Ex-Israeli Hostage Negotiator: Israel is ISOLATED Globally, NO JUSTIFICATION For Gaza Slaughter

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I'm Ashin Ratansky, welcome back to Going Underground, broadcasting all around the world from the UAE. Today, 82 years ago, German Nazis, after a peace treaty and then war declaration from Britain, began the deportation and mass murder of a quarter of a million Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto on Holocaust trains to Treblinka. In Gaza today, if you accept the estimates of the medical journal The Lancet, the number of Palestinians killed by UK-USEU weapons may be proportionately like wiping out five and a half million mostly women and children in Britain or 27 million mostly women and children in the USA. Millions have been left to starve with nowhere to hide as hospital schools and all signs of human civilization are annihilated by NATO weaponry and Google and Amazon cloud computer systems. All this as prison-dodging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares for Wednesday's applause from the US Congress, bought and paid for by Israeli lobbyists. Today at the White House, he meets Genocide Joe, accused even by his own supporters of being demented. All that while presumed ex-US President Trump has appointed Zionist Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential nominee. Joining me from Jerusalem is veteran Israeli negotiator and Middle East director of the London-based International Communities Organization Human Rights Advocacy Group, Dr. Gershon Baskin. Dr. Baskin, thank you so much for coming on. Let's just start with whether you've seen Israeli authorities fail so badly as they are now, despite the support of the European Union and the United States after Israel has, well, it's become alienated from the whole of the world, except those NATO countries. And I think Israel's become, or the government of Israel has become alienated from a large number of Israeli citizens who no longer want this government to rule us, no longer want Netanyahu as our prime minister. It is a chilling introduction that you gave, one that's quite stunning in its dismal reality that we're living here in Israel and in Palestine. And any rational person has to admit that it seems that Israel has no coherent strategy facing the Palestinians, facing the aggression that started by Hamas on October 7th. And Netanyahu's call for the total victory is something which is certainly not achievable through any military means. There has never been a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There still is no military solution to this conflict. There's only a political diplomatic solution. And Netanyahu has done everything possible since 2009 to avoid any diplomatic political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I mean, it's easy to blame Israel, arguably, for all of that. I'll get onto the Israeli population, but it's not just Netanyahu, is it? I mean, it's Blinken, Sullivan, Biden. They're the people visiting Israel and arming Netanyahu to the teeth. He couldn't be doing any of this without the help of the United States, could he? Rather than just attacking Israel all the time. From the beginning of the war, way back nine and a half months ago, the United States would have ended the war in a week's time, in two weeks' time, simply by telling Israel that we're not supplying you with any bombs anymore to drop on Gaza. And that would put an end to the war. But in the American administration, the British government and other European countries, other countries around the world have supported Israel's, first of all, right to defend itself. And no one wants Hamas. No one wants Hamas to stay in power in Gaza. And this was seen, I think, as the ultimate opportunity to change the reality on the ground. I don't think that anyone could have imagined the amount of slaughter and the amount of killing and destruction that has taken place over the last nine and a half months by the Israeli army with American and other weapons. And this has certainly shown us that this is not sustainable. This has to end. This war that's been going on between Israel and the Palestinians for more than 100 years now, this war has to be the last war. And- Just on that, actually, why do you think those European vassal states and the United States, Biden, Blinken, why are they doing that then? If they don't like Netanyahu, so they say. Well, it's not a matter of not to know. I really think in your introduction, you're talking about the Holocaust. For Israeli Jews, more Jews were killed at one place at one time on October 7th than at any time since the Holocaust. And Israel was traumatized. We not only have the incredible number of people killed in their homes, taken out of their beds, taken as hostage into Gaza, but we also have the reality that Israel was supposed to be the safe haven. Israel was the place where we're protecting ourselves, where the army protects us. And on October 7th, the army wasn't there. And people were left in their shelters, in their homes, in the kibbutzes, and communities along the Gaza Strip calling for help and no one came to assist them. And we hear that every day. Israel has not gone to October 8th yet. Israel is still on October 7th. And I think that Israel did a very good job of transmitting that trauma to the United States and to other European countries primarily that have Israel's back and have perhaps a sense of guilt going back to the Holocaust, when nobody was there to protect the Jews, when Jews tried to escape and there was no country that would take them. I think there's a sense of guilt here. I think that there was a time of moral imperative to help the Jewish people establish a safe haven for themselves. That's not the case today. And I think we are seeing changes. We're seeing changes in the United States, maybe not at the level of the administration, but a majority of Americans today think support the cause for Palestine to have independence and freedom. We're seeing that across Europe and civil society, all around the world. As you said, Israel is becoming isolated and Israel is being brought to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. And the space in this world for Israelis, because of our government, is gonna get smaller and smaller. Yeah, I mean, clearly the October 7th massacres have changed their character. I mean, on this show, we've talked about it. We had a former justice minister of the Israeli government on it who didn't accept what was being said back then. Gray zone, electronic intifada, Mondewise have been talking about what Haaretz has now exposed. It wasn't Hamas that killed all those people, as you say, the worst atrocity since the Holocaust in terms of numbers of deaths. It was the Israeli government that killed all those people on October the 7th. Haaretz going so far as to saying that sort of- None of the evidence really points in that direction. There were one or two cases where we know that an Israeli tank fired at a home where there were hostages being held by Hamas terrorists. There were a couple of cases- But what did you make of the Haaretz? I mean, this is the Israeli media. I mean, in the media of countries supporting sending the weapons, we don't get any of that kind of information. But the Israeli media clearly saying the Hannibal Doctrine was involved on October the 7th- We have an investigation of what happened on October 7th or prior to October 7th. There was a demand by the people of Israel to create a national commission of inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge that Netanyahu refuses to create. But I think that there is no denial that 3,000 Palestinians crossed the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7th and committed atrocities, went to an open-air music dance festival and murdered 340 people, burned people in their homes alive, children in front of their parents, and parents in front of children. Yeah, but there's no evidence, is there, for all of that? Yom Kippur is invited on this show. We'll invite the one who works with this Israeli paper, Haaretz. I mean, you're particularly interesting to speak to because of your past as regards negotiations for peace, because- I think they made a big mistake to try and cover over the atrocities committed by Hamas. They committed war crimes. Hamas crossed moral red lines on October 7th that should never be crossed, just as Israel has been crossing moral red lines- We need to see the inquiry that you're calling for, and Netanyahu's not allowing to, but you were involved in a peace deal to release Gilad Shalit. So there are some- It was a hostage release deal- Exactly. So you would be the ideal person to speak to. Do you not think that there are some Israelis in the Israeli state who saw the number of Palestinian prisoners that were released as part of the deal? That should never happen again, and that's why the Hannibal Directive was used on October the 7th to mass kill so many Israeli Jews by the Israeli army, Yes, I can- There were isolated cases that we know of that were documented where the Israeli army ended up killing Israelis on October 7th. The overwhelming majority of the more than 1,200 people who were killed on that day were killed by Hamas- Why do you know that? It's interesting you say that, because we know the discredited Zakah movement statistics. We know that the UN looked into, for instance, the sexual crimes that were talked about widely in media in the United States and European Union. They were discredited shortly after the UN- No, they were not. There was a UN report- The UN report clearly says there's no evidence for what the claims were. Yeah, I read the report. It definitely says that. I'm grappling about facts here, and these facts can be brought and shown, but this is not correct. This is not the heart of the matter. So you're saying, you know Hamas. You talk to Hamas people. You're saying they're like animals. They were just trying to kill them. This wasn't political violence. I didn't say they were like animals. I said that they committed atrocities on October 7th. But surely the point was to capture hostages for the hostage negotiations. That may have been the initial plan, and people in Hamas told me that we sent 1,500 of our fighters into Israel on October 7th. We expected 1,000 of them to be killed by the Israeli army. We expected to capture army bases and take soldiers as hostages, but they didn't find the Israeli army. They're protecting the border, and they didn't go to army bases. They went to civilian communities. They went to Kibbutzim. They went to Moshovin. They went to Sderot and Ofakim. These are towns on the border where they went, and they pillaged, and they killed, and they raped, and they did atrocities. There's no evidence of rape whatsoever. No evidence of rape whatsoever, according to the UN. I mean, do you know what I think? I don't want to argue about this. I really don't. You either accept it, or you don't. Okay, you said a moment ago to me that you want an inquiry. Why then are Israeli authorities not having an inquiry that would prove your allegations? You're making these allegations, which are so far unsubstantiated. It's not about October 7th, the inquiry that I want. Netanyahu implemented a policy since 2009 that sought to divide the Palestinians, to create a delegitimized Palestinian authority, and Mahmoud Abbas and his head, and to empower a weakened Hamas in Gaza in order to say to the world, we have no partner for peace. Netanyahu did everything in his power to prevent a two-state solution from emerging, and this is why I believe there needs to be a commission of inquiry. It's not just about what happened on October 7th and every day since in the last nine and a half months, but also what happened all the years prior when Israel refused to negotiate a two-state solution with Palestinians who wanted a two-state solution. There were Palestinians, a majority of Palestinians, who advocated a two-state solution, but we have a government in Israel which was committed to never allowing an independent Palestine to be established, and that's why we need a commission of inquiry, not just to figure out what happened on October 7th. We also need to know why the army wasn't there, why the Israeli army was defending settlers in the occupied West Bank, and they weren't defending Israel's borders. How in the last two decades, the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, became an Israeli occupation police force, not doing the job for which it was established and for which we serve and send our children to serve in, but Israel's army has become a protection force for Israeli settlers. I want to know why they weren't on the border on October 7th. When you think about it, if there had been a dozen tanks and three attack helicopters in the air on October 7th early in the morning, October 7th wouldn't have happened. That's all it would have taken to prevent that massive atrocity raid on the state of Israel that morning. Gershon Baskin, I'll stop you there. More from the Middle East Director of the International Communities Organization after this break. Welcome back to Going Underground. I'm still here with veteran Israeli negotiator, Dr. Gershon Baskin. Dr. Baskin, we were talking about October 7th. We were talking about the murky evidence about what happened on that day, but as you said, we've seen the repeated breaking of all UN Security Council resolutions and who knows what else as regards to human rights against the Palestinians for decades and for years. Just remind us of how close you got to a peace deal back in 2012. You actually mentioned the backing of Hamas by Netanyahu. It was Barak, Israeli Defense Minister on this program who actually walked out when I was talking to him about that because he was associated with the backing of Hamas back then. Just remind us of how close you came to a security establishment proposal and why it broke down, the agreement with Hamas you negotiated. Sure. If you recall in October of 2011, the deal for the release of Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was completed with the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners from Israel. Amongst them, there were more than 300 Palestinian prisoners who were serving life sentences for killing Israelis. Amongst them was Yehya Sinwar, who is the leader of Hamas in Gaza. And shortly after the success of the secret back channel, which I have established and was running for the entire time that Gilad Shalit was in captivity, more than five years, I started talking with my Hamas counterpart about trying to establish a long-term ceasefire. Who's today the spokesperson for Hamas? Sorry? Who is today the spokesperson for Hamas? One of the spokespeople. He's a member of the Politburo, the member of the Shore Council. He's one of the Hamas leaders. He's outside Gaza. He left Gaza before the war and was the primary spokesperson of the war from Beirut at the time. He's not in Beirut anymore. Anyway, Razi Hamad and I began negotiating a long-term ceasefire. He was talking directly to Ahmed Jaberi, who was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza at the time. The man who really built the military might of Hamas at the time. Certainly the person who was responsible for abducting and holding Gilad Shalit. We went through four or five versions. Sorry to interrupt, but at that time they were being bankrolled by the Israeli government, as far as you know. No, not by the Israeli government. The Israeli government never funded Hamas. The Israeli government allowed Hamas to be funded. Hamas is a financial empire. It's not only the $30 million that Netanyahu allowed to come into Gaza every month. It brought in suitcases and then later transfers. Hamas has built a financial empire on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and businesses around the world and companies that they own, and not just the money, and of course the whole tunnel enterprise that worked in Gaza for years that enriched Hamas with many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a lot more. Anyway, we were negotiating a long-term ceasefire on the day that Ahmed Jaberi received the latest version of the text. After I had consulted with the Israeli Minister of Defense, Yair Baraka, consulted with the United Nations, representative of the Secretary General and other people about the context of the draft that we were working on, on the morning that Ahmed Jaberi received the latest version in Arabic, later that afternoon Israel assassinated him. He was seen by Israel as a horrible enemy who deserved to die, and Israel decided to kill him. It was not connected, in my view, to the negotiations that we were conducting. I'm not sure that anyone in the Israeli military really knew that the negotiations we were conducting were ongoing and even had chances of success. But after Jaberi was assassinated, that was the end of those negotiations, and that was in November of 2012. We have no way of independently verifying that information about Hamas funds. But do you think there were people in the Israeli state, in Mossad, and other elements of the secret state who were unhappy with the deal that you helped negotiate, because they didn't want the 1,200 Palestinian prisoners, captives, or Palestinian hostages out? Going back to what I was saying earlier, the policy on October 7th of taking hostages, because your deal had created the precedent. I'm obviously not blaming you for the atrocity. No, it's not the precedent. There were deals that happened before the one that I did that even released more Palestinian prisoners. The deal with Ahmed Jaberi, back in the 80s. There were other precedents where- Do you recognize the animal doctrine by some in the Israeli deep state trying to avoid- Look, at the time that the deal was made, and the Mossad officer in charge of the file all recommended to the Israeli government to vote for it. The day the deal actually was brought home, on October 18th, 2011, was a day of celebration in this country. Okay, so what's happened now? Because polls show that the Israelis, I mean, you've already said Netanyahu's deeply unpopular, and sure, might be going to jail as soon as this horrific conflict is over, genocide is over. What's happened? That now, they don't, apart from those demonstrating for their relatives who are still kept hostage in Gaza, most Israelis are not protesting against, they're not opposed to the genocide we're seeing on our phones every few seconds of mostly women and children being slaughtered by the British American and EU weapons. Yeah, I think there are two things to take into account. One is that most Israelis don't see the humanitarian disaster that the Israeli army has created in Gaza. We see the physical damage on the Israeli media, on the Israeli television stations. They have TikTok. Sorry? They have TikTok. They have social media. No, Israelis don't watch the same TikTok channels that you do, and they're not on Hamas's Telegram or Palestinian Telegram. They see Israeli media, and they trust Israeli media, and they don't see the humanitarian suffering, but they're also reliving the trauma of October 7th every single day, and for most Israelis, what's happening in Gaza is revenge, and that's how they relate to it. We don't have a rational society which is looking coherently and logically at what's being done in Gaza. We don't see it. Now, people like me, She was wounded. Her mother was wounded. Her cousins were wounded with her. The tent that she was living in was destroyed. All of her property, all of her belongings. This is a human story. I know this woman. I know her name. I've spoken to her. I've seen her on WhatsApp video. Most Israelis don't have those kinds of contacts where they actually know human beings in Gaza. But should a country with a mindset like that, with a genocide next door, which they are perpetrating, albeit with the weapons from Britain and the U.S., exist? I mean, should a country like that exist on the face of the Earth? I told you about those estimates from the Lancet saying, which equates to 27 million wiped out, mostly women and children in the United States. That's what we're talking about. If you kill 27 million people in the United States. Okay, my argument is whether Israel has the right to exist is, of course, because I know you, the PLO, Israeli politicians, Hamas, they all support the two-state solution. But you know that many increasing numbers support a one-state solution. Is it now time to look at a one-state solution instead of- Well, the time was before October 7th. October 7th proved that the one-state solution is totally not viable. I actually thought for years before October 7th that the two-state solution was dead and we need to find other solutions. And I was talking to a large number of Israelis and Palestinians and sitting around tables and trying to come up with all kinds of ideas of federation and confederation and hybrid models. But one of the big surprises of this war is that the two-state solution is back in front of us. And countries that have been talking about a two-state solution for 30 years but only recognized Israel are beginning to turn around and also recognize the state of Palestine. And that needs to happen. And while the recognition of Palestine doesn't end the occupation, it does remove the veto from Israel on the question of Palestinian statehood. There is an equation here that's perhaps simplistic. But the equation is that the Palestinians will not have freedom and dignity if Israel doesn't have security. And Israel won't have security if Palestinians don't have freedom and dignity. That's not to say that the Palestinians and the Israelis all don't deserve freedom, dignity, and security. They do. But this is the equation that we're talking about. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there are 7 million Israeli Jews and 7 million Palestinian Arabs. And no one is going anywhere. And the possibility of them living together under one democratic, secular state is not real. Well, they said that in South Africa, famously. And it's the most dangerous- but it's not the same situation as here. We're not talking about a small minority that controlled a large majority that didn't have any political rights here. You're talking about two peoples on equal numbers that both claim a territory of their own, claim that they give their identity- Okay, well just- Obviously, demographically, that's changing, and lots of Israelis have left since October the 7th, arguably. We don't know how many are leaving, and we know that 22,000 have arrived in Israel as immigrants. I saw that figure, but we don't know how many left, famously. We don't know. But demographically, we know where the population is headed. It's not a demographic question here. It's not a battle of the womb. It's the fact that there are two people here in a territory who claim it as their own, and both peoples need to continue to live here, and both peoples need to find a way- With a wall. To accommodate them having the right to live here. Okay, just finally- Everyone living between the river and the sea, one sentence, everyone living between the river and the sea must have the same rights to the same rights. That's the basis of- But in two separate nations? They do state their identities. Okay, well just finally, you've been critical of what Israel has done, the ICC investigating the genocide. Do you see any prospect of Nuremberg-style hangings for genocide, for those perpetrating what's happened in Gaza? Look, the question of genocide is one that the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is in violation of the Convention of Genocide, and if you look at the Convention and the breaches of the Convention that have been done by Israel, you can conclude that we're talking about genocide here, according to the Convention. There's been massive killing in Gaza, but there's no genocide. There is total destruction. There is the attempt of Israel to- Not attempt, Israel has succeeded in destroying all of Gaza, but there are more than two million people living in Gaza. We don't have gas chambers and ovens burning bodies, and Israel is not dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. Israel is not going in and plowing people with machine guns in pits that they make them dig like the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe. This is not an actual genocide. It is a breach of the Genocide Convention, but let's be real here. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, we would have a million dead Palestinians, not 40,000 dead Palestinians, and that's way too much, and there's no justification for it, and it is a war crime that Israel has been committing in Gaza. I'm gonna be clear about that. We have crossed moral red lines in Israel's committing war crimes in Gaza, but it's not really a genocide. Gershon Baskin, thank you. Thank you. And that's it for the show. Our continued condolences to those bereaved by what many believe is a UK-US-EU armed genocide. We'll be back with a brand new episode on Saturday. Until then, keep in touch by all our social media if it's not set in your country, and head to our channel, goingundergroundtv.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you Saturday.