After the war in Gaza started and there were all these civilian casualties, we saw Israel intentionally denying humanitarian aid to people who were starving. What should the response from people have been at that point?
That’s not something I can say because I don’t know what my own response should have been. I trusted no one and I trusted no report. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t see some pictures on television. The BBC has been appalling. It just showed you pictures, unbearable pictures, heartbreaking pictures of dying babies every night, but any war would look appalling if you just showed the suffering of the women and children.
So, I thought, Who am I to believe here? I read a lot of people; I believed some, and I didn’t believe others. It’s turned out very badly and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is contemptible. I have no doubt about all that, but that didn’t mean that something didn’t need doing. There was no alternative to it. Israel had to try and get Hamas. I thought Netanyahu’s belief that he could wipe out Hamas was stupid. So I felt that this war had to be prosecuted. If a war is prosecuted, it will be ugly.
I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I can’t really comment on that.” Is that right?
Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.
So you’re saying the idea that twelve hundred Israelis were killed and now forty-two thousand Gazans have been killed—that comparing the two in itself is not any sort of argument?
Well, all right, Isaac, what’s the figure you’d choose?
I was just trying to clarify what you meant.
I don’t know how you do the mathematics of this, and I’m not going to say the “mathematics of revenge” because, while of course there was an element of revenge, and you wanted it not to be revenge, you didn’t want it to be a punishment either. I hated that word—“punishment.” I think the justification for what Israel did was to try to make sure that this never happened again. And I think in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high. If you’re a terrorist, you do hide yourself in schools and hospitals. So if the Israelis are going to get you, they’re going to have to attack those things.
Why should this be a matter of numbers? I’m not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. It’s a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.
What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?
I’m not talking about those days. This was every single night. I’m telling you I saw a dead baby every single night. You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.
Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.