've worked in southern Zimbabwe and Haiti, in Burkina Faso, and in Ukraine three times during the Russian invasion. And Gaza is altogether unique. I've never really seen anything like it. It's in a lot of different ways. One, the first is just the sheer scale of killing. Our relative to the size of the place, it's completely unprecedented. A UN report noted that you'd have to go back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 to find a time when a population was obliterated this fast of a rate, as long as you adjust by trying the population, the size of the population. In other words, what percentage of the population was killed at what rate? And that's only going by the official numbers, incidentally, the numbers from the Ministry of Health, which don't include anything such as starvation and death from infections, death from displacement, things like that. But so specifically what we witnessed were a few things. Number one, me personally, I was at European Hospital. Every day that we were there, we had huge mass casualty events. It's a 220-bit hospital. It's not some massive, but you know, from the place. We would regularly, on a daily basis, get mass casualty events that involved anywhere from a dozen to 60 people. I mean, it was completely insane. Now, you know, as in any mass casualty, about most of them were lightly injured, which was good. But we had huge numbers of children that were badly injured. Lots and lots of people that needed operations. And Gausea European Hospital has four operating rooms. Actually, there was, I still remember there was a moment where we had a man who had been shot in both sides of his chest, he had been, he had had chest tubes put it in another hospital and was transferred to us. When he got to us, his blood pressure was very low, his, and his left chest tube was putting a lot of blood. So I said that he needs to go upstairs to have his chest opened and surgically repaired. And the hospital just said, no, because there's no way to do that, there's no space, there's no time, there's no one to run the, run the anesthetic machine there, you know, so you just can't do it. Thankfully, he didn't end up, I just managed him at the bedside, did a few things, and he survived, but, or at least he survived until he left. But, so the massive number of civilian, even if he just, it's, that's not true, but even if you were to assume that every male of combat age was a combat, which they certainly weren't. Even if you were to assume that the huge numbers of just women and children coming in who were, who were obviously civilians, was just absolutely insane. It was beyond anything that any, any hospital of any size could possibly handle. And the, the, the injuries that we were seeing were just, and they were just incredibly, they were naming, they were these, the bombs that were sending the Israelis are just incredibly powerful. You know, they're meant to be dropped on bunkers, reinforced military structures, mountains, things like that. They're not meant to be dropped on poorly constructed apartment buildings, and they're certainly not meant to be dropped on tents. So, you know, that you can imagine that the injuries we saw were just outrageous. A second crime, at least I'm not a lawyer, but I would call it a crime, that we saw, was the deliberate destruction of the healthcare system. And that, that took on multiple, I don't know, that was done in multiple ways. One was the targeting of healthcare workers. And it was very, very clear that the, that healthcare workers were a deliberate target of the attack, multiple people. So the staff at European hospital, European hospitals in the south of Gaza, it's in Conunis on the southeastern edge of Conunis. And I was there from March 25th to April 8th, which is when the Israelis were conducting their fourth and last raid on Shipah Hospital. So a lot of the staff at Shipah had fled. And a lot of them had also been taken in the previous raids of the hospital. And when they were released, they were released in the south of them, they came to European hospital and just started working, 'cause they didn't have anything else to do. They weren't paid, they just felt that it was the right thing to do. But all of, I should say, the large majority of them said that when they were taken, they were actually taken from outside the hospital, after the hospital was being emptied and everybody was being forcibly evacuated. And as they walked, they said, you in the scrubs, you in the scrubs, you in the white coat, you come here. So there was quite clear that they were deliberately picking out healthcare workers of any variety for interrogation, whatever it might have been. So that was one aspect. The other aspect is just the raw physical destruction of a huge number of hospitals in Gaza. It's commonly said that Gaza has 36 hospitals. That's not really true. In terms of anything that you or I would recognize as a hospital, there's four. There's Shifah, there's Indonesia, and there's European, and there's a Nasser medical complex on the western side of Kanya's, or maybe in Rafa, I can't remember now. But those are the only four that you would actually recognize as being a hospital. They have a blood bank, they have an operative, a significant operative capacity, they have an emergency capacity, they have a pharmacy that's well stocked, they have a blood bank, things like that. So, and we've been in a situation where only two of those four are operational, let me give you a moment. And of those four, European is the only one that has not been physically invaded by the Israeli military, and just had everything inside of it destroyed. So, that's a major problem. Every time, you can't just destroy everything in a hospital and then let the doctors back in later. And say, "Oh look, we have a hospital again." No, you don't, you just have a building where doctors happen to be inside of it. So that was the second thing. And then the third thing was just the starving of the healthcare system with supplies. So, we only had basically what we brought in with us and now you can't even take anything in with you because you have to go through Israel, you can't go through rougher anymore. So, those three things were major issues. And there were plenty of other things. The starvation was very obvious, there was a lot. - Yeah, I wanna break some of it down. So, one of the things that you mentioned there is that the official death toll statistics are covering somewhere over 40,000 and have hovered there for a long time. One of the things that your letters have argued is that there is very good evidence that the actual death toll is substantially higher. Believe you peg it closer to well over 100,000. Could you explain why it is that you and other healthcare professionals are confident that in fact, the death toll in Gaza is far higher than has been reported? - Yeah, so, I just to clarify what we were trying to say there. It's not that we're confident or we're not confident. It's that going by the available data, the data that actually exists, it's impossible to conclude that the death toll is less than 118,000. It's just, it's genuine, but I'll tell you why. So, the official death count that's given by the Ministry of Health, the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is kind of widely impugned, but because it's obviously part of the government in Gaza, which is which is run by Hamas, but the numbers that come out of there has been verified in several different ways by several different academic groups, both before October 7th and since then. There's absolutely no question whatsoever that the deaths they were reporting are real deaths and that they're actually deaths by violence. They are only reporting people who actually show up to morgues. This is a very important thing to understand. There was a time when the Gaza media office was also included in the count because the whole system was, they basically their entire electronic system for morgue, for capturing and relaying to a central database what the morgues were finding that that was completely down. I think that was around like November and December. They made one shift that was attacked again. But now the Ministry of Health has the morgue system relatively functional and relatively accessible. And so the numbers that are there are only bodies that have shown up to morgues. Now, I will tell you that there are, actually it was the day before I got to Europe, this is just an anecdote, obviously, but the day before I got to European Hospital, there was a bombing in a displaced persons area. So tents, right? A lot of these people were just shredded. I mean, like they were just busy, they were dismembered, their heads over there, their arms are over there, their chest is somewhere else. And somebody just kind of didn't know what to do. So he put all those body parts in a pickup truck and just drove it to European Hospital. And well, those people aren't going to be identified. I mean, this you can make maybe a gross estimate. There's tight on those 12 bodies in here or something. There's no way to know who they are. They'll never be known if they're men, women or children. You know, so the such people are not counted in the debt. You know, that actually the Washington Post had a long article, I'm pretty sure it was the Post, just recently, maybe two weeks ago now. This is in, this is to their credit, they had a long article about deaths in Gaza told by family members that there's no way they're counted in the debt. People buried under buildings, people who were simply vaporized during an attack, people who were shredded so badly, they'll never be able to be identified. These are major problems. The number of people that are estimated to be buried under the rubble has been 10,000, but that's since, like, January. I don't know how it hasn't gone up because nobody really has any way of counting. But then the most significant part of the death toll that's not being reported and really should be included in the death toll in this particular war is deaths from starvation and its complications. Is it important to write, yeah, I was on another podcast with another fellow, it's just important to remember that people don't starve to death in the way the lay person hasn't understand you this. The large majority of people who die because of malnutrition, die of an infection. They don't die looking like a victim from Auschwitz. They don't be skinny, of course, but they won't be the literal skeleton that we think of when we think of starvation during the Holocaust or during African famines, things like that. The large majority of such people die of infections and they are very likely to be dying in their tents. They're very likely to be dying in places where they're inaccessible and so they just can't get to a hospital where they don't even have, you know, maybe cell service or they don't have electricity to charge a cell phone. There's all sorts of reasons that these people may not be counted. In any official death toll, they're certainly not counted as death by violence because they're not. But in this case, you know, in a lot, you know, the way Alex Dewal, he's the main historian of famine in the modern period, the way he put it in a Guardian article, maybe a few months ago now, maybe four or five months ago now was, wars are often starvation crime scenes. I think that's the way he turned it. And that's correct that in this case, the starvation is very clearly deliberate. It's not even remotely, it's not hidden by anyone unless they happen to be talking to an American reporter. So they, you know, it's perfectly obvious that the starvation is deliberating on purpose. And if you look at the data that exists, which admittedly isn't very good, but the data that exists from the integrated food security phase classification, which is the major group that monitors, the major technical group that monitors starvation and food problems in the world. If you look at their data, there's just no way to conclude that less than 62,000 people have died of starvation. That's a huge number. Remember, most of these are not most. I shouldn't say that. A very large proportion of these are going to be children under the age of five. So you're talking about a huge death toll, but to us, the point wasn't to say that there's great data to show that this many people have died because there isn't. The point we were trying to make is that there's no way to estimate less than that based on the available data. And it's kind of shocking to think that we don't even know if we starve tens of thousands of children to death in Gaza. That's scary. - Now, we've talked there just about death, but I'd like to talk about the heart, more about the harm inflicted on the living, people who survive. I mean, what comes up over and over in the testimonies that you collected from doctors who worked in Gaza is people saying they feel like they're waiting for death or children who say they wish they died or they want to die. So perhaps you could talk about the kind of living hell that has been created for survivors who have to live with these terrible disabilities who can't be treated properly, who have to live with the trauma of the things that they've seen, of the family members, they've seen shredded before their eyes. I mean, perhaps you could tell us more about what happens to those people who don't in fact get killed. - Yeah, so I mean, aside from the fact that they're suffering from starvation, from repeated displacement, from being homeless, from being unemployed, from all sorts of other things, there is obviously just the physical ailments that people are dealing with, the displacement, the total social disruption, you know, not having anywhere to even go to the bathroom, you know, in its report, water, war crimes, which is really important. I wish more people had read it as violence from oxygen. They estimated that when the velocity area has half a million people in it, there is one toilet for every 4,130 people there. It's just outrageous, and it's incredibly undignified. And now on top of that, there's actually probably a million people in the velocity we don't even know. So there might be one toilet for over 8,000 people in that area, you know, it's just totally outrageous. The disease that you can imagine that comes with this is just outrageous, it's just incredible. And again, it mostly affects the young children. They're just not by many elderly people in Gaza for a two-effect. So there's that, there's the disease, the displacement, the just general horror. But then on top of that, there's a few groups that I really think they're mental health. It should be highlighted. Why are the attack on mental health should be highlighted? Number one is health care workers themselves. Every health care worker with maybe a marginal exception really felt that they were gonna die during this war. They didn't feel like, you know, and it's important to remember that these people are supposed to have a special protected status in international law. But despite that, they're literally being targeted by the Israelis. And it's really wild. They very much felt that they were just waiting for the next bomb to drop on them. And they just buried themselves in their work until that happened. It was kind of shocking to see, actually. That was actually one of the things that we really wanted. It was one of the things that we realized that we are providing them some semblance of safety by being at their hospital with them. You know, the Israelis might still attack it, but at least they won't just drop a bomb in it from the air and that's very unlikely. They've done it still, but they are less likely when there's a big contingent of foreign positions there. The second group of people are children. I mean, I just think about it in your own life. How many children, meaning toddlers and, you know, preteens, have you ever seen that we're suicidal? That's not a common phenomenon at all. I haven't seen that anywhere else in the world. And then just to be clear to me, there is anybody else. This is one of the few things that's actually widely discussed by professionals is the fact that children are widely suicidal in the Gaza Strip. That's very, very uncommon. It speaks to the incredible psychiatric distress that they're undergoing. And again, it's not that surprising when you think about it for a year, these people, these are children who've had their home destroyed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, sometimes like 15 times. A lot of them have seen their parents building front of them, a lot of them have seen their siblings building front of them, almost all of them have seen somebody killed in front of them. You know, it's just totally outrageous and it's insane. And then the third thing that I haven't seen this covered much in the media, but I just can't imagine it's not a massive issue, it's mothers. I mean, of course, fathers care about their children as well, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But there was a woman named Arwa something I'm forgetting her last name. Now she, I believe it's half Syrian, have something else, she used to work at CNN. And now she has an NGO that helps children in traumas zones like this. And she told a story, I think it was the CNN. She told a story about a mom who was talking to her and said that her young son made five years old or something, hasn't slept through the night, had, you know, what's the bad about all these, all these signs of trauma since he saw in this discussion, but it since he saw her sister's head explode. And then the Arwa was, I appreciate her name, Arwa was talking to the mom a little bit more. And finally she realized this lady also saw her dog's head explode. And then this woman realized that Arwa had realized this. And she said, I know, I understand what you're thinking. But I have to stay calm because I have children who are still alive. That's, I mean, you know, and it's a remarkable feat that she's able to do that, but everybody has a limit. You know, and everybody has a limit, even mothers. These are the things that people are living with. It's not only the trauma, it's not only the fact that they can't get help here, it's not the only the fact that they can't get the actual surgeries and the prosthetics or anything else. But they're literally, they're for a year and they've been living in this existential dread. I mean, it's just, they don't know where that is gonna come from. - There's the fear too, right? The drones hovering over at all times at any moment. - Yeah. - You could be killed. - I remember there was a famous quote from a little, probably an anonymous little girl in Afghanistan when you were still occupying Afghanistan. And she said, we pray, we pray for over, we used to pray for a blue sky, but now we pray for overcast days because the drones can't shoot you during those times. This is just, what are we doing to children? I mean, this is, and just to be clear, every time I say Israel, I should say the United States and Israel because it's not, Israel isn't doing any of this. We are doing this through, it's American planes with Israeli pilots. It's American, maybe there's Israeli drones, but they wouldn't be able to be there. American tanks, it's American everything. Just happen to be used by Israelis. - And to be clear, these are their children now, those who are fortunate will grow into adulthood and carry this trauma for their entire lives, carry these disabilities for their entire lives. I'm sure many of their life expectancies, again, those who survive will be much shortened. You've talked about in one of your pieces, the quantity, just the quantity of rubble in Gaza, the amount of time it would take to rebuild to the condition it was in before, where it was a place with massive unemployment and poverty and few food insecurity. So these things have not just been going on for a year, but even if the war stopped tomorrow, the effects on human beings would last for a decade. - Yeah, and just to go back to that same guy, Alex, the wall then, the historian, the famine. The way he puts it is that famine is a train. You can hit the brakes as hard as you want, but it's not going to stop immediately. And the same thing is true of the destruction of an entire society. I mean, we have to remember that at least I can't think of one, maybe go, you know, unless you go back to like the Mongol raids or something like that. I can't think of a time when a society was this heavily destroyed in the year, I mean, can you? And certainly Germany during World War II doesn't qualify Japan during World War II doesn't qualify. I really can't think, other than maybe like a local village that's very isolated and it was burned or something like, that's literally the only close parallel I can think of. The whole place has been destroyed. I mean, like I still remember, I was there before the construction of Khan units was completed. And I got, I remember we, I got the opportunity to drive down to Rafa and then up through the Moasi and then back to Khan units. And when we were coming back, I just had to say that I was like, stop the car for a second. And just got out and I looked around and I was like, where the hell, where are we? There's no buildings that are more than like five feet tall here. This is crazy. I remember thinking if I had grown up in this house right here, I don't think I would know where I was. Like that's the level of destruction. It looked like a nuclear bomb hit the place. The level of destruction and the level of suffering that this is engendered, not just until it stops. 'Cause unfortunately we all know that's what's happening. The point is it's a disaster and it's gonna be multi-generational with no question, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they've been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not gonna develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to create, if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties, concentrating with serious difficulties, understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you've guaranteed it for an entire generation in fact. - Now, one of the things I want to do in this conversation is to just bring out and to emphasize the level of horror that is very easily preventable, because you've mentioned the lack of supplies, for instance. I mean, these are things where, I mean, the testimonies of your colleagues about, if you have just a basic functional medical system, people would be alive who have died. There's plenty, and the conditions that you're working in where people are not even able to wash their hands. Things that should be completely basic and then result in it being so much worse than even the baseline condition of what happens when you drop 2,000 pound balls in highly densely populated areas. - Yeah, yeah, no, if Gaza had the equivalent of any third world healthcare system that I've ever worked in, there would be lots and lots of people who are alive who are now dead. There'd be lots of people who are severely crippled, who would have been minorly crippled or not at all. Yeah, no, that's clear as day. I was on some podcast of somebody else the other way, which it was one of the other people who signed the letter, Monica. She said, you know, the way she put it was, if I blew up your house and then said it was an accident, maybe somebody would believe me. But what if I then said an ambulance can't come to get you? That's not an accident anymore, that's just clear as day. I mean, that's not a hard analogy to understand. These really should destroy the healthcare system on purpose. I did this complete nonsensical thing about Hamas being under every hospital. It's just getting on it. When somebody writes a history of this period and they say that, yeah, the American media just believe this utter nonsense about Gaza's hospitals being, you know, the Hamas's command and control sentence. It's the fact that anybody believed it for two seconds will be just a, no one's gonna, no one will believe it. Anybody could have been that credulous, you know? So there's no justification for it. In one of the letters, I believe, your colleagues affirm that at no point did they, did any of them see militants using medical facilities, which is the allegation that is used to justify the destruction of Gaza's health facilities. Yeah, exactly. Not, and it's just, it's important to remember, not only did we not see it, anybody who has been there has never seen it. Mods Gilbert worked, he's an originologist and emergency physician. He worked in Shifma Hospital for, I believe like three decades, like a very, very long time, he never saw this. But the closest anybody has ever been able to get to Hamas using a hospital for military purposes was after the 2014 war Operation Protective Edge. Hamas used an outpatient facility briefly as an interrogation and torture place, which obviously is not good, like that's not nice, but that's just, that doesn't justify blowing up the hospital in 2023, it's absurd. And then, you know, I haven't seen your national report about it because it was criminal, they didn't know that about it. You know, you can't, it wasn't really the use of the building so much that was criminal is the torture. But yeah, it's just outrageous. Furthermore, if the presence of a Hamas person justifies blowing up a hospital, why doesn't the presence of any Israeli soldier just by blowing up a hospital? 'Cause anybody except that is legit, that's insane. Like I'm at work right now, if some general happens to walk by here, Russia can't just drop a bomb on my hospital, it's absurd, it's outrageous. That's not how international law works, and nobody claims it does. Like literally no one says that's the way international law works. - Yeah, it's just outrageous. - There's kind of a funny thing to me about that the accusation has always been, well, Hamas uses human shields. The thing about using human shields is, the whole reason it's supposed to be effective is 'cause when someone uses a human shield, you're not supposed to shoot them. - Right. - It's why human shield works if you just-- - Yeah. (laughs) - Right, because we assume that people are humane enough to where they know it's an effective strategy, and it's very-- - Yeah, yeah, the assumption is that people won't want to kill civilians and they'll hesitate. Exactly. And you know, it's really funny. I was on a show with a guy named Noam Dorman. - Oh, yeah, so I saw this, yeah. - Oh geez, oh gosh. The, yeah, I had to be fair, I thought it was a productive conversation, not maybe in the way I didn't know who he was when I went there. I said I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I thought it was fine. Anyway, at one point I pointed out to, 'cause he brought up the human shield thing, I pointed out to him that, you know, when Iran attacked the Mossad headquarters with ballistic missiles, there were, you know, CNN or somebody, I think it was CNN, went there and they said, look, you know, there's all these civilians around. How could Iran possibly safely attack this place, you know? But nobody accused the Israelis of using human shields. Because that's not what the term means, just because you built Mossad headquarters, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you couldn't drop a nuclear bomb until it even say you were aiming at Mossad headquarters, but you can fire ballistic missiles at them if they have some reasonable point of accuracy. So that's just how the law, that's how war fighting and the laws around war fighting works. But with Hamas in Gaza, it's kind of funny because Hamas is constantly accused of using human shields, meaning meaning their own people as human shields, which presupposes that the Israelis care about killing Palestinians civilians, which is ludicrous. It just has nothing to do with the totally historical nonsense. But beyond that, it's funny because Hamas is also accused at the same time of wanting to get as many of its own civilians killed as possible. So, okay, fine. But then at the same time, why is it that Israeli soldiers use human shields in Gaza or right end in the West Bank? If Hamas is trying to get as many of its people killed as possible, why would using Palestinians as human shields for Israelis? It's just stupid. Like none of it, it doesn't even make any sense. Leaving us that there's just no evidence for any of it. It's just ridiculous. Anyway, sorry, I don't want to talk about that. But yeah, the point is just that the attack on the hospitals is just outrageous. It is one of the crimes of the century. And the fact that my open government is backing it to such a degree that they won't even meet with 99 physicians, they're not all physicians, but almost 100 doctors who wrote them a letter saying that they witnessed atrocities being carried out with our own weapons. And they won't even acknowledge the letter. And it's the second letter. It's ridiculous. And it's really shocking, honestly. It's beyond anything I ever thought would happen. - You're listening to current affairs. 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And if you just want to help us, keep building independent progressive media because you understand how vital that project is, go to currentaffairs.org/donate where you can read more about our work and make a monthly or one-off contribution. Current Affairs is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and donations are tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. Now, back to the program. - So you mentioned there, you're, yeah, I watched your conversation with now Dorman, who's, you know, he's very pro-Israel, obviously. And although relatively somewhat open-minded guys know him and Ficklestein on and stuff, you know? - He seemed very similar to us, yeah. - But the thing is that someone like that has imbibed a lot of talking points and propaganda and misconceptions. And I wonder if you could perhaps clear up what you think are some of the most, you've touched on a few of them, this idea that, you know, the hospitals are actually military bases. - Clear up a few of you. What do you think are the most pernicious talking points that people in this country, who will only have read U.S. media, who won't have heard from many Palestinians, who, unless they listen to democracy now, probably haven't heard from or read Current Affairs, probably won't have heard from you. What kind of misconceptions do they have about this conflict? - Yeah, you know, one thing that was interesting is Noam mentioned to me. He said, I didn't really, it's not that he knew nothing about the area of Israeli conflict, but he said, I really started learning about it. That was how he put it, after October 7th. And I wish I had thought, I was trying to think what is wrong with this feeling? Why doesn't he know the most basic truth, facts about this conflict? It's very strange, you know, when I got home, I kind of was thinking about it more. I said, I should have told him this, Noam, if you studied something in school for a year, what would you spend the first year doing? Do you think you would spend it reading random Israeli propaganda outfits like MEMRI, and are like listening to their translated videos? Like, does a first year master's student dive into primary sources, or do they read books? Just read a book on the conflict. It's, I mean, yeah, I know there's a lot of them, fine. But the, like, just read one of the overall, like, there are lots of standard histories of the area of Israeli conflict. Mark Tesler's, Benny Morris's. You guys, I don't think I wouldn't call Norman Figgles, he's a standard history. Like, it's not used in school very much, but it's still very good. Noam Chomsky's Faithful Triangle. And there's plenty more. You could read them from a more, you know, Tesler's is a very neutral perspective he's an American profiled. I'm not sure if he's still professing or not, but he was an American professor, I think, in Indiana. These books are available. It's not like they're hard to find. You know, Benny Morris is a very right-wing guy. He's not subtle in his beliefs. But if you read the book from start to finish, you won't come to the same conclusions that he does. So, you know, it's just not that, it's not hard. - Yeah, he's an odd guy, 'cause he says, all of, basically, like all of the charges that left us make are true, and that's a good thing. - But, yeah, the occupation is brutal, and yes, it's ethnic cleansing, and we should do more of it. - Yeah, and, you know, and again, he's an honest fellow. He's a very confident, no, I mean, really, he's a very confident archival historian. That's very obvious, and he's got an incredible memory. He's got, he has the patience to sit there and go through these archival sources. And, you know, somebody actually during the, he was having a discussion somewhere, and it was a pretty hostile audience, and, you know, you're still there, which is good. Somebody at the, I think the last question was, if you were a Palestinian, would you fight the Israeli occupation? You said, oh, yeah, yeah, no question. That's not an hard question to answer. - So, you know, I mean, it's just, he's just, he's an honest guy, but he's also fully enamored of his side. You know, what did Kamoo said something like, you can never side against your own mother or some stupid such thing when he was talking about French atrocities in Algeria? - Justice versus your mother, you know. - Yeah, yeah, something like that, yeah. Just for, you know, better than I do, but the, but anyway, so yes, it's hard to pick out a few because the Israel Palestine conflict is shrouded in so much utter nonsense that it's really honestly, it's very hard to peel back any one layer of it without having like a five hour discussion with somebody, but what I would just say is that it may be a few things. Number one, the Palestinians are presented with all of the subtlety of God still in the American media. Like, it's like they just walked out of the ocean and started bombing television. It's crazy, there's a long history here and you don't have to have a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the history. Again, if you read any of the standard books on the topic, just, again, pick up Mark Tesla's book. I think it's called The History of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. It's long, you gotta get through it. It's not particularly exciting. Just get through it. You will not come out of that book thinking, "Wow, the Palestinians sure hate Jews." That's not what it is. If you read the first edition of Righteous Victim, but he morse his book, he won't get that impression either. The second edition, you will because he decided it's true. But the, if you read Righteous Victims, if you read border wars, if you're betting more with his other books, these books are quite straightforward. They're not hard to understand. They're very, you can see what happens with more. When he's limited to the archival record, he comes up with the history and a conclusion that makes sense. When he reads the news and incorporates that into, because when he talks about him with current affairs, then it's just on my side, my side, my side, my side. But anyway, yeah, I would just try to explain to people that the Palestinians are not just some bizarre anti-Semitic force of nature that loves killing people. It's just, it's like any other national liberation movement. They, yes, they've done some very brutal things. There's no doubt about that. Like October 7th wasn't some joke. But the, and you know, suicide bombings are not some joke, but I want, people should understand the vast differential of violence that exists in this conflict. Let me just say this, as an anecdote to that talking point, it's both, because anytime you hear about violence, it's Palestinian violence. Israelis do bombings, they do shootings. The conflict kills people, but Israelis don't do violence. And they just kind of like the US. We don't do violence. That's what other people do. We don't do terrorism. That's what other people do. But let me just give this one statistic. More two-year-old children are confirmed to have been killed. I'm not talking about my estimates for starvation or anything. I'm talking about confirmed, their names are known, known to have been killed by violence. More children under the age of two in Gaza since October 7th have been killed than the entire number of Israeli civilians who were killed in the first Intifada, the second Intifada, and October 7th combined. That is shocking. That is absolutely and utterly outrageous. And there's no reason for it. There is absolutely no justification for this what so ever. And people who want to claim that Hamas is all of these, it's just Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas. Hamas killed all these kids. Hamas forced Israel to kill all these kids. It's insane. The power differential between these two sides is massive and vast. They are not on the same playing field at all. And to claim that Israel had to kill more two-year-old kids than all Israeli civilians who were killed in the past 30 years combined. That's insane. There's nothing that makes sense with any of these numbers. If you look at the, I did these calculations a few months ago, so the number, the exact differential will have changed. But if you look at the rate of killing of children in Gaza versus in Ukraine, the rate of children of killing in Gaza is 600 times higher than in Ukraine. Ukraine's being attacked by Russia. Russia, it's a huge country. People have probably heard of it. This isn't some joke that's going like Ukraine is horrendous. I've been there three times, I can mention. It's very, very bad. It's, but it's not, and it's not, I have plenty of Ukrainians who are friends of mine now. When I told them, yeah, I put on my little Facebook page. I said, I'm just letting my friends know I'm going to Gaza. They were like, no, no, no, no, don't do that, dude. Do not do that. Please just come back here instead. Don't go to Gaza. - So what do I say, please? Like Eastern Ukraine? - Yeah, no, I mean, it's just, it's wild, you know? I mean, because they're not idiots. I mean, these, the Ukrainians were remarkably sophisticated people. I was really, very, very proud of knowing them. I hope they can go back soon, actually. But yeah, I mean, it's just, it's insanity. The talking point I would just say that people should get out of their heads is just that this is not just something that is happening because Hamas. This Hamas, that Hamas, those Hamas, these Hamas, it's not, that's not what is going on. The United States and Israel have decided to destroy the Palestinian movement. That's all it is. They've decided to make sure that there is no Palestinian state. The US is willing to let Israel do that so that it can continue to be its judgment of control in the Middle East. That's all it's going on. It's not fancy. It's not, it's not super complicated. - I wanna ask you two more quick questions. One is you published this New York Times op-ed, which was pretty remarkable for appearing in the New York Times, to be honest. I think some of us were quite surprised when that came out. And people tried to discredit you or all sorts of, you have, you pointed out that so many had seen children shot in the head, a lot of ballistics experts, quote, unquote, popped up on Twitter to say this couldn't possibly happen, but actually, you know, you have the evidence, the times stood by the story. Did you encounter any resistance from the New York Times to saying what you said? Because your conclusion is not just, oh, this is, look at the tragedy, look at the suffering. Your conclusion in that piece is the United States must stop arming Israel and we need to take a long hard look at ourselves as Americans. - Yeah, what's interesting to me about the criticism of the piece, including even the three letters that they published, is that none of them actually seem to look at the conclusion. I think the three letters are like, this is so, or the one letter said, oh, I think he went too far and saying that they should are, that we should stop arming Israel. It's like, okay, well, it's been a year, but that's fine, that's your opinion. The second was just a credit for, of like, how could we let such a horrible thing happen? And then the third, and I just, I have to give the time to credit for publishing the opinion piece in the first place, but I just, it kills me that they did this. The third was a letter from, I believe, the Jewish American Physicians Association or something, some such thing. - Yeah, the president of the Jewish American. - Of the Jewish American medical association, yes. - American Jewish men, whatever. - Yeah, that thing. And why is that the letter that they chose to publish? I mean, I understand that they sent it, that's fine, but what does what I said have to do with Jews? Nothing. It's, kind of, I'm sorry, kind of pisses me off, like you can see. This is not a conflict between Jews and other people, at least not in the United States. It's not, what is it? I can't remember the exact numbers now, but something like 40% of young American Jews, not only think what Israel's doing in Gaza is wrong, but believe it's a genocidal. That's a huge number. If you, and actually just after, right after the times published our piece, Harris translated the entire thing into Hebrew. And published it on their site as well. After that, just maybe like a few days ago, maybe I just spoke to her on yesterday, maybe last Sunday or something like that. I got a letter from 150 Israeli, I think it's up to 250 now, by the way. 150 Israeli physicians endorsing our letter to the Biden administration. And that letter was sent not to Netanyahu, but to Biden. That's how desperate they are. And the Jewish American Medical Association President is saying that I'm being hurtful. Okay, why don't you go talk to your Jewish colleagues in Israel and see what they think about it? Is there a majority opinion? No, of course not. It's the meaning of the Israeli physicians. Of course, it's not a majority opinion. It's a very nationalistic and right-wing country now. But it's just setting this up as a conflict between Jews and other people. It's not, that's not what it is. So that really made me upset. But anyway, what I have to say is, when I stood firm in wanting to say something with the times, they would push back on a lot of things for sure, which I wasn't surprised by. But I gotta be honest, I never expected that these to be published. I was absolutely sure that they were not going to publish it. And I would just end up putting it on commentary or something. So I didn't feel the need to do that. You didn't have to have 65 people backing you up. Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, it's so funny 'cause people, oh look, see, we knew the time is anti-Israel, if the times was anti-Israel, this is what would have happened. There would have been 65 different pieces because they would have sought out doctors coming back from Gaza. There would have been 65 different pieces, meaning, you know, for a year, five a month, saying, this is what Dr. Furos so many come back. This is what Dr. Syed saw when she got back. This is what Nurse Monica saw when she was young. It would have been 60, 65 separate pieces about this, not one opinion piece. And they would have been new, but not just, you know, so if they were anti-Israel, that's what they would have done. But I think this just got to the point that they couldn't ignore it and they figured, and also, you know, again, this is to the times credit, or at least they cried to the visual opinion team, they reached out to me and asked me to write the piece. So that's, you know, credit where credits do. It should have been published a year ago, but they're not, not that exact piece, obviously, but something akin to it could have easily been published a year ago. And it honestly could have been published after Cast Lead and after Protective Edge, but I suppose better let them never. - And finally, I want to bring this conversation back to where we started because I started with you, you led it to the Biden administration. In fact, you've gotten no response. You mentioned in one of your answers there that you believe it's pretty clear that the Biden administration has just made the decision that it is willing to let Israel obliterate any chance of Palestinian self-determination. Perhaps you could discuss, I mean, we're a few days away from the election, many people are being called upon to go to the polls and put Kamala Harrison to succeed Joe Biden. Many are hopeful that what I might consider wishful thinking that Kamala Harris will change this policy. So perhaps you could just say a few words about the last year of Biden administration policy and how difficult it's been to get really any movement or even acknowledgement from this White House. - Yeah, and it's frustrating to be sure, but I think it speaks to the depravity of American politics in general. I mean, mainstream American politics, Democrats, versus Republicans. We don't actually have, this just kind of, I think it was jogging or something that occurred to me the other day. We don't actually have a political party in the United States that is opposed to genocide on principle. That's wild, that's very scary. And the United States is an incredibly powerful country. We don't even have, even though the so-called left-wing party, the Democrats are not opposed to genocide on principle. - I think the Green Party would want me to interject. - Yeah, no, the Green Party of course, because Joe Stein has been very vocal about this as his Cornell West, which isn't surprising because something like 80% of the country wants us to stop sending arms to Israel. And on top of that, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and all the rest of these democratic people, they've been going around for what? At least since Trump left office, probably since before, saying that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy that has ever existed. You hear it all the time from everywhere. I don't disagree with them, actually, in some ways. But just think about it, all they had to do was say, and by the way, we're opposed to genocide. So we're gonna stop sending arms to Israel. And then win the selection with no question whatsoever by a mile. Every swing state would fall way onto the, I don't pay any attention to these kind of polling things just 'cause it makes me wanna jump off a roof. But so I don't know who's gonna win the election. It's hard to tell as it closes, not close. I don't really care. And as I shouldn't say that, I do care, but I just don't have the bandwidth to figure it out. But yeah, I mean, let me give you another example. Just maybe two weeks ago now, Israel announced to COGAT, which is the Israeli office that coordinates between humanitarian organizations and the Israeli military. They announced that they are going to cut, it was hard to get exact numbers, but either six or eight international NGOs from access to Gaza, no longer allowed it. It's not hard to figure out what they were. Five of them were American, incidentally. It's the, I can't remember their names off the top of my head, but all five are American registered American NGOs, run by Americans, but with boards that had people who are a bear of ethnicity. That's it, that's all it is. Fudger Scientific, Palestinian American Medical Association, Palestinian American Bridge, and two others that I just can't remember the name so right now. And this was maybe a few days after the New York Times article came out, and even more shockingly, was just after the Biden administration had a letter leaked to the Times of Israel, in which they said that they would not, that Israel has to massively increase the amount of humanitarian aid going into Gaza, unless otherwise they're going to have to face possible consequences under an SM20. Now Blinken immediately walked that back once the letter was released, it doesn't matter. The point is, all Harris has to do is go out, she doesn't, even if she didn't come out against the attack, against arming Israel, she could just say, when I am president, all five of those NGOs will be immediately reinstituted or Israel will give up arms. Everybody knows Israel would agree to let those people back in, just if they're not going to die on that hill, why would they? That's some cert. They can still kill everyone in Gaza, just because Fudger Scientific and Palestinian American Medical Association sent a few doctors in. This doesn't stop them from doing anything. She won't even do that. - Yeah, it's outrageous. - Commit to enforcing U.S. law. - Yeah, and that was something that I wrote in the piece, it was, you know, Peter Bynard, and also in the New York Times again, to their credit, in some ways. Peter Bynard has said, he wrote a column in which he said, Harris can differentiate herself from Biden by simply saying that she will enforce the law. That's some revelation that has to be mentioned in the New York Times before the executive department or the executive branch figures it out. That's wild. That says something about our own culture, our own society, our level of understanding of the world, our level of what we're doing. Is the rule of law important or not? Does it only matter that people in poor black neighborhoods have to adhere to the rule of law? Or does the president of the United States also have to do that? I mean, it's just totally independent. The whole situation is so outrageous. And it's just, I mean, it's very hard to fathom. We have a lot of work to do in our own kind. That's why I said, the article there, and this one I wrote, that article is not about Israel. People can claim it as good, people can claim it's anti-Israel, anti-s, I don't really care anymore, I'm tired of hearing it. But people can claim it as all they want. It's about the United States. It's as pro-American as you can get. It's not saying, I didn't call for it to do America. I called for us to take a look at ourselves. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? We ought not to. I think we can all, I think any sense of, well, you know, when I was in Burkina Faso, just before the Democratic National Convention, and I gave a talk there, I just got five minutes' talk, and I pointed out that the US has kind of gone insane. I kind of likened it to the way the South was resurrected slavery after the Civil War. And, you know, the whole society, everybody just knew what to say, when to say it, who to kill, who to beat up, who not to beat up, what laws really matter, what laws don't really matter. I just finished reading a book by dozens of Clacken on the topic, so it was on my mind. Yeah, I slavery by another name, right, it's a very good book. And I pointed out that I kind of see the same collective in sanity taking hold here now. And it's not just the South, obviously, now it's the whole country. But I had been in Burkina Faso, which is this very, very small poor country, just north of Ghana. That's one of the poorest countries in the world. I was just there for a week. And I mentioned, you know, when I was, I was going around doing NGO work with my buddies in geo, pull for progress. And at some point, you know, we were at the university, there were a lot of people who spoke English, and so they were talking to him, and he said, "Oh, do you only come to Burkina Faso, "or do you go other?" I said, "No, you know, I've been in Ukraine, "and the West Bank, and I was in Gaza recently." And they stopped, and they said, "Oh, you were in Gaza." And then they would just say, "Can you explain why America is doing this?" This was like a universal response. I was very surprised by how sophisticated they were with the end in regards to this specific issue, 'cause they don't really, they don't get any international news there. Yeah, why is America doing this? They didn't ask for this room. They didn't, they said, "Why is America doing this?" And it's a very hard question to answer. We really have a lot of work to do with ourselves, and I'm glad magazines like yours exist, because I know you guys are, I don't read current affairs every day, but you guys are definitely trying to put out, to make people under these ideas. Oh, well, actually, I just have to mention that, 'cause we just released last week this new book, which is with Noam Chomsky, called "The Myth of American Idealism," how U.S. foreign policy endangers the world. The central message of that-- There you go, that's actually, yeah. Professor Chomsky and I collaborated on was the central message of that book, is that America needs to take a long, hard look at itself, and there's a long chapter about Israel Palestine and that. And the title of that book is really the central theme of, I would say, all of Chomsky's work for a long time, or is political work. It's true, American foreign policy is, it's not the only problem in the world, certainly, but it is very, very, very dangerous. It's not, I don't think people have a full appreciation of how bad and how dangerous and how close the world stays, virtually all of the time, to ultimate destruction. And it's very scary. And you obviously know better than I think. Meanwhile, completely convinced of our own righteousness and the ability and devotion to. Our leaders are, and I know Noam has had a stroke, so he can't speak for himself. I certainly don't want to speak for him, but I do think that he would point out that if that was an intrinsic feature of our society, then billions upon billions upon billions of dollars in an entire industry wouldn't have to be dedicated to others-- That's right. And so there's a lot of opportunity for us to do something about it. Yeah, when we say America, you know, we're off to talk about the state. You know, the state is insane. The people often just don't know what a thing is about what's actually being done in their name. And there's a reason that it's hid because it's deliberately hidden from them. Yeah, and they're deliberately confused. And I think journals like Coronavirus have a lot to contribute to. Well, this is why we're talking to you and why we're trying to talk to people who have actually seen these things up close because the stories are often buried. I would encourage every one of our listeners and readers to go to gazahealthcareletters.org. And I would encourage you to read every word of the letters that Dr. Sidwell and his colleagues have sent to the Biden-Harris administration, repeatedly, explaining exactly what they witnessed, explaining exactly the changes that need to be put in place from the broad change of an arms embargo and the imposition of a ceasefire. They explain why we can, in fact, impose a ceasefire, but also particular changes like just making sure that adequate, you know, basic, adequate medical supplies allowed into Gaza that health care workers, that Palestinian health care workers aren't discriminated against. Various things that our administration could do and that there needs to be major political pressure on them to do. So, Dr. Sidwell, we thank you so much for your work, not only the work that you did in Gaza, but also the work that you've done subsequently, and tirelessly, trying to draw attention to what is being done in Americans named by their government. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - The Current Affairs Podcast is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. If you are not subscribed to Current Affairs Magazine, visit currentaffairs.org/subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The Current Affairs Podcast is released regularly every week on patreon.com/currentaffairs. Thanks for listening. 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