0:10Ramzy Baroud in his haunting memoir Before the Flood, the chronicle of three generations of his family in Palestine, personalizes the struggle by Palestinians to endure British and then Israeli occupation. He details the intimacy of village life for the al-Badras family in Bayt Daras and later, after the Nakba in 1948, the refugee camps in Gaza. His portrait weaves together ancestral history with the colonial forces that for a century have a miserated and oppressed the Palestinian people. Set against the unrelenting violence of settler colonialism, apartheid, and finally genocide is the steadfast resistance of
0:52Palestinians who cling with ferocity to their land, their culture, and their faith. Ramzy is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, which he has led since 1999. He holds a PhD in Palestine studies from the University of Exeter and is the author of eight books, including Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, The Last Earth, and These Chains Will Be Broken. He is also the co-editor with Ilan Pappé of Our Vision for Liberation and the forthcoming volume Gaza Rising, which examines Palestinian resistance and political transformation in Gaza, where he is from.
1:33Ramzy, uh I want to begin with the uh dedication of your book.
1:40To my sister, Dr. Soma Muhammad Muhammad Baroud, I write your name in full because that is how it appeared on the white bag that held your remains soon after the bomb was dropped. I want to begin with that because this is a wound at this point. I think almost no one in Gaza has escaped.
2:04That's right.
2:06Um Yeah, I I I know that you ask difficult questions, but I didn't realize that you were going to start with the most difficult question. You know, when when the people who who perish in the genocide uh even if you don't know them, even if they're not close to you, as a Gazan, we are one large family. And I don't mean that in a sentimental way because we are essentially the the descendants of the 80,000 to um rather uh to 200,000 Palestinian refugees fellaheen that made their way to Gaza after the Nakba, and they multiplied within an area that actually shrunk. So, physically Gaza is a lot smaller than it was in 1948,
2:50but the population of Gaza have increased by over 10 11-fold.
2:56And yet somehow we created this space in which we are one family. Um I I doubt that there is a single person anywhere in Gaza in which another family on the other side of Gaza cannot find some sort of a familial connection through mother, through father, through anything. It just It's It's just you can't create that separation after after this this much time. So, every everyone who dies in Gaza is somehow family, friend, neighbor, relative connection of some kind.
3:26But when the genocide grew in its intensity, it got closer and closer. So, within the very first few days, you had three Baroud families that were killed in Nuseirat refugee camp in the center, in Khan Yunis in the south, and in in Jabalia in the north.
3:45And then, for whatever reason, we started counting. I don't know why I was counting the dead. Um you know, so the number went 33, 55. We reached 110 and then I stopped counting because I didn't know why I was counting my family that were killed. And then immediate cousins with their wives or husbands and children, aunts and uncles.
4:08But for some reason you just never think that it's going to hit that hard, so close to the point that it's your own sister. And there is something about my sister that I think it's important to denote here. She wasn't just a doctor.
4:23And every doctor is very special in Gaza, especially in Gaza.
4:26But she was an intellectual. She was a community leader. She empowered so many women in the southern Gaza that they created this powerful clique basically of medical workers. She fought for their rights. She established unions. She seemed in a sense kind of like larger than life and no matter what happened, somehow you feel like she is safe and you don't know why.
4:49Maybe because she survived many massacres before. Maybe because she was the one who was responsible for dealing with the wounded of the various and previous wars. She told me at one point she said, "You know, you bring so many children to this life as a doctor and to be the one who pronounced them dead within your own lifetime, it is something so difficult to bear, but that's the life we live in."
5:14And just to wake up one morning and to see your sister on the news, it was complete shock and disbelief. But she's the only Suma. Suma is not a common name in Gaza. She was one of the very few Sumas and how many doctors Sumas? So, I saw it on the Wafa News Agency. I saw the body in a white bag with the full name on it with DR there and I was like, no, I reported on it as if it's not my sister. I knew she was my sister, but I wanted to hide it until my my daughter came and told me of course devastated and crying, I think Auntie Suma died.
5:54And that's when I realized, yeah, indeed Auntie Suma has died and that was supposed to be the end of it and it shouldn't.
6:03And Israel has targeted not just journalists and of course many academics, but in particular doctors and health workers.
6:14It it has and and and there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. Um Israel wanted to ethnic cleanse the Palestinians from the very very beginning. This is not something that Smotrich was talking about separately as if he is operating outside the system or Ben-Gvir. This was the Israeli plan.
6:34This wasn't just about killing, yes it was. It wasn't just about revenge and it was. It was about something much bigger.
6:41They thought the Nakba will end here.
6:44That chapter that they started in 1948 was supposed to be um over now. Push the Palestinians out of Gaza and and by extension the West Bank that really for various reasons that we can discuss now or later um did not put up so much resistance would have been an easy target. You push the Palestinians out of the West Bank, you have ethnic cleansing there annexation area C is gone and so forth and so on. So how do you do that? You target the places that bring people together. You go after universities, schools, shelters and hospitals. This this civilian infrastructure which is of course the most obvious war crime ever. It wasn't
7:27just because Israel was committing war crimes, Israel had a strategy. Destroy the hospitals, kill the doctors, people have no reason to be in those places.
7:36This is why they carried out that first massacre in the Baptist hospital uh and hospital in Gaza City, followed by Shifa, Nasser, and all the rest.
7:46In in when when people went from the north to the south, um now the Khan Younis hospitals became a place that brought brought people together. And Israel wanted to take over Khan Younis. So, they systematically started assassinating the doctors of the Khan Younis of the Nasser Hospital, not only within the vicinity of the hospital, but in their own homes, in the streets, and so forth. My sister was was uh uh targeted by a drone that kept chasing after the the taxi that was carrying her with few other civilians, and they kept going after them until they they they uh blew up the car, and and and that was it. So, so yes, it was
8:26about killing doctors and medical workers. Thousands of doctors, medical workers, uh civil defense, firefighters, and so forth were killed to ensure that people leave the areas that brought them together and go somewhere else further south.
8:43Before we speak about your book, let's just speak a little bit about what is happening now in Gaza. Israel has seized what, almost 60% of the Gaza Strip, and we should be clear Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. It is blocking uh humanitarian aid in violation of the ceasefire, and in particular materials that would allow uh Palestinians to uh construct any kind of dwellings or permanent shelters.
9:17Uh it has uh of course destroyed medical facilities. Uh people are drinking uh uh water that is unclean, uh not not uh treated, uh living next to fetid pools of raw sewage. Uh let's talk a bit about it's a slow-motion genocide, which sadly has uh the world is kind of shifted its focus from uh the horror of the full-blown genocide uh and and is allowing Israel to essentially continue uh the process that it began on October 7th.
9:59I just wanted to add that the irony in all of this is that this what really led to October 7th in the first place. There was a slow-motion genocide in Gaza to begin with. 90 to 97% of Gaza's water was undrinkable, according to the United Nations.
10:14Uh uh people were dying from easily curable diseases in Gaza. Cancer patients had no access to medicine.
10:21People who needed dialysis machines were dying in in you know, the once you once you are at a stage that you actually need kidney patients needing dialysis machines, you know that your chances of death is a lot higher than your chances of living. So, Gaza was suffering to begin with. And the Israelis were very clear about this. Uh in terms of food, in terms of medicine, the argument that was made, we all remember that infamous Wise Glass, the the former advisor of Ariel Sharon, when he argued that uh uh that we don't want to kill Palestinians, we just want to put them on a diet. You know, that's just a code
10:57word for, you know, we want them at the you know, kind of at the brink of starvation. Uh and and Israel in terms of military action, every few years they would go to Gaza to so-called mow the lawn. Uh meaning to kill few thousands, wound few tens of thousands, and just remind Gazans who is the boss, and kind of carry, you know, continue this perpetual uh sense of besiegement, in which as a result of which the vast majority of the people of Gaza, mostly youth, never stepped a foot outside that tiny little space of about 181 rather 140 40 plus square miles, right?
11:38Um so so that situation that was already dire before the genocide, we can only use our imagination to to think about what it was during the genocide when 92% of everything that was standing in Gaza was destroyed with the entire infrastructure of Gaza was decimated and now with no infrastructure to the you know, for for for people to even pretend or try to survive, that is gone.
12:06So now we are back to to the to the slow motion genocide you speak of, Chris. But the the issue is this is different than the one that existed prior to the genocide because at least prior to the genocide they had somewhat functioning hospitals, somewhat functioning clinics, somewhat functioning schools. There was somewhat of a civilian lives that operated somehow because they are amazing people. They you know, uh they are my people. I am from Gaza. We are very very resourceful in managing under the most dire of circumstances. But now they are being asked to engineer a miracle of survival while while while the world is looking
12:43on somewhere else, which is creating the exact same cycle that is going to lead to the the same anger, the same rage uh rage that led to October 7th in the first place. So so everyone is going to pay the price for this, but sadly, if that is to happen again, everyone is going to point the finger at Gaza and say, "It's Gaza's problem or Gaza's fault. They initiated uh all of this as if there's absolutely no historical context to any of this story."
13:13From the beginning of the genocide, uh Israel was through leaks in the Israeli press, but often public statements, was very clear that the Palestinians in Gaza were to be driven from Gaza.
13:28Uh that must remain the goal.
13:32Uh do you see Israel achieving that goal? I mean, that's certainly what they want.
13:38I I don't think they will achieve that goal because, you know, there's something that I call the the, you know, the the secret code of Gaza. There is a social code we have in Gaza that you can't understand via academic research or theory or or or or rational logical thinking. You have to be embedded in that population and you have to experience living in Gaza and be one of them in order for you to understand what that code is.
14:06Um you know, I come from a village uh called Beit Daras, as you saw in the book. And the people of that village are usually associated with having large heads.
14:16I thought that people were we say that we have large heads, that we physically have large heads. It turned out that was just a way to say that people of that village are particularly stubborn. And we are very stubborn people.
14:29Um but we are also located in a place in which, you know, Palestinian refugees from Gaza all are villagers. They come from you know, they are peasants, fellaheen, we call them. We come from the countryside in southern Palestine. We are people that value community, value honor, uh value bravery, value resilience, value karama, dignity, hurriya, freedom. These are the codes and the little concept according to which we operate. They are not something you can translate to new sound bites to explain why we do what we do.
15:03And there is a decision that has been made in Gaza, a collective decision that is uncommunicated, but it's there, that we would rather die to the last of us than leave Gaza. In fact, we have that saying in Arabic, we say, "Hatta akhir nuqta dam." Until the last drop of blood. So, we will fight until the last drop of blood. And now, here's the thing. That is supposed to be a metaphor, but it's not. For us in Gaza, it's an actual thing. We stand our ground and and we die in large numbers, but we'll never abandon our homeland. If Israel could not achieve that over the course of 2 years of genocide plus an
15:41ongoing and ongoing, and they still haven't. When people applied to leave Gaza for medical purposes, the vast majority of them are just wounded uh people who needed to go and get uh urgent medical attention. You did not see a million Palestinian applying to go and leave Gaza. They will not leave. In fact, a lot of them came back to Gaza during that brief transition where some people were allowed to cross the Rafah border. So, as long as the Palestinian people have made that decision to withstand under any circumstance and they proved that tangibly and practically, I don't think Israel will possibly
16:23succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza.
16:27Well, let's talk about your book. Um I think you do a couple things in the book that I think are really important. It's beautifully written, by the way, too.
16:35And that is that so often those of us on the outside of Gaza uh hear the stories of the elites.
16:44Um you know, those people who were educated in the West or would we don't hear the stories of most Palestinians which come from the kind of villages that your family comes from. Uh that's number one. And number two, I think what you do really well in the book is talk about the continuum of resistance beginning with, of course, the Zionist militias and the British that attack uh the the the town in Palestine where you come from and integrating that all the way to the present including uh, the resistance of Hamas.
17:26I think that's right. So, the reason I you know, I do long I do uh, people's history. I do micro history. It's a way of challenging not just the Zionist narrative and the mainstream narrative which is kind of the traditional academic narrative much closer to the Zionist narrative than it is to the Palestinian narrative. But, I dare say that I'm also challenging some in the Palestinian narrative itself.
17:51Um, that's the common one that we are familiar with and I'm not challenging them because I think that they have made a mistake in in their historical narration of of of Palestine, but because we were pushed into this position because we were so dehumanized, so neglected, so marginalized in the story that by by kind of like intuitively we started trying to prove that as a people we existed prior to Zionism, that we are not anti-Semitic, that we are not not only that we are we are so humanized, you know, we had a culture before before Israel. We had theaters and we had opera houses in Haifa and Jaffa and we had a thriving
18:33civil society as in in this defensiveness in which the Palestinian has traditionally told his story in Western academia. But, the fact is vast majority of us are actually peasants.
18:46We're fellahin. And we're very proud and we are rooted in our society and many of us did not that generation has never been to an opera house or never been to a cinema and did not necessarily go to libraries and many of them were illiterate. You see, like my family in Beit Daras was perceived to be middle class because we had a donkey. Most people didn't have donkeys. So, during the Nakba you know, the privileged ones, of course, the rich were the first to leave using trucks because they could afford trucks and but the the majority left on foot. And some left on donkeys and we were one of the privileged one where my
19:26my uncles and aunties were kind of kind of taking turns on the donkey, kind of circulating around the country, southern Palestine for days until they ended up in in in Gaza. So, the reason I am saying this is sometimes I feel that when we tell the story, we try to accommodate the so-called target audience so much to the point that we invest so much in humanizing. I think I don't think we need to humanize as Palestinians because we are not only I don't want to say superhumans in Gaza, but our story speaks for itself. No, my my dad my my grandfather did not have the biggest, you know, library or or,
20:06you know, yeah, in in in Jerusalem and we did not have a villa and we lived in a in a mud brick house and and we we, you know, we farmed the lands and we lived as an extension for of numerous generations of Palestinians who were very close to the land. Um, that that story is not told often. It's always told in the margins. But or as footnotes. But the thing is, we are the vast majority of the Palestinian people.
20:33We are the refugees. We are the ones who live in refugee camps. And here's the trick. We are the ones who has fueled the resistance of Palestine from the very beginning in 1948 when we and we resisted in night during the war of 1948, but when we were pushed out into Gaza, we immediately formed what we call fedayeen, the freedom fighting groups.
20:57These were peasants, had no ideological background.
21:00Uh, they were their their sole focus was to find a way back to to their homes in Palestine. Some of them just wanted to go and claim some of the harvest that they collected, but they did not bring with them in the rush of war and Zionist massacres. The Fedayeen eventually became ideological groups, became the Palestine Liberation Army, became the socialist, the PFLP, became the communists, became Fatah, and eventually became Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and the current ideological resistance formations in Gaza. All of this is very, very important context, so we don't think about Hamas in isolation.
21:41Hamas is the same people, the same demographic made up of all of these groups since the very start of the modern Palestinian struggle.
21:51One of the themes of your book from the beginning is the divisions within Palestinian society.
22:02Those who for economic or other reasons decide to collaborate or tolerate with the occupiers, first the British, but then later the Israelis right up of course to the present day with the Palestine Authority. I remember I covered the first Intifada, and I remember the tension in Gaza between the shopkeeping, the bourgeois class, and the shabab on the streets.
22:35And and that is also you know, something that has been unchanged in this long resistance struggle, and I wondered if you could address that.
22:47Absolutely, and I don't think it will change, Chris, because I think we we made a mistake, many of us made a mistake at least in in in in what we considered the unit of analysis to Palestinian unity. And we many of us also played in the hands of Netanyahu.
23:03Remember it was Netanyahu and others who were saying, "You want us to go back to the the peace process. Palestinians are not united, you know, how do we speak to people who speak in so many voices?" Of course it's underhanded and devious because in actuality no national liberation movement has ever been truly and fully united. At the end of the day, we always have classes even before the British came to Palestine. We had classes that existed and coexisted during the Ottoman era. Then there was new formulation under the British, then under the Zionists. You will always have that. You are going to always have those
23:39and usually the downtrodden and the poor and the working class are the people who are going to carry arms and fight until the very end. But you always have this group of people who negotiate. Um, I would I'm in the process of reading this excellent book by uh Amilcar Cabral, the uh from one of the great African uh uh national liberation leaders, uh you know, fighting against the Portuguese back uh in the day. And he was assassinated himself in 1973, I believe. And he talks about the formation of of Guinea during the fight against Portuguese colonialism. And it's just incredible. I mean, if you just
24:20remove the word Guinea and replace it with Gaza and remove Israel Portugal and replace it with Israel, you're going to find the exact same thing. You're going to have those who are fighting and those who are negotiating, the petty bourgeoisie.
24:34That's going to always be the case and it will never change. And they change hands. One day they are working with the Ottomans, then with the English, then with the Israelis. Now, they are the Palestinian Authority for of today. They are trying to benefit. They have VIP cards.
24:49It allows them to travel, to do business with Israel. Some of this are Some of them are actually contractors with the with with Israel to build settlements and the apartheid wall. This doesn't say that Palestinians are particularly bad or they are doing it different. This just says that the course of history is almost predictable and consistent. What really matters is that you have majority of Palestinians who support resistance, who are proving and demonstrating that support in their everyday life. And when I say resistance, I'm not just talking about clash of cops and you know, firing and firepower. I am talking about the
25:29idea of resistance, that we cannot submit, we cannot surrender, that we will always find a way to subsist, to exist, but to also to fight back. They are the majority. They are the majority of Gaza and the West Bank, but they are specially people in the West Bank, they are caught between the Israeli military, settlers on the one hand, and and the negotiating bourgeoisie of the Palestinian Authority on the other who do not want to lose their privileges.
25:57And this is the reality of Palestine.
25:59No, we are not divided people. This is just the nature of national liberation struggles.
26:07There's two things. One, of course, uh under international law, the Palestinians have a right to resist, including the use of force.
26:15Uh and secondly, when I uh was in Gaza and and I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas, the co-founder of Hamas, uh they made it very clear to me that this was not primarily an Islamic resistance group. This was a national liberation movement. And I think you also make that clear in your book.
26:41Um it's a it's a national liberation movement. Hamas has always been a national liberation movement. Ideology in national liberation struggles in Palestine, it is something that kind of serve as um as as um the a platform for articulating and pronouncing a political discourse, kind of having a sense of ideological orientation, but it really doesn't change the fact that it's it's it's a national liberation movement. And you kind of see this. In fact, if you look at the early early statements made by Hamas in the their in fact, their very first statement where they make a reference to the Arabs to come to the rescue. They shame the
27:20Egyptian army for for actually protecting Israel instead of protecting the Palestinians.
27:27Um and they make references that seemed like yeah, they were locating themselves. They were Palestinians, but locating themselves within a larger Arab uh uh um political context, the same way that Fatah has done, the same way that other movements have done in Palestinian history. Then there's the Islamic world, the Islamic ummah. It's not marginal, it's important, but it was not the main center or the core of of Palestinian political awareness. But even that kind of changed in in recent in in recent years, especially during the June aside.
28:02I have read every statement made by Abu Obaida, the the the spokesperson for Hamas who was killed by Israel uh uh in the later phases of the war, and you could see how he was actually relocating Palestine very slowly in his discourse.
28:21At times at times you feel like the the the the Arab and Muslim factor was becoming marginal and he was speaking to the Ahrar al-Alam, the free people of the world. And it's just because according to their political dialectics, as we could see during the June aside, solidarity was not really pouring in coming from the Arab and Muslim world. A lot was happening in South Africa, in in in in Namibia, in in Spain, in Nicaragua, and so forth. So, you start feeling at times that the discourse of Abu Obaida, his language, and his target audience began shifting. So, you see all of these these shifts happening
28:59throughout the years from the very beginning until now, and yet you realize that there is one common factor that never ever changed, that we are Palestinians and that our political identifiers are the Nakba, resistance, muqawamah, hurriyah, fida, the the same political identifiers of all other Palestinian groups. So, no, absolutely, this is not part of some grand Islamic revival project. Uh this is very much a Palestinian national project.
29:29In your book, you write about two powerful political forces, one the Arab nationalist movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Can you talk about those forces and their importance for the Palestinians? And and I think this is very much linked to to to to this is that you know, some somehow we, you know, generation after generation kind of linked our hopes uh and and connected our own existing sense of agency to other movements, leaders, individuals that were somehow you know, um uh kind of rational uh uh uh in in their behavior towards towards the Palestinian cause. Gamal Abdel Nasser
30:16was seemed to be the most rational choice uh for Palestine liberation. Uh he had he earned a lot of credibility uh during the the 1948 uh struggle, the Nakba, the the war. Uh he was one of the last people to uh to leave Palestine uh during the war as he was besieged along with other Egyptian officers with Palestinians fighting together in the town of Fallujah in southern Palestine, the scene of the siege being broken and Gamal Abdel Nasser and the officers kind of marching through Gaza all the way to Sinai is a scene that was is repeated in several of my books because it was really it was very iconic. It you had basically
31:03all the refugees, hundreds of thousands going through the streets to greet them and to show them gratitude as they were as they were leaving and I felt like something was cemented at that particular point in the relationship between Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Palestinian people to the point that I don't think there was a single Palestinian household that actually did not have a poster of Gamal Abdel Nasser. And and and you could have been a secularist, a socialist, an Islamist, it made no difference. Gamal Abdel Nasser was a character that nobody disagreed with. He was there and he was always present in our lives until 1967
31:43happened.
31:44The what we call the Naksa or the setback. And this is was an era in which new voices and new ideas began challenging that narrative that existed between 1948 and 19 until 1967. And in in fact until very recently you have that older generation of Palestinians that wouldn't even allow a conversation about the credibility of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Or was he actually you know did he have Palestine's you know um you know interest in mind or not?
32:20They don't even want to talk about it.
32:22But for the newer generation of historians they started kind of examining the discourses and the politics and realized that maybe there's another way in which we can frame what happened up to that point. Then the Muslim Brotherhood was rising. Now the Muslim Brotherhood are connected to Palestine from the very start.
32:39I don't accept the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood, with all of the mistakes that they may have or haven't committed, I don't accept that the idea that they are an imposition on the Palestinian discourse. They actually fought in Palestine during the the Nakba war, and I speak about this in my book, and they left behind this ideology, this political revolutionary ideology that kept them and the rest of the Palestinian nation kind of somehow connected until Gaza happened. Gaza, when the Gazans were allowed to leave to Egypt and get education from Egypt, they had a kind of like this direct channel to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many
33:23of the early leaders of Hamas studied in in in Egypt, particularly Ain Shams University, Zagazig University, Helwan even, and of course University of Cairo. And they met, coordinated, discussed, but they built kind of a common discourse that made Palestine feel or Hamas or the early Islamic movement at the time, Al-Jama'a Al-Islamiyya we call it, they made it appear as if it's an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood but with Palestinian priorities. And that evolved. That evolved throughout the years until today, where you feel like in a way yes, that connection is still there, but it feels as if it's an entirely different
34:03political movement.
34:06Well, Rantisi studied in Egypt. He was at Alexandria University and I believe was very close to the Muslim Brotherhood before the founding of Hamas. That's right. You write about Sheikh Yassin and you write about Yahya Sinwar and you write about your amazing relative. I'll let you talk about all three. Who I mean, this guy is in his 40s and you know, is still kind of he's finally martyred of course, but just talk about those three figures in terms of resistance.
34:38So, these figures are you know, um I think are very important to understand them at a micro level.
34:45Um and and by extension understand the larger Palestinian experience. Uh Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is is the uh byproduct of revolutionary generation that existed in in Gaza in particular since 1948.
35:02>> just stop you to explain for people who don't know he was an Islamic scholar.
35:08Uh he was finally at the end of his life, wasn't he a quadriplegic, I think?
35:14Um but a brilliant scholar um just to insert that.
35:20Uh >> He was a brilliant scholar and and that's and that's kind of this common character uh that I tried to trace throughout Palestinian history. In fact, I I I ended up discussing what they call uh uh long durée or or long history that goes back hundreds of years in Palestinian history. There's this scholar-warrior sort of sort of thing. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was the quintessential scholar-warrior in in Palestinian history and he is the one who kind of launched armed resistance in Palestine more or less leading to the 1936 uprising and revolution in Palestine that unified the peasants of Palestine
36:00along with the intelligentsia and the urban uh communities in one continuous uprising and revolution that lasted between 1936 and 1939. And and then later I kind of look at Ahmed Yassin as an extension of that. He was the the scholar-warrior, but what makes his character partic- particularly interesting is that he uh his disability over time reached a point that he was literally reading using his tongue and with with time he, you know, they kind of developed a special device uh for him in which he would put in his mouth and he would move between the pages. Uh so we he was in a constant state of
36:40learning.
36:41And and one one element in the scholarship of Ahmed Yassin that I think was interesting, it was this concept of resurrection. That of the resurrection of Palestinian collective intellect. Uh and I think Muhammad Shahada, uh who was also from Beit Daras, from my village, was one of the kind of the, you know, the the those who were communicating that message to young people. That we don't need to lend ourselves to outside ideologies anymore. That Palestinian liberation has to happen from Palestine itself. And for that to happen, we need to resurrect ourselves as a nation, intellectually before anything else. And
37:19in fact, Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic grouping or movement, spent so many years. I mean, they've been around for a very long long time, but they became particularly active after 1967, throughout the '70s, throughout the '80s, all the way until the launch of Hamas in December, I believe it was December 1987. There were like 20 years process of studying, cleansing, resurrecting. These are the terminologies that they they have used.
37:46Uh Yahya Sinwar was one of the disciples of Yassin in that generation. Um and his focus was in the beginning uh on on uh kind of cleansing Palestinian society from the collaborators. Because you can imagine, after 1967, uh Israel now has direct relationship with Gaza. They were not outsiders anymore. You had the Israeli military administration in every part of Gaza.
38:15You cannot leave, you cannot come back to Gaza without having to go through an Israeli.
38:20Uh um everything was controlled by the Israeli they call it the civilian administration. It wasn't civilian at all. It was military.
38:28And you have to speak to the Shin Bet about every little thing. I I had to go to Egypt to study at one point. I needed to meet with the Shin Bet. That's the the the Israeli Yes, the Israeli secret service for people >> service. And then they start negotiating with you. I had an uncle of mine who was with the PLO many years ago. And I needed to explain where is he? I need information. I will not give you a permit. And I was a child. I was a kid.
38:53So, many people became collaborators sometimes out of need. And as a result, they became active participants in the Israeli occupation. And Yahya Sinwar had this group called Majd glory that was dedicated to catching and eliminating these collaborators. Because again, that was their philosophy. You clean your own society. You cleanse your own society before you deal with the enemy. And dealing with the enemy started in 1987. And by the way, Chris, I think this is really important that a lot of kind of new scholarship made this horrific mistake of misinterpreting this relationship between Hamas and the Israeli occupation
39:33to the point of saying so conveniently without understanding any of that history or context by saying, well, you know, at the end of the day Israel established Hamas. And you know, I don't know if you've seen people like that, but some are very well-respected scholars making that argument. No, Israel did not establish Hamas. Maybe maybe in the minds of Israel at one point they wanted to give some space for the Islamic movements to to to prosper, to create some sort of conflict between them and other PLO faction. But creating Hamas as if that was a deliberate Israeli intelligence operation is completely
40:16erroneous. And in proved that to be the case. And and if that was not enough, what happened during the genocide that really in my mind should end that conversation altogether.
40:27And let's talk about your relative. Is what his name? Ahab? Is that right?
40:31Ahab. Ahab is my relative. Now, the thing about Ahab is that um I You know, it's it's funny because I remember him. The last time I saw him before I left Gaza, he was a child. Now, um he was a maybe nine or something like that. But somehow he was pushed to be a man at a very young age. Why? Because he was very close to another character, another brother, friend of mine named Wael. Wael was exactly almost exactly my age, 2 days separated from my birthday.
41:03During the uh uh what we called uh later on we called it Black Sunday. It happened during the First Intifada when an Israeli uh soldier guns down a number of Palestinian workers uh in uh Rishon LeZion in southern Israel leading to a eruption of protest all across Palestine. My cousin Wael was killed during that day of protest. He was shot in the throat standing outside uh his house. That was a defining moment for the entire Badrasawi family. Badrasawi family is just that branch of my family, the Baroud family. Prior to that, they were all sheep laborers in Israel. They were workers. Uh they were
41:47people of great honor. They were the descendants of the same people, refugees, fellahin, freedom fighters.
41:53But they seemed to be focused on just trying to subsist to survive. Then Wael was gone. He was killed. And then Ahab, this child, watching and I describe in the book the very specific scene in which he almost went mute just looking at the body of his brother at the Shifa Hospital as he was being prepared for burial. And then Ihab went from this cute little child that we were be teasing and playing with into this kind of like it's time for me to stand up to be a man. And then Ihab started going to the mosque where Ahmed Yassin was giving lectures.
42:29And then Ihab started reading the Quran and Ihab start try to find his salvation in spirituality.
42:36But I still remember him as this child with his jeans he was so poor he didn't have a belt to keep his pants together.
42:43So he would use a rope. And I just remember that very final scene and I left and I went back to Gaza in in 2012 after another Israeli attempt at mowing the grass of Gaza and I meet Ihab. And Ihab was the head of the northern commands of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam military arm of Hamas.
43:07And I was just like I could not understand the transformation. He was still as kind, he was still as sweet, he was still as polite and gentle, but he was in that position. Now later on he aged per their standards and he went back to school. He did his master's degree in Islamic Sharia. He wanted to do his PhD. He was teaching. He had a halaqah which is the religious group in which he teaches other scholars and he kind of moved on with his life until the June genocide happened and the early days of the June genocide you remember that Chris when they attacked the Shati refugee camp.
43:43And everybody understood that if this fight for Shati is an easy fight, it's over for Gaza because that's where the real warriors of Gaza kind of in the northern area of Gaza are are there. And and my understanding and I just actually just very recently spoke to with his wife at length about this.
44:02She said the young people of the resistance were scared because the fight is usually happening at the border.
44:09You know, the the very close to to to Israel. But it really enters into the Shati refugee camp. So they did not know what to do. So Ehab had to make the decision of going back to the to the fighting himself. And he needed to do something something so extreme before he he dies that he would change the dynamics of the Shati battle. And he did. And I speak about that at length in the book.
44:38Well, he explained he he fires he he walks out into the open and fires on on a on an Israeli tank.
44:47That's right. And and and that was that was immediately went in the news. Of course I reported on it in the news as a journalist not knowing that was actually Ehab who did it. Only later on I discovered that.
44:59And and and and and of course and after that he actually blew himself up in in in you know, kind of ending it all right there. Followed by his son Abdul Rahman, followed by his son Muhammad and so forth and so on. So after that it seems that there was an Israeli decision knowing that he is the one who has done that to completely obliterate the family. There are many many members of that branch of the family. In fact most of my family that were killed during the war comes from that particular branch. Because as they were taken out along with their wives, husbands and children and so on.
45:38So where what's the next chapter? Where are we going? Of course and we've not spoken about it, but there's horrific violence perpetrated by armed groups of settlers they've been given automatic weapons. I think Smotrich what gave them 10,000 weapons they've become you know, uh, you know, murderous gangs inflicting terror. Israel has seized, I think they just wouldn't they just uproot 3,000 trees or something.
46:10They've seized uh, large sections of uh, the West Bank itself.
46:17Uh, the the they've you know, I I when I was in Ramallah uh, uh, summer ago uh, you just couldn't even move between uh, villages. In fact, the day that I was there, the Israelis had come in and burned down all the money exchange shops so people couldn't get foreign currency or money transfers.
46:41Uh, where where are we headed?
46:45Um, I I know it might sound a bit odd to kind of to be positive during these times considering the the kind of losses and grief that we experience and continue to experience.
46:58Um, but in in my mind, I believe that Israel is acting out of total desperation as opposed to confidence with a strategy. Israel started with a strategy, plan D, plan delete. This this maximalist could settler colonial plan that was not only meant to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of historic Palestine, but it kind of so kind of to the very end the very end of the Palestinian nation and and where Israel exists in total permanency. Um, what happened in the last few years destructed that plan. Destructed it in a way that no Arab army could have possibly have done so. Um, I'm not promoting armed resistance. I'm a
47:39historian. I try to explain why people make the choices they do and what are the historical timelines and context of why they resist. But if you think about it, Chris, I was I was thinking about the campaign that we have been doing for years to boycott uh, uh, Caterpillar bulldozers, for example, uh, in in the US and and globally. But, to think about how many bulldozers have been blown up by the resistance in Gaza and in South Lebanon, uh, as a result of the result These are kids in Gaza making up their own I It's not military. There's nothing military about it. They create their own little devices uh, underground and they are
48:20They have done more damage to Caterpillar than any other, uh, you know, movement to to hold Caterpillar accountable. How many Merkava tanks have they destroyed? The Israeli army just made a very upsetting discovery that it can no longer achieve political and strategic ends using military power. They neutralized Israel's military. This is why they are killing civilians because we are talking about the civilians because we want They want us to ignore what has happened to their military. So, the answer is this.
48:54The Palestinian people have one one leverage and one leverage only. If they let go of that leverage, then there is absolutely no hope for us as Palestinians and that leverage is resistance. How do you define resistance? The Palestinians themselves define resistance. Not me, not anyone else. They will tell us what resistance is and they will have to define it in the way that they find suitable. So, any Palestinian faction, group, authority that behaves outside of that scope, they are conceding to Israel. As far as the Israelis are concerned, they are trying to They realize that the the the current
49:34war that they are leading, not only against Palestine, but in Lebanon, in Iran, and throughout could be the most defining war. And I think Netanyahu, for once, is actually telling the truth.
49:46This is as important as their so-called war of independence. They lose, uh, and by losing I mean they are not able to achieve the political outcomes and strategic outcomes, then they have to make a choice either to leave or to reach political compromises with the Palestinians that satisfy the Palestinian people.
50:06Um if they win, well, I don't want to think about that possibility, and I don't see it happening because again, if your military power has been neutralized and Israel is a settler colonial society that can only survive through military power and through physical expansion, then I don't know what other alternative they still have.
50:27Right. Thank you, Ramzy.
50:29Uh and I want to thank Diego, Max, and Noel who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
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