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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israeli forces have killed at least 11 people, including five children, in strikes on the southern city of Rafah. Israel has repeatedly attacked the city ahead of an expected ground invasion. There are new reports the Biden administration has approved Israel’s plan to attack Rafah in exchange for Israel not launching counterstrikes on Iran.

The latest article by our next guest is headlined “Why Israel-Iran War Is a Lifeline for Netanyahu.” In it, she writes, quote, “Just days ago, much of the world’s attention was on the impending famine in Gaza, and on Israel’s failure to achieve its war objectives of toppling Hamas and returning hostages more than six months into the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was under pressure from U.S. President Joe Biden to allow in sufficient humanitarian aid and reach a cease-fire, as well as appeals from Israeli protesters to seal a hostage deal and hold new elections.

“But at night on Saturday, April 13, all that faded instantly as Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in much-anticipated retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed senior Iranian military [officers] in Damascus, Syria, on April 1.”

AMY GOODMAN: That article is by Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. She’s joining us now from Tel Aviv.

Mairav, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by just continuing your argument? Lay out what you think has happened in the last few days.

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: Thanks for having me.

Well, essentially, we have an ongoing war, for months and months, that Netanyahu has orchestrated in a way that, clearly, he’s talking about a total victory, that most Israelis now understand he’s not able to achieve. He has lost a lot of legitimacy both at home and abroad. At the same time, many Israelis have supported the war effort. They’re in trauma. And so you have this chaotic situation.

And just days ago, we started to see what looked like, at least rhetorically, cracks in what has been U.S. support for Israel’s war effort in Gaza. And just as things started to seem to change a little bit, primarily as a result of an absolute humanitarian disaster, man-made, in Gaza, all of a sudden attention has gone elsewhere, to another very worrying development with Israel and Iran.

Now, I can’t speak to Netanyahu’s intent on the decision to strike the Damascus consular facility on April 1st, but what I can say is that when you’ve lost legitimacy, and when former security officials and even some current ones are telling everyone that Netanyahu is not fit to lead and is not fit to be providing any kind of safety and security for Israelis, and then he takes the decision to strike a consulate, then that’s clearly something that he took into account. In other words, it could have either led to nothing, or it could have led to what we saw, and in which case he’s now basically, you know, benefiting from the fact that all the world now has to kind of cooperate with him. The Western capitals, surely, some Arab countries, as well, have no choice but to kind of band together against this Iranian threat.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mairav, could you explain? Your article before this one, earlier this month, is titled “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society.” Explain what you mean by that, and what you think the problem is with people focusing only on his being the head of Israel, Netanyahu, and taking all the decisions.

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: Right. Well, I mean, it’s important to understand some of the nuances. I mean, basically, Israeli society is largely a right-wing society. It is a society that has not spoken about or thought about Palestinians or the occupation except when it’s forced to. And it is a society that has gotten used to acting with impunity.

After the Hamas October 7th attack, which was truly unprecedented for Israelis, there was huge consensus for the war, and there’s been almost, you know, complete apathy to what’s happening in Gaza. Israelis are not really interested or emotionally capable of handling that. And there’s been a dehumanization of Palestinians for a very long time. So you have this kind of consensus and just support for Israel’s war effort.

At the same time, you have a leader, specifically Netanyahu, but also the far-right government in general, that many liberal secular Israelis don’t support. And so you have a situation in which the Western capitals in the world, that have pretty much unconditionally supported Israel, have found a way to try and kind of split between, you know, criticism of Netanyahu but supporting Israeli society at large. Now, I understand why they’re doing that, but it’s just important to understand that even if you took Netanyahu out of the equation and you put somebody else, some of his political rivals, in the leadership positions, their approach to the Palestinian issue is almost identical. There’s really no difference there. So, the Israelis that are protesting Netanyahu now are not protesting him about his policies on Palestinians. They’re protesting him about his attacks on their own freedoms and the fact that kind of the same rights violations that Israel has been doing for years are now starting to seep into their own world.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Mairav, about this possible trade-off that’s being reported, U.S. wanting Israel not to attack Iran again, but they can invade Rafah?

MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: I think all of this is largely theater and largely performative. I mean, basically, Israel has been dangling the threat of an invasion in Rafah for months now. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s something that it plans to do. But the U.S. pushback on it, while firm rhetorically, hasn’t really been convincing. You know, I’m not convinced that the U.S. is actually about to withhold aid or that the U.S. or Biden were actually going to stop Israel from invading Rafah, because they largely support the war effort.

And Israel is almost surely going to respond to the Iranian strike in some way. And it’s understandable, you know, if we understand the ways Israel works, that it would do so. I think it’s also understandable that Israel, you know, would now — since it hasn’t already responded, it’s now going to consider its options in how it can do that and how it can leverage that situation. So, now, in effect, it has the benefit of being able to kind of dangle both threats — we’re both going to attack Iran, and we’re going to attack Rafah. And so, ultimately, those things are still the case. You know, so I —

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. We’ll link to your piece in Foreign Policy. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. As Columbia University President Shafik testified before Congress about accusations of antisemitism at the school, Democracy Now! spoke to Columbia and Barnard College students yesterday who set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment early Wednesday morning with dozens of tents, occupying the South Lawn of the campus outside the main library. As we broadcast, students have been threatened with suspension and discipline action but are still refusing to leave until their demands are met. They spoke about what they’re calling for.

PROTESTERS: Down, down with occupation! Down, down with occupation! Up, up with liberation! Up, up with liberation!

MARYAM ALWAN: My name is Maryam Alwan, and I’m with Columbia SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. And we are here today to demand that Columbia divest immediately from all stakes in Israeli apartheid. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed. And as we speak, our president is testifying in front of the House in a game of political theater that is conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. We want to focus the attention on what’s going on in Gaza and tell Columbia that we are not going anywhere. No matter how much government suppression we face, we will keep fighting until they divest.

They have been completely repressive. I mean, we’ve faced police brutality. We have faced countless policy changes. I mean, my group, along with Jewish Voice for Peace, was suspended in the fall semester completely illegitimately. And I filed a lawsuit to counter that action. And it seems like the repression is only getting worse and worse and worse. But the more they repress us, the more we rise up. And that’s why we’ve escalated — that’s also why we’ve escalated here today.

Not only are they not listening to us when we peacefully protest, when we attempt to just pass referendums for student voices to even be heard, they don’t even want to listen to the students. They don’t want to know what the students think. And so, we’re here to tell them that we will take up space and presence on this campus, and they’re not going to be able to erase our support for Palestine.

PROTESTERS: What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If Gaza doesn’t get it, shut it down!

SOPH: My name is Soph. I am with Jewish Voice for Peace at Columbia. And I am here today because I will not stand by while thousands and thousands of people are dying because of our tax dollars in this country, as Columbia’s money is going towards a genocide. The money that should be funding our education is going to the bombs that are dropping on Gaza right now. Columbia is a majority share — has massive amounts of shares in various organizations, like Lockheed Martin, that are supplying Israel with bombs right now, and we will no longer be complicit.

In a campus like this that is filled with repression, that is — every day we wake up, and the administration tries to silence us more and more. We are here to say, “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.” We will not be complicit. We will stand in solidarity, because we know that we keep us safe.

We refuse to believe that Israel is in any part related to our Judaism. In fact, our Jewish values inform why we’re here, why we’re standing in here — Jewish values of tikkun olam, of love, of appreciation, of respect, of mutual liberation. And so, as Jews, we are here to say that we will always support the liberation of Palestine, because that is what historically Jews have done. We have stood up for other oppressed peoples, because we know that there can be no freedom until we are all free.

PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine!

SARAH BORUS: My name is Sarah Borus. I’m a student at Barnard College. And I’m here because I was raised as an anti-Zionist Jew. It is important for me to stand with Palestine. I go to a university that is actively profiting off of the genocide of Palestinians and then is hiding behind Jewish students by saying that they want to crack down on us because of antisemitism. But as an anti-Zionist Jew, I know that that is the farthest thing from the truth. They are doing that because they know that we are on the right side of history, that they are doing something that is profoundly wrong. And it is our job during this genocide to come out and resist.

There were Jews protesting against this genocide who were harassed and then attacked with a chemical weapon. That is not being addressed. This is — quite frankly, we’re seeing McCarthyism once again. And our administrators need to be aware of the experience of anti-Zionist Jews, the way that antisemitism is being weaponized in order to crack down on this movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the South Lawn of Columbia University, where students have set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Special thanks to Democracy Now!’s Hana Elias and Tey-Marie Astudillo and Eric Halvarson for that report.

When we come back, we go to Tel Aviv, Israel, to speak with a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group about why Israel-Iran war is a lifeline for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Back in 20 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The president of Columbia University was grilled at a congressional hearing Wednesday about allegations of antisemitism on campus. In nearly four hours of grueling testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, Minouche Shafik said she had taken serious action against the accusations, including dismissing or removing five faculty members from the classroom in recent months for comments related to Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as suspending 15 students and two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Shafik’s visit to Capitol Hill came after a December hearing that led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

AMY GOODMAN: In the run-up to the congressional hearing, a group of Jewish faculty at Columbia and Barnard penned an open letter addressed to President Shafik expressing their concerns about, quote, “the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses” and labeling the hearings a, quote, “new McCarthyism.”

During yesterday’s testimony, Lisa McClain, the Republican congressmember from Michigan, questioned Shafik over a number of pro-Palestinian slogans, including “from the river to the sea.”

REP. LISA McCLAIN: My question to you: Are mobs shouting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or “Long live the [intifada]” — are those antisemitic comments?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting. And I have heard —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask. So let me repeat the question. When mobs or people are shouting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” or “Long live the [intifada],” are those antisemitic statements? Yes or no? It’s not how you feel. It’s —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I hear them as such. Some people don’t. We have sent a clear message —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: So, is that yes? So, is that yes?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: We have sent a clear message to our community.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I’m not asking about the message.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yeah.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: Is that fall under definition of antisemitic behavior? Yes or no? Why is it so tough?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Because it’s a — it’s a difficult issue because —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I realize it’s a difficult issue.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: — some people hear it as antisemitic, other people do not.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: But here’s the problem, is when people can’t answer a simple question, and they have a definition, but then they can’t — “Well, I’m not really sure if that qualifies.”

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: So, we’ve done —

REP. LISA McCLAIN: I’m asking a simple question. Maybe I should ask your task force. Does that qualify as antisemitic behavior, those statements? Yes or no?

DAVID SCHIZER: Yes.

REP. LISA McCLAIN: Yes. OK.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Later in the hearing, Republican Georgia Congressmember Rick Allen brought up the Bible in his questioning of Shafik. He cited the Old and New Testament and asked Shafik if [she] wanted Columbia University to be cursed by God.

REP. RICK ALLEN: Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Probably not as well as you are, Congressman.

REP. RICK ALLEN: Well, it’s pretty clear. It was the covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear: “If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.” And then, in the New Testament, it was confirmed that all nations would be blessed through you. So, you do not know about that?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I have heard that, now that you’ve explained it.

REP. RICK ALLEN: OK.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yes, I have heard that before.

REP. RICK ALLEN: So, it’s now familiar. Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God, of the Bible?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Definitely not.

REP. RICK ALLEN: OK. Well, that’s good.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Much of the questioning on Wednesday focused on Columbia’s handling of faculty. New York Republican Congressmember Elise Stefanik led the charge. She grilled the president about her testimony on both the protests at Columbia and about professor Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics who chairs an academic review committee.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Dr. Shafik, you realize that at some of these events, the slurs and the chants have been “F— the Jews,” “Death to Jews” —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yeah.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: — “F— Israel,” “No safe place, death to the Zionist state,” “Jews out.” You don’t think those are anti-Jewish?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Completely anti-Jewish, completely unacceptable.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: So you change your testimony —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Horrible.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: — on that issue, as well? So, there have been anti-Jewish protests.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I didn’t get to finish my sentence. So, what I was going to say there were protests that were called that were — that had a —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: That’s not what you were asked. You were asked: Were there any anti-Jewish protests? And you said no.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: So, the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: I’m not asking what it was labeled.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: — labeled as an anti-Israeli government policy. But anti —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: The question wasn’t what it was labeled.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: But antisemitic incidents happened, or antisemitic things were said. So, I just wanted to finish —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: It is an anti-Jewish protest. You agree with that? You change your testimony?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Congresswoman, anti-Jewish things were said at protests, yes.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Thank you for changing your testimony. Another instance when you changed your testimony is you stated that professor Massad was no longer chair, then you stated he’s under investigation. He is still chair on the website. So, has he been terminated as chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Congresswoman, I want to confirm the facts before getting back to you. I can confirm that he’s —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Did you confirm he was still the chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I need — I need to confirm that with you. I want — I need to check.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this: Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I think that would be — I think I would, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: In a statement emailed to Democracy Now!, professor Joseph Massad said Republicans had, quote, “fabricated statements” about him and that it was, quote, “news to him” that he was under investigation. He said no one had spoken to him about his chairmanship of the committee in question.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Nara Milanich is a professor of history at Barnard College, part of Columbia University, who co-wrote an open letter to President Shafik titled “Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism.” Professor Milanich is a member of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. And professor Rebecca Jordan-Young is also with us, professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, at Columbia. She’s a member of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. She’s also a member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young, let’s begin with you. Your response to these hearings yesterday?

REBECCA JORDAN–YOUNG: My response is — well, first, let me just thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. It’s so important.

My first response is that what happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody, regardless of their feelings on Palestine, regardless of their politics. What happened yesterday was a demonstration of the growing and intensifying attack on liberal education writ large.

So, there was an opportunity yesterday for President Shafik to come forward to mount a robust defense of the university as a unique site for debate of difficult ideas, for the fact that slogans can’t be reduced to soundbites, that in fact that what happens at the university is deep discussion, deep thought, and that, in fact, instead, what we got was a live performance of her not just throwing protesters and specific professors under the bus — which we somewhat anticipated, as awful as that was — but, in fact, throwing the entire university system under the bus, throwing out established policies and procedures of the university, throwing out rules that have been established by the American Association of University Professors for decades as best practices, actually announcing unilateral decisions on faculty members on live television, which she doesn’t actually have the authority, and the university, to do. And I could say more, but really I was astonished. It went worse even than any of us had expected.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Professor Nara Milanich, if you could also respond, what most struck you about the hearing, and what Professor Young just said, that the debate, rather than it being a debate about difficult questions, it became extremely narrow, and professor — President, Columbia president, Shafik seemed to capitulate almost entirely, as Professor Young said, threw the entire university apparatus under the bus? If you could respond to that? What was your sense?

NARA MILANICH: So, my sense, one of the things that I learned is that congressional hearings are kind of like social media, which is to say they are wonderful places for political performance, for political theater, for soundbites, for “gotcha” moments, for interrupting one another. They are really terrible spaces to have deep debates about serious and contentious issues. And academic freedom is one of those issues. What goes on on campus and what is happening on campus right now is one of those issues. Where my freedom to speak ends and your right to be free of harassment begins, those are really difficult questions. And a congressional hearing, Twitter are not the places to be litigating these issues.

The place to be talking about these issues is on college campuses, in classrooms, in university quads, in dorm room hallways, right? Universities are precisely the place where we should be having these deep and difficult conversations. And instead, we have seen, time and again, that university administrators are ceding this conversation to people who have very different motives — right? — and who are engaging on these issues for very, very different reasons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could talk, Professor Young, about the establishment of this congressional committee, to begin with, and what we saw happening in December, which led to the resignation of two of the presidents of the top universities in the U.S.?

REBECCA JORDAN–YOUNG: Well, I think it’s been clear from the very beginning that this task force, that this committee, was actually never about antisemitism. This was about a broad attack on liberal education. And, you know, we have many people on this committee who have never before expressed any concern about antisemitism.

And what we saw was that antisemitism, or a particular interpretation of that, a very precise, very politically aligned interpretation of that, has been procedurally split off from discussion about all other forms of harassment, discrimination, violence, etc. — and this is really contrary to what we do in the university; certainly it’s contrary to what we do in my field — where, broadly, this has been created and used as an opportunity to attack all forms of liberatory, critical scholarship. It’s been a place where critical race studies have gotten attacked. It’s attacking DEI. And throughout, unfortunately, the university presidents who have been questioned, and yesterday President Shafik among them, and the rest of the members of the Columbia leadership, played along with this willingness to split these groups apart. But it’s absolutely against what we do both in scholarship and justice activism. We try to help students understand the intertwined nature of systems and power and oppression and discrimination.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could say, in the past, how has Columbia University — in other instances of harassment for other reasons, how has Columbia University dealt with those complaints of harassment, persecution, etc., by students or by faculty?

REBECCA JORDAN–YOUNG: Well, there are disciplinary procedures in place, and have been for a very long time. And they involve members from all sectors of the university that both develop the policies and who are involved in adjudication of particular complaints.

What we’ve seen happening in the run-up to this particular hearing is it looked like the university was doubling down, or tripling down, on just how much surveillance and policing they could demonstrate ahead of time to say, “Look, we are a surveillance campus. We’re a law-and-order campus. There won’t be protests on the university campus.” Columbia has historically been a center of protest and free speech, which is essential for our role as preparing students to be active members of a democracy. And instead, what’s happening now is an arrogation of the right to decide all of those procedures just at the level of the administration, to actually treat protest itself as dangerous and as violent, which is really, really bone-chilling to me.

The other thing that they’ve done is actually outsource a lot of the investigations and the hearings, especially that our students have been subjected to, to law firms and private investigation firms that are not in any way aligned with understanding the mission and the history of the university as a site for deep and principled disagreements.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar, one of only two Muslim congressmembers, questioning Columbia President Shafik.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen anti-Muslim protests on campus?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: I have seen — we have had pro-Israeli demonstrations on campus.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: No, no, no.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: But not —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Just a protest that was against Muslims?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Not — no, I have not seen —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen one against Arabs?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have not.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen one against Palestinians?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have not.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Have you seen against — one against Jewish people? Have you seen a protest —

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: — saying, “We are against Jewish people”?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: No, I have — I have seen — no.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: OK. Thank you for that clarification. There has been a rise in targeting and harassment against antiwar protesters, because it’s been pro-war and antiwar protesters, is what seems like, correct?

MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Correct. There has been —

REP. ILHAN OMAR: OK. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Congressmember Ilhan Omar, one of two congresswomen — Muslim congresswomen in the House. In January — Congressmember Omar also in this hearing brought up the attack on pro-Palestinian students in January, who say they were sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical. Eight students were reportedly hospitalized, complaining of burning eyes, headaches and nausea and other symptoms. Organizers allege the attack was carried out by two Columbia students who were former members of the Israeli military, using a chemical weapon known as “skunk” that the Israeli military and security forces regularly deploy against Palestinians. Professor Young, if you can comment on that incident, of what happened and what happened to these students?

REBECCA JORDAN–YOUNG: Yes, absolutely. First, I’ll just say that in the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate, I was an organizer against — I was an anti-apartheid organizer. And I was involved in a lot of demonstrations on my campus. My colleagues, students all around the country were faced with a lot of condescending policies and a lot of pressures from administrations and crackdowns. Never, ever have I seen something like what happened on the Columbia campus.

Never, first of all, have I seen a situation where the administration sets up students to say that protests themselves are problematic — you can’t be against a war, you can’t be against indiscriminate bombing of civilians. I mean, what’s getting lost in this is the situation in Gaza.

And at the same time, what we saw is that the university did not respond to that attack on our students. Students were never contacted. The students who were actually attacked with that chemical weapon were not supported until after the fact. After intense pressure from faculty, the administration said that they would offer them some resources. But they also said that students who were subject to this skunk attack would not be exempt from the sanctions imposed on them for protesting.

And I also think it’s important to say that these policies against protest are not long-standing policies. They’re new policies, that have been created on the fly, sometimes after the fact of particular demonstrations. And the inquiry hearings that are being held are getting more and more draconian, so that there’s a dragnet, basically, of sweeping up all kinds of students that they target, often because of wearing hijab, often because of being near other students, being friends with students who are protesting. So, it’s sweep everybody up, ask questions later. And again, it’s so chilling to me.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Milanich, in your open letter, in the open letter that you wrote prior to this hearing to Columbia President Shafik, you said it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism is rampant on Columbia’s campus. So, why do you think that so many people are convinced that this is the case? And as Professor Young said, nothing like what’s happened at Columbia has happened in the past with protests. How do you understand why this has happened?

NARA MILANICH: Yeah. So, I think this is a really important question. And I had the opportunity to author this letter, open letter to President Shafik, in advance of her testimony with almost two dozen of my colleagues who identify as Jewish. And it’s important to know here that Columbia has a large Jewish population, of Jewish faculty and Jewish students, but there is no such thing as a Jewish opinion — right? — on campus. This is a really heterogeneous group, a diverse group, people with very different experiences, different identities and different politics, different ideas, different relationships, or even nonrelationships, with Israel, right? And we had the sort of impression, the sense, that people were speaking for us, right? People were assuming that we needed to be protected, that we felt vulnerable, people assuming that we all shared a particular political point of view. And we wrote this letter to President Shafik to clarify that, to explain sort of the diversity of different political opinions on campus and to question this idea of a single, hegemonic Jewish position or voice or experience.

And the letter goes on to implore President Shafik not to capitulate to this kind of politics of weaponizing antisemitism. One of the remarkable things that we have seen in recent months, since the fall, are the ways that right-wing politicians have suddenly discovered — they’ve had a come-to-Jesus moment and have discovered Jews and have discovered the scourge of antisemitism. And, of course, many of these folks are people who flirt with white nationalism — right? — in their everyday life, which is to say with actual antisemites, right? So, we wanted to make the case, and that my colleague has made, as well, that antisemitism here is being used as a wedge. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a very different political agenda. And that is a broader and deeper kind of desire or effort to insert politics into the university.

So, we can see how right-wing politicians, even yesterday, on display in the congressional hearings, have a bigger agenda, a bigger ax to grind. They are interested in undermining academic freedom, in attacking wokeism. This is not about antisemitism so much as attacking areas of inquiry and teaching, whether it’s about voting rights or vaccine safety or climate change — right? — arenas of inquiry that are uncomfortable or inconvenient or controversial for certain groups. And so, this is essentially what we’re seeing, antisemitism being weaponized in a broad attack on the university. And I think that’s really worrisome. And we’re all sort of looking to November to think about what happens then. I mean, if this is what is going on now, what happens if Trump is reelected, and then we get these inclinations coming not just from Congress, but also from higher up?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. Nara Milanich is a professor of history at Barnard-Columbia. She co-wrote the open letter to President Minouche Shafik titled “Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism.” We also want to thank professor Rebecca Jordan-Young in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College-Columbia, member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today we’ll look at the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campuses across the United States. In a moment we’ll look at Wednesday’s congressional hearings where the president of Columbia University was grilled for hours about accusations of antisemitism on campus. But we begin with the University of Southern California, which continues to be rocked by controversy after canceling the commencement speech of its valedictorian for what it claimed were “safety” reasons after she became the subject of an online anti-Palestinian hate campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! co-host Juan González and I interviewed Asna Tabassum, who is a first-generation South Asian American Muslim on Wednesday. I began by welcoming her to Democracy Now!

ASNA TABASSUM: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you give us the chronology of what happened? I mean, to be the valedictorian of this elite university, the University of Southern California, is such an enormous achievement. Can you talk about when you learned you’d become the valedictorian and when you learned you would be giving the speech at graduation? And what happened next?

ASNA TABASSUM: Absolutely. So, part of the selection process of becoming valedictorian is the willingness to give a speech during commencement. And so, when I got the call, I believe in the second week of March or so, it was during Ramadan, and I was incredibly happy to receive the honor and incredibly grateful. And that was the moment I also knew that I would have the chance and the opportunity to address my peers during commencement.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when did you hear that the university had changed its mind? And who contacted you?

ASNA TABASSUM: Of course. So, I was contacted by the administration on Monday, actually, this past Monday, shortly before the statement was released, that I would unfortunately no longer be allowed to give the commencement address for the class of 2024.

AMY GOODMAN: How typical is that, Asna? Does the valedictorian always give the speech?

ASNA TABASSUM: Yes, as far as I know, in history of USC. And in fact, I asked the provost this himself, you know: Has this ever happened to a USC valedictorian? And in fact, I think we both agreed that, to the best of our knowledge, it has never happened before.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly did he say when he explained to you it was for safety reasons? Did he talk about — talk to you about what the threats are?

ASNA TABASSUM: So, that’s exactly the question here, is that I received no details as to what the security threats or what the security concerns were. You know, I heard that there were hundreds and thousands of emails sent to the university, but I was given no clue as to what the contents of these emails were, as well as, for example, the university had said that there were other security concerns in relation to having a big event such as commencement. But, you know, even details there were unclear. And so, when I had asked for details regarding the security concerns — for example, were they security concerns about me or my classmates? — I was offered no information and was told it was not appropriate for me to know.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, were you aware that pro-Israel student groups were targeting you on on social media, that a group called We Are Tov posted a photo of you on its Instagram account and claimed that you were, quote, “openly” — that you “openly promote antisemitic writings”?

ASNA TABASSUM: It’s honestly heartbreaking, yes. Once I was shortly — once I was announced on social media, through USC student media, it only took a few hours before such posts began circulating. And it launched a very generalized and, honestly, very hateful and disappointing campaign to remove me as valedictorian, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue that wasn’t raised by the provost, but in your Instagram bio, you link to a pro-Palestine landing page that reads, in part, “learn about what’s happening in palestine, and how to help.” Some students took to social media to express their opposition to it due to the language on the landing page. The website states, quote, “zionism is a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land.” The website also states, quote, “one palestinian state would mean palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of israel,” end-quote. Can you talk about that and talk about when you linked to that page, and your feelings about this?

ASNA TABASSUM: Sure. So, there are a few points that I’d like to clarify. The first is that a university and students have the responsibility to engage in productive and meaningful discussion. And we’re allowed to learn from one another’s ideas and express those ideas so that we can all grow. And I think that that’s the beauty of an academic institution.

But another factor that I’d like to bring up is that there are other form — there are other pieces of information in that link. You know, there are paragraphs and information relating to the two-state solution, as well, as well as the one-state. The sentence right after the one you just quoted talks about coexistence between Arabs and Jews. You know, there’s a lot of factors here. And my goal in putting the link in my bio is simply to inform my fellow peers in the small ways that I can. But, ultimately, what I want people to take away is for people to inform themselves, come to their own conclusions, and then advocate for what they believe in.

And so, in no way am I advocating for hate. I am only advocating for human equality and for the sanctity of human life when I say that Palestinians, as well as Jews, as well as Muslims and Armenians and anyone else who is invested in this conflict, has the equal right to life and the equal privilege of the fullest extent to life.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you tell us more about yourself? You’re majoring in biomedical engineering and minoring in resistance to genocide. What inspired you to follow these courses of study?

ASNA TABASSUM: This is my favorite question, especially because, you know, as you might know, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, and I wish people more talked about my biomedical engineering major, as well, because I think it’s an important part of who I am and my worldview.

That being said, the way that I see my major and my minor working together, for the very same goal, is that, you know, my minor in resistance to genocide allows me to study the human condition at possibly one of its worst conditions, and then biomedical engineering is my way of learning technically how we can improve the human condition through increasing health accessibility.

And so, the ways that I specifically see this are, for example, when I learn about the Rwandan genocide or the Holocaust or various other forms of genocides and conflicts through my minor, I look at the ways in which healthcare and health are impeded and the ways in which the quality of life are impeded, so that I can build devices and health technologies, using my major and using the education and the information I learn in my major of biomedical engineering, to see how we can develop low-cost and accessible point-of-care devices, so that we can improve the ways in which people experience healthcare when they are at their most in need of healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, if you were giving the speech — I mean, this speech would be given in May — right? — at graduation. So isn’t there still a possibility that USC could change their mind? What would your speech be? What would you say to the USC community?

ASNA TABASSUM: So, you know, I actually have not considered and actually started writing my speech. But, of course, this experience is informing me how I want to go about it. But, ultimately, my message is one of hope. I think something that I truly believe in, given my familial background and, you know, the way I was raised, is that education is such a privilege. And using the ways that we have learned how to learn, it’s incumbent upon us to look at the world and see what we see, and then take information and make conclusions so that we can change the world in the ways that we want to. And so, in accordance with my message of hope, I also want to do a message of inspiration, so that our graduates and my peers can feel empowered to take on issues of world concern and see themselves in positions of making change.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve talked about an online hate campaign against you. Can you describe more what you have received?

ASNA TABASSUM: Sure. You know, I’ve received incredibly disappointing comments. And I think it’s an unfortunate part of, you know, expressing who you are and expressing what you believe in. But I do want to call attention to the overwhelming support. And I think that anybody who is watching this unfold is seeing that various communities, from Muslim communities to Jewish communities to South Asian and first-generation American communities, all coming together to see this as something bigger and as something representative of a collective voice. And so, you know, while there is hatred out there, I do want to give my kudos to the people who have been seeing the inspiration and seeing the hope as this unfolds.

AMY GOODMAN: University of Southern California valedictorian Asna Tabassum. She joined us Wednesday on Democracy Now! after USC cancelled her commencement speech for what it claims are “safety” reasons after Asna became the subject of an online hate campaign.

Coming up, Columbia University president is grilled at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus, in what critics are calling the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices. We’ll be joined by two Barnard-Columbia professors. One of them signed an open letter from Jewish professors calling the hearings a “new McCarthyism.” We’ll also hear from students who have camped out on Columbia’s lawn. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Today, in a closely watched election, 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, start to vote on whether to organize with the United Auto Workers. This could be the UAW’s first big victory as they try to expand into the southern United States after huge contract wins last year with the Detroit companies General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Pro-union Volkswagen workers in Tennessee spoke in a video produced by More Perfect Union.

VICTOR VAUGHN: Healthcare costs went up almost 15%, while they gave us a small 11% increase, after the Big Three negotiated their contract. Well, our insurance costs went up, so it ate it up. So we don’t see any of that.

KELCEY SMITH: Well, if you want to work for a company like this and they’re going to generate that kind of money, then why can’t we have our fair share, as well?

VICTOR VAUGHN: Volkswagen sales have shot out the roof, you know, $78 billion profit over the past three years.

ARNO ANTLITZ: We were able to grow revenues and underlying operating result in a difficult economic environment.

VICTOR VAUGHN: We’re the largest automaker in the world, but yet the employees are here struggling?

VW WORKER: The loudest voices of the anti-union, they keep trying to press this notion that if we unionize, Volkswagen is going to shut us down, they’re going to close our factory. They’re not going to pull it out just because 4,000 employees, out of 600,000, want to be organized, not to mention the fact that all of their other factories are organized.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Hamilton Nolan, journalist who writes about labor and politics for In These Times and his Substack, How Things Work, where his latest piece is “Trampoline Unionism: ‘Power expands, it doesn’t contract.’” His new book is The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.

Hamilton, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about this epic struggle in Tennessee right now, the significance of the workers trying to unionize the Volkswagen plant.

HAMILTON NOLAN: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

This election is a big, big deal, probably the most important union election that this country has seen in years. It’s been decades since UAW or anyone has successfully unionized a big auto plant like this down south. And, you know, it’s important to understand that these companies are in the South in the first place because they think they can go there to escape unions, to escape regulation, to find more easily exploited workers. It’s essentially a form of domestic offshoring. Companies use the South the same way they use Mexico.

And so, the UAW, which is coming off a big, big win in a national strike last year, has taken that energy that they had from the strike and funneled it directly into a big, ambitious plan to organize not just one company down south, but all of the nonunion auto companies down south. And this Volkswagen election is the first one to come up for a vote, so this is really going to be a extremely important indicator as to whether the UAW can finally crack these nonunion auto plants down south. And if they’re able to successfully pull off this Volkswagen election — and I think that, you know, all the reporting on the ground indicates that cautious optimism is probably warranted here — if they’re able to win in Chattanooga, it sends a really powerful signal to all the other nonunion auto workers down south that this is not a dream, that this is not something they have to be afraid of, that this is something that can actually be done. And I think you could really see this, looking back, as the first domino in something that changes the entire South.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Hamilton, this plant is the only Volkswagen factory in the world without a union? How does the company — how did the company respond to the unionization effort and justify to its workers that this is the only plant that is not organized?

HAMILTON NOLAN: Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous. You know, particularly the European automakers are very used to working with unions all over the world. And the plants that they have down south are, in many cases, the only places where they don’t have unions. And still, I think, you know, Volkswagen has claimed to be neutral in this election, and I think the workers would tell you they probably haven’t quite been neutral.

But it really does go to illustrate how ridiculous the South’s kind of model of economic development is, which is, for many generations, the South has put forward a theory that the way to do economic development is just to give companies everything they want, to create an easily exploited and economically desperate workforce, and that is the thing that will attract businesses. And, you know, we saw six Southern governors come out with a joint statement yesterday warning workers not to join the UAW. And it was probably one of the most pathetic things I think we can ever see in our life, governors of U.S. states catering to international corporations before the workers who are citizens of their own states. So, again, you know, the South is really funneling money to international corporations for free, and the UAW is trying to put an end to that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, as you say, there’s not only labor organizing spreading across the South, but there’s also major gains that occurred in California that you’ve written about, a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers there. Can you talk about the importance of that?

HAMILTON NOLAN: Yeah. California recently passed the $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers. You know, A, it’s obviously something that’s good for fast-food workers. But, B, the interesting thing about that was it’s sort of a step down the road toward sectoral bargaining, which means, you know, the ability to negotiate wages and working conditions for entire industries at once, not having to go store to store to store, unionizing every store in order to get a contract at each fast-food outlet, which is nearly impossible and is why the fast-food industry doesn’t have any unions. You know, California establishing things like a wage board that can set a wage for a whole industry, it’s a really interesting kind of step towards thinking bigger about ways to empower workers on an industry-wide level. It’s something that a lot of people think is really the path for reaching workers on the scale that we need to reestablish union power in America, given how bad our labor laws are and how hard it is to organize at scale. And so, it’s encouraging, and it’s also, I think, an illustration of what you’re seeing all over the country, which is red states are running in a real negative direction on labor rights, and blue states, in response, are trying to become more and more progressive on labor rights. And I think that’s a trend that’s going to continue for a while.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 15 seconds, Hamilton, but I wanted to ask you about Shawn Fain, the head of UAW, being the guest of the Bidens at a White House dinner, and the UAW’s stance, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Do you think Shawn Fain is getting through to President Biden?

HAMILTON NOLAN: I don’t know if he’s getting through to President Biden. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence, based on what Biden has done, that Shawn Fain has got through to him on that point. Biden has done a lot of nice things for the UAW. But as you said, the UAW and many, many other unions, representing at this point the majority of union members in America, have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and that is one issue that Biden is really not being responsive to the labor movement on. So I hope that changes.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Hamilton Nolan, labor journalist. His new book out is called The Hammer. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: One year ago this week, a devastating civil war erupted in Sudan when a fragile alliance between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary group the Rapids Support Forces collapsed, pitting the two sides against each other. The war initially began around the capital city of Khartoum but quickly spread to other parts of Sudan, including Darfur, Port Sudan and Gezira state, situated in the country’s agricultural heartland.

One year on, the conflict has created what the U.N. high commissioner for refugees has called, quote, “one of the worst displacement and humanitarian crises in the world, and one of the most neglected and ignored.”

More than 8.6 million people have been driven from their homes, creating the world’s largest displacement crisis. A new report by the International Organization for Migration has found 20,000 people are forced to flee their homes in Sudan every day, half of them children.

The crisis has been compounded by food insecurity, with the World Food Programme recently warning Sudan is facing the world’s largest hunger crisis. The number of Sudanese facing emergency levels of hunger — one stage before famine — has more than tripled in a year to almost 5 million, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a U.N.-backed index. Save the Children has warned that 230,000 children, pregnant women and newborn mothers could die of malnutrition in the coming months.

Meanwhile, Sudan’s health system has collapsed, allowing outbreaks of diseases, including measles and cholera.

The war erupted April 15, 2023, when a planned political transition following the ouster in a popular uprising of President Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power fell apart between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.

For more, we’re joined by Khalid Mustafa Medani, an associate professor of political science and Islamic studies at McGill University, chair of the African studies program there. His recent piece for MERIP is headlined “The Struggle for Sudan: A Primer.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you here in studio in New York, Professor. If you can start off by telling us where Sudan stands, one year after the war erupted?

KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Well, first of all, thank you, Amy, for having me on the show. It’s a real honor. Thank you for your coverage of Sudan.

I think that where we stand is an unbelievable kind of, what the Doctors Without Borders have called, a failure of humanity. I think that there are very few crises in the world historically, including in Africa, where there’s been such an acceleration, in just one year, of the kind of devastation that you just itemized — 9 million displaced internally, over a million across the borders, the seven borders of Sudan, mostly in Chad, Egypt and South Sudan, and the complete destruction of the infrastructure.

In addition to that, in December of last year, something occurred that has accelerated the famine, basically — not just food insecurity, but the expansion of the famine. And that is the attack on the Gezira state in central Sudan, which really produces over 60% of the agricultural products of the country.

In addition to that, of course, there are 70% of the hospitals that are destroyed. The educational system has completely collapsed.

And so, the acceleration of this kind of devastation, I don’t think we’ve seen since perhaps maybe the genocide in Rwanda. And I think that compounding that, for those of us, of course, concerned about the situation, is the lack of attention to the conflict. Of course, eyes are elsewhere, but that has been a really problematic aspect of this conflict so far.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, you remarked that this is a war that doesn’t have support for either side among the Sudanese people. Could you talk about that and also the roots of this conflict, going back to the revolution of 2017 and 2018, how that informed these current warring parties?

KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the very kind of unique aspects of this particular war, and local Sudanese have insisted, including in Darfur, one of the most ravaged regions, that this is not a civil war, that this is essentially a war between two generals: on the one side, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who’s the head of the Sudan Armed Forces, on the other side, the militia leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. And whereas, in general, civil wars are characterized by, you know, two groups with some kind of significant constituency and civil society supporting one side or the other, in this particular case, the war has absolutely no legitimacy in civil society and no real constituency for either side. And that, I think, is unique in the history of conflicts in Africa and, I would argue, elsewhere.

The reason for that has very much to do with what you said, and that is the genesis and the root of the war really is the revolution of 2018, 2019, that many people followed throughout the world. And what was unique about that particular pro-democracy revolution is that it encompassed the entire country. It wasn’t just in the urban areas. It wasn’t just in the rural areas. It wasn’t just middle-class Sudanese. But Sudanese across social classes, Sudanese across regions, across ethnicities, rose up in late 2018 as a result of implementation of economic policies that raised the price of consumer goods, and it expanded over a six-month period, leading, as you probably know, to the downfall and the ouster of an authoritarian regime led by Omar al-Bashir that lasted for 30 years and had conducted or executed three different wars in the country.

That is really the genesis, for viewers and listeners to understand, because this war is essentially a war against that revolution. It’s a war against the Sudanese people. Both of these generals, while they have a great deal of competition over resources, over political power, have one thing in common, and that is their fear of this kind of revolutionary potential, and their, essentially, fear of Sudanese civil society. That’s why, in addition to all of the kind of devastation that we’ve been talking about, a key aspect of the targeting has been civilians. Civilians, of course, have been the greatest victims, and not just randomly. I’m talking about not only doctors and journalists, but also activists and those members of what we call in Sudan and are well known to be the grassroots resistance committees that led the revolution. Those people are either being targeted and killed or expelled from the country or forced to leave the country. And so, that becomes a really important aspect of the root of this particular kind of conflict in Sudan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk also about the influence of outside governments on the conflict in preventing a ceasefire, and especially Egypt and the United Arab Emirates? And where is the African Union on this?

KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Well, it’s very important to understand that the external forces had very much to do with supporting what was a fragile coalition between civilian leaders and military leaders. At that time, there was an alliance between these two warring generals, which I think that it’s very important to understand. Because of the continued protest for democracy in Sudan, by the end of 2022, there was something called a framework agreement, basically talks to bring together civilian leaders and these generals in order to oversee a transition to democracy. That was overseen by the international community — in particular, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the EU. And their genesis of the external involvement and the failure to see Sudan through a peace and a democratic transition really has to be understood in that context.

It was at that point, I would argue, that the failure of achieving a civilian transition occurred, and it was, of course, a result of the machinations of these two generals, but also the lack of foresight with respect to external actors at the time, specifically the lack of inclusion of the very forces and groups and youth and resistance committees and civil society organizations that really were the ones who mobilized for the revolution. So, that is really important. That failure of the framework agreement, it was accelerated. It was not inclusive. And, of course, as you know, the catalyst for this war began in the context of a contentious issue around merging the militias into the standing army. That, of course, would have led to the lack of autonomy and power of the militia leader who has gone to war against the Sudan Armed Forces, and at the same time, of course, the Sudan Armed Forces, Burhan at its head, was very concerned about having two command-and-control institutions. In essence, he wanted to control the country. So, to answer your question currently about external actors, that is the genesis of their lack of foresight in terms of really supporting the revolution, in my view.

And to bring it up to date, the kind of variety of interests — Egypt’s interest in and support of the Sudan Armed Forces, the United Arab Emirates’ support of the militia, Saudi Arabia’s support also of the Sudan Armed Forces — has led to the situation where we have up to three or four different peace initiatives — one in Saudi Arabia headed by the U.S., one in Djibouti headed by IGAD, the regional bloc, another headed by the UAE that was recently held in Bahrain — basically, competing peace initiatives that have obstructed, number one, a resolution to the conflict in terms of implementing a ceasefire, but also motivated these two generals, because, basically, they are utilizing their patrons, whether outside forces, in order to perpetuate the war against the Sudanese people.

So, I hope that makes sense. But we do have to get back and understand the initial failures of the international community in really implementing a peace agreement that would really satisfy the, you know, kind of the roots of the problems in Sudan, but most specifically those forces, including resistance committees, young people, civil society organizations, that mobilized for the revolution. The reason I mention that is that any resolution to this conflict would require getting back to that and understanding, given that this is a war against the civilian population, the support must be given to the civilian population and immediately be included in any peace initiative that would seek to resolve this conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor, on Monday, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced that donors had pledged more than $2 billion to Sudan. He was speaking at an international conference in Paris aimed at increasing humanitarian aid to Sudan.

PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: [translated] Even if today there are far too many conflicts and there are conflicts that are covered more by the press and diplomatic efforts, our duty was to make it clear that we are not forgetting what is happening in Sudan, that we remain mobilized, that there are no double standards. … We can announce that more than 2 billion euros will be mobilized for the women and men of Sudan. Before this conference, we had a commitment of 190 million euros. This evening, we are at 2 billion euros for Sudan.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s French President Emmanuel Macron at this international conference in Paris. If you can talk also about the role of France, but, overall, what the international community can do to be most supportive to ending this war?

KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Well, of course it’s good news. The priority, of course, is to address the humanitarian crisis. There is absolutely no question about that. The 2 billion euros is important. There have been a lot of different initiatives on the part of the United Nations. Very few have met the targets. And this is one of the reasons Doctors Without Borders has called it a failure of humanity, because of the lack of donor, you know, kind of pledges and support.

The 2 billion euros are important, but it’s very important to understand that one of the central aspects of this conflict is the way that these two parties are using food delivery and aid delivery as a weapon of war, not only in terms of targeting aid workers, but also setting up bureaucratic blockages, refusing permits for aid workers. And the reason I mention that is the 2 billion is extremely important, but the problem is that without a really vigorous political intervention, without understanding that this aid must be really kind of implemented or utilized in the context simultaneously with a vigorous political intervention that seeks to stop the war — and the reason I say that is, one of the most important problematics at the moment, as I mentioned, is the lack of coherent coordination on the part of external actors, with France and the EU, of course, pledging this money, Canada and the United States utilizing sanctions against these two generals, but a lack of coordination that would, A, include civil society organization to set the agenda for a ceasefire and to implement that kind of ceasefire. And also, this kind of pledge, while it’s so important, it really does not make up for the destruction of the distributive networks in Sudan. Aid is an absolutely important aspect, but what is happening now is so severe in terms of food insecurity and the famine, that the support of local Sudanese, including organizations that were transformed from resistance communities into voluntary association, like emergency response rooms.

So, what we need is, A, a very vigorous political intervention, coordination between the different actors. And I’m talking about the Gulf countries, the United States, Europe and African countries. All of them have a stake in this conflict. The reason that this pledge has gone through — one of the reasons — is the recognition on the part of external actors, to be quite honest, Amy, that there is not only a huge humanitarian crisis, but the spillover effect across the region, the Red Sea region, the strategic areas that are of such concern to the Gulf countries, to the United States, to Europe, the issue of migration. All of that necessitates a coordinated understanding of the problem or of the intervention, that everyone has a great deal to lose from this conflict. So, the pledge is important and very, very useful and vital, but without a political coordinated intervention that includes civil society forces and supports local Sudanese organizations, like the emergency response rooms, the Darfur Association and others, we won’t really see kind of the restoration of peace.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I just have one question that maybe you could address briefly. A war of this length obviously requires weapons. Who is supplying the weapons to both sides? And what could be done to put pressure on the arms suppliers of the warring parties?

KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Well, the problem is that in the Sahel region, in Africa, in general, the smuggling of arms is something that is very difficult to control completely, what we call the small arms trade, that really encompasses the entire Sahel region. One of the issues of the arms supplies for the militias has to do previously with the supply of arms that was brought in by United Arab Emirates. That is something that is well known. You know, the Russian Wagner Group also facilitated arms to the militia. The arms that the Sudan Armed Forces have, of course, number one, has to do with its own stock. It is the Sudan Armed Forces and had received a lot of arms supplies recently as they began to lose the war, particularly after the fall of Gezira, the central state. They have been getting arms and drones from Iran as a last resort because of the grave situation they find. So, we have Gulf countries involved, Iran involved, the small arms trade. That requires, of course, great attention. There have been sanctions implemented against the financing of these arms through the corporations of both the militia leaders and the Sudan Armed Forces, who are supported, I want to add, by extremist Islamists, as the only small coalition left to support them. So, there is a complex of external actors and informal trade of arms. That is important to pay attention to, but without really looking at the ways to implement a ceasefire and restore peace, it’s just a stopgap kind of policy or intervention. So, it is important, but, once again, we have to really bring these regional actors into play.

The United States, as you know, has finally appointed a special envoy to Sudan, who has, interestingly enough, reiterated much of what I’m saying. And that is that there needs to be a coordination among the regional actors, the ending of arms supplies by certain actors to the different warring parties. And interestingly enough, he has also emphasized the importance of taking civil society seriously. And I would like to also mention that — and this is very key — that he has also mentioned, as the majority of Sudanese have mentioned, despite the severity of this conflict, there is only one solution and only one interest on the part of the majority of Sudanese — 99% of Sudanese — and that is the restoration of full civilian democracy. I know it’s counterintuitive. It seems difficult at this stage to think postwar in Sudan. But there is, I think, that even if the American envoy has recognized, as I’ve said in this program a couple of times, that because of the lack of constituency, the lack of legitimacy, the kind of venal, kind of instrumental, self-interested political and economic objectives of these two warring parties, there is absolutely no other way to resolve this conflict except to support the vast majority of the civilian population and Sudanese, inside and outside, and to continue what we call the objectives of what Sudanese call al-Thawrah Majida, the Glorious Revolution. That is really the only solution. And this is what even the special U.S. envoy has reiterated, and, I would argue, primarily because he’s been talking to Sudanese.

AMY GOODMAN: Khalid Mustafa Medani, we want to thank you so much for being with us, associate professor of political science and Islamic studies at McGill University, also chair of the African studies program. He is from Sudan. We will link to your piece in MERIP headlined “The Struggle for Sudan.”

When we come back, at least nine Google workers are arrested after staging sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York and the Google Cloud CEO’s office in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. We’ll speak with two of the arrested workers. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show with journalist Peter Maass, who has written an opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them,” unquote. Until recently, Peter was a senior editor at The Intercept. He’s the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. He covered the Bosnia war for The Washington Post and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times Magazine.

Peter, welcome to Democracy Now! You begin your piece in The Washington Post by saying, “How does it feel to be a war-crimes reporter whose family bankrolled a nation that’s committing war crimes? I can tell you.” Lay it out for us.

PETER MAASS: Well, my great-great-grandfather was Jacob Schiff, who was a financier at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, one of the wealthiest people in the country probably, who donated a lot of money and organized the movement of Jews, persecuted Jews, from Europe, largely from Russia but also from other countries and Russia, to any safe haven that would have them, including America, but also, significantly, British-controlled Palestine. And then, his son-in-law, my great-grandfather, Felix Warburg, who married Jacob Schiff’s daughter, continued that process of supporting and helping to organize the migration of persecuted Jews from Europe to British-controlled Palestine. This is before World War II, the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet you say they were anti-Zionists. Can you explain?

PETER MAASS: Well, they were non-Zionists, which was actually different, significantly different, from being anti-Zionists. There was a movement amongst American Jews and Jews elsewhere, in Europe, that was called non-Zionism. And for them, the non-Zionists, the point was Jews should be able to go to British-controlled Palestine. They need to go to British-controlled Palestine because they need refuge from the persecution they’re suffering in Europe.

But they were against the establishment of a Jewish state, for two reasons. One is that they were concerned that if there were a Jewish state, then all of the antisemites, in America and elsewhere, would look at Jews who are not living in this Jewish state and say, “Ah, you know, your loyalty is actually to this other country.” And that would kind of increase suspicions of Jews and make them seem lesser citizens in the countries that they were living in. And then, the second concern, which was one that a lot of people had but that non-Zionists also had and pronounced, was they were concerned about violence between Arabs and Jews. They just kind of said, “Look, you know, if one side, the Jews or the Arabs, for that matter, try to exert total control over a state that’s going to be established there” — because, remember, at this time, Palestine was under the control of the British Mandate — “then it’s going to be really violent.” My great-grandfather referred to it as a shooting gallery.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Peter, you also covered the wars in Croatia and in Bosnia. And could you talk about how your journalism there helps inform your perspective of what’s going on? Because many, of course, of our listeners and viewers are not familiar with those wars and the war crimes committed there.

PETER MAASS: In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia, which was a kind of conglomeration of different republics, five or six — I forget the precise number, actually — began to fall apart. And instead of falling apart peacefully, it fell apart violently. And there was first a war when Slovenia, one of the republics, seceded. And then there was an even larger war when Croatia, another one of its constituent republics, seceded. And then, when Bosnia did the same — this was in 1992 — this was, unfortunately, the largest war of all.

There were a significant number of Serbs who lived in Bosnia. And Slobodan Milošević, who was the leader in Belgrade of kind of all Serbs in the country, organized the kind of provisioning of military materiel and soldiers, guerrilla fighters, paramilitaries, to go in and basically fight against the Muslims and Croats in Bosnia who wanted to have an independent state and who voted in a referendum for an independent state. And the war there, which I went to cover, it was not your ordinary war of army against army. It was a war of paramilitaries committing atrocities against defenseless civilians, largely Muslims, some Croats, and it also consisted of sieges against the few cities that were able to resist the onslaught. Sarajevo was one of these cities. Srebrenica was another one of these cities.

And so, I was there covering this war, seeing terrible things happen that are not supposed to happen in war. I mean, wars are violent. Civilians get killed in wars. But it’s not always illegal. In this case, there were civilians right under my window in Sarajevo getting shot by snipers, and I wrote about that. There were civilians whose houses were getting bombed. There were civilians who were standing in bread lines who were getting bombed and killed. There were aid shipments of medicine and food that were being prohibited from entry into these so-called safe areas, because they were supposed to have been protected by the United Nations but were not. And so, I was there reporting on this.

And in 1993, a year after this war began, there was an international criminal tribunal that was set up to investigate war crimes and possible genocide that was occurring at the time in Bosnia. And that tribunal subsequently did hold a number of trials, including of senior Bosnian and Serb leaders — the military leader Ratko Mladić, the political leader Radovan Karadžić and the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević — in which the charges included genocide. And both Karadžić and Mladić are now in jail for the rest of their lives on charges that include genocide. So I was reporting on this genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: As you compare what you saw in Bosnia to what you saw in Gaza, you write in that piece, “When I reported from besieged Sarajevo, I stayed in a hotel that was smack on the front line, with Serbian snipers routinely firing at civilians walking under my window. … On a spring day in 1993, I heard the familiar crack and whistle of a sniper’s bullet, followed by an awful scream. I went to my window and saw a wounded civilian trying to crawl to safety. Writing in The Post more than three decades ago, I described the man’s desperate shouts as ‘a mad howl of a person pushed over the edge. It came from the lungs, from the heart, from the mind,’” you write in The Washington Post. You also write about disturbing video footage from Gaza that shows Hala Khreis walking on a so-called safe route in January with her grandson, 5-year-old Tayem Abdel, who was holding a white flag when she was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper. Talk about the comparisons, or what you call the rhymes.

PETER MAASS: Yeah. I mean, God, I remember those stories so well. This is the most — there are so many disturbing things going on in Gaza now and in the West Bank. But as the Israeli attack began, after the Hamas attack on October 7th against Israel, you know, we began seeing these videos and reports emerging from these very brave journalists in Gaza of what was happening — and, for example, that video of this grandmother being shot, obviously quite intentionally. And everything that I was seeing — flour line massacres in Gaza, for example, airdrops of humanitarian aid that killed some of the people they were intended to help because they landed on top of these people — also happened in Bosnia. I began seeing just the same kinds of incidents, that were the constituent elements in Bosnia of genocide, also happening in Gaza, but — kind of most disturbing in a way — at a scale that was larger than Bosnia. I mean, for example, you know, in Bosnia, over the course of its four-year war, there were something like 7,000 or 8,000 children killed, which is terrible. In Gaza, over the course of just six months, there have been more than 13,000 children killed. So, you know, I just could not help but see not only the parallels, but also how what seems to be unfolding in Gaza is even worse than what I saw in Bosnia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we have less than a minute left, but I’m wondering your perspective on how the U.S. media has been covering the war in Gaza.

PETER MAASS: It’s been a real mixed bag. And it was a real mixed bag in Bosnia. And we’re all kind of captives of our experiences. And so, I covered the war in Bosnia, and I also covered other wars. So, you know, I may be talking too much about Bosnia, but I think it is relevant. In Bosnia, there was exceptionally good coverage, I think — and I’m biased on this, but I think — from the journalists who were on the ground, largely foreign journalists, but also a lot of Bosnian journalists — really good coverage of actually what was going on. But then, in the foreign capitals, in Washington, D.C., but also London and France — France and Britain were very important elements of the international community at the time — the reporting was terrible, because it reflected the kind of briefings that the journalists were getting from all their government sources and all the think tank people, and they were just saying, “Oh, it’s a mess there. These people — 

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds, Peter.

PETER MAASS: — “plan to kill each other.” So, we have the same problem now, where there’s a lot of bad coverage coming out of the capitals, such as Washington, although from the ground itself, reporting is quite excellent.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Peter Maass, journalist, former senior editor for The Intercept, author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. We’ll link to your latest piece in The Washington Post. He also covered U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks so much for joining us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The Intercept is reporting The New York Times has instructed its reporters to avoid using the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory” in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. The Intercept‘s report is based on an internal memo from the Times. One newsroom source told The Intercept, quote, “I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel,” they said.

Today we’re joined by a Palestinian journalist who’s been highly critical of how the Western media has portrayed Israel’s war in Gaza. Dalia Hatuqa is an independent Palestinian journalist specializing in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, usually based between Amman, Jordan, and Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She was a close friend and colleague of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in the occupied West Bank May 11th, 2022. Dalia’s latest piece for The Century Foundation is headlined “Under Cover of Gaza War, Assault on West Bank Accelerates.” Dalia joins us now in our New York studio after speaking last night at the Columbia Journalism School.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. This was also the topic of your panel at the Columbia J School last night, the issue of how the conflict is being covered. What do you think is most important for people to understand, Dalia?

DALIA HATUQA: Well, I think that a lot of what’s missing from the bigger portrait or the puzzle, so to speak, is the Palestinian voice. So, in order to find out what’s going on in Gaza, we need to not just rely on Western journalists coming into Gaza. I know that’s very important, and it’s a demand by a lot of us and by, you know, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other journalism rights groups. But it’s also to amplify Palestinian voices, because, ultimately, nobody knows Gaza better than the Gazan journalists on the ground who are actually doing the work that they’re doing right now. And in a way, these journalists, not only are they fighting for their lives while doing all of this, they’re also resorting to extraordinary measures to be able to cover what’s going on. And speaking to journalists on the ground, they tell us that what we’re seeing from them is only like 10% of what’s happening in Gaza at the moment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dalia, I wanted to ask you — the Western press does have the opportunity to cover what is going on in the West Bank, and yet, this — as you wrote in a recent piece, more than 4,000 West Bank Palestinians have been displaced just in 2023, the highest number ever recorded. What is going on in the West Bank, from what you’ve been able to see?

DALIA HATUQA: Basically, in the West Bank, the fog of war has allowed Israel to perpetuate crimes at a very large scale not only throughout the West Bank, but including occupied East Jerusalem. And in the West Bank, we’ve got what a lot of even Israeli officials have admitted are pogroms that are going on by and being perpetrated by Israeli settlers, especially in villages around Nablus, for example, which are in the north, where there are many settlements surrounding villages. We’re not talking about just, you know, the torching of houses and the torching of cars and whatnot. We’re talking about people getting killed by armed settlers.

And while they’re being armed and attacking Palestinians, they’re also being helped or aided by Israeli soldiers, whose job, technically, is to be there to not allow such things to happen, but in a way, you know, sometimes they just sit by idly and not do anything, or they actually participate in these attacks. That’s why when you look at the U.N. figures, a lot of times we see, you know, 10 Palestinians have been killed by settlers, two Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, but then there is a line that says three Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers and/or soldiers. So, we don’t know, because they are part of the system that’s subjugating these Palestinians, that’s, you know, carrying out all this violence against them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And it’s not just those who are killed, but also the detentions of Palestinians in the West Bank. Could you talk about the conditions that they’re facing in Israeli custody?

DALIA HATUQA: The detentions, honestly, they’re atrocious, and they are the least talked about, even among Western journalists, who actually haven’t been really mentioning this at all. We’re talking about the least amount of, you know, livable situations that can be — that any detainee can live in. So, they get water up to two hours a day now. Sometimes they don’t get to shower. The food that they get is rotten. I’m talking about the detainees in — the 9,000 or so in Israeli prisons. They don’t have access to their families. They don’t have access to lawyers. The people who have come out have come out with — some have had their limbs amputated because of the extended use of handcuffs. So, honestly, the conditions are really harrowing, and there’s not much access.

And right now, as we speak, I was just seeing that there is a detainee who died in, actually, an Israeli hospital a few days ago, and his body is still being withheld. And his family has not been able to put him to rest, because — even though he had already carried out his sentence, 30 or more years, which is, quite frankly, a devastating thing for the family, because they’re unable to get any kind of closure.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking, of course, about Walid Daqqa. Human rights groups, everyone had asked for him to be released, as he was there for almost 40 years and he was dying of cancer. Speaking of people who have died, not in prison, but outside, the last time I spoke to you was just after Shireen Abu Akleh was killed May 11th, 2022, as she was a dear friend of yours, the Al Jazeera Arabic reporter, outside the Jenin refugee camp, all laid out now, determined to be an Israeli sniper who killed her. As her colleagues tried to reach her, they shot at them, clearly wearing “press.” It wasn’t in the middle of any kind of skirmish. They were just standing outside. This issue of journalists being killed, that you spoke of before — the memorial for Shireen, outside Jenin, has now been bulldozed over, destroyed by the Israeli military. But even in Gaza — and you took this up last night, you and your colleagues on the panel, of what’s happening to journalists. Even you were surprised, you said, as we spoke before the show, by learning about when David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, asked, “How do you know that journalists are targeted?” Talk about the response.

DALIA HATUQA: Basically, we were very lucky to have a journalist from Gaza who managed to leave the coastal enclave, the besieged coastal enclave, to Qatar. Her name is Ameera Harouda. And she had to leave, obviously, because, you know, for her well-being and her family. She has four kids. Anyways, she was talking about the fact that journalists would get phone calls from Israeli authorities, military authorities, basically questioning them about their work, especially if they worked for Qatar, which is a little strange, considering that Qatar is the go-between, you know, between Israel and Hamas for the talks to reach a ceasefire and to release the hostages. And in the meantime, also CPJ was talking to a few journalists who were released after being detained, and they had been taken away for 33 days, made to sit in squatting positions, in horrific conditions. They came out, you know, having lost 30 kilos or so.

There’s a lot going on in that sense, but also the targeting of journalists. People know because there are UAVs or drones, as we say, constantly hovering in Gaza. It’s so perpetual that people in Gaza, if they don’t hear a UAV, they think something’s wrong. UAVs have been part of the Gaza skyline for years, long before October 7th.

AMY GOODMAN: And even the phone calls from the Israeli military to journalists, threatening them?

DALIA HATUQA: Yes, absolutely. And in the West Bank, they do the same thing. They call them in. They say, “We want to have a chat with you.” And then they don’t come out, because, you know, they take them in. They can put them in administrative detention, which, as you know, is basically when you put people in or Palestinians in prison without any kind of — without any kind of proof or without charging them. And it’s very easy to do that. I mean, right now there’s a young Christian girl who’s a student. She’s in administrative detention for four months. And I know that the archbishop of Canterbury was calling for her release. So, all these things are intertwined. There’s a lot of things going on that don’t — that are far-reaching. It’s not just about journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: And the journalists who are being detained in Gaza are being questioned about their reporting?

DALIA HATUQA: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Interrogated for hours?

DALIA HATUQA: Absolutely, because what — the questions that they were being asked is, “Why did you write this? Why did you say this? Do you talk to Hamas people?” Of course they talk to Hamas people. It’s their job. It’s like how you talk to Israeli forces. You’re going to — how you talk to Israeli military personnel or government officials. I mean, that’s your job as a journalist. Your job is to talk to people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you, Dalia Hatuqa — you’re usually based in Amman, Jordan, or in Ramallah in the West Bank, but you’re here in the United States now. What’s your message to the American public and to the Biden administration, given that this country is the largest supplier of weapons and military aid to Israel?

DALIA HATUQA: I think, honestly, the American public has been very instrumental in working with Palestinians. Large segments of the American public have been working with Palestinians. I’ve seen a lot of support. I’ve seen a lot of support among Israelis, you know, the few Israelis who get it. I’ve seen a lot of support among American Jews, and I believe that they are one of the Palestinians’ biggest allies.

But my message, obviously, to Biden is, I mean, there’s a lot at stake right now. The Biden administration can do so much, and that’s been proven over by the fact that, you know, once Biden put his foot down, several steps were taken by Israel in order to open the border crossings, or some of the border crossings, into Gaza. But I believe that taking this kind of blind support for Netanyahu is leading us nowhere.

And as an American, as well, not only as a Palestinian, I have bigger fears of what’s to come, come November, because if Biden loses the election — and he might, because of the situation, because of what’s going on in Gaza — then we are doomed, basically, to have another four years of a Trump administration. So, in my mind, I’m like, you know, we are doomed in the Middle East, we’re doomed in the U.S. And I know that’s a lot of doom and gloom, but, honestly, these are some of the thoughts that people, especially dual nationals like me — these are some of the thoughts that they have.

AMY GOODMAN: Dalia Hatuqa, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian independent journalist, usually based between Amman, Jordan, and occupied Ramallah — that’s Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Next up, we speak with journalist Peter Maass. He has a new piece for The Washington Post. It’s headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: As the official death toll in Gaza nears 34,000, we begin today’s show looking at Germany’s intensifying crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices. On Friday, police in Berlin shut down a three-day Palestinian conference just moments after it began. In addition, Germany’s Interior Ministry banned several speakers from even entering Germany or addressing the Palestine Congress conference remotely. The Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta opened the conference, but his remarks over a live stream were cut short when Berlin police raided the conference site.

SALMAN ABU SITTA: We have never seen before these daily scenes, one massacre after another, homes demolished over the heads of the occupants, bodies pulled from under the rubble, surviving child with all his family killed. We have never seen before people deliberately denied food and water, children starved to death and killed when rushing to get food. We have never seen before all means of life systematically destroyed — hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, libraries, ancient monuments, mosques, churches, universities, cemeteries, bakeries, apartment build—

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 1: Live stream, we ask you — so, for all people on the live stream, the police is standing right in front of us, and they ask us to stop the video.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 2: They are — they’re even trying to take away this microphone!

AMY GOODMAN: That was a live stream capturing the moment when German police raided and shut down the Palestine Congress conference in Berlin just minutes after it began.

On Friday, German authorities also detained and questioned the Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress. Dr. Abu-Sittah, who is the nephew of Salman Abu Sitta, who we just watched interrupted, spoke to Middle East Eye after he was barred entry.

DR. GHASSAN ABU–SITTAH: Upon arrival, I was stopped at the passport office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil, that I will — and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress but was denied entry to Germany. German authorities defended the decision to shut down the Palestinian conference, citing German laws against so-called hate speech. When Dr. Abu-Sittah came out of Gaza, we interviewed him, and you can go to democracynow.org to see that conversation.

We’re joined right now by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. He was also banned from entering Germany and barred from engaging in any political activity there. Varoufakis is a leader of the pan-European progressive movement DiEM25, which helped organize the Palestine Congress.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece. His most recent book is Technofeudalism; What Killed Capitalism is the subtitle. Yanis Varoufakis, can you explain what happened in Berlin?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: To give you a vignette, Amy, of the absurdity, which would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic, of what went on, during the morning, just before the police burst in, as you described so accurately, there was a young man who — an attendee of the congress, a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace, which together with the MERA25, DiEM25, we co-organized the Palestine Congress. And this young man, as he approached the police cordon — there were two-and-a-half thousand policemen preventing our attendees from attending the congress. Anyway, he was approaching, and he had a little placard that he had written with his own hand, and it read “Jews against genocide.” And for that, he was apprehended, arrested, manhandled. And while the police were manhandling him, he turned around humorfully, or half-jokingly, and said to them, “Would it have been all right with you if it said ‘Jews in favor of genocide’?” at which point, of course, they were far more angered and manhandled him even more fiercely. I’m conveying this to you, Amy, and to our listeners and viewers because this shows the absurdity of the whole thing.

The police entered the building, the venue, a few minutes before I was due to deliver my talk via video link. As a result, what I did was I recorded my talk, and I posted it online from Greece, from Athens, where I’m even now. And the next day, I found out that a ban, as you put it, was slapped on me by the German authorities, a ban that harks back to laws against Nazism, a law that has only been used recently for ISIS operatives. That was used against me.

Allow me just to briefly say that the rationale behind this is the Germans’ Staatsräson, the logic or rationale of the German state, to protect Jews, which is of excellent rationale. I wish every state had it, each one of us had it, to protect Jews. Except that this is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice, in the final analysis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yanis Varoufakis, the federal interior minister of Germany not only applauded the police action, but she described the event, the conference, as an Islamist conference. What do you think of that characterization of the Palestine Congress?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Isn’t it remarkably farcical that our Jewish comrades who helped us co-organize, put together this congress have been dismissed as Islamists? Let me be clear: There were no Islamists in this. And in any case, the reason why our congress has been so, let’s say, unpopular with the German political system is because the German political spectrum — and this is not just the government; this is also the opposition, including some members of the left, I say with deep regret, some of my former comrades — they insist on equating acts of terror, atrocities against civilians — which every soundly thinking person in the world should condemn, and I condemn, of course, and so do all the organizers of this congress — equating, however, violence against civilians with a principled resistance to an apartheid state which is part of a project of systematically ethnically cleansing the population of the Palestinians. That is what they do not want.

They do not want a congress like ours, especially one that includes progressive Jews. That is the main thing that they detested, that they were Jewish demonstrators, Jewish activists, Jewish intellectuals, Jewish speakers with us, with one voice, saying one thing, one thing alone: equal political rights, civil liberties, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I’m neither a Jew nor a Palestinian. I don’t have a view as to how this will be accomplished. But I think every single human person on this planet has an obligation — not a right, an obligation — to demand, from the river to the sea, equal political rights. And the German political establishment does not want to listen to this. They simply want to associate anyone who opposes Netanyahu’s government, or any government in Israel that perpetrates genocide, essentially, to be associated, to be stigmatized as an antisemite, which, by the way, it is the antisemite’s greatest dream come true.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Germany has also banned the display of the Palestinian flag. How do you think the suppression of pro-Palestinian protest in Germany — has that spread to other countries in Europe? What’s your sense of what’s going on throughout the rest of the continent?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Not formally. The Palestinian flag has not been banned formally. But I can tell you that even here in Greece, anyone who is sporting the colors of Palestine walking on the street risks — seriously risks — being assaulted by ultrarightists, being arrested, apprehended by police for some pretext. The bourgeois, liberal, democratic rights and principles have all been sacrificed on the altar of enabling Israel to complete the genocide which is carrying out — that it’s carrying out not just in Gaza but, as we heard before in the news bulletin, in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. In the same way that in the 1930s we all had an obligation, a duty, an ethical commitment — or should have had one — to support Jews and to show our solidarity to the Jewish people who were suffering from the Nazi regime, from the Croat Nazi regime, from the Greek fascists and so on, we have a duty today to end the genocide in ancient Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanis Varoufakis, as a former finance minister, a vocal critic of austerity, how do you perceive Germany’s position on the war on Gaza in light of its significant arms sales to Israel? I mean, you have Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of Justice, saying that by providing weapons for Israel to carry out this war, that it’s engaging in crimes against humanity or war crimes.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, Amy, it’s interesting and, I think, not coincidental that on the Monday before the invasion, the incursion by the German police into our Palestinian Congress in the venue in Berlin, I happened to be in Milano, in Italy, in Milan. And I was giving a speech to a gathering of hundreds of financial analysts, the top, the crème de la crème of European financial experts. And in it, unbeknownst to me of what was going to happen later on that week, I outlined dire prognostications about the long-term damage inflicted upon Germany and Germany’s social economy by decades of austerity, combined with impressive largesse finances, what you call in the United States quantitative easing. And, you know, I was really surprised, because here I am, a lefty, addressing a gathering of hundreds of financial experts. Those hard-nosed financiers actually applauded me. And afterwards, they came to me, and they said that they agree with what I was saying. And I have to tell you that when that happens, I get really worried, because if these hard-nosed financiers, many of them German, came to me and they said that they agreed with my prognosis that the German business model is kaput, is in dire straits, I start feeling very uncomfortable.

So, I think there is a connection, because here you have a political system in Germany which understands in its bones that the economic dominance that the German industrial model had within the European Union for so many decades is now waning. And when such a regime feels threatened, feels that its economic prowess and authority and dominance is waning, it’s really very easy for that to translate itself into movements that essentially fan the flames of increasing, and increasingly farcical, authoritarianism.