Senior retired US government official speaks out on Gaza

JVL Introduction

A fascinating interview with a retired senior US government official, Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s desire to appoint him as chair of the National Intelligence Council was opposed successfully by the Israel lobby, led by Aipac.

Among the many points he makes are these (H/t Arnaud Bertrand and for the transcript below)

• Israel’s response on October 7 was a “disgrace in military terms” taking a terrible toll on Israelis;
• Hamas was successful in putting the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda and in bolstering support among Palestinians for its willingness to resist;
• Israel will not recover its image as a historical refuge for victims of oppression but will be remembered as the home of perpetrators of genocide.

RK

This is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary interviews of a former senior US government official on Gaza.

This is Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Key points in the video:

– He agrees that many of the victims… pic.twitter.com/tzZQ3KncaF

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 7, 2024

Text of the Twitter/X post above

This is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary interviews of a former senior US government official on Gaza.

This is Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Key points in the video:

– He agrees that many of the victims of Oct 7th were killed by the Israeli army in the form of “undisciplined fire by helicopters with hellfire missiles or by tanks with incendiary rounds directed at buildings”. In the case of the victims of the music festival he even says they “were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces”. To him this “disgrace in military terms” stems from a “lack of discipline and training necessary to respond” but also from the IDF’s “Hannibal directive”, which “says that rather than get into bargaining over hostage exchange you should just kill the Israeli hostages along with their captors.”

– He says that with Oct 7th “Hamas had 2 objectives”: 1) “Put the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda”, something he says they’ve “succeeded” in doing since they’re is “widespread recognition outside Israel that only self-determination for Palestine in the form of a 2-state solution can provide security to Israel”. He says that even in “the US, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel, many Jews have come to realize that this is the case. Younger Jews in particular in the U.S. are very disillusioned with Zionism and don’t want to suffer contagion from it in the form of antisemitism, which is actually growing now as a result of Israeli actions”. 2) “Give Hamas enormous popularity among Palestinians because they are seen as having stood up, as having been willing to accept death rather than captivity”. He refers to Norman Finkelstein’s “analogy of slave revolts in the U.S.” and particularly the “1831 revolt by Nat Turner, a well-educated very intelligent enslaved African who led a slave revolt in Southern Virginia which had as its objective the murder of every white person they encountered.” He says it “raises a moral question: ‘Is the violence of the slave-owner morally the same as the violence of the slave trying to end that violence?’. The same moral question arises with Israeli oppression of Palestinians versus Palestinian resistance to oppression.”

– All in all he concludes that much like the violence against African-Americans that followed slave revolts in the 19th century, the Israeli vengeance against Palestinians “won’t be remembered fondly by anyone in the future”. In fact he goes as far as saying that “when people think of Israel in the past they thought of it as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust… now they will think of it as the home of perpetrators of genocide. When they think of Israel, they will think of burned buildings and dead babies. This is an image problem of a fundamental nature and from the point of view of Israel it strips Israel of its protection by charges of antisemitism against anyone who is critical of Israel because to be critical of people who are carrying out genocide cannot be antisemitism, it cannot be considered immoral. Antisemitism is a despicable attitude but to oppose genocide by Israel is not.”