It’s been over a month since Hamas’ rampage in Southern Israel killed over a thousand Israeli men, women and children, and over a month of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza that has claimed 10,000 lives, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In this episode, we’re focusing on the precipitating factors that led to the conflict and issues that continue to impede a resolution. Sari Bashi, who lives in the West Bank and is married to a Palestinian, has a unique perspective as a Jewish woman with U.S.-Israeli citizenship, living in a household that transcends the conflict. Bashi is the program director at Human Rights Watch, an author and is the co-founder of Gisha Access, an Israeli NGO whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. She joins WITHpod to discuss what the year before the war looked like, violations of international laws, the devastating impact on civilians, calls for countries to suspend military aid and more.
Note: An earlier version of this episode misstated the scale of the civilian death toll in Gaza. This version has been edited to omit this.
This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Sari Bashi: Nothing justifies targeting or war crimes against civilians. I am the first person to point to the root causes of the current violence. Nothing justifies the attack on Israeli civilians on October 7. And that does not justify the deliberate targeting of civilians through collective punishment and deliberately impeding humanitarian relief that the Israeli military is doing.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I am speaking to you about a month, a little more than a month after the Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel, which happened on October 7 when somewhere around 1,500 Hamas fighters came over and slaughtered, first encountered Israeli Defense Forces, overran them and proceeded to systematically slaughter men, women and children in the areas around the Gaza border and a variety of kibbutzes in the town of Surat methodically with sort of almost unfathomable barbarity and atrocity and took 240 hostage, brought them back to Gaza.
Beginning basically a day after that, I think even that night, Israel began an aerial bombardment campaign of Gaza that has now extended for a month and has had a ground incursion that’s gone on for about three or four days at this point.
The Gaza Health Ministry says 10,000 Gazans have died. Almost immediately upon the October 7 attack, almost all electricity, water, fuel was cut off from Gaza. There’s been some trucks that have gotten through there. There’s some back and forth about some amount of electricity, but really basically none. The civilian population is basically under siege. I mean that word we use so much is like a cliché and metaphor, but it actually has like historical roots, which is like an army taking a town, particularly a castle by cutting it off from the outside world.
And the people inside would essentially begin to starve to death. They would succumb to illness. It was an incredibly gruesome thing to happen. And that’s basically what is happening to the folks in Gaza. I’m recapping this, presumably you know all this. But as with anything with this conflict, it seems important to create some sort of whole of context. The subject of today’s conversation is not the war in Gaza, really, and it is not Hamas’s atrocities in the south. It’s not the brutal toll in Gaza.
It’s about kind of the context of the Israeli government, Palestinians aspirations for some form of national self-determination or liberation on October 6. What was happening prior to the Hamas attack? And I particularly want to focus on the millions of Palestinians who live under occupation in the West Bank. They are not in Gaza. Hamas does not control their lives. They are at some level governed by the Palestinian authority, which is ostensibly the governing entity pursuant to the Oslo Accords that have made the Palestinian authority. But they are under an Israeli occupation and they are subject to Israeli law and force and often violence by settlers.
In fact, that violence has picked up notably in the last month. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed. Some have been evacuated from villages they have been in for years under the threat of more violence. But I think understanding the kind of equilibrium, because it wasn’t really an equilibrium, pre-October 6 is key to understanding both what’s ensued on October 7 and the aftermath. And trying to get your head around what any vision of what after this war would look like that won’t be more continued violence and brutality.
And we have a unique guest for that today. Someone that I have had the pleasure of talking to on the show. Sari Bashi is the Program Director at Human Rights Watch. She’s an author, she’s Co-founder of Gisha Access, which is an Israeli NGO whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents.
She lives in the West Bank and I think has just a really unique perspective on the conflict, having sort of moved across different lines of it. She’s married to a Palestinian man, so her own household sort of transcends some of these lines. And I really relied on her and her work navigating this, not just here, but even before that. So, Sari Bashi, it’s great to have you in the program.
Sari Bashi: Thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: I’m sorry for that long windup, but you know how this goes, right? Because it’s like, you just want to be fair and clear and not shortchange things. And then this ends up happening in every segment where it’s like, there’s this tension between the kind of economy of language and ruthless editing necessary for good communication and the necessity of like setting the table in a careful and precise way that doesn’t shortchange people. Does that make sense?
Sari Bashi: I get it. We do a lot of editing at Human Rights Watch. I get it.
Chris Hayes: So, I’m actually curious, before we get into this, you were born in America, you’re an American by birth?
Sari Bashi: Yes, I was born in the United States. My mother is an American Jew of Eastern European ancestry. My father is from Baghdad in Iraq, also Jewish, grew up in Israel and then met my mother in the United States. So, I have dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. And as a young adult after university, I went to live in first in Jerusalem, later in Tel Aviv and now in the West Bank.
Chris Hayes: That’s so interesting because to your father is what is called Mizrahi in Israel and from the sort of Middle Eastern Jewry that came to Israel around ‘48 and afterwards. And I’m curious to hear what your father talks about, his experience because there was an amazing Baghdad Jewish community.
And I once watched an incredible documentary about this, actually one of the sort of legendary Jewish communities in the Middle East pre-1948. And Baghdad was this like fascinatingly kind of cosmopolitan and diverse city at the time with this very strong sort of Jewish culture. What did you learn from him about how he viewed Israel being Jewish, being Jewish in the Middle East, being Jewish in majority Muslim countries and populations?
Sari Bashi: Well, my father was a child when he left Baghdad. He left in 1953, which is maybe a year or two after most Iraqi Jews left Iraq. But Baghdad before that was maybe more similar to New York City in terms of Jewish culture —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Sari Bashi: — and influence. So, about 30 percent of the city was Jewish. They were Iraqi Jews, Iraqi Muslims, Iraqi Christians. Jewish Iraqis were very prominent in culture, in finance, in music, in business. So, you really could imagine New York City in terms of the prominence of the Jewish community. And you said Mizrahi, which is not wrong, but I would actually call myself an Arab Jew.
Mizrahi means Eastern, which is fine, east of what I’m not sure. But I think what people sometimes miss is that Arab and Jew are not two opposing things.
Arabs can be Christian. Arabs can be Muslim. Arabs can be Jewish. And for centuries, Arabs were also Jewish. It’s more recently that we started to separate those two things out and say Arabs versus Jews, and the same thing truthfully for Palestinians. I’m not Palestinian, but there were always indigenous Palestinian Jews living in Palestine. So, the history is a little more complicated, I think, than something polarizing.
Chris Hayes: I mean it’s interesting you say that, right? Because like we’ve gone right down to the fundamentals of the question in that statement, right? I mean that is it, right? What is the nature of this identity and its national constitution, right? You know, and I just reread portions of Judenstaat, Herzl’s sort of first manifesto on a sort of Zionist vision. He says Jews are a nation.
I mean it’s not written in English, but basically what Herzl envisioned and what Zionism was and what it became in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel is almost an exclusive identity of Jewishness, right? That like, you kind of can’t be Jewish in Arab or that the national project has to be exclusively Jewish for it to function as a state.
Sari Bashi: Yeah, I mean I think there were a couple of moves in the way that Jewish identity was defined by the early Israeli state. So, one move was to define Jewish identity as European Jewish identity. And even today in Israel, people will refer to Israel as a Western country, even though actually Israel is not in the West. And we’ll call Arab Jews a Mizrahi or sometimes Sephardic, which means Spanish, as a way of distancing them from Arabs. In the early days of the state and still to this day, there was a lot of pressure on Jews who came from Arab countries to change their names from Arab names. It was also pressure, to be fair, for European Jews to change their names to Hebrew names, but in particular not to speak Arabic.
Because part of the work that was done was to say Arabs are the enemy. And so if you are Arab Jewish, let’s have you stop being Arab and let’s redefine you. And that actually does violence to a really rich culture of Arab Jews that, you know, as in Arabic music, Arabic literature, Arabic poetry in which the Jews were very involved.
Chris Hayes: So you grew up in the United States. You went to school and law school in the U.S., if I’m not mistaken. What brought you to Israel?
Sari Bashi: I think I was always curious because my father had grown up here. And when I had a chance after finishing university, I came to Jerusalem. I worked for a couple of years as a journalist for the Associated Press. And at the time, I saw things that the Israeli government was doing that I found troubling. So on the one hand, it was an optimistic time. This was 1998, 1999, 2000.
Chris Hayes: It’s like peak optimism.
Sari Bashi: Yes, it was because of the Oslo Accords. And so —
Chris Hayes: Yes, it was like close. It was going to happen.
Sari Bashi: Any day, it’s going to be good. But it actually wasn’t going to be good because it was a pie in the sky idea about peace that wasn’t grounded in what was happening on the ground. So, what was happening on the ground was actually increased violence, increased restrictions on movement. The Oslo Accords also brought in a tightening of freedom of movement, both for Palestinians in the West Bank as well as in Gaza.
So, we often talk about Gaza as being closed in 2007. And it’s true the closure was tightened then, but actually the 1990s was the period of time in which the Israeli government not only set up many more checkpoints in the West Bank, but also built a fence around the Gaza Strip and began to pretty seriously restrict movement in and out. So, that was all happening on the ground while politicians were talking about peace.
And I saw this and I wanted a chance not just to report on it, but also to take a stand. So, I went back to the U.S. I studied law. I clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court, and then I founded an Israeli human rights organization called Gisha, which means access, which provides legal assistance to Palestinians in Gaza who need permits from the Israeli military in order to travel for medical care, to see family, schools, jobs, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: What was your relationship to the state of Israel, your Zionism, or how you thought about Israel growing up? And how did that change upon the encounter of being there?
Sari Bashi: So, I think when I was a child, I learned about Israel as being like the epitome of the Jewish people. And at the time, I don’t think I envisioned Israel as a state that was exercising power and therefore had responsibilities. I sort of associated it with the diaspora Jewish community.
And when I came, I saw that things were different, that actually while there certainly were very vibrant Jewish communities in Israel, there also was a state. And that state was not some quaint religious community. It actually had power. I came to believe that it was actually abusing that power. So, I don’t want to jump ahead, but it was a bit of a sobering moment for me to realize that while Jewish communities abroad were communities, the Israeli state is an authority that has responsibilities. And in my view was not fulfilling those responsibilities toward all the people under its control, not just Jews.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit about the reality of the occupation in the West Bank. We’ll focus on the West Bank, I think, because for a bunch of reasons. But I think it’s worth shining some light there because there’s been so much focus on Hamas, totally, correctly, in the wake of the attack. But, you know, West Bank is governed at the first level by Fatah, which is the sort of faction of the old Palestinian Liberation Organization, then the Palestinian Authority.
I’m trying to think of a way to ask this question that doesn’t sound like idiotically simple, but like just to start at the most basic level for people that are unfamiliar with the reality of life there, like what is life for Palestinians like in the occupied West Bank?
Sari Bashi: Sure. So, there is the biblical land of Israel or mandatory Palestine that’s divided into three areas, the internationally recognized state of Israel within the green line, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are occupied territory. And in the West Bank, the Israeli military rules directly. So, the law of the land are military orders. The governor of the area is the military. And for the last 30 years, the Israeli military has delegated responsibilities, primarily for local governance to the Palestinian Authority.
So, schools primarily are run by the PA, the Palestinian Authority. Water bills you pay to the PA. But the Israeli military retains overall control and directly controls 60 percent of the West Bank. In that 60 percent of the West Bank, it has settled 600,000 Israeli settlers, Jewish settlers, who live in Israeli-only communities called settlements. And over the years and decades, the Israeli military has built a system of roads, physical barriers and checkpoints to keep Palestinians out of most of the West Bank and certainly out of Israel.
So for Palestinians, their ability to move around is quite limited. There’s a wall that encircles most of the West Bank, but it’s built deep in the West Bank. So, it actually cuts off Palestinians from one part of the West Bank to the other. Going into areas restricted to Palestinians requires permits, which are very difficult to get and can be removed at any time. And even within the so-called Palestinian areas, Palestinian villages, there’s a lot of pressure from the Israeli military and from settlers working under the auspices of the Israeli military to push Palestinians further off their land in what we would call forcible displacement.
So, sometimes the Israeli military directly declares areas off limits. They put a physical barrier. They build a fence. They don’t let somebody pass. And sometimes settlers come to Palestinian towns and villages and engage in violence that makes people feel scared. And so they stopped tending their land and in some cases even leave their homes.
Chris Hayes: When you’re talking about the settlement, and this is just a key point and it’s an obvious one, but worth just lingering on for a second. If you are Palestinian in the West Bank, you are subject to military law and some of that is delegated to the Palestinian Authority, but ultimately it’s the military law. If you are a settler in the West Bank, you are subject to civil law. You have access to the Israeli judicial system with whatever rights and protections that would have the same way as an American have constitutional rights. That is just a different set of laws, right, for those folks in the settlements than Palestinians who are there?
Sari Bashi: Yes. And that’s one of the many reasons that Human Rights Watch has followed the lead of many Palestinian organizations, intellectuals, and human rights defenders in saying that the Israeli government is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid and also persecution. Because there are two people living in this land, Israeli Jews and Palestinians, about seven and a half million Palestinians, about seven and a half million Jews throughout the space.
Chris Hayes: You’re saying in mandatory Palestine in the whole —
Sari Bashi: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — including Gaza, West Bank and within the Green Line 67?
Sari Bashi: Yes, controlled by the same sovereign, controlled by the Israeli —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sari Bashi: — government with different rules for the different areas. But the overarching principle of that rule is that the Israeli government is seeking to maintain the domination of Israeli Jews over Palestinians, including demographic superiority. So, a lot of the work of the forcible transfer, pushing Palestinians off their land, is about having a maximum amount of land for Israeli Jews with a minimum number of Palestinians.
So in the West Bank and Gaza, there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, a people who they or their families fled, what is now Israel, in 1948. But when the fighting stopped, they weren’t allowed to go back. And part of the reason they’re not allowed to go back is because the Israeli authorities are trying to maintain that demographic superiority in the areas that they claim for Jewish settlement.
So in the West Bank, it’s particularly stark because you have Palestinians living alongside Israeli settlers, often using separate roads, separate rights. If you’re Israeli, you have excellent healthcare. I’m Israeli. I have excellent healthcare. There are cities and settlements being built for Jews only. If you’re Palestinian, good luck trying to access medical care and other things.
And not only are you not having cities built for you, it’s actually quite difficult to build it all. It’s nearly impossible to get building permits in much of the West Bank. And if you build without a permit, your home is destroyed, demolished. And that’s all part of this overarching intent of maintaining Jewish demographic superiority. And in the West Bank, you see it very starkly because it’s so close.
Chris Hayes: I just want to be clear for the people to understand us and I think I probably do. You live in the West Bank, but not in a settlement, just to be very clear. When you say you’re Israeli, I want people just to know that you do not live in a settlement.
Sari Bashi: Yes, so I’m in a bit of an unusual situation because my partner is a Palestinian Muslim from a Muslim family from Gaza. And so we’re a mixed family and that maybe helps me see it a little more starkly, especially through our kids. So, you know, we have two kids. When my daughter was very small, I had to find a way to explain this reality to her.
She was a bright kid. And I remember one day I was taking her and her brother to a family memorial in Tel Aviv. And we were leaving the West Bank to reach Tel Aviv. And my partner didn’t come with us because as a Palestinian, he can’t enter Israel. So, my daughter knew that and she knew that’s why he wasn’t coming. And it just so happened that as we were leaving, there was a flying checkpoint, a surprise checkpoint, which usually doesn’t happen.
And there was a soldier blocking the road who wouldn’t let me through. So, I started to turn around. And as I turned the car around, my daughter asked me, you know, ima, why are we turning around? My daughter, I had always told her that the reason her father couldn’t travel with us is because there are soldiers at checkpoints who are having trouble sharing. And so they’re not letting Palestinians through.
And you know, ima and baba don’t agree and we think that everybody should be allowed to go through, but they’re not letting Palestinians through. So when I turned around, my daughter asked me why we’re turning around. And I said, well, you know, those people at the checkpoint, the ones who have trouble sharing, and she said, yeah, and I said, well, they’re not letting us through. So, we have to turn around.
And she said, but ima, we’re Jews. And that was actually the first time I’d heard my daughter refer to herself as Jewish. You know, she was 5-years-old. She didn’t know the word apartheid, but she did what 5-year-olds do. They look around, they observe, they listen, and they draw conclusions from what they see. And the conclusion that she drew is that Jews can and Palestinians can’t. And that’s why it was surprising for her when the soldier turned us back. And that’s actually the essence of what’s happening here.
Chris Hayes: The checkpoints, I think, points to something. And again, I have seen this firsthand because I’ve been to the West Bank and I went to Qalandia, which is one of the big checkpoints. I can’t really express what an unbelievably dehumanizing situation the sort of checkpoint situation is. And particularly the fact that maybe people know, some people don’t, like there’s, I think, hundreds of thousands of folks that are commuting every day that are Palestinian that are going into Israel to work.
And, you know, take your worst TSA experience and magnify it by a hundred. Just like that feeling of like waiting and being hassled and someone with kind of petty authority over you. But again, you’re an American citizen. It’s the TSA, people don’t like it. This is that times like a thousand people are just in these insanely inhuman lines, crammed together, waiting to go through security apparatuses.
And again, to be very clear, the security apparatus is there for a reason. Obviously, the Second Intifada and there was all these horrible suicide bombs inside the Israel proper. That is the Israeli rationale for this security regime. But the first person experience which I saw of just dehumanizing hassle and petty authority over your life was pretty shocking to me.
Sari Bashi: Yes. On the security front, what I would just remind us is that Qalandia is located pretty deep inside the West Bank. So, it separates occupied West Bank from occupied West Bank. So, I would say that the Israeli government actually doesn’t have the right to keep Palestinians out of either parts of the occupied territory.
The other side of Qalandia is a part of the West Bank that the Israeli government is unlawfully annexed and settled with Israeli Jews. So, the security conversation needs to also be put into that context. But yes, I mean, one of the things that’s really hard is that there are separate roads and separate checkpoints for settlers who can breeze through pretty quickly. But trying to come and go from Palestinian areas is hard also because of the unpredictability.
So, maybe it will be okay and maybe you will be there for four hours and there’s nothing you can do because the people controlling the checkpoint, the people ruling the West Bank, don’t have your interests in mind. It’s a military occupation. If you’re Palestinian, you don’t elect the people who are making decisions about your lives. And more and more, they’re being quite open.
And by them, I mean the Israeli government in saying that in contrast to international law, which says that an occupying power has to protect the welfare of the occupied population, they’re saying no. We are here to ensure that the West Bank is for the Jewish people. I mean, that’s very scary if those are the people with guns who are, in their words and in their deeds, abdicating responsibility for you.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Everything you’ve described is a sort of description of the kind of, steady state is the wrong word, but the way the occupation has functioned for quite some time. The increasing encroachment of settlements, this sort of bifurcated legal regime and movement regime and security regime, two different kinds of people occupying shared land in which one set of people are subjects and one are citizens.
What is the last year before the war looks like? Because, again, from my perch following you have the Israeli government which is the most, I think, right-wing government probably in the state’s history. People brought into that government, including Ben-Gvir, who was a notorious extremist. His first date with his wife was to go to the grave of the Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
He had a picture of Baruch Goldstein up in his living room that was so wildly offensive, that the very far right Israeli politician, Naftali Bennett, basically forced him to take it down from his living room to join a government leaving Ben-Gvir to basically put up a self-pittying social media post like fine, I’ll get rid of the adoring picture of the terrorist that I have in my living room. That guy is now the Minister of Security. He’s currently handing out guns to settlers in the West Bank.
So, you have the occupation which is, it is what it is and endures through different regimes or different Israeli governments. But this Israeli government is probably the most kind of right-wing and pro-settler in history. And I wonder, did that tangibly change things on the ground in the West Bank?
Sari Bashi: Yes, but it was a change of degree, not of kind. I think maybe one of the biggest differences from this most recent Israeli government, at least for people outside of the region, was the transparency of their intentions. So, the settlements, which are unlawful under international law, they’ve started since the 1970s, a succession of Israeli governments over decades, has unlawfully settled at the West Bank and at a certain point Gaza as well with Israeli Jews as settlers.
The policies of taking land and trying to ensure Jewish demographic superiority, not letting refugees return to their homes, those are very longstanding policies. But this particular government under Prime Minister Netanyahu has been more transparent in saying yes, we want to take the land for the Jewish people. Yes, we believe that Jewish lives matter more than Palestinians. And those have been the words. The deeds have been an increase in violence.
So even before October 7, this year had been the bloodiest year in decades for Palestinians in terms of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces or by Israeli settlers. And in particular, what has been happening is a decentralization of violence against Palestinians by increasingly having settlers engage in state-sponsored violence. So, settlers coming to villages, destroying property, setting fire to homes, and in some cases killing people.
Sometimes with Israeli soldiers looking on and doing nothing, and some cases with Israeli soldiers participating as well. That’s a significant escalation, not just in the number of Palestinians who were killed, but also in the difficulty of controlling that. Because when violence becomes unofficial and decentralized, even if at a certain point you want to write it in, it’s much more difficult.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I’m asking you impossibly broad questions and I’m recognizing that, but I’m going to ask it anyway. How has that shaped or affected what we might call public opinion among Palestinians in the West Bank?
Sari Bashi: I mean, look, I think people are scared. People are scared and are feeling like there’s nowhere to turn. The Palestinian authority has been, let’s say, not effective to say the least. And the Israeli military has increasingly been, literally, narrowing people’s horizons. And there’s nowhere to go and I think, you know, certainly now in the West Bank, people are looking at Gaza and worried about, are we next? And there’s already been an uptick in missile attacks on the West Bank, which had been quite unusual. But over the last couple of weeks, the Israeli military has launched missiles at West Bank cities, which is something that —
Chris Hayes: Wait, what?
Sari Bashi: Yes, in Jenin and other places. In Jenin, they said that there were Hamas fighters hiding out in a mosque. And under other circumstances, it would have been more typical for them to come in with ground forces, but they launched a missile on the mosque and they’ve done it in the northern West Bank on a number of occasions. It’s not unprecedented. They’ve done it before, but it’s unusual and it’s happening much more. And that’s just adding to fears that the kind of violence that we’re seeing in Gaza is going to be spreading here as well.
There’s been an uptick in nightly incursions from the Israeli military. So, the Israeli military coming into Palestinian cities where they usually don’t go during the day, arresting a lot of people, hundreds of people. They’ve been closing down stores that have expressed support for Hamas. This week they went into Birzeit University and arrested students and shot at students. So, it’s getting closer.
And there’s a feeling, you know, people look at what’s happening in Gaza. More than 10,000 people have been killed, two-thirds of them civilians, and nobody seems to be protecting civilians in Gaza. And so in the West Bank, there’s a lot of fear that, you know, there’s nobody who is protecting civilians. And I want to maybe try to, you know, relate it to what you started with, which is, you know, the terrible attack by Hamas and other fighters on Israeli civilians on October 7.
I think that, you know, people across the world were appropriately horrified by those war crimes against Israeli civilians because they targeted civilians, because they targeted families. That same outrage should apply to some of the measures that the Israeli military is taking against civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, families, children, you know, in Gaza. Since this began, more than 4,000 children have been killed. It’s about 150 children being killed every day. It’s a lot.
Chris Hayes: I want to offer this argument because I think it’s worth lingering here for a second. The U.S. killed thousands and thousands of civilians in its war on terror but let’s just say Afghanistan. They were killed through bombing, through JSOC, Joint Special Operations, that would do targeted killing and sometimes either go to the wrong place or they would go to a house and they would kill folks, women, children who were in the house. Sometimes there would be restitution for that, sometimes there would be an apology. So, that’s something the U.S. government has done throughout the war on terror.
Then you have someone like Robert Bales, who’s a U.S. soldier, who went by night into Afghan villages and murdered people, over a dozen of them, killed them in their sleep. Now Bales was convicted of murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the reason I bring this up is because it’s very important for American self-conception, and I believe Israeli self-conception, this distinction between these two things, right, that if you are sort of operating broadly under international humanitarian law, you’re attempting to minimize civilian casualties and you bomb a target and there are civilians who died, that’s terrible and tragic. But it’s different than the intentional slaughter carried out by, again, in this case, an American soldier who did it and was brought up on charges for it.
Now, my feeling about this is that this is an important distinction, but probably doesn’t matter a ton to people on the receiving end of the violence. Like I think it’s an important distinction, but I also think that like if a missile dropped out of the sky and killed my family, it wouldn’t make me feel great for you to just be like, sorry, it was an accident. But I do wonder how you think about this as a human rights lawyer about this distinction, which is an important distinction to both Israelis and Americans, I think.
Sari Bashi: But I disagree that the Israeli military is conducting its operations in Gaza in accordance with the laws of war, in particular the laws —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sari Bashi: — that require you to protect civilians. So at the very start of this, the Israeli government immediately cut off water and electricity supplies in Gaza, saying that it was fighting human animals and had no obligation to allow people in Gaza to have clean drinking water. That’s collective punishment. It’s punishing Gaza’s 2.2 million residents for the actions, the despicable actions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. It then proceeded to close its own crossings with Gaza and not even allow Egypt to get fuel into Gaza.
So the fuel, the electricity has run out in Gaza. Hospitals have had to shut down critical operations because there’s no fuel for generators to power incubators, to power ventilators. And the Israeli government is refusing to allow life saving fuel into Gaza. So, under the laws of war, deliberately impeding relief supplies is a war crime. The Israeli government has the right to inspect relief shipments to make sure there’s no weapons. They have a right to monitor the fuel to make sure it’s not diverted, but they can’t deny people in Gaza life-saving fuel. There are thousands of cases of respiratory infections, diarrhea, chickenpox being reported in crowded Umer (ph) shelters because the sanitation has deteriorated in the absence of supplies. That’s unlawful. It’s not just unfortunate, it’s unlawful under the laws of war.
In addition, the way the Israeli military is conducting its operations in Gaza with the massive use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas is predicted to cost civilians. It risks being unlawfully indiscriminate attacks. So if you were to take very heavy weapons, missiles and bombs and drop them in the middle of Manhattan, whatever you were targeting, you would be expected to kill large numbers of civilians because it’s so densely populated.
That’s the reason that the United States as well as Palestine and 81 other countries have signed on to a political declaration, pledging to limit the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, in part based on U.S. experience in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And I would say that the Israeli military has a choice. It can choose to follow that widely accepted new standard in ways that would protect civilians. I also have concerns about unlawful attacks that the Israeli military is conducting against medical facilities, which is also killing civilians.
Chris Hayes: I mean, again, the thing about this conflict is you can never have like a novel argument about it. But so I’m just going to give you the line that you’ve heard and you’re prepared to respond to, but I think it’s worthwhile which is, and I think grounded in some reality, I mean that there’s just nothing like Gaza, right? For a million different reasons, I don’t think there’s a place like Gaza in the world.
And one of the realities of that is Hamas doesn’t have like, you know, here’s Fort Benning for Hamas. We got all our fighters here in this area. And if you want to come fight us, come here and we’ll fight you. That’s obviously not going to happen. They’re obviously embedded in the civilian population. And more than that, it would almost be tactically ludicrous of them not to do so from their perspective. Like, yes, you want to maximize the cost of coming after us. We’re going to build tunnels under civilian populations.
And if you want to come to us, you’re going to have to kill a bunch of people and that will look terrible for you and will show the world what we think is your true nature. This is essentially the kind of devil’s bargain here. And so the Israelis say, look, this is on them. They’ve put positions. They’re the ones enmeshed in a civilian population. They’re the ones who attacked Israel. We have a right to defend ourselves and there’s no other way to go about this, given the density of the population and the unique nature of how Hamas is essentially, you know, so enmeshed in this parcel of land.
Sari Bashi: So, I want to challenge the idea that there’s something unique about the warfare taking place in Israel and Gaza. There’s a specific context, of course.
But the laws of war are called international humanitarian law because it’s a deal with humanity. They are rules that all the nations of the world have signed up for to maintain some basic humanity in the very ugly business of war. So, that means that Hamas fighters are required by the law to do everything they can to the extent possible to minimize harm to civilians and to avoid to the extent possible locating military installations, personnel, weapons in crowded civilian areas.
And in previous conflicts, Human Rights Watch has documented that they have not fulfilled that obligation. That’s on Hamas. They have that obligation no matter what Israel does. Israel has obligations to continue to take precautions to protect civilians no matter what Hamas does. And I’m very concerned about the rhetoric that I hear from the Israeli military, which is a distortion and misrepresentation of international humanitarian law.
The Israeli military has said, for example, well, Hamas is hiding fighters under hospitals, and so we can bomb them. That’s not what the law says. Hamas should not be using hospitals for military purposes. But if they do that, there are still rules that protect civilians. And the Israeli government has not been following those rules. We just documented an unlawful strike on an ambulance in front of Gaza’s main hospital on Friday.
So, that strike was apparently unlawful because even if there were fighters in the vicinity, as the Israeli government claimed, although we haven’t seen evidence, that doesn’t mean you can strike the ambulance. You have to warn, you have to take precautions to protect civilians because those obligations are non-reciprocal. It doesn’t matter if the other side is committing war crimes. You are not allowed to commit war crimes.
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s the nub of it, right? Your obligations are not relieved by the other side committing war crimes. I mean, it’s obviously the case, right, that if the Ukrainians acquired the capability for airstrikes and they started targeting civilian apartment blocks in Moscow, that would be a war crime.
Sari Bashi: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They wouldn’t get to be like, well, they did it to us.
Sari Bashi: Right.
Chris Hayes: It would not justify it.
Sari Bashi: Right. Nothing justifies targeting or war crimes against civilians, nothing. I am the first person to point to the root causes of the current violence. Nothing justifies the attack on Israeli civilians on October 7. And that does not justify the deliberate targeting of civilians through collective punishment and deliberately impeding humanitarian relief that the Israeli military is doing.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I’m going to ask you a personal question about October 7 and the aftermath. And then I want to talk more about what could possibly come out of this, given the context here. Given what I’ve seen reported and also given what I’ve seen on social media, I think that there was a wide array of responses to October 7 among Palestinian folks, among Arab people in the Middle East, and some of them were celebratory.
And I think, in a sociological sense, I can understand that. Just as a sort of descriptive matter, I can understand that. But I also think that if I were encountering that, I would find that very difficult. And I’m wondering if you encountered that and if that was difficult for you or if you had conversations about it.
Sari Bashi: So, for our family, October 7 was a time of worry for people on all sides. I had friends in Israel huddling in shelters. We found out about October 7 because my partner’s niece called early in the morning, frightened, because there were airstrikes. And the airstrikes came after Hamas launched rockets, unlawfully, against Israeli communities. And since then, it’s been this polarizing experience of some people caring a lot about Israeli civilians as they should, and some people caring a lot about Palestinian civilians as they should, but not enough people in that Venn diagram of doing both. And in our family, we care about human beings. We care about civilians. Our kids understand that. And in my professional life, in my role in Human Rights Watch, that’s what we’re trying to do.
We’re trying to get people to recall and remember universal principles of humanity that should apply, no matter who you are. It shouldn’t be that hard, but it is. And it’s been hard. It’s been hard for us to maintain that, that space within our home where human beings are intrinsically valuable because they’re human beings. And in my work with Human Rights Watch, it’s been too hard to get people to understand that Palestinian children deserve to be protected just as much as Israeli children, and Israeli children deserve to be protected just as much as Palestinian children.
Chris Hayes: There are a few different ways one could imagine a future for the land and the people living on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And I want to sort of sketch out three different versions, which I think are roughly the three that are possible, I guess? Let’s just run the gamut, right?
So, the sort of pre-October 7 status quo, which was Hamas governing Gaza, again, in a very limited way. They’re not the actual governing authority but ruling over Gaza, however you describe it, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Israel as the occupying power over all of it. I think my understanding of the Likud Netanyahu line is that we could kind of manage this in perpetuity. That we’ve got good security forces and we can kind of make this work and we’ll keep settling the West Bank and we’ll deal with stuff as it happens.
That seems quite ruptured in some ways by October 7. The Israeli government itself says that’s no longer possible. We have to get rid of Hamas. So, I don’t even know what comes after that and I don’t think they know either. There’s some talk about international forces. There’s some talk about an indefinite security regime. There’s some talk about the Palestinian authority coming back into Gaza, but having it turned over at the point of the bayonet, which seems like a just disastrous idea that would almost inevitably lead to another civil war in Gaza. What do I know?
So, that’s the first order question of like what happens next, specifically in Gaza. But then more broadly it’s like, it’s 75 years since the creation of the state of Israel. Many wars later, seven million Palestinians, seven million Israeli Jews on this same land. What do you see as the path forward?
Sari Bashi: So, I mean for Gaza the question is actually kind of easy, not what I think will happen, what I think should happen. So, the Israeli military has damaged or destroyed nearly half of the homes in Gaza. A lot of people just don’t have anywhere to go. Seventy percent of the people in Gaza are refugees and their descendants. They have a right to return to the areas that they left behind 75 years ago.
My mother-in-law, as a 5-year-old, fled the Israeli Army, advancing in what is now a southern coastal area of Israel. And then went to a refugee camp in Gaza where her home was then again destroyed by the Israeli military. Then she moved to another home and she’s now sheltering in the south. And we believe her third home has also been destroyed by the Israeli military. She has a right to come back, just like all the refugees have a right to come back.
And if we want to not just have a pause or an end to this current escalation but to make progress toward really addressing the root causes of the violence, the first thing we would do is give people, refugees in Gaza a chance to resettle in the places to which they have a right to return. More broadly, if we want not to engage in political debates over one state, two-state, 12 states, but actually pay attention to what’s happening on the ground, we would say that the Israeli government has to stop committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.
That means dismantling these structures and systems that systematically privilege Israeli Jews over Palestinians. And once we do that, and I realized it’s a tall order, then we can talk about one-state, two states, 12 states. That’s all fine. But when we have these political discussions that have nothing to do with what’s going on the ground, they remain political discussions, and what’s going on the ground is the horrific violence we’re seeing now.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the problem is like there’s literally no political will for that.
Sari Bashi: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, you know what I mean? Like it’s like, right, sure. I mean, there’s a million things I could say about like how American society should look, but the path from here to there is just so difficult, particularly in the wake of the sort of trauma of the worst pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust and the sort of, you know, vision of mass slaughter. And it just seems to me like, I don’t know, Israeli public opinion is not going to be particularly amenable to that.
Sari Bashi: And I very much take on the responsibility. of continuing to say uncomfortable truths. And I don’t think that people are going to listen anytime soon.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Sari Bashi: But I can’t stop saying the uncomfortable truths, which is that if you want to see an end to the violence, you have to address the root causes of the violence. And with all due respect to the U.S.-brokered plans, the peace process, how’s that working out for you? Doesn’t seem —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sari Bashi: — to be going anywhere. And maybe we should ask why.
Chris Hayes: I mean, but the thing really what it comes down to when you talk about the right to return, right. You’re talking about ‘48, you’re talking about what Palestinians refer to as The Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass expulsion and exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugee camps as documented by Israeli historians, often under the threat of formal violence, basically intimidated or scared or thrown out of the places they were, you know.
And again, I think in this case, the people who say that the desire for people to end Israel Jewish and democratic state are real is that, what you’re saying is that the original Zionist vision here, right, of a state that is Jewish as a state can’t be continued, is what you’re saying?
Sari Bashi: What I’m saying is that, you know, human rights law gives states wide latitude for immigration policies. If the Israeli government wants to have preferential immigration policies for Israeli Jews, it’s allowed to do that. It can have other policies to preserve Jewish culture in its state, that’s all fine. What it can’t do is systematically disenfranchise the people who are already present. The Palestinians already living in Israel, and the people who have a right to return to that area.
So, there’s limits to what you can do. You can have a state that allows more Jews in, if you want to, but you can’t keep people out. You can’t engage in forcible transfer, and you can’t prevent refugees from returning. You know, I mean, with Ukraine, right, the refugees who are leaving areas that the Russians are occupying. I mean, do people think they don’t have a right to return when the fighting is over? The idea behind refugee law is, I mean, you can leave to save your family but you have a right to come back.
It’s a principle we uphold elsewhere. I would assume the United States would uphold it for the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine. I don’t think that Israel-Palestine should be an exception. In particular, because it’s not an accident that 70 percent of Gaza residents are refugees and that Gaza continues to be the canary in the coal mine, the place where things begin, which signify what’s to come for the rest of this area.
Chris Hayes: I almost don’t want to ask this because I can only imagine what’s on the other side of this question. You talked about your mother-in-law, how your partner’s family is doing and I asked that knowing that the answer is not well.
Sari Bashi: It’s hard. It’s hard. I think it’s particularly hard when there are telecommunications blackouts and we don’t hear from them. They’re in the south. You know, thank God so far most of them have not been physically harmed. We believe all the homes are destroyed and there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing we can do. There’s no safe place in Gaza.
Chris Hayes: I’m asking you this knowing that this may be published a week from now and this will change in that time. But in the short term, like there’s calls for ceasefire, there’s huge international support for ceasefire, there’s mobilization in the U.S. for ceasefire. Though, I don’t think it’s certainly not the position of the U.S. government under the administration of Joe Biden or European countries who basically say Israel has a right to do whatever it has to do to get rid of Hamas. But how do you see this, not the conflict general, but like this part of the conflict ending? Like what is the off ramp here?
Sari Bashi: I don’t know. I think that what the U.S. does matters tremendously. The U.S. is backing Israel under ordinary circumstances, giving it $4 billion of military aid. Now there’s another $14 billion of military aid on the table. What the U.S. does matters. If the U.S. would suspend arms transfers to the Israeli military, if the U.S. would insist that Israel let in life saving fuel, if the U.S. would insist that the Israeli military uphold international humanitarian law, people in Gaza might have a fighting chance.
But that hasn’t happened yet, and, you know, we are concerned that the United States government risks complicity in serious abuses by continuing to knowingly arm the Israeli military, even though it knows that doing so could significantly contribute to grave abuses. And in particular, it’s disappointing that even something as basic as turning the water back on fully, turning the electricity back on, opening Israeli crossings for life-saving relief trucks as Israel has done in previous hostilities and all the previous hostilities. It has opened its crossings for —
Chris Hayes: In Gaza, including 2014 —
Sari Bashi: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which was the most, yes.
Sari Bashi: They published press releases extolling how proud they were of the fact that they did so. They can do it if they want to. They need to take the measures necessary to do so. There’s not enough food in Gaza. There’s not enough clean water in Gaza. People are drinking brackish water from agricultural wells because there’s no electricity, there’s no fuel to pump the water and run the desalination plants. This is not hard. It shouldn’t be that hard. And the United States could do so much more than it is doing.
Chris Hayes: Your work at Human Rights Watch is not just on Israel-Palestine, right?
Sari Bashi: I’m in charge of research globally.
Chris Hayes: Globally, okay. It is so striking to me the way the world’s attention goes to this conflict in a way that it does. Like there was an Armenian community that had been living in a portion in the contested area between Azerbaijan and Armenia, 100,000 Armenians a month before, I want to say, a month or six weeks before the attack on October 7. And after pursuing to an Azerbaijani ground offensive of their military forces over contested land, essentially forcibly expelled, you know, a kind of Nakba for those folks there who had been there for centuries, this Armenian community.
Hundreds of thousands leaving their homes behind under threat of violence, put on buses and leaving. Now this was a huge issue in the Armenian diaspora across the world. Armenians obviously are people that have undergone unbelievable persecution and ethnic violence. Raphael Lemkin coins the term genocide in reference to what the Ottomans did to the Armenians. Basically the world didn’t even pretend to care. No one cared.
These people were just put on buses in the most like clear cut ethnic cleansing you’re going to see. Just boom, done, you’re gone. And no one cared. There was some diplomatic effort. Samantha Power showed up for USAID. It got covered a little bit, but generally it was just like, uh, hey, what is it? Like things like that can happen in other parts of the world. And it just does not fire the imaginations of the global publics in the way that things happening in the Holy Land do.
Sari Bashi: Yes and we didn’t even talk about Sudan and Ethiopia where the civilian death has been unfathomable and nobody wants to hear about it. Look, I think that people in the West, in Christian countries have a bit of a fetish with the Holy Land.
And they like to believe that there’s some biblically ordained battle going on between Muslims and Jews or Arabs and Jews or I don’t know what. And that, you know, this is very important in God’s divine plan. So, I just think that it’s not helpful. It means that people are fueling the conflict.
Chris Hayes: But it extends, let me just push back on a little bit, it extends to the global south as well, not just in the West, right?
So like in other places, you’re not going to see an Armenian flag at a mass protest in Malaysia, just not going to happen. And I’m not saying like they’re wrong for it. We didn’t cover the expulsion of Armenians on my show. Like I’m as implicated as anyone. Everyone makes decisions about what they care about and what fires them up.
But I’m just saying as a descriptive fact, I mean, your point about Sudan, there’s about 1.7 Afghan refugees here, but got kicked out of Pakistan through forcible deportation. Like states do terrible things to other people and also move them around all the time, which is not to excuse them. It just means like there is something about this conflict that is capable of capturing the world’s attention in a way that basically nothing else is.
Sari Bashi: I think in the global south a lot of it is a reaction to the global north. So, certainly South Africa, for example, people have a very strong —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sari Bashi: — sense of solidarity with Palestinian people, in part because of the historic ties —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sari Bashi: — but also because of the idea of fighting apartheid. And I think that does extend to other global south nations as well.
Chris Hayes: Ireland as well. I mean, you see —
Sari Bashi: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that Ireland as well.
Sari Bashi: Yes. But I mean this is, to some extent, a proxy war for superpowers. Iran is arming Palestinian armed groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We’ve called for suspension of those arms transfers because of the war crimes that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have committed against Israeli civilians. The United States is arming Israel as is Canada and the U.K. and Germany. We’ve called for suspension of those arms because of the harm that the Israeli government is doing the war crimes against Palestinian civilians. So, these superpower battles are being played out over the lives of Israelis and Palestinians. And, you know, it may be convenient for the superpowers. It’s not particularly convenient for us.
Chris Hayes: Well, I really, I truly hope that your family is safe and all the families in Gaza are safe. And I hope that by the time this airs, the violence has ended. Although, that’s a much longer project as this conversation makes very clear.
Sari Bashi is the Program Director at Human Rights Watch. She’s an author and co-founder of Gisha Access, an Israeli NGO whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. She lives in the West Bank. That was really so generous of you to devote your time amidst all this. I really appreciate it.
Sari Bashi: No, thank you for having me. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Sari Bashi for joining us. I really appreciate her making it work over the time distance.
It’s that time of year when we’re gearing up for a WITHpod holiday mailbag episode. Reminder to send over your questions, thoughts, feedback to withpod@gmail.com. We’ll try to get as many of your comments and questions as possible. You could always get in touch with us on X, the site formerly known as Twitter using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can find me @chrislhayes on threads and Bluesky.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?