Hala Rharrit on Quitting State Dept. & Ending U.S. Complicity in Gaza
www.democracynow.org
As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel. We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza. Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”

As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel.

We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”

  • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    4 hours ago

    Your underlying causes do not go very far back in time. The first Zionist settlers purchased their land from Palestinians and lived peacefully alongside them. While I understand your desire to focus solely on material causes, one must also take ideology and religion into account as factors. Humans experience emotions, and emotions do not always have material causes.

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Early Zionist settlers who did live side by side with the native Palestinian people did report that they were received peacefully, that is true. But the land purchases were not, that began the forced displacement.

      The Transfer Committee, and the JNF Ethnic Cleansing, which led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate before the Nakba

      • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        4 hours ago

        The 1940s are still half a century after the first settlers arrived. Purchasing land from Palestinians is not forcibly displacing them.

        You’re starting your history at around the time Israel was founded, and the Jewish community had grown powerful. That is not the beginning, the beginning was 50 years earlier. Doing this is very common in propaganda.

        • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          1 hour ago

          I’m referring to the 1920s - 1930s

          Both the Zionist buyers and Levantine companies knew that many Palestinian Arabs still owned homes, olive groves, mills, warehouses and fields in the N-shaped region. They offered money to the families that came forward. But, Zionists forcibly evicted them if they refused compensation or to sell their land.

          From 3rd link

          Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.

          In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a large-scale uprising against the British and their support for Zionist settler-colonialism, known as the Arab Revolt. The British authorities crushed the revolt, which lasted until 1939, violently; they destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

          From 4th link

          Forcible ‘Transfer,’ Ethnic Cleansing, has been central to Zionist thought since the 1880s

          Quote

          Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers.

          The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat.

          An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.