Palestinians fleeing to southern Rafah. Photo: Ismael Abu Dayyah/AP
I caught up with attorney, journalist, and author Dan Kovalik just as the Coalition to March on the DNC stepped off from Chicago’s Union Park on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
ANN GARRISON: Dan Kovalik, tell us what you'd most like people to understand about your book. We have this book right here, The Case of Palestine: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care.
DAN KOVALIK: The main reason I wrote the book is to explain to the mainstream American audience that what's happening in Gaza, this genocide that's happening in Gaza, the conflict in Gaza, didn't start on October 7. This has been ongoing as far back as 1948 with the Nakba in which 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced by Israeli militants, gangs in many cases, and even before that, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Americans have not been taught that history. In fact, they've been willfully encouraged not to even look into that history. Palestinians have largely, as you know, been made invisible on purpose, and that goes back to the myth that the Israelis were the people without a land coming to settle a land without a people. The whole idea was that they moved to historic Palestine, but there weren't any Palestinians there, and they are doing their best to make that a reality right now.
They're making it a reality that there won't be any Palestinians left, and there won't even be a memory of them left. That's why I wrote this book.
AG: You just came back from Egypt. Tell us about what you saw.
DK: Yes, I was on a delegation to Egypt with some lawyers and also some trauma experts. We were taking testimony from Palestinian evacuees from Gaza about the crimes that they suffered in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis. People should know that about 100,000 Palestinians have been evacuated to Egypt since October 7. Almost all these folks had to pay about five to six thousand dollars per adult, and a thousand dollars per child, just to come in, and they paid it to a company owned by the son of President Sisi. It was very corrupt.
I don't want to totally criticize Egypt because at least they took these refugees in, but these refugees can't put their kids in school. They can't work. They don't have resident status, so they can't travel. It’s a very tough life for them. Obviously better than what it was in Gaza, but very tough.
We went there to talk to people about the absolutely horrific atrocities they suffered in Gaza.
AG: I know someone who got out, someone I was in touch with on Facebook, who was trying to get out because he had shrapnel in his body. Do you have to pay to get in even if you’re wounded?
DK: You might get in for free if you had a medical condition that needed treatment that you couldn't get in Gaza, and of course you can hardly get any treatment there now because Israel's destroyed most of the hospitals. If you have, for example, cancer, or you’re wounded, you might be able to get into Egypt for free. That is true. But short of that, you have to pay, even if you were living in a tent and your area was being bombed every day, you had to come up with that money.
I have a lot of friends from Gaza now living in Egypt, including a student of mine who went to the University of Pittsburgh, School of Law for years as a foreign student, and they had to raise money from friends. Many of them bankrupted themselves, basically emptied all their life savings just to get out, and they've already lost their homes. They've lost generational homes that were in their families for generations, and they showed me photos of these.
There were some people who had just built brand new homes that had taken them years to build. Everything they saved for years to build these homes is now gone, and now they're in a country where they have no right to work and no right to schooling and no right to travel. These are people without a country, and that's been true for so long.
The Palestinians are a people. They're the people without a land, and that's what people have to understand. Everything's been turned on its head. The aggressors have been made into the victims, and the victims have been made into the aggressors.
Are these Palestinians living in a concentration camp? Are they living in some kind of settlement where they can't move around because they don't have rights? They don't have resident status?
These are people without means living in cinder-block tenements that house only Palestinians. There are curfews. I wouldn't say it's like a prison, because you can leave--and we met people who left to visit us inside downtown Cairo--but it's a very austere life. It's a ghetto because it's all Palestinians, and again, even me, as an American, I would need special permission to visit there. Our delegation asked for permission and we were denied it.
So, as I said, they basically live in their own ghetto there in Egypt, unless they are persons of means who can afford an apartment or whatever. You can do that if you have means, but most of the Palestinians who came, certainly by the time they came and spent the money to cross, have nothing, and so they live in these cinder-block tenements.
AG: Is there any effort to resettle them in the West or in Africa or anywhere else? We've heard about resettlement efforts, even as outlandish as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, another of the most tortured places on the planet which already has its own internally displaced persons population of roughly seven million.
DK: Israel has, as you said, thought about resettling Palestinians to Congo, but Israel's first choice is to force all these Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, ironically, where the Israelites spent 40 years wandering in the desert. They offered to pay Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to accept this. The offer from the United States, which is helping Israel with this ethnic cleansing, was to pay off Egypt’s $185 billion in foreign debt to construct tents in the Sinai and take all the Palestinians in Gaza. To his credit, Sisi said that Egypt would not be a part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing. He turned down the money.
When I talk about Egypt, I also want to say that they're between a rock and a hard place. They do want to provide some refuge to Palestinians in need, but they also don't want to be party to a wholesale ethnic cleansing of 2.3 million Palestinians.
And as far as I know, no one else is taking these Palestinians once they cross into Egypt unless they're Egyptian nationals to begin with. Some are Egyptian nationals because Egypt was Gaza’s protector, for lack of a better word, from about 1950 to 1967. There are a lot of Palestinians who have an Egyptian mom or dad, and they have some more rights to try to leave to go somewhere else if they have the money to, but most of those without Egyptian nationality are trapped in Egypt once they get there.
I'll give you an example. There's a woman we met with a tragic story. In a massacre by the Israelis in Gaza, she lost her husband, her oldest son, and another of her children. One of her two daughters, a five-year-old, was burned by white phosphorus, an illegal weapon according to international law. Her 18-year-old sister sustained a serious back injury while jumping out of a window trying to save her sister. Both daughters are now in a hospital in Ankara, Turkey, while the mom is trapped in Egypt. Her two younger sons, who are not even high school age, are still in Northern Gaza. She can't get her sons to Egypt, and she can't get from Egypt to Turkey to see her daughters. This resembles the fate of so many separated families.
Once again, these are people without a country. They can't travel, and I don't know any who have the ability to leave and go anywhere else.
AG: There was actually a proposal on the table to move the entire population of Gaza out into the Sinai?
DK: Yeah, but not a public one. Those discussions were had with President Sisi. The United States and Israel drew up a plan to do that. The US and other countries would have paid to construct the tents to do that, and they were willing to pay off Egypt's debts for that to happen. We know that those discussions happened early on and that Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders were talking about moving all the Palestinians in Gaza into the Sinai, and that plan is not off the table. They would still like to do that.
Maybe Sisi will eventually agree, but Egyptians on the ground, including the military people and the cops, are furious at Sisi for not doing more to help the Palestinians.
Egypt has legions. They have a navy. They could do something like Nassar tried to do in 1973 to help the Palestinians. And the people of Egypt are furious about this. So if he went ahead and built a desert encampment for the Palestinians in the Sinai, I think he would be overthrown. I don’t think he would survive that, but that's the Israeli plan, that's their hope. And at this point, short of that, they're planning on wiping out all of Gaza.
Now we’re sitting here looking at a giant truck plastered with an advertisement for Kamala Harris. A lot of people are like, “Oh, you're protesting the DNC and Kamala Harris. So you must support Trump because you're going to get Trump elected.” My response is that I don't want Trump to win. I don't want Kamala to win, right? I'm going to vote for Jill Stein, and I realize she's not gonna win. Okay? I realize one of the two are gonna win, but my concern right now is that no matter who wins, whether it's Kamala or Trump and whichever’s better or worse, they won't even be inaugurated until the end of January of next year, and the people of Gaza don't have till January. There's a famine now that is wiping out the population.
AG: Even polio.
DK: Polio and all kinds of other preventable diseases like smallpox. There is no potable water left in Gaza. The aquifers have been destroyed. There is no way to get potable water. There is very little food. I have friends still in Gaza, and all they can do is pay exorbitant amounts of money, like $100 for a little piece of meat. No one can do that. And even if you could, all that means is that whatever food they pay for is the food they got till they run out again. No food’s coming in, no water's coming in.
That’s the other thing about Egypt that you need to know. The Israelis have had the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza closed since May 7. That was the main route for humanitarian aid. There is some small trickle of aid coming in but nothing from the Rafah Crossing.
I want to encourage people to support the people of Gaza, but if you give to a relief agency, all they can do is get food and water that's already in Gaza to the people there. There's no way to get it in. Israel was closed off every crossing. There's no way to get it in by water. You remember Biden built that ridiculous pier, that $300 million pier that never worked, that failed in no time, and will never work now. So you have famine. You're seeing photos of emaciated babies dying. Of course, the babies that don't die, if they're lucky not to die, they're going to have permanent brain damage because of the lack of nutrition.
You have the most maimed children in any conflict known in history. You have tens of thousands of orphaned children, so now you have maimed, orphaned, starving children. Who's going to take care of these children? It is a horrifying situation.
AG: UNWRA reported that 10 children in Gaza were having one or both legs amputated every day without anesthesia.
DK: Yes, it’s unspeakable and, again, that's why we're here. That's why we're in Chicago to protest the DNC. Again, people may say that Trump's a bad guy, that he's worse than Kamala, and hey, I'll stipulate to that, but the point is that this is the Democrats’ war. The White House is run by the Democrats. The White House is running this war. The White House is giving billions of dollars of military assistance to Israel all the time, including 2000-pound bombs. Military experts in the US say they wouldn't use 500-pound bombs in an urban setting because then you’d just be murdering civilians, but we're giving them 2000-pound bombs to wipe out whole neighborhoods. This is Biden, this is Harris, this is what they're doing, and we have to protest them now, because again, we don't have till January to wait. The people of Gaza don’t have till January to wait for a change that probably won’t come from the Democrats anyway.
AG: You also took a recent trip to the West Bank. Tell us about that.
DK: Yes, I went to the West Bank in December, a couple months after October 7. And that was my first trip to Palestine. I went into Jordan and crossed the King Hussein Bridge into the West Bank, and it was an incredible experience. A lot of people talk about apartheid in Israel and Palestine, and you see it there right away. You see the walls that surround everything and everyone to separate Israelis and Palestinians. You see the checkpoints. You have to go through checkpoints if you're a Palestinian. You have to go through them even if you're not a Palestinian, but if you are a Palestinian, those are occasions to be harassed, imprisoned, or raped.
I'll give a little example again of what life is like there, even under the best of circumstances. I was there during Christmas—Advent—and I wanted to go to Bethlehem. I was staying in Ramallah, and the distance between Ramallah and Bethlehem is something like 15 miles. I should be able to go there in about half an hour, but it took three hours, because you have to go through all of the checkpoints or try to go around them.
I was with a guy who’s almost 80 years old. He was born before the Nakba, in 1946, and he's Jewish. Nicest guy in the world. He insisted on personally taking me to Bethlehem. He said he could get us around the checkpoints, which he did.
AG: This is a Jewish person native to Palestine who supports the Palestinians?
DK: Yes, he's even in Fatah. So he's a very interesting guy. His name is Uri Davis. In 1987 he wrote a book about Israeli apartheid. He was a very early proponent of that theory.
The only reason we were able to go to Bethlehem at all and make it even in three hours and four hours back, was because he had his yellow Israeli license plate, not a Palestinian license plate. If you're Palestinian, you get a different color. But if you don’t have that yellow-colored Israeli license plate, you can't go anywhere.
There are people I have met in Palestine who've never been to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, who've never stepped inside Jerusalem because they're not allowed. The Israelis can go anywhere with that special yellow license, but the Palestinians with the other color cannot.
AG: You have Palestinians in the West Bank who've never been able to get into Jerusalem?
DK: Yes, and you even have Palestinians who are lucky enough to be from Jerusalem and they are therefore allowed to live in Jerusalem and travel in Jerusalem, but they still can't get into the Old City to see the Al-Aqsa Mosque. That's how intense the segregation is.
Now, and people need to understand this, Israel really is in full war with the West Bank. It can’t be like Gaza because so many Israelis live there, but they are attacking the Palestinians in the West Bank with incredible force.
There are now an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Palestinians in jail. Most of those have been arrested since October 7. Many of them have been arrested from the West Bank, and as we're learning more and more, even from mainstream sources like the New York Times, the treatment of these prisoners is incredible. They're being raped, they're being beaten, they're being killed. Sixty prisoners have been killed in jail since October 7, and many of them have been arrested without charges.
AG: Tell us about the persecution of the Christians.
DK: That's an interesting aspect of the situation. Most people don't even know that there are Palestinian Christians. Most people don't know that Jesus himself was Palestinian. But there are many Palestinian Christians, though far fewer than there used to be in Historic Palestine, because most have left. They left not because of what Israel claims, that Hamas scared them out. That's totally untrue.
They left because they’re being persecuted, particularly in the West Bank. For example, the Church of the Nativity, which is built over the cave where Jesus was born, was actually attacked by Israel. I mentioned that in the book. I believe it was in 2008. Don’t hold me to that date, but it's in the book where they shelled the Church of the Nativity. They shot people inside the Church of the Nativity, and that's a more extreme example of what's happened in the West Bank.
But in Gaza, after October 7, the Israelis actually blew up historic ancient Christian churches on purpose. They want to get rid of any remnants of the Palestinian Christian community because that's a very inconvenient community for them.
Why? Because you have so many Christian Zionists who support Israel. In fact, even Biden says he's a Christian Zionist. Mike Pompeo is a Christian Zionist. Mike Pence, the former vice president, is a Christian Zionist. It's very inconvenient for those people to know that Israelis are persecuting Christians, many Christians, when they walk around the Old City of Jerusalem. If they're known to be Christian, if they're wearing a cross, they’ll be spat upon, or their cross will be taken from their neck.
Again, these are inconvenient facts that aren't discussed much. And again, I talk about this in the book.
AG: Did you have any contact with the dissident Orthodox Jews in Israel?
DK: Not with the Orthodox per se, but again, I had plenty of contact with Jews in Jerusalem who support the Palestinian people. These are the bravest people you’ll ever meet. I met with one of them, a woman, in addition to Uri Davis, the 80-year-old Jewish gentleman who took me to Bethlehem. He actually introduced me to a friend of his named Leah. I forget her last name, but it's in the book. There's a photo of her in the book. She's a fairly older Jewish person who's an attorney in Jerusalem, in the center of town, who represents Palestinian political prisoners and has for many years. And of course, she's persecuted by other Jews. They hate her for what she does, but she has a certain amount of freedom because she is an Israeli Jew. She's very isolated, but it doesn't stop her. She's an incredible human being, and these people need to be talked about. Sadly, there aren’t as many of those people as there used to be in Israel, but those people do exist. There are people to this day, Jews in Israel, who try to protect Palestinians from the settlers who steal their property and their land, who beat up Palestinians. You know, there are those people.
Again, there used to be a lot more. There used to be a stronger kind of leftist current in Israel. There used to be a Socialist Zionism, a labor Zionism. Most of that's gone. Basically, Israel's now been ceded to the right wing. Even if Netanyahu left tomorrow, another right winger would take his place, but there are still Jews in Israel who support the Palestinians. These people need to be applauded. And again, they're an inconvenient fact for the Israelis and for the Western press.
Last week a video surfaced of a Palestinian prisoner being gang raped by Israelis. They took a poll in Israel on whether people thought it was okay to rape Palestinians, and 47% to 46% of Israelis said yes, it's okay to rape Palestinians.
AG: Dan, it sounds like you feel like it's a hopeless situation. I never imagined it could go on this long.
DK: No, I don't think any of us thought, when it started, that it could go on this long, but here we are ten months later.
AG: I think everyone thought it would be over by Christmas, that Biden would say, “Look Netanyahu, you’ve killed enough people. It's time to back off.” But nothing like that has happened. We're still sending 2000-pound bombs and the latest fighter jets. Israel is buying our top-of-the-line fighter, which actually means that we gave them our money to buy them.
DK: That’s right, and people who think that Biden couldn't stop it are wrong. In fact, you know those of us are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan. We were peace activists back then. I was one of them. Remember what a warmonger he was? But at some point during the Israeli war in Lebanon, he told Menachen Begin, “You're killing too many civilians. You’ve got to stop it.” And he stopped it with one phone call.
AG: Biden could have made that phone call, but he hasn’t, so where do we go from here?
DK: I think first of all, you know, the American people who are disgusted by this need to protest. They need to call for this to stop. I think that we have the power to stop it by protesting. I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe that. But I also think it may be settled militarily between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran. It would be terrible, and I don't wish for that, but nothing's being done to prevent that regional war, and that's what Netanyahu wants.
I think that one-third of our Navy is now in the Mediterranean. We are preparing for that regional war, and, sadly, that is how this will probably end, with regional war. That's not what I want. I think we need to protest at the top of our lungs to prevent that, but realistically I think that's where we're headed because that's what Netanyahu wants.
I don't know if Biden or Harris, or whoever's actually running the White House now, actually want it, but they won't stop it, at least not at this moment. That's clear. There must be some people in the Pentagon that have more sense than that, that realize the kind of arsenal that Iran has, the kind of friends Iran has. I think there are probably people in the military who don't want that war, but the thing is, you know, we do have a civilian form of government where civilians control the military.
They may press for it not to happen, but if the White House wants it, they will get it. But with Biden basically out of commission because of his diminished mental capacity, and Harris doing nothing but campaigning, we don’t really know who’s running the White House. I think it has been turned over to the neocons like Anthony Blinken. I think they're running the show, and I think they’re pushing for this regional war, because that's what Netanyahu wants.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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