Title: Complicity In Gaza's Genocide w/ Richard Falk
Show: The Deep Focus Show
Date: 2025-11-25
URL: https://youtu.be/7h9bYpFCKnk
Duration: 50:00

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[00:03] I'm not sure Israel is so crazy about having uh America run Gaza and uh it interferes to some degree with their own plans uh which are I think uh to occupy the whole of Gaza at least. indirectly and to have undisputed rights to claim

[00:36] the offshore uh natural gas deposits [music] which are considerable apparently. >> Hi, I'm John Kuryaku and welcome to Deep Focus. Before we get into the substance of uh today's conversation, I want to ask you the favor of uh subscribing to the podcast, liking, sharing, commenting, talk about it with your friends. It means the world to us and it helps to

[01:07] trigger that algorithm at YouTube that makes it all so much better and uh and gets word around. I want to start by telling you a very short personal story. Um I got out of prison in 2015. I served 23 months after blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program. Something I would do again today if I had the opportunity. Just after my release from prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law and they flew me out to Athens to meet

[01:38] with the Minister of Justice, the Minister of State for Anti-Corruption, and a half a dozen different parliamentarians. But they did it on the cheap. And the cheapest way to get me out to Athens was to fly out through JFK and to fly back to Washington through Toronto. Toronto is in Canada. Well, I went out to Greece. I worked with the government and I flew back to Toronto. When I got off the plane, or maybe it would be more appropriate to say as I was getting off the plane, two

[02:10] members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police intercepted me just there at the plane's door and grabbed me by both of my arms. I said, "Hey, what's up?" One of them turned to me and said, "You are not welcome in Canada." I said, "I'm not entering Canada. I'm walking from one plane to another so I can go home to Washington. They didn't say anything else to me the whole time, but they physically pulled me by the arms through the airport with people taking pictures

[02:43] and video. It was all very embarrassing and humiliating, which I think was probably the point. And then they physically walked me on to the connecting plane to Washington. As I sat down and put my seatelt on, they said, "Don't come back to Canada." That was my last experience with the Canadians. Well, today we're going to talk with a bonafide American hero who we've had on the show before. Professor Richard Faulk

[03:14] has been everything I would want to be. The United Nations special reperator on uh human rights. a prominent voice in support of human rights around the world, but recently and specifically human rights for Palestinians. He's a a professor ameritus of law and uh and the co-founder of a very important organization that supports human rights around the world. He also

[03:45] had a recent and difficult experience in Canada. Professor Faulk, welcome back to the show. It's so good to see you again. >> Thank you so much, John. It's very always good to be your guest. >> Thank you. The pleasure. Believe me, the pleasure is all mine. Professor, I want to get into in in a few minutes some of the the substantive issues surrounding Gaza and the treatment of of Palestinians there, especially Palestinian civilians. But first, I want to talk about what happened to you in

[04:17] Canada. And it just so happened to take place on your 95th birthday. [laughter] Now you were you were accosted in Ottawa at the airport. You had flown in from California. Tell us what happened. >> Uh well it's it's sort of a long uh tale but an abbreviated version is that um they took our passports. I was with my wife uh who had also been

[04:50] a UN special reporter. Uh and we were led to a sort of a holding area where we waited an half hour and then they told us to come follow another uh border security person and we went to another room where uh we waited for another half hour or so until uh border

[05:21] security agent came and uh said that he had the obligation of uh questioning us so that Canada could determine whether I was a security threat [snorts] uh to Canada. I'd never been flattered in that way before. Uh I

[05:51] wondered what uh could have led to this sudden elevation of my status to be a security threat. uh and uh it eventually came out that from the questions they posed that they were interested in the uh event that I was attending, which was a [snorts] a tribunal organized by some young

[06:24] Canadians, uh to uh it was called the Palestinian Tribunal. on Canadian responsibility and it was devoted for the two days that it lasted to a variety of testimonies from either survivors of the Gaza genocide or uh experts on aspects of the situation.

[06:58] But uh the net effect was to create the most um uh devastating inquiry into third party complicity. Uh which of course other countries are even more in need of illuminating than Canada was. Starting with the US, of course, that has been the most stalwart of Israel's supporters

[07:32] and has gone along even with this uh phony ceasefire that kills numerous uh Palestinians uh and yet is still called a ceasefire. fire there. I think there are over 200 violations of it in the 40 days it's been in operation.

[08:05] And really Israel is doing quietly and without international objection what it has been doing in a much more accelerated form uh before the ceasefire went into effect. So it's a very peculiar diplomacy that has that is emerging and uh with a certain degree of UN

[08:36] complicity at this stage. not only the uh countries that uh overtly support Israel, but the countries that uh indirectly do so through their way of filtering the news in their uh media or by um subtle ways of

[09:08] uh indirectly ly assisting Israel by uh encouraging economic relations with their private sector corporations and other means of promoting national economic and political interests. >> Professor, let's talk for a second about u these violations that we're seeing taking place. Donald Trump said as recently as as yesterday, we're

[09:39] recording this on a Friday, uh, November 21st. He said as recently as yesterday, that thanks to him, there is peace in Gaza. We all know that's not true. There's a ceasefire kind of, sort of. Uh, but as you noted, uh, truthfully, correctly, the Israelis violate it constantly. There have been hundreds of Palestinian civil civilians killed just since the announcement of the ceasefire.

[10:10] Do you see that changing at all? Is there any reason to be optimistic here that the ceasefire will turn into some sort of a peace? Uh I I it's hard to be optimistic about a uh plan that is another form of uh 21st century o oppression. It's a it's a there's no role for the US

[10:41] or for uh Europe to play in the governance of Gaza. And yet this is not only a plan for that kind of controlled governance, but it puts the American president at the head of a so-called board of peace that is given the authority to administer

[11:11] uh the transition from whatever accelerated genocide occurred uh for the past two plus years uh to some stabilized condition under uh western supervision. So it's it really carries forth out in the open the allegation that the whole

[11:42] uh Zionist undertaking was a settler colonial uh imposition on a uh society that had long been organized around its Arab Palestinian majority and this idea of dis devising

[12:12] what the future of Gaza is on the part of uh Europeans and North Americans seems historically out of touch with the collapse of European colonialism. It's a it's a kind of zombie colonialism that occurs after uh that takes its shape and uh uh

[12:45] encounter with the native population after the collapse of European colonialism and other parts of the world particularly Asia. So it's a very uh strange uh kind of phenomenon that's has uh these original characteristics that are not repeated uh in other anti-colonial struggles.

[13:17] Professor, I think just about every non-Israeli observer of uh of the Gaza conflict uh has come to the conclusion, if they hadn't been there already, that the only the only way out of this is that there has to be an independent Palestine. The Israelis of course have utterly ruled this out. It will never happen. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said just about a week ago and he has been saying it all of his life.

[13:49] Um but it seems like there is no other there is no other way to do this that there has to be an independent Palestine or maybe Palestine is in the West Bank and Gaza has some sort of special administrative status. I know the Israeli press was uh writing briefly a month or two ago about the idea that perhaps Israel would quote unquote own Gaza while the Saudi government would administer it on a day-to-day basis and

[14:20] would invest in it so that they could build a a port and an airport and an electrical grid and water desalination facilities and such. Do you see anything like that happening? Is there any stomach among the Israeli political class to allow at least some sort of administrative assistance to Gaza or more broadly a path to an independent Palestine?

[14:51] uh at this point I mean one can't rule out the improbable because it's historically the improbable sometimes occurred and the most relevant example of that would be uh the South African turn away from a partate rather than face this choice between uh genocide

[15:22] and continued resistance. See, you come to a point in in an effort to suppress the native population that it either s politically surreners, which happened to the native peoples in North America by and large and Australia and New Zealand, or you go to the next

[15:54] stage of repression. which after a partate is genocide and uh and echocidal uh secondary uh uh implications as uh as in Gaza, which now is a virtual wasteland where the rain recent rains have flooded some of the tent

[16:26] communities and they're forced to live in this uh condition that would make what we call homelessness be seen as a kind of luxurious lifestyle. Uh uh and we we call that peace to subject a population to uh that is

[16:57] physically present in its own homeland to be victimized in this extreme continuing way where they where their homes have been destroyed where their access to adequate food and medicine has been uh denied over a long period where there's no uh safe drinking water where electricity is very uh unstable

[17:29] and unreliable and all of these uh aspects have been deliberately manipulated by the IDF and the political leadership. leadership of Israel to make the suffering of the Palestinian people as intense as possible. uh and that seems to make uh any kind of

[17:59] strategic sense only if the Israeli uh policy had is and has been one of either uh killing a large number of Palestinians or making conditions of uh uh of remaining so burdensome that a lot of Palestinians will choose the lesser of evils which is to become

[18:32] uh refugees [snorts] and to leave and and th this is an ongoing pro process. It has not ended with the ceasefire. The ceasefire has, as you earlier said, diminished the drama of uh 247 bombardment and uh devastation from the air, but it hasn't eliminated

[19:05] a a condition of acute suffering and vulnerability not only to uh Israeli uh militarism but also to conditions that imperil health particularly of young children uh their health and development. So it's really a spectacle of horror that the eyes and ears of the world have

[19:39] been exposed to uh for many months. less so in the countries supporting uh Israel, the complicit third party countries, but still gradually enough of the imagery of atrocity has penetrated uh western political consciousness that one now finds growing tensions

[20:12] between uh the society and the state over these issues. where this the citizenry has a greater moral sensitivity uh than the elites running the country uh that are thinking of very uh selfish short-term interests

[20:42] and not respecting the their own pledge of never again after the Nazi Holocaust. And one now has to reinterpret that from a racist uh perspective and and say the slogan should be never again against a white minority. You raise a very important point here

[21:16] that uh that frequently comes up in the in the Arab press and that is uh what appears to be a a usually unspoken Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing. And when I say ethnic cleansing, I mean actively encouraging Palestinians to get out. Uh, King um Abdullah of Jordan and President Cece of Egypt have both said that they will not

[21:46] take Palestinian refugees, not because their hearts aren't breaking for the Palestinians, but because to do so would further the Israelis policy of ethnically cleansing Gaza, freeing it of of any um any claim that Palestinians may have to their ancestral land so they can take it over and develop it and settle it. What's What's the solution to something like this? You can't just allow people

[22:16] to live in perpetuity in in rubble, the rubble of their of their bombed and destroyed homes. And if other countries won't take them as refugees, can't take them uh as refugees, then what's the solution there? uh well the uh most uh disturbing uh I wouldn't call it a solution but the most uh disturbing

[22:47] uh scenario for the future uh is is a [snorts] continuation of the basic structure of oppression and exploitation with changing the format to some superficial degree, but from a Palestinian point of view, still excluding them from any kind of

[23:18] participation in shaping their own future and subjecting them to the ide to the ideology of the Israelis that any expression of resistance uh is a form of terrorism and that goes against the development of international law in the course of the antic-colonial struggles

[23:49] which came step by step to the conclusion that there is a human right to resist uh colonial occupation and colonial uh policies that are exploitative. and and that uh uh Palestine is a a textbook example

[24:22] of such a uh structure of domination and explo exploitation which has been characterized by the leading uh international human rights uh nos Amnesty International and human rights touch as a definite form of aparate which is an international crime developed in relation to South Africa

[24:54] but not limited to the South African situation. the apartate convention uh for the um pre uh pre prevention and punishment of aparate was came into force in 1972. So it it goes back to the aparate period, but as I say, it is flexible enough to

[25:28] be applied in the given the facts of uh Palestinian uh victimization. >> Professor, I was wondering if you might comment a little bit on domestic Israeli politics. Um, the reason I ask is that we've seen what appears on the surface of things to be a a a very strong Israeli move to the political right to

[25:59] the point where there are Israeli ministers now like Idomar bin Gavir and um uh Smootri uh the minister of finance who also is the security minister of the West Bank. These men have felony convictions for anti-Palestinian hate crimes in their past. Felony convictions in Israel. Even by Israeli standards, their personal positions were were too much for the law

[26:29] to even be able to handle. Uh but there are powerful ministers in the Netanyahu government. Now, before October 7th, Israel was experiencing demonstrations the likes of which the country had never seen before. and it looked like the Netanyahu government was going to collapse. Instead, it was able to strengthen by rallying people against the Palestinians. Now, in the West Bank, it looks as though the government may be losing

[26:59] control, not to Palestinians, but to settlers who have been attacking Palestinians, killing them, burning mosques, burning buildings, and the government says that it's powerless to stop them. What are we seeing here in terms of Israeli politics? Has the body politic moved so far to the right that it's it's out of control or uncontrollable? Or is this a government policy where the

[27:30] Israelis want us to think that they can't control the settlers? or is Netanyahu really more popular now than he was before uh October 7th? >> Well, you raise a series of very um challenging issues um that can't be authoritatively uh answered because there's a lot of uncertainty.

[28:02] some of it deliberate uh effort to uh shift attention away from uh what Israel has done to the Palestinians. partly a way of keeping the Israeli public unified around an an anti-Palestinian

[28:32] political agenda. We have to remember that when the uh Netanyahu coalition government uh took control in Israel at the beginning of uh 2023, but uh 10 months before the Hamas attack, it was already characterized even by the

[29:04] mainstream western media as the most extreme government in the history of Israel. And what made it extreme in my view was its uh only slightly disguised intention to fulfill the Zionist uh vision of a uh single

[29:34] state, a a a one-state outcome with uh Israel. presiding and uh the uh ethnic uh characteristics of a uh Jewish supremist state being uh embodied in the uh constitutional structure of the country which it already is to a certain

[30:06] degree as a result of the 2018 basic law which declared that only the Jewish people have self-determination within the boundaries of uh uh Israel Palestine that that incorporated the occupied territories. So what happened when uh this coalition

[30:37] and the reason u that the ultraright got into that uh leadership role was that uh Netanyahu otherwise could not have uh re reassumed control over the governing process. In other words, it was his uh need for uh partners

[31:08] that in order to escape his uh fraud accusations within Israel and assume or reassume uh control of the government that forced him into this uh Fouian bargain. uh with the uh ultra rightight. It didn't depart so much from uh his own uh agenda which was as you

[31:40] suggest always uh always denied uh the uh willingness of Israel to allow a Palestinian a genuine Palestinian state to come into exist. existence and what the Netanyahu coalition did

[32:10] uh in addition to appointing these religious extremists to very critical uh cabinet positions and particularly sensitive ones in relation to the Palestinian uh issues. Uh what they did was to greenlight violence by the settlers from day one. And they even provided uh

[32:44] settlers with additional weaponry and and played a a kind of double game. On the one hand, as again you suggested, claiming they had no control and on the other hand facilitating the outrages that the settlers were perpetrating which included leaving uh notes on people's

[33:15] uh on West Bank Palestinians cars which read, "Leave or we will kill you. And that I think represents the uh core uh core uh uh passion of uh ethnic cleansing. It it it u tries to

[33:46] portray ethnic cleansing as the lesser uh tragedy and compares it in effect to genocide. So that if a uh subjugated people uh fear genocide, they will uh choose the lesser option of

[34:17] uh leaving. And that's what Palestinians did in 1948 and again in 1967. what the Palestinians uh call by their Arabic uh by the Arabic name Nakba which translates as catastrophe. [snorts] Professor, help us understand too what

[34:48] kind of conversations are taking place among the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, or even in countries like Tunisia or Morocco or Sudan that have relatively recently opened diplomatic relations with Israel have not broken them in light of uh of the the war in Gaza. How do these how do these families

[35:18] and governments justify continuing diplomatic relations with Israel with this treatment of Palestinians when you would think they would be natural defenders of the Palestinians? Uh yes, it's a great uh disappointment I think to the Palestinians that they haven't received real support from their uh Muslim brothers and sisters.

[35:49] >> [snorts] >> Um, I think the explanation why they haven't received support is that the regimes in almost every one of these uh countries is afraid of its own population and needs uh the support of the US and the West in order to feel politically secure. cure.

[36:20] And so on the one side it fears a movement like the one associated with Hamas and uh Islamic Jihad against in the taking the form of a second Arab Spring and the uh desire on that their part to please uh the US and

[36:54] indirectly Israel. They're dependent. Some of these countries are dependent on Israel for arms exports and a variety of undisclosed interactions, including the uh unified uh posture uh against uh Iran and its present uh uh

[37:26] political uh makeup and theological identity. Israel and the uh leading Arab countries uh oppo oppose and fear uh the Iranian influence in the region. And so uh that creates a kind of uh transactional bond

[37:57] uh between Israel and its Arab neighbors. But but as you say, the cost of pursuing such a pragmatic policy is to betray their own uh ethical and uh legal commitments to a uh lawful and morally acceptable uh policy.

[38:28] Professor, you've been around for a long time. As we said, your birthday was recently and you turned 95 years old. You've seen American politics over a a great number of decades. We seem to have the most pro-Israel administration in history governing the country right now. Uh, do you see this as a pendulum that goes back and forth or is this the the policy of the United States and it shall

[39:01] remain the policy of the United States? We've chosen our side and we're going to seed leadership on the human rights issue to anybody else who wants it. How do you see this? Well, I I think I differ uh somewhat with your um initial po uh point of departure that this is the most pro pro-Israeli government in history. I don't think on the uh on the scale of real pro-Israeli

[39:37] uh commitments. Uh the Biden uh presidency was not sub substantially different than Trump. It it was [snorts] more predictable. And see, Trump is kind of unreliable and pursuing a kind of narcissistic uh geopolitics

[40:09] which is very unstable from a Israeli point of view. They don't uh they think they can manipulate Trump and have succeeded I think in the shaping of this uh so-called peace plan. But they if they were uh prudent they would be uh scared to place all their eggs in

[40:39] that basket. Uh Trump is uh very murial and if he sees that he can get a better economic deal with the Arab countries by uh endorsing a Palestinian state or by doing something that departs from the uh position of unconditional

[41:09] support. he's quite likely to do it in a way that for instance Biden uh wouldn't be likely to do. And one change is in the the domestic scene. The Zionist lobbies are less formidable after this genocidal uh experience. [snorts] and uh they

[41:40] don't have the uh at least silent acquiescence of the broader society. Their view the relationship with Israel is no longer viewed as a positive aspect of American foreign policy. American foreign policy uh except in a condition of of some kind

[42:12] of wartime uh doesn't um affect the voting behavior of most Americans that are influenced by what happens domestically rather than internationally. And that seems to be a continuing characteristic. Should

[42:42] Americans have any reason to think that u that this policy will change regardless of who ends up in the White House, regardless of which party controls either of the two chambers of Congress? Is this just something that we have to expect to tolerate or do you think there's real a real possibility for change in American policy in the Middle East? I think there's enough uncertainty that now exists

[43:14] that it's worth trying to exert additional pressure to uh make this change seem less politically costly uh to uh members of Congress that I think weren't genuinely so pro-Israeli as they as much as they feared the consequences for their own careers

[43:47] of uh blatantly opposing what the uh pro-Israeli uh lobby was uh seeking and demanding. I think uh that lobby as I suggested has much less leverage than it used to have and there's a stronger case

[44:17] for uh at least departing from this position of uh outright complicity with what Israel is doing and whether uh Trump in all his uh involvement with uh trying to take credit for everything and put his name

[44:50] attach his name to all kinds of uh international and national uh developments. uh whether he uh comes to be disillusioned about uh the prospects for his plan being uh realized in in Israel and then what

[45:21] happens after that happens. I'm not sure Israel is so crazy about having uh America run Gaza and u it interferes to some degree with their own plans uh which are I think uh to occupy the whole of Gaza at least indirectly

[45:52] and to have undisputed rights to claim the offshore uh natural gas deposits which are considerable apparently and didn't exist earlier when uh Israel was more worried about the demography of keeping Gaza than it was about the political and economic consequences

[46:22] of allowing allowing it to affiliate with Jordan or possibly even Egypt or become autonomous. It was much readier for that because of its demographic fears of a uh majority Palestinian population in uh Israel. And it it on the one hand wanted to enex

[46:55] uh the Palestinian territories. On the other hand, it wanted to keep a uh Jewish majority population so it could have at least the u uh appearance of being a political democracy. Professor, last question. I want to uh I want to return to the Canada issue uh for a moment. Were you able to get to

[47:27] your conference? Were you able to speak your peace? Did did they treat you with respect? And and did you have any problems leaving Canada? Uh it was very it was part of the strangeness of the experience when they finally uh did let us enter. They then completely forgot about us and the conference and there was no problem. I never in all

[47:58] my uh years of traveling had so little problem uh entering uh the US as I did this time where they absolutely didn't look at our passports [snorts] they it was very peculiar and Canada had no interest in our when we departed We uh they didn't uh

[48:31] ask a single question where had we been or what had we done so it was there was something that happened that is a missing part in the puzzle because I think that maybe see the people who were arranging this tribunal had some influence of their own and when they heard we were having this trouble

[49:03] they tried to put pressure on the prime minister's office uh to do something and I had as a former student Lloyd Axeworthy who had been the foreign minister of Canada and much respected public figure and they knew that I was uh close to him. Uh and he uh he also intervened

[49:34] and proposes to write something about the uh situation which he considers also to have been an outrage. >> Well, I'm glad and I'm glad you uh you got in and got out in one piece. Professor >> Professor Richard Faulk. Uh, thanks for joining us. Professor Faulk is an American professor ameritus of international law. That's at Princeton University. He's Eurommed Mediterranean Human Rights Monitors, chairman of the

[50:04] board of trustees. And he's the former uh special reperator for human rights with the United Nations. Thanks so much for being with us. Great to see you again. >> Good. Thank you for having me, John. I enjoyed our conversation. >> Oh, I always enjoy them as well. Thanks for taking the [music] time. >> Good. It was well worth it. >> All the best.
