#1684 - Abby Martin

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Hello. Abby Martin. How are you?

I'm great. How are you?

You're my favorite hardcore lefty.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Because all the podcasts that I ever do, whenever I do a podcast with you, I'm like, okay, this one's going to be interesting. It's going to be some shit that's going to disturb me that I don't know about.

Hell yeah, man. That's how I like to do it. Well, a lot of this stuff is depressing, and it's not for everyone, but you try to just go balls deep. Because I grew up in the YouTube generation and I learned so much, and I want to be that source for a lot of people. I want to guide people through the journey of learning about real education and all the sinister shit your government's doing.

Sinister shit all governments are doing. I remember one of the first times, not one of the first times, but one of the biggest times that I got blowback from having you on was your personal experience interviewing people in Israel, interviewing Israelis and interviewing Palestinians and trying to sort through what is really going on over there. What is the real attitude about people over there? And I remember it must be an email campaign. It must have been a campaign because it was like the same letter over and over and over again I was receiving in my inbox. It must have been like a website. You could go and then sign it and then send it to me. But don't you think that the tide has shifted in that subject where now people are realizing they're going, hey, this is not as simple as the mainstream media wants everybody to look at it the way the mainstream media was portraying it in this country. It was always that Israel's the good guys, the Palestinians are the bad people. That's how it was. But the mainstream perception now has very much shifted, don't you think, with this last, when you see that iron Dome and you're seeing these rockets being fired out of Palestine and they're all getting detonated in the air, and then you realize, like, oh, this is kind of a crazy situation. Like, one side has this insane technology and the other side is kind of in an open air prison camp in a way, like, you can't go anywhere, right? You're kind of stuck.

25% of american Jews now, after the latest onslaught in Gaza, believe Israel is an apartheid state. And that that shows you how dramatically the narrative has completely flipped on its head because for the last 20 years, Israel's been losing control of dictating the narrative. I mean, that was really what they relied on for so long. That we're acting in self defense, that we're surrounded by people who hate us and hypothetically will commit genocide against us. To basically defend the fact that they are committing de facto genocide in Gaza. That is the erasure of Gaza residents. It's the erasure of a culture. It's not just the extermination. That's according to the UN. But, yeah, the tide has changed, Joe. They can no longer say that they're acting in self defense over the last 20 years with the bombardments, with the invasions, with the colonization outside of their borders. I mean, we're talking about Lebanon, Syria and the Golan Heights and just constantly bombing and open air prison. It is an open air prison. There's 2 million people trapped there. They cannot leave without permits by the israeli government or the collaborative government in Egypt. Those people are trapped. And then you look at Israel, they're living high. They're living a great life. I mean, I saw some crazy ass ad from Dior, like, of people basically just having this very ritzy time living in Tel Aviv, living in Jerusalem, and completely just separate from the fact that there is this besieged ghetto of 2 million people denied basic access to things like water and electricity. I mean, the right to have human mobility, I think, is like the most basic right that you can have as a human being. Like to leave and freely travel. And these people can't do that. And the media has completely painted it forever. The media is totally controlled, right? The media acts as an arm of the state. And for the longest time, the media has basically just said Israel is right. They've only depicted the israeli side of the story. And it doesn't matter anymore because with the advent of social media, Palestinians are able to film their own reality for the first time. So they're filming the home demolitions, they're filming the ethnic cleansing. They're filming themselves getting bombed relentlessly for no reason other than collective punishment and torture of this area. And that is convincing the world and actually bringing more people to their side. The sympathy is now going to Palestinians, where even democratic voters, a Gallup poll has taken every single year of democratic party voters and where they're at on the Israel Palestine thing. And this year, for the first time in the history of the poll, more democratic Party voters say that the pressure needs to be put on Israel than Palestine. And it's just because of this. It's because the narrative is changing, Joe, and they've lost the moral high ground here. They have targeted munitions that the US supplies to them. They choose to target entire families homes. They choose to kill 14 members of one family sleeping in their bed at night. Because maybe one person has ties to Hamas. Hamas has indiscriminate rocket fire because they don't have targeted munitions. Wrap your mind around that. One side has all the armaments in the world supplied by the world's empire, and they actually direct these missiles towards sleeping families and civilian infrastructure and ap buildings.

Don't they let them know in advance when they're doing something? Don't they drop leaflets and let them know that?

So that's what they claim, that we're the most moral army in the world because we warn people in advance. I have contacts on the ground in Gaza that said that is not true. And also, this was happening at night. You're sleeping in bed. But they can use that and say, oh, no, we sent a ten minute warning. And even if that were true, your entire home, some guy lost his whole, like, a bookstore that his family has passed down from generations. That's all gone. All of these businesses gone. It's not just about people's lives tragically lost. It's about their livelihoods.

And their counter is that Hamas is attacking them and they're simply counter attacking. Right?

That is what they say all the time. And they have used Hamas governing the Gaza Strip as a reason, since Hamas pushed israeli settlers out back in the day, 15 years ago, as a reason to enact this medieval siege and tighten the noose every year, allow less and less people to leave, allow less and less water, bomb more and more factories, all of these things that basically make life harder and harder. But the thing is, if you look at actually the history, the israeli government facilitated Hamas to rise to power. They wanted Hamas to take control of the Gaza Strip. So then they can use Hamas as this eternal enemy to collectively punish everyone there. And it's actually a war crime upon war crime upon war crime, because this is indiscriminate bombing. 50% of people who live in Gaza are children. Innocent children. That's 70 kids who just died in the last bombing campaign. These people are innocent. They have nothing to do with Hamas. But, Joe, it doesn't even matter what Gazins do, what Palestinians do to resist. Look at the great march of return, the documentary that I actually came on last time and talked about. It's now up for free. Gaza fights for freedom. Everyone can check it out on YouTube. YouTube's throttling it, but please check it out. This is what happens when Palestinians resist peacefully. Everyone says, where's the palestinian Gandhi? Why don't they peacefully resist? They are. They have been. They've largely abandoned violent struggle or armed resistance, which is actually internationally protected right for colonized people. But when they resist peacefully, in the tens of thousands, they were mowed down by Israeli Snipers, Joe. And it doesn't matter what they do.

In the tens of thousands, tens of.

Not mowed down dead, but shot. Shot with exploding bullets from these snipers. 200 people died. 500 people were shot in the head. A lot of them did survive. We interview several of these people, medics, journalists, children. I mean, all of these people are protected categories under the Geneva conventions. They were targeted and shot by israeli snipers, and they were peacefully protesting. And that just shows you it does not matter what they do. They will get met with the same brutality and violence.

So do you think it's a part of their culture? Has something been ingrained in them that there's, like, this Us versus them mentality and that they are the other and that they don't think of them as the same?

Yeah. I mean, 73% of Israelis wanted the bombing to continue. This was a completely indiscriminate bombing campaign that was leveling civilian infrastructure. We all saw those buildings fall like 911. I mean, this was a huge media tower that was leveled for no reason. There was no proof that Hamas was even in the building. This is part of a subtler colonial attitude. You look at us institutions like our justice system and police force, there's no doubt that there's racism when it comes to the disproportionality of people who are in prison, for example, in terms of African Americans. Imagine if the US were colonizing native land and just subjugating these people today. That is what's happening in Israel.