Legendary journalist Bob Scheer interviewed me about my new book, “Gaza Yet Stands,” for his Scheerpost radio program, which is also available at YouTube .
USC explains, “Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing,” in a career that stretches back to the 1960s, “as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and went on to do interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and other prominent political and cultural figures.
“From 1964–1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976–1993 he served as a national correspondent for the L.A. Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the L.A. Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years.” Scheer now edits Scheerpost.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
. . . .We’re going to talk about this contentious subject of Israel and Gaza, and most people, frankly, who discuss it are idiots or they’re propagandists, and they maybe know a lot, but they don’t tell us. They spin the story. And here one thing, and I remember that as distinguished as you are, and I consider you actually the best informed, I don’t want to trivialize it by saying academic, I’ll just say I think you’re the best informed person I know on this whole region. And you’ve written really important books. I found, in particular, your book on Prophet Muhammad really to be enlightening as to where the real life Muhammad came from, or his journey and education. But the reason I want to talk to you today is that you put out a book recently called “Gaza Yet Stands.” And I was annoyed because with Kindle or whatever, when you get these things, and then I saw there were two reviews, one liked you, one didn’t. But I want to see 50 people, 500 people, commenting on this book so I’m unashamedly promoting it here. And the reason I want to promote it is because the whole discussion about this genocide in Gaza is taking place without any explanation really, or focusing on how did Israel get to control Gaza and the West Bank and the Golan Heights and so forth.
And as someone who went there as a journalist at the time of the Six Day War, and I was in the area, I was in Gaza and Egypt and so forth, to my mind, that is critical to the story. This is not as if they were just attacked from inside, by subversives who want to engage in terrorism or something. But the fact is, Israel fought a totally unjustified war, I would say preventive, but it wasn’t preventive. It wasn’t protecting against anything. And I’ll let you tell that story, but it has a whole history and just one historical footnote, the creation of Israel, as I recall it, ironically, either Russia, Soviet Union, was the first or second country to recognize Israel, and I think the US was either the first or second, they were competing for it. And this was not supposed to be a country swept into either the Cold War or the colonial effort of the French and English to restore their power, or of the United States to take over their role. And reading your book, I was reminded that this fight really had not just the Six Day War, which I had some knowledge of, but 11 years before, when Israel was allied with the French and the English in their efforts to control the Suez Canal and control the region. So why don’t you take it from there and just tell us why this book, and in particular, “Gaza Yet Stands,” does it still stand? And you justify that quote with the reference to [John] Milton, Samson Agonistes, maybe you can explain the title, the purpose of the book.
Juan Cole
Sure, the book is “Gaza Yet Stands,” and it’s a collection of my journalism, my commentary on events in Gaza and the Israel-Palestinian issue since 2006 when I wrote the first of these essays for Salon, some of them appeared in The Nation Institute, TomDispatch or The Nation. I think one or two of them is from TruthDig . . .
Robert Scheer
When I used to edit it, yes.
Juan Cole
Edited by a distinguished doyen of American journalism, and some appeared at my own site, Informed Comment. But, the internet is not well indexed, and [you can’t] read these essays in serial order, in chronological order. . . I chose out a selection of them that I thought had legs, could still, were informative. And so it covers from 2006 when there were elections for the Palestine Authority sponsored by the Bush administration, until the present. But of course, as you say, being a historian, in my essays, I advert to the past. And, I think you’re absolutely right, Bob, let me just begin with Milton. He wrote this closet play. It’s called, it’s not meant to be performed on stage. A single actor is supposed to come out on the stage and just read the script. So that’s why we probably haven’t seen Samson Agonistes performed, but it is obviously about the story of Samson, the last of the Israeli judges, who was an ancient superhero, had super strength and was favored by God and was betrayed into the hands of the Philistines who then controlled Gaza, and when his hair had been cut and he’d become weak, and his hair grew out, and he recovered his strength, and he asked them to prop him up against one of the pillars of their establishment there in Gaza City, and he managed to bring it down. So of course, he killed himself, but he also killed his captors. So it’s a Pyrrhic victory. And the passage that I begin the book with, and which supplies the title of the book is this: A messenger comes and says, Gaza yet stands, but all her sons are fallen. This is a very interesting way of looking at it. The Philistines were killed, the leaders of them and so forth, but the territory is still there. All in a moment, overwhelmed and fallen, the messenger is talking to a man. The man replies, sad, but thou knowest to Israelites, not saddest the desolation of a hostile city. Can’t expect the Israelites to be very unhappy about this. The messenger said, feed on that first there may in grief be surfet. He’s saying that, yeah, absorb what I’m trying to tell you, that there’s been this huge disaster in Gaza, and don’t be thinking that the grief stops there. There may be grief for the Israelites yet to come out of this. So I thought it was apposite to our current situation, and drew the title from it….
Robert Scheer
I want to just stop you for a second, because this is what I found so interesting. I had read a number of your articles before, but there was life in Gaza. It’s like we marginalize, dismiss every other culture in the world. We did it in Cambodia, where they had plumbing before the British did and so forth. And in reading your book, we’re reminded that Gaza was a vital society. It wasn’t just something that maybe Kushner or somebody could think about turning into a tourist attraction, or just want its beach and that this all gets ignored. But the other point you made, we’re in this crazy thing where the Palestinians are held responsible for two things, which I want to get to. One, there’s somehow the inheritors of the horror of the Holocaust. And there are actually very good Israeli, one particular documentary [inaudible] but there are others, how Israel constantly uses the Holocaust to justify what it’s doing there in this area of Israel, when this Palestinians are after… you didn’t do this to the Germans. Germany was welcomed back into the civilized world in a matter of months, and part of the Western Germany, part of the US and the Cold War, nor were the antisemitic movements that had terrorized the Jews and killed them in large parts of Eastern Europe in any way held accountable. Somehow, the Palestinians were held accountable and Jews had not been able to find sanctuary before the war, they were turned away, even by Franklin Roosevelt from the United States. So there’s this weird, sick blame on the Palestinians, number one, for that, Germany, the Holocaust and so forth. Secondly, and this I want to get to, the Palestinians are held accountable in the David’s Goliath mythology. They’re held responsible somehow for whatever insecurity Jews might have felt in Israel, right? And so let’s get into that. I want you to talk about the ’56 war, the ’67 war, because in your book, you do a very good job of explaining that there’s history. It didn’t all start with this attack on a kibbutz in last October, there’s a history in which Israel lined up with the colonial regimes, right?
Juan Cole
Yeah, in a way, it’s the last colony, Israel. It’s the last colonial enterprise, and was set up that way by Britain and the United States and France after the war. And this is why the rest of the world, when you see these lopsided votes at the UN General Assembly (the Israelis blame it on antisemitism and so forth) condemning them, is that the rest of the world understands exactly what’s going on here, that it’s as though the French managed to stay in Algeria and weren’t kicked out in ’62 by the Algerian revolution and went on bringing in French to settle more and more of Algeria and nail it down as part of France. And marginalized the local millions of Algerians, pushed them to the curb and pushed them to the marginal land and the slums and so forth. And so that’s what it looks like to the rest of the world, much of which was colonized. That’s what Israel is, it’s a Western colonial instrument, and what’s been done to the Palestinians is considered extremely unfair by almost everybody in the world, outside of Western Europe and the United States . . .
Robert Scheer
I want to bring it back to your book, because Israel denies all of this. At least they’re propaganda. I forget the word hasbara or whatever. But they deny all this. They say, No, no, we only do these things reluctantly because we’re attacked. We would love to have been able to get along with them, but these people are basically savages that you can’t get along with, and this informs the whole aggression here. And the fact is, so when I was there, the Labor Party was in power. Then they said, No, we’re not going to keep it and we should give it back. But they really, as you’ve pointed out in the previous interviews I’ve done with you, they had no intention of doing that. I felt I was fooled by people like Moshe Dayan and Allon and so forth, because they talked a good game. We’re not imperialists. The fact is, they were, and they had every intention of keeping these areas and making life miserable. This is the power of your essays. And again, the book “Gaza Yet Stands.” You gotta check that out. “Gaza Yet Stands,” and people should understand this, that the occupied population may turn into an enemy and a menacing force is something that Israel created.
Juan Cole
With regard to Gaza, it’s the most horrible story in the world. The Israelis occupied Gaza in 1967. Over time, they actually sent about 8,000 Israeli settlers into this very densely populated, desperately poor place. This was an area where hundreds of thousands of refugees had already been crowded in—refugees from what became Israel, whose property had all been confiscated by the Israelis. Then, the Israelis came after them again and occupied them.
In 2006, as a result of the Oslo process, the Bush administration had said elections should be held in Gaza and the West Bank for the Palestinian Authority. Unexpectedly, a Muslim fundamentalist movement, Hamas, won the elections. Bush hadn’t anticipated this and had ironically insisted that Hamas be allowed to run. This was an American initiative, one that the Israelis were not happy about.
When Hamas won, however, the Israelis convinced the Bush administration that they couldn’t let this victory stand. In 2007, they staged a coup and overthrew the elected Palestinian Authority. The Israelis arrested parliamentarians and jailed them, bringing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into power. This plan succeeded in the West Bank, but in Gaza, the PLO was defeated by Hamas, and the coup failed.
Most journalists describe this as Hamas staging a coup in Gaza, but it was actually the reverse. Hamas had been elected—not overwhelmingly, but with about 51% of the vote. They had come to power via the ballot box and managed to remain in power despite efforts by the CIA and Mossad to overthrow them. In the West Bank, the PLO came to power in about 40% of the territory, where the Israelis allowed them to police for Israel. In Gaza, however, Hamas retained control.
Following this, the Israelis imposed a blockade on Gaza. They restricted building materials, necessities, and even, at certain points, food imports. One Israeli document revealed calculations on how many calories a person could consume to avoid starvation—just enough to avoid death but with no body fat.
Robert Scheer
You go into this in detail in your book. It’s worth reading for that alone. The Israeli policy was calculated and inhuman. It wasn’t about outright starvation but about public relations and appearance—keeping people alive so there wouldn’t be images of starving children, but just barely. This approach stunted their physical and mental development, undermining education and daily life. It’s one of the eeriest examples of manipulation. How do you commit genocide without allowing it to be called genocide?
What’s happening now is like drip torture. I heard that three trucks of food were allowed into northern Gaza today. So Israel claims, “We’re not starving them,” and blames any shortcomings on the Palestinians. Your book is crucial because it exposes how the basic humanity and history of the people in that area have been denied. The narrative is so false—entirely a PR war, concocting a narrative more misleading than any before.
Juan Cole
What’s amazing is how much the Palestinians of Gaza achieved despite the blockade. They had several universities, graduated medical professionals, and even supported scientists working on cancer research. There were teachers, poets, and musicians -— a vital culture thriving within a bubble, entirely surrounded by Israel, except for the Egyptian border. And Egypt did whatever Israel told them to do — or else.
Robert Scheer
They couldn’t use their port or travel freely.
Juan Cole
Yes, the Israelis bombed their airport. They even fired at people if they ventured too far out in fishing boats. Gaza was under siege.
Robert Scheer
Your book is even more relevant now, with the narrative focused solely on the October events. People from Gaza attacked Israel, and the media shows idyllic kibbutz life being disrupted. But the years of suffering that preceded this have been erased from the discussion.
Yes, people in Gaza built universities and worked on improving health systems, which may have contributed to support for Hamas. But the broader narrative paints them as uncivilized savages. This is reminiscent of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which referred to Native Americans as “merciless savages.” Israeli propaganda and U.S. media have applied this dehumanization to Palestinians, reducing them to a caricature.
How did they get to the point of supporting attacks on kibbutzim? They were forced to live in a concentration camp—or at least a high-security prison.
Juan Cole
Yes, Gaza is the largest concentration camp in the world. It’s open-air.
Robert Scheer
You’re a historian I deeply respect, especially regarding this region. Referring to Gaza as a concentration camp is language that could get someone fired from many universities or media outlets. Why do you use that term?
Juan Cole
There’s a distinction between a concentration camp and a death camp, though Gaza increasingly resembles the latter. The Israelis imposed an illegal siege on Gaza. The United Nations Security Council declared it illegal, and it’s undeniably harmful to the stateless people trapped there.
Now, it’s even worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leveraged military operations last year to secure his political position. He struck a deal with Hamas: they would control Gaza as a fief, albeit under heavy restrictions to prevent development, in exchange for not pushing for a united Palestinian state.
This arrangement kept the Palestinians divided between Hamas in Gaza and the PLO in the West Bank. Netanyahu could then argue to international pressure for a two-state solution, “But the Palestinians themselves are divided.” This was deliberate. Netanyahu pressured Egypt and Qatar to send funds to Gaza, which helped sustain universities and institutions but also entrenched Hamas.
Netanyahu essentially thought he had tamed Hamas, but younger radicals — some possibly influenced by ISIL — planned the recent brutal, horrific, and frankly stupid attack on Israel. However, the conditions that led to this were meticulously arranged by Netanyahu himself.
Robert Scheer
Your book is titled Gaza Yet Stands. But does it? Gaza is rubble. The universities are gone. Jared Kushner once suggested turning it into a gambling hub.
Juan Cole
The title references a line from Milton: “Its sons are fallen, but Gaza yet stands.” The sons and daughters are fallen, and the future is bleak. Netanyahu’s cabinet has floated numerous ideas, such as pushing Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt has firmly rejected this, backed by its military strength.
Another plan involves depopulating northern Gaza. The strategy is to starve people out, bomb civilian targets, and make life unlivable until they leave. This is ethnic cleansing. The idea is to confine the surviving Palestinians — however many remain after Israeli attacks — to southern Gaza while annexing the north.
Why this plan would succeed any more than previous strategies, I cannot say. It will likely lead to further radicalization, war, and terrorism. With the return of the Trump administration, which would probably greenlight anything Israel does, the outlook is grim.
In the long term, this won’t end well. Israel’s success in 1948 involved ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a state, but the pursuit of Greater Israel—expanding endlessly while ruling over 5 million stateless Palestinians—is politically unsustainable.
This will destabilize not only Israel but also the United States. The horrors inflicted on Gaza have been witnessed worldwide, including by young Arab and Muslim men. I fear we’ll see a resurgence of terrorism similar to 9/11, which already cost us substantial civil liberties. If this occurs, it could push us into even more perilous territory, especially given the direction of U.S. electoral politics.
The Israeli enterprise of Greater Israel, ethnic cleansing, and genocide won’t leave Americans untouched.
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