Episode 281 – Gaza: Unmasking Empire with Dan Kovalik

[00:00:00] Steven Grumbine: All right folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest is a returning guest, somebody who’s very, very close to the issues in Gaza today. And it’s with great pride and joy that I get to bring out his book as well. We talked about it before it was released, now it has been released, and that is The Case for Palestine, Why it Matters and Why You Should Care by Dan Kovalik.The foreword by George Galloway. Dan’s an author of critically acclaimed The Plot to Scapegoat Russia, The Plot to Attack Iran, The Plot to Control the World, The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela and No More War, and has been a labor and human rights lawyer since graduating from Columbia Law in 1993.

He has represented plaintiffs in the ATS cases arising from egregious human rights abuses in Colombia, and he’s also taught international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from 2012 to 2023. Bottom line is,  that Dan is an expert, has traveled around the world lecturing, and I’m really, really thrilled to have him back on the show, especially now that his book has finally been released.

So with that, Welcome to the show, Dan. Thank you for joining me.

[00:02:02] Dan Kovalik: Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

[00:02:05] Steven Grumbine: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, let me just tell you, this has been one of the most challenging experiences, to thread this needle, that I’ve been trying to thread with class analysis, modern monetary theory, and geopolitical discussion points.

And in this particular case for Palestine is an incredibly important one, because what I feel like it does, is I feel like it lifts the lid on empire, lifts the veil back and it shows exactly how little agency we have within the electoral system itself. How very, very deaf, if you will, the powers that be are, if in fact, their goal is to even serve us in any way, shape or form.

It feels like the AIPAC group has got absolute control of our government from every decision, every piece of propaganda that comes out, every news article that comes forth, the vast majority of the politicians that are quote/unquote “in office” are going around basically calling Hamas ‘the terrorist organization’, and basically explaining away all the dead children, all the dead Palestinians, the bombing of tent cities, you name it.

It’s almost like a uniform machine, just coming out and just propagandizing the world that, ‘Hey, Israel’s good.’ Doesn’t matter that they’re behaving as fascists. Doesn’t matter that Netanyahu is a right wing, ideological crazy man. It doesn’t matter any of that stuff. It’s like just pop-up, common nonstop propaganda, flooding every mainstream outlet, every corporate stream outlet, every political stream outlet, save for, I hate to say it, but like X and YouTube and other places where you get to see- you know, TikTok for all of its faults that people whine about-

I mean, we’re seeing a genocide happen in real time, like never before. And the kids aren’t having it, the kids are sick of this political operation.And they’re letting people know about it, and they’re getting beaten. We just had Bryce Greene come on here recently, and we had Aaron Good come on, but Bryce was arrested for being at the student encampments.

I mean, this is serious stuff. And there’s an entire political class, an entire careerist group of people that will stay mum on this, will be quiet about it, will literally defend Genocide Joe Biden, as he annihilates, through funding, the people of Gaza. Your book is very timely and that was a lot of words right there, but I hope that it expresses exactly how I feel.

I am beyond myself. I’m ashamed of what our country is doing. I’m ashamed, but I’m happy in ways that it shows it reveals so much.

Your thoughts, sir.

[00:04:59] Dan Kovalik: Well, it does. And, this  podcast is ostensibly about my new book, The Case for Palestine. And I certainly hope people read it and we’ll go into more detail about it. I’d actually like to open my remarks discussing another book that I just finished and that’s Cormac McCarthy’s book, Blood Meridian, which is very timely and really could have been written about what’s happening in Gaza right now.

If you’re familiar with the book, it’s a fictional book, but it’s based on true story, for lack of a better term. It’s based on these American settler colonial, scalp hunters in the American Southwest, where they went out and murdered Native Americans and scalped them and collected them and got bounties for them, both fromUS and also Mexican leaders.

And why is that relevant? Because what you’re seeing in Gaza now, what you’re seeing in Palestine, is nothing but settler colonialism of the type that the US had, for example, in its early founding against the indigenous peoples. Where we came in to a land that was already occupied and decided that while we could have tried to cohabitate with the people who lived here, that that was not the goal.

The goal was, from the very beginning, to wipe out the indigenous population and take over everything, which we did from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And of course, in the case of Israel, what you have is the Israelis who came into a populated area with Palestinians, Arab peoples.

There were some Jews at the time, but they were a very small percentage of the population when the Balfour Declaration was made in 1917. And that was a British declaration saying that Jews should have a homeland in Palestine. It made some reference to the rights of the Palestinians already living there, at least made a nod to them.

But the goal was always to take over all of the land from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and that’s always been the goal. And in 1948, the U. N. passed a resolution, following up on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to give Jews a homeland in Palestine. And of course, that was greatly motivated at the time by the Holocaust, which was obviously a terrible event which affected a number of different groups, but obviously, disproportionately Jews, who lost 6 million people in the Holocaust.

So the world was very happy to give them a homeland. But again, the problem was that it was to give them a homeland in a place that was populated mostly by Arabs, known as Palestinians. But even if you look at that U. N. resolution, it was only to give Jews a certain percentage of Palestine. And I’m forgetting what the, I talk about it in the book, what percentage it is, something around 50 some percent of Palestine. But of course, the settlers who were there, and they were there with the British by the way- because by that time the British had taken over from the Ottoman Empire- they decided to take more land than the UN even gave them, because the goal again, the goal was totally eradicate that Arab population from Palestine.

And so they carried out- the Israeli settlers, through these terrorist groups, really these militias, terrorist groups led by various people, including Menachem Begin, who would become prime minister in the seventies and early eighties- they carried out the Nakba, which was this mass ethnic cleansing of about 750,000 Pelestinians from their home, and from their land. And there were massacres carried out in the process.

In fact, as I mention in the book, that was a very crucial part of the ethnic cleansing. They realized [and the main leader, Ben Gurion, his position was] that the only way to really ethnically cleanse them was to terrorize the population.

You had to put fear into them to get them to, what they claimed back then, “voluntarily move.” Netanyahu uses those words, “voluntary emigration.” There’s nothing voluntary about it. You go into- in the case of the Nakba in 1948- these armed gangs would go in and terrorize villages, destroy the villages, rape women,

by the way, that’s an untold fact that most people don’t know about, the rapes… massacre civilians and drive the people out of those villages and overtake them. And that’s what happened on a mass scale, in around 1947 and 1948. You know how they talk about ‘how the West was won’ in the United States, that’s how the West was won. And that’s how Israel was won.

Very quickly, the UN became horrified about what they had wrought. And even countries that had supported the UN resolution to create the state of Israel, like most notably the Soviet Union, began to regret what they had done, and they quickly passed resolutions saying the Palestinians had right of return. And those resolutions of right of return have been reaffirmed over the years, but they’ve never returned.

And again, just like the United States, where you still do have indigenous population, mostly living on reservations in horrible conditions with terrible lifespans and health outcomes much worse than any other population in America, in Palestine, they didn’t successfully ethnically cleanse everyone.

They put them into what is known now as the West Bank and Gaza, and even after 1948 continued to gain more and more land from them, even within those areas. The big land grab happened in 1967, during what’s known as the Six Days War, that’s when they began their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which had, at that point, been controlled by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.

Once they began occupying those areas again, they began gobbling up more and more land, to the point where now, and I have a map of this at the back of the book, where very little land now is left over for the Palestinians. And of course now, after this Gaza slaughter, that started in October 8th of 2023, they’ll even have much less land,if they have any land at all in Gaza. And in the West Bank, Israel’s also used the events of October 7th to start making more in roads, even there. So the long and short of it is, this is nothing but settler colonialism. where mostly Europeans and Americans have come to the land of Palestine and forcibly, and very violently, taken over land.

And just like the U S justified, on a strange religious notion of manifest destiny [that somehow God anointed the white people of Europe to take over North America from Atlantic to the Pacific], the Israelis have based their religious claim that somehow God gave them, what is now known as, Israel. Both of which being, in my own view, bad religion. These are not based  on anything really.

And now,  Israel really is an extension of the West, of the white West, and seen as this important beachhead of the West , particularly the United States, in the Middle East,which is otherwise an Arab world. From which the US and other Western countries can project their power, and gain access to the great resource of the Middle East known as oil.

That essentially is, in brief, an explanation.

[00:12:52] Steven Grumbine: So, I’m looking at the map right now, on the back of the book, and it starts off, Israel’s almost completely black, meaning Palestinian run, going back to 1947. And then I’m looking at the next iteration, the partition plan at 1947 splits it about 50-50, I don’t know if that’s right, but close enough.

Yeah.

[00:13:15] Dan Kovalik: More or less.

[00:13:16] Steven Grumbine: But then from ‘49 to ‘67, it looks like you’re down to 25 %Palestinian. And then over here in present,  it looks like maybe 15%?

[00:13:26] Dan Kovalik: Yeah, something like that. Yeah, and not even contiguous. The West Bank is all pockmarked with all these Israeli settlements. And for the most part, the Israelis have gotten the best land, and it tends to be on the top of these hills, overlooking Palestinian villages and towns. And the Israelis allow their pollution, and their industrial waste, and their sewage to run down those hills into the Palestinian towns.

And they have a series of walls, and gates, and highways that segregate the Israelis from the Palestinians. So again, even within the Palestinian territory, [and again, those maps show that] the Palestinians don’t have even contiguous controlof land. A big fight is over East Jerusalem, which under an international law is Palestinian. Israel has made it clear, they want all of Jerusalem to be their capital and they’re taking actions to make that a reality, and the US has been helping with that.

Most notably when Donald Trump moved, in a very provocative act to the entire Arab world, moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv [which is the official capital of Israel], to Jerusalem. And a couple other states followed suit, including, I believe, Guatemala.

And now I believe Argentina, with this new leader. And again, despite the fact that the international law recognizes East Jerusalem as Palestinian and it is ostensibly supposed to be controlled by the Palestinian Authority. It’s now being gobbled up by Israel, which is very- not only is it significant because it’s taking more land from Palestinians, but this happens to be the most important historic land. This is really the Holy Land in East Jerusalem. This is where the old city is, this is where the Al Aqsa mosque is, which is the third most Holy site in Islam. It’s where some of the most important Christian sites are. It’s where Jesus was crucified. It’s where his body was entombed in the  Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The tomb of the Virgin Mary is there. So you have these very important holy sites there,

and that is where Israel’s trying to take over. In fact, in the old city, they prohibit most Palestinians from even going inside it now, and again, the USis complicit. And by the way, Biden became president and he did not countermand the decision to keep the US embassy in Jerusalem.

He upheld Trumpism, let’s keep it real.  Blue and red MAGA, correct?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, again,  the difference between the two parties, on things like Israel, there’s no daylight between them. This is a joint project of both parties. This is a very essential part of US foreign policy. Very few presidents have tried to buck against that, there were a couple. I mentioned in the book, Eisenhower did during theSuez crisis, got Israel to back off of Egypt and to relent from taking over the Suez canal. John F. Kennedy, after Eisenhower tried very hard to do a few things to rein in Israel, he tried to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. He tried to make AIPAC subject to FARA, the foreign agent registration act, which every other foreign agent that’s engaged in political activity has to register under. He tried to do a few things and that was greatly opposed, and of course, then he was assassinated.

That was really the last time the US, in a major way, made any efforts to rein in Israel. There were a couple smaller incidents where that happened. Interestingly, under Reagan, Reagan told Menachem Begin, who I’ve already mentioned, to relent from killing civilians in Lebanon, which he did… just through a phone call.

[00:17:17] Dan Kovalik: By the way, at that same time, Joe Biden was applauding the killing of civilians in Lebanon by Israel, and said, “Hey, if we were in the same situation and Canada was attacking us, I’d be killing Canadian civilians.” Even Begin was ashamed by that remark by Biden, and had distanced himself from it, which shows how deeply Biden is supportive of the Zionist/Israeli project.

[00:17:40] Steven Grumbine: Wow, wow.

[00:17:41] Dan Kovalik: Despite his crocodile tears from time to time about the deaths of civilians in Gaza, he is full on-board in supporting this slaughter in Gaza. He has no interest in reining in Israel, which gets us to Gaza. I just want to mention, so we mentioned the Nakba of 1947-1948, which displaced about 750,000 Palestinians, killed thousands of others.

Gaza now is what many- even Israeli officials- are terming Nakba 2.0, and it actually is dwarfing the first Nakba. Because you now have about 1.9 million Palestinians that have been displaced within Gaza. That dwarfs the 750,000 of the first Nakba. And you now have the official figure being around 40,000 Palestinians killed again, which dwarfs the number killed

in the first  Nakba. I think, by the way, that- and I mentioned in the book, and I talk about why I believe this- I believe that even that figure, the 40,000, is probably a huge underestimate for several reasons. You have thousands of people still under rubble, that aren’t counted in that, and also, people are dying now, of starvation, of disease in their own homes.

Those people are probably not being counted, because all of the figures that we’re getting, are relying on the Palestinian health ministry to tell us how many people are dying… and Israel’s destroyed all the hospitals. That’s how deaths are counted, right? That’s how births and deaths are counted, right?

You usually get your death certificate from a hospital. You get your birth certificate from a hospital. Well, the hospitals are, for the most part, gone. So who’s counting the dead now?It’s not being well counted. So I think you could easily double that 40,000, or triple it, or quadruple it.

I think when this is all done, it will be in the hundreds of thousands of people dead, which again, makes the first Nakba much smaller in comparison. But this was always the goal. I mean, Israel is doing in Gaza, and also in the West Bank on a smaller scale, what they really wanted to do all along, and that is get rid of every Palestinian.

And not just get rid of them physically, but destroy their heritage, destroy any memory of them. And that’s why also in Gaza,  the Israelis have been methodically destroying churches. Christian churches and mosques. They destroyed the hall of records where all the records are kept. Birth certificates, again, death certificates.

They’re trying to wipe out any memory that these people existed. And in fact, over the years have denied that a group called the Palestinians ever existed. They would like to wipe out the Palestinians from the map, and pretend that they were never there to begin with. And again, that’s always been the conceit in the myth of Israel.

The myth has been, ‘a land without people for a people without land.’ But of course, there were people on that land, but we’re to believe that’s not true. And of course, the West has largely believed or given into that myth. This is the first time, with the protests we’re seeing, that on a huge scale, Westerners are finally waking up and saying, ‘Oh wow, there were people on that land,

they’ve been horribly treated, they’re being massacred now and we don’t accept it.’ And that gets back to my first remarks. I heard a very good, interview, and I forget who it’s with, I’m sorry, I can’t give an attribution for this statement, but I thought it was a very good statement of the problem Israel has with what they’re doing right now.

What he said is, ‘look, every Western country has had some form of settler colonial project.’ And again, the US, Canada are great examples of this. Where they went in, they massacred on a huge scale, literally millions of Native Americans, spread disease to them, killed all the bison, which was their main source of food and took over the land.

And he said, ‘look, that was immoral, even back when that was being done, but it was accepted amongst the Europeans that you could do that.’ What he said was, ‘in the 21st century, that’s not acceptable anymore. No one, outside a small group of people, would acknowledge that is a proper thing you can do.

So what the guy was saying is, well, Israel’s essentially trying to do this about a century or so too late. This is not appropriate anymore. And thenthat’s why you’re seeing this reaction on the college campuses, because they know that, these students, God bless them, understand you’re not supposed to do that.

We shouldn’t have done it to begin with in North America. It was done. We need to deal with that. We need to maybe have reparations and other things, but it was done, but it can’t be done anymore. And now we know, as you mentioned at the outset, we know that it’s happening, not because of the mainstream media, but because of social media, we’re seeing videos and photos every hour of babies being killed in Gaza.

And that’s why too, the entire Western narrative of moral superiority, and being the beacon of democracy, it’s completely falling apart. And you can see that at the state department press conferences, where the spokespeople for the government, they can’t even answer questions with a straight face.

They look horribly embarrassed, to try to defend the indefensible, and that’s a problem. The US has really never been in this position, even during terrible things the US has done in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, they always found a way to have some, at least colorable, explanation for what they were doing, that most people accepted…

fighting communism or whatever. That’s not working now. For the first time, there really is no ideological answer or moral answer for what’s happening in Gaza. And so, you see these officials being interrupted, being bothered on the streets because they’re in the wrong, and they can’t even tell people how they’re not in the wrong.

I think that also explains why we’re seeing really terrible violence against the student protesters and professors, by the way, who support them.

[00:24:07] Steven Grumbine: Oh my.

[00:24:08] Dan Kovalik: Because the universities, which are supposed to be these institutions of learning and education, I thought, [we all thought], can’t ideologically defend what’s happening. So, all they can do is billy club people. And the fact that that’s the answer on a university campus, at an Ivy League school, like Columbia, for example, tells you everything you need to know.

That this cannot be defended with words, with reasoning, and so they need to use violence. And it can’t even be defended by the highest institutions of learning in the United States. That is creating a crisis. There is a crisis. I mean, what is going to happen? This is leading to revolutionary change, I believe, in the West.

The Palestinian uprising is radicalizing the West. It has held up a mirror to who we are, and it ain’t pretty. It’s never been pretty. Again, going back to our own settler colonialist history, slavery, other things, it’s never been pretty. It’s always been ugly. And now, I really think, for the first time, in a profound way, people are seeing that ugliness for what it is and can’t abide by it.

[00:25:20] Steven Grumbine: You know Dan, normally we talk about MMT here, and I have not been able to bring myself to just do a pure MMT show. As we’re watching this happen, I know, because I understand federal finance, I know that Joe Biden is literally not raising a nickel of taxes on a single soul, is using this to fund Halliburton, and Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, and all these other military industrial complex vipers, these parasites. And they are, in turn, handing weapons over. Israel couldn’t do what it’s doing, if it didn’t have the US directly funding these things. And  as an MMT guy,

focusing purely on the economy, I see this and I say, ‘this is a perfect example of MMT.’Look, you’re watching public money go directly to the annihilation of a group of people that doesn’t have a standing army, doesn’t have major weapons going on, it doesn’t have any of the things that would need to defend itself.

[00:26:29] Dan Kovalik: No air force to defend itself, right.

[00:26:32] Steven Grumbine: Nothing. And yet the greatest, the greatest, the largest, most violent empire in human history, the US, is sitting there literally full funding, like as if Israel is, somehow or another, this child, this little baby that needs protecting , as this little teeny group of people trapped in a, basically a terrarium,

throw stones at them, etc..  I think to myself, and I’ll just throw this at you, okay… if I was a slave and I started talking to my other fellow slaves at night about let’s break loose, and the slave owner came to me and tried to stop me from doing what I was doing, and we killed the slave owner… I am fully righteous in that killing.

I have alleviated my oppressor. The idea that these people have the ability for a diplomatic solution, I mean, they have offered to give back whatever hostages they had, prisoners, and Israel has rejected everything, straight across the board, as we watch. They literally told folks to go to Rafa, it would be a safe place.

And then subsequently, while they’re trapped there, bomb the bejesus out of them. And you see the beheaded baby, real, literal, live, now dead, beheaded babies, burned up babies. And I see people, genuinely, either A- ignoring this and going about life, and doing selfies, and smiling on vacation and living La Vida Loco. Or I see them excommunicating people that actually speak up on it. Or worse,

they’re out there talking about Joe Biden “sticking the landing”, or literally celebrating his state of the union, things like that, instead of taking this opportunity to describe that public money can be used for good. Which would be healthcare, ending student debt, fixing the climate, making reparations to descendants of slaves, whatever. Or it can be used to fund genocide, as is happening right now.

And I just, as an MMT person, I find it an opportunity lost. Either we’re against genocide – and here’s a great opportunity to explain the way federal finance works and what’s going on – or we’re silently complicit about genocide and going about our lives. And so, I just want to state unequivocally that we, at Real Progressives and Macro and Cheese, are decidedly against genocide 100 % and we’ll do whatever we can to expose that

as often as we can. And I really appreciate you, and your clarity of vision, and your clarity of the message. There is no wiggle room here. This is a genocide. And if you look, there’s not going to be anything left. There’s not going to be a need for a twostate solution. There’s not going to be a need for any kind of negotiation. They will be wiped out. They will be erased from history. Your thoughts.

[00:29:32] Dan Kovalik: No, it’s true. And what came to mind when you were saying, you were talking about the slave revolts and what not, there’s this cognitive dissonance in US culture where we, in the culture, we properly are trained to support David over Goliath, right?

I was thinking, when you mentioned the Slave Revolt, I was thinking of the movie Django Unchained, which is a very popular Quentin Tarantino film. A remake of an older film by the same name, where the protagonists, were hunting down slave owners. And it was a very popular film, and of course, everyone properly rooted for the guys hunting down the slave owners.

They weren’t rooting for the slave owners. And we watch a movie like Star Wars, where the rebels fight against the horrible Empire. And we know from George Lucas’s notes that, in fact, the Empire was the United States. When he wrote it, he was thinking United States, and the rebels were Vietnam.

He actually, explicitly thought that when he was making the film. And we rooted for the rebels, and we have rooted against the empire, of course. But in real life, in real life, many people continue to root for Goliath over David.

Now, some of that is though, because of propaganda, because they’re turned around, because they don’t really understand who the David and Goliath are in the story. And of course, in the case of Israel-Palestine, they’re very confused, because Israel happens to have the Star of David on their flag. They wrap themselves in the mantle of David. But that doesn’t make them David, in the circumstance, but people are confused.

Finally,that confusion is starting to break apart. And again, it is because of social media, which has been the best friend the Palestinians have ever had. Because for the first time in a long time, we are seeing the reality of these types of wars that the US is supporting.

Really, the last time before this that we saw that, was in Vietnam, when that mainstream press actually did some reporting.  60 Minutes went there and showed soldiers calmly setting huts on fire, and old women outside crying and sobbing.

And that made an impact on people. But since Vietnam, journalism has collapsed. Mainstream journalism is a joke, and it doesn’t cover wars like that anymore. We don’t see dying in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t see anything about it. I mean, we had this war in Afghanistan for 20 years.

I remember very few segments about Afghanistan in the news. It was happening, but no one really paid attention to it. But now, again, with social media, people are seeing these terrible atrocities. And it’s very clear who David is in this story.

The American people, for all their faults, have decent instincts, and their instincts are to side with the poor over the rich and what not. Our goal, people like you and me, is to spread the word about the true nature of these wars, and who the players are, and who David is, and who Goliath is.

And again, the mouthpieces of the government are unable to compete with the reality that we’re seeing, and that’s why they want to censor people. That’s why they want to get rid of professors who support Palestine. That’s the main reason they want to get rid of TikTok… and AIPAC’s been pushing that.

They don’t like these little videos of kids being killed in Gaza. And they try to portray that as propaganda, but that’s the, it’s the opposite of propaganda. It’s real. And when humans see other humans being treated that way, they recoil. And that’s what you’re seeing on the college campuses, and I only hope that it spreads.

We need a bigger peace movement because more war is coming, and we didn’t even get the other conflicts. But this government wants more war. It wants more direct war with Russia, maybe with China, and we need to stop that. And we’re the only people who can. And we’re privileged to live in this country that wants these wars, because maybe we can stop it.

[00:33:16] Steven Grumbine: Right.  I look at– Folks, I want to give a shout out to a few people that I’ve been following closely, that are not necessarily, they don’t get enough credit.  Obviously, The Gray Zone with Aaron Mate.

[00:33:29] Dan Kovalik: And Max Blumenthal too.

[00:33:31] Steven Grumbine: Exactly, Max as well. But then you look over at people that maybe go under the radar, folks that were once centrist shitlibs.  Advocates like Peter Daou, has been unapologetically frontline on this.  @ecomarxi A.K.A. Tiberius on X has been remarkably relentless in his attacks on the genocide.There have been folks like Ben Norton, who has been relentless on these things as well, yourself, on and on and on. I mean, seeing someone in particular, like Kate Willett, who is a comedian, but she’s also an unapologetic Democrat

And she’s out there leading frontline, like just to show that this is not about politics, this is about genocide. Right. And she’s out there literally saying, “Oh my God, I cannot believe the level of depravity that people are deploying to bully people around to overlook genocide, to not look, do not look here.” She’s, quite frankly, she’s like,’I’ll do whatever it takes.’

And this pier thing, oh my god, more aid was getting to the folks in Gaza before the fricking fraudulent PR stunt, called a pier, was put out there and has done nothing but create problems.

[00:34:55] Dan Kovalik: And now it’s floating away.

[00:34:56] Steven Grumbine: Yes, this is what I am saying.

[00:34:58] Dan Kovalik: I mean, we could not even do it competently. $50 million! It is a joke.

[00:35:03] Steven Grumbine: Think about this, the Democrats were traditionally the party of labor. That’s been a long time since that’s been true.

[00:35:10] Dan Kovalik: Yes, and civil rights. Yes.

[00:35:12] Steven Grumbine: On and on and on. But we’re trading off of the memories of these things. Let me just state, for anybody that’s wondering, I’m not focused on electoral politics in any way, shape or form. But the narratives that we have to fight through, to get people determined to fight against genocide. Folks,

genocide, like,  the never again of 8 million Jews being killed in Auschwitz. The never again is happening again right now. This is not political. If this is political to you, that’s disgusting to me. This is 100 percent simply about slaughtering people indiscriminately. I mean, we’re talking about AI drones, literally killing people. We’re talking about technology from the United States being used to slaughter children, in our name.

Not in our ‘tax dollars’, in our name. And in reality, we don’t have nearly enough. I mean, think about what kind of look and feel the aesthetic of all these protesters across- I mean, I see this stuff Jordan Chariton shows us. All the marches and protests and the violent beat downs that are occurring in New York.

[00:36:27] Dan Kovalik: Yeah, I saw.

[00:36:28] Steven Grumbine:  Columbia, you name it. I mean literally, Jill Stein got hit with a bicycle,  unbelievable.

I don’t care what you think about any of the individuals. I don’t care if you even like Muslim faith. I don’t care if you have issues of patriarchy. There are legitimate issues thatwe could talk about, after we’ve stopped the genocide. But a genocide, no matter who they are, I have a hard time watching people talk about the United States and these colors don’t run, and I’m proud to be an American, as we’re watching the indigenous people in this country, have all the ailments that you laid out in the beginning here.

I’m so disgusted with this kind of privileged perspective. And I don’t even know how to function in that.I go to bed at night feeling sick inside, that there’s not more we can do.

People run around with, I just voted sticker on their forehead, as if they’ve done something. But in reality, you should already know, inherently know, there has been study after study, after study, after study, after more studies, that show we live in an oligarchy. We do not live in a democracy. We don’t even really live in a constitutional republic,

quite frankly. We live in the “American exception” as Aaron Good would say. That the rest of the world has to follow these rules or be worried about bombs from the US. But the US doesn’t have to follow these rules. I mean, think about this brave groups of people, South Africa, I think Turkey, who all was it that stood up and brought a case?… Nicaragua, yep,

brought a case to jail Netanyahu for war crimes. What was the US’ response? “You do that, we’ll invade the Hague, we’ll take, we’ll do some…” What the hell man? This is ridiculous. On its face, it should be like, “Oh wow, we’re doing that?’ Why do you think that we’re not seeing the lights go on for these folks? Are they that propagandized?

Are they that mesmerized by the belief of American exceptionalism? It’s just unbelievable.

[00:38:40] Dan Kovalik: I think some are. I think many, who are only watching the mainstream news, are not really keyed into what’s truly happening, and that’s a lot of people. I think many Democrats are willing to look the other way because it’s ‘Joe Biden’s war.’ And they are so afraidof the prospect of Donald Trump, that they are willing to hold their nose and vote for Biden, and don’t want to criticize him.

I think that answers a lot of it. I think that’s a lot of the reason. And that’s why truthfully having a Democrat in office, again, in reality, can be worse than having a Republican, because the people who would naturally protest war, who are the liberals, look the other way when it’s their president that’s doing it.

Obama got away with murder, literally. Clinton did, and now Biden is. And if this were Trump’s war, you’d see maybe a lot more protest out there, because again, the people naturally inclined to protest over these things, would be protesting them. That’s why,  in part, there were much bigger protests, in truth, in the run up to the Iraq war.

And that’s because it was George W. Bush, because people hated him. And I’m okay with people hating them.But the point is, if something’s wrong under a Republican, it’s also wrong under a Democrat. That should be an obvious fact for people, but in this two-party system we live in, it’s not. That is not a reality.

The reality is, they root for their own team, such as it is. Even if their team does nothing for them. I mean, what have the democrats done, even on the other issues people care about? Have they defended abortion rights? No.

[00:40:16] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely.

[00:40:17] Dan Kovalik: If Biden had a democratic majority in both houses, they could have passed legislation to protect abortion. Did they do it? No. What are they really doing? Even on the social issues people care about? Nothing. What are they getting from Biden? Nothing.

I mean, it really is more a matter of style, more than anything. I joked, I thinkthe difference between Obama and Trump, was the difference between Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.One was kind of a handsome guy, and then the other guy was an unkempt clown. But they both killed people, sowhat’s the difference?

But apparently, those appearances matter to people Wwhich is sad. But again, on the bright side is, you do have significant protests happening.

[00:41:05] Steven Grumbine: What are they accomplishing? I mean this with like they’re not stopping the genocide, but maybe what we’re seeing is an American public unifying around a set of principles. And maybe that does change us for the better, long term. I don’t know.

[00:41:20] Dan Kovalik: It hasn’t stopped the genocide, that’s true. In truth, it hasn’t even slowed it down, or even sped up humanitarian aid. I mean, those are realities we have to confront. At the same time, it has forced the administration to try to answer some of these things, which is good,

the fact that they are being held at least somewhat accountable for what’s happening. But yeah, I think this is probably, the demonstrations are more important on the medium to long term. I think it will change the trajectory of this country and Israel’s too.

[00:41:51] Steven Grumbine: What do you think about the latest changes to the way that they’re pushing upanybody that speaks ill on this, that talks about genocide, will be considered a terrorist sympathizer or a terrorist.

[00:42:04] Dan Kovalik: And anti-semitic. Yeah.

[00:42:05] Steven Grumbine: Yeah. Talk about that.Because for real, these are the things that terrify us. We feel like our job is to inform people. I’m not a voter. I’m not telling people who to vote for. I’m saying I’m standing on principle and I’m saying, for God’s sake, people are dying now. Not in a month, not in six months, right here, right now, what are we doing about it? We’re accepting this.

And, to me, the idea of turning it into politics is where I depart. I can’t handle that. I don’t want to hear any ‘rah, rah.’ I don’t want to hear about your candidate. I don’t want to hear about your… I don’t want to hear about any of that. I want to see us not do these things that are truly, if you want to quote Hillary, ‘deplorable.’

I mean, this is as deplorable as it gets, is it not? I mean, what is the other thing that we could do beyond genocide that’s worse. I am trying to find it.

[00:42:58] Dan Kovalik: No, this is as bad as it can get. I mean, that’s why this idea, ‘oh, we’re afraid Trump’s going to get elected.’ It’s like, how worse could it be? I mean, Biden is doing the worst. Don’t worry about who’s going to be president in January, worry about the guy who’s in there now. That should be the focus, is stopping this genocide.

I think those memes that say, ‘if you wondered what you would do as a German during the Holocaust, you know now, because you’re doing it. If you’re not protesting this genocide, you are a good German.

[00:43:25] Steven Grumbine: That’s terrifying.

[00:43:26] Dan Kovalik: That’s just the fact. This is a moral litmus test for people and many people are failing it, some people are not. I applaud those people. I applaud people who are brave enough to stand up, as you say, against now new laws that they’re trying to outlaw speech, and that’s what those laws are. Again, because, the powers that be can’t defend what they’re doing, so they just want to quiet everyone who’s criticizing it.

But the good news is, the people who are protesting, are just ignoring that. It’s just background noise. And the claim of antisemitism, which is so overused, it’s a shame, because there is really antisemitism and that should be condemned. But this thing, whereanytime you criticize Israel for murdering people, you’re antisemitic, which is absurd.

[00:44:12] Steven Grumbine: Yes.

[00:44:13] Dan Kovalik: But that is the charge. People are not taking it that seriously anymore. It does not have the power it used to have, and you have plenty of Jews. And even Holocaust survivors are saying no, you are wrong, it is not antisemitic, it is human and if you oppose the Holocaust, you have to oppose this.

And you can’t hide behind the Holocaust to commit another genocide, right? I mean, that just stands to reason. And Israel has been very adept at using false claims of antisemitism, of misusing the Holocaust to defend its actions. But again, that is starting to slip away. That those defenses are starting to slip away.

People are not taking those as seriously as they used to, and that’s a good thing. I hope that in the medium to long term, what’s happening now, the protests, are going to have an impact on that discourse. And it’s a critical thing because this country needs some self-analysis, needs full throated discussion about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going as a nation.

We have to have that come to Jesus moment, that we’ve never really had. And this is going to help do that.

[00:45:18] Steven Grumbine: I hope so sir, I really do. Dan, do me a favor, plug your book one more time before we get out of here.

[00:45:24] Dan Kovalik: Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed the discussion. The new book is The Case for Palestine:  Why It Matters, Why You Should Care. You can get it on Amazon bookstore near you. If they don’t have it, they can order it for you. You can also get it directly, publisher Skyhorsepublishing.com.

[00:45:41] Steven Grumbine: Thank you so much, Dan. And without further ado, we bid youadieu. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese, with my guest Dan Kovalik. For the organization and for the people of Gaza, we are praying for you. And without further ado, we bid you adieu, and we are out of here.